The Dead House: this was the children’s name for the Yellow Villa. As if we, who lived in it, not only made the decay worse but were somehow part of it, perhaps even the very cause of its degradation. But what did I really know about how the talk went? Nothing was ever said outright. Still, it seems likely that most of the islanders must have thought it out of order for two small children to live with a single man who was getting on in years and was not a widower, or even divorced. Besides, the children, too, were somehow out of order. This had nothing to do with our foreign origins or anything else that we had done, or were like, only with the fact of us being. Minna, in particular, exasperated people. Her rudeness was almost unnatural; she was such a go-getter and seemed to have no inhibitions at all. And there was her red hair and the way she moved: her thin, skinny body was like a living scream below the tall willow in our garden, the willow that was a slowly, ponderously rustling dome of greenery in the summer, and in the winter a mass of harsh, scratchy branches that gashed the sky just as Minna’s screams tore into every silence; the shrill sound of her voice could be picked up anywhere in the neighbourhood. In the rare moments of quiet, the Dead House stood there as if truly dead, carved out of the very silence: a jarring eyesore on the less respectable side of the road to the farm, the old fur breeder’s house giving way under the pressure generated by the comparatively proper house frontages up there, as if, despite all Johannes’s efforts to rebuild, it had been unable to defend itself against the shiny glare of the well-kept Mains Farm buildings and begun to rot and disintegrate by itself, perhaps from the ongoing struggle to keep up appearances or even to stay upright at all. I remember this: it is summer, and warm outside; the garden is filling with dense, heavy greenery, and the children move among the berry bushes as swiftly as birds’ shadows. Minna wears her droopy and too low-cut green swimsuit; she is laughing, her lips swollen and blue with the juice of all the Morello cherries she has stuffed into her mouth, and she has draped a lace curtain over her head, one of the curtains put up by a former housekeeper and nowadays used by Johannes to protect the fruit. The curtain material is absurdly long: it flows from her head out over the grass like a covering of fish scales or the sloughed-off skin of a huge snake. The hut that would later be known as the Cottage, or the toy house, was then nothing more than a small shed where the Simonsen couple lived while their own house was being built. This was how people managed when the war had ended: once you had got hold of a site (Simonsen got his at about the same time Kaufmann gave Johannes the fur breeder’s place), you skimped and saved, and built a little more every year until your proper house was ready for you to move in. Simonsen had shown us pictures of the Cottage barely standing upright in the snow, while what was to become their real house consisted of a pile of bricks and stacked timber over by the wooded hillock at the back of the garden. When the house was completed, the Simonsens’ two eldest girls used the Cottage as their playhouse. They served their dolls tea on a plastic toy set, which they insisted was made of real china. There were hordes of children on the island in those days. I don’t know where they all came from or what happened to them later in life. A girl called Emelie lived up on Bird Hill, and her neighbour was a solitary woman, whose name I cannot remember, who bred beagles. Emelie stomped about; she was not right in the head and fat for her age. I can see her now, squeezed into the far corner of the Cottage, large and greyish and long-suffering, with an imbecile smile on her face. And naked. Minna had managed to make her undress, presumably because she wanted us to play doctors, or maybe it was farm animals, because the daft girl had been ordered to stuff grass into her mouth and also to push sticks and pine cones into her down-there. When Emelie would not do it herself, I was told to get on with pushing these things inside her and I remember trying (I never dared to defy Minna’s directives whatever they might be), but Emelie squashed her thighs together and yelled like a stuck pig, so Minna tried to muffle the screaming by pulling a sack down over Emelie’s head. Minna called it a nosebag, like the ones the horses were given to eat from up at the farm. Was it this scene, or another one, which Mr Carsten watched and later briefed the social services about, and which, in the end, led to them to decide that Minna should be placed in a foster home? Or was it just (as I heard him tell Johannes) that Minna would turn up on the roadside and make rude faces and gestures at him every time he went past on his tricycle? Much later, once the old man had died and his widow, who was growing increasingly deaf, no longer bothered about the running of the farm, Mr Carsten would turn himself into the master of the Kaufmann estate, but then he came to the Yellow Villa’s front door in his knee-high boots that were always caked with mud and chaff and with one corner of his mouth twisted into a crooked smile, and stood there in the doorway, addressing us in long, weird, Danish-sounding harangues that flowed out, soaked in spittle. Mr Carsten always seemed to be informed about everything that happened on the island and felt no compunction about telling whoever he met about what he had seen, and kan de tell me, Johannes, he might say, what sort of devilry will that lass of yours think up next time? You would like to get rid of her, wouldn’t you? He would say this kind of thing in a way that sounded as if the very best thing would be for Johannes himself to see to it that not only Minna but his entire objectionable family was dispatched somewhere else, once and for all.
We ate oranges, crammed slivers of peel between our lips and teeth and made yellow grimaces. Clowning – that was Johannes’s word for our antics. Once, he tried to teach Minna how to dance the tango. The record was old and scratched, and a man’s voice, frail and spiky like a flower stalk, was almost drowned in the crackly music from a distant orchestra as it sang something incomprehensible deep inside the horn that seemed filled with darkness as solid as cement. Johannes counted, One two three and four, they walked alongside each other and then: the cross! Johannes said, and made his own hand into the shape of a crown for her hand to lace into, high above both their heads. Minna had put on a pair of low-heeled shoes with a red bow that had been left behind by one of the housekeepers, and he had dressed up in an old, moth-eaten tweed suit and sported a bow tie. Surprisingly, Johannes, who was usually so awkward, was moving smoothly and fluidly, so that even I who watched with childish eyes perceived a much younger man, a charmer, behind the distinctive hawk-like profile and the long, slicked-back hair, and as I crouched next to the gramophone, admiring them sincerely, I must have been flooded by a sudden wave of jealousy because I put my finger on the old 78, slowing down the tempo of the music on purpose and eeeeehh-EEHHH … groaned the flower stalk as if suffocating slowly inside that dark cement, and STOP IT! Minna screamed, and put her hands over her ears, suddenly bright red in the face from a mixture of shame and rage.
We had our own inner spaces, just as we had colonised our own secret places on the island. We had a language known only to us, made up of invented words and phrases, and a collection of English words and expressions that Minna believed we had inherited from our parents, though Minna was the only one able to recall the words correctly and pronounce gorgeous, ravishing and voluptuous as she believed they should be pronounced. She whispered the words in my ear, her voice hot, and her cheeks grew shiny and red with excitement and her eyebrows shot up almost to where her hair began, vo-luup-tuo-ooous, and her lips parted in that self-satisfied smile of hers that stretched her mouth like a rubber band and made her look just like the Cheshire cat in the storybook that Johannes had been reading to us. We also had our own, carefully thought-out daily rituals, like the way one of us would stop the other if either of us spotted something especially noteworthy – like a strangely rounded stone, or an abandoned bird’s nest on the field verge, or if Mr Carsten drove past in his Volvo pulling the rattling horse-box trailer – and if I had made a particularly interesting find, Minna would approvingly tap her temple with her index finger, then raise her arm and swing it up over her shoulder in a wide arc while pointing at me with the same index finger, and I, only too overjoyed at a chance of imitating whateve
r she did, soon learnt to tap my temple and gesture the same way to point at her, and then there was another thing that we did every time we had made one of these interesting finds: we would stand stock-still for a moment or two, continuing to gaze fixedly at whatever it was we thought important, then move away by taking three solemn paces backwards and say fart on you! before we could turn and run from the place. We observed this especially if we were in one of our secret places. We had a whole network of secret places, in the forest and down by the lake. The most secret of them all was the broad stony field on top of Bird Hill, which, according to Johannes, was the crash site of the plane our parents were travelling in when on their way to collect us. Though he was pissed when he told us that, Minna said. Everyone knew what bullshit Johannes would come out with when he was drunk. Our parents were living in America and could come to get us any time, or perhaps send us the plane tickets so that we could go to them. Unaware of the contradiction, Minna all the same insisted on us building a small chapel for our dead parents on the place where the plane had come down. If our dad had been sitting at the bomb-bay doors, he would surely have fallen out and landed here, she said, mixing things up even more, but why should I mind as long as I was an accepted part of her games? She pointed at a reasonably flat piece of ground and we both set about finding stones that we could move along to the spot and then added sticks and bottle tops and Minna’s shawl, which she claimed had once been our mother’s and then, after we had said a home-made prayer for our parents, we were taking the three backward paces prescribed in our ritual and I remember having taken the last backward step and being about to say fart on you, when a large, furry, reddish-grey dog with its tongue dangling from its muzzle bounded towards us out of nowhere, with Mr Carsten following just behind, groaning with the effort of dragging his paralysed leg up the hill and past the large boulders. This was the first time I had seen him up close, and the first time (I think) that either of us had been alone with him in such a distant, exposed place. Mr Carsten stood and looked at us for quite a long time, shifting his weight from one leg to the other and breathing in heavy bursts, the way he did, inhaling with a rasping, painfully tearing sound and then letting the air out in a slow puff, before he bent over to put the leash on the dog, who had been jumping at me but now went unprompted to his master’s side. You young ’uns shouldn’t be here, he said. This is no place for children to be running around. It’s where the plane crashed, right? Minna asked, and I had to admire her courage. As for me, I just stood there, shivering like an eel. I had not been able to stop shaking ever since that big, shaggy beast had jumped at me. It was the plane my dad was in, Minna said, and, once more, I was amazed. Just a little while ago, she had denied all that, dismissing it as Johannes’s drunken chatter. Meanwhile, Mr Carsten stood still and panted and did not take his eyes off Minna for a second while he put his weight first on his stiff leg and then on the other. At the time, I could not work out why he kept staring at Minna like that. Me, he did not even glance at. Yes, it was over there, he said, pointing with his walking stick at a tree, an ash that grew a little further up the hill and had partly lost its leaves. I was one of the first to arrive at the site, he said with a smile, as if this fact gave him particular satisfaction. By then, it was a roaring sea of fire up here. He was hanging there, he said, and raised his stick to point again. And: who was? (This was my question, I couldn’t stop myself.) And Mr Carsten: he had been thrown out of the plane, seat and all, so he was hanging still in the chair, like it was a parachute that hadn’t unfolded. Mr Carsten started to laugh. And my, how he burnt, the poor fucker, like in the fires of Hell! His laughter looked very odd because only half his face was laughing. The other half kept staring at us, with an expression that seemed to say that he was quite terrified by what he had just said. And: you’re lying! Minna screamed, and started to run. Halfway down the hill, she stopped me and said: don’t believe him, he was just trying to scare us! After that, we kept on running until we reached the bottom of the slope, where the ground was ordinary, soft and just grass, and then Minna let herself fall on purpose, rolled in the grass and pressed the palm of my hand against her ribcage, all flat and bony at the time, and inside her heart leapt and splatted. Like a frog, I said, it’s jumping about like a frog in a water bucket. And Minna: would you have guessed, he keeps a heart that behaves just like that! And I: who, Mr Carsten? And she: no, not Mr Carsten, you idiot, Kaufmann of course, he has this heart in a glass jar and he makes it beat by using a lot of electrical wires. And I: what, a real heart, a person’s heart? And Minna tapped her index finger against her temple to show how smart I was and then raised her arm towards me in a long, challenging arc. A human heart, she said. Don’t ask me whose it was.
I have written that we went to school together every day. But ‘together’ may not be the right word. Minna always walked well ahead of me, as if to show everyone that we did not belong to each other one bit. At least, not in school. The teachers, however, made no distinction between us. To them, we were both the Lehman children. The name tied us to each other even when nothing else did; that name, and those special, deeply unfortunate circumstances which everyone on the island knew were linked to that name. No one took any notice of other facts: for instance, that we were in different classes and did not even get together in the breaks. My classmates soon worked out that they had better avoid me like the plague, as if I were infected by whatever ailment they believed was causing Minna’s problems. I grew lonely then, a loneliness that I would for a long time believe to be not so much chosen by me and somehow self-inflicted but rather the direct effect of my dependence on her. We were not just each other’s sibling but we were also drawn into a strange field of energy that affected our minds every waking hour of the day, determining who we were and influencing what we did more distinctly than anyone or anything else. And, paradoxically, it seemed at the same time to suck all strength out of us. It could make me feel utterly drained simply to raise my hand at her, or nod or shake my head or try to answer the questions that she incessantly asked me. How to name this condition? I have tried to define it several times but every attempt failed. ‘Dependence’ is too weak a word. Perhaps I can express what I mean in much more straightforward terms: neither of us existed away from the island, outside our natural habitat, as it were. Or, if we exist, we were fragile and vulnerable, as easily broken and fragmented as the island slate. At least, this is how it was with Minna. As for me, I am not sure. What saved me might have been my awareness that I must always watch out for her. Constantly watching out for her served to keep my mind off other things. It made me forget that I was alive only when close to her, nowhere else, but also that it was totally impossible to live side by side with her, that (as Johannes would say later) if she had not shown the good sense to disappear, she and her freakish whims would have been the death of us one fine day.
The Tempest Page 6