We shrugged and did a good job of hiding the fact that there was nothing in the world we would like more. Well, we said, they could always lend a hand.
“But weren’t we going berry picking?” Hauk asked, looking at Eva and Karoline.
“Oh, honestly, Hauk,” the girls burst out. They couldn’t just shut their eyes and pretend that nothing had happened. They had to help, of course they did, they could pick berries any time.
“Okay, be like that,” Hauk said.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, can’t you help as well?” the girls asked.
“Nah,” Hauk muttered, the look on his face saying he wasn’t interested.
A sniff and a grunt.
“Jeez, how selfish can you get,” Karoline said.
“I didn’t think you were like that,” Eva said.
And they tossed their heads, letting Hauk know that he had gone down drastically in their estimation.
Hauk, poor bastard, said not a word as he slunk off into the raspberry thicket, but it wasn’t hard to see that he was hurt. I felt a twinge of guilt as I watched him go because he was a good friend and, like you, I knew that his mom and dad had forbidden him to take part in our activities at the camp, so he couldn’t have helped us to rebuild it however much he might want to.
But we didn’t say anything about that to the girls. No, no. We let them get themselves all worked up and indignant at the idea that anyone could be so selfish and, even though I did feel kind of guilty, that didn’t stop me from feeling a little bit pleased too. There was no getting away from the fact that most girls thought Hauk was handsome, so it was good to have him out of the way for a while.
Then we got back to work.
Per mended the lookout post up in the birch tree and two of the littlest kids tried to dig a deeper hole for the totem pole to stand in. Meanwhile Karoline was wrestling with one of the stakes for the stockade. We hurried across as casually as we could, you and I. “Let me get that for you, Karoline,” you said, beating me to it. I had thought, not to say hoped, that she might be a bit mad at you for knocking her berry pail out of her hands, but she didn’t seem to be. Quite the opposite, in fact. Not only did she immediately let you relieve her of her burden, she even thanked you in the way you liked best of all:
“You don’t find that at all heavy?” she asked when she noticed that you were only using one hand to carry the stake.
“Heavy?” you said. Your face was scarlet, your arm all but breaking in two, but you acted as though you had no idea what she was talking about.
Laughter from Karoline.
“What?” you said, looking more and more puzzled.
“Oh, nothing,” Karoline laughed, not wanting to say it.
And you shook your head and sauntered on, chuckling, with the stake under your arm. “Women!” you muttered.
As well you might. Well, I for one didn’t understand them. I mean, how could she be so keen on you so soon after you had tramped all over most of the raspberries she had picked? It was unbelievable. But I wasn’t giving her up that easily. As soon as all of our joint projects were finished I started to give the girls some advice on how to build a good, solid brush shelter that wouldn’t collapse at the first faint breeze to sweep through the forest. If Karoline and Eva were me they would, for example, borrow Per’s tomahawk and use that to sharpen the ends of the poles, I told them, because then you could stick them more firmly in the ground and the shelter would be more stable.
The girls were impressed.
“I never thought of that,” Eva said.
“You’re so smart, Ole,” Karoline said.
Oh, I didn’t know about that, but I had built a few shelters in my time, that I couldn’t deny. Well, I didn’t have to tell them, Karoline informed me. I was thrilled to hear her talking to me like this and it was all I could do not to let it show.
“But it’s not as easy as you might think to sharpen a pole if you’ve never done it before,” I said, keeping my delight in check by becoming all matter-of-fact and technical: you had to do this and this, and for heaven’s sake mind your fingers. But, well, I was right here, as she could see, so if they needed help all she had to do was ask and I’d be at her service—if I had the time and the possibility, that was.
Okay, so did I happen to have the time and the possibility right now?
“We—ell,” I said, trying to play hard to get by dragging it out.
No, no, she could ask David instead.
So then I had a busy time convincing them that I wasn’t all that busy. I scratched my chin and thought for a while. “No, actually I can leave that till later,” I murmured to myself. Then I looked up at Karoline and nodded. Yes, of course I could give them a hand now, that shouldn’t be any problem.
“Oh, great. Thanks a lot, Ole.”
And then all I had to do was borrow Per’s tomahawk and get to work. I sharpened the poles we had, went into the woods to cut down some more and once I’d sharpened those it was time to start building the framework for what was to be their tepee. My forehead glistened with sweat, but the girls didn’t need to help me, I assured them, they would only be in the way, I’d be just as quick doing it alone. And I’d rustle up pine branches for the tepee covering while I was at it.
Wow. But wasn’t I at least going to take a break? Karoline wondered.
A break? What for?
They both laughed, they just didn’t know what I was made of.
Oh, it was so good to hear them say things like that.
Well, okay, they said. They might as well go and collect some bracken while I was working.
Bracken?
Yes, for the floor. So it would be nice and soft to sit on.
What? Well I never—the girls thought the ground was too hard to sit on comfortably? Okay, okay, I laughed, then they’d better go off into the forest and find their bracken, and in the meantime I’d finish making the tepee.
Oh, this was the life. Not only had we an enemy we could stand against shoulder to shoulder, now we also had women whom we could help and maybe even give our lives for if the situation demanded it.
Perfect, in other words. Your diversionary tactic had worked and everything was perfect in the camp again.
This just shows, by the way, why of all of us you were the brains behind our imaginary world. Because there was no one to touch you when it came to storytelling and yarn-spinning. In fact I’ve never known anyone like you. If, for example, I asked you what you’d done the day before, you might say that you’d been coley fishing with your grandfather, even though you hadn’t been coley fishing at all, you’d actually gone blueberry picking. As if the fact that you’d been blueberry picking was something you wanted to hide, or as if you felt that there was something special about going coley fishing that made it worth boasting about. At other times you would launch, unasked, into descriptions of books you’d read or television programs you’d seen—books and television programs you couldn’t possibly have read or seen, or that might even prove to be nonexistent. And if we happened to be talking about someone, whether it was a kid or a grown-up, you almost always had some story about them that nobody else knew and that would later turn out to be a pack of lies. And it didn’t need to be anything dramatic, designed to spellbind us, your audience. Sometimes it was, but just as often all you would have to tell us was that this person or that had an uncle who was a welder, or that the person concerned was really good at drawing.
I’ve often wondered why you did things like this, why you lied without any thought of gaining some kind of benefit or advantage from it. I mean, you risked getting a name for being the sort of person the other kids couldn’t trust and whom they wouldn’t want anything to do with. I spoke to Eva about this when I ran into her down at the Co-op today. She works as a psychologist in Namsos and she cited your family situation as a possible explanation for why you were the way you were. Berit, your mother, wouldn’t tell you or anyone else who your real father was, and since you and she had lived with
your grandfather he had, to all intents and purposes served as a father figure for you. And, since he was such a domineering control freak, you had a particularly strong need to create for yourself a world in which you and only you called the shots, or so she thought. So from that point of view, all the lying, the yarn-spinning, the fantasizing, was actually a survival mechanism, she said. Your imaginary world was a place in which you had the power you didn’t have in your normal everyday life.
This all sounds very neat and logical, but I’m not so sure that it’s correct. Unlike today, when the lives of most kids are totally regulated and supervised by adults, we were given plenty of scope and had more than enough time to ourselves. None of the kids on Otterøya went to nursery school, not as far as I can remember, because when we were at that age, our mothers were at home. Or if they went out to work they had grandparents or babysitters to look after their kids, and this meant that we were free to run around the farms and roam the forest and the seashore. And later, when we started school and more and more of our mothers started going out to work, there were no after-school clubs where we could be looked after. Hardly anyone on Otterøya ever locked their door, but the few that did gave their children their own doorkeys to hang on strings around their necks and when we came home from school, alone or with a friend, we could look forward to hours to ourselves without any adult interference. So I find it kind of hard to see how excessive control on Erik’s part could have forced you to take refuge in an imaginary world in which you ruled the roost.
There was no doubt, though, that Erik could be controlling and domineering, not to say a bit of a tyrant. Years after your mom got together with Arvid and you moved from Otterøya to Namsos, I had a summer job at the sawmill where Erik worked for the last few years before he retired and there he behaved pretty much like a general among the rank and file.
“Johnsen, come here,” he said to one man who had just been taken on.
“It’s Johansen,” the man corrected him.
“If I say your name’s Johnsen then Johnsen it is,” Erik retorted, and if he was trying to be funny then he hid it well, because he neither laughed or smiled, and to the guys at the sawmill that poor bastard was Johnsen until the day Erik retired. If anyone wasn’t pulling their weight or made a mistake, especially if that mistake held us back or caused problems for the gang in some other way, Erik would usually punish the culprit by refusing to let him make up for it. His language could get pretty colorful at times, but usually he would simply dismiss the person concerned with a brusque wave of the hand and fix the fault himself, quickly, neatly and efficiently, leaving the sinner feeling useless. The only positive thing I can find to say about this side of Erik was that he was the same with everyone, high or low. He was as far from being a yes-man or an ass-kisser as you could get and he could be as rough on an odd-job man or the owner himself as he was on the other men at the sawmill.
The only reason he was able to act like this without it having greater, more serious consequences was, of course, that he was as big and as strong as he was. He was well over six feet tall, took a size twenty in a shoe and had an enormous pear-shaped face with two close-set black eyes. With a mug like that he could scare the wits out of just about anybody and if anyone was stupid enough not to be scared they soon would be, when he tore off his shirt, baring his chest—as he was quite liable to do when he was staggering around the community center, blind drunk and spoiling for a fight. As with all the local gatherings, everyone, from teenyboppers to pensioners, attended the parties in Årnes and Devika, and when I was a boy it wasn’t unusual to see a half-naked Erik “rearranging” somebody’s face, as he was wont to put it. But no sooner had Erik beaten the living daylights out of his opponent—and I never saw it turn out any other way—than he would do a complete about-turn and be as nice as could be, showering the other man with kindness and compassion. This was probably a sign that he was capable of remorse and possibly that he was afraid he might have gone too far, but such abrupt changes of mood, and the fact that remarkably often Erik and his fellow brawlers were the best of pals again as soon as they lowered their fists, also shows that there was seldom any serious or deep-rooted issue behind their battles. Brawling at a party was more a kind of ritual, it seemed, a good fight had a value and a function that did not primarily have anything to do with revenge or injustice, or a slight or insult of any sort. In fact insults tended rather to be welcomed and regarded as the perfect excuse for finally starting a fight. I think these brawls acted partly as a purge, allowing the combatant to give vent to his feelings and expend energy that he could not use or find outlet for in other ways, and partly as a way of proving to himself and everyone else that he was a real man, one who would never walk away from an honest-to-goodness fist-fight.
This last was important on Otterøya. The macho culture is still strong out here, but it was even stronger back then and each in their own way the island men all strove to live up to an ideal of manhood that most town and city dwellers would have considered hopelessly out of date. A true Otterøya man preferred home-brewed hooch to brand name booze from the state wine store; he smoked roll-ups, wore checked flannel shirts and when he wasn’t out walking with that manly, slightly rolling gait that townies claimed we had and have, he was driving around in a car or a boat a little bigger than he could actually afford on the money he made at the herring oil factory in Vikan, the mink-feed processing plant at Fosslandsosen or wherever he happened to work—if he wasn’t a fisherman or farmer and thus self-employed.
This is of course something of a caricature, but most caricatures have a grain of truth in them. Otterøya was a community in which men were men, as they say, and even my dad, who I knew had voted Socialist Left in more than one general election, hated fairies and laughed at women who tried their hand at traditional male jobs. He never ceased to be amazed, for example, by Hauk and Grim’s mother and father when they moved from Oslo to Otterøya, because when they went anywhere in the car it was just as likely to be the wife that drove as the husband. I’m sure Dad was never aware of it himself, and he would probably have sworn it wasn’t true if anyone had suggested it to him, but for him being in charge of the car seemed to be a metaphor for being in charge of the family and it went without saying that that was a man’s job. The only valid reason for a woman to get behind the wheel when her husband was in the vehicle was if he’d been drinking and wasn’t fit to drive, although even that wasn’t always a good enough excuse. “I’d have to be pretty damn drunk to be as much of a danger on the road as the wife,” as Dad always said.
All this can, of course, be seen as typical of the brash way middle-aged men have always behaved—convinced as they are that they and their ilk have been selected by nature to run society. But if you ask me the macho culture on Otterøya has made a lot of men far more full of themselves than normal. For instance, I’ve always tried as far as possible to avoid going shopping in Namsos with my dad, because he’s never satisfied with the quality of the service or the merchandise, and if he spots an article with a little flaw in it you can bet your life that’s the one he’ll want, just so that when he reaches the checkout he can demand to get it for half-price. “No, I’m sorry, I can’t let you have it for that,” I remember the checkout girl at the hardware store saying once, when he demanded a discount on a toaster with an almost invisible scratch on the enamel. “Aw, c’mon now, of course you can,” Dad said and he didn’t look like he was joking. He seemed totally unconcerned by the line forming behind us, he simply stood there staring at the assistant, waiting to see what she would do and, young and unsure as she was, she didn’t dare to do anything but agree to giving him a discount. Dad walked out of that shop afterwards having had confirmed yet again what he was always angling to have confirmed when he did this sort of thing: that he was a real man and that, like all other real men, he wasn’t easily fooled, he knew his rights and he always stood his ground.
Likewise, he believed he had a perfect right to say exactly what he thou
ght, no matter how little he knew about a subject, and not just a perfect right: he seemed to feel he had a duty to share his usually very strong opinions with other people. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him get information from anywhere except the Namdal Workers’ Weekly, the television news and Nationen, but even when talking to people he must have known to be better informed and more abreast of events than he was, like the headmaster at the school or the highly knowledgeable chairman of the local historical society, for example, he would lay down the law, telling the person concerned exactly “what was wrong with society today.” He was a real man and real men “didn’t mince their words,” they “called a spade and spade” and “didn’t beat about the bush,” to quote three expressions he was fond of using of himself.
But still there was one thing that real men in general and my dad in particular did not talk about and that was, of course, feelings. Because feelings could knock a person off-balance and since a real man had to be ready at all times to make important decisions on behalf of himself and his family, he always had to be in control, he had be rational and “keep a cool head,” as Dad used to say. The only time when an exception could be made to this rule was when he was drunk, or raging mad or both, because naturally real men had a karsk or two on a Saturday night and as I say they weren’t easily fooled. If provoked it was quite permissible to “see red,” “lose your temper,” or “blow a gasket”—all of these also favorite expressions of Dad’s.
I first became aware of this inability and reluctance to talk about one’s feelings when it began to dawn on me that my mom was mentally ill. I was in early primary school at the time, Primary Two maybe, I don’t really remember. But at any rate I noticed that she was beginning to neglect her personal hygiene, she stopped washing herself and her clothes and she started to smell. Both this and the fact that she spent less and less time on the housework and more and more lying on the sofa, doing absolutely nothing, made me feel more and more worried. She could be up one day, down the next, but during her worst spells she would lie in bed upstairs for days on end, just crying and smoking. She hardly spoke at all and if she did open her mouth it was mostly only to moan and complain and make unfair accusations, mostly aimed at herself, but also at Dad and me. Dad believed that hard work was the cure for all ills that weren’t of a physical nature, and in an attempt to force her to get out of bed and get on with her chores on the farm I remember he tried refusing to tend to her and wait on her as long as she stayed in the bedroom. But then she went from skimping on her appearance and personal cleanliness to not washing or caring for herself at all, and from eating far too little to eating nothing. And as with all the other strategies he had tried he had to abandon this one too.
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