by Linn Ullmann
HEI am taking a walk outside the house, and walking there right next to me is a person I don’t know. An anonymous person. After a little while I say to this person: This is, after all, a fabulous house. And the person replies: Yes, you must be exceedingly proud.
He leans forward as though to confide in her.
HE(murmuring) But I’m not the one who built this house. (Sits back, raises his voice.) I say to the person: But I’m not the one who built this house! And do you know what happens then?
SHENo.
HEThe stranger looks at me, astonished, and says: But of course it was you who built this house!
Silence.
HEAnd in so many situations . . . dreams . . . the stranger turns to me and says: Yes, you did all this. This is your house.
Long pause.
HEIt terrifies me.
The abscess in his mouth makes it hard for him to pronounce certain words, particularly multisyllable words or compound words, such as “sexuality,” “contractor,” or “Stockholm Opera,” the words get stuck between tongue, abscess, and lips.
SHEWhy does it terrify you?
HEIt’s a big nothing. A nonsense. The person says, you did all this. And I say: It was the architect . . . and . . . and . . . the con . . . the contractor who did it all.
SHEBut what do you mean by nonsense?
HEWhat’s nonsense is that they say things that are . . . utterly misleading! I haven’t had anything whatsoever to do with the building of this house.
SHEBut surely the house is an expression of who you are? You’ve lived here for over forty years and you’ve made decisions about how it should look?
HEYes, I have. I have decided how it should look. I furnished the rooms and hung pictures on the walls . . . that I’ve done . . . but that’s not exactly architecture. I’ve been indescribably passive as far as this house is concerned. You can’t imagine. It frightens and astonishes me.
HEThe onset of my illness goes back to the twelfth of August last year. One morning my nose started to bleed. I was bleeding like a hippopotamus. I stood over the sink and the blood poured down.
Long silence.
HEI called the doctor and he said: No harm done, these things happen to old men, but you’re fine now. But then, a few days later, after the hem . . . the hemorrhage . . . I think it was on the twentieth of August, I jumped into the swimming pool and to my astonishment I sank to the bottom.
SHEYou sank?
HEI sank and couldn’t come up for air, I pushed and kicked but couldn’t.
Silence.
HEEventually I managed to cling to the wall . . . to the edge . . . and . . . and . . . and finally I was able to crawl back on land. For the very first time in my life I was able to experience how unpleasant death is, I had never experienced that before.
SHEYou were afraid you were going to die?
HEYes. But eventually it eased up.
SHEAh.
HEBut then, a couple of days later, I fell into the swimming pool again and sank like a stone.
He looks at her with his one good eye.
HEI managed to . . . Oh yes! . . . I managed to maneuver myself over to the steps, but I thought it was odd . . . I thought it was strange that I sank to the bottom and was unable to surface again, so I called the doctor, the same doctor I had called about the nosebleed . . . and this time his tone was very different: You must come in right away so we can have a look at you! The way you’re carrying on now could be fatal! Please come immediately! . . . Well, there you go . . . So I went to Stockholm and he examined me and ran every conceivable sort of test and it turned out that my illness was both peculiar and banal.
Silence.
SHESo what was it?
HEWhat?
SHEWhat was wrong with you?
HEWhat?
SHEWhat was the doctor’s diagnosis?
Silence.
HEI had lots of dreams, uninteresting ones, like flopticon pictures . . .
He says flopticon, but means balopticon. Slides.
HE. . . like old balopticon pictures that I have to look at.
SHEAt night, when you were asleep?
HEThe pictures were there during the day too. When I was awake. At night and during the day.
Silence
HEThen I caught pneumonia. And when I recovered from the pneumonia, I began losing my balance. I walked and I fell, it could happen anytime, in all tracks, I’d walk and I’d fall. My whole damn body was black and blue . . . I found it quite comical . . . I’ve wondered about that . . . why I found it comical . . . It was fun going to the circus when I was little, I went with my aunt, Anna von Sydow, the one with the big hat . . . and . . . and . . . the clowns came in and fell on their backs and did somersaults and rolled about and bumped into each other, and I thought it was hilarious. When I fall over it feels a little bit like . . . well . . . it makes me think of that. When I fall—you must understand this—when a man who is five feet, ten inches tall falls and hurts himself, or does a kind of a somersault and lands on a piece of furniture . . . or whatever the hell it might be . . . there is something comical about it. People have always found it funny, throughout the ages . . . I fall . . . fall . . . and now it hurts more than it used to.
SHEPoor Pappa.
HEAnd then there are all the dreams.
SHEThe dreams?
HEI dream that this anonymous person turns to me and says: What a fabulous house you’ve built here. And I say: But I didn’t build this house, I don’t know who lives in this house, and then he says: But it’s you. You’re the one who lives in this house.
SHEAnd that is terrifying?
HEI think it’s terrifying, yes.
SHEBut why is it terrifying?
HEI have a feeling that it’s all an uncanny hoax . . . a silent agreement involving a lot of people.
Silence.
This is where I think he raises his head and looks at her.
HEWell! There you have it! This has been my entertainment for the past year . . . Are you cold?
SHENo.
Silence.
HEI was still writing in my calendar back then. I don’t anymore . . .
She interrupts him.
SHEEvery day, you and I write in your calendar that we’ll meet right here, in your study, the following day at eleven a.m.
HEYes, I know. But that’s different.
SHEI’m sorry. I interrupted you. You were about to say something.
HEI was going to say that I wrote in my diary that I’d had a nosebleed. I wrote: This is where my confusion begins, this is where my dreams and hallucinations start to intrude on reality in a terrifying way.
What he actually said was: This is where my confusion ends, but I think he meant: this is where my confusion begins. That spring he tended to get words mixed up and often said the opposite of what he was trying to say. Ends presumably means begins, but I could be wrong.
WHEN MAMMA AND PAPPA were an item in the ’60s, Mamma’s face was so naked as to almost not be a face. It was constantly falling apart and putting itself back together again. Much has been said and written about Mamma’s face, her eyes, her lips, her hair, her unsettling vulnerability and the way in which all great actresses channel every emotion to the area in and around the mouth, but no one has said anything about her ears. When I was little, I liked lying close to her and stroking her hair, I didn’t yet have words for beauty, or for love; like most children I was more concerned with the size of things, whether they were big or small, and Mamma had big feet and big ears. We would lie in her double bed with its golden bedposts and pink flowery sheets, and she would let me stroke her hair while she read a book or spoke on the telephone. She often ended a phone conversation with the words Men—over and out. She said it with her face averted, as if addressing the walls. Men—over and out. Nanna also said Men—over and out. Once I heard Aunt Billy say Men—over and out, and I always paid attention to what Aunt Billy said. Aunt Billy had red curls, a floor-length fur coat (which hung
at the back of the hall closet in the house in Trondheim and was hardly ever worn), five children, and a husband and a full-time job as store manager, she smoked two packs of cigarettes a day and read a new book every week. Mamma had many suitors, but I don’t think she liked any of them. Like Penelope, she waited for the right one to come home. There was a white Cobra telephone on her bedside table. This was the one she always used. She liked spending time in her bedroom, lounging about in various stages of silk negligee. When I lay close to her and stroked all the hair away from her face, her ears came into their own. Mamma’s ears were big like conch shells, and if I had put my ear to her ear I would have heard the ocean. We had a telephone in the living room as well. A red Cobra. It rang incessantly. When Mamma could no longer stand all the ringing, she would pull out both plugs and stick the telephones, the red and the white, in the freezer.
SHECan you tell me about Mamma?
HEI have been thinking about Beethoven and how he goes right at you. Right at your feelings . . . feelings . . .
SHEOkay?
HEThere was an orchestra rehearsal in Malmö, and Käbi was the soloist . . . it was the G major Concerto. I had never met Käbi before.
SHEBut I was asking about my . . .
He interrupts her.
HEWhat you may not know about dress rehearsals is that in many cases it is the first time that the soloist and the orchestra actually play together with the conductor . . . we’re talking a hundred and forty musicians . . . it’s a big orchestra . . . the Malmö City Theatre is a big venue . . . I sat alone in the middle of the big auditorium and Käbi walked out onstage, she was wearing a red dress, and I thought, a more beautiful . . . that I’d never seen a more beautiful woman in my life. I was sitting in the tenth or fifteenth row, I don’t know where I was sitting, and then the rehearsal began. Käbi sat down at the piano in her red dress, and her dedication, her passion, lit up this whole big orchestra, this gigantic concert hall.
Silence.
HEYes, and then they broke for lunch and the conductor came over to me and said: Would you like to meet the girl . . . the girl wasn’t much older than twenty . . . and I had already fallen in love with her though she didn’t know it, and I didn’t know it. All of a sudden I was shy as a country bumpkin and said, no, no, I couldn’t, and then the conductor said: all right, suit yourself, but we’ll be having lunch in the cafeteria, just a simple lunch, and then I said: Oh, well, I suppose I could come along . . . And so we talked . . . and we drank coffee . . . the sandwiches were good, they had very good sandwiches in that cafeteria . . . and then we fell in love for the whole world to see. It didn’t take long. Yes, that’s how it came about, my dance with Käbi.
SHEAnd what about Mamma?
HEWhat?
SHEI asked you if you could tell me something about Mamma. Käbi is Daniel’s mother.
HEWhat?
SHEKäbi is Daniel’s mother. I was wondering if you could tell me about my mother.
Long silence.
HEShe traveled around and I followed her career, or rather, her travels. After some time we began writing letters to each other. We wrote so many letters . . . there must be an unbelievable amount of letters lying around somewhere. Then one day . . . you may not know this, but I had a one-room apartment in Grev Turegatan in Stockholm.
SHEYes, I know about it.
HEAh, you do, do you?
SHEMamma told me that I was conceived in that apartment.
HEWhat?
SHEMy mother.
HEYes . . . ?
SHEShe claims I was conceived in the apartment on Grev Turegatan.
HEReally? . . . Is that so? Well . . . Be that as it may, we met at that apartment, again and again . . . and then, bang . . . It was a wonderful little apartment, kitchen, bathroom, cupboard, bed . . . Yes, that’s how things can go. And it all started with Beethoven’s Concerto in G major.
He looks at her.
HEQuestions, questions, questions—what’s with all the questions about music?
SHEWell, you see, I also had some questions about my mother . . . about you and my mother and about love.
He looks at her for a long time.
HELove is an entirely different matter. I don’t think I want to go mixing love into it. It’s clear that love has played a part, for example right here. Listen to this.
He lifts the Beethoven record off the turntable and slips it into its cover. Each time he reaches out of the wheelchair to select another record or to replace the previous one, I’m reminded of how drivers reach out of their car windows to drop coins into the basket at a toll station.
He puts on Schubert’s Winterreise. We listen to the last of the twenty-four songs. Then he reaches out of his chair again, lifts the stylus, and the room falls silent.
HEThe voice is perfectly clear—that’s what I’m talking about. From the first chords . . .
He pauses. Looks at the record player.
SHE(tentatively) Could you expand on that a little?
HEIt’s alive. Listening to that music, it’s as if you were injected with life. In certain situations, when I’m alone here in my study, I start to cry. And I’m not a teary-eyed lad. You know that. I’m not. But when I’m sitting here alone, listening to my records, the tears start coming. I get this heightened sense of being alive. Do you understand what I’m saying?
MAMMA WAS MUCH YOUNGER than Pappa when they met. She was twenty-seven and very beautiful.
She has told me that when I was born, Pappa came by plane from Stockholm and brought with him a green ring—an emerald—which he presented to her at her bedside. Once he had presented her with the ring and taken a brief look at his newborn daughter—yellow, scrawny—he caught the next plane back to Stockholm.
After one night in hospital, Mamma had to move to a private room because the other mothers in the maternity ward were giving her dirty looks, and every time she had the tiny baby in the room with her, she didn’t dare to read or sleep or stare at the ceiling or look out the window. Nothing except stare at this thing she had given birth to. It was boring to lie in bed and just stare, but she would rather die than give the nurses (who came and went and came and went) reason to believe that she thought of anything except loving her child, no one should be allowed to think that here lies a bad mother who shouldn’t have gone and gotten herself pregnant with someone other than her husband.
I don’t know whether anyone spoke to her about the tears that come with the milk, I think maybe she was ashamed of crying. She who was supposed to be happy. Ashamed of the restlessness that haunted her and that she wanted no part of, the stray suspicion that nothing was as it should be, or as she had imagined it would be.
THE MOTHER AND THE father could not decide what to call her. Time passed. Other decisions were made. When the girl was a few weeks old, the father decided that the mother should stop nursing, tuck the breast back into the blouse, give it back to him so the two of them could go away to Rome together.
The mother wanted to name her after a doll she had had as a child. Her favorite doll, Beate. I know nothing about the doll. Was it fair or dark-haired? When the mother was a little girl, she played tirelessly and earnestly with her dolls, dressing and undressing them, singing them to sleep in the evening and waking them in the morning, and when, one by one, she had declared them dead, she would slip out at night to bury them at the cemetery and cry.
The father wanted to name her after his mother, the girl’s paternal grandmother, dark-eyed, dark-haired Karin. A trained nurse, Karin took on the all-consuming role of minister’s wife and (eventually) mother of three while still a young woman. She wrote in her diary every day for thirty years, wrote about her children, her household, her acquaintances, her husband, the congregation, the changing seasons, holidays and ordinary days, sickness and death.
After she too had died, the father discovered that alongside her regular diary she had also kept a secret journal. In the secret journal she wrote:
More and more it seems t
hat my own story is the story of the whole family.
The girl was nearly two years old when she was christened, and walked up the aisle by herself. In a letter to the girl, addressed to 3 Svingen, Strømmen, Norway, the father writes:
THE DAY OF MY DAUGHTER’S CHRISTENING
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 5, 1968
This is a letter.
Dearest little daughter of mine. Since I am thinking of you more today, the day of your christening, than I usually do, and worry that you might become frightened and impatient during the actual ceremony, I am writing to you. For the time being I suppose you are entwined with your mother in such a way that everything else, while interesting, is none of your concern. But I can tell you that a few months ago you planted yourself, small and sniffling, between my legs, having decided that I was, after all, Pappa . . . In photographs you look very strong and full of life and at times like a little general who has just issued an order. I like the way you look because you already seem to me like a little person and not just a blur of a baby. I have the feeling that one day you and I will understand each other. We will have something in common that is not so easily defined. I believe you will meet the world with considerable resistance, and that is a good thing, surely.
The girl wasn’t interested in listening to the mother’s stories about how difficult it had been to find a minister willing to officiate. She was even less interested in the stories about how good and kind the minister had been—the one who said yes, when all the others said no.
