Will and Testament

by Vigdis Hjorth

  Freud believed that dreams expressed a repressed desire, a desire that is camouflaged and distorted. Jung, however, believed that if he didn’t understand a dream, it was because his own spirit was distorted and preventing him from truly seeing the dream. Jung didn’t want to view things from an angle other than the one his instinct encouraged him to adopt because if he did that, his snake would turn on him. Freud believed certain things which Jung’s snake couldn’t accept so Jung broke with Freud; Jung wanted to follow the path his snake prescribed because it was good for him.

  Dad was a good-looking man. Dad was just as good-looking as Mum was pretty. Mum and Dad made a handsome couple. They looked good when they went to Christmas festivities and other events they had to take part in. They would always leave such events as soon as they could, talk as little with the other parents as they could, Mum wanted to socialise, but Dad was awkward and uncomfortable and wanted to go home. Dad was good-looking, I thought Dad was a bit like James Bond as played by Roger Moore, but without the easy charm.

  I lost my birth family twenty-three years ago. It was my choice, I was alone at Christmas when my children were with their father and I would rather be alone than lose myself in my family, but I had lost my family. I was scared of dying and my family organising my funeral and Mum or Dad giving a eulogy and lying about me, lying about us. I was scared of dying, for my family to take over and thus lose my true self in death. I rang Klara and told her that if I died, she and Karen were to organise my funeral. She agreed. I called Karen and said that if I died, she and Klara were to organise my funeral and to prevent Mum and Dad from giving a eulogy. She agreed.

  Bo tried to understand wars without simplifying them like the media did, to avoid black and white thinking, good and evil, victim and aggressor, like the media did, like people often do, like I do.

  We met at a patisserie at least once a month to discuss global conflicts, and Bo explained their backgrounds to me as he saw it, he made a point of saying that they could be viewed differently.

  At least once a month I would sit in a patisserie waiting for Bo and he would arrive with his characteristic forward leaning gait, his old knapsack on his back filled with copies of newspaper articles from foreign newspapers, he would leaf through them and aim his bright light on what lay in darkness and spot connections where others claimed there were none, see patterns the authorities claimed didn’t exist but were merely coincidences that, by a happy chance, benefited the powerful, but sadly nobody else. Bo would come from the University Library with Goebbels’s diaries and speeches in his knapsack and show me their similarities to contemporary orators, the lengths to which we go to protect civilians. Bo studied Goebbels’s rhetoric and highlighted how today’s Norwegian politicians were adopting Goebbels’s pre-war rhetoric to justify the wars they were about to join. Bo was beside himself when Norwegian politicians went to war having used Goebbels’s pre-war rhetoric, which the country swallowed raw, we must save the civilians. Bo turned up at the patisserie with the evidence in his knapsack, the gift of the gab and his intellect in his heart.

  Lars came to the house in the woods in the snow and we celebrated the New Year together. We tried hard to have a nice time, but I could talk about one thing only. I tried talking about other things, but I invariably ended up talking about The Thing. Dad, his funeral, my childhood. Lars had had enough of hearing about my dad, his funeral, my childhood, what good will it do, there’s nothing you can do now apart from putting it behind you. I knew he was right, but how did you do that, how did you put something behind you? I knew I was being tiresome, but I couldn’t help myself. And that’s no excuse. Dad couldn’t help himself either, nor could Mum help being who she was, Astrid couldn’t help being who she was, I took after them in that I couldn’t help being me: destroyed and destructive.

  On 1 January Bård wrote to wish me a happy New Year and asked me if I had received a notice of the meeting with the executors, a firm of accountants. I hadn’t. You should have got one, he wrote back, along with a copy of the will. The meeting was being held on 4 January at five o’clock. Lars left the next day and I was alone in the woods.

  I went for long walks. I had managed to extend the deadline for On Stage, I had explained to the editorial staff and the printers that my dad had just died and that I wasn’t able to work with as much concentration as usual, they understood and expressed their condolences and told me to take as much time as I needed, no wonder that losing a parent had knocked me sideways.

  I went for long, contemplative walks along the river and despite my misgivings, I texted Mum and wished her a happy New Year. She responded immediately by thanking us for turning up at the chapel in full force. I suspected Astrid and Åsa were helping her text, in full force wasn’t in Mum’s vocabulary. They took turns with her, I guessed, they probably spent every other day with her, it must be exhausting. She wrote that she thought it was a dignified end. It was, I replied.

  Then I received a notice from the accountant, 4 January at five o’clock.

  From time to time I had wondered how I would react when Mum or Dad died or if they died together, say, in a plane crash. I had always believed that it would be impossible for me, mentally and physically, to turn up for a meeting about money and property, to sit with my siblings distributing Mum and Dad’s assets. Given I hadn’t wanted to see my parents while they were alive, it would be hypocritical to turn up when they were dead in order to get their money or some of their things. I had previously made up my mind not to turn up for such a meeting, not to participate in the distribution of their estate and had felt relief at my decision. But it had then occurred to me that I might be being unfair to my children. I had called their father and asked if, should my parents die, say, in a plane crash, he would represent our children’s interest at the reading of the will, and he had said yes. Once our children were adult and could represent themselves it was no longer an issue, but subsequently I had got in contact with Bård and sided with him in the inheritance dispute, so now I was duty bound to show up, wasn’t I?

  I had also become aware that the thought of such a meeting no longer filled me with the same dread as before Dad’s death because it was Dad, I realised that now, I had been scared of, although I had tried my best to imagine him being dead. But now he really was dead, and I wasn’t scared of Mum, Astrid or Åsa the way I had been scared of Dad, I didn’t fear their voices as I had feared Dad’s voice when he raised it, Dad’s stare when he wanted to terrify me into silence. The meeting with the accountant was on 4 January at five o’clock. How should I behave there? What was I trying to achieve? What am I trying to achieve, I asked Klara. Justice, she said. Restoration, she said. But they can’t give me justice or restoration, I said. They’ll have no choice but to listen to you, she said. They shouldn’t get away with their underhand behaviour. They’ve never supported you, never listened to you, they’ve silenced you for all these years, and now they want to cheat you as well whereas you should have been awarded damages, as should Bård, the neglected son, but instead you’ll both get less, instead they’ll profit from your misery. She insisted on seeing me before the meeting with the accountant on 4 January at five o’clock, she refused to accept that I would accept being conned, that I was ashamed to demand something when it was Astrid and Åsa who ought to be ashamed.

  But it’s already on Monday, I said.

  Come over Sunday evening, she said, she insisted, and we’ll prepare you for that meeting.

  Once many years ago after a long day at a café with Bo’s articles, we were walking down dark city streets, it was late October and raw, and we talked about our insomnia. We kept slipping because the streets were covered with slimy, rotting chestnut leaves, our legs got wet, but we didn’t go home, we put off going our separate ways, we walked in the dark autumn streets under the chestnut trees, telling each other what we did when we lay awake at night. Bo would occasionally use sleeping aids and take sleeping pills, but he was scared of getting hooked on them, he put a lot
of energy into planning what kind of sleeping aids and what kind of sleeping pills he would use and how often, I drank wine. Bo had had trouble sleeping ever since he was little as had I, I had always dreaded sleep, longed for it, but dreaded it, dreaded falling asleep, falling in general. I had made up a story when I was little, when I lay in bed and couldn’t sleep, didn’t dare fall asleep, that I was Jewish and lay close to other Jews in a railway carriage heading somewhere during the Second World War, that I was close to other people in a railway carriage, surrounded by other living, warm bodies in a shared destiny, not alone but together with others while the train rolled along with its rhythmic, calming chugging, I imagined that I could hear other people breathe around me, near my ear, my neck, and I tried breathing in the same rhythm as them, as the train, I imagined that I lay as close to other living, warm human beings as it was possible to lie, that we were one big body morphing into the train.

  You identify with victims, he said.

  But, he then said with a wry smile, every victim is a potential aggressor; don’t be too generous with your compassion.

  Astrid rang Sunday afternoon just as I leaving to see Klara. There were two things she wanted me to know before the meeting the following day. One was that Mum’s overdose had nothing to do with Rolf Sandberg. She had asked Mum and Mum had said that it had nothing to do with him. On the contrary: Mum had attended Rolf Sandberg’s funeral with Dad’s blessing. The other thing that wasn’t true was that Mum and Dad had given her money over the years, which Bård seemed to believe. Mum had paid her office rent for some years, but that had been Mum’s contribution to human rights and she was perfectly entitled to spend her money as she wished.

  And Mum was doing well, by the way, all things considered. They took turns staying with her, day and night, but of course that couldn’t carry on.

  When I got pregnant with my first child at the age of twenty, when the pregnancy test was positive, I called Mum and Dad to give them the good news and Mum invited me to Bråteveien. When I arrived, she met me, smiling and secretive, at the door. She too was pregnant, she told me, and that was exactly what she and Dad needed after the upheaval with Rolf Sandberg, a new baby. We could go shopping for baby clothes together, she said, go for walks with our prams, she said, and my heart sank, I would never be free. She wanted us to buy pregnancy tests and I was ambushed into going with her to the chemist where she bought two Prediktor pregnancy tests, and we went back to Bråteveien and peed into the jars and if there were two blue circles at the bottom of the jar in the next hour, we were pregnant, but during that hour we mustn’t touch the glass. After one hour blue circles at the bottom of the jars proved that we were pregnant. Aunt Unni, who was a doctor, dropped by and Mum told her that we were pregnant and that we had the pregnancy tests to prove it. Aunt Unni looked at her, my childish mother, and said: You tampered with the glass, didn’t you?

  Yes, she confessed, she had touched the glass.

  How desperate she must have been. There was no way out. Every door was shut to her.

  Lars told me about his unhappy grandmother who lived on Fagernes in the 1960s. Granny Borghild had toiled from morning till night for years, Granny Borghild had cooked the food and done the laundry and cleaned the house for years, until one afternoon Granny Borghild said to her husband, who was sitting at the kitchen table reading the newspaper, Lars was there and heard it himself: No, I can’t do this any longer. I’m leaving.

  But where will you go, Borghild, her husband said and made himself comfortable on the sofa.

  I sat in Klara’s study the night before the meeting with the accountant.

  Oh, Bergljot, she said. If it’s not one thing, then it’s another.

  Yes, I said.

  The street of childhood, she said, quoting Tove Ditlevsen again, taught you to hate, taught you hardness and defiance, it gave you your strongest weapons, you must learn to use them well.

  Yes, I said.

  Whatever happens tomorrow, she said, is a once in a lifetime opportunity.

  I took it to mean that she wanted me to mention the unmentionable.

  Wouldn’t it be inappropriate? In those circumstances?

  No. If you don’t speak up now, then when? If you want to speak up, it’s now or never. You won’t get another chance, your mum might die soon, you know now how quickly, how unexpectedly a death can happen. When will the five of you be together in one place again, and with an outsider present? If there’s no outsider present, a witness, they’ll walk out, you know they will, they’ll stop you, they’ll scream and shout and drown you out and throw you out or walk out themselves, and you know it, but they can’t do that tomorrow with the accountant present, this is your moment if you’re ever going to speak up, say what you want to say to them, what you’ve always wanted to say to them, all together, but which you’ve never managed to say when they were all together, with you being sober, without you being emotional or angry, surely it has to be tomorrow?

  I had never said anything when we were all together. I had never argued my case to anyone other than Astrid and then always in the throes of emotion, of rebellion. If I were to finally speak up, get it off my chest, my case well prepared and my being composed, then it had to be now. And it wasn’t inappropriate, Klara said, because what had happened to me was relevant to the terms of the will because Mum had justified favouring Astrid and Åsa by saying they had been so nice, so kind, so present, so helpful and close, but whose fault was it that Bård and I weren’t present, weren’t close, warm or helpful, why weren’t we? Were we naturally cold, less helpful and warm, or was our coldness the result of Mum and Dad’s treatment of us. Why would two out of four children be cold and lacking in empathy, while the other two were loving and considerate, was it perhaps the result of the various genetic mixes Åsa had mentioned in her eulogy in the chapel? Or might there be another explanation?

  Klara was right. Tomorrow, Monday 4 January, was my chance. It would do me good, I thought, it felt like it when I sat with Klara, the day before, on Sunday the third.

  Tomorrow.

  I wouldn’t be ruining anything for myself, I thought, because it couldn’t get any worse, any more ruined for me than it already was. I didn’t believe in spring in January. If Mum and Astrid and Åsa believed in spring in January, in more temperate weather now that Dad was dead, was it simply because they didn’t understand the extent to which I felt betrayed by them? In the twenty-three years which had passed since my estrangement none of them had ever contacted me and asked to hear my side of the story. No amends could be made, it was impossible. A vase smashes onto the floor, you glue it together, the vase smashes onto the floor a second time, you glue it back together again, it doesn’t look as nice, but it still works—just about, it smashes onto the floor a third time and lies shattered at your feet and you can see immediately that it’s lost for ever, that it can’t be fixed. That was how it was. Destroyed. My family was gone.

  But then why did I care? Why go there to cause a scene and experience one in return? To have my say when for once I was calm, composed and prepared, because I needed to speak my own carefully chosen words just the once, for my own peace of mind, for the sake of my honour, for the sake of my self-respect, get it out into the open, the rot, the rumours, the knowing nods, the glances they would sometimes exchange, to end this game of Chinese whispers; it felt as though if I didn’t do it now—and it had to be now—then I would have allowed myself to be bought off with the promise of an inheritance. Tell Bergljot she’ll inherit something, that’ll probably stop her telling tales about what she claims happened to her, promise her some money and she’ll change her tune. That was why they wanted me to inherit, that was why they preached treating their children equally, to shut Bård and me up. They wanted to buy our silence and the benefit of our company, but only on their own terms.

  In Memento, Larousse writes that mourning the death of a parent lasts eighteen months.

  But Roland Barthes writes in his Mourning Diary that th
is is not true, that time doesn’t lessen grief, that grief is never-ending.

  Barthes writes that time doesn’t heal anything, apart from the emotional side of grief.

  Have I always been grieving? Is grief my default setting? And is it only the emotional side of my grief that has lessened? Deep down have I always been sad? Only when I’m calm, when I’m alone, when I work intensely, is my sadness less painful. That’s why I’m calm, that’s why I work so hard, that’s why I’m alone.

  Roland Barthes said to a friend that the feeling will pass, but the grief remains. The friend replied: No, feelings come back, just you wait.

  Feelings come back.

  The night before Monday 4 January, I couldn’t sleep. The words from the draft I had written with Klara in her study kept going round my head. I finally nodded off around one o’clock, but woke up at four and couldn’t get back to sleep because the words from Klara’s study kept going round my head. It turned five o’clock, I couldn’t sleep, but had to sleep, so as not to turn up sleep deprived on this critical day, with just a few hours’ sleep under my belt, I had to sleep, but I couldn’t sleep because the words from Klara’s study kept going round my head, I got up and downed a bottle of wine in order to sleep, but I couldn’t sleep, I dozed off and woke up around eleven in the morning and didn’t have as much time as I had hoped for and expected to have to write a brief summary. I was still drunk, but I had to get up and write a short, concise text. I used the draft from my meeting with Klara, but expressed in my own words, I was more economic in my vocabulary than she was, I wrote a draft and went for a walk with the dog to clear my head, to get some snow on my hair, I called my children who could hear that I was drunk, who said that I mustn’t for anything in the world be drunk at the meeting with the accountant, no, no, I said, I promise, I said, it would be disastrous if I were to turn up drunk for the meeting, I knew that, I said, that’s why I had gone for a walk, I said, to sober up, to clear my head, to get some snow on my hair, it’s coffee only from now on, I said. Once I was home again I edited my draft, making what I needed to say as short and succinct as possible, I felt as I wrote that it was crucial for me to say it, I became increasingly convinced as I wrote that it was the right thing to do and increasingly anxious about the unmentionable, which would be mentioned with everyone present. I rang the children when I was done and read my text aloud to them. Tale said do it, Ebba said if that’s how you feel. Søren was more hesitant, perhaps it wasn’t a smart move to bring such matters up at an executor meeting, perhaps it would harden positions, make us real enemies, he said, but I defended my text, I had made up my mind. I called Klara afterwards and read it aloud to her, she said she would have been blunter, but OK. I called Bo and read it aloud to him, he said the text showed that I also cared about my brother. I called Lars, who was exasperated that I was in such a state, so het up and agitated and on edge as if I cultivated and wallowed in my pain, rather than working to put it behind me. You’re going to get a drubbing, he said, but I had made up my mind. I called Karen to get the assurance I needed, then I caught the bus because I was meeting Ebba afterwards at an Indian restaurant, I would be needing a beer, someone to talk to, I would be shaking. I was shaking now, I caught the bus and then the train into town, and I felt that everyone could tell from looking at me that I was shaking, that I was on my way to the front and that I was in mortal fear of the upcoming battle, and I was reminded of the opening scene in Festen where the central character walks through golden, undulating fields knowing he is on his way to the front, how did he manage to appear so calm, and why couldn’t I? I got off the train and went to the café where Bård was waiting as we had arranged, and I said to Bård that I was shaking and that I had written a text, it feels unreal now, but it was unreal at the time as well, I gave the text to Bård and asked if he thought I should read it aloud at the meeting. I went to the loo while he read it. I was thinking, as I sat on the loo, now he’s reading the text, its contents. I had considered not letting him read it in advance, to surprise Bård as well because if I asked him to read my text before the meeting, he might say that I shouldn’t read it aloud and I wanted to read it aloud, it had become crucial for me, I didn’t want to risk missing my moment which would never come back and I would never get a chance to say something which it was now essential for me to say, but when I saw Bård, when I entered the café and saw Bård’s grave face, I realised that I had to let him read the text first, that I couldn’t spring it on him because we were on the same side and to spring something on Bård, no matter what it was and though my intentions were good as far as our common cause was concerned, I couldn’t do it. I had to let him read it first and if he didn’t want me to read it aloud, he probably had sound reasons which hadn’t crossed my mind, perhaps he thought it wasn’t a good strategy to read it aloud. I was in the loo while he read it, I came out and my hands were shaking, he wanted me to read the text aloud. But what if they get up and leave, I said. Then we stay put, he said. When shall I read it, I asked. He told me how he thought the meeting would go. The accountant would start with Dad’s businesses. The accountant would review the business side of the estate. Then she would hand out copies of the will and go through it, and there would invariably be one or two things to discuss. Once the will had been read, the accountant would bring up the matter of the cabins and might well mention that she was aware that they were a bone of contention. At this point Mum would probably argue that Astrid and Åsa should have the cabins because Astrid and Åsa had been so nice for so many years and because they had been with Mum and Dad on Hvaler for so many years, and for those reasons it was only natural that they got the cabins. Then you can read your text, Bård said. I drank two big cups of coffee, trying not to spill them, it was a quarter to five, and we walked to the accountant’s office, it’s about seeing it through, I thought, don’t think of anything other than seeing it through, don’t think about the consequences, don’t worry about how they might react, just see it through because it’s absolutely crucial, this is about your life. We went to the offices, they were already there, Mum and Astrid and Åsa, Mum with a glum face and the scarf I had given her one Christmas around her neck. A gesture to me, I thought, a thank you to me and a plea, I thought, which I would ignore.