by Linn Ullmann
Now that all this is said and done, it might seem as if Johan was the only one who knew he had an inner flame, a quietly resounding yes. Whether or not other people knew it was there, it was what he was prepared to fight for. He would fight as long as he could. It was not impossible to survive this. Johan had made a list of all the stories he had read or heard, about men and women, given much the same diagnosis as he, who had survived. He could be one of them. He wanted to be one of them.
But when he couldn’t fight any longer, if it came to that, then he wanted to die with dignity. Before they found him caked with his own shit. Before he became a burden to Mai. She must understand that it would be his choice, his last plea for help. Yes, he would fight, but if and when he found the battle going against him, he would ask for help.
Johan faced himself in the mirror. This thing about a dog, he thought, had left its mark on the day. He didn’t even want a dog. When Charley was put to sleep, he’d made up his mind never to have another dog. But a perfectly ordinary conversation between a husband and wife about getting a dog shouldn’t have to be so goddamned existential, a matter of life and death like everything else these days. Mai didn’t want a dog because she thought that Johan was about to make his exit—now there’s drama for you, thought Johan, making a face in the mirror; Mr. Johan Sletten makes his exit—and she didn’t want to take care of a dog on her own. Even the most ridiculous, banal conversation revolved around the fact that Johan was about to make his exit. (Although making one’s exit really suggests leaving a stage, and he was going to do more than that: he was going to kick the bucket, cash in his chips, pass away, shuffle off this mortal coil.) But talk about it … she never would. Not that he wanted to. But they hadn’t made plans as they usually did. Mai wouldn’t admit that she believed he was going to die, but she wouldn’t make plans either. She wouldn’t even pretend. That wasn’t her way.
The business about the dog had set him thinking, and now he wanted to talk to her. He had wandered around his little Swedish cottage garden, cursing the capricious weather (which he took personally, as a sign), thinking that it was time he took control of the situation. A voice, like another, deeper form of breathing inside him, said that it was high time to take control! And at that moment the sun peeked out from behind the clouds and shone down on him, shone with just a fraction of its enormous power on my spindly friend Johan Sletten.
He turned his face to the sky and let the sun warm him.
It was high time.
Johan did not have much of an appetite at dinner. Food, even good food, nauseated him. But he could still, on occasion, enjoy a glass or two of wine, as he did that evening. Sitting with him at the kitchen table under the blue lamp, Mai remarked, a bit absentmindedly, “Your boil’s looking a bit fiery. I’ll clean it for you.” She stood up.
“Sit down, Mai!”
Mai looked at him, taken aback. She sat down.
“Forget about my face! We need to talk.” They both winced at his tone. He took a deep breath. “And there will be no interruptions,” he added. He raised his hand to feel his cheek.
“For heaven’s sake!” Mai burst out laughing.
But Johan silenced her, saying, “I’ve … I’ve been thinking.”
“I see.”
“I want you to hear me out without interrupting. This is important. I need your help, Mai. I need you … more than ever.”
Mai nodded.
“I’m sick, but I’m going to fight it. You know I want to fight it. I may even recover completely … I may recover, you know … but if not—”
“Johan,” Mai interrupted gently, “why don’t you just take one day at a time? You’re feeling better now, aren’t you? Can’t we enjoy this time together without thinking too much about it?”
“I want to get certain things sorted out now,” Johan whispered. “So that I can live out the rest of my time with you in peace. That’s all I want, Mai, a bit of peace.”
“You’re not going to get any peace as long as you keep trying to predict the future,” Mai retorted. “I could have a heart attack tomorrow, right? Bye-bye, Mai! There’s no point looking too far ahead.”
“You have to listen to me,” Johan pleaded. “I am fighting. I don’t want to die. But I need you to help me if … if my illness should become a burden”—he struggled to find the right words—“a burden to us both.”
“You’re not a burden.”
“But if I become one—”
“I don’t think of you that way,” she snapped.
“I worry about the pain, Mai.”
“Pain can be eased. And I’ll be with you. I’ll always be right there with you.”
He looked at her with gratitude. He said, “I worry about the humiliation. I don’t want you to see me like that. I don’t want your last memory of me to be the stink. I remember when my father …” He couldn’t finish the sentence.
Mai looked at him and took a breath. “I understand what you’re saying, but …”
He waited for the rest, but nothing else came. He wanted to know what was supposed to follow that but. He wanted to know whether she was going to repeat I’ll be with you, maybe say I’ll always be right there with you, no matter what. But she said no more. She began clearing the table. He contemplated her hair, which she had put in a long gray braid, and her big hands with their short, clean nails, a narrow white crescent at the tip of each: a sign of good health, she had once told him. Alice’s nails had been flimsy and ragged, and she was always absentmindedly nibbling at them. Sometimes she would have them painted pink. She’d come home and flutter her hands, those teeny Chinese hands, in front of Johan’s face and ask him if he thought they were pretty.
He looked at his own unclipped fingernails: narrow white crescents at the tips. Once he had put his palm up to Mai’s and said, “We have similar hands, you and I.” But she had pulled her hand away, saying it was bad luck to compare them. Mai had promised that she’d be with him always. Hold his hand until it was over. Mai’s was the good hand he wanted to be the last thing he sensed in this life. She would take his hand in hers and lead him to the other side.
He had always thought of Mai’s hands in this way—as good hands, patient hands. She who was always so quick could suddenly draw her body very close to his. It was the way she stroked him, the lingering progress of her hand across his stomach and down, the fact that it was so slow, so easy and slow. Other women didn’t have hands. Only Mai had hands.
Before they went to bed that night, Mai lit a fire. The August summer smacked of fall; the wind was blowing hard, and—after months of long, light-filled evenings—darkness had fallen suddenly and unexpectedly. Johan and Mai sat in their chairs with their books. It might have been any ordinary evening, Johan thought, if not for the nausea, a gob of vomit in his gullet that would not go up or down. And the conversation with Mai that had concluded with the word but. Was she going to say that she would be right there with him whatever happened?
“Say it, Mai!” he whispered. “Talk to me!”
He looked at her sitting there in the firelight, her mouth half open over her book, like a little girl with her first detective novel. But Mai is a middle-aged woman, he thought with some satisfaction, even with that girlish aspect. She, too, is mortal, just like all little girls who think they will never die. But the worms will crawl through the locks of little girls too. He smiled and looked at her. It could end here, he thought. Two old friends, Johan and his wife, in their chairs, reading their books in front of the fire on a late-summer evening.
He studied her. The glossy gray braid had grown straggly in the course of the day, sprouting stray hairs in all directions. A pair of round reading glasses perched on her nose, and her face was warm and rosy. He reached out to stroke her cheek but checked himself, reluctant to disturb her.
It could end here. No pain, no howling or fear or degradation. Just this moment—Johan and Mai and the fire in the hearth—and then a long, black night.
Johan shut his e
yes and thought of another woman. Mamma.
From time to time before she died, they would meet at a coffee shop for muffins and hot chocolate. One day he asked her to tell him about his father. Usually they didn’t talk about anything in particular. She would tell him about her insufferable neighbor, the ladies at her bridge club, her long solo expeditions to the old department store downtown. When he asked about his father, she started to say something but stopped abruptly. She looked at him and whispered, “I can’t.”
Her small lined face turned to his, and her eyes glistened.
“You don’t understand… . Every time I try to picture Pappa, all that comes to mind are those last days. Pappa covered in … Pappa was suffering something terrible, Johan. And there was nothing I could do to help him. It’s as if these images have erased all the others, the good ones. There were so many good images. Pappa and I had a good marriage. He was a good man. But all I’m left with are these horrible memories. I can’t push them away. I can’t wipe them out. I try, but I can’t do it.”
Johan heard Mai yawning, and soon her book slid onto her lap. The fire had gone out. Neither of them spoke. They simply got on with doing the usual things a husband and wife do every night, without disturbing each other, without getting in the other’s way. Turn down the bedcovers. Brush teeth, go to the bathroom, wash hands. Kiss good night. Turn out the light.
But Johan knew he wouldn’t sleep that night. He rarely slept now, but he didn’t keep Mai awake complaining about it. He had a headache, a dull pain over his right eye, as if some irate little man had driven a fist into his forehead; not that it was unusual to have a headache when the weather was changing so fast. The nausea was worse—it just would not go away—and the comforter was too warm and smelled a little funny, and he couldn’t get comfortable. He tried to visualize all the healthy cells in his body smothering the unhealthy ones, the way a psychologist had advised him to do. But instead he found himself visualizing the opposite: death to the healthy cells. He cursed that psychologist, all the rotten psychologists and their rotten advice. He just lay there feeling worse and worse.
“Johan, are you all right?” Mai’s voice was soft. She wasn’t sleeping after all.
Johan said, “Give me your hand. I’m afraid.”
Mai gave him her hand. “Don’t be afraid. I love you.”
His voice broke. “Will you help me when I can’t take it anymore? When it gets to that point, will you help me?”
Mai lay still and gave his hand a squeeze. Neither of them said anything.
For a long time they lay like that, hand in hand in the dark. Johan shut his eyes. He was conscious of her hand and her breathing and her scent and her half sleep, and sleep for him soon seemed possible. His nausea abated, his headache too. Sleep was possible tonight, Johan thought, and he squeezed her hand. Sleep. Peace. You’re my best friend, Mai.
And just as sleep was enfolding him in its great black cloak, Mai sat up and switched on the lamp. Johan’s eyes snapped open. “What’s the matter?” he whispered. “I thought we were sleeping.”
“We’re not sleeping,” she said. “Anyway, I’m not.”
“What’s the matter, Mai?”
“Johan, what you’re asking me to do is against the law!”
“What?” Johan rubbed his eyes.
“What you’re asking me to do. What you’ve asked me several times to do.”
“Oh, that,” he whispered.
“It’s against the law.”
“What damn law?”
“Norwegian law. It’s against everything the Medical Association of this country stands for, don’t you see that?”
Johan was wide awake now. “And what about your own law, Mai?”
She thumped a fist on the comforter and looked at him. “My own law doesn’t count, dammit. Do you realize that you’re asking me to commit a crime?”
Johan’s eyes filled with tears. He hadn’t expected this. “Well, we’ll just have to go to Holland,” he said softly. “Or Belgium, someplace where it’s not a crime. And then we’ll have to bide our time in some hotel room until this cadaver is rotten enough for you to agree, with the law’s blessing— because that’s what matters to you, isn’t it?—to give me a legal injection.” He had to stop for breath. Then he said softly, “I thought you wouldn’t do it because … I thought you had personal reasons. I never thought about the legal aspect. I was thinking of this as a personal act, Mai, an agreement between two old friends, an act of mercy, that’s all.”
“I know,” Mai said.
“You’re the one who took Charley to the vet to be put to sleep. You didn’t balk at that.”
“No.”
“Woof, woof,” he murmured.
She smiled.
“Oh, what the hell,” Johan said, as if to put an end to the conversation. “Maybe I’ll come through this. That’s what I mean to do, you know.”
Mai was not listening. She didn’t even notice when he tapped her arm.
“Mai?” he whispered. “Where are you? Come back.”
She seized his hand. “Would you like to know why this is so difficult for me, Johan?”
“I thought we were sleeping,” he said, shaking his head.
There were tears in her eyes. “I think it’s monstrous to force a person to go on living against his will. I think it’s monstrous that people who are mortally ill and in great pain cannot be given help to die when they choose—if they ask for it, I mean. You talk about dignity. There is no dignity, Johan. People who are dying, old or sick or both, are reduced to helpless infants—first by nature, then by the hospitals. Is that what they mean by respect for human life? I can’t see that happen to you. I won’t. It goes against everything that is good and beautiful and true.”
Johan stared at the comforter. “That’s right,” he said.
“You ask me to help you, and I will, Johan. I will. You’re my husband, and I would give you anything, even this. But I’m afraid. I’m afraid that my courage will fail me because it’s you. Because you’re my best friend. Because I don’t want to see you die, even if life, for you, becomes nothing but pain. And I am scared of the consequences for me.”
She’s going too far, he thought. I don’t want this, not like this.
He said, “Yes, but it might not come to that, Mai. I’m feeling pretty good, actually. I think I’m on the mend.”
Mai clasped his hand between her two. She snuggled up close to him and kissed his lips. “My darling Johan.”
Johan cleared his throat. “I don’t think we should get too carried away, either. Here I am now, lying right next to you, alive and kicking.” He got out of bed and started to jump up and down in the white light of the bedside lamps. “See? Alive and kicking!” He waved his arms about as he jumped. “From now on, just call me Jumpin’ Johan!”
He was gasping for breath and there was a tightness in his chest, but he went on jumping. He shouted, “Jumpin’ Johan jumped and jumped, up and down he jumped.” Every time he came down, his feet hit the floor with a thud. Mai put her hands to her face.
“Stop that, please,” she whispered. “Come and lie down.”
But Johan would not stop. Thud! Thud! I’ll show her who can still jump till dawn, he thought.
“Look at me!” He gasped. “Look, Mai!”
“Stop it!” she shouted.
“I’ll show you who can jump till day breaks and the rooster crows.”
She began to cry.
Johan stopped. He was panting heavily. Her face was buried in her hands. He sat down on the bed and stroked her hair.
“Why do you do that?” she shouted.
“What, jumping?” There was a willful note in his voice.
He reached for the tissues they kept on the bedside table, in case he started bleeding during the night, and mopped his brow.
Mai turned to him. “You’re the one who wanted to talk about this seriously, so we’re talking. But then you have to go and make a joke of the whole thing. Do you kno
w what? You’re belittling us, Johan. You’re doing everything you can to avoid talking about what has befallen us, befallen both you and me. You’re sick. You’re not getting better. Do you know how much that hurts? And you refuse to admit it; that hurts too. We need to make plans. We need to make arrangements.” Her voice broke.
“I’m going to fight it, Mai.” But his voice was faint. Sweat poured off him, however much he mopped, his breathing was labored, and the nausea was coming back. He felt as if some creeping thing in his belly were trying to work its way up and out, but he whispered that he was going to fight this and then he mumbled that she musn’t take away what hope he had; she was supposed to take his hand and say that she would be with him, right there with him always. But she did not hear. Possibly he couldn’t quite form the words and say them out loud.
Mai said, “Johan, this conversation began with you asking me to help you. I need to know if you are sure you know what you’re asking for, and that you’re sure this is what you want—if the time comes. That’s just one of the things we have to talk about.”
“What about the consequences? For you, I mean.”
“I don’t know.”
Mai turned out the light. For a while they just listened to each other breathe.
Johan whispered, “All I want is for you to say that you’ll be with me when it becomes hard to bear. That you’ll hold my hand. You said that a while back, and I loved hearing you say it. I want to hear you say it again. The other part … about you helping me if … I hadn’t really thought it through properly, and you took me seriously. That scared me.” He gave a little laugh. “I don’t know what I want, you see. I don’t know what will happen, so it’s hard to know what I want.”
