Dear David,
My name is Harald Hansen. I am a retired headmaster and I have been asked to write this letter on behalf of Paula Hindmo, former auxiliary nurse, now retired and living at Otterøya residential care home. Everything that Paula tells me will be treated in the strictest confidence and all information will be deleted as soon as this letter has been sent to you. Paula has made me swear to this. The only exception to this being if anything illegal should come to light in the course of our conversations. In which case naturally I reserve the right to inform the police.
As former headmaster of Otterøya Primary and Lower-Secondary school I remember you myself, and since I also knew your mother and your grandfather some of my own memories may well find their way into this letter. It’s also quite possible that I will ask some of the other care home residents to tell me what they know of you and your family. Otterøya is a small place, you see, where everybody knows everybody else, so I’m sure a good few of them will have something to contribute.
Essentially, though, this is Paula’s letter.
Paula worked as an auxiliary nurse in the maternity ward at Namsos Hospital from 1955 to 1981 and one of the first things she said to me once we had settled ourselves in her room was that she and the midwife were the very first people to see you and that they were the very first people you saw. She seemed quite moved when she told me this. “Imagine that, Harald,” she said, “that there could be such a first time. It’s almost like imagining that there was once a very first spring on this earth.”
You two would see one another many, many times after that because Paula and her family lived less than five minutes away from where you and your mother and your grandfather lived and during the years before you and Berit moved to town she and your mother were very close. Paula had always known your mother, but she was nearly seventeen years older than Berit so it’s not surprising that they didn’t become bosom friends until later, once your mother was a grown woman – in fact Paula thinks it must have been two or three years after you were born.
They first became friends through the sewing circle to which they both belonged. A bunch of the local women used to get together at Dagny Pedersen’s house on one or two evenings every week: Dagny had her own weaving workshop in the basement and they could sit in peace down there catching up on the latest gossip while they sewed, embroidered, knitted or wove. To begin with, Paula says, it was Dagny who was closest to your mother. She was only seven years older than Berit and every bit as fond of going to parties and having fun as she was, and even though there weren’t as many nights out in Årnes and Devika after Berit had you to look after they did still manage the occasional one, just the two of them, all done up and giggling with half-bottles of moonshine in their handbags.
But it didn’t take many meetings of the sewing circle for Paula and Berit to discover that they were two of a kind. You see they both had a darkness inside them that neither Dagny nor any of the other women had, as Paula herself put it. Take Dagny, for example. She had been the baby of her family, a little afterthought. Not only that, but she had been born into a pretty well-to-do home. All of this had endowed her with the confidence and the free-and-easy nature so typical of all privileged individuals. She knew no fear, she had been a sheltered, much-loved child so she was never afraid of being rejected, she took it for granted that people would like her and so she could allow herself to be totally frank about just about everything with just about everybody.
With Paula it was the exact opposite. While Dagny could reveal the most intimate details of her own life without a blush, Paula would almost always ask herself whether the others would be interested in what she had to say. And since very often the answer to this was no, she tended to be the quiet one of the group, the one who listened attentively to the other women’s stories and confined herself to responding with a little comment or quiet laugh.
Let it be said right away that Berit was not like that. Quite the reverse, really. She was outgoing, pert-tongued, almost a little too outspoken at times, and to anyone who didn’t know her all that well she seemed more like Dagny than like Paula. But unlike Dagny, in Berit’s case this persona was more of a mask. Berit hid in the spotlight, Paula says, and it was when Berit realized that Paula had grasped this that the friendship between these two really began to grow. The bond between them wasn’t formed through long heart-to-hearts or by the confiding of those secrets which, it would later transpire, they both harboured. No, all that came later. They felt a rapport before they had so much as said a word to each other, or at any rate before they had ever spoken one to one. There had been something about the way they looked at one another when they were sitting there in Dagny’s weaving room, Paula says. It was as if they saw themselves mirrored in each other’s eyes. Berit might have been flighty and outgoing, but she had these dark eyes full of gravity and depth, eyes that said she knew something nobody else knew. What this “something” might be Paula had no idea as she sat there with her embroidery or her knitting, but that it was there at all, that your mother had it in her, was enough to tell Paula that this was someone to whom she could really talk, someone who would understand.
You always went along with Berit to those sewing-club evenings, and willingly at that. In fact you insisted on going with her, because this was long before sugar was considered a health hazard and there was always a good chance that one of the aunties – as you called the ladies of the sewing circle – would slip you a chocolate or two, if you just sat on their knee or gave them a hug in exchange. And you enjoyed impressing them with all the things you knew and could do, not so much because this earned you more chocolates, but because you loved their reaction, you positively beamed when they gazed at you wide-eyed and exclaimed that they didn’t know how you did it. “Fancy that, only four and he can do a backward roll already. Oh, you’ll have to be a gymnast, David, that’s for sure.” That’s the sort of thing they said to you. But when you weren’t watching they sniggered at you, their bodies shaking with laughter, because being fond of chocolate and sweeties has its price and your backside was so solid that you sometimes had difficulty lifting it over your head to roll over. Oh, Paula says, it could be quite hilarious, to see you lying on the floor heaving and straining, until you were red in the face.
You knew, of course, that you weren’t any good at gymnastics, you knew very well that you weren’t particularly good at drawing or reading or any of the other things that the aunties praised you to the skies for, you’d always known that. But for a long time you did believe that they thought you were, and when it began to dawn on you that they didn’t something happened to you. When someone receives a lot of undeserved praise it’s usually because he is regarded as a poor soul who needs a bit of a boost, and when you realized that the aunties didn’t mean all the nice things they said to you, you began to think that they actually felt a little sorry for you and that in turn seemed to fill you with shame. The compliments and the praise and all the little rewards they showered you with were obviously well-meant, but as time went on they appeared to leave you with a feeling of being looked down on and underrated, to the point where you no longer seemed able to cope with being praised. It was as if you found it impossible to believe that such compliments could be sincerely meant, Paula says, and if she made the mistake of congratulating you on something you’d done you could get quite angry and upset.
But it wasn’t just compliments you couldn’t cope with. Suddenly you also started avoiding, nay, fleeing from events in which you played or rather, were supposed to play a central part. Like your birthdays, for example. No matter what Berit said you refused to celebrate your own birthday. All you wanted was for this day – a day that every other six- or seven- or eight-year-old looked forward to all year – to be treated as a perfectly ordinary day with fish pie for dinner, as Paula put it. To begin with your mother thought it was just something you were saying; that you were actually as keen to celebrate your special day as any other child would be, but that you were possibly worried that someone whom you really wanted to come to your party would turn down the invitation or that some of the guests might think your party wasn’t good enough or something. But on the one occasion when she arranged a surprise party for you and you got back from Johanna Mørek’s, where you’d been sent to borrow some butter, to find seven kids all dressed in their best waiting for you in a living room hung with balloons and streamers, she realized that you meant what you said. Because you simply turned on your heel in the doorway and left. Everyone was dispatched to look for you, but you had disappeared into the forest and you didn’t come back until you were sure all of the party guests would have been sent home.
It was also around this time that you started having spells when you refused to speak to grown-ups, Paula says. You were as talkative as always when you were with other children, but the minute an adult appeared you clammed up completely. You wouldn’t even answer questions requiring a simple yes or no. Berit found this very frustrating, she would lose her temper and tell you off, threatening to thrash you and take away various privileges. Or she would be sweet and gentle and try to coax you into talking. Either that or she would get upset and plead with you to answer when people spoke to you. But none of it did any good. You were bright and cheerful and behaved just as you always did, but not a sound passed your lips. This could go on for weeks and then, as suddenly as you had stopped, you would start speaking again. There seemed to be no particular reason for this. Or if there was then those around you had no idea what it was. It could happen any time and anywhere, it was as if you had got fed up with staying silent and simply decided to speak again. And you wanted no fuss made about this either. Naturally Berit was always happy when you broke one of your long silences. The first time it happened she made no secret of it. She praised you and told you how relieved she was, she even bought you presents. But you didn’t like that. You got sullen and resentful and accepted her gifts only with the greatest reluctance. The child psychologist you spoke to some time later believed that you had reacted in this way because you saw Berit’s happiness as an indirect rejection of the boy you were when you wouldn’t speak. You were probably suffering from selective mutism, he said. Selective mutism was an anxiety disorder. In other words it wasn’t your fault and you certainly weren’t doing it for the fun of it so Berit was going to have to be careful not to scold you when you were having one of your silent spells or praise you when you started talking again, he said. She had to let you see that she loved both the David who spoke and the David who didn’t speak or else she could make things worse, because nothing could do more harm to a child than to be rejected by his own mother.
But what everyone was wondering, of course, was what could have caused this anxiety.
Initially the blame fell on your childminder, Johanna Mørck. Before you started school Berit had a job as a home help in Namsos and during the day when she was at work you were either with your grandfather, Erik, or Johanna came over to look after you. It wasn’t the ideal solution because Johanna Mørck was not exactly the most caring and nurturing of individuals. She was rather like Krösa-Maja in the films of Astrid Lindgren’s Emil books, the old hunchbacked lady who loved a good gossip, preferably gossip relating to scandals and disasters. Not that Johanna was all doom and gloom, not at all. She was a lively character, always joking and laughing. But she loved to tell stories and she did so want her stories to make a real impression on people, and there’s nothing better designed to make an impression on people than stories concerning matters of life and death – preferably quite literally. The only problem was that she didn’t tailor her stories to suit her audience. She had no children of her own, just a whole pack of dogs and it never occurred to her that, as a child, you ought to have been spared the grisliest of her yarns. Take, for example, the time when your gums started to bleed. Only a little bit, but Johanna construed this as a sign that you were coughing up blood. “Aye,” she said, “we could well be looking at tuberculosis here.” She had lost her own little brother to TB when she was a girl and that had started in exactly the same way, she said, with him coughing up blood onto his handkerchief. This had been followed by a long and painful illness and confinement to a sanatorium far, far from home, and there he had ended his days, poor soul, alone and forsaken and only six years old, exactly the same age as you were then.
On another occasion she led you to believe that your mother was in great danger: Dagny was going to Trondheim to see her cousin and Berit was going with her just for the trip. Trondheim was quite a place, Johanna told you. She had lived and worked there one summer years before and once, when she was on her way home from the hotel where she was employed as a kitchenmaid she had witnessed an armed robbery in a newsagent’s. And if you absolutely had to know what it looked like when somebody got shot between the eyes then she was here to tell you that it looked a bit like a jar being shattered. The head just sort of split wide open and the insides ran out, she had seen it with her own eyes. But that was nothing in Trondheim she was wont to add when she told this story. She could tell a lot worse and she really hoped that Berit would be careful. In fact it would be best if she stayed indoors after nine o’clock at night and if she really had to go out then she should do what Johanna herself used to do when she was living there and carry a four-inch nail in her hand. It wouldn’t be enough to overpower an attacker completely, but a hard jab with a four-inch nail would give him a shock and put him out of action long enough for her to take to her heels and run for her life.
It was even worse though when Johanna told you stories from the Bible. Or rather, according to Paula, took biblical tales and then embroidered them, making them even scarier than they already were. To begin with I found it hard to imagine how the grimmest of the Old Testament stories could be rendered even more hair-raising but no, Paula says, it was simply a matter of telling them in such a way that the listener could identify more closely with them. Once, for example, when you had got salt in a cut and were crying because it smarted so much, Johanna seized the opportunity to tell you how much worse it was for sinners in hell. Because down there, the Devil would peel the skin off people, much as we would peel the skin off a sausage, and when their bodies were totally covered in open sores he would roll them in salt for a whole three weeks. And when she recounted extracts from the Book of Revelations she always set them on Otterøya. “D’you see Grønskard Fell there?” she would say. “Well, come Judgement Day, it’ll crack down the middle and out of that crack will come a pillar of smoke, and out of that smoke will come grasshoppers as big as horses. They’ll be wearing coats of mail, they’ll have lion’s teeth and where the horses’ tails should be there’ll be huge scorpion tails, and these they’ll use to scourge all those who don’t believe in God.”
Had Johanna been a religious person, her behaviour might have been understandable, but there is nothing to suggest that she was. Indeed to judge by her habits she was anything but. She smoked a pipe and drank moonshine like a man, she cursed and swore and lied when it suited her and, as if that wasn’t enough, more than once she had been caught stealing from the homes of people she visited. On one occasion, for example, after Johanna had been in the house Paula discovered that the unopened pack of brown goat’s cheese was gone; another time it was half a kilo of coffee that went missing, and on a third occasion some teaspoons that weren’t in the drawer where they had been before Johanna arrived. She only ever took little things, nothing to make a fuss about really, but still, it didn’t exactly testify to a Christian way of life.
Anyway: at first Paula and Berit convinced each other that Johanna Mørck’s stories had scared the wits out of you and that this was the source of your anxiety. True, you had never mentioned anything at home about Johanna having frightened you, Paula says, but apparently you weren’t the sort of boy who would have done that anyway, you weren’t one for telling tales. But at the same time there had been days when you had been unusually thoughtful and withdrawn and your mother thought she had noticed that on such days you would often ask seemingly casual questions possibly designed to lead up to a conversation about things that frightened you. “Is that smoke up there?” you asked one morning when you saw mist drifting over Grønskard Fell. “Smoke? No, that’s the sea mist rolling in, can’t you see that?” your mother said. “Why on earth would there be smoke coming out of the mountainside?” “Haven’t you read the Bible?” you asked, thus paving the way for a little chat during which your mother was eventually able to reassure you and tell you quite truthfully that the Bible said nothing at all about the Day of Judgement starting with smoke seeping out of a crack in Grønskard Fell. “You mustn’t believe everything Johanna tells you,” she said.
Berit had never worried too much before about Johanna’s habit of making up stories and filling your head with her fanciful notions, she had neither approved or disapproved, Paula says. But the child psychologist’s conclusion that you were suffering from an anxiety disorder made her think again and one of the first things Berit did was to take the matter up with Johanna. This was no easy task, since spinning yarns wasn’t just one of Johanna’s many foibles. Her tales were also her way of explaining and expressing herself and the world around her, and to criticize – no, not only criticize but condemn – her storytelling was tantamount to condemning her personally. So of course she was hurt. Berit asked her if she couldn’t tell you stories about other things instead. About what life had been like in the old days, for example, what sort of food people had eaten, what sort of clothes they wore, the houses they lived in, the schools they went to and so on, ordinary, everyday things. It didn’t all need to be about life and death, surely.
Johanna was amazed that anyone could think there was a connection between your bouts of silence and her stories, but she would certainly curb her tongue, she declared, if only to prove how very wrong your mother was, in fact she wouldn’t open her mouth at all unless she was spoken to, Berit could be sure of that.
Whether she kept this promise or not, Paula didn’t know, but you didn’t get any better. Far from it. Your condition steadily worsened. Your bouts of silence grew longer and longer and where previously you had at least spoken normally when you were with other children – even during one of your silent spells – that too now stopped and instead you took to speaking a kind of “robot talk”: “beep”, you would say if one of the other kids asked you a question. And when things were particularly bad you even started acting like a robot, or so Paula says. You would walk in a jerky mechanical way and no matter what people said or did to you – even if they got really mad and yelled at you or said they wouldn’t let you play unless you stopped acting like a robot – you would just stand there with a little smile on your face.
Johanna tossed her head and took this as proof, of course, that whatever was troubling you it certainly had nothing to do with her and her stories. But Berit did not agree and Paula backed her up. The fear that Johanna had been instilling in you repeatedly since you were a toddler must, they felt, have become ingrained in you. To begin with it was probably the case that when Johanna told you some scary story the fear of it would stay with you for a while afterwards, but at some point the fear had taken root in you and now you were afraid all the time without being able to say what it was you were afraid of. That had to be the explanation, they eventually concluded.
And when your psychologist didn’t dismiss this theory out of hand, but instead said that yes, that was exactly what anxiety was – being afraid without knowing what one is afraid of – they were even more convinced, or so Paula says. And thus the smouldering resentment that Berit already felt towards Johanna turned to downright hate. If anything went wrong at home, if something went missing, for example, Johanna automatically got the blame: she had taken it, she must have. And if you did anything wrong, it didn’t matter what, that too was Johanna’s fault, you’d got it from her. That was how Berit thought, Paula says. And not only that: for a time she seemed to be obsessed with Johanna. If I understand Paula correctly, it was almost as if Johanna were a channel through which she could give vent to all the rancour and the rage that had built up inside her. They could be sitting in their garden chairs over by the redcurrant bushes, smoking and drinking coffee, and no matter what they were talking about something would always remind Berit of Johanna, something she could use as an excuse to start going on again about what a nasty piece of work she was.
Whether Berit actually believed all this talk herself or not, she was finding it harder and harder to defend the fact that she had allowed Johanna to look after you. If she did believe the charges she levelled against Johanna and didn’t fire her she was a bad mother and if she didn’t believe them and chose to let Johanna carry on she would still seem like a bad mother to everybody else on the island – if, that is, she didn’t change her tune completely and admit to all and sundry that obviously she and Paula had merely been gossiping and dishing the dirt. But that probably wasn’t an option. So there was nothing for it but to ask Johanna to find some other employment.
In any case, you were six by then and pretty self-sufficient, so being without a childminder wasn’t the disaster it would have been only a year earlier. And besides, you had your grandfather for company. Granted, he had his work on the farm to see to, but for one thing you were now big enough to help him with most of his chores, and for another he was never that far away if you needed him.
According to Paula, you and your grandpa were also very attached to one another. Since you had grown up without a father he had been both father and grandfather to you: a father in that he set limits and rules for you and a grandfather in that he always had time for you, he never told you to be quiet because he was reading the paper or watching the news and he was patient and able to put up with more pestering than any father. Not only that but he could be playful in the way that only grandparents can be with their grandchildren, Paula says.
But there was one snag:
Erik would not tolerate you showing any weakness. Boys would one day become men and so they had to be toughened up right from the start, because if they weren’t they wouldn’t be able to fulfil the obligations that a grown man had to fulfil in order to ensure the survival of himself, his family and society at large. There was much to be said for this way of thinking, of course. Everyone who knew you well could see that, Paula says. Erik would often ask you to do things that most people would consider too difficult, too strenuous or too dangerous for a child of your age. “Would you mind chopping the rest of that wood for me, David?” he might ask when you were just seven or eight years old, and possibly because he took it for granted, or at least acted as if he did, that you were capable of doing it he also made you believe that you were capable of doing it, thus equipping you to actually do it. In this way you had become very good at lots of things, so good in fact that you were the talk of the surrounding farms, I remember that myself.
But that you should be suffering from anxiety, that was hard for Erik to take because he didn’t have much time for scaredy-cats. He had nothing against girls and women being frightened occasionally, of course, Paula says – far from it, because as everyone knows the more frightened a woman is, the tougher she makes a man look. But boys and men? No. And the idea that his own grandson in particular could be fearful and anxious and hence incapable of being the boy and man that he wanted him to be, which is to say a carbon copy of himself, that he found hard to swallow.
Erik’s response to this whole business was to become even harder on you and expect even more of you, especially when you were going through one of your silent spells. He didn’t give a damn about the advice the psychologist had given, nor did he pay much mind to Berit’s opinions or her admonitions to do this or that. Partly because he did not understand the difference between anxiety and fear he insisted that the only way to cure you was to expose you to situations that required a certain amount of courage. For one thing this would get you used to dealing with challenges and situations that you perceived as dangerous, and for another you would gradually discover that these situations were not in fact dangerous at all. He duly proceeded to put this theory into practice. For example, Paula says that when the barn had to be painted he asked you to climb up to the top of a fifty-foot ladder. It didn’t seem to occur to him that there actually was some danger attached to climbing fifty feet up a wobbly ladder and when you stopped halfway and refused to go any further, his face took on the look of somebody who’s just drunk sour milk. “Aw, don’t give me that,” he said. “You’re not a bloody girl.” And once you were safely down again he shook his head and told you to “go on inside along wi’ the other women”.
But you were suffering from selective mutism, not fear of heights, so obviously this strategy did not work. On the contrary. If I understand Paula correctly, Erik’s reaction and the fact that the other kids in the neighbourhood were avoiding you and excluding you more and more from their games actually seemed to exacerbate your condition. You responded by acting as if this was a fight between you on the one side and them on the other; a contest of sorts in which you had no intention of surrendering, quite the opposite: the more they rejected you the more silent and robotic you became.
And the worse you grew the more frustrated Berit became, and the more frustrated she became the more fiercely and bitterly she hated Johanna until – according to Paula – it had grown out of all proportion. She could hardly open her mouth without criticizing Johanna and she no longer cared who heard her either: acquaintances of Johanna’s, friends, relatives, it made no difference, she was an endless fount of invective and derision and she didn’t give a toss for what those who heard her might think.
But one day when Paula and Berit were sitting in the garden sampling that year’s redcurrant wine, Berit suddenly broke down and said that it was all her fault. She was so moody and unpredictable and this confused you and made you feel anxious and unsure. This, she was certain, was the cause of your anxiety, not Johanna Mørck’s stupid stories.
And according to Paula there may have been some truth in this, because your mother’s mood did tend to fluctuate drastically. One day she could be bright and cheerful and outgoing, talking non-stop and clowning around, full of fun, and the next – or no, it didn’t even have to be a day later, it might only be hours, or even minutes – you would suddenly notice something different about the way she moved, her actions would become somehow sharper and jerkier than usual. And something happened to her eyes, they grew darker and began to burn. At the same time she almost stopped speaking. Usually, according to what she told Paula one day when they were discussing this side of her character, she would find herself looking for reasons to get angry. Or rather, the anger was already there but she would look for things in the people around her on which to hang her anger, so to speak. She didn’t mean to, but she did. She watched everything going on around her like a hawk and the minute someone said or did something that she could criticize or get worked up about, she would pounce. And if someone apologized or admitted that they had done or said something wrong, she didn’t relent. Far from it, because the person concerned had thus acknowledged that she had reason to be angry and then she was liable to let fly at them in earnest. She could tear people to shreds, hurting and humiliating them in the worst possible way and knowing full well, even as she was doing it, that she was being totally unreasonable, or so she told Paula. She knew her response was out of all proportion to what her victim had said or done, but she couldn’t stop herself, no matter who the poor object of her wrath might be, she just couldn’t, not even if it was Paula, or Erik; not even, sadly, if it was you.
There seems little doubt that this would have made you feel frightened and insecure. To be four or five or six years old and never quite know how your mother will react to whatever you say or do, to know that you might be subjected to a storm of abuse just for taking too long to get dressed or forgetting to flush the toilet or spilling a little food at dinner. It can’t be easy, that sort of thing could make anyone nervous and fearful. Unfortunately, however, women do have a woeful tendency to consider themselves more at fault than they actually are, or so Paula maintains. Indeed it sometimes seems as if women have an urge or a need to make atonement, not only for things that are their fault, but also for things of which they know full well they are blameless. In fact they may even be more eager to take the blame for and atone for the latter, as if a person convicted of a crime of which she is innocent were somehow a cut above the rest, and if you look at it that way there might well be a certain pleasure and satisfaction to be had from atoning and suffering even though one has done nothing wrong. It makes you feel like a better person.
I’m not entirely sure that I’m interpreting Paula correctly here. She talked a great deal about this, and at some length, and I didn’t catch it all. At any rate, her main point seems to be that Berit shouldered more than her fair share of the blame for the problems you were having. Paula says that she talked a lot to Berit about this. Johanna Mørck had spent several hours a day with you so she must have had some effect on you, or so Paula tried to tell your mother. And there was always the possibility that you had quite simply been born this way, that it was in your genes, a matter of instincts and impulses within you for which no one, not Johanna or Berit nor anyone else, was to blame. Or that the cause lay somewhere else again, in something that neither Berit nor Paula knew anything about, that too was a possibility.
But it was no use. Berit persisted in believing that it was all her fault, she was a bad mother, she said, she wasn’t good enough and she never would be. She had always told herself that her mood swings, the abrupt shifts in temper and sudden outbursts were simply the result of low blood sugar and that all she had to do was eat something and it would pass, but that wasn’t it at all, she told Paula. And it wasn’t that she was tired, as she also told herself sometimes, it wasn’t because she had too much to do and wasn’t getting enough sleep, nor because she had pressing problems or serious worries of one sort or another, not at all. Blaming such things was just a way of kidding oneself. No, this went much, much deeper, deeper than she was capable of seeing within herself.
As I touched on briefly at the beginning of this letter, this very aspect of your mother’s character was one of the reasons that she and Paula were such close friends. Because even though it could be unpleasant to be in the same room as Berit when her mood darkened, it was this same darkness in her that had led Paula to suspect that here was a person who knew and understood more than the other women in the sewing circle. The gaping void your mother had inside her, that was what Paula saw in her eyes, and that was what made her feel comfortable with her, she says. What scared off other people and made them feel nervous and uncertain, made her feel comfortable because, since Berit had this gaping void inside her, Paula took it for granted that she would understand and be less critical of her own gaping void.