From time to time I did try to talk to you about this problem. I was perfectly honest with you, I said that you drank too much and that your behavior had changed so much that I didn’t like to be around you when you were drunk. I was worried about you, I said. I had expected you to react the way most people with an alcohol problem would when accused of drinking too much, but you didn’t. You weren’t at all angry. You weren’t even annoyed, and you gave no indication that you found it difficult to talk about. At the time I took this as a sign that I was making a mountain out of a molehill and that you were telling the truth when you said you were in full control, but now I know that that was exactly what you wanted me to think. The calm, rational demeanor, the slight air of perplexity were a ploy to save you having to answer any more awkward questions. In fact you were probably every bit as angry as I had expected you to be when I sat down to talk to you. Because by then you were quite obviously losing control. And it showed. Your face was pale, with an unhealthy yellow cast to it, and there were dark circles under your almost chronically bleary eyes. You were putting on weight too. Your cheeks were fuller and flabbier than before, you had a belly and a spare tire that hung a good inch or so over the waist of your pants and quivered when you walked.
I don’t know whether you drank because you couldn’t write, or couldn’t write because you drank, but things being as they were, I began to fear that nothing would ever come of this second novel either. I began to fear that you actually were the lazy, good-for-nothing dreamer who, right from the start, my mom and my sisters had tried to make me see that you were. Oh, how they hated you, Mom most of all. In her mind you had stolen me away from Torkild and Malin and she simply could not forgive you for that, since this also meant that you were to blame for her almost losing touch with the grandchild she adored. I tried to persuade her that it wasn’t like that, but I might as well have saved my breath. She didn’t really argue, but no matter how many times I told her that Torkild wasn’t as perfect as she thought and that it had been I who had pursued you and not the other way around, she still spoke and acted as if she knew better. “Well, well, we’ll say no more about it,” she would murmur with a deceptively sweet smile, then briskly change the subject. “Now where did you put the egg separator?” she would say, or some other such non sequitur, acting as if it was up to her to save me from having to continue with a conversation in which I would feel compelled to lie. And then, after a brief pause, she would usually proceed to ask questions designed to remind me of how hopeless you were. “No sign of a job yet?” she might ask, knowing full well that you wanted to write and weren’t looking for a job at all, or: “How does he manage when he’s not earning anything?” even though she was well aware that you were living partly on money from me and partly on social security—apart, that is, from a short spell when you managed to hold down a job as a receptionist in a guesthouse in the center of the city. The fact that you were fired from the receptionist job was regarded by her as yet another opportunity to humiliate us both. “So good to hear that you’ve got a job, David,” she told you, even though she knew you’d already been fired for repeatedly turning up for work stinking of booze. “How are you getting on, are you enjoying it?” she went on, with a guileless smile that barely concealed how much she was looking forward to seeing us squirm with embarrassment when we had to confess this fresh failure to the rest of the family.
At the time I hated Mom for all of this. As far as I was concerned, she was a real pain, manipulative and spiteful. I see things differently now. Not only do I understand why, as a mother, she behaved the way she did, I wish she had been even more of a pain, more manipulative and spiteful, because then I might have broken up with you sooner, by which I mean before the family gathering at Mom’s between Christmas and New Year’s when you made a spectacle of yourself by getting blind drunk and climbing into Mette’s bed. The rest of us were woken by Mette’s outraged yells and rushed to her room to find you curled up on the floor trying to protect yourself, with her standing over you, screaming bloody murder and raining blows and expletives down on your head. When we eventually managed to pull her away and she had stopped screaming, you tried to excuse yourself by saying it was an honest mistake, you thought it was our room.
“But … but … I thought you were Susanne,” you said. We all knew what had really happened, though, and since you knew that we knew, you made only this one feeble attempt at an explanation before, with a sly grin, retreating to our room to sleep it off—alone, of course, because right then and there I made up my mind never to sleep in the same bed as you again.
When I got up the next morning you were gone. One might think that this came as a relief to me, but it didn’t. I don’t think I’ve ever been so angry and by packing your rucksack and taking off you deprived me of the chance to have one last, almighty showdown with you for everyone to hear. It deprived me of the chance to vent my wrath on the one person who deserved it, so to speak, and instead I was left with a huge and almost unbearable sense of shame. It was as if, since I couldn’t direct it at you, I had turned all of my wrath inward, on myself, so it was with flaming cheeks that I sat down at the breakfast table with the others. Now they could all see that Mom had been right. You were a drunken loser, a selfish bastard, and I was a naïve fool for imagining that you were some sort of misunderstood literary genius. I had looked up to and sacrificed myself for a good-for-nothing slob who had never done anything with his life and probably never would. It had been obvious to everyone but me, I didn’t know where to look, I was mortified. But the most humiliating thing of all was that you had climbed into bed with my sister and had said that you’d always fancied her. It was nearly two years before I could even face Mette again after that.
And then it turned out that you were a writer after all.
You made your literary debut in the fall of 2002 and when I picked up your book in the Ark bookshop on Nordre gate and read the blurb on the back of what had been described as an autobiographical novel, I couldn’t help laughing. It said that you had had a hard, itinerant life, a life of poverty, casual labor, crime, drink, and drugs and a constant, burning desire to write.
I know, of course, that this was just a pure marketing pitch, an attempt to present you as a writer in the classic male literary genius mold. But it was stretching it a bit, surely, to state that you had led an itinerant life when you had only ever lived in three places in your entire life (Otterøya, Namsos, and Trondheim) and our five-month trip around to Central America was the only time when you were actually on the road, as it were. And wasn’t it a bit much to say that your life had been marked by crime just because you’d been involved in stealing a few mopeds and boat engines when you were a teenager? And why mention the few invariably fleeting spells of casual labor you had had in your twenties, but not all those years at university?
With such a skewed, not to say fallacious, jacket note it goes without saying that I was somewhat skeptical as to the veracity of this autobiographical novel. I was, however, positively surprised. Or rather, to begin with I was. The descriptions of the hard-drinking budding author were both painful and honest and even if the central character’s increasingly frustrated and exasperated girlfriend was depicted as being a slightly more forceful, aggressive, and humorless feminist than I remember being at that time, I had no trouble recognizing myself and I won’t deny that I cried when I read of how much you had admired me and how much you had loved me. This was beautifully and movingly written, and when you also presented a fine and fitting portrait of Mom—whom I had always assumed you hated—I was all set to call you and tell you how impressed I was.
But then came the lines I quoted at the beginning of this letter, taken from the beginning of a long passage in which I’m portrayed as a young mother completely lacking in oxytocin who has, therefore, no qualms about abandoning her daughter to go off and live it up with her artist boyfriend. If this image of me had been presented purely as your personal view and your personal reflections, I mig
ht have been able to live with it, but in the novel you have me admitting that I don’t feel particularly attached to her, which is much worse. As I remember it, we were in a hostel in Campeche on the Yucatán Peninsula, we were drinking mescal, and, biology student that I was, I had been wondering out loud whether I might be lacking in oxytocin, I don’t mind admitting that. But what was not made clear in your novel was that I asked this only because I wanted you to console me. This was one of many times when I missed Malin so much I could hardly bear it and I only mooted the idea that I might have some biological flaw that prevented me from feeling as strong a bond with Malin as most mothers have with their children to get you to reassure me by saying that I hadn’t done anything wrong in deciding to come with you to Central America. I was angling for you to tell me that I was a good enough mother, that was all. I wanted you to tell me to stop talking rubbish and then reel off the many ways in which I had proved that I loved Malin more than anything in the world; to remind me of all the sleepless nights, all the hours spent on the swings at the playground, all the kisses and hugs I had given her.
Whether you understood this I don’t know, and it really doesn’t matter. What does matter is what it says in your book and in that you make it sound as if I was serious. You describe me as a young woman who has no scruples about going off and leaving her child and who wonders whether this might be because her brain doesn’t produce enough oxytocin. This image of me as a cold and indifferent mother seems even more credible when viewed in the context of how I’m described elsewhere in the book: as a feminist, that is. That the depiction of me as a feminist accorded so well with the facts meant, for one thing, that people who knew me took it for granted that the portrayal of me as a bad mother was authentic. After all, why should they doubt this particular aspect when everything else rang so true? And for another, I’m fairly certain that the description of me as a feminist triggers a number of preconceived notions in the reader, preconceived notions that help to reinforce the image of me as a bad mother. You know the sort of thing: a women’s libber isn’t like other women, she’s strict, tough, and uncompromising and lacks the warmth, tenderness, and love most women and mothers are so full of, and these preconceived notions—which many people harbor, I know—are borne out, so to speak, when one reads of how I decry my own maternal feelings. The pieces fall into place, as it were, it all fits—and this in itself gives the whole thing a semblance of credibility.
At first, after I finished the book, I was only angry and upset, but as the full gravity of what you had written sank in, I gradually went to pieces. Since most people more or less assume that when a couple split up, any children will live with the mother, quite a few had already questioned why Malin was living with Torkild, and now they would think they had the answer: I was simply not all that attached to Malin, I didn’t love her as much as Torkild did. That was why I had chosen to live it up with a lazy, drunken ne’er-do-well of an artist rather than do my duty as a mother. Relatives, friends, and acquaintances, neighbors and coworkers, that’s what they would all think. They wouldn’t let on, of course, not to me, they would deny thinking any such thing, but still, that’s what they would think, and that’s what they would say about me when I wasn’t there. And as this began to dawn on me, I was filled with a deep sense of shame and embarrassment. For some time I was afraid to answer the phone, afraid to open the door to anyone or to go and see anyone, afraid to go out at all. No matter where I went, I felt people were staring at me, I imagined them sticking their heads together and whispering: there goes that coldhearted feminist bitch, the one who gave up custody of her child. In the supermarket, at parties, or in cafés it was always the same. Not to mention at university. Luckily your book wasn’t a great commercial success, but as is often the case with novels about academics or artists it became popular in student circles and something of a talking point, so when I walked into the cafeteria or the reading room at Dragvoll, I always had the feeling that everybody was turning to look at me, the way they would eye an insect they would like to step on. I had broken one of the few surviving taboos in our society, I was a mother who had given my child away because I didn’t care about her and as such I deserved all the contempt that came my way. That’s what they were thinking, I was sure. I tried to tell myself I was becoming paranoid, that people were far less interested in me than I imagined, but it was no use. No matter how rational I strove to be, the fear and the awful thoughts would not go away. Not only that, but I continually found myself in situations that suggested my worries were not unfounded. Because people were actually talking about me. When I was introduced to someone I’d never met before, for example, it was often pretty obvious that they knew who I was, and not infrequently I was faced with drunk individuals who, with little or no prompting, would launch into a whole spiel about how they didn’t see anything strange in fathers having custody of their children rather than the mothers—well meant, of course, but as far as I was concerned merely even more proof that the picture of me you had painted in your novel had stuck in people’s minds.
Just after you and I broke up, I tried to get Malin back. I had allowed Torkild to take her to Svalbard on the condition that they would be there for only a year, but at the end of that year when he suddenly announced that they had been offered the chance to stay on for another two years and intended to say yes to this, I no longer felt so amenable. I was furious. Dismayed. Frustrated. Torkild said he knew how I felt but that I had to consider what was best for Malin. She loved their life in Longyearbyen, she had settled in nicely and was doing well at home and in kindergarten and it would be a terrible shame if she had to move now, she needed peace and stability and she should certainly not be moved before she started school. If I were selfish enough to try to bring her back to the mainland, he would do everything he could to stop me. “And you don’t need me to tell you what would happen if we went to court,” he went on. “Not only did I take charge of Malin when you decided to go off to Central America to find yourself, but you’re a single freelance journalist living in a tiny studio apartment in Møllenberg while I’m in a stable relationship, I have a job, a large house, and a healthy bank balance. That being the case, do you really think a jury would grant you custody?” he asked and I could hear the gleeful burble in his voice as he said it. He was loving this and he didn’t try to hide it. This was his way of paying me back and it made me furious and even more determined to get Malin back.
So I contacted a lawyer.
Initially he was as certain as Torkild that he would be granted custody, but when I informed him of our verbal agreement that they would move back to Trondheim after a year on Svalbard and then found out that Torkild had been offered the job on Svalbard before I left for Central America, he began to think that we might have a chance. The second point in particular could work in our favor. The fact that Torkild had assumed responsibility for Malin while I was away but neglected to tell me that he was planning to move to Svalbard in my absence put things in a totally different light, because obviously if I had been informed about his plans to move, I would never have left and we wouldn’t have been where we are today. In that case Malin would probably have been living with me. “It won’t be easy to win, but it doesn’t look nearly as hopeless as it did a little while ago,” the lawyer said.
But then came your book. Then came the depiction of the coldhearted feminist who didn’t appear to care much about her child. Then came the rumors. The mudslinging. The shame. You might think that all of this would have made me even more determined to win Malin back—surely fighting to regain custody of her would in itself be proof that I loved her—and since it was so important for me to show everyone that the picture you had painted of me in your book was wrong, you might think that the novel and everything it brought in its wake would have given me fresh incentive to pursue a child-custody lawsuit.
In fact it had the opposite effect. Even though I loved Malin with all my heart, I began to see myself as others saw me: I didn’t love Mal
in as much as other mothers loved their children, so I didn’t deserve her, I was more interested in realizing myself than in looking after my own child, and from that point of view I was a perfect example of a generation that was incapable of looking after anyone but themselves. That was how I thought. And this last, the well-known notion that people of our generation refused to become responsible, grown-up individuals, became something of a mantra for me. It was something I did my best to believe because it shifted some of the blame off me, so to speak, and onto the times and the generation to which I belonged. Thus, abandoning Malin, leaving Torkild with full responsibility for her, wasn’t really evidence of a flaw in my character, it was more a sign of the times I was living in, times Erlend Loe had described so well in Naïve. Super. After a while this is what I tried to tell myself.
So, things being as they were, when I began to doubt my maternal instincts and my capacity for caring and nurturing, it was hard to summon up the energy and confidence to pursue a lawsuit that would have been difficult enough to start with. So I gave up the fight before it had even begun.
I wish I could say that everything turned out all right in the end and that Malin and I have a good relationship today. But I can’t. I’m guessing that, young as she is, she hasn’t yet read your novel, but knowing her father as well as I do, I’m pretty sure she’ll have heard what you’ve said in it and may even have read the passages in which I’m denounced as a bad mother. Whether this is the only reason why she refuses to have any contact with me now, I don’t know, but I’m certain that it has a lot to do with it.
Aftermath Page 29