Encircling

by Carl Frode Tiller

  I raise my eyes, tilt my head back instinctively and gaze at the ceiling. “Thank you, Lord,” I whisper, then I swallow and wait a moment. I feel my mouth widening into a little smile, then I straighten my head, face front again. I smile and feel myself being filled with joy and gratitude. And now I’m going to write an email and ask how I can best help David. I may not have that much time left, a month perhaps, or possibly six months, Dr Claussen said. At any rate, whatever time I have left I’m going to use to help David. “Help David and help myself,” I mutter. Because by helping David I’ll be helping myself too. Having someone to live for is what makes us human. It’s banal but true, if we have no one to live for we cease to exist; the old Arvid disappeared when he lost those closest to him and only with God’s help can he rise again. By praising God and all His works I have been reborn; to love thy neighbour as thyself is to praise all that God has created and all that God is and only through this can we find salvation.

  Namsos, July 23rd–24th 2006

  On the morning of August 11th 1989, as she was trying on a new pair of shoes in Ole Bruun Olsen’s shoe shop, your mum’s aorta burst and she keeled over and died.

  While she was still alive I had occasionally tried to imagine how I would react if she died before me and when I did this I had felt a certain light-heartedness that I was reluctant to acknowledge and that always made me feel guilty. I knew of course that I would be devastated if I lost her, but the thought of being able to do exactly as I pleased and of being spared some of the obligations that come with marriage did sometimes seem tempting and exciting. But when she really did die there was none of that whatsoever. I didn’t feel so much as a glimmer of excitement, no thrill at being free, neither immediately after her death nor when I was starting to get back on my feet. Losing her was just terrible. In order to make the loss easier to bear I tried to convince myself that she hadn’t really loved me, that she would have left me and gone to live with Samuel if he hadn’t let her down. But it didn’t work, she had got over Samuel a good while before she died and if there was anything at all to forgive I had long since forgiven her. As she had always forgiven me for the mistakes, big and small, that I had made. I remember I also tried to make myself angry with her by thinking back on the things about her that had irritated me: a strategy I had heard counsellors recommend to people coping with the breakdown of a relationship. I thought of how often she had tried to make me feel guilty by being in such a hurry to do things that were actually my responsibility, but which she felt I didn’t do soon enough. I thought of how bright and bubbly she could be, giggling at the silliest things when she was with some of her women friends, and how she would simply become brighter and bubblier when she saw how this annoyed me. I thought of how she snored, how she smoked on the sly, and of how she mispronounced certain foreign words or used them in the wrong context and how it always embarrassed me when other people heard her do this. But since that was the worst I could come up with, this strategy actually had the opposite effect. The fact that I could only come up with such petty failings simply served to underline how well Mum and I had got on and this made my grief all the greater. I balk at writing this because more than once since then I have found myself thinking that it was such a ridiculously sentimental thing to do, but I actually kept the pillow on which she had dreamed her dreams. Every single night for one or possibly two years after she died I slept with my head on her pillow, hoping that with its help I might meet her in my dreams.

  I still think it’s a lovely thought, however sentimental it might be, but it was also a symptom. I didn’t realize it at the time, but looking back on it I can see that it was also one of many signs that I was no longer capable of living among the living, so to speak. It was not only Mum who departed this world on that August day in 1989, the man I had been for as long as I had known her and you also departed this world. Because it’s trite but true: when there is no longer anyone to document our life, when there is no longer anyone to tell the funny stories of how stubborn we are or how grumpy in the mornings; when we no longer have anyone who will laugh when we tell a joke or get mad at us when we are bad-tempered: when we no longer have anyone to remind us of who we are; when we no longer have anyone to encourage us to be the person we can be, we crumble away to nothing. Even Arvid the Christian crumbled away to nothing in the weeks and months that followed. Although, I don’t know whether this was due purely to the loss of Mum, it certainly wasn’t as if losing her rendered me incapable of believing in a good and a just God – nothing so banal. My loss of faith was possibly more a sign of the secularization that was taking place all around us. As a vicar I had had plenty to say about yuppiedom and dancing round the golden calf. I had warned against the growth of materialism and been concerned about the flight from the world of the spirit, but I did not see that I too was a part of the society and the times in which this was happening. I wasn’t merely a vicar who could and should help reverse this trend, I was also a small individual, and one who was equally affected by this same development. But it wasn’t until after Mum died that this was really brought home to me. When I stood in the pulpit for the first time after returning from sick leave I remember being struck by how empty the church was. There probably weren’t any fewer people there than there had been before my leave of absence, but after my time away it seemed so to me and this triggered a train of thought in my mind. It was as if during my brief absence God and all the godly had left this world, they had fled in all haste, rather like the Jews during the war, and here I was, standing in a large and almost deserted church, talking as if nothing had happened. I looked at the cross, at the altarpiece, at the font and all the beautiful paintings on the walls and suddenly I saw myself as a bewildered museum director. I was coming to the end of one of the first sermons I had given since returning to work and suddenly I had this image of myself as a museum director who thought he was living in the age from which his museum exhibits dated. Nothing outrageous happened, I finished the sermon as normal and I gave several sermons after that. But I could not get that image out of my mind and this sense of not being a part of my own time, of not living in the same age as all the people I saw round about me every day, filled me with an overwhelming dread. I would wake up in the middle of the night drenched in sweat and ask myself what I was really doing with my life. Suddenly and without any warning this question would come into my head; it happened more and more often, I was given no peace. I tried putting it down to a perfectly normal mid-life crisis and I laughed at myself, told myself I ought to buy a motorbike. But it did no good, it was only a stupid attempt to take the sting out of the question and I couldn’t fool myself into thinking anything else, the situation was too serious for that. I hardly slept at all any more, many a time you were woken in the middle of the night by me talking to myself downstairs in the living room.

  “Who are you talking to,” you asked me once. “Hmm?” I looked up to see you standing there in nothing but your underpants. You scratched the fine line of hair running downwards from your navel. “Who are you talking to?” “Oh, I was just having a little chat with myself,” I said, trying to smile. “At least that way I’m always in the right!” I added, as if such a stupid crack would make it all seem slightly less worrying. You neither smiled nor laughed, you simply shook your head, then you turned and went back up to your room without saying a word.

  It’s dreadful to think that you had to witness everything that I went through at that time, David. Eventually it got so bad that I had to see a psychologist and it was after many long sessions with him that I decided to give up the ministry and accept the job of accountant. After that things started to improve slightly. Not only was I relieved to finally have made my decision and not only was I sure that I had been right to resign my vocation, I also felt it was good to work with something as concrete as accounting, where I could put a double line under the final balance and go home for the day. I needed that.

  Still, though, something wasn’t right. I was functioni
ng on a day-to-day level. I went to work, earned money and did whatever had to be done in and around the house. But I did it joylessly, reluctantly. Where I would once have pushed myself to work on for an extra hour or two just for a word of praise or an admiring glance from Mum, now I was more liable to stop an hour early. I put off cleaning the house and washing the dishes until I couldn’t put it off any longer, even though I had much more spare time than I had had as a vicar, and I no longer put on a smart shirt at the weekend, as I had done when Mum was alive. I didn’t even make myself something a little more special for dinner on Saturday evenings. It was a life devoid of cheer and magic, I was not so much living at that time as simply surviving.

  So it wasn’t surprising that I saw less and less of you, or that you eventually moved in with Silje and her mother. Only vestiges remained of the man I had been and you needed more than that, you needed a good male role model, a man you could look up to and strive to emulate, and I was unable to be that for you back then.

  Now, though, I have regained something of the old Arvid. I won’t go into all the details except to say that what I have tried to do for you with this letter you have already done for me. You have brought to life a little of the man you knew when you were about ten or eleven and moved into the vicarage with your mum. This may even have left its stamp on what I’ve written here, you may read this letter and recognize aspects of the man I was then, something about the tone, the tenor, something about the mood, I don’t know, but I can hope.

  You know, I’m often been unsure of exactly how to phrase things here. I have sometimes felt like a mad scientist, playing at being God and attempting to create an ideal new human being. I have felt tempted to fill you with false memories, not because I wanted to present myself as better than I was, but because I had a burning desire to present you as someone who believes in God and thereby turn you into someone who believes in God. I admit it, there was a part of me, especially when I began this letter, that was desperate to make a Christian of the person you are now by leading you to think that you had always been a Christian. I’m not going to dwell on this, but I was in a kind of ecstasy when I started writing and my missionary zeal may well have had something to do with this. As I wrote, though, it became more and more clear to me that I loved you exactly as you were and that it is the boy you were that I miss. Just at this moment the mere idea that I could have contemplated improving you fills me with shame. As if I could have done that. Talk about arrogant.

  But let me close this letter as I began, David. As a Christian I believe that everything ends with us coming home, so let me close with our homecoming, with the first day of what were to be the best years of my life. I can see myself in the yellow Simca I had borrowed from the parish clerk, I see the heavy green branches hanging over the road, the shadows of the leaves softly flickering over the yellow gravel and Berit’s red hair fluttering lightly in the draught from the half-open car window. “Are you excited?” Mum asked. “Yes,” you said. “Any minute now we’ll see it,” she said and then she turned to you and smiled. “But … what have you done to yourself?” “Done to myself?” you echoed, not quite understanding what she was talking about. “There,” she said, nodding at you. “Your finger, you’re bleeding.” “Oh, that. I had a bit of an accident, that’s all, cut myself with my pocketknife.” “Oh, no,” Mum said, “does it hurt?” You raised your eyebrows and eyed her quizzically. “What, that?” you said. “No!” “Are you sure?” Mum asked. But you just laughed and didn’t even bother to answer. “Women!” I said. I shot you a glance in the rear-view mirror and shook my head. “Hey, you!” Mum cried in that pretend-cross voice of hers and punched me on the shoulder. I laughed and shot you another glance. “The weaker sex, eh, David?” I said. “Yep,” you said, laughing back at me. Mum turned and glared at you, then faced front again, sat there shaking her head. “See, I told you. You two are always ganging up on me.” I looked at you in the mirror and winked, and you smiled back. “Look, David,” Mum said. “There’s the house.” You didn’t say anything right away, simply sat with one hand on each front seat gazing at the rambling red-brick pile which was to be your home from then on. The car wheels crunched over the gravel as we drove up in front of the house, the neighbour’s elk hound barked fiercely a couple of times, but he was old and tired and soon fell quiet again. We climbed out of the car and stood looking at the house. Behind us the car engine clicked and clunked: we could hear the flies buzzing about over in the flowerbed and I remember that the backs of my knees and thighs were damp and sweaty from sitting in the boiling-hot car. “Here you are, David,” I said, pulling the door key out of my shorts pocket and handing it to him. “Go up the stairs, turn right and you’ll come to your room.” “Oh, yeah!” you whooped and off you raced across the drive. Mum and I watched you for a few moments, then we turned to one another and smiled. “Do I get a kiss?” Mum said softly and as I bent down to kiss her we heard a long “Yuck” from you on the front steps. I can hear it now, David, I can hear it and see it and it reminds me that loving gestures are handed down through the generations. One day, when you kiss your own wife and are good to her, I would like to see that as an echo of the time when I kissed Mum and was good to her. And one day, when you tuck in your own child and tenderly kiss its cheek, I would like to see this as an echo of the kisses and caresses Mum and I gave you at bedtime when you were small. That, I hope, is how I will live on in this world, through the kisses and caresses I gave to you and to others. Anything else of myself that might remain is of no interest to me.

  Silje

  Silje

  Trondheim, June 21st 2006. Coffee at Oddrun’s

  I look at Mum and I look at Egil and Egil’s talking and Mum’s listening to what he’s saying and I smile at them and act as though I’m paying attention. I put my hand to my mouth and stifle a yawn, never taking my eyes off them. It’s like I’m looking straight through them and on through Mum’s flat, but they think I’m looking at them, they think I’m paying attention, and I open my mouth as if to say something, then close it again as if I’ve decided not to say it after all. And Egil talks and talks and Mum murmurs “Oh, really,” and takes a sip of her brandy, then murmurs, “Mm-hmm” and takes a little sip of her coffee, and I pick up my coffee cup and take a sip of my coffee, then put the cup down with a little chink. “Will you run the girls down to the bus station afterwards?” The words blurt out of me and Egil turns to me, taken aback, and I look at him and I realize that he hadn’t quite finished talking, I realize that my question came right out of the blue. “Er,” says Egil, gazing at me wide-eyed and a little laugh escapes me, but he doesn’t catch it, he has turned to Mum, he shoots her a puzzled glance, but Mum avoids his eye, she looks as if she’s just happy not to have to listen to him any more, she’s tired of all his talk, and she leans quickly over the table and drains the last of her brandy and I hear the hum of the fridge out in the kitchen.

  “Oh, come on, Silje,” Egil says. “It’s only a fifteen minute walk to the bus station,” he says. “I don’t like them walking down there on their own after dark,” I say. “Oh, come on, Silje,” he says again, tilting his head to one side and smiling at me. “Okay, okay, then I’ll have to take them,” I say, eyeing him a little wearily and he gives that sweet smile of his and winks gently at me. “No, no!” he says. “I’ll take them,” he says and he cocks his elbow, angling his hand towards his knee, and his watch slides out of his shirt sleeve and hits his slim wrist with a faint clink, and Egil looks at his watch and says, “Hmm” and thinks for a moment. “I can run them down there before I go to work,” he says. “Fine,” I say, and I look at Egil and smile.

  “Damn,” I hear Mum say. I turn to look at her and see that she has spilled coffee over herself. She’s sitting with one hand hovering in mid air and coffee dripping from her fingers. “Fetch me a wet cloth from the bathroom, Silje,” Mum says, her eyes never leaving her dripping hand and first one moment passes, then another moment passes and I just sit there and
then Egil gets up. “I’ll get it, Oddrun,” he says briskly and I notice that his suit jacket is covered in stray hairs again, I picked them all off before we got in the car, but it’s almost as thick with them again, and Egil nips out of the living room door and strides off down the hall.

  “Nothing about me works any more,” Mum mutters crossly. “I can’t even drink my coffee without spilling it,” she says, and that’s all she says and I just sit here looking at her and a moment passes and now I have to pull myself together. I take a deep breath, blink a couple of times and feel myself waking up slightly. Then I look at Mum and it’s as if only now do I really see her. I see her slack, purplish cheeks, see the dark bags under her eyes. With those cheeks and those bags under her eyes she looks a little like a bloodhound. I smile hesitantly at her. “Oh, we all spill things sometimes, Mum,” I say. “Humph!” she says, whirling round to face me, her slack cheeks quivering slightly as she turns, and she eyes me indignantly. “Stop that,” she says. “You can’t fool me into thinking that I’m younger or fitter than I am,” she says, and just then Egil comes back into the living room. “There weren’t any wet cloths in the bathroom,” Egil says and he stands there looking at Mum and Mum looks at him and frowns. “What?” she says. “There weren’t any wet cloths in the bathroom,” Egil says again, “only dry ones,” he says and I look at Egil and suddenly I realize that he’s joking and I start to laugh and it feels good, the laughter seems to loosen something inside me and I feel myself waking up a little more and I look at Egil and laugh and Egil looks at Mum and laughs, but Mum doesn’t join in. “I’m only kidding, Oddrun,” Egil says and he flicks a hand at Mum and grins. “I’ll go and wet a cloth and bring you it,” he says and he turns and leaves the room again and I stop laughing and look at Mum and Mum looks offended.