by Linn Ullmann
Can I mourn people who are still alive?
Every evening, I follow the map and walk down to the sea, I’m in a new place and don’t know my way around yet, it is very beautiful here, the towns have strange names like Brantevik and Skillinge and Simrishamn, it is winter and the sea is covered by a thin sheet of ice.
I remember my father-in-law used to say: I don’t ride the same day I saddle.
My grandmother used to say: Men—over and out!
My mother also used to say: Men—over and out!
And my father used to say: Be careful what you wish for.
He also said: Words that have flown the nest cannot be caught by the wing. He was a minister’s son, so quoting Luther (by way of Strindberg) came naturally to him. Not to forget cleanliness, self-control, order, and punctuality.
He was talking about anger. Were his children angry? Had they inherited this from him?
“Are you angry, my heart?”
He never saw me angry.
“There’s nothing unresolved between us, is there?”
“No, Pappa.”
“Nothing eating you?”
“No, nothing at all.”
“Good, nor did I think there was.”
The kind of anger he called murderous rage. Or, what to call it? A short fuse? Feeling like you can’t breathe? Having a bad temper? Scorn, contempt, resentment, self-pity? I am grieving and no one will save me. Rage as a form of gluttony: First the anger devours you and then you devour the anger, it never stops.
If you are unfortunate enough to be saddled with such rage, he said, you have to learn to control it. This was advice he had learned early in life from older and wiser men than he, and he was only too happy to pass it on. He said: Some people have perfect pitch, they can hear the buzzing of a bee and say, You hear that? That’s a G sharp! Some people are stingy. Some people can dance. Some are angry. The body consists mostly of water, the heart of rage. The kind of rage that cramps up your jaw and makes you grind your teeth and tends to land you in situations in which you end up making a complete fool of yourself. Professionally, it can be disastrous. There’s no room for emotional sloppiness in the workplace; if you let your rage get the better of you and lash out like a poisonous liver sausage, you’ll only waste valuable time and ruin things for yourself and whatever you hope to achieve, not to mention the fact that you’ll have to call everybody the next day and apologize. Which is both embarrassing and time-consuming. You may, in the course of your temper tantrum, have said something to another person that cannot be explained away or retracted. It has been said. Which is the opposite of unsaid. For words that have flown the nest cannot be caught by the wing. Remember that, my heart. This applies not only to professional life, but also to your romantic relationships. You think you’re rich, that your reserves of love will last forever, but if you don’t pay attention, you’ll find yourself broke in no time. Bankrupt. You have to play your parts with care. One—one—pedagogical fit of rage per play or film can be effective, but it has to be professionally, and not emotionally, motivated.
“No, Pappa, I have not come from the Royal Palace. I’ve come from Oslo. I’ve come to interview you, remember? We have work to do.”
I don’t say We agreed to meet, or we’re going to sit and talk for a while, I say We have work to do because work is a magic word, because nothing will get in the way of work. We do not call in sick. We do not malinger. We may lie, betray, wake up in the middle of the night frightened and crying and looking at the clock. Morning is not far off and the nightstand is covered in writing. But at six o’clock, we get up and go to work.
Pappa and I are writing a book. We start tomorrow.
Maja wipes the kitchen counter. She speaks to my father in the third person. Would he like some more wine? Would he like some more bread with his omelet? Speaking slowly and a little too loud. She wrings the cloth out over the sink, gray trickles dripping down, and hangs it on a little hook on the wall.
“Isn’t it nice for him to have a visit from his youngest daughter?”
She nods enthusiastically, the way you do when you expect the person you’re nodding at to nod back.
“Oh, yes,” my father says, not nodding back. “Oh, yes, indeed.”
He looks at me and winks.
It was no longer just the odd word that had gone missing. Maybe half of them. The forgotten words formed a long, sinuous trail that stretched from the stony beach, through the forest, and all the way into the rooms at Hammars. When the moon rose and he went out to look for them, the birds had gotten there first. Noises and images helter-skelter. I said to myself: But he has lost his senses, we can’t do the interviews now, it’s too late, but looking back, I wonder whether the expression lost his senses is misleading. From behind his thick spectacles my father could see a little bit with one eye and just about nothing with the other, in the diary that lay on his desk, someone had written the words “laser surgery.” An appointment had been made at Visby Infirmary on the eighteenth of June. The surgery was supposed to restore some of his eyesight. One ear was in good working order, I had to shout sometimes, but only if I forgot to pay attention and stood or sat on the wrong side and talked to his deaf ear. It was up to me to remember which ear to speak to. His sense of touch must have been magnified sevenfold. He would flinch if I so much as brushed against him, as though his skin had been torn off. I didn’t touch his cheek or hand as often as I used to. He opened and closed himself, continuously. It is hard work to get yourself going every morning, especially at the age of eighty-nine, and sometimes the most obvious choice is to go back to sleep, or not to wake up at all. What is it Pessoa writes in The Book of Disquiet? “I’d woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist.” Occasionally, before, Pessoa had come up in conversation when we talked about our book. Perhaps we could steal, or allude, to Pessoa’s title, or would that just be putting on airs, we don’t want to be putting on airs, there’s an art to knowing exactly how much of that one can allow oneself, but as a working title it was good, maybe we’d come up with another title once we had finished writing and were ready to publish, but time passed and then he forgot all about Pessoa.
The boy in the store had suggested a tiny silver-gray electronic device from Sony. It was oblong and fit neatly into my hand. A book about growing old.
Growing old is work. Getting out of bed is work. Taking a bath is work, putting on your clothes is work, getting your daily dose of fresh air is work, meeting other people is work. Nobody talks about the work.
“It feels like this is the epilogue,” he said.
We were sitting in the jeep on our way to the cinema. It was a year earlier, maybe even two, we had just started planning the book. Without warning, my father stepped on the accelerator and shot forward so fast I had to grab the edges of my seat. He swung off the road and into the forest, sped down the trail toward the sea, and slammed on the brakes right at the edge of a high cliff. He turned and looked at me, grinning from ear to ear.
“I scared you!”
“Yes.”
“Hahaha.”
“I don’t think you should be driving like that.”
“But I’m having fun! You should lighten up and allow the old man some fun now that he’s a hundred and losing his memory.”
“You’re not a hundred and your memory’s better than mine.”
“So, are we going to write this book?”
“Okay. But you have to drive properly. I don’t want to die yet.”
“We can call it The Epilogue,” he said.
“Maybe.”
“Maybe? Well, I think it’s a damn good title.”
WE MADE THE RECORDINGS in May, he died at the end of July at four o’clock in the morning. That same evening, after a long day, I got out the tape recorder. It was in my purse. I sat on the edge of the bed, having sought refuge in one of the two upstairs bedrooms at Ängen. The family was still gathered downstairs. My husband had made soup for everyone. Occasionally he had
taken my hand in his as if he wanted to tell me something, but there wasn’t much to say. Everyone praised the soup. Carrot and ginger. Warm. Soothing. The perfect soup for the occasion, said one of my sisters, I think it was Ingmarie, my sisters noticed everything, even such a minute detail (considering the circumstances) as the soup. Earlier that day we had agreed that everybody would meet at Ängen to eat a meal together and maybe talk about what to do next. The obituary, the funeral, that sort of thing.
I looked at the tape recorder. It fit into the palm of my hand. When we did the recordings, I told him the technical equipment worked as it should, I told him I had listened to the interviews and had already begun transcribing. That was a lie. Every time I had been down at Hammars, taping a conversation, I returned to Ängen almost as worn out as he was. There was no way on earth I could sit down and listen to a day of us talking, or start transcribing. Leave me alone, I said to my husband and Eva. I couldn’t deal with them. My father left no room for anyone else. So they went off to Norsholmen at the northern end of the island to gather reeds and shells.
I looked at my watch and calculated that he had been dead for sixteen hours. I pressed Play.
Was this it? Was this all I’d accomplished? The sound quality was awful. The tape crackled and sputtered—it sounded as if I had lit a fire and set us down in the middle of the blaze. Our voices were drowned out, his faltering, mine shrill, I couldn’t tell one word from the next. After five minutes I pressed Stop and put the tape recorder back in my purse. An utter fiasco. I should probably have used an external microphone, a mic attached to his shirt collar, although there’s no way you could have attached a mic or anything like a mic to his shirt collar. He wouldn’t have liked me fiddling. He would have winced at that. He always wore faded checked flannel shirts. Thick flannel. Pale-green, gray, red, brown, autumnal orange. He decided on a style as a very young man and never changed it. During his last summer he needed help to get dressed. If my father were a tree, the faded flannel shirt would be the bark. I didn’t want to poke and prod at him with gadgets. His top button would be undone and I remember noticing a fine, loose fold of skin above his Adam’s apple, fragile as eggshell. So no, I couldn’t have attached a mic to his shirt collar.
What I’m trying to say is that when I presented myself at Hammars to interview him, I had neither the technical know-how nor the equipment one might want to have in such situations, and that my obvious shortcomings had resulted in six acoustically disastrous recordings.
Even though I didn’t listen to the recordings—yes, and even though the tape recorder disappeared and I was sure it was lost and gone forever—I thought about them often. In my mind, the five minutes I had listened to on the evening of the day he died grew large and dismally long. The tape recorder microphone had picked up all the sounds in the room, including our voices, and composed its own hissing, throbbing, crackling, murmuring, sputtering cacophony. And why hadn’t I taken notes? I should have realized that these were the last conversations we would ever have. I should have registered everything that happened. Not just what we said, but everything else as well. The weather, for example. And what we were wearing. Which dresses I had chosen. Out of old habit I never wore jeans when I visited my father in his study. Things were happening all the time. The pine tree outside his window swayed ever so gently in the wind. None of this can be heard on tape. It can only be seen. The house at Hammars is built in such a way that when you’re inside, you can’t hear the outside. The pine tree swayed ever so—why didn’t I write about that? Or about his hands? Or the light?
My father was dead. I sat on the edge of the bed in one of the upstairs rooms in the house at Ängen, the evening sun lighting up everything. I looked at the tape recorder. Small, rectangular, closed.
Down there in the house at Hammars he lay lifelike, waiting to be picked up. We had decided to let him lie for twenty-four hours so that children and grandchildren, those who wished, could come to Hammars and say their goodbyes. Not everyone wished to or was able to. One of my sisters slept in the house that night, in the room next to his, he shouldn’t be alone, she said, not on the first full night of his death.
In the end, what I was left with were recordings of all the sounds in the room and, not least, the unbearable sound of my own voice.
What would he have said if he had been sitting there beside me on the edge of the bed, listening? The ear is all-important. He would have complained about the sound quality. The equipment. The workmanship. These spools are crap! And then he would have said: Your voice, my heart, so silvery and thin and eager to please, like a maiden in her tower. I’ve told you to speak Norwegian when you speak to me, and then he would have said: We have to do it all over again.
WHO IS THAT WOMAN shouting at the old man?
HOW IS LITTLE PAPPA DOING TODAY?
I pressed Stop.
Then I pressed Play again. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as I thought.
HOW IS LITTLE PAPPA DOING TODAY?
I pressed Stop and slipped the tape recorder into my purse. I got up from the bed and drew up a new plan.
Go down and join the others.
Have soup.
Go to bed and get up and go to bed and get up and go to bed and get up.
Take one day at a time.
First bury him, then mourn him, and then—when some time has passed—listen to the tapes.
AFTER THE TAPE RECORDER had bounced around in my purse for three years, I took it out and placed it in a desk drawer—and this is where everything becomes a blur. My husband lost his father the year after I lost mine. Now we both had a dead father. Every night a mangy cat came to relieve itself in our daughter’s sandbox, the house and the garden smelled of cat pee, no matter how much we cleaned. My husband fell for a woman with long, dark hair and slender wrists. We moved to Fårö and stayed there for a year. He sent her emails with links to songs. When I asked him why, he said it was because she wasn’t me. We moved again. For many years I had no idea where the tape recorder was.
SEVEN YEARS AFTER MY father’s death the tape recorder resurfaces in a box in the attic. It is my husband who finds it. I call my son, Ola. He is twenty-four.
“The sound quality is awful,” I say. “I don’t know why. The boy who sold it to me said it was the best on the market.”
“Yes, well, that was a long time ago.”
“Seven years.”
“That’s a long time in the life of a digital tape recorder.”
“I know, but when you listen to the recordings they sound like they’re a hundred years old.”
“Have you actually listened to them?”
“Well, no, not exactly. Not now. It was bad enough the last time I tried. I couldn’t listen to more than five or ten minutes.”
I take a deep breath.
“So I was wondering if you could help me? I was thinking there might be a way of transferring the recordings to a laptop or a phone . . . maybe there’s a tool or an app or something that could clean up the sound . . . don’t you know a good sound technician?”
Ola is up to his knees in cardboard boxes. He is moving in with his girlfriend and doesn’t really have time to talk to me now. I ask if I can send him a picture of the tape recorder. If he saw what kind of tape recorder it was, he might be able to suggest what I can do to salvage the sound.
“How about just trying to listen to it?” he says.
“It’s impossible! It crackles!”
“Maybe it’s just a lousy speaker. I mean, the tape recorder is tiny and it’s been lying around for seven years.”
He is infinitely patient now. When did he get that voice? A grown man speaking to a young girl who’s at the end of her tether.
“I don’t know,” I say.
“Mamma, listen to me. I think you should hook it up to a pair of good headphones and see if the sound gets any better.”
“Okay.”
“And if the sound isn’t any better, if you still can’t hear what you’re saying to each other,
send me a text. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“I have to go now, okay?”
“Okay.”
I dig out a big pair of headphones and settle on the sofa in the living room. It is night, early morning. My husband and our daughter are asleep upstairs. I press Play. It’s like diving underwater.
There’s noise. Fumbling pauses, searching for words. My hands are fiddling with something, causing even more noise. The fiddling sounds are loud, occasionally drowning out our voices. I remember that the tape recorder was lying on a little wooden table between his wheelchair and my chair and that I kept picking it up to make sure it was working, moving it closer toward him whenever he lowered his voice, constantly worrying that I wouldn’t catch what he was saying. And every time my hands touch the microphone, it translates into a thundering noise in my ear.
I want to say to her—she who sits there fiddling with the tape recorder: Stop that fiddling! Put your hands in your lap! Concentrate on the old man, he’ll be dead in a few weeks. It’s embarrassing. But I don’t switch it off. I don’t press Stop. He is more lucid than I remembered, and my voice is less shrill. We’re doing the best we can. But the fiddling drives me crazy. I’ve never thought of my hands as a source of sound, obviously I can snap my fingers, clap, applaud, but hands are usually quiet, gestures are inaudible, fiddling too—or so I thought. “It is confusing and embarrassing to have two mouths,” writes Anne Carson, describing a group of terra-cotta statuettes from the fourth century BC, each of which consists of “almost nothing but her two mouths,” how much more confusing and embarrassing to have mouths in places where you didn’t know you had them, to discover that even parts of your body you thought of as soundless are actually fraught with sound. The microphone picked up everything, making no distinction between the important and the unimportant. On the other hand, it’s pointless to think in terms of categories such as important and unimportant. Pointless to think in terms of categories at all. I spend too much time distinguishing between the one and the other. “But the living all make the mistake of distinguishing too sharply,” wrote Rilke. “Angels (it is said) often know not whether they walk among the living or the dead.”
