Child Wonder

by Roy Jacobsen

  Linda was bereft of speech. She smelled strange, her hair was unkempt, all over the place, and her fringe hung right down over her face. But she did put her hand in Mother’s and clasped two of her fingers, making her knuckles go white. Then Mother lost her composure again. And I couldn’t watch any more, this grasp which I knew instinctively was a grasp for life, which would change most things not just in Linda’s existence but also in mine, one of the grasps that lock themselves around your heart and hold it in a vice-like grip until you die and it is still there when you are lying rotting in your grave. I snatched the small sky-blue suitcase that weighed almost nothing and swung it around my head.

  “She’s asking you if you want some chocolate!” I shouted. “You deaf or something?”

  Linda gave a start and Mother sent me one of those murderous looks of hers that are usually reserved for larger gatherings. I took the hint and kept a couple of paces behind them as we walked up the hill, Mother talking now in a pseudo-friendly and much too shrill voice and saying “This is where we live, Linda,” and she pointed through the traffic fumes across Trondhjemsveien.

  “On the second floor over there. The one with the green curtains. It’s No. 3, the third block from the bottom, one of the first to be built …”

  And a load more drivel to none of which Linda responded.

  But after we had our chocolate, things improved a bit because Linda gobbled it down and smiled too, more confused than happy, and that made you feel a little less sorry for her, yes it did, I suppose Mother thought she had been eating the chocolate too greedily, and so there was a reason to find fault with her, or there was something one might have wished were different, which I think was good for us all because so far Linda had not uttered one word. Nor did she until we got inside the door.

  “Bed,” she said.

  “Alright,” replied Mother, nonplussed. “You’re sleeping there.”

  At which Linda loosened the iron grip she had on Mother’s fingers, scrambled up into bed, lay down and closed her eyes. Mother and I followed this game, our amazement increasing by the minute, because this was no game, Linda was sleeping like a log.

  Mother said There, there, and covered her up and sat on the edge of the bed stroking her hair and cheek. A little later she left the room and crashed down at the kitchen table as if she had just returned from the War.

  “I imagine she must be all in, the poor thing. Coming to stay with us. So alone …”

  I didn’t have any sympathy for this line of thought either, after all, what could be better than to be allowed to stay with us, in a bed that had been made three times already, even though no-one had slept in it? I said as much, too, showed Mother that I was already beginning to get pretty sick of this new family member of ours.

  But she was not listening, she had opened the little blue suitcase and found a letter, a sort of instruction manual, it appeared, which told us in spiky handwriting what Linda liked to do – playing (!) and eating: Sunda honey and spiced cheese, and potatoes and gravy, she wasn’t so fond of meat or fish or vegetables. But it also informed us that we should be “careful not to stuff the child with too much food”. Furthermore, she had a problem with her left knee, she needed to take some medicine for it, there were pills in boxes with Linda’s name on, which Mother duly found in the suitcase and held up to the light to have a closer look, two pills every night, or three. “And give her them with a full glass of water,” the letter instructed, “just before she goes to bed so that she won’t get up in the night and raid the fridge.”

  Mother lost her composure again:

  “Good heavens.”

  “What’s up?” I said.

  “So sad!” she groaned.

  Once more I understood nothing, just repeated:

  “What is up with you?”

  “And she looks so much like him!”

  “Like who?” I cried, feeling that I was seriously beginning to lose my temper, not so much because of what she said, but more because of how she looked. She was referring, of course, to the crane driver, my father, Linda’s father, the bloody cause of all this howling, the man who before falling to his death had managed to create so much mess that we no longer knew whether we were coming or going. And as if that wasn’t enough, Kristian came home at that very minute, heard something was afoot and wanted to know what on earth was going on.

  “It’s got nothing to do with you!” Mother shouted, totally out of control and making no attempt to conceal her tear-stained face. “Get out! Do you hear me! And don’t show your face in here again!”

  Kristian was smart enough to perceive that this was a state of emergency and retreated, unruffled. I was not so smart.

  “But who do I look like?” I yelled. “You’ve never said I look like anyone!”

  “What has got into you?”

  I was someone else and before I knew what I was doing I had grabbed her hand and sunk my teeth in the two fingers Linda had claimed for herself and bitten them as hard as I could, so that she really did have something to scream about. She slapped me good and hard, which she had never done before, and we stood glowering at one another, both of us even more changed. I even felt a stiff smile spreading across my truculent face, and a cutting chill.

  Then I threw up on the floor between us and walked into the hall without a word, put on my outdoor clothes and went down to the street to join the others, those who had no home, it would seem, at any rate they never were at home, the big boys, the losers, Raymond Wackarnagel and Ove Jøn and so on … that night we smashed the window panes in the entrances to No.s 2, 4, 6,7 and 11 and also the little glass panel in Lien’s stockroom where sago and roll-up tobacco were stored. There had never before been so many windows smashed in the Tonsen estate on a single Saturday night. And perhaps I was the only person to know why, or who at least had a motive, a strange dumb creature who lay asleep in our new bunk bed; I suppose the others did it out of habit, or because it was in their nature, it was not in mine.

  There was a huge hullabaloo afterwards with an investigation involving the caretaker and the housing co-op chairman. There was, of course, no difficulty finding out who was responsible, it was the usual suspects, Ove Jøn and Raymond Wackarnagel etc, the mystery was me, the person who had never done anything wrong, who was known as a mummy’s boy, and not just because I didn’t have a father, but because I was a well-balanced lad, a happy lad with my feet on the ground and a quick brain, as frøken Henriksen had written on my handwriting tests, I could write and do sums, I wasn’t afraid of anything, not even of Raymond Wackarnagel, I washed up almost every night, I was small of stature, but I didn’t pee in my pants and was more than happy to paint a whole sitting-room wall with a brush if asked. Had I just got into bad company? Or was there an unpredictable demon lying dormant in me, too?

  This gave Kristian the chance to re-enter the arena.

  “Crap,” he said to the housing co-op chairman, Jørgensen, who was standing in our hall, an imposing, magisterial presence, talking to Mother about how to deal with the brat. “There’s nothing wrong with the lad.”

  “How can you know?” came the pert reply from Mother who on this occasion had deemed it appropriate to kowtow to Jørgensen, she can do the servile bit, Mother can, if needs be, it comes from her background, the youngest of four children from Torshov, with a father who was said to drink, a lot, and a mother who, after he died, had ensconced herself in an easy chair and begun to drink, too.

  “Everyone can see that, can’t they,” Kristian said in his indomitable chairman’s voice. “Anyone with their wits about them.”

  To be on the safe side, he laid a hand on my head and smiled, God knows why, and went to his room humming.

  Mother stood with her arms crossed, fidgeting with the bandage she had wrapped around her two sore fingers, the Linda fingers, a touch less confident now about the unholy alliance she had entered into with Jørgensen, a man who determined when radiators should be bled and kick-sleds should be stacked before bei
ng put into summer storage in the bomb shelter.

  “Oh well, I suppose we shouldn’t make too big a thing of this,” she ventured, averting her eyes. And that was all it took to start me off crying again and blurt out that I would pay for the window at No. 11 from my savings, for that was the one I had smashed.

  Mother looked down at me, touched, and Jørgensen knew that the negotiations were at an end, but stood his ground anyway, as if to demonstrate that it was he and not Mother who decided when he was to leave, let alone pronounce when the affair was to be regarded as settled; when he had done that, he left.

  Thereafter Mother was free to start on a long diatribe about how I was to keep away from the street gang and what was I thinking of and so on. But all this was pretty ordinary stuff, quite unlike the bombshell that had hit us the day Linda arrived, last Saturday.

  Now she was sitting at the kitchen table, waiting.

  For supper.

  In accordance with the instructions in the blue suitcase, we had already introduced the ruling that Mother would butter slices of bread on the board, and put them on two different plates and place them in front of us beside our glasses of milk. An equal number of slices on each plate, two and a half, with whatever we wanted to eat on top, whereas Mother had only one, with syrup, which reminded her of her own childhood, or perhaps mostly of what she had never had enough of, because times had been lean then, as people said. She stood by the breadboard fiddling with something in a cupboard, or in the sink, and making the occasional funny remark. And there was no more bread and butter for Linda, however long she sat there giving Mother the wordless stare, which under normal circumstances would have cracked the strongest of wills, it would, although she didn’t eat anywhere near as greedily as on the first day and furthermore had realised she shouldn’t grab at food on the table, such as the Sunda honey.

  I knew that even if I had felt like another slice of bread on this particular evening, and it had never been an issue whether I ate two or six slices, I would not have said anything, and I received a nod of acknowledgement from Mother, since we were so united in the task of complying with the instructions in the letter. Linda could see how the land lay.

  “Read,” she said.

  And we read. But first of all the table was cleared and the washing up was done, if you could call it that, because Linda had enough trouble standing on the stool – which I had had to cede – and splashed her hands in the soapy water while I was even more thorough than usual, and I noticed that she didn’t smell strange any more, she didn’t smell of anything, like me. Her hair was also combed, shorter, and she had been given a light-blue hair slide to keep her fringe out of her large eyes so that she could no longer hide behind it. Mother asked if she knew any songs. Linda, after much hemming and hawing, finally mumbled a song title I hadn’t heard before, but Mother smiled and hummed the tune, she knew a couple of verses of this particular unknown song, as she dried and cleared away, and Linda smiled coyly into the washing-up water and went pink, which we considered a good omen, for, to tell the truth, she had not smiled a lot since she arrived.

  Even reading had changed quite a bit, now it had to be the Bobbsey twins again, of whom I was heartily sick, a gang of kids who had God knows how many parents and uncles and aunts, and Mette-Marit at the Ballet School, which Mother had read as a child and had also tried to foist on me, I couldn’t stand Mette-Marit. Anyway, Linda didn’t want to read very much, she just wanted to listen to the first page and a half again and again, as if she lost the thread as soon as the story got going, or perhaps because she had an especial predilection for repetition.

  But lying there under the ceiling has an atmosphere of its very own, with your arms tucked behind your head, knowing you have to keep your mouth shut about your needs, knowing that this is appreciated, and Mother made sure it was, with a new look she had added to her repertoire; we had become, as I said, a team, with the task of looking after someone we hadn’t quite deciphered yet, nor would we until a good three months later.

  7

  As I mentioned, Mother came from a pretty large family, three elder brothers and a mother who had turned grey and retired to a rocking chair. Now she spent her days indulging in games of patience, and innumerable glasses of sherry, but she always brightened up when she saw me, and asked how things were at school. It was important to do well at school. But she never listened to my answers.

  “Pick a card,” she said.

  I picked a card, and if it was the seven of clubs, that meant I was going to have a prosperous life, and the jack of diamonds meant more or less the same. But normally we didn’t stay long, apart from on Christmas Eve, on the ground floor in an old working-class tenement in Torshov, where there was just a kitchen and one room, and in that room, which for some reason was not called a sitting room but a parlour, there was an enormous cylindrical black wood-burning stove that was always so hot it had to be shielded behind a fireguard, itself almost as hot.

  When we turned up on Christmas Eve I had to join Uncle Oskar in the cellar and chop wood, which was a pleasant midway stage between the freezing cold walk from Årvoll and the pork-ribs aroma of a Christmas Eve fought out in the parlour where now there was a spruce tree wilting next to the red-hot stove. Gran still used real candles which had to be replaced all the time because the wax ran down onto the bone-dry spruce branches like snot.

  Uncle Oskar was much older than the others and had been a merchant seaman in the War; he didn’t have any children or a wife and was on the dole, he whiled away his time doing simple carpentry, but even so had “coped”, as Mother put it. He always arrived early on Christmas Eve and put the ribs in the oven and then chopped kindling in the cellar wood store for hours on end to help Gran, so that she would have something to get the coke going over the winter. When I turned up he showed me how to chop and pile the wood and smiled and was good-humoured and nice, but he didn’t say much. And even though I looked forward to the presents, the hour down there with Uncle Oskar was without doubt the best part of the whole evening, as the others, for some reason, liked to have a go at him, especially when we were sitting around the table, saying he had developed quite a stoop since they last saw him or his hair had greyed or had he still not won the pools.

  My mother joined in, too, and I didn’t like that, even though she was more restrained than Uncle Bjarne, who was a dreadfully serious engineer at an out-of-town paper factory, and therefore seldom seen except on this one day of the year.

  The youngest of the brothers, Uncle Tor, was a waiter at Hesteskoen and Renna and Grefsensetra and … it kept changing. He was cheerful and lively and danced with Mother after the presents had been distributed and the drinks appeared on the table. He also danced with Uncle Bjarne’s bad-tempered wife, Aunty Marit, who loosened up as the evening progressed, so much so she had almost come apart by the end, unlike her spouse, Bjarne, who was always given books for Christmas and who, as soon as he had said his piece about Uncle Oskar, liked to settle down to read on the kitchen bench where, apparently, he had also spent most of his childhood, books which he managed to finish before the evening was over and it was time to gather the herd of kids and his unsteady wife and wend his way to the taxis in Sandakerveien. The kids in question were my three cousins, all belonging to Bjarne and Marit, who conversed in dialect and were forever making sure they hadn’t soiled their frocks with pork fat. The eldest, whose name was also Marit, was two years older than me and quite interesting; she liked to bamboozle me with conjuring tricks.

  “Look at me, Finn,” she said, and did something with her fingers that was supposed to be magic and then, all of a sudden, in a hand that had only a split second before been empty, she was holding a Christmas heart. But this one was easy to see through.

  “It’s in your other hand.”

  “Look now,” she ventured.

  “Now it’s behind your back.”

  But that didn’t wipe the smile off her face; she just held out one hand, slowly, as if to magic a coin f
rom inside my ear, but instead pinched my cheek, making tears well up, and I howled with pain.

  “See,” she said, turning to the others in triumph.

  “Ha, ha, Finn fell for it again, hook, line and sinker.”

  This expression came from Uncle Bjarne, I recognised it. He loved this sort of thing: a spanner in the works, Mary, Mary quite contrary (for Mother), not to mention Knock, knock, is anyone at home? – which he used on Uncle Oskar – idioms, rhymes and catch-phrases my mother and I considered embarrassing. She didn’t like Uncle Bjarne, not him, not his wife, nor his pack of kids: I had also caught her mumbling “twit” and “muttonhead”, or worse, when she thought no-one was listening.

  But, well, there was something about Uncle Oskar, who appeared not to hear the jibes directed at him. He smiled with good humour at everything and ate slowly and to repletion after the long wood-chopping session in the cellar. He even had his work-clothes with him, which he hung in the minute bathroom before donning his blue suit for the meal. Mother was always tight-lipped and touchy when we were here, never went to the loo, because it was so dark and cramped in there, and she needed a day or two to recover, kept mumbling it was good to get it over and done with as we trudged home in the freezing cold, late at night, like last year for example, each of us carrying a rucksack of presents, past the Ragna Ringdal day centre, across the Ring Road and through Muselunden, my route to school, past the shanty huts – belonging to the men we called Yellow, Red and Black – covered with glittering snow, all looking like Joseph and Mary’s stable with Trondhjemsveien’s line of silent, fog-yellow Bethlehem stars in the background. Except that the idyll was broken by the sound of beasts of prey, unless it was the sound of snoring, Mother shivered and increased her pace and murmured “Poor things” and said:

  “We’re doing fine, we are. Remember that, Finn.”

  Though she was relieved to have got Christmas Eve in her childhood home out of the way.