“Take them off. I was saving them.”
Also, there was no correlation between happiness and kindness.
Hanne rode every afternoon that week. More than half a month’s salary. Oda put it on a credit card she had only recently paid off. But those hours were Oda’s respite as much as Hanne’s, her vacation from her vacation. She didn’t walk to the lighthouse Hanne refused to visit or go the maritime museum or have a beer in the lovely garden of the pub she heard the innkeeper tell guests about. She sat in her chair with her book and her tea and looked out the window. The sky rarely cleared and never for more than an hour or two. The ferry came in and out. Sometimes if she leaned all the way to the glass and looked far to the left at just the right moment she saw Hanne on the back of a horse on the long East Beach, hooves flashing through shallow water.
After a week, Hanne became more amenable to excursions in the morning. She even came back from the stables with ideas of places she’d like to go. They walked several kilometers to a place called the Burger Meister run by Americans. Instead of the whaling museum, Hanne showed her the graveyard of whalebones in the woods behind it. Every few weeks, Hanne told her, people from the museum removed the pile, but after a few days another stack of bones took its place. If their morning together went well, Oda would tell herself that tonight, tonight she would insist that they talk in the dark, that Hanne listen to one of the stories Fritz used to tell her about his childhood in Fürth or about their courtship or the strange trip they’d taken to Luxembourg before Hanne was born. She felt like a suitor, a seducer. She bought Hanne a bracelet and gave it to her at dinner. She encouraged her to have coffee or caffeinated tea with dessert. But no matter the good mood she might have lured her daughter into during the day, once in bed if Oda tried to start a conversation, Hanne shut it down. “Can’t we just listen to the sea,” she might say, or more violently: “I cannot listen to your voice anymore today.”
At lunch one day, Oda tried to explain herself and the stories about Fritz she wanted Hanne to hear. “We don’t talk about him enough. Or about his death. I don’t want you to think I can’t talk about it. I can. I will. I want to.”
“Okay,” Hanne said.
“So would you like to?”
“I don’t know. Not right now.”
“Tonight?”
“No.”
“When?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what you want me to say.”
“I don’t want you to say anything in particular. I just don’t think the silence is healthy. I grew up with parents who never talked about the things that mattered, the things that pained them.”
“The war?”
“Yes, the war was one of those things.”
“So Papi’s death is like the war and I’m like a Nazi who won’t talk about it?”
“Hanne. You know what I’m saying. I don’t want you to believe when you’re older that you had a mother who didn’t want to talk about things, because I do.”
“Okay, if I promise never to say that you didn’t talk about things can we stop having this conversation?”
“I met him in French class.”
“Yeah, I know. He thought it was a history class but he didn’t leave because he saw the back of your head.”
Well, that was a bit of an exaggeration but she let it slide.
“I know the stories. I have a ton of photographs. I remember him.”
“Do you miss him still?”
“I guess.”
“Do you feel it was unfair that he died?”
“Of course. He only got half a life. Maybe less.”
“But unfair to you.”
“I guess so. But it’s not like I knew him all that well.”
“What do you mean?”
“He worked a lot.”
“He was home for dinner nearly every night. He helped you with your homework.”
“Once maybe.”
“Hanne, no. Many nights.”
“And on weekends he went to conferences.”
“A few times a year. And sometimes we went with him. To Barcelona, remember?” She had a memory of the three of them in a park near their hotel, but she also had a memory of buying Hanne a doll made out of palm fronds, because Hanne had stayed home with Fritz’s mother. Which was true? She wasn’t sure.
“Is this talking? Because it feels like you’re telling me what I should remember.”
Three days before she and Hanne left the island, Oda had her first real conversation with the Australians.