Robert’s friend was Ebbe. Naturally he didn’t much care for me, but there was never any hostility between us. I think he accepted me because I never posed any real threat to his domestic life. My pains and needs as I struggled out of the closet reminded him of his own earlier self, of which he didn’t like to be reminded, but it must also have evoked his compassion and his intuitive understanding, that what went on between Robert and me was best left alone to run its course. It was not possible to be jealous of Robert because he was fully present and genuine with everyone. What more could you get?
After three years in Denmark, Robert left and settled down in Germany where he started a career as an actor. Alex, Ebbe’s friend, in whose room I had first known Robert in the biblical sense, was a guide and took people to Morocco. One evening he invited Ebbe and me to smoke kif.
In Morocco Kif is marihuana, the raw material as well as the finished product, cleaned, fine cut, and mixed with homegrown tobacco according to the traditional métier du kif. It is smoked in a sibsi, a pipe with a long wooden shaft and a small head of clay. I didn’t know this; I don’t think I had even heard about marihuana, and Alex just told us that everybody in Morocco was smoking this kif. He had a sibsi and showed us how to smoke the traditional way: each one stuffing the pipe and giving it lighted to the next person, who then smoked all of it. The pipe went around several times, and finally I said: “I can’t feel anything.”
“Neither can I,” said Ebbe, and then we began to laugh and laugh, and I had the most hilarious good feeling.
Since that day Ebbe and I began to take our lunch together and became fast friends.
Here are Ebbe and Robert together in 1950.
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