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.
Later, Johan went over Mai’s list. He had asked for six words; she had given him seven. One word had to be deleted.
Strong-willed and professional? Yes. She always got her way; she was a reputable and well-respected doctor. The wall of her office was covered with colorful children’s drawings. She was forever receiving cards from grateful parents. But she never took her work home with her, as they say. She once told him that she could not remember the names of the children she had treated, not even the ones who had died. Johan found this surprising.
It was a matter of will, she said. She didn’t
want
to remember their names. If she had to carry all those names about in her head, the ones who got well and the ones who didn’t, she’d never get any peace.
Ugly?
No, not ugly. But when Mai used the word she uttered it with something like pride, well knowing that she was magnificent precisely by virtue of her ugliness: her long gray hair, her child’s face, and her fabulous big nose. Had she been the slightest bit prettier she would have been far less attractive.
Steadfast?
Yes, unfailingly. Mai kept all promises and honored all agreements. It would never occur to her to break a promise, come what may. On one occasion, for instance, she had promised him that they would have dinner at a new restaurant in Oslo that had been getting rave reviews in the press. When they arrived at the restaurant, the maître d’ couldn’t find their name in his ledger.
“But I reserved a table,” Mai told him.
“I’m sorry,” the maître d’ said, “but I don’t have your name. Another evening, perhaps?”
“No,” Mai said. “We’re dining here this evening.”
“But—”
Mai cut him off. “The minute a table becomes available, you let us know!”
Johan and Mai sat down at the bar. It was eight o’clock. When ten o’clock came and they still hadn’t been seated, and the maître d’ gave no sign that it would soon be their turn, Johan said he’d rather go home and pick up a hot dog on the way.
“No,” Mai said.
“What do you mean, ‘No’?” Johan said.
“No,” Mai said. “We had an agreement, you and I. We agreed to have dinner here tonight. I promised you.”
Johan shook his head and sat for another ten minutes. Then he got to his feet and said, “That’s it, I’ve had enough.”
Mai remained where she was, staring straight ahead. “I’m waiting here,” she said. “I’m waiting right here. I’m having dinner here tonight, no matter what.”
So Johan left. Later, Mai told him that she did eventually get a table, close to midnight, and to the chagrin of the staff (the restaurant was getting ready to close) she proceeded to order a four-course dinner, which, to the staff’s relief, was nonetheless consumed in record time.
Childless?
Yes, but by her own choice. Johan raised his eyes from the sheet of paper. Sometimes, in the bathroom in the morning, after a hot shower, he would breathe softly on the mirror. And a face would reveal itself on the glass, not his face yet one akin to his own. A face he carried with him always. Johan bowed his head over the list once more.
Content,
she had written. Definitely, thought Johan. Mai’s natural state was quiet, inexplicable, and unassailable contentment. She had a capacity for enjoying what she called “the littlest things in life”: a lovely dinner, a glass of chilled white wine, a walk in the forest, Johan’s hands, Johan’s kisses. Years before, in the first flush of their romance, it used to surprise him how much pleasure she took in his body. She was hungry, passionate, curious, and always eager to make love. As the years went on he realized that all this passion had nothing to do with him. Or, rather, it had less to do with him and more to do with her: her mouth, her throat, her hands, her breasts, and her sex. It all came down to Mai’s pleasure in her own body and what her body could achieve when it came into contact with other bodies, what delights were possible.
The last word on Mai’s list was
honest,
and Johan knew that this was the word that had to go.
Mai wasn’t honest at all. Quite the contrary: she told lies. Pointless little lies that didn’t matter, lies never mentioned between them—or, rather, Johan never let on to her that he knew she was lying. Mai was proud, and proud people mustn’t be made to see that one has spotted their weaknesses. It’s upsetting, like stones thrown at a peacock that, in a moment of great ease, treats you to a display of beautiful feathers.
Letting a coward know that she is, indeed, cowardly can, on the other hand, be very satisfying. Alice, his wife number one, was a coward. “Alice and I were two of a kind,” Johan was wont to say. “We tormented each other.”
As for Mai’s lies: they were of no account. Simply not important.
One evening many years ago, Mai set off on the last train to Göteborg. She had been invited to speak on colic in newborn infants at a conference of Nordic pediatricians. Three days without Mai, Johan thought. The truth was, he couldn’t bear being parted from her for so long. When the door slammed behind her, he sat in their apartment in Jacob Aals Gate, rolling a spool of thread around the dining table. It was a Friday evening, and he toyed with the idea of taking himself off to the summer cottage they had bought across the Swedish border in Värmland. Better to be alone in the country than here in town. At least there he had the trees to talk to. He went on fiddling with the spool.
Then he said out loud, to himself, “Mai can sew.” And then he said, even louder, “Alice couldn’t sew. Alice couldn’t do anything but nag me. And count the pennies.
That
she could do!”
He cast an eye around the empty apartment. He thought he heard laughter from one corner.
“Alice, is that you?” he hissed. “Come back to haunt me, have you?”
He heard the laughter again.
“Bitch!” he muttered.
It was late in the evening. Johan knew that when he started speaking his first wife’s name and, worse, when he started talking to her, then desperation lay just around the corner. So he promptly decided that he wouldn’t go to the country cottage in Värmland. No. First thing next morning he would travel to Göteborg and surprise Mai.
Surprises are, of course, never a good idea. Johan was against surprises of any sort on principle, and one’s principles ought to be taken seriously. It was not a good idea to travel to Göteborg to surprise Mai. For one thing, they never even saw each other and she never found out that he had been there. Never. Not even after he was dead. And like as not she has forgotten all about that seminar. If, on his deathbed, he had asked her, Mai, do you remember seventeen years ago when you took the train to Göteborg to give a lecture on colic in newborn infants? she would have frowned and shaken her head. Mai’s memory has never been very good. The best that can be said of Mai’s memory is that it is selective. She remembers what she chooses to remember and forgets the rest. Johan believed this was one reason why she seemed so content and secure and why he, an insecure individual, could find peace with her. She simply forgets everything that she does not consider worth remembering.
Johan did not forget. Johan forgot nothing. There were times when he thought that the boil on his face, the bedsores, the bloody incisions, all those things that seeped and ached and throbbed, all those things that were turning his body into a dense swamp, were memories of life lived. That only now, at the end, through pain, had he become a reality.