by Anne Sward
I followed close behind Papa’s back. The mist drifted over the frozen water. We were father and daughter out hunting, right out toward the sun. Every so often I stopped behind him, took aim, and shot. When we heard the ice lowing we were well out on the lake. Appalled, I saw the fracture open up between his legs and mine, convinced that it would widen, separate us, swallow us up. But a glance at Papa’s face told me that the ice would hold. The shots that went off beneath us just meant that the day was exceptionally cold and the ice thicker than usual and it was cracking because of temperature stresses. The warning noise of the thaw was quite different; you had to learn to hear the distinction.
There seemed to have been something special about Mama’s sister even before she drowned, perhaps just that she was the youngest.
“As small as you, Lo, and yet she still fell through the ice I’d walked on a moment earlier. If she’d gone first she’d have been fine and I’d have drowned,” Papa said as we were standing right out in the deepest part. Once-only ice, nightmare ice. To be the death of someone else in that way, to want to protect but instead to weaken the ice so that it broke the minute the next person put her foot on it.
Salt ice, sweet ice, blue ice, glass ice, wreck ice, floe ice, diabase ice. Ice that looked like frozen carbon dioxide. Walking along I almost dozed off to his soothing voice, as he explained to me how the water was arranged in different layers, coldest uppermost in winter, warmest uppermost in summer. Papa knew just as much about the ice as Mama knew about the art of handling an ax. The drowning accident didn’t make him afraid of ice. It was the depth that frightened him, the vertigo, the feeling of great height, a fear of falling that could strike at any time. But he still went out onto the ice as soon as it froze, set pike traps though there were hardly any fish here. He never asked me to come with him. Nor did he stop me when I put on my ski boots and followed.
It was mostly for the stories that I went with him. The stories belonged to the ice. About the dogs that were let loose during the polar bear hunt, still leashed together in pairs, and two by two they surrounded the quarry, which instinctively reared up in defense. Upright on its back legs the bear became an easy target for the hunters. When Papa described this to me I thought of his father, who in an upright position was as large as the animal from which he took his name. He and Papa didn’t see eye to eye. It was something you just knew—that they were like dog and bear together.
“Were you really all born out of the ice?” I had gone around shaping this question until it had gotten soft and sweaty—that was the picture I had before me when Papa’s mother said that she and Mama’s mother gave birth to one child every winter. I imagined that they went out and pulled them up from a hole in the ice. But all at once Papa’s desire to tell me things vanished into thin air.
“When we get home, tell your mother to explain how children are made. She can give you all the details.”
And she did. About the bakehouse that was next door to the house they lived in, and in the bakehouse there was a warm wall, and by the warm wall they had made a bunk bed, and to this bunk bed you could go if you wanted some time to yourself. This is where they had been made, one after the other. In the heat lost from the oven that was often newly lit, in the familiar smell of birchwood and barley flour. If you took a tub of butter with you, you could eat some of the leftover bits of bread if you were hungry afterward. And you were.
—
What about me, though? Where was I made? By the warm wall as well? Mama looked at me as she sat on the chopping block with the ax and the sharpener and answered that no, the bakehouse belonged to a different time and a different place.
The story of the day I was born had been related to me many times, but never how I was in fact made. Why them? The most ill-matched pair. Papa was a perfectly normal father, but Mama . . .
“Not by the warm wall, Lo. You were made under the sloping ceiling.”
Under the sloping ceiling? Was that the only answer she could think of? That explained nothing. There wasn’t even a sloping ceiling in our house.
Certain memories are so clear that everything surrounding them seems blurred. It was late one evening several months after Papa had gone, with the hollow sound of the bittern’s cry from down at the lake, a sound like blowing into an empty bottle. An invisible and sinister bird, I had only glimpsed it once, how it flew, heavy at the front, like a bird of prey over the quicksilver water.
I turned on the television to block out the eerie noise. Lying in Rikard’s room on a bean bag on the floor and bored. The news. Blah, blah, blah. Lay so that I could watch the screen upside down to make it less boring.
Reporter struggling against the wind, raging storm with gusts of hurricane strength, camera lens so spotted with rain it was almost impossible to see anything, but I saw anyway . . . there in the background . . . I stared, lying upside down until all the blood collected in my head and burst. The ominous words Alexander Kielland suspended over everything, the whole disaster. The sea in complete tumult, huge waves. The legs had broken, the platform capsized, tipped over, turned upside down. And sank.
Everything had happened very fast. Most of the crew had fallen in and those who didn’t fall threw themselves into the ice-cold sea. Why? Because everyone else did? Because there was a risk that the oil would begin to burn? But was the water not also full of leaking oil? Were they not going to drown in the thick black sticky soup like helpless seabirds? Without survival gear they wouldn’t last many minutes in the cold, the reporter said, and anyway, what would that matter? When the sea began to burn. A burning sea. I crept nearer to the screen, tried to imagine a burning sea.
They didn’t yet know how many had been killed. Their relatives would be informed before the names of the dead were released. I flung myself forward and switched off in the middle of the broadcast, strained to hear if there was a noise from downstairs, but the television was not on down there. There was only me who had heard what had happened. The appalling event. The oil rig disaster. Horrific words. And all of a sudden I was no longer in any doubt that Papa was there. I knew he was. If anyone was to have bad luck it was him. I ran. Down into the kitchen where Papa’s mother and Mama were standing by the sink, scaling herrings. Buried my face in Grandmother’s fishy apron, refused to tell them what had happened.
The next few days I wandered around in a shocked trance, a bittern in my head, its boom foreboding and echoing, day and night. No one said anything. As if the accident hadn’t happened. As if none of them had heard about it, or they tried to keep me in the dark—how could they act so well? Eat and sleep and work as usual. Laugh as usual.
“If he was one of the ones who drowned, they would’ve told you,” Lukas assured me. If he had been one of the few who survived, they would also have told me. Silence could only mean the worst.
Days of disquieting normalcy ensued. The kitchen in cold sunlight, Mama chopping wood, Rikard and Katja stacking the wood, Erik and Marina washing the cars, Helena lying on the television sofa with her boyfriend, Jon arguing with his girlfriend on the phone, boyfriends and girlfriends coming and going—they never lasted long in this house. And there was Papa’s mother putting the dishes in to soak, while his father had retired to the arboretum. Mama’s mother was wiping down all the surfaces, touching things with light hands. In the evenings I crept down between Mama and Marina again, as I had when I was small, lay there with eyes wide open, while they appeared to sleep, a sleep as peaceful and deep as ever.
“Girl, you’re going around and around like a dog about to have puppies. What is it?” Mama murmured in the darkness. I tried to say something about Papa, but I couldn’t get the words out. “Think about something nice. Your birthday. Think about what you’d like. Shall we ask David to come?”
I twisted my head into the pillow. “Stop it! I know he’s dead!”
Mama sat straight up in bed. “Pull yourself together. That wasn’t funny.”
I buried my face deeper into the foam-rubber pillow. “Ask Grandfather!” I howled.
She grabbed me firmly by the hand and dragged me along the hallway in the cold of the night, down the black staircase to Papa’s parents’ room. Went in and fetched out a sleepy Grandfather for interrogation in the kitchen.
“Are you out of your mind? Have you told her that her father’s dead? Have you no heart, no shame, are you mad?” she screamed at him. Grandfather looked as though he thought he was still dreaming, pressed up against the sink by the sheer force of Mama’s voice. I slipped away to get the picture of the oil rig, the one that was no longer standing out there at sea but lying on the bottom, collapsed like a house of cards with 123 dead men. That was the final death toll Lukas had heard on the television and passed on to me. More had died than had survived, and Papa was like Lukas: if anyone was unlucky, it was him.
Before I entered the kitchen I heard Grandfather’s voice. “What the hell should I have said, then? The child was asking and asking. Should I have told her that her father lives so close and still never comes to visit her because of—” Because of us, I thought he said, but just then he caught sight of me and swallowed the last bit.
The smell of his night sweat, salty like nettles. He lay on his back with his arms under his head, opened his eyes right next to my face. He had just fallen asleep, but not so deeply that he didn’t hear my question. His eyes very dark blue with a circle of rust around the pupils.
“Do you love Mama?”
He looked at me, as if my words reached him very slowly.
“I have never loved anyone else.”
It wasn’t an answer to my question. It didn’t reveal whether he still loved her. Not even if he had ever loved her.
Just a few weeks later he packed his bags and left, and I was overwhelmed with the sense that I shouldn’t have asked.
—
“Do you love Papa?” Mama was filling the laundry room with white sheets and underclothes. She answered as naturally as if I had asked if the night was dark and the mountain of washing endless. But she never showed it. I tried to remember if I had ever seen her put her arms around him, or he her. I couldn’t recall a single instance.
I’d been born into the best of worlds, but I no longer lived there. When I was growing up the picture was complete, everyone was there and no one was going to disappear. Dangers were only things adults spoke about when they thought I had fallen asleep on the television sofa. Oil crisis and Falklands War and embassy bombings, inadequate safety at the factory, the risk of rain during the holiday.
Papa was the first. When he disappeared the balance was disturbed, and then things settled down and we thought that nothing else would happen. Mama’s and Papa’s brothers and sisters had all the patience Mama was lacking, shared the burden of me between themselves. I had taken for granted that they existed just for me, felt hurt if I could not join in, if a door was closed, took it as a personal insult that they had to go to work sometimes, without me. To belong to everyone is to belong to no one. It was only after the family started to scatter in the wind that I belonged to Mama.
The chain reaction had started, it was work and love and homesickness and a fish-gutting factory in Iceland that lured. Quick money—you could earn gold at the conveyor belt, if you could just stand the cold and smell and didn’t need any sleep and could live on a shoestring for a while. The house became more and more empty. The fish-gutting factory, homesickness, and finally death. Mama’s father died of chemical pneumonia. He had inhaled a corrosive substance at the factory and his lungs began to burn. He left his shift at the paper mill an hour early on the Friday afternoon and by Monday he was dead.
His boots stood in the hall the whole winter, waiting for his broad feet, were shoved back and forth among the others. Who was going to take them away? There were many of us who could have done it—but no one who wanted to. I took care of the broken pieces that Grandmother produced in a steady stream in the kitchen when things inexplicably slipped out of her hands. Grandfather’s coffee cup, schnapps glass, soured-milk bowl—buried at the edge of the field behind the house, they came up every year when they were plowing, like a memorial.
Mama’s mother died among the currant bushes. She’d half filled her plastic tub when her heart gave a double beat in a warning that was altogether too late, and stopped. She’d been a little confused for a long time, and since Grandfather’s death she had been comfort-eating to the extent that her wedding ring disappeared into white flesh, in the end her body so unwieldy that she could no longer climb the stairs in the house. Why she needed to be out in the currant patch on the hottest day of summer with her weak heart, no one could understand. Least of all her doctor. Her death could have been avoided, he said.
But it cannot be.
The currants flew through the air like a bloodstain onto the layer of manure she’d just put under the bushes that morning. Grandmother in her frumpy white dress smeared with berries and blood and earth.
She had told Papa’s mother that she wanted to be buried at home, and this wasn’t home. It cost a fortune to get her there, so much more than if she had been alive. Papa’s parents’ last savings.
“A little while ago I was young, wasn’t I?” Mama’s face in the bedroom mirror was changed. It was still her face, but it was as if an older face had been pulled over it. I wanted her to take off the pale, lifeless mask that was not her. Grandmother stroked her hair, but didn’t contradict her—she did look old, overnight. I didn’t realize that such a thing could truly happen. When Grandmother didn’t reply, Mama turned to me instead, as if I would be able to explain what had happened—where the stranger’s face in the mirror came from.
Losing both her parents had happened so fast. As long as one of your parents is still alive your childhood carries on, I heard Grandmother say. When you’re no longer anyone’s child—that is when you realize what you’ve lost.
Then Grandmother herself became ill, almost without our noticing. Unlike Mama’s parents, she died slowly. No visible decline. It was more as if she was dying from the inside out, her vital organs succumbing one after the other. In the end there was nothing left of her, the cancer had eaten everything, though she looked normal from the outside. The doctor had gauged how much time she had, and it turned out to be correct to within a few days.
When Rikard, the last of the brothers and sisters, moved to a hotel job in Stockholm that Marina had fixed up for him, it was almost worse than when Papa left. Now there was just Papa’s father, Mama, and me. Rumors started to circulate in the village, but Mama had forbidden me to listen to them. It was something about Mama and Grandfather, a little domestic war going on, the causes of which only they knew. Love, hate, either-or, or both-and—just like turning on old taps and the water coming out ice cold and scalding hot by turns.
“I ought to move out for Lo’s sake,” I heard Grandfather say from inside the woodshed.
“If you move, then I’ll move.”
“But that solves nothing, Karenina.”
“Don’t call me Karenina!” I couldn’t catch any more through the thick partition wall before Mama strode away. Soon noises could be heard from the arboretum, Grandfather’s black poplar, how she axed it down in a frenzied rage, with the strength and fury of a pig. Smashed it to smithereens, which she crammed into the stove that evening, piece by piece. A few days later she bought electric heaters for all the rooms, despite Grandfather’s protests. One thing was certain: she had felt cold for the last time. This is still my house, I’m not dead yet, warned Grandfather. Mama turned in the cold light of late winter and stared at him. There are some people who must not die. He was one of them.
“Dead?” she said, unable to grasp this, as if it had never even crossed her mind that he also . . .
“No, not yet,” Grandfather said. “It is still me who makes the decisions around here.” It never had been him, of
course—but it’s true that it was still his house, and when that was no longer the case, then I would inherit, he said, something he had suddenly just decided. “You brothers and sisters can hardly divide it into nine parts, Katarina. There’d only be a window each.”
There was a time when we didn’t know how there would be enough room for all the beds, crisscrossed throughout the house, but now the problem was filling the rooms, stopping the echoes. And then Grandfather started to talk about leaving as well, and that I had to stay behind so that Mama wouldn’t be totally alone.
“Your grandfather,” Mama said coldly, “talks so much. Haven’t you noticed? He claims that he’s going to die too.” The word “die” flew from her mouth with the speed of spit. Grandfather wasn’t even ill yet, but all the others had gone, so how could we be sure that he would stay?
However much I missed the rest of the family, what I missed most was Mama the way she was before the others disappeared. Now she, Grandfather, and I were the only ones left. I would soon be fifteen and no one could be bothered any longer about what I did.
ADOLESCENCE
Childhood trickled away and was gone, leaving only a few sun-bleached fragments of regret. Suddenly I was at an age when I read Bonjour Tristesse, read whatever I happened to find in Mama’s bookcase. She must have lost her faith in books at some point in her youth, because all she had in her bookcase were from that time. In the absence of any revealing diaries that I could read surreptitiously, the novels were the only way I could sneak a look into that period of her life. A glimpse of the outlook she must have had then. There was the scent of pine trees, American suburbs, and deserted French cafés when I opened them and let myself be transported away. Lukas was jealous. Books made me unreachable even when I was lying right next to him in bed. He watched me disappear, but didn’t understand where—still less why. Novels? There was nothing wrong with this world, where he existed, where he was waiting. He waited for me to finish, whether I wanted him to or not, lit a new cigarette whenever I turned a page, blew the smoke out over the book, looked at me.