The Cold Song

by Linn Ullmann

  And Jon would turn around and say to her, “Your light shines more.” And she would make fun of him for coming up with a line like that, “You really do know your lines, Jon,” she would say, but she’d let him get away with it. That was then. These days she never let him get away with anything.

  Yet it was something he’d say to her from time to time: “Your light shines more.” More than the lighthouses on Thacher Island, more than the bright rooms they had inhabited during those first years of marriage.

  When Siri said, “I think you’re depressed,” it wasn’t out of concern, it was more of an accusation, her voice demonstratively weary, telling him Oh, I am so tired of you and all your crap.

  On a threadbare blanket on the threadbare couch lay Jon’s dog, with his relish for the inner organs of beasts and fowls, hence his name, Leopold, after Leopold Bloom; regular dog food was out of the question, he’d rather starve than eat regular dog food. He was a big, black Lab mix with a white patch on his chest and a doleful look in his eyes. Leopold knew that Jon was never going to finish his book and this worried him. The reason that this worried him—he was, after all, a dog and not a particularly pensive dog—was that Jon had stopped taking him for long walks. Jon was incapable of doing anything until the book was finished—apart, of course, from not writing, not beginning, and not finishing,

  What Jon Dreyer said to himself and also to Leopold was that once the summer was over and the book was finished, everything would return to normal and then they would go for long walks. It was still possible to finish it this summer. It was only the end of June. If he wrote ten pages a day, he would have sixty new pages every week—he’d take Sundays off and spend quality time with his children—which meant that he would have about three hundred pages by the end of August. Three hundred pages was a book. It had worked before, it could work again. Ten pages a day starting tomorrow. So day after day Jon sat at his laptop intending to write, either that or he lay on the floor next to his dog and tried to sleep, or he gazed out the window, or he read newspapers online and wrote text messages to women who might or might not reply, and after a lot of all that he ate peanuts and drank beer.

  Jon had a way of resorting to attic rooms. There was the attic study at Jenny’s house, where he was now, with the window facing the meadow, and then there was the attic at his and Siri’s home in Oslo, the extortionately expensive and drafty house on which they had a mortgage of more than eighty percent. Why the bank still trusted Siri and him and kept raising their credit limit was a mystery to him.

  Jon leaned over the keys and typed:

  10 × 6 is 60

  60 × 5 is 300

  300 is a book

  Sometimes he spent the night in the attic room. In Oslo the attic was even more drafty than the rest of the house, but at least he could get some peace. Lie underneath the sloping walls and pointed roof and drink. Play his guitar. Google stuff. Send and receive text messages, which he promptly deleted. It’s hard to say when Jon and Siri had started sleeping apart. It wasn’t something he wanted and it wasn’t something she wanted, it wasn’t a permanent solution and it wasn’t as if they slept apart every night either. And this summer they had even made love once or twice. He liked to run his hand over the sharp indent of her waist (which was so sharp because of her asymmetric back), he liked to run his finger down the nape of her slender neck.

  Jon stood up and stretched a little. Leopold followed him with his eyes.

  Walk time now?

  Leopold let out a sigh.

  No, apparently not, he’s sitting down again.

  Everyone except the dog was confident that Jon was going to finish the book, which was why he had been granted an additional advance of 200,000 kroner from his publisher. Yes, parts one and two of the trilogy had sold like hotcakes. That was what they had said, that was what they had written in the papers. But it was a while now since anyone had said or written anything about Jon’s books, and the money had all been spent. Besides: Jon would never have used the expression “sell like hotcakes”—not only was it a cliché, it was also inaccurate. Hotcakes no longer sold like hotcakes. He had no statistics to back this up, but he was pretty sure that hotcakes fared poorly compared to smartphones or drafty houses in overpriced areas (like his own, for example) or antiaging creams. What a strange word, antiage. Jon typed it on his computer.

  Antithis. Antithat. Antiage.

  The point of an antiaging cream was that women and men who buy it and apply it to their faces will look younger. Feel younger. Be younger. Turn the clock back. Stop aging and start antiaging. Antitime. Antihunger. Antianxiety (that was already a word!). Antideath.

  He remembered that much against his will, he had gone to a mall outside of Oslo with Siri to buy Christmas presents, and, that done, she had said that she had to stop by the cosmetics department to buy moisturizer.

  “Feel how dry my skin is,” she’d said, and she had taken his hand and run it over her cheek.

  Antidry. Antidrought.

  The woman behind the cosmetics counter, clad in a white coatdress, like a kind of trailblazing scientist, spoke softly and confidentially about the state of things in general. A demigoddess for our times, Jon thought. In his fifty years on this earth, he had witnessed and even participated in one or two political revivals and ideas about how to run the world and he could not help but admire her. The white skin, the white dress, the white voice, never uttering a word about fear, she talked only about beauty. And Siri, his clever, cool, critical, hot-tempered Siri, with her gracefully asymmetric back and dry cheeks, listened raptly and wound up paying 1,750 kroner of the million that the bank had just paid into their joint account with their drafty house as security, antidebt, for a cream containing peptides, retinol, EGF (discovered, according to the white-clad demigoddess, by a Nobel Prize winner), collagen, and AHA.

  Leopold looked at his master: Walk time now?

  The final part of his trilogy was to be about time. Jon planned to write a hymn to everything that endures and everything that falls apart. But truth be told he wasn’t sure what he actually meant by “everything that endures and everything that falls apart” or how he was supposed to write about it, but no one argued with him, except the dog who was stretched out on the floor with his leash between his teeth, waiting, and reminding him that one human year is equal to seven dog years and how is that for a thought on the nature of time? Just think how many years it’s been since I had a proper walk, I’m a humble dog, born with big muscles and long limbs and I need to get out and run, I have no other wish.

  For a while Jon toyed with the idea of picking up where Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project had left off. This would be something quite different, of course, Jon was writing a novel and not a massive, impenetrable work on the arcades of nineteenth-century Paris (Walter Benjamin had been somewhat disdainful of fiction). But something that took its outset in shopping malls, the arcades of our own day, a depiction not merely of the people, of white-frocked women with their gospel on how to turn back time, but of the things themselves.

  Jon sighed and looked over his notes.

  Siri was a chef. Siri cooked real food for real people. Not pretentious pap. People ate her food and were happy. And here he sat, year in, year out, writing a novel that might or might not have to do with a mall. Or with time. Leopold raised his big head and looked at him.

  Jon had fooled everyone. The cover art was ready, the catalog blurb was written, he had agreed to do a reading from the book at his publisher’s press conference at the end of August. And he had nothing.

  Not “nothing” as a modest man might say about something, but quite literally nothing. Not a word.

  Jon took a swig of beer and looked out the window. His girls were playing in the meadow. Alma and Liv. Alma black-haired and dark-eyed. Liv fair-haired and finespun. They were picking flowers and dancing about in the sunshine with the girl who Siri had hired to look after them. The girl called Milla. He had barely said hello to her the previous evening,
after Siri had picked her up at the bus stop.

  He regarded his daughters. They were jumping back and forth and Liv laughed and lay down in the meadow and made angel wings in the snow, even though it was summer and there wasn’t any snow and she would leave no imprint. Something to hold on to. Something that was real. Alma turned and looked up at the window, but it was so dim in the attic and so bright outside that she could not possibly have seen him standing there looking down at her. Don’t let go. Try to live a decent life. Hold on to my girls. Protect them. Don’t let go.

  And maybe Alma realized that he was standing there looking down at her, because she broke into a wild sort of dance in the tall grass, with her eyes fixed on the window. She spun around and around then suddenly fell down. Jon laughed. Alma got back onto her feet and looked up at him as if she had heard him laughing. Alma’s short dark hair. Alma’s chubby face. Alma’s unformed body. She started spinning again. Around and around and around.

  Jon shifted his gaze, looking for Liv, who was closer to the woods, having found a spot where there were obviously more flowers. Milla was right behind her, together they were picking an enormous bouquet.

  Jon went on standing at the window. But now he wasn’t looking at Alma spinning and falling, or at Liv picking flowers. He was looking at Milla. She had long dark hair and big eyes. A nice body. He had noticed that the evening before. About nineteen or twenty years old. Shy and a little bit awkward. Sweaty palms. Her eyes bright when she shook his hand and said hello. She had held on to his hand a little longer than necessary and something in her eyes told him that, young as she was, she had acknowledged him. And now she was running after Liv with a flower for her bouquet.

  Her body full and young, she had held his hand a little longer than necessary. Something inside him quieted down. It was all going to hell anyway.

  It was fine to just stand here and look at Milla and not think.

  BUT SOMETHING WAS wrong. Siri held her breath. It had to do with Milla. Or something else. But Milla definitely had something to do with it. Her presence here at Mailund. The slightly lumpish body, the long dark hair (long dark hairs on the kitchen counter, in the bathroom sink, between the sofa and the sofa cushions, on the baseboards and doorframes), her face, sometimes pretty, sometimes not, beseeching eyes.

  More and more Siri found herself having to concentrate in order to keep herself in check—was that the expression? Keep oneself in check? Be one. One body, one voice, one mouth, one thread, and not fall apart, dissolve, collapse in a heap.

  “Your main responsibility,” Siri said, “will be to look after Liv for five hours or so every day. But we’d be grateful if you’d keep an eye on Alma as well. Alma’s twelve. She’s”—Siri searched for the right word—”a bit of a loner.”

  Milla laughed hesitantly, brushed the hair back from her pretty moon face, and said that she thought it all sounded really great.

  It was a mild, bright day in May and Siri had invited Milla to the house in Oslo. The idea was for them to get to know each other a little better before the summer. Alma was at school, Liv was at nursery school, and Jon had gone for a long walk with Leopold. Something about a chapter he was having trouble writing.

  Milla had replied to the ad on the Internet for a summer job and Siri had been taken with her application. In her e-mail she came across as a happy, friendly, reliable girl. It would be fantastic to get to know all of you and be able to be part of your family this summer. If I get the job I’ll do my best to be a good “big sister” to your daughters so that you and your husband won’t have to worry when you’re at work.

  Maybe Milla could spread a little happiness? Maybe, Siri had thought, maybe, just maybe there were such things as happiness-spreaders? Siri may also have been influenced, or impressed, or intrigued, by the fact that Milla’s mother, Amanda Browne, was a famous, or relatively famous, American photographer living in Norway. Siri remembered browsing in a bookstore and stumbling upon a book of photography by Amanda Browne—this was nine years ago, maybe even ten—and being struck by the stark beauty of the black-and-white images. Amanda Browne had, according to the book’s introduction, photographed everything that was precious to her. Most of the photographs were of her young daughter, lovingly observed, intimately portrayed—playing, sleeping, eating breakfast and getting chocolate milk all over her face, running through tall, sun-scorched grass. The girl’s name was Mildred. There were photographs of other people too. Amanda Browne’s husband, her aging parents, an old aunt with illness written all over her face. And there were several photographs of the flat, blistering summer landscape surrounding Amanda Browne’s house on the outskirts of Oslo. But it was the photographs of the child that moved Siri. She remembered standing in the bookstore, looking at the pictures, and thinking of her own child, of Alma, just a toddler then. She remembered placing the book back on its shelf, jumping on a tram, and going directly to the day-care center where Alma spent a few hours every day. Looking at those photographs, Siri urgently felt the need to find her daughter, to hold her in her arms, touch her face, inhale the warmth of her skin.

  And so here she was. Mildred. Or Milla, as she was called now. Nothing like the strong-willed, suntanned child in the book. Siri had offered her the job. And now she was regretting everything.

  She smiled.

  “My husband is a writer,” she said. “He has a book to finish. I have a small seafood restaurant five minutes from Mailund, as well as a restaurant in Oslo. The seafood restaurant, Gloucester it’s called, after a little fishing port outside of Boston, is only open during the summer months and I’ll be spending most of my time there. It’s a lot of work. I—”

  Siri broke off. There was no point in trying to explain to Milla the amount of work involved in running two restaurants.

  “Also, we like the house to be kept neat and tidy,” she continued. “So it would be good if you could lend a hand with that too. It’s best if everybody in the family helps out, that way it’s easily done and takes little time. And while you’re staying with us you’ll be sort of like one of the family.”

  “Oh, yes,” Milla said, looking bewildered. “It’ll be great. I’m really looking forward to it.”

  She put a hand to her face, stroked her cheek. Her bracelets jingled. She had a whole lot of them on her wrist. (Fine. Silver.) And every time Milla moved her hand, as when she stroked her own cheek—why did she do that?—they jingled.

  “And I’m throwing a party for my mother this summer,” Siri said. “For her seventy-fifth birthday. I’m probably going to need some help with that too.”

  Milla nodded uncertainly.

  Siri never wore jewelry. No bracelets, no earrings, nothing around her neck, only her wedding ring, which she removed every night.

  The sound of Milla’s bracelets reminded her of when she was a little girl, sitting opposite her mother at the kitchen table. There was always complete silence when they sat together like that, except when Jenny turned a page of the book she was reading and her bracelets jingled.

  “We spend all our summers at Mailund,” Siri said, again regretting everything. Surely she and Jon could have split the days between them? They’d done it before. She could have taken Liv in the mornings and he could have taken her in the afternoons when Siri was at the restaurant. Yes, that’s how they had done it in the past. But that hadn’t really worked out, had it? They always ended up fighting about who did what and who didn’t.

  “A big old house,” she said, interrupting her own train of thought. “Oh, and we have this small house, an annex, in the garden, that’s where you’ll be staying. With your own bathroom and lots of bookshelves.”

  “Okay,” said Milla, and giggled.

  Siri forced herself to smile. Why on earth are you giggling? Oh, she tried to curb her own impatience. Twenty years of running restaurants—it did something to you. To things like having patience. To things here at home. Jon, the children. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it. But what have I done with my life?r />
  “My mother and I lived in that big old house—Mailund, it’s called—until I was fourteen and then we moved to Oslo,” Siri said. She was babbling on. “My mother was a bookseller. She had a bookshop near the old bakery, where I’ve got the restaurant now. But you’ll see all of that when you get there. We’ll take you around and show you everything, the children and I will.”

  Siri could tell that Milla’s mind was elsewhere, that she wasn’t particularly interested in accepting Siri’s little flower: We’ll take you around and show you everything, the children and I will.

  The veranda door was open and Siri could hear the neighbour’s children next door, Emma’s daughters, seven and nine years old (older than Liv but younger than Alma), who had been picked up from school early that day. They were clapping their hands and chanting a rhyme that she remembered from when Alma was younger.

  Under an apple tree

  Sat a boy and he said, said he,

  Hug me,

  Kiss me,

  Show that you love me.

  “And after that she worked for years in a big bookshop here in Oslo,” Siri went on. “It’s closed now. She was in charge of the foreign literature section. Now that she’s retired she’s moved back to Mailund for good. She lives with Irma, who helps her around the house. You’ll meet both of them.”

  “Don’t you have any brothers or sisters?” Milla asked. And then, as if she had already received a reply: “I don’t either.”

  “No,” Siri said. “I don’t have any brothers or sisters.”