by Linn Ullmann
I walk into the kitchen, lugging my suitcase behind me.
Catherine is making lunch. It’s Saturday afternoon.
“I’m leaving now, okay.”
She raises her head and looks at me.
“Excuse me?”
I take hold of my suitcase, unable to lift it, I’ll have to lug it along all the way.
“I said, I’m leaving now.”
“Where are you going?”
I take a deep breath and say as clearly as I can: “I’m going to Munich.”
THE NOBEL LAUREATE WAS no longer in the picture, and Catherine quit when I ran off to Germany. Eventually Mamma and I moved back to Oslo, resettling in the big flat on Erling Skjalgsson Street.
Mamma has come to a point in her life, she says, that she wants to do something for other people.
She wants to be useful.
She looks around at the world and wants to make it a better place.
She will not (like Elisabet Vogler) go silent.
If you need me, she said.
If you miss me.
If you want me to come.
If you want to talk.
If you want me to be with you.
Mamma left for London. I don’t know why, I no longer sat by the phone waiting for her to call. But I was still terrified of losing her. Sometimes I forced myself to walk a hundred times quickly around the block, or run up and down the stairs until I wept from exhaustion, once I poured salt into a glass of water and forced myself to drink it. Do it, or she’ll die! I knew it was just my thoughts forcing me to do these things, that the thoughts were mine and no one else’s, I knew I should ignore them and go about my day. I needed one body for life and one body for all the thoughts. I skipped ballet class. It didn’t matter. I quit ballet. That didn’t matter either. I was fourteen now. Heidi and I had sleepovers and prepared ourselves for a life with men. She already knew about smooth skin, ways of moving, the looks she elicited when she walked through a room or down the street. She had overcome her old fears and replaced them with new ones. I hovered somewhere between the old and the new.
In London, Mamma was profiled by Yugoslav television. Bogdan, a name that would have suited him, is Slavic and means God-given. Dressed in a white linen suit, he interviewed my mother and fell so deeply in love with her that he packed his suitcase and followed her to Oslo. I picture him landing at Fornebu Airport. I picture him taking the bus, not a taxi, and getting off at Olav Kyrres Square, then walking, suitcase in tow, the 150 meters to the tall, white turn-of the-century apartment building where Mamma and I lived on the third floor behind heavy vermilion curtains. He stands there in the ice-cold Oslo air with autumn leaves swirling around him, with his suitcase and his books (in a large leather bag slung over his shoulder) and his deep voice and his broken English, asking if he can move in.
“I have left everything,” he says.
And then he spreads his arms as if he had wings and were about to fly. Mamma has run down the stairs to open the main door, and when he spreads his arms, she thinks he wants to embrace her, but he only wants to show her how big everything is. It starts to rain. He takes a step toward her, says: “I have come here to live with you.”
Mamma was forty-two. He was a year older. In the first part of the Yugoslav television interview, her hair is pulled back in a tight ponytail, in the second part it hangs loose. It wasn’t he who loosened her hair, she is in the midst of shooting a film and the interview is recorded between takes. In one of the film scenes she wears her hair pulled back, in another she wears it down. Halfway through the interview he thanks her for making the time to see him.
The interview, which was later aired in its entirety in Yugoslavia, starts with him sitting on a sofa saying a few words to the TV viewers, then he turns his attention to Mamma, who is also sitting on the sofa. Now the camera is fixed solely on her. I don’t know whether she is thinking about the camera’s gaze or his gaze or both. He asks questions, she answers them. He quotes Beckett. She’s impressed. She does this thing with her eyes, it’s a trick, it drives men crazy; she looks at them, stares, her eyes bore into them, and I imagine they feel seen in a way they’ve never been seen before, I’ve tried doing it myself, in front of the mirror, but when I do it, it just looks like I’m squinting. He asks her if her beauty is a burden and she gives a little laugh and doesn’t know what to say, and then he asks her if she can remember the first words she heard as a child. And in her little girl voice Mamma whispers that it is a lullaby her mother used to sing . . . and then she starts to sing.
She sings very softly, as if singing for him alone and not for the whole of Yugoslavia, as if she wants to sing herself and him to sleep:
Sleep sweetly little child
rest quietly and mild,
angels watching at your feet,
sleep in peace, my darling sweet.
To me she said that he had defected, which apparently meant that he couldn’t go back home. He had to stay with us, it wasn’t as if we had a choice, he had nowhere else to go.
This was not the first time love and the Iron Curtain had somehow crossed paths. It was difficult to explain, she said. I didn’t care. I’d stopped listening. It annoyed her that I never listened. That I rolled my eyes. That I couldn’t be bothered to answer when spoken to. As for Bogdan, when he imagined what it would be like to leave everything behind to be with my mother, he’d forgotten to imagine me. I wasn’t part of his plan, he wasn’t part of mine. He had his own children in Belgrade, but had abandoned them to live with us. Or not us precisely. Her. To live with her. Be careful what you wish for. He and I made a pact. A pact of silence. He let me bum cigarettes, I left him alone. Mamma came and went. Spring arrived. Neither of us looked up when she walked into the room. Winter arrived.
Mamma said: “All day and no light.”
Bogdan blew smoke rings through all the rooms in the big flat.
Spring arrived.
Summer arrived, and one night he knocked on my bedroom door and told me I had to come right away. It was the middle of the night, I wasn’t myself, I wasn’t the girl, I wasn’t my name. I was sleep. I was heavy and light at the same time and impossible to reach, to stir, to wake, lying there under the warm duvet, but he said I had to wake up now, I heard his voice, as in a dream, first softly and then a bit louder. “I don’t know what to do,” he said, “I . . . she . . .”
He had never said so many words before. At least, not to me.
When we spoke to each other, we spoke English. His was broken and handsome, like old woodwork.
“She is in there.”
He pointed at the door to Mamma’s bedroom. It stood slightly ajar.
“She says that she has . . . I think she just wants to frighten me . . .” he didn’t finish his sentences, “but then she says that she hasn’t.”
He hesitated, looking at me.
“Can you talk to her?”
I went into Mamma’s room and lay down next to her in the bed with the golden bedposts. The stench of clammy, stuffy sleep and liquor. White wallpaper with a pale red border. When I was little, Mamma and I used to lie in bed and trace the border with our fingers, and Mamma would hum a lullaby to which she didn’t know the words.
Mamma whispered something.
She wanted to sleep. She wanted me to leave. She wanted to be left alone.
I nestled up close to her, gently: “Mamma, did you take pills?”
“No, no . . . but maybe a little too much to drink.”
A pill bottle was standing on the bedside table. I picked it up and laid it between us.
“Mamma . . . ?”
“Not because I took . . . it was already empty.”
Her body was still the warmest place. I lifted her arm and draped it around me, and then she sighed, not resigned, but like a child who has woken up at night and been comforted and who finally dares to fall asleep again, I closed my eyes, her sleep was so vast it had room for the both of us, a breeze blew in from the open window and
Mamma stirred, it was hard to tell who was asleep and who was keeping watch, but then she started to cry and everything became clear.
“I didn’t mean to do it,” she wept, almost inaudibly.
And then she whispered: “I don’t know what to do.”
Bogdan sat in a chair in the dark in the living room and smoked. If you ever happened to wonder where he was, you could follow the thin swirl of white smoke curling its way through the flat.
When the paramedics came stomping up the stairs and into the flat, I spoke to her softly.
“Mamma?”
She turned away and moaned.
“Look,” she cried, “look what you’ve done now.”
She was lifted from the bed onto a stretcher, and the paramedic said: “Perhaps the two of you should take your own car to the hospital.”
I translated for Bogdan. The paramedic said: “We’re going to take her with us now, and you can both follow in your own car. Okay?”
And then he looked at me and repeated: “We have to go now. And you’ll follow in your own car.”
I nodded.
I was still wearing my nightgown when Bogdan and I got into the taxi to go to the hospital.
“Do you think,” he said, “do you think that your mother has ever been happy with a man?”
“I don’t know that,” I said. “How should I know?”
“But why did she do it?”
“I don’t know.”
“She’s done it once before.”
He lowered his voice and added, “I’m only wondering whether it’s possible for her to be happy with a man.”
I turned and looked at him.
“I don’t know, Bogdan.”
The taxi driver looked at us in the mirror. He didn’t like us. My nightgown was grubby. Bogdan smelled of cigarettes. If I threw up in the car, the taxi driver would probably kick us out.
“You have to stop asking me stuff! I feel sick!”
Bogdan took my hand and squeezed it.
The car seats were black and shiny, I imagined throwing up all over the blackness and shininess; there was a faint smell of windshield wiper fluid in the air.
The doctor laid her hand on my shoulder. I didn’t want it there, tried to shrug it off, but it stayed where it was, big and moist and sluggish like a jellyfish.
“Has your mother been very sad lately?”
Bogdan came and stood next to me, took the doctor’s hand, and removed it from my shoulder. He said something to her in English, but she didn’t speak English or pretended that she didn’t; she wouldn’t look at him, tried to catch my eye instead.
“Has your mother been very sad lately?”
The doctor had braids, she was younger than Mamma. I thought she should lose the braids. She looked like a little girl.
“Maybe,” I said, looking away, “or maybe she would just rather live in New York. I have no idea.”
THE PARTY IS HELD in a chambre séparée, It means separate room, says Mamma, it’s French, Okay, I say, even though we’re in Germany, Yes, she says, this is one of Munich’s finest restaurants. The maître d’ takes our coats and points at a long, sweeping staircase. Mamma takes hold of her dress and starts running up the stairs, she runs and runs and runs, we mustn’t be late, she says, and turns in the middle of a leap, the hem of her silk dress weaving its way up.
She points to a closed, gilded door and says: “That’s where we’re going.”
I stand next to her—voices and laughter on the other side of the door. I turn toward Mamma.
“Is Pappa in there now?”
“Yes, Pappa and a few other people.”
“Are we going in?”
“I just have to catch my breath.”
“Does Pappa know I’m here?”
She lets out a small giggle.
“Does he know that you ran away from home and came here without anyone’s permission . . . Yes, he knows.”
“But I wasn’t at home.”
“What?”
“I wasn’t at home, so you can’t say that I ran away from home.”
“No.”
“Catherine is not my mother.”
“Catherine is just sad, she probably feels that you ran away and now she doesn’t want to be our babysitter anymore.”
“Are you mad?”
“No.”
“Is Pappa mad?”
“No.”
I take her hand. “Well, are we going in?”
Mamma looks at me, her cheeks blazing. Her silk dress is so long and sheer, it looks like a nightgown.
“Do I look nice?” she asks.
“Yes,” I say.
“All right, in we go,” she says, and is about to open the door.
I squeeze her hand, I want her to wait a little.
“What about me? Do I look nice?”
Mamma smiles at me. She lets go of my hand, takes hold of my shoulders, and looks at me. I’m wearing a blue dress.
“You’re beautiful,” she says.
IV
HAVE MERCY ON ME
...
He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other (as perhaps the people of Babel did in the beginning), so to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out.
—VIRGINIA WOOLF, “On Being Ill”
SHEDid you and your father ever speak about God?
HEFather and I?
SHEYou’ve told me so many stories about your mother and your grandmother, I feel as if I know them even though they died before I was born, but I know very little about your father. He was a minister.
HEYes, but he was quite aloof, he was silent and aloof. One didn’t have deep conversations with Father.
SHENever?
HENo. He had to follow certain rules, and even if you were thankful for the rules, it was always rules, rules . . . Fuck! When’s lunch? Isn’t it time?
SHEYes, soon. We will finish up in a moment.
HE(hesitates) No . . .
SHEYes, we’ve gone into overtime, but tomorrow is Saturday and we will meet at eleven o’clock as usual. Should we write it down in the book?
HEYes.
SHEAnd Sunday is free.
HEAh, I see.
He avoids looking at her.
SHEShould we write it down in the book?
HEThat we’re free tomorrow?
SHENo, tomorrow we’re working, Sunday is free. Should we write it down in the book?
HEYes, I suppose you can do that.
She gets up and walks over to the calendar, which lies on his desk.
I know that she does this because her voice is far away from the microphone. His voice is close. This creates a new dissonance between the two voices.
SHE(from a distance) I’m wondering whether . . . when we meet tomorrow . . . I’m wondering whether it’s okay if I ask you a few questions about your father?
HE(up-close, as though he’s bending over and speaking directly into the microphone) No.
SHEIt’s not okay?
HENot very okay, no.
SHEWhy not?
HEBecause there’s been a lot of okay today. I’m going to feel exhausted, and I don’t want another day like this tomorrow.
SHEWould you rather not work tomorrow?
HENo.
SHEBut let’s just agree then, that we won’t meet tomorrow.
HEIs that okay?
SHEDo you want to work the day after tomorrow then? On Sunday?
HENo.
SHEDo you want a break from the project on Saturday and Sunday?
HEYes.
SHEDo you want to work on Monday?
HEYes, let’s do that.
SHEShould we write it down in the book?
HEWe can do that.
SHEThen I’ll write it down. Monday at eleven o’clock . . . okay?
HEOkay.
BEFORE HE GOT SICK, he would write on his nightstand whenever he couldn’t sleep. Not on a piece of pape
r on the nightstand, but on the table itself. He had a black marker. The table was white.
He wrote on the walls too, for example: Turn out the lights! And on the tables in his study and in the living room. A name, a telephone number, a time and a date he mustn’t forget, maybe a concert on the radio.
But the nightstand was reserved for the night and is covered in closely written words, sentences, notes, dreams. From a distance, the tabletop looks like a map of the moon.
One place it says, like a three-line poem:
The true nightmare
SARABAND
The bloody cataract is spreading
He once said that he envisioned the Sarabande of Bach’s fifth cello suite as a painful dance for two.
HEI am no longer able to do my work! It’s over.
SHENo . . . it isn’t over.
HEYes, it is.
SHEYou and I have been talking for a whole week . . . and there’s nothing to indicate that it’s over.
HEReally? . . . You think so? . . . (eagerly) Sometimes it feels as if my creativity, the desire to write, returns like a godsend, settles on my shoulder and speaks to me. And when that happens, I get such a bloody urge to sit down at my desk with my yellow sheets of paper. They’re still lying in the drawer over there . . . I’m talking about when writing is fun . . . when writing is snazzy-pazzy . . . what happens is, I get an urge . . . and then . . . the next day . . . uh, you know, all that . . . the next day the urge is gone.
SHEYes, but you’ve told me that all it takes is discipline.
HEYes, but that was before.
SHEBefore, but not now? Why not now?
HEI don’t know. It’s . . . before I felt like a child at play.
Long silence.
HEOh never mind, forget everything I just said, it’s bullshit.
