A Blessed Child Read online

  Chapter 5

  The roads were slushy and icy, but for Erika it was still the roundabouts and the road signs indicating the way out of Oslo that were the hardest part. She always ended up in some tunnel leading somewhere she did not want to go.

  “It’s not that difficult,” said Laura on the telephone. “It’s signposted all the way to Stockholm. All you have to do is follow.”

  For Laura, this sort of thing was easy. But Erika had, for reasons she failed to understand, always done the exact opposite of what the signs said. If the arrow pointed right, she turned left. In her nine years behind the wheel, she had caused many near accidents and received several fines, just like her mother, who was possibly an even worse driver.

  Sometimes people would wrench open Erika’s car door in the middle of a road junction just to shout at her. The difference between Erika and her mother was that Erika apologized whereas her mother shouted back.

  Laura said once that Erika’s nature behind the wheel, so totally contrary to her nature in all other areas of life, grew out of a profound split, an unspoken rage. Erika did not agree. She attributed this lack of confidence to some kind of dyslexia, an inability to read and process simple signs and codes or calculate distances.

  Before Erika got into the car and drove off, she rang Laura and said: “Can’t you take some time off, too? Can’t you come with me?”

  “Actually, I’ve got the day off today,” Laura answered.

  Erika could hear her gulping coffee and visualized her sitting in front of her computer, surfing the Internet, still in her pajamas though it was nearly eleven. Erika said: “I mean, can’t you take the week off and come with me to Hammarsö? You could drive,” she added.

  “No!” retorted Laura. “It’s not that easy to get a substitute teacher. And anyway, none of them want to take my class.”

  “Can’t you come down at the weekend, at least? I’m sure Isak wants to see both of us.”

  “No!” said Laura.

  “It would be an adventure,” said Erika.

  “No,” repeated Laura. “I can’t. Jesper’s got a cold. We’re all exhausted. Everything’s falling apart. The last thing I have the energy to think of right now is going down to Hammarsö to see Isak, who, besides everything else, I am sure doesn’t want to see us.”

  Erika would try again. Erika wouldn’t give up. It was perfectly feasible to get a substitute teacher. Laura always moaned about her students, but in fact she didn’t like entrusting them to other people; she didn’t like other people doing her job. Nobody did it well enough, in her view.

  Erika said: “What if Isak dies while I’m there?”

  Laura laughed out loud and said: “Don’t count on it, Erika! The old man will outlive us all.”

  Chapter 6

  Every summer from 1972 to 1979, Erika had flown by herself from Oslo to Stockholm, and then taken a smaller plane down to the port on the Baltic coast that was the last stop on her journey. She had a big blue plastic wallet around her neck; inside the wallet were her plane tickets and an official-looking piece of documentation on which her mother had written who was escorting her to the airport in Oslo and who would meet her at the airport in Sweden, as well as her name, age, and other such information.

  “In case the stewardess loses you when you’re changing flights in Stockholm,” Erika’s mother told her, putting a large, flowery handkerchief to Erika’s nose and telling her to blow. Hard.

  “Blow it all out before you get on the plane. Isak doesn’t want children with colds coming to visit.”

  Elisabet had long auburn hair, strong, well-turned legs, and high-heeled, snot-green pumps. Erika was her only child.

  “And if the stewardess happens to lose you, then find another stewardess and show her this sheet of paper,” she said. “Are you listening, Erika? Can you manage that? All you have to do is show her the paper.”

  At the airport in the town on the shores of the Baltic, Rosa and Laura would be waiting for her. The drive to Hammarsö took an hour and a half, but sometimes they had to wait in a queue of cars to get onto one of the two ferries that transported residents and tourists between the mainland and the island. Then it would take two and a half hours or even longer. For Erika, it was like a small eternity. Going to Hammarsö was something she did every summer. She sat beside Laura in the backseat and followed their route on the road signs, saying: Now there are only fifty kilometers to go, now only forty, now we’ve passed the halfway oak and now there are only twenty kilometers to go. Rosa! Rosa! Are we nearly there? Can’t you speed up?

  “No!” said Rosa. “Do you want us to crash, for the the police to come and pull bits of our bodies from the wreckage?”

  Erika looked at Laura, who was to be her sister for a whole month, and laughed.

  A kilometer is like a minute.

  Ten kilometers are like ten minutes.

  Rosa said the girls could watch for the kilometer signs and work out for themselves how far they had left to go without whining.

  But it wasn’t just waiting in traffic or even the prospect of seeing Isak again that made the ride from the airport seem like a small eternity. It was anticipating the white limestone house and her room with the floral wallpaper. It was her half sister Laura and eventually Molly, too. And it was Ragnar.

  It was Hammarsö itself, Erika’s place on Earth, with its flat heath, gnarled trees, knobbly fossils, and vivid red poppies. It was the silver-gray sea and the rock where the girls sunbathed and listened to Radio Luxemburg or her friend Marion’s special tapes. It was the scent of everything as the ultimate confirmation of now! now it’s summer!

  The summers in Hammarsö were the real eternity.

  The drive was a small eternity on the way to the real one.

  Chapter 7

  Erika drove slowly, talking out loud to herself. Talking out loud to herself was something she had learned from her driving instructor, Leif.

  Erika knew she should have failed when she took her driver’s test nine and a half years before (the day before her thirtieth birthday), and having somehow failed to fail she should have refused to accept her driver’s license, simply giving it back to the authorities.

  “You’re not relating naturally to others on the road,” Leif would say.

  “I don’t relate naturally to anybody,” said Erika.

  “Neither do I,” admitted Leif. “But if you’re going to drive a car, you have to relate naturally to others on the road. That’s just the way it is.”

  Erika had never really intended to take the test. But when she and Sundt got divorced, she decided to learn to drive, and that was how she met Leif. He was a white-haired, quiet, melancholic man who opened his mouth only to pronounce sarcastic statements of the obvious, usually related to vehicular traffic. Erika drove around Oslo in Leif’s company for a number of months; she paid for a hundred and thirty-four driving lessons.

  “The older you are, the more lessons it takes,” Leif said.

  The newly divorced can latch on to the strangest people, and Erika latched on to Leif. She viewed him as a wise man, a mentor, if a bit gnomic. Every time he said something, one of those sarcastic statements of the obvious, a stop sign means stop, for instance, she would interpret it at a more profound level.

  Laura, Isak, and even Molly had thought Erika was spending too much time with Leif. Nevertheless, in that time she did learn to talk out loud to herself when she was behind the steering wheel. This prevented her concentration from lapsing so she could stay focused on the act of driving, if not quite the direction of her trip. It was like this:

  Now I’m at the roundabout.

  Now I’m stopping at this red light.

  Now I’m joining the motorway.

  Now I’m keeping my eyes firmly on the middle of the road.

  It was winter; she was on her way to Hammarsö she was driving. She passed a roadside café. She didn’t want to stop yet. Although she was hungry, she didn’t want to stop yet.

  Chapter 8<
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  Whenever Erika spoke to Isak on the telephone, and that was often, this was how she visualized him: he is sitting in one of the two armchairs in the living room of the white limestone house, with his feet up on a pouf and his big rectangular spectacles on his nose. He is listening to a piece of Schubert, perhaps the slow movement of the C major string quintet. On the table beside the chair is the black tape recorder that he carries around the house with him. Erika is twelve and Laura is ten. They are lying side by side on the white wooden floor, reading and listening to the music with him. He lets them do that as long as they are quiet. The legs propped on the pouf are grasshopper thin and clad in worn brown velvet trousers. He once bought several pairs of velvet trousers of the same style and make. These trousers were patched over time and otherwise maintained by Rosa.

  I bet he’s still got those same trousers, thought Erika, but now it would be Simona who patched and stitched them. On his feet, a pair of warm sheepskin slippers. Isak often had cold feet. On the table beside the chair, three newspapers: two national and one local.

  It had been a year since Erika had seen her father. The last time had been in Stockholm, one of those dinner dates he liked to make with her and Laura. At first he had invited Molly, too, but she rarely came, so he stopped asking her.

  Erika followed the signs, just as Laura had advised. It worked. She was on her way now. She felt sure Isak would not have changed much since she last saw him. He wouldn’t have changed, his house wouldn’t have changed. She hadn’t been there for more than twenty-five years, but was sure he hadn’t moved the furniture around or bought any new clothes. He would still eat two thin slices of toast for breakfast, a bowl of kefir with a banana for lunch, and little meatballs with potatoes and gravy for dinner. That would be on Tuesdays. On Mondays and Wednesdays there was fish. And on Saturdays chicken casserole. The same dinners were cooked by Simona that had been cooked by Rosa in years gone by. After serving him his meal, Simona went home. He had told Erika all this on the phone, and sometimes Erika spoke to Simona to ask how her father was. Was he perhaps nearing death without any of his daughters knowing it?

  “He’ll never die,” said Simona.

  His face had more pockmarks and furrows and discolored patches, to be sure. But it was the same face. The same eyes, she thought, though she couldn’t picture her father’s eyes. She didn’t even know what color they were. Isak’s eyes looked at you and you either existed or didn’t exist in that look. He had been old for a long time. He had been old twenty-five years ago.

  Once he said on the telephone that he had changed since Rosa died. Isak Lövenstad’s formative years, according to him, had been between the ages of seventy-two and eighty-four.

  “Really?” asked Erika. “How’s that? I mean, how have you changed?”

  Erika stared at the windshield wipers moving back and forth without much effect. The snow was coming down heavily. The driving was difficult.

  He had said: “I’m maturing.”

  “You’re maturing?”

  “Yes.”

  “What does that mean, you’re maturing?”

  “I’m reading Swedenborg.”

  “Oh?”

  “And Swedenborg wrote that if you feel you’re living too long—and that’s certainly true in my case, isn’t it—then it’s your obligation to mature.”

  “So that’s what you’re doing?”

  “Yes.”

  “But what does that actually entail, Isak, you maturing?”

  “I understand things better.”

  “Such as?”

  “That I’ve never cared about other people. I’ve been indifferent.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “What don’t you believe?”

  “That you’ve been indifferent. I don’t believe you. It’s too easy just to say that.”

  A little boy with matchstick legs and scabby knees came running toward her, in and out of the light. Just occasionally, he turned to look back. She remembered the boy saying: “We need to find his weakness, where he’s vulnerable, but it won’t be easy.” Erika gripped the steering wheel, but the car went into a skid and grazed the snowy bank before she could regain control. She stopped at the next gas station and bought herself a coffee. She closed her eyes for a few minutes before setting off again.

  “That’s how people get killed,” she said to herself. “They drive in weather like this.”

  “And yet I told you not to come,” Isak would have said.

  Chapter 9

  Elisabet said it wasn’t easy to be mother and father at the same time. She said more is demanded of a woman than of a man. She said that as a woman she had been forced to do everything by herself. (Elisabet often spoke in italics.) She said women, simply because they are women, are not heard the same way men are. That’s why I speak clearly, she said. To be heard. To get your attention.

  In the spring of 1980, almost a year after that summer when everything happened, everything changed, Erika spoke to Isak on the phone, and he said she would have to forget about coming to Hammarsö for the holidays. It would be the summer Erika turned fifteen. Why? she said. Why must I forget Hammarsö this year? Her father did not like to be questioned, so he snapped his fingers. Erika heard a little snap from far away in Stockholm or Lund or wherever he was, and the frost seeped through the receiver. Yes, the receiver Erika was clutching froze in her hands, and Erika’s hands, which her father would sometimes kiss, turned to ice, too. That’s the way he is, thought Erika, and so as not to cry, she thought of five reasons why she loved him.

  She would have to forget about Hammarsö that year. And maybe next year, too. And the year after that. She wasn’t going there; none of them were. Because Isak didn’t want them to.

  “But why doesn’t he?” asked Elisabet. “Why, Erika?”

  Her mother was standing on her long legs in the living room on Oscarsgate, running a hand through her thick hair. On her feet she had a pair of high-heeled ferry-yellow pumps by Yves Saint Laurent.

  Elisabet said: “There is simply no way I can be expected to think up all sorts of exciting activities for the holidays. You’ll have to entertain yourself.”

  She continued: “I shall be working. My head’s full of things that need doing. Full! Your father can’t just change a system that’s worked perfectly well since 1972.”

  Erika knew all about Elisabet’s head. It had always been full. Erika was nearly fifteen now, but when she was little, her mother used to declare herself a bundle of nerves. Erika felt sorry for her then, having to drag around that overflowing, tired, and heavy head filled with a bundle of nerves. She hadn’t been sure what nerves were, but imagined them to be some kind of maggot. She had thought Elisabet’s lovely head might explode at any moment or open up and let out some huge, tangled horror, especially if clumsy little Erika, by her very presence, added to the bundle.

  As Erika grew older, her mother ceased claiming to be a bundle of nerves. She just said: I’m just not very happy today, Erika.

  Erika wasn’t going to Hammarsö (“Why? Why? Is the house just going to stand empty, Isak?”), but she had a plan.

  “I shall keep out of your way, Mamma. I promise. You won’t know I’m here.”

  “But why, Erika? Why aren’t you all going to Hammarsö? I mean, it’s so beautiful there. Green sea and everything.”

  “Gray,” said Erika.

  “What?” said Elisabet.

  “The sea’s gray,” said Erika. “Not green. It’s different sorts of gray.”

  “But why?” asked Elisabet. “Why aren’t you going there? Why isn’t anybody going to Hammarsö?”

  “I don’t know, Mamma.”

  “What will you do, then? Get a summer job of some kind?”

  “Yes, maybe.”

  Erika had known Isak would come to this decision, of course. All that long winter she had known. How could they stay in that house again as if nothing had happened? How could she possibly go there again? How could he? How could L
aura and Molly? How could Rosa, who had sat in complete silence beneath the blue lamp in the kitchen in the white limestone house, go back there? To Hammarsö. To the heaths and beaches and poppies and the bluish-gray sea she had once heard a grown-up man call the Frog Sea. The man intended it in a derogatory way. But Erika liked the idea of her and Ragnar’s sea being a frog sea: silent and strange and alive and shallow until it was suddenly deep and ominous. A frog, Ragnar had said, can go slack and play dead for several minutes if he’s attacked.

  The currents brought things from the Baltic states and Poland that washed up on the stony beach below Isak’s house: sodden detergent boxes and cigarette packets, shampoo bottles, driftwood; and bottles that might contain oxygen and be deadly dangerous (Don’t touch anything you find washed up on the beach!), or even a secret message from the sealed continent on the other side of the horizon, from the communist regimes in the east, from the countries where people were shot or thrown in prison if they tried to cross the border or escape. The cardboard boxes and shampoo bottles had strange words on them, written in strange letters: PRIMA and STOLICHNAYA, and Ragnar and Erika tried to decipher the words, adding them to their cryptic language. They gathered the things in plastic bags from the shop and took them to the secret hut deep in the woods.

  So never again. Erika grew up and married Sundt and had a girl and a boy. Both forced their way out of her, took a breath, and found her breast, and now, this winter, her son was the same age that Ragnar had been in the summer of 1979.