But that wasn’t possible. I become panic-stricken at the thought of anyone feeling annoyed, I want everyone to feel comfortable and am willing to give up everything that is mine in order for that to happen. If someone does not feel comfortable, I close my eyes to it or withdraw, since the only way I can deal with people not feeling comfortable is if they do so somewhere other than right in front of me. Out of sight, out of mind. It can even get to the point where for long periods I won’t open letters I receive for fear they might be unpleasant, since what other letters are there but letters from reality? Something’s burning in the Rosengård District, but the papers aren’t reporting on it because reporting on it might lead to other problems, might put racist ideas in people’s heads, so they close their eyes, shut their mouths, turn away. As such, I am the very epitome of Swedishness, but to be Swedish is also to possess something else, something alien to me, which is social adroitness. The ability to talk about matters great and small in a personal way without ever getting personal, which Swedes master to perfection, is something at which I am utterly inept; either I blurt out something so private that people look down or become ill at ease, or else I go on about something so remote from myself that everyone else quite naturally is bored to death. There is a colloquial elegance about Sweden that is collective and very much a part of the social world, something sophisticated and impressive, quite absent in Norway, where such casual refinement is always individual, attaching to those who have been fortunate, either in something they’ve just said or in their lives altogether.
* * *
A siren suddenly screamed out of nowhere, rising sharply, then stopping abruptly outside the building. I leaned forward and looked out; most likely it was over the road at the hotel, which with its many guests sometimes had to call for an ambulance. Businessman with a heart attack, I usually thought to myself; what else could happen to a person staying at a hotel?
This time it was a police car.
“What’s going on?” Geir wanted to know.
“A police car outside the hotel. Maybe they caught that dyslexic thief, the one with the misspelled youth.”
“Ha ha.”
“Should we get them dried now?” I asked, and looked at him inquiringly.
Geir shrugged and threw up his hands.
“Looks like they’re still having fun, if you ask me,” he said.
“Can you keep an eye on them for a minute then? I just need to check my e-mails.”
“Gunnar haunting you?”
“Not only.”
I went past him and into the bedroom, sat down on the chair, and clicked into my in-box.
There was a new message, from Jan Vidar.
Hi Karl Ove
Sorry to get back to you so late on this, came home Sunday and have been a bit busy since, a lot going on at work. I’m not shocked, and not angry either. Why should I be? Past is past, and writing about it isn’t going to change anything. Besides, there’s nothing there that can’t see the light of day as far as I’m concerned. I think I’ve got a fairly good idea of who I am and the way I was, and I really don’t care too much about what other people might think anymore. So if it benefits your story you can do what you like, it’s all fine by me.
Apart from that I must say the book knocked me out. Maybe because it’s all so close to home – or maybe it’s the way you write that does it, I don’t know, but others besides me are bound to get off on it. Fantastic and gut-wrenching at the same time. So incredibly exact about what it was like. Lots of stuff I’d forgotten – suppressed, maybe … but it all came rushing back full power. Fantastic, the way it set off so many thoughts about how and why.
Anyway, there I was, in the wilds of Finnmark, reading more than I was fishing. Came across an old peat hut and spent a lot of hours inside with your book. Incredible place, Bilbo Baggins could have lived there …
Hope it works out with your uncle and the rest of the family. And that they get the point.
If you’re up for a coffee or a beer next time you’re around, just give me a call. It’d be nice.
All the best to you and yours too.
Jan Vidar
It had been a long time since I’d felt as glad as I did after reading something. But there was also a tinge of what felt like grief in that joy, because with him coming across as generously as he did here, it became clear to me that I hadn’t done him justice. I was indebted to him. I had no problem with that; the sliver of despair I felt had to do with the time that had gone, it was there, in the past, back then, and I wished I could make up for that imbalance. Another thing which occurred when he said the novel had knocked him out was that I then assessed the forthcoming book in that light, and it was so radically different, having so little of the narrative thrust of the first book that no one would ever be able to say the same about it. In other words, it was less of a book, and that thought deflated my spirits.
I sat there for a minute in front of the computer in the bedroom, staring out the window, first at the railing of the balcony, then at the front of the hotel on the other side of the road, the three elevators which slid up and down in their unpredictable patterns, as the gleeful sounds of the children in the bath swelled and diminished in the background. I felt a sudden and very strong sense of closeness to Jan Vidar. The emotions of that time welled inside me, I saw the faces of his parents and his sister, recalled the smells of their home, and the landscape that had been ours, with all of its little places, glowed with the intensity of the most compelling memories. At the time it was just a landscape, almost insignificant, certainly when compared to the landscape in which I had grown up, which even then had been saturated with emotion, but now it too had become the Landscape, laden with significance and meaning. The same thing occurred with respect to those who had lived there. The number of people we come close to during our lives is small, and we fail to realize how infinitely important each and every one of them is to us until we grow older and can see things from afar. When I was sixteen, I thought life was without end, the number of people in it inexhaustible. This was by no means strange, since right from starting school at the age of seven I’d been surrounded by hundreds of children and adults; people were a renewable resource, found in abundance, but what I didn’t know, or rather had absolutely no conception of, was that every step I took was defining me, every person I encountered leaving their mark on me, and that the life I was living at that particular time, boundlessly arbitrary as it seemed, was in fact my life. That one day I would look back on my life, and this would be what I looked back on. What then had been insignificant, as weightless as air, a series of events dissolving in exactly the same way as the darkness dissolved in the mornings, would twenty years on seem laden with destiny and fate. The people who had been there then would become even more important, infinitely significant in as much as they had not only been shaping my perception of who I was, had not only been the people through which my own face emerged and became visible, but embodied the very understanding of how this particular life turned out the way it did.
I thought about all of this. And then I thought about how I had always considered time to be vertical. Time was to me a kind of ladder one climbed, whose rungs were ages – at the bottom one’s time at preschool, then school, gymnas, university, and so on. That thought had never been explicit to me, and I had never pictured it as such in that way, but somewhere in the depths of my conceptions some idea of that nature must have existed, subconsciously shaping the way I perceived things, and perhaps the most surprising thing I discovered while writing this novel was that everyone who had appeared in my life, even my friends at nursery, my mother’s co-workers at Kokkeplassen, the neighborhood kids in Tybakken, the cleaning lady we had there, my old teachers, and everyone else who had been there in my vicinity from when I was six months old to when I was thirteen, existed simultaneously with me now, and had always done so. Moreover, everyone I had known from my time in Tveit and in Kristiansand, at school and at the gymnas, existed on exact
ly the same level, in that same horizontality. Not one had sunk into the depths of history! All had lived their own lives, lived through exactly the same things as I myself, and had been contactable throughout this time, through all these years. They were a phone call away.
It had never occurred to me before. I had thought my life to be lived only in my immediate and most intimate surroundings, and that every place I ever left had gone from my life at that same moment.
Naturally, I didn’t really think that to be true, had never even entertained the thought, but something inside me had certainly experienced things in that way, that the places I left, and the people who populated them, died away after I was gone. For that reason it had not been them I had written about, but my recollections of them. The fact that they still existed in their own right, at the same time as my writing about them, had not occurred to me.
At the time they took place, the events of my life had possessed a weight of which I had been wholly unaware. Now that I could sense that weight, paradoxically it was gone, as if my life and the person I had been were now fixed, and that nothing of what had taken place then could change the fact. It was only a feeling I had, but it was strong. I was somewhere else. Now it was my children who were living through days heavy with destiny and fate. Although I knew this was so, I had difficulty putting myself in their place, seeing things through their eyes, not the way they saw them now, but the way they would later realize they had been seeing them. To me, the life we lived together was a long series of everyday events, and all I could do was behave accordingly, as if caught in their trap. The idea that this time too would one day be gone often filled me with consternation. Now was the time I could be close to them, my children, now was the time I could give them all my love and attention. In only a few years – and a year in the life of a forty-year-old passed with the hurtling speed of a locomotive compared with how to them it crept along – they would be beyond it all, adults in whose past, the time and events by which they were formed, I had never quite been present. This and nothing else would be what they judged me by. But even when they judged me I would still be the person I was, with the knowledge of what everything had been like and why, something to which they would not, and perhaps never would, have access. So what I hoped for was for them to grow up in a world that received them well, and in that way to gain independence from me and us.
* * *
I got up and went back to the bathroom. The sky rumbled abruptly over the city.
“Did you hear that?” I asked.
“It’s thundering,” said Vanja.
“Time to get dried,” I said. “Come on, out you come.”
One by one I lifted my three children out of the bath, draped a big towel over each of them, and quickly rubbed their tummies and backs before sending them out to make room for Geir and Njaal. I got some underwear out of the drawer in the bedroom for Vanja and Heidi, and a fresh diaper for John from the little bathroom, then handed nightgowns to the girls, who had already climbed into bed, before helping John with his pajamas.
“When’s Mommy coming home?” said Vanja.
“Tomorrow.”
“I want Mommy now!” said Heidi.
“It won’t be long before she’s home,” I said. “First you go to sleep, then you go to dagis tomorrow, and then when you come home she’ll be back.”
“Mommy,” said John.
“You’ll see,” I said. “She’ll be back before you know it. Vanja, do you want to choose a book?”
I sat down on the bed. Heidi and John sat down next to me. The sky rumbled again. Vanja and Heidi both looked at me, Vanja from the bookshelf over by the wall.
“It’s nothing to be frightened of,” I said. “It’s a nice sound, don’t you think?”
Heidi shook her head. Vanja took a book and brought it over to us, then sat down slightly behind me.
The air in their bedroom felt dense and clammy, my head was still thumping slightly.
The book was about a little girl who was very timid and unadventurous, she was in nursery school, and one day they were on a trip, she got separated from all the others and met a pack of wolves, who at first were scary, yellow eyes among the trees, but then when they came up to her it turned out all they wanted was to play. The game they liked best was one where they were patients in a hospital, they could lie there on their backs without moving while she went around and tickled them. The next morning they took her back to the nursery, and on the last page she could finally do what she hadn’t had the courage to do before, which was to jump down from the roof of the little playhouse.
Their little breathing bodies cuddled up to me, absorbed by the story. The thunder rumbling closer in the sky. The drumming of the rain on the balcony and on the square below. The innocence, all that was pure and fine in them.
I got up. They wanted more, but I told them one book was enough, it was late and time to sleep, they had to be up in the morning. I lifted John up and carried him over to his crib, pretending to drop him from on high, catching him again as he fell. He laughed and said, again, Daddy. I said no, turned to Heidi and told her to climb up into her bed and Vanja to get into hers, and then I would come and tickle them.
I sang Heidi a song about a mommy troll putting her children to bed, and another for Vanja about a little songbird, and the one about sailing without a wind for John. They seemed ready to sleep, but a bit overtired too.
“Can the door stay open like that?” Vanja asked.
“Of course,” I said.
“What if the lightning strikes here?” she wanted to know.
“It can’t,” I said.
“Will we die?”
“No, no, no. The first thing is it can’t happen, because lightning always strikes the highest point. What’s the tallest building here?”
“The hotel?”
“Exactly. So if lightning strikes here it’ll strike the hotel instead. And the hotel’s got lightning conductors, so nothing will happen there either.”
“But if,” she said. “Will we die?”
“No, we won’t. We’re safe here. And now it’s sleep time for little tots. We’ve got to be up early in the morning.”
“Night night,” said Vanja.
“Night night, Vanja,” I said. “Night night, Heidi.”
She didn’t answer. I went over to her bunk and peeped in. She was fast asleep. Sometimes she could just fall asleep from one moment to the next.
I smoothed my hand over her head. She was snoring slightly.
“Night night, John,” I said.
“Night, Daddy,” he said.
“Heidi’s snoring,” said Vanja.
“Yes, she is,” I said. “She’s fast asleep. And in a minute you’ll be asleep too.”
“But she’s snoring!”
“Just ignore it, you won’t hear her then,” I said, stepped out and closed the door behind me.
“DADDY!” Vanja shouted.
The door.
I opened it again.
“I forgot, that’s all. Go to sleep,” I said, left the door ajar and went into the living room. I heard Geir’s voice in the other room, opened the balcony door, stepped out and sat down in the chair.
Oh, the air was so cool and delightful.
A diagonal bolt of lightning cracked out of the heavy gray cloud and vanished again. I lit a cigarette. Another lightning bolt, to the south this time, sliced through the sky. The thunder came rolling in. Raindrops splattered white against the black roofing and were felt six floors below, and on the roof of the building opposite it looked like they were rebounding. Another peal of thunder, this time accompanied by a crackling fracture, so loud that no other sound compared, it seemed almost to make the entire city shudder.
My Struggle, Book 6 Page 29