‘Where is Aslak?’
‘He went out.’
‘But I asked you to look after him.’
‘There’s a fire engine outside. He went to look at it.’
The fire engine was still there, but there was no sign of Aslak. I went with Mum and we walked round the garden, the fire engine and the neighbouring streets. Mum picked up her phone and I wondered whom she should call. The lump of dough in my tummy grew so large that I couldn’t swallow.
‘How could you leave him alone like that?’
‘I didn’t think he would be so stupid.’
‘Aslak isn’t stupid, just little.’
‘He’s going to school next year.’
‘He’s still little.’
‘I’m little too!’
I burst into tears. Mum didn’t hug me; she didn’t even stroke my cheek. She looked at me angrily, and for a moment I thought she was going to hit me. She looked up the numbers of Aslak’s nursery school friends’ mothers and wondered whom to call first, how she could summon up the nerve to ring any of them and say she had no idea where her child was. I wondered what nerve had to do with something like this, but didn’t dare ask. Shame thickened around us like air that was too hot. I didn’t understand what was shameful about the situation but I did know that it was all my fault.
Mum breathed heavily, speaking in a shrill voice. The phone in her hand vibrated. As I looked at it, my legs and arms went limp like spaghetti that has boiled too long.
Up till then I had believed that grown-ups had a big secret. That grown-ups knew for sure how to be in the world and what you should do when. Dad and Mum were often tired and got angry easily; sometimes I was woken by Mum’s crying. All the same, I believed that beneath all that grown-ups had a strong and steady core, an inner stability that nothing could completely destroy.
‘We will make sure that nothing bad will happen to you,’ Mum and Dad repeated when I or Aslak was scared of something – riding a bike, swimming, going to a birthday party, getting run over by a car, fatal illnesses or playing the piano in the music academy concert.
‘We will take care of you.’ I had believed it. I had believed that grown-ups had a secret way of making the world good for children. Now, looking at Mum’s shaking hands, I understood that this was not so. Grown-ups were just as scared, just as helpless, as children.
I wiped my tears on the sleeve of my blouse and looked at the familiar buildings, the familiar hedges and streets on which I had learned to ride a scooter and a bike, to skip and to twist and to hide if a child I didn’t want to play with came out. Everything looked the same as before, yet everything had changed. Playing and running in these streets I had always thought that I was safe, that someone was looking after me. Now the wind blew on my face more harshly than before, the sounds of the cars were sharper, there was a threat in the faces of passers-by. On the path up to our front door hopped a crippled sparrow. The bird pecked at some bread that had fallen to the ground, flitting away when someone approached it.
The someone had bare feet. There were bruises on his legs, his trousers and shirt were torn, a scrap of pink tulle clung to his collar, his face paint had run from under his eyes onto his cheeks. Mum dropped her phone and ran to Aslak.
‘Darling. What happened?’
Once inside, Aslak said nothing. His mouth was a narrow line and his eyes, lined with black face paint, were dark pools. Mum took off Aslak’s dirty clothes, discovering that the back of his shirt was torn and his skin was raw and bloody. Aslak stared at the floor and scratched one ankle with the toes of his other foot.
I went to the bathroom to fetch some antiseptic wash, some cotton wool and plasters for Mum. I stood on the toilet seat to reach the medicine cupboard and saw in the mirror a face that was very pale, and much older than before. At my back I felt a light wind, as if someone had walked quickly by.
‘This is your fault,’ said a voice inside my head. It was Aslak’s voice, Mum’s voice, my own voice. And the voice of someone else, a stranger who was staring at me, someone who could see everything and knew what would happen to a badly behaved girl.
When I went back to Aslak and Mum, my steps were heavier than before. I would have liked to become very small, to curl up in Mum’s arms and cry, to let Mum stroke my cheek and say everything would be all right. But Mum spoke only to Aslak.
‘Darling. You need to tell us what happened,’ Mum repeated, but Aslak said nothing, just looked at the floor and scratched his feet. For a moment I thought Aslak was perhaps somewhere completely different, on a sun-warmed shore boulder by the sea. That he had left us and would never come back again.
17
Laura
You think life will be a certain way. You think that however difficult it is, the most important things will always stay the same. You know you belong to a privileged group, small but permanent. Then the world changes. And only when it is too late do you realise that everything really is possible. It is possible that everything you have considered certain will be swept away. It is possible that one day we too will flee war.
I wrote that in my journal when Aslak was seven and Aava ten years old. The Iraq war had been going on for years, and I could not get it out of my thoughts. I thought about children who saw their parents die, who hid when soldiers in heavy boots came to get their father. I thought about the closed shops, schools and hospitals, the people who left their homes, quickly packing their most important belongings, setting out without knowing where they were going.
I thought about my young granny, in her shiny shoes and white coat, saying goodbye at the railway station to the man whose child was making her belly swell. Granny put a note in her husband’s coat pocket, saying she was knitting him a scarf, she would go on knitting until the war ended; the scarf would have blue-and-white stripes and would be as long as the war. When the wool slips through my fingers, I will think of your skin, Granny wrote, not knowing that she would never wrap the scarf around her husband’s neck, would never finish the scarf.
She would bring up the girl in her belly alone, would work three shifts and carry the unfinished scarf in her bag from one small flat to the next. In the evenings her daughter would sit on the windowsill waiting for her mother to come home, pressing her nose against the glass, not daring to go back into the room, which was cold and full of ghosts.
I wonder what we would do if a war really did begin. Where would we try to go?
That same year, Aslak started school. On his first day I took the day off work and we walked to school together. Aslak was wearing his new yellow jeans and a yellow T-shirt with a racing-car print. He had chosen his clothes himself, comparing different combinations and looking at himself in the mirror for a long time in a way that made Eerik uncomfortable, even if he did not say so. Aslak walked beside me but would not hold my hand. His face was unsmiling and his gaze sombre; his hair, the colour of an unripe strawberry, glowed in the sun.
A little before the school gate, Aslak stopped.
‘What’s up?’ I asked.
Aslak kicked the ground with the toe of his tennis shoe and gestured towards the school gate with his hand. Children were walking to school like ants executing a task. Pairs of girls in glittery sweaters, whispering, heads together; groups of boys on skateboards and scooters; bigger children greeting each other easily and the big, confident nursery-school children who had, over the summer, been transformed into small, shy first-formers, toting brand new backpacks, shoulder to shoulder with a friend.
I saw what Aslak had seen: everyone else had a friend. Everyone else was coming to the first day at school with someone else, the bigger children with a group of friends and the first-formers with dense groups of adults and children, family friends together. Only Aslak and I were alone together. No one was waiting for him at the gate and no one would walk with him to the classroom.
I crouched down in front of Aslak and stroked his cheek.
‘Are you feeling nervous?’
He kicked
the ground, biting his lip in the same way as Eerik did, then shook his head.
‘You can go,’ he said. ‘I’ll be OK.’
The skin of his cheek was as soft as a kitten, his voice brave. I clenched my teeth and looked at a seagull that was tugging at a pizza box in the rubbish bin.
‘I’ll come and collect you,’ I said. ‘We’ll go for an ice cream.’
‘OK,’ Aslak whispered, his voice trembling with suppressed tears. An icy pain spread from my stomach towards my neck. I pressed Aslak quickly to me; his heart was beating like a shrew’s, his breathing tickled my neck.
‘Have a lovely day, sweetie.’
Aslak did not reply. He waved quickly and set off, head and shoulders stooped as if expecting a beating, towards school. I rushed home swallowing my tears; it was only when I reached my own front door that I realised that I had forgotten my bag.
‘He will be fine,’ Eerik said when I called him, weeping so much that at first he could not make out what I was saying. ‘We have to believe that he will be fine.’
18
Mum, can I come with you?’ Aslak was eleven years old. His eyes were serious and his face narrower than before; his limbs were longer and everything about him seemed suddenly to have become darker and sharper than before, his body and mind awkwardly uncertain at the point when a child is growing into a teenager.
I was on my way to an Open University course to talk about the same subject as always, climate change. Eerik was in his study, Aava out with her friends, and Aslak was in his room playing computer games, as he did every evening in those days. As I packed my bag in the hall, Aslak appeared beside me as if from nowhere, his phone in his hand, wearing pyjama trousers and a T-shirt. He looked at once small and big, and I had to hug him close; to my amazement he stayed still for a moment.
‘Why do you want to come?’
Aslak shrugged his shoulders.
‘There’s nothing to do.’
I stroked his cheek, covered with soft down.
‘I’d like to hear what you say,’ he said finally, with forced cheerfulness.
‘Really?’
‘Maybe.’
I hugged him again. His shoulder blades rose under the thin shirt like wing stumps.
‘Do come with me, sweetie. It would be really nice.’
Aslak put on jeans and sneakers, I kissed Eerik goodbye, and Aslak and I fetched our bikes from the back garden, cycling through the August evening to the darkening city.
At that time the family was strange to me. Eerik and I were in a polite but distant phase; neither of us had the energy to build bridges. Aava went round to friends’ houses after school or shut herself in her room with them. When I tried to talk to her, her short responses made me feel absolutely ancient. Aslak spent his evenings in his room behind closed doors. Sometimes I knocked on his door, sitting on the edge of his bed for a moment and asking him questions to which he did not respond. As for me, I had the time and space for which I had yearned when the children were small, but the gloomy silence that hovered over our home was so suffocating that I was tired from morning till night.
Is that all there is to life? I thought, remembering me and Eerik when we were young, full of a thirst for each other and for the whole world. Ordinary life and a surreptitiously deepening strangeness, was that all that lay in store for us?
When Aslak cycled ahead of me through the city with its smell of high summer, my pedals moved more easily than for a long time. I looked at my son’s tousled hair, which had grown long, and the narrow back revealed by his fluttering shirt. I remembered how, when he was two, he used to be wakened by nightmares, how I bent to stroke him, how he used to squeeze his fingers firmly around my forefinger.
‘This is my boss,’ I said to the people who had come to listen to my lecture. I ruffled Aslak’s hair and felt an overwhelming desire to keep him close to me, to find a language in which I could get him to talk to me.
‘Pleased to meet you!’ everyone said to Aslak, and Aslak responded with an embarrassed smile. Amid the well-dressed, thoughtful adults, my son suddenly looked different from before, relaxed and adaptable. He took his computer out of his backpack and sat next to a lanky young man to listen to me.
‘We talk about the climate crisis but continue to live as if there were no crisis,’ I said at the beginning of my lecture, and Aslak looked over his computer at me intently and sharply.
‘At the same time the climate crisis influences how we treat one another,’ I said. I cited research according to which global warming and the associated change in rainfall increase violence both between individuals and between large groups of people. Aslak’s eyes looked like coins darkened by age.
‘If we cannot control climate change, by 2050 the risk of violent conflict will have grown by fifty per cent across the globe. Do we want to leave our children such a world?’
To finish, I quoted the French philosopher Michel Serres, whose writings give form to things that are difficult to understand.
‘According to Serres, humanity is for the first time in a situation in which we can have a effect on the entire globe. Our impact reaches the entire globe and out into space,’ I said.
‘When we lived in an agrarian society, we learned to live at the mercy of nature, which was strong and governed life. Now we leave traces on the environment which we encounter everywhere. There is no escape. Our imprint has made nature fragile, its power uncertain. Nature can mend itself only when it has space to do so. Now humankind has become a parasite which takes all the space away from nature. To stop it, our only option is to make a contract with nature, as Serres suggests, to find once again a way to live in harmony with nature.’
Aslak looked at me quizzically, whispering something to the man next to him and tapping some notes with quick fingers. His forehead wrinkled and his ears stuck out beneath his long hair – he had suffered from their size since he was small. For a moment I saw an image of him as an adult, with a smart suit and serious eyes, talking about the same subject to different audiences, calling his listeners to action in a world in which there would be much more hope than now. I closed my eyes so that the image would linger for as long as possible.
I was in the habit of dreaming constantly of alternative worlds, conjuring up pictures of me, Aava and Aslak in strange landscapes and new stories. The pictures coloured new layers into life, suggesting that life was not merely a succession of ordinary days, one after another. That somewhere there was also something else, another time, another life and another kind of self; that there was still something to come. But now I realised that I had not imagined anything about Aslak for a long time. I had seen nothing but the present moment, endlessly continued, and a boy whose life I watched powerlessly from afar, in which nothing would change. Perhaps it was precisely this that was the cause of the gloominess that hovered over our flat like dust that gathers in corners.
After the lecture, I stayed to talk to the students. Aslak came up to me and to my eyes he looked for a moment like one of them, a gifted, enthusiastic boy for whom the world was an open book. I did not want to go home. I wanted the evening with Aslak to go on unhurriedly. I asked if he would like to have something to eat with me and was startled when he said yes.
We cycled to a café where Eerik and I used to go before we had children, drinking wine and gazing at the ice-cream-white surface of the cathedral. Years ago the café had meant limitless time, the chance to order glass after glass of wine, milky coffee and little pies which were served on porcelain plates. There Eerik and I had talked about the past and the future, about our fears and dreams and, on summer evenings, moved out into the courtyard to watch movies, wrapped together in a blanket, going with the movie to Tunisia, Italy or France, looking at people who walked in high-heeled shoes on the cobbled streets. The things that happened in their lives were carefree even when they were sad, melancholy even when they were carefree.
The table Eerik and I used to sit at was free. Aslak sat down opposite me and
set his backpack down on the windowsill; I moved it onto the floor underneath the table. Aslak glanced at me with irritation, but neither of us said anything. I ordered chocolate cake and tea for both of us. I would have liked a glass of wine, but it was important to have the same as Aslak. His relaxed demeanour at the lecture had disappeared. The veil that had seemed for a moment to have lifted had come down again. He spooned up his piece of cake with lowered head and responded to my questions in short sentences. I did what I always do when I am ill at ease: filled the space with trifling talk, which made Aslak withdraw even more.
‘Who do you spend time with at break time?’ I asked, regretting my words the very moment they came out of my mouth.
‘No one,’ Aslak said, and his face was reflected, long and pale, in the surface of his plate.
‘Is it horrible?’
‘I think it’s quite OK to be alone,’ he said with a smile.
I felt the smile as a sharp stab beneath the skin of my belly. It was my smile. The same smile that I pulled across my face as a child like a mask on the warm mornings when I wore a long-sleeved shirt to school to hide the bruises on my arms. It was the smile that I pulled across my face when I said I couldn’t come to gym class because I had a tummy ache. And when I told the teacher, the school psychologist and my friends’ parents that everything was just fine, absolutely fine.
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