“Aw, stop your nonsense,” Odd Kåre snaps, narrowing his eyes and screwing up his face, then he opens his eyes again. He looks straight at me and there’s blind fury in his eyes. He stares at me for a moment then he looks at the table, just for a split second, then he looks up again and turns, scans the dayroom, like he’s searching for something or someone in the dayroom. “Thought I might get a refill of coffee,” he says and then he pauses, trying to pull himself together, I suppose that’s what he’s doing.
After a moment he turns to me again. He seems to have pulled himself together a bit, he doesn’t look angry any more. “Can we just help ourselves, do you think?” he asks. “Oh, I don’t see why not,” I say, and I look at him and smile, but the corners of my mouth are drooping more and more and my smile is getting fainter and fainter, and I’m crying and crying inside, and the moments go by, but I really don’t want to be here any longer, I want to get out of here, I want to get away. “Oh, never mind, we’ll just wait till the assistant comes back,” Odd Kåre says. “She can’t be too far away.” “No, she can’t be,” I say. “But I need to go to the toilet,” I say. “So I can pop my head into the staffroom on the way and say to her.” I look at Odd Kåre and Johnny and smile, and my smile is faint and sad and the girls are playing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and another moment goes by and then I place my hands on the arms of the chair and try to get up.
“Hang on. Let me help you,” Odd Kåre says, jumping up. He slips one hand under my armpit and the other under my forearm and eases me up out of the chair. “Thank you, that’s kind of you,” I say, looking at him and smiling and Odd Kåre sits down again and I start to walk away. I shuffle stiffly across the room, look at Sylvia and her family and smile, look at Therese and smile. “Hey, isn’t that the boy that used to live across the bay from you?” Therese asks, scowling at me and pointing at a picture in the paper, but I don’t feel like stopping now, I don’t feel like talking to Therese about some boy right now. I pretend not to realize it’s me she’s talking to and just walk on past her. I walk out of the dayroom and along the corridor, I walk past the staffroom and the toilet, I’m just walking away. It’s hard to believe it, but I am. I walk down to the entrance hall and across to the door, and I see that the door is wide open, I see that the sun is shining. But who’s that coming in? Well I never, it’s Harald Hansen with his accordion slung over his shoulders, well, well, what do you know, fancy him showing up right now. But I don’t feel like talking to anybody right now, I’d like a little time to myself right now. Oh, well, it’s a good thing he’s only arriving now and not ten minutes ago really, it’s a good thing he didn’t arrive while Odd Kåre and Johnny were going at it hammer and tongs, oh yes, because if he had it would have been even more unpleasant than it was, I’m sure. Harald’s not exactly the sort to hold his tongue when he gets his dander up, he’d have read the riot act, I’ll bet. He can get awful steamed up on behalf of us old folks.
He looks at me and smiles, and I look at him and smile back. “Well, well,” I say, “if it isn’t the pensioners’ champion.” And Harald looks at me and laughs. “Yes, I’ve got to inspect the troops before we go into battle, you know,” he says. “And a right sorry sight that’ll be, Harald,” I say. “Oh no, don’t say that,” he says. “Well, they’re all pretty worn and battered, already, your troops, so I sincerely hope you’ve got some more in reserve,” I say and I let out a little laugh. And Harald laughs too, he puts out a hand and pats me gently on the shoulder. “Don’t you worry, I always have,” he laughs. “Right then, talk to you later, Paula,” he says. “Right you are,” I say.
And Harald walks on. I wait until he has disappeared down the corridor, then I walk on as well. I walk out into the sunshine. I’m in just my slippers, but I walk across the parking lot and out onto the road and I walk down the road. The gray, sun-baked asphalt burns the soles of my feet, what on earth am I doing? Am I really doing this, just walking away? Well, Odd Kåre and Johnny are really going to think I’ve gone dotty now. “She did a bunk while we were visiting her,” they’ll say. “Said she was going to the toilet and off she went,” they’ll say. “Walked out in just her slippers,” they’ll say. I feel my spirits lift a little at this thought, the sadness seems to gradually drain out of me, because it feels so right somehow, me turning into a dotty old woman while they’re here. It feels both right and good, I don’t quite know why, but it does. And I walk on, I walk down the hill. There’s a warm breeze sweeping in from the right, a warm breeze that carries with it the lovely, fresh scent of sea and shore, and I walk on, I walk up the hill to the church, I walk and walk. People must be wondering where I’ve got to by now, they may even be looking for me, they may be searching the care home for me. It’s too bad really that they have to go looking for me, they’ve enough to do as it is, the staff there, without having to spend time and energy looking for me as well. But I walk on, I don’t know where I’m going, I’m not going anywhere in particular, I’m just walking, and up the hill on the right is the church, and I walk into the churchyard. It’s like pushing a boat out from shore, I think to myself, me just walking aimlessly like this, me turning myself into a dotty old woman, it’s like pushing a boat out from the shore and letting yourself drift with the current. And it feels right to do this. I don’t know why, but it feels right and good.
Otterøya, July 13th, 2006
I never thought I would be writing to you again, but for reasons which I will explain in due course Paula succeeded in persuading me to finish what we have started. She was both sad and hurt when I told her that your memory loss was a complete hoax, but when I returned to her room after going off to tell the other residents what you had done, something had dawned on her, as she put it, and she now wanted us to finish writing this memoir anyway. In fact, not only did she say she wanted us to finish it, she insisted that we do so. If I refused she would ask someone else to help her, she said, and if she couldn’t find someone else then she would do it herself, bad eyesight or no bad eyesight. It didn’t matter that you had deceived us and that you hadn’t lost your memory after all, because in all likelihood this had nothing to do with you writing a book about yourself, it had nothing to do with art and literature, she was sure, or not just that anyway.
When I asked her to be more specific she promptly proceeded to tell me about the time when Berit and Arvid were together and you and she moved into his house in Namsos—in the summer of 1982 this was. Arvid was a vicar in Namsos at the time and folks simply couldn’t believe that someone as ungodly as Berit could have married and moved in with him of all people. That she and Arvid were about as different as chalk and cheese didn’t make it any easier to understand. They lived and walked at different speeds, as Paula says. Berit was impetuous, dynamic and purposeful. She talked fast, she was quick and restless in her movements and as I’ve said she had this capricious temperament: her mood could swing from bright to black in the blink of an eye.
Arvid on the other hand was so stolid, so sedate in nature that Paula says it made her skin crawl just to be near him. It took him forever to do anything, he was fussy and pernickety and when telling a story he could never get to the point, but would simply ramble on with that dopey smile on his face. And sometimes when he walked, or even if he just shifted slightly, it looked as though he was moving in slow-motion. “That man gives me the creeps,” as Paula wrote in her diary on the twelfth of May 1982.
And yet, despite their differences, they were together. Or possibly precisely because of them, as many of the women in Paula’s and Berit’s sewing circle remarked. Dagny, for example, believed that Berit had picked Arvid because she had such a low boredom threshold and because everything about him, his manner and the life he led, was so very different from Berit’s own personality and lifestyle that to her it seemed new and exciting. Spontaneous and impulsive as she was, she therefore did exactly as his grandfather had once done: she cut all ties with her family and started a new life in a new place.
But most
people believed that Berit had hooked up with Arvid because she saw marrying a vicar as a step up in the world. Being a man of the cloth didn’t have quite the prestige that it had once had, it’s true, but the local vicar still enjoyed a great deal of respect, much more than today and possibly even more among the farmers and fishermen on the island of Otterøya than in Namsos, where the vicar had to compete for respect and prestige with businessmen, politicians, doctors and all sorts of other individuals, including celebrities, as Paula says. Plus Arvid had “money in the bank” and that made him a much more interesting prospect than he would otherwise have been. “He spoils me rotten, and I love it,” your mother used to say to Paula.
Arvid, for his part, was intent on saving Berit from “that hole” as he once called the house on Otterøya. It was this—being allowed to play the prince who saves the princess from the dungeon—that caused him to throw himself into their relationship as wholeheartedly as he did, so Paula says, not without a trace of contempt. He rolled his eyes and shook his head at the tires, spare parts and hulks of cars scattered around the yard at Erik’s place. He was sure that the walls of the house were permeated with the smell of boiled fish and he asked—in all innocence, seemingly, and with the best will in the world—if they ever ate anything but fish. The bathroom was riddled with damp and needed to be totally stripped and redone before they all succumbed to the effects of mold and mildew, he declared. The aspens up on the hillside would have to be felled before they were blown down in a storm and flattened the house while they were sleeping. The living room was so drafty that he caught cold if he spent any length of time in it. And he thought it was quite ridiculous that Berit had to cut the grass with an old-fashioned, mechanical lawnmower whenever Erik was away. He couldn’t bear to see her sweating and straining like that, he said, and he insisted on taking over the job of cutting the grass. But according to Paula he only ever did it the one time, because he got such an ache in the small of his back from the way he had to stoop to push the lawnmower that Berit had to take over again.
He made everything out to be worse than it actually was and of course he believed it was all Erik’s fault. If I understand Paula rightly, Erik was the troll in the fairytale that Arvid liked to think he was living in. Not only was he a lazy so-and-so who never reinsulated the house or renovated the bathroom or cleared up the yard, and not only was he too mean to buy a motor mower or a snow-blower or any other labor-saving equipment, the fact that he liked a drink and maybe a bit of a party at the weekend made him an alcoholic and unfit to look after his family. The fact that he was honest and straightforward and spoke his mind branded him as rude, crude and vulgar; and that he read your comic books, or the western ones at any rate, made him stupid and childish. Even when Erik made an effort to make Arvid feel welcome he couldn’t win. “I hope you don’t mind pork chops,” Erik said one time when Arvid came to dinner, thereby giving Arvid his cue to say that the pork chops were delicious. But he didn’t. “Oh, pork chops are all right,” was all he said, even though he must have known that pork chops were only ever a weekend treat in your house.
Obviously he behaved like this because he wanted to make his rescue of you seem as great a deed as possible. The blacker he painted Erik and your living conditions the more of a hero he would seem. And if I understand Paula correctly much the same thinking lay behind his virtual glorification of Berit’s mother. Not that Arvid had known her, of course—she had died back in the 60s when she got caught up in the tire chains of a passing bus and dragged under it on her way home from the blueberry woods—but according to Paula he milked Berit’s stories about her for all they were worth. He pumped and grilled her for information and everything Berit told him about her mother made her seem wonderful in his eyes: according to him she was practically a saint, another Mother Teresa, just because she’d been in the habit of giving eggs and milk to a neighboring family that had trouble making ends meet, “She must have been an extraordinarily good person,” he said. And when Berit informed him that most of the neighbors had done what they could to help this family, providing them with food and clothing from time to time, he didn’t even want to hear about it. All he said was, “I’m sure she was wonderful,” and nothing would change his mind, probably because he wanted to provide Berit with a mother whom he considered worth resembling and emulating. This—if I understand Paula rightly—was not only a cunning way of controlling and manipulating Berit, but also a ploy designed to make his rescue of her seem even more impressive. The more beautiful the princess, the more splendid the deed, as it were.
As you may have noticed and may also have found surprising, Paula is remarkably interested in the relationship between Berit and Arvid. This fascination is also evident from one of her diary entries from that time:
Otterøya, May 29th, 1982
Berit and Arvid are getting married. All the blood seemed to drain from my head when she told me. I couldn’t even pretend to be happy for her although she tried to make me say I was. She sat there with her head covered in electric rollers, smiling and trying to look radiantly happy, but I didn’t feel like humoring her. I turned away and cried. I’m older and more experienced than her and I just know this will end in disaster, this is just another way of punishing herself, a way of making amends and winning the forgiveness and solace that she has so desperately been looking for. It’s awful, painful even, to watch. She’s already started dressing the way the women at the Salem Church do. She insists that David prays and sings before meals and yesterday she couldn’t come and meet me because she was going to church. She tries to act as though none of this is any big deal. As if it’s pure coincidence that she has suddenly started wearing the old gold cross her grandmother left her, and as if it was pure coincidence that she has all but stopped wearing make-up. It’s so obviously not a coincidence, and that in itself says a lot. The way she tries to convince me that it means nothing, that it is just coincidence, that’s simply her way of trying to ease the sadness she knows I’m feeling right now; her way of telling me that just because she’s starting a new life that doesn’t mean to say that we’re going to lose one another. But we will lose each other. Not only because she’ll be getting married soon and leaving here for good, but also because she’s already starting to cancel herself out, she’s already starting to disappear. This is just another way of taking one’s own life. Soon the Berit I know will no longer exist, soon she’ll be a fanatical Christian, I know she will, she has the temperament, the self-sacrificing nature and the strength necessary to reinvent herself; and, not least, she has an insatiable need for the solace and forgiveness that religion can offer. Because that is what drives her. Contrary to what many people think, she’s not marrying Arvid out of love for him, and she’s not becoming a Christian to please him. It’s the other way around: it’s religion she’s looking for, it’s God she’s looking for. Arvid is merely a guide in all of this, a guide to lead her into the Christian church.
So you see, Paula has a quite different explanation for why Berit married Arvid. According to what she writes in her diary Berit did it because she wanted to make amends and because she sought forgiveness and solace in religion. But it is only when she starts to write about why Berit sought forgiveness and solace that I begin to understand why Paula was so intrigued by this marriage and why she is so terribly keen for us to finish this letter. Because it appears that all of this has to do with you and your advertisement in the newspaper, David. You see, Paula maintains that Berit was driven to join the Church by exactly the same urge that drove you to place a notice in the newspaper and pretend that you had lost your memory. Or rather, she maintains that both these acts can be traced back to one particular incident.
Let me explain:
According to Paula, your advertisement is not part of an artistic project, or not primarily at any rate. First and foremost it is an attempt to find your real father, she says. You placed that advertisement in the paper hoping that your father would recognize you from your picture and get
in touch with you. It seems pretty obvious and self-evident now, as I write this, but even though I knew that Berit had always refused to reveal who your father was, I have to admit that this thought had never even crossed my mind before Paula mentioned it. Let me just say, though, that as soon as she said it I began to take a more clement view of you and your actions. All of a sudden you were no longer a cold-hearted cynic, you were a man who longed to find your own father, your own roots, your own history. I can understand how you would be willing to go to extremes to achieve your goal, which is why I agreed to finish this letter.
But enough of that.
From a very early age you had, of course, wondered who your father was. You had asked Berit about him every now and again, but she had always palmed you off with some story or other, for the first years of your life at least. Your father was an Apache chief, she would tell you on one occasion; on another he might be a pirate and on yet another an astronaut, living on the moon. If you didn’t see through these lies yourself then naturally you realized that that’s what they were once you started talking to other children. But that was the whole point, of course, because Berit didn’t want you to grow up with the wrong idea of your father, she just wanted a little break from all your questions. As you got older though you were no longer content with such absurd answers. Your questioning of her became much more earnest and insistent. Sometimes you would act like a little adult, appealing to her common sense and telling her that you felt you had a right to know. Other times you would cry and beg. Or you would take a more cunning approach and bring up the subject when other people were present—presumably to show Berit that you would give her no peace until she told you. This last plan of attack could give rise to some painful scenes, however, so Paula says. Although I don’t remember this incident myself, she says that during one Christmas assembly at the school, in 1979 or 1980, one of the teachers had read from and spoken about St. Luke’s Gospel. And when he got to the part about the virgin birth you turned to Berit and asked if that was how you had been born. Everyone there had burst out laughing, of course, but not Berit. She had flown into a rage and to the shock of teachers, parents and the other children she had given your face a resounding slap.
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