The Helios Disaster
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“I am born of a father. I split his head.”
This modern spin on the myth of Athena plunges us deep inside the mind of an unlikely twelve-year-old goddess confined to a small Swedish town. Separated from her father just moments after bursting from his skull in full armor, Anna is packed off into foster care where she learns to ski, speaks in tongues, and negotiates the needs of a quirky cast of relatives. Unable to overcome her father’s absence, however, she finally succumbs to depression and is institutionalized. Anna’s rallying war cry rings out across the pages of this concise and piercing novel as a passionate appeal for belonging taken to its emotional extreme.
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Praise for The Helios Disaster
‘The emotional intensity created by Boström Knausgård recalls Sylvia Plath, but her spare, accelerating modern myth owes something to the poet/classicist Anne Carson’s novels in verse. This novella cannot be read quickly, its psychological range and febrile prose demand attentiveness. It takes skill and imagination to describe extreme emotions in ways to which everybody can relate but that’s what Boström Knausgård achieves in this short, piercing book.’
The Independent
‘The story is tightly, cleverly organized around a central idea: to show how Anna’s perceptive, disturbed mind struggles to impose some kind of mental order and, finally, fails. The author’s passionate involvement with her protagonist illuminates what it is like to slide irresistibly away from reality.’
Swedish Book Review
‘Linda Boström Knausgård’s style is magical, hallucinatory, and very poetic. Passionate, refined, and as clear as cool water.’
Aftonbladet
‘The Helios Disaster is a story about longing for a father and about prepubescence. About the will to die, refusal, and a sun shining far too brightly. But in this field of tension there is also a simple happiness. Boström Knausgård’s authorship keeps getting better and better.’
Dagens Nyheter
‘It is simple and it is grand, a story about a girl who came too close to the sun. The Helios Disaster shines!’
Kulturnytt i P1, Sveriges Radio (Swedish Public Radio)
‘The Helios Disaster is an insightful story about mental illness and missing a father. Linda Boström Knausgård manages to fill the rather monotonous hospital existence with a tension so powerful and poetic that one is actually quite taken by it and reads it without missing a single detail.’
Kulturnyheterna SVT
‘The Helios Disaster is a dense, tender, painful novel written in a prose which, always poetic, touches, shakes, and makes a mess.’
Helsingborgs Dagblad
‘Chosen for the unsentimental language of her portrayal of human existence on the border between a world distorted by psychosis and reality’s structured existence. Her stories are written according to the logic of myths, never asking why, but allowing an understanding of ourselves that is difficult to be determined in the dominant categories.’
JURY, MARE KANDRE PRIZE
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LINDA BOSTRÖM KNAUSGÅRD is a Swedish author and poet, as well as a producer of documentaries for national radio. Her first novel, The Helios Disaster, was awarded the Mare Kandre Prize and shortlisted for the Swedish Radio Novel Award 2014. Welcome to America, her second novel, was nominated for the prestigious Swedish August Prize and the Svenska Dagbladet Literary Prize.
RACHEL WILLSON-BROYLES is a freelance translator based in Saint Paul, Minnesota. She received her BA in Scandinavian Studies from Gustavus Adolphus College in 2002 and her PhD in Scandinavian Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2013. Other authors whose works she has translated include Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Jonas Jonasson, and Malin Persson Giolito.
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AUTHOR
“Greek mythology means a lot to me—I always return to it. This influence mixed with a plane accident named the Helios Disaster, that I heard about on the radio, to become this novel. Fighter pilots were sent up to look inside the plane, which was still flying, and they saw that everyone was dead. I saw this image of a plane full of dead people, flying on autopilot, until it crashed into a mountain outside the town of Grammatiko. I suddenly imagined that that was how the old gods of the Antiquity got into our world.”
TRANSLATOR
“What struck me as I translated The Helios Disaster was what a great deal happens in the tale, even as the book remains a compact one hundred or so pages. The prose is exacting and tight, making it a joy and a challenge to render into English. I also appreciate the many small details that give the reader a sense of time and place, from the embroidery at the craft store to the boiled cod and peas of the psychiatric unit. As a reader, I remain intrigued and thrilled by the mystery of the end of the novel, and its implications for everything that came before in Anna’s story.”
PUBLISHER
“Linda Boström Knausgård needs few words to draw us into a universe both mythical and disturbing, and at the same time as tangible and real as if we were experiencing it with our own senses. Hers is a passionate universe of sadness and silence, and her writing is exceptionally intense and pure. The literature of Boström Knausgård is dark, tough, and vulnerable—it is all these things, and more. This novel takes one deep into the world of depression and madness, and captivates from the inside.”
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LINDA BOSTRÖM KNAUSGÅRD
THE HELIOS DISASTER
Translated from the Swedish
by Rachel Willson-Broyles
WORLD EDITIONS
New York, London, Amsterdam
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Published in the USA in 2020 by World Editions LLC, New York
Published in the UK in 2015 by World Editions Ltd., London
World Editions
New York/London/Amsterdam
Copyright © Linda Boström Knausgård, 2013
English translation copyright © Rachel Willson-Broyles, 2015
Cover image © Paul Citroen / Nederlands Fotomuseum
Author portrait © Christina Ottosson Öygarden
This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. The opinions expressed therein are those of the characters and should not be confused with those of the author.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data is available
ISBN Trade paperback 978-1-64286-068-9
ISBN E-book 978-1-64286-065-8
First published as Helioskatastrofen in Sweden in 2013 by Modernista, by arrangement with Nilsson Literary Agency, Sweden
The cost of this translation was defrayed by a subsidy from the Swedish Arts Council, gratefully acknowledged.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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Book Club Discussion Guides are available on our website.
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PART ONE
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I AM BORN of a father. I split his head. For an instant that is as long as life itself we face one another and look each other in the eye. You are my father, I tell him with my eyes. My father. The person in front of me, standing in the blood on the floor, is my father. His woollen socks suck it up greedily and turn r
ed. The blood sinks into the worn wooden floor and I think, his eyes are green like mine.
How, at my birth, do I know that? That my eyes are green like the sea.
He looks at me. At my shining armour. He lifts his hand. Touches my cheek with it. And I lift my hand and close it around his. Lean against him. His arms, which embrace me. We cry together. Warm, salty tears and snot run down my face. I want nothing but to stand like this with my father and feel his warmth, listen to the beating of his heart. I have a father. I am my father’s daughter. These words ring through me like bells in that instant.
Then he screams.
His scream tears everything apart. I will never again be close to him. Never again rest my head against his chest. We have met and must immediately part. He could do no more than give me life. The scream presses my lips together; they want to shout at him to stop. You’re scaring me, grows within my mouth. My temples ache. All the love turns to rage in my chest.
So much screaming, I think, and I immediately want to plunge my lance into his heart to make it stop. I’m afraid. Just a child.
He doesn’t stop screaming. He holds his head. Presses his strong hands to it as if to close what has opened.
*
I take off my armour and hide my lance in the kitchen bench. I am wearing my helmet when I go out into the world for the first time. I am twelve years old when I show up in the village in the north.
I step into the snow with bare feet. I don’t get far. A naked girl with a golden helmet on her head. Moreover, there are many people who saw the ambulance that picked up my father after the neighbour couple came running to find out what had happened. They had heard his scream from far away. And the neighbours who saw me in the armour on the floor in my father’s living room wanted to know. Had I been kept hidden? Who was I? A child whom no one had seen. Where were my parents?
It was chaos. What should I say?
‘My name is Greta,’ said the neighbour lady. ‘Who are you?’
I didn’t answer. My tongue suddenly felt large and shapeless, thick and in the way.
‘You have to put something on.’
She took off her down coat and put it around me. She carefully but firmly took me by the elbow and led me to their house, which was on the same street as my father’s. She led me like this, into the warm, as they apparently say, and into the kitchen, where she sat me down on a chair.
What do I do now? My thoughts were jumbled around and I longed for my father’s eyes. Instead I got warm milk with honey and cinnamon, and clothes.
‘I’ll help you,’ she said when she saw that I only stared at the clothes.
‘Dear girl. Here are some underpants, there we go. First one foot, then the other. Good. Long johns. They’re made of wool, so you won’t freeze. It’s cold up here right now, you know. It’s over twenty below freezing. Then the undershirt. You can have these clothes. They’re too small for me now.’ She dressed me from head to toe. Pants and knitwear and everything. I also received a coat, and a hat and mittens. I thought of the armour in the kitchen bench and wanted to go there.
‘Now you have to tell me who you are,’ Greta said when I had drunk the milk and eaten up the reindeer-meat sandwich. Reindeer meat, I thought, storing the words in my memory. That salty and bloody taste.
‘I want to go to my father,’ I said.
‘Dear child. Conrad doesn’t have any children.’
‘He has me,’ I said, getting up from the chair.
Greta looked at me gravely.
‘Has he been mean to you? Conrad is a bit different, after all.’
‘No.’
Would a father be mean to his child? To his own child?
‘Has he kept you hidden?’
Greta was kind. I understood this, even if what I wanted most of all was to knock the chair I was sitting on to pieces and destroy the house after what she’d said about my father. She doesn’t know any better; the thought that came to me calmed me down and I realized two things: that no one would ever understand how I came to be in Conrad’s kitchen and that I would therefore be alone for the rest of my life.
Greta drove me to the social-services office in the city. She had made a call, and I had heard the words: ‘Girl. Conrad. I don’t know what to do. I can’t keep the girl here.’ And then this: ‘If I didn’t know better, I would believe that a miracle has happened.’ Miracle. That was the word that stuck, and I didn’t know where to put the word, so I looked at Greta to keep more words from coming out of her.
My father had acute schizophrenia and was sent, screaming, to the mental hospital in Skellefteå, where his story was disregarded and his headache was alleviated with medicine so strong that, in the end, he himself was sceptical that it had really happened. But I didn’t know that then, as I sat in Greta’s car looking at all the white. I still believed that I would live in the house with the dirty rag rugs and the unwashed windows. That Conrad would come back and that we would be father and daughter, as it had been decided in that instant when everything between us was still good.
*
Snow. Snow. I learned the word right away. Understood that it was important. It was the only thing I could see besides the road and Greta.
‘The reindeer are having a hard time this year. The Sami are driving them further and further down to find pasture, but the snow line is all the way down to Stockholm. And it’s only fall. Just think. So much snow and it’s only October.’
October, I thought. Reindeer. Sami, I thought, and I saw a flowing body of water pushing its way out of the landscape.
‘The river,’ said Greta. ‘Do you know what I’m talking about?’
I shook my head. The river. The river.
‘We’ll be in the city in an hour. They’re going to ask questions. Do you know what I mean?’
I looked out the window. The river rushed along as if it were playing. It hopped and twisted. I rested my forehead against the window and it was like it was singing, the river.
The helmet was beside me in the back seat. I stroked it with my hand, and the fact that it was there calmed me.
‘People are going to talk, you know. A naked girl in Conrad’s house.’
‘He is my father. I don’t know the rest,’ I said.
‘No,’ said Greta, and she concentrated on driving.
There was an ache within my chest, and I looked out across the snow that lay on the branches of the trees, on the fields and the meadows. It is sadness, I said to the snow. That’s what is hurting and pushing out the tears. What will I do? I don’t know anything about my future. Who am I? I asked the snow.
The city grew closer. Wooden houses, several storeys high. The people walking on the street looked like black birds against all the white. They flocked together and glided away from each other. They know nothing, I thought, and then: Is this where I belong? Among them? We have nothing to do with one another. It was clear as they rushed along. That we wouldn’t become familiar with one another. I closed my eyes and remembered Conrad’s eyes. Those calm eyes looking at me.
*
I was placed in a home. The family I was going to live with had always wanted a girl. They already had two boys as it was.
The social-services lady was called Birgit, and there wasn’t much to her. We didn’t say much to each other because she smoked the whole time. Cigarettes and smoke were all over the room with the telephone and the lingonberry almanac she was looking at.
‘It’s a difficult situation, but I’m sure we’ll figure something out.’
Her accent was like Greta’s, and that was something they had up here. Something in common. As she exhaled the cigarette smoke she said that the best option was probably Birgitta and Sven. Sweet people. They had always wanted to have a girl, and here she gave me an exhortative smile, as if she demanded a smile in return, since she was putting in so much effort on my beha
lf.
I didn’t smile. I didn’t speak. I hadn’t mentioned my father’s name because I could not utter it in this ugly room with the picture and the desk and the lady.
I coughed from the smoke when she asked me if it sounded okay.
‘Does that sound okay?’ she said.
‘Good people. Really normal and nice. Active in club life. Lots of sports. Those things are important when there are so few of us. Sticking together. You understand that, don’t you?’
‘I’d rather live with Greta,’ I finally said.
But that wasn’t true. I would go to my father. Get my armour and free him. Nothing else was possible, now that I wanted it so much.
‘Greta doesn’t want you, you see. But I have to know’—she coughed—‘how you got here. Tell me. It will feel better as soon as you tell me.’ She paused and took a drag on her cigarette, in and out. ‘Even if it’s horrible, it will feel better afterward.’
Everything went quiet. I looked out at the white outside the window. All the words she had said struck me. So many words for nothing, I thought.
A thought came to me: The snow is beautiful. All the white. I thought I could say it. As an experiment.
‘The snow is beautiful.’
The social-services lady didn’t say anything to that. Instead she said that she helped people who lived under very difficult circumstances.
‘Where is he?’ I said. ‘Where is my father?’
She took a little drag on her cigarette and thought for a long time, it looked like. She ran her index finger across the desk pad.
‘You have to have a name.’
She stood up and her skirt swung and twisted around her legs as she walked to the bookcase full of binders and catalogues, and she took one out, a binder with a red spine, and then she sat down and looked at me.
‘You look like an Anna,’ she said. ‘Anna Bergström. That sounds nice,’ she said, looking at me.