by Linn Ullmann
When Chekhov visited Tolstoy at his beloved estate Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy suggested they go swimming together in the river, something Chekhov was reluctant to do. Although he admired Tolstoy greatly, he didn’t necessarily want to go swimming with him, which is understandable.
There is a photograph of Tolstoy posing next to his new bicycle. Sophia is also in the picture, wearing a black dress and an impenetrable expression on her face. Grieving the loss of her son? Sick and tired of her husband? Absolutely determined to compose herself and play her part. I think about the time lapse in her diary. Two years of silence. Two years of nothing. Tolstoy is dressed in white, sporting a loose-fitting white linen shirt or tunic and a small white visor cap and that full, white beard. He has a slightly resentful look about him. He holds on to his bicycle with a hard and determined grip, and maybe with some apprehension.
The photograph of Tolstoy and the bicycle reminds me of my father. You see one thing and think of another.
Tolstoy doesn’t look like my father, apart from that old-man-like quality they both radiated in the final years of their lives. My father didn’t have a beard, at least not one as full and white as Tolstoy, and even though he went swimming naked every morning in his ice-cold swimming pool, he preferred to swim alone.
When I look at the picture, it is the bicycle, more than anything else, that makes me think of my father.
My father on his big, red ladies’ bicycle.
Some days before Tolstoy died, in 1910, he fled his home and left the following note for his wife, Sophia: “I am doing what old men of my age usually do: leaving this worldly life in order to live out my last days in solitude and quiet.”
Pappa never left a note like that, although he too wished to live out his last days in solitude and quiet. But things didn’t work out exactly as he had planned. Worldly life intruded until the end, but in slightly different ways than for Tolstoy. One hopes that death will be peaceful, one puts one’s house in order and makes the necessary arrangements, but then everything turns out otherwise. After he died, I found two handwritten yellow Post-it notes on the wall of his study. They were hidden behind the door. They had been there for a good while. I peeled them off. The pinewood was paler underneath.
The note to the left read:
It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. But only then can man find atonement.
The note to the right read:
Maybe that’s what we look for all our lives, the worst possible grief, to make us truly ourselves before we die.
–CÉLINE.
December 24, 1998. It was snowing when I woke up, snowing into the near-empty rooms of the flat in Sorgenfri Street, where I lived at the time, it was snowing when I ran to catch the bus to the airport, snowing as the plane took off from Oslo to Stockholm.
Pappa and I were going to celebrate Christmas Eve together, and he had outlined the following plan for our evening:
3:00 P.M.:
You arrive at the flat at Karlaplan.
3:30 P.M.:
We walk to Hedvig Eleonora Church at Östermalmstorg where your grandfather Erik Bergman was a minister for thirty years.
4:00 P.M.:
Christmas Mass.
6:00 P.M.:
Dinner. Meatballs. You can have wine, if you like.
6:30–10:30 P.M.:
Sitting.
10:30 P.M.:
End.
I was thirty-two and divorced. My son was celebrating Christmas with his father, I was celebrating Christmas alone. I had never done that before. Maybe I could take a sleeping pill and sleep through the whole thing? Or go to church? But there wouldn’t have been enough services to get me through the night. My father was eighty years old and a widower. It had been his idea, not to write a book—that came several years later—but to celebrate Christmas together. Writing a book came under the category work, and the very word itself lent it legitimacy. Celebrating Christmas together fell into an entirely different category.
To stand by the window, dressed in your Sunday best, food ready, tree lit, and be able to say to the person standing next to you: Look. There comes my little family.
A week earlier, Pappa and I had spoken on the phone and in the course of the conversation stumbled upon each other’s loneliness. Or—that’s how I’ve always thought about it. I’ve thought that we were there for each other on that Christmas Eve. But there’s something not quite right with this line of reasoning. When Ingrid was alive, he didn’t want to take part in any sort of Christmas celebration. I believe she celebrated the evening with her children and grandchildren—not with him. And after she died, he continued to spend the evening in solitude. So perhaps we didn’t stumble upon each other’s loneliness, as I’ve thought. He didn’t need me. I was the one who needed him. And he said: Come to Stockholm.
This is my very first Christmas memory: It was Christmas Eve, 1967, I was eighteen months old, so it’s a lie to call it a memory, someone must have told me, someone must have said: Your father didn’t want to celebrate Christmas, he had shut the door on Christmas parties, Christmas gifts, Christmas cookies, Christmas trees, Christmas decorations, and Christmas candles. To your mother’s despair. It was their first Christmas together as parents. She was very young and lived with him at Hammars, far away from the rest of the world. It was snowing and it was dark, and he was the one who called the shots. But she wanted to celebrate Christmas. She didn’t just want to pretend Christmas Eve was a day like any other. They had a child together. At the very least, they owed it to their daughter to make an effort. The fact that the girl wasn’t old enough to understand the difference between Christmas Eve and any other day of the year was a different story altogether. He demanded absolute silence in the house while he was working and because of this he never noticed that she took the baby and the car and went to the store to buy candles. The store was a fair way off. The ferry between Fårö and Fårösund left only once every hour. At the store, she bought an entire shopping cart full of candles, maybe even two carts, in any case, a lot of candles. Thick, white candles inside beautiful glass cylinders. She also bought canned Sauerkraut, a frozen ham (which she didn’t realize was frozen), and mustard. Then she drove back. He was still busy at work, the door to his study was closed, and she flitted quietly from room to room, placing the candles on windowsills and tabletops, in the living room and in the kitchen and outside in the snow, where the sky was already pitch-dark, but where the snowfall brightened things up a bit, and when she had all the candles in place, it looked to her like something out of a fairy tale. What she didn’t know, and what he may or may not have told her that evening, was that the candles she had bought were grave candles. She had chosen the prettiest candles in the store. She didn’t know they were intended for the dead. And when he finally emerged from his study, ready to have dinner, but not to celebrate Christmas, he was met by the flickering of grave candles in every room and outside in the snow.
And a frozen, dripping ham in the middle of the kitchen table, the size of a man’s head.
When I arrived at his flat at Karlaplan, we were both so nervous that we waddled about like hens in the narrow hallway. I took off my coat, he hung it up on the coat rack, I sat down on a chair and began pulling off my boots, and he said: “But we have to go soon, to church, I mean, maybe you didn’t have to take off your coat,” and I said: “Yes, you’re probably right,” pulling my boots back on, standing up and fetching my coat from the coatrack, but then he said: “But we don’t have to leave for another twenty minutes, so maybe you should take off your coat and come inside and sit down for a bit.”
It had stopped snowing, but when twenty minutes later we found ourselves in the hallway to put on our coats—for real this time—heavy snow came flurrying down once again.
“It’s snowing,” I said, pointing at the windows.
“Yes, it’s been snowing all day.”
He opened the hallway closet and took out a green wool coat and a green wooly hat.
I put on a pair of wooly tights, my coat, and a hat. Then we sat down on identical stiff-backed chairs and started pulling on our shoes and boots. We had never sat together like this, putting on shoes. At Hammars, in the summer, one simply slipped off one’s shoes before going inside. I had high-heeled boots that I had to wriggle into. By the time he had put on both his shoes and galoshes, I had only managed to pull on my right boot. He stayed seated in his chair, looking on as I continued to struggle with my left one. After a while, he said: “Why, for heaven sakes, would you wear high heels in this weather?”
Once we were ready to leave, we took the elevator down and walked out into the snow. It was beginning to turn dark, but the street lamps had come on and light shone from all the windows. I could glimpse the decorated Christmas trees and all the people getting ready for the evening, and it struck me, as I glanced into one window after the other, that the Christmas trees in Stockholm were much bigger than the Christmas trees in Oslo, or maybe it just seemed that way because we were outside and everyone else was inside. I walked along these broad, dark streets surrounded by the city’s large old apartment buildings and it snowed on my father, who was walking here beside me. We kept the same pace, with equal strides, he didn’t have to wait for me, I didn’t have to wait for him, I wore high heels and he used a cane, but we walked quickly, quietly, as the snow settled on his wool coat and hat and turned green into white. When we were almost there, he gently stroked my cheek as if to carefully wake me, pointing at something and speaking, and there it was, the church, large and yellow, with snow swirling around its mighty dome.
“Hedvig Eleonora has three bells,” he said, “Little Bell, Middle Bell, and Big Bell, which weighs nearly five tons and was cast in Hamlet’s hometown.”
“In Helsingør.”
“Yes, Helsingør, for Kronborg Castle in 1639.”
And then he fell silent. I wondered whether he would say something about his father, the former minister, or about himself? About the boy called Pu? No, not now. What he said, was: “The service starts in ten minutes, we have enough time to take off our coats and let our eyes adjust to the light.”
I turned toward him, brushing a few snowflakes from his shoulder. By now it was almost dark outside. He knew these streets and this place and this church and this snow. To me, everything was new. We had never walked along these streets together, I had never seen my father in snow.
When we returned home, we had meatballs with boiled potatoes and a green salad. A woman named M worked for my father a few days a week. She cooked and cleaned and shopped and did the washing and ironing. They got along well, my father and M, she was ten years his junior, her food tasted good, and she was unsentimental and punctual. How would he have managed without her? M had let herself in to prepare dinner while we were in church. She had set the kitchen table and put out wine for me. When she saw that everything was as it should be and that we were seated at the table, she said, goodbye and Merry Christmas, and we said, Merry Christmas, and she said that she looked forward to celebrating with her children and grandchildren, and Pappa said, Seems like it was Christmas only yesterday, but here we are, here we are, and she told us that it was just a short walk from Pappa’s flat to her daughter’s flat, but now she had to hurry, and we said Merry Christmas once again and Pappa said, Put on some warm clothes, it’s snowing outside, make sure you don’t catch a cold.
Snow continued to fall throughout the evening. The grandfather clock in the living room struck twice every hour. I remember telling him that for me Christmas was all about one’s children and how I missed my kid. He said that for him it was all about memories. So there we were, wishing we were somewhere else, wishing we could go back home, wishing we could go back in time. Later it occurred to me that it was stupid of me to sit there wishing I were somewhere else, considering it was the only time we’d celebrate Christmas together. And ever since then, before he lost his memory and forgot everything, we would laugh at ourselves and how uneasy we had been and how the hours had dragged by. The taxi was pre-ordered for ten thirty, but neither of us had the nerve, at seven or eight or nine o’clock, to even think about scrapping the plan and saying out loud, “Well, how about calling it a night?”
I remember thinking that I was lonely, that he was lonely, filled with longing, but not for each other’s company. I don’t think much about that now. Instead I find myself going back to when we walked together in the snow and my father stroked my cheek and pointed at the mighty church dome enswirled in white and said: “Look, my heart, we’re nearly there.”
HEI feel so uncertain . . . I have to ask . . . I have to ask . . . there’s a woman who comes and goes, what’s the name of the one working here today?
SHEAnn Marie.
HEYes, Ann Marie. I like her. She has a beautiful voice . . . She was an opera singer, did you know that?
SHEYes, I know.
HEBut in any case, I have to ask Ann Marie to come in and check my . . . what the hell is it called . . . ?
SHEYour book? Your calendar? Is that what you mean? You want Ann Marie to come in here and help you check your calendar? The one right there on your desk?
HEYes . . . I wrote in it . . . You wrote in it . . . You wrote your name and I wrote my name and we wrote down the times . . . well . . . despite the fact that I’m sitting here . . . on time . . . waiting for you to come, I find myself in a situation where I have to ask . . . what’s her name?
SHEAnn Marie.
He takes hold of the armrests and tries to push himself out of his wheelchair. He groans and sits back down again.
HEI can’t do this. I can’t get away from here.
He tries pushing the wheels.
HEI haven’t had a chance to actually learn how to do this . . . What a miserable wretch I am.
SHENo, Pappa, don’t say that.
HEI can’t walk. I can’t see.
He drops his hands in his lap and doesn’t speak for a long time.
HEIt’s so frightfully uncomfortable, so unsettling, it’s shameful, you see? I find myself surrounded by props . . . I walk and I walk and then I find myself surrounded by props or caught in the same damned camera angle . . . always the same props, always these dreams . . . I can see it the instant it starts happening . . . you see? . . . But by then it’s too late to get out . . . I don’t want to do this anymore.
SHEWhen I was a little girl, you’d ask me about my dreams and then you’d sit me down and tell me what they meant. If you were to stand outside yourself for a moment, what would you tell yourself about these dreams that haunt you?
HEBut you’re not listening to me! My heart! You and I have completely different ways of looking at things, completely different ways of looking at . . . you have your mother’s . . . you have my . . . I have . . . I don’t know what this is . . .
He looks at the turntable but does not put on a record.
HEI have become so tangled up in a dream system that I cannot escape, it’s no fun anymore, I don’t enjoy my dreams, not a single fucking enjoyable dream. This . . . these dreams don’t have anything to do with reality.
SHEWell, then, what is real to you these days?
HEYou are.
SHEThat’s true, I’m real.
HEBefore you came, I sat here for twenty minutes and was all ready to get to work, but then I started to worry that I had somehow accidentally called you and canceled, that you weren’t coming after all . . . and then I had to call for . . . ?
SHEAnn Marie.
HEYes, Ann Marie . . . she had to help me over to the desk so I could look at my calendar. I was so goddamn happy. Something I thought was a dream, or something that seemed uncertain, was actually quite clear . . . And then I heard your voice outside. Thank God. You are here, I am here. Yes, that’s how it goes.
He takes her hand.
SHEMy hand is cold.
He rubs it, leaning forward and placing his forehead against hers.
HEI have a cold nose.
SHEYes, it’s cold, t
hat’s a good sign.
He leans back again.
HEIs it?
SHEYes, at least for dogs and cats.
Puts her hand on his forehead.
SHEYour forehead isn’t warm, but it’s not cold either, you don’t have a fever.
HENo, I believe I’m in excellent health and ready to start working now.
It’s started snowing here too. I look out the window, there is so much snow that when I wake Eva up in two hours, it will be easy to get her out of bed, all I have to do is whisper: Time to wake up, it’s snowing, and she’ll jump up to see the newly fallen snow with her own eyes.
I walk up the stairs and lie down next to them.
“Where have you been?” my husband whispers from his side of the bed.
Eva is lying between us, taking up most of the space, even though she’s the little one.
“Downstairs. Listening to the tapes.”
“It’s started snowing.”
“I know.”
Eva moves.
“I want to sleep,” she says, “Mamma, it’s not morning yet, you have to be quiet.”
“But I’m whispering,” I whisper.
Her breathing is quicker than ours, softer, not so strained, when I stroke her head, her warmth streams into me, her hair is wiry and tangled and stickily soft at the same time, like drawing your fingers through powdered sugar, she wants to grow it long, it can’t ever be long enough, she says.
