Grace Read online

  So it was not as Norway’s third most important arts editor that Johan sat with his three colleagues, his only friends, around a table in a café, drinking beer and discussing a new novelist, a young woman everyone said was tremendously gifted. Suddenly, with a triumphant look on his face, Johan slapped the photograph of Mai down on the table. The three colleagues (Ole Torjussen, Geir Hernes, and Odd Karlsen— fair-to-middling journalists all; Ole Torjussen is dead now) bent over the picture and squinted at it in bewilderment. They all misunderstood, taking Mai to be the new novelist. As I said, she looked very young in that picture. Then Ole Torjussen, or it might have been Odd Karlsen, moaned, “Well, she’s no beauty, that’s for sure!” And Geir Hernes stifled a fit of coughing and declared, “If you ask me, the least we can expect of this country’s new women writers is that they be beautiful. The dogs, like this one here”—he planted a bitten fingernail, yellow with nicotine, on Mai’s face—“ought to be rejected at birth.”

  Johan grabbed the picture, his cheeks burning. He wanted to wail, as if he were a child again and had just tipped a whole bucketful of wild strawberries into the stream. But he contained himself and didn’t say a thing. Ole Torjussen, Geir Hernes, and Odd Karlsen didn’t notice that anything was wrong; they’d all had a drink or two. A moment later, the new woman novelist and the picture of Mai were forgotten.

  Johan never bothered to clear up the misunderstanding. It later occurred to him that he could have said, “It’s the way she moves.” He could have said that when she swept her hair back from her forehead she drew the heavens down to her, and how can you not follow the heavens?

  If he had been a fighting man, he would have fought. He would have jumped up and punched Geir Hernes in the face. He would have knocked him out cold, not so much for what he had said as because he had touched Mai’s face, and to this day the photo bears the faint smudge of that pudgy fingertip. But Johan wasn’t a fighting man. He didn’t fight with other men, and he didn’t fight with his two wives—either the dead one he despised or the living one he adored—and he didn’t fight in the columns of the newspaper. When he retired at the age of sixty-four, it was with a sense of never having written anything worthwhile. He wasn’t just being modest. His colleagues and readers would have agreed.

  When he was younger, he had, in fact, written a series of articles that caused quite a stir in academic and literary circles. These six pieces—some described them as essays— appeared with no little fanfare on the newspaper’s arts page on six consecutive Saturdays. The subject was William Faulkner: the man, the writer, and the myth. Johan compared American literature and society with Norwegian literature and society in subtle and telling ways. It was brilliant work. Each article took up two whole pages and was thoughtfully illustrated with old photographs. Never had Johan received so much attention from those whose good opinion he valued. He was inundated with telephone calls from doyens of the arts, ringing to say that he had shed new light on Faulkner’s work and set a new standard for literary criticism. Johan Sletten’s informed and highly personal discussion of Faulkner’s life and work had, in fact, said something about the very art of reading.

  But that was a long time ago. No one mentioned the series anymore. No one talked to him about the art of reading. The University of Oslo occasionally held seminars on William Faulkner, but Johan Sletten was never invited to attend.

  And now his rapport with the newspaper readers of Norway was history. It was time for him to retire. Although to say that he retired is a pretty way of putting it. He was asked to leave. You might say he was fired, sacked, given the boot.

  It all started the day a German review of an obscure Latvian novel sparked his curiosity. Johan—and this was not emphasized strongly enough at his funeral—had an inquiring nature. He bought the Latvian novel in a Danish translation, read it, and wept. He wanted to tell everyone in Norway, or at least all of his newspaper’s readers, to rush out and buy this book. But when he sat down to write, he could not find the words to do it justice. They were pale and puny and meaningless, like those innocuous little flies that take on waspish coloring in order to look more fierce. It was awful. His every word trivialized this book he wished to extol. So he did something he had never done before: he translated the German review, put his own name on it, and turned it in. This review, which Johan had read in a literary journal with a circulation of only about fifteen hundred, was by any standard brilliant. It was signed only J.I.S.—they might almost have been his own initials; he just didn’t have an I in his name. The point was that J.I.S. expressed exactly what Johan felt when he read the book, and J.I.S. got his point across without resorting to sentimentalism, something Johan abhorred above all else, something far too prevalent in the press as it was. J.I.S.’s review was witty and relevant, placing the Latvian novel in its proper historical, political, and emotional context. It was deeply personal and utterly universal. It was, quite simply, the review he himself would have written.

  The next day at 1:07 p.m., just a few hours after Dolores, a gorgeous twenty-three-year-old intern, had praised him for having written “the best piece of the year,” Johan got an e-mail from the editor in chief asking if he could possibly present himself, without too much delay, in his office for a word.

  And so it was over.

  You wait all your life for this very thing to happen, and then it happens: you are found out and it’s over. Johan took a deep breath.

  It appeared that an outraged reader from Mo i Rana was one of the fifteen hundred people in the world who actually subscribed to the German literary periodical, and probably the only person in Scandinavia who knew who the initials J.I.S. stood for. This outraged reader spotted the plagiarism straightaway and wrote a lengthy irate fax to the editor in chief, with copies to the arts editor and the Op-Ed desk. Johan Sletten had stolen J.I.S.’s review. Such a thing was unheard-of, and this in an organ that called itself a quality newspaper!

  Johan scanned the editor in chief’s face. He wasn’t angry. In retrospect, Johan would go so far as to say that he didn’t even seem surprised. The man did not like Johan, and Johan had done no more than the editor in chief expected of him.

  But no—now I’m going too far. If it could only be said that he disliked Johan.

  The truth is that Johan was merely a staff member whom the paper wanted to be rid of. He was surplus, and so this act of plagiarism—Johan’s one and only, for, mind you, while no brilliant journalist, he could at least be depended upon, and in forty years with the paper, this review of a small Latvian novel stolen from an even smaller German literary magazine (886 words, 4,250 characters) had come as something of an opportunity for Johan’s bosses. An embarrassment for the newspaper, to be sure, as the editor in chief did not neglect to inform Johan. The Op-Ed editor had had to spend almost half an hour placating the outraged reader, who was demanding to have his letter printed—it was not a letter, he hollered, it was a commentary!—and had to be persuaded that it was an ignoble thing to denounce a washed-up journalist who was due to retire very shortly anyway.

  Johan’s last memory of that day was this:

  Dolores, the gorgeous summer intern, knows nothing of his shame. Everyone else does. The editors, the switchboard ladies, the secretaries, the receptionist, everyone in archives, the reporters, even the guys on the sports desk know—he’s the talk of the office now—but Dolores knows nothing. Johan walks down the corridors with everyone knowing, everyone staring at him. He’s been waiting for these stares all his life; he knows these looks and has always known that one day they would be directed at him. This is not the look one gives to a man who is controversial. A controversial man meets the eyes of the other, his own eyes saying, I stand up for what I believe in, I stand up for what I’ve done. But plagiarism isn’t controversial. You can’t stand up for that.

  Dolores was alone in knowing nothing. This utterly stupid, luscious little girl stood before him in the endless corridor. She smiled. She rummaged through the large black bag slung over he
r shoulder, pulled out the Danish translation of the small Latvian novel, and said, “It’s not often a review in the newspaper sends me running out to buy a book.” She uttered the word newspaper with a scornful, conspiratorial whisper, as if to second Johan’s assumed contempt for the low intellectual level of the dailies. “But your piece did,” she said, fixing her brown eyes on Johan. “Your piece moved me.”

  God bless Dolores. He stroked her hair. Nothing like this had ever happened to him before. Not many men have the good fortune to be looked up to by a gorgeous young woman, let alone one named Dolores. For a moment Johan Sletten forgot, made himself forget, the mess he was in.

  Gorgeous young Dolores looked up at him, and he stroked her hair, which was possibly even more beautiful than Mai’s, and she let him do it.

  He got out of there before she found out. He couldn’t stand the thought of seeing her again, seeing the look in her eyes after someone had taken her aside and whispered it in her ear. He couldn’t face her after that. His life had never been what one might call the picture of dignity. But having to face Dolores again? That was one indignity to which he would not submit.

  Instead, Johan accepted the editor in chief’s offer of early retirement, never to set foot inside the newspaper offices again.

  Mai was younger than Johan. When they met, Mai was thirty. When he died, she was fifty-three.

  During his last months he had a large boil on his left cheek.

  One time he asked her for a mirror, and she produced a compact from her bag.

  “I don’t know what you see in me,” he said. “I’m old and ugly and I’ll be dead soon.”

  “But you’re still my Johan, and I love you,” she said softly.

  It often occurred to him. She was his grace, but he was her burden. But you’re still my Johan, and I love you. A child could have been their shared burden, but she did not want that child. All she wanted was Johan.

  On the evening of the day he lost his job, he told Mai about the plagiarized review. He was lying in bed, and she was standing in front of the mirror brushing her long hair, now completely gray but still thick and shiny.

  “How come you have such beautiful hair?” he had asked her once.

  “Because I brush it a hundred times every morning and every night. First I bend over—like this!” she said, bending over to demonstrate. “I brush from the back, one-two-three-four-five-six-seven, and so on all the way up to a hundred. There!”

  That’s what she was doing when he told her about the review. Bending over, listening, counting the deliberate strokes of the brush through her hair.

  When he finished his story, she still had thirty-eight to go, and these she completed, slowly, intently, without saying a word. Then came the moment Johan usually loved: the moment she tossed her hair back, letting it fall into place around her face and shoulders. Then she would look at herself in the mirror and smile.

  But on this particular evening, when he told her about the plagiarized review, she didn’t linger in front of the mirror, smiling.

  Instead, still facing the mirror, she said, “Poor you. My poor Johan.” Then she turned around, crossed the room, and sat down on the bed. The stuff of her nightgown was filmy and blue, dotted with little white stars. Her feet were bare. She smelled nice. Johan rested his head on her shoulder.

  “Do you despise me, Mai?”

  “Never,” she said, putting her arms around him. “Never!”

  An almost identical scene was enacted five years later when he told her about his visit to the doctor. Mai was bending over in front of the mirror—the brush, one-two-three-fourfive-six-seven-eight times, through her hair, Johan lying in bed, searching for the right words. Should he tell her about the doctor’s office, small and claustrophobic, or about the doctor who smelled of sweat and was younger than his own son? Should he tell her about the word alarming and how this thing was spreading? He looked at her and thought, She’ll help me. She’ll put her arms around me and tell me she loves me. She’ll put her arms around me and tell me that she’ll help me when the time comes. To be allowed to die at the moment of his own choice. To die without unbearable pain. It all came down to dignity, and his life had never been the picture of that.

  He looked at her again, standing in front of the mirror. Didn’t know exactly where to begin. Couldn’t find the words.

  The night before Johan’s father died, he was found crawling naked on all fours through their neighbor’s garden, leaving a trail of shit behind him. The next morning, when his father learned what he had done, he cried with shame, clutched his wife’s arm, and begged her to forgive him.

  Johan was fifteen years old.

  “Stay with me!” Johan’s father pleaded. He clutched at Johan’s mother’s arm. “Don’t leave me, Agnes, please!”

  His mother shut her eyes tight and shook her head.

  “No, don’t go!” he cried. “You can’t … Please, I beg you… .”

  “But I can’t take this,” his mother whispered, and she left the room.

  It was then that Johan’s father began to howl.

  The door was shut.

  Johan’s mother, Johan’s older sister, and Johan sat on the sofa in the living room. The lights were off, the door shut. His father howled. Hour after hour he howled. And then, finally, there came a couple of bellowed cries for help.

  Once upon a time, long before he fell ill, Johan’s father had painted the bedroom door blue. His mother felt there was something not quite proper about a blue bedroom door. Particularly when, in front of the children and a neighbor who just happened to have popped in, he grabbed her around the waist and declared, “See, Agnes! There’s our door to heaven!”

  Now the door was shut, the blue paint flaking, and his father howling.

  When Johan began to cry, his mother raised her hand and stroked his head. Then his sister raised her hand and stroked his head. Johan huddled on the sofa, between a mother and a sister stroking his head, and listened to his father howling. When the women’s caresses did not still his sobs, his mother laid her hands over his ears and pressed the sound out of existence. Then his sister did the same, one hand over each ear. First his mother’s hands, then his sister’s hands over his ears. And so they sat: Johan in the middle, with his mother’s hands over his ears and his sister’s hands over their mother’s.

  It took a while. No one moved. No sounds now. Just the blue door and four hands, women’s hands, two pairs of large, warm, dry palms, twenty fingers locked around his ears. Their bodies close to his. Hour after hour. His mother smelled of detergent, his sister of sweat, but only faintly. And then it was over. Johan knew it was over, because suddenly the two women pulled their hands off his ears—pop!— like a cork leaving the neck of a wine bottle. And then: only silence.

  Johan’s mother got up, crossed the room, and opened the blue door. She stood on the threshold for a moment first, seeming to look about her, as if this were the first time she had seen her own bedroom. The light coming in through the window. The blue curtains. The mahogany bureau with the brass knobs. The big double bed with the blue bed linen under which, when he was younger, Johan had loved to curl up and hide. The constant, drowsy warmth of his parents’ bed. His mother called to his sister, and together they managed to lift the dead man onto a rug in the hallway. Then they set to work with brushes and brooms, scrubbed the floor and walls, changed the bed linen, opened the windows, and lit the candles. When all this was done, Johan’s father was lifted back into the bed.

  “Now I want to be alone with him. I want to lay him out myself,” Johan’s mother murmured, and she closed the door.

  Johan shut his eyes, then opened them again. He looked at Mai, bent over in front of the mirror, the brush running through her hair. From time to time she would count out loud to herself—sixty-eight, sixty-nine, seventy.

  Johan wasn’t a popular man. He wasn’t a man people looked up to. And he wasn’t a controversial man. He doubted whether he was a man others would miss. But he was
loved. He didn’t doubt Mai’s love, although he never truly understood why she loved him. When things were going well, he imagined that he was in possession of qualities that he had never dared to reveal, or been capable of revealing, to anyone but her. But when he lay awake at night with his thoughts churning, he imagined that she was the sort of woman who could only love a man weaker then herself, someone who adored her, someone who would always be at her mercy, and that such a love degraded them both. True love was something that existed between kindred spirits, between equals, wasn’t it? He looked at her. Never mind, he thought, I’ll take a degrading love, if only it’s tender as the love between Mai and me.

  Once, many years ago, Johan asked Mai to describe herself in six words. He gave her a sheet of paper and asked her to write a list. Johan was a great one for lists.

  These are the words she chose:

  Strong-willed

  Professional

  Ugly

  Steadfast

  Childless

  Content

  Honest

  “You’ve put down too many words,” Johan said, when she handed him the sheet of paper. “You were supposed to write down six words, not seven.”

  “So what?” she said, and a moment later she’d forgotten the whole thing and moved on to something else. That’s how she was. Johan didn’t know anyone who did things as quickly as she. It was a question of patience. Mai never had the patience to stick to one thing for any length of time. She walked quickly. Ate quickly. Made love quickly. Tidied up quickly. Thought quickly. Sometimes she snapped at Johan for not doing things just as quickly. For taking his time—to walk, to eat, to make love, to tidy up, and to think.