Grace by Linn Ullmann Page B

realized she might actually die and be gone for good. He didn’t care about his father, who would in fact die not too many years later, when Johan was fifteen. But his mother! His mother with her beautiful hands, her sweet kisses, her soft round tummy in which he could bury his face. She couldn’t die. So he raised his eyes to heaven and promised never again to steal money from his mother’s purse, to be a good boy, a nice, obedient boy, if his mother would only be allowed to stay with him. And Death answered his prayers. His mother recovered and everything returned to normal, except that from then on Johan talked often to Death. On behalf of his mother, his sister, and himself. As I say, he didn’t care much about his father—not that he told Death that. He told no one. He didn’t even permit himself to think such thoughts, since it seemed likely that Death could read his mind. So when his mother recovered, Johan was a good little boy, obedient and nice, even to his father, who was a clumsy, smelly, if well-meaning man. More well meaning than other fathers, always taking the time to talk to Johan and his sister, especially Johan, the youngest. He would read to him in the evening and take him for walks or to the movies, even during the war. They saw the German movie
The Golden State,
filmed in Technicolor, for which Joseph Goebbels himself had written the heroine’s last line:
“I did not love my native soil enough, and for that I must die!”
Even this film they saw, despite his mother’s protests.
    “I’m not seeing it because it’s German, goddammit,” his father shouted. “I’m seeing it because it’s in Technicolor!”
    “It makes no difference,” his mother hissed. “You just don’t get it, do you? It makes no difference. It can be in as many colors as you like, but it’ll still be German. People will talk!”
    His father had planted himself squarely in front of his mother. As Johan remembered it, as he pictured them there, he saw something he hadn’t seen before. He had always recalled his mother as a towering presence and his father as a little man. But now, sixty years on, standing in front of the mirror in the bathroom, he suddenly saw them as they had actually been. His mother had been a tiny little woman. It was his father who had towered over everyone.
    Johan’s father had planted himself squarely in front of his mother and roared, “Who will talk?”
    “They’ll all talk!” she shrieked. “All of them! And you know it!”
    Johan opened his eyes, and when he caught his own gaze in the bathroom mirror he remembered his parents as he always had and as he preferred to do. She towered and he was little.
    Johan’s father took his son for walks and to the movies. He was not a bad man but he was, nonetheless, clumsy and smelly (Johan suspected that he didn’t wash between his legs properly). What’s more, he had no friends as other boys’ fathers did. Johan thought his solitude might have had something to do with the war. Other boys’ fathers had stories about all the things they had done during the war, and they told them again and again, but Johan’s father didn’t have a single one. Not a single friend and not a single story.
    In 1945, when Johan had just turned thirteen, his mother got sick again. The doctor looked worried when he came out of Johan’s mother’s room.
    Johan walked right up to him and said, “My mamma is going to be okay, isn’t she?”
    The doctor said one should never give up hope. Johan nodded, silently cursing the doctor for such a stupid answer. He was a doctor, not a minister. Then his father ran a weak, smelly, well-meaning hand through Johan’s hair and said exactly the same thing. “We musn’t give up hope, Johan. We musn’t give up hope that Mamma will pull through this time too.”
    Johan stared at his father. “No!” he said to himself. “No more!”
    He shut himself up in the bedroom he shared with his sister, went down on his knees, and