On the outskirts of town stood an old monastery, dilapidating. The monastery had been built towards the end of the Middle Ages and was later used as a hospital and asylum, before it closed its doors in the mid-1980s and didn’t open them again for nearly fifteen years, because of outdated facilities, because of poor municipal finances, or so the official explanations went, but everyone who worked there knew that that was not the whole truth (and a half-truth is perhaps a lie): There was a pressure that hit you when you walked inside from the road on a Monday morning and hung up your coat in the cloakroom, a pressure that induced headaches and occasional hallucinations (anxious velvet. silk. children’s laughter and women’s screams), and some thought it was due to the incessant suffering which, after seven hundred years, had embedded some form of fever in the walls, not unlike the summer heat that rises from the rocks long after the sun has set, while others contrarily claimed that the pressure was inherited from the monastery, that it was what remained of the small brothers’ collective contemplation; modern man’s consciousness was so limited, so knotty and compressed, like a secret message scribbled down on a piece of paper that was later chewed up such that the words dissolved into the paper and became a gray, mealy mass, that it was physically painful for them to step into such a zone, characterized as it was by as much insight into humanity’s possibilities as into its limitations, as much longing and patience as submission and independence, said Lilli, in short, by an inner freedom which we – she stretched her arms wide – aren’t confronted with until we are struck by disease or degradation, until we find ourselves on this or that deathbed, and which we then try with all our strength to suffocate. I’ve seen it with my own eyes! The people of today would rather nurse their neuroses and heed their hopes than come into contact with their inner freedom! Perhaps because doing so implies a radical courage and radical humility at one and the same time, and these are qualities we despise in our age, we despise humility in the same way we despise idiosyncrasy! We would rather die in denial about what we are than be transformed, if only in the moment of our death, into someone we wouldn’t even have gone on a coffee break with!
Lilli caught her breath. She was twenty-eight years old and had worked at the Hospital for four of them – the facility was located in the newest addition to the monastery compound, farthest down towards the river, with a view of the original building – the last two years of which as the head of security, and despite this and other statements – which perhaps revealed a religious inclination or at least a romanticization of the old-fashioned, not to say the martyr-like, a love of limitations and boundaries (and self-discipline? Was she not very thin?), but also of seriousness and solemnity in the face of life (of the fact that one was alive), and of typologies, eras and cultures in which it would’ve never occurred to man to think that it was the melody (it knew it was the flute) and had realized that its smallness was what made it great – she was otherwise of a relatively mild nature; when meeting with patients she was friendly and attentive, and, yes, sometimes she was aloof with her colleagues, strict perhaps, if you really wanted to see it that way, but usually friendly, and whenever she asked her colleagues for advice she’d nod diligently at each and every step of their response (Condescending? Affirming? An expression of nervousness? Opinions were divided, but it was rare that she followed the advice anyway).
Lilli stayed in the office for the whole afternoon. She stared absentmindedly out the window at the oak growing slowly, quickly, depending on what you compared it to. The tree stood right in front of the ruins of the original building, the evening sun shined through the thick, soon-to-be-bare branches. The oak was almost eight hundred years old, it had been planted when the monastery was founded; Lilli imagined a lone monk, early in the morning, just after the frost had let go of the earth, resting on his knees outside the building. He untied a bag from his belt, opened it and rolled three acorns into his hand. He used a stick to poke a deep, narrow hole in the ground and dropped the acorns into it, before he covered it with soil, stood up pensively with his hands folded somewhat dejectedly in front of his chest like a wounded animal begging for food, and he pressed his foot down on the spot as he murmured some inaudible phrases, and within her the short word echoed, god, god, god.
The word was within her as she made the last round for the evening. Most of the patients were calm, they were at the Hospital of “their own free will,” if that expression, which reeked of wind in the sails, made any sense at all in their situation. They would lie in their beds looking up at the ceiling, or shuffle around the rooms and had to be told to go to bed, turn off the lights now. Soon the whole building was dark, except for the fluorescent tubes in the corridors buzzing and flickering.
After making one last round – she put her ear to each of the eleven doors, but heard nothing – Lilli went into the staff room and made herself a cup of coffee. Then she went into the guard booth and sank into the tattered armchair. Steam rose from the hot drink, she closed her eyes. What did that word mean to the men who wandered around here – she heard the sweeping sound of robes dragging along the stone floor, the muffled smacking of swift, bare feet – perhaps one could paint a room blue, if only it were the right shade of blue, then… No. But she still had the feeling that that’s how it was. If it were just the right blue color, all these fragile questions would be redundant, they would melt into the answers and be inseparable from them, and no such words anymore, just breath.
A knock on the plexiglass made her jump in her seat. It was Kerstin, the oldest patient, she had just turned seventy. Lilli stood up, unlocked the door to the glass cage and stuck her head out. Kerstin looked at her apologetically.
Are you having trouble sleeping, Kerstin?
The old lady nodded. Lilli opened the door and stepped to the side.
You’re welcome to come in and sit down.
Kerstin, who was dressed in a linen suit which she wore as pajamas, but which looked more like a danrho, walked into the small guard booth with gentle steps and an upright back and sat on the edge of the empty chair in the corner.
Tea?
Kerstin shook her head: I’m going back to bed soon.
Lilli sat back down and turned towards her.
I just had a dream.
Nightmare?
Kerstin shook her head again: No, she said. Her voice was more stable now. It wasn’t a nightmare. It’s hard to explain.
Lilli nodded. It went silent between them. Lilli leaned forward and grabbed the cup of coffee she had set down behind the plexiglass. Next to it was a stack of books left by employees over the years, but rarely read. At the top of the pile was a book with a faded dust jacket, the cover was yellow and green – Flowering Nettle, the author’s name meant nothing to her.
Can you hand me that book there, on the top? Kerstin asked suddenly.
Lilli picked up the book and gave it to her. She held it between her hands and looked at it with a slightly mocking expression.
The poor bastard, she mumbled and laughed, before she softly shook her head, as if she were reading the obituary of an old, unruly lover who had been impossible to trust but was now safely in the grave. She turned to a random page: It didn’t help that the birds were singing and the sun was shining when the family had set up their lives so strangely, she read, followed by a short, raw laugh. No, you won’t be of any help.
After Kerstin went back to bed, Lilli stayed seated with the empty cup in her hand. She was still tired, maybe she should go and brew herself another cup. She looked at the plump pile of keys on the shelf, it also seemed sleepy, like a creature that only moves when it absolutely must, and that has eyes in every part of its body. She put down her cup and picked up the book that Kerstin had read from. When she was younger and in college, she occasionally paged through books in the hope of finding a sentence that would point the way for her. She used to stand in front of the small bookshelf in her dormitory room that held books from her unfinished philosophy degree next to healthcare textbooks, it was a risky sport. She would close her eyes and stretch out her arm and let it guide her towards the shelf and pick out one of the books, let her finger run through the pages until she found one that felt right, and then she would open to it. Then she did it again: took the book in her hand, closed her eyes and turned to a random page, flipped a couple of pages back, let her hand brush across the page to tell if it felt right, no, not that one. She opened her eyes and read one of the sentences on the left page: She sat there behind the guitar like a deathly pale fortune teller. A silent wonder arose amongst the siblings. She made life so uncertain for them. Why did she walk around like that and “think”?
And suddenly there was Vivian’s face in her again, Vivian’s brown eyes.
Vivian had shown up in class at the beginning of her second year of high school. One morning in October, when they were sitting out in the woods smoking, she asked Lilli if she was a believer, and Lilli, who had grown up in a strict atheist home, repeated the phrase that she had mastered already in kindergarten (but this time she dropped the no, but at the beginning of the sentence, because she had seen that Vivian wore a simple miniature cross around her neck; it was usually hidden under her sweater but fell out whenever she, for example, crouched over her Norwegian textbook or kneeled down to pick something up from the sidewalk), I believe in Jesus as a historical person. Vivian looked at her inquisitively, not mockingly, but it was clear that she was thinking unspoken thoughts. She looked up at the trees where the leaves were changing color.
Hmm, she said. I don’t think of it like that at all. I think he’s always being born again. She pointed her index finger into her chest. That all of this is, in a way, the manger, she said and smiled, before she took another puff from her cigarette.
The next morning on Lilli’s desk there was a folded sheet of paper with her name on it. She sat down, placed the paper in her lap and opened it, hidden under the tabletop: Don’t think that you can ground sanctity in what you do, you must ground sanctity in what you are, it said. For the work does not sanctify us, we must sanctify the work.
Throughout autumn and winter, as Lilli and Vivian spent more and more time together, her classmates started making jokes at Lilli’s expense. Her determined and self-assured manner and her grown-up way of speaking, which had earned her the status of a kind of guardian among the teenagers in her first year of high school, admired by some and despised by many, evaporated as soon as Vivian entered the room. Vivian was Lilli’s more spontaneous and street-smart counterpart, somehow both more mature and more youthful, with her thick eyeliner and her Red Prince cigarettes, her effortless philosophical expositions and her sexual experiences, her friendly smile that did not discriminate, her frequent truancy. Vivian liked to create dissent in the classroom, she had strong opinions, but they often changed, and when Lilli would spend several weeks thinking about one of Vivian’s statements, arguing against it in her mind before eventually submitting to it and accepting what Vivian said as truth – sewed it into her own worldview and tied off the thread – and proudly say something that resembled one of Vivian’s previous claims, in the middle of social studies class, for example, Vivian would turn to her and look at her, confused, as if she were hearing this strange theory for the first time; no, she didn’t agree with this, no, things weren’t connected like that, she didn’t think so. And the lightning struck Lilli’s body and ignited a fire, which she quickly suffocated by making herself small and staring down at the floor, well yes, no, she hadn’t really thought enough about how it was all connected.
How did it feel? Like locking yourself in a lover’s apartment, cleaning and baking and cooking and brushing, dressing up in your finest underwear and carefully arranging yourself in an armchair in the dark with a somnolent expression, only to, when the lover arrives, be met with an initially dazed but then sleepy facial expression, a voice announcing it was tired and had to sleep, the light being turned off, and then you’re left sitting there with your white skin, and what had looked like seductive stockings suddenly looked sad, your thighs no more than laced pork roasts, and one time when Lilli was very small she clung to a woman’s leg and pressed her cheek against it, convinced that it was her mother’s leg, before a strong hand wrenched her arms away and Lilli looked up, and a strained woman’s face said, trying to be friendly, or at least she tried to not seem angry, but it only made it worse, she was as cold as all strangers are when you’re a child: I’m not your mother.
Vivian didn’t care how things appeared, she wanted to get to the heart of things. She asked her fellow students what they believed in (Lilli had hoped the moment in the forest was reserved for her) and was open about being drawn to the mystical, or was it the gnostic, she had read a lot about these and related subjects, but she never spoke from a clear point of view, never from a zoomed out perspective, but from the middle of the nebula, and yet with a rare authority, like some apostle of trial and tribulation, and some probably thought she was completely off the wall, but there was no denying that there was something seductive in her voice and the words she chose, on a good day it sounded almost prophetic, as if a radiant darkness descended over the classroom whenever she spoke.
Everything was in place for Vivian and Lilli to become friends, because they were different from their peers in similar ways, and so that’s what happened; towards the end of that second year, when spring was finally in the air, they were seen several times together outside locales in the city where events of a dubious nature were known to take place, but Lilli remained silent and awkward in Vivian’s presence, like a pale copy of her, Vivian also walked fast, such that Lilli was always literally half a step behind her, whether it was on the way through the schoolyard to their smoking spot in the woods or through the school corridors on the way from math to business finance, Lilli always lost her own footing, and you could tell that she often argued with herself, that she was torn between an urge to submit to Vivian and to scream in her face; she always went with the first option, but her volition somehow grew thinner each time it happened because, yes, she could endorse Vivian’s views and fiery speeches, but she wasn’t Vivian, and it was clear that this spelled trouble for her, that a little ego (or something divine?) somewhere within her was screaming to be itself, because Vivian was never very interested in what Lilli had to say, she was generally never very interested in finding role models, conversation partners or guiding stars among the living.
In short: It was difficult. But Lilli held back, she held back, all these counterarguments she had ready when Vivian painted with too broad a brush or contradicted herself or wasn’t listening, she held back and felt dishonest and fake and small. They continued to be friends.
The thought of Vivian was exciting, the twenty-eight-year-old Lilli fidgeted behind the plexiglass. She started to scratch the top of her hand, she scratched and scratched until she discovered red, then stopped, ashamed. No, no, not that again. A calmer person now. Different, more mature, less frightened now. Blah blah blah. But she remembered it well: the closer Lilli had gotten to Vivian, the less she showed of herself, the less it seemed like Vivian knew her. She had mined her own sentences for lies and approximations, but she found none; she had to assume that it had something to do with feelings. That when other people talked about feelings, she didn’t instinctively know what they meant. And one day, in math class, as she sat scribbling on the worksheets half-asleep, a sentence formed on the sheet in front of her: build bridges, understand everything, never tell the truth.
The nasty suspicion that she was not only living in hiding from something, but thinking in hiding, feeling in hiding, breathing in hiding. That everything within her played out in some small space, the stupid square meters of her hiding place.
I..am.a..terrified.child.
She jolted, she must’ve started dozing off. She grabbed the keyring and coffee cup and stood up.
She made herself another cup of coffee in the kitchen. It tasted acidic. She poured it out and looked down into the sink, at the brown image reflecting back at her. In the end, it might’ve been Vivian’s eyes more than anything else that knew something. Something about Vivian’s room and Lilli’s room and the short walk between them. About their classmates’ comments about how lucky the two girls were to live alone, about the fleeting glances they traded, through the cigarette smoke, over the glowing butts between red fingertips peeking out from the sleeves of their college sweaters, or when it was a school break or a bank holiday and the other students who also lived in the dormitories went home, and those from the city went to the countryside with their families, and the only people Lilli came across in the supermarket were those she knew the least. The silent boy at the back of the classroom, the shy girl whose name she had forgotten, they never went anywhere either, they sat alone in apartments or houses with peeling paint, together with their single parents and younger siblings, they were sent out to buy bread and a bag of dried soup mix and otherwise sat in the bedrooms they shared with their little siblings, big headphones over their ears, staring at screens filled with the magical worlds of fairies and potions and sparkling lakes that splashed when you waded into them, the sound of stardust and dragon roars and enemy horns, and it was an eternal Tuesday at ten past three and a drowsiness hung over the town, no parties, no plans, October, February, golden light and melting snow and Vivian and Lilli who each lived alone in their own place and who went out to buy bread and milk, or went for walks along the canal, freezing because they had lost their scarves, lost their gloves, February and still several more months of cold, but it was pointless to go and buy something you should’ve owned a long time ago, and the living stipend barely stretched through the month, this was everyday life, there was nothing really waiting for them in other towns, no real homes in other houses or flats, no childhood friends or parents or siblings to look forward to or to lure them home. Lilli and Vivian ran into each other by the canal, or caught sight of each other over the top of dirty guard rails and waved to each other, in the middle of the autumn or winter holidays, and it was peaceful in town, the little children bobbing up and down on their backs in invisible baby carriers, invisible children that they perhaps didn’t even know they were carrying, but which they nevertheless recognized in each other, something within them that knew that what their peers thought they saw as a kind of freedom also meant something else, was also the opposite, was also something entirely silent and almost dead. The inexplicable loneliness of being sixteen or seventeen years old in a small town one week in February when all the other students have gone on holiday or returned to their hometowns, and it’s ten past three on a Tuesday and you stumble out of your dormitory room and into the gray late winter light to buy some food for dinner and three beers with a fake ID, and you have every blossom imaginable in your chest, you are as young as you can be, and yet not at all, you never have been.
Lilli shuffled back to the guard station and sat down in the armchair again. It had now been several years since she had last seen Vivian. And since she hadn’t kept in touch with anyone else or created any profiles on the internet, she didn’t know what had become of her, but it was probably like everything else with Vivian; something brilliant she had achieved seemingly without effort, some sensational success or skill resulting from, as a wise person once put it, a concentration on the thing in itself. People who are interested in the thing and not in how mastering the thing would change them in the eyes of others. Who don’t pretend to do something, but actually do it, and when the urge to manipulate arises in them, it’s like the breeze; they let it glide over the surface of the water within them, allow it to make a gentle ripple on the surface, and let it disappear again. No danger. Just a light breeze.
Lilli felt something sink in her. She heard her mother’s voice from childhood, haha, Lilli, you’re always so envious of the other girls. So jealous, jealous, no, no, no. A grown-up now.
Three weeks earlier, Lilli sorted through some old boxes that her sister had retrieved from her mother’s storage unit – Lilli had sent her out on a mission soon after she heard a news story about a mother who had killed both of her children and then tried to kill herself. Lilli had come across many similar situations at work, even when she was in an intern in child and youth psychiatry there had been stories, reports; thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds with burn marks on their necks because their parents used them as ashtrays when they were little, but for some reason there was another memory that bothered her more, that haunted her, it could all of a sudden pop up in her head and make her cry, an incident where she and another employee accompanied a seventeen-year-old boy to the cinema, it was his birthday. The boy loved Disney movies, there was a showing of Lady and the Tramp, in the middle of the scene where the spaghetti ends meet and the accordion-playing waiter sings “Bella Notte” at the top of his lungs, the boy started happily singing along, it was the fourth time he had seen the movie, and he was swaying in his seat and flailing his arms, he knew both the melody and the words by heart (he would sit and whisper them silently to himself), when the man in the row behind him, a coat-clad guy in his fifties who was there with his daughter, told him to shut up. Then the boy suddenly turned around, grabbed the man by the throat and started to choke him, almost past the point of no return, but Lilli’s colleague was strong and was able to loosen the boy’s grip on the man’s neck. Afterwards, when they were summoned to a meeting with management to explain the situation, Lilli’s colleague claimed that it had all happened in a fraction of a second. But Lilli sat there and couldn’t get rid of the thought that this wasn’t true. No, there was nothing they could’ve done to prevent the situation, but it wasn’t the case that the boy had lunged at the man out of reflex, that there had been a jump cut from singing and smiling to murderous rage, because there had been something in between, and it was this something, this facial expression, this link between the two situations, that burst out of Lilli’s subconscious at night and contorted her face into a grimace. It was the expression of the seventeen-year-old boy the second before he noticed the man’s scorn. It was as if everything you needed to know about humankind was in that single facial expression.
In any case, the news report made Lilli think of something her own mother had often said when she and her sister were little: I would’ve killed us all. I would’ve shot you first and myself afterwards.
Lilli had no clear memory of the context in which it had been said, only that it had to do with a game, a game they often played, in which Lilli and her sister asked their mother questions such as: What would you do if four men came here, locked the door behind them and started walking through the apartment looking for us? Or: What would you have done if you heard on the radio that a gang had tortured and killed all our neighbors and was on its way towards us? And their mother gave the same answer, always: I would’ve killed us all.
But, protested the little sister, couldn’t you have made a rope out of our clothes and let us escape out the window?
Their mother shook her head. If all of our neighbors had already been killed – indeed that’s what they had said on the radio – then we wouldn’t stand much of a chance either.
I wouldn’t want you to experience what it’s like to run from an enemy who’ll get you sooner or later, she said. You’re better off being shot by someone you trust.
In any case, the news had awoken a strong urge in Lilli to clear out the last of her belongings from her mother’s old storage unit, she had moved far away many years ago, and her sister, who had the key to the unit, had gone there and taken out the last few remaining boxes. One of them contained small items from Lilli’s childhood (a small porcelain bird, a jewelry box, a few notebooks), and she also found a letter from a man she had corresponded with during middle school, an American convict who had been referred to her by a volunteer organization that worked to remedy the miscarriage of justice (she had lied about her age), and now she thought of this engagement as a kind of tacit protest against her mother’s attitude towards the fictional gang that was rampaging through town on its way to her, as if the correspondence was a way to freeze the situation, to petrify her mother as she stood there with the revolver in her hand pointed at her daughters. Walk through the apartment. Go to the front door. Open it. Wait with empty hands for those who were still to come.
The relationship between Lilli and the American prisoner had eventually gotten quite intimate, not romantic, but like two children whispering secrets to each other in the dark. Back then, Lilli had struggled with food – anorexia, if you absolutely had to define and delimit it, for the sake of the record. The disorder was not due to the fact that the world was ugly and threatening, at least that’s not what she thought at the time; on the contrary, the pain stemmed from the fact that the world was a wonder that she had access to on one side but was cut off from on the other, it was such a strong bodily sensation that she had from the moment she became aware of herself, and perhaps even earlier, the feeling of being tied up at the bottom of a shaft. But she could still look up at the sun and the sky and the birds swooping overhead in great flocks, she breathed in the smell of the sea and flowers.
She must’ve written something like that to Jeff, that she didn’t want to disappear, but rather become a part of the whole, and Jeff had been sympathetic, because he himself had a daughter her age, and besides, he knew a thing or two about hunger and thirst and powerlessness, but also about the body that resisted so much, the body that was in turns heavy, sad and anxious, and full of dark fantasies and thoughts and moods that repeated and repeated and spun dark cocoons around everything so that it all was and remained separate, because in one of Jeff’s letters it was written: one day, love.
At ten before seven she woke up. Fabian, one of the few colleagues younger than her, was standing a few feet away from her and smiling.
You can go home now, he said in a hushed voice. I’ll take over here.
Lilli nodded quickly. She felt like curling up in a basket in the corner of the room and going back to sleep to the sound of his hands carefully flipping through a folder of forms. She got up from the chair and closed the door behind her.
In the kitchen the appliances hummed and whirred. She made herself another cup of coffee and leaned her hips against the counter. Still sleepy, she leaned over the table and pushed the window open, the sharp air seeped into the room. She straightened up, stood with the coffee cup in her hands and looked out the window. In the square outside the monastery ruins, two men were taking a walk, as they did every morning at sunrise, one young and the other old, the young one heading down the hill towards the river and the old one up towards the road. Both of them had lived in the facility for a long time, they were the only patients who confirmed the suspicion that madness and genius went hand in hand, they had books piled up everywhere, and if the nurses opened the door while the window was open, loose pieces of paper would sail around the rooms like doves, and in the evening their screens glowed blue-white in their darkened rooms. Lilli looked out at them. They had the same shuffling gait, their heads bobbed forward as if too heavy for their bodies, their feet barely seemed to touch the ground, and you need not have read any ancient Indian scriptures to conclude that there was an imbalance here: too little earth and too much sky, and therefore no sky at all.
The older one had now reached the road. He paused for a moment and looked to the right, where the winding asphalt road disappeared behind a hill and then continued along the sea. There was little traffic, it was barely morning, cold October, only the occasional semi-truck, that was it. One truck drove past with its windows wide open, music pouring out of it.
The old man froze.
He listened to the music until the truck disappeared behind the hill. He stood still for a long time, then he stretched his arms open. He began to turn on his own axis, slowly at first, then faster and faster, his face turned upwards. He spun and spun, and Lilli felt a tugging sensation in her chest, she had to hold on to the table. She stared at the man, she waited for him to stumble, for him to collapse and come back to himself with a confused look on his face, to then finally turn around and meet her gaze. Then she would be ready. She would be the landscape in the early morning mountains, when the pale darkness rises from the earth and gradually dissolves.
Don’t laugh, Lilli thought, don’t laugh. You have to be like the cottongrass when it falls out of rhythm.
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Originally published as “Nattevakt” in Ingen hellig (Aschehoug, 2022).