Dark Matters

Cecilia Ekbäck

 

The first time my father died, I was eight years and one day old.

We were in the middle of winter and the darkness outside was so intrusive my mother said she could feel it pushing through our windows. It brought with it something gritty to each room that couldn’t be cleaned up or aired out. I had gone out to play in the snow whilst waiting for my father to return home. The only sounds were those of my body against snow: a soft thud-udd when I fell, the rasping of a shovel, the crunch-munch of red moon boots and, above it all, the rhythmic sound of my breathing inside my hat. I was on the moon. Like Neil Armstrong.

I knew of Neil Armstrong, but, just as my father once had warned me, I couldn’t remember the name of the second man on the moon—the one who stepped down on its surface right after Neil. My father had said that man was doomed to be forgotten. This was his lesson in the Importance of Being First. I didn’t like this lesson. It made me sad to think about all those people who couldn’t be first. They might not even recognize the importance of it at the time. Or maybe they were merely well-behaved and said: “No, after you, I insist,” and then, too late, they realised what awaited them was a future of people asking: “Who?”

In order not to think about it any longer I rolled snowballs—maybe a thousand—and stacked them in pyramids to be used as lanterns.

In the late afternoon, my mother gave me candles for my lanterns. The candles were perfumed, as everything was around my mother, and the forest at the back of our garden soon smelt of old sugary cinnamon buns fried in yellow butter—something we used to make to eat and call “poor knights”.

I didn’t like our house without my father—it was shapeless and mushy with candle light and classical music. When my father came home, he switched on every lamp in the house, whistling beautifully as he walked from room to room—whole concerts in adagio, allegrissimo, prestissimo! He changed the classical music for jazz and turned up the cassette player to volume level four. Then he scrutinized me with brown eyes, raising his left eyebrow.

“What did you decide today?” he asked.

The lesson around the Importance of Making the Right Decisions was exemplified by John F. Kennedy’s death, how the day when he was shot he rode in the convertible, top down as always, sun on his shoulders, grace by his side, but for some reason that particular day the windows that were normally rolled up, were down. “Ah, let’s feel the wind in our hair today,” he must have said. “Go on then, roll them down!”

I had a notebook in which I wrote down all his lessons. There were so many and it was easy to become confused. For example, what if you had to choose between being first and being right? I assumed it was better to be forgotten than dead, but I couldn’t be sure.

My face had stopped hurting from the cold and it was time to go inside. I knew spots on my cheeks would be hard and white and it would hurt when the blood came rushing back. I hung up my wet snow suit in the hallway and put my boots on the stand. The gloves and my hat I put in the drying cupboard on the plastic shelves.

My mother worried about my hands. After I’d been playing in the snow it never took long before she stood on her toes, holding onto the large kitchen cupboard and stretched fa-a-ar to reach the cream where she had placed it behind the wedding photo. It made her huff and sigh. This day was no different.

“So,” she turned to me and when I didn’t obey: “Don’t fuss.”

Sighing I put both my hands into the one she had stretched out.

“You have got to stop taking your gloves off outside. Look!” she scolded.

They were ugly without a doubt: chubby, the skin red and rough, swollen finger tips and the lining around the nails soggy, even torn. We knew the hands would turn out alright one day—I had inherited them from my father’s mother and there was nothing wrong with hers, in fact, hers were rather pretty. My mother’s concern was that I might just manage to ruin them before something real became of them. My father agreed.

“It is the first thing a man looks at, a woman’s hands,” he would say (left eyebrow raised). “Your mother has hands like jewels.”

I watched my mother putting cream onto my stinging limbs. I had tried to explain to her again and again that snowballs simply did not get the icy shell that could return the shine of a candle unless you squeezed them hard with bare hands. My mother did not want to hear it.

“You will end up like your grandmother,” she threatened.

“I like grandmother,” I said with a sudden defiance that surprised us both.

“She is unbalanced,” my mother said.

My grandmother lived in a small village in Lapland. We didn’t see her often. She was not part of the Pentecostal church. “Your granny was h’expelled,” a snotty boy with clammy hands had whispered to me one time at a sermon. His nose was so stuffy it sounded like he said my grandmother had been “helled.” I didn’t believe him, but I never dared ask my mother. I don’t know what had happened between my mother and hers, but something had; that was clear. Whenever they met, both my mother and my grandmother acted strangely. Sentences were pronounced politely in LARGE LETTERS. They never turned their back on one another. My mother insisted she herself had no memories from her childhood. Life began when she married and bid farewell to her mother and that was that. Now and again she forgot herself and a fibre of something murky from the past would surface. Whenever that happened she would stop speaking mid-sentence and fall silent.

There were sounds on their porch of someone removing snow from clothes, kicking their shoes against the edge of the stairs—first one, then the other, stamping their feet down hard two, three, four times and then using the brush. My mother untied her apron, folded and arranged it on top of the kitchen towel. She looked at me once more: we were not done yet talking about my hands. She walked towards the entrance. The doorbell rang. She opened the door and a cold gust entered. Two of my father’s friends were standing outside.

“So you are here,” she said and stepped to one side.

We didn’t talk very much. Stating the obvious was a pleasantry. “So you are out walking the dog,” “So you are out buying milk.”

“Yes,” one of them said. It was a good beginning: concurrence.

The two men fingered their woollen hats, shuffled feet and cleared throats. My mother stood still, careful not to disrupt.

“It’s about a man, your man, he’s unwell,” one of them said finally.

The other one glanced at him.

“Well,” he continued. “It is a bit worse. We believe he might have died.”

In that instant, the four of us were trapped together, between what was and what must come. Nobody screamed or cried. There seemed to be no questions. Nothing more to say. I looked down at my hands. They were covered in white gloves of fat. As I lifted my head, the world returned to life with a whirring sound, like when you wind up a mechanical dog too far and then let go of it and the poor thing whizzes around on the floor in front of you. The tick-tock from the grandfather clock seemed thunderous, the classical music menacing. I could see only my mother’s back. It was quite still and erect. At the back of her neck a few strands of blond hair had escaped her ponytail.

 

 

I was to occupy myself in my room in the basement. I sat with a greasy crayon in one hand and a blank sheet of paper in front of me, my ears straining, aching to hear what was going on upstairs. There were muffled voices, the phone rang, the front door opened. There were hasty footsteps between rooms. Whilst my father died, night had fallen.

I knew it was wrong for my mother to try and cope on her own.

“She is not like you and me,” my father often had said, tenderly, irritated. “She is… weaker. She needs caring for.”

I had looked at my mother with her strawberry blond hair and eyes blue like the sea on a postcard from Greece and then back at my father with coarse black hair and brown eyes like my own and I had felt worried, but also pleased.

I should have been with him, I thought. My father had gone to church. He’d asked me to come, but I said I wanted to stay home and play. This might have been a punishment. God was like that. You couldn’t quite know what would invite His wrath. I felt cold. My fingers were cramped around the crayon I had rammed hard into the paper, gaze fixed at the one strained dot on the white.

And then my mother’s voice: “Irma, come upstairs!”

All of a sudden, I didn’t want to see her, but I placed my crayon on the table. I stood up. I walked towards the stairs, head hanging, up the steps, just as the front door opened and my father walked in.

There was a small noise in my chest. A funny little noise that almost immediately began to hurt. My father appeared tired, broken. With all my might, I held onto the noise in my chest, shoved it back down to where it came from, knowing nobody could stand it when noise came out.

And then I saw who he’d brought.

My father held the door wide open to Death, a troll with long arms, potbelly, and a beard who, as he entered, unceremoniously threw his knapsack down on the floor and kicked off his leather boots. His toes were long and rather hairy.

“I’ll make dinner,” my mother said.

My father observed his routine of switching on the lamps. I trailed him in and out of every room like a pet, ready for the words that would transform also this into a droll anecdote. But my father didn’t meet my gaze. He was silent, unbearably so, and Death was still there, winking at me. My father walked into the kitchen.

“I don’t think we should talk about this with anyone,” he said to my mother.

She did not answer.

He cleared his throat.

“But what happened?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Some sort of attack,” he said.

I imagined some men jumping my father, beating him, perhaps with a stick. But there was no blood on his face, no bruises.

“Why can’t we tell?” I demanded.

Death was leaning against a kitchen cupboard, arms crossed, eyebrows raised. He observed us with what appeared to be genuine interest.

“It could have consequences.”

“What kind of consequences?” I was angry with my father, or with my mother. I wanted to have it out.

“What would it be like if we started to talk about things like this?” my father said. “We would end up doing nothing but talking about how we felt. No, you mustn’t tell anyone.”

He walked out. I kicked the doorpost. I couldn’t understand—surely there was a formal procedure with rules and instructions we were supposed to follow? And for sure telling people about what had happened must have some part in the ritual that made this into an irreversible event?

I looked at Death, but he was of no help at all.

“So what,” I said, “are you going to live here now?”

“Guess so,” he said.

I wondered where she would put him.

 

 

My mother liked things you could pack neatly in a box and tie a pretty ribbon around. She liked things you could fold, things you could roll tightly, things you could position in rows and things you could name. My mother doted on linen closets where the linen was strictly folded, arranged by colour and by size, and scented like fresh air. “The linen closet is a woman’s pride,” she used to tell me in confidence. My mother smiled seeing cleaning cupboards where the bottles stood in rows with their handles outwards—easy to snatch in case of disaster—and where the dusters were crispy and felt new. She liked freezers where packages with frozen food were marked in immaculate handwriting with a smudge-proof pen and arranged by its origin: elk, reindeer, grayling, flatbread, berries, other. She loved pulling a damp cloth over a surface and when lifting it up finding it as white as when she started. She relished in re-using and economising and unendingly came up with solutions for the old: mending the broken, thinking of a new use for the redundant, altering the aged. She liked being able to touch what she had, and she kept her salary divided into envelopes in a kitchen cupboard, each clearly marked with their purpose: food, clothes, garden, savings. She liked me, even though I was what she called a dare-devil, because, after all, I was a girl and she could knit and sew all my clothes. She loved suitcases.

My mother’s finest recurring dream: she is packing a case, thinks about it for a while, and comes up with improvements. She repacks and ties a strap firmly around it. My mother’s most atrocious returning dream: the moving van is outside our house. She has forgotten to get boxes and there is no option but to cram belongings into garbage bags.

My mother hated things that didn’t fit, that suddenly left a mould, were too large, moved fast, or that you couldn’t control. She was frightened of epileptic people. She detested drunkards, addicts and crazy ones. She didn’t like impulsiveness, surprises, and changes of plans. My mother did not believe in the trolls. She hated the night.

“Why?” I’d asked my father once. “Why the night?”

To me, the night was the best of times. Time to potter around on warm floors with naked feet, perhaps steal a cookie from the pantry.

“That’s often when things happen,” he’d said.

“What kind of things?”

He’d shrugged. “Bad things. People die, people get hurt. That is when human frailty is at its peak.”

I thought about it. I didn’t feel frail at night, but peaceful. Perhaps things got different as you got older.

I needn’t have worried about my mother finding a place for Death. No, the problem seemed to be Resurrection. Resurrection, the little bundle, was full of beans. She just couldn’t sit still, and she was quite unruly. She was like a glowing hairball bouncing up and down our hallways and I think, to my mother, Death just seemed more sophisticated, more established. Perhaps Death was less imprecise: at least you knew what you got with him.

I thought it might have been easier for my mother if my father had not bothered with Resurrection. My mother would have grieved, there would have been practical issues, but then she could have laid the incident tenderly to rest in a coffin, ordered a glorious gravestone, and buried him during a distressing, yet dignified, ceremony.

That night I began a bed time ritual that I would follow in some shape for all years to come:

“Good night?” I shouted.

I started walking slowly down the stairs to my room in the basement (thump, thump, thump).

“Good night,” my father and my mother called from their bedroom.

“Goood niiight,” Death echoed lazily from where he was sitting at the kitchen table picking his teeth.

“I love you?” I shouted (thump, thump, thump).

“We love you.”

Me, heart pounding, dread in my voice: “Dad, I didn’t hear you? Dad? Dad, you also need to shout!”

“I love you.”

“No, now we need to start over.”

(ThumpthumpthumpthumpthumpTHUMPTHUMPTHUMP Me walking up the stairs again)

“Good night?” I shouted, again starting to walk slowly down the stairs (thump, thump, thump).

“Good night,” they responded.

“Gooood niiiight,” Death echoed.

“I love you?” (thump, thump, thump).

“We love you.”

“Loooove yoooo.”

“See you tomorrow?” (thump)

“See you tomorrow.”

And then there was silence. Death gave no guarantees.

 

 

If something immense and unexpected happens, it will be accompanied by change. Not because nature demands it, or even likes it, but, because human beings are human beings. They think they need to deserve everything—even that which is already complete.

That autumn we were unclear as to what needed to happen. There was no precedent involving Resurrection: no “I remember when Aunt Anita resurrected herself and we all went home to have black pudding and lingonberry jam.” No, we had no idea what to do.

I observed my father closely.

“Positive thinking,” he finally imparted. “It’s the answer.”

“Is it?” I asked.

“The answer to everything,” he confirmed. “It is actually very simple. It is all about trying harder. Our words are the only real thing, the rest merely circumstances. Nothing is ever a problem, apart from our attitude to those circumstances. And positive words create positive thoughts and the right attitude. Brilliantly simple. All that is ever missing is a: ‘I feel fabulous today!’ …but you need to say it with force,” he added as if he just thought of it.

“Brilliant,” I said.

“It was in the American books all this time,” my father said.

He looked as if he had been up reading all night. His hair stood up even though my mother patted it every time she passed his chair.

“All this time,” he repeated, shook his head and chuckled, “it was in the American books.”

On my father’s desk: one almanac, five pens, toothpicks, a pair of nail clippers, two alarm clocks, one notebook, and one telephone. In my father’s bookshelf: the Christian books and the American books.

The Christian books had been gathered by the whole family over time. The American books had all come in one batch to my father’s mother from a brother that had emigrated to America in the 1950s. “This is what made me,” he had written. “It is better I send you this than money. Spread them far and wide.”

My father said that his mother had looked in astonishment at the box full with books and then she had started laughing. “We could just eat the American books,” she had said. It became a family joke: “We could just use the American books for firewood.”

“From now on I ban negative words and mannerisms from our home,” my father declared. “No more local newspapers reminding us of neighbourhood miseries.”

He hesitated, and went all the way: “No more Bible reminding us of gloom on a global scale either. From now on we read Dale Carnegie and Napoleon Hill.”

I felt a prick of fear. God wouldn’t like this. “But we will still be saved?” I asked.

“We’ll always be saved,” my father said. “There is God. We have no choice.”

My father expected me to learn by heart Dale Carnegie’s: Six Ways to Make People Like You; Fundamental Techniques in Handling People; Twelve Ways to Win People to Your Way of Thinking; and Nine Ways to Change People Without Giving Offence or Arousing Resentment. On that front it was somewhat easier to please my mother, she only ever asked me to memorize one rule: “Tell your mother everything.”

Every day my father and I practised a firm and trustworthy handshake. It was like playing a game, we would shake and shake until we both laughed. Sometimes I tried walking away and he hauled me back by the hand that securely held mine. Sometimes I gave him “the dead fish handshake.” My father screamed in horror. “And look at me!” he wailed. “Always look people firmly in the eyes. Now smile! Now tell me things are great.”

If at some point we didn’t feel great, all they had to do was to go out and “run like crazy for eight minutes.” My father had read that was the best remedy to depression.

“For-the-one-God-loves,-all-works-out,” I shouted as a departure greeting every morning.

“Always-be-happy-and-nice,” my father answered. “Success-leads-to-victory.’

But Death still lingered. Ah, if at least he were polite! But he was insolent and intrusive, a real piece of work. I saw him in the hallway trying on my father’s fur hat—the one my mother regularly threw out, that had learnt to find its way back in on its own. I came to watch the children’s show on TV only to find him on the sofa. He was in the kitchen drinking milk directly from the carton, flipping through her mother’s cookbook.

I wanted to shout at him to behave, to know his place, but I knew he wasn’t the type who cared about what people thought. Without really deciding to, I started collecting things to remember my parents by: shopping lists in my mother’s immaculate handwriting, to-do-lists scrawled in my father’s, ink napkin doodles, old bus tickets, photos. I hoovered around our house like a sentimental vacuum cleaner—only Death seemed to love those things too. I continuously found him there, his long fingers touching things, lifting them up, and then putting them back again.

“What are you doing?” I said.

“Just lookin’,” he said.

He sighed loudly.

“What?” I said.

“I was just thinkin’…” he said.

“What?”

“Aw, nothin’…” he said.

“What!”

“I was just thinkin’ it’s a shame none of these things will remind you of what they were really like, y’know?”

I looked at the things on the table in front of us.

“What about the napkin doodles?” I said triumphantly.

“Aw, you think?”

No, of course, the doodles wouldn’t do it. I could see that too.

Resurrection bounced by making shrieking noises, but we ignored her.

“Any ideas, smarty pants?” I asked.

“Recordings,” he said. “D’you have a tape recorder? I’ll help.”

Over the next few weeks Death and I interviewed my parents and recorded their answers on cassette tapes. Death held the microphone and I asked the questions we had prepared beforehand. It was mostly questions like: “What is your favourite food?”, “What is your favourite colour?” “How old are you?” “When do you think you will die again?”

 

 

The second time my father died was on Jesus’ birthday. Outside the window the morning was blue. In every yard along the village road lofty pine trees twinkled, shrouded in lights and silver tinsel, on every driveway torches burnt and had done so all night. In the windows Christmas stars shimmered.

My mother was in the living room. There were sounds of wrapping paper being folded and sticky tape drawn.

“Schh…” she mimicked. “Don’t tell! Don’t look!”

Secrets. The good kind.

When my mother went into the kitchen, I went to look under the fir tree. I counted the gifts and then furiously made and wrapped some more: everyone would get the equal number of presents, everyone was loved the same.

From then on, it was all about waiting.

Dinner was prepared: pickled herring of all sorts, salads—beetroot and mimosa, a colossal breaded ham, a towering carousel with smoked and cured meats—my favourite—smoked reindeer heart, rice porridge smelling of cinnamon and butter, cheeses as large as my head, bulky baskets with different kinds of bread: thick and thin, soft and hard, white and yellow and brown.

“Sit down,” my mother would bid and we would sink and sigh into the red velvet chairs.

We would eat and eat and eat. And when we just could not fit anything more in, not one little piece, we would clear the table together, eagerly now, running in and out of the kitchen. Then my father would state solemnly he needed to go out to buy the newspaper. We would wait until he returned, now dressed in ugly clothes and a grey long false beard. “Are there any good children here?” he would shout, for Santa wasn’t a large jovial man, but a small evil goblin with grey beard who lived in each barn.

I was too old for this, my father too impatient. But tradition meant so much to my mother.

My father and I were standing by the dining table dressed nicely. My mother was in the kitchen, the walls, the windows, steaming it up,

“Did I tell you the lesson about leaving nice traces after you, the one with McNamara?” my father asked.

“Many times,” I giggled as my mother entered carrying the Jansson’s Temptation.

The Temptation was golden and fat, alternating layers of potatoes, sprats and chopped onions, simmered in cream. It smelt heavenly. My father and I oohed and aahed. My mother’s cheeks were red. She glowed.

Suddenly my father sat down, heavily, on the floor. His body lurched over and his glasses broke against the table leg. For a moment, I didn’t know whether to run towards him or away.

“Dad!” I shouted. “Dad!”

My mother dropped her tray, she started towards my father and fell, her knees hard on the parquet floor, slipping in the hot potatoes and onions. She tried holding him up with her hands but he was too heavy and he was gone.

We screamed his name.

Then he came back. He opened his eyes, he drooled, he was confused.

“Don’t tell anyone,” he mumbled.

He slept the whole Christmas evening.

 

 

I couldn't sleep. I walked upstairs to steal a cookie and found Death and Resurrection together at the dining table. Death had put his arm around her shoulders.

“How long are you going to keep this up?” he asked.

She was just making noises, something like “Pfft, pttt, trrrrrr.”

“Leave her alone,” I said.

Death raised his brows. “But she is disturbing matters,” he said, “complicating things.”

“Leave my dad alone, too,” I said to him.

Death didn’t answer.

I took a step forward. “Can you make him leave?” I asked Resurrection. “You are here now. We don’t need him any longer.”

“Trrrriiiipppp,” she said. “Tipp, tipp.”

I sighed.

“I know, right?” Death said and shook his head.

I noticed my mother had cleaned the floor.

 

 

The next day when my father woke up, he was beside himself, gripped by fear, mortified.

“I am sorry,” he said to my mother and reached for her.

“I’ll make you something to eat,” she said.

I heard her crying in the kitchen.

“I am sorry,” he cried and hugged me.

I freed myself from his arms: “Dad, stop it,” I said uncomfortably. “There is really nothing to be sorry for.”

I found my mother in the kitchen. “I cannot bear it,” she said, blue eyes shiny, swelling.

“I understand that,” I said.

“I hate it,” she cried, biting her knuckles.

She might as well have said she hated him.

Late evening, the Church elderly came. I don’t know who called for them, but I was sent to bed. I made loud thumping noises all the way into my room in the basement—an extra couple of thumps for good measure, then I snuck back half way up the stairs and sat down on one of the steps. Through the bannister I could see our kitchen. My mother, my father, and the church elderly sat at the table. I could see the pastor, the vice-pastor and the ones we called the Three Wise Men: John, Paul and Rolf. Death was there too. He was the only one who noticed me and raised his white hand in a salute. I ignored him.

“Prayer,” the pastor said. “God has promised, he will heal.”

My father nodded. My mother had lowered her head. I couldn’t see the expression on her face.

Death was not listening. He was making faces to me. Like, look at me, now I am making this face. Now, I am making this face. I can roll my eyes so you only see the whites! I glared at him.

The pastor said: “If you pray enough, you will be healed.”

 

 

“God," my father said to me that afternoon. “God must come before everything. We should pray every morning to be led by the Holy Spirit.”

I wondered how it made him feel, to be back with God as priority number one again. I could imagine how it made God feel, being right.

Now that we knew God had to come before everything, I tackled my father’s slight bookshelf. All the Christian books in his bookshelf looked the same: they were bound in thick green, blue or brown leather, the title and the author’s name were embossed in gold on the front page. Their language was outdated, haughty, but told of religious heroes and real-life exploits that made them exciting all the same. The sun never rose at this point during the year and I had days to just lie in bed and read. The lace curtains of the squashed windows beneath the roof floated in some thermal stream from the radiators, making listless patterns on my duvet. The air in my room was dry and warm.

Kathryn Khulman was born again at the age of fourteen and after this glorious new birth experience she started preaching to Idaho farmers. With time she became an important faith healer, holding healing crusades throughout the world.

In one of the books was a photo of Kathryn looking like a tiny Edith Piaf on stage. There must be several thousand people in the audience and Kathryn stands slender in front of them—a fairy dressed in a white gown with wide arms—believing in miracles with “every atom of her being.”

Yonggi Cho was born a destitute Buddhist in 1936 in Korea. After converting to Christianity, he had a vision for creating the largest church in the world. As his congregation grew towards a staggering 830,000 members, he created a cell group formula where small groups were taught to tend to each other in this large sea of people. These “cell groups” became famous throughout the Pentecostal world and so did Pastor Cho.

Seventeen year-old Joni Eareckson was left quadriplegic after a diving accident in 1967. Post her misfortune, Joni authored over thirty Christian books, painted with the brush in her mouth and recorded religious songs, but as we could imagine; for a healthy, sporty adolescent, being condemned to a life in a wheelchair was devastating.

Her story caused me some concern for Joni was not healed. I read all her books despite most of them being a repeat of the former, trying to find the book with the eluding, but, surely, the only suitable ending. Joni said her life was more valuable now, but what I wanted to know was: where on earth was Kathryn Khulman?!

After a service, I asked our pastor.

He shook his head. “Not enough faith,” he said.

“So… she could be healed if she wanted to?”

“Oh absolutely,” he said. “The Bible is clear.”

“You have taken to clearing your throat when you speak,” my mother said when I asked her about Joni. “It is not nice. Do not clear your throat, just swallow.”

I continued talking, but after every couple of words she interrupted me by saying: “Swallow!” so I gave up.

 

 

My father remodelled the walk-in closet by the entrance into a prayer room. He put in a bathmat to bend his bony knees onto, a chair to lean forward on and removed the winter clothes to be able to fit. The closet was poorly insulated: my father strident. As he shouted in tongues and pleaded with God, we were silent. My mother kept busy. I found it difficult to focus on anything much. I sat around, waited.

A paltry closet jam-packed with prayers wouldn’t work when God was to come first. Instead, we sat in the closet. He wanted the house. My father began praying wherever he was, walking in and out of the rooms that each had a name, sighing, mumbling in tongues. Sometimes he shouted something that made little sense. He was oblivious to the turmoil his prayers caused. Death began to pray too. He would stand outside the closet and sway with his white limbs above his head in the air. His prayers sounded mostly like LA-LA-LA-LA-LA-LA-LA.

“It’s so loud,” I whispered to my mother.

She did not respond.

“Mum,” I persisted, “don’t you find it loud?”

“I do,” she whispered back.

“He has a unique relationship with God.” I turned to defending him.

“I know that,” she said.

“It is not so bad,” I said. “I mean, we almost cannot hear a thing, right?”

“O, thank you Jesus,” my father sighed.

My mother vanished into the kitchen. She dropped a pot loudly in the sink. A cupboard door slammed.

“Jesus, hear my prayers!” my father shouted.

I took my crayons and went down to the basement. Once in the basement, I fell to my knees and I, too, prayed. It couldn’t be that my father didn’t get healed because of me.

 

 

In January, my grandmother came on a surprise visit. She only stayed for one night. As she stepped inside the door, she paused. Death was standing by the walk-in closet and she was looking straight at him. She sees him, I realised. She sees him too! Death nodded at my grandmother. My grandmother was no larger than a wet woollen glove. Her fingers were knobbly, pointing both here and there. She reached Death merely to his chest. But Death seemed worried. He was wringing his hands.

“SO YOU ARE HERE,” my mother said, stilted. There were red flames on her cheeks and neck.

“YES,” my grandmother answered in the same manner.

“I CAN TAKE YOUR COAT.”

I cringed.

My grandmother’s name was Saga, which is the Swedish word for “fairytale”. Her sister’s name had been Engla—for the angels, and her brother’s name Ehrling—for honesty. Of the three, my grandmother was the most unlikely fairy-tale there was. She was fierce. I think even my father was scared of her. She lived on her own in a house in the village where she had lived since the beginning of time. And that was where you would find our family’s roots. The roots stretched and wrapped themselves around countless other villages, hobbled into the darkest corners of Lapland, reached across the Gulf into Finland, and on top of this mountain of lumpy living wood sat my grandmother, cutting strands of roots off, or nurturing them, however she saw fit.

“What is he doing here?” my grandmother hissed at me when my mother went into the kitchen to prepare dinner. I knew who she meant.

“He just moved in,” I whispered back.

“Who invited him?”

We didn’t have a choice, I wanted to say, but my father had said we weren’t allowed to tell anyone, so I just shook my head.

At nightfall, she asked to tuck me in. My mother didn’t like the idea, I could tell, but nodded.

“How are things with you really?” my grandmother asked.

“Great,” I said.

“That is the funny thing with you,” she said. “You are always great.”

“Did you know that 35,000 Chinese get saved every day?” I asked.

My grandmother sighed. “So little time,” she mumbled. “Irma, sometimes parents forget that their children are not grown up.”

“What do you mean?”

“Some children are so bright, so mature, that their parents forget that at the end of the day, they are little, and they must be allowed to remain that way. Those children take on a too large responsibility too young.”

“Young or old, God doesn’t make a difference,” I said.

“Oh God,” she said, but I don’t think she was praying. “The numbers of sermons I have attended through the years. Tuesday, there was the prayer meeting, Wednesday, choir song, Saturday, sermon. Sunday, there were sermons at eleven, at three and at seven. If I ever felt tired and tempted to stay at home, I knew it was actually more tiresome to not go. If you missed a sermon, people worried that you had fallen behind, asked concerned questions in a way I really didn’t like. ‘How are things with you, Saga?’, ‘You have been on my mind so much lately—how do things stand with you?’ Bah!

“And the sermons! Spectacles! We smelled the sulphur and felt the heat from Gehenna. ‘The end of the time is near! Are you ready?’ Were we ready? ‘Oh, pray for me I am not ready!’ Sometimes we felt we were amongst the lucky saved ones and sometimes that we were doomed to eternal rejection. Worst were the sins we might have committed unknowingly—how could we be sure we were forgiven those? Afterwards, we tumbled out into the yard, dizzy, speaking with low voices as if we were expecting to be struck down at any moment. I remember your mother, she must have been around seven at the time, one Sunday morning after sermon she turned to me on the stairs and said: ‘Saga, are we going to die now?’ The pastor, overhearing her words, praised God and said, ‘She is right! We have to die away from that which is old, in order for something new to be born.’

“And what did we do? We fools. Yes, we shouted ‘Hallelujah!’

“Ah, Irma, we chose God for our children, as he was chosen for us by our parents. And they chose him for you. How I wish we had been sensible in how we entertained the notion of God. But we weren’t.”

I held my breath, suddenly certain my grandmother had been “h’expelled” from church and that she was doomed.

“Bedtime,” my mother shouted from upstairs. “Bedtime!”

“If there is a God, he is good,” my grandmother said. “Remember this.”

She leaned close to me and kissed my forehead. She smelt of talcum powder, of love, and perhaps of onion.

First thing the next morning, she was on her way.

“Don’t fall!” my mother called out, unable to help herself, as my grandmother started to descend the stairs, with legs thin as kindling.

“Bah!” she we heard her mutter, “as if I usually fall!”

“Don’t worry,” my father said between his teeth. “She will outlive us all.”

 

 

Spring didn't come. Winter lingered long and cold. My father kept dying. It happened at home, it happened when we were out. It happened when we had slept well; it happened when we were tired. It happened when we were on our own; it happened amongst people. There was no pattern to it. Each time we’d go through precisely what had happened and try and see what we could have done differently. “You were hungry, that’s why!” we’d say. Or “It was the loud music!” We’d agree to make the necessary changes. Each time it happened again it was a defeat. There was never any warning, suddenly he’d fall and be gone. Then he’d wake up. It scared people. It scared us. The phone didn’t ring much. People looked at us: first with interest, then pity, then they avoided our gazes.

“…eight-nine… Nine times I’ve killed him,” Death beamed. “And every time he rises! I’ve killed him in the shop, in church, outside the school… Still he rises. I keep thinking of new ideas, new ways, you know… He’s tough, your pa. I wonder how long we can keep this going.”

I was standing looking out the window. The elves touched the pane. Come out and play! they mouthed, their breath making ice roses on the glass. I looked over at Death. He had picked up a book and sat reading on the sofa. I shook my head and put my hand against theirs on the glass. Can’t, I mouthed. Big tree has grown beard, they tittered. And as I looked, it had. Its branches had grown long grey straggly hair. One of the branches arched backwards from the weight of the snow. It looked as if it might break at any moment. Just like my father, I thought.

“Irma? Irma what are you doing? You’re making spots on the glass.”

“I’m sorry, Mum.” I removed my hand.

 

 

Every night, hidden under my covers with a flashlight, I prayed and read the Bible. I cried. I begged. Nothing changed. My father would still die. He’d still resurrect. And so, finally one night, I came upon the story of Lazarus.

Lazarus was Jesus’s best friend. Apart from maybe Peter, but Peter betrayed Jesus later, so maybe Jesus kept his distance a bit from him—being omniscient must be difficult that way. Lazarus became very sick and his sisters called Jesus to ask him to come and heal him, but Jesus waited and waited before answering and then he only arrived when Lazarus had already been dead for four days. But with Jesus it was easy, he simply resurrected his friend.

When I thought about this I realised it had been the same with Jesus: dead for three days, before he rose.

My father was dead for a too short time, I thought. Resurrection needed more than a couple of minutes to do her job properly, once and for all—she was so small—she needed several days!

I looked all over the house to see if I could find her and talk to her, but she was nowhere to be found.

“Irma?” My mother.

“I just needed to pee,” I said.

Middle of night, or not, I just had to call the pastor to double-check.

“Irma?” He didn’t sound all pleased. Come to think of it, not very pastor-like at all.

“Why did Jesus wait three days before rising?” I asked.

“What?”

“Why did Jesus wait three days before rising?” I repeated.

“Well, actually I have no idea. I guess it took him that long to conquer death?”

I knew it. This was it.

 

 

After this, I encouraged Death.

“Maybe you need to do more,” I’d say.

“You think?” He put a long finger on his chin.

“Yes. It’s not working,” I’d say.

“Clearly.”

“Clearly.”

“More what? Violent?”

I shuddered. “Perhaps,” I acknowledged.

“You’ve got a point,” he’d say.

We would nod.

And Death did it. It took him two months, but just as the buds on the trees where showing and the ground was muddy and bare, he killed my father in a most violent way: a heads-on car accident on the highway. And this time, my father didn’t immediately rise again. The police came and told us. We cried. This time, there was a process that followed: the obituary in the newspaper, the planning of his funeral, the wake…

It was my uncle who walked me to my father’s funeral.

I was dressed in a black dress and pantyhose. The pantyhose seemed to finish by my knees and I wanted to pull them up, but I was in company, so I couldn’t. I felt almost giddy. This was it. This time it would all be different.

As my uncle and I walked into the church, people bent their heads. Just like when the police came to say there had been an accident, I thought, their heads hung, too. Nobody met our eyes, but I still waved a little to the ones I recognized. You just wait, I thought.

The coffin stood at the front fluctuating in candlelight. My mother sat on the first row and my uncle and I sat down beside her. Her eyelids were thick and she had a little twitch by her mouth. I wanted to tell her not to worry, that what was happening was part of the plan, but then the pastor started talking, so I didn’t. I nodded as the pastor spoke. I looked around, but I couldn’t see Death. A good sign, I thought. Death was obviously busy with my father.

I sang all the songs with a really loud voice. My mother looked strangely at me.

“Don’t worry,” I whispered. “It will be ok.”

I held my mother’s hand as we watched them lowering the coffin into the open hole.

And then I went home and down into my room and waited for three days.

 

 

On the evening of the third day, I went to bed early. I lay fully dressed under my covers until it was quiet upstairs—until my mother and my uncle had stopped talking—and then I got up. I opened one of the basement windows close to the roof, stepped onto my chest of drawers, lifted myself up and crawled out onto the lawn. The earth smelt strongly from wet leaves, dying grass and mouldering berries. I got up and tip-toed around our house to the garage and took out my bicycle.

I rode down to the church quick like the wind, feet turning round and round. My cycle light made a whining sound and the faster I cycled, the brighter it shone. My bicycle was really too small and my knees kept hitting the handles. My father said I would get a new one come summer. It was cold outside, and I had forgotten gloves. I pulled down the sleeves of my jacket to cover the knuckles. As I arrived, I jumped off the bicycle and led it towards the gravel path.

It was dark in the graveyard in the night. I was almost happy when I saw Death waiting for me at the church entrance. I wasn’t going to say it though, and, anyway, it was only almost. But I had to admit this was his territory more than mine. He was carrying a lantern, which was kind of a nice touch.

“Want me to show you to the grave?” he asked.

“Yes, please,” I said.

My father’s grave was a mound of earth not yet covered by grass. “They sow the grass later,” my grandmother said when my grandfather died. “After the settlement,” she added, before she was hushed by my mother.

“You can wait here,” I said to Death.

“I’ll hold your torch,” he offered.

I tapped on the earth on my father’s grave. “Come forth!” I whispered.

“For keeps,” Death whispered, looking at me.

I refused to look at him.

“Come forth!” I said louder focusing on the grave.

“For keeps!” Death said louder, excited.

“Come forth!” I yelled.

“For keeps!” Death yelled happily.

And that is how the pastor told my mother they found me, digging the earth up with my hands, screaming witlessly: “Come forth! Come forth! Come forth!”

 

 

They put me in a hospital. They say it is not a place for crazy people, but a Children’s Hospital. I don’t know. All the kids seem pretty out of it to me.

My mother visits. She really tries but I have become one of those things she hates: not a drunkard, nor an addict, but a crazy one. She comes for a while every morning, her hair is tidy and her clothes are neat but she grows thinner and thinner and her blue eyes look frightened.

My grandmother comes too. My imbalanced grandmother. It is easier with her. She comes in the afternoon and sometimes stays long into the evenings. I don’t know where she is staying, I doubt it is with my mother, but perhaps they talked about it and agreed who would go when. As my mother hates the night, maybe my grandmother said she would do them. And the nights are the worst. Just like my father said, I have become frailer then.

The pastor came a couple of times. He said all I needed to do was pray more and I would be fine. ‘Healed’, he said. But once when he came my grandmother was here. I don’t know what she said, because she took him out in the yard. When he left, his face was white, and his cheeks flamed. My grandmother said he was never coming back.

Death is with me at the ward. He seems really at home, potters about, waters the plants in the common room, even makes the beds for some of the sicker kids.

 

 

“I see Death,” I once admitted to my grandmother when she came, and Death was in my room. I studied her hands which she had crossed in her lap. Blue crisscrossed the back of them. The two gold rings were worn rubber band thin. She had put them on her middle finger where they shone bright yellow and they had a hollowness about them that was more than just their shape.

“Oh him,” she said.

“You see him too,” I said.

“Sure.”

“When he will go away?”

“Oh never. Once you have started seeing him, he sticks around.”

I gasped.

“Don’t worry, Irma,” she said. “After a while he becomes part of all that is ordinary. You know like a broom in the cleaning cupboard. You don’t really notice him anymore.”

Death looked at her.

“A casserole dish in my drawer,” my grandmother said to him, “that’s what you are.”

I picked at the brown blanket on my bed. It was frayed, and its edges had been picked before, you could tell.

“I had him kill my father,” I said.

“Oh rubbish,” my grandmother said.

“No,” I said. “For real.”

“Oh Irma, we have no say at all in who gets to die when. I don’t even think Death decides.”

God, I thought. He takes life whenever he wants to. It’s Him.

“Your father had epilepsy,” my grandmother said.

I tried the word out on my lips.

“They should have taken his driving license,” my grandmother said. “But, it’s a small town… I guess they didn’t have the stomach to do it. Sometimes people refuse to call things by their right name, which is very unhelpful. The church is the worst in this regard.”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said.

“To be honest, neither do I,” she said. “How old are you now again?”

“Eight,” I said. She always forgot my birthday. She usually sent me some money in an envelope a couple of months later and scrawled on the note itself was: “Sorry I forgot your birthday.”

“I think it is about time you started drinking coffee,” she said and took out her thermos. She put two beige plastic mugs on my bedside table and poured us coffee, the hot drink steaming. It was black as tar. It tasted bitter and strong and made my throat clutch not in a nice way. I made a face.

“You’ll have to learn at some point,” she said. “It’ll keep you grounded when you get older.”

I wasn’t sure about that. It made my heart race.

“If you’re ever sleepless, you might as well make something of it,” she said. “Some people just lie in bed and agonise. Better to go up and give yourself a reason for why you cannot sleep.”

She looked out the window. I did too. The night was black.

“Let’s go outside,” she said.

“Now?” I said. “It’s the middle of the night.”

She pursed her lips.

“We’ll be tired tomorrow morning,” I said.

“Are you going anywhere?” she asked.

“It looks really cold,” I said.

“Just put your jumper on top of your nightie,” she said. “No need to make a big affair of it.”

I dressed. We walked down the carpeted corridor and my grandmother just nodded to the warden. He nodded back as if it was perfectly normal to be going out at this hour with a patient. My grandmother pushed open the heavy entrance door. It closed behind us with a soft thud and we stood there and listened to the silence. The stars were white and large. There were millions of them.

“I have never seen so many,” I said.

“They are always there,” she said. “Sometimes you can’t see them because you are too close to other lights. It is often like that—a person is too close to something to really see.”

“Nights are dangerous,” I said.

“Oh, rubbish,” she said. “Nights are when you can potter about on your own and eat cookies.”

“I don’t know if I’ll ever be okay again,” I said.

“That’s alright,” she said. “Most of us are a bit damaged. But know this; that which has been torn down, can usually be built up.”

It sounded like one of my father’s lessons.

When we got back into my room, I lay down.

“Do you want me to stay the night, Irma?” my grandmother asked.

“Yes,” I said. “I do.”

She nodded and clapped me on my cheek, a clap that turned into more of a tap.

At some point during the night, I woke up. Grandmother wasn’t in the chair by my bed. She had moved to the table with the two chairs and was sitting there with Death. It looked as if they were playing chess. My grandmother grinned. I swear she was winning.