“I don’t know what to do with many things. I can’t just throw every thing away after all.”
Anna looked at me.
“Take the time you need,” she said.
My eyes wandered to the opening in the stove where you could see right into the fire; I saw the couple who still held each other close and danced under the black sun. We sat for a while talking about one thing and another as the steam rose from our coffee cups. Then, when we didn’t seem to have anything else to say, I brought out the bag of Tone’s clothing.
“Look what I found. This has been lying here for fifty years.”
Anna seemed to stiffen when she realized what it was. She unfolded Tone’s pale yellow sweater, laid it across her thin knees, and stroked the material over and over again.
“Where did you find this?” she asked.
It had been many years since I had talked about Tone with someone who had actually known her, someone who remembered how she talked, how she laughed; someone who hadn’t just seen Herbert Andersson’s painting, but who had actually seen her run around in the garden that now lay in darkness outside the windows. I thought Tone was gone, but she was still here. Even now, after an entire lifetime. She hadn’t gotten any older, she clung to the kitten, or the kitten clung to her. Tone grew clearer the more we talked about her. I heard her voice, I heard words and sentences she spoke, I saw her hands, I saw her clothes draped over a chair, her ribbon thrown on the floor. I saw the sunlight in her hair.
“How old would she have been?” Anna asked.
“Fifty-four,” I replied.
She regarded me silently for a long time.
“Are you sure?”
I nodded.
“Yes,” I said.
A car approached on the road outside, but it wasn’t coming to us, it didn’t slow down; it drove farther north in the darkness, and then everything was quiet again. Anna shook her head.
“I can still hear her laugh,” she said.
Anna stayed for a couple of hours; the clock had just struck eleven when she stood up to leave. The fire had gone out in the stove. I went into the front hall with her, and felt the cold draft along the floor as I watched her put on her coat. I had thought about saying something, something from me to her, something about how she had brought back the old life, how all of a sudden Tone had come so close. I opened the door and went out onto the front steps with her.
“Thank you so much for coming,” I said.
“Of course. It’s the least I could do,” she replied.
“It was good to see you,” I added.
“It was good to see you too,” she said.
As I walked across the yard with her I had an unpleasant prickling sensation in one leg, it seemed as if my feet would not carry me. However, it gradually felt better, and after a while I was just fine. I’d had the same feeling as when I carried Mama from the chair in the garden some months earlier; she had been so light, I could have just continued, down the road to the milk platform, and it would have been like carrying almost nothing.
We paused where the road began to curve down the hill and I saw her house, the warm light from her kitchen window.
“Did you know that Hans carried me all the way from the hay barn to your place?”
Anna gave me a questioning look.
“He carried you?”
“He was the one who found Ingrid and me. We had hidden in the grass by the hayloft. He didn’t say a word, he just picked me up and carried me the whole way.”
Anna stood there as if she had to think carefully how to reply.
“You and Ingrid had been hiding?” she said.
“Yes, we lay in the grass and prayed.”
“And then Hans carried you down to our place.”
I nodded.
“Yes,” I said. “That’s what happened.”
At that moment I was overwhelmed by a deep, defiant sadness and I had an urge to give her a hug, put my arms around her; I wanted her to say something more, tell me something I didn’t know. Something. Something.
Anna turned to me in the dark.
“Are you managing all right?” she asked.
“I’m managing just fine.”
“That’s good,” she said.
Then she turned and walked away. I didn’t do anything, I didn’t say anything, I just stood there and watched as she walked the short distance to her home.
2.
After she left I immediately began clearing out the desk in the living room. That’s when I found the contract, the cover letter, and, later, the photographs in Mama’s confirmation Bible. I also found a letter that stood out from the other things. It was written in Papa’s sloping, somewhat shaky handwriting on very thin, almost Bible-thin, paper. A duplicate. The letter, dated July 12, 1973, was addressed to the Child Welfare office in Stavanger, which over the years had changed its name to Stavanger Social Services. In it Papa gave notice to terminate the caregiving agreement.
For twenty-eight years he and Mama had been bound by the contract he signed outside on that dark winter evening in 1945. For a generation they had demonstrated a Christlike spirit of love, and in the summer of 1973 he sat alone at the kitchen table and summed up their entire life.
A one-month notice was still required.
The three brothers, Nils, Sverre, and Erling, had been released from the contract since the fall of 1963, although they had come back each Christmas and each summer since then. Christian Jensen had died, as had Matiassen. But patients had been at the house the whole time. Jensen for almost twelve years, Matiassen for twenty-two years, the three brothers for eighteen years, Josef for twenty-nine. And then there had been Mina Jensen’s five-month intermezzo starting in the fall of 1948, when at long last she was reunited with her son Christian.
Lilly and Ingrid were still there.
Papa sat alone at the kitchen table, he wrote slowly, and tried to include everything. He wrote about the wild dance that had finally worn out Jensen completely; he wrote about Matiassen, who at the end had to be carried back and forth from the stool under the ash tree; about Erling’s increasing migraines; about the fight upstairs; about Sverre, who ran out of the house and lost his way in the woods more and more often. He wrote about Josef’s singing, about the wandering cup and the medal for courage. He wrote about everything—the way it had been, the way he remembered it.
He did not write anything about Tone.
At the very bottom of the thin sheet of paper was his signature. Mama read the letter and had nothing to add, even if perhaps she wished he would have written something about Tone. She didn’t say anything, only nodded. So he folded the page, put it in an envelope, and walked down to the milk platform in the last of the afternoon sun.
Upstairs, something moved behind the curtains.
He walked the short distance to the milk platform, put the letter in the mailbox, and returned home, slowly and alone. About halfway he stopped, his shadow stretched far across the field. He looked toward the house, toward Mama taking down laundry from the clothesline. He had tried to summarize the last thirty years. Everything fit on an A4 sheet of paper, but he hadn’t mentioned one word about Tone.
Several weeks later a green station wagon drove up the road from the milk platform. The car stopped in the yard, and out into the sunshine stepped a man in light-colored trousers; his shirt was wrinkled in the back and the sleeves were rolled up. He walked over to the shade of the ash tree to stretch his legs, took off his horn-rimmed glasses, and wiped the sweat from his face with a pocket handkerchief.
The man was Peder Johannessen, department head at Stavanger Social Services. A little later another vehicle arrived and another man got out, district doctor Håberg from Søgne.
It was a warm day, the sun was high in the heavens, and Johannessen had driven nonstop from Stavanger, a demanding four-hour trip. It had taken Håberg forty-five minutes from Søgne. They had come to sign the final papers and thereby end the care giving contract.
Mama and Papa came o
ut to the front steps, the four of them stood talking in the shade for a while, and then they went in to the living room, where all the necessary papers were stamped and signed.
Afterward Papa suggested he show the men around the house that had served as a caregiving home for a generation. He showed them the living room and kitchen on the first floor, then the easy stairway to the second floor with its short distance between the steps. They came to the upstairs hall with doors to the right, to the left, and straight ahead. First they went into Josef’s room, which was empty now.
“This is where Josef lived,” said Papa. “He almost took care of himself. He liked to read. I don’t think anyone around here read more books than Josef.”
Johannessen took a few cautious steps into the room, the floorboards creaked. He thumped his knuckles against the Jøtul stove, then went over to the window. Papa said:
“And he had an unusually good singing voice.”
That was all that was said. Josef’s remarkable life briefly and precisely summarized in five sentences. Johannessen and Håberg stood by the window for a while looking at the ash tree, at the tangle of twigs and branches and the interplay of sun and shadow. Then they turned and walked out of the room, and Mama carefully shut the door.
After that the two visitors were shown Matiassen and Christian Jensen’s old room.
“This is where Christian Jensen from Mandal and Matiassen from Flekkefjord lived,” said Papa. “Matiassen usually sat on a stool out in the garden, whereas Jensen, well, he wrote a whole book of poetry before he came here.”
“Really?” Håberg exclaimed. “A book of poetry?”
Papa nodded.
“But his mother burned it.”
Again Håberg and Johannessen walked into the room slowly, and again they went to look out the window.
“What did you say his name was?”
“Christian Jensen,” Papa replied.
“And the other man?”
“His name was simply Matiassen.”
Finally Papa led them to the last door in the upstairs hall. He knocked softly, and they heard a response from inside.
“Who’s there?”
“It’s just me,” Papa replied, leaning toward the door. “There’s someone here who wants to say hello to you.”
He waited a moment, footsteps were heard inside, and the door opened.
Lilly and Ingrid were still there, and since it was July, the three brothers were at home on summer vacation. The whole flock of siblings was there, almost like the old days.
Lilly lined them up—Sverre farthest away, then Ingrid, then Erling, then Nils, and finally Lilly. When they were children this was a natural arrangement, from the youngest to the oldest. But now it looked a bit disorganized. Sverre had become the tallest. Ingrid was slightly taller than Erling, Nils was a little taller than Ingrid, and Lilly was the shortest of them all.
Johannessen and Håberg crossed the room and shook hands with each one. Lilly made a deep, dignified curtsy as she had done her whole life; Ingrid did the same. Erling just stood there, while Sverre dutifully made a stiff bow.
“So people live here too,” said Johannessen.
“Yeah, yeah, by George,” replied Nils.
Everyone watched as Johannessen walked around the room. He circled the table with the five chairs. He leaned against the window frame, looked out the windows. He saw the picture of Jesus holding a lamb, and then leaned over to study a framed photograph that hung above Ingrid’s bed. It was the picture of her and Tone with the kittens in their arms.
“Who is this?” he asked.
No answer.
“Is it any of you?”
Still no one replied.
Johannessen turned around.
“Are you the one standing there with the kitten?” he said to Lilly, pointing at the photograph.
“No,” said Lilly. “It’s not me.”
At this time Lilly was forty-five years old. Nils forty-three. Erling thirty-nine. Ingrid thirty-seven. Sverre thirty-two. Now they were gathered in the room where the five of them had lived together for eighteen years. Each day they had sung the table grace. In the evening Lilly helped them brush their teeth and saw to it that everyone got to bed, and they lay with their hands folded on top of the duvet while Lilly prayed an evening prayer; then she turned out the light, and they all lay in the dark. They were her children somehow. Even though they got older, they never grew up.
“It was nice to meet you,” said Johannessen as he stood in the doorway.
None of the siblings replied, but Lilly curtsied.
They had no idea that the caregiving was now formally ended.
3.
Mama taught Lilly how to dry small bouquets of flowers picked from the garden. The patients at Dikemark had done the same, she told Lilly; the attic above the women’s unit had smelled like eternal summer. Lilly picked small bouquets, tied them with twine, and hung them on clotheslines in the attic above Josef’s room. Every day she went up to check on them, to see if anything was needed, if everything was as it should be. The flowers hung to dry for several months, but they kept most of their original colors. There were daisies, buttercups, and yarrow in delicate, beautifully made bouquets. At Christmastime Lilly and Ingrid went from house to house in the falling snow and sold them for five øre each; the money was to go to missionary work. They stood close to each other on the front steps when the door opened.
“Do you want to buy, ma’am?” Lilly asked.
Ingrid held out the basket of flowers, and people bought the small bouquets. Ingrid received the money in her hand, gave it to Lilly at once, and made such a deep curtsy that snow sprinkled from her shawl and shoulders and her long winter coat spread out on the floor; when they left, there were puddles on the floor where they had stood. They went from door to door until all the bouquets had been sold, and on the way home they stopped at the Brandsvoll store. They were hungry after their peddling, so Lilly bought a package of Gjende shortbread, which they devoured on the spot. Afterward Ingrid was thirsty, so Lilly bought her a bottle of Asina, and one for herself; then of course they needed a snack to keep them going until they reached home, and by the time they left the store there was no longer any money left to send to the missionaries.
After all, it could be called a kind of work.
And so the hours, the days, the years went by. Josef rode home on his bicycle from the public library with his bag full of books; the Tower of Babel grew on his nightstand, and he began with the A’s once again. Halvard Lange became foreign minister under Gerhardsen, Jensen held conversations with Our Lord, and Matiassen rocked on his stool under the ash tree.
The starlit sky revolved slowly above the house.
They got meals morning, noon, and evening; they had a bed and a roof over their heads. Matiassen had his stool, Josef had world literature, and Jensen had the magazine from the College of Wooster. They lived isolated from the world, and yet, there were occasions when they entered it.
In May 1949 I was confirmed in our church.
Grandpa came all the way from Oslo, the first time he had seen Mama since the fall of 1945. It was also the first time he saw Astrid.
I wanted the siblings and Josef to be in church.
“I want them all to come,” I said.
There was silence for a few seconds. Papa looked at Mama, she looked at me.
“Well,” she said. “Why not?”
Lilly washed and dressed the four others upstairs. When they came down Ingrid had a ribbon in her hair, Nils’s and Sverre’s hair was combed smoothly, and Lilly wore the flowered summer dress with a narrow belt around the waist. I recognized the dress immediately; it was Mama’s, but fit Lilly perfectly since they were the same height. Lilly was twenty-one, she was of age, or of age in theory. In practice nothing happened, in practice she was the same as always: almost beautiful, almost ordinary—and of age. She arranged the siblings in a row while they waited to leave. Josef came downstairs too, and, as always when he
went to church, he was wearing his uniform jacket with the medal for courage on the lapel.
A new pastor had come to the area recently. Absalon Elias Holme, a name worthy of a parish pastor. He stood inside the altar rail in his black cassock and prayed for each of us while the swallows flew back and forth from their nests in the church tower. When it was my turn, Mama and Papa, Josef, and all five siblings rose from the pew. They stood there while Holme laid his hand gently on my head. Nils grinned, Erling’s head wobbled, Ingrid just stared, and at that moment I caught the scent of white carnations.
Afterward everyone sat around the big table in the living room at home, and when we had finished eating Josef tapped his knife against his glass, pushed back his chair, and stood up.
“I won’t say much,” he began. “But what I’m going to say, I’ve thought about carefully.”
Then he was suddenly silent. He stood behind his chair and regarded me with a serious expression while he chewed his mustache and held on to the back of the chair.
“Once when I was a young man I left on a long trip, to the city of Trondheim.”
Long pause.
“And in the city of Trondheim I was lucky enough to see the midnight sun.”
Another pause. He took a deep breath.
“And in the city of Trondheim I met my young bride.”
The room was very quiet, only the soft ticking of the Junghans clock, and the creaking in the ceiling that was Matiassen rocking on his stool above us.
“What I want to say to you on this day is that I’ve never forgotten the midnight sun, and I’ve never forgotten my young bride. I want you to know that on a day like this.”
Josef and I exchanged glances. It was as though strange words and images drifted like mist before his eyes. Words he almost understood, images he almost recognized. This lasted a few seconds, but then suddenly his face broke into a remarkable smile that made his mustache leap. Still holding on to the back of his chair, he reached for his glass.
“Skoal for the confirmand, and skoal for the missus!” he shouted, and took a drink.
After Josef’s short speech, Lilly stood up. The room grew quiet again. Mama glanced at Papa and lowered her glass. Lilly smoothed her dress and stood behind her chair, exactly as Josef had done. The four siblings looked up at her. Perhaps they were surprised; everyone had assumed that only Josef would make a speech, but then Lilly stood up. She cleared her throat, held on to the chair, looked at me, and said:
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