Vivian

by Christina Hesselholdt

  The tears fall on my knees because I have pulled them up to my chin.

  ‘She made herself completely stiff,’ she says. ‘I would say to her: “I would like to help you.” And how do you think she replied? She was four years old. She replied: “You can’t.” How do you think that makes a mother feel?’

  Miss Maier returns, and I think she is telling the lady off because I’m crying. She hands me a handkerchief and says that it’s perfectly clean. I don’t think it is clean, but my throat and my head hurt from crying, and I want to stop. Miss Maier says to her in our language that now they are not to speak French any longer, because everything goes wrong in French; American is a calmer language. She says to me that we are going to spend the night there, and then the tears come flooding out again. Miss Maier points at the flowers on the table in a vase and says: ‘Ellen picked them, they looked better yesterday.’

  ‘They have been on a long journey,’ the lady says. ‘They’re drooping a little, they are tired – perhaps they’ll perk up overnight.’

  But it must never become night.

  We eat dinner in the kitchen, where instead of cupboard doors there are curtains, so that you can’t see what is happening inside the cupboards, and which wrinkle up at the top. The paint on the pipes is flaking. There are ugly sounds coming from another apartment. We are completely quiet. Then Miss Maier points to the meat on my plate with her fork and says: ‘I promise that soon I’m going to show you where what you’re eating comes from.’ Then the lady says to me: ‘Vivian has never been able to get enough of reality.’ I don’t know how she knows all this about Miss Maier. I have to sleep on a yellow bed with black spots on it that they call an ottoman. I’m afraid to shut my eyes even though Miss Maier has left the door to the living room open a crack. I have to sleep in my underwear. When one of them speaks loudly, the other says shush. They are talking about Charles, who has taken the lady’s name and is probably outside under open skies, maybe in Florida, because life is easier where it is hot. Miss Maier says that when it rained when he was a child, he was scared that the dead would fall down from heaven (did she really say that?), because he had seen how paste dissolves in water.

  ‘Nonsense Carl, I said,’ Miss Maier said. ‘When we die, we disappear completely, how else would there be room for the next batch?’ Now they both laugh.

  ‘And the first time I put him in the zinc tub he screamed because he thought the water was black,’ the French lady says.

  She mimics him, ‘I don’t want to bathe in the black water I don’t want to bathe in the black water,’ and laughs unkindly.

  I am eventually allowed to have the yellow string, the bells shout no no no when they are unwound from the door handle, the smallest in a thin little voice, the mother’s sounds golden – her tongue slowly strikes the body. Now Miss Maier is talking about her masterpieces from Champsaur which have been made into postcards, and the French lady says that she knows that she will never return there, and that it is a shame she left her Rollei there. But that on the other hand it doesn’t matter, because everything has its time. Now the words on the other side of the door have started to become a piercing mishmash, I understand nothing, it’s French, and I am scared that everything is going wrong, that we will never leave. Miss Maier keeps saying that I should look at the bells, and I do, but I don’t like them any longer, they are cold stiff skirts where the real body inside is also the tongue. Now the French lady comes in carrying a candle, and if she is not allowed to console me, she’ll get angry.

  In the morning they tell me that I screamed, then fainted. But I don’t care because now we’re going home, and it was really stupid to have taken me along.

  On the way home, on the train, Miss Maier says I will have to learn to like myself, because it’s not certain that there will always be others who do. I don’t believe that, but she nods and says yes. Then how do you do it? She says that everyone can find something or other inside themselves that they like. She says I have to close my eyes and find it. But I shouldn’t tell her what it is. Have you found it? I have. (But there was a lot to choose from.) Then she says that I have to pretend that I am grabbing the end of something, and pull on it. The more I pull the more it unfolds, and finally it covers me entirely. That’s what you do, she says, isn’t that nice? Now the thing that you like fills everything. Yeah. Close your eyes and sit and enjoy it. I think it’s so that she can photograph people on the train without me disturbing her.

  Maria

  When you get old, all you have is your steel helmet of grey hair, your age for a shield, and the bad conscience of others, the sense of guilt, to poke at. But Vivian is immune to that. Vivian is immune to most things.

  I had a child who was completely different from me. She doesn’t know what longing is. I think I can say for certain that when Vivian was young (no, she is no longer young), she never left a party and locked herself in a room and sat down on the floor with her hands on her temples, because she longed so wildly that she had to collect herself for a moment before she could again be with other people. She has never had any desire to have change and redemption come from someone else. And what is there to long for then, I mean really long for? And I don’t mean longing for the workday to end, or longing to be back in Champsaur and the mountains, away from the sombre backdrop of skyscrapers that have never seemed real to me.

  Nobody has touched me for years now, and in all likelihood nobody will ever touch me again. Not until my corpse is washed; I hope for gentle hands.

  Sometimes I run my fingers over my throat and my cheeks in the most featherlike manner. And I have discovered that there are nerves in my eyelashes. I put black on them today and the mascara brush, yes, it tickled furthest in where the lashes meet the lid, I happened to think of Vivian who as a child asked if you could get cancer in your hair. No richness has replaced the richness there was (and is) in the past.

  Viv

  They hold hands, they fall asleep on the train and find rest on one another’s shoulders, or they have their nodding heads support one another, the married couples, all the married couples, when they surrender to sleep together. I don’t understand why anyone would expose themselves to falling asleep on the train. It happened to me only once, and I woke with drool running down my chin. I was always a bag of bones and nobody thought of calling me princess, nor could I ever have thought of calling Ellen or any of my other children that. Nobody is going to come and put the brakes on me, nobody is going to steal my life, even though I wonder what it will be like not to have anyone to lean against when I grow old, but there are after all no guarantees. Just make sure that you don’t take a tumble from the big wheel of life – there is nothing more to do. I have never in my life seen a hand I would like to have close to me.

  The high school boys buy sandwiches during lunch break and are already eating them on the way out of the shop. When I caught them on camera yesterday, it occurred to me that, even when I was a girl, I never wondered whether somewhere or other out there was the one for me. I don’t think Carl ever had a girl, but he certainly could have had one without me knowing, because he would never have taken her home with him and subjected her to Mother or Father. I don’t think so though: first he had the boys and the tricks, the cheque frauds, the reformatory, the prison, then came the drugs, six different types, then came the mental hospital, and then he was gone.

  Sarah

  ‘Sarah, Sarah!’ she started to shout, from out in the garden, and I thought something had happened to Ellen and raced outside to the garden, but thank God nothing had happened. Viv was just enormously agitated about an experience they had just had on the train, where they had driven past some apartment blocks where the washing was hung to dry on lines stretching between the windows, and then Ellen had said: ‘Look, Miss Maier, they have outdoor wardrobes,’ because she had never before seen washing hung out to dry, but then Miss Maier also said: ‘Ellen! Not all people have washing machines and driers like your mother. Some people wash their clothes in
a tub and hang them out to dry on a line.’

  And when she came home: ‘Sarah, Sarah, it’s scandalous that she doesn’t know how the majority of people live.’

  And she simply could not stop: ‘It’s a scandal, it’s a scandal!’ She kept saying it while she stood picking blackcurrants, she was so indignant that she was ripping and tearing at the poor bush, and I got scared that she was going to pull it up by the root. When she used the term ‘rich ghetto’ I went and put my hand on her shoulder and told her that was enough, that it was nonsense, and could she please stop crushing the berries.

  Ellen

  I have hundreds of glass animal figurines that I have bought in that little shop with all the clutter. Miss Maier also buys things there. She likes little things, just like me. When she has to leave a name so that they can phone her and tell her that the items she has ordered have arrived, she says that she doesn’t have a telephone. She is allowed to use ours. But she has to give her name so they can write a name in the notes. ‘Then write V. Smith,’ she said. When we got outside, she said, ‘You shouldn’t tell everyone you meet who you are – remember that.’

  Narrator

  Vivian only calls herself V. Smith when she really needs some peace.

  In documents they (authorities of every kind) have always got her name down the wrong way and spelled it differently: Von Meier, Maier, V. Meier, Meyer. So when you hear that Vivian sometimes spelled her name one way, sometimes another way, I would just interject that it was the authorities who started it, that they were the ones who inspired that practice.

  Just once, upon her departure from France, Vivian became Vivienne and other times Viven.

  Ellen

  She has told me twice that she thinks the glass figurines are unhygienic and have to be washed. They are standing on my windowsill, the unicorn is the leader. The bear is the only one who can make him laugh and change his mind. The deer just do what they are told. In the afternoon she came in carrying a tub of water and a bottle. What is it? It’s ammonia water. She pulled the stopper out of the bottle and poured it in to the tub. Then she held the tub up to the windowsill and swept my glass figurines into it. She was wearing rubber gloves, and she stirred them round and round. The animals thrashed about down there, clattering together. I know they can’t stand touching one another. When I take them to school with me, I roll them up in cotton wool and place them inside a chocolate box, each with their own space, just like in a stable. Afterwards I didn’t know whose legs belonged to whom. Miss Maier said I could pretend that they were ill and that’s why they were lying down. I piled the legs together and pushed them into the corner. Miss Maier sat down on my bed and said she wanted to read something to me about how unhygienic it once was at the stockyards here in the city:

  ‘It seemed that they [the meatpacking companies] must have agencies all over the country, to hunt out old and crippled and diseased cattle to be canned. There were cattle which had been fed on “whiskey-malt”, the refuse of the breweries, and had become what the men called “steerly” – which means covered with boils. It was a nasty job killing these, for when you plunged your knife into them, they would burst and splash foul-smelling stuff in your face; and when a man’s sleeves were smeared with blood, and his hands steeped in it, how was he ever to wipe his face, or to clear his eyes so that he could see? They [the plant owners] welcomed tuberculosis in the cattle they were feeding, because it would fatten them more quickly… They [the butchers inside the stockyards] would have no nails – they had worn them off pulling hides; their knuckles were swollen so that their fingers spread out like a fan. There were men who worked in the cooking rooms, in the midst of steam and sickening odours, by artificial light; in these rooms the germs of tuberculosis might live for two years, but the supply was renewed every hour. Worst of all, however, were the fertilizer men, and those who served in the cooking rooms. These people could not be shown to the visitor – for the odour of a fertilizer man would scare off any ordinary visitor within a hundred yards, and as for the other men, who worked in tank rooms full of steam, and in some of which there were open vats near the level of the floor, their peculiar trouble was that they fell into the vats, and when they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting – sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard!’

  When she was finished reading, she said: ‘They certainly could have used some ammonia water, couldn’t they?’, and then she grabbed her Rollei and took a photo of the rubber gloves on the windowsill, where they lay looking like a pair of evil hands (Miss Maier said they looked helpless), and added that now we were going to go and see the slaughterhouses, as they were going to shut soon, and I had to have a chance see them before. But first she showed me an aerial photograph, so I could see what an enormous area the slaughterhouses cover. She calls it the animals’ concentration camp, but says that it is nevertheless worse for those who work there. I walked as slowly as I could to the bus, because I hoped she would say that I was probably too tired, and that we had better wait until another day.

  We’re not going inside. It’s not allowed. I didn’t know that. But I’m happy about it. We stand looking at the pens with the fatstock: they are large and there are a lot of them, and there are a lot of animals in each one. So many pigs are butchered there that the city was once called Porkopolis instead of Chicago. And many cows were slaughtered, a whole lot of chickens, and some horses. In a short time, the sheep standing there will no longer be able to stand on their feet, but will have to lie down. Their bodies will be chopped into pieces, and the various body parts will be sorted and placed in piles. You can’t eat most of their legs, only their thighs.

  A sheep is already lying down, and the other sheep trample on it. I look at the sheep, and Miss Maier films it.

  Now it’s all over, and it wasn’t as bad as I thought. It’s dead. It died while I watched. And I stood here on the other side of the bars.

  When we have to go home, Miss Maier says that she wants to take the opportunity to teach me to hitchhike. It’s useful. I would rather take the bus. But no. So we stand by the side of the road and wag our thumbs, it’s the same movement you use to jig cod, but sideways rather than up and down. We didn’t have luck on our side, so we end up taking the bus anyway, but we will try again another day.

  Ellen

  I’m ashamed. I’m so ashamed that I stop being afraid of Miss Maier and grab her by the sleeve and say: ‘No, you can’t. Stop it, Miss Maier.’

  She has positioned herself half a yard from a poor crazy man, taking a photo of him right up in his face without asking for permission, because she never asks for permission. She muscles in on other people with her vile Rollei, and when they get cross, she just laughs or shrugs and walks away or takes another photo. Why does she want to show someone that he is crazy? Why does she want to exhibit his poverty when she is always on the side of the poor? Why can’t he be allowed to sit and be ashamed of being crazy and poor in peace?

  Viv

  Sometimes after we have eaten and I have done the washing up, and Sarah might have done the drying, they ask if I want to have a drink with them out on the patio. I don’t drink. But I spend time with them. They might hold hands. They are liberal-minded, so they hold hands even when I am there. I see it as an opportunity to learn something. ‘Now are you sure you don’t want a glass?’, Peter asks again, holding out the bottle for me. I couldn’t be more sure: 1. I know how men get on a Saturday afternoon when they get paid. 2. I will not lose control and be different than I am.

  We talk a little about the various neighbourhoods, how the occupants have changed over time, how people move on to something better when they can afford to, and how those who are worse off take over their homes until they themselves might rise up a little and move on. How the houses are emptied and then filled. Today I took Ellen to Cicero with me to show her and see for myself a place where, in ’51, a black fami
ly moved into an all-white apartment building, which led to a mob of angry white people rioting. The mob was only quelled when the national guard was called in. It was in the papers and on TV around the world. Here in the city the racial struggle is fought over the housing stock. I stood thinking about how scared the family must have been, and how different they must have felt, such courage such perseverance such defiance. Their apartment building was set on fire and rocks were thrown at their windows. And the white fire department refused to direct their water hoses at the white culprits, which they were later fined for. I also showed Robert Taylor Homes to Ellen.

  Narrator

  The largest social housing estate in the world, four miles south of The Loop, consisting of twenty-eight identical sixteen-storey buildings, built in the early sixties, which housed up to 27,000 black Chicago citizens. Clean to start with, and attractive, the estate eventually became a so-called vertical slum. And in the end, it was in such a wretched state that it was torn down. In 1999, a study was conducted at Robert Taylor Homes regarding the significance grass and in particular trees have on people’s well-being and behaviour – it is an obvious place to conduct the survey since there is a view of greenery from some of the apartment blocks and not from others. Out of 150 respondents, three per cent of those with a view of trees and fourteen per cent of those who look out on a lunar landscape of asphalt and concrete had threatened their children with knives or firearms.