Will and Testament. Vigdis Hjorth
really think that I would give the girls drugs? I was speechless with shock, but Klara read the situation correctly and offered Mum a chair and a glass of wine. Klara had realised that Mum simply wanted to feel included. Mum had been sitting in the new cabin and could hear that we were having fun and had come up to join in. She probably didn’t understand it herself, but that was what she wanted. Klara offered Mum a chair and a glass of wine, and Mum sat there for some minutes before she staggered drunkenly back down to the new cabin in the darkness. Poor Mum. Trapped in the new cabin with Dad. She had heard the sounds of good times coming from the old cabin and had come up to join us, but didn’t understand it herself and turned her desire for company into a rebuke: Did you give the girls ecstasy?
Only I hadn’t realised it because I was on the defensive.
I asked Bård if he had gone to Astrid’s fiftieth birthday party. He hadn’t. He had been invited, but he had been abroad at the time. I said that I had been invited but hadn’t gone because Mum and Dad would be there. I’m scared of them, I said, I told him that the thought of Mum and Dad terrified me. It doesn’t terrify you, Bård said, but you feel a strong dislike.
Terror and a strong dislike, I said, and we smiled.
I told him that Tale no longer wanted to see the family in Bråteveien, that she refused to keep up appearances. I told him about a time when she and her family spent a summer weekend in the old cabin on Hvaler with another couple. The men went out in the boat and Mum and Dad came up to say hello and asked where the men were. They’ve gone out in the boat, Tale said, and Mum got hysterical because it was raining and the sea was choppy and it was late in the day and foggy and the water was cold, if they fell overboard they would drown, perhaps they were already dead. And Tale got nervous and didn’t know what to do, Mum’s anxiety, Mum’s catastrophizing histrionics were starting to rub off on her. Dad was upset for different reasons, the men had taken the boat without first asking him, after all he owned the boat and the cabins, because the men had helped themselves and not shown him any respect. Tale stood mute in front of the upset owners through whose generosity she was there. Mum ordered her to come with her down to the jetty, a prisoner of her own anxiety, controlled by her overwhelming fear, which rubbed off on her surroundings, which had rubbed off on me my whole childhood, which had made me just as fearful towards the things that made her fearful such as alcohol and rock music. Tale stood with Mum at the end of the jetty, staring across the sea. I’ve stood here many times, Mum said. I’ve stood here many evenings and nights, looking across the sea as I prayed, she said, I’ve saved lives here!
I mimicked Mum’s melodramatic style and Bård laughed. Mum was like that. I mimicked Dad’s chastising style, Bård laughed. Dad was like that.
But that wasn’t the real reason why Tale went home a day early and found it difficult to be on Hvaler and in Bråteveien. It was because later that evening when the men were safely back from their boat trip, her friend asked her why I, her mother, wasn’t in touch with my parents, and Tale had to explain why and saw her friend’s reaction. And because the next morning Mum came up to the cabin to ask Tale if she took good care of her child. She had had such bad dreams that night about how Tale wasn’t taking proper care of her daughter: I had a terrible dream that you didn’t take care of Emma. You do take good care of Emma, don’t you?
Mum had had nightmares about Tale not looking after her daughter and had dumped her anxiety on Tale without any sense of shame because she lacked the ability or she was too scared to examine her bad dreams about Tale being a bad mother. Because who was it who had really failed to care for her own daughter, why did Mum have nightmares about a mother who neglected her daughter? She lacked the insight or she was too frightened to ask herself hard questions because then a void would have opened up.
It was Bo Schjerven who reminded me of that story when I was in turmoil once, weighed down by guilt because I had cut contact with Mum and Dad and was refusing to see them.
But they’re going to die soon, I cried.
As are you one day, he said.
I had forgotten that.
As I left the Grand and walked up Karl Johans gate towards the metro station, I felt lighter than when I had arrived. It had been good to laugh about Mum with someone who knew her, to joke about our family with someone who knew it. I never laughed about Mum and the family when I spoke to Astrid. Whenever I had contact with her, I was always heavily burdened, I always felt very alone.
I called Klara and told her how we had laughed about Mum and Dad at the Grand. She asked: If you had the choice, which would you pick? A cabin on Hvaler and your parents or nothing?
Nothing.
That afternoon Bård texted me to say that every cloud has a silver lining. Love, your brother.
The silver lining being that he and I had found one another again.
December in Lars’s cabin in the woods near the river, which was partly frozen and thus strangely quiet. Usually it would babble to anyone who listened carefully. Dark and cold and quiet, the trees black and mourning the summer, which had been taken from them, their branches spiky against the sky, yearning for snow, to be dressed in snow. I tended to work well when I was there, far from the city and the people, where Fido could run free.
December darkness with snow in the air that evening, but the next morning the grass lay green and the sun was strong as though we weren’t in December. Then raw December, sudden darkness and red wine in the evening, bad dreams at night, low-lying fog in the morning only for the next moment to be bright and sunny as if it were spring, it didn’t make any sense. I couldn’t concentrate. I was restless, unedited theatre reviews were piling up. I had intended to write about the risks of dramatizing popular novels, but struggled for hours to find an angle, then I had an email from Bård, who had had an email from Åsa. She wrote that they would obtain new valuations. That the previous ones might have been rather low. However, it was up to the testator to decide how much money should be deducted for presents given as an advance of an inheritance, but by obtaining more quotes and valuations, Mum and Dad would have a basis for a fair estimate. If we were able to agree on a method of calculation, she thought that Mum and Dad would accept it.
It was up to Mum and Dad to decide, but if we could reach an agreement, she thought they would accept the new valuations. The implication being that if Bård continued to object, they would ignore them.
An hour later I received a copy of an email he had sent to Dad, Bård had gone off the deep end now, I recognised the deep end. He reminded Dad how he had always said that he would treat his children equally when it came to inheritance. So how was it fair to give two of his children the cabins on Hvaler as an advance of their inheritance without first having them valued? And presumably many years before the other two, Bergljot and I, he mentioned me by name, would inherit anything at all?
I’ve never caused you any trouble, he wrote, he was referring to me, who had caused them trouble and grief. You tell me how much you love me and my children, to that he would reply: Actions speak louder than words.
I sat in the forest with no peace. I imagined them gathering in Bråteveien to continue the myth of Bård as a troublemaker and Bård’s wife as a warmonger, she had been allocated the role of the woman who had seduced Bård away from his family. I knew exactly how it would play out; once I had contributed to it myself, I had been so completely enmeshed in the family’s version of its own story. It wasn’t until I became estranged myself, until I had distanced myself, that I started to look at things differently, but still slowly, taking baby steps, such is the power parental stories have over a child’s concept of reality that it’s almost impossible to free yourself.
And had I managed to free myself? Or was I still stuck, and had the name of the villain merely changed?
I closed the Mac, got dressed, took the dog down to the river and let her off the leash. She didn’t run away, she was loyal. I counted the rocks in the river, you couldn’t see them in the spring and summer, in my mind I traced the river backwards, to the spring it had come from, its source, I walked along the bank for about an hour and then back in the darkness, alone on the path, as far as it was possible to