was nothing more than a minor key variation of a Russian
folk melody. I also suspected Chaplin of stealing some
musical ideas from Puccini, who was capable of being just
as melodramatic. But it was all to the good that Chaplin had
found inspiration in other composers, because I loved both
Tchaikovsky and Puccini, and so did my mother. We went
to the opera and saw Madam Butterfly. I tried not to cry, but
it wasn't easy. My throat didn't choke with sobs because
Pinkerton leaves Madam Butterfly, or because she kills
herself in the end � I knew she was going to do that from
the start of act two. It was the music that had me fighting
back the tears, right from the moment in the first act when
Madam Butterfly comes over the crest of the hill with the
great choir of women. I was only twelve at the time, but the
picture of all those women with their colourful parasols
singing on the path up from Nagasaki, haunts me still.
At home we played La Boheme with Jussi Bj�rling and
Victoria de los Angeles on the gramophone, and my mother
always began sniffling when Musetta drags in the sick Mimi
in act four. Then I'd go into another room, leaving the door
open behind me. Not because I wanted to hear my mother
crying, but because I was listening to the music. And then I
could shed some tears of delight, too.
Before I'd seen Chaplin's Limelight, Puccini and Tchai-
kovsky were the only real geniuses I'd encountered. When I
was at home by myself, I would play the final movement of
the Symphonic Pathetique. It would have been very embarrass-
ing if my mother had found me out. I was big enough to
like capers, but even I had to admit that I was a bit young to
be in raptures over classical music. I tried to play the music at
full volume whilst keeping an ear out for my mother on the
stairs. Sometimes the little man would stand by the front
door and listen for footsteps down in the lobby.
I had read about Tchaikovsky in the encyclopaedia. He
had died of cholera just a few days after he'd given the
first performance of the Symphonic Pathetique. His life's work
was complete. After the first performance of the Symphonic
Pathetique he no longer bothered to sterilise his drinking
water. He'd written his own requiem, and now he had no
more tunes left inside him. He was finished with this world.
I, too, felt rather finished with the world when the last
chords of the Symphonic Pathetique faded away.
Death was something my mother and I never talked
about. I never talked to her about girls either. I was just as
careful to conceal a Playboy magazine as I'd been to cover up
listening to the Symphonic Pathetique.
I was only seven when we saw East of Eden with James Dean
as Cal. My mother almost broke down at the end of the film
when Cal's girlfriend has to beg his father to love him. 'It
hurts not to be loved,' she said. 'It makes people evil. Show
him that you love him. Try! Please!'
Cal's father hated his son because he thought the boy had
taken his mother's part when she'd left her husband and
children and become a steely brothel-keeper. Before he died
he did manage a reconciliation with his son. He told him to
send the nurse away. 'I want you to look after me,' he said. It
was the same as saying that he loved his son.
My mother found it hard to speak about that film. I
realised she was the one who'd told my father to move out.
That wasn't normal in those days. It was rare for a mother
with a small child to throw the father out of their flat.
As I was going to bed that evening, she suggested we ask
my father to Sunday lunch. It was all right by me, but
nothing came of it, and I wasn't going to nag her into
picking up the phone and inviting him.
I had certain vague, almost dreamlike impressions of
things that had happened in the flat before my father left. It
is possible to remember the atmosphere of a dream without
actually being able to break the dream itself. I knew there
was something cold and hard that I was trying to repress, and
so well did I consign it to oblivion that I could no longer
remember what it was I was trying to forget.
The only thing I recalled about that time was some
mysterious things I'd dreamt about a man who was exactly
my height, but who was nevertheless a real, grown-up man
with a hat and a stick and that, suddenly one morning, he'd
appeared in the flat in broad daylight. He'd moved into our
flat around the same time my father moved out.
I imagined that perhaps there was someone out in
dreamland who was missing him. Possibly the little man
had left his wife and children too, or perhaps he'd been
kicked out of the fairy tale where he belonged because he'd
misbehaved. But it was also feasible that he commuted
between two realities. I wondered whether the little man
sneaked back to dreamland during the night while I was
asleep. That wouldn't be so strange, because I certainly went
there when I slept. The really odd thing was that the little
fellow was capable of swaggering about the flat in the middle
of the day.
*
I was the only person in my class with divorced parents. But
the father of one of the girls was a communist, and Hans
Olav's dad had been in prison.
Having divorced parents wasn't a problem. I preferred
being with them one at a time. I also think I got better
Christmas presents from my mother and father than other
children got from their parents. I always got two presents.
My mother and father couldn't even co-operate over gifts.
On the contrary, I think they vied to give me the nicer
present. They never gave anything to each other.
My father took me to watch skating heats and ski-
jumping. He was an expert on lap times and form ratings.
It's not his fault I've turned out the way I have. We went to
Holmenkollen to watch the three ski-jumping Ts: Toralf
Engan, Torbjorn Yggeseth and Torgeir Brandtzasg. They
jumped before Wirkola, the supreme champion. That was
easy. Jumping before Wirkola wasn't difficult.
When I was eight, my father and I took the boat to
Copenhagen. We only spent one night there, but that even-
ing we went to the Tivoli Gardens. I thought I'd been to an
amusement park before, but the Tivoli in Copenhagen was
worlds away from 'Ivar's Tivoli' in Oslo. I felt like a tourist
from some Third World country. What must Danish
children think of us Norwegians when they go to 'Ivar's
Tivoli' in Oslo, I wondered in horror and dismay.
My father was in high spirits. I think he was feeling rather
proud of himself for getting me out of the country and a safe
distance away from my mother. On the ship he'd said in a
man-to-man sort of way that a few days to herself would do
my mother the world of good. It wasn't true, I felt sure she
wanted to come to Copenhagen with me, but it had
&n
bsp; obviously been out of the question once my father had
proposed that he and I should go. I think my father knew
that I'd really rather have gone to the Tivoli Gardens with
my mother. Then my mother and I could have strolled
amongst the crowds and gossiped about the things we saw
and thought. My mother and I often had identical notions.
Or we could have gone to a caf� and had a nice chat.
My father's trouser pockets were full of Danish money
and he wanted us to ride the dodgems and the ghost train,
the merry-go-round and the big dipper, the Ferris wheel
and the tunnel of love. I was only eight, but I was acutely
aware of the embarrassment of having to do the tunnel of
love with my father, bad breath and all. It was awful being
jammed in a little boat with him, listening to artificial
birdsong in a tunnel full of paper flowers and pastel shades.
I think my father felt pretty pained as well, because he didn't
utter a word. I was scared he might suddenly put his arm
around me and say something like: 'Isn't this lovely, son?
Don't you think so, Petter?' The worst thing of all was that I
felt convinced it was just what he wanted to do, only he
didn't dare put his arm round my shoulders because he knew
I wouldn't like it. Perhaps that was why neither of us spoke.
It was mainly for my father's sake that I went on all the
rides. I was more interested in going round looking at
everything the Tivoli Gardens contained. I'd made up my
mind to note every detail, right down to each little tombola
and hot-dog stand. From the very first instant I'd known
that this visit would entail a lot of work when I got back, I'd
been seriously inspired. I walked around thinking that soon
I'd be going home to create the world's finest amusement
park. This was after I'd given up drawing, so I had to make
an effort to remember exactly how everything was. In the
end I succeeded in forming a detailed picture of Copen-
hagen's Tivoli Gardens, but I had to draw it in my head, I
had to get it all off pat. It wasn't easy to concentrate, because
now and then I had to look up at my father and say
something to him too � he mustn't think I was moping.
Just before we left, I won a soft toy in the shape of a red
tiger. I gave it to a little girl who was crying. My father
thought I was being kind, he didn't realise that I wasn't
interested in red, cuddly tigers. If my mother had seen me
win such a thing, she'd have given one of her characteristic
peals of laughter.
Even before our visit to the Gardens had come to an end,
I'd mentally constructed a ghost train with everything from
dangling skeletons to ghosts and monsters. But I'd also
positioned a real live man in the middle of my tunnel, a
perfectly ordinary man in a hat and coat, who might, for
instance, be eating a carrot. I imagined that the people riding
the ghost train would give an extra, ear-piercing scream
when they suddenly caught sight of a real person in the
tunnel.
In certain situations the sight of a live person can be as
scary as that of a ghost, especially in a ghost tunnel. Ghosts
inhabit the imagination, and if something real enters the
imagination, it can seem almost as eerie as if some fantasy
figure had suddenly loomed up in real life.
I was truly frightened the first time I saw that little man
with his bamboo stick outside the confines of a dream, but
the novelty soon wore off. If elves and trolls began to stream
out of the woods all of a sudden, we'd naturally be alarmed,
but sooner or later we would get used to them. We'd have
to.
Once I dreamt I'd found a purse containing four silver
dollars. I'd have been pretty shaken if I'd woken up and
found myself holding that same purse in my hand. I'd have
had to try to convince myself that I was still asleep, and then
make another attempt to wake up.
We think we're awake even when we're dreaming, but
we know we're awake when we're not sleeping. I had a
theory that the little man with the walking-stick lay sleeping
somewhere in dreamland and only dreamt that he inhabited
reality. Even at the time of my visit to the Tivoli Gardens I
was a good bit taller than him. I'd begun to call him Metre
Man because he was only a metre tall.
I said nothing about these new rides to my father; I wasn't
trying to complain. Perhaps it was a bit unfair that the result
of all this inspiration was to blossom in my mother's vicinity:
she became more and more jealous because my father was
the one who'd taken me to Copenhagen. 'You've got
amusement parks on the brain,' she said a few days after I
got home. I observed that perhaps that was because I'd been
a huge tivoli in a previous life. My mother laughed. 'You
mean you worked in a huge tivoli in a previous life,' she
said. I shook my head and emphasised that I'd actually been
an entire amusement park.
*
I took plenty of punishment as a child. It was never my
father who hit me, or my mother.
I reckoned that the reason I never got smacked by them,
was that they were divorced. Because they didn't share the
same house they could never agree about when I deserved
punishment. My mother was only too painfully aware that if
she were hard on me, my father would be the first to hear
about it. Sometimes I'd ring my father and ask if I could stay
up an hour or two longer than my mother had decreed. He
always supported me when he glimpsed an opportunity of
making me happy and my mother cross at the same time,
thus completing his satisfaction. And when I needed more
money than my mother was willing to give me, I would also
ring my father. My father was never angry. He only saw me
once a week. We agreed this was enough.
It was the boys at school who beat me up, and that wasn't
much to boast about, because I wasn't big or strong. They
called me Little Petter Spider. When I'd been younger, my
father and I had visited the Geological Museum and we'd
seen a piece of amber with a spider, millions of years old,
embedded in it, and I'd mentioned this spider at school on
one occasion. We'd been learning about electricity and I
informed the class that the word 'electricity' was derived
from the Greek word for 'amber'. From then on I was
known only as Little Petter Spider.
Though small in stature, I had a big mouth. That was why
I got beaten up. I was especially glib when there were adults
close by or when I was just about to hop on a bus or lock
myself into the flats. I could get so carried away at moments
like these that I never gave a thought to the following day. I
wasn't good at what is now called forward-planning, I never
took the trouble to make a risk assessment. I would come
face to face with the boys again, of course, and when I did
there wasn't always a grown-up about.
I was much more s
kilful with words than my peers, and
better at telling stories too. I found it easier to express myself
than many of the pupils who were three and four classes
above me. This brought me many a bruise. There was too
little emphasis on freedom of speech in those days. We'd
learnt about human rights at school, but we were never
reminded that freedom of speech applies just as much to
children and amongst children.
On one occasion, Ragnar sent me hurtling into a drying
rack so hard that it cut my head open. As soon as I began to
bleed I found the courage to say a whole lot of things I'd
otherwise have kept to myself. I dished up some startling
home truths about Ragnar's family - for example, that his
father was always getting drunk with down-and-outs � and
Ragnar didn't retaliate now. He could at least have
answered my accusations, but Ragnar wasn't much good at
talking, he just stood there and stared at me bleeding. So I
called him a cowardy custard who didn't dare shut me up
because everything I said was true. I claimed to have once
seen him devouring dog turds. Next, I said that his mother
had to wash him on a big changing mat in the living-room
because he pissed and shitted in his trousers. Everyone knew
his mother bought nappies at the shop, I observed. She
bought so many she got a discount. Blood was pouring from
my head. Four or five boys stood watching me solemnly.
My hand told me that my hair was all wet. I felt cold. I said
that the whole street knew that Ragnar's father was a
country bumpkin. I also knew, I said, why he'd moved to
the city. It was a secret that even Ragnar might not be privy
to, but one that I would willingly divulge now. Ragnar's
father had to move to Oslo because he'd been arrested by
the police, and the reason he'd been arrested was that he'd
been screwing sheep. He screwed them so much that many
of the sheep got ill, I said. They got screwing sickness, acute
screwing sickness, and one of the sheep had even died of it.
That sort of thing's not too popular, I revealed, not even
north of Oslo. After this last piece of information they all ran
off. I wasn't quite sure if this was due to the sheep north of
Oslo or the blood pouring from my head. But now there
was a big pool of it on the tarmac at my feet. It surprised me
that the blood near my brain was so viscous and sticky. I'd
imagined it to be a shade brighter and a little thinner than
other blood. For some moments my gaze shifted to a
luminous sign over the basement entrance. BOMB SHEL-
TER it said in large, green letters, and I tried to read the
words backwards, but the green letters just made me feel
queasy. Suddenly Metre Man came rushing round the
corner of the building. I was already a head and a half taller
than him. He looked up at me with a startled expression,
pointed up at my hair with his bamboo stick and exclaimed:
' Well, well! What now?'
I felt unhappy about returning to my mother, because I
knew she hated the sight of blood, and especially mine. But
I had no choice. As soon as I got in, my mother wrapped my
head in cotton towels until I looked like an Arab, and we
took a taxi to Accident & Emergency. I had to have twelve
stitches. The doctor said that was the record for the day.
Afterwards we went home and had pancakes.
This is recalled reality. I still have a broad scar on my
forehead. It's not the only scar I incurred. I've got several
similar 'distinguishing marks'. Now, at least, they've stopped
noting that sort of thing on my passport.
Of course my mother wanted to know what had hap-
pened. I said I'd got into a fight with a boy I didn't know
because he said that my dad screwed sheep. For once my
mother took pity on my father. She was usually the first to
slag him off behind his back, but a line had to be drawn
somewhere. I think she saw something noble in my defence
of my father's honour. 'I can see why you got angry, Petter,'
was all she said. 'One doesn't say that sort of thing. I quite
agree.'
I never told tales. Telling tales was like mimicking real
events. It was far too banal. Squealing or lashing out was
The Ringmaster's Daughter Page 3