Even worse, though, were the times when Mom actually did try to pull herself together. After weeks at a time when simply turning over in bed appeared to take a massive effort, she would suddenly seem to find reserves of energy that only minutes before neither she nor Dad nor I would ever have imagined she possessed. She would hop out of bed, pull on her clothes and start tidying up, washing floors, mucking out the barn or going over all the homework I had had since the last time she had been up. It was as if she had a clear moment when she saw how bad things were and then she panicked and attempted to catch up on everything she’d left undone—and all in the course of the first day. She had to cut my hair, wash the windows and bake bread; she had to call on the woman next door, rearrange the furniture in the living room and darn Dad’s socks and mine. Nothing could wait. Everything was done at breakneck speed, with no thought for anything else—until she ran out of steam or began to see how ridiculously she was behaving. Then she could throw a fit because she had missed a little bit of dust on a windowsill; she could freak out because she had forgotten to mail a letter that wasn’t the slightest bit urgent, or dissolve into tears because I wouldn’t eat the food she had just cooked—even though it was the second hot meal she had dished up that morning and even though I had already told her I was full and didn’t want anything. I didn’t like her cooking, she would sob, she was totally useless, she was a burden to everybody around her, she’d be better off dead. Slowly but surely all of her newfound energy would drain away until there was nothing for Dad to do but take her upstairs and put her back to bed.
But even though I stopped bringing friends home because I was afraid the other kids would notice that something was wrong with her; even though I took on more and more of my mom’s household chores and even though there were times when I was so worried about her that I couldn’t sleep properly at night or concentrate on my schoolwork during the day, Dad made no move to talk to me about what was going on, not to begin with anyway. Or at least, he may have made the odd hesitant, half-hearted attempt to do so, clapping me on the shoulder and asking how I was doing, but when—me being my father’s son—I said I was okay he just left it at that and fooled himself into believing that I really was okay. I’m not sure, but I don’t actually think he was capable of talking to me about it, I don’t think he had the words for it. Dad preferred us to “find something to do together.” We went camping at Salsnes and took a drive across the Swedish border to Østersund, and he made a start on several little projects on the farm that he tried to get me involved in. He meant well, I’m sure, and it was all fine as far as it went, but it didn’t help one little bit, and these days I always look a bit doubtful when I hear someone talk about there being a more physical, manly way of dealing with emotional upsets. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve tried taking refuge in work myself when things got tough, but that never solved anything.
Physical pain was a very different matter. Not that a true Otterøya man could ever say anything that made it sound as though he was moaning or complaining, but it was important to let everyone know if you were in pain, because there was a lot of prestige to be won from “gritting your teeth” and “taking it like a man.” I don’t know how many times I’ve heard the story of the time when Erik’s brother Albert, who lived next door to you, had an accident with a cross-cut saw in which his right hand “was severed from the rest of my body,” as he put it. At any rate, he picked up the hand, walked down to the road and stopped a passing tourist who was on his way from Aglen Campsite into town.
“Sorry about the limp handshake,” Albert had said, smiling and holding out his severed hand.
How true this story was I don’t know, but that’s not really the point. The variety and popularity of such yarns shows that strength and toughness were valuable assets among the island men and that this was the image of the typical Otterøyan male most of them cherished. Those few who dared to openly undermine this image were usually vilified and ridiculed and jeered at when the other men were together. And in the case of particularly drastic, blatant rejections of the macho values—if someone came out as a homosexual, for instance—the individual concerned ran the risk of having the shit kicked out of him. Like most men on the island, Dad would never have done such a thing, but when one of the players on Otterøya’s sixth division team came out of the closet and had all of his front teeth knocked out by a teammate who “couldn’t bear the thought that he had taken so many showers alongside a butt pirate,” my dad seemed to have more sympathy with the assailant than with the victim. “Maybe he went a bit too far, but what a fucking thought, eh? To have to stand there being drooled over by another man,” as he put it when we were having dinner one day.
But it wasn’t just fairies and women that the men of Otterøya tried to distance themselves from in their efforts to seem like “real men.” City folk also came in for their fair share of abuse. Although it’s true that bad-mouthing townies had as much to do with local pride and creating some sort of identity for oneself as an Otterøyan. It had to do with experiencing a sense of fellowship and solidarity by highlighting and preferably exaggerating how different one was from people elsewhere and—there’s no getting away from it—for many it also had to do with concealing and living with a feeling of being inferior because they came from the provinces.
But the Otteroya man’s attempt to distance himself from town and city dwellers was also an attempt to live up to the macho image of a real man. Whenever my dad and Erik were discussing townies the underlying assumption was that they were priggish, stuck-up, fussy and far too full of themselves. According to my dad it was hard to tell the women from the men when you walked down Havnegata in Namsos, and he was sure that the Oslo guy who had bought the cottage plot on the other side of the bay would sell it again as soon it came time to fertilize the fields. Well, did we think a man from Oslo would be able to take the smell of slurry mingling with his whisky and soda on the terrace of an evening?
The reception given to Hauk’s and his big brother Grim’s hippie family when they moved to Otterøya from Oslo in 1979 or 1980 was another sign of much the same attitude.
Lasse and Lene Albrigtsen, Hauk’s parents, had no friends or relatives in Otterøya and when people asked them what had made them move from the capital to this of all places they would often start to talk, without a trace of irony, of how they had longed to experience the true, authentic life of the countryside. They would wax lyrical about the joys of growing your own herbs and vegetables and breathing clean, fresh air. But even though this was actually true, it wasn’t the whole truth, because it didn’t take long for word to get around that Lene was a drug addict and that Lasse had forced her to come with him to this remote corner of Norway in a desperate attempt to get her as far away from the drug scene as possible.
I can still remember how exciting we thought it was the first time we visited their house, and how intriguingly different it was from what we were used to. Our houses smelled of soft soap, tobacco smoke or boiled cod, but when we walked into the Albrigtsens’ living room we were met by a sweetish scent that my dad insisted in his worldly wise fashion, when we described it to him, had to be marijuana, but which later turned out to be incense. The walls were hung with the Albrigtsens’ own brightly colored works of art; from the attic, where Hauk’s mom practiced what I later learned was yoga, came the sound of soft, Indian-inspired music and after we’d been there for a while—once we’d said yes to staying and having dinner with them and a barefoot Lasse Albrigtsen not only served up an emerald-green soup he had made from nettles he’d picked from the hedgerow outside, but also instructed us to sit on the floor with our legs crossed while we ate—we really felt we were doing something we had always dreamed of doing.
It’s easy now to see that the Albrigtsens’ lifestyle appealed to the Indian in us and that it was this that made us feel so much at home there, on that first day and all the days after that. Lasse Albrigtsen had long hair that he sometimes kept in place with a headband. He went ar
ound barefoot and often bare-chested, the time of year and weather permitting, and since he had been practicing meditation and yoga all of his adult life he was as lithe and supple as we imagined an Indian would be. I don’t think it would have surprised us if he had said “Ugh” or greeted us by raising one hand and saying “How,” he seemed so much like an Indian to us.
Years of drug-taking had left Lene with a coarse, husky voice and a rather worn, haggard face and this was not how the comic books and films had taught us that squaws should look. But she also had her own pottery workshop in the basement, where she made pots inspired by the art of the Pueblo Indians, and she often wore dresses trimmed with long fringes that would have looked good on any woman in Silver Arrow.
Obviously, though, it wasn’t just the more superficial aspects that fired our American Indian fantasies when we were at the Albrigtsens’ place. Both Lasse and Lene talked about self-sufficiency and living in tune with nature. In their garden they grew potatoes and cabbages, not to mention zucchini (which none of us had ever heard of) and they picked plants that grew all around us but that we had always thought of as weeds, or at best no more than animal fodder, and used them in weird vegetarian dishes or made tea from them or hung them from the kitchen ceiling to dry and used them as herbs. To us, this last was a sure sign that Lasse and Lene possessed the same secret skills as the medicine man of an Indian tribe and although we never said anything we were very impressed.
Mind you, I seem to remember that Hauk and Grim weren’t as wild about those sides of Lasse and Lene that we admired, or not all of them, at any rate. Their parents would not have a television in the house, for example, because apparently television made you lethargic and apathetic and killed the art of conversation. And when, incredible though it seemed, they eventually did give in to pressure and buy a TV, they put it in a small, cold, unfurnished room that would be so uncomfortable to sit in that no one would think of doing so unless there was “something worth seeing” on, as Lasse said. And it was Lasse and Lene who decided what was worth seeing, because while they may have been more easy-going than our parents where most things were concerned, on this one matter they were anything but. Hauk and Grim weren’t allowed, for example, to watch the Westerns that we loved more than anything else, because they were American, they glorified violence and were almost always racist in the way they portrayed Native Americans. Besides which, John Wayne was a fascist according to Lasse, and anyway he wasn’t nearly as tough in real life as he was in his films: “Did you know he’s actually terrified of horses?” he used to say to us and then he would laugh at how ridiculous he thought the man was—thus also letting us know how stupid he thought we were for idolizing him.
But as I may have hinted earlier, when I wrote about the Otterøyans and their efforts to present themselves in a certain light by distancing themselves from other people, after a while we began to see that the very things we found so fascinating and appealing about the Albrigtsens were more or less the same things that made them seem so suspect to my mom and dad and to Erik and Berit. At first, just after word got out that Lene had been a drug addict, they had quite naturally been afraid that the home of the hippie Albrigtsen family would become a “drug den in our safe little Otterøya,” as Dad put it. But no one ever saw anything to suggest that Lasse and Lene used drugs. And anyway, everybody on the island knew that certain shadier local characters had already approached the Albrigtsens, hoping that by mixing with such liberated individuals they might have the chance to give rein to sides of themselves that the small village community did not normally allow them to express—“They’re probably hoping they’ll get to take part in orgies of sex and drugs,” as your mother said. The fact that Lasse sent them all packing reassured the locals and led most of them to abandon their suspicions and speculations concerning Lasse and Lene and their possibly drug-fueled, debauched bohemian lifestyle.
There were other things about the Albrigtsens, though, that the Otterøyans still weren’t too sure about. Okay, so Lasse did his sowing by the stars and the apple tree that Lene had brought with her from Oslo was planted on top of the placenta from Grim’s birth. Such things were just seen as adding an eccentric dash of color to everyday life on Otterøya and were a source of much hilarity to the locals. But the Albrigtsen family’s general behavior and lifestyle acted as a constant reminder that there were alternatives to the way in which the fairly homogeneous population of the island lived and this in turn was regarded by many as a threat. My dad, for example, could get extremely hot under the collar over the fact that Lasse and Lene went in for organic farming. Instead of showing an interest in it, keeping an open mind and possibly learning something from Lasse and Lene’s farming methods, he took it as a criticism of the way he and all the other farmers on Otterøya farmed their land. Lasse and Lene’s relaxed easy-going, take-things-as-they-come attitude to most things was automatically interpreted by your mother as laziness and sloppiness, and that they built their new shed out of logs and chose to give it a grass roof was in Erik’s opinion one of many examples that they were only playing at farming and that they were going to “get a real smack in the face from reality some day,” as he put it.
That Lasse and Lene dared to realize sides of themselves that the small village community did not allow the islanders to express and which were therefore left to smoulder inside them as suppressed urges and longings, this also did its part to fuel hostility to the Albrigtsens when they first moved in. Even though Lasse was in no way effeminate in his character or his gestures he was definitely a “new” man and the fact that he dared to have long hair and wear colorful clothes, and that he never made any effort to seem tough and strong and brave, all this felt like a serious provocation to many Otterøya men who struggled and strived every single day to follow all the rules and regulations imposed on them by the island’s macho culture. So, not surprisingly, a rumor spread that Lasse was actually a “butt pirate” and, as if that weren’t enough, one night after the family had been living on the island for about six months, Albert and a gang of younger men who believed that such scum had no place on the island paid them a visit and in a collective fit of rage tore up some of their vegetable crop, trampled flowerbeds and painted “fucking fairy” on the wall of their house—obviously in an attempt to convince themselves, each other and everyone else that they were real macho men from Otterøya.
But I shouldn’t exaggerate: there were also situations in which the men of Otterøya showed themselves in a more nuanced light and even undermined their image as macho men, of course they did. I remember, for example, one of the first occasions when your mother paid one of her secret visits to our house. Mom was over at her sister’s in Levanger and I can still remember how Dad almost seemed to become a different person when Berit walked into the room. I’d never seen him light candles before, but he did that night and all of a sudden he no longer seemed to think that red wine tasted like “undiluted blackcurrant cordial,” because he poured a glass for her and for himself, and in the long-stemmed blue crystal glasses at that, the ones that Mom had bought at the pottery in Grong and that Dad had sworn he would never drink from because it was pretentious crap and sheer madness to spend so much money on glasses when you could get ten times as many for half the price in an ordinary shop. And it didn’t stop there, because he didn’t drain his glass in two or three gulps, he didn’t curse and swear and he didn’t start pontificating on this subject or that. But what impressed me most of all was that he didn’t just listen to Berit when she started coming out with what my dad would normally have dismissed as “rubbish” or “drivel,” “sentimental claptrap” or “female tittle-tattle,” he actually had a conversation with her and spoke frankly about himself and his affairs in a way I’ve never heard before or since.
I was nine or ten at the time. I sat up in my room, listening in on their conversation. At some point my dad had changed into a man I didn’t recognize. Today it saddens me to think of that little incident. I realize of course that I
was witnessing a scene in which a man was entering into a relationship with a woman and so it’s not all that surprising that Dad turned himself into the sort of man he thought Berit would like. But it wasn’t just an act, of that I’m sure, and so I can’t rid myself of the thought that Dad showed some of his actual potential as a man and a human being that night. In fact this little incident makes me wonder what he might have been like if the Otterøyan macho culture hadn’t set such clear limits for what a man could and could not be in everyday life. Maybe he would have been able to reveal those sides of himself a little more often, maybe he would have been a little less angry, less brusque and stern, a little gentler and easier to live with.
I may be rambling a bit here, but what I’m trying to say, what I’m getting at, is that we grew up with male role models who always did their best to seem like “real men.” And here, perhaps, lies the answer to why you made up stories and lied as much as you did. Perhaps your lies and your tall tales—or many of them, at least—were attempts to present yourself in much the way you imagined Erik to be. I’m not sure, but I think the imaginary Wild West-inspired world that you dreamed up and became so absorbed in when we were playing up at the camp also had something to do with this. Because our Indian universe allowed you to play at being Erik. Everything we had read and heard about Indians—that they were brave, strong and proud, that they were wild and noble and could never be intimidated—these were all qualities we recognized from the way Erik and the other men around us tried to appear. So it wasn’t only the Albrigtsens who had something in common with the culture of the North American Indians as we knew it. The ideals, values and norms depicted in the Deerfoot books and the Silver Arrow comics, in Captain Miki and Commander Mark, in Centennial and How the West was Won, were pretty much the same as the ideals, values and norms we knew from the macho culture on Otterøya, and when we thought we were being little Indians, in many ways we were being little Otterøya men.
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