“I just want to say the food was good.”
4.
Months could go by when nothing special happened. The days melted into one another. Morning came, evening came. Breakfast at nine o’clock, dinner at three o’clock, the table grace was sung, Erling’s voice changed; during the summer Erling suddenly talked like a man, but he learned to sing in falsetto like Nils. They sang “Blessed Lord.” Always “Blessed Lord.”
Then suddenly important things could happen.
Like one day in August 1952.
For a long time Mama and Papa had wanted the five to have a visit from their parents. More than seven years had gone by since the evening the siblings were picked up, and nobody knew anything about Hertinius and Rebekka Olsen’s life now. Papa wrote to the Child Welfare office in Stavanger to find out how things stood. After a while the office confirmed that Rebekka and Hertinius would like to see their five children again. After that, everything happened very fast. Transportation back and forth was arranged, two assistants from Child Welfare would go along on the trip, and a date was set for the visit. In mid-August the siblings stood waiting under the ash tree, dressed in their very best, when the car from Stavanger drove up the hill. The car stopped, Erling fumbled nervously with the buttons on his shirt, Nils grinned and stuck his hands in his pockets, Lilly made sure that everyone stood in a row. The car door opened and an older man got out; behind him came a little gray-haired woman. They stood and thought for a moment before they approached the group of children.
More than seven years had passed since they last saw them.
Rebekka was the first to say something.
“Is it really you?” she said.
No one replied. Ingrid let out a soft, ominous howl as Rebekka and Hertinius came over and gazed in amazement at their five children. Hertinius lay his large hands on Sverre’s shoulders.
“Are you little Sverre?” he said, looking him straight in the eye.
He did the same with Erling and Nils. He put his stonemason hands on their shoulders and asked if they really were his sons. Rebekka clutched a white purse in her hands while she walked back and forth in front of the five children, as if she still could not believe they were hers.
Mama and Papa and the two assistants from Child Welfare stayed in the background the whole time. They had feared some sort of incident might occur, which was the reason for two assistants in addition to the driver. The five of them stood in the shade and watched. Rebekka and Hertinius scrutinized their grown and half-grown children, but nothing happened. No incident occurred. Rebekka opened her purse, took out a tube of lipstick, and gave it to Lilly.
“For when you want to find a man,” she said.
Lilly curtsied and took the lipstick.
“Thank you, Mother,” she said.
Hertinius came forward, but he didn’t have any gifts. He pointed at Matiassen, who was rocking on his stool under the ash tree, like he did every day.
“What’s he doing?”
Lilly looked at Rebekka, then at Hertinius.
“He just sits,” she said.
Silence for a few seconds.
“He just sits?”
“Yes,” Lilly replied.
“Yeah, yeah, by George,” Hertinius said finally.
Afterward Rebekka and Hertinius went upstairs to see the children’s room. Lilly showed them around the way Papa had shown the siblings around that evening in February seven years earlier.
“We sleep here,” she said, pointing to the beds. “We eat here,” she added, indicating the table. “We have five chairs and five plates. And this is the window,” she said, pointing again. “We can look outside here.”
Afterward they said hello to Josef, who, as usual, introduced himself as Mama’s uncle and a former tenor in the Hope Chorus; and at the end, at dinnertime, the seven sat and ate calmly by themselves around the table upstairs.
When they sang the table grace, it could be heard all the way out in the garden.
Rebekka and Hertinius stayed for perhaps four hours, and left in peace and contentment. Ingrid was silent, Lilly curtsied, Sverre and Nils stood with their hands in their pockets. Erling turned away. At the end, Papa shook hands with Hertinius.
“It was nice that you came,” he said.
“We had to see to the children,” replied Hertinius.
Then the unfamiliar car drove away and headed west toward Stavanger.
It was the first visit in more than seven years. It had been a success. No incidents. Mama and Papa had shaken hands with Rebekka and Hertinius, and when the car drove away they breathed a sigh of relief. They had heard the family sing the table grace before dinner, followed by quiet conversation. It was the first visit. And it would be the last.
No one knew what the seven had talked about.
5.
In the summer of 1952 we lost one person in the large caregiving house. But before that, we added one.
A new patient arrived in the fall of 1948. I was at home that day, a dreary, gray day; rain streamed down the windowpanes and every one was inside. I heard a car stop in the yard, but didn’t have time to look outside before it had driven away and the front door opened. An older woman entered the hall, arm in arm with Papa. Water dripped from her clothing as she stood just inside the door, wet and exhausted, as if she had been rescued from the sea.
It was Mina Jensen.
She who had once had such great expectations for her son, she who had recognized his talents before anyone else. She who had sent him to America and thought he would return as a pastor. She had waited in Mandal for letters that never came, and had burned his poems while he was still at the College of Wooster, on the other side of the Atlantic.
Now she stood in our front hall, soaking wet.
I didn’t know that she existed, that crazy Christian Jensen upstairs actually had a mother. It had never occurred to me at the time.
Mina had difficulty walking, her shoes scraped across the floor, and Papa had to support her the few meters over to the chair Mama had set out. I don’t know how it happened, but Mina Jensen had come to live with us. No contract is to be found. But she was to be a patient, just like her son. Perhaps Papa and Mama would get eighty kroner a month, perhaps more; she wasn’t a child after all.
Mina Jensen sank heavily onto the chair, and all her belongings were in a small net bag she set down beside her. Someone said later that she had stomach cancer. That she would die soon, that this was why she had come. Perhaps this was true. But she didn’t look sick, just frail, worn-out, and bewildered, as if she had walked in the rain all the way from Mandal.
As she sat there on the chair catching her breath, a door opened upstairs. I heard unsteady, hobbling footsteps and knew who was coming. We all heard who was coming, everyone except for Mina Jensen. Christian came tottering down the stairs, concentrating intently on holding on to the railing, moving his feet, keeping his arms still. He was thirty-four years old, with a long beard. Pale and thin, he looked like Wergeland, but Mina recognized him immediately, her son who had once been a poet.
“Oh, dear Jesus,” she exclaimed.
She got to her feet as Christian made his way down the stairs. At the bottom he stopped by the newel post, his whole body trembled and shook. He was thirty-four, and Mina must have been more than seventy. Her face was sallow, her eyes clouded, but her black hair had no gray and shone in the glow of the ceiling light. She rose from the chair, but once on her feet she must have felt she couldn’t walk the few meters over to the stairs, and Christian must have felt his body would not obey him if he let go of the newel post, so they just stood there and looked at each other.
The two of them lived together upstairs. Matiassen moved in with the siblings from Stavanger for a while, and for the first time I heard Jensen laugh. In the evenings I heard Mina and Christian Jensen laughing so long and so loudly you would think they were going completely out of their minds. It was as if suddenly Jensen had forgotten his earlier life as a student and poet
, forgotten the wild dance, the burned poems, the dancing devils, the dirty angels, the conversations with Our Lord. Everything was forgotten. Now he just sat up there with his mother and laughed, long and heartily.
Christmas came, and on Christmas Eve Mina and Christian sat with us around the table while Josef stood by the piano and sang. Christian sat there with a full beard, but without his glasses, and then he looked more like Jesus holding a lamb than like Wergeland on his deathbed. In the warm light he appeared older. He and Mina were like an elderly married couple. Mina had her hands folded on her stomach while Josef sang; her hair was pulled back so tightly it shone in the lamplight. Jensen’s face and upper body twitched a little, his arms jerked erratically, but otherwise there was nothing conspicuous about him as he gazed attentively at Josef.
When the rest of us marched around the Christmas tree, Christian and Mina stayed seated. They had no gifts for each other. Now and then she leaned toward him and whispered in his ear, and he would nod and gently pat her thigh.
Throughout the winter evenings they sat upstairs and laughed. The nights were starlit, icy cold; the pine trees in the forest creaked in the frosty air.
Or perhaps I was mistaken. Perhaps it wasn’t laughter. I just remember the laughter being there the whole time until Mina Jensen died. Suddenly she died. The laughter stopped, the winter was over, Papa took care of Mina Jensen’s body, Christian’s glasses were back on his nose. His eyes grew large and round. Spring came with bird-song early in the morning before the sun rose. The snow melted, Matiassen sat on his stool under the ash tree, and one morning Jensen was helped into a waiting automobile and driven to the chapel in Mandal, to his mother’s funeral.
6.
He followed her three years later, during the winter Olympics, the same winter I took my high school exams.
In the afternoons I sat with Josef, Nils, Erling, and Sverre and kept track of scores. When Hjallis won the 1,500-meter, Josef stood up and saluted; and when Arnfinn Bergmann flew down onto the landing slope at the Holmenkollen ski jump, Erling sat on the wood box and pulled his sweater over his head while he laughed and laughed.
The laughter and celebrating could be heard outside among the snow-laden pine trees.
In the room across the hall Christian Jensen lay curled up in a fetal position. He lay on his bed with his face turned toward the wall. The wild dance had completely worn him out and forced his body to curl up the way it had once lain in his mother’s womb.
Papa knocked on the door to Josef’s room and asked me to come with him. He needed help and Mama wasn’t there, he explained, and then he sent me downstairs to the kitchen for hot water. When I returned, Jensen lay on the bed almost naked. He lay on his stomach, his clothes in a pile on the floor, and his backside was white as snow. He had soiled his pants. I poured warm water into the wash basin by the bed, and stood by the door as Papa wrung out a cloth and washed Jensen.
“Don’t leave yet,” said Papa.
I emptied the dirty water outside by the front steps; it melted the snow in a large circle and I could see the ground. When I came upstairs again with clean water, Jensen still lay on his stomach, so I helped Papa turn him over. Papa lifted his upper body while I held his legs, but Jensen was heavy and slippery after being washed, his whole body trembled and jerked, and at one point I was about to lose him. Papa managed to push his legs onto the bed again, and then he lay there on his back, stark-naked, with his eyes closed.
I thought maybe he was ashamed.
He no longer looked like Jesus with a shepherd’s staff, he looked more like the pencil drawing of Henrik Wergeland on his deathbed: the sparse beard, the fine, sensitive facial features, the closed eyes. It was a different Wergeland from the dreamy poet astride his little horse, Veslebrunen. This was the Wergeland who had written his last poem and would soon die.
Steam rose from the water while Papa wrung out the cloth and washed Jensen’s face. The whole time Papa talked to him calmly, almost lovingly, but Jensen didn’t open his eyes. Papa dipped the cloth, wrung it out, and washed his neck. Jensen lay there almost without moving, and for a moment I thought he was sleeping, but he wasn’t asleep. Suddenly he opened his eyes and gazed straight at me. Jensen looked at me, his eyes calm and clear, as if he had seen everything in life that was worth seeing.
I lifted each arm so Papa could wash his armpits. His arms were heavy, even though they were almost nothing but skin and bone. Then Papa wrung out the cloth again and washed Jensen’s nearly hairless chest. It was as if we were in a cavern filled with warmth and quietness, and a kind of tenderness, for rarely if ever had I seen Papa touch a person with greater care and consideration. There was only quietness and warmth and light, and the sound of trickling water each time the cloth was wrung out, and Papa washed Jensen’s stomach, and afterward his groin, and then I looked away.
I went down to get fresh water two more times. After that I brought a large, clean towel and Papa’s shaving things—the small brush and the razor that could be folded up. Then I watched Papa lather Jensen’s cheeks, chin, and throat, and carefully draw the razor in long swipes across his Adam’s apple and almost up to his lower lip.
Next I helped Papa put clothes on Jensen. I held his legs while Papa pulled clean underwear over his calves and thighs. Then we put on a white nightshirt that had to be tied in the back; Papa held Jensen upright in bed while I got his hands and arms into the shirt and tied it behind his neck.
“I’m ready,” said Jensen, looking at me.
His eyes were large, immobile. It was the first time I heard him speak to me. For twelve years we had lived under the same roof, and now he suddenly spoke to me.
“Now, now,” said Papa. “You’re not going to leave, Christian. Just lie down.”
Jensen looked at Papa for a moment, then his gaze shifted to me—firm, clear, and determined. He stretched out his hand. It trembled and shook.
“You can take me along,” he said. “I’m ready.”
It was Papa who cared for him during the final weeks. Christian Jensen had become like a child; he lay with his face to the wall and his knees drawn up almost to his forehead, at the mercy of anyone who took pity on him. Papa fed him, but after a while he would no longer eat. Papa turned him, and changed the bed, but at the end Jensen simply wanted to lie in peace, curled up with his face to the wall, as if in terrible shame.
That was how he lay when he died. Like a fetus.
In death the spasms let go, the wild dance was over at last, his body became relaxed and docile; he could lie normally, his body stretched full-length, and he was free.
Christian Jensen was thirty-seven years old.
Like Wergeland.
The night Jensen died there was a huge snowstorm, and it kept on snowing throughout the day while Papa cared for Jensen’s body and placed it in the coffin that had already been ordered and brought by bus from Kristiansand. The snow didn’t stop. It continued through the next night and during the following morning. It snowed and snowed, deep in the dreams of everyone as they slept. Jensen’s coffin was in the hayloft, and when we awoke the third day the snow was a meter deep in front of the house. The road down to the milk platform was impassable. The hearse, which had come all the way from Mandal, stood down there with white curtains in the windows, and was about to turn around.
That’s when Papa found the toboggan in the hay barn.
He dragged it to the yard while Ingrid, Erling, Sverre, and Lilly watched from the upstairs window. Nils and I helped carry Jensen’s coffin from the hayloft and, together with Mama, we put it on the toboggan.
“Yeah, yeah, by George,” said Nils with satisfaction, putting his hands in his pockets.
Papa straightened his fur cap and brushed snow off his shoulders. He pulled the toboggan over to the top of the hill, seated himself astride the coffin, edged forward the last stretch before the slope went down steeply, gave the toboggan a last push, and slid down the hill in the loose snow.
7.
C
hristian Jensen was gone; there were no more nightly conversations with Our Lord. The magazine from the College of Wooster continued to come to the Vatneli postmaster, but Papa wrote a letter in English explaining that Christian Jensen had died, and after that we no longer heard anything from America. It was the summer of 1952. We had lost one person in the house, and soon I left too. I went to Kvås to attend folk high school for one year.
Papa drove me in the new car he’d bought that summer, a Nash Ambassador, or simply the Ambassador, as Josef called it. When we were ready to leave, everyone stood in the yard: Josef, Ingrid, Erling, Sverre, Nils, and Lilly. Matiassen was rocking on his stool as usual and took no notice of my leaving. Papa started the car, Lilly drew her sweater tighter around her.
“I’m on my way,” I shouted out the window.
Josef waved his arm as if he were standing on the deck of a ship sailing for America, Ingrid stared at the car in disbelief, Nils hitched up his trousers, Erling laughed, and Sverre merely stood there.
“Take care, Ingrid!” I shouted.
“Greet the king!” Josef cried.
And with a jolt the Ambassador drove off.
It was the first time I left them. I was sixteen years old. I wore my confirmation suit, had my hair slicked back, and saw the shadow of the car glide along the hawthorn hedge. When I turned in my seat I saw them all still standing in the yard. They looked almost like an ordinary family, and that was the last thing I thought before the house disappeared behind us. They were almost an ordinary family.
While studying in Kvås I wrote letters home, to Josef, to Erling and Ingrid. I never received an answer, but I knew that the letters reached them, and that they were read. Papa told me later what happened: when a new letter arrived, Josef immediately called every one into his room. It was irrelevant whether the letter was addressed to him or to Ingrid, or to Mama and Papa. In every case, Josef assumed the role of reader and intermediary of the latest news from the outside world. My letters always began: Dear everyone at home. I wrote to everyone, but after a while I knew that Josef always read aloud to the others, so I heard Josef’s voice as I wrote.
Across the China Sea Page 12
