by Jon Fosse
Welcome! Åsleik says
Glad you could drop by, he says
Isn’t it me who should be saying that? I say
Or have you taken over my house too? I say
Sure did! Åsleik says
You did? I say
Yes, you said that it’s mine now, he says
What are you talking about? I say
There’s yours and there’s mine, I say
Yes you have yours and I have mine, I say
That’s how it needs to be, I say
I have my own place, even a farm, so there’s nothing to argue about, he says
Yes that’s what I meant, I say
But why did you say you’re glad I could drop by? I say
Why not? Åsleik says
Is there something wrong with saying that? he says
Isn’t that something you’re supposed to say? he says
Something people always say? he says
It’s something you say when it’s your own place, that’s when you thank someone for dropping by, I say
Especially when it’s your own farm, he says
and in a way I probably have something like a farm too, even though it’s just an old house with a few rocky hills and a little boggy soil and some heather and a couple of small pine trees around the edges
And it’s not like this is a farm, Åsleik says
It’s a house anyway, it’s my house, I say
Your house, yes, Åsleik says
Of course it’s your house, who would say it wasn’t, he says
That’s for sure, he says
In a way, yes, I say
and we fall silent and then Åsleik says of course it’s my house, whose else could it be? even if I wasn’t born and raised in this house it was still my house, no one can deny that, even if he does remember very well old Alise who used to live here, he says
Yes, I say
and we fall silent
She was a good woman, old Alise, Åsleik says then
Yes she sure was, he says
and we fall silent again and then I say that my wife, Ales, was named after her, and maybe that’s why old Alise wanted Ales to inherit her house, I say
Yes, no, I know, Åsleik says
There weren’t any closer relatives, after her husband died so long ago, and then her brother, Ales’s father, was dead too, he says
and again we fall silent and then Åsleik says that he can just barely remember old Alise’s parents, he’s certainly getting on in years himself, he says, but they were truly old, as far as he remembers, yes, from an ancient time you might say, and it was a pretty bare house, but the father, old and bent, he sure was old, didn’t he row to The Country Store in Vik to his dying day, he would go down to the water as long as he had the legs for it and then row to The Country Store, and that wasn’t something for a frail old guy like him to do, no, Åsleik says
Yes, I say
They sure were made of strong stuff back then, Åsleik says
Of course it was hard work, a real chore for him, but how else could he get food into the house? he says
So he had to, he says
and then silence sort of spreads out and settles in
Yes, yes, I remember it well, Åsleik says then
Back then there were no cars around here, you know, it was a long way to walk, but just in the countryside, between the country farms, there weren’t roads out of the country, no, he says
and he says he was quite old when they built a road out, yes, he remembers it well, and the old people in the country, isolated, religious folks, they thought it would’ve been just as well if that road never did get built because of all the evil and sinfulness that could come into the countryside now, and who wanted to drive out to the countryside anyway? some of them felt, so the best thing would have been if the road never got built at all but the road was built, and because of that Dylgja became part of the world too and because of that someone like me could move to the country, that’s what it meant to have a road out, so actually maybe the pious old people had a point about what they said, despite everything? since now that a road had been built all kinds of people could come driving along and then before you know it one of them might want to move out here? Åsleik says and I think that Åsleik will always, always be like this, starting to talk about one thing and then ending up somewhere else, and he just keeps on talking, without stopping, maybe it’s because he’s alone so much and doesn’t have anyone to talk to that he can sometimes just launch into talking nonstop, about this and that, past present and future all jumbled together, and it’s all things I’ve heard before, many times over, I think
Yes now you’ve got a bad memory, he says
I have a bad memory? I say
and I don’t understand why he’d say that all of a sudden, as if my memory was something we needed to start talking about of all things, Åsleik bringing up my supposedly bad memory just like that, out of nowhere, no, I don’t know how I’ve been able to stand him all these years, how can I stay living here in this godforsaken place that time forgot, almost no one else lives here of their own free will do they? I think, and Åsleik says besides, maybe it’s not really my house, in a way, don’t I remember what I said, that time, yeah, that if he could move that boat I’d give him my house? he says
But that’s just something people say, I say
Just something people say? Åsleik says
Did I manage to move that boat or didn’t I? he says
I helped you move it, I say
You helped! he says
Yes, I helped! I say
I moved that boat by myself, he says
No, the boat was stuck until I grabbed it too and helped, I say
So you were lying, and now you’ll break your promise, he says
I’m not lying about anything, I never lie, I always tell the truth, I say
You always tell the truth, he says
Nothing but the truth, he says
What I say is true, I say
and then it’s suddenly quiet, we both stop talking and stand there a moment without saying anything
Nice weather we’ve had today, calm too, Åsleik says then
Yes, I say
It was dead calm all through the morning but then in the late afternoon yes then the wind picked up a little like always, he says
And what else would you expect, here we are in late autumn already, Advent’s here, we should expect to see some storms, he says
and then he says we won’t have to wait long, the first storms of the year’ll be here before you know it, it’s strange that they haven’t started already, he says, and then we stay standing there some more, not saying anything
And everything in Bjørgvin was the same as usual? he says
Yes, I say
and again it’s quiet
It’s nice to drive into town now and then, I say
Yes, I suppose so, Åsleik says
and I think now I should ask him about the last time he was in Bjørgvin, but I’ve done that so many times before and it always bothers him a little, he always squirms a little, shakes his head a little, because the truth is he’s probably almost never been to Bjørgvin, maybe a few times long ago, that’s it, so I shouldn’t bring it up, not now, that wouldn’t be nice, I think and again we’re standing there not saying anything
I’m glad I can go fishing, have something to do during the day, Åsleik says then
Me too, I make the days go by in my own way, I say
Yes, you and those paintings of yours, he says
Yes, right, I say
You spend whole days painting, he says
and I think that Åsleik has said that so many times before, he’s repeated it over and over, time after time, but then again I’ve said the same things over and over again myself, I’ve asked Åsleik again and again if he’s caught anything today and again and again he’d say that his net came up empty, or else that it was so full he could barely heave it up on board T
he Boat, or else that there wasn’t much, something like that, and if I showed him a picture I’d painted he’d say something, too, or else not say anything, but when he did say something what he said was always amazingly smart, he always saw something I hadn’t seen myself, and then these stupid little arguments of ours, as if we always had to have a little fight over some tiny thing before we could really talk to each other, I think and I hear Åsleik ask me again, the same as he’s done countless times before, why I paint, won’t I ever stop painting these pictures of mine? I’ve spent almost my whole life painting these pictures and now I’m supposed to stop? no, he doesn’t understand me, for him it’s simply incomprehensible, he’s never drawn even the simplest thing himself, not once, and he’s always had someone else paint the house too, he’s never even tried to paint the house, he can wax a boat no problem of course but that doesn’t count, that’s not like painting anything, no, he says and I say, the same as I say every time, that I don’t know why I paint these pictures I just do it, it’s a living, I say, and Åsleik says I’ve kept on painting since I was a little boy, and now I know he wants me to tell him about how I couldn’t do maths when I went to school and so I sat there and drew in my maths books instead of doing maths, I drew The Schoolmaster and drew the boy sitting next to me, I drew my classmates one after the other, and why did I do that? I did it just to do it! simple as that! I did it so I wouldn’t have to think about numbers, only about drawing, yes, I could add, and subtract, I could do that in my head if none of the numbers was too big or too hard, but when it came to multiplying or dividing or percents or anything like that, no, I just didn’t understand it, pure and simple, I understood the difference between big and small numbers, and how to add more or take away, and that’s all I needed to get through life, there was no need for more, but other than that I understood nothing, I couldn’t do it in my head, and the poor Schoolmaster, he tried and tried, he was so patient, and he was confident too, again and again he tried to explain multiplication to me, and when I didn’t understand he said surely I had to understand it, everyone had to learn how to multiply, he said, to get through life you needed to know how to multiply, and he said take two and multiply it by two and you’ll have four, he said, two twos are four, he said, and I said I understood that, and he said so two plus two is four and two times two is four, he said, and if you take seven and multiply it by seven how much is that? The Schoolmaster said, and he said I could figure it out by adding seven plus seven and then seven more until I’d added seven plus seven seven times in all and I did it and got the wrong number every time, it was always wrong, but I should have just memorized what the number was, seven times seven, but I couldn’t do it, no, I never ever saw the sevens before my eyes the way I could see pictures so easily, even that was practically impossible, and to this day I can’t do the seven times tables, I can’t, and I don’t understand why it was always so hard for me, it was like the numbers shifted after I memorized them and turned a little too big or a little too small, there was just no way I could do it and that’s why I’d draw, because I could do that, yes, I could draw anyone no matter who, either just their face or, preferably, someone in motion in some way or another, what I liked best was drawing the movement, drawing someone or something moving, drawing the line you might say, yes, it’s hard to understand, and I didn’t understand it either, I didn’t understand why I liked it or how and why I could do it, but I thought about it a lot and I’ll probably never figure it out, I think, but I know that Åsleik wants me to tell him the whole story again, he likes it when I tell it, when I talk about how I couldn’t do maths but I did know how to draw, nobody in my class could draw like me, absolutely no one, but I don’t feel like telling Åsleik that story again, not now, and the truth is I don’t think he wants to hear it either, not now, he just wants us to be talking about something, anything, and it’s been a long time since we’ve had anything especially new to say to each other, we’ve known each other so long and chatted together so many times, so I say just that I don’t know why I paint and that I don’t know why I’ve done it since I was young, and I think that at some point I’ll tell him the whole story again, about drawing in my maths notebooks instead of doing maths in them, but not now, and then Åsleik will say that he wasn’t good at much of anything in school, not maths, not reading, not writing, and definitely not drawing, but actually, he’ll say, it wasn’t because he couldn’t have done it, done all those things well, it was because he was so scared of his teachers, he was so scared that he didn’t do anything, whenever he saw a teacher it was like he was paralysed and not a single thought stirred inside him and he froze up and he couldn’t do anything, that’s what he’ll say, the same as he always says, I think and then I say well I probably paint for the same reason he fishes
To pass the time, he says
Yes, and to bring in a little money, I say
Yes that too, he says
and there’s another long silence
They’re pretty much the same thing really, Åsleik says then
Yes, I say
and I ask Åsleik if he’d like to step inside and he says yes, maybe he’ll do that, why not? he says and I go and open the door at the back of the car and Åsleik says, the same as he always does, that I have a big, practical car now don’t I, you can fit a lot more into that back area than it looks like from the outside, he says, and I pull a roll of canvas out of the back of the car and he takes the roll under his arm and goes over to the front door of the house and opens it, since I never lock the door, it’s never locked, no one in Dylgja leaves their door locked, that’s how it’s always been and that’s how it’ll always be, and I untie a thick bundle of pinewood boards ten feet long from the rack on the roof of the car, boards I’ll use to make stretchers, and I take them inside and Åsleik has turned on the hall light and put the roll of canvas down in the corner by the door to The Parlour and I put the boards down next to the canvas, and later I’ll carry the canvas and boards up to the attic, I think, because I have my storage space in a room upstairs, with all the stuff I need for painting, and I go into the main room and I turn on the light there and the cold hits me
It’s cold in here, I say
and Åsleik comes into the room
It sure is, he says
Should I light the stove? he says
and I say yes, that’d be good, and I can bring in what I’ve bought, I say and I see Åsleik go over to the stove and crouch down and with wood chips in his fist he looks up and says do I know where these wood chips come from? and I say yes, yes, I know perfectly well, and I thank him very much for the wood chips and for all the wood he’s brought me, I say and I see Åsleik put the chips and some kindling into the stove with the firewood, and yes, it’s from Åsleik that I got all the wood chips, the firewood, all the wood, because he likes working with wood, as he says, gathering wood, and then I pay him for the wood, he always says that he doesn’t want anything for the wood but he needs the kroner that I give him, I always have to give him the money kind of furtively, even though I’m doing well, as they say, strangely enough there are still plenty of people who want to buy the pictures I paint, I don’t know why but that’s how it is, ever since I was young I’ve made money from my paintings, the first pictures I painted were of the building next door in the farming village where I grew up, in Barmen, and in the pictures it was always a day of beautiful weather with the fruit trees in bloom and the sun shining over the house and the farm, the fjord blue, actually it was the light I was painting, not the buildings, they were pretty enough as far as that goes, it wasn’t that, but painting the buildings as such was too boring, that was why I tried to paint the light, but in the sharp bright light of the sun what looks brightest are the shadows, in a way, yes, the darker they are the more light there is, and what I like painting the most is the autumn light but people always wanted to see their house painted in brilliant sunshine, and I wanted to sell my pictures, of course that’s what I wanted, yes, after all that’s why I
painted them, so I had to paint them the way people wanted them, but none of them saw what I actually painted, nobody saw that, just me, and maybe a few other people, because what I painted were the shadows, what I painted was the darkness in all that light, I painted the real light, the invisible light, but did anyone see that? did they notice that? no, probably not, or maybe some people did? yes, well, I know there were some people who saw it, Åsleik too for that matter, he has a real understanding of pictures, I have to admit, but I painted buildings and houses, and people bought the pictures I painted, and that’s how I could buy more canvas and tubes of oil paint, because oil paint on canvas has always been what I’ve liked, nothing else, oil on canvas, always, it was like that from the very first time I saw a picture painted in oil on canvas, and the first picture painted in oil on canvas I ever saw was in the local schoolhouse where a painting hanging crooked on the wall in one of the classrooms was meant to show Jesus walking on water, and to tell the truth it was a terrible painting but the colours, the individual colours in themselves, colours in certain places, colours the way they were on that canvas, yes, they were fixed on that canvas, they clung tight to it, went together with it, were one with it and at the same time different from it, yes, it was unbelievable and I looked and looked at that painting, not at the picture itself, it was so badly painted, but it was oil paint on canvas and that, oil paint on canvas, lodged inside me from the very first moment and stayed there to this day, yes, that’s the truth, yes it somehow lodged itself in me for life, the same way oil paint fuses with the canvas I was fused with oil on canvas, I don’t know why but I guess I needed something or another to cling to? get attached to? and The Schoolmaster noticed, he noticed that I was always staring at that painting, and he told my parents that I had a gift for drawing, and probably for painting too, if I could just try it, and that way if I couldn’t do maths I could at least paint pictures, yes, that’s how it was, and then my parents got hold of some kind of kit with tubes of paint and brushes and a palette, and a tool for mixing colours and scraping the paint off if the paint was wrong, a palette knife they call it, one of those was included too, and I was astounded, I was beside myself, I knew what I wanted to paint because at home there was a picture hanging in the living room that Mother and Father had been given as a gift, I think it was Father who’d been given it when he turned forty, and the picture was called Bridal Procession on the Hardangerfjord, by Tidemand and Gude, it was what they called a reproduction, a word I liked a lot, what I didn’t like as much was that both the paint and the canvas were missing, the picture was flat with no oil paint stuck to any canvas, but anyway I decided to paint a copy of this picture, none other, as well as I could, yes, I’d told my parents that this was the first picture I wanted to paint and both my mother and my father said I’d never be able to, and I told The Schoolmaster too and he too was sure I’d never be able to do it, but I’d decided to do it, I wouldn’t touch a brush until I got a canvas in a frame exactly the same size as Bridal Procession on the Hardangerfjord so my father bought me a canvas and frame in that size, I was given that too, I remember, it was a Christmas present, I think I must have been about twelve, yes, somewhere around there, yes, and then they took down the picture and I put both Bridal Procession on the Hardangerfjord and the empty white canvas on the floor, up in the attic at home, and I started to paint, carefully, slowly, because the colours had to be exactly right and had to go in exactly the right places, I painted carefully, almost point by point but at the same time they were supposed to turn into brushstrokes somehow, it went slowly and took days, the whole week between Christmas and New Year’s I was up in the attic busy with my painting and my parents were more and more beside themselves with amazement because miracle of miracles my picture looked like it, yes, to a T! it was almost better than the picture I was copying! they had to admit that they would never have believed it, they said it was exceptional, unbelievable, and Father couldn’t restrain himself and he went and told The Schoolmaster and then The Schoolmaster came by to see the picture for himself and then he asked if he could buy the picture from me, and Father hummed and hawed, he’d probably be willing to let go of the picture I’d copied, how about that, Father said, but The Schoolmaster wasn’t interested in buying that, and I said I needed money, both for tubes of oil paint and more canvas, so I wanted to sell the picture, and since after all it was me who’d painted it Father had to go along with what I wanted and The Schoolmaster bought the painting from me and paid good money and I can still see The Schoolmaster before my eyes, one Sunday not far into the new year, walking down the driveway away from the house with my painting under his arm and I stood there with the notes in my hand, I can’t remember how much it was but I can remember that one day I took the bus from Barmen to Stranda, because that’s where the shops were, most of the shops were there, and at The Paint Shop in Stranda they sold both house paint and art paint, and that’s where I went and I bought tubes of oil paint, and a roll of canvas, and wood for stretchers, and ever since then it’s been oil on canvas, I have lived on nothing but oil paint on canvas, I’ve never made money doing anything else, yes, since I was a boy, because already as a boy I made enough money from my paintings and that is what Åsleik likes me to talk about most of all, yes, how I could paint pictures of houses on the neighbouring farms and sell them to the neighbours and use the money to buy tubes of oil paint and more canvas, but I don’t feel like talking about that now