It was pretty rotten what we did to you there, of course, and I’ve no decent excuse for it. Except that that’s just how we were and our background was what it was. And since this was the background that you eventually fell into and became a part of, I think I should tell you a little more about it.
To take Bendik first:
He had holes in most of his teeth, a mop of red hair and a tiny upturned nose covered in freckles. I’ve always felt that all of this, together with his skin, which was a sickly bluish-white, like skimmed milk, fitted really fucking well with the uncontrollable rages and wild behavior that would lead, a decade later, to robbery with violence, double murder and ten years in prison. Honesty and common decency were airs and graces that he had no time for, and whether he was faced with other kids or adults he didn’t know, he was always just as pushy, cheeky and totally fearless. He fought and lied and stole, not just when he felt he had to, but just as often because he thought it was exciting and fun. If he was spotted and caught he would put on a brilliant act, sobbing his heart out, begging and pleading to be let go and swearing by all that was holy that he’d never do it again. But as soon as his victim took pity on him and Bendik got beyond arm’s reach he would scoff and sneer and fire the most hurtful insults at the person concerned, and before too long he’d be off on yet another raid.
But behind the bandit’s mask there was another Bendik, and even though it sounds so stupid that I almost balk at writing it down, this Bendik was an insecure boy with hardly any fucking self-confidence, partly because of the mother he had. Ingun Pettersen was well up in years when she had Bendik and by the time you moved to Namsos she was a wrinkled, bent old woman with mournful, doggy eyes set slightly too close together in a face that was yellowish-brown from way too much Petterøes No. 3 tobacco. We just called her “the Chimney” and if you kidded her and told her that she ought to shut her kitchen window because she could be fined thousands of kroner if the fire brigade was called out to a false alarm, she would squeeze her doggy eyes shut and croak that hoarse, hacking laugh of hers. That’s a sight that’s stuck in my memory because it was pretty fucking rare for Bendik’s ma to laugh or be cheerful at all. She was obsessed with sickness and death and disasters of one sort and another. She seldom talked about anything else and when people got fed up and remarked on her gloomy view of things she always responded by saying that they weren’t strong enough to cope with the harsh realities of life. But if there was anyone who wasn’t equipped to cope with the harsh realities of life, it was her. Because the fact was that she suffered from anxiety and hardly ever left her apartment. She was fretful and frightened of just about everything and no matter what Bendik might do or was supposed to do or felt like doing she was always sure it would end in disaster. “Well, don’t blame me when you’re sitting there in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down,” she said when Bendik was a little boy and wanted to jump from the big ski-jump hill along with the rest of us kids. “You’ll know what I’m talking about when you’re looking at your fingers lying on the ground,” she said, when wee Bendik wanted to take his sheath knife out with him to whittle something. She also made sure that Bendik knew the emergency number for police, ambulance and fire brigade by heart and as if that weren’t enough he was never allowed to go anywhere without a card in his pocket on which she’d written his blood type—just in case he had an accident and needed to have a transfusion.
Obviously a lot of her fretfulness and anxiety and pessimism rubbed off on Bendik and, knowing as I do how much he hated that side of himself, it was hard not to see his rough, tough manner as a kind of compensation for this. Sometimes, for instance, if we robbed a place where there was a particularly big risk of getting caught, he would be running with sweat and white with fear, but the minute he realized he was afraid and, even worse, that he looked afraid, he would do a complete turnaround and be so intent on seeming brave that he could become reckless and take unnecessary risks. He was the same in other situations too. In discussions or disagreements he’d do anything rather than say what he thought, and if he was unfairly treated in any way he would simply swallow it, go all quiet and look almost sad. But this never lasted long, because suddenly it would seem to dawn on him that he was acting like the spineless wimp he hated to be and he’d instantly switch back to being the tough, aggressive lout whom even grown men were loath to cross.
Me, I grew up in an old yellow-washed, two-family house further down the same street as Bendik. Ma and I had the ground floor and Grandpa and Grandma lived on the first floor, but I spent almost more time upstairs than down, certainly during those spells when Ma was seeing the most hopeless of the men she took up with. As to my Da, he fell off a crane and was killed when I was only three years old, so I don’t remember anything about him. According to Ma I didn’t miss much, though, because he was an even bigger bum and drunkard than the guy she was with when you moved to Namsos and that’s saying something, since he drank aftershave and ate shoe polish when he was hungover and couldn’t get ahold of anything else to stop the shakes. I know it’s not normal to call a man a bum when his son can hear it, but that was Ma for you, she couldn’t be bothered hiding anything from me, or certainly none of the things she should have hidden. She made no effort to put away the dildo that lay on her bedside table, even though she knew I’d be in and out of her bedroom. She’d come crying to me to tell me the latest on her love life. And when she had her gabby, chain-smoking women friends around, the air in the living room would be blue with talk dirtier than I’ve heard in any of the construction-site camps I’ve ever lived in. I remember, for example, one of the first times you came home with me, because Heidi Olufsen was there, the woman I would lose my virginity to at an after-party a year later and who then took it upon herself to teach me what Grandpa used to call the fine art of rumpy-pumpy. Oh, my God, what a glorious time that was. Anyway. You and I had come into the living room to fetch something and Heidi and Ma started asking us about our gym teacher.
“Do you take showers with him?” Heidi asked.
You were surprised and a bit thrown at being asked such a question. You didn’t say anything right away, but then you saw me grinning and that reassured you.
“Sometimes,” you said.
“Lucky bastards,” Ma said pertly. She and Heidi looked at one another and cackled suggestively. They both bent over the coffee table, knocked the ash of their cigarettes, then sat back on the sofa.
“So, has he got a big dick?” Heidi asked. She took a quick puff on her cigarette and grinned at you, blowing smoke out of the corner of her mouth. You didn’t say anything. I think you were wondering whether this was some kind of a joke or whether they really did want to know.
“Does he, Tom Roger?” Heidi asked, turning to me.
“Not as big as mine,” I said, grinning. “But yeah, it’s big.”
Ma and Heidi looked at each other and cackled again.
“Ooh, look at him!” Ma cried.
“Big-head,” Heidi said.
“No, but seriously,” Ma said, stubbing her cigarette out in the ashtray and holding her hands out in front of her, a bit like an angler describing the size of a fish he has caught. “This big?” she asked.
“Bigger,” I said.
“This big, then?” Ma said, holding her hands farther apart.
“Bigger,” I said.
“Oh, my God,” Heidi gasped. “Go into the bathroom, somebody, and get me a cloth. This sofa’s getting wet.”
So, as you can see, in our house there was no clear line between the children’s world and the adult world. Ma spoke and acted around me pretty much the same way as she did with her women friends, even though the people from Child Welfare had advised against it and tried to persuade her to shield me from that sort of thing. “I’ve got nothing to hide and there’s no fucking way those bitches from the social work department are going to make me pretend I’m better than I am when I’m with my kid. I’d rather he learned to have respect for himself and be pro
ud of who he is and where he comes from.”
That, more or less, was what she said, and she usually made a point of adding that those social workers didn’t really want to help. What they wanted was to see people like her struggle in vain to be like them, because that acted as a sort of reminder to them that they’d done well for themselves and were better than ordinary folk. Not to belabor the point, but if you ask me she was right in a lot of what she said. Specially when it comes to what kids are supposed to be shielded from, it seems to me that things have gone way over the score. These days you can’t even say the word “nigger” without the authorities moving heaven and earth to whisk the kids off to safety. I’m telling you, I’ve seen it happen more than once at parents’ meetings at nursery or school.
There was one thing about Ma though that really fascinated you, I remember—and I’m not thinking about her tits, which were always bulging out of a bra several sizes too small and which you used to gaze at longingly when she was sunbathing in the garden. No, I’m talking about her work as a medium and clairvoyant. I was used to it, of course, and I couldn’t really see the fun in hiding in the wardrobe behind the red velvet curtain to spy on her when she held her consultations, but I did it for your sake and I can still remember how mesmerized you were by the sight of Ma sitting there solemn-faced and straight-backed with her eyes closed, letting the dead speak through her or seeing into someone’s future. A future which, as it happens, was usually either very bright or very bleak and seldom anything in-between. “I can taste blood. Promise me you’ll see a doctor as soon as you leave here,” she told the plumber who lived further down the street. Or: “Oh, I feel a pressure in my pelvis, you’re going to have many children, at least three,” as she said to Jenny Lund.
Once in the mid-80s, after you’d been going on at her for ages, she finally gave in and agreed to help you find your father. I haven’t mentioned this before, but not only did you grow up without a father, you didn’t even know who he was, because for some reason Berit refused to talk about the guy. So it was no wonder you were so tense and serious-looking as you sat there in the deep, red-plush armchair, watching Ma light the obligatory incense stick, closing her eyes and preparing to search. There was a long silence, then she suddenly began to speak in the flat, monotonous voice she always used when she travelled out of her own body.
“I smell baking, cakes … I’m in a cake shop … or a café … the walls are pink … and I hear voices, many voices … but I don’t understand what they’re saying … they’re speaking another language … I don’t know what language it is, some East European … no, wait … wait … there’s one voice that’s … that’s rising out of the babble of voices, a deep male voice …”
She fell silent for a moment or two and then something happened that was unlike anything I’ve ever seen before or since. And it seemed to come as as big a shock to Ma as it did to us because even though she couldn’t speak any language but Norwegian she suddenly started speaking very fast in what we at first thought must be Russian or Polish but which turned out to be Slovakian. Or at least the only sentence we could remember afterwards was “Stalo sa prvého septembra” and this was apparently Slovakian for “It happened on the first of September.” Don’t ask me what happened on the first of September that was so special, or whether this meant that your father was living in what was then Czechoslovakia and is now Slovakia, but that’s certainly what we thought when Ma was finished and you got up from the armchair, pale and dumbstruck by what you had just witnessed.
While Ma was a medium and fortune teller, Grandpa ran, as I’ve said, a scrapyard and junk shop, so the garden, the yard and the garage were all overflowing with every sort of old trash. The neighbors were really pissed off with us about this, especially all those middle-class bastards living in the big villas on the other side of the fence. They saw red every time Grandpa rolled up with a new load in his blue pickup, because junk in the garden was one of countless things that didn’t fit with the chocolate-box style of life they were trying to build for themselves. Not only did they write to the housing board to complain, they also started a petition which stated that Grandpa was “polluting the local environment” and “putting the lives and health of children at risk by allowing them to play freely in unsafe surroundings strewn with dangerous objects.” But Grandpa was a tinker and used to being hassled so that sort of thing cut no ice with him, and he usually got his own back anyway. Not long afterwards, when the guy who had started the petition put his house up for sale, Grandpa made a point of inviting Erik and all his other drinking cronies over for a thumping great karsk binge in the garden at the exact time when the house was being viewed. Not only that, but he got Erik to bring an old toilet up from the basement and dump it right where it would be the first thing prospective buyers would see from this guy’s veranda. Oh, God Almighty how Grandpa crowed when he heard some time later that the house had sold for way under the asking price. Best of all, though, was the time when the guy who lived right next door to us wrote a letter to the Namdal Workers’ Weekly that everybody knew was aimed at Grandpa and all his junk. Grandpa smiled and was as sweet as sugar and grovelingly polite when he ran into the guy in the street one day, but that very same evening he summoned you and me and Bendik and Uncle Willy to the yard. We left the junk exactly where it was, but we moved the fence several yards farther over into our property so most of the mess now seemed to be in our neighbor’s yard, making it look as if he, and not Grandpa, was the neighborhood scrappie. A brilliant act of revenge, if you ask me.
Being looked down on by those middle-class bastards was one thing, but it was quite another matter, and much worse, to be looked down on by many of our own. Oh yes, because that we fucking were. Ma believed it was because we weren’t as well off as a lot of other working-class people and because we couldn’t join in the so-called consumer boom of the 80s, but I don’t really think that had so much to do with it—there were plenty of folks around us who couldn’t afford to run out and buy all the things the admen said they should buy, but no one thought any less of them for that. The difference between them and us was that they spent their time and energy on mending and fixing up, painting over and touching up things that were old and battered to make them look decent. We, on the other hand, didn’t really give a fuck about all that. In other words, we didn’t give a fuck about the ideals, the expectations and tastes they had picked up from the middle classes and which the middle classes must have picked up from the upper classes. That’s why they looked down on us. Or at least that’s how I see it today. We weren’t to be intimidated. This could be seen even more clearly in our attitude to work, I remember, because, as with Erik, nobody in my family could be bothered pretending that the whole point of life was to slog your guts out from the age of sixteen to sixty-six. And it wasn’t that some members of the family hadn’t tried that either. Under pressure from Grandma, Grandpa did take a job in the quality control department of the Van Severen sawmill, for example, but he only stuck it out for two or three months because, as he growled on the day when he had finally had enough, “No fucking way was I put here on this earth to sit on a chair for eight hours a day, looking at wooden planks.”
And Ma was exactly the same. She had tried a lot of jobs before setting herself up as a fortune teller and medium, but on those occasions when she didn’t quit off her own bat she was given the boot and if anybody suggested that she only had herself to blame, for being such a slacker and a sloppy worker, she told them in no uncertain terms that she wasn’t going to break her fucking back for fifty kroner an hour. She used pretty much the same argument in court when she was convicted of embezzling money from the newsstand out at the Prairie, I remember, because when the prosecutor asked how much she had taken she replied: “Only as much as I felt I was entitled to.”
But this sort of protest, if I can call it that, didn’t mean that we were ashamed of being who we were, and when I think about it I don’t actually believe that any of us felt as much shame a
s Grandpa, who was a full-blooded tinker. Norwegians have never had any time for tinkers, you see, because the sight of a free and footloose tinker reminds the Norwegian of how tied he is to the clock and his employer and all the things he owns that he feels he has to guard. To save being reminded of how unfree he is, the Norwegian has done his best to wipe out the tinker society and this he has done in ways that are as bad as anything the Nazis did during the war. Grandpa’s mother was forcibly sterilized after giving birth to his little sister, his uncle was shot full of LSD then given a lobotomy at Gaustad Asylum in 1946, and as far as Grandpa himself was concerned there was hardly a town in Trøndelag that he hadn’t been beaten up in and run out of. It goes without saying that if you’re treated like this then you will, unconsciously, seek the reasons for this. You’ll start to wonder what’s wrong with you. Well, as the good book says, “seek and ye shall find,” and before you know it you find you hate yourself.
And if you ask me it was this sense of shame and self-loathing that also led Grandpa to beat up Grandma every now and again. I’m not making excuses for him, but because Grandma wasn’t a tinker herself I think he sometimes saw her as a sort of representative of society at large and of his persecutors. She was the one who tried to get Grandpa to work and earn money instead of sitting on the porch playing guitar or lying in the hammock behind the shed reading pulp westerns. She was the one who insisted that it was worthwhile clearing the snow, even though Grandpa was quite right when he said that it would eventually melt anyway. She was the one who got mad at him when he came home from the shop with expensive steaks for dinner instead of the makings of four economical meals that she had sent him to buy. And she was the one who worked from the minute she got up until she went to bed, thus making Grandpa look like an even bigger layabout than he actually was. No matter how discreet and soft-spoken Grandma was she was still a constant reminder to him of what a failure and a misfit he was, so she was the one who had to pay the price when his self-loathing became too much to bear and his lust for revenge too great.
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