Will and Testament

by Vigdis Hjorth

  I left Fido in my room and walked to the ferry which would take me across the river to the centre of Fredrikstad. From there I called Tale and Ebba again, but they still didn’t pick up, I called Klara and asked her why I got so wound up, why I absolutely had to talk about it, given that nothing terrible had happened.

  It goes deep, Bergljot, she said. It’s seriously deep.

  I got off the ferry and walked up through the streets, it started to rain, I got wet and felt heavy. It was just as Klara had said, it was how I felt, how deep it went, how it pushed me into the abyss, how it weighed me down, how I started to sink.

  The debate went well, I did well. Afterwards I stayed in the café telling my fellow participants all about the cabin valuations and Mum’s overdose although I didn’t know them personally and, while I told them about it, I thought to myself that I really ought not to. I was ashamed while I spoke and ashamed when I saw the faces of my listeners and I was ashamed on my way home at having whined about cabin valuations and overdoses like a spoilt brat, in a manner that belonged to childhood and self-centred puberty, I was mired in shame the whole night, I couldn’t sleep because I was so ashamed that I hadn’t grown up, that I couldn’t talk about it in a mature and balanced fashion, that I’d become a child once more.

  The day after Klara had unbuttoned my coat in Hausmanns gate and touched my silk blouse, she rang me. I was in the hall of the house where I lived with my husband and children and didn’t recognise the name. She said it again and then I remembered, then I grew scared, she had caught me off guard. She asked if I would be willing to review a book for the literary magazine she edited, I didn’t want to, I didn’t have the courage to take it on, but I didn’t have the courage to say no either. She asked if I could come over to hers tomorrow morning so we could discuss it, I didn’t want to, but I didn’t have the courage to say no either. When I arrived the next morning, she was busy trying to put together a bookcase and failing, she wasn’t following the instructions and she was drinking gin. I couldn’t drink, I was driving, so I took over the bookcase. While I worked on it, she said that the review didn’t matter, the magazine was folding, it wasn’t making money for the publishers, how would she pay her rent now? I didn’t know, I shook my head, I didn’t want to get involved with her financial problems. She was in love with a married man, she said, and my heart skipped a beat. She was pregnant by this married man and was having an abortion tomorrow; unless she did so he would refuse to see her again. I couldn’t help her, I wanted to go home, I too wanted to drink gin, I put the bookcase together and I left, I never wanted to see her again.

  Sunday in the old city of Fredrikstad. Yellow, red and rotting leaves on the cobblestones, cold rain in the air. I walked along the streets feeling morose. I should never have told total strangers about the cabin valuations and the overdose. I had a compelling urge to talk about it, but I didn’t know how. Then I bumped into someone who had been present in the café last night and who asked me if I was OK, as if I wouldn’t be. She invited me back to her yellow wooden house a short distance up the street and gave me apple cake and coffee, and the tears welled up in my eyes and stories from my childhood poured out of me, and she embraced it all and spoke calmly and dispassionately about her own past. Was it possible for me to ever get to that place?

  As I stood in the doorway and was about to leave, she asked me how long it was since I had last spoken to him.

  Who?

  Your brother.

  I couldn’t remember, twenty years or more.

  Call him, she said, and I had to smile because she didn’t understand what it was like. But we hugged one another as if we had exchanged presents and as I opened the gate, she called out: I’m on Bård’s side!

  ~

  In the car home I was filled with ambivalence. Shame at yesterday’s confessions in the café, anger at myself for being so easily upset, gratitude for the invitation to coffee and cake, for meeting someone on a day like that who had given me advice. I asked myself whether my parents or Astrid and Åsa ever sought advice from anyone because it didn’t take much insight into human nature to predict that a man who takes exception to being passed over in a will is also likely to take exception to secret transfers at rates well below the market value. If they had taken advice, surely someone would have pointed this out to them. Then again, perhaps they wouldn’t have listened. Perhaps they had already made up their mind to do what they had done, regardless of the consequences.

  Once I was safely home in Lier, when it had started to get dark and I was walking across the fields with the dog and it had started to snow, I called Tale and she picked up. I told her about the overdose, about the transfer of ownership and the valuations, and my daughter knew me and understood that I was going off the deep end and said that I mustn’t take it so seriously, that I mustn’t get involved, that it was just my mother creating more drama and casting herself in the leading role as the tragic victim of evil schemes, while her real goal was to silence her critics.

  They’ve seen the last of me, she said, I refuse to take part in that charade any longer.

  I heard what she said, I understood it at an intellectual level.

  I walked for longer than usual to wear myself out, to be able to sleep, even sleep through the night; I walked a long way and then went home and sat in front of the fireplace. Astrid called and said that Mum was doing well, perhaps she thought I had been worried. Mum was still at the hospital and was exhausted, but would be going home the next day, and the birthday party would still go ahead next week as planned, she hoped that Søren and Ebba would come.

  I said I hadn’t heard anything to the contrary. Mum will be so pleased, she said, she was worried that Bård’s children wouldn’t show up.

  He’s using the children, she said again. It’s the worst thing you can do, using the children! Mum is terrified of losing contact with Bård’s children. Mum has always had such a good relationship with them, and now it might be ruined all because of him.

  Cautiously I ventured that they might genuinely be sad that the cabins had been transferred to her and Åsa; it was the first time I hinted that I didn’t buy her version wholeheartedly. She fell silent. Then she said that if this really was just about the valuations, they could always get new ones. Perhaps it was a silly way to have gone about it, she said. Perhaps the valuations were a little low, she said. Perhaps we should have asked for two quotes, but we didn’t think that far ahead.

  I opened a bottle of red wine. When I had drunk it, I felt calmer and I took the dog for another walk. It was still snowing, big heavy flakes that melted on my face and soon I was wet through and through. The sky was big and the stars shone with an unreal intensity or maybe it was just the wine. I walked back, I had made up my mind.

  I couldn’t find Bård’s number online so I called Astrid. She said she didn’t have it either. But you only spoke to him yesterday? Åsa has it, she said, I asked if she would call Åsa and then call me back, it was late, she said reluctantly, and then it turned out that she had it after all.

  When I said my name, Bergljot, he fell silent. Then he said that he had thought about me a lot recently, and it was my turn to fall silent. Then I told him about my conversations with Astrid and he told me how he saw the situation. He seemed sad, I thought. He mentioned a dystopian novel I had once sent him about the decline of a family I thought resembled ours, about a childhood that resembled ours.

  It had been like that, he said.

  My heart was racing as I drove home from Klara’s. Had she told me that she was in love with a married man because she had worked out that I was too? Could she tell from looking? Did anyone else know? I was married to a nice and decent man and I had three young children with him. And yet I was in love with another, a married man. It was monstrous, it was horrible, what should I do, it was impossible, I was impossible. I didn’t have a job, no regular income, but three small children and a nice and affluent man and was passionately in love with another, it was terrible,
shameful, unforgivable, how could I, what was wrong with me for me to do something like that?

  Klara rang the following week; I wouldn’t have picked up the phone if I had known it was her. She asked if I would visit her again, she had bought another bookcase she couldn’t assemble. I didn’t want to, I went there and assembled the bookcase and told her about the married man. She had sensed as much, she said. She could feel things like that, she said and patted my cheek and I started to cry, what was I going to do?

  What I was experiencing, I came to realise once I started to understand my life, was that a moment of insight was approaching like the tremors that precede an earthquake, and like an animal I could sense it before it happened. I was filled with dread and I trembled at the painful dawning of a truth which would rip me to pieces, perhaps I was working subconsciously to advance it, to get it over with, given that it was inevitable.

  December and fog right down to the ground. Yesterday’s snow had melted, there was slush and black puddles on lawns and roads, and it was cold both outside and in because my heating was broken.

  I should have been editing theatre reviews and writing the editorial for the next issue of On Stage, but I didn’t. Instead I made a Thermos flask of tea, got dressed in woollens and wellies and my heavy parka with the hood, it’s always a good idea to be dressed properly. I went to the forest where no one ever came at this time of the day, sat down on a fallen tree trunk and let the dog run free. Sometimes I would see deer here, in the spring and summer, and birds and squirrels and frogs, but today it was just us. Fido sniffed and wagged her tail, jumped over branches and stones, blissfully ignorant of inheritance and childhood. Should I write in an ironic style about The Journey to the Christmas Star and The Nutcracker, about the lovely family shows that theatres staged at Christmas? No, that would be facile; I could feel a lump in my throat.

  It grew dark so we went home, I lit a fire, opened a bottle of red wine and took out my editorial notes. I had only just got down to work when Bård emailed me to say that it had been good to talk though the circumstances could have been happier. Would I like to have lunch soon?

  I agree and yes, please, I replied.

  As soon as I had pressed ‘send’, Astrid called, wondering if I had spoken to Bård. I said I was meeting him next week. I got the impression that that worried her.

  I had closed down my Mac and was getting ready to go to bed when Klara rang to tell me that Rolf Sandberg had died.

  Rolf Sandberg. Mum’s great extramarital love. A professor at the teacher training college where Mum had been a mature student. The man Mum had fallen head over heels in love with, the man Mum had started an affair with although he also was married. Mum’s passionate love affair with Rolf Sandberg lasted several years until Dad found the beginning of a love letter from Mum under an embroidered cloth on a chest of drawers on Hvaler. Perhaps she intended him to find it. Perhaps Mum wanted Dad to know about the affair, perhaps she thought that if Dad found out, he would divorce her and she could marry Rolf Sandberg. But Dad didn’t react as she had hoped, but as he always did, with rage and violence, and Rolf Sandberg didn’t react as Mum had hoped either. When she told him that Dad had found the letter, he replied that one divorce was better than two. Mum locked herself in a room with pills and alcohol, Dad kicked down the door, called an ambulance and Mum was taken to Fredrikstad Hospital and had her stomach pumped.

  Mum tried living on her own, but it wasn’t a success. Dad rented a flat for her, but after a week and a half she was back with him, but on his terms. However, she never stopped seeing Rolf Sandberg, and I guess she never stopped loving him either. She told me this. She didn’t tell Astrid or Åsa because they would have been horrified to discover that she still was in touch with Rolf Sandberg, and they would have told Dad and sided with him against her. Mum knew that I wouldn’t be outraged on Dad’s behalf or tell him anything. That was the difference between Astrid and Åsa and me, our relationship with Dad.

  Then I cut all contact with my family and heard nothing more of Rolf Sandberg, but I’m convinced that for years Mum kept hoping that the two of them would end up together. When his wife died, I was almost sure that Mum wanted Dad dead so that she could move in with Rolf Sandberg. Then Rolf Sandberg died and Mum took an overdose when she heard that he was on his deathbed—possibly because she realised that her dream had shattered.

  I called Astrid though it was past midnight and told her that Rolf Sandberg had died and that Mum’s overdose probably had nothing to do with Bård’s text message, but everything to do with Rolf Sandberg’s death. She began to get nervous, I could hear it.

  I wrote to Bård to tell him that Rolf Sandberg had died, and that Mum’s overdose was probably to do with his death rather than the text message Bård had sent her.

  Klara and I both loved married men who wouldn’t get divorced, who didn’t want us, who wanted sex with us in hotel rooms, whom we couldn’t bear to tear ourselves away from, and we were miserable. Klara lived on her own, it had its downsides, I lived with my husband and three children, that too had its downsides. I had married and had children young in order to be a mother and not a daughter any more, I came to realise once I started to understand my life; now I was deceiving my husband and my children, and I was ashamed. Klara was deceiving no one, but had no money and worked night shifts as a waitress at Renna Bar to make ends meet. My husband earned plenty of money so I was able to study without having to take out a student loan, I was a cheat and a parasite. I visited Klara whenever I could and drank with her friends from the bar who were mentally unstable and alcoholic, intelligent, broke and wretched, misfits and outsiders. Strange, marginal existences with no survival skills, always knocking on Klara’s door, as did I, eager to mix with the misfits and the wretched, what was that about? This compelling urge of mine to seek my own downfall, what was wrong with me? I visited Klara and drank in the company of strangers who had failed at life, I spent the night there and woke up the next morning in the bright light of day surrounded by broken, filthy people and I rushed home to hug my children and husband, wanting to live for ever in the big, airy, clean house, I promised myself never to leave it, but I would soon be back at Klara’s, drawn to my destruction.

  Four days after the overdose, the same day that Rolf Sandberg’s obituary appeared in the newspaper, Mum and Dad celebrated their big birthdays in Bråteveien. When Tale heard that Søren and Ebba were going, she was outraged. Why were they playing along with it? Putting on a brave face and accepting the Bråteveien version of events, pretending that nothing had happened? That was why the world was going to hell in a handcart, she said, because people didn’t set boundaries, weren’t honest and acted hypocritically in order not to upset anyone, why were Søren and Ebba going to Bråteveien to take part in this appalling performance? She herself would never set foot in Bråteveien again, she would tell her grandparents that immediately.

  I advised her against it. If she got involved in the inheritance dispute, they would merely think that she wanted a cabin on Hvaler.

  On the day of the birthday party I felt twitchy. I knew I was safe, but it made no difference. My doors were locked, Søren and Ebba were grown-ups and could handle themselves, and yet I was on edge as I always was whenever my children visited Bråteveien. I kept looking at the clock as it got closer to the starting time as though a bomb might go off. I imagined Søren and Ebba crossing the threshold, hugging my parents, whom I hadn’t seen for years and could no longer be sure of recognising, imagined them hugging or shaking hands with Astrid and her husband and their children, Åsa and her husband and their children, imagined Søren and Ebba’s faces and felt sorry for them, or was I projecting and was I really feeling sorry for myself? I wondered what they would say, the usual greetings and congratulations, nothing about the real issues, the inheritance, the overdose, Rolf Sandberg’s obituary or the elephant in the room, those of us who weren’t there, Bård and I, and Bård’s children.

  The time passed slowly, I waited imp
atiently without knowing what for. I knew what my children would say, it had gone well, they had kept to safe topics, updated one another about careers and education, and yet I felt apprehensive. It was just like when my children visited Bråteveien before Christmas and were given presents, and I would be on tenterhooks until they returned. My fear was irrational, it was the non-financial legacy of my upbringing. An irrational sense of guilt because I had opted out, cut contact, because I had done what you weren’t supposed to do, refused to see my ageing parents, because I was like that, vile. The party started at six, it was eight o’clock now and my children hadn’t called and I didn’t want to call them in case they were still there. At eight thirty Søren rang me and said that it had gone well although my Mum had got drunk very quickly and my Dad had just sat brooding in his armchair, more taciturn than usual. Bård and his children hadn’t been there, but Astrid and Åsa had been there with theirs, of course, and Astrid had made a speech saying that she and Åsa were happy to be so close to Mum and Dad, how they always had such nice times together, how they saw one another often, several times a week usually, not to mention all the lovely long summers on Hvaler.