Chapter 16 - Only Human

Beate is fashionable, her style is of the time. Beate is time, because she is so young. She is fluid. I am not time any longer, I am age. That means calcification, the death of cells. I do not mean much by all this, it is a stockpile of words I construct to keep myself down for the most part, that is how depression works: it produces thoughts that squeeze emotions together, force them down or push them away. I think this myself, because I am possessed of self-knowledge. This gives a double dimension to most things. Double depression, double longing, and in theory double joy as well.

Beate has freckles and long fair hair, tight faded jeans and a white blouse which she has tied a knot in on one side. Plucked eyebrows and deep pink lip gloss. When I am close to her I can smell different fragrances, some must be from the styling products in her hair, some from body lotion and perfume, and some maybe from the fabric softener on her clothes.

I recall a reader’s letter on a page aimed at children and teens in a newspaper:

What’s wrong with being perfect?

I wear Uggs, cool clothes and make-up. I am pretty, many people say I look perfect. What’s wrong with that? Why should I be criticised for it?

I could have told her: nobody is perfect. Only babies, and you are hardly a baby any more, are you? Or: what is perfection? Or: perfection is boring. But I do not understand exactly what I mean by that. I understand neither the girl nor myself. Deep down I think that perfection exists. But I do not want it to. Why can we not just say it is irrelevant, that we can manage without the word?

We say that we live, I write in one of my notebooks, but it is not like that, that is a very poor description. At any rate, I do not live. It lives me. As if that is a better way to put it. Idiot. My dreams have deceived me. They have no time limit, yet time leaves them behind. Sooner or later there will be nothing ahead.

But I do not speak to Beate in the same way as I write. On the contrary. I play her music, show her books, tell her about them and am even enthusiastic when I do. Beate shall have what I myself want. Beate’s open, young face. Isn’t she beautiful? Anita used to say, beautiful, I would say, she’s lovely, perfect.

I take books down off the shelf when I am alone as well.

I have everything, yet it is still not enough.

It is humid outside, but dusty amid the books, I find it hard to breathe. There is a picture of a forest on one of the covers. A woman walks alongside a river in the forest, in a black skirt and white blouse. I look out through the window at the overturned wheelbarrow. The flies, the midges hovering above the water bucket. The spade planted in the ground.

I feel sorry for myself. I have not lived through the Second World War, have only had my own fear, the dreary notebooks and nothing at all to frame my life, give me direction and consequently a purpose, no complete collection of friends, ways of speaking and conventions, no distinct culture, neither ideals nor visions. Only the flowing past, the one I found in books, or my own, the one that comes drifting.

We live in an age where nothing is at stake, I am in the habit of saying amongst gatherings of friends, slurring slightly after too much red wine, nor is there anything to fight against, no oppressive morality or suppression, the meaning of life cannot be identified. That is what I say, but not what I am thinking. There is nothing wrong with time, I think, it is not us, it is me. I lack something, I am not here, I should take a master’s degree, a doctorate, maybe two.

I can do anything I want, there are no obstacles, it all depends on me and me alone.

No, I am too tired. Tired of thinking. Tired of lacking. Whatever it might be that I lack. Greater spirituality, or a man, a love that shakes me to my very core?

Or an activistic attitude, a societal engagement. That would help me see the meaning of life. To be committed to a cause, along with other people. To work for the common good.

So I do mean what I say through the haze of red wine. I am going in circles. Nothing generates purpose in me. There are no limitations.

Only loathing.

Knut used to laugh at me and say I got too worked up about the most inescapable facts. You’re Norwegian, he would say, you just have to put up with it. That’s how life is for us. Security has its price. You don’t pay heed to the fact that the very existence of the planet is under threat, nature, climate change, all that stuff, there’s a cause for you, but you don’t involve yourself in that, maybe you find it boring?

Yes.

I travelled to Berlin instead to look for Jews, but they had literally gone up in smoke. I cried, not for them, but because I could not stroll into 1933, into a bourgeois Jewish apartment, sit at the table by the light of the candelabra and break bread, dip it in soup. I suffered from a non-committal reverie, exoticism, that was me, distant.

The trip was confusing, lonely, my attention attracted to shopping centres, museums, their gift shops, cafés with nostalgic servings of Sachertorte and espresso, hot chocolate with real cream, this word ‘real’ actually meant ‘old’, old cream, yes, my awareness of the present interfered with everything. The camera shaded my face. The text in the tourist guide never stuck in my mind.

I do not even know if I have utilised my books as well as I might have, if burying myself somewhere in the story might have helped, remaining there, not moving, not watching so many films, not reading so many novels or forgetting to read them, just seeing them pile up and become titles I would one day want to penetrate, but which remained simply titles, something familiar I was nevertheless unfamiliar with, something I had obtained, but had not used.

But the self-criticism has declined, not because I have matured, but because my time is running on and running out, I need to hurry. What I do not have time to absorb now is never going to be of benefit to anyone, what I do not read will not be read by me and what I do not write will not be written by anyone.

Yes, that is how I am, me, Bea Britt Viker. Filled with self-pity that poisons my intelligence and emotional life, and makes me feel even more sorry for myself. I am without doubt a true child of my time. Every time I read in the newspaper about an underage asylum seeker the Norwegian government has sent out of the country I sigh and say: I cannot even manage to get upset about that, I do nothing. That is the way things are around me, passive, but simultaneously marked by excessive activity, excessive consumption, restlessness. We suffer from a lack of alternative courses of action, suffer. But what can I do? Me? The solution is not to be found on the level of the individual, I say. What an awful person I am. A cliché.

I have pondered it since the children were born. The black dog. The black sickness. Warm and sleek, it slips between the trees. Pauses, approaches, waits outside the house. A faithful friend. Standing guard. I am inside the house. Cannot get out. The dog can enter but I cannot leave. The dog is free. It does not have to speak. It was Knut who told me that Churchill termed his depression the black dog. Knut suffered a lot from depression. I did too. But I did not understand why that animal would embody depression. Smooth, glossy black dogs are beautiful after all. And as I stand looking at Beate, I have a sudden insight: the dog is not depression itself, but its companion, the opposite. The wonderful things there are no room for, the things melancholy has displaced. The dog is actually your friend.

Beate’s skinny body. That was what put me in mind of the black dog. Surely she has not got an eating disorder, I thought, at the same moment remembering that Anita and I had once taken the children to a stage production of When the Robbers Came to Cardamom Town. There was something about one of the actors. She was playing Mrs Bastian, wore prim fifties attire and had long legs that were far too thin. Her kneecaps protruded. Anorexic, I whispered to Anita, but Anita was not interested. There is something about her stance as well, I thought, staring at the actor, she stands like a little girl. Even though she was strong and could both tap-dance and smile coyly, she moved her legs like a young girl. When she turned to the side slightly, or stood still. Something awkward, knock-kneed. I remembered how it was back when I was fighting to stay thin. That feeling of being in harmony with myself, that came from keeping my weight down. As though my body belonged to a stranger and was made ready for this ownership, another life. Every time I exited the house, I was out to tender, I only existed in expectation of something else. My body was as light as that of a child. Soft and supple. It was while I sat looking at the actor’s anorexic body that I realised I was seeing something other than the childlike. It was the opposite. Which was perhaps not the opposite. I was looking into something complex. My head throbbed, my thoughts trailed off, and the three robbers came singing and dancing onto the stage. What coordination. Look, so strong, I whispered to Anita. Sexy, she whispered back, more interested now, we sniggered. My stomach ached. I wanted to have every one of the men on stage. They were in control. They could withhold or dole out affection. The unruly chest hair. The very thought of men like that taking care of small children turned me on. That was where the misunderstanding lay, the twisted factor. If it is a misunderstanding, that women want to be women-children. First they fight themselves free from the symbiotic sense of belonging with the fleshy bodies of other girls. After that they can stand alone in front of men. Visible. Something special. When no longer a part of their bunch of friends they can be plucked: pick me, no, no, take me instead. Be like a father to me, but fuck me. Lift me up, hold me tightly, deal with me. Know better than me. Control me. I need you. I want to need you.

Skinny legs and pointed knees. Mere swell of breasts. I cannot be more visible. It is sexy. Stomach flat between my hip bones, skin taut. There is space for a man’s hand there. It can take up all the room. Lust after me, away, away into the darkness. The woman who wants to look like a child is desperate with desire. Men think women like that have no interest in pleasure, that they are only concerned with themselves, that they must be roused, but that is a misapprehension, on the contrary, on the contrary, I thought, and that was how I was. Misunderstood.

What is it about penetration that is so crucial?

Don’t ask if you can’t answer.

Why not?