by Linn Ullmann
“You weren’t there!” said Laura. “You weren’t there. I called you, and you weren’t there.”
Rosa’s big broad hand maintained its grip on Laura’s shoulder. Laura peered furtively up at Isak, who was standing beside his wife, merely nodding. Whatever her mother said, he nodded. As if everything she said was obvious.
“We were on the veranda having coffee, with Ruth,” Rosa said. “Daddy and I were on the veranda. We were on the veranda the whole time. Molly was in her carriage, asleep just outside the house, and we were on the veranda.”
“I called out,” said Laura. “You weren’t there. You didn’t hear me.”
Rosa said: “If you had called, we would have heard you. We had the veranda door ajar so we’d hear Molly if she woke up.”
And she went on, sounding more conciliatory: “Ruth’s come to Hammarsö with her daughter, Molly. Now she’s going back home, and Molly’s staying with us for a while. Things haven’t exactly got off to a good start for Molly and Ruth, or for any of us, have they? We’ve all been terribly scared and awfully worried.”
It was as if her mother’s hand on her shoulder was burning its way deeper and deeper into Laura until it reached the place from which all the tears and snot and sick welled up, and Laura, who had begun to shake all over, opened her mouth and screamed, I called you, Mummy, but you weren’t there! Laura flailed her arms about her before bending over to be sick. She couldn’t stop. It just kept coming out of her mouth in waves. Rosa’s hand let go of her shoulder and moved to her forehead. Laura took a breath and shut her eyes. She was seven years old. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, repeating: I called you and you weren’t there.
Chapter 38
Paahp moved into one of the properties in the Colony sometime in the spring of 2004, to be near his brother, a resident at the Fryden Nursing Home. When his brother died at the end of October the same year, Alfred Paahp was left alone in his dilapidated house with no big brother to care for. None of the Colony residents knew where he was from originally. Someone suggested Eastern Europe, but someone else said Paahp wasn’t an Eastern European name. Maybe he was simply a Dane? Was Paahp a Danish name? Mikkel Skar said expressions like Eastern Europe were no longer valid, not since the fall of the Wall and the breakup of the Soviet Union. But Central Europe was okay, he said, without expressing any view as to whether Paahp was Danish or not. The Residents’ Association was holding one of its meetings—seven o’clock in Fryden’s dining room as usual. Paahp appeared as a separate item on the agenda, after the item “Autumn working party at Marie and Nils Åsmundsens’.” The reason for this special item on the agenda was the following: Paahp had not mowed his lawn, not even once. He had not raked up the leaves. Paahp was letting his house fall into a terrible state of neglect. When some children threw a stone through his window, Paahp made no move to repair it. He did not phone the glazier. He got a sheet of cardboard and taped it in place as best he could.
“It looks terrible,” said Mikkel Skar. “It looks like a goddamned war zone there.”
Lars-Eivind said maybe Mikkel Skar hadn’t watched the television news lately, since he saw fit to use the phrase war zone.
“I don’t weigh my every word,” said Mikkel Skar sourly.
“Well, maybe you should,” said Laura.
“I think you’re all overreacting,” said Tuva Gran, supporting Mikkel Skar.
Everybody listened to Tuva Gran. After all, she and her family were Paahp’s closest neighbors. Tuva had been hoping for a family with children.
It was a day in October, and Laura’s little girl pointed at Paahp, who was sitting on a park bench, in the light, opposite the school. She said: “His brother’s dead.”
Laura looked down at her daughter.
“He’s dead? How do you know?” And then she added: “Don’t point your finger.”
Julia shrugged her shoulders.
Laura said: “I think we should go over and express our condolences.”
Julia shrugged again.
“Expressing your condolences means you say you’re sad to hear somebody’s died,” Laura explained.
“But I’m not sad,” said Julia.
“No, but Paahp is, so you and I can be sad with him for a bit.”
Julia folded her arms and looked at her mother. She had just learned to roll her eyes.
“Come on, we’ll go over to him, Julia!”
Laura regretted not having simply walked on, letting the matter lie. She dragged her daughter across to Paahp’s bench and sat down beside him. She said quietly: “I hear you’ve lost your brother.”
Paahp turned slowly to Laura. His eyes were big and blue, like a child’s. Big and blue, with long black lashes. He took her hand and squeezed it.
“It all goes quiet when the crows die,” he said.
Laura nodded; she smiled at him.
“It all goes quiet,” said Paahp.
“Yes,” said Laura.
“It all goes quiet when the crows die,” he repeated.
“I don’t quite understand what you mean,” said Laura.
“I moved here because of him,” said Paahp.
“Because of your brother?”
“Yes, because of him. I moved here because of him.” Paahp buried his face in his hands and sobbed.
Laura patted his shoulder.
“Please accept my condolences,” she said, getting to her feet.
The words accept my condolences hurtled out of her like a locomotive. She took Julia’s hand and started walking. Paahp went on weeping. Laura squeezed her daughter’s hand and kept walking.
When they had gone a little way, Julia said: “Paahp’s disgusting.”
“Disgusting? Why is he disgusting?” asked Laura.
“Because he is,” said Julia.
“Yes, but why?”
Laura studied her daughter’s face.
“Has he ever done anything or said anything that you thought was disgusting?”
“No,” Julia said. “He gives me bracelets. They’re made of stones and beads and sometimes bits of fir cone. He threads them on a string. They’re nice. But Paahp’s disgusting—everybody knows that.”
It wasn’t just a question of raking up leaves and cutting the grass. That was part of it, certainly. But everybody knew it was really about the bracelets. Mikkel Skar and Ole-Petter Kramer had both informed Paahp that the Residents’ Association didn’t want him stopping little girls on their way home from school and giving them bracelets, but Paahp went on doing it. And the little girls went on accepting them. All the children in the Colony residential area, particularly the girls, were ordered by their parents not to talk to Paahp under any circumstances, and not to accept bracelets, or anything else for that matter, from him or from any other stranger; they were just to say no thank you and keep walking. It didn’t help. There were bracelets everywhere. Around wrists. In schoolbags. In bedside tables. In jewel boxes. In dolls’ houses. Under pillows. In Lego sets. Around dolls’ necks. On windowsills. In trouser pockets. Down the backs of radiators. Deep inside beds.
The matter for discussion now was whether there was any way of obliging Paahp to move. Getting rid of him, to be blunt. There turned out not to be. Andreas Knudsen and Line Disen were both lawyers; they lived in the Colony; they were married and had children. They had looked into it and reached the conclusion that there were no legal grounds for doing anything at all. Paahp’s sitting pretty, they said. We’ve got nothing to go on. He hasn’t done anything wrong. So the Residents’ Association decided that Ole-Petter Kramer, who had three daughters himself, would try talking to Paahp one more time.
Chapter 39
It happened sometimes. After Laura had gone to bed and turned off the light, Isak knocked on her door, opened it a crack, and whispered: “Are you asleep, Laura?”
“No, I’m not asleep.”
“Shall I read to you?”
“Yes, please.”
Isak sat on the edge of the bed and leafed
through that book of poetry he always brought with him.
“Here!” he said, and carried on turning the pages. “No, here!” He turned more pages. “No, here: look, this is a beautiful one! Are you ready?”
“Yes, but don’t ask me afterward what I think.”
Isak looked at his daughter in the gleam of the bedside light. Before she went to bed, she had undone her plait and brushed her hair. It was long. As long as Rosa’s hair. His other daughters didn’t have such long hair. Laura lay in bed under the covers with her head and her beautiful long hair on a big white pillow.
“You’re lying there shining at me,” said Isak, and stroked her cheek.
“Come on, Daddy,” said Laura.
“Are you ready?” asked Isak.
“Yes.”
“What do you mean, I’m not to ask you what you think?” asked Isak.
“I don’t always understand the stuff you read,” said Laura. “But it doesn’t matter. It’s nice anyway.”
And Isak read:
And no one hears those songs
hears the whisper
calm and light
and oblivion the memory
this day—absorption
“That was the first verse,” Isak said. “Now I shall read the second verse.”
In a hymn the day goes
light and still
and as song sounds everything
and against the misty island of a cliff
and as in agony to touch the beach
Isak looked up from the book. He said: “Do you want me to read the poem again?”
“No,” said Laura. “I’m going to sleep now.”
Isak leaned over her and kissed her forehead.
“Good night, Laura. Sleep well.”
He stood up and moved toward the door. Laura sat up in bed.
“Daddy!”
Isak opened the door. He paused in the doorway in the light from the hall.
“What does absorption mean?” she asked.
“I think,” Isak said, “it must be a sort of swirl of darkness.”
“A swirl of darkness?”
“Yes…it tugs at you and you fall into it, slowly. But it isn’t unpleasant. One day you’ll long to be there.”
Chapter 40
It was Marion with the black hair who decided who was to be punished, and how. Before that it had always been Emily. Once it was Frida, but Frida always started giggling, so everybody turned against her and punished her instead.
“Don’t you ever get to decide?” asked Laura.
“Decide what?” said Erika.
“Who’s going to be punished,” said Laura.
Laura was eleven in the summer of 1979; her plait swung from side to side as she walked along the road to the shop. Erika was always with Marion and Frida and Emily now. Or else with Ragnar. Anyway, Erika never had time to walk to the shop with Laura.
If they were to be together, it had to be at night. Sometimes Molly would sleep with Laura in Laura’s bed and then Erika couldn’t be bothered with Laura. But there were times when Laura slept with Erika in Erika’s bed, and then they would talk until four or five or six in the morning. Rosa said everybody was to sleep in her own bed in her own room, but nobody did. Sometimes, after Rosa and Isak had gone to bed, Erika crept out and went to sleep with Ragnar in the secret hut in the woods. Erika didn’t think anybody knew, but Laura knew; Laura knew much more than Erika could ever imagine.
Erika said: “I was there when we punished Marion, once.”
“I didn’t think anyone ever punished Marion.”
“Oh yes, even her. Nobody gets let off. We all punished her together. Frida, Emily, Pär, Olle, Fabian, and Ragnar, too.”
“Was Ragnar with you?”
“He is sometimes, only not so much these days. He always acts so weird when there are many of us. Jumps up and down and makes faces or sings out of tune just to get attention. And he’s so clingy with me. It’s annoying. It makes me want to hit him.”
“Why do you hang out with him, then?”
“He’s different when we’re alone together, when it’s just him and me. Actually, it was Ragnar who came up with the idea.”
“What idea?”
“Punishing Marion.”
“How did you do it?”
“We made her cry.”
“But how?”
Erika giggled, and squirmed closer to Laura. She whispered: “We forced her to eat the tick off Fabian’s butt.”
Laura stared at Erika in the darkness. They were lying so close together that Laura could feel Erika’s breath on her cheek.
“Disgusting,” said Laura. “Did she do it?”
“She had no choice,” said Erika. “We made her. We were hanging out in Emily’s garden and Marion tossed back her black hair and said, Can’t we go to the beach instead of sitting here. I’m bored. And then Pär told her to shut up.”
“Isn’t Pär Marion’s boyfriend?”
“Uh-huh. They’ve been together for ages. And he told her to shut up and then Fabian started laughing. Then Ragnar started laughing and then Olle. Everyone was bored and I think they thought it was good that Pär told Marion off. Nobody ever tells her off. It’s good that he was a little tough on her. Anyway, she got all red in the face and nobody stood up for her. Not even Emily, who’s, like, her best friend. Then Pär asked Fabian if he still had the tick stuck to his butt. It had been there forever. Fabian wanted to see how fat it would get before it dropped off. Luckily, he said, it was far enough up for him not to squish it when he planted his big bum on a chair. Fabian just laughed and took off his trousers and underpants and showed his butt to everybody. The tick must have been there over a week. It was the size of a grape, brown and disgusting and shiny and ready to pop. Then Ragnar said to Fabian, I think Marion should take it off for you. Interesting idea, Fabian said, and wiggled his ass. Yes, very interesting, went Pär. How do you think she might do that? Frida, Emily, and me just giggled, and then Ragnar went, I think Marion, since she’s such a bitch, should bite it off and chew it and swallow it. Marion screamed that Ragnar could go to hell and that he was a bastard—You’re a complete fucking psycho, she told him—and then Ragnar warned her to take that back. She was to stop it. And that was when Pär put his arm around her and said, Maybe you shouldn’t call people psychos, Marion, and then he kept hold of her and said if she didn’t eat the tick off Fabian’s butt he was going to cut off all her hair. You know Pär always has a knife. And he had it that day, too, and he held it up for Marion to see, so she’d know he was serious. Then everybody started laughing again. Even Marion laughed a bit and said, Lay off, Pär, let’s go to the beach now, or to the shop for some Coca-Cola, but then Fabian bent over and stuck his butt in the air and Pär grabbed Marion’s hair and said, Go on, do it, you fucking cunt. He didn’t mean anything by it. He was only joking, probably. But that was when Marion started crying. Tears started running from her eyes. She didn’t say anything. She just cried. Then Emily and me told Pär to lay off, but Frida couldn’t stop giggling.”
Erika paused. It was the middle of the night. Laura thought it was great, lying there talking about stuff like that.
“I was totally hoping,” Erika said, “she wasn’t going to do it.”
“Do what?” asked Laura. “You mean she ate it?”
“Yes,” said Erika. “She kind of braced herself. She couldn’t stand us seeing her crying, so she really braced herself. She shook off Pär and stood there, sort of swaying. Okay, she said, and tossed back her hair. It’s okay. She squatted down behind Fabian, who naturally hadn’t put his underpants back on, and bit his big butt so he screamed. Then she straightened up to let us all see the tick between her teeth, I’m sure it was still alive, and then she closed her mouth and started crunching.”
Laura sat up in bed and stared at her sister.
“Did she swallow it?”
“Yes.”
“I bet it was full of blood.”
“Yes.�
�
“Did she start crying again?”
“No. She didn’t cry.”
“Poor Marion,” said Laura.
“But everybody was laughing,” said Erika. “Even Marion laughed. I think everybody thought it was disgusting and wanted to go home and forget the whole thing, but everybody laughed. Then Pär suddenly stopped laughing and said Ragnar was a total psycho. It was Ragnar’s idea, eating the tick. And Pär said, You really are a psycho! Get the hell out of here, Ragnar! Then everything went back to normal. Ragnar got up and went. Marion threw an empty Coca-Cola bottle after him and the bottle clipped his head, and then he started running. He ran out of the garden and up the road and into the woods.”
“Poor Marion,” repeated Laura.
“Don’t feel sorry for Marion,” said Erika.
“Poor Ragnar, then.”
“You don’t have to feel sorry for Ragnar, either.”
Erika pulled Laura toward her. They lay still beside each other for a while.
“The point is, there’s no need to feel sorry for anybody,” said Erika. “Nobody.”
Laura giggled and turned to her sister.
“Yes, there is,” she said. “The tick!” She paused. “I feel sorry for the tick.”
Chapter 41
Her mobile phone rang. Laura had a large brown leather bag over her shoulder. In that bag, it was chaos. In her shopping trolley she kept things in order. But in her shoulder bag there was chaos. Keys, money, cards, tram tickets, receipts, Jesper’s pacifier, packets of chewing gum, chocolate wrappers, a small bag of pork rinds, which were the tastiest thing she knew, class schedule, pens and notebooks, a leaflet from the church about christening and funeral services that she’d been meaning to copy and hand out to her pupils so they could discuss what a ritual was. She’d had so many plans when she began teaching the thirteen-to-sixteens, but she never got through half of what she wanted. If she put her hand into her bag to find something, like twenty kroner for the underground, she would often stab herself on some object and make the tip of her finger bleed. A safety pin. A pen nib. She had to empty out her bag. Her phone flashed. It was Lars-Eivind. The doctor had wanted to do more tests than he had expected, and he almost hadn’t made it to his important meeting.