Inghill Johansen
Four prose pieces from Bungalow
Translated from Norwegian by Hege A. Jakobsen Lepri
Roof
I was never able to determine if my parents thought the word bungalow was a word for something nice, or if it was just a word, on the same level as all the other words they used.
The word hip-roof, instead, was pronounced with unmistakable pride. Because the roof of the house was meticulously constructed, in a way that made it stand out from the other, pointed roofs.
Our roof had a more curved and soft shape. A shape you felt good resting your eyes upon. Unfortunately, the roofing tiles were made of old cement; every winter some of them broke and fell off, and in the end all had to be replaced. My parents, who didn’t have a lot of money at the time, installed aluminum roof panels. These were popular at the time; the snow was supposed to slide off easily, but on our roof it stayed put. It didn’t slide off at all. Rather, it looked like it got stuck, at least it didn’t disappear until spring. But it didn’t matter. As long as it stayed put, it hid the panel roofing. The panels weren’t all the same, on some, the aluminum was shiny, on others it was duller. The whole thing looked like a patchwork. My mother didn’t like them.
From the day they were installed there, we stopped taking the road that passed above the house, where you could see the roof. Up until that point, my mother often took a stroll with my siblings and I to pick flowers or look around. She was a stranger in the area, she came from a completely different landscape, a flatter and more fertile landscape with grain fields that expanded and turned yellow or were cut, with soil that was plowed and harrowed. My mother knew all types of grain by heart. She knew the color of mellow grain and grain that hadn’t had enough time. She knew words for grain that had been struck down by rain. And for soil that had just been plowed, for the dark furrows that curled like snakes and turned upward, kilometer after kilometer. But all this she hid in her heart, or it came out in tiny sentences from time to time. As a kind of knowledge she possessed, but that didn’t belong in the forest where she lived. I don’t know if there were words she missed, a language she carried inside herself, but she always behaved as if she were somewhat a stranger. Basically, that was the attitude she always held, as if life had placed her there and she had to make the best of it. From the day the roofing panels were laid, we always took the lower road, from there everything looked OK, there was nothing about the house that wasn’t as it should be. Even when my brother had a seizure and his whole body was shaking and she had to run to a neighbor to borrow their telephone, she chose that road, even if it was a matter of life and death and the upper road would have been shorter.
It’s possible she didn’t think clearly. That she took the road she was used to taking, that she didn’t see the other one as a possibility, an opening, that it may have saved my brother’s life.
A couple of years later, they got a carpenter to change the whole thing, roofing panels, battens, roofing felt.
They thought it may help. The new tile was shiny and black. It looked nice; it really highlighted the shape of the roof. But it didn’t help. My brother was gone. They could have saved themselves the trouble. And not long after this, my father died, he keeled over on an incline.
Rubber Band
I leave the tiny seconds that are called day, that are called hour, and sink into something else that isn’t, that has been, that is called before, that is called then, that is called that time.
I let myself fall, I’m standing on something and then I sink down, as if the now is attached to a rubber band you can stretch a bit forward and a bit backward.
Pigmentation
I’ve struggled so long with finding something to say about my mother. Something that kind of gathers her up, captures her. The common thing is to think about your mother’s hands, the way they caressed you or touched your hair. But there’s nothing for me to find there. My mother’s hands were red, and when they got old they lost that color. The last time I saw her, they were interlaced on her chest, I couldn’t stop thinking that it was the nurses that had placed them like that. I thought it was a little bit wrong that they were completely empty, so I felt like inserting something into them, a flower or something. But the only thing I had handy was a pen. You can’t make obituaries out of that. But then I remembered her legs. My mother’s legs never tanned. During the summer, she developed a dark, almost black color on her back and neck, while her legs stayed equally white all through the summer. She looked like she was divided in two. She said it was because she lacked pigmentation. But we who were her children after all, and knew her, said it was because she’d never lie out in the sun, the sunrays didn’t touch her legs the way they touched her neck when she stood bent over a flowerbed or walked around.
That time she went to the south, she came back with legs that were almost whiter than when she left. We didn’t understand why, hadn’t she been outside, had she not bathed, lounged around on the beach? Oh yes, she said, showing us a picture where she was lying flat out on a sunbed, dark brown on top, with her white legs sprawling at the bottom. In the background the ocean. Maybe you didn’t lie down long enough, we said, we knew how restless she was. It wasn’t natural for her to lie down, except to sleep. We could easily imagine her walking along the water’s edge, picking up ice-cream sticks and all kinds of trash that had floated in, just to have something to do.
But maybe she was right, that she really did lack pigmentation, that her skin was split in two, black, white, because that’s how she was elsewhere, patient, brusque, kind, mean, bad, good.
Basement
An old bathtub I sat in one hot summer day a long time ago while my mother poured cool water down my back with a ladle.