Will and Testament

by Vigdis Hjorth

  But later that day, on 6 January, having discussed it with her Klara, Tale went home and wrote a furious, unedited email to Astrid saying that her intention was never to present herself as a suffering victim, that she wasn’t a victim in this case, but then again, neither was Astrid. Neither are you, Astrid!

  She wrote that she had written purely as a witness since they clearly needed one, and Astrid going on about how everyone had suffered terribly was pure provocation because Inga’s suffering was self-inflicted, and that rather than offer empty words, Astrid could use her influence to talk Inga to her senses because Inga wasn’t going anywhere and wouldn’t want to write off any more daughters because she couldn’t manage without Astrid. But the truth is you have taken sides, she wrote, you sided with your mother at the expense of your sister, and it beggars belief that you’re incapable of acknowledging that.

  She received no reply to her last angry email. Just as I got no reply to my angry emails to Astrid. Anger wasn’t good. Astrid wouldn’t stoop to anger, Astrid wanted to act in a civilised manner, with dignity and without contributing to the escalation of the conflict, which anger might very well do, Astrid wanted to bring about peace and reconciliation by acting calmly and in a conciliatory manner, perhaps she looked down on people who acted in anger, who couldn’t control themselves, who were ruled by such a primitive emotion as aggression. Perhaps Astrid might respond to us when we had calmed down.

  It was time for reconciliation, Astrid had written.

  It sounded all very conciliatory. Simple, as if it were merely a question of pulling oneself together and showing a little good will.

  The philosopher Arne Johan Vetlesen has said that the problem with truth commissions and reconciliation processes after wars is that they usually demand just as much from the victims as from the aggressors, and that in itself constitutes an intrinsic injustice.

  I had often pondered that statement and concluded that a reconciliation process in our family would demand more of me than of Mum and Dad and my siblings, and that that was unjust. And, besides, in truth and reconciliation commissions set up after wars, to a large extent, there was consensus on who the victims and the aggressors were. How can you possible reconcile when you can’t even agree on that?

  And besides, if Astrid was serious, if she was genuinely motivated by the desire to reconcile, then surely sharing the cabins on Hvaler with all of her siblings would have been a start?

  Have you ever noticed, Bo said once when we had seen Woody Allen’s Husbands and Wives, that the defining characteristic of many of his major female characters, especially those played by Mia Farrow, is their apparent concern for everyone, their apparent sacrifice, that all of Woody Allen’s women, the ones who seem to mean well, who strive to solve conflicts, who never raise their voices, who are mildly overbearing when others lose their tempers and raise their voices, that these women who apparently never think of themselves but only ever of others, women you struggle to contradict or disagree with because they’re so mild and kind, that those women, he said, usually end up getting what they want. Those women tend to cross the finishing line in front, in some strange way their wishes are granted and their dreams come true. He believed that they had developed an effective but uniquely feminine language of power dressed up as concern.

  Have you ever noticed, I asked myself, how you use all of Bo’s observations to your own advantage?

  Bård had communicated to Mum, Astrid and Åsa that his lawyer believed that the intention of the will wouldn’t be met unless the cabin valuations were increased. They in turn contacted a lawyer. Their lawyer disagreed with Bård’s lawyer’s opinion and said that Bård and I wouldn’t win a subsequent court case, they cited some legislation. I didn’t understand it nor did I have the energy to even try to understand it, but the last paragraph in the letter from their lawyer got my attention. It said that no one could prevent us taking legal action, but that it would be very stressful for my mother and also thwart ‘the cooperation which the testators wanted to exist between the beneficiaries involved with the businesses’. Such cooperation wouldn’t work unless the family conflict was resolved.

  Mum, Astrid and Åsa would appear not to have told their lawyer how Bård’s request to have the cabins shared between the four of us had been brusquely rejected, nor had they explained what my conflict with the family was really about.

  Karen called. Astrid had written to her and asked if they could talk and it must be about me because they had no contact otherwise. I told her about Tale’s email and said that Astrid was probably worried that I might throw myself out of a window or jump in front of a train. Or she pretended to care and wanted to demonstrate that she cared, but deep down she was hoping that I would throw myself out of a window or jump in front of a train. Perhaps everyone in Bråteveien was hoping that I would throw myself out of a window or jump in front of a train. They dreaded what I might say or write next. Only when I was dead would they be safe, and they longed for certainty. It’s natural, it’s human.

  Karen spoke to Astrid and told me afterwards that Astrid had sounded genuinely concerned. Maybe she did care about me in her own way? Maybe she really had tried, once or on several occasions when she had been alone with Mum, a cautious: Are you absolutely sure there’s no truth in … ?

  And Mum’s reaction had been just as terse and aggressive as on 4 January when we met at the accountant’s, and she had responded with a furious: What are you saying?! What are you insinuating? How could you think something like that about Dad!

  It must have been difficult for Astrid. It must have been difficult for Mum. How high the stakes must be for Mum to activate such a defence immediately, to live in a constant state of alert, when she not only reacted as she had done when we saw the accountant on 4 January, but also for her to never ever in the last twenty-three years approach me with a: Tell me what you think happened to you. Instead there was blind panic and an instinctive reaction of fear. Was she in denial? No, she wasn’t because she wasn’t choosing not to know, she knew better than that, no, it was what her life would look like if my history came out and was believed. That was what she feared.

  Poor Mum who spent years being scared that I might founder because of the unmentionable. Then I didn’t founder, then I would appear to be OK, and her fear that I might subsided only to be replaced by her fear that the unmentionable would rise from my subconscious, that I would remember my past. Then she reached a point in her life when she stood to gain if the unmentionable was mentioned, back when her infatuation with Rolf Sandberg was at its peak, back when she wanted to divorce Dad in order to live with Rolf Sandberg, back when she asked me: Are you sure Dad didn’t do something to you when you were little?

  I didn’t understand what she meant. We were in the refectory at the teacher training college where she was a student, I remember it so clearly because what was she saying and what raw nerve in me did her words touch? No, I replied.

  Then it didn’t work out between Mum and Rolf Sandberg, then Mum went back to Dad, what else could she do, and started dreading once again that the unmentionable would rise from my subconscious, that I would remember my past because it would mean that she was living with a criminal, and she realised that she herself might have sown the seed to my memories surfacing by asking me: Are you sure Dad didn’t do something to you when you were little?

  Mum was scared, always scared. If it wasn’t one thing, then it was another.

  Then I got married and had children, and Mum’s terror, Dad’s terror subsided, they thought the danger had passed, then my older daughter turned five and I started suspecting her father of going to her bedroom at night and I fell in love with a married man and got a divorce and I was in crisis and I happened to mention one Christmas dinner that I was considering therapy, and Dad asserted in his most brusque voice, the one everyone in the family and Mum especially was scared of: You’re not having therapy!

  I remember it clearly because of what was he saying, and what raw nerve in
me did his words touch?

  After I had written a one-act play about a romantic encounter, I began to suffer strange, painful attacks and I looked at what I had written before they occurred and came across this sentence: He touched me like a doctor, he touched me like a father. And it all came back to me, it hit me like a blow, it was like fainting. I understood everything and everything fell into place and it was terrible and unbearable and I thought I would die, but I didn’t die, I bore it somehow because we’re so ingeniously designed that anything terrible, unbearable that we repress surfaces the moment we’re ready to deal with it. I called Astrid a few minutes after I had fainted, dazed and falling apart, and I called Mum, agitated and falling apart and Mum came over and I collapsed in spasms on the floor and she said: Now I understand why one shouldn’t trivialise such things. And she spoke to Dad and they went to Hvaler in crisis and drank and Dad said to Mum: What if I said that I did it?

  And Mum replied, she said when she called me the next morning and told me what he had said, that she had responded: Then I couldn’t stay married to you. Mum called me and told me as if to prove how principled she was, that she wasn’t the type of woman who could be married to a man who had done such things, while for all those years she had been married to a man she suspected had done such things. Dad was drunk and sobbing on Hvaler saying: What if I said that I did it? Dad was drunk and open to a serious, life-changing dialogue, and Mum had replied that then she couldn’t stay married to him. Mum thus stifled the possibility of a serious, honest, life-changing conversation. Mum must have realised in some nightmare scenario what an admission from Dad would mean for her, how would she deal with such a confession from Dad? Then I couldn’t stay married to you, she said, and Dad shut up. And that was the end of that. They carried on with their shared life, they shut down the crisis, they tried putting it behind them, maybe they never spoke of it again because what would they say? Together they decided, tacitly, to act as if nothing had happened, to put a lid on it and perhaps they hoped that it wouldn’t cost them their relationship with me. Or they calculated that their relationship with me was worth less than what it would cost them to enter into the honest dialogue Dad had opened up. What if I said that I did it? Whatever had opened up for Mum at that moment must have been so dizzying that she could go no further. How should Mum act if Dad admitted it? Dizzying, dizzying. Perhaps she would talk it through with Dad and then summon me to a meeting so we could talk about it seriously and honestly, the three of us, the triangle. Could they have stayed married after that? Might I then still have been able to see them? And what about Bård and Astrid and Åsa, their other children, would they speak openly and honestly about it with them? And moreover, hadn’t a crime been committed, shouldn’t it be reported to the police? And should other people be told as well, Aunt Sidsel and Aunt Unni and their families, should it be shouted from the rooftops? Dizzying and impossible, I could see that, while their relationship with me was but a small thing, their relationship with me could be sacrificed, so who wouldn’t have acted like Mum?

  Me?

  Astrid had taken it seriously twenty-three years ago when I called her in tears, Astrid had been moved, unsure and entered into a dialogue with me and spent more time there than Mum and Dad who, once they had turned away from the dizzying, the impossible, soon picked up their old life, Mum with a show of principles: Then I couldn’t stay married to you.

  Astrid took it seriously for a while, but then I stopped calling her and sharing with her because I started psychoanalysis four times a week and had a space in which I could bring up the unmentionable. I stopped contacting Astrid, I was mainly absent in the years that followed and the issue became less precarious for Astrid, who slipped into the Hvaler family fold and hoped that the business with me would blow over. She would call me a few times a year, if that, usually to talk about an article, but enough for her to feel like a go-between, a demanding role that had made her see herself caught between a rock and a hard place, as she put it. Which must have meant that Mum and Dad were pressuring her not to have contact with me. Or they were pressuring her by asking her intrusive and leading questions: Surely you don’t believe Bergljot is telling the truth? But even that happened increasingly rarely as the years passed and the drama diminished; they grew closer to one another in Hvaler, they saw one another often, at Christmas, the traditional holidays and during the long, sunny summers on Hvaler, and then several times a week as Mum and Dad got older, and it wasn’t until now, after Dad’s death, after 4 January, that Astrid had understood that perhaps the sum total of her actions during these twenty-three years, each of which individually might have seemed innocuous, was that she had ended up siding with Mum. That everything she had received in terms of money and presents from Mum and Dad over the years had landed her with a debt of gratitude she couldn’t ignore, because all presents come with strings attached, everybody knows that, I had found that out for myself. It hadn’t dawned on her until now that little by little she had acted as if she had sided with her now late father and perhaps her soon-to-be-late mother, rather than with her big brother and sister and their children.

  What if you experience a sudden emptiness on the death of someone you’ve organised your life around to please and gain acceptance from?

  What if on the death of someone whose approval you consciously or subconsciously wanted, you discover that the choices you made, big and small, to gain their approval, have pushed others away?

  Sybille Bedford writes somewhere that when you’re young you don’t feel that you’re a part of the whole, of the fundamental premise for humanity, that when you’re young you try out lots of things because life is just a rehearsal, an exercise to be put right when the curtain finally goes up. And then one day you realise that the curtain was up all along. That it was the actual performance.

  During the twenty-three years that had passed since things first blew up, I strongly suspected Mum and Dad of positioning themselves with a view to things possibly blowing up again. That they had deliberately bound Astrid and Åsa more closely by giving them many big gifts, substantial loans, being generous in every way, creating new traditions, new rituals to shore up and strengthen a sense of family and unity in case things blew up again.

  Or was I just being paranoid?

  The Norwegian film Sons is about a group of young boys who were abused by an adult man. He had met them at a municipal swimming pool and befriended them. They were neglected boys in need of a caring father figure. The abuser became that caring father figure. If the boys didn’t have enough to eat, he would feed them. If they were wet and shivering, he would give them warm clothes and affection. If they didn’t have anywhere to sleep, they could sleep at his place. The film is about these boys taking revenge as adults. They are repugnant and seem unnecessarily aggressive as they attack their abuser who is now an anxious old man. The boys are tall, overweight and gross, a bunch of losers; watching those raging, moronic, juvenile adults fall upon a frail and elderly man is agony.

  Suffering doesn’t make you a nice person. Usually it turns you into a bad one. Arguing over who suffered the most is childish. Abused children tend to stay traumatised and their emotional life is destroyed, they often assume the mind-set and methods of their abuser, that’s the vilest legacy of abuse, it destroys the abused and makes them less capable of freeing themselves. It requires hard work to transform suffering into something which is useful to anyone, especially the victim.

  When the scandal involving Mum and Rolf Sandberg was at its most turbulent, when Mum and Dad were busy shoring up their positions in relation to us children, Dad said to me: Mum says that when the two of you walk down the street, then she’s the one men turn to look at.

  When the scandal involving Mum and Rolf Sandberg was at its most turbulent, when Mum was shoring up her position in relation to us children, she showed me a picture taken on my eighteenth birthday and said: I don’t know why Dad is always saying that you’re not pretty. I think this picture makes you lo
ok quite pretty.

  A few years ago when I took part in a television debate about contemporary drama, Mum called me after the programme had been broadcast and said: You’re so tall and your hair is so dark, what a shame, you were so pretty when you were younger.

  Perhaps she thought that I was just as vulnerable as she was when it came to looks.

  Did she speak like that to my sisters? She couldn’t have done, or they wouldn’t have loved her or been as close to her as they were. Dad had turned Mum into my rival and Mum didn’t understand why, she had trained herself to ignore every inconvenient truth, she had too many of her own wounds to lick to put herself in my place. And how could she ever understand me when she never looked closely at herself?

  When we were at the municipal swimming pool, while we were swimming and discussing the meeting with the accountant which I hadn’t finished telling her about, Karen said, and it made me so happy, that it wouldn’t have taken much effort on Mum’s part, that things could have been so very different if she had started to cry. If she had said: I’ve been so miserable. If she had said: I was so dependent on Dad, I couldn’t manage without him. If she had said: I was so young, I was so scared. If Mum had said, as Tove Ditlevsen said not long before her death: My life has become stupid.