Echoland

by Per Petterson

  The wind swept across the fields, pushing at their backs, almost lifting their bikes over the bumps in the pitted tarmac and all you had to do was stay on an even keel, and then the road turned east towards the coast and the wind hit them in the chest and they had to stand on the pedals to keep moving. Coming round the bend Gry’s hair came loose from her slide and it whirled around and covered her face and her bike wobbled blindly towards the ditch alongside the road, but at the last moment she cleared it away and her blonde hair was caught by the wind and flew yellow against a stand of green trees. Between the trunks they saw the sea rushing in with its white-crested tips and the lighthouse to the south. In front of the trees was a line of low buildings with corrugated iron roofs. The wind brought the smell to them long before they got there and it was strong and unpleasant. They wrinkled their noses and held their breath.

  ‘Mink farms,’ his mother laughed, and Arvid remembered the small, slim animals with marble-round eyes, how they ran up and down the wire netting of their cages in line after line and never settled, for they were going to be mink coats for wealthy women. They cycled past the buildings and Arvid didn’t look back.

  Beside the trees a path ran north. Arvid had been there before, with Mogens, and they were not far from the creek and the fields with the bull, they had just come a different way down and he knew there were lots of tiny summer-houses there. The trees were pines and they were smaller and more crooked than those in Norway and bent by the winds.

  They passed a brown cabin, which was small but cosy, his mother said, and a green one the size of an outside loo and a yellow one which wasn’t bad, but most of them looked like they had cardboard walls.

  They were sheltered from the wind now, and it was easier to cycle. They turned down a narrow path with pine bushes on either side and wheel ruts that were overgrown a long time ago, no one had been down here for years. Then there was another bend. In the middle of a small plot was a greyish-white summer-house which someone had painted fake timbers on, though the paint had almost completely peeled. It was smaller than the living room at home and the whole plot was covered in weeds and rushes up to your chest and a rainwater puddle the size of a swimming pool blocked the way to the house. They could hear frogs croaking by the puddle and Arvid saw things moving in the tangle. He squatted to see what was down there.

  His father got off his bike and pushed it as far as he could. He scratched his unshaven summer face.

  ‘Well, this is it,’ he said.

  ‘Sweet Jesus,’ said Gry. She had just been confirmed. She had asked for a Tandberg tape recorder as a gift and got it, and she hadn’t been to church since.

  ‘Christ, Frank,’ his mother said, ‘it’s just a shed!’

  ‘My name’s Frank Jansen, not John D. Rockefeller,’ his father said wearily and his mother said: ‘No one knows that better than me,’ and they listened to the wind and the frogs croaking and then she said: ‘I didn’t mean that.’

  It was true. She never complained about money. Why would she? It made no sense, like sneezing in the Gobi Desert and expecting someone to say ‘Bless you.’

  ‘Do we have to cut the grass?’ Arvid said. ‘I like it as it is.’

  His mother sent him a withering look and his father mumbled: ‘We could perhaps wait and see if we could find something better.’

  ‘Let’s have no more waiting,’ his mother said. ‘I’m sick of waiting. I don’t think I’ve ever done anything else. We’re moving in on Wednesday!’ And with that she put down her bike and waded across the puddle sending water everywhere. It wasn’t deep and they were wearing boots, but the mud at the bottom was soft and slippery and they sank into it almost to the tops of their boots. When they reached the door his father took a bunch of keys from his pocket and unlocked it. He had to pull and push for the door was jammed and there was a loud creaking sound as it came free and the smell of mould hit them.

  There was one small room containing four bunks with straw mattresses and an even smaller kitchen with two gas jets, and in the living room there was space for two chests of drawers and a dining table and a divan. The furniture was already there and didn’t seem very solid and on the wall hung a nautical map of the Kattegat and pictures so dusty that no one could work out what they were supposed to be. Arvid went over and wiped one of them with his hand. A lighthouse.

  ‘Yuck!’ Gry cried from the kitchen. ‘The cupboard and the bread bin are full of creepy-crawlies!’

  Arvid sneezed and wiped the dust off his nose and left black marks on his cheek.

  ‘Do we have to wait until Wednesday?’ he said.

  A SKINNY BOY IN SHORT TROUSERS

  ARVID SAT IN the grass with his back to the summer-house wall. With one hand he was pulling up clumps of grass until he found a long blade that he placed between his thumbs. He put his thumbs to his mouth and blew. Not a sound. He licked his lips and tried again. A tiny squeak.

  There were molehills everywhere and he watched his grandfather dragging a hosepipe across the lawn. Grandfather unscrewed the sprinkler and fixed one end of the hose to the exhaust pipe of his moped. The other end he stuffed down one of the holes and he went over to the moped and started it and exhaust fumes pumped out of the pipe, through the hose and into the hole. The moped chugged away in the sun and after five minutes Grandfather pulled up the hose and stuffed it into another. And so he kept on.

  His father came from the bike shed carrying a pair of old shears. He was going to cut the hedge. It was just a little hedge facing a field, but no one had trimmed it in years. His father didn’t like hedges, he liked spruce trees. You didn’t trim spruce trees. He didn’t like poodles either, he liked Alsatians and he had had one before the War. When he saw what Grandfather was doing he walked over, said something sharp, pointing to the ground and stabbing angrily with his finger. Arvid couldn’t hear what he said because of the moped, but Grandfather just turned his back on him and his father’s hand stopped in mid air.

  Arvid had seen a mole one time. They had cut the grass against his will and raked it into a big pile, and when they later took it away there was a mole underneath. It was still alive when they found it, but it died in the sun like the troll in the fairytale, though it was so much smaller. It looked like an animal in a cartoon. Now the moles were dying down below in their tunnels. He could hear them coughing.

  He blew hard on the blade of grass, the sound pierced the sunshine and then the blade split and the sound was gone.

  People died all the time, so why not animals? Old Larsen, who lived in the place we used to call the bully house back home, lay dying next to his stick, face down on the tarmac, his glasses smashed, on the slope down to the Veitvet waterfall. Arvid had been on his way to school, it was five to eight in the morning and he was running down the long set of steps by the waterfall to Rådyrveien. Larsen lay completely still on the ground and what Arvid could see of his cheek was blue beneath the grey bristles. The only thing moving was the wind through his thin hair. It wasn’t possible to walk on past him, although there was plenty of room on the footpath and the free breakfast at school started at eight on the dot. So he had to turn back and make a long detour and then he arrived too late and was told off and no one believed him when he said it was because there was a dead man lying on the road.

  Little brother died. But he was born three months early in the lift up at Ullevål Hospital. He wasn’t much longer than Arvid’s school ruler and weighed less than a bag of sugar and they put him in a glass box called an incubator and after a week they sent his mother home, telling her to forget the whole business. But she couldn’t. His father had been away, and there was no money for a bus. So every other day she walked down Trondheimsveien to town and through town up to the hospital to look through the glass of the incubator. Truls they called him, just in case, and Arvid, who had wished for a little brother, prayed to God every night to let him live, but he died anyway three months later on what could have been his birthday.

  ‘It was as though he
never existed, a dream, almost,’ his mother said. But it wasn’t, even though no one talked about him afterwards and his father, who was working in Sweden at the time, didn’t find out until he came home.

  Uncle Jesper died the year Arvid was born. Jesper was his mother’s elder brother and when he died Jesper was the same age as Jesus was when he died on the cross. But Jesper was no Jesus, his mother said, for even though he was a bit of a lad, he was a lad in the same way that Tom Sawyer was, and he had lots of friends. Jesus had only twelve and a couple of them weren’t much to write home about.

  Everyone liked Jesper, and Arvid did too, but he had never met him.

  He stood up from the grass when Gry arrived on her bike. Her hair was a yellow flag, her shorts were green and her long legs brown with light-coloured down. She was his sister Gry and yet so unfamiliar, he didn’t know her.

  She jumped off her bike while it was still moving, her teeth white against her tanned face when she smiled and said: ‘Hi, Arvid, what are you up to?’ and she turned and took the bathing towel from the luggage rack and walked towards the bike shed with the towel over her shoulder.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said, with his back to her, and straight afterwards Mogens arrived, his hair still wet and dry sand down his arms, his shirt open at the front, and he waved to Arvid as he cycled past following Gry.

  Arvid went into the summer-house and looked in the mirror hanging just inside the door. When he stroked his hair from his forehead he looked like Jesper. They were both Italians, both different. Once when his mother and Gry and Arvid were down on the beach and Arvid was sitting on his own building a sandcastle, a woman went over to his mother and said: ‘So kind of you to take in a refugee.’

  Arvid had looked around, he didn’t realise that it was him she meant, until his mother told his father the story afterwards.

  ‘You look like Jesper,’ she said, ‘to a T.’ Everyone on the Danish side of the family said that, and when Arvid saw pictures of Jesper as a boy, he ran his fingers over the smooth photographs of a skinny boy in short trousers with a sun-tanned face and dark hair, and if he looked long enough he could see what they meant.

  ‘When you think about it, what happened was probably written in the stars,’ his mother said after Jesper died and they had all stopped crying. She said that many times later too, but chose to leave out what had happened and Arvid didn’t dare ask, even when he was old enough. Thirty-three was quite old after all, and you knew that if you looked so much like someone and everything was written in the stars, at least nothing was going to happen before then. He still had plenty of time.

  Jesper had been a typesetter and a trade-union man. His grandfather had left him Pelle the Conqueror, and when he took his apprenticeship exams there was a picture of him in the local newspaper. The cutting was in a shoebox with his death notice and a pile of photographs. In the picture Jesper was sitting in front of the typesetting machine and he looked as if he knew what he was doing. A man was leaning over his shoulder. He was the foreman, and while Jesper was looking at his hands, as he was supposed to, the foreman was looking at the photographer and his blank face made it clear he knew nothing about anything.

  But Jesper did.

  That was obvious from everything his mother said about him. She had missed Jesper for as long as Arvid had been alive.

  ‘That’s many years ago now.’

  He gave a start and turned away from the mirror. She was sitting by the wobbly table in the tiny living room with her chin in her hands, a book open in front of her, looking out of the window at the field, where a partridge was pecking at the ground. On the wall behind her hung a picture of a woman on a beach. The woman had a kerchief around her head and was waving to a fishing boat heading out through the breakers. The wind was blowing in the picture and two earwigs were crawling across the wall and were gone behind the picture frame.

  ‘What was?’

  ‘When Jesper died.’

  ‘Twelve years ago,’ Arvid said, and again they were having the same thought.

  ‘He was so wild, but he was kind too. When I was fourteen he took me to a dance at the Ferry Inn and introduced me as his girlfriend. You can imagine how jealous the other girls were. He was so popular. He gave me a beer too. That didn’t taste so good, but it was a wonderful evening.’

  She laughed. ‘I had to be smuggled into my bedroom afterwards. It was past twelve o’clock.’

  Jesper was a resistance man during the War, one of the first in town.

  ‘It took time before it kicked off in Denmark, longer than in Norway, but when it did, it really happened and Jesper was glad. He was as wild during the War as he had been before, he took risks all the time and when things went wrong he had to escape in a fishing boat to the coast of Sweden. Your grandfather was furious as always, but the crew told us later that Jesper sat by himself, laughing all the way,’ and all this made the boats in the harbour look different when Arvid walked with his bike along the piers, inspecting them and wondering what they looked like inside and where Jesper had been hiding.

  In 1945 Jesper was one of the men who walked down Danmarksgade with a machine gun slung over his shoulder and he had looked around at all the people on the pavement and smiled at them and he was happy because the War was over and because he was still alive, and that made the streets seem new and brighter as Arvid pedalled through them, and not as sleepy and full of rubbish.

  He walked over to the little bookcase and took out the book about Klit Per, which his mother had borrowed from the library, and lay down on the divan to read.

  ‘For someone who likes reading so much you should do something with words when you grow up,’ his mother said.

  Typesetter, Arvid thought, and Gry came in through the open door and said: ‘Is it all right if I go to the cinema with Mogens?’

  ‘Yes, it is,’ his mother said, looking at Arvid, but he pretended not to hear and turned a page in the book. Gry went out to Mogens, who was waiting by the door.

  ‘Arvid?’ his mother said.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘No, no, nothing.’

  ‘Well, what the hell,’ Arvid said.

  He lay reading. Klit Per was a young fishing hand on the west coast. He had big poles that he used when he fought against anyone who tried to harass him after his parents died and he alone had to take care of the little ones in the family and put bread on the table.

  There was a clink of metal on stone outside the door and his father came in from the sun shading his eyes and his face was dark.

  ‘What’s up with you?’ his mother said.

  ‘The damn hedge,’ he said, but Arvid knew that wasn’t true. It was the moles. His father was a softie.

  THERE WAS A REEK OF DEAD BODIES

  THE CIRCULAR SAW could cut a man in two. Arvid had thought about it many times and it wasn’t funny, but he thought about it anyway. If you placed a man on the board and he opened his legs you could slice him from crotch to forehead, and then Arvid had to stop, for in truth, you couldn’t really think about it.

  But that was during the day. At night the saw whined through his dreams, the man howled, there was a reek of dead bodies and ground bone and Arvid screamed so loud the little room swelled with the sound.

  The straw mattresses and old newspapers creaked as the others turned in their bunks. Between the mattresses and the wire netting there were old newspapers they hadn’t changed yet, and there they could read that the whole world was sighing with relief because Stalin had died in Moscow.

  ‘Was that you, Arvid?’ His father’s voice sounded distant and strangely weary.

  ‘Yes.’ His head hurt, his lips were dry and it was difficult to talk.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘There’s a reek of dead bodies,’ he said into the darkness, and he felt sick too.

  He heard his father’s hand rummaging over the bedside table to find the matches they used for the paraffin lamp. It took him a long time, but in the end he found them and there was a dry scr
aping noise as he opened the box.

  His mother turned in her bunk and coughed loudly as if she was going to be sick.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ she said. ‘That’s not dead bodies. That’s gas.’

  His father sprang out of bed and when his feet hit the floor he fell to his knees. ‘What the hell,’ he mumbled and started to crawl towards the kitchen. It was slow work and they could hear him throwing up on the kitchen floor. They should have got out of bed, but they lay there waiting, without the will to move.

  ‘The gas is on,’ his father said to himself, and his mother pulled herself together and struggled to her feet and she leaned over the top bunk and shook the duvet.

  ‘Gry! Wake up!’ Gry didn’t stir and his mother shook her again.

  ‘I want to sleep,’ Gry mumbled, and his mother pulled at the duvet and it slipped off her body and on to the floor.

  ‘Come on now,’ his mother said, ‘or else we’ll die.’

  Carefully she gave Gry a hand down, and then she helped Arvid. He felt heavy and lumpen.

  ‘I’m going to be sick,’ he whispered.

  ‘Be sick then, but keep moving,’ his mother said, and he grabbed her nightdress and threw up all over his pyjamas and the rag rug on the way into the living room. His father was on his feet, shaking the door. It was stuck in the frame and he was too weak to push it open.

  ‘Goddamn it,’ he groaned, took a run-up and hit it with what force he had left. The door flew open with a ripping sound and they tumbled out on to the grass. The air was like fresh water on their faces.

  They lay in the grass beside each other breathing heavily, looking up at the deep blue night sky. It was starry and the air was cool. Arvid saw the Plough and the Great Bear, but then there was a throbbing behind his eyes and he rose out of himself, higher and higher, until he was flying round their plot like a helicopter, round and round in big circles. He could see the whole family far below, there were four patches of light bedwear against the darker grass in the middle of a great carousel. He saw the fields and the pine trees and the Skagen railway line to the north like a bright jet of light, and the sea, vast and calm close by. He thought maybe he should wave to them, but then he sank back down, the dew drenched his pyjamas and his teeth began to chatter.