Vivian

by Christina Hesselholdt

  And so she did, but she was not particularly keen on it. A little later she said: ‘I’m only good at things that interest me.’

  I hoped that she was interested in children and cooking and housekeeping.

  ‘Children, yes,’ she said.

  Mrs Rice

  When I’ve been sleeping with a man for some time (I did at least manage to have one other man before I got married), let’s say two or three years, it starts to feel incestuous, as though I know him far too well to perform the in all respects age-old steps with him; it starts to feel wrong and awkward, and it’s been like that with Peter for a long time. When I’ve known a man for some time, let’s say two or three years, I start to have a hard time sitting at the table with him. I simply can’t stand watching him eat, he seems to be chomping his food, and I can’t help imagining the food in his oral cavity being pulverized into an indistinct mass, a gruel or a porridge, a grey stream that vanishes down his throat, which I’m very sorry to say is now more like a sewer to me.

  Narrator

  She suffers from aesthetic hypersensitivity, the poor thing.

  Mrs Rice

  I hide it as best I can. I try to look away when he is chewing. Why does this sickly hypersensitivity only manifest itself after I have known the man for some time? And why is it reserved for the man I share a bed and a table with? My psychologist has not been able to answer that. The table manners and chewing of other people don’t bother me in the least, unless they are particularly glaring, thank goodness, otherwise I would almost be crippled, since a significant chunk of human interaction in this world revolves around consuming something together, be it food or be it drink.

  Narrator

  She is (still) young and full of burning desire, but Mr Rice has now become her brother and a disgusting masticator, so what does she do to let off steam? She throws herself at the soil, in the garden, she doesn’t use a shovel but bores into the ground with her hands, with her fingers and nails, and with no gardening gloves (except on days like today when she is expecting someone).

  When she was pregnant she was so full of desire that she was ready to explode, and lay in wait for Mr Rice everywhere. Now she leaves it to the tulips to impregnate her, now she rides the roses …

  Mrs Rice

  Nonsense, give me a man.

  Narrator

  One night she dreamt that she saw Hitler looking down at her from a poster on the wall, who in his odious voice shouted: ‘You must not masturbate!’ She hadn’t planned on it either, she thought in the dream – she had grown tired of it.

  Now the car rolls up the drive, now she pulls off the gardening gloves, now she adjusts her hair and pulls Ellen up from the grass, now the suburban housewife with the delightful child with dark curls welcomes the family’s new nanny, and now we hope the suburban housewife does not have dirt on her lips after copulating with the flowerbed.

  Viv

  That’s the lady who saw me collapse after receiving word of his death the last time we were together, now I’ll have to show her my strong side.

  Narrator

  In order to avoid unnecessary confusion: the following events took place approximately one week earlier.

  Viv

  The phone rang. Mrs Rice answered and handed me the receiver. I had not heard Aunt Alma’s voice for years. I stammered. I have never stammered before. I stammered the word ‘father’ so many times that she lost patience and shouted ‘Yes, he’s dead, and you might as well know straight away that I have removed both of you from my will.’ Then my voice finally stopped skipping – it was the notion of money that settled it, that returned it to its senses, but only for a moment, before the stammering seized on ‘how’. And while ‘how-how-how-how’ threw me out of joint I knew that I was stammering to postpone my understanding of the message I had received; that this skipping gave my mind, my soul, my consciousness, my old head time to prepare for the shock; I sensed the noise, the shock got closer, then it was on top of me and landed directly on my head and caused my knees to buckle. Mrs Rice, whom I barely knew, slid a chair beneath me.

  I asked how it could have happened. It wasn’t difficult, my aunt responded. The cold and the booze. His heart had stopped one night under a bridge. But I thought he was in Florida. No, he had travelled north.

  That was not accurate, I later discovered. It was an out-and-out lie. He lived in Queens. He had been found dead in his apartment. His wife Berta had died a month earlier.

  ‘Yes, you have lost a father,’ Aunt Alma said, ‘but I have lost my little brother.’

  I don’t know why she thought that was worse; she must have insight into a hierarchy that I’m not familiar with.

  He is dead, not as a man of seventy-six but as an entire series of men, of all the ages and all the temperaments I have known: the friendly one, because he was sometimes friendly, and the disgusting one; the man who forced me down onto my brother’s lap, and the man we waited for at the front door because we hoped his coat pockets were bulging with misshapen candy taken off the production line. And the drunken bawler who could sound as ugly as Hitler in the German I never learned. I learned Mother’s language, not Father’s. And he was also the man I was afraid of getting separated from in the throng of people when the police forced their way through the crowd with Langley Collyer’s corpse. And the man Mother made me sing the Daddy song to in order to make him stay.

  Father is marching towards me in all his forms.

  Alma was not the only one who had removed us from their will – our old father had done the same thing. He left us nothing ‘for the reason that I have not seen them in many years and that they have not been close to me’. Those words were written about Carl and me. He deserted me, he left me, I mourned for him back then. I am finished mourning. New chapter.

  Aunt Alma

  They had done him up nicely. Before we went in to see him we were told that we must not touch him, or press against him – why on earth would we do that? – because then there was the risk of fluids running out, the nature of which I had no desire to imagine, though maybe it would just be pure alcohol, out of his mouth. ‘Did you put make-up on him?’ I asked. But what’s-his-name hadn’t, he had just washed him.

  ‘It’s your fault,’ I said to Maria, ‘you drove him from house and home. You didn’t understand him, you French bastard.’

  Vivian just stood looking stupid. She didn’t even defend her mother. I couldn’t understand why his face wasn’t flushed and red-veined, that’s why I asked if he was wearing make-up. He was pallid. I was nowhere near crying. I have to admit that I broke wind, silently, I could run the risk of doing it because they would all think the smell came from him. At this point we, the so-called immediate family, only get together at funerals – there are no weddings. Well, I suppose I was just rummaging through my purse, at any rate it escaped my notice that Vivian had pushed her way forward to the front rank and was now bent over him, as close to his face as she could possibly get, and started to photograph him.

  ‘Vivian,’ Maria shouted, ‘you mustn’t press against him.’

  ‘Stop that at once, have you no respect for the dead?’ I said. But she didn’t hear a thing: she just continued, right up close. And that made him even more into an object, and I shouted that at her, ‘He’s not an object, he’s still a human being,’ but then I began to have doubts. Vivian had made him into an object. A moment ago, he had been a dead human being. Then she spoke to me: ‘Grand-père offered Mother his name, but she didn’t want it.’

  ‘That’s right, I didn’t want it,’ Maria said; ‘I had at long last managed to shake off Maier,’ – and she pointed – she actually pointed – at the bier – ‘was I then supposed to hitch Baille to it?’

  ‘We manage fine with the names we’ve got,’ Vivian said.

  ‘But he was always good for a laugh,’ my husband said (we’re not married; he doesn’t want to, but nobody knows that). Imagine having been nothing more than good for a laugh.

  There w
as a moment of tension: would the door suddenly fly open to reveal Carl standing there? But how would he have found out that the funeral was today, how would he even have found out that his father was dead? I saw Maria and Vivian steal a glance at the door more than once. And I wanted to shout at them, ‘Do you two think he would even dream of coming? You managed to drive him out on the road, too, he’s probably lying dead and bloated in a ditch somewhere…’ I was on the verge of saying it, when I felt my husband’s hand on my arm, because when it comes to me, he’s a mind-reader. Joseph squeezed and whispered into my ear: ‘On a day like this there has to be a limit to the malice.’

  Then I remember that he is Russian, that he doesn’t understand a thing.

  All the same it surprises me that he wants to defend Vivian, I thought he still held a grudge against her after that telegram she sent to the Russian Embassy in ’56.

  But he has clearly forgotten that, so I nudge him and whisper ‘Fifty-six’.

  Narrator

  ‘May you be haunted by the blood of Hungarians,’ Viv wrote in French to be certain the Russians understood it. And it sounded splendid. So splendid that she quoted it several times. And then more fuel was added to the fire.

  Aunt Alma

  After the ceremony, we went into town together with the intention of going our separate ways, all suspicious of one another, I have to say, apart from my husband and I, obviously. The way Vivian stared at my fox fur. I remembered Maria’s coat, she bought it in the forties when she and Charles entered the ring for another round even though he also had Berta, and he earned two thousand dollars a year, so she didn’t need to work, but just went to the pictures, sometimes twice a day. He bought loads of hats for himself. And his shirts were sent out to be washed and ironed. Vivian is wearing the same style of clothing as twenty years ago, she never left the fifties. Her clothes look like they’re from the Salvation Army, and they probably are, too. We part ways at a street corner; they know that I’ve written them out of the will, but I don’t think we’ll see each other again, and for a moment I am moved by this, which is why I bring it up again: ‘And remember not to expect a penny from me, you have his death on your conscience, I don’t know how you sleep at night’.

  Vivian stood with that peculiar smile that I’m unable to decipher, and Maria had already turned on her heels. Then Vivian followed her, I took Joseph by the arm, and we stood watching them disappear, two women who looked like they were from another time, Joseph didn’t think we would see them again either. I’ll probably be the next to be shovelled six feet under. Then they had better keep away. Now I’m going to say what I once again thought when I stood looking at Charles. I thought: why all of this fuss? Why do generations have to pass and come and go? Why weren’t there simply a finite number of people created from the beginning who were then immortal? Then you could avoid all of this bother with procreation (I’ve never taken the plunge) and death. I don’t mention it to Joseph, because then I know I would be enlightened about his great borscht-eating Lord.

  I resent there being someone who knows more about me than I do, here I am enjoying the springtime, thinking it’s lovely, and that I’d like to be here next year too, and He’s sitting up there with his abacus knowing that this will be my last year, or that I have exactly three springs remaining.

  Maria

  The sight of Charles at the end of the road made me think of the wooden signs in the French countryside where the roads divide: they stand in the landscape, pointing.

  Narrator

  So we’re back where we left off.

  Viv

  There’s Ellen, the slightly podgy child. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that she’s sheathed in fat. It takes some effort to reach her. That’s why I rap her lightly on her fat cheek and say, ‘Knock, knock.’

  I’m just supposed to call them ‘Sarah’ and ‘Peter’. They’re liberal-minded. They can call me Viv. But Ellen has to say Miss Maier.

  ‘We’re probably about the same age,’ Sarah said. I didn’t respond to that.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I would like a large padlock, please. And nobody must ever come in here. That is my only condition. The room at the top of the stairs is mine.’

  ‘No admittance,’ I said to Ellen, and wagged my finger in the air.

  The staircase is wide. It flows up. It flows down.

  ‘And I would like to have the newspaper when you’re finished with it, please. The newspapers, even – much better.’

  Sarah is a journalist and subscribes to several papers.

  Ellen shouldn’t come running towards me from behind, she knows that now. I’m not Mary Poppins, like she thought. They had told her that now she was going to have her very own Mary Poppins. I have explained to her that this neighbourhood by the immensely beautiful (and today shimmering in the sun) Lake Michigan is different from the rest of the world, and every afternoon after school I want to show her all sorts of things that aren’t found here. My day: 7 a.m. wake Ellen, make sure she eats her breakfast and gets on the school bus. Grocery shopping. A little cleaning but it just gets dirty again. At 1 p.m. pick Ellen up from the school bus, make sure she eats her lunch. Then look after Ellen, and that means: take Ellen out in the world. Make dinner to serve at 7 p.m., then bathe Ellen and put her to bed, unless Sarah feels like doing it. But I prefer to be told that first thing in the morning if that’s the case. Off on Thursdays and Sundays. Sarah and Peter have separate bedrooms. They’ve got the child they wanted. Peter has made work his god, for Sarah it’s work and the garden. They hope and believe I will make Ellen my god. I intend to make her into a person just like me – free and independent, the way I see myself on good days. I say things as they are to my children. The truth gives you a thick skin, and without a thick skin you won’t have a chance in this great vessel we call Life, you’ll be scrubbed to pieces.

  Narrator

  Hanging in the wardrobe was a fur collar with a fox head and dangling paws. Over the years Vivian took several pictures of women with fox-fur collars; in some photographs it appears as though there is a conversation taking place between the dead foxes on the women’s shoulders, behind their backs.

  The house consisted of twelve rooms and three bathrooms. Vivian used her bathroom for developing. When an object made it up to her room, it never came out again.

  A very beautiful light came in through the large windows in the hall, whose walls were painted a quiet red. And in the afternoons. She stood. Sometimes. For a moment. Outside of her room at the top of the staircase, with her eyes shut, and felt the warmth.

  Peter

  Vivian arrived one Sunday and made us her first meal, a welcome meal, on the Monday night. We simply could not guess what it was that she had served us, becoming increasingly mystified the more we chewed. And she looked jubilant when we couldn’t guess what the meat that was unlike anything I had ever tasted was. We had to give up in the end.

  ‘Tongue,’ she said.

  I could see Sarah was about to choke on her mouthful. Ellen was by then already in love with Viv and behaved like a model child.

  ‘Salted ox tongue.’

  Narrator

  Many years later, after having been with Viv day-in, day-out, with her revealing next to nothing about herself, Peter Rice gave some thought to the symbolism of that first meal, the tongue salted and devoured.

  Peter

  And with the tongue she served a dark, full-bodied red wine, an Egri Bikavér intended for us alone, while she drank water. We knew that she came from France, you could also tell from her accent, and that she thought Americans smiled too much – and showed their teeth too much. She always smiled with her mouth closed. And then there’s the fact that she was a non-practising Catholic. Neither then nor later did we discover anything else about her.

  Ellen

  I did not think she was Mary Poppins – she has no umbrella. She walks very fast and swings her arms. I have to be careful not to get an arm in the head.

  Narrator

/>   That’s right, long strides and swinging arms, paddling across the troubled waters of the mind.

  Viv

  Today I photographed a pigeon resting on a cornice, blinking down at the streets. In my version it became heroic. Because it took in the streets with its small gaze. A little later, outside the station – someone must have dropped some food because a grey sea of pigeons surged upon the same spot; a fresh wave arrived and bored into the crowd, and here and there a wing flew up above the competing mass resembling a sail – feathers were flying. The nausea came at once, I had to go behind a shed and throw up. A little while later when I squeezed through the hectic crowd of people in the ticket hall and over to my platform (where all of us in our grey and dark coats were congregated, a few lit up by scarves with a little light and colour; if someone had thrown a diamond necklace into the air, and it had landed on the floor between us, we would have fought for it, with sleeves and collars waving about) the discomfort was over.