A Blessed Child

by Linn Ullmann

  But Isak had ruined everything.

  Isak had ruined everything.

  And then there was something else, something he couldn’t put his finger on, something missing. The reviewer was right. He was through being a playwright. He didn’t give a damn! Next summer he would just relax and enjoy himself.

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  “Come hither and hear what I have to say, for they call me wise!”

  The stage was dark and silent. The animals were sleeping. The wood sprites began to hum and the bird tamer, clad in green, played the flute. It was a simple, pretty tune. Then Isak made his entry from stage left, dressed in a black cloak and fake white beard, with a large leather-bound book under his arm. When they saw him, the wood sprites stopped humming, the bird tamer laid down his flute, and Isak positioned himself center stage and cleared his throat. He looked out over the audience. He cleared his throat again. He saw their faces and froze. He felt giddy, and as if he were going to be sick. He knew that Now! Now! Now! Now! it has to happen and I can’t do it, can’t do it. He heard someone in the audience fidgeting, someone coughing, someone saying: Hurrah for Isak Lövenstad! He bowed and smiled at the man who had shouted hurrah and thought, If I don’t say what I’ve got to say now, it will be too late. Everything swam before his eyes. It was cold. He had no choice. Or anything to lose. Not anymore.

  Isak bowed again and then he spoke; he spoke loudly to be sure everyone would hear him.

  “I apologize.”

  Isak felt a great, heavy fatigue running through his body, as if he were underwater and could no longer resist; it would be nice to get home to Rosa.

  “As I say, I apologize.”

  He took a breath. It was over. He said: “But I seem to have forgotten my lines…I do not know what I am supposed to say.”

  He gave a third bow.

  “So I shall go now.”

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  All the suitcases were packed and lined up in the hall—Isak’s big green one, with room for his papers and folders and books, Rosa’s and Laura’s practical black ones, Erika’s little blue one, and Molly’s big red one. Molly had the biggest suitcase of all. Molly’s case stood there in the hall, lording it over all the others, and when Isak went to lift it and carry it out to the car, he gave a loud groan. Not wanting to hurt his back, he decided to drag it after him through the front door to the open trunk. Molly, wearing the blue dress that just about covered her bottom, hop-skipped back and forth between his legs until in the end he had to ask her to go and sit in the car and be quiet. All the bed linen had been washed, ironed, folded edge to edge, and neatly piled in the linen cupboard. Rosa had been up since three o’clock on the last morning to get the house ready for their departure, and at eleven the drying cupboard was switched off for good that summer. Now it was empty and dark and cold in there. There was nothing hanging on the drying rails. Not Molly’s blue dress, or Isak’s socks and shirts and trousers, or Erika’s polka-dot bikini. The sheet of paper with the picture of the horned devil and the warning THIS DRYING CUPBOARD IS NOT TO BE USED BY CHILDREN AFTER SWIMMING! ANYONE WHO BREAKS THIS RULE WILL BE PUNISHED WITHOUT MERCY! was still on the door, fixed with a bit of sticky tape. Rosa had considered taking it down; it was in her nature to tidy, clean, clear out, and sort, and she liked to leave clean, smooth, empty surfaces behind her—yet, without really being able to say why, she left the sign there. The floors had been vacuumed and then scrubbed with green soap; the windows had been cleaned and covered with thin fabric to protect everything from the light and to stop anybody who happened to be passing that autumn from looking into the living room (at the armchairs, the grandfather clock, the writing desk) and perhaps getting the urge to break in. Her duster had touched everything in the house that could be touched; Rosa had stood on the top rung of the ladder; she had gone down on her knees and lain flat on her stomach; she had compressed herself into a little ball—not a single hook or sill or corner or patch of floor, under a wardrobe or bed, had been missed. The toilets had been scrubbed and scoured with blue cleanser, and when she had finished that (about two hours before it was time to go), nobody was allowed to go to the toilet again except once, just before they got in the car and drove off, and when you pulled the chain that last time, the water in the toilet was still blue. A final afternoon meal comprising cold meatballs, boiled potato, salad, and homemade lemonade was served, and consumed quickly around the kitchen table, and by then there wasn’t much to say to one another. The people around the table, a man and a woman and three children, had, as the house would have attested if houses could bear witness, already left. The house had washed them out of itself and remained standing there, clean and shut and uninhabited, ready for quieter and darker days and nights.

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  Isak was at the wheel, with Rosa in the seat beside him. In the back sat Erika, Laura, and Molly. As the car passed the gate and the field of long grass, Erika turned around and saw the white limestone house disappearing from view in the back window. She said nothing. Neither did anyone else. Molly sang a song; that was all. A memory, a memory, the stars are sweet, a memory, a memory, and the sky is blue. Now the journey was the important thing. First the twenty-minute ferry crossing to the mainland. Then the tedious car ride to the airport. Then the flight itself. And finally the arrival at Fornebu in Oslo, where Erika and Molly would be met by their mothers, Elisabet and Ruth.

  It was Erika’s job to look after Molly the whole way, because Isak, Rosa, and Laura would be taking a different route, by car back to Stockholm.

  They found they had Ragnar’s mother’s blue Volkswagen Beetle in front of them on the ferry. She was sitting alone in the car. Erika couldn’t see her face, but noticed she had long, thin gray hair (Erika couldn’t remember it having been that long, or that gray) and a big gray sweater.

  Rosa said quietly: “Don’t you want to go over? Say something to her?”

  “Who?”

  Isak’s answer was brusque and dismissive, but Rosa went on: “Ann-Kristin, Isak! She’s sitting there, in the blue car.”

  Isak looked straight ahead.

  “Why should I? What would I say?”

  Rosa said: “I don’t know. That would be up to you.”

  Isak shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t want to. I’ve nothing to say.”

  Chapter 72

  It was now, at this time of year, that Hammarsö’s summer guests cleaned their houses, dismantled their garden furniture, stowed away their barbecues and barbecue equipment, hammock cushions, blankets, and oilcloths, cleaned out their fridges, jettisoned half-empty milk cartons, messy packs of butter, half-eaten casseroles and veal roasts, hot dogs, depleted packs of cold cuts, and cartons of eggs nearing their sell-by date. It was a shame to throw food away, but what could they do? The food couldn’t be left to rot, and it was too much bother to take it back to the city. And it was now that cars were crammed full of dirty clothes (because not many people had laundry rooms as Rosa did, with washing machines and drying cupboards), carryalls, plastic bags, large towels that had once been a luxurious white but were now grubby and gray and lay squashed up against the back window alongside bits of tent, cardboard boxes, tricycles, typewriters, golden retrievers, and cats that in some cases would be let or thrown or lured out of the car in some unfamiliar place far from the island, far from the city, and left to fend for themselves.

  In Oslo, Molly lay in her mother’s arms and slept heavily. Every morning after they had got up, her mother said: “Give me a twirl, Molly! Let me see. I do declare you’ve grown some more in the night again!” And Molly laughed loudly, jumped down from her chair and spun round.

  Yes, it was now that the island was emptied of people, the ferries no longer shuttled so regularly to and fro, the shop kept shorter hours, and the beaches lay deserted.

  Hammarsö’s permanent residents could finally stretch their arms skyward and feel the clear, sparkling sunlight warming their bodies, their skin, their hands, their finge
rtips; warming them all before the autumn came in earnest sometime in November, with its catacombs full of wind and rain and darkness.

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  And fresh storms came. The wind rampaged over the stony beaches, over the rock in the sea where young girls had played and sunned themselves, over the closed shop and the deserted roads. It forced its way into the houses, into the beds with the rolled-up mattresses, and into the corners that were no longer clean, dusted and redolent of green soap. If anyone had accidentally found themselves going down to the white limestone house sometime during the autumn (though nobody did), they might have asked themselves why Rosa had troubled to get down on all fours and clean and toil and sweat—hadn’t it all been in vain? There were black heaps of dead and half-dead flies on the windowsills. Admittedly many of the flies would come to life and start buzzing again when Simona looked in sometime in January to check on the state of the house. The flies would be swatted and swept out into the snowdrifts, but she wouldn’t find all of them, and, anyway, new heaps would form on the windowsills after she had gone. There were mouse droppings in the kitchen, in the bread basket, under the refrigerator, beside the telephone, and a real, live mouse was living in the cupboard under the sink. The mouse was living well, because Rosa had forgotten to empty and clean a shelf of snacks. Cheese puffs, among other things. Eventually, as the snow drifted down, it became almost as cold inside as outside, and when the wind decided to show its strength by knocking over Big Dick’s son (who was now well over seventy) on the road, causing damage to his hip so he had to start walking with a stick like other old men, it whistled and howled in people’s houses, and Isak’s was no exception. Fluff scudded over the floors from one corner to another: balls of fluff rolled and flew and gamboled and reshaped themselves into more balls of fluff and still more again; and then the darkness rolled in over the island, over sea and sky and heath and field; into Isak’s house, through cracks and holes and fissures and the slit between the curtains that never quite met when they were shut. Nothing remained untouched by the winter darkness. Not the armchairs, or the grandfather clock, or the blue china vase.

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  When the cold was at its most intense—the residents said it was the coldest winter since 1893—the water froze in the pipes and they burst; and when the snow melted around early April, the water flooded out over the floor of the bathroom, the kitchen, and Rosa’s laundry room. Simona had come for the second time that year (mainly to swat a few overwintering flies, she thought, because there was no point dusting while nobody was living there), but when she unlocked and opened the door, the stink of mold and fungus and rot rose up to meet her, and when she stepped over the threshold, the water came up to her ankles.

  “What an old dump this place is,” muttered the plumber who was summoned. “Did they just forget to turn the water off?”

  Simona shrugged her shoulders. She said: “It seemed they were in a hurry to get to the mainland.”

  There was water running and dripping and seeping and gushing both outside and in. The sun shone through the dirty windows that Simona was sure to get around to cleaning one day, but not now.

  The daffodils had just begun to poke through the ground, and soon the hepaticas would be showing, too.

  “What rusty old junk!”

  The plumber was lying on the bathroom floor with his backside in the air, shaking his head. Simona sat at the kitchen table, smoking. She said nothing.

  “The floor’ll have to come up. This is a job for a carpenter. And a painter. The whole place will need repainting.”

  When Simona rang Isak, he barely had time to speak to her; he said he couldn’t come and see to it all himself, he had so much to do at the university—he was in Lund now—and Rosa was very busy in Stockholm looking after Laura, who was having problems at school. Laura didn’t want to get up in the morning, didn’t want to go to school. Depression, the school psychologist said. At twelve! Personally, said Isak, he felt like shooting school psychologists, the whole damned lot, but Rosa said that as long as he had his work at the university, he should leave the child rearing to her, and maybe she was right. He would be grateful if Simona would kindly take charge of all the work on the house and send him the bill—and if she could pay the electricity and telephone bills, too. He would arrange for money to be transferred to her account.

  The plumber lay flat on his stomach and sniffed the floor. He said: “It’s not just this latest water damage, though that’s bad enough—believe me! This is old rot. I’m guessing all the joists will have to be replaced.”

  He pulled himself up to a kneeling position again.

  “It’ll cost you…hell of a job…he’s only got himself to blame…but I suppose professors can afford it.”

  The plumber grinned. His teeth were lily yellow from two packs of cigarettes a day for fifty years. In a year’s time he was going to retire and move north.

  On Hammarsö they said he was a good man.

  Simona stubbed out her cigarette and smiled. She was thinking that when the hepaticas flowered—and they generally flowered in profusion around Isak’s house—she would pick a big bunch and take them home with her. There was nobody to notice they were gone, after all.

  Simona wiped up all the water in the kitchen, bathroom, and Rosa’s laundry room, though there was actually no point cleaning or tidying anything now—the house was going to be renovated in due course, in any case, or sold, so she dragged a black trash bag after her from room to room, throwing in any rubbish she came across: everything from a dead mouse in the cupboard under the sink to a drawing long ago fixed to the drying cupboard. Simona tried to read the words under the drawing, but the faded felt-tip pen was impossible to decipher. The plumber mended the pipes and the carpenter pulled up some floorboards, looked down into something that to judge by the expression on his face was a bottomless pit of damp and rot, and announced it was going to take a heck of a long time and cost a lot of money.

  He said: “These old houses don’t just take care of themselves.”

  When Simona rang Isak in Lund, he sighed and said it would have to wait. He didn’t have the money at the moment. He didn’t know when they would be back. No, there would be no summer holiday on Hammarsö this year.

  When autumn came, the permanent residents told one another there had never been so many tourists on the island as this year, and even though it had poured rain for the last two weeks of July and been cold and chilly all summer, the shop’s revenues were up twenty percent and the campsite had never been so full of RVs and tents.

  One summer, a few years later, Palle Quist was asked if he would be writing and putting on a new play anytime soon. A married couple came up to him at the hot dog stand. He remembered them. They had always made appreciative comments after those revues in the seventies. The married couple, she in a bright floral-patterned bikini and he in baggy swimming trunks, regarded him expectantly. Palle Quist shook his head and said it was nice of them to ask…but no, he didn’t think so.

  “Though, who knows?” he said as they turned to walk back to the beach. He suddenly felt more cheerful than he had in a long time.

  “Who knows?” he called after them. “Maybe next year.”

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  Simona went from room to room, whistling. She had a face like a shriveled red apple. Her hands were big, brown, and callused. She pushed a broom around the bathroom floor, killed flies that had revived on the windowsills, ran a duster over tables and cupboard ledges. The rot must have spread up the walls by now, she thought, but she had got used to the smell, and even grown oddly to like it. All houses smelled of something and this house smelled of rot and sea. She could come here and be in peace, sit at the kitchen table under the blue lamp and look at the snow falling on the plot of ground outside. She could sit here in complete silence and smoke a cigarette without anyone asking her anything or wanting her to do something for them. Why shouldn’t she be able to take a break now and then?

  Occasionally
she made herself a cup of instant coffee or lay down on the bed in one of the children’s rooms. She liked the room of the eldest girl, Erika, best. Simona had unrolled the mattress and found a quilt in the linen cupboard, and the first time she lay there she thought she might stay there for good, in that unfamiliar room with the torn floral wallpaper and the old, faded film posters, lie there in the cold, unfamiliar bed and just be. Nobody could find her. Nobody could hear her when she shouted or screamed or sang loudly and joyfully.

  What was more, she was getting paid for it. Isak made a deposit into her account every other month for her services watching over the house, keeping it clean, and contacting him if anything came up. Simona lay in Erika’s room; it was hard work lying down, hard work getting up, but when she finally got the opportunity to stretch out her old bones, really stretch them out, it was as if a song ran through her. She opened the bedside table drawer and found a pile of girls’ comics. She gave a little chuckle, heaved the whole pile onto the bed, and started to read.

  Chapter 76