She had called because she believed that I would reiterate the statement I had made when she called three years ago not long after I had received the Christmas letter about the will, that I would say what she needed to hear, which was that I didn’t want a cabin on Hvaler, that I thought their will was generous—if their will was still the one referred to in the Christmas letter, that is. Because it might have been changed, but whether or not it had been, the circumstances had and were now different from when she had called me three years ago when I was in San Sebastian. I went to bed and slept badly, Bård’s email was on my mind. The next morning I wrote to ask him if he wanted me to tell the family that I shared his view of the conflict. It took a while before he replied. He wrote that he thought I should either stay silent or declare that I too felt unfairly treated.
I could see what he was saying. What he was pointing out. That I was offering to back him but was unwilling to enter the fray and express my own opinion.
But I didn’t want to argue about cabins and inheritance! I had always said that I didn’t care for any of it. I couldn’t very well join in now and demand something, it was beneath my dignity!
But then again I did share his feeling of having been let down by Dad, and by Mum who was loyal to Dad, I shared his view that the valuations were laughable, I agreed with him that Åsa and Astrid were behaving appallingly. Should I leave him all alone on stage like the villain, then sneak in and hide in his shadow?
I called Klara.
She said that I had failed to rock the boat for far too long, that it was exactly what Mum and Dad had wanted when they told us about their will that Christmas three years ago, for me not to rock the boat. It left them free to tear up the will or write a new one at any time, while all along I did nothing and regarded them as generous.
I wrote to Bård that I would write to Astrid and Åsa.
Incomprehensible Publications closed after one issue, and financial necessity forced Klara to work evenings and nights at Renna. Klara was exhausted and fed up with guests and staff treating her flat as a late-night drinking den and the married man treating her like dirt. The married man finally ended it with Klara, she was devastated and sinking fast. I need a change of air, she gasped.
I worked on the editorial while the email I had promised Bård came together in my head. When I had submitted the editorial late that evening, I opened a new document and poured myself a glass of wine to strengthen my resolve, then suddenly it couldn’t happen soon enough, suddenly it was of the utmost importance to me or perhaps I was scared that I might get cold feet, I wrote as if in a trance and sent it to Bård, although it was late, asking if he thought it was too long.
To Astrid and Åsa
Subject: Cabins on Hvaler
I wrote that, because I had expected no inheritance, I was pleasantly surprised at getting the Christmas letter three years ago which stated that we would all inherit equally. That was why when Mum had called to say that Bård was raising hell because of the cabins, I had said that I thought their will was generous. But that I regretted now, I wrote, that I hadn’t phoned Bård, given that I had later learned that he had merely asked Mum and Dad to consider another and fairer solution, namely that the cabins were shared between us four children so that all the grandchildren could enjoy them. This had been dismissed without explanation, and I didn’t think it was surprising that Bård had got upset at that or that he was upset now when they had been transferred in secret and at such ridiculously low valuations. After all, Bård had never, unlike me, distanced himself from the family, so why should he be treated differently from his younger sisters?
I wrote that now we knew the cabins had already been transferred in secret and at such low valuations, we must assume the intention was to ensure Bård and me would be left as little as possible in the final will. In other words, more would be given to two branches of the family and less to the other two. Of course this was seen as an injustice and a betrayal. And them blaming Bård for Mum’s overdose on top of everything else was particularly nasty, I wrote, making him out to be the bad guy while they themselves looked good and caring at the hospital. I wrote in anger that the responsibility for the current situation really lay with both of them who, if they had wanted to, could have used their influence to dissuade Mum and Dad from doing what they had now done.
I calmed down, poured myself another glass of wine and continued by mentioning that in one of my recent conversations with Astrid she had wondered whether Bård might be jealous of her and Åsa. No, we weren’t jealous, I wrote, but we had had a very different childhood to them, our experience of Mum and Dad was very different to theirs. They both had degrees and worked in professions which emphasised rights and equality before the law, the importance of examining both sides of an issue, and the fact that they showed no willingness to understand how Bård and I viewed the situation was depressing. Then I added: The fact that neither of you has at any point asked me about my side of the story, I’ve experienced and continue to experience as deeply hurtful. It needed to be said, I felt. In conclusion, I wrote that throughout our childhood and adulthood Bård and I had been given less than them, emotionally as well as materially, and the fact that we were now passed over so blatantly was distressing to us and our families, especially the realisation that Astrid and Åsa clearly endorsed such discrimination. Regards, Bergljot
Bård replied immediately that it wasn’t too long, that everything must be included and he pointed out some typos. I would correct them in the morning, I replied, I didn’t want to send it now given how late it was so that Astrid would simply dismiss it as she was wont to do with my angry night-time emails. She deleted them unread, she claimed.
I appreciated that Astrid was in a tricky situation, that she risked being everybody’s whipping boy, that Mum probably dumped things on her because she was the only one still in contact with me, that she would alternately be made to pay the price for being in contact with me and then be pressurized to put pressure on me to reconcile with our parents, I appreciated that Astrid was caught between a rock and a hard place, that it was unfair, that she, the only one of my siblings who kept in touch with me, was the one I heaped all my rage upon. I understood, I told her that I understood when I apologised profusely the next morning, and she would reply that she appreciated my apology and that she had deleted my night-time emails unread. Perhaps she said it to reassure me. Did she think that my night-time emails were so awful that she could see why I would regret them and thus she pretended not to have read them for my sake? I did regret my angry night-time emails, I felt remorse when I woke up the next morning and wild panic at the thought of what I had written the night before, but at the same time I was hurt that Astrid dismissed them as trivial, read or unread, because my furious night-time emails were the most truthful, and I regretted them only because I had learned that speaking the truth was against the rules, that speaking the truth would get you punished.
Klara was down in the dumps, Klara had hit rock bottom, Klara was almost broke, she needed a change of air.
I started my theatre degree without having to take out a student loan, I was married to a wealthy, kind and decent man, but unhappily in love with a married university professor who was going to stay married, I realised, although he was having an affair with me, although he had had affairs with many other women, I heard countless stories about how the man I loved was with other women, and it hurt me just as deeply as if he had been my husband, it cut me to the heart like a knife. I couldn’t bear the married man’s infidelity and I couldn’t stay married to the nice, decent man when I felt like this about another man, I wanted a divorce although Mum told me to think about my children. I thought about my children, who were seven, six and three years old, but I had to get a divorce because I couldn’t share a bed with the nice man when I was constantly thinking about another man and yearned to be in bed with him, when I suffered due to the married man’s infidelity towards his wife and our love. How could I, what was wrong with me,
who loved a notorious womaniser rather than my faithful, kind husband, what was wrong with me, who nagged and shouted at my kind, easy-going husband and destroyed him, or so it felt? I was horrible to him and had terrible thoughts about him and told myself that he must have gone to our older daughter’s bedroom at night when all he had done was fall asleep in front of the television, what was wrong with me for having such thoughts?
I had to get a divorce, I had no choice. I had lost the married man I couldn’t forget and I would lose the nice man I had to forget because he deserved better than me. I braced myself for the loss and went to see Klara who was in bed, shaking, because she had just found out that her father killed himself. She had discovered that her father hadn’t drowned accidentally, as she had always believed, but had in fact drowned himself. What a difference those twelve letters made. Klara had gone to a family party and overheard her father’s sisters whisper while she was behind the door taking off her coat, if only Nils Ole hadn’t drowned himself. It was like a knife to Klara’s heart and throat, everything fell into place. The fog and confusion of the past cleared, but the realization was painful like a knife slicing through flesh, like sharp glass in the eye, like piercing jets of icy water. He had drowned himself. He had walked into the sea on purpose and kept on going until he drowned, he hadn’t fallen from a jetty, he hadn’t been drunk. He had been sober and he had stepped out into the sea cold sober, intending to die. Even though Klara was only seven years old, he had drowned himself and she lost her dad, what was he thinking when he drowned himself depriving Klara of her dad, when he walked out into the sea, never to see her again, how desperate he must have been, but how could he have been so desperate when Klara existed and loved him and was only seven years old?
Everyone had known except her. That was the family secret which filled them all with shame and which was never mentioned, which they wouldn’t tell her, the daughter. In one respect the discovery set her free because she had always sensed that something was terribly wrong but had concluded that there must be something terribly wrong with her. But there wasn’t. He had drowned himself.
She couldn’t take any more, she said, she needed a change of air.
The night before Monday 14 December, I couldn’t sleep. The clock turned two, the clock turned three, I read my email over and over, tomorrow I would send it, tomorrow I would join the battle.
Monday 14 December. Everything was quiet when I woke up at eleven o’clock, the snow thick, calm and white on the grass outside, on the trees, on the car, all sharp edges were gone, everything outside was curved and soft.
My hands were shaking as I made coffee, turned on my Mac and sat down, but I didn’t have the energy to read the text yet again, so I skimmed through it and sent it still with typos just to get it over with.
It had been sent. It could be read. I had joined the battle. I would like to have stayed in the quiet, white forest where I felt more unavailable than in the car, than on the motorway and certainly more than at home where a bus went past fifty metres from my house so that passengers as well as anyone who walked by and the neighbours would know if I was in, if the light was on, if my car was in the drive, if my dog was in the yard, if there were noises coming from my house and, in the winter, when there was snow, when there were footprints in the snow. I could choose not to answer my phone, avoid going online, I could crawl under my duvet and pretend to be out, but if anyone came to my door and saw my footprints in the snow, they would know that I was there. What if someone were to turn up and ring the doorbell and bang on the door and walk around my house to the garden door and bang on it too and shout out my name in a commanding, furious: Bergljot!
I would have liked to stay in Lars’s house in the woods far away, I would have liked not to have to ruin the pretty, undulating crust of the snow with my nervous footprints, but the text I needed to edit was at home so I had to go back.
My email had been sent, it could be read, perhaps it was being read right now. I meant what I had written, that wasn’t the problem, so what was it?
I cleaned Lars’s house and packed my things and dreaded my mobile ringing. I got into my car, restless and troubled, for what, for what? For that which would happen next. Ten minutes later when I had joined the motorway and was doing one hundred kilometres an hour, I heard the email notification from my iPhone on the seat next to me, an act of war, was my guess. I didn’t dare open it while I was driving, but neither could I wait to read Astrid’s response, I looked for a lay-by, an exit, but there was none, what had she written, what had she replied? Then a sign announced a Statoil petrol station in one kilometre and I accelerated to one hundred and twenty and pulled into it, I stopped the car, my hand was shaking and I forgot the code to my phone, what the hell was it, what had she written?
She wrote that she had seen that I had sent an email about the situation. That she had also written an email about the situation. Before reading my email, she would send hers first. She felt, she wrote, that hers was an account of many of the facts in the case. She regretted not having sent it earlier, but she had been away. She would also send it to Bård this afternoon, but right now she was on her way to a meeting. She would read my email as soon as her meeting was over.
I called Klara, my head spinning. I called her with the feeling I so often got whenever I was in contact with Astrid. I felt that I had detonated a bomb while Astrid reacted as if I had merely said boo. I felt that I was threatening her with an axe, she reacted as though I was waving a plastic knife in the air. She wasn’t scared of me, nor did she respect me or take me seriously. Astrid wants to set the agenda, Klara said. She wants the discussion to be on her terms, not yours.
I drove home and up my snow-covered drive, thus revealing that I was in. I didn’t open Astrid’s email, I would delete it unread, as she did mine. But perhaps she was lying, she probably was, I too was capable of lying.
Hi everyone, she wrote and apologised for her late response, but she had been away. As she hadn’t previously put anything in writing, she had decided to compose this email. She thought it was important that we all listened to one another and so she wanted to have her say.
The situation had taken a very unpleasant turn, she wrote, she had been very angry and upset. The way she saw it, the starting point of the conflict was a valuation which was too low, but then misunderstandings and distrust combined with poor communication had led to accusations and emotional outbursts and the situation had escalated. In order to find a solution we had to get back to the starting point: the cabin valuations. But before she introduced proposals for a resolution, she wanted to comment on Bård’s allegations about Mum and Dad.
She wrote that she didn’t think that Mum and Dad were being unfair or that they didn’t want us to inherit equally. On the contrary, she was convinced that was precisely what they wanted. She had spent a lot of time with them in recent years, and they had said so often. It was also the stated intention of the will. Mum and Dad had repeatedly said that they were pleased to be able to leave something for their children. So she thought we ought to be grateful and mindful of how lucky we were. As a result she was distressed that so much anger and aggression were being directed at Mum and Dad. Nobody is perfect, she wrote, everyone makes mistakes, including Mum and Dad. She had made mistakes in her life, she wrote, as had we probably. She thought it was sad to see our parents upset while we argued about assets we hadn’t created, but which were a result of their lifelong work.
Arithmetical equality was straightforward when it came to money, she wrote, but it was more difficult when applied to the cabins. However, people had resolved such issues before and it was usually done by establishing the current market value and then compensating financially those who didn’t get the cabins. Mum and Dad’s decision that she and Åsa would inherit the cabins was therefore no reason to claim that they were being unfair, as long as Bård and I were properly compensated. The challenge was to establish the correct market price. There was much to suggest that the first valua
tion had been too low although it had been carried out by a certified appraiser. In hindsight it was unfortunate that they hadn’t asked two separate estate agents, since the valuations they got had led to suspicions about Mum and Dad’s motives and accusations of unfairness.
She had some sympathy for Bård’s argument that he and I had been short-changed, she wrote, yet she felt we ought to understand Mum and Dad’s decision, which according to her, was quite natural. It was a simple continuation of the cabin situation as it had been for the last twelve to thirteen years, and with which Mum and Dad were comfortable. That was an important point, she wrote. Åsa and her had spent a lot of time on Hvaler with Mum and Dad in recent years, and they had all really valued that. By Åsa’s and her taking over the cabins now, the status quo could be maintained while ensuring that Mum and Dad could continue to spend time on Hvaler in future. Given that this was Mum and Dad’s wish and seeing as they were their cabins, she thought we ought to respect it. It was neither surprising nor unreasonable that she and Åsa would inherit the cabins while we would be compensated financially, it was merely the result of how our lives had turned out. Many years ago when we four siblings took over the use of the old cabin, we had agreed usage and the payment of bills. But about thirteen years ago Bård stopped going, and we sisters shared the use and the financial responsibility. Then Bergljot stopped using the old cabin, although she would sometimes borrow Mum and Dad’s cabin and her children occasionally the old cabin. Then she and Åsa took over paying the bills and the maintenance and in recent years Åsa and her family had spent more time in the new cabin, either alone or with Mum and Dad, and taken over much of the practical responsibility there. Astrid had taken over the old cabin where she paid the bills and dealt with the practicalities. Ebba and Tale and her family had spent one or two weeks in the old cabin every summer, she wrote, but that wasn’t true, she was exaggerating. And Søren had been there in connection with his work, she wrote, and everyone had thought that was great fun. If Bård’s children wanted to visit the cabins, that could only be a good thing.
Will and Testament Page 6
