2022:2

That breath and the ability to breathe are also closely associated with freedom and life borders on cliché. Yet being one who breathes is a fundamentally vulnerable state, there’s always the possibility that we’re just one breath away from death. The phrase ‘I can’t breathe’ isn’t just figurative, it’s all too often a phrase uttered at the threshold of life and death, or a chronic, baseline mode of existence. The metaphorical codification of getting a breath of fresh air as a rejuvenating experience derives from the restorative power that conscious breathing can have on the mind and body, beyond the unconscious respiration that our bodies do on their own. This sense of breath as freedom is illustrated by the multi-hyphenate Swedish-German-Jewish poet Nelly Sachs. When giving her acceptance speech upon receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1966, Sachs spoke of her arrival in exile to Sweden. She did not yet know the Swedish language and she hardly knew another person. Despite the anxiety, fear and terror she must have felt, what she ostensibly recalls most strongly upon setting foot on Swedish soil is the breath of freedom, as she specifically speaks of inhaling or breathing in (einatmen) that freedom: ‘Without understanding the language, or knowing a single person, we breathed in the air of freedom’ (Ohne die Sprache zu verstehen, oder einen Menschen zu kennen, atmeten wir die Freiheit ein). Sachs’s speech ended with a recitation of her poem ‘In Flight’ (In der Flucht), the last two lines of which are as follows:

An Stelle von Heimat                                        
halte ich die Verwandlungen der Welt –             

 

In place of home
I hold the metamorphoses of the world –

 

Sachs and Mossaed both migrated to and settled down in Sweden in exile, fleeing persecution. They both write of breathing frequently in their poems. To do so is hardly a novel metaphor in poetry, or in language in general, for indeed throughout history to write of breath was also to write of the soul. By the same token, to write of breathlessness is still to write about the soul, albeit in a different mode, for breathlessness is not the absence of or negation of breath, as the word would initially imply. One can be breathless while still being alive; indeed, many people around the world must adjust to a breathless form of life, many people cannot experience a full breath, whether due to ecological, political, biological, or other oppressive conditions. In Sachs’s poem, what may initially appear as a mere metaphor for freedom can also evoke another, more fundamental layer that permeates through every layer of being: the patient, sharp clarity of a deep breath after a period—or a lifetime—of suffocation. All too often, that suffocation is equated with silence, and vice versa. To the extent that speaking is a sign and symbol of life, that breathing is the rhythm that supports and punctuates it, Mossaed—in the poem above and all her others, whether in Persian or in Swedish—chooses language over silence, freedom over oppression, breath over asphyxiation, life over death. Many have not been afforded the same chance to choose, Mossaed knows this. Among other readers, she writes for them.

This breath of freedom (and its discontents) resonates in many poems by Mossaed, which often explore not only the different meanings and manifestations of freedom, but its relationality and directionality via a variety of prepositions. For example, a freedom from oppression, a freedom to speak a new language, or a freedom of speech. Many of her poems can be easily deemed autobiographical, for indeed many are written with a first-person poetic subject. Take, for example, this poem from her Swedish debut in 1997:

Flykten

Jag skriver för mina barn
som blev stumma efter den här resan
för mig själv
eftersom glömskan erövrade mitt minne
och för dem
som stannade kvar och dog.

Hela dagen försöker jag
damma spegeln fri från grå bilder
hela dagen vill jag komma ihåg
ett ord som kan värma
mina barns kalla och hemska nätter
hela dagen drömmar jag
om gamla nätter
men ordens själ har försvunnit,
mina barn väntar på mig
med sina öppna ögon
men jag och världen kan inte minnas.

 

Escape

I write for my children
who went quiet after this journey
for myself
because forgetting conquered my memory
and for those
who stayed behind and died.

All day long I try
to dust the mirror free from grey images
All day long I want to remember
a word that can warm
my children’s cold and awful nights
all day long I dream
of old nights
but the soul of words has disappeared,
my children wait for me
with their open eyes
but I and the world cannot remember.

 

This poem’s title stands in subtle contrast with its topic, for its opening line can read as a response to the archetypical question posed to every author, why do you write? But in the lines that bring the first stanza to a close, we see the union of writing and refuge, and the alliance of language and survival. If the first part of the poem answers the question why write?, then the second part depicts the reciprocal struggle of writing and surviving. The challenge to clean a murky mirror, to find a language that can warm the mind and therefore perhaps also the body of a sleepless child, to vitalize the soul through language. The final line of the poem leaves the reader with a taste of grief—no doubt about it—but also the wonder that the poem exists at all despite this grief. The poem, like all poems, like life, is but one attempt at understanding. No single attempt at survival will suffice, no single poem can incarnate the essence of existence. Both are merely stages on life’s way. The first half of the poem identifies the speaker’s will to live; the second half of the poem details the struggle. Two stanzas, two sentences, two realities.

(The key word in this poem is the same as Sachs’s poem above, Swedish flykt and German Flucht. On one etymological branch, they share the denotations of flight and escape, with verb forms meaning to flee and to seek refuge and adjectival forms such as fleeting, fugitive, volatile, and elusive. But the German word has another etymology that is lexically opposite but semantically specific. It can either refer to a line, alignment, or collection of building elements, such as rooms or windows, or a flock of birds. I’ll stop the philological sidebar here, suffice it to say that it’s a curious anecdote that from a certain angle this word carries both one meaning and its opposite: a precarious moving away (ostensibly from disorder) and an intentional organization into order.)

But, for the individual, silence is not immediately adverse. We often think of silence in negative terms, as a lack of language, as something to be broken or resulting from being broken, as something destructive, disintegrating or even disturbing, to the point where silence is equated with death (much as sound is equated with life). Orr writes, ‘In the silence of shame, we imagine that if others knew our story they would recoil in disgust or disapproval.’ This might be true, but in the same way that speech can be used as a tool for survival, so too can silence. It may be the case, as Orr states, that ‘to suffer in silence, like grieving in silence, is destructive of the self, since it means walling off aspects of experience and the emotions connected with them’ and thus this kind of silence ‘makes us the victim of our experience, not the master.’ Orr’s claim is that we must break (through) silence and transform it into speech in order to be able to share our selves with the selves of others and overcome the many experiences that plunge us into silence. Many things can send us into a ‘destructive or isolating’ silence, but unlike those things, silence is the one thing that, Orr believes, can be changed. On the one hand, Orr is right: it is a signal of strength to speak out and speak for. But it can also be a measure of strength to be strategically silent, whether as a form of political resistance or self-preservation. When someone chooses to go or stay silent, we (might) have to attend to other ways that might be meaning or signifying (this is what J. Logan Smilges argues in Queer Silence: Disability and Rhetorical Absence). This also makes it all the more powerful when the person who chose to stay silent chooses to speak.

To be fair, Orr is advocating for the transformation of silence into the work of poetry, of channeling creativity as a means to abate trauma and even save oneself. He is centering the therapeutic potential of poetry for the writer (but this is also valid for the reader). For example, as the epigraph for his chapter on ways of survival, Orr cites Muriel Rukeyser:

‘I don’t believe poetry can save the world. I do believe that the forces in us wish to share something of our experience by turning it into something and giving it to somebody: that is poetry. That is some kind of saving thing, and as far as my life is concerned, poetry has saved me again and again.’

 

I have to admit that I disagree with the claim in the first sentence, not only because it immediately and unreasonably ascribes an ethical imperative to poetry (and art, for that matter) which implores it to have value only insofar as, and to the extent that, it can save the world, but also because we tend to confuse what we mean by ‘the world.’ There is a pervasive conflation of the words ‘earth’ and ‘world,’ where the former technically refers to the physical planet and the latter to a broader array of conceptual meanings, ranging from the world as the collective everything on earth or in the universe (the Swedish word världsalltet, meaning ‘universe; everything that exists,’ is literally rendered as ‘the world’s all’) to my world as I experience it or my worldview that is based on said experience. So while I can concede that poetry may not be able to save the World (in whatever definition), it does have the capacity to change an individual’s world; for every person is a world, with their own perspective, understanding, point of view and relation to the wider World that constitutes our existence, which is inherently shared. Poetry does not, and should not, have to save the world for it to be meaningful. That a poem succeeds as a poem—that it exists at all—is meaningful enough.

Mossaed arrived in Sweden in 1996; her first collection in Swedish was published in 1997. In the intervening time, between when she entered the world of Swedish and when she made her own world through Swedish, she had buried herself in a deep feeling of muteness (stumhet), as she describes in her pamphlet essay in verse, To Breathe Words in the Forest (Att andas orden i skogen). Neither this freedom nor its manifestation in language are to be taken for granted. To be silent is not inherently to be unfree. Likewise, one can be forced into speaking; thus, speech is not innately or entirely a form of freedom. The freedom lies in the ability to choose speech or to choose to remain silent. Does freedom not walk hand in hand with possibility, if not metaphysically then at least metaphorically?

Mossaed’s poetry is infused with the possibility of language, rather than its limitations. Yet there is a thread running through her poetry, of the bumping into or being distressed by the limits of language. Not the speculative limits entertained and explored by intellectuals of all stripes, but the quotidian, even banal, limitations that every language learner, indeed many non-native speakers of a language, encounter regularly. Wittgenstein was right, sort of: the limits of my language may indeed be the limits of my world, but what of my second language, or my third or fourth? Does not being a native Swedish speaker inherently limit my world? It depends on what we mean by world. Wittgenstein, so it seems, was speaking of the language faculty, the fact that we have language at all, regardless of which language it might be. If anything, it gives me access to a world, whether I make it my own our not. The difficulty of this growth runs throughout Mossaed’s work in Swedish, such as this stanza from the collection How I was missed here (2018; Vad jag saknades här):

Jag är försvunnen
på stadens gator
Kan inget alfabet
inget språk                    

 

I have disappeared
onto the city streets
Knowing no alphabet
no language

 

Or this couplet from one her early poems, where the speaker recounts the pathos of breaking down into tears, finding respite against a tree whose name is unknown to her:

Jag gråter vid ett träd
som jag inte ens kan namnet på 

 

I am crying against a tree
that I don’t even know the name of

 

Mossaed ranks among a growing number of ‘exophonic’ writers, authors who write in a language that this not their own. Think, for example, of Samuel Beckett, Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen), Joseph Brodsky, Don Mee Choi, Ilya Kaminsky, Jhumpa Lahiri, Vladimir Nabokov, Yoko Tawada and (at one time) Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. These writers, Skrikanth Reddy writes in his introduction to a special issue of Poetry Magazine on Exophony, featuring a poem by Mossaed, ‘project their own cultural histories into a new language, as writers always have done, and will always do. They are translators of themselves.’ But we have to be careful not to conflate modes and methods of translation. Mossaed herself states her position: ‘To be able to write directly in Swedish was my goal from the beginning. I didn’t want to translate my poems into Swedish.’ (Att kunna skriva direkt på svenska var mitt mål från början. Jag ville inte översätta mina dikter till svenska). Mossaed doesn’t translate her words from one to another language; that is what I have done. She translates her experience into words, whether Persian or Swedish; that is not what I do. I only have access to her experiences through her words, which when read through my English, take on a shade of my understanding, which is then passed on to the reader.

The experience of exile gives a new contour, if not an entirely new foundation, to the meaning of survival. I myself cannot speak from a place of exile as it is traditionally understood, not in the way that Mossaed, Sachs, or Celan experienced it. I can only approach it second hand. Mossaed gives us a sense in To Breathe Words in the Forest: ‘To live in exile means that you have to dare to find replacements for everything you wish you had from before.’ [Att leva i exil innebär att du måste våga hitta ersättningar för allt som du önskar att du hade kvar från förr.] For Mossaed, exile is a total and complete existential shift. The many replacements that one will have to seek out and accept are too numerous to count, but there are several throughout Mossaed’s poetry. One is language, another is landscape.

Mossaed writes starkly and directly about the natural world, and of her and humanity’s relationship to it, often employing a rich, poignant imagery that echoes the lucidity that made Tranströmer so successful and therefore translatable (or vice versa). I would venture to say that Mossaed has inherited Tranströmer’s status as the Swedish purveyor par excellence of simple, crystalline images. For example, this stanza from How I was missed here, which recalls for me Tranströmer’s poem ‘Den halvfärdiga himlen‘ (‘The Half-Finished Heaven‘):

Jorden har svårt att andas
genom asfalten
cementen
Rinnande floder av klorofyll          
följer mig                       

 

The earth has trouble breathing
through the asphalt
the cement
Flowing rivers of chlorophyl
pursue me

 

When Tomas Tranströmer was awarded 1990 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, he spoke of two ways at looking at a poem. One way was to see it as impossible to carry over from its original language into another. The other, contrary, view is to understand

the poem as it is presented is a manifestation of another, invisible poem, written in a language behind the common languages. Thus, even the original version is a translation. A transfer into English or Malayalam is merely the invisible poem’s new attempt to come into being. The important thing is what happens between the text and the reader. Does a committed reader ask if the written version he reads is the original or a translation?

 

A poem, then, is always a translation of experience into words, which through writing are themselves first and foremost of act of memory, a resistance to the ephemeral. Poetry itself is a translation of silence, one that inhales nothingness and exhales life and language. In a sense, all understanding is a form of translation. Or at least, the mechanics function similarly, bound both to time and to the unknown or the unfamiliar.

Låna mig ditt språk

Lär mig ordens rötter
låt mig leka med dina ord
låt mig skapa
nya konstiga meningar med dem
låt mig ge orden
nya färger
nya dimensioner
låna mig ditt språk
dina substantiv
låt mig ta dem med på en äventyrlig resa.

 

Lend Me Your Language

Teach me the word-roots
let me play with your words
let me create
new strange sentences with them
let me give the words
new colors
new dimensions
lend me your language
your nouns
let me take them on an adventure.

 

Mossaed wears her heart on her sleeve, and its blood infuses her poetry. If I were to describe her poetry in one word, at this moment, it would be palpable. If I were to describe her poetic voice in one word, at this moment, it would be earnest.

But what is it, then, the breath of a poem? Where does it occur, and how? This essay began with a gesture to the (recorded) breath of the poet, but the breath of the poem is of another kind. I’m reasonably sure that there are no lungs concealed between a book’s binding and its spine. I’m reasonably sure that its pages do not respire, even if the trees from which they were produced did. No, the breath of the poem is no material process, no biological rhythm. Nor is it merely a matter of metaphorical rhetoric or imaginative figuration. The breath of the poem is rather akin to the spirit of the poem, inspired by the poet, exhaled by her and inhaled by the reader. Like the real air that is shared by those that breathe, the poem is a shared space, even if it is temporally disjointed, indeterminably delayed on its journey from writer to reader.

Ibland kommer orden till mig helt döda
som hårstrån eller naglar
De andas inte på pappret

 

Sometimes the words come to me entirely dead
like a strand of hair or nails
They do not breathe on the paper

 

So begins one of the opening poems in Mossaed’s latest collection Delayed Words (Orden är försenade). Here, as elsewhere, in every poem, the poem is a meeting place, a breathscape, whose inhabitants are prepositionally related towards one another, however temporarily, however separated by time and space. In that same poem, she writes that even though it ‘takes time to breathe life into them’ [Det tar tid att blåsa liv i dem], that eventually ‘the paper accepts them / one at a time’ [Pappret tar emot dem / ett efter ett]. Though Mossaed may write of words dead on arrival, it is the work and wonder of poetry to animate them.

We are grateful to Jila Mossaed for granting permission to include translations of her poems in this essay.

Food is love. People say so all the time, I hear it ever more often nowadays, and know it to be true. But to me it has also meant that love was food.

A former anorexic once said this to me, many years ago, when I had invited her and some other friends over for a meal. My large white dining room table was set with mis-matched china and old cutlery of a kind that I had spent a long time searching for. The table was standing in the middle of the one-room apartment I lived in back then, and she walked over and let her eyes wander across it and everything I had laid out. A thick wedge of Parmesan cheese, a bowl of French string beans, a plate of young green leaves and thinly shaved fennel, roasted artichokes in my mother’s white soufflé dish from the 1980s, steamed broccolini with garlic and lemon, and in the middle of it all a deep ceramic dish into which I was about to pour a steaming pot of spaghetti arrabiata with fresh basil and chunks of half-melted buffalo mozzarella.

I had opened two bottles of wine and set out two carafes of water, along with the bread I had baked in the gas oven that morning, cut into thick slices, so the guests could tear bits off to eat with olive oil and flaked salt as they settled in at the table.

She took it all in and smiled.

You show your love through food, she said.

I fell silent and dropped my gaze. I couldn’t look her in the eye as those words struck me, but I looked at all the food sitting there, feeling stupid that this had never occurred to me. On some level, of course, it had, but I’d never put the thought into words the way she had, as if she were free to say anything she liked. I for one had never talked to a single person about my relationship with food and had never articulated it to myself, and I felt ashamed that it could be so obvious to another person.

Thinking about it now, I realize that she may have been simply pointing out our differences when it came to what is called the language of love, that is, how we show the people we love that we love them.

But it’s also possible that she understood.

I imagine that she did, because she knew a thing or two about what food can be and how it can be used, and I think her words were what allowed me to see myself so clearly not long thereafter, when I made that rice pudding for my daughter and was confronted with myself, in all my lack and ineptitude.

Everything I couldn’t do or say.

I used to think it was right after this event that I began seeking out others with problems similar to my own, in order to solicit help. But in reality it took much longer. After all, memory is deceptive. It’s hard to remember one’s life. It’s hard to remember in the right order, and as for this matter of food, I don’t know how it all began or why.

Those I sought out said it might begin with the very first sustenance. The milk that is so rich and sweet, that satisfies and soothes the newborn child and relieves its pain. It could be that we wish for a return, to once more be allowed to drink it while lying in someone’s arms. One might think it would be easy to speak in terms of 'we,' because we all must eat in order to survive. But people are so different. I see the love of food everywhere, simple and full of pleasure, and I wonder if there aren’t others like me after all.

They told me that I must tell my story, because it is the only way to be freed from this. And it’s not that my story is special, it’s what they’d say to anyone. It’s one of their guiding principles; they sound like sober alcoholics when they speak and indeed many of them are—alcoholics and drug addicts who stopped drinking and doing drugs and started on food instead.

But I don’t know how to tell the story of what food has meant to me. I’m frightened that I might not have a language for it. I don’t believe this story will set me free in the way that they insist they have been set free and I don’t want to spin this into 'a good story.'

Do it anyway, they say.

So I try.

I see before me a tangerine.

That is the beginning. The tangerines. It was winter, citrus season, I think I was three years old. It was the middle of the day and bright outside and the fruits had been set out on the big white table. There may have been thirteen of them, maybe more, but thirteen is the number I haven’t been able to get out of my head ever since, and they were bright orange and luminous amidst all the white in our kitchen.

I was alone in there, on the floor by the table, and it was quiet in the apartment. My mother was in her room, working as usual, as she would do on weekends unless one of her friends came over for a coffee or a walk around the nearby lake. I remember that I climbed onto one of the chairs and leaned across the white table top, reached out and grabbed hold of a tangerine, then picked it up and held it in my hand.

I pressed my nose to it and inhaled the scent, letting the tip of my tongue slip out and over its smooth rind. The bitterness made my tongue withdraw, like a small animal retreating to its den. Then I dug my nails into the rind and felt the release of a tangy mist.

I poked a small hole in the rind so I could touch the bare, juicy fruit beneath, then tore off a long strip. Then another and another. When all the peel was discarded, I removed two segments. I thought about how they reminded me of my lips when pressed together. I spread them, scraped away the soft net-like pith, put one segment between my teeth and bit down. Juice gushed out, cool and fresh and quenching. And its sweetness filled more than my mouth, it filled the whole of me and the kitchen in which I sat.

I chewed and swallowed and stuffed the other segment in and bit into it as well, felt the fibers in the flesh with my tongue, probed the membranes with its tip for what was still to be had and sucked it into me before I took another segment, doing the same with it and then one more. I was taking the time to chew, but still the juice caught on the way down and it made me cough and clear my throat, but I was undeterred and once I’d finished the first tangerine I reached across the big white table for another.

Something new and unknown was racing through me, trembling and burning. I ate one after the next and when all the tangerines were gone, the sensation vanished as quickly as it had appeared, and it was as if something colorless and slack came over me. I stared at the table, which looked so different now with that untidy heap of rind in place of what had moments ago been plump fruit, full of promise. My fingers were sticky and vibrant citrus notes rose up around me. I was still alone in the kitchen. I had taken a tangerine and tasted it, and then I had eaten them all up at once. I had done this, me, and yet I could hardly believe it had happened.

On the other side of the apartment, I could hear the door to my mother’s room opening. I gathered up the peels as quickly as I could and climbed down from the chair to try and dispose of them. She had looked so happy coming home with her bag of groceries. She’d said that tangerines were part of winter, and she was sure that I’d like them. A scrap of a rind hit the floor and when I turned around I saw that others had fallen from my hands. They were too small to hold everything.

Mom came into the kitchen with her mug of tea. She always drank tea when she was at home. What have you done? she asked. I didn’t know what to say, I was just trying to get rid of the tangerine peel that lay like a trail behind me on the floor. Have you eaten all the tangerines?

I couldn’t respond.

She looked at me and when I didn’t speak, she bent down and picked up the peels, threw them in the trash, and then took her mug to the teapot on the counter to freshen her tea.

I left the kitchen and went into my room to play with my tea tins. If you opened the lids and stuck in your nose, they still contained the aroma of the leaves: jasmine, lemon, muscatel, and osmanthus. She had taught me all the scents and words and this was something she seemed to enjoy, but I also noticed that she didn’t like that I could smell certain things so clearly and the effect they had on me, how a smell that didn’t bother anyone else could cause me to despair.

I put the tea tins in a row on the floor, picked them back up and built a wall and then a tower. After a while I started to feel itchy. My legs, my inner thighs, prickled and stung and when I pulled off my thick tights to get at it, I saw that big reddish blotches had spread across my skin. My nails left long white scratch marks. Scratching felt good, but the more I scratched the worse it got; I felt it on my neck too, my forearms and hands.

I pulled off my shirt so I was just sitting in my underpants, I kept scratching and the itch got worse. When I couldn’t stand it anymore and didn’t know what else to do, I ran into the corridor, through the hall, to my mother’s room, even though I knew I wasn’t supposed to bother her. I walked across the thick white carpet to the other side of the room. She was hunched over her desk, the typewriter and all of her papers next to a plate, empty but for a few rusk crumbs, and the mug, its interior dark with tea. Mama, I said, and she hemmed in reply without looking up from her work. I stood in front of her and started crying, or just let the tears come, to get her attention and to make clear that I had a reason for disturbing her writing time.

She spun around on the chair and looked at me, horrified at the sight of the rash, and then she stood up. Her special scent and heat enfolded me as she lifted me onto her bed and sat down beside me. I loved her every smell. They were most exquisite in winter, when mixed with the cold. I longed for them always—leather, cigarette smoke, the perfume clinging to her wolf fur when she came to pick me up, and the smells of skin and body around her when she was just at home, sitting still or walking around. I looked at the two of us in the mirror beside the desk, like she looked at herself each time she was going out. What is this, she asked, her voice different, unsteady and a touch shrill rather than deep and soft. What have you done? She stared at the rash and I remember thinking that I was leaving my body, that I too was looking at myself from the outside, just like she was.

She felt my forehead and said I had a fever and then she picked the large, heavy phone up off the floor, and as she placed it on her lap it emitted a soft metallic ping. She took one of the phone books from the pile under her nightstand, put it next to her on the bed, flipped to a number and dialed. Then she sat next to me with the receiver in her hand, the phone in her lap, and the long cord winding down her bare legs, her warm, freckled skin and her scent, which was like a room of its own that I wanted to find my way into and never leave. She had been working all morning in the big t-shirt she usually slept in, not having managed to get dressed properly. She had another job too, what she did on the weekends was a side hustle. A 'bread job,' she’d call it.

I squirmed in the bed sheets while she spoke with the person on the other end of the line who was asking questions and of whom she was asking questions in return: how had it happened, was it dangerous, what could be done. When she’d hung up, she went to the kitchen to fetch a tube of ointment that she said was in the medicine drawer in the broom closet. She came back with it in hand and squeezed some out and after she had smeared it into my itchy patches, she stroked my hair and sang to me until I fell asleep.

Svetlana Alexievich has described Russian culture as her homeland, or one of them. Her first homeland is Belarus, the country where her father was born and where she lives and writes her books today. The second is Ukraine, the country her mother comes from. And the third is Russian culture.

There is a glimmer of light in the idea of culture as a home in this time of homelessness, rootlessness and flight, of literature as a dwelling you can take with you anywhere in the world, one that moves silently across national borders. For many, Svetlana Alexievich’s books have been a means to understanding what war is, beyond grand history with its conflicts and battles and its sovereigns with their swelling peers, and beyond all the peace treaties which appear to sow the seeds of the next war, and the next. War – and so too the history of war – is grandiose and greedy. Svetlana Alexievich seeks instead the little tremor that exists inside everyone, ‘the tremor of eternity’, as she calls it. This little tremor that reflects grand history like a broken mirror.  

In her first book, The Unwomanly Face of War, which came out in 1985, she writes about women in the Red Army. ‘A human being is most visible and open in war, and also maybe in love. To the depths, to the subcutaneous layers. In the face of death all ideas pale, and inconceivable eternity opens up, for which no one is prepared.’ ^[1]

The seeds of full-scale war exist in peacetime in all civilisations, a thin surface of peace over cruelty and barbarity, but love and caring exist too. We are frequently told that this war began in 2014, but perhaps it began long before that? Kseniya has spent time in eastern Ukraine with her social projects – including children, health and literacy – and has often been to Donetsk, Luhansk and the Kharkiv region.

Kseniya: ‘We’ve been supporting refugees from eastern Ukraine since 2014, with books and so on, but also providing psychological support. And a huge amount has changed there. The thrust of Russian ideology has always been to regard Ukraine as a vassal state.’

Petro: ‘We have friends in Bucha, Irpin, Vorzel, Chernihiv, Kharkiv and Mariupol. Most of them are still alive, but some are dead. Some have lost their homes, all have lost their businesses. A number of them have found safety now, some of the others we haven’t heard from for a month.’

One night I dream that bombs are dropping on the other side of the water, above the silhouettes of buildings on the little island in the centre of Stockholm. The sky is rumbling, crashing, the sound of explosions so loud and metallic it feels as though the whole world is gone, that we are the only ones left. In the morning Kseniya and I write about another kind of dream. ‘What are you dreaming about now?’

Kseniya: ‘We dream of victory and a bright future for our son. We also dream about travelling, but not as refugees. And we dream about publishing fantastic books and about seeing people smile again. But none of that can happen for a very long time.’

Svetlana Alexievich writes about women fighting in the Red Army. ‘Now I understand the solitude of the human being who comes back from there. As if from another planet or from the other world. This human being has a knowledge which others do not have, which can be obtained only there, close to death.’^[2]

We are still writing to each other, Kseniya, Petro and I. Sometimes I receive photographs of Luka. In the latest photo he is holding a chess piece in one hand and a book about chess in the other. On the desk next to him is a freshly picked rose in a vase. On 7 May he celebrated his tenth birthday in Katowice. He feels slightly better now, but when he hears a loud noise he often thinks it’s the air raid siren. Their hometown Kyiv was bombed again a few days ago, but their building is still standing. They keep in touch with the other tenants in a chat group.

Their plan is to stay in Katowice at least until the summer, when Luka’s school term ends. ‘Then we’ll have to see what happens next.’

She doesn’t remember I promised her I’d be back on Thursday.

That is what I have to tell myself when Thursday comes around and I don’t make the journey to see her. It is a very slow job trying to explain to Dad why I just can’t. The words don’t come out right. I have to start my sentences all over again, even though what I want to say is simple: I am so very tired.

And maybe there is no rush to visit her. Perhaps there is more time than we thought. Maybe I can allow myself to rest for a while. After all, she has been like this for more than a month. It might be another month yet. Or even more, no one knows. The only certain thing is that this is the final stage and time is running out. But no one can calculate in advance how long there is exactly.

This particular Thursday it isn’t just a question of going down to the metro and travelling all the way out to the care home. It isn’t just a question of alighting at the right station and walking the last stretch, tapping in the entry code, going up three floors in the lift, tapping the code in again by the door to the unit, following the corridor to her room. Even though I have done it hundreds of times, it is easier said than done.

Late morning, the swimming pool is almost empty. For a moment, the sun beats sharply through the glass wall looking out to the waters of Årstaviken, forcing me to squint. Long, slow movements, a few lengths. Afterwards I take a sauna. Muscle fatigue and the heat help my back to relax, relieving the pain that radiates up my neck and down my thighs. Some friends are coming over for dinner. D is cooking. I merely say she is worse, wanting us to talk about something else.

I hold D tightly before I fall asleep. It is midwinter now. No snow yet. Just the cold, black darkness that retreats for a few hours in the middle of the day.

Sitting at her side, Dad informs me that her condition is stable. I say I’ll go there on Sunday. I’ll be more up for it then, for a while at least. But when she dies, I’m not there. Neither is Dad. It doesn’t take long. When the nurse gets to us, it is already the end. A nursing assistant on nights is holding her hand. Her breathing is getting heavier and heavier. At 00.20 it stops completely. Her eyes have remained closed the whole time. A new day has just begun, the 16^th of December, my birthday.

Snow is finally falling across the bare trees and the empty streets, across the leaden waters. I’m sitting in a taxi, talking to the driver and I don’t remember what I say. The bridges of Stockholm rise up to the sky and then sink back down to earth. For a moment, right at the crown of the Tranebergsbron bridge, the sky and the earth are one and the same, a oneness of pale grey with no horizon.

Dad is waiting for me outside the doors to the unit. Together, we go to her bedside. She is dressed in the summer dress with the small flowers on it. The sheets are new, white, the duvet pulled up across her chest. Dad is crying, he is crying in a way I have never seen him cry before.

Her forehead is clean, fair and cool. I touch her brow. I touch her hand. They look like her hand and her forehead, but no longer feel like either her hand or her forehead. They are so stone-still and so strange.     

Her body is carried away. We are given eight calendar days to clear her room.

She doesn’t remember her direct line number was 08-620-1842.

Of course, it has been a long while since she remembered any telephone number. I pick up the phone and dial the number on the spur of the moment, I was actually going to open my diary to plan which days to visit her at the home and which days I would have off. I don’t give any thought to tapping the numbers in, they are impressed on my fingertips. Telia customer information – this number is not recognised, speaks an automated voice.

When I visit her, she often makes sounds, sighs, grunts, vowels and syllables. But no words anymore. I had hoped her recorded voice message would still be there, that I would get to hear her speak.

This hasn’t been her number for eight years. The place she used to work has now closed down, its premises vacated, the employees scattered all over, and it is highly unlikely that her voice would still be waiting down the other end. I call anyway, trying to call backwards in time.

Later that day, I unload the dishwasher. It is the afternoon and I’m the only one at home. The radio is on. I’m not listening too closely. One sentence jumps out, a single one becomes evident amid the clatter. A woman who says: all I want is for him to come and hug me again.

I stop, dead in my tracks, a plate still in my hand. It is a wish so impossible that I have pushed it away from me. Someone else has to articulate it for me to understand that this is what I long for most of all. I want to have her back. Turned towards me, arms outstretched.

I say it right out there and then: come back. I say it again: come back. I carry on: I miss you. Don’t leave me. Through my streaming snotty tears, I say: I will see you again. The way you were. I just have to.

I grew up without God. What I’m saying relates to heaven. The hope of the afterlife. She liked to tell me about how they put massive tents up, for an audience of hundreds, how they stood right in front of the pulpit, making a noise and speaking in tongues. It had mass appeal, people came from far and wide to listen.

She told me, as an amusing detail from her past, about the celebrity ministers of the Pentecostal church, who would tour the country during her childhood. She told me, in the same way, that once upon a time you would go to school on Saturdays, and were given time off to help with the potato harvest, and that girls were expected to be housewives. What really made her sceptical about all religion and the intentions of religious people was not its spiritual gloss or the speech-like sounds, but the time when Jehovah’s Witnesses called at the white house, where the family were living, to save them, the day after her dad died. Like vultures, she said.

She told me about the money box at Sunday school that took the form of a little African boy in nothing but a loincloth, who bowed when you dropped a coin inside. A symbol of a barbaric time in the past, now cleansed through the shining light of the common good. My parents never had me baptised.

I light candles in church and I don’t dare to ask her to come back. I dare only to ask for her not to suffer. But when Jesus heard it, He answered him, saying, ‘Do not be afraid; only believe, and she will be made well.’

The hope I lack in this world, I lay beyond this world. The hope that there will be another chamber behind this chamber, a chamber that the living can know nothing about as long as we are living.

Now all wept and mourned for her; but He said, ‘Do not weep; she is not dead, but sleeping.’ If that is to be believed. Then I believe now. Her illness has transformed me into someone who places their hope beyond the limit of life. I wasn’t that person before. Then her spirit returned, and she arose immediately. And He commanded that she be given something to eat.

She doesn’t remember wanting nice pictures of herself.

She asked for the number of a photographer who had taken publicity shots of me. This was one of the good years, just before her illness, when she seemed contented with herself.

Throughout the time I was growing up, she was dissatisfied with her appearance, sighing when she looked in the mirror. In the seventies, a doctor prescribed her slimming pills containing amphetamine. She hadn’t gone to the doctor because of her weight, but for reasons that were completely different. She never did collect the pills.

I remember us having a bath when I was a child. Her breasts kind of floated out, like balls of white bun dough, her brown nipples right there in the middle. She told me (a little proudly?) that they ruptured the machine at the maternity wing that was supposed to get the milk flowing so she could breastfeed me.

When I was about nine, I was given an essay to write for homework on the theme of ‘My Family’. It contained the sentence: My Mum is kind and slightly round in shape. She repeated it to friends, laughing. I was a child. I was still to know that shame can be hidden by laughter. I didn’t know that shame over one’s own body is a particularly toxic shame.

In one photograph from the late eighties, she is sitting beside a colleague. Mum often told me about this particular colleague; she was a former beauty queen of some kind. The beauty queen smiles into the camera, the light falling elegantly on her cheekbones and ensemble, bright and perfect. Mum is beside her in a baggy oversized sweater, she is hiding herself inside it, the way she hides in loose-fitting clothes in all photos from back then. She is leaning over a paper plate of food, her hair hanging down.

I think that was how she saw herself: someone who could never compete in the same environment as the beauty queens, and who therefore might just as well give up all but the most elementary of matters when it came to her own appearance.

Her older sister was known locally as a beauty. Being the one who came after a beauty may have had something to do with it. She liked to tell me about those beauties, the beautiful women. Very rarely about the beautiful men. The beautiful women weren’t just interesting, but vulnerable. Often they bore a secret tragedy and their stories ended with an extra something that darkened the image, such as: her husband was such a nasty piece of work, he hit her about.

The stories about the beauty queens were similar to Grandma’s tragic tales about people for whom fortune once smiled, but who had now lost everything. The lives of the beauty queens weren’t actually real. They were like a soap opera, like Falcon Crest, infinitely distant from our own existence.

Her transformation began when she was about to turn sixty. She lost weight. She had her ears pierced. She had her hair tinted. Got a new wardrobe. Maybe she thought this was her last chance? I don’t know, I can only acknowledge the difference with the benefit of hindsight. She wanted it documented. The CD with the pictures the photographer sent her is gone, of course, lost in the confusion of carrier bags.

I email S, the photographer. She replies that she doesn’t recall this job, but promises to get back when she has looked into the matter further. She has photographed thousands of people. Even so, this surprises me. How can S have forgotten my mum? It makes me wonder if the pictures exist at all. Did I ever see them? Or did she just talk about them as something she wanted, but never had done? Has my memory been playing tricks on me?

Then S gets in touch. She has no record of any files, but she has found an email with the pictures that she sent to Mum. She forwards the email to me. Not the best resolution. But there they are. The photos. So much like herself. In her favourite muted colours, red and purple. With her smile, the expression in her eyes.

At the dementia care home they use a sling hoist to lift her out of bed. They haven’t managed to get her to walk any more by herself since her fall, except once after her operation. Not even with support. The hoist is attached to a ceiling track and makes me think of an industrial robot, something that wouldn’t look out of place in car manufacturing. She only manages to sit up in her wheelchair for a few hours a day, at meal times. The staff feed her. But she eats far too little anyway, nurse C tells me. Quietly and gently she tells me this.

I wet Mum’s lips with the large cotton swab when I’m there, just how I’ve learned. I rub her dry forehead with some moisturising skin cream. I make sure to visit her when she isn’t in her wheelchair, I can’t stand seeing her in that. The bed rails are always up. She opens and closes her mouth, but no sounds pass her lips.

At home I show the photos to D and we look at them for a long time. Then I cry and ask, not D, but myself: why didn’t I record her voice? Now that she has stopped speaking altogether and it is too late, is what I find myself asking. Even though she was inevitably heading there, to the expiry of her words, I haven’t been able to imagine that it would actually happen. It would have been easy to ask her to say a few sentences into her phone’s voice recorder.

Does she remember my voice? Does it soothe her when I talk to her in her torpor? Or is it one voice among other voices, uttering words that are incomprehensible to her? Maybe it isn’t that at all, but just a sound, like a fan whirring or water running out of a tap. Anyway, I keep talking to her. Her eyes move behind her eyelids, a narrow chink opens and closes again.

Mum, I’ll be back on Thursday. That is the last thing I say to her before I leave for the day.

She doesn’t remember that the skin on the arm of a dehydrated person returns very slowly to its usual position when you lightly pinch it with your fingers, whereas the skin on the arm of an adequately hydrated person springs back quickly to its normal position after a similar pinch.

She once knew that the life of a person suffering from severe dehydration is in danger if the condition isn’t corrected quickly. I call Dad. It is early December and the daylight has already come and gone. The canal is shining in the dark, and out on Lake Hammarby the small passenger ferry travels back and forth, back and forth with its lights on. Dad and I talk about what to say when nurses and doctors ask us if they should put her on a drip. We feel differently about it. Dad talks about hope, the hope that she will get stronger, eat by herself again, get out of bed and walk. I say that, to me, she is already gone. It is as if another person is shaping those words. They are true and I don’t want to articulate them, so I let someone else do it. Someone to speak with my mouth, my voice. Someone who knows the truth and won’t be intimidated by it.

A long time ago, she said that this was exactly what she was terrified of: becoming unable to communicate, locked-in, someone who can only eat and breathe, no more. She shouldn’t have to live her horror. Dad says: I know you’re right. And I know it’s not enough for him. He sees certain things with her that I don’t see. Eyes that seek his own, sounds that could be words but for me remain only sounds.

When I was with her at the dementia care home earlier in the day, I touched her face. She was beautiful as she breathed. When I put my hand in hers, she squeezed her hand around mine. The care home nurse said it was an automatic response. You can’t be certain there’s any intention behind the movement.

I was speaking to her, yet she didn’t open her eyes. I was so terribly, so completely and utterly tired that I soon fell silent. I thought: the world is impossible without this human being. I thought: she is inscrutable. I thought: she can’t die, not now, not ever. I thought: I can’t let her down now.

She doesn’t remember wearing three rings.

The rings are in a plastic pocket marked ‘K. Brun 3 rings’ in robust, red marker pen. Staff have placed them at the foot of Mum’s ambulance trolley on her way back to the care home from the hospital. Neither Dad nor I thought to take care of the rings when she was admitted. You are not allowed to wear any jewellery during surgery.

Dad thinks we should keep the rings in the medicine cabinet in her room. C, the care home nurse, advises us against it. She explains that too many people have access to the cabinet to risk storing anything precious in there. Who will take care of the rings? A brief, irritated exchange of words ensues between Dad and me. Everything turns into an issue right now, things flare up, go away, flare up again.

I take the rings home. The diamond ring. The engagement ring. The little bird ring from Portugal. The insides of all three rings are black with a greasy, thick layer of stubborn dirt. I clean them with a toothbrush.

She mutters and pulls her hand towards her as I try to slip the engagement ring onto her ring finger the next time I visit her. It takes a long while. I have to start again several times from the beginning, before the ring is finally back where it belongs. The other two rings can stay in the plastic pocket. I can’t face putting both of those back on her.

Past the twelve-week mark. The risk of a miscarriage drastically reduced. Sonogram. We got scheduled early, according to the midwife ‘because you’ve had one miscarriage already, so we usually take an extra look so you can relax.’ A throbbing little cloud on the screen. A beating heart. I had to take a deep diaphragmatic breath so as not to fall apart. Astonishing. It is utterly astonishing to see a new life. Completely filled up with it, the astonishment. A single word to hang onto. As with every person who faces the arrival of a new generation, I, too, must summarize. I’ll have to summarize. I’ll dare to summarize now. The story of a person, a childhood, everything involved in becoming a parent. in other words, me. 

Who are you?

My name is Olivia and I’m thirty. My work is writing and performing. I can tell myself I am in perfect control of this presentation, although I know this is just how the imagination works, it comes from somewhere. There’s no deciding in advance what you’re going to make up, it is simply the result of a thousand little coincidences you can’t possibly control. It’s difficult to talk about yourself, the self is private, wants attention and validation, which makes it uninteresting. I care a great deal about my relation to the world, but less about myself. The circumstances. They’re easy to talk about. I’ve always been interested in history. Something preceding me, something coming after me. That makes it simpler.

Where did you grow up?

I was a city child, grew up in central Gothenburg, in the outermost row of buildings in Nya Masthugget. You entered from Andra Långgatan 46, which had more porn shops and fewer cafés in those days. And a state liquor store as well. The buildings in Nya Masthugget served as a fortress, impenetrable, with a huge system of interconnecting underground corridors and identical courtyards. I still know my way around Masthugget perfectly. Everyone’s parents worked in the arts, but no one’s parents were well known. We children who hung out together were all girls, all city kids, courtyard kids, when dinner was ready a parent would shout from a balcony: Come on in. Time to eat. Sometimes I tell the story of when we built a playhouse right next to Johannes Church, with its soup kitchen, and how somebody took up residence there. I tell it as an anecdote about what it’s like to grow up in the middle of a city — somebody homeless moved into our playhouse. We’d dragged over some old rug we’d found in the trash room, it was pale pink, I remember that clearly, and an old plastic chair. The next day when we arrived there someone was there, and we backed off in fright. Drunkos were no danger, just creepy, but flashers were scarier. You could see them in the city park or out by the pier at Saltholmen. Everybody knew that, and everybody’d encountered a flasher some time.

Like all children, I was part of an us. Us kids on the courtyard, us kids on the street, …us kids from Masthugget, us kids in class 1-3 A, us kids from Oscar Fredrik School. Later the us was fragmented, as happens, each individual stands alone. Each of us has to stand in that solitude, become an I, become the only individual who is me, in solitude. There’s no getting around it.

I grew up. Halfway between two church spires, Masthugget Church at the top of the hill and Oscar Fredrik church at the foot. When I couldn’t sleep I’d lie and listen to the church bells ringing, more or less in time, and know I was at home. Not until I got to upper secondary school did I realize that lots of other people don’t grow up living in apartments, and not only the ones who live in single-owner houses with basements and indoor staircases. That a sense of community not only means living in the same way at the same place, with the same kind of parents, clothes and hairdos, but that it is about other, deeper things, like a color inside or muffled music close to the soul, whether the soul is in the stomach or close to the heart.

In any case, I’m a city kid, and cities are where I feel safest. Always some place that’s open, always a light on somewhere, always someone moving around in an apartment across the street. Always part of an anonymous, enormous community. I like it. 

In the city you learn to observe people. This is a different gaze than the look that gazes at the natural environment and the changes of the seasons. I’ve always looked at people. At strangers. 

I was also a solitary child, didn’t like being a child, couldn’t wait to grow up. Not because childhood was so awful, but because adult life seemed so wonderful. My sister and I grew up surrounded by wildly enthusiastic love. There was a distinct line down the middle of life, between what was family and what was outside. I never doubted that I was loved, I knew it. I was good and clever and used an adult vocabulary. My mother always asked why, asked me to explain and to tell her: why do you think they behave that way? How did that make you feel? Do you think there’s a reason for it? I learned from the outset to think dialogically, was able from an early age to put into words to the thing everyone has to formulate some time — my feelings in the world.

Throughout grammar school I was an outsider. Sometimes invited along, sometimes not, never relaxed. For a long time I said it didn’t bother me, in my childhood I wasn’t interested in other children, I said. When, one afternoon as an adult I returned to my old school, I wept. It took a few minutes for me to sort out the sea of emotions. Then I realized the trigger was every time I passed the spot where I used to hide from the other kids during recess. If you’ve ever been excluded from the community, you carry it around like an ugly scar on your face, that’s what I think. Most of the time life is pretty good anyway, but then there are situations in which you behave peculiarly, as if driven by your angst. I still find it very difficult to know how to behave in relationships that aren’t clearly defined. I stand there at a loss and panicked by the thought that I might do something wrong. That’s how important a sense of community between people feels, I know that for certain.

The first time I was on a stage I was about ten or eleven. I liked it from the get-go, I found it easy then to perform, there were clear rules within which I felt entirely free. I rushed out into the world in an enthusiasm of puberty. I had tremendous self-confidence. At one time I thought any stage was a worse stage if I wasn’t on it. I invented myself in front of the audience at the same time as I invented myself to myself, I thought it was wonderful, I felt omniscient.

I had to eat those words later. I grew older, reduced, I no longer know what I knew then. Exactly what the greatest grief in life was, the greatest joy. What is to come, probably. If you have been young and gifted, you often remain young for a long, long time.

As an adult, I have had an unusual professional life, closely intertwined with my self-image. I have done a great deal of touring. I’ve been just about all over Sweden except for the island of Öland, just by chance. I’ve travelled widely in Europe and the US, I’ve been to a couple of countries in Africa. That’s how I’ve introduced myself. As an itinerant. An observer. A satellite with powerful anchor chains. My best friends are all over the place. Myself, I moved back to Gothenburg, it was primarily a physical sensation, missing my hometown as if it were an amputated body part. Not exactly essential, maybe like a pinkie finger, that was how I felt when I moved back home. I got back my amputated pinkie, things fell into place.

This is where I live now. I live with the man who will be your dad in an apartment from the 1930s. They were referred to as ‘the healthy buildings’ when they were new, with large, bright rooms. From the living room we have a view of the street, from the bedroom a view of a slope where deer sometimes graze. It’s a lovely apartment, we were lucky.

Every person lives a tremendous life. This is what I can say about myself. I’m not interested in being at the center of things, as I’ve had to explain to people. That’s not why I’ve been attracted to the stage, it attracted me as a place where you can recreate yourself. I devote a lot of effort to doing that. To drawing a ring around myself and saying: This far but no farther. You can’t get at me. Within language there is an opening where I have always been free. Here. That which is me. Everything which will be your mother. There’s no getting around it.

The rest of you will also be my mother. There’s no getting around it.
 

I still haven’t miscarried. Astonishing. Absolutely astonishing.

But how to raise a daughter when you know what men do to women? I’m the one asking this question, you know nothing of all this yet. I’m asking the question because I know exactly when it happened the first time the second time the third time the thousandth time, I know exactly, I know exactly, exactly how it feels.

You weep. You love. That’s all. There is no other answer. I did think you might be a boy and not have to know. Know the sound of the streets on the way home in the dark, what it’s like when you travel, what kind of looks you get, what kind of words you hear, how everything you do has to be sifted through it. That’s the only answer. I know. I know too much about it.

What’s going to happen?

You’re going to learn which side of the street to walk on and in which parts of town. You’re going to learn how to talk back and how to ignore anyone who shouts, looks, asks questions, takes things from you, your solitude, your right to it. You’re going to stand at a bar or on a dance floor. They’re going to talk about your clothes in a way that implies something you didn’t mean. 

You’re going to be tired and lean against a wall, semi-shut your eyes because you’re falling asleep and somebody will come up and tell you that you look like a whore. You’re going to just have turned twelve when that happens. You’re going to sit alone in a taxi at fifteen, stiff all over and unable to get out.

You’re going to hear how men twice, three times as old as you talk about imagining you naked, this is going to happen in work-related contexts, when you have a chance to do a good job, you’re not going to do a good job because that happened, just because that happened. You’re going to be at restaurants and at parties and on just an ordinary afternoon when you’re boxing things up to move and a neighbor offers to give you a hand, all these times are going to end with somebody groping your breasts. Some of the times you’ll freeze to ice. Other times you’ll be outraged. You’re going to scream at a man, a full restaurant, a neighbor and you’re going to think: they’re dogs. They aren’t people, they’re dogs. You’re going to wish a man were dead. There’s no other way to explain that feeling. Wishing someone were dead, you’re not going to believe you had it in you, you’re going to have to admit it, that it’s there inside you, that it’s what gets deposited there when something else is taken from you, when something that was your absolute right is taken from you, and the freedom in simply being able to exist is taken from you and the freedom in simply being able to exist is exchanged for this, to be able, deadly seriously, to hate.

It makes no difference that you didn’t think you had it in you. You’ll travel all over the world and it will be everywhere. A little less freedom. You’ll long for old age, when there will no longer be such things to take from you. You’re going to find the thought of old age horrifying, because this is what people say, that only youth is worthwhile, that’s what they holler and freedom, freedom, freedom being taken from you at every moment. There will be hands, there will be limits crossed, there will be ruthlessness, there will be an apology afterwards, you’re going to say it’s okay, it’s all right, you’re not going to talk about it, because you don’t talk about that kind of thing, don’t mention it, you just know, you just know, know how it feels not to be able to breathe when somebody’s holding you much too tight, know what it means not to be able to break loose, how it feels to be looked at, now hate is deposited in you, hate not amenable to reason, all this, it will not be mentioned with a single word. Especially not to me. Because how do you tell your mother? How do you tell your mom something like that?

And then at some point in adulthood, you understand. It wells up in you with icy clarity: she knows. She’s known it all along. Mom has always known because the same things have happened to her, and she’s carried it with her. All my life, she’s carried it. So I will be your mom. So I will know. So I will carry.

Then what do you do?

You weep. You love.

Life always goes very fast and very slowly. Then the phone rings, everything changes, a moment later: something new.

What did they say on the phone?

They told me I had cancer. Malignant melanoma. Do you want the number to a psychologist or a therapist? Normally we would have called you for an appointment, but it’s like this because of Corona, over the phone. We’ll send you information about sun protection and your treatment plan. That’s what they said.

What did you hear?

Nothing and everything. I heard a voice speaking to me as if I were in a state of panic, I wasn’t in a state of panic then. That came later. I thought I’m glad I’m pregnant. Cancer reduces fertility, I was thinking, I want children. The circumstances are special what with your pregnancy, my contact nurse, who had taken the phone from the doctor whose voice just told me cancer, said now. I liked her very much, my contact nurse. I’m your contact nurse she said, I’ve made you an appointment at the surgery unit in a week’s time. Call any time. Nothing that happens now, no matter what the outcome, will affect the child you’re carrying.

What did you think then?

I stopped thinking. I had no idea I was so good at stopping thinking. I didn’t think for several days. I called my mom and dad. I called my sister and a couple of friends. I practiced. I said I have cancer. Then I didn’t think any more. I painted a chest of drawers. I binge listened to a podcast on the history of country music. I told the man who’s going to be your dad that I wanted to watch movies with absolutely no female characters, didn’t want to know there were women because women are the ones who get pregnant and I’m pregnant and this is me in my body and I didn’t want to think about my body because my body was not only pregnant, it also had cancer. We watched movies with absolutely no female characters. He held me. Tight. I didn’t think. I didn’t write at all. I painted a chest of drawers. I scrubbed it down, washed it, put on two coats of primer and then three topcoats. I was overwhelmed by a peculiar, wild feeling of happiness. There was nothing but the present. I didn’t leave the apartment. Together with me lives the man I love most, as if to fully lean on him, my entire body. This is levitating, and we are expecting a baby together. I didn’t think anything more than that. 

Then what happened?

I went to the country, my best friend was there from Copenhagen. There was so much growing there. So many flowers. So much grass. So much life. In the middle of a field. And the trees. I saw all of that, and I didn’t think anything more than that. Then I went back home. […]

The Writer has cancer. She has to recreate herself now, these are words she has written before, that time it was about something else, this time it’s about this: there was life growing inside her, there was death growing insider her. The Writer had a baby, the Writer got cancer. She is very young to have cancer, she has skin cancer, malignant melanoma, the kind Tage Danielsson died of? Yes, the kind Tage Danielsson died of, the kind lots of people have died of, in the old days the survival rate was one in twenty, things have changed a lot since then. The Writer has skin cancer at the right time in relation to how things used to be, research has made progress, modern medical science, the new kind of cancer treatment has revolutionized the world. Not least for melanoma patients. The Writer had no idea.

The Writer gave birth to a baby. A healthy baby in late August, 10 out of 10 on the records, Bergdahl female child, 49 centimeters, 2900 grams. She had never had a baby before, she had no idea about that either, but it all went well, went magnificently, she didn’t get depressed which she had read everywhere that you got, the baby blues they called it, she was overjoyed. Her lovely little baby, her body had given this to her, it felt like a gift. She didn’t give a thought to illness, medication, health & care. Nursing and diaper changing, magical nights of being awake, dawn light. She had no idea about cancer medication. No more than most people know, radiation, chemo, hair loss, the Writer knew about this. The new cancer medications, the current treatment regimen, is completely different. Nurse her as long as you can, soon you’ll be on medication.

The Writer is unable to write about this in anything but the third person. The Writer is pretending it’s about someone else and googles on side effects and survival statistics. A very good form of cancer to have unless you belong to the minority, if it hasn’t had time to spread. The Writer’s cancer has spread.

There are the sick people and the healthy ones. The Writer had no idea. Had no idea, none, about the limits of the body, thought she knew, but that was sheer vanity.

The Writer is facing a death threat. It is for real. It is a real death threat, so what happens? The Writer is now utterly insignificant, since there is nothing to tell here, there is nothing but the present. The Writer is the one reaching forward in time, backward in time, in the face of a death threat there is no forward, no backward. Just the present. Nothing else. The Writer becomes something else. Loving. Beloved.

The loving one has a little child in her arms, a newborn, her child. She knows that nothing she can do can make this child remember her if she ends up dying. She knows that this is the only real betrayal, dying, but it’s the one thing over which she has no control. She can’t stop looking at the photos of the two of them, the only parenthood she can give, a child’s fantasies about how things might have been. Look, this is me with my mom, I don’t remember her, I look like her in this picture.

The loving one fends off the words, refuses to speak, is unable to respond to emails or messages, is unable to write anything down, not the words for it, anything but the words for it, the loving one does not want to speak them. She fumbles for the pictures. The terror. The fear, a lit corridor. There goes her beloved, her child, there they go without her. The sheer terror of it, of a slow death. Knowing that the most evil thing you can do is the only thing over which you have no control, because it’s completely arbitrary, it’s good luck or bad luck, and no one knows the answer: will I recover?

A special gaze strictly for crises. The crisis gaze, the clear-eyed gaze, the gaze of terror and a sense of detail. I’m drawing a circle around myself just here and this is me. I am. But not forever. That knowledge.