The Days of Paint and Roses
by Kjetil Jansen
The comforting noise of car wheels on gravel failed to penetrate Wilhelm Iversen’s gloom as he pulled up in front of his mother’s house. His wife, Ellen, got out while Willy, their eight-year old son, got stuck in the back while trying to unbuckle his seatbelt.
Wilhelm joined Ellen and the Saturday shopping by the luggage compartment. A leek had tried to escape from one of the five plastic bags, as leeks do. Wilhelm patted his jacket on the front pocket. “I need a smoke. I’ll join you in a minute.”
Ellen furrowed her brow teasingly and mumbled her consent as she rummaged through the bags for items freezer-bound. She knocked on the back window. “I have saved one bag for you, Willy.” She left without waiting for an answer.
Wilhelm closed the trunk to lean on it. No cigarette. He hadn’t had a smoke for two years. He just needed alone time. He sighed and breathed the crisp September air. To no avail. The melancholy was back. This barricade between him and the world. No pleasure from the sunny patch of fjord visible on the horizon, or from the gnarly and statuesque pines saluting the driveway. Nor from the roundabout of rose bushes, both red and white, his mother’s daily pride and joy. Not in bloom, of course, but still looking regimentally pruned. They were surrounded by garden tools.
His time to knock. “Willy, are you coming out of the car any time soon? Grandma is waiting.”
Pause. “Yes, Dad.” Finally, he did.
“The bag on the right.” His son complied with a goofy smile and scampered toward the house on his stumpy legs, bag swinging.
“Careful! There might be eggs in that one.”
Wilhelm knew very well there weren’t. Willy slowed down to an overcompensating crawl. His curly, blond hair was getting a bit too long. Same color as his mother’s, but without any grace or verve. Perhaps it didn’t work because he had inherited his father’s long face.
He sighed. The pretend cigarette was on its last legs. He gave the house a squinty look. Gables and spires and those ridiculous small windows, and painted featherlight blue, like a pietistic version of the sky as seen through a veil.
Inside, he barely gazed at the ancient furniture. A breakfront cabinet. Three ottomans. Shelves with moldy books he hoped never to touch. Moving through the overstocked house, he felt like a blind man but lacking even the small comfort of familiarity. Something needed to change.
In the kitchen, the bags were in different stages of being unloaded. Wilhelm looked at his watch. “What do you say, Ellen? Make dinner or go wild in the attic. I have bought both red and white paint.”
She smiled and swept her hand over the kitchen counter. Raw chicken fillets, crème fraîche, garlic, and a lemon. The rebellious leek was not invited; a zucchini was.
“Right,” said Wilhelm. “I’ll start on the rice. Basmati, yes?”
“Absolutely. Could you chop the zucchini, Willy?” Ellen asked. “No, not the bread knife. Yes, that one will do. No, make them smaller.”
Willy chopped away, happy to be a part of things. With both the chicken and rice well underway, Wilhelm joined him at the bench. “Good work, son.”
Willy looked up and promptly cut himself. Nothing new about that, and the boy did not make a fuss. He held up his bleeding index finger while waiting for his father to produce a band-aid from the kitchen drawer. Always prepared.
“Remember. In the shed. All for you. Red and white both,” he said slowly and winked at his son, who winked back.
As Ellen took command, Wilhelm set the table in the dining room. Only six forks left, due to one of mother’s little eccentricities. She had cutlery and other precious things nested away in her room, as if she thought the family would swing by to rob her before they moved to another town without telling her, thereby forcing her to eat with her hands.
She had also a lifelong fear of gypsy thieves, who she believed went for all things shiny. At sixty-five, she was not ready for the old people’s home, and the assessment after the incident four years earlier, which had left Willy with a sprained wrist, had not concluded otherwise. Old women underestimate their strength sometimes.
It was her house, and the Norwegian welfare state encourages its older residents to live at home when possible. Wilhelm was her only child, and he and Ellen did her shopping and visited her, bringing Willy for a family meal two days a week, Wednesdays and Saturdays. If they did abandon her, she would probably do something rash, like selling the house for cheap just to spite them.
Willy, who seemingly had forgotten all about the former calamity — he had been barely four years old — went halfway up the stairs and called for her. Dinner was ready. The three of them sat down but didn’t help themselves.
As always, Ramona made her entrance at the point of irritation. Even in gray track pants and a tired black jumper, she had the air of someone who belonged to a century where the lady of the house was entitled to be summoned to dinner by bell. She sat down in the chair at the end of the table, rigid and regal. All surplus fat had gone to her face and narrowed her eyes into slits. “Send me the potatoes.”
Ellen chuckled sheepishly. “Ramona, we have rice with this.”
Her mother-in-law wrinkled her nose but settled down. “Rice. The food of the yellow people. I will eat what is put in front of me, as I have always done.”
What Ramona brought to the table was silence. Not her own. “I know perfectly well how to use their wooden sticks. I just prefer not to. Who wants to be slobbering away when you can eat like a human being?”
Ramona stabbed at the food with a natural disdain. She never complemented their efforts. If they had brought in a three-tier cake circled with dancing lobsters, she would have complained why the lobsters didn’t click their claws. Recently, she had stopped attacking their culinary contributions. She had other bones to pick.
“Your father. He was a saint.”
Wilhelm and Ellen exchanged glances. Here we go.
“All I had left was a child strapped to my leg. Strapped, I say.”
“It couldn’t have been easy to start over,” Wilhelm said.
“That child was you!”
Already, her gaze began to drift from Wilhelm to Willy, who stared at her as if hypnotized.
“The crying. Poop everywhere. A magnet for disease. The mumps. Endless colic. By Freyja’s cats! I wonder why I didn’t just drop... why I had you at all.”
Willy lost his fork on the floor. While he retrieved it, he knocked over his glass of water and the bottle of soy sauce. He sat down slightly askew, as if he wanted to punish himself.
“Once you closed your ears when I sang for you at bedtime. I never sang for you again. I wanted a guitar, but my parents gave one to Beatrice instead.”
Further outbursts didn’t affect her appetite. As soon as she was finished, she put her knife down on the plate, hard, to distract from her putting the fork in her pocket. “I will have a short rest before gardening. I am the only one doing anything around here.”
The rest of the family stayed mute until they heard her door slam shut.
“Who is Beatrice?” Willy asked.
“Who do you think?” Ellen retorted.
“Oh, I know. Her dead sister?”
“Why would her parents give another Beatrice a guitar?”
Willy fell silent. As they cleared the table, Wilhelm took Willy aside. “I think today is the day.”
“Will it make Grandma happy?”
“Yes. A nice surprise. Afterwards, we’ll all have ice cream.”
Willy hurried out the front door. Ellen and Wilhelm calmed themselves down on the living room sofa, listened to music on the radio, low enough to hear Mother’s steps half an hour later. The shriek from outside was high enough to rattle the window.
Ellen got up. “Give them a minute,” Wilhelm said. They listened. No scolding, only silence. They walked to the door in tandem.
His mother was nowhere to be seen. Willy was thrashing around inside the rose bushes, trapped by thorns. Wilhelm sighed. More wounds to take care of.
“Stay still!” he barked, but the boy did not listen. As he turned, he could see prongs from a small rake, stuck deep into the back of his neck. Willy began to convulse before he slumped, branches holding him aloft as preparing him for a funeral pyre.
Wilhelm’s son was dead.
He lifted his eyes to find mother. She was coming out of the shed, dressed in a yellow apron and green gloves, carrying a new rake. As she saw him, she took it back inside. She walked calmly towards him ignoring everything but him.
“I am sorry. I don’t know what happened. It is all a blur.”
“Yes, Ramona. You will probably be better off sticking to that statement. No way around it, we will alarm the police.”
A short, understanding nod, and she was back in the house, her steps sagging, but only a little.
Ellen pointed to her mobile. “Wait,” he said. He approached the bushes. Willy still had his band-aid on, frayed at one edge. He had brought both the red and white canisters, and he had managed to dabble a couple of the branches white on top.
He turned back to Ellen. “We got a bit more than we bargained for. Let us get our stories straight.”
She thought for a moment. “With Willy dead, do we need that story? All the stuff about we bought paint for the attic, tried to make him interested by suggesting he paint the bushes to please your grandmother. We were certain he would come back and ask about which color where and which brush to use and that he wouldn’t end up doing what he did.”
“You are absolutely right. We don’t need a story. He got the idea on his own. He did have wild ideas about pleasing her. How do you feel, by the way?”
Her eyes lit up. “I will mourn him but, without Ramona, we are safe to have more children. Better children. The world is getting tough, and we need to be strong and have a clear mind to survive. We mourn, we thrive. This day will haunt us, but we have each other.”
“Amen to that.”
As Ellen placed the call, Wilhelm turned away to give her privacy. The pines, their intricate patterns of shadow and light. The fjord, jewels of promise.
Behind him, the main attraction, blue as the sky of angels. We survive, we thrive, we build.
Copyright © 2022 by Kjetil Jansen
