“Didn’t he wear a paper bag over his head?”
“No, no. A paper hat. He had a whistle as well. Here comes the Elephant Man! he’d shout, and blow his whistle when he was out for a walk. It was never a dull moment with him.”
“You’d better get off to bed. You clearly need a rest.”
“You’re right,” I said, getting to my feet. “Have you got everything you need? Sheets, bedding?”
“All sorted.”
“Goodnight, then. Sleep as long as you want in the morning, no need to get up with us.”
“Will do. Goodnight.”
I went inside, paused in the doorway of the kitchen for a second, decided to leave the dishes until the morning, disconnected the phone, and went into the dim light of the bedroom, where Vanja and Heidi lay with eyes closed, their breathing regular and heavy, like two little animals. Vanja was lying crosswise. I lifted her up and laid her down straight, side by side with Heidi. She didn’t stir. I got undressed and lay down next to them. How small they are, I thought to myself, staring at them for a moment before closing my eyes and drifting into sleep, the night inside us that seems so vast and boundless when we are within it yet can never be greater than ourselves.
* * *
A few minutes after five thirty John was standing by the side of the bed shouting at me to wake up. I put on my clothes from the day before and took him into the kitchen. Outside, the sun was coming up over the horizon. Its rays were sharp and penetrated the room. Everything became visible in its light, the bits of food on the floor, the trail of coffee stains that ran from the counter on the right to the sink on the other side, the globules of fat that specked the surface of the sausage water in the saucepan, the two bloated sausages that lay at the bottom, split open, the two empty milk cartons next to it, the open packet of margarine, so soft it was almost a fluid, its yellow color much deeper now than when it had been taken from the fridge. The Wetex cloth, stiff as a shell when dry, draped over the lip of metal that separated the twin bowls of the sink, like some odd fitting that was a part of it, originally white, now a grimy gray. The glasses and cups, plates, and bowls that were piled up in the sink, spilling out over the stainless-steel draining board like some encroaching plant of glass and crockery. The two empty jars of pasta sauce left unrinsed behind the tap, insides red with what remained of their contents. The transparent plastic cheese wrapper, which to a distracted eye made it look like the label with the logo on it hung in midair above the chopping board that had been pushed back against the wall. The beetroot juice the wood had absorbed. The withered plants in the window, dead for months, so much a fixture now that no one thought of throwing them out anymore. The table, with its glasses and plates, the jug of water with its tiny bubbles, the dried-up crumbs and other detritus that pointed to where the children sat, the empty bags of fruit that lay dumped, like little hangars of plastic among the drawings and drawing pads, crayons and felt pens, not to mention the two shelves on the wall next to the window, swelling like some coral reef with objects the children had collected and kept over the past couple of years, from sweet dispensers in the shape of princesses or Disney figures, little boxes full of beads, bead boards, sticks of glue, toy cars, and watercolors, to oddments of jigsaw puzzles, bits of Playmobil, letters and bills, dolls, and some marbles with little dolphins inside that Vanja had wanted when we were in Venice the previous summer. The shelves were a kind of station; once something was put there it was out of circulation and stayed there. We had a number of such places where the lives of objects came to a sudden end, most notably the long counter in the hall, presumably once used as a kind of sideboard for serving food before it was taken into the dining room, since it had those kinds of cupboards above and below, which were now crammed with all manner of stuff we must once have thought we needed but no longer knew we had, some three cubic meters of discarded lamps, used and unused lightbulbs, candles, piles of printer paper, rolls of undeveloped film, heaps of photographs, loose as well as collected in the little yellow folders in which they had been delivered, cookery books, assorted children’s clothing, woolen tights from winter, odd socks, odd gloves, a pink Hello Kitty rain hat, a number of T-shirts, most likely outgrown, a hoodie, a thick sweater, napkins bought in abundance from IKEA, flowerpots, cables from old computers, extension cords, ballpoints and lighters, old paperbacks, washed but unironed tablecloths, invitations and advertising brochures, glossy weeklies, unused sparklers, a collapsed rice-paper lamp shade, the children’s birthday train with wagons with numbers on them in which you could put little candles, balloons and whistles, bits of their wooden train set, including a station building and a locomotive, drawing pads, DVDs, CDs, tea towels – all in all a mountain of stuff that from time to time sent Linda into panic mode, the sudden feeling of utter chaos it could bring about would be too much for her. Not infrequently she came home with organizers and storage boxes to help her get on top of things; different boxes for different objects, a shelf for my mail, another for hers, with our names on them, like other people had, people who were tidier than us, but these systems would collapse after only a few days and everything would be chaotic again. It could get on my nerves too, and about once every six months or so I went through the lot, sorting and tossing, whittling down these bulging piles, only for them to swell again within weeks. It was as if they were alive, drawing objects toward them and consuming them, growing bigger and stronger all the time.
Happily, the children didn’t seem to be bothered. Conceptions of inner and outer chaos were not yet relevant to them, they approached the world as an unproblematic place most of the time, which was probably right, I thought to myself now. The material world was neutral, we wove our inner psychological landscapes into it, coloring it with our conceptions until it couldn’t help but be messy. But it was a practical issue, nothing to do with morals. We weren’t bad people for being messy. Our messiness was not a sign of poor moral fabric. I could tell myself this, but it didn’t help, the feelings it stirred in me were too strong; as I moved around in all our mess it was as if it were accusing me, accusing us, we were bad people, unfit to be parents.
“What do you say, John, do you think I should clean things up a bit while you’re having your breakfast?”
He looked up at me and nodded. I let the blinds down, lifted him into his chair, gave him his cornflakes and milk, which he seemed happy with, and began emptying the dishwasher.
“Coffee, Daddy,” said John.
“Yes, in a minute,” I said.
“No, now!” he said, jabbing his spoon in the direction of the coffeemaker.
“All right, then,” I said, and switched it on. The shadows from the blinds were slats of darkness on the table, between them the light shone with particular intensity, almost scintillating, so strongly that the shadows had no definite boundaries but were as if diluted by the light at their edges.
John kept looking at the coffeemaker then back at me as I finished emptying the dishwasher and began rinsing the plates and glasses, cups and saucepans, before loading it again and switching it on.
There was a patter of bare feet against the linoleum in the hall. Heidi appeared in the doorway and blinked at us with bleary eyes.
“Hi, Heidi,” I said. “Did you sleep well?”
She shook her head as she came in and sat down on her chair. Her hair was sticking up, her face streaked, as if it had yet to regain its elasticity after the inactivity of night.
I put a bowl and spoon out in front of her, the box of cornflakes and the carton of milk. I got myself a cup, poured the now brewed coffee into a thermos and took it out with me onto the balcony, where I sat down with a smoke, leaving the door half open so I’d know if anything happened inside. Gazing out over the kilometers of rooftops I remembered I’d had a dream. I’d been sitting in the same place. The sky had been black and crisscrossed by planes. Some had been very close, great jumbo jets with every detail of their fuselages plain to see, others merely lights passing beneath the stars.
The feeling it had given me had been intense and fantastic. Fantastic, fantastic it had been, and then I’d woken up.
I leaned back and put my feet up on the railing. The sun, bright and blazing, had warmed up the air around me considerably, and its rays burned against my face, sparkling in the window, the tabletop, and the shiny metal of the thermos.
Low-flying planes sweeping between tall buildings, sometimes skyscrapers, sometimes ordinary towers, were something I dreamed about recurringly, perhaps two or three times a year. Sometimes I was on board myself, other times I looked at them from a distance. Even in the dream I found myself marveling at how beautiful and unreal they were. Occasionally, I saw great plane disasters too, entire scenes in which they came hurtling from the skies to crash into a building or a street, exploding into flame. For that reason, the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 was like watching a dream to me. All the elements were there. The skyscrapers, the great shining airplanes, the impact, the flames. But while these dreams were oddly concentrated, always centered on some single point around which all my feelings in some way seemed to be gathered, the true-life event was quite differently open and expansive, and I felt I could both remove myself from it and connect with it.
The job of the terrorists was to penetrate into our subconscious. This had always been the aim of writers, but the terrorists took it a step further. They were the writers of our age. Don DeLillo said this many years before 9/11. The images they created spread around the globe, colonizing our subconscious minds. The tangible outcome of the attack, the numbers of dead and injured, the material destruction, meant nothing. It was the images that were important. The more iconic the images they managed to create, the more successful their actions. The attack on the World Trade Center was the most successful of all time. There weren’t that many dead, only a couple of thousand, as against the six hundred thousand who died in the first two days of the Battle of Flanders in the autumn of 1914, yet the images were so iconic and powerful that the effect on us was just as devastating, perhaps more so, since we lived in a culture of images.
Planes and skyscrapers. Icarus and Babel.
They wanted into our dreams. Everyone did. Our inner beings were the final market. Once they were conquered, we would be sold.
I took another slurp of coffee, wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, stood up, pressed an index finger against one nostril, and with a swift, forceful exhalation expelled a glob of mucus from the other out over the balcony.
“You do your morning ablutions al fresco, I see,” said Geir. He was standing in the open doorway watching me. “Lovely!”
“I’m glad you appreciate it,” I said, and sat down again. “I did that on a beach in Greece once when I was nineteen. There was an American girl lying there sunbathing, she turned to her friend and said, Did you see that? How disgusting!”
“She wasn’t far off the mark, if you ask me,” he said. “Is there any coffee around?” His voice was rusty, it had been idle all night.
“Sure,” I said. “Cups are in the cupboard in the kitchen. Coffee in the thermos here.”
I was about to go in and check on Heidi and John, and I would have to get Vanja up at some point as well, but I stayed put, thinking it would be rude to leave him on his own just as he’d come out to chat. I shoved the thermos across the table, stubbed my cigarette out on the side of the upturned flowerpot, whose terra-cotta red was almost obliterated by a blackness of soot and ash, like the wall of a fire-ravaged house, then dropped the end into the little hole in the top. But I hadn’t done it properly, smoke began to curl up into the air. I reckoned it would burn out on its own, and lit another as Geir came out and sat down.
“Are they all right in there?” I said.
“Think so,” he replied. Blinking up at the bright sun, he unscrewed the lid of the thermos, removed it, and poured himself a cup of coffee.
“You don’t need to take the lid off every time,” I said. “All you have to do is unscrew it a bit.”
“Engineer all of a sudden, are we?” he said, leaning back and putting the cup to his lips.
“I’m an engineer of the soul,” I said.
“That’s the smuggest thing I’ve heard anyone say in ages,” he said, and closed his eyes completely after taking a slurp. He opened them again and looked at me as he put his cup down on the table. “I’d say garbageman of the soul would be more accurate.”
“Refuse disposal officer, if you don’t mind,” I said. “You know they call the garbage room in the basement here the Milieu Room, don’t you? That makes ‘milieu manager of the soul’ the most correct title.”
“Milieu consultant of the soul.”
“That’s it.”
“Your ashtray’s on fire, in case you hadn’t noticed,” he said.
“So I see,” I said. “I was hoping it was going to put itself out. Doesn’t look like it though.”
I lifted the flowerpot up, and all the cigarette butts that had been crammed inside its thick earthenware walls tumbled out into the saucer. A couple of them were still burning and I stubbed them hard before trying to put the pot back on top. The sheer number of cigarette butts meant I couldn’t get it to stand level, even when I tried grinding it into place. Eventually, I lifted it up again, swept the cigarette butts into a pile with my hand, and put one edge of the pot down on the saucer, flicked the cigarette butts that had already fallen down again back into place, and was finally able to put it back like it had been before.
“Looks like it’s going to be a nice day,” said Geir. “What should we do? Any suggestions?”
“We could go somewhere, I suppose,” I said. “After I’ve taken the kids to the nursery.”
“Sounds good. Not to a beach, though. I hate that.”
“A town, then? Lund? Trelleborg?”
“Lund. I’ve always wanted to go to Lund.”
“Lund it is, then.”
I got to my feet and stubbed the half-smoked cigarette against the side of the ashtray.
“Let me get them dressed and ready.”
* * *
When I went inside and into the hall, Heidi was standing on the little kids’ chair in front of the cupboard, rummaging through the top shelves. She was the only one of the three who chose what she wanted to wear. Now it was the blue top with the white flowers that she was after, and a denim skirt, apparently, with a pair of pink Hello Kitty tights.
“That’ll look nice,” I told her as she climbed down and put her arms through the holes of the sleeveless top.
“Take the chair back into your room when you’re finished,” I said, and cast a glance into the kitchen, where Njaal was sitting without a shirt on, his legs dangling in the air as he ate his cornflakes, Geir leaned against the counter watching him, arms folded against his chest. I went into the living room, where John was sittting on the sofa dropping a buzzing locomotive onto the cushion next to him, picking it up, dropping it again.
“Time to get dressed,” I said. “Stay there and I’ll get you some clothes.”
I found a yellow T-shirt with a red ladybug on it in the cupboard, and a pair of green pirate-style trousers with a drawstring at the waist, took a clean diaper from the bathroom, where I also wet a facecloth with warm water and rubbed some soap into it, washing him as he stood with legs apart on the floor in front of me to get rid of the faint, yet pungent, salty odor of urine left by his diaper. It was a smell that stigmatized, belonging to children whose parents were less than rigorous with hygiene. Once it was done, I went out and dropped the used diaper into the bin under the sink, took a towel back in with me, dried him, put his clean diaper on, and his clothes, and straightened his hair with my hand.
“There you go!”
“Socks!” he said.
“You can put your sandals on today, the weather’s nice. You don’t need socks.”
“I want socks!”
I went into their room and rummaged around for two matching socks in the drawer. There must have been forty socks or
more, and amazingly no two seemed to be alike. I took them all out and dumped them on Heidi’s bunk, laying them out as if on a shop counter to be sold, and began sorting through them systematically. Yellow, green, blue, red, pink, purple, turqoise, brown, white, black, gray, orange, and every shade in between. Striped, spotty, patterned. Some with cars on them, others with rabbits or dogs or cats. But all were different. I had to go into the bedroom and rummage through the pile of laundry on the floor. Socks were always at the bottom, they percolated down through the layers, as if consciously seeking the ground, and after finding five I took them back into the children’s room to see if they matched up with any of those I’d laid out. Luck was on my side. I now had a single pair of purple socks. While they were slightly on the feminine side for John in my view, I took them into the living room with me and put them on his outstretched feet.
I found a dark red sweatshirt with long sleeves and a unicorn with long hair and big eyes on the front, and a pair of thin, mint-green cotton pants, and took them into the bedroom, where Vanja was still asleep, the duvet kicked aside. Her spine was visible, a faint rise under the skin of her slightly hunched back, from whose upper part the shoulder blades curved away on each side of the fair hair that veiled her head and neck so finely and was such a radically different material to the skin. The hair was to the body rather like the petals were to the stalk of a flower.
I lifted her onto my lap. Her skin was so warm, the way it is only after a night’s sleep. I held her tight with my arms, opened the neck of the sweatshirt with my hands and put her head through. She put her hands into the sleeves herself and wriggled them into place, then pulled the bunched-up garment down over her belly. I put her feet into the trouser legs, first one, then the other, and inched the trousers up to her hips, then she arched her back, I gripped the waistband and pulled them up over her bottom.
“There we are,” I said. “Do you want a macka to take with you and eat on the way?”
She shook her head.
My Struggle, Book 6 Page 31