Echoland

by Per Petterson

  ‘She looks older,’ Mogens said, but Arvid knew nothing about that, he only knew that Mogens seemed older than thirteen and a half, especially now, wearing his windcheater with the sun on his face and his hair swept back and his adult grip on the rod as he hauled in the fish. He had caught three plaice and sent them into the ever after with a sharp knife. Arvid hadn’t caught anything, but for now it didn’t matter.

  ‘Gry,’ Mogens said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Mogens said, and Arvid didn’t look at him, for now he felt such a powerful pull on the line that he almost lost his balance. The rod bent double and the winder jumped out of his hand and the line sang as it unwound.

  ‘Christ, I’ve got a whopper here,’ he shouted, trying to brake the reel, but the handle smashed against his thumb and he yelled: ‘Goddamn it!’

  Mogens jammed his rod between two rocks and sprinted over to Arvid, yanked the rod out of his hands and used the sleeve of his jacket as a brake to get the reel under control and slowly began to draw in the line.

  ‘Hey, that’s my fish,’ Arvid hollered. ‘Give me the rod.’

  ‘Just wait a little,’ Mogens said, still reeling in, and they saw a flash in the water, and what was out there was not a plaice.

  ‘I think it’s a cod,’ Mogens said, ‘a big one.’

  ‘I don’t give a shit if it’s a cod or a shark, so long as it’s not a plaice,’ Arvid said. ‘Give me my rod!’

  ‘Actually it’s my rod, but you can have it now,’ Mogens said, although he didn’t show the slightest sign of handing it over, he just stood there with his tongue sticking out one side of his mouth and a childish look on his face, and Arvid shouted: ‘What the hell are you interested in my sister for anyway, you’re only thirteen!’

  He turned and leaped from rock to rock in a zigzag down to the water and he jumped in. It was deeper than he expected, it reached up to his chest and for a moment he couldn’t catch his breath. He waited until his lungs were filled up again and he shouted to the shore: ‘Cod is a Norwegian fish, you stick to your Danish plaice, capiche!’ He grabbed the line and as Mogens reeled in, Arvid let it glide through his hands until he saw the fish in front of him. Then he stopped the line and held it tight. He lunged for the cod with his other hand and it thrashed its tail and was slippery in his wet fingers and every time he had a hold it shot out. But he could feel how alive it was, how its whole body was one writhing muscle. He had never held a fish in this way before and it was up at the surface now and he made another grab for it and the tail lashed against the palm of his hand and the water splashed into his face. He wasn’t aware that his mouth was wide open, but now he could taste the saltwater and on the mole Mogens burst into laughter and Arvid coughed and lost his temper.

  ‘Fucking cod!’ he muttered, and drew his hands up into the over-long jacket sleeves and used them as mittens to clamp the fish’s tail in a tight grip, and pulled the fish through the seaweed and then out of the water with all the strength he had and smashed it against the nearest boulder and then it was still and Mogens wasn’t laughing any more.

  They stood on the path without moving. Water was streaming down Arvid’s clothes, they could hear it dripping down on to the flagstones where they formed dark patches around his legs. The sun was up, but still it wasn’t very warm.

  ‘Are you cold?’ Mogens said, and carefully squeezed Arvid’s upper arm and was grown up again.

  ‘No,’ Arvid said, trying to keep his teeth from chattering.

  ‘We’d better get the hell back home, or else you’ll be ill,’ Mogens said. He took two plastic bags from his jacket and put the three plaice in one and the cod in the other and gave it to Arvid. ‘Here, take this. You’ve earned it. That kind of fishing I’ve only seen in the cinema.’ He gave a wry smile. ‘Come on and get yourself home.’

  Arvid took the bag, opened it and looked down at the cod. It looked miserable. Its head was smashed, one eye was gone and he couldn’t remember why he had done what he’d done. He felt a little sick.

  ‘Shall we swap?’ he said. ‘My cod is as big as your three plaice.’

  Mogens stood there. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘But then you must promise to run home, is that clear?’

  ‘It’s clear,’ Arvid said, and they exchanged bags and set off down the path at a jog, Arvid in front, his clothes steaming and there were sounds coming from his shoes he would’ve preferred not to hear, and then Mogens at his back and whenever Arvid slackened his pace, Mogens gave a shout to keep him going.

  He ran until he reached Lodsgade and there he almost came to a halt and let Mogens go first up the street and into the yard. Then he walked slowly past the Ferry Inn, his legs like lead, his breathing rasping in his throat like sandpaper. He stood by the staircase for a while, then went to the top. In the kitchen his mother was making breakfast. He entered quietly, she was standing by the worktop humming and enjoying being on her own and he went up behind her, dripping on to the floor, and maybe that was what she heard as she suddenly turned round and was so startled that Arvid felt himself go cold too.

  ‘Jesus! What a shock you gave me! Don’t you get it, coming in like that you give people a fright.’

  She stared him in the eye.

  ‘Look at you, boy! You’re soaked to the skin. Oh, Arvid, not again!’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  She ran her fingers through her hair. ‘No, what do I mean? Nothing,’ she said, and he gave her the bag.

  ‘Look, here’s dinner.’

  She took the bag, peered inside, looked at him and smiled. ‘I thought you were fed up with plaice?’

  ‘It’s different when you’ve caught them yourself,’ he said, and went into the bedroom to change his clothes and maybe sleep a little, for he was more tired now than he had ever been.

  AS THOUGH THEY DIDN’T EXIST

  AND THEN CAME the rain, for days and nights, and it never stopped. The flat they lived in shrank around Arvid and the bright houses outside turned dark and glistening and then almost invisible. He tried going outside, but the air was drenched from pavement to sky, and clouds and air merged into one and walking along the street was like wading through porridge. No one was out and no one was cycling either because the wind was strong and you got wet from your neck down into your underpants and your boots, whichever way you turned. The rain swept in like breakers up and down the streets and you couldn’t say where the wind was actually coming from. The flags across the main street cracked like gunshots in a film and echoed in the emptiness between the houses, and display cases left on the pavements were hurled against the walls and made a clattering noise.

  In Lodsgade everything was afloat. On his only venture outside, Arvid stood in the gateway watching the water swell up to the second step of the dairy shop. No customers dared approach, so instead they stayed at home and had juice for breakfast.

  Billegaard the glazier’s van came down the opposite side of the street, the muddy water swirling around its wheels. It stopped and the driver and his gofer opened the doors and walked round the van and began to untie a huge sheet of glass from the side, they fumbled with cold fingers and then they carefully lifted it down and walked unsteadily towards the gate of the glazier’s workshop. They couldn’t see the tarmac beneath their feet, nor the kerb. The leading man tripped just as a gust of wind came down the street and ripped the glass out of their hands. It took off and sailed through the air like a flash in the sky and Arvid could see the sky right through it, and the sky was grey, as everything else was grey. The glass landed flat on the water and stayed intact and drifted down the street like an ice floe and didn’t smash until it hit the brick wall of the Ferry Inn.

  The pub’s cellar had turned into a pool with boxes, beer barrels and tin cans floating, and after three days of stormy weather they had to close. No one would go out for a drink in this weather anyway. In gratitude Grandmother crossed herself and said this was God’s work, like THE FLOOD. Arvid watched her sitting in the chair by
the window looking down on the street, nodding her head, moving her lips. Now that she had an audience all day long she sang more psalms than usual and it was unbearable, for the living room was the only place where they could gather and no one but Grandfather left the house. Every morning he put on his oilskins and wading boots and went downstairs and up round the corner to Danmarksgade. The workshop was on higher ground than the dairy shop and it was dry there and warm between the saws and the planes and the wood shavings. But he wanted to be alone.

  Arvid examined the bookshelves one more time. There was nothing else to do. He started one of Leonard Strömberg’s books, but after a few pages he gave up. It was easy to see that the bad guy, the wealthy landowner’s son, was going to be good and a Christian at the end of the book and marry the kind-hearted, poor girl who was God-fearing and always well turned out. When Arvid was about to put the book back on the shelf a slip of paper fell to the floor. He picked it up. It was an old telegram. Apart from the ‘STOP’s it said: ‘CATCHING BOAT HOME THIS EVENING. NEED HELP. LENE. OSLO, 16 MARCH 1949.’

  Lene, that was his mother. He put the telegram back in the book and the book back in its right place.

  On the fourth day of the storms his father revealed the outcome of the secret negotiations he’d been having. He cleared a space on the table, which was covered with old newspapers and Grandmother’s sheet music, and on a piece of paper he began to draw. He was going to buy a cabin. Or a summer-house. Or whatever it was. They would go together and have a look at it first, but the deal was as good as done. It was clear that the purchase was an emergency solution and no one knew where the money came from, but things couldn’t carry on as they were. Then they would have to stop coming and Arvid would be sent to a children’s holiday camp and that’s where his mother drew the line and the reason why she had words with his father in private.

  Now, if only the rain would stop, they would go out to inspect the property. Søren had gone to the shipyard in Ålborg to work there and couldn’t drive them and even Arvid’s father didn’t feel like cycling in this weather. On the sixth day the rain stopped, but the wind was still blowing so hard a neighbour had a window blown off its hinges when trying to air the house. On the seventh day his father couldn’t stand it any more, he got nervous and after lunch they all set off.

  The weather came in from the Kattegat with such power that bushes and poplars were bent down by the wind and it would have sent them sprawling into the ditch if they had cycled along the harbour and up the coast. So they made a detour through town, up the main street until they turned off by the railway station, along the park, where the wind rushed through the beech trees and made them creak, and on through a new neighbourhood. These were detached houses, most of them made from light brown bricks, some whitewashed with thatched roofs like the old farmhouses Arvid had seen many times. But there were no sway-backed ridges here or yellow-stained walls. Everything was straight and white and on the roofs not a single reed was out of place. One of the houses even had a swimming pool in the garden, although it was less than a ten-minute walk to the nearest beach.

  ‘This is where the rich people live,’ his father said, pointing around him. ‘Every town has a neighbourhood like this.’

  In Oslo it was up in the Holmenkollen hillside behind the town and Arvid had never been there until the Sunday two years ago when Sveen walked along the houses in Veitvet knocking on the doors where there were children. He mustered them on the flagstones in front of their houses and asked the parents whether it was all right if he took them to an alternative Sunday School. They couldn’t go through life in ignorance, he said. When Arvid’s mother was certain that Sveen was sober she said yes, and then the other parents said yes too.

  Not many of the children went to Sunday School. Arvid was one of the few who had been, he had gone there almost every Sunday for a long time and got a red star on his card to prove it and a gold star for every fifth time and on the front of the card there was a colour picture of Jesus and the little children that had come unto him. But Arvid stopped when his little brother died and it was a long time ago now.

  The Blåmann lorry stood ready in the road and Sveen lifted them up one by one on to the back and finally covered them with a tarpaulin in case it should rain.

  ‘Everyone sitting comfortably?’ he said.

  ‘YES!’ they answered as one, and Sveen got behind the wheel and started the engine and it climbed up to Trondheimsveien as they knelt and peered through holes in the tarpaulin and waved to the people they knew.

  They told jokes and laughed and sang songs on their way down the hill to the town. Everything they saw from the back of the lorry was familiar: the wooded ridges behind Slettaløkka and the floodlights on Bjerke trotting course, the Sinsen junction roundabout and Sinsen Cinema, where he had seen Apache Chief, and Ringen Cinema, where he had seen The Mark of Zorro. It was part of their lives all the way down to the Beer Man on the front of Schous Brewery towards the River Aker and New Bridge. But when they drove up Karl Johans Gate and past the Royal Palace they stopped singing although everyone had seen it before in pictures and once in the flesh the year Veitvet School had joined the great 17 May procession. At Majorstua they went silent. Blåmann with the tarpaulin fastened down was a prairie wagon on its way into Indian territory and Arvid and Gry and the others were the new settlers peeping cautiously out into a foreign land, where the enemy lurked behind every tree and every house. It wasn’t that people looked different, they were different.

  And Sveen drove on. Along the Holmenkollen train line and up the hill that got steeper and steeper until they arrived at the Holmenkollen ski jump, which only Jon Sand had seen close-up when he went with his father to cheer on Toralf Engan and Torgeir ‘Ski-tip Licker’ Brandtzæg. Sveen stopped and got out of the lorry.

  ‘Stay where you are,’ he said, tearing off the tarpaulin, for he wanted them to have a proper view. And it wasn’t raining, the sky was closer here and big and very blue and there were no ski jumpers on Holmenkollen, but there was a small lake at the bottom of the ski jump. It looked all wrong.

  Sveen got back into the lorry and Blåmann trundled slowly down the winding roads and this was where the houses were, big houses, posh houses. On a bend he pulled into the side of the road and parked and went behind the lorry and lifted them down one by one. They huddled together looking all around them. They looked down the sloping hillside and they saw the Oslo Fjord clearly, and Arvid even thought he could make out the Bunne Fjord, and far in the distance there was smoke coming from factory chimneys even though it was Sunday.

  ‘So, this is where the upper class lives,’ Sveen said. ‘You’d better have a good look now. It will be a long time before I do a trip like this again. It’s bad for me.’

  They did have a good look, but they were ill at ease and could not decide whether they should go up the hill or down and so they just stood huddled together in the same spot.

  Almost all the houses had garages with cars in them, and they had big lawns too and bushes and trees and hedges that had been trimmed like poodles. In one of the gardens there was a man with a bare chest wearing shorts with a crease in. His hair was nearly white, but his body was as brown as a berry and he was holding a glass in one hand and a pair of shears in the other. He waved to them with the shears and walked towards the hedge by the road. They kept close together and didn’t wave back and Sveen ignored the man.

  ‘It’s not hard,’ he said, ‘there’s no art in being envious of these people and their money. It’s dead easy. And it’s not that they don’t work. Some of them work like mad. But so do I. That’s not the point. The point is that they own everything. The art . . .’ Sveen said, and then seemed to tire. He went quiet and stood there with his mouth half open, and the tanned man came closer with a curious smile on his face.

  ‘I want to go home,’ Arvid whispered to Gry.

  Sveen coughed and continued: ‘The art’, he said, ‘is always to know that they are here and at the same time live
your life as though they didn’t exist.’

  ‘Is that a difficult art?’ Gry said. She was the only child who had said anything.

  ‘Yes, it is,’ Sveen said, and he looked like he was one of those who had tried to live that way and failed.

  The man was up by the hedge now and called to them: ‘Hello there, kids!’

  Sveen twisted his mouth, chewed his lower lip and ran a hand through his hair. ‘All right, we’re off,’ he said, and they shuffled towards the lorry, taking very small steps because they were moving in a close pack. Arvid could feel irritation creeping up his legs and suddenly they started kicking each other.

  ‘In the name of Jesus!’ Gry shouted. ‘Let’s go home, shall we!’

  They sat at the back and Blåmann was on the move again, but no one felt like singing, even when they were far up Trondheimsveien on their own side of town.

  Arvid looked around and could feel himself getting annoyed again when he thought about that drive, and he pedalled harder and leaned into the wind and tried to stay right behind his father without getting too close to his rear mudguard. They cycled as fast as they could alongside the pavement with its alternate light and dark kerbstones. He knew that Sveen was right and he knew there were many people in Veitvet who yearned for a house like the ones here and in Holmenkollen in Oslo, but Arvid didn’t. He didn’t hate them either, he just didn’t want to see them. They were unimportant in an irksome way.

  They left the neighbourhood and crossed the city boundary. Arvid laughed to himself as the landscape opened up and was yellow and green and gentle. There was just the road and the unploughed fields on both sides without a single tree and he thought if he cycled alone here and there was thunder and lightning, he was the highest point for a kilometre at least and it sent shivers down his spine.

  They were no more than two metres above sea level and yet it looked like a mountain plateau. There could have been cloudberries growing in the heath beside the road and maybe a herd of wild reindeer coming in from the west. His whole body ached to see large animals moving at speed, see them flying along with flared nostrils, looking far into the distance, surging past with their antlers pointing to the sky.