Knots

by Gunnhild Øyehaug

  * * *

  Susanne is shaking. She stammers. “Alvin,” she says, and turns toward him, wanting him to put his arms around her. “I love you,” she whispers into his neck. “I knew you’d come back.” He holds her tight but says nothing. “I can’t say it,” he says finally. “You know I have said that I can’t. It would be wrong. It would build up your hopes, you know I would love to … but Thomas…” She nods and looks at him, he can see that she is not entirely happy. But she tells herself that she can cope with anything and that he must be able to see that, on her face, how big and generous she is. Maybe that will make him understand that deep down, he loves her and that it would be impossible, impossible to leave her. She looks at him with an understanding expression on her face.

  * * *

  “Fucking hell, I have to clear the snow again,” shouts Edel. “Fucking fuck, shit, shit!”

  * * *

  She drives through the village through the snowstorm, her windshield wipers racing furiously back and forth, and a triangle of snow builds up under one of them, in a while she will no doubt have to get out and brush it off. Triangle! Naturally, a symbolic triangle had to appear right in front of her very eyes! She snorts, Ted Hughes, she snorts, that she could be so stupid. Oh, Life—right. Oh, Terrible, Oh Good, Oh Pain, it is none of that, it is pure and simple lunacy and shit. And the outside is just bodies, skeletons packaged in flesh, doing this and that and nothing makes sense. That, thinks Edel, and laughs a sad laugh aloud for herself, is what I will say at the seminar on Monday. “Mooommmyyy,” complains Thomas. She has woken him, he is lying across the backseat with his duvet over him. She let him lie down without putting the seat belt on. “Go to sleep,” she says. She has been taking courses in English literature at the college in the next village and up until now has enjoyed the course “Symbolism in Literature.” She felt that it was true that you shouldn’t scorn symbolism and simply look at it as antiquated, romantic thought, things should make sense, the expression and the content, she believed that something could stand for something else, a rose for love, an ocean for life, a cross for death, but now it just irritates her, because now she realizes that of the two lanes on the road along the fjord toward the ferry, only her side has been cleared, she immediately thinks: Is that how it is, is that what this means, is his path closed, will he not come back, it is only she who can reach out to him, and he cannot reach her, is his lane full of snow, is that how it is? She feels helpless, is that what this means? No, she refuses to read it symbolically! It is just a road, she thinks, a stupid road, without any symbolic meaning. Crap and idiocy, and on top of that, asphalt. She wishes she had furry dice hanging from the mirror, or a Wunderbaum, the most pointless thing she can think of, when she gets back to the village, she will stop at the gas station and buy a Wunderbaum, to remind her of this, to mark this evening when she said goodbye to symbolic thinking and to—what, what else is she going to say goodbye to? Her marriage? But she is on her way to collect him, why, why is she doing it, should she rather drive back home and lock the door, let him sleep in the garage, should she stop driving, should she just stop, why did she react in this way, it had to be the least reflected-on thing she had ever done, she just did it, and what should she do now, should she carry on driving? She slows down as she swings into a wide bend, she sees an orange light pulsing in the trees on the other side of the road, it must be a snowplow, she is frightened of snowplows, she comes to a near standstill and lets the snowplow sail past on the far side of the road, the snow blasting over the barrier on the other side and hitting the trees and tears come to her eyes, spontaneously, because now his lane is also being cleared.

  * * *

  Alvin looks at Susanne’s face, the pleading in her eyes makes him ashamed, he kisses her on the cheek and goes to look for his pants. “What have you been up to recently, then?” he asks, and Susanne tries to hold in her stomach as she picks up her bra from the floor. “Not much, same as always really … no, hang on…” She has thought of something. “Give me a second,” she says, and with a sparkle in her eyes, she pulls on her panties and practically runs to the CD player. Alvin thinks suddenly there is something helpless about her body, dressed only in underwear, as she bends down to put on some music, he feels like he can’t breathe, he tightens the belt on his pants and pulls on his jacket. “Susanne, I’m going to have to go. Edel will flip if I’m not home soon, I’m sorry, Susanne,” he says. But Susanne doesn’t listen to him, she has put on a CD of salsa music and starts to dance in front of him. He must not go. She must get him to stay. She must get him to say something nice to her before he goes. “I’ve been going to salsa classes!” she says and dances closer and closer to him, with a provocative, slightly coy look. She takes him by the hands, he says, “Noooo…” then she lets go and turns her back to him as she rolls her hips. She’s a bit nervous, so her dancing feels contrived. Alvin is so embarrassed on her behalf that he goes over to the dancing back and puts his arms around her and says that he really must go now, but that she’s good at dancing, and she should carry on with it. “I’m a fool, Susanne,” he says. “No, you’re not,” she says. “You are the best person I know.” He kisses her on the forehead. “I might go to Cuba soon,” she says, even though it’s not true. “Well, I hope you have a good time then,” he says.

  * * *

  Edel shakes her head, she does not want to think about it anymore, she does not want to interpret things symbolically anymore. We have rejected nature, that is what we have done, thinks Edel, as she drives slowly forward on the newly cleared road and the snowstorm gradually dies down, yes, nature has been abandoned and we are to blame, we have focused on language and become complicated. We have to get back to nature, we have to stop reading books, we have to stop interpreting everything, we have to stop thinking figuratively, we have to live like animals, we have to eat food and sleep. We must renounce symbolism. We must stop thinking altogether. We must live in one simple dimension. Ah! She is happy. She feels mad. Or perhaps she has actually been mad up to this moment and has now regained her sanity. She has a horrible, crystal-clear feeling in her head. As if her head is two wide-open eyes with a cold wind blowing into them. She shakes her head. Your husband has fucked another woman this evening. She wants to laugh. And so we have to stop thinking symbolism! Haha. Jesus! she mumbles. And then laughs again. What a thing to mumble. In fact, she wants to cry. She has to pull into a bus stop and cry. Imagine, she thinks as she leans forward over the steering wheel, crying. Imagine if it’s not what I think, but that he’s been in an accident. She looks over her shoulder at Thomas, he is sleeping, lying with his face to the back of the seat, and she can only see his hair sticking up from the duvet, a small fan that spreads across the pillow and she thinks: then he will be fatherless and she will be a single mother, and she leans over the wheel again.

  * * *

  Alvin cannot quite understand what has happened. He drives home along the fjord, it has stopped snowing, the branches on the trees on the mountainside are weighed down, the road is white, no one has driven here since the snowplow, no tracks on the snow. The streetlights stand silently with bowed heads off into the distance, he imagines the noise that is made when the light from each streetlamp hits the roof of his car as he drives past, bzzzzzzzzt, he imagines that they are X-ray beams that penetrate the roof of the car and illuminate him, so that if you were looking in from the outside, you would see a skeleton sitting there holding the wheel and driving along the road. Out of the light: a man. In the light: a skeleton. On, off, on, off. In a kind of corny gray light, you can now see his right hand with all its white bones moving like tentacles, gripping the gear stick and shifting. And then he dresses the skeleton up in bluish-red muscles, veins, and sinews, just as he remembers from that picture in the anatomy book at secondary school that made a lasting impression on him: a person without skin, only muscles, veins, and sinews. Teeth without lips, eyeballs without eyelids. Sometimes it comes back to him, like when Edel was shouting and sc
reaming and saying it was over, he could only just hear what she was saying, he stood there staring at her, he imagined her as a face without skin, only bluish-red, knotted muscles in her cheeks, over her lips and teeth. He feels hot, flushed, conspicuously flushed, and it will not have died down by the time he reaches home, he knows that, because he has done it before, he should really take a long detour when he gets to the village, but that won’t be of much help either, as then he will get home even later and Edel will know, maybe she will have packed the suitcase on wheels like she did the last time—the good, big red suitcase on wheels—and then remembered that it was a gift from him and stopped right in front of the front door, opened the suitcase and taken out all the clothes, then kicked the suitcase across the floor so that it hit the chest of drawers and lay there open like a gaping mouth, just like the last time, and then run up into the attic and searched and searched until she found the old bag that was the bag she had brought her clothes in when she moved in with him, as she had the last time, to make a symbolic point to herself that she was on her own again, and then woken Thomas up and gone down to the hotel; maybe he smells of perfume, he thinks, thank God he took her from behind, touching as little skin as possible from the waist up. It was really only the lower part of his stomach that had touched her hips. He pictures Susanne’s salsa-rolling hips and feels sick. He stops the car, in the middle of the road, gets out of the car, leaves the door open, walks to the edge of the road, turns around, stretches his arms out from his body, and allows himself to fall backward into the snow. It is soft. If he lies here for a while, he will cool down. He will lie here and slowly but surely erase Susanne from his mind. Because now he can feel it in his bones, it is over.

  * * *

  Susanne pulls on some sweatpants and opens a bottle of wine, she sits down on the sofa and tries to think that she has just had a visit from her lover and that she is a grown woman with a rich life. She managed to get him to come. He could not stop thinking about her. He could not get her out of his mind—that’s how strong the power is that she is fortunate enough to possess. But she knows there’s no point. She tries not to think about the desperation that drove her to dance for him. She tries not to think about the embarrassed look on his face when she wanted him to dance. She drinks the glass of wine in one go, swallowing only a couple of times. It tastes of alcohol. Susanne purses her lips and goes over to the phone, looks up the number of a travel agent in the telephone directory. She just doesn’t understand, she thinks, how Alvin, the best person she knows, who is so sensitive and observant, who has told her the strangest things about what he thinks, could just come like that and fuck her and then leave with an embarrassed, hard expression on his face. She feels it deep down, that he will not come back. It is over this time. She hopes he has an accident. She hopes he has an accident and ends up in the fjord. She dials the number for the travel agent. He could quite possibly have an accident with all this snow. The travel agency is closed and will open again tomorrow morning at 8:00 a.m., and she throws herself down on the floor. She wonders if she should slide her way over to the sofa, she lies on the floor and pictures herself wriggling exhausted and doomed like a soldier on a muddy battlefield, over to the sofa—but she knows that it’s not true, the truth is that she is lying on her back on the floor, that she is looking up at the ceiling, that the back of her throat is burning and that the tears are running from her eyes down into her ears.

  * * *

  “Please,” says Thomas. The missing rhino has not come back and Thomas is not allowed to leave the ark. Noah is so big that he nearly reaches the ceiling and he says firmly that it is not possible to go out, it has started to rain so they have to shut the door soon. Thomas tries to get to the door all the same, but the floor is heaving with baby crocodiles, so he slips and falls and never gets to the door. Now he notices that there is an elevator like the one in the hotel beside the door and he can see that it is on its way down, because the floor numbers are showing on a panel above the door, and he thinks that maybe it’s the rhinoceros, 2, 1, pling: it’s two lizards. The lizards clamber over to the baby crocodiles. Edel lifts her head from the wheel. She starts the car and swings out into the road. “Fucking shit,” she mumbles.

  Damn, fuck, shit, shit.

  * * *

  Alvin has made an angel in the snow, which he realizes is a great paradox, symbolically. It makes him think about Edel, which makes him want to cry, without managing to, he sits up, pulls up his knees, and sits huddled in his own angel. A pathetic, overly symbolic position, thinks Edel as she pulls up beside him before he has looked up. He looks up. He is not surprised to see her there. She stops the car, gets out, and stands in front of him. “What’s happened?” she says. He shrugs his shoulders and opens his hands. Closes them again. “This,” he says. “I made an angel in the snow.” “You little shit,” she says, and nearly starts to laugh, she is not reacting as she thought she would, she had imagined the scene and it was not like this, she shouted and cried and then he fell to the ground, but now it feels as if she is not here and the whole thing is slightly comical. “We’re finished,” she says, without feeling anything, and then goes back to sit in the car, her head feels crystal clear and cold, nearly light. Her feet feel light as well. “The car broke down!” he shouts, coming after her. “Fucking hell, Edel! I’ve been standing here for nearly an hour. And I couldn’t phone you because I couldn’t find my mobile! I’ve been sitting here waiting for help, but no one came.” The crystal-clear, light Edel smiles. “I would have liked to see that,” she says. Alvin says nothing, but gets into his car and his hands shake as he turns the key, because now it is over.

  * * *

  But the car does not start.

  * * *

  The car just manages to splutter a few times but does not start. “There you go,” says Alvin. Edel says nothing. The blood is about to leave her legs and rush to her head, her cheeks. She looks at him, coughs. Nothing that is happening now is as she had imagined. She doesn’t know whether this is true or not. “Get out of the way,” she says and sits down in the driver’s seat of his car, it is cold in the car. She turns the key, the car barely reacts. It is true. The car has broken down. She does not know what to do. She has driven along the fjord to collect him, to shout at him and leave him, or collect him, or leave him, and her side of the road was cleared of snow first, and then his side was cleared, it hits her, that actually happened. It literally happened. She goes around to the trunk and gets out a towrope and hands it to him. Alvin stands looking at Thomas, who is sleeping in the backseat, and tries to behave like someone whose car has broken down and who has been waiting in the snow for an hour. “What’s he been up to today?” he asks, casually, and coughs. “He learned about Noah’s ark and sold raffle tickets,” Edel replies. “Come and look at him,” Alvin says. Edel stands beside him and looks in at Thomas. He is lying with his arms stretched out above his head, up the back of the seat. In the same position that Susanne is now lying on the floor, without knowing that the painful pressure she feels in her heart is that same pressure that is in Edel’s and Alvin’s hearts right now, as they stand there side by side.

  * * *

  Edel drives the small car and tows the big car, which Alvin is steering. She refuses, she thinks, to interpret this symbolically. It’s just the way things have turned out. They drive along the fjord. It’s night. There are three of them. And the fact that there is a rope between the cars has no significance other than the physical fact that when a car breaks down it needs to be towed. I just don’t understand this, thinks Alvin. He feels that he is being watched, as if someone is laughing at him; he said the car had broken down, and that is what happened. He got exactly what he asked for. He leans forward toward the windshield to see if he can see the stars, but is blinded by the light from the streetlamps, which stand silently with bowed heads, illuminating the cars as they pass. At regular intervals along the road, you can see a skeleton, an adult, sitting at the wheel, then a child’s skeleton
lying across the backseat, and then finally another adult skeleton, which is sitting more or less directly behind the first. The adult skeletons have their arms in front of them, holding the wheel, the child skeleton is not holding anything but has its arms stretched out above its head.

  * * *

  You can also see a larger skeleton, standing on all fours, which has a huge horn on its snout; it’s standing beside the child skeleton. A similar skeleton now appears to the left, to the surprise of the first rhinoceros skeleton, because it lifts its head and looks expectantly at the approaching rhinoceros skeleton. They stand for a moment staring at each other and then the one rhinoceros rubs up against the other. A couple of antelope skeletons wander past and a tiger skeleton and a lion skeleton, and farther along, two small cat skeletons and then dogs and a mass of small crocodile jaws that nibble the child skeleton’s legs, making it laugh and wriggle. And if X-rays could also show the contours and shape of other things that were not of solid, indisputable mass, you would be able to see the outline of an enormous wooden boat, with pairs of skeletons, two by two, on many levels, two for each sort of animal. A big human skeleton lifts its arms and then everyone feels what they are standing on leave the ground and float through the air.

  Notes

  “From the Lighthouse” is based on the book Barn på fyr—minner om oppvekst (Children at the lighthouse—memories of childhood) by Ragnhild Roald, Aschehoug, 2003.

  “It’s Snowing” quotes a poem by Gunnar Ekelöf, in the translator’s own translation.

  “Vitalie Meets an Officer” cites the biography Somebody Else—Arthur Rimbaud in Africa, 1880–91, by Charles Nicholl, Vintage, 1998.

  A Note About the Author

  Gunnhild Øyehaug is an award-winning Norwegian poet, essayist, and fiction writer. Her novel Wait, Blink was made into the acclaimed film Women in Oversized Men’s Shirts. She has also worked as a coeditor of the literary journals Vagant and Kraftsentrum. Øyehaug lives in Bergen, where she teaches creative writing. You can sign up for email updates here.