Gerda Voss's Dentures

Gerda Voss's Dentures are a practical aid to speech and eating that the narrative repeatedly makes impossible to overlook: they slip, break, scatter across the floor, and are glued back together. Their changing condition marks the violence of Gerda's confinement under Fiete Honka, who treats their damage not as an injury to repair but as an opportunity to control and degrade her. Gerda's eventual repair is small and precarious, but it is also an act of practical persistence in a household where even food has disappeared.

Appearance and Early Occurrences

When Fiete Honka wakes beside an elderly woman, he is still immersed in a fantasy of having found a young, beautiful companion. The body beside him contradicts that imagining: her dentures have slipped halfway out, and the pillow is wet with saliva. Fiete probes at the slack flesh, gets no response, and recoils from the reality of the face. The denture makes the contrast material and immediate. It is not an abstract disappointment but a displaced object, visible in the mouth and impossible for him to ignore.

The narrative connects this encounter to Fiete Honka's repeated pattern of taking home older women, though the waking episode itself initially presents the woman through his drunken, distorted perception. In later scenes, Gerda's slipping denture is part of her visible appearance as she talks about her daughter. Her excitement makes it slide from her mouth repeatedly. The object is thus present in ordinary conversation as well as in moments of crisis: Gerda speaks, and the denture interrupts the polished, imagined version of her that Fiete would rather see.

Gerda's Body and Fiete's Fantasies

Fiete Honka does not respond to Gerda's bodily vulnerability with care. He imagines her daughter through a grotesque butcher-shop fantasy, turning a woman into meat for sale and making Gerda the salesperson. The denture slipping during Gerda's account of her daughter belongs to the same harsh contrast between Fiete's invented scenes and the imperfect bodies in front of him. His fantasies promise control over what he sees; Gerda's mouth, and the denture that will not stay in place, return him to a reality he resents.

The denture also becomes entangled with Fiete's plan to remake Gerda according to his preferences. He thinks she should lose weight, attend to her lips and hair, and have her nails and feet cleaned up. He estimates that he might improve her by thirty or forty percent. This language treats Gerda as a project to be brought into line, not as a person whose needs should determine what happens to her. The denture's later destruction gives that controlling impulse a brutal, physical form: Fiete does not merely imagine changing Gerda's appearance; he breaks the object that helps her eat and speak.

Breaking the Denture

The decisive damage occurs when Gerda pours herself a full glass without asking. As Fiete tries to wipe the glass from her mouth, she turns her head; his blow lands harder than he intended, and the denture breaks into pieces that scatter over the floor. His response is divided in a way that exposes the cruelty of the scene: he is somewhat sorry, but also regards the break as useful because Gerda will be unable to eat and might become thinner more quickly.

Gerda crawls around collecting the teeth and pleads for them. Fiete makes the collection into a humiliation, insisting that she pronounce the word for teeth properly before she can continue. She cannot manage it. After half an hour, she has gathered all the pieces and holds them out to him, in a posture Fiete likens to a well-behaved dog. He tries to join the denture with Uhu, fails, and throws the teeth down in anger after several attempts. He then tells her that she will get only what she can swallow without teeth. The broken object has become an instrument of punishment: its damage is followed by threatened food deprivation, while Gerda's distress provokes another blow from Fiete.

Repair and Significance

The next day, Gerda spends her time trying to mend the denture. Uhu does not work, and neither does Pattex. Among the household products she finds a tube of cement glue; after several attempts, it holds. The result is described as a joke-shop denture, a makeshift repair rather than a restoration to its former state. Yet the detail matters: after Fiete breaks the teeth and abandons the repair, Gerda searches for another material and persists until the pieces stay together.

Her repair does not resolve the conditions that made the denture so vulnerable. She is desperately hungry, searches the apartment for any food, and finds nothing—not a can, a potato, an onion, or a crust of bread. Fiete's threat that she must eat without teeth hangs over that deprivation, while the repaired denture offers no relief from the larger confinement. The object therefore records both coercion and limited agency. Fiete makes its breakage part of his effort to discipline Gerda's body; Gerda, left without his help, gathers the fragments and puts them back into use. Its patched condition keeps the violence visible even as it enables her to carry on.