by Helene Flood
He’s sitting at his desk, a manuscript before him, reading glasses balanced on his nose and a huge teacup at his elbow. It takes a moment before he glances up at us, the student and me, as we stand there and look at him. He finishes the page he’s on, his lips moving with each word in a half-expressed accom-paniment to the text.
Then he looks up, and a smile spreads across his face.
“My goodness, Sara, hello!” he says. “It’s so nice to see you.”
I cross the room to his desk and give him a hug. He smells of tea and aftershave and wet leaves.
“Hi, Pappa,” I say.
“Have you met my daughter?” he asks the student who’s standing in the doorway, who answers in the affirmative.
“Hi,” she says to me.
“Hi,” I say, most graciously.
“Would you like something to eat, Sara?” Pappa asks me as he gets up. “I’m not sure what I have in the house right now – I’m so busy either skiing or writing that there’s little time to do the shopping. And I have a group here, as you can see – a group of students who are discussing some very interesting ideas around how punishment is handled within society, so they’re getting on with that, and of course things get eaten up.”
“We have bread rolls,” the student says helpfully.
“A cup of tea is enough,” I say.
Pappa disappears out to the kitchen to make the tea, the student at his heels. They’ve almost moved in, these students who worship him. There’s something off about the whole situation, something not quite right, and I try my best not to think too much about my father’s relationship to these students – whatever it might involve.
A few years ago Pappa acquired a small flat in Bislett, so he would have a place to which he could go to write. “For when the university department gets too busy,” he said. Afterwards, Annika and I asked each other whether it was so he could get away from the students who were camping out in his house. Because why else would a man who lives alone need yet another place to go to to be alone?
“Maybe it’s so he can sleep with them,” Sigurd once said dryly in the car on the way home. I said nothing.
The FleMaSi offices are close to Pappa’s writing flat – actually, if you lean your head out of Sigurd’s office window you can see the window of Pappa’s apartment. I once pointed this out when we were talking about it – suggested that they might have lunch together some time, seeing as they’d be working so close to one another. Why I did this I don’t know, because I really couldn’t imagine them ever setting a date to meet up, and predictably enough the suggestion wasn’t very palatable to either of them – they’ve never had much time for one another. Pappa thinks Sigurd is a glorified make-up artist, since his only occupational purpose is to make things look pretty. Sigurd has always viewed my father with the bewilderment felt by most people who get to know him: does he really believe all that stuff? Yes and no, I would answer. But it’s best not to give Pappa too much thought – he likes to provoke, and the angrier you get, the more fun he has teasing you. Sigurd found a way of dealing with him – and as long as Sigurd didn’t make too much of himself, Pappa endured him like a piece of decor he didn’t much care for, making the effort because I insisted he do so. It was fine, there was no conflict between them. But the proximity of their offices was never mentioned again – and it wasn’t as if they invited each other over for coffee.
While the office is empty I glance at the title of the manuscript on his desk. “The use of flogging in criminal sentencing and its preventive effect on crime, a cross-cultural literature review by Vegard Zinerman.” I sigh. Business as usual.
When I was fourteen, Pappa wrote an opinion piece for the Aftenposten newspaper in which he argued for the reintroduction of the stocks to the Norwegian judicial system. My social studies teacher asked me, “Zinerman, is that a relative of yours?” That was the first time I understood that other people were aware of him, and later I found out that he had written such controversial columns and articles throughout my childhood. In his younger days he’d taken a different standpoint – had read Nils Christie, and believed that punishments should be minim-ised. But then he had evidently changed his mind. When I read his texts I’m never sure of the level at which he’s operating – whether he’s being ironic or sincere, whether he pushes questions to the extremes to highlight society’s paradoxes and hypocrisies, or whether he truly believes what he writes. He was extremely active in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks that took place on July 22, shouting his opinion into every microphone held out to him.
The year after the article about the stocks, Annika said, “Listen. I’ve been thinking about something. I want to take Mamma’s surname. To honour her.”
“Do you not want to be called Zinerman anymore?” Pappa said.
We were eating, I remember, in the dining room of this very house. Pappa had his fork halfway to his mouth. He put it down again and looked at Annika with a heavy, serious gaze. Annika looked down at her napkin.
“I’ve started to forget what she looked like,” she said, her voice thick. Silence descended over the table like a blanket.
“Oh, dearest,” Pappa said. “It’s your name. You can do as you wish. Mamma would have liked that.”
Annika nodded in thanks, but there were no tears in her eyes, I noticed. She was in her second year at law school. The week before, Pappa had written an article in Dagbladet entitled “Capital punishment and the dignity of the state”.
I was too weak for him, knew that I’d never have another chance.
“I’ve almost forgotten her,” I said, my voice trembling. “I almost remember her funeral better than I remember her.”
“You, too?” Pappa said. I didn’t look at him, endured the silence, counted the seconds in order to make it last.
“Well, I suppose I have no choice but to understand,” he said. “And regardless, it’ll be nice for you girls to have the same name.”
The Zinerman name came from my father’s grandfather, a Polish seaman who in Lisbon had signed on to a ship to Bergen, lied about his origins and made up a name. Pappa was immensely proud of his enterprising grandfather. Nobody else bore the name Zinerman. It was a stamp of quality, he believed, and he never noticed the embarrassment he was causing his daughters. It must have pained him that we wouldn’t carry on the name, but it was just like him not to reveal this hurt to us. He showed us that he respected our choice by never mentioning it again. Annika and I went down to the courthouse and completed the paperwork, and that was that.
When he returns to the study he’s shaken off the student. He’s holding two teacups, and sets them on the coffee table between the armchairs by the fire. Of all the rooms in the house, Pappa’s study is the most painstakingly crafted – it’s large, a living room in itself, has a fireplace, armchairs, drinks cabinet and all. In the event of a national emergency he could live here in his study for several days.
“So,” he says, looking at me. “How are you, my dear?”
He has clear, green eyes, my father – like those of an old man, or a baby. The skin of his face is full of furrows, blown into him by the wind and rain atop the high mountains and exposed crags he has climbed on skis. He has this friendly smile, so mild that you’d never believe him capable of defending capital punishment and flogging. Now he’s taken off his glasses, crossed one leg over the other, and the look he gives me says, “Speak, you have my full attention.” All of a sudden I want to cry.
When I was little, there was nothing I wanted more than to be invited to enter this room. The honour was not extended to me very often, but every now and again Pappa would ask me whether I’d like to join him for a while. Sometimes he would make tea, and we would each take a seat in one of the armchairs. I would tuck my feet up under me, hardly speaking, terrified of disrupting the magic of the moment, as if the improbable joy of sitting with him might evaporate should I say
the wrong thing. He would talk, and I would listen. He would tell me about the scientists he admired, about the great philosophers, about decisive battles of the Byzantine Empire and epic poems from ancient Turkey, songs from distant times and far-off foreign lands. I don’t think I understood even half of what he said, but it didn’t matter. I could lean my head against the back of the chair, narrowing my eyes until they were almost closed and my father was no more than a shadow. Listen to his voice, always rasping, as if you could strike a match along it.
It isn’t that my father doesn’t ask me how I’m doing now that we’re both adults – it’s that he forgets to listen to my answer. With him, I have only a narrow window of time into which what I have to say must fit. After a few minutes his attention begins to wander. I know this – but it’s not something I mourn. My father is who he is, and a man like him can’t be changed. His glasses are on the desk, but I can still see the impression they have left across the bridge of his nose, a weak, red line. Now he looks at me, tells me with his gaze that the floor is mine, that he’s listening, and I steel myself to come out with it, just say the words: “Sigurd is dead.” Get it over with. Then he can say whatever he likes.
For a time, when I was in secondary school, I tried to talk to him about my feelings. Told him about how my friends were going away to a cabin but hadn’t invited me; went to him when I couldn’t sleep at night because the boy I was in love with had got together with someone else. Felt the pain worsen on speaking with him. “Aha, I see. I’m sure things will work themselves out,” he would say – the words often appearing at such an inopportune moment that I would realise he wasn’t even listening, that he was engrossed in his own thoughts, probably thinking that whatever I was going on about was just some teenage drama, something that would pass of its own accord – which it often did. But I felt stupid every time. I never learned. Always thought that this time, just maybe, what I had to say would be enough.
When my grandmother keeled over and died in Husebyskogen without warning, Pappa invited Annika and me on a cruise. He didn’t ask us first, just bought the tickets. Three weeks in the Caribbean. We would leave Oslo the day after the funeral – it must have cost him a small fortune. Annika was heavily pregnant and said, “No way.” So Pappa and I went, just the two of us. The timing wasn’t great for me, either – it was right before my exams, and I spent most of the trip sitting in a sunlounger on deck, a textbook open across my knees. Thought of my grandmother in the evenings as I tried to go to sleep, tossing and turning in bed. Pappa was restless, too. Spent hours pacing up and down the ship. He had been so close to his mother. It had never occurred to him that she, too, would one day die; that it might happen so suddenly. Back and forth he wandered, agitated in his grief. Should have been out in the forest or the mountains where he would have been able to move more freely. He must have hated every moment of it; had only gone on the cruise for my sake. Had probably thought it would ease our grief, Annika’s and mine. Had used his savings to give us this holiday neither he nor we really wanted.
It isn’t that he doesn’t care about me. But I never know what I can expect from him. Nor do I know what I need. I’ve just lost Sigurd, have so little to hold on to. So I say:
“I’m fine.”
And he says:
“Yes? With your work and everything? And with Sigurd?” His voice is normal, almost cheerful. I feel a sting in my chest. I didn’t expect him to know anything, of course, I came prepared to tell him, and still a part of me hoped that he somehow already knew, so that I wouldn’t have to. But he is the same as always, and it is as if the full burden of this hits me only now: It is up to me to do it, to say the words and shoulder the response. Or at the very least to ask my sister to do it for me; when it comes to Pappa, it seems, Annika will not act before I ask her.
“I’m keeping at it,” I say, trying not to sound strained. And you – how about you, Pappa?”
For a moment he looks at me, searchingly, as if he wants to ask something more. I’m sure he can see it on me, and my stomach flips, I will have to explain. But then he smiles again, and says:
“Well, you know, I’m keeping at it, too.”
It’s pleasant, his smile – stories read before the fire and a feeling from when I was small, of being invulnerable as long as he was there. Endless relief washes over me. I came here to tell him. Now I won’t have to.
“So what have you been up to?” I ask him.
“I’ve been out skiing quite a bit,” he says, before adding, like a proud child, “I went out every day last week. There’s enough snow if I drive up to Sørkedalen.”
I lean back in my chair, longing to press my cheek against its high back as I used to when I was small.
“Have you read any good books recently?”
Pappa makes himself comfortable. Has been reading Michel Houellebecq.
“Now that guy really is something,” he says. “It’s dark, there’s no escaping it, but at the same time, Sara, I think there’s a lot one can learn from sitting in the dark and watching the world for a while. I think it’s an essential activity. One just has to be sure to emerge from the darkness afterwards, and not get stuck in it.”
I’ve been reading Sofi Oksanen.
“You should read her,” I say. “I’d like to hear what you think – I think you’d like her work. Speaking of darkness.”
This is how we talk about the big things in life – love, death and pain, the absurdity of it all. If great authors have written about it, Pappa and I can talk about it. I’m so relieved at having decided not to say anything about Sigurd that I become generous. I laugh at his comments, a little bit too much. I joke with him: “Yes, well, if you’re stuck in the darkness that’s where we therapists come in.” As he begins to tell me about the book he is reading, I lean back in the chair; in the heat from the fireplace it’s almost as if I can taste the cocoa from the audiences I was granted with him as a child. And I know I will regret this later. I should take the opportunity and tell him, instead of stealing this moment of calm for myself. But it feels so irresistibly good. Sitting here listening to his voice in complete stillness, eyes closed.
When I get home, the house in Kongleveien seems to tower there upon its slope. It’s cloudy, almost dark outside. There’s a police car in the drive, and in the garden I see a police officer bent over, her backside in the air. The sound of my footsteps on the gravel reaches her, and when she turns I see that it’s Fredly, the red-haired northerner who accompanied Gundersen at our first conversation in my office. I wave to her, and she waves back.
In the kitchen I realise how tired I am. I have barely slept since 2.45 this morning. Now that I think about it, I’ve slept poorly ever since Sigurd disappeared. I feel unsafe in my own house. How am I supposed to sleep?
But with the police car in the drive, with Fredly in the garden, I’m safe. I walk up the stairs as if in a trance, drift into the bedroom and sink onto my bed. On Sigurd’s side.
*
The competition was called New Horizons, and the project was to design a new cultural centre for a village in the west of the country. The municipal council had dug up some money, applicants were given free rein, and Sigurd – recently graduated, out of work and hungry – threw himself into the challenge. He covered our apartment in drafts, sat in the spare room until late into the night in a never-ending dance between his computer and the drawing board.
“Expansive surfaces,” he said. “Open spaces. Views.”
“Sounds good,” I said.
New days and nights; new ideas. I came home from work, walking up Vogtsgate and into the stairwell to the apartment we had bought in Torshov, and let myself in. It smelled of heavy breathing, of cold coffee.
“Sigurd,” I called, and he emerged, his eyes shining.
“Meeting places,” he said. “An arena for play, learning and conversation.”
He had a drawing in his hand
s. He held it up to me.
“What do you think?”
“What on earth is it?” I said, and a hint of irritation worked itself into the corners of his mouth before he explained.
“This is the main auditorium, that’s the foyer, in here are meeting rooms, and over here is a play area for children.”
A library, multimedia room, stages. Sigurd’s passion burned on behalf of the villagers. Why should everything be limited to Oslo? Why shouldn’t these weather-beaten westerners have the same access to cultural experiences and beautiful architecture?
In the evening, as I sit watching T.V. in the living room, I can hear him in there, the creaking of the outdated printer that’s working overtime, his feet crossing the floor to collect the printouts. Sometimes he comes out to get something to drink or go to the loo. I’ve stopped asking him whether he wants to sit down and watch T.V. with me.
At university, Sigurd was the golden boy. He worked longer days than anyone else, lived for his projects. He earned high praise, which always glanced off him, and criticism, at which he snorted. He’d had his eyes on the prize ever since I first met him – would make it big, design opera houses and landmarks, and take on private projects through which he could express himself as he wished. He could speak endlessly about it – the importance of what we surround ourselves with; buildings that help us to breathe. Once he got going, he would lose touch with his audience. Thomas and Jan Erik would humour him, their patience wearing ever thinner; Margrethe would tell him straight out, “Sigurd, honey, we can’t stand to listen to any more about open-plan office spaces” – but he paid no attention. Yes, he would graduate with a diploma more golden than any the university had ever seen; would sail smoothly into an established but innova-tive firm, start at the bottom and work his way up. I don’t believe it ever occurred to him that things might not turn out that way.
