The Tempest

by Steve Sem-Sandberg

  After meeting in trams over some time, the tension between us eased a little. Perhaps she had a bad conscience. Do you remember the sucking-hole? I asked her one day when we got seats next to each other for a change. By then, it had become clear to me that the only way to make her speak to me was to start talking about something quite random, whatever happened to come to mind, a stray memory or thought. I always envied her such a lot, she said one day, oh, what’s her name, the girl whose mum bred beagles? Anniken? I suggested. I was so envious of her for her swimsuit, she had a two-piece, a red one, and all I had was that ugly green one-piece job. It was so loose, it drooped at the crotch. And who would’ve bought me a new swimsuit? Would he? No way, he probably thought the floppy crotch was just fine so he could ogle me whenever. After going swimming, he always wanted me to get under the shower so he could rub soap all over me. Filthy old sod that he was. Was? I asked, because I assumed that she was talking about Johannes. And then: why are you always so hard on him? That last question was one I repeated many times. But in her mind, she was back on Horse Strait beach, eyeing Anniken, the daughter of the woman who bred beagles. And she said, what kind of mechanism makes one sad, silly little girl sick with longing for something another sad, silly little girl has got? Something like a two-piece swimsuit? Whatever you say, I was sick with longing, I did so want one like hers. Then, quite abruptly: have you been over there recently? Have you seen how the place looks now, with all those super-smart villas? I’m often over there, I said. And she said, glancing at me in that masterful way of hers: you simply can’t tear yourself away from it, from the sucking-hole – can you? One day I reminded her that there were still things out there that belonged to her. And she (not very interested): what things? Things that belonged to them, I said. Which them? she asked. Our parents, I said. She looked away. I have nothing that belonged to them, she said. And I: yes, of course you do. A shawl, for instance, and jewellery – those earrings. Don’t you remember, blue sapphire earrings? At least, you told me that the stones were precious, real sapphires, and the earrings had been our mother’s. And she: I own nothing that was theirs; and I (again): but what about the shawl? She: the shawl, maybe, yes; and then I: and what about all the rest of your new stuff, where did it come from? And she: he gave it to me; and I: who did? Johannes? And she: no, him, Mr Carsten. I was silenced, just sat and looked out through the window. I remember it as a clear, bright day. When the tram swung round a street corner, the sunbeams pierced the grimy window panes like sharp spears of light. But what about all the photos? I said then. And Minna turned and smiled at me for the first time. Her old Cheshire Cat smile, stretching her lips from cheek to cheek until they looked like pulled rubber bands, had changed into an arrogant, ugly grimace: a smile like a slash across her face. Haven’t you noticed how we’re never in the same photo, you and me? she asked. They might have wanted to take pictures of us one at a time, I said. Why would they want to do that? she said. Come on, I said, whatever, we’re brother and sister. What makes you think that? she replied, to your knowledge, is there anyone who believes that? Are we the slightest bit alike? This was the Minna I knew, who with one word could hurt me deep inside. Suddenly, it was as if time had stood still: again I was the little boy who sat with his face pressed flat against the window, staring at the farm where my sister was, and waiting for her to come home, but only the pale whitey came and dissolved everything around me – forest, farm, telephone poles, road signs; not even the ever-glowing light on the stable wall could penetrate the fog. Why did you go up there, to Mr Carsten? I asked. She shrugged. What did he want from you? She shook her head. The question seemed not to trouble her; rather, it was beside the point, even meaningless. He wanted to shag me, I suppose, she said without much conviction. When he didn’t get what he was after, he was just like all of them. Tried to make up for it, said he was sorry. As if that made any difference, she added. Then she got up and got off the tram. Even though it had not reached her destination. That was the last time. I went along and waited at her stop on Jernbanetorget, day after day, but never saw her again. After several weeks of waiting, I went back to the collective on Markveien. A woman there told me that Minna had gone abroad. She was not sure where. Maybe India. Later, I heard that she had gone to Chile. They left in March 1990, after Patricio Aylwin had succeeded Pinochet as president, and Chicuelo presumably thought it was safe to return to his homeland.

  I had asked Minna if she remembered the ‘sucking-hole’, as we called it. It was at the northern end of the beach at Horse Strait. The beach was good for swimming, and Johannes and I used to turn up and help, as our annual voluntary service. At the far end, spurs of flat clay-shale rocks stretched out into the sea. The older children went there in the summer to dive for crabs. At the furthest tip of the lowest of the rocks, there was a bowl-shaped cleft or hollow, of roughly the same diameter as a toilet seat. If you climbed into it and tried to stand on the bottom, you discovered that there was water underneath the rock and also that the current down there was really powerful. A twelve- or thirteen-year-old standing on the murky bottom of the sucking-hole would have water up to his waist and the smooth upper edge of the rock level with his shoulder blades, which was just the right height for using his elbows to heave himself up and out. But the pull of the current was very strong, the flowing water nipped and tugged at one’s skin all the way from the ankle bumps to the belly button, and it was so cold it felt as if one’s entire body had gone numb. Minna, as I remember her from the summers when we went swimming from the Horse Strait beach, was a long-legged, lanky girl, whose knees and elbows were sharp enough to hurt if you were trying to push yourself to the front of the queue that always formed on the tip of the diving rock. Everything about her was in uncontrolled motion. When she dived in, she did not keep her legs together and her arms stretched out over her head like everyone else: her limbs sprawled and flapped, often making her splash hip or back first into the water. When she had had enough of swimming and diving, and came back in, she breathed heavily, in fast, noisy puffs, and seemed to have a hard time crawling up on the flat rock. Help, she would scream, or pretend-scream, her arms splashing furiously in the water. When she asked me to slide her down into the sucking-hole, her skin felt the way I imagined a seal’s or a dolphin’s would, all slippery and smooth. When she stood in the hole, only her head and part of her neck stuck out. I lay down with my cheek against the rock edge so that my mouth was quite close to hers. Her lips were cold and rubbery when she pressed them against my arm. In that moment, all of her was on the surface. Her lips, suckered onto my skin; below her dark eyebrows, her sparkling eyes had an unmistakable expression, which I would always think of as Minna’s: at the same time fearful and scornful, with a pretence of submissiveness. And when she asked me to pull her angular, bony body out of the hole, her breath against my face was mildly sweet and sour like sun-warmed buttermilk. Alone, she could not have got out. It is her eyes I remember after she had left the tram, my last sight of her. Their expression was the same: fearful and scornful and pretending to be submissive. Help me, her eyes whispered, while the water, which nobody could see, sucked and tugged at her deep down. Help me up. But I never wholly understood how to help or even with what I was to help her. I was lying next to her, with my face pressed close to hers, but could do nothing.

  After Minna’s move away from the collective in Oslo, I went out to the island more often. I told myself that it was because Johannes needed someone to look after him, but each time I left the island, I understood that I had come because I had nowhere else to be. Though it was a fact that Johannes was in truly sad shape at the time. He had stopped paying for water and drainage after a long-drawn-out struggle with the local council and, once water no longer came out of the taps, he gave up on washing and shaving despite my best efforts. Every time I visited, I brought clean clothes for him and saw to it that he changed. I bought drinking water in ten-litre containers from the Kiwi shop and, if it had been raining since my last visit, I filled
four or five buckets from the rainwater tub at the back of the garden and carried them to the bathroom. Usually, there was enough for him to have a bath at least once a week. He was suspicious of the rainwater as well and would sit hunched on the edge of the bathtub, with his arms clutching his knees. The tub had been unused for so long that a streak of rust had formed between the tap and the drain, and the bottom had become covered by a yellowish chalky crust which no amount of scrubbing could remove. While I was bending over the tub to try to clean it, Johannes kept chattering about what Brekke or van Diesen or some other neighbour had said about this or that. Mrs Brekke has got cancer of the oesophagus, he said. Do you have any idea of how many people on the island have come down with cancer during just the last few years? Well, you haven’t, anyway, I said, and told him to climb into the bath. And, before he had time to protest, I tipped two full buckets over him. It made him sink shivering into a corner and, while he sat there, I washed his hair and shaved him. His once beautiful hair was still growing well, dense and long, and his high-boned, shiny cheeks gave his face something of the innocence of the younger man. But dirt had entered into his pores by now and remained like a shadow over his skin even after the shave. A dirty cherub: he had never looked more of a fake than he did then. The call from Ullevål came one afternoon, while I was towelling his hair dry. I went to answer it on the telephone in the hall. A woman’s voice enquired if she had reached the Lehmans’ house. I remember that my hand on the receiver went completely cold. To gain time, I asked her to repeat the number she had dialled and stood perfectly still while she counted out the figures. Johannes’s voice from the bathroom wanted to know if it was the police. He never had any problem with his hearing. I shouted to him that he was to carry on drying his hair, and then the woman’s voice at the other end of the line gave my sister’s name in full: Marie Sophie Wilhelmine. What has happened? I asked with a sinking feeling, and saw Johannes drop the towel on the floor. He must have heard what I said, or perhaps my face told him all he needed. I turned my back to him and said into the phone that I was her brother, trying to speak as quietly as I could, but even so Johannes must have heard every word, because when I came back into the bathroom, he had climbed into the tub and was sitting there, swaying from side to side, tears flowing down his cheeks as if he were a small child.

  She had been found floating lifeless in the pool at the Tøyen swimming baths; it was at about half past three on an ordinary afternoon in October, the time of day when the noisy school classes that fill the pool in the mornings have left and exercising adults do their monotonous lengths in peace. A woman who had been swimming alongside Minna for a bit saw her floating and thought at first that ‘the lady had just decided to rest’ in the water. She swam calmly on but when she came round a second time, she took in the fact the body ‘didn’t move’ and called for help. One of the employees, a pool lifeguard, tried to save Minna with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and then applied a defibrillator. It was too late. When the ambulance reached the hospital, it was established that Minna had died. The police suspected suicide because there were tranquilliser tablets in the bag she had left in the changing-room locker. Later, suicide was ruled out. The post-mortem examination did indeed find a small amount of water in her lungs but no trace of alcohol or prescription drugs in her blood. Conclusion: death from natural causes. Natural causes? Minna was forty-one years old when she died. Would someone at that age simply expire ‘from natural causes’? Looking back now, I’m not sure what tormented me most: that she floated in the water for so long before anyone noticed and realised that she had died, or the insight that I should never have stopped watching out for her, that I ought to have been in some inconspicuous spot in a high row of seats, keeping an eye as my sister swam her lengths. Just as, over the years, I had scrupulously observed everything she did, in secrecy or in full view of everyone. If only I had been there, it would not have ended like that. Or was it the other way round? This was precisely how she wanted to die, in complete privacy, seen by no one and, least of all, by me. I talked with Margit, one of the women in the collective and someone whom Minna was probably closer to than anyone else, and learnt that Minna had stayed abroad for only a couple of weeks. Margit had hardly said goodbye when a removal firm got in touch to say that they were to come and pack up all Minna’s belongings. There was not much: a table, a bed, a chest of drawers and a few old armchairs which Minna had had mended and reupholstered. The collective assumed that she would want her things to be delivered to a new address, but it turned out that the removal firm had been told to deposit everything in a self-storage unit, with the rent paid ahead for several years. Margit did not have any forwarding address for mail. Much later, in connection with the police investigation, I heard that Minna had decided to live in sheltered housing under her old name. It was utterly inexplicable to me why she kept that name even though she had broken with everything else in her past. She had also made a note of Johannes’s telephone number in a worn black notebook that was in her handbag. For many years, it pained me to think that I might have driven her to the brink of suicide with my constant proposals about how we should meet and talk (about Johannes and Kaufmann and Mr Carsten, and heaven knows who else). Perhaps she left the tram the last time I saw her simply to escape from me (and all the rest of them) for good. I no longer believe that to be true. I think she had completed a kind of cycle, moving on from the years of being the person people told her to be, and reverting to what she had been in the beginning – nobody or, rather, nobody’s. If she really had killed herself, it was an act she carried out the moment she decided to take off and move to a place that no one knew of, and where no one knew her. What happened later in the Tøyen pool only confirmed something that had already been completed a long time ago.