by Linn Ullmann
“They never do,” Laura told Erika on the phone.
It was five o’clock and Erika had decided to stop somewhere for Swedish meatballs and mashed potato. She said out loud: “Why don’t I stop the car and have meatballs and mashed potato. With lingonberry jam.”
Erika had a feeling Isak might not have long to live, and that was why she had embarked on this journey, which she was now regretting. The truth was that he lived on and on and on. Isak never died. His grief at the loss of Rosa remained unbearable, and he would occasionally speak of his suicide, planned down to the last detail but never carried out. The pills had been procured and lay ready, interminably, in the drawer of his bedside table.
Elisabet would say, in one of her few moments of insight, that if they were the same pills he had been talking about for the last twelve years, they had no doubt passed their sell-by date, in which case he ought to get some new ones if he was serious. Like Erika, Erika’s mother spoke frequently to Isak on the phone.
Elisabet would say: “Your father and I are good friends. We once sat on a rock out on the sea when we were in love, and he said we were painfully bound to each other.”
Talking to each other on the phone every other Saturday from twelve to half past one was a ritual they had had ever since their divorce in 1968. They had divorced because Rosa’s belly had swollen past any point denying she was pregnant or that Isak was the father.
Now Isak had grown old. Elisabet, to be sure, thought eighty-four was no great age. Elisabet’s friend Bekky was over ninety and bright as a button, Elisabet said, so eighty-four was really nothing to speak of.
And vocal cords do not decay at the same rate as the rest of the body. When Elisabet and Isak spoke on the telephone, they were not two bodies, a source of concern and embarrassment to themselves and each other. Two bodies moving ever more slowly and often hurting. Mamma and Father, thought Erika. Isak with his painful hip and cramps in his legs, and Elisabet the dancer with her aching back and feet.
As a child, Erika would sometimes overhear part of their telephone conversation. Elisabet’s voice when she was talking to Isak was bubbly and happy and as light as a length of pink silk ribbon before it has been measured out, cut, and threaded into a shoe.
When Elisabet Lund Lövenstad was a young and promising ballerina, a member of the Swedish Opera Ballet (which was grander than the Norwegian Opera Ballet), one of her boyfriends said that if he had only one day left to live and had to choose between seeing her dance or hearing her laugh, he would choose the day of her laughter. Erika’s mother laughed often and loudly. There are women who giggle and women who laugh; Elisabet never giggled. She opened her whole mouth, bared her teeth, tongue, and throat, and uttered sounds that came from someplace deep down inside her. But the exact source was unclear. Her chest, her stomach, her pelvis, her abdomen? Isak must have pondered such matters. He wanted the whole of Elisabet. Not just the beautiful part everyone else saw onstage, the perfect beauty—no, he wanted all the other things as well. Everything that ran out of her. The sounds she made. Her sobs when she cried. The painful cough that kept her awake at night. The rumbling of her stomach, her groans and low snores. It was not enough for him that she stripped naked. She had a fantastically beautiful body. As a ballet dancer she was a vision onstage. Admittedly, she was too big for the international stardom her talent merited. Too tall, too broad, too heavy. There was far too much of her. Too much for the powder-white lace skirts, too much for the male dancers who almost collapsed each time they had to lift her, but not too much for Isak, who always wanted more. Though he was himself a lean man, known for his brilliant brain and his perfect pitch.
With a small team at the University of Lund, Isak helped develop the use of ultrasound. In his old age he was called a pioneer in his field. The female patients were grateful. Tumors were discovered, the unborn checked and assessed. Some might say invaded. Isak’s many romantic indiscretions were forgotten as time went by, and those women had grown old, their bodies no longer arousing anything in anyone. Neither desire nor curiosity. Perhaps pity. The female body is predictable that way.
But oh! Isak the lean and Elisabet the voluptuous! As a young man, he would spread her out naked on the bed like a big hand-embroidered quilt. He would not allow a single piece of skin, a single limb, a single orifice to remain unattended. But it wasn’t enough. He wanted more. And she let him rub oil on her stomach and move the transducer over her skin so her flesh melted away and they could both see the inside of her body on a screen; he couldn’t get enough of it, couldn’t get enough of the irresistibly lovely Elisabet: her stomach, bladder, womb, ovaries, birth canal, cysts, tissues, ligaments. And one day, a fetus inside her! A nine-week-old fetus. A nine-week-old Erika. Or not Erika. Not nine weeks. Something else. Not a human being. Not time. Something that would one day be a human being, be time, be a nine-week-old Erika screaming and screaming for her mother’s breast. But now: something dark and mobile, like a jellyfish. A blob or blotch that often merely dissolves and runs out of a woman’s body as blood and liquid and grit. But that just as often takes root and eats and grows and bursts out of its skin like a cancer or a tree. Sounds attracted to or repelled by each other: sounds that create an image. A blotch that wasn’t there until it appeared on the screen, in the womb, deep within and way up inside Elisabet’s divinely beautiful body.
There was a child growing inside your divinely beautiful body, Elisabet. It would not disappear, though you ran up and down all the steps you could find, ran through the streets of Stockholm instead of taking the bus, ran to the shop to buy food for yourself and your husband, the man they declared a genius, ran to rehearsals at the Opera House, where you held your breath and pulled in your stomach though nothing showed yet; ran home, up and down more steps, always more steps, ran to your morning class, ran until you fell over in one practically perfect movement and threw up on yourself and two other girls who came tripping over on tiptoe to help you; threw up on pure white costumes, on diaphanous tights, leg warmers and toe shoes firmly tied, crossed twice around the ankle; threw up so the stench of your vomit overpowered the smell of chalk; everywhere that smell of chalk; you could no longer bear the smell of chalk on the floor, on your shoes. But your child didn’t disappear. You went on running, but your child clung on to you and you couldn’t stop throwing up. Rehearsals were canceled, classes skipped. You were replaced by another dancer. Get rid of it, Isak! Get rid of it! I don’t want it, you must see that! I don’t want children! Not this child! Not now! But Isak did not want to get rid of it. That’s a life you’re carrying, a life, Elisabet, he said, and shut the door behind him. Your body lost its shape. It swelled up. What’s that smell, Isak? Fried food? Sweat? Perfume? Soap? Semen? Coffee? Snow? You’ll soon be able to see your baby, he said. And if it’s a girl she’ll be called Karin, because it’s the loveliest name I know. Your stomach expanded. Your ankles swelled. You got out the sewing machine and the rolls of pink silk ribbon. You measured and cut four ribbons of equal length and fixed them to your shoes. Like hell she’ll be called Karin, you whispered to nobody, and threw the shoes at the wall. That was the last thing you said for a while. Little ballerina! Your ankles were fat and puffy, the hemorrhoids were riveted between your buttocks, your legs were as blue as an old woman’s, and now you were certainly too big. Too big to dance, too big to run, too big to sleep, too big to speak. You were a gigantic white whale, Elisabet. A gigantic white whale lying quite still on the ocean floor. And you didn’t say a word.
Chapter 14
Normally, said Laura, who had made the trip a thousand times before, it takes two days to drive to Hammarsö. Two days, with an overnight stop in Örebro. But Erika had set off in a snowstorm, started late, and only got as far as Arvika. She hadn’t stopped for meatballs with mashed potato and lingonberry jam. Isak had been right. It was dark. It was icy. She should never have started out.
Erika said out loud to herself: “This is how people die. Driving when the roads are like this.”
She said: “You were quite right, Isak. It was a bad time to come!”
The mobile phone was on the seat beside her. All she had to do was pick it up and ring the number. She was sure he would understand. He would support her decision to abandon the trip. He would be relieved. She continued along the motorway, planning to stop for something to eat in Boda.
“After all, we’d just tiptoe around being polite to each other,” Isak had said.
Chapter 15
And the boy with matchstick legs knocked and hammered and pounded on Isak’s door for what seemed like forever, and the door was at last flung open by Isak himself. Laura, lying on her stomach in the grass, clung tightly to Erika and blurted OH NO OH NO when she saw her father.
“Shush, shush,” whispered Erika.
Erika has since wondered whether she really did see Isak tearing out his hair like the mad professor in some comic strip, and whether she really did hear him bellow at the boy DAMN YOU GET OUT OF HERE OR I’LL CUT YOUR EARS OFF AND EAT THEM FOR DINNER YOU FILTHY LITTLE BRAT.
What Erika does know is that the boy with matchstick legs was so astonished to see the door opening and Isak suddenly standing there that he fell over backwards and played dead for several minutes.
Chapter 16
She was on her way to Hammarsö, and these were the sounds she could hear: the drone of the engine, the fan, and the snow tires on wet asphalt. Gusts of wind, dark rain, and falling snow, melting in the air and joining the slush on the motorway, and the front windshield wipers swishing to and fro, one-two-one-two-one-two, like black pendulums.
Erika remembered sitting barefoot on the settee, reading a magazine and waiting for the sun to come back, the grandfather clock in the living room ticking, waiting for the overcast sky to clear so she could put on her polka-dot bikini and sunbathe on the rocks with Marion and Frida and Emily and occasionally Eva. And she remembered Ragnar, who smelled of Coca-Cola and of the sea and was ugly and handsome at the same time. It depended how you looked at him, with eyes open or virtually shut.
She remembered Isak stomping out of his workroom and stopping short when he saw her. He’ll start bellowing any moment now! He’ll start bellowing because I’m sitting here on the sofa. I haven’t disturbed him. I haven’t made a single disturbing sound—unless…unless…unless turning the pages of a magazine made a sound that Isak could hear. Because Isak could hear sounds no one else could hear. She had read that in the article about him in Life. That is, it wasn’t that he heard the sounds; he saw them on a screen. A throbbing fetal heart. The outline of a brain, looking like a shriveled date. The shadow of two babies instead of one in the mother’s womb. Laura, who knew their father best, used to say Isak could hear everything. He could hear what Laura and Erika were saying to each other, even if they were a long way off. He could even hear what they were thinking. Words and thoughts could be picked up and registered as dots and lines on a screen to make a picture. It was better not to say anything or even think anything you didn’t want Isak to get wind of. But that was impossible. No talking. No thinking. Two deaf-mute girls in the grass with virgin knots between their legs and in their heads. It was Ragnar, the boy with matchstick legs, who came up with a plan.
Ragnar had five ring binders full of The Phantom and Superman comics and knew everything about superpowers. Isak had a sort of superhearing and X-ray vision combined, said Ragnar, who also seemed to know things about Isak. But just like Superman, Isak had his limitations, a kind of weakness or vulnerability. “Like Achilles!” Ragnar exclaimed, not bothering to explain to the sisters who Achilles was. The point was to find Isak’s heel (which wouldn’t have to be a heel, exactly; it could be anything), cause pain, and make sure there was a total loss of all superpowers. Only then would the three of them be able to win the war against someone like Isak.
“A superhero without his superpowers is much weaker than ordinary people without ordinary powers,” Ragnar said.
Erika and Laura nodded and continued to say nothing. (Erika was not aware of exactly why Ragnar was declaring war on her father, but she and Laura went along and listened and didn’t protest.) Ragnar took the sisters to the hut in the woods and said that until they could discover what Isak’s weakness might be, they would have to speak and think in a language Isak didn’t understand, because then it wouldn’t matter that he could hear them. A language that he, Ragnar, had started to develop; it was based on criminals’ backslang but was much more complicated: you didn’t have the same consonant on each side of the vowel o, for example, like you do in the simplest form of backslang. In backslang the word love became lolovove, which anybody could work out. In Ragnar’s language, love was lomovowe and I’m in love with you was Imon inop lomovowe woxitovhoj yozou; and what was more, you had to pronounce it as if you were speaking Russian.
In the hut he had a box full of things he had found on the rocky shoreline, flotsam and jetsam from the countries in the east, and that was how he had collected foreign words in foreign alphabets that could be added to his language. The wonderful word STOLICHNAYA from a vodka bottle, for example.
But the first thing Erika and Laura learned to say was I’m in love with you or Imon inop lomovowe woxitovhoj yozou. Erika remembers repeating the word lomovowe to herself when she went to bed at night. Lomovowe, lomovowe, lomovowe. It was a lovely word once she had learned to pronounce it. Laura gave up trying to speak Ragnar’s language more or less straightaway. She found it too difficult, she told them. But not Erika. She didn’t give up. She liked speaking in a language only she and Ragnar could understand.
Ragnar would speak to her, quietly. She lay there in the secret hut with his arm around her; he stroked her hair and said:
Isak, pronounced Isotakol, was the wicked king from the land of Dofeatovhok who had bewitched the island and everyone who lived there—the people, the sheep, the cows, the trees, the fish. He had an ear as big as the tall windows of the community center. He heard everything. Every sound. The slap of the flounder against the stony seabed. Fir cones opening. Your breathing as you run away through the woods.
Chapter 17
At a bus stop on the edge of Fagerås, a woman waited for the bus. Beside her was a boy of fourteen or so. The woman and the boy stood motionless in the slush; it was snowing and raining by turns. The bus stop consisted of a pole with timetables mounted on it and a rotting shelter with a disintegrating roof, the bench inside unusable. The woman, dressed in a red checked coat with a tie belt and high-heeled black boots, had her dark hair up and was holding a big black umbrella in her right hand. The boy stood a little apart from her. He was wet and inadequately clad in a cap, a hoodie, and sagging jeans. Between them on the ground were a black suitcase and a yellow nylon bag with the logo of a Swedish soccer team. The woman and the boy were both staring in the same direction, to the left, as if their gaze could impel the bus along the road.
Erika saw the two figures as she drove past them. At first she thought that she was just imagining it, that the boy and the woman were a ghostly vision created by the rain, the dark sky, and the perpetually changing light. But when she looked in the rearview mirror to confirm that it was her imagination, they were still there. The woman under the black umbrella. The boy with the hoodie, soaking wet. The suitcase and bag on the ground.
Erika pulled over to the side of the road. She switched on the hazard lights and grabbed her anorak from the backseat and threw it around her shoulders. She opened the car door, got out to face the driving rain, and tried to attract the attention of the woman or the boy. They just stood there, unmoving, staring the other way.
“Hey there! Hello!” she shouted. “Hey there, you two!”
The woman with the umbrella turned toward her. Erika broke into a run. The boy still did not move. He was listening to music; a thin white cord ran from his ears to his jeans pocket. The woman looked inquiringly at Erika, who was wet and freezing cold and out of breath after her run along the road.
“You looked as if you�
��ve been waiting awhile,” said Erika.
“The bus should have been here ten minutes ago,” said the woman.
The boy had now realized that his mother—for the woman with the umbrella must be his mother, thought Erika—was talking to someone. He took out his earbuds so he could hear better.
“Where are you going? I mean, can I give you a lift part of the way?” asked Erika. “You’re drenched,” she said when neither of them responded. “And the bus definitely isn’t coming.”
The woman and the boy regarded her as if they didn’t really understand what she was saying. Erika switched to Swedish.
“Especially you,” she said, nodding to the boy. “You’re absolutely soaked.”
The boy shrugged his shoulders and looked at his mother.
“We’re going to Sunne,” the woman said. “Are you going there?”
Erika was heading for Örebro, to stay at a nice hotel, eat good food in the hotel restaurant, and get a decent night’s sleep before the long drive to the ferry terminal the next day; everything had been planned in accordance with Laura’s instructions.
Sunne would mean a detour of at least eighty kilometers.
“Yes, I’m going to Sunne,” Erika said.
And why not, she asked herself as she hurried back through the rain with her anorak over her head to the parked car and its flashing lights, followed by the woman and the boy with their luggage. The boy, who was about the same age as her own son, was wet and cold, and their bus hadn’t come, so why shouldn’t she drive them to Sunne?
“Do you live there? In Sunne?”