So Long, Marianne

by Kari Hesthamar

  Axel becomes steadily drunker, and late at night the four of them go outside for some fresh air. Leonard, Marianne, Axel, Patricia. They lie down on the flat, smooth paving stones, resting their heads on a low curb. Look up at the starry sky. They are all in their mid-twenties. It’s 1960, two and a half years since Marianne first came to Hydra. The harbour is quiet. There are no tourists, no restaurants blasting thumping music. Just them.

  A little while later the group breaks up and they go their separate ways. Marianne and Axel start in on the ascent up to their house. There is tension between them, the run-up to a quarrel. Just before they reach home Marianne stops by a ledge and puts down her basket of food and milk. She asks Axel to leave, to take Patricia away from Hydra. “Go to her, go to Patricia, because that’s where you’d rather be!” she says loudly and clearly, even though she doesn’t really mean it. She has to get it out and can’t remain passively quiet, ignoring the betrayal any more.

  Axel is livid.

  They argue loudly. There’s some shoving and scuffling. Marianne tears herself loose and storms up the steps to the house. Axel rushes after her. Axel Joachim is alseep in a wooden cradle on the first floor; the babysitter hurries out when they come. Axel disappears into his workroom where his writing table is. Marianne listens as he discharges his fury. The chairs fly from wall to wall. He overturns everything he comes across, and begins to hurl things out of the window. Suitcases and clothes, hangers and books, hurtling out into the Greek night.

  Marianne takes her child out of the cradle and positions herself behind the door in the hope that Axel will calm down. She is scared. When he doesn’t show signs of settling down, she takes off, running as fast as her legs can carry her to the home of George and Charmian and bangs on the door, begging them to please help her. Marianne hands them the baby and asks if they will look after him while she hurries back home to check on Axel. She’s afraid that he’s going to do something. George and Charmian stop her and she lets herself be persuaded to stay with the baby, who is wide awake.

  A short while later Axel comes running to the house, barefoot, in the ankle-length djellaba he wore in the Sahara. Standing there, sliced up and bloody from stepping on broken glass, he announces that he’s there to fetch his wife and child. George calms Axel and leads him into his study. Charmian makes up a place for Marianne and the baby to sleep and bundles them to bed.

  The next day it’s blown over. Marianne and Axel bring the window frames with broken glass to Francisco the carpenter to repair. The matter isn’t spoken of again.

  * * *

  It hadn’t been more than a few days after Marianne had met Leonard for the very first time when she realized that her relationship with Axel was disintegrating. She stopped pretending not to see Axel’s lover. Axel had been with his little son for barely a week when he decided to take a trip to figure things out. He intended to discover whether he wanted to spend his life with Marianne or the other woman. He was leaving in his own sailboat, a BB11 that had been transported from Norway on a freighter and set on land in Piraeus.

  It was a tearful parting. A group of friends gathered at the port to wave goodbye to Axel. Marianne had an urge to leap into the sea and swim after the boat — despite everything there might be a wisp of hope, she thought. Maybe he would find out that it was Marianne he still wanted. He had come back to her before, and they had, after all, exchanged vows of eternal fidelity when they married in Athens the year before.

  Chapter 5

  * * *

  SLOW WALTZ

  * * *

  After Axel had gone, Marianne invited some friends back to the little house. They sat outside, drinking retsina and talking. She was in good spirits, choosing to believe that everything would turn out alright. It was the end of May and wildflowers were still in bloom. The earthen-floored terrace was blanketed with small yellow and white flowers. Observed by one of her guests — a young American whom she’d only just met — Marianne pinched off a handful of blossoms and placed them in an envelope. “I love you,” she wrote on the note she slipped inside the envelope, which she addressed: Axel Jensen, American Express, poste restante, Athens. She knew he would have to stop in there.

  She posted her love letter at the port the next morning. The young American happened to be travelling to Athens on the same boat as the letter.

  A few days later the young man stood at the American Express office in Athens, waiting to collect his mail. In the neighbouring queue, a blond man accompanied by a beautiful woman opened the letter he’d received. Small flowers spilled out of the envelope. The American contemplated the stranger and the dried flowers that lay strewn on the floor and thought, That must be the letter from Marianne, and this must be Axel. He took the ferry back to Hydra, made his way to Marianne’s house and said, “I just had to tell you, Marianne, that they are together.” She realized then that it was all over.

  Marianne felt utterly defeated. When she’d followed her heart to warmer climes, she hadn’t envisaged for herself a life as a single mother in a foreign country, without income or a job to fall back on. Marianne had to make a decision about what she was going to do with her life. Not an artist, and lacking paid work of some other kind, Marianne’s obvious course of action was to return to the north. Yet Hydra felt like home in many ways. There was the house, and she had good friends and neighbours who supported her.

  And then there was Leonard.

  The coming together of Marianne and Leonard was like a slow waltz. They began to meet during the day. He told her over and over that she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. Marianne quivered, shaken by the patience and goodwill Leonard showed her and which she couldn’t fully understand. She pushed away the pain Axel had inflicted on her and, for their child’s sake, pulled herself together, just as her mother had taught her. Instead of cowering under the blankets, she danced the danse macabre, climbing ten metres up the cliff and diving between the rocks into the sea.

  Leonard sat and watched her, took her in hand and led her home. Marianne wanted to block out all painful thoughts and lose herself in falling in love. When she joined in the Greek dancing and drank retsina, he waited patiently for her. She didn’t want to stop dancing. She wanted to be beautiful and dangerous, to dance and dance until she escaped from herself. Leonard hardly touched alcohol himself, in contrast to many of the other party-loving residents of the island. Leonard looked on while Marianne danced. Waited. Afterward they went home together.

  With Leonard, Marianne felt protected and cared for. He was Axel’s opposite: whereas Axel had been erratic and explosive, Leonard was placid and unassuming. He was polite and somewhat old-fashioned, raised in a traditional Jewish family in Montreal. Marianne recognized in Leonard the manners that she’d learned at her grandmother’s — the niceties that were rarely encountered among people of their generation. He was the kind of man who removed his hat when a woman entered the elevator.

  Leonard stood by Marianne while Axel was off with Patricia. They went for walks along the island’s coast. Protected by his white sunhat, Axel Joachim was pulled along in the funny old baby carriage over the stones to the little bay in Kamini, where the fishing boats lay close together and the beach pebbles were smooth and warm underfoot. They ate lunch at the ochre-yellow restaurant with red window frames. When the little boy took his afternoon nap, Leonard read her poems. He had published his collection of poetry — Let Us Compare Mythologies — four years earlier and had come to Hydra to work on his second book, which would be called The Spice-Box of Earth.

  Marianne was house-bound in the evenings, when Axel Joachim had been put to bed. Leonard came to her. They sat on the terrace, taking in the view of the ocean. Leonard sang lullabies for the baby while Marianne sat in the rocking chair with a piece of rope tied to the cradle. After she rocked the little boy to sleep, the balance of the night belonged to her and Leonard.

  * * *

  Leonard: There was
n’t a man who wasn’t interested in Marianne, who wasn’t interested in approaching that beauty and that generosity. She was a traditional Nordic beauty, but she was also very kind and very modest. One never got the sense that she played on her looks; it was as if she wasn’t aware of how good she looked. The American painter that her husband had left with was also a very lovely woman. It was as if everyone was young and beautiful and full of talent — covered with a kind of gold dust. Everybody had special and unique qualities. This is, of course, the feeling of youth, but in this glorious setting of Hydra, all these qualities were magnified. They sparkled. To me everyone looked glorious. All our mistakes were important mistakes, all our betrayals were important betrayals, and everything we did was informed by this glittering significance. That’s youth.28

  * * *

  On the 15th of May, 1960 Axel sat down at the typewriter in Tourkolimano, a neighbourhood of Piraeus known for its good yacht anchorage.

  I’m sitting here frying in my own fat and writing on your rival’s typewriter. Everything I undertake (even with the most effective camouflage and emotional lubrication) will (in the eyes of the world, perhaps also in your eyes) have the unmistakable character of brutal insensitivity. And not only that. The unpleasant taste of overblown egotism. I am therefore not going to beg for forgiveness. Or even plead for understanding. What I have done, what I am doing, is as far beyond the common morality as is possible to be, but it is not without consequences. And not without desperation.

  … The worst thing about this rat-trap is that I’m inflicting suffering upon you. It is truly grievous if this is the result of the individualism that I believe in and live for, my conviction that one must hold one’s head high in the world and not buckle under external pressure, not drown. The strange thing is that the more one removes oneself from the rules of the game and rediscovers one’s inner morality, the greater the pressure becomes, the more intense the solitariness. Because your husband is not merely happily fleeing from responsibility; he is lonely — and he struggles. Or, better: the battle is within him.29

  The day Axel sailed from Hydra — ostensibly to discover whom he wanted to spend his life with — he and Patricia had rendezvoused on the nearby island of Poros. It was all planned, explained Axel in his letter, to spare Marianne the humiliation she would have felt had Axel and Patricia openly left Hydra as a couple. Axel’s intention had been to parcel out her suffering: little by little she would come to understand that he had chosen Patricia and that they intended to live together.

  My heart bleeds for you, to use one of those threadbare phrases that has lost its meaning through overuse, but believe me, my little wife, I feel for you and suffer with you — and there are a thousand voices in me that shout: get a grip on yourself, quit all this, go back home, hold her close to you and give her what she needs: you.

  Everything there (and Little Axel; naturally, he gnaws at me) oppresses me. But then there are other voices, other rooms. I wish so very much that you understood me, that you could feel a little for me in the way I feel for you, it would help me immeasurably, but I know that would be asking for the impossible. My conflict is so invisible, so egocentric — no, I must accept being alone with this.

  … Give my regards to no one. Think of me. I am (believe me!) so much more fond of you than ever before! And I admire you. And I don’t say “love,” out of fear of using a word whose breadth we don’t truly comprehend.

  Live well, your own Axel30

  Marianne had already gone through the shock of abandon­ment, tipped off by the young American who reported seeing Axel and Patricia together in Athens. The letter that now came from the typewriter of Axel’s lover was just salt in her wounds. Any hope of getting Axel back had already died within her.

  ACCIDENT IN ATHENS

  While Marianne and Axel Joachim were on Hydra, Axel and Patricia spent a couple of weeks with an American friend stationed at the military base outside Athens. It was from this base that the Voice of America was broadcast, giving the foreigners on Hydra the latest music and big stories like the war in Vietnam and racial unrest in the U.S. George Lialios related the news from the Greek press and they all read the weekly Athens News, which reported international events. There were also new people steadily arriving to the island, bearing news and ideas. The small foreign colony on Hydra knew what was going on in the world before the news had reached Norway.

  Marianne and the other expatriates on Hydra at the beginning of the 1960s lived far from the enormous upheavals that were taking place in the world, but they listened to the news and discussed the changes and rebelled in their own ways. In coming to Hydra, many were rejecting the values of their homelands. Some wanted to escape the pollution of the cities and let their children run free in the clean air. Others wanted to live out their sexual leanings without harassment. The first African-American Marianne met on Hydra was amazed at the lack of difficulty he encountered when looking for a place to rent there.

  * * *

  On the military base outside Athens there was often good company and drinking in the evenings, and after one of the many parties Patricia insisted on taking some of the guests home. The sun was rising as she drove back to the base through the farmland that surrounded the city. The Greek farmers had arisen at dawn and were about to begin their day’s work when Patricia came driving along in the Karmann Ghia.

  Suddenly a farmer pops up in the road with his donkey and cart. Patricia avoids them but the car spins around in the middle of a bridge and crashes into the railing. She is flung out of the vehicle and lands in the dry riverbed, which is heaped with clumps of cement and junk from an automobile workshop. Slamming into this leaves scarcely a bone in her body unbroken. It takes ages before she is brought to the hospital.

  The hospital in Athens is antiquated, even for 1960. The American painter lies bandaged from head to toe, but the nurses have failed to keep the bandages saturated with antiseptic: Patricia has developed gangrene and the doctors have amputated one of her thumbs. Axel sits by her bed for three days and nights and is falling apart. In desperation he sends a telegram to Hydra asking Marianne to come.

  Marianne is at a loss, but Leonard says that he thinks she should go. He’s been spending a lot of time together with her and Axel Joachim and is beginning to know them both well. Slowly, love has bloomed between them.

  Never having changed a diaper in his entire life, Leonard promises to take care of the baby while she’s away. Marianne feels like a child and an adult at the same time. She’s yearned for someone to look after her; the thought of visiting the hospital to tend to her estranged husband and his lover is more than she believes she can cope with. But she does what she has been asked to do, as she has always done. Leonard moves in and is given a lightning course in the care and feeding of a baby. Marianne takes the next ferry to Athens.

  Marianne doesn’t recognize the tiny, thin body in the hospital bed. She is unable to feel sorry for the woman lying there, bandaged and unconscious. Marianne is most pained by Axel’s condition: he looks like a living corpse. She stays for a couple of days, keeping vigil by Patricia so Axel can rest. She drips antiseptic on her rival’s bandages, unsure if Patricia recognizes her the brief moments she surfaces. Axel is in despair, tormented by guilt and apparently in shock.

  Meanwhile, on Hydra, Leonard cares for Axel Joachim the best he can. When he runs out of cloth diapers, he makes use of the linen napkins that Marianne’s mother had sent as a wedding gift, along with the silverware and sauceboat.

  Marianne was relieved to come home to Hydra, relieved and grateful that Leonard had been there for her. The sight of Patricia in her sickbed, and of Axel cracking, had been traumatic. She was racked by anger and hatred, despair and jealousy. But she was in love with Leonard. The basest and most uplifting feelings rioted within her, and she struggled to come to terms with them.

  A new chapter in her life was about to begin.

  * * * />
  In August 1960 Axel’s publisher sent a worried letter to Marianne. It had been several months since he’d received a word from Axel and now he’d heard by chance that Axel was in Mexico. Uneasy for both Axel and Marianne, Groth asked if something had happened between them. He said that he hadn’t felt particularly optimistic at the sight of Marianne and her little baby leaving to travel all the way across Europe to meet her “fire-spouting volcano who erupts unpredictably in all directions.” Groth asked Marianne to write him a few lines to say how they were all faring.31

  Groth’s publishing house, Cappelen, helped Marianne through her economic straits when Axel left her and the baby. She received cheques worth about fifty or a hundred dollars that came with brief notes: “transmitting 250 kroner,” “transmitting 500 kroner.” Axel let Marianne and Axel Joachim keep the house in Kala Pigadia, and when they were later formally divorced he transferred ownership of it to her and their son.

  Late in the summer of 1960 Axel returned to Hydra and rented a house where he could continue his writing. He had accompanied Patricia back to Chicago and then travelled around Mexico with John Starr Cooke. He’d experimented with psychedelic drugs and contracted malaria. Back on Hydra, he wrote one of his rare letters to his father back in Norway.