Unquiet

by Linn Ullmann

  SHEForget what?

  HEAll that stuff about being a child at play.

  SHEThat was bullshit?

  HEYes, I say: it was a game I played . . . and that I thought was essential, and then it vanished.

  SHEAre you saying that work and play were the same thing to you?

  HENo. Or yes. On the one hand, you see, I am very precise, very meticulous . . . as you’ve probably heard from my colleagues.

  SHEYes, but more than that, I’ve heard it from you.

  HEYes.

  SHEWell, you never liked to improvise.

  HENo, I certainly did not.

  He laughs.

  SHENo!

  HE(continues to laugh) No. Improvising is not my thing. When I made The Magic Flute, I was like a child at play, it was a game, every day Mozart’s music in the wings, but, mind you, all of it was very precisely thought out. Precision. Precision. Precision, my heart.

  DR. N IS AN elderly man, slight and distinguished-looking in a brown tweed jacket and a bow tie, small fingers, small teeth, long eyelashes. He conducts home visits like physicians did in the old days, only it isn’t the old days, it’s now, or not now, it’s seven years ago, so you might still be able to call it the present. One of the six women who cares for Pappa serves Dr. N a cup of coffee in the kitchen. Afterward he is shown into the living room, where Pappa is waiting for him in his wheelchair. I am sitting on the sofa. When Dr. N has greeted us both—the whole thing is so well-mannered you’d think we were hosting a soirée—I get up and leave. I say something like, Now I will leave you gentlemen to your own devices. I haven’t even had a chance to close the door behind me when I hear Pappa tell Dr. N that he is surrounded by strangers.

  He lowers his voice: “I believe she is a relative, but I’m not sure.”

  “She’s your daughter,” says the doctor, and laughs, a little embarrassed. “The youngest one, I believe.”

  “Really?” says Pappa.

  They remain sitting for a while in silence.

  And then Pappa says: “How old is she?”

  “Uh, hmm, well, I don’t know,” says Dr. N, and mumbles something about how a wise man should never try to guess a woman’s age.

  “Maybe seventy,” says Pappa.

  “No, no,” says Dr. N.

  “No?” says Pappa.

  “Perhaps you’re exaggerating a little,” says Dr. N. “My guess would be that she is somewhere around forty.”

  “Aha,” says Pappa, “you might very well be right about that.”

  SHECan you tell me about Ingrid? Look, here is a picture of her. Do you see her? Can you see the picture?

  A photograph of Ingrid as a young woman hangs on the bedroom wall. She takes it down and shows it to him. Ingrid’s thick, dark hair is drawn into a braid descending down her back. He studies the picture. When she holds it in front of him, as if it were a mirror, Ingrid looks straight at him. There is a hint of a smile in her eyes.

  HE(almost inaudibly) For her, life was a straight, wide, open road on which we could travel together in safety.

  SHESafety for both? Or just for you? Did she also feel safe?

  HEYes. That’s how it was.

  SHEDo you still talk to Ingrid?

  HEYes, I do, she is always nearby.

  SHEDo you believe that you will see Ingrid again when you die?

  HEI’m utterly convinced of that.

  SHEDo you believe that you will see others beside Ingrid?

  HEI don’t know, but I know I will see Ingrid. I am absolutely certain of it. Is your loudspeaker still on?

  He says loudspeaker, but means microphone.

  SHEYes. Is that okay? We’ll finish up soon.

  HEIt is finished.

  SHEAre you tired?

  HEYes, I am.

  SHEWould you like to rest a bit before lunch?

  HEI don’t know. When is lunch?

  SHELunch is in forty-five . . . or, no (she looks at her watch) . . . in forty minutes.

  HELunch?

  SHEYes, in forty minutes.

  HETwelve o’clock?

  SHEIt is twelve twenty now. Lunch is at one. It is forty minutes till lunch.

  HEWhat . . . I don’t know.

  SHEYes, but I know. You are having lunch at one o’clock.

  HEI am having lunch at one o’clock?

  SHEYes. Omelet at one.

  HEOmelet at one.

  SHESo, just over half an hour from now.

  HEAre you sure about that?

  SHEYes, I am. Dead sure.

  HEDead sure?

  SHEIn Norwegian we say skråsikker, from skrá, meaning parchment.

  HEWhat was that?

  SHESkråsikker. So sure it might as well be written on skin.

  Long pause.

  HEYes, well, I think that we should finish today’s exercises.

  SHEThen let me turn this off. Listen, did I upset you when I asked about Ingrid?

  HEYes.

  SHEI’m sorry.

  HENo, you couldn’t have known that it would hurt, but it did. Damn!

  SHEWe’ll finish up now.

  HEYes.

  SHEBut listen . . . Should I get the book so we can write down the time for tomorrow?

  HEYes, but you see, that will be very complicated.

  SHEWhy is that?

  HEBecause then one of the women who works here will have to come all the way in here and help us . . . and we can’t drag them here at all hours.

  SHEBut can’t we just get the book ourselves and write whatever we want in it without the help of other people?

  HENo, that’s not possible.

  SHEI see . . . but should we just agree to meet tomorrow at eleven?

  Endlessly long pause.

  HEYes.

  SHEYou sound doubtful?

  HEWell, yes, you know, I am a very busy man.

  SHEYes, of course.

  HEA busy man has the right to doubt.

  SHEThat’s true.

  HEIf you don’t mind, I would like to suggest that we meet at one o’clock.

  SHENo, that’s when you have lunch.

  HEWell, then you and I will have lunch together! I think they’re serving eggs, probably an omelet, and maybe we’ll even have a glass of wine. I believe we have a plan, no?

  HE SAT QUIETLY POKING at the omelet in front of him, his smooth heavy head bent. He raised his head and glanced at me, lowered his head and took a bite, raised his head again. Finally, he opened his mouth, not to eat, but to say something.

  We had been sitting there forever, so when something was finally about to be said, I was relieved and leaned forward. He had shriveled up, faded away, his eyes involuntarily mild, but his cheeks a rosy red.

  Anne Carson has written: “Why do we blush before death?”

  He pointed at the ketchup bottle between us on the table. It too was red. And ugly next to the little glass vase with wildflowers that someone had taken the time to pick. The kitchen table was comfortably familiar, pine, the wildflowers too, but the ketchup bottle was all wrong, a big, ugly, red wrong in my father’s house.

  After a long silence, Pappa asked whether I had ever tasted ketchup. I realized he was trying to make small talk. If this were a party, he was the host and I was the guest. He said that if I hadn’t tasted ketchup, I was in danger of missing out on one of life’s great joys. I wasn’t sure how to respond to that. Should I say something about ketchup?

  I have arranged parties since I was sixteen, always with a feeling that something terrible was going to happen.

  Some days he would recognize me, other days he wouldn’t. Every morning I hoped that he would be in the one state and not in the other. After a while I discovered a third state, more perplexing than the one or the other. He often knew who I was, but doubted whether what he knew was in fact true.

  It took time to die, it was an ongoing task, and if anyone had asked me that summer: What is he doing now? I would have answered that he lay dying although, of course, that wouldn’t ha
ve been entirely correct, because even if he was mostly lying on his back, he would also sit or double up, now and then he was lifted into his wheelchair by meddlesome or well-meaning female hands and wheeled into the kitchen to be served an omelet.

  I was afraid that his head would grow too heavy for his body, that he would rip, rupture, unravel like a rag doll. He weighed no more than a bag of apples.

  The bedroom windows were kept shut to prevent flies and insects from getting in, but still there were butterflies on the walls, on the ceiling (sitting? standing? clinging?), there was something leaden about them, something winterlike, flecks of black on smooth white surfaces. If I lay on his bed and stared at the ceiling, squeezing my eyes shut so that everything became a blur, the butterflies started to look like other things. They looked like blood spatter, maybe because I had just read an article about blood-spatter analysis, how the spatter can uncover what happened at the crime scene. They looked like gravel in the snow, his bedroom was warm and stuffy, it was warm outside and warm inside and I longed for snow. I lay on the bed next to my father and longed for snow, or at least a chilly breeze, sometimes I spoke to him, sometimes I sang, it occurred to me that he may not have wanted me there next to him in bed, talking, singing, maybe he wanted to be left in peace, die in peace, but was too weak to tell me.

  The butterflies were a type of presence that can’t be called corporeal or even physical, I counted one, two, three, four. One butterfly is lovely, it strays into your room, perhaps you ascribe meaning to it, you admire its beauty, you are thankful that something so exquisite reveals itself to you, but many butterflies all at once—inside a dark, warm room—is something else. It is what it is, they are what they are. They want nothing from you, they don’t even want to flee. I got up from the bed, drew the curtains, and opened the window wide.

  “No, not that,” Pappa mumbled when the light fell on his face.

  One would think that the butterflies would have appreciated the chance to escape, that they would have spread their large wings and fluttered into the light, but no, I stood there tottering and waving and whispering shoo, shoo, but they remained stuck to the walls.

  The house was an extension of him. You were not allowed to move around in it as you liked, there were rules for everything, I would never, for example, have taken a glass of water from the kitchen into the living room. No one ever told me. No one said: You are not allowed to take a glass of water into the living room. It was something I knew. I knew it so well (and had known it for so long) that I didn’t have to think about it. The long narrow house, lying stretched out with a view of the stony beach and the Baltic Sea, maintained a chaste order whereby everyone who lived inside it, children and adults, saw to their work, watched the time, and avoided emotional hurly-burly. A small world sketched out and planned in advance.

  In Ingrid’s day, butterflies wouldn’t have gotten inside. I went to fetch the long-handled broom from the cupboard in the hallway between the foyer, the kitchen, and the living room. Had King Solomon come to the house at Hammars, he would not only have said that there is a time for everything, but also that there is a place.

  Every morning, Ingrid went through the house with a carpet beater to beat the pillows on the armchairs, the sofa, the beds, and if you sat on the sofa after she had beaten the pillows, the whole sofa would collapse and become all squashed and sloppy. Although Ingrid died many years before Pappa, it sometimes felt as if she still went from room to room beating pillows.

  WHEN HE SAT IN his wheelchair, it was hard not to notice his spindly legs, ballerina legs, his feet wrapped in large sheepskin slippers. On one of the slippers he had written the letter L, on the other the letter R. He had used his regular black marker. It was several years since he had written L and R on his slippers. Now he wouldn’t have been able to write anything at all.

  His striped nightshirt flapped around his knees, several sizes too big, as if it belonged to another and much heftier man than he, a heftier man who was now walking around looking for his nightshirt because the one he himself was wearing was too small and too tight. When Pappa was wheeled from his bedroom to the kitchen, he hollered NO!, and then he would double up and try to make himself small, as if he wanted to vanish into the wheelchair, become the wheelchair, he took time to die and it wasn’t as if he simply lay down and died or sat and died or doubled up and died or hollered NO! and died, he mumbled and hollered and whispered and rattled and one day I lay next to him in bed and sang a lullaby, the same lullaby I’ve sung for my children, the blackout curtains were drawn as usual, so even though it was the middle of the day and the sun was blazing outside, the room was dark. He always said that all his nightmares and thoughts of death played out in bright sunlight, and he would protest whenever I tried opening the curtains, heavy, yellow-beige curtains that dragged along the floor and lapped up dust. To me everything in here felt dark and stuffy, and I didn’t like having to keep a constant eye on the butterflies, but I lay there in the dark and sang for him, the same song that my children loved so much. I couldn’t see him clearly, and he couldn’t see me, we were two shadows lying side by side, one shadow singing, the other shadow quiet, he hadn’t said anything for a long time, and, then, right in the middle of the song, I wondered whether he had died, I hoped that he had, that he had passed quietly away in his sleep, as the expression goes. The lullaby had many verses, that is why my children loved it, it takes time to get through it, and they wanted it to take as much time as possible from when I started singing until I said good night and turned out the light and closed the door. Eva is afraid of the night, she dreads the moment she has to go to sleep, always tries to put it off, asks for a slice of bread with jam, asks for a glass of water, asks for a kiss, asks us to sing the long song with all the verses, and when I lay there next to my father on the bed—in the middle of the third or fourth verse—I thought: Maybe he is dead now?

  But then, after a few more verses, a thin rasp: “Very beautiful.”

  His voice was perfectly clear, as if from an earlier time. This was a new time.

  We were always courteous with each other. I said: “Do you think so?” without getting an answer. And then I asked: “Would you like me to sing it one more time?” and he said: “No, thank you.”

  Courtesy was important, I am grateful for the courtesy, we made an effort until the end.

  SHEBut you have always portrayed characters who ruminate about death—death is all over the place, in your films, in your plays, in your writing.

  HEOh, is that so?

  SHEDo you disagree? Haven’t you been more than just a little preoccupied with death?

  HEWell, maybe, in a way, but not too much, my preoccupation with death has been quite modest, actually.

  SHEI’m surprised you should say that.

  HEDeath as lore, death as fantasy, yes, but I’ve never taken death seriously. That, of course, is what I have to do now.

  SHEWhat do you mean?

  HEAh, what’s with all the questions!

  SHEDoes my asking make you angry?

  HENo, no, no.

  SHETell me if you’d like to stop.

  HENo, no.

  SHEWhat do you mean when you say that you have to take something seriously?

  HETo take something seriously means to be concrete.

  SHETo be concrete?

  HEHaving to be concrete frightens me.

  SHEWhy?

  HEDon’t you see: because it is real. It can’t be altered, it is tangible, it is something you have got to get through. No fuss. The truth of the matter is that I have never taken anything seriously.

  Silence.

  SHEIs that the kind of person you are: someone who never takes anything seriously?

  HESometimes I think so, yes. And no—I am also the opposite.

  SHESomeone who takes everything seriously?

  HEYes . . . I don’t know who I should rather be.

  THE WOMEN WHO CARED for him during his last year worked in shifts. They came and went
and did a lot more than open and close the bedroom curtains. One woman listened to the radio in the evening, the second woman ironed laundry in the living room, the third woman tried on dresses in the kitchen, the fourth woman sang, the fifth woman said, He says I remind him of his mother, the sixth woman walked around jingling with a big chain of keys, and little by little the house changed. Everything in this house had happened in compliance with certain rules, in designated rooms and at specific times, no one had listened to the radio in the evenings, except for Pappa, no one had ironed laundry in the living room, or tried on dresses in the kitchen.

  If I try to picture the women’s faces, everything becomes a blur. When I think about them, I think about their hands.

  He had made arrangements for dying. I will lie in my own bed, in my own house, looking across the stony shore, the gnarled pines, the sea, and the ever-shifting light. “Everyone must bear his own universe,” Henry Adams wrote, “and most persons are moderately interested in learning how their neighbors have managed to carry theirs.”

  The women who cared for him had tended children and old people before, these were experienced hands, weathered hands, yet I would hesitate to call them caring hands. But it was all part of his plan. I don’t want to go to some fucking retirement home. I want to die in my own house. I will not be left helpless and at the mercy of my children. I will not be subjected to displays of emotional brouhaha.

  The women, most of whom were in their sixties, and whom my father tended to refer to as the women or girls who work here, did what they had always done, at least since becoming adults. I can’t even picture them as ever having been young girls. That summer everything was about dying, the work of dying, death leaning into life, life leaning into death, he would wake up in the morning and fall asleep at night, but died every day nonetheless. The heart was still beating, but the absence was overwhelming. The women from the island, doing what they had always done, cared for him as they knew how—they wheeled and lifted and fed and washed and patted and dried and sometimes they caressed his brow or held his hand.