History. a Mess.

by Sigrún Pálsdottír

  I hold my breath deep inside and glance very quickly behind me to make sure there’s no one there but the darkness. Then I carefully bring myself over to the threshold and enlarge the crack enough to observe the unexpected gathering, my eyes on Hans, making sure not to push back the tapestry too much.

  “Can I offer you a drink? Beer?”

  “Well, sure, I’ll have a cold one.” Hans disappears into the kitchen and I hear the heavy breath of his sister’s husband: “Indeed, indeed,” he says half-aloud, and at the same time he appears vividly to me on the other side of the covering; I see all his gestures, the smallest movements and the facial expressions. I can even see how he’s dressed.

  After a fair while, a bit longer than it takes one to get two beers out of a fridge, Hans walks back into frame and puts the cans on the table. He straightens, stands motionless, looks straight ahead. At something that seems to make him happy, though his smile is rather more disapproving than warm. Has the visitor fallen asleep? I ask myself and watch Hans wipe his hand over his face, plunk himself down on the couch and sit back. Plunk himself? No, Hans does not really plunk. He just sits on the couch and leans slowly back. He seems tired. My delicate genius. How I long to crawl through the crack and into his lap, to tell him I just had to get inside the dark for a while until my painkiller kicked in. But I don’t do that because I fear he would ask why I didn’t just get under the blanket as usual. I’m afraid he’ll go to see what’s hidden behind the door, that it might be something other than I’ve surmised. More than anything, I am afraid he’ll just take me in his arms and not ask a thing.

  Hans reaches for his beer, takes a sip and looks at the clock. He stands back up. When I hear that he has shut himself inside the bathroom, I push the door carefully open and stick my head out. I get up, close it, and speed past the open-mouthed, snoring seminar participant.

  When I get into the corridor, I let myself consider throwing on a jacket and acting as though I’d just popped out, but by now Hans is opening the bathroom door so I have no option other than the nearest door to me. It’s the door to the basement and before I know it I’m in the storage area. From there, unfortunately, there’s no way out of the house.

  What’s my story here? What is it that it has taken me about half an hour to find, which is how much time I estimate has passed since Hans returned home? I look over a stack of cardboard boxes standing on the floor up against the wall by the door. I find a box of photographs. Of course! I’m looking for an old photo! But I do not have much time so, without thinking about it, I take the one that’s top of the pile. And I almost run up the stairs and into the apartment.

  We meet in the middle of the hallway. I extend the photo in a rather agitated way and precipitously inform Hans that Mom wants to make a copy of this picture and frame it for herself. He does not say anything. Just looks at me somewhat oddly. It’s what the photo shows: my parents up against a stone wall in the back garden with my grandmother, sometime in the early 1970s. Or, rather the fact that the photo I have in my hand is an inferior version of a picture already in my parents’ home. In a frame with other family photos on the desk inside my father’s office. Or does he look questioningly at me because I have suddenly appeared here from the basement with an old photo, wearing a nightdress, about half an hour after he’s come home from work? For one moment, I hope that he will get his bearings, come over to me, that we’ll look each other in the eye and know my conduct is no coincidence, which will give me the opportunity to tell him everything, of the great misfortune that befell me about a month ago. But just when I feel that Hans is about to open his mouth, a noise can be heard from inside the living room. His sister’s husband has leapt up from his alcoholic doze, knocking over the glass vase that stood on the table next to the sofa. Passivity seals our fate, and soon we’re both standing in the living room. The leather-vested political scientist in front of us is apologizing in a flurry, then suddenly, cheerfully cursing as he drops to the floor and starts picking up glass fragments, finding himself unable to work out what to do with them. He seems to have forgotten Hans saying he did not know where I was because he doesn’t seem surprised to see me appear in the living room in my nightdress so late in the afternoon, standing there giving him amiable instructions about leaving things alone, don’t worry about any of this.

  As I sweep up the fragments, the brothers-in-law walk to the front door. They’re talking, but I can’t hear them. I take the dustpan out of the living room, but instead of heading right to the kitchen, my way leads into the bathroom where I thrust my face into the toilet bowl. And while I throw up, I go back over the images in the gold frame, the silent communication between the woman and the man in tweed that ended with him crawling out of the frame on all fours. The woman’s face which I never saw. According to medical science, a meaningless, inexplicable image composed from the material that sends messages between our cells. A picture created from a disturbance that gives rise to a hammering blow inside my head. But if its source wasn’t my own experience, where did it come from? Wasn’t it I who called it forth? I deliberate whether the picture could be a scene from a movie or a novel I’d read and which had developed in my head in a slightly altered, distorted way, dissimilar enough that I did not understand the connection. Then I remembered the newspaper. Something tells me I’ve seen that front page and its photograph before. Is it even possible to make up images without a template?

  I stand in front of the sink, turn on the water, and lean down to the faucet to get a mouthful. I look up and see Hans standing behind me. He walks in, embraces me around my sore waist. He puts his face against my throat and kisses me, looking directly into the mirror as he smiles: “Aren’t you happy with the new curtains?”

  I have to admit that I don’t entirely understand where Mom is headed with these words. I’m not sure she knows, either

  It was not until I got into bed last night that I thought about the notebook. As I watched from behind the door, Mom seemed to have just set it on the pile of books on the table. I have no way of telling if she opened it or not, but the sort of person who uses a key to get into someone else’s home and hang curtains for them is hardly averse to snooping inside something like a little pink book. And that would mean she knows her shame as she stands here at my dining table working hard to adjust the tray of canapé pastries she has arranged for the social gathering that’s about to begin.

  But what is there to celebrate? Does anyone know? The new curtains? No, this is a banquet my mother was already planning just before we returned home. Probably in order to give the signal that my homecoming meant nothing, was just an intermediate moment, a turning point in the process, even if not all the pieces were in place. But even that occasion is a lost cause, ultimately undermined, because “my people,” to quote Ester, have been constantly knocking on our door, ever since we moved in. And so there’s no reunion needed, as was originally the plan.

  I look at my guests chatting together. Mom’s guests. Their gestures and expressions. Everything indicates without a doubt that these dissimilar people, “my people,” have found their so-called common ground. But, for sure, it’s an empty deception. Everyone who has ever networked at a gathering knows that. From the host’s viewpoint as she monitors silent conversations and people’s gestures, it’s easy to forget your own experiences as a guest and to rejoice in the image apparent before you.

  I stand with a bottle of wine in my hand and turn in a circle. Take in the excellent atmosphere. Gréta standing by the bookcase in a long wine-red leather jacket, holding her glass of white wine, laughing with Bonný and Guðbjörg, who seem to be saying something together, half-laughing themselves, nodding their heads in time as Gréta starts talking, offering a more serious interpretation of their rather comic story. From the host’s perspective, there’s a nice rhythm to it.

  And slightly different from the rhythm in front of The Three Fates. Some conflict is underway, albeit a minor one, one quite appropriate to a group of people getting to
gether. The woman is talking about some local politics, as I hear when I fill her interlocutor’s red wine glass. He stands in his socks, wearing over a beige khaki shirt a knit vest buttoned up to his neck, looking down into his freshly filled glass, nodding his head, then shaking his head with jerky movements back and forth in courteous protest; as the woman holds her hand aloft to put her case more forcefully, the young man leans back all the way against the tapestry, so that the door handle touches his back. As far as I can see. He looks upward to gather strength for his response. An answer he ought to be well able to give being an expert on the subject. That’s why I have no reason to believe that this conversation between Bjarnfríður Una and Hans’s brother-in-law is some kind of a game. Their gestures seem genuine. Their communications are, therefore, an exception to the rules about the host’s willing deception.

  But could such deception also cover the exchange of words between a younger woman and older man who have found a place at this very moment in the dining room? How sincere is my father’s interest in Tína’s speech as she flicks her long hair, underscoring her words with her delicate hands? I ask because Dad is strangely motionless in front of her. Entirely rigid. Shouldn’t he move about a bit, show some kind of expression, anything? Perhaps he is so busy listening to the young actress that he does not need to pretend with his body the way you do when you have lost your interlocutor’s thread at a party. Or so I think as I go into the kitchen to fetch yet another bottle of wine.

  When I return to the dining room, Tína’s disappeared. Dad is standing alone with his wine glass, smiling over the room, still happy as Sigga D. walks across to him. He sets down the glass and takes a tight hold of my childhood friend. Their vignette begins with a question and quick reply and continues on as I watch or until I look out over another corner of the living room. Ester and the teenager, Hans’s niece, are there. They aren’t talking. Why are they standing there? Had they been talking and just now stopped? Did Ester bring up something that this chip off her father’s shoulder didn’t want to be party to? What would be her mother’s take, my sister-in-law? That her daughter does not care for small talk. What can the science of mindfulness teach us about these circumstances? And where is my sister-in-law leading my mother with her words? Mom is staring down at the floor, probably to give the impression of unusually focused attention and interest in what my sister-in-law is trying to explain. Here’s another kind of exception: in this case I, the host, do not accept the deception; Mom has no appetite for what my sister-in-law has to share, so she lowers her head and takes the time to consider the lecturer’s footwear. And here I butt in, for their glasses are empty, catching the final words of this Puss in Boots: “to be the director of your own life,” at which Mom places her glass under the bottle mouth and praises me for her own food and drink, letting hang in the air the mismatched metaphor, these lofty words of wisdom my sister-in-law had offered as a way to fix the mess our lives had become.

  And the wisdom persists until my father-in-law walks onto the stage. He greets my mother with the pretense of respect and strange formalities. The sister-in-law, however, lets herself vanish, popping up next between her daughter and Ester, seemingly having contrived to build some bridge. My sister-in-law is very much at home in Ester’s world, and, although this world may not be an adolescent one, the teenager is her mother’s daughter, and they seem in concert, even though they are little alike. For, despite all the talk, this generation of children is usually closely connected to their parents who, denying their own age, have become part of the life and culture of their offspring.

  I clink glasses with my father-in-law, and when he has thanked me, he begins to ask Mom about the exhibition of the young artist, the mirror woman, which opened in the Art Museum a few days back. “You see, I have to confess that I don’t entirely understand the idea behind the work.” I don’t care one bit to take a stance against my father-in-law’s words, and even less to listen to a well-phrased, learned reply from Mom, but her set expression puts me in a difficult spot: she looks thoughtfully at her conversation partner, my father-in-law, squinting, as one might, but then she also looks right ahead at me so that I’m stuck fast; she freezes me inside the picture before she makes her speech:

  “Listen. The viewer only sees the work from one angle at a time. But by moving about, he comes to sees how the face of one historical figure transforms into an image of another famous person from the past, except one of a different gender. And as you’ve no doubt seen for yourself, there is no coincidence who transforms into whom.” Then she glances up, adjusts her hair, and continues to talk about how these dual portraits shake up the conventional wisdom that history is a story spun by powerful, victorious forces; she talks about the many threads that inhere in the past, the one reliable knowledge history can bring us: “I should say that the past literally rises up through this work. Rises up and places itself in sight of the viewer, reminding him how she is more or less a product of his perspective.”

  Renaissance man, dressed in a polo sweater, whose color I do not entirely trust myself to accurately describe in words, and a thin wool jacket with some tiny insignia high up on the collar, looks down. I look at his face, how he pauses and pouts his wet lips. Should I take my chance to disappear? But then, without meeting my eyes, he takes my shoulder, indicating that I’m not going anywhere. At the same time, it becomes clear to me that he’s given up on reacting to Mom’s verbal torrent, that he’s using me to change the topic: “But you, on the other hand, are doing something remarkable, I’m told! Have managed to find their first female painter, those Englishmen!” He smiles gently and asks: “But does that change our perception and understanding of the artist’s work, his position within art history?”

  Sometimes I have found that my insecurity toward other people is in opposition to my respect for them: the less I respect someone, the more insecure I will be toward them. But that’s not the only reason I can’t come up with any words for my father-in-law at this moment; in my head there are no answers to such questions. But Mom is still here. How very fortunate:

  “Of course that changes things in a historical sense, no need to even waste words on that! But more than that, when we’re talking about a relatively unknown artist from such a remote period of history, their gender may also have a different significance. You see, in today’s historiography, where the focus on the individual is once again becoming stronger, it’s actually better for a forgotten artist to have been a woman than a man. What used to work against the artist has become her success.”

  I have to admit that I don’t entirely understand where Mom is going with these words. I’m not sure she knows, either, but she’s clearly going somewhere. She puts her hands in her pants pockets, bounces on her toes, and heads off. But my father-in-law does not see that at first, so absorbed is he in his skepticism and Mom’s words; before he can gainsay them, I lift the wine bottle in the air, unnecessarily high, as if to suggest there must be guests around with empty glasses. And with that I budge slowly away from my father-in-law, the art-inclined, culturally-minded empiricist.

  Mom has installed herself with Dad and Sigga D. I see the three talking as I enter the kitchen to get one more bottle. They are merry until Sigga starts shaking her head between them as she looks in my direction, inquiringly. I pour some wine into my glass, although I know I must not drink a drop while taking my medicine. I look at my parents. Sigga has gone. Dad looks at Mom. I look at him looking at her, how his face is dissolving and running together with the hazy environment of the living room. Until everything is a fog, although Mom’s image is sharpening, moving somehow beyond the three-dimensional, blurred background. She’s wearing a black wool jacket over a tightly-woven shirt, white and collarless. There is nothing to disturb that picture except perhaps the slim gold band on her ring finger when she strokes her silver-gray bob to pat down anything that might have gone haywire, though nothing, of course, has. I steady myself against the kitchen sink, I’m losing my balance. The liv
ing room is ebbing away, but the image of Mom has become more focused, higher in the air than ever before, she somehow doesn’t seem a part of this environment. But when I head in her direction, something black appears in front of her. Something on her shirt. First, it seems like letters. RC and maybe A. But then the letters start to move and become a pattern that reminds me instead of a coat of arms. I reach my hand out to stop myself falling.

  He lay on his side in his suit the way he would at a picnic, though I’d never seen him lying like that on the living room floor before

  I wake myself up by knocking one hand against the bedside table lamp. In my dream, I’d wanted my notebook, which was lying on the nightstand. As soon as I open my eyes I know why. There’s an image in my head, and I must write it down before it disappears. I reach for a pen, which is on the windowsill and which I don’t recognize having seen before. One of Hans’s writing implements, a little peculiar, probably from the laboratory. I open the book to the back because the image in my head is really beyond its contents. But just as I mean to start writing, something quite strange happens. Instead of fading away slowly and surely, as dream visions are meant to, the image in my head becomes ever clearer, and the clearer it becomes the more difficulty I have finding the words to describe it. Without thinking, I start drawing in the book, and then it’s almost like I’m stroking across the page in soft strips with thick ink. Like the model is lying underneath the paper. Hair frames the woman’s face, a forelock falling over one eye beside a round-tipped nose. I cut the picture off at the woman’s chest and outstretched arms; in her raised palm sits a tiny little girl. And now I can see who it is. I see what this is. This is the picture that appeared to me just before I fell to the floor at the gathering yesterday evening. A picture of Mom as she stepped forward like some giant to seize me with both hands while my guests stared at me, petrified. Not displaying any reaction other than expressions that said, “What misfortune is this?” What happened next can, however, be explained only in words. I write immediately. Right below the picture. And then over to the next open page.