A House in Norway

by Vigdis Hjorth

  How is it supposed to be then, relationships between people?

  The sea temperature dropped, the sun went down earlier, her boyfriend had to go back to work and get his youngest child ready to start school, and Alma couldn’t join in these preparations because she had to work, she said, and she did, and she swam in the sea on her own and lay on the jetty alone in the twilight and made up her mind that she would make a tapestry illustrating how relationships should be between people – now that she had decided to try to explore them.

  The world was so big and its history so long. There had been and there continued to be so many ways in which to live, in which to organise society. What should people’s relationships be like? People grew up in refugee camps and jungles, in tribal communities and sects, on rubbish dumps or on steppes, some men had many wives, and many women were the third wife. She wasn’t a moral relativist, but how could a middle-aged, middle-class man in twenty-first-century Norway so shamelessly and with such confidence in his voice, claim to know how lovers should be together, how people should behave, simply by comparing himself to other middle-aged, middle-class men in his circle?

  The following day she received a call from the regional TV station, NRK Østfold, which wanted to interview her in connection with the opening of the new sixth-form college. She drove there on the agreed date, feeling slightly nervous. She had visited the college previously to look at the permanent display solution with the caretaker; the tapestry had been hung beautifully and hadn’t yet been relegated to just another decoration, but perhaps it was only a matter of time. Now the college would be teeming with young people treading water, anxious to release their latent fire. Her legs wobbled as she entered. The cameraman and the interviewer were waiting for her, lessons were in progress and the corridors were deserted. Why did you do it like that, the interviewer asked, and what are you trying to say, she asked, what’s your work called and what’s your name. Alma said something vague about colours. Suddenly the students poured out and the journalist tried to summon some of them to solicit their opinion, but they were shy and unwilling because it was the first day of term and they were struggling to stay afloat. But at length some were persuaded to stop and the interviewer asked them to look at the tapestry and give her their reaction. They looked at the cameraman and giggled and tilted their heads, and the journalist asked them to study the tapestry and they glanced at it and looked again at the cameraman with roguish smiles. For the third time she asked the seventeen-year-old girls to look at Alma’s tapestry and told them that Alma had made it, and they looked at Alma and then at the tapestry and then back at Alma. And one said that the tapestry was very big and asked if Alma had made it all on her own. And another asked if she had done it all by hand, and the third how long it had taken her and the fourth how much money she had been paid for it, and the cameraman filmed it and the microphone was on. One student went up to the tapestry to touch some of the orange beads on the chest of one of the drowning figures. Then she came back and looked at Alma with a serious face and told her she thought it was nice.

  Alma gathered that the TV feature must have been seen by quite a few people because she received several text messages from friends and acquaintances, and one from a stranger wanting to know where the tapestry was displayed and if it was possible to view it. And the following day as she sat in her studio making sketches for the tapestry about how relationships between people should be, she received a call from the head of the committee responsible for exhibitions celebrating the centenary of women’s suffrage in 1913 and the Constitution Bicentenary the following year. One exhibition would focus on the development of democracy from two hundred years ago up until today, and it would tour the country from March 2013 to February 2014, before ending up as a permanent exhibition at Akershus Fortress. Would Alma be prepared to make them a tapestry? The fee was mind-boggling, her artistic freedom total.

  She said yes, of course, and was paid 200,000 kroner simply for signing the contract; autumn and Christmas were saved.

  Because autumn had arrived. It was wet. It rained almost continuously and when it wasn’t raining, moisture would drip from the branches, drip from the roofs, drip from the posts, run in the gutters, run down the drive and on the roads, it was dark in the mornings and dark during the day, the clouds lay heavily on the people who bowed under their weight and the rain; it was especially dark in the afternoons and the air felt cold against her face and hands. Alma spent a lot of time out of the house. Her younger daughter had finished her studies and moved back home for the time being; Alma had been unable to say no to her because that wasn’t how a relationship between a mother and a daughter is supposed to be. But it meant she could no longer put off practical tasks for weeks and months on end and let the house fall apart, let herself fall apart while she immersed herself in her work. In order not to be overwhelmed and distracted by noise from the television and music and footsteps on the creaking stairs, the constant opening of the door to her studio and questions about food and money and keys for the car, she would walk ten kilometres to the nearest café most evenings because it’s not only in dreams, but also during leisurely walks that hidden truths can surface. She would sit in a corner drinking wine, making sketches, trying to focus on the development of democracy and Norway’s constitution before taking the bus home around eleven at night. When she approached the house, she would sometimes see four or five cars parked in her drive because her daughter had friends round and they tended to stay over, and when the Pole needed to get her car out in the morning, all the other cars had to be moved. The Pole would knock on Alma’s front door, which woke Alma up no matter how late she had gone to bed because her bedroom was nearest the hall. She would open the door and then go upstairs where her daughter’s friends were asleep in the bedroom, the guest bedroom and on the living-room floor to find her daughter, who then had to identify the owners of the cars, who then had to retrieve their car keys from the vast pile of coats and jackets and bags in the hall and other places, and then run out and drive their cars down the street and wait until the Pole had driven off in her low-slung Volkswagen and then drive back up and return to bed before rising later that morning and eating every scrap of food Alma had in the house. ‘Aren’t you glad to have me home?’ her daughter would chirp and Alma would nod mutely because that is how the relationship between a mother and a daughter is supposed to be.

  Alma’s boyfriend, however, was thrilled that Alma’s daughter had moved back home because he hoped it would make Alma live more like he thought people ought to live. Get up early in the morning, work during the day and go to bed at a reasonable hour. Not drink alcohol except at weekends and certainly not when working, never pour alcohol into a Thermos flask and drink it sneakily on the roof or on the jetty, something she had let slip to him once. Be gregarious and social and invite other couples round for dinner parties. Celebrate birthdays. Dress up and wear Constitution rosettes on 17 May. Join colleagues for a trip to a cabin in the mountains and ski in a line down the slopes, eat oranges sitting on a rock and read crime novels at Easter. He and Alma had been invited to a cabin by one of his colleagues, but she couldn’t make it. When she declined the invitation, he started talking about normality again. She paid close attention as he stated his case in order to use his ideas for her tapestry about relationships between people, and she didn’t respond as she normally would by arguing in favour of a little charity and tolerance towards people who were different from him and didn’t live according his norms. But he misinterpreted her expression of concentration. He thought it sprung from a sincere wish to understand in order to change. That she didn’t argue back as usual but listened attentively, he viewed as encouragement and so he held forth at length. Other people like being with other people, he said. Other people are interested in other people. Other people are curious about other people. At this point Alma wanted to interject that she was interested in other people, but not in the trivial aspects of their lives, which tended to
form the main topic of conversation at dinner parties, but she refrained. He enquired earnestly about Alma’s distrust of other people, had it always been as bad as it was now or had it grown worse over the years. And Alma thought that she would embroider a tapestry of couples at a dinner party just as unbearable and claustrophobic as she experienced them. Create a picture of the cabin trip so that he would understand how difficult it would be for her to breathe alongside strangers in such a setting. Create a picture so that he would realise that Alma couldn’t be with other people like he believed she should, that his template didn’t suit everyone, that expectations could divide as well as unite. But she hesitated. Perhaps she was the exception, and she couldn’t make a rule based on her own feelings.

  Her work was going well, although it occurred to her from time to time that she really ought to start the Constitution tapestry, which was paying for everything but which she had no idea how to approach, rather than work on something she might never sell. She read up on Norway’s constitution every afternoon when she ate, but wasn’t inspired. It didn’t seem relevant to her world, although she knew that it was. But the deadline was ages away, she told herself by way of consolation. When she came home from the café at night, she would put on her long sheepskin coat and walk down to the jetty. The luminous yellow leaves would flutter in the wind; there was a scent of wet wood near the log piles of birch, spruce, pine and bright red sap, the smell of the sea. One day all the leaves had fallen and the road unfurled like a yellow ribbon between the dark trees. She stayed on the jetty with her Thermos flask until she was quite sure that her daughter had gone to bed, then she went to her studio and sat with the needle in her hand until the early morning while she drank white wine in order not to fall asleep. Occasionally she had to take out some stitches the following day, but as a rule what she made at night was surprisingly fresh and raw as if her mild intoxication gave the needle wings. The only real danger was a risk that the small movement with her hand might become mechanical, but that never happened when she drank. How should people conduct their relationships, whose rules applied? She had explored the rules of the classroom in the ‘Latent fire’ tapestry, and the rules for couples at dinner parties and trips to cabins in the mountains she completed quickly because being critical and dismissive was easy, she had embroidered all of that into the base of the tapestry. It proved harder to work on the layers higher up, at the top, to produce something grand and liberating that could point the way to the Constitution tapestry, which she felt so guilty about putting off. The result of not too specific but generous rules, because rules are necessary, human behaviour must be regulated, but to what extent and how should they be enforced? If she had the nerve to mock and be critical, she would also have to offer up her own suggestion. But first she had to identify why she found it so difficult to adhere to the norms that other people seemed to follow so easily, even enjoy following. She went to bed before her daughter woke up, so she wouldn’t find her mother with a wine glass in her hand in the morning – she agreed with that rule although it was tiresome – and she looked forward to her daughter moving out so that she could set her own pace. She went to bed and fell asleep, but was woken soon afterwards by her daughter’s radio and the coffee machine and running footsteps on the creaking staircase, she didn’t tiptoe around out of consideration for Alma. This isn’t how relationships between people should be, Alma thought, woozy from lack of sleep. Sleeping undisturbed should be a right, a law. Not because we’re all children when we sleep, but because at night when we sleep and when we dream, we belong to a huge and dizzying world. On rare occasions she enjoyed vivid dreams where she flew high above the earth and saw the planet in all its beauty and vulnerability and wanted to hold it in her hands and caress it and comfort it, when she would plunge into deep oceans and swim with not only dolphins but all kinds of fish and wondrous living creatures, when she swooped through the foliage of the treetops or soared up through them and landed on a birch leaf on the topmost branch and sat there bobbing up and down with other colourful, friendly birds. It was such a shame, such a pity, that her strongest sense of fellowship with other living creatures appeared only in her dreams, and then only infrequently because she had yet to discover how to conjure them up. However, she intended to research and investigate this and share the recipe with other people because it would make the world a better place, she thought, because dreaming was one of the very few pleasures that didn’t hurt anyone. Every night she would lie down bursting with anticipation in the hope of experiencing that particularly intense joy which dreams alone could deliver and which couldn’t be compared to anything, and which was completely authentic.

  Christmas came and went without her getting a single flash of inspiration or sewing a single stitch. The house filled with people and when she went to shower on Christmas Eve after everyone else had, there was no more hot water. The Pole appeared outside a couple of times also to complain about the lack of hot water. And Alma asked her visiting adult children who had children of their own, not to give their children baths, not to shower endlessly, and yet she could hear how they broke the rule when they thought she wasn’t paying attention. They would bath their children, take long showers, the water constantly gurgled through the pipes. And there were lists of presents everywhere and they wrote long shopping lists and didn’t think for one moment how many stitches Alma had to sew in order to buy them whatever they wanted, be it rowan berry jelly, saffron or organic olive oil. As usual before they sat down for Christmas dinner she read aloud the poem about the black city and the young birch trees bravely reaching their thin branches towards the sky, to mark the festive occasion where other people might read the Nativity from Luke’s Gospel, and afterwards as she was in full stride, a poem about those who owned nothing, but who had created everything, built the ships and the roads and mined for gold and salt, as a counterbalance to commercialism, and everyone rolled their eyes at her.

  She heaved a sigh of relief when they left just after New Year and only the one daughter remained. And she had got a job by now and was looking for a flat, so things were moving in the right direction. And at the start of January, Alma received rent from the Pole, the right amount, a thousand kroner more than in December as they had agreed, and that was just as well because Alma had feared that the Pole would forget that she had accepted the increase and Alma would then have had to remind her and show her the letter – luckily she had kept a copy of it, and perhaps she would have had to call the National Landlords Association and that would have been unpleasant. But this time the money was just paid straight into her account; it was probably something the council had told her to do because it made it easier to prove that she had paid. The future looked bright. A few days glittered bright with falling snow and Alma went skiing on the floodlit track. And though her work was progressing slowly because she still didn’t know how to make it uplifting at the top, she would go to bed every night filled with anticipation. She hoped for dreams, especially some like the previously mentioned vivid ones, once her daughter moved out so her mornings would become quieter. When the snow melted on the drive and froze to ice so the cars couldn’t drive all the way up, but had to be left on the side of the road, when the snow melted and turned to ice on the ski track so it hurt to fall over, she would walk down to the beach in the evenings instead, jumping from rock to rock, and one night she stumbled and fell and lay on her back in the water as everything slowed down. The water wasn’t deep, it wasn’t dangerous, not even cold, it was just a matter of lying down. The water seeped in through her clothing, one drop at a time, at first a cool tickling, then it grew warm and all urgency vanished from her body and her mind grew clear and she could see further as she sank and yet the mute stars came closer, it was bizarre. You need to take a tumble in order to get a better perspective, she concluded. Eventually she did start to feel the cold and walked back, dripping onto the road, her clothes heavy with water. In order not to get the carpets in the hall wet, she undressed on the front
steps, quickly let herself in and enjoyed a long, hot shower while her daughter banged on the wall, before she climbed into bed with a glass of red wine.

  When she woke up late the following morning, the house was quiet. Her daughter hadn’t woken her when she got up, was she starting to show some consideration? She tried to retrieve a dramatic dream she had involuntarily woken up from, something about a bus driver shooting her in the knee, but it slipped away, and that was irritating because it was the ones that got away, that resisted being recalled, which were the most important. And once she became irritated, her joy evaporated because the only part of the dream she had understood was that her joy was conditional on her not being irritable or worried. And that in itself was worrying because most people worry all the time. She happened to look at her bedside table where her mobile wasn’t lying in its usual place. Had it been in her pocket when she tripped yesterday? Had it slipped out and was lying in a puddle between the rocks, ruined? She got up and discovered it on the chest of drawers in the hall along with five missed calls from her daughter. She called her back; her daughter wanted to know why Alma’s clothes were lying in heap on the steps leading to the house with her knickers at the top like the star on a Christmas tree. Oh, that, Alma said, she had forgotten all about it. She opened the door and there they were, a wet heap with her knickers at the top like a decoration. Her initial thought was to ask why her daughter hadn’t brought the clothes inside, but she realised that she was hardly in a position to do so. What will the neighbours say, her daughter asked. Oh dear, Alma said, grateful for the many big trees that offered her some privacy. But the Pole had seen the clothes, of course, and drawn her own conclusions. It explained why the Pole didn’t take Alma seriously, why she was curt to her, didn’t greet her properly, and wasn’t ashamed to smoke in Alma’s laundry basement or complain about the lack of hot water. And now Alma’s daughter was exasperated, the neighbours possibly shocked, the whole day was ruined. In the harsh sunlight Alma could see how filthy the windows were; she hadn’t washed them for years. It was on her to do list for spring, because during winter it was dark from morning till night, so no one cared whether or not the windows were clean, but the February light was mercilessly revealing, as it can be on certain winter afternoons, a bleaching kind of light cutting through the house and her body, so bright it hurt to look at it. And all the neighbours and everyone passing by could see the filthy windows. She tried to dismiss it, trivialise it. What difference did it make to the neighbours whether or not Alma’s windows sparkled? It was no skin off their nose if they were filthy, surely? Or were Alma’s windows bad to look at? Everyone knows the difference between a nice neighbourhood and a bad one, and everyone wants to live in a nice one because neat and tidy surroundings make people happy, we’re all responsible for our environment, it’s why we don’t throw litter in the street. You enter a part of town and you like it or you don’t, and your reaction depends, among other things, on whether the windows have been cleaned and the streets are litter-free. But, she told herself, there are also areas, parts of a town that are so neat and tidy that you’re reluctant to go there because you feel that you tarnish them with your very presence, if, for example, you aren’t smartly dressed one Saturday morning and accidentally happen to find yourself in Bygdøy Allé. There are areas and neighbourhoods in Oslo so neatly manicured that they instil fear in people like Alma, who often don’t feel good enough and therefore not welcome. It was the reason why her boyfriend got nowhere by stressing that the cabin his colleague had invited them to was big and elegant and located in a highly desirable mountain region. It was at that moment Alma knew that it could never be. She didn’t have the right ski clothing or the right skis, everything about Alma was dated and unfashionable. The windows, however, were trickier because she was responsible for the house and consequently for what her neighbours had to look at, while she wasn’t responsible for the cabin trip. The neighbours couldn’t opt out of Alma’s filthy windows, but still she felt unable to clean them today. She was weak today. Her daughter’s stern voice echoed in her ears. What will the neighbours say? Oh, if only she lived alone on a desert island. If only she had enough money she would have bought an island at the mouth of the fjord and a boat so she could row herself there! She started fantasising about such an island and looked for one on www.finn.no. There were some primitive cabins in Vestlandet, which she might be able to afford if she sold the house, but that was a step too far. And she wouldn’t be able to have tenants there and thus no rental income. But what if she got rich one day, she thought, miracles do happen. She decided to buy a scratchcard the next time she went shopping, but not today. Today she couldn’t face anyone. She hoped that her daughter would call again and say she wouldn’t be back that night, and she did. She was going out with some friends and would be staying over in Oslo, and Alma was relieved, but also worried at her relief; perhaps she really did suffer from a phobia of people like her boyfriend claimed. However, the real question was whether she could turn her anxiety into something constructive. She went to have a look at ‘How it should be between people’, and examined the claustrophobic couples’ dinner party she had embroidered at the bottom. That was how she felt now, in her own home, trapped between critical and hostile houses. Fortunately her boyfriend had eventually twigged that couples’ dinner parties weren’t her thing and no longer invited her; however, he had invited her to something even worse and which she couldn’t turn down. His brother had a big birthday coming up and intended to celebrate it with a long weekend at his holiday home in Spain; a glorious place, her boyfriend explained, lovely beaches and great food and tennis courts where he and his brother could play tennis. But what about me, Alma said, what am I meant to do? Lie on the lovely beach with Tone, he said, Tone was his brother’s wife, and have fun! But that was impossible, didn’t he get it? And he had shook his head and been genuinely upset, she could see that, perhaps she should include that in the sketch, how that which is impossible for one person leads to misery for another, no, it wasn’t easy between people these days! She had to create a sky above it, she realised, to show that we live on a star. Some people would remember to clean their windows several times a year, but had completely forgotten the bit about the star. But how? She couldn’t decide and put away the tapestry. Constitution and democracy in Norway, she thought, perhaps an idea would come to her today. They often did on difficult days like today. She went to the bookcase and picked out Norwegian Society, which fell open on the page about violence. Even the starting point was difficult, it said, because what kind of violence are we talking about? The classic definition where intentions, means, the situation and the outcome are straight out of a crime novel? Or a definition of violence based on the consequences of our behaviour, e.g. how our trade policy decisions affect living conditions in Ethiopia. If we choose the latter, it said, Norway was a very violent society. But if we choose the former, and it says a lot about us that we do, it declared, then Norway is a society with very little violence.