The day we stopped being friends with him it was because of this last.
“Oh, by the way, is it true that Berit’s been selling her body to Steinar?” he asked, looking at me and grinning spitefully.
I’m not sure he even knew what it meant to “sell one’s body,” but I’m pretty certain he didn’t know what a terrible thing it was to say, because he was surprised, to put it mildly, by how angry Lasse and Lene were when they heard it. They both looked as if they wanted to leap out of their seats and tear the boy apart with their bare hands, but you and I knew of course that Hauk had only said what he said because he had heard his parents say it, and since our anger was therefore directed as much at them as it was at Hauk, there was no way they could act as referees, as they then tried to do. We got up and left and we never set foot in that house again.
Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe we went back there lots of times after that and I’ve simply invented this rift between us because it fits with the rage we—but most of all you—felt when you realized that the Albrigtsens had thought of and spoken about your mother the way they obviously had, I don’t know.
It’s not for me to judge either Dad or your mom for having an affair and thus hurting Mom in a way that made life even harder for her than it already was. I don’t know much about Berit, but I suppose that as a single woman she, like everyone else, must have dreamed of meeting the great love of her life. And even though he was married, Dad was also, to all intents and purposes, on his own, certainly after Mom was admitted to the psychiatric unit in Namsos.
Because of course she had to go into hospital. It wasn’t safe to keep her at home, not for Mom herself or for Dad, who was just about dead on his feet by then. He had a sort of unspoken agreement with Mom’s sister that she would take her now and again to give him a break, but that wasn’t nearly enough because Mom was getting worse and worse. It had got to the point where quite frankly it was an absolute nightmare being in the house with her. It was terrible to see her lying in bed, limp and lifeless, smoking and crying for weeks on end, and it was just as terrible to watch her frantic attempts to pull herself together. But then she started to develop some rather more paranoid traits. She had been suspicious of Dad and me for a long while, accusing us of all sorts of ridiculous things, probably because she had no control over us when she was bedridden. She had no idea what we were doing, where we were or who we were with, and so she began to “get ideas,” as Dad put it. But as time went on these ideas became positively morbid. We were used to hearing her say that we didn’t love her, that Dad was running around with one woman or another and that I was only hoping that he would trade her in for somebody else so that I could have a new mother, but there came a point when she seemed to actually start believing these things herself. Her accusations were no longer simply an expression of the sadness, anger and self-loathing that her illness brought with it, they had been thought and voiced so many times that suddenly they seemed true to her. We could tell from the way she spoke to us, of course: there was a new weight to her accusations. But it wasn’t until she started acting on her suspicions that we realized she was losing touch with reality. One day when we were having breakfast she got it into her head that we had injected poison into her boiled egg. She had spotted the tiny pinprick in the eggshell when she lifted the egg out of its cup, she said. What was that, if she might ask? Dad explained that we always made a little hole in the egg before boiling it so it was less likely to crack, but even though she couldn’t argue with this she was far from convinced. Dad even offered to give her his egg instead, but she still wouldn’t eat it. And she got worse. More and more often she would demand that we taste her food before she ate it, or she would suddenly decide to take my plate or Dad’s and shove her own over to us. She was convinced that we had it in for her, and her efforts to keep tabs on us in order to catch us red-handed, as it were, became more and more extreme. She had been listening in on Dad’s telephone conversations for some time, but one day we found a bag of cassettes in a cupboard and when Dad played them he discovered that she had hidden the cassette recorder under the telephone table and taped all our calls. It was a pathetically amateurish attempt at phonetapping, of course, but it was done in deadly earnest and when I think back on that day I find it strange that my dad let it go so far before having her hospitalized.
But eventually he’d had enough. The proverbial last straw came when she rigged up a sort of alarm system that was supposed to wake her up if Dad tried to sneak in and kill her while she was asleep. She had quite simply knotted one end of a length of string around the leg of the bed and the other to three pots that were tied together and balanced on the very edge of a chair. When Dad went into the bedroom to ask her about something the whole lot crashed to the floor with a terrible clatter. That did it. Dad said as little about this as he had about all the other things she had done, but he called the psychiatric unit in Namsos more or less immediately and the very next day he enticed Mom into the car. He was going into town to pick up some paint for the cottage living room, he said, and he would like her to come with him and help him to choose the color because he wasn’t so good at that sort of thing. And surprisingly enough Mom fell for it. It wasn’t until they turned onto the road to the hospital that she realized what was happening and it was all Dad could do to stop her from jumping out of the moving car. She freaked out completely, biting and punching and clawing, and Dad told me later that he’d had to pick her up bodily and carry her into the hospital. The worst of it was, though, that this only went to show that she’d been right in what Dad and I had always called her groundless accusations. She’d been claiming for ages that we wanted rid of her and clearer proof of this would have been hard to imagine.
I don’t know when my dad and your mom started seeing one another. Dad seems to have had a reputation for being something of a charmer and a ladykiller in his younger days, so for all I know it could have happened long before Mom became ill, but at any rate it was while she was in the hospital that Berit started coming to see us much more often than she had ever done before. The excuse given to neighbors and everyone else was that with Mom in the hospital Dad needed help in the house and on the farm and that was true enough up to a point, but even though Berit did clean the house and cook and help out in the barn, the work was plainly not the main reason for her visits. The neighbors didn’t latch on to this, not right away, but I did. As I say, I was only nine or ten at the time, which is probably why Dad and Berit made no great effort to hide their relationship from me. I suppose they thought I was too young to understand what was going on. But the mere fact that Berit stayed the night was enough for me to get the picture. Not that it was unusual for people to stay the night at our place, especially if the grown-ups had had a bit of a party, but Berit stayed even when not a drop of alcohol had been consumed and she stayed the night more and more often. Granted, she always slept on the sofa in the living room while Dad was in the bedroom upstairs, but it wasn’t at all unusual for me to come down in the morning and find Dad’s clothes lying scattered around the living room floor, or for Berit to have to run upstairs to fetch hers.
But however careless they might have been, they obviously didn’t want me to know what was going on between them. If, for example, I accidentally walked in on them when they were kissing and cuddling Dad would make the most ridiculous excuses. Like the day when I caught them sitting at the kitchen table, holding hands: “Oh, yes,” he said quickly, “I think your watch is running a bit fast.” As if I was dumb enough to believe it was Berit’s wristwatch he’d been so busy stroking. And then there was the time when my football training was canceled and I came home to sighs and groans and creaking bedsprings. I knew better than to walk in on them, of course. I was even considerate enough to blunder accidentally on purpose into the coat stand in the hall and knock it over, to warn them and give them the chance to finish and compose themselves before coming out and carrying on as if nothing had happened. And they did make some effort to act normal
, but Dad was so embarrassed and flustered that he just couldn’t. He tried to fob me off with a different explanation for the groaning and creaking, even though I knew very well what had been going on. “Hell, that wardrobe was heavier than I thought,” he said as they came down the stairs. “I didn’t realize it was solid oak. I worked up a helluva sweat there, so I did.”
Later that night, after I’d gone to bed I heard them laughing and joking about this little incident. “Solid oak,” your mother giggled. “I came up against something in that bedroom that felt like solid oak, but it was no wardrobe,” she said. “And I worked up a sweat as well,” she added and then they both howled with laughter.
Actually, that’s what I remember best from that time, that she brought laughter and joy into our house again. Because Dad had been miserable for a long time. He’d been run off his feet, almost all of his time taken up with looking after Mom or working in the house and on the farm. And when he did have a little time to himself he usually spent it just sitting in an armchair staring into space. I still remember how much of an effort he made to look cheerful when I came home. He would paste on a strained smile and ask how I’d got on at school, but he could never concentrate on my reply, certainly not if it amounted to more than a few words. If it did he would usually interrupt me, with a gentle, but weary “Oh, really, is that right?” and then he would turn away, still smiling, and stare at the wall again.
But when your mother starting coming to the house, slowly but surely he became his old self again. She was so full of life, she talked all the time, laughed easily and often, and her good humor rubbed off on everybody around her. Dad started talking again, he became more enthusiastic and interested, he was happier and more carefree, and this man who had for so long been dour and dismal was suddenly transformed into a wit and a wisecracker, a role that he thoroughly enjoyed, I could tell. I remember, for example, the time when he fell off the ladder while painting the barn. This was after your mother had started bringing you with her when she came over during the day, so you were there too, in the yard with me, eating waffles, and Berit was sitting on the front step smoking a cigarette, tired out after cleaning the house.
“For heaven’s sake, what have you done to yourself?” she suddenly exclaimed, and when we looked up we saw Dad coming limping across the yard, his eyes screwed up and his face all twisted in what was obviously pain.
“I fell off the ladder,” he said, sinking down into one of the garden chairs with a groan.
“Oh, my God,” Berit said, “you poor thing. Were you high up?”
“To start with, yeah,” Dad said.
We had a good laugh at that.
Mom couldn’t stand that side of him. It infuriated and annoyed her when he made quips like that, and this in turn annoyed Dad and brought a sneer to his lips and sarcastic edge to his voice as he remarked that being half-Nordlander she was probably incapable of laughing at anything that didn’t include the word “horsedick” and the Trøndelag sense of humor was obviously too sophisticated for her.
Berit, on the other hand, laughed her head off when he came out with one of his wry comments and, no matter how hard Dad tried to act as though he couldn’t see what was so funny, it was no good. He could stay perfectly deadpan for two or three seconds, but then his face would start to crack and eventually he would give up and burst out laughing too.
They were well-matched, so I wasn’t the least bit surprised when Dad came to me one day and told me that you and Berit were going to move into the cottage. I don’t know whether he was aware of it himself but not a day went by without him saying or doing something that testified to him and your mother wanting to live together. He became more and more keen to know what I thought of her. “Berit says you’re such a good boy and so likeable,” he might say, for instance, after Berit and I had spent some time together just the two of us. Or: “Berit was really impressed by what a big help you were with the firewood yesterday,” he might say, even though Berit had shown up when we only had a little firewood left to stack, so she couldn’t possibly know whether I had been a big help or not. I was just a little boy, but these reminders of how much Berit liked me were so frequent and could be so over-the-top that I realized his main aim was to assure me that I had nothing to fear if Berit moved in with him. Although I’m sure he would also have liked me to say as many nice things about Berit as he reported her saying about me. He also began to take an interest in how you and I were getting along together even though we’d been friends for years and Dad had never given any more thought to our friendship than he had to my friendship with Per, say, but now all of a sudden he kept wanting me to say things that would confirm what good friends we were, you and I. He dug and probed and asked leading questions designed to get me to sing your praises. He even started making special arrangements for you and me to meet and spend time together. “Would you and David like to go to the pictures this evening,” he might ask. Or: “Why don’t you and David bike down to the Co-op and buy yourselves an ice cream.” It was as if he wanted everything I did or was planning to do to include you as well, and if it so happened that it didn’t he would look surprised and wonder if there was something wrong. “So where was David?” he would ask if I’d been with Hauk and Per, just the three of us. “There’s nothing wrong, is there? You haven’t fallen out?”
One day when we were winding fuse wire around the spokes of our bike wheels I remember I tried to talk to you about what was going to happen. And to show you that I had nothing against Dad and Berit being together and them moving in with us I did more or less the same as Dad had done with me: I started talking about the four of us as if we were a family. “Maybe we should ask Dad and Berit if we can go fishing tomorrow?” and “D’you think Dad and Berit would let us watch Centennial tonight?”—that sort of thing. But you got so mad, I remember. Dad and Berit were still trying to make us believe that Berit was only working at the farm and that it was simply more practical for you and her to move into the cottage. But even though you must have known what was going on between them you asked me what I was babbling on about. “Have you gone off your rocker as well now?” you said, a remark which obviously hurt me and upset me because it made me think of my mom. I didn’t speak to you for a couple of days after that.
I’m not sure why it was easier for me to acknowledge what was happening than it was for you. Maybe it was because it’s easier for a son to share his dad with someone than to share his mother with someone, I don’t know. All I know is that I no longer felt I was betraying Mom when I accepted that Berit was a part of Dad’s life. Because I had done to begin with. I had felt really guilty about Mom and even though I was a cautious child, almost too well behaved, I suppose I did sometimes take my distress and anger out on Dad and Berit. When she first came to live with us I was huffy and moody. I’d often make a point of mentioning Mom and asking whether we weren’t going to go and visit her soon, as if to remind Dad of what he was giving up and probably also to pile some of the guilt I felt onto him. I remember I used to get out family photos from the time when he and Mom were still happy together and leave them lying around, where I knew he and Berit couldn’t help but see them.
But after a while all this changed. Mom’s absence probably made me realize how hard, not to say really awful, it had eventually been to have her living at home, and even though I wasn’t an old guy like him I understood that Dad had to get on with his life. Besides which, I could see how fond he was of Berit, how happy he was when he was with her.
But once the two of you were settled in the cottage your aforementioned dislike of the new arrangement soon vanished. Although you did try for some time to maintain the impression that you weren’t happy. Our drinking water tasted of iron, you said, and there were a lot more midges and mosquitoes here than at your own place because of all the birch trees and bushes that grew so close to the house, and the television reception was so rotten that you didn’t even want to talk about it, it made you so mad.
But you on
ly said these things because you felt you would be letting Erik and your childhood home down if you didn’t protest against moving into the cottage, of that I’m sure. Because other than that, from the way you spoke and acted it was clear that you liked living with us. In fact you perked up a lot after you moved in. You’d always been moody and unpredictable, there were times when you seemed to withdraw into yourself and wouldn’t talk to anybody, and there were times when those of us who were with you had to watch what we said or did because you could fly into a terrible rage over the slightest thing.
After you moved in with us, though, I saw little or no sign of this. I seem to remember you being more even-tempered, more relaxed. Which isn’t to say that you were quieter in a physical sense, because you weren’t. Quite the opposite, really: you were brighter and livelier than ever, firing on all cylinders from morning till night. But you seemed more easy in your mind, more secure somehow, less tense, less wary. You weren’t so quick to take offense at things I said or did, nor did you have the same need to dominate me and boss me around. This may have had something to do with your having moved in to my home and feeling therefore a bit like a guest in the house, feeling that here at least you weren’t in charge. In any case you certainly didn’t seem to resent the fact that I was now on a more equal footing with you. You didn’t kick against it, if I can put it like that.
I might be exaggerating this and representing the change in you as greater than it actually was, maybe because subconsciously I want to paint a rosy picture of our life on the farm, yes, I’m sure I do, but still: it’s perfectly true that I remember you as being particularly cheerful and contented back then, maybe because you saw how happy your mother was. I don’t know, but it’s possible. I certainly felt very peaceful and secure when I saw how good Dad and Berit were together. I remember one day we were in the garden and a flock of little birds flew down and landed on the berry-laden currant bushes. The bushes were swarming with them, they seemed to come alive and Berit pointed to them, wide-eyed.
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