by Linn Ullmann
I stroke her hair away from her face and kiss her cheek.
Eva has curled up like a little shell.
VI
GIGUE
...
It will be very tiresome to have to leave it all.
—AMONG THE LAST WORDS
SPOKEN BY SWANN
THE PALLBEARERS HAVE LIVED their whole lives on the island. They are Fårögubber — Swedish for Fårö oldsters. My father also wanted to be a Fårö oldster. He visits the men, one by one, and asks them: When I am dead, will you carry my coffin to the grave?
HE KEPT COMING BACK to what he called the epilogue, but whether by epilogue he meant the last years of self-imposed exile at Hammars while still in good health and riding around in his jeep at breakneck speed, or the final six months, the sickbed, the wheelchair, the blind eye, or the work of dying itself, the aftermath, the funeral—I don’t know. As far as the funeral was concerned, it was planned as meticulously as everything else, the final chapter, the final gig. He wrote and revised his will. He searched for and found a gravesite. He walked around the churchyard on Fårö, alone and with the sexton, discussing the benefits and drawbacks of lying buried under a tree or by a stone wall, surrounded by others or off in a corner by himself. Once dead, he wanted to lie next to Ingrid and began the process of obtaining permits for her grave to be moved from a different location in Sweden. He had conversations with the minister—who often adorned her hair with a single red flower—about what to say and not to say during the officiation. He was adamant that she stick to her sermon and not set up shop, an expression he used when actors strayed from his direction and started improvising during a performance. There are many reasons why one might want to set up shop, go out on one’s own, so to say—one might want to elicit laughter from the audience, or tears, or love, or just get a little more applause; he once canceled a production of Molière because his critically acclaimed Alceste decided to set up shop, and now, here he was, faced with a situation where the option of canceling the festivities was limited to say the least.
My father knew several local carpenters and woodworkers, and the house at Hammars was extended until the very end, expanding horizontally rather than vertically, a library at one end, a quiet room at the other. I’m the one who calls it the quiet room, he called it the meditation room. This particular room, the last one he had decided to build, was the smallest room in the house, almost like a wooden box, with a window facing the sea, sparsely equipped with a cot, a candle, and a radio. Before he became wheelchair-bound, he would come here at night when he couldn’t sleep, and light a candle.
He is eighty-four years old when he moves to Hammars for good. He will not be making any more films. He is not planning another play. He is selling the flat in Stockholm, the one at Karlaplan. He will live in the house at Hammars now, he will live here until his last day, he will listen to records and keep track of the seasons. That’s the plan. He and the house have an agreement. When you are done with your assignments, come here, come as you are, come alone and shut yourself away inside of me. Winter is the island’s true garb. In winter everything is dark and still. All that is red blushes when faced with its own redness, blushes until it wanes and erodes, the poppies are gone, the blistering sunrises, even the red jeep and the red bicycle wane in the silvery light of winter. The jeep is parked under the tall pine tree at the front of the house, the bicycle is in the bike shed. In the morning, the jeep and the bicycle are shrouded in rime and frost—and snow, if snow has fallen. When he opens the door and steps outside, everything is white.
HE NO LONGER SEES films every day, and when he’s not seeing films, he might spend the afternoon catching the ferry over to Fårösund to buy newspapers. Sometimes when he’s out driving, there’s time to spare before the ferry leaves, so he takes a right by the church, past the old store, toward Sudersand rather than a left toward the ferry dock. Many years ago he bought a house not far from Sudersand, at Karlberga, probably the most beautiful of all his houses, a white limestone farmhouse with a lush garden and a big barn. Not long after Ingrid’s death, it was sold. Now he might be thinking that he will drive to Karlberga and have a look at that house.
The barn at Karlberga was dark. And big. With a lofty ceiling. And full of things, mostly film props, stacked from top to bottom. Sofas on top of tables, chairs on top of sofas, rugs on top of chairs on top of beds. Once, a long time ago, Ingrid took me there with her. She left the barn door open and blazing sunlight poured across everything inside. All around me things were breathing and steaming, as if the abandoned pieces of furniture, like restless captive animals, had begun to stir. Ingrid was looking for a nightstand lamp and found it strangely wedged between a table and a mattress, a brass lamp with a long, thin neck and a yellow porcelain lampshade of indeterminable age. A dozen bees, having found a dwelling place inside the lampshade, now swarmed toward the open door. Ingrid pulled back as the lamp fell from her hands. “Oh dear,” she cried, although she hadn’t been stung. And then she gathered her hair in a knot, bent down, and picked up the broken shards.
Along the way, he passes the primary school and kindergarten. The school will soon be shut down, every year the island becomes a little more depopulated, but the kindergarten will survive a while longer—and every afternoon the children gather round the windows, waiting to be picked up by their parents. He can vaguely glimpse them in the light of dusk, their faces in the windows, three in one, two in another. The school is housed in a long, squat limestone building. It is just past three o’clock. The children are disappointed. His was not the car they were waiting for, they knew it the moment they heard the hum of the engine, they can distinguish the different sounds the cars make even from inside with the windows closed, they knew it before they saw the jeep speed past, that wasn’t the car they were waiting for, that wasn’t the sound. And the old man with the bat-eye sunglasses doesn’t wave. He never waves. Not to them. He looks straight ahead at the road. The lambs stand silent out on the moors, they don’t raise their heads to look. They don’t bleat. They don’t move. They look as if they’ve been standing there for a thousand years and will continue to stand there for another thousand. Only the dumbest visitors assume that the name of the island is Fårö because of its many sheep (får = sheep). Originally, the island was called Farøø, derived from far as in to fare. And right now, he who was my father and wanted to be a Fårö oldster is faring along the main road, wondering whether he has enough time to reach Karlberga and return to the ferry dock before half past three, he glances at the clock on the dashboard, it’s ten past three, no, he won’t make it, he hits the brakes, backs up, turns around, and races back, now in the opposite direction, past the kindergarten once again, the pale faces in the windows, past the church, the old store, the moor, the windmill, and all the way to where the road ends. Here, at the ferry dock, he is met by a large yellow signpost with thick black lettering: Drivers of vehicles transporting dangerous goods must contact the vessel commander before boarding. He doesn’t know that when I was a child, lying in bed in my flower-wallpapered bedroom making lists and hierarchies of men who ruled the world, my father came high up on the list, but the vessel commander came highest.
He arrives on time, at three twenty-eight, exactly two minutes before the ferry leaves. He slows down. The barrier goes up and Pappa lets the jeep roll over the gangway. Up on the bridge, the ferryman in sou’wester and oilskins raises his hand and waves.
IN APRIL 2005, HE sits alone in front of the big television set in the video library, watching the funeral of Pope John Paul II.
The Bible passages being read he knows by heart.
Truly, truly, I say to you, when you were young, you used to dress yourself and walk wherever you wanted, but when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will dress you and carry you where you do not want to go.
Pappa has grown so thin that he takes a rope and ties it around himself just to prevent his trousers from falling off. A life in solitude. He ea
ts next to nothing. A slice of toast and a cup of tea for breakfast, yogurt for lunch, and a piece of meat or fish (no spices, no vegetables) in the evening. Every day, a woman comes and prepares his dinner and tidies up and washes and irons his clothes. Gradually, the number of women increases. Cecilia, who is in charge of hiring extra help, comes to the house several times a week. Pappa doesn’t care all that much about food. He never did. Food is the root of all mischief and stomachaches. Wine too. Maybe a glass of beer with dinner. The windows must be kept closed, food (the kind that causes stomachaches) must be avoided, wine does not taste good and causes headaches, no excesses of any kind, a strict daily schedule will be observed.
“I have to use a rope to tie it around myself so my trousers won’t fall off,” he says on the phone, “but at least I dress it myself.”
The pope’s funeral is a magnificent performance. Grand processions. Opulent tapestries, scarlet robes, white headgear, the colors remind him of a film he once made, the one with the red room and the women dressed in white. “Every now and then,” he wrote in one of his notebooks, “images return unbidden without making it clear what they want from me. Then they disappear and return and present themselves in exactly the same way. Four women dressed in white, a red room. The women move about and whisper to each other and are utterly secretive.” He returns to the television screen. When the pope is laid to rest, everyone knows precisely what to do. Nothing is improvised. The choreography is symmetrical and elegant. He thinks of the last plays he directed for the stage. The Misanthrope. The Winter’s Tale. He misses the theater. The actors. He misses getting up in the morning and lying down at night, and in between the two, going to work. That’s a lot more fun than this. He is eighty-six years old, turning eighty-seven this summer, and sometimes he wonders whether solitude is overrated. Maybe he should move back to Stockholm, renounce his self-imposed exile, write a script, direct a play, or at least go to concerts, be among musicians. My father stares at the pope’s coffin, a simple wooden box amidst all the pomp and circumstance. I want one just like that, he says to himself. A few days later he climbs into his jeep and goes to see a carpenter in Slite, an old friend. I use the word “friend” in the broadest sense here, acquaintance is a better word, my father now surrounds himself with what Strindberg called an impersonal circle of acquaintances. People you recognize and nod at when walking or driving by, people who, like yourself, prefer to avoid any intimacies. This is what he wants. This is the plan. He wants to be left in peace. He wants to walk from room to room in his house and not say anything to anyone. But then, in the milder days of spring following the pope’s funeral, he feels exhilarated and restless. He visits the carpenter in Slite and shows him newspaper clippings and photographs, and starts explaining. The carpenter takes a sip of coffee—Bible black, no sugar. He doesn’t say much, allows the old man to present his business. My father doesn’t want coffee. He wants mineral water, which is put in front of him. The carpenter leans over to look at the photographs. The pope’s coffin. A simple wooden box, says Pappa. No ornaments. The carpenter lets out an almost inaudible sigh. Well, let’s see, he says. He finishes his coffee, stands up, pulls out a notepad and a pencil, sits back down, outlines and sketches, we don’t have cypress in this part of the world, he mumbles without waiting for a response, ordinary pine or spruce will have to do, and then he shoves the notepad across the table for Pappa to take a look. Pappa leans over and studies the sketch, nods.
“Yes,” he says, shoving the notepad back across the table. “I want one exactly like that.”
THERE WERE NO STAIRCASES in the house at Hammars, and toward the end there were no doorsills either. When my father became dependent on a wheelchair, Cecilia removed all the doorsills so that he, at least in theory, could move freely from one room to the other.
He didn’t like the wheelchair, couldn’t figure out how to maneuver it.
He missed putting on his chalk-white sneakers and taking walks on the beach or bicycling through the forest.
He missed the red jeep and the sound it made when you stepped on the gas and sped along the narrow roads, for example from Hammars to Dämba to see a film, or from Hammars to the church to light a candle for Ingrid, or from Hammars to the ferry dock to buy newspapers in Fårösund.
Toward the end, he no longer had a word for loss, he no longer said I miss this or I long for that, the assumption that he missed his jeep, his bicycle, his sneakers, is mine. When I say toward the end, I mean the last weeks of summer before he died. Some of his children were at Hammars during this period, we spoke with him, one at a time, but I no longer recorded our conversations on tape. He didn’t have a word for tape, either. Or work. Or children.
On the next to last recording we made—it was in the spring—he wonders whether he should go find his sneakers and his jeep and go on a journey. His whole life he has longed for Hammars. Just to be able to be there. Not having to pack his bags every autumn and return to Stockholm or Munich. To be. But now that he finally is here, he thinks it might be time to go. Maybe to the city. To Stockholm.
He didn’t like to travel, it gave him stomachaches, he hated the thought of moving from one place to another. The thought of unfamiliar streets, unfamiliar rooms, unfamiliar faces, unfamiliar voices filled him with dread. Travel stole time from meticulously planned and deeply ingrained routines, and not least from what he proudly called the exercise of his profession.
Many people like to travel, but for those who don’t, the experience is roughly like this: A trip is not only the trip itself, it’s all the time you spend thinking about it before you leave and after you come back home. I don’t know whether thinking is the right word here. You may very well manage not to think about it, but you can’t avoid feeling permeated by it in some way, the trip has taken up residence inside you, and you have to live with it for some time before embarking on it and for some time after it has come to an end—in this way, it’s a lot like the flu.
I have long runways for takeoff and landing, he used to say.
Despite all this—at the end of his life, while still able to remember the word longing, he longed to travel. Away from the island and back to the city.
HEYes, I long for a little three-room flat somewhere, near Hedvig Eleonora Church . . . Storgatan, Jungfrugatan, Sibyllegatan . . . I miss going to the theatre, going to concerts. I find it difficult to let go of all of that.
He places his hands on the wheels of the wheelchair to show her that they remain motionless, regardless of how he moves his arms.
HEI can see myself living in that little flat . . . do you remember the one on Grev Turegatan? It was the ideal place for me. That’s where I would have wanted to live now in the autumn of my life. But that’s not likely to happen, is it?
He lets out an exaggerated sigh.
SHEI don’t know . . . maybe?
HEMaybe?
SHEYes, why not?
HEI don’t know . . . to be present at an orchestra rehearsal, I don’t know if you can picture it, there is nothing like it. You open the door and walk into a gigantic concert hall . . .
Seven years later I’m lying on the sofa in the living room at home in Oslo. My husband and our daughter are asleep upstairs. It’s night or early morning and many hours until dawn. I’m listening to the tapes. It’s four a.m. I’m lying with the Mac in my lap, writing down every word we said, and while I’m transcribing, I’m also translating from Swedish to Norwegian. The act of translating is liberating—perhaps because it gives me ownership of the voices. I’ve borrowed Eva’s big blue headphones. On the tape, my father says that he would like to go back to Stockholm, move into a small three-room flat near Hedvig Eleonora Church, he has two months left to live, and even though I don’t remember this conversation, I can tell by my voice that I’m deliberating whether to contradict him (yes, but, Pappa, you can’t move now, this, here, is where you wanted to be) or to humor him (of course you should go back to Stockholm and live in the city), it turns into a kind of compromise
. I don’t know, I say, maybe? And then I say: Yes, why not? We do not talk all that much about death, he has more than enough grappling with the life he is living now. The forgetfulness. The dreams that come and go. The women that come and go. All the windows that are thrown wide open. The women don’t know that the windows must be kept closed. Cecilia hasn’t told them. It’s spring and the sun is shining. The fly buzzes on the windowsill. He talks a lot about his eye. He worries about the surgery scheduled for June 18 at three p.m. at Visby Infirmary. Worries about the drive there. The procedure. Having to check himself into the infirmary. It takes about an hour and a half to travel from Hammars to Visby. He used to say that no Fårö oldster would voluntarily check himself into Visby Infirmary.
Check yourself into Visby Infirmary and you’ll never get out alive. Better to die at your post than at Visby Infirmary.
Charting the heart’s early development:
The nascent heart tube begins to elongate in the middle of the fifth week of gestation, initially taking the shape of the letter C and developing into a compressed S.
When I was pregnant with Eva, long before I knew she would be called Eva, I woke up one night with cramps and bleeding. Two pregnancies had gone wrong over the past years. One at week twelve. One at week ten. When I woke up that night, with ominous symptoms, I was in my eleventh week.
