by Nicolai Houm
‘I’m so sorry,’ she said.
She noticed him glancing at her again while they waited for their luggage. She considered her appearance from the point of view of a forty-something scientist. A large, straight nose. A rather more golden skin tone than her Scandinavian genes would have generated. Lips that were well-drawn examples of their kind. She would never, unlike most of Ulf’s recent conquests, end up with unkissable, bright red lines surrounded by powder. Shoulder-length, nut-brown hair (clever colouring). Her behind filled out her mom jeans nicely but nobody would have classified it as fat, surely, or what was the definition of ‘fat’? And what about her breasts, were they for real? he would ask himself. What did they look like without a bra? He would imagine standing behind her in a clean and brightly lit Scandinavian hotel bathroom, watching her in the mirror while she brushed her teeth, and then putting his arms round her, full of a sense of possession, despite not really knowing her. This feeling sustained him and usually compensated him for not falling head over heels in love any more. She looked up at him and smiled compassionately. He misunderstood the smile.
‘Look, I like you. And I think that you are… going through something.’
A glint from his massive diver’s watch as he pushed his hand through his hair where a boyish, almost white tuft kept sticking straight up. He aroused the same emotions as the countless jocks in her past. She wanted to bite his arm.
‘I know how lonely one can feel sometimes, believe you me. I’ve lived in a trapper cabin for ten months.’
She smiled sardonically but thought: he cannot have a clue how insensitive that comment is.
‘What about a cup of coffee?’
‘No.’
‘Then why not make a note of my telephone number anyway? Then you’ll have a friend to contact here. Just in case.’
It seemed easier to do as he said. They stood silently side by side for several minutes, waiting for their luggage.
DR RICE SAID that there had been no change in the grieving process. There should be a change in the grieving process after six to twelve months. It is a cause for concern if, after six to twelve months, there is no change in the grieving process. All this, according to Dr Rice.
In other words, it is generally accepted that grief should show orderly progress.
‘Now, what are your thoughts about this?’
‘I don’t think about it. I haven’t set myself any goals.’
‘I was under the impression that we had, together?’
‘Maybe we did.’
‘We have discussed the lifelong outcomes.’
Dr Rice balanced the lifelong outcomes on the palm of his hand.
‘That’s not, however, what I am talking about now,’ he said, and reached out with his other hand. His movements were swift and unusually engaged for someone of his age. ‘I’m referring to not seeing any step change, however small, in the short term. I might also consider reducing your medication.’
‘“Also”?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Also… what?’
‘Jane, I don’t weigh every word.’
His eyes were bright and quick, and surrounded by dry, wrinkly skin like a parrot’s. Sometimes, she felt she was there mostly to please him.
‘For as long as your mind is dulled in various ways, it will be difficult for you to move on, all the way from denial to acceptance.’
‘That’s the Kübler-Ross model again, right?’
Dr Rice’s smile was that of a grandfather having to cope with a troublesome grandchild. She actually felt bad about tormenting him, but the discomfort it caused was as simple and unmistakable as holding one’s hand in scalding water. In her previous session with Dr Rice, she had talked about the widespread and growing scepticism towards Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s theoretical stages of grieving, a paradigm that had dominated work with the bereaved for the last forty years. She had also referred to some of the critical articles that, a decade or so after Kübler-Ross’s death, described her as a New Age spiritualist and a charlatan whose theory was based on anecdotal observations.
‘So good to hear that you find the energy to read, Jane,’ Dr Rice had replied, quite without sarcasm.
His office smelt of tear-stained paper tissues. His creaking leather chair allowed him to swing forward and back as he spoke. The room had a window, but looking into what could be another room, or a corridor, because one could sometimes see shadowy figures pass by on the other side of its milky glass. There were no diplomas on the wall above his dry, bald head, but instead framed children’s drawings. She had a feeling that during one of her early consultations, he had spoken about his voluntary work with Somalian refugee children, including trauma management.
While he thought, Dr Rice was breathing heavily and loudly through his nose. ‘It also seems true to say that the pills don’t help to prevent your functional episodes – is that right?’
The word functional made Jane think of space-saving wardrobe solutions.
‘But, do we still believe that I want to have these episodes?’
‘I don’t think people in your situation want either one thing or the other. It is all about loss of control. Or, wanting to lose control.’
He turned and looked at the opaque window. His expression suggested a man allowing magnificent scenery to inspire new lines of thought.
‘Why don’t you write, Jane? Why not start writing again?’ She saw his rosy ideas about the author’s vocation reflected in his face. ‘After all, many have felt that writing has a therapeutic effect. And for you, it is also a profession. I see patients at your stage who simply cling to their work and find that it helps them.’
She didn’t have the strength to explain her problem. Once, back in 2003 or perhaps 2004, Jane’s editor had sent her a copy of a travelogue called Stranger on a Train by the British writer Jenny Diski. Because you think alike, it said on the Post-it note that fell out of the bubble wrap envelope. In an especially memorable passage, Diski described her last conversation with a dying friend. When Jane reread that passage recently, it had seemed to express the reason why she no longer wrote: The nonsense of language reaching towards the void it was not equipped for, developed as it was by the living for the living, made us laugh.
To make Dr Rice’s forehead smoother, she told him instead about her travelling plans. It felt as if she had held back from telling him to achieve the maximum effect.
‘Now Jane, this is…’ Dr Rice gave the thumbs up, boyishly. He couldn’t help himself. That was how his old hand would still show enthusiasm, and one of the few things in this world that were still beautiful.
‘That changes everything,’ Dr Rice said. ‘It points to what I said earlier about initiative and change. I’m biting my tongue, Jane. Norway! Now, I imagine that’s a chilly country, Jane! Just how cold, I wonder? Come on, tell me, how cold can it get?’
SHE IS SHIVERING where she lies, fully clothed, inside the sleeping bag, and watches the world outside the tent. The wind has died down, she notes, but the fog is still there. It covers the ground – and she still can’t avoid evaluating nature in literary images – like a thick rug.
She misses chiding her college students for using that kind of worn-out simile. Correcting them but making them feel valued at the same time, allowing their youthful, hopeful minds to believe that every one of them is a unique individual and their world will be truly different from that of their parents.
A thick rug on the ground? But of course, writing about nature is actually impossible. One never writes about nature but about various cultural perceptions of it. To speak about it at all, just to name its parts, turns nature into something it is not.
She thinks back to all the rebellious young men she has taught over the years – there was at least one in each class. Why did she let herself be provoked by them? After all, they kept writing, these young men, which demonstrated their belief that the human talent for language could capture all the most terrible, most saddening phenomena
on Earth. Deep down, they were optimists, not misanthropists. Their texts investigated immorality, breaches of norms but never reached rock bottom: the place where concepts do not exist.
When you begin to think that your writing is no more than a construction you use to say something about another lot of constructions, and that, meanwhile, the most profound truths of the human condition are forever beyond your reach – then you stop writing. You resign from your post teaching creative writing in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Your farewell address to the Faculty of Arts makes your colleagues look down at their casual shoes and exchange discreetly supportive glances. Afterwards, they address you with raised eyebrows and in far-too-bright voices: ‘Thank you, Jane. That was so good.’ You have to take on board that the only two people in the audience who have grasped anything of what you said are José Pérez, who teaches in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, and Art Wilder, who is something in Accounts. Art’s wife tried out tandem parachuting in Niagara Falls in 1992 and died in an accident while Art, who had stayed safely on the ground, was watching. You realized this when Art got up and left in the middle of your address. And José comes up afterwards, takes your hand, holds it between both his and says, ‘My god, Jane. I know how you feel. Theoretically.’
Then, you take up genealogy. You travel to Norway.
The first nights in Norway, she stayed in a motel room that reminded her of motel rooms back home, apart from all the wood panelling. Before resigning from her university post, she prepared a final handout for the creative writing students, which included extracts from two Scandinavian novels in translation. It so happened that both pieces contained passages in which the protagonist is lying on his back observing knots in the wooden ceiling panels. It seemed a pleasant, meditative thing to do. Thus art improves on reality.
Still, the motel room provided nice physical containment. An electric radiator next to her bed gave off a faint smell of the past being burnt. She had a plastic bag full of provisions. The food was all alien; none of the packaging aroused memories, there were no preferred brands, no favourite chocolate bars. The hire car she had picked up at the airport was parked in front of her door. She had been in touch with the family who, as far as she knew, were some of her closest relatives in Norway, and told them that she would like a couple of days in Oslo to acclimatize. Visit the Opera House, for instance. In the end, all she did was speed through the capital city without really noticing it – or, not so much ‘through’ as ‘underneath’, inside a gloomy system of tunnels. Once out of the tunnels, she drove on for another half-hour before checking in at the motel. After settling in, she started smoking again (her last cigarette had been twelve years ago), drank exceptionally expensive beer and prepared instant noodles with a small kettle on the dressing table. She found it possible to bear watching TV, even American reality shows that hadn’t been dubbed, and no longer looked out for signs or coded messages in the programmes. But she still could not sleep; if she drifted off, it rarely lasted for more than a few minutes at a time.
One morning, her mobile rang. She staggered in her large Snoopy sweatshirt over to her bag and, before answering, said her name out loud twice to make sure she wouldn’t sound utterly unhinged. The caller was Lars Christian Askeland-Nilsen.
‘There you are! Great!’ He seemed to be reading his English sentences off a list.
‘Do you really think so?’
‘Of course.’
It was just that insecurity of hers that made her spend her first days in Norway alone. She had been looking forward to meeting her long-lost relatives but had begun to doubt if the invitation to stay with them was genuinely meant. Perhaps he had simply urged her to visit the country in general? Perhaps she had introduced the idea of staying with them and Lars Christian had simply affirmed it would be all right? Or perhaps he had just come out with one of these weird Norwegian hrump noises, meaning roughly I’m hearing you?
In the background, she picked out what must be Eva’s voice and another that probably belonged to their daughter Camilla. Lars Christian said that their son Martin was away at summer camp.
‘Wow, summer camp.’
‘Yes, he’s growing up so fast.’
‘That’s so true,’ Jane said, as if she had followed the lad’s growth from the sidelines for years. She wasn’t even sure there was a word that described their relationship.
As it happened, she had driven quite a long way past their area. They agreed that she would return to the highway and drive back towards Oslo. At a certain exit ramp she was to turn off and stop at a parking lot by the side of the road.
While she waited in the car, she pondered the reaction her Norwegian relatives would expect from her when they met for the first time. Would it strike the right note to do a full, shrieking outburst of joy, American-style? Only last night, she had observed three of these on the TLC channel, though the happiness turned into childish pouting when one of the participants failed to find the wedding dress of her dreams.
She had started with genealogy, mostly because she wanted to have something to tell Dr Rice and others who cared to ask.
I thought I ought to find out about my roots. It feels important at this point in time.
To her surprise, no one seemed surprised. It was a fact that, unlike most of her childhood friends, she had never bothered turning up in Stoughton for the 17th May procession on Norway’s national day. She had never been to Little Norway before it closed, hadn’t even owned a coffee mug inscribed Uff da! Generally, concern about biological origins wasn’t her thing. She was Writer-Jane, the intellectual among them. Fundamentally, she had decided that the all-American worship of family history was fascistoid. Once, at a dinner party, she had ended up in a heated discussion on the subject: a friend had several times used the words pure bloodline to describe her links to the old country in Europe. It didn’t help that the country was Germany.
All the same, she had become hooked the moment she opened MyHeritage.com and clicked the Start button. She sat in front of the screen for days on end. As the blank fields in her family tree gradually became populated, the growing orderliness felt good. She dug out the histories of her distant relatives in cuttings libraries and registers, and found that they had the grand, inclusive sweep of novels, which she missed being able to write. Rooting around in digitized records and parish documents constantly reminded her that death, viewed from far enough away, amounts to no more than faded ink on dry paper.
For some time before she set out on the journey, she had been exchanging emails with unknown, reserved Norwegians, who were typically better schooled in the English language than her undergraduates. It was a liberating kind of correspondence. The recipients of her queries knew nothing about her other than fragments of distant family relationships:
‘It would seem to indicate that either my grandfather or my great-grandfather changed his name from Askeland to Ashland. Also, it confirms that Hjertrud Askeland, whose descendants live in Salinas, have nothing to do with this matter. I feel we have reached a conclusion and can only reiterate that I am very grateful for…’
Lars Christian Askeland-Nilsen had seemed really fascinated by her project. Unasked, he had searched the collection Letters from America, held in the National Library in Oslo, and found correspondence between the man who begat Jane’s branch of the family and the people he had left behind in Norway. Lars Christian translated extracts from these letters and sent them to her. She googled him and discovered pictures taken at a cross-country run: his running shorts were tight and shiny and his smiling face was splattered with mud.
But the brutality described in the translated letters was hard to take.
‘I had no idea that malaria was so prevalent in Texas at the time. Not to mention the Indians,’ Lars Christian commented.
Three of Fredrik Melchior Askeland’s letters from the middle of the nineteenth century were left. In them, he listed the five children that he and his wife had l
ost; the youngest was just seven months old. The references to their deaths were made with the absolute minimum of emotion, and interspersed with notes on the weather and accounts of the autumn harvests – so-and-so many barrels of rye and bushels of corn, and I have to tell you that little Martha was taken from us this past August.
‘This F.M. Askeland, what is his problem? His wife doesn’t seem too bothered either. The children’s mother!’ Jane wrote in an excitable email.
‘I have come to think that the reason is their very strong belief in God,’ Lars Christian wrote in reply. ‘They profoundly believe that they will meet their children again.’
She had liked his answer. She imagined Lars Christian writing to her while wearing his tiny, shiny shorts. The more they wrote to each other – it was a huge number of messages, though she began to wonder if she hadn’t sent many more than she had received – the stronger her wish to go to Norway became. Lars Christian had uploaded pictures of family skiing trips, apparently in perpetual sunshine. She imagined being with them in the pictures.
*
She hesitated with her hand on the door handle, then inhaled deeply, left the car and went to meet the Askeland-Nilsen family. The ground was scattered with wet leaves. The rumbling highway traffic drowned her too-early ‘Hi’.
The daughter hung back behind her father. Her mother stepped forward.
‘Jane?’
They shook hands. The fourteen-year-old, too. Her hand was warm, slightly moist, and she kept glancing at her father.
‘Any moment now, I’ll start looking for family characteristics,’ Jane said with a laugh as she scanned each one of them. It wasn’t her true reason. All three seemed to have dressed for a moderately severe hike. The morning mist had left drops clinging to their pale eyebrows and trickling down the synthetic material of their anoraks.