The thermostat has been turned up for old ladies’ bones. The furniture consists of antique reproductions in dark wood, and atop a high vitrine there perches a stuffed condor with outspread wings. Gerda warned me about the condor on the phone earlier today. “Don’t be alarmed. When new guests come for the first time, they often find it unsettling, but my husband purchased it from a good friend before we got married.”
Gerda is retired, and she had plenty of time to talk on the phone. “We argued about that foul monstrosity for almost fifty years. Now he doesn’t give a fig about it! I could throw the bird away, or our vacation slides, or whatever. He just isn’t attached to anything anymore.”
Beneath a row of commemorative Christmas plates and the condor’s shabby, dust-colored feathers, we wait for the last participant to show. The meeting hasn’t started yet and the rest of the people laugh and chatter, exclaiming about how glad they are to see each other. They ask me about Frederik, and already we’re talking in a way that’s markedly different from the way I speak with my friends. This is what I’ve been yearning for. But I begin to shiver, even in this overheated apartment. Suddenly I feel this is my last chance to escape.
The woman to one side of me is a stout lady in her mid-sixties. If she’s wearing a bra under her loose rust-colored blouse, it’s not providing her with much support.
“You can say anything you want here!” she says, her voice rising with excitement. “Everything is permitted. There are so many emotions that can be understood only by someone who lives with a victim of brain damage. Your intense anger — which you might direct at the wrong person completely. Your grief — which you have to learn to live with. Your—”
“Ulla!” says the woman on my other side, interrupting her. “Do give Mia a chance to experience it herself.”
“All right, all right, I will. You should just know that here, you can be utterly frank. Utterly! That’s the way we are.”
When I talked on the phone last week to Kirsten, she took her time too, relating the medical history of every group member’s partner. Yet their tragedies all ran together in my mind. There are just two people I recognize from her descriptions. One is the only woman younger than me, Andrea, who’s in her mid-thirties and skinny, with a blond pageboy. I know she has a PhD in marine biology and two small children, and her husband fell down a mountainside while climbing in Norway a year and a half ago. Now he speaks with difficulty, has disturbing nightmares every night, and is paralyzed from the waist down.
The other one I remember is the grey-haired man, who’s one of two men in the group. I don’t understand why he looks so old, because he should be my age. He’s French, his name is Bernard, and he was in a car accident with his Danish wife eight years ago. Now she’s in a wheelchair and goes to a day-care center for handicapped people while he’s at work. They have twin boys Niklas’s age, so Kirsten thought we might have a lot to compare notes about.
Why this strong impulse to run away, flee?
The last woman arrives. Everybody’s been asking about the hospitalization of Kirsten’s husband, and complimenting Gerda on her cookies. Now we can begin. Soon I’m telling about my life in the four months since Frederik’s operation.
I feel so cheated when I tell about it. Cheated of a life. My coworkers and friends have lives; everyone has a life.
The others in the group can see that I’m not able to say anything more, and the woman at one end of the table takes over. Her husband suffers from what I’ve learned is called neglect. He doesn’t see the left half of anything. And it’s not that there’s anything wrong with his vision. In the first weeks after his stroke, he only ate the food on the right side of his plate and was constantly crashing into furniture and other things on his left side. It’s still impossible for her to watch TV with him, because he doesn’t grasp everything that happens on the left side of the screen.
Late one night when I was a little girl in Fredericia, I saw a film for grown-ups on our black-and-white TV. Dark grainy images set in colonial India. Some eminent man had died, and everyone expected his wife to accompany the corpse onto the pyre and be burned alive, in accordance with local custom. Her friends, her immediate family, everyone gathered around the pyre, staring at her in the night. Often now I see images from that night in my mind: I’m sitting on the sofa, my parents elsewhere. The faces, the darkness, the flames in black and white, and the snowy static on the old screen; the row of large dark Indian eyes. She climbs up on the pyre. Her husband’s family sets fire to it. She screams for a long time. And she dies.
I have a desire to hit someone. I want to hit the woman who came to our meeting late, I want to hit another woman for the way she spreads her lips and takes tiny bites from her cookies, so that everyone hears each crunch. I want to hit Bernard because he sits in his chair so unperturbed, with such masculine self-assurance. I want to smash the nasty condor.
Now another group member is talking, about her husband’s problems with food falling from his mouth when he eats.
This cannot be happening to me. I am young and play tennis and have a house in Farum. The others here must be full of fury too, but I just don’t see it. How do they do it? How do they excise the rage from their lives?
One by one I examine them. The weathered faces, the paintings on the wall, the vitrine and more faces, the mildness there; Gerda taking one of her cookies and quietly biting into it, holding the dry unbroken half before her where her eyes can bring it into focus and inspect it, then smiling softly and eating the rest; Andrea’s little pursed-up mouth, her tired eyes.
And then I see it. I see what distinguishes these women from the others I know.
They’ve effaced their sexuality. They’ve climbed onto the pyre, they’ve burned away their flesh. And Andrea’s the scariest of them all — so much younger than I but with those thin lips, the way she cowers, the way she looks as if no one loves her. As if she’s resigned herself to never being loved again.
And I look at Bernard. Eight years with a woman who goes to a handicapped center? Can a man stand it? Men aren’t the same as we are when it comes to sex.
Does it really suit him? His firm flesh, his short grey hair. Does he get a kick from having complete control over her? Sexually? Is he some sort of sick bastard?
His muscles are working beneath the skin of his jaw. A handsome man yet with something wolfish about him — and it isn’t just the well-trained body and the grey hair on such a young man. He hasn’t climbed onto any pyre, that’s for sure.
A woman at the other end of the table is saying, “Could we go around and each say something about guilt feelings? For instance, I know there’s no way I could have prevented Steffen from having a stroke, but it doesn’t feel that way. Especially when I think about our kids; I ought to have made sure it didn’t happen.”
Ulla leans over so that her hanging breasts brush against the tabletop. “I feel that way a lot! I ought to have kept their father healthy. It doesn’t make sense.” She glances at Bernard. “And my kids are thirty-eight and thirty-six. What if they still lived at home?”
Against my will, I find myself getting to my feet.
“I can’t imagine how you manage it,” I say. “It’s truly impressive. And year after year.”
I don’t give them time to reply, and I can hear I’m talking too fast. “What all of you put up with is much harder than what I have to. I’m not as strong as you … so maybe it’s me who … I don’t know if I ought to be here, I think I need to leave.”
I bend down to the table and slide my cup over so that it stands in front of my chair, precisely in the middle, as if I’m tidying up on my way out. Andrea looks up at me with her small pale eyes and says, “But my husband is still himself, Mia. That’s the difference. That’s the huge difference.”