Grandma whistled and drummed her fingers on the table. She had done that for as long as I could remember. There was something good about seeing it, for so much had changed about her otherwise.
I had seen photos of her from the 1930s, and she had been attractive, not strikingly so, but enough to mark her out, in the typical way for that era: dark, dramatic eyes, small mouth, short hair. When, toward the end of the fifties, as a mother of three, she had been photographed in front of some tourist sights on their travels, all of those characteristics were still there, if in a softer, less distinct yet not undefined way, and you could still use the word “attractive” to describe her. When I was growing up, and she was in her late sixties, early seventies, I couldn’t see any of this of course, she was just “Grandma,” I knew nothing about her characteristic traits, the things that told you who she was. An older woman, middle class, who was well-conserved and dressed elegantly, that must have been the impression she gave at the end of the seventies, when she took the unusual step of catching a bus to visit us and sat in our kitchen in Tybakken. Lively, mentally alert, vigorous. Right up until a couple of years ago that was how she was. Then something happened to her, and it was not old age that had her in its grip, nor illness, it was something else. Her detachment had nothing to do with the gentle otherworldliness or contentedness of old people, her detachment was as hard and lean as the body in which it resided.
I saw that, but there was nothing I could do, I could not build a bridge, could not help or console her, I could only watch, and every minute I spent with her I was tense. The only thing that helped was to keep moving and not to let any of what was present, in either her or the house, find a foothold.
With her hand, she wiped a flake of tobacco off her lap. Then looked at me.
“Shall I make you a cup as well?” I offered.
“Was there anything wrong with the coffee?” she said.
“It wasn’t that hot,” I said, taking the pot to the sink. “I’ll put some fresh on.”
“Wasn’t that hot, did you say?”
Was she reproving me?
No. For then she laughed and brushed a crumb from her lap.
“I think my brain’s unravelling,” she said. “I was sure I‘d only just made it.”
“It wasn’t that cold,” I said, turning on the tap. “It’s just that I like my coffee boiling hot.”
I rinsed out the dregs and sprayed the bottom of the sink with the water until it had all gone down the drain. Then I filled the pot, which was almost completely black on the inside and covered with greasy fingerprints on the outside.
“Unravelling” was our family euphemism for senility. Grandad’s brother, Leif, his brain “unravelled” when, on several occasions, he wandered from the old people’s home to his childhood home, where he hadn’t lived for sixty years, and stood shouting and banging on the door all through the night. His second brother, Alf, his mind had started unravelling in recent years; it was most obvious in his merging of the present and the past. And Grandad’s mind also started unravelling at the end of his life when he sat up at night fiddling with an enormous collection of keys, no one knew he had them, let alone why. It was in the family; their mother’s mind unravelled eventually, if we were to believe what my father had said. Apparently the last thing she did was climb into the loft instead of going down into the cellar when she had heard a siren; according to my father, she fell down the steep loft staircase in her house and died. Whether that was true or not, I don’t know, my father could serve up all manner of lies. My intuition told me it wasn’t, but there was no way of finding out.
I carried the pot to the stove and put it on the burner. The ticking of the safety device filled the kitchen. Then the damp pot began to crackle. I stood with folded arms, peering at the top of the steep hill outside the window, at the imposing white house. It struck me that I had stared at that house all my life without ever seeing anyone in or around it.
“Where’s Yngve then?” Grandma asked.
“He had to go back to Stavanger today,” I said, addressing her. “To his family. He’ll be back for the f … for Friday.”
“Yes, that was it.” She nodded to herself. “He had to go back to Stavanger.”
As she grasped the pouch of tobacco and the small, red-and-white roller machine, she said, without looking up: “But you’re staying here?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’ll be here all the time.”
I was happy that she so clearly wanted me to be here, even though I gathered that it was not me especially that she wanted here, anyone would do.
She cranked the handle of the machine with surprising vigor, flipped out the freshly filled cigarette and lit it, brushing a few flakes from her lap again and sat staring into space.
“I thought I would carry on cleaning,” I said. “And then I’ll have to work a bit later this evening and make a few phone calls.”
“That’s fine,” she said and looked up at me. “But you aren’t so busy that you don’t have time to sit here for a while, are you?”
“Not at all, no,” I answered.
The coffeepot hissed. I pressed it down harder on the burner, the steam hissed louder, and I removed it, sprinkled in some coffee, stirred with a fork, banged hard, once, on the stovetop and placed it on the table.
“There we are,” I said. “Now it’ll just have to brew for a bit.”
The fingerprints on the pot, which we hadn’t washed off, must have included Dad’s. I visualized the nicotine stains on his fingers. There had been something undignified about doing this. Inasmuch as the trivial life it demonstrated did not go together with the solemnity death evoked.
Or that I wanted death to evoke.
Grandma sighed.
“Oh dear,” she said. “Life’s a pitch, as the old woman said. She couldn’t pronounce her ‘b’s.’”
I smiled. Grandma smiled too. Then her eyes glazed over again. I racked my brain for something to say, found nothing, poured coffee in the cup even though it was more a golden color than black, and tiny coffee grains floated to the surface.
“Do you want some?” I asked. “It’s a bit thin, but …”
“Please,” she said, nudging her cup a few centimeters along the table.
“Thank you,” she said when it was half-full. Grasped the yellow carton of cream and poured.
“Where’s Yngve then?” she asked.
“He’s gone to Stavanger,” I answered. “Home to his family.”
“That’s right. He had to go. When’s he coming back?”
“On Friday, I think,” I said.
I rinsed the bucket in the sink, ran the tap, poured in some green soap, put on rubber gloves, grabbed the cloth on the table with one hand, lifted the bucket with the other, and went to the back of the living room. Outside, darkness was beginning to fall. A faint bluish glimmer was visible in the light at ground height, around the foliage on the trees, their trunks, the bushes as far as the fence to the neighbor’s plot. So faint was it that the colors were not muted as they would gradually become in the course of the evening, on the contrary, they were strengthened because the light no longer dazzled, and the dulled background allowed their fullness to come to the fore. But to the southwest, where you could just see the lighthouse in the sea, daylight was still unchallenged. Some clouds had a reddish glow, as though powered by their own energy, for the sun was hidden.
After a while Grandma came in. She switched on the TV and sat down in the chair. The sound of commercials, louder than the program, as always, filled not only the living room but also reverberated against the walls.
“Is the news on now?” I asked.
“I suppose so,” she said. “Don’t you want to see it as well?”