by Linn Ullmann
They took pictures of his body, imaged his innermost recesses, slid him into machines with eyes that could see straight through him—they were treacherous, those eyes. They scanned his organs one by one and decided that the problem lay there and there and there. And this there and there and there told them all they needed to know about Johan Sletten.
He looked at Mai. “Am I going to lose control?”
“Johan—”
“Goddammit, Mai, am I going to lose control?”
She did not answer. Instead, she looked at the floor. She closed her eyes and rubbed her temples.
“I don’t want … I don’t want to become … a vegetable.” He raised his voice. “You’ve got to do something, Mai!” he pleaded. “Do something!”
“I think you’re right,” she said. “You should be talking to Dr. Meyer about this, not to me. I shouldn’t have said anything.”
She would not look at him, even though he was staring right at her. Was it because she knew that when he looked at her it was like looking in a mirror? Was it because she knew that every expression, every gesture, every glance betrayed not only what had passed between Dr. Meyer and herself but also the conclusion to which they had come? There was no way back. It was all over. The worst had happened. And after the worst—nothing. His head spun; he felt his chest pounding, the nausea rising. He started to cry, and Mai put her arms around him.
“Is it going to change me? … Am I going to lose control?”
Mai still did not look at him. She said, “Everyone is going to be doing their very best for you.”
“I’m doing my best, too,” Johan sobbed. He grasped her hand. “I’m doing my best, don’t you see that?”
Mai ran a hand through his hair and whispered, “I see that, Johan. I do see that.” She caught her breath and hesitated for a moment. “And when you feel you can’t fight it any longer, don’t worry; you won’t have to.”
“No?”
“No.”
“You promise?”
“I promise. But I need to know that you still want me to keep the promise you asked me to make in Värmland.”
Johan pulled away and dried his face with a corner of his pillow. “I don’t want to talk about that right now!” he said. “For God’s sake, Mai! Don’t push me!”
But she persisted. “I don’t mean to push you. Johan, darling. I don’t want … It’s just that you might lose”—she struggled to find the right words—“you might suddenly … suddenly no longer be capable of making decisions.”
“And then what?” Johan cried.
“I’ll abide by your wishes,” she whispered.
Mai got to her feet. Her red dress was made of some heavy material. It looked expensive, and it suited her. She looked beautiful today but tired, too, very tired.
All at once he realized that for her it was over already. The decision had been made. They had agreed that she would help him when it became too much to bear, and now she was waiting for it to become too much to bear. He wasn’t ready. He could still say yes! It grows light in the morning and dark in the evening. And in those words there was dignity. Not for her—for her it was day after day of pointless waiting. Only afterward, after his death, would she be able to fill her days with purpose again, with tears and memories and comfort and reconciliation. With life. His death would be—again he saw Mai’s face at the moment she made the promise—his death would come as a relief.
Johan closed his eyes.
Mai’s face reminded him of something. This was not so surprising; memories kept rushing back now, like children demanding attention. Sharp, detailed images but also sounds and scents and sensations. A white neck. A voice. An index finger. A lock of hair. He wished he had the strength to write it all down so something would be left behind. Something of himself, something that could not be misunderstood. And now, picturing Mai’s face at Värmland when she had finally made her promise to him, he was reminded of the time he sat between his mother and his sister on the sofa, with his father howling on the bed behind the closed blue door. He remembered their hands over his ears, then their hands coming off. The sound then: deep breathing. Nothing but the sound of his mother’s and sister’s deep breathing. As if they had been underwater, and only when his father drew his last breath could they shoot to the surface and fill their lungs with air.
He looked at Mai. Her weary face, her lips, her eyes, her earlobes, the red stars dangling from silver threads. He opened his mouth to say something but stopped himself. The promise she had made him in Värmland. Or the promise he had made her? He was no longer sure. At any rate, they had an agreement. Didn’t he owe it to her to get it over with? For her this was not time, simply waiting. It might drag on for weeks, months even. One thing for the dying, quite another for the living to bear. The not knowing how long, that was the unbearable part. The remorseless part. Even though—do you hear me, Mai?—even though it grows light in the morning and dark in the evening.
How much time had passed since that conversation in Värmland? Days? Weeks? He’d lost count.
Johan stared at his bedside table. These were his things: a morphine pump, an almanac, a passable novel by an American woman Mai admired—but why on earth, he asked himself, was he forcing himself to read a page a day of this passable novel? This wretched novel that only Mai and women like Mai (it crossed his mind to wonder exactly what kind of women these were, but he did not pursue the thought) would enjoy? In all likelihood it was the last novel he would ever read, and it was only half good or half bad, which boiled down to the same thing: totally worthless. His last novel. You’d think he would have hurled it to the floor, ripped it apart, jumped up and down on it, spat on it, screamed—yes, screamed—it to death. How dare such a thing lie there on his bedside table presuming to be the last novel of his life? This was a time for masterpieces. This was a time he should immerse himself in the one book he could not die without having read, the first, last, and only great work. Johan breathed deep, considering. Macbeth, perhaps? Or The Sound and the Fury? War and Peace?
Again his eyes fell on the bedside table. Other things: a comb, a handkerchief, a watch, a Discman, a Walkman. Two CDs and one tape of consequence: Mozart’s The Magic Flute and Bach’s chorales on the CDs, an amateur recording of some of Schumann’s songs on the tape. Songs, but no one singing, just Mai playing. Johan recalled a conversation with Mai, a snippet of a conversation, actually. Nothing she was likely to remember herself. It was something she had told him about Robert Schumann, something he had not been able to get out of his head. How during a trip to Holland in 1854, Schumann fell ill and had to return home, where he was committed to an asylum, having totally succumbed not only to syphilis but also to the music—glorious, tumultuous, devastating music—that rang in his ears wherever he went. “All clamor and noise is transformed in his head into music. He says it is a music so magnificent, played by instruments so wonderful, that its like has never been heard on this earth … Robert suffers most horribly,” Clara wrote in her diary. Either Clara had been advised not to see her husband, or else she did not want to see him. And that was how Schumann spent the last two years of his life: in an asylum in Endenich, near Bonn. His only visitors were Johannes Brahms and his friend Joseph Joachim.
Spiteful tongues accused Clara of heartlessness, for not being by her husband’s side when he needed her most.
“But I wouldn’t have gone either!” Mai had exclaimed. “Why should she go to see him? It would cause nothing but pain.” And then she had said something Johan had never forgotten: “Schumann wasn’t Schumann anymore!” What exactly did she mean by that? What do you mean, Mai? Johan had never asked, not then, not now. They were only words she had blurted out over a glass of wine, and a minute later she was talking about something else. But, Johan thought, wasn’t Schumann still Schumann, even in the asylum? Or was Schumann Schumann only when he was composing music that would survive himself and Clara, and Mai and Johan and everyone else? Wasn’t he also completely and utterly Schum
ann when he was lying in bed or wandering around the asylum in Endenich, unable to produce a single note, with music grinding on and on inside his head? “Oh, if only I could see all of you again,” he wrote in his last letter. “Talk to you all one more time. But the road is so long.”
For a while, Johan would cross off every single day in his almanac. He wanted to know whether it was Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday or Friday. He wanted to know whether it was warm or cold outside. In Norway, August is both summer and autumn, depending on the temperature, so every day he would ask the nurses what the weather was like.
It was a Thursday or a Friday, definitely Thursday or Friday. Andreas was due to visit him that day, with his pregnant girlfriend, Ellen. Mai had announced this the day before, or maybe it was the day before that.
But now Johan no longer bothered to tell the days apart and had given up crossing them off. It was warm or it was cold; he didn’t care. But the nicest and prettiest nurse, Malin with the long blond hair, had told him it was warm outside.
She sat on his bed and told him it was warm. That morning she had put on three sweaters, because she thought it would be cold. But then, she told him, on the way to work she had taken the sweaters off again. First one, then another, and then the third. It was actually so warm that she didn’t need anything except her white cotton slip. She looked at him and laughed. The prettiest nurse by far looked at him and laughed, and her laughter was like fresh water. He longed to drink it.
Johan lay in bed imagining the whole scene. Did she walk to work? Was she at an intersection when she peeled off her sweaters? Or did she take the streetcar? Such spectacles never occurred when he took the streetcar.
Anyway, it was a Thursday or a Friday, or both. Could it be both Thursday and Friday at the same time? Johan called to his neighbor on the other side of the screen. “Hey, you there, what day is it today?”
He heard the other man stir and mutter the words too much, this is too much. Johan cleared his throat.
“Sorry,” he said. “My son’s coming to see me. I’d like to know what day it is. I don’t want him thinking I don’t have my wits about me. Forgive me for bothering you again.”
“It’s Saturday,” mumbled his neighbor.
“Thank you.”
The man coughed.
“Thank you,” Johan repeated.
Later that day Andreas showed up. All of a sudden he was standing in the doorway, looking stunned. Johan tried to sit up. His boil had been freshly dressed, so as not to startle his visitors. The nurse, Malin, said she had done an especially nice job. And now there he was: his son.
“Eight years,” Johan said, his eyes filling with tears. He hadn’t expected them. Tears were nothing but dramatics. Cheap dramatics.
Andreas nodded and stepped inside, followed by Mai and a young red-haired woman who was introduced as Ellen. Her pregnant tummy was also introduced.
“It’s a girl,” Ellen said. “We know it’s a girl. I was due yesterday.” She laughed. “So now I’m just waiting.” She rocked her body from side to side. “Waddling and waiting.”
“Me too,” Johan remarked mildly. “Not waddling, but waiting, like you.”
She looked at him quizzically. She didn’t get it, so she tried to explain. “No, what I meant was that I was due to give birth yesterday,” she said. “I’m overdue now … that’s what I meant when I said I was waddling and waiting.”
Johan nodded. “I see, is that what you meant! Now I get it.” So this is Ellen, he thought. A woman who rarely understands but always needs to explain.
Mai stayed in the background and watched. It was, Johan thought, as if she were intent on taking it all in now so she could describe it in detail at some later date.
Why had father and son not spoken to each other in eight years? The reason was unclear. Andreas had once asked if he could borrow Johan and Mai’s cottage in Värmland. Johan explained that it wasn’t convenient, and Andreas seemed to understand. Some weeks later they had dinner together, and everything between them was fine. The business about the cottage was barely mentioned, and they had an exceptionally pleasant time. That evening Johan even told Mai that he would like to spend more time with his son. One month later, Johan received a letter from Andreas. In the letter Andreas made it quite clear that he despised his father as much as his father had always despised him. The fact that his father would not even allow him to borrow his cottage was simply the last straw.
Johan shook his head. The letter wounded him deeply, but he didn’t know what to make of it. They had had a leak at the cottage, and they’d been doing a bit of redecorating. He had explained all that to Andreas, not that he’d owed him any explanation. His son was a grown man. He couldn’t just assume that he could borrow the cottage whenever he liked and do heaven knows what with heaven knows whom in Johan and Mai’s most private retreat, among their most personal possessions. But really: a leak. Surely even his son could understand that.
Several days after he received the letter, Johan asked Mai to call Andreas. She was better at sorting out matters like this, he thought.
His son said to Mai, “Doesn’t my father realize that I want nothing more to do with him? As far as I’m concerned, he no longer exists.”
But now here he was, eight years later. As spindly as his father, but with his mother’s face. And with a girlfriend on the verge—any minute now—of giving birth. Johan wanted to ask Ellen whether she had ever read Marcel Bavian’s short stories. But he restrained himself and tried to smile, even though it was a painful effort. It wasn’t the hypocrisy that hurt so much, it was the physical action itself. Lips, cheeks, eyes, so many parts of his face had to be moved in order to conjure up a reasonably convincing smile. And his head. The pressure that never let up was only exacerbated by their presence. When he probed deeper, the pressure turned into a chant, a string of one-syllable words: get-out-of-here-it’s-no-use-I-can’t-take-this-I-want-you-all-out-of-here-get-out-get-out-now.
“Well, here we are, then,” said Andreas. “How’re you doing, Pappa?”
“Oh, up and down, you know,” Johan replied, struggling to keep his hard-won smile in place. It was threatening to crumble, crack, and gape open, like the boil on his cheek. All sorts of stuff was sure to be oozing out of him soon. He fumbled discreetly with the morphine pump. Everybody saw it, but nothing was said.
“Eight years,” Johan said.
“Yes,” said Andreas.
The two women, Mai and Ellen, sat quietly listening.
“Eight years,” Johan said again.
“But now you’re sick,” his son responded candidly, “and that changes everything.”
Johan wanted to ask exactly what had changed. If his son had come here to forgive him, he might as well not have bothered. Reconciliation, Mai had said, not forgiveness. Johan had done nothing that needed forgiving. He turned to Andreas.
“We’d had a leak!”
His son stared at him blankly. “What?”
“We’d had a leak.”
“I’m not following you… .”
“The cottage. You wanted to borrow it, and I said no because we’d had a leak—the pipes in the bathroom. Flooding. So we had to do some redecorating.”
Andreas looked at the floor. “I see.”
Johan looked at his son. Wasn’t this what he wanted? Wasn’t this enough? He was Alice all over again, holding a grudge for years. Refusing to relent.
“You might have told me,” Andreas muttered.
“Told you what?”
“About the leak.”
Johan shut his eyes. Was this what it was like to die? He opened his eyes again and looked at Mai. Was this what she called reconciliation, this pathetic exchange between a spindly man in his forties and an even spindlier man of seventy? All this banal chatter about a leak at the cottage, all this lousy, rotten pettiness? Johan’s eyes moved to Andreas. What was it about his son that made you feel like punching him in the jaw? It was a familiar impulse. Always there, e
ver since Andreas was a helpless, amoebic child with trembling hands who never dared do anything and was conceited to boot. His classmates had called him Bighead because even though he was a coward he was always boasting and lying. “Some children are simply harder to love than others,” Alice used to say. “We’ll just have to try harder. He is our little bird.”
Johan cleared his throat, summoned up the last of his strength, and reached a hand out to his son. He was, after all, no one else’s little bird.
“Andreas,” he said, “come sit beside me.” His son sat down. Johan stroked his hair. “Can you forgive me?”
“For what? The thing about the cottage?”
“Yes, that too. But for not being the kind of father you needed. Can you forgive me for that?”
Andreas turned to Ellen with a question in his eyes. She nodded to him. Andreas took a deep breath and turned back to Johan.
“There’s no need. I … you don’t understand … I just wanted …” As always, Andreas broke off in mid-sentence, but this time it was in order to lay his head on his father’s shoulder, sigh, and dissolve into tears.
As they were about to leave, when they were standing in the doorway saying goodbye, Ellen suddenly had a thought. She rummaged through her purse and pulled out a camera.
“I almost forgot the most important thing!” she exclaimed.
Andreas was ordered to take up his position by the bedside again. He was asked to sit down and take Johan’s hand. Mai was to stand behind, like a ministering angel in the background of a painting. Ellen peered at them through the lens and assured them it looked great, especially with the silvery afternoon light filtering through the window. “There!” she cried blithely. “Captured for posterity!”
“Ellen,” Johan said, “do you think you could send me a copy once it’s developed?”