by Linn Ullmann
It was the summer of 2003, and we (my husband, my son, and my husband’s two children) had been on the island for a few days, staying at Ängen. We had brought the dog, not the one we have now, but the one we had before, called Brando, after Marlon. He was a large dog and I hadn’t worked up the courage to tell my father that we had brought him with us, so every night when the old man dropped by for what he called evening sittings, we locked the dog into one of the upstairs bedrooms and hoped he wouldn’t bark or whimper. I didn’t want my father to get angry, to start going on about how we had to lose the dog, or leave the island, or choose between him and the dog because he didn’t want a fucking mongrel running around. I was nauseous all the time, and most days I couldn’t get out of bed. I didn’t play with the children. I didn’t write. I didn’t go to afternoon screenings at Dämba. I imagined myself throwing up in the middle of the movie and being banished for all eternity. My sister Ingmarie had been nauseous too, she said, when she was pregnant. It runs in the family, she added. I liked that she said runs in the family.
My father called on the telephone and said in his most gentle voice: “Why don’t you come today? You can have a blanket for your tummy. That will help calm the nausea. We’re seeing the one with Gregory Peck.”
“Which one?”
“You know the one. One of the two . . . the one with Gregory Peck.”
When I woke up that night, frightened that I might be losing the baby, my husband roused the two eldest children and told them that we had to go to the hospital, and that they must look after their little sister, make sure she had some breakfast, and that they mustn’t forget to walk the dog, but not down by Hammars where the old man could see them, instead they should walk into the forest and down toward the moor. And then we took the car and drove to the hospital in Visby. In the car, I said: “Better to die at your post than at Visby Infirmary.”
To which my husband replied: “Sometimes you attach too much importance to what your father says.”
The ferrymen had already been informed, they knew where we were headed and why. On that morning the ferry waited for us rather than the other way around.
The hospital corridors were quiet, the midwife was quiet. She whispered—that’s how I remember it—that I needed to see the doctor and have an ultrasound. She helped me gather my things and sent us even farther down the corridor.
I remember lying on the doctor’s examining table in a dark cubicle, only the ultrasound machine emitting light.
I remember covering my face with my hands.
After a while, the doctor touched my arm.
“Look,” he said.
My husband took my hand in his.
The doctor pointed at the screen and moved his finger carefully around the sonogram, as though showing us a rare map, and then, because we couldn’t quite believe what we were seeing and what he was telling us, he turned up the sound so we could hear the steady beating of the heart.
On the next to last recording, my father says he would like to live in a three-room flat, then he says he would like to live in a one-room flat, then he opens the door and walks into a concert hall of such impressive proportions that birds fly around inside it.
HEAnd I open the door and there are one hundred and fifty musicians and I know that a great and unanalyzable . . . non-analyzable . . . indescribable experience awaits me now. A Beethoven symphony. Or the St. Matthew Passion with full choir and orchestra. It is overwhelming. Impossible to describe. This is the best life has to offer.
SHEIs that the best life has to offer?
HEThat’s it. Yes. It’s the best there is.
DÄMBA IS MADE UP of a main house, an annex, a cinema, and an old windmill that has been turned into a small apartment with a kitchenette on the first floor, a narrow flight of stairs, and a bedroom with an enormous bed on the top floor. When my siblings and I were younger, bringing our girl- and boyfriends to Fårö for the summer, the windmill was reserved for the newly-in-love.
“With some determined fucking,” my father said, pointing at the four windmill blades that had remained motionless for the last hundred years, “the blades will start spinning again.”
Inside the cinema, four sloping steps lead to the projection room. A steep narrow staircase, not unlike a ladder, leads from the projection room to Cecilia’s office, which for a while also served as an editing room.
If you walk a straight line from the cinema, across the moor, past the lilac hedge, and through the garden, you’ll end up at the foot of a modest wooden staircase with a blue banister. The staircase will lead you to the main house entrance. When you enter the main house, you are met by a dizzying flight of stairs.
The annex was originally built with an external staircase, so to get from the first to the second floor, you had to go outside and up and inside again. Since then, the annex has been renovated and the stairs relocated inside the building.
During his forty years on the island, my father worked with local architects, carpenters, and woodworkers. He never tired of renovating and expanding the houses. I read somewhere that the coffin maker from Slite had worked on building many of the staircases.
My husband, our daughter, our new dog, and I moved to the island in late summer 2008 and lived there for a year. Now that my father was dead, the houses (Hammars, Ängen, the Writing Lodge, and Dämba) had to be looked after until their fate had been resolved. During the first autumn and winter, we lived at Ängen, when spring arrived we moved to Dämba. Eva went to the local kindergarten. I told my husband and Eva that we were islanders now, and they didn’t object, but the islanders themselves didn’t seem to agree. We were outsiders. We didn’t belong.
That first autumn, having just moved from Oslo to Fårö, Eva received a letter from my father-in-law, the university librarian. Eva was almost five years old, and the letter was met with much ado, since this was the first time she had ever received mail addressed to her. The envelope contained a postcard—a glossy picture of a gray-brown kitten inside a blue velvet purse.
The back of the card said:
Dear, dearest Eva,
Here comes a kitty cat all the way from Norway to Sweden to say hello to you! Can you see that it has white paws?
Grandpa and Grandma can’t wait to see you again. Today I walked past your old school in the park, but all the children were hiding inside, so I only heard their voices.
When, after a long winter at Ängen, we moved to Dämba, my father-in-law had died. The summer, too, was long. And quiet and very hot and clammy. Every night we carried mattresses and sheets down to the room with the two grand pianos. Käbi used to play on both of them, practicing on one and giving her recitals on the other. Now they were covered with dark blankets, like horses in winter.
The room with the two pianos was the coolest one in the house, and we all sprawled out on the floor.
One late morning in August, my husband took the car and headed for Oslo, it would take him two days with an overnight stay in Örebro, where he would meet the woman with the slender wrists. He had been planning it for months, but I didn’t know that then. He started the car and drove away quickly. I remember noticing how fast he was going, much too fast on these narrow dirt roads, but, then again, he had two ferries to catch. We were moving back home to Oslo. He had the dog with him and most of our things. Eva and I and the older children were flying back a few days later. When I could no longer see or hear the car, I walked across the moor and over to the bench outside the cinema and sat down. I had the key to the cinema in my pocket. That whole year, I carried all the keys to all the houses around with me, and sometimes I would wander through all the rooms at Hammars, sit in the chairs, lie down in the beds, rummage through the kitchen drawers, drink wine in the study, and open all the windows.
The houses had been put up for sale, and I thought to myself that all of this—abandoned rooms, abandoned houses—would soon come to an end.
I unlocked the rust-red door to the cinema. I walked past a large tapestry
depicting the characters from The Magic Flute, Sarastro, Monostatos, Pamina, Tamino, Papagena, Papageno, Queen of the Night, and up the sloping steps to the projection room and further up to Cecilia’s old office. After my father died, Cecilia left the island for good. My work here is done, she said. The office was left in turmoil. Papers and binders that nobody had managed to sort through. We have to get together soon, I thought (as I did every time I came in here), and put everything in order. I found a vacuum cleaner and took it downstairs and vacuumed the green armchairs and the green carpet. There were dead flies everywhere. Then I carried the vacuum cleaner back up to the office, switched off the lights, walked out, locked the door, and sat down again on the bench.
It was then that I noticed a young man on a bicycle coming my way. He was struggling to cross a cattle guard and I could see right away that he wasn’t from the island.
The bicycle was white, he had dark hair and wore brown shorts and a large black T-shirt. He pedaled all the way to where I was sitting and rode around in a loop, as if to show me that he was here, that he had arrived.
“Hello,” he said in English, but with an accent.
“Hello,” I said, and looked away.
He came to a stop right in front of me. Had I stretched out my arm, I could have touched him, or better still, knocked him off his bicycle.
“Is this the cinema?” he said.
“Yes,” I said. “Actually, though, it’s a barn.”
“The master’s personal cinema,” he said with rehearsed reverence.
I didn’t reply.
“I have come all the way from Germany,” he said.
“On a bicycle?” I said.
He gave a long and loud laugh. And then he stopped just as abruptly as he had begun.
“No, I rented the bicycle in Fårösund. But I’ve come all the way from Germany . . . to meet the master.”
“Where in Germany?”
“Hamburg.”
“Well, I’m sorry to say, the man you’ve come to see is dead,” I said. “He died two years ago.”
“I know that,” he said, lowering his voice, “but I can feel his presence everywhere. This is a kind of pilgrimage for me, you see.”
He got off his bicycle, let it keel over on the grass, and seated himself next to me on the bench.
“I saw you come out of there just now,” he said. “You have keys. Could you let me come inside and have a look?”
“No,” I said.
He was dumbfounded. And took some pleasure in showing it. As if instead of saying “no” I had said, Show me what you look like when you are dumbfounded.
“No?!” he said.
“No,” I said.
He stared at me.
I got up from the bench, stuck my hands in my dress pockets, glancing at the bicycle he had tossed down on the grass. I took my hands out of my pockets, pulled the bicycle up onto its wheels and leaned it against the limestone wall.
“But I just saw you come out,” he said. “You have keys.”
“That’s true,” I said, “but now I don’t want to go inside again. It was a bit strange . . .” I cut myself off, didn’t feel that I should have to explain myself.
He stood up.
“You don’t want to?” he said, raising his voice. “You don’t want to give up five minutes of your so-called valuable time to show me his cinema?”
“No,” I said.
“No?”
He sat down and got up again and said almost pleadingly: “But I’ve come such a long way.”
“Well, I’m sorry.”
He walked over to his bicycle, climbed onto it, and started pedaling. A moment later, he stopped and turned.
“You are not a very nice person,” he cried. “I meet people all the time, and they are nice, but you are not nice.”
He cycled across the clearing and out onto the road.
“Wait,” I called.
His legs were pale, jutting out from his brown shorts.
“Wait,” I repeated, and started running after him.
He stopped and turned, putting his feet to the ground. I ran out onto the road. We stood on either side of the cattle guard. He couldn’t have been much older than twenty.
“Come back,” I said, aiming for a calm voice. “I’ll open the door and show you the cinema.”
“No,” he said, crossing his arms.
“It’s okay,” I said and moved a little closer. “It was just so strange when you showed up. I was all alone, and then you suddenly appeared and then . . . but come back and I’ll show you around.”
“No,” he said. “It’s too late now. I don’t want to.”
He turned around, put his feet to the pedals and rode off. As I watched him disappear down the road, he turned around one last time, shouting: “I don’t want to! You ruined it for me!”
Sometimes that summer I would run up and down the stairs in the main house just to see how many rounds I could do without stopping to catch my breath. I told Eva about the ghost in the lilac hedge. My father, her grandfather, whom she almost couldn’t remember, used to say that if you didn’t want the ghost to visit, you had to lay out forks and knives on all the steps, Eva thought we should do the same thing, but when night fell, she asked me why I had told her that stupid story about the forks and knives, because now she was scared of falling asleep.
Teach them the beauty of forgetfulness, sings Lou Reed in the song about all the things you have to remember to teach the children. I remember almost nothing of my father’s funeral. I remember that the minister wore a rose in her long, flowing hair, and that she sang a lullaby from Gotland, its lyrics incomprehensible because of the local dialect. I remember that the cellist performed the Sarabande from Bach’s fifth cello suite. I remember that he who once played Hamlet broke down and cried so hard that he started sobbing. I remember the red flowers on the coffin. I remember the endless processions, in and out of cars, in and out of the church, and then, finally, the long walk through the church cemetery and to the grave waiting to receive him.
TOWARD THE END OF the sixth and final day of recording, my father and I made a plan. We were, if not well under way, at least making progress with the work—the project—the book—and when you are making progress with something, the question of how to proceed inevitably arises. It is May 10, 2007, and I have to go back to Oslo for a few weeks.
“But,” I say.
“But?” he says.
“But,” I say, “I’ll be back soon, and then we can pick up where we left off.”
This was the new plan. I will leave, but I will come back. We will pick up where we left off.
But when I came back, he was so frail that it was impossible to continue, to meet at agreed-upon times, to record conversations on tape. He had forgotten everything. The project. The tapes. Me.
The work we had done so far could be described as follows: After every meeting, we close with a ritual. First, we repeatedly agree that it’s time to finish. Then we talk a little bit about what we’ll have for lunch, and finally I wheel him over to his desk. This is where the calendar is kept, also called the book, or the diary. I leaf through its pages and find the date for our next meeting and write down the agreed-upon time. Every now and then we discuss whether to meet at a different time than eleven, only to conclude that there is no better time than eleven. And then, as though to seal the agreement, we write our names on the page of the calendar. I write his name and he writes mine. This ritual lasts for about twenty minutes. He takes his time writing. My name consists of four letters. He sits in his wheelchair, I stand next to him and he takes his time writing my name in the calendar. His hand is shaking. I have to bury my own hands in my dress pockets to keep myself from yanking the pen away from him and finishing the task myself, one n, and then another n, there, we’re done.
He needs assistance—or help—or care—around the clock. Six women take turns caring for him, with Cecilia making all the decisions. Cecilia who operated the projectors when he sti
ll went to the cinema at Dämba, Cecilia who found him in the ditch when he had driven off the road, Cecilia who removed the bullets from his rifle when Ingrid died.
The plan was to meet every day. But that is not how it turned out. We didn’t meet every day, not even every other day. In the course of those final months, even before I left to go to Oslo for two weeks, he took a rapid turn for the worse. I don’t know whether rapid turn is the right expression here. The choreography of aging is complex. An intricate combination of quick and slow. There are no breaks. Not during the day, not at night. Sometimes we just listened to music. Once, I asked him if he wanted to put on a blues record for a change, or jazz, or maybe gospel? What about Mahalia Jackson? But he said, Ssshh. Or he said Bach. And then he shook his head.
When the cellist Pablo Casals was asked why he still practiced six hours a day, even after he had turned ninety, he replied, “because I think I’m making progress.”
Sometimes he wasn’t able to get up in the morning, and then I would just sit by his bedside. Other times, one of the women who cared for him called me on the phone and said: He’s too tired today. Or: Today is not a good day. Or: He doesn’t want you to come today. I didn’t know who made these day-to-day decisions. Was it him or one of the women or Cecilia? I didn’t know whether he knew who I was when I wasn’t there. Days and faces and voices blurred into one. A fog spread over Hammars and everyone who came and went.
Cecilia with the long, dark hair and the beautiful face wrote a note and put it on the kitchen table: He wants to be left in peace! Don’t come here tomorrow!
Cecilia had her own plan and her own arrangement that did not coincide with mine.
