Mayhem

by Sigrid Rausing

  —

  It was a photocopy of the names and contact details of all Swedish ministers of 2009. There was an empty sheet of Eva’s personal letterhead and an empty envelope. And there was a letter printed on white paper, making another false allegation against my father, an allegation that had nothing to do with Olof Palme.

  She ended the letter: “I am sorry for the necessity to do this but Hans Rausing has harmed me badly and I believe that he deserves to be caught, if not for what he did to me then for this. I wish you well and am glad to offer my help if you need it.”

  I don’t know if she ever sent it and, if so, when, or to whom.

  —

  I still wonder about her rage against my father—that angry grudge against someone who had always been kind to her. She had a skewed perception of his power, and of the power of money; a patriarchal and conservative bent clashing with her teenage rebellion.

  I think of Patty Hearst holding a machine gun, then asking for eyeliner in prison. Or so the story goes.

  *

  The summer of 2014 Eric and I took the ferry over to Denmark to see the Emil Nolde exhibition at Louisiana, the art museum on the coast north of Copenhagen. It was an extraordinary show, disturbing and impressive. Eric, disliking Nolde’s political ambiguity, his Nazi leanings, walked outside in the grounds. I came, alone, to the painting Adam and Eve Banished from Paradise (1919).

  Adam and Eve, stout and graceless, sit naked on the ground, side by side, their eyes that strange intense Nolde blue, no whites. Between them the snake curls up a purple pole. A lion emerges from the background, white teeth showing, a hungry, bitter face.

  The expressions of Adam and Eve are so remarkable that you don’t quite notice the dissonant colours, the garish clash of red earth and purple tree trunk. There is no doubt that they are lost: nothing I have seen better captures the Fall than that wide-eyed silent stare, that visible shock, that mute stubbornness.

  —

  They were no sooner out of their blissful abode than a paralyzing terror befell them, my old Jewish Encyclopedia of 1901 tells me.

  Unaccustomed to the earthly life and unfamiliar with the changes of the day and of the weather—in paradise an eternal light had surrounded them—they were terrified when the darkness of night began to fall upon the earth, and the intercession of God’s word was necessary to explain to them the new order of things. From this moment the sufferings of life began; for Adam and Eve were afraid to partake of earthly food, and fasted for the first seven days after their expulsion from paradise, as is prescribed in Talmudic law before an imminent famine. (Volume 1, page 179)

  Eve seems slightly more blind in the painting, staring without seeing, hypnotised or exhausted. Adam looks over to the left, with more anxiety, and more consciousness. The snake looks foolish and drunk; the sinister lion is coming closer.

  —

  This was the story of Hans and Eva, too, tempted by the snake in paradise, then banished. Tempted not by knowledge—humanity, it seems to me, is redeemed by the fact that Adam and Eve’s temptation was a desire for moral knowledge, the capacity to distinguish right from wrong—but instead by something that might make paradise even more heavenly, something that would lead not to consciousness and intelligence but to blissful unconsciousness.

  Eve was tempted by the serpent, who told her that if she and Adam ate the forbidden fruit their eyes would be opened, and they would be as gods, knowing good and evil (Genesis 3:5).

  Hans and Eva partook of another forbidden fruit to re-enter paradise and forget the ethical distinctions they knew.

  There is amnesia at the heart of drug addiction.

  Floating in the oblivion of heroin and the euphoria of crack and cocaine, Hans and Eva didn’t want out, they wanted in. They were in exile, searching for home. The drug den, the bubble, was Eden.

  *

  Last summer I saw an adder on the dirt road that runs along a part of the common. We sometimes cycle along that road to the village, passing a row of small summerhouses, all as familiar to me as the ceiling of my psychoanalyst’s office; the random dots that I line up into gloomy squares as I talk and talk. I was walking home, past the farmhouse with the French flag and the 1960s glass front. I walked on, past the next house, the glass house where the parents of an old boyfriend still spend their summers. I walked, looking down to avoid being seen, when the adder emerged from the stone wall behind some roses. It was about two feet long, slim and agile, with a precise olive-green diamond pattern on its back, a little tongue flicking out of a lined mouth.

  Now I wonder if the tongue was really there, but I can see it in my mind’s eye, on that warm sandy road, the stone wall, the glass house beyond.

  Eric and I took the same walk a few days later, and I told him about the adder. I didn’t expect to see it again, but it emerged from the same place, the same olive diamond body against the warm sand. We jumped towards each other like Hansel and Gretel in the forest, laughing slightly hysterically at our own nerves. We were laughing at me, at my pretend nature lore, my bravado; and laughing at him, at the sudden absence of macho courage, his mock-falsetto jump.

  The snake slithered off. But it remained in my mind as a threat—and why did it emerge in front of me, twice?

  I remembered my mother raking the bushes by our house where an adder had been seen, my father standing by with his gun, ready to shoot. There is a photograph of it: she wore her long 1970s crazy-pattern turquoise dress with plastic beads on wide sleeves, hair short and permed; he was in a short-sleeved shirt and panama hat. They never found that adder.

  But death was there, even in this clean wild place (our pointer gently carrying dying rabbits, eyes gummed shut with myxomatosis; the dead seal, rose intestines curling into tight spirals). Repulsion was there (sticking my hand into the hole in the ground to turn the tap of the fountain; hole crawling with earwigs).

  The snake was real. That green-and-olive diamond pattern on the sandy road, the stone wall, the house beyond: the snake was not a symbol or a message. It was not meant, I must remember. The snake had its own world, its own thoughts and preoccupations, to do, I presume, with food, with smells, with danger, with the pleasant heat of the sandy road.

  I want to see the snake before the snake sees me, to catch a glimpse of that other world.

  *

  In the summer of 2015 a friend took me to see Anne Carson’s version of Euripides’s Bakkhai, playing at the Almeida theatre in Islington. The Bakkhai, or maenads, are the female followers of Dionysus, also known as Bacchus. Crazed and murderous, they follow Dionysus into destruction. King Pentheus is lynched and torn to pieces by his own mother, Agave, who has joined the cult—it is a plot devised by Dionysus to punish Agave with grief, with guilt, and with exile for her initial disbelief and disrespect.

  We sat near the stage in the small theatre. Towards the end of the play Pentheus’s body parts were assembled and placed on a blue tarpaulin on the stage.

  I froze. The blue tarpaulin. The body parts.

  Islington’s Upper Street near the theatre is lined with bars, people were drinking outside, there was vomit on the pavement. We walked faster and faster until I found a taxi and got in, leaving my friend, who was going in a different direction, on the street.

  I felt guilt.

  Only later did I make the connection: the play, the street, the drinking, had upset me.

  Only later did I forgive myself for leaving so abruptly in that taxi.

  *

  I think of my lovely dog Leo, the vet injecting his leg. Leo dying in my arms.

  I sat with him on the steps outside the kitchen where I used to wave goodbye to the children with his paw. I fed him small pieces of meat; he took them so gingerly, so slowly, deaf now, and almost blind.

  The vet injected him; he shuddered, and died.

  The wind touched his fur; it moved in the wind so that he seemed alive still, for so long.

  We wrapped him in a sheet. I couldn’t bear to think of him buried
in the cold dark earth, so he lay on the sheet by the grave we had dug, the hole we had dug, for a long time.

  I had to know that he was really gone.

  —

  We live, and then we die.

  Things end.

  18

  My life is made up of rooms. I walk from room to room, each shift in atmosphere slightly jarring. In each room I tell the story.

  The rooms are actual rooms, the rooms are different languages, and the rooms are different relationships.

  I see my complicity, my guilt. I see my tiredness, my hopelessness; my false moral superiority, my finger wagging, wagging. I regret everything.

  I see my guilt, I see the guilt of others. All of us are guilty, all of us are complicit.

  People offer absolutions: I am embarrassed by their attempts to comfort me, their clumsy well-meant offers:

  You did your best.

  Where would the children have been without you.

  They are so lucky to have you.

  This is not reasonable of me, I know, but I want people to understand the nature of what the children went through. Of course it would have been worse without us. But they were hardly lucky.

  —

  I try to understand this catastrophic breakdown, this strange inversion of wealth: here’s a double-fronted townhouse, with oil paintings and marble, with paint effects and chintz curtains, with solid sofas, old rugs, Victorian desks and Georgian chairs, with strong brass rods holding the stair carpet in place; that thick and pleasant stair carpet.

  Those strong brass rods.

  —

  And inside all that solid wealth, inside that slightly stiff combination of new and old, is a drug den.

  A locked room.

  *

  Sometime that autumn of 2012, I saw a documentary about experimental processes of rotting in a closed room, visible behind glass. Many substances rotted, and the camera focused on each in turn. Insects appeared seemingly out of nowhere, life out of death. I was tired; it was mildly interesting. And then the focus shifted to the carcass of a pig, left on the side. I suddenly started weeping uncontrollably as the pig’s body deteriorated. I switched off the TV, alone in the house except for my sleeping nephew.

  I rang Eric. I cried so much I couldn’t speak. How could they, I tried to say.

  How could they show something like that on TV?

  I didn’t see that my reaction was unusual.

  —

  And then, slowly, another era began. Think of dawn on a cloudy day: the dark feels as if it will go on forever, but suddenly you realise there is a lifting, or dispersal, of the dark.

  There is my sister, and her husband. There is my husband, and my parents. We sit and stare at one another. How pale we are, how tense our faces. We sit in a circle, in a cave. There are shadows on the walls of the cave; real life goes on somewhere else.

  One by one we crawl out, blinking in the sun. We smell the morning air, we stand up on unsteady legs.

  This twelve-year episode of intense anxiety; of court cases; of social workers and lawyers and judges; of self-proclaimed experts and psychiatrists; of abusive letters and fear and shame and constant red alerts already seems not quite real.

  *

  I tell my father I am writing a book about what happened. It’s summer; he is sitting in his rocking chair, reading, watching the sea, looking out for hares.

  “Good,” he says. He gestures at the common, at the sea. “Then it won’t be just fragments, like a dream.”

  —

  I try to finish the text, but something is missing. I fear I have redacted too much—real life was so much more painful and confusing and stressful than this book. You write and write. You hone, you edit. Each phase takes you to a different place; you process the memories, over and over.

  This is a representation of the story, not the actual story.

  I think about where it began: “Now that it’s all over I find myself thinking about family history and family memories; the stories that hold a family together, and the acts that can split it apart.”

  “Now that it’s all over”—what hopes I had. Language is indeed a machine that continually amplifies the emotions.

  But still: my brother is remarried, and in recovery. He is rebuilding his relationship with his children, and with all of us.

  *

  Daniel graduates from school. My brother comes; Lisbet and Peter come. Daniel’s father is here, with his new wife. Daniel plays football with his friends; they shoot the ball at the ruined monastery wall; they pose for endless photographs; they smile blankly, shocked that this mythical day has actually arrived.

  This is more than we could have hoped for, this reprieve, this happy scene. The swifts are diving in the wind, my brother leans back in his green folding chair holding now an olive, now a piece of mozzarella; he talks to my ex-husband about a clinic in Austria they both know; they laugh. I listen to the echoes of conversations long ago, when I was married to my ex-husband and my brother was married to Eva and the people we are now married to were unknown to us and to each other.

  *

  About a month before this, Eric and I had seen the Unfinished show at the new Met Breuer in New York. I was finishing this book and was interested in the idea of the unfinished. I had imagined that unfinished works might be as interesting as finished ones, perhaps in fact even more poignant—more emotional, revealing, and raw. But most of the paintings on show—by famous artists all—felt oddly lifeless to me. That thing, the touch that denotes that a work of art is done, was lacking; the unfinished petered out.

  I almost wished I hadn’t seen these paintings. There was Klimt’s posthumous portrait of Ria Munk, so similar to his earlier portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, the glorious Woman in Gold now at the Neue Galerie a few blocks north. Same pose, same construction. Woman in Gold is prewar; the portrait of Ria Munk, who had died long before Klimt could finish it, dates from 1917–18. The war was still raging; there were tired maimed soldiers in hospitals and on the streets; people were hungry in Vienna. The painting feels like a sketchy pastiche; like ersatz food; like rationing and disillusion.

  There’s Sargent’s Two Girls with Parasols, faces blank blobs, crude hands like birds’ beaks. There is a Lucian Freud self-portrait, a pencil drawing only partially filled in with paint, a grotesque mask over the bones—I think of painted faces and concealed death, the process of creation and the process of disintegration.

  —

  I conclude that I can’t get away with the unfinished. It’s not enough: I must tie it all together, finish the stitching.

  And yet I also like the tradition of investigations, of analysis, of children tearing their toys apart to understand the mechanism, the pieces on the carpet, the missing clues.

  Maybe this book can’t be finished partly because I can’t decide which tradition I like better; where I belong.

  More than that, I am hesitant to release it into the world, to have this sad legacy picked apart once more. Better to forget, perhaps.

  But then my book will be unfinished, like the paintings in the show. And people will never know that once, long ago, Eva and I sat side by side, a child playing behind us, throwing her head up to the sky.

  “That’s me!” my eldest niece exclaims when I show her the photograph, asking her if she can tell who the child is. So then I know: it must have been around the year 1999 or 2000. The cusp of Eva’s relapse. It was still invisible; soon we would know.

  Afterword

  As I was writing this book, drug overdosing became the leading cause of accidental death in the United States. Thousands of people in Britain, too, lose their lives to drugs every year. Not all the people who die are addicts, but probably most of them are, leaving a trail of sadness and devastation behind them: broken promises, broken homes, broken lives. This book is for the people they leave behind.

  It is dedicated to Hans and Eva’s four children. For legal reasons, they cannot be named in the book. That is one of the man
y reasons why the text remains as partial and unfinished as it is, since these young people, alongside my own son Daniel, were, and are, an indelible part of my life.

  I thank them for their patience, their humour, and their courage.

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you:

  Eric Abraham, Lisbet Rausing, Robin Desser, Simon Prosser, Albert Bonnier, Sarah Chalfant, Andrew Wylie, Stephen Grosz, Johanna Ekström, Rosalind Porter, Domonic Barber, Jennifer Kurdyla, Hermione Thompson, Emma Duncan, Hans Jürgen Balmes, Max Porter, Adam Nicolson and Elizabeth Wedmore.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Sigrid Rausing is the editor of Granta magazine, and the publisher of Granta Books. She is the author of two previous books, the monograph History, Memory, and Identity in Post-Soviet Estonia, and Everything Is Wonderful, a memoir about living on a collective farm in Estonia, which was short-listed for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize. She is a member of the Cultural Council of the University of Lund and an Ambassadors Council member of the Scholars at Risk Network. Rausing has a PhD in Social Anthropology from University College London, and is an honorary fellow of the London School of Economics and St. Antony’s College, Oxford. She lives in London with her husband, film and theatre producer Eric Abraham.

  What’s next on

  your reading list?

  Discover your next

  great read!

  * * *

  Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.

  Sign up now.