Welcome to America. Linda Boström Knausgård
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It’s a long time already since I stopped talking. They’re used to it now. My mum, my brother. My dad’s dead, so I don’t know what he’d have to say about it. Maybe that it was genetic. The genes come down hard in our family. Hard and without mercy. The direct lines of descendancy. Maybe the silence was always inside me. I used to say things that weren’t true. I said the sun was out when it was raining. That the porridge we ate was green like the grass and tasted like soil. I said school was like walking into pitch darkness every day. Like having to hold on to a handrail until it was time to go home. What did I do when school was over? I certainly didn’t play with my brother, he locked himself away in his room with his music. He nailed the door shut. He pissed in bottles he kept. It was what they were for.
The silence makes no difference. You mustn’t believe otherwise. You mustn’t believe the sun will rise in the morning, because you can’t ever be sure it will. I haven’t used the notebook my mum gave me. In case there’s something you want to communicate, she said. The notebook was a kind of consent. She was accepting my silence. Leaving me alone. At some point it would cease. Most likely it would cease.
I passed my hand over the windowsill and drew outlines in the dust that stuck to my palm. A spruce tree and a Father Christmas. It was all I could think of. Thoughts come so slowly and express themselves so simply: pellets, bread slice, pond.
Did I say we lived in an apartment? There was no contact with nature, apart from the park where I saw my first flasher. I was sitting on top of the climbing frame and the man stood below and exposed himself completely. He took off his pants altogether. His thing was stiff and purple. I stared and noted the colour.
I had friends, but they don’t come round anymore. They found other apartments to visit once the silence began. Before that, there were always kids at ours. My mum was bonkers. At ours you could shoot pucks against the double doors. We built a skateboard ramp up against the bookshelves, and the apartment was so big we could roller-skate in it. It made marks in the parquet, but the important thing was for the children to play. The place is quiet now. That’s one difference anyway.
I stopped talking when growing began to take up too much space inside me. I was sure I couldn’t do both, grow and talk at the same time. I think perhaps I was the sort of person who liked to take charge, and it felt good to give that up. There were so many to keep track of. So many dreams to fulfil. Wish something of me, I could say. But I could never make any wish come true. Not really.
I could have talked about my mum. But I said nothing. I didn’t want her glitzy smiles. Her perfect hair. Her wanting me to be a beautiful girl. To her, beauty was something on its own. An important property that had to be cultivated like a flower. You had to sow the seed and make sure to water it so you could watch it grow. I could have been like her. Dark, with a kind of sparkle that went without saying. But somehow I fell short. I was no force of nature, the way she was. I was infected by doubt. It was everywhere. It ran through the marrow of my spine and spread from there. I felt doubt assail me. Days and nights, sunsets awash with doubt.
I wrote nothing in my notebook, but I always knew where it was. I moved it from the top cupboard to under the pillow, then back to the cupboard again. Sometimes I hid it behind the toilet in case I needed to write something there.
My dad’s dead. Did I mention that? It’s my fault. I prayed out loud to God for him to die and he did. One morning he was lying there motionless in his bed. That was the power there was in me speaking. Maybe what I said about growing wasn’t right. Maybe I stopped talking because my wish came true. You think you want your wishes to come true. But you don’t. You should never ask for what you want. It disturbs the order of things. The way you really want them. You want to be disappointed. You want to be hurt and have to struggle to get over it. You want the wrong presents on your birthday. You might think you want what you wish for, but you don’t.
The days and nights are the same. The silence softens the edges so everything is like a kind of mist. We can call them half-days. We can call them what we like.
Before, I would often go with my mum to the theatre. I don’t do that anymore. I hear her go out and I hear her come back. The last time I saw her perform she was a fallen Statue of Liberty wishing the immigrants welcome to America. She was bald, with a shard of mirror stuck on her brow. She’d lost her torch. I loved it. The way they’d made her up. The way she shone and shone on the stage. Welcome to America. Welcome to America.
I felt an urge to write those exact words in my notebook. But I stopped myself. You’ve got to be strict. You can’t just follow the impulses that criss-cross the mind in their little tunnels of light. I could see my thoughts. They were everywhere. They passed into my body, darting about my heart, toying with it, forcing themselves upon it. I could do nothing about my thoughts.
I sang in the school choir. The music teacher’s name was Hildegard. She was from Austria. If only I could sing like you, she wrote in a book I was given as a prize on the last day of term. She did sing dreadfully. Her voice was a screech. But she knew all the parts. I sang on my own that day in the church. The sun is shining, the grass is green, the orange and palm trees sway, there’s never been such a day in Beverly Hills, L.A. But it’s December the twenty-fourth, and I am longing to be up north. I was so nervous I was shaking, but it went down well. And my mum said everyone was always nervous.
My dad spoke to me in a dream. Cat got your tongue? he said. No, daddy. But the words are so heavy. So heavy to fling about.
What more did he say? You’re my lovely girl. You were never any trouble. No, daddy, I said. I was never any trouble.
He needed reassuring. Even though he was dead. In that respect, there’s no difference between the living and the dead.
I tried to keep him away. Ignored his questions. But he was everywhere, the same as when he was alive. To the fatherland, he’d say, filling up his glass. To the old woman who has no teeth.
It was all so easy. My mum says it was denial. That I wanted life to pass by me, instead of standing there getting drenched in it like everyone else. She thought less of me now, but that was hardly surprising. I thought less of her, too. We were standing on each side of a trench, measuring out a distance between us. Or perhaps we were measuring each other. Measuring each other with our eyes. Who was the stronger? Who was weak? Who would come creeping in the night, sobbing and reaching out to be held?
Nevertheless, she’d been loath to make an issue of it. That’s what she told my teacher at school, who after a week was in tears. It’s a whim, she said. She’s full of them. Don’t make a thing about it. Leave her alone. She’ll grow out of it again. There’s nothing the matter with her.
Along with speech went the light. It no longer danced on the walls where we lived. We’re a family of light, my mum would say, though my dad lay in bed staring at the wall when he was alive. What light, my eyes would ask. What light are you talking about? Maybe we’d always measured each other. Maybe the question of who was strong and who was weak had been there from the start.
I was afraid of my brother. Always had been. All the time, he was there, his hands and his rage. My grandma up north sent me a box of raisins. He snatched it from my hand. I lost my temper and picked up