Dag Solstad - Shyness And Dignity

Little Camilla, Johan Corneliussen’s daughter, had moved into the newly purchased four-room apartment in Jacob Aalls gate along with Eva Linde. She became Elias Rukla’s stepdaughter. She lived there, together with them, from the age of six to nineteen. One can safely say that Elias Rukla had never got to know any other person as well as Camilla Corneliussen. He followed her growing up near at hand, as an always-present stepfather. Elias and Eva Linde never had a child together, so Camilla was the only child he would ever watch growing up. About Camilla he could say that she did not need to worry about having secrets from him, at least as far as her nature was concerned, for he knew her inside out. He had seen her express herself freely and uninhibitedly as a child and adolescent and turn, with much hullabaloo, into the young lady she was today. Through her he experienced a child’s fear of not being like everyone else, down to the minutest detail. He understood that this apprehension was even greater than the dread of being locked up in a dark room, which also was great and fundamental. And he came to understand the fear a little child can have that her shoe buckles, which she herself thinks are very pretty, do not look in the least like the buckles other children have on their shoes, that it can be a real torture to a little child’s soul, and for a long time, and this gave him a good deal to think about. How will she be able to develop into an independent person under such conditions? he had often to ask himself during Camilla’s adolescence. And it did not improve matters, quite the contrary, that the little child was at the same time extremely open and trusting with those around her, both with Elias and her mother, and even with those same children she was so afraid of not resembling to a T. What disasters, real and imagined, must this not lead to! And, sure enough, Elias witnessed all of little Camilla’s disasters and breakdowns near at hand. When her mother’s patience was exhausted, Elias stepped in, trying to soothe, encourage and comfort. And when Camilla entered her teens, he had to assume the role of mediator and reconciler between mother and daughter. He had a tendency to side with Camilla, for he thought that Eva Linde sometimes did not quite manage to distinguish between being Camilla’s mother and educator and being her mother and owner. For that matter, it had started right after they got together. Camilla had then been given her own room, which she kept in all the years she lived with them, though its appearance changed quite radically as time went on, and Elias felt that neither of them had the right to go in there unannounced. He was of the opinion that a child was entitled to have its own room and to be left alone there, without fear of being disturbed by grown-ups. Eva did not agree with that, and over the years they had a number of arguments about this, but though Elias was inclined to give in to Eva on other matters concerning Camilla — after all, she was her daughter — he did not do so in this regard. But Camilla often sought his company. He had felt terribly sorry for the little girl when, at six years of age, she came padding after her mother, a teddy bear under her arm, in order to settle in his place. He had a feeling that she had been deprived of something in her life, and that the sense of loss left by what she had been deprived of, a father, was irremediable. And he did not himself want to remedy it, not even if he had been able to. He was Camilla’s stepfather, taking the place of her father, but he could not replace that father, because he was not her father; her father was called Johan Corneliussen and lived in New York. Elias Rukla was her mother’s friend and new husband, and in that capacity he was to take her father’s place with Camilla. He did not for a moment wish to deprive Camilla of the sense of loss left by her father; that he had no right to do. Therefore he was always slightly reserved with her. When she came to him trustingly, wanting him to fulfil all her expectations, he had to take care to maintain a certain distance from her. In the same way, he found himself in a distant relationship with Eva’s parents, the retired colonel and his wife. Their purpose in coming to see the married couple Rukla/Linde was, after all, to have contact with their grandchild, Camilla Corneliussen. In such circumstances Elias Rukla was an intruder, and accordingly kept in the background as far as possible when they visited the colonel and his wife or were visited by them, as, for example, at Christmas, and he had the impression that Eva’s parents looked upon him as a man who, for the time being, was taking care of their daughter, even after they were quietly married, something that, per se, seemed natural to Elias Rukla. But in such circumstances, especially on Christmas Eves with the colonel’s family in Lillehammer, which Elias Rukla did not exactly look forward to, he was always a bit apprehensive that Camilla would come over to him, as she often did at home, and sit on his lap, and when she did, he tried to coax her away as quickly as possible by some diversionary manoeuvre or other, not least because under the Christmas tree there lay a big package from Johan Corneliussen.

Because one year after they had begun living together, Johan Corneliussen had manifested himself. He wrote a letter to his daughter. Camilla had then just started school, and her mother took the letter to her room and read it to her there. Elias never learned what it said. He insisted, though, that Camilla answer it, which Eva did not want. But Elias forced it through, and he sat for long periods with little Camilla composing a letter to her father, the way she herself would have written it if she had learned the art of writing letters. That she had not done, however; she could only write capital letters and had difficulty putting them together into words, which had a tendency to exceed the space of her sheet of paper when they were to make a whole sentence. So Elias had to help her, both with getting out of her the sentences she wished to write to her father and, later, with getting them down on paper in such a way that there was enough room for them. When this was done, at last, there remained the laborious task of preparing the envelope, on which Camilla would write her father’s name and address. Eva, as indicated, refused to have anything to do with this letter-writing, and Elias could not bring himself to write Johan Corneliussen’s name and address on an envelope which contained a letter to him from his daughter. So the only solution was that Camilla had to do it. But it took time to put the rather extensive address of Johan Corneliussen, written in a child’s handwriting, in place on the rather small surface that an envelope provides, and it can at least be said that Camilla learned to discipline her childish capital letters in a manner that was unusual among children her age. Afterwards, more letters arrived, and the same procedure was repeated, until Camilla had become big enough both to be able to read her father’s letters and to answer them on her own. She would sit undisturbed in her room writing letters to a father she barely knew, but who would haunt her entire life like a loss that nothing could soothe, Elias Rukla thought. When she was fourteen, she was invited to New York to visit her father and her half-siblings, born to Johan Corneliussen in his third marriage. Eva Linde protested strongly against her daughter going, but again Elias managed to persuade her. But when they stood on the roof at the Gardermoen Airport and saw Camilla pad out to the large jumbo jet that was to carry her to New York, Elias Rukla felt fear take hold of him. What if she never came back, what if she writes to tell us that from now on she wants to stay with her father! He had already noticed that she now and then wrote her name as Camilla Cornelius, from her father’s new name, which was John Cornelius, though not on anything official; but it said Camilla Cornelius on her pencil case, and she would scribble Camilla Cornelius on slips of paper strewn about everywhere, half in jest, but also to try out another identity, one that was more directly linked to her American father than Camilla Corneliussen, a name that Johan Corneliussen himself had dropped, and now Camilla, too, would drop Corneliussen and follow him as a Cornelius — at least she was trying it out, scrawling it down time and again, as he had noticed. Still, he insisted, and forced through, that she would go to New York that summer. He could not help it. With what right was he to prevent Johan Corneliussen from seeing his daughter again after eight years of being separated from her? With what right was he to prevent his stepdaughter from seeing her father again, after a whole lifetime, which after all it was to her? But fear took hold of him. Eva will not ever forgive me for this, he thought, and why should she? Johan Corneliussen has done nothing to earn this, he thought, and it would be bloody unfair to Eva. He cannot do this to us, he thought. But all summer he was afraid that this was exactly what Johan Corneliussen could do. Elias Rukla knew Johan Corneliussen’s exuberant personality, and what fourteen-year-old girl could resist this father when he displayed himself in his dazzling new surroundings? Poor Camilla, he thought, it is asking too much of you to be strong enough to resist. But Johan Corneliussen cannot do it, he thought. If he wants to, though, he will do it, leaving us behind, to sit here alone, for which I cannot ever be forgiven. What power that man has over us, he exclaimed, and for the first time he felt resentment against Johan Corneliussen and his entire person. But the summer went by. And Camilla came back again, to them, to stay with them in Jacob Aalls gate for the remainder of her growing-up years. At nineteen, after getting her final graduating exams, she left her childhood home to begin her professional education.