A House in Norway

by Vigdis Hjorth

  The tone was one of outrage. Her mother had tried to escape from the arranged, unhappy marriage to the narrow-minded vicar. She stole his savings one Sunday in July when he was conducting a funeral and left with Ninja in her arms. However, she was caught twenty-four hours later on the high road near the Swedish border, and taken to an asylum against her will where three years later, in November 1913, she hanged herself.

  Psychiatry’s treatment of women was what had prompted Ninja B. to write. She had missed her mother desperately as she grew up, of course she had, only to learn that she had been alive and living close by. And when she uncovered the reason for keeping her incarcerated, cut off from her own child, she found that it was based on loose suppositions and inexact character assessments: unstable temperament, difficulties in adapting, reluctant to submit. In those days quite natural reactions to living in restricted conditions with no opportunity to express yourself were regarded as a sickness to be treated, but the treatment available was barbaric. Ninja B. hadn’t stopped at investigating her mother’s fate, Alma learned as she read on utterly absorbed, but also included her mother’s fellow patients who, according to the pamphlet, had also been incarcerated for equally spurious reasons.

  Ninja B. was outraged and had written down her fury and wouldn’t appear to have had any outside or editorial assistance, and that was an advantage because Alma felt that she got close to Ninja precisely because she didn’t consider form, convention or style, but simply poured out her heart, and those who do so are easier to connect with and understand over the centuries than those who adapt to the form of their time, quite an interesting observation. Though, of course, her shamelessly uninhibited outpouring was the very reason why Ninja couldn’t get her pamphlet against psychiatry published by a proper publisher, but had had to publish it herself, and thus it had never reached a large audience. But Alma was full of admiration that she had written and published it anyway, that she’d had the courage; she had been able to afford to do so because she had just inherited her father’s money. To inherit or not to inherit, that is the question, as Virginia Woolf also thought, but what we inherit which isn’t purely financial is also significant. Alma hadn’t inherited rage or rebellion, she realised now. Alma could be angry and outraged in thought and attitude, but she had rarely felt rage deep in her heart, deep in her very core, it became clear to her now as she was confronted with Ninja B.’s anger and outrage at the, in her opinion, unfairly incarcerated women. Ninja B. wrote plainly that she thought there was a little too long between French revolutions. And Alma realised that she envied Ninja B. her outrage and her anger because there had been several things in Alma’s life she could have been angry about, but she had never really expressed them, she had kept them in, letting them eat her up, and that was probably unhealthy. So it was refreshing to read the pamphlet of the courageous, plain-speaking Ninja B. Alma had never, she realised that now, in her childhood or youth met any angry women, women who rebelled. Frustrated and mentally crippled yes, but not rebellious. Nor could Alma herself remember being properly angry, and that might be a good thing because it must mean that there couldn’t have been anything to be properly angry about, though she suspected that it was due to a flaw in her emotional register, something she failed to inherit and also that anything which might rouse her anger had been hidden from her, covered up or was difficult to spot, too far away. And that was bad, all of it, because the thought-provoking element of Ninja B.’s pamphlet was how her rage carried it, how her deep anger and outrage made the text quiver so that Alma quivered on encountering it. And that was intriguing because Alma had a theory that the deeper the emotions, the more universal they were, and had been throughout the ages. So the anger experienced by Ninja B. at such an injustice, must feel quite similar whatever the cause, whatever the age, and it was that kind of emotion which spurred people into action. The impotent spectators in Trieste lacked that rage, everything was a blur to them, while Ninja B. was angry with a particular doctor, a particular institution, a particular profession. Perhaps it was blind rage, rage which didn’t see clearly, but the fact that she was shouting it out fearlessly felt exciting nevertheless. And terrifying, because what if the impotent people in Trieste, the world’s poor, its asylum seekers and paperless Roma gathered and recognised their common rage and the embers in their chest flared up and were aimed at – Alma?

  Clouds arrived and blocked out the sun, and Alma thought she would have to go back and fetch a jacket, if she wanted to stay outside, and she would prefer to do so. She went upstairs and found a jacket which didn’t look too out of place with her costume, and went back to the stalls and bought a bag of old knitting yarn for darning socks in shades of brown and beige, and some bone buttons. She thought about Johanna, Ninja B.’s mother, who had been admitted to the psychiatric hospital. Having recently read about the narrowness of women’s choices a century or two ago, it had occurred to her that had she lived back then, there was a strong possibility that she too would have been admitted to a psychiatric hospital, since she too struggled with norms and following the dictates of the day. Then she checked herself and blushed at the courage she had just attributed to herself. The chances were much greater, indeed close to one hundred per cent, that she would have submitted to poor conditions rather than run away from anything. She would have accepted her restricted sphere and limited opportunities, or worse, believed them to be the most natural thing in the world. Hindsight and retrospective bravery were so easy, she had to avoid that, she thought, if she were to make use of the story and not oversimplify it. But nor could she avoid identifying with, agreeing or disagreeing with elements of it, or siding with Johanna against psychiatry. To be hot here, cold there, choose red or blue; ultimately it was impossible to be fully aware of and understand people from the past. She shouldn’t strive to tell the story with retrospective logic, but to make it as complex and as unpredictable as it must have been for the people who were alive back then, just as complex and unpredictable as Alma found her own life. Living in the present is hard work.

  She visited all of Østfold’s fabric shops to find the coarse linen she wanted for the Constitution tapestry that was starting to take shape in her mind. Ninja’s mother was born and bred in a cottage at Soli Brug Manor, it said in the pamphlet, which Alma found no reason to doubt, where her father was one of three millers who supplied the sawmill with flour.

  She got into her car and drove there. Left the motorway by Greåker and followed the signs to Soli Brug Manor, a well-maintained estate on the left side of a gravel road a few kilometres further on. There were two main houses and several smaller log cabins that acted as art galleries, and which Alma thought she could remember were on the list of places the touring Constitution exhibition would visit. And a small café by a pond where Alma could drink coffee once she had had a look around. Sculptures and clipped hedges and flowers in herbaceous borders and luminous green lawns with perfectly straight edges against pea shingle pathways. She crossed the road and headed down to the river where the remains of the big sawmill, once one of Scandinavia’s biggest, loomed on the bank in the form of large, moss-covered stone pillars. A heavy, rotting, dark brown wooden mill wheel still remained and gave visitors an idea of how big the sawmill would have been. The river flowed rapidly and the water was cold, she could feel as she walked along the bank, found a quiet pool, sat down on a rock, took off her shoes and dipped her feet into it. So this was where poor Johanna had grown up. As a child born in the late nineteenth century, she would presumably have run along by the river here. Because there were little children then as there are now, and water in the rivers and current in the streams. And people drowned then as they did now, gasping desperately for air, taken by the current, not wanting to die, yet still they died, full of terror. It was hard to believe as she sat in the sunshine. Mortal fear was surely also a feeling universal to all ages because even people convinced of a heavenly afterlife must feel terror and uncertainty at death’s door. But she di
dn’t want to think about that as she sat by the quiet pool at the River Ågårdselven, instead she tried to imagine Johanna, who apart from what she might otherwise have experienced, must have enjoyed peaceful moments on the river bank, like Alma was doing now. She looked around and thought it must be a fine place to grow up, if the miller and his wife were good people according to the standards of the time, and she supposed they must have been because most people were. That Johanna would have run barefoot through the grass and into the woods full of animals of which there were more then than there are now, and to which people used to live closer, not only cats and dogs and chickens and pigs and horses, but deer and elk and hares and all kinds of birds. Though she wouldn’t have had the right to vote, she would have had something priceless that we’re in danger of losing: diversity, she thought, and there was timber on the river in those days and logs piled up to dry; it’s well known there is deep peace in timber and in the great glow coming from it, that shines late into the summer nights. And in these past summers Johanna would play with the other children from the mill, and especially with the son from the manor house, it was more than hinted at in the pamphlet. And when gypsies crossed the Swedish border and built campfires in the clearing up by the waterfall, the children would lie on the moss, spying on them, listening mesmerised to their songs filled with sadness, and later they would walk home in the twilight without saying a word to each other.

  At the café where she had a cup of coffee afterwards, she got chatting to an elderly woman who ran the gallery. When she heard that Alma was a textile artist and was making a picture for the Constitution Bicentenary, she told her that the arts centre owned two studios which they rented out cheaply to artists like her. Alma submitted an application on the spot.

  It was the middle of August. Her children had gone, leaving behind piles of dirty clothes, bed linen and towels in the laundry basement and they had used her underwear and T-shirts and running clothes, rather than wear out their own or so as not to have to wash it afterwards or in order not to have to pack it in the first place when they came for the summer. And the freezer was empty and the fridge was empty and the lights had been left on, as had the radiators, and in the garden the seat cushions lay wet and rotting on the chairs because no one had bothered bringing them in so they could dry, and in the basement were fourteen black bin bags with empty bottles, they must have had a lot of parties. And Alma wasn’t furious, more resigned, and she washed and hoovered and switched off the lights, turned off the radiators and twenty-four hours later, the house was habitable once more as far as she was concerned, and she could resume her chosen existence with a feeling that she had regained control. Except that she had no control over a mustard-yellow cat that kept sneaking into the garage whenever it rained and lying on the few seat cushions she had managed to save from the rain, it made itself at home there so the cushions were soon matted with long, sticky, mustard-yellow hairs which were difficult to remove, and the cushions reeked of cat. And it rained and the garage door warped and refused to close properly, the roots from the big spruce tree had grown right under the garage floor, which explained why the door wouldn’t shut and now threatened the whole foundation, said her neighbour who recommended that she had it chopped down, and she wrote in her notebook that once she had finished the Constitution tapestry, she would take care of everything.

  The Polish grandmother stayed in the apartment until the end of August and beyond, and when Alma spoke to her children on the phone, she learned that she had been there in July as well along with the young girl Alma thought was Alan’s daughter from a previous relationship. Alma couldn’t object, or could she? It didn’t matter really, except for the hot water and the wear and tear. The little girl seemed more comfortable now, no longer quite so shy when meeting Alma. Perhaps it was her grandmother’s presence that made the difference, the security she presumably brought with her as a mature woman, she probably represented a Poland different from that of her daughter who was likely to be ambivalent about her Polishness, dependent as she was on and surrounded by all things Norwegian and by Norwegian prejudices about the Poles. Surely she couldn’t help but be affected by it? Or was it because the little girl had lived in the apartment for so long? Five years is a long time for someone who is five years old, a whole lifetime, in fact. Apart from the relatively short stay at the shelter, she had always lived there. The apartment was the girl’s childhood home. Alma caught herself thinking that thought a few times, but she dismissed it because it contained a truth she didn’t want to acknowledge. The girl knew every nook and cranny in the apartment, the skirting boards, dents and knotholes, as only children can know a house because they crawl on the floors, cling to the furniture, taste the furniture, the walls, the floors and windowsills with their mouths. And the cat belonged to the little girl, she was told, one day when the little girl was standing by the car waiting for her mother. Alma had pulled up and was getting out of her car when the cat appeared and tried to sneak through Alma’s front door when she opened it, and Alma shooed it away and saw how the little girl reacted, she jumped as if startled. When Alma asked the girl if it was her cat, she said that it was, nodding gravely and looking anxiously at Alma as if she expected her to say that having a cat was against the law and that she had to get rid of it. But Alma didn’t say that, she just said all right, and the girl was relieved. She spoke Norwegian, she spoke Alma’s language and the cat lived on Alma’s land. Alma’s home and land was the cat’s home and territory. It was a weird thought. She didn’t want to think about it.

  The Pole did a great deal for her child, Alma could see, it’s normal, it’s natural to give a child who has a father in prison a cat if she wants one. The girl had wanted a cat and got one. And a Barbie doll house, Alma could see because the cardboard box it had come in stuck out of the household waste bin, although Alma had repeatedly asked the Pole to sort her recyclables. When Alma went to hang up her laundry on the line between the big trees behind the house, she happened to look inside the Pole’s bedroom and there she saw the little Barbie dollhouse squeezed in tight between a lot of other plastic toys, but she couldn’t see a child’s cot, so they must both be sleeping in the double bed, she presumed, and that was probably cosy. However, it couldn’t be easy to live so simply, so cramped as she lived with her daughter in a neighbourhood where other children lived in large, well-tended houses. Alma certainly thought it must be stressful. Driving a battered, old, Polish-registered Volkswagen, which she must constantly worry about breaking down. Parking outside the nursery next to shiny new Volvos, the latest models. Especially now that she could no longer be at home with the baby, hide in the apartment among the trees, while her tall builder husband with the chipped canine was out in the world making money. Now she had been catapulted into Norwegian society, almost unprepared, Alma thought, and had to hold down a job, deal with the authorities, the nursery. Or was it the other way round? She was taken care of and placed in the hands of social services. She could always ring them and they would ride to her rescue, as they had done when Alma turned up with the mouse traps. How did she view herself and her situation? Safe under the auspices of social services? Or was she scared of social services, of not being good enough for them, under suspicion and observation? She probably oscillated between the two extremes, like Alma’s own experience of being Alma was fluid, like most people’s experience of themselves presumably oscillated between different poles. And besides, she was here of her own volition, she had a choice, she could always go back home to Poland, so she must have concluded that ultimately it was worth it. And besides, the Pole’s situation wasn’t just determined by her relationship with social services, her relationship with her affluent neighbourhood and with Alma, but also by her relationship with her fellow Poles in Norway, with whom Alma knew she was in contact. When Alma looked out of the window and watched her chat with one of her helpers, a cigarette in her hand, her face was frank, unlike when she talked to Alma. And although Poles are obviously just as dif
ferent individually as other people and a single Polish person is no more representative of ‘Poles’ in general than Alma was of ‘Norwegians’, yet most Poles in Norway had in common that they had gone to Norway to work and get paid more for the work they did here than they would have earned back home. That was an honest position, and the smart and very human thing to do, but it was implied that those who had come here weren’t the ones who had succeeded in Poland, it wasn’t the Polish upper-class or intelligentsia who were here. The Polish workers in Norway probably had quite a lot in common, both in terms of who they were back in Poland and the fact that they shared the Norwegian experience, possibly a unique experience? They stuck together and helped one another, a small community within the larger community, for better or for worse.