by Moss, John
“All that, and more. She looks at the bright flowers in embroidery, sleek design in furniture, violence and vengeance in the sagas.”
“An expansive project.”
“An important project. She’s been working on it for years. She travels, does research, writes. She’s made a couple of forays to Greece and Italy for comparative purposes. Once recently to Canada. But, mostly, she works closer to home. She speaks the Scandinavian languages, Suomi, and Icelandic. She is in some ways a simple soul. She supports herself as a clerk in a shop, or spends her time with our aunties. Eventually, she’ll reach an end.”
“You’re very fond of her?” His own observation puzzled Harry, since Bernd and Skadi had seemed to occupy different dimensions when they were in the kitchen together. He hadn’t detected animosity, but there had been no affection, either. The kiss on both cheeks in the French manner didn’t count.
Bernd responded with a slight scowl. Harry tried another tack, again voicing his question as a statement of fact: “She was very close to your mother.”
Bernd seemed to equivocate for a moment, then answered, “They were close.”
“And Skadi shares your mother’s ambivalence about you?”
“That is a tactful way of putting it, yes: my mother’s ambivalence.”
“You must have been about five when she was born, right? But not in Canada, I assume.”
Bernd seemed relieved by the possibility of candour. “My parents separated after Giovanna died. Three summers before that, my mother was on Fårö for a few weeks. It was kind of a retreat, she explained. She came back again for a long visit the next winter.”
“Birgitta had a summer affair, then returned to have her baby.” Since Bernd did not demur, Harry went on, “Who was the father?”
“I don’t know.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“My interests are focused on the dead, not the living. I don’t really care who he was.”
“Does Skadi know?”
“We never talked about it. Skadi was here when we visited in the summer of ’83. We were all our mother’s children on Fårö. I thought Skadi was the lucky one, staying with Aunt Annie and Aunt Lenke. After Sigrid died, I came every summer on my own. My mother would visit, occasionally, but we seldom saw her. She had friends on the island.”
Obviously.
“Skadi is her mother’s daughter. She’s named after Scandinavia, the goddess of winter and the hunt.”
Bernd got up and stoked the fire. Blazing light flashed out from the roiled embers and broke into streaks across the cardboard tacked to the walls, as if the two men were trapped in a fiery inferno. Bernd left the iron door open while he picked up the axe and split more lengths of wood, which he stuffed into the flames. Then he closed the door, turned to address Harry, thought better of it, and returned to his crate, where he sat, leaning forward. The dry sweet smell of wood smoke filled the space between them.
Harry waited. What Bernd was going to tell him would be important to their mutual understanding, perhaps to their mutual survival.
“I don’t remember my sister Giovanna until she was dead.”
Bernd spoke in the way people do when they’re beginning a lengthy narrative. He took in a few deep breaths, as if he might run out of air. His enunciation was deliberate but his words flowed together. His eyes were fixed on the eyes of his listener. Opposite each other in the smoky, fire-flecked shanty, Harry was doubly a captive.
19 A STORY RE-TOLD
“THE DEATHS OF MY SISTERS BECAME A SINGLE EVENT IN my mother’s mind, Harry, episodes in a story about me. You, the police, whomever she talked to, you don’t understand me at all. I see myself through a glass darkly. You see only reflections in the glass of yourselves.”
“‘But face to face we shall know each other.’”
“First Corinthians. A bit distorted, I believe. But no, I was thinking of Bergman’s film where the protagonist comes face to face with God.”
“She was schizophrenic.”
“Yes. And I am neither the creator nor the protagonist. In my story, as we are calling it, there are three stories, a trinity of sorts, and I am fifth business in all three, an engaged observer despite what you and your Toronto detectives have divined from my mother’s account.”
Harry could see in his eyes, hear in the timbre of his voice, that gathering memories were taking inexorable shape in Bernd’s troubled soul, as if he had told himself so many versions he was desperate this time to get it right.
You don’t believe in souls, Harry.
“When Giovanna drowned, I watched,” Bernd continued. “When Isabella died, I survived. When Sigrid tumbled into an open grave,” he paused. “I walked away. I was the common factor in each death. This is not solipsism, Harry. The only thing known for sure was my presence. This to my mother was the cumulative proof of my guilt.”
Harry listened to the muffled sounds of the wind and the sea, to the crackling of the fire in the pot-bellied stove, to the laboured sounds of their breathing.
Some of his tension eased when Bernd began talking again.
“The summer I turned seven, that’s where the story begins. That’s when the rituals of summer ended. Everything changed.
“Giovanna and Isabella used to sleep in the loft over the boathouse. Sigrid and I slept up in the cottage with our parents and the au pair. We missed out on the morning swims but saunas at night were a family affair. Even Vittorio would join us. I used to imagine the au pair was envious and homesick when she watched, but she would have been too shy to join in, had we asked.
“On June twenty-first, 1985, I wandered down to the boathouse early in the morning while the mist was still rising off the water. My older sisters rushed by. Both dropped their towels and waded, bare-naked, up to their knees. I watched. I was sad. It was probably that summer I first became aware I was not like them. I ached to be included in their circle of open affection, the way even Sigrid was, who was less than two years older than me. But the circle had closed, and I was a boy, on the outside. When our father came on the weekends, I was even more on my own.
“Their splashing in the shallows made me desperately need to pee. I didn’t want to leave. I pinched myself through my Christopher Robin pyjamas. I had to go badly, but if I released my grip I’d have an accident. It’s still very vivid in my mind, Harry. I stood resolute like a toy soldier, and very confused.
“Isabella thrashed through the water toward the boathouse where I was standing by the upturned canoe. She threatened to soak me. She knew what I was doing. She knew I’d wet my pants if I tried to retreat.
“Giovanna yelled, ‘Leave him alone.’ She stood tall and her breasts seemed to float on sunlight reflected from the water splashing around her legs. Isabella slapped the water in my direction. I let go of myself. A sudden warm stain spread across the front of my pyjamas.
“Giovanna whooped and dived toward the deep water, surfaced and swam away from the scene of my humiliation. Trying to choke back the laughter, she must have inhaled a mouthful. She doubled over and turned back for shore. She sputtered for air. She screamed. A surge of water flooded her mouth, convulsed her throat, and her lungs spasmed as the warm thought of her small brother filled her with love and she slowly spiralled to the sandy bottom.”
“How can you know what she thought?”
“When you think enough about something, the details become real.”
Harry regretted interrupting. He rose to his feet, stooped and picked up the axe. Bernd gazed at the throbbing red of the pot-bellied stove that reflected in the sheen on his face. Harry shuffled through the mottled light toward the double door. He stopped and swung the axe hard into the chopping block, sending spasms of pain across his shoulders and down his arms. When he tried to wrench the blade free, it had sunk so deeply into the wood it refused to yield. Fine. He left the axe there. He tried to open the doors for more air. They resisted from the force of the wind.
Sit down and listen, Harry. T
he most important thing on his mind is to have you hear his story.
Why?
That troubled him. The apparent urgency, the reliance on hearsay, on Bernd’s need to rework the facts unaccountably made him feel claustrophobic. He edged his way back to his bench, feeling winded as he sat down. Still staring at the stove, Bernd began talking again.
“I stared at my dead sister lying on the dock. She was strong and kind and clever, and I couldn’t understand why she refused to rise up and make me feel better. I remember standing transfixed with my hands clasped in front of me to hide my shame, and I clearly recall my eyes drifting from her long toes up her legs, past the golden pubic hair, her trembling stomach, her breasts distended under the au pair’s pounding fist doing CPR, and along her elegant neck tilted back so my mother could blow air into her lungs, finally to her limpid blonde hair spread across the grey cedar planks.
“This is what is important, Harry. She was more beautiful at that moment than anything in the world. Beauty and horror merged in my mind, forever inseparable. Beauty and horror …” His voice trailed off.
“Bernd?”
“Sorry. So there I was. Seven years old. Gaping in pissy pyjamas at my dead sister, Giovanna. I turned away. I needed to change before anyone noticed.”
“What about Isabella?”
“Oh, she noticed but she wouldn’t tell. That would have implicated her in the crime. Or perhaps she had already forgotten. She had a sister to grieve, sorrow to wash her memories away.”
Yet sorrow made his own memories more vivid, Harry thought. “Why is it so important to tell me this?” he asked.
“I used the word ‘crime’ just now. In my mother’s story, there was one crime in which three girls died.”
His crime was being there, Harry. For God’s sake, he was seven.
Or was it for becoming aroused, Harry thought to himself, to Karen. Check out Freud on juvenile depravity.
Fuck Freud.
Death has not made you genteel, he silently countered.
“Are you comfortable talking about sex, Harry?”
No, he isn’t, not always. About intimacy, yes. About the mechanics, not so much.
“That depends,” Harry answered, a little nonplussed by the awkward segue. “Are you?”
Bernd smiled. “I am a Swedish-Canadian. I can be quite open about such things. There is a saying, you know: ‘Never trust a Swede who avoids talking about sex.’”
“And never trust a Canadian who talks about it.” Harry suspected Bernd’s aphorism was no more authentic than his.
He wondered if Bernd was trying to alert him to the importance of what he was about to say or just the opposite, to play down its significance?
“Despite my mother’s strange allegations, I only became aware of sex as a personal experience around the age of ten. Sadly, the good feelings I discovered were undermined by haunting shame, a sense of transgression that had been instilled so deeply it seemed innate. I avoided touching my penis when I peed, standing against the toilet to drip dry rather than giving it a good shake. I refrained from soaping my penis when I bathed. I thought of it as it, with a will of its own. It was capable of rearing up on a vibrating bus or in school when I was called to the board or while reading a comic strip where voluptuous pen-strokes teased my imagination. I had become the ‘little man of the family’ and was mortified that a rogue erection might betray my unsuitability for the role. It was all very awkward.
“Then early in the autumn of my eleventh year, alone in my room, trying to think of nothing at all, I had an orgasm. Do you remember your first, Harry? Surely, every man remembers his first. It was the greatest, most frightening, and terrible feeling I had ever experienced. After a week to recover, I tried it again, and thereafter managed once a day. I associated the explosive ecstasy with guilt more than shame. Guilt, I understood. Guilt was what held our family together.
“Four days before Christmas, I was sprawled on my bed in the middle of the day, singing to the ceiling. O Tannenbaum, I think it was. Of course it was. I remember perfectly. I was quite precocious, you know. I knew the words in German. Wie treu sind deine Blätter … O Tannenbaum … Du grüinst nicht nur zur Sommerzeit … Nein, auch im Winter, wenn es schneit. By the last stanza I was caught up in the conflicting imagery of tree branches still green after being cut down in the dead of winter, aflame with candlelight in the stifling warmth. The lyrics were highly arousing.”
It’s not the most sensual song I can think of!
You were never a ten-year-old boy.
“Isabella and her friend,” Bernd continued. “Rose Ahluwalia, they flounced past my open door on their way upstairs to Issie’s room. Before long, the pulsing music of Rush descended from above. I followed the mounting crescendo up to the third floor on a devious project, fraught with the possibility of humiliation, but filled with the promise of unspeakable excitement. I crept through the back of a closet in the hall, the child in me playing out the plot of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the adolescent envisioning images from the stolen issue of Playboy hidden under my mattress.
“By the time I reached the back of Isabella’s closet and could peer through into her room, I was desperately trying to stifle the laboured sounds of my breathing. Asphyxia and euphoria together as I watched them dance. Provocatively. Childishly. Giggling and swooning. Smoking furiously as they stripped and dressed up. At one point I gasped. The music stopped. I drew in a deep slow breath. The music started again. If they knew I was there, they didn’t let on. My attention shifted from Rose to Isabella. I was confused. My sister in her underwear, silky and gleaming like a moonlit night. Isabella shimmying, Isabella dropping her bra and gyrating as she put on another that squashed her breasts upwards, Isabella laughing. It belonged to her dead sister, she announced theatrically. Isabella crying. Tears and laughter together. Rose, no longer a player. After a while, Rose put on her own clothes and left.”
Bernd stood up and stoked the fire. The flames blazed molten on his face. He turned away and tried to wrench the axe free from the chopping block. The handle broke, leaving him clutching the shaft like an artifact from the distant past. Bracing the handle between two split logs, he stamped on it. The first time his leg recoiled. He winced and did it again. The shaft broke. He stuffed both pieces into the stove and sat down, grimacing, as Harry supposed, with pained satisfaction.
“Well then,” he said. “That was a moment chock full of meaning.”
Harry addressed Karen. “Meaning what? Symbolism is your department.”
I have no idea. That’s probably the point. A broken axe? It means what you will. Or nothing at all. A diversion, a distraction to obscure the sexual intensity.
Or to relieve it, Harry thought, as Bernd continued.
“I watched as my sister collapsed on the floor in front of me and wept softly against her arm. My entire body shook with a sense of violation inseparable from arousal. She lifted her head, rolled sideways to retrieve a cigarette from a pack on the bed, lit it, and sank down in front of me again, softly caressing herself, her whole body, her breasts, between her legs, her long neck, as smoke circled in soft clouds around her.
“I exploded. I lurched in surprise, quivered from head to toe. I pushed sharply away from the back of the cupboard, forcing the copper-pipe lever behind me to the side. I leaned forward. Isabella’s face was contorted with pleasure and yet eerily serene. Frightened, confused, I scrambled toward the empty closet where I had entered. I was overtaken by the unfamiliar sulphuric smell of Easter eggs gone rancid.
“Emerging into the hallway, I descended the stairs to my own room. Strains of a Beatles tune drifted down, I couldn’t be sure which it was.
“After the explosion and the fire, after Christmas and the funeral, I struggled to assimilate what had happened. Christmas, of course, had been ruined. Water damage destroyed most of the presents and the few that survived the flames and the frozen water from the fire hoses were thrown out when contractors moved in and clea
red the wreckage. Isabella’s urn at the funeral was nearly empty.
“Rose Ahluwalia attended the service on Boxing Day with her family. When she bent close to whisper her sympathies, I thought I could feel a breast pressing against my arm. I imagined it was covered in sky blue satin.”
Harry peered at the speaker through the shimmering gloom. Sweat streaked Bernd’s face, distorting the lines and contours. It was almost as if he were wearing a mask.
“The point is,” said Bernd. He stopped abruptly, as if the point were obvious.
Shadenfreude, Harry. Pleasure from another’s misfortune.
In spite of another’s misfortune, Harry responded. The sensuality of shame. The fusion of sexuality and death.
“Fire marshals determined the gas valve had been forced open. It was clear what had happened. They didn’t name me as a voyeur. I was ten and there was no proof. My mother was cautioned to keep an eye on me. Which she did. Assiduously. And to take me for therapy, which she didn’t.”
Harry?
I hear you.
He’s using you, Harry.
He needs to connect. He’s connecting.
To atone for his sins. You know your Bible, Harry. Sins are transferred to a goat who is then cast into the desert. You’re the goat.
Isn’t there a Nordic equivalent?
Possibly it’s him. He’s his mother’s scapegoat. You don’t want to be his. Remember, for scapegoats to be effective, they die.
Harry shook his head and moved into the flashing shadows between the stove and the workbench. He grasped the edge of the bench and squeezed the worn wood until his fingers hurt. He took a few deep breaths from the swirling vortex of air near a crack in the boards.
Okay, Sailor. I’m back.
He returned to his place, which Bernd took as a signal to continue.
“What about Sigrid’s death?” he asked.
“We’re coming to that. It was another equinox, the spring this time. March 1991. It was the day my father’s funeral got cancelled. I was almost fourteen and well-embarked on an introspective, aloof, and cheerless adolescence.”