Death didn’t answer.
I took a step forward. “Can you make him leave?” I asked Resurrection. “You are here now. We don’t need him any longer.”
“Trrrriiiipppp,” she said. “Tipp, tipp.”
I sighed.
“I know, right?” Death said and shook his head.
I noticed my mother had cleaned the floor.
The next day when my father woke up, he was beside himself, gripped by fear, mortified.
“I am sorry,” he said to my mother and reached for her.
“I’ll make you something to eat,” she said.
I heard her crying in the kitchen.
“I am sorry,” he cried and hugged me.
I freed myself from his arms: “Dad, stop it,” I said uncomfortably. “There is really nothing to be sorry for.”
I found my mother in the kitchen. “I cannot bear it,” she said, blue eyes shiny, swelling.
“I understand that,” I said.
“I hate it,” she cried, biting her knuckles.
She might as well have said she hated him.
Late evening, the Church elderly came. I don’t know who called for them, but I was sent to bed. I made loud thumping noises all the way into my room in the basement—an extra couple of thumps for good measure, then I snuck back half way up the stairs and sat down on one of the steps. Through the bannister I could see our kitchen. My mother, my father, and the church elderly sat at the table. I could see the pastor, the vice-pastor and the ones we called the Three Wise Men: John, Paul and Rolf. Death was there too. He was the only one who noticed me and raised his white hand in a salute. I ignored him.
“Prayer,” the pastor said. “God has promised, he will heal.”
My father nodded. My mother had lowered her head. I couldn’t see the expression on her face.
Death was not listening. He was making faces to me. Like, look at me, now I am making this face. Now, I am making this face. I can roll my eyes so you only see the whites! I glared at him.
The pastor said: “If you pray enough, you will be healed.”
“God," my father said to me that afternoon. “God must come before everything. We should pray every morning to be led by the Holy Spirit.”
I wondered how it made him feel, to be back with God as priority number one again. I could imagine how it made God feel, being right.
Now that we knew God had to come before everything, I tackled my father’s slight bookshelf. All the Christian books in his bookshelf looked the same: they were bound in thick green, blue or brown leather, the title and the author’s name were embossed in gold on the front page. Their language was outdated, haughty, but told of religious heroes and real-life exploits that made them exciting all the same. The sun never rose at this point during the year and I had days to just lie in bed and read. The lace curtains of the squashed windows beneath the roof floated in some thermal stream from the radiators, making listless patterns on my duvet. The air in my room was dry and warm.
Kathryn Khulman was born again at the age of fourteen and after this glorious new birth experience she started preaching to Idaho farmers. With time she became an important faith healer, holding healing crusades throughout the world.
In one of the books was a photo of Kathryn looking like a tiny Edith Piaf on stage. There must be several thousand people in the audience and Kathryn stands slender in front of them—a fairy dressed in a white gown with wide arms—believing in miracles with “every atom of her being.”
Yonggi Cho was born a destitute Buddhist in 1936 in Korea. After converting to Christianity, he had a vision for creating the largest church in the world. As his congregation grew towards a staggering 830,000 members, he created a cell group formula where small groups were taught to tend to each other in this large sea of people. These “cell groups” became famous throughout the Pentecostal world and so did Pastor Cho.
Seventeen year-old Joni Eareckson was left quadriplegic after a diving accident in 1967. Post her misfortune, Joni authored over thirty Christian books, painted with the brush in her mouth and recorded religious songs, but as we could imagine; for a healthy, sporty adolescent, being condemned to a life in a wheelchair was devastating.
Her story caused me some concern for Joni was not healed. I read all her books despite most of them being a repeat of the former, trying to find the book with the eluding, but, surely, the only suitable ending. Joni said her life was more valuable now, but what I wanted to know was: where on earth was Kathryn Khulman?!
After a service, I asked our pastor.
He shook his head. “Not enough faith,” he said.
“So… she could be healed if she wanted to?”
“Oh absolutely,” he said. “The Bible is clear.”
“You have taken to clearing your throat when you speak,” my mother said when I asked her about Joni. “It is not nice. Do not clear your throat, just swallow.”
I continued talking, but after every couple of words she interrupted me by saying: “Swallow!” so I gave up.
My father remodelled the walk-in closet by the entrance into a prayer room. He put in a bathmat to bend his bony knees onto, a chair to lean forward on and removed the winter clothes to be able to fit. The closet was poorly insulated: my father strident. As he shouted in tongues and pleaded with God, we were silent. My mother kept busy. I found it difficult to focus on anything much. I sat around, waited.
A paltry closet jam-packed with prayers wouldn’t work when God was to come first. Instead, we sat in the closet. He wanted the house. My father began praying wherever he was, walking in and out of the rooms that each had a name, sighing, mumbling in tongues. Sometimes he shouted something that made little sense. He was oblivious to the turmoil his prayers caused. Death began to pray too. He would stand outside the closet and sway with his white limbs above his head in the air. His prayers sounded mostly like LA-LA-LA-LA-LA-LA-LA.
“It’s so loud,” I whispered to my mother.
She did not respond.
“Mum,” I persisted, “don’t you find it loud?”
“I do,” she whispered back.
“He has a unique relationship with God.” I turned to defending him.
“I know that,” she said.
“It is not so bad,” I said. “I mean, we almost cannot hear a thing, right?”
“O, thank you Jesus,” my father sighed.
My mother vanished into the kitchen. She dropped a pot loudly in the sink. A cupboard door slammed.
“Jesus, hear my prayers!” my father shouted.
I took my crayons and went down to the basement. Once in the basement, I fell to my knees and I, too, prayed. It couldn’t be that my father didn’t get healed because of me.
In January, my grandmother came on a surprise visit. She only stayed for one night. As she stepped inside the door, she paused. Death was standing by the walk-in closet and she was looking straight at him. She sees him, I realised. She sees him too! Death nodded at my grandmother. My grandmother was no larger than a wet woollen glove. Her fingers were knobbly, pointing both here and there. She reached Death merely to his chest. But Death seemed worried. He was wringing his hands.
“SO YOU ARE HERE,” my mother said, stilted. There were red flames on her cheeks and neck.
“YES,” my grandmother answered in the same manner.
“I CAN TAKE YOUR COAT.”
I cringed.
My grandmother’s name was Saga, which is the Swedish word for “fairytale”. Her sister’s name had been Engla—for the angels, and her brother’s name Ehrling—for honesty. Of the three, my grandmother was the most unlikely fairy-tale there was. She was fierce. I think even my father was scared of her. She lived on her own in a house in the village where she had lived since the beginning of time. And that was where you would find our family’s roots. The roots stretched and wrapped themselves around countless other villages, hobbled into the darkest corners of Lapland, reached across the Gulf into Finland, and on top of this
mountain of lumpy living wood sat my grandmother, cutting strands of roots off, or nurturing them, however she saw fit.
“What is he doing here?” my grandmother hissed at me when my mother went into the kitchen to prepare dinner. I knew who she meant.
“He just moved in,” I whispered back.
“Who invited him?”
We didn’t have a choice, I wanted to say, but my father had said we weren’t allowed to tell anyone, so I just shook my head.
At nightfall, she asked to tuck me in. My mother didn’t like the idea, I could tell, but nodded.
“How are things with you really?” my grandmother asked.
“Great,” I said.
“That is the funny thing with you,” she said. “You are always great.”
“Did you know that 35,000 Chinese get saved every day?” I asked.
My grandmother sighed. “So little time,” she mumbled. “Irma, sometimes parents forget that their children are not grown up.”
“What do you mean?”
“Some children are so bright, so mature, that their parents forget that at the end of the day, they are little, and they must be allowed to remain that way. Those children take on a too large responsibility too young.”
“Young or old, God doesn’t make a difference,” I said.
“Oh God,” she said, but I don’t think she was praying. “The numbers of sermons I have attended through the years. Tuesday, there was the prayer meeting, Wednesday, choir song, Saturday, sermon. Sunday, there were sermons at eleven, at three and at seven. If I ever felt tired and tempted to stay at home, I knew it was actually more tiresome to not go. If you missed a sermon, people worried that you had fallen behind, asked concerned questions in a way I really didn’t like. ‘How are things with you, Saga?’, ‘You have been on my mind so much lately—how do things stand with you?’ Bah!
“And the sermons! Spectacles! We smelled the sulphur and felt the heat from Gehenna. ‘The end of the time is near! Are you ready?’ Were we ready? ‘Oh, pray for me I am not ready!’ Sometimes we felt we were amongst the lucky saved ones and sometimes that we were doomed to eternal rejection. Worst were the sins we might have committed unknowingly—how could we be sure we were forgiven those? Afterwards, we tumbled out into the yard, dizzy, speaking with low voices as if we were expecting to be struck down at any moment. I remember your mother, she must have been around seven at the time, one Sunday morning after sermon she turned to me on the stairs and said: ‘Saga, are we going to die now?’ The pastor, overhearing her words, praised God and said, ‘She is right! We have to die away from that which is old, in order for something new to be born.’
“And what did we do? We fools. Yes, we shouted ‘Hallelujah!’
“Ah, Irma, we chose God for our children, as he was chosen for us by our parents. And they chose him for you. How I wish we had been sensible in how we entertained the notion of God. But we weren’t.”
I held my breath, suddenly certain my grandmother had been “h’expelled” from church and that she was doomed.
“Bedtime,” my mother shouted from upstairs. “Bedtime!”
“If there is a God, he is good,” my grandmother said. “Remember this.”
She leaned close to me and kissed my forehead. She smelt of talcum powder, of love, and perhaps of onion.
First thing the next morning, she was on her way.
“Don’t fall!” my mother called out, unable to help herself, as my grandmother started to descend the stairs, with legs thin as kindling.
“Bah!” she we heard her mutter, “as if I usually fall!”
“Don’t worry,” my father said between his teeth. “She will outlive us all.”
Spring didn't come. Winter lingered long and cold. My father kept dying. It happened at home, it happened when we were out. It happened when we had slept well; it happened when we were tired. It happened when we were on our own; it happened amongst people. There was no pattern to it. Each time we’d go through precisely what had happened and try and see what we could have done differently. “You were hungry, that’s why!” we’d say. Or “It was the loud music!” We’d agree to make the necessary changes. Each time it happened again it was a defeat. There was never any warning, suddenly he’d fall and be gone. Then he’d wake up. It scared people. It scared us. The phone didn’t ring much. People looked at us: first with interest, then pity, then they avoided our gazes.
“…eight-nine… Nine times I’ve killed him,” Death beamed. “And every time he rises! I’ve killed him in the shop, in church, outside the school… Still he rises. I keep thinking of new ideas, new ways, you know… He’s tough, your pa. I wonder how long we can keep this going.”
I was standing looking out the window. The elves touched the pane. Come out and play! they mouthed, their breath making ice roses on the glass. I looked over at Death. He had picked up a book and sat reading on the sofa. I shook my head and put my hand against theirs on the glass. Can’t, I mouthed. Big tree has grown beard, they tittered. And as I looked, it had. Its branches had grown long grey straggly hair. One of the branches arched backwards from the weight of the snow. It looked as if it might break at any moment. Just like my father, I thought.
“Irma? Irma what are you doing? You’re making spots on the glass.”
“I’m sorry, Mum.” I removed my hand.
Every night, hidden under my covers with a flashlight, I prayed and read the Bible. I cried. I begged. Nothing changed. My father would still die. He’d still resurrect. And so, finally one night, I came upon the story of Lazarus.
Lazarus was Jesus’s best friend. Apart from maybe Peter, but Peter betrayed Jesus later, so maybe Jesus kept his distance a bit from him—being omniscient must be difficult that way. Lazarus became very sick and his sisters called Jesus to ask him to come and heal him, but Jesus waited and waited before answering and then he only arrived when Lazarus had already been dead for four days. But with Jesus it was easy, he simply resurrected his friend.
When I thought about this I realised it had been the same with Jesus: dead for three days, before he rose.
My father was dead for a too short time, I thought. Resurrection needed more than a couple of minutes to do her job properly, once and for all—she was so small—she needed several days!
I looked all over the house to see if I could find her and talk to her, but she was nowhere to be found.
“Irma?” My mother.
“I just needed to pee,” I said.
Middle of night, or not, I just had to call the pastor to double-check.
“Irma?” He didn’t sound all pleased. Come to think of it, not very pastor-like at all.
“Why did Jesus wait three days before rising?” I asked.
“What?”
“Why did Jesus wait three days before rising?” I repeated.
“Well, actually I have no idea. I guess it took him that long to conquer death?”
I knew it. This was it.
After this, I encouraged Death.
“Maybe you need to do more,” I’d say.
“You think?” He put a long finger on his chin.
“Yes. It’s not working,” I’d say.
“Clearly.”
“Clearly.”
“More what? Violent?”
I shuddered. “Perhaps,” I acknowledged.
“You’ve got a point,” he’d say.
We would nod.
And Death did it. It took him two months, but just as the buds on the trees where showing and the ground was muddy and bare, he killed my father in a most violent way: a heads-on car accident on the highway. And this time, my father didn’t immediately rise again. The police came and told us. We cried. This time, there was a process that followed: the obituary in the newspaper, the planning of his funeral, the wake…
It was my uncle who walked me to my father’s funeral.
I was dressed in a black dress and pantyhose. The pantyhose seemed to finish by my knees and I wanted to pull them up
, but I was in company, so I couldn’t. I felt almost giddy. This was it. This time it would all be different.
As my uncle and I walked into the church, people bent their heads. Just like when the police came to say there had been an accident, I thought, their heads hung, too. Nobody met our eyes, but I still waved a little to the ones I recognized. You just wait, I thought.
The coffin stood at the front fluctuating in candlelight. My mother sat on the first row and my uncle and I sat down beside her. Her eyelids were thick and she had a little twitch by her mouth. I wanted to tell her not to worry, that what was happening was part of the plan, but then the pastor started talking, so I didn’t. I nodded as the pastor spoke. I looked around, but I couldn’t see Death. A good sign, I thought. Death was obviously busy with my father.
I sang all the songs with a really loud voice. My mother looked strangely at me.
“Don’t worry,” I whispered. “It will be ok.”
I held my mother’s hand as we watched them lowering the coffin into the open hole.
And then I went home and down into my room and waited for three days.
On the evening of the third day, I went to bed early. I lay fully dressed under my covers until it was quiet upstairs—until my mother and my uncle had stopped talking—and then I got up. I opened one of the basement windows close to the roof, stepped onto my chest of drawers, lifted myself up and crawled out onto the lawn. The earth smelt strongly from wet leaves, dying grass and mouldering berries. I got up and tip-toed around our house to the garage and took out my bicycle.
I rode down to the church quick like the wind, feet turning round and round. My cycle light made a whining sound and the faster I cycled, the brighter it shone. My bicycle was really too small and my knees kept hitting the handles. My father said I would get a new one come summer. It was cold outside, and I had forgotten gloves. I pulled down the sleeves of my jacket to cover the knuckles. As I arrived, I jumped off the bicycle and led it towards the gravel path.
The Outcast Hours Page 31