A Fortune Foretold

by Agneta Pleijel

  As if it were entirely self-evident.

  I drove her to the hospital and they met. He sat on a chair in front of an elevator door that was constantly opening and closing, with an overflowing ashtray beside him. Mom sat on a chair opposite him. The meeting lasted for maybe twenty minutes. I have written about it in A Winter in Stockholm. They were old.

  I was afraid that Mom would come out with all the bad stuff she had said and thought about him over the years. I needn’t have worried. They smoked. She leaned forward and lit his cigarette for him. They didn’t talk about anything in particular. They looked at each other, and were very kind to each other.

  For me: a genuine miracle. Then a nurse came to fetch him. That’s what happened. It was the last time they met, and it was good. Something was concluded, for them and for me. He died not long afterward.

  My problem was how to get out. Or rather, how do you find your way into life? You never stop doing that, not until you stop breathing. Anywhere out of this world, as Edgar Allan Poe wrote. I changed it to Anywhere at all, but into this world in my rented room at the time.

  The second winter after graduating from high school, and she has gotten to know a Danish painter and ceramic artist who offers board and lodgings in exchange for her taking care of the household and his four small children. She will also have the opportunity to learn the secrets of ceramics.

  He has a summer cottage in Vikhög on the coast.

  The artist’s wife is slim, with long legs; she is breastfeeding her newborn baby. The girl often walks on the shore, where swans have blown in. She writes poetry in her head. The gale robs me of my voice. Everyone has a story into which they can fit their life. She ought to take her place in her own story, but she doesn’t have one. The wind steals my cries away from me.

  In the evenings when the children are asleep, they sit in the kitchen and the artist talks about the war, when he worked for the Resistance. His wife talks about a prophet called Hubbard who has created a doctrine known as Scientology, and who has seen through the lies of the bourgeois society. As have the artist and his wife.

  All three of them read Henry Miller. The other two get excited—sperm, piss, excrement—but she finds Miller dull. The artist is constantly trying to get her into bed. His wife doesn’t mind, he claims. They could have lots of fun in bed, the three of them.

  That’s their attitude to life—rebelling against convention.

  In principle she would like to share this view, but she finds him exhausting. He never stops talking—in his studio, in the kitchen, in the woodshed. She doesn’t want to share a bed with him and his wife. He can’t understand it. He wants to have a serious conversation with her.

  He has reached the conclusion that she lacks contact with her inner life. Oh yes, and how exactly does he know this?

  After the conversation she is so annoyed that she loads the kiln carelessly, and several of his thin mugs are ruined. She does have an inner life; she just can’t reach it. There is something in the way. But isn’t that exactly what he’s saying?

  He is furious about the disastrous firing and calls her indolent, uninterested, and indifferent. He’s right. She apologizes. They have a woodshed with books scattered all over the floor; she goes and sits in there and reads poems by Poe and Rilke to get some peace and quiet and to calm down. The artist turns straight back to the sexual pressurization. She is tired of having to come up with arguments to explain why she doesn’t want to do it.

  He thinks he has the right to demand reasons, which is both trying and taxing. And if the argument is not good enough in his opinion, he draws conclusions about her inner life. Who does he think he is?

  She doesn’t dislike him or his wife. On the contrary, they are kind and, in their own way, respectful; life with them is a sort of blessed asylum. She admires his pottery when it comes out of the kiln. She also strips naked and models for him. It costs her nothing.

  She does some painting in Lund, but is seized by a sense of emptiness. She doesn’t know what she’s doing. She sits in front of the mirror and doesn’t recognize her face.

  If anyone had suggested she was depressed, she would have been astonished. Depression—that means electric shocks and paranoia. She is simply gray inside, like cement. She grits her teeth. She can’t be a painter, she lacks the talent.

  Ceramics might be a possibility. If every life is a story, the pot can be seen as a container for life.

  That’s the way she tries to think.

  She receives a letter from her Senegalese friend. He has looked on the map to see where Lund is, and suggests they should meet in Copenhagen. She has almost forgotten him, and is charmed by the fact that he remembers her. But the shaman’s magic hasn’t worked, and she doesn’t reply to the letter.

  She travels between Vikhög and Lund. She tries to be nice to Mom. This is what she can do, shoulder the responsibility Dad has walked away from. She isn’t nice at all. She has simply ended up in the middle of something that means her lust for life is chewed to pieces by a machine with iron teeth so that it runs through her fingers like shingle and gravel.

  There were many obstacles for a girl like her: being kind, sympathetic, empathetic. At the same time she had to wriggle out of the unceasing sexual pressure—it was like trying to get through a dense hedge of demands—but without hurting anyone.

  Not only pressure from the artist. A constant whining and nagging from men who couldn’t cope with rejection. She feels guilty because she thinks she ought to be able to do something for her parents, which is unreasonable. Perhaps no one is asking such a thing of her, but that’s what she’s gotten into her head. She feels guilty about the person she is.

  She can be seen through the binoculars turned the wrong way around—closer this time.

  One winter evening she bumps into Dad on Lilla Fiskare-gatan. This makes her indescribably happy. She is on her way to the cinema, and he joins her: L’Avventura, by Michelangelo Antonioni, with Monica Vitti. He falls asleep during the short feature. She tries to wake him with a strong Tenor lozenge, but it goes down the wrong way and he has such a violent coughing fit that she is grateful when he falls asleep again.

  Alain Resnais’s short feature shows images from a recently liberated concentration camp. Barbed wired. Prisoners and dead bodies. And Germans, forced to visit by the Allies, standing there with handkerchiefs pressed to their noses. It is only ten years since she took a language course in Lübeck. She is pushed down in her seat by indignation, sorrow, and guilt.

  The main movie shows Vitti in dark towns, treeless landscapes, and whitewashed rooms. She doesn’t have the energy to follow the plot, but the actress’s face absorbs the distress from the first film. When it is over she is blinded by tears, and has to stay in her seat letting everyone else pass by while she pulls herself together.

  And when she has pulled herself together, she wakes Dad.

  He invites her to a café for a sandwich, then he asks—very tactfully—what she is actually doing in Vikhög, is she thinking of becoming an artist? He sounds skeptical. An artist? She defends herself. The word is too big. She just wants to get rid of the blockage, the plug inside her that is stopping her from living.

  She tells him that ceramics is an interim project, halfway to art but less pretentious: it’s just making pots. If she had been honest she would have said that she wanted to avoid living. She didn’t want to die, exactly, but she did want to avoid living. You don’t say that sort of thing to your dad. Who seems tired this evening.

  You can’t stay in Vikhög looking after kids for the rest of your life! He sounds unexpectedly opinionated.

  And what about you? she snaps back. How long are you going to stay in that pathetic little room—the rest of your life?

  For the time being, Dad answers tersely. He doesn’t expand on the situation, but he does tell her that Ricki is sick. They are standing on Södergatan, she is leaning on her bicycle. Tiny ice crystals are drifting down from the sky. Don’t leave me, Daddy! She does
n’t shout out those words. She doesn’t even say them. She simply asks what’s wrong with Ricki.

  He doesn’t know. He says he’s sure she’ll be fine.

  The snowflakes land on his white hair. He turns up his collar and walks away, heading for his little room. She stands there watching him go, until he disappears among the trees in Lundagård. Then she cycles home. Where Mom is waiting.

  Wide awake and inconsolable.

  The suction drags her down, inexorably downward. She leaves the Danish artist and Vikhög. She becomes an apprentice with the ceramicist Signe Persson-Melin in Malmö. On the train between Lund and Malmö she reads the books she has borrowed from Nanna, who has been studying philosophy. The Ways of Thought, by Gunnar Aspelin.

  The Problems of Philosophy, by Bertrand Russell. Philosophy in a New Key, by Susan Langer. Outside the train window she sees figures in transparent spheres, desperately fighting to get out. Spheres containing trapped souls, hovering above grotesque scenery. Where has she seen them—in a painting by Hieronymus Bosch? But the spheres outside the window are not soap bubbles. They are resistant cages made of a material that is harder than hard. She is locked inside such a cage. She despises herself for it, but that’s the way it is.

  Sitting at a potter’s wheel that goes round and round, and it takes ten years to become a fully trained potter? Ten years! To learn how to repeat shapes so that they are all exactly the same.

  She unceremoniously abandons ceramics.

  She rents a room in town so that she can study philosophy. She can’t live at home. The downward pull is too strong there. But she doesn’t turn her back on them. She cycles home to Mom, who needs her. And maybe, although I didn’t think of this until much later—maybe I needed a mother too.

  The rented room is on a corridor outside a ladies’ hair salon. It stinks of perming solution. She goes into the kitchen to make a cup of coffee, and she can see into the salon. Fine ladies are sitting under the dryers looking like astronauts, some with a little dog on their lap.

  She christens all the little dogs Laika. After the dog who met her demise in the Sputnik spacecraft. She hopes things will go better for these little dogs. Her boyfriend comes to visit her in the smelly room. He’s the one who gave her a ride home on his bicycle after the graduation party; he is now studying at Chalmers.

  They make love in the narrow bed. It is friendly. Often ecstatic. She is scared of getting pregnant, but he keeps her in the world, as Nanna does.

  She cycles home, and everything in Mom’s past is making a noise. Dad is a fiend, an evil spirit. Down, down, down. It is like wading through quicksand.

  But one evening something happens. One Saturday evening.

  They are sitting at the kitchen table with a glass of wine, and Ninne and Ia are out. Mom is calm this evening, or so it seems, but suddenly she asks a question that leaves the girl dumbstruck. Are you sleeping with him? This unexpected question about her boyfriend drives her out into unfamiliar terrain; visibility is poor and there are menacing shadows.

  Her throat contracts and she doesn’t answer. At which point her mother places a hand on hers. Do you enjoy it? In that second something is severed. The question is greedy, voracious, intrusive. If she replies, whatever she says could be turned against her on another occasion. It has happened many times before.

  Everything can be turned against her, and she never knows when that might be.

  She is cut off. She is naked, like the child on the matchboxes. She staggers through bitter cold toward a gray planet, desolate and dead. It is difficult to describe the moment, almost impossible. They have grown together, they have been that way since the beginning of life, she and Mom. They are one single body made up of membranes, blood, and internal organs.

  Being rejected by Mom is painful, but intimacy is even worse. Perhaps this is a rare moment when Mom actually sees her for once. And she just wants to get away. Anywhere. Far, far away. To any extinct planet whatsoever.

  I have grown old, Mom goes on, turning her wineglass around and around. The days have gone whirling away out of the diary, a snowstorm of days. One day she woke up in an unfamiliar room, which is an old woman’s body.

  How is that possible? Mom wonders with undisguised amazement.

  In silence she contemplates the unfamiliar room that is her mother’s body; it has grown thin and scraggy. She is suddenly aware of her mother’s sexual needs. She is seized by the idea that Mom wants to know what sleeping with her boyfriend is like because she is envious. A repulsive thought. It shuts her inside her mother’s body. From that moment she knows that she has to get away from her.

  But Mom refuses to be diverted.

  You do know that a woman who sleeps with more than two men before she gets married is a fallen woman? Thank God, at last the paralysis is broken. She is furious, and rediscovers her voice. What crap.

  Who’s ever heard of a fallen man?

  She refuses to give in, and she actually manages to make Mom laugh eventually. Deep inside she decides to become a fallen woman. She is going to sleep with twenty, fifty, a hundred. Or more. Men and women. She will be the author of her own Decameron, with herself as the courtesan and protagonist.

  So I’ve finally made a decision about my future, she thinks ironically afterward.

  However, strangely enough, when she sleeps with her boyfriend or with others in the future, she has to press her thighs together very tightly in order to prevent her mother’s face from popping up between them. Like a pitch-black rose.

  Unhappy. And reproachful. A black rose that blooms, withers, and dies. A perverse fantasy that I have never managed to find in the canon of psychology. This obsession, palpable and painful, pursued me for a long time, and forced me to think long and hard about mothers and daughters.

  It turns out that Ricki has undergone many examinations, because her lightheadedness won’t go away. Now she is in the hospital. She had an operation, it failed, they operated again. Dad is in Stockholm, and together they go to visit Olle on Drottninghusgränd.

  He is putting the boy to bed when they arrive; it takes a while. He is thinner than ever; the furrow between his eyebrows, which meet in the middle, is deeper and makes him look stressed and hunted. It is a long evening, and a great deal of cognac is consumed. Olle’s stomach ulcer has burst.

  He has been forced to employ a nanny, she is very young, but it’s her day off. Olle works long hours at Philips, and the hospital visits are the only bright spots in his day.

  He misses Ricki every single second.

  The boy is five years old, and on the whole he’s doing fine. He never asks about Ricki, even though she’s been away for quite a long time. He is talking at last, but in his own particular way. Comic book style. Olle imitates him: Slam, bam. Danged kids! Watch out, run for your lives, crash, bam, help!

  And all in such a shrill, ear-splitting monotone that Olle is afraid the neighbors will hear and think he is abusing his son.

  Both he and the nanny are exhausted. Don’t get him wrong, he loves his precious boy, but the child is strong-willed, everything has to happen exactly the way he wants. Brushing his teeth must take two minutes; one second over and they have to start again. It as if the boy can make himself feel at home in the world only by imposing his will, his rules, and his meticulous but peculiar restrictions, Olle says.

  Dad thinks the boy should be allowed to go and see Ricki.

  Absolutely not, Olle replies. Not under any circumstances.

  It would just mess things up. The boy might get yet more idées fixes. He might start insisting on visiting her every day, making life increasingly difficult for them. And even worse: Ricki might not recognize him.

  Not recognize him—what the hell is wrong with her?

  Olle doesn’t answer the question, but he curses the doctors, fucking dilettantes, everything takes such an unconscionably long time, Ricki should have been home by now. Precious Mommy will get better, anything else is unthinkable. Ricki is the light of his life, his l
ucky star.

  She wants to go and visit Ricki in the hospital. We’ll see, Olle says. Outside it is getting darker. The glasses are refilled. Dad invites Olle and the boy to the house in the archipelago, he needs to rest. We’ll see, Olle says again. In the middle of the night the precious boy appears in the doorway like a little white ghost.

  Olle has to put him back to bed, once again it takes ages. Every time they make a move to leave, Olle begs them to stay. They are there for hours.

  And Olle talks about himself: straight after his birth he was placed with a foster family. He has never met his biological mother, although he has tried to trace her. The only thing he has of her is a blurred photograph of a young girl with braids. Not being recognized by his mother—that’s something I don’t want our son to experience, he says.

  No, he doesn’t want the boy to visit Ricki.

  There are different kinds of loneliness. Olle’s is mute. No access. Only Ricki has found her way in. When they finally leave, it has grown light outside. They walk across St. Johannes churchyard in the early dawn. The air is clear, not a cloud in the sky. It is quiet, there is no traffic yet.

  Butterflies among the gravestones. And birds.

  It will be fine, she says. Otherwise why would they have operated? You can never rule out the possibility of a miracle, Dad replies. By the steps leading down to Sveavägen she watches as he walks away.

  She turns back and sits down on the grass in the churchyard. She wraps her arms around her knees and gazes out across the gravestones. In spite of the fact that she hasn’t slept, she feels light and rested. A cat catches her eye.

  Its tail is wagging slowly; it is on a journey of discovery. Then a girl comes along in grubby jeans; she raises a hand in greeting and asks for a cigarette. She sits down a short distance away, smoking. Her back is hunched, the nape of her neck white and fragile. Two lonely girls among all these dead people.