The premiere is packed. So many people turn up that some have to stand at the back, behind the rows of chairs. Whenever she is about to appear she has to climb that rickety ladder in her high heels, which means she has to pull her tight dress right up over her thighs.
The janitor, who is holding the ladder, smacks her on the bottom and makes inappropriate comments of a sexual nature on every single occasion. She doesn’t have time to worry about that. She just hopes he steadies the ladder properly; she doesn’t want to fall and break her leg before she has managed to win over her audience.
And win them over she does. The music room is full to bursting with students from her school, students from other schools, parents, curious teachers, and hopefully one or two journalists.
She steps into the spotlight. Her cheeks are burning, there is a rushing sound in her ears. The tension is unbearable as the band strikes up.
With a flamboyant gesture she removes the top hat. Her best number is the irreverent, sensual lullaby toward the end; it’s about the flirtatious Geography teacher, and is set to the music from the film Rififi by the director Jules Dassin. She copies the teacher’s mannerisms as she pushes her hair off her forehead; lots of people recognize him, and start to applaud.
First he’s strict and then he smiles,
Asks those cheeky questions,
That’s his Ri fi fi…
The audience is virtually ecstatic. And she sucks on the notes and wiggles her hips, she roars and throws one leg forward, kicks out with her foot. They love her and her ironic exaggerations. They whistle and stamp their feet and clap their hands.
She is a woman. That is the role she is playing.
Slut, seductress, subjugator: that is her role, and she revels in the power it gives her. As she takes her bow she feels dizzy with happiness. She wants to be exactly like the character she is playing.
And that is what she intends to do.
The revue is a succès formidable. Many people say so, including the director who has actually been to the nightclubs of Paris. Her contribution to its success was far from insignificant. During recess she stands outside the tobacconist’s opposite the school, where they sell loose Bill, and reads about herself in the newspaper. Third professor’s daughter to appear in a revue in Lund.
Following in the footsteps of Yvonne Lombard and Cilla Ingvar.
With a big photograph of her in the dress and the top hat, with the mouche on her cheek. The picture isn’t unflattering. Her cheeks are a little too full, her eyes a fraction too childish. And perhaps she is slightly too chubby for the dress, which is creased over her stomach. But no, she looks good.
Practically smashing, in fact.
She realizes that she could be exactly that. She stuffs the paper into her coat pocket and runs across the street in the naked light of spring to get to her lesson in time. She admires her Latin teacher; he is a poet, and she reads his anthologies with genuine appreciation. He has a particular way of handing back their exercise books when he has marked them: he tosses them through the air in an elegant arc, so that each one lands unerringly on the right desk.
Of course some people prefer to strut around on a stage. The Latin teacher’s tone is sarcastic. There is no possibility of misunderstanding his words; he is talking about her. She didn’t have much time to prepare for the test, and no doubt she has paid the price.
Quickly and nervously she flicks through until she finds her grade.
A-minus. So what is he talking about?
It is true that she struts around on a stage. But for the time being she decides to take the comment as a kind of backhanded recognition. She has just turned seventeen. She is a woman and she is smashing.
The final performance, the last time in the spotlight. She is feeling more and more at ease. She tosses her hair over her shoulder and brings out the seductive Rififi. She is in the middle of the number and her eyes have gotten used to the bright light when she catches sight of him. Dad is at the back of the room. With Vibeke.
She is holding her little boy in her arms.
They are standing close together.
Seeing them gives her a bit of a shock, but she finishes the number. She takes off her hat and bows to the audience, glancing in their direction. They have gone. They must have come in toward the end of the show. And slunk out again.
During the wild, high-spirited party at her classmate Eva’s apartment after the final performance, she realizes she can no longer ignore the way things are.
She gets drunk. She chatters and kisses everyone and everyone tells her how brilliant it was and babbles away. She totters out onto the balcony with a glass of wine in one hand and a cigarette in the other. The night air, with its sharp edge of spring chill, sobers her up. She has to look reality in the eye.
Mom is in the psychiatric clinic in Lund.
That’s the way things are. While she has been rehearsing and strutting around onstage, Mom hasn’t been at home. She hasn’t asked why, she has only thought about being allowed to show off in the school revue. Many people see her as tough and self-confident. Which means she has been able to fool both them and herself. She stands on the balcony at Eva’s and looks up at the stars. The light has traveled for millions of years to reach her eyes.
This time the stars provide no solace. What are they doing to Mom in the psychiatric clinic, why is she there? Anxiety, a faithful companion throughout her life, reports for duty.
The following day she stays home from school. She doesn’t get up until late morning; she pulls on some clothes and opens her books. But at lunchtime Dad turns up. With Vibeke and the boy.
No doubt he didn’t expect to find anyone in the apartment.
They are perfectly pleasant. They don’t mention the revue, but they ask her to look after the boy; they have something important to discuss. The boy is very cute. They lie on their tummies on the floor in her room and she draws cartoons telling stories about everything he asks for: giraffes, monsters, cars. The important discussion takes a long time.
The boy starts to get anxious, wanting his mommy. Should she stop him from going to look for her? She opens the door and he rushes out. She deliberately follows him. Vibeke is lying on the couch in the living room. Dad is half-lying on top of her, caressing her. Vibeke’s skirt is pushed right up and her thighs are visible.
She immediately goes back to her room.
Now she knows for sure. She can no longer turn a blind eye.
After a while they call out to her from the kitchen. They’ve made coffee, would she like some? They look perfectly normal. All their buttons are done up. Vibeke is sitting with the little boy on her knee, her smile just as warm and untroubled as always. Vibeke knows that she saw them, of course. Dad must also realize that she is aware of the situation.
But they act as if nothing has happened. By doing so they make a demand of her: that she must do the same.
To know and to give nothing away is to be split in two. Her head and her heart are torn. What is infidelity? It is having a sexual relationship with another man’s wife. Does Uncle Bertil know that his wife is having sex with his close friend? Does he accept the situation? And Mom, what does she know?
She hopes she has got it wrong. She tries to convince herself that’s what’s happened. They like one another, of course they do. They just make out a little. They think it’s cool.
But she hasn’t got it wrong. Objectively she recalls one incident after another over the past few years. They are having a relationship, and presumably it has been going on for a long time. Vibeke, who turned up with the boy at the house in the archipelago last summer. They stood in the kitchen with the boy and hugged each other.
And Mom didn’t come down; she stayed upstairs. The girl went up to her after a while. She was lying in bed, smoking. The girl asked her to come down, but Mom shook her head. She tried to take the brandy bottle away from her, and Mom rapped her sharply across the knuckles. Go away!
Everything falls into place. At th
e same time nothing makes sense. Vibeke, who said to her afterward, when Mom didn’t come down: I feel sorry for you, having a mom who’s so sick. How dare Vibeke say such a thing! How did she have the gall to turn up at all? To join them on Kullen? To appear with Mom in the St. John Passion?
Could they have been together for that long? What if Vibeke’s little boy is Dad’s too—is that why he stayed away in America when the child was born? No, that’s unthinkable. How can Dad seem so blasé about the whole thing? Or is he just not facing up to the situation?
Perhaps he’s burying his head in the sand, like an ostrich.
And Vibeke is doing the same. If you don’t admit it, it doesn’t exist. Is that what’s going on? She turns it over and over in her mind. Dismisses her thoughts. Forces herself to think them again. Maybe Bertil does know. Maybe he thinks it’s okay. Maybe that’s how he and Dad cement their warm friendship, by loving the same woman.
A crazy idea. Totally perverted.
Maybe Dad is drawn to warm, cheerful Vibeke as a motherly figure? He misses Grandma, and Mom is neither cheerful nor particularly motherly. Or maybe Vibeke went after him, and Dad—who is always so reluctant to hurt anyone—couldn’t end it. Once they’d started.
So many possibilities. There’s no point in trying to work out how they feel or the reality of the situation. She still won’t be able to understand. The only thing she knows for sure is that it could be one way or another.
They’re having a relationship. Or they’re not having a relationship.
From a logical point of view, one excludes the other.
It is very difficult to accommodate two such contradictory truths. So how is she supposed to deal with this?
It turns inward. Either she has to trust the evidence of her senses and her intellect, which means she is a co-conspirator with Dad and Vibeke.
And it means she is culpable too, in a way.
Or she keeps on telling herself that it’s all a figment of her imagination. In which case she becomes blurred and unclear. If she is going to be able to understand who she is, and to be honest, then she has to trust what her eyes and her intellect are telling her, and not allow herself to become a vague smudge. She would love to behave like Dad, and bury her head in the sand. Refuse to engage with the matter. If they are together, then so what? Nothing to do with her.
But she can’t behave like an ostrich.
How can Dad have been so calm, so cheerful over the years if he’s been leading a double life? And Mom, constantly fishing for the truth, running after it so to speak, while being betrayed.
Why is Mom really in the psychiatric clinic? Does she know? And should the girl choose to realize or continue to look away? It’s an important choice. Practically a philosophical choice. She wants to be able to see clearly. She wants to be true. But how can she be true if everything around her is a lie? The more pressing question is how she is going to deal with her parents. To put it simply: how is she going to behave toward them?
Dad brings Mom home from the clinic in the old Hanomag. They didn’t get a new car after all. He has bought pork chops and fries them for dinner.
He opens a bottle of wine to celebrate her return.
They sit around the kitchen table, the whole family. She gazes at her mother’s long fingers as they pick a match out of the box with a movement that is so familiar, and light a cigarette. A pianist’s fingers, as Dad used to say.
She can’t talk to them. She doesn’t even try. Which of them would she turn to? During the period that follows, something I referred to as the terror of silence became a reality. You have to watch what you say. Make sure you don’t come out with the wrong thing. Keep quiet about what she isn’t sure if Mom knows, the knowledge that could lead to disaster.
Disaster? Really? But many people are involved: her parents, Bertil and Vibeke, and their children. She has no way of knowing who knows what. Maybe the whole town knows? Apart from Mom, possibly.
But obviously Mom knows everything, she thinks.
Which means that Mom must have exercised a heroic level of self-control, which occasionally faltered. And who can blame her?
At regular intervals she once again tries to tell herself that it’s just her imagination. That she dreamed up Vibeke on the couch underneath Dad. But she didn’t. She gets stuck in the fissure between truth and lies.
Surely something must happen? Nothing happens. Catharsis is the high point in classical drama, when the reality becomes clear and the audience is faced with the truth. This is a drama with no catharsis. She knows what she saw.
And she doesn’t trust either of them. If her parents’ life is a play, she thinks it’s dreadful. She concludes that she and her sisters have grown up in a lie. Nothing has been as it appeared to be. That hurts.
And keeping quiet hurts most of all.
The photographs from that period. One of Ninne’s confirmation. Oh yes, after me Ninne was confirmed too. In this picture: Mom at the piano, calm and collected, hands hovering over the keys, an almost ecstatic smile on her face. Dad, without a care in the world, one arm around Ninne in her white dress. Ia, half-grown, in a checked dress with a cross around her neck. And me, relaxed and smiling next to Ia, in a woolen dress with a broad patent belt. I remember the dress was itchy. Everything else has been erased. A forgotten photographer said cheese and we all smiled.
A snapshot of a very happy family.
But the way I remember it: my last year in school was nothing more than a protracted wait for school to be over. I stopped smoking and didn’t care if I got fat.
I was living in Lund, a delightful academic town. The mendacity was hidden well, but not entirely. Certain authors in Lund wrote about it. Fritjof Nilsson Piraten (Three Semesters). Hjalmar Gullberg (Love in the Twentieth Century). Bold, sharp Majken Johansson with her careless irony. I read Anna Rydstedt’s poems and heard her recite them at the Academic Society.
I eat next to nothing these days, a little bread, a few crumbs from the happiness of others. Something along those lines. The poems reached me, but through a thick mist. And reality was cloven in two like a tree struck by lightning.
Shortly before she graduates from high school she is home alone with Mom. She thinks it over, then asks why she was in the clinic. Because I suffer from depression, Mom says.
And why is that? Mom says it’s always been that way. They are sitting in the living room. The potted plants in the window are barely breathing, and the twilight is no more than a shimmer of yellow. And Mom tells her about Jetty, a little girl who became her playmate when she acquired a baby brother. He was sick, and Granny had to spend a lot of time with him. Mom got Jetty instead.
And they played together all day. She was four years old, and strictly forbidden from going out through the iron gate in Surabaja on her own. One day Jetty, who was full of ideas, thought it would be good if they went for a walk. The servants were otherwise occupied, and the gate was open. Clutching each other’s hands they headed for the Red Bridge among the crowds of pedestrians, street traders, and ox carts.
Suddenly Granddad loomed up before them like an enraged bull elephant. He dragged her home. When she refused to admit that she had been disobedient, he locked her in his big closet. She stood there for hours, kicking and screaming.
When the key turned it was night. Once again he demanded that she admit she had gone out through the gate alone. She refused. She hadn’t been alone. Jetty was with her. He locked her in again.
She screamed until her voice gave out. When Granddad finally opened the door for the second time, he demanded that she admit that Jetty didn’t exist. She refused, and was beaten. After all those hours in the closet, she was no longer able to speak. She developed nodules on her vocal chords and couldn’t make a sound. For over a year.
Of course Jetty didn’t exist, Mom says.
But she seemed so alive that Mom didn’t realize. She told the truth, but still got beaten. Since then she has suffered regular episodes of depression. Mom says she
believes she has always had another world, a fantasy world, within her. She had never been able to share it with others; instead, music took up all the space available.
And she wasn’t good enough. The nerves. The anxiety. The sense of inadequacy. No, she wasn’t good enough for the music. Mom sounds sad, but she’s calm. She hopes Mom will mention Vibeke, that it will be possible to discuss the whole thing openly. But Mom doesn’t mention Vibeke.
Which means she dare not mention her either.
Mom says that she asked to be admitted to the clinic. She wanted to understand her anxiety, her depression, once and for all. But the professor wasn’t interested in what she had to say. He interrupted her and declared that her depression was endogenous. Which means hereditary.
She was given electric shock treatment to counteract her endogenous depression. They secured her to the bed with straps and sent electric currents through her head. This was repeated several times. The patient shakes, the limbs jerk uncontrollably. She flaps around like a fish out of water and the nurse stuffs a rag into her mouth.
It’s a bit like epilepsy, Mom says.
It sounds like torture, the girl thinks.
But the electric shocks didn’t help. When she told the professor she was just as depressed afterward and that she wanted to go home, he replied that she ought to undergo a sleep cure.
That was the only thing that could fix her.
But Mom had seen the somnambulists around the clinic, drugged to the eyeballs, tottering along like zombies, not entirely asleep but robbed of their mind. She couldn’t agree to that.
You’re not touching my mind!
She slammed her hand down on the desk. When the professor insisted, she got frightened. She ran away from the clinic and called Dad from a telephone kiosk. She sat on her suitcase in a snow-covered field smoking cigarettes until he came and picked her up.
A Fortune Foretold Page 13