Welcome to America

by Linda Boström Knausgard

  I thought about what it was like for him, me being there. And for her too. It must have been off-putting, his sister staring like that, without a word. I could have spared him, but for some reason I didn’t want to. I didn’t want them to feel they had me pinned down, mum and my brother. I didn’t want them to think I’d always be in my room.

  I heard mum open the door into the hall. In a moment she would say goodbye to her pupil, then come to the kitchen. My brother heard her too, I saw the way he stiffened. Mum’s footsteps, so energetic. A second later she was standing there, buoyant. Vendela, how nice to see you again. She glanced at me. I looked back at her and stayed where I was. I needed all my willpower not to disappear back to my room. Well, here we all are, she said, smiling. What plans have you got? We’re going out, my brother said, and I couldn’t tell if he was angry. He sounded normal. Good idea, it’s lovely outside, mum said, and glanced at me again. I couldn’t hold out any longer, slid down from the counter and crossed through the kitchen to my room. I closed the door behind me and sank down into the armchair. Then the tears came. They welled in my eyes and trickled down my cheeks.

  I cried without a sound, unable to sob, though I was definitely on the verge. I compelled the tears to leave all sound behind them. If I let them flow quickly, it wasn’t a problem. I concentrated. Mum started dinner in the kitchen. My brother had gone out with Vendela. What would happen if I went to the kitchen? Would mum tell me her thoughts? I got to my feet, wiped away the tears, which had now subsided, and went to the kitchen again. I sat down at the table. Mum was shaping lamb patties. She turned her head towards me and smiled, but said nothing. She was totally absorbed in what she was doing, and the thought came to me from somewhere that I would have to die.

  Dear God who art in Heaven. Look after mum and make her happy. Look after her and let me die.

  I lay in bed in the dark and silently uttered my prayer for the first time. Would God hear me straight away, or would he wait? If he waited, how long would I have to wait? Until I was grown up? I’d never looked into the future before, now it was all I could see. I peered ahead in time and saw myself as a teenager like my brother, then as an adult. I took a hard look at myself. This staying silent couldn’t possibly last a lifetime. A full, whole life was unreasonable, I told myself. No one could ask that of me. They’d understand. Deepest down, they surely knew how impossible it was. I’d unleashed my will. Now anything could happen.

  The school was on fire. I was walking along the pavement some paces behind my brother with my schoolbag. The smoke could be seen some distance away. The entire top floor was in flames and I was sure it was my fault. That it was my prayer that had brought on the blaze. Later, however, it turned out it had been started by two boys outside the chemistry lab. We all had to go home again. The police cordoned off the area. We couldn’t see the firemen as they put the fire out, we weren’t allowed in the playground. The smoke rose up. Black clouds, expelled into the sky. It was hard to stop looking at, but eventually my brother tugged at my sleeve and said it was time to go home. We walked next to each other on the pavement and I thought to myself that it was the fire that brought about this sudden closeness. Something external that in some way was a threat to us and led to us now walking together.

  I went to my room and sat down in the window. Only the two of us were home, mum was at the theatre. She thought we were at school. The chestnut tree writhed in the wind. How long would the school be closed? I jumped with joy inside at the thought of having to stay home. I put my forehead against the pane, felt the cool glass against my skin and smiled. Maybe we’d get to stay home for a week. Maybe longer. It felt like being off ill, so I got into my pyjamas and went to the kitchen. I found a carton of bilberry soup, then made a cheese sandwich as I listened to my brother’s music coming from his room. I sat on the counter and ate, swilling down the sandwich with the fruit soup. I was hungry. I went to the pantry and got some rusks, spread butter on them and dipped them into the soup, sucking on them until they crumbled and dissolved in my mouth. Mum had a first night coming up, so I’d gathered. There was a full dress rehearsal that afternoon in front of an invited audience. She used to ask us not to bring friends home in dress-rehearsal week, having too much on her mind to cope with the place being full. But now she didn’t mind anymore. My brother hated the theatre. We’d only been small the time mum had been rolled onto the stage on a slaughter bench wearing only underwear and high-heeled shoes as she sang: Peckers, gentlemen, please. Behold these ravishing thighs, behold these glorious American tits. My brother had kept away from the theatre ever since. He hated seeing her made up, hated her wearing high heels. He didn’t want her pretending. He was against her work. He was against, and I was in favour. Maybe I would go to the first night after all. Mum used to regale me in the dressing room after a premiere, with sweets and fizzy drinks to celebrate no longer having to rehearse day and night. From then on everything would be more normal, she would have time for us in the afternoons. What was she rehearsing now? Suddenly my heart was thumping. It was the thought of my prayer. That I’d asked to die. Was it really what I wanted? Could I take it back, or was God already getting things ready? At any moment, I could drop dead. Should I pray to God to take it back? Was that possible? I tried to return my mind to the clarity of the day before, when death had seemed like a necessity, like the only possible outcome of my silence. Calmly, I took hold of my thoughts and followed them to the decision. Yes. It was the right thing to do. God would surely let me live a while yet, but a whole life? No, he would spare me adulthood, I was sure of it. I couldn’t see myself having any other age than the one I had, the whole idea of growing up felt completely wrong. I wasn’t going to let it happen. I couldn’t stop time and stay in the present. Growing scared me. My brother resembled a man already, his voice was deep and croaky, his shoulders broader, his nose and jaw more pronounced. He was so tall now. Everything about him had changed, he was no longer the boy in the boat with the fishing net, his eyes watching the fish as they moved in the water. He was something else now. Not quite a grown-up, but then not a child either. There was no going back, it felt so unreasonable.

  I avoided mirrors, not wishing to see what growing was doing to me. I was afraid the transformation had already begun.

  I knocked on my brother’s door. I’m not sure why. I’d not been inside his room for years. Maybe death had frightened me so much that I didn’t want to be on my own all of a sudden. My brother’s eyes when he came and answered. The way he looked at me, with what seemed like fathomless sorrow and despair. But he opened the door, and I went in. Dark-blue curtains were drawn in front of the window. The light was dim, the desk crammed with computer equipment, a drum machine, the floor packed with amplifiers and loudspeakers, instruments in their stands, fat, worming leads. And the dust, illuminated in the band of light that fell in through the chink in the curtains. I sat down on the unmade bed, straightening the cover before almost flopping down. What was I supposed to do now? What was my intention, going into his room like that, my brother wondered, his eyes telling me so. What do you want here? What are you thinking? How were you supposing we’d get on? I gave a shrug, it was a reflex, something I did a lot, and I found it frightening that it was such a part of me. That it was something I was doing now in my brother’s room. Shrugging my shoulders was nearly the same as speaking. I think the shrug was to say: Do what you normally do here. Don’t mind me. I think he understood, because he switched the amplifier and the drum machine on. The beat sounded like a fork struck against the kitchen counter. He hung the guitar over his shoulder and plugged in, turned the microphone on. He stepped backwards and looked at me, then began to play, and when a moment later he started to sing it sounded like he was crying. I watched my brother as he stood there singing in English. It was a song about Laura, a girl everyone looked at, but no one ever got to talk to. It felt like I had my brother to myself, as long as he was singing I was allowed to watch him. I stared at his f
ace. He wasn’t keeping anything in, was quite unrestrained, singing with all his voice. I was fascinated and hoped the song would never end, but of course it did. I’d seen him, but now it was finished. He went over to the door and stood there as if to tell me it was time for me to go. I got up and walked out, passing close to him in the doorway. Was I scared? Not then.

  I went to my room and sat in the window. What had happened? I’d been to my brother’s room. That was all. He’d played a song and I’d watched him. He’d opened himself to me, and why had he done that? Why had he suddenly allowed me to be there, and why had I knocked on his door? The courage of that action made me tremble.

  I sat in the window until mum came in through the front door. Then I sat in the armchair with a book and waited for her. I heard her moving about in the kitchen, opening the fridge. I wanted to tell her there’d been a fire at school. I wanted to tell her about the smoke that rose into the sky and about my brother and me having been in his room together. This sudden yearning to speak to her. Where did it come from? I picked up the notebook and a pen. My hand shook as I wrote: There was a fire at school today. I went out into the kitchen and placed the notebook on the table. Prodded mum’s arm and pointed at it.

  She cried. Mum cried. She looked at me with tears running down her face. Her cheeks streaked with mascara. Thank you, she said, and hugged me. I didn’t move in her arms. What had I done?

  I’d altered something fundamentally. Something whose full scope I couldn’t yet see. What did it mean? What would this change bring with it? Did I regret it? I wasn’t sure. All I knew was how good it had felt to write down the words. Would I write others? Was the notebook now gradually going to fill up with my thoughts and experiences? What was it that made me feel I had to carry on and write more? Was it just because the words There was a fire at school today were now committed to paper and felt like they were carved in stone? There was nothing forcing me. What did mum always say? You’re so hard on yourself.

  Gingerly, she let go of me, extricated herself from my arms that clung to her. She put her hands on my shoulders and stepped back so as to look me in the eye. This is the start, she said. Everything’s going to be all right. Do you understand? I nodded. It was all I could do with her holding me like that, looking straight into me. What was I going to do? What was open and what was closed? Had things swapped places without me noticing, and was I now open to everyone? Could they see straight in? My legs shook and I felt like I was falling. Plummeting to the core of the earth where everything was burning red. The last thing that came to me were the words: You’re lost.

  You’re lost. The words pounded inside me. It felt like someone was hitting me as I sank through the floor. A moment later I was sitting on the back stairs that led from the kitchen, the smell of dust in my nostrils, watching rats as they darted about. I went down the iron staircase, my hand gripping the rail. I met my brother, who passed me slowly without noticing me. At the bottom my mum sat smoking. I went past her, smoothed her blond hair with my hand. I gripped the handle of the door that led out into the courtyard. Cautiously, I pushed it open. The freeways ran in and out, above and below each other. The traffic roared. And there was my dad, bald, the mirror shard pressed to his forehead. Welcome to America, he said, shouting to make himself heard. Welcome to America.

  The days that followed the nights after that were ablaze in light, a light so strong I had to close my eyes. I sat in my bed from morning till dusk with my eyes closed. The light cut into me. My dad slithered into my mind and sang, Wilkommen, Bienvenue, Welcome, with bells that rang. I tried to get rid of him, but he danced like the blue squiggles behind my eyelids. He alternated between being small and big. Sometimes he turned into a giant, pressing me back against the wall so I could hardly breathe. He sat down on the edge of the bed and blindfolded me. So you never have to see what you all did to me, he said.

  Dad disappeared and instead the sea emerged before me. I waded out to the island and watched the herring gulls as they followed the boats. I saw the eagles on the rocks further out. The way they tore at the fish with their beaks and claws. The way they hopped about on the rocks. The rain lashed down and there were geese on the water. I reached up and drew my hand across the sky.

  I would never be able to explain why my clothes were wet as I sat and shivered in bed. The puddles that appeared at my feet. I went to the bathroom and peeled off my clothes until I was standing naked in front of the mirror. I was blue from cold. My mouth was stiff and my teeth chattered. I stood for a long time under the shower and felt the warmth come back to me. I dried myself meticulously and crept back to my room where I put on clean, dry clothes.

  I was a child. The words that said so came to me as I dried my hair. I didn’t need to understand what had happened to me, because there was nothing to understand. Mum was getting the dinner ready in the kitchen. My brother was in his room. Dad was dead. Everything was in its place, even me, so it occurred to me. I was hungry, but I didn’t want to go to the kitchen. I thought that if I just stayed where I was, mum would come in with a tray. What had she been doing these past days? Presumably the same as always. But it had passed me by. The blindfold that was on the bed. Did it scare me? The fact that I couldn’t explain how it got there. I put it on, and closing my eyes became easier. My eyes relaxed and the darkness surrounded me. Dressed me in black. I listened to the sounds, that sounded like they came from a long way away. The rhythm of the drum machine, and mum moving about. They belonged together, I realised as I sat there on the bed. They were parts of the same music. My throat felt sore. Maybe I was ill. Maybe that was why everything seemed so strange? Dad threatened to come back. He was dead, I told myself, and tried to picture him in front of me, the way he’d been lying there on his own in the flat. I imagined his clothes and the white-green colour of his face. I touched his face and closed his eyes. Again and again, I closed his eyes.

  My brother was standing in the room looking at me. He pulled off my blindfold. I hadn’t heard him come in. I looked at him. My heart thumped in my chest and I saw that the intimacy we had experienced was gone again. I couldn’t keep him out, he would only force his way in. He dragged me out into the kitchen where mum was sitting at the table, and pressed me down onto a chair before sitting down himself. Mum passed me a dish of grilled chicken drumsticks. Her look told me to eat. We were going to sit together and eat our dinner. I took a drumstick and then some rice and salad. My brother took some too. My mum and brother talked about the rebuilding of the school, how we would soon be starting again, and mum’s premiere. Her reviews had been glowing and she was buoyant. I was completely unprepared when my brother suddenly tossed the knife at me. I screamed. The sound that came out of me. My brother and mum smiled and carried on eating. I got up, backed away to my room, where I flung myself onto the bed and wept.

  Only the ground floor of the school was in use. Many of our lessons were suspended. The days had gaps in them which I spent in the library. I sat in the same place in the reading room, next to a window looking out on the playground. I read whatever I found. A book about eagles, another on the Greek sagas, another on the flora of the outer archipelagos. None of it stuck, I was drifting on the flow of words, through sentences and pages. Maybe I was only pretending to read so I could sit there in silence. It felt like I was spending those hours there to grow back together again. To feel what had opened now slowly closing. I perceived every sneeze, every footstep, every turn of a page. These were sounds that calmed me. I breathed like someone who’d been underwater for a long time. Heaving in air. I listened to my heart, and made it beat slower and slower.

  I was scared. Was I not scared?

  The walk home wasn’t long enough. The stairs up to the apartment were too few. I was standing in the hall before I even blinked. What had been mine alone was now everyone’s. At any time, mum or my brother could appear in my room. I didn’t feel safe.

  Dear God who art in Heaven. Look after mum. Make
her happy and let me die. How many evenings had I asked to die? Surely it had to come soon. Death. I saw no other way.

  Mum looked in on me in the evenings when she came home from the theatre. She sat down in the armchair, her eyes rested on me. She always had to tell me how things had gone. How big the audience had been, the scenes that had worked and those that hadn’t. She was full of words that found their way inside me. I hadn’t touched the notebook since the day of the fire at school, but mum still looked in it every day. I listened to her stories, sensing how every word seeped its way in. I could see it all: the foyer, the lift up to the dressing room, the corridors and the passage that led to the small stage where she was appearing at the time. The play was a comedy, The Servant of Two Masters. I could flutter with longing for the theatre. Why couldn’t I go with her, the way I used to? I thought about the time a thief had been on the prowl there, how the stage manager had come over the tannoy and advised everyone to lock their dressing rooms. I remember how frightened it made me. The way I made no distinction between a thief and a murderer. At any time, my mum could be murdered. That was what I’d thought. One of the old doormen gave me a piece of chocolate cake to settle me down. It was their Tempest project and every actor in the company was involved on stage. Mum had been Mother Earth, her body bombarded by missiles. I was too big now for the theatre. That was the truth. No one would want a kid my age hanging around. Somehow I’d grown without noticing, and now there was no more path. Ahead of me lay only darkness.