by Linn Ullmann
Here is a picture of Pappa as a young man. No one calls him Pu now. He’s far too grown-up to be called Pu. He has slicked-back hair and is wearing his Sunday best, your eyes fall on the white shirt collar, the black knot of his tie and the somewhat ill-fitting suit jacket. What year is it? Perhaps 1935, or 1936, I’m not sure. I don’t think he likes having his picture taken. His mouth is closed, he doesn’t smile, his lips are well shaped and sensitive, as if they were borrowed from his mother for the occasion. His ears are big and stick out, there is a sly glint in his eye, he looks at you with a combination of feigned indifference, suspicion (I recognize that look from the eyes of the twelve-years-younger Pu), and ingratiating devotion—there’s no telling what he might do if you turn your back on him. Does he spit on your food? Does he ask for a kiss? Does he get up and bail, never to return?
Now I sit hunched over the same pictures that Pappa sat hunched over.
In my mind’s eye I see him, the old man of over eighty, studying the young man of seventeen, he who is no longer called Pu, the youth with the sly glint in his eye. The eighty-year-old has written something in the margin. Just two words. But in order for all the letters to fit on the page—without having to write across the youngster’s face—he has written from top to bottom rather than from left to right, as always with a black felt-tip pen and in his big, childish capitals:
THE
MA-
STUR-
BA-
TOR
For a long time, the only image of my father I could picture was of him lying dead. This picture doesn’t exist, but for a while it obscured all the other pictures.
He is lying with his head on a white pillow, in his own bed in the house at Hammars. Outside it is overcast, I don’t know whether morning had broken when he took his last breath, and whether he saw a streak of light between the curtains—the curtains were closed when he died—he died at the end of July, at around four in the morning, the hour he himself called the hour of the wolf, without knowing the slightest thing about wolves and their habits. Someone had tied a checkered kerchief around his face and made a bow at the top of his head, presumably one of the six women who cared for him during his final days, someone who knew what to do with the dead: a scarf tied around the face prevents the mouth from falling open and staying open once rigor mortis sets in. Someone had also closed his eyes. We will not go to heaven with open mouth or open eyes. I think he looks cranky there on the pillow.
I picture the movement of loosening and untying, all of the times I have loosened and untied my children’s hats, scarves, shoelaces, I sit on the edge of the bed, stretch out my hand, deliberating whether to loosen and untie the stupid bow, Pappa shouldn’t die all tied up in a bow, but then I lose my nerve, there will be many of us coming to say goodbye today. We used to get together every summer for his birthday, his children would have a lavish meal, paid for by him, he didn’t eat with us, but dropped by afterward; a frantic cleanup before he appears, no glasses or bottles on the table no dishes in the sink, everything has to look spic-and-span. Now that he was dead, we had agreed to go in one at a time, this was the first of many processions, when it’s my turn, I walk in, sit down on the edge of his bed, place my hands in my lap, do not loosen and untie, the bow stays, like a joke, like a sneer, I don’t know when rigor mortis sets in, I don’t know whether his mouth will fall open if I remove the kerchief.
HEI believe in God in every respect, but I don’t expect to understand His will. God is in music. I believe that the great composers speak to us about their experience of God. This is not nonsense. For me, Bach is a constant.
SHEBut you used to have doubts?
HENot about Bach.
SHENo, but about God.
HEAll that nonsense, it’s over with now, it’s gone, I don’t have any energy left to babble on about lack of faith, lack of trust, and all that.
SHEDid anything particular happen to put an end to your doubts?
HEIt has happened gradually, peu á peu, I suppose it’s fair to say that since Ingrid’s death I have had an acute sense of God’s will . . . I can be outside, here at Hammars, surrounded by the sea and the sky, and I’ll sense a presence.
OCCASIONALLY, THE GIRL WAS allowed to borrow one of his brown or green cardigans, the ones with the leather elbow patches and bits of stitching and darning. The cardigans were much too big, nearly trailing along the ground. Every day he rode up and down the shore on his big red ladies’ bicycle. The girl stood at the door, swathed in one of his cardigans, and watched him disappear down the narrow path. There are stones everywhere on Fårö. On the beach. Along the gravel roads. Around the houses—stone walls. The largest and oldest rocks, the limestone stacks, are called rauks. One summer, the girl took her bike to the other end of the island to explore the stacks together with her brother Daniel, who believed his little sister was such a skinny, shivery, teetering slip of a thing that he was afraid she might fall between the bars of the cattle guards.
The four-hundred-million-year-old stacks force their way up and out of the sea, reaching for the sky. They look like heads, huge, weird old men’s heads, and in the summer, flowers and grass grow on them and children climb all over them.
Daniel and the girl each had their own little room, wall-to-wall, at one end of the house. Their father let them draw and write on the doors. They shared a shower and a toilet. Because of the water shortage, no more than one shower a week was permitted and you were not allowed to flush if all you’d done was pee, but the girl flushed anyway so Daniel wouldn’t see that she had been to the bathroom. Daniel was four years older than the girl and had written fuck! on his door. Ingrid made it clear that things now had gone too far. It was one thing to let the children draw and write on the doors, quite another to allow the word “fuck,” but Pappa didn’t mind, so that was the end of that. They could also make as much of a mess as they liked. Not in the rest of the house, which was always kept in perfect order, Ingrid saw to that, there was a time and a place for everything, but in their own rooms the children could make a mess. No one told them to go clean their rooms. It was a house rule of sorts. When the children visited their father, no adult would ever say: Go clean your room. The girl’s room was small, with flowery wallpaper. She had her own radio on her bedside table and a box full of old magazines (that she read every summer) on top of her closet. On the floor, halfway under the bed, lay the two empty suitcases.
When the father’s office door was closed you were not allowed to knock. Usually because he was at his desk, writing. Or giving Daniel a German lesson. The girl wondered whether Daniel would have done absolutely anything to get out of his German lessons with the father. Ich bin der Geist, der stets verneint! Und das mit Recht; denn alles, was entsteht, ist wert, daß es zugrunde geht, the father said, and laughed out loud. And now it’s almost time for the lesson to begin. Daniel is sitting in the chair in the office, the same chair she sits in when she visits the father’s study. She has wandered this way by mistake, she’s not sure how, she’s supposed to be somewhere else entirely: in the garage, which doubles as a ballet studio, in her room, out picking wild strawberries for dessert, but she has wandered this way and she can see her big brother through the crack in the door—head in his hands, the long, dark hair falling over his brow and eyes. Ich bin der Geist, der stets verneint. German grammar is beyond what any child should be expected to understand. And in the middle of summer vacation—that’s probably the worst part. The girl is convinced that Daniel’s mother is behind this, that she’s the one who’s insisting that the father tutor his son in German. Their mothers do sometimes get such ideas into their heads—it’s only right that the father should take some responsibility. And now here’s the girl peeping through the crack in the door at her brother, who is sitting in the chair with his head in his hands, but she must have made a sound, maybe she scratched one of her hundred mosquito bites, because the father turns and looks straight at her. Her brother raises his head and he too looks at her. She stands b
y the crack in the door, a thin strip of skin and blue, peeping and scratching and making sounds, she is about to say something but decides not to—short dress, tight ponytail, pipe-cleaner legs. No one says a word, it’s not her turn to be at this end of the house, and she’s not the one who has to learn German. The father gets up, walks across the room and closes the door without so much as a glance at her.
Pappa and the girl had an appointment. It was written down in his diary. Or his calendar, as it was also called. The calendar was kept on his desk. Everything had a place and a time. Time had been set aside for the girl and the father to have a conversation.
She tugged at her dress, it was blue and had grown too small for her over the summer. She sat in one chair, he sat in the other.
And after a long time he gave her an almost desperate look and said: “The problem is that there is such a big age difference between us. We simply don’t have all that much to talk about.”
The girl didn’t know what to say to that, she squirmed a little in her chair, she had noticed that in the course of their conversation her father had started to look a little desperate, but had no idea what to do about it, there were forty-eight years between them and forty-eight years is a long time and it wasn’t as if she could put on seven-league boots and try to catch up with him, and frankly, it wasn’t a very insightful remark on the father’s part, of course there was a big age-difference, neither of them could help that or do anything about it. The girl had told him about a chair she wished she had, a chair that was nicer than any other chair in the whole world.
“Is it a metaphor?” he asked.
“Huh?”
“Sometimes a thing is not actually that thing, but something else. This is called a metaphor. What I mean is: Does the chair symbolize something inside you? Something you’re thinking about? Something you dream about?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Is it, perhaps, a magical chair?”
“No!” the girl sighed. “It’s just a chair.”
WHEN THE GIRL TURNED nine, she got her own record player. It would have its place in the old garage up by the forest. The garage had been turned into a ballet studio. She had been taking ballet lessons for several years, and the father and the mother were both very happy about this. The father said that if she wanted to be a ballet dancer she would have to practice every day for two hours in the garage, he had a new pine floor laid for her to dance on and a barre mounted to the wall. He had also ordered a box of rosin for her ballet shoes, all proper ballet studios have a box of rosin to prevent the dancers from slipping and falling. When it was windy outside, pinecones would drop onto the garage roof, first you would hear the thud of the pinecone hitting the roof, followed by the rumble as it rolled down the roof and landed in the gutter.
PAPPA SAID: “MAYBE YOU could write it?”
“The book?”
“Yes.”
“About growing old?”
“Yes.”
“Are you thinking it should be a kind of . . . interview book?”
“If you absolutely have to call it something, then yes.”
“We don’t have to call it anything.”
“But maybe we should call it something.”
“Well, we can always come back to that.”
“I have a good title.”
“What’s that?”
“Laid & Slayed in Eldorado Valley.”
“Hmm?”
“I always wanted to call one of my films Laid & Slayed in Eldorado Valley but never made one that quite fit the bill.”
EVERYTHING HAS A NAME. Every day, at five o’clock, Pappa takes the Volvo, also known as the Red Menace, and drives to the kiosk at the other end of the island to buy the evening papers.
Daniel always gets to go to the kiosk with the father. Sometimes the girl gets to go too. Usually, though, she will stay at the house with Ingrid and Maria and help set the dinner table, or she is sent out to pick flowers for the table, or wild strawberries for dessert. But sometimes she gets to go with Pappa and Daniel to buy the evening papers. She sits in the back. Daniel sits in front. She’s nine, perhaps, and Daniel is twelve. The father drives fast. Much faster than what is legal or safe on these narrow roads, but every time a pretty girl or woman comes walking or cycling toward them, he slows down so that he and Daniel can have a good look at her.
The girl sits in the backseat. The backseat is much bigger than her, she can stretch out her arms and flap them, like a bird flapping its wings, but nobody pays her any attention, maybe they’ve forgotten she’s there. Girls are different from boys.
“She’s lovely!” the father says, shifting into first gear and smiling at the woman who walks or cycles past. The woman smiles back.
“Yes!” Daniel agrees, waving.
Then the father speeds up again, going fast, fast, so fast that dust and grit swirl and spatter around them and the girl cries caw-caw-caw because when they drive this fast it almost feels like they’re about to fly, the forest whizzes past on one side, the sea on the other, fast along the road, past the moors spreading before them, until another girl or woman comes into sight, walking or cycling toward them. The father slows down.
“She’s lovely too!” Daniel says.
“Yes, she is!” says the father.
Every Thursday, Ingrid served fresh cod. If there was one thing the girl hated, it was fish. There are hardly any cod left in the Baltic now, but women and girls still walk and cycle along the road.
SHEWould you like to sit up a bit? Shall I lift you up so you can sit?
HEWhat?
SHEWould you like to sit up, or would you rather lie down?
HEI want to be just the way you want me to be.
One of the recordings took place in his bedroom. He felt ill and was unable to get out of bed, but didn’t want to cancel their work session.
She gets up and walks to the window, pulls back the curtains. He covers his eyes with one hand. She turns and looks at him.
SHEIs it too bright?
HEMaybe a little bright.
She closes the curtains. Walks back to his bedside.
SHEWould you like to lie down or sit up?
HEI want to lie . . .
SHEIs that all right?
HEI don’t know . . . I’ve had three dreadful days.
SHEHave you?
HEThree dreadful days and three dreadful nights.
SHETell me.
HECould you open the curtains?
She gets up and crosses over to the window. Opens the curtains, turns to him.
SHEDo you want to see the ocean?
HENo.
SHEWould you rather have it dark?
HEYes.
SHECompletely dark?
She closes the curtains and walks back to the bed, sits down.
HE(faintly) But we can still see each other, can’t we, even though it’s dark?
III
TO MUNICH
...
. . . in search of emotions, not landscapes.
—GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, Madame Bovary
NANNA’S TWO ROOMS AND kitchen in Oslo are furnished as if she were actually living in a much bigger flat, the walls covered with large and small paintings and reproductions. The eye catcher is the blue portrait of my grandfather in his officer’s uniform displayed on the wall above the blue Biedermeier sofa, but the one that I find most interesting is the small reproduction tucked away almost out of sight behind the carmine Chinese cabinet. The woman in the painting is standing on a blue shore, looking out across a blue ocean. You can’t see her face, only her long, white dress, her long, fair hair, so long that she has strapped the belt of her dress around its ends to hold it in place. Year after year, the woman with the fair hair hangs on Nanna’s wall and gazes out across the ocean without turning even once to show her face, gazing and longing and waiting. I know that the woman in the painting is my mother.
“No, it’s not her,” says Nanna. “Your Mamma was just a little girl wh
en Munch died.”
I shrug my shoulders, I know what I know.
The coffee table is covered with books, mostly novels, and over by the window overlooking the tracks and the Skarpsno tram stop are two prim little armchairs upholstered in a vivid red-and-black rose-patterned fabric. This is the brightest spot in the flat and where I like to sit. There are potted plants on the windowsill, some of them send green tendrils twining up the frames and across the windowpanes, and arranged between the pots are Nanna’s prettiest and most expensive music boxes. When you wind them up, it’s important to wind slowly, and in the proper direction, to the right, as if you were winding up a clock; if you’re impatient and wind too quickly, or in the wrong direction, you’ll ruin the mechanism and the music box will stop playing. Several music boxes double as jewelry boxes, the most precious are made of mahogany and their lids are engraved. Nanna’s favorite is a little case in blonde wood with a red velvet lining. Two tiny porcelain figurines live inside its crimson depths, she in a pink dress and he in a light-blue prince’s costume, and every time you open the case, they dance the same little dance to the tune of “Edelweiss.” Nanna knows all the words to “Edelweiss” and sings with such an insistent voice and mournful vibrato that she drowns out the faint tinkling of the music box.