by Linn Ullmann
Half sister and half brother—as if they weren’t real. Half-born, half-alive, half-remembered, half-forgotten—shadow children who vanished into the lilac hedge or slipped between the bars of the cattle guards. In the evening, there was a party at Dämba, and the girl danced a dance at full speed round and round and round until she hardly had any clothes left on her body.
The father gave her a green lined notebook and told her to remember to write in it every day. Her big sister, Maria, wrote in her diary every day and had done so ever since she was younger than the girl was now. If the girl didn’t write things down, the father said, she would likely forget. But the girl didn’t want to keep a diary. Instead she invented a secret language and filled the green notebook with secret tables and words: Ivoefo qqjttfsS j tåmb. She drew maps too. Hundreds of maps. The measurements didn’t need to be too exact, what mattered were the borders. Beyond the brown-stained bench lay the bike shed and beyond the bike shed lay the forest with its three trails. One trail led to the sea, another trail led to a little shack, and a third led to a clearing or a meadow where the father would later build a new house.
The father’s plan for the new house—all his houses had names and this one was called Ängen, meaning meadow—was for him and Ingrid to live there in their old age. He had it all figured out. They would stay at Hammars in the summer and at Ängen in the winter. Sometimes, he said, the winds from the sea were so violent that it was impossible to sleep at Hammars. At such times he would rather sleep somewhere else. As would Ingrid. But then Ingrid died and left him grief-stricken.
Some summers were cold, and everyone said it was the coldest summer ever. The father liked it best when it rained. He said that all his worst nightmares played out in deafening sunlight. When the girl was little she wasn’t allowed to go into the father and Ingrid’s room until the man on the radio had finished reading the weather forecast with temperatures for all of Sweden. Once the man had announced the temperatures for Visby, Visby, seventeen, meaning that it was 62.6 degrees Fahrenheit, the coast was clear and the girl could go into the grown-ups’ bedroom and wake them. Her adult siblings took turns staying at Ängen together with their lovers, spouses, and children. The girl was no longer the family’s youngest. There was a house over at Sudersand, called Karlberga, which later was sold, and then there was the little cottage down by the sea, the Writing Lodge, where her older brothers would stay with their girlfriends.
The girl, like most children, enjoyed making lists and keeping count, and if anyone asked her about her father she could have said: My father has four houses, two cars, five wives, one swimming pool, nine children, and one cinema.
Pappa and Ingrid never lived at Ängen, the house on the meadow, but before she died, Ingrid decorated it exactly as she wanted it. Jan spent several summers there with his children. He started out as a locomotive engineer, but ended up in the theatre, working as a director. King Lear is not about a man who wants to be king, but about a king who wants to be a man. And that, Jan said, raising his hand, is the most difficult thing of all. Anyone can be king! Jan was the head of the sibling flock. One summer he suggested hoisting a big tent on the stretch of moor between Hammars and Ängen to make room for the steadily growing family who came to Fårö every year in July to celebrate the father’s birthday. The father balked at the idea and roared at Jan that no fucking way am I having a bloody tent on my property, no bloody fucking way, that’s going too damn far, I will not have people coming here thinking they can do whatever the fuck they want.
The girl lived in the United States for some time before returning home to Norway. She married and had a son. He was named after his father’s father, Olav, but everyone called him Ola. She was no longer a girl, but she still had her maps. Every summer she stayed at Ängen. In the evenings Ola played soccer on the grass outside.
The art of telling a story without words—whatever happened to that, the father asked, and showed silent films at the cinema in the afternoons. This is your education, he said to the girl when she was still a girl. Pay attention. Back then, Åke operated the film projectors. Later came Cecilia: Tall, dark, beautiful, and barefoot behind the glass panel, waiting for the signal from the father: Right arm up in the air. A little wave. Lights out. The film starts. Love in the Afternoon. Jan was there. Several of the father’s daughters were there. One summer Käbi moved into the main house at Dämba and after that she returned every summer. Years before, she and the father had been married, they had a son, Daniel, now they were friends and had dinner together every Sunday, and after dinner she would play him something on the piano. When Käbi came to see a film, she would stroll across the moor wearing a large hat and a long summer frock, like in that photograph of Françoise Gilot on the beach, the one where Picasso is running after her with a parasol. The father didn’t exactly run after Käbi with a parasol, but he waited for her and called her madame and pretended not to notice when she, in the middle of the movie, made rustling noises with the water bottle and nuts that she had brought with her in a large wicker basket. No one else brought wicker baskets with water bottles and nuts, no one else made rustling noises. That would never have gone unremarked. Others came and went, such were the summer afternoons, and some were always there. Before going inside to take their seats, they would sit for a few minutes on a bench outside. You must give your ears time to adjust, the father said. And your eyes. Not just rush in and out. And in the middle of July, on the fifteenth precisely, the day after his birthday, the curlews migrated across Dämba in a low-flying flock.
“Look!” the father said, pointing to the black carpet of beaks and feathers weaving their way overhead.
“There they go, leaving Dämba to begin their journey south.”
He grinned.
“Isn’t it incredible? On precisely the same day every year!”
He was a punctual man who valued punctuality in others, birds included, and had a unique talent for partings.
The girl eventually divorced her son’s father, and after a year she met a new man. He will make you very unhappy, said the father. A bit dramatic. The man was good-looking and she was in love.
One winter evening she spoke to her brother Jan on the phone. He asked how things were going with the new man and she told him that he had left her, and then Jan told her that there was a high survival rate for the type of leukemia he had, possibly as much as 80 percent, but that the last few nights had been a nightmare; strange to think that maybe I only got fifty-four years on my ticket, he added.
The new man came back to the girl and they were a couple once again. At their wedding they were both very out of breath, as if they had run all the way to church. In due course they had a daughter. They called her Eva. In the summer they would go down to Hammars and stay at Ängen. The lamp above the kitchen table had a yellow shade with a broad band of pleated trim that became a little more threadbare every year.
Every day the father drove his red jeep back and forth between Hammars and Dämba. The drive took ten minutes. The afternoon screening started at three. But you had to be there at ten to three. He once said he wanted to build a railroad track between Hammars and Dämba and ride back and forth to his cinema in a steam locomotive.
He also drove to Fårösund to buy the morning papers. This he did in the late afternoon, after the movie. To get from Fårö to Fårösund, you have to take one of the two yellow ferries. It takes five minutes to cross the strait. During the summer months, the ferries shuttle back and forth, but in the autumn and winter, there’s only one leaving every hour. The ferry is always on time. Imagine you are the only one going across the strait. It’s late October. Imagine you come driving at breakneck speed. The road to the ferry landing is long and straight and the ferrymen can see you from a distance. You drive past the church, the moors, the lambs, the pine trees, and an old windmill. The ferrymen see you, but you’re too late and they will not wait for you. They lower the barrier, you can hear the boom even though your car windows are closed, they raise
the bow ramp and set out for Fårösund.
He grew older, old, he said that things went missing.
“What sorts of things?”
“Words. Memories.”
She didn’t give it much thought at the time. His memory was better than hers. Nothing had changed in that respect. He remembered names, dates, historical events, films, stage sets, pieces of music. He told the same stories over and over again, but he’d always done that, it was part of the summer repertoire. Maybe the time between each telling of the same story had narrowed, but other than that there weren’t any noticeable signs.
A yellow piece of paper on the kitchen table at Ängen, undated:
Dearly Beloved
Youngest Daughter!
You who come with summer (whatever the weather).
The warmest of possible welcomes
to you and young Ola (Olav?)
and dear friends.
Big hug
Father.
He liked to make the red jeep roar. He wanted to be heard, he wanted people to hear that he was coming. The girl, who is no longer a girl but a grown woman and mother of two, pictures a flash of red and whirling dust through the forest. Hear how much noise I’m making! See how high above the ground I’m soaring! Now he rounds the bend, he’s going fast, very fast, brakes screeching, a final rev of the engine just for the fun of it, and then he turns off the engine. He opens the door, grabs his cane, and makes a brave attempt to jump out.
It is exactly ten minutes to three.
“What are the words that go missing?”
“Oh, I don’t know . . . I’m in the jeep. I have turned off the engine, there are hardly any other cars on the ferry, I wave to the ferryman and he waves back. I believe he’s been a ferryman here for forty years. Summer is finally over. The gray light has returned. There is a girl standing at the railing, face averted, in her twenties. I’m on my way to Fårösund to buy the morning papers. Suddenly the sky opens and the rain starts pouring down. The girl looks up at the sky but doesn’t move. The ferry throbs. The rain pours down and I switch on . . . you see? Everything comes to a halt. It starts to rain, the girl looks up at the sky and I switch on . . . oh, for heaven’s sake, what do you call them . . . ? The things you switch on in the car when it rains and then they move back and forth and go swish-swish-swish?”
“Windshield wipers?”
“Exactly! Windshield wipers!”
“You’d forgotten that they’re called windshield wipers?”
“Like a white spot in the brain, forgotten, gone. It happens all the time. I forget things.”
It takes several minutes for the eyes to adjust to the dark. You can’t just rush in and out. He repeats the same thing year after year. Some summers he lets his hair and beard grow, other summers he shaves everything off. He has a mole on his right cheek, it gets bigger every year, and he wears huge sepia-tinted sunglasses. He is a little thinner now. And I’m taller than him.
“Ah, good afternoon,” he says, climbing out of the jeep with difficulty. “Let’s sit on the bench for a while before we go inside.”
In autumn 2006, we went to Hammars by car. My husband drove. We took our daughter with us. I hadn’t seen my father since the beginning of August. We had agreed to meet outside the cinema.
A few days earlier we had spoken on the phone. It wasn’t a long conversation.
“What are we seeing?”
“Oh, you’ll find out when you get here.”
“I’m looking forward to it.”
“Me too! I wish you a warm welcome.”
“See you there at the usual time?”
“At the usual time.”
I’m standing next to Cecilia, waiting, in the autumn gray. She has long, dark hair and wears a bulky parka. I was used to seeing her barefoot, but now she has on thick boots. After Ingrid died, she handled everything having to do with the houses, in addition to being the appointed projectionist. She was the only one allowed to touch the projectors, which he loved more than anything else in the world. They’re gorgeous old broads, he said. And wearing very well, I might add. To hell with all that goddamn digital crap.
Sometimes he has visitors in autumn and winter, but for the most part he is alone.
I check my watch and glance up. It is eight minutes to three. The road is quiet.
I turn to Cecilia.
“He’s late.”
“Yeah, it happens.”
“Pardon?”
She stuffs her hands in her pockets.
“It happens sometimes . . . it’s not uncommon.”
“Not uncommon . . . what are you talking about?”
I look at my watch.
“It’s five to three.”
“So what? We don’t start until three.”
She doesn’t look at me.
“Cecilia, he is late . . . my father is late. He should have been here at ten to. That doesn’t worry you? It worries me.”
She sighs, looks at me.
“The first time it happened I was worried—that was last winter. I waited for six or seven minutes, and when he didn’t show up I went looking for him. That time, he had driven off the road, opened the door, tried to get out of the jeep, tripped, and fallen. I found him lying in the ditch.”
“But. . . we have to go look for him!”
“Go ahead if you like, but he’s often been late since then and not because he’s lying in a ditch. He’ll be here soon, you’ll see. If he’s very late, I’ll take the car and go find him.”
We stand there in silence. I check my watch again. Five past three. A nuthatch flies over the fields and off toward the marsh. And then nothing. I want everything to be the way it was before, and everything around me is the way it was before. This landscape never changes. But no matter where I stand or walk, no matter what I say or think, no matter where I look, the time agreed upon, ten to three, has long since passed. And then I hear the jeep. It’s coming now. Tearing down the road. Faint birdsong is drowned out by the drone of the engine. His sunglasses are so big they cover his whole face—he looks like a nocturnal animal. He slams on the brakes, opens the door, gropes for his cane. It is seven minutes past three. Seventeen minutes late. He takes off his sunglasses and stretches his arms out to me.
He does not say: I’m sorry I’m late. Or: Forgive me for being late.
Pappa puts his arm around my shoulders and we walk toward the door. I nestle up to him.
“Ah! There you are!” he says. “Welcome! Oh dear! Did you have a comfortable trip? Come, come, let’s sit down here on the bench for a moment before we go inside and see the film.”
II
SPOOLS
...
Have you been getting on with your memoirs?
Did you try the tape-recorder?
—SAMUEL BECKETT in a letter
to Thomas MacGreevy
I HAVE A KINK IN the line running from my hip bone to my neck. It isn’t noticeable to anyone but me. I think it’s because of my purse. I stuff things into it and forget to take them out. I hang it over my shoulder and walk around lopsided all day. Often, when I reach in to get something, I prick myself on some object or other, a broken safety pin, for example, or a sewing needle. I have no idea why there are sewing needles in my purse. I can’t sew and haven’t sewn anything since I was a little girl in fifth grade and had to make a felt cushion. It took me a very long time to finish that cushion, I dreaded sewing classes, I made no progress, I would never be finished, it would never be pretty, all the other students were done with their cushions and I was still plodding away at mine. Winter came and it snowed for days in a row, it was dark when the school day began and dark when it ended. And so the weeks went by. When the cushion was finally finished, I thought it looked like a red cloud, with its coarse stitching and stuffing poking out through all the gaps, but the teacher, who suffered from migraines, did not think it looked like a red cloud. You haven’t managed to sew it up properly! she shouted, and her voice resounded down the grani
te steps and out into the schoolyard, where the filthy mounds of snow in the corners were starting to melt. Her breath had an odd milky smell to it that stuck to her, despite the ammonia-strength lozenges she was constantly sucking on, something seeped from her pores, tiredness, I think, and perhaps I sensed, although I wouldn’t have put it that way at the time, that she saw something of herself in that cushion—that no matter how long she worked on stitching herself together, she’d never be properly sewn up.
I have never pricked my finger on a spindle, never fallen asleep for a hundred years, fallen yes, but not slept for a hundred years, I rarely sleep for more than four hours at a stretch, five if I’m lucky, I once pricked my finger on a sprig of spruce, it was summer and I was carrying the remains of last year’s Christmas tree around in my purse, I don’t know how it ended up there, underneath my cell phone and my wallet and my mirror. I’ve pricked myself on twigs, stalks, a fragment of a pinecone—a forest grows inside my purse, autumn leaves, dandelions, yarrow, and grass.
My daughter gives me flowers, lip gloss, elastic hairbands, leaves she wants me to hold on to, once she gave me a drawing of a tree. It was tall and green with a thick brown trunk and two large branches reaching for the sky. This was when I still picked her up from school. Now she walks to and from school with her friends.
I had meant to unfold the drawing and hang it on the refrigerator door, but it got tossed into my purse and forgotten. But it was for you. Didn’t you want it? Sometimes my daughter and I use the same hairbrush, also in my purse, often she brushes her hair so hard that strands of it tear out and get caught in the bristles.