by Helene Flood
Outside the window is the garden, which borders on other gardens containing other houses. Ten years ago, Pappa divided the garden and sold a piece of it to a developer, and now there’s a new white detached house where my swing set once stood. The house is shaped like a cube and features a roof terrace with steel railings. Someone has forgotten to take in a grey-blue parasol for the winter and it stands there, drooping, worn shabby by frost and damp and snow. On the other side of the garden, parallel to ours, is the garden of the Winge family, who lived in the neighbouring house when I was growing up. The Winges’ son was called Herman – he was in my year at school, and I loved him to the point of bursting for three long years of my youth without ever saying anything of it, not to him nor to anyone else. I wrote his name in notebooks I hid in the secret drawer of my desk, and tried to walk home at the same time as him so that we might start walking to school together.
My father’s desk stands there as it always has. I know from experience that if you turn the desk chair around to face the other way, you have a good view of the Winge family’s house from it. You can sit there, watching, hoping to see Herman Winge – perhaps even catch a glimpse of him. But I can’t imagine my dad has ever turned his chair to look out. These distinguished houses and gardens offer him no inspiration, and he’s positioned the desk so that he sits with his back to the window.
Open on the desk is a large book. It has thick cardboard covers and shiny black pages covered in newspaper clippings that have been glued into place. This is my father’s archival scrapbook. He keeps all his published works, whether they are scientific articles or contributions to newspapers or journals. The cutting he has just glued in – the reason the book is lying here open, I presume – is an article that appears to have been taken from a magazine for people with a special interest. “Time and Society”, says the header. I’m not sure what kind of journal it is, but those that are willing to print my father’s texts are often controversial or of a limited circulation. The article is entitled “Ten things that would be improved if Norway ratified full Sharia law”. I turn back through the pages of the book, scan the many colourful magazine pages. If his article has been published as a double spread he creates the same layout in the scrapbook; the two pages glued so precisely into the fold at the binding that you could almost believe they were the same page. It’s almost touching how diligently he has undertaken this task; how straight he has cut the paper, how carefully he has applied the glue – there is no sticky mess beyond the edges of the cuttings, no creases in the glued pages. Much of what he’s written I don’t understand, paragraph such-and-such discussed in the light of the theory of theoretician so-and-so. But then there’s the occasional bomb. Punishment as a means of preventing receipt of benefits. Human rights – a threat to our sense of justice? I rarely read what he writes, perhaps because Annika did so for a time and ended up raging at him or storming from the table at family dinners. Annika would stride out of the room, while Pappa, the imperturbable, cantankerous quarreller, would stick to his guns. Farmor, if she was there, acted as the Peace Corps, mediating between them.
“Vegard likes to provoke, but he doesn’t mean anything by it,” she would say.
I believed her. I still believe her. Pappa’s trademark is to follow logic wherever it takes him, without being influenced by ethical considerations. He sets conventional morals aside, undertakes significant cost–benefit analyses with an added pinch of his special philosophy of life – a personal blend of Charles Darwin, John Stuart Mill, Per Fugelli and Rage Against the Machine, combined to create a kind of surprising, self-composed utilitarianism. He offers this up with a naive gaze, in the softest voice: if one accused innocent must suffer a long punishment, isn’t that better than allowing a guilty person to walk free and letting ten innocents suffer?
“No!” Annika would scream, when she was fifteen, or twenty, or twenty-five. “The state cannot punish someone who hasn’t done anything wrong – that’s assault!”
“But Annika, honey,” Pappa would say in his friendliest, most innocent voice, “isn’t it true that we, as a society, must prioritise the solution that brings about the least possible overall suffering? Is that not logical?”
“Vegard so likes to stir up the things we disagree on,” Farmor would say, “but let’s talk about something nicer now, shall we?”
Of course Annika was right, every single time. You can’t dole out sentences and harsh punishments to people who may not have done anything wrong. Of course we shouldn’t flog criminals or punish the wrong person. But I just wanted to believe that my grandmother was right. “Let’s talk about something nicer, shall we?”
I turn the pages of the scrapbook, thinking of all the hours he must have spent archiving his works. I imagine how he must have sat here before I was born: Mamma sitting in the living room, or here in one of the armchairs, perhaps, crocheting my bedspread as my father, with the utmost care, placed a clipping covered with the thinnest layer of glue against the page, concentrating on achieving the right angle before passing his hand across the paper to stick it down. Perhaps my parents looked at each other. Maybe Pappa smiled, self-conscious at having been observed in his ritual, and maybe Mamma teased him, or simply laughed, thinking to herself: Vegard and his archive.
What was Pappa writing around the time Mamma died? I’m sure he must have continued to write; must have sat here and cut and pasted deep in concentration while she was ill – if not in the days before her funeral, then at the very least afterwards, while the house was in mourning. It’s never occurred to me to find out. I have never been interested in his work, haven’t wanted to know anything about it – have actively avoided it, in fact. I’ve heard Annika scream at him, seen her run from the table in tears and felt the tension of the house in my body for days afterwards, when they weren’t speaking. Pappa making a point of being cheery and indifferent; Annika working through her hostility until she could stand to be in the same room as him again. So I’ve steered clear, figured that the less I know about what Pappa believes and writes, the better. But he must have been writing around the time he lost Mamma. And now I’m here, and I’ve lost my partner, too.
I know where he keeps the rest of his scrapbooks. On the bottom of my grandfather’s old oak shelves, right beside the fireplace, is book after book like the one on the desk, meticulously dated since the end of the ’70s. Mamma died in June 1988. I pull out 1986–91, set it on the table between the armchairs, and open it. Turn the thick, heavy pages filled with old printer’s ink and graphics. 86–86–86–87–87–87–88. February. The next clipping is from October. In February: “On corruption legislation”. In October: “Moralism and what’s best for the herd”. I’m not interested in corruption, but I might be interested in moralism and the herd.
The article starts with a story about a kind of wild dog that lives in packs on the African plains. In these packs, Pappa says, what’s best for the group is the greatest justice. Sick, old and injured individuals leave the group so as not to hold it back. The dogs realise that they are a burden and accept the consequence of this: to die alone, of hunger or at the jaws of other predators. So the pack will manage more effectively.
In certain cultures, we also often find this sacrifice among humans, Pappa writes. And then:
But in western, individual-oriented societies, the rights of the individual outrank what is best for the group. We are like baby birds, each and every one of us screaming: Me! Me! Me! The noblest act, which we know of from the morals taught by the world’s religions, the moral we teach our children and the rest of the coming generation, is to put one’s own wishes aside for the common good. And where do we see this nobility more clearly than within the family, society’s most important unit? Parents and grandparents sacrifice time, energy, money and other resources in order to support the next generation. A mother will throw herself in front of an out-of-control bus, giving her life to save her children. We are well versed in the nobility
of putting others before ourselves, but we shrink from taking this maxim to its logical, existential conclusion.
Elderly individuals in ill health expect to be cared for, tended to and looked after by their children, even though these children often have more than enough to do in providing care and guidance to their own children, the generation that will inherit the earth. They, the ill, use the community’s resources to keep themselves alive, living year after year with their illness, although they will never be cured. They have no future other than further sickness and a slow death, but still think they have the right to abuse the resources that the young have more need of and can make better use of. Would it not be economical for society – not only for the health and welfare services, but also for the individual family – if the elderly were to do as the wild dogs of the plains? Would this not be the noblest of acts? The same could be said of the terminally ill; those who have chronic mental disorders or degenerative brain disorders.
But since it is unlikely that individuals will make the choice of the wild dogs voluntarily, should there not be a body that can assist them? I imagine a committee to which one could apply when a given individual has become too great a burden. For the benefit of their family, their pack, relatives would be able to apply to this committee to have the individual removed. Children would therefore be spared having to grow up in the shadow of illness. Spouses and other relatives would have the capacity to use their resources on supporting those who are able to contribute to society, rather than on sitting beside hospital beds or in institutional waiting rooms. In the absence of such a committee, some individuals will take this upon themselves as a private responsibility, and I ask myself – can I cast moral judgment upon these individuals? Is it not perhaps they who ultimately commit the most noble, exalted act?
*
The article goes on, but I’ve read enough. I close the book, and twice drop it on the floor before I manage to set it back on its shelf. I get up and go to the desk, close the book that’s lying there, too, and pick up the tiny sextant, holding it in my hands and trying to calm myself.
He doesn’t mean anything by it. He likes to provoke. Let’s talk about something nicer, shall we?
I wish the sudden idea to investigate my father’s writings had never occurred to me. Especially now, when my house has been broken into and my husband is gone; when the police are in and out of my home and I’ve spent the night in my office with a kitchen knife in my hands. When I so sorely need a little peace, a little comfort.
I try to breathe normally. This clipping has been in the book on the shelf since the 1980s. I could have come in here at any point during my childhood, opened the book and read it. There’s nothing new about it, nothing sudden.
I wish I’d never read it, but now that I have, I can’t stop thinking about it. The most important thing now is not to panic. I have known for years that my father has written plenty of crazy articles.
I put the sextant down. Pick up the meteorite, my finger gently stroking its rugged surface. Breathe. And start again.
My father wrote this article only months after his wife had died. And his wife had been suffering from what he so insensitively terms a “degenerative brain disorder”, a diagnosis which, according to his logic, should inspire the individual to take themselves off and die. I almost can’t believe how he could dare to write such a thing, write it and publish it, so soon after his family had experienced such a tragedy. And not only that – he believes that if people like Mamma fail to kill themselves, then the state should do it for them. And since the state doesn’t do this, he goes so far as to defend those who would kill their relatives. Which leads me to a question I would have preferred not to have to ask: does that mean that he was capable of doing so?
But this is crazy. I put down the rock. This isn’t why I came here. I came to his house for a sense of peace, to feel at home – to feel safe. I don’t need this, not now. I leave the study, hurry up the stairs and run into the room that was mine, closing the door behind me.
Everything in here looks just as it did when I moved out. The patterned wallpaper. White lace curtains. The ornament shelf on the wall, the wicker chair and its frilly cushions in the corner. A white desk. A family photograph, from when I was so small that Mamma’s illness had not yet progressed very far. The crocheted bedspread. A straw hat hung on the wall for decoration, a porcelain doll on top of the bookcase. There are more teenage elements, too – a picture of Leonardo DiCaprio hangs on the door, cut from a teen magazine with less care than that exhibited by my father in his scrapbook. A Dorothy Parker poem written out on lined paper in my childhood handwriting hangs above the bed, and in the bookcase are the books I read during my teens (books for adults, of course): Bjørneboe, Dostoevsky, Plath, Woolf, Kafka. There are even a couple of shot glasses on the ornament shelf. But overall, the room looks as if it belongs to a little girl.
It was she who decorated it for me, and that’s why I could never change it. As I sink down onto the bed it resurfaces, the heavy, hollow lump in my chest which is the grief for everything that might have been. The family life I never had. She must have been so loved, the child for whom this room was made. How painstakingly her mother must have decorated the walls with exactly the right flower-filled wallpaper. How she must have pondered – which curtains would be best, what kind of bed? How many hours it must have taken to crochet the bedspread. All to create the best childhood bedroom for her daughter. Before she fell ill. Before she took too much medicine and collapsed on the floor of the hallway of this house.
If she took too much medicine, that is. I mean, if it was an accident. I lean back on the bed. This is a monstrous contention. Do I really want to continue this train of thought? To follow this logic through to its final conclusion, as my father would say? Do I want to go down that road?
But what if it wasn’t an accident? What if Pappa, based on the arguments he set out in such detail a few months later, decided to take her life? Helped her to make the noblest of sacrifices, as he himself would put it. Might that have been possible?
She took many medicines. I’ve never altogether understood why a woman with Alzheimer’s had access to medications potentially so dangerous that a mistake might kill her, but perhaps she was often very fearful, maybe they gave her anxiety-suppressing drugs – and then there were all the analgesics. I’ve asked myself how an overdose might have happened. How on earth is it possible that a person suffering from a disease that by definition causes confusion and disarray was responsible for taking their own medicine?
But of course she wasn’t. There were nurses here, they came and went. Some of them chatted to me. One used to give me soft mints to chew on – they would often get stuck in my teeth. I remember the nurses and I remember their pill dispensers: the plastic trays divided into many compartments – the Monday compartment, Tuesday compartment, Wednesday compartment, and so on. When I was little I thought they looked like the ornament shelf I had on my wall. The nurses counted out and divided up the pills that Mamma would take outside their working hours. Then the family was responsible. My father, that is.
How easy it would have been for him to give her more or less medication than she should have had. She understood nothing. Everything around her was messy and difficult. She knew she was supposed to take some tablets, so if her husband had said, “You have to take these ten,” would she not just have done it? As she did everything he told her to do – crossed the street when he said it was safe to do so, went to bed when he said she should, got up when he said it was time to get up. Stayed indoors even if she wanted to go out because he said it was the middle of the night or pouring with rain, or for some other reason she didn’t understand, but which she accepted. Because the world had become so hard for her to grasp. Because she needed help with so much. She accepted that’s how it was. We eat what he says we should eat. We use the cutlery he says is the right cutlery. When he puts a handful of pills in front of her an
d asks her to take them, she does it. Of course she does. If she were to start to ask questions about everything he asked of her, where on earth would she end up?
To the question of how it was possible that this accident happened, why there wasn’t sufficient control of the medications to prevent an Alzheimer’s patient taking a lethal overdose, the answer was this: it was human error. How the medicines were stored, perhaps, or a problem with the dispenser. Pappa avowed that she had been given exactly what she should have been given that day. He had needed to go out, run a couple of errands. She must have got into the medicine cabinet on her own. She must have got it into her head that she needed to take more. She was like that. Might all of a sudden decide she wanted to take a walk in her underwear. Might want to go and buy groceries in the middle of the night. The medicines should have been stored in a locked cabinet to which she didn’t have access – but she deteriorated so quickly. The safety procedures hadn’t kept up with the progression of the disease. The system had failed, as systems sometimes do. Maybe the nurses should have foreseen the coming danger, maybe the doctor should have seen how much worse she was at her last appointment, maybe Pappa should have taken the initiative to lock up the medicines. But who wants to point the finger in such a situation? She was seriously ill, was never going to get better. This was a sorry incident within a family already wracked by the tragedy of this awful illness. The father and his two small daughters would be left to grieve in peace. The enquiry into the matter was closed. The hospital would review its procedures. And so on.