by Linn Ullmann
As a memento of their father.
I chose a portrait of the dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch—a signed and framed poster from her first production of Café Müller. After Ingrid’s death, when I went to Hammars to try to console him, or at least to keep him company, he had no interest in seeing films at the cinema at Dämba. After a few days, though, he did want to watch either opera or dance on the big TV in the video library, which had a wide selection of dance and opera cassettes. For days on end we looked at Pina Bausch. Café Müller is dream and night, oblivion and memory. The choreographer’s parents owned a small café in Wuppertal that she re-created for the stage—chairs, tables, and sleepwalkers. A man rushes around the stage, moving all the chairs out of the way so the sleepwalkers won’t trip and fall. Pina Bausch herself is tall and thin, pale as water, every time I come down the stairs in my house in Oslo, she’s there, hanging on the wall, wearing her loose-fitting, white, almost transparent nightgown. In the photograph she stands half-hidden behind a door or a partition, her eyes closed. She is thin and fragile and strong, not old and not young, her nightgown is so loosely arranged around her limbs that it almost reveals her left breast. Every time I walk past her, I’m afraid her dress will dissolve if I so much as brush against her.
Next to the poster of Pina Bausch hangs a framed photograph of my mother and father. My son gave it to me. They are sitting side by side, they are no longer lovers, but friends, colleagues. He looks directly into the camera, she looks at him and makes a funny face—squints and pouts. They sit very close. Ola said that he found the picture on the Internet and wanted to give it to me because they looked so happy and free and sort of goofy.
“They look like they’re having fun,” he said.
When my father’s parents died and he himself had begun to grow old, he started writing about them.
In one of his three novels about his family he writes:
I look at the photographs and feel myself powerfully drawn to these two people, who in nearly every way are so unlike the half-averted, mythical, larger-than-life creatures that dominated my childhood and youth.
I look at the photographs of my parents and wonder who they are and who they were, do I carry them with me, did they get answers to any of the things they wondered about, did they feel that time slipped away from them the way it is slipping away from me?
The man who bought my father’s house also bought all of my father’s things. He decided that every single piece should be returned and put back in its original place. The heavier pieces of furniture had not been gone long enough for the dents in the wall-to-wall carpets to disappear. A small group of competent professionals, armed with tape measures and documentation (photographs and descriptions of how all the rooms had looked before they were cleared out), oversaw the process of moving everything back, taking care not to put the straight-backed pine chairs by the wrong table in the wrong room in the wrong house, and that the grandfather clock at the one end of the living room was still perfectly aligned with the old linen cupboard at the other end, you should be able to draw a straight line between the little door of the grandfather clock and the heavy door of the linen cupboard. Both were heirlooms, the clock came from his father’s side, the linen cupboard from his mother’s, or maybe it was the other way around. And here they stood, back in the house at opposite ends of the room, scowling at each other. The clock ticked, the cupboard creaked. All the other furniture was purchased when the house was being built, lots of pine, lots of green and rust-red upholstery bleached by sunlight, two battered armchairs and two footrests, once black, now brown, one pair in the study and one pair in the library. When my mother and I came to live in the house in 1967, everything was ready.
After his death, all his belongings drifted off to Stockholm, and then they drifted back home again to Hammars. I walked through the house alone. Everything was as it should be. Not a single piece of furniture stood in the wrong place. Every room was the spitting image of its former self. I found myself wishing that the two small tables in the living room had switched places, or that the third, and much bigger table had somehow mistakenly been put down in front of the sofa rather than between the two bulky armchairs. I wished for something to be wrong, but everything was right and everything was quiet. I opened the windows and sat down on the floor. A speck of ash flickered in the fireplace. No one lived here now. All his things had lost their thingness. What was it Rilke wrote: O night without objects.
The butterflies wake me up. Or no, of course they don’t. That was a long time ago. They were on the wall and on the ceiling. I can’t stop thinking about him. If I get up now, I can make coffee. I can walk down the stairs, go to the kitchen, and make myself coffee. Maybe sit down and write. I can hear my husband breathing. Our daughter breathing. All three of us are sleeping in the same bed. The dog breathing. If I listen, I can hear cars out on the road, it’s still nighttime, or early morning, it depends on who you are, how you were raised, what experiences you bring to the different times of day, it’s three forty-five now, do you call that morning or night, I call it morning, but too early to get up, I check the time on my cell phone and then I check my messages, I sit up and lie down, a few cars drive past right outside my window, there and there and there, and farther off a gentler stream, cars driving past at night sound different from cars driving past in the daytime. Today is the first of December.
Virginia Woolf writes that the ways in which we read differ greatly depending on whether we are in good health or struck by illness. When we are sick and no longer soldiers in the “army of the upright,” bedridden, or, if we are lucky, sitting in a chair in the shade with a blanket over our feet, we tend to be far more audacious and reckless in our reading than before we became “deserters.” Ideas strewn across the page evoke, when collected, “a state of mind which neither words can express nor the reason explain,” she writes, “incomprehensibility has an enormous power over us in illness, more legitimately perhaps than the upright will allow,” not unlike the middle of a sleepless night, or early morning, when your heart is pounding and everything has come undone.
The world looks different when you’re standing and walking than when you’re lying down. When you lie recumbent and stare at the ceiling, like I am doing right now, for example, or like Beckett’s nameless old man does in Company, or the nameless patient (the reader, the narrator) does in Woolf’s essay on illness, you start noticing other things. The stains, the flies, the flecks of paint, the edge of the wallpaper, the window, the sky, the constantly shifting clouds. Like a “gigantic cinema playing perpetually to an empty house,” writes Woolf.
Our house is quiet at night, I seem to be hearing dog paws on the stairs, but the dog lies sprawled asleep on the floor next to the bed. Maybe I’m hearing the dog we had before the one we have now? I don’t think people linger on after death, but I wonder whether dogs do. And that we can hear them scuffling about for many years after they’re gone.
I’ve started getting up instead of taking sleeping pills. I get up and walk down the stairs. It’s almost four a.m. I go into the living room and sit down on the sofa, looking in on the open kitchen. The coffee machine blinks. The laptops glow. The refrigerator hums. The house has three floors. The rooms are small. Often (during the day, when everyone is awake) there is a crash from one of the floors. There are four of us living here now. We used to be six, but the two oldest children have moved out. Four people and a dog. One of us is always dropping things, or bumping into something, or tripping and falling. And every time that happens, the other three stop whatever they’re doing and shout: Hey, what’s going on? Is everything all right? Are you okay? And more often than not things are okay and the reply comes quickly: Yeah sure, everything’s okay.
On August 17, 1969, my father wrote a letter to my mother and instead of signing his name, he signed it “Your brother in the night.” He wrote letters to her when they were newly in love, and again when things between them had ended.
I have copies
of all the letters they wrote to each other.
This is the story of the copies: When my father died, my mother gave all the letters he had ever written to her to an archive, a foundation dedicated to his legacy, consisting of private papers, notebooks, handwritten manuscripts and photographs. The archive was set up during his lifetime and on his initiative, and on that occasion, he instructed two of his daughters (my older sister and me) to join the foundation’s board of trustees and watch over everything on his behalf. The board meetings were held in the main building of the Swedish Film Institute in Stockholm, on the third floor. The archive itself—steadily growing and claiming to hold his life’s work—was located in the basement. And then he died. The trustees continued to hold their meetings on the third floor, while the archive remained in the basement. It was like keeping watch over a large and formless animal. I never went down there.
Before my mother donated her collection to the archive, my husband’s father, a university librarian, offered to sort and make copies of all the letters so she could still take them out and read them whenever she wanted. I don’t know what my mother and father-in-law said to each other when she entrusted the letters to him, at the time I didn’t care about the letters or what was written in them, all I cared about was that she donate them to the archive as quickly as possible. In the weeks and months following my father’s death, I turned into a person who insisted that everything be handled properly, frequently resorting to expressions such as by unanimous agreement and nonreversible consensus and as stated in the minutes. If I were to—and I do this reluctantly—summon an image of who I was during that time, I see a twitchy woman who talks too loud and walks too fast and whom no one wants anything to do with. I certainly wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with her. Her voice is shrill and the emails she sends are too long. Every morning she sits up in bed and talks incessantly about her father’s house, all the houses—and what is going to happen to his houses, she cries—before her husband has even had a chance to open his eyes and wake up.
Once my father-in-law had sorted and copied the letters, he put the copies into two large brown folders, each with a black, stiff spine finished off with a black silk ribbon and boasting the logo of the university library’s manuscript collection on its cover. Several years later, when he too had died, my mother found the folders in a cupboard in the big flat in Erling Skjalgsson Street (where she and I and Nanna and several babysitters and Bogdan had once lived) and brought them to my house for me to look at.
“I know you are writing a book about Pappa,” she said. Sometimes when she says Pappa, it’s not entirely clear to me whether she means her father or my father, or whether she means that my father is her father too. In which case we would be sisters. Things are easier to relate to. A grandfather clock. A poster with a photograph of Pina Bausch. A bed. A window. A kitchen table. Chairs. A sheet of wallpaper with flowers that yawn at night.
Your brother in the night. One day I sat down and read all the letters he had written her, it took many hours, my husband had to help me because I still found his handwriting almost impossible to make out.
When, in 1969, my mother left my father, she took the child with her. It was spring and the girl would turn three in the summer. My father remained at Hammars.
In order to administer their breakup, they compiled a register. I write register because I think they intended to set up a system, or a catalogue of rules, to help them navigate the chaos in which they now found themselves and the new chaos that awaited them. The register consists of scattered, handwritten notes and lists—viewed as an actual catalogue it isn’t very impressive—but I’m moved by the sincerity that has gone into it: “What can I expect of you, now that we won’t be living together any longer? Who are you then? What stories will we tell about each other and ourselves?”
I picture them sitting side by side and writing, perhaps at his desk at Hammars. They’re having a sitting. The child has been placed in the care of Siri or Rosa or some other babysitter. I imagine he has offered up one of his yellow notebook pads for the occasion, the sheets of paper will in the course of the day be covered in her handwriting. They speak two different languages, Norwegian and Swedish, and they have very different ways of talking and writing. They themselves claim that the reason they couldn’t stay together was that they were so alike. But to me they are night and day. When I find myself wondering about who I am and why I am like this and not like that, I can hear a voice whispering: You are like this because of her; you are like that because of him.
In their separation register (my expression, not theirs) my mother has written: “There is no such thing as a pure life—a faithful life—we can never give each other that. But as long as you hold my hand and I hold yours and we don’t let go—never mind if your hand is 100,000 kilometers away or next to me in bed—then it’s up to each of us how we live our lives, including our secret, lonely lives.”
Here, as she writes the word lonely, I imagine she gives the pen to him. Now it is his turn to write. But then he hands the pen back to her. Perhaps he says something about her handwriting being more legible than his. (In the black folder, I found a letter in which he wonders whether she actually reads his letters, or just pretends to; another letter is written entirely in block capitals, as if he wants to make sure she will read every single word.) I wonder whether they laugh a little while they’re busy with their task, this planning of the rest of their lives now that their breakup is a fact. I don’t think they called it a breakup, I associate the word “breakup” with my own life, not theirs, I think they used the word “separation.” I also think it was my mother who decided what to include in their catalogue and how to word it.
Be considerate. Do not make decisions that impact on the other person without hearing what he or she has to say.
Do not live a double life.
Honesty in difficult situations.
The list is not numbered. They wrote on yellow scraps of paper that are not at all systemized as I am giving the impression they are. They sat next to each other and wrote down a few thoughts of how they wanted things to be now that they were no longer going to live together. I am the one doing the systemizing and numbering, the cataloguing and registering. In this way, I’m taking part in their conversation, talking to them.
The year is 1969, I’m almost three, my parents are separating. We are at Hammars, it is spring, the decision has been made, it is final, but for the time being they both act as though the status quo continues to apply, that leaving each other is not the same as being left, that a life apart is almost the same as a life together. But as long as you hold my hand and I hold yours and we don’t let go—never mind if your hand is 100,000 kilometers away or next to me in bed. I still have my room, my cot, the dog that lets me pull its ears, it’s a small dog, smaller than me, and right outside my bedroom window there are a couple of pine trees, the wind in the trees is the first sound I hear waking up in the morning and the last sound I hear falling asleep at night, I tell myself that I can remember the sounds from when I was two, the sound of the waves, the sound of gravel scraping against a shoe, the sound of the refrigerator in the kitchen, the sound of the grandfather clock in the living room, the sound of the flies in the window panes because Mamma always left the windows open, the sound of the sleepy flowers in my flowery wallpaper, the flowers in the wallpaper yawn at night when it’s time to go to sleep, was it Mamma or Pappa who said that, the sound of the newly laundered bed linen when I turn from one side to the other, the sound of night and everyone’s sleep, and of Mamma’s and Pappa’s footsteps through the house, their voices, I’m lying in bed and I hear them moving from room to room, the house is long and narrow, like a fortress. When the day of our departure finally arrives, the weather is mild and Mamma leaves behind my knitted sweater and some of the long-sleeved jerseys and doesn’t pack all of her own clothes either, doesn’t want it to be final, although she knows it is. When Mamma takes my hand to help me into the backseat of the tax
i, Pappa stands in the doorway, scowling. Back then, there was only one taxi for the whole of Northern Gotland, and Mamma greets the taxi driver in an overly friendly manner so he won’t be upset with her or think she’s stuck-up. The dog is running around. It doesn’t like being outside in bad weather, but this day is blessed with blue skies. It is because of the dog’s particular sensitivity to weather that my mother remembers the day as bright, warm, and quiet; had there been even a hint of rain or thunder or strong winds—the winds at Hammars can be quite brutal—the dog wouldn’t have been running around outside. It was a dachshund. It stayed behind with Pappa.
And then comes an item I read as an accusation disguised as an admonition disguised as a prayer:
Do not tear down her homemade safety, but add a pinch.
It is a peculiar sentence. First of all, I’m puzzled by the phrase homemade safety. I have never heard my mother or father use that expression. One knows one’s parents by their words and phrases. Things they used to say. Mamma always said, My nerves are frayed, Pappa always said I’m angry as a poisonous liver sausage. But I’ve never heard the words homemade safety. Homemade—as opposed to what? Canned safety? Neither of them knew how to cook; perhaps one of the reasons they couldn’t live together was that they had no idea how to prepare a meal, I am probably overstating this, I realize that, but neither of them knew how to iron clothes or clean a floor, they didn’t know how to care for a child, I’m not talking about love, they had love, I’m talking about the work, I’m talking about what it takes once you’ve set up a home and a family. They were children of the bourgeoisie, and yet they were incapable of living a modern, Scandinavian middle-class life. Nor did they want to. They yearned to be free. They yearned to be children. They talked about freedom and art, but came running back to safety whenever the unknown proved to be too much. They were children of the little world. My mother and father both wanted to be the prodigal son, and when the fun and games were over, they wanted to go home. Or go away. Or go home. Or go away. The lost son is the most beloved. He is always well received, his father runs out into the field to greet him, slaughters the fatted calf for him, and dismisses the dutiful older son with crumbs. My child! Thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine. But it is fitting that we should celebrate and be glad: for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found.