by Linn Ullmann
Siri blamed Milla. Something had gone wrong and Siri blamed Milla. Milla was there to help but was turning into a nuisance, a big, clumsy, needy nuisance, lurking around, snapping pictures with her cell phone. And she blamed Jenny who decided to fall off the wagon on this exact day, in front of all these people, triumphantly announcing this family’s defeat—why? Because she didn’t want a party and had said so many times and Siri hadn’t listened? And she blamed Jon who smiled foolishly every time he saw Milla come into a room. Just because she was young and pretty. It was too stupid. But then she pictured him sitting there in the attic room not writing. Yes they joked about it. All work and no play makes Jon a dull boy. She hated him for joking about it. The not working. The giving up. The lies. The cheating.
Sometimes at night Siri would go upstairs to the attic to say good night to Jon. They slept apart almost every night now—and he looked so lonely lying there on his bed, staring at the ceiling or reading a newspaper on his cell phone, or flicking through novels he’d written himself.
There was a stack of Jon Dreyer books on the floor.
“So, now all you read are books you’ve written yourself?” she asked him once.
“Leave me alone, Siri, just leave me to read whatever I want.”
“Maybe if you actually read a book written by someone other than yourself, you would be inspired to write again.”
“Thanks. Why don’t we make the following agreement right now: I don’t tell you how to cook and you don’t tell me how to write. Okay?”
It was wrong to call this room the hallway, Siri raised her head and looked around, they had always called it “the hallway”—I will not have a lot of mess in the hallway, Siri, help Syver hang up his outdoor things—when in fact the room was grand and lofty, with old wooden flooring and no furniture. There was the stairway, set like a throne at the room’s center, the broad stairway that wound up from floor to floor. On the first floor Jenny was perched on the edge of her bed (or maybe she was standing behind the curtain, looking out the window), refusing to come down. And Siri had come to take matters in hand. She was going to take matters in hand. This was not an expression she had ever used before, but suddenly she had found herself plodding around the garden in her long, blue silk dress and high heels (that had sunk into the ground with every step she took, squelch, squelch, squelch), behaving in a manner that seemed foreign, using words and expressions that were not like her at all. Occasionally, for a fleeting, horrified moment, she caught a glimpse of herself. The shrill note in her voice. The stupid words. It was as if there were something heavy weighing on her tongue that had to be removed immediately—that expression, It’s time I took matters in hand, uttered in such a phony way—and out of her mouth she plucked a big, shiny bug. And then another. And one more. Her mouth full of big, shiny bugs.
“Well, I think it’s time I took matters in hand,” she said with a smile to old Mrs. Julia Herman, who was swanning around, talking to everybody and dressed in a rather odd-looking green caftan that emphasized her old, skinny, blue-tinged, varicose-veined legs. Had Julia Herman perhaps forgotten to put on her trousers?
“Right, now I’m going to take matters in hand,” Siri said. “I’ll go and get her. Mama has to come down now, of course she must. We can’t wait any longer.”
Siri listened. Out in the garden the party was running its course, but the heavy front door muffled the sounds of it. The silence in this house was deafening, it had been that way ever since Syver died. She had tried so hard to fill it with sound.
“MAAAAMMMMAAA!”
As a child she’d had a clear, high-pitched, penetrating voice, but she had learned to control it.
“Not that voice, Siri, if you please!”
But sometimes she forgot, whooped and sang and danced around the house, ruining everything.
Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest,
Yo, ho, ho and a bottle of rum.
Drink and the devil had done for the rest.
Yo, ho, ho and a bottle of rum.
Hey!
And all at once Jenny would appear on the stairs, somewhere between the ground floor and first floor, her face chalk-white, with her red lips, her long flowing hair, her high heels, her neat little figure, and whisper, “Your voice, Siri, could you take it somewhere else? Please. Please! I can’t take it.”
The stairway reared up, it had always been scary to walk those stairs, up or down, as if the stairway were out to get you, as if you and it would never see eye to eye, as if at any moment it might withdraw a stair here or insert an extra one there. Over the years the stairway had been sanded down, oiled, and painted, it had been furnished with carpet, stair rods, and a new banister, the carpet had been replaced by another carpet, but no one in the house wanted carpet, I don’t like carpets, Jenny said, so now the stairway had been sanded down and painted again, cobalt blue, the same color as it had been long ago, before she, Siri, was even born. She had counted the stairs time and again. One stair. Two stairs. Three stairs. Four stairs. Until she got to twenty-six. Sometimes she got to twenty-seven, on one occasion she counted thirty. When Jon counted the stairs he got twenty-seven. And only a couple of days ago, just before they had that big fight about the party, the two of them had taken each other’s hands and walked slowly, like a bride and groom, up the stairway, and together they had counted the stairs in between kisses: One, two, three, four, five, six, seven—they got to twenty-six, but Jon insisted that they had miscounted, that he had kissed her too many times and that neither of them had taken the counting seriously, so he wanted to do it again, and this time there was to be no talking, no laughing, no kissing. So they turned around and started to walk back down the stairs: One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, but when they reached eighteen Siri tripped and twisted her ankle. It hurt, but not very much.
“Ow!” she said with a little laugh. “Sorry,” she added and gave him a kiss. “I know we’re not supposed to laugh. Or say ‘ow.’ ”
“We’ll turn back,” Jon said. “I’d better take a look at your ankle.”
So they turned and walked back up the stairs. Jon helped her to their bedroom, which was on the second floor, set her down on the bed, undressed her, propped pillows under her leg, packed ice cubes in a towel, and packed the towel around her ankle. Siri laughed and said that it didn’t hurt that much, and he kissed her ankle and then her knee, as if she was a little girl who had injured herself, and then he put his lips to the inside of her thigh, and then they fucked.
Jon was still in the garden, wandering from guest to guest, I’m putting the finishing touches to a book at the moment, it’s coming out soon, at least I hope so, if I get it finished, she had seen him talking animatedly to Ola and to Steve Knightley from Seattle and to Karoline and Kurt Mandl and it struck her that she had never liked Karoline, Jon’s vain little dentist friend from when he was young. Why couldn’t Karoline and Kurt, the Mandls, have found a summer house somewhere else? Did they have to come here? She pictured Karoline’s face—so much insecurity and vanity squeezed into something so little and blond. Jon didn’t like her either, he had called her “humorless” and Siri had agreed. Sometimes they would laugh at how humorless Karoline had been on this or that occasion and how they really didn’t like her very much at all.
And Milla—she’s not helping. She’s in the way. It’s not working. People are in the way. People must leave us in peace. She repeated these phrases inside her head. People are ruining things.
Siri sat on the floor in the hallway and tried to summon the courage to climb up the stairs and fetch her mother, but something was not right. She lay down on the hardwood floor in a rustle of silk and closed her eyes.
Three years earlier Siri and Jon had gone to Gotland to see Sofia, her father’s Swedish widow. Sofia was going to sell the house in Slite and move into a two-room flat. According to Siri’s father’s will, some of the money from the sale was to go to her, so there were papers to be signed—and Siri and Jon and Leopold were goi
ng to have five days together on Gotland without the children.
Siri remembered laying a flower on her father’s grave, saying “I’ll be back!” even though nobody was there to hear her, she remembered picking kajp, a sort of wild chive that only grows on Gotland, and making soup for Sofia and Jon, and she remembered Jon and her taking the car out for a long drive on the island and Jon hitting the brakes, whispering, “How about buying a house here on Gotland, a little limestone house where you and I and Alma and Liv could live?”
They had explored the island from Burgsvik to Fårö, visiting the medieval stone churches. Bunge church, Lokrume church, the cathedral in Visby, Hörsne church, Gothem church with its tall tower, Follingbo church with its painted ceilings, Eskelhem church, and Hamra church.
“You could start up a restaurant,” he said, “one that’s only open in the summer months and I’ll become a writer again, one who actually writes, we’ll sell the house in Oslo and clear our debts, we’ll know no one, bother with no one, it’ll just be us, you and me and Alma and Liv and Leopold and our love and all this.” He flung out his arms, embracing everything around him. The shifting lights of gray that were typical for Gotland, the grassy moors on Fårö that called to mind African savannas, the impressive rock formations—raukarna—that were four hundred million years old, the sand dunes, the cement works in Slite, the phantom ship out at Norsholmen.
“A little limestone house,” he said again.
Siri laughed and shook her head. She didn’t say anything, but if she had, it would have been: You can’t just move to a strange place and think, oh yes, here I’ll be happy, here I’ll find peace, here I’ll be able to write my book. They had climbed out of the car to take in the ghostly landscape that had unveiled itself to them on the way to the old limestone works at Furillen.
“Alma could go to a Swedish school and Liv could start at nursery school here,” Jon went on. “I bet there’s no problem getting your kids into a good nursery school here, and they can both run in the woods and on the moors and pick scarlet poppies and swim in the sea until late in September.”
Siri stroked his hair and said that he should put it all in his book. It was nice. The limestone house, the love, and the poppies.
“I mean it,” he said softly. “I’m talking about something we could actually do.”
“But we don’t belong here, Jon,” Siri said. “We can’t just pack up and move. That’s not something we can do. I want to be with you, I want to be with Alma and Liv, I belong with the three of you, but I don’t belong here. This island has nothing to do with us. It doesn’t work that way.”
“Why can’t we just pack up and make a new start somewhere else?” Jon asked. “Why not? Where does it say that we can’t do that?”
“I don’t know,” Siri said. Her patience had run out. She got back into the car. “You just can’t. End of story.”
But Mailund was another matter.
After all the dreary summer cottages and houses lining the long road up from the little town, Mailund appeared like an oasis from another age, the age of white lace dresses, the age of straw hats, of handlebar mustaches, Rhenish wine, and croquet. Never mind that on moonlit autumn nights the place seemed to shine with an almost uncanny glow and in misty weather could look somehow forbidding, as if it were hovering a few feet above the ground. This was her childhood home, it had been in the family since 1947, Alma and Liv had spent every summer here—this is where she belonged, for better or for worse. Siri knew every room, every bedroom, every inch of the vast kitchen (she could have cooked a meal blindfolded in there), every window, every threshold, every single wall, and every single floorboard on every single floor, at any time she could call to mind the various sounds that each room and each stair made, and the blue moonlight that caressed the furniture and ornaments in the front room or flickered over her big bed in the over-large bedroom on the second floor on all the nights when she could not sleep.
Siri looked up. She had been lying on the floor long enough. Now she must go and get her mother, drunk or sober.
Up the stairs, first door on the left.
Drag her out of her bed, down and out into the garden, kicking and screaming.
Here’s the birthday girl, everyone! Here she is!
When Siri was a little girl her legs often buckled under her and she would sit in the hallway like this and look around. As if she were readying herself. She came home from school, pulled off her satchel, shut the door, and flopped to the floor. After a little while she’d begin to listen. That was the whole point. To listen. The ticking of the grandfather clock in the living room. Faint rustlings on the first floor or in the kitchen. Where was Jenny? Was she back from work? Had she gone to work at all? Was she in a bad mood? Had she been drinking? It was the guessing game.
Where are we today?
Who are we today?
What do we do today?
What do we say today?
Every day was different, so Siri needed this time after she came home from school. To flop and ready herself. To dissolve and re-form. To lie or sit or stand perfectly still and listen. Become one big ear. Were those crying sounds she heard from Jenny’s bedroom? Singing? Snoring? Angry mutterings?
“Siri? Is that you?”
And you had to be able to interpret the tone of voice.
“I love you more than anything in all the world, Siri,” her mother might say and then burst into tears. “I don’t blame you, I really don’t, I just miss him so much.”
Her drinking escalated as the years after Syver’s death wore on, but then, when Siri was seventeen, Jenny stopped drinking quite decisively and hadn’t touched a drop until today, her seventy-fifth birthday, the day of the party, her fete.
Siri listened to the noises from the garden.
The voices, the music, the clinking glasses, the plates, the cutlery, the fluttering white tablecloths (she had put them on the tables, then taken them in, then put them on the tables again), snatches of conversation, Have any of you seen anything of the birthday girl, No, neither have I, all the different ways in which people laugh when they are gathered at a party, high and low, all the sounds that the guests don’t even hear: the wind, the sighing in the treetops, the first drops of rain, I don’t think it’s going to rain. The forecast said rain, but you can’t trust the forecast.
Her plan was to run up the stairs and knock, no, bang on Jenny’s door, and say that now she really did have to come downstairs, now it was time to honor her guests with her presence. Her plan was to take matters in hand. But Siri was still sitting on the floor, eyes fixed on the stairway.
She said: Get up and go to her.
Nothing.
And then she said: I’ll sit here awhile longer.
Siri gazed up at the stairway. It coiled its way through the house like a rattlesnake. And together they had counted the stairs in between kisses. She could hear Jenny moving about in her room. Siri stood up and stretched until the kink in her waist was barely noticeable under her long, pale blue silk dress.
Then she shouted at the top of her voice wincing at its shrillness: “Jenny Brodal! Mama!” She walked to the foot of the stairs. “Listen to me now, you’ve got to come down! The party’s started and your guests are all waiting for you!”
THE RAIN FILTERED down, thin and gray, and the wind picked up and pulled and tugged at Milla’s red umbrella. No one could say exactly when she had left the party and gone down to the jetties. Maybe there were other parties that evening. The quayside was shrouded in mist. Milla bought a hot dog at the kiosk, she spilled ketchup on her red dress and gasped softly. A young man with fair hair turned, looked at Milla, and smiled.
“Love the red umbrella.”
Milla smiled back.
“Thanks. But I’ve stained my dress. Look.”
The boy, known to his friends as K.B., shrugged and spread his arms.
“Some summer evening, this, huh?”
“It was my birthday a few weeks back,” Milla said
, thinking that he was good-looking, and that she should say something. “I’m nineteen now and about to start a new life.”
“Oh, good. How old are you?”
“Nineteen,” Milla said again.
“Shame about the weather, though,” he said. “Oh, and happy birthday.”
“Thanks.” Milla stared at the boy. “But that was weeks ago.”
The boy went on talking: “Good, good. Well, see you later maybe. I’m off to the Bellini to meet some people. Ever been to the Bellini?”
Milla shook her head.
“Well, see you there, maybe. Bye.”
“Bye,” Milla said, smiling. “See you, maybe.”
“I’M LEAVING NOW,” said Jon. He felt raindrops on his fingertips. He thought: If it started to rain everyone could crowd together under the sails he’d strung up in the garden.
“Are you leaving …?” The bespectacled professor of literature who might or might not have been Jenny’s lover some time in the last century looked surprised. “But you can’t leave now?”
“Oh, but I can,” Jon replied.
“But the birthday girl hasn’t put in an appearance yet.”
“Well, that may well be,” Jon said, “but I have to go.”
The man Jon was talking to, Hansén his name was, had the vexing habit of throwing his head back and roaring with laughter every time he said something he deemed amusing. He was a literary critic for Bergens Tidende and was known for once having plagiarized an obscure American essay on William Faulkner and to have gotten away with it. He had a big belly, a big nose, and a big beard. Jon had studied the beard closely while listening for what seemed like an eternity to the critic’s pessimistic views on contemporary writing and literature (contemporary writing in general and Jon’s writing in particular), and to his delight he had discovered a ladybug living in that soft, hairy indent between Hansén’s lower lip and his chin.