by Roy Jacobsen
The year we had Linda, she sent her apologies, told me she wasn’t up to it, what she wrote on the Christmas cards she sent round the family I have no idea. However, we were to be on our own, the three of us. And it was one of the best Christmases I can remember, even though it got off to a shaky start. We had been to the Årvoll Senter and bought a Christmas tree which we were dragging home on Essi’s fish sled when, half way down Traverveien, we discovered that Linda didn’t know what presents were.
“What are presents?” she said in a very quiet voice, after Mother and I had been talking in excited tones about Christmas lists, what we might get, our sky-high expectations, Mother’s relief this year at not having to think about whatever it was she thought about in connection with the family down in Torshov, and about Kristian, who had not only paid his rent for December on the dot but also given her an advance for January, so she would have a bit more to play with over Christmas, as he put it.
The significance of Linda’s question sank in slowly for her, it didn’t sink in at all for me, even though I ought to have realised from the pallor of her face, Mother’s, so all I was able to come out with was:
“Don’t you know what presents are? Are you stupid or something?”
Then I heard something I had never heard before:
“Now you just shut your mouth, Finn, or I’ll murder you.”
“She says gifts!” I screamed. “She understands gifts! Don’t you, Linda, you understand gifts, don’t you.”
We stared down at Linda in expectation. But there wasn’t a glimmer of comprehension. Scared by all the commotion, she had again held Mother’s two fingers in an iron grip, her eyes boring into the depths of eternity, and she wanted to go back home.
The rest of the day was taken up with long, comforting monologues from Mother’s side. About there being many ways to celebrate Christmas, Linda didn’t need to rack her brains, some people gave each other presents, others didn’t, there was no limit to diversity in this world, and we could in fact see that Linda was looking forward to the presents she would soon be getting when at length she understood what it was all about.
The Christmas hearts she was supposed to be weaving didn’t go too well, either, but I showed her how to cut up an egg carton and glue two tops together and paint them in watercolours, the way I had been taught at school on the last day of term, and tied a thread to them so that they could be hung on the Christmas tree.
While we were busy doing this, Mother sent me one of her new looks, which meant that she wanted to have a private word with me, and Linda was left in the kitchen fully engaged in her egg-box activities.
In the sitting room she bent right down to my ear and asked if I thought we should send a Christmas card to Linda’s mother since we had received one from her, with very spiky handwriting, and, question number two, whether we should show it to Linda because it didn’t say anything nice or personal, just Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, printed, and she couldn’t read anyway, on top of which she had never so much as mentioned her mother, not even when Mother asked, which she was trying to stop herself doing for that very reason.
I didn’t need to think twice, I answered no straight off to both questions. Apart from that, it was the 22nd of December and from my experience the post was a bit on the slow side around these parts. We found that out when we put the advertisement in the paper.
At first Mother shot me a look of surprise, then of reproach, then without warning she changed and exuded the new warmth. I was even given a hug and packed off into the kitchen where Linda was poring over her third cardboard bauble, which was black with runny yellow streaks.
“You have to wait until it dries, before you paint on top,” I said. “Look.”
I demonstrated while Linda watched. Copied what she had to do. But now that she had got going, there was no stopping her, Mother tried a bit later in the evening, we didn’t have any room for more than four, maximum five, baubles on the tree, after all we were going to put a lot of other nice things on it, shop-bought baubles, tinsel, lights, hearts, flags and some clip-on birds. I had a feeling this was going to be the same process as with the reading, that whatever was done would have to be repeated ad infinitum, it was worrying. I think Mother was worried too, for out of the blue she said we should go out to the balcony and look at the Christmas tree, which of course was not to be moved into the sitting room until the following day, because that was the tradition in our house, she intoned in her fairy-tale voice, standing in the cold balcony doorway on the 22nd and admiring the new Christmas tree before it came indoors, as the snow fluttered down from the Arnebråtens’ balcony upstairs, a scene that was redolent of Walt Disney.
Of course, this was a ploy to distract Linda. I took the hint and stayed behind in the kitchen to tidy up all our mess so that only the eight baubles Linda had made stood in a line against the wall. I had to admit that the black one with the runny yellow paint was in fact the best. When they returned and Mother said with a shiver that now it was time to enjoy a nice hot cup of cocoa, Linda had no problem focusing her attention on supper, which today included an extra slice of bread topped, in her case, with spiced cheese.
We decorated the tree on the 23rd, Mother on one stool, me on another and Linda on the floor with her baubles forming a kind of skirt around the branches, like planets in a rough and tumble solar system, and she had never even done that before, so it was another great night, which the tiniest slip of the tongue on my part could so easily have turned into a catastrophe, and Mother was in a very good mood now that Kristian was away with his family and we had the place to ourselves.
On the morning of the 24th I went into the street with Linda for a few hours. For the first time. Brother and sister. And that passed off well enough too, even though I was nervous, and Anne-Berit, the stay-at-home, made the point that Linda didn’t sledge the way she should, she was always trying to come on my sledge. I let her, of course, but it meant she cramped my style, and I suppose I looked more awkward than usual. When any of the other kids spoke to her she did not answer.
“What’s your name, then?”
“Her name’s Linda.”
“Are you visiting?”
“No, she lives here.”
“Where, at your place?”
“Yes.”
“Are you Finn’s sister?”
Neither of us answered that one.
“My mum says you’re Finn’s sister.”
“Mother does too.”
“Is that true, Finn?”
Silence.
“Hey, Finn won’t answer. Is she your sister, Finn? Come on, out with it.”
“Where the hell’s she been all this time?”
A boy by the name of Freddy 2 said to her face:
“Can’t you talk or what?”
“No,” Linda whispered, and the whole gang laughed, Freddy 2 loudest of all, he had been given that name because there were no fewer than three Freddys in our street, of whom only Freddy had any personality.
“P’raps you’re just deaf?” Freddy 2 wondered.
“Yes,” Linda said.
They laughed even louder at that. But it was a good answer, which meant no more questions were asked, for the time being. We did some more sledging, to Linda’s mounting pleasure, because we kept to the shortest slope, in front of the house. When we got to the bottom she grabbed my mitten with more or less the same grip she had used on Mother. We tramped to the top and tobogganed down again. But then some bright spark asked:
“You – what’s your name, then?”
“Her name’s Linda, I’ve already told you!”
“Can’t she speak or what?”
“Say something, Linda!”
“D’you wanna toffee, Linda?”
“…”
When, after a couple of hours, frozen to the bone and aching with lumps of ice dangling from our sweaters and socks and scarves and woolly hats, we went back inside, Mother had to crack our laces to undo our boots and hugged u
s both, and was nice and said Linda had to have a bath now, she was as cold as ice, poor thing, and she loved having a bath, didn’t she?
“Yes.”
When at last she was sitting in the bathtub and whizzing her new duckling around, a pre-Christmas present, of which there had been quite a few, clothes mostly, and Mother had laid and unlaid and relaid and unlaid the table and changed the cloth before plumping for white, she said to me:
“You seemed to be enjoying yourselves on the slope.”
“You bet.”
“I noticed you were playing with the other kids.”
“Mm.”
“You were having a good time, I s’pose …?”
“…”
And because adults can never get it into their noodles what idiots children are, this too rose to the dizzying heights of Freddy 2-style conversation, that is, until I left her and knelt in front of the T.V. and pressed the “on” button, aware it was time for a Jiminy Cricket cartoon. But hardly had I immersed myself in it for more than a couple of minutes when the doorbell rang.
“Can you see who it is, Finn? Think it’s someone for downstairs.”
This someone was for upstairs.
It was Uncle Tor, who never visited us as a rule, even if he was working nearby, at Hesteskoen for instance, which we could see from the kitchen window, but today he had an errand, as he called it, standing there in his waiter’s suit with an alcoholic smile and his blond wavy locks smothered in Brylcreem.
“Well, Finn, are you looking forward to Christmas?” “
Yes, of course … erm it’s today, isn’t it.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“Oh, it’s you, is it,” Mother said behind me, fidgeting with an earring, but not without a critical look, which must have registered – as did mine – that the guest was standing there without a single present in his empty hands, this was Uncle Tor, who could give me a pair of expensive skis one Christmas and not a sausage the next because he was broke, which he readily admitted with his pearly white charm. Uncle Tor was, according to Mother, the one member of the family who would never grow up, however old he became, and with some justice too, well, in fact he had been my age for as long as I had known him. He had dropped by to pick us up, he said, the car was waiting down in the street.
“The car?”
“Yes, a taxi.”
Mother dashed over to the balcony window.
“Are you out of your mind? Have you got a taxi waiting down there with the meter running?”
“Yes, aren’t you ready?” Tor said innocently, surveying the wallpaper, the sofa and the Christmas tree with evident admiration, and perhaps the T.V. in particular, which Mother switched off, and then installed herself in front of the screen with her hands on her hips and a steely glare.
“Is this something you and Bjarne thought up?”
Then things took their usual course. Uncle Tor flopped down on the sofa, sighing and fidgeting with the crease in his terylene trousers and thrust out his hands as if trying to shake his watch bracelet further down his arm.
“Yes,” he admitted, glancing at his watch.
“We’ve already been through all this,” Mother said reprovingly.
“Yes,” Uncle Tor said again, looking across at me, realising he ought to smile, did smile, then went back to being serious and continued to sit as if just being there was an argument in itself.
Mother said nothing, but I could see from her face that she was not only in total control of the situation, but might also even have been enjoying it. She went into her room and fetched her purse.
“You’ve got nothing to pay the taxi with, have you?”
“Er … no,” Uncle Tor said, gazing at the wallpaper again.
“Here you are. Say hello to the others and have a good time.”
Tor was on his feet.
“OK, Sis. You win, as always.”
He gave her a thumbs-up, grabbed the note and headed for the hall. But then he remembered something.
“Er … Could I have a word with the girl, too, while I’m here?”
“She’s having a bath,” Mother said curtly, and Uncle Tor looked down at his formal get-up, ill at ease.
“Yes, well, I suppose I should have brought her a present.”
“Yes, you should.”
There followed a few more moments of embarrassment before Uncle Tor showed us one of his party pieces, a three-step shuffle on the lino, chin on chest, shadow boxing with me:
“Watch out for the jab, lad, watch out for the jab …”
Upon which he opened the door, said oh well and Happy Christmas, and made off down the stairs.
“Rascal,” Mother said, then strode into the kitchen, turned, came back and said, as if mustering a troop of elite soldiers: “Come on, Finn, now you get yourself dressed and this year you’ll be smarter than ever before, both you and Linda.”
We plucked Linda out of the bath water, which had become quite cold in the meantime, so much so that she was shivering and her teeth were chattering. But she laughed when Mother tickled her through the towel, these lovely, almost inaudible gurgles we had heard only once. And indeed we did look smarter than ever before, and stiffer. That wasn’t such a problem for Linda who was to a large extent stationary. But I couldn’t sit still while eating the meal, which even today we ate in the kitchen, no ribs this year, it was roast leg of pork with oodles of gravy.
I had to read out the names on the presents as I was the best in the family at reading. And it is strange how you get a true picture of life standing like that, with a stiff collar chafing away at you, beside a sparkling Christmas tree, reading names on presents and working out who can be relied upon in this world and who cannot. Gran, for example, doesn’t get a very high score this year: Linda and I each get a card game, and Mother gets nothing. Uncle Bjarne and Aunty Marit have given us nice presents as usual, but neither has given Mother anything, while the previous year she at least got a weighty ornament which was more expensive than anything she could have afforded herself.
Only from Uncle Oskar did we all get what we wanted, Linda a jigsaw puzzle she couldn’t do, a magnifying glass for me, and Mother a primus stove. But she just snorted at it, even though she had said she wanted one just like it after the old one gave up the ghost on a picnic last autumn.
Kristian, too, had bought presents for everyone. Mother got some jewellery, which silenced and irritated her, and caused her to busy herself with anything else but what we were doing. Linda got a pair of Dutch skates and I got two books, number eighteen in “The Famous Five” series and the 1961 edition of Hvem Hva Hvor, an almanac, in which a bookmark had been inserted and a sentence underlined about the rapid rise of television viewing:
“It has been our experience that gifted children soon prefer reading books and magazines to spending their leisure hours in front of the screen, while there is an increasing tendency for less gifted children to spend their time watching television …”
“What’s he mean by that?” Mother said, snatching the book and perusing it with a furrowed brow before returning it and devoting her attentions to the strange jewellery which, squinting through the magnifying glass I was given by Uncle Oskar, I could see had 585 written on it; it was a hare holding its paws in front of its eyes.
Linda was given most presents, it turned out, including from me. But that didn’t matter, because most were clothes which had to be tried on and taken off and tried on again while we ate marzipan and cakes, and laughed and laughed until she fell asleep in bed amid the skates and all her clothes, and I was on the point of dropping off myself after no more than three pages of Kristian’s boring book, although at least it did have a picture of Yuri Gagarin, when, sad to say, Mother came into my room with tears in her eyes, whispering something about it having been nice on our own, hadn’t it?
I didn’t have an answer to that; in fact, there had never been so many of us.
But, as so often before, when she wanted to tell me somethin
g in confidence, other things came out first which had nothing to do with the main point, this time it was what the family might have said about her during the evening, another thing I couldn’t get worked up about.
The real problem didn’t surface until a while after Christmas. There were three of us now, weren’t there, she explained. But Linda would be going to school soon, and giving up the shoe-shop job was out of the question, it was much more likely she would go full-time. And then the nursery up behind the church had rejected our application, there might be a place in spring, fine, but what on earth would we do until then?
Even this question wasn’t addressed to me, though; Mother had already found a solution.
“How do I look?” she asked, it was the 28th of December, just after three in the afternoon.
She had put on some make-up and her shoe-shop dress, now she was draping her smartest cloak across her shoulders, she asked me to look after Linda and went out starting with No.1,then went from block to block, rang all the doorbells, said Happy Christmas and asked if there was anyone at home who might be able to take care of a little girl for five to six hours a day until spring. She got no further than No. 7, where she found the right person, a twenty-year-old by the name of Eva Marlene whom ever since we have called simply Marlene and who worked as a waitress in the evenings, at Kontraskjæret, and slept all morning in her parents’ flat. And Marlene seemed fine, even though Linda ran off and hid the instant she popped her head in.
“Come and say hello to Eva Marlene, Linda. She’s going to be looking after you while I’m at work.”
That didn’t have much of an effect, and I can’t say I blame her, the way she had been bundled from one woman to another, barely used to mother No. 2 before No. 3 was introduced. But Marlene, who at first sight could appear somewhat flighty and very nubile, judging by all the paintwork, turned out to be robust and down-to-earth, a realist, who strangely enough was employed in the same frivolous line of work as Uncle Tor, the fairy-tale industry, as Mother called it, where dreams and insanity were two sides of the same coin.