I did not know what they talked so intensely about, if it was football, politics or women, I did not understand what they said nor what I saw. Were they serious, earnest and upright? Or were they irresponsible and lacking drive? I really would have liked to know, but on the other hand, I thought, as I sat there writing, if I did find out then perhaps I would not have begun pondering the importance of talking, or have been able to long for conversations with more content than the ones I had with my own friends. I yearned. Which meant there must be something to yearn for, even if it only existed in my imagination, like the idea of perfection in other people.
I turned, walked a little way back and went into a shoe shop. There were shelves of trainers by the entrance. All of them were made in China and none of them cost less than twelve hundred kroners, I checked, held each one in my hand to gauge if it was light enough, bent it to see how flexible the sole was, longed to run on the roads. It felt good looking at new shoes in strong colours, I was almost far away, deep in thought, but then I began to sweat, my pulse beat faster, my hat itched, enraged I tore it off, unbuttoned my coat, left the shop, and suddenly: a large space around the mind, that did not know what it thought. I found myself far back in time, and I was standing bent over the drop-leaf table in my student bedsit, furious. All my youthful energy intact, but no direction for it to take, going in circles. A frightening person. Filled with sex.
I wiped the sweat from my upper lip and set off downhill. My scarf was moist and the back of my neck cold. When I reached the Arabian café I slowed down and looked in the windows. The man with the scarf was sitting at a table with a beer in front of him. When he spotted me, he rose quickly to his feet. I gave him the finger and broke into a run.
The following day I rang the Arts Council and Authors’ Union and asked them to ignore the letters I had sent. Don’t read them, I said. As though it had ever been necessary to ask someone to refrain from reading something I wrote. But it would not prevent me from assuming my fundamental duties, I thought, God knows what I meant, but I suppose it’s possible to work it out:
Nobody has the right to be read
But I am not getting what I deserve
I reap what I sow
But I have no control over the weather
I cannot get away from myself
No but, nobody can.
It was not possible to leave, I still ended up inside, only in a different way: off kilter, wretched, easy prey. Yes, there were many words to describe a person back in the fold, in a community, even if it was a community composed of the misguided.
16
Beate is fashionable, her style is of the time. Beate is time, because she is so young. She is fluid. I am not time any longer, I am age. That means calcification, the death of cells. I do not mean much by all this, it is a stockpile of words I construct to keep myself down for the most part, that is how depression works: it produces thoughts that squeeze emotions together, force them down or push them away. I think this myself, because I am possessed of self-knowledge. This gives a double dimension to most things. Double depression, double longing, and in theory double joy as well.
Beate has freckles and long fair hair, tight faded jeans and a white blouse which she has tied a knot in on one side. Plucked eyebrows and deep pink lip gloss. When I am close to her I can smell different fragrances, some must be from the styling products in her hair, some from body lotion and perfume, and some maybe from the fabric softener on her clothes.
I recall a reader’s letter on a page aimed at children and teens in a newspaper:
What’s wrong with being perfect?
I wear Uggs, cool clothes and make-up. I am pretty, many people say I look perfect. What’s wrong with that? Why should I be criticised for it?
I could have told her: nobody is perfect. Only babies, and you are hardly a baby any more, are you? Or: what is perfection? Or: perfection is boring. But I do not understand exactly what I mean by that. I understand neither the girl nor myself. Deep down I think that perfection exists. But I do not want it to. Why can we not just say it is irrelevant, that we can manage without the word?
We say that we live, I write in one of my notebooks, but it is not like that, that is a very poor description. At any rate, I do not live. It lives me. As if that is a better way to put it. Idiot. My dreams have deceived me. They have no time limit, yet time leaves them behind. Sooner or later there will be nothing ahead.
But I do not speak to Beate in the same way as I write. On the contrary. I play her music, show her books, tell her about them and am even enthusiastic when I do. Beate shall have what I myself want. Beate’s open, young face. Isn’t she beautiful? Anita used to say, beautiful, I would say, she’s lovely, perfect.
I take books down off the shelf when I am alone as well.
I have everything, yet it is still not enough.
It is humid outside, but dusty amid the books, I find it hard to breathe. There is a picture of a forest on one of the covers. A woman walks alongside a river in the forest, in a black skirt and white blouse. I look out through the window at the overturned wheelbarrow. The flies, the midges hovering above the water bucket. The spade planted in the ground.
I feel sorry for myself. I have not lived through the Second World War, have only had my own fear, the dreary notebooks and nothing at all to frame my life, give me direction and consequently a purpose, no complete collection of friends, ways of speaking and conventions, no distinct culture, neither ideals nor visions. Only the flowing past, the one I found in books, or my own, the one that comes drifting.
We live in an age where nothing is at stake, I am in the habit of saying amongst gatherings of friends, slurring slightly after too much red wine, nor is there anything to fight against, no oppressive morality or suppression, the meaning of life cannot be identified. That is what I say, but not what I am thinking. There is nothing wrong with time, I think, it is not us, it is me. I lack something, I am not here, I should take a master’s degree, a doctorate, maybe two.
I can do anything I want, there are no obstacles, it all depends on me and me alone.
No, I am too tired. Tired of thinking. Tired of lacking. Whatever it might be that I lack. Greater spirituality, or a man, a love that shakes me to my very core?
Or an activistic attitude, a societal engagement. That would help me see the meaning of life. To be committed to a cause, along with other people. To work for the common good.
So I do mean what I say through the haze of red wine. I am going in circles. Nothing generates purpose in me. There are no limitations.
Only loathing.
Knut used to laugh at me and say I got too worked up about the most inescapable facts. You’re Norwegian, he would say, you just have to put up with it. That’s how life is for us. Security has its price. You don’t pay heed to the fact that the very existence of the planet is under threat, nature, climate change, all that stuff, there’s a cause for you, but you don’t involve yourself in that, maybe you find it boring?
Yes.
I travelled to Berlin instead to look for Jews, but they had literally gone up in smoke. I cried, not for them, but because I could not stroll into 1933, into a bourgeois Jewish apartment, sit at the table by the light of the candelabra and break bread, dip it in soup. I suffered from a non-committal reverie, exoticism, that was me, distant.
The trip was confusing, lonely, my attention attracted to shopping centres, museums, their gift shops, cafés with nostalgic servings of Sachertorte and espresso, hot chocolate with real cream, this word ‘real’ actually meant ‘old’, old cream, yes, my awareness of the present interfered with everything. The camera shaded my face. The text in the tourist guide never stuck in my mind.
I do not even know if I have utilised my books as well as I might have, if burying myself somewhere in the story might have helped, remaining there, not moving, not watching so many films, not reading so many novels or forgetting to read them, just seeing them pile up and become titles I would one day want
to penetrate, but which remained simply titles, something familiar I was nevertheless unfamiliar with, something I had obtained, but had not used.
But the self-criticism has declined, not because I have matured, but because my time is running on and running out, I need to hurry. What I do not have time to absorb now is never going to be of benefit to anyone, what I do not read will not be read by me and what I do not write will not be written by anyone.
Yes, that is how I am, me, Bea Britt Viker. Filled with self-pity that poisons my intelligence and emotional life, and makes me feel even more sorry for myself. I am without doubt a true child of my time. Every time I read in the newspaper about an underage asylum seeker the Norwegian government has sent out of the country I sigh and say: I cannot even manage to get upset about that, I do nothing. That is the way things are around me, passive, but simultaneously marked by excessive activity, excessive consumption, restlessness. We suffer from a lack of alternative courses of action, suffer. But what can I do? Me? The solution is not to be found on the level of the individual, I say. What an awful person I am. A cliché.
I have pondered it since the children were born. The black dog. The black sickness. Warm and sleek, it slips between the trees. Pauses, approaches, waits outside the house. A faithful friend. Standing guard. I am inside the house. Cannot get out. The dog can enter but I cannot leave. The dog is free. It does not have to speak. It was Knut who told me that Churchill termed his depression the black dog. Knut suffered a lot from depression. I did too. But I did not understand why that animal would embody depression. Smooth, glossy black dogs are beautiful after all. And as I stand looking at Beate, I have a sudden insight: the dog is not depression itself, but its companion, the opposite. The wonderful things there are no room for, the things melancholy has displaced. The dog is actually your friend.
Beate’s skinny body. That was what put me in mind of the black dog. Surely she has not got an eating disorder, I thought, at the same moment remembering that Anita and I had once taken the children to a stage production of When the Robbers Came to Cardamom Town. There was something about one of the actors. She was playing Mrs Bastian, wore prim fifties attire and had long legs that were far too thin. Her kneecaps protruded. Anorexic, I whispered to Anita, but Anita was not interested. There is something about her stance as well, I thought, staring at the actor, she stands like a little girl. Even though she was strong and could both tap-dance and smile coyly, she moved her legs like a young girl. When she turned to the side slightly, or stood still. Something awkward, knock-kneed. I remembered how it was back when I was fighting to stay thin. That feeling of being in harmony with myself, that came from keeping my weight down. As though my body belonged to a stranger and was made ready for this ownership, another life. Every time I exited the house, I was out to tender, I only existed in expectation of something else. My body was as light as that of a child. Soft and supple. It was while I sat looking at the actor’s anorexic body that I realised I was seeing something other than the childlike. It was the opposite. Which was perhaps not the opposite. I was looking into something complex. My head throbbed, my thoughts trailed off, and the three robbers came singing and dancing onto the stage. What coordination. Look, so strong, I whispered to Anita. Sexy, she whispered back, more interested now, we sniggered. My stomach ached. I wanted to have every one of the men on stage. They were in control. They could withhold or dole out affection. The unruly chest hair. The very thought of men like that taking care of small children turned me on. That was where the misunderstanding lay, the twisted factor. If it is a misunderstanding, that women want to be women-children. First they fight themselves free from the symbiotic sense of belonging with the fleshy bodies of other girls. After that they can stand alone in front of men. Visible. Something special. When no longer a part of their bunch of friends they can be plucked: pick me, no, no, take me instead. Be like a father to me, but fuck me. Lift me up, hold me tightly, deal with me. Know better than me. Control me. I need you. I want to need you.
Skinny legs and pointed knees. Mere swell of breasts. I cannot be more visible. It is sexy. Stomach flat between my hip bones, skin taut. There is space for a man’s hand there. It can take up all the room. Lust after me, away, away into the darkness. The woman who wants to look like a child is desperate with desire. Men think women like that have no interest in pleasure, that they are only concerned with themselves, that they must be roused, but that is a misapprehension, on the contrary, on the contrary, I thought, and that was how I was. Misunderstood.
What is it about penetration that is so crucial?
Don’t ask if you can’t answer.
Why not?
17
The hallway lies in semi-darkness, even though the ceiling light is on, because the windows are small and set high up in the wall. I usually ‘see’ things when I stand here: wrought-iron and ivy, dilapidated parks, townhouse gardens, thicket, and shadows of houses across the tarmac, strips of strong, yellow sunlight. I know I am in Granny’s time. There are no people at first. Just places. But I can tell by the light, the difference in how it falls, making things appear with a sharpness I would not ordinarily see, in the material of the attire, for example, the fibres in the weave of the woollen clothing, the burls, the shiny lining discernible on the inside of the coat sleeve. This is a winter’s day. I am walking on the street, the dirty blue tram passing by. I come to a pastry shop, enter and stand by the glass counter. A heavy chandelier hangs above my head. The ceiling is high. Large windowpanes face the snow outside, the light is harsh, making me squint. A woman in a white apron and bonnet stands in front of a shiny metal drum. She turns the black tap and hot chocolate runs into my cup. She places the cup and saucer on a tray and slides it down towards the till. The cashier provides everyone with cream from a bowl beside her, using a large spoon, she leans forward and tips the cream into the cup. In the park across the street, heavy snow lies upon the trees, the benches and atop the litter bins, the railings, on the little bridge over the pond. Black open water, two solitary ducks, males.
Where is this park? And why is nobody there?
I come near the inside of a coat, the form of a large man on a deserted street. Johan Andreas Walter. Suit trousers beneath his coat, the lining moving smoothly over the knees. It is winter, an icy wind. Underneath the clothes his body is strong, but unfit, his stomach white and soft, legs and chest slightly hairy, nipples pink. If I am Granny now, then I do not like this body, it is forcing itself in. From a different time. The men from childhood. Granny is tired of men. The road leads neither forwards nor backwards. Snow, cream. Ice, crystal, it does not become anything else, as it were. A bad dream.
Johan Andreas Walter. Granny once showed me that name. She had begun to research her family tree and I was visiting, sitting on her red sofa and reading the names on the genealogical charts she showed me. She had handwritten them in black ink, entered years of birth and death, who was married to whom, and what kind of titles they had. She had transferred the two latest generations to a drawing of a large family tree. My name was included, with a dash after the year of my birth and a space for the year of my death. But I already knew that I was never going to die. Granddad’s name had a big black cross beside it. Between his name and her own, Granny had drawn a knife dripping with blood. She had written ‘Bastard’ in large letters with an arrow pointing to Granddad. She had only put in her own past relatives.
Look, Granny said, our ancestors came from Schleswig-Holstein in the eighteenth century. She pointed to some names. Proper German sailors, she said, yes, of high rank and all, chief officers and captains, that kind of thing. Johan Andreas married a Danish woman, and one of their sons went to Norway and married there, he was a merchant.
And then, after that? I asked.
No, everything gets hard to follow from then on, Granny said, lit up a cigarette, and turned towards the window, the blue sky, the apartment block across the street, the rows of white balconies. I don’t really know if I’ll bother
doing much more on it. Nobody is interested in it anyway.
I’m interested, I said, but she pretended not to hear.
I was a very clumsy nine-year-old. Granny looked at my body, and then I understood I had a defect. All the same, she told me about her father. What he made her do.
Why did he do that? I asked.
Because he was mean. He was a mean, mean man, Granny said.
We sat in silence for a while, Granny in the chair, me on the sofa. I did not dare go for a piddle, because then she would see me from behind, and no doubt say I was stout. That meant fat. The sun was about to break through the cloud cover, only a snowflake or two still sailing through the air. The sunlight lay in warm strips across the wall opposite us, where Granny had her portraits, both paintings and photographs. One of the paintings was of her, in a white dress and dark high-button boots, her fair hair falling loose over her shoulders, the front up in a ribbon on one side of her head.
You were pretty, I said.
Yes, I was fetching, quite fetching, Granny replied.
I think I look like you in that picture, I said.
Really, you think so? Granny responded.
I get the red bucket from the cellar. Fill it with hot water and green soap. Switch on the light in the hallway and wash the floor covering, it is linoleum and depicts a Persian rug. I bought the art-deco lamp hanging from the ceiling in a second-hand shop in Amsterdam fourteen years ago. I was there with some friends and fellow writers. On a cultural holiday. We were at both the Rembrandt and the Van Gogh museums. My thoughts were unsettled, the museum spaces big and airy, I do not remember too much about the pictures. The staircase to the Secret Annexe where Anne Frank lived on the other hand was packed with people, we shuffled through in a queue and no one got to see the rooms properly. All that stood out to me was a firewood box, painted an optimistic shade of blue. Anne Frank used to sit on the box, I recalled that from the book, that she was a light-hearted girl. Memory is selective.
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