by Linn Ullmann
I fetched the long-handled broom and walked back to Pappa’s room. When I was little, I would count the steps from Pappa and Ingrid’s room at one end of the house to Daniel’s and my rooms at the other.
Back then it was Ingrid who washed, vacuumed, and ironed, who mended socks and typed his manuscripts, who hung up sheets and linens in the drying closet and mangled them in the wringer and made up the beds so nothing would bulge or wrinkle, who shopped and prepared meals, who cleaned as she went, who archived and did the accounting and responded to letters.
Standing on tiptoe, I carefully nudged one of the butterflies with the broomstick, I was afraid of nudging it too hard, I didn’t want to kill it, I would have killed a fly no problem, but not a butterfly, I don’t know why, these weren’t even pretty, and they wouldn’t budge, not even when I gave them a poke. They kept sitting there on the wall, one, two, three, four, and a fifth that I hadn’t spotted earlier, they sat there with their wings, not going anywhere, not wanting anything, I gave up, placed the broom in a corner, and lay back down on the bed next to Pappa.
It isn’t true that he weighed less than a bag of apples, I could just as well have written that he weighed more than a large tree. I can’t say whether he was heavy or light.
I was unable to lift him from a lying to a sitting position. I meant to give him some water. He must have weighed a ton—how much does a large tree weigh? An elm, for example? He ended up half lying, half sitting in bed in an uncomfortable and entirely unsuitable position for drinking water while I balanced on the edge of the bed, also half sitting, half lying, with one arm draped around his shoulders and the other fumbling for the glass on the nightstand, both of us deadlocked in this position, an unfinished sculpture of indeterminable origin. Once I had finally gotten hold of the glass and brought it to his lips, I managed to coax us into place. We were no longer deadlocked, we could move, but Pappa wasn’t able to open his mouth and drink. I gently nudged the glass against his lips. I don’t know where I got the idea that he was thirsty and wanted to drink, he had not said: I am thirsty. He had not pointed at the glass. He had not spoken in several days. Perhaps he had decided not to drink any more water.
Later it occurred to me that I should simply have moistened his lips. I had never before been present at someone’s deathbed, but I’ve read lots of books and should have known that this is what you do. You moisten their lips. Have mercy on me and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue. The rich man in the verse doesn’t ask for a glass of water. He asks that the poor man dip his fingertips in water and moisten his lips.
I blew it. I blew it because of my clumsiness, my terrible clumsiness. The women in my family—on my mother’s, not my father’s side—are all beset by this terrible clumsiness. I trip on the street, walk straight into trees, spill wine on the floor. This time I spilled water on my father, it ran, it ran down his neck and under his collar, down his chest and all over the sheets. He gasped as the water hit him, it was the coldest thing ever to hit his skin, or what do I know about his skin and its experiences with hot and cold, all I know is that it was a long time since he had been touched in the places he was being touched now—water spilling down his neck, along his collarbone, his chest—and I believe this is why he opened his mouth to speak, although he didn’t exactly speak, but mumbled what would be his very last words to me.
“Fucking bitch,” he said.
I said: “I’m sorry, Pappa.”
And he said: “Fucking cold . . . fucking bitch.”
GROWING OLD IS WORK. To convince your body to obey your brain, and eventually convince your brain to obey itself, to ask God for mercy. His entire life, Pappa zigzagged between faith, doubt, and disbelief. Once he said: “On the one hand I believe I will see Ingrid again, on the other hand I believe dying is like blowing out a candle.”
He said: “Get out of bed, shower, put on socks and shoes, fresh clothes, eat breakfast, ride your bicycle, go to work.”
For instance: Think about the work that goes into tying your shoelaces. It calls for physical exertion, dexterity, and cleverness, any child between the ages of six and nine years old knows it, early in life it is a serious matter, the bow the greatest mystery, the fingers, the hands, the laces, altogether an apparently unsolvable riddle. But once you have mastered it, you forget how complicated it is, the years pass until one day—having put your socks on—you look down at your feet, unsure of how to proceed.
At night, before he was confined to a wheelchair, he would seek refuge in the smallest room in the house, sit down on a bunk and surrender himself to thinking about other people. Regarding this ritual, he once said: “I see her before me, her lips, her gaze, her form, I say her name out loud, I hear myself say her name, I see her turn toward me, there may be something awkward about her movements, maybe she is laughing, and then I think about her laughter, or something she says . . . look, it doesn’t have to be a woman, it could be a man, or a child . . . I think about others, the living and the dead, and then I light a candle.”
He asks her to open the curtains. She gets up, walks to the window and draws them apart.
HETo let some more light in.
She remains standing by the window.
SHENow we can see the ocean.
HEI can’t.
SHEShould I open them some more?
HENo.
SHEAre you cold?
HENo.
SHEWould you like another blanket?
HENo.
SHEFine, then, I’ll come sit down next to you.
HEWhen someone asks me where I live, they always reply before I’ve had a chance to say anything . . . they tell me I live at Hammars.
SHEBut this is where you live.
HEYes.
SHEDo you miss Stockholm?
HEYes.
SHEDo you miss the theater?
HEYes.
WHEN I WAS IN my twenties, he wanted me to read Agnes von Krusenstjerna’s The Misses von Pahlen, a novel in seven parts. I started on the first part, but got bored after only a few pages and put the book back on the bookshelf. When he noticed that I wasn’t reading it, he couldn’t hide his disappointment and irritation. Some years later I told him that I had read Hedvig Charlotta Nordenflycht’s poem “The Duty of Women to Use Their Wit” from 1741, although this didn’t appreciably make up for the fact that I never read The Misses von Pahlen. Many years later he built his library—based on his own sketches and assembled from pine, light, and glass—and the house at Hammars grew even longer. In the library, I found a collection of poetry by Hedvig Charlotta Nordenflycht. The Sorrowing Turtledove was written when the poet’s second husband, Jacob Fabricius, a priest, died, leaving her a widow after only nine months of marriage. Its full title is: The Sorrowing Turtledove, or Numerous Wretched Songs, set to beautiful MELODIES and collected by a compassionate Listener.
He had thousands of books, he was always reading and underlining passages he thought were important.
Around the time Ingrid lay dying, he read Ulla Isaksson’s The Book About E, which recounts the story of a woman, the author herself, who loses her husband to Alzheimer’s. Pappa lost Ingrid to cancer. He asked me to read it. He himself had read it with his black felt-tip pen in hand. Notes in the margins. Underlined sentences. To read a book that he had read and scribbled in was like talking to him without being afraid of saying the wrong thing.
Some weeks after Ingrid’s funeral we spent an entire night sitting on the living room sofa looking out over the pines, the shore and the ocean. Hand in hand, nearly blinded by the red sun ascending slowly and furiously from the septic depths of the Baltic Sea.
“By the Shores of this lonesome Place,” wrote Hedvig Charlotta Nordenflycht, “she beholds the Waves.”
He kept telling me to go back to Oslo, he didn’t want me around. And then he took my hand and wouldn’t let go. Our knuckles turned pale to the point of blue during the night.
“I am a seventy-four-year-old
man,” he said, “and only now does God decide to kick me out of the nursery.”
In The Book About E, Ulla Isaksson quotes the Swedish poet Elin Wägner: “Even in hell you have to arrange the furniture.” Here, my father had added an exclamation point in the margin.
When I was seven, he told me not to use exclamation points. I had just written a story about three little kittens. Its title was “Three Little Kittens!”
As he got older, his handwriting became increasingly difficult to read. His hand began to tremble, his one eye gave out—the letters of the alphabet blurred into one.
Pappa’s exclamation point in the margin bore the mark of all this. A short vertical line and a dot. A burning candle. A broken twig. Mainland and island.
HEAnd now and then I walk into the living room and say: I want us to do something about that picture on the wall. There is a man standing in the room, I turn to face him, it is an anonymous person, and I say: That picture was already here when I arrived, and the anonymous person replies: There was nothing here then, you are the one who hung the picture, drew, built, and furnished all the rooms, all of this is yours . . . And that line—all of this is yours—is played back in continuously new variations . . . I dreamed that I was on my way to the Royal Palace, and along came a man, an utterly anonymous person, and said: So where do you come from? To which I replied: I come from Hammars, on Fårö, and then he said: Indeed, it is about time we learned who lived there, and I say, with a shade of doubt, that, yes, I believe I am the one who lives there.
V
YOUR BROTHER IN THE NIGHT
...
The only thing we knew for sure about Henry Porter is that his name wasn’t Henry Porter.
—BOB DYLAN/SAM SHEPARD
IN ORDER TO WRITE about real people—parents, children, lovers, friends, enemies, brothers, uncles, or the occasional passerby—it is necessary to make them fictional. I believe this is the only way of breathing life into them. To remember is to look around, again and again, equally astonished every time.
“Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone,” writes John Berger.
I wanted to see what would happen if I allowed us to emerge in a book as though we didn’t belong anywhere else. For me it was like this: I remembered nothing, but then I came across a photograph of Georgia O’Keeffe that reminded me of my father. I began to remember. I wrote: “I remember,” and felt unnerved by how much I had forgotten. I have some letters, some photographs, some scattered scraps of paper, but I can’t say why I kept precisely those scraps rather than others, I have six recorded conversations with my father, but by the time we did the interviews he was so old that he had forgotten most of his own and our shared history. I remember what happened, I think I remember what happened, but some things I have probably made up, I recall stories that were told over and over again and stories that were told only once, sometimes I listened, other times I listened with only half an ear, I lay out all the pieces next to each other, lay them on top of each other, let them bump up against each other, trying to find a direction.
For the past several years I’ve been lying awake at night, for a while I took sleeping pills just to get away, I was never able to put my sleeplessness to good use, all I did was lie in bed and stare at the ceiling.
Not long ago my husband found the tape recorder in the attic. I pressed Play, and there we were. Pappa and me. Our voices faraway. The recordings had been gone for so long that I had started to believe I had dreamed them.
When my father couldn’t sleep, he wrote on his nightstand. I took a picture of the table after he died, the picture is on my cell phone, I can zoom in on different places on the tabletop:
TEN YEARS
I look frantically
for Ingrid
DREAD
DREAD
DREAD
DREAD
DREAD
Made a rather gray and
boring film; wanted to
depict the spirit of our time
Ingrid also frightened
A hideous fiasco
And malicious reviews
SHITTY NIGHT
The bed he was lying in when he wrote this is now properly made up, and has been for many years. A white crocheted blanket is spread over the pillows and duvet. The last summer he was alive, someone had written on the bedroom wall as well, the wall has since been scrubbed clean. He wasn’t the one who wrote on the bedroom wall, he got one of the women who cared for him to do it. In big capital letters and with the same thick, black marker he himself always used, she had written his name followed by the place names Hammars, Fårö, Sweden, Europe, The World, The Universe.
His room was an envelope—a child’s stationery pad.
Everything is left precisely the way it was when he was alive. The house at Hammars is preserved for posterity, as the expression goes. Strangers wander from room to room. Some take pictures. Some sit down on the chairs or on the sofa and put their things on the tables and turn on and off the light switches and gingerly lie down on his bed to check out the mattress.
One evening I turn on the TV here in Oslo and see a renowned middle-aged film director sitting in the green armchair in the room we used to call the video library. There were two green chairs in there, one for Ingrid, one for my father. The middle-aged film director is sitting in Ingrid’s chair, speaking directly into the camera.
The video library—synopsis of a room: When Daniel and I had outgrown our children’s rooms, Pappa converted them into one big TV room. He had a large collection of VHS cassettes, all of which were catalogued and placed in alphabetical order on custom-built shelves. Between eleven and three in the afternoon, you were allowed to come to the house to borrow cassettes.
Every time you borrowed a cassette, you registered the film’s title, the date, and your signature, and, upon returning it, you made a note of the time and date of return. On a little table, a pen and a yellow notepad were provided to write down all this information.
Sometimes he comes in to the room while you are looking for a film.
“How about Claire’s Knee?”
“No, I don’t think so, not tonight, Pappa, I’ve seen it lots of times.”
“It’s Rohmer.”
“Yes, I know.”
He shuffles around, browsing the shelves.
“What about A Heart in Winter then?”
You notice that he has written a big L on one of his slippers and a big R on the other. You are about to say: When did you start writing on your slippers?, but instead you mumble something like: Yes, well . . . Sautet is a wonderful director.
What you actually want is for him to go away and leave you alone and since that’s not likely to happen, you might end up taking A Heart in Winter just to get him off your back, and come back later to borrow another film.
Or you say something like this: “I’ve seen A Heart in Winter many times, so tonight I was thinking Woody Allen.”
Pappa stares at the ceiling. His eyeglasses are thick, at times his mouth is so thin and long and tightly strung that it can stretch from one end of the house to the other.
“Well, of course. One makes a suggestion, but she appears to have seen every film ever made. By all means, Woody Allen is first-rate. Crimes and Misdemeanors is a masterpiece, but I see you’ve chosen Manhattan. Good enough. You do as you please.”
And then, many years later I turn on the TV here in Oslo and the renowned middle-aged film director is telling the camera that he feels a kinship with the master.
He is sitting in Ingrid’s green chair, surrounded by videocassettes, saying he feels a kinship. He has long dark eyelashes and a mop of curly dark hair. A glass of water sits on the table. It’s the same table on which the yellow notepad and pen used to lie. Now and then he takes a sip of water. He doesn’t sit up straight, but leans back and gesticulates.
You’re not allowed to bring water in here, you idiot, the glass will leave rings on the table.
The film director says he
can feel the master’s presence in the room and produces a stopwatch from his inner pocket. He says that the stopwatch is a magic pendulum and goes on to explain that if the pendulum starts to move, it will prove beyond doubt that the master is present. Ah, yes, he says, breathing softly, swinging the watch back and forth, it moves, see, it moves, he is here.
All the rooms—the study, the living room, the kitchen with the two pinewood tables, the video library, the library, even the bedroom—are intact.
Death commenced when he arrived seventeen minutes late. Seven, no, eight years later I try to account for them. The minutes. What should I call them? An archivist asks: What should be preserved, what should be discarded, what should be sorted under what?
All of his belongings were sold at auction. That’s what he had decided. He left a will with precise instructions: I want to be buried in my brown corduroy trousers, the red-checkered shirt and the reddish-brown knitted vest. Displays of emotional brouhaha shall not, under any circumstances, be tolerated.
The will stated that his eight surviving children could each take one item valued at 5,000 kroner or less, “as a memento of their father.”
Everything else should be sold to the highest bidder, “preferably at auction.”
I picture a procession of objects making their way from Hammars to the auction house in Stockholm, the straight-backed chairs, the tables, the rust-red sofa, the green armchairs, the bed, the bedside tables, the desk, the pictures, as if drifting down a river, one after the other.
