The Fast and Variable Cost of Apples

by Mark Wekander

When I was twenty-six I decided that I needed to learn a trade, to be able to be something else than an academic, so I enrolled in a technical school to study printing. For a year I took classes and found out that printing was technical and required coordination and a subtle mechanical sense, at least before the invention of the electronic printing presses. I was not good at art so I was not that good at layout and I was not that good at machines, so I never quite got the hang of the presses. Perhaps I might have made a decent typesetter, but it was the end of the age of the linotype. But I was a good student and I had good grades and after a year, I talked to some of my Danish relatives and they sent me the information for applying to the Grafiske Højkole near Copenhagen, I was accepted, and found a room in the Copenhagen suburb of Valby.

I could read Danish and I could write some. Writing was how I communicated with my relatives who remembered me fondly because I had sent them a present after the first visit, using the Danish I knew to write a short card. I had written that I was sending them this gift. And the word in Danish for gift, however, was gave. Gift meant poison. They wrote and told me that they had many laughs about my sending them poison.

Writing and reading did not mean that I could speak or understand. I saw the look of weary patience on the faces of those who tried to decipher what I was trying to say and I myself often answered yes to questions I didn't understand and often they were about where I lived or where I was from or what I thought. Almost inevitably the speaker would switch to English for a few minutes and then walk away.

Some things I understood. In one class I took, I heard the mantra, "What we sell is not printing, but information," as the class analyzed color print flyers from Danish supermarkets. I suppose they emphasized it so much since a lot of the students were under the illusion that they were selling printing.

I was still mostly in the dark, however. I listened as attentively as I could and latched on to certain words like blanket, thinking it was the rubber cover of the rollers of a printing press. I struggled to decipher the word fast that always seemed paired with the word æble and I knew from childhood that that was an apple. But I could not put it together.

It was not an epiphany, but a deep personal embarrassment that I could share with no one when I realized that the blanket they had been talking about was a business form and that the instructor had not been saying æble, but variable. And the hours of lectures that I had listened to were about fast and variable costs. That Friday afternoon as soon as the classes finished, I hurried away from the school to the bus stop. As I waited, I hoped that no one from the school would show up and try to make small talk. The bus ride seemed endless, the buildings, the somewhat familiar route, passed like a blank page. The signs on shops that I had read that morning, tilbud, slagter, Den Danske Bank, dejlige priser, Isenkræmmer, alt billigt,ægte kvalitet—sale, butcher, The Danish Bank, wonderful prices, hardware store, everything cheap, real quality, made no sense. If someone addressed me now, I would not be able to speak, so like many other people on the bus, I stared intensely out the window.

I walked up the three flights of stairs to my room which was what was called a klubværelse, a club room, which meant that I and three other people had our own small rooms with one dormer window and that we shared a kitchen and a bathroom. The kitchen had a small refrigerator and a gas burner and the bathroom had a toilet and a shower head. There was a squeegee to scrape the water on the floor into a drain when one was finished showering. I pulled the curtains on the window and got into bed with most of my clothes on. The next morning I got up, went to the bathroom, took my clothes off, and went to bed for another twelve hours. I slept with brief interruptions until Monday morning.

When I sat in class on Monday morning, I understood almost everything. Now I knew that this was a business school for the printing industry and that my classmates had all worked in printing companies and were now studying to be managers. Now I understood the lecture on labor unions, health insurance, and labor law and the reason why it was important to design forms for a business.

Soon after this weekend, the school director informed me that my class was taking a trip to the United States and it would be good if I accompanied them. This was a time when there was a lot of money in Denmark. I did not pay for classes and this trip was also free. I knew that I did not want to continue so I said I didn't want to go because I didn't want to feel any more obligation to continue and when the class returned I went to the director and quit.

I applied to the Department of Nordic Philology at the University of Copenhagen as a guest student and was accepted, but the new term began in January so I read and wrote in my small room on a typewriter I bought.

I washed all my clothes by hand in the shared kitchen when the other borders were at work. I would wring them out as best I could and carry them in a large plastic bag to the laundry in front of the apartment building. I put them in the centrifuge machine and then in the dryer. And while my clothes were tumbling over each other in the dryer, I would listen to the women around me.

On one of these afternoons in October, a woman shouted over the whirr of the centrifuge and the spinning and humming of the dryers to ask the time. Another responded that it was fem minutter i halv to, or five minutes into half two, or 1:35. Of course, I knew what time it was, but how should I untangle what the woman said. Those five minutes moved into the larger stationary hours, which could be sliced in two. You could have half of the second hour which would be one. It was as if time were fluid and moving and also stationary and solid, movement and matter. I'm sure that no one who speaks Danish thinks of it that way. Perhaps children do. I remember pondering English as a child, wondering about the auxiliary "do" and what it meant. But to me fem minutter I halv to was a revelation. It was an insistence on thinking of the same thing two ways. It was the metaphysical side of a language that was usually so straight forward, almost vulgar to an English speaker in its descriptive insistence, a language that referred to a desk as a writing table, cookies as small cakes, and nipples as breast warts.

Fem minutter i halv to. I felt that I had been let into a mystery. Language was arbitrary, unfathomable, and miraculously mine on that day. I felt lost, but in a different way than I did in the first weeks at the GrafiskeHøjskole. It was the loss of abandon and hopelessness that can cause exhilaration and freedom. I knew that I could tell about that experience, but in a sense never share it. The feeling could never really make sense to anyone else. I checked the clothes and put another eight crowns in the dryer and watched as the clothes I had worn for the last few weeks grew lighter and lighter until they floated in the air of the dryer.