“Some minor complications have come up,” I said, looking across at her. “I don’t know if Geir said anything?”
“He has mentioned something about a relative not wanting it published. Is that it?”
“Yes. He keeps sending e-mails to the publisher, threatening to go to court and the newspapers. He’s got the idea my mother’s behind it all and made me write the book to get back at my father’s family for him having left her.”
She smiled gently and put her glass down on the table, shoving a plate aside to make room for its foot, which partially vanished from sight beneath the slightly elevated rim of the plate, whereas the slender stem that connected it to the bowl of the glass was a thin column of light in the sun.
“They can’t be taking it seriously then?”
“No, not that. That’s just a kind of background theory, it’s not the main issue. The main issue is he finds the novel libelous. He says it’s a pack of lies, that none of it’s true.”
“He’s pissed off,” said Geir.
“Yes, he is,” I said.
At the other end the door opened again. Linda came out and, after closing the door behind her, stood for a second, shielding her eyes with her hand as she peered toward us. She was wearing a blue-and-white-striped sweater and dark blue shorts; with the wooden decking and her saluting gesture it made her seem quite nautical. I smiled.
“Is there a chance he can actually stop the book?” Christina asked.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “He might give it a try, I don’t know.”
Linda stood beside us.
“This is looking nice,” she said, and pulled out a chair at the opposite side of the table from me.
“Why don’t we get started?” she said. “Just dig in.”
“Thanks,” said Christina. “It looks delicious.”
“Come on,” I said. “It’s prawns.”
“I haven’t had prawns all summer,” said Christina. “We usually do.”
She laughed and looked up at Geir. “We have them at your dad’s.”
“We do,” said Geir. “They like their prawns down there.”
“Up,” I said. “You’re in the south now, remember.”
“Were you talking about your book?” asked Linda.
Christina grabbed a couple of prawns and put them on her plate. The shells were so slippery and frictionless they slid on the smooth surface, and one of them ended up with its curling tail hanging over the opposite side from where she’d put it. Geir took a piece of bread, glanced around for the butter, located it, and picked it up. I lifted the bottle of wine and poured some into Linda’s glass, nodding in reply.
“It’s awful, really,” I said.
“Thanks,” she said.
“Weren’t you expecting it?” Christina asked.
I shook my head, dropped a piece of bread onto my plate, and took a sip of wine while I waited for Geir and the butter.
“No,” I said. “Nothing even close. I thought maybe he might be a bit peeved, but I hadn’t anticipated anything like this. I’ve been really naïve, as it turns out. I thought I was writing about stuff that happened, and I hadn’t imagined people could object. I realized it might annoy a few people, I was prepared for that, and maybe they’d want their name taken out, but I never envisaged anyone would want to stop it. Or get so ridiculously worked up.”
“I’ve read the e-mails,” said Linda to Christina. “He comes across like a madman. He scares the life out of me, anyway.”
“He’s not dangerous,” said Geir. “If he was dangerous he’d have tossed an axe in the trunk and driven down here long before now.”
“Don’t say things like that!” said Linda.
“The worst thing, though, is that he’s saying what I’ve written isn’t true. That things didn’t happen the way I describe them. Not just that it’s innacurate or whatever, but that I’m lying. He says he can prove it.”
Geir took a handful of prawns and dropped them onto his plate. I picked up the butter dish and put it down in front of me, drawing the knife toward me across the dark yellow surface which by now had been softened by the sun, then spreading the small curl that had gathered on the flat of its blade over the bread. The crusts were brown, verging on black, quite smooth on top, with a powdering of flour here and there, though porous in the cross section, tightly enclosing the soft white substance of the bread itself. I picked up the slice so as to find a better angle with the knife, whose remaining deposits of butter I wanted to spread onto the bread, just as one of the hotel’s three external elevators began to glide upward through its transparent tube taking it to the very top of the building. Christina sat leaning forward, as if absorbed in some piece of sewing, shelling her prawns. I knew the feeling of tiny, delicate prawn eggs on one’s fingers, they had their own very particular consistency, not unlike wet sand, and quite as hard to brush away, only a bit stickier. Linda, who as yet didn’t seem to be ready to concentrate on the meal, as if she’d decided to rest for a moment on its outskirts, perhaps still with the rumpus of headstrong children whirling about inside her, raised her glass.
“Skål, and welcome!” she said.
“Skål,” said Geir.
“Thanks for having us,” said Christina.
We clinked our glasses and drank. I put my glass down and made sure to make eye contact with the others, as I had learned was customary only after arriving in Sweden seven years previously, an insight that was accompanied by the realization that, in all the years before that, people had sought eye contact with each other during every toast, apart from me, who had sat there completely oblivious, my ignorance exposed on every occasion without my even knowing.
“I don’t want to spoil the evening going on about my uncle,” I said, and noticed that the elevator had now stopped, the doors then slid aside, and a fat man and a slightly thinner woman got in at the same moment as one of the other elevators began to ascend. “But just to finish up what I was saying, about him claiming he can prove I’m lying.”
I took a fistful of prawns and dropped them next to the bread, then picked one up between my fingers, pinching my thumb and index finger together at the seam of the head and body, and removed the head.
“It was as if suddenly I no longer knew what was true and what wasn’t. It was really unpleasant – is really unpleasant. We’re talking about things I’ve lived through. All of a sudden I start wondering if I’m just making them up. Do you know what I mean?”
She nodded. I pinched the shell that covered the belly of the prawn, bulging with its roe, most of which I managed to squeeze onto the edge of my plate before gripping the top of the shell and removing it with a swift upward movement, the way you might lift up a visor and put it to one side.
“The only thing I’m completely sure of is that my dad drank himself to death. If I’d written it like that, it wouldn’t have mattered. As a simple fact, I mean. But I’ve gone into detail in describing the place where it happened. That was his childhood home. I’ve written about my grandmother, right down to the smallest detail, and she was his mother. He grew up in those rooms. Of course it’s an infringement, because it’s a private space. His space. And there I am, turning up for a few days, then writing an entire novel about it. A novel that might even be lies. Or a distorted truth. I can’t trust myself. I don’t know what’s true and what isn’t. And now I’m doing this to his brother. I’ve always looked up to him, he’s always been an important person in my life, a representative of something.”
I passed my thumb over the underside of the little grub-like scrap of prawn meat to remove the few remaining specks of roe, then placed it on my bread, at the very corner, before beginning the same process all over again with a new prawn.
“That’s what makes it all so agonizing. Because everything he says resonates against something I carry inside me. It’s already there. And when it comes from outside, it just consumes me.”
“What’s happening in purely practical terms, then?” Linda as
ked. “You’re changing all the names, of course. But is there anything else you have to do?”
“No.”
“I don’t even think you should change the names,” said Geir. “Why should you?”
“You’d understand if you thought about it,” I said. “It’s his name. I’ve no right to exploit it for my own purposes.”
“OK, so maybe in his case,” Geir replied. “Though basically I think you should keep them all. But what about your dad’s name? And your grandmother’s? That’s not OK.”
“That’s as far as I can go,” I said, placing the second prawn next to the first. The transformation from living creature to waste was remarkable, the little pile of shells, heads, roe, and the antenna-like tentacles that lay next to the fine and delicious shellfish.
“Let’s say it goes to court, then,” said Geir. “Where’s the case against you? That you wrote about your dad? Why should he be protected? Why should his name be kept untarnished? What if an incest victim wrote a book about his dad, would the court be supposed to stop them publishing because the dad’s brother doesn’t want his name dragged through the mud? As if it wasn’t already sullied by what he did?”
“But that’s a criminal matter,” I said. “That’s different.”
“True. But he still did what he did to you. Are you supposed to keep quiet just because it can rub off on your uncle, because they were related? That’s absurd. What’s worse, the action or the description of the action? Is the description of the action an offense but not the action itself?”
“I don’t think that’s what Karl Ove means,” said Christina. “I think it’s the description of the space it took place in that’s causing the offense. The fact that your door’s being opened and everyone can look in.”
“That can’t explain why he’s so angry,” said Linda. “There must be something else besides.”
“Why does he think your mother is behind it all?” Christina asked. Her bread was almost covered by pale fleshy prawns with their streaks of red. They lay there on the thin layer of butter, like people on a beach seen from a plane preparing to land, I thought to myself.
“I’ve no idea,” I said. “But he was still a child when Mom and Dad got together. Ten years old, something like that. His big brother got married and moved away. That must be quite an upheaval for a boy that age. Who was she to him? Presumably the same person she was to his parents. My guess is they didn’t want Dad to marry her, that they didn’t think she was good enough, or right for him. At any rate, they didn’t go to their wedding. That’s a statement. I remember Dad making an issue of it when he married for the second time and they still didn’t go. It was obviously something that had affected him. It meant a lot. Gunnar must still carry all that with him, their rejection, and the reason for it. Maybe not in the form of arguments or thoughts as such, but emotionally, and thereby as a kind of truth: that’s how she was. Then after they got married and had children they must have been able to tell that Dad wasn’t happy. That’s certainly something I can see now, looking back. And because he was theirs and came from them, the obvious thing for them to think must have been that it was her fault.”
“So he lost a brother?” said Linda.
“Yes,” I said, placing another prawn on my bread, which would soon be covered. My mouth was watering and I removed the shell as quickly as I could. “And then he lost him again when he started drinking.”
“And a third time with you writing about him.”
“I hadn’t thought about it like that,” I said. “But you’re right. I’ve taken him away from him, and now I’m saying he was mine, that he was like this and like that.”
“Did they get along at all, your mom and your dad’s parents?” Christina asked. She lifted her bread to her mouth and took a bite, and her movements were so small that for a moment there was something squirrel-like about her, but then, perhaps because I was looking at her, or perhaps because she felt some sudden twinge of happiness, she smiled and everything that was small dissolved.
I smiled too.
“Can I just ask you something?” Linda intervened.
Christina nodded.
“How come you’re not having any wine?”
Christina laughed and put her hand in front of her mouth. Geir grinned, the biggest smile he had. And Linda smiled too.
“We’re expecting,” said Christina.
“I knew you were!” said Linda.
“Seriously?” I said, looking across at Geir. “You never said!”
“We’re saying it now.”
“I can tell too,” said Linda. “There’s a bulge.”
Christina looked down at her tummy and placed her hand on it. When she looked up again, her eyes were full of joy.
“When’s it due?” asked Linda.
“Late December,” Christina replied.
“That’s fantastic,” said Linda.
“Congratulations,” I said, raising my glass.
“We were inspired by you two,” said Geir. “When we were here New Year’s Eve and saw John. The thought of having another little one like him. He was such a little bundle of happiness, reaching his hands out to us.”
“It’ll be good for Njaal,” said Linda.
“Yes,” said Christina. “It’ll be great for him being a big brother.”
“Have you told him yet?” said Linda.
Christina shook her head.
“We’ve told my parents. And Geir’s dad.”
“Have they found out if it’s a boy or a girl yet?” Linda asked.
“No,” said Christina. “We don’t want to know either.”
“We’re keeping the excitement,” said Geir.
“I can’t get over you being here two days already and not saying a word,” I said. “Or maybe I can, come to think of it. Do you remember me telling you we were having Heidi?”
Geir nodded.
“You were expecting Njaal, but you still didn’t let on. Not for another two months, in fact.”
“And?”
“That’s far too disciplined for me. We could never keep anything like that secret. How long did it take before we told everyone we knew?” I said, looking across at Linda.
“Two days, maybe,” she said.
“It’s the Strays looking at the Hamsuns,” said Geir.
“And you’re the Strays, I take it?” I said.
“Of course,” said Geir. “We look on everything you do with wide eyes. We’re the ones with our house in order.”
“I’m so pleased for you both!” said Linda, looking at Christina.
As I looked at her, the radiance inside her now visible in her eyes, everything fell into place; of course, that was it! She had been withdrawn, but not like she had turned herself away from the world, from something in it she didn’t want, more as if there was something good there inside her.
“We’ve even got the names ready,” said Geir, his eyes looking into Christina’s.
“Are you sure you’re ready to divulge, after six months?” I said.
“If it’s a girl, she’s going to be called Frøydis,” said Geir. “And if it’s a boy, he’ll be called Gisle.”
* * *
As we sat there, on our narrow ledge above the city, eating and drinking, the sun gradually sank in the sky, redder and redder, the darkness rising and enclosing us imperceptibly from the streets, where the air seemed to become grainier, the colors of everything there, the cars, the people, the buildings, fading slowly into gray. We talked about the baby they were expecting, we talked about the children we had, we talked about what were now already the old days, the time we lived in Stockholm, and we talked about Gunnar and his e-mails. I was hesitant about the latter, but the unease I felt about the whole situation had to be calmed, and the only way I knew of doing that was by talking about it. After the wine had been drunk and the food eaten up, Linda and I cleared the table and took the things into the kitchen. I put the coffee on and got the ice cream out of the freezer.
&nbs
p; “What a lovely evening,” said Linda.
“Yes,” I said.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“Yes, fine,” I said. “Well, sort of. But it’s nice to have company.”
I put my arms around her. We stood there for a moment, then she went to get the lantern she had once given me as a birthday present, an old-fashioned kind made of metal and with little windows of glass, inside which a fat candle can burn, or in this case, because we’d run out of candles, an array of tea lights.
I stood in the living room and watched her go past with the lantern glowing in her hand in the dim light. Then I carried the ice cream out, and the fruit, the wafers, and the coffee, all on a tray, together with the cups, plates, and spoons.
The darkness in August is the finest darkness of all. It lacks the luminous transparency of June’s, the sheer ripeness of its potentialities, yet is quite unlike the impenetrable depths of autumn’s or winter’s darkness. What was with us before and now is gone, spring and summer, lingers on in August’s darkness, whereas what is to come, autumn and winter, are a time into which we can only peer, a time of which we are not yet a part.
The light of the lantern flickered on the table, shimmering in our faces and eyes. The darkness swelled, and the streets below were quiet. The elevators went up and down, the traffic lights continued to change, and now and then people came walking from the pedestrian street, ambling families or young people on their way out, perhaps to a park where they would sit and drink, or to some outdoor café. There was a force field of excitement about them, or perhaps it was me, because what they were doing was so familiar to me, and I could still feel the pull, to be out on the town with the feeling that tonight anything at all could happen.
But that feeling also belonged to the darkness of August, I thought to myself. In that darkness too there was promise and expectation. Something closes, something else opens. Life is there for the living. Through autumn and winter, spring and summer, fuller with every turn. Wasn’t that what was happening? Never had the darkness of August felt more replete than now.
Replete with what?
The beauty of time passing.
My Struggle, Book 6 Page 44