Will and Testament

by Vigdis Hjorth

  And, besides, even if I’d managed to get myself to the hospital, even if my legs would have carried me there, then everything I said at her hospital bed—unless it was something furious which it would be inappropriate to say at a sickbed—would be interpreted as remorse and an admission on my part that their demands had been reasonable and my conduct unreasonable, evil, so it was impossible, why go there simply to betray myself?

  But if I had truly succeeded in silencing their voices inside me, if their voices genuinely had no power over me now, surely I could go to the hospital and tell white lies? Make hospital small talk with Mum and get it over with. Why did it matter if Mum no longer mattered, why the need for honesty towards someone so irrelevant to me? Why couldn’t I just give Mum what she wanted, give the family what it wanted, let Mum think that I repented, let the family think that I repented, perjure myself on this one occasion and be done with it, why was I so stubborn towards someone who no longer mattered. There were so many other lies in my life, what difference would one more make? Why couldn’t I just go to the hospital and reel off stock phrases, then leave and be done with my quandary. So I was in a quandary, was I? No! There was no alternative, I knew I wouldn’t be able to do it. How weak I was, how trapped.

  Could I instead go to the hospital and speak my mind, was that an option? Go there and say that I stood my ground, that I repented nothing, that I had come to say goodbye. No! Impossible! Why? I couldn’t work it out! Philosophers, where are you in my hour of need? In my mind I tried to cut contact again by making a decision like the one I’d taken at the Narvesen kiosk in Bogstadveien about not seeing them again, not allowing myself to be emotionally blackmailed, but I didn’t experience the relief and comfort I had felt when I made my decisive break at the Narvesen kiosk in Bogstadveien in 1999.

  Had it been merely a postponement, a brief respite from an insoluble problem? Because even if Mum didn’t express a wish to see me before she died, Astrid would still call me when she died, and I would have to see them at the funeral or before. Surely I couldn’t not go—or could I? And their behaviour towards me would be dismissive and disapproving because of my long absence. And Dad, whom I hadn’t seen for years, a man I might no longer recognise, who had been poorly for reasons I was unaware of, he would be there, grieving, and I couldn’t comfort him, I couldn’t take part, but would remain only an outsider. That had been my choice, although I hadn’t had a real choice, and now I would suffer the consequences of that choice. But it would also be uncomfortable for them, wouldn’t it? So why did they continue to nag me, why was my presence so important to them? Because although it would be uncomfortable also for them, it would be worse for me, was that what they were hoping for? The chance to watch me isolated and squirming, the chance to express their pent-up aggression towards me because I had upset my parents and they had had to pick up the pieces?

  Or were my siblings angry with me and did they hate me because, consciously or subconsciously, they had wanted to do what I had done, break free, get away, did they resent me as one who had escaped the parental regime and thus made it more difficult for them to do likewise?

  I should have emigrated to America, I thought, I should have sailed around the world and been somewhere on the ocean when it happened, then I would get an email in some port when it was all over, and the ocean would put our little lives, our little deaths into perspective.

  But what opportunities for growth and resolution would I then have fled from? What if I was close to an epiphany, I asked myself, perhaps this was the moment, perhaps this was the challenge. And if I failed to meet it, I would never learn the most important lesson of all, but have made only half-hearted attempts and settled for easy answers.

  But it hasn’t been easy, I protested, it has been a struggle, an ordeal! But what if it’s not over yet, I wondered to myself, perhaps this is the last leg of the race and I mustn’t give up now.

  I didn’t sleep the night I had reread the I-just-thought-you-ought-to-know message from Astrid. To be reconciled, to forgive? But surely you can’t forgive what people refuse to admit? Did I think they were capable of owning up to it? To finally admit the truth about the very thing they had devoted so much energy to repress and deny? Did I really think they would risk public censure in order to be reconciled with me? No, I wasn’t worth that much, they had made that crystal clear to me on several occasions. But what if they admitted it just to me? If I wrote to Mum and Dad that they could admit it just to me, and that I would promise never to tell anyone. No, that wouldn’t happen either, I was sure of it, because it didn’t even exist between the two of them, they never talked about it, they had entered into a conspiracy to save their reputation, to maintain a level of self-respect; they had entered into an unspoken, unbreakable pact a long time ago in which they were the victims of their oldest daughter’s mendacity and callousness, and as long as that version was believed, they remained on the receiving end of compassion, pity and care, and they couldn’t manage without that, they fed on it, and it would be harder for them to get it if they ever admitted the truth to me, even if it stayed just between the three of us, harder to keep up their public image of them as the victims. They must be pitied. And there were times when I did pity them because of the mess they had created for themselves, because they were ill and old and would probably die soon, while I was in good health, touch wood, touch more wood, and only halfway through my life. You, too, are going to die, I told myself, by way of consolation. You might die tomorrow, I said, in order to strengthen my resolve. Why do they care, I called out to the sky, what do they want from me, I called out into the darkness. But they didn’t care, not really, they hadn’t cared for years.

  Two days later I got a text message from Astrid saying all Mum’s tests were fine. She would make a full recovery and was already feeling much better. As was Dad. I wrote that that was nice and asked her to say hi. I resumed my own life.

  ~

  A month later Astrid called. She would be turning fifty soon and was having a party with lots of guests, people she thought I would enjoy meeting. She told me the date and I was free, she was pleased about that, she said, and then she paused and said that Mum and Dad would be there too. They so love a big party, she said, and didn’t say ‘one final’ but it was in the air.

  She would appear to think that something had changed. That although I hadn’t turned up at the hospital when Mum had her operation, I had wished Mum a speedy recovery and probably realised that Mum could be gone for ever at any moment, and that I’d subsequently had a change of heart. It’s merely abstract to her, I thought. But all too real to me. Having to enter a room where my parents were and shake hands? Hug them? Say what? The others had met up regularly during all these years, they were at ease in one another’s company, I had chosen to distance myself and be the black sheep. Would I turn up, smiling, with a ‘hiya’? As though we didn’t see the world differently, in mutually exclusive terms, as though they weren’t denying the very fabric from which I was made. Had Astrid no understanding of the reason why I had done what I had done, how deep it went? She talked to me as if it had been a whim, a fad, the result of a childish, rebellious urge which I could put aside when something really important happened. That I could ‘pull myself together’, make an intellectual decision to change my point of view, did she not understand the physical terror I felt at the thought of entering her house where I hadn’t been for years, where Mum and Dad came all the time, and seeing them, my parents. To Astrid and to most other people, they probably came across as two harmless, fragile, old folks, but to me they were giants whose grip it had taken years of therapy to shake off, was that the problem? Astrid didn’t understand how I could be scared of two stooping, grey, old creatures, but I couldn’t go to an airport without quaking with fear of accidentally bumping into them. What are you scared of, I would ask myself on the airport train. I forced myself to imagine seeing them, confronting them like you do to cure yourself of a phobia. What would happen if I reached the air
port and they were in the check-in queue? Fear rippled through me! Well, so what? Would I walk straight past them? No. Too stupid, too immature for a woman over fifty to dodge them, to be unable to greet her own parents in a check-in queue. I hoped that I would stop and ask where they were going and they would tell me and then ask me where I was going and I would tell them and smile stiffly and add have a safe flight. A straightforward exchange, perhaps it would be easy to behave like an almost ‘normal family’, but no! Because afterwards I would have gone to the lavatory and locked myself in a cubicle and sat trembling on the loo seat and waited until they would surely have taken off, even if it meant missing my own flight. It was depressing that I had made so little progress, that it could catch up with me at any time because I didn’t want it to catch up with me, I didn’t want to be back there again, and yet here I was! I so wanted to be adult and calm and composed. I decided not to go to Astrid’s birthday party, I would invent an excuse and forget all about it. But I couldn’t do it. Because if my parents hadn’t been invited, I would have gone to my sister’s fiftieth birthday party to meet the people she worked with, who were likely to be exciting and interesting and possibly useful to me. That was my loss. That I was so inhibited and traumatised that I had to stay away from something that might have been good for me. All because of my stupid childhood. That should be my epitaph: All because of my stupid childhood. Over fifty, but still suffering from that fear of parental authority, which all children have. Except my siblings appeared to have grown out of it. Perhaps Astrid had invited us all because she thought I was free of my childhood, that I had worked through my traumas and my fear of my parents? Perhaps she thought the only reason I hadn’t turned up at the hospital was habit, and decided that it was time for a change. So the invitation could also be regarded as a compliment from Astrid, who thought I had made more progress than I had. Astrid, who believed that I was capable of turning up, all smiles, unaffected by my parents’ presence, that I no longer cared about what they thought of me.

  I said that I would think about it. I thought of nothing else. I went for long walks in the empty void of the forest and imagined that I was on another continent where no one could reach me. No one can reach you, I told myself, if you make yourself unreachable. Who are you, I asked myself, and who do you want to be and what yardstick do you measure yourself by.

  The biggest?

  I imagined myself walking through the once familiar streets on my way to Astrid’s birthday party, a quiet Saturday afternoon in bright autumn light. Apples hanging ripe on the branches, heavy redcurrant bushes over the fences, bumblebees buzzing, and the smell of freshly cut grass. I inhale it gratefully, the bounty of the earth. Calmly I ring the doorbell and enter my sister’s house.

  Would I ever get there? No. I so badly wanted to be free, but I was trapped. I so badly wanted to be strong, but I was weak. My heart was pounding and I didn’t know how to calm it. I knelt on the ground, pressed my face against my knees and sobbed.

  ~

  That was three years ago.

  It was such a long road.

  I wondered where Bård was on his journey, and how different it was from mine.

  I couldn’t ask him that as we sat silent and awkward in the old-fashioned restaurant.

  So instead I told him about the time Klara and I went to the old cabin on Hvaler with Tale and her friends, it was many years ago, back when I still had a small amount of contact with my family for the sake of my children. We had been playing music and dancing when Mum appeared in the doorway and asked if I had given the girls ecstasy.

  Bård laughed, and I laughed with him, but I hadn’t laughed then. Did Mum really think that I would give the girls drugs? I was speechless with shock, but Klara read the situation correctly and offered Mum a chair and a glass of wine. Klara had realised that Mum simply wanted to feel included. Mum had been sitting in the new cabin and could hear that we were having fun and had come up to join in. She probably didn’t understand it herself, but that was what she wanted. Klara offered Mum a chair and a glass of wine, and Mum sat there for some minutes before she staggered drunkenly back down to the new cabin in the darkness. Poor Mum. Trapped in the new cabin with Dad. She had heard the sounds of good times coming from the old cabin and had come up to join us, but didn’t understand it herself and turned her desire for company into a rebuke: Did you give the girls ecstasy?

  Only I hadn’t realised it because I was on the defensive.

  I asked Bård if he had gone to Astrid’s fiftieth birthday party. He hadn’t. He had been invited, but he had been abroad at the time. I said that I had been invited but hadn’t gone because Mum and Dad would be there. I’m scared of them, I said, I told him that the thought of Mum and Dad terrified me. It doesn’t terrify you, Bård said, but you feel a strong dislike.

  Terror and a strong dislike, I said, and we smiled.

  I told him that Tale no longer wanted to see the family in Bråteveien, that she refused to keep up appearances. I told him about a time when she and her family spent a summer weekend in the old cabin on Hvaler with another couple. The men went out in the boat and Mum and Dad came up to say hello and asked where the men were. They’ve gone out in the boat, Tale said, and Mum got hysterical because it was raining and the sea was choppy and it was late in the day and foggy and the water was cold, if they fell overboard they would drown, perhaps they were already dead. And Tale got nervous and didn’t know what to do, Mum’s anxiety, Mum’s catastrophizing histrionics were starting to rub off on her. Dad was upset for different reasons, the men had taken the boat without first asking him, after all he owned the boat and the cabins, because the men had helped themselves and not shown him any respect. Tale stood mute in front of the upset owners through whose generosity she was there. Mum ordered her to come with her down to the jetty, a prisoner of her own anxiety, controlled by her overwhelming fear, which rubbed off on her surroundings, which had rubbed off on me my whole childhood, which had made me just as fearful towards the things that made her fearful such as alcohol and rock music. Tale stood with Mum at the end of the jetty, staring across the sea. I’ve stood here many times, Mum said. I’ve stood here many evenings and nights, looking across the sea as I prayed, she said, I’ve saved lives here!

  I mimicked Mum’s melodramatic style and Bård laughed. Mum was like that. I mimicked Dad’s chastising style, Bård laughed. Dad was like that.

  But that wasn’t the real reason why Tale went home a day early and found it difficult to be on Hvaler and in Bråteveien. It was because later that evening when the men were safely back from their boat trip, her friend asked her why I, her mother, wasn’t in touch with my parents, and Tale had to explain why and saw her friend’s reaction. And because the next morning Mum came up to the cabin to ask Tale if she took good care of her child. She had had such bad dreams that night about how Tale wasn’t taking proper care of her daughter: I had a terrible dream that you didn’t take care of Emma. You do take good care of Emma, don’t you?

  Mum had had nightmares about Tale not looking after her daughter and had dumped her anxiety on Tale without any sense of shame because she lacked the ability or she was too scared to examine her bad dreams about Tale being a bad mother. Because who was it who had really failed to care for her own daughter, why did Mum have nightmares about a mother who neglected her daughter? She lacked the insight or she was too frightened to ask herself hard questions because then a void would have opened up.

  It was Bo Schjerven who reminded me of that story when I was in turmoil once, weighed down by guilt because I had cut contact with Mum and Dad and was refusing to see them.

  But they’re going to die soon, I cried.

  As are you one day, he said.

  I had forgotten that.

  As I left the Grand and walked up Karl Johans gate towards the metro station, I felt lighter than when I had arrived. It had been good to laugh about Mum with someone who knew her, to joke about our family with someone who knew it. I never laughed ab
out Mum and the family when I spoke to Astrid. Whenever I had contact with her, I was always heavily burdened, I always felt very alone.

  I called Klara and told her how we had laughed about Mum and Dad at the Grand. She asked: If you had the choice, which would you pick? A cabin on Hvaler and your parents or nothing?