by Linn Ullmann
To get from Hammars to Dämba, the girl and her two half siblings would squeeze into the backseat of the father’s car at exactly 7:40 p.m., twenty minutes before the movie started. It was a short drive, ten minutes at the most, but once you had arrived you needed an additional ten minutes to adjust. No rushing in and out. Same thing in the afternoon. The afternoon screening started at three, but you arrived at ten to. The girl had a knack for drawing maps, many of them of Fårö using her blue marker to accentuate the places she knew best: First, there was Hammars, where she stayed every summer together with her father, Ingrid, her half brother Daniel and half sister Maria. Then there was Dämba, built in 1854, consisting of a main house and an annex, a lilac hedge, a ghost deemed to be friendly, a windmill, and a barn-turned-cinema. There was a new two-story limestone house called Ängen, meaning meadow, built to withstand winter weather and, also, a little cabin by the sea, called the Writing Lodge, although nobody ever did much writing there. There was even a place called Karlberga, on the southern tip of the island, near the beaches of Sudersand, which was later sold.
The house at Hammars had a small foyer with three doors, one door formed the main entrance and led straight out to the brown-stained bench, the second door opened up into the house itself, and the third led out into the garden, which was enclosed by a stone wall. The garden boasted a guest annex, a wash house, a rose bush, and a swimming pool.
During her first summers at Hammars, the girl’s favorite place was the electrically heated narrow closet in the wash house, where clothes were hung to dry. The drying closet was hot and sultry, and on the bottom beneath the hanging rods there was just enough space for her to curl up. Ingrid’s and her father’s newly washed clothes hung in the closet, either dripping or damp, the father had striped pajamas, flannel shirts, and brown corduroy trousers. His clothes took up most of the space. Ingrid was small and delicate and stuck to a few sensible pieces: mostly skirts and blouses. Occasionally, the girl’s blue dress would hang at the very tip of one rod.
She was a good swimmer and could stay in the pool for hours, said the father, he always exaggerated, not hours, said the girl. Sometimes he came out into the garden and said: Now your lips have turned completely blue, get out of the water immediately, he worried that the girl might catch a cold and that he might catch it too, so occasionally he interrupted his workday in order to get her out of the water.
All the windows in the house had to be kept shut, even on beautiful summer days. The father was afraid of flies and drafts. Conversations with the father usually began like this:
“Do you feel a draft?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t want you to catch a cold.”
“I don’t have a cold.”
“I know that, but I don’t want you to catch a cold.”
But for the most part, the girl was allowed to stay in the pool for as long as she liked. The father worked in his office and Ingrid did housework while Daniel did whatever it is that older boys do—the girl wasn’t all that interested. And when she was done swimming she curled up inside the drying closet. She liked it best when it wasn’t full of clothes, because when there were clothes hanging from all the rods there was hardly any room for the girl, and the more clothes there were, the hotter it was, and not just hot but humid like in a jungle; when the closet was full, she had to crawl, yes practically battle her way inside, and when the clothes were still wet, she’d get slapped in the face and on her body by shirt sleeves, pant legs, dress hems, like being licked all over by big animal tongues.
One day Ingrid opened the door and pulled her out. She said it was dangerous to sit inside the drying closet. Ingrid had pretty hair. She nearly always kept it in a braid, but for parties she would put it in rollers in the morning and wear it down in the evening. Then it would ripple down her back.
Lots of things were dangerous. All the usual things, of course, like putting a plastic bag over your head (death by suffocation), walking around in wet underpants, swimsuits, or bikini bottoms (death by bladder infection), twisting a tick the wrong way when detaching it from the skin (death by blood poisoning), going swimming less than an hour after eating (death by cramps), accepting rides from strangers (death by kidnapping, rape, murder), taking candy from strangers (death by poisoning, possibly kidnapping, rape, murder)—but there were also other dangers specific to Hammars: Never touch the flotsam that washed up on the beach below the house, liquor bottles, packs of cigarettes, shampoo bottles, tin cans with labels in foreign languages, foreign lettering, don’t touch, don’t sniff, and for God’s sake don’t drink (death by poisoning), don’t sit in a draft (death by catching a cold), don’t catch a cold (death by expulsion from Hammars), don’t sit in the drying closet (death by suffocation, possibly electrocution), don’t be late (if you showed up late, death would be a consolation, death was, if anything, the only valid excuse for a lack of punctuality). Give this girl a map and she’ll follow it—she doesn’t break a single rule, except the one about not sitting in the closet. Ingrid had told her over and over again, but still the girl snuck in to be enveloped by the warmth. Until the day she found a sheet of yellow notebook paper taped to the closet-door on which the father had written in big block capitals:
WARNING! IT IS STRICTLY FORBIDDEN FOR SWIMMING CHILDREN TO FREQUENT THE DRYING CLOSET!
The father spoke beautiful Swedish and often resorted to the old-fashioned custom of addressing the girl in the third person singular. How is my daughter today? He never used English words in conversation except when referring to his swimming pool, of which he was extremely proud. It lay stretched out in the middle of the lawn like a magnanimous, bejeweled old lady in a long turquoise gown; six meters long and three meters deep at one end, rectangular and, yes, turquoise, and smelling of chlorine. At night the wasps fell into it—either sinking to the bottom or staying on the surface and crawling about—as did spiders and beetles and ladybirds and cones from the trees and the occasional sparrow. Every morning, all the things that had fallen into the pool had to be fished out with a landing net. For this job too Daniel was paid ten kroner. Early, early in the morning the old lady would lie there sparkling with things creeping and crawling all over her, on her surface and on her bottom, surrounded by tall grass and lofty pine trees—a glittering turquoise spot on the map.
I have heard recordings of my father speaking English to British and American journalists and film students. He spoke it with a heavy accent, part Swedish, part German, part American, a jazzy sound unlike anything else I’ve ever heard and not like him at all—yes, yes, he’d rattle on, as Faulkner once said, the stories you tell, you never write. He thought Norwegian was a beautiful language and was fond of repeating the nonexistent word buskedrasse, which he mistook for the Norwegian word buksedrakt, meaning a woman’s pantsuit.
Every day, he—the girl’s father—went for a morning swim in the pool. And the girl would hide behind the rosebush and watch him. The father, she thought, was actually much too old to go swimming without any clothes on, too old to go swimming at all. Honestly! Splashing around in the water like a great big beetle! He always swam alone. First thing in the morning. Before breakfast. Before disappearing into his study. The girl didn’t know much about the work he did in there. He wrote, this much she knew, on lined sheets of yellow notebook paper.
He wrote in the summer, the rest of the year he made films or worked at the theater.
Sometimes he and his editor, a friendly woman whose name the girl never remembered, withdrew to the guesthouse to cut film, this was in the days when strips of celluloid were actually cut and spliced together. He spent an entire summer cutting The Magic Flute, and then Schikaneder’s libretto and Mozart’s music would flow from the windows of the guesthouse—this was the only summer the windows were left wide open—and everyone at Hammars pricked up their ears. Tamino pleaded desperately: O endless night! When will you vanish? When shall my eyes see light? And the
chorus replied: Soon, youth, or never more.
But when the father wasn’t busy cutting, he was busy writing, and in the afternoon he would hand the sheets of yellow notepad paper to Ingrid. She had no difficulty reading his handwriting, hardly anyone else knew how, and she would type up a fair copy. When the father was writing, he was on no account to be disturbed, the girl knew this very well, He has a temper, said the mother before sending her daughter off to the house that had once been built for her to live in, What is a temper, said the girl, He can get angry, said the mother, Is it dangerous, said the girl, No, said the mother and hesitated, Or yes, if you hurt other people, but if you never show that you are angry or sad or scared, you can get a big knot in your stomach and that can be dangerous too, Does Pappa have a knot in his stomach, said the girl, No, said the mother, he doesn’t have a knot in his stomach, but sometimes he can get angry and say things he doesn’t mean . . . and thunder and yell . . . and then other people get knots in their stomachs . . . that’s what I mean when I say he has a temper . . . he’s a hothead . . . he’s got a short fuse . . . A short fuse, asked the girl, what’s that? The mother sighed, Well, it means that you . . . that . . . that if you light a match and suddenly the whole house goes up in flames . . . Oh, right, said the girl, who knew very well that she mustn’t disturb the father, but sometimes she disturbed him anyway. She knocked on the door to his study and told him to come—there was a spider in her room that he had to get rid of. She didn’t dare spend another minute in there if he didn’t come right away and get rid of it. Or a beetle. Or a wasp. He didn’t start yelling. He didn’t catch fire. He only sighed a little, got up, and followed her through the living room and the kitchen to her room. She was so thin. As though the insects were her kinfolk. And he liked the Norwegian words she kept piping. Øyenstikker. The girl liked the Swedish words. Trollslända. Two such different words for dragonfly. And she wasn’t afraid of him. She was afraid of horseflies. Broms. And harvestmen. Harkrank.
When she had become an adult and spoke fluent Swedish, he told her to speak Norwegian instead. At least when speaking to him. He said that when she spoke Swedish, her voice went up several notches and sounded like it did when she was a little girl and now that she was a grown woman, she ought to stick to a lower key, it was more agreeable, more becoming, he preferred the sound of her voice, he said, when she spoke her mother tongue.
But there was a time when she was 113 centimeters tall and could hide behind a rosebush without being seen and could disturb the father if there was a millipede in her room to be dealt with. Or an ant, or a bumblebee, or a beetle.
Maybe I ought to call her something. The girl. I can also let it be. When the father turned sixty, he invited all his nine children to Hammars to celebrate his birthday. It was the summer of 1978—the summer the girl turned twelve. I don’t remember how the idea of a big party—the first of many—was presented to her, she probably wasn’t even aware that she had so many siblings, or maybe she was aware of it in the same way that she was aware that Norway was made up of many different counties. She had just finished fifth grade and would soon be moving to the United States with her mother and go to an American school. Her Norwegian geography teacher’s name was Jørgensen, she would miss him. She was good at geography. Maps were her specialty. And yes, she knew that she was one of nine siblings, just as she knew that nine of the highest waterfalls in the world were in Norway. She had written down their names: Mardalsfossen, Mongefossen, Vedalsfossen, Opo, Langfossen, Skykkjedalsfossen, Ramnefjellsfossen, Ormalifossen, Sundifoss. Apart from Daniel and Maria, whom she already knew, she had only seen her siblings in photographs. A lot of people think that Vøringsfossen is the highest waterfall in Norway, but it isn’t. Far from it. Goes to show how wrong you can be, Jørgensen would say. It was the day before the big party. The father’s birthday was on the fourteenth of July, France’s National Day, and she was finally going to meet everybody. All eight of them at the same time. She sat on the brown-stained bench outside the house and waited. Every now and again she would get up and wander toward the forest where she picked wild strawberries and threaded them onto blades of grass. Then she would sit down again. She meant to save the wild-strawberry necklaces and give them to her sisters, she had four, but time passed and no one came, so she ate them all herself. Her faded blue dress only just covered her bottom. She had mosquito bites on her thigh and on her hand. There was no place as quiet as Hammars as she sat there alone on the bench watching the grasshopper wake up on the stone wall. When a car came driving along, you could hear it from far away. Usually, when she heard a car, she would run up to the road and over to the first cattle guard, which according to the father marked the boundary between private and public property, and wave her arms so the car would turn around and drive away. They didn’t want people here. But today she stayed where she was, not running up to the road and chasing people away. The father was probably regretting this whole bloody party. It had seemed like such a good idea—a delightful idea!—when he first thought of it. All of his children gathered at a party. But one should beware of one’s own good ideas, Aksel Sandemose—a writer whom the father occasionally quoted—once wrote. You can become so smitten with the idea that you forget everything else. Sandemose was talking about writing, but the same can no doubt be said of throwing parties. And besides: the girl suspected that the party wasn’t entirely the father’s idea, it was also Ingrid’s. If all of his children were invited to Hammars, then all of her children would also get to come. Not only Maria, Ingrid’s youngest, but her three other children as well. Ingrid had left her children when she went off to marry the girl’s father, and now she missed them all the time, but her new husband insisted it should be just the two of them. No children. They had waited so long for each other, through all of his numerous marriages and affairs and her marriage to the baron. Or was it the count. Such is love. Sitting on the brown-stained bench, and someone once said such is love. The girl’s mother would shake her head at any talk about the father’s women, she didn’t want to hear about wife number five, she didn’t want to hear about wife number four, I don’t want to hear about them, one tends not to want to hear about the one who came right before and the one who came right after. The mother didn’t like being between number four and number five. What does that make you? Four and a half?
The father used to say that for his seventieth birthday he would invite all the wives too, and the mothers and the women who were neither wives nor mothers, but who had nevertheless played a part one way or another. What do you call them? But now he’s sixty, not seventy, and the girl is sitting on the brown-stained bench waiting for her siblings, most of whom she had never met before, and tomorrow, on the big day, the father would be photographed with a wreath of flowers in his hair, surrounded by Ingrid and the children on the steps at Dämba. The girl turned, looked toward the road, and scratched her thigh. The first mosquito bite is the sweetest, the father used to say. It pops up somewhere on your body and it’s white and new and slightly pink, shouting, Scratch me, scratch me. When you have lots of mosquito bites, it’s not so sweet anymore, your skin hurts, the bites don’t shout, there’s no sound in them, and the itching keeps you awake at night. When she heard the first car, she stood up and immediately sat down again. They’re here! They had arrived. She looked around. Where was everybody? Pappa! Ingrid! Daniel! Maria! Come! They’re here! And then the first car turned into the gravel yard, and then another and then one more, and out of the cars tumbled young women and men, the girl’s siblings, and their boyfriends and girlfriends and suitcases and silk scarves and red lips and laughter and flared trousers and hair and voices. Where was the father? Was he even there when they all arrived, or had he sought refuge in his study? It didn’t really matter. He was an old man with stomachaches who hated visitors. Look! Here comes my little family! More and more people filled the yard. The girl began to laugh. This wasn’t a little family. It was a big family. Look—there’s Jan. He is the oldest and the wisest with a
wife and children. And there—there’s the sister who lives in London, who smiles like a movie star. And there’s the airline pilot. The girl knew that one of her brothers was an airline pilot who flew back and forth across the Atlantic every week. He was the tallest of them all, she knew it was him the minute she laid eyes on him, he turned round in the yard and when he caught sight of her, he set down his suitcase and opened his arms, he was treetop tall and slim and the best-looking man she had ever seen, and she had, despite her tender years, seen lots, and she ran toward him and he swept her so high off the ground and swung her round so fast that she nearly lost her breath, but instead of losing her breath she opened her eyes, slowly, as if she were underwater, and from up there in his arms she saw not only Hammars, with its flat moors, its lambs, as the islanders called the sheep, whether they were newborn or fully grown, and its old limestone farmhouses, but the whole of Fårö, from the limestone quarry up at Norsholmen and the English cemetery south of Dämba, to the sand dunes at Ullahau where the girl had heard that you could go sledding in the winter, to the old grocery store down by the church and the beaches at Sudersand, Ekeviken, and Norsta Aurar, and all the way out to the stacks at Langhammars and Digerhuvud, and just when she thought he was going to set her down on the ground again, his arms grew even longer and she rose even higher in the air and now she could see the ocean and the horizon and the Iron Curtain there in the distance, where, if you lose your way and end up there, they’ll never let you out.