by Linn Ullmann
UNQUIET
A NOVEL
LINN
ULLMANN
TRANSLATED FROM THE NORWEGIAN BY
THILO REINHARD
For Hanna
I
HAMMARS PRELUDE
A map of the island
...
The only maps and charts
he had to go by
were remembered or imaginary
but these were clear enough.
—JOHN CHEEVER, “The Swimmer”
TO SEE, TO REMEMBER, TO COMPREHEND. It all depends on where you stand. The first time I came to Hammars I was barely a year old and knew nothing of the great and upheaving love that had brought me there.
Actually, there were three loves.
If there were such a thing as a telescope that could be trained on the past, I could have said: Look, that’s us, let’s find out what really happened. And every time we began to doubt whether what I remember is true or what you remember is true or whether what happened really happened, or whether we even existed, we could have stood side by side and looked into the telescope together.
I organize, catalogue, and number. I say: There were three loves. I am the same age now that my father was when I was born. Forty-eight. My mother was twenty-seven, she looked both much younger and much older than her years back then.
I don’t know which of the three loves came first. But I’ll begin with the one that arose between my mother and father in 1965 and ended before I was old enough to remember anything about it.
I have seen pictures and read letters and heard them talk about their time together and heard other people talk about it, but the truth is you can never know much about other people’s lives, least of all your parents’, and certainly not if your parents have made a point of turning their lives into stories that they then go on to tell with a God-given ability for not caring the least about what’s true and what’s not.
The second love is an extension of the first and concerns the lovers who became parents and the girl who was their daughter. I loved my mother and father unconditionally, I took them for granted in the same way that, for a while, one takes the seasons for granted, or the months or the hours, one was night and the other was day, one ended where the other began, I was her child and his child, but considering that they, too, wanted to be children, things sometimes got a little difficult. And then there’s this: I was his child and her child, but not their child, it was never us three; when I browse through the pictures lying spread out on my desk, there isn’t a single photograph of the three of us together. She and he and I.
That constellation doesn’t exist.
I wanted to grow up as quickly as possible, I didn’t like being a child, I was afraid of other children, their inventiveness, their unpredictability, their games, and to make up for my own childishness, I used to imagine that I could split myself and become many, turn myself into a Lilliputian army, and that there was strength in us—we were small, but we were many. I split myself and marched from one to the other, from father to mother and from mother to father, I had many eyes and many ears, many skinny bodies, many high-pitched voices and several choreographies.
The third love. A place. Hammars, or Djaupadal as it was known in the old days. Hammars was his place, not hers, not the other women’s, not the children’s, not the grandchildren’s. For a time it felt as if we belonged there, as if it were our place. If it’s true that everyone has one place, although I suppose it isn’t, but if it were true, then this was my place, or at least more mine than the name I was given; it didn’t feel uncomfortable to wander around Hammars the way it feels uncomfortable to wander around inside my own name. I recognized the smell of the air and the sea and the stones and the way the pine trees hunched in the wind.
To name. To give and take and have and live and die with a name. One day I would like to write a book without names. Or a book with lots of names. Or a book in which all the names are so ordinary that they are immediately forgotten, or sound so alike that it’s impossible to tell them apart. My parents (after much back and forth) gave me a name, but I never liked that name. I don’t recognize myself in it. When someone calls my name, I duck as if I’ve forgotten to put on clothes and only realize it once I’m outside with people all around me.
In the autumn of 2006 something happened that I’ve since come to think of as a darkening, an eclipse.
The astronomer Aglaonike, or Aganice of Thessaly as she is also known, lived long before the age of the telescope, but could, with her naked eye, predict the precise time and place of lunar eclipses.
I can draw down the moon, she said.
She knew where to go and where to stand, she knew what would happen and when. She reached for the sky and the sky turned black.
In “Advice to Bride and Groom,” Plutarch cautions his readers against women like Aglaonike, calling them sorceresses, and instructs new brides to read, learn, and keep abreast. A woman who masters geometry, he argues, will not be tempted to dance. A well-read woman will not be lured into folly. A sensible woman schooled in astronomy will laugh out loud if another woman tries telling her it’s possible to draw down the moon.
No one knows exactly when Aglaonike lived. What we do know, and what even Plutarch acknowledged, never mind the condescending comments he made about her, was that she was able to predict the exact time and place of lunar eclipses.
I remember exactly where I stood, but lacked the ability to predict anything at all. My father was a punctual man. When I was a child, he opened the case of the grandfather clock in the living room and showed me its mechanics. The pendulum. The brass weights. He expected punctuality of himself and of everyone else.
In the autumn of 2006 he had less than a year left to live, but I didn’t know that then. Nor did he. I stood outside the white limestone barn with the rust-red door and waited for him. The barn had been converted into a cinema and was surrounded by fields, stone walls, and a few scattered houses. A bit farther off lay Dämba Marsh with its abundant birdlife—great bitterns, cranes, herons, sandpipers.
We were going to see a film. Every day with my father, except Sunday, was a day with film. I’ve been over and over it, trying to remember which film we were seeing that day. Maybe Cocteau’s Orphée with its leaden dream images? I don’t know.
“When I make a film,” Jean Cocteau wrote, “it is a sleep in which I am dreaming. Only the people and places of the dream matter.”
I have thought about it again and again, but can’t remember. It takes several minutes for the eyes to adjust to the dark, he used to say. Several minutes. Which is why we always arranged to meet at ten to three.
That day my father didn’t show up until seven minutes past three—that is, seventeen minutes late.
There were no signs. The sky didn’t darken. The wind didn’t tug at the trees and shake them. No storm was brewing and the leaves didn’t swirl in the breeze. A nuthatch flew over the gray fields and off toward the marsh, other than that it was quiet and overcast. Not too far off, the sheep—referred to on the island as lambs, regardless of their age—were grazing as they always did. When I turn and look around, everything is the same as usual.
Pappa was so punctual that his punctuality lived inside me. If you grow up in a house near the railway tracks and you are awakened every morning by the train roaring past your window, by the trembling of walls, bedposts, and windowsills, then, even when you no longer live in the house by the tracks, you will be awakened every morning by the train hurtling through you.
It wasn’t Cocteau’s Orphée. Maybe a silent film. We used to sit in green armchairs and let the images, unaccompanied by piano tinkling, flicker across the screen. He said that when silent films disappeared, a whole language was lost. Could it have been Victor Sjöström’
s The Phantom Carriage? It was his favorite. For him, a single night is as long as 100 years on Earth. Night and day he must carry out his master’s business. I would have remembered if it had been The Phantom Carriage. The only thing I remember about that day at Dämba, apart from the nuthatch over the field, is that my father was late. This was as impossible for me to comprehend as it was for Aglaonike’s followers to comprehend why the moon should so unexpectedly vanish. The women who, according to Plutarch, were unschooled in astronomy and allowed themselves to be fooled. Aglaonike said: I draw down the moon and the heavens turn dark. My father came seventeen minutes late and nothing was out of the ordinary and everything had changed. He drew down the moon and time went out of joint. We had arranged to meet at ten to three, it was seven minutes past three when he pulled up in front of the barn. He had a red jeep. He liked to drive fast and make lots of noise. He had big black bat-eye sunglasses. He offered no explanation. He had no idea that he was late. We sat through the film as if nothing had happened. It was the last time we would see a film together.
He came to Hammars in 1965, forty-seven years old, and decided to build a house there. The place he fell in love with was a deserted stony beach, some gnarled pine trees. He was overcome by an immediate sense of familiarity, he knew this was his place, it echoed his innermost ideas of form, proportion, color, light, and horizon. And then there was something about the sounds. “Many a man erroneously thinks he sees a picture whereas he really hears it,” Albert Schweitzer wrote in his two-volume work on Bach. Of course, there is no way of knowing what my father saw and heard that day on the beach, but this is when it all began, that is to say, this is not really when it began, he had been to the island five years earlier, maybe that is when it began, who knows when something begins and ends, but for the sake of order I will say: this is where it all began.
They were shooting a film on the island, it was his second shoot there, and she who will be my mother played one of the two female leads. In the film, her name is Elisabet Vogler. Over the course of the ten films they make together, he gives her many names. Elisabet. Eva, Alma, Anna, Maria, Marianne, Jenny, Manuela (Manuela—that’s when they made a film together in Germany), and then Eva again, and then Marianne again.
But this is the first film my parents make together, and they fall in love almost immediately.
Elisabet, unlike my mother, is a woman who stops talking. Twelve minutes into the film she lies in bed, entrusted in her inexplicable silence to the care of Nurse Alma. Her bed stands in the middle of a hospital room. The room is sparsely furnished. A window, a bed, a nightstand. It is late evening and Nurse Alma, having introduced herself to her patient, turns on the radio, switches between stations, settles on Bach’s violin concerto in E major. She exits and Elisabet is left lying alone.
In the middle of the violin concerto’s second movement the camera finds Elisabet’s face and stays on it for almost one and a half minutes. The image grows darker and darker, but it darkens so slowly that you hardly notice it, or at least not until it is so dark that her face is barely visible on the screen, but by then you have been looking at it for so long that it has become imprinted on your retina. It is your face. Only then, after one and a half minutes, does she turn away from you, exhale, and cover her face with her hands.
First, my eye is drawn to her mouth, all the nerves in and around her lips, and then, because she is lying down, I tilt my head so that I can look at her face directly. And when I tilt my head, it feels as though I am lying down beside her on the pillow. She is very young and very beautiful. I imagine I am my father looking at her. I imagine I am my mother being looked at. And even though it’s growing darker, her face seems to light up, to burn, to dissolve right before my eyes. It’s a relief when she eventually turns away, covering her face with her hands.
Mamma’s hands are slender and cool.
One evening, my father took his cinematographer to a place he had spied out. Maybe I could build a house here, he said, or words to that effect. Yes, but wait, said the cinematographer, come with me a little bit farther and I’ll show you an even nicer spot. When you walk along the beach, the way they did that day in 1965, you won’t reach the end of the road, there is no headland, hill, clearing, or precipice, no geographic or geologic formation to indicate a change in the landscape; there is stony beach as far as the eye can see, nothing begins or ends. It just continues. If this spot lay in the woods and not on a beach you could have said that my father had been taken to a place in the middle of the woods and that it was here, right here, that he decided to build a house. The two men stood there for a little while. How long? Long enough, or so the story goes, for my father to have made up his mind.
If one were being pompous, one might say that I had finally come home, he said, and if one were joking one might talk about love at first sight.
I have lived with this account of home and love all my life.
He came to a place and claimed it, called it his own.
But language got in the way every time he tried to explain why things had turned out the way they did, and he always ended up with: If one were being pompous, one might say that I had finally come home, and if one were joking one might talk about love at first sight. But what if one were to use one’s regular voice? Not too loud, not too soft, not to convince, not to seduce, not to make fun, not to move? Which words would he have chosen then?
So, how long did he stand there? Between pomposity and jest, between home and love? Had he remained standing there for too long and thereby noticed his own awe, noticed that he was giving it a name—home, love—the urge to shake his head and keep walking would surely have made itself felt. I detest emotional sloppiness and bad theatre. Had he remained standing there too briefly, chances are he would not have let the place get to him and consequently decided to devote his life to it. A few minutes, maybe. Long enough to hear the wind in the already wind-bent pines, the wind in his ears, the wind in his trouser legs, the pebbles under the soles of his shoes, his hand fiddling with coins in the pocket of his leather jacket, the oystercatcher’s shrill, Morse-like biik-biik-biik-biik. I picture my father turning to the cinematographer and saying: Listen to how quiet this place is.
First, love. An intuitive certainty. Then a plan. There will be no improvising. No. Never improvise. Everything has to be planned down to the last detail. She who will be my mother is part of the plan. He will build a house, and she will live in the house together with him. He takes her there, shows her the spot and points and explains. They sit on a rock. Actually, I think she’s the one who says, Listen to how quiet this place is. He wouldn’t have said it, not to her, not to the cinematographer. There were a thousand sounds on the island. Instead, he turns to the woman who will be my mother and says: We are painfully connected. She thinks it sounds nice. And a little unpleasant. And confusing. And true. And maybe a little bit corny. He was forty-seven, she was more than twenty years younger. In due course, she gets pregnant. The film shoot has long since ended. The house is being built. In the letters he writes to her, he worries about the great age difference between them.
I was born out of wedlock, and in 1966 this was still frowned upon. Illegitimate. Bastard. Brat. By-blow. None of that mattered. Not to me. I was a bundle in Mamma’s arms. It didn’t matter to my father either. One child more or less. He had eight already and was known as the demon director (whatever that means) and a womanizer (pretty obvious, that one). I was the ninth. We were nine. My oldest brother died many years later of leukemia, but back then we were nine.
Mamma got pregnant and it was frowned upon. She was frowned upon. Because she was a girl. She cared a lot about what other people said and thought. She loved her baby. That is what mothers do. She swelled up and bore a daughter. Illegitimate. But she was also ashamed. She got letters from strangers. May your child burn in hell.
Mamma’s first husband was present at my birth. He was a doctor who, according to his colleagues, had a lively, infectious, and cheerful nature. My
mother has told me that giving birth didn’t really hurt that much, but that she screamed for the sake of appearances, and that he, the doctor, leaned over, stroked her hair and said, There, there. He knew the baby wasn’t his, both he and my mother had taken their affections elsewhere, but they hadn’t yet gotten around to getting a divorce. So according to Norwegian law, I was his daughter. I—2.8 kilos, 50 centimeters long, and born on a Tuesday—was a doctor’s daughter, and for several months I—or she—carried his surname. In photographs she has round, chubby cheeks. I don’t know that much about her. She looks content in her mother’s arms. A first name had not yet been given her. She lived in Oslo with the mother, in the little flat at 91 Drammensveien that the mother had shared with her husband and that the grandmother, Nanna, would take over some years later. Many of the father’s letters are addressed to 91 Drammensveien. In one of them, scribbled on yellow stationery from the Stadshotell in the small Swedish town of Växjö, he writes:
TUESDAY EVENING
A gray-black letter
The hotel is fine and everyone is kind and I am filled with cosmic loneliness . . .
WEDNESDAY MORNING
Now it is morning, and there’s an autumnal tree outside my window and everything is better today . . . The sense of paralysis has eased off. If we are to write down all our thoughts, I must tell you about a very black thought I had last night. It mainly concerns my physical person. In some way or another, the very core of my being is rather worn down. I have worked so hard throughout my career that the consequences are beginning to show. There aren’t many days in a row when I feel really well. What frightens and worries me the most are the dizzy spells, the signs of weakness, a circle of unquiet that culminates in fever and depression. My hysteria most likely plays a part in all this . . . in some ludicrous way I feel deeply self-conscious and ashamed of these ailments that I scarcely can do anything about. I believe it has to do with the older man–young woman conundrum.