by Linn Ullmann
My father had the rare ability to make others feel as though they were the one and only. That they were seen, heard, chosen. He would take you by the hand and say, Come with me, and for a brief or a long moment you might think you were the first person he has ever said this to. That it was you and him against the world. Even when he was very old and one-eyed and frail and forgetful and the abscess in his mouth had grown so big that it obstructed his tongue, when he was no more than a heap of skin and bones stuck in a wheelchair behind seven closed doors, even then he had this ability. Stay with me. Don’t abandon me. You are the only one I let come close.
Perhaps he said: We are so alike, you and I. Prodigal children. Brothers in the night.
You are loved, you are not loved, you could have been loved, you were loved, you are the most beloved. If Pappa had been a song, it would have been—thinking of all the women, all the breakups, all the regrets and all the words—a song with more than a little dash of country and blues, two genres of music he himself didn’t care much for, or know much about.
I’m trying to understand something about love here, and about my parents, and why solitude played such a significant role in their lives, and why they, more than anything in the whole world, were so afraid of being abandoned.
Here is from a love letter written in 1958, addressed to Käbi, the fourth of the five wives:
Today I received four most enchanting letters from a HIGHLY BELOVED PERSON. In one of these letters she asks why I love her so much, and why “her in particular.”
Should I attempt to answer, or should I dodge the question with a haze of beautiful words that easily flow from the pen.
The thing about LOVE is that it is such a peculiar and misused and sad word besides, so I don’t want to love you.
But maybe I shall nonetheless attempt to say something about all that fills me and rises and falls inside me like so many waters.
When he moved to Hammars for good, Cecilia made him a promise. He had never been like a father to her, I don’t believe they thought about things that way, not a suitor, either, nor a brother, nor a friend. So, what were they? I know they conducted regular morning meetings. I know they wrote messages to each other on yellow notepad paper, void of emotion but full of abbreviations—FYI, ASAP, e.g., etc., i.e. Short messages about practical things: the house, the cinema, bills, repairs. My father was not a practical man, he could never, like my father-in-law, have gone into the forest, found a piece of wood, and carved himself a knife or ax handle, but he understood the value of being practical. A proper piece of workmanship. Doing things right.
“You have to be practical, my heart. Always. In love as well as in work. Especially in love. Impractical love is doomed. You can’t—how do I say this?—you can’t build a house with a fistful of sand and a million beautiful words. Are you listening to me?”
Throughout his life, my father elicited promises from women, the first was his mother, dark-eyed Karin, the last was Cecilia.
What will become of me when I’m too old to take care of myself?
The question haunts him long before there are any noticeable signs.
He is brimming with energy, the flat in Stockholm has been sold. Finally he can live at Hammars all year-round. He is eighty-four years old, it’s springtime, windflowers everywhere. He is looking forward to his new life as a Fårö oldster. So why is he asking this question now?
A girl is standing at the railing, face averted, she is staring down into the water as though planning to jump. He is on his way to Fårösund, to buy newspapers. The rain pours down. The girl stands perfectly still. He would like her to turn around and look at him. She is young, he can tell by her slender back. The ferry throbs. The rain pours down, and he switches on . . . what’s that word? It all comes to a halt. Around him, everything continues, but inside him something comes to a halt. The girl doesn’t turn. It rains, the girl stares down into the water, leaning far across the edge and he wonders whether she wants to jump and he switches on . . . well, what do you call them . . . ? The things you switch on in the car when it rains and they move back and forth and go swish-swish-swish?
He is sitting in his jeep, rain pouring down, and he can’t think of the word “windshield wipers,” and what the hell will things come to when I can no longer articulate myself? Once my hip and my eye fail me, once my language disappears?
All his life, he wrestled with language, with writing. The yellow notepads and the pens. The strict rules he would like to break, but doesn’t quite have the nerve to break, not in his writing, only on the film set, surrounded by actors and coworkers—people who know how to do their jobs. His colleagues. It’s a beautiful word—colleagues—but when he sits down to write, he’s on his own. No one around but ghosts. And the occasional bloody critic (I despise you and hate you and hope that evil will befall you, and more than anything I hope that at least once in your life you will come face-to-face with your own spineless self). The silence in his study is not entirely benign. The words do not come easily, or they come in the wrong order. The sentences become entangled and have neither beginning nor end. “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world,” Wittgenstein said, but what happens now, asks the old man, what happens now that I am about to lose my language? Soon nothing left but shards.
He sat up in bed and thought of Strindberg. How the hell did you do it? And Strindberg replied: I live in a confusion of tongues.
What can be said about the task of writing can also be said about the task of growing old. Once again, invoking Strindberg: “This disparity between myself and my landscape strains my nerves to such a degree that I am about to go to pieces and flee.” And yet . . . every now and then it’s actually fun to write. It’s easy. Every now and then, I can write about anything anywhere, I can stand on my head and write. The world expands. The world is new. In situations like these, he could have said, one might dare utter the word “grace.” When the day and the light and the writing appear easy.
But growing old is nothing like that.
I think that growing old is hard, grueling, unglamorous work with very long hours.
Strindberg glances disapprovingly at him from the wall every time he leaves his desk and walks through the silent rooms of his house, like a dance hall with a thousand windows, he thinks.
“So many things become crucial when you attempt to examine an event in retrospect and have the blueprint in front of you,” my father wrote in one of his three autobiographical novels about his parents, “an event that, moreover, consists of only a few aimlessly floating shards. You have to add common sense and a good deal of imagination. At times, I can hear their voices, but only faintly. They encourage me, or they reproach me, saying ‘that’s not at all how it was. That’s not what really happened.’ ”
One day he summoned Cecilia to a meeting. Listen here, Cecilia, I trust you. I don’t have many years left. I’ve started forgetting things. Words. “Windshield wipers,” for instance. For heaven’s sake, it’s nothing to worry about. It happens with age. I’m not complaining, I’m eighty-four years old, I’m not whining, but I am a bit astonished: Well, well—I’m turning into an old fogey. It all seems somewhat comical to me, my body that won’t cooperate, the ailments, there are many forms of astonishment, and this is one of them. Astonishment keeps me company. But . . . (he places his large hand on top of her long, slender one) . . . you must promise to do what I ask of you, and not leave before it’s over, and what I am asking is this:
I do not want to go to some damned old people’s home. I want to die in my own house, in my own bed. I will not be left helpless and at the mercy of my children. I will not be subjected to displays of emotional brouhaha. I want peace and order around me. May my death be gentle.
THE FIRST TIME HE said he wanted to visit his mother at his family house, Våroms, in Duvnäs in Dalarna, I said: But your mother is dead, Pappa, she died forty years ago. This made him angry and he refused to speak to me and asked Cecilia to call for a taxi. I don’t know whether the taxi
was meant for him or for me. Cecilia shrugged and continued what she was doing, and after a little while he had forgotten the whole thing. The second time he said he wanted to visit his mother at Våroms, I replied: But I’m not sure how we’ll get there, or if she’s even at home. He looked at me for a long time, What on earth is she talking about?, and then he asked Cecilia to call for a taxi. The third time he mentioned visiting his mother, I didn’t want him to involve Cecilia and I didn’t want any more talk of a taxi, so I told him that, yes, I would like to go with him to Våroms.
PERHAPS I COULD LIE here, he said, or words to that effect. Yes, but wait, said the church sexton. As a rule, the next of kin chooses the gravesite, but the sexton refrained from pointing this out to my father. Who has sovereignty over the body, the living or the dead? Are we our dead body? If so, we aren’t for very long. The body turns to dust and then it hardly matters to it where it is buried—as long as it is buried. Or cremated. Or lost at sea, like so many here on the island throughout the centuries. Two paintings adorn the church walls, a larger one from 1618 and a smaller one from 1767, both depicting seal hunters adrift at sea. I imagine that the sexton was thinking about those men who, hundreds of years ago, huddled together on the ice floe in the freezing cold. Now it’s spring, the sun is shining on the two elderly gentlemen, the sexton and my father, but neither of them takes off his jacket, blessed is the earth that receives us again and again since the dawn of man. My father gazes out across the graveyard with its tall trees and scattered headstones. The two men do not speak much. Come, says the sexton, if we walk a bit further I will show you an even nicer spot.
When you walk across the graveyard, the way they did that day in 2005 or 2006, you come to a stone wall, and behind it there is a field where the lambs graze in the summer.
Here, in a corner, against the stone wall?
My father and the sexton stood there for a while. A mild wind fluttered through the crowns of the ash trees. Neither of them spoke. How long did they stand there? Long enough for my father, or so the story goes, to make up his mind.
EVERY SUMMER, A YELLOW welcome note lay on the kitchen table—at Ängen or Dämba or Karlberga.
MONDAY, 7 P.M.
Beloved
Youngest Daughter!
Warm
Welcome Wishes
From
YOUR OLD FATHER
Come see me tomorrow at around eleven
—but only if you feel like it.
WHEN I WAS NINETEEN he traveled to Greece, he called it time travel—back to antiquity. He defied his dizzying fear of travel—the fear of freedom, the fear of the unknown, the fear of losing his footing—and flew from Stockholm to Athens, where he was received at the airport by a procession of distinguished-looking individuals with ribbons of honor across their chests, suits and ties and dresses, TV cameras and microphones, flashes and clicks and a throaty female voice shouting louder than all the other voices: Welcome, Maestro! He was scheduled to direct Euripides’s The Bacchae at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm in six months’ time, and traveled to Greece with his very own troupe of assistants, technicians, a choreographer, and a literary adviser. They came to learn, they came to see, they came to visit the Oracle of Delphi and to climb around the Great Theatre of Epidaurus.
Ingrid came along too, but mostly to hold his hand. I’m not sure why he brought me. Pappa and I had not spoken much during the last few years, I lived in New York, he lived in Stockholm, I was a teenager, he was your old father, which is what he called himself the few times a year he telephoned me. There was (as he had already pointed out when I was little) a vast age difference between us, not always easy to know what to talk about, but then, one time, he suggested—I imagine baffling both of us—that I should come along with him to Greece. Fly to Stockholm and join him and Ingrid on their trip to Athens. I was studying literature at university and could conceivably contribute to discussions about Euripides. Well, well, look at this, she’s at university now, studying literature and putting on airs. Next thing you know, I’ll have to stand idly by and watch her become a critic. I will not have it! I will cut her out of my will. Two things, my heart: I don’t want you to become a critic and I don’t want you to talk disparagingly about the royal family. Queen Silvia of Sweden is an admirable queen. Just look at how beautifully she carries herself.
It would be a trip back to the age of great theatre, he said, a pilgrimage.
In the car on the way to the airport, Ingrid was upset because I was wearing ripped jeans.
To Pappa: “Doesn’t she have proper traveling clothes?”
To me: “Don’t you have proper traveling clothes? Couldn’t you at least have chosen a pair of jeans without holes in them?”
Pappa was dreading the trip and had taken Valium. His voice was remarkably calm, but not in a calming way. It was as if he had left himself behind and sent someone else in his place, equipped with his clothes, his limbs, his distinct features and an eerie pre-recorded voice. He said he agreed with Ingrid, but didn’t she realize that young girls nowadays bought jeans with ready-made rips in them, that my jeans weren’t actually old, but quite to the contrary brand-new, and that the holes and rips and tears on my thighs and knees and down my calves weren’t a sign of slovenliness, but rather proof that I had attempted to dress up for our little trip.
He turned and looked at me, smiling proudly.
We flew first class. Ingrid and Pappa sat in the second row, I sat in the first. Next to me sat an Englishman who took up all of his and most of my seats. He drank whiskey, read the Financial Times, and glared disapprovingly at my ripped jeans, my knees were cold, my arms were cold.
The seats were spacious, but I squeezed up against the window, wishing I could crawl out of it and vanish. I looked at the clouds below and listened to Pappa’s anxious breathing behind me. The businessman opened his paper and spread himself out even more. Now I had his newspaper right in my face and his elbow poking my side. Perhaps he hadn’t even noticed that I was sitting there in the seat next to him? Perhaps he hadn’t seen my ripped jeans and bare knees after all? Maybe I was invisible? What was worse? To be glared at or be treated as if you weren’t even there? Visible or invisible? Whatever I was, I had his newspaper in my face and his elbow poking my side, all of which my father must have observed through the crack between our seats, because now he stood up, leaned over and extended his arms as if he were a golden eagle ready to swoop down and attack, addressing the businessman in his peculiar American-German-Swedish accent: “Get your fucking arm away from her seat. And your newspaper too. That is my daughter sitting there beside you! My daughter!”
The businessman turned bright red. Unable to come up with a reply, he folded his newspaper and removed his elbow. All this while my father hovered.
I almost felt sorry for the businessman and blushed when he said: “I apologize, miss.”
My father made a sound, a combination of a snort and a neigh, after which he sat back down and refrained from speaking another word for the remainder of the flight.
In 340 BCE, the architect Polykleitos the Younger built a large amphitheater in the small town of Epidaurus, birthplace of Asclepius, the god of healing and medicine. The theater was the most important venue for all who were sick and wanted to be healed, large enough to accommodate more than 13,000 spectators. The acoustics at the theater are such that you can hear what the actors are saying, no matter where you are sitting. Previously, it was believed that the wind carried the sound, or that the actors’ masks doubled as amplifiers. Later it was found that the steps serve as acoustic traps that filter out noise such as wind. This is due to the phenomenon of “virtual pitch” whereby the listeners themselves, even those far in the back, fill in the missing tones.
The evening before we left Athens for Epidaurus, we had dinner at a restaurant. Pappa and I had not had dinner with strangers or been to a restaurant together since that one time when I was a child and Mamma and I showed up at a swanky restaurant in Munic
h and he refused to hug me because I sneezed. I sneezed, not because I had a cold, like he thought, but because I hadn’t seen him for almost a year and my nose started tickling the moment he laid eyes on me. Would he notice that my braces were gone? Would he think I was pretty? But now, here we were at a restaurant in Athens, surrounded by Swedish and Greek scholars and theatre people, I was nineteen and no longer little, and Pappa sat there in his plaid flannel shirt, saying “yes, please” to wine even though he didn’t like wine, and “yes, please” to bread before dinner, even though he didn’t eat bread before dinner, and I noticed that he had combed his hair in an offbeat fashion, over the top of his head in a kind of comb-over, and that his English pronunciation bordered on the comical, and I wondered whether the others around the table thought so too, and whether it was true, what he used to say about himself, that in many situations he felt as though he were his own cousin.
He raised his wineglass, pointed at the bread, and, in a voice that sounded like it was borrowed from some actor about to play a flâneur strolling down the boulevards of the world, he said, “I would like to make a toast to the fantastic invention that is this wine and this bread.”
Everyone joined him in the toast, after which he somewhat lost his zest. When the food arrived, he quietly asked the waiter if he might have a glass of beer.
It had been a long day of guided tours and lectures when my father and I climbed all the way up to the top row of seats at the Theatre of Epidaurus, finally sitting down. Far below, on the stage, people were walking around and talking. We could hear their voices, hear what they were saying, but didn’t grasp all the words. Some spoke Swedish, some English, some Greek. Standing by herself, some way from the others, I noticed a girl. I couldn’t see her face, she was young, maybe a few years older than me. She stood perfectly still, wearing a large wide-brimmed black hat and black sunglasses, looking up at the sky. The sun had begun to set, the light was warm and gray and red all at the same time.