You Disappear: A Novel (8 page)

Beneath a row of commemorative Christmas plates and the condor’s shabby, dust-colored feathers, we wait for the last participant to show. The meeting hasn’t started yet and the rest of the people laugh and chatter, exclaiming about how glad they are to see each other. They ask me about Frederik, and already we’re talking in a way that’s markedly different from the way I speak with my friends. This is what I’ve been yearning for. But I begin to shiver, even in this overheated apartment. Suddenly I feel this is my last chance to escape.

The woman to one side of me is a stout lady in her mid-sixties. If she’s wearing a bra under her loose rust-colored blouse, it’s not providing her with much support.

“You can say anything you want here!” she says, her voice rising with excitement. “Everything is permitted. There are so many emotions that can be understood only by someone who lives with a victim of brain damage. Your intense anger—which you might direct at the wrong person completely. Your grief—which you have to learn to live with. Your—”

“Ulla!” says the woman on my other side, interrupting her. “Do give Mia a chance to experience it herself.”

“All right, all right, I will. You should just know that here, you can be utterly frank. Utterly! That’s the way we are.”

When I talked on the phone last week to Kirsten, she took her time too, relating the medical history of every group member’s partner. Yet their tragedies all ran together in my mind. There are just two people I recognize from her descriptions. One is the only woman younger than me, Andrea, who’s in her mid-thirties and skinny, with a blond pageboy. I know she has a PhD in marine biology and two small children, and her husband fell down a mountainside while climbing in Norway a year and a half ago. Now he speaks with difficulty, has disturbing nightmares every night, and is paralyzed from the waist down.

The other one I remember is the grey-haired man, who’s one of two men in the group. I don’t understand why he looks so old, because he should be my age. He’s French, his name is Bernard, and he was in a car accident with his Danish wife eight years ago. Now she’s in a wheelchair and goes to a day-care center for handicapped people while he’s at work. They have twin boys Niklas’s age, so Kirsten thought we might have a lot to compare notes about.

Why this strong impulse to run away, flee?

The last woman arrives. Everybody’s been asking about the hospitalization of Kirsten’s husband, and complimenting Gerda on her cookies. Now we can begin. Soon I’m telling about my life in the four months since Frederik’s operation.

I feel so cheated when I tell about it. Cheated of a life. My coworkers and friends have lives; everyone has a life.

The others in the group can see that I’m not able to say anything more, and the woman at one end of the table takes over. Her husband suffers from what I’ve learned is called
neglect
. He doesn’t see the left half of anything. And it’s not that there’s anything wrong with his vision. In the first weeks after his stroke, he only ate the food on the right side of his plate and was constantly crashing into furniture and other things on his left side. It’s still impossible for her to watch TV with him, because he doesn’t grasp everything that happens on the left side of the screen.

Late one night when I was a little girl in Fredericia, I saw a film for grown-ups on our black-and-white TV. Dark grainy images set in colonial
India. Some eminent man had died, and everyone expected his wife to accompany the corpse onto the pyre and be burned alive, in accordance with local custom. Her friends, her immediate family, everyone gathered around the pyre, staring at her in the night. Often now I see images from that night in my mind: I’m sitting on the sofa, my parents elsewhere. The faces, the darkness, the flames in black and white, and the snowy static on the old screen; the row of large dark Indian eyes. She climbs up on the pyre. Her husband’s family sets fire to it. She screams for a long time. And she dies.

I have a desire to hit someone. I want to hit the woman who came to our meeting late, I want to hit another woman for the way she spreads her lips and takes tiny bites from her cookies, so that everyone hears each crunch. I want to hit Bernard because he sits in his chair so unperturbed, with such masculine self-assurance. I want to smash the nasty condor.

Now another group member is talking, about her husband’s problems with food falling from his mouth when he eats.

This cannot be happening to me. I am young and play tennis and have a house in Farum. The others here must be full of fury too, but I just don’t see it. How do they do it? How do they excise the rage from their lives?

One by one I examine them. The weathered faces, the paintings on the wall, the vitrine and more faces, the mildness there; Gerda taking one of her cookies and quietly biting into it, holding the dry unbroken half before her where her eyes can bring it into focus and inspect it, then smiling softly and eating the rest; Andrea’s little pursed-up mouth, her tired eyes.

And then I see it. I see what distinguishes these women from the others I know.

They’ve effaced their sexuality. They’ve climbed onto the pyre, they’ve burned away their flesh. And Andrea’s the scariest of them all—so much younger than I but with those thin lips, the way she cowers, the way she looks as if no one loves her. As if she’s resigned herself to never being loved again.

And I look at Bernard. Eight years with a woman who goes to a handicapped center? Can a man stand it? Men aren’t the same as we are when it comes to sex.

Does it really suit him? His firm flesh, his short grey hair. Does he get a kick from having complete control over her? Sexually? Is he some sort of sick bastard?

His muscles are working beneath the skin of his jaw. A handsome man yet with something wolfish about him—and it isn’t just the well-trained body and the grey hair on such a young man. He hasn’t climbed onto any pyre, that’s for sure.

A woman at the other end of the table is saying, “Could we go around and each say something about guilt feelings? For instance, I know there’s no way I could have prevented Steffen from having a stroke, but it doesn’t feel that way. Especially when I think about our kids; I ought to have made sure it didn’t happen.”

Ulla leans over so that her hanging breasts brush against the tabletop. “I feel that way a lot! I ought to have kept their father healthy. It doesn’t make sense.” She glances at Bernard. “And my kids are thirty-eight and thirty-six. What if they still lived at home?”

Against my will, I find myself getting to my feet.

“I can’t imagine how you manage it,” I say. “It’s truly impressive. And year after year.”

I don’t give them time to reply, and I can hear I’m talking too fast. “What all of you put up with is much harder than what I have to. I’m not as strong as you … so maybe it’s me who … I don’t know if I ought to be here, I think I need to leave.”

I bend down to the table and slide my cup over so that it stands in front of my chair, precisely in the middle, as if I’m tidying up on my way out. Andrea looks up at me with her small pale eyes and says, “But my husband is still himself, Mia. That’s the difference. That’s the huge difference.”

I manage neither to sit down nor to leave the table.

She continues, “My husband is still the man I’ve always loved, the same laughter and interests. He just has some problems now. Your situation is much more difficult. It’s totally natural that you think it’s hard!”

“More difficult? Yes, but when I hear about you … the wheelchair, the two small children!”

“
Your
husband’s injury makes it so you no longer know who you’re sacrificing yourself for.
That’s
hard!”

My body got up without my deciding to, and now it’s on its way to the door, about to burst into tears without me having control over anything at all.

“I think you’re right, Mia,” I hear Bernard say behind me. “You
aren’t
like us. It’s obvious that your husband isn’t nearly as sick as our spouses.”

Such a weird thing to say.
You aren’t like us
. No one’s told me anything like that since I was a schoolgirl. But now I suppose I should understand the words as something positive. I turn toward him.

“No I’m not. He’s not so very sick.”

He gives me a reassuring smile, almost like Frederik or my father-in-law. “But that’s why you might find it interesting to hear about our very different experiences.”

“Yes,” I say, “I might. And Frederik’s going to get better, of course.”

“Exactly. He might make a lot of progress in the coming months.”

I’m trembling, yet when I look at my hand, it isn’t shaking. And I feel something gnaw at me deep inside, far down in my abdomen, just like the cramps that used to plague me as a teenager. I never figured out if it was due to the mechanics of puberty, or to everything from my mother that I had to put up with—or being terribly infatuated with a boy two grades above me.

At last my body begins to return to my chair. The group waits, considerate and curious, while I seat myself.

“The first meeting can sometimes be a little overwhelming,” says a woman whose husband used to be a department head in the Ministry of Justice. Earlier she was explaining how he’s been stealing trash and odd items from the neighborhood and putting them into big piles in their yard.

And several members repeat what Bernard said, which they now understand is what I really want to hear.
Your husband isn’t like our husbands
.

“Thank you. I’d really like to stay. You have a fantastic group here. I don’t know what happened …”

We grow quiet. We drink from our coffee cups and look at one another.

“Thanks for urging me to stay,” I say—not to Bernard, but to Gerda. “You should just keep going.”

A short while later, Gerda receives a call from Kirsten in the hospital.

We try to listen in, and soon we understand that something’s gone well.
Gerda takes the handset from her ear and tells us that Kirsten’s husband is now in stable condition; it was a much smaller stroke than the last one. It’s a terrible setback for his rehabilitation, but he survived.

“Congratulations!” we all shout in chorus to Kirsten on the phone.

After Gerda’s hung up, she slumps in her chair. “Kirsten’s greatly relieved,” she says. “Both of them are.” She tells us in detail what Kirsten said, and then she goes out to the kitchen to put on some more coffee.

We talk among ourselves. Through the even murmur of voices, I distinctly hear Ulla say, in a subdued voice to the woman who feels guilty toward her adult children, “It would have been better if Kirsten’s husband had died this time.”

Can you say that? Am I the only one who heard it?

A quick ripple of unease passes around the table. Andrea raises her voice, so that even Gerda out in the kitchen will be able to hear her. “Ulla, how’d you feel if someone said that about
your
husband?”

Ulla gazes at her with vague, tranquil eyes. She shrugs her shoulders and says nothing.

Glancing back and forth, everyone’s eyes meet, and now I see a warmth in their faces that I’ve had a hard time seeing in anyone’s for a long time. There it is: warmth. I can feel it. We smile controlled, crooked smiles that are anything but merry.

Figure 8.3. A common test for neglect, in which the subject is asked to place numerals and hands on a clockface. The test shown here reveals pronounced neglect
.

The three years before Frederik collapsed in Majorca are the ones that Niklas and I need to remember and find strength in. In those years he was a dream of a man. The time we had with the real Frederik was brief, but for those few years he deserves my willingness to sacrifice the rest of my life in caring for him.

We spent extended weekends in Budapest, Prague, and Vienna, sometimes with Niklas, other times just the two of us. We repaired the roof on the house by ourselves, sitting up there with our safety lines tied to the chimney, him so funny and happy while the house and the yard and the other fine homes of Farum lay spread out beneath us. Together we chose new plants for the yard, so that the blooms would be better distributed over the course of the summer. And we redecorated the bathroom, building a large shower stall that we inaugurated twice in one evening while Niklas was sleeping at a friend’s. It felt strange to fall so wildly in love with my husband again, after so many years of feeling cheated.

Even after spending one entire summer Saturday alone together, we found ourselves slipping away from a garden party at a neighbor’s because the other guests bored us and we would rather spend a few more hours by ourselves. We ran back to our yard and sat in the hanging sofa that had become our special place. We opened our own bottle of wine, and there we sat and watched the pale blue summer sky turn slowly to night. Beneath us, the gentle swing of the sofa. I took off my shoes and sat with my legs tucked up. We looked up at the outermost twigs of the apple tree. Gazed at each other and our small yard.

We had created everything here. It was good. Niklas and the house and yard and each other, our whole life together. Because we had stuck it out, because our love was strong enough.