Will and Testament

by Vigdis Hjorth

  I wrote these things down on a piece of paper. I intended to bring it with me to Bråteveien so that if the worst happened, I could prove that I hadn’t been caught unawares, but that I was prepared, that I knew my dad.

  The more I prepared myself for the worst, the more likely it seemed to me that yet again my side of the story would be dismissed and denied by everyone present, demolished by my dead father who was right because he was dead. And my mum and my sisters would welcome his attack and rejoice: Look what it says here, what do you have to say to that? The word of the dead has more weight than that of the living. It’s also easier to feel sorry for the dead than the living, so now they would pity Dad even more, Dad who had suffered for years because of me, an innocent man convicted by me, the daughter who had lied to get attention, and I would be the outsider, the black sheep once more. I could already visualise it, I started to shake and called Bo. He said: You’ve already said that you want nothing more to do with those people. You don’t have to go there just because your father insists. It’s not a legal document.

  But won’t it look cowardly if I don’t show up, as if I’m afraid of what it might contain?

  Their opinion shouldn’t matter to you. Why subject yourself to more? I think you’ve put yourself through enough.

  I decided not to go, not to comply with Dad’s last request. I called Bård, who understood and said he would be happy to represent me but added that he didn’t think it was the kind of letter I feared. Astrid had mentioned that the envelope was fat and contained several folders, presumably securities. Dad had once said to Bård that if he and Mum died in a plane crash, he wanted him to know there was something in the safe. I hope, he said, that it’s something positive for us children, that it won’t result in any more fighting. But, he added, it was odd that the discovery had made Mum so hysterical that she couldn’t breathe normally until the envelope was opened. Mum had called Aunt Unni, who had called Astrid and told her that it was vital that the envelope was opened as quickly as possible in view of Mum’s mental health.

  The anxiety, the hysteria they display, Klara said, merely proves that they’ve no idea what your dad was capable of.

  When I was awarded a travel grant to develop my magazine concept On Stage, I got in my car and drove randomly down through continental Europe to think, work and practise being like the lilies of the field and the birds of heaven and gather moments of joy with which I could warm myself when times got hard, I feared that times might get hard. I drove through Germany, through Austria, I reached Trieste in Italy, I saw the sea and the sun was shining, it looked like spring in Trieste and everything felt easier. I continued into Bo’s beloved former Yugoslavia, along terrifyingly narrow roads with hardly any traffic, it felt as if I was alone under the sky with little evidence of other people, there was only the odd house with smoke rising from the chimney, I drove through orange groves and saw a rowing boat on a calm lake between willow trees. Then it grew dark and I got lost on a deserted, unfinished, unlit road near Split, I started to worry that I mightn’t be able to find Split, I was exhausted, I had been driving for eleven hours. Then I found Split after all, I drove through the suburbs and right into the old town and found a parking space outside a small, venerable and typically Eastern European hotel by the picturesque harbour and got a room in the hotel and a big iron key, and I wandered around the old city, which was full of people out for a leisurely stroll because it was Friday evening, and the smell of the salty sea wafted in from the harbour and New Year’s decorations still hung from the trees and the breeze was mild, and I felt mellow inside and sat down in a café with a beer and my notebook, and a feeling of serenity that looked like gratitude came over me. I had no boyfriend to report to back then, I had no one I wanted to call or talk to, I had no desire to share anything because everything had already been shared, I felt a deep sense of being a part of the world and when I look back on that special Friday evening in Split, I can still feel it. Surely that’s the goal and the reason to experience many such moments, they balance out the pain, to build a house of such moments in which I can seek refuge during hard times. I had an inkling that times might get hard.

  When I broke my leg some years ago and needed surgery, I spent three days in hospital. I liked being in the hospital, there were people nearby who were awake all night, all I had to do was ring a bell and they would come. The hospital didn’t sleep, it was sleepless like me, at the hospital they changed my bed linen, brought me three meals a day and asked me how I was. During two of those three days I shared a side ward with an old woman. We didn’t talk about what was wrong with us, why we were there, but I guess she could see that my leg was in plaster and raised towards the ceiling in a pulley. Neither of us had any visitors during the two days we spent together at the hospital, but the woman had adult children and grandchildren who lived in Oslo, it emerged, during a conversation she had with a nurse, and which I couldn’t help overhearing; later I asked her gently about her children and grandchildren, but she became evasive and uncomfortable so I stopped, I felt sorry for her and sorry for Mum, who probably felt the same when strangers asked her about her oldest daughter. The old woman’s children and grandchildren never visited her during the two days we shared the side ward. Perhaps they had fallen out. A nursing assistant came to shower her, but couldn’t do it properly, she got just as wet as the naked old lady, and they laughed and they shrieked and they laughed some more and came out from the bathroom to show me how the nursing assistant had got completely soaked and they were still laughing, the wet and naked old woman and the drenched nursing assistant in her uniform. It was hilarious.

  One night it rained and there was a thunderstorm and neither of us got any sleep; when the rain and the storm died down, a moonbow was arched outside our windows. The side ward lay high up, on the tenth floor, we had a great view, it was past one o’clock on a long summer’s night, most people were asleep, but we weren’t, we looked at the moonbow. I’ve never seen anybody so excited, so awestruck on encountering a natural phenomenon like a moonbow, but not just any moonbow, this one was brightly coloured and broad against the dark sky. Isn’t it beautiful! Isn’t it amazing! Imagine that I would live to see this, my roommate said, an old woman; you don’t need family to visit you, I thought and felt relieved, family isn’t everything.

  I made up my mind not to go to Bråteveien. And made up my mind not to change my mind and go anyway, to go out of duty and in order to obey Dad. I decided to disobey Dad and pack for San Sebastian. The time was seven in the evening, then it was seven thirty, then eight. Now Bård would be arriving at Bråteveien. The time was now a quarter past eight. The envelope would have been opened. Murder or half siblings, my phone stayed silent. An accusation or securities, Bård didn’t call. If the contents had been dramatic, he would have called. He called me at a quarter past nine. There had been no drama. It was a draft will where Dad had recorded the amounts of money the four of us had been given over the years, right up to 1997 when it stopped. Astrid had got the most, Åsa and I about the same, Bård the least.

  They had gone through it together, then the contents of the envelope had lain on the desk while Mum, Astrid and Åsa told him about Dad falling down the stairs, about the plumbers, about the time they had spent at the hospital. Before Bård left, Mum had complained that she never saw his children, and he had replied that she knew why.

  I imagined Dad revising the draft will, diligently, accurately right up to 1997 when he gave up. He wanted to be fair, he had made it a point of honour, there was much to make amends for, he wanted to be equitable when it came to our inheritance right up until 1997 when he gave up. I imagined Dad hunched over the ledgers, conscientious. What he had given me when my ex-husband and I bought our first house, what my sisters got when they bought their first houses, what Bård had got. I thought that originally Dad might have wanted us to inherit the same amount, that it was a way to atone for how he had treated Bård, how he had treated me when we were children. His relatively
major assets acquired through hard work would be divided equally between his four children because it was only fair and because anything else would give rise to rumours and speculation. I thought about the mistake Dad had made as a very young man, as a very young dad, which couldn’t be undone, which he had to live with, but how? It can’t have been easy, it must have been Dad’s tragedy, Dad’s fate. Dad did something irreparable and lived in fear for the rest of his life that it might come out. Dad was terrified of his oldest daughter, he would glance at her furtively, he never touched her once she turned seven, the oldest daughter was off limits once she turned seven, Dad ended his relationship with her because she understood even more once she turned seven, because she grew into a wild, sentient and talkative child, who might let her tongue run away with her. Dad ended his relationship with his oldest daughter and no longer took her on trips in the car as he had done when she was five years old, when she was six years old because her mother, his wife, had so many children to look after, a boisterous son only a year older than the oldest daughter and two little ones, a newborn and a two-year-old. To give his wife a break Dad would take his oldest daughter along in the car with him when he went to look at building plots for the construction company he worked for, and Dad and his oldest daughter would spend the night in a hotel and it was fun to stay in a hotel, in a hotel you were allowed to get into bed before dinner and close the curtains, that’s what you do when you’re in a hotel, said Dad who knew how you behaved in hotels. And if they weren’t staying in a hotel, they could make a bed in the forest, Dad said, he knew all sorts of things. But then his oldest daughter turned seven and one day when she was in the car with her dad, she asked him if he had ever been with a black woman. And Dad was shocked, the daughter realised, but she didn’t know why although she could see that he was upset. You mustn’t ask such questions, he said angrily, alarmed, she wasn’t allowed to ask such questions, he said, still reeling. What, he must have thought in the middle of the 1960s, if the child starts asking people in the lower middle-class neighbourhood of Skaus vei such questions? If his daughter asked him such questions, what might she not ask others, what might she say at school? Dad had a problem now, his daughter had become his problem, what was he going to do? How it must have haunted him, how he must have lived in terror. He was home as little as possible, worked as much as possible, came back in the evening, crossed his fingers and hoped for the best. He studied his oldest daughter furtively, and luckily she behaved as if nothing had happened. Or did she? His oldest daughter did her homework and played with her friends and practised the piano and took ballet classes, surely that was as if nothing had happened? Life went on like that for quite a long time, luckily, perhaps it could be forgotten, perhaps he could breathe a sigh of relief and put it behind him. The years passed, time is on our side, in a hundred years all this will have been forgotten, but then his oldest daughter started writing strange poems and sending them to the newspapers, which published them. His oldest daughter started writing strange plays and staging them in the sports hall at her school and inviting people to watch them. Imagine the terror Dad must have felt, his fear of his uncontrollable, unpredictable oldest daughter. They came, my parents, to such a performance in the sports hall at my school, written and directed by their oldest daughter, they couldn’t not go because the other parents were going, the parents of the children their oldest daughter had directed and those children included their youngest daughters, so they had to go although they would have preferred not to. They sat there terrified at what might happen on the stage, at anything which might give it away, poor Dad. And after such a performance when their oldest daughter had gone to bed that night, when she lay in her bed awake as usual, but proud because she thought she had done well, had been a success, while her parents sat in the kitchen, she heard her dad say to her mum, and perhaps she was meant to hear it because her door was open and her parents must have known that it was, but perhaps they thought she was asleep. Her dad said to her mum that one of the other dads had said: Are we meant to be in some kind of strip club?

  The daughter didn’t understand the implication of that remark, the daughter didn’t understand anything, she was just crushed that her dad wouldn’t appear to think that she was any good, that she was a success, quite the opposite, her dad didn’t like ‘what the girl was up to’, the daughter realised that one of the other dads hadn’t liked her work, that one of the other dads thought she had created something that looked like it could have taken place in a strip club and that her dad was embarrassed. What if nobody had liked her show even though everyone had clapped at the end, what if she had caused a scandal? Instantly she felt as if she were the scandal herself. Her dad was referring to the opening scene when a row of twelve girls aged nine to eleven entered wearing red feather boas and black silk petticoats which his oldest daughter had sat up at night making, when the twelve little girls shimmied out of their silk petticoats which slipped down around their ankles, one after the other from left to right, and on the black gym leotards which they wore under their petticoats there was a letter on each groin which she had sat up all night sewing, which spelled out a cheerful: Welcome.

  Are we meant to be in some kind of strip club?

  Poor dad.

  Dad never touched his oldest daughter once she turned seven, never even cuddled her once she turned seven, never held her hand like Astrid had said he held hers when they went walking in the forest, never hugged her, never expressed any physical affection once she had turned seven. Her dad became increasingly frightened as his oldest daughter grew up and became more bizarre and unpredictable; perhaps he hoped that her behaviour would become so outrageous that no one would take her seriously. He couldn’t escape it, his family. Had he wanted to escape, to get a divorce, his wife might have told the world of her suspicions, what she had on him, her husband, and destroyed him, that was the power the otherwise powerless mother had over the father.

  Finally his worst fears were realised. His daughter did remember. What would he do?

  He briefly considered confessing, putting it out there and unburdening himself, but the mother quickly realised what that would mean for her and shut him up. Then he had to deny it during the crisis and in the time that followed the crisis, day after day, year after year, and denial came at a price. Not just in terms of his relationship with his oldest daughter, but also guilt, a heavy burden of guilt, as well as a lack of self-respect. He demanded respect with his blustering manner, but gradually as he grew older, he lost his self-respect, he wasn’t stupid or callous enough not to be tormented by a sense of guilt for what he had done and the way he had behaved when it came out. The least he could do, the only thing he could do to make up for it, even a little, in relation to his oldest daughter, in relation to his only son, his oldest child, whom he had never given the recognition he deserved, who might have worked out what had happened to his sister and whom he therefore feared and avoided, was that they would inherit just as much as his two other children, the younger ones. It would also make him look good in the eyes of the world, which might have heard rumours that not everything was as it should have been at Skaus vei number 22, if the children inherited equally.

  A draft will with details of who had been given what began in the early 1980s and stopped in 1997 when keeping a complete set of records became impossible and irrelevant because the oldest daughter had cut contact, the only son had grown distant and the younger ones grew ever closer; birthdays and holidays and frequent visits with grandchildren who wanted to go to language schools and study abroad, who wanted this that and the other, the mother becoming increasingly controlling as the father aged and gave up noting down every single sum, large as well as small. Instead he wrote a new will stating that all should inherit equally. It looked good. A will which declared that when one spouse died, Bråteveien would be sold and the four children would inherit equally. Except for the cabins on Hvaler.

  His documented legacy should state that he wanted the children to inh
erit equally. But how would he go about it? By writing a will. He didn’t trust what his wife might do if he simply left everything to her, he didn’t trust that she would share equally because she was capricious and impulsive and she no longer had a guilty conscience, she was no longer anxious, but bitter towards her oldest daughter who had cut off contact. His wife might well decide to reward the nicer and more attentive children, but even if she still went ahead and shared equally, the fact that she had a choice would make it appear as her will, and not his. If they died at the same time, in a plane crash, the children would inherit equally, the Inheritance Act would take care of that, but then the Inheritance Act would get the credit for being fair, not him, and Astrid and Åsa couldn’t be sure to get the cabins on Hvaler. Dad had to write a will and word it so that he would appear to be fair while showing preference at same time.