She managed to get a lot of work done. When she packed in order to go home, she had more than one hundred spectators on the pavement, wrapped up in their Saturday clothes with long, paralysed arms and impotent faces. She wondered if she should include a protest march, but couldn’t make up her mind or what else to put in in its place. The way of the world, the world passing her by? She looked at her figures, whom she had initially thought were just as impotent as she was, but something didn’t add up. She went for a long walk by the sea and looked at the strange wooden constructions whose purpose she still didn’t know, but she didn’t want to ask the brusque-looking, unemployed young men hanging around the café. Seen from one perspective, she recalled, Norway is a very violent country.
She went home. She reached Oslo on a bright spring day. She stood on the deck of the Kiel ferry, watching the approach to the beautiful capital, which had changed so much since she was young that it no longer looked like itself, but a foreign city. While she stood at the gunwale reflecting that the Norwegian spring was unique because it followed a long, cold darkness, she had a text message in English from an unknown, foreign number, which puzzled her at first. It was signed with a name she didn’t recognise, before she realised that ‘Alan’ might be her ex-tenant Alan, who was in prison in Poland. Dear Alma, he wrote, using her first name, and asked how Izabela and her mother were, and wrote that he would soon be back in Norway. The trip up the fjord lost its charm, she came down to earth with a bump. As the ferry wouldn’t be docking for another half hour, she scrolled down to the number of the social worker and called her. She said that Alma mustn’t reply. She explained that Alan had now been in prison for so long that he was eligible for early release and might appear at any time. For that reason the Pole carried a panic alarm. Alma mustn’t reply because Alan was just trying to manipulate everyone again to regain control over the Pole. He was doing the same thing to the Pole’s mother in Poland. Calling and sending text messages declaring his love and his devotion to the Pole and the child, but it was just empty phrases. Don’t reply, was the message, she had to promise not to reply.
Alma disembarked and it took her twenty-five minutes to drive to the island where she lived. It was so strange. Everything looked exactly as she remembered it and as it had been on the day she left, except that it was spring now, but even spring looked like itself. The Italian fishing village seemed unreal and dreamlike as she drove along Drammensveien. How could she hold on to the insight she hoped she had gained down by the sea? Those few, decisive moments when she thought she had seen the light, were suddenly reduced to useless memories because nothing in the world or in her had really changed, so what was the point? Or was it the case that the change was minute, almost imperceptible. That many, many such tiny changes in the same direction were needed before overall change could be felt. And then only if many tiny changes in many individuals happened at the same time could anything in the world be changed. She had to hope that it could and believe that the recent, tiny changes were real. She drove more slowly than she needed to, stopped at the shop and bought essentials. She knew that the house was still standing or someone would have called, the Pole, the police or her daughter. And indeed it was, she came round the corner and saw it and she felt her heart beat softly. But when she came closer, she felt bad about the house because the spring light revealed the poor condition it was in. The windows were filthy, the paint peeling on the windowsills, the front door was dirty; she thought the whole house was complaining. Random gardening tools were scattered around the house, rotting seat cushions, beer cans, the withered Christmas tree, everything which had been hidden by the snow. The leaves she had never raked up last autumn were rotting on the flower beds and plastic bags and paper had accumulated around the bins, and on the drive were twigs and branches from last year’s autumn gales. But the small path from the main drive, from Alma’s front door and to the apartment, was raked and swept. And the Pole had planted several thuja bushes below the terrace which she presumably hoped would grow tall in time and provide privacy, possibly from Alma?
So the Pole intended to stay in the apartment for a long time, for years to come even. And, all in all, that was OK because it meant stability and looking for new tenants was tiresome, but Alma couldn’t shake off the feeling that the Pole was starting to feel a little too much at home. Although she rented the apartment, the land belonged to Alma, the soil in which she planted the thujas, was Alma’s soil. Besides, it was impossible not to interpret her tenant’s planting and sweeping as a deliberate snub at Alma’s lack of interest in gardening. Her tenant wanted to show her how the area around one’s front door ought to look. And show the neighbours that she was just as tidy and conscientious as they were when it came to gardening, she wanted to side with the neighbours against Alma. Sometimes Alma worried that the neighbours gossiped and spoke ill of her garden and her house and planned reprisals against her. Or was it simply that the Pole wanted it to be neat and tidy around her home, which Alma reluctantly had to admit was probably how the Pole regarded the apartment. Whatever. Alma acknowledged that she had mixed feelings about her tenant’s thuja bushes.
If only she had enough money, she thought, then she could have used the apartment as her studio and not been forced to have a stranger living so close to her.
However, her tenant’s car wasn’t there that morning, she had probably gone to work, and that was great because it meant that Alma could unpack in peace. She let herself in and noticed that most of the lights were turned off, as were most of the radiators and nothing appeared damaged or scratched. Relieved, she opened all the windows to let in the fresh spring air, then she attacked the huge pile of post which the Pole had brought in and left on the chest of drawers in the hall. With a pounding heart she carried it upstairs to the dining room and made herself a cup of coffee before she sat down. She was only intending to take a quick look at it to get some idea of how much money she had left in the bank and how soon the biggest bills would need paying.
It made for depressing reading. The only mitigating circumstance was that in between the bills were a couple of requests for trade union banners and music corps banners which were quite well paid and not very difficult to do. Marching outdoors in strong sunlight or rain on May Day or Constitution Day caused them to fade so much that new ones had to be made, but to the same measurements. If she accepted them, as she needed to, and got an advance, which she would get, and worked hard for a couple of months, she would be solvent and could dedicate herself to the Constitution tapestry exclusively. She ran outside to her car, fetched her laptop and accepted all the commissions. Then she brought in the rest of her luggage, put a load of washing in the machine, draped the rugs over the railings of the veranda and cleaned the windows. She picked up her spade, her rake and her gardening shears and put them in the garage, threw away the rotting seat cushions and beer cans, raked up the biggest branches and twigs on the drive thinking that if it was so important to the Pole to sweep her own path, she could have swept their shared drive, or at least picked up the plastic and the paper around the bins, which wasn’t necessarily Alma’s rubbish, but which Alma was now picking up, and which the Pole must have left there as a provocation, Alma thought, as if to point out that it was Alma’s responsibility as the landlord, not hers as the tenant; her tenant wasn’t exactly being very civic-minded.
After several hours’ intense effort the house was clean, the garden tidy. So that was all it took. She could have done it ages ago, but when she was absorbed in her work, it was impossible. She had changed the bedlinen, put a leg of lamb in the oven and her boyfriend was due in an hour. With her heart aflutter, she went out to the car and fetched the rolled-up tapestry, which she hadn’t touched since leaving the fishing village. The time had come to reveal it and be confronted with herself. A single glance would tell her what it was worth. She placed the compact square on the newly beaten rug. Fetched herself a glass of wine, went back and looked at it. Emptied the glass, pu
t it down, this was the moment of truth. She squatted down on her haunches, unfolded it, got up and took three steps back. Over one hundred impotent people with long, paralysed arms hanging by their sides, their fingers thin, bony and limp; they were all looking at the same thing, but appeared incapable of reacting to what they saw, as if they were standing behind an invisible fence too dangerous to approach, impossible to scale. Alma wasn’t among them. Alma was on the other side. And they were looking at Alma.
She quickly folded it up and put it away under the bed; she was trembling when her boyfriend arrived. He was happy, although he couldn’t help being snide. He told her how people’s eyes widened when they asked about Alma and he told them that he’d had a phone call from her from Kiel a month ago and learned that she was on her way to Italy. And he mimicked how his brother had shaken his head and put his arm around his shoulder, a gesture of pity, when he heard that Alma wouldn’t be coming with them to Spain after all. He exaggerated, but it had no effect on her. People often said to him, he told her, that this wasn’t how a couple was meant to be together, and Alma thought of ‘How it should be between people’ which lay unfinished under her bed, but only until the banners were done and the Constitution tapestry had been submitted. They ate and drank wine, and halfway through the meal the Pole parked outside; Alma went up to the window and stood behind the curtain in order to watch her. She had gained weight and cut her hair in a more Norwegian style, gone was the home-dyed blonde of earlier. And the child had grown taller, she thought, and was carrying a rucksack, had she started school already? Why are you hiding? her boyfriend asked, and she didn’t know, only that she had to. When they had eaten their dinner and made love, he asked her how she was getting on with the Constitution tapestry and Alma hesitated. He asked about her approach, and she liked that he asked and cared. He had never been interested in the banners, but the Constitution picture, which would tour the whole country, interested him, and no wonder, it consumed Alma with all its contradictions. He wanted her to pull it off, she understood, but she had nothing to offer him because she didn’t have the energy to bring out the impotent spectators at the demonstration, she felt despondent at the thought of their accusing faces. Instead she asked him how he would have done it, and he reflected on it and said that what was remarkable was how many different classes of people had gathered at Eidsvoll back in 1814, peasants and government clerks, clergymen and shopkeepers; and yet they had been able to agree on a framework for Norway’s constitution, and that was a blessing. She nodded. Different people coming together and reaching an agreement was a good thing. One option was happy people waving flags, he suggested, celebrating freedom and independence. She shook her head at this and briefly considered taking out the tapestry with the impotent, paralysed people she had made to show him what freedom and independence for some people can mean for others, in the bigger picture as outlined by Nils Christie, but she didn’t want to explain that now, it was too complicated, too difficult, so she knocked back some more wine. Her boyfriend talked about freedom and society because he was an optimistic soul and a nice man who liked talking to and being with other people, behaving like he thought people ought to behave towards one another, and he didn’t suffer from moral or metaphysical qualms as Alma did. But Alma suspected that her boyfriend’s cosy philosophy was ultimately a result of his having given up on changing anything at all and that he was simply trying to make the best of the situation he was in, which explained why he believed that everything would be all right in the end as long as people behaved in what he considered to be a proper manner. But then nothing would ever change, Alma thought. Someone had to point out the danger of everybody sitting on the same side of the boat enjoying themselves, someone had to sit on the other side and sound the alarm and shout out that the Emperor isn’t wearing any clothes. But that was also too simplistic, too facile, besides she didn’t weigh very much and so was unlikely to change the outcome, the boat would sink anyway. Then she remembered her earlier promise to herself in the schoolyard at her old sixth-form college and decided to be charitable and told her boyfriend that she liked what he said about different people coming together and reaching an agreement, in order to be positive and see things his way because she had given up confronting him about his perception of normality, he was too rigid, and they were never going to see eye to eye anyway. She could make that, she said, a chorus of peasants and government clerks and shopkeepers singing, each singing their own tune, and yet it wasn’t entirely lacking in musicality as the voices grew in numbers over time and added defining nuances to the work.
It made him happy, she could see, her liking what he had said because although he constantly criticised Alma, he did respect her, that was the strange thing, or perhaps that was the point. He wanted to capture her essence and change her, but he couldn’t, and he liked that she remained a foreign country. And that was why Alma was with him, because he put up with her. He wasn’t really stern, although he tried to be. And because he was messy, although he tried not to be. The things he didn’t like about himself and tried to improve and change, were the very things she liked about him. She could stitch that, how people fixate on each other’s flaws or challenging features, and perhaps this didn’t just apply to individuals, but also countries and organisations?
She set aside the big tapestries for two months in favour of the banners. When they were done, she had enough money to last the summer. Her adult children returned from the cities with boyfriends and children to holiday by the sea. There were so many people in the house, so many who needed to borrow her car and the bicycles, so much food to be bought, so much food to be cooked, so many clothes that needed washing and hanging out to dry. And it rained all the time, so the clothes had to dry inside, there were clothes drying in the living room, in the dining room and in every bedroom, and there wasn’t enough hot water for everyone to shower, and they got on each other’s nerves. She told herself not to sweat the small stuff and that it didn’t really bother her, yet she felt suffocated by it. Her boyfriend had his children staying with him, so escaping to his place wasn’t an option. Instead she drove to Fredrikstad and rented a room in a cheap boarding house in a former barracks in Gamlebyen, the old part of the city, where she had stayed several times before. It was so quiet there, surrounded as it was by city walls, ramparts and water. She went for walks in the park, sat on a bench in the garden, the sun was shining, the bees buzzing, the flowers bloomed in every colour and the protest in Trieste seemed miles away. She read up on the history of Eidsvoll and King Christian Frederik and tried to find inspiration; in the evening she would look up from her books and see the soft rustling of the birch tree and the sun would still be shining in the sky, although it hung a little lower now, was a little redder now, and it cast a pretty, golden light across the uneven stones in the old walls and the old buildings, and across the gently undulating sea and the grass. And Alma was free to stroll through the pedestrianised, cobblestone streets and find somewhere to eat and drink wine as she tried to feel the wind of history. After three glasses of red wine, she thought that she could feel it, but it disappeared with the fourth, and in the morning she couldn’t get it back. One morning on her way to the patisserie for a cup of coffee, a Saturday, the streets were filled with people dressed up in old-fashioned costumes. When she reached the square, there were countless stalls selling antiques and other sorts of old stuff. It turned out to be Fredrikstad Gamlebyen Preservation Society’s annual fête. Alma bought a long skirt with several petticoats, a blouse with ruched sleeves and a lace collar, and a bonnet, and went back to her room and changed. She felt rather silly when she looked at herself in the mirror and even more so when she returned to the street, but then again she wasn’t the only one. She blushed when she bumped into people; she couldn’t hide behind sunglasses when she was dressed like this, but no one batted an eyelid, and on the square there were so many people dressed up, young and old, so she blended into the crowd with her long, full skirt and her puff-sleeved
blouse with mother-of-pearl buttons. She didn’t attract the attention she would have done if she had dressed like this yesterday or tomorrow and concluded that what you wear influences how you feel, it made a really big difference not to wear trousers but a long skirt, which billowed around her legs, she felt herself smiling. Indeed everyone who had dressed up today appeared unusually cheerful; we ought to dress up more often, she thought, to distance us from ourselves and feel the rush of history, although dressing like a woman who lived a hundred years ago was one thing, being that woman a hundred years ago was clearly quite another, it explained why the people who had dressed up were so festive and smiling, they wouldn’t have done that a hundred years ago, even if they had worn a skirt. She must bear that in mind, she thought, how easy it was to romanticise the past. And yet people’s clothes must affect their mood because she felt very different now from how she usually did. She had never studied what people wore one hundred, two hundred years ago, so she went to a second-hand bookstore and explored its richly-stocked history shelf. There she found several books with pictures of how people dressed one and two hundred years ago, depending on their social class, of course, and she bought them for inspiration. However, she wasn’t going to follow the pictures slavishly because she wasn’t trying to create an historically accurate picture, enough people had done that already, the sagging history shelf was proof of that. Alma’s strength wasn’t the academic disciplines, but the way in which she invested herself. And how was she going to invest her own experiences in a picture about Norway’s road to democracy? She turned away and picked up a slim, small pamphlet from a box because on its cover there was a head that was suspiciously reminiscent of Munch’s scream, a truly desperate face with bulging eyes and a crooked mouth, completely amateurish but no less horrifying because of that. The pamphlet was written by someone calling herself Ninja B., ‘A pamphlet’, it said on the cover and, according to the author, it was about her mother’s unjustified incarceration in a psychiatric hospital in Fredrikstad, and published at the author’s own expense. The shocking drawing on the cover would appear to be her mother’s self-portrait. Alma paid five kroner for the pamphlet and sat down on a bench under a birch tree. Ninja B. wrote in the foreword that she had been brought up by her father, a strict, joyless and repressive vicar in Greåker, but she didn’t blame him for anything other than never telling her about her mother’s fate. As a child, Ninja B. had only been told that her mother suffered from a rare disease and had died when Ninja was eight years old. It wasn’t until the vicar died and she had to clear out the vicarage, that she found documents that proved that her mother had been forcibly admitted to a psychiatric hospital where she later killed herself. Ninja B. was thus confronted with what she throughout the pamphlet referred to as ‘her life’s moment of truth.’
A House in Norway Page 10