Encircling (16 page)
Authors: Carl Frode Tiller
I open the door and step out into the corridor, look back and see Eilert and his daughter pulling apart. Eilert straightens the collar of his checked flannel shirt and says that it’ll be good to get home all right, and his daughter tells him they can’t wait to have him home. “Mum’s not the same when you’re not there,” she says. “She’s restless, she just wanders around the house and doesn’t know what to do with herself,” I hear her say before I close the door behind me. I stand for a moment looking round about. It’s quiet and pretty peaceful out here, there’s a porter up a stepladder, changing a flickering fluorescent tube and the chubby nurse from earlier on comes along wheeling an empty bed. She stops and waits for him to finish so she can trundle on. They look at one another, exchange a few words and I seize the chance to slip past. I’m not up to talking to anyone right now, just want to be alone. I make my way towards the lift, slowly, stiff-legged. I’ll take the lift down, go for a little stroll, sit down on one of the benches and enjoy the last of the sunset.
But then the door of one of the rooms opens and out comes Dr Claussen. He turns, says something to a patient in the room and I stop short, glance around for somewhere
to hide, I’m not up to talking to Dr Claussen either, can’t take his fussing, he has his back to me, still talking, he hasn’t spotted me yet, so I nip round the corner and down a side corridor, going as fast as my feeble legs will carry me. I walk all the way to the end and stop, stand there: I’ll just have to wait till Dr Claussen has gone past. If he sees me I’ll simply say that I took a wrong turn, or maybe that I’m looking at that painting. On the wall in front of me there’s a large picture of a man and woman walking hand in hand along a beach, smiling and looking happy, looking blissful. All the pictures in the unit aim to exude an air of bliss, aim to present some sort of idyllic scenario. They’re probably supposed to make the unit seem more homey, but they have the exact opposite effect, on me at least, because when I look at this picture I see it for exactly what it is. I see it as an attempt to make me forget that I’m ill, an attempt to help me escape from what I cannot escape. Actually it reminds me of the titbit that the driver of the slaughterer’s truck gives the cattle to steady them as they’re herded into the truck. I remember this from when I was a little boy and used to visit my grandfather’s farm: the driver leaning on the rail of the short ramp leading up into the back of the truck, luring and coaxing the most restive beasts with sugar lumps, and how those stupid cows let themselves be fooled. At such times cattle can sense the horrors that lie ahead, I don’t know how, but they do. All animals on their way to the slaughter can sense that something terrible is about to happen and yet it takes no more than a little lump of sugar for them to settle down and climb into the slaughterer’s truck, one lump of sugar and they act as if they’re on their way to summer pasture. That the people responsible for the decor in here treat me
in much the same way as those cattle annoys me, I realize, it makes me feel even more agitated than I was to start with because when faced with such blatant attempts to make me feel at home, such blatant attempts to get me to stay calm and composed, I take it simply as a sign that those of us who have wound up here really do have cause to be worried and afraid. I gaze at the picture, at the happy couple strolling along the beach barefoot with the waves lapping lightly at their toes, and all of a sudden I have the urge to poke my finger through the canvas, have the urge to make a little hole in the painting and ruin it.
Then I hear a voice say: “Arvid.” I give a little start, spin round and there’s Dr Claussen, his glasses perched on the tip of his nose. He ducks his head slightly, eyes me over his specs.
“Oh, hello,” I say and start to walk towards him.
“So, have you been up and walking about as we agreed?” he asks.
“A bit,” I say.
“Are you sure?”
“Of course.”
He doesn’t say anything for a moment, holds my eye, as if weighing me up. A couple of seconds, then I let out a little laugh, a laugh that’s as good as an admission that this is not entirely true and he immediately understands the significance of this laugh, I can tell by his face. He doesn’t laugh, though, he looks at the floor and removes his glasses, and only now do I notice that he has his glasses on one of those cords. He lets them fall from his hand to dangle on his chest and stands there looking at me.
“As a former vicar who has had a lot to do with people in difficult situations you know this as well as I do, of
course,” he says. “But I’m going to say it anyway. You are sick, Arvid, but you have to remember that you’re not just sick! I know it sounds like something you’d read in a woman’s magazine, but you really do still have to make the most of the time which you have left,” he says. “And it will take you a lot longer than necessary to get to the stage where you can go home if you don’t get up and about more than you’re doing.”
“I know,” I say and force a little smile. “I’ll try to do better,” I add.
He holds my eye for a second or two.
“Good,” he says, then he raises his glasses and pops them back onto his nose, turns on his heel and walks off down the corridor. I stay where I am, following him with my eyes, stay perfectly still. He’ll be going off duty soon, then he’ll be going home to his family, exactly as I used to go home to my family after telling someone much the same as he has just told me. “I’ve been in your situation, but you’ve never been in mine,” I say under my breath. “If you only knew what it really feels like,” I mutter as I start to walk. As if I haven’t done all I could to shake myself out of this frame of mind, as if I haven’t tried to extricate myself from this image of myself and dredge up sides of myself other than this, the sick Arvid. To begin with, each day was one long struggle to do just that, behind almost everything I thought and saw and did was an awareness that I mustn’t only be sick, that I would only get worse and that I might not get well again if I didn’t pull myself together and dredge up a little of the old Arvid. But no matter what I did or thought or said it did no good, the sicker I became the more of my image of myself my illness occupied and now, when I can’t even look myself in the eye any longer, the
exact opposite is the case: now I want to have as little to do with my old self as possible. The old Arvid has the same effect on me as the pictures in these corridors, every time a little of the old Arvid starts to rise to the surface I have the idea that that I’m simply trying to escape from what I cannot escape, every time I feel happy or enthusiastic or light-hearted a little voice inside me tells me that this is merely a sign that I haven’t succeeded in reconciling myself to what lies ahead and if there is one thing I must do, it is to reconcile myself.
I turn the corner and walk over to the lift, slowly and with my stiff, somewhat unsteady gait. Then I hear a crash and a scream. There’s a moment’s silence and then Eilert’s daughter comes running out of our room. “Doctor!” she screams, “Doctor!” She doesn’t even see me, her eyes are wide and staring as she runs straight past me and on down the corridor. And here comes the chubby nurse, emerging from the staffroom with her mouth full and half a slice of bread and cod roe in her hand. She stares at Eilert’s daughter in alarm. “My dad’s collapsed, he’s all blue in the face,” Eilert’s daughter screams. She looks at the chubby nurse and points to our room. The nurse lays her slice of bread on a steel trolley and sprints down the corridor, she flings open a door and says it’s an emergency. “Guttormsen in room 301,” she says, then she steps aside and first Dr Hartberg then Dr Claussen dash out. Like gladiators when the gate is raised they leap through the door and along the corridor, grim-faced, their white coats open and blown back, flapping like the capes of a couple of superheroes. “Hurry, please!” Eilert’s daughter wails and I step out of the way, flatten myself against the wall to let the doctors past, stand there watching all the commotion. Eilert’s
daughter holds the door of the room open for the doctors and I catch a glimpse of her father. He’s lying on the floor, blue in the face, the gnarled veins on his temples are thick as pencils and his eyes are bulging out of his head like little glass domes. Eilert is going to die, I can tell, there’s nothing the doctors can do here, I can’t take it in, it’s all over for Eilert.
“You’d better stay here,” the chubby nurse says, placing a hand on Eilert’s daughter’s shoulder as the girl makes to go back into the room. “Come here,” she says and she pulls Eilert’s daughter to her, holds her and strokes her hair. I stand there staring at them for a second or two, see how utterly distraught Eilert’s daughter is. She throws her arms around the nurse and buries her face in her shoulder, sobbing with despair, her fingers clawing at the white tunic and making faint scratching noises before they dig into the nurse’s back. “Oh, please don’t let him die,” she sobs, “please don’t let him die.”
I stare at her and swallow. I ought to go now, I’ve no right to be here, watching this, it’s too private, but still I stand there, stand bolt upright, staring at the young woman weeping like this for someone she loves, weeping for her own father. A couple of seconds, then it’s as if I somehow break free of myself, come to my senses, and I start to walk away. I walk towards the lift, slowly and with my faltering, unsteady step. But how can Eilert die like this? It can’t have anything to do with his illness, I don’t understand it.
“Oh, my God,” I murmur, raising one hand and running it over my smooth scalp. I give a faint shake of my head, my jaw drops slightly and I carry on along the corridor with my mouth half open and my eyes wide. A few moments
pass, then slowly the thought creeps over me that I’m not actually as sad and shocked as all this posing and posturing would suggest. It’s awful to think of Eilert lying there dying, but I’m not as sad as all that. “I’m actually not nearly as sad as I would have thought,” I mutter, and immediately feel a twinge of guilt; guilt because I’m affecting to feel more sorry for Eilert than I actually am, guilt because I don’t feel more sorry than I do.
“Well, this is a hospital, after all,” I mutter, “and it doesn’t exactly come as a shock if someone dies up here. I mean, they’re prepared for it.” And this makes me feel a little less guilty, I can tell. I don’t think my death would have been a bigger blow to Eilert than his is to me, we hardly knew one another, and I’m sure he would have forgotten me as quickly as I’ll forget him. I make my way up to the lift, press the “Down” button and wait, watch the red numbers marking the lift’s progress. “As quickly forgotten by Eilert as by everyone else,” I mumble to myself. Then the lift door glides open. Fortunately it’s empty, because I realize that my eyes are wet, I feel the tears beginning to well up. No, this won’t do, I can’t stand here blubbing, somebody might get in, I need to pull myself together. But it’s no use, the tears well up and I feel a cold trickle down one cheek. “Poor Eilert,” I say. “Poor Eilert,” I say again and I try to picture Eilert as he was only a short time ago, try to picture that jovial face, hear that bright, cheery voice. “Poor Eilert,” I say for a third time, but I can’t kid myself, I know I’m only saying it because I’d rather cry over Eilert’s death than over my own plight. “And I was so rude and mean to him,” I mumble, not about to give up, trying to get out of having to blame myself. But it does no good, it only makes matters worse
because the way I behaved towards Eilert only serves to highlight what my problem is. I’m not that stupid, I know why I was so rude and mean to him, obviously it wasn’t only because I was sick and tired of him talking so much, talking and talking and always about the same things, it was just as much because I envied him his wife and the two daughters he was forever going on about, I realize that. When he talked about his family it reminded me that I also needed someone to live for and that’s why I was so rude and spiteful and tactless. Because what I needed more than anything else was someone to live for, someone to whom I could show the old me. Just as Eilert was being the old Eilert for his youngest daughter only a moment ago, I suppose I need someone for whom I can be the old Arvid. Just as Eilert could appear strong for her, I suppose I need someone to appear strong for. It’s because I haven’t had that, you see, that my illness has been able to gain control, gain the upper hand. The main reason why the old Arvid disappeared as fast as he did, that the illness was allowed to become so dominant when the new Arvid came into being, was that I had no one with whom I could be my old self. I haven’t had anyone for whom I could appear cheerful and full of fight, and it’s this and not the disease itself that has made me the man I am today. I’ve always tried to convince myself that I was merely facing the facts, that this new Arvid is simply a result of an attempt to reconcile myself to reality. But that’s not so, rather the reverse. This supposed willingness to reconcile myself to my own fate is merely another attempt to escape, merely an attempt to avoid admitting to myself that the old Arvid has no one to live for. “Oh, God, how maudlin can you get,” I say, then I shake my
head briskly and wipe the tears from my eyes. “That’ll do, Arvid,” I mutter, shaking my head again impatiently. I try to laugh a little at myself, but I can’t, my mouth pulls out of shape and I have to bite the inside of my cheek to stop myself from crying even more.
One day I overheard the verger and the parish clerk talking in shocked tones about some man who had apparently had a child by a woman little more than half his age. They were sitting in one of the back pews in the church drinking coffee and they didn’t notice me standing in the doorway, catching a breath of fresh air. And that I’m glad of, because when it became clear from their conversation that the man in question was Samuel I am ashamed to report that I was so overjoyed that I was unable to stifle the little burble of laughter that escaped me.
I guessed that this would come as a bit of a blow to Mum, but even when we were sitting at the dinner table that evening and I was waiting for the right moment to tell her what I’d heard, I couldn’t help gloating. “I feel so sorry for Samuel,” I said, sounding as if I meant it. “Oh, why?” Mum asked, but even as she said it I realized that she already knew all about it, I could tell just by looking at her. She made a half-hearted attempt to look puzzled, but she was clearly vexed at being confronted with this news and while I was telling her about it she kept her eyes fixed mainly on her food and said “Hmm” and “Oh, dear”. I should have stopped myself, of course, and asked her how long she had known, but I
couldn’t bring myself to do so and she couldn’t bring herself to admit that she knew, especially since she had initially tried to give the impression that she didn’t. So we both endeavoured to act out this little charade as best we could and I was just about to change the subject when you suddenly announced that you had heard Samuel was a randy old goat. Everything immediately went very quiet. I tried to gauge from your face whether you actually knew anything and whether this remark had been meant as a sarcastic dig at Mum and me, but I don’t think it was because you looked at us in amazement, obviously wondering what you had said. Mum struggled hard not to let her feelings show, she went on eating, but her face was grim and clouded and when you giggled and asked what exactly you had said wrong, she turned to you and said with inordinate asperity that she would thank you not to use such language at the dinner table. You blew up at her and asked if she was going to tell you how to talk now too, and this brought the conversation round, yet again, to how you had changed and how worried we were; to the need for limits and you having obligations as well as rights, and so on and so forth. Eventually you said: “Please may I leave the table?” then you got up and walked out. Your mother sat where she was, shaking her head and close to tears while I went after you and asked if you wouldn’t please come back so we could talk. “Talk?” was all you said, and you grinned wryly as you tied your shoelaces with sharp, fierce tugs.
Worse was to come, though. One day I came home from work to find Mum crying in your room. Her eyes were red and swollen and when I asked what was wrong she didn’t say anything, just shook her head and pointed to your bed – and there was your diary. “Read that,” she said. I knew of course that by reading your diary I would be overstepping the mark,
but given the gravity of the situation I had no choice, and what I read and what I saw there made my blood run cold. The countless poems about death, decay and corruption were one thing – those and the almost morbid fascination with everything that was dark and destructive, the innumerable detailed drawings of forms of torture and methods of execution, the way you romanticized suicide and attempted to justify it by means of warped interpretations of Camus, Zapffe and Schopenhauer. All of this was dreadful and disturbing, of course, but I found it hard to take it as seriously as I ought to have. I couldn’t get it to fit with the person that I knew you to be, deep down. Still I construed it as a youthful flirtation with extreme theories and standpoints.
What did cause my legs to give way, though, forcing me to drop down onto the bed next to Mum, was a brief description of something that had happened once when you and Jon were out walking in the hills: you had met a girl (mentioned by name in the diary), she had got lost and you refused to tell her the way home until she had sex with both of you. I can’t remember ever having read anything, before or since, that has left me as stunned as that entry in your diary. It was so brutal and vicious that I felt like throwing up after I had read it. I had barely recovered from that shock when we confronted you with it and you dealt us another shock. It wasn’t true, you said. You were angry and on the offensive. You told us you had been wondering how far we were willing to go to control you and that certain entries in your diary had been written to find out just that. The incident with the lost girl was all lies, you said, we could phone her and check if we liked, you had simply decided to write something so terrible that, if we read it, Mum and I would find it impossible not to confront you with it, thus giving ourselves away. “Well, now I know I
can’t trust you any more than you trust me,” you said. Mum and I didn’t know what to say, and a moment later, when you turned and walked out, we felt we were losing you for ever. We didn’t know what to do and in frustration I turned on Mum and said that now she really had to tell you who your real father was.
For some time I had had a vague and possibly mistaken idea that your real father had something to do with all this. The man in whose image you were actually supposed to shape yourself was absent. Indeed, not only was he absent, you didn’t even know who he was, and I had an idea that this had led to you having an identity crisis much more drastic than the usual crises of identity experienced by all teenagers.
You had always said you had no great desire to know who he was. You used to snort scornfully when you heard stories of people who had grown up knowing nothing of their origins, because no matter whether these stories were presented in the form of novels or films the question of the central character’s real mother’s or father’s identity was always made out to be the most crucial question in his or her life. According to these accounts, anyone who didn’t know the names of their birth parents could never be happy, they would always feel that something vital was missing and that, whether they knew it or not, their life would be one restless hunt for their roots. This search might be disguised as a constant hunt for new sexual partners or the ultimate high or all manner of religious experiences or political and ideological father figures, but in the end it always boiled down to the same thing: the search for one’s biological origins. But, you used to say, all of these were nothing but displays of sentimentality, they had little or nothing to do with reality. Naturally you did sometimes wonder who your father was, but this was
not and never had been something you thought of every day, you got on perfectly well without knowing who your real father was.
I have to admit that it was good to hear you say this, especially when Jon and Silje were there. I loved you like my own son and there was a part of me that wanted you not to miss your real father and wanted everyone around us to hear you say as much. Now and then I might have had the suspicion that this was exactly why you said it, that you knew I cherished a desire to be all you needed and that this was your way of letting me know that I was. To me this was a declaration of love so powerful that I found it hard not to show how happy it made me.
But hard though it was for me, and even harder for your mum, this situation was so serious that I had no choice but to raise the question of your paternity with her. I had tried once before, not long after we met, but her reaction back then had left me in no doubt that your real father was a no-go area. And gentle though her dismissal of the subject had been, it was also so firm and clear that I decided to leave it at that for the time being. I hoped and trusted that she would eventually find it easier to tell me about it. I thought perhaps she harboured a secret that she felt you could not cope with hearing until you were a certain age, or that she wanted to put off saying anything until we had been together long enough for her to feel sure that I would never abandon her, no matter what she told me. Whatever the case, I had made up my mind to ask her again before we got married and I probably would have done, if she hadn’t beaten me to it and made it a condition of marrying me that I let that particular question lie for ever. In love as I was and willing to forgo anything for love of her, I promised never to ask again, and I actually succeeded in
keeping that promise until the day when you stormed out because we had read your diary.
You had no sooner slammed the front door than I turned to Mum and said that it was time you were told who your real father was. I hadn’t planned on saying it, it just slipped out and I remember giving a start as I said it. Mum, on the other hand, acted as if she hadn’t heard what I had said. She had the same sad look on her face that she’d been wearing before I said it. At first I thought she was pretending not to have heard, thus giving me the chance to get it out of my system by behaving as if I had said something other than what I had actually said, but that was not the case, as I discovered when I plucked up the courage to repeat it. “I don’t know what we’re going to do,” was all she said, and there was nothing in her voice or her expression to suggest that she was putting on an act. She didn’t respond at all to what I had said, it was as if she had an in-built psychological mechanism that prevented her from taking in anything associated with your biological father and I remember what a strong impression this made on me. I used to have a friend who discovered that his wife was psychotic and he described to me what it was like to see the person he loved most in the world become a total stranger to him. It wasn’t until the moments after I had mentioned your biological father to your mother that I finally understood what he had meant. I never spoke to your mother about this episode, I never saw her look like that again and I tried to forget that this side of her existed. Nor did I ever mention your biological father again. I tried to tell myself that there were times when it was better not to know and all the signs were that this was one of those times.
Later it would occur to me that Mum and I only used you as an excuse for staying together when our marriage was
falling apart. Compared with parents who have drug addicts or delinquents in the house, or anorexic kids for that matter, we really had little to complain about or to worry us and it struck me that, each in our own way, we blew your problems out of all proportion and made the situation much worse than it actually was. By standing by you I wanted to show that I was a worthy father for you and a good family man; the more troubled I made you out to be, the better I would look and consciously or unconsciously the aim was always to show Mum that I and not Samuel was the man for her.
Mum, for her part, overdramatized your problems because, having been let down by Samuel she wanted to find her way back to me, or so I thought. She was also genuinely worried about you, of course, but when Samuel told her that he was having a child by another woman she turned your problems more and more into a project that she and I had to accomplish together, a project that would bind us to one another and help us to save the marriage that she had been about to walk out of. Because the more I thought about it, the more convinced I was that she had seriously been considering leaving me. I would sit alone, thinking, and I came up with clue after clue to support this theory. The disproportionately fierce animosity she felt towards Silje, for example, stemmed from the thought that such a “rude, shameless little tart” possessed all the qualities that Mum herself would have needed to possess in order to leave me for Samuel, so every time she saw Silje she was reminded of her own shortcomings. She was, I concluded, quite simply jealous of her. Something similar had happened when you built up that bone collection and your mum took you to task for not being grateful for all I had done for you over the years. Mum was eternally grateful to me for having rescued you and her from a life with Erik, and since it was
this same gratitude that prevented her from leaving me for Samuel it hurt her to see how you could take me so much for granted. She envied you that ability.
At brighter moments, though, I saw what had happened in a very, very different light. The challenges we had been faced with as a family when you were a rebellious teenager may not have been huge compared to what other families had to cope with, but if you looked at the bigger picture, for many years we were almost outrageously happy and hence, when we did encounter problems and challenges, they seemed greater than they actually were, or so it seemed to me. As if that weren’t enough, at some point the past seemed to catch up on Mum. Her childhood had been a catalogue of disasters and it was as though she had begun to doubt that the happy life she had with you and me could last. She seemed almost to be preparing herself for fresh disasters to strike and, since she regarded what was happening to you as the start of just such a disaster, she felt both desperate and afraid. Samuel had nothing to do with this, I would tell myself, he had been nothing but a passing fancy, an infatuation that had eventually run its course, as such infatuations tend to do.
At other times it has crossed my mind that you and Silje and Jon really were getting into deep water and that our concern was not merely justified, but possibly not as great as it ought to have been. More than anything, it was Jon’s attempt to kill himself that made me think this. It was his mother who found him. She suffered from some sort of neuromuscular disease and had got up in the night to take a painkiller only to discover that several bottles of pills were missing. At first she had thought Jon’s brother must have taken them when he had called at the house earlier that evening: he was a drug addict just like their father and if she hadn’t heard the sound
of music coming from Jon’s room she probably wouldn’t have gone in there at all. He was still conscious when she found him, but the pills had begun to take effect and fortunately he was too dopey and confused to stop her calling the ambulance.
I don’t think any of us realized how fragile, sensitive and highly strung Jon was and how easily he could be manipulated and led on by things you and Silje said and did. It wasn’t your fault that he tried to take his own life, of course. He was a troubled and tormented soul and who or what was to blame for that I don’t know. For you, the fascination with death and destruction was probably just an innocent exploration of yourself and of the big questions in life, but for Jon it was the proverbial last straw. Maybe he wanted to impress the two of you, maybe he felt small and insignificant or maybe he wished to show that of the three of you he was the one who dared to do what you and Silje only talked about.