by Linn Ullmann
“Yes, he’s better now,” the woman said.
“That’s good,” said Rosa.
“Say hello to Isak for me,” said the woman.
“I will or I won’t,” said Rosa, pulling Laura away from the lit candles and out of the church with her.
“Who was that?” Laura asked.
“Someone Daddy knew a long time ago,” Rosa said. “She lives here on the island in the summer and in Stockholm in the winter, like us.”
“But who’s Ragnar?” Laura asked.
“He’s a boy.”
“How old is he?”
“I don’t know. Older than you. Six, perhaps.”
Years later when her mother lay dying, Laura had asked her if she believed in God.
Her mother no longer had enough muscles in her body to be able to nod or to shake her head, and neither could she smile. She had a little movement left in her index finger and used it to type words into her computer. Don’t know, she wrote. She looked at Laura. Ask Isak. He talks. I’m tired. Her look was more penetrating now that she had only a few words at her disposal. Laura thought at the time that her mother had a secret, an answer to a thousand questions, but then she decided everybody who was dying no doubt gave the impression of having a secret. It was the desire of those who lived on for meaning, coherence, insight, consolation.
When she finally died, it was Laura who washed her and laid her out and dressed her in the soft floral-patterned dress she had had for years and the blue canvas shoes she liked wearing in the summer. Her mother had smart, high-heeled shoes, too, but neither Laura nor Isak thought she should lie in her grave in high-heeled shoes. Laura had brushed and braided her mother’s hair the way she brushed and braided her own. Laura then studied her mother’s face. She found a lipstick in her bag and rubbed a little red into the pallid skin. There! Laura took a step back so she could survey all she had done. Floral dress, blue canvas shoes, a long plait, glowing cheeks. Now Isak could come. Rosa was ready.
Laura turned and went home. She would put the shopping trolley away and get the stroller. Jesper could never walk all the way home from nursery, at least not when it was snowing and cold. It wasn’t even four yet but it would soon be completely dark. The special dinner didn’t really matter. They could order pizza. She would decorate the pizza with her two tomatoes, and her hair and her daughter’s with white tulips. Afterward they could all snuggle up in bed together and watch television. Laura would put her arms around Lars-Eivind and Julia and Jesper; her arms were long enough. They would eat pizza and snuggle up in bed and the children could sleep there all night if they wanted, lying crossways.
Chapter 45
“Molly, is that you?”
Laura walked along the road, past the banner. LIVELY CHILDREN! She turned right; she was almost home now. LIVE CHILDREN! She held the mobile phone to her ear. Molly sounded happy. When Laura married Lars-Eivind and moved from Stockholm to Oslo, she thought she would be seeing a lot more of Molly. But it hadn’t turned out that way. Now and then they met up, all three of them, Erika, Laura, and Molly, and talked about one thing or another and promised they really would meet more often in the future. They were sisters, after all.
“Molly, it is you!”
Molly laughed.
“I know we haven’t spoken for about six months, so let me just say what I rang to say, then you can think it over and ring me back.”
“So, what did you ring to say?” asked Molly.
“Erika’s on her way to Hammarsö to visit Father,” said Laura.
“Father?” said Molly.
“Yes, Isak,” said Laura. “He’s old now.”
“Yes, he is,” said Molly. “But I haven’t spoken to him for years.”
“Exactly,” said Laura. “So Erika and I thought it might be a good idea to spend a few days with him.”
“On Hammarsö?” said Molly.
“Yes, on Hammarsö,” said Laura. “So he can look at us and we can look at him, if you know what I mean.”
“I haven’t been to Hammarsö since I was—what was I—five, I think.”
“You were five,” said Laura.
“Do you mean go right away?” asked Molly.
“Yes, now! Right away!” said Laura. “That is, I’m leaving early tomorrow morning. Erika’s already on her way, but she’s taken a detour via Sunne. And I’m going tomorrow morning. I can give you a lift.”
“Yes, but I can’t do that. I start rehearsals in under a week. I can’t just…out of the blue like that…My life isn’t about Isak anymore.”
“I’d decided not to go down there, either,” Laura interrupted. “But now I’ve decided to go after all.”
“Do you and Erika think he’s going to die? Is Father ill?”
“No, we don’t think he’s going to die, Molly. He’s old, not ill. He says he’s going to die soon, but he’s been saying that for the last twelve years.”
“I often think it would be a relief if he died,” said Molly.
“Why?”
“I don’t know. That’s just how it seems to me.”
Molly’s mother, Ruth, had died when Molly was only seven. Laura, who was fourteen at the time, passed the half-open kitchen door in the Stockholm flat and heard Rosa and Isak talking about whether Molly should come and live with them now that her mother was dead. Isak was her father, after all. Whispering voices: “But you’re always at the flat in Lund,” said Rosa. “You’re never here with me. I have to look after Laura on my own, and now you want me to bring up this cuckoo in the nest as well?”
“No,” said Isak. “No. I don’t want that. She can live with her grandmother in Oslo. That will be best.”
And for many years, Laura and Molly did not speak to each other. They grew up quite separately. Laura trained as a teacher and Molly went to the theater academy in Oslo and became a director.
“And why couldn’t she have trained for a proper profession and gotten a proper job?” was Isak’s reaction.
Laura and Erika leapt to their little sister’s defense. They said Isak should be proud of her. They said she was very good at what she did. They said everybody agrees she’s very good.
But as the years passed, Laura and Molly had lost touch.
Molly! I had my arm around you in the narrow bed, in the dark room on the island we believed would be our island for all eternity. We lay close together in bed, listening to Isak’s voice in the next room. He was in Erika’s room. He was sitting on the edge of Erika’s bed, trying to comfort Erika. It was the middle of the night, but everyone in the house was wide awake. It was that night nobody slept. It was that dreadful night when nobody could sleep, you know why, and I told you to forget everything you’d seen. And then—do you remember, Molly?—Isak started singing! He had a deep, rumbling voice. And you looked at me and smiled your lovely smile and said: Bom, bom, bom!
For many years there had been this silence between them, but when Rosa died, Laura got a letter from Molly.
Dear Laura, the letter said. Now we are both motherless. Perhaps that makes us more like sisters? I’m eighteen now. I still live with Grandmother, but I shall be moving out soon. If you come to Oslo or I come to Stockholm, maybe we can meet up. Yours, Molly.
P.S. Give Father my best wishes. Erika says he wants to kill himself after what happened with Rosa. I don’t think he’ll do it. I think he’ll live to be a very old man.
Chapter 46
In her schoolbag, Julia had a note addressed to all the parents in the Colony, signed by Mikkel Skar, Geir Kvikkstad, Tuva Gran, and Gunilla and Ole-Petter Kramer. The letter referred to the Colony Residents’ Association meeting in December, when Paahp’s behavior had been under discussion once again.
Back at the start of November, Ole-Petter Kramer had tried to talk to Paahp. It had gone well, or so Kramer thought at the time. They had sat on hard wooden chairs in Paahp’s seedy kitchen. They had drunk insipid instant coffee together. Paahp had nodded and said it wouldn’t happen again; he realized th
e little girls of the neighborhood should not get the idea that accepting bracelets from strangers was all right; he realized it worried their parents. He also realized, now that they were having this frank exchange, neighbor to neighbor, man to man, that it was important not to let his house fall into such disrepair that it impeded on the well-being of the community, of his neighbors. Paahp promised to ring a glazier and rake up the leaves in his garden the next day, and to clear the snow from his driveway when the time came. Paahp concluded by taking Kramer’s hand and saying something about crows, which Kramer didn’t quite catch, but Kramer interpreted the conversation as having been entirely successful. Thus it was Ole-Petter Kramer who showed annoyance at the December meeting. Anger, even. He clenched his fist and said, To hell with this idiot! The December meeting was traditionally devoted mainly to pleasant social interaction and mulled wine; the only item on the agenda was the Christmas workshop under the direction of the Krag family. But the pleasant social interaction evaporated as one family after another spoke of yet more bracelets. The little girls knew now, after innumerable lectures from their parents, that they weren’t to talk to Paahp or to accept his bracelets. Yet they still did. They accepted the bracelets, slipped them onto one another’s wrists and compared the beads, shells, stones, and bits of fir cone; and when they got home they hid them in their dolls and teddy bears, in empty CD cases, inside the books of fairy tales they no longer read, and behind the windows of their advent calendars. Then the parents found one and then another, and then one more. Things could not continue this way. Paahp would have to go.
“I don’t understand it,” said Ole-Petter Kramer. “I don’t understand it. We talked to each other. We sat in his filthy kitchen and drank that dishwater he calls coffee and he understood everything I said. I didn’t use a single word he wouldn’t understand. He grasped how serious it was. Yet it just goes on. Is he laughing at us? Does he think we can’t see him? Does he think we are fools?”
He stretches out his long, thin old man’s arms to our girls, stops them on the way home from school, talks to them, gives them presents; he takes their soft hands in his hands.
A committee was set up, a sort of semiofficial committee, a shady committee, somebody thought, since it had no name and operated outside the usual structures; a think tank to come up with various proposals for a definitive solution to the problem that had arisen in the Colony residential area.
“So this is the solution?” said Laura into her mobile phone.
She was pacing up and down the garden, talking to Tuva Gran. She had the letter in her hand. It was dark outside now, and Julia and Jesper had reluctantly started making a snowman. Julia wanted to watch television instead, and Jesper wanted to sit on Laura’s lap, but Laura said it would be fun to build a snowman: they would give it a carrot nose and tie a scarf around its neck, and it would stand in the garden ready to say hello to Daddy when he got home later in the evening.
Then she read the letter she found in Julia’s schoolbag.
“It’s a symbolic act,” said Tuva Gran. “Putting down a silent marker, telling him in a civil way to stop tormenting our children.”
“He’s not tormenting our children,” said Laura, looking across to where Julia was helping her little brother roll a snowball.
“We don’t know what he’s capable of,” said Tuva Gran quietly. “I’ve heard stories. My girls say he’s disgusting. Why is he disgusting, Laura? Why do they say he’s disgusting?”
“I don’t know,” Laura replied.
“My girls say he asked them if they wanted to go home with him. Why does he want them to go home with him? They say that Jenny Åsmundsen, who’s four—four, Laura—told them he gave her a bracelet and pointed to his genitals.”
“Children say so many things,” said Laura.
“Why should they lie?” said Tuva Gran. Her voice was shrill. “The children told me this of their own accord; I didn’t ask them a single question. They said Jenny Åsmundsen got a bracelet and then he pointed at his private parts. What they said was ‘and then he pointed at his willy,’ if you want to know the exact words. And we’re supposed to sit back and let it happen? Is that what you want?”
“No, of course not,” said Laura. “But I just don’t think he…I don’t think Paahp is…I think he’s just a lonely old man.”
“In any case, it’s not normal behavior,” Tuva Gran interrupted, “for a grown man to seek out little girls and tempt them with presents. You know that! You know that, Laura! And he continues doing it even when we’ve begged him to stop.”
In the letter, the committee requested that all parents go through their daughters’ rooms and find as many of the bracelets as they could. A list of possible hiding places was appended. Next, the parents were requested to hand over all the bracelets to Mikkel Skar, Geir Kvikkstad, Tuva Gran, Gunilla Kramer, or Ole-Petter Kramer. The committee would collect all the bracelets (in a bucket? in a bag? in a cardboard box?) and return them directly to Paahp.
“You’re welcome to come along when we go to hand them back,” said Tuva Gran. “We’re meeting at Fryden’s at nine this evening and going in a group to Paahp’s house.”
“How many of you?” said Laura. “How many of you are going in a group to Paahp’s house at nine?”
“I don’t know,” said Tuva Gran. “Lots, I think. He’s got to grasp, once and for all, that he needs to keep away.”
Laura looked at Julia and Jesper. “I need to hang up now,” she said to Tuva Gran.
Her kids needed help. They couldn’t make the snowman without her, and here she was, pacing up and down the garden talking into her mobile. It had been her idea. She had said it would be fun to build a snowman, and now the three of them were wading around in the dark, in slushy, wet snow, getting cold. The snowman still had no head, and the children wanted to go inside. She took a deep breath, grabbed their hands and said: “Right, it’s time. Time to make a gigantic snowball. We’ll roll and roll and roll, all together, and when we’ve finished rolling we’ll have a head.”
“With a carrot nose!” shouted Jesper.
“Of course with a carrot nose,” said Julia.
Laura looked at the children. She had forgotten to buy carrots.
“Tomato nose!” said Laura. “This snowman is going to have a big red tomato nose, and that’s much better.”
She looked at her daughter. I won’t let anyone touch you.
“Isn’t it, Julia?”
Julia opened her mouth and closed it again. Jesper wiped his face with his mitten and jumped up and down to keep warm, and every time he jumped he whispered, Roll, roll, roll, roll, roll, roll.
“A tomato nose is cool, too,” said Julia quietly.
Chapter 47
Laura ran. She could run faster than anybody. Only Ragnar was faster. Laura had always been quick. She ran through the gate, out into the road, round the bend, past Tuva Gran’s house, as far as the snow-covered drive nobody had cleared since it started snowing, and along it to the run-down house with several smashed windows. She knocked on the door. The old man opened the door and looked at her.
“Do you want to come in?” he said.
“Yes,” said Laura.
“Shall we sit down?” asked Paahp.
“Yes,” said Laura.
He went first, stumbling across the floor through a dark hall and a dark living room. Laura followed. They sat down in his kitchen. The furniture comprised two hard wooden chairs and a big yellow table. From the ceiling hung a naked lightbulb. On the window ledge stood four potted green plants. They were not wilting. On the yellow table there were various boxes containing beads, fir cones, bits of glass and shells. Laura was given an instant coffee. It was insipid. Paahp did not ask why she had come. And she didn’t really know, either. She had told Lars-Eivind there was something she had to do, and he should order pizza only for himself and the children.
“But weren’t you going to cook dinner?” he asked, surveying the all-too-pristine kitchen.
“Yes. And so I will, another day,” said Laura. “But now there’s something I’ve got to do—and anyway, it’s too late to start cooking now.”
So here she was, sitting at Paahp’s and not knowing what to say. It was a few minutes past nine.
Paahp said: “As you know, I’ve lost my brother.”
Laura nodded.
“He was the last one. Now I have nobody.”
Laura nodded again. She said: “I’ve always wished I had a brother.”
“I can be your brother,” said Paahp. “Then it won’t be so quiet.”
“I don’t think so,” said Laura. “I’m not much of a sister.”
Paahp bent over his boxes and selected a big red bead. He placed it in her hand.
“To my sister,” he said.
And then there was a knock. Laura could hear voices outside the house. There was another knock. A voice called: “OPEN UP, PAAHP!”
Paahp looked at Laura.
“More visitors,” he said.
“Yes, but I don’t think you should open the door to them,” she said.
“Why not?”
Laura moved her chair to the other side of the table and sat down beside him.
Someone out there had clenched his fist and started hammering on the door. She could hear more voices now. “OPEN UP! OPEN UP!”
Paahp sat hunched over the table. He quickly pushed the boxes away. His back was a thin pillar. His hands were slender. “OPEN UP!”
“Why shouldn’t I open the door?” he repeated.
Laura hadn’t eaten all day. Paahp’s coffee stung her stomach. There was more hammering at the door. “OPEN UP! OPEN UP! OPEN UP!” She put her hand over her mouth. She shook her head. She couldn’t hold back the tears. She couldn’t hold back any of what was coming out of her. Everything just steamrolled on. She couldn’t hold it back. She put her arms around Paahp and her head on his shoulder.