Aftermath Read online

  I’m not sure what the connection was between the change in Dad and the change in Mom, but I and just about everyone else who knew our family took it more or less for granted that Mom’s problem was a reaction of sorts to what Dad was going through. “Klara has never had to struggle, so when Kåre started going downhill, she caved in right away, you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to see that,” Aunt Rebekka said when she and Uncle Frederik came for their annual visit. She then went on to give a long account of how she, on the other hand, had stayed strong throughout her late cancer-stricken husband’s illness. “I had no choice, I couldn’t take to my bed, I had a young child to see to,” she said. That that same child had been placed in a foster home after her husband’s death due to some form of neglect, the nature of which was never disclosed, was apparently not deemed worth mentioning.

  Uncle Frederik, for his part, seized the chance to tell a funny little story about how jealous Mom had been when he broke both legs and had to move back in with Grandma and Grandpa to be nursed and cared for. “Remember how you daubed your legs with blue paint and said it was bruises so Mom and Dad would feel sorry for you?” he said, and then he laughed as if to show that this was simply a sweet story, one that he had just happened to remember and definitely not what everyone knew it to be: namely, a sly way of insinuating that Mom was a pampered drama queen who only feigned illness and went around looking woeful to get attention. Oh, Uncle Frederik, he could be so scathing in such a sympathetic fashion that it still makes me mad to think about it, ten years after he was crushed to death in a tragic accident at his repair shop.

  Nevertheless, Rikard and I took a slightly more positive view of it all. We had grown more and more different from each other as time went on, but we still had plenty of good chats and during one of these Rikard expressed a thought that had crossed my own mind many times: that it was the fear that Dad was seriously ill and might die that caused Mom to “feign illness and go around looking woeful,” as our uncle had put it. In words very different from those I’m using here we agreed that the change in Mom was an unconscious attempt to tell herself and Dad that his problems were neither as uncommon nor as serious as one might think. “I mean, just look at me, I’m not the person I was twenty years ago either, my health is failing as well” was what she was trying to say. Seen in that light, the change in her was a strangely beautiful declaration of love and a desperate, if somewhat warped way of asking Dad to see a doctor and then fight whatever was wrong with him.

  In any case: there we were, with both Mom and Dad reduced to mere shadows of themselves, when Aunt Rebekka came steam-rollering into our lives in a manner very different from what she had done every summer of our childhood. Aunt Rebekka, always clad in red or purple and wearing lipstick and eyeshadow that she believed matched, but that Mom thought made her look like a madame from the Reeperbahn. Aunt Rebekka, always with a story to tell and her menthol cigarettes, chewing gum, and a gossip mag within reach. Aunt Rebekka, who was always on some diet or other but who ate rum babas or Napoleon’s hats every day and consequently had flabby, quivering upper arms as thick as my thighs. Now she sold her flat in Oslo and moved to Bangsund to support and assist Mom. “I couldn’t, in all conscience, do anything else,” she told people, going on to add that “the real estate agent said I would get a lot more for my apartment if I waited a while before selling, but no, I told him, I can’t, I said, my sister needs me now, and if that means I lose a lot of money, well, so be it, I said.”

  She might well have got a little more for her apartment if she had held off and she might well have felt it was her duty to help Mom, but it should also be said that she had been talking for some years about moving back to Namsos or Bangsund. “There’s nothing to keep me in Oslo now,” she used to say, I remember. But this additional piece of information would have shown her in a less heroic and self-sacrificing light than she would have wished so she was careful not to mention it.

  But whatever her motives, Aunt Rebekka moved into the apartment in the extension at the back of the house and even I, a scientist who cannot abide the misuse of the word energy, have to admit that from the day and hour she arrived, the house seemed to be filled with new, well, energy. I had always regarded my aunt as a lazy woman, partly because I usually only ever saw her for a few drowsy summer days each year and partly because she was on disability benefit—and like so many other people I automatically associated fat people on disability benefit with laziness. But I was wrong. Aunt Rebekka was astonishingly efficient and proved to be incredibly hardworking. She could wash down the whole house in roughly the same time it took Mom to explain to Dad why we ought to hire a cleaner, and once she’d done that she would start polishing the silver, cutting the hedge, or making mutton and cabbage stew. She’d been told not to clean Mom and Dad’s room or to touch the things on the desk in the office, but she paid no heed. She made their bed and changed the duvet whenever she felt it was necessary and I was forever hearing my dad muttering to himself that he didn’t know where some document or letter had got to: “I put it right here, dammit,” he would say, only a moment later to roar: “Rebekka! Have you been tidying my papers again? Rebekka!” She was a positive whirlwind. If she was alone in the house for a couple of hours and had nothing else to do, she was quite liable to rehang the pictures on our walls or rearrange the living room furniture. “There now, doesn’t that look nice,” she would say to Mom and Dad when they came home. And once, when I was lying stark naked on my bed, relaxing after a shower, I suddenly found myself looking straight into the eyes of Aunt Rebekka, who was up a ladder, cleaning my window. “You could at least warn me before you do that,” I told her, but it was like water off a duck’s back. “Oh, relax, I’ve seen naked men before and I was no more shocked then than I am now!” she said. As if it was to save her blushes, not mine, that she ought to inform me before she started climbing up and gawping through my bedroom window.

  But even though she did sometimes encroach too much on what ought to have been the family’s privacy, we were all happy that she had moved in, and not until much later did Mom begin to refer to Rebekka’s efforts as “an investment in her own future” and “part of an extortion scheme.” Even Dad, who always used to flee the house when our aunt and uncle came to visit, eventually became glad to have her there. Not only because she was a hard worker and took care of all the chores he and Mom were no longer able to do, but also because he liked her as a person. Yes, she talked the ears off him, as he put it, and she had neither the manners nor the tact to refrain from saying things that were hurtful or that infuriated him, but she was also thick-skinned and endowed with enough self-irony and wit to cope with him being equally blunt with her, which meant he could relax and be himself, as he said. Like the time when Aunt Rebekka told Dad off for smoking in the car when Rikard and I were there.

  “Passive smoking doubles the risk of contracting lung cancer,” she declared.

  “Passive chatter is just as harmful,” Dad retorted.

  And they both burst out laughing.

  One might think that Rikard and I—who were both in late adolescence and so sensitive and unsure of ourselves that now, as an adult, it’s hard to imagine—were permanently crimson with embarrassment from having to listen to Aunt Rebekka’s utterly brazen questions and remarks from morning to night. “I know you’ve gone without shaving for a while, and I know you call that a moustache, but that doesn’t make it one, so shave it off, for heaven’s sake, it looks like your father’s ear hair,” she said to me once, at the top of her voice, when two of my chums could hear. And: “Now, don’t forget to use a condom when you have sex,” she told Rikard and a girl who had come to see him. But we weren’t embarrassed. Aunt Rebekka was Aunt Rebekka and you just had to take her as she was: an entertaining addition to our daily lives, a breath of fresh air. Like Dad, we felt we could relax around her and be ourselves. Indeed, the fact that she didn’t appear to hide anything from us made us less concerned about hiding things from her an
d it got to the stage where we would go to her rather than Mom or Dad if we had questions of a more delicate nature. Or I did, anyway. So when I discovered two brown spots on the underside of my penis and couldn’t sleep at night because I thought I had skin cancer and would need to have amputated the one body part that I was most afraid of losing—apart from my head—it was my aunt I eventually turned to. “Pigment change, that’s all, nothing to worry about,” she said. And again, when I felt there were rather too many stray hairs on my pillow in the morning and started buying tins of brewer’s yeast, which I hid in the cupboard and took on the sly to at least delay the hair loss, it was her I consulted. “Bald? You? What a load of rubbish. We shed hair all the time. Sometimes a little, sometimes a lot,” she said. And since, as Dad said, she was known for not mincing her words, I trusted her more in such situations than Mom, for example, who I knew had a tendency to gloss over things to make me feel better. I don’t know how many times I left Aunt Rebekka’s apartment feeling as though a ton of weight really had been lifted from my shoulders.

  That said, however: Aunt Rebekka was not, strictly speaking, the person to go to if you had a medical issue of any sort. Or at least, not if her diagnosis of Dad’s problem was anything to go by: a brain tumor, that’s what it was, she confided to Rikard and me one evening when we came down to the kitchen and found her sitting there all alone, looking very grave. She was sure of it. She had had a colleague at the telegraph office when she was a girl and his personality had changed completely. He had been quiet, polite, and nice as could be in January, but when he returned to work after his summer holiday, he was crazy as a loon, she told us. “Went around yelling at coworkers for all to hear, calling them this, that, and the other, we thought he’d lost his mind, but it turned out that he had a tumor as big as an orange between his ears,” our aunt said.

  Fortunately, though, she was wrong.

  Dad had strenuously resisted going to the doctor for far too long already, but when, on top of everything else, he began to grow breasts, he finally saw sense and agreed to go for a checkup. Chronic kidney failure, the doctor said and gave Dad the choice of a kidney transplant or dialysis every day for the rest of his life. Dad couldn’t bring himself to ask any of us to donate a kidney, but he made it pretty clear that there was nothing he would rather have. This was just after he had inherited the fish farm from our uncle, he was in the midst of building up the new business and kept saying that there was no way he could go in to Namsos every day for two hours of dialysis—as he had started doing as soon as his illness was diagnosed—not with all the work he had to do. “We could have done something really great here, but now I suppose we’ll just have to abandon the whole project and sell the damn thing, don’t you think?” he said, this being our cue to shake our heads and say, no, no, and then suggest that one of us donate a kidney for him. Which was exactly what we did. Rikard, Mom, and I all offered to do the needful and just a few days later we underwent tests to see who would be most suitable as a donor. The test results showed that all three of us were more or less equally suitable, but after a brief discussion Mom decided that she should do it. Rikard and I had our whole lives ahead of us, after all, as she said, and we never knew whether we might have need of that kidney, which, at the moment, we could in principle manage without.

  And she got her way.

  The doctors said the prognosis was good, so we were all feeling relaxed and cheerful when Mom and Dad packed their tartan suitcases and set off for the University Hospital in Oslo one day in early April. Well, all except Aunt Rebekka, that is. Although none of us quite understood why, she seemed oddly anxious, she wept and was quite distraught; she could hardly open her mouth without talking about the dreadful state of the Norwegian health service: “You’d better be fit as a fiddle if you have to go to the hospital in this country,” she said before going on to give us a little lecture on everything from hospital bacteria that could cause serious streptococcal infections to incredible and probably fictitious tales of surgeons amputating the wrong feet and leaving scissors and forceps inside patients’ stomachs. “Yeah, but some people do get better after a spell in the hospital, you know,” Rikard protested, grinning and endeavoring to bring her back down to earth with a little wry humor, but she was having none of it: “Show a little respect, you idiot,” she snapped.

  But the operation went well. For a short time afterward it looked as though Dad’s body might reject the kidney, but once they changed some of the medication used to suppress the immune system, everything went according to plan. Still, however, all was not well. It was as if Dad’s new personality had somehow stuck with him. A couple of months or so after the operation he was physically as strong, fit, and well as he had been before he fell ill, but his mood swings were as bad as ever. Worse, in fact. His fits of rage became more frequent and more violent and at times he was so cranky and contrary and so foulmouthed, particularly toward Mom, that I wasn’t the only one who began to wonder whether he might be mentally ill after all. He constantly, and deliberately, misunderstood Mom, crediting her with thoughts and motives that she did not have and calling her “unspeakable things,” as I heard her tell a visiting woman friend one time.

  “I don’t deserve this, Kåre,” I heard Mom sob late one evening when they were in the living room and thought no one was listening. I had been woken by the sound of them arguing and Dad calling her a “female psychopath” and was sitting on the stairs to the ground floor, listening.

  “I don’t deserve this,” Mom said again.

  “Why, because you’ve just given me a kidney?”

  “Kåre?”

  “Do you think I’m stupid, Klara? You think everything can be the way it used to be just because you volunteered to act as a donor, that’s the problem.”

  “Kåre, you’re scaring me.”

  “You keep reminding me of what you just said,” Dad said, and then he put on a whiny, woman’s voice, supposed to sound like Mom: “I don’t deserve this,” he mimicked. “You never get what you deserve, woman, this is all about you wanting me to think you don’t deserve to be abandoned, right? You want to make it impossible for me to leave you.”

  I frequently caught myself thinking that he was trying to provoke and punish Mom by pretending to have grown closer to Aunt Rebekka than he actually had. He could be deep in quiet and demonstratively confidential conversation with our aunt, only when Mom walked in to promptly find some excuse to leave the room: “Yes, well, I’d better be getting back to the office,” he might say, or: “But we can talk about this again some other time, Rebekka.” Then he would get up and leave, smiling and apparently quite unfazed. I had also noticed that he would laugh and work himself up into an artificially good mood when he was with our aunt, but only, I noticed, when he knew that Mom could hear or see them. If Mom was elsewhere, there would be nothing unusual about his behavior. Not as far as I could see, anyway.

  There were times, I remember, when I interpreted all of this as the psychological aftereffects of the kidney transplant. I thought of what I had overheard while sitting on the stairs, and from that I formed the notion that Dad felt Mom had some hold over him because she had given him her kidney and that acting like a complete asshole in order to alienate her was part of a subconscious attempt to feel freer and more independent. But I was far from certain, I don’t even know if it was ever more than a half-formed thought. Mom and Dad didn’t talk to me or Rikard about what was going on, so all in all this was a confusing time for me. I had the feeling that everything around me was falling apart, but I didn’t know why or how. Nor did I have anyone to talk to. Aunt Rebekka, who was normally so outspoken, preferred not to discuss the matter, I could tell, because whenever I made some remark that invited her to comment on what was happening in the house, I came up against a brick wall. She would either act as if she didn’t know I was fishing for her thoughts on the situation, or find some excuse to leave the room. Rikard was as much in the dark about what was going on as I was, so he was no
help. He didn’t care anyway, or at least he tried to give that impression. When Dad took a little dig at Mom, for example, and Mom responded by looking even more hurt than she really needed to—possibly to make Dad feel guilty, I don’t know—Rikard would laugh and make it very clear that he regarded this as no more than a bracing little interlude.

  Of all the family Rikard was the one who changed the most during this time. Although I’m not sure when it started, he slowly but surely changed from a “little Gandhi” to being, if not exactly nasty, then at any rate the rather aggressive and arrogant sort of cynic that often comes to mind when the terms “West Side brat” or “Young Conservative” are mentioned. Or no, come to think of it, maybe he didn’t change that much after all. His Gandhi-like manner had, after all, also been a sign of a certain arrogance and aggression, a means of making other people—not least his former tormentors—feel like reprobates and losers; a passive-aggressive psychological weapon, in other words. So maybe Rikard hadn’t really changed all that much, maybe it was the climate at business school, which he went to straight after junior high, that encouraged him, as it were, to become a new version of himself, a persona tailored to fit the preppy mentality up there in Tromsø. Actually, when I think about it, I’m sure that’s it. And the fact that Dad was busy building up the new company at that time and that he was referred to in the newspapers as an entrepreneur, a captain of industry, and “the Salmon King of Bangsund” may also have been a contributing factor. Maybe this led Rikard to see himself as a future business magnate and maybe this in turn inspired him to give vent to this inherent arrogance and aggression in ways he considered befitting a budding captain of industry. I don’t know. In any case, he gradually adopted a style that went perfectly with the copy of the Wall Street Journal he always had tucked under his arm. He wore his hair slicked back and used expensive aftershave. He ironed his own shirts as soon as they were washed and while he may not have panicked, he certainly felt very out of sorts if he happened to forget and had to go to school wearing a creased shirt, anybody could see that. Aunt Rebekka called him “our little banker,” but “our little yuppie” was more like it. I certainly wasn’t the only one to suspect that the famous yuppies whom the papers were so full of in the eighties were his role models and that he had a vague dream of becoming some sort of playboy, with a bottomless bank account, a mobile phone (a real status symbol in those days), and a red convertible with a busty blonde in the passenger seat. Had it stopped at that, my relationship with Rikard might not have been as bad as it actually was at that time, but it didn’t. Rikard was as unsure of himself and as intent on discovering who he was and what to do with his life as everyone is at that age, I suppose—and the fact that he overdid it and turned himself into a caricature of a yuppie was in itself, of course, evidence of that. But just like some rockers I knew who tried to define their identities by disdaining people who exercised and ate healthily, so Rikard tried to define himself by disdaining and abhorring everything and everyone that he associated with anti-capitalism and socialism. He had nothing but contempt, for instance, for the friends I had made in high school. With a couple of exceptions, although none of them were avowed socialists, they were all doing social studies and since Rikard believed that the social studies department was a fucking breeding ground for socialists, he couldn’t understand why I would want anything to do with them. And the way they looked: some of them had long hair and wore clothes that must have been picked up at flea markets or the secondhand store at Namsos Rock Club. “I mean honestly, do they ever wash? Do they shower after phys ed?” he would ask, trying to look as if he was asking because he really wanted to know, but I knew, of course, that this was his way of telling me that he associated my friends with dirt and squalor. Not literally, but in the sense that they were liable to sully me with their radical ideas and radical tastes if I didn’t steer well clear of them. And in that he was, to some extent, right. During my years at high school I became quite the little radical. But that’s not the point here. The point is that Rikard strove so hard to live up to his obscure yuppie ideals that he eventually became insufferable. His inherent arrogance and aggression didn’t only take new forms, they reached new heights. He saw himself as a king, a world champion, and he acted as if everyone else existed merely to cater to his needs. This was evident, not least, from the way he treated his girlfriends. Take Hilde, for example, whom he started dating soon after he started business school, and who received the following birthday greeting in the Namdal Workers’ Weekly: