Four years later.
I finished the novel about the factory. It took me five years, and it was 234 pages long. Tolstoy spent less time on War and Peace. It was published in October. It did better than I had feared. Now it was the middle of March. I was standing by the bank of snow along Uelands gate, not far from Lovisenberg hospital. The snow was black with exhaust fumes. Behind me, on the pavement, stood Vigdis, my oldest daughter. She was sixteen. I was forty-three. I have two more daughters, they were twelve and thirteen then. They are all grown up now.
I stood in the snow because I was trying to hail a taxi that was on its way down from Nordre cemetery, but the taxi would not stop. I could have sworn it was empty, that the roof light was lit, that the driver turned his head and saw me standing there, waving, and I waved again, but he did not stop.
I was distraught. We had just been to the hospital where I had tried to get Vigdis admitted to the psychiatric ward. Not because I wanted to, but because it’s what she wanted, we had spoken about it briefly, Turid and I, we were almost certain, or she was certain, I was not so sure. That in itself was nothing new. In any case, it hadn’t worked. I turned around and looked at her and searched for something that could carry me onward, but she had closed her face. Vigdis, I said, come on. Let’s walk a bit further down. She didn’t reply, she gave me no sign, she looked the way she had looked most of that day, and she hadn’t spoken a proper sentence for several hours. It was quite a feat.
I retreated from the snowbank onto the sand-strewn pavement and stamped the dirty snow off my shoes and began walking down towards Alexander Kiellands plass, where I thought it would be easier to get a taxi to stop. She followed slowly, not unwillingly, but rather with the pull of gravity on her body which this day had allotted her, or she had allotted herself, and what this day had allotted me, was the task of interpreting her state of mind, so that she didn’t have to ask me for anything, that it was I was who was responsible for the choices we made before this day was done. The roles had already been assigned as we left home. She her home, I mine. It’d been a long time since hers and mine were one and the same.
The Mazda was at the garage, so a few hours earlier I had travelled by bus from Bjølsen where I still lived and down to the centre of Oslo and had taken the train as agreed from Oslo Central station to Lillestrøm, which was still a new and stylish station that year, and had walked down the stairs from the platform and now stood by the big glass doors on the side of the station where the river runs into the lake and the parking places spread out in the mud. And standing there I saw the car of the woman who was once my wife cross the bridge from the hill beyond, and there was a wind happening, for the banners snapped against their poles along the road, and the river ran in reverse, it was a swirling morning. And here came the metallic-blue Toyota, glittering in the low sun, heading straight towards me in the razor-sharp spring air, into the roundabout past the river and out again on the other side, which was my side, and parked not far from me, by the kerbstones.
They got out of the car, mother and daughter, Turid and Vigdis, and walked together across the flagstones, down to where I stood by the doors, and we greeted each other, not coldly, but formally, that’s what it had come to, but then the transaction was accomplished, and I turned around and was about to go back into the station with my hand on Vigdis’s shoulder, when Turid, my old flame, my irreplaceable all, came after me and laid her hand on my shoulder. I looked at her hand, it was brown and pretty, I knew it well, its narrowness, lightness, she was wearing a coat as blue as the car she’d arrived in, it was casually slung on, almost arrogantly open over the pretty dress in the crackling weather, and she looked better than the last time I saw her, not a single line had been added to her face, no circle under her eyes, she didn’t look like that before, I thought, when she was mine, she has a new lover, that’s why, I thought, and she touches him the way she once touched me, or even worse, she touches him in ways she had never touched me, and suddenly I felt severely cheated. It was that old feeling, for a brief moment it flooded through me, and then it was gone, and I thought, she deserves better. She deserves better than what I could give her. I have no one else but you, she had said once, although we were no longer married, but she was desperate then, she wouldn’t have said that now, that she had no one else but me. Why would she. She had someone else.
She said, it’s easier for you, Arvid, who is not so close to her. She withdrew her hand, and I thought, not so close to her. Hadn’t Vigdis and I had long conversations almost every other evening on the phone. Hadn’t she been close to me every day, every week, in the sixteen years since she was born more or less in the back seat of a taxi, on the way to a hospital too far away on the other side of town, on the west side, and who had held her in his arms then, in his hands, so tiny and light as she was, if not me. Didn’t she tell me about her life, as I told her about mine. Wasn’t I informed about her person as no one else could be. What the hell, not close to her.
And why did Turid think that I was able to do what no one else could do. It was true that most ideas we had come up with had been exhausted, and this, the very last, it was left to me alone to carry out. I didn’t understand how it had come to this, other than that the burden now lay on my shoulders and I was not close to Vigdis. Turid had insisted, she had given me no choice, and everyone she knew who also knew Vigdis, pointed to me. I felt trapped.
So I didn’t answer. I walked into the station building with Vigdis in tow and up to the platform where the train was already pulling in from the north, from Eidsvoll, Hamar, places like that, and then we had to get out again only four stations closer to the city, at Hanaborg, and down a footpath where she could cry, and suddenly she was sobbing. I had seen it coming on the way from the previous station, Fjellhamar, and understood that what mattered now was getting out at the very next station. I hadn’t seen her like this for a very long time. I thought she had put it behind her, as she had put her fainting fits behind her too.
Now she stood doubled over by a bush, hitting her chest and crying, while I stood stiff-backed like a sentinel keeping watch in case someone walked past us on the footpath and asked questions I would find embarassing. But no one came, and she struck her chest harder, and suddenly she shouted, Daddy, Daddy, I can’t breathe, Daddy, I can’t breathe, and there was more panic now than despair in her voice, and she sank to her knees with her hands pressed hard against her chest, and then she hit herself again and whispered, Daddy, Daddy, I can’t breathe, and I ran over and sank down next to her and held her hard around the shoulders and felt how thin she had got and thought, my God, where have I been. Was there a distance between us after all, a film, a veil before the eyes, in that case, my eyes, so I hadn’t seen her for who she was, while she perhaps had seen me, for who I was, but I didn’t want to think about that now, and I said, just breathe in Vigdis, just draw your breath in as far down as you can and hold it until you start feeling funny. Do as I say, I said, and she did, and I heard a long gasp, and then she went quiet. She didn’t breathe, she stared straight ahead of her although her eyes were shut, and not a sound could be heard, not a wisp of air seeped out, and then it all came back up again, Vigdis came up again as from a deep lake slamming against the surface, and I thought she would fall from the impact, but I held her even harder and thought, when was the last time I held her like this.
From the city centre we took the bus down Storgata, past the Opera Passage, and the bus turned there, by the Gasworks plot, as we used to call it, then up past Jakob church, which strictly speaking was not a church any more, but still was when I grew up, and then onward on Maridalsveien, Uelands gate up the long hill, and we got off at the bus stop at the intersection where the road divides, to the left towards Ullevål, Majorstua, to the right towards Sagene, Bjølsen, close to where I lived.
Hand in hand we crossed Uelands gate up towards Lovisenberg hospital.
The psychiatric ward was two flights up and in to the left. It turned out to be a good deal smaller than I had imagined. I didn’t know what I had imagined, probably something from a film I had seen, maybe One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, or 12 Monkeys, which had just been taken off in Oslo, and the images from those films were not pleasant to carry around, but honestly, I didn’t think conditions were like that any longer, not here, not now, not in Norway, if they ever had been, and if they were, I would definitely not have been where I was on this day in March.
All the same, we went in, and I asked the first person in a white coat if there was a head nurse here, a superintendent, someone in charge I could speak to, and there was. The person in the white coat pointed up the corridor towards an open door. She’s over there, behind that door. All right, I thought. Behind that door. And I said, many thanks, like my father always said, not thank you very much, but many thanks, he was born in 1911, that was probably why.
Vigdis and I walked down towards the open door, and there was a desk right outside, in the corridor, a little like the ones we had in primary school more than thirty years ago, and it may well have been one of those, for nothing I could see around me looked new in any way. Vigdis, I said, you just wait here a little, and I’ll go in and talk to her, and Vigdis didn’t say anything and didn’t do anything, but stopped and stood there with her arms hanging straight down.
I knocked on the door frame and was about to enter, but it turned out there was just a closet behind the door and barely room for one person at a time, and when she turned around abruptly, we stood hardly a metre apart. I looked straight into her face, nothing else was possible. She was my age, and maybe she had been crying, and if she had, it was for reasons of her own, and she’d come over here to this closet to wash her face and dry it, there was a sink on the wall right behind her, and a tap. It seemed that way. As if she’d been crying. But still she looked me straight in the eyes the way I looked into hers, and she didn’t even flinch, she didn’t look down, in the end it was I who had to, and for a moment I stared at my shoes, which could have done with a shine after the muddy streets outside, before I lifted my gaze towards her face again and took my chances. I would like to have my daughter admitted to this ward. I see, she said. Just like that. No, not just like that, I said, there is a reason.
I don’t know who she thought she had in front of her, if it was someone familiar to her, someone she had experience of, and that was exactly what I needed now, that someone experienced saw me for who I was, a man in my situation, who didn’t reject me, but could carry me, and what she did was shut the door to the closet, fetch two chairs from a bit further down the corridor and set them in front of the desk. Then she sat down on the opposite side and said, sit down. Vigdis, I said, let’s sit down, and Vigdis sat down, and I sat down. For some reason I placed my hands on the edge of the desk in front of me, where she could see them. I wasn’t wearing a ring, but still bore the marks of one, a thin white groove on the ring finger of my left hand, a mark I could never get rid of, a stigma. Neither was she wearing a ring, nor the trace of one, and it probably wasn’t what I wanted to show her, that I did not have a ring. Or maybe that’s exactly what it was I wanted her to see, a single father in trouble. It wasn’t true, I was not a single father. But I was in trouble.
She took out two forms from a drawer and placed them on the table with a professional look on her face and put a pen on top of those forms and folded her hands and laid them too on the table, but not in a Christian way. What reason, she said.
What reason. I tried to collect my thoughts, what reason, what reason. I looked around, for the first time really. Down the corridor a man was standing with his face close to the wall. Not very hard, not very fast, but very clearly he struck his forehead against the thick wall, thump, then a short pause, thump, then a short pause and another thump, and it looked painful, I wished he would stop. From the depths of the corridor a woman came almost running towards us, her knees high with each step and her forearms straight down, her fingers straight down, and she looked odd, her face blank and turned in on itself, the only living thing about her was her legs. Actually she was moving very slowly, seen from the side while she ran, but not once did she look in our direction, she didn’t take any notice of us at all, like the Masai in Out of Africa, but Vigdis couldn’t take her eyes off the woman, her face opened up a little, and she bit her lip slightly. I turned to look at her, we looked at each other, and a veil of despair spread over her face. I turned slowly back towards the lady in white, I ran my hand through my hair, maybe I’m not so sure after all, I said, if this is the right thing to do. I thought it was, but now I’m not sure. Maybe we should wait. I looked at Vigdis again and saw a faint yes in her eyes. Maybe we should not admit her, I said. There was a pause. The lady in white looked at me, for quite a while, I thought. I wouldn’t have, she said, not now, and she didn’t say it to put me in my place, no, on the contrary, she said it with empathy, she was on my side. It’s not easy to know what to do, she said, I have grown children myself, it’s not easy. No, I said. I was close to crying. The two forms were still on the table, but now they were unpleasant to look at, like receipts for thirty silver coins waiting for my signature, and she saw my gaze and pulled out the drawer and put the forms back and pushed the drawer shut. I took a deep breath. But I have to do something, I said. Yes, I think you do, she said.