A Blessed Child Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Part I: The Road

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Part II: The Colony

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Part III: The Hammarsö Pageant

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Part IV: Summer, Winter

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Part V: The Light over the Water

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  A Note About the Author

  Also by Linn Ullmann

  Copyright

  To Halfdan

  Part I: The Road

  In the winter of 2005, Erika went to see her father, Isak Lövenstad. The journey was taking longer than expected, and she felt a strong urge to turn around and drive back to Oslo, but she pressed on, keeping her mobile phone on the seat beside her so she could ring him at any time and say that the visit was off. That she wasn’t coming after all. That they would have to do it another time. She could say it was because of the weather, the heavy snowfall. The change of plan would have been a great relief to both of them.

  Chapter 1

  Isak was eighty-four years old and lived by himself in a white limestone house on Hammarsö, an island off the east coast of Sweden. A specialist in gynecology, he had made his name as one of the pioneers of ultrasound. Now in retirement, he was in good health and his days passed pleasantly. All his basic needs were met by Simona, a lifelong resident of the island. Simona saw to it that he had a hot lunch and dinner every day; she gave the house a thorough weekly cleaning; she shopped, dusted, and did his laundry, of which there was not much. She also helped him with his annual income tax return and payments. Isak still had all his teeth, but in the past year he had developed a cataract in his right eye. He said it was like looking at the world through water.

  Isak and Simona rarely talked to each other. Both preferred it that way.

  After a long, full life in Stockholm and Lund, Isak had moved to Hammarsö for good. The house had stood empty for twelve years, during which time he had more than once considered selling it. Instead he decided to sell his flats in Stockholm and Lund and spend the rest of his life as an islander. Simona, whom Isak had hired back in the early seventies to help Rosa take care of the house (in spite of knowing that Rosa was the kind of woman, quite different from his previous wife and mistresses, who rarely needed help with anything, and especially not with the house, which by Rosa was kept to perfection), insisted that he allow her to take him in hand and cut his hair regularly. He wanted to leave it to grow. There was no one to cut it for, he said. But in order to restore the mutually preferred silence between them, they reached a compromise. In the summer, the crown of Isak’s head was blank and glossy and as blue as the globes he had presented to each of his three daughters, Erika, Laura, and Molly, on her fifth birthday; in the winter, he let his hair grow free, giving him an aspect of towering grayish white, which in combination with his handsomely lined, aging face suggested the beginnings of a rauk, one of those four-hundred-million-year-old island outcrops in the sea, so characteristic of Hammarsö.

  Erika seldom saw her father after he moved to the island, but Simona had sent her two photographs. One of a long-haired Isak and one of the almost bald Isak. Erika liked the long-haired one better. She ran her finger over the picture and kissed it. She imagined him on the stony beach on Hammarsö with arms stretched aloft, hair streaming out, and that long, fake beard he would wear when rehearsing his lines as Wise Old Man for the 1979 Hammarsö Pageant.

  Rosa—Isak’s second wife and Laura’s mother—died of a degenerative muscle-wasting disease in the early 1990s. It was Rosa’s death that prompted Isak’s return to Hammarsö. In the twelve years the house had stood empty, there had been only occasional visits from Simona. She had swept up the insect life that forced its way in every summer and lay dead on the windowsills all winter; she had the locks changed after a minor break-in and mopped up when the pipes burst and water leaked all over the floor. But she could do nothing about the water damage and rot if Isak was not prepared to pay for workmen to come in and fix them.

  “It’s going to get run-down whatever I do,” she said in one of their brief telephone conversations. “You’ll either have to sell it, do it up, or start living in it again.”

  “Not yet. I’m not making any decisions yet,” Isak said.

  But then Rosa’s body let her down, and though her heart was strong and wouldn’t stop beating, Isak and a colleague agreed in the end that Rosa should be spared. After the funeral, Isak made it plain to Erika, Laura, and Molly that he intended to kill himself. The pills had been procured, the deed carefully planned. And yet, he moved back to the house.

  Chapter 2

  Molly was born, against Isak’s will, in the summer of 1974. When Molly’s mother, who was called Ruth, was giving birth in an Oslo hospital, Rosa threatened to leave Isak. She packed two suitcases, ordered a taxi from the mainland, took their daughter Laura’s hand, and said: “As long as you go on sleeping with anything in a skirt and babies are the result of it, there’s no place for me in your life. Or in this house.”

  All this happened just before the premiere of that year’s Hammarsö Pageant, the annual amateur theatrical revue written and produced by Palle Quist. The Hammarsö Pageant was a tradition on the island; both tourists and residents contributed in their various ways, and the production had been reviewed in the local paper several times, not always favorably.

  When Rosa had her furious outburst, her only one, as far back as Erika could remember, Laura cried, saying she didn’t want to go. Erika cried, too, seeing before her the long summer holiday alone with her father, who was too b
ig for Erika to cook for or to comfort all by herself.

  Ruth rang twice. The first time, she rang to say the contractions were coming every five minutes. Thirty-two hours later, she rang to say she had given birth to a daughter. She knew at once the child would be called Molly. She thought Isak would, at any rate, want to know. (No? Oh. To hell with him, then.)

  Both times she rang from a pay phone in the hospital corridor.

  Isak spent those thirty-two hours calming Rosa down and persuading her not to leave. The taxi waiting outside was sent away, then called again a few hours later, only to be dismissed once more.

  Isak couldn’t live without Rosa, he said. This thing with Ruth was all just a big misunderstanding.

  Isak sent Erika and Laura out of the kitchen several times, yet the girls kept inventing new excuses for coming in to disturb them: they were thirsty, they were hungry, they were looking for their soccer ball. In the end, Isak roared and said that if they didn’t let him and Rosa talk in peace, he would cut off their noses, so then the sisters hid behind the door and listened. That evening, when Isak and Rosa thought the girls were in bed, they came back to their post outside the door, wrapped in their blankets.

  During the night, Isak almost succeeded in persuading Rosa to accept the word misunderstanding without, in fact, having to explain exactly who had misunderstood whom—Rosa, Ruth, or Isak himself—or how this sick state of affairs had arisen.

  Isak had been away at a conference in Oslo nine months previously, yes. This is true.

  He knew Ruth (at the time, just a pretty, fair-haired midwife who admired Isak), yes. Also true.

  He had had sporadic contact with her, both before and after the conference, yes. And he is not denying this.

  But Isak could not give any proper account of how and why Ruth was at that moment in an Oslo hospital, in labor with her first child and claiming he was the father.

  This is where, in Isak’s view, some kind of terrible misunderstanding must have arisen.

  After many hours of argument, attended by much slamming of doors and muttering of resentment, Rosa made tea for herself and Isak. The two blue suitcases she had packed for herself and Laura were still standing in the middle of the floor. The last thing Erika saw from her hiding place behind the door was her father and Rosa sitting on either side of the kitchen table under the big pendant lamp—also blue—each cradling a cup of tea. Both were staring out the window. It was still dark.

  And when Ruth rang, early the next morning, to let Isak know he had a fine, healthy daughter weighing 3,400 grams and measuring 49 centimeters, and that the delivery had generally gone smoothly, he threw the telephone on the floor and shouted DAMN IT. Rosa, who was standing just behind him in a polka-dot nightdress, her long hair hanging loose and tousled, picked the phone up off the floor, put the receiver to her own ear, and listened to what was being said at the other end. She nodded, said something back, nodded again.

  Erika and Laura, who had been woken by the ringing of the telephone and their father’s DAMN IT, crept out of their beds and back to their hiding place behind the door. They could not hear what Rosa was saying. She was speaking softly. The telephone was red and shaped like a periscope, with the dial in the base and a long cord so you could carry it around the house with you. When Rosa had finished her conversation, she tugged on the flex to gather it up and put the phone back on the hall table where it belonged. She returned to the kitchen and put her arms round Isak, who was standing in the middle of the floor, beside the suitcases. She whispered something in his ear. He laid his head on her shoulder. They stood like that for a long time.

  Erika heard him say: “She should never have had that damned baby.”

  In the days that followed, Erika and Laura talked over what it could mean: that she should never have had that damned baby. They realized the fuss was all about some Norwegian woman called Ruth, the mother. Laura said that their father, who knew more than most people about having babies, was cross because the Norwegian woman hadn’t waited for him to get there to help.

  “Help with what?” Erika asked.

  “With getting it out,” said Laura.

  Erika said she didn’t believe that. Their father had said loud and clear that he didn’t want it, so why would he help?

  Laura said maybe he could have helped shove it back into the mother again.

  Erika said you couldn’t do that.

  Laura said of course she knew that, she was only kidding.

  Now, more than thirty years later, Isak would often say on the telephone that he lit candles for his daughters every evening. One candle for Erika, one for Laura, one for Molly, he said. He made it his business to mention this ritual of his to Erika as often as he could. Erika thought it was because he wanted her to pass it on to Molly, who, despite having lost her mother, the fair-haired midwife, Ruth, in a car crash when she was seven and having been sent to live with her grandmother rather than her father, had never stopped loving him.

  Chapter 3

  His lean frame, his slim hands, his narrow feet, and his large head. Erika knew that it wasn’t his looks that attracted so many women. It was his brain. That was what it said in the November 10, 1965 edition of Life magazine. Under his photograph, it said in so many words that Professor Lövenstad had a brilliant brain. The photograph had been taken in glaring sunlight and he was screwing up his eyes as he looked at the camera, which meant you couldn’t see them or any of his face particularly well, just a great round head and a shock of fair, curly hair. The article, which was long, said that the Swedish researcher, along with his fellow scientists from Dublin, New York, and Moscow, was on his way to solving one of the mysteries of life.

  When Erika went to Hammarsö for her holidays for the first time, in the summer of 1972, Laura took her hand, led her into the living room, and pointed out the article, which had been framed and hung on the wall. Erika could already read English without too much difficulty. The picture of her father with his big head, his fair hair, and his brilliant brain had stayed with her ever since, through her medical studies and then in her professional life as a gynecologist.

  But she knew so little about her father, as he told her almost nothing. Now and then he would start a story, then stop in the middle. He would speak quietly under his breath; Erika had to lean in close or press her ear to the telephone receiver to hear. When he was angry, he would sputter monosyllabic roars, carefully chosen poisonous words. But whenever he was trying to tell some sort of narrative or answer questions (and Erika never posed one without considering it carefully), it was as if his voice faded away; the pauses grew longer and she sat waiting in vain for him to continue. And because he spoke so quietly, because Erika had to concentrate each time he said a word, as if what was passing between them was essential, like light or water, and because she could never be sure of having heard the whole story, any conversation with Isak gave her the sense of being let in on a secret.

  Chapter 4

  There had been two husbands. On paper, Erika was still married to Tomas, but he had left her.

  Then there was the first husband, Sundt, the father of her two children, who above all was extraordinarily cheap. Isak once pointed out that whenever Erika mentioned him she always referred to him in the past tense. But Sundt was not dead. He also had a first name, but Erika had only ever called him Sundt.

  In fact, Erika thought, it would have been better for Sundt if he were dead. Being dead didn’t cost anything, and the funeral, gravestone, flowers, as well as prawns, salmon, and roast beef sandwiches, were paid for. After the estate had been divided up, being dead would be free of charge and all cares, something Sundt would doubtless have preferred, if only he hadn’t been so scared of it. Sundt lay awake at night, feeling all his bodily irregularities and thinking about everything that could strike him down.

  “Cheap people have their own way of counting,” Erika told Isak on the telephone. “Let’s say, for example, that Sundt was supposed to give me ten, let’s say Sundt
owed me ten; well, without a moment’s thought ten would wind up four, and there wouldn’t be the slightest explanation; but if Sundt was expecting ten from me, then he’d have no problem making ten into sixteen, which he’d take off me even if I said it’s my last sixteen here and we said ten—at that moment it would seem as if I were the cheap one.”

  “Yes,” said Isak.

  “Cheap people always win,” said Erika. “Cheap people have all the power. Cheap people have no friends. They start off with lots of friends, then they have fewer friends, and in the end they have none. Who knows whether that bothers them. Do you think it bothers them?”

  “I don’t know,” said Isak.

  “Even the skinflint’s spouse can never get the better of the skinflint,” Erika went on.

  “That’s true,” said Isak.

  “Still!” said Erika.

  “Still what?” asked Isak.

  “Still, one evening I tried to get my own back,” said Erika. “One evening I tapped my knife on my glass, rested my head on my husband’s bony shoulder, and declared to our party: This evening is Sundt’s treat! Champagne and oysters for everybody! Sundt has been looking forward to this! And our friends knew exactly what I was up to; they were in on it, a coup d’état against Sundt, an assassination attempt, a temporary seizure of power—our friends gorged themselves on champagne and oysters, reveling in his pain. They saw him sweating and gritting his teeth; they heard his impotent hints about skipping dessert. And it didn’t end there. I started spending extravagantly, Father. I twirled around in new dresses, laid down new rugs, unpacked new books and a new stereo, shut out the light with new blinds. We couldn’t afford any of it, you see. None of it! Still, I dressed up and laughed and came home late in the evenings.”

  And as Sundt lay in bed beside Erika at night, feeling all his bodily irregularities (a swelling in his right leg, a sharp pain in his chest, a change in the texture of his gums—possibly a symptom of decay?), she would not put her arms around him and comfort him the way she used to when they were first married. Instead she would tell him he was a wimp, a fool, a pathetic little figure, an affliction, even; then she would roll herself up in her new quilt and sleep through the night without giving his discomfort another thought. And so she was through with Sundt.