The Therapist

by Helene Flood

  Harald doesn’t answer. A few seconds pass in which we all wait, and then he says:

  “What about that gentle one? The one about everything changing.”

  “‘The Times They Are a-Changin’’,” the funeral director says.

  “Yeah, that one,” Harald says. “What about that?”

  Margrethe is quiet for a moment. She rocks slowly back and forth. Sigurd was her favourite.

  “It was your father who liked Dylan,” she says resignedly.

  “I know a young singer who often sings at funerals,” the funeral director says. “I heard her sing it once, and it was beautiful. It gives an entirely different feel from playing a C.D. More dignified, somehow. I can ask whether she’s available?”

  Margrethe nods.

  “Does she sing Grieg, too?” I ask as a peace offering, and the funeral director says he’s almost certain of it.

  I should choose a song, too. It’s the funeral director who says this. I choose “Blackbird” by the Beatles. I don’t know why. It isn’t as if it was our song or anything. But there’s something simple, something light about it. And Sigurd was light, I think. Not just light – but if I’m going to get through the ceremony it’s probably best to remember the good days.

  The service will take place on Monday. The time and date don’t matter to me, I have no plans. All I feel when we mention Monday is the terror of the long week that lies ahead after it.

  The meeting at the funeral parlour has worn me out, but it’s only one o’clock. From the car park Harald calls a taxi while Lana Mei, Margrethe and I stand there and watch him in silence. They’re all going back to Margrethe’s place. When the taxi is on its way, Harald asks where I’m heading – if it’s on the way I can join them in the cab, he says. Since I don’t want to impose I say I’m going to pop in to visit my father – it’s just around the corner, I assure him, and I’d prefer to walk, get a bit of fresh air. Harald nods – relieved, it seems. I understand. I’m an outsider now, and they’re grieving – it’s best that they’re able to spend time alone, just the three of them. We say goodbye; I hug each of them in turn. We say we’ll see each other next week. No-one uses the word “funeral”. Lana Mei says that it was nice to meet me. I walk slowly across the car park to the path that leads up to Holmen, and when I turn, they’re standing with their backs to me and looking down the road up which the taxi will come. Harald has his arm around his mother; she leans her head against his shoulder. Something twists within me.

  I don’t really intend to visit my father. I’m too tired, too frayed. I just want to get away from the three figures in the car park, wait until they’re gone, and then walk back the way I came to take the train home. I follow the narrow footpath away from the clamour of the Smedstad junction, between the old semi-detached houses built during a time when the area was like any other, in the direction of the large, venerable detached properties and new builds.

  Sørkedalsveien runs close by; Smestad’s inhabitants have barricaded themselves against it with large wooden boards facing the road, the suburb’s occupants trying to preserve a kind of nostalgic belief that they still live in rural surroundings, even with this main artery that leads from Majorstuen and up to Røa and Østre Bærum raging and frothing on their front doorstep.

  I’m glad not to be making my way to Margrethe’s house – glad that I’m not sitting in a taxi, squeezed between Harald and his girlfriend. That I won’t have to enter Margrethe’s living room, where I’ll feel as if I’m disrupting things if I pull out a chair or move a cushion to sit on the sofa. That I won’t be subjected to the ever-present, somewhat strained atmosphere of her house, which will be all the more strained now, with this huge, formless grief packed so tightly around everyone that it’s impossible to breathe without pulling it down into your lungs. Yes, I’m glad I’m not making my way there. But still. They’re leaving together. I’m walking alone.

  There are many ways of grieving. I suppose I must have grieved when my mother died when I was small, but I remember so little of it. I have a few vague memories of crying during the night, of hiding my head beneath the covers so that Pappa and Annika wouldn’t hear me. But there’s another kind of grief in these memories, which I can’t quite place – the fact that I can’t say for certain that this is what they’re about, that I’m crying in them because I missed my mother. And then there’s also the grief that isn’t for her, but for all that was lost – everything that might have been if she hadn’t passed away. That’s the grief that lasts longest. It never lets up, reappears at irregular intervals without warning. When I was in fifth grade and went to a friend’s house after school, and her mother teased us over dinner and asked us if we were behaving for our teachers. When Ronja’s mum showed us how to style our hair into a fishbone braid; how she had moved to stand behind Ronja’s chair, taking out her daughter’s ponytail and starting to plait the hair with tender movements, explaining as she went. When Sigurd’s brother put his arm around his mother in the car park just now, and she rested her head against him.

  The path along which I’m walking leads out into a passageway, a couple of streets down from the one where I grew up. I stop. It won’t be long before the taxi collects the three members of Sigurd’s family from the car park; perhaps they’ve even gone already. I could turn around and go back. But on the other hand, I only have the one parent left. I could visit him, drink a cup of tea with him – even better, I could just go and sit in my old bedroom for a while. It’s still there, almost untouched since I was a child, the large white blanket Mamma crocheted for me spread across the bed. When lying on the bed you can turn yourself into it; feel her handiwork against your cheek.

  As I’m making my way towards my childhood home, walking along the road between patches of ice, tyre tracks and dirty snow that is yet to melt, my mobile rings.

  *

  “It’s Gundersen,” Gundersen says as soon as I pick up. “Sara, I have a question for you. When you write up your notes, how honest are you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, to what extent do you write what you really think? If you think a client is barking mad or argumentative, for example, would you write that down?”

  “That’s not an easy question to answer,” I say. “I’m always honest, but I’m professional. And my patients have the right to view their records, so I try to write my notes in such a way that it won’t offend them should they ask to read them.”

  “So what does that mean? That you embellish them?”

  I sigh. My exhaustion after events at the funeral parlour asserts itself.

  “My notes aren’t my opinion on anything. They’re my professional assessment. If anyone is barking mad? Well – I don’t even know what that means. But if someone is argumen-tative . . . well, yes, it depends. If someone complains about something within their control, something they have the power to change, I might write about that. But I also take it up with the patient concerned, of course.”

  “Hmm. I’m just wondering. You have a file here labelled assessments.”

  “Are you reading my notes?”

  “Just a few selected excerpts. In order to understand.”

  “Understand what?”

  A brief pause.

  “Your workday. What happens in your sessions.”

  “That’s confidential information,” I say, but my indignant response to our previous discussions on the topic has deserted me. “The law is on your side in requesting access, but you also have an ethical obligation not to violate the private lives of my patients. If you have any questions about what happens in my sessions, I’d prefer it if you just asked me.”

  “Understood,” Gundersen says impatiently, and I have a distinct feeling that he’s going to do whatever he wants with my notes. “But now I’m asking you. What do you put in your notes?”

  I turn down the road to my father’s house as we talk. The
sun is at my back; my distorted shadow falls across the gravel on the path ahead of me.

  “I assess the patient. The treatment. I try to make an assessment after every session.”

  “So what if you think a patient is – for example – lying to you?”

  “Lying to me? I rarely think that. But sometimes they exaggerate, or avoid telling me something that’s bothering them. A patient might describe a childhood memory, for example, something tragic that happened to them, and say: “But it wasn’t really a big deal.” And then I might think that they’re glossing over it, changing the subject, so there is probably something there. A five-year-old wouldn’t think such and such wasn’t a big deal. See what I mean? In that case I might write something about it in my assessment.”

  “And what might you write?”

  “Hmm. Patient appears to have a flat affect considering the severity of the episode. Consider whether there might be something more beneath this incident than apparent, will explore further in the next session. Something like that?”

  “I see,” Gundersen says. “Thank you, Sara. I’ll be in touch.”

  “Wait,” I say as I walk up the drive to my father’s house. “Are you any closer to finding an explanation? I mean, are you any closer to finding the guy?”

  The line goes quiet for a moment. I wonder whether he’s been doing something else while he’s been speaking to me.

  “We’re following a couple of leads,” he says. “We think we know what Sigurd was doing in Krokskogen that day. But that’s all I can tell you at this stage, Sara, and I’d like you to try not to think about it. Let us do our job.”

  “Have I prevented you from doing your job?” I say.

  “I know that you went to see Fru Atkinson,” he says. “Of course, I can’t prevent you from visiting her if that’s what you want to do. But I think it’s wiser to leave well enough alone. I really do.”

  The warning is a blow to the stomach. Not because it’s embarrassing that he knows I went looking for the old woman, and possibly also knows that I left her apartment in a panic – although that is embarrassing. It hits me because he’s insinuating that I’m obstructing him and his team; that I’m a silly girl fooling around playing amateur detective. “It’s wiser to leave well enough alone.” As if I’m incriminating myself. And why shouldn’t Gundersen be interested in what happens in my sessions, what my working day is like? And so, perhaps as a kind of defence, I sputter out the tiny piece of information I’ve been keeping to myself, the information I didn’t want to give him.

  “There was a woman who used to wait for him outside his office. Were you aware of that? I talked to his colleagues, and they told me. They saw him go out and meet her.”

  Gundersen falls silent again.

  “Is that so?” he says after a few moments. “No, I didn’t know that. But it’s interesting. Who told you that, did you say?”

  “Mammod. At FleMaSi.”

  “Thank you very much, Sara.”

  “You’re welcome,” I say.

  But I feel no satisfaction in throwing this information in Gundersen’s face, no sense of being his equal.

  “I only heard this yesterday,” I therefore say, hearing how it sounds like an apology.

  “I have to go now. Speak soon, Sara.”

  There’s a click on the end of the line. I put my mobile in my pocket and ring the doorbell.

  Nobody opens the door; I wait outside for a long time. When I’m certain that the house is empty, I walk down the steps and across to the four flowerpots lined up along the wall next to the entrance. Large terracotta pots, probably bought and planted by my mother, and neglected since her death. They’ve held no flowers in recent years, and one of them now has a crack in it, but they remain there, four pots on four saucers. In the saucer of the third pot from the door, well hidden around the back, is a spare key to the house. It’s been there for as long as I can remember. I feel my way around with my gloveless fingers and take it, the small plastic figure of a dog, a chain and a key ring with a key on it.

  Inside, the house is silent. Luckily, the hallway contains no dainty women’s shoes – all of them are Pappa’s: a pair of trainers, a pair of ski boots. I can’t imagine these are his best ones, though – so perhaps he’s out skiing, or maybe he keeps his good boots in the car so he can head out into the countryside whenever the mood takes him, as it often does. I set my shoes beside his spare ski boots.

  “Pappa?” I call out, just in case.

  Nobody answers. I go into the living room.

  Pappa inherited the house from his parents, long before I was born. Mamma, Pappa and Annika lived in a small apartment in Holmen, and my grandmother believed that a family of four had greater need of a big house than an ageing couple. What my grandfather thought about the matter I don’t know, but they moved into an apartment in Frogner, leaving a few things behind – an old linen cupboard, an antique chest of drawers, my grandfather’s old writing desk. Mamma must have made an effort with the interior decoration, but since then little has happened on that front. Pappa isn’t interested in furniture, wallpaper or art – it’s all too mundane for his tastes. To walk into the living room is to be reminded of my family history. Those who know the story can scrape it off, layer by layer, like archaeologists. The large mirror hanging in the plaster stucco frame above the fireplace is obviously the work of my grandparents; the grey-flecked sofas probably my mother’s. The chest of drawers against the wall, well, that was my grandmother’s, as far as I know – she loved to tell us how it came from her childhood home and how her mother had promised that she would inherit it when she got married. Just the thought of this was enough to bring tears to Farmor’s eyes. On it stands my grandparents’ wedding photograph, the only personal image in the living room – my unsentimental father must have discovered a touch of sentimentality all the same, because he didn’t put it in a box in the cellar with the rest of the photographs. The decor is otherwise spartan. Above the chest of drawers hangs a painting which for the longest time I thought depicted my grandmother’s mother, probably because of the story about the chest, but I later learned its subject is actually Hannah Arendt, a Jewish author who wrote books about totalitarianism and evil. Why Pappa chose to hang a picture of Hannah Arendt on the wall I have no idea, but there is something reassuring about her gaze; she has fixed, self-confident eyes along with a gentle smile. When I thought she was my great-grandmother, I would often sit before the painting and talk to her.

  Above the sofa hangs a large and ugly painting of a vase of red flowers against a bold, light-green background. Pappa was given it by his department at the university as a sixtieth birthday present, and, contrary to everything I thought I knew about him, he loved it and decided to hang it on the living room wall. He showed such enthusiasm for this painting that for a moment I started to wonder whether he was losing his wits – “Isn’t it lovely,” he said, enraptured, “doesn’t it suit the room so well?” The painting is so awful that I almost wondered whether his colleagues had chosen it for exactly this quality. Pappa doesn’t have many friends at the university due to the nature of his writings. Perhaps some of them felt that this was the perfect gift, an ugly painting for a disliked colleague. And it would be in line with my father’s character if it turned out he had hung it up precisely because he saw through this intention. Pappa often takes it as a mark of distinction if members of high society turn their backs on him.

  The study is the only room in the house which Pappa actually seems to care about. It’s beyond the living room – you have to cross the living room to reach it. It was my grandfather’s study before it was Pappa’s, and Farfar built dark oak shelves along the walls, from floor to ceiling, which he filled with his books. When he moved out, he took all his books with him, and Pappa filled the shelves with his own. If he uses the flat in Bislett as his writing space, then the study is his library. He also kept Farfar’s writing
desk, a gigantic table made of polished cherry wood, with plenty of drawers that can be locked with small, gilded keys. I loved these drawers when I was little – they were like small treasure chambers, which to my disappointment Pappa neglected to lock. “I have nothing to hide from the world,” he claimed. At the end of the study is a fireplace, in which Pappa lights a fire every day from October to April, and often in spring and summer, too. There’s a basket of wood beside it, and Pappa prides himself on keeping it full at all times. Maintenance of the fire is also important, and he has a number of instruments for this purpose, all hanging from a small metal stand: more than one set of bellows, pokers for sifting through the ash, a small dustpan and brush for cleaning up when the fire has gone out. Facing the fireplace are two chesterfield armchairs, in which we would sit on the rare occasions I was granted an audience with him as a child. Between the chairs is a table with books on it, and when I cast a glance at it I see there a novel by Dag Solstad, one of his more obscure works, I think – or at least I haven’t read it.

  When it comes to the decor in here, Pappa hasn’t held back. He has a collector’s constitution, although he rarely shows this side of himself. On the window ledges are an old set of scales, possibly used by gold miners in Klondike, and a clock that was the only thing his father’s father – the Polish con man who gave us the name Annika and I chose to abandon – took with him to Norway. Pappa keeps it serviced, and it still works. Beside this is a bust of Darwin, a jug he may have imported illegally from Iran, and a beautifully carved runic calendar.

  Pappa considers himself a scientist first and foremost. He’sa social scientist, but sees himself as a direct descendant of Newton, Darwin and Copernicus – the natural sciences are just one of several branches of his dearly beloved science, and when anyone feels otherwise about the interdependence of these disciplines he is either genuinely surprised or emphatically dismisses their opinion. Science, as far as he’s concerned, is a method for seeking the truth, and he considers this the purest, most elevated path to knowledge. He therefore only allows space on his desk for objects he sees as symbols of this: an old-fashioned sextant, a copy of the Foucault pendulum, a piece of a meteorite, and a Newton’s cradle. He has endless stories about these objects. He looks upon them with such a tender gaze, of the kind other men employ only when looking at toilet roll Santas and polystyrene ball snowmen made by their children. Pappa has never kept anything my sister or I made in kindergarten or school. Annika is hurt by this; I might wish that he’d done otherwise, but understand that it isn’t about a lack of love, only about a lack of ability to understand what a Santa Claus made from a milk carton might mean. This is what I think as my fingers graze the treasures on his desk. My sister sees his limitations. He is a man who is unable to see things from any perspective but his own, who deep down cares mostly about himself. But I also see the little things he did for us as we were growing up: the visits to his study and the myths and legends he would tell us, or the long speeches about the sextant and the pendulum – attempts to initiate us into what he loves. To me, the awful cruise we went on when Farmor died is proof that he cares. He would give his life for ours if it really came down to it, but he’s unable to do the things that mean something in the life we’re actually living: visit us, show an interest in his grandchildren, ask us about our jobs and friends and marriages. It isn’t his fault. He was born lacking the ability to show an interest in anything that, deep down, doesn’t interest him.