by Linn Ullmann
Gradually, the trembling became more noticeable. This is why Mamma can’t send text messages or write on a computer, she can’t hit the right keys, and when she drinks tea, the china rattles.
When Mamma was done crying, we found a place that served banana splits, they have everything at Macy’s, bananas are solace, Mamma used to say. When I was little, she showed me how you could put a banana and a piece of chocolate on a plate and leave it out in the sun or stick it under a lamp, and when the chocolate had begun to melt and the banana was squishy and warm, you would take a fork and stir carefully, it was important that the chocolate didn’t melt completely and that you didn’t stir too hard.
Later that day she bought me a blazer, and then she decided to buy one for herself as well, we got the saleswoman to put our old wool cardigans into a shopping bag so that we could wear our new purchases right away. The blazers were brown and a little too tight, with pockets on the sides, prominent lapels and shoulder pads the size of turtles. They were woven from some kind of dense fabric that immediately felt clammy. The escalators at Macy’s weren’t working and we kept walking upward and upward without feeling we were getting anywhere, like treading air, Mamma’s face was all flushed, I don’t think we’ll get any further up or down today, and, Oh my, this jacket is making me feel warm, and then I caught a glimpse of us in one of the large department-store mirrors, there were mirrors everywhere, and we looked like two overgrown boys, brothers, perhaps, in ill-fitting prom suits.
When I arrived in Paris, I lost my sense of direction. I had always been able to orient myself and draw up a map of where I was, but in Paris I immediately lost my way, I didn’t speak French, and after asking a young couple for directions and not understanding a word they said except the young man’s impatient Elle est stupide, I burst into tears right there, in front of them, in the light of dusk, it was dusk all week the way I remember it, dusk or night, and the young couple turned and walked down the broad avenue whose name I didn’t know, and after that I stuck with the photographer, who knew the city like the back of his hand and spoke fluent French. The first time we slept together, I threw up afterward. Was it he who made me feel sick, or his body or my body, or the touch itself, the pleasure, the way he stroked, kissed, licked, jabbed? I wanted him to keep doing it and said so, I want you to keep doing it, and when I came, it surprised me, how sudden and violent it was, like shame, like betrayal, and it surprised him too, and he laughed a little, not to make fun, but because he hadn’t expected it, I was still small and skinny, and the fact that I came made him want it even more and even harder, and his hair, which was so much longer than mine, spread across my face like a thousand threads, and when it was over and he kissed me on the lips, I put my arms around his neck and hugged him the way little girls hug. And then I started feeling sick and ran to the bathroom and threw up. I felt dizzy being with him and just as dizzy throwing him up, I didn’t know it could be like that. I wanted him, I wanted him to want me, I let him, I threw him up, it didn’t stop. Once he asked me what I was doing, locked in the bathroom for so long, and I said I was putting on makeup. I have often wondered whether he heard me throwing up and whether he was curious why. On the fourth day he took the pictures of me he had promised to take.
To see, to comprehend. It all depends on where you stand. Once there was a Renaissance astronomer and Jesuit priest called Giovanni Battista Riccioli. He is known for naming the lunar seas, craters and formations: Mare Tranquillitatis—Sea of Tranquility—owes its name to him.
The lunar maps—with all the new names—were drawn by Riccioli’s younger colleague, Francesco Maria Grimaldi. Their life was to give name. I try to picture the two of them, who they were, how they went about their work.
I imagine that they were friends, I imagine they were very learned—Grimaldi gave up a professorship in philosophy in favor of a professorship in mathematics because philosophy became too much of a strain on his health—I imagine they worked day and night, writing and calculating and experimenting and building and making use of advanced instruments. Grimaldi, for example, built an instrument that could measure the height of clouds.
But sometimes they probably just stood straight up and down on their feet, peering at the moon. They had known each other for years, both lived in the university town of Bologna, they probably installed themselves someplace in the city, or maybe they ventured outside, found a deserted field where they could observe in peace. Did they stand in silence, did they have a rule to be quiet during work, or did they talk, and if so, did they talk about what they saw in the sky or about other things, everyday things such as—well, such as what? How exactly would an everyday conversation unfold between two Jesuit astronomers in the seventeenth century?
Much of their work must have taken place at night, and it occurs to me that conversations between friends, brothers, colleagues, fathers and sons—I don’t know how the two astronomers would have defined their relationship—unfold differently at night than during the day.
A copy of Grimaldi’s lunar map adorns the entrance to the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, which I visited together with Ola when he was still little, but we didn’t stop to look at the map, I can’t even remember noticing it, we were freezing cold and hungry, it was raining in Washington that day, and our only thought was to find a place where we could warm ourselves and have a bite to eat.
I wonder whether the men and women who dedicate their lives to map, classify, and give names—regardless of whether their eyes are trained on the sky or on the earth, or whether what they are looking at is nearby or far away—sooner or later become overwhelmed by their task.
When Eva was still in preschool, my father-in-law would take his daily walks in the neighborhood—the school lies in a park known for its three thousand trees—and occasionally he would stop and rest for a while under an oak hoping to catch a glimpse of the little girl running about. He kept his distance, he was a tall, broad-shouldered man with a full head of white hair and a cane, a man who, because of his towering presence, didn’t easily blend in with the crowd, but who disliked the idea of inconveniencing anyone or getting in anyone’s way.
Once, on one of these daily outings, Eva looked up and saw him, and called to the other children: “Look! There’s grandpa standing under the tree!”
Eva started fussing about getting her ears pierced when she was six, we had told her she would have to wait until her tenth birthday, but then her paternal grandmother died and we told her she could have it done, even though she was only eight. My father died when Eva was three, my father-in-law died when she was five, and my mother-in-law died when she was eight, and this time the matter took on a sense of urgency, I don’t know why the word urgent comes to mind, but in the days following her grandmother’s death, it became a matter of utmost importance to Eva that she’d get her ears pierced, preferably before the funeral. We called a neighborhood salon and spoke to a lady named Liv, I told Liv that Eva’s grandmother had died and would be laid to rest in a week, and on hearing this, Liv said she would squeeze Eva in before that, as though there was an obvious connection between these two rites of passage—an old woman’s death and funeral, and a little girl getting her ears pierced. Eva and I went shopping and bought a new top and a new skirt for her to wear, funerals more often than not involve the purchase of clothes, even the greatest sorrow resolves itself into a question of trying on dresses, wrote Proust. When my father died, one of my sisters and I went to a department store in Stockholm to find something to wear for his funeral, I bought an expensive, black velvet dress that I somewhat sentimentally thought Pappa would have liked. I can’t remember what my sister bought, she likes cashmere and silk, soft things, but I do remember that we tried on many different dresses and that we were in high spirits. I have never worn the velvet dress since, it doesn’t look very good on me, more than once, I’ve pulled it out of the closet, tried it on and then quickly taken it off again. The day before her grandmother’s funeral, I went with Eva to Li
v’s salon, we had rubbed her earlobes with anesthetic cream, something that had to be done at least half an hour before the actual piercing. A girl from Eva’s school had just gotten her ears pierced without anesthetic cream, Eva told me, and it had hurt so terribly that the girl had held her ears and cried for days on end, after which things had become infected, one ear had swelled up and grown twice as big as the other ear, I remarked that the story probably was exaggerated.
When Eva and I were nearly at the salon, she stopped in the wind. We had to cross a large public square to get there, and all of a sudden she stopped cold. It was autumn and the leaves were falling and she stood there in the middle of that large public square all wrapped up in autumn and wind and whirling leaves, as if inhabiting her own snowstorm, and that’s when she said: “I’ve changed my mind. I’m scared. I don’t want to do it.”
When she wakes up in the morning, we’ll spend some time in front of the bathroom mirror getting ready. I’ll brush her hair, it’s difficult to pull the brush all the way through, Ouch, she cries, Mamma, stop that, her hair is fine and tangled, long, thin, strawy shoots that splinter only to get snarled up again. When she’s been at the public pool, her hair takes on a greenish tinge. I gather the shoots and pull tight, sometimes I lean down to look at our faces in the mirror and ask her if she wants to wear her hair up, it looks nice, I say, and she shakes her head and says, no, she wants to wear it down. Her hair dries out now that the cold weather and the snow are coming. Autumn has been warm this year, last year was warm too, warm and dark, every morning a great, pivoting darkness. I hope it will begin to snow soon, the roses in the garden blossomed for the third time in early November, the flies came to life in the windowsills, they thought they were dead and then they woke up; flies on the windowsills, in the sink, they had lain down to die, but now they are ascending through the plumbing, a lone fly buzzes sluggishly through the rooms just before the first advent candle is lit; had the flies been able to sing, they might have sung about how cold it is to wake up from what they thought was death. We are living in the Anthropocene, I tell the flies, there is no prestige in having an epoch named after you, roses blossoming in November, insects coming to life in December. I look at Eva in the mirror, we look at each other, lots of people tell us that we look alike, I tell her it may be time to trim her hair, and she tells me she just trimmed it, and then she says: “Mamma, it’s a myth that you have to cut your hair to make it grow faster.”
“I think you’re probably right,” I say.
Sometimes she comes right up to me and stands very close, trying to catch my eye or wrapping her arms around my waist, but then she pulls away, sensing that I’m busy, or whatever it is I say, Just a minute, I tell her, not right now, okay, or else I pretend that I’m listening while I’m actually thinking about something else. At night her neck is damp, and more likely than not she has kicked off her duvets. Her father and I have two duvets each, so she wanted two duvets too, two duvets even though she gets hot and kicks them off. The dog lies on the floor, breathing almost inaudibly. Sometimes, when he is dreaming, he whimpers so noisily that I have to shout his name into the room to make him stop, and every so often he takes a deep breath and releases a sobbing sound reminiscent of that made by an infant after a bout of tears. The dog sleeps on a sheepskin rug on the floor by my side of the bed, he is in the middle of life and might live for another six or seven years. He has never figured out what it means to be a dog, he is always guessing. My husband and I are the same, we have no idea how to be us, it’s a perpetual guessing game. Often, the dog will remind us of other animals, a seal, a small black horse, a sheep—maybe because he ran freely among the sheep at Hammars during his first year of life. My husband once commented that the dog resembles an Australian platypus. When he curls up on the sofa, he looks like a giant snail, his muzzle is too large for his head, he likes it when I run my fingers gently along it. When he eats, he does so by placing a considerable distance between himself and the bowl, and then, when he thinks no one is watching, he quickly snatches one morsel at a time, as if the act of eating is a secret he is keeping from us. His ears are luxuriously soft and shiny, like precious fabric, they remind me of my black funeral dress, the one my father would have liked. I think it’s because it accentuated my figure while at the same time being seemly, he himself might have used the word classic. Long before he died, almost thirty years earlier, when I was still a girl, I flew to Munich to see my mother and father together in the same room, Mamma was wearing a low-cut silk dress, it was long and blue, her hair, too, was long and blue, or that’s how I remember her—blue—as if someone had installed a blue lightbulb in the ceiling and placed her directly under it, and when Pappa opened the door, he pointed at her plunging neckline and said in a kind of whisper, “Good God, I wish you would have chosen another dress.”
He didn’t like dogs, they scared him, at least that’s what he said, but my mother and father had a dachshund while they lived together. When they separated, my mother kept me and my father kept the dachshund. He said he didn’t like animals, but then he would go on and on about the animals at Hammars, the rabbits, the birds.
When she wakes up, Eva never forgets to say good morning to the dog, she gets up, walks around the bed, lies down on the floor, and wraps her arms around him. It’s the first thing she does every morning, and then, like a sleepwalker, she continues into the bathroom, into the shower, turns on the water, and rests her head against the tiled wall, motionless, unapproachable, the water from the shower gushing down, she doesn’t raise her head even when I call her name, doesn’t open her eyes, sleeps standing up, like a foal. I say: “You have to open your eyes now, grab the soap, time to get a move on,” and a little bit later, “it’s time for you to stop showering, come downstairs and have your breakfast.”
I will exercise caution in describing her. She will want to do that herself. Every once in a while she baffles me with a look so infinitely her, an other altogether, right in the midst of her childhood, relentless in its grip, and even though she will soon abandon it, or it will abandon her, it will follow her for the rest of her life.
The book Pappa and I were supposed to write together had come to a halt. I recorded six long conversations on tape, at times clear, at times a blur, and then he lost his mind (is “lose” the right word?) to such a degree that it seemed inappropriate to continue taping, and then he died and I couldn’t bear listening to the tapes for more than five minutes at the most, and then I misplaced the tape recorder, I’m ashamed of having misplaced it, of not being able to hold on to things, I’ll write another book, I thought, about that last summer, about him and me, about a father and a daughter, about fathers and daughters, about an old man, about a place, I sometimes think I mourned the place more than the man—the things, the stones, the shadows under the gnarled pine trees.
When he was alive, there would never have been butterflies in his bedroom. But he was alive. And there were butterflies. He was alive when he lay in bed, staring at the ceiling. I don’t know whether he noticed them, but he was alive.
Exactly when that summer did I begin thinking about him in the past tense?
The rule was: no insects inside. He used to be so strict about the windows. They had to be kept closed. When I was little and had my own room at Hammars, I would run all the way from my room to his and curl up between him and Ingrid. Same room, same bed, same pale yellow bed linen, same window, same trees, same stones, same sea.
The butterflies sat, stood, clung on the walls. I lay on the bed, next to him, and stared at the ceiling.
Sometimes he would tell me about where he was. We didn’t talk that much, but sometimes he spoke a few words. I had long since stopped recording things on tape. The butterflies reminded me of snow. Blots of snow. Filthy snow. Snow that won’t melt. Snow that stays by the wayside when all the other snow is gone, April snow, May snow, snow that refuses to disappear, piles and mounds of snow, snow that is as much dirt and gravel and exhaust fumes as it is sno
w, snow on which people have stepped and animals have defecated. I don’t even know whether what I was staring at actually could be called butterflies, they were black and ugly, maybe some type of moth, but heavier, more compact, with large wings, patternless.
Give it time, said a friend who had also lost her father. It was like being pregnant, you see other pregnant women everywhere you go, you look for them, you quietly greet them, a kind of sisterhood, and then you become fatherless and you start looking for other people who are also fatherless, you read books and articles written by authors who have lost their fathers, or their mothers, although offhand I can name more authors who have written about their dead fathers than about their dead mothers. I didn’t know how to mourn my father, I thought I might be doing it wrong, not only when he died, but in the years that followed his death, and so I read countless books written by authors who had lost their fathers or their mothers or both parents, and then I read books by authors who had lost their spouses, I couldn’t get enough of books about loss and different forms of mourning.
When little Ivan, also called Vanya, also called Vanechka, died of scarlet fever in 1895, his mother didn’t write in her diary for two years.
But before that, she wrote about unquiet nights, watching over her sick son and about the feeling of joy and relief when the boy shows signs of recovery. Then there are a few entries of everyday activities and everyday worries before his illness abruptly returns and he dies.
The mother’s name was Sophia Tolstaya. The father was Leo Tolstoy. There is no time lapse in Tolstoy’s diary, instead there is the bicycle. He is sixty-seven years old and had never before ridden, let alone owned, a bicycle. Now he writes about his new bicycle all the time, his diary is full of entries on the subject, listing compelling moral reasons why he should treat himself to such a vehicle, referring, among other things, to L. K. Popov’s Scientific Notes on the Action of the Velocipede as Physical Exercise.
