by Linn Ullmann
For many years I carried my father, or what I had left of him, around with me in my purse. He died in the summer of 2007, and for several years he rattled about in there along with all the other stuff.
What I had left of him were six tape recordings from the last spring he was alive. His voice. And the silence. And my voice. And all the sounds I can’t quite identify that the microphone had picked up and which imprecisely could be labeled noise. The recordings were made with a small gray tape recorder the size of a thick finger. I knew I would have to deal with them somehow, the recordings, I mean. I would have to listen to them. This was my father. He was in my purse. There were probably more suitable places to keep him. In a safe-deposit box, for example, or a filing cabinet, or a small chest.
HE SAID THAT THINGS went missing. He said that the words disappeared. If he were younger he would have written a book about growing old. But now that he was old, he wasn’t up to it. He no longer had the vigor of a younger man. This line of thinking prompted one of us, I don’t remember who, to come up with the idea of writing a book together. I would ask the questions, he would answer them, I would transcribe the conversations, and finally we would sit down together and edit the material. Once the book was out, we could take the jeep and go on a book tour.
He was eighty-seven when the idea of a book first came up. He sometimes forgot words, or mixed them up, but his memory was better than mine. To have a plan. This is the family creed. I have a big family. One family on my mother’s side and one on my father’s. My father had nine children with six different women—I really ought to talk to him about that, I remember thinking. If we are going to write a book. Because I don’t believe he planned to have nine children with six different women. I was not a planned child. My mother has told me that she carried birth-control pills around with her in her purse, but she either forgot or neglected to take them, I’m not sure which, the story is different each time she tells it. My father has told me that the discussion of an abortion was brief and undramatic, and that it ended with them agreeing she should have the baby. Happiness is finding yourself in the middle of the planning phase, when everything is possible and nothing is final. A plan is more tangible than hope, there is time to spare. “We may, indeed, say that the hour of death is uncertain,” Proust writes when depicting his beloved grandmother’s last days (although he was actually writing about his mother), “but when we say so we represent that hour to ourselves as situated in a vague and remote expanse of time, it never occurs to us that it can have any connexion with the day that has already dawned, or may signify that death—or its first assault and partial possession of us, after which it will never leave hold of us again—may occur this very afternoon, so far from uncertain, this afternoon every hour of which has already been allotted to some occupation.” My father and I made a plan without considering that death had already begun to take possession of us. For two years, with time to spare, we made plans for a book about growing old.
The readiness is all:
What to call it?
How to structure it?
What to ask him?
He said I could ask him whatever I wanted, but I doubted whether that was true. I said: I don’t believe you, and he said: No, really, whatever you want, and I said: Okay, we’ll see how it goes.
FOR TWO YEARS WE planned the book. We discussed it when we spoke on the phone, my father liked to talk on the phone and had opinions about my answering-machine message, his own message was short and brusque. We talked about the book whenever we met in person. I went to see him at Hammars, mostly in summer, but sometimes in spring and autumn. We talked about other things too, but when we weren’t talking about other things, we talked about the book.
Now and then he would say something that made me think: I have to ask him about this. I should be taking notes. I didn’t take notes. I remember him saying that growing old was work and that every morning he made a list of all his ailments (stiff hip, bad night, stomachache, inconsolable and filled with longing for Ingrid, leaden body, anxious when thinking about the day that lay ahead, toothache, et cetera), and if the list amounted to eight or fewer, he would get out of bed. If it came to more than eight, he would stay in bed. But that almost never happened.
“Why eight?”
“Well, because I’m over eighty. I allow myself one ailment per decade.”
We spent a lot of time discussing schedules. My father was a punctual man.
So: at what time of the day should these recordings take place?
Eleven to one?
Ten to one?
Ten thirty to one?
Every other day?
Every day?
I voted for the shorter sessions, he voted for the longer ones. It wasn’t always that way. As a child, I was occasionally allowed to visit him in his study and sit in the big battered armchair in order for us to converse. He called it a sitting. I remember wishing the sittings would never end.
“Shall we have a sitting tomorrow, you and I,” he’d say when I was a child, “around eleven if that suits you?”
“Okay.”
Ingrid in the kitchen.
“He’s waiting for you, just go on in.”
Pappa in the office.
“Well! How’s my youngest daughter today?”
“Fine.”
“Fine? What does that mean, fine? I don’t want a communiqué.”
“What’s a communiqué?”
“I don’t want empty words. Fine, fine. I want to know exactly how you are!”
We would sit facing each other. I took up only a tiny portion of the chair in which I sat. We shared a footrest for our feet. He wore thin, brown woolen socks, I had maybe a blue sock on one foot and a white sock on the other, neither very clean, I would have liked to have found a clean matching pair, but then I would have been late. He spread a blanket over both our feet.
“Do you feel a draft? Are you cold?”
One time I sneezed. It wasn’t a big sneeze, just a little one caused by dust in the air.
My father went quiet.
“Do you have a cold?”
“No, no.”
“You’ve spent too much time in the swimming pool. I knew it. You stayed in the water too long.”
“No, Pappa. I promise. I don’t have a cold.”
“Well! It’s time we finished anyway. I don’t think you should swim any more today. Maybe you should lie down? I’ll tell Ingrid you’re not feeling well and that you need to lie down and rest.”
Summer 2006. We continue planning our book and all that lies ahead. The book will emerge through many phases. Interviewing, transcribing, compiling, writing, editing. A great deal of work.
A woman in a red dress moves into the guesthouse at Hammars. She is a journalist, working in radio and television. I will call her Ana, after the Hungarian brothel madam Ana Cumpănaş. One day she appears in Ingrid’s kitchen. She’s making meatballs. I come riding down on my bike and catch a glimpse of her red dress through the window. Another day she’s sitting with my father on the brown-stained bench. They’re giggling. Yet another day they make plans to go to the local church to listen to chamber music, the musicians have come all the way from Stockholm. I insist on going with them. We squeeze into the jeep. My father drives fast. When we reach the church, Ana and I take hold of the gangly old man’s arms as if he needs support on each side, which he does not. He goes for long walks every day supported only by his cane, but today he strides up the aisle with Ana on one side and me on the other, smiling broadly.
Late summer 2006. The phone rings. I’m up at Ängen. He’s down at Hammars. Although we’re only a few minutes’ walk from each other, we speak on the phone more often than face to face.
“Guess what?” he says.
“What?”
“I’m engaged!”
“Okay.”
“You think I’m making it up?”
“Yes.”
He pauses for effect.
“I’ve heard th
at you’re jealous.”
“I’m not jealous. I’m your daughter.”
“You’re jealous!”
“I’m not jealous. I’m not one of your women. I’m your daughter. You’re welcome to get engaged anytime. ”
Autumn 2006. The phone rings. I’m in Oslo. He’s at Hammars.
“I’ve been thinking about our book.”
“Okay?”
“I’ve been thinking about the . . . technicalities.”
“Pappa, don’t worry about it.”
“No, listen. I’ve got an idea. How about Ana?”
“No.”
“She’s a radio journalist, you know that, right? She has access to first-class technical equipment.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
“I thought it might be a good idea if she brought her equipment to Hammars . . . I mean, if we put her in charge of the actual taping of the interviews.”
“You don’t think a simple tape recorder will do?”
“I’m concerned about the sound quality.”
“I’m literally on my way out to buy a tape recorder.”
“What? Now?”
“No, not right this minute. But soon.”
“Hmm.”
“Pappa, this is our book!”
“Okay, okay, don’t get mad.”
“I’m not mad.”
“Yes, you are, I can tell by your voice that you’re mad.”
Spring 2007. A series of minor strokes, says the doctor. I Google “minor stroke.” Temporary disruption of blood flow to the brain. The medical term for this is transient ischemic attack. The change is gradual, but something is happening to his memory and his ability to distinguish between what is real and what is not real. By real and not real I mean: he no longer distinguishes between dreams (I don’t know whether dreams is the right word here) and reality (I don’t know whether that’s the right word either).
All the windows of his brain have been thrown wide open.
Beckett wrote: “Such the confusion now between real and—how say its contrary? No matter. That old tandem.”
He says: “Let me tell you a little about the order of my day. Every afternoon at precisely one o’clock I am wheeled to the kitchen and served an omelet.”
He laughs with his mouth closed.
He used to laugh with his mouth open, but after developing an abscess on the inside of his cheek that makes it harder for him to speak, he laughs with his mouth closed. And then he says: “Omelet at one. That’s a pretty good title for our book, don’t you think?”
WE CALLED IT the work. Or the project. Or the book. It is difficult to know what to call things. On an undated yellow paper note, he writes:
My Dearest Daughter!
I’ve tried in vain to call you to say that I’m at your disposal and prepared to work on “our project” whenever you want.
Hugs,
Your Old Father
There is a stain on the note. The stain is big and round with a smaller teardrop stain jutting out of it. If it were a child’s drawing and not a stain, I would have taken it to depict a hot-air balloon with a small basket for passengers. I must have left something on top of the note, a cup of coffee or a glass of wine.
The stain highlights some of the words: Daughter, in vain, prepared.
LATELY, THIS SEEMS TO keep happening: I see one face and think of another. I don’t know what to call it. Disappearing contours.
For a while I remembered nothing about my father, I read the notes he wrote to me, looked at pictures of him, but remembered nothing, and by the word “remember” I mean that I couldn’t conjure him up, picture him, imagine what he would have said or done in a given situation, recall his voice. To mourn someone is to remember them, I couldn’t do either, neither mourn nor remember. I walked around blindly, saw neither the dead nor the living, my husband wrote in one of his poems: You have vanished into your father’s house.
When he was still alive my father had an archive and a foundation named after him. Eventually there would be three foundations, one dedicated to his manuscripts, notebooks, letters, and photographs, one dedicated to his houses, and one dedicated to the island he called home. After his death, his face graced a postage stamp and a banknote, he even had a street stub named after him. I walk up and down in the rain, the street lies in the middle of Stockholm, near the Royal Dramatic Theatre. It’s really more of a stub than a street, I count my steps, up and down, but arrive at a different number every time. At the end of the street, which opens up onto a square also bearing his name, a heap of bikes are parked. The bike locks—black and silver—coil round the wheels. One of the bikes has toppled over and is gradually dragging the other bikes down with it.
Tell us about your father.
I shake my head.
I can’t very well say that I don’t remember anything.
One day I leaf through a book about the American artist Georgia O’Keeffe. When she grew old, she lived in New Mexico and painted the things she saw around her. Her mountains are rust-red, terra-cotta, yellow, like massive membranes, the plains and the sky barely visible. She combined perspectives, the book says, in such a way that when you look at her paintings you seem to be both very close and very far away from what you’re looking at. O’Keeffe is famously associated with the expression faraway nearby.
In the early ’80s, the photographer Ansel Adams took a picture of her. Adams and O’Keeffe were friends and drawn to the same landscapes. She was older than he was, but still outlived him by several years. In the photograph she’s over ninety, ninety-two. She’s wearing a white shirt, a white scarf in her hair, and a black jacket. Around her neck hangs a piece of jewelry that looks as though it’s been forged from earth and light and sand. Her face is austere, her skin past wrinkled and aging, like a rocky outcrop, a lunar crater, or a sun-bleached bone. Her forehead is broad, her gaze determined, the nose long and thick like a naked branch, the lips firm and taut. My father looked exactly like that in the years before he died. The forehead, the nose, the mouth. For a long time I had felt as though I had forgotten everything, I couldn’t even remember his face, but now here was Ansel Adams’s photograph of Georgia O’Keeffe. I looked at her face and thought of his.
“Let’s go to New Mexico,” I said to my husband.
“Can’t we just stay here for a while?” he said, and laid his hand on top of mine.
THE BOY WHO HELPED me was around eighteen years old, tall, skinny, with long hair and a pale, pimply face. He picked his way slowly through the store. It was a huge store, with cell phones and GPS systems in one department, TV and audio in another, small electronic items in a third, household goods and appliances in a fourth, computers in a fifth, cameras and video equipment in a sixth. I noticed his fingers, long, slender, as if he were using them to feel his way around. Occasionally, for no apparent reason, I start talking to strangers. Explaining myself. I told the boy that I needed a tape recorder because I was going to interview my father, that my father was eighty-eight years old, almost eighty-nine, that I needed the best tape recorder on the market, that I didn’t want to be sitting there on some remote island with the old man and worry about faulty equipment.
“They’re not really called tape recorders anymore,” the boy said, and looked down at the floor, “there’s no tape, just a digital recorder.”
I tried to catch his eye.
“Well, yes, I realize that, but you know what I mean, right, what I need? Can you help me find a good one . . . you know, that’s not technically complicated?”
He was spindly like an insect, his name tag said Sander, I couldn’t decide whether he was clumsy or graceful, he constantly seemed on the verge of bumping into things. It had the quality of a carefully choreographed dance, this almost bumping into things, and yet avoiding it every time.
In the spring of 2007 we drove to Hammars. The new tape recorder was in my purse. My husband was driving. Our daughter Eva sat in the backseat, watching cartoons on a laptop. She had new p
ale-blue headphones. Now and again my husband would stop the car and rest his head on the steering wheel. I asked him what was wrong and he said that nothing was wrong. Eva’s headphones were the size of jellyfish.
I hadn’t seen my father for several months and had only spoken to him a few times on the phone. He was sitting at the kitchen table, eating an omelet and drinking a glass of wine. He looked up as I walked in, eyes flickering. He had aged a hundred years since I last saw him. Didn’t he recognize me? He asked if I had come from the Royal Palace.
With a little wave of his hand, he invited me to sit down.
“Do you want an omelet?”
I shook my head, sat down, trying to catch his eye, but he didn’t want to look at me. He said he was ready to resume his duties as royal coachman and that we could be on our way as soon as he had finished his lunch.
“Pappa. It’s me.”
He continued to eat, his eyes on his plate.
“Pappa?”
Women took turns caring for him. They came and went. First there was Cecilia and later also Maja. Cecilia supervised everything, Maja took care of the household. Eventually, there were others. That last summer I counted six women at Hammars. That’s how he wanted it. Be careful what you wish for, he used to say.
To mourn another person is not necessarily the same as to despair. When Ingrid died, my father was grief-stricken. He despaired. He said he wanted to die but was too much of a coward to kill himself. I am a seventy-four-year-old man and only now does God decide to kick me out of the nursery, he said. My father lost a son as well. Jan, his oldest. If I lost a child, despair would be too feeble a word. As would grief-stricken. I wouldn’t have known how to go on. But he did. Jan died, and he went on. Children were not what mattered most to him. I still busy myself with maps, lists, charts—important, unimportant, most loved, least loved—even though I know it gets me nowhere. To be honest, I think I have mourned my parents all my life. They changed before my eyes the way my children change before my eyes and I don’t really know who I was to them.