by Roy Jacobsen
A pair of Splitkein skis, one metre forty long, which Kristian had impregnated and strapped together with a small wooden block in the middle to retain the elasticity, with Kandahar bindings that can be adjusted on both sides using small brass screws; there is something dependable and cultivated about a pair of Splitkeins that speaks to your heart of snowy landscapes, the glossy, mahogany-brown surface with light-coloured inlays oozing chocolate and time-honoured solidity, libraries and violins.
“She hasn’t got any boots, has she?”
“Yes, she has. Here.”
Mother unhitched her rucksack, pulled out Linda’s pitch-seam skiing boots, ordered her to sit down and changed her footwear while I loosened the straps and realised there was no wax under the skis, just a black impregnate which still stank of tar. Linda carefully placed her boots in the bindings so that I could fasten and adjust them. Mother said:
“Off you go now.”
Linda took two steps and fell, I got her on her feet, and she fell again. Mother removed the rope from the rucksack and tied a loop at one end. “Hold onto this and we’ll pull you.”
Linda grabbed the rope and we dragged her up through Muselunden Park and Disen estate, it was like a Nativity scene depicting life’s most fundamental relationship. I caught Mother smiling once, and then a second time. She slipped on the ice beneath the snow, went flying and sat eating snow from her gloves, laughing and commenting on Linda’s skiing style, Linda lost her temper and tried to dunk Mother in the snow, and they began to wrestle while I looked on, a spectator, because – in front of my very eyes – yet another chapter had opened in Mother’s unfathomable nature.
It started snowing again, white ash fluttering down from a black void and turning yellow in the street lights from Trondhjemsveien before settling on skin and clothes and ground. They sat beside each other like two young schoolgirls, and it is thanks to this image that I always think of childhood as yellow, these lights that, for once, shone for no purpose, there was not a car to be seen, my heart was ticking in a bell of matt glass – when Mother began to speak in the same earnest manner that she had used when leaving us on the island in the summer, about this hospital she had been to, which was no ordinary hospital like Aker, for example, which we could just see through the falling snow, where you had your tonsils or appendix removed, but a hospital that worked to eradicate bad memories, such as being locked up and knocked senseless in your childhood, by your own father, memories that remained and bled like a burst appendix in your mind, no matter how old you became, and threatened to poison even the smallest thought, so even though we might have considered this to have been a difficult year it had been good for her, when all was said and done, she just hadn’t realised it until now, this very minute, thanks to the mysterious hospital the gift of Linda, who had given her fresh courage and taught her something she believed she would never unlearn, and also you, she added, fortunately, I was still there and was not exhibiting any signs of going mad, not just yet.
“Do you understand what I’m telling you, Finn?” she said in much too loud a voice, but with a broad smile, for it was meant in jest, she sat there so in control and unvanquished and secure.
“Yes,” I said, compliant rather than enlightened. Linda said yes as well and nodded a couple of times because it was important here to have agreement, we perceived it that way at least, and for Mother to be at ease with herself, and that was more than enough.
It had just turned six when we clattered into the flat where Mother went into action frying the chops and rissoles which had been intended for Christmas Day. I wrapped Linda up in a duvet and sat her in front of the Christmas tree which this year not only had egg-carton decorations but proper red-and-white hearts, woven by Linda and me and Freddy 1, who created the biggest of them all, a yellow one. We devoured home-made marzipan and pepper nuts for all we were worth until dinner was on the table. And then at last we were ready for some hearty laughter, what an evening, tomorrow we would have to make do with sauerkraut and gravy!
After the food, there were even more presents. Clothes and an autograph album for Linda, a watch for Mother from Kristian, who this year was also celebrating with his family, plus a pile of books for me.
But, when Linda had fallen asleep and we were listening to carols on the radio and I was reading Five Go To Smugglers’ Top and Mother was drinking red wine, three glasses already, and was snugly ensconced in her armchair gawping at the Christmas tree, unhappily there came a devastating postscript to the relief I had felt out in the snow.
“Do you think I should marry Kristian?”
She was winding the wrist watch that she had unpacked with a much more practised air than when the gold hare first made its appearance.
“He’s asked me. What do you think?”
I said no without a moment’s hesitation. Repeated it, too, quite loud.
“Why not?”
“Why?”
Because men were just comic characters, I had a dead father, a grandfather in hell, I knew Frank from over the way, who whistled and smelled of horses, Freddy 1’s father who was never there, Jan with the dry ice and the high-pitched voice, who had same ill-fated profession as Uncle Tor; Uncle Oskar was the only one I got along with, in my own way, but he, too, was guilty of something I dare not even imagine. And the very thought of Mother going to bed with the lodger in the temporary digs made my spine run cold.
“I know, I know, he’s a deceitful devil,” she mumbled unprompted, but with a strange laugh.
“I don’t want to be adopted by Kristian,” I said.
“Yes, there is that,” she said with the same casual intonation, letting the watch dangle from around her wrist like a noose. But then something occurred to her. “But then we won’t be able to sort out Linda’s papers.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m a single mother, Finn. Only married women are allowed to adopt. And all this mess we’ve made …”
This was a reference to everything from Linda’s being given medicines, which was tantamount to child abuse, to the row at school, to Linda’s possible dyslexia or whatever the thing was bloody called and to this thing that wasn’t there but nonetheless would not go away. And, as I had nothing to add, because I had no brain left to think with, that was when it came:
“Someone is ruining everything for us, but I’m not allowed to see the papers, all they tell me is that it could take a bit more time, a bit longer … And …”
“Yes?” I said as she paused.
“And then they come up with this business about me having been unwell …”
“But there’s nothing wrong with you!”
“No, of course not …”
I wanted to scream, the evening was being blown sky-high after all, I would have jumped up and run away, had it not been for the fact that I had already done so, I wanted to see black and white pictures of people sitting by a tent holding a cup of coffee, standing in a field with pitchforks over their shoulders and looking as if they were enjoying themselves, I wanted to see an invisible crane driver and Mother on the bumper of a Ford, above all I wanted to see her as she had been only a few hours ago, sitting beside Linda, eating snow and saying, in an almost credible way, it had been a great year.
“But we have a triumph card,” she said, interrupting my thoughts.
“It’s called a trump!” I shouted angrily.
She laughed and took a swig of wine.
“You’re unbelievable.”
“What is it then?” I yelled. “The trump?”
She looked straight at me and said, coolly:
“It’s you. You’re related to her. It’s a blood …”
“Blood tie?”
“Yes, you’re her only relative, apart from the mother. Neither her nor … your father have any surviving …”
“So you don’t need to marry Kristian after all,” I exclaimed, and she stared dreamily at the Christmas tree, at Freddy 1’s Christmas heart, or so I reckoned, it distinguished itself
by being the biggest, the clumsiest and by some distance the yellowest that has ever been hung on a Christmas tree. But then she spotted something which I had hoped she would not, and which, in the light of the latest phase of the conversation, I had made up my mind to hide away, so long as she didn’t notice it, that is, a final present concealed behind the base of the tree, a small cylinder in green paper with a home-made tag.
“What’s this?” she asked, getting to her feet and picking it up.
Linda had read out the names on the presents this year, but she had forgotten this one or intentionally ignored it, and now Mother was studying the tag. To Kristian from Linda.
She searched my face, of course Mother and I hadn’t bought anything for Kristian, as far as I was aware, for all the good reasons in existence for not giving someone a present, it means altogether too much in a situation like ours.
“What’s this?”
“I don’t know,” I said. But those days were gone, for ever, she only needed to look at me. “A drawing,” I was forced to admit. “I think it’s a horse.”
“A horse?”
“Yes, a horse!”
And so ends the evening, Christmas Eve, with Mother clutching a rolled-up drawing of an unrecognisable horse which she cannot decide whether to open or hide or hand over to the rightful owner, and I look down at the faded letters in the book I have been given and make myself more comfortable on the sofa, so that the last thing she said will not vanish into the night, the bit about the trump, “hope it will work”, hear the patter of feet in the flats all around us, voices and muffled laughter, a door slamming and a tap being turned on, the sounds of the building, the murmuring bloodflow of the radiators, and also the rubbish chute – the hatch and the fall and the clatter in the cellar – and the footsteps that fade away before the world awakens to the smell of candle wax, gravy and spruce twigs. It is night time on the estate. The night of the year. I see Linda running towards me, see her dissolving into thin air and slipping between my fingers as I awake in a sea of sweat to the sound of thunder.
But it is the sound of sleep.
A faraway island in the dark. Two islands, Linda and Mother, breathing, and I lie listening to the turbulent sky that only a mother can create and also only a mother can destroy, until the sweat on my body dries, for everything becomes clearer from a vantage point such as this, looking down from the pinnacle of night, all I have to do is get up and fetch the watch from her bedside table and take it to the kitchen and retrieve the hammer from the shoe box where we keep the tools high in a cupboard above the sink, and with one well-aimed blow smash the bloody watch to pieces on the formica table.
I sweep up the bits, the cogwheels and hands and slivers of glass, and put them in a pile beside the hammer, like one of Freddy 1’s Christmas decorations, and go back to the bedroom.
“What was that?” she mumbles.
“Just me,” I whisper, climbing onto the top bunk and going to sleep.
Next day the weather is clear and bright. Uncle Oskar drops by, with a pork joint under one arm and a bottle of aquavit under the other, Uncle Oskar who never touches a drop and will not do so now, neither he nor Mother. They are sitting at the kitchen table, each with a cup of coffee, and finishing a serious conversation when Linda and I come in after a hard session on the ski slopes, where Linda has made great progress, depending on how you see that, but she has not attracted as much attention as Freddy 1, who was given jumping skis for Christmas.
“Ah, here come the young ‘uns,” Uncle Oskar chuckles, and Mother looks at us as though she is of like mind, my young ‘uns, the trump card and his sister, she can’t even be bothered to help us off with our boots and clothes, we have to do that ourselves. But she sits there watching, with the same smile that had been on Uncle Oskar’s face in the gleam from the paraffin lamp in Gran’s wood cellar when he discovered that Linda was no different from everyone else, the man who had never seen her before, as though fresh eyes were needed.
The aroma of roast pork in the flat, warmth, a glass of Solo, Christmas all over again, Mother and Uncle Oskar are talking about snow, it is a winter made for young people, and not a word is said about the catastrophic Christmas Eve, nor about the marriage. And when the smashed watch is not brought up either, I realise it must have been a dream.
As we take our places for dinner Jan and Marlene also drop by and Mother says they may as well stay. Marlene, with her new engagement ring, bought on the Swedish border, who drinks aquavit at the same speed as Uncle Tor, without looking any the worse for wear. Stories are told about the summer, about dry ice and the potato race and a shop that is open and closed at the same time, stories that share common ground with photographs in that they can be listened to without your feeling any desire to cry. We sit around the kitchen table talking and chomping on skull-crunching cold crackling and then play Crazy Eights and whist, which Linda wins once, with me as a partner, easy as wink. I meet Mother’s gaze across the table, and we agree – I feel – that now life is bloody well beginning! Now things are beginning to go the way they should, in our family too. And that is how they will continue through the winter and spring, touch wood, and summer and autumn and through the rest of the Sixties, this incredible decade when men became boys and housewives women, which started with some pointless decorating and being hard-up, and especially when the poor mite got off the Grorud bus one dark November day with a bombshell in a small, light-blue suitcase and turned our lives upside down.
29
They came for Linda on 8th January, at school. In other words, they knew what they were doing. The same afternoon we were visited by a man in a hat and coat who handed over a document and said they had found her some good foster parents somewhere, who already had a son of my age, so the transition would not be so difficult, she would be fine.
Since Mother could not bring herself to sign the paper, he said it didn’t matter, the formalities were in place anyway, approved by the hairdresser woman and the authorities. So the only question left was whether Linda would be allowed to take any more than her school bag and the clothes she was standing up in, things she was fond of, games, a doll?
Neither Mother nor I had much to say in this regard either.
We sat in our chairs in the sitting room and had stopped living. The man who was here in the name of charity and justice had not. He could understand us, he said, but experience told him things like this were done in the child’s best interests.
Then he left.
Mother and I said nothing to each other that day, as far as I can remember. The morning after we got up as usual, we sat without looking at each other across the breakfast table, and we didn’t eat much either. Afterwards we went our different ways, a mother to work in a shop selling dresses and shoes to whoever might be interested, and a son to school to sit behind Tanja and stare at her black hair, not hearing a word that was said.
We met again at the dinner table and still had nothing to say. But in the middle of the night Mother broke down while I lay motionless, listening to sounds from the time Linda stopped taking her medicine. And when I returned from school the next afternoon her things had gone, clothes, games, books. Amalie. The following day her bed was gone, too, I suppose it must have ended up back in the loft, without any help from me this time. We were paralysed victims of natural forces and sat as still as mice waiting for things to get even worse.
Two weeks later Kristian moved out, he didn’t wear a hat and coat any more but a jumper covered in snowflakes and reindeer. He had bought himself an old Chevrolet which he filled with all his worldly goods. He left behind the microscope and the chess board. He also wanted to leave us the T.V. set.
“Take it with you,” Mother said in a tone that made him take it with him.
There must have been a winter and spring that year as well, a summer too, for all I know, but we stayed indoors, under cover, me back in my old room, the lodger’s room, with a view over to Essi. And Mother in her old room, with a view of nothing. I
could not bring myself to look at her any more, we lived our own lives, at the bottom of an ocean of silence, and did not resurface until some time in September. Then we started to do the place up again, at long last we bought a bookcase and adorned the whole flat in an even more discreet wallpaper, costly.
“Can we afford this?” I asked.
“What do you think?” Mother said, and cut the wallpaper and stirred the paste at night and went to work during the day, she was working overtime, she went to evening classes and studied book-keeping and checked the accounts for fru Haraldsen, from whom Linda and I had had to hide in a fitting room on one occasion. Then she took over accounts, was put in charge of buying and worked longer hours. We were what everyone else in this country was, we were better off.
“It’s as if it never happened,” Mother said one evening at the end of October, coming down from the step-ladder and casting an eye over our new world, mumbling, in complete seriousness, that Linda had just been an angel that Our Lord had sent down to patch up her life, we had only had her on loan and should be grateful for the time we had spent together.
I looked at her and knew this was something I would never be able to forgive.
I plastered the walls of my room with pictures of English pop stars and spectacular planets, an unrecognisable orange horse and a blown-up aerial photo of Tonsen estate, the way it looked before we moved there, in the Fifties. The crane driver in the middle of the picture was my father doing his bit for the local community, invisible in the photograph and invisible in life, locked in a drawer with his daughter, now as invisible as he, standing on a beach with Boris and me and without a swimming belt.
I started Ungdomsskole the year The Doors sang “When the Music’s Over”. And Gymnas to the tones of Led Zeppelin. Where I met Boris again. We were in the same class doing maths and science and were still like two peas in a pod. But we didn’t have quiffs any longer. We had shoulder-length hair, we wore battered military jackets, talked in code and were preparing for the revolution. We were what everyone else in this country was, we were better off.