A Fortune Foretold

by Agneta Pleijel

  Eventually they find overnight accommodation in a trailer park by the shore. Summer is over, and the rain hammers down on the metal roof of their trailer. Mom sits slumped over her bad leg. Everything is dreadful. They are saved by Marta’s unfailing good humor.

  Plump Marta squelches away in the rain and charms the park supervisor, returning with schnapps to cheer everyone up. And it actually works. Even Mom has to smile at their situation.

  After the schnapps Marta insists on going for a swim. They walk together down to the long, sandy beach. It is dark and deserted, and the waves are like three-story buildings—black and shining, tipped with foaming white. As they reach the shore they settle down to a sighing swell.

  They stand on the shore gazing out across the waves. Behind them they can just make out the misty lights from the windows of the trailers, but on the shore they are alone. And Marta raises her arms toward the sky and salutes the sea.

  It is like some magnificent pagan ritual.

  The whole thing is completely crazy. The journey home is a schizophrenic symphony by a deranged artist. Marta hurls herself into the water with a deafening roar, wallowing like a whale, while the girl swims with rain above her head and in her hair and her mouth. Marta puffs and pants and they yell to each other across the swells, and she might as well make the best of things.

  Later they play three-handed bridge in the trailer. Mom takes her tricks with acidic remarks and gallows humor. This could be a turning point, a step toward healing and relief. She hopes so. That’s not what happens. And there, in the trailer, the trip to Paris comes to an abrupt end.

  Dad’s room is unprepossessing. She looks around. A desk, a bed, outside the room two hotplates and a sink. He hugs her and takes her coat, and even though it is new and strange—so this is where he lives now?—she feels welcome. Planks of wood propped up on bricks serve as bookshelves.

  His cups and plates don’t match, but as usual his desk is piled high with papers covered with scribbled formulas, lovely curves and symbols that she doesn’t understand. The most beautiful mathematical solution is the simplest, Dad often says. That could be a motto for the way he lives his life.

  Simplest is best. Mathematics has its own particular beauty.

  Crystalline. Beyond human suffering. Visiting him in his new life is a bit like meeting a stranger, even though she knows him so well. And besides, it’s not just his new life, it’s everyone’s; a cog has slid across another cog and everything has switched to a different track, and now it’s like this.

  Can you work properly here? I guess so, Dad replies. I’m with John Steinbeck. You carefully sharpen all your pencils, you arrange your papers in perfect order, in a neat and tidy pile, you place a steaming cup of coffee beside you and light the first cigarette of the morning, then you open yourself to great inspiration.

  At that moment your thoughts flap around like giddy hens in a farmyard, and you can’t grab hold of a single one of them. She bursts out laughing.

  That’s how Dad provided solace, joked away all her troubles and woes and restored a sense of proportion in the blink of an eye, which means realizing that one’s own life isn’t the main issue. Never run after a streetcar or a boy, there will always be another one along in a minute. That’s Dad. A shrug and a kindly, ironic grimace as he allows the world to take care of itself.

  Everything will always sort itself out. No reason to panic. Tomorrow is another day. This attitude has provided a defense against chaos, inner tumult, and panic. And yet, even though he is so unsuited to catastrophe, to imbalance, to exaggeration, this potentially good aspect of his character has left the family and himself in a state of disarray, uncertainty, and total flux.

  It is a paradox. And it is impossible to talk about it.

  At a student union event she danced with one of his students, a blond guy with clever eyes. Your dad is the most considerate person I’ve ever met, he seems incapable of being mean. Really? she says, sounding surprised.

  Dad’s student nods and says that her father reminds him of a boy, slightly impatient. Your dad is incredibly kind, he reiterates.

  Is he? Mom takes the opposite view. Inconsiderate, fawning, a liar. She needs her father. She doesn’t want to take sides. She doesn’t want to choose.

  Her rare visits allow her to see new sides of her father. On one occasion he tells her about a dream he had that morning. He doesn’t remember the details, just that he woke surrounded and lifted up by a bright light.

  It was almost spiritual, he says, sounding quite overcome.

  Does he have religious feelings? That would be unlike him. She decides that he is experiencing a sense of liberation because he has moved out and left them. On another visit a pigeon has laid her eggs in the guttering outside his only window. He won’t open it for fear of disturbing her. He is very fond of the pigeon, he says.

  The pigeon is company for him in his loneliness.

  He doesn’t just feel liberated, he is also lonely. Apparently. It’s only natural. After all, they have always been a pentagram, the five of them.

  All three sisters visit him, but never together. One at a time, and without telling Mom. From Ia she learns that the relationship with Vibeke is still going on. Ia finds her way to Dad’s room after school, seeking peace and quiet. Which is much needed.

  One day when she is there, the phone rings. Ia can hear that it’s Vibeke, as clearly as if she were in the room. I’ll meet you in fifteen minutes at the usual place. And suddenly Dad is in a hurry. The call came from the university department, he claims, he has forgotten about an important meeting and he has to leave right away. So Ia cycles home.

  Dad tells lies, Ia states, with a thirteen-year-old’s tone of slight disappointment and arrogance. As if she were commenting on an area that had been hit by a natural disaster. She adds that everything is perfectly normal at home with Vibeke and Bertil. The catastrophe appears to have struck only this family.

  A localized storm, as they say on the radio.

  Dad sticks to a casual, carefree approach. Digging deeper is not something he’s interested in. Psychology isn’t his thing. Presumably he is skeptical about it. She isn’t about to accuse him of anything. During her visits they chat about superficial matters: a book, a movie, a newspaper article.

  He thinks she ought to choose something to study at the university, but she’s not interested in anything.

  She is living in limbo, like a particle flung around in a void. Sometimes she fears for her sanity. Mom’s outbursts make her feel worthless. There are moments when she simply wants to die.

  She can’t say that kind of thing to Dad. She can’t say anything that might sound hysterical, make him feel uncomfortable, make him turn away in silence as he has turned away from Mom. They never talk about Mom. Dad doesn’t ask about her.

  And she doesn’t want to expose Mom’s humiliation, which is how she sees it. It is mortifying for Mom to be forced to question everything in her life, herself most of all, and to trample around in a boggy mess of rage, vicious words, and despair. He ought to know—he lived with her for long enough.

  But he doesn’t ask, which means that she avoids key topics, such as how he views the future. Whether he is intending to move back home. In her calmer moments, Mom hopes that will happen. This is a crisis, violent and long-lasting, admittedly, but it will pass. And who knows.

  But Dad says nothing. Sometimes it seems to her that he believes his daughters know everything and that there is no need for explanations. But they know nothing!

  If only he could come right out with it, say that he found himself in an impossible situation. Say whether he wanted Vibeke or not. Say that he is never coming home, or that he hopes to return—anything, just so long as they know.

  But he says nothing. Her parents remain married. It also seems as if it’s going to stay that way. Unresolved, in other words.

  Dad speaks on a personal level on only one occasion. Well, almost personal. He asks—unexpectedly—if she remembers the
statue of the naked woman outside the minimarket in Årsta. She does. Mom slipped on the ice and fell right in front of that statue. And Dad says that every time he walked past that naked woman, he was seized by such a strong sense of unease that he could hardly bring himself to go home.

  He doesn’t understand it, he says. For once he looks troubled. It’s as if he wants her to understand it for him.

  First thought: he’s thinking of Mom. Of her body. His obligations toward her. His sexual obligation. Men are repulsed by the female body. They find the female body’s emissions and blood disgusting, but are forced to go there by the male sex drive. A masochistic thought that also strikes her.

  With a certain amount of effort, she manages to shake it off.

  He has Vibeke. It is Mom’s body that revolts him. That’s what he says. At that moment she feels sick. He is sharing a confidence that has nothing to do with her, a confidence that should not be shared with a nineteen-year-old daughter. She is angry.

  But Dad drops the subject and never returns to it again. She realizes that he is facing something he really doesn’t understand. Did he feel inadequate when he was with Mom? Probably. Was that why he left? Maybe.

  He seems to spend a lot of time brooding about himself and his role. He doesn’t appear to want to break away from Mom. It is possible that she’s right, that they really do belong together. If only Mom could avoid getting stuck in her putrefaction, in her rage and her contempt, if she could just accept him and forgive him, then maybe things could work out.

  That’s what she thinks. Sometimes. At the beginning.

  During the first three or four years.

  In spite of everything, visiting Dad means experiencing a little bit of stability. It is also somewhat ambivalent and ambiguous, because he doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t say whether he’s waiting for Vibeke to get a divorce. Or whether he wants to come back to Mom, and is just biding his time until the right moment comes along. Or whether he’s fine as he is.

  He doesn’t say a word about Mom.

  Ever. He takes Ninne on a trip to Paris. He invites Ia to Copenhagen, where he works as a lecturer for a while. He unexpectedly gives the girl a dress that is nicer than any she has ever owned. He lives in his little room when he isn’t lecturing overseas.

  He travels all the way to Africa to teach.

  Ambivalence means wanting two things at the same time. Loving and hating simultaneously, for example. And the strange part is that although the ambivalence is her father’s, it moves in and occupies her. Never being able to make up her mind. Constantly worrying about upsetting someone. Which means she can’t create her own shape.

  A demarcation line against others. But time passes. Year follows year, and nothing changes. The ambivalence digs down deeper inside her.

  Until it is as deep as the Mariana Trench.

  The ice down below the house on Yxlan formed a bobbing mass at first, then froze solid. Now it is beginning to break up. Ice floes that have been torn loose are floating northward, with ducks and swans standing on top of them, grabbing a free ride.

  They look funny. Do they know where they’re going?

  I have been in town a few times and have come back here. The sun is showing its face with increasing frequency. Spring is on its way. It is unclear what actually happens when decisions are made in the skein of tangled threads of which life is currently made up.

  Decisions are seldom made with logic and clear thinking.

  If it seems that way, it is usually because we have put a spin on the situation afterward. A wise person once said that we consist only of fiction, of the idea we construct about ourselves. Sometimes it seems to me that the story I am telling about myself—about her—all those years ago has been cobbled together into a fossilized memory, which has gradually changed as she became me.

  We rattle around inside the armor of memory.

  Many of the people about whom I write are dead. They cannot defend themselves, they are at the mercy of a young girl whom I sometimes cannot distinguish from myself.

  Can I discover something new? I am sticking to the questions she asked when she was young. The first question: what is truth? The second: love. Where does love go when it dies? The third: what do you do to be able to be yourself?

  We are fiction. We create ourselves with words. This is my fiction: I perceived my father as unbearably indecisive. I could have been wrong.

  But I kept all options open in all directions.

  By doing so I allowed everything to pass through me, and lost myself. I got the idea that Dad was waiting for something. For what? If one of them could just make a decision, I thought back then. If Mom could give up expecting him to come back. If Dad could ask for a divorce.

  Then the world could start turning again and I would be able to escape, get away. Apply for a place at art school, make a movie, become a doctor in Africa. Or get a job on a boat and head off anywhere, or maybe to Indonesia where apparently I had quite a few relatives—that was just a fraction of the thoughts that went through my mind, all equally unrealistic.

  I waited, but they didn’t make any decisions.

  According to later witness accounts, this is what really happened. When we arrived in Lund, Dad and Vibeke instantly fell in love.

  That’s what Vibeke wrote in a letter to Laura, which we found in Laura’s apartment after her death. According to Vibeke, Dad took off his wedding ring back in 1948. They knew immediately that they were meant for each other. They shared the same lust for life, but they had both married the wrong person.

  And Laura told me—after my father’s death—that he had confided in her. For the sake of his children, he had to stay and try to endure his marriage. I’m counting the days and the years, he had said to Laura, until the children are old enough. He worked hard to avoid having to think.

  The third account is from my father’s second wife, also after his death. When he arrived in Lund in 1952, the sexual side of his marriage was already at an end. He was sexually famished. I need someone, anyone, he thought, and that someone happened to be Vibeke.

  If you put these three accounts into a pot and shake them up, you get a more or less consistent picture, albeit with quite a lot of gaps. My fiction today: my father was a nice man who didn’t want to hurt anyone.

  But he believed he had obligations. To Vibeke. And to Bertil, a close friend who must be kept in the dark. And to Mom, to whom—I am convinced of this—he was still emotionally tied, in spite of everything. He was very attached to his daughters. He had left us, and he was caught up in a tangle of interwoven obligations; he couldn’t see a way out. He allowed one day after another to pass.

  Mathematics was a refuge and a solace.

  When many years had passed, I wrote a letter to my father. I told him how we had dangled in that state of uncertainty he had created. If he had no intention of going back to Mom, why didn’t he get a divorce? I was caught up in that uncertainty.

  So were my sisters, I think. We fell in love with the wrong kind of men, those who seemed ambivalent. Ambivalence is a major force in eroticism. We were attracted to men who didn’t know what they wanted. Who were already in a relationship. Who were unable to break free.

  Who couldn’t make up their minds. That’s what happened to me, anyway.

  I wrote to my father and tried to explain all this to him. Of course that says something about me, the fact that I waited for a decision on their part before I felt I was free to make a decision of my own. So many lost years. My father was, as you might expect, annoyed. He didn’t want anyone interfering in his life.

  I replied that his life was other people’s lives too, and that I didn’t want to see him until he had made a decision that would put an end to the quagmire that had paralyzed us all. I tried to put it politely, and without badmouthing Mom.

  It was the summer of 1966, just over eight years after he had left us. In the fall he asked for a divorce, through his lawyer. I felt I could take a certain amount of credit for that. M
aybe I was wrong. Mom hit rock bottom once more. It is possible that my letter had no effect, but at the time I thought my parents had ended up in a state of permanent inertia. Paralysis. Constantly putting things off.

  They saw each other, he came round for dinner and cycled back to his room. He always spent Christmas Eve with us, which was pure torture. Then he headed off again, slightly the worse for wear. It was many years before I understood the power my father’s silence had exerted.

  Oh yes, the obstinate silence of men. But something happened after my letter. He finally made a decision. Just before he asked Mom for a divorce, he finished with Vibeke. That emerged in her letter to Laura.

  Vibeke missed him desperately, she wrote. She and Bertil had just ended their marriage, an ugly and bitter divorce, she wrote. But my father abandoned her too, in order to marry a third woman.

  She was a door that opened for him; he was able to walk out through that door and leave the whole mess behind him. That’s my perception, anyway. I never discussed it with my father. Nor have I ever managed to make up my mind as to whether the whole thing is a rather banal tale, or one that is a little unusual because of the amount of time it covered. I tend toward the latter view.

  Following the divorce, my parents didn’t see each other again. Not for thirty years. Not until just before my father’s death, when he was in the hospital and in a bad way.

  All of a sudden he desperately wanted to see Mom.

  He was like a man possessed. It’s the only time I ever experienced such an unshakable resolve in my father. He refused to give up, and he begged me to help him. Mom, who hadn’t had a good word to say about him through all those years, wasn’t surprised when I asked her if she would come visit him.

  I’ve been expecting it, she said. I know he wants to see me.