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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE 2017A spikily funny, startlingly perceptive and beautifully written novel about modern life by the brightest light in Danish fictionSonja's over forty, and she's trying to move in the right direction. She's learning to drive. She's joined a meditation group. And she's attempting to reconnect with her sister.But Sonja would rather eat cake than meditate.Her driving instructor won't let her change gear.And her sister won't return her calls.Sonja's mind keeps wandering back to the dramatic landscapes of her childhood - the singing whooper swans, the endless sky, and getting lost barefoot in the rye fields - but how can she return to a place that she no longer recognizes? And how can she escape the alienating streets of Copenhagen?Mirror, Shoulder, Signal is a poignant, sharp-witted tale of one woman's journey in search of herself when there's no one to ask for directions.Dorthe Nors was born in 1970 and studied literature at the University of Aarhus. She is one of the most original voices in contemporary Danish literature. Her short stories have appeared in numerous international periodicals including including The Boston Review and Harpers, and she is the first Danish writer ever to have a story published in the New Yorker. Nors has published four novels so far, in addition to a collection of stories Karate Chop, and a novella Minna needs rehearsal space, also published by Pushkin Press. Karate Chop won the prestigious P. O. Enquist Literary Prize in 2014. She lives in rural Jutland, Denmark.
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PUSHKIN PRESS
PRAISE FOR DORTHE NORS
“Gripping … how often can we honestly say that a book is unlike anything else? Yet here it is, unique in form and effect … Nors has found a novel way of getting into the human heart”
Guardian
“To read a Dorthe Nors story is to enter a dream and become subject to its logic … Nors knows and understands so much about us; her perceptions frequently shock with their acuity, though within seconds you recognize them as, yes, true”
Daniel Woodrell, award-winning author of Winter’s Bone
“Unsettling and poetic … Some pieces … are oddly beautiful; others are brilliantly disturbing”
The New York Times
“Nors’s prose is direct … a series of uncluttered and voice-driven sentences that achieve their rhythm through careful juxtaposition and build”
Chicago Tribune
“The intricately crafted stories in Karate Chop, from popular Danish writer Dorthe Nors, focus on ordinary occurrences … and then twist them into brilliantly slanted cautionary tales about desire, romance, deception, and dread”
Elle
“Nors has found her own space away from Copenhagen’s literati … Her words whip along, each idea cascading into the next: it’s like having a window into someone’s thoughts”
Independent
“Darkly funny and incisive … In these literary body-blows, Nors takes merciless aim at families, relationships and egos”
Financial Times
“Dorthe Nors’s story collection, Karate Chop, also blew me away … these are some of the best five-page stories I’ve ever read”
Irish Times
“Nors has a great knack … for portraying the voids and fault lines in an unbalanced mind … crisp, quirky, jarringly funny”
Times Literary Supplement
“My favorite discovery was Minna Needs Rehearsal Space by the ferociously-talented Danish writer Dorthe Nors … a beautiful, moving, totally compelling account of one woman’s yearning. I simply can’t wait for Nors’s next English translation”
The Herald
“The short-short stories in Danish sensation Nors’s slim, potent collection … evoke the weirdness and wonder of relating in the digital age”
Vogue
“Spare and sublime. Dorthe Nors knows how to capture the smallest moments and sculpt them into the unforgettable”
Oprah Magazine
“Dorthe Nors is a writer of moments—quiet, raw portraits of existential meditation, at times dyspeptic, but never unsympathetic”
Paris Review
“In this slim collection of stories, the Danish Nors examines everyday issues with intensity and force”
Marie Claire
“Beautiful, faceted, haunting stories … a rising star of Danish letters”
Junot Diaz, author of This Is How You Lose Her
Translated from the Danish by MISHA HOEKSTRA
PUSHKIN PRESS
Contents
1.
SONJA IS SITTING IN A CAR, and she’s brought her dictionary along. It’s heavy, and sits in the bag on the backseat. She’s halfway through her translation of Gösta Svensson’s latest crime novel, and the quality was already dipping with the previous one. Now’s the time I can afford it, she thought, and so she looked for driving schools online and signed up with Folke in Frederiksberg. The theory classroom was small and blue and reeked of stale smoke and locker rooms, but the theory itself went well. Besides Folke, there was only one other person Sonja’s age in the class, and he was there because of drunk driving, so he kept to himself. Sonja usually sat there and stuck out among all the kids, and for the first aid unit the instructor used her as a model. He pointed to the spot on her throat where they were supposed to imagine her breathing had gotten blocked. He did the Heimlich on her, his fingers up in her face, inside her collar, up and down her arms. At one point he put her into a stranglehold, but that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst was when they had to do the exercises themselves. It was humiliating to be placed in the recovery position by a boy of eighteen. It also made her dizzy, and that was something no one was supposed to find out. “You’re such a fighter,” her mom always said, and Sonja is a fighter; she doesn’t give up. She ought to, but she doesn’t. “And then you compress the heart hard thirty times and pay attention to whether they’re breathing,” the first aid instructor said.
That’s all that counts in the end, Sonja had thought, breathing, and she passed theory. With her the problem’s always practice, which is why she’s now sitting in a car. It’s great that she’s made it this far, even if it’s not far enough; she just wishes she were skilled and experienced. Like Sonja’s sister Kate and Kate’s husband Frank, who got their licenses in the eighties. Back home in Balling, folks were driving souped-up pickups, burning rubber, off-roading. All those accidents the adult Kate fears now are things she’d gloried in as a teen. She’d been a stowaway in rolling wrecks, a barn-dance femme fatale, and the belle of clubs and gym meets. It wouldn’t surprise Sonja to learn that Kate used to sneak the car home the back way. In Balling, cars would slink along the road behind the church, and Sonja’s car tiptoes around too, but that’s because she’s a terrible driver. The car as mechanism is hard for her to fathom, and her driving lessons have been plagued with problems. The biggest of them is sitting in the car right now, next to Sonja. Her name is Jytte, and it’s her smoke that clings to the theory classroom. Surfaces at the driving school are galvanized with cigarette smoke, and most of it took a trip through Jytte’s lungs first. When Sonja arrives at the school, Jytte’s sitting in Folke’s office, on Facebook or going through other students’ medical records. “Melanie with the ponytail wasn’t certified by the doctor!” she shouts over to Sonja in the doorway. “Something wrong with her nerves, did you know that?”
Sonja didn’t know, and she hasn’t been certified by the medical officer either. She’s got an ear disorder. It’s an inherited condition from her mother’s side; none of them can maintain their balance when their heads are in certain positions. For a long time she thought she’d escaped it, but then it showed up, the positional dizziness. It’s called benign paroxysmal positional vertigo, but that’s far too much Latin for the place Sonja comes from. And besides, she’s got it under control. It’s not going to keep her from doing squat, and so now she’s sitting in the car. She’s got Gösta in the backseat, and Jytte at her side.
Because Jytte’s got a lot on her mind, she hasn’t had time to teach Sonja to shift for herself. Sonja’s been driving with Jytte for six months, and still she fumbles with the gears. Jytte seizes the initiative and deals with it for her, since when Jytte deals with changing gears, there’s no need for her to change topics: her son’s getting married, her grandkid’s going to be called something ghastly, the fiancée’s got a cockamamie clothing sense, and the sister of her brother-in-law’s mother’s new husband just died.
“Thai people just can’t drive.”
Sonja and Jytte are in Frederiksberg, waiting for a traffic light. Smoke from the last cigarette out the window has been sucked into the passenger compartment, and it mixes with the sweat that Sonja excretes. She signals right, Jytte’s hand on the gearstick, and keeps an eye out for cyclists.
“This woman I’ve got now is called Pakpao. Pakpao!? GREEN LIGHT! SECOND GEAR, SECOND GEAR, BIKE!”
Jytte shifts to second while Sonja swerves to miss the bike.
“And then she’s married to this dirty old man who’s seventy-five. He’s been down in the office, completely bloated and all.” They’ve gone a fair piece toward the inner city and traffic is light, so Jytte can shift to fourth no problem. She uses the passenger-side clutch and then points at a deli.
“They make a good headcheese in there, and this warm liver pâté with bacon and cocktail wieners. I love Christmas, I simply can’t get enough of it. Don’t you just love Christmas?”
It’s early August, and Sonja does not like Christmas. It all revolves around Kate’s shopping lists and minimizing damage by winding back time, and yet she nods anyway. She wants to stay on Jytte’s good side since in truth, it’s Jytte who’s driving the car. Actually, Sonja has a soft spot for her, because Jytte’s told her that she comes from the Djursland peninsula. From a small village in the direction of Nimtofte. Jytte’s father ran the local feed store, right across from school, so Jytte could run home and eat during lunch hour. She moved to Copenhagen when she was twenty. The village constable had a younger brother with an extra room in the suburb of Hvidovre. He was a cop himself, the younger brother, and Jytte’s always had a weakness for a man in uniform. Now she lives inland, in Solrød, but back then the thing was to go out dancing till you no longer stank of Danish farmland.
Sonja’s told Jytte she has a hard time believing that Jytte’s also from Jutland. Sonja can’t hear it in her speech, and in general she has a hard time understanding what Jytte’s saying. Turn left is turleff, turn right trite, and it’s not really dialect to speak of. It’s just the fastest way for Jytte to bark commands without changing topics.
“There’s not much Jutland left in you,” Sonja says now.
“You should just hear—trite—when I talk on the phone to my sister. GREEN ARROW, GREEN ARROW, TURN GOD-DAMMIT, BIKE!”
Sonja turns right and thinks about how she herself might sound when she talks on the phone to Kate. But she hardly ever talks to Kate anymore, and now they’re headed toward the Vesterbro quarter. Ahead of them lies Istedgade, with its traffic quagmire, and Jytte is saying that she likes Swedish stair-step candles to be in the windows. There should also be tinsel on the Christmas tree, but that’s not the way her son’s fiancée sees it. At her place, the tree always has to be trimmed in white, and Jytte just doesn’t get it, just like she doesn’t get why Folke lets so many foreigners into the driving school.
“They can go to their own driving schools,” Jytte says. “They can’t understand what I say. I—turleff—take my life in my hands every time I drive with them.”
Sonja thinks about the feed store in Djursland. Back home in Balling, they had one of them too. Across the road lay a grocery store, known as Super Aage’s on account of the manager’s first name. Now there’s no grocer, no butcher, no post office in Balling. The farms have swallowed each other up so only two are left, and they’ve taken out all the dairy cart tracks, the gossip paths, the old sunken roads. Balling lies like an isolated instance of civilization in an oversized cornfield, though out past that, the heath has escaped the drive for efficiency. There are whooper swans there, and while almost no one farms anymore, farmhouse kitchens are still huge—the size of small cafeterias. A long laminated table at one end for the vanished farmhands, and then the modern cabinets by the window. You always had to scoot over on the bench when they came in to eat, and then there’s Jytte, sitting in Djursland, dangling her legs. It’s the lunch hour, she’s run home to eat, and her feet don’t reach the floor. She’s wearing red bobby sox and a plaid skirt. Her mother’s placed a slice of white bread before her. Her mother bakes the bread herself; it’s dry, and Jytte spreads margarine on it. Then she grabs the package of brown sugar. It makes a crunching sound. It’s fun pressing the brown sugar into the margarine. She can spend a long time pressing it in. Afterward, she listens to how the brown sugar keeps crunching in her mouth. It dissolves in her spit, which becomes sweet, like syrup. The bell’s going to ring soon. When it rings, her mother yells that she’s going to be late. Jytte’s forced to run across the road, her legs going like drumsticks.
“BRAKE GODDAMMIT! CAN’T YOU FUCKING SEE THE CROSSWALK?”
Jytte’s stomped on the brake and clutch. They’re stopped at a pedestrian crossing, staring at a frightened man in a windbreaker.
“You have to stop for people!” Jytte says.
“I know that,” Sonja says.
“It doesn’t fucking look that way!” Jytte says, and she releases the clutch, first, second.
Jytte’s phone rings. They pass Vesterbrogade, third gear. Jytte’s husband has mornings off, and he can’t find the remote.
“IT’S IN THE BASKET. YEAH, THE BASKET BESIDE THE—trite, signal, signal goddammit, turleff, slowly, slowly!— … PORK RIB ROAST, I THINK.”
They drive up Istedgade amid glistening shoals of bikes. Sonja’s vision is a fog and she almost can’t breathe, yet at the intersection by Enghavevej she manages a left turn pretty much on her own. Jytte’s no longer talking to her husband, but she’s discovered a text with a photo from her son’s fiancée. It depicts her grandchild in a christening dress and Jytte’s voice grows elastic, for Sonja has to see the picture too, but Sonja would prefer to wait if she may, and then Jytte places the phone up on the dashboard.
It’s difficult to maintain boundaries in an automobile. When you’re a driving student, you have to relinquish free will, and once Jytte forced her to overtake a hot dog cart. They’d been driving around calmly enough, but then they’d come to a place where there was a traffic island on the street. A traffic island and a hot dog cart that was creeping forward. Sonja wasn’t supposed to pass, but people in back became impatient and started honking. “Pass, God damn you, pass!” yelled Jytte, whereupon Sonja crossed over into the lane of oncoming traffic, passed, and then turned back into her own lane so quickly that she nearly clipped the hot dog man. He was walking along in front, of course, hauling the cart. “You almost had his blood on your hands there,” Jytte said.
That still lingers in her body as shame. Shame, and fear of manslaughter, and now they’re approaching Vigerslev Boulevard. The road goes past Western Cemetery, and Jytte decides they’re going to turn and drive the entire way around it.
“You know, I really like Western Cemetery,” Sonja says, trying to make conversation. “Down in the bottom part is a chapel with plywood over the windows. I think they’ve stopped using it. There’s this avenue of gnarled old poplars there too. And a pond. I love to take a blanket and lie there and read.”
To Jytte, reading is for people on holiday, and cemeteries are for the dead. In Jytte’s family, the dead are numerous. Some have been killed in traffic accidents, others have died from cancer or workplace accidents. Her mother’s still alive, but her sister has lung disease, and then Sonja should turn. She should turn left. Mirror, shoulder, signal, and in with the clutch. Jytte downshifts to second, but Sonja gets to pick the lane herself. She picks the correct one, which isn’t so easy when there are so many. The light’s red and they’re sitting there in first gear, waiting. In the lane to their right is a delivery van, revving its engine.
“Aborigines,” Jytte says, pointing at the van.
Sonja looks up at the traffic signal. The light changes. She lets out the clutch and drives forward. So does the van, and then it starts turning in front of Sonja. It’s against the law to make a left turn from a right lane. Sonja knows that, and so does Jytte. Jytte’s already rolled down her window, and one hand is out the window with middle finger extended, the other hand over by the steering wheel to honk the horn. She gives them horn and finger, and the car stops in the intersection in the middle of a green light. The van has stopped too, and now its driver window rolls down.
“CHINKS!” shouts Jytte.
“FUCKING HO!” shouts the driver.
Sonja thinks about the dead prime ministers in the cemetery. It’s lovely to take a blanket there. Then she can lie on it, looking at Hans Hedtoft while the ducks quack and the roof of the big chapel gleams in the sun. It’s like the New Jerusalem, or a little patch of far-off Denmark. The sound of cars in the distance, the scent of yew and boxwood; almost the middle of nowhere. In theory a stag might drift past, and she’s bought a cookie for her coffee, pilfered some ivy from the undergrowth. The dead make no noise, and if she’s lucky a bird of prey might soar overhead. Then she’ll lie there, and escape.
2.
“THERE’S SOME TROUBLE with my neck and arms,” Sonja says.
It’s Thursday, and the air hangs heavy and close. She’s lying on the massage table with her head down in the mini bathing ring. Her jaw tenses against the leather; it ached when she brushed her teeth. It’s as if the joint’s rusted, although right now her masseuse is working on her butt. A little while later, she works her way up and says that something’s wandered from Sonja’s abdomen, up through her body. Anger, most likely. And it’s on the cusp of wanting to come out her mouth. She should just let it out, says the masseuse, whose name is Ellen.
“Out with it,” she says.
In the room that serves as massage clinic, the floorboards are all planed. The places where branches once sat on the trunk are demarcated clearly. The bedroom belonging to Sonja’s parents had been paneled in wood, and there were knotholes everywhere. While her mother read a tabloid, and her father rustled his newspaper, Sonja would lay there and set the wood surfaces in motion. She could get a knot to look like many things: birds, automobiles, the characters in Donald Duck. The floor at Ellen’s is alive in the same way, and now she’s got a good grip on Sonja’s butt cheek. She says that Sonja keeps tensing up, and when Sonja got there twenty minutes ago, the door stood ajar to Ellen’s kitchen. Sonja tried to peer inside but didn’t manage to see anything other than some knitting on the counter. She doesn’t know much about Ellen, except that she’s good at massage and there’s something wistful in her eyes.
“Your buttocks are hard,” Ellen says. “That’s because, if you’ll pardon a vulgar phrase, you’re a tight-ass with your feelings. An emotional tight-ass, a tight-fisted tightwad. Can’t you hear how everything’s right there in the words?”
With the job Sonja has, that’s something she knows quite well. Language is powerful, almost magic, and the smallest alteration can elevate a sentence or be its undoing.
“I think you should ask for more calm when you’re in the car.”
Driving school problems are a recurring theme at the clinic, and Ellen’s advice is always confrontation. But Sonja gave up on asking for calm long ago. There’s no way it would pay off. If Sonja requested calm, Jytte might try, all right, but it wouldn’t last long. Just being dictated to by a student like that would play havoc with Jytte’s mind. With Jytte, all bad things stem from quiet. Just like Kate, Jytte senses danger in blank expanses, so the thing is to abrade them with tedious speech, cake recipes, dog hair.
Ellen’s hands have a good grip on Sonja, and it’s far too seldom that Sonja puts herself in someone else’s hands. She imagines that Ellen’s hands are stronger than most. Ellen carries a lot of stuff around, and it’s not likely that all her clients can get up on the table by themselves. “Everyone needs to be met in their body,” Ellen likes to say, and Kate has strong hands too. At the nursing home where she works, they have hoists for the elderly and infirm. Yet she still can’t avoid lifting people, and both she and Ellen are strong that way, and now Ellen’s moved from Sonja’s buttocks to the back of her heart.
The back of the heart is the spot between the shoulder blades. Ellen calls it the back of the heart because that’s where you get stabbed when you get stabbed in the back. The spot is tender in Sonja. So tender that she stares hard at a knot on the floor while Ellen rubs. The knot resembles Mickey Mouse with his ears a bit too large, and he’s standing with his hands at his side. He’s got gloves on his hands and yellow buttons on his pants, he’s calling for Pluto and the dog’s supposed to come, he’s supposed to come now. It’s painful, and her upper arms hurt too; they feel like big bruises.
“Oh jeez,” Sonja says, “there too.”
“Why do you think your arms are so sore?”
Sonja says it might be because she was in this brawl in an intersection by Western Cemetery. She thought she’d told Ellen already during her other lament about Jytte, but apparently she hadn’t. It feels good to say it now, and she also tells Ellen about how it had been on the drive back to Folke’s Driving School. How Jytte had gotten rather huffy. At one point, Sonja tried to shift gears herself, and she shouldn’t have done that, because then Jytte accused her of trying to destroy the car.
“I was ready to cry,” Sonja says.
Ellen places her warm hands on Sonja’s upper arms.
“That was pretty unfair.”
Sonja can feel the muscles in her right upper arm relax a little. It’s Ellen’s hands, they’re patting her, and the fingers are massaging a spot behind her ear, and Sonja’s a woman in the middle of her life, she’s an adult now. She no longer needs for people to always get along, and she can’t make them either. They’re not very accepting, they won’t open up. Kate, for instance, doesn’t answer the phone anymore.
“Ready for the other side?” Ellen asks, and Sonja tries to nod.
It isn’t easy with her head in the bathing ring, and flipping over can be tricky besides; certain angles trigger the positional vertigo. Having her head in the so-called dentist position is awful. According to Ellen, Sonja’s dizziness is an expression of a spiritual condition, and Sonja’s explained that in that case, it’s a spiritual condition that most of the women in her family are subject to, though she doesn’t like to discuss her family with strangers. There’s also something in Ellen’s way of parsing other people’s bodies that reminds her of her university classes in textual analysis. Everything’s supposed to mean something else, everything’s supposed to be rising, tearing itself free of its wrappings, climbing up to some higher meaning; it’s supposed to get away from where it’s been. Reality will not suffice. Ellen cannot hide this yearning, and to judge by the many angels she’s placed around the room, she doesn’t want to either. There are small angelic figures on the desk and in the window, even on a chain around her neck, and now she’s on the way over to the other side of the table. She wants to start in on Sonja’s feet, which have a defective arch. “They don’t want to grab the earth,” Ellen has said. It said “Massage Therapist” on Ellen’s website, and Sonja thought it would be a form of physiotherapy, but at Ellen’s, her shoulder is not a shoulder; it’s a feeling. Sonja’s hands aren’t hands, but expressions of spiritual states. As a massage therapist, Ellen sees it as her job to decode Sonja, and Sonja’s only countermove is to decode Ellen. It’s a circus of mutual interpretation. If Sonja’s wrists are hurting, Ellen says, “Perhaps you’re holding the reins too hard.” When Sonja says it might also be because the Gösta Svensson novel has her hands toiling at the keyboard, Ellen says, “Then it must be some resistance to Gösta Svensson that’s sitting in your hands.”
That’s not at all out of the question, but now it isn’t her hands that Ellen’s working on but Sonja’s feet, which stick out well past the end of the massage table. Kate’s husband Frank calls her “the Masai,” because he had once been to Africa. He was down there to tell the Africans about wind turbines, and Sonja imagines him standing in the middle of the savannah. He stands there gazing at a Masai’s kneecaps. He’s small and clad in a T-shirt next to a man who towers over his head, so now he thinks it’s funny to tease Sonja about being a Masai because she’s so tall. She’s so tall that Ellen’s had to scoot her little stool back a few inches in order to really get at her feet. Ellen’s good at massage, there’s no doubt about that. But with the body analysis, Sonja’s gotten more than she bargained for.
“That’s a nice pendant by the way,” Sonja says, glancing at the angel on the chain.
Ellen fumbles with the pendant and says she bought it at a seminar.
She doesn’t say any more, but Sonja’s known for a long time that there are some things that Ellen doesn’t like to talk about, some additional data. She’s partial to the supernatural, and Sonja’s friend Molly is partial to that sort of thing too. For as far back as Sonja can recall, Molly’s been governed by a geographic and cosmic restlessness. Throughout their years in high school, they laid plans about how they would get away. And it wasn’t that Sonja wasn’t game. It was more that Molly was the one expanding on the idea, putting it into words. It had been a time of fevered dreams of the future, and that’s how they found themselves in a moving van that day in 1992. Dad behind the wheel with his lower lip jutting out, Sonja and Molly with an insistent eastward orientation. First the shared flat, then life in Copenhagen, and then, years later, Sonja found herself at a party at Molly’s up in Hørsholm, north of the city. And there there was a fortune teller. Sonja stood and drank a beer up against the fridge while the fortune teller, wearing a curry-colored tunic and drinking just water, was able to see things in Sonja’s future. Even though Dad had always advised Sonja to steer clear of anything that reeked of belief, she stood there thinking mostly about how the woman must have some illness, and Dad had also taught her that it was a sin to turn away the sick. So she allowed the fortune teller to let rip. And in hindsight, the fortune teller had certainly been right that she’d be unhappy in love. First she met Paul. Then she fell in love. Then he chose a twenty-something girl who still wore French braids, and the rest of the fortune she repressed. How are you supposed to survive otherwise? she wonders, trying to remember the whole thing. But her memory won’t yield.
“Does this hurt?” asks Ellen.
Yes, it hurts, but she doesn’t say that to Ellen, because Sonja doesn’t want the soles of her feet interpreted, and once in Jutland she also met someone who could see ghosts. She’d applied for a translation residency, because sitting at home with Gösta Svensson had gotten too lonesome. The translation center lay in an old convent, and before long there was rustling under the eaves. There was creaking in the floorboards and doors opening when no one was there. At night, the owls took flight over the main building, and from signs such as these the translators—there were a number of them there—concocted a ghost. The evenings passed with wine and chatter, and in their conversation the ghost walked again. To join in, Sonja gave the ghost some of Gösta Svensson’s attributes—the hipster goatee, the tweed jacket, the squeaky shoes. It was easy enough, as she’d translated all his crime novels into Danish and met him several times. What happened then was that she ran into one of the staff members, a chambermaid. Sonja ran into her in the staircase tower; Sonja was going down and the maid was on her way up. “Oh,” Sonja said when the woman suddenly appeared, “I thought you were the ghost.”
