That was all.
As for the black kitten in Tone’s arms, Andersson could do whatever he wished with it.
Mama folded the clothes neatly and packed them up with the photo graph and the letter, and one morning Papa walked down the road behind his thin shadow. He stood by the milk platform and waited until the bus arrived. After checking one last time that the address was correct, he handed the package to the driver.
“This goes all the way to Oslo!” he shouted over the noise of the engine.
The photograph of Tone, Ingrid, Cain and Abel, and me was sent off with the clothes. It was sort of a sibling portrait. Tone and Ingrid were holding the kittens tightly. Andersson had received strict instructions. Everything was there, except for the hair ribbon.
The whole summer went by, autumn came, and I’d almost forgotten Herbert Andersson in Oslo. However, one day in October a large package came to the Vatneli postmaster, and Papa had to go alone to get it. It was dark when he returned, and he left the package on the kitchen table. Papa’s name was written on the gray wrapping paper in large, elaborate letters and, without anyone telling me, I knew it was Herbert Andersson’s handwriting.
The package was not opened that evening. Mama put it in the bedroom, and there it stayed for a long time. It was as though both she and Papa had to get used to the idea that the painting was finally finished, that at last it was in the house with us. They had to get used to the idea that they would see her again.
Like taking a deep breath.
And then.
One afternoon when I came home from school it was hanging on the wall. Just above the piano. Papa had hammered in a nail while I was gone, and it was as if the painting of Tone had always hung right there. I saw it the moment I entered the living room, and I saw that Tone stood there alone. Herbert Andersson had followed instructions and painted her in the clothes Mama had enclosed with the photograph. The ribbon was in her hair, and he had left out Ingrid and me, but he kept the kitten in her arms. Nils Apesland had lined us up, raised his arm, and shouted that we must not move, even though we were all standing motionless. Now Tone stood alone with the kitten in her arms, and even if I’d wanted to say something, no one said a word about the painting until many years later.
Only then did I learn that Mama had not been satisfied. She had seen the same thing I did. Something wasn’t right. A little girl stood there, and perhaps it was Tone, because she was wearing Tone’s clothes and was clutching the kitten, but there was something about her mouth and her eyes that wasn’t right. Something about her gaze. Mama had seen it. I had seen it, and perhaps Papa did too, but none of us had said it out loud. Papa had hammered a nail into the wall and the painting hung there without anyone saying anything. But everyone saw it.
The girl in the painting was Ingrid.
7.
I was nearing the end. It was the middle of November. Astrid had come from Oslo and we went through the house together. I told her what I’d thrown away and what I’d kept. She had left it to me to clear things out, and now only the large items remained. It was a bitterly cold, windless day. A yellow wreath of stiffly frozen leaves lay on the ground under the ash tree; the few leaves that still remained on the branches gradually loosened and fell straight down. The sun had risen above the hills to the south, the rooms were bright and bare, and when I carried out the last boxes the gravel crunched under my shoes. We were in Josef’s room when we heard the moving van drive into the yard.
“They’re here now,” I said.
The truck backed up all the way to the front steps, the ramp was lowered, and four men went with us into the living room.
Astrid and I had managed to push the piano out from the wall a little, perhaps as much as a meter, and now it was up to the movers to get it out of the house.
“It’s heavy as lead,” I said, as two men fastened straps on each side of the piano.
“No problem,” one of the men replied. “As long as you’ve got straps, you can lift anything.”
And it was true. They lifted simultaneously, and Mama’s Steinway concert piano swayed between them. The last time it swung like that was in the spring of the first year of the war, when it was carried from the horse cart into the house. I saw the four deep grooves in the floor where it had stood for fifty-four years. The two men walked calmly, taking small steps, across the living room and through the door, holding on to the doorjambs, and then the final few meters out onto the front steps. There they put the piano on a dolly with rubber wheels, and after that it was just a matter of rolling it into the waiting van.
We had decided that Astrid would have the piano and I would have Herbert Andersson’s painting, so the old concert piano set out on the four-hundred-kilometer journey back to Oslo, where at one time it stood in a basement apartment on Parkveien. The men secured it firmly in the truck, the hydraulic ramp went up, and soon they were ready to leave.
“It will probably have to be tuned when it arrives,” one of the movers said.
Then they drove away.
I took the dented tin plates and Matiassen’s lantern, Astrid took the picture of Jesus holding a lamb. I had already collected all of Mama’s clothes in large black garbage bags and delivered them to the meeting house, where they would be included in one of the annual trips to needy people in Russia. We divided the photo albums. Astrid got the three pictures of pregnant Mama in Oslo, since it was Astrid lying in Mama’s stomach after all, while I got the caregiving papers: the contract for the five siblings, the settlement papers from Rebekka and Hertinius Olsen’s estate, the letters I wrote to Josef and the siblings, and the final termination notice. We had divided everything of value, and at last all that remained was the bag of Tone’s clothes.
“What are we going to do with them?” Astrid asked.
I gave her a questioning look.
“What do you think?” I said.
“You should have them,” she replied. “You’re the only one who remembers her.”
At this time Astrid was forty-eight years old. She had some of Mama’s features, especially her eyes and mouth. I saw that she also resembled Tone. When she looked at me I sometimes thought that it was Tone standing there, that this was what Tone would have been like: a woman of about fifty who reminded me of Mama and was waiting to hear what I’d say.
“I’ll take them home with me,” I said.
8.
It took another ten years after Papa died before Mama told me the rest of her story.
It was after her first stroke.
She lay looking at me with large, frightened eyes in the hospital on Tordenskjoldsgata in Kristiansand.
I was the one who found her. She was leaning back on the living room sofa at home. Half of her face was paralyzed, one corner of her mouth slid downward while the other half of her face was filled with terror. She stared at me open-mouthed, and I don’t know how long she had sat like that, I don’t know if she had tried to shout.
“Mama?” I said.
The ambulance arrived after forty-five minutes.
Meanwhile, I helped her lie down and propped up her head and neck with pillows; I asked if she wanted a glass of water, but didn’t get a real reply. Her eyes were clear, however. She understood that she was unable to speak.
After several hours at the hospital the words gradually began to return, at first helter-skelter, as if everything was tossed around at random. Then the words seemed to find their way back to themselves, the sentences fell into place again, and in the course of a few days she spoke almost as before.
It was August 1994. They said it was a moderate stroke. No permanent paralysis. She had lost her speech, but it had come back.
A few days later she was transferred to the rest home in Nodeland, where Papa had been ten years earlier, but unlike him, she did not get worse, she continued to get better, and soon had improved enough to be able to go home.
I came to pick her up early one afternoon in the middle of August. For the first time, I noticed how
thin she had become. Her light summer dress fluttered around her ankles when she stood up. She held on to the back of her chair, and the grass at her feet trembled.
“Have you come to get me?” she asked.
The fountain murmured softly. Several cars went by and continued north on the highway. I stood in front of her to block the sun.
“Yes, we’re going home now,” I replied.
She had difficulty with her balance, she who had always been so spry, running up and down the stairs at home with cups and containers and washtubs. Now she held my arm tightly. In my other hand I carried her suitcase, which was white and quite new. We walked like this over to the shade where my car was parked.
We drove the twenty kilometers home, and arrived sometime in the late afternoon. Our house stood just as it had since the war. Not much was changed after fifty years. The grass had grown freely this summer, and the branches of the ash tree stretched almost to what once had been Josef’s window.
I helped her unfasten her seat belt, then we walked arm in arm across the yard. I found the key in her purse and let us into the house, where warm afternoon sunlight filled the front hall. After settling Mama on the sofa in the living room, I opened the windows wide to create a draft. The curtains blew inward, sheet music fluttered to the floor. I knew she had begun to play a little for herself after she was alone. I knew this, but never mentioned it.
I put on the coffeepot in the kitchen, turned on the radio on top of the refrigerator, and slowly the house came alive. The front hall, the living room, the kitchen—everything was the same: the low, blue-painted steps leading upstairs, the Steinway piano in the living room, the painting of Tone with the kitten in her arms. Time had stood still, but something had happened; Mama had suffered a stroke, I had picked her up at the rest home, and I didn’t know how long I was going to stay.
It was a warm, pleasant afternoon, the sun still hung high above the pine-covered hills in the west, and after our meal I helped Mama out into the shade of the ash tree. Then I brought a chair from the kitchen and sat down with her.
There was a strange, cool stillness under the tree. It struck me that I’d never sat there before, exactly where Matiassen’s stool always stood, even if perhaps I’d wanted to. We stayed maybe as long as an hour. I could see the roof and a little of the upstairs windows down at Anna’s house, but I didn’t know if she was home, or if anyone had told her what had happened to Mama. We sat there as if in the midst of a summer that was long past. I gazed across the fields, at the woods, the sky. For the first time I saw everything Matiassen must also have seen.
Sky. Clouds. Wind. Nothing.
It was then that she told me the rest.
She remembered the bronze lion, she remembered the Freia clock, she remembered the Parliament building and the Royal Palace, she remembered Foreign Ministry receptions held right above her head. She remembered the laughter and singing and piano playing and clinking of glasses into the wee hours of the night. She had decided to get rid of the old suitcase, yet it remained in her room in the custodian apartment. She had decided to cut her hair short, but instead she lay in bed for several days. Grandpa took care of her as best he could, but she felt terrible.
She was four months pregnant.
She wrote a letter to Papa saying that perhaps she couldn’t bear to come back. But as soon as she mailed the letter, she wrote another one saying that she wasn’t sure.
How can I sleep in the bed where Tone died?
That was the question.
Papa wrote in return, but I don’t know how he responded. Their letters had gone back and forth during the fall, and when once again she stood in the Vestbanen station waiting for the train to Stavanger, she was wearing a new dress that fit her stomach better, her hair had grown longer, and next to her was the suitcase that had been with her for two births and when they moved to southern Norway.
That was the story.
She kept the old suitcase, she did not cut her hair. She did not start over again, but Grandpa gave her a new dress that wasn’t so tight at the waist. She sat in the train on her way back. Through the window she saw the broad fields when the train neared Drammen, she saw the same distant mountain ridges she had seen from Dikemark. Sunlight glittered on the sea around the cargo boats, and in Kongsberg the bridge over the Lågen River had been rebuilt and the train glided slowly across it to the other side.
I didn’t ask what Papa had written; maybe I thought I’d ask later, but at that moment I let it be. Instead, I asked about Cain and Abel.
“What happened to the two kittens?” I asked.
Mama looked at me.
“Don’t you know?” she said.
“No.”
“He killed them. Papa killed them.”
We sat in our chairs gazing at the landscape until the sun sank so low that the insects began to flare up overhead, and finally Mama grew so tired I had to help her into the house.
That was when I carried her.
She put her arm around my shoulders, I picked her up, and we walked through the grass toward the front steps and the open door like a newly married couple. It was the first and only time I carried her. She was much lighter than I had imagined. For some reason I’d thought she would be heavy. I’d thought I wouldn’t be able to carry her. But the moment she put her arm around my neck I knew it would be just fine. I sensed at once how light she was; I sensed the bones in her thighs, the ribs under her blouse, the fragrance of her hair; I sensed how little was left of her. I walked through the grass with Mama in my arms, and I was the bridegroom carrying his bride into the house. Fourteen days later she had a second, massive stroke. Fourteen days later she was dead. I thought she would be heavy, as if I were still a child, as if part of me was still a child. Or perhaps I’d been given unexpected strength. Because at the time it felt as if I could carry her anywhere, no matter where it might be; I could have continued down the road, past the hawthorn hedge and Anna’s house, to the roadside milk platform, across the valley and the bridge over the Djupåna River, past the meetinghouse and the vacant store with its balcony above the road. I could have just kept walking, and it would have been as if I carried nothing in my arms.
PART FIVE
1.
For some reason my letters to Josef and the siblings lay with the caregiving papers. Mama must have saved them and put them aside. I thought I’d written many letters home, but there were only six in the writing desk. I recognized my handwriting, I saw the dates and postmarks, I remembered the view from the different rooms where I’d written the letters, but I did not remember anything of what I wrote.
I had the feeling that the letters were written to me.
In the fall of 1952 I wrote to Ingrid, Erling, and Josef for the first time. The letter was postmarked Kvås. I remember that I sat alone in my dormitory room, the window looked out on green spaces, the Lygna River sparkled, and I remember feeling far away from home.
The next letter was postmarked Heistadmoen military base. I wrote about life in the camp, about being issued a uniform and a beret, and I promised to come home for a visit as soon as I got my first leave.
Which I did.
I stood in the front hall at home in my new off-duty uniform. Josef had put on his uniform jacket for the occasion; he wore the medal for courage on his chest and had the Border Resident card in his pocket. I let him borrow my beret, and Ingrid was allowed to gently touch the buttons on my uniform. As we stood there, Mama came out from the kitchen. My hair had been cut very short and I was quite unrecognizable I’m sure. She dried her hands on her apron.
“Is it you?” she asked.
There was one more letter from my years in the military, this time from Porsanger garrison in Finnmark:
Dear everyone at home,
I’m in Porsanger now, about as far north as it is possible to go in Norway. It’s light the whole night here, and there are lots of mosquitoes. I’ll be here a couple of months, before I’m sent south again. Hope you are all fine
there at home. I under stand you have good weather this summer in southern Norway too. I’ve been to the Russian border. I stood high up in a watchtower and looked into Russia, but seen from the air Russia is not very different from Norway. That’s all for now. I’ll write again when I’m coming home. Greet Mama and Papa. Take care!
PS: Now it’s not only Josef who has seen the midnight sun!
I left the parish in southern Norway, just like Papa, and completed basic training and military academy for noncommissioned officers. But then, instead of going to Oslo and Diakonhjemmet like Papa did, I went back to southern Norway, to Kristiansand and the teachers college close to Oddernes church. Every day I sat in the old classrooms with a view across the European Highway toward the whitewashed stone church and surrounding cemetery. I rented a studio apartment near Gimlemoen military base, and in the evenings I could see the lights of the old Eg asylum reflected in the river. I saw the pointed church steeple jutting up from the grounds of the asylum, the same steeple that both Christian Jensen and Matiassen must have seen at one time.
Now and then I heard the faint clang of the church bell. The sound just barely carried across the water.
I was going to be a teacher, like Nils Apesland, but I did not have any grass snakes in my pockets, I did not skid down Gaustatoppen Mountain on the soles of my shoes, and when my final exam was over I did not go home on foot.
Instead I wrote another letter to Ingrid, Erling, Nils, Sverre, Lilly, and Josef. I sat by an open window in my little apartment, where I’d just given notice. It was early summer, in the garden the apple trees were blooming; I saw seagulls circling a small fishing boat headed up the river; I heard occasional traffic over the Lundsbrua Bridge. I smelled the sea.
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