“You know, kind of a telling look.”
“You think I’d give you a telling look about something relating to Linda while she was there? I’d never dream of such a thing.”
“Well, it looked like it to me, anyway,” I said, letting go of Heidi’s hand for a second while I wiped my palm dry against my trousers, then taking hold of it again. “She saw it too, I think. That’s why she went off like that.”
I pushed open the door of the Systembolaget, the state-run liquor store, gave it an extra shove so Geir could come through too, grabbed one of the gray baskets with the black handles, and went through the little automatic barrier, already scanning the signs above the aisles to see where the white wine was.
“I can understand it’s not going to be much fun for her if everyone in Norway hates you all of a sudden and you’re in the hot seat like some criminal. But she’s not the one getting the worst of it, is she? So yes, that’s the way I look at it.”
“Daddy?” said Heidi.
“Yes?”
“Is this soda?”
She pointed to a display stand with various shelves that could be spun round. They were full of green bottles of Jever’s nonalcoholic beer.
“No,” I said. “It’s beer. Do you want soda?”
She nodded.
“All right, we’ll get some in Hemköp after we’re done here. OK?”
She nodded again. We found the white wine section and stopped in front of the shelves. They were arranged according to price, the cheapest on the right, then more expensive the farther left you went. It suited me fine; I knew nothing about wines, so whenever we had guests for dinner I just went with one a bit left of center and hoped for the best.
I put three bottles of Chablis in the basket and looked at Geir.
“Will that be enough?”
“I should think so.”
I looked around for the cognac, locating it in one of the intersecting aisles closer to the checkout. I went over and stood there for a moment looking at all the labels, unable to recall the system of quality grades, the O’s and the X’s, and the differences between them, and ended up putting a half-bottle of a brand I hadn’t tasted before in the basket before joining the line behind a man of about fifty who gave off a blend of the characteristic sportiness a polo shirt and a pair of khaki shorts can lend to a tanned frame, and the alcoholism his fatigued features and lackluster eyes otherwise seemed to indicate. He bought two cartons of white wine.
“First came the volcanoes, then the dinosaurs,” said Heidi.
“That’s right!” I said.
“And then came the people.”
“Yes.”
“But the dinosaurs didn’t know they were called dinosaurs.”
I looked down at her. She was staring at a man in a wheelchair who had joined the other line, his basket resting in his lap. It sounded like something I could have said. But I couldn’t remember having done so.
“Who told you that?” I asked her.
“What?”
“About the dinosaurs.”
“No one. Why is he sitting in a wheelchair? Is he sick?”
When we had traveled home after spending last Christmas in Jølster, Heidi had suddenly fallen ill on the journey, and by the time we got to Flesland, Bergen’s airport, she was so feeble we had to borrow a wheelchair for her. She still talked about it. It was one of the events that stood out in her life so far.
“I don’t know,” I said, and put the basket down on the little counter before the checkout as the man in front of me placed the divider bar behind the second of his cartons on the conveyor.
“I don’t suppose prawns are anything special to you, are they, now that I come to think of it?” I said to Geir as he went past the till, presumably to bag the wine as it came down the conveyor. “It’s probably all you eat when you’re on Hisøya.”
“You might have thought of that before,” he said.
“Paying by card?” said the assistant.
“Yes,” I said.
“Six hundred and twelve, then,” he replied.
“Yeah, it was a bit stupid of me,” I said, inserting my card into the reader. “You might have said so, though.”
“We’re here to spend time with you. We could have boiled onion and it wouldn’t make any difference. For goodness’ sake, man.”
Two people in the other lane looked across at us.
I didn’t care for this, and turned away so all they could see was my back.
We were speaking Norwegian, that must have been it. Unless they happened to think we were a pair of gay men out with our surrogate child. Or our niece. Weren’t gay men often close to their nieces?
“Thank you,” said the assistant.
Why on earth would they think that?
It was enough me looking like an idiot, with the beard and the long hair. I looked like a has-been heavy-metal musician rapidly heading for his fiftieth birthday. Oh, the fleshy face, the chubby cheeks, the deep furrows, and that wispy beard.
Heidi clung to my leg all of a sudden. I looked around. There was an old terrier sitting against the wall in the bagging area at the end of the checkout, its leash wrapped around the leg of a chair.
“It’s all right, I’m sure he’s friendly,” I said. “Walk on the other side of me as we go out.”
She did as I said. As soon as we were outside she changed sides again.
We strolled along the sidewalk, the flagstones cast into shade, the warm air seeming even warmer now after the air-conditioned environment of the liquor shop, then passed into sunlight as we crossed the side street, which was edged by leafy deciduous trees. They were invisible in the same way as all the parked cars were invisible, something one usually failed to notice, apart from at the end of April and the beginning of May when they blossomed white, as if dressed with snow, all the way down the street.
My anxiety suddenly intensified, it felt like it came streaming from every extremity to lump together in my abdomen, and I looked down at Heidi walking beside me, the small steps she took as she gazed toward the windows of the shopping center on the other side of the road. I was in pain, such terrible pain. It was like everything had come apart. And although I knew the reason, the book I had written and the reaction it had provoked, I had no idea why the emotions it sparked should be so powerful, it was as if they had been separated from their origin and were now running wild. This was the anatomy of guilt. Guilt was in everything, spreading vaporously through my organism, pervading my very fabric with its ruin and destruction. It was a guilt that could no longer simply be traced back and attributed to the terrible thing I had done, it was now rampant in its own right.
We passed between the sidewalk advertising on one side and the bike racks on the other, then went into the supermarket, where, to our right, the cell phone provider 3 had set up a stand that seemed to be mostly made of cardboard, manned by two young men of about twenty who stood there trying to grab the attention of passersby so they could ask them which provider they used. If they asked me, I invariably mumbled something vaguely dismissive, I wasn’t at all comfortable, their energy was so incredibly cheerful and positive, mine so dismissive and negative. Who was that? Vanja always asked. What did they say? What did they want?
Now they were both engaged in discussion with a woman of about fifty, and we walked past without hindrance into the big store, with its checkouts on one side and the combined kiosk, gambling station, and post office on the other. I grabbed a basket, went through the barrier with Heidi, who looked up at the TV monitor that hung from the ceiling as we came toward the camera.
“Do you want a banana?” I said.
She nodded, let go of my hand, and stared up at the monitor’s reaction as she put first one, then the other arm in the air. I picked up one of the ripe bananas whose skin was speckled brown, which they had put out for children to take in a small box next to the regular, hard, yellow-green bananas, peeled it, and handed it to her.
“We need lemons, mayon
naise, soda, and mineral water,” I said.
“Don’t forget the ice cream and the fruit,” said Geir.
“You’re right,” I said.
“You don’t look that well, are you OK?” he said.
“Does it show?”
He laughed.
“You look worried to death.”
“I’ll be all right,” I said. “It’s probably just that I’d much rather it all wasn’t happening. I don’t want to upset people. I don’t want to offend anyone. I don’t want to wreck anything for anyone.”
I put five lemons in one of the smoky bags, which seemed immediately to yield to them, suppressing its faint transluscence in favor of the yellow of the fruit where it bulged against the plastic, bringing even the pores of the outer rind to the fore.
“I know,” said Geir. “But it’s done now.”
“Yeah, and it hurts like hell,” I said, looking away to see where Heidi was. “Come on, Heidi!”
She came running, curled her hand into mine, and walked at my side as we went down the aisles, past the fish counter and the ready-made meals, the cheese and charcuterie counter, with its cheeses the size of barbell weights, salami sausages like baseball bats, past the island displays of bread, the rows of cookies, to the slanting shelves of carbonated drinks, where I put two one-and-a-half-liter bottles of Loka mineral water, one with citrus, the other without, into the basket, followed by four glass bottles of Fanta.
“It makes no difference your telling me I’ve done nothing wrong,” I said. “I can tell myself that. I’ve written about myself and my life with my father, what can be so terrible about that? That’s what I tell myself. But it doesn’t help in the slightest. It has no bearing on the matter. Arguments don’t help. Legal arguments don’t help. Literary arguments don’t help. I’ve overstepped a mark, and it’s got to me.”
“If the sociologists could understand that, maybe the discipline would have a future,” said Geir.
“Understand what?” I said, looking up from the tubes of mayonnaise, which reminded me of my childhood, and the jars of mayonnaise, which I considered somehow more sophisticated.
“Social boundaries, the things that regulate what we do and allow us to exist side by side with each other, aren’t abstract. They’re not thoughts. They’re concrete, as you say. If you overstep the mark, it hurts. That’s what you’re sensing now.”
“Sensing? But it hurts like I killed someone. Oh! And not just anyone, but someone close to me. That kind of feeling. Like something irreparable has happened.”
I glanced around. Heidi was nowhere to be seen.
“Jar or tube?” I said. “Real or light? French or Swedish?”
“Take one of each,” he said. A tube of Swedish light, and a jar of real French.”
“You’re a genius,” I said. “I’d never have thought of that.”
“Where’s Heidi got to?” he said.
“She’ll either be at the ice cream or down by the pet toys.”
We set off toward the middle aisle. A child screamed somewhere, but it was a baby, six months old at most. As we got to the corner I looked up the aisle. There she was, with a pet toy in her hand, the kind that squeak when you press them, just as she was doing.
“Come on, Heidi,” I said. “We’ve got to pay now.”
She put it down and came running back to us.
“Can we have a rabbit?” she said.
“We already had a rabbit,” I said. “It didn’t really work out that well.”
“Can’t we have another one?” she said. “One that’s nicer?”
I laughed.
“You were so afraid of it,” I said.
“No, I wasn’t.”
“A little bit,” I said.
“I wasn’t.”
“We’ll have to see,” I said.
The rabbit had come from one of the nursery staff. It was Linda’s project. Cage and rabbit were transported home and put in the corner of the kitchen. The rabbit was frightened, and we were too. None of us dared take it out of its cage. John dropped all sorts of stuff in there. After two days we had to take it back. Hopefully, the episode had had no adverse affect on Vanja and Heidi. The arrangement had been that we could borrow it and see how it went, so it wasn’t that big a failure, not like the aquarium, when all the fish had died one after another over the course of the spring.
It hurt to think about it. The things we did were their childhood.
I stopped at the ice cream, picked out a tub of Carte d’Or with real vanilla, which I supposed was what the little black specks in the yellowish ice cream were, shards of vanilla pod, and put it in the basket. I looked at Heidi.
“You can decide what kind of ice creams you want. Have a look in there,” I said, indicating the other counter where they had popsicles too. “Look at the poster and see which ones you want.”
She studied the various sorts.
“That one,” she said, pointing to a Piggelin. “No, I mean that one,” she said, and pointed at a Daim.
“That’s the biggest one they’ve got,” I said. “Are you sure?”
She nodded, and I put three Daim and an ice-cream sandwich in the basket.
“There we are,” I said. “Now we can go up and pay.”
“Fruit?” said Geir.
“I’ll get some from the stall outside the apartment. It’s cheaper there. And better too.”
We got in line, there were about ten other people in front of us. I put the basket down on the floor.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “I forgot the wafers.”
I hurried over to the far side of the supermarket and stared at the rows of wafers, there had to be fifty different varieties, but none of the fluted kind I wanted, or at least I couldn’t see any. Maybe they had some more on the other side? Then, suddenly, on a lower shelf I hadn’t noticed before, at a right angle to the other shelves, and separated from them by a two-meter-wide passage, in their blue-and-white packaging, were the Belgian wafers I’d only ever seen before in Stockholm.
Perfect.
I grabbed two packs and hurried back to the checkout, where Geir and Heidi were now sixth in line.
“Your evening’s just been saved,” I said, putting the wafers in the basket. “Belgian waffle wafers.”
“Now I’m a happy man,” he said.
I picked up the basket and kept hold of it in my hand as step-by-step we progressed slowly toward the till; there was no way in the world I was going to end up the sort of person who shoved their basket over the floor with their foot while they flicked through a newspaper they had no intention of buying, putting it back in the rack as soon as it got to be his turn. I took four lightbulbs from the shelf next to the conveyor; the bulb in the hall by the kitchen had gone, I remembered, and the one above the toilet in the bathroom.
Heidi slipped off to the end of the conveyor as our turn approached, clambering up onto the counter that was intended for bagging your purchases, then looking up at me in case I shook my head. I didn’t, so she stayed put, watching the first items bought by the man in front of us come sailing along on their black conveyor-belt river, gently sliding ashore onto the sedate metal, there to be buffeted by the items that followed, in patterns of movement not unlike those made by sticks and plastic detritus in the quiet pools that came after swift-flowing sections of water, only much slower.
He placed the divider bar on the conveyor, thereby signaling that it was our turn, and I lifted the basket up onto the ledge that was there for the purpose, putting the items one by one onto the conveyor, the big bottles of mineral water upright so they could be easily scanned, but the motion caused them first to wobble, then to fall, one against the other, like a pair of drunks. The assistant was the young man with the funny voice and the crutch, he glanced up at me and uttered his mechanical hej. I infused my own with a degree of enthusiasm, thinking vaguely it would add some touch of humanity to his plight, this conveyor-belt reality he occupied, but forgetting to take into account my otherwise
dismissive and disinterested body language that completely invalidated any hint of warmth there might have been in my voice.
“Hej,” I said, taking my Visa card out of my pocket.
“One hundred and sixty-five, ninety,” he said.
“OK,” I said, noticing the top edge of the Hemköp customer card I hadn’t used for some days, pulling it out and swiping it through the reader, though I wasn’t sure why, it verged on the compulsive, because although I’d spent vast amounts of money there over the past few years and saved up tons of bonus points, as the monthly statements I received in the mail informed me, I’d never cashed them in, and since they ran out after a certain time the action of swiping the card had become fairly meaningless. On the other hand, I thought I might as well start now.
I inserted my Visa card, entered my PIN, and accepted the amount.
“A bag might have been practical,” Geir said.
“Damn, I forgot,” I said, and tried to catch the assistant’s attention, though he seemed not to notice.
“Can I have a bag as well, please?” I said.
Would he say it was OK and dismiss the extra cost with a wave of his hand, or would he enter the amount and make me get my card out again?
“That’ll be two kronor,” he said.
You little shit. Fuck you.
I did my shopping there every single day.
“OK,” I said, inserting my card again, entering my PIN again, accepting the amount again. By the time it was done, Geir and Heidi had filled the bag with our items and we could go back out into the warm, late-summer afternoon.
* * *
We bought strawberries on the square, and Heidi carefully carried one of the overfilled cardboard cartons all the way to the elevator, Geir and I trudging along behind with our shopping bags. In the elevator I realized I’d forgotten to get flowers. A bunch of white roses would have been nice for the table, setting off the fiery red of the prawns and the yellow of the lemons. Never mind, we would have to do without. I couldn’t be bothered to go out again, even if the florist’s was only across the square.
The elevator came to a halt and I shoved the door open with my elbow, holding it there for Geir and Heidi, who still had the little box of strawberries in her hands, cautious as if she were holding a small animal. Geir opened the door and as soon as I was inside I dumped the bags next to the row of shoes and went off to the bathroom, the one farthest inside.
My Struggle, Book 6 Page 39