The pastor, p.18
The Pastor, page 18
Where’s my mommy? she asked.
I think someone needed her help and she had to hurry out, I said.
I switched the light on over the countertop, and the one above the stove.
Do you want some cocoa?
Yes, she said, a little burst of joy.
She gazed out through the window, and then suddenly she laughed. I turned around. It was something she’d seen outside, and I went over to see what it was. It was a chocolate wrapper, the wind tossing it about, scribbling in the air with it. And I thought about Kristiane again, as if the patterns drawn by the chocolate wrapper being blown around like that were a memory, or a message of some sort. But about what?
I went back to the cooking area and got a saucepan out, some milk and sugar, the cocoa.
Lillen wanted to stir, she told me.
I pulled a chair up to the stove for her. She kneeled upright on it, and began to stir the milk with a whisk. I stood beside her, and together we watched how gradually the white and brown blended together, dissolving into the same color. I could smell her, the softness of her so close, her hair a dull sheen.
We ate bread with slices of salami. I lit a candle. Outside was a dismal grey. We hardly talked, but sat across the table from each other with the candle between us, the jug of cocoa, the basket of bread. We ate the bread and drank our cocoa, and my head was filled with images and nothing more, images undeveloped into thoughts, images I simply watched as they drifted by.
* * *
—
Nanna phoned while Lillen was getting dressed. I’d found some clothes for her to put on, on the chair in her room, neatly folded from the day before. I’d thought I would take her to nursery school and then go on to the hospital.
Nanna burst into tears when I picked up the phone.
You’re there, she sobbed. Oh, thank goodness you’re there. I forgot Lillen, I forgot all about her. How could I forget her like that?
Everything’s fine, I said. It’s all in hand here.
But it’s not fine, she said. It’s not fine at all, I can’t do a thing right. I can’t even look after my children. They slip away from me. I can’t hold onto them. First one, then the other. They’re here and there, and I’m nowhere. Everything’s coming apart. I can’t cope, I don’t have the strength. I can’t manage anymore.
I’ve been trying to phone, I said. How is she?
Her reply was a tiny peep, a thin etching of sound. It was all she said. I could see her in my mind’s eye, her compact little frame collapsing on itself. Her voice sounded like it was riddled with holes.
I’m taking Lillen to nursery school, I said. And then I’ll be right over. I take it you’re at the hospital?
Yes, she replied feebly.
I’ll be there as quickly as I can.
* * *
—
Are we going in the car to nursery school, Lillen asked. Yes, I said. Can I sit in the front? Yes, I said. You’re saying yes to everything today, she said. Yes. I said. And we looked at each other and smiled.
* * *
—
The hospital entrance doors were so heavy. I went over to a reception hatch where a woman sat in a white coat. I asked what ward Maja was on. She checked her screen. I realized my armpits were moist with perspiration, new sweat and old. I wanted to lie down on the floor, to lie down and stretch out on the floor.
She found the name, pointing a finger at the screen to tell me Maja was in intensive care on the fourth floor. She indicated the lifts. I walked over and pressed the button. The panel above the door told me what floor the lift was on. I could see it had stopped on the second, and heard someone manoeuver a rattling trolley inside. There were fingermarks on the brushed steel of the door.
What on earth had they been thinking, putting an intensive care unit on the fourth floor? Making people wait all those seconds, minutes perhaps, for a lift to come. It wasn’t logical. I felt an urge to kick the door, to yell and scream that whoever was in the lift up there should get their backsides into gear and find out whether they were coming or going, instead of holding everyone up. But of course I didn’t. I glanced around in search of a staircase, and when my eyes found the sign on a door, I strode over and hurried up the stairs, noticing as I went the tiny little stones that were encased in the concrete, red, white, and green stones, quite immovable. I took the stairs two at a time. Some people came the other way, and I hugged the wall to make room, squeezing past and continuing upwards.
As if it mattered all of a sudden whether I got there a second sooner or later. As if it mattered.
As if Maja would get well on that account, as if I could leap back in time if only I ran fast enough, back into the woods that day, into the mist, into the trees, to dash the pistol from her hand and hold her in a tight embrace.
There was an IV stand with a blood bag on it beside her bed, a tube in her arm. Nanna was standing with her back to the bed, staring out the window.
I lingered a second at the door. It was so still in there.
I looked at Maja, her face with its shiny studs, as if the studs were just resting on her skin. As if plucking them would bring her back to life again. Why did I think that? She was pale and small, and seemed almost to have shrunk. She looked younger too. She looked like she was asleep.
Nanna turned around. It was Nanna who looked dead. Her face was like pulp. Her eyes were so cold. Not dismissive or hostile, but as if the place from which they came was so cold it made everything freeze inside her.
I went up and stood in front of her, looked at her.
She put her hands out and cupped them. Stood there before me with her cupped hands in front of her, and looked at me, tears welling in her eyes, and it was as if her tears too were cold, as if they hurt as they ran from her eyes.
Like this, she said. The only thing I wanted was to hold her like this. To keep her safe, to hold her and keep her safe.
And then it was as if she could no longer manage to keep her hands together, and the cradle she’d made of them came apart. She splayed her fingers, making them look like claws, and in between were great, gaping spaces. Her hands trembled. I looked at them, and looked at her. Then her fingers, her hands relaxed. Her palms faced upwards. They were empty.
* * *
—
I stood at Maja’s bedside while Nanna went out. Her arms were at her sides on top of the cover, bandaged from halfway down her forearms to her wrists and hands. The air was warm and dry. There were various machines and instruments, a monitor that drew a curve across a screen, a bag of clear liquid being led into her vein through a catheter.
Tubes and wires, leads and cords hanging suspended from the ceiling of the performance room, Kristiane moving about beneath them, rehearsing in the round pool of light, and she seemed to like me watching. I’d stood at first, then sat down, propping myself against the wall on the opposite side, watching her. As if it were a proper performance she was putting on, in that space, a performance for me only. She looked to be so immersed, her twisting movements, as if she were enjoying her own body and what it was doing in a way that was somehow beyond me. She was absorbed in a world I didn’t know, a world within her, a place to which I had no admission. I’d tried to watch her while thinking of what she’d told me about it, about existing only in the movements and what the body perceives. But it was beyond me. I found it superficial, hollow. All she was interested in was pleasure, sighs and moans, she wasn’t interested in thinking at all. She was uncritical, irresponsible, lazy. She wanted everything to be good, and nothing more.
I told her so afterwards.
You just want everything to be good, I said.
She’d looked at me, swiveling around from the counter with the bottle of wine in her hand to give me that cold, hard glare. And then her little smile, the teeth in her mouth.
Yes, she said. I do. She paused, making it clear she had more to say, but pausing to study me.
As long as it’s good, it doesn’t have to be truthful.
She said the words, and knew she was saying them, and what they did to me. And it was exactly what she wanted. That’s what it had felt like. Because it wasn’t just about her theater work or my studies, it was about everything, everything we stood for and believed in. It was about us. And she knew this, knew what she was saying, and wanted to trample on me by saying it, to trample on me and hurt me. And I lay there, kicking and flailing. Because to me it was the opposite. If it wasn’t truthful, it couldn’t be good.
* * *
—
But what had happened, exactly? I looked at Maja, the mask they’d put over her nose and mouth, the machine breathing air into her. Was there some truth she’d discovered, something that was truthful, but wasn’t good? A truth so heavy and dark as to smother her, snuff her out?
She’d gone out to the fishing village on her own. Nanna didn’t know where she was. They were meant to be doing something together in the evening, Maja was going to her theater group straight after work, and when she came home they were going to make pancakes and watch TV. There was a program Lillen liked, a contest between two teams who had to recognize snatches of old pop songs and then sing them for the audience, they watched it together every week. I’d watched it with them, just once, and Lillen had laughed so much it got the rest of us going too, we couldn’t stop. We’d been in stitches, all four of us.
But she hadn’t come home. Nanna and Lillen had watched the program without her, and then Nanna had put Lillen to bed. Maja still hadn’t come, and Nanna, too restless to just sit and wait, had decided to clean the living room, taking the pictures down from the walls, dusting, and wiping in behind.
She goes off on her own sometimes, that’s all, she said. I did too, when I was nineteen. You can’t be angry with her for that. Only she loved to watch that program with Lillen. We’d talked about it before she went off in the morning. She’d been looking forward to it.
After a while, I phoned one of the others from her theater group, and she said Maja hadn’t turned up for rehearsal. So then I phoned her boss at work, and he said she hadn’t been there either.
Nanna had told me all this and been quite calm about it, as if it were all something that had happened a long time ago, as if it were something she’d seen on TV, or heard on the radio.
And then suddenly the bottom went out, she said.
It felt like I was falling and there was nothing that could stop me. I was so frightened, she said.
Not for Maja, for what could have happened to her. And not for myself either. Just frightened, that’s all. As if being frightened was the only feeling there was. And I remember feeling so cold too. I emptied the bucket, put the pictures back on the walls, and tidied up after me. Then I went out to the car and drove off. I didn’t actually know where to go, it was more like there was only one direction, into the darkness.
She fell silent for a moment and stared at the floor.
That was how I ended up there, she said.
I could see from a distance that someone was there, because all the lights were on in the house. I thought it was on fire at first. The car Maja sometimes borrows from one of her friends was parked outside. So I went in.
* * *
—
I looked at Nanna, and at Maja in the bed, and I thought about Lillen who was at nursery school, perhaps she was sitting on a chair at a little table, playing with some plasticine. I thought about the girl who’d hanged herself out at the stockfish racks, her mother in their kitchen, with a plate of cake in her hand, her father on the fell with his shotgun slung over his shoulder, the dog lying on its side at his feet, white in the white snow, dead.
It was Kristiane who lacked depth, not me, yet there she was implying the opposite. I was lucky, she said. I, who had nothing. As if somehow things just came to me. Was I lucky? I thought of her standing there in that space of hers, releasing words into the air as if they were balloons, standing back to watch them, pointing at them and laughing.
I’ll simply use some others instead, Liv. I’ll use some other words if these are no good.
And then I came along, stiff and waddling, my words as heavy as rocks.
Aslak: Indeed, but the Lord says that he has not come to send peace, but a sword.
I: But what Jesus was referring to there was the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.
Aslak: Also Peter took the sword to the enemies of Jesus.
I: But then said Jesus unto him too, Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.
Aslak: Indeed, for it would help not for Peter alone to take the sword.
It was as if what happened that night was that the sword of language became a real sword. Heavy and hard and smooth.
And I had held that sword, and had plunged it into Kristiane’s flesh. Had stood over her, straddling her body, as I thrust the blade into her, thrusting and thrusting until the blood ran out into the moldering leaves, the broken twigs, in that little dell in the woods, that misty dell, a stream of blood forging its path beneath those tall trees.
No, it was me lying on my back on the floor, and she who was standing over me, about to crack my head open with the wine bottle. And though I grasped the sword and held it aloft, she would not yield, but fell forward onto the blade, her hand raised high to strike me with the bottle.
You can’t deal with pain, I said.
That was what I told her.
You can’t deal with anything that hurts, all you want is for everything to be delightful. Only everything isn’t delightful, a great many things are not delightful at all, airy and weightless, the way you want them. And you can’t deal with that, I said.
What are you talking about, she replied. What? What can’t I deal with?
Anything of substance, I said. Your performances are shallow, they never look for any truth, because you can’t deal with that, it hurts too much. You couldn’t be bothered listening to me when I come to you in despair, all you can do is sweep it aside. You can’t deal with anything that’s got any substance to it at all, I said.
She just sat there staring at me. Why didn’t she say anything? How could she be so cold and unruffled, wordless? I wanted her to answer me, I wanted her to stop destroying me, that we should halt our fall, reach out and hold each other tight. I’d wanted to give her a shove, knock her off balance, make her fall towards me. Or were my intentions really that grand? Wasn’t it the case that I simply wanted to hit out, in order to hit back?
But she didn’t answer. She just sat there like a stone and stared at me.
You prefer not to deal with having to carry the weight of your daughter needing you when you weren’t there for her, I said. You prefer not to deal with having to carry the weight of having failed her, so now you criticize her instead, I said. Your own daughter, coming here now, twenty years on, because she needs you.
This was what I said to Kristiane. This was what I yelled into her face, because she wouldn’t listen.
She sat there, unresponsive, while I fell, and her arms weren’t there to catch me.
She stood up and went to the door, and held it open for me. She didn’t say a word. All she did was gesture towards the door, a nod of her head.
Go.
Raus.
And I got up off the mattress and went, went through that cavernous room, out through the passage, out. And of course the realisation came to me as I walked home through the dimly lit streets in the rain, as I trudged up the steep hill, around the bend in the road, to my rented room. I’d stood at my window and looked out over the town, realizing that it hadn’t been for her daughter’s sake that I’d raged at her like that, but for my own. That I was the one who needed her, now.
But I hadn’t realized that she also needed me.
* * *
—
The landscape, the fjord outside the windows of the pastor’s residence. The wind blowing, the light changing, the vast and endless sky. It felt like everything had converged into a hard, concentrated lump, without order, without form. There was no structure to any of it, no sense of anything whole, everything was just mashed together, a denseness of matter, lacking in air, nothing to define it, and no peace anywhere.
During the winter at some point, when we’d gone out to the house in the fishing village, I was standing in the kitchen cooking dinner and happened to look out the window. It was snowing, dense globules of snow descending gently through the air, for there was hardly a breath of wind. In the light from the outdoor lamp on the side of the house, I saw Maja and Lillen twirling around in circles, their arms held out to their sides, heads tipped back, their faces open to the falling snow. It was a scene of such stillness.
It was like flying, Lillen said afterwards, lying in bed with me seated at her side. It wasn’t the snow falling down, it was me floating up. There was something in between the snow, she said, something in the dark sky that made me want it. I asked her if she’d found it scary. No, she said, because I was so light.
I thought about another time, a morning out there during the winter. I’d come downstairs and it was still early. I’d thought the others were still asleep, but Maja was up and was sitting in the kitchen when I came in. Sitting on a chair with her knees tucked up to her chin inside her sweater, her thick black hair framing her face, sitting completely still, looking out the window, out at the fjord.
There was something about her body, as if something inside her were straining, and I’d thought to myself that it was as if she were waiting for something out there, something or someone, as if her eyes were searching.
But there was only darkness there, darkness and the sea, occasional smears of light above the horizon, pink, purple, dark blue.
