I Curse the River of Time

by Per Petterson

  ‘You haven’t been here for a while,’ he said in a kind of Swedish. ‘They closed two years ago,’ and I thought why the hell is it that all Danes think that all Norwegians are Swedes and at the same time speak such dreadful Swedish? We are three countries in Scandinavia, for Christ’s sake.

  ‘They’ve moved,’ he said and pointed back into town. ‘They’re next to Rose’s Bookshop.’ As though everyone knew where Rose’s Bookshop was. But I knew where Rose’s Bookshop was. I had cycled there from the summer house through town when I was a youngster, and younger even, and had stood outside to gaze at the new books in the window and leafed through the remainder boxes on the pavement outside the shop and always found something I wanted, that I could afford.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Then I’ll go back to the bar next door to Rose’s Bookshop and get drunk.’

  ‘You’re not Swedish,’ he said. ‘You’re Norwegian.’

  ‘Not bad,’ I said. ‘Really, not bad at all. Then perhaps not so very drunk,’ I said.

  ‘I hope not,’ he said.

  ‘Again, thank you very much,’ I said, and got on my bicycle.

  ‘Good luck,’ he said.

  First, I stopped outside the bookshop. It was late in the day, there was a grille outside the door, but the obstinate light still stayed in the sky, and the lamps in the ceiling above the window display were lit. Klaus Rifbjerg had a new book out. He had almost every year. And there was a collected edition of la cour’s poems. And a paperback edition of Hærværk (Ravaged) by Tom Kristensen, about the alcoholic journalist and critic, Ole Jastrau. That book terrified me so the first time I read it that I promised myself and the god who did not exist that I would never ever touch alcohol. Then I parked my bike in a cycle stand and entered the bar.

  Inside it was brown and gloomy. The first thing I saw through the haze of tobacco smoke was the illuminated bar and the men with their elbows on the counter between all kinds of bottles, and little by little more men and a few women emerged in the booths to the right and the left of me. They were all drinking beer and smoking cigarettes, Prince, I supposed, and they spoke about things they knew something about, but that were alien to me, and in here they could keep each other informed by exchanging views on the most recent progress in any topic worth talking about, like the need for icebreakers in a time like ours when the ice no longer lay that solid, about shipbuilding, the size of the gas tankers owned by the Alpha Diesel company, and most certainly they talked about the Wall which, to my total surprise, had fallen, hurling chunks of concrete to East and West, and every sound from every corner of the room was deafening, almost menacing after the silence of the street. But when I came down the steps the room went quiet. Everyone turned and looked at me. I walked quietly up to the bar, the last few paces maybe less confident than the first, and found the only available space between the men standing there. They all had one elbow resting on the counter, and were all facing me.

  I ordered a beer and said:

  ‘Draught beer, please, if you have any.’ I could see nothing but bottles scattered along the counter, bottles of Carlsberg and Tuborg, but I did not feel like bottled beer. It was too lukewarm and there was not enough of it.

  Draught beer was no problem. The barman took a glass, pulled the handle and filled it and there was too much foam so he scraped the foam off the glass with a wooden spatula and filled the glass to the brim a second time and placed it in front of me on a beer mat, which said Carlsberg in green and white letters with a red crown in the middle.

  The men started talking again, and the few women too. At first just barely audible, and then louder and louder until they were almost back at the volume they had when I entered the room, but not quite, and perhaps a little more guarded, a little more private, as if I were an informer for the shipyard, where I guessed most of them worked.

  I took a deep swig of my beer, and it really did taste good, so I took another and put the glass back on its Carlsberg beer mat and gave a sigh, that could be heard by many, and rolled a cigarette with tobacco from my Petterøe 3 tobacco pouch, and lit it with the blue lighter. The man that was second closest to me along the counter leaned across the man beside me and looked at my tobacco pouch and said:

  ‘So you’re Norwegian.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that’s right.’ And I thought, what is it about this day that I keep bumping into Danes who have such a profound insight into the field of Scandinavian languages?

  ‘Pardon me for asking, but, eh, in that case what are you doing here?’

  ‘I am here to drink beer,’ I said.

  ‘Eh, I can see that, but, eh, there are other places in town where you can drink beer. So why this place? You don’t know anyone in here, eh, isn’t that right?’

  ‘That’s quite right,’ I said, and thought he really said eh a lot.

  ‘So why here?’

  ‘This is my town,’ I said. ‘I drink beer wherever I want,’ and then suddenly I felt untouchable. I turned my body all the way round and with my back against the bar, I faced the room. I was a man that no one could harm. It was not true, but the people in the bar didn’t know that.

  ‘Eh,’ he said. ‘Your town?’

  ‘I more or less grew up in this town, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘But, eh, you don’t speak Danish.’

  ‘No, I don’t. But that doesn’t mean you can’t understand what I’m saying.’

  ‘Most Danes mistake Norwegians for, eh, Swedes. They, eh, can’t hear the difference.’

  ‘That’s it. It’s fucking irritating,’ I said, and thought how irritating it was that he kept saying eh. I took another deep swig of my beer and then the beer was gone. I raised my glass so the man behind the bar could see it and said:

  ‘Another one, if I may.’

  ‘You may,’ he said. And I did. That pint and then some, and when I had drained my fourth, I was fairly drunk. I did not feel well at all. My head was spinning. I stood holding my fifth glass, raised it to my mouth and took a big swig and thought I had better leave, if I take just one more swig, I’m a goner. So I took another swig and a man in the furthest, darkest corner of the room stood up from his table and started walking towards me. His walk was not steady. Zombie-like he came into the light from the bar and his whole face was visible, and there was a purple and swollen mark across his left cheek, right above his cheekbone. I could not believe it. It was the man from the ferry. And he was still coming towards me. I did not know what to do, I got scared, I felt threatened, in fact I feared for my life. I squeezed my glass hard, and then he stopped only a metre from me. He stood there, he said nothing, he blinked a few times, closed his eyes tightly shut, opened them again and looked into mine and said in a voice of such despair that I felt like crying:

  ‘But why did you have to hit me?’

  I took a deep breath, I did not defend my behaviour, I said: ‘I’m truly sorry, I really am. I thought you were coming at me,’ I said, ‘that you wanted to hurt me.’ And now I must have been drunk, no doubt about it, because I said: ‘I was afraid you were going to throw me overboard.’

  ‘What,’ he said, ‘throw you overboard?’ And now he looked really baffled, and I felt sorry for him then, and not because of the swollen purple bruise on his cheek.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said again, ‘it was unbelievably stupid of me to think that, but I did, I was a little drunk, you see, I got scared.’

  ‘Scared of me? But it’s me, Mogens.’

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘It’s Mogens,’ he said. ‘My name’s Mogens.’

  ‘Mogens,’ I said.

  ‘I’m Mogens. Your friend. You shouldn’t hit your friends. It’s not right.’

  ‘We’re friends?’ I said. He was drunker than I’d realised. He was drunker than me.

  ‘Of course, we’re friends. Don’t you remember anything? I recognised you at once when I saw you on the ferry,’ said the man called Mogens in a trembling voice, but now with a sudden undertone of anger.
>
  I did not understand. He had recognised me on board the ferry, in the bar of the Holger Danske, how could he recognise me in the bar of the Holger Danske? It’s Mogens, I thought, his name is Mogens, Jesus, it is Mogens. I had known only one Mogens in my life, and he had been my friend, that was true. And suddenly it was plain to see it was Mogens standing in front of me, he had just grown older as I had grown older, and I had been so wrong when I told myself in the bar of the Holger Danske last evening or last night, that the man at the other end of the room could not possibly know anything about my life, because Mogens had been my friend. He had been my friend for years. Every single summer when I came down on ferries called the Vistula or the Crown Prince Olav or the Skipper Clement or the Akershus, or ferries with other names such as the Cort Adeler or the Peter Wessel, he would be standing at the terminal on the quay waiting and waving with his eyes fixed on the railing where I was leaning out far too far, waving back. I had never understood how he could have known which day we would arrive. Still, whenever we docked with one ferry or another, no matter what that ferry was called, he stood waiting by the green terminal, and right then and there in the bar next to Rose’s Bookshop, in 1989, I realised he had gone to the quay every single morning for a week, or maybe longer, to wait in case I did arrive that very day on the big ferry and would see him standing by the green terminal building and raise my hand to wave.

  I tried hard to stand without swaying. I held out my right hand.

  ‘Hi, Mogens,’ I said, ‘it’s been a long time. Really good to see you again.’ And he took my hand and squeezed it hard, and said:

  ‘Oh, you think so,’ and punched me on the cheek with his left fist while still holding my right hand with his right hand, so I didn’t fall far when I fell, but was dangling from his arm and he hit me again, and he opened his hand and let me fall to the floor between the legs of the men by the bar. Jesus Christ, that hurt. I closed my eyes and lay flat on my back, and my cheek really hurt, I could not recall such pain, and not one man at the bar helped me up. I hoisted myself on to my elbows and watched Mogens turn and walk very slowly back to the table in the deepest, darkest corner. Our friendship was over, and at once I began to miss it, the way it once was, the way it could have been, but all the summers were gone, and not only because I had forgotten them after twenty-five years, but because there was no longer any point remembering them.

  21

  It would be Christmas soon. I had stood at the machine for six months, and all this time I had tried to carry out every single Party resolution, but I had not succeeded. I had run for a seat on the local union board and received four votes; two from old friends of my father’s, who felt they had to. I had Elly’s vote, and the man who swept the floors gave me his vote, because he was hard of hearing and had raised his hand at the wrong time. They called me Little Stalin, but I had never said anything about Stalin, I hated Stalin, he had ruined everything.

  But the work itself was going well, that was the weird thing. I was no worse than the others, but rather the swiftest on the A team, the most accurate, everything I did on that floor came easy to me. I found pleasure in most of it, I liked the rhythm of the belt, the sharp smell from the melting chamber, driving the forklift through the door to the ramp with pallets of shrink-wrapped magazines twelve layers high and turning on a sixpence towards the rear end of the lorry and lowering the pallets slowly within a centimetre and sliding out again to get the next.

  Those I knew from the college in Dælenenggata said I was brave, but also said that the work I was doing was boring and might damage the brain the way I had to perform the same movements over and over again every single day for the rest of my life, but, to tell the truth, I did not mind. It came as a surprise, even to me, that the work left me free to ponder all sorts of things I felt were important, or I could just dream myself away when the noise was at its loudest. The work was not difficult, but it required precision and rhythm and a will to collaborate with other bodies, and I had that will, and I enjoyed the feeling of rushing around the factory concourse to find a mechanic or take the goods lift down to the print works, or just standing at the belt next to Elly when everything ran like clockwork, and in the few minutes’ break, turning the page in the book I was reading at the time, The Myth of Wu Tao-tzu by Sven Lindqvist, where at the end it says:

  Is social and economic liberation possible without violence? No. Is it possible with violence? No.

  It was something to think about, and I did, as the days passed one after the other, and yet it did not turn out as I had hoped it would. There was a void between me and the other workers in the hall, and every single time I tried to turn the conversation from football to the factions in the trade union movement – the red, revolutionary, and the blue, conservative – they would simply pat me on the shoulder, laugh and walk away, to sit on a pallet and smoke cigarettes when there was a short break, or laugh all the way up the stairs to the canteen to play a game of cards at lunchtime. And even though my father had been there for many years and was liked by everyone and everyone had told me how I looked just like him, I did not want to be like him, did not want to enjoy my work as he had enjoyed his. I did not feel like him, I never had. I wanted to be different. I wanted to make a difference. But I did not, and it suddenly dawned on me that what I had tried to do might not be possible: to leave behind the Arvid I had been up to this point in life, to pull him up by his hair and then lower him into some other Arvid I still did not know, yes, with full conviction turn my back on the Arvid who was loved by those he loved the most, who greeted him and called him by pet names when he passed them in front of the house, the Arvid who got one hundred kroner notes from his mother when he was broke, but now had done what I had done and joined the peuple which really did not exist any more, but was an anachronism. I was a man out of time, or my character had a flaw, a crack in its foundation that would grow wider with each year.

  And then there was a double shift, the evening shift and overtime until the morning, and it was starting to wear me down. I was confused, I felt cheated. I took the Underground home and then we had to wait at Hasle Station because a man collapsed in the aisle. He thrashed about with his arms and legs, epilepsy I guessed it was. I had not seen a fit like that before. His head was pounding the floor and the people in the carriage were so tired they did not know what to do or did not want to be hauled out of their sleepy bubble, and so they sat there, mute and awkward, and it fell to me to snap out of my bubble into the garish life outside and order someone to hold him fast so he would not beat himself senseless against the pole or the door. And it was I who ran through the carriages to alert the train driver, because I was a Communist or a Boy Scout, one of those things, but it turned out all right in the end, and I got off the train at the blue station and walked up the incline and out through the revolving doors with a windmill in my head. It was morning and there was a bite in the air I was not used to, a constant, artificial light blinding my eyes. I had started to squint and wore sunglasses in all weathers, there was a sore spot in my throat that would not heal, a raw patch, like an infection.

  The station doors slammed behind me, and suddenly there was Elly walking up Grenseveien from Carl Berners Plass in a light-coloured coat, a blue leather bag slung over her shoulder, a cigarette between her fingers. We almost crashed into each other. She stopped and I stopped, and there was only a metre between us. Seeing her in other clothes than the blue work apron made me feel shy, she looked alien and feminine in a bewildering way. I was blushing, I could feel it, and she said:

  ‘Hi there, Arvid. So you’re standing here looking good?’

  I caught the scent of her perfume on the wintry air, and the perfume was probably a little on the strong side, but it certainly hit me in the gut in a way, I suppose, is the whole point of perfume.

  ‘Actually I am on my way home to get some sleep, I’ve worked the double shift, yesterday evening and all night.’ I wanted to tell her about the man who had a fit and collapsed in the
carriage, but I did not have the energy.

  ‘I bet your head is spinning,’ she said, and I said that it was, and then I said:

  ‘But you don’t take the train from Carl Berners Plass, do you?’

  ‘I have moved,’ she said, ‘that’s why I’m running a bit late too. The man I used to live with, let’s not talk about him, the bloody idiot. Now I have a flat close by the Munch Museum, right across Tøyenparken, so I guess I could walk to Tøyen Station as well. You really should come and visit me, now that we live so close,’ she said, ‘we could have a great time.’ She smiled.

  ‘Yes, sure, that would be great,’ I said, and I did not know whether I could visit her, I did not think so, still she told me her address.

  ‘I’ll never be able to remember that,’ I said.

  ‘All right, hang on a moment,’ she said and rummaged around in the blue bag until she found a used envelope and a pen, and she was nearly forty years old, and I was just over twenty.

  ‘Turn around,’ she said, and smiled, ‘and lean forwards.’ I turned and leaned forwards, and then she wrote her address very slowly on the envelope against my back, and her perfume hit me stronger now, and her hands on my back made the sore spot in my throat feel even worse, and it was soft too, the way she touched me, and I thought maybe I was going to cry. But I was not, and Elly put the envelope with her street and house number written on it into the pocket of my jacket, gently, still standing behind me, leaning over me, and she gave me a hug, from behind, and I felt her mouth against my ear and the scent of her perfume and her body all the way down in the unfamiliar, light-coloured coat, and my head filled with shapeless, wild thoughts.