So why does she want to have contact with a terrible human being, I cried out. Why is she so adamant that we stay in touch? If I’m so stupid and wicked that I made up a story of incest to get attention, how can it be that Mum, according to Astrid, suffers much more because of the conflict with me than the inheritance dispute with Bård? Surely it’s easier to dismiss an outrageous liar, which is how they view me, than someone who, let’s face it, is only after half a cabin on Hvaler?
Astrid’s unease stems from her bad conscience, I said more calmly now. She knows that I’m telling the truth, but if she were to acknowledge it, accept it, there would be consequences and she’s incapable of dealing with them. She couldn’t whisper in my ear one minute that she believed me, and then the next and in every other respect, including publicly, be Mum and Dad’s loyal, loving daughter, it would be impossible, but that was her dilemma to resolve. The solution that worked best for her involved being in contact with and talking to me, conversations which weren’t about my allegations, but about editing articles, except that those conversations did me no good, in fact they upset me, why should I help resolve her dilemma in a manner which didn’t benefit me? I’m glad she wrote that letter, I said, now even more calmly. I’m glad that she writes plainly that she wants proof of something which can’t be proved because then there’s nothing more I can do. If only she had said twenty-three years ago that she wanted proof, then we could all have saved ourselves a lot of time. Was it any wonder that I had felt troubled and ambivalent towards someone who wanted proof and reconciliation at the same time? That was the impossibility, the untruth which had lain unspoken underneath all our conversations, which now turned out to have been nothing but lies.
It was much easier for me to deal with Åsa, who had never believed me, who had cut me off the way I had cut her off, it was a clean break. Åsa didn’t demand verification or evidence, Åsa didn’t try to force me to see her, Åsa didn’t believe me, pure and simple, and wanted nothing to do with me.
She probably takes it seriously in her own way, Bo said, but I don’t think that you should take this seriously, he said, waving Astrid’s letter in his hand, I don’t think you should take her incredible sadness seriously, the one she goes on and on about, her incredible sadness.
It is sad, I said, but I can’t make it not so.
There is, he said, putting the letter aside, every reason to ignore this. She’s exaggerating, he said, how awful she feels about this. But I guess she wants her peace-making mission to succeed. Even though the air has already gone out of that balloon.
Jung saw things the way his instinct encouraged him to. If he didn’t, his snake would turn on him. I tried to look at things the way my instinct encouraged me to. If I didn’t, my snake would turn on me. My mum and sisters had acted in ways and said things which my snake disagreed with. I travel along the path my snake prescribes, I thought, because it’s good for me.
Bo had travelled to Ireland to write poems about Ireland but didn’t know why. He woke up one morning in Ireland wanting to write a poem about the rain. Or did he just want to be in Ireland? Why couldn’t he do that here in Norway, he wondered, we were in a patisserie in Lommedalen. He had met a man in Ireland who had told him to go left through the forest and then take a right. Bo turned left through the forest and then right and reached a church with a poster which read: Imagine how God feels. He realised that he had come too far and was walking back when it started to rain. The rain was directionless, as was he. He had left the main road and got lost, but that was what he had hoped for, he had wanted to get lost, and it was quiet where he was, but not so quiet that he couldn’t hear the drone of traffic from the main road. He could always find his way back there. I walk towards new towns full of anticipation, he had written, because they would give him everything he wasn’t or didn’t have. You learn something about yourself, he had written, when the road forks between hawthorn and lily of the valley and exposes you. Which way will I go, he had wondered, on coming to a crossroads. He reached a town, but after that town lay another, he had arrived bursting with anticipation, but drank himself into a stupor, he had gone to Ireland to seek the protection of the big trees but found only bushes.
The night before 11 March I couldn’t sleep. Is there life after death, I asked, is Dad somehow on the other side, I asked myself and tried summoning Dad, but got no reply. When I finally dozed off, I dreamt that I had woken up in my old bedroom in Skaus vei number 22 and got out of bed because my daughter Tale, who was five and wore glasses, was crying her heart out. I went to see her, she was lying in Mum and Dad’s double bed. I comforted her and asked her why she was crying, she said: It won’t get up.
Her doll’s house had been completely trashed. I started to pick up the pieces, small turquoise bits of furniture and sections of walls and roof, I said that we could fix it and she started to calm down. While I was clearing it up, I got mad at Dad who had wrecked the house, I braced myself and opened the door to the living room where Dad was sitting, heavy and limp in the green leather Chesterfield and I said to him that smashing the house was a rotten thing to do. He replied that it was worthless anyway, just some crap from McDonald’s. I said it was bad of him to wreck the house when Tale was so fond of it. But as soon as I had said it, I got scared of how he would react and I went back to Tale and we heard him come up from the living room and go to the bathroom where he took a leak without closing the door, and I thought: What’s going to happen now? After all, we’re alone with him, there are no grown-ups here, anything could happen.
Irish street names are much more cheerful than Norwegian ones, Bo observed. If the street names in Ireland had been more depressing, it would have been easier to throw everything into the sea of oblivion.
He said it was all about letting yourself fall with the fruit and be carried off by the ants.
All the 8mm films Dad took of me when I was little, where I stand, grinning and naked, on a rock on a beach in Volda in a ballet pose, have they been destroyed, what happened to them? I was cute back then or maybe Dad was a talented photographer? Because it looked like love, I took it to be love. Dad couldn’t resist me. When he and I were alone, Dad changed completely, Dad couldn’t control himself, the mere sight of my naked body turned Dad’s head. I discovered, even as a child, that men would drive themselves crazy wanting me, that I could turn their heads, how did I learn that? In my experience, all you had to do was take off your clothes and wrap yourself round a man, then he would go crazy and not be himself anymore. But it was painful as well because it lasted only a short time. When these rushed encounters were over, Dad would grow distant and cold, he would avoid me because we tend to shun those we have hurt. That was my first sorrow, the many, long, bleak days when Dad ignored me, when Dad took even less notice of me than of the others, when Dad didn’t see me, didn’t touch me, never cuddled me, but would glance nervously, furtively, in my direction, Dad would watch me fearfully and in secret, while I just missed my dad. Dad would go crazy for me. For a brief moment he couldn’t control his desire, and the knowledge of her physical appeal isn’t without value for a little girl. But with that knowledge the little girl lost her dad and it hurt because she missed him all those long, sad days, all those years when he didn’t look at her out of terror and shame, and she was jealous of her mum, whom her dad would show affection in public. It was a ménage a trois, the mum won and the girl lost. But then her mum rejected her dad by falling in love with a professor she didn’t get, and the daughter fell in love with a professor and got him. The daughter had the guts and got a divorce and her professor. As if to rub her mum’s face in it? Defeat her mum like her mum had once defeated her? Are we caught in such webs, spun in our early years?
My poor, dead dad, my first and greatest tragic love.
The big house in Bråteveien had been sold and cleared out, the sale would be completed by the end of the month and I would get my share of the inheritance during the first two weeks of May, Bård said.
I refuse
d to believe it till it happened.
On 10 May I received a letter with the probate accounts, columns of figures that meant nothing to me. I needed to sign it and give my bank details whereupon my share would be transferred immediately. I could send the signed letter to Mum’s address or drop it off in person. She might have hoped that I would drop it off at her new address, an eighty-year-old widow alone in a new flat. I wasn’t going to, so I didn’t. I signed the letter and sent it by post.
On 14 May the money was paid into my account. That was weird.
I had an unexpected text from Mum. She had come across an article I had written, she wrote, which was called ‘Reading, loving’. I vaguely remembered it. She wrote that she loved me very much.
Her message left me cold.
When Dad dies, I had said to her once, then you’ll come round. But by then it’ll be too late. That was how I felt, that it was too late. And if Astrid were to come round, if Mum died and Astrid came round, it would also be too late. Even if Astrid wept and repented, I would still be cold.
A psychologist quoted in a newspaper said that he had witnessed scenes when someone guilty of betrayal admitted their mistake and started to weep, but the injured party would look away with an unmoved face, rejecting their plea for forgiveness.
When he was less experienced, he had found it painful to watch and had encouraged the injured party to relent and accept the repentance.
But no longer. Because it didn’t work, unless it happened in the right order. Someone guilty of betrayal shouldn’t be praised for admitting their betrayal until the despair, grief and rage of the injured party had been acknowledged. Without it, their repentance would fall to the earth like a rock. It’s the law of nature, he said, it’s in our bones, we can’t escape that sequence of events.
I was incapable of forgiveness.
But throw it into the sea of oblivion?
Hold it up to the light, examine it, acknowledge it and accept it, and then throw it into the sea of oblivion?
I couldn’t do that either. Because it wasn’t isolated incidents and a finished story, but a ceaseless exploration, a necessary excavation full of dead ends and distressing flashbacks. And the presence of my lost childhood, the constant return of this loss had made me who I was, it was a part of me, it pervaded even the slightest emotion in me.
Then I felt bad for not having responded to Mum’s I-love-you message and called directory enquiries, got Mum’s new number and rang her. How are you, I asked. She wasn’t well, she replied, because she never saw Bård and his children or me and my children. Why don’t you want to see me? Why do you hate me, she asked. What could I say, should I explain myself yet again? I said that she knew why, and she became aggressive and said that I was a liar, that if I was telling the truth why hadn’t I gone to the police, and I rang off, my guilty conscience had evaporated.
Emma asked: Granny? Do you have a mum?
Me: Everyone has a mum.
Emma: My other Granny’s mum is dead.
Me: Yes.
Emma: Dad’s dad is dead.
Me: I know.
Emma: Is your dad dead?
Me: Yes, he died not long ago.
Emma: Will the dead grow big again?
Me: No.
Emma: Is your mum dead?
Me: No.
Emma: Can I meet her?
Me: She lives a long way away.
Emma: I’d like to meet her.
Will and Testament Page 23