On the Internet, she says, a new platform where students can log on and do homework together. From all over the world. It’s a lockdown thing.
Okay, I say. So, what happens? What’s the point of it?
Nothing happens, she says, I think that is the point. You can’t hook up or send messages or anything – it’s muted, microphones not an option, all completely without sound, like the study area in the school library, except they’re never quiet even if they’re meant to be. But here – it’s silent. You can’t hear anyone, you can’t hear anything. You just log on and do your homework, or stare into space or into the camera. I saw someone playing the guitar, but couldn’t hear it.
The dog lumbers along between Eva and me, dictating the pace, slowly because he’s old, first through Torshovparken, then on to the second park with the almost identical name, Torshovdalen – the park and the valley for short – round and round the large doll’s head cast in bronze.
Mamma, Eva says, do you remember the first lockdown, when we dressed up just to go to the doll’s head and back?
I nod.
I want to know more about the girl on the Internet. Where’s she from?
I’ve no idea, says Eva, she’s likely to be in the same time zone as me, although not necessarily – a lot of people log on in the middle of the night, but there’s something daylike about her.
What do you mean, daylike?
I don’t know – like she got up at dawn or something.
I ask what it was exactly about the girl that caught her attention.
Eva shrugs.
I’m not sure. Her face. Her gaze. Her cool demeanour.
Eva’s wearing a thin black silk dress (a hand-me-down from me) and red Dr. Martens.
I logged on again yesterday, she says, and scrolled through all the faces until eventually I found her.
She finishes her coffee and pulls a face mask out of her pocket, stuffing it into the empty paper cup she then drops into the waste bin.
The girl’s got pretty blue wallpaper on her wall, she says. Everyone can see each other’s background, but it’s impossible to make eye contact. Anyway, there are so many people logged on at the same time that she might be seeing entirely different faces from the ones I see. Maybe I’ll signal and see if she reacts.
*
How do experiences live on, not as memories, but as absences? How to write about the splash of untranslatable white paint and make of it a story with a clear beginning, middle and end? When I was sixteen years old, between autumn 1982 and winter 1983, I knew for a brief time a forty-four-year-old man I’m calling K. He’s old now. Sometimes I think about sending him an email.
Remember me?
He was always high or low or strung out on one thing or another, he was in demand and unpredictable.
It’s unlikely that he remembers me. I don’t know if I want him to.
I click on the photos of him on the Internet and I see an old man who’s moved from New York to an entirely different setting (with a beach close by), who occasionally posts photos of himself, his children, his grandchildren and his thirty-years-younger wife on social media. The most recent are new, he’s been uploading pictures while I’ve been writing about him, he doesn’t know I’m thinking about him every day, repeating his name to myself. In one of the images, he’s with his whole family, on a white-sand beach, around a big table that’s been festively set, everyone’s keeping a good distance from each other, it’s windy, I can tell by the girls’ hair and the flapping edges of the white tablecloth; the point of the picture, judging by everyone’s expressions and gestures, is clearly to illustrate how difficult it is to share a birthday cake when everybody’s wearing a face mask. The cake, with more than eighty candles on it, is the table’s centrepiece. Untouched. Blue sea surrounds them. During the last few years, besides family photos, he’s posted pictures from the seventies and eighties when he was most feted, pictures of beautiful women, magazine covers, features, legendary fashion shoots, and it makes me wonder if he might ever post the picture he took of me. I know it won’t happen. Of course it won’t. If he remembers me, it certainly won’t be as a career highlight, as someone who lit up his life. What was it he called me when I sat in his jeep and cried and said I wanted to go home, a neurotic little bitch ?
All I have is a memory of a photograph of a young girl, of me. I was the same age then as Eva is today, even slightly younger, and I wonder if experiencing sixteen again, not as myself, but through another person, a child, a daughter, does something to one’s perspective.
I’m no longer as furious as I used to be at the sixteen-year-old girl I once was, no longer as ashamed of her, as eager to write her off, forget her, pretend she didn’t exist. Doesn’t exist. And yet: the fact that no one remembers what happened, that it’s never been written about, makes me wonder if what I experienced is true, whether it really happened, or rather I know it happened – stupid little girl, why don’t you go back home – but I doubt whether what I experienced is valid, whether there’s any point broaching it. And yet: if I don’t write about it, because I’m uncertain, because uncertainty creates anxiety, because I’ll do almost anything to avoid anxiety, because uncertainty and anxiety transport me back to the same state of helplessness I knew at sixteen – then I’ll fail to acknowledge, as Annie Ernaux writes, that these things happened to me so that I might recount them.
But the girl I was unravels whenever I draw near. There’s so much you don’t understand, she shouts from a street corner in what is to her an unfamiliar city. And the word knew is wrong, she says. You wrote, When I was sixteen years old, between autumn 1982 and winter 1983, I knew for a brief time a forty-four-year-old man I’m calling K. That’s wrong. It wasn’t about knowing, getting to know.
Be precise. Please.
It’s the middle of the night, it’s freezing out, she’s wearing a borrowed dress, a new blue coat and knee-high boots.
*
In New York, K is surrounded by people. In the studio. In the apartment. There’s the scrawny young assistant, the make-up artists and hair stylists, the friends, an older photographer who lives in an apartment in the same building. He used to be famous, he took important pictures, you ought to know who he is, K tells me. Girls. There are girls everywhere. And a fat man. The men (apart from the assistant) are old, over forty, over fifty. The fat man’s name is Claude. Wherever K is, there’s Claude. When K looks to the left, Claude looks to the left, when K looks to the right, Claude looks to the right. Apart from that, it’s hard to know what exactly Claude does. He knows the names of all the girls who come and go. One of them is Jane. She goes to the same school as me, she’s a freshman, I’m a junior, she’s fourteen or fifteen, younger than me, but over six feet tall, talks to no one. When we run into each other at K’s studio, we pretend not to know each other from school. As if our being in high school is a secret we prefer not to share. Jane was discovered in a shopping mall in Wisconsin. Rumour has it she’s living with her agent.
Jane is incredibly pretty, I say to K.
Jane isn’t pretty, Claude replies in his stead, she’s a piece of sex.
Jane disappeared from school a few months after I came back from Paris. I look for her in the school yearbook for 1984, but can’t find her anywhere.
What happened?
Someone said she quit modelling. Someone said she enrolled at another school. Someone said her agent kicked her out and replaced her with someone else. Someone said her older brother came and picked her up at Port Authority (he found her standing alone, towering above every other woman and almost every other man, underneath the Greyhound sign, without so much as a dollar in her pocket), someone said her brother wouldn’t let go of her until they were safely back in Wisconsin, someone said the bus journey took almost nineteen hours, which is a long time not to let go, someone said she was dead, someone said she got a job in Milan, someone said she got a job in Tokyo, someone said she overdosed, crack, heroin, someone said she’d snorted so much coke she put a hole in her nose and couldn’t work as a model any more, someone said she met a twenty-year-old guy, got married and moved away.
*
If I say your names many times, one after the other (all the names I’ve given you over the years), I can picture your face, your thin body, your hands (wings?) dry as old leaves, ivy in autumn.
When we were little, nine years old perhaps, and more sun than shade, warm, you took my hands in yours.
Look at us, you said.
I pulled my hands away.
It’s bad luck to compare hands, I said, at least it is if you put them palm to palm.
You’ve started turning up unannounced, like when we were young.
Leave me alone, I say. Go away and bother someone else.
You lie down on the sofa. You take a seat in the chair by the window. You dance round and round in the sunshine, trembling, saying, I’m not making any sound, I’m not making any sound, listen to how quiet I am.
And you take my hands in yours again and squeeze them tight.
Your hands are bigger than mine, you say. Everything about you is bigger.
__________________________________
Excerpted from Girl, 1983: A Novel. JENTE, 1983 © Linn Ullmann, 2021. First published by Forlaget Oktober as, Oslo, 2021. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
