by Sjón
Boy: 19 July 1962 –✝8 August 1963
Boy: 11 December 1962 –✝3 October 1963
Boy: 5 February 1962 –✝26 October 1963
Girl: 29 May 1962 –✝26 October 1963
Boy: 6 May 1962 –✝14 November 1963
Behind the prams and cots, the highchairs and mat, three boys and a girl enter and come toddling into the pools of light. One of the boys is dripping seawater, another is muddy, the third is as ashen-faced as the girl he is leading by the hand.
Boy: 14 January 1962 –✝16 July 1964
Boy: 10 February 1962 –✝4 September 1964
Boy: 30 July 1962 –✝30 September 1964
Girl: 1 July 1962 –✝18 October 1964
They are joined by five more children. One boy comes cycling in on a red tricycle, another is straddling a home-made car, propelling himself along with his feet; one girl is pushing a frilly doll’s pushchair, another is clutching scissors and a pair of hot curling tongs; the fifth child is pulling along a sailing boat, made from an STP oil can. They are pale and bruised, crushed and broken.
Boy: 10 May 1962 –✝5 January 1965
Girl: 6 August 1962 –✝18 February 1965
Girl: 4 October 1962 –✝9 October 1965
Boy: 24 June 1962 –✝14 November 1965
Boy: 9 February 1962 –✝23 December 1965
Footsteps herald the arrival of two more girls and one boy. They trot on stage and take up position on the platform with the younger children – blood crusted in their hair and salt in their mouths.
Girl: 9 August 1962 –✝13 January 1966
Boy: 29 October 1962 –✝10 July 1966
Girl: 10 November 1962 –✝20 December 1966
The chorus deepens, the newly arrived voices increasing the range, supplementing the sighs and whimpers with babbling and primitive words: ‘daddee’ and ‘nana’, ‘mama’ and ‘oh-oh’ – and the beginnings of intelligible sentences: ‘’top it’ and ‘Me no go bye-byes’ and ‘Teddy cuggle’.
The first obituary written for a child born in this year includes the following description:
She was a bright little soul, full of beans and as busy as a bee. Wonderfully imaginative too and unusually interested in all she heard or saw. People couldn’t get over how grown up she sounded in some of the things she said.
This little darling, who died in her fourth year, now leads the chorus in the second movement:
— We fell out of our mothers’, fathers’ or siblings’ arms; we rolled off tables, out of beds, down the stairs; we walked off cliffs, in front of milk lorries and vans; we swallowed a coin, a prune stone, a glass bead, the button of a smoking jacket, which got trapped in our windpipes; we ate scouring powder, we drank caustic soda, we poured boiling water and coffee over ourselves; we ran with scissors or with a teaspoon in our mouths; we got meningitis, whooping cough and pneumonia; we suffocated in cots, beds and prams; we got shut in doors; we were washed out to sea.
Dear brothers and sisters, born in 1962, we await you here.
9
Jósef Loewe puts his head on one side, slumping deeper into the sofa and pressing back into the thick cushion that supports his neck, as if he can’t talk about himself without a certain distance between himself and his audience, Aleta, the young woman with the questionnaire and the tape recorder; as if the gap between them grants him the narrative detachment he needs for his story to be believable; as if only by seeing the woman from a distance, from head to toe, can he respond to her reactions to his account of the main events in his own and his parents’ lives – instantly adapting the plot and focus to prevent her attention from wandering or himself from losing faith in what he has to say. Or perhaps Jósef has unwittingly resorted to one of the oldest tricks of the trade, whereby storytellers are not content merely to have power over their audience’s minds but must also take control of their bodies at the very beginning of their tale by lowering their voices and leaning back, thus compelling their listeners to lean forwards – after all, they’ve come to hear what the storyteller has to say. By means of this synchronised shift they establish who is the guide and who the travellers on the coming journey, for at the outset they all cherish the same hope:
That their roles will remain unchanged to the end of the story, that the speaker will hold the listeners’ attention, that no one and nothing will be lost along the way, least of all the story itself, which can at times seem loose underfoot, precipitous, slippery, boggy and overgrown, or cleft by sudden bottomless chasms into which everything falls: plants and animals, men and monsters, gods and death itself, together with all the ballads and fairytales that come into being at the meeting of these types, in town and country, in the sky and at the bottom of the sea, by night and by day, in the spirit and in the flesh – though, if all else fails, the guide has up his sleeve a thread that will help him navigate his way out of the fieriest pit, causing a path to open through mountains and wilderness.
Yes, it is the storyteller’s tiny initial withdrawal that lures the audience over the invisible border into the storyworld – thereby confirming that all true literature speaks to the body as well as the mind – and, sure enough, Aleta now leans towards Jósef by exactly the inch or two that he has leaned back into the cushion.
* * *
‘I was the silent child. I was the child who stood by while the other children played. The child who waited quietly while the others fought over who was to be first in line for the seesaw, first at the back of the bus on the school trip, first at the table for the chocolate cake. I was the child who didn’t speak unless spoken to, by adults or other children, either to the teacher at the nursery when my legs were soaked up to mid-thigh, or to the boy sitting next to me at the cinema when he emptied a full bottle of Coke into my lap, to the postman when a letter fell out of his sack on the pavement, or to the child who stood under the eaves when a pile of snow was about to fall off the roof. I was the child who replied to every question with a nod or a shake of the head, or a mumbled “I don’t know” when answering was unavoidable. I was the quiet child who pottered about alone in the far corner of the playground, who sat at the back desk by the wall in the row nearest the classroom door. I was the child who never volunteered for the role of the prince in the Sleeping Beauty musical, who never shot his hand up when the blackboard was to be decorated for Christmas. I was the child who neither laughed aloud nor cried in the presence of strangers. I was the dull child, ignored by adults when they spoke to his father in the street, never talked about behind his back by the other children. I was the child whose name no one can remember when they’re looking at old class photos.
A person is a composite of the times they live through – a combination of the events they have witnessed or taken part in, whether willingly or not; a collection of dreams and thoughts, whether their own or strangers’; a concoction of deeds done by themselves and others, whether friends or enemies; a compilation of stories remembered or forgotten, from distant parts or the next room – and every time an event or idea touches them, affects their existence, rocks their little world and the wider one too, a stone is added to the structure that they are destined to become. Whether this is to be a town square or a path beside a pond, a bridge or a beer factory, a Portakabin or a watchtower, a palace or a university, a prison camp or an airport, not until after they are dead and buried will their true dimensions – their role in society – be revealed; they will only be complete when there is nothing left of them but ruins; a fading gleam in people’s memories; the occasional photograph in the albums of family or friends; the odd tangible creation; belongings now dispersed; everyday clothes and one smarter outfit; name and social security number scattered through the public records; death notice and obituary yellowing in a newspaper, none of which can ever be reconstructed…’
He’s expansive now; no evidence here of the silent boy or the weary invalid.
‘That’s depressing talk.’
‘Though I spared you the conclusion:… any more than th
eir physical remains, disintegrating in the grave.’
‘Thanks for that.’
‘This is the preamble my father used to trot out by way of a refusal whenever I asked him to tell me his story. He would claim he was nothing but the sum of everything he’d experienced during his lifetime. And who would be interested in that? People have trouble enough coping with their own lives. Only after he was gone would I see what his purpose had been.’
Jósef smiles wryly.
‘Luckily he left behind a load of cardboard boxes full of papers that I’ve been able to draw on. After he died, I was lumbered with the task of reconstructing his story…’
Aleta ignores the note of self-pity.
He goes on:
‘If you want to succeed, you have to read the Man in the context of the World.’
Jósef picks up a folder from the coffee table and, opening it, starts leafing backwards and forwards through the plastic sleeves until he finds what he’s looking for. He pulls out two yellowing newspaper cuttings, closes the folder and places it flat on his knees, laying the cuttings on top.
‘For example, what do you suppose these two news items have in common?’
Aleta joins him on the sofa. The cuttings come from the inside pages. She skims the headlines:
Sheep-worrier at Large in Borgarfjördur
Body Discovered on Ring Road
The first is labelled in red biro HWK 29/08 ’62, and the second HWK 07/09 ’62.
He waits, as if expecting Aleta to answer his rhetorical question.
She waits for him to go on.
‘Well, they record the demise of Hrafn the stamp collector, the first reporting how he went around biting the throats of sheep while in his werewolf state; the second how his body was found lying naked by the side of the road near the Agricultural College at Hvanneyri. My theory is that he was on his way to seek help from the local vet when his frenzy began to wear off.
And that’s not all…’
Jósef reaches for a small photo frame that stands on a crocheted mat on the sideboard by the sofa and hands it to Aleta. He gives her a sign to wait while he locates a handwritten sheet in the bundle of papers on the table. Then, taking the glasses that hang from a chain around his neck, he props them on his nose and begins to read.
PORTRAIT OF MY MOTHER
Throughout my childhood and teens the first thing that met my eyes when I awoke was a photograph of my mother.
This black and white portrait, the size of a playing card, used to be propped against the base of the lamp on the table between our beds, in a bronze-coloured copper frame, designed to look more expensive than it was – with two dark grooves along the sides and decorative swirls at the corners that tickled my fingertips when I stroked them.
In the photo under the shiny, convex glass, my mother has her right profile to the camera and is looking slightly down and to one side, so both her eyes can be seen, the soft daylight picking out her features. Her expression is serious, yet gentle. She is pensive. Her dark hair is combed into a fringe that falls over her forehead from under a black cloche hat that covers her head to the nape of her neck. She’s wearing a white jacket with the collar turned up against her long throat, a deep seam running from the neckline down her slim shoulder to the edge of the picture.
The background is divided into two slanting halves:
The upper half shows a light-coloured wall with a horizontal flaw at the top. For a long time I thought it was a crack in the plaster, though later I decided it must be a decorative moulding, but at the very beginning – before my vision was sufficiently developed to interpret perspective – I was under the impression that my mother was balancing a plank of wood on her head, since the line ran straight across the picture, touching the top of her hat.
The lower half is black – apart from three white spots floating at breast height on the dark plane in front of my mother, forming the three corners of an equilateral triangle. They are fuzzy, like stars in a night sky seen through the worn lenses of an old pair of hunting binoculars, or city lights receding in the rear-view mirror of a fast-moving car. This is the most mysterious element of the picture, yet it also serves to accentuate the beauty of the woman, the purity of form repeating itself in variations; the dark triangle between the points of light confirming the classical proportions of her face.
At times I would trace the light in the picture, following it from the glimmer on her dark fringe, down the smooth forehead to the tip of her nose, and from there to her cheek, upper lip, the corner of her mouth, her shining lower lip, then down to her white throat, and up again under her eyes. There was so much warmth in those bright planes that I had no need to imagine the feel of her cheek against mine, my face grew hot simply from looking at them. And the flush in my cheeks was accompanied by a silent yell of joy that went racing through my mind and body, causing a sudden tingling in the roof of my mouth. I felt my mother’s gravity must be put on, as though any minute she would burst out laughing at the photographer’s ridiculous instruction not to smile while he was taking her picture. She, Marie-Sophie, who was always so cheerful; the chambermaid who only ever saw the good, the beautiful in everything, even in the darkest times.
Not to smile – how on earth was she to manage that? He might as well forbid a lily to bloom.
At other times I would allow my gaze to be guided by the dark planes, starting at the nape of her neck where the shadow was blackest and moving up to where an unruly lock of hair led me to a partly shadowed ear, then over that and on to her temple, her cheek, down her cheekbone to her nose, out along one nostril and from there up the bone of her nose into the corner of her eye.
Then I would be gripped by the feeling that my mother was genuinely sad, that in the instant the camera shutter opened and closed she had been struck by the thought that this picture would be the sole confirmation of her existence, that she had ever been born and known what it was to feel. And I would touch the frame, stroking it and thinking:
But you didn’t know then that you’d meet my father the invalid; that you’d nurse him back to life; that together you were destined to create me.
Fortunately, it was much rarer for my eyes to stray down that melancholy path of shadows. When they did, I would find my way back to the long lashes, under which a distant light glittered on the black pools of the eyes. At this, my mood would brighten.
The last thing I did in the evenings, before laying my head on the pillow and pulling the eiderdown up over the tops of my ears, was to place the frame so that the picture would be directly in my eye-line when I awoke.
As soon as I was able, I would rise on my elbow, still groggy with sleep, and switch on the lamp. Then I would sit gazing at her, leaning my head against the cool wall, until my father came back into our bedroom having got breakfast ready, and helped me into my clothes or, once I was old enough, chivvied me to get up and dressed myself.
There were times when the picture shifted and was no longer aligned exactly with the crack in the varnish on the bedside table, and once – or twice perhaps – it was facing away from me when I awoke, as if she had decided to turn round during the night to see how my father was doing.
Then I would find myself looking at the back: the brown speckled card that supported the picture in the frame, held in place by four copper clips, and the extendable foot attached with a shiny ribbon, while in the bottom right-hand corner there was a small, oval sticker with the silhouette of a swan and the name of the manufacturer:
Andersens Ramfabrik – Odense.’
Jósef sighs and lowers the sheet of paper to his lap, where it slips from his hand.
He has nodded off again.
The Dance
Black-clad stagehands go about their work, pretending they’re invisible, but in the darkness the eye can make out four shadows walking on to the stage carrying a long platform which they place behind the one that’s already present. There’s a clicking of fluorescent bulbs, the various chandeliers flicker into
life.
Girl: 12 January 1962 –✝13 January 1962, Girl: 13 January 1962 –✝13 January 1962, Girl: 21 January 1962 –✝21 January 1962, Boy: 24 February 1962 –✝27 February 1962, Boy: 1 March 1962 –✝14 April 1962, Girl: 13 May 1962 –✝14 May 1962, Girl: 13 May 1962 –✝17 May 1962, Girl: 5 May 1962 –✝21 May 1962, Boy: 7 May 1962 –✝25 May 1962, Girl: 19 May 1962 –✝26 May 1962, Girl: 27 May 1962 –✝27 May 1962, Girl: 28 May 1962 –✝29 May 1962, Boy: 22 June 1962 –✝23 June 1962, Boy: 27 June 1962 –✝30 June 1962, Boy: 10 February 1962 –✝11 July 1962, Girl: 30 April 1962 –✝11 July 1962, Boy: 10 February 1962 –✝16 July 1962, Boy: 16 July 1962 –✝16 July 1962, Boy: 9 July 1962 –✝18 July 1962, Girl: 19 July 1962 –✝19 July 1962, Boy: 31 July 1962 –✝31 July 1962, Girl: 1 August 1962 –✝1 August 1962, Boy: 29 March 1962 –✝3 August 1962, Boy: 9 July 1962 –✝4 August 1962, Girl: 13 February 1962 –✝7 August 1962, Boy: 1 July 1962 –✝18 August 1962, Boy: 17 August 1962 –✝20 August 1962, Girl: 3 September 1962 –✝3 September 1962, Boy: 1 October 1962 –✝6 October 1962, Boy: 18 November 1962 –✝18 November 1962, Boy: 27 November 1962 –✝27 November 1962, Boy: 18 December 1962 –✝18 December 1962, Girl: 16 December 1962 –✝23 December 1962, Boy: 19 November –✝? 1963, Girl: 27 July 1962 –✝9 February 1963, Girl: 8 August 1962 –✝14 February 1963, Girl: 30 March 1962 –✝16 February 1963, Girl: 21 October 1962 –✝3 March 1963, Boy: 1 August 1962 –✝1 April 1963, Boy: 7 June 1962 –✝4 April 1963, Girl: 27 February 1962 –✝10 April 1963, Boy: 9 February 1962 –✝15 April 1963, Boy: 11 November 1962 –✝1 May 1963, Girl: 3 December 1962 –✝14 May 1963, Girl: 30 June 1962 –✝16 May 1963, Boy: 19 July 1962 –✝8 August 1963, Boy: 11 December 1962 –✝3 October 1963, Boy: 5 February 1962 –✝26 October 1963, Girl: 29 May 1962 –✝26 October 1963, Boy: 6 May 1962 –✝14 November 1963, Boy: 14 January 1962 –✝16 July 1964, Boy: 10 February 1962 –✝4 September 1964, Boy: 30 July 1962 –✝30 September 1964, Girl: 1 July 1962 –✝18 October 1964, Boy: 10 May 1962 –✝5 January 1965, Girl: 6 August 1962 –✝18 February 1965, Girl: 4 October 1962 –✝9 October 1965, Boy: 24 June 1962 –✝14 November 1965, Boy: 9 February 1962 –✝23 December 1965, Girl: 9 August 1962 –✝13 January 1966, Boy: 29 October 1962 –✝10 July 1966, Girl: 10 November 1962 –✝20 December 1966 …
