Encircling

by Carl Frode Tiller

  For some time I had had a vague and possibly mistaken idea that your real father had something to do with all this. The man in whose image you were actually supposed to shape yourself was absent. Indeed, not only was he absent, you didn’t even know who he was, and I had an idea that this had led to you having an identity crisis much more drastic than the usual crises of identity experienced by all teenagers.

  You had always said you had no great desire to know who he was. You used to snort scornfully when you heard stories of people who had grown up knowing nothing of their origins, because no matter whether these stories were presented in the form of novels or films the question of the central character’s real mother’s or father’s identity was always made out to be the most crucial question in his or her life. According to these accounts, anyone who didn’t know the names of their birth parents could never be happy, they would always feel that something vital was missing and that, whether they knew it or not, their life would be one restless hunt for their roots. This search might be disguised as a constant hunt for new sexual partners or the ultimate high or all manner of religious experiences or political and ideological father figures, but in the end it always boiled down to the same thing: the search for one’s biological origins. But, you used to say, all of these were nothing but displays of sentimentality, they had little or nothing to do with reality. Naturally you did sometimes wonder who your father was, but this was not and never had been something you thought of every day, you got on perfectly well without knowing who your real father was.

  I have to admit that it was good to hear you say this, especially when Jon and Silje were there. I loved you like my own son and there was a part of me that wanted you not to miss your real father and wanted everyone around us to hear you say as much. Now and then I might have had the suspicion that this was exactly why you said it, that you knew I cherished a desire to be all you needed and that this was your way of letting me know that I was. To me this was a declaration of love so powerful that I found it hard not to show how happy it made me.

  But hard though it was for me, and even harder for your mum, this situation was so serious that I had no choice but to raise the question of your paternity with her. I had tried once before, not long after we met, but her reaction back then had left me in no doubt that your real father was a no-go area. And gentle though her dismissal of the subject had been, it was also so firm and clear that I decided to leave it at that for the time being. I hoped and trusted that she would eventually find it easier to tell me about it. I thought perhaps she harboured a secret that she felt you could not cope with hearing until you were a certain age, or that she wanted to put off saying anything until we had been together long enough for her to feel sure that I would never abandon her, no matter what she told me. Whatever the case, I had made up my mind to ask her again before we got married and I probably would have done, if she hadn’t beaten me to it and made it a condition of marrying me that I let that particular question lie for ever. In love as I was and willing to forgo anything for love of her, I promised never to ask again, and I actually succeeded in keeping that promise until the day when you stormed out because we had read your diary.

  You had no sooner slammed the front door than I turned to Mum and said that it was time you were told who your real father was. I hadn’t planned on saying it, it just slipped out and I remember giving a start as I said it. Mum, on the other hand, acted as if she hadn’t heard what I had said. She had the same sad look on her face that she’d been wearing before I said it. At first I thought she was pretending not to have heard, thus giving me the chance to get it out of my system by behaving as if I had said something other than what I had actually said, but that was not the case, as I discovered when I plucked up the courage to repeat it. “I don’t know what we’re going to do,” was all she said, and there was nothing in her voice or her expression to suggest that she was putting on an act. She didn’t respond at all to what I had said, it was as if she had an in-built psychological mechanism that prevented her from taking in anything associated with your biological father and I remember what a strong impression this made on me. I used to have a friend who discovered that his wife was psychotic and he described to me what it was like to see the person he loved most in the world become a total stranger to him. It wasn’t until the moments after I had mentioned your biological father to your mother that I finally understood what he had meant. I never spoke to your mother about this episode, I never saw her look like that again and I tried to forget that this side of her existed. Nor did I ever mention your biological father again. I tried to tell myself that there were times when it was better not to know and all the signs were that this was one of those times.

  Later it would occur to me that Mum and I only used you as an excuse for staying together when our marriage was falling apart. Compared with parents who have drug addicts or delinquents in the house, or anorexic kids for that matter, we really had little to complain about or to worry us and it struck me that, each in our own way, we blew your problems out of all proportion and made the situation much worse than it actually was. By standing by you I wanted to show that I was a worthy father for you and a good family man; the more troubled I made you out to be, the better I would look and consciously or unconsciously the aim was always to show Mum that I and not Samuel was the man for her.

  Mum, for her part, overdramatized your problems because, having been let down by Samuel she wanted to find her way back to me, or so I thought. She was also genuinely worried about you, of course, but when Samuel told her that he was having a child by another woman she turned your problems more and more into a project that she and I had to accomplish together, a project that would bind us to one another and help us to save the marriage that she had been about to walk out of. Because the more I thought about it, the more convinced I was that she had seriously been considering leaving me. I would sit alone, thinking, and I came up with clue after clue to support this theory. The disproportionately fierce animosity she felt towards Silje, for example, stemmed from the thought that such a “rude, shameless little tart” possessed all the qualities that Mum herself would have needed to possess in order to leave me for Samuel, so every time she saw Silje she was reminded of her own shortcomings. She was, I concluded, quite simply jealous of her. Something similar had happened when you built up that bone collection and your mum took you to task for not being grateful for all I had done for you over the years. Mum was eternally grateful to me for having rescued you and her from a life with Erik, and since it was this same gratitude that prevented her from leaving me for Samuel it hurt her to see how you could take me so much for granted. She envied you that ability.

  At brighter moments, though, I saw what had happened in a very, very different light. The challenges we had been faced with as a family when you were a rebellious teenager may not have been huge compared to what other families had to cope with, but if you looked at the bigger picture, for many years we were almost outrageously happy and hence, when we did encounter problems and challenges, they seemed greater than they actually were, or so it seemed to me. As if that weren’t enough, at some point the past seemed to catch up on Mum. Her childhood had been a catalogue of disasters and it was as though she had begun to doubt that the happy life she had with you and me could last. She seemed almost to be preparing herself for fresh disasters to strike and, since she regarded what was happening to you as the start of just such a disaster, she felt both desperate and afraid. Samuel had nothing to do with this, I would tell myself, he had been nothing but a passing fancy, an infatuation that had eventually run its course, as such infatuations tend to do.

  At other times it has crossed my mind that you and Silje and Jon really were getting into deep water and that our concern was not merely justified, but possibly not as great as it ought to have been. More than anything, it was Jon’s attempt to kill himself that made me think this. It was his mother who found him. She suffered from some sort of neuromuscular disease and had go
t up in the night to take a painkiller only to discover that several bottles of pills were missing. At first she had thought Jon’s brother must have taken them when he had called at the house earlier that evening: he was a drug addict just like their father and if she hadn’t heard the sound of music coming from Jon’s room she probably wouldn’t have gone in there at all. He was still conscious when she found him, but the pills had begun to take effect and fortunately he was too dopey and confused to stop her calling the ambulance.

  I don’t think any of us realized how fragile, sensitive and highly strung Jon was and how easily he could be manipulated and led on by things you and Silje said and did. It wasn’t your fault that he tried to take his own life, of course. He was a troubled and tormented soul and who or what was to blame for that I don’t know. For you, the fascination with death and destruction was probably just an innocent exploration of yourself and of the big questions in life, but for Jon it was the proverbial last straw. Maybe he wanted to impress the two of you, maybe he felt small and insignificant or maybe he wished to show that of the three of you he was the one who dared to do what you and Silje only talked about.

  You and Silje gradually lost touch with Jon after that, as I recall. He was deeply ashamed of what he had done and even though it had been his own choice to swallow those pills he was well aware, of course, that the company he kept had also had something to do with it, so it was understandable that he wanted to distance himself somewhat from you two. Oddly enough, this close encounter with death also prompted you to abandon your warped philosophizing and all it entailed. Not overnight, obviously. I think that in some way you would have regarded that as a loss of face. Slowly but surely, though, you began at any rate to gravitate away from the person you had been before Jon’s suicide attempt. Your youthful rebellion was over and you were on your way home again.

  Hospital, Namsos, July 4th 2006. Home again

  The lift is starting to slow down, so now I really will have to pull myself together, I don’t want to be caught blubbing here if somebody gets on, so I hastily tug my sleeve down over my hand, raise my hand to my face and dry my tears. A couple of seconds, then I hear the long hiss of the brakes followed by a high, grating whine as the lift comes to a halt. It gives a long shudder, then a little lurch before it stops completely and the doors slide open. I step out, walk slowly past the reception desk and down to the entrance. Someone has left a newspaper on top of the rubbish bin outside the kiosk; I pick it up on the way past, it’s always good to have a paper to hide behind when you don’t feel like talking to anyone. On the other side of the entrance hall I see a bloke from the room next to mine, he looks across at me, smiles and nods, but I don’t nod back, I run my eye vacantly around the entrance hall and pretend not to see him, I don’t want to risk him coming over, I’m not up to that, I’m in no mood to talk to anybody right now. I walk out into the warm summer evening. There’s an empty bench under the lilac tree so I stroll over to it and sit down. I shut my eyes and breathe in through my nose, smell the sweet scent of new-mown grass. I sit like this for a little while, then I open my eyes, lay the newspaper on my lap and open it.

  And suddenly I’m looking straight into David’s eyes. “David,” I cry out and I snatch up the newspaper in both hands and bring it close to my face. I haven’t seen him for years, not since he moved away from the town, but that’s him in the picture, there’s no doubt about it, that’s David. But what on earth is he doing in the paper, what does it say, he’s lost his memory? I feel my mouth fall open and I crease my brow, try to focus and rapidly skim the newspaper report, read that he has lost his memory, that he doesn’t know who he is, his past has been erased and everyone who knows or has known him is urged to contact the authorities so that he can be helped to discover who he is. I tip my head back slightly, look up at the sky and shake my head, sit like that, open-mouthed, for a couple of seconds. “Oh, my God!” I murmur.

  Well, I’ll have to do my bit, that’s for sure, there weren’t many people who knew David as well as I did when he was younger so I’ll have to do all I can to help with this. “I’ll help you, David,” I murmur solemnly, and as the words leave my mouth I feel a surge of eagerness, I feel so eager to get on with this task, and I’m conscious that it makes me happy again just to know that I’m still capable of feeling such eagerness. I feel filled with a strange sense of happiness, something akin to relief. “So there is a little of the old Arvid left,” I murmur and even as I say it I realize that I’ve been given the very thing that I have just been shedding tears over, because it was gone. Only a moment ago I was standing in the lift, crying because I no longer had any of the old Arvid in me, because I had no one to care for and show my positive qualities to, crying because this had turned me into a sick man and nothing but a sick man. But suddenly everything has changed, I think. Suddenly I have someone for whom I can be the old Arvid. David has lost his memory, he has no idea who he is and he needs me to tell him.

  I lower the newspaper onto my lap, sit there staring into space for a couple of seconds, feel myself filled with a strange, faint sense of happiness. “Ah, no,” I say, and I feel a sneaking twinge of guilt, feel guilty for sitting here feeling happy when someone who was once very close to me has been struck by such a tragedy. “Poor David,” I say, shaking my head. “Poor David,” I say again and it helps, I can feel it, feel the guilt ebbing away. A second, then I get to my feet and start to walk back to the entrance, because now I have to hurry, I have to hurry along to the computer room, have to hurry up and write an email to ask how to proceed. The best thing would probably be to write down everything I remember, put it all down in writing and post it or email it, that would be best, I suppose, but I can ask the psychologists what they think, take their advice. There could be all sorts of considerations that I’m not aware of, I’m sure there must be both practical and more psychological aspects to be taken into account in such cases, I’ll have to remember to ask about all that sort of thing, find out about it, it’s important, I mutter to myself, then the doors slide open and I stride into the entrance hall, going as fast as my feeble legs will carry me, and there’s the computer room, I can see it, down at the end of the corridor. I feel so fired up, I can scarcely remember the last time I felt so inspired and it’s so good to have something as important as this to do, it feels so good to matter to someone, to be allowed to give something of oneself to another human being. “It sounds so banal, but you don’t realize how true it is until you’ve been hit by loneliness,” I mutter under my breath, “you don’t realize how dependent you actually are on other people until you’ve felt what it’s like to be lonely,” I mutter and I give a little laugh, laughing at the banality of what I’m saying. “Ah, no,” I say, “no, that’s enough now,” I mutter, because I can feel the guilt returning. “This person who was once my stepson, the boy I loved as if he were my own, little David, has been struck by tragedy and here I am feeling happy again,” I mutter and I give a little shake of my head, shake my head to salve my guilty conscience. “Yes,” I mutter, “but it’s not the fact that David’s been struck by tragedy that has fired me with such enthusiasm. Surely it must be possible to differentiate between the tragedy itself and the joy I feel at being able to help,” I mutter. “The tragedy has already struck, so what better than to throw myself into the task with zeal and enthusiasm. It’s not as if I’m feeling happy because this misfortune has befallen David,” I mutter and I’m conscious that what I’m saying is true, it’s true, and this in turn makes it even more alright to feel happy. This new fire, this spark that was lit when I read about what had happened, well obviously I have to tend it and keep it burning, I have to do it for David’s sake, and I have to do it for my own sake, this task comes almost as a gift to me. Only a little while ago I was blubbing in the lift because I believed I had no one to live for, and then, out of the blue, I’m given this. I’ve never seen things in this light before, never give any real thought to how much influence other people actually have on who I am
as a person. Well, obviously I had thought about it in a more superficial way: there can’t be many people who talk as much about brotherly love as we clerics; in all my years in the ministry, in sermon after sermon, talk after talk I wrote and spoke about loving thy neighbour and yet I don’t think I had ever understood what it meant, not until today, not until I was standing blubbing in that lift, not until it struck me that the absence of any close kith or kin has probably had as much to do with how I’ve changed as my illness. And no sooner had I come to the conclusion that what I missed most of all was having someone to live for, no sooner had I told myself this than it was given to me, the very thing I was crying for. “And if that isn’t a gift I don’t know what is,” I mutter. “No, it’s more than a gift, it’s a miracle,” I mutter as I sit down in front of one of the computers and even as I hear myself say this an avalanche sweeps through me, a long avalanche of joy, because suddenly I see it, I see it all so clearly and distinctly, suddenly I see that it is God who has granted me this gift and that is Him who has worked this miracle. I see it and I feel this almighty force running through me, feel my whole body being filled with the power of the Lord and I can only sit here, incapable of speech, incapable of movement, because this, this is the greatest gift of all, I am with God, again, I have come home to Him once more. In the blink of an eye I’ve been shaken out of the life I’ve led for the past year and into a new life with God. Since I became ill I don’t know how many times I’ve prayed to God for a miracle, it’s years since I resigned my ministry and forsook the Lord, but in my despair I prayed anyway; weeping and with clasped hands I’ve begged and pleaded for him to make me well again, but I’ve never received a single sign, not one, not until now, not until today, not – it strikes me – until I prayed for a miracle regarding something other than being cured of my illness. The minute I did that, God revealed himself to me, and that very fact is significant. “This can’t be a coincidence,” I mutter excitedly and no sooner have I said this than I realize what it is God has been trying to show me – well, what was it I was praying for, what was it I was crying for in that lift and saying that I lacked: someone to live for, a neighbour to love. “The nature of brotherly love, that’s what this is all about,” I mutter, “what it means to love they neighbour and how much it’s worth, that’s what it’s about.”