A Plea for Eros

wondered what my greatgrandfather saw when he imagined “Amerika.” Could he have seen in his mind a landscape as open and flat as what he actually came to? Immigration inevitably involves error and revision. What I imagined it would be, it’s not. For better or worse, some mistake is unavoidable.
    My sisters and I loved to listen to a simple story about an immigrant’s mistake in our own family. My grandfather’s first cousin, whom my sisters and I called Uncle David, left Hustveit when he was twenty-two years old to make his way in America alone. He arrived at Ellis Island in August 1902. He spent his first day in New York City and was flabbergasted by the chaos, color, and crowds. Somewhere in the city, he saw a man selling apples, the most gorgeous, red, perfect apples he had ever seen. He had almost no money, but he lusted after one of those apples, and, overcome by desire, he splurged and bought one. The story goes that he lifted the apple to his mouth, bit into it, and spat it out in disgust. It was a tomato. Uncle David had never seen or heard of a tomato. My sisters and I roared with laughter at this story. It encapsulates so neatly the lesson of expectation and reality that it could serve as a parable. The fact that tomatoes are good is beside the point. If you think you’re getting an apple, a tomato will revolt you. That New York should be nicknamed the Big Apple, that an apple is the fruit of humankind’s first error and the expulsion from paradise, that America and paradise have been linked and confused ever since Europeans first hit its shores, makes the story reverberate as myth.
    On the other hand, if not violently overthrown, expectation can have a power in itself, can invest a place with what literally isn’t there. When I saw Hustveit, I felt the same reverence I felt the last time I was in Mandal. They are both beautiful places, it is true, the stuff of postcards and nineteenth-century landscape painting, but no doubt I would have felt reverent in less lovely places, because I imagined a past I connected to myself. Walking beside my mother up toward the house where she lived with her parents and siblings, I imagined what she must have felt walking over that ground where she walked as a child, remembering people now dead, especially her father and her mother, and that empathy provoked in me deep feeling. My father never lived at Hustveit, nor did his father, but it was a strong presence in both their lives. In 1961, out of the blue, my grandfather Lars Hustvedt inherited 5,850 crowns, about 850 dollars, from a Norwegian relative, Anna Hustveit. He used the money to travel to Norway for the first and last time, visiting Voss and Hustveit during the trip. He was seventy-four years old. My grandfather’s sojourn in Norway was a great success. According to my father, he impressed his relatives with his intimate knowledge of Hustveit. He knew exactly where every building on the property lay and what it looked like from his father, who had described his birthplace in detail to his son. Hustveit was and is a real place, but it is also a sign of origin. I don’t doubt that there were times when that sign alone, carried from one generation to another in a name, accompanied by a mental image, anchored the people who had left it and anchored their children and grandchildren as well in another place, crushed by the vicissitudes of nature and politics.
    My grandfather remembered what he had never seen. He remembered it through someone else. It is no doubt a tribute to his character and to his father’s that the image handed down from one to the other seems to have been remarkably accurate. Every story is given some kind of mental ground. The expression “I see” in English for “I understand” is hardly haphazard. We are always providing pictures for what we hear. My mother and father both lived through World War II, my mother in occupied Norway and my father as a soldier in New Guinea, the Philippines, and finally Japan during the occupation. They were both inside that immense historical cataclysm. Each has a story of how it began, and I like both of them, because they are oddly parallel. In the middle of the first semester of his freshman year at St. Olaf College (the college where he would later become a professor and where three of his four daughters would be students), he was sitting at a table covered with index cards, on which he had tirelessly recorded the needed information for a term