Aftermath Read online

  “I don’t know … I don’t know what to say,” she says.

  She squeezes me even tighter and it feels so good to have her holding me and comforting me like this, feeling so sorry for me, it feels good, I can’t help it, it’s rotten of me to make her feel sorry for me when there’s no reason to feel sorry for me, but I can’t help myself.

  “Well anyway, it’s a good thing I found out before the wedding. At least this way we’ll be able to cancel it,” I say, not letting it go, leaving the way open for her to say she loves me and that we’re going to go ahead exactly as planned, love conquers all and so on, that’s what I’m angling for her to say. But she doesn’t say a word. “Don’t you think?” I ask. Moments pass, but she still doesn’t say anything, just stands there with her arms around me, she’s not playing along, not saying what I’m giving her the chance to say. There’s total silence and then I feel a ripple of unease, my stomach starts to flutter, does she think we should call off the wedding as well, has she changed her mind about marrying me, now that she thinks I have MS? Is that why she’s not playing along, is that why she doesn’t say anything when I’ve just given her a cue to say that she loves me and that we should go ahead with the wedding exactly as planned, does her love run no deeper than that? MS is a terrible disease, of course, both for those afflicted by it and for their families, and of course Julie knows a lot about what it means to live with someone in need of care, having grown up with a paraplegic father, but still, is that really enough to make her want to call off the wedding? Apparently so, or she would have said something long before this, she would surely have protested when I asked her to call the vicar and tell him to cancel the wedding or when I asked her to call her mother and tell her to stop work on the wedding dress, but she didn’t, she let everything I said go unchallenged. I stand quite still, my unease growing, I swallow once, then again, give it another second or two, then gently prize myself free of her embrace.

  “I’ve got to finish packing,” I say.

  “You’re not serious?” she says.

  “Of course I am.”

  “You can’t go to the mountains now,” she says. “We need to talk.”

  “What more is there to talk about?” I say, then I pick up my rucksack, turn around slowly, and look her straight in the eye, stand there waiting for an answer, but she doesn’t answer, she knows very well what I mean and she has no answer, she holds my eye for a couple of seconds, saying nothing, then she swallows hard, looks down, looks up at me again.

  “Bye then,” I say.

  “Marius, please,” she says, placing her hand on my arm, making a rather half-hearted attempt to hold me back, but I ease myself out of her grip, walk out of the storage room, up the basement stairs, into the hall, and over to the shoe rack, then I sit down on the stool, grab my hiking boots, and start to put them on. I deliberately tie the laces wrongly, do it quite instinctively, giving her time to follow me and stop me, but she doesn’t, she stays in the basement, she doesn’t mean to stop me, she means to let me go. I undo the knot, retie it, do exactly the same with the other boot, then I prop my elbows on my knees, sit there staring at the floor as this terrible unease grows and grows. My stomach churns harder and harder, what on earth have I done, what have I started? I close my eyes and put a hand to my brow, rest my head on my hand, I have the urge to go back downstairs, have the urge to put my arms around her and confess everything, tell her I was lying, that it just happened, that I don’t know why, but that I want everything to be the way it was. I can’t, though. Things can never be the way they were, not knowing what I know now, I wish I’d never discovered it, but I have. And maybe this was what I wanted all along, maybe all this came about because I needed to know whether she really did love me or not, maybe that’s why I lied about having MS, maybe I did it to test her, I don’t know.

  Namsskogan, July 9th–11th, 2006

  I know I’m in danger of sounding like some women’s magazine agony aunt, dispensing good advice and words of wisdom, but I’m going to say it anyway: happiness depends to a great extent on choosing the right moments at which to consider and comprehend one’s life objectively. I’ve suspected for some time, I suppose, that I haven’t always been as good at doing this as I might have been, but it’s only now, since I started writing this letter to you, that this has really been brought home to me.

  But I’ll come back to that.

  Anyway: Gjert Rosendahl, Dad’s brother, started a fish farm in Flatanger and when he died, single and childless, in 1988, Dad inherited a business that would take the family from being rich in a way that people could imagine to being worth the sort of money that neither we nor anyone else could relate to. Initially, though, the outlook was not nearly as good as one might think. Fish farming in the eighties was, as we know, plagued by furunculosis and other fish diseases and these, along with substandard net pens and the resultant large-scale escape of fish, meant that Uncle Gjert had been running at a considerable and more or less consistent loss during his time as director, so when Dad took over the place in 1988, no one dreamed that it would become as hugely successful as it did in the nineties and aughts, or that he would become known as the Salmon King of Bangsund. Not even Dad himself, I’m sure.

  To cut a long story short, its success came about due to Dad—in collaboration with the district council and two other investors—closing the furniture factory in Bangsund and turning the premises into a plant for the development and production of fish vaccine. He then bought an old herring-oil factory and used this as a testing station for the vaccine. The financial investment was enormous, many people were extremely skeptical of the whole project, and his plans would have been impossible to implement had it not been for the support provided by Statoil and the sovereign oil fund, channeled through what was then known as the Norwegian Export Council (now Innovation Norway). In principle these funds were earmarked for a variety of international projects (as part of Statoil’s drive to raise its profile and, as such, an attempt, I presume, to present itself as an attractive prospect in the competition for new oil fields) but Dad and the other investors argued that fish farms in other countries would also benefit greatly from the vaccines. After a bit of to-ing and fro-ing, their application was granted and suddenly Dad wasn’t only the owner of several disease-free fish farms, he was also the main shareholder in Aqua Central, a company that would eventually dominate the global market for vaccines for salmon and trout.

  But the road to that point was long and hard and here I’m not just thinking of the many great business obstacles that had to be overcome: Dad first began to notice that he had a problem in 1986, but he was fifty-five, so he simply took the accumulation of fluid in his legs and the increasingly frequent need to urinate, the fact that he had to get up two or three times a night to pee, as signs that he was getting old. The same went for the change in the color of his urine. If I went to the bathroom after Dad had been there and forgotten to flush (something he was always doing, much to Mom’s annoyance), the bowl was always full of rusty-brown pee that smelled as rank and penetrating as the boys’ restrooms at school, where certain ninth graders thought it fun to pee on the floor and the wall. “Old man’s piss,” Dad would say, “perfectly normal.” And the fact that he felt like doing less and less and was tired and out of breath after the sort of physical exertion that he would never even have thought of as such a year earlier was explained away in similar fashion: “Ah, well, I’m not sixteen anymore, you know,” he would say when pushed to explain why he no longer felt up to taking a walk up Flakkfjellet or down the Bangdalen valley to pick cloudberries with Rikard and me. “Wait till you get old, then you’ll understand.”

  This was, of course, a way of ignoring the problem. Dad was terrified of doctors, and even though Mom tried everything short of putting a gun to his head, as she put it, to persuade him to have himself checked out, he flatly refused. He got annoyed if we hinted that he ought to make an appointment and would blow his top completely if we said it straight
out. “Stop fussing, dammit,” he would snap. “I told you, it’ll pass.” But it didn’t pass. It got worse. He had always had the same fresh, ruddy complexion as Rikard, but now he began to look pale and wan. His breath smelled so bad that I balked at getting too close to him when we were talking and no matter how often he brushed his teeth or how scrupulously he flossed, it got no better. But the worst of it was the change in his character. His steadily deteriorating state of health made him anxious, tired, and tense. This in turn meant that he wasn’t able to work as well or as much as before, which was probably one reason why the furniture factory wasn’t doing as well as it once had, and this made him even more anxious, tired, and tense. And so it went on. All of this resulted in a state of mind that sometimes made Mom wonder whether he was becoming what we now call bipolar, but that at that time was described as manic-depressive. For days on end he would be withdrawn, moody, and irritable and never opened his mouth except to bite someone’s head off, as Mom said at one exasperated moment. Take, for example, the time when I was woken by them returning from a dinner party at which, as far as I could gather, Mom had been a little friendlier toward another man than Dad liked.

  “I was only trying to be sociable,” Mom said. “He’s just lost his wife.”

  “It’s just like I’m always saying. He has all the luck, that one.”

  “And what’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Work it out for yourself, if you can,” Dad said. “So, are you staying up for a while or are you going straight to bed?”

  “Oh … I don’t know, it’s nearly midnight, so I was thinking of going to bed.”

  “Fine. In that case I’ll stay up for a bit.”

  That’s what he was like. And not just with Mom. With Rickard and me too. Despite being habitually stubborn, difficult, and endowed with what he himself described as “a Latin temperament,” he had been a great father. He had been interested and supportive and always there for us in all sorts of ways, no matter how busy he was with work. But not anymore. He took less and less interest in how we were doing at school, for instance. Previously, he had always made a point of knowing when we had a test coming up, he saw to it that we were well prepped on whatever subject we were being tested on and would ask to see the test papers once we got them back. But now he didn’t even check how we had done in our exams, and when we told him, he didn’t seem proud and happy, the way I knew he would have been had he been himself. “Okay” was all he said. And if we just stood there, a little confused and probably unable to conceal our hurt at the lack of praise, he would look us straight in the eye and ask whether there was anything else we wanted. No? Well, in that case he would like to be left in peace, if we didn’t mind. And unlike before, when his angry outbursts were understandable and could usually be put down to Rikard or me having said or done something we shouldn’t have, now they came as a complete surprise. He could explode over the smallest thing and use words and expressions that I associated mainly with Nielsen the butcher’s fat son who, according to the butcher himself, had learned to say “crap” before he could say “Papa.” Dad simply wasn’t the same person at all. And yet there were some signs that our good old dad was still in there somewhere. Like the fact that he clearly felt guilty for the way he was behaving. Not only was he remorseful and apologetic when he had been unreasonable and not only did he assure all of us that whatever had happened was no one’s fault but his, he also endeavored to do something about the problem. There were times when he would try so hard to be nice that it became strained and awkward. He would push himself to work much more than he was actually able to and at least as much as when he was fit and well and he was making plans for himself and the furniture factory that were totally unrealistic, considering the state we all knew he was in. This would go on until he grew tired of fighting and succumbed to all his underlying frustration and anger.

  But there was no way he was going to the doctor.

  All of this was very hard on Mom. Some people actually thought she was talking about herself when she said she wondered whether Dad was suffering from manic depression or possibly just depression. That it was somehow a case of projection. There had never been anything pessimistic or melancholy about her. On the contrary, as I mentioned earlier, she had always had a bright and easygoing nature. Over all her contradictions and her seemingly irreconcilable qualities and idiosyncrasies there had always hung a kind of indifference. Or no, not indifference exactly, more like a particular knack for not brooding over things she couldn’t change, an ability to say “oh, well, never mind” and move on. But not anymore. She lost her sparkle, was less quick to laugh, and seemed constantly to be looking for something to worry about, any excuse to look on the black side. If there was a tiny cloud in an otherwise blue sky, it was bound to rain, as Rikard said. And alongside this she had developed a quite extraordinary gift for self-deprecation. She had always seemed so self-possessed, so confident, but now she acted as if she had somehow taken a drastic drop in worth, possibly because Dad didn’t show her that he loved her the way he had before he became ill or possibly because Rikard and I were becoming more independent and she no longer played such a large part in our lives. I don’t know, it’s hard to say, but her self-esteem was certainly at a low ebb. “I know they don’t like me,” she said, for example, on one occasion when Dad had summoned up the energy to go to dinner at the Schröders’ and Mom suddenly decided she didn’t want to go after all. “Where on earth did you get that idea?” Dad said. “I just know,” Mom said. “But how do you know?” Dad asked. “You can just tell,” Mom said, knowing full well that there’s no arguing with such feelings and that Dad didn’t have a leg to stand on. In the old days she would have laughed at how negative she sounded when she said things like this: “Oops, there I go, doing my Eeyore act again,” she would say, or something like that, then she would cheer up and go to dinner anyway. Not now, though. She was convinced that people disliked her and were laughing behind her back, so she was forever looking for excuses to stay home. On her birthday that same self-loathing raised its ugly head again. We had always gone to Tino’s for a birthday dinner, but this particular year she told us she didn’t want to celebrate her birthday at all, and even though she never said in so many words that she didn’t think she was worth celebrating, we all knew she wanted us to understand that that was how she felt and that we were now supposed to jump in and assure her that she was wrong: “Of course you’re worth celebrating, Mom, come on, let’s go to Tino’s.” That’s the sort of thing she wanted us to say, and when we didn’t, when we simply said “okay” and the day itself looked like being no different from any other Tuesday, with gray skies, housework, and fish cakes for dinner—which was what she said she wanted—she didn’t merely go into a terrible huff, she was also genuinely upset. At one point I went down to the kitchen for a glass of water and found her crying and banging her head gently against the door of the cabinet above the sink. I thought, therefore, that she would be relieved and happy when it turned out that Dad had gone against her wishes, bought her a present, and organized a little party for her anyway. But no. To our great surprise, not to say shock, she was furious. “Why does no one pay any attention to what I say?” she cried. “I told you I didn’t want any presents, that I didn’t want to celebrate my birthday, why can’t you ever take me seriously?”

  As if all of this wasn’t enough she was also turning into a hypochondriac. “Something’s not right,” she kept saying about herself and her body, but this wasn’t meant as a way of reminding us that things could go wrong and that disaster lurked around every corner. Or, at least, that may often have been what she was trying to say, because not only had she developed an exceptional ability to fret over the slightest thing, the sudden change in Dad’s state of health had shown us all how fragile life could be and perhaps she felt the need to share this insight with others. But still: such announcements were often a way of warning us that she would soon be taking to her bed, suffering from some imagined ailment
or other. For example, when, like most middle-aged people, she began to have difficulty reading the newspaper without glasses, she became convinced that she had cataracts. “It often starts with failing sight,” she said. For several days after this she lay in bed, feeling all the other symptoms she imagined that she had. “I have such a terrible headache,” she said, and “my eyes have been watering an awful lot recently, I can hardly watch TV without the tears streaming down my cheeks, so yes, unfortunately I think it’s as I feared.” And then, after she’d been to see the doctor and he had told her that she did not have cataracts, she would be right as rain for a little while—until, that is, she again began to suspect that there was something seriously wrong with her. Pancreatic cancer. A congenital heart defect. Marfan syndrome. There was so much to choose from if you read the medical handbook as assiduously as Mom did back then.