So much in life is unspoken.
* * *
Linda called again that evening. She was still happy, it was as though the happiness was a wave washing through her. Everything was fantastic. Vanja, Axel and Linn, Oslo, May 17, Independence Day. I had a warning on the tip of my tongue, I wanted to tell her to take it easy, but I didn’t have the heart, of course she should be allowed to be happy.
In Voss I didn’t get much work done, Heidi and John wouldn’t let me sit in the loft writing, at least not for long periods at a time. I had a whole day to myself when Yngve and his girlfriend, Tone, took all the kids to her mountain cabin, but that was it. In the house below Yngve’s lived Espen, it was strange, this was how we had lived so many years ago in Bergen, him below and me above, and when I saw him in the garden I shouted to him and he came up for a cup of coffee and a long chat. He’d spent the last years writing a tome about dissection. We shared a fascination with the baroque and the physical, but our attitudes to it diverged: Espen was more rational; I was more irrational. He was a poet; I was a prose writer. Perhaps what was open in him was closed in me, and vice versa. Nevertheless we had been friends for twenty years, that was what mattered most. In the evening he came over with a bottle of red wine, we sat with Yngve and drank and listened to music from the eighties. The next morning I felt so sick I couldn’t get out of bed. I threw up out of the children’s sight, told them I had the flu, was unable to get up until late afternoon, when I took them to a shopping mall and bought some May 17 clothes. They didn’t know what Constitution Day was but were happy anyway, they had a sense that it was an important day. At home Heidi got a splinter the size of a forefinger in her foot. She screamed so loudly it must have been heard all over Voss. She was afraid of everything that stirred in nature and everything to do with blood and pain, though felt perfectly at home in the social world. There was no question of my removing the splinter, she howled at the mere mention of it. But Ylva, whom she looked up to, was finally allowed to take it out, by the following day there was already a story Heidi could tell, on par with the time she was pushed through the airport in a wheelchair.
On May 17 we stood in the rain in Vossevangen watching the procession, Heidi and John with a Norwegian flag in one hand and an ice-cream cone in the other. I had written only a couple of pages, about Hermann Broch, of what looked like was going to become an essay. Tonje, who lived in Bergen, turned up one day with a tape recorder, she was going to make a documentary about being a character in my books, she asked if I would mind answering a few questions and I couldn’t refuse. She had replied to my e-mail about Book 5 a few weeks earlier and said she didn’t want anything deleted. I answered all her questions and read out some passages from the novels. She left, we stayed there a few more days, and then we flew to Malmö. A couple of hours after we arrived home the handle on the door started moving up and down and I realized that it was Vanja trying to open it.
“Here they are!” I called out. Heidi and John sprang to their feet in the living room and ran into the hall as the door opened and Vanja and Linda appeared. Vanja was full of her experiences she wanted to tell us about, but also how much she had missed her brother and sister, they had never been apart for so long.
“Hi,” I said to Linda. “How was the journey?”
“It was fine,” she said. “But I’m a bit tired.”
“Have a rest, then,” I said.
She nodded.
“But first we need to eat something. Do we have anything here?”
I shook my head.
“Shall we get Chinese takeaway?”
“Yes.”
I took the elevator down, bought five boxes, brought them back up, placed the contents on five plates, called the children, who didn’t come, so Linda and I sat eating at the table alone.
She was on her way down. The joy had gone, her energy had gone, she ate facing me, quiet. But, I reasoned, she might be tired after the traveling and the week away.
“I did hardly any writing up there,” I said. “So I’ll really have to go for it over the next few weeks. That’s all right, isn’t it?”
She nodded.
“At least when Mom and Sissel come,” she said. “But that’s after you go to Iceland, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said, looking at her.
“Do you have to go? Couldn’t you cancel it?”
“Are you crazy? I can’t do that. And it’s only one day. One day, Linda.”
“OK,” she said.
“If I can just get down to writing now, over the next few weeks, I’ll be done for good. Then I’ll have all the time in the world. I just need to stick at it. Then it’s over.”
“Yes,” she said.
* * *
Before leaving for Iceland I had to sort out the details around the cabin, so I rented a car and drove there one morning at the end of May. Initially I sat down on the doorstep, smoked a cigarette, and studied the mess. The first job I had to do was to remove the pile of planks, drywall, pipes, and all the other scrap from the old bathroom. The car I’d rented was a Mercedes, it was brand new, and I covered the bottom of the large boot with garbage bags before loading up with trash and driving to the dump several kilometers away. It took six trips to clear the pile.
I took another smoke break on the step.
The lawn which only two years before had been flawless was now riddled with weeds. There was no longer any separation between bed and lawn. Moss grew beneath the tall hedges, and elsewhere, the soil was like an open wound. The white wall of the cabin had a dark coating, several of the wooden boards were rotten at the bottom. The paint had peeled off the window frames. One pane was cracked. The pile of building materials and junk was gone, but the soil and sand the workmen had dug up when they were laying new pipes formed enormous bumps in the grass. By the hedge there were still two buckets of shit from the outhouse days, and it had definitely ripened in the last year. I had to empty them today. And the boxes of apples in the cellar, which I’d optimistically stored two years before, had to be disposed of.
The grass had to be cut.
The hole had to be filled.
The heap of rotting garden waste had to be removed.
That would make a difference at least.
I flicked my cigarette into the hole and opened the door to the small shed where the lawn mower was kept. Took the coiled cord, put one end in the socket, the other in the mower, lifted it out, and started it.
* * *
It was Linda who had been behind the purchase of the cabin. During one of her sleepless energy-charged nights she had come across the advertisement online. The cabin had been built at the beginning of the twentieth century, it was really beautiful, a bit Swiss in style, while the garden was large and trim, with two old apple trees, rosebushes, a myriad of flower beds and massive, two-meter-high hedges around three sides. Linda had been saying for a while that we should have one; a couple at the nursery school had one, they went there every weekend of the spring and autumn, grew their own vegetables and berries, and spent large parts of the summer there. With three children and an apartment in the center of town, we had to take them for a walk in the park as if they were dogs, we absolutely should have a cabin in the country.
I should have loved her for that because she was dreaming about our family when she was talking about it. About a happy life, hanging up the washing as the children played around her on a summer afternoon. About a woman’s hands covered with soil, about children who had their own little vegetable patches, who had their own paddling pool, and about her husband who cut the grass with a push lawn mower in the evening. Somewhere in the open, our own plot, our own little house, that was what she dreamed about. I should have loved her for it, but I didn’t, I was just annoyed.
She showed it to me in the morning. Sitting on the chair in front of the computer clicking on the photos. I leaned over her.
“Isn’t it great?” she said. “So beautiful. Almost like a doll’s house. But there are two flo
ors. There are bedrooms upstairs. The inside has recently been done up.”
She turned to me.
“What do you think?”
“Well, it looks nice,” I said. “But we don’t have any money. Have you considered that?”
“I can get some. I will get some.”
“How are you going to do that?”
“I just will. I want that place.”
“It’s a lot of work though. I don’t have any time. Out of the question.”
“I do. I can look after it. You won’t need to do anything.”
“And if we could get hold of that much money,” I said, “we should buy a car. We certainly need one.”
“We don’t need a car in town. And definitely not if we have a cabin.”
“I can’t talk you out of it, I can see. And it is nice. But, as I said, we have no money.”
“Can’t we go out and take a look at it at least?”
“Fine by me.”
There followed a few days of hectic activity on Linda’s part. She made an appointment at the bank, but that led nowhere since neither Linda nor I were credit worthy, that is, once we hadn’t paid some bill or other and had ended up on a list that made it impossible for us to get a loan or a cell phone contract or to rent a car, except for with Europcar, who didn’t check the list and whom I therefore used whenever we needed one.
It was humiliating to sit there in the bank, feeling as if I were a criminal with a record, while the lady wearing a pantsuit, blouse, and gold jewelery had no intention of giving us a loan. Linda called her father, who not so long ago had sold his place and was happy to contribute with a hundred thousand kronor as he had never given her anything before. I called my mother, she could take out another mortgage on her house, she said, checked, and called back the next day: she could lend us a hundred and twenty thousand.
So we were a hundred thousand short.
A hundred thousand!
Where were we going to get that from?
I received a monthly stipend of fifteen thousand. On top of which I read manuscripts for a publishing house, who paid ten thousand a month. That made twenty-five thousand, which was seventeen thousand after tax. Although that was a lot of money, it stretched just far enough to cover the rent for the apartment – ten thousand – and there were five of us in the family. If there was a crisis I could call the publishing house. I had no idea how much I owed them, I only knew that it was a lot because at various times I’d received a fixed monthly advance. But I didn’t dare ask about my debt. It had been three years since my previous novel came out, and I was still nowhere near a new one. I closed my eyes to anything related to money and the future. By and large this approach worked, that was the main thing.
But a hundred thousand!
“Asking won’t hurt anyway,” Linda said. “The worst that can happen is they say no.”
“OK,” I said, and e-mailed Geir Gulliksen.
We want to buy a cabin, I wrote, the idea being that I’ll be able to work there, however we are a hundred thousand Swedish kronor short. I know I have had a large advance already, and I won’t be upset if you say no. But please consider it.
Geir sent the inquiry to his boss, Geir Berdahl, who called me the following day to ask what kind of place this was. I explained. He said I could borrow ninety thousand Norwegian kroner. Would that be all right? Oh yes, thank you very much, I said. That’s too much. Thank you again.
After I hung up, I was racked with guilt. The publishers were putting themselves out so much for me, they always had, and I was exploiting the situation, bringing family matters into the financial arrangements, allowing them to go out on a limb to help me buy a country cabin, which I didn’t even want.
Now I would have to work there. That was for sure. I would have to write a lot there.
Linda was happy. We went to see the cabin, a woman in her midfifties met us, she had decorated inside the cabin with great taste, everywhere there were tiny maritime features, wooden sculptures of gulls and lighthouses, mobiles of seabirds, little ornamental cases of shells, balls of green yarn, and fishing nets. The furniture was simple and old, a nice couch with a lovely dresser, both painted blue and white, and two white wicker chairs, plus a dining table with chairs. It felt as if we were in a cabin on one of the skerries and not in the middle of an enormous subdivided community outside the third-biggest town in Sweden.
The girls loved it. After a few minutes hidden behind Linda’s legs they thawed and ran around the garden. The owner said she had put so much work into the cabin and the garden, and she liked it so much she didn’t really want to sell it. No, selling it was the last thing she wanted to do. But she was moving to another town and couldn’t keep it any longer. She said she was pleased we had children, knowing that there would be children playing in her garden was a comfort.
She wanted 290,000 kronor for it. When we got home, we called her and offered 320,000. There were other people interested and I thought it was best to frighten them off right away to avoid a bidding war. She called back the same evening and accepted the offer.
And that was how we became cabin owners.
* * *
Linda pictured herself in a straw hat walking around the garden tweaking the flowers, I suspected, perhaps lying in a hammock in the shade and reading, the children around her, barefoot and happy, and on autumn evenings pulling up the carrots, almost colorless in the falling dusk, a pot of vegetable soup on the stove in the little kitchen. The children’s excited voices and red cheeks before they fell asleep on the little mezzanine floor while she and I sat in the little living room with a glass of red wine. It wasn’t like that, reality was bearing down on us like a juggernaut, all our dreams were crushed, we were arguing, the children were defiant, the garden was dug up to lay pipes and no one filled in the holes, so there were piles of soil and sand everywhere, and where there weren’t any it was overgrown. The woman who’d sold it to us came back a few years later to say hello, and when she saw the state the garden was in her eyes had welled up, we were told. The neighbors scowled at us, the amount of work that had to be done increased to such an extent that we began to keep our distance because I’d been against the purchase from the beginning and made it a condition that I’d have nothing to do with it, Linda had to take care of it. She couldn’t, it was beyond her now, and so there we were, with our shame and guilty consciences, her with a dream in tatters as well. Even the dream of barefoot children and a carefree life in the open air requires work.
On this afternoon in May 2010, as I pushed the mower down one side of the lawn, if indeed what I was cutting merited such an exalted term, we’d had the place for two and a half years, and nothing had gone as planned. It turned out to be difficult to have three such small children there. The staircase to the second floor was so steep that we constantly had to keep watch to make sure they didn’t crawl up, and if we closed the door to be outside, one of us had to occupy John while the other kept an eye on the girls, so there was no question of relaxing, which despite everything we were able to do at home, where they had their rooms and toys and knew how to occupy themselves. Then I was always overcome by an immense feeling of claustrophobia there; I didn’t like having people around me on all sides. In town I had no problem with other people, they had nothing to do with me, I had nothing to do with them. In town we were strangers to one another, here we were neighbors, we were supposed to greet one another and exchange a few words when we met, and it was impossible to do anything without being seen. To be seen as a random stranger was quite different from being seen as a particular individual, a stern forty-year-old father, and I couldn’t bear that look, it made my brain boil, made it impossible for me to relax, I saw myself all the time, and if the children shouted, or cried and started fighting, it wasn’t the shouts, the tears, or the fights I reacted to but being seen by others. I had internalized these other people, and I hated it. Oh, how I hated it. My head churned, I saw myself and I saw myself seeing my children, and nothing was
as it was, everything was tied in knots, I was the most unfree person in the world. And I had voluntarily locked myself in here! On the other hand, it was a dream, Linda’s dream, I owed it to her to live it out.
Up at six one spring morning, it is damn cold outside, the grass is wet, and there is nothing to do inside the doll’s house, except wait for the hours to drag by until ten, then we can go to the shops and afterward maybe make some lunch.
If only the sea had been nearby! Or a forest. Some open expanse.
During the summer we were informed that sewage pipes were going to be laid for all the cabins. It would cost twenty thousand kronor. In the fall the whole garden was dug up and a pipe laid to the outside toilet, a small room with its own door. We had to get ahold of a plumber who could build a new toilet there and, somehow, find the money for this and the excavations. It definitely wouldn’t come in at under forty thousand. Linda borrowed the money from the bank, her mother was our guarantor. The fence was taken down and the front garden dug up, in addition the lack of maintenance had already begun to have consequences. It wasn’t my responsibility, I had been absolutely unambiguous in that respect: if we buy a cabin it is your responsibility, you are the one who will have to take care of it, I haven’t got the time, I’d said, and because I’d said it, I wasn’t going to go back on my word – except to cut the grass. As the neglect slowly spread I gloated, this was her responsibility and hers alone. I had washed my hands of the matter. No one could say I hadn’t warned her! Or that I hadn’t predicted it would turn out like this.
Linda’s mother, who at this time was staying with us for long stretches, managed to turn up a gardener from the Balkans, who leveled the lawn and sowed new grass, and a plumber from North Africa, who was able to do the pipe job for a song, relatively speaking. How she found them I have no idea, but she was the kind who chatted to everyone, such as our neighbors, in a few days she knew them better than I did and I’d been there for more than two years. So by the spring the garden looked nice again, and we had a bathroom with a shower. I didn’t care that when I turned on the hot-water boiler the shower wouldn’t stop or that the pipes weren’t discreetly tucked away alongside the wall, but stood out in all their chrome-metal glory and in places resembled the cryptic instruments in a Cronenberg film. We just had to accept it, we couldn’t look after the place, we couldn’t live out that dream, it wasn’t for us. When would I ever sow carrots with the children? When would I ever weed the beds? The claustrophobia began to throb in me the moment we got into the bus to go there. We went there less and less, and in May 2010, when I was cutting the grass with the red cord wrapped around my shoulder, under a dry, gray sky, we hadn’t been there since the previous autumn, and even then only sporadically, a few hours one sunny day perhaps, because it was a vicious circle: the more neglected it became, the less time we wanted to spend there, and the less time we were there the more neglected it became.
My Struggle, Book 6 Page 120