The Ballad Of Sigurd Jorsalfare

Danny Maseng
Jul 27, 2017 · 6 min read

Chapter 45

Israel

Monday, August 17, 1990

11:30 PM

“David, Rachel and my sweet boys,” the squiggly droplets weep towards the edge of the photo and fade out.

This can’t be, I say to myself. He never wrote, he never answered, never once mentioned the boys — he was lost.

(Technically speaking my father was never lost. He’d just failed to answer our letters or phone calls for the last couple of years, but that’s nothing unusual for him. He’d been thoroughly drunk ever since my mother died eight years ago, and the four to five bottles of Vodka he drank daily had begun to have an affect on him.)

And here it is, by the couch, which, I now gather, had become his bed by the end of his drowning, as the distance to the kitchen grew insurmountable and the journey to the bathroom across the sea was too dangerous to undertake.

I crawl under the couch and run my hands, recklessly foolish, in the dark and filthy abyss. I touch a mound of something and retrieve it.

In my hands I hold a stack of letters, photos, poems and notes, more like blotches of fragmented thoughts written down with pen and piss and blood on dead, flattened wood shavings.

“Dearest Rose,

Desolate, desolate ” A smudge completes the letter.

“In the event of my death, which will come, I hope ”

This one is ripped, so no smudge, just space.

A black and white photo of my father, crouching on a boulder by the water. Above him rise mountains and trees. The shore is rock-strewn. My father’s face is smooth and carefree, his eyes cast forward, as clear as the water.

“In Norway,” says the neat title on this one. It appears to be my mother’s writing. A young man is looking at my father from three or four paces away, hands tucked in his pockets.

A black and white photo of my parents holding hands, walking down a hill in Eilat through a public garden.

“Don’t feed the lizards,” says the sign in Hebrew, English, French, and Arabic.

Agave plants, aloes, cacti, rocks, and stones and an emaciated tree casting no shadow, but plenty of doom. My parents are smiling.

“Dear sister…” says this letter, more aged and weathered than the others. Sister? Which one?

The letter is sweet, if bland, offering up no clues as to the abyss inside the writer’s heart, nor of his relationship to this nameless sister. Still, a letter…

“With warmest affection,” it ends.

A black and white photo of my mother, age sixteen, sitting at a grand piano, wearing a deadly serious expression.

Her hair is a bundle of black weeds dumped on her head by a vengeful storm, repaying her for some past unkindness. Her eyes are as dark and threatening as two Albanian bandits. Her lips are pouting.

She is, by all accounts, profoundly unhappy.

“Me, practicing Brahms. Mother away in Philadelphia,” says the note on the back of the photo, naming the pain and providing some hint for a future time when she would chance upon the photo again and need a clue to decipher her misery.

Actually, I think she’s angry at the piano. Furious. It must have failed her, yet again, a split second before the photo was snapped. My guess is she kicked it right after the one who took the photo turned away to reload the camera. There was always a dent on the front right leg of the Bluthner.

And then it hits me: The piano.

It’s not here.

It can’t not be here — it’s always here reminding my mother of her failure, reminding us of her sacrifice, of the glory she gave up selflessly for love.

There is no way my father would have ever given up the piano.

And it strikes me how surprised I am that something that important is missing. As though, other than that, everything else was as it ought to be.

What was I hoping to find here? Answers? To what?

I vow to find answers.

Maybe tomorrow, at the funeral, somebody will know what happened with the piano.

Tomorrow at the funeral.

It ends tomorrow.

After tomorrow comes Wednesday and Wednesday night I have to fly back to the States.

I am noticing time.

This could not be good.

I should be feeling overwhelming grief for the father I have lost. I should be swept away by too much emotion to allow for clear thinking, for time delineation, for any rational observation.

I am slipping into normalcy. There is nothing much in this world I fear more than normalcy. I will take intolerable grief any day over normalcy.

I know what: I have not been enmeshing myself enough in my father’s last moments of misery, that’s what it is. I’ve been slacking.

I don’t love my father enough because I am too self absorbed. Fact: I am discussing myself as we speak.

Moreover, says I, I have neglected to examine every nanosecond of my parents’ relationship, thus allowing for the tide of the hours to creep back into my life and push the boat of my parents’ sorrow off to sea.

I swim out after them.

It occurs to me that most of our books, my daddy’s books, are gone and I wonder where they went: Did he lose them? Did he sell them for a steady supply of fuel with which to run the distillery he called his rusting heart? Did someone just take them while he wasn’t watching? Who would have done that?

These questions run through my calming mind more like efficient nurses hurrying to save a life than like frantic refugees escaping the impending ethnic cleansing.

I find books scattered everywhere, in no specific order, no logical location: under the couch, on the windowsills, in the hallway, in the kitchen sink.

I run back into the big room and fetch my camera.

Snap. Flash: book in the toilet bowl. Two books, actually, one of which has begun to disintegrate, flushing Steinbeck toilet paper down the pipes. My daddy always treated his favorites the worst.

Back to the kitchen. Something makes me open the refrigerator.

Snap. Flash: book in the refrigerator. My favorite: Norse mythology.

Sacred, rare Saturday mornings, biscuits freshly baked, coffee brewed, my mother out in the garden pruning all that needs to be cut down to size, my father sober, sane, healthy, powerful and almost approachable sits down to his breakfast and offers me two biscuits and a glass of milk.

“Have I ever shown you this book, sonny?” he asks.

Many times.

“Nope,” I say and nudge closer to him.

He opens the book with tender hands, peering down at the pages, remembering where it all began for him.

“The story of us,” he says in a soft voice and flips pages filled with illustrations of fierce looking men: Magnus Olafson, Sigurd Magnuson Jorsalfare, Eric the Red, The Wolf, The Hatchet, The Nighthawk; Illustrations of Odin and Thor; of war and bliss; of giant waves and menacing cliffs, of snow.

All this I witness here, in Israel, in the summer of 1964, on this couch.

“Farmers, seamen, carpenters, and kings are who we are; this is our family, these are our ancestors: killers and givers of law; builders and destroyers.” His hand lands softly on my shoulder, pulling me closer to his chest.

“We cross oceans. We fight the good fight no matter what the consequences. We never bother with success; we concern ourselves with good and evil. Good and evil only, regardless of the outcome. Do you understand?”

I nod.

“Evil will triumph in the end, but we will fight the good fight until we die because good is good and evil is evil and must be fought.”

He runs his hand through my hair and pats me on my back.

“How are the biscuits?”

“Incredible.”

He smiles broadly and chuckles: “I sure can make a good biscuit, can’t I?”

“You sure can, daddy,” I push my head against him and hope this never ends. He gets up to clear his dishes.

“Why don’t you take the book to the sun room, sport, it’s nice out there”

“Thanks, daddy,” I say, “I won’t mess the pages up, I promise.”

“I know you won’t,” he smiles and hums “Jimmy Crack Corn and I don’t care,” as he walks away.

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade