Encircling

by Carl Frode Tiller

  “What is all this?” Egil says. “Why don’t you come with me?” I say. It just comes out and I hear what I’m saying and once again I’m amazed by what I’m saying and I stand there looking at Egil and I smile. “Come with you?” Egil says. “We can’t just leave,” he says. “We have guests,” he says. “Oh, what do we care?” I say and I hear what I’m saying and I get such a kick out of saying what I’m saying. “Let’s just get in the car and go,” I say and I hear what I’m saying, in my mind I can see Egil and I driving off, and I realize that I really want to do this, and I realize that if I really do do it there will be a price to pay, and I look at him and smile and I raise my hand and pick a stray hair off his suit jacket and he just stands there looking at me, and I pick off another hair, and a moment passes and he stammers something and shakes his head helplessly again. “And where would we go?” he asks. “We could just drive, and see where we end up,” I say. “Kind of like a road movie,” I say and I hear what I’m saying and I’ve no idea where the things I’m saying are coming from, it’s as if someone else is talking through me. “Silje,” he says. “What is all this, really?” he says and I look at him and I laugh again. “Hmm?” he says. “Are you coming or aren’t you?” is all I say. “Silje,” he says, raising his voice a little and eyeing me gravely, and I give him that airy, indifferent look, wait a second or two, then simply shrug. “Oh, well,” I say, and my voice is airy and indifferent and I feel airy and indifferent too, and a moment passes, then I simply turn and walk away. “Silje,” he says again, but I don’t reply and I don’t turn round, I just walk away and Egil must think I’m losing my mind and I realize it amuses me that he should think that.

  Trondheim, July 14th–18th 2006

  The time when we went for a beer down at the Quayside:

  The big supermarket chains came to Namsos in the early Eighties, if my memory serves me right, and by the late Eighties they had put most of the small shops in and around the town out of business. I would probably have noted this development, but possibly not thought too much about it if it hadn’t been for Mum, who was furious when the butcher in Vika was forced to close and this, the only butcher’s shop left in the town, was replaced by the cheaper, but greatly inferior supermarket meat counters where, as Mum remarked to us, you risked being served by people who didn’t have the slightest interest in food and could scarcely tell the difference between leg and shoulder. This was a perfect example of the way in which the ruthless forces of capitalism left their stamp on the local community and our daily lives, she said (with an ill-concealed dig at my dad, who had been a businessman and a capitalist), and when she sent us out to pick up the last few things she needed for the party she was having that evening, we were a little put out to find that we only had to buy perfectly ordinary salmon and not something which the untrained – or so we assumed – assistant at the meat and fish counter would never have heard of, something like filet mignon, for example. And not only were we cheated of the pleasure of sighing in exasperation at an incompetent shop assistant and, hence, at the entire alienating capitalist system, we were much abashed and put well and truly in our place when we got to the counter and gave our order, because when the assistant – a plump, kindly woman with a strong North Trøndelag accent – asked if we wanted a cut from the top end or the bottom of the fish, we had no idea which was the better, and once she had explained this to us and advised us to go for the top half it was hard to hold onto the image of ourselves as discerning customers, highly critical of both produce and service.

  Afterwards, when we emerged from the delightfully cool supermarket and the sun began to blaze down on our bare shoulders, you suggested that we sit down outside somewhere and have a beer, and although I was all for this I wasn’t sure whether we should, seeing that it was almost thirty degrees in the shade and we had two kilos of fresh fish in a carrier bag. You said you were sure it would come to no harm and, although I wasn’t convinced, I said okay and we strolled down to the Quayside, ordered two ice-cold beers and found ourselves a table for two over by the harbour railing. Not until my beer was half drunk did I notice that Jon, Eskil and their dad were sitting just a couple of tables away. Jon’s dad, a notorious hardman, was serving a lengthy prison sentence for smuggling drugs for a biker gang to which he owed money, but had recently been granted parole. Jon had told us about this, but not that his dad would be coming to see them, and I was so taken aback that I nudged you and some of your beer splashed over the rim of the glass and onto the table, where it lay in a shining, faintly quivering little puddle. Just as you turned to see what had put me in such a flap, a big guy with glistening, beer-sodden eyes and a mean-looking grin on his face got up off his chair and walked over to the table at which the three were sitting. I don’t remember his name, but he was a local up-and-coming thug and anyone could see that he was out to provoke Jon’s dad and thereby challenge the older generation of hardmen. And, despite the fact that Jon’s dad was on parole and had, therefore, a lot to lose by getting into a fight, this turned out to be pretty easy to do. When the young guy planted both hands on the table and started mouthing off about how all cons were sex-starved and how it was a well-known fact that most of them resorted to screwing each other to satisfy their urges, Jon’s dad looked him straight in the eye: a look that was clearly no mere attempt to seem tougher than he actually was and thus intimidate the challenger, but a sign that the formidable temper for which he was renowned was already close to erupting. All the other people in the café, particularly those who knew Jon’s dad, grasped this and the atmosphere grew suddenly tense. A middle-aged woman with a husky smoker’s voice, a plastic rose in her hair and enormous white breasts bulging out of a bra several sizes too small, got up, walked over to the lad and told him to come away with her to another table, there was something she needed to talk to him about. And although he must surely have seen this for the ruse that it was and realized that she was simply trying to drag him away before there was trouble, he went with her. He was still grinning and muttering, “Ooh, you’re so scary,” at Jon’s dad, but everybody could see that he was terrified. He must have realized it too, and the more apparent it became to him that he had made a fool of himself and that he was also in danger of losing his reputation as a ruthless hardman, the more set on revenge he became. After fifteen minutes of plucking up his courage, he was back again, leaning over their table, looking meaner than ever and with an even bigger grin on his face. Jon’s dad let him hurl a few obscenities at him without saying or doing anything, but when the young thug asked him whether he preferred to be on the top or the bottom, he could no longer restrain himself. He got to his feet and, after asking the pathetic, but obligatory question as to whether this guy wanted to step outside for a moment, there followed a brief, but very nasty tussle in which the younger man didn’t even manage to raise his fists before Jon’s dad kicked him in the balls, put his hands around the back of his head, dragged it down and drove his knee up into his nose again and again, grinning wrathfully through clenched teeth all the while and asking the kid whether he still thought he was dealing with a poof or what.

  Not only would Jon’s dad lose any future right to parole, in addition to the conviction for assault and battery that he would most probably receive for beating up this young man, he would also have to serve the full eight years of his sentence for drug trafficking, and I could see how losing his father like this, when he had only just got him back, would utterly crush such a fragile artistic spirit as Jon’s. His face seemed to dissolve as he stood there watching, and a moment before his dad let go of the young man’s head and let him slump to the tarmac (when I saw how he dropped I was immediately struck by the aptness of the expression “to fall like a sack of potatoes”), he turned and took to his heels. You didn’t notice this right away and although you were a much faster runner than Jon you couldn’t catch up with him. You came back looking shaken and dismayed. “It’s life or death now,” I remember you saying, and although I didn’t know as much as
you did, and although the situation did prove to be more serious than I then thought, there’s little doubt that you were overreacting. The scene with Jon and his dad had roused your longing for your own father and with this coursing through you your sympathy for Jon was all the greater, so you construed the situation as being much more serious than it actually was. I don’t think I’d ever seen you as upset as you were when we got back to our place, called Jon’s house and received no answer.

  Later that evening, after we had got good and plastered on the gin brought by one of Mum’s more eccentric guests (he claimed, in all seriousness, to be able to talk to birds), I tried to make light of this episode, to cheer you up. After talking about the fight in general and in particular about what a bad role model Jon’s father was for his sons, I remarked with apparent casualness: “Yep, some men should have left and never come back once they’d done their bit and fertilized the egg.” Not until some time later did I realize that, while I had meant to make you feel better by saying this, it might in fact have given you the idea that I was belittling how hard it had been for you, to grow up not knowing your father. You were pensive, morose and irritable all evening and when you asked for another shot and the guy who could talk to birds said he thought you’d had enough, you grabbed his goatee and tugged, dragging his head down until for a moment he was as bent as a hunchback. I laughed my head off at that.

  The time when I was so mad at you:

  We had been over at Jon’s house (ate crisps, drank fruit squash, saw Betty Blue, loved it all three of us) and were walking home when you found a long colourful lady’s scarf by the roadside. And out came the actor in you. You wound the scarf round your neck a couple of times and slung one long-fringed end over your shoulder with an effeminate toss of your head, and as we strolled on through the August night you regaled me with imitations of Berit, who was going through some sort of midlife crisis at the time and endeavouring to keep the fear of death and the feeling of pointlessness at bay by being passionate about things she had heard it was worth being passionate about, more specifically art and culture. I sobbed with laughter as you mimicked the earnest and rather pompous way in which she recited poetry, and when you were finished you gave another little flourish of the scarf, placed a hand over your heart and with fluttering eyelids asked rapturously if that wasn’t quite beautiful.

  Only half a minute later we came upon the scene of the accident. Åge Viken’s car had run straight into the tree, the front end had been shunted back into the middle of the vehicle and the front wings were wrapped like two steel arms around the tree trunk (just as his wife Anita Wiken wrapped her arms round their son Arvid when he brought her the news) and while Knut Borge and Leif ‘Smoke Rings’ Andersson compèred Swing and Sweet on the still-functioning car radio, the engine wept petrol and oil onto the cushiony, pine-needle covered ground (as Anita’s tears fell onto her son’s brown hair?).

  The car was a red Volkswagen Beetle. With its smooth, rounded lines it really did look like a large beetle and just as beetles wriggle out of their old shells, Åge Viken was in the process of wriggling out of his shell: the driver’s door was wide open and his hand dangled in mid-air like a shrivelled feeler, and while the headlights resembled enormous bug eyes staring fixedly into the darkness, the broken aerial called to mind a spindly insect leg. On the ground just outside the open driver’s door was a pool of blood, with a broad, glistening ribbon running from it into the dark forest, rather like a red carpet along which Viken could walk into death.

  That is more or less how I remember it: like a painting, or possibly a sequence from one of those baroque and highly stylized films by Peter Greenaway (which we loved, unlike Jon, who thought them far too pretentious). Softly, slowly we edged towards the car, our eyes wide and intent, and once we reached it, once we were standing over the dead man, you suddenly took off the scarf you had found, unwinding it from your neck much the way you would uncoil a mooring line from a bollard on the dock, and – as if it were the most natural thing in the world – you opened the passenger door and laid the scarf on the seat.

  Then we walked away from there, softly and without saying a word. This was before they erected street lamps along the path through the forest to the housing estate; the darkness closed in around us, rather like wood closing around nails in a wall, and when we eventually stopped short and turned to one another we could barely see each other’s faces. “We’d better run and tell somebody,” I remember you saying, and then we started running – not fast, as one might expect, and not frantically, in a fit of delayed panic, as one might also expect, but quite calmly and with what I remember as a sense of wonder and confusion at what we, or rather you, had just done.

  During the hours and days that followed this wonder and confusion turned for me into remorse and guilt. That ladies’ scarf might make Anita Viken think that her husband had been on his way home from a date with another woman when he crashed, she might begin to wonder who this woman might be, she might even recognize the scarf and know whose it was (this was not entirely unlikely, since it was quite an unusual scarf and people who wear unusual clothes tend to be noticed in a small town), she might even go so far as to accuse some totally innocent woman of having an affair with Åge Viken. This in turn could have major consequences for this woman’s own marriage, if she was married. And then there was Viken’s son: his whole view of his father might be altered when he learned about the ladies’ scarf, he might start to dislike or even hate his own father. Or perhaps this unexpected image of his father as something of a womanizer would bring out the Casanova in him and lead him to cheat on his own girlfriend.

  There was no way of knowing what might go through their heads if their imaginations gained the upper hand, but no matter how many awful scenarios I painted for you, and no matter how mad I got, you would not agree that we had to call Anita Viken and tell her everything. It was a work of art, you said, before launching into your usual rant about how it was an artist’s job to jolt ordinary people out of their humdrum existences (if only for a moment), thus enabling them to see themselves and their surroundings from an unwonted angle. You would send Anita Viken an anonymous letter telling her the whole story, you said, but you would wait with this until her imagination had “turned her concept of reality inside out and upside down,” as you put it, because the greater the contrast between fantasy and reality, the more powerfully and more clearly she would experience the reality when all was revealed.

  So from that point of view you were doing Anita Viken a favour, you said, you were doing the same favour for her as we endeavoured to do for ourselves when we flirted with death and suicide. Writing and reading as much about death as we did, collecting bones, hair, skin and nails, applying for summer jobs at the slaughterhouse simply in order to see animals being killed and attending the funerals of strangers, all of these were attempts to get as close to death as possible, in order thereby to gain a fresh perspective on life, you said – although I was perfectly aware of this, of course: this particular topic had been thrashed out so often that that viewpoint had become something of a cliché to us. This was one of the reasons why, one day, in an attempt to actually do what till then we had done little more than talk about, you suddenly bent down, picked a mushroom at random from the forest floor (we had gone for a walk in the wooded hills around Namsos) and popped it in your mouth. “You have to learn that you’re mortal in order to appreciate life,” you declared loftily.

  Well, you certainly learned you were mortal that time. Of the three of us I was the only one who knew a little bit about fungi – Mum was a keen mushroom picker and I had gone mushroom gathering with her lots of times – and when I asked you to describe to me the one you had eaten (I hadn’t managed to get a good look at it before you popped it in your mouth) and it sounded to me as if it might be a Deadly webcap, a very common species in pine forests, you, Jon and I were thrown into a state of shock that would last for about two weeks. My face was white and grave as I told you that just a ti
ny crumb of Deadly webcap was enough to cause permanent kidney damage and that a whole one, such as you had just eaten, could be enough to kill as many as ten people. At first you played it cool, merely pooh-poohing Jon when, tearfully and more distraught than I had ever seen him, he begged you to see a doctor right away (he even started pulling and tugging at you to make you come with him). But it wasn’t long before you turned quiet, pale and thoughtful and by the time we got home and found, on reading Mum’s book on mushrooms, that it was too late to do anything once the poison had been absorbed into the bloodstream and that it could take it up to fourteen days for symptoms to appear, to be followed by a swift and agonizing death, there was no doubt that this was a state you were now anxious to escape from. During your worst fits of panic I could actually see the beads of sweat breaking out on your chalk-white face and it was the sight of you lying on Mum’s sofa that prompted me to write a song containing the line, “The cigarette lies in the ashtray, curled up in the foetal position”; lyrics to which, by the way, Jon added a lovely tune.

  Fourteen days later, however, when you still hadn’t taken ill, you couldn’t tell us often enough how happy you were that you’d eaten that mushroom. You felt stronger and fitter than ever before, you said, and one evening when we were eating pizza and watching The Deer Hunter on video you insisted on playing the Russian roulette scene over and over again and kept pointing to Christopher Walken and saying, “There you are, guys, that’s me.”

  We talked about all of this in the days after you left that ladies’ scarf in Åge Viken’s car, but although you managed to pacify me, you did not manage to convince me that what you had done was right, and when I said that losing her husband was actually enough in itself to jolt any woman out of her humdrum existence and that “this work of art of yours” (said with a little snort) was, therefore, not only unethical, but also unnecessary, you had no valid argument to offer. “But you have to admit, it was beautiful,” was all you said, and then you gave that charming laugh that always softened my heart.