Novel 11, Book 18

by Dag Solstad

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Dag Solstad

  Title Page

  When this story begins . . .

  Copyright

  Also by Dag Solstad

  Shyness and Dignity

  Novel 11, Book 18

  Dag Solstad

  Translated from the Norwegian by

  Sverre Lyngstad

  When this story begins, Bjørn Hansen has just turned fifty and is waiting for someone at the Kongsberg Railway Station. It has now been four years since he separated from Turid Lammers, with whom he had lived for fourteen years, from the very moment when he arrived at Kongsberg, which before that time barely existed on the map for him. He now lives in a modern flat in the centre of Kongsberg, a mere stone’s throw from the railway station. When he arrived at Kongsberg eighteen years ago, he had only a few personal belongings, such as clothes and shoes, plus crates and crates of books. When he moved out of the Lammers villa, he also took away with him only personal possessions, such as clothes and shoes, besides crates and crates of books. That was his luggage. Dostoyevsky. Pushkin. Thomas Mann. Céline. Borges. Tom Kristensen. Márquez. Proust. Singer. Heinrich Heine. Malraux, Kafka, Kundera, Freud, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Camus, Butor.

  When he had thought about Turid Lammers in the four years which had passed since the break-up, it had been with a sense of relief that it was over. At the same time he’d had to admit, with an amazement that verged on grief, that he was no longer capable either of understanding or bringing back why he had been taken with her. It is beyond doubt, however, that he had been. Otherwise, why would he have broken his marriage to Tina Korpi and abandoned her and their two-year-old son to follow Turid Lammers to Kongsberg, in the secret hope that she would have him? It was because of Turid Lammers that he had ended up at Kongsberg. Without her, or his now forgotten enthralment by her, he would never have ended up here. Never. His life would have been altogether different. It would never have occurred to him to apply for the position of town treasurer at Kongsberg – in fact, he would not have dreamed of applying for a position as treasurer at all, but would probably have continued in the ministry, made a passable career there, and today in all likelihood would have been head of a government office or have moved on to a high position in the Communications Administration, the Norwegian State Railways or something of the sort. But never town treasurer. Never Kongsberg.

  It troubled him that he was unable to bring back the fascination which Turid Lammers had had for him when he first met her. A skinny, nervous woman – that was how he remembered her. When they met she had just returned from France, where she had lived for seven years, with a wrecked marriage behind her. She settled in Oslo and immediately took a lover. The lover was him. Was it his fascination with the effect that women’s nerves have on their surroundings that had ensnared him? Those restless mood swings? After half a year her father died, and she moved back to the provincial town she had come from, Kongsberg. Here she settled down in an old villa, took over the management of a florist’s with her elder sister, and took a job as teacher at Kongsberg Secondary School, where she taught French, English and drama.

  Her father died in September. She went home for the funeral and the settlement of the estate, and returned to Oslo after one week. For a month she lived as before. But then she suddenly decided to move back to Kongsberg. She told her lover on Wednesday evening and by Sunday she was gone. When she said she intended to move, he first felt relief. At long last he could restore normal order to his life. He was married to Tina Korpi and they had a two-year-old son. He had not told Tina about Turid, it was a secret erotic adventure on his part. Actually it suited him well that she went away now, to Kongsberg and out of his life, leaving nothing more behind in his consciousness than the memory of a moment of stolen happiness.

  But then he got to thinking that he couldn’t let her down. He had to go to Kongsberg, to her, otherwise he would come to regret it for the rest of his life. Indeed, the absolute certainty that he would have regrets made returning to Tina and their son, to continue as before but now without a secret love, impossible. And so he disclosed his secret to his wife and cut loose from his marriage.

  Aside from the relief he had initially felt when Turid said she was now going home for good, there was also his sense that it could not last; he had already then seen clearly what fourteen years later would result in his leaving her. He had no illusions that she would give him happiness. But when it dawned on him that she really was gone, he missed her so terribly that he was seized by a veritably moral urge to remain close to this woman who was constantly sending out nervous signals to her surroundings, who was never at rest, who was full of ideas, all the time, every hour of the day.

  It is possible that he told Tina he had found love and that he could not betray it. In all likelihood he did. It bothered him that he could recall nothing about Turid Lammers from that time to justify these big words. Apart from a few insignificant episodes, such as he and Turid walking arm in arm along the pavement somewhere. Then Turid catches sight of a banana peel, right in front of her on the pavement. She bends down without letting go of his arm and picks it up. Then she flings it into the middle of the street and says, merrily: ‘I hope the cars will skid on it!’ Good God, he had thought (then or later), this is her way of solving her problems! He was employed in a ministry, as he had been ever since he took his university degree in economics six years previously, and had already been promoted to office manager, no more than thirty-two years old. His lover was also thirty-two, a teacher. And so she picked up the banana peel from the pavement and simply flung it somewhere else. At the cars. Completely wacky. He must have been fascinated. But also uneasy, at any rate with a view to possibly sharing his life with her (but that had to be later). Was it episodes like this that made him tell Tina that he had found love and could not betray it? The alternative would have been to say that he was having an adventure and couldn’t give it up. That, however, he could not have said, despite the fact that it expressed to perfection why Bjørn Hansen – a poor boy from a Norwegian coastal town, this successful young civil servant in one of our ministries – left his wife and two-year-old son to set out for Kongsberg and an uncertain future. It was his obsession with the adventure that had sucked him in, so intensely that he could barely breathe, and not his love for Turid Lammers. The allure of it. Deep down Bjørn Hansen knew that the most desirable happiness on this earth was a brief happiness, and now he was experiencing it by seeking out Turid Lammers secretly in her little flat at St Hanshaugen in Oslo. He had never lived so intensely before, because he knew he was in a place where he would not stay for long. It was a dangerous game. Stolen happiness. And since Turid Lammers was the object of all this stolen happiness, he also started saying to himself that it was his love for her that he could not betray. But it wasn’t true. Turid Lammers was nothing apart from the adventure, the circumstances surrounding their relationship. Her mimicry, her glances, her gestures, which would send shudders through him, those small wrists, so beautiful and French in their grace, her way of walking – everything received its lustre from the circumstances surrounding their relationship. He knew all that. To tell the truth, he was fully aware of it. He had played this game quite consciously, cultivating these stolen moments. He ought to have told his wife: I cannot possibly be certain that this is love, because I barely know her. I know her only from specific situations, where she is the object of my fascination. But these situations fulfil so many of my innermost desires, well, of what I expect from life, that now, when she has betrayed these situations by breaking out of them, I have to set out after her in an attempt to find her again.

  The only thing he regretted about this break was that he had not told his wife exactly h
ow things were. Otherwise he accepted that everything had turned out as it did. He still recognised, eighteen years afterwards, that he had done the right thing in abandoning an unsuspecting wife and his small child sleeping in an adjacent room. In order to look for the woman who represented adventure to him, even though he knew that the adventure was now over by the very fact that he was cutting loose from his marriage to follow Turid Lammers. He had no hopes of recovering what had been, but he wanted to preserve the memory of it, of her, that is, to breathe in the same room as her. He could not let her down. He had discovered in this deliberate infidelity an intensity and a suspense that he could usually only observe with fascination, but without fully understanding, in art and literature.

  So he had left. After telling Tina Korpi that he was a prisoner of love and had to follow its commands. Tina Korpi seemed to be in a state of shock. Stunned, so to speak, she sat on a chair just staring at him as she repeated, time and again, ‘So that was why, I should’ve known.’ He had feared that there would be harrowing scenes, and especially that, while it was taking place, they would scream loudly at one another and wake up their son, who was lying in the adjacent room, so that they would have to go in and soothe him and that he, perhaps, would have to pick him up. But that did not happen. Bjørn Hansen packed a few personal belongings, which he took to the car, walking back and forth several times, while she, stunned, was still sitting on her chair every time he came back, repeating, like a wail, ‘So that was why.’ Ready at last, he had gone.

  He drove to Drammen, under the amber light from the street lamps suspended over the E18, through the town along the eastern bank of the Drammen River, and then up towards Hokksund, still driving along the eastern bank of the Drammen River. At Hokksund there was a fork in the road, with one road leading across the river towards Kongsberg, Notodden, Numedal and Upper Telemark – the one he would take. But before doing so he stopped outside Eikerstua, a roadside pub just before the fork, and went in. Though it was late in the evening, there were still plenty of customers, eating open meat patty sandwiches and drinking coffee, car owners like himself or lorry drivers, their heavy, massive vehicles parked in front of the pub. Bjørn Hansen went straight over to the telephone booth and called Turid Lammers. He felt very nervous as he pushed coins into the slot and dialled the number, for he had not told her in advance that he was on his way. (‘I do not want to be the lover of a married man,’ Turid Lammers had said when she moved to Kongsberg, in a perfectly sober tone which had given him no reason whatsoever to think that she wished he would contribute his share to her not having to.) He heard her voice, while at the same time hearing the krone pieces rattle into the box, so that he could talk and know that she heard him. He told her what had happened and that he was in a roadside pub some twelve miles north of Drammen, near the exit to Kongsberg. He asked if he could come and she said yes.

  He took his seat in the car again and drove towards Kongsberg. All at once he was in the middle of Norway, the inhospitable, wooded, remote and (except for those who live there) out-of-the-way Norway, even though he was only forty-five miles from the nation’s capital. It was in the middle of winter, with a heavy snowfall. The road was narrow, though it was a state highway, slippery and winding. High snowbanks left by the plough; cold, compact snow. Flat fields buried in white darkness, gorges and hollows. Scattered farms. Spruce forests. A lone lamp in the night, fixed on the wall of a haphazardly placed modern one-storey building, swept by white whirling snow. Frozen lakes. Icebound rivers. Bedraggled spruces. Icicles hanging from crags that dropped steeply over the roadway and were illuminated by the headlights of Bjørn Hansen’s car. The trip required far more time than he had calculated, because he had to maintain a low speed in this wintry landscape, which he bored into deeper and deeper along the narrow, winding and slippery road, until suddenly, on a steep downhill slope, he found himself on the outskirts of a town. Soon thereafter he turned off the main road and drove into the illuminated streets of Kongsberg.

  It was late in the evening, but there was a surprising number of people to be seen, due to the fact that the last movie screening had just ended; it was ten past eleven. He drove around rather randomly in search of a taxi rank. He found one near the railway station and parked there. He walked over to a taxi-driver who sat in his cab waiting his turn. He read out Turid Lammers’s address from a slip of paper and the cabby gave him a meticulous explanation as to how to get there. Five minutes later Bjørn Hansen had parked in front of a large but rather run-down villa which, judging by the address, was where Turid Lammers lived.

  She did not stand in the doorway waiting for him. He rang the bell, and some time passed, he thought, before she answered. But when she did, she seemed glad to see him. She had made a fire on the hearth. She was waiting for him with food and drink. She seemed calm and relaxed, far more relaxed than he had expected to find her in the vast draughty villa she had inherited.

  As it happened, he would live in this old villa for fourteen years. As Turid Lammers’s partner. And he still lived in Kongsberg. Early on he commuted to Oslo, to his job at the ministry. Who was Turid Lammers? In Oslo she had been an attractive woman in the whirl of the big city whom he had met by chance and who fascinated him. Now she had gone back to her roots, had even moved into her childhood home, and lived in surroundings that had only been occasional (and very charming) attributes of her personality earlier on. As her lover in Oslo, he had mostly been interested in the French element of her past, those seven years in France that had made her wiser (he assumed) and simultaneously conferred upon her movements that acquired grace, which he (on account of the adventure that lent them glamour) could not live without. Especially her gestures. That Mediterranean way of using the hands as an aesthetic adjunct to the voice had fascinated him, in an all but childish way, so much so that he had barely listened to what she said, so preoccupied was he by the way she said it. And so he had only en passant got to know the small-town side of her, which then emerged only within the context of her exotic southern manner. A Frenchwoman who talked about her impossible sister at Kongsberg. But now all this became a daily reality for Turid Lammers, and thereby also for Bjørn Hansen. The Lammers family had in its time owned half of Kongsberg and its environs. Forests, farmland, stores, building lots, woodworking factories, etc. But when her father died only a florist’s and a service station were left, in addition to the old Lammers villa. The sister got the lucrative service station, managed by her husband, and Turid got, after many ifs and buts, the villa, while the florist’s was jointly owned by both sisters. All this led to a wrangling that was not yet over when Bjørn Hansen, after fourteen years, finally moved out of the Lammers villa and acquired his own place. It was basically a question of which sister best represented their legacy, the Lammers name.

  On the face of it Turid Lammers was above such matters, and her partner, Bjørn Hansen, thought so too for a long time. She was anti-bourgeois in her very being. She despised fussing over money and her sister’s way of raking it in, as she put it, meaning it quite sincerely, and when a two-hundred-year-old sauceboat slipped from her hands and broke on the floor at one of the parties they gave in the Lammers villa, causing the sauce to ooze out among the broken porcelain fragments, she laughed, and her eyes sparkled as she exclaimed, ‘This is a historic moment! Two hundred years fell out of my hands and was reduced to nothing!’ To a standing ovation from the guests. But Bjørn Hansen knew that the sight of the broken sauceboat affected her painfully. For when this happened he had lived with her, as her husband, for two years.

  That he had not done, however, when he returned from the ministry in Oslo one evening and, slumped over the latest issue of the daily paper, Lågendalsposten, during their late dinner, she called attention to an ad. Bjørn Hansen considered himself a slow, introvert and not very spontaneous person. The ad announced an opening: the position as town treasurer at Kongsberg had now become vacant for qualified applicants. Bjørn Hansen read the ad, then gave Turid an enquiring gl
ance. Was there something in the wording of the ad that had awakened her anti-bureaucratic sense of humour? But Turid again pointed at the ad and said, ‘For you, my dear. Town treasurer – that would be something for you, wouldn’t it?’ Bjørn Hansen looked at her again. He laughed. ‘Well, why not?’

  Yes, why not? Why shouldn’t he apply for the position of treasurer at Kongsberg, now that he lived there? No sooner said than done. Bjørn Hansen solemnly applied for the position.

  What is a town treasurer? A tax collector. He is the one who is responsible for the payment, on time, of the rightful taxes and fees to the State and the local authority, and for taking the necessary measures when that doesn’t happen. Originally, being a tax collector was a very high office; it was the bailiff who had that task, and he was the king’s man. Later it was the treasurer. He was a municipal public servant, trusted and respected, but he held a position with its roots in the urban community, and the fact that the tax collector was changed from being bailiff to treasurer can be seen as an expression of the State changing its character from a bureaucratic system of government to one based on extensive local democracy. The small-town treasurer in the twentieth century was no high official; he was recruited in the course of the daily routine in the Norwegian town where he worked, usually had no academic education, being a graduate of a business school or commercial college, and had risen through the ranks in the office of the treasurer.

  Bjørn Hansen’s application was not welcomed by the treasury office employees. With his university degree and experience at the ministry, he was actually over-qualified and therefore pulled ahead of two long-time members of the staff who had lately been scowling at each other because both considered themselves qualified to reach the top. Bjørn Hansen snatched the title from under their very noses. And they immediately joined forces against him, from the first day that he – an outsider who lived with Turid Lammers in the Lammers villa, a snob of thirty-two with too many degrees, a softy – had a good look at the office and his colleagues.