Welcome to America

by Linda Boström Knausgard

  The room is dark. But I don’t switch on the light. We’re a family of light. A light to ourselves. There’s a lot that doesn’t bear thinking about.

  My brother’s footsteps as he crosses the floor. The way he moves about in there. Tramping, yet timid at the same time. His voice inside me when he tells me to do something. Take his plate away. Fetch him a glass of water. I’m his servant. Or slave. I do as he says, afraid of his hand, the way it grips my throat. I don’t like to think about being afraid of my brother. But I think about it a lot.

  Before, there was always the park. I used to play in the tree with my friend. We sat for hours, talking about the world the way we saw it. We were together there in the tree, and we climbed higher and higher, until at last we sat at the very top, each in our own fork, with legs that dangled down. Now she plays with another girl. I don’t know if they climb the tree. But I saw them skipping across the school playground, the way we always did, where one abruptly bolts like a horse, pulling the other along with her. The panic that struck between her strides, converting into sudden acceleration. Their laughter, which sounded like crying.

  The smell of my mum. Her perspiration in sleep. The warm bulk of her body to snuggle up to and sleep beside. Her heavy breathing, in and out. The bedroom, with its velvet curtains and the picture on the wall. The framed diploma from the academy of dramatic arts above the table and telephone. The black garter draped over the picture, a souvenir from some show or other. The ashtray of brown glass. My mum’s room, smelling always of stale smoke and naked body. Or exhaust fumes when she opened the window in the mornings to let in the air. The street separated the building and the park. The cars drove fast. They took chances, accelerating to catch the lights before they changed. We lived splendidly, overlooking the park. Six rooms and a kitchen. My mum needed a fair amount of income. She took pupils in the living room. When I came home from school I would hear her smooth voice and the efforts of her pupils in there. The dramas of the world echoed around the apartment. We got used to it. Our friends did too, though we always had to explain the situation to begin with. The screams and the laughter. We were supposed to be quiet when mum had her pupils, or else play outside. When her classes were over, she would open the doors of the living room wide, as if to show us we were allowed to enter. The walls seemed still to tremble with the nerves of her pupils. But after a few laps on our roller skates, through the bathroom, into the great drawing room with the door that led out onto the balcony, into the serving corridor with its black-and-white chequered flooring, and back into the living room again, it was as if the room once more was ours. We practised our starts in the hall. From zero to a hundred, the front door was our brake. My brother had his friends. I had mine. It was mostly his who practised their ice-hockey shots against the door, leaving it peppered with black marks, but sometimes we joined in, me and my friends, dribbling forward and sending the puck skidding across the floor. Sometimes I went to my friends’ houses as well, but the smells there, and the sense of order I always found, confused me. I would long to go home. I would long for my mum. Her hands, her solicitude. I would long to be biking along the pavement with her, on our way home from the theatre in the dark light of evening. Always on the pavement, even if it was against the law. People would shame us as we came whooshing along, invariably at top speed, as if the speed were vital to us in some way, as if it kept us alive. My mum talked us out of trouble the time we got stopped by the police. It was easy for her.

  But when she cried, the world fell apart and her crying was all there was. The guttural sounds she made, and all that came out of her. It was like setting a match to me, hearing her cry. Sometimes she could be on the phone at the same time. All this responsibility, she could wail, and it was as if my whole being zeroed in on her weeping so that I might understand and make it better. I took her distress in my hands as if it were a tangle of threads, and tried to unravel them, one at a time, to stop her tears by being there to help, but sometimes there was nothing I could do, the tears would be that much stronger.

  I hear my brother on the other side of the wall. He’s built his own sound studio in there. Mixer board, speakers, cables. Sometimes he’ll bring some nice-looking girl home with him after school for her to sing his songs. He empties his bottles of piss in the night when no one can see, and hides them away if anyone comes to visit. Maybe he puts them under the bed. My brother can do what he wants. No one’s ever been bothered. Maybe I could too. The thing is my own will is too weak to surface. If I had to probe into my life and ask myself questions, I wouldn’t be able to answer.

  On weekdays I walk to school. To begin with I wore pleated skirts and a woolen Loden coat, pigtails flapping against my back. No one else dressed like that, but I didn’t realise. Now I wear jeans and a top like everyone else. The school smells of dust and chalk and damp clothing. Always the same smell, though the spring draws in more dust and the dampness can recede. I never write on the board or in my books. Not speaking and not writing are the same. I can’t do one thing and not the other. Our teacher’s name is Britta. She speaks to my mum on the phone once a week. They talk about me, and I’m not sure if I like that or not. The days pass quickly. I walk to school and then I’m walking home again. What happens in between is something I absorb. I feel the way the class seems to proceed through the days like a living organism; suddenly someone will break out and pull others with them, but their agitation diminishes, everything evens out and becomes stable again. I listen carefully to what the teacher has to say, and I put her words away inside me. In the dining hall I keep to myself, sit on my own and eat my lunch. No one speaks to me anymore, and the memory of myself at school, the games we played, the way I took charge, has begun to fade.

  The walk home. Seeing the entranceway of our building always gives me a kind of shock. The marble columns and statues, a man and a woman holding up the balcony of the apartment above ours, the only one facing the street. The paintings on the stairway, the angels on the ceiling, the stone stairs with the fossils in them. We live on the first floor. The key slides into the lock, the door opening into the hall with the piano I sometimes played without being able. Home, home. Before, there was my dad to consider, the mood he might be in and what he could do. You never knew if it was going to be a quiet afternoon or if he’d be wanting company. But I didn’t need to worry about that anymore. Death stood between us now, like a river running by, and I could wade through that river, across to the other shore, and know I was safe.

  My mum’s thick, blond hair, her wide mouth and full lips, her laughter, so vibrant and fluid. So much joy. In one seamless movement, upwards, ever upwards, she could lift me and I would rise with her, rise to the ceiling and out into space, we rose and rose together. We flew. Flew over the city, looking down at the rooftops below, laughing as we picked out our own, onwards, upwards, away into the world. The air grew thin and cold, darkness surrounded us, until we turned and fell through the layers, all the way back to the apartment, and were again standing in our living room with the view of the park. It was night and thundering. Lightning lit up the park, the trees showed themselves fleetingly to us as light, before darkness took over again. Mum laughed at my fear of thunder. I had come running to her, crying, and we stood there together in the middle of the floor, staring into the night as it was ripped apart by electricity, and she laughed. What more did she do? Did she go with me back to my room again? Did she sit with me, on the edge of the bed? I can’t remember.

  Maybe this was where I should have resisted. Resisted the memories. I sat here in the darkness thinking about her, even though I didn’t want to. What did I want?

  I wanted to sit in enduring silence, to feel it grow strong and take everything into its possession. Was that what I wanted? Yes, that too.

  I surveyed the room. The bunk beds with the curtain mum had sewn, the night table with the books I no longer read, left there. The desk and the floral armchair where my clothes were dumped, the ones
that weren’t in the wardrobe. The flowery wallpaper. Why were there so many flowers in my room?

  I went to the kitchen, knowing no one was there. I filled a glass with water and scurried back, drank the water and put the glass down on the desk. The notebook lay there with its soft, black cover. I ran my hand across it. Something inside me liked it being there.

  The first time I went to see my dad at the hospital he showed me off to everyone: patients, nurses, doctors. He was jaunty, glowing almost as he told them: This is my daughter. This is my daughter. He couldn’t sit still, he went off into the day room where the TV and the games were. I made sure not to look anyone in the eye. Mostly, I stared at the floor. A doctor sent him back to his room. Sit here and stay with your daughter, he said, and closed the door when he went out. It was as if suddenly dad came down to earth. He said: I’m no good. I’m no good. Several times in a row. He looked down at his hands, I at mine, until the visit was over and I could leave the ward and go back to mum who was waiting in the cafeteria.

  That was the first time. There were some more visits after that. And then mum no longer wanted him to live with us, so he went and lived on his own in a flat. I never felt guilty about wishing he was dead. It was the best thing.

  Sometimes, though, I felt guilty about him being on his own. At home he’d had us, even when all he could do was lie on the sofa, though occasionally, if he was up to it, he might make dinner after we’d played cards.

  We were a family of light. Mum’s light shone out to us all. Her light poured on us. Before, I’d been proud of my mum. The most beautiful of all the mothers at the parents’ evening. Conversing with the teacher and the other parents. She made an impression. No one could resist her. Least of all me. And could I now? Resist her? Was my silence down to her? How could anyone allow someone else to take up so much space in their lives?

  You’re only a child, she used to say, lifting my chin to make me look at her. You’re only a child, and now it’s enough. Do you hear me? Enough.

  I saw my brother in the playground. I saw him, and he saw me.

  The first few days had been a rush of excitement. The fact that I could. That it was so easy. Just stopping. From one moment to the next my life was changed. It was more than a refusal.

  It wasn’t running away. It was the truth. The truth about me.

  Now and then I wondered what my voice would sound like if all of a sudden one day I said something. Whether it was still there inside me, waiting, or if it was gone. What would it sound like? That was one question I asked myself.

  I asked myself others too, like about responsibility. Was I making my mum go mad? Most often she was calm, but when she flipped it felt as if it was my fault. It wasn’t so much what she said, it was more that she became small all of a sudden. I made her small. It was scary. I wondered whether I had to start talking again to stop her from disappearing. If I had to choose between her and myself, wouldn’t I choose her?

  Wouldn’t I choose her strength over mine?

  Yes. I would. That was still the way it was.

  Sleep came like a mist in the night. It settled over me, only a few centimetres of air between me and it. I filled that air with a prayer. Always the same: Dear God who art in Heaven. Look after mum. Make her happy and never let anything bad happen to her. Amen.

  Make her happy. God makes her happier than I can. Every night I prayed for her, and how I knew God was listening I’ve no idea. I just knew. I had access to God. It was me and God who’d killed my dad. We’d done it together, once and for all. God and me.

  At night, I went about the apartment making sure everything was the way it was supposed to be. That things were in their proper places in the kitchen. That the balcony door was shut. I stood for a long time in the living room looking at the moonlight over the park. I put the chain on the front door, went to my mum’s bedroom and listened to her deep breathing. It was unthinkable for me now to climb in beside her, the way I did when I was little. The thought repelled me, but I still liked to look at her when she was asleep. For some reason it made me feel good to know that she was at rest. That she would be at rest until morning, when she would get up and sprinkle bilberries over our yoghurt, take the grapefruit juice that all of us liked so much from the fridge and pour it into our glasses, butter the bread for us, despite our being old enough to do it ourselves. She wanted to be present in the mornings, to be there for us. That was what she said: I want to be there for you. That was probably the worst thing: that I wouldn’t let her be there for me. That I wouldn’t accept anything of what she was giving.

  I was always quiet before, at the theatre too. Mum was annoyed by it, but there was so much for her to do that it got lost in everything else. At performances, I was allowed to sit next to the prompter, and there my silence was expected. It would have been terrible if I’d suddenly started talking in the theatre space. Unthinkable. But after, in the corridors and walkways to and from the dressing room or the rehearsal rooms, whenever mum spoke to me she would surely have appreciated an answer, but it was like it was impossible for me to speak in that building. That the only thing I could do was look at my mum, look at her over and over again. Follow her transformations from beginning to end.

  Silence had always been there as a possibility. A black floor to step out on.

  Have I mentioned our getaway cabin? It burned down. To begin with we were there in the summer and at weekends. Cooped up inside its brown-painted walls. In the evenings we put the nets out, mum, dad, my brother, and me. I would sit in the prow and look out over the water that glittered in the mornings, and loomed up at me, slate blue, in the evenings. My brother scooped up the trapped fish, hauling them up into the boat with the landing net. We filled our crates with slippery fish—whitefish, cod, the occasional turbot—and afterwards mum would prepare them, fish pudding with melted butter. It was at the cabin dad started to change. One night he stopped us sleeping by singing the compère’s song from Cabaret for hours on end. There were noughts-and-crosses tournaments. He drank all the time. Eventually, mum phoned the hospital and an ambulance came and took him away. The first time he was locked up, I felt a stillness spread through my body, like warmth. He was gone. For the time being he was gone, and I hadn’t realised it was what I’d been wanting all along, for him not to be there.

  I saw photographs of the cabin on fire. A boy on the road had taken pictures with his camera. I saw the flames, the way the blaze took hold of the structure with all its might, consuming it. Later, my brother and I picked through the ashes and the question we asked ourselves hung unuttered in the air between us: Was it dad? Was it dad who started the fire?

  There were a lot of questions like that, hanging unuttered between my brother and me.

  My brother took dad’s death as if it were the most natural thing in the world. It was he who’d answered when the nurse phoned from the hospital. She asked for mum, but mum wasn’t in. You can tell me, my brother said. Is it dad? He must have sounded older on the phone than he was, because the nurse told him everything. Dad had been lying there for three weeks, no one had asked about him. It was the nurse who’d found him. He hadn’t turned up to his last few appointments and, because he wasn’t answering the phone either, a doctor had asked the nurse to go to his flat and check up.

  He was dead. All at once, great spaces opened inside me. Spaces the silence filled. An immense calm came over me in the beginning, and the sense that this was what had always been missing.

  I never let on to anyone about me, God, and my dad. That knowledge was something I had to bear myself.

  What else did my thoughts say? They lurked and pounced on me. They were noisy, and I batted the air with my hands, the way you do to swat a fly. I chased my thoughts away. I didn’t want them, but the thoughts were big and strong. They knew I was only a child. That there was nothing I could do to stand up to them. I imagined a whole life with such thoughts and realised it would be im
possible. Peering ahead in time is dangerous. You never know what you might see. I needed to stay where I was.

  There was a question I asked myself: What did it mean to be grown up? How did you know when you were?

  Dad had been out in the boat when the fire started in the cabin. By the time he got back it was ablaze. What thoughts were going through him, watching his dream go up in flames? He loved fishing. We went on trips to the nearby islands. The picnic basket was always full. Mum made sure of everything: squash, sandwiches, coffee, biscuits. We explored the island, and after that we fished. I learned to use the oars when the outboard ran out of petrol one day. My brother and I sat with an oar each and chopped through the water together. We had been together. All of us. And now we weren’t. Had I always been scared of my dad? Yes, always.

  I often pictured him dead. I imagined the moment he died. How his heart stopped beating from one second to the next. His final breath. I imagined he was happy, but the thought was tainted. How long had he been in the flat? How long since he spoke to someone? It was the loneliness that came across the strongest when I pictured him in front of me.

  I wanted to draw him dead, but I couldn’t. I wanted to draw the fine lines of his face. His staring eyes.

  Once, I forgot the key. I’d been needing a wee for ages at school, and hurried home as fast as I could. I stood there at the front door, ringing the bell in desperation, but by the time my brother answered I’d already wet myself. There was a puddle at my feet on the landing, and me standing there crying. My brother got me changed and put me to bed. As if I was ill. Then he cleaned up the mess on the landing.