by Linn Ullmann
She squeezed his hand; he went on.
“All I want is to lie here next to you.”
“And you will lie here next to me.”
“That’s all. Nothing else.”
“That’s all.”
“Let’s forget the other part. I didn’t like that conversation. I just want to take one day at a time.”
“Then let’s forget all about it.”
He breathed a sigh of relief.
“Good night, Mai.”
“Good night, Johan.”
First came the light: white, hot. Then came the headache. Johan was woken by the headache. Or the light. Or both. The sheets were damp with sweat, his and hers. The fist had ground its way deeper into his skull, except that it was no longer a fist, it was a hammer, pounding away. Pounding him to pieces, he thought. “Go right ahead. Don’t mind me,” he muttered to himself. He dragged himself into the bathroom, threw up in the sink, and stared at himself in the mirror. His boil leered redly. He knew they would have to go back to Oslo right away. It was no use, this being away. He had realized it yesterday, but now there was no time to lose.
He went back to the bedroom. Mai was up. She had turned on the light and started packing.
“I’ll just take the essentials,” she said, without looking up. “I can come back in a day or so and get the rest, close the place up.”
“I think we’d better leave as soon as we can,” Johan said.
“I know.”
She looked up at him, trying to keep her features composed, but her face told him exactly what she could see in his.
“Is it that bad?” he whispered.
“No, no,” she said, turning away.
Johan took her hand and sank down on the edge of the bed. She sat down next to him. They stayed there like that, hand in hand on the edge of the bed.
“I don’t want it to be like this, Mai. I don’t want it to get any worse. This headache … it … I don’t know why my head should hurt so much.”
“We’ll get it checked out.”
“What we talked about yesterday?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know what came over me … not to be able to finish a conversation that I actually initiated. It matters so much to me, do you understand? I want you to help me, Mai. I want you to help me when the time comes. I can’t take this!” Johan was sobbing now. “Help me, Mai! I need to know that I have some control! Things just keep on happening to me, you know? I need to have some control! Promise me that you’ll help me!”
“I will help you!”
“I don’t want to be humiliated.”
“You won’t be humiliated.”
“I want to have control.”
“You will have control.”
“And dignity?”
“And dignity.”
“You’ll help me?”
“I’ll help you.”
“You promise?”
“I promise.”
She leaned into him, put her arms around him, and whispered, “You’re sure about this, Johan? I have to know that you’re completely sure.”
“Yes.”
“You have to tell me if you’re not absolutely sure.”
“I’m sure.”
Johan looked at Mai. She was crying. But there was something else, too, a new look on her face. He had learned to read that face: the grief over the child she had aborted all those years ago, the pointless lies she told that he seldom bothered to comment on; the seconds before she reached orgasm—the way she laughed then—and her mouth when she was asleep, a slack and rather ugly mouth, vulnerable and totally unaware of being observed. Johan looked at that face now.
Her eyes met his. “I think you’ve made the right decision,” she whispered. “No one, certainly not you, should have to suffer more than necessary.” She wiped away his tears and her own. “And we have the time that’s left to us, Johan. That time is ours.”
“That time is ours,” he echoed.
She got up and went back to the suitcase. His eyes followed her. She was so light on her feet, like a young girl. And her face, Mai’s face. Johan couldn’t find the right word. She packed a few things and went out to the kitchen. He heard water running. He sat where he was on the edge of the bed. His head. He wanted to scream: AHHHHHHHHHH. OHHHHHHHHHH. AHHHHHHHH! Maybe he could sit here and scream until it passed. A blinding white flash. AHHHHHHHHHH! Another flash. He imagined his head, a severed head, Johan’s head on a platter. Who was it again? Who chopped off whose head and served it up on a platter? Was it Caesar’s head on a platter? No, no, no. Not a hammer, a sledgehammer. And Mai? What was it about Mai, about her face? He had always been able to read her face, but this time, before she got up and went to the kitchen and turned on the tap, what was it? A word, he couldn’t think of it. She said she would help him. He said he was sure. It was a deal. Then he glimpsed something in her face. It was as if something had finally loosened its grip. He pictured her at the piano on the rare occasions when she forgot that she wasn’t gifted enough. What was it her father had said? She wasn’t graced. On those rare occasions when she forgot she wasn’t graced.
Grace, Johan thought. Mai’s face. He whispered, “I have no faith. I have no hope. But I do have love.”
Could it have been relief?
Again he pictured the look on Mai’s face. Yes, that was the word. It was relief he had seen in her face when he said he was sure. Not composure, not regret, but relief. Poor Mai.
She had promised to do as he asked. He had begged her, and in the end she had promised, and relief had crossed her face.
Something inside him fell apart. He hadn’t thought it would be like this. He wanted to call out to her, shake her, plead with her, only touch her. “This isn’t how I thought it would be, Mai!” But he couldn’t. It hurt. The words wouldn’t come, only sobs. Not even sobs, only weird inhuman sounds that seemed as if they couldn’t be his. And the pain in his head, that couldn’t be his. Johan stretched out on the bed, pulled the covers over his face, and lay quite still. Like when he was a child, waiting for his mother to find him, take him in her arms, and comfort him until the hurt was gone.
III
THE DOOR
His naked, bluish-white old-man’s body is covered by a hospital gown and nothing else. Penis, testicles, buttocks—all on display. Like a grotesque overgrown child in a hand-me-down Sunday dress, he thinks, tugging at the gown. Even with his brain pumped full of the sedative they give you before the anesthetic, he doesn’t forget to yank at the gown. Why doesn’t the damn thing cover the most vital parts? Johan Sletten, always at pains to keep a certain distance between himself and others, but here he is, flaunting his private parts like some species of sea anemone.
The white coats take no notice of him.
The white coats have no faces, only hands, countless hands, all seeming to belong to one big body. It’s like being tended by a giant white octopus, he thinks, but when he opens his mouth to tell them, no words make it out. In a little while the surgeon will have another go at him. He’ll cut through layers of skin, fat, cartilage, and muscle, blood running all the while. Although everything is green and cool and quiet here, like the bottom of the ocean. And as the female anesthetist—never a face, just a voice—whispers softly, with infinite tenderness, “Time to go to sleep now, Johan,” he sees the small rusty bread knife in its drawer (second from the top) in the kitchen at the cottage in Värmland. He sees Mai, who has just been baking, or is it his mother?
Could it be his mother he sees?
When this is over, he’s going to tell the white coats and everyone else down here on the bottom of the ocean about the taste of home-baked bread with butter and freshly mashed wild strawberries with sugar.
Johan’s mother was born Agnes Lind. In 1930 she married Henry Sletten, a cautious, well-meaning man. All you could really say about him was that he loved going to the movies, so much that he even went (when that time came) to see German films shot in Technicolor for which G
oebbels himself had written the heroine’s last lines. Johan’s father was a clerk, his mother a secretary. They lived with Johan and his older sister, Anne, in a three-room apartment on Ole Vigs Gate on the west side of Oslo. The children attended Majorstuen school. Life was pretty uneventful. The day peace was declared, Johan heard his mother singing softly to herself in the kitchen:
In my little, little world of flowers, oh so slowly, slowly pass the happy hours.
The best day of the year, at least as far as the children were concerned and certainly for Johan, the family’s youngest member, was Christmas Eve. Even the words themselves—say Christmas Eve often enough, and a great green fan seems to unfold, adorned with glittering strokes of color.
Christmas Eve was always celebrated at the house of Johan’s Grandmother Lind, a strong-minded gray-haired widow who, despite her stern demeanor and Christmas presents of hand-knitted scarves and woolen stockings, positively adored her family. On Christmas Eve morning, after she set the table with snowy damask, blue porcelain, and the best crystal (with only the odd chip here and there); after she lit the candles on the tree Johan and his sister had trimmed the night before; and after she changed into her nicest red dress—after all the finishing touches, she would take her place by the window, behind the red curtains in her Frogner apartment, with a small glass of sherry in her hand, waiting for her guests to arrive. And when she caught sight of them on the street below, in their winter boots and bulky coats and last year’s woolly hats, with brightly wrapped presents under their arms, trudging through wet snow on a bright and beautiful winter evening, she’d whisper to herself, “See, now! Here comes my little family!”
Johan gasped. How it all came back to him! He hadn’t even opened his eyes, and it all came rushing back: Christmas Eve. Granny. And Mamma.
Until her dying day, Johan’s mother tended her own little, little world. He could hear her voice far away, beyond the door. Not the bedroom door, blue and closed, his father’s door to heaven, but the kitchen door, which by no stretch of the imagination could have been said to be improper—or anything else, for that matter, except safe—because it was always ajar. Beyond the kitchen door, a glimpse of his mother’s hair, the sound of his mother’s voice.
The cannula inserted into his hand didn’t hurt; the sheets were stiff, clean, white, boiled in one of those big one-eyed washing machines down in the hospital basement. The white coats came and went. His body was no secret to them. They had opened him up, looked inside, helped themselves to this organ and that, laid hands on everything that beat and breathed and lived. But they hadn’t touched the beast. Maybe they had taken a little bit here, a little bit there. But the beast, no, not the rat. It was a rat that had taken up residence inside him, dancing, whistling, mating, and pressing out new rats right under the white coats’ noses.
They would soon be moving him out of intensive care and back to the ward with the other patients. Mai had already been to see him. When he came to, she was there, holding his hand and stroking his cheek. After a while, when she was confident that he was fully conscious, she whispered to him that they hadn’t been able to do anything.
The white coats had opened him up, looked inside, and concluded that there was nothing they could do. Nothing but stitch him up again.
“Do you understand what I’m saying to you, Johan?” she whispered.
“I think so.”
“I wanted to tell you myself. I wanted …”
Johan nodded and looked up at her. “Did you know, Mai darling, that Pappa painted the bedroom door blue? He said it was a door to heaven.”
Mai leaned over him and kissed his lips. He caught the scent of her long hair. Apples, or possibly pears. Fruit of some kind, anyway.
Later they wheeled him along to a ward with six beds. There was only one other patient, a man who kept coughing. Johan asked for a screen. A screen was provided. He didn’t need to ask for a morphine pump. That too was provided.
This was in the middle of August. Three weeks later he was dead.
It came as no surprise to anyone. He might have survived for another month, maybe two, who knows? But the beast would have triumphed in the end, and the pain might have been bearable or it might not.
Mai, at any rate, deems Johan’s pain no longer bearable. One evening she comes and sits on the edge of his bed.
“Johan,” she whispers. But he does not answer, just moans faintly. She looks at him for a good long while before opening her purse and taking out two syringes. She has come prepared. She had to. She cannot take the risk of anyone coming in and disturbing her, possibly kicking up a fuss, or of having her courage desert her, once she starts fiddling with vials and syringes.
“Johan,” she says again.
He opens his eyes and looks at her, looks right at her.
“It’s time … isn’t it?” she asks.
And he looks at her.
“I think it’s time, Johan.” This time she isn’t asking.
He says nothing. But she knows him. They have a language all their own. He’d said so himself, many times. Or was it she who had said it? Anyway, it is time.
“I love you,” she whispers, and he closes his eyes.
Now she lifts his hand, moistens the skin of his upper arm with a wad of cotton, and injects him with the barbiturate. She sees that he is sleeping and that he feels no pain; that it is good. So she gives him the lethal injection. She watches and waits. So quick and yet so imperceptible. No change in his facial expression, just a trickle of blood from the boil on his cheek. Not much. What had she expected? She’s seen people die before. It’s like exhaling. She lifts his wrist and feels for a pulse. It’s almost over. She bends down to him, her blouse rustling. She puts her ear to his chest. Good. It is done. She steps back.
Three weeks earlier, Johan shut his eyes and thought that Mai’s hair smelled nice. He pictured her standing in front of the mirror, running the brush through her hair, one-two-three-four-five… .
If he were to sit up in bed, if he could just manage to sit up, he would catch a glimpse of Mamma’s hair beyond the kitchen door. He would hear her voice. The songs she used to sing. One song especially, that silly little song she loved to sing long after everyone else had forgotten it:
Among the dreams so fair
That in my heart I hold
Is a vision of joy so rare
that e’er will linger there.
In my little, little world of flowers …
“Do you remember our walks, Mamma?”
“Yes, of course I do.”
She sat down on the edge of his bed, gazing at him with a worried look, the way she did when he was small and running a temperature and had to stay home from school. She wore a blue dress and beige walking shoes. Her long dark braid hung down her back.
“Would you put your hand on my forehead, please, Mamma?”
He couldn’t have been more than six or seven that summer, so it must have been 1939. The family had rented a house in the country, and every single day Johan and his mother went for a walk to look for wild strawberries. She walked ahead and he followed behind, each carrying a white pail, Mamma with her long brown braid, her thin white cotton dress, and her bottom lurching from side to side as she walked.
“You had a long brown braid and a thin white dress,” Johan said out loud.
When he looked up, she was still sitting on the edge of his bed, smiling.
“But one day we went our different ways,” Johan said.
Little Johan spied a clearing in the forest and wandered off, away from the path, away from his mother. There in the clearing, among the moss and twigs, under a big tree, he found the wild strawberries. His eye fell first on one big red berry, and another, then yet another, and when he bent down for a closer look he saw that there were lots of them. Lots and lots, enough to fill a whole pail.
Johan turned to look for his mother. He wanted to show her.
It was always his mother who found the strawberry patches, never Jo
han, until today. And every time his mother found a patch she’d beckon to him and put a finger to her lips, warning him to be very quiet. As if the strawberries would turn into clover and moss before your very eyes at the first loud sound or sudden movement. You hardly dared blink.
“Patches like this don’t really exist,” she’d whisper. “It’s best to pick them before they disappear. Don’t take your eyes off them.”
He knelt down on the mossy ground and picked and picked, turning every now and then to look for her. Where was she? He didn’t dare call out to her until the pail was full. Here he was, little Johan, picking enough berries for the whole family. She’d be so proud of him!
But why didn’t she come? How could she not tell that he had found such a patch, such a place, the sort of place where you had to be quieter than quiet, or else it would all disappear? You had to trick the place into thinking that you hadn’t seen it, hadn’t touched it, that you weren’t there at all. So Johan picked and picked, but with each berry he dropped into his pail he turned to look for his mother (even calling out to her once, very softly, because the place could hear everything), and each time he reached to gather more—yes, even more—he expected the place to exact its revenge, to turn into a heaving, gray, monstrous swamp.
Finally he shouted, Mamma! Where are you? He looked around: the trees, the sky, the grass. Nothing. Now he really had ruined everything, and his mother hadn’t even heard him. Everything was ruined. Now it was only a matter of time. He lay on the mossy ground, hands over his ears, thinking that the heaving gray swamp was bound to be a lot more dangerous than the monsters. Mamma!
And then her fingers were in his hair, her voice high above among the treetops and the light. “Johan! What’s the matter? I’ve been right over here the whole time.”
He rolled over onto his back and gazed at her: still in white, smiling, and with her index finger to her lips.
He sat up. “Mamma, look!” he whispered.
He showed her all the berries he had picked before he got scared. She smiled, bent down over the pail, put her whole face inside it, and inhaled their scent.
