Across the China Sea by Gaute Heivoll

Author:Gaute Heivoll [Heivoll, Gaute]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-55597-976-8
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2017-10-18T04:00:00+00:00

2.

After she left I immediately began clearing out the desk in the living room. That’s when I found the contract, the cover letter, and, later, the photographs in Mama’s confirmation Bible. I also found a letter that stood out from the other things. It was written in Papa’s sloping, somewhat shaky handwriting on very thin, almost Bible-thin, paper. A duplicate. The letter, dated July 12, 1973, was addressed to the Child Welfare office in Stavanger, which over the years had changed its name to Stavanger Social Services. In it Papa gave notice to terminate the caregiving agreement.

For twenty-eight years he and Mama had been bound by the contract he signed outside on that dark winter evening in 1945. For a generation they had demonstrated a Christlike spirit of love, and in the summer of 1973 he sat alone at the kitchen table and summed up their entire life.

A one-month notice was still required.

The three brothers, Nils, Sverre, and Erling, had been released from the contract since the fall of 1963, although they had come back each Christmas and each summer since then. Christian Jensen had died, as had Matiassen. But patients had been at the house the whole time. Jensen for almost twelve years, Matiassen for twenty-two years, the three brothers for eighteen years, Josef for twenty-nine. And then there had been Mina Jensen’s five-month intermezzo starting in the fall of 1948, when at long last she was reunited with her son Christian.

Lilly and Ingrid were still there.

Papa sat alone at the kitchen table, he wrote slowly, and tried to include everything. He wrote about the wild dance that had finally worn out Jensen completely; he wrote about Matiassen, who at the end had to be carried back and forth from the stool under the ash tree; about Erling’s increasing migraines; about the fight upstairs; about Sverre, who ran out of the house and lost his way in the woods more and more often. He wrote about Josef’s singing, about the wandering cup and the medal for courage. He wrote about everything—the way it had been, the way he remembered it.

He did not write anything about Tone.

At the very bottom of the thin sheet of paper was his signature. Mama read the letter and had nothing to add, even if perhaps she wished he would have written something about Tone. She didn’t say anything, only nodded. So he folded the page, put it in an envelope, and walked down to the milk platform in the last of the afternoon sun.

Upstairs, something moved behind the curtains.

He walked the short distance to the milk platform, put the letter in the mailbox, and returned home, slowly and alone. About halfway he stopped, his shadow stretched far across the field. He looked toward the house, toward Mama taking down laundry from the clothesline. He had tried to summarize the last thirty years. Everything fit on an A4 sheet of paper, but he hadn’t mentioned one word about Tone.

Several weeks later a green station wagon drove up the road from the milk platform.

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