What My Body Remembers

by Agnete Friis

  I shot a look in the direction of the store and saw the owner and his plump wife arranging the wares in front of their shop, intermittently casting surreptitious glances in our direction. This time I had been too stoned to do a decent job.

  “I’ll pay for your whiskey later,” said Bæk-Nielsen. “But right now, we are going to see your grandmother. Or he’ll call the police, and Ella . . . this won’t do you any good. You’re under the influence, and that’s the first thing the authorities will record when they file their report.”

  My file. The white paper mountain describing Ella Nygaard down to the very last dot.

  I remained standing where I was, my arms hanging loosely by my sides.

  “But I don’t want to talk to her,” I said through clenched teeth.

  A disdainful snort escaped from the frail man’s body.

  “We’re leaving. Now.” He turned round and made for his car. The wind tugged at his grey-brown tweed jacket. Despite the warm morning sun, his body looked like it was made of frozen bones.

  There was a goldfish tank in the foyer of my grandmother’s nursing home, but apart from that there was nothing exotic about the place. The long corridors smelled unmistakably of an institutionalized hospital, even though the windows and terrace doors were thrown wide open onto evergreen lawns.

  The home was called the Rose Garden. Of course it was. Everyone loves the idea of old folks reclining in white-washed cane wicker chairs scattered among bushes of lilac lilies, roses, and color-radiant butterflies. There weren’t any roses in the Rose Garden either. The home looked identical to the nursing home in Tåstrup near Solvang, where I had gritted my teeth through a three-month-long apprenticeship when I was twenty-two. The building was a modern cement block perched upon a grass-green landscape of lawns and cobblestoned paths. The meticulous and constant washing with alcohol and anti-bacterial soap couldn’t quite camouflage the pall of corporeal excretions and slightly too seldom bathed bodies. In the sunlit patches of the long, bleak corridors imploded figures slumped in their wheelchairs as they stared out of the windows or down at their feet. It was a garden of wart-riddled, hairy, and crumpled creatures. Still as statues. The world around me was still trembling faintly.

  Bæk-Nielsen followed my gaze.

  “I’ve applied for a room here myself,” he said. “It’s not so bad. I know quite a few people here.”

  “Like my grandmother?”

  “She’s an old friend. The kind of friend you would happily walk to the ends of the earth for. Don’t be alarmed when you see her.”

  “I’m not afraid of little old ladies,” I said.

  “No, but of getting old, perhaps,” said Bæk-Nielsen. “Old age is not a pretty sight.”

  He had stopped in front of a door. Agni Sigurdadottir Nygaard was inscribed on the nameplate.

  “She took back her Icelandic maiden name a couple of years ago,” he said. “If she could have, she would have swum her way back to the volcanoes and hot-water springs. Now she has to make do with gravel and chalk. I guess she reckons it’s too late to make a run for it.”

  He knocked on the door and went in without waiting for an answer. I followed suit hesitantly, and was immediately confronted by the sight of a small, bird-like figure sitting in a wheelchair by the window.

  My grandmother.

  There was almost nothing left of her. The body was as frail and slight as that of a six-year-old child, the eyes were small, sunk deep into her skull. It seemed as if every ounce that once had filled her being now had shriveled and gone. When I last saw her at my confirmation party, there had been a thin sheen of jet-black hair covering her skull, but now she was completely bald. She resembled neither man nor woman.

  “Ella. You came.”

  I stood in the middle of the room, looking at her. Bæk-Nielsen had disappeared, closing the door behind him. We were alone.

  “Sit down.” One miniature hand pointed towards a small black armchair.

  “I’d rather stand.” I fished my bottle of whiskey from my bag and screwed off the cap. “I won’t be staying long.”

  She nodded. “You look exactly the same, Ella. And yet, you are so changed.”

  I raised the bottle of whiskey in a mock salute, tried to smile. “I’ve become such a big girl, I know. Children grow.”

  The irony she chose to ignore.

  “I’ll come to the point,” she said. “I believe your father is innocent. Yes, I am his mother, and I know that mothers don’t always see clearly, as I’m sure you know too. We have to believe and hope for the best.”

  I took a sip from my whiskey bottle and peered at the old woman through the pleasant, red-tinted haze that had slid over my eyes like a veil.

  “The Danish legal system never errs,” I said. “I’ve seen the stats: Our police force is not corrupt; our judges are not on the payroll; they have no interest beyond uncovering the truth.”

  “Did you know that your mother tried to commit suicide when she was a girl? She moved in with Helgi and me after a horrible abortion. Her parents were very religious, and they didn’t take it well at all, so she left. For a long time, things went well for them. Helgi and Anna were happy. They got on with their lives, got married. But just before they moved into their own house, Helgi found her in the bathtub at our house, full of pills, her wrists badly cut up. The cuts were made in a hopelessly haphazard fashion. Your mother wasn’t made for blood and knives, but the pills could have killed her if your father hadn’t found her in time. He saved her life back then. But nobody mentioned any of this during the trial. Nobody was called to testify about the way Helgi had looked after you both for many years.”

  “Even selfless, heroic acts don’t give you the right to blow another person’s head off,” I said. “How long are you intending on keeping me here?”

  I glanced pointedly at my watch. Bæk-Nielsen had forced me to come, but there was a limit as to how long they could insist upon my company. I could just leave. I knew the drugs would work themselves out of my system over the next couple of hours. And once they had, whatever Bæk-Nielsen and the store owner cooked up between them would be one person’s word against another’s.

  “Your father blamed himself for your mother’s death; he still does in all his letters. But he didn’t kill her.” She paused. Brought a shaking hand to her mouth, ran her fingers along her lips. “He pleaded his innocence in court, but he never talked to me, and he never defended himself. He didn’t even want a lawyer.”

  “There is nothing in this world I care about less than what my father has to say about my mother’s death,” I said. All at once the whiskey left a foul taste in my mouth. I put it down on the coffee table in front of me.

  “Here.” The old woman took a stack of folded papers from the windowsill. “This is a transcript of the interrogation you were subjected to after they found you in the plantation.”

  I took the papers from her without looking at them. Shook my head. “Where did you get this?”

  “You stayed with me the first couple of weeks after the murder. That was before they decided I was too old to look after a child,” she said. “I asked for access to all reports, and I made some copies. Read it, and tell me what you think.”

  “Why?”

  The old woman made a sound somewhere between a grunt and a sigh. “When your time is up, you want to know everything. All the loose ends have to be tied up. Not doing so would be . . . unbearable. And I want to know how and why I lost my son. The two people I lost at sea are gone, but my son is still alive. If you can’t do it for your father, then do it for an old woman. And your mother.”

  I picked up my whiskey, took another swig, and unfolded the papers carefully. They had been read so many times that the paper was worn thin along the folding lines and already on the first page entire passages were underlined in fat red ink.

  Interviewer: Ella . . . Tha
nks for coming to talk to me. How are you feeling?

  Ella Nygaard: . . . (a shrug).

  Interviewer: What we need to talk about today isn’t very pleasant. We need to talk about what happened two days ago in the dunes. About your mom and dad.

  Ella Nygaard: Yes.

  Interviewer: Can you tell me what happened that night?

  Ella Nygaard: My mom was shot.

  Interviewer: Were you there, Ella? Did you see your father shoot your mother?

  Ella Nygaard: No.

  Interviewer: Did you see your father with the gun in his hand?

  Ella Nygaard: No. But he hit her. He hit her again and again . . . He hit me on the head.

  Interviewer: So you didn’t see who shot your mother?

  Ella Nygaard: (Crying) She was dead. She wasn’t moving.

  Interviewer: Perhaps you misunderstood what you saw, Ella. Perhaps you saw your dad with the gun.

  Ella Nygaard: Maybe . . . He was shouting at me . . . I was scared.

  The interrogation seems to have ended there, and a psychologist had scribbled some notes in the margin: At best, confused. Testimony inconclusive.

  “Your father was not convicted on the basis of your testimony. It had to be disregarded, because you kept contradicting yourself. And you are his child, his daughter, after all. But there was so much other evidence weighing against him: The fingerprints on the gun were his. He had the gun slung over his shoulder when the police arrived . . . but Helgi was an experienced hunter . . . He would always pick up a gun that was lying on the ground. And he was beside himself, because you were missing . . . and then there was Anna.”

  I imagined my grandmother rubbing her hands against her bony thighs.

  “In the final version of your testimony, you place the gun in your father’s hands. You say that you saw him pull the trigger. What really happened?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Surely the correct sequence of events was fresh in your mind during the first hearing? The same questions are repeated in the second, third, and fourth interrogation, so it’s more than likely that you learned to provide the answers the interviewer wanted to hear. Children are clever like that, and you were one of the brightest. Quick as silver lightning.”

  My rising discomfort spread like a rash over my skin.

  “My father murdered my mother. I don’t have anything else to say on the subject. Can I go now?”

  She nodded at the papers in my hand. “It also says that your father hit you.”

  A sudden flash. A pinprick at the back of my head. A hand raised over my mother’s pale, indistinct face. I felt a wave of rebellion swell. I wondered just how far my grandmother would go to clear her son’s name. Whether she was prepared to brand the child I once was as a liar. I was seven years old, and seven-year-olds don’t lie. The split brow that bore three stitches did not lie; the scar cutting through my eyebrow was still there. I saw the seven-year-old Ella sitting on a doctor’s bench, blood matted in her curly hair, no mother to hold her hand as the doctor worked with needle and thread.

  The thought of her kindled the pain in my chest.

  “Yes,” I said. “I think he hit me.”

  “Hitting your child wouldn’t have been so unusual in those days,” said my grandmother. “Where I come from, many parents hit their children back then. I don’t even think it was against the law in Denmark. But Helgi never hit you. Ever. I certainly never saw him lay a finger on you. You were a strong, happy child, Ella. Wild as witches. No one could hit you. You couldn’t be broken. Not by Helgi, in any case.”

  I shrugged. If that was her preferred interpretation of reality, it was just fine by me. It was not my job to change her mind on her deathbed. As far as I was concerned, people could go to their graves believing whatever they wished—including my grandmother. But my mother was dead. And my scar was real.

  “There is one more thing . . . ”

  There was no end to this old woman. Her gaze rested heavily on me from under those bushy eyebrows of hers, and I marveled at how vigorously hair can grow on your face when you’re old even as it deserts all other regions of the body.

  “Helgi was not himself the last couple of months before it happened. I’ve seen it happen before. Cupid’s arrow can prove to be particularly poisonous when it impales the heart of a man so late in his life; so much life has already been lived, time is suddenly scarce . . . a man in love can be very inconsiderate, but that doesn’t necessarily make him a murderer.”

  “He was fucking somebody else?”

  My grandmother’s gaze didn’t flinch a millimeter. “Hopefully you’re only this foul-mouthed when you’re drunk.”

  “Hope is lily-green.” I shrugged again. It was news to me that my father had had an affair—but not surprising, when you thought about it. A marriage that ended in murder would necessarily have a couple of twists in the tail. But the fact that he was the one who’d been fucking around didn’t exactly weigh in his favor.

  “Many men are unfaithful,” said my grandmother. Almost as if she had read my thoughts. “But this rarely drives them to murder. As a rule, the murder of a wife usually presupposes that she had been unfaithful, not him. And Helgi had always been a good man. He loved your mother and he took good care of her.”

  “Maybe he got tired of her. Depressed people can be such a bore.”

  She ignored my remark.

  “While he was in prison, he asked me to look up a woman at an address in Holstebro. He didn’t know her real name, he said. But she possibly went by the name of Christi. I never found her. I believe this woman knows what happened to Anna. Perhaps she was even the one who shot her. An act of passion, maybe.”

  “I’m leaving now,” I said, screwing the cap back onto my bottle of whiskey and slipping it into my bag. I tried not to meet her gaze.

  “He’s doing well, Helgi. Apart from the fact that he misses you, of course. He’s started his own business in Thailand. Building houses. He has six employees now, he says, and a big house with a swimming pool. He’s always been an excellent carpenter, after all. Perhaps you could give him a call one day. I’ve got his number right here.”

  She thrust a piece of paper at me. I let her sit there, her arm hanging limp in midair. I didn’t move a muscle.

  Just the thought of that number on a piece of paper made me sick. It wasn’t just the fact that the numbers made him more real, but the fact that he and I were only separated by a row of digits. I could punch them into my phone by mistake or succumb to temptation, late one night, after drink number seven. The mere thought of it was enough to make my brain implode.

  My grandmother could see the horror in my face.

  “I also know where he lives.” She let her arm drop into her lap. “I have his address. You could write a letter, if a call is too . . . expensive. He would very much like to talk to you.”

  I turned on my heel and walked out the door. Didn’t look back. There were seventeen miles between Thisted and Klitmøller, and I didn’t have any money, but, as I said: there was nothing wrong with my legs.

  21

  HELGI, 1994

  Christi had changed. It was hard to say exactly when he’d first noticed, but something mournful had come into her expression when they made love. When she came it sounded more like a wail than a moan of pleasure.

  Rain and the persistent autumn storms had driven them into an empty summer house near Hanstholm. It wasn’t ideal. He knew the owner, Tommy, was divorced, and sometimes they drank a beer together after work. Tommy had gone to Greece for four weeks to drink ouzo and dance at the Athenian nightclubs. There had been talk about a lady down there, and he knew where Tommy kept his key.

  “Your friend ought to wash the floor in the bathroom once in a while. It stinks of stale piss.”

  Christi appeared in the bedroom doorway. Her pretty no
se was wrinkled in disgust, making her look all the more adorable—if this were possible at all.

  “Nobody told him to expect female company while he was away. Men thrive in an environment smelling of their own urine. The more pungent the better. It keeps the competition off their turf.”

  He laughed, but Christi didn’t. She didn’t even look at him. She was concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other on the soft, fir-wood floor. As if walking on a tightrope. She was naked, and her long blond hair fell forward over her shoulders, covering her beautiful, beautiful breasts. He leaned back against the bedstead, threading his fingers behind his head, and watched her with an overwhelming tenderness burning in his chest.

  She was perfect.

  Her breasts swayed with every move she made, but it was her narrow waist, her navel, and that line from the tip of her hips down to the blonde pubic hair that moved everything inside of him. The perfect sample of a woman in Classical portraiture. Hips, waist, shoulders; thighs, breasts, cunt, which he knew was still wet and warm from before. The thought filled him with a primitive and exquisite pleasure.

  She crawled in under the blankets with him, brushed over his penis with one leg as she did so, and curled up against his body. Skin against skin.

  “How are things back home?”

  The question was innocent enough. Her eyes were bright, showing no more than a natural curiosity.

  “Hmm . . . the same as usual. We work and eat and sleep.”

  This was not entirely true. He was worried about Anna. She seemed more and more upset of late, and she wasn’t sleeping, didn’t say anything. And he didn’t dare ask.

  “And what about Ella? How is Ella?”

  Christi was nibbling on his ear, and he flinched slightly.

  “Wild as a wicked troll . . . ”

  He smiled at the thought of Ella. All the questions she kept asking right now. Whether it was possible to have an octopus sewed onto your stomach, and what would be worse: drowning, death by old age, or being swallowed by quicksand? He couldn’t answer all her questions, but he had showed her how to clean the fish they had caught together from the pier. She was still a little clumsy with a knife, but she had the will to learn, and a keen curiosity was the most important attribute a child could have.