She tried talking to him but got no response. He would not make eye contact, would not answer her, and his hand lay limp in hers as she led him inside. She gave him hot chocolate at the kitchen table and told him he looked like his uncle, my brother, she said. That was something she said to him at happier moments, but it was also meant in reproach, because he was not his uncle and all the times he was impossible it was doubly obvious, for how could he let down his own mother in such a way, by bearing a resemblance to her beloved brother, and yet be different?
But Christmas came soon after, and it went well. As though nothing bad had happened. Perhaps the boy had already forgotten the whole thing. Hartvig stood in the kitchen, his coat open and a layer of wet snow on his shoulders. He had one hand on the Christmas tree he had bought, the stem of it resting on the black-and-white checked floor, gloves on so as not to prick himself. The room was chilly, she was airing out the steam from the roast and outside it was dark and snowy. They laughed about something, she could not recall what. The boy ran from room to room, stopping now and again to hug her, filled with anticipation. The apron was tight and her hips were a little too round for her liking, but she was not tired and Mama was spending Christmas with them. Thank God for Mama.
There is a Persian rug in the doctor’s office that looks like the one in the living room at home.
It is of course her nerves. Dr Vold tells her as much when she asks him for a diagnosis, something definite. Her nerves would certainly appear to be the cause. She needs to take it easy. He says other things as well, but what sticks in her mind as the single most pertinent is: in future she must avoid these distressing episodes. She must get up out of the mire, she tells herself.
She tells Hartvig that they need to send the boy away for a while. He seems perplexed, is reluctant. Shouldn’t she manage to mind her own child? he says. Looking after the boy does fall under her remit and in point of fact was the very reason for her being at home instead of earning a living. Then she snaps. She pounds her chest, slaps her face with both hands, tears at her hair and throws things at him. The whole of this big house. The maid. The garden. That demanding boy. Her health. Her nerves. Doesn’t he understand anything? She’s weak. She screams and sobs. Smashes things. But fine, she cries, the boy stays but you have to stop working so much. Home at five o’clock. No more twelve-hour work days.
He gives in then, naturally.
She groans about having a headache when Hartvig and the boy come in to say goodbye. That will make them realise how mean they are being. This is certainly not something she wishes for, but something that has to be done. Her body is crying out for rest. It is impossible to make Hartvig understand that, even though she has explained it over and over. So she resorts to having a headache. He cannot object to that. She is confined to bed and has terrible head pain, she cannot look after a child. Moreover, a demanding child. Even Hartvig can appreciate that. All the same, she has to choose her words carefully when speaking to him. She does not quite know why, but she can sense it, him watching her. It could happen suddenly: his not wanting to have anything to do with her any more.
The boy is so excited, he can hardly bring himself to sit still on the edge of the bed while she cries and kisses him. She comforts herself with the thought that it will be a delight for him to take the train, regardless of everything else. Together with his father. He loves trains and begs Hartvig every single Sunday to take a walk down to the station to look at the locomotives. Yes, the train journey will be simply splendid. And at the children’s home he will get lots of fresh air and have friends to play with. People to keep him out of mischief, that will not do him any harm. Truth be told, he is mollycoddled. Mama does not agree but the children’s home comes on the highest recommendations. They have not told him yet, after all, he does not know what a children’s home is. Like visiting Aunt Marthe, Hartvig now attempts to explain, but with that the boy thinks he is going to Marthe’s to help out with the animals. The sheep and the hens and the cat, he says. Hartvig leaves it at that, he is not terribly fond of crying or emotional to-dos. She can almost hear him: ‘There’s damn near nothing but scenes in this house.’ Her scenes, mind you. He wants peace and quiet. Decorum. Well, in that case he should not have married her. Now he can attend to the boy, then he will get some peace.
3
My childhood memories are as clear to me as the things I perceive around me: the grain of the wood in the kitchen table, the pen, the paper, the yellow gerbera in the green glass vase, the cup of lukewarm tea, the dark shadows of the trees outside the window, the wind blowing. I am thinking about Plato’s allegory of the cave. It was difficult to understand his reasoning when I was young and studying philosophy at university. Now my thoughts flow easily. The allegory comes and goes. The shadow of ‘the good’ on the wall and the prisoners in chains who did not know of anything else but that. And yet the shadow itself was the very proof that ‘the good’ existed. The One. The starting point. These were the kinds of thoughts you could have before thoughts became relative: that you could not get behind the origin. There was a limit. It is not like that any more. Now our thoughts lead us all over the place and nowhere at all.
I picture the room in the attic. It must be a particular day that I recall. The restless shadows on the wall, not possible to see if they were cast by people. Had we visitors? Your birthday. I understood all the words but not what they meant. I heard them talking about the strong sun, about down-in-the-harbour and the fleet. About Nortraship and the war and the torpedoing. My only brother, Granny said. Daddy was named after him, his Uncle Finn who was torpedoed. Oh, he was one of a kind, all right. And there were shadows from branches, but no tree outside, not that I could see. Granny lit up a cigarette, and said fuck to Daddy, fuck, Finn. She liked to be teased. When she laughed in anger she was not angry. But excited.
The playhouse was in the garden. It was delivered on a lorry. But what did I know about the relation of numbers to time, I was only four years old. Sandalled feet went up the steps. They were made from old, tarred tram sleepers. Soles skidded on sand grains. There was sand on the bench too. The bench was the cooker. A yellow plastic cup and a red mug. The pine tree seen through the window quite different from the pine tree seen when outside. It was smaller seen from outside, when you saw it together with everything else that existed around it. The walls were smooth. The playhouse smelled of shadow and sand.
There were nettles behind the big house. Thin blades of grass tickled my legs. I got a cold bum when I sat on the stone steps at the kitchen door. It was always in the shade. Moss grew on the foundation wall alongside the steps. The door faced the spruce hedge. A little path ran beside the hedge down to the garage. Well-trodden, compacted sand. Stones sticking up here and there. Feldspar. The garage door was often open. Daddy lay under the car. Then he was not under the car any more but standing and showing me different tools. Adjustable spanner. Saw. Screwdriver. Pliers. The grown-ups smiled almost all the time. I did not understand every word they said but they were happy. It was me who made them happy but I did not know that then. They called to me from the window, asking if I was hungry. Asking if I would not like to take the spade and spread what little snow was left by the gate under the hedge. There was another girl there, ‘a little companion’, as Granny put it. Granny came to see us, visited the house that had once been hers. She had lived in America and I pretended there was an American city under the hedge. The grown-ups walked back and forth on the gravel, and the car drove out of the garage. Someone was expected. Several men came, and emptied manure onto the grass beside the yard. The heap lay there in sunshine and rain. Another day they burned grass and leaves. The gravel crunched beneath their feet, I heard the tram through the smell of smoke. It was a nice garden to be out in, with a potato bed, berry bushes and lawns. A small wood connected the garden to the neighbouring gardens. Tall pine trees, roots, pine cones and needles, I played in there.
Later on, we did not live in the house. That was because of Mum and
Dad’s divorce. We had to move. I do not remember why, but I do remember successive flats, stairwells, lawns and washing lines between the blocks of flats, with wet sheets that were lovely to put your face against. One morning I entered the kitchen and noticed the gleam of the knives beside the breakfast plates and saucers. The dazzling light was of more interest to me than the loss of the house and the happy grown-ups. That is how children are. They take advantage of every lonely moment to play by themselves and in their games the world is recreated. It can be wonderful or less than wonderful. Enthralling, but empty, or dark, dense and boundless. This was in the early seventies, but I distinctly remember the linoleum flooring was from the fifties, and slippery. And so the days, the years and decades pass. Mum and Dad are friends again now, even live under the same roof sometimes, other times not. Thinking back, it is clear to me that I understood very little of their quarrels, why they had them, I do not remember a word of them. Children really do not understand an awful lot of what grown-ups are doing. How childish they are. No matter, the time around the divorce was not all that bad. But then family does not count for everything in a child’s life, almost but not everything, ninety per cent perhaps? The rest is genes and other kids. Little shits. At least at my school, but I cannot face thinking about that any more.
It is as if the fear in my body has already informed me, even though my mind is dull and distant, slumped in rumination: it is Emilie who is missing. They have released her name and a photograph. It must have been taken recently, on one of those hot days last week, because she is only wearing a T-shirt, and I think it must have been in the afternoon, when the sun is low and the light is golden. She is sitting on a wicker chair, against what looks like the wall of a house, on a veranda, with the poodle on her lap. Her eyes appear bluer than usual against the yellow wall, the whites of them shining, and her skin is a little red, sunburned perhaps, her freckles prominent where shadows fall on her face, cast by a tree, a softly defined pattern of leaves and swaying boughs. Her hair is strawberry blonde and up in a ponytail, which is coming loose. Her smile is broad and open and whoever is holding the camera may have said something at the moment the picture was taken, something that made her happy, because she is looking right at the lens, brimming with laughter.
A wasp crawls over a congealed tea stain on the kitchen table. I place my hand over it, cupping it first, so that the wasp buzzes and flies around inside as if in a cave, smacking into walls. Then I gradually press my palm down. It stings me at the bottom of my middle finger. I open my hand. A red circle appears and starts to swell. It hurts. I pluck out the black stinger. The wasp is not moving any more. I lift my head and look outside. The windows are streaked with a film of pollen and other dirt. There is a magpie on the fence. The post van arrives and the bird takes off. I go out, walking down the driveway. It is muggy and moist, rain on the way. The postman sees me and smiles. We usually say hello to each another. He even waves to me if he passes me on the road when I am returning from the shops in Slemdal. He is probably keeping an eye out for Emilie too. Driving slower than usual, looking in the gardens, feeling he could catch sight of her at any moment. A foot behind a bush. Something pink protruding from behind a woodpile, from between some trees.
If I am out in the garden when Emilie is passing by, I usually go over to the fence. I pet the little grey poodle and we talk about animals, especially dogs. She is going to join the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, she has already decided that, and wants to be a vet if her marks in maths are good enough. Because she loves animals and hates to see them suffer. When she grows up she is going to buy a big house where animals that have had a hard time can live. She is going to look after them. There may be so much work with the animals that she will not be able to get married and have children, she tells me, but if it turns out she does have children, she thinks they will enjoy growing up in a house like that, because animals and children like each other, love each other in fact.
Emilie often looks down at the mobile in her hand while walking along, in her lopsided pink Uggs, which she wears all year round. The dog scurries from one side of the road to the other. She lets the lead out too far, I always think when I see her, what will happen if a car comes, if the dog suddenly pulls, makes for the other side of the road and the car does not stop?
I can clearly picture Emilie’s pale, delicate scalp showing through her centre parting, can imagine how it feels to hold that soft, smooth ponytail, pointed at the end, a brush of hair gently prickling the palm of my hand. She always wears the same piece of silver jewellery around her neck: a symbol combining an anchor, a heart and a cross. I had a similar trinket when I was at primary school. A charm. That was what we called them, the little silver figures we wanted as birthday presents, and hung on bracelets. The best was if you had figures no one else had, or at least the same as everyone else had, and everybody had hearts, anchors and crosses. Granny had given me my bracelet, and lots of charms too, I had forgotten that, but I remember now: a cat and a dog, a horseshoe, a four-leaf clover, a unicorn, my star sign, several angels and hearts. We talked about charms on the telephone, about how many different types there were, how new ones were always coming out, and I told her which of these I wanted most. Granny’s voice was cheerful, they are nice, she said, very pretty. Sometimes I received several in the same box from her, and not just at Christmas or on birthdays, I had a large collection in the end, but do not know where they are any longer.
Once I bent down and carefully lifted the trinket from the hollow of Emilie’s neck with my index finger. I wanted to examine it properly, to see if it was the same as mine. The warm, distinctive scent that children have hit me, a combination of hair, soap and something dry, sweet, but perhaps it was as much the absence of smell that I noticed, because children lack that pervasive odour of hormones and private parts.
That’s lovely, I said, I had one just like it. Yes, Emilie said, standing completely still while I examined it, Mummy gave it to me. She said she’d been keeping it for me her whole life. You know that it means faith, hope and charity, don’t you?
A woman in her thirties pushes a buggy up the hill and passes behind the postman. I often see her. I have considered exchanging a few words with her on occasion. I have also been thirty years of age with small children. But she does not seem the type to be interested in others. She is so thin that you might suspect she had an eating disorder, and always wears expensive brands, at least according to Tuva, who knows about that kind of thing. A caricature, Tuva says, a posh, west-side bitch. Her eyebrows are plucked, make-up evenly applied, face closed. She is unlikely to be thinking about Emilie. Perhaps about herself. Thinking about things she wants. Furniture to get. Clothes to buy. Trips to take. Or she is thinking about what she can eat and what she cannot eat. Things like that. You should never judge a book by its cover, I am aware of that, but still, she is a fucking cow. I don’t know why you let yourself get worked up, Tuva says, you don’t even know her. Because Tuva does not know that I am always on the run from my inner self and external things provide a welcome break, in the nature of other people, and Sod’s law. Release. How nice it would be to disappear into the world. It is different for Tuva, she knows so many people, has no need to compensate with either eating disorders or escape, for Tuva nothing is too small to talk about, and she talks to everyone, leans forward over tables, shop counters, information desks, she connects with people. I miss having her around, the sound of her determined footsteps through the rooms, the doors flying open and closing, her face appearing in the doorway: Hi Mum, what’s going on?
I open the gate. I have no shoes on and only a thin cotton skirt covering my legs. The temperature is in the high twenties and there is not a breath of wind. There are two newspapers and an earwig inside the post box. It begins to rain, a warm, light shower that increases in strength throughout the afternoon. I stand by the worktop and drink red wine while listening to the radio and looking at the gravel in the driveway, which has become wet, dar
k and glistening.
I am nothing but love to the children. Yet I continue to exist for myself.
I hear a rumbling in my stomach and take the crispbread packet from the cupboard, count out five and put cheese on all of them. They taste dry and boring on their own, but together with wine and a few slices of apple they are something else entirely. I do not know if I am eating in order to drink the wine, or drinking the wine so I can manage to eat.
My teeth are sore, or rather my gums I should say, they must be inflamed. I have to ring the dentist, but do not like using the phone any more, not since having a mobile. It makes it hard to concentrate, people calling while I am on the train, while I am walking along busy streets or am in the shower. I jot down messages and appointments on scraps of paper that I leave wherever I was when the phone rang, because it rings when I least expect it, when I have gone to bed, when I am on the toilet, and still I answer it, I have to when somebody wants me for something, it vibrates in my body, in my brain. Landlines are different, they can ring and ring in empty rooms without anyone hearing, or managing to reach them in time, and thus not bothering to try, but I do not have a landline, because I do not know how long I will be able to live in the house. As long as you want, Dad says, because it is his childhood home, but how long is that? Besides, I’m in two minds. I am not sure if I want anything at all, neither want nor do not want. When life drifts on and disappears all the same. Sooner or later memories break down, Dad’s, mine, the children’s, and then the house will fall into the void, out into the open. Whether it is knocked down or not. They may well tear it down soon. Dad and his sisters. There are lots of eventualities you cannot foresee. What did Granny and Granddad want with this house, to play at being grown-ups?
Only Human Page 3