Across the China Sea

by Gaute Heivoll

  A faint white mist hung in the garden, as if someone had tried to erase a small part of the world. For a moment I wanted to knock on Anna’s door and tell her about the photographs; maybe she hadn’t gone to bed yet, maybe she was sitting in the living room reading. After all, she too had been a reader all her life. I started walking slowly down the road, hearing only the sound of my footsteps. Then I paused. A bird appeared to fly right out of the dark treetops. It crossed the sky just above me, chattering strangely, ominously. Suddenly I saw Anna come into the kitchen; she put something on the counter and turned toward the window, but she could not have seen me, because she calmly returned to the living room. I changed my mind, walked back to our yard, and stood for a moment peering up at Jensen and Matiassen’s windows before heading into the woods.

  The path was misty and unclear, and I kept thinking I should turn back. My trouser legs got wet, but I didn’t turn back, I walked on until I saw Lake Djupesland lying ahead of me, dark and still. I didn’t find the path Josef used to follow; instead, I made my way through waist-high juniper thickets, which pricked me through my trousers. I crossed a marshy hollow that gurgled underfoot, and followed dim, gray outcroppings to which large patches of soft hair-cap moss and an occasional pine tree clung. At last I came to the headland and sandy beach where I’d stood so many times before. But never in the dark.

  Never in the dark.

  I gazed out at the lake. The milky sky gave more light by the water than in the woods, but even so, the sandbar wasn’t visible. The water was completely dark and still. I could sense it only in front of me, I could sense how the ground where I stood curved downward. Somewhere it disappeared under the water and continued down into the depths.

  I told myself: You should shout now. But I didn’t shout.

  2.

  Almost forty years would go by before I learned what happened when Mama left.

  It was the end of July 1984. I was going to visit Papa at the rest home in Nodeland. I turned left by the butcher shop and parked in the shadow of some tall pine trees. Papa had grown weaker, his health had rapidly declined. He became sick in February, during the spring he got thinner and thinner, in April he received the news, in May all hope was gone, and when summer came he got a room in the rest home with a view of the railroad tracks. When I entered his room, Mama was sitting in a chair by the window with a magazine in her lap. I had a feeling that they hadn’t talked together for a long time, that they both knew the other knew, and no words were needed.

  They waited for the bird to take flight.

  An extra bed had been brought into the room, but I don’t know if Mama had slept in it. Usually she stayed awake all night. She went to the kitchen herself and brought his food on a tray, she emptied his bedpan, she helped him shave, she helped him into the bathroom and left the door slightly ajar while she waited outside. She had done this before, after all; she knew how to do it, she had been a hospital nurse. She wasn’t the one who gave him shots of morphine, but she moistened his lips with a sponge if he tried to talk.

  There was a strange, almost lighthearted atmosphere in the room when I arrived.

  “Is he sleeping?” I whispered.

  Mama nodded.

  “Come in,” she said.

  I sat with her all evening. From time to time a train roared past outside the window and the sound was so deafening I thought the room would split apart. Papa was restless, perhaps the noise of the train penetrated his morphine sleep and awakened him. He received another shot, which quieted him; he seemed to sink into himself, and his lips slid away from each other.

  At nine o’clock the evening train from Oslo arrived.

  It thundered past, just a few meters away from us. I was sure Papa would wake up again, but he didn’t. He lay peacefully, his mouth was half-open, his chest rose and fell. Then everything grew quiet again, and that was when Mama began telling me.

  While Papa slept, she told about the fall day when we all walked down to the milk platform with her. She had been wearing her gray fall coat belted at the waist and Papa had carried her suitcase, the same one she used that time at St. Josef’s hospital.

  She had cared for Tone’s body when it lay in the coffin; she had sent everyone out of the room and asked to be alone. She would never have thought she could do that. But she had done it. Dipped a cloth in water and wrung it out, washed the sand from Tone’s face. Put the new dress on her, fixed her hair, tied the red ribbon, folded the small hands. And when she was finished, she had gone out onto the front steps, out into the sunshine. She had walked over to the ash tree and seen the place where the cart tipped over. She had seen the dark, wet sand that was still scattered on the grass, and she had said to herself:

  I can’t be here any longer.

  It had been absolutely clear to her, and that made her calm. She had felt a sense of peace, and all at once everything became easier to bear. She had managed to care for Tone’s body, and suddenly she knew that she was going to leave. She knew it when she sat with us in church and Josef sang louder than everyone else. She knew it in the days and weeks that followed. She had gone around in kind of a fog, and the only thing she knew was that she was going to get away from everything. She knew it when the bus appeared behind Jon Båsland’s hayloft, she knew it when she knelt down and hugged me and said I must take good care of Josef and the siblings. She knew it when Papa went onto the bus with her. He had put the suitcase on the luggage rack, and she had told herself she would get rid of that suitcase as soon as she got to Oslo. She would get rid of everything. And she would begin with the suitcase. Papa had stood there in the aisle, and when he turned toward her, he was completely changed. Gone was the man who almost never raised his voice. Gone was the man who sat shoulder to shoulder with Josef in church and listened to the sermon each Sunday. Gone were the eleven happy years. It was as if all barriers had crumbled, as if the dam he’d built after the day he came running with Tone in his arms had burst in front of her, in the midst of the villagers and friends in the crowded bus. She had seen directly into a naked, unfamiliar person who wanted something from her that she could not give. She had touched his arm.

  “You need to go now,” she had said.

  3.

  She traveled alone the forty kilometers to Kristiansand. It was a warm, sunny afternoon and already nearly a dozen people stood on the platform waiting for the train from Stavanger. She loosened the shawl around her neck, walked to the edge of the platform, and stared down at the tracks. The train was expected a little past three, and she heard the whistle as it approached. The power cables trembled, people around her grabbed their suitcases and coats and pressed closer to the tracks, and as the locomotive came into view the platform shook slightly beneath her feet.

  She traveled more than eight hours, through scattered pine forests, across marshy areas that had already turned golden after the long summer. Endless forests flowed by. Small lakes and islands. Now and then a farm, a cluster of farms, a man with a horse pulling a plow, a black line of overturned soil.

  She could not get rid of the image of Papa. It was Papa walking there holding the reins, it was our horse with shaggy hair over its eyes pulling the plow and leaving a line of overturned earth behind it. She thought about Papa’s eleven happy years at Dikemark, about the road from the venerable asylum buildings to the employee residences; she thought about the frozen snowbanks by the road, and about how she had suddenly stopped and Papa had walked on alone.

  She had only touched his arm.

  The train arrived at midnight. She had boarded the train in the Kristiansand railway station in quiet sunlight. Now she got off in the crowded Vestbanen train station in Oslo, and it was like another world. Swarms of people surrounded her, even though it was late at night, and she realized this was because the night train to Bergen stood ready to depart on the other track. She was back in Oslo, five years after leaving. She wrapped her coat tighter around her and tied her shawl firmly across her chest. Then she picked up her suitcase in
her right hand, walked through the crowd, and found the taxi stand next to the station.

  This is what Mama told me that evening at the rest home. She sat calmly in the chair with a magazine open in her lap while Papa slept in the bed next to her. Outside, the sky had become completely dark. I remember my amazement; it was still July, but a deep November darkness lay outside the window. Just Mama’s monotonous voice, the November darkness outside, and Papa lying asleep. Or maybe he wasn’t asleep. Maybe he just lay quietly and listened.

  She told me everything.

  She told about the night nearly forty years ago when she arrived in Oslo and sat in a taxi that took her through the quiet streets. She told about seeing her father again in the custodian apartment. How he helped her with her suitcase. She sat with Grandpa in the basement of the Foreign Ministry housing complex, and somehow it was like coming home. She told him everything, and his eyes never left her. She knew he understood. She had come home to the old life, the life that had abruptly ended the day Grandma died and Mama gave up her dream of singing. But now, while she and Grandpa listened to the festivity of a Foreign Ministry reception on the floor above, it was as though she had come back and was going to start over again. She would start over again, and would begin by cutting her hair; after that, she would get rid of her suitcase. And then perhaps she could start to sing again. The only thing missing was the Steinway piano, which she thought impossible to move, and which now was more than four hundred kilometers away, in a house that lay forty kilometers from the coast, at the end of the world.

  Perhaps she could sing again.

  At one point I had to go out and get some air. When I got up from my chair Mama gave me an accusatory look, but I didn’t know why. I put on my jacket and quietly went out into the corridor. It was the middle of the night, so I checked with the night watchman to make sure the doors would not be locked when I returned. I zipped my jacket up to my chin and walked out to the highway through the November darkness that I didn’t know existed in the summer. Behind me, water splashed in the fountain; ahead of me was the butcher shop, its red-lettered sign hanging toward the road. Walking made me feel calmer. I still heard Mama’s voice, but it became increasingly faint. I turned right and continued toward the train station. No people. No cars. The orange sign at the Shell gas station glowed, but everything was closed, locked and bolted. I reached the train station and walked to the platform. Standing there, I saw a pulsing red light at the far end of the tracks. I didn’t know what it meant—if a train was coming soon, or if the train was not allowed to continue toward Kristiansand. It wasn’t long before I got an answer. I heard long, drawn-out whistles and a faint whoosh from farther up the valley. The sound grew to an avalanche that came hurtling through the night. I stood very still and waited. The train appeared, and the engineer must have seen me, because the locomotive gave a series of short, sharp blasts before rumbling into the station. It was the night train from Stavanger. The cars clattered past me dangerously close; the noise made me shut my eyes, and for a moment it was like being underwater.

  Afterward I walked back the same way.

  Everything was as before, but I no longer had Mama’s voice in my ears, just the sound of water splashing in the fountain. I knocked softly on the window at the entrance, and the night watchman came to let me in.

  Things had changed a little during the half hour I’d been away. Papa was awake. Mama had tried to prop him up with an extra pillow behind his back. She was holding a sponge to wet his lips, and it was clear that she had already moistened them several times. He tried to talk. Mama leaned down close to his face as I stood by the door. I saw him say a few words, I heard his voice, I heard what he said; I’m quite sure he said her name. And as I stood there I suddenly remembered the evening we came home from St. Jose’s hospital. Mama held Tone in her arms as Papa squatted by the open door of the stove and the flames made his face come alive. And I thought, as I often had, that the two of them were the black, dancing couple that had been cast in iron at Drammens Ironworks. It was Mama and Papa. I’d always known that. Tone had been branded on one buttock, but it was Mama and Papa who danced under the black sun.

  4.

  At the beginning of March 1946, Mama took the bus alone to Kristiansand. We walked down to the milk platform with her like the last time, but now it was only Josef, Papa, and I. Once again she had packed her suitcase, once again she would be away for a long time, and once again she left for St. Josef’s hospital, not far from the Aladdin cinema.

  She had the same suitcase as last time.

  The bus appeared, it slowed down, and Mama wrapped her coat around her large stomach as much as possible. She waved from the steps of the bus, Josef straightened up and saluted, Papa stood with his hands loosely at his sides. Mama hesitated. Then she came down the steps again, moving heavily; she walked over to Papa and touched his arm, his cheek, and finally went into the bus. The door closed behind her, and Mama was on her way forty kilometers toward the coast.

  The date was March 7. The sun was shining, our shadows stretched across the road. I had never seen her touch him that way. And I never saw it again.

  She went to the hospital on Kongensgata for the second time. It was the same redbrick building, the same ancient elm trees in the hospital garden, the same sounds from the city as she lay in bed alone. A quiet evening. Freezing temperatures. Elm trees without leaves.

  Once again she gave birth to a girl, but this time there were no blackout curtains.

  The sky was white. Snow began falling while she slept.

  They brought the baby to her in the morning, and she saw the blood pulsing on top of the little one’s head. The wind blew from the sea. She thought she heard the German soldiers singing as they passed under her window. The Sisters of Josef cared for her. When evening came, they gently picked up the child and took it to the nursery with the other newborns. She heard the soldiers singing far away, but then she remembered the war was over. During the night she was awakened by babies crying. She lay there listening. None of them were hers. She was sure. None of them were hers.

  When Mama came home with the little girl, Josef went to the piano in the living room, struck a key, and began to sing at the opposite end of the scale. I think it never occurred to him that Mama could sing too, not even after the concert at church. For him, she was just the missus, the little niece in whose home he happened to live. It was Josef who was the real singer as he stood with his faithful public before him and all the lights turned off, except for the lamp on the piano.

  They named the little girl Astrid.

  She was baptized in mid-April, but Mama didn’t write anything in the confirmation Bible. No hymns, no Bible verses. Nothing.

  Maybe she didn’t dare.

  Knud Tjomsland baptized Astrid, just as he had baptized Tone almost six years earlier. It was a quiet Sunday, heavy rain poured down onto the snow-covered churchyard, and the gravestones were visible now, dark and glistening. Astrid cried during the entire baptism. Tone had gazed up calmly while Tjomsland ran water over her head, but Astrid screamed. We sat there as before, in the front row. I glanced at Mama, while Josef sat beside me in the pew below the pulpit and covered his ears.

  5.

  For the first few weeks, Mama kept Astrid next to her bed, but this time Papa had made a proper crib with bars and a feather mattress and carvings of summer birds and field flowers on the headboard.

  I don’t know what happened to the orange crate.

  It was still cold early in the day, but by later in the morning the sun felt warm on my face. The siblings sang upstairs, Josef rode unsteadily to the Brandsvoll library. As soon as the snow disappeared Matiassen ventured out into the spring sunshine with his stool. He hesitated for a long time on the bottom front step before finally hobbling onto the ground. Then he took the ten or twelve steps over to the ash tree and he stood there for several minutes before placing his stool exactly where he thought it had been the last time he sat there, several months ago.
Little by little, spring arrived. White anemones bloomed in semicircles in the woods. Mama opened the kitchen windows, and she spread our rag rugs on the brown grass so they would smell of sun and wind when they lay on the floor in the evening. I sat on a windowsill with one leg outside and watched everything she did. On the outside wall of the house, flies moved slowly in the early spring sunshine; they were quiet and peaceful, and I tried to catch them in my hands. The next morning they lay frozen to death on the crusted snow. Astrid woke up and started crying, and Mama put down everything in her hands and ran to the crib to pick her up.

  One morning Mama stood in the sunshine hanging up laundry, which she did every day; but this day was special, because I recognized the clothes. I recognized the yellow sweater, the pink wool dress, and the brown stockings. She had washed everything, and now she shook one piece of clothing after another, sprinkling drops of water. Mama acted as if nothing was the matter, but I kept my eye on her from the windowsill, and when she had gone inside with the laundry tub under her arm, Ingrid and I ventured over to the clothesline. We smelled the sweet scents of earth and soap and clean, newly washed clothes. Water dripped from the arms of the dress. Ingrid stretched out her hand and touched it very lightly. Then we ran and hid.

  6.

  Only later did I learn why Mama had washed those particular clothes. Through acquaintances in the Bethlehem congregation in Oslo, Papa had met the Swedish painter Herbert Andersson. Mama had written a letter to Andersson explaining that they wanted to have a portrait painted of Tone, and all they had was the photograph of Tone and Ingrid and me, with the kittens in the girls’ arms. They had the photo graph, and they had her clothes. Mama ironed Tone’s dress in the kitchen, then folded the stockings and knitted sweater, and when I realized what she was doing, I didn’t dare look at her; I turned around in the doorway and didn’t go into the kitchen again until long after she had finished. She wrote asking Herbert Andersson to paint Tone in the enclosed clothing. And she added further details. She wanted Tone to stand alone. The background could be the same, it was fine to show a little of the forest and the sky, but she mustn’t look as serious as in the photograph. Not serious, just a gentle, natural expression. Finally, Mama asked Andersson to paint a red bow, a little to the right of the part in Tone’s hair. Unfortunately, she could not enclose the ribbon.