What you are about to read is the opening of Simon Fruelund’s novel The World and Varvara. Who is Varvara Eng? She is a flamboyant, 79-½ year old Danish actress who has lived a very colorful life (who began her life as a fictional persona in a real poem by the Danish poet Per Højholt). When the struggling young writer Pelle is hired to write Varvara’s memoir, he’s told that Varvara wants “someone who knows how to lie without being exposed.” The memoir is supposed to be published when Varvara turns 80, which means Pelle has eight weeks to finish it. But there are certain distractions.
There are Pelle’s mounting bills, for one thing. Also there’s his girlfriend, Johanne, who doesn’t understand why he has agreed to become a ghostwriter. And there’s Varvara’s lover, the diamond-trader Knud, who once in a while needs a courier for what may or may not be legal activities. And then there’s the captivating young photographer, Knirke, whom he meets right before she embarks on a long trip around the globe.
So as Pelle begins to interview Varvara, nothing goes according to plan.
The World and Varvara is told in the characteristically spare, precise style for which Fruelund is known in Denmark, one that calls to mind the innovative fiction of David Markson or Jenny Offill. It is a comic novel about celebrity and literature and the difficulty of accurately rendering another person’s life. — K. E. Semmel
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One
Varvara Eng was born on Tuse Næs.
She appears in one of Per Højholt’s poems, but she’s not his invention. She’s not mine, either.
She is real.
She wears orthopedic shoes.
She has a lover named Knud.
She’s 79-½ and lives in an apartment with a panoramic view of the city.
Varvara’s full name is Varvara Birgitta Sigismunda Eleonora Margrethe Sophia Eng.
She was conceived in the basement pantry at Adserbølle Manor.
With her father, the count, standing and her mother, a maid, seated on one of the shelves, the jars of preserves jangled and clinked and shifted.
When the jars began to fall and the scent of blackcurrants filled the cool room, the maid ordered her master to keep going.
She’d helped to pick and conserve the berries, and afterwards she herself had to clean it all up.
Varvara and I have our first meeting on a Tuesday in July.
We sit on opposite ends of a red and white-striped sofa.
We drink a white tea that Varvara says comes from China.
I turn on the recorder and ask a single, rather cautious question, and soon she’s telling me about her early childhood.
I once read that it was so cold at Lenin’s funeral that the musicians had to wipe their instruments with vodka so their lips wouldn’t stick.
That’s about how chilly it was on the January day some eighty years ago when Varvara entered the world.
It was 7 degrees Fahrenheit, and windy.
Down in the basement, the boilerman (who was also the gardener and had a club foot) moved like a pendulum back and forth between the coal cellar and the furnace, and around the house the staff made sure to stoke the woodstoves that, a few years earlier, had been supplemented with radiators.
A doctor had been called in from Holbæk, but as time passed, and the contractions grew so strong and frequent that Varvara’s twenty-two-year-old mother nearly passed out, the count grew increasingly nervous.
In the end he sent for the cook.
Approaching the mustard-yellow four-poster bed where the young countess lay, she shot the count a condescending glance.
He asked one of the maids to help out, and then with pensive steps went down the wide, thickly carpeted stairs.
He continued into his beloved smoking room, where long Meerschaums and porcelain pipes hung on the walls, and there he sat reading Statstidende, the Berlingske Aftenavis, and Holbæk Amts Venstreblad (which, though liberal, was at least local), and every so often he got up and walked to the window to watch for the doctor.
Now and then he went to the stairwell and tried to determine how things were coming along by listening to the groans from above.
The doctor never showed, and he wasn’t found until his body washed ashore at Orø several weeks later.
Apparently, his car had broken down, and he’d attempted a short-cut across the ice.
A writer is helping Varvara Eng write her memoirs, and that writer is me.
It was an arrangement brokered by my publisher.
It was accompanied by a check (which I immediately cashed) along with a few admonishments (that I barely heard), and I’ve promised to complete the manuscript in eight weeks.
The book is to be published when Varvara turns eighty.
—I want a writer, she’d told my editor. I want someone who knows how to lie without being exposed.
Varvara Eng has lived nine lives.
In the first she did everything that was expected of her.
In the second she did nothing of what was expected.
In the third she had four children.
In the fourth she became an actress and shocked the landed gentry of Zealand.
In the fifth she took a nap.
In the sixth she kept getting married.
In the seventh she remained unmarried but had an almost unbroken chain of affairs.
In the eighth she became a morphine addict, a Christian, and an expert on roses.
In the ninth she died of boredom.
Varvara Eng has a rooftop terrace where she grows more than thirty types of roses, and the second time I visit her that’s where we sit.
We drink iced tea on the porch swing until four o’clock and, later, Campari and orange juice.
We are able to see Frederiksberg Park, Søndermarken, and most of Vesterbro.
On the table before us rests a large, cloth-bound box containing old photographs.
The count’s daughters from his first marriage had lean, pale faces and watery eyes.
Only the son, Clifford, inherited his father’s dark complexion.
At age thirty-five their mother, the first countess, was admitted to the State Mental Hospital in Nykøbing, never to be released.
Years of mood swings had come to a head when she drove her car into the fjord with baby Cliff in the backseat.
Shortly before the accident, she’d gambled away one of the tenant farms in a card game.
Exactly when the count had begun to take notice of the young maid from Svebølle, no one knew for sure.
Varvara Eng always wears dresses. She has liver spots and wrinkles and thick eyeglasses, but when she removes the glasses, I recognize the seventeen-year-old girl in the photographs.
The expression in her eyes is surprisingly tender.
Her head is small and her neck long.
Her legs are relatively stocky, her torso ample and short.
She’s a little swaybacked.
On bad days she has a certain resemblance to an ostrich. On good days she looks like a goddess.
When she was a fifteen-year-old riding through Adserbølle forest, a lumberjack sawed off the tip of his index finger.
A few years later, a count from Langeland sent her roses every week for seven consecutive months.
—Beauty is such a strange thing, she says. I’m not sure one should trust it.
Every one of her husbands cheated on her, she tells me, except for the one she betrayed on their honeymoon.
The third time I visit Varvara, Knud opens the door.
He has white hair that he slicks back over his scalp, a cleft in his chin, and a little silk hanky around his neck.
—There’s our young poet! Come in, come in! We’re going for a drive!
Knud owns a dark green Bentley with light brown leather upholstery.
He wears black driving gloves, and Varvara and I sit in the backseat.
Every now and then Varvara points at an apartment building or a massive industrial park and sighs:
—In the old days it was much nicer around here. There were fields.
—What a fucking idiot, Knud grumbles when a semi moves into the passing lane.
—Language, my dear, Varvara says.
—He cusses like a Turk, she says to me.
—Have you ever heard a Turk cuss? Knud asks.
Varvara smiles:
—I guess there’s quite a lot you’ve never experienced.
I’ve prepared a number of questions, but only manage to ask the first before Varvara says:
—Knud, why don’t you tell Pelle about the time you met Jackie Onassis?
Knud has been a diamond trader for more than fifty years.
He’s been a regular at Hovenierstraat in Antwerp and 47th street in New York. He’s visited mines all around the globe.
He’s Jewish, but not a believer.
—I believe in Varvara, he says.
—No, you don’t! she says. You believe in yourself.
He tells me about Antwerp: The Jews dressed in black, the Sikhs in their colorful turbans, and the European businessmen in suits from Saville Row.
—Knud’s mother stitched their entire fortune into his clothes.
—Yes, I learned that early on: Diamonds are a Jew’s best friend.
In an Australian diamond mine, he met an American trader by the name of Maurice.
He lived in an enormous apartment on Fifth Avenue, and when Knud visited him for dinner a few months later, a stylish woman, who introduced herself as Jacqueline, met him at the door.
She explained that Maurice was running a little late and offered Knud a drink.
They spent half-an-hour alone, and she politely inquired about Denmark and his impression of the United States.
—I thought you knew, Maurice said afterwards. Everyone knows. It’s a huge scandal here. We live together, and we’re not married. Technically speaking, I’m still married to my wife.
—So what was she like? I ask.
Knud smiles.
—It was a bit like being with a black and white photograph. I can see why John F. started chasing after Marilyn.
We have lunch underneath a patio umbrella in the courtyard at Søllerød Inn. Varvara and Knud order caviar, and I eat scallops.
We drink a white wine called Meursault, and Knud tells me about the time he was on safari with Zaire’s President Mobutu.
—He was an absolute criminal, Varvara says.
—Oh, he wasn’t so bad, Knud says. In fact, he was quite friendly. And I really liked his leopard-skin hat.
That same day I got a reminder from the Unemployment Office.
They write that I’ve been expelled, effective immediately.
They’ve discovered that I’ve engaged in artistic work during my period of unemployment, and now they’re requesting I pay back 100,000 kroner.
In the spring, so their reasoning goes, I published a book of flash fiction. My advance was 4,148 kroner, and the last time I checked, 372 copies had been distributed.
—Which unfortunately isn’t the same thing as sold, my editor emphasized.
Varvara naps in the backseat.
We pass Hillerød and drive north, Grib Forest on one side and Esrum Lake on the other.
I sit in the front seat.
I’d hoped we could pay a visit to Adserbølle, but Knud and especially Varvara would rather drive to Rågeleje.
—If you really want to, we can drive there someday, Varvara said. It’s just a horrid old manor house. Let’s do it on a rainy day.
—Any money in being a writer? Knud asks.
—Not really, I say. Not for me anyway.
—If you ever need to make some extra cash, just let me know. Every so often I need a courier.
I think about Rimbaud, who gave up writing poetry and became a weapons smuggler in Abyssinia. It’s said he died a wealthy man.
Knud was born in Copenhagen in 1932. His father was a merchant. They owned an entire block of Bredgade near the Russian Church.
In 1940 they fled to Haifa.
—My parents hated being there. They thought it was too hot and too filthy. They were cultivated people. They were Europeans. As soon as the war ended, we returned to Copenhagen. We definitely thought the Germans got off much too easy. They could’ve given us Berlin. Or Cologne. Or Vienna! What good was a parcel of desert teeming with unfriendly Bedouins? All because
of an old book?
He smiles.
—That probably makes a guy like you happy, doesn’t it? The power of literature!
—Don’t listen to him, I hear from the backseat.
—Are you awake, my love?
—Oh yes. Are we there anytime soon?
Knud’s summerhouse is comprised of three black, wooden cottages with thatched roofs, and a swimming pool in the center. The pool is near the slope and offers a view of the Kattegat.
A VW Beetle convertible is parked at the house.
—Oh, how I need a swim in the sea, Varvara says.
—I think my granddaughter Emma is here, Knud says.
We walk inside, and he finds a pair of bathing trunks and a towel for me.
He follows Varvara upstairs, and when they return ten minutes later, she’s wearing a purple bathing suit patterned with red flowers.
I notice her arms. They are fleshy and not particularly wrinkly.
Knud is slender for a man his age, and there’s a swirl of gray hair on his chest. He’s wearing a pair of tight black swim trunks.
Walking down the path to the beach, we run into Emma and her friend.
They are in their early twenties.
They are suntanned.
They’re wearing bikinis.
Knud introduces me, and they smile.
The girlfriend’s name is Knirke.
Varvara and I stand on the second sandbar talking while Knud heads out toward the third.
—What’s your earliest memory? I ask.
—Oh, I don’t know. I remember a horse running amok on a plowed field. My mother sitting on a gig that’s bouncing up and down. I also remember that Cliff bit a dachshund’s ear. We had these enormous hunts, you know. I remember the blood running down his cheeks.
Varvara’s first husband was Baron Henrik of Søholm.
He was one of the count’s hunting buddies.
When it wasn’t hunting season, they played cards and drank, and one winter night in 1946 the count lost half of his possessions.
The baron, though, was willing to cut him a deal.
Varvara was eighteen, and although the farm manager’s son, Ditlev, had inserted three fingers inside her, she was still a virgin.
The baron was missing a finger on his right hand.
His forehead extended across his scalp and came within two inches of his nape, and he had a pointy, rather porous nose.
—I remember how on our wedding night, after the baron had fallen asleep, I lay thinking about Ditlev. Why hadn’t I let him? It would’ve been far more dignified. Henrik’s experiences came from prostitutes and the servant girls who rarely lasted more than a few months. He treated me more or less just like them, but I lasted a year and a half. Thank God he was sterile.
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The World and Varvara by Simon Fruelund, published by Spuyten Duyvil on October 15, 2023. To acquire a copy of the novel directly from the publisher, click here.