I shoot a glance at Jørgen as we drive across the bridge and onto the island.
“Want a smoke?” I ask, pulling the pack of tobacco out of my breast pocket and handing it to him. Don’t really know why I do this, neither Helen nor his dad has anything against him smoking and I know he’s inhaled a lot worse things, but even so, I’m not in the habit of offering him cigarettes.
“So now all of a sudden you want to be friends?”
“Aw, come on, Jørgen,” I say, giving a little sigh.
“You can’t get around me just by offering me a cig, if that’s what you think.”
“D’you want to roll yourself one or not?” I ask, eyes on the road as I say it, then I turn to look at Jørgen again. He sits for a moment more, still with a face like thunder, then he takes the tobacco pack from me. “Roll one for me as well, will you please?” is all I say. I can’t be bothered arguing, there’s no point. If I’m going to help Jørgen change his ways there’s only one thing to do and that is to behave much as I’d like him to behave, to set a good example, it’s the only way. If we just stay calm and speak nicely he’ll gradually learn to do the same. I only hope Helen can stay calm when she hears that Jørgen has screwed up again, that she manages to talk to him instead of freaking out and threatening him with everything under the sun. There’s no telling how she’ll react, one day she can shrug off something that other people would call a disaster, the next she can throw a fit over the slightest thing, it depends on how she’s feeling, mentally and physically. Whether she’s been in a lot of pain or not.
There’s a tractor right in front of us. I can’t be bothered sitting behind it around all the twists and turns up ahead so I take the chance, pull out and overtake, zoom past it doing well over a sixty miles an hour and nip in just before the crest of the hill, feel the tickle in my stomach as we sail over the top. I breathe in, let out a quiet sigh, I don’t really feel like saying anything to Helen about what’s happened, although she has a right to know, of course, she is his mother, after all. But still, I’m worried that no good will come of it, worried she won’t be able to handle hearing about it and that she’ll do something that’ll make matters worse than they need to be. And anyway, I’ve been working hard all week, I’m knackered and I don’t want any trouble either.
“Here,” Jørgen says, handing me the pack of tobacco and a freshly prepared roll-up.
“Thanks,” I say, sticking the cigarette in my mouth and slipping the pack back into my breast pocket. “Got a light?” I ask, shooting another glance at him. He takes out a silver Zippo lighter I’ve never seen before, opens the lid with a neat flick of his thumb, shuts one eye and curls a hand round the roll-up as he lights it and inhales deeply, sucking in his cheeks: it’s such a pose, trying to smoke like a Hollywood tough guy. He hands me the lighter without a word, doesn’t so much as glance at me, just winds down the window, props his elbow on the sill and sits there trying to look cool. It’s almost comical, he’s like a little kid, telling clumsy lies and going into the huff like a little kid when I call him on it, and yet he likes to see himself as macho man. I light my cigarette and hand the lighter back to him, drive with one hand on the wheel and the roll-up in the corner of my mouth.
A moment passes. Then: “I won’t say anything to your mom,” I say, blow smoke out of my nose, glance at Jørgen then look at the road again. “On one condition, though. That if I offer you a summer job at the fish farm you’ll take it.” I glance at him again and he looks at me, doesn’t answer right away, just sits there looking surprised.
“Okay,” he says, trying to sound laid-back, but he’s both relieved and pleased, I can tell by his voice that he is, he’s so keen to give the impression that he doesn’t care what his mother and I say or think, but when it comes right down to it he does care and now he’s relieved.
“But Jørgen,” I say, eyeing him sternly, I have to show him that I really mean it this time. “This time you’re going to show yourself worthy of our trust, right?” I say. “You stop selling hash and all that other crap. And as far as the job is concerned—you turn up every morning and do whatever’s asked of you,” I say, then I pause. I’m just about to ask if that’s understood, but I don’t. I have to be careful not to dent his self-esteem, he’s so touchy, his pride is so easily hurt and if he feels he’s being treated like a child or ordered about I run the risk of ruining everything. I have to be sure to leave him with the feeling of having some sort of choice, it’s the only way to get him to go along with it. “Okay?” I ask.
“Yeah, okay,” he says, taking another drag on his roll-up.
We drive down the hill and past the church and suddenly I feel a bit more cheerful, feel pleased with the way I’ve handled this. I think this will be the best solution for all concerned. I’ve not only saved Helen from having to hear that Jørgen has screwed up again, I’ve actually fixed it so that Jørgen is going to start working as well, that’s almost the best part, that should keep him out of trouble for a while.
Otterøya, July 6th, 2006
Dear David,
Yesterday I took a walk up to the forest where we had our camp and where we used to run around with warpaint on our faces and bows and arrows in our hands. I’d never been up there as a grown man before, but when I saw the ad in the newspaper saying that you’d lost your memory and urging anybody who knows you or knew you to help you to recover it, I plucked up the courage to do so. And I found just as many traces of our childhood as I had thought I would: old arrows, spears and clubs, bits of the rope ladder we had hanging from our lookout post, rusty barbed wire from the stockades we used to put up, poles and stakes that once formed the framework of our brush shelters. I wandered around among all these ruins of our childhood and just as I had expected they sparked off a landslide of memories inside me, a landslide that just goes on and on and that I’m going to try to share with you in this letter.
You may be wondering, though, why I should start by writing about our camp, why I should have gone there, of all places, in order to trigger this landslide of memories, and not to our old primary school or the football pitch; to one of our many fishing or swimming spots; to the moor where the ski carousel was run or to the community center where the Christmas parties were held, or why—possibly most obvious of all—I hadn’t simply stayed here, on the farm that you and your mother moved to in the early 80s when she and my dad were together and where you and I shared so much. So why didn’t I do that, why did I go up to our old camp?
I did it because that camp encapsulates, if you like, the whole of our childhood. Because the things that happened and the things that we got up to at that camp evoke the essence of what it was like to grow up on the island of Otterøya in the late 70s and early 80s, and because I assume that this in turn is as much a key to understanding how you became the person you are as it is to understanding how I became the person I am.
I don’t really know when I became fully aware of this. Probably not until I started writing this letter to you. But something inside me has always known how important this part of my childhood was. Obviously, otherwise I wouldn’t have been so sure that this was what I ought to write about first, and otherwise I wouldn’t have thought back on it as much as I have. Because remarkably often, when I smell the scent of pine and juniper, when I hear the sound of a chattering thrush or dry twigs snapping underfoot as I push my way through a dense raspberry thicket, when I feel the soft tickle of ferns on my bare legs or spider webs clinging to my face as I accidentally blunder into them, I’m transported back to the time when I was ten or eleven years old, running around the camp with you and the other kids. Only rarely do these things remind me of all the walks in the woods that Dad and I took, of hunting for elk, deer and grouse, of felling trees and chopping wood or other things that might come just as readily to mind for anyone who has spent their whole life here on Otterøya.
But even though I’ve found myself thinking back remarkably often on building the camp and playing there with you an
d the other kids, I’ve never felt the presence of that time as strongly as I did yesterday. Walking along the winding, pine-needle-covered path that leads up to the campsite, handling our old spears and clubs again, looking down on the housing estate from the particular angle you see it from when you stand at the top of what we called the grottoes—all of this caused the camp to rise up again before my eyes: the brush shelters, the totem pole with its intricately carved bark, the smoking campfire with the ring of stones around it, suddenly there it all was, and in it a bunch of small boys sitting, standing and walking around with quivers on their backs and bows slung across their chests.
I saw it so clearly: I had just tumbled off the lookout post and bashed my foot, and you and Per were standing over me, asking if I was okay, did it hurt? I didn’t say anything, but the look on my face must have told them all they needed to know.
“Will I take the rest of your watch for you?” Per asked. He had two seagull feathers stuck in his hair and around his waist he wore a loincloth with fringed ends that his mother had made out of an old sheet.
I broke off a blade of grass, fixed my eyes on it and said nothing.
“Yeah, do that,” you said to Per. “And be quick about it, you never know when they might attack.”
“Who might attack?” I muttered crossly. But such questions were taboo, they could destroy our imaginary world and I regretted it as soon as I’d said it. “Apart from the Husvikings, of course,” I added hastily.
“You can never underestimate the Husvikings,” you said.
“No.”
“They’re armed to the teeth with fiberglass bows and they shoot first and ask questions later.”
“Yeah.”
Pause. “Feeling better?” you asked.
“Yeah.”
“Good, then you can get back up there and take the watch yourself.”
We had no enemy, so it was kind of hard to stay motivated, but an attack could come when you least expected it, so there was really nothing for it but to get up there and keep a lookout anyway.
But then.
“What are you lot up to?” a voice behind us asked.
“By Manitu!” you cried and spun around.
But it was only the girls. Eva and Karoline.
“What are you doing?” they asked again.
“Nothing,” you said, eyeing them fiercely.
The girls came over to us. They looked at me. Oddly enough my foot had started to hurt again as soon as they appeared and I was no longer sure that I could get up unaided, the pain was so bad.
“Have you hurt yourself, Ole?” Eva asked.
I gave a little wince, to leave no one in any doubt that I had hurt myself. But I didn’t cry.
“They got me too,” you suddenly piped up, putting a hand to your cheek. “Stupid cowards. They had us outnumbered.”
It took me a second to catch on. At first I just sat there staring at you, so no wonder the girls were suspicious.
“How about you, Per?” you asked quickly. And Per played along. Oh, he hadn’t escaped unscathed either, he announced. But it was okay, it was just a graze.
“Have you been fighting?” Eva asked.
We barely glanced at her, said nothing. Simply went on tending our wounds.
“Well, have you?”
Still not a word to be heard, just soft moans.
“Oh, well, bye then!”
“Okay,” you said. “If you promise not to ask any more questions, and if you promise not to tell anybody, then yeah, we’ve been fighting.”
“You have? Who with?”
“No, we’ve said too much already.”
The girls shrugged.
“Fair enough.”
We looked at one another. We didn’t really care what they said, but still.
“Do you know where we can find raspberries up here?” Eva asked, pointing at the pail she was carrying.
We look at one another again. Raspberries? Now they were going too far, this was no time to ask about raspberries.
“We’ve got other things to think about,” you said.
“Okay,” the girls said, shrugging again. And off they went. Suntanned legs swished through the grass. A minute or two passed. We yawned and chewed blades of grass and couldn’t have cared less about where the girls had gone. But where exactly had they gone? A fuzzy bumblebee flew by and landed on a wild onion flower, all set to gorge itself on nectar and we fell to studying the bee and trying to take an interest in it, but it wasn’t interesting, so in the end we sauntered after the girls anyway.
“Not there,” Per called when we spotted them down by the stream. “There’s loads of raspberries down below the camp.”
“I thought you had other things to think about,” Eva said.
I didn’t hear that and neither did you or Per, so we didn’t comment on it either. We found the path and immediately took it upon ourselves to escort the girls down the hill to the raspberry thicket, where there were sure to be snakes or other things that they needed us to protect them from. We were all suffering from minor injuries, bruised and battered after the battle we had just fought. There was no way we could hide this from the girls. We limped and hobbled along, but we assured them that we were fine, really. All things considered, that is. The girls said annoyingly little to this, but at least they listened to what we said and they didn’t laugh.
“Shall we help you pick them?” you said when we reached the raspberry thicket.
“Are you sure you have time for that?” Karoline asked.
“Oh, yeah, they won’t be back now anyway.”
“What?” said Karoline, making it plain that she’d forgotten what we’d just been through. A look of annoyance flashed across your face but then you changed tactic and gave a big yawn instead.
“Huh?” you said, blinking lazily.
That did the trick.
“Well, who was it?” Karoline asked.
“The Husvikings,” you said.
Karoline and Eva looked at you. So what had happened, they wanted to know.
You couldn’t talk about it, you said, you had sworn an oath.
The girls turned to me, hoping that I would be more forthcoming. But they got nothing out of me.
“It’s better that you don’t know any more than you already know—for your own good,” I said.
“Let’s talk about something else,” you said. “Let’s pick raspberries.”
Fine. So we picked raspberries. You and me and Per, Eva and Karoline, we plucked the nubbly red berries off their stalks, opened them up to check for worms then dropped them into the pail. The raspberry branches jagged and scratched our bare legs and when I looked down I saw that mine were criss-crossed with red streaks all the way up to my knees. They smarted, but it was no big deal, we’d been through a lot worse. Every now and again we sneaked a peek at the girls. Per had eyes only for Eva, while your eyes and mine were on Karoline, because we thought she was the prettier one. Like all the other girls she liked you better than me, I knew she did, but that could change, couldn’t it? If I just did this instead of that, if I just spoke like this instead of like that, if I just tried hard enough, was daring enough? Oh, Karoline. With her brown eyes and shining black hair hanging halfway down her back, she looked so exotic. “Karoline looks like that gypsy singer, Raya,” you’d said once. And she did actually. Although if she’d stuck a daisy in her hair she would have looked even more like her.
“You look like Raya,” I blurted out as I was dropping a handful of berries into her pail.
I hadn’t meant to stand so close to her. So close that I could smell the scent of raspberries on her breath.
“Raya?”
Her mouth was set in a straight line. Didn’t she know who Raya was?
“That gypsy woman,” I said.
Karoline shrugged, edged away and carried on picking. She looked almost offended, but … well, maybe she didn’t know what a gypsy was either, maybe she thought I meant it as an insult. I didn’t know
what to do. I felt like saying that Raya looked nice, but I didn’t dare, so I just stood there, gathering berries for the winter or something like that. Per and Eva had become more and more wrapped up in each other, they kind of drifted further down the slope and you and Karoline and I stood there in silence.
One minute.
Then: “But a duel, that they wouldn’t hear of,” you said, right out of the blue.
“Huh?”
Your eyebrows shot up and you clapped your hand over your mouth, letting everyone know that you’d been thinking out loud, that you’d said too much. Oh, well, since the girls had heard that much, they might as well hear the rest, you thought, and you launched into a detailed description of the battle between us and the gang from Husvika. Without any warning they had sent a rain of fiberglass arrows down on the camp, and if it hadn’t been for the fact that we knew this forest like the back of our hand and knew, therefore, where to take cover, we wouldn’t be standing here now, Karoline could be sure of that. When the Husvikings had run out of ammunition and the time had come for close combat, you had called out to them that both sides would be spared unnecessary suffering if we settled our differences instead by a duel between yourself and their chief. But like the yellow dog he was, their chief wouldn’t agree to this and so it had ended in a terrible battle from which no one had escaped unhurt.
“That sounds really dangerous,” Karoline said.
Well, it wasn’t exactly a walk in the park, you had to admit.
But why didn’t we just go and tell the grown-ups?
Encircling 2 Page 2