by Linn Ullmann
Later it occurs to me that the fiddling sounds are embarrassing in the same way that it’s embarrassing to see yourself in photographs. When someone takes my picture, I squeeze my eyes together, I frown, I duck into my own neck, as if it were a tube into which I could disappear. My neck is long and slender, but new creases continue to appear as I get older. When I look at myself in photographs, I see two slits where the eyes should have been, in a face that hasn’t made up its mind about what sort of face it ought to be.
Six recordings. Had my father been alive, I would have asked him about the pauses. The silence. The blank spaces. How to render them? How would he have done it?
SHESo, we’ve been planning this for a long time.
HEWe’ve been planning this for a long time.
SHEYes.
HEBut last night I felt so incredibly unsure.
SHEYou did?
HEYes, I was lying awake, feeling unsure.
SHEWhy?
HEPardon?
SHEWhy were you unsure?
Long silence.
HEI’ve been trying out a new sleeping pill.
SHEOh?
HEI have been a dedicated sleeping-pill addict my whole life . . . Rohypnol, great stuff, two a day, plus two Valium, a couple of Valium in the evening and a couple in the morning.
SHEIn the morning?
HEYes.
SHEEarly morning? To help you sleep a little more?
HEYes.
SHEWhich means you slept quite well last night?
HEI did sleep well last night, yes. I didn’t sleep quite well, I slept exceptionally well all night.
SHEBut in that case . . . I mean, that’s good, right?
HEYes . . . and so here we are . . . here we are in my study . . . designed by an architect specializing in acoustics, everything in here is set up for the sole purpose of listening to music . . . This is my room.
SHEYes.
HEYes.
SHEBut you started by saying that you were lying awake last night feeling very unsure about the whole project, so do you think maybe you woke up now and again and thought “no” . . . ?
HEYes.
SHEThought “no”. . . and felt unsure about the whole thing?
HEYes.
SHESo, what were you thinking about when you lay awake?
HE(clears his throat) I was thinking that I should have been better prepared. I was thinking that we should have had a preparatory conversation and then proceeded from there.
SHEHmm.
HEOr something like that. It was vague.
Pause. He clears his throat.
HEBecause the closer it got to morning, the more anxious I became.
THERE ARE SIX RECORDINGS in all. Each one a little over two hours long. By the time we got to the point of sitting down in his study with the tape recorder between us, we were both feeling very unsure. I remember it, and you can tell from our voices. Shy. As if we were in a strange city and had to speak a foreign language. On tape, the silence is not silent but sputtering, crackling, fiddling, fumbling. At times he sounds clearer than at others. At times I sound clearer than at others. I don’t know whether the word “clear” is right here—as if it were a question of light and air.
SHEYou’ve had this study for many years.
HEFor many years.
SHESince 1967?
HEReally? . . . Oh, I don’t know.
SHEIt must have been 1967. You built this house when you and my mother were together.
HEWas that in ’67?
SHEYes, I was born in ’66, the house was finished in the summer of ’67.
HEHmm, yes . . .
Long pause.
HEWere you born in ’67?
SHENo, ’66.
HESixty-six?
SHEYes.
HEDear me!
SHEAnyway . . .
HE(interrupting) It’s good to see you!
SHEIt’s good to see you too!
HE(hesitating) How old are you now?
SHEForty.
HEForty? Good God! Are you that old?
I TRY TO PICTURE HIM, but can’t quite manage it. Or, maybe. If I stand on the narrow forest road, the one with all the cattle guards, I see an old man on a big red ladies’ bicycle. The bicycle is clearer than the man. A burst of red in an otherwise gray-green landscape. Nothing (apart from the red of the red bicycle) stands out. That’s how it was. Strict. Austere. The man on the bicycle has no face.
I have a picture of him sitting hunched over his desk, peering at photographs through a magnifying glass. In the picture he is wearing a thin brown wool cardigan over a checkered flannel shirt. He looks thin.
He sits tall on the bicycle seat, pedaling without hurry, the forest on one side, the sea on the other, the bicycle has a luggage rack, big wheels, and a slender frame, he himself is tall and thin, his corduroy trousers are brown, his cardigan is green, his wooly hat is also green, he wears sensible shoes and elegant brown wool socks from Munich.
Ingrid was the one who mended his socks. Her spools of yarn are neatly piled on top of one another in her sewing box in her study.
Pappa and Ingrid each had their own study separated by a narrow hallway and a small archive. Ingrid used her study to type up his manuscripts, balance accounts, answer letters, write in her diary.
The yarn was the same color as the socks, or possibly a paler shade, as if the sun had etched a little light in all the places she had mended. When he was at his desk, Ingrid would walk back and forth through the house. Only occasionally did she sit in silence, head bent over her needlework (socks, shirts, bed linens). I slept in sheets with tiny coarse patches darned by Ingrid. I was twenty-six when she fell ill, cancer of the stomach. When she died, I was afraid that grief would break his heart.
The old man on the bicycle resembles a thistle. Tall and thin and green. He blends so perfectly into the landscape that you almost can’t make him out. You only see the bicycle. Thistles grow along the road to Hammars, around the cattle guards and out on the moors.
When I was a little girl, he used to read to me in bed. When he got to the end of the chapter—the chapter we had agreed to read before the light was turned off and it was time to sleep—he would glance up from the book and say: “One more? Shall we read one more?” He read Astrid Lindgren, Maria Gripe, Tove Jansson. Sometimes he would read a poem or part of a poem. He said he didn’t like poetry, but in his trouser pocket he occasionally carried a folded yellow piece of notebook paper with some lines or verses he had come across in a book and copied down.
I was tucked up in bed, he sat on its edge, we looked at the sheet of paper being unfolded. Unfolding a piece of paper takes time. We didn’t speak while he was busy doing this. A lamp burned on the bedside table. I had long, fine hair. I wished that it were even longer and that it shone. Nanna said it would shine if I brushed it a hundred times every morning and every evening. Over the chair hung a faded blue sundress that I had outgrown over the summer.
“Are you ready?” says Pappa, now finished unfolding the piece of paper.
“Okay,” I say.
“Are you quite sure that you’re ready?”
“Yes.”
“Absolutely sure?”
“Pappa! Yes!”
I listen my heart
my heart is
I listen my heart
when I know that my heart
that stars tore themselves asunder
I listen my heart
my heart is.
“That’s it.”
“Hmm.”
“You want me to read it again?”
“No, it’s okay, you don’t have to.”
“What do you think, was it any good?”
“I’m not sure.”
The landscape is flat. The trees are gnarled. The road winds gently. The sea is cobweb gray, pale, green, still. The sea is dying from lack of oxygen. Sometimes the surface is covered with toxic algae, the algae are spongy like old wall-to-wall carpeting. The bicycle is red,
the gravel crunches under its wheels. The bicycle is so red that no matter what I try to compare it to—poppies, for example, that also grow by the roadside at Hammars—it falls short. The bicycle is redder than any other red I can think of. I make a list of reds, but nothing is red enough. Even after Pappa is dead and buried, crumbled to earth and gone—I’m no longer able to describe his face—even then, the redness of the bicycle stands out in memory.
WE HAD ALWAYS BEEN better at departures than arrivals. Pappa was old when I was born, forty-eight years old, the same age I am now, always forty-eight years older than me. Every time we had to say goodbye I would think to myself that this was probably the last time.
I don’t remember how old I am when I begin dressing up for him, a tiny bracelet around my wrist that slips off and vanishes because my wrist is tinier still (I spend a lot of time hunting for trinkets that have slipped off or come undone and gone lost), hair brushed away from my face and drawn into a tight ponytail. You mustn’t hide your face. Seven years old, maybe. We will not say goodbye, he says, goodbyes give him sleepless nights, goodbyes cause anxiety and stomachaches, his runways for landing and takeoff are long, arrivals and departures aren’t done in a blink, we’ll just act like it’s nothing, talk about ordinary things in our everyday voices. We’re sitting side by side on the brown-stained bench outside the house. The car is waiting, it’s time to go. He kisses me on the forehead, hugs me and says: Let’s not say goodbye.
He stays at Hammars for as long as he can, but eventually he and Ingrid will also have to get in the car and drive away. When the snow comes, the house is empty. Ingrid will have cleaned and vacuumed every nook and cranny, but after a few weeks’ time it is quite clear that no one lives there anymore, the dust gathers in the corners and under the beds, dead flies litter the windowsills, the flies got inside despite the rule about keeping all the doors and windows closed in summer. The house is what it is, immersed in gray and unaffected by all who came and went and filled it with sound, the house has waited for winter and opens up to it in the still, shimmering half-light. This is the place, this is the house he longs for when he’s in Stockholm, in the flat at Karlaplan; winter on Fårö doesn’t put on airs, it is what it is, summer caters to the whims of others, demanding and insistent, bright and coquettish: Look how beautiful I am, look at my red poppies and the tall blue sky and the moors like West African savannas.
So once more we sit on the bench, saying goodbye. Or rather: we don’t say goodbye. The bench lies in the shade, sheltered from the wind. The other side of the house is prettier, with a view of the sea. But we hardly ever sit there.
I THINK ABOUT THE WOMEN in my family and about their purses and the things they carried around with them. Nanna, for instance, carried my grandfather’s ashes around with her in her purse. Nanna was rosy-cheeked and plump, sporadically sassy in high-heeled shoes. During the war, she and my grandfather and their two young daughters lived in Toronto. My grandfather was an instructor at the Royal Norwegian Air Force base, also known as Little Norway, on Centre Island south of Toronto Harbor. The purpose of the camp was to train young airmen for combat in Northern Norway. One day out on the airfield, my grandfather was struck in the head by a propeller. He died some years later in a hospital in New York. Brain tumor. I’ve never been able to work out whether there was a direct connection between the propeller and the brain tumor, or whether these were two unrelated events. His daughters were fair-haired, pale, gangly. I remember reading that all little girls look alike—fair-haired little girls look like other fair-haired little girls, dark-haired little girls look like other dark-haired little girls—it’s next to impossible to tell one from the other. I learned this from an American police detective involved in a missing-persons case. In the autumn of 2007, not long after the death of my father, the body of a little girl was found in the waters of Galveston Bay in Texas. She was in a blue plastic box, she’d been lying there for at least two weeks. At the time no one knew who she was or how she ended up in the box. “Our life was to give name,” wrote the poet Gunnar Björling. I remember that the detective in charge of the investigation gave the little girl the name Baby Grace and that he said the investigation was made more difficult by the fact that all little girls look alike.
But little girls don’t look at other little girls and think: she looks like me. What they think is: nobody looks like me, I’m the only one like me.
It was quite a bundle Nanna brought with her when the war was finally over and she and her daughters boarded the first boat home to Norway. She brought her grief and a crate of oranges and her girls and her suitcases and her purse—black lacquer with an arched handle and a clasp that produced a little click each time she opened or closed it—and the urn with her husband’s ashes. When they docked at the wharf in Bergen, the two little girls, one of whom would one day be my mother, tossed oranges to everyone who had come to greet the boat from America.
HEI only have the one eye and I don’t even see very well with that. In a few months I’m going to Visby Infirmary to be operated on. They tell me I’ll get my eyesight back. In the meantime there’s not much else for me to do than to sit here and listen to music. It’s fantastic, you know, that over the years I’ve built up such a collection . . . all these books . . . music . . . all these records on my shelves.
WITH GREAT DIFFICULTY HE reaches out of his wheelchair—positioned an arm’s length away from the shelves holding the turntable and his record collection—and with trembling hand he raises the stylus and lowers it onto the record. I picture him doing this. I have no memory of this moment. I didn’t take notes. I only have the recording. Hissing, sighing, crackling, and a faint grunt from him, and then my voice asking: Can I help you with that, and his: No! . . . No! . . . I said No!
HEIt all began when I was a little boy and was allowed to go to the opera.
SHEWho took you to the opera?
HEPardon?
SHEWho took you to the opera?
HEMy aunt Anna von Sydow, she had a gigantic hat and was very rich.
Silence.
HEI remember . . . I was ten or twelve, and the first one was Tannhäuser . . . Wagner’s Tannhäuser . . . and I experienced it with a kind of fever . . . I came down with a fever that night . . . it was such fun, you see . . . I don’t know what year that was.
SHEWell, it must have been 1928, perhaps, if you were ten years old, in Stockholm?
HEYes, perhaps.
SHETell me more about the night you came home from the opera.
HEI got very sick, I came down with a fever.
SHEWere you frightened?
HENo.
SHECan you still be shaken, the way you were then?
HEYes.
SHEJust as much?
HEOh, yes . . . but Wagner, of course, has taken a backseat . . . I’d like you to hear . . . Let me see how this works.
He fumbles, struggles to put on a record, the radio comes on at full volume, a female voice says something about Vivaldi.
HEBut this is all wrong.
SHEThat was the radio, you switched on the radio.
He turns everything off, fumbles some more, she tries to help but is told to get out of the way, he puts on the record. It is Beethoven’s Piano Concerto no. 4 in G major.
HEThere is nothing greater than this, apart from Bach, perhaps.
For a long time there is just the music.
She says something on the tape, but it’s hard to make out. He interrupts her.
HE(loudly) I don’t want to talk. I’d rather not talk over Beethoven. I won’t talk at the same time as Beethoven.
SHEI’m sorry. I won’t say a word. We can just listen.
The music stops abruptly.
HEWe can listen to it some other time (impatiently) then we can listen to all of it . . . It takes about thirty-five minutes.
SHEYes, I think we should do that . . . listen to all of it . . . without saying a word.
HEYes, or you could just go out and buy the record yours
elf.
She doesn’t reply.
HENow then, where were we?
I THINK OF ALL THE shades of blue that spread across his hands and feet and parts of his face when there were only days or hours left of life. The common term for this is mottling of the skin, blue marbling in Norwegian. He became, even as he ceased to be. Marbling involves the mixing of two or more colors to create a marble-like pattern and transforming a surface—stone, paper, wood, skin—into something other than it is or was. I’m not sure whether to use present or past tense here. The tenth-century collection of writings by Su Yijian, The Four Treasures of the Scholar’s Study, contains what is possibly the first reference to paper marbling: a type of decorative paper described as “flowing sand.” When I rearranged his blanket and caught a glimpse of his blue-marbled feet, I didn’t think of any of this, not of the color blue, not of paper, not even of flowing sand, of which there is so much on Fårö. I thought of what my mother used to say to my father: If you’re ever in doubt that she’s actually yours, take a look at her feet. They’re yours to a tee. Her legs too. Long and skinny.
