A Fool, Free

by Beate Grimsrud

  I stand up and notice the lead on the floor. Something is flashing behind a curtain. ‘It’s just the printer,’ Janus assures me. Just the printer? Will the police storm in or are they waiting outside? They’re going to lock me up in a prison out in the country. I won’t be able to cope. Is there anyone who understands that I won’t be able to deal with being in prison? My picture of the cell gets smaller and smaller. It shrinks to the size of the toilet at home when I was a child. To the straps around my body. To cries when my mouth is invisible.

  I want to die. I feel it as soon as I open my eyes in the morning. I can’t live, on repeat. I want to disappear. I can’t be alone in the flat. Can’t eat breakfast. Can’t make anything. Can’t work. Can’t be with people. I think that I’m going to jump from the balcony and fall six floors down. It would be so wonderful to let go. Not to have these thoughts about wanting to die. Not to have to worry about losing control. The voices that rule me and the police that pursue me.

  But what would my friends say? They would understand. My family? They wouldn’t understand. But they would manage. They would think it was unnecessary. Lolo would tidy my flat and cry. Giving her that kind of sorrow is not worth it. She who has given me so much more than anyone else. She who has done as she promised and never let go. And how can I know that she doesn’t need me as much as I need her? To kill myself would be like pouring iced water through her warm body. I can’t do it today. I can do it today. Or wait a few days. I will do it today. I’ll wait a few days.

  The African statue guards the bedroom window. It watches over me. But who watches over it? I watch over it. But I have no energy. I have to wait. I get scared. Will I really do it? Yes. I throw myself down on the bed and cling onto the bedframe. I’m almost lifted out of bed. Jump. Jump. I hold as hard as I can. Save me.

  I’m on my way to Janus again. I’m going to let him know that I know. I sit there shaking and talking to myself. There are too many people out and about right now. ‘I’m going to let him know that I know that he tricked me,’ I say. ‘Not so loud,’ says Emil. Janus has made me ill. Is that just a thought or do I say it out loud as well? I don’t know. Can’t get there quick enough. Can’t take the metro. People notice and people know. And now even Mum knows.

  I have to hide. All these years of doubt and voices. Of admissions and discharges, of angst and wasted time. It’s the therapist’s fault. There’s been a misunderstanding. I am not ill at all. I’ve seen him on TV. Then suddenly I understood everything. I knock on the door as soon as I get there. We have agreed that I shouldn’t do that. I should sit in the waiting room and wait until he comes out to get me. He doesn’t open the door. A colleague comes out into the waiting room. I tell her that I can’t wait. ‘He’ll come through soon,’ she says, and hurries off to her own room. Then he opens the door and we shake hands.

  As soon as we’ve said hello I say it: ‘I’ve seen you on TV.’ ‘Please, sit down,’ he says. I remain standing with my coat on. ‘You’re that terrible father I saw on TV. You abuse your children. And you’re dangerously religious. You hit, cry and pray.’ ‘Take off your coat and sit yourself down,’ Janus says, calmly. I drop my coat in a pile on the floor and sit down. ‘Don’t hit me,’ I say. ‘Don’t hit me.’ I hastily get up and move my arms around. ‘I’m not going to hit you, you can sit down again.’ ‘You’ve been fooling me all these years. You’ve made me ill. You’re deeply religious at heart. Admit it. Or you’re Freud. Or Freudian. You’re an extreme believer, and that’s been harmful for me.’

  I make repetitive movements with my arms, even when I’m sitting. ‘Yes, yes, yes.’ Laughter. I feel confident of my case. But underneath my confidence lies a white room of doubt. I don’t know. Half of reality is hidden from me. The answer is behind the walls and I can’t get there.

  ‘I am not religious,’ Janus says, ‘and I am not Freud.’ Really? He’s just saying that to confuse me. ‘And I am not the father in that TV series.’ We sit in silence. I feel uncertain. ‘I’ve got a meeting at one,’ I say. ‘With the artistic director of Stadsteatern. I’m writing a play for them.’ Is it me that’s ill after all? ‘I’m not sick,’ I say. ‘You’re confused,’ Janus says.

  ‘Hang on a minute,’ Erik says. ‘I’m here now. Eli’s not here. And I know that you’ve tricked her.’ Erik jumps up. ‘Lie down,’ he orders. Now Eli’s back. And she has to do as he says. I lie down on the floor. ‘You can get up,’ says Janus. I get up from the floor. He’s tricked me over and over again. He can’t save me. He, who I thought was so kind and understanding. He looks at me. Looks like he always has, but is someone else. ‘Eli,’ he says several times, in a calm voice. ‘You normally think you are several people. And today you think that I am. I’m sitting here in this room with you and I’m your therapist. I’m the actor you saw on television and the horrible man that he plays. I think perhaps it’s best if we call the hospital. Have you eaten today?’ ‘No.’ ‘Have you washed and changed your clothes?’ ‘No, I slept on the kitchen floor. I’ve been preparing to come here and expose the truth. I’ve been preparing for liberation. Eli is well,’ I say. ‘You don’t need to call.’

  He has already called. He’s talking to my mental health worker, Elsa, and asks if she could perhaps come and get me. She can. ‘You need treatment,’ Janus says. ‘I’ve got a meeting at Stadsteatern at one. I don’t have time for any treatment.’ He laughs. I look down at the asymmetrical carpet. He’s not looked as carefully as I have, even though he practically lives there. ‘I’ve been waiting nearly six months for this meeting at Stadsteatern,’ I say. ‘I don’t think it will be good for your play if you go there as you are now.’ He’s lying. I’m not postponing anything. If I’ve said I’m coming, I’m coming.

  There’s a ring on the doorbell. It’s Elsa. She comes in and rubs me over the shoulders. ‘Hi,’ she says. ‘Can I call you Eli?’ ‘No.’ ‘Well, then I won’t.’ ‘I can’t come with you,’ I tell her. ‘I’ve got a meeting at Stadsteatern.’ Elsa’s read the play and knows how important it is to me. ‘I think Eli needs some treatment, food and sleep,’ Janus says. ‘We’ll go the hospital for something to eat and then we’ll drive you down to Stadsteatern. It’s only a quarter to eleven,’ Elsa says, and looks at me. She tries to tease out a smile, but doesn’t succeed. ‘Ingemar is waiting in the car,’ she says. ‘Come on, let’s go.’ I follow her out. Think that I have no idea what will happen now, but maybe Elsa can decide. Maybe I don’t need to take responsibility. Out in the car, Ingemar says: ‘Hi Eli.’ I get in and he reaches back to give me a pat on the shoulder. ‘Eli’s not here,’ I say. ‘It’s Erik. I’m going to a meeting at Stadsteatern.’ ‘It’s a very good play,’ Elsa says. ‘Why don’t I get to read anything?’ Ingemar asks. ‘You can read as much as you like. But you’re always a bit poorly.’ ‘That was an Eli remark. Eli’s here,’ Ingemar says. ‘So we can start the car.’

  We drive through the town. I feel safe in the car with Elsa and Ingemar, that they won’t change and become someone else. We stop at a Vietnamese restaurant to buy food. We sit in the day centre to eat it, and I try to explain to them that the therapist has tricked me. That I’ve seen him on TV, that he’s religious at heart. That he hits children in God’s name. That I’m frightened of being hit.

  ‘Eat something now,’ Elsa says. ‘We’ll talk about it after your meeting at Stadsteatern,’ Ingemar says. They start to talk about something else, joking with each other and they make me laugh. When we’ve finished eating, Elsa asks whether I can cope with the meeting. I say yes. For me there’s no such thing as not doing what I intended. Ingemar thinks I’ll be fine. But says that he has to consider whether to let me go or not. He thinks it’s their responsibility to make sure that I don’t do anything that might show me in a bad light. ‘I’m not letting Erik go,’ he says. ‘Are you sure that it’s Eli who’s here now?’ I lie. I say yes, but it’s Erik.

  I’m given an anti-psychotic Zyprexa injection. Erik doesn’t want to have it, but thinks it might be tac
tical; if I don’t take it, they won’t let me go. Then they drive me to the meeting and I promise to come back to the unit when I’m finished. ‘You’re usually quite frayed after all that effort,’ Elsa says, and she’s right. It’s good to know that I can go back there and have supper.

  I’ve got plenty of time, so I walk up and down a bit outside the stage door to Stadsteatern before going in to let them know that I’m there. I make a deal. I will swap myself from Erik to Prince Eugen. I think Prince Eugen is better at meeting artistic directors than Erik. I ask if they can be nice, just this once. Just now. Then I’ll spend time with Erik afterwards. It’s fine, and with great relief, I walk up to the reception and ask to meet the artistic director.

  I sit up straighter now that I’m Prince Eugen. More friendly in my manner, more sophisticated. Glide straight-backed across the floor. Then the artistic director arrives. In a pink shirt, very happy and friendly. They would love me to do a play by me. He asks if I’m politically active. Prince Eugen isn’t, after all, he’s a royal. But he is an artist, and that is political in a way. I sit in the armchair without shaking and talk about a number of political contexts where Eli has contributed. I look out of the window and see a train station. The conductor blows the whistle and the train pulls out. The trees and electricity lines disappear instead of coming closer and we travel back in my political life. I tell Prince Eugen, who tells some of it to the artistic director. Prince Eugen is astounded, this was before his time and so is unfamiliar to him. Has Eli really done all this?

  I end up in the Soviet Union. There’s a meeting in the playwrights’ union and I am sent from Sweden as an observer. It’s December 1991. The meeting is over and we are all about to go back to our respective homes. Then someone storms in and says that the Soviet Union has been dissolved. He tears up the minutes from the meeting. These are new times, adieu. All the way home I think that it is I who have torn apart the colossal union. That I’ve actually been working on it for fifteen years. I’m holding a red thread from a woolly sweater and unravel it stitch by stitch.

  I started with Eastern Europe. The train stops in Hungary in the early eighties. I’m in a team of young people from the Soviet Union and the whole of Eastern Europe. There are over a hundred from the east and ten from the west. We work in a factory and on a construction site, sleep in vast dormitories, eat together and hang out in the evenings. As soon as I get a chance, I ask them about conscientious objectors and homosexuals. They don’t exist. I repeat my uncomfortable question in every context. Talk about multi-party systems when we eat. They laugh and pass the vodka. Am I preaching to the deaf? They’re not so deaf after all, one by one they come to me in the dark and want to talk. When the floor to what is to become the Technical University of Budapest has been poured, we have to water the concrete. Twenty of us carry buckets of water from a tap some distance away and I suggest that we get a hose so that only one person is needed to do the job. This is not well received. Do I want to create unemployment like in the west? I don’t reply. I pick up my pail and make no more suggestions.

  One summer I cycle from Moscow to Washington. It’s a peace convoy including Russians, Americans and Scandinavians. Do our numbers on the streets and squares make any difference at all? I hand over a petition to General Secretary Pérez de Cuéllar of the United Nations, with signatures from thirty European mayors against the deployment of Tomahawk and Pershing II cruise missiles. One of the participants is interviewed on the popular programme Good Morning America. We gather round the television in the hotel. He’s practised formulating his political views and will finally be able to talk so that all of America can hear. But the question is not political. The question is, do you have a sore backside after all that cycling? And he does. He’s got blisters and can barely sit down. He loses his thread.

  The artistic director sits opposite me and listens. I don’t know why he asked. Is political activism in or out? Does he want my play to be political? I realise that to pull people in it has to be set in our time. Or slightly, but not too much, into the future. He probably just sees Eli. Prince Eugen is a good speaker and tells the stories as best he can. Several trees disappear. Houses and fields and someone waving from a fence. We stop in the middle of the Norwegian forest. I’m at a seminar run by The Future In Our Hands, and am learning about alternative world economies. I’m back at the end of the seventies. I’m writing pieces for Norwegian radio. About Generation X and the baby boom. I go through long tunnels. Light and dark. Backwards. Backwards. Finally end up at home in my bedroom where I am standing with a stolen vase and about to go out and sell raffle tickets. That was not political.

  Prince Eugen laughs. The artistic director laughs. His secretary pops her head in and reminds him about his next meeting. Our meeting is over. He promises to get in touch the following week. I walk through all the corridors and find my own way out. I’m exhausted. Go back to the hospital for something to eat and to rest. The artistic director does not get in touch for months.

  I sit on the floor in the corner of the kitchen in the flat. My fingers are vibrating. My thoughts are white and grey and white and grey. I’m being watched. Erik has hit me. He’s hit my head against the wall several times. I’m going to report him to the police.

  I go to bed with a big bag of crisps on my tummy, what Jonathan calls teenage temptation. ‘I’ll show you something,’ Emil says, when I wake up in the middle of the night with crisps all over the bed. Espen is crying. I dry his tears on the duvet cover. ‘Get dressed,’ Erik orders. I do as he says. Outside it’s snowing and cold and dark and silent. Only an ambulance drives silently past with its blue light flashing. ‘Walk,’ Erik says. I cross the street and go into the park. It’s slippy. It starts to dawn on me where we’re going.

  We go down to the new bridge over the Mäleren. When they were building it, Astrid Lindgren threatened to lie down on the tracks in order to save part of the park that would be ruined by the bridge. But it never happened. She said that she was too old to threaten them with her life. Where is the boundary? We go up to the highest point on the bridge. I lean over the railing, feel the pull in my stomach. I’m wearing my pyjamas under my coat. I don’t have my ID card in my pocket.

  ‘Eli,’ the boys say. ‘We found, we found it.’ Should I say thank you? They’ve shown me a place to jump from. But I’ve promised to ring someone before I think about jumping. I don’t ring anyone.

  *

  I never lock the door to the flat. I walk through parks and along dark streets late at night. I’m not afraid of bird flu or mad cow disease. It doesn’t concern me. I think: all danger comes from within.

  Saturday morning. Olof wakes me at midday. I open the door in my pyjamas. ‘They’re coming,’ I shout. ‘They’re coming.’

  ‘Who?’ Olof asks, and comes in.

  ‘The police.’

  ‘No, it’s just me.’ He hangs up his coat and gives me a bear hug. Don’t want to leave that space. Olof can save me. I know that he can.

  ‘The police are coming to get me. Can you stop them?’

  ‘The police have other things to do. It’s me who decides whether the police come to get you or not. And they’re not going to come.’

  My right leg is shaking. I sit down. ‘The police hear my thoughts and send them to Mum in Norway. She hears that I’m writing about her.’

  ‘When did all this start?’ Olof asks.

  ‘The day before yesterday. I couldn’t sleep. They heard what I was thinking. The boys are in on it. There’s radiation coming from the walls, can you feel it?’

  ‘There’s no radiation in here,’ Olof says.

  ‘I have to apologise to Janus. Don’t think that there’s a dangerous Janus behind the friendly Janus any more. Trying to tell him stuff makes me psychotic.’

  ‘Maybe psychodynamic therapy isn’t the right thing for you just now. That’s why we’ve suggested Jonathan. After all, cognitive therapy is all the rage,’ Olof says.

  ‘That’s enough to make you sceptica
l,’ I say. ‘I have to apologise to Janus.’

  ‘He knows how to deal with transference, after all, that’s his training,’ Olof reassures me. ‘I think you need a Zyprexa injection. Why don’t you come back to the unit with me?’

  I quickly put some clothes on and pack a bag. Something tells me that I might be staying a while. We stop in front of the hospital building. ‘One day we’ll leave the hospital, both you and me,’ Olof says. I agree, but we’re not going to do it today.

  I get my injection in the bum and I get food. There’s a vegetarian option left over from lunch. It’s cooked beetroot with a good sauce, and a salad with a strong garlic dressing. One of the nurses made it. As they’ve started cutting back on the garlic, he takes it with him from home and makes his own dressing. I normally pour it over all my food, so it tastes of something.

  Several of my mental health workers are on duty. I can sit and listen to music. The very fact that they are here makes me feel safe.

  For the first time since I started going in and out of hospital, everything is perfect. Now when everything is about to be changed. Now I have several mental health workers, so I can always get hold of someone. I live at home. I go to the unit when I want to or need to, get something to eat and have a chat. I meet the same people when I’m in hospital as I do when I’m at home. They know my voices and my behaviour. They can calm me down and support me when things get a bit tricky. There’s such a difference between talking to someone on the phone you don’t know, and meeting someone who knows you well. Then often, it’s not so bad.

  I can live with this. I’m changing, but I’m still vulnerable. When I behave in a way that might seem sick or frightening to others, they steer me into a new phase. And now they’re going to disappear. Now everything is going to be changed. So that it’s like the rest of the country, so that it fits in with the Swedish model. It’s just been a trial, a socio-psychological focus, with the patient at the centre, supported by a mental health team comprised of doctors, a care coordinator and mental health workers. A pioneering project to show to study groups from other countries.