Knots

by Gunnhild Øyehaug

  * * *

  When Kåre got married, Marianne naturally moved in with the young couple. They made a bedroom for her next to their own, because the bride couldn’t cope with Marianne sleeping in the same room, so that’s what they did. It was actually nothing more than a dividing wall with a small opening so they could feed the cord through before they all went to bed. But the bride thought she saw Marianne’s eye staring at them through the crack. Marianne said it wasn’t true, but the bride was adamant, and made a curtain that she hung in front of the opening. The curtain was obstructed by the umbilical cord and the bride wailed and collapsed on the floor. “She’s everywhere!” she sobbed. “She’s everywhere, Kåre, and nothing works, I can’t bear it! I can’t bear it!” she cried, and in her desperation she bit the umbilical cord with all her might. “Ow!” Kåre and Marianne screamed, then looked at each other, horrified, through the opening; they didn’t know that the cord had become sensitive. The bride just sobbed. “I’m leaving,” she said. “I’m le-e-e-aving.” And she left.

  * * *

  Kåre didn’t really have any objection. In many ways it was much easier to live the way they had to live; now that his mother was getting old, he would have to start taking her slowing pace into consideration. He could no longer do the things he wanted to do: he couldn’t go out with his friends—she got tired so quickly, but it wasn’t that, she could happily sit in the pub and sleep, she said, but he didn’t want to, he said, he didn’t need to anymore. The truth was that he’d always been embarrassed when she fell asleep; her chin dropped onto her chest and she dribbled out of the corner of her mouth. So he would just have to manage without. “It’s always been you who’s done what I want, Mom,” he said. “Now I can do what you want.” So he went with her to play bingo. To the shops. And when she fell asleep in public places, he didn’t feel so embarrassed anymore, he even felt affection for her, as she sat there with a thin thread of spittle hanging from her chin; she was his mother. And she had gone with him everywhere. He loved her. He eventually got used to a quiet life, to a few hours with the crossword and knitting, to longer and longer afternoon naps, to all sorts of TV series and radio programs. To shuffling in his slippers across the linoleum. To going to bed at nine. It was peaceful. Pleasant.

  * * *

  But one day, in the middle of breakfast, Marianne died. Her heart had stopped, the doctors said, and Kåre was inconsolable. They also said that now that she was dead, they had to cut the umbilical cord. Because if not, Kåre would have to move to the graveyard. “But the cord’s sensitive now,” Kåre said. “It’ll hurt!” “Have you never heard of anesthetic?” they asked, and Kåre blushed. Of course he had, he mumbled. So they gave Kåre a general anesthetic. They were going to try to separate Kåre from his dead mother. But nothing worked. “What the hell,” the doctors said. “This is unbelievable!” The placenta had shriveled into a lump the size of a raisin that was attached to her pelvic bone; it had become part of the skeleton. Not even the part of the umbilical cord that was turning green could be cut by scissors, knives, or laser. Nothing worked. The bond was not to be broken. “Kåre, we have to cut loose part of her skeleton if you’re to be freed,” they said. Kåre looked at them, as if he was frightened they were going to hit him. His eyes wide open, his ears flat against his head like a dog; the specialist whispered he would live like a dog, when Kåre cried: “No, it’s fine, don’t do it!” “Then we’ll have to tie a small knot in it, to stop her death from feeding into you. There’s nothing more we can do, Kåre, we’re terribly sorry,” the doctors said. Kåre said it was fine. He just asked them to request that the funeral directors make a hole in the coffin, so the umbilical cord could get through. And to apply to the local council for permission to build in the graveyard.

  * * *

  Permission was granted, but the house could not be higher than the highest gravestone, or wider than was possible without disturbing the other graves, but that was fine for Kåre, he didn’t have much room to maneuver in any case, now that the umbilical cord had been shortened by six feet. It was fine, he had got used to the quiet life and he passed the days as he had before his mother died, doing the crossword, watching TV, listening to the radio. He shuffled his slippers against the wall every now and then, looked out of the window at the various funeral parties that passed once a week. To see if he could see her. She was always part of the funeral party, but never seemed to know any of the others standing there crying and comforting each other. She always stood on the periphery, dressed in black, her small white face looking down at the ground.

  * * *

  He had noticed her the very first time he saw a funeral party from his new home; she’d been right at the back and tripped on her long skirt, which was even longer thanks to the rain. One day when there was a lot of wind and rain, she had tripped right outside his house. It was well situated that way, he thought, it was just by the small gravel path that wound through the graveyard, so that funeral parties had to walk past to get to the graves. And when she stood up again and brushed down her knees, she looked straight at him. Heaven and earth stood still. And then she moved on. He watched her go. She folded her arms across her chest; she was a thin, dark line at the back of the party, in a far too long and wet skirt. He thought that he would love to kiss her in the wild wind. And the kiss would be like long hair in the wind, or like long grass in the wind, it would both suck them down to the ground and tug at them, as if trying to blow them away.

  * * *

  Oh!

  * * *

  He waited for her every day. She had started to look in now, every time she passed, they’d started to acknowledge each other, only just, with their eyes, but there was something, he didn’t know what it was, a kind of understanding, and then one day he dared, he had written a small message and held it up to the window, in the hope she would see: COME HERE, it read. Come here. He had tidied as best he could, washed the floor, picked a few flowers from his mother’s grave and put them on the tiny table, and he thought that everything looked nice. The only thing that made him a little uneasy was the umbilical cord: his part up to the knot was gray and healthy and fine, but Marianne’s side got blacker and blacker, closer and closer to the small knot, and he didn’t know if the knot was strong enough to keep her death at bay. And he had no idea what the girl whose name he didn’t know would think. He was standing there with flour on his hands when there was a knock at the door. He’d thought of trying to powder Marianne’s end of the umbilical cord, but now just wiped his hands as quickly as he could on a tea towel and opened the door. It was her. There she stood, small and dark, with her pale, pale face. Her arms folded across her chest. “Come in,” he said, smiling. “Come in.”

  * * *

  She had no family, she told him, and she was so lonely! She was utterly alone in the world! She cried in his lap. Funerals were the only place she dared to go to meet people, people were so open at funerals, they wept and opened up, and even if people didn’t know her, they assumed that she had known the deceased in some way or another, that perhaps she had done little jobs for them, cut their hair or something. Because they welcomed her, gave her coffee at the reception afterward, talked to her, asked how she had known the deceased, and generally she said something nice, something she’d heard during the service, and they asked about her, who she was, what she did. He stroked her hair. “But now you can come here,” he said. “For as long as I’ve got left.” “What do you mean?” she asked. “You see the cord that comes out from my belly?” he asked. She lifted her head and wiped the tears from her eyes. “Yes! What is it?”

  * * *

  He told her everything.

  * * *

  “She just left?” she said, when he told the bit about his bride. “Yes,” Kåre said, and felt a lump in his throat. Something was being squeezed somewhere. It stung and stung. “So you’ve got no children,” she said. He shook his head. “Nor have I. And I so want one! I want something that is mine! A home! Someone to be
at home with!” She looked at him. “Do you think … would you want me, I mean, in theory, am I something worth having, am I something that someone would want—to be blunt, what do you think?” she said. “Would you want me?” he asked. “After all, I’m a man bound to his dead mother by an unbreakable umbilical cord!” “I don’t want anyone else,” she said, and threw her arms around his neck. Her body was so small and he could feel her vibrating. Kåre was trembling. “Who knows what my genes might produce,” he said. “You might get a child with an umbilical cord like mine.” “I don’t want anything else!” she cried with joy. And now he was going to kiss her.

  Gold Pattern

  The sound of the wind rustling through the grass and aspen trees around the yard at her grandma’s house can be heard through the open window. But she’s straddled him on a wooden chair in the narrow kitchen and barely notices the wind. They cycled out to the small house that’s not been lived in since her grandma died, they giggled up the steps, then she hitched up her skirt and planted her feet on the stretchers between the chair legs on either side. She’s standing on the balls of her feet, one hand on the door handle, the other on the kitchen table, lifting herself up and down. He’s holding her buttocks and helping, looking red and pained as he bangs the back of his head against the yellow-paneled wall. They met at a party six months ago, and as they stood on opposite sides of the room and looked at each other, they just knew, they said when they were lying on a mattress on her floor a few hours later, stroking each other’s hair, that this had to happen. They lay like this at regular intervals over a three-week period, until she’d had enough because she thought she detected a trace of reluctance to commit on his part. It upset her. “Don’t talk to me again,” she said. They’re not talking to each other now. She feels her thighs burning and he is deep into a brain-draining darkness.

  * * *

  They met again at a party three months ago, and as they stood there on either side of the room looking at each other, they just knew, they said when they were lying together on a mattress on the floor in her room later, they just knew that this had to happen. And it happened at regular intervals over a three-week period until she couldn’t take anymore because she detected a trace of reluctance to commit on his part. And he didn’t run his hands through her hair anymore. He held her by the hips and banged his head against her stomach and said: “I don’t want to upset you. But I can’t have a girlfriend right now. It’s just not the right time.”

  * * *

  They met again three weeks ago, at the Shell station in the middle of the night, and as they stood there on either side of the freezer and a stand of sunglasses, they just knew, they said when they were lying on a mattress on the floor in her room later, they just knew that this had to happen. He slides his hands up to her breasts, which move up and down under her top, and his eyes look as though they’re sinking back into his head behind his eyelids, like two heavy stones. The kitchen window is ajar, the stay rattles, the panes vibrate in the wind that blows over the fields of tall grass, through the leaves of the aspen trees outside, and makes the rope on the flagpole slap against the pole in a hollow metal rhythm. She thinks: This, the fact that we’re here having sex now, must mean that he’s changed his mind.

  * * *

  A cat meows in the wind, but he doesn’t hear, he moves his hands back down under her buttocks. It’s getting closer; he grabs her by the hips. Always, when it’s nearly over, he turns her around, holds her by the hips. She, on the other hand, has always hoped that he won’t turn her around, but rather come looking at her face-to-face, so she can see what he looks like in that moment. She believes that this expression, this expression of ecstasy, will show her the truth, something that he doesn’t want to show her; she thinks that he loves her, secretly, but that he doesn’t dare to admit it, not even to himself, but she thinks that his expression in that moment will give him away, will express something like love. She has to see it, she has to know that what she believes is true, is there. It would be enough. And that is what makes her into what one could only call a fool.

  * * *

  The wind sings in the grass and soughs through the aspen trees, everything is sighing and whispering, everything is green and comes in waves. They’re in the kitchen trembling, and now she feels him letting go of her hips at precisely the moment she sees an old porcelain cup in the sink with a gold pattern that has almost been washed off, she listens, and now she must, she will see his face: she turns around. But she lifts herself a little too much and he slips out of her with a sucking sound just before the crucial moment, and all she sees is a red face twisted in frustration before she loses her balance and falls forward onto the floor, onto some rag rugs made of something that resembles plastic. He gets up from the chair, asks if she’s all right, hears a yes, and then finishes off against her back, which is arched in front of him, just as somewhere outside in the wind the cat meows loudly and she realizes how tired her thighs are.

  Overtures

  It’s warm, and Ragnhild needs to pee. She’s kneeling on her bed, with her elbows on the windowsill, looking out at the birch tree that stretches its branches toward the window, rocking on her heel, which she’s sitting on to delay going to the bathroom. As the birch branches wave back and forth in the drowsy wind, she sees through them over the road and up to the field where one of her cousins is lying on a sun lounger with one knee pulled up and her arms slightly out to the side. And she sees one of the boys from next door over by the fence that divides the two properties, lying on the ground peeping in through the planks. He’s the cutest boy in the neighborhood, the one everyone’s in love with, and her cousin knows that he’s lying there, that’s why she’s pulled up her knee. A girl always looks better with her knee pulled up. Ragnhild’s heel is holding in so much pee now that she almost feels sick. But she carries on rocking to keep it in even longer. The toilet sits in the danger zone, a danger zone where creaking doors might burst open and great vacuum cleaner pipes might suck you into the living room and spit you out by the piano. Grandpa has been so looking forward to it, they’ll say, and you’ll have to sit down on the piano stool, feel the ridged fabric under your thighs, because the thin dress you didn’t really want to wear because you think you’re too fat for it—but it’s still better than shorts—rides up when you sit down; you’ll have to look at the music, which you’ve looked at a hundred times before, and still think it looks illegible and completely unknown, you’ll have to feel your heart thumping, the sweat on your fingers, and you’ll have to play, on keys that get slippier and slippier. The first line, knowing all the time that you have to play two more pages before you can stand up and take the applause you know you don’t deserve because you’ve made so many mistakes along the way. And you’ll get a hug that smells of aftershave and feel the thin shoulders under the thin shirt and say hmm, hmm, right, when they say that one day, in a few years’ time, you’ll make your debut in the concert hall, the Aula, at the University of Oslo, and you know that it’s impossible and blatantly not true, and that everyone knows that, that the Aula is just something they say, and you hate it, you hate that hall at the University of Oslo, you want to scream and shout that you hate them all because you have to play the piano for them when you can’t and only make mistakes, and it’s not fair to force someone to do something they don’t want to do. And that what they’re saying about the Aula in Oslo is just rubbish. Aaauulaa. It’s a big, horrible word that makes her shudder.

  * * *

  She is NOT going to go to the bathroom. She rocks and rocks. Moves over to the small window next to the main one, lifts the latch and gently pushes it open with her finger. Carefully checks the windowsill to make sure there are no spiders, one of those big black ones that come out at dusk and stare at her lying on the bed, reading or dreaming, because she doesn’t want to be out there, where you have to wear shorts, and where you’re always being bothered by wasps and bees and all kinds of insects, which make it impossible for her to have the window
open at night, so her parents have to sneak in after she’s gone to sleep and open it, because they can’t bear the thought of her sleeping in that boiling-hot room. It’s not healthy, they say, it’s not surprising that you get so many headaches in summer, which sometimes make her howl with rage, and they don’t dare open it again for a few days. Sometimes she catches them just as they’re about to close it again in the morning, before she’s woken up, or so they think, but she’s awake, and she leaps out of bed and shouts: DID YOU OPEN IT? making them jump as they stand there in their nighties or underpants, before she forces them to inspect the window and curtains and ceiling for spiders before she can go back to sleep, but more often than not, she lies in bed looking up at the ceiling to see if any of the knots in the wood are in fact moving. Maybe she regrets shouting. Then she’ll put on her shorts and go out into the garden for a while and play badminton with her dad. And often there’s not as many wasps out there as anticipated. But she doesn’t say that. And now she needs to pee so badly she’s about to burst. But she keeps rocking, pushing harder against her heel, and then a wasp brushes over her hair and flies into the room, turns abruptly and bashes into the window, making a horrible, flat sound as her hammering heart, which plunged into her pee and squeezed out a few drops as she moved her heel to dodge out of the way, slowly pushes itself back into place in her chest, hammering all the while, and she bolts out of the room and slams the door.

  * * *

  When she opens the door a crack thirty seconds later to see if the wasp has flown out, it’s banging against the ceiling, like a shark in an aquarium, she thinks to herself. She closes the door. When she opens it a crack again, the wasp is at the window, buzzing up and down in fizzing strips, the sting waiting in its tail. She thinks it’s settled. So now she has to decide what to do. She wants to watch what’s happening out in the garden. And she doesn’t want to play the piano. It’s not easy to think straight; she’s full to the brim with pee. Light-headed and aching with pee, she puts one leg in front of the other and clenches her thighs together, sits down so she can clench even harder, but doesn’t quite manage to hold it in, clings to the door handle, doubles over, twisting and turning: she HAS to pee. Has to go down into the danger zone. Has to tread on the creaky stairs as lightly as possible, tiptoe down the hall, open the door that always jams against the frame and you can’t open it without pulling it hard so that when it finally lets go it makes a noise that lets everyone know: someone is going to the bathroom, and it must be Ragnhild, because she’s the only one who’s not in the living room, where they’re sitting drinking coffee because Grandpa has come to see them, and now they’ll have to go out and get her to come in and play the piano, because he’s been looking forward to it so much. She treads as quietly as she can. Holds on to the banister and tries to step in the places where it creaks least, holds her breath and grits her teeth every time the pee almost bursts out between her legs, which can’t be clenched on the stairs. Gets down. Looks to the right; the door to the living room is closed. She hears them laughing; a good thing, as they maybe won’t hear her hurrying to the bathroom door, pressing down the handle, trying to open it carefully, carefully, bent over, one foot in front of the other, clenching and clenching, pulling and pulling, but it doesn’t help, she has to yank, yank; the door makes a loud noise as it opens, she almost leaps into the bathroom, her legs tight together, pulls up her dress, pulls down her underwear, but when she’s finally sitting on the toilet her body has forgotten how to pee, what she has to do. And then she closes her eyes.