In the hall in your house hung an aerial photograph of a white wooden house sitting right down on the shingle on the island of Otterøya. Before Berit married Arvid and moved into his home in Namsos, you had lived in this house along with her and her father, your grandfather, Erik – a man I know of only from an old black-and-white photo of him when he was young: a big, burly road-worker with a shock of thick hair, a broad, hunched back and a bushy black moustache that stuck out like pigtails on either side of his face.
Berit had kept house for your grandfather ever since the death of your grandmother in the early Sixties. When she was about seventeen or eighteen she left home and moved into a bedsit in Namsos, where she started her training as an auxiliary nurse at the same time as my own mum. But within the year she was pregnant with you and had to move back to Otterøya. No one was ever told who your father was: for some reason Berit refused to say and she kept it a secret as long as she lived, even from you.
Mum used to tell me stories about your mother and what she was like back then: such a pale slip of a thing, she said, with red hair, freckles and a little turned-up nose. To begin with Berit had seemed shy and a little unsure of herself, but she had turned out to be anything but. Like lots of people who’ve had a tough upbringing and survived, she’d been hardened and according to Mum she seemed not the slightest bit shy or afraid, as folk from small towns often were when they came to the city to study. She had a sharp tongue, talked nineteen to the dozen and always said exactly what she thought, no matter who she was talking to. She could be ruthlessly spiteful to anyone who crossed her and would go to almost any lengths to hurt and humiliate them. Physical defects, speech impediments, a dodgy past, it was all fair game to her and her jibes were so spot-on and so witty that no one listening could help but laugh, no matter how hard they tried. And if her victim gave as good as they got and commented, for instance, on her bad front teeth, she would just grin, baring those same teeth. Self-pity and sentimentality were luxuries she’d never been able to afford and she never let anything get to her. “If anyone had told me back then that one day she’d nab herself a vicar, I’d have died laughing!” Mum used to say.
Your grandfather found it hard to get used to the idea of his daughter marrying a vicar. According to you he was an atheist and a communist, red as they come, till the day he died. He shook his head and scoffed at a lot of what Arvid believed in and stood for and he never seemed to tire of asking for concrete descriptions of, or rational explanations for, various miracles and wonders mentioned in the Bible. “Could you not explain that business of the virgin birth in a way that a simple man from Otterøya can understand it?” he would say, and if Arvid chose to ignore the ironic undertone he detected in Erik’s voice and gave him a serious answer, your grandfather would listen with a gleeful look on his face, and when Arvid was finished he would chortle and shake his head indulgently. “Aye, those were the days!” he’d say. “You’d never see that happening now, that’s for sure!”
He thought these conversations were great fun, you told me, and the same went for teasing Berit by reminding her of the sort of family and the sort of background she came from. His talk was broader and coarser than usual when he was with her and it was like he just always happened to remember the juiciest incidents from the old days, the one thing common to all these stories being that they didn’t go down at all well in the Christian circles which Berit was trying so hard to fit into and become part of. “Then there was that New Year’s Eve when you drank all the menfolk under the table,” he would say, roaring with laughter. And if your mother didn’t laugh along with him he would act surprised and puzzled. “Oh, don’t tell me you don’t remember that?” he’d say, then sit back, gloating, and wait for an answer while Berit turned white with rage.
You used to laugh when you told me all this, but at the time it had left you feeling uncomfortable and insecure. Arvid, on the other hand, did his best to pretend that it didn’t bother him. According to you, he might have been annoyed, angry even, but he wanted to convince you and your mother that it was beneath his dignity to be shocked by that sort of thing, so he would merely sit there smiling and showing endless patience and tolerance. This fits, as it happens, with my own impression of him as a person after we got to know one another and I began to spend a lot of time at your house. My memories of those days may be coloured by my hearing later that Arvid had had a mental breakdown after your mother died; still, though, I seem to remember thinking that he was the sort of man who hides inner turmoil behind a calm, solid exterior and who, without knowing it himself, overcompensates and ends up seeming intimidating. He had a smile so warm and gentle that it was hard to credit the love it was supposed to reflect, and he spoke so slowly and softly and with such sincerity that I for one felt uneasy in his company and not calm and relaxed as I was probably meant to feel.
A lot of people misinterpreted his manner and took it as proof that the stereotype of the rather smug, pompous man of the cloth was actually true. As my mum said, “It’s easy to be gentle and kind and tolerant of people when you’re sure that you’re going to heaven and everyone else is going to hell!” But none of us who knew Arvid saw him as smug or pompous. Quite the opposite. He honestly seemed to see himself as a perfectly ordinary man who just happened to be a vicar, and wanted to be seen that way, as a man of the people. He couldn’t quite pull it off, though. When this rather straitlaced man wrapped his blue-and-white Namsos FC scarf round his neck and took his place on the terraces to cheer on the home team a lot of people laughed and eyed him with the contempt normally reserved for politicians indulging in the same sort of antics. To them this was all an act, an attempt to woo the man in the street. Not only that, but Arvid, like so many other clergymen, had an irritating habit of eventually bringing every conversation round to the subject of Christianity, something that tended to alienate people and make them feel uncomfortable. If, for example, we were sitting out on the steps at your place on a winter’s night, gazing up at the stars, I knew that at some point he’d be bound to mention the Star of Bethlehem – just by the bye, as it were – and if there was a natural history programme on TV that showed how well some species of animal was adapted to its surroundings, I’d be sitting there just waiting for him to express his amazement that there could actually be people who seriously believed something so wonderful could have come about purely by accident.
You said yourself that you hated this side of him. When you were younger you had often noticed how the atmosphere changed when he walked into a room. A loud, lively conversation could fizzle out completely the minute he appeared and and the mood in the room became unsettled and edgy. There were always one or two people who made a show of talking and acting quite normally, but they were very much on their own and stood out so much from the rest that their efforts always seemed more strained and awkward than heroic, and in the end they either gave up and shut up or they did the same as everyone else and switched, instead, to talking about things they felt it was safe to talk about when the vicar was there. They gabbled on about nothing in particular, voiced opinions that no one in their right mind would disagree with. And while you burned with embarrassment, Arvid seemed quite oblivious to what was going on, or so you said. Thinking about it now, though, I’m not sure you were right about this. I remember Arvid as being both intelligent and observant, and I can imagine that such situations must have been every bit as painful and embarrassing for him as they were for you.
The unsettled, faintly edgy mood that was generated when Arvid walked into a room was something I actually sensed in your home, too. There was a slight stiffness and artificiality about the way he spoke and behaved. It was as if the apparent air of calm that Arvid radiated represented a standard of behaviour and an ideal that all the family should aim to achieve, and not only the family, but friends of the family too. Most of the members of the Christian community seemed to do their utmost to appear as gentle and kind and full of brotherly love as possible, as if dead set on reminding t
hemselves of how much they cared about one another. At your house I had the feeling that while it was all right to disagree with something, you should never argue; it was even all right to get annoyed or angry, but it really wasn’t done to raise your voice. All fluctuations in mood and tone had somehow to be played down and smoothed out, not only the troughs, but the crests as well. It was great to be happy, but you didn’t need to make a song and dance about it, so to speak, a smile was sufficient. And if, even so, someone did get carried away, the others would fall ostentatiously quiet for a few seconds, or they would smile pleasantly, then change the subject completely.
But despite, or maybe because of, this unspoken insistence on constant self-control, violent emotional outbursts did occasionally occur and once, when I was at your house, I witnessed one such outburst. Your mother had just finished washing the floor when Arvid came in and walked right across it in boots caked with clay. Then I caught a glimpse of the Berit that Mum had told me about. Mind you, it was no small thing for her to have somebody walk into the house in mucky boots right after she’d finished cleaning it. For housewives like your mother and mine it was a point of honour to keep an immaculate house, and they expected their husbands, neighbours and anyone else to appreciate all their hard work. My own mum even went so far as to leave the mop and bucket standing in the hall for a whole day after she’d done the cleaning, so that everybody who came in would be sure to see them and comment on how fresh and spotless she kept the place. Seen in that light, to go tramping across Berit’s newly washed floor in muddy boots was to treat her like dirt.
All the same, the fury that Berit unleashed on Arvid when he walked in wearing mucky boots was completely out of proportion to the crime he’d committed. “You dirty fucking pig!” she screamed at him, and just hearing someone use that voice and those words in your home made me jump and then sit there open-mouthed. I was even more astonished when she swept everything off the kitchen counter. Her forearm swished like a scythe across the worktop; cups, bowls, glasses and cutlery fell to the floor with a deafening crash and when a terrified Arvid gathered his wits enough to ask what on earth had got into her, she flung out her arms, grinned manically and, said: “I’m only doing the same as you, making sure I’ve plenty to do this evening.” Then she burst into tears.
I never heard of you giving way to similar outbursts and I can’t imagine you doing so. Like I say, at school or when you were with friends you were more the strong, silent type, and you had taken this even further at home, adopting a cold, almost stony manner, particularly towards Arvid. It wasn’t that you were directly hostile, more as if you’d taken the insistence on self-control to the extreme, as if you’d decided not to show any emotion at all, and your manner was often formal, bordering on mechanical. If, for example, Arvid asked you to do him a favour, you would do as he asked without a murmur, you didn’t answer him, didn’t even look at him, you simply got up and did as he asked, then went back to what you’d been doing. You behaved as if he was your boss and not your stepfather. And when he spoke to you and tried to start a conversation, you would often reply in words of one syllable and in a flat, indifferent voice. “Fine,” you would say, if he asked how one of our trips to the cottage had gone. “No!” you would answer if he asked if we’d caught any fish.
In such situations I often felt sorry for him. He would smile and act as if it didn’t bother him, but I saw how it hurt him, you being so offhand with him. When I confronted you with this on one of our walks, you got surprisingly het up about it, I remember. You couldn’t stand it, you said, his friendliness towards you, his endless patience. You didn’t believe in the love that all of this was supposed to be proof of and you didn’t know how to defend yourself against it. You could also feel sorry for him, you could be overwhelmed with guilt when he showered you with kindness. You said you often felt pressured into being nice in return, but you didn’t want to – not because you were still jealous of him for marrying your mother, but because being pleasant to him made you feel as though you were losing sight of yourself and becoming the person he wanted you to be. He had always tried to mould you, to form your character, you said. His methods were just a bit more subtle now. When you were younger he had read and told you stories from the Bible, he had subscribed to The Blue Anemone, a Christian children’s magazine, for you, took you to church and Sunday school and scared the wits out of you with tales of the Devil and eternal damnation when you said your prayers together in the evening. He had done all he could to lead you onto what he believed was the right path, but none of it had done any good, so now, instead, he was deliberately using the power of example and trying to ingratiate himself with you. He was kind and affectionate because he saw this as the only way to win you over, you said, and it wasn’t just him: the whole of the Christian community to which your family belonged was involved in this conversion project, they prayed for you, they tried to talk Berit into making a bigger effort to get you to join the church youth groups (especially the choir, since you weren’t a bad singer) and were nigh on shameless in their idealization of the Christian way of life.
Although I thought you were being unfair to Arvid by cold-shouldering him the way you did, I was impressed by the strength of your resistance to him and the rest of the Christian community. Your mother they had managed to “tame”, as my mum put it. She was a secret smoker, though (I remember the half-disintegrated butts floating in the toilet and the smoker’s breath she tried to camouflage with the aid of chewing gum, usually Orbit, but sometimes Trident), and you suspected that she let her old self off the leash a bit on those rare occasions when she visited her old girlfriends on Otterøya, but that she had changed her ways and truly accepted Jesus, of that everyone was certain. For a while she had even attended meetings at the home of one of Arvid’s aunts, but that had proved too much of a good thing. She couldn’t bear to sit for hours, embroidering some prize for the raffle at the next church bazaar, while drinking coffee, eating waffles with brown goat’s cheese and listening to women twenty and thirty years older than herself who laughed themselves silly and thought they were being really naughty if they dared to say the word “fart”, as she put it.
But no matter how hard Arvid and the others tried, they couldn’t “tame” you. Quite the reverse, in fact: the harder they tried, the farther they drove you away from them and when they were at their most zealous you used to refer to Arvid and his cronies in almost hateful terms. You tried to assume a wry and slightly indifferent tone, but behind the grin and the laughter lay rage, frustration and sadness and you spent many a long evening at our house, delaying going home until you were sure that Arvid would be in bed. Neither of us ever mentioned that this was why it could be eleven, twelve or half-past twelve before you started yawning and saying that, well, it was a school day tomorrow, but I knew this was the reason and you knew that I knew, and I could tell just by looking at you that you appreciated that I was there for you and never asked questions. As far as I was concerned that went without saying, and I knew you would do exactly the same for me if the day ever came when I needed someone to be there for me.
Namsos, July 5th 2006. Home to Mum
I place my hand on the doorhandle and press it down, try to pull the door to me, but nothing happens. It’s locked, but she never used to lock the door, so this is something new she’s started doing. So many darkies, she says, roaming the streets since those asylum flats were built, she doesn’t dare not lock the door. I put a finger to the doorbell and press it, once, then again. Stick my hands in my trouser pockets and try to look casual. Take them out again, place them on the banister, ease myself up onto it and sit there, gaze at the yellow frosted glass in the front door, wait a moment, but she doesn’t open up, so I hop down again. I’ll have to fetch the key and let myself in, the spare key will be hanging where it’s always hung, I suppose. I walk round to the shed, flip up the latch and open the door, which emits a long, plaintive creak. Sounds like I’ll have to oil the hinges while I’m here.
I turn and look at her. She’s standing in the doorway, looking a little tired. Strange how old she’s got lately. She stands there smiling faintly at me.
“So you are home” I say.
“Of course I’m home.”
“You took so long to come to the door, I thought you must be out gallivanting,” I say, closing the shed door behind me.
And she laughs that mournful laugh of hers.
“Oh, and where would I go?” she says, smiling sadly at me, as if to let me know how seldom she gets out of the house now, let me know how lonely she is. I’ve only just got here and she’s started already.
“Ah, now how would I know that? You could be having a high old time of it for all I know,” I say, trying to make a joke of it.
“Oh, you think so, do you?” she asks, laughing her mournful laugh again. “No, I think my gallivanting days are pretty much over.”
I look at her, say nothing. She always has to start with this, I’ve only been here half a minute and here she goes, it’s so bloody tiring, but I keep smiling, walk up to her with a smile on my face, I’ll just have to ignore her moaning, there’s no point in saying anything. I lay a hand on her shoulder, give her a hug. Tobacco fumes waft across my face and I feel her hard cheekbone bump lightly against mine. She places a hand lightly on my upper arm, barely touching me, then takes it away again almost immediately, positions herself by the door and gives a flourish of her hand, as if ushering me in.
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