Хьелль Аскильдсен - The Dark Blue Winter Overcoat and Other Stories from the North

I start to nod off, because I am so sleepy, and when, a little while later, I wake up again, I can hear that there are fewer people in the living room, and that they are calmer now. I can’t hear my mother; perhaps she has passed out somewhere. I can hear two Danish men. One of them is about to leave, and the other one will follow. Once the first one has gone, the second man goes over to my mother and tries to wake her. He calls to her softly. I know very well what he wants. When he can’t wake her, he goes over to the door. I prick up my ears and listen to every step he takes. He continues moving towards the door, but just as I allow myself to relax, I hear him creeping even more quietly back towards the living room. I lie down in my bed and pretend to be sleeping heavily. I can hear him approaching my room. A thousand thoughts seem to whirl around me. I know very well what could happen. Somehow, I have to prevent it. He moves into my room, and I can hear him quietly placing his jacket and his large rubber boots on the floor so as not to wake me. But it is not until he walks slowly over to me and starts taking off his damn belt that it truly dawns on me what he wants. I open my eyes, lift up my head and stare directly into his eyes. “ Shhh … calm down,” he says quietly, as he puts his hand out and moves closer. I sit halfway up and shake my head. I am angry, terrified. But I know it won’t help to act like that. It is not enough. It takes all my courage to say something: “I’ll scream.” He steps closer, and I repeat: “I’ll scream!”

When, many years later, I look back on that night—and so many others like it—I wonder over the scale of the courage and the strength of the will I possessed. Thin and fragile; an easy prey for the horny, drunken men in my mother’s life. But no. I could not accept a fate of being a rape victim. I knew that my womanhood, my life, my future would be ruined completely by such an act. I would not let that happen to me. If it happened, I would never be able to forgive myself. When I grew up, I would give up and become an alcoholic. My life would be over in a split second. I could scream, I could fight against it, I could bite, I could kick, and I would do anything to protect myself. No one was ever going to break me.

I can see that the Danish man understands what I mean, what I’m saying. I can see that he understands that I’m ready to do whatever it takes to fight back. He starts moving backwards as he repeats, “OK… OK…” He picks up his jacket and his rubber boots and walks out of my room. Shortly after, I hear him going out of the front door. As soon as he has gone, I hurry over to the front door to lock it, checking in all the rooms on my way back to see that there is no one in them. I want to know if I can sleep safe and sound for the rest of the night.

Sometimes, when my mother was drunk, she would call for me, so she could tell me things. She would cry, sometimes, while she was telling me them, and you could see in her eyes that she had slipped back into her memories. Her father had worshipped his four sons. They were destined to be fishermen like himself. His only daughter was a thorn in his side. She was good for nothing. He took to hunting her around the house with a knife, but fortunately many years of fishing had worn out his body and made him slow. He would yell at her. Tell her that she shouldn’t go to school, because it was her brothers that would earn the money, so she ought to be making food for them, washing their clothes and making sure they came home to a clean house. My mother stopped going to school.

Several times I have been woken in the middle of the night because I was being choked by smoke. The smoke would be large and greyish and would have gathered into a bank of fog that grew larger and heavier, until it sank from the ceiling to the floor. I would wake with a shock, without knowing what awaited me out there, how it would look, how much damage there would be, and the adrenalin would start pumping around my body. Luckily what had usually happened was that my mother had passed out cold while she was making food, and I would awake just before the food burned to a charred, black crisp.

One night I awake at dawn to the smell of fire. My throat stings. I get up and walk out of my room, but I can barely see anything for the smoke. When I come into the living room, I get a glimpse through the smoke of my mother’s legs on the floor. She has passed out again. I go directly into the kitchen, over to the oven. As I get closer, I can see that she has put some food in the oven and then fallen asleep, and that the legs of meat have burnt away to nothing. I go to set the oven door ajar and turn off the oven, when a thought hits me… I could leave the oven on. I could leave the oven on and walk away. But where would I go? I could go to my grandmother’s, but then she would ask why I was over there in the middle of the night. When she discovered that there had been a fire over at our house, wouldn’t she then ask me what had been going on when I left, and how would I answer?

As I stand and think about whether I should leave the oven on, a mass of memories pop up. I decide to turn it off. If I let her die, I would end her suffering, and I have no wish to help her. Let her suffer. Let her battle her own shitty life. When she can no longer handle it, when she finally gives up, then she can end her life herself. I will not help her.

As I stand here and say my last goodbyes to you, it is hard to keep my thoughts in the present. I think about everything you have done to me and everything you never did for me. Mother is just a word.

Without a sound, she takes out her gear and tries to open the driver’s door. Her face clenched, she looks around her, ever on guard. She gets the door open, gets in and closes it quietly. She tries to start the engine. Successful, she immediately turns the heater on high and lets the warmth hit her hands which cover her mouth. Quietly and carefully she lets the car roll. When the house has disappeared from sight, she hits the accelerator. The heat begins to spread slowly throughout her body and a tense smile appears on her otherwise expressionless face. She laughs forcefully, but it is false and hollow. She turns on the radio and, screaming to the blasting music, she drives way too fast out towards the airport.

She drives as if intoxicated. She owns the asphalt. With yet another forced laugh, she aims directly at the street light, before straightening up the car right at the last moment. Over and over she plays “chicken” with the street light. Her eyes grow moist, but she dries them as if it doesn’t matter. On a long straight stretch, she floors it. With a firm grip on the steering wheel, she lifts her body up towards the windscreen and screams, then slumps back into her seat. The tears run freely down her cheeks, and she lets go of the steering wheel to dry them away.

You would see Louisa out walking in town with her mother. Like a wounded animal, following its owner, always with its head bowed, always compliant. She walked with small, hurried steps, shifting her weight between each foot. Stopping when her mother stopped; walking when she went onwards. Pulling on the sleeves of her coat, she scanned the ground intensely, but without really looking. There was no longer any Louisa left in Louisa. When people greeted her, she would laugh like a small child. But the laughter was toneless, not a child’s. A cold, empty laughter. The laugh of a crazy woman.

I remember clearly one day, when my mother picked me up from school. I wasn’t very old. When we went outside, I couldn’t zip up my coat. The zip on my coat began to taunt me: it wouldn’t work as it should do. Scared of making my mother mad, I tried frantically to zip up my coat. The more I tried, the harder it got. She had already gone a few feet when she turned around and saw that I had not followed her. When she got back to me, she grabbed hold of my coat by the chest, lifted me up and began to shake me. Stupid, useless, kid. It was during a break-time in front of a load of kids who were out playing. She shook me so hard that my coat was ripped to shreds along the zipper, and the down began to fall out over the playground like fake snowflakes. I cried: not because of the pain, but out of shame.