by Linn Ullmann
Maybe what Mamma and Pappa both needed was a father. Someone who would love them and greet them and care for them every time they lost their way and yearned for home.
Or they needed a wife. Artists need wives. And when she or they try to define the word “safety,” they resort to a word epitomizing food and shelter. Homemade. And then Mamma writes: “but add a pinch.” My father must not tear down the homemade safety she had managed to build, but rather add a pinch, like salt to chicken soup.
They didn’t talk all that much about the girl, not in the letters the father wrote to the mother, and not in the separation register. Each of them has played a significant role in her life, and I believe she has played a role in theirs, although not in their shared life. It was never the three of them. The mother and the father talked all the time and continued to work together, but I don’t think they talked about their daughter. So, what did she do today? Well, let me tell you. That sort of thing.
They had so much of their own thing going on, their own childish games, their own secret language. In several of his letters, my father writes about a black puma that I am guessing means danger, and now and then the word piiiiiitsjjjhhhh surfaces—its meaning not at all clear to me. They had their secret signs, their secret references, their secret places on the island. And they had their work. Their child—I, she—was not a part of all that. They were children themselves who, as children do, sit down together and in great earnestness make rules for the games they are about to play.
Albeit—one item is devoted to their roles as parents:
No more than one month (30 days) away from the child.
Punctuality is important. When things will happen, and how long they will last. We begin here and end there. We do not come late. We do not come early. When I was a child, Pappa explained to me that being late was only just a little bit more unforgivable than being early. There is no such thing as improvising.
But what does item number five mean? Does it mean that neither of them should be away from me for more than a month, or that Mamma shouldn’t be away from me for more than a month? The child is not mentioned by name. Even though I wasn’t christened yet, they did call me by a name, so it occurs to me that this rule may not be about me at all, perhaps it just means that they shouldn’t be away from each other for more than a month? Yet another reassurance that their separation is not really a separation, that what is final is not final, and that what is in fact over will continue on as before.
I carefully open the door to Pappa’s study, everything looks like it usually does, the battered black armchair and footrest by the large paned window facing the sea, the stones and a few scattered pine trees, twisted, wind-swept; under the window a narrow built-in bench upholstered in sheepskin and with a folded gray wool blanket at its foot. When I was a baby, my mother sat on the bench with me in her lap. That probably happened only once. He didn’t want us anywhere near his study while he was working. Usually the bench would be covered with piles of books and records, so that every afternoon, after finishing up at his desk, he could sit in the battered armchair, resting his legs on the footrest, and either read or listen to music. He comes to Hammars at the end of April and leaves at the end of September. When he glances up and out the window, he will see the pines, the stony shore, and the sky and know exactly what day and time it is, the light doesn’t lie, but then, of course, he knows what day and time it is, light or no light, there are clocks everywhere in this house, and if the clocks weren’t enough, he has the book (also called the calendar), in which he writes brief summaries of each day as well as reminders of future tasks. The book lies on his desk, which is positioned right in the center of the room.
At the time of his death the walls of his study are bare, as they always have been, no pictures, no drawings, except for two yellow Post-it notes behind the door, fastened with Scotch tape.
I open the door all the way, and there they are, my mother and father at his desk. They sit close together, facing the opposite wall, giggling, whispering, writing, kissing, and then, slowly, Mamma turns around and looks at me. I stand in the doorway, Mamma’s sitting at the desk, and now she’s no longer laughing, she looks worried, or is it just the light that keeps changing, it’s that kind of day today, a typical Nordic spring day, sunshine one moment, dark clouds the next, the spring of 1969 is mild, but with icy drafts. She has a face that captures every nuance of light and she is young enough to be my daughter. She looks at me. I am forty-eight, Mamma is thirty-one. I think she worries what will become of us. My father could let the camera dwell on her face forever.
Six weeks on Fårö every summer as a family.
That’s not how it went. Not her. Not us. Not family. But I went to Hammars every summer and stayed for several weeks, not six exactly, but more than a couple, and for a long time I knew nothing about the great and upheaving love that had brought me there.
On the tape recording dated May 2007, he flailed and stuttered and struggled with his sentences, the way an infant struggles to lift its head from the floor. When I was a little girl, we looked at each other with a kind of alarmed curiosity.
In order for a relationship to work, he once said, you have to make sure you’re able to take turns at being the adult and the child. You can’t be the child all the time, even if that’s what you want to do.
When Pappa died, I couldn’t bring myself to listen to the tapes: the floundering, the slowness, the searching for words. And my voice like an overeager recorder player in the middle of the requiem.
I can remember what happened often and what happened rarely. The ordinary and the extraordinary. It is not always clear to me which category a particular memory belongs to. Am I remembering this because it happened all the time, or because it happened only once?
I remember Pappa reading to me in the evenings, I have written about it many times, remember him opening the door to my room, sitting down on the edge of my bed, unfolding a yellow piece of paper or opening the book on the bedside table, how he smiled at me and said NOW!, and that there was so much anticipation in the room that the wallpaper flowers opened up and shouted YES! YES! YES! It is curious to think of all the things that live and can crawl out of wallpaper patterns.
That stars tore themselves asunder
I listen my heart
my heart is
I forget names, faces, words, dates, places, conversations, events, boyfriends, books I’ve read, songs I’ve heard, films I’ve seen, I even forget articles I myself have written, once I forgot the title of one of my own novels, a man asked me about the name of my latest book and for a moment I drew a blank. I went to the doctor and asked her whether she thought there was anything wrong with me, she said there wasn’t, but that I was probably tired, exhausted, and possibly depressed. I have always envied people with photographic memory, I have the opposite of photographic memory—what would you call that?—that’s why I avoid quizzes, I loathe quizzes of any kind, the only time I ever participated in a quiz, I witnessed my husband falling for another woman, I witnessed the fall, but didn’t realize it until later, we were a group of people sitting around a table, and the question had to do with a Bible quote, the dark-haired woman with slender wrists—younger than me, obviously—knew the answer right away and whispered it out, I don’t remember whether it was the quote itself she whispered, or whether the quote was included in the question, I don’t even remember the question, only that it had to do with a specific quote from the Bible, and that my husband later that evening said: Did you notice how she whispered out the answer? and I said, no, I didn’t notice that, and he said, yes, everyone was so loud and no one listened, they were all talking on top of each other, but she just sat there and knew exactly what the answer was. I should have realized it then. But she was probably shy, he continued, or so flustered by all the talking, that all she could do was whisper.
The Bible quote was: You hurled me into the depths, into the very heart of the seas, and the currents swirled about me; all your waves
and breakers swept over me.
The year was 1981. He was an American photographer, and I met him in an elevator in a building on West Fifty-Seventh Street in New York. He told me to cut my hair even shorter. I was fifteen. I remember we sat face-to-face with a table between us, there was food on the table, we were at a Chinese restaurant and I remember that his face was lit up by a big, red lamp and that he kept hitting his wineglass with a chopstick.
Listen to this, he said, and put on a Jimi Hendrix record. We were in his studio. You know who this is, right? Yes, I said, because I had seen Apocalypse Now! a few years earlier together with Pappa and recognized the song. What’s it called, he said. I don’t know, I said. It’s surprising that you don’t know more about music, he said, and put on a new song, what about this one, surprising, considering who your old man is, as far as I know your father actually cares about music. I should have known more, remembered more, listened more, who gives a shit, I said, that’s what I always said when someone started talking about my parents. I was no one’s daughter, I was fifteen and no one’s child.
For a while, I did everything the photographer said, I wore the white summer dress he liked so much and bought Are You Experienced, which, of course, I wasn’t (and was that intended as a question from Jimi Hendrix to me?), I listened to the album over and over again, and then I went to his studio after school and sat on the black leather sofa in the corner, the one with the clothes and purses and hats, rhinestone jewelry and lighters scattered all over it, and drank cola while he smoked and photographed girls and talked incessantly. One evening he took me to the Chinese restaurant down at the corner, it was just the two of us, I don’t know why he wanted me along, but I was flattered, and he kept hitting the glass with his chopstick and said, It’s my birthday today, forty-four years old, I’m so bloody old, I could be your father, your grandfather, theoretically, I’m so old that I remember the moon landing, do you remember the moon landing, and then he laughed and said: Fuck . . . He had watched it on TV and never gotten over it, had played with the idea of going to Ohio to photograph Neil Armstrong, buy him a beer, get him talking, do something real for once, and not all this fucking nonsense he had going on in New York and Paris, nothing worked like it used to, not the booze, not the drugs, not the sex, not his old friends, who used to be interesting, nor his new friends, who were never interesting, not a single fucking trip, models came and went, half-naked, young, willing, replaceable, in and out of his studio, like the tin soldiers he’d played with as a child, but, he said, if an ordinary woman runs up the stairs and her skirt slides up and I get a glimpse of her knee or a bit of thigh, I can go around thinking about it all day, that woman, you know.
He was a burned-out yet sought-after fashion photographer, a convulsive insomniac, always high or low or strung out on some new or old drug, and it wouldn’t have hurt him to take a walk in the forest and pick mushrooms, not magic mushrooms, obviously, but ordinary chanterelles, give Hendrix a rest and listen to Cage’s “4'33",” although I doubt he would have had the patience to listen to nothing for four minutes and thirty-three seconds, all of this is me thinking now, not then, at fifteen, I didn’t know who John Cage was, the photographer was right when he said I didn’t know all that much about music, so we discussed films instead, Godard, Chabrol, they’re like ten thousand times more interesting than your father’s stuff, he said, and then, lighting a cigarette, he suggested we go to the movies, he is almost eighty years old now, I Googled him and was surprised that he was still alive, I mean, when I think about all the people who are dead, who died even though they were too young to die, who died unexpectedly and suddenly, or old and tired and sick, hungry or much too full, died in one of the many wars between then and now, in fires, avalanches, waters, died because they wanted to die, or because they had no choice, died because they drove themselves too hard, died of loneliness, when I think about all of them, all of us, it seems strange to me that he should still be alive, I thought about writing him an email, Do you remember me, or something like that, the girl with the short hair? He was prone to tenderness and violent rage, in the beginning he said we should be friends, he was an adult, I was a child, why shouldn’t an adult and a child be friends, we didn’t touch each other, the thought of touching him never occurred to me, he was so old, I had slept with boys, two boys, but mostly to have done it, I was eager to cross every threshold into adult life as quickly as possible. He saw something beautiful in my face that no one else had seen, least of all myself, the girl in the mirror and the girl in the photographs were two completely different girls, maybe he had discovered a new way of looking at my face, a secret angle, I don’t know, I think that both he and I fell a little bit in love with the pictures he took of me, the other girl, as we called her, a little older than me and with a serenity to her glance that didn’t match my own, there was nothing serene about me, nothing in my face had settled quite where it was supposed to. He was tall, with long hair, his skin reminiscent of something a saddle maker would keep in the back of his store, aged, tan, cracked, and soon he would take me to Paris on assignment for a French magazine, he would take pictures of me and I’d have even shorter hair and almost no makeup, it was going to be great, maybe the best thing he’d done in a long time. He called my mother and told her he wanted to take me to Paris, and she said, No, she’s only fifteen, I can’t possibly let her go to Paris, and I begged her and she said no, and he called her again to explain what kind of picture he wanted to take and how great it was going to be and how highly he regarded her as an actress in my father’s films, the muse of an amazing artist, he said to my mother, and she said no, I’m saying no, she said.
Bogdan’s cigarette smoke drifted through the rooms in the spacious, dark apartment on West Eighty-First Street where we all lived, Mamma, Bogdan, and I, drifted through the rooms accompanied by Bach’s fifth cello suite, which he played over and over again on the record player, it took the same amount of time for Bogdan to smoke a cigarette, he once said, as it did for Casals to play the Gavotte. I’m so alone, I heard Mamma say, she looked for him but couldn’t find him in any of the rooms, there was smoke, there was music, a record was playing on the turntable, Did you know that the cello is the musical instrument that most closely resembles the human voice, he also said, Mamma didn’t know that, and now she couldn’t find him, I’m so alone, she said, maybe he had dissolved, curled into his own cigarette smoke, I’m so alone, can’t you please answer me . . . Mamma didn’t want me to go to Paris, she agreed to let me go, but under duress, she didn’t want me to go, she kept repeating this over and over again, wandering from room to room, I’m so alone, and I don’t want her to go to Paris, wandering from room to room, as if hoping to garner support from the walls, the rugs, the chairs, the lamps, the cigarette smoke that coiled along the walls like an infinite strip of gray wallpaper border, she always had to make these decisions on her own, never anyone to consult with, the girl’s father didn’t care, Bogdan didn’t care, where was Bogdan, when had she actually seen him last, heard his voice, seen his face, not just the damned cigarette smoke drifting through the rooms, the scratching sound of a cello, there are still so many beautiful things that can be said in C major, Bogdan once said, he had a habit of volunteering quotes, Mamma would have liked them to discuss their relationship, she was forty-three, a single parent and sole breadwinner, supporting both her child and her boyfriend, and she had no idea what to do, there was no one to help her with decisions, finances, meals, letters from the girl’s school informing her that her daughter had an unusually high absentee rate and disappointingly low grades, now he was simply nowhere to be found, and she repeated that she had agreed to let her go, but meant to say no, she had been pressured, and who was this photographer anyway?
The day before I left for Paris, Mamma took me to Macy’s.
“We have to go shopping, you need new clothes for your trip,” she said.
But you don’t want me to go, no, I don’t want you to go.
A nice s
kirt. A warm sweater. Two tops. Tights. A suitcase. I wanted high-heeled boots.
“Not until you’re seventeen.”
Mamma had just cut her hair and decided on bangs, I’m not exactly sure what I was going for, she said, and touched her hair and burst into tears, we were surrounded by mannequins and dresses and hats and belts and skinny saleswomen who came and went, and shelves and hangers and mirrors, and Mamma cried and said that she missed her long hair and that there were so many other things on her mind that she couldn’t explain just now, and then she took my hand and squeezed it hard. I don’t know when her hands began to tremble, but that time at Macy’s was when I first noticed it. We remained standing like this for a while, on one of the eleven floors, I don’t remember which, surrounded by our shopping bags and the new suitcase. My hand in her hand.