A Blessed Child
To Halfdan
Part I: The Road
In the winter of
2005
, Erika went to see her father, Isak Lövenstad. The journey was taking longer than expected, and she felt a strong urge to turn around and drive back to Oslo, but she pressed on, keeping her mobile phone on the seat beside her so she could ring him at any time and say that the visit was off. That she wasn’t coming after all. That they would have to do it another time. She could say it was because of the weather, the heavy snowfall. The change of plan would have been a great relief to both of them.
Chapter 1
Isak was eighty-four years old and lived by himself in a white limestone house on Hammarsö, an island off the east coast of Sweden. A specialist in gynecology, he had made his name as one of the pioneers of ultrasound. Now in retirement, he was in good health and his days passed pleasantly. All his basic needs were met by Simona, a lifelong resident of the island. Simona saw to it that he had a hot lunch and dinner every day; she gave the house a thorough weekly cleaning; she shopped, dusted, and did his laundry, of which there was not much. She also helped him with his annual income tax return and payments. Isak still had all his teeth, but in the past year he had developed a cataract in his right eye. He said it was like looking at the world through water.
Isak and Simona rarely talked to each other. Both preferred it that way.
After a long, full life in Stockholm and Lund, Isak had moved to Hammarsö for good. The house had stood empty for twelve years, during which time he had more than once considered selling it. Instead he decided to sell his flats in Stockholm and Lund and spend the rest of his life as an islander. Simona, whom Isak had hired back in the early seventies to help Rosa take care of the house (in spite of knowing that Rosa was the kind of woman, quite different from his previous wife and mistresses, who rarely needed help with anything, and especially not with the house, which by Rosa was kept to perfection), insisted that he allow her to take him in hand and cut his hair regularly. He wanted to leave it to grow. There was no one to cut it for, he said. But in order to restore the mutually preferred silence between them, they reached a compromise. In the summer, the crown of Isak’s head was blank and glossy and as blue as the globes he had presented to each of his three daughters, Erika, Laura, and Molly, on her fifth birthday; in the winter, he let his hair grow free, giving him an aspect of towering grayish white, which in combination with his handsomely lined, aging face suggested the beginnings of a
rauk,
one of those four-hundred-million-year-old island outcrops in the sea, so characteristic of Hammarsö.
Erika seldom saw her father after he moved to the island, but Simona had sent her two photographs. One of a long-haired Isak and one of the almost bald Isak. Erika liked the long-haired one better. She ran her finger over the picture and kissed it. She imagined him on the stony beach on Hammarsö with arms stretched aloft, hair streaming out, and that long, fake beard he would wear when rehearsing his lines as Wise Old Man for the
1979
Hammarsö Pageant.
Rosa—Isak’s second wife and Laura’s mother—died of a degenerative muscle-wasting disease in the early
1990
s. It was Rosa’s death that prompted Isak’s return to Hammarsö. In the twelve years the house had stood empty, there had been only occasional visits from Simona. She had swept up the insect life that forced its way in every summer and lay dead on the windowsills all winter; she had the locks changed after a minor break-in and mopped up when the pipes burst and water leaked all over the floor. But she could do nothing about the water damage and rot if Isak was not prepared to pay for workmen to come in and fix them.
“It’s going to get run-down whatever I do,” she said in one of their brief telephone conversations. “You’ll either have to sell it, do it up, or start living in it again.”
“Not yet. I’m not making any decisions yet,” Isak said.
But then Rosa’s body let her down, and though her heart was strong and wouldn’t stop beating, Isak and a colleague agreed in the end that Rosa should be spared. After the funeral, Isak made it plain to Erika, Laura, and Molly that he intended to kill himself. The pills had been procured, the deed carefully planned. And yet, he moved back to the house.
Chapter 2
Molly was born, against Isak’s will, in the summer of
1974
. When Molly’s mother, who was called Ruth, was giving birth in an Oslo hospital, Rosa threatened to leave Isak. She packed two suitcases, ordered a taxi from the mainland, took their daughter Laura’s hand, and said: “As long as you go on sleeping with anything in a skirt and babies are the result of it, there’s no place for me in your life. Or in this house.”
All this happened just before the premiere of that year’s Hammarsö Pageant, the annual amateur theatrical revue written and produced by Palle Quist. The Hammarsö Pageant was a tradition on the island; both tourists and residents contributed in their various ways, and the production had been reviewed in the local paper several times, not always favorably.
When Rosa had her furious outburst, her only one, as far back as Erika could remember, Laura cried, saying she didn’t want to go. Erika cried, too, seeing before her the long summer holiday alone with her father, who was too big for Erika to cook for or to comfort all by herself.
Ruth rang twice. The first time, she rang to say the contractions were coming every five minutes. Thirty-two hours later, she rang to say she had given birth to a daughter. She knew at once the child would be called Molly. She thought Isak would, at any rate, want to know. (No? Oh. To hell with him, then.)
Both times she rang from a pay phone in the hospital corridor.
Isak spent those thirty-two hours calming Rosa down and persuading her not to leave. The taxi waiting outside was sent away, then called again a few hours later, only to be dismissed once more.
Isak couldn’t live without Rosa, he said. This thing with Ruth was all just a big misunderstanding.
Isak sent Erika and Laura out of the kitchen several times, yet the girls kept inventing new excuses for coming in to disturb them: they were thirsty, they were hungry, they were looking for their soccer ball. In the end, Isak roared and said that if they didn’t let him and Rosa talk in peace, he would cut off their noses, so then the sisters hid behind the door and listened. That evening, when Isak and Rosa thought the girls were in bed, they came back to their post outside the door, wrapped in their blankets.
During the night, Isak almost succeeded in persuading Rosa to accept the word
misunderstanding
without, in fact, having to explain exactly who had misunderstood whom—Rosa, Ruth, or Isak himself—or how this sick state of affairs had arisen.
Isak had been away at a conference in Oslo nine months previously, yes. This is true.
He knew Ruth (at the time, just a pretty, fair-haired midwife who admired Isak), yes. Also true.
He had had sporadic contact with her, both before and after the conference, yes. And he is not denying this.
But Isak could not give any proper account of how and why Ruth was at that moment in an Oslo hospital, in labor with her first child and claiming he was the father.
This is where, in Isak’s view, some kind of terrible misunderstanding must have arisen.
After many hours of argument, attended by much slamming of doors and muttering of resentment, Rosa made tea for herself and Isak. The two blue suitcases she had packed for herself and Laura were still standing in the middle of the floor. The last thing Erika saw from her hiding place behind the door was her father and Rosa sitting on either side of the kitchen table under the big pendant lamp—also blue—each cradling a cup of tea. Both were staring out the window. It was still dark.
And when Ruth rang, early the next morning, to let Isak know he had a fine, healthy daughter weighing
3,400
grams and measuring
49
centimeters, and that the delivery had generally gone smoothly, he threw the telephone on the floor and shouted DAMN IT. Rosa, who was standing just behind him in a polka-dot nightdress, her long hair hanging loose and tousled, picked the phone up off the floor, put the receiver to her own ear, and listened to what was being said at the other end. She nodded, said something back, nodded again.
Erika and Laura, who had been woken by the ringing of the telephone and their father’s DAMN IT, crept out of their beds and back to their hiding place behind the door. They could not hear what Rosa was saying. She was speaking softly. The telephone was red and shaped like a periscope, with the dial in the base and a long cord so you could carry it around the house with you. When Rosa had finished her conversation, she tugged on the flex to gather it up and put the phone back on the hall table where it belonged. She returned to the kitchen and put her arms round Isak, who was standing in the middle of the floor, beside the suitcases. She whispered something in his ear. He laid his head on her shoulder. They stood like that for a long time.
Erika heard him say: “She should never have had that damned baby.”
In the days that followed, Erika and Laura talked over what it could mean: that
she should never have had that damned baby.
They realized the fuss was all about some Norwegian woman called Ruth, the mother. Laura said that their father, who knew more than most people about having babies, was cross because the Norwegian woman hadn’t waited for him to get there to help.
“Help with what?” Erika asked.
“With getting it out,” said Laura.
Erika said she didn’t believe that. Their father had said loud and clear that he didn’t want it, so why would he help?
Laura said maybe he could have helped shove it back into the mother again.
Erika said you couldn’t do that.
Laura said of course she knew that, she was only kidding.
Now, more than thirty years later, Isak would often say on the telephone that he lit candles for his daughters every evening. One candle for Erika, one for Laura, one for Molly, he said. He made it his business to mention this ritual of his to Erika as often as he could. Erika thought it was because he wanted her to pass it on to Molly, who, despite having lost her mother, the fair-haired midwife, Ruth, in a car crash when she was seven and having been sent to live with her grandmother rather than her father, had never stopped loving him.
