Leaving Home

Abstract

16 World Literature Today A reply to Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “Autobiography” (1958) I looked away from home, on the farm which my parents couldn’t leave because it was either the season for sowing or harvesting or harrowing or rolling, an outlying farm standing solitary on the fields between two small villages. At night I sometimes dreamt that I could fly over the trees on wings constructed from branches or other available material, but always woke up on the earth. I disembarked on foreign shores in the books I borrowed in the book bus where the evening light fell in, making the gilded letters on the spines of the books shine and the safe, good smell of earlier readers that clung to the pages struck me in greeting. I rowed the last part of the way to an island in the small lake in the garden, encouraged by my mother’s mother, who read Robinson Crusoe to me. I established a prairie life out on the fields, when they were harvested, and the sheaves could be stacked into forts I knew from cowboy films on long Sunday afternoons with my male cousins. Or after School Cinema I continued David Livingstone’s expedition into the heart of Africa equipped with machete and compass in between the beech trees in the dark place right at the bottom of the garden and dug myself Eskimo-like into holes in the snow to sit absolutely still, listening in the creaking winter to what even back then had vanished and would not come back. I dived straight down into the Stone Age after history hour was over, ate berries and nuts and ground handfuls of my father’s newly harvested barley between two stones round by the old chicken coop, where foxes dug in under the fence. With the gardener’s children I played at travelling circuses, in my bathing suit walked on a tightrope stretched between the trees, after a visit by Circus Benneweis. I started an Egyptian collection Leaving Home Pia Tafdrup photo : bjørn giesenbauer May–june 2012 17 photo : isak hoffmeyer at home in my own room after a tour of the Glyptotek art museum with my grandfather, who guided the way from the earliest times up to the Roman emperors and as a souvenir gave me a plaster cast of an Egyptian scribe, which still stands on my windowsill – as my father on a lathe in the workshop kept meteors fallen black-seething on his fields, magical lava-like stones, sent straight from the universe to him. I listened to birds that flew from exotic lands to settle in the bushes of our garden. I would not have gone anywhere, if my aunt had not kidnapped my sister and me and hidden us one afternoon in the half-darkness of Kronborg’s casemates. Or if my grandmother and grandfather, when my brother had been born, and my mother for a time lost sight of my sister and me, had not abducted us for a weekend to Arild, on the other side of Øresund, which I often looked out across as I hung about at Langebro in Hellebæk and in all weathers watched the world pass by, with only one desire: to take part in it, there, where things happened, but here for the first time as a ten-year-old in a new country was confronted by rocks that could be climbed, a journey that had an effect like an injection of dreams and drove me later to try to leave home. No one must hold on to me, no one must put obstacles in the way, I was willing to run the risk life is. I left the farm one day in anger, packed my clothes in a bundle set off, as I had seen vagabonds portrayed, to walk around the earth, or at least – as perhaps was hoped – far out on the field in the direction of the village that lay further off, was fetched back by my father. Yet only for a time, for I soon invented a code, a new alphabet, which galloping led me away across the empty paper, so scarily white that not...