The Undertaker's Daughter (Ilka #1)(7)

“Morning in there. Are you awake?”

She sat up, confused. She had been up once in the night to look for a bathroom. The building seemed strangely hushed, as if it were packed in cotton. She’d opened a few doors and finally found a bathroom with shiny tiles and a low bathtub. The toilet had a soft cover on its seat, like the one in her grandmother’s flat in Bagsv?rd. On her way back, she had grabbed her father’s jacket, carried it to the bed, and buried her nose in it. Now it lay halfway on the floor.

“Give me half an hour,” she said. She hugged the jacket, savoring the odor that had brought her childhood memories to the surface from the moment she’d walked into the room.

Now that it was light outside, the room seemed bigger. Last night she hadn’t noticed the storage boxes lining the wall behind both sides of the desk. Clean shirts in clear plastic sacks hung from the hook behind the door.

“Okay, but have a look at these IRS forms,” he said, sliding a folder under the door. “And sign on the last page when you’ve read them. We’ll take off whenever you’re ready.”

Ilka didn’t answer. She pulled her knees up to her chest and lay curled up. Without moving. Being shut up inside a room with her father’s belongings was enough to make her feel she’d reunited with a part of herself. The big black hole inside her, the one that had appeared every time she sent a letter despite knowing she’d get no answer, was slowly filling up with something she’d failed to find herself.

She had lived about a sixth of her life with her father. When do we become truly conscious of the people around us? she wondered. She had just turned forty, and he had deserted them when she was seven. This room here was filled with everything he had left behind, all her memories of him. All the odors and sensations that had made her miss him.



Artie knocked on the door again. She had no idea how long she’d been lying on the bed.

“Ready?” he called out.

“No,” she yelled back. She couldn’t. She needed to just stay and take in everything here, so it wouldn’t disappear again.

“Have you read it?”

“I signed it!”

“Would you rather stay here? Do you want me to go alone?”

“Yes, please.”

Silence. She couldn’t tell if he was still outside.

“Okay,” he finally said. “I’ll come back after breakfast.” He sounded annoyed. “I’ll leave the phone here with you.”

Ilka listened to him walk down the stairs. After she’d walked over to the door and signed her name, she hadn’t moved a muscle. She hadn’t opened any drawers or closets.

She’d brought along a bag of chips, but they were all gone. And she didn’t feel like going downstairs for something to drink. Instead, she gave way to exhaustion. The stream of thoughts, the fragments of memories in her head, had slowly settled into a tempo she could follow.

Her father had written her into his will. He had declared her to be his biological daughter. But evidently, he’d never mentioned her to his new family, or to the people closest to him in his new life. Of course, he hadn’t been obligated to mention her, she thought. But if her name hadn’t come up in his will, they could have liquidated his business without anyone knowing about an adult daughter in Denmark.

The telephone outside the door rang, but she ignored it. What had this Artie guy imagined she should do if the telephone rang? Did he think she would answer it? And say what?

At first, she’d wondered why her father had named her in his will. But after having spent the last twelve hours enveloped in memories of him, she had realized that no matter what had happened in his life, a part of him had still been her father.

She cried, then felt herself dozing off.

Someone knocked on the door. “Not today,” she yelled, before Artie could even speak a word. She turned her back to the room, her face to the wall. She closed her eyes until the footsteps disappeared down the stairs.

The telephone rang again, but she didn’t react.

Slowly it had all come back. After her father had disappeared, her mother had two jobs: the funeral home business and her teaching. It wasn’t long after summer vacation, and school had just begun. Ilka thought he had left in September. A month before she turned eight. Her mother taught Danish and arts and crafts to students in several grades. When she wasn’t at school, she was at the funeral home on Br?nsh?j Square. Also on weekends, picking up flowers and ordering coffins. Working in the office, keeping the books when she wasn’t filling out forms.

Ilka had gone along with her to various embassies whenever a mortuary passport was needed to bring a corpse home from outside the country, or when a person died in Denmark and was to be buried elsewhere. It had been fascinating, though frightening. But she had never fully understood how hard her mother worked. Finally, when Ilka was twelve, her mother managed to sell the business and get back her life.

After her father left, they were unable to afford the single-story house Ilka had been born in. They moved into a small apartment on Frederikssundsvej in Copenhagen. Her mother had never been shy about blaming her father for their economic woes, but she’d always said they would be okay. After she sold the funeral home, their situation had improved; Ilka saw it mostly from the color in her mother’s cheeks, a more relaxed expression on her face. Also, she was more likely to let Ilka invite friends home for dinner. When she started eighth grade, they moved to ?sterbro, a better district in the city, but she stayed in her school in Br?nsh?j and took the bus.