I lifted my cup to my mouth and sipped the hot coffee, then lowered it as, to my mortification, tiny brown drops were running down the outside. I looked out at the auditorium, took another sip, wanting to chat with “Dag Solstad,” but I didn’t know about what. Once someone had said I just wanted to chat with the greats; ever since then I had been reminded of that remark whenever I was standing next to one of the “greats.” Was it true? Did I want to chat only with them? Not only perhaps, but I had to admit I did want to, they had a magnetic appeal, being in a position to say something to them was a privilege, that was how it felt. On the other hand, it was also fawning. There was no doubt about it. Fawning and crawling.
I sought his eyes and met them.
“Do you have any opinions on Peter Handke?” I said.
It sounded a bit abrupt. But “Dag Solstad” didn’t appear to notice. He shook his head and said actually he didn’t. He had read some of his books, but that was a long time ago and he couldn’t say he was particularly interested in Handke, no.
“I’m in the middle of reading a fantastic book by him now,” I said. “My Year in the No-Man’s-Bay, it’s called. Have you read it? Think it came out in the eighties or maybe the nineties.”
“No, I haven’t. It’s good, you say, is it?”
“Yes, it is.”
That was it. There were a lot of people around, conversation flowed, people drifted in and out and soon it was time to go onstage. Solstad didn’t move, he wasn’t on until half an hour after me, and when the technician had attached a mic to me I stood behind the curtain, beside the flashing mixing desk, waiting for the applause to die down and Cathrine to introduce me. Then I walked across the stage, she asked her question, the audience laughed, I waffled something trite, she took a few steps back, and I started reading. After I had finished I went backstage, removed the mic and hurried into the foyer, which was still full of people, crossed the plaza, and dashed up onto the footbridge, also crowded, in some places so packed that I had to stand and wait, until, on the other side by the train station, I found a taxi and gave the driver the address of Thorenfeldt’s photographic studio in west Oslo. We drove through the glittering, sunlit autumn streets and after I had paid and got out I saw a man waving at me from a doorway around fifty meters away. I half ran over, was led into the studio where Hanne Ørstavik and Ingvar Ambjørnsen were waiting, the former wearing a vintage dress, from the 1920s or the 1930s perhaps, and the latter a white dinner jacket with a white top hat. Thorenfeldt himself appeared and shook hands, he was a portly man who obviously laughed a lot, at least he was now. I was given a pile of clothes, all white, stepped into a cubicle and put them on. The trousers were much too big, they hung off me like a sack, but with suspenders they were fine, the assistant said when I emerged, and away we went. We lined up for the photo, Thorenfeldt played some Frank Sinatra at full blast, laughed and shouted as we three squeezed together and posed, with and without hats, and finally Hanne was given confetti, which she threw into the air as a kind of finale. It was all over in ten minutes. The photos were for a chain of bookshops, as far as I could make out, and at first I had been dubious, which was my way of declining, it meant nothing to me since I had my literary credibility to think about, which this would undermine at a stroke. I wasn’t that type of writer, I had thought, but then I allowed myself to be persuaded after all, it was important for the book, and “no” was one of the words I found hardest to say, I was too weak for that word, the thought of disappointing someone always outweighed any consideration of my credibility, so there I was, in the studio of a photographer who was used to working with celebrities, dressed up as some kind of literary revue artiste. And it had been fun. It had been fun to dress up, it had been fun to have my photo taken, it had been fun to stand there posing amid the laughter and blare of music. It helped that I was doing it with Ingvar Ambjørnsen and Hanne Ørstavik, I respected them both, and if they had signed up it couldn’t have been that bad. It was a sellout. Yes, it was, but what had I actually sold? My soul. But I had already lost that anyway.
* * *
After the photo shoot I had a cup of coffee with Hanne at a nearby sidewalk café. We first met in the mid-nineties, I had done an interview with Rune Christiansen for Vagant, and he had invited me to the Oktober summer party. Espen was there, he was an Oktober writer, Mom’s brother Kjartan was there, he was an Oktober writer, and at the table where I was assigned a place Hanne was there, who was also an Oktober writer. We chatted during the meal, but as I felt so inferior, being the sole nonwriter there, I moved to Espen’s table as soon as we had finished eating, and stuck close to him for the rest of the evening. The next time I met Hanne was just after I had made my debut and she reminded me of that evening, of how impolite I had been, moving away from her as though she wasn’t worth talking to. Since then we had met at various literary events at the publishing house, after I had moved from Tiden to Oktober. She was a novelist to her fingertips, uncompromising with regard to her books, and incorruptible. Rare qualities, both of them. As a person she was sensitive and there was something vulnerable about her, and perhaps it was the impossible equation, the uncompromising, incorruptible essence versus the openness to impressions of the world that made her novels so perfectly rounded and yet so testing. We had never talked at length apart from on one occasion a few weeks earlier, at a dinner held by Oktober after a press conference, when all our social inhibitions were suddenly thrown to the wind and we got down to the nitty-gritty. I talked about what my life was really like; she talked about what her life was really like. The openness had been restricted to that moment, now we just talked about our books for the most part and after a quarter of an hour I got up, the plane would be going soon, and I took a taxi to the train station, from where I caught the express to Gardermoen, checked in at the last moment for the Copenhagen flight, and finally plumped down onto a seat, alone.
The desperate rush through the departures hall reminded me of another time when I’d had to run to catch the plane home. At that time I had been carrying Vanja. She couldn’t have been more than twelve months old. I had been invited to my uncle’s child’s confirmation ceremony, which was to take place outside Oslo, and as Linda was pregnant with Heidi and didn’t want to fly, I had gone with Vanja. I wanted to show her to the family. Everything had gone well, except on the plane home when she had screamed without interruption for half an hour, and even my suit jacket was soaked with sweat. Now, the race across the airport having jogged my memory of the previous occasion, it struck me that that was probably the last time I had seen my family. Admittedly I had seen Gunnar and his sons once since then, in Mom’s garden in Jølster, but that had been only for a few minutes. The confirmation had lasted all day, and all the people I had known all my life behaved in their own idiosyncratic ways, which I knew so well. The dynamics between the two brothers, all the wordplay, all the hackneyed phrases. Their children, who were becoming adults. Representing Dad and having Vanja with me made the occasion an enjoyable experience.
Holding Vanja in my arms, sensing the person she was, filled me completely as I sat in the stationary plane waiting for our turn to take off. My love for her seemed to collect in one point, overwhelming and uncontrollable, it hurt so much tears came to my eyes, and then it relinquished its hold on me and sank back into the depths as the plane began to taxi onto the runway. The sun was low, the shadows were long, I leaned back and closed my eyes in an attempt to doze. Of course it was impossible; too much had happened in the past two days. But now it was all about getting off this plane, onto the next, off again, a taxi to the city center, and then I would have a different world around me.
* * *
When we were up in the air and the Østland forests beneath us were becoming more and more distant, the passenger in the seat next to me, a woman in her late twenties or early thirties, blond with muscular arms, picked up Dagbladet, took out the magazine section, and started flipping through it. As soon as I saw that, I turned away and looked o
ut the window. A few seconds later, in a diversionary move intended to appear as if I was opening the air vent above the seat, I glanced at the page she was holding steadfastly in front of her and discovered to my despair that she was reading the article about me. I glimpsed a photo of me before turning away again with my cheeks burning. She couldn’t have realized that the man who was featured in the interview she was reading was in the seat beside her, otherwise she would have looked at me and said so, wouldn’t she? If the krone dropped during the flight she would know why I had turned away so obviously and the situation would be embarrassing for both of us; she would have unmasked me, I would have been unmasked. But I couldn’t tap her on the shoulder either and say: That’s me you’re reading about! That would have sounded completely stupid. If she had kept flipping through, it wouldn’t have been so bad, but now she was reading every single word while I sat beside her, only a few centimeters away, with my head averted as far as possible. When she finished the interview I would have to continue hiding because the predicament was not over, even if the reading was.
She spent at least ten minutes on the interview, I was able to confirm after several sidelong glances at the silly magazine. It was odd that she didn’t notice as my body must have been giving off all sorts of signals. But no, while I stared out the window for the long hour from Oslo to Copenhagen she quietly occupied herself, reading a bit, eating a bit, reading a bit more. Oh, what a relief it was when the plane landed, came to a halt, and she got up and went down the aisle and I could finally straighten my neck, breathe out, and relax.
Linda was waiting in the arrivals hall when I came out. She had dressed smartly and was happy. We kissed, checked in, and spent the hour before the plane departed having a beer in the café where I had been that morning. It felt decadent, I never drank when I traveled because there was always something I had to do on my arrival, and Linda and I seldom drank together anymore either because we always had children around us.
It was a feeling of freedom. For the next two days we could do exactly what we wanted. No children, no writing, no readings, no interviews. Just us two. The cloud hanging over everything, the book I had written about us that Linda hadn’t read yet, I cast from my mind. There is a time for everything. She would get the manuscript on our return. For the moment she knew nothing and the weekend would be spent within that nothing.
* * *
The sun had gone down when we boarded the plane. The atmosphere in the bright cabin was quite different from what it had been on the Oslo-bound plane because the language on all the signs and advertising stickers was foreign, the faces of the cabin attendants another type, but also because of the darkness which, as we rose through the air, soon shut us in and defined the space with such incredible clarity: here we were, high above the ground, on our way down Europe to one of its old capitals while nameless, unknown towns lay like luminous jellyfish in a sea of darkness beneath us, and what the sharply defined space said was “travel,” in the same way that a train compartment said travel, a ship’s cabin said travel and for that matter a cabin on a zeppelin said travel. Not travel as movement but travel as mythology. Travel in the twenties and thirties; travel in the fifties and seventies. And not Europe in the sense of geography, but Europe as mythology. It was fantastic that the towns had been there in the Middle Ages, indeed that they had been what was the Middle Ages, what was the Renaissance, what was the Baroque, not to mention the world wars in the previous century, it was fantastic that they were still there, scattered across the continent beneath us, and they were so different, had such different auras and meanings, permeated by time, each in its own way. London and Paris, Berlin and Munich, Madrid and Rome, Lisbon and Oporto, Venice and Stockholm, Salzburg and Vienna, Bucharest and Manchester, Budapest and Sarajevo, Milan and Prague, just to name a handful. Prague, it was Golem, the man-made man, and it was Kafka. It was the Faustian Middle Ages and the nineteenth-century dual monarchy, it was the communist 1950s and the capitalist 2000s of the unsophisticated and vulgar Eastern European variety.
What was the difference between reality and our perception of it? Did reality exist, was it beyond our reach? For perception-less reality was also a perception.
What did the moods and impressions these names evoked mean? They meant nothing. But neither did our lives, if we took away our perceptions of them.
* * *
The hotel was by the river, beside the old bridge, and our room had windows overlooking the water. It wasn’t luxurious, no minibar or TV, but it was classy in the same way that the old hotels along the fjords in Vestland are classy, those that have retained the interior from the turn of the previous century, as they had done here, unless they had recreated it, that is. We put down our luggage and went out to eat. It was nearly ten, so we chose the first – and the best – restaurant, on the other side of the bridge, with tables along the river illuminated by small lantern-like lights. It was hard to grasp, at least for me, that we were here, beside the black flowing water with the old bridge arched over it, the castle towering up behind us, it was as though everything that moved around us was somewhere else, even when we were crossing the bridge a short time before and had our feet on it, that had been the feeling.
We ordered a bottle of red wine and clinked glasses. Linda’s dimly lit face blazed in the darkness, her eyes glittered, she placed her hand on mine and a warmth spread through me. The food arrived, we ate, from behind us came the sound of Norwegian voices and the feeling that we were completely free was gone, suddenly there were people who could see us. Linda noticed the change in me and asked what was wrong. I said there were Norwegians here and that I was beginning to weigh everything I said on their scales, hear everything with their ears. She said that sounded terrible and I had to stop doing it. I said I would try. Then I told her about what had happened on the plane. She laughed at me. We paid and wandered around the town before going back to the hotel. The next morning we woke up early and were unable to sleep in, even though we tried, our circadian rhythms were in tatters after five years with small children, instead we had breakfast and went out into the morning-empty, Sunday-quiet town which was slowly getting warmer, had a coffee at a café and on our way back a few hours later we bought tickets for a ballet that evening, Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, which we thought must be wonderful here in old Eastern Europe. In the evening we dressed up, I put on a white shirt, a tie, and suit, Linda a dark dress, and then we left for the theater. I imagined marble staircases, balconies clad with red plush, men in tailed coats and women in white evening gowns. I had found instructions for how to get to the theater on the computer in the lobby, but I didn’t print them out, and when we arrived in the area we walked around for a while, unable to find the street. With only ten minutes before the performance was due to start we began to run. Linda asked a woman in a kiosk where the theater was, she didn’t understand, Linda showed her the ticket, she pointed, we set off in the direction she indicated, nothing, we came into an open square, no theater, we crossed it and ran down a narrow street where there was nothing but apartment buildings, turned, ran back, crossed the square again, Linda asked someone else, this time a fat man with a dog, he spoke English and said it was in the parallel street, we rushed off in that direction, found the name of the street, ran up and stopped, there it was at last. But instead of the large palatial theater I had imagined, something like the opera house in Proust’s novel, we were standing in front of a building that looked more like a cinema of the run-down, lugubrious variety. Surely this couldn’t be it? But, yes, it was, the name on the elegant, ornate tickets we had been given matched the name above the door. We entered, and the shabby music-hall feel of the building became even stronger. The auditorium was small and dowdy, the stage tiny, there was no orchestra pit, let alone an orchestra. The audience was meager and seemed for the most part to consist of disoriented tourists, but not as disoriented as the two of us, who had dressed up and were attracting interested looks as we made our way along the row of folding chairs to
find our seats. Oh no, I said to Linda, what have we got ourselves into here? The dancing might still be all right, she said, taking my hand as we sat waiting. Around us the lights dimmed, but not much, and in front of us, on the stage, the lights came on at the same time as someone put on the CD they were going to dance to. The music came from two loudspeakers on a stand on either side of the stage, and after a few minutes without anything much happening two young ballet dancers jumped out, they must have been sixteen or seventeen, probably students, and from their dancing bodies came nothing, all their movements seemed to stay inside them as they gyrated and jumped and sallied back and forth across the stage, every step a thud on the floor. I was none too fond of ballet, I was there for Linda’s benefit and squirmed with embarrassment at all the awkwardness and lack of grace unfolding in front of our eyes. Linda had spent so much time in front of the mirror preening herself. It was the only full evening we had in Prague and we were going to spend it here of all places. I looked at her. She looked at me. Then she smiled. I think it’s the worst show I’ve ever seen, she whispered. And that’s saying quite a bit, I’ve seen a lot of bad dancing. Shall we go, I whispered. Let’s wait until the interval, she whispered. And we did. We found a bar instead, where we sat for the rest of the evening chatting and getting drunk. The next morning we slept in, had lunch somewhere at the foot of the hill where the castle stood, in a courtyard, and then we walked up to the castle, visited an art exhibition, and afterward went to an outdoor café on the margins of the castle precinct, overlooking a forest below. It was warm, like in summer, we both had a cold beer, suddenly she took out a pen and wrote down the song she had sung at my fortieth, six months earlier, after which she passed it to me. I had asked for it some months ago but had forgotten. I’d had a party at home, there were twenty-odd guests and I had let it be known that I didn’t want any speeches. Espen, Tore, and Geir had taken no notice, so when Linda stood up I was expecting another speech.
My Struggle, Book 6 Page 101