Savage Love Page 13

  Uncle Boris up in a Tree

  The photo was taken just before all hell broke loose. Uncle Boris, always the clown, perches on a tree branch above the family group, making a mockery of the occasion. Jannik, the wastrel, smiles inscrutably. Bjorn, the straight arrow, looks like a man with all the troubles of the world on his shoulders, but he works in a bank in town and can afford a gold watch and fob. His eyes are closed. Gurn, the insane one, his mouth twisted from a horse kick, seems merely confused, innocent, and anxious. Lisel, the compulsive smoker and Bible reader, has momentarily suppressed her persistent and fatal cough. The three young ones huddle with Ma and Pa: Trig, later executed for murder, only six in the photo and dressed like a girl; Grete, who became a great lover; and little Nikolai, the math genius, eight months old. Bjorn’s wife Olga, plain as a pine plank but seething with desire, leans against the tree trunk next to Jannik. Aunt Doreen, flighty, excitable, and dim, stares at the camera warily. Daphne, the family slut, has her hands in her skirt pockets and her head tilted to one side.

  *

  It begins like this: a family dinner, alfresco despite the lateness of the year, just after the turnips were in and the hog slaughtered. Bjorn walks behind the barn to pee and discovers his wife Olga in a passionate embrace with Jannik, the wastrel. At first, the couple remain unaware of Bjorn’s presence. They whisper sweet, desperate nothings in each other’s ears. “Oh, my little potato bug!” “Oh, you bad boy, you bad, bad boy, oh!” Bjorn knows that Jannik sleeps with girls in town. He’s even discussed with Olga how Jannik seduced one of the bank tellers. Jannik is drunk half the time. He borrows money from his parents to spend at the dance halls and buy presents for his girls. Bjorn sees nothing charming in him. When they were boys, Bjorn was forever finishing the fights Jannik provoked. The scene behind the barn repulses Bjorn. He doesn’t want to be the straight arrow any more. Suddenly, he doesn’t remember why he married Olga. They have been trying to have a baby for three years, long nights of sweaty labour sawing away under the goose feather quilt. She nags at him to ask Herr Grimmig for a raise. She is always accusing him of sleeping with the tellers at the bank. She calls the teller pool his private harem. Now she sighs and squeals, trembling in Jannik’s embrace; Jannik thrusts himself against her and fumbles with her skirts. The white flesh of her doughy thighs flashes in the October sunlight. Seeing her flesh, Bjorn feels an unaccustomed throb of desire. He should object, but there is nothing he can say now that will make this scene better. Yet he cannot tear himself away. Then Olga, with a shriek, notices him at the corner of the barn. Their eyes meet. It breaks the spell. Bjorn claps his hat on his head and turns on his heel, thinking only of escape, relieved almost, turgid with desire. Suddenly, time, which had seemed forever stalled in a state of minute reiterations of itself, begins to flow again. He feels the current under his elbows, tugging him along. Olga frantically pushes Jannik away. Bjorn glimpses drab nether hair, petticoats, and the tip of Jannik’s erect penis like a small purple heart. Olga catches up with him at the gate. “That didn’t mean anything,” she says. “I had too much potato vodka. Jannik made me. I was confused.” Bjorn towers over her. He can’t think of anything to say. It seems like a speech from some other drama, staged long ago. Her breath smells like red onions and garlic, an odour he associates with love. “Anyway, I’m pregnant,” she says. Bjorn’s shoulders sag. Suddenly, the doors of his cage clang shut again. The doors are called duty and responsibility. The entire family is watching from the blankets spread on the lawn amid the squirts of goose shit and pats of cow dung. Chickens, geese, and eight-week-old shoats wander from plate to plate looking for leftovers. “Enough,” says Bjorn, allowing himself to be led back to the festivities. Jannik’s shirt-tail hangs out. He throws his head back and guffaws at something Pa says. There is a war in Bjorn’s head. Briefly he becomes a philosopher. He thinks, What does it mean to be alive? How should one behave? He gazes up at the sky, cold and numbingly blue. Trig, always the sensitive one, bursts into tears. Uncle Boris is climbing the tree again, trying to make everyone laugh. Bjorn catches up a bottle of potato vodka from the blanket and whirls away. He has the air of a man who is never coming back. Two of the shoats start to drag baby Nikolai toward the bushes. Daphne, the slut, laughing, rescues him and clutches him to her breasts. Olga cries, “If it’s a boy, we’ll name him Bjorn.”

  In the days that follow, Pa remembers that Bjorn’s bank owns the farm. He has been borrowing money and losing it for years. Pigs and turnips never seemed to catch on. He tried asparagus once, but the pigs ate the asparagus. Bjorn convinced him to modernize by buying a computer for his accounts. He keeps a list of the pigs, their birthdates, and their weights. Every weekend, he catches the pigs, weighs them, and enters the new weights on a spreadsheet called Pigs. Bjorn didn’t tell him how this was going to make money or pay off the loan. In another file he keeps a list of his children, their birthdates, and their weights. He doesn’t know what the older children weigh any more. In yet another file he keeps track of the number of people living in his house and how many square feet each person occupies. And in a fourth file he notes everything each person eats and how much he would charge if he were operating his family as a business. It gives him some satisfaction to know that if he did charge room and board, he could have paid off the bank loan years before. Pa moves into the barn to get away from his children, who are not working out the way he had expected. He catches the piglets and weighs them and plays solitaire on the computer. He senses a drift in the life of things, a massive inconsequentiality. He thinks of the mole on Ma’s left breast, shaped like a rabbit and sprouting three dark hairs she strokes and flattens during her morning reveries. He remembers that when he was a boy, he wanted to be a painter. He didn’t even know what a painter was. Now he drags out tins of leftover house paint, cleans his brushes, and begins to slap out garish murals on the inside walls of the barn. He tries to paint the pigs, but they run around and rub against each other and smudge the paint. Pa has never felt as happy as he does now, painting his vast picture. Since they have nothing else to do, the children sit in the barn and watch and offer helpful criticism. At first Pa doesn’t mind, but soon they begin to tell him secrets. They confess their lies, their sins, and their darkest desires. Jannik pats a pig painted to look like a dachshund and says that he doesn’t love Olga but wants to propose to the bank teller instead. He needs money to buy her a make-up present. Daphne confesses that she cannot keep her legs closed, that she wanders into town without any underdrawers beneath her skirt and offers herself to strangers. She is happiest of the children, Pa notices. Trig chases a piglet with a pitchfork with murderous intent, but his skirts tangle in his short, ungainly legs, and the piglets are, so far, too quick for him. Next to Bjorn, Trig seems the least happy. Bjorn has gone back to work in the bank. Days, Jannik sneaks into town and sleeps with Olga. Olga slaps the walls when she comes and makes wild and indiscreet noises as she labours under his thighs. She tells Jannik she has never felt so alive, so wonderful. “You make me feel beautiful,” she says. The words chill him. He can hardly bear to look at her face. Every time they sleep together, he is racked with guilt toward his brother. Evenings, Olga sets a plate of peas and radishes for Bjorn and sips potato vodka and tells him what an oaf, what a failure he is. She screams at him about his harem of secretaries and claims to smell sex and eau de cologne on his clothes. Sometimes she just leaves the plate of peas and radishes and drives back to the farm and sits giggling in the loft with Daphne, comparing their lovers. Boris entertains everyone by pretending that his job is to move the manure pile. He actually does move the manure pile every day, from behind the barn to the front yard or the potato field or the coal cellar, and then again the next day. Every morning, Jannik and Daphne take turns telling him to move the manure pile, and Boris throws his head back and laughs till tears roll down his cheeks, and then he fetches a shovel and wheelbarrow and moves the manure pile.

  Gurn falls into a depression, only no one
notices because he is already silent and crazy. His scarred lips twist in unspeakable agonies. He leaves notes tacked to the refrigerator door with magnets in the shape of pigs. “Why does the manure pile keep moving?” he wonders. “Why does Bjorn live in town with that ugly woman?” The slightest change in routine Gurn takes as a personal assault. He feels constantly victimized by Fate, a plaything of the gods. “The Universe is an inexplicable mystery,” he writes. He thinks, What does it mean to be alive? How should one behave? Without telling anyone, he sends away for literature about assisted suicide. Eventually he will hang himself from the branch where Uncle Boris sat for the photograph, but not in this story. Nights, while her father is sleeping, Daphne sneaks into the barn and uses his computer to sign onto an Internet dating site where she posts naked photographs of herself taken in the bathroom mirror. She likes to read Jane Eyre in a hammock strung between two cedars in the backyard. She wants to find an old blind man like Rochester whom she can love and care for. “I will be your eyes,” she whispers to herself. “I will be your eyes,” she whispers to every man she sleeps with. At heart she is a true romantic. She is a true romantic who likes sex. Grete overhears her sister’s whispers. “I will be your eyes.” She picks up the discarded book and begins to read. Lisel chain-smokes hand-rolled cigarettes in the hayloft, reading her Bible by a candle in a bronze holder. In a notebook she keeps a list of people God smites for no good reason. Aunt Doreen watches Pa paint another shoat to look like a Dalmatian, only red with green spots. She opines that she is probably a lesbian. She tells her brother that Amy Rastinhad touched her breasts when she was thirteen and she has been in love with Amy ever since, though Amy moved away to a big city in the East and disappeared from her life. She wishes they had made love, because now she is forty-two and it doesn’t look as if she’ll ever make love to anyone and it makes her flighty and nervous. “I am not as empty-headed as I seem, only empty-hearted,” she says, looking vague and empty-headed, fretting her hair with her fingers, picking at split ends and crossing her eyes. Pa puts the finishing dab of paint on the pig and unties its legs just as Trig makes a lunge with the fork. Pa wishes they would stop telling him their secrets. He has enough trouble just feeding them all and keeping them in underdrawers and socks. His family is nothing but a cesspit of passion, delusion, self-pity, egomania, and borderline personality disorder. It bothers him that his children seem so driven, that they act out of boredom or compulsion, that despite their confessions, their real motives and inspirations remain secret and hidden, even from themselves. Nights, Ma trips out to the barn in her nightie and they make love on a paint-spattered drop cloth thrown over bales of hay. Paint smudges her cheeks and thighs, hay tickles their noses, he kisses her rabbit mole, she sneezes, makes little farts, heaves her heavy thighs, and moans. Prior to this they had not spoken in five years and Pa had slept on a hard bench in the hallway on a pile of coats. But something has changed, as if the vast complex machinery of the cosmos has shifted slightly — mysteriously and secretly. Now they laugh and shout and slap each other’s backsides pink, and Pa rubs his nose in Ma’s capacious belly.

  Like Gurn, the country is in a depression, much like every other country in the world. The bottom has fallen out of the real estate market. Herr Grimmig, the bank manager, sends Bjorn out to repossess properties every day. The first day, a bankrupt computer repairman threatens to slit his children’s throats, bludgeon his wife to death, and then kill himself. He breaks down in tears, muttering, “I don’t know what to do. My teeth hurt. There’s no money.” Bjorn tries to get Herr Grimmig to renegotiate the loan. “We should go broke?” says Herr Grimmig. “He brought this failure on himself. The marketplace is the new God.” Herr Grimmig is an ascetic sixty-year-old with a tennis-player tan and a languid graciousness that makes even the worst news sound unexceptional and even mildly pleasant. A week later, the bankrupt computer repairman slaughters his children and wife and burns the house down over their bodies, then gives himself up to the police. Neighbours tell reporters he was a quiet family man and they would never have suspected he was a homicidal maniac, though in their hearts, they remember him as a brooding, violent man obsessed with keeping his front yard free of weeds and threatening to shoot children who cut across on their way to school. (Back at the farm, young Trig cuts out the newspaper article with his snub-nosed preschool scissors.) Bjorn begins spending his days at a roadhouse called The Wingless Phalarope. Instead of serving papers on low-life homeowners, he sits at a white table under an awning and drinks peppermint schnapps in tall shot glasses with little etched bird patterns. In fact he is supposed to serve papers on Tamara Winzcheslon, owner of The Wingless Phalarope, but he cannot bear to make another person unhappy. So he drinks with her instead and commiserates about her dead husband, who was lost at sea when environmentalist protesters sank his fishing boat. “What were they protesting?” he asks. Tamara shrugs. “He was minding his own business — the usual crime.” While Tamara is pouring drinks for other customers, Bjorn concocts elaborate schemes to conceal his inability to serve papers on poor people. He creates dummy corporations and offshore holding companies and bizarre oscillating land swaps and uses the paper profits to finance complex futures plays in pork bellies and turnips. Reading the daily spreadsheets over his shoulder, Tamara pats him on the head and kisses his bald spot. “Who owns my sweet little taverna this morning?” she asks. Herr Grimmig decides to promote Bjorn. Somehow the paper profits turn into real profits. The glowing screen of Bjorn’s computer makes no distinction. Bjorn buys a lemon-yellow Land Rover on eBay. Olga clasps her pregnant belly and squeals with delight. When Jannik, the wastrel, comes by the next day, he finds the door locked. But Olga calls him back from the bus stop at the corner and invites him in one last time, overcome with the tragedy of his bitter disappointment. She thinks, I hate myself. How should one behave? What does it really mean to be alive? She doesn’t understand why she is so bitter toward Bjorn, the innocent in all this. Nights, she waits anxiously for the sound of his feet on the doorstep. But then he greets her with a look of wariness. His wary eyes inquire, What is she going to do next? And she explodes with rage. Every hateful thing she says, and she is very good at inventing them — she could win the Nobel Prize for Hateful Things Shouted at a Husband — seems right and true in the moment. Like everyone else, she wants a moment of true feeling. But panic and rage come easier.

  “You’ll end up in jail,” says Pa, when Bjorn drives up in the lemon-yellow Land Rover and confesses his fraudulent speculations. “Why tell me about this?” he adds. Bjorn waves a sheaf of papers in Pa’s face. “I am supposed to repossess the farm today,” he says. He peers up at Pa’s barn-wall mural, sucking in his breath in surprise. The painting stretches past the roof beams onto the peaked ceiling where there is barely any light, a vast array of exuberant life panels, a narrative of the family history complete with the names and slaughter weights of generations of pigs. At the beginning Ma and Pa cavort naked around the tree in the front yard, Adam and Eve, only Ma is a tight-bodied, slender-hipped adolescent Venus with a mischievous look and Pa is a golden-haired hero. Uncle Boris is up in the tree in a nightcap. Babies and turnips sprout in the fields. A lone grey phalarope perches atop a sow rooting among the turnips. Geese and chickens pick daintily at the manure pile. In panel after panel the children grow taller, more babies appear. The farm looks like a jungle, like a primeval garden. Ma and Pa scamper hand in hand amongst the trees. To Bjorn it seems indecent, though strangely exciting. Bjorn confesses to Pa that he has begun writing poetry in his afternoons at The Wingless Phalarope, in between cellphone calls with developers and Internet billionaires. Herr Grimmig drives to The Wingless Phalarope to consult, not wishing to interrupt Bjorn’s precious work schedule. He depends on Bjorn to help him with all his bank decisions. Tamara Winzcheslon serves Bjorn peppermint schnapps and coffee and sometimes sits across the table from him with her chin on her hand, longing for him. But Bjorn is a faithful husband. In fact he can be a bit of a bor
e on the subject. And so Tamara is sleeping with Joran Boze, the dishwasher, to make Bjorn jealous and to have some fun. Nights, Bjorn sleeps next to Olga, who tosses and sighs, sweating with desire and frustration in the stale sheets. When they try to make love, it is all tedium and effort. She accuses him of having sex with Tamara Winzcheslon. Her belly expands, she looks like a snake that has swallowed a football. When he puts his ear down there, Bjorn can hear the heartbeat. He says to Pa, “I don’t understand what life is about. All I can think of is the possibility that I will get brain cancer and die horribly before I have a chance to be happy.” Pa says, “Come and have dinner. Trig killed one of the shoats. He’s a handy little butcher, you know. At least one of my sons will have a trade.” To Bjorn, his father looks half dead from care. The multicoloured pigs keep warily to the shadows, crowding together in protective groups. Pa and Bjorn smell smoke and climb into the loft, where they find Lisel asleep beside her overturned candle. They put out the fire with their coats.

  Jannik, the wastrel, borrows money from Ma to buy the teller a gold necklace with a tiny seabird charm attached. The teller’s name is Agnes Botgaard, and she is secretly in love with Herr Grimmig. But she accepts the necklace and pretends to like Jannik because Herr Grimmig won’t pay any attention to her and Jannik’s brother might soon own the bank. Jannik suspects something is up because the sex isn’t so good. He thinks illicit sex is the best; he likes the first weeks of a new affair when all sorts of hanky-panky seem possible. He craves that abandonment in pleasure. Now he wishes he had not bought the necklace, wishes he had used the money to gamble instead. Suddenly he feels obligated to Agnes Botgaard. He has the strange thought that he must somehow do right by her. He has never felt this way. She tells him it’s okay, he doesn’t have to do right by her. It can be a one-night stand. He wonders what to do next. He thinks, How should one behave? What does it mean to be alive? Like many people in that economically and spiritually repressed land, Jannik has few options and no fun except for illicit sex and gambling. He notices that in the present age people are turning to art and sex to pass the time. His father’s barn murals are beginning to attract attention. Much to Pa’s disgust, his barn is now included on local vacation bus tours, along with the desalinization plant, the cement factory, the abandoned canal lock, the salt marsh, and the earthen dikes where multicoloured cows graze placidly. Daphne poses naked for local art groups that have sprung up like mushrooms in the cultural darkness. The town newspaper’s columns are taken up with virulent aesthetic disputes between the right-wing realists, the left-wing avant-garde, and the irritatingly articulate postmoderns, despised by all. Jannik notices that the newspaper is also publishing his brother’s poems, pages of them, and photos of his new house in the gated community going up along the salt marsh nesting grounds. Bjorn has a swimming pool and a personal gymnasium, and there are photos of Olga, big as a barn, reading celebrity magazines in a bikini. The shoats should be full-grown by now, but many have mysteriously disappeared. Boris finds caches of bones when he moves the manure pile. He is running out of new places to move the manure pile. The joke is getting old. His face is haggard and drawn. Around the neighbourhood, small pets are also disappearing. Daphne is more popular than ever, now that nude paintings of her adorn gallery walls across the country. An elderly gent with a white cane comes calling, asking for Grete, and the elderly man and the girl walk down the laneway to the dikes and the salt marsh, their heads bending together in animated conversation, her hand lightly touching his forearm as she guides him through gates and over stiles. Though he can’t see, she points out the various sights to him. In the distance she can see Bjorn’s new house, rising like a palace beyond the new yacht club. Nikolai cannot speak yet but solves intricate math problems with a toy abacus. Gurn tests slip-knots on rope samples from the hardware store in town. He has never seemed happier. His twisted mouth knots up in a grimace, impossible to read. Lisel begins to study ancient Greek and Hebrew through an online university in Arizona. Aunt Doreen writes a letter to Amy Rastinhad, now Mrs. Artemis Hagedoorn. One day a taxi, spewing oily smoke from its exhaust, stops at the gate. A tall, slim, sad-looking woman with a large flowery hat steps out and gazes up at Uncle Boris, sitting in the tree. Aunt Doreen totters along the dirt path to the gate and Uncle Boris watches the two women embrace, a long look of relief on their faces. Then Aunt Doreen takes one of the woman’s bags and guides her toward the house.