My visual memories of those months are like gray fragments. I can see the hallway in the school building and the door to the toilet where I would sneak into a stall and shed a few tears as quietly as possible. I remember contemplating my pleated skirt and the gray ribbed wool stockings I often wore in winter as I sat there alone and, despite my unhappi-ness, felt relieved to be away from the others.
At my mothers urging, my father took up my case with the teacher, Mr. V. That encounter took on mythical dimensions in our family because Mr. V. was surprised by what my father had to say. Oblivious to all the intrigue that had been lurking in his own classroom, he spoke the words my parents would both later repeat to me: “But why Siri? She has so much going for her.”
It must have been in November or December of the following academic year that I had an epiphany. I now think that moment was simply a self-conscious recognition of my own dramatically changed circumstances. My family had left Minnesota for Bergen, Norway. My father was spending his sabbatical doing research at the university in the city where my mother’s brother and sister and their families lived. I loved the Rudolph Steiner School I attended. I loved my teachers. I loved my best friend, Kristina. The moment came one night after a party given by one of the boys in my class. He came from a wealthy family that lived in a large, low, elegant house outside Bergen. I was wearing the pink dress my mother had sewn for me, a minidress with a lace ruffle down the front, and the pink suede shoes with a small heel that had been purchased at the largest department store in Bergen. At the party I had danced with every boy in my class. Each one in turn had wrapped his arms around me and swayed slowly to the maudlin class favorite, “Silence Is Golden.” As I stepped out the door into the cold night, I saw that it was snowing. Outdoor lights illuminated the circular drive in front of the house as well as the snowflakes, which were so large I felt I could see the articulated form of each one as they fell slowly to the ground and turned it white. The scene wasn’t only beautiful; it was touched by magic. The dull, brown, and barren world of only hours before had been transfigured into a new and radiant albescence. I didn’t understand it at the time, but no picture could have matched my inner life more perfectly. I told myself to remember the snow and to remember my pure, strong happiness at simply being alive to see it. That thought has never left me.
The lesson of these brutal shifts of fortune ran deep. For some people, cruelty came easily, shamelessly. For me, every unkind word I uttered was followed by a merciless guilt and remorse I could hardly bear. I continue to be preoccupied with these differences among people. The mysteries of personality aren’t easily parsed, but it is certain that human beings run the gamut from the highly empathetic to the absolutely cold. The secret lies in our bodies and in the stories of our lives with other people, in the dark nuances of repetitions and interruptions.
It’s the summer of 1968, and most of the day and into the night I read. I read one book after another. The hooks excite and agitate me. I can’t stop reading during the day, and for the first time inmy life I suffer from ongoing insomnia. One night at two o’clock in the morning, I am still awake. I have been reading David Cop-perfield, but I’ve put it down from exhaustion. I get out of bed and walk to the window. I lift aside the shade and look into the night that isn ‘t night but isn ‘t daylight either. A pale yellow-green haze illuminates the rows of houses in front of me. It’s Reykjavik in June. There are no people outside and no noises. Everyone is asleep. Standing there, I am struck by a strong but pleasant sadness. All my anxiety leaves me as I look outside. I stand and look for a while longer and then return to bed.
Again and again, I have seen those houses in that queer light through the window. The memory is stubborn and potent. Why is this memory so insistent when others have vanished? Unlike the evening when I watched the snowfall, I didn’t tell myself to remember that view, but it returns to me all the time. The memory carries a feeling of melancholy that is linked to both reading and sleeplessness. The experience of David’s childhood had been an enormous one for me. By the time I looked out that window, I had lived through the sadism of Mr. Murdstone, the death of Dearest, the tenderness of button-popping Peggotty, the flinty goodness of Aunt Betsey, and the wonders of Mr. Dick, a character who remains one of my favorites in all of literature. It was that summer I began to nurse the fantasy of becoming a writer. The books made me feel deep and alive, as if these stories were closer to me than anything else. No one could have been less orphaned than I was with my two loving and attentive parents, and yet the sufferings of David Copperfield and Jane Eyre touched on my old sore. I surrendered the whole force of my empathy to the hero and heroine of those novels. Nevertheless, when I read about their sufferings and humiliations, my grief for them was a kind of safe translation — a reinvention of my own emotional life. Through them, I was able to make a turn in myself, and somehow that view from the window seen alone and at night has become an image for what I now recognize as the end of my childhood.
When I say my wound became political in the years that followed, I don’t mean that my involvement in the anti-war movement was somehow insincere or that I have any regrets about my activism. As a champion of the downtrodden, the disenfranchised, the poor, and the oppressed, I found a new outlet for the somewhat irrational but nevertheless strong sense I had of being an outsider in a group — uncomfortable, awkward, and quick to feel a slight. Political feeling can’t exist without identification, and mine inevitably went to people without power. In contrast, right-wing ideologies often appeal to those who want to link themselves to authority, people for whom the sight of military parades or soldiers marching off to war is aggrandizing, not painful. Inevitably, there is sublimation in politics, too. It becomes an avenue for suppressed aggression and anger, and I was no exception. And so it was that armed with passion and gorged on political history, I became a firebrand at fourteen. For three years, I read and argued and demonstrated. I marched against the Vietnam War, helped print strike T-shirts at Carleton College after the deaths of four students at Kent State, attended rallies, raised money for war-torn Mozambique, signed petitions, licked envelopes for the American Indian Movement, and turned into a feminist.
But even then, I didn’t believe all the rhetoric — the puerile drivel that escaped the lips of people like Abby Hoffman and members of the Chicago Seven. The militarism of the Black Panthers, the violence of the Weathermen, the shallowness of Guerilla Theater all alienated me. I remember listening to Russell Means, a leader of AIM, one winter afternoon in Minneapolis as he expounded on the superiority of American Indian culture as if it were a monolith and thinking to myself that his polemic distorted the vast differences among tribes to a degree that was nothing short of preposterous. I began to understand that ideologies necessarily push, pull, and tug at reality to make it fit the system. Even when they are committed in the service of a noble cause, lies inevitably make me recoil.
By the time I entered St. Olaf College as a freshman in the fall of 1973, the historical period into which I had been swept had more or less ended. I vividly remember a discussion I had with a sociology professor my first week as a student. He was a former priest who had been a civil rights activist and had marched in Selma. We discussed “the fall of the New Left.”