Aftermath

by Carl Frode Tiller

  “I don’t want to write about the terrible summer weather and all the other first world problems that the Norwegian papers are so obsessed with, Mom. I want to write about things I feel are important, and working freelance gives me the chance to do that. Besides, I enjoy the freedom that comes with working like this, how many times do I have to tell you?” I say, unable to conceal the fact that I’m starting to lose my temper.

  “Yes, well … er … of course, I mean, I was going to say it’s good that you care about … about what’s happening to black people in Africa. But what if something happens to you? I mean … Agnes’s accident has shown us how short life can actually be. What if you fell down the stairs tomorrow and lost the use of your limbs, who would look after you?”

  “What? Are you afraid you’d have to look after me?” I say.

  She doesn’t answer right away, just sits there looking at me and I feel a sudden ripple of unease, I realize I’m worried that she’s going to say yes, she is, not that I expect her to look after me if such a thing were to happen, because I don’t, I think I’m more afraid that the love she feels for me isn’t actually infinite, maybe it’s the little girl in me who’s afraid, I don’t know.

  “Oh, Susanne, don’t be silly,” she says.

  I smile quickly, relieved by her answer. I feel almost pleased by the way she brushes aside my question, it may be a mite pathetic, infantile even, to take pleasure in something like that but I can’t help it.

  “I’m only asking,” I say.

  “I just don’t understand how your mind works. It … well, you don’t seem to be able to look any more than one day ahead,” she says. “I don’t know where you get it from. Your dad wasn’t like that, I’m not like that and neither are Mette or May Lene, it’s … I don’t understand it,” she says, her voice suddenly rising. She looks me straight in the eye for a second or two, shaking her head, then she shuts her eyes, takes a deep breath, and lets it out in one great sigh, as if collecting herself. “I’m sorry, Susanne, I didn’t mean to … I’m sorry.”

  “Well, at least you care,” I say, smiling at her. “And that’s a good thing.”

  “Oh, God, you and your sisters must be so tired of me,” she says with a little laugh, putting her hands to her head.

  “Rubbish.” I pick up my wine glass, knock back the last few drops, and stand up, there’s a dried-up peach pit lying on the back page of The War of the End of the World, I scoop it up as I get to my feet, feel its little ridges tickle my skin as I roll it back and forth in my hand. “Coffee’s ready,” I say. I go into the kitchen, put my wine glass on the counter, open the door of the cabinet under the sink, and drop the peach pit into the trash can, then I take down two of the blue-and-green Book Club mugs, pour the coffee, and go back through to Mom. “Oh, by the way, I’m meeting up with Mette at Bare Blåbær tomorrow evening for a glass of wine, why don’t you join us?” I say, although I’m not sure why I say it, I see Mette so seldom and it would be good to be able to chat with her without Mom butting in all the time, fussing and fretting, I had been looking forward to talking about something apart from Agnes for a little while, but there will be no chance of that if Mom’s there, she’s almost incapable of thinking or talking about anything else now. And besides, I know what happens when we’re all together, even though we try to avoid it, we all seem to fall back into the roles we played in the family when we were growing up, it’s bound to happen.

  I set her coffee in front of her and sit down on the sofa, hunch forward with my hands wrapped around my mug, and blow lightly on the piping-hot coffee.

  “Oh, no, you don’t want your old mother tagging along when you finally have the chance to get together,” she says, smiling at me. I glance across at her, raise my eyebrows, let out a little “ha-ha,” and try to look as though she’s just said something ridiculous and completely untrue.

  “Of course we do,” I say and take a little swig of my coffee. “Eight o’clock at Bare Blåbær.”

  “Well, I have a few things to do after I’ve been to the hospital tomorrow, but we’ll see.”

  I look at her and nod. Then Rex comes waddling over to me, sounds like I’ll have to cut his nails soon, I can hear them click-clacking across the parquet floor. I turn to him and give him a big smile, he wags his tail, clearly happy. I bend down and let him lick my face.

  “Who’s a lovely dog then,” I murmur, feel his rough, wet tongue brushing my chin and my cheek. “Yes, you are. The loveliest dog in the whole world.” I lay my hand on his neck and ruffle the thick fur before sitting back again, sit there scratching Rex behind the ear and regarding Mom, but what’s the matter with her, she looks as though she’s about to cry, she’s swallowing hard and there are tears in her eyes.

  “Mom, what’s wrong?” I ask. She doesn’t answer right away.

  “Mom?”

  “Oh, I can’t help it, Susanne. It’s just that … you’re so sweet and so kind, you have so much to give. I don’t understand,” she says, then she puts a hand to her face and wipes away a tear.

  Trondheim, August 2nd–6th, 2006

  I had been planning to take the introductory course in social anthropology, that was what I really wanted to do, but when the time came to complete my application form and send it in, I did what I had promised myself I wouldn’t do: I let Torkild talk me into signing up for an intermediate course in political science instead. I had tried for ages to convince myself that social anthropology would give me the opportunity to study “primitive” societies where people were not ruled by the tyranny of Western consumerism, and that this in turn would provide me with insight and knowledge that would prove useful in the fight to save the environment, but after being subjected by Torkild to numerous long lectures in which he dismissed this argument as naïve hippie bullshit, it no longer seemed such a great idea. So political science it would be, that and organizational theory.

  In the weeks after I posted my application, I was moody and irritable. Torkild was probably right in saying that political science was more relevant than social anthropology for someone intending to pursue a career in environmental protection. Nevertheless, my heart was still set on the latter. Even though Torkild said, and to some extent managed to persuade me, that social anthropology was a soft, female subject and one of those trendy courses that did nothing but qualify people for unemployment, that was still what I really wanted to do and the fact that, even so, I ended up putting my name down for political science made me really angry. I was angry because Torkild kept trying to force me to be someone I didn’t want to be and because he always succeeded. Eventually, though, I began to pay him back by doing things I knew would irritate him: I would pop into McDonald’s and buy a burger on the way home from a night out (or “eat the rain forest,” as Torkild put it), I would insist on seeing the comedy sketch show Lille Lørdag on Wednesday evening (puerile undergraduate humor and a pale imitation of Monty Python, in Torkild’s opinion), I bought and played a “Best of Elvis” CD (according to Torkild, Elvis wasn’t just ridiculously kitsch, he had also been one of America’s key weapons in the colonization of Norway, more important than the Marshall Plan), I would neglect to turn down the heating at night, left lights burning in the apartment when I went out, and burned plastic waste in the little wood-burning stove in the living room. I quite simply rebelled. It was a feeble, childish rebellion, but a rebellion nonetheless, an attempt to take back my life and possibly also to show Torkild that we weren’t right for each other and it would be better for both of us if we simply called it a day. Which we did, but not until much later because around Christmas 1996 I found out that I was five months pregnant. In April 1997, Malin was born and suddenly everything changed.

  We were so happy. Of course we were. Not as happy as society expects new parents to be, I grant you, a fact that made me feel guilty and led me to wonder whether there was something wrong with me, I remember. But we were happy, and during those first weeks, when Malin was still sleeping through the night—inexperien
ced parents that we were—we would get up five times a night to check that she was breathing and then just sit there together, gazing at her, unable to believe that we could have made something so beautiful. So naturally we were determined to give it another chance, it wasn’t even something we discussed, Malin deserved the best and the best obviously meant growing up in a two-parent family. And to begin with everything was fine. All new parents tend to say that having a baby won’t change their lives, that they won’t crash in front of the TV every evening, that they’ll still go to concerts or out for drinks or to a movie with friends, that they’ll still read big, fat novels and stay as well informed and involved in the things they used to do in their old lives. They all say it and two or three months later most of them are shaking their heads and laughing: “We had no idea what we were talking about,” they say. But not Torkild and me. We actually did manage to hold on to much of our old life. Obviously we didn’t go out so much in the evenings as we had done before and obviously the daily routine revolved mainly around Malin, but Torkild’s parents were always happy to babysit for us, so we spent less time at home than most couples in our situation, and even though our lives had been given a new focus, we weren’t the sort of new-fledged parents who can scarcely talk about anything other than sleepless nights and mastitis, the first tooth, the first step, and how strong their baby’s neck is. Not at all. We became even better at inviting people over than we’d been before we had Malin and since none of our friends had kids, the main topic of conversation tended, quite naturally, to be the same as it had always been—which is to say, politics in its broadest sense.

  Our old problem hadn’t gone away, however, although to begin with I actually thought it had. Or no, I didn’t. Torkild still corrected me and told me off as he had always done and I don’t suppose I ever expected him to stop doing that, it simply bothered me less and less now that I had Malin to think about and worry about. What I’m trying to say is that to begin with I thought Torkild seemed more willing to compromise and a little more easy going when it came to what sort of parents we should be. But no. It soon became clear that he had merely been feeling a little unsure of his new role as a father and all this entailed, and this in turn had made him slightly more hesitant and slightly more inclined to listen to my thoughts and opinions. But as soon as he began to feel more confident of his own parenting skills, he started trying to educate me on that front as well. He insisted that we use cloth diapers, he refused to allow me to drink so much as half a glass of wine as long as I was breastfeeding, and when I stopped breastfeeding and Malin switched to solid food, everything had to be made from scratch and preferably from organic, locally produced ingredients. The idea of buying jars of baby food for her was completely out of the question. It didn’t stop there, though. Friends and relatives were told not to buy Christmas and birthday presents for Malin because, according to Torkild, she lived in the wealthiest country in the world and already had all she needed. And if they insisted on getting her something anyway, he would inform them that for 150 kroner they could purchase a goat from Christian Aid or, to be more precise, for 150 kroner they could purchase a certificate stating that their donation would go toward buying a goat for a poor family in Tanzania. It was enough to drive anyone crazy. He felt I washed Malin’s clothes too often, he believed I was hindering her language development by saying bow-wow instead of dog and if I put on a record when Malin was awake, he would smile softly and inform me that I really ought to play something else, preferably Mozart or Bach, since research had shown that listening to Mozart and Bach had a soothing effect on children. The same went for whale song, he said before going on to subject me to a brief lecture based on an American study that had shown that whale song had a beneficial effect on the language development of young children. He was planning to buy a CD of whale song.

  I was starting to lose my temper with him again.

  It didn’t help that Torkild’s mother called in every single day and never stopped telling me how spoiled I was. I was sick and tired of hearing her say “When I was young and the children were small” without a grain of irony or any thought for my feelings. “Ah, but you had an epidural, didn’t you,” she said when we were talking about the difficult labor I had had, “but when I was young, there was no such thing as an epidural or any other pain relief for that matter, so you can imagine what we had to suffer.” “You don’t know how lucky you are to have Torkild,” she said. “When I was young, men didn’t normally help with the kids or the housework, but look at him, he changes diapers, he feeds her, takes her out in the baby carriage, and I don’t know what all. Oh, you’d better watch out, Susanne, or you’ll be out of a job,” she said, and then she gave a little laugh, as if to say she was only joking. I felt like pushing her down the stairs.

  I tried to talk to Torkild about how I was feeling, but even though he tried hard to understand, he couldn’t, not totally at any rate. Torkild believed that all problems could be solved by making even more effort to follow the unwritten rules contained within his philosophy. It would never have occurred to him to bend or break these rules. So no matter how exhausted and how close to tears I might be, I still had to go on hanging cloth diapers on the small drying rack that we could just manage to squeeze in between the desk and the crib, because there could be no thought of switching to disposables. And if we were going somewhere, we had to run ourselves ragged beforehand, making fish stew from scratch so there would be food for Malin when we got there, because popping into the local supermarket and picking up some jars of baby food was not an option. We just had to organize things differently, plan our day a bit better, work a little harder and it would all go much more smoothly, according to Torkild. He was utterly intransigent, utterly incapable of breaking with his own principles. That, more than anything, was what wore me down. It wasn’t things like hanging up cloth diapers or making meals from scratch, not as such. It was the fact that there was never any letup, that we always had to be striving for excellence, striving for perfection. That was what I couldn’t stand. No matter how hard I tried, I felt I was never good enough. I’d had a serious inferiority complex before Malin was born, but once I became a mother, I felt more inadequate than ever. And the fact that Torkild was so good, so self-sacrificing and hardworking only made me feel even more useless. People commented on it. Mette and May Lene remarked on how much time he spent “on the floor with the baby,” as Mette said, and Mom told everybody who would listen how Torkild doted on his little girl: “He’s a serious young man, you know, a bit on the strict side maybe, but the minute he sees Malin, it’s like there’s this totally different person looking out of his eyes, he positively melts,” she said. At the risk of sounding like a five-year-old: everybody sang Torkild’s praises, no one had a word of praise for me. I’m pretty sure I pulled my weight, but Torkild did a lot more than was expected of a man and a father. I simply did what was expected of a woman and a mother and this made me think even less of myself than I had reason to.

  I would sometimes find myself thinking that Torkild’s mother was right. After all, what were my problems compared to the problems that so many women and mothers have had and still have to contend with? Mere trifles of course. Compared to them I was spoiled. I had had it too easy and like so many others in my situation as soon as things didn’t quite go my way I knuckled under. That’s how I tend to see the person I was back then. Especially if I’m having a bad day. And it may be true. But I also know that I gradually began to find my life almost intolerable. When I was curled up on the sofa with Malin at 4:30 in the morning, waiting for Teletubbies to come on, and heard other students coming down the street shouting and singing, on their way home from a party, I was filled with a desperate longing to be with them, a powerful urge to go back to the carefree student life I had only just begun to enjoy.

  That was the situation when I ran into you again.

  It happened on one of my very rare evenings out. Kjersti Håpnes and I had been to Dalí and we’d been thinkin
g of having a last beer at Café 3B, but the line at the bar was so long and moving so slowly that we soon gave up that idea, and then, just as we turned to leave, there you were, with two of your pals. We recognized one another, nodded and smiled, but if Kjersti hadn’t known one of your pals and gone up to him to ask whether he knew of a party somewhere, I doubt if any of what happened would have happened. We wouldn’t have gone back to your place and got even drunker on awful homemade red wine from the big green glass demijohn on your rickety kitchen table, we wouldn’t have played Elvis’s “Suspicious Minds” so loud that the music student in the apartment above came down to complain so often that he eventually gave up and joined the party, we wouldn’t have debated whether Pulp Fiction was as brilliant as you said it was and we wouldn’t have ended up having sex in a single bed with a rock-hard mattress and a sheet and duvet cover that probably hadn’t been washed for months. But we did.

  I had been unfaithful to Torkild once before. Shortly after we started seeing each other, I had sucked off a guy in a restroom at the student union and I remember being almost consumed by guilt afterward. I was a total mess, in actual physical pain. I had made up my mind not to tell Torkild, I remember, but even though I knew how hurt he would be and even though I knew he would never have found out for himself, I couldn’t help telling him. I felt so guilty and it hurt so much that I simply had to own up to what I had done and hope that he would forgive me. And he did—albeit after a couple of unbearable weeks. Not this time, however. Although Torkild and I now had a daughter and were, therefore, more deeply committed to each other than we had been the last time I had cheated on him, I didn’t feel the slightest bit guilty, not when I was lying there with you panting on top of me, nor afterward. I was amazed at myself, I was surprised that I had done what I had done, that I had actually dared to do it. But I felt no guilt. On the contrary, I felt I deserved it. I felt I had the right to have an affair, that I had the right to get drunk and kick up my heels, to go a bit crazy and have casual, no-strings sex. I honestly felt that I was taking back what Torkild had stolen from me, that I was reclaiming my life.