I wrote that I was getting married.
I wrote that I had met a girl at the teachers college, that we had noticed each other from the very beginning, but only now when we had completed our education, early summer 1963, had we decided to get married. The letter was mostly about me. I realized this at the time. And I realized it more than thirty years later when I read the letter again. Everything was about me. I remember I folded the letter, put it in an envelope, and addressed it. Then I took a summer evening stroll to the red mailbox outside the venerable main residence at Gimlemoen. I imagined Ingrid’s face when Josef read my letter. I imagined she would howl softly and pleasantly, or perhaps she would howl painfully. Suddenly I saw her in my mind. She was howling painfully.
I got married that September.
In December I wrote a Christmas card, but didn’t mention that I would become a father the following year. I didn’t write anything when my son was born, in July 1964. No one, neither Josef nor the siblings, knew I’d become a father until September of that year, when we had the baptism at home. During the party afterward, I went upstairs to see Lilly and Ingrid with the little boy in my arms. I knocked softly, and heard light footsteps inside. The door opened and Lilly stood there staring at me.
“Is it you?” she said.
“Yes, of course,” I said. “I’m not alone, as you can see. May we come in?”
Lilly moved aside, Ingrid got up from the table, and I took a few steps into the room with the baby in my arms.
“Who’s that?” said Lilly, pointing to the baby.
“This is my son,” I replied. “He was baptized today.”
“Your son?”
“Yes indeed”
“You have a son?”
“Yes,” I replied again. “He’s still a tiny baby.”
Lilly looked at me, then at the boy.
“What’s his name?”
I said his name, and then Ingrid wanted to see too.
“Look, Ingrid,” I said. “I have a son.”
Ingrid was silent. Lilly had no further questions.
“Look,” I said. “Isn’t he tiny?”
Ingrid nodded. She gradually came closer.
“Do you want to hold him?”
We sat down on Ingrid’s bed, all three of us, and I placed the sleeping baby in Ingrid’s lap. She regarded him silently with a serious expression. Though she seemed uncomfortable, she held him almost naturally. She drooled a little, as she always did. And then she howled, softly and pleasantly. Finally I picked up the baby and laid him in Lilly’s lap. Like her sister, she held him almost naturally, almost effortlessly. The little boy was asleep; Lilly looked at him, then at me and at Ingrid. After a while she said:
“You can take him now.”
I took the baby gently from her lap. He had slept soundly the whole time, but when he was back in my arms he woke up. He lay with his eyes wide open, gazing at me.
2.
I continued to write letters home. I had gotten a teaching position at Oddemarka school in Kristiansand, and wrote about small, everyday events, harmless things: about a novel I’d read, about unruly students, about the seagulls that glided in the wind outside my window. I wrote to Nils, Erling, and Sverre at the Naerlandsheimen address, and always received an answer telling me that the letter had been read aloud to the brothers. During the World Ski Championship in 1966 I wrote to Josef about Bjørn Wirkola, who jumped farther than everyone, because I knew Josef would empathize especially with that.
After all, I knew about Josef’s own ski jumping.
Then, in the summer of 1967, I wrote that we were going to move back to my old parish. I’d gotten a job at the central school in Lauvlandsmoen, and we were going to build a house about halfway between the meetinghouse and my childhood home. Like Papa, I moved back home and built a house.
The letter was postmarked June 17, 1967. It was the last one.
That’s how I happened to return. Fifteen years had passed. We moved into our new house just before Christmas. The area was the same, the people were the same, Reinert was still the parish clerk and sexton. Still, there were changes. The public library had moved a hundred meters from Dr. Rosenvold’s old office, beyond the meeting house to the second floor of the town hall, right above the bank. Moreover, the doctor’s office had been turned into a garage. During the past seventeen years Josef had managed to get through the library’s entire collection a few times, but the number of books had increased during the sixties, so he made progress more slowly.
“Not more authors beginning with D!” he complained.
He had become an old man.
One evening I picked up Josef, Lilly, and Ingrid and drove them to our new house.
“You’re going to live here?” Lilly asked, as she entered the front hall.
“Yes, that’s what we plan to do,” I replied. “That will be nice, don’t you think?”
“Yes, that will be nice,” she said reflectively.
I showed Ingrid around the house: the living room, the kitchen, the baby’s room. After that, we made a short visit to the garden. It was dark, starlit, very cold; her hand, too, was very cold. When we came in, Lilly and Josef were waiting with their coats on, ready to leave.
“Will you give us a ride home in your carriage?” Josef asked.
“Yes indeed,” I replied.
We stood for a moment on the lighted porch. I saw how old Josef had become. Lilly had also grown older. Ingrid as well. We had all gotten older. I shut the door behind us, and we walked in the dark toward the car.
Tone would have been twenty-seven years old.
3.
The parish was the same, the people were the same, but upstairs great changes had taken place. After Matiassen was taken to Heslandsheimen in the winter of 1962, Nils, Sverre, and Erling moved into his old room, while Ingrid and Lilly remained together. It was a natural arrangement. The boys by themselves, the girls by themselves. For a long time things seemed to go well. However, Erling constantly suffered from severe headaches, migraines perhaps. Frequently he was confined to bed. Often with both hands pressed against his ears. Sometimes he wrapped his blanket around his head and lay like that, as if a spider had spun a cocoon around its egg. He regularly had to listen to his two brothers squabbling. And at times he was seized by powerful rage; he tore off his blanket and pounded his hand against the wall, hard, again and again. But only once did the brothers start to fight.
They heard the screams from far away, and when Papa went upstairs the three brothers were struggling with each other on the floor. Tables, chairs, every loose object, had been strewn around. One windowpane was smashed, Sverre had cut his hand, Nils clutched a broken chair leg in his fist. Erling screamed and screamed, saliva ran from his mouth; his howls were heartbreaking, and he didn’t calm down until Lilly came in and put his head in her lap.
Later no one could explain how the fight started, but after a while Erling moved back with his sisters, while Sverre and Nils stayed in Matiassen’s room. Things went on like that for a few months. It was a game of solitaire that couldn’t be won. Sverre slowly changed from a quiet, timid four-year-old into a rebellious young man. His hair was long and wiry, his eyes a striking clear blue. From a distance one certainly could not tell that he was mentally disabled. He refused to have his hair cut. When Papa came with the scissors, Sverre might knock his head against the wall or on the table. He would bang his head so hard the tin plates bounced. During meals he might suddenly sweep aside his cutlery and drinking glass and thump his head on the table, hard, hard, while Lilly screamed and Erling laughed and Nils stood up with his plate in his hand. Or he might decide to run away. Suddenly he would slam his fork on the table and dash down the stairs, out to the yard, and into the woods. Papa had to lock the front door while they ate, and eventually also while they slept. Sverre might decide to sneak out in the middle of the night. First he set off silently across the room and down the stairs, then he began to run, even though it was pitch black outsi
de, even though he knew he would not find the way back by himself. He wasn’t afraid, he knew someone always came to find him. He ran into the forest or down the road past Hans and Anna’s house toward Brandsvoll, and maybe even farther, shouting and screaming and waking the neighbors. He didn’t know where he was, but he knew someone would always find him. As long as he screamed, someone would always find him.
It became impossible in the long run. They couldn’t watch him around the clock. Finally, they’d had enough.
Papa wrote to the Child Welfare office in Stavanger to ask about possible care facilities for Sverre, and perhaps for Erling and Nils as well, perhaps for all three brothers together. They had become grown men after all; they had lived together their entire lives, and maybe the time had come for a change.
After several weeks an answer arrived from Stavanger; the letter stated in black and white that Nils, Sverre, and Erling had been accepted at Naerlandsheimen, outside Naerbø, in Jaeren.
For now, just the three brothers.
That evening Mama and Papa went upstairs to tell everyone the big news. Papa knocked on the door, and Lilly opened it.
“Is it you?” she said.
“We have something to tell you,” said Papa. “May we come in?”
Lilly gathered all the siblings around the table. They sat there as they had for almost twenty years, while Papa told them about the place near the sea where Nils and Sverre and Erling were going to live now.
“You will each have your own room and your own bed,” he said.
“Will we get food?” asked Nils.
“As much as you can eat,” said Mama.
There was a slight pause. Nils grinned. Erling seemed restless, his head wobbled back and forth. Mama went over and placed her hand gently on his shoulder, and at that moment he suddenly began to clap his hands enthusiastically. Erling clapped, then Sverre began to clap, then Ingrid and Lilly and Nils, and so the short conversation about the place near the sea ended with long, hearty applause.
4.
The three brothers left on a cold morning in November. Papa would drive them to Marnardal station; from there, three nurses, who had boarded the train in Kristiansand, would go with them to Jaeren. The three left without ceremony. Nils was allowed to ride in the front seat of the Ambassador and he triumphantly waved from the side window to his sisters, who remained behind. The car headed down the road, turned left by the milk platform, and disappeared.
A new era began.
Together with forty other boys and men from all parts of the country, Nils, Erling, and Sverre moved into a brand-new building for asocial, mentally disabled men located in Naerbø, a few hundred meters from the seashore. Each got his own room, with a view of the ocean from the window. It was not far from Stavanger, where they had once lived, so it was almost like moving back home. Or perhaps they had forgotten everything that happened before they came to us. Perhaps they had forgotten that they had lived anywhere but with us.
At any rate, to come home meant to come back to the big house in the middle of the woods, forty kilometers from the coast.
Every year in mid-December, Mama and Papa stood on the platform at Marnardal station waiting for the train from Stavanger, which had stopped at Naerbø to pick up about ten patients, all going south to celebrate Christmas with their families. The Christmas tree in the square outside the train station was laden with snow, almost like the tree in the yard outside Dikemark in Papa’s youth. A dense December darkness had fallen, snowflakes swirled under the yellow station lights. They heard the train whistle in the distance and moved closer to the tracks. Soon the locomotive came thundering into the station in a cloud of snow with a string of cars behind it. Mama and Papa waited calmly as the platform filled with travelers, and when Nils, Erling, and Sverre climbed out of the last car it must have felt almost like having their children home. Erling laughed, Nils shook Papa’s hand, and Sverre had become gentle and peaceful. Perhaps he was on medication.
When the brothers came home, the house immediately grew lively. Mama had gotten their old room ready; the beds were made, Christmas curtains hung in the windows. The three had much to tell after months in the large building far to the west by the sea. Nils and Sverre talked at the same time, Erling laughed with his hands on his ears, and at night Lilly prayed a short evening prayer with them before they could all go to sleep.
They sang “Blessed Lord.”
They still had childlike voices.
On Christmas Eve, I came with my family, Astrid had arrived from Oslo, and we celebrated Christmas together as in the past. Josef stood by the piano, and only the one lamp was lit. Strictly speaking, he sang only on the Big Day, but he made another exception. He sang as he always did: in a loud voice, with fine, clear articulation. He looked like a cultivated elderly nobleman as he stood there in the soft light, and afterward he got tremendous applause. Erling and Sverre clapped and clapped, and Josef bowed with his hand on his stomach.
“Merci,” he said. “Au revoir.”
The five siblings ate and sang and opened Christmas presents that Mama and Papa had bought for them. They received mittens and scarves and small marzipan pigs that Lilly gathered up for safekeeping. New Year’s Eve we celebrated together again. We sat in front of the television and watched the king’s New Year speech from the Royal Palace in Oslo. Everyone was silent. The king spoke. We let the words sink in. Afterward, Papa went out into the yard with his Mauser rifle on his shoulder, while the rest of us stood waiting by the windows. It was very dark outside. We saw nothing but a reflection of the living room and our own white faces, but we all knew Papa was out there, and we all knew what was going to happen. Erling and Ingrid covered their ears, Sverre dozed, and Nils grinned the way he always did. Suddenly there was a loud bang. Erling laughed wildly, waving his arms, and hid his head in his sweater; Ingrid howled and hung on to Sverre. Five more bangs echoed back and forth among the hills like the sound of English fighter planes, and then the new year could begin.
5.
There were days with sunshine and drifting clouds, there were evenings with rain from the southwest and misty mornings when the pine trees were barely visible. Not completely dark, but still not light enough to distinguish the closest trees from the rest of the forest. The ash tree motionless. Easter lilies in the garden, like small white bonfires scattered in an unknown shadowland.
Suddenly it was autumn.
On November 25, 1965, Rebekka Olsen died in a nursing home in Stavanger. Two years later, on October 14, 1967, stonemason Hertinius Olsen followed her to the grave.
None of their five mentally disabled children were with them.
The parents had visited the children just once. It had gone well. Fifteen years passed, and then both parents were dead.
I don’t know what Rebekka felt that day in late December 1944 when Inspector Aarrestad from the Child Welfare office stood in the miserable apartment near Strandgata surrounded by her filthy children.
Perhaps she felt ashamed.
Perhaps she felt like an old woman.
Several weeks after Hertinius died, an inventory of the estate was made, and later a meeting was held regarding the beneficiaries. The estate’s assets were found to be a good fifteen thousand kroner in cash. Liabilities included a number of expenses in connection with settling the estate: government taxes of three hundred kroner and eighty-three øre, a registration fee of twenty kroner. Various probate court expenses, nine kroner for deponents with cars, plus fifty kroner for the death certificate filled out by district medical officer Håberg.
A total of nine items. People made sure they got paid.
Finally, a thousand kroner were set aside to pay for a common gravestone for the couple.
When everything was deducted, the inheritance had shrunk to thirteen thousand four hundred forty-nine kroner and thirty-one øre. Divided by five.
Papa went upstairs with the money that came to Lilly and Ingrid, two thousand six hundred eighty-nine kroner for each, ca
refully counted out and placed in two brown envelopes. Ingrid ripped open her envelope with her thumb, emptied the money on the table, and watched in amazement as the kroner coins and fifty-øre pieces rolled across the floor and under the bed. Lilly took her envelope without opening it, but she made a deep, dignified curtsy as always. And rightly so at last. Suddenly she had become wealthy. A package of Gjende shortbread cost no more than a couple of kroner at the Brandsvoll store, a bottle of Asina could not be much more, and she no longer needed to sell dried flowers.
Every Sunday they counted the money. The house was Sunday quiet; Josef and Papa were at church, Mama was down in the kitchen preparing dinner for everyone. Ingrid stacked the coins in crooked piles, and there was never a single øre missing.
They had nothing to spare for the missionaries.
Papa set up a joint account at the savings bank located in the new Brandsvoll town hall, and one day the three of them took the money there. They stood at the counter, each sister with her envelope; the teller opened the little window and was going to take the money, but Lilly suddenly would not give up her envelope.
“It’s my money,” she said.
“We can take care of it for you,” said the teller. “And then you’ll have even more money.”
“I don’t believe it,” said Lilly.
With that she turned and walked away.
In the end they went home again with the money. They had a joint account at the savings bank, but the money lay in the brown envelopes in their room. All through the years, the account remained empty.
6.
Josef managed to read all the books in the public library seven or eight times, according to his count. That did not include the poetry books, and perhaps also Ibsen’s plays. He must have been one of the most well-read people in the parish, but whether he remembered anything from all those books was another matter. He was also among the most faithful churchgoers. Now and then he walked alone the five kilometers to church. Occasionally he got lost, but someone always found him along the road and guided him in the right direction. He had his regular place in church, in the front row on the right, with a good view of the altar rail and the pulpit with three evangelists painted on it. He saw four parish pastors come and go, but the sexton, Reinert Sløgedal, was there the entire time. Sløgedal was the same, and Anna at the reed organ was the same. Anna glanced at the organ mirror, Josef sang louder than everyone else, and if by chance the former sheriff was in church on Sunday, Josef did his best to talk with him and stand shoulder to shoulder with him in the churchyard.
Across the China Sea Page 16