Encircling

by Carl Frode Tiller

  But her arrogance wasn’t always charming. She could be tactless, rude and ruthlessly honest and a lot of people dreaded being in her company because you never knew what she was likely to come out with in the way of awkward questions or hurtful comments. She often asked things that a lot of other people wondered about, but would never have dared to ask, just as she often said things that lots of people agreed with, but either didn’t dare or were too polite to say. And almost always she would express herself in a way that made it difficult to challenge her. She would act innocent, make a joke of it so that her victim seemed churlish if he or she protested, or she would confuse the person concerned by making them think that whatever she said it was out of kindness and with the best of intentions: “You’re really brave, I’d never dare to get my hair cut that short if the back of my head was so flat,” she said once to a girl with whom she had a score to settle, when she walked into the classroom with a new haircut. She was at her most merciless, though, if she thought she detected the slightest whiff of male chauvinism. She was the sort of feminist who could hurt a boy most cruelly on behalf of all the hard-done-by women in history. That there were men who raped and beat up women seemed justification enough for her to pass comment on the size of some poor guy’s penis, and that Latin males had a reputation for being womanizers seemed reason enough for her to fool a nice Italian musician friend of mine into believing that she fancied him, only then to give him the brush-off in the most humiliating fashion. “There, that’ll give him some idea of what life’s like for women in his country,” she said afterwards.

  I don’t remember exactly how we got to know her, but I do remember that we were both very surprised to meet a girl who was genuinely interested in the same things as us. Despite the reckless, almost sinister sides of her character, we hit it off with her right from the start, and there were times when we slept and ate almost more at her house than we did at our own, something which made Oddrun, Silje’s mother, very happy. “If you want to stay young,” she used to say, “you have to spend time with young people.” And when word got around that Oddrun had a voracious sexual appetite and enjoyed the company of young men, she laughed that coarse, husky laugh of hers; it would never have occurred to her to be more discreet or hold herself more aloof. Quite the opposite. Oddrun liked being provocative and shocking people. Once, when you were helping her to change the washer on the tap for the garden hose and she noticed the retired army officer who lived next door watching the two of you through binoculars from his living room window, she suddenly pulled you to her and kissed you full on the lips. Back inside the house she could hardly stop laughing. “That phone of his will be red hot till tomorrow morning, I bet you,” she said.

  Oddrun didn’t seem to give a toss what people thought of her. She would sit on her balcony, knocking back the drink on a Tuesday morning while people walked by down below. She would march straight into the newsagent’s and buy Playgirl no matter how big a queue there was, and instead of hiding it in her bedroom she’d leave it lying on one of the bookshelves in the living room. But according to my mum she hadn’t always been like that. Silje’s father had been a Freemason and businessman with a reputation to maintain. He had expected Oddrun to be respectable and presentable at the very least, and it wasn’t until the early Eighties, after he had contracted some sort of lung disease and died, that Oddrun “became hellbent on being a Bohemian and doing all the things her husband wouldn’t let her do,” as Mum put it.

  Silje pretended to despair of Oddrun’s unconventional habits, the little scandals she caused and the way she occasionally set tongues wagging, but from the way she acted it was clear that she was actually proud of this side of her mother and admired it. “Oh, Mum, for heaven’s sake,” she would say, rolling her eyes. “Oh, God, I’m so mortified,” she would sigh, putting her hands to her face. But unlike you and me, who were still embarrassed by and blushed for our mothers, she never blushed, not at all, she simply laughed at it all and the very next day she would be entertaining friends and acquaintances with the latest antics of her crazy Bohemian mother. Oddrun, for her part, knew that Silje was only pretending to be shocked and dismayed and she responded to this playacting with a little playacting of her own: “What?” she would say, frowning and looking as though she had no idea what was so shocking about what she had just said or done.

  And we admired her and looked up to her as much as Silje did. She was well-read, well-informed and intelligent and we found it hard to understand how a woman like her could take the time to talk to us as often and at such length as she did, why she would ask us in for a cup of tea even if Silje wasn’t home, why she invited us to her parties and treated us exactly the same as all of her other, adult, guests.

  She didn’t hold the sort of parties that Mum and the other adults I knew held, though. She held salons. And at her salons she served apéritifs in long-stemmed, wide-bowled glasses with glacé cherries on plastic cocktail sticks propped against the rims, and her guests – often well-known faces from local arts circles and occasionally from the world of commerce – mingled and chatted until it was time go in to dinner, which never consisted of lamb stew or a casserole with lager on the side – the usual fare when grown-ups had a party – but of some French-sounding dish served with mushrooms that Oddrun had picked herself, and always accompanied by a fine wine, more often than not from the same region as the dish itself, which, according to Silje’s mother, would go very well with the food.

  Incidentally, Oddrun could never open a bottle of wine without sighing and shaking her head at the thought of the Wine Monopoly shop in Namsos. They had hardly a single drinkable wine in that place, she had to order almost everything from the catalogue and the staff knew absolutely nothing about the products they were there to sell, she used to say. When she went to the Wine Monopoly she always ended up telling them about wine and not the other way round, as should have been the case.

  Unlike Arvid and Berit, my mum had been known to buy a bottle of wine on the odd occasion when she was having people to dinner, but no matter what sort of food was served the wine was always either Bull’s Blood or the Monopoly’s own home-bottled red, because they were cheap and perfectly okay as far as Mum was concerned. If I made the mistake of pointing out that not all wines went equally well with all sorts of food, she would respond with some caustic remark to the effect that she was afraid she wasn’t as sophisticated as I would like her to be; or she would act hurt and sigh something about how she was doing the best she could and she was sorry if it wasn’t good enough. As far as she was concerned, being open to and learning new things was as good as admitting defeat, or so it seemed. All the things she didn’t know or couldn’t do were regarded by her as a threat and a reminder that she wasn’t good enough, and not as the key to a richer, fuller life. This was also reflected in conversations around the dinner table. If, for some reason, anyone brought up a subject that hadn’t been discussed a thousand times before, or on which there was a risk that opinions might differ, this would give rise to a sense of unease, rather like the atmosphere generated by Arvid, the local vicar, when he came to call. In such cases, Mum, and everyone else who knew the unwritten rules for appropriate conversation in their circle, would promptly take steps to bring the conversation back onto safe, familiar ground.

  At Silje and her mother’s dinner table there was absolutely none of this. No topic was too small and or too big and whether an opinion was voiced by an irate or an ecstatic dinner guest did not appear to matter. While Arvid and Berit and the whole Christian community approved of people demonstrating self-control and never letting themselves get carried away, here the exact opposite was the case; if anything was frowned upon it was a lack of enthusiasm and interest in what was being discussed. “The Lord likes you hot or cold. If you’re lukewarm he’ll spit you out,” as Oddrun the atheist was fond of saying.

  And we were thrilled to be included. We did our best to seem as worldly-wise and self-assured as we could, but it must have been
pretty obvious that we were very pleased with ourselves and almost grovellingly grateful. We admired everyone there for all their knowledge and their skills and for all the things they’d seen and done. Oddrun had her own studio in the attic, where she painted pictures in which condors were a recurring motif; one lively, talkative character with a Lenin badge in his lapel had taken part in the student revolt in Paris in 1968, and a guy in a suit and bottle-glass specs had been a hippie and driven across America in a rainbow-coloured Volkswagen Dormobile. Our own travels were limited to the odd motoring holiday in Sweden and, strange as it may sound today when foreign travel is so cheap and so common, neither Mum nor Berit nor Arvid had ever been further from home than that either.

  We drank in every word these people said, we tucked away every story, every remark and observation, and at school or at a party with chums of our own age we repeated it all, presenting it for the most part as if it were straight out of our own heads.

  After dinner, too, the format was, on the whole, pretty different from what we were used to. In our homes it was always the women who cleared the table and retreated to the kitchen, and the talk over the washing-up was usually of family matters. My mum’s favourite topic was illness: pain and suffering in general and the poor children in particular, and I’ve never known this to be anything but a popular talking point with other women, too. Meanwhile, the men sat in the living room, waiting for the women to bring in the coffee, to which they would add a dash of something stronger. They smoked roll-ups, swore, and robustly debated the national budget or talked of a pipe that had sprung a leak in someone’s basement, and every now and again they would shout something to the woman, something meant to be a bit daring and close to the bone: “Oy! Get a move on with that coffee, will you! We’re bloomin’ parched in here!” And Mum and the other women would pop their heads round the kitchen door and pretend to be annoyed. “Oh, shut your mouth, you old rogue, or you’ll get nothing!” And they would all laugh.

  After dinner at Silje’s and her mother’s place, on the other hand, it was as natural for the men to clear the table and help with the washing-up as the women, and the conversations in the kitchen were extensions of the conversations that had been conducted during dinner. And I, for one, could detect no male–female divide in these. Oddrun’s contributions to discussions on progressive taxation, German literature between the wars and Soviet foreign policy were as impassioned as the men’s and, unlike Mum, who might occasionally venture to make a joke, but never anything that went beyond the bounds of what was considered decent for a woman, Oddrun could be every bit as crude and blunt as the male dinner guests. Once she’d had a bit to drink she would often start to joke about the number of lovers she’d had and how easy it was to trick a man into doing this or that: “All you have to do is show a little cleavage and they’ll do whatever you ask,” I remember her saying late one evening, and neither you, I, nor anyone else thought her improper or immoral on that account.

  That said, when people got drunk at Oddrun’s they tended to behave in ways that would have been absolutely unheard of at the grown-up parties you and I had been used to up till then. There was, for example, a former actress with the Trøndelag Theatre, a skinny woman with long, white hair and bulging eyes, who stripped naked, stepped out onto the balcony and sat down, and there she stayed, smoking and staring defiantly at everyone who walked past on the street below. No friend of Mum or Berit would have dreamed of doing anything like that, no matter how drunk or far from home they were, and if such a thing had ever happened and had got out it would have been a personal disaster and an eternal source of shame. But the next morning, when we were all up and sitting at the breakfast table, this same white-haired woman emerged from the bedroom and, contrary to what you might think, she had neither forgotten, nor did she pretend to have forgotten, the incident; she didn’t look the slightest bit embarrassed, instead she laughed until the tears rolled down her cheeks as she described the looks on the faces of the male passers-by and everyone else at the table laughed just as hard.

  But no matter how broad-minded Oddrun and her friends and Silje herself were, we never dared to tell them about what went on between us. Not that any of them would have had anything against it, of course, we knew they wouldn’t. But oddly enough that was why we kept it to ourselves. Because if Silje were to find out about it she would think nothing of telling other people. She simply couldn’t see what was so shocking about two men sleeping together, and even if we begged her not to say anything, and even if she promised on her honour not to do so, she would do it anyway, and afterwards she would wonder why we were upset. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, relax,” she’d say. “It’s not that big a deal, is it?” She had a confidence in herself that rendered her immune and she acted as though everyone around her was just as self-confident.

  Eventually, however, Mum’s suspicions were aroused. She never actually said anything, but it was obvious that she was growing less and less keen on you. She would give a little sigh or roll her eyes and look almost annoyed if I said I was popping over to your place, and I discovered, quite by accident, that on several occasions when you had phoned and asked for me she had said I wasn’t in, even though she knew I was up in my room, practising or listening to music. At first I put it down to her illness and the fact that she had become so dependent on me at home. She had been plagued for years with chronic pain in her joints and muscles, but during the winter and spring it had been unbearable, and when, on top of everything else, she lost a lot of the grip in her hands she could no longer carry on with her job or do the housework. Although she never said it in so many words, she let me know in no uncertain terms that she didn’t think it was too much to ask for me to spend a bit more time at home and do a greater share of the household chores than I’d been doing, and I thought that the dislike of you that she’d suddenly begun to show was just one of many ways she had of telling me this. But when I noticed that she didn’t look unhappy if I said I was going to see anyone else it began to dawn on me that it had to have something to do with you, and it was only once I’d realized this that I noticed how her manner towards you had changed. She wasn’t directly unfriendly, but she was short with you and not as chatty, and sometimes when both you and Silje were there she would make a big show of being nice to Silje and interested in her, while ignoring you in an ostentatious, almost childish manner.

  More and more, though, I also had the feeling that she was trying to check whether or not we were gay. It was remarkable how often, when your name was mentioned, she would bring the conversation round to HIV and AIDS. It’s true that the virus had only recently been identified and there was a lot about it in the papers, but that still didn’t explain all the times when, out of the blue and apropos of nothing, she would start going on about what a long and painful death it led to, how far medical science was from discovering an effective antidote and how much she agreed that all HIV sufferers should have to wear some sort of badge, so that everyone else could take precautions. “Although it’s mostly homosexuals who catch it so we can rest easy on that score,” she would say, while keeping a close eye on me to see how I reacted. For a long time I played it cool when she carried on like this, acted as though I didn’t know why she was saying all these things. I would yawn and try to look as if it had nothing to do with me, and I hoped and expected that this would eventually persuade her to give up, but it didn’t, and one day when you had come over and she had brought the conversation round, by dint of some weird detours, to a male hairdresser whom she was convinced was gay, even though he had a wife and kids, I exploded. “We’re not gay, Mum,” I yelled.

  First she went bright red, then she was angry with me for saying it straight out, thereby breaking the unwritten rules for how she believed such things ought to be discussed, but only a minute later she seemed happier and chirpier than I had seen her in a long time. All of a sudden she could see herself having grandchildren to spoil, after all, as well as a daughter-in-law to train up and a son she cou
ld tell her women friends about without having to lie or blush. The second and third of these my brother Eskil could be said to have given her, but to Mum’s great sorrow in his teens he had caught mumps and this had left him sterile, so it was up to me to provide grandchildren and pass on the family name, as she had given me to understand on more than one occasion.

  I was as unsure then as to whether I was gay, straight, or bisexual as I am now, but it was no less painful to hear her talk and carry on the way she did. You thought she was just a joke and there were times when you had to bite your lip to save laughing out loud when she sat there sounding us out. But even though I agreed with you, and even though a lot of what she said was so stupid that it was hard to believe it could be hurtful, these conversations always left me feeling depressed. At the time I didn’t know why, but now I can see that it was the fact that she set conditions for loving me that left me with what I remember as a vague sense of shame.

  Unlike Mum, I don’t think either Berit or Arvid suspected that we were anything other than friends at that point. But then Arvid thought and acted as if he were living in the heaven that he sometimes believed in, and since there definitely can’t have been such a thing as homosexuality in that heaven, I don’t think it ever occurred to him that anything of that sort could be going on between us. Berit was much more down-to-earth and under normal circumstances she might have been able to spot what Mum had spotted, but the silent, stiff, almost cold manner you had adopted when you were at home had become more and more marked during ’88 and ’89 and this made you all but impossible to read or to fathom, not only for Arvid, but also for her. On one occasion, for example, when we popped in to your house to pick up a camera we needed for one of our endless art projects and you needed to eat something to boost your blood sugar levels before we headed out again, I remember you asking Arvid if you might “be allowed” to take a couple of slices of bread. Silje and I thought you were kidding, but when we saw that Arvid wasn’t smiling, but reacted by sighing heavily and walking out of the kitchen without replying, we realized that this was pretty much par for the course.