Authors: Douglas Glover
“You'll end up in jail,” says Pa, when Bjorn drives up in the lemon-yellow Land Rover and confesses his fraudulent speculations.
“Why tell me about this?” he adds. Bjorn waves a sheaf of papers in Pa's face. “I am supposed to repossess the farm today,” he says. He peers up at Pa's barn-wall mural, sucking in his breath in surprise. The painting stretches past the roof beams onto the peaked ceiling where there is barely any light, a vast array of exuberant life panels, a narrative of the family history complete with the names and slaughter weights of generations of pigs. At the beginning Ma and Pa cavort naked around the tree in the front yard, Adam and Eve, only Ma is a tight-bodied, slender-hipped adolescent Venus with a mischievous look and Pa is a golden-haired hero. Uncle Boris is up in the tree in a nightcap. Babies and turnips sprout in the fields. A lone grey phalarope perches atop a sow rooting among the turnips. Geese and chickens pick daintily at the manure pile. In panel after panel the children grow taller, more babies appear. The farm looks like a jungle, like a primeval garden. Ma and Pa scamper hand in hand amongst the trees. To Bjorn it seems indecent, though strangely exciting. Bjorn confesses to Pa that he has begun writing poetry in his afternoons at The Wingless Phalarope, in between cellphone calls with developers and Internet billionaires. Herr Grimmig drives to The Wingless Phalarope to consult, not wishing to interrupt Bjorn's precious work schedule. He depends on Bjorn to help him with all his bank decisions. Tamara Winzcheslon serves Bjorn peppermint schnapps and coffee and sometimes sits across the table from him with her chin on her hand, longing for him. But Bjorn is a faithful husband. In fact he can be a bit of a bore on the subject. And so Tamara is sleeping with Joran Boze, the dishwasher, to make Bjorn jealous and to have some fun. Nights, Bjorn sleeps next to Olga
, who tosses and sighs, sweating with desire and frustration in the stale sheets. When they try to make love, it is all tedium and effort. She accuses him of having sex with Tamara Winzcheslon. Her belly expands, she looks like a snake that has swallowed a football. When he puts his ear down there, Bjorn can hear the heartbeat. He says to Pa, “I don't understand what life is about. All I can think of is the possibility that I will get brain cancer and die horribly before I have a chance to be happy.” Pa says, “Come and have dinner. Trig killed one of the shoats. He's a handy little butcher, you know. At least one of my sons will have a trade.” To Bjorn, his father looks half dead from care. The multicoloured pigs keep warily to the shadows, crowding together in protective groups. Pa and Bjorn smell smoke and climb into the loft,
where they find Lisel asleep beside her overturned candle. They put out the fire with their coats.
Jannik, the wastrel, borrows money from Ma to buy the teller a gold necklace with a tiny seabird charm attached. The teller's name is Agnes Botgaard, and she is secretly in love with Herr Grimmig. But she accepts the necklace and pretends to like Jannik because Herr Grimmig won't pay any attention to her and Jannik's brother might soon own the bank. Jannik suspects something is up because the sex isn't so good. He thinks illicit sex is the best; he likes the first weeks of a new affair when all sorts of hanky-panky seem possible. He craves that abandonment in pleasure. Now he wishes he had not bought the necklace, wishes he had used the money to gamble instead. Suddenly he feels obligated to Agnes Botgaard. He has the strange thought that he must somehow do right by her. He has never felt this way. She tells him it's okay, he doesn't have to do right by her. It can be a one-night stand. He wonders what to do next. He thinks, How should one behave? What does it mean to be alive? Like many people in that economically and spiritually repressed land, Jannik has few options and no fun except for illicit sex and gambling. He notices that in the present age people are turning to art and sex to pass the time. His father's barn murals are beginning to attract attention. Much to Pa'
s disgust, his barn is now included on local vacation bus tours, along with the desalinization plant, the cement factory, the abandoned canal lock, the salt marsh, and the earthen dikes where multicoloured cows graze placidly. Daphne poses naked for local art groups that have sprung up like mushrooms in the cultural darkness. The town newspaper's columns are taken up with virulent aesthetic disputes between the right-wing realists, the left-wing avant-garde, and the irritatingly articulate postmoderns, despised by all. Jannik notices that the newspaper is also publishing his brother's poems, pages of them, and photos of his new house in the gated community going up along the salt marsh nesting grounds. Bjorn has a swimming pool and a personal gymnasium, and there are photos of Olga, big as a barn, reading celebrity magazines in a bikini. The shoats should be full-grown by now, but many have mysteriously disappeared. Boris finds caches of bones when he moves the manure pile. He is running out of new places to move the manure pile. The joke is getting old. His face is haggard and drawn. Around the neighbourhood, small pets are also disappearing. Daphne is more popular than ever, now that nude paintings of her adorn gallery walls across the country. An elderly gent with a white cane comes calling, asking for Grete, and the elderly man and the girl walk down the laneway to the dikes and the salt marsh, their heads bending together in animated conversation, her hand lightly touching his forearm as she guides him through gates and over stiles. Though he can't see, she points out the various sights to him. In the distance she can see Bjorn's new house, rising like a palace beyond the new yacht club. Nikolai cannot speak yet but solves intricate math problems with a toy abacus. Gurn tests slip-knots on rope samples from the hardware store in town. He has never seemed happier. His twisted mouth knots up in a grimace, impossible to read. Lisel begins to study ancient Greek and Hebrew through an online university in Arizona. Aunt Doreen writes a letter to Amy Rastinhad, now Mrs. Artemis Hagedoorn. One day a taxi, spewing oily smoke from its exhaust, stops at the gate. A tall, slim, sad-looking woman with a large flowery hat steps out and gazes up at Uncle Boris, sitting in the tree. Aunt Doreen totters along the dirt path to the gate and Uncle Boris watches the two women embrace, a long look of relief on their faces. Then Aunt Doreen takes one of the woman's bags and guides her toward the house.
Olga makes love with Gurn in the hayloft. This is during Christmas dinner when, once again, the whole family celebrates together and Ma cooks the usual roast pig and turnip dumplings. It's a surprise to everyone, including Olga and Gurn. Bjorn goes to the front stoop for a smoke and hears her cries of ecstasy and discovers Gurn with his trousers at his ankles, thrusting between Olga's legs from behind (on account of her ponderous belly), his twisted mouth twisted into a fantastic grin of delight, the loft floor shaking beneath them, the brilliant greens and golds and pinks of Pa's epic painting climbing the walls like smoke, like dream maps. Olga had not intended this, but something about Gurn's scars had lately begun to obsess her. She wondered what it would be like to kiss those awful lips, wondered if poor Gurn had ever made love, wondered at the degradation of submitting herself to his disfigurement. After a couple of tumblers of potato vodka, she lost all inhibition. Instead of trying to explain this to Bjorn, she merely spreads her legs in a languid motion and allows him a better view of Gurn's veined erection sliding into her thatched vulva. Her underdrawers bag around one ankle. Her smock rucks up at her throat, revealing her vast fertile belly and distended breasts with nipples like dinner plates. She imagines herself a picture of filth and female satisfaction, an ancient oriental princess being serviced by a slave on a couch of damask and leopard pelt. But Bjorn barely notices her after he spies a grown pig, painted like the map of the world, peeking warily from a niche in the hay bales. The pig's eyes meet Bjorn's eyes with a look of terror and wisdom, a fatalistic look that makes Bjorn suddenly ashamed. Gurn comes with a shout of dismay. Olga shuts her eyes and seems to settle into herself, the image of saintly depravity. Bjorn envies the pig and Olga and even Gurn for their animal natures, for their ability to abandon decorum and act out of avarice and desire, just as he envies Pa for his ability to live in a barn and irresponsibly paint pictures while farm and family go to ruin. Bjorn, the straight arrow, has a gold watch and fob, symbols of rectitude, his mastery of time, like a lock on his soul. Rather than feeling the usual tumescent jealousy at the sight of Olga
's amorous paroxysms, Bjorn now senses a vast pity in his heart. He understands that Olga is hungry for love, that she feels trapped in her marriage, in her plainness, in her pregnancy, all those forms of living that have nothing to do with the person she knows herself to be, that she longs for the thrill of something real, a strange man's touch, beyond reason or obligation, his breath on the nape of her neck, his hardness probing her most intimate parts. He also understands that Olga understands that he understands. Gurn, who understands nothing, thinks, Why does she love strangers and not the man she loves? In the dining room, Pa and Ma pet and flirt shamelessly. Pa tweaks Ma's nipples through her dress with his paint-smeared hands. Jannik, the wastrel, lowers a proprietary arm over Agnes Botgaard's shoulder. He announces their impending marriage; he doesn't want to marry her but has vowed to live a better life after betraying Bjorn so egregiously with his pregnant wife. (Actually, the baby is Jannik's, though no one except Olga will ever know this.) Jannik is taking accounting courses and has applied for a position in the bank. He published a poem in the town newspaper. Out of guilt, he wants to become his brother, though every move in that direction makes him feel as if he is lowering himself into a grave. Agnes looks radiantly happy, although this is only because her engagement to Jannik has provoked Herr Grimmig
's jealousy and he has invited her for a New Year's Eve punch at The Wingless Phalarope. Aunt Doreen sits in a corner sipping thimbles of potato vodka with her lover, their hands clasped, their thighs pressed together in a line to their knees, their faces hovering so near that they breathe each other's breath. Since Amy Rastinhad arrived, no one has heard either woman speak a word, but they are inseparable and spend most of their time behind the locked bedroom door. When Bjorn, Gurn, and Olga return from the barn, young Trig slips out the back and, in the distance, they hear the death shriek of a sow. This is a week after Nikolai disappeared, when the whole family went into a hysterical panic until the boy was discovered hiding in a neighbour's doghouse with the last of the shoats. Hearing the pig's dying cry and imagining the tide of clotting blood dripping through the haymow planks, Bjorn knows that he is unequal to the task of being a poet, that reality is too real for him ever to capture it in a rhyming couplet, that there is too much violence, drama, and wayward passion to fit into a sonnet, that form deforms the truth just as decorum deforms personality. Every step he takes, Bjorn feels as if he is lowering himself into a grave. To everyone's delight, Uncle Boris capers about, uttering nonsense rhymes, dressed in Bavarian hunting costume. He tells them he has taken the day off and will not be moving the manure pile. He knocks over the Christmas fir, trying to climb into its higher branches.
Bjorn wins a national prize for his poetry. He is lauded in the media as “the banker poet.” Bjorn vows never to write another poem and, under the pseudonym Alonzo Cutlip, publishes a critique condemning himself as a conventional, sentimental, bland hack (which, as a poet, he is).
“What does it say of the poem,” he asks, “if it is praised in the gutter press, finds favour with the usual editors, and is read with pleasure by the illiterate masses? One must aim to write the unreadable poem!” Olga delivers a baby boy, the very image of Jannik right down to the widow's peak twisted into a spit curl at the top of his forehead. He has a flirtatious (wastrel) look from the start. They call him Bjorn 2 or Little Bjorn. Agnes Botgaard breaks off her engagement to Jannik after her New Year's Eve tryst with Herr Grimmig. Jannik is crushed, his heart is broken. He drops in at The Wingless Phalarope, drowns his sorrows in nineteen glasses of Pilsner with peppermint schnapps depth charges, kisses Tamara Winzcheslon under the mistletoe in front of her lover Joran Boze for half an hour (sets fire to her lonely heart), then visits his favourite casino, The Abyss, and wins a small fortune at blackjack. He forgets to cash in his chips, but an alert floor manager presses a bag of zlotys into his hands. The stock market slumps, consumer confidence turns into suspicion and doubt. Pa becomes the leader of a booming art movement called the Even More Eccentric Rural Primitives
, made up mostly of retired schoolteachers, unemployed factory workers, and young college graduates who can't find jobs, all painting rapturous mythic murals on the walls of their apartments in imitation of the Master. Famous art auction houses offer to sell Pa's barn to the highest bidder. In the villages and suburbs nearby, children begin to disappear with alarming frequency. Uncle Boris strolls up and down the front walk with his hands in his pockets, unable to think of anything better to do now that there are no more pigs and the manure pile has been replaced with recycling bins. Aunt Doreen whispers to Pa that her relationship with Amy Rastinhad is dwindling. She dreams, at night, of naked men, admits to Pa that perhaps she is only in love with what she cannot have. One day, a taxi pulls up at the gate, and Aunt Doreen hands Amy Rastinhad's bag to the driver, and the tall, elegant woman in the flowered hat rolls away in a cloud of dust, a pink monogrammed hanky waving bravely at the taxi window. Daphne elopes with an orchestra â not a member of the orchestra, but the entire string and reed sections. No one tells Pa, which, for him, is a relief. Grete, much too young for romance, continues to receive the blind, elderly man,
whose name is Mr. Quimby. Someone hears her say, “I will be your eyes.” (When she says the words, they are full of gentle innocence and selflessness, in contrast to Daphne, for whom the words are an unconscious tactic in a game of erotic conquest.) She reads to him in the front parlour where no one ever goes except during those periodic joyous family get-togethers. Sometimes she leads him through the barn, stopping before the great, soaring, glittering panels to describe the colours and stories. Mr. Quimby says to Pa, “These are wonderful pictures. I can tell by the smell of the paint.” Gurn cheerfully writes and rewrites his will. He puts his affairs in order, and then he puts them in a different order. Bjorn tries to love little Bjorn 2 but can't. He resigns himself to an empty fac
ade of dutiful parenting just as the sensitive Bjorn 2, realizing what is what, resigns himself to a joyless imitation of a childhood. Soon Bjorn 2 and Bjorn begin to resemble one another, they wear the same stern, blank expression in the face of life's furious injustice. Without the baby inside her, Olga looks like a collapsed balloon. She feels even less attractive. At night she lies next to Bjorn in an agony of frustration and desire, but his touch makes her skin crawl, not the touch she desires. She accuses Bjorn of being a homosexual because he doesn't make love to her. She accuses him of sleeping with Herr Grimmig. She recites whole litanies of his failings and betrayals. For a man so infuriatingly polite, faithful, dutiful, earnest, and socially conscious, Bjorn has a lot to answer for. Lisel is diagnosed with emphysema and walks around with her cigarettes, books, and an oxygen tank like a literate deep-sea diver dragging her aqualung on a cart. To everyone's amazement, she abandons her close reading of the Apocrypha in Aramaic and begins studying translations of ancient Sanskrit erotic texts. She confesses to Pa that she has been secretly dating an unemployed dishwasher named Joran Boze whom she met in the town library where he was trying to find a job on the Internet. Nights, Lisel and Joran meet at The Wingless Phalarope, where she takes off her oxygen mask so they can kiss and sip peppermint schnapps. As often as not, they will find Bjorn working over the bank's balance sheets, also sipping peppermint schnapps (in those distinctive tall shot glasses with the strange seabird design), absent-mindedly dandling Bjorn 2 on his knee. In the kitchen, Tamara Winzcheslon and Jannik, the wastrel, will be throwing plates at each other, squabbling about his wastrel ways, after which they rush upstairs and make love with wild abandon. At some point, Uncle Boris breaks an arm falling out of the tree.