It was clear to everyone, including Berit that you desperately needed to know. But still your mother refused to tell you. Not even when it was pointed out to her that your anxiety disorder might be linked to you not knowing who your father was, did she show any sign of changing her mind. So why not? What was so terrible about your father that his identity could on no account be revealed to you?
When I asked Paula about this she really surprised me: it’s all her fault, she says. The day after you were born, she made a fatal mistake, a mistake which has certainly been made before by midwives and other hospital staff, although so seldom that most people associate it solely with American soap operas. What happened, quite simply, was that Paula got you and another baby mixed up. So you were put into Berit’s arms and your real mother was given Berit’s son. Naturally one has to ask how this could have been at all possible—that was certainly the first thing I asked. Surely the hospital had all sorts of safety procedures in place to prevent this sort of thing from ever happening? Oh yes, of course they had, Paula says, but due to a combination of chance and bad luck it did nonetheless happen. For one thing both births had been fairly unusual. Berit’s son was delivered by emergency cesarean so she had been anesthetized and was therefore unconscious during the birth, and when you were born your mother was hit by a sudden fit of postnatal depression so bad that she would not even look at you to begin with. This meant that the next day neither woman was able to identify her own child—well, they had never laid eyes on them before. And for another, six babies had been born that night, an unusually large number for such a small hospital, and amid all the fuss and commotion Paula had forgotten to provide you and Berit’s baby with the obligatory wristbands giving the infant’s sex, blood type and mother’s name. And as if that weren’t enough, after helping to deliver so many babies Paula was exhausted. When she wheeled you and the other baby along to the postnatal ward the next morning she was dazed with tiredness and somewhat distracted—not only because of the two difficult births, but also because she was going through a tough time in her personal life and her mind was often elsewhere. And so, in an unfortunate momentary lapse of concentration, she managed to switch you and Berit’s baby.
But now comes the part that I simply cannot understand:
As part of the aforementioned safety procedures, attached to your cribs were labels giving exactly the same information as should have been given on your wristbands. No sooner had Paula handed over the two babies than she noticed that she had mixed up you and the other baby boy. So she realized that she had made a mistake. She saw it. With her own eyes. And she was just about to tell the mothers this, she says, when it occurred her that she couldn’t remember putting wristbands on the two of you, and when she checked and discovered that she had indeed made this fatal error she held her tongue. “I was already putting out my hands to take David back, but then Berit looked at me and smiled and I let her think that I was just stretching a bit because I was tired,” Paula says.
For a long while afterwards Paula tried to convince herself that she had done this because she was afraid she’d lose her job. You see the personal problems I mentioned had led her to make a number of mistakes before mixing you up with that other infant. In fact some of her colleagues had even hinted that her mind was never really on the job and that this inattentiveness had been partly to blame for complications during one birth in which a baby suffered brain damage due to lack of oxygen. This wasn’t true, of course, Paula says. Nevertheless, a close eye was being kept on her and she wasn’t trusted as she ought to have been, so from that point of view she had every reason to fear for her job. But this wasn’t why she didn’t tell your mothers that they had been given the wrong children. Nor was it because she was too embarrassed to admit her mistake. “The fact is that I wanted to do it,” she told me. “Something inside me wanted to switch those babies.”
And that is what I simply don’t understand. How Paula could have wanted to do it. That this nice, kind and always warm and friendly woman should have wanted to mix up two newborn infants, giving the children the wrong mothers and the mothers the wrong children, this is beyond my comprehension and, to be honest, David, I’m not altogether sure whether you should trust her, not on this point.
But she insists that it’s true, she takes full responsibility for what happened. To the question as to why she would do such a thing, all she says is that she doesn’t really know. She only knows that she couldn’t stop herself. As soon as she realized that no one would be any the wiser, something inside her drove her to do it. It was a terrible thing to do, she freely admits, a wicked thing. But she is also careful to point out that it was not planned, not in any way. A combination of accident and bad luck made it possible and for some reason she felt she had to fulfil this opportunity that had suddenly presented itself.
Later, although how much later she doesn’t know—possibly a day, possibly a week, possibly a month—the enormity of what she had done began to dawn on her, but by then there was no way she could have owned up to it. She wanted to get in touch with Berit and your real mother, she told me, she was wracked with guilt and several times she tried to pluck up the courage to do so, but she couldn’t. And the longer she left it the more difficult it became, of course. She lived very close to you and Berit, of course, so she could see how well the two of you were getting on, how attached you had become to one another. Was she to destroy all that by telling the truth? Now, after such a long time? What consequences would that have—for you, for Berit and for Paula? What good could ever come of it? She knew nothing about the other family, but you and Berit were doing just fine as you were, you loved one another and the very thought of splitting you up was a crime, Paula says. So was it only to ease her own guilty conscience that she even considered telling the truth? Or was she driven by some sense of duty, some inner conviction that blood is thicker than water and that a child ought to be with its own natural parents no matter what? Every day for a little over two years Paula wrestled all alone with these questions, but contrary to what I would have thought she did not become more and more troubled and burdened by the thought of what she had done. Not at all, she says. Instead it had become more like a habit to think about it. And not only that, but since this was something known only to her it was also something that she found herself reflecting on when, for whatever reason, she wanted to be by herself. The knowledge of what had happened was something that belonged to her and her alone, she tells me, or rather—that was how she saw it, as a kind of room in which she could take refuge when things became too much for her, a room where no one could get at her.
But in spite of all this she did eventually tell Berit the whole story. Or no, not in spite of but possibly because of this, is what I think she was trying to say. Because the more she thought about, it the less and less disastrous her action seemed, and obviously this made it easier for her to explain what had happened. Moreover, she and Berit had already become friends and begun to confide in one another. Indeed it was partly because she had the urge to own up to what she had done that she had continually sought Berit’s company at the sewing circle evenings at Dagny’s house. At the time she couldn’t have said whether she did this deliberately, but now, looking back on it, she says, it’s clear to her that she gravitated towards Berit because she was anxious to know whether it would be at all possible to tell her what had happened, whether Berit would be able to cope with this information. And, as I wrote at the start of this letter, Paula had discovered that Berit had a kind of darkness inside her, a gaping void, and because of this Paula felt sure that Berit would also be able to understand the darkness in other people, and possibly even the darkness inside her, Paula.
But still, she hadn’t planned to say anything. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing, she says. They were on their way home one evening from a sewing circle meeting at Dagny’s and suddenly she just blurted out the truth to Berit. Or at least, not the whole truth, because she missed out the part about having stopped herself fr
om correcting her mistake while there was still time. That was one thing she was never able to admit to Berit, not even after they had become the bosom friends that Paula claims they eventually became.
But if habit and the passage of time had distanced Paula from the seriousness of what she had done, it was brought back to her full force when she saw how Berit reacted to her confession. Because, of course, she went into a state of shock. Her own natural color seemed to drain from her face and while Paula was overcome by the remorse and dread that she had until then more or less suppressed and sobbed and wept her way through all the details, Berit said not a word to what she was being told. Not then, nor in the days and weeks that followed. Later she told Paula that she had tried to block it out. Or, at least, not block it out, she had tried to convince herself that it wasn’t true. She tried to tell herself that Paula must be mistaken. Either that or she was mad and incapable of differentiating between fantasy and reality. Or maybe she was a psychopath, intent on controling her in some way. Maybe she had made the whole thing up just so she could threaten to make it public if Berit didn’t do what she wanted—it was, after all, a secret that could have appalling consequences for you and Berit should it become known.
And so, by clinging to the shred of uncertainty attached to Paula’s revelation Berit managed to survive the first weeks and months. After a while she almost managed to convince herself that it was all a pack of lies, and so she did something that she would later come to regret often: she got in touch with a doctor she had become friends with while doing her nursing training in Namsos and got him to do a test—merely to confirm once and for all that you really were her son, she told herself. As an almost fully qualified nurse she took the blood samples herself, and when she went up to the hospital to deliver them to her doctor friend she told him it was a woman friend of hers who wanted to have this test carried out, she was just doing her a favor.
And you already know the result of that test, David. It was the exact opposite of what Berit had hoped for and believed.
It’s hard to imagine how hard it must have been for Berit after that, how it must have eaten away at her. By which I mean the sorrow over the realization that she had never known her own son and probably never would, the feeling of loss and the yearning for him, to never know how he was—all of this must have been nigh on unbearable. And according to Paula it was. Berit spent her whole life feeling that she had failed her own son. Not a day went by when she didn’t torture herself with the thought that he needed her and that she ought to be there for him. She would probably have done this anyway, but it didn’t help that she remembered with horror how your real mother had treated the child she had believed to be her own, but who was in fact Berit’s son. Not only had she screwed up her face and been reluctant to take the child Paula laid in her arms, and not only had she sat there with a cold and indifferent, not to say sulky, look on her face for the short time that she could be bothered to hold him, but when your real father came to see you both she had jerked her head in the direction of the little cart with the baby’s crib on it and almost spat at him: “There, you see, that’s what comes of you never being able to control yourself.”
Berit never got over it. Even though Paula kept trying to reassure her by saying that your real mother’s behavior must have been a result of the aforementioned postnatal depression, Berit could never shake off the idea that her real son had been brought up by a ghastly, tyrannical mother.
And this of course only made the feeling of having failed her own son even worse than it would otherwise have been. History repeats itself, as Berit used to say of this. By not going to see the other family and demanding to have her son returned to her, she was doing exactly the same to him as she felt her grandfather had done to Erik and hence also to her, Paula says. She deprived him of the chance of a good life. And what is more, the constant feeling of guilt, the deep sorrow and longing and, not least, the uncertainty and the attendant fear, this welter of painful emotions—this was what found outlet in the seething rages by which, as Paula mentioned earlier, Berit was sometimes overcome. Oh, yes, Paula declared, those fits of rage to which you were subjected were quite clearly connected to this. After all, it was you who had taken the place of her real son. Berit didn’t want to think like this, of course, she knew it was totally unreasonable, but part of her did so anyway, and it was this part that caused her to treat you the way she sometimes did. As a little boy you were completely mystified by these violent and always equally sudden outbursts, the screaming and the tongue-lashings that could be triggered by the smallest thing you had said or done, Paula says, but she hopes that what she is telling you here, through me, will help you to understand them a little better. At any rate, her treatment of you only served to make Berit feel even more guilty and bad about herself. She felt that she had not only failed her own natural son, she had also failed you.
Knowing all this obviously makes it easier to understand why Berit’s mood swings became more and more frequent and more and more extreme, why she tried to take her own life and, not least, why she eventually sought solace and forgiveness in religion. Although it wasn’t just solace and forgiveness she was looking for, Paula says, regarding this last point. It almost looked as though she had also chosen this new life as another form of penance. To start with she probably was seeking solace and forgiveness from God, but that she chose to marry Arvid, a man who was as different from her as he could possibly be and whom Paula is convinced she did not love, and that she not only accepted but also followed this man’s old-fashioned and unnecessarily strict Christian way of life—this, according to Paula, smacked of self-torture. And not only self-torture. In speaking of this she actually reiterates what she wrote in her diary many, many years ago: marrying Arvid the clergyman was another way of taking her own life, she says. The countless thou-shalts and shalt-nots that were part and parcel of her marriage and her new life as a Christian caused the old Berit to disappear. The old Berit felt she didn’t deserve to go on living, and being such an uncommonly strong and determined character she succeeded in erasing herself completely.
Having said all of this, there is one thing, however, that Paula cannot emphasize strongly enough, and that is how much Berit loved you. Because, while she may have missed and yearned for her real child and while she may have been almost drowning in guilt and self-loathing because she was not a part of his life, this did not mean that she loved you any less. You may think that when you read all this—when you read, for example, that Berit took her grief and frustration out on you for taking the other baby’s place—but actually it was the other way around. The fact that Berit missed her real son as much as she did simply shows how much she loved you. There was only one reason why she did not try to trace the other family and tell them what had happened and this was, of course, that she was afraid they would want you back. You were her whole life, David, and she couldn’t bear the thought of losing you, so instead she had to live with the pain of not having her own natural son.
And clearly it was this same fear that led her to react as she did when the question of your father’s identity came up. Not only did this remind her of all the guilt and anguish, but if she were to answer this question honestly and truthfully, you and everyone else would know that she was not your real mother—and then she might lose you.
But there is one thing that I find odd, not to say almost incomprehensible, and that is that Berit and Paula should have been such close friends as Paula claims. I mean, Paula had after all made a mistake which had caused you and Berit great and irreparable hurt, and even though Berit never did discover that switching you and the other baby had to some extent been a deliberate act, still, somehow it would have seemed more natural for her to hate Paula than to accept her friendship.
When I ask Paula about this she gets annoyed and quite indignant. It’s true that Berit had given her a wide berth for some time after she learned what had happened, Paula says. But eventually the need to talk to someone who knew had b
een too strong for her and this, together with the fact that she thought Paula had got the babies mixed up by mistake and was ridden with guilt over what she had done, helped her to overcome her anger and become her friend. Indeed as time went on that incident in the postnatal ward became more of a bond between them than a bone of contention, or so Paula maintains. They knew something that no one else knew and that no one else could ever know, and this formed the basis for a mutual sense of loyalty that was stronger than anyone could imagine, she says. They acted as each other’s confessor, you might say. Paula confided things to Berit that she has never confided to anyone else before or since, and Berit was equally frank and open with Paula.
It sounds logical enough as far as it goes, and yet I can’t help thinking that Paula is exaggerating and glamorizing their friendship a little. And possibly more than a little. For one thing it seems unlikely to me that anyone could find it in themselves to make a close friend and confidante of a person who had, after all, done them such great and irreparable harm, and for another I’m beginning to wonder why Paula gets so hot under the collar just because I ask how she and Berit could have been as close as she says. To be quite honest, the way she idealizes their friendship makes me think that Paula has something to hide and that she’s afraid that I and then you will discover what it is.
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