“Anyone would think you hadn’t seen another human being in years, the way you’re going on,” I said.
“Someone has to say something,” he said. “Seeing as you’re not, I mean. Can’t you take your phone with you?”
I closed the door behind me, lifted John up, and rode the elevator down with him sitting on my arm. As soon as we reached the basement he bombed off along the passage on his little legs. In the laundry room itself he immediately started playing with the sweeping brushes. Someone had put our clean clothes nicely in the bags for us. Although this was a kind gesture, with no hint of annoyance in the form of a note about sticking to our times or reporting the matter to the caretaker, I still hurried back out again in case I ran into whoever was responsible, John in one hand, the two IKEA bags in the other. There had been feces on the sofa, I remembered all of a sudden, perhaps prompted by the two beer crates and the carrier bag that someone had left up against the wall, which we passed again on our way back through the basement. And there had been empties all the way up the staircase to the upper floor. The place had been littered with them. Plastic bags full of empty bottles under the piano. But maybe not on the staircase from the ground floor to the first floor? I couldn’t remember. Yet Gunnar seemed certain. He said he had proof, if it came to a court case.
What was I going to do if it went to court?
Oh, hell! Hell, hell, hell.
I lifted John up so he could press the button for the elevator, then put him down, only for him to reach out for me again, his arms in the air, perhaps because he wanted to see the elevator arrive, the light of its interior appearing in the rectangular window of the door. I lifted him up again. My body was weak with dread. He was so angry with me. He was so terribly angry with me.
“There!” said John.
And, sure enough, a light descended!
I opened the door, holding John up so he could press the top button, then putting him down again and studying my reflection in the mirror.
There wasn’t a trace of my inner turmoil to be seen. Just a serious-looking face with sad eyes, that was all.
John crouched and examined a little strip of red plastic on the floor that had caught his attention. It looked like one of those plastic binder things.
After some trouble he managed to pick it up between his little fingers.
“Look, Daddy!” he said, holding it up.
“Oh yes, that’s good,” I said.
Inside I was trembling, and nothing outside could help, it was as if everything was trembling there too.
The elevator stopped, I opened the door, John toddled out with his head down, absorbed in his bit of plastic. I cast one last glance at the mirror, stepped the few paces across the landing to the door of the apartment, which John was already trying to open, though without succes, and with ill-concealed annoyance prized his hands from the handle and opened the door.
Inside, the children were watching TV while Geir stood at the stove stirring the contents of the big saucepan he’d found, from which a thin, almost invisible veil of steam rose.
“How’s it going?” I asked.
“Fine,” he said. “I put the TV on. Is that all right with you?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m not a fan though.”
“You might not be, but the kids love it.”
I was sticky with sweat, not because I’d exerted myself in any way, but because the air was so humid. Through the window I noticed the sky to the east had gone cloudy and was now gray-white rather than the clear blue of only an hour before.
“If it were up to them, they’d watch TV from the minute they got up till they went to bed,” I said. “That’s why we’ve got rules.”
“Are we going to debate morals now? I’m not sure sausage is all that good for them either, but it tastes great and they like it.”
“There’s more than 70 percent meat in those sausages,” I said with a smile. “Morally, they’re beyond reproach. And now I’m going to have a smoke. Do you want to come with me?”
He nodded and followed.
“Actually, I have one principle when it comes to what Njaal watches,” he said from behind. “I try to slip something useful in every now and then, something educational. It’s not easy, though. All he wants is entertainment. It’s like pornography.”
I sat down, held up the thermos, and caught his eye, raising my eyebrows in inquiry. He shook his head, then leaned back against the railing. I poured myself a cup and lit a cigarette.
Here and there the gray-white cover of cloud slashed open, and gashes of dark drifted across the sky.
“Looks like there’s a storm on its way,” I said with a nod in its general direction.
“Is there?” he said, turning to see, then looking back at me. “But you play with your kids, don’t you? You might not like it all the time, but you do play with them. I do nothing. I rely more on warmth and humor.”
“So I’m cold and humorless when I play with them, is that it?”
He laughed.
“I don’t play with them much at all, to be honest,” I said. “I spend a lot of time with them, but I never exactly get down on the floor with the Lego or the farm animals.”
“Don’t give me that. You take them to the swimming pools on weekends. You take them to the park. You play football with them.”
“Sometimes, yes. But that’s not playing, is it?”
“True, if you want to be nitpicky, that’s up to you. But what I mean is you spend a lot more time and energy on your kids than I do on mine. That’s not to say Njaal doesn’t give me any joy. I believe the Chinese. They say a man doesn’t realize he’s a dad until his child’s five years old. There’s a lot of truth in that, if you ask me.”
“You won’t be a dad before next autumn, then.”
“Exactly.”
“You’ve only got one child, though. That makes it different. Once you’ve got three, you no longer have any choice in the matter.”
“I do tell Njaal I love him. In those words.”
“I can’t say the same. I don’t think I’ve ever said that. There’s a limit.”
“Draw not nigh hither. Ha ha ha!”
“Tread not upon the grass, my boy. Skjæraasen, wasn’t it?”
“Leave tender shoots to sprout! No, I can’t remember. But I think it has to do with the way we are, not just the roles we choose. Some people love to play. My dad’s got a way with children, they love him. The neighbor’s little boy still invites him to his birthday every year. He’s knocking on eighty now. The same outlook on life as Goethe. ‘For nothing brings us closer to madness than distinguishing ourselves from others, and nothing maintains common sense more than living in a normal way with many people.’ Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship.”
“Only someone on the outside, who doesn’t live in a normal way, could say something like that.”
“That’s the big difference between you and me, I think. Nearly everyone I know has a father who failed them in some way. And everyone tries to compensate for that failure in the way they relate to their own children.”
“It keeps the world going round, doesn’t it?”
“Even if you succeed, like my dad did – and I’d say he was an ideal father – the ideal doesn’t necessarily get passed down. What happens then is that the sons haven’t got anything to make up for. So you’re a better dad than your own father, while I’ll be a worse one than mine, and when it gets to Njaal’s turn he’ll be compensating for that in the way he relates to his own kids, who for their part are going to be just as hopeless as me, their granddad. The ideal doesn’t get inherited, that’s the point.”
“A kind of dialectics of hopelessness, is that it?”
“Exactly. Having a decent dad doesn’t help in the slightest.”
“Of course it does. It’s a good thing in itself. Having a stable and harmonious life, I mean.”
“But what do we get out of a harmonious childhood? I know loads of people whose childhood was fantastic,
but where did it get them? What have they done?”
“But that’s like an industrial viewpoint on life. As if it’s got to have a product. If that’s the idea, then you’re right. Nothing comes of a harmonious childhood. But what if it’s the harmony itself that’s the point? What if the meaning of everything is just a well-balanced life?”
“Oh, come on, you don’t really mean that! I’m much more in line with Ayn Rand, who writes that only a few individuals, a very small number of us, keep the world going. They’re the ones who make something of life, who achieve something in the world rather than just using or enjoying it.”
“But even in those people there’s a sense of restlessness. That’s why they create or act the way they do, because there’s a restlessness inside them, something incomplete. But what they’re aiming for, all the time, is harmony. All through their twenties and thirties and forties. The aim is to be able to sit in a garden and watch the sprinkler watering the lawn, with their children all around them, and to be able to think, right, that’s it, I’m happy now. All human urges are about the urge for harmony.”
“Listen, Aristotle, didn’t you just write that you weren’t interested in happiness?”
“Yes, but not that I’m not interested in harmony.”
“Same difference. But you’re right in what you say about restlessness and feeling incomplete, that it’s the strongest force of all. What’s happened in our time is that restlessness is no longer translated into action. Restlessness doesn’t produce anymore. We live in the age of therapy. Restlessness isn’t wanted, we try to remove it by talking about it. We’ve got one Vision Zero after another, trying to live immaculate lives in immaculately happy families, and our explicit aim in life is to eliminate road traffic deaths. But it’s a chimera, a great big lie. It’s ridiculous that we even believe it. But we do. Harmony, happiness, and no more deaths in traffic. Give me a useless dad who doesn’t give a shit! Give me a godforsaken awful childhood! Because something comes of that. Something gets created there. In the disharmony and the dissonance.”
“I can agree to that in theory, but not in practice. I look at my kids and the only thing I want is for them to be happy. To have as good a life as possible.”
“Well, all I can say is I hope you fail!”
“Actually, it’s something I think about a lot. What kind of impressions they’ll be left with from their childhoods when they get older. What all this is to them. I’ve no idea myself. And what they’ll have from me. No idea.”
They’re very different as well, in character, I mean. What you give to Vanja and Heidi might be exactly the same, but you can bet your life their experiences of it are going to be different, and they’ll understand it all differently too, in later life.”
“Yeah, I suppose so.”
“The truth is we don’t know what we’re doing. We don’t know where it’s going to lead. It’s a known fact that children of divorce are overrepresented in the crime figures, and the younger they were when the parents divorced, the greater the risk of them getting into trouble. But we won’t give up the right to divorce, so instead we say it’s best for the kids. In any system it’s impossible to foresee all the effects. To get back to the automobile: if anyone had said the invention of the automobile was going to kill thousands of people every year, would we have put it into production and centered our lives around it the way we have? No. So we don’t talk about that, we say the automobile brings us freedom and opportunity instead. And when capitalism increased its hold and we needed more labor, did anyone say women have got to leave the home now and start producing goods, so we can double the labor force? Not to mention double the number of consumers? No, they didn’t. That was women wanting the same rights as men. The right to work, what kind of a right is that? How’s that supposed to be liberating? It’s just the opposite, a prison. The consequence of that is that our kids are farmed out to an institution from the age of two, and what happens then? Mom and Dad are almost driven insane, aren’t they? They’re riddled with guilt, so they spend all the time they can on their kids when they’re not at work, trying to be as close to them as possible. Compensation, compensation, compensation.”
“The road from sociology to paranoia is shorter than one might think,” I said.
“What, don’t you agree?”
“Actually, yes. Especially the part about the chimera, as you called it. If you read Marx, Das Kapital, much of it’s about exploitation of the workers. They slogged away for sixteen hours a day under the most degrading conditions. So one of the most important goals of the workers’ movement was to limit the amount of work. Work was seen as something the employers – the capitalists, if you like – forced on the workers. It was slavelike. Nowadays, though, people work themselves into the ground of their own accord. Why? Because the idea has arisen that they realize themselves through their jobs. So work has become the opposite of alienating. Now it’s self-realization. Everyone works like mad now, because it’s good for them. The same with consumption. We find our identities in the purchase of goods that are mass-produced. You’d think it was a joke. But the worst thing is you’re not allowed to say that, it means you’re paranoid. And what’s more, that criticism has turned into a cliché, it’s become invalid by virtue of being repeated too many times. I remember when I was a student and read all that criticism and was totally in agreement with it at the same time as I was living my life in exactly the same way as what I was criticizing. It didn’t even occur to me then. And even if it had, I wouldn’t have done anything about it. The two spheres are separate. What you know, and what you do. They never join up. They’re like east and west. Or, at best, like the tie and the vest.”
“You couldn’t stop yourself there, could you?”
“No, but the point is it’s no longer possible to live in any other way. There are no alternatives. It’s seeped into everything.”
“Do you remember what you said once about Nazism being like amateur night? Well, it’s true. We, on the other hand, lead professional lives. And how can we not? I can’t ignore thinking about safety when it comes to Njaal, for instance. I can’t let him ride his bike without wearing a helmet, or run around at will in the neighborhood, even though it’s what I did when I was a kid.”
“Why, because you’d feel guilty if he fell and hit his head?”
“No, it’s not as simple as that. Once the thought’s there, that they have to wear a helmet and you’ve got to go with them everywhere they go, it’s no use trying to escape it anymore. It becomes my thought too. We can’t do anything other than wish the best for our children. Now, this is what happens to be best. But what governs that is the thought of what’s best. Because whether it really is best is something we’ve no way of knowing. When Njaal started nursery school, I wanted him to go to the nearest one, because that was the most practical, but Christina went all over, checking out all these different nurseries, because she wanted the best. But how could she know what was best for Njaal? Who knows what’s going to happen in a place, who he’s going to meet and what it’s going to mean to him? We can’t control life, only our thoughts about life. So everything that has to do with our kids is actually all about us. It’s the tyranny of good intent. All we can do is try for the best, it’s impossible to imagine any other way, but the consequences are beyond our control.”
“We’re starting to get old, that’s what it is,” I said.
“We are. How old was Voltaire when he wrote that all you need in life is a garden and a library? Certainly not twenty, that’s for sure.”
“Wasn’t it Cicero who said that?”
“Was it?”
I shrugged.
“Anyway,” I said. “I got a letter about six months ago with that quote in it. Only I read it wrong. I saw hagle instead of hage: ‘He who has a shotgun and a library wants for nothing,’ I thought it said.”
“Ha ha ha! A lot more credible too, if you ask me.”
“Completely in your spirit.”
�
�Yeah, but why do you think men went to war? Why do you think men would put everything, even their own children, aside in order to fight and kill? The answer, of course, is love. The love they felt was no less than the love women felt, just different. Now we connect intimacy and closeness with the truest of feelings. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve read people ridiculing men’s ways of dealing with emotions. Slapping each other on the back, that sort of thing. But a woman doesn’t know what it means to get a slap on the back when you’re down in the dumps. Men’s emotions are worth no less, if anyone believes that, just because they’re not expressed the way women’s are. What I’m saying is there are many different kinds of solicitude, and intimacy isn’t necessarily going to be right in itself. There’s no monopoly on feelings or caring. What happens if you’re all over your kids all the time, what does that get you? Nothing.”
“Harmony.”
“Nowhere near. I’ve yet to meet anyone less harmonious than you when you weren’t writing and all you had was your family. And when all these men start making amends for their own childhoods, they overcompensate, and in overcompensating they create the opposite problem. We go to the opposite extreme, wrapping them up in cotton wool and giving them whatever they want, in that way making sure they’re not going to feel any sense of gratitude or meaning, all they get out of it is an extreme childhood, only in a different way. So compensation doesn’t get you harmony or equilibrium. That said, however, I do know I’m a shitty dad. I had to face that when Njaal came along. It wasn’t nice. All the bad sides of me suddenly became significant. I try to be good for him, but most likely that’s not good enough. When he grows up he’ll be able to judge me for it. That’s his prerogative. But I can never judge him. Never. That’s a right I don’t have. And that’s where your uncle is wrong. He can’t take your father’s side and judge you. He hasn’t the right. No human being has. The children can judge the parents, but never the other way round.”
“Did you have to bring that up?”
“What?”
“Gunnar. I’d just managed not to think about it for five minutes.”
My Struggle, Book 6 Page 24