What My Body Remembers

by Agnete Friis

  The nurse stopped in front of my grandmother’s door and knocked lightly. There was no answer, so she opened the door a crack and slipped inside, blinking conspiratorially at us over her shoulder.

  “She’s sleeping,” the nurse whispered. “But why don’t you take a seat inside. It would be okay to wake her now.”

  I remained standing in the doorway.

  It seemed wrong to go into the room of a woman while she was sleeping. But Alex had already snuck into the stuffy room and was looking around curiously. The windows were closed, the curtains were drawn, and it stank of old person. An at once sweet and sour smell combined with the stench of urine from the adjoining bathroom.

  We sat down at the narrow, dark-wooded table as the nurse opened the curtains. She sent us one last bright smile and then left us alone with the old woman.

  Grandmother was lying in her high hospital bed, breathing evenly, calmly. Her mouth was open, her bald head buried deep into her pillows. This was a woman who had given birth to two boys; one had drowned at sea, the other was a murderer, and we were blood-related. We shared little genetic idiosyncrasies, this woman and I. Perhaps a particular movement of the hand, a characteristic curl of the lip when we smiled. Perhaps even a little chunk of Iceland had lodged itself in my brain. I came after her, she said. Like swallow chicks that seemed to have a map of Africa etched into their skeletons so they could find their way south, or eels hatched in the Sargasso Sea seemed to have an inborn homing device to their South Jutlandic stream in Varde.

  Alex writhed on his seat. “Shouldn’t we wait outside?” he whispered. “You can’t just go into a person’s room when they’re sleeping.”

  I shrugged and remained sitting where I was. Alex could go if he wished, but I wanted to be there when she woke up. All at once I felt a sense of urgency. This woman was very old. She could die at any moment. I didn’t want to risk missing the last of her waking hours, nor did I want to miss the chance of hearing what she knew about my parents.

  “I’m going to get something to drink,” mouthed Alex. “Coffee or some of that piss-colored juice I saw on the trolley outside. Maybe take a look around.”

  The door closed behind him with a dull thud. I checked my phone. Two messages from Magnus. I deleted without reading them. One message from Thomas. It was one of those idiotic sayings you can find on the back of toilet doors or citation sites on the Internet that were meant to enrich your life:

  The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them. Ernest Hemingway.

  I deleted the message. It would have been easier if he’d stayed mad at me. And why the hell hadn’t he just kept his mouth shut about the cancer? It was none of my business that he’d been sick, and I didn’t need to know that he’d had his balls roasted in chemotherapy, and nearly died.

  “He’s a handsome boy, your son.”

  I shuddered. My grandmother was watching me with half-closed eyes, and she must have been doing so for some time.

  “I can see both you and your mother in him. I was very close to your mother. Did you know that? Sometimes it felt as if she was the one I was related to, not Helgi. But then, I had also had her under my wing since she was sixteen years old. I still miss her. Could you give me a hand up?”

  She lifted her arms to demonstrate the problem. She couldn’t sit up on her own. Her gnarly fingers could reach a lever under the bed, but they weren’t strong enough to pull it up.

  I went over to her reluctantly, put an arm in behind her back, and lifted her into a sitting position so she could swivel her weak legs over the side of the bed.

  “My wheelchair . . . ” She pointed at the chrome-shiny vehicle at the foot of the bed.

  I positioned the chair next to the bed and let her rest her arms around my neck, lifted the tiny body and deposited it on the lambskin cover of the chair. She weighed no more than a child. Perhaps she had read my thoughts, because once she had secured the oxygen tube over her nose, she cocked her head and smiled.

  “I used to lug you around too when you were a little girl,” she said. “You were such a crackerjack. Just like I used to be.”

  I shuddered again. “I’m not like anyone.”

  She lifted her frail shoulders ever so slightly and those dark eyes rested on my face.

  “We did many things together, you and I. When your mom went shopping, or was too busy to play, you ran over to my place. We made vanilla pudding, drew pictures, or listened to the radio. Do you remember?”

  “Nope.”

  “Your mom came over to my house when she needed to talk, just like you.”

  I had sat down on the edge of the chair again. I could have killed for a smoke, but there would be rules and regulations about smoking in an institution like hers. My hands twitched.

  “What did she talk about? Was there something in particular she was afraid of?”

  “Not your father, if that’s what you’re thinking. If she was afraid of anything, it would be the ghosts she had grown up with.”

  “So she was insane. Is that what you’re saying?”

  My grandmother laughed for the first time, revealing her slightly too perfect front teeth, which bounced a little against her tongue.

  “She wasn’t insane,” she said. “Not at all. But her reality was a different one from ours. Her mind had been formed by the dread of doing something wrong, of losing her place in a millennial kingdom. When she was a child, she was told that the world would end soon, and there were so many things she could do wrong, things that were punishable by a painful death. Her heart was stained with these beliefs. Sometimes parents can do that to their children.”

  “But she left the church,” I said. “She no longer believed what they preached.”

  “She left because she was in love, and sometimes a love can be so strong that you forget who you are. Ultimately, you can eradicate beliefs by thinking rationally, but you can’t change who you are inside.”

  There was a picture of my father on the wall above my grandmother’s bed. I knew it was him without being able to say why. It was a black-and-white photograph from when he was very young. Soft lips, big dark eyes, and a soldier’s beret. He was very young in the picture, but it still struck a chord. A vibration radiated outwards from my breastbone—followed by the nausea, with only a moment’s delay.

  “Could I have something to drink?”

  “You can get yourself a glass of water in the bathroom.” The old woman nodded in the direction of the blue sliding door.

  “I was thinking of a beer.”

  “There’s vodka in the cupboard over there. I believe that’s what you prefer, right?”

  She followed me with her eyes as I helped myself to what proved to be a well-stocked bar. The old geezer had gin, vodka, whisky, and cognac in half-full bottles. Life in a nursing home seemed to require the same kind of medicine that I administered my own soul. Half a glass ought to be enough to get me through the conversation and the trip back home. No need to panic.

  “Ever since that day, I knew that things would turn out badly for you.”

  I swung round, glass in hand, and met her gaze. Her face was calm.

  “As I said before, you were a strong and happy child, but you could also whip yourself into a fury if the tide turned against you. I can still remember your eyes . . . It was quite frightening . . . ”

  “My life has not turned out badly. I’m alive, I have two legs, I have a son . . . ”

  She shook her head distractedly. “I remember one time Anna cut your hair too short. You must have been about four years old at the time, and when you saw yourself in the mirror, you lashed out at her, hitting her with both arms, demanding that she put the hair on your head back at once! You had absolutely no sense of restraint. Threw things against the wall, smashed your toys . . . Your heart never had room for either melancholy or grief, Ella. There was an abundanc
e of wild joy and equally wild anger stored in there, and when they drove away that cold November day, I knew that the anger would force everything else out. Strangely enough, this is also something you have inherited from me.”

  I took another gulp from my glass. “Can I smoke in here?”

  She nodded, mercifully, and I fished out my smokes and a lighter. My limbs began to relax after the first long drag.

  “Can I borrow those notes of yours about . . . my father . . . about the case? Recordings, newspaper clippings—the whole damn thing.”

  She nodded, and pointed to the stack of papers lying on top of the bar cabinet. “Take those over there with you now. I know them by heart, anyway. Bæk-Nielsen can bring the rest over to the house, later. It’s probably a bit too heavy to carry by yourself.”

  “Thanks . . . ” I inhaled sharply. “That is very kind of you.”

  “Don’t mention it. How have you been, Ella? How are you getting on? I’ve thought about you so much over the years. A small child, alone among all those strangers.”

  I didn’t answer, allowed a kind of ceasefire of silence to settle in the room as I stuffed the papers into my rucksack.

  Alex knocked on the door and came in with a tray of coffee, cake, and three cups that he put on the table.

  “I scored the lot from the cafeteria,” he said, glancing over at my grandmother. “A lady over there said it would be okay.”

  The look in his eyes surprised my grandmother. She withdrew into her chair, suddenly becoming acutely self-conscious in a way elderly people often do when confronted with a child. Perhaps you can get used to your own distorted reflection in the mirror over the years, but a child always sees the horror of your own physical decay.

  “I look terrible,” she said to Alex, covering her nearly bald scalp with her hand in obvious embarrassment. “I didn’t always look like this, you know. I was pretty once.”

  “An Icelandic beauty,” I said. “Fire and ash. We’ve got a picture on the wall back home. I can show it to you when we get back, Alex.”

  My grandmother smiled at me gratefully, and it felt as if we met for the first time. It was no more than a moment. And afterward, neither one of us knew what to say, so we drank our coffee in silence.

  Alex shook my grandmother’s hand before we left. It was a polite gesture that was unusual for him, and it made me happy, and proud. I don’t know why. Children who shake hands and say thank you for the meal usually gave me creeps. It reminded me of schooled apes with their parents looking on like self-satisfied ringmasters.

  There was a trembling at the corners of the old dame’s mouth, and she pulled it into a narrow line as we made to get up and leave.

  “Now I’ve also had a family visit,” she finally said with a smile. “I’m so happy that you came to see me.”

  35

  Bæk-Nielsen dumped a heavy black plastic bag in our driveway early the next morning and drove off again, lifting his hand to an imaginary cap. And that was just fine. Our relationship wasn’t conducive to small talk, I gathered.

  I dragged the bag into the dunes, sat myself down in the sand, and scanned through the piles of paper, beer in hand. It was the strongest beverage we had in the house. Barbara had called, saying that she’d be coming around midday and that she would buy some alcohol in Hanstholm on her way home.

  She’d been gone two days, but hadn’t explained her absence. I guessed it had something to do with that sleazy landlord of hers. Stacks of cardboard boxes, papers, and bills for paint and cleaning, including an extraordinary sanitation bill to replace the carpet in the living room that had been saturated in cat piss. People who leased their property to social scum knew perfectly well that subsequent tenants had no desire to live in the piles of shit inevitably left behind, not that this dampened their indignant outrage in the aftermath. I almost felt sorry for Barbara—not to mention the cats that no longer had a place to go. The landlord would probably feed them rat poison or have them shot, if he was more inclined to summary solutions.

  She should have told me, and asked for help. I could carry a heavy load.

  The pile of yellowed paper reeked of a bitter woman’s desperation. After a transcript of my first interrogation, there was a record of my grandnother’s own notes from the trial, written in an angular hand:

  Court case, day 1: Helgi asked me not to come, but I did anyway. I want to be there for him. Even if he doesn’t want to see me.

  Court case, day 2: Helgi has lost weight. His pants are held up by a piece of rope, but he is not allowed to have the rope in his cell. They’re afraid he might hang himself. He refuses to talk. Not just in court, but to anyone. He will not talk to his lawyer, doesn’t talk to me. Has been denied access to Ella.

  Court case, day 7: Guilty. Helgi has been sentenced to min. 12 years in prison. This seems to suit him fine. He called me finally when I got home. He sounds relieved. As if something had finally fallen into place. He has asked me to take care of Ella, but I don’t know where they have taken her. They think my presence could be harmful. They say I’m too old. That my connection to my son is too strong. This could be difficult for Ella, they say.

  Further.

  A collection of newspaper clippings, meticulously organized. Most of them were from local papers, but there were also a few from the national papers that quoted the coroner’s reports extensively: My mother had suffered a deep lesion in the lower abdomen, but the cause of death was attributed to a subsequent gunshot wound that had blown away part of the lower jaw and a significant part of the cranium. The shot had been fired by my father’s hunting rifle, but a knife had never been found.

  There were significant traces of prescription sleeping pills in her bloodstream; not enough to be fatal, but enough to impair her speech and faculty of movement. No prescription was found in the victim’s possession, and there was no plausible explanation for their origin. However, the prosecution argued that the drugs in all probability had been procured by the accused, Helgi Nygaard; the accused held a position that allowed a large degree of flexibility, and Nygaard had had ample opportunity to acquire the pills in a larger metropolitan area. Furthermore, employees of the accused testified that Nygaard had been absent from the site for an extended period of time on several occasions over the preceding six months. The victim, Anna Nygaard, worked in shifts at the fish factory in Hanstholm, and, as such, it was highly improbable that she had either the initiative or the resources to seek out a supplier for this kind of medication.

  Helgi was silent—and the journalists speculated ad infinitum.

  Had Anna Nygaard threatened to leave the accused? Perhaps she had refused to get a divorce? What was the nature of the relationship between Anna and Helgi Nygaard? And what was to become of their daughter, Ella, who had not been given an opportunity to testify?

  It was reported that I had been found in a plantation nearly six miles inland. This tallied with what Thomas had said. By the time they found me, my body temperature was so low that death by exposure was imminent, and, it was sheer luck that a farmer and his dog had seen me hidden among the sapling Christmas trees. According to the farmer’s particularly detailed description, he chanced upon me lying curled up in a shallow ditch in the forest floor: I had covered myself with a blanket of pine-needles; I was dressed in a bloody night-dress and a winter jacket, my bare legs stuck into a pair of blood-splattered galoshes; I had a deep gash over the right eyebrow, and two broken fingers.

  Several people from the local community had called and volunteered to adopt me, but my welfare was a complicated question that deserved careful consideration. Everything humanly possible would be done to ensure the child’s well-being, and for the time being she had been taken to a children’s home beyond the reach of the media. She was doing as well as could be hoped under the circumstances.

  I looked down at my right hand. The two broken fingers were news to me, but no surprise.
The last digit of my ring-finger had always been a little askew, and, as a rule, this joint was the origin of the vibrations that spread throughout my body when I had one of my fits. A pulsing pain, severed nerve endings that had never been able to find peace, perhaps. Till now, I had always assumed that my crooked finger was a congenital deformity. I had no recollection of the pain of having them broken, nor did I remember anything about a lonely ditch in the plantation on an icy November night. It was like reading an account of the misfortunes of a someone else.

  I opened beer number two, paged back a couple of articles, and reread the coroner’s report: My mother had not only been shot, she had also been stabbed by a broad-bladed knife that had never been found. There had been a great deal of speculation over whether or not the child—me, that is—could have grabbed the knife, then dropped it in flight. The police had tried to find it. They combed the six-mile area with sniffer dogs. But the terrain covered both stubble fields and plowed meadows, and nobody could know for sure what route I had taken through the plantation. The search was abandoned. No explanation could be ruled out. In theory, either my father or my mother could have inflicted the knife wound, as the lesions on the victim’s hands and stomach were equally compatible with assault and a self-inflicted injury.

  There was no mention of my father’s female friend.

  I lit a smoke and squinted into the sky. How much had little Ella known about what was going on in the house that night? She had heard her father say that he was in love with another woman, that he was prepared to leave her mother for his lover. Perhaps she had even seen them together. I recalled the image of myself barefoot in the dunes, Thomas calling to me through the wind. Did you see them? They were doing it. Did you see them, Ella? A face turned towards me, distorted. My father’s full beard.

  Alex came walking towards me along the beach, his fishing rod slung over his shoulder, a silhouette cut against the sea. I wondered whether he could remember his father. Whether he thought about him at all. We never talked about him, and Amir had only seen Alex twice.