by Linn Ullmann
“And what did you say to that?”
“I said: ‘What the hell does that mean?’ And then I cried.”
“How much money do you owe, Jon?”
“More than a million. More, maybe. I don’t know. Gerda was going to send me a statement.”
“But she … Gerda said they would publish the book as soon as you finished it, didn’t she—”
“For Christ’s sake, Siri, it’s all falling apart.”
His voice cracked. She wanted to touch the back of his neck. She also wanted to tell him that she couldn’t take it anymore.
“I don’t know what to do, Siri.” He sighed.
“I’ll be home this evening,” she answered. She cast a glance at the white flower bed. “And then we’ll sort it all out. Okay?”
MOST OF THE time now, Jenny was silent. Siri removed a long dark strand of hair from her mother’s robe and was reminded of Milla, she looked around, startled, as if the girl would suddenly appear in the room, but then she realized it must have come from Irma.
Her mother’s hair was very beautiful before all this happened—the aneurisms, the wheelchair, the half madness. Now it was thin and stringy and not quite clean. Apparently Irma didn’t care about such things as hair, perfume, dresses, although to her credit she had made proper carpentry adjustments in parts of the house so that Jenny could be wheeled from one room to another without being knocked around by thresholds and narrow doorways.
Siri rolled Jenny’s wheelchair to the bathroom. She filled the bathtub with hot water, wrapped her mother’s thin terry-cloth-robed body in fresh towels, and carefully began washing her hair. Jenny still had bottles of expensive shampoo and conditioner on the shelf and soon they were both enveloped by the smell of cardamom.
And while Siri lathered up her mother’s hair, Jenny rambled on.
“I’ve shrunk, I’m much thinner and wispier than I used to be. I’ve always been a thin woman, though never wispy, but now I’m both thin and wispy and I have to tie a cord around my waist to hold my skirt up. Look at this, Siri! You’re Siri, right? My skirt has to be tied with a cord.
“Look around you. I know this house. I know these walls and the room we were just in and this bathroom here. I recognize the smell of cardamom. But sometimes I ask myself: Who lives here? Who owns this house? And that big woman you hired to take care of me answers: Why you do, Jenny Brodal.
“What you’ll discover when you get older is that the words disappear. And your memories, of course. And big parts of your body. I have to hold mine up with a cord.
“What I’d most like to do is to leave. I don’t want to be here anymore. I don’t like that big woman. Do you know who she is? Was it you who asked her to come here? Do you think I can’t look after myself? Are you here to check on me? You’re Siri, right? Couldn’t you go and find my shoes? I’ve a pair of white sneakers in the cupboard, size thirty-eight. Very good shoes! Do you know where they are? Could you get them for me so that I can get the hell out of here?
“In one of my cabinet drawers I have a photograph of the Olympic champion Abebe Bikila and do you know, in it he is wearing exactly the same kind of shoes as I—in my nigh on a hundredth year—have in my posession? The first time Abebe Bikila won the Olympic gold medal he ran barefoot. That was in 1960. The next time he ran with shoes on. My shoes. He won that time too. That was in the summer of 1964, in Tokyo. He won the Olympic gold medal twice! Once barefoot. Once with shoes on.
“That’s the sort of thing I remember.”
Siri let her talk, while at the same time gently pushing her mother’s head over the rim of the bathtub, rinsing the shampoo out of her hair.
“I wanted to tell you about your little brother,” Jenny continued when she sat upright again, with a towel around her head. “His name was Syver and he lived for four years. Each morning I wake up and there is a brief moment when I don’t remember that he is dead. And then it all comes back to me like sheets of hail. With age, you’ll discover that everything disappears. Words, images, days, months, years of your life. And you’d think there would be relief in that. But there isn’t. Because there’s one thing that never goes away, and that is waking up every morning to a world without him.”
“I’m sorry,” Siri said, kneeling down in front of her on the blue tiled bathroom floor, patting her mother’s dripping face with a dry towel. “I am so sorry.”
“Oh, it isn’t your fault,” said Jenny. “Some years ago I wrote a speech that I meant to make to you. There was a party in the garden and charming people strolled around, raising their glasses and chatting pleasantly to one another. I don’t know what happened to it. The speech, I mean. But I know it must be around here somewhere. I think you had arranged the party for me and that things didn’t go as planned. Something happened, but this I can’t remember.”
But most of the time Jenny just sat silently in her wheelchair, slumped, with her big head lolling, her chin resting in the hollow of her throat, her mouth half open. She was liable to fall apart at any moment, thought Siri, snap in two.
The first time she saw her like that, slumped over in her wheelchair, Siri sat down in front of her and whispered, “Are you even there, Mama?”
She received no answer.
Then she leaned in, as if her mother were a sleeping baby, to check whether she was still breathing.
JON WENT DOWN to Mailund with Siri for a couple of days in June 2010, to help her clear out the annex. Irma refused to see either of them and locked the door.
“Jenny doesn’t want the two of you here,” she hissed. “You upset things.”
And so it went. Sometimes Siri made it over the doorstep, sometimes she didn’t. The main thing was not to give up, it was important to be there, Siri said, so they retreated to the annex and hoped for a change of mood. Irma had evidently turned the little house into a storage room of sorts: two bikes, a couple of boxes of books, and three wicker chairs occupied the center of the room, and a ceiling lamp shaped like a huge, smiling moon lay on the narrow bed. Jon carried the whole lot over to the garage, where Jenny’s gray Opel sat under its tarpaulin. Covering the car with a tarpaulin when it was already in the garage, it seemed so old-fashioned, so touching, somehow. The lost art of taking care of one’s belongings. His phone gave its text-message trill, Jon checked it, and the green display glowed in the half-light of the garage.
She was irreplaceable, Jon. I don’t know if you can imagine what it feels like to have lost her. A.
Fuck!
By the time Jon returned to the annex, Siri had lit candles and was fiddling with the tuner on the little portable radio, searching for some suitable music. He went to sit on the bed. He dreaded the moment when they would have to go to bed, couldn’t stop thinking about the slug he had found on the sheet of Milla’s mattress the night she disappeared, and the bed was so narrow, it was a long time since Siri and he had slept together. Maybe he should offer to sleep on the floor. He felt in his pocket to check whether his cell was in silent mode, he couldn’t have another text from Amanda coming in right now. He couldn’t tell Siri, what would he say? Amanda Browne thinks I know something about Milla that I’m not telling, she sends text messages all the time, I think she’s lost her mind.
Siri abandoned the radio and straightened up. Jon tried to think of something to say, something harmless and confidence-inspiring, but Siri beat him to it: “No one has stayed here since Milla. You think about that?”
He felt a prickling on the roof of his mouth. “No.”
“Were you by any chance in the annex, in here I mean, on the night she disappeared?”
“Why do you ask?”
“I don’t know.”
“No, I wasn’t in the annex. I knew she hadn’t come back, that she wasn’t here, so why would I be in the annex?”
Siri regarded him.
“Sometimes I wonder whether you lie about everything, Jon. You can’t help it. It just happens.”
Jon sighed. “What brought that on? What hav
e I done now? Do you want to fight, is that it?”
“I only asked if you’d been here in the annex that night when she disappeared.”
“No, of course I wasn’t.”
“Was there something going on between you?”
Jon got to his feet and yelled. “No, damn it, now will you give it a fucking rest. What’s gotten into you?”
“I just thought you might have been a little besotted with her, little moon-pretty Milla, I mean, you like them young, don’t you?”
Jon stared at his wife and said quietly, “What do you want, Siri? Where are you going with this?”
Her cheeks were pink. She spoke softly, and what she said came from somewhere deep inside: “So I suppose you weren’t besotted with Paula either?”
Jon dropped down onto the bed. Paula. What was she talking about? Who the fuck is Paula? Did she mean Paula …? But that was such a long time ago.
“What?” he stammered. “Okay, now you’ve lost me.”
“Ah, I bet I lost you,” Siri said. Her hand was shaking. “Maybe you thought I didn’t know about Paula?”
“But,” he broke in, “but … Christ.”
Siri took a step closer, planted herself in front of him, and with pink cheeks and pink-tipped nose proceeded to recite some words, he didn’t know what it was, a letter, something he had written and she had learned by heart, he wanted to get up and put his hand over her mouth and make her stop. This was just a huge misunderstanding. He scarcely remembered that letter. He scarcely remembered Paula. Fair-haired. Nice-looking. A bit on the plump side, though. And a bit fumbly when it came to the actual fucking. She was all talk, really.
But this he obviously couldn’t say to his wife.
He and Paula had had a couple of unsuccessful sexual encounters after Siri and Jon’s trip to Gotland. First that night at a hotel in Örebro and then a couple of times after that, one of these at Paula’s house, in a child’s bedroom, he remembered lying on a narrow IKEA bed with her writhing on top of him. He remembered staring straight at three blue cardboard crowns decorated with glitter and fancy writing. Three crowns marking three birthdays of a certain Benjamin, ranged on a shelf over by the window. Benjamin age three, it said on one crown, Benjamin age four, it said on the second, Benjamin age five, it said on the third, and he wondered why she would want to fuck him in her child’s bedroom, why not in the marital bed—this woman who had boasted about living in an open marriage (he had found that exciting)—or on the sofa, or any fucking where but here, in Benjamin’s room, oh, it was awful.
But the first time they’d been together was at a hotel in Örebro. It had been difficult right from the start. With Paula everything had been difficult, that was why he had ended it. Or was it Paula who had ended it? At any rate he had been relieved to have her out of his life. He remembered how Leopold had rested his head on the edge of the bed and gazed up at him as he entered her from behind. He remembered how he pressed her head down hard into the pillow so she wouldn’t be distracted by the staring dog, and how he had motioned as discreetly as he could to Leopold, man to man as it were, to go away, but Leopold wasn’t a man, Leopold was a dog, and Leopold would neither go away nor stop staring, he just stood there, with his head on the edge of the bed, his ears pricked up and that doleful doggy look in his eyes, and in the end Jon’d had to pull out of her, apologize profusely, and shut Leopold firmly in the bathroom.
Jon looked at Siri. She reminded him of a child who had just learned to read, flushed from excitement and exhaustion and without the ability to recognize punctuation marks yet.
She stood there bolt upright reciting the words he had written.
I think of how it would have been just you and me morning afternoon evening night and I think of everything you are and everything you can show me and all the things I want to do with you you ask if I’m unhappy if the thought of you makes me unhappy but just knowing you exist makes me happy I picture your face your hair your eyes your light shining but you know my situation maybe that’s what’s making me unhappy I think of you morning afternoon evening and night but I can’t be with you except in my thoughts because well you know. Because dot dot dot.
Siri was trembling. “Okay,” she said. “Who is she?”
Paula Krohn liked his books, she was a reader. But he couldn’t tell Siri that either. It would sound too stupid. An enraptured reader. She had come up to him in a bar and said something about how wonderful his books were, and then she had whispered, “Do you know that you have an exceptional effect on women?”
Well, for God’s sake, what was he supposed to do? He had been on his way out but stayed awhile longer. They drank a bottle of wine. Two maybe. She drank more than he did. The next day she sent him an e-mail in which she wrote that she had been struck by their meeting. She’d been struck. Those were her exact words. She had told him that she lived in an open marriage, she was, in other words, available, not to mention struck and quite pretty. Or at least he had thought she was quite pretty that first evening, and the more red wine he drank the prettier she became. And they had started exchanging e-mails and after a few weeks he and Leopold drove to Slite in Gotland to meet Siri and on the way down he called Paula and suggested that they meet in Örebro in a few days, when he and the dog would be on their way back to Oslo.
“Now maybe you could tell the truth,” Siri said.
She sat down on the bed and wrapped her arms around herself to stop the trembling.
Jon chose his words with care, but couldn’t help noticing that, despite “choosing his words with care,” he sounded like a Linguaphone tape. And that Siri, too, sounded like a Linguaphone tape. Hello, my name is Jon. What is your name? My name is Siri. Would you like something to drink? Yes, please, I would like a glass of cold water.
“It didn’t mean anything.”
“What didn’t mean anything?”
“Paula. She didn’t mean anything.”
“Are you still seeing her?”
“No, no, no, Siri, it was one night, one single night, it was a long time ago. Years ago. That’s all it was. It didn’t mean anything. It was awful.”
“When?”
“You remember,” he said hesitantly, “when we went to Slite to see Sofia? We took Leopold with us, remember? So we decided that I would drive back and you would fly. You remember I stayed overnight in Örebro. I met her there. At the hotel in Örebro. She came down. We spent the night together. It was awful. The minute I saw her I knew it was a mistake. She was fat and she had a mustache.”
“How many times?”
“Once, I told you. It was a disaster.”
“And you had Leopold with you. He saw the whole thing?”
Jon sighed. “It didn’t mean anything.”
“And you had sex just one time that whole long night? Is that what you’re saying? Lying next to each other all night in the same bed and you did it just once? You expect me to believe that?”
“Twice, maybe. I don’t know.”
“Why twice, if the first time was so awful? What was the point of doing it again?”
“It just happened. Siri, please. It didn’t mean anything.”
“And then?”
“And then what?”
“Did you fall asleep? Did you sleep there with her? Did you drive her back to Oslo the next day? Have you seen her again?”
“I didn’t sleep much. I drove her back. I wanted her to take the train, but she insisted on coming in the car with me. And no, I haven’t been with her since. She wanted to, but I wouldn’t.”
“So she sat next to you in the front seat, of our car, she sat in the front seat, with her fat ass and her mustache, in our car?”
“Yes, but it didn’t mean anything.”
“And when you wrote that letter?”
“What letter?”
“The letter I just read for you, the one I fucking know by heart, the one you were so careful to delete, like five years ago, the way you delete everything.”
“Oh,
right, that letter.”
“Why did you write it?”
“I’m trying to remember … but I simply can’t … I can’t remember.”
“You wrote a love letter to another woman and you don’t remember why you did it. Your hair your eyes your light shining.” She screamed and flew at him. “Light shining, Jon! Your light shines more!”
He grabbed her wrists, shook his head. “Siri, please.”
She pulled away, don’t touch me, and said under her breath, “Did you write the letter before or after you met her in Örebro?”
“I don’t remember, Siri, I guess I just wanted to—”
“You just wanted to fuck her one more time?”
“No! Not that! I don’t remember.”
“Your light?”
“Light … what?”
“You wrote your light. You wrote your hair, your eyes, your light. Just to be sure I’m understanding you correctly: first I shone, then she shone, how much light are we actually talking about, Jon?”
“Cut it out, Siri!”
“I don’t ever want to hear you say the word light again.”
“Cut it out!”
“Her light, my light, can’t you be just a little more original?”
“It didn’t mean anything, Siri.”
“What didn’t mean anything?”
“None of it.”
“And where was I?”
“Where were you?”
“Yes, where was I?”
“Weren’t you in Oslo?”
“I mean, where was I in that letter?”
