Encircling 2

by Carl Frode Tiller

  You always went along with Berit to those sewing-club evenings, and willingly at that. In fact you insisted on going with her, because this was long before sugar was considered a health hazard and there was always a good chance that one of the aunties—as you called the ladies of the sewing circle—would slip you a chocolate or two, if you just sat on their knee or gave them a hug in exchange. And you enjoyed impressing them with all the things you knew and could do, not so much because this earned you more chocolates, but because you loved their reaction, you positively beamed when they gazed at you wide-eyed and exclaimed that they didn’t know how you did it. “Fancy that, only four and he can do a backward roll already. Oh, you’ll have to be a gymnast, David, that’s for sure.” That’s the sort of thing they said to you. But when you weren’t watching they sniggered at you, their bodies shaking with laughter, because being fond of chocolate and sweeties has its price and your backside was so solid that you sometimes had difficulty lifting it over your head to roll over. Oh, Paula says, it could be quite hilarious, to see you lying on the floor heaving and straining, until you were red in the face.

  You knew, of course, that you weren’t any good at gymnastics, you knew very well that you weren’t particularly good at drawing or reading or any of the other things that the aunties praised you to the skies for, you’d always known that. But for a long time you did believe that they thought you were, and when it began to dawn on you that they didn’t something happened to you. When someone receives a lot of undeserved praise it’s usually because he is regarded as a poor soul who needs a bit of a boost, and when you realized that the aunties didn’t mean all the nice things they said to you, you began to think that they actually felt a little sorry for you and that in turn seemed to fill you with shame. The compliments and the praise and all the little rewards they showered you with were obviously well-meant, but as time went on they appeared to leave you with a feeling of being looked down on and underrated, to the point where you no longer seemed able to cope with being praised. It was as if you found it impossible to believe that such compliments could be sincerely meant, Paula says, and if she made the mistake of congratulating you on something you’d done you could get quite angry and upset.

  But it wasn’t just compliments you couldn’t cope with. Suddenly you also started avoiding, nay, fleeing from events in which you played or rather, were supposed to play a central part. Like your birthdays, for example. No matter what Berit said you refused to celebrate your own birthday. All you wanted was for this day—a day that every other six- or seven- or eight-year-old looked forward to all year—to be treated as a perfectly ordinary day with fish pie for dinner, as Paula put it. To begin with your mother thought it was just something you were saying; that you were actually as keen to celebrate your special day as any other child would be, but that you were possibly worried that someone whom you really wanted to come to your party would turn down the invitation or that some of the guests might think your party wasn’t good enough or something. But on the one occasion when she arranged a surprise party for you and you got back from Johanna Mørek’s, where you’d been sent to borrow some butter, to find seven kids all dressed in their best waiting for you in a living room hung with balloons and streamers, she realized that you meant what you said. Because you simply turned on your heel in the doorway and left. Everyone was dispatched to look for you, but you had disappeared into the forest and you didn’t come back until you were sure all of the party guests would have been sent home.

  It was also around this time that you started having spells when you refused to speak to grown-ups, Paula says. You were as talkative as always when you were with other children, but the minute an adult appeared you clammed up completely. You wouldn’t even answer questions requiring a simple yes or no. Berit found this very frustrating, she would lose her temper and tell you off, threatening to thrash you and take away various privileges. Or she would be sweet and gentle and try to coax you into talking. Either that or she would get upset and plead with you to answer when people spoke to you. But none of it did any good. You were bright and cheerful and behaved just as you always did, but not a sound passed your lips. This could go on for weeks and then, as suddenly as you had stopped, you would start speaking again. There seemed to be no particular reason for this. Or if there was then those around you had no idea what it was. It could happen any time and anywhere, it was as if you had got fed up with staying silent and simply decided to speak again. And you wanted no fuss made about this either. Naturally Berit was always happy when you broke one of your long silences. The first time it happened she made no secret of it. She praised you and told you how relieved she was, she even bought you presents. But you didn’t like that. You got sullen and resentful and accepted her gifts only with the greatest reluctance. The child psychologist you spoke to some time later believed that you had reacted in this way because you saw Berit’s happiness as an indirect rejection of the boy you were when you wouldn’t speak. You were probably suffering from selective mutism, he said. Selective mutism was an anxiety disorder. In other words it wasn’t your fault and you certainly weren’t doing it for the fun of it so Berit was going to have to be careful not to scold you when you were having one of your silent spells or praise you when you started talking again, he said. She had to let you see that she loved both the David who spoke and the David who didn’t speak or else she could make things worse, because nothing could do more harm to a child than to be rejected by his own mother.

  But what everyone was wondering, of course, was what could have caused this anxiety.

  Initially the blame fell on your babysitter, Johanna Mørck. Before you started school Berit had a job as a home help in Namsos and during the day when she was at work you were either with your grandfather, Erik, or Johanna came over to look after you. It wasn’t the ideal solution because Johanna Mørck was not exactly the most caring and nurturing of individuals. She was rather like Krösa-Maja in the films of Astrid Lindgren’s Emil books, the old hunchbacked lady who loved a good gossip, preferably gossip relating to scandals and disasters. Not that Johanna was all doom and gloom, not at all. She was a lively character, always joking and laughing. But she loved to tell stories and she did so want her stories to make a real impression on people, and there’s nothing better designed to make an impression on people than stories concerning matters of life and death—preferably quite literally. The only problem was that she didn’t tailor her stories to suit her audience. She had no children of her own, just a whole pack of dogs and it never occurred to her that, as a child, you ought to have been spared the grisliest of her yarns. Take, for example, the time when your gums started to bleed. Only a little bit, but Johanna construed this as a sign that you were coughing up blood. “Aye,” she said, “we could well be looking at tuberculosis here.” She had lost her own little brother to TB when she was a girl and that had started in exactly the same way, she said, with him coughing up blood onto his handkerchief. This had been followed by a long and painful illness and confinement to a sanatorium far, far from home, and there he had ended his days, poor soul, alone and forsaken and only six years old, exactly the same age as you were then.

  On another occasion she led you to believe that your mother was in great danger: Dagny was going to Trondheim to see her cousin and Berit was going with her just for the trip. Trondheim was quite a place, Johanna told you. She had lived and worked there one summer years before and once, when she was on her way home from the hotel where she was employed as a kitchen-maid she had witnessed an armed robbery in a newsstand. And if you absolutely had to know what it looked like when somebody got shot between the eyes then she was here to tell you that it looked a bit like a jar being shattered. The head just sort of split wide open and the insides ran out, she had seen it with her own eyes. But that was nothing in Trondheim she was wont to add when she told this story. She could tell a lot worse and she really hoped that Berit would be careful. In fact it would be best if she stayed indoors after nin
e o’clock at night and if she really had to go out then she should do what Johanna herself used to do when she was living there and carry a four-inch nail in her hand. It wouldn’t be enough to overpower an attacker completely, but a hard jab with a four-inch nail would give him a shock and put him out of action long enough for her to take to her heels and run for her life.

  It was even worse though when Johanna told you stories from the Bible. Or rather, according to Paula, took biblical tales and then embroidered them, making them even scarier than they already were. To begin with I found it hard to imagine how the grimmest of the Old Testament stories could be rendered even more hair-raising but no, Paula says, it was simply a matter of telling them in such a way that the listener could identify more closely with them. Once, for example, when you had got salt in a cut and were crying because it smarted so much, Johanna seized the opportunity to tell you how much worse it was for sinners in hell. Because down there, the Devil would peel the skin off people, much as we would peel the skin off a sausage, and when their bodies were totally covered in open sores he would roll them in salt for a whole three weeks. And when she recounted extracts from the Book of Revelations she always set them on Otterøya. “D’you see Grønskard Fell there?” she would say. “Well, come Judgment Day, it’ll crack down the middle and out of that crack will come a pillar of smoke, and out of that smoke will come grasshoppers as big as horses. They’ll be wearing coats of mail, they’ll have lion’s teeth and where the horses’ tails should be there’ll be huge scorpion tails, and these they’ll use to scourge all those who don’t believe in God.”

  Had Johanna been a religious person, her behavior might have been understandable, but there is nothing to suggest that she was. Indeed to judge by her habits she was anything but. She smoked a pipe and drank moonshine like a man, she cursed and swore and lied when it suited her and, as if that wasn’t enough, more than once she had been caught stealing from the homes of people she visited. On one occasion, for example, after Johanna had been in the house Paula discovered that the unopened pack of brown goat’s cheese was gone; another time it was half a kilo of coffee that went missing, and on a third occasion some teaspoons that weren’t in the drawer where they had been before Johanna arrived. She only ever took little things, nothing to make a fuss about really, but still, it didn’t exactly testify to a Christian way of life.

  Anyway: at first Paula and Berit convinced each other that Johanna Mørck’s stories had scared the wits out of you and that this was the source of your anxiety. True, you had never mentioned anything at home about Johanna having frightened you, Paula says, but apparently you weren’t the sort of boy who would have done that anyway, you weren’t one for telling tales. But at the same time there had been days when you had been unusually thoughtful and withdrawn and your mother thought she had noticed that on such days you would often ask seemingly casual questions possibly designed to lead up to a conversation about things that frightened you. “Is that smoke up there?” you asked one morning when you saw mist drifting over Grønskard Fell. “Smoke? No, that’s the sea mist rolling in, can’t you see that?” your mother said. “Why on earth would there be smoke coming out of the mountainside?” “Haven’t you read the Bible?” you asked, thus paving the way for a little chat during which your mother was eventually able to reassure you and tell you quite truthfully that the Bible said nothing at all about the Day of Judgment starting with smoke seeping out of a crack in Grønskard Fell. “You mustn’t believe everything Johanna tells you,” she said.

  Berit had never worried too much before about Johanna’s habit of making up stories and filling your head with her fanciful notions, she had neither approved or disapproved, Paula says. But the child psychologist’s conclusion that you were suffering from an anxiety disorder made her think again and one of the first things Berit did was to take the matter up with Johanna. This was no easy task, since spinning yarns wasn’t just one of Johanna’s many foibles. Her tales were also her way of explaining and expressing herself and the world around her, and to criticize—no, not only criticize but condemn—her storytelling was tantamount to condemning her personally. So of course she was hurt. Berit asked her if she couldn’t tell you stories about other things instead. About what life had been like in the old days, for example, what sort of food people had eaten, what sort of clothes they wore, the houses they lived in, the schools they went to and so on, ordinary, everyday things. It didn’t all need to be about life and death, surely.

  Johanna was amazed that anyone could think there was a connection between your bouts of silence and her stories, but she would certainly curb her tongue, she declared, if only to prove how very wrong your mother was, in fact she wouldn’t open her mouth at all unless she was spoken to, Berit could be sure of that.

  Whether she kept this promise or not, Paula didn’t know, but you didn’t get any better. Far from it. Your condition steadily worsened. Your bouts of silence grew longer and longer and where previously you had at least spoken normally when you were with other children—even during one of your silent spells—that too now stopped and instead you took to speaking a kind of “robot talk”: “beep,” you would say if one of the other kids asked you a question. And when things were particularly bad you even started acting like a robot, or so Paula says. You would walk in a jerky mechanical way and no matter what people said or did to you—even if they got really mad and yelled at you or said they wouldn’t let you play unless you stopped acting like a robot—you would just stand there with a little smile on your face.

  Johanna tossed her head and took this as proof, of course, that whatever was troubling you it certainly had nothing to do with her and her stories. But Berit did not agree and Paula backed her up. The fear that Johanna had been instilling in you repeatedly since you were a toddler must, they felt, have become ingrained in you. To begin with it was probably the case that when Johanna told you some scary story the fear of it would stay with you for a while afterwards, but at some point the fear had taken root in you and now you were afraid all the time without being able to say what it was you were afraid of. That had to be the explanation, they eventually concluded.

  And when your psychologist didn’t dismiss this theory out of hand, but instead said that yes, that was exactly what anxiety was—being afraid without knowing what one is afraid of—they were even more convinced, or so Paula says. And thus the smoldering resentment that Berit already felt towards Johanna turned to downright hate. If anything went wrong at home, if something went missing, for example, Johanna automatically got the blame: she had taken it, she must have. And if you did anything wrong, it didn’t matter what, that too was Johanna’s fault, you’d got it from her. That was how Berit thought, Paula says. And not only that: for a time she seemed to be obsessed with Johanna. If I understand Paula correctly, it was almost as if Johanna were a channel through which she could give vent to all the rancor and the rage that had built up inside her. They could be sitting in their garden chairs over by the redcurrant bushes, smoking and drinking coffee, and no matter what they were talking about something would always remind Berit of Johanna, something she could use as an excuse to start going on again about what a nasty piece of work she was.

  Whether Berit actually believed all this talk herself or not, she was finding it harder and harder to defend the fact that she had allowed Johanna to look after you. If she did believe the charges she leveled against Johanna and didn’t fire her she was a bad mother and if she didn’t believe them and chose to let Johanna carry on she would still seem like a bad mother to everybody else on the island—if, that is, she didn’t change her tune completely and admit to all and sundry that obviously she and Paula had merely been gossiping and dishing the dirt. But that probably wasn’t an option. So there was nothing for it but to ask Johanna to find some other employment.

  In any case, you were six by then and pretty self-sufficient, so being without a babysitter wasn’t the disaster it would have been only a year earlier. And besides, yo
u had your grandfather for company. Granted, he had his work on the farm to see to, but for one thing you were now big enough to help him with most of his chores, and for another he was never that far away if you needed him.

  According to Paula, you and your grandpa were also very attached to one another. Since you had grown up without a father he had been both father and grandfather to you: a father in that he set limits and rules for you and a grandfather in that he always had time for you, he never told you to be quiet because he was reading the paper or watching the news and he was patient and able to put up with more pestering than any father. Not only that but he could be playful in the way that only grandparents can be with their grandchildren, Paula says.

  But there was one snag:

  Erik would not tolerate you showing any weakness. Boys would one day become men and so they had to be toughened up right from the start, because if they weren’t they wouldn’t be able to fulfil the obligations that a grown man had to fulfil in order to ensure the survival of himself, his family and society at large. There was much to be said for this way of thinking, of course. Everyone who knew you well could see that, Paula says. Erik would often ask you to do things that most people would consider too difficult, too strenuous or too dangerous for a child of your age. “Would you mind chopping the rest of that wood for me, David?” he might ask when you were just seven or eight years old, and possibly because he took it for granted, or at least acted as if he did, that you were capable of doing it he also made you believe that you were capable of doing it, thus equipping you to actually do it. In this way you had become very good at lots of things, so good in fact that you were the talk of the surrounding farms, I remember that myself.