Will and Testament

by Vigdis Hjorth

  I left my newly repaired watch behind at the swimming pool that day, perhaps I did so on purpose; it was time for a new watch, a new era.

  I got off the metro at Majorstua on the morning of Saturday, 9 January, and walked down Bogstadveien to the House of Literature to meet Bo to discuss an article he had written about his trip to Israel and Palestine. Then it occurred to me that I might bump into them, Astrid, Åsa or Mum. One or two of them, or all three together, and a shiver of fear went down my spine. What if I bumped into one of them, or all three of them, what would I do? Dear God, please don’t let me meet them! What would I do? I imagined them as they had looked on 4 January, at the meeting with the accountant, three terrified women, three women with short, greying hair, two of them with flitting eyes. What if I suddenly bumped into one of them, or all three of them, I started seeing them everywhere that Saturday morning on Bogstadveien, which was teeming with people, women with short, greying hair everywhere, some arm in arm, like Astrid would probably walk arm in arm with Mum, the eighty-year-old widow who was to be pitied, out shopping or out for a walk on Bogstadveien, on their way to Baker Hansen, having ventured further afield, if they dared venture out into the world that is, down Bogstadveien on a Saturday morning, unless they stayed home for fear of bumping into me, didn’t travel far so as not to bump into me. Avoiding places where they risked bumping into me, perhaps they walked around with the same physical fear that I was experiencing now, a fear of suddenly seeing me, my figure and my face, a figure and a face which would immediately fill them with dread, I imagined their terrified faces, Mum’s terrified face at the meeting with the accountant, like a cornered animal that knows it will be tortured and killed, and a wave of pain washed over me, the agony of compassion, poor Mum.

  The problem isn’t when you sympathise with one side in a conflict, Bo said, but when you sympathise with both. The problem arises when both parties are victims and adopt the role of victim and need it and milk it for what it’s worth, refusing to give it up. It had been difficult, he said, to be in a place where every representative of both sides in the conflict employed Goebbels’s propaganda rhetoric and who scanned Bo’s face for signs of support or scepticism, and became aggressive, if they thought they detected scepticism. It was a challenging place to be, he said, and lit a cigarette, he had started smoking again. I don’t know how it’ll end, he said, I struggle to see how it can end well, he said, there doesn’t seem to be a way out.

  I was about to suggest that they broke away, but of course they couldn’t, that was the tragedy, the great tragedy, I said, if you can’t break away, if you can’t escape, if you can’t get out, if you’re doomed to stay and be consumed by it.

  But you’ve tried that, Bo said, and you’re not free.

  I dreamt that Mum and I were walking down Eiketunet, a landscape I remember from my childhood, and I was trying to tell her about all my problems, how much I struggled, but she wasn’t listening to me, didn’t want to listen, didn’t want to understand, she just talked about her own problems and I thought: I really have to leave home now! And then immediately afterwards: But I can’t, I’m only five years old.

  I spent the last weekend in January at a seminar on the role of theatre critics in daily newspapers; I was one of the organisers so I couldn’t get out of it. I was on edge. I hoped that people hadn’t seen Dad’s death notice and associated it with me, I hoped that no one knew that my dad had just died and wanted to express their condolences, I didn’t want to talk to outsiders about Dad and his dying and the funeral. I tried to look busy during breaks, hunched over my Mac, writing, I went for walks on my own and dropped out of the gala dinner on Saturday. When the seminar ended on Sunday afternoon, I drove to Lars’s house in the woods. I had been looking forward to going there, to getting away from it all, I had no urgent jobs to do, On Stage had finally gone to print and the only thing I had to do was prepare for a talk in a week’s time about the dramatization of Rolf Jacobsen’s poems. I was looking forward to turning on the radiators in Lars’s house, for the heating to spread, to be deep inside the woods, far away from everything. I usually felt calm when I went there, I hoped that I would feel calm there.

  I reached the house, I switched on the radiators and waited for the heating, the calm, I was hoping for calm and a good night’s sleep. I dreamt that I was in Frogner Park, struggling to get two small children and a lot of bags up the steps to the top of the sculpture park where Mum and Astrid and Åsa were waiting so that we could join in the International Women’s Day march. It starts at one thirty, Astrid said, when I reached the top and the time was instantly one thirty. But I need to put in my contact lenses, I protested, I need to change the younger one’s nappy, I said, I can’t get there for one thirty. They looked at one another, and I realised that they would leave without me. We’ll go on ahead, they said, and got in the car, we’ll probably see you there.

  I woke up feeling heavy. Tale rang and could hear that I felt heavy, I told her about the dream and she said: You keep trying to justify to yourself that you don’t want to see them, but they’re the ones who don’t want to see you.

  In Jerusalem Bo had seen the Wailing Wall, the security guards, the heavily armed military police and the spot where the wall loomed so high that it blocked out the sky to all sides of this tiny, claustrophobic square which was surrounded by barbed wire and surveillance cameras and megaphones and soldiers in guard towers, it looked like a scary Soviet defence installation from a 1980s James Bond movie, he said. Some Orthodox Jewish boys ran around having fun, it was a public holiday in this creepy place. The guide put his hand on the wall and said that behind it lay a refugee camp. Who lives there, Bo asked, what an idiot he was. Why Palestinians, of course, the guide said, those who were expelled in ’67. Behind it, half a metre from Bo and cut off from the rest of the world, they had lived there for almost fifty years. It had been an unpleasant visit. It had been even more unpleasant in Tel Aviv because Tel Aviv looked like a European city, all new and modern with tall, shiny skyscrapers and a big opera house and a huge modern museum, Tel Aviv was familiar and civilised and a success, he had felt safe and at home in Tel Aviv with its fashionable shopping areas and luxury restaurants and a broad seaside promenade where attractive young people in Western clothing drank coffee or beer, while gazing across the Mediterranean; on cloudless and very clear days they could see across to Gaza, it was eerie.

  Bård wrote to ask me how I was. I replied that I was well and that I was in Lars’s house in the woods, that I hadn’t heard from any of the three of them and that was a good thing. He’d had a text message from Mum on his birthday, he wrote, at ten minutes to midnight, just before it wasn’t his birthday any longer: Congratulations. A mother never forgets.

  Mum might have hoped that Bård had been afraid of not getting a greeting from her. That Bård had checked his mobile throughout his birthday, hoping for a beep and a happy birthday, love Mum. And perhaps he had, I didn’t know him well enough to say. But Mum had probably hoped that he was like that, that he had been waiting for his birthday greeting and so she prolonged the agony so that he would realise just how much he yearned to hear from her, just how much he really loved his mother, and then there were no congratulations from her until ten minutes to midnight, just before his birthday was over, and then she wrote: A mother never forgets.

  She had probably spent a long time coming up with that. And her intention was that Bård would in turn spend a long time contemplating it. Wonder what it was she couldn’t forget. His birthday or his behaviour in the inheritance dispute. There was always a sting in her tail. I remembered that from the old days, how I would often feel ill whenever I had spoken to Mum. The phone would ring, I would answer it, it was her, we would chat about this and that and when the conversation was over, I would be holding the handset, feeling ill. Once, as I stood holding the handset feeling sick after having spoken to Mum, I said to myself: Surely it’s not meant to be like this? Shouldn’t it be the other way round?

&
nbsp; Had it always been like this? No. It got worse after my divorce, after I had managed to get both a divorce and my professor, after I had succeeded where she had failed.

  Optimism had reigned in Europe before the gunshots in Sarajevo, Bo said, he had come straight from the National Library. In order to understand today’s wars, he had to understand the Second World War and in order to understand that, he had to understand the First World War and the time before that. Before the gunshots in Sarajevo, he said, the most important conversations about politics and art and science were international. Before the gunshots in Sarajevo, the avant-garde from various countries would meet in Gertrude Stein’s Parisian salon, the incendiary questions of the day were discussed at the international conventions of the psychoanalytical association, and leading Europeans spoke warmly about cross-border collaboration. The great European war won’t come, the leading Europeans said, then gunshots sounded in Sarajevo and the war came and advances in civilisation such as the railway made it easier to move troops, the trains could supply the front with fresh bodies and the arms industry had developed automatic rifles with greater firepower, millions of young men were butchered on both sides, and people were shocked when they realised the horror of it all. But not Sigmund Freud. Freud didn’t share people’s horror of what Europeans were capable of. He understood the general outrage, he wrote, because he too had shared in the belief that the great nations had developed so much appreciation of what they had in common and such enormous tolerance of the differences between them, that ‘foreign’ no longer equalled ‘hostile’—so in view of their self-image, no wonder the cultured cosmopolitans were disillusioned when faced with the realities of war, when their self-image collided with reality.

  Freud wrote that the notion that people could erase all wickedness within themselves and their society through common sense and a certain level of education was a falsehood, Bo said. Psychoanalysis had shown Freud that we are essentially made up of impulses, that we are neither good nor evil, but good in one respect, evil in another, good in certain circumstances, evil in others, that human beings are primarily human, and the danger arises when we deny this fundamental premise. It’s the weak point of the European mind, the Western human being, Bo said, summarising Freud, that we were blinded by the triumph of our own civilisation, that we overestimated our cultural abilities and underestimated our urges. And so we were shocked and dismayed at the horrors of war, but the shock and disappointment were unfounded, Freud wrote, we in the West hadn’t suddenly plummeted deeply because we had never risen as high in the first place as we had convinced ourselves that we had. People in Western Europe had repressed their fragile egos, he wrote, and Bo agreed, we had chosen to overlook that our intelligence isn’t separate from our emotional life, and during wars and crises our otherwise dormant urges would rise to the surface. Civilisation was put to one side, people started believing their own lies and exaggerating the wickedness of their enemy, people in Western Europe didn’t realise that they were obeying their passions rather than their interests.

  Whenever we squabbled, Mum used to say to us: No wonder there’s war in the world when you lot can’t keep the peace.

  I dreamt that I was with five-year-old Tale in a haberdashery, I had tidied up some bobbins of sewing cotton, but she messed them up again, I told her off and she exploded, not in a childish tantrum, but in a grown-up and sarcastic manner and everyone heard, she spoke to me as if I was the world’s worst mother. I had no idea what I had done to deserve such a dressing-down, such lofty condescension from her, she told the shop assistants that I had stolen the bobbins, she betrayed me, she wanted to hurt me, and I was hurt and I felt despair and rage, but was scared to react the way I really wanted to, with outrage and aggression so that everyone would hear, but I couldn’t help it, I picked her up and set her down hard on a chair and shouted: How dare you speak to your mother like that!

  It was a phrase, I realised to my horror as I blurted it out, that I’d heard many times as a child: How dare you speak to your mother like that!

  Tale burst into tears and I could see that her sobbing was convulsive, that her despair was profound, and I felt sorry for her and guilty, and I hugged her and thought that now we could make up and cry together, that I could finally comfort her. We sat like that for a while, me with my arms around her, her head against my chest, her face buried in my chest, then suddenly she looked up at me and hissed: Go away!

  She hated me. Why did she hate me, what had I done? Then her father appeared and told me that she was jealous of his girlfriend.

  And then it dawned on me. I was jealous of Mum who was Dad’s girlfriend. And furious with Mum because what had she done? Nothing. It was this nothing which Mum did. It was everything Mum didn’t see, which I couldn’t tell her when I was five years old, everything Mum didn’t want to or didn’t dare see, my despair and that which made me despair, which made me hate her because she had been unable to protect me.

  Jung describes the unconscious as a vast historical warehouse. I admit that I, too, have a nursery, he writes, but it’s a small room compared to the huge periods of time, which even as a child interested me more than childhood.

  I, too, want to get out of the nursery! Please help me get out of the nursery!

  According to Freud, Bo said, there’s a link between the collective madness of war and a civilisation that has done its utmost to rein in mankind’s urges, whose population has developed the ability to give up satisfying its urges, a civilisation which denies death and the wish for others to die, including those we love, that exists in each of us.

  So we’re just animals? I said.

  No, no, he said with a smile.

  Self-awareness is crucial, he said. We shouldn’t deny our irrational urges or overestimate ourselves, but see ourselves in a realistic light; we shouldn’t deny the destructive urges deep within us, but strive to live wisely with our urges, our conflicts and irrational impulses.

  That was the problem with Tel Aviv, he said, everything that was repressed at the Hilton, all the things that had been brushed under the carpet because it was unpleasant to be reminded of them, but which didn’t, of course, stop them from existing for that very reason, and they became evident in subtle ways and possibly more strongly as a result, precisely because people sought to eradicate anything that leaked out, anything that found a way out into the body of society like a poison, everything that was repressed by this impressive display of civilisation based on denial. We aren’t aggressive, the official spokesman had said, we’re simply defending ourselves, but every passionate defence contains an element of lying, Bo said, certain parts of reality are repressed in order to keep painful feelings at bay, and it’s demanding and draining to keep up such defences. No wonder they were exhausted, that they looked so weary in Tel Aviv, he said, he saw it when the sun went down and people took off their sunglasses. They build walls, he said, to keep the Palestinians out, he said, and not just for security reasons, but so they won’t have to look at them and recognise themselves in them, so they won’t be reminded of their own humiliating history of victimhood, they can’t stand them because of what they have done and continue to do to them.

  What do we repress, what do we deny, that’s the question which must be asked over and over, he said, so that we aren’t blinded by our technological advances, our scientific progress, our magnificent new architecture, our well-ordered, well-regulated society here in Norway where a prime minister once said something so very un-Freudian: It’s typically Norwegian to be good.

  On my way home from meeting Bo at the House of Literature, I bumped into some old university friends from my drama course and joined them for a beer. One of them had brought along his girlfriend, a woman I took an immediate dislike to, she spoke too loudly and too much, she acted as if she owned the place, then the penny dropped and I went bright red: She was just like me. She shared aspects of my own personality with which I had an unresolved and ambivalent relationship. Look how she puffs herself up
in order to get attention! My immediate antipathy pointed straight back at me.

  I’ll try to remember that, I thought, the next time I have a strong reaction to another person or a phenomenon, that the explanation may not lie with them, but in me.

  Åsa and Astrid wanted to go for a walk with Bård in Frogner Park. Bård asked what the point was and they replied that they wanted to speak to their brother at this difficult time. They would appear to have given up on me. Moreover, there were new developments, they wrote. Mum had had her offer on a flat accepted and they wanted to discuss selling the house in Bråteveien. They wanted a constructive dialogue and thought it was best if they met.

  The meeting took place in a café in Frogner Park. Afterwards Bård emailed me that Mum had bought a flat, where it was and how much it cost. The house in Bråteveien had been put up for sale.

  When I asked, he said that the mood had been fine.

  Bård, Astrid and Åsa in a café in Frogner Park. A brother and two sisters at a café in Frogner Park. Deep down they probably loved one another. Maybe deep down we all did. Once we had been squashed together on the green leather Chesterfield in Skaus vei watching Disney movies on Christmas morning and waiting for it to be time for church. And now? People who spend time together often grow close. People who spend time together become involved in one another’s lives and take an interest in one another. Human lives are like novels, I thought, when you’re quite a way into a novel, even a dull one, you wonder how it will end, and when you have followed someone for a long time, even if it’s a dull character, you wonder what will happen to them. Astrid and Åsa had spent the most time together and loved one another the most, they were the most involved in one another’s lives, especially now after Dad’s death. Astrid and Åsa must then love Bård next because he had spent a lot of time with them throughout the years, not as much as the two of them had, but they had seen each other regularly and at emotionally charged occasions such as Christmas and Easter and Constitution Day and birthdays. Bård must love Astrid and Åsa more than me because he hadn’t seen me, hadn’t kept in touch with me for years, to him I must seem like a half-read novel, a lost novel, for the last fifteen years I had probably existed merely as a memory, as far as he was concerned. An estrangement is like a death, I thought, it hurts the most at the start, then you get used to the absence and slowly the other, the deceased is phased out, as is their absence within you.