So began a relatively happy time in my life. At the age of twenty-eight I left the world of industry and became nanny to my sister’s children. Arvid, bless his dim soul, could not have been more pleased. How easy it would’ve been for him to resent this intrusion into his home, or his wife’s “failure” in her duties, or the additional strain on his financial stability (although this was very little, as I employed my savings to buy groceries and clothing for the children). He must have known his neighbors and friends were muttering about the woman whose brother had to move in because she wasn’t taking care of her children. But he only ever expressed relief. Emotionally limited as he was, he hadn’t known how to handle the situation, and not knowing made him anxious. He knew quite well how to buy and sell fish, and how to be a pleasant husband. But decompensation in the face of unimaginable loss was outside his meager realm of expertise.
My God how those children tried my patience. After the first blush of delight in one another’s strange new company, there passed a month or two in which we knew only enmity. Their training in the arts of obedience and civility had been cursory at best. Arvid was a toothless taskmaster. He could compel Wilmer and Helga into little more than an immovable wall of resistance. Bearing witness to his pathetic attempts to make them eat, for example, was a trial. And my sister—well, it is difficult to say. Perhaps she’d had more capacity for discipline before the death of her unnamed third child. I doubt it, somehow. But losing one certainly caused her to see her two living children as precious beyond reproach.
Oh, they wished to please her, particularly when she drew inward, her eyes far away. And they knew she would never deceive them, which is a concept that children can grasp earlier than we think, even though they do not yet know the boundaries of this world—what is real, and what is not. They simply ran rampant. Arvid was referred to regularly as “Fish Guts” or “Crab Ass.” They loved him but did not respect him.
Naturally I took it upon myself to introduce some discipline. Knowing, as I did, nothing about children or their willfulness, I was in for a surprise. They were shocked at first—wounded, even—by the things I was willing to deprive them of when unheeded (e.g., their lengthy, rigidly dictated nighttime rituals of bath, story, and song). They were awful beasts—truly dreadful. Most children are. But gradually they began to see that I was not all bad—in fact, far more tolerant of behavior and activities that most other adults seemed to find aberrant or unwholesome (e.g., a coarse, freely employed interpretation of the vulgate)—and we developed a respect for each other. They learned how stubborn I could be, and I learned how stubborn they could be. I could not be moved, for example, when it came to sufficient nourishment, or adherence to a bedtime early enough to regenerate humanity in all parties. Their anchors held fast on matters of hygiene, vulgarity, the existence of certain equatorial predators in their closet, etc.
By necessity, the rules of stalemate and cease-fire evolved over time, and I grew to love the horrible little urchins. Their strange, unjaundiced observations often took me aback, and they had a joy in the ridiculous inanities of daily life that rejuvenated me. I think fondly of the occasion when Wilmer, age five, noting an absence of lard in the pantry and wishing to fry some herring—a favorite of Olga’s—attempted to render his sister. We smelled it before the shrieking began. When Helga stumbled from the kitchen, her arm crimson and dotted with angry white blisters, Wilmer followed, explaining blithely, “Mother always says how Helga still has the plump rolls of a baby seal,” at which Helga looked up from her wounds and began to laugh and laugh.
It sounds absurd, I suppose—and certainly trite—to suggest that two such unempathetic tyrants could have given me something to live for, but that is indeed how it seemed. Perhaps I was just too busy to wallow.