Mayhem

by Sigrid Rausing

  Tetra Pak was founded in Sweden in 1951 by Mr. Rausing’s grandfather, Ruben Rausing, who invented a paper carton for storing milk. It became the world’s biggest packing production company.

  Where did that quote come from? I don’t even know. The BBC site gave this information:

  Rausing dynasty

  Founded in 1951 by Ruben Rausing in Lund, Sweden, Tetra Pak quickly grew into a global packing company.

  Hans Rausing Senior was appointed managing director of the company in 1954. After decades at the helm, he sold his 50% share of the company to his brother Gad Rausing, who died in 2000.

  At the bottom of the web page is a box, with “More England Stories”:

  SUICIDE MOTHER GAVE GIRLS ACID DRINK

  JAIL FOR PC WHO STABBED WIFE 81 TIMES

  HEN PARTY DEATH LORRY DRIVER CLEARED

  “Men are to be pitied.”

  Or as Caryl Churchill’s translation has it: “People are so fucked up.”

  9

  After the initial court hearing in May 2007, when the children first came to live with us in the country, Hans and Eva occasionally came to see them. The visits, however, gradually dwindled. Hans’s last visit was in the summer of 2008, on his birthday. He came alone.

  I made a cake for him. I baked it in the oven and let it cool. I cut it into three layers. I whipped cream and spread each layer thickly: the Swedish way. I covered the top of the cake in raspberries and grated dark chocolate over it. It was a pretty cake—a modest and symbolic monument to love and to simplicity, in the face of Hans and Eva’s rejection of the small, the cosy, the sincere. It was a gesture towards the maternal and the domestic; the practices I fumbled so blindly to reach. Not too much, I thought—not an excess of virtue, not a smug rebuke.

  I stood in my apron, by the Aga. A picture of motherhood. But this was beyond mothering, of course. The cake was a symbol and a gift, but it was a reminder of origins, too. When I was a child we used to make cakes in the summer from cake mixtures—how delicious they were, those mixtures, that lost modernity. Pour the mix in a bowl, add water. Make cake, then lick the plastic bowl, feel the clingy aftertaste of bitter baking powder.

  —

  We ate lunch. We ate the cake. We sang. Hans blew out the candles.

  He swam with the children. He jumped into the swimming pool with his glasses on. He lost the glasses and found them on the bottom of the pool.

  Then he sat at the kitchen table with the children and they drifted away one by one until only the youngest was left. Hans was still speaking, but his eyes were closing; he couldn’t stay awake. Sometime in between lunch and tea he had, I assumed, taken something—most probably a morphine tablet or methadone. I would have smelled the heroin if he had smoked it, and he never injected.

  Suddenly he decided to leave. I went with him to his car; I tried to stop him from driving off, but I couldn’t.

  Afterwards I thought I didn’t try enough. I could have blocked the drive if I had been faster and stronger, but I didn’t. I held the car door; he wrenched it out of my hand.

  “You can’t drive. I will have to call the police,” I said, shrill and desperate. Worse than dull, now.

  He drove off, wheels screeching.

  Eric called the police: I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

  This perennial sense that I could have stopped him. Always this sense that when I tried I didn’t try hard enough, so that trying itself became damaging rather than reparative. “Help,” not help. My good intentions.

  I didn’t see Hans again for six years.

  *

  Eva’s last visit was a few months later—I think it was sometime in September 2008, a weekend, summer still lingering, but I am not sure. She arrived on a late-afternoon train, and I picked her up from the small station outside the village. A few people got off, Eva amongst them. Her legs were emaciated, her eyes glazed. The children drifted away from her, too, but I am not sure whether she really noticed. She sat with me in the living room and chatted, calmly, about this and that. After a while she decided to leave, and I drove her back to the station.

  I never saw her again.

  She didn’t stop writing, though. Her texts and emails were relentless. She had started dabbling in Kabbalah, and her communications were punctuated with references to G-d and to evil. She commanded me to obey her; she commanded me to go to hell. She called herself omniscient and omnipresent, she referred to herself as almighty, eternal, infinite; evermore, everpresent, everlasting Eva.

  All those texts in the middle of the night on my old Nokia phone, often ending with a standard message about [more data being received] or whatever phones said in those days in response to texts that were too long to download. Her emails were even longer, full of craziness, self-pity and anger. But I also find the sadness in them now, in between the abuse and the outlandish accusations, like silver thread in a tapestry.

  “If something should happen to me do not leave him alone,” she wrote about Hans on January 18 in 2011. “Section him”—have him certified—“if you have to but don’t leave him alone at least for a couple of weeks. I’m not planning anything but I’m scared my heart is going to fail. I am too sad and I sometimes hope that G-d will take me away to wait elsewhere for my children and Hans. It is not at all because I didn’t love them enough. On the contrary, I loved them so much my heart may explode. I have died once before during an operation and I know what happens to us.”

  In between these glimpses of something real and human (I hesitate to write those words, because of course everything we do is real and human by definition, but take it as shorthand for something honest, or at least believable) she returned to the same themes over and over again: that she couldn’t see the children because then they would think that she was dangerous since the court had ordered that she could see them only under supervision; that we had bribed the judge, the social workers and the psychiatrists; that people—her secretary, her accountant, her trustees, her staff—stole from her or physically attacked her; that she had special powers because she had “died” during her heart operation in 2006.

  —

  Looking through my records again I find an old text from Eva, a typical text. She told me I had driven a stake through her heart, and nails through her palms; that she was in unbearable pain. She said I had lied in court, and stolen her children. She told me that she would never forgive me: “I despise you with an intensity that is not describable,” she wrote.

  I try to understand why she wrote that particular text. It arrived late at night, and I check my inbox for that day, to see what was going on. I find an email from Lisbet about a meeting at the children’s school. It was well meant, innocent and kind, and yet reading it I can see that it might have triggered Eva’s rage. Lisbet had sent the email to Eva’s parents as well as to us and to our nanny Mel, and they might have forwarded it to Eva. It must have been one of Lisbet’s weekends—sometimes she and Peter looked after the children, at our house. Those were the weekends when Daniel went to stay with his father in London, and Eric and I would go to London, too. Sunday afternoons we would pick Daniel up, drive back to the country, and get ready for the week to come.

  Sun 7th Sep 2008

  Hi everyone,

  I went to the Year 6 meeting at the school on Saturday, Daniel’s year. Here is what they said:

  There will be a bit of academic streaming but no proper scholarship stream, and kids typically move up and down. It is important the kids don’t feel an elite is being selected.

  Homework diaries are key: check and sign prep diaries every day. Don’t do the children’s homework (although make sure they do their homework). It is more important the teachers know if the kid can’t do something. If you have concerns, note them in the prep diary. Every prep should only take half an hour: they can stop if they are not done then.

  The children will be tired with the extra work and they need to rest a lot, and eat healthily, at home.

  Mr. W is the Child Protection Off
icer and the school will report any more serious worries they have about children to the Children’s Services, if at all possible talking to parents first, but not if it is an emergency.

  This is the year—this autumn really—when senior schools must be selected. Remember lists fill up fast. Provisional places must be arranged.

  There is a new expanded salad bar at lunch.

  The kids will get work that is only due a week from now—and no advance warnings of exams. They need to learn to space and pace their work: to become self-motivated and self-organized.

  They will all do the ESB, English Speaking Board: family are warmly welcome to come hear their child.

  They will have a great camping trip in summer term.

  Summer term is an excellent time to start full-time or weekly boarding. They whizz around and have fun in the summer weather. There will be a taster boarder weekend soon. There are lots of Friday night boarders in this year.

  It is not decided if Year 6 will do a play this year.

  There should have been a letter from the form teacher this weekend (I didn’t find it but perhaps you, Mel, will?).

  As ever,

  Lisbet

  Such a kind email, such careful attention to detail. But if your children have been removed by a court, an email like that might well make you despair. All those cosy details of extended salad bars and camping trips; the note about the English Speaking Board, the ritual when eleven-year-old children speak without notes on their chosen subject, families and friends willing them on; all that, and the slightly sinister reference to child protection issues, might feel like nails driven through palms.

  I feel weighed down with guilt, making this possible connection. But I also know this: there is no addict story that doesn’t revolve around guilt. We were all guilty, and we were none of us guilty. We were trying to deal with a tragedy bigger than ourselves; one that we were as ill equipped to handle as anyone else, despite all our lawyers and addiction experts. Eva may never have seen Lisbet’s letter. She could have randomly sent her own despairing communication on the same date. But I am looking for logic, for cause and effect. I am trying to solve the riddles and elucidate the remaining questions.

  We did genuinely and sincerely try to help, I know that. But it wasn’t the help Hans and Eva wanted, or needed: “I am unable to see things the way that you do, consequently I do not feel ‘helped,’ ” Eva wrote to me in January 2011. “I feel broken, damaged, very badly hurt and I sense that I am going to die soon.”

  I didn’t believe her, but she was right.

  *

  On the twenty-ninth of May 2011 Eva wrote a long email to me, which ended on a sad note:

  “I don’t think that I am nearly as strong as maybe people thought. In the same way that nobody had any idea how deeply I loved my children as I kept it hidden.”

  “Thank you for reading all of this Sigrid. I talk to so few people. You have no idea.”

  “I am still your Eva X”

  I responded by trying to get her to see the children:

  They miss you very much and would like, obviously, to see you. It’s not too late. I wish I could persuade you to put your pride on one side, and your wounded feelings and your humiliation, your anger and your resentment. I wish I could persuade you to try and rebuild the relationship with the children—to put them first, not yourselves. Since you haven’t done it I assume there must be a part of you that feels they are better off without you. But I don’t believe that to be true. They would, I think, very much like to see you, and would be happy to see you—there is a wound in them of missing you that is not getting better. Even if they may not think of you every day (though I believe they do), they still miss you, and need you.

  On the same night she wrote to me, Eva had also written to our solicitor in the children’s case, accusing her of fraudulently changing our affidavits to the court in the case about the children—a claim that came up repeatedly. Hans and Eva couldn’t remember—and couldn’t keep track of—the affidavits, and they often accused us of making claims that we had never made. They lost the court papers; we sent copies that were dismissed as fake. We requested and sent certified court records; those papers, too, were lost or dismissed.

  —

  My puppy is on the carpet sleeping, his nose pressed against one of my discarded socks. His lead is next to him on the floor; the window is rattling slightly in the wind.

  I remember Sussex social services in this room—Eva had written to them claiming that Eric was homosexual, and that I was depressed and on drugs. We were not, therefore, suitable carers for their children. The Brighton social workers who came for a home visit were in an awkward situation: they had to investigate us, but they also felt compelled to communicate their disapproval of the implicit homophobia of Eva’s letter.

  The investigation itself didn’t take long—a conversation, followed by an observation of our interaction with the children in the kitchen. We were being judged, of course, but it was done with a light touch. Only two of the children were at home. My niece pressed herself against our nanny Mel and smiled shyly. My nephew pressed himself against me, giggling. Mel smiled ironically, and even the dogs seemed to be amused by this theatre of the absurd.

  10

  In May 2012, all communications ceased. There was radio silence. Virtually all our exchanges had been with Eva, not with Hans—she was an avid communicator, and when she stopped, there was silence.

  There was a rumour that she had left with Hans on June 12. One of the cars was gone. There had been pillows in the car, someone said. What did that mean? We sucked on scanty facts, asking one another useless questions, questions we knew had no answers; questions we knew would lead to no action. We had dwelled for too long in the realm of trying to find things out, of keeping an eye on, of reports.

  No good could come of that, we knew.

  But…had she gone back to America?

  Had anyone seen her passport?

  How could we find out…?

  —

  I think we had already let go, by then. The questions were rhetorical.

  A kind of hiatus opened up.

  *

  In late May 2012 my mother was hospitalised to investigate some new and alarming symptoms—she had unusual stomach pains and felt anxious. I had organised the admission and was taking her to the hospital. She came to our house to have lunch beforehand. At the house she missed a step and fell heavily backwards, hitting her head on a wooden step. She was eighty-two years old, and I thought we would have to call an ambulance, but strangely she seemed hardly to notice. We went to the hospital as planned, and she was examined there. She wasn’t concussed and never mentioned it again.

  The doctors found nothing physically wrong with her.

  Looking back on it, I think the sudden silence from Hans and Eva had caused a subterranean panic, making her ill with anxiety. She sensed, I think, what we didn’t: the potential meaning of silence.

  *

  Sunday, July 8 we flew to Sweden, with the children, our dog Leo, and my sister. We were so happy in the plane, pointing out landmarks to one another. There was the sea! There was the village! There was the island! The children were talking and laughing. Leo was smiling broadly and wagging his tail, half closing his eyes in contentment.

  It was lovely—almost too lovely. We landed and stood on the tarmac of the small rural airport, greeted by a kind policeman acting as immigration officer. We gathered passports; we watched the high blue sky.

  There was suddenly an eerie feeling in the air; an ominous note.

  “I feel like something is going to happen,” I said to Eric.

  —

  On the following day, July 9, 2012, Hans was arrested on Wandsworth Bridge in London, and his terrible life unravelled.

  —

  I had a scheduled call at 2:30 p.m. that day about human rights in Belarus. And then, so quickly, so easily, Eric stepped into my office. He had written a note: “They have found Eva’s body.
”

  I looked at it, briefly, while my interlocutor continued talking about Andrei Sannikov, the presidential candidate who had been jailed by President Lukashenko.

  I stared at Eric. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move. Time stilled. Eric stood with his note, ready to act, looking at me, waiting for me.

  Leo stretched on the floor, oblivious to the shocking present.

  They have found Eva’s body.

  —

  What is that underwater quality of shock? That sense of slow motion, that sudden weight of invisible and silencing substance?

  —

  As yet we knew nothing, beyond the fact that a body had been found, presumed to be Eva.

  My atheist legacy, that sentence. I guess the formulation should be in the possessive form…a body had been found, presumed to be Eva’s. You possess your body in death, even though you have lost it, or it has lost you. But in real life, as I sometimes say to the children, in real life…was the body Eva, or was the body Eva’s?

  I don’t know.

  What is life?

  The infinite and infinitesimal part of Eva that was her life was gone.

  A body had been found, presumed to be Eva’s.

  That must be right.

  Eva was gone; they found her body.

  —

  But in fact all we knew was this: a body had been found.

  —

  Soon we knew more. It was worse than we thought. The body—by now referred to as human remains—had been found in the bedroom on the second floor. It had been there for a long time.

  —

  Within a day we knew that it was Eva. She had died, probably, of a heart attack, but all we knew was that she was dead.

  —

  This is what we heard: that Hans had piled clothes on top of her and wrapped the body in a tarpaulin. He had stuck duct tape around the door to what the press later referred to as the “annexe” of their house—the bedroom, dressing room, and bathroom. It was, the papers said, a drug den.