Nothing in the world was obvious to me back then, in Vålerenggata 5, nothing was simple. So I kept a sharp eye on everything around me and I should have noticed that the woman whose body had once been so strong, so robust, at some point grew thinner and thinner, that her lap was no longer so soft. But I did not warn them, did not shout: ‘Danger!’ to the men in the flat who were all equally blind, for I was a late talker and knew only a few words of Norwegian at that age, so she had to work it out for herself, the pain, the weight loss, her random periods, and she had to drag herself off to a doctor, almost furtively, with my brother and me in tow, and leave us in waiting rooms where there was nothing to play with, not even Lego was invented yet. And there we sat, my brother and I, dangling our legs, staring at one another, or I sat on his lap and he showed me the pictures in Norsk Ukeblad or sometimes Illustrert and waited for what seemed like a lifetime, while she lay in there, cringing with shame, her legs in stirrups behind the soundproofed double doors, and the doctor finally pushed back his chair, took his glasses off and said:
‘I’m sorry, madam, let me be straight with you. This looks like cancer. We’ll see what we can do. You have children, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I have children.’
When the three of us came home from our secret mission, to Sagene, I think, or maybe Bjølsen, the men were still at work, and as she had cleaned and tidied the flat before we left some hours earlier, my mother went across the landing to see Mrs Frantzen who was home from work and now sitting in her kitchen with her daughter, who almost thirty years later would send me a letter.
My mother sat down by Mrs Frantzen’s table and she buried her face in her hands and started to cry because she was exhausted, because it had been such a long ride back through town from Sagene or Bjølsen with my brother and me in tow. And Mrs Frantzen, who knew about my mother’s condition, said:
‘So, my lass, how did it go?’
And my mother said:
‘I’ve got cancer, I’m going to die.’
‘You don’t know that,’ Mrs Frantzen said. ‘Many survive. And you have children.’
‘Yes,’ my mother said. ‘That’s true. I have children. I have two children. And in their brief lives they’ve barely had room to move in the flat across the landing, and now they’re going to be without a mother to take care of them and give them what they need and I’ve neglected them so badly.’
‘No, you haven’t,’ Mrs Frantzen said. ‘You can’t say that.’
‘Yes,’ my mother said, ‘I can say that, and they’ve never even tasted chocolate. Not once,’ she said, and that might have been true, that we had never tasted chocolate, but in that case it was not something we held against her. But from that day onwards she stuffed us with chocolate. Freia milk chocolate and Kvikklunsj bars, and every day was like a celebration, and then she would cry a little because she was going to die soon and would not be able to spend with us the years to come, the years that were queuing up one after another, but all the same it was a party, and she carefully put away the chocolate wrappers in small paper bags and threw them in the neighbours’ bins, just as she carefully washed our faces before our men returned from work.
And then she did not die. She lived on and had two more sons, and I do not know how it was resolved, if the diagnosis was wrong or a successful operation was performed that I was not told about, or whether she was simply worn out by the twilight life with all those men behind the blinds on the second floor, and the weight started to drop off her and that the life she was leading was making her ill. You cannot rule that out, because shortly after we quickly moved from this place, from the flat on the corner of Smålensgata and Vålerenggata, where those damned tramlines ran, and up to the new and more affordable housing at Veitvet, which was completed that year, or at least our terraced house was, and my father came with us, but he only, and within a short time she felt much better and almost looked like her old self.
13
I felt so cold. I was drenched. I followed my mother from the terrace into the living room and tugged at the reefer jacket, got the buttons out of buttonholes that were too small and pulled the jacket off and hell, it was hard work. She turned her back to me and I threw all my clothes on the floor as the water ran down my thighs. I rummaged through my bag and found no spare clothes, no trousers, no jumpers or shirts, but what I did find was writing equipment and notebooks with Chinese signs on the cover and secrets written down inside them, right back from the mid-Seventies, and no one ever knew about those notebooks, not even the girl in the blue coat, not one member of the Party, and I had kept them in my pockets all this time, in many different jackets, in leather jackets, army jackets, reefer jackets. I can’t take it any more, it said in one of them on an otherwise blank page, so stupid, it said. It is too late, it said on another page, but I could not recall exactly what it was that was too late. At the very bottom of the bag I found a blanket I had really no use for, as you were no longer allowed to sleep on the benches on the deck of the Holger Danske the way I used to. These days you had to pay for a cabin if you wanted to take the night ferry to Denmark, and besides it was too cold to lie under the open sky far out at sea in November, so when I packed the blanket it was more out of habit.
I took out the blanket, and with all my clothes in a soaking pile on the floor, I wrapped it tightly around me, and it was hard to breathe, I would catch pneumonia, no doubt about it, my head was pounding, I felt wretched. I kicked my clothes and was so confused and temple-throbbingly furious, but she had done me no harm.
Tilting her head, she studied me closely where I stood in the middle of the floor, water dripping from my hair, tightly wrapped in my blanket, and she should have given me a towel then, but she did not, and maybe just then, there was a smile on her lips, an ironic smile or any smile at all, but perhaps that was only wishful thinking. She went to the bedroom and opened a wardrobe in the corner and came back with several garments over her arm which I knew belonged to my father. I had not seen them in years, not since I was young and my body was younger and my father was younger and his body really filled those clothes. There was a charcoal jumper with red trim, a T-shirt that no longer had any colour and a pair of trousers that once upon a time had been beige or khaki, like a British uniform in hot and sun-scorched colonies, but they had faded now after decades of hardboiled washing. But the colour was not the point. The point was that when I had put on those clothes with shy and awkward movements because this time my mother did not turn her back to me, they fitted like a glove, as if they were made especially for me. But they were not. They were meant for my father and purchased especially for him twenty years ago or more. And it was good to feel dry, warm clothes against my skin, but it was also odd to wear clothes that fitted so well, so comfortably, and yet belonged to another man.
‘That’s what I thought,’ my mother said. ‘That they would fit.’
I had not eaten that day, not on the ferry, no breakfast of crusty Danish rolls and Danish butter and delicious full-cream milk and coffee, I had not eaten a Kvikklunsj, or milk chocolate from Freia, and the dry clothes made me feel drowsy and dizzy, floating aimlessly about as if I were drunk.
‘Why don’t we eat,’ I said, ‘you do have food here?’
‘Of course I have food,’ she said.
‘Well, let’s eat then,’ I said.
She looked at me, turned and opened the fridge, and I went to the cupboard above the kitchen counter and took out plates and cups, as I had done when I was small and a good little boy in her presence, and I smoothed the tablecloth to both sides with the palms of my hands and tugged it slightly at each end and set out cutlery on the table. She fried eggs on the stove, and I heard her hum, or quietly sing, a soft Elvis song: ‘Are you lonesome tonight’ it was. Then she fried the bacon and toasted bread in the chrome toaster we had had on the kitchen counter since the dawn of time and switched on a fan above the stove which was so noisy it was impossible to talk. And that suited me fine.
<
br /> We sat at the table to eat. It felt good to sit down. I closed my eyes and opened them. It was an effort. It was like breaking cardboard. I lifted my cup and drank a mouthful of coffee. I had not tasted anything that good in a long time.
She looked at my hands. ‘What’s wrong with your hand?’ she said. I put the cup on the saucer and looked at my right hand. My knuckles were red and slightly swollen. I opened my hand and closed it again, clenched it hard. It hurt. I told her what was wrong with it.
‘Oh, for God’s sake, Arvid,’ she said. ‘When did you start getting caught up in that kind of thing?’
‘I haven’t. He was coming at me. He made up his mind the moment he saw me in the bar.’
‘I hardly think so,’ my mother said.
‘I guess that’s for me to know,’ I said. ‘I was the one who was there.’
‘There’s no doubt about that,’ she said.
When our plates were empty, I said:
‘Maybe you would like a drink now? A Calvados?’ I attempted a sly smile, as if I were joking, I mean, it was only one o’clock in the afternoon or something and I was a little startled when she replied:
‘Yes, please, I’d like that,’ she said. ‘Why don’t we have it on the terrace?’
‘Now? Won’t it be too cold?’
‘We’ll wrap our duvets around us.’
OK. We will wrap our duvets around us. I stood up. And then I got all excited and took the bottle from the table by the window and took two medium sized glasses from the cupboard behind me and went outside to the terrace in the cold and placed them on the picnic table and poured two decent sized shots before I went back inside. She was waiting with the duvets. I took one, shook it out a bit, and then we went outside and sat in our chairs to drink Calvados with our duvets wrapped tightly around us. She was wearing woollen gloves. It was so cold our breath streamed from our mouths like frosty mist.
The glasses were on the table. She lit a cigarette, there was a smell of singed wool, and she said nothing, and the glasses stayed where they were, and I did not drink when she did not. I eased the blue packet out of my pocket and rolled a cigarette with stiff fingers. I smoked making no noise and just stared into the distance. After a while I leaned forward to look out across the big meadow stretching from the back of our plot towards a farm on the other side. There used to be horses in that meadow, and heifers sometimes. I had flown kites in that meadow when I was a boy, but it was a wilderness now, and the grass was so tall and dense there was no way you could walk through it unless you were a roe deer on its long legs. And there were hares and hedgehogs, too, and pheasants with chicks that were full grown now, in November, and rodents in abundance, and hawks in the sky above, and buzzards that came sweeping out of nowhere, and falcons hanging cruciform in the air before hurtling down, and there were owls in the oak trees in the evening, all quiet where they perched on a branch in the dark and stared their prey to death, and in the black night a marten darted between the trees and up across our roof, and there was plenty to eat for everyone.
I threw the cigarette stub on to the lawn, and then I raised my glass anyway, said skol and took a sip even though her glass remained untouched on the table, but then she too raised her glass and said:
‘Well, skol then, Arvid,’ and took a large gulp and coughed violently and said: ‘Bloody hell, that was strong,’ and then she said: ‘Oh, that’s good booze! Imagine, to live so long and still have that in store!’
Then we just sat there. For a long time she was silent and her breathing was wheezy, and if you listened carefully, you could hear her taking great pains to keep it going, and eventually it was her breathing that made me drowsy. We lay in the deckchairs with our eyes closed and the duvets tightly around us, so only our heads were free and our right hands free to hold the glass. And I could picture us looking like TB patients at Glitre Sanatorium in Hakadal, on the terrace with a view of the valley, or in the Alps in Switzerland. But it was not TB that ailed my mother. Nor me, if you could say that something ailed me. It felt that way.
‘Are you feeling better now?’ I said.
She did not reply.
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘So am I,’ I said.
Then out of the blue she said: ‘Do you remember little brother?’
I thought, little brother, of course I remember little brother, why did she say it like that? I grew scared, had something happened to little brother that I did not know about? Surely he was OK where he was, he was in Norway, he was in the last year of his apprenticeship with a plumber and he was different from the rest of us brothers. He did not want to go to college, he hated school, he did not read books, he was dyslexic, and I liked him very much. He was little brother, he was the last one, not him who came after me, who had died.
And then I realised what she meant. Across the meadow a dog came hopping on stiff legs in the tall grass and landed just about half a metre further on each time, it was an Alsatian chasing something that was moving deep below the roof of crested wheat grass and thistles. I had seen a fox leap that way once and thought it was a rare sight, but clearly it was not.
‘The dog, you mean?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
Every year when we came down on the ferry, an Alsatian called Teddy would be waiting for little brother on the other side of the hedge. The dog knew precisely when we came, when he came, it had a sixth sense, that maybe only dogs have, and it would grow restless from early in the morning and would pine to be let out of the house and press its nose against the hedge until we arrived from the ferry to the summer house in our own car or in a taxi.
As soon as we opened the car door, Teddy would storm through the hedge and throw himself at little brother, sending him sprawling, and little brother would knock Teddy down and get back on his feet and hurry inside to change. A moment later he reappeared in shorts and trainers and together they raced down to the beach and all the way up to Strandby in the north and back again, and damnit, that was a long way. Two hours later they would run up along the hedge, both exhausted and throw themselves on the grass, panting and gasping. They would do this almost every single day. He loved that dog.
‘Out of all of you, he’s the best looking,’ my mother said, and maybe that was true, but I felt it was wrong of her to classify us in that way. Then she said: ‘Teddy couldn’t live for ever. It’s sad, really.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it’s sad,’ and it was true that little brother was the best looking. Once a lady had stopped him on Karl Johansgate and asked if her sister could take a photo of them together. Several people stopped and stared, and when he told us about it at home, he blushed, but right now all I remember was his body against mine, the substance of it, the trust, and the few words he said over and over again were the only words he knew, and my name was one of them, and I would not let him go.
‘He’ll never learn to walk properly,’ my mother said. ‘Put him down, for God’s sake.’ But I did not put him down, and he did not want me to.
14
The empty glasses were on the table, she rose with an effort and rolled up the duvet in her lap and was already on the way to her room. She squeezed her eyes tightly shut, opened them, and I rose and blocked her path and said:
‘Are you feeling unwell?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Is there anything I can do for you?’ I said, but she raised her hand and said:
‘If anything needs doing, I’ll do it myself. Get out of my way,’ she said and pushed me in the chest.
‘But, Mother,’ I said, ‘why won’t you let me do something for you? I want to.’
‘Well, that seems reasonable,’ she said, ‘but it’s not going to happen. And we’ll say no more about it.’
And we will say no more about it, and my eyes were stinging and my legs were burning, and she pushed me aside and went into the living room and on into the bedroom and closed the door and it fell silent.
I followed her and stopped outside the door, just star
ing at it. I turned and looked in the mirror that hung on the wall by the bathroom, and I did not like what I saw, did not like those eyes. I felt restless. I took the two glasses from the table outside and put them on the kitchen counter, moved them to the sink and I filled the sink with hot water and a dash of Zalo and I washed the glasses, and the cups and the plates from breakfast, and everything else I could find I washed and stacked in the cupboards and I carefully wiped the kitchen counter, wiped the tablecloth, and then there was nothing more to do.
She had gone to bed in such haste that she had forgotten the book she was reading, The Razor’s Edge, and that was unusual for her, but she did not call out to me to bring it.
I went over to the big window and pulled the curtain aside and looked across the meadow. I could not see a single animal, not a single bird of interest. Beneath the clouds the sun came in low across the tall, pale, withered grass pushing long shadows out from behind the tiniest objects, and far across the meadow, where the farm was, white smoke came swirling from the chimney of the main building. The barn was chalk white in the blinding light. A man came on his moped along the road to the farm. He had a helmet on, although he was not going very fast, and the light caught his mirror, and the puffing sound from the small engine cut sharply through the autumn air and could clearly be heard, even behind the window where I was standing holding the curtain. I bent down to add a couple of logs to the rumbling fire and put my boots on even though they were still damp, and I tied the long laces around my ankles and went out on the terrace, and there I stood in the cold, slanted November sun, shining on the grass in front of the summer house.
I looked across the meadow. Smoke was still coming from the chimney, but the moped was gone. I turned and walked along the hedge and then on the path leading to Hansen’s plot. I bent double and slipped through the hole in the hedge and walked around his summer house, which was barely bigger than a shed, and there I found him hunched over an outboard motor he had attached to the sawhorse. He heard me coming, straightened up and turned with a monkey wrench in his hand and smiled his strange, fine and toothless smile.
I Curse the River of Time Page 9