Child Wonder

by Roy Jacobsen

  “Tomorrow I’m going to take the note off you, then you’ll have to say what you want, got that?!”

  Above all, this was the spring when old one-eyed Ruby disappeared from the house in Hagan and the last light was extinguished in her window. And so we children could tear down the rest of the fence and climb the trees and burn the heaps of wood and launch the final destructive attack on the house itself, smash the windows and break down the doors and burst in and steal all the things that were not there, for the house was as empty as the sky and razed to the ground by two bulldozers in a single hour.

  A new day-care centre was going to be built here, and a shopping centre with a hairdresser’s and an Irma supermarket and a photography shop and a fishmonger’s and shoe shops, because the satellite town is devouring everything, even inwards to its own core. Blocks of flats have appeared now at the bottom of the estate, cars, children, roads and noise are springing up, there is only one way this is going, to hell, according to our lodger, Kristian, who is not moving after all, it transpires, he is content to exchange his winter coat for his spring coat and walk up and down the new short cut, which he has been doing for close on six months now, are his temporary digs going to become permanent?

  And one more thing: was it nine o’clock or eleven o’clock the day that Mother couldn’t face taking me to casualty?

  The last item of old Ruby’s furniture to be carried out of her house was a venerable old piano. Inside there was a concealed treasure. Sound. We had heard this sound for many years as we sneaked up in the autumn murk through the towering oak trees with our torches and encircled the one eye that shone, and were stopped in our tracks – by sound. No-one had a piano in Traverveien. But there was one here, in this ancient house in our midst. It was now being carried out by four strong men in white overalls, all the same age, the same height, the same hair colour and the same thick, black-rimmed glasses and all with short grey beards, which not only made them look like soldiers in the same army but also quadruplets from the same family – they were carrying out this shiny, black wonder in a perfect, silent synchronised dance as we stood watching from our unnaturally static positions and for the first time I knew what we had heard all these years, thirty, forty children, fifty, sixty … of all ages. In the end there were 183 suburban children who had heard music for all those years and had not known where it came from, until it went silent. Now we stood there paying our last respects, to a coffin being borne to the grave.

  “There weren’t so many of you present, were there?” Mother said.

  “Yes, there were,” I said. “I counted them and I remember.”

  “Don’t give me that again, Finn, please.”

  “Ask Linda, then.”

  “Don’t, I said! Don’t!”

  She covered her eyes with one hand, which she had done the morning I woke up with three broken ribs, and which at long last I realised meant it was me she couldn’t take any longer, she couldn’t take listening to what I had to say, it was me she couldn’t take, not being hard up, not a sudden death, not a lost love, not a pestering lodger nor a Linda who was so quietly wrapped up in her own eternity. No, it was me. And I realised that on the evening I was talking about the 183 children who had stood in the involuntary line bidding a dejected farewell to a piano, she was incapable of listening because this was not a sign of childhood but of nascent decadence.

  “Well, was it a grand piano or an upright?” she asked, crossly.

  “Makes no difference,” I said, and left, for good.

  10

  Then a letter arrived. With a crossed-out addressee and our name written in spiky handwriting, in pencil. It was from the health clinic in Sagene where I myself used to go for checkups before the school nurse came onto the scene. Now it was Linda’s turn. And Mother had the bright idea of taking me along, to have a rib-check, as she jokingly called it; she had never succeeded in coming to terms with this injury of mine, you don’t break three ribs doing cross-country skiing, do you. Besides she knew the staff in Sagene, and trusted them more than Dr Løge who had been called only because his practice was in the vicinity.

  This was indeed to become an hour of truth. Which started with Nurse Amundsen declaring that Linda seemed somewhat unco-ordinated, distant, sluggish …

  “Sluggish?” Mother said with a new facial expression.

  Fru Amundsen nodded pensively. “But what about this problem with her knee?” Mother enquired.

  “Knee?” said fru Amundsen, she was big and old and dressed in white like fru Lund in the school canteen, had brought four children into the world, lived through two wars and seen most things. But she couldn’t see any sign of the trouble with Linda’s knee that had been mentioned in the letter in the blue suitcase.

  “Yes, you know, she takes medicine for it,” Mother persisted.

  “Medicine?”

  For a moment Mother didn’t know whether to nod or shake her head, and ended up doing neither.

  Fru Amundsen leaned over Linda, who was seated on a long, crinkly piece of paper over what resembled an operating table, took off Linda’s shoes and rolled down her tights and felt the left knee with her large hands.

  “Does that hurt?”

  Linda cautiously shook her head. “And now?”

  More head-shaking. Fru Amundsen grabbed her under the arms, lifted her down and asked her to walk towards the wall where the eye chart was hanging, turn around and come back and then walk to the padded door and turn again. She asked what her name was, but Linda did not answer until her enquiring look had received a nod of approval from Mother.

  “Linda, yes, that’s a lovely name. How old are you?”

  Again Linda needed a nod from Mother.

  “Six.”

  “So you’ll be starting school in the autumn?”

  Linda nodded.

  “She can already spell,” I said.

  “Can you? Well, there’s a clever girl.”

  “G,” said Linda.

  Fru Amundsen nodded appreciation, lifted her back onto the table and shifted her gaze to Mother.

  “And what is the medicine you’ve been giving her?”

  Mother told her. “Does she sleep well?” fru Amundsen asked.

  Mother nodded. “A lot?” fru Amundsen asked. And Mother had to nod again, and mumble under her breath: “Yes, actually she does.”

  Fru Amundsen flashed a serious smile and said wait here and went out, while Mother started to roll up Linda’s tights and put on her shoes.

  “I can do it myself,” Linda said as she tied a bow in laces.

  “Yes, I know, my love, but now I’m going to do it.”

  Mother pulled the laces so that they were an equal length, like bows on a Christmas present. Then she suddenly found herself giving Linda a hug, where she was sitting, on the crinkly paper, a hug of the kind that extends right across the entire Atlantic Ocean, and I knew now that the mystery surrounding my three ribs was not going to be solved.

  I stepped onto the scales and moved the weights to and fro, and then stood under the angle iron on the wall to measure my height, Mother didn’t stop me, she just stood with her nose buried in Linda’s hair, giving her hug after hug, as if someone were planning to run off with her, so I went ahead and opened the white, safe-like cupboard on spindly legs and peered in at all the bottles lined up on glass shelves like small, tubby dwarfs, picked out one of them and shook it and began to unscrew the top before Mother intervened, but only with a flick of the hand, a weary, resigned gesture.

  Then I screwed the lid back on, closed the cupboard door, took the pointer hanging beside the window, gently pushed Mother aside and pointed to the letters on the chart for the blind, one after the other down the pyramid, and made Linda say them, we carried on doing this until fru Amundsen returned, this time with a young man we hadn’t seen before, but who seemed friendly and shook hands with all three of us and asked Linda to walk across the floor and back, as fru Amundsen had done, whereafter he led Mother into another offic
e.

  “The children can wait here,” he said over his shoulder as they left.

  We waited.

  Fru Amundsen gave us an old Donald Duck comic which I read aloud. Then she took us into the waiting room because other people had to come in. Then she came back for us and said we could sit on a small, black leather sofa, which in reality was just a very wide armchair, while she sat behind her desk catching up on her medical records for the day, because now it was beginning to get seriously late.

  Mother was only half with us, so to speak, when she returned. She had little make-up left on, her eyes were red-rimmed and dry, and the grip she had on Linda, after having signed three forms with a nib that was needle-sharp, was as firm as the one Linda had applied the day she alighted from the bus.

  Nothing was said until we were outside on the pavement listening to the roar of the rush hour traffic, and we realised how quiet and desolate it had been inside the naphthalene-ridden institution.

  “Right,” Mother said to herself, with force. “Right.”

  She glanced up and down the busy road, as if to plot a route, while Linda and I looked up at her, tense, what was going on here?

  O.K., now we were going to a butcher’s Mother knew, to buy some pork and sliced meats, then we were going to a bakery, which she also knew, from her childhood, I gathered from the way she was speaking, much too loud and familiar with the lady behind the counter, who gave us a cake each. After that we took a trolley bus and changed to the Tonsenhagen bus in Carl Berners plass where we also had time to buy two bags of peanuts from the machine outside the Progress factory. When at length we arrived home it was to be pork with gravy, since in our family food is the way we like to settle crises or signal that dangers are over.

  But this time events came in reverse order.

  This was the evening that there was to be no medicine for Linda, it went down the lavvy, two full bottles, while the prescriptions were locked safe and sound in the drawer with the photographs of the crane driver and Mother, her happily-married life. As proof, she said, after Linda had gone to sleep. She also said that we might have some tough days ahead of us. Plus:

  “There is nothing worse than stupidity, Finn. And your mother has been stupid. Stupid, deaf and blind. And do you know what makes folk stupid?”

  “Er … no.”

  “Fear. That’s why you must never be afraid, my boy. And you must go to school for as long as you can. Will you promise me that?”

  Yeah, yeah, I’d never had any plans to do otherwise, and I didn’t see Mother as some shrinking violet either, although she was frightened of the dark and could never really feel at ease even before Linda came into our lives despite the fact that we were doing fine. And what was going to happen now?

  “I don’t know,” Mother said. “We’ll have to take things as they come.”

  That was what we did, and it started in the middle of the night when Linda stood beside my bunk wanting to play. Then she wanted to go to the lavvy, after that she wanted something to eat. But she couldn’t sit still and instead ran out to the sitting room to fetch something, only to forget what it was she was looking for, she said oops and went back to the kitchen, where something else occurred to her and she ran back and scurried around the meagre space that is available in a three-room flat minus one for a lodger. Then she began to shake and knocked over a chair, then she sent a glass flying and began to fling her legs and arms about. Mother held her tight, locking her in a vice-like grip, put her to bed and restrained her while I ran into the sitting room and sat on the floor behind the television with my hands over my ears, unsure whether I was dead or alive, with the screams and a tingling in my skin, with the smell of Bakelite and teak oil searing my nostrils, and I read the Chinese symbols that were supposed to make the electricity work, but which could not drown the noise, until the enormous sitting-room window turned grey and filled with light, like drawing paper, and I heard Mother shout that I had better get myself off to school.

  Which I did, without any breakfast.

  There were only four lessons today, though, and when I returned nothing had changed, Mother was in bed with Linda, who was wriggling and squirming, and her face was blue and white. The whole flat smelled of vomit, of Linda, who never cried but who was beside herself now, like a circular saw cutting through rock. But I knew Marlene had dropped in, for there was food on the table, and when I had eaten and still didn’t know whether I would live or go up in smoke, Mother shouted through the door I couldn’t bring myself to open – out of fear that I would see something I would never forget – that I could watch T.V. and sleep in the sitting room.

  But the night was to be no more peaceful.

  At six the following morning Kristian came in wondering what the hell was going on and found himself being chased back into his room.

  “And you stay there!” shrieked Mother, who obviously had the strength of a horse and was carrying Linda round the flat and comforting her with strange words I had never heard before, incantations that did not work and therefore had to be repeated ad infinitum.

  But then at long last she fell asleep, and Mother sent me off to school, this time with a packed lunch and an absent-minded hug, and admonitions not to say anything, not even to Essi, be strong, she said, as though the terrible things that were going on inside Linda were only the half of what would assail us if anyone on the outside caught wind of it.

  As I was leaving, along came Marlene, who was not stupid and never had been, and spent the whole day with Mother, who didn’t go to work that day, either.

  That evening Linda slept for more than two hours before the hullabaloo started afresh, just as I was about to go to bed. But by then Mother had also managed to get some sleep. And again I was lying in the sitting room with cotton wool in my ears and a tingling sensation in my body as the battle raged on in the bedroom. I didn’t wake until Marlene was sitting in the armchair beside the sofa asking me how I was.

  “How are you doing, Finn?”

  “It’s ten o’clock,” I said, sitting up with a start because I thought something was wrong.

  But there wasn’t. I was soaked in saliva and sweat. Everything was calm, still and light. In the middle of the floor stood the doctor we had spoken to at the check-up in Sagene, in his coat, without a hat, and he uttered some reproachful but friendly words to Mother, who had put on some make-up and looked ready for work. She couldn’t be expected to do everything on her own, he said, whatever that was supposed to mean. And she answered:

  “That child is not going to any home!”

  “No, I appreciate that, but …”

  “She’s never going to leave this house. Never ever!”

  The doctor said no again and hung his coat beside Kristian’s, as if he lived here as well, and carefully took Mother by the arm, led her into the kitchen, sat her down on a chair and started to examine her arms and hands which had acquired some bluish-red crescent shapes I guessed were bite marks.

  Linda was also sitting at the kitchen table, having breakfast and drinking cocoa, she was smacking a tea spoon on the cocoa skin and smiled sheepishly as I padded in. Mother burst into laughter in a way that reminded me of death, and I felt Marlene’s hand on my head, steering me towards the table and I seemed to be pressed down in front of a plate with four slices of bread, typical Marlene slices, buttered and cut to the sounds of “You Can Have Him”, I grabbed one and took a cautious nibble.

  “Linda’s been ill,” Linda said.

  “So have I,” I said and shivered and chewed as the visitor beside me stopped doing what he was doing and everyone’s eyes focused on me. Mother had to get up and go to the bathroom to wash her face and apply make-up for a second time, and came out again blinking at the doctor and the light and asked if she was fit to go to work, “looking like this?”

  “And you’re asking me?” he smiled.

  “Who else should I ask?” she said.

  “Yes, well, if you absolutely must. I’ll give you a lift.”
>
  “She’s not going to work,” Marlene decided, and Mother crumpled, half turning, but in doing so made a stupid movement with her head in my direction, believing I wouldn’t notice, and the doctor seemed to catch sight of me in among the others and bent over the table and the plate and my food and asked, with that broad mouth of his, if I had done my homework yesterday, and I had, good, he said, then he wanted to know how many pupils there were in my class …

  “Mixed class? Ah, I see. Any nice girls in it?”

  “Tanja,” Linda said, and the doctor smiled while I was trying to recall if I had in fact done my homework yesterday. I had, yes I had, I remembered the hymn verse and the piece we had to retell from our reading book, about Halvor who comes home and is very upset; I knew it off by heart, which was not the purpose of the exercise as we were supposed to use our imagination and write it in our own words. I had done that, so, anyway, I wasted no time in telling them about what happened in Heia to the sick horse that couldn’t stand up after a fall in the forest, and how the vet thought it needed some water, then it perked up, the nag did. And strangely enough, for once, everyone was following and laughing and seemed to be very interested, Mother too, I just had to finish the story and drink my milk and get up and go to school. But it was getting on for eleven o’clock.

  “You can stay at home today, Finn.”

  “Tell me again,” Linda said.

  11

  It is quiet and warm and summer and holiday time in the streets of Årvoll, and I have to teach Linda to climb trees, I feel. She is no longer afraid of heights, has become thinner and is a tiny bit taller, I don’t want to exaggerate, it is easy to exaggerate when there is progress; in our house we take things one step at a time, we are prepared for the worst and we are caught on the hop if things just go moderately well, for example a whole evening in front of the television without Linda having any relapses, as Mother calls the last vestiges of her old life.