A Fool, Free

by Beate Grimsrud

  I look up. Her hand is still on my head. The hand that has shaken so many other hands today. It’s all mine now. I look straight at her. She has round, lovely cheeks. She’s pale and has no make-up. I know what I want. I want the minister to hug me tight in her divine cape.

  ‘That’s quite a lot,’ the minister says. ‘You just need to pray that I’ll be released from hospital,’ I say. Then she takes her hand from my head and sits down beside me on the pew. She puts her hand on my shoulder. ‘Have you come from the hospital now?’ I shake and nod. ‘Then I think that you should go back.’ She puts her hand on my head again and says Our Father. Then she says something very quietly that I hope contains a lot. It occurs to me that I’d like to ask her about Marit. If she could pray for her. The minister takes my hands in hers and asks the Lord to look kindly on Elin. Elin is someone completely different from Eli. If God doesn’t have his eyes shut then he’ll be looking somewhere else right now. He’ll be looking for Elin.

  ‘Now, you get back as quick as you can,’ the minister says, and stands up. ‘Promise me you will?’ I don’t answer.

  It’s almost empty outside the church. I don’t want to walk back through all the flats and buildings. I want to walk where things don’t get in the way. I choose the widest street. It’s rush hour. Everyone wants to get home now. It’s still snowing and windy. Suddenly everyone is gone. I’m the only one left on the pavement and a few cars illuminate the snowflakes in their headlights. The new snow has whirled through the town like a cleaner. A voice can be heard in amongst the sounds of the cars. I can’t make out what she’s saying. She’s mumbling a kind of chant. Is it the minister? I did want her to pray especially for me. But she just said a general prayer. I’m nothing special. I don’t know who I am.

  The mumbling is in my right ear and is quite comforting to begin with. Then another woman’s voice starts to mumble at the same time. It’s the women who appeared a few weeks ago and sit at the top of my right ear. They talk from the outside and the inside. Not like the boys. Suddenly all midnight masses are over, all family festivities. Even the cars have vanished. The road is empty. Now the voices are behind my back and very clear. ‘Jesus, I love you,’ says one. ‘I love you, Jesus,’ says the other. I walk a bit faster. ‘Jesus, I love you.’ ‘No, I love you, Jesus.’ They both shout at the same time. I can’t protect myself. I can’t turn round. ‘Jesus, I love you.’

  I’ve got the wind on my back and drag my feet to whip up the snow in front of me. My entire being is a sail for their love. I’m forging ahead. Leaving clear tracks in the snow. It’s beautiful. It’s my favourite weather, but I can’t enjoy it. ‘Turn around.’ ‘Look at us.’ ‘Save us.’

  I can’t. I cross over to the other side of the street. Their shouts are cold like snowballs on my neck. I am completely covered in snow. Stick out my tongue to taste it. Do you think their arms are reaching out? That they could touch me at any moment? I shouldn’t have gone to church. I’m nearly at the hospital. There they are again, chorusing: ‘Jesus, we love you.’ ‘Stop!’ I shout. ‘There’s been a misunderstanding. Stop!’ Then I start to laugh. I want them to hear, but don’t dare turn around and laugh in their faces. I laugh to myself and think ha, ha, Jesus certainly doesn’t love all of you. Jesus doesn’t love you back... ha, ha...

  When I get to the hospital gates, I turn round. The women aren’t there. I am open, cold and empty. Just snow in front of me. Just the city and me. That’s just how it is, and how it cannot be.

  Every night, a Finnish angel appears in my room. She comes tiptoeing in. How can she know that I’m awake? She seems to embrace the whole room with her calm voice. I can barely see her in the dark. I tell her I’m a writer. Say some sentences. Steal some of Erik Lindegren’s lines and say: ‘Reality crashing. Without reality born!’ Then say some of my own Norwegian sentences: ‘Do you know the world the way it looks at you? That is reality.’ The angel listens with curiosity. She says that she likes what I write, because that is what I need to hear.

  She comes with warm milk and honey. I’m full to the brim with sleeping pills, and still can’t sleep. The Finnish lady disappears just as angelically as she came. Now I can sleep. She comes back in the dark the next night, in white hospital overalls. With milk and honey and a voice that embraces. Milk and honey and whispers. I give her new words and sentences, she listens. I hold my hands round the warm cup and drink. She waits in the dark. Doesn’t the angel know there are sleeping pills in one of the largest hospitals in the north?

  Kristin comes to visit me from Oslo when she hears that I’m ill. Lolo phoned to tell her. She’s a student and broke, but borrowed the money for a plane ticket from her sister-in-law. She stays in my flat and comes to see me in hospital every day. I’m allowed out for a few hours on New Year’s Eve. I want us to be together at midnight, but we can’t. I have to be back by eight o’clock. We go back to my flat for New Year’s dinner. I’ve almost stopped eating. Kristin knows that. I say that I’m full before I’ve even tasted the food. It’s too noisy to eat in the unit. Kristin knows that. She’s someone who always knows everything in advance. Who sorts things out and meets your needs before you’ve even said what they are. There’s a quiet power in this. I let her decide, let go of my adulthood a bit when I’m with her. She’s like a home. A house, a familiar bed. The part of me that’s broken rests in her closeness. She talks to Lolo and my friends. Says that I should have as little stimulus as possible. That I shouldn’t write. Sonja doesn’t agree. She writes herself and knows that you just have to.

  I don’t want dinner or to sit by the kitchen table. ‘You’re not going to sit by the kitchen table, you’re going to sit on the sofa in the living room,’ Kristin says. I turn on the telly and Kristin switches it off. She comes in with a plate with the tiniest amount of food decorated with parsley. It’s not more than a mouthful. I look at it with curiosity. It looks tempting. ‘Are you not going to taste it?’ Kristin asks. I shake my head. ‘You could at least taste it.’ I taste it and the whole thing disappears. She goes into the kitchen and comes out with something else. A minimal little titbit. I shake my head. She tells me what it is and my mouth starts to water. I take a bit and the whole thing is gone. She comes in with one more, and another. Marinated prawns and avocado, and raw beef and parmesan and basil, prosciutto and rocket, crab and aioli, gravlax on rye bread. I must have eaten about fifteen miniature courses in the belief that I’ve eaten nothing. I’m smart, but Kristin is smarter.

  ‘Happy New Year.’ We raise our glasses of water and I ask if we’re not going to have champagne. ‘Not this year,’ Kristin says. ‘There will be other New Years.’ We have to go back to the hospital. It’s dark and fireworks are already exploding, some people can’t wait. We go into Tantolunden, to the highest point in the park. ‘This is where you need to stand at midnight,’ I tell Kristin. ‘This is where we would have stood and watched the fireworks together.’

  ‘I’ll come with you back to the hospital, then I’ll go home to bed,’ Kristin says. ‘I’ve come here to see you, not to see the fireworks.’

  I found, I found something. A line of poetry has popped into my head and I say it over and over again, all the time. I write it down on a piece of paper and hang it up on the wall. I am completely obsessed with this line by Erik Lindegren: Reality crashing. Without reality born! Another patient, a depressed secondary school teacher, reads and records poems for me and I listen to Erik Lindegren and Karin Boye. It goes straight to the heart of my stomach. What is difficult and what is good resonate together.

  Long, wasted days. I wear an ink-blue, far too big tracksuit with Landstinget written on it. The trousers are so long that I don’t need socks and shoes. I stand out on the small fenced in balcony. It’s strange to stand behind the wire and look down at life on the street. Like a bird in a cage. Then a woman comes out and says: ‘Hello, my friend.’ We’re not friends. ‘Can I get a cigarette?’ ‘You’ve already had two, so that’s a no.’ ‘Can I get one later?’ ‘You can
buy your own.’ ‘Yes, I can. But I prefer to be given them.’

  I get a hug from one of the guys. He keeps saying: ‘I believe in miracles.’ He’s been saying that for several days. Every now and then he shouts: ‘I’ve only got good intentions.’ He hugs everyone all the time.

  I’ve got to know a nurse who’s on an hourly contract. She’s looking for a job as a therapist with drug addicts and working here in the meantime. She’s got cropped blonde hair and a vest that shows off her muscular arms and tattoos. It’s easy to talk to her. She seeks me out. And that’s what the staff have to do with me, because I don’t try to talk to them.

  A woman is lying on the floor waving her arms and legs in the air. She’s done it before and no one seems to bother. She’s taken off her top so that everyone can see that she has only one breast. ‘Help me get her up,’ the hourly paid nurse says to the other staff. ‘No, let her lie there,’ they say. ‘She can lie there until she’s done.’ The nurse gets so angry that she shouts: ‘What kind of a place is this? Is that how you treat people?’ She dashes into the storeroom and gets a patient’s gown. Two other nurses eventually lift the woman up onto a chair. I’ve heard that there’s some bad feeling amongst the staff. It wasn’t there before. It affects all of me. They are them and we are us.

  I’m sitting waiting for a new doctor who might become my doctor. He’s known to be very good. I’m twenty-six years old and my name is Eli. I’m a woman. But the boys are still inside me. I have to talk to them. The exits from reality are more and more frequent. And I don’t come back into myself afterwards. I end up somewhere diffuse and halfway. Partly the one, partly the other. Espen is crying. Emil wants to play, hide in the game and forget. Erik wants to smash up everything around him. I pull my hat down over my forehead and play football with Emil. My body feels for all the world like I’m ten years old and a boy. I hold the ball in a special way. Lie down on the hospital bed and become Erik. In my mind I destroy everything around me. Am restrained, released and do it all over again. I’ve dyed my princess golden hair red, have clear dark eyes, long eyelashes and a fringe that stands straight up. I’m dressed in leather. Black leather trousers and a black leather jacket. I’ve got a leather armband around my wrist with extra long nails.

  We go into the doctor’s office, it’s big. Bookshelves and books everywhere. He greets me and indicates that I should sit down on the chair in front of the overflowing desk. I don’t know what to say. The words stack up. There are so many of them. Completely naked and disconnected from each other. Have I said my name? I think about sand, grass and snow. Places where you can play. I think about the boys, Espen, Emil and Erik. Did I greet him properly? I wouldn’t mind wrestling with the doctor. Not talking.

  ‘You are Erik. Sixteen years old. You are invincible. You are strong. You are a skier, a footballer, a boxer, a wrestler, you run great distances on the beach and warm up. You have to show your good side now.’ I really want this doctor to be my doctor. My best side. What is that? No words can change my facade. It’s actions that count. I have to show what I can do. That I’m balanced.

  I lean forwards over the desk. Put my hands down amongst all the papers, lower my head and forehead. Lift my body slowly up over the desk into a headstand. I don’t lose my balance. I stand straight up and down and look around the doctor’s room. The doctor says nothing, so I stand steady for a while longer. Then I lower myself down again. Slowly, without shaking. We did it. Now the doctor knows who we are and the way things are.

  I’ve started bowing. I’ve started to wear a white dinner shirt and have taken off my armband of nails. The belt as well. You can’t wear that many nails when you spend so much time in bed. I’ve started stretching. Combing my hair and nodding politely to everyone I meet, no matter whether they’re staff or a patient. Feel someone pushing out from inside. I’m randomly looking through a book of old photographs and see a picture of Prince Eugen. It’s me. He is me.

  ‘You are Prince Eugen.’ A voice cuts through my thoughts. ‘You are twenty-six years old and one of the most stylish people in the world. A royal rebel. Someone who wanted to paint rather than cut ribbons and represent his country. Who wanted to go to Paris to meet like-minded people.’

  I have found myself. ‘You have to show them who you are,’ Prince Eugen says. I take a copy of the picture and hang it on my door to the hospital corridor. I have my own room. I am royal. Unique. I am not only a writer, I am also an artist.

  I zip up and down between ages like a lift. Jonathan wants to talk to the adult Eli. But the boys are there. ‘I’m the lift that they come up in. It’s their ideas about me that I can’t shift.’

  ‘It’s good if they don’t feel safe,’ Jonathan says.

  I don’t understand. Their insecurity makes me insecure.

  ‘Imagine that they’ve moved out and only come to visit. How would that be?’

  ‘I do sometimes think about that as I’m going up to the sixth floor. What if they got out on different floors? Espen lives in the cellar near the water pipes so he can cry himself dry. Emil lives on the first floor, and you can barely squeeze into the hall because of all the balls, skates, skis, toboggans and football boots. Erik lives on the second floor. You can always hear him out on the stairs there and catch the sweet smell of hash. Prince Eugen lives on the fourth floor. He has nice pots with plants in them outside his door and an embroidered sign that says: No junk mail! And I live on my own on the sixth floor.’

  ‘Good. You keep thinking, more and more often, that you go up and down in the lift without them getting in.’

  ‘But they’ve got a key!’ I say. ‘They can come in the evening, the middle of the night, whenever they like.’

  ‘Just tell yourself that you’ve changed the lock. That they don’t have a key any more. You invite them in, not the other way round. So that maybe one day, you won’t want to carry them around any more, even if you can.’

  That’s Jonathan’s idea of me. That I can shift them. Throw their keys down the drain. Full control. Just invite them in when I need them and want to. They came because I needed them to survive. So is it essential to get rid of them? Jonathan answers that I should just keep telling myself: ‘It’ll take time.’

  One evening I lose my single room. I come back from a rather stressful release, when I didn’t even manage to sit in a cinema and ran out halfway through the film. I’ve been drinking whisky. My things are all stacked up in boxes in the corridor. The picture of Prince Eugen has been taken down from the door. A woman in a wheelchair has been admitted and needs my room. She jumped from the old Katarina Lift at Slussen and survived.

  I’m thrown out of what was mine. It’s like a landslide. My place is gone. I grab the thing closest to me, a chair, and smash it against the wall until it breaks. I throw myself against the door. My head splits. I muster all my strength, Espen, Emil, Erik, Prince Eugen, get everyone to help. I have to break my skull. Have to annihilate myself. Have to change. Espen is crying. We split, my head splits in two. I feel the blood gushing out. The alarm goes off.

  There are six nurses around me. I lash out and kick with all my might, hurl myself against the door again. There’s a little plastic Christmas tree nearby. I lift it up and throw it to the floor. I stamp on all the baubles. Another patient arrives who wants to join in the fray. I’m wrestled to the floor, carried to a bed and restrained with straps around my stomach, hands and feet. I throw myself from side to side, but can’t get loose. I’m too big to be restrained. It’s not Mum and Dad who do it any more. It’s the nurses, who I like. My trousers are pulled down and I’m given four injections. Immediate and slow release anti-psychotics, tranquillisers and something for the side effects. I shout when I talk. Is someone trying to calm me down? I don’t hear it.

  A nurse sits down on a chair by the bed. When you’re restrained on a bed, someone always has to sit watch. He picks up a magazine. ‘Think yourself fit and healthy,’ he reads. ‘I am fit and healthy,’ I say. ‘Curvaceous mothers have smarter
children,’ he reads and laughs. ‘Eli, there you go, your mother must have been curvaceous.’ I can’t make a joke about it. I have to pee. More nurses come into the room. They pull down my trousers again, so that my lower body is naked and uncovered. I’m the wrong sex. I’m Prince Eugen. It was Erik who wrecked everything and Prince Eugen who’s punished. Maybe he was also the wrong sex. They put a bedpan under my bum. It’s like ice. I can’t pee. They don’t put the covers back. I lie there on the cold bedpan with my trousers down. Everyone in the room can see my sex. Maybe the whole thing is being filmed and will be shown to the police. Or to my teenage friends who asked: ‘Let’s have a look at your bits. Are you a boy or a girl?’

  When they finally put on my trousers again and pull up the covers, I wet myself and have to stay there all night. I try to throw myself from side to side even though I’m restrained on the bed. Can’t sleep, despite the injections. Can’t give in. Can’t calm down. Know that I just have to persevere.

  ‘Walk,’ Mum says, ‘walk!’ I’m six years old and the family is walking from hut to hut in the mountains. We’re going to be there for seven days. I’m carrying a rucksack with my sleeping bag and clothes. It’s far too big. The mountains are steep. The air is cool. I’ve got blisters and a tummy bug. But I mustn’t let it stop me. Not when we’re out walking.

  We walk for ten hours every day. No one is allowed to give up. There’s no way out. Just stones and mountains, moss and dwarf birch, and the odd burbling stream. I have to be coaxed the whole way. Behind every next peak there are raisins. I know that it doesn’t help to complain, but I still cry. I’m bribed and harried on. I’m sick along the path. ‘Look at the others, they’re walking like troopers,’ Mum says. Odd is the only one not walking, he’s in a carrier on Dad’s back. But Marit is walking, Hild and Torvald are walking. When I see the hut that is today’s destination, I break into a run. Then Torvald starts to run too. First to the hut, which is still only a dot in the valley.