You

by Zoran Drvenkar

  Paris was a dream, Madrid too, and if you were brave enough you wanted to take a detour to Norway, not just to see the house where you were born, but also to visit your mother’s grave. The very thought made your palms moist. Even though in all those years not a single relative from Norway had stayed in contact with you or your father, you’ve got this vague fantasy–arriving in Ulvtannen and seeing the beach hotel, everyone recognizing you right away and you becoming one of them. Everything seems possible, if you make it possible.

  You’re free. You have no steady boyfriend, and no interesting internship. Your father was of the opinion that everyone should conquer the world at sixteen, so you had a green light from him. Your curiosity about the world is the only thing you have in common with Uncle Ragnar. When he heard about your plans, he gave you an envelope with five hundred euros in it. It looked as if nothing could stop you. And then the phones rang.

  You’re no fan of ringtones, especially not since people have been downloading them onto their cell phones. Everyone wants his own tune, everyone wants to be special and different, and that very fact makes them all the same. The hunger for originality. Your father was no exception, only he used his own jingles as ringtones. And you particularly loathed this one. It was a jingle for children’s toothpaste.

  You were sitting on the sofa and traveling across Europe with your finger, you’d just settled in Portugal when the tune rang out.

  Your father had four landline phones, scattered around the whole house and all diverted to a single number. He didn’t want to be one of those idiots who always have a phone hanging from their belt. So he became one of those idiots who have their phones ringing all over the place and really get on your nerves as a result.

  One of them summoned you from the kitchen. After you’d listened to the jingle five times and your father’s mailbox still hadn’t leapt into action, you stirred yourself and got up.

  The ringing stopped.

  You marched into the kitchen anyway. The procedure was always the same. You took out the batteries and set them down beside the phone. Your father never complained. You were about to open the flap when the phone rang again. You cursed, the batteries jammed, the phone tinkled, then the jingle fell silent and a woman’s voice said:

  “Vi bør snakke.”

  Surprised, you turned the phone over. You must have pressed the answer button after your father took the call. You just stared at the display for several seconds before putting the phone to your ear.

  “… med mig tysk,” said your father.

  “As you wish,” the woman said, in German now, “but don’t forget, she was your grandmother.”

  “I know who she was, but it has nothing to do with us now.”

  “Not with us,” said the woman. “It has nothing to do with you now.”

  Your father said nothing, you thought you could hear the grinding of his teeth, perhaps it was just a bad connection.

  “It’s her legacy,” the woman continued, “at least you could allow her that.”

  Your father exploded.

  “Allow her? As if I didn’t allow her anything! You know what you can do? You can stick your legacy up your ass! Where did you get this number?”

  Now the woman fell silent. The silence started spreading, then your father said in a menacingly quiet voice, “I’ve warned you. And I’m warning you a second time: never call this number again!”

  “I understand.”

  “What do you mean ‘I understand’? Are you even listening? Do you get what it really means when I tell you never to call here again?”

  “I’m sorry. You know—”

  “Go fuck yourself!” your father interrupted. “Go fuck yourself with your stupid explanations. We don’t need your shit!”

  With those words he hung up and you were left alone with the woman’s breathing. At that moment an idea lit up in your head, like a match being struck in the dark. The bad connection, the woman’s voice, your father’s irritation.

  They were speaking Norwegian.

  It was like a bad melodrama—relatives looking for you to bring you back into the fold of the family. You were about to say something when the woman hung up as well. Too late. You were so stunned that you couldn’t take the phone away from your ear. Your thoughts raced. You listened to the hiss on the line and looked out of the window at the driveway. You only reacted when your father appeared in the kitchen doorway and asked why you weren’t using your own cell phone.

  “Hi there, are you still on this planet?”

  You were still there and you proved it to him by throwing the phone at him. It bounced off his shoulder and landed on the floor. The two batteries fell out and rolled at your feet.

  “What’s up with you?” your father asked and laughed.

  He was drunk, and when he was drunk he didn’t take anything seriously. He had this stupid grin that was supposed to excuse him for everything.

  “Who was that?” you asked.

  “What are you talking about?” he asked back and reached past you to open the fridge. You shut the fridge again.

  “Who was the woman on the phone?”

  He flinched slightly, then pushed you firmly aside, took a bottle of water, and closed the fridge again.

  “I have no idea who you’re talking about.”

  He drank straight out of the bottle and looked at you from the corner of his eye.

  “I heard everything,” you admitted.

  “Naughty girl,” he said.

  “Who was that?”

  “One of your aunts.”

  “Which aunt?”

  “Aunt …”

  He waved his hand around in the air. He was so bad at lying that it was shameful.

  “Christ, what’s her name?”

  “Are you messing with me?”

  “How could I?”

  He put the cap on the bottle and shrugged.

  “I can’t remember her name.”

  “You’ve just spoken to her on the phone and you can’t remember her name?!”

  “Seems that way.”

  “What were you arguing about?”

  “You know what Norwegians are like.”

  “I know … What? How should I know what Norwegians are like, I’ve never even met one!”

  “Point to you,” he said and laughed again.

  That was when you took the bottle away from him.

  “Hey, I’m still thirsty!”

  “Talk to me now.”

  “I am talking to you.”

  “Who was that on the phone?”

  He looked at you as if he was about to give you an answer, then he shifted into one of those perfect displacement activities that you knew so well. He mumbled that he wanted to watch some TV. So he marched out of the kitchen and sat down in front of the television. You knew the alcohol wasn’t his only drug. He’d once told you that no muse in the world was as good as a clean high. Whatever a clean high was, your father needed to top it up with vodka, cocaine, and a whole lot of weed.

  You picked the batteries off the floor and put them back in the phone. You tried to calm down, then you followed him into the living room, where he was sitting on the sofa, clicking through the channels. As soon as he found an advertisement, he leaned back contentedly and waited for a commercial with one of his jingles to come on.

  “I’m going to bug you all day,” you threatened.

  “Have fun.”

  You went and stood in front of the television. Your father furiously raised his arms and whined, “Come on, that’s not fair!”

  “How old are you?”

  He pointed the remote control at you as if to switch you to a different channel.

  “Oskar, who was that on the phone?”

  “Christ, stop it, you know how much I hate it when you call me Oskar.”

  “Give me an answer.”

  He scratched the back of his neck with the remote.

  “It’s complicated. We’ll talk about it tomorrow, okay? Or what abou
t the day after? Or how about I write it down for you?”

  You didn’t move from the spot. You counted to twenty in your head, then you said, “What have I inherited?”

  “Christ, you really were listening!”

  “Of course I was listening, I told you I was listening. Are you actually listening to me?”

  “I’m listening to you. I hear everything. It’s the hotel, okay? You’ve inherited it. Happy now?”

  “The beach hotel?!”

  “Don’t go nuts on me. It’s old and it needs renovating. But if you save up and borrow some money off your good old dad, you might get it back on its feet.”

  “What?”

  You felt dizzy. You sank into one of the armchairs. Your heart raced. The only beach hotel in the world without a beach. Mine. You saw the photographs in your head. The gravel in the driveway. The massive Nordmann fir casting its shadow across the façade. Your mother standing in front of it and waving at the camera. A curtain flapping out of one of the windows. The fjord and the mountains in the background.

  The beach hotel on the cliff? Mine?

  Your mouth was suddenly dry as dust. Norway was calling to you.

  “I know it’s hard for you right now,” your father went on, “but why do you think I didn’t want to tell you?”

  He turned off the television and set down the remote control. Then he calmly started to roll a joint. Just as he scattered his phones around the place, in every room there were little wooden boxes of cigarette papers and grass. You were familiar with the ritual, your father didn’t speak again until the joint was glowing between his lips.

  “Maybe we should talk,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  “Maybe it’s time. You’re a big girl, you can cope.”

  “Christ, what’s coming now?”

  He offered you the joint, you shook your head, he took a second drag and as he exhaled he said, “We should be honest.”

  “I hate it when you say things like that.”

  He looked at you doubtfully.

  “Perhaps you’re not quite ready yet.”

  “Oskar, I’m ready.”

  “Good, good to hear it.”

  You leaned forward, elbows on your knees, your legs were trembling.

  “What’s happened?”

  “You know the accident and your mother …”

  Your father took a third drag.

  “… it wasn’t quite like that, that was kind of a lie.”

  “What?”

  He touched his forehead.

  “I got that scar swimming. An idiot from the other class deliberately threw me off the three-meter board. His name was Roland or something. Afterward he—”

  “WHAT DID YOU SAY?”

  You didn’t mean to scream at him, but your voice came out uncontrolled. Your father fell silent and looked out at the terrace, as if there were someone there who could save him from his situation. Of course there was no one there. When he spoke again, his voice was filled with grief.

  “She had a new guy at the time, do you understand that? She wanted to split up and keep you. So I took you and cleared out. You can’t really call it desertion. It wasn’t kidnapping either, because you were my little one. Your mother thought she could bring charges against me, but she hadn’t reckoned with Ragnar’s lawyers. And we’re still married, so you have to sort out custody and everything.” Your voice was just a breath.

  “Mom’s alive?”

  “That’s what I’m saying.”

  “Mom’s alive?”

  “Is there an echo in here?”

  Now you knew what it was like to be paralyzed. Arms, legs, head. Only your thoughts were moving, repeating those two words: Mom’s alive. And sometimes it sounded like a question and sometimes like an answer. Then you exploded.

  “HOW THE HELL COULD YOU LIE TO ME?”

  “It was self-defense.”

  “SELF-DEFENSE?”

  “Taja, she had a new guy, she didn’t want me anymore, what choice did I have? Leave you with her and watch her being happy with her new guy? We lived out in the country, it would never have worked. Was I supposed to stand by and watch you calling him Dad and avoiding me in the street? It was out of the question.”

  “But … you could have …”

  “Of course I should have told you everything before, then you’d probably have emigrated at six years old to go and find your mother. Forget it. Now you’ve finished school and you can do what you like. You’re grown up, you can deal with it all by yourself. I’ve done my best.”

  “You’ve done what?”

  He looked at the joint and stubbed it out. He didn’t think about repeating himself. You saw him picking up the remote control and turning the television back on as if your conversation was over. Then you got up, bent over the coffee table, and, with suppressed rage, asked your father one last time who that had been on the phone. You needed to hear it.

  He didn’t take his eyes off you.

  “It was your mother, she lives in Ulvtannen and she wanted—”

  “YOU MISERABLE PIECE OF SHIT!”

  “Hey, listen, it was done with the best of—”

  “I HATE YOU, I WISH YOU WERE DEAD!”

  He stopped, he saw the tears in your eyes, he saw your fury, and through his haze and his ignorance he must have understood that you were entirely serious. You wanted to pick up the wooden box and smack him with it. You’ve never been violent, you’d had one fight with a girl from the other class because she’d kicked out at Ruth. Violence isn’t a solution, everyone knows that. But on this particular day you understood for the first time what leads to violence.

  Disappointment, helplessness, weakness.

  Your father saw all those things in your eyes, and a change occurred. In his face, in his eyes. He was shocked. He sank back down on the sofa and sighed. Once. You heard a cracking sound. His right hand was twitching, his left hand was a claw that held the remote control so firmly that the plastic broke.

  “Dad?”

  He only looked at you. He didn’t blink. It was a little as if he’d seen something in you that he’d never seen before. Darkness. His mouth opened and shut again. He sat there motionlessly and his gaze was his gaze for several seconds, until something disappeared.

  That day you had no idea what it was that disappeared, and while you tell your girls about it you hear yourself whispering that it might have been his soul—for a moment fear flashed in your father’s eyes, a moment later his gaze was blank and lost and still directed at you.

  And so it happened that you killed your father.

  Of course you’ve thought about death, but you didn’t really expect that it would catch you like that. Your ideal would have been to drift away unnoticed at a great age. A hot bath and the right music in the background, a bottle of red wine, and you would have gone to sleep gently and contentedly. Instead you have this furious daughter yelling at you as if you were the lowest of the low. You should never have let it come to this. What were you thinking of?

  Your death takes place in stages. Taja stands in front of you for a moment, shouting at you as you stub out your joint and hope she’ll calm down. A moment later there’s darkness and you don’t understand what’s happened. Something’s missing. The transition. The switch-off. You’re dead, without understanding it. And you always thought there would be an understanding.

  Dead?

  Dead.

  The darkness persists. And in that darkness your body starts changing. From top to bottom, even though you can’t feel it, you know it’s happening. As if your body were bidding you a sighing farewell. As if all the light were vanishing from it, flowing and leaking away.

  When the light comes back, it happens all of a sudden and you’re staring at the ceiling. The colors explode around you and you want to breathe out with relief and tell Taja that this has been the worst trip ever. But the trip isn’t over, it’s only just started. Everything starts and ends with death. But you really didn’t expect
that it would catch you like this. If you’re honest, there are lots of things in your life that you didn’t expect—not a crazed father bringing you and Ragnar up like a dictator; not a brother who abandoned you at the age of twelve; but certainly not a life in Norway and a wife like Majgull. Not to mention your daughter.

  “Dad?”

  If you could cry, you’d cry now. Christ, how long has it been since she called you Dad? And she means it. It’s not her voice that gives it away, it’s her thoughts, her feelings. You can read her effortlessly. As if you had a mental connection. It’s a world suddenly opening up to you. You have access to every thought, every emotion. And what can you do with it? Nothing. You’re just an observer who can’t intervene. How fucked is that?

  Really fucked.

  Taja pulls at you, the ceiling vanishes from your field of vision, you are sitting up again and looking at your little one. Her fingertips stroke your face as if you might shatter if she made a false move, then she recoils and runs away. Shame, fear.

  Poor girl.

  And as she flees, you suddenly understand what has happened. Her thoughts come fluttering after her like nervous birds, they find you and talk to you and you don’t believe them. And don’t believe them. And don’t want to believe them.

  You sense Taja’s presence in the room before you see her. Your eyes don’t obey you any more than your body does. You stare straight ahead. Taja comes and stands right in front of you as if to catch your eye. She doesn’t want to think the word death. She thinks everything else. She doesn’t want to touch you again. She breathes guilt and vanishes from your field of vision.

  Taja is back. She’s been thinking. She’s been crying. One of her knuckles is dark. She must have hit the wall. She could never keep her feelings under control. Now she’s sitting next to you. Her hands touch you.