*
Supper has been eaten, plates and cutlery have been cleared away, he has brushed the crumbs on the table into his palm and thrown them into the sink as usual, and opened the pad covered in oilcloth against the edge of the table, pressing the pages down with his left arm to keep them straight and bending forward over them, the biro gripped firmly in his right hand. Every evening, he sat like this, wearing only his rough string vest, with his round, steel-rimmed glasses on his nose, shaping each letter with the patient precision necessary to thread a needle. Behind his back, beyond the dirt-streaked kitchen window, the twilight was waning. Towards the end of his life, Johannes wrote more often and took longer to pen his letters, which were practically always addressed to me, or so I believe. Even though he seemed to have jotted things down with no particular care and was more likely to write about notions drifting into his mind than things he felt were important to tell me about, his letters could also be read as an ongoing plea in his own defence, always shifting between lines of argument and requiring a range of strategies to deal with an accusation that was never explicit but, for that very reason, was always hanging over him. It was as if Johannes, because he always revisited this fragmented document of self-defence, was forced into a kind of constant retreat across space and time, only to find himself unable to reach any refuge more secure than that nook of his between the drop-leaf table and the larder door, where he sat, evening after evening, busy writing his letters to me. He would set out within arm’s length everything that mattered to him then: the brandy bottle, the crosswords, the lottery coupons and a free calendar handed out by the brewery he had once worked for and in which he every morning crossed out the previous day, as if time was nothing other than another day’s work that had to be done; there would also be a few objects from the collection of odds and ends that he had picked up during his travels, perhaps aimlessly, but which were wonderful playthings for us children. I remember in particular a small bamboo box from Java: it had a beautiful lacquered lid with a painting of a tropical forest landscape with dense clusters of palm trees and a field with a farmer in an Asian rice hat who walked behind a plough pulled by two water buffaloes. The lacquer paints were so thick the surface bulged and so glossy the figures seemed to glow. When she was little, Minna was obsessed by the Javanese box. She would not stop scratching at the lid with the nail on her index finger and picking away at what remained of the colourful crust. Inside the box Johannes kept some essential practical objects, like the keys to the garage and the car, but there were photographs as well, not like the old family setpieces, showing his relatives posed in sober, formal clothes at neatly laid dining tables or in garden arbours, but the small, shiny Kodachrome images of our real parents from America, photos that in contrast to the other ones were in colour and also taken in places we could recognise. In some, Mr and Mrs Lehman stand together with Johannes under the Morello cherry trees in the garden or in front of the NATO villa, where we lived when we were small – or so Johannes said. We were of course especially fascinated by the NATO villa, built on a steep slope and on two floors, where part of the top floor had been extended into a large, oval terrace flagged in grey slate, which had been polished to a mellow, slightly uneven surface, and finished around the edge with a terrace railing made of semi-transparent fibreglass, a material that must have been a novelty in the early 1950s, when the house was built. Johannes’s family photographs seemed to overflow their hefty frames, but the snapshots in the Javanese box were different, appealingly easy to handle, small and square and surrounded by a wide, white frame. I am in one of them, about one and a half years old, standing on sturdy legs under the willow in Johannes’s garden, a big, stooping tree that, to this day, walls in a lifeless spot with its long, droopy branches, and the child who was me is looking straight at the photographer with the total expressionless seriousness of the very young (who took the picture, I wonder, my father or Johannes?), while in another picture my mother stands half turned away, her long blond hair pulled lightly together with a broad clip at the nape of her neck. Unlike her husband, Elizabeth Lehman was not of German descent: we were told that her maiden name was Westwood and that she came from an old family who had lived in New England since the eighteenth century. Frank Lehman was an adult when he moved to the USA. According to Johannes, it was my father, Frank, who had insisted that his and Elizabeth’s firstborn, a daughter, should be given the rather antiquated name Wilhelmine, apparently after his paternal grandmother, though on their lips and ours, it was always Minna. My name, Andreas, has no known source; I do not know whose name I bear. My father probably had a great deal on his plate when my christening was due. Frank was a real-life war hero. At least, that is what Johannes always says when he takes the precious pictures out from the Javanese box and we lean forward over the table to see properly, straining so much we almost get neck cramps. During the Korean War, your father carried out several hundred life-or-death sorties over enemy territory, Johannes tells us. Was he the pilot? I ask, or perhaps it is Minna. No, he was the one who made the bombs drop, Johannes explains. He sat in the bomb bay at the far end of the plane and when he was told through his earphones that they were in the right position, he opened a hatch to let the bombs drop, and so we imagine this: the bombs that move across the sky, looking like small cross-stitches on a wall hanging, and then blossom into great exploding stars when they hit the ground over there in the black enemy landscape. Here he is, our heroic father, smiling as he stands next to his huge pistachio-green Studebaker, which he has parked in the middle of the drive to Johannes’s house. It is in the late spring or maybe early summer of 1961, clearly a warm, sunny day. He wears a suit and tie, but the jacket is unbuttoned and the trousers casually worn, held up by a belt just below the navel, as people did then. I look in vain for my own features in my father’s broad face, but it is hard to make anything out because of his merry grin. His smile has the boundless self-confidence of someone who feels it is due to him alone that the grass grows so tall and the fruit trees in the background are in such fluffy bloom. Every time I look at these pictures, even now (they are still in place in the brightly painted bamboo box), it is just as hard to comprehend what happened a little more than a year later, also on a day in early summer. Johannes had been standing on top of the folding ladder, busy spraying the plum trees that had been plagued for years by grey mould and shot hole blight. From inside the canopy of a plum tree, already almost in leaf, he spotted the pistachio Studebaker driving on the long, gravelled road that begins outside the NATO villa at the top of the slope below Bird Hill. It was so strange, Johannes said afterwards, the way the car seemed to take it easy. The dust cloud that always followed it had almost settled by the time it stopped outside the gate to the Yellow Villa. As Johannes put away his spraying kit and climbed down, my father, holding Minna and me by the hand, already stood leaning against the hood of the car. Behind his sunglasses, Mr Lehman had looked troubled, despite his smile. You see, Johannes said, he didn’t just look jolly on photographs, it’s a fact that Frank smiled whenever he spoke or was spoken to. There had been a regrettable accident, Mr Lehman said, or was that really what he had said? Johannes didn’t remember exactly. Frank might have said it straight out but without mentioning what kind of accident. Anyway, he had to accompany Mrs Lehman to the hospital, and could Johannes possibly look after the children? It would only be for a few hours, at most. Johannes assumed that the accident had happened to my mother but admitted that it was just a guess: the car windows facing his way were closed. Still, who else could it have been? If not, why all this fuss about the children? Of course Johannes agreed to keep an eye on the children. The NATO villa was far up along the sloping road but, even so, Johannes was the Lehmans’ closest neighbour. Besides, the two of us had been darting in and out of his house all the time, as he put it. It was surely Minna who did the darting; if I did, it was just as an unknowing witness following in my sister’s wake. Johannes gave us a snack meal in the kitchen, a sandwich and a glass
of milk, he told us (smiling at the memory of the milky froth that stuck, as always, to Minna’s upper lip), and then we played in the garden until he called us to come inside because it was getting dark. By nine o’clock in the evening there had still been no sound of the Studebaker (it had become a habit of Frank’s to hoot the horn as he turned off the road into our drive and then wave to us), so Johannes called the hospital and was put through to a ward. Yes, a woman by the name of Elizabeth Lehman had been admitted. Once Johannes had told the sister that he was in charge of the Lehman children and that they were anxious to know how their mother was, Frank Lehman came along to speak to him. My father’s tone of voice had changed, Johannes said; it was loud and distinct but sounded colourless, almost hollow, as if from far away. They talked briefly. Frank Lehman had said that the situation was extremely serious and that they could only hope and pray. Hope and pray. Had he used precisely that phrase? I asked. In English? Or in Norwegian? Because he did know quite a bit of Norwegian. Johannes could not recall the language, only that Frank had sounded tense and distant, somehow encapsulated, that was one word he used. This seems to have been the last time anyone on the island, including Johannes, spoke to Mr Lehman. The following morning, Johannes drove us to the hospital in the old Dauphine. With much less room in the back than in the Studebaker, we were squashed together and Minna held me on her lap. The girl had been excited and happy, Johannes said. We had been in the garden to pick the still slightly unripe cherries for our mother and had bought her flowers as well. But when we arrived in the ward, she was no longer there: a patient with the name Elizabeth Lehman had been discharged earlier that morning and professional confidentiality meant that the nurse could not tell us why the patient had been admitted in the first place. In response to Johannes’s question, the nurse however confirmed that Mr Lehman had been with her all the time. He had brought his wife’s things, apparently. What she meant by things was never clarified and no one knew, of course, where the Lehmans were now. Once he had got this far in the story, Johannes invariably took his glasses off and began to rub his forehead. I had no choice, I had to bring the two of you back with me, he would say with an embarrassed smile, as if found out to have done something forbidden, even shameful. Around this time, he must also have contacted the US embassy, but the officials denied all knowledge of any Lehmans, either well or suddenly taken ill, which is, as I now know, their routine for dealing with such situations. (That is, denial is the set response: diplomats will always say they know nothing until they know more, and then keep silent because of what they have learnt.) By the following morning, the police had cordoned off the road to the NATO villa at the crossing with the Mains Farm Road and men in strange white suits and helmets with visors were walking along the ditches and pottering around the pump house at the Mains Farm. They had brought instruments for measuring things, and a constable on guard duty told Johannes that the entire area was, from now on, a designated crime scene and that we would learn soon enough what it was all about. Soon enough turned out to be at six o’clock the same evening, when two plain-clothes policemen came to the front door of the Yellow Villa and wanted to know if we had noticed any effects from the water recently. By effects, they meant things like feeling sick, vomiting, fever, diarrhoea. They were concerned about the possibility that something in the drinking water might be a cause of trouble as several people in the neighbourhood had shown such symptoms, some so serious that those afflicted had to seek medical help. Even so, it had taken time before people had drawn the only reasonable conclusion. Because the residential water supply had been drawn from the lake for as long as the current population had settled on the island, it must now have been poisoned somehow – and who would have the opportunity to do that except the person or persons in charge? In other words, someone at the Mains Farm. Soil samples were collected from all around the pump house and the pump itself was taken apart and examined in detail, but no plausible explanation for the sudden attacks of sickness was ever found. (A later report stated that the soil and water samples from the island contained certain perfluorinated compounds that are components of firefighting foams, and because the fire and rescue services ran exercises regularly in the nearby mainland airport, the contaminants could well have built up in the still water of the lake; PFCs break down very slowly in nature and are described as persistent. It seems that, in the long term, PFCs can cause hormonal malfunctions, including reproductive ones, and foetal damage, but not the acute illness that struck so many people more or less overnight. All the report provided, if anything, was yet another argument for Mrs Kaufmann to use in her campaign against the flights across the island, so dangerous to health, and in favour of moving the nearby mainland airport to somewhere else.) Once the incident had been investigated, the only remaining issue was the presence of two orphaned Lehman children, thought by many to be the most scandalous part of the whole event, especially when they realised that Johannes was the official carer. The American bureaucrats consistently refused to confirm that Mr and Mrs Lehman ever existed, so the social services moved in and used every argument they could think of, including bribes and threats, in order to make Johannes accept that the children must be looked after by people described as responsible foster parents; when Johannes refused, quite a few women, some young and some not, suddenly overcame their distaste for the old Quisling and turned up to sit on his threadbare sofa and drink cups of coffee. I remember some of them: their sticky hands on the back of my neck and their eager talk about well-heeled husbands and the very good schools we would attend, and Minna making faces (I also remember that, of course): how she rolled her eyes or pretend-strangled herself or staggered to the toilet and made vomiting noises. The police must have been involved, I suppose, perhaps they sent out an international search warrant, but throughout Johannes refused to shift from what Frank had told him that afternoon: that he and his wife had to go away but would be back shortly. However, they never got in touch with Johannes or with us, never sent as much as one single letter or card, not any kind of message, nothing.
The Tempest Page 4