by Linn Ullmann
“I kind of understand why she did it,” was all she’d had to say.
“And her drinking,” Siri said. “I don’t know whether she’s drunk all the time now or what’s going on down there. Every time I call it’s Irma who answers the phone and she always says that Mama’s asleep or out or busy.”
And Siri would cover her face with her hands and say, “I can’t take this. I can’t take it. I can’t take it anymore.”
OCTOBER 23, 2008. To my wife.
What would you say if I told you I had been in the annex that morning after you had gone to sleep, and that I took her diary? I don’t know what made me do it. I really don’t. It was stupid. She had told me that she had a secret scrapbook—yes, that’s what she called it. And I was afraid that there might be something about her and me in there, but there was nothing. There was nothing, because it was nothing. I didn’t touch her. A kiss on the cheek. A few kind words. She wasn’t happy, you know. She wasn’t happy staying with us at Mailund. I felt sorry for her. You were angry with her all the time.
Anyway, I tucked the diary into my waistband, under my thick sweater, and took it up to the attic and quickly leafed through it. Lots of photographs. Quotations. Dried flowers. Tufts of grass.
She had faith apparently. There were many prayers and psalms in the book, this little one among them:
Burning in the night
In this world of darkness
So let us shine,
You in your small corner
And I in mine.
Do you remember how we used to sing to Liv and Alma when they were little? It was the only way for them to fall asleep.
I know you lie awake at night, wondering what happened to her. Nobody just disappears, you say. But they do, all the time. It happens all the time. You disappeared. I disappeared. We disappeared from each other. But nobody just disappears, you would say again, annoyed at me for belittling this dreadful thing that happened to Milla by comparing it to our own private little hell.
“I’m talking about literally disappearing,” you’d say. “Not figuratively disappearing.”
“People disappear all the time, literally and figuratively,” I’d reply then. “You know that.”
So I leafed through the diary and was relieved. Nothing about her and me. Not that there had been anything to write about. But you never know what’s going on in other people’s minds.
Here’s the thing: The person who appeared on almost every page was you! Did you know that she took pictures of you and stuck them in her book? Including a series of photos of you asleep in a wicker chair in the garden.
And then there were the pictures of the children. And of the house. And one of Irma having a surreptitious smoke behind the annex. Milla had obviously crept up on her and tried to take her picture without her being aware of it (like the pictures of you!), and Irma must have looked around just as Milla clicked the shutter. She looked very angry.
Do you think about Milla’s mother? About Amanda? I do all the time. I think about her father too, he was such a quiet man, just standing there, broken, beside his wife when she was shouting at us.
I want us to write that letter.
What do you think about when you think about Milla? I keep thinking about Amanda, can’t get her out of my mind, all alone, night after night, wandering from room to room, screaming out her grief.
The thing is, Siri: I got rid of the diary. I went into the woods when it was clear she was not coming back and I ripped it up and threw it in the lake.
If I told you all this, if I had let you read this note before I deleted it, would I have lost you then?
“WELL, WHAT IF I write something like this?” Alma said, looking at Jon.
October 29, 2008
Hi, Mrs. Lund,
Sorry about what happened. I didn’t mean it.
Yours sincerely,
Alma Dreyer, 8B
Alma was not speaking to her mother or her sister. Fuck, cunt, shit, prick, cock, stupid, ass, screw. Alma didn’t give a shit about all these people and all the shit that surrounded her wherever she went.
“Try again,” Jon said, and Alma wrote:
October 29, 2008
To Eva Lund,
My deepest apologies for the recent incident. I didn’t mean it. Best wishes for the rest of the autumn term!
Yours sincerely,
Alma Dreyer
Alma was not attending school at the moment. Expelled. Not wanted. Instead she found herself, along with Siri and Jon, in the office of a psychologist, with a policewoman present, being interrogated, as if Norway were a bloody dictatorship, for God’s sake. The policewoman and the psychologist looked exactly alike, like sisters, both wore big glasses and had curly hair and tremulous red-wine lips and soppy, school-milk eyes. They both puckered up their faces as a way of expressing concern, frowning so hard that you could crawl into one of the creases in their brows and hide there. The psychologist wore a white blouse and had ice-cream-cone breasts.
Alma found it impossible to answer any of their questions, the psychologist did most of the talking anyway, but sometimes she stopped talking and looked at Alma, as if waiting for her to say something, they all looked at her: the psychologist, the policewoman, her mother, her father. Why, Alma? But Alma had no answer. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to say anything, she just couldn’t, couldn’t explain what had happened, and in any case she kept getting distracted by those ice-cream-cone breasts.
“Why did you do it, Alma?”
Do what? Cut off the teacher’s hair? Well, it was bound to happen, really. They had been planning it for weeks. The whole class had been in on it, so the fact that Alma was sitting here now, having to take all the blame, was unfair and stupid—like everything else in this stupid world. Three thousand kroner she had been promised for doing it. No one believed she would actually dare to. No one else dared to. They all wanted to, though. It wasn’t that they didn’t like Eva Lund. Her English classes were actually pretty good. My name is Alma. I am thirteen years old, I live in Oslo, I attend a very nice Norwegian school, my hobbies are horseback riding and reading, my mother’s name is Ms. Brodal, my father’s name is Mr. Dreyer. I am a very happy student.
Alma shrugged, and said, “No idea!”
The psychologist lady’s nipples were totally hard, like Alma’s nipples after a cold dip in the sea in the summer at Mailund. Like the nipples of a bikini model. And this lady must have been fifty at least. It was crazy. Gravity, grave, the gravity. Did Alma understand the gravity of the situation? Did Alma have anything to say for herself? The breasts were pointing straight at her. Alma said, “Shouldn’t you really be wearing a bra when you interrogate children? Shouldn’t there be a law about that or something?”
October 29, 2008
Dear Mrs. Lund,
I am very sorry that I cut off your hair.
Sincerely, Alma Dreyer
Alma would never be going back to that school. That had been decided. She was no longer welcome there. That too had been decided. Alma and Jon and Siri would be going for sessions with the psychologist for an indefinite length of time. But not now, because now it was almost the end of the semester and the point was to think seriously about what she had done. All these decisions had been made on her behalf. And they wouldn’t be going to Mailund either. Milla disappears, everyone goes crazy, and then all of a sudden no one’s going to Mailund. Alma wanted to see her grandmother. The only person in the world she could talk to was Jenny. Not because she’s her grandmother (she’s not like other grandmothers—Jenny wears high heels, never leaves the house without lipstick on, and takes people seriously). And not because she’s so old (though she did turn seventy-five the day Milla disappeared). But because she understands what Alma says and does and thinks, without asking a whole lot of stupid questions. When Alma called to tell her she’d cut off her teacher’s hair, and that she might read about it in the paper the next day, Jenny said, “Well, sometimes you just can’t help yourself.”
“It’s always a good idea to write Dear so and so, rather than Hi, when you’re writing a proper letter,” Jon suggested. “Like this: Dear Eva Lund—”
“Oh, hello-o! Daddy! Come on! I’m not writing Dear. Nobody writes Dear. It’s not like we’re living in the seventeenth century!”
The last image Alma had of Eva Lund, before Alma pulled away, scissors and all, was of her teacher’s gaping mouth, from which weird sounds were emanating. Lips distorted, tongue, teeth, and all that soft, pink flesh, the bread crumbs in the corner of her mouth. It had been more of a howl than a scream. It lasted only a second or two. Then Eva Lund’s hands flew up to her face, covering her mouth, as if she had to physically stop her own screaming. She stared at Alma—first in disbelief, as if she really couldn’t credit what she was actually seeing: little dark-eyed Alma with a pair of scissors in one hand and her own thick, blond plait in the other. And then came the tears. Eva Lund’s eyes filled with two lakes that proceeded to flood over her cheeks.
But why? Not for the three thousand kroner.
Not because everybody had said she didn’t dare and she was determined to show them.
It was the hair itself, always braided in one long blond plait that dangled down Eva Lund’s back; that and the fact that it was indeed doable. That it was mind-bogglingly doable. Day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year she had sat in that classroom, looking at Eva Lund and her long plait. When Eva turned to face the board it was hard to look at anything else. Sometimes with a hair elastic at the tip, sometimes a little blue ribbon. How long would it take to cut it off (one million, two million, three million, four million, five million), five seconds tops, with a decent pair of scissors. She would have to do it when Eva was standing like that, with her back to the class, writing English vocabulary on the board, my head, my face, my arms, my hands, my tummy, my legs, my feet, my body, she would have to sneak up on her, she would have to grab hold of her, no, not of her but of the plait itself, give it a tug, and then snip, snip, snip. Mind-boggling, overwhelming, beautiful, doable.
As if it was all Alma’s fault. As if the whole class hadn’t been in on it. As if Theo hadn’t been sitting with his phone ready to film the whole thing. As if Nora and Sofie hadn’t uploaded the pictures that same day. As if the whole class hadn’t bet her that she wouldn’t dare.
October 29, 2008
Hi, Eva,
Sorry for what I did. I hope your hair will grow back quickly. I didn’t mean it. It wasn’t my idea. You’ve always been an incredibly nice teacher. Both in English and Norwegian. Especially Norwegian. It was fun that time we had to write short stories. My sincerest apologies again for what happened. Enjoy the rest of the school year!
Best wishes, Alma
“Spare me your smiley faces,” Siri said. “Have you still not grasped the gravity of the situation, Alma? What’s gotten into you?”
“Now we’re going to use the rest of this year to think and talk,” Jon repeated.
Siri had been very angry after the meeting with the psychologist and the cop. Siri had been angry about Alma’s remark about the breasts. She was angry about Eva Lund’s plait and she was angry because Alma had become this strange, baffling child.
Alma had heard her mother say to her father one evening when they thought she was asleep: “How did she become this strange, baffling child?”
Her mother had been crying. Her father too.
“I’ve never been so embarrassed! So bloody awful, all of it. What’s gotten into you, Alma! You’re so goddamned uncouth.”
“Couldn’t you just make up your mind to be angry about one thing at a time?” Alma said coolly.
Siri opened her mouth and screamed: “I’m angry with you for all of it, Alma! What’s gotten into you?”
And for the third time Jon said that everybody should just calm down and take time to think. At that point Siri whirled around and said Jon was a useless idiot who didn’t see the gravity of the situation and if he uttered the word think one more time she would kick him in the face.
Alma hadn’t meant to be uncouth. She had fully intended to be couth. But it had just slipped out of her. Those ice-cream-cone breasts had a life of their own under that thin, white blouse and they had distracted her. Alma hadn’t meant to be cheeky. It had, in her opinion, been a perfectly fair question: Isn’t there some law that obliges women psychologists to cover their breasts so they don’t stick straight out, pointing at people? Isn’t the whole idea of going to a shrink to calm the brain so that it will work better? She was a vulnerable child, for God’s sake. She was easily distracted. But those present had not considered her questions to be exactly constructive.
“I don’t see anything constructive coming out of this meeting,” the policewoman said, slipping some papers into a folder and slamming it shut. She looked at Jon and Siri.
“I suggest we meet again in January and that we use the next two months to think about things.” She looked at Alma. “And I would just remind you again, Alma, of how grave this episode at the school was and how seriously we, the police, are taking it. You have violated another human being in the most brutal way, you have committed a serious crime, do you know what that means? It means that if you were older we would have been looking at a sentence of anything up to two years. We’re talking prison here, Alma. And it’s really disheartening to have you coming here railing at everything. I’m disappointed and saddened by the outcome of this meeting.”
Alma didn’t know what railing meant. But she liked the word.
The lady psychologist had clammed up completely. Which was why the lady cop had had to step in and be disappointed and saddened and talk about what the correct outcome of constructive meetings ought to be. But the lady psychologist (who had talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked) had been turned princess-silent by Alma’s mention of the ice-cream-cone breasts.
There, now I’ve got you tongue-tied, Alma thought, but didn’t say.
Alma Ash-lad rails and rails anywhere else but Albury, Australia.
To tongue-tie means to render speechless, make inarticulate, leave at a loss for words. They had read a folktale in Norwegian class about a princess who was never lost for words until the Ash-lad came along and shut her up, and Eva Lund had opened the dictionary and read out loud the definition of tongue-tie—render speechless, make inarticulate, leave at a loss for words—and Alma thought they were lovely words, even if she didn’t completely understand them, render speechless, make inarticulate, leave at a loss for words. And then Eva Lund had split the class into groups of twos and threes and got them to play a game in which they all had to try to tongue-tie one another.
The story about the scissors incident appeared in the tabloids, it was on TV and all over the Internet. One newspaper, Dagbladet, had it splashed across the front page, as part of a series on violence in Norwegian schools: THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD GIRL ATTACKS ENGLISH TEACHER, it said in huge letters and inside the newspaper it said:
The plait was the 52-year-old teacher’s pride and joy. But the work of a lifetime was cut short when a 13-year-old student attacked her during an English class and hacked off a 42-centimeter chunk of her hair.
October 29, 2008
Hi Eva Leva Lund,
My mother and father, the police and the shrink, the principal, the teachers, the students, and all the people of Norway say that I have to write a letter to apologize. I hereby apologize. It said in the paper that your plait was 42 cm. long.
Best wishes from rolling, rounding, railing Alma
Dreyer, 8B
Siri and Jon had gone to the school to collect Alma at the principal’s office. Nothing was said. Alma had noticed that Siri seemed unsure of herself. There was the principal and there was Mama, unsure of herself. Mama, who always knew what to say and do in any situation, who always had a smile for everyone. That was what people said about Siri.
But when Siri and Jon arrived to collect Alma after the scissors incident,
Siri had no smiles for anyone. Siri was confused. Alma wasn’t to know that Siri had been inundated by memories and that when she saw the principal’s lowered brows and Alma’s averted face she recalled Alma’s first day of school.
Siri, Jon, and Alma, who had been six at the time, had been in the school yard, waiting for Alma’s name to be called out. Alma, in a red-and-white gingham dress over blue jeans, with her short dark hair and shining dark eyes, a new schoolbag hanging down her slender, violin-shaped back. Siri remembered Alma’s hand clutching hers. And when Alma’s name was called and it was her turn to cross the school yard and meet her teacher, the child reached for her mother and whispered in her ear: “I can do it, Mama. Let go of my hand.” And she had walked alone, across the school yard over to her teacher, shaken hands politely, and quietly lined up with the other children.
And now here we are, Siri thought, glancing over at her daughter, sitting in the wicker chair in the kitchen and refusing to speak to her. This strange child. When did it happen? When did we lose her?
October 29, 2008
Hi Mrs. Lund,
I’m sorry I cut off your hair. I hope it’ll grow back soon and that you’ll enjoy the rest of the semester.
Best wishes,
Alma Dreyer, 8B
Jon and Siri circled each other, each of them alone, each on their own planet, so it seemed, both loving that strange child. And little Liv with her flaxen locks hopped from planet to planet, singing and singing a song she had made up herself.
Siri sat down on the kitchen chair and wept and shouted at her daughter: “Don’t you realize, we can’t send that letter until you show that you’re sorry, and that you really mean it?”
HE TRIED WITH WORDS.
Jon told Alma she was the apple of his eye, although he didn’t know exactly what that meant, apple of my eye, or why he had chosen that particular expression.
Thirteen years old. Small and chubby. Short black hair. It was now the beginning of March, still very cold, and Jon had picked her up at school (yet another school) and taken her to a bakery for hot chocolate and cupcakes. They passed a table where a young woman was drinking coffee, with her baby on her lap. Jon looked at her, but the woman didn’t look at him. He noticed things like that. At another table some young girls giggled and dropped their eyes as he and Alma walked past them.