The Cold Song

by Linn Ullmann

  Note to self, October 16, 2008

  1. Alma expelled from school for cutting off her teacher’s hair. Why did she do that? How do we deal with this? How can we help her? How can we get through to her?

  2. I don’t exercise and I drink too much. (Make a plan!)

  3. I’m not writing. Solution: Call Gerda at the publisher’s, agree on a schedule, write minimum five pages every day (no more self-loathing!), deliver the next hundred pages in about six weeks. Ask for another advance???

  4. Write a letter to Milla’s parents.

  Milla left the party and had texted him and he had texted her, but her cell phone had never been found and he hoped to God it never would be.

  Jenny and Alma got back to Mailund as the party was winding down. They had been on a frenetic ride around the country roads. Jenny had been drunk and Jon and Siri had been furious at her. How could she go off drunk with Alma like that? How could she? But the celebration was still going on in the garden and Jenny ignored both of them, went and sat down next to Steve Knightley from Seattle.

  And when the last guests were gone, and Jenny had gone to bed, and Alma had gone to bed, and Siri had gone to bed, Jon sat down at the end of one of the trestle tables and finished a bottle of red wine.

  Eventually he got up and wended his unsteady way over to the annex where Milla stayed while with them. To see if she had come home? To see if she was all right? Why wouldn’t she be? It was her night off and she could stay out as long as she wanted. She wasn’t a child.

  Jon made sure that no one saw him, he knocked on the door and waited a few seconds before stepping inside. He stood for a moment in the dark room, the pent-up smell of perfume, the unmade bed, the untidy desk, the overflowing bookshelves, the dirty clothes on the floor. He walked over to the desk and ran a hand over the magazines and makeup and a pink book that he realized must be her diary, that secret scrapbook she had told him about. He tucked it into his waistband, under the thick sweater. He felt his heart pounding. He opened the two clothes cupboards. Did he think that she would be hiding in there? He pulled the blue-and-white striped duvet off the bed and noticed a dark lump lying on the sheet. He took out his mobile and studied the lump in the light from the screen. He jumped back and let out a quiet scream at the sight of the black slug on the white sheet.

  JON NEVER STOPPED admiring his wife. Her graceful movements, her asymmetrical back, her slender wrists. Siri bemoaned the lines on her face and what the years had done to her (as if the years had asked her to dance and then rudely stepped on her toes), and he noticed how she was always checking her reflection in shopwindows and in the dark, gleaming paintwork of parked cars.

  Jon told her often that she was prettier than ever before.

  The first time he saw her had been from afar, and it was the very way she moved that had made him fall in love with her. She had walked straight past him, not noticing him at all, or at least pretending not to notice him, and he remembers thinking that he had never seen a woman move so gracefully.

  Leopold got up and left the attic room. Jon heard him padding down the stairs, it was the same padding sound he heard every morning and every night. When Leopold was dead, when the dog was gone, he’d still hear it.

  Over the past fifteen years the drafty house had somehow come to encapsulate the sounds of his family—Leopold’s pad-pad on the stairs, Siri’s cheerful hello every time she came home, Alma’s tireless rendering of “Little Song Thrush.” He could still hear it, his daughter singing, that bright, childish voice of hers, like a little flute in the house, distinct from the girl herself. Alma had just turned thirteen and it was years since she had sung anything at all.

  Jon had the house to himself for a few hours and could do what he liked. He could lie down on the floor and sleep. That would be nice. Just sleep it all away: Siri, Alma, Milla, all those female glances, his intolerable friend Kurt, and his intolerable friend’s humorless wife.

  Note to self: Must break it off with Karoline!

  He had downloaded all the music from the seventeenth-century Purcell opera King Arthur on his computer and played it over and over again. There was an aria in particular he couldn’t stop listening to about a cold man waking up. The man pleads with the higher powers—What power art thou?—that they leave him alone and let him go back to that unconcious state of mind where he had dwelled. He is excoriated. Alone. Freezing. Trembling.

  I can scarcely move or draw my breath,

  I can scarcely move or draw my breath.

  Purcell died a few years after composing his masterpiece, supposedly having caught a chill after his wife, Frances, angered by something, locked him out of their apartment.

  A man wakes up and for a few moments he experiences everything exactly as it is.

  Jon wrote: A man wakes up and is lucid.

  It doesn’t last long, though, he thought, that kind of lucidity. If it did you wouldn’t be able to stand it, it would kill you.

  Let me, let me, freeze again to death

  Jon blinked and turned the music up, he didn’t want to fall asleep, because then Siri would come into the attic room and just look at him until he woke up, and say things like The writer at work, I see.

  And still: It took only a minute or two. He called Leopold’s name and heard him pad-padding back up the stairs. “Come here, boy! Come lie down here.” And then Jon lay down on the floor beside his dog, inhaled the calming scent of him—grass, Bourbon, tar, and something hot and sweet and alive—and fell asleep.

  “FUCK YOU, MAMA!” Jon opened his eyes and sat up sharply as Alma’s voice cut through the house. It was half past one and he had slept for hours and now they were back from town. Siri had taken Liv and Alma shopping. “Don’t worry,” she had told him. “Just write.” Those precious hours alone—wasted. “It will all be fine,” she’d said and touched his hand. Wasted. That gift. Those hours. And what had he done? Surfed the Internet. Thought about Karoline. Listened to the entire libretto of John Dryden who in contrast to Jon Dreyer had gotten down to the business of working. And slept on the floor. All this and now they came tumbling back into his life. The front door slamming. The chorus on his computer singing. “FUCK YOU, MAMA!” Siri shouting, “Jon! Jon! Have you remembered to walk Leopold? He probably needs to go.”

  What Jon needed was a long spell on his own. No children. No Siri. No dog. Borrow that house in Sandefjord that an acquaintance had offered him. Jon got up from the floor and sat at his laptop and pounded away on the keys. This so that Siri, if she put her ear to his door, would hear the sound of working. Click click click! He looked at the book on the desk. Danish Literature: A Short Critical Survey by Poul Borum (Copenhagen: Det Danske Selskab, 1979). He turned to page seven and proceeded to type what was written there. Preliminary Remarks: This book is a short survey of contemporary Danish literature, preceded by an even shorter sketch of the first thousand years of Danish literature click click click.

  “Okay, whatever,” Siri shouted. “Can you send him down? I’ll take him out.”

  Jon got up from his chair and opened the door for Leopold and shouted, “Great! Here he comes. Thanks! Nearly there!”

  He heard her sigh. He heard it through all the other noises. She was mad. He knew it. Later, he would ask her about her afternoon; he would pretend he hadn’t heard their daughter’s “FUCK YOU, MAMA,” engrossed as he was in his writing, and he would listen to her. His fingers danced over the keys. In a significant lecture on the aesthetics of literary influence at the second congress of the International Comparative Literature Association (reprinted in his book Literature as System, published in 1971), the Spanish critic Claudio Guillén put it very succinctly: It is important … that the study of a topic such as, say, Dutch poetry be encouraged not for charitable but for poetic reasons.

  Jon heard the door slam and a moment or two later he peeked out the window and saw Siri and Leopold on the street outside their house, Leopold tugging and straining at the leash—that dog was strong as an ox—and Sir
i doing her best to stay on her feet, tugging and straining in return. Leopold squatted in order to shit while Siri looked on peevishly, clutching a small black plastic bag. She drew the bag over her hand, bent down, and picked up the turd. But instead of getting up again she stayed where she was, crouched down with the plastic-wrapped turd in her hand, her head bowed. Leopold wriggled and squirmed around her, but she stayed crouched down, didn’t move, and Jon wondered why she wasn’t getting up, had she hurt her back or been struck by anxiety, lost her ground, and he was all set to run out to her and take her in his arms and comfort her, but then she stood up, tugged on the leash, dropped the turd bag into the nearest trash can, and disappeared around the corner—half walking, half running to keep up with the panting dog.

  Leopold was every dog’s revenge on mankind. It is humiliating not to be able to control your dog. It is a sign of weakness. Lack of willpower. Lack of perseverance. It proves that you’re lazy. Slothful. Sloth. One of the seven deadly sins: acedia (or accidie or accedie, from the Latin acedia and the Greek άκηδκία meaning neglect, indifference, nonchalance, carelessness). Rather like a writer who doesn’t write. But unlike a dog owner who can’t control his dog, a writer who doesn’t write can hide behind the excuse that he is thinking, that literature takes time, he can even allow himself a yawn or snigger of contempt at fellow authors who spew out a new book every year. Jon had used these very words himself just a few weeks ago, when asked by a journalist why it was taking him so long to write part three. Writer’s block? Might the whole notion of a trilogy have been a mistake in the first place? The journalist was a young female summer temp named Charlotte. She had a PhD in literature and had had two collections of poetry published. Jon had decided in advance not to sleep with her, she was twenty-seven, had milky thighs and a tattoo, but then he changed his mind. Her line of questioning was driving him crazy and maybe if he fucked her, she’d shut up.

  “Well, here’s what I think,” said Charlotte, “I think there is something very contrived about the whole notion of a trilogy. I mean, this is something you decide on beforehand, along with your publisher, before you’ve even written a single word, possibly simply in order to sell more books, sell the idea of this very big literary event, and I guess what I’m asking is if your trilogy was motivated more by commercial concerns than literary ones?”

  It is impossible to act as if everything is fine, when the dog is straining at the leash and setting the pace and won’t sit when you say Sit or heel when you say Heel. It is there for everyone to see: You’ve got no control over your dog, you’re a spineless little man. Ulysses’s dog didn’t question Ulysses’s authority. Argos didn’t tug and strain at the leash, but waited patiently for his owner for ten long years, while Ulysses himself fought and won a lengthy war and then slowly wended his way home to Ithaca. Homer, Shakespeare, Kafka, Pynchon, Jules Verne, Poe, Steinbeck. They all wrote about dogs. Literary dogs. Click click click. But Jon’s dog just strained at his leash and had no idea how to be a literary dog. Jon’s dog had no idea of how to be a dog, period.

  But here they were. His family. Liv calling, “Papa, Papa, I gathered some shells for you.” And Alma’s “FUCK YOU, MAMA.” He noticed that his daughter had yelled fuck you and Mama—such a tender word, mama—in the same breath.

  The thing was: Alma had cut off a chunk of her teacher’s hair. First Milla disappears and then Alma cuts her teacher’s hair off.

  Jon tried to block out the image of the teacher with hacked hair, a big nose, and red-rimmed eyes.

  Why, Alma?

  They had asked her again and again and all she did was shrug or say, “I don’t know why. Her hair was just really long.”

  It wasn’t as if they hadn’t talked to Alma about the difference between right and wrong, good and bad, white lies and black lies. Siri and Jon weren’t bad parents. Jon wasn’t a bad father. He loved his children.

  On his computer he wrote: I want to write about fathers and daughters.

  And then he wrote: Talk to her!

  But when did Alma start acting different? He pondered the word different and wondered if it was the right one. Was it because of Milla’s disappearance? No. Alma had always been … different. He had taken secret pride in her uniqueness, as had Siri. Jon was reminded of an incident six years earlier when Alma was seven and Siri was pregnant with Liv. They were sitting under the blue lamp in the kitchen, it was snowing outside, thick white snowflakes falling on the rough gray stone walls of the house.

  “To have an imagination,” Siri had said, “means that you like to make up stories, that you have worlds inside of you that you can travel to and live in, either alone or with other people. When Papa writes books, he makes up stories that other people can read and … and … then they become their stories too, just as Pippi Longstocking and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory are your stories—”

  “Papa doesn’t write books, he just pretends to,” Alma broke in.

  “That’s not true, Alma,” Siri replied. “What makes you say that? Papa has just had a big book published and now he’s writing a new one. You know that.”

  Alma shrugged and said, “But Astrid Lindgren wrote Pippi Longstocking, not me.”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “You said that Pippi Longstocking and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory were my stories.”

  “What I mean,” Siri said, “is that to have a good imagination is a valuable thing.” She laid her hand over her teacup. “Don’t put a lid on your imagination, because your imagination enables you both to make up stories and to identify with stories, identify with other lives, with how other people think and feel, and while the stories may not be true, well we know there’s no such thing as a girl or boy who’s strong enough to lift a horse, we know that Roald Dahl used his imagination to make up the story about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and yet in a way these stories are still true, as all good stories are, I mean.”

  Alma took a bite of her bread, looked at her mother, and said, “I didn’t understand any of that, now let’s not talk about it anymore.”

  “Oh yes, but we will,” Siri said, looking to Jon for help. “I’d like to say something about lying,” she went on, “I think we lie in order to achieve something, you tell a story that’s not true because you don’t want to or don’t dare to tell the truth, or because you want to trick someone, and it’s very important not to lie, the lies you tell become a kind of wall between you and other people. When you lie, you can really hurt other people and you can hurt yourself—”

  “Can I have some more chocolate milk?” Alma interrupted.

  “It’s a bit difficult, from what you’re saying, to understand the difference between a lie, which is a bad thing, and having imagination, which is a good thing,” Jon muttered, gazing at the ceiling.

  “What did Papa say?” Alma asked.

  “Papa didn’t say anything, really,” Siri replied. She took a sip from her teacup and shot Jon a furious look. “Or rather, Papa doesn’t think Mama is explaining things very well,” Siri went on, “and maybe Papa could explain it much better, although he’s not saying anything right now, is he? The thing is, Alma, it’s not okay to lie the way you did in school today.”

  This conversation had been prompted, Jon recalled, by the fact that Alma had told her sweet young teacher, Miss Molly, that she couldn’t go out and play with the other children because her mother was dying.

  “I want to rest in your arms,” Alma had said.

  “Are you tired, Alma?”

  “No, I’m not tired. But Mama’s tired.” Alma lowered her voice: “Mama has cancer and she’s going to die.”

  “My God, Alma?” young Molly whispered.

  “Mama has cancer, and now she’s going to die,” Alma continued. “First she’s going to lose all her hair. And then she’ll die. Very soon, probably. Can I rest in your arms now?”

  And Alma had flung her arms around her teacher. “There! I want to stay with you! Don’t leave me!”


  And Jon recalled Siri’s voice that same evening. The despair. The weariness. Had it started to come undone already then, long before the writing became so hard, long before their financial troubles, long before Milla’s disappearance, and long before Jenny started drinking again?

  “But how do you even know what cancer is?” Siri whispered as they sat there in the kitchen under the blue lamp. “Does someone you know have a mother or father who’s ill?”

  “Nope!” Alma said.

  “But why did you tell Miss Molly that your mother had cancer and was going to die?” Jon interjected.

  Alma had only recently learned to shrug. “Don’t know,” she said.

  “I don’t have cancer, you know,” Siri said. “I’m very healthy and I’m not going to die. Not yet. We’ll all die someday. But not for a very long time and … and people don’t always die of cancer.”

  “Are you worried that Mama or I will die?” Jon asked. “Was that why you told Molly that story? Because you were worried?”

  “Nope,” said Alma.

  “Well, why then?” Siri asked.

  Alma shrugged again, and said, “Can we just not talk about it anymore?”

  Soon Siri would come up and tell him that Alma had screamed “FUCK YOU, MAMA” at her, she would repeat that she simply couldn’t understand why Alma had picked up a pair of scissors and cut her teacher’s hair off, she would say that she dreaded the thought of more newspaper stories, first Milla’s disappearance, then Alma attacking her teacher, she would say that it had all started when Milla came to Mailund, the dreariness, no, the sadness, it was Milla’s fault, all of it, and then she would flop down onto the floor and say she didn’t see why Jenny couldn’t just die now. Jenny who could never take anything seriously, Jenny who had taken Alma with her in the car, drinking and driving, on that awful night when Milla disappeared. Jenny who had only laughed when she heard about the cutting-the-teacher’s-hair thing.