I have some aural and visual migraine symptoms, migraine without pain. But the pain is there, a grey shadow waiting. I just don’t feel it. I don’t want to feel for it, because I’m afraid it might come. My depression and anxiety are the same.
And it did of course come back in the twenty-odd years after I left Estonia. But by then I had built up my own culture of defence, my own internal state. Now I know too much to be dragged down into it. I trick my mind, I jump over the crevices, but I make it.
Eric stands on the other side calling me. He seems to see value and strength in me. But even he doesn’t quite understand how, when the depression comes back, it feels like reality, like the grey and sensible light of day after a heady night. Memory and identity leach out; my confidence seems like a pose, a high, a drunken illusion; my true self a plain and bony figure in possession of a canny realistic mind. A tired mind.
“Who do you think you are,” Eric says kindly, in a mock Swedish accent, green eyes half closed, studying me. He says it to remind me that I am Swedish and that I must consider the effect of the national ethos I grew up with—Who do you think you are is part of my bone marrow. Don’t think you are better than anyone else. He reminds me of the tricky reality of depression—part culture and part nature. He says it to remind me that what feels so real, that depressive default setting, doesn’t have to be true anymore.
—
We discuss whether depression and addiction are genetic or environmental. I am writing a memoir of addiction, a history: that seems to imply a belief in external causes. But in fact I believe that all states are a combination of genetic, emotional, and cultural conditions. Privileging one over the other seems to me the wrong way of looking at it—the factors involved are infinite and varied, more like colours in a painting than fixed notes in a composition. Genes are one: there may be a genetic fracture in us, and in my mother, too, and her grandfather, and others—one or many mutations, weaving in and out of the generations. I don’t suppose my depression was caused by my brother’s acts—it may have been another sibling thing between us, my depression, his addiction; a similar emotional deficiency, or a similar emotional state.
And then again there is such a thing as depressive realism: studies have found that people who are depressed tend to be more realistic than others about their own abilities, and about their social standing in a group. Cheerfulness and resilience are mutations, too. Our acute understanding of the nature of life—we live, we suffer, we die—might become unbearable without those rose-tinted glasses; without our inclination to happiness and optimism. Resilience helps us to survive.
We can’t easily grasp or explain the complexities of our emotional lives. Describing the taste of wine is hard enough; putting words to emotions much harder. We use coded expressions for how we feel, but in fact we feel through the body, not the mind: the rising heat and quick energy of anger; the faintness of anxiety; the exhaustion of depression; the levitating flight of happiness; the gravitational force of desire.
And what about the other sensations, the physical symptoms that have no names, at least known to me? Every so often, my mouth tastes of ash; the taste plagues me. I am sometimes enveloped in passing smells—of rot, of honey—that might be phantom, might be real.
We exist in body and brain; the meeting between the two is consciousness and mind. Nothing that we feel or think is wholly physical or wholly imaginary—the brain interprets the body, and the body interprets the brain. But we must still try to describe, and understand. As David Grossman said, putting words to emotions is what makes us human. It differentiates us from the animal world. Creating a narrative aids understanding, and not understanding negative emotions can be dangerous. If you fail to make sense of depression, it can turn you into something other than what you are, or what you were. It can turn you into someone drawing pearls of blood from wrist to elbow like blood-red jewelry; like lace; like strings of lights.
5
In May 2005 we went to Scotland for a week. At the last minute I had to travel up on the sleeper—I had a cold and couldn’t fly with Eric and Daniel. It’s hot outside; the train is oddly dismal, I wrote in my diary.
I wasn’t thinking about Hans and Eva. I was writing, and reading old diary notes about Daniel, flicking from page to page and from year to year, missing him even though I had only just left him and would see him again the next day. The nostalgia of motherhood: he was eight then, the early years already behind us, memories echoing as though from the bottom of a dry well. I had written down some of the things he had said when he was very young and I read them again on that train to Scotland.
“Mummy, when you have a bug, do you have a fly in your tummy?”
“Mummy, I had such a strong dream last night. I dreamt that my soul was pulled out of my nose and it was blue.”
“Mummy, I am sick.”
“Where does it hurt?”
“Everywhere. Everywhere in my whole body except my heart. My heart is OK.”
—
Motherlove. I love you and you love me.
—
I was in Paris recently to launch an issue of Granta at Shakespeare and Company, the English-language bookshop. The next day I walked along the river, to the botanical and zoological gardens. It was still early, and the yak was dozing in the zoo, alone in her small paddock. She woke up and looked at me thoughtfully, heavy horns, rags of winter fur, a blond fringe. Her stable was a gesture at the Tibetan or maybe Mongolian vernacular, though not for her benefit, of course. My back ached; I felt so stiff, so old.
I wandered over to the singerie. A L’Hoest’s monkey, a mother, sat with a baby. The baby’s long arms were wrapped tightly around his mummy, he was nestling in her lap, tiny black hands clutching soft fur. The mother was eating; the mother was resting. She was deeply peaceful. Behind her sat an older child, aimless, a little restless. Once that child too was wrapped tightly in warm clean fur. Now she sat behind her mother, still so safe.
I thought of Harry Harlow’s rhesus monkeys. In a series of experiments in the 1950s, Harlow, an American psychologist, removed baby monkeys from their mothers and offered them a choice between a cloth “mother” and a wire one. The wire mother gave the children milk, but they still preferred the soft cloth mother, the mother they could cling to. The cloth mother punished the babies with metal spikes and pushed them away; they still tried to cling to her. Harlow caused such pain to prove something about the universal nature of love. He was searching, innocent and mystified, for the invisible essence of love which most people can sense intuitively, even between animals.
Motherlove, babylove. I walked back to my hotel, my attic room. I was tired. I stretched my back, I lay down on my bed, heavy like a yak.
*
We have a new puppy, a silky spaniel. I lie on the sofa, he lies on my stomach, he wriggles and exposes his pink tummy, he gazes at me intently with black eyes. What does he see? Suddenly he hears a sound, a gurgle, and stands on tippy-toes, then jumps like a fox catching voles in the snow, thrusting his nose into my stomach. I laugh, I hug him. But what am I to him, if it’s possible that my body is also a drift of snow or leaves, concealing voles? He knows me, but it is possible also that something live and good and biteable is hidden inside me and that he can penetrate the surface of the body-snow.
My puppy fawns on me; he rolls over, he submits, he bites, he bites. I pick him up, I kiss the top of his head; he throws his head up casually and licks me on the lips, once, briefly. That licking on the mouth is a feeding reflex for puppies—canines feed their young with regurgitated food—but it is also an expression of love.
What was the blood on my arm to my cat? Maybe the truth about thought—human, animal—is that it is so rarely just one thing. My affectionate old cat, a beaten-up kitten found on the road, may have been excited about the smell of blood and at the same time anxious about the smell of blood. Sometimes we miss the nuances, the infinity of causality, the shades of colour on the canvas: real life.
Text and speech are
only representations of real life.
*
In the summer of 2006, Eva almost died from endocarditis, a heart infection, probably caused by dirty needles. Her heart was damaged, and she needed an operation to replace one of the valves and a pacemaker to regulate the heartbeat. Hans, deep in his own addiction, hadn’t noticed how ill she was, and neither, I think, had she.
The pacemaker formed a tight square under the skin below her collarbone; she made fun of it and carried on. I remember standing with her in front of a mirror at some charity event. She powdered her emaciated face and the skin over her pacemaker, laughing. She was so thin.
“It’s just not funny anymore,” someone said to me later.
But was it ever funny?
—
After that summer our side of the family staged an intervention for both of them. Everything was prepared: two rehab places had been arranged; the transport was ready. We met outside Hans and Eva’s house in London.
We sat down. Hans listened patiently as I read our intervention letter, but Eva stormed out of the house, incensed. Eric went after her to try and persuade her to come back, but she wouldn’t stop, walking quickly up the King’s Road.
The idea that we had confronted her just as she was recovering from her heart operation came up again and again afterwards. It was as though we had hit her as she walked out of the hospital door; kicked her when she was down; stamped on her head. The fact that we were trying to help was no longer part of her narrative—in the beginning she had sometimes acknowledged that we meant well. That was over now.
Hans telephoned her, but she wouldn’t come back. We could hear his end of the conversation. “Well, but they are right about some things,” he said, reasonably. She argued with that; he listened silently. In the end Hans went to Osea Island rehab in the Thames Estuary, and Eva stayed behind. And because their relationship was a folie à deux of mutually enforcing addiction, a powerful normalisation of the not-normal, her denial endangered him as much as it endangered her.
Hans only stayed at Osea Island for a few days. He came in with a supply of heroin and was obviously in a bad way. The staff, following new legislation about protecting children, were obliged to contact social services. From that autumn on, the social workers were involved, and a series of events unfolded which culminated in a custody case and Hans and Eva’s four children coming to live with us in May 2007.
—
I read through the paragraph above and I see how abbreviated it is. I have filing cabinets stuffed full of legal documents and court orders. I can’t bear to look at the papers. I don’t even know where they are, since the storeroom in Sussex where I kept the filing cabinets is now the downstairs kitchen of the playbarn, and the builders—or someone—must have put the cabinets somewhere else. I think I know where they may be, but I don’t know where the keys are.
—
It only occurs to me now how strange this not-knowing is.
Or perhaps not so strange. In those cabinets are all the sad and sordid details redacted from this book.
Je veux dormir! wrote Baudelaire in his poem “Le Léthé.” I lock the cabinets, I lose the keys, I want to sleep, and to forget. Instead I write, fighting sleep.
I struggle to remember. What was that thing, that time, the time we tried to save Hans and Eva…
—
Where are the keys?
—
In the autumn of 2006 Hans and Eva deteriorated, but they still let us see the children—later on they banned us even from that. The two youngest came to visit us in London one weekend. As I was driving them home we passed my stepdaughter Natasha, then sixteen, on the street and stopped to say hello.
As we drove on, my youngest nephew, then five, said, “I am thinking of something, but I mustn’t say it.”
“What are you thinking about?”
“She knows.” He prodded his sister.
“What are you two thinking about?”
“Does Natasha have a mummy?”
“Yes, she does, and she lives with her mummy.”
“But who would she live with if her mummy died?”
“Well, she would come and live with us.”
“And who would she live with if you died?”
“She would…live with Lisbet.”
“And who would she live with if Lisbet died?”
—
And so on, until every family member and every family connection had died, and everyone in the world had died, and until every dog in the world had died, and my stepdaughter was alone in the universe.
Who would she live with then?
*
I think Hans went to seven rehabs in 2006 and 2007—Osea Island was one of many. Amy Winehouse was there, too, along the way. “A fucking little island in the middle of fucking nowhere,” someone says ironically in Amy. She is there with her friends; they are sitting around brushing hair, smoking, giggling.
Osea Island rehab closed down when it was revealed that its director had lied about his credentials.
But still, when Hans left after a few days, the staff did call social services.
That was good.
*
In the summer of 2015 Cecil, the soon-to-be-famous Zimbabwean lion, was killed by an American dentist. Everyone was talking about Cecil. “There is one rule for celebrity lions and one rule for the rest of us,” someone said indignantly on the radio. I laughed in my car, alone, driving through London.
I had started writing this book, and woke up night after night worrying about it, imagining the ugly Swedish headlines:
HEIRESS SIGRID RAUSING TELLS STORY OF BROTHER’S ADDICTION
RAUSING PALME MURDER ALLEGATION DENIED
SIGRID RAUSING ON HER BROTHER: “HE KNEW THEN THAT SHE WAS DEAD”
RAUSING FAMILY SECRETS
HANS RAUSING DID NOT KILL OLOF PALME, SAYS DAUGHTER
Can a book about this story ever be framed by anything other than tabloid headlines?
—
I had a dream about walking into a café in Copenhagen. No one knows who I am: this is a relief. On a menu blackboard was the line: RAUSING PAID TOO MUCH. I was criticised for paying my own kidnap ransom. The ransom—too much—would inevitably support the extremist cause. In the dream I was conscious of sadness.
There is a real link between Copenhagen and kidnapping: more than thirty years ago the Danish police discovered a terrorist plot to kidnap one of my cousins. A random car crash led them to a flat full of weapons—the group, Danish radicals who had become affiliated with the PFLP, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, specialised in robbing military weapons depots. The police also found a dossier: a detailed plan of the proposed kidnapping. I never saw it, but I heard that it involved a cage; a boat; a hut in Norway. The cage was to be dropped into the sea if they were followed.
This haunted me for years.
It still haunts me.
Before that, there were other kidnap threats. I remember policemen and new alarm systems, loud sirens forever going off in the still forest of our weekend house.
The daughter of someone my parents knew in Germany joined the Baader-Meinhof Group. Another man was shot dead by his own stepdaughter—she too had been radicalised and joined the terrorists.
How many times did we sit through meetings with security companies, scenario-casting kidnaps? How many times did we have to rehearse and memorise sequences of telephone calls; imagine the negotiations? How many times were we given the message to stay under the radar; never speak to journalists; vary all routines; never resist?
My grandfather Ruben had lived in Rome since the early 1970s. After one of his Italian neighbours was kidnapped, Ruben moved to Switzerland, to Lausanne, to fog drifting over Lake Geneva; a town of banks, shoe shops, and misshapen fetuses in glass jars in the town museum.
—
That was many years ago, before the addiction, before the first headlines, and long before Eva’s death.
Eventually the newspape
r headlines about drugs began; the floodlights clunked on one by one. We stood frozen in a vast and empty arena, we looked around.
The powerful old patriarchy that ruled the family was dead or faltering; the company was sold; we were on our own.
The nature of privilege: what it means and what it doesn’t mean. Pleasure and pain, security and risk, private comforts, glamour and envy.
You walk a little apart, always.
—
Power. A familial police state. I was, and am, uneasy about power, which made dealing with Hans and Eva’s addiction harder than it might have been. I was uncomfortable with the unwitting panopticon we had constructed: the power base of lawyers, security consultants, addiction consultants and family networks. My guilt nagged at me; I was like a nervous dog staring at its own reflection in dark windows.
But I never doubted our intentions. We tried to help Hans and Eva. That help, however, was interpreted as an exercise of power; an oppressive force; a colonising impulse; a familial takeover. Hans and Eva alternated between denying that anything was wrong and blaming us for whatever was wrong—this, I imagine, will be familiar to most people who have had to deal with addiction. We also came to be familiar with the unlimited-love versus the tough-love position, and how families divide into hawks and doves. The doves see the hawks as harsh and unloving; the hawks see the doves as enabling and codependent. Each side secretly or openly blames the other for the decline of the addict. The hawk-dove continuum is not unique to addicted families, of course, but the divisions can become especially bitter because family entanglement is part of the disease of addiction.
—
Disagreements are so interesting. We flit from discourse to discourse, from cultural tradition to cultural tradition, whatever gives us the better advantage in the moment. Our minds are formed by all the layers of history, all the strands of culture, all the conversations, codes and triggers that we know: culture accumulates, as much as it changes. And at this point in history there are so many accumulated models—cultural and literary and scientific—so many different lenses through which to understand ourselves and the world, each one refracting and reverberating through the others. There is no metadiscourse anymore, there is no certainty, and there is no dominating system of thought. What you say in the context of psychoanalysis in terms of desire or a dream or anger is not what you can say in the context of everyday life. Shifting the context is a strategy of arguments, of the tabloids, and of the courtroom. Those are the realms of attack and defence.
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