She wrote that it could be argued that Mum and Dad should have put off the transfer of the cabins, but she understood their decision because the cabins were old and in need of maintenance and the bills needed paying. After all, Mum and Dad were eighty and eighty-five years old respectively. Given that they also had Bråteveien, it had all become too much for them. It had also suited Åsa and her to clarify the ownership because it reflected the effort they put into maintenance etc. And it was nice for Mum and Dad to know that the cabins wouldn’t be sold and that they could continue to go there for the rest of their lives. That was a perfectly understandable sentiment, she wrote. Just as we were concerned with our own feelings in the matter, we had to respect Mum’s and Dad’s feelings. After all these were assets they had created and had total ownership of, she reiterated. Perhaps they could have communicated the matter better and obtained two valuations, but it wasn’t a question of unfairness.
She also believed that the matter should now be resolved by obtaining two new valuations from different appraisers. For information she wanted me to know that the second estate agent had come up with a higher valuation for both cabins than the first one. Four new valuations were probably the closest we could get to an actual market value. Then Åsa’s and her inheritance could be reduced proportionally. We were welcome to contribute to the process, she wrote, and if the four of us could agree on a figure and put to Mum and Dad that they used the new valuation as their basis, they had said that they would then do so. Thus the matter could be resolved. She thought it was of the utmost importance that the conflict was resolved. It was not only difficult for Mum and Dad and us four siblings, it might also hurt our children. Her children valued their cousins greatly, she wrote, and had expressed a wish to see more of them; they always had such a nice time whenever they met up. All our children had much to lose if contact between them was made difficult because of us. She also knew that Mum and Dad were anxious not to lose contact with Mari and Siri.
She and Jens had told their children that any disagreement between us in this matter had nothing to do with them, and that it mustn’t affect their otherwise good relationship with their cousins.
Even if we couldn’t all get one hundred per cent of what we wanted, she concluded, she hoped that we would now do our bit to end the conflict. As she had said earlier, Åsa and she would contact some local estate agents straightaway. Love, Astrid
The elephant in the room wasn’t mentioned, the real reason I had stopped coming to Hvaler and Bråteveien; it was as if I didn’t exist, as if my story didn’t exist.
So you’re saying that your personal history should affect the inheritance issue, I asked myself, and the cabin dispute?
Yes, I replied, not entirely convincingly.
Everything is connected. No words are ever totally innocent to someone who is seeking to understand.
An hour after Astrid’s email, I got a text message from her.
She must have read my email in the meantime and realised that the problem wasn’t quite as simple as she had imagined in her account of the facts of the matter. She happened to be in my neighbourhood, she wrote, and would like to stop by.
But I didn’t want to see her, I didn’t want to be talked round, I didn’t want to be entangled in her therapy jargon now that I had finally found the courage to speak up. I wrote that I wasn’t in, that I had gone to Lars’s house in the woods. I turned off my mobile and my Mac and went to bed with earplugs and the duvet pulled over my head so I wouldn’t hear if she decided to come over anyway and saw my fresh, treacherous footprints in the snow and the dog’s paw prints and realised that I was in after all, so I wouldn’t hear her if she knocked on the windows and the doors, I prayed to God that it would start snowing again so that our tracks would be obscured.
The last time Klara saw her father was when he drove her to school. She was in Year One. Her mum had given her a big green apple with her packed lunch; back then big green apples were a rare treat. Klara couldn’t wait to take the apple to school, placing it on her desk, eating it.
Just as she was getting out of the car, after her father had pulled up in front of the school and they were about to say goodbye, he asked if he could have the apple. Klara was confused and upset, but she gave him the apple. But what if she hadn’t?
I stayed under the duvet until the darkness was dense, until the world was quiet, the buses had stopped running and the lights had been switched off in the neighbouring houses, until the least fearful time of the night when everyone was asleep, including human rights activists. I lit a fire and drank to calm myself, then I reread Astrid’s email. She wrote that Tale had spent weeks on Hvaler every summer, but Tale had only been on Hvaler two days over two summers, and she had had to put pressure on Astrid to be allowed to stay in the old cabin for those two days over those two summers because it had apparently been difficult for Astrid to find convenient dates, Astrid was already planning her summers as if she owned and could use the cabin as she pleased. Astrid had made Tale feel that she was being a nuisance, and it hadn’t been much fun on Hvaler, Astrid herself hadn’t been there, and Mum and Dad had interfered with everything.
And then there was Astrid’s didactic approach, her desire to lecture us all on the nature of the conflict as if she wasn’t a part of it.
And her honest broker attitude, how indirectly and gently she told us to pull ourselves together, to show gratitude. Although we wouldn’t get one hundred per cent of what we wanted, she hoped that we would now do our bit to end the conflict, wrote she who had got exactly what she wanted.
But the bit about making mistakes was the worst. How everybody makes mistakes. That Mum and Dad had probably made mistakes. That she herself had made mistakes. How magnanimous of her, how full of self-awareness was Astrid that she could admit that she had made mistakes, unlike the rest of us, Bård and me, so that by admitting her own fallibility, she became the least flawed of us all. If we just examined ourselves and thought carefully, she was in effect saying, then we would discover that we, too, had made mistakes and then we could surely forgive Mum and Dad the odd mistake. She encouraged us to examine ourselves and assumed the role of the mentor, the role of the adult towards us, her older siblings, as though we were uncontrollable, thoughtless children at the mercy of our emotions, who needed to be taught civilisation and psychology. I drank more and got more worked up and ended up at the mercy of my emotions and couldn’t not write and didn’t want to not write, everybody makes mistakes, are you kidding me, I wrote, incandescent and furious yet utterly clearheaded and I sent my email that evening on 14 December at ten past midnight, although something inside me told me not to do it.
Everybody makes mistakes, you write, wrote I, and that you yourself have made mistakes, that you assume everyone has and so on and so forth in a vague, politically correct tone, thus trivialising what happened to me. Or haven’t you understood anything after all these years? Never taken it seriously? It would seem that you haven’t. And that feels like an abuse in itself. When you meet victims of human rights abuses, is that what you tell them? Everybody makes mistakes?
I continued still incandescent, hammering on the keyboard: When I was five years old, when you were around two and Mum had just had Åsa, Mum took the two of you to Granny’s and Grandad’s in Volda for a break, and Dad was left alone with Bård and me in Skaus vei number 22. Bad things happened upstairs. Dad drank a lot. Bård was six years old and probably didn’t understand very much, only that something was terribly wrong. Do you want details?
I sent it to Astrid and copied in Bård and Åsa, I didn’t get a response, of course I didn’t, they were asleep, and we’re all children when we sleep as Rolf Jacobsen writes, except that’s not true, it’s a lie because we relive our battles in our dreams, it’s the rule rather than the exception, and so I was reluctant to fall asleep and I drank in order to sleep and read and reread my own text over and over, I read it and I drank myself to sleep. I woke up late the next morning, the clock said fi
ve, but it wasn’t true, it was light outside. I checked on my Mac, it showed ten past noon, my watch had stopped, the battery must be dead. I hadn’t got any emails from Åsa or Astrid, nor had I expected any, well at least not from Åsa, what could she say, I had never written like that to her before. If she had heard the story, as she must have done, from Mum and Dad, who needed to explain my absence, then it was their version that she would know and I had no idea what that was like, but I presumed it was about my overactive imagination, which I’d always had even as a child, how good I was at making things up and telling tales, as well as me probably wanting someone to blame for my unhappiness, my outrageous behaviour, my divorce, or it was something a therapist had planted in me, the possibilities were endless. Perhaps she had deleted my email unread on advice from Astrid, who had probably deleted hers unread. Astrid was waiting for an apology, only this time she wouldn’t get one, she wouldn’t get one because I still felt angry the next morning despite my hangover. No, I didn’t want Astrid to become estranged from Mum and Dad as well, her defending them worked to my advantage, it set me free; if Åsa and Astrid hadn’t sided with Mum and Dad, my cutting off contact would have been far harder, my sense of guilt far greater, and it was bad enough as it was, but it provoked me that Astrid had never been open to the truth and thus the gravity of what I had said, and that she wrote that Mum and Dad could make mistakes like everybody else. That was her mistake, Astrid’s mistake. She claimed to be neutral, but deep down she wasn’t because sweet-talking everyone isn’t being neutral if one party has hurt the other, only she didn’t factor that in or she didn’t believe it. She didn’t seem to understand or be willing to accept that there were conflicts which couldn’t be resolved in the way she would like them to be, that there are situations which can’t be balanced out, talked over and round, where you have to pick a side.
Klara needed a change of air. Anton Vindskev had the answer. Klara first met Anton Vindskev at Renna. He had ordered lamb kebabs, but they had run out and his girlfriend got uppity and insisted that they serve lamb kebabs to Anton Vindskev because he was Norway’s greatest poet. Klara said she refused to believe that. So who, in your opinion, is Norway’s greatest poet, he asked her. Stein Mehren, Klara said, or Jan Erik Vold, she said, but definitely not you. And that was how Klara and Anton Vindskev became friends. He later moved to Copenhagen because he wrote well there. When Klara realised that her father had killed himself and she was feeling at her lowest and needed a change of air, Anton suggested that she rent a room in his flat in Copenhagen. Klara went to Copenhagen for a breath of fresh air.
I divorced the nice, decent man. I moved from the big airy house to a smaller house, I carried tables and chairs and plates, the whole of my half of our marital assets to my car and drove from the big house to a smaller one. I was hurting. I had lost the decent, nice man, and before that I had also lost my great passion, the married professor, I suffered from the loss of two men, but knew that I was doing the right thing, that it was the first step on the road to an inevitable destination. It was something I had to do, I carried tables and chairs, I carried it all in the certain knowledge that I was doing the right thing even though I couldn’t explain my certainty to anyone, not even myself, or rather least of all to myself. I had lost, it was my own fault, had I wanted to lose? But why? It was my fault that the children had lost their home. Mum had begged me not to get a divorce, had pleaded with me to think of the children, my poor children, but still I left.
Klara was in Copenhagen. I was divorced, I was alone, it was my choice, I had made my bed and could lie in it.
The married man had found himself a new mistress, I couldn’t blame him. My ex-husband soon found himself a new girlfriend, another woman to be kind to, I couldn’t blame him either. I had to grin and bear it, I had chosen this myself. I didn’t complain to my family, they had warned me, told me to think of the children, and I had thought of the children, but not in the way that they wanted me to think of them, and I got divorced. Dad helped me renovate the bathroom in my new house, sometimes I would drive back to my new home, see Dad’s car parked outside and feel alarmed. Dad couldn’t have a key to my new home, it was unacceptable, Dad couldn’t be allowed to come and go as he pleased, turn up out of the blue, no way, I grew scared that he might suddenly be there, turn up unannounced, in the middle of the night even. I didn’t dare tell him, but I had to say that he couldn’t have his own key, I hoped he would finish the bathroom soon. The bathroom was finished, I still didn’t dare ask Dad if I could have my key back, but as long as Dad had a key, he could walk into my new home at any time.
I existed in a trance of fear, of loss, it was fog and confusion, I did the laundry. It felt like I was drowning in laundry, I hated doing the laundry, back when my life was normal, that is to say numb, I used to regard it as the dullest, most exhausting chore, having to do the never-ending laundry. The contents of the laundry basket and the mountains of clothes lying next to the overflowing laundry basket, the heavy bedsheets and duvet covers and tablecloths as well as curtains, piles of underpants and socks and dirty tea towels, I would curse all that laundry back when my life had been simple and undramatic. If it hadn’t been for all that laundry, I used to think back then, then I would have been more content, I would have been able to read the books I ought to read and longed to read, but rather than read them, I was forced to start yet another load of washing and when that was finished, I had to hang up the heavy, unmanageable sheets to dry, and it would rain or it would be winter so I had to drape them over doors and chairs because the clothes horses were too small and already covered with socks and pants and shirts and tops, I cursed the laundry. But now that my world had imploded and I was raging and grieving, it was the laundry that kept me going, the time it took to do the laundry and hang it up and when it was finally dry, to fold it, put it away in the cupboards when the children were asleep at night, and then fall asleep myself knowing the laundry had been done and dried and folded and was ready, clean and waiting in the cupboards, I’m surviving on laundry, I thought to myself.
I did the laundry, I cleaned the house, I wrote my final year essay on modern German drama as well as theatre reviews for small newspapers, I started writing a one-act play, I tried to live a normal life, to appear normal, to repress the dizzying sensation of falling. One bright Sunday morning in May when the children were playing in the garden, I was struck down by a feeling of pain that defies description. It wasn’t centred on any specific part of my body, but it was physical rather than mental, I couldn’t move, couldn’t stand up, couldn’t talk, couldn’t do anything other than curl up in bed. It lasted three hours, then it passed and I started feeling like myself again, but still numb. Three days later, one sunny Wednesday in May while the children were at school, it happened again, it came back, a three-hour episode of pure agony. And again on the Friday and on the Tuesday the following week. The fifth time it happened, once I had recovered, I looked in my diary where I had noted down the times of the attacks to see what I had been doing in the hours leading up to them. I had been working on my one-act play. What had I written? I went to the Mac and read my text, and there it was, in between all the other words, and I had a shock, I was floored, and at one fell swoop I turned into someone else, forever changed into another by this moment of truth. I had lived a life characterised by routines, sustained by routines, and then this happened, a brutal encounter with the truth that upended my life.
I couldn’t bear the anguish that followed or process the discovery, the horrific realisation, I couldn’t deal with any of it on my own, but neither could I talk about it. I read poems about pain, poets that usually soothed me, Gunvor Hofmo, Gunnar Ekelöf, Sylvia Plath, but they didn’t soothe me, I prayed to God, he didn’t respond, I wanted to surrender to him although I didn’t believe in him, anything as long as it might help, I needed help, I need help! I cried out from the void. At night I wrote pleading letters to the country’s psychoanalysts. I had read a great deal of psychology in an
attempt to understand and heal myself, I knew about Freud, of course, I had read Freud, I had read Jung, I knew a couple of psychologists about the same age as me, but I wouldn’t dream of contacting them because they were no wiser than I, at least that was how I saw it. I knew that if I were to trust and open up to another human being, it had to be a psychoanalyst.
~
I told no one about the letters, I hid the letters because the children needed taking to school and packed lunches and Constitution Day decorations and new football boots and lifts to swimming lessons and basketball practice, and I had to do the laundry and shop for groceries and cook dinner and put the children to bed and I was holding it together, just about. Then a Thursday afternoon at the start of June, a man called just as I was about to take Søren to football practice and said he had read my letter, I had no idea what he was talking about. Then I understood and the pain came back and I collapsed on the floor, unable to speak, I heard how he heard, how he realised that I had repressed my letter, that he was speaking to a human being driven to repressing things. He offered me an appointment and when I sat in front of him in his consulting room, trembling with guilt and shame, he said with a grave face that he had interpreted my letter as a cry for help. He understood. He took it seriously.
Will and Testament Page 7
