by Linn Ullmann
I was unable to calculate the number of molecules in a glass of sugar, Mamma and I couldn’t even find the sugar, but what I was able to calculate, or figure out, was that I was still a little girl, and that I could not, with any measure of credibility, be called someone’s woman.
I TOOK TO MY BED and refused to get up. I told everyone I was sick. The first time I stayed in bed for three days. The second time I stayed there for seven days. The third time I stayed there for ten days. For ten days I stayed in bed hugging the scabby cat.
“Why is she always running a temperature?” Mamma asks on the phone.
“We’re not sure,” whispers one of the two Swedish babysitters. “She says she’s freezing cold because she has to wear that uniform for school. It’s minus ten degrees outside, so no wonder?”
They come with tea and blankets and pat me on the cheek.
I never again want to set foot in a classroom ruled by Miss French. I can’t take any more of her beauty. Be careful what you wish for. And finally, after three bouts of fever, I transfer to the local public school, where the students are allowed to wear their regular clothes. This is where I get to know a boy my age named Adam. He wears a blue wool sweater with a white pattern just like the one I have. Marius sweaters, they’re called back home. In Norway everyone wears them; here, no one does, except for Adam and me. He comes over to the yellow house after school and plays Monopoly and listens to the Village People and Supertramp. Adam has a hint of a mustache. A little downy black mustache that partially conceals the childish cleft between his nose and mouth. I like it. I think it’s interesting. Manly, even. When we kiss, it tickles my upper lip. He strokes the outside of my sweater, barely touching my boobs, even though I don’t have proper boobs yet, as in plural, just that one, aching nipple.
For a while Adam is my only friend, but then I meet Violet, the girl next door with the long dark hair. Violet says that the ugliest thing in the world is little boys with mustaches. Disgusting. The mustache exposes Adam to be the stupid little idiot he truly is—he’s obviously not even close to being able to shave or to grow a real mustache like, say, Violet’s big brother Jeff.
Adam is small. Everything about him is small and delicate. Narrow shoulders, small hands that tremble when he tells me that he likes to read. Right now the whole class is reading To Kill a Mockingbird, I’ll help you, he says, we can read it together and discuss it, he tells me I shouldn’t worry that I can’t keep up with the reading assignments since I’m from another country and speak a different language. It takes me days, weeks, months to finish To Kill a Mockingbird.
I spend more and more time with Violet. One day I tell Adam that I don’t want him to come over anymore, I don’t want to play Monopoly or read books or listen to the Village People and Supertramp.
Violet’s favorite song is Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” and that’s my favorite song too.
Adam sits on the yellow sofa in the yellow living room where the Nobel Laureate usually sits when he comes to the house. I tell him I’ve made up my mind, it’s finished, it’s over, and when he begins to cry, I think he’s disgusting, that the things we’ve done together are disgusting. Adam is not a terrible clumsiness, like Gombrowicz wrote about, just a small disgusting clumsiness sitting there on the yellow sofa sniveling and crying like a baby.
“CATHERINE IS HEARTBROKEN,” Mamma says. “Remember that! Heartbroken. And from now on Catherine will be at the helm,” she adds. “And God help you if she quits as a babysitter. Then I don’t know what I’ll do.”
Mamma’s arrangement hasn’t gone according to plan. It rarely does. The arrangement with the Swedish babysitters was that if one girl jumped ship, the other could take over. That was the whole point of hiring two rather than one. But now both want to quit. They want to see America, they say, they’re only young once—and the boy with the bangs is going too. The three of them have split the cost of a car, and now they want to live life—all of this they tell Mamma—you just have to live and life will give you pictures, they trumpet, both talking at the same time. The thing about life giving you pictures they got from the boy with the bangs who got it from Henri Cartier-Bresson.
Mamma tells me that Catherine once dreamed of becoming a nun and even lived in a convent for a few years, but then she fell in love with a man and, well, she couldn’t really be a nun after that. She chose earthly love, says Mamma. Yes, and then she abandoned the convent and her vows and everything she believed in to be with the man.
Mamma has completely forgotten the advice from her women friends not to confide in me.
And not long after Catherine abandoned the convent, the man abandoned Catherine.
“Heartbroken,” Mamma repeats. “So you have to be really, really, really nice to her and do exactly as she says.”
Mamma is going away on yet another long trip, with a final stopover in Munich. This is Pappa’s city. This is where Pappa lives. She is not going to Munich specifically to see Pappa, she tells me, but she is bound to run into him once she’s there. And then she sighs. Everyone’s tugging at her. Everyone wants something. If only she could shut herself away somewhere and just sleep.
I’ll be thirteen soon. I’ve made a birthday wish list on which I’ve written: lip gloss, mascara, rouge, eyeliner.
“I’ve invited Catherine to come and visit before she moves in,” Mamma says, “She’s coming on your birthday.”
“Why?”
“As I said, I think you should get a chance to say hello.”
“I don’t get it.”
“What don’t you get? I’ve invited her to come to the house so that the two of you can get to know each other before she moves in.”
“Yes, but why is she coming on my birthday?”
“Because of all the days in the year,” says Mamma, “your birthday is the one day on which it wouldn’t occur to you to be rude.”
Pappa and Mamma are going to meet, Mamma doesn’t think I’m paying attention, I don’t usually pay attention when she’s talking, but when she talks about where she’s going and how long she’ll be away, I pay very close attention.
We are bound to run into each other, she says, and it’s happening in Munich. I don’t know anything about Munich, except that Pappa lives there.
The big question is: How will I get to Munich?
I’m not allowed to fly on my own without permission. I am a heap of knuckles and bones. A foolish child dependent on adults and their money to get from one place to another, at least if getting from one place to another involves a journey across the Atlantic. A heap, a ruin. Ruins are beautiful. I am not beautiful. Venus de Milo is more beautiful without arms than with them. You wonder what happened to her arms. She is a mystery. I’ll be thirteen soon, a mishmash of skinny limbs and a big mouth. I’m not a mystery.
If I can get myself to Munich and into a room with both my mother and father present, I will ask someone to take a picture of us.
I would like to own a picture of the three of us together.
I want to be there when my day and my night meet.
I raise my head and look at Catherine. She doesn’t say a word. Neither do I. Catherine promises Mamma to take complete and full responsibility for the girl, but she doesn’t know that this particular child can neither fall asleep in the evening nor wake up in the morning. It’s always either the middle of the day or the middle of the night where this girl’s concerned. Mamma will be going away soon. Catherine doesn’t know the meaning of panic.
“If the ship capsizes,” Mamma says, and smiles nervously, “you can call Mr. P. His number is in the kitchen drawer.”
I take her travel itinerary with me everywhere. It’s a typewritten sheet of paper with stains on it, smudged dates and places, cities, hotels. I know most of it by heart, even some of the telephone numbers. Under no circumstances, though, am I allowed to dial any of them, because of the expense involved in calling overseas.
During the day, I carry the sheet of paper with me in my school
bag, inside my math book, at night I keep it on the bedside table underneath my cup of cocoa.
Catherine (who came to the yellow house with a small suitcase and her oboe) makes hot cocoa with honey every evening and lets me drink it in bed. She says it will calm me. Before I go to sleep, I have to make sure my radio cassette player, my notebook, my mother’s travel itinerary, and my cup of cocoa are arranged in exactly the right order on the bedside table. There is a symmetry to this. Compulsion as discipline. Compulsion as choreography.
Actually, it is strictly forbidden to set cups and glasses down on tables in the yellow house. The corpulent lady was very specific about this. When Mamma and I lived in the house together, we had to remind each other about it all the time. If Mamma forgot to put a coaster under her wineglass, she had to pay me a dollar, if I forgot to put a coaster under my cup, I had to pay her a dollar. When Mamma started staying over in the city, and eventually, for all intents and purposes, moved to the apartment in New York, she told me I could take the train to Grand Central Station and visit her whenever I wanted. This wasn’t quite true. Not whenever I wanted, which was all the time, but sometimes, when I didn’t have school the next day, for instance. In Mamma’s New York apartment, it didn’t really matter if you got marks on the tables. We ate Chinese takeout in her large king-size bed, and I drank Coke or ginger ale from a can that I could put down anywhere. The more marks I left in the apartment, the better, said Mamma, and kissed me and rubbed her nose into the nape of my neck, “Mouse, I love you so much and miss you so much when you’re not with me,” even though both she and I knew that I was too old to be called Mouse. Now and then we’d watch three or four films in a row on TV, and often I was the one who fell asleep first.
But now Mamma has gone off on her long trip abroad and I take out her travel itinerary and put it on my bedside table, and then I place the cup of hot cocoa on top of it.
Eventually the sheet of paper is covered with cocoa rings. The longer Mamma is gone, the more rings on the sheet of paper, like the growth rings inside a tree. The cocoa rings are small, just smudges on a piece of paper, while the rings inside a tree are large, yet both are evidence of time passing slowly. Each new ring is a new day, a new week, a new month, or in the case of the tree, a new year.
I know exactly when she is in Leningrad or Moscow or Belgrade or London—and there is still a way to go until Munich. Right now, she is in Moscow, behind the Iron Curtain, Hotel National on Mokhovaya Street, and it’s difficult for her to call, she’s prepared me for this, she said that when you find yourself behind the Iron Curtain, it’s really hard to put in a call anywhere and that I shouldn’t start worrying. If I don’t hear from her, it’s because of the overall world situation, she tells me, the Cold War, communism, and not because she doesn’t love me.
Catherine has been instructed to avoid all situations in which I start waiting for Mamma to call me. If I start waiting, things are liable to go off course. I’m incapable of waiting for Mamma’s phone calls. I overreact, I’m frightened, I get hysterical, things get out of hand. Catherine has to find ways of diverting my attention to prevent these unfortunate episodes. So, if there’s a crisis and it’s impossible to get hold of Mamma, Catherine may (as already mentioned) call Mr. P, whose number is in the kitchen drawer.
One evening, Mamma calls and shouts, I love you, my darling, but there is so much crackling on the line that I can’t bring myself to answer, I just stand there in the kitchen clutching the receiver and nodding, I love her too, I do, she knows that, I love her so much that I burst into tears
“Go on, say something,” whispers Catherine, “say something!”
She stands in front of me, nervously shifting from one foot to the other. I don’t know which one of us is more relieved that Mamma has finally called.
“She can’t see that you’re nodding,” whispers Catherine, and gesticulates, “she can only hear you crying. Don’t cry. Why are you crying? You have to say something so she can hear your voice and doesn’t think you’re just going around being sad all the time.”
I remember what the Swedish babysitters looked like and what their names were, I remember their bodies, I remember their faces and their scent, but when it comes to the woman whose name may have been Catherine, I remember nothing. What I mean is that I remember nothing about what she looked like, her body, her face, but I can recall the atmosphere that surrounded her, dark, deep, blue, sad. If I were to compare her to a berry, I’d say blackcurrant. She played the oboe and practiced early every morning before I even got out of bed, her playing usually woke me up. It was nice, but a little tiresome too, the same passage over and over again. Once she said: “I’m grateful if I’m allowed to work in the garden, play my oboe, or just take a walk in the forest, I hope that I’ll always be able to abide by what the apostle Paul tells us: Rejoice evermore, pray without ceasing, in every thing give thanks.”
Apart from that one time, she never spoke of her faith. She laid her hand on my shoulder and pressed me down onto a chair, she wanted me to stop crying, rejoice evermore, pray without ceasing, in every thing give thanks, I could tell that it came from the Bible, Pappa would sometimes quote from the Bible, Nanna too, but not with this kind of insistence. I didn’t get it. Rejoice evermore. Catherine was the saddest person I had ever met.
Before Mamma left for Europe, Catherine said to her: “Your daughter needs new clothes. Something other than that blue-and-white wool sweater she’s always wearing. If it’s okay with you, I would like to take her shopping. She feels like she doesn’t fit in anywhere.”
Catherine cooks dinner every day. She always puts coasters under glasses and bottles. She helps me with the essay I have to write about To Kill a Mockingbird. She picks me up at the dentist’s office when I have my braces removed. Afterward she takes my face between her hands and tells me that I look pretty. She combs the cat every day and untangles the knots without ever pulling out tufts of fur.
The air is still warm, even though it’s late autumn, and on weekend nights I climb out the window to meet Violet and her brother and their friends on the beach down by the yellow house. We listen to music and drink either beer or concoctions poured from the bottles in Violet’s parents’ liquor cabinet. Her parents have marked the liquor bottles so they know how much should still be inside, but Violet gets a funnel from the kitchen drawer and replaces the missing liquor with water. It’s important to be accurate, she says, and puts the funnel back in place.
We sit in a circle around the bonfire. I have borrowed a blouse from Violet and a pair of pants. Violet is older than me and has nicer clothes. I turn around and there is Catherine. She is standing down by the water’s edge, a little way off. The sun is fat and pushy, glaring at us as it sets on the horizon. Jeff has turned up the music. He picks the tapes, it’s his boom box. Catherine’s hair blows in the wind. She is wearing a black dress. She is shouting to me. Shouting my name. Not with a loud voice—shouting is the wrong word. She never calls me anything other than my name. I turn back to the others, the fire is crackling, I pretend not to see her. Catherine continues shouting or not shouting or whatever it is she’s doing. Eventually, I turn to Violet and tell her I have to go, I’m being fetched, I say, and we roll our eyes. Everyone turns to look at Catherine. She doesn’t come any closer. The sun is fading, there is a chilly breeze blowing off the sea. I shrug. I’m the one who has to leave. I feel nauseous, but finish my drink. I don’t rush. Catherine will never let go of me. I dreamt that she said that. I will never let go of you. I gather my things and my shoes and walk barefoot across the sand. She takes my hand, but I pull away. She came to the house the day I turned thirteen. She came with her sadness and her prayers and her abandonment.
I say: “I’m not surprised your boyfriend doesn’t want you. You’re ugly. I don’t want you either. I hate you.”
IN THE END, I am the one who calls Mr. P. The telephone number is written on a piece of paper in the kitchen drawer, to be used in the case of an emergency. This is a
n emergency. Mr. P has a secretary, and the secretary says that Mr. P is in a meeting. I tell her that I must speak with him immediately, could she please go and get him. It’s urgent.
My English is good. I speak directly into the receiver. Clearly. Standing up straight.
“Good afternoon,” says Mr. P. He calls me Miss, but mostly to tease me. “How may I help you?”
I say that he needs to withdraw some money and buy me a plane ticket, “I’m going to Munich.”
“Hmm,” says Mr. P.
I say that these are my parents’ specific instructions. The word “parents” is surprisingly compelling.
“Hmm,” he says again.
I say that it’s not possible to get hold of them just now.
“May I please talk to the lady who takes care of you?” says Mr. P.
“Catherine is not here.”
“Does she know about this . . . that you’re calling me . . . that you intend to go to Munich?”
Mr. P is hesitating. That’s good. He’s not sure what to say next. He’s wavering.
“Of course, she knows! Mamma has talked to her.”
I have to fight the urge to say that I’m not a child who needs anyone’s permission.
It is important that he does as I ask, a plane ticket to Munich, it doesn’t have to be round-trip, but it would be nice if he could arrange for a car to pick me up and take me to the airport.
“Hmm,” he says a third time.
Mamma is in Moscow, I tell him, behind the Iron Curtain, it’s not possible to call her at the moment, Mr. P is quite aware of that, and Pappa, I add, is a man who under no circumstances should be disturbed, I don’t even have his telephone number, he is, so to speak, his own iron curtain, all of this I tell him. I have a plan. I have written it down. I am not improvising. And I don’t tell Catherine anything, not until the car that will take me to the airport pulls up outside the yellow house.
