Stig Dagerman - A Burnt Child

His fiancée has done everything else. She has swept all the floors, including her fiancé’s room—even though he didn’t want her to. When she asked him why he didn’t want her to, he said that his floor was clean. Nevertheless, she went into his room and when she came back out, the dustpan was full of dirt. Amid the dirt was a little yellow handkerchief, rolled into a ball. He let her throw it away, but when she did, he took her by the arm and told her that she shouldn’t go snooping around in his room. She didn’t understand what he meant, so she started imagining things. But after he said it, he felt sorry. Sorry because he wasn’t sure himself what he had meant and because he had hurt her. He regrets almost everything he says to her nowadays. But in spite of this, he still says it.

Other things are done, too. The books are dusted and so are all the picture frames. All the dishes are washed, too. She had to do that on her own because the father just stood by and watched. Well, he did do one thing at least. He brushed the dog. Now its fur glistens black like a woman’s fur coat. Then he caresses it as one caresses a woman. At one time, he wanted to buy Alma a fur, but he changed his mind and bought her a big black coat instead. It makes me so ugly, she had said. He replied that it suited her. He was the one who picked it out; he picked it because it made her ugly. He wasn’t aware of it then, but he realized it when her clothes came back from the morgue. And because he didn’t want anyone else to notice, he hung it up in the attic. He thinks about this as he strokes the dog.

He doesn’t do anything else but comb and pet. Well, he does walk back and forth in the apartment, here then there. It might seem aimless, but he’s actually following a plan the whole time. He doesn’t want to leave the son alone. In fact, since he came home he hasn’t left him alone for a single moment. If the son is in his room, he knocks and claims to be looking for something that might be in there. And once he’s inside, he doesn’t leave. He stands around chatting about this and that and doesn’t even notice the son isn’t listening until he asks him a question. But it doesn’t matter. The most important thing is that the son is not alone.

Berit arrives at eight. She is anxious because she can’t find any coffee. She is always anxious, even in ordinary situations, and she breaks a plate in her nervousness. There is no coffee, yet at nine o’clock there is to be coffee for five, or at least four. So the father goes to borrow some from a neighbor. And he takes the son with him. Standing in front of his neighbor’s door, the father realizes that this is the first time since the funeral that he’s had to deal with a neighbor. A woman opens the door. It’s one of the women who came to the funeral. But when she sees the widower something peculiar happens. She doesn’t open her door the way neighbors do for other neighbors but peeks through a small slit, which she doesn’t open any wider. She doesn’t say anything, either. Then the widower asks her if he can borrow a little coffee because they are going to have company at nine o’clock. The woman tells him that she’s out of coffee, but perhaps someone else has some. But they do not ask anyone else.

Instead, Berit makes tea. They wait in the other room as the water boils and Berit carries on slamming doors to cupboards in the kitchen. It’s very quiet in the other room. The father seems to be looking for a book in the bookcase. And in a way he is. He notices that the son’s textbooks have been moved, and when he notices, he looks immediately at the son. The son is standing by the desk, which has a pen without a penholder and a dried-out inkwell on it. There’s also a little glass jar with green beads in it that you’re supposed to dab your pen into when you’re done writing. This makes the beads rather dirty but the pen very clean. For fun, he picks up some beads and starts rolling them back and forth across the desk. Five beads don’t make a lot of noise, so he grabs some more. Yet not even ten beads make enough noise to drown out what he doesn’t want to hear. So he puts the beads back and starts banging on the desk with an ink-stained ruler. But he can still hear it. The father hears it, too. It’s because of this that the father is looking at the son. And it’s because of this that the son is not looking at the father.

What they hear is the noise from the kitchen. In the silence of the room they realize it hasn’t been noisy like this for three months. And suddenly it’s like a grave has been opened. At once, they remember her with a terrible, crystal-clear clarity. Does he remember Alma? Does he remember Mama? Maybe. Yet in a sense it isn’t she they remember. It’s the racket she made whenever she was in the kitchen and they were in the other room. A twenty-year-old noise. The rattling of spoons pulled from a drawer, the slamming of drawers, the sharp clinking of china against china, the scraping of chairs across the floor. Now she is back after being away for three months.

This is when the ghastly certainty strikes the son. It strikes the father, too, but it can’t frighten him the same way; it can only arouse a few minutes of uneasiness. But it hits the son with such force that he intentionally knocks over the glass jar with the green beads in it, so that he can lie on the floor without being suspicious. The linoleum is nice and cool. And to see the beads better, he lays his face on it, making his face nice and cool, too. Then he slowly begins refilling the glass. Before it’s filled, the father cries out to the kitchen:

Berit, he yells, sing!

Then she starts to sing because he yelled at her to sing. She will do anything if you yell at her. She will even do anything if you simply ask her. This is why some people like to ask her to do impossible things. “Pull down the moon, Berit,” you want to shout, or “Put out the sun!” And if you do, Berit will cry. Not because you are being mean but because she can’t do it.

In any event, it’s good that she is singing. Not because they can really hear what she’s singing, but because what they do hear is enough. They hear that it’s not Alma in the kitchen. They hear that it’s someone completely different. Yet they don’t hear Berit. Because that’s not what they want to hear. And as she sings, the father straightens out the chairs at the table. They are fine where they are, but the son is the one who put them where they are. So it’s good to move them around. Meanwhile, the son thinks there aren’t many beads left to find, but when he’s done picking them up, he sees there aren’t as many in the glass as there were before. There never is. They’ve upset the jar of green beads several times and some were always missing. There was only one time when none was missing. That time, Alma knocked it over while dusting, and they had to help her move the daybed because several of them had rolled underneath it.

Now the son doesn’t have to move the daybed, because Berit is singing. Had she been singing the whole time, he wouldn’t have needed to knock over the jar. And he wouldn’t have needed to know what he now knows—incidentally knows. We get to find out a lot of things. But much of what we learn, we forget. Even though it’s often said that we don’t forget anything. And by the time he puts the jar of green beads back on the desk behind the inkwell, he has already forgotten what the sensation of certainty meant. It was horrible, and horrible things are the easiest to forget. But they are also the easiest to remember. Before Berit started singing, he was standing by the desk and thinking that it isn’t his mother he’s been missing for the past three months. It’s the noise that came from her being alive.

Berit comes singing into the room, but when they realize it’s she, they ask her to stop. Then she tells them it’s nine o’clock. The clock hasn’t chimed, because it has stopped. And it has stopped because the key is gone. One evening, almost all the keys were gone. But out of habit the father still looks at the clock. For a month now, the father has been used to it showing half past eleven when he wakes up in the daybed in the mornings, and the same time when he turns out the lights at night.