by Roy Jacobsen
“Who to?”
“I’m not telling you.”
“You’ve got your own crayons, haven’t you?”
“I haven’t got orange.”
“Can’t you just borrow an orange one then?”
“No.”
For a few days she walked to school with Freddy 1 and me. Then she walked with the twins again and soldier girl, Jenny. A letter arrived saying she might be dyslexic, and Mother had to summon all her strength. But there is something odd about those parts of hell labelled in Greek: Linda was given special lessons by the school’s nicest teacher, Gillebo, and sat looking at watercolours of badgers and cranes, which he had painted himself, and listened to his hypnotic voice for three hours, then she was back in the classroom, beside the twins and Dundas, who had never ever learned to read. She was where she should be. So perhaps it wasn’t dyslexia after all, the next letter said, a clean bill of health, as Mother called it, before it was filed away with all the other correspondence which had accrued in the course of this year, the longest year ever, but there was something else about it, for of course there had to be something else. Then the snow came.
27
It came to stay. With ski slopes and toboggan slides, snowballs and frostbitten fingertips and thick milky-white ice. This was the way winter should be. With a roar and a crash and enduring silence. Christmas was approaching. I gave Freddy 1 another ball bearing, and he gave me one, it was impossible to tell them apart, but mine was wrapped. Linda would get skis, there was so much secrecy surrounding this that Kristian had to spend his evenings in the basement hobby room mounting the bindings and impregnating the skis and then carrying them up to the store room in the loft and hiding them behind the suitcase that had been to Dombås.
A Christmas tree was bought and stood in the swirling snow on the balcony from the 19th onwards, to be admired every evening by Mother and Linda, with me in the background. The annual debate about where we would spend Christmas Eve had also to be resolved, but under different circumstances this time.
After all, we had not seen much of the family over the past year, and rumours were flying around that Uncle Tor had been given the boot from the restaurant where he was working, because he had been drunk, Mother said without beating around the bush. But then he had enrolled at the Seamen’s School to become a ship’s engineer on the seven seas, he had started a new and better life, Uncle Tor had, a Romeo and a dandy, as Uncle Bjarne called him. Gran wasn’t getting any younger, either, sitting in her chair, stoking her glowing wood burner and playing patience and winning.
But once again I had something on my mind.
“I want to stay at home,” I said.
I said it quietly, I had no intention of causing a row, it was simply a sentence that had to be expressed for unclear reasons, the same vagueness that had steered me all through the autumn, as though I had seen something again.
What’s more, we had enjoyed some peaceful weeks, since the Dundas business, a cosy family life of the kind that proceeded as it should on an estate, the rhythmic round-the-clock routine that at its best is redolent of soft music on tiny radios very late at night, without Kristian, and how was Mother?
Well, she was fine, relaxed, sitting and glancing at me from over the top edge of Rain Follows The Dew, a story we had heard two or three times, about two people who, like Tanja and me, didn’t find each other, albeit for more prosaic reasons, but I knew she liked to read it alone, so that she could have a sniffle whenever she felt like it, and since I could not give an answer as to why I wanted to keep away from the family, I directed my gaze at Linda, who was lying on her tummy in front of the T.V. with her chin in her hands and swinging her thin legs back and forth, and Mother took that as a hint.
“What do you say, Linda, shall we visit the family on Christmas Eve?”
“Yes,” said Linda to the screen, without hesitation.
We filled the old rucksack with presents and off we went, at twelve o’clock on the 24th, me with the carefully wrapped skis over my shoulder, Linda at my side with her satchel and expectant smiles, stealing furtive upward glances, while making stupid little hops and skips. Mother was out of breath and red-cheeked from all the carrying well before we arrived, and armed herself straightaway with her family voice as she got down to cooking the food, with which there was quite a bit to find fault, not to mention the shopping which a neighbour, following Gran’s senile instructions, had attended to.
Linda and I were sent down to the cellar, to Uncle Oskar, who was his usual old self, in overalls and a peaked cap with an axe in his hand, nice and cosy. But the store room had shrunk since the last time and the ceiling was lower – it was the first sign that something was wrong. Had I grown too much? Or was Linda taking up too much room in her new, white dress with the red ribbons and her trilled chuckles that made Uncle Oskar roar out loud with laughter, looking as though he had just been cured of cancer?
“Well I never,” he kept saying in response to her stream of chatter, and Uncle Oskar was not the type to overdo the smiles, we were serious folk down here, we worked with firewood, we concentrated. But the axe had become lighter, I didn’t need to hold it with both hands any more, the piles had shrunk, and Linda stacked the logs according to our instructions and was black with dust and coke by the time we surfaced to the smell of pork ribs, each carrying an armful of kindling, we could show her off to the newly arrived pushy cousins who always managed to give the impression that there were twice as many of them as there really were.
Now they took it upon themselves to spruce up the new member of the family in the minuscule bathroom, where there was a miniature tub on lion’s feet, stained brown and green from the brass taps right down to the plughole which resembled a pig’s snout. We heard giggles and shouts from inside, a dialect which became even more remote through the locked door, while Mother paced to and fro like a nervous gatekeeper and kept knocking on the door and asking just how long they were going to be inside there and if they had the light on, and saying it was time they came out, no-one else seemed to notice her bizarre behaviour, I had seen it before, but it was only now I was fully aware of it.
“Is the light on?” she screeched.
“Pick a card,” Gran said.
I picked an eight of spades. And not even that was how it should be.
The candles on the Christmas tree were electric this year, there were Smarties and hazelnuts and sand cake and the aromas of lard and caraway and hair lacquer and cigarettes, the fireguard quivered in the heat as always, and Uncle Tor sat on the windowsill drinking shorts and chain-smoking and said I had grown enormously since last time, which at least was a polite exaggeration, while Uncle Bjarne didn’t think I had grown a single millimetre, which was a rude under-exaggeration.
“Look at Marit,” Uncle Bjarne said. “If she carries on like this she’ll end up being a glamour model, I reckon.”
“Ha ha, the fat tub,” Uncle Tor laughed in the middle of a deep drag and had to cough and clear his throat to stifle his laughter, and Uncle Bjarne told him to keep his trap shut, “she can hear you, you bonehead”. Aunty Marit brushed nut shells off her dress, stood up and said:
“My God, I’m damned if I’m going to sit here and listen to this.”
She went into the kitchen where Mother had succeeded in recovering her composure, since the girls were out of the bathroom, and she was hard at work cooking and didn’t want any help, not at all, she hadn’t come here to be helped, and Uncle Bjarne, in the ladies’ absence, saw his chance to be dismissive about Uncle Tor’s new career, the engineering course at the Seamen’s School, which I assumed must have been a kind of special education class for adults.
I tried to behave as if nothing had happened, but there was no mistaking the atmosphere: Uncle Bjarne was in a blue suit and a navy blue tie, with a crease in his trousers, clean-shaven, groomed, smelling of aftershave, with polished black shoes. And Uncle Tor was the complete opposite in every detail, though there was something eye-catch
ing and self-assured about his brown shoes, bootlace tie, Teddy boy hairstyle and devil-may-care knees in his unpressed trousers, as though he represented a counterpart to his elder brother, they were not just two incongruent worlds but two different eras, sitting here and jousting with little jibes and smirks that were more like unhealable surface wounds than jolly banter, and perhaps they had been there since they were boys, I just hadn’t noticed before, like Uncle Oskar’s laughter – had that been there all along, too?
Or was it something Linda had brought out in them?
I could also see that Gran was perhaps not as senile as officially pronounced and approved, perhaps she had just drawn the blinds for the evening and the occasion, and was not sitting in her rocking chair counting cards but the minutes, waiting for it all to be over and done with, as Mother used to say as we walked home after these dramas, it was an ongoing countdown.
And me?
I could be seen in a narrow black-framed mirror that had always hung on the wall behind Gran, usually covered with a hand-woven tapestry, and perhaps in truth I had grown, as if it had been four years since I was last here, I was a head taller, there was no room for my shoulders, my chest and arms had disappeared, I couldn’t see my hands even though I held them in front of my face and pressed them against the flaking glass, there was no room for my eyes either, there was no room for anything at all, nothing that had anything to do with me at any rate, but there still was no need to be frightened, because it was the same as with Mother, the others didn’t notice.
“Well?” Gran said. “Stick or twist?”
I looked down at the little table that Uncle Oskar had made for her, at a card placed face down, and pretended I was considering whether to turn it over or not, but I was also aware of the teasing smile at the wrinkled corners of her mouth, and slowly shook my head.
“I daren’t,” I said with the broadest smile I could manage.
“Wise move,” she said, putting the card back in the pack, and began to shuffle and deal again, shuffle and deal …
At length Linda was dolled up and led round like a princess and had her ears stuffed with how elegant she was, and small and pretty and clever, and she could curtsey, too, then I saw there was something in all of this drivel, it had just taken us a year to find out, the others were watching her, and now you could even read it on Aunty Marit’s crabby face, Linda was not only like everyone else, she even threatened to outclass her daughters.
That was the fourth danger signal. Or the fifth …
It turned out that the girls had been given a pre-Christmas present on the train here – so that they would be able to keep the peace until we had got the food down us and the decent-sized parcels could be opened – a game of Mikado, which was strewn over the kitchen table and which Linda won again and again: her little hand was as steady as a rock and plucked out all the sticks every time without touching any of the others, of course this was tempting fate, Marit had to resort to one of her tricks.
“You touched one! I saw you!”
Linda, however, preferred to trust her own large, puzzled eyes, which were far more reliable than Marit’s exotically-inflected claim.
“You can’t bear to lose, can you, Marit,” Uncle Tor laughed on his way to the kitchen to fetch more soda water and in passing gave Linda a pat on the head by way of acknowledgement.
“Are you calling me a liar?”
“Oh, put a sock in it.”
“Don’t you dare talk to her like that, Tor,” said Uncle Bjarne, who had followed him.
“I’ll talk in any bloody way I want, she’s a bad loser.”
“Take it easy now, bruv, or else I’ll give you a taste of this,” Uncle Bjarne said, holding up a fist with a jovial expression in an attempt to lighten the atmosphere that had been becoming increasingly tense as the afternoon had progressed, as though we were on an accelerating carousel. Uncle Tor planted his unpolished shoes a couple of feet apart, adopted a professional boxer’s stance and began to jig around like a second Ingemar Johansson, throwing jabs at bags of sugar, tins of coffee and a begonia that trembled on the windowsill and Mother’s pan of simmering sauerkraut, then grabbed her firmly by the waist and swung her round in a sweeping waltz, singing the theme from The Third Man as he did so, and for some reason the fury in the face of the successful paper-factory engineer became more and more obvious, we all saw it, something was going to happen now, but it was Aunty Marit who managed to whisper loud enough for us all to be able to hear:
“I told you we shouldn’t have come this year.”
“No, you bloody well did not!”
“Oh, didn’t I indeed?”
“No, you did not indeed, you were going to see the screwy girl, come hell or high water.”
“Bjarne, please.”
With that, the dance was over. Mother shook herself free from Uncle Tor’s arms, took three purposeful strides across the floor and, with every last drop of her strength, whacked brother number two’s face so hard he was sent reeling, and slumped down on the bench where he was wont to spend the latter part of the evening finishing off the two books he knew he would be given.
“What the bloody hell do you think you’re …?”
He tried to struggle to his feet, but he was halted by a further slap and remained seated, for good. A semi-stifled howl emanated from Aunty Marit. Mother’s neck and arms were ablaze and she looked as if she were preparing to launch another onslaught, which Uncle Oskar must have noticed as well because he tried to wrap himself around her, with the result that he, too, copped one in the mush.
“Oh, now you want to intervene, do you,” she yelled. “Where were you when I needed you?!”
“What are you doing out there?” Gran called from the living room.
“Look at her!” Mother shrieked with a voice like steel, pointing to Linda who was sitting clutching a Mikado stick in one hand and me in the other, unless it was vice versa. “Can’t you see the similarity?! Can’t you see?!”
Uncle Oskar collapsed in abject shame. “You were an adult and you saw what was going on,” Mother ploughed on. “You and that old cow in there!”
“Ouch, that hurt,” Marit said, and the other girls burst into tears one after the other, Mother now appeared to be allowing some data to percolate through, Uncle Bjarne’s incomprehensible words perhaps:
“Do you imagine it was just you he abused, you dope?”
Then there was something about the darkness in the bathroom, which I gathered involved their father, my grandfather, of whom even less was said than of my father – we hadn’t even been to his grave, it was Uncle Oskar who tended it; I had been there once, one frosty morning, Christmas Eve four years ago, to light a candle and lay a wreath among millions of others, at the time I asked if Grandad was in heaven, and Uncle Oskar mumbled quietly into his frozen breath: “No, he’s in hell.”
This was not part of Uncle Oskar’s everyday vocabulary, so I stood poking around in the snow with the tip of my shoe, but the way he expressed himself made it sound a bit like, well, we all have to live somewhere, so I forgot it again, until I saw that Uncle Tor had also been struck by some mysterious affliction and was standing with his forehead against the ice cold windowpane, crying like a baby.
“There’s obviously been a lot of fun and games in this family,” Mother snorted and announced that the party was, as far as we were concerned, over, dragged us into the hall and started dressing Linda, who stood like a candle in the dark, still holding the Mikado stick which Mother had to snap to put on her gloves, while I gathered up all our presents and tucked them into the rucksack.
“What are you doing out there?” Gran called.
“Nothing,” Mother said. “As always.”
28
It can’t have been more than four o’clock. All the streets were silent, and all the houses, and the heavens too, and we did not say a word either, as we trudged off in the powdery snow until we found ourselves under the railway bridge by the timber yard, where Mother ca
me to a sudden halt and looked down at me:
“Did you know this was going to happen?”
“Not sure.” I shrank under her gaze. But she crouched down and would not let the matter rest, grabbed me by the shoulders, shook me and stared into the depths of what was left of me. “Did you know this was going to happen,
Finn?”
“Not sure,” I said. “But I think I can see … something.”
“What? What can you see?”
Perhaps I had a chance here to find her again, but that would have required more from me than I was capable of, I was on the verge of tears.
“Don’t you start as well,” she said, straightening up and looking around at the snowy railway bridge and the carless road that forked here, the glistening snow-covered ground that lay ahead of us, a good kilometre’s walk home in the cold early Christmas darkness, as though again she was wondering where on earth she was when she tore off one of Linda’s mittens and saw blood on her hand.
“My God, what’s this?”
Linda looked crestfallen. “What is it? Answer me, girl!”
“I stabbed her in the thigh.”
“What?”
Linda repeated the sentence, abashed.
“Who did you stab in the thigh?”
“Marit. With the stick.”
Mother and I exchanged glances, me desperately hoping that we might be able to laugh together again, at long last, the laughter of ours which had vanished. But she was lost to me, and remained so.
“God Almighty. Unwrap them.”
“Unwrap what?”
“These,” she repeated with resolve, grabbing the skis I was carrying on my shoulder and passed them to Linda, who was watching her, wide-eyed.
“Here?”
“Yes, here, missie, come on now.”
Linda stood still, smiled, opened the gift tag and read – To Linda from Mamma and Finn – and began to remove the paper, with infinite care so as not to ruin it, folded it up and put it in her school bag while Mother and I looked on.