by Linn Ullmann
It was Charley—good old Charley with her timorous, trusting heart—he was thinking of when he told Mai they should get a dog. Mai said no, and breakfast was ruined. The idyll, the cottage mood, was shattered. Johan got up from the breakfast table and went out into the garden. After a while he went into the bathroom and shut the door. He stood in front of the old mirror over the sink and stared at his face.
He had fixed this bathroom up with his own hands. Blue vinyl wallpaper, blue flooring. The window was open onto the forest and the lake. The weathermen had forecast a fine sunny day, but instead they’d had wind, a little rain, and an unreliable sun—a typical Scandinavian summer sun, which gave no warmth, could disappear behind a cloud any minute—and often did. Johan had been feeling out of sorts all day. He took the uncertain weather personally. Like everything else, the weather was a sign. Pain or the absence of pain was a sign. The books he bought or was given as presents, the books he read, were full of signs. A collection of poems by Dylan Thomas, a gift from his old friend Geir, was a sign. Johan said, “I can fight this. That’s what this means. It’s a sign from Geir. I can fight this. Mai, do you hear me? Rage! Rage! I won’t go into that good night. Not gently. No. I don’t want to die.”
Soon Mai would knock on the bathroom door, and when he did not answer she would cautiously open it and see him there in front of the mirror. She would stand behind him, maybe put her arms around him.
Mai’s face was a sign. He caught himself searching Mai’s face with something like suspicion, much as a passenger on a plane will search the flight attendant’s face when the plane begins to shudder and the cabin lights go out. Is this it? Are we crashing now? Does she look worried? Will it be over soon?
Everything was a sign that might tell him something about his illness. He looked around and asked the sun, the grass, the sky, the books, and Mai, “Am I going to make it through this, or am I going to die?” It was like the time Mai lost—or got rid of, or killed—the fetus; Johan was never quite sure how to think of it, and this was one of the things of which they never spoke. Never. Back then he thought that the change in the weather was a sign. He remembered it as if it were yesterday. The sun had been shining, but then the wind picked up and it started to rain and Mai told him that she was pregnant and intended to have an abortion. He remembered the way the weather suddenly changed. He remembered Mai’s face when she told him it was a girl. And he remembered the book he came across in the bookshop with the pictures of a fetus at various stages of development and the heart that pumped twenty-eight liters of blood a day.
In time, however, when Johan’s condition worsened, and the pain with it, the signs would cease to appear, cease to be signs, showing themselves to be simply random occurrences. Just as Johan himself was a random occurrence. There would come a time when Johan would realize that the world wasn’t trying to tell him anything, that his body was saying nothing, that the pain offered nothing; that the body is flesh and flesh decays. It was simply there—all of it. He had no tacit understanding with the world. Sunshine was sunshine. Rain was rain. Flesh was flesh. Pain was pain. And there would come a time when Johan would clasp his hands and whisper, “Why?” And the answer would make no more sense than the question: “Because.”
But now, standing in front of the mirror, he was still hoping something would happen, hoping for a sign, hoping the beast that had taken up residence inside him and cast its shadow over his life would give way to long, unchanging, sunlit days.
My … life, he thought. He didn’t know what else to call it. He would have liked to have come up with something grand and eloquent, there in front of the mirror. “My … life. My life.” That was all he could muster. Sip a glass of cold beer. Read. Go fishing. Lie next to Mai, hand in hand, with the scent of her hair and body in his nostrils.
At the same time, listening to his body, he was conscious of a slight headache and a touch of nausea. The nausea frightened him. It didn’t take much to scare him into imagining that something nameless, terrible, unthinkable, was about to happen, something he could not foresee and therefore could not guard against or control. Convulsions. Hemorrhaging. Choking fits.
Being hours away from a big, bright, modern hospital worried him. He’d been looking forward to getting away, but now “away” didn’t seem a safe place at all. He didn’t want to be “away.” He wanted to be where it would be technically possible to save his life. Someplace he wouldn’t die just like that, with only the trees, the grass, and the still waters of the lake bearing witness. Who would save him if he were suddenly to collapse right now? Mai? She’d barely give him a Valium if he complained of feeling agitated. She was a doctor, but she lacked access to the necessary facilities and drugs and didn’t have the specialist’s skills. A man in Johan’s condition needed the utmost expertise. He took a deep breath. A man in my condition needs the utmost expertise. He stared at the gaunt face in the mirror and held his breath. The nausea was stronger now, a gagging sensation, as if someone had rammed a stick down his throat. Was the headache worse? He went on holding his breath. He didn’t want to start retching, because once begun it would go on and on until he was laid out, drained, on the bathroom floor, like a broken twig. Who would save him then?
When Johan was a boy, he and his friends used to have contests to see who could hold his breath the longest. Underwater, in railway tunnels, while someone counted to fifty or seventy or even a hundred. When Andreas was ten, Johan found him shut up inside a wardrobe with a plastic bag over his head. Johan tore off the bag in terrible fear and slapped the boy’s face.
“What made you do such a thing, Andreas?”
The boy merely shrugged and walked away.
Once, many years later, he asked Mai, “What is it about suffocation that children find so seductive?”
Mai thought for a moment. Then she put her finger on his windpipe and pressed, then pressed a little harder and kept pressing until he pushed her away.
He exhaled, stared at his face in the mirror, took a step back, and looked himself up and down: the old man’s chest; the long, thin fingers; the nails that had not been cut in a while (he must remember to do that first thing, once he was finished here!); the pale, sagging belly, like a kid’s white backpack; the legs that had always been spindly. “Hideous cadaver,” Johan said out loud. “Hideous, shitty old cadaver,” he said, shocked to find himself using the word shitty. Such a refined old man! He leaned in closer to the mirror and studied the boil: a fiery red today. It was surely grinning at him.
“Shit! Shit!”
The boil was still grinning. Johan grinned back.
“Shit! Fuck! Cunt! Cock!”
He must have been louder than he realized, because Mai called from the kitchen, “Johan? Is everything okay in there?”
He muttered something in reply.
The voice from the kitchen: “I just popped outside for a moment—”
He cut her off. “Everything’s fine, Mai. I’m just cutting my fingernails.” He waved his hands about in front of the mirror. “Cutting my fingernails! Cutting my fingernails!”
He could still smell her sex on his fingers. She had tenderly and efficiently slid them back and forth inside herself earlier that morning.
Strictly speaking, thought Johan, death had no business bothering him. He had done all the right things, made his arrangements, struck his bargains, and said his prayers. Other people died, not Johan, although he would never admit to thinking such a thing. He didn’t smoke or drink or drive too fast or brag about this clean living, he wasn’t the sort to take comfort in other people’s funerals, and he wasn’t the sort to say, “It won’t happen to me.” He knew it was exactly this sort of statement that could strike a man down when he least expected it. He took great care never to evince the slightest sign of hubris; the last thing he wanted was to tempt fate. In his relationship with Death, a relationship he had come to regard as a friendship of sorts (not a friendship between equals, to be sure, but a friendship nonetheless), he had been h
umble, one might even say ingratiating.
“I know it could happen to me. I know you’re greater than I. But I’m being good, look at me, I’m being good, and I would be so very, very grateful if you would leave me alone.”
When Ole Torjussen returned to Norway after being kicked out of New York by his brown-eyed mistress, his wife forgave him without much of a fuss. Four years later he got sick and died.
“This is what I get for thinking I could find happiness,” Torjussen whispered to Johan. “Hubris, that was my downfall.”
“Nonsense,” Johan told him. But the thought had occurred to him too, and he was relieved to think that he himself had never tempted fate by being untrue to anyone, not even his wife number one, whom he hadn’t liked. And he never forgot to give thanks for Mai. Not a single day with Mai was taken for granted.
After Ole Torjussen’s funeral, his mourners talked not about his life, nor about his having once “tempted fate” by chasing happiness across the Atlantic. No, what people remarked upon was the deceased’s success at dying graciously, peacefully, and speedily. His wife made particular mention of this. The family had gathered around his deathbed, candles had been lit, and Ole Torjussen had professed his love for them all, most especially for his wife. Then he’d squeezed her hand and asked her, yet again, to forgive him.
“For what, my darling?” she had whispered, wishing to hear him grovel one more time.
In his mind’s eye Ole Torjussen saw a pair of beautiful brown eyes, an apartment on West 73rd Street in New York, a man giving directions to a stranger who had lost his way.
“For everything!” he whispered, and closed his eyes.
He closed his eyes, thought Johan (who had heard the story of Torjussen’s death several times), partly because he was dying and partly to see those beautiful brown eyes one last time.
“He closed his eyes and died with a smile on his face,” his wife sniffed.
Johan was just a little boy the first time he appealed to Death. It was on his mother’s behalf. She had a cold and a fever, and the boy realized she might actually die and be gone for good. He didn’t care about his father, who would in fact die not too many years later, when Johan was fifteen. But his mother! His mother with her beautiful hands, her sweet kisses, her soft round tummy in which he could bury his face. She couldn’t die. So he raised his eyes to heaven and promised never again to steal money from his mother’s purse, to be a good boy, a nice, obedient boy, if his mother would only be allowed to stay with him. And Death answered his prayers. His mother recovered and everything returned to normal, except that from then on Johan talked often to Death. On behalf of his mother, his sister, and himself. As I say, he didn’t care much about his father—not that he told Death that. He told no one. He didn’t even permit himself to think such thoughts, since it seemed likely that Death could read his mind. So when his mother recovered, Johan was a good little boy, obedient and nice, even to his father, who was a clumsy, smelly, if well-meaning man. More well meaning than other fathers, always taking the time to talk to Johan and his sister, especially Johan, the youngest. He would read to him in the evening and take him for walks or to the movies, even during the war. They saw the German movie The Golden State, filmed in Technicolor, for which Joseph Goebbels himself had written the heroine’s last line: “I did not love my native soil enough, and for that I must die!” Even this film they saw, despite his mother’s protests.
“I’m not seeing it because it’s German, goddammit,” his father shouted. “I’m seeing it because it’s in Technicolor!”
“It makes no difference,” his mother hissed. “You just don’t get it, do you? It makes no difference. It can be in as many colors as you like, but it’ll still be German. People will talk!”
His father had planted himself squarely in front of his mother. As Johan remembered it, as he pictured them there, he saw something he hadn’t seen before. He had always recalled his mother as a towering presence and his father as a little man. But now, sixty years on, standing in front of the mirror in the bathroom, he suddenly saw them as they had actually been. His mother had been a tiny little woman. It was his father who had towered over everyone.
Johan’s father had planted himself squarely in front of his mother and roared, “Who will talk?”
“They’ll all talk!” she shrieked. “All of them! And you know it!”
Johan opened his eyes, and when he caught his own gaze in the bathroom mirror he remembered his parents as he always had and as he preferred to do. She towered and he was little.
Johan’s father took his son for walks and to the movies. He was not a bad man but he was, nonetheless, clumsy and smelly (Johan suspected that he didn’t wash between his legs properly). What’s more, he had no friends as other boys’ fathers did. Johan thought his solitude might have had something to do with the war. Other boys’ fathers had stories about all the things they had done during the war, and they told them again and again, but Johan’s father didn’t have a single one. Not a single friend and not a single story.
In 1945, when Johan had just turned thirteen, his mother got sick again. The doctor looked worried when he came out of Johan’s mother’s room.
Johan walked right up to him and said, “My mamma is going to be okay, isn’t she?”
The doctor said one should never give up hope. Johan nodded, silently cursing the doctor for such a stupid answer. He was a doctor, not a minister. Then his father ran a weak, smelly, well-meaning hand through Johan’s hair and said exactly the same thing. “We musn’t give up hope, Johan. We musn’t give up hope that Mamma will pull through this time too.”
Johan stared at his father. “No!” he said to himself. “No more!”
He shut himself up in the bedroom he shared with his sister, went down on his knees, and whispered, “Take him instead. Take my father, whom I love, instead of Mamma!”
And it seemed to him that Death whispered back: But if you love your father as much as your mother, why should I take him when it’s her I want?
Johan considered this. “Because he’s lived longer. It’s … fairer that way.”
Everything was quiet for a moment. Johan stared at the ceiling.
Then he heard the voice again. Are you sure it isn’t because you don’t really care about your father, Johan? Are you sure it isn’t because you think your father is a smelly, spineless little man who might as well die now? Are you sure it isn’t because you adore your mother and you’d be lost without her? Is it not the case, my dear boy, that you are asking me to do you a favor?
“No,” Johan replied, clasping his hands. “I love them both. Pappa’s a good man; he means well. It just seems fairer for you to take him first. He … he … he’s ten years older than she is.”
Johan lifted his face to the bathroom mirror. He looked tired. He was tired. There was no escape from this fatigue. He could not sleep, and he was tired; he slept, and he was still tired. It made no difference. He remembered the little girl at the hospital who thought he was as old as her ancient grandpa. This was the face she had seen. Poor child!
The day after thirteen-year-old Johan spoke with Death, his mother got out of bed for a while with a hint of roses in her cheeks. Within a week she was up and about all day, and after three weeks she was well enough to go back to work.
Johan had all but forgotten Death’s favor when, more than a year later, he overheard his mother and father talking in the living room. He knew his father had been to see the doctor, but he hadn’t given it much thought. Johan heard his father’s anxious whispers and his mother’s calm, soothing voice. “Everything will be fine. Things always work out fine.” Then he heard his father burst into tears, and the words I’m scared!
Johan sat up in bed. His father, this well-meaning, friendless little man who had always been good to Johan, was weeping in the living room.
Johan hurriedly clasped his hands. “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” he whispered, tears spilling down his face.
He
lay down again and shut his eyes. He could still hear the voices in the living room and his father’s quiet sobs.
Johan clasped his hands again. “Hey, there!” he whispered in the darkness. “Hey, you!”
No reply.
“I know you can hear me, and I just wanted to say that I’m grateful to you for doing as I asked, but that this is no small sacrifice. I want you to know that. My father’s a good man. It’s not that I don’t care about him. You said I didn’t care, but I do.”
Johan blew on the mirror. He saw his father’s face, the last glimpse of his father’s stricken face before his mother closed the door and the howling began.
He didn’t want to end up like that. He wanted to decide for himself when it was time, and he didn’t want to be a burden to anyone, least of all to Mai, any more than he already was. Mai was seventeen years younger, only fifty-three. And slim, stately, almost beautiful. He tried to summon up Mai’s face the way he had his father’s, but there was only mist. He could hear her out in the kitchen, humming and clattering dishes and cutlery. It was impossible to picture a face one knew so well. When he thought about it, he realized he seldom saw her face in his dreams. He could envision his mother’s face whenever he liked, and his father’s as he lay dying, before the blue door was closed, and Alice’s face, twisted with scolding, but not Mai’s face. If he shut his eyes and worked his way inside to that part of him that continued to burn, he could find the rapture Mai’s face awakened in him, not only when they first fell in love but to this day. It was like discovering a clearing in the forest where wild strawberries grew.
Very few who knew him would have described Johan Sletten as a man with an inner flame, but he was aware of a small unaccountable flicker deep inside all the same. At his funeral he was remembered as honest, amiable, witty, intelligent, able. His interest in books, the cinema, and music was mentioned but not overplayed. It would never have occurred to anyone to use the word passion in connection with Johan. Not even Mai—when, to many people’s surprise, she delivered her husband’s eulogy—gave the impression that their twenty-three-year-long marriage had been in any way passionate. Qualities such as friendship, thoughtfulness, understanding, and trust were named. Especially trust—she repeated the word several times.