Then as now Otterøya was a small close-knit community so almost everyone, and certainly all of us in that dayroom I think, had heard about this rift—well, it had been the talk of the town at the time. But there were various theories as to the actual reason for it. Sylvia Skog had heard that your great-grandfather had got a housemaid pregnant and when his father tried to force him to marry the girl he quite simply walked out and never went back. Therese Skorstad on the other hand had been told that your great-grandfather had been his father’s close confidant and colleague, as well as the natural heir to the business and his fortune, but that they had become estranged when your great-grandfather tried to save a lot of money by not insuring a small sawmill owned by the family. When this mill burned to the ground, your great-great-grandfather was so enraged by the loss and this breach of faith that he disowned his son.
But none of these theories is correct, Odd Aune says. According to him your great-grandfather broke with the family for political reasons. Even as a young boy your great-grandfather was troubled by the huge differences he saw between the lives of his own wealthy family and all the poor men working themselves half to death at the sawmill, so Odd says, and when he joined the company he was far more open to discussing things and cooperating with the workers and the trade union than your old-fashioned, deeply paternalistic and pretty uncompromising great-great-grandfather. While your great-grandfather supported the union’s demand for a cost-of-living allowance after the outbreak of the First World War, your great-great-grandfather rejected it on the grounds of high war taxes and an uncertain timber market; while your great-grandfather defended the workers’ right to free firewood from the sawmill, your great-great-grandfather stuck to his decision to deprive them of this right, and while your great-grandfather was prepared to give in to the demands for higher and higher wages, your great-great-grandfather would not yield. And so it went on. They held fundamentally different views on the relationship between employer and employee and this led to violent clashes that rendered relations between them more and more strained. The friction between them did not escape the notice of the workers and union men, who exploited it for all it was worth—which in turn made the relationship between father and son even more fraught.
Eventually something had to give. The son was every bit as stubborn, proud and hard-headed as the father and neither of them was willing to make any concessions. Far from it, the more personal the feud became, the wider the gulf between them grew until the day when your great-grandfather simply upped and left the company. And not only that. Inspired by the Russian Revolution and a trade union movement that was becoming more and more radicalized, he announced that he was now a socialist, said so long and farewell to his old life and took a job as a sawmill worker with the Namsen Timber Association. But that wasn’t such a good move, Odd says. Your great-grandfather was a tall, strapping young man so the work itself was no problem for him, but to the other workers he was still a Dyrbakk, and no matter how hard he tried to fit in he was never accepted. He was shunned and cold-shouldered and so after only a year or two he moved to Otterøya, where he built a little wooden house down on the shore.
And many, many years later you would grow up in that same house.
Odd Aune is a knowledgeable and, not least, an honest and reliable fellow, so I’ve no doubt that he’s right and that most of what he says is true. But still, I can’t help thinking that he and those who were most in agreement with him are as much intent on conveying a message that’s important to them as they are to presenting an accurate account of past events. It seems to me that they are creating an image of your great-grandfather that will reflect their own ideal of a sober, thrifty character, content with little. Their admiration for and animated accounts of a man who lived a life of affluence and had everything but chose to forsake all this wealth to live instead much the same sort of life as themselves, the life of a fisherman and farmer on the island of Otterøya, are as much an attempt to invest their own lives with value and meaning as to tell the truth about your great-grandfather. And naturally they want you to learn from this, David, they want you to identify with the great-grandfather they speak of and embrace the values and the qualities which they say he possessed. Not, of course, that I think they do this consciously or that it’s in any way planned. They do it instinctively, they present it this way because it feels good and right to present it this way, it satisfies a need in them, that’s all.
Actually it was interesting to talk to Paula about this afterwards. Because she told me that this aspect of your family history meant a surprisingly great deal to your mother. Berit felt cheated, you see, Paula says. She felt that, in choosing to cut himself off from his family, her grandfather had deprived her of the chance of a happy, carefree life. She knew it was ridiculous to think like that, she even laughed and said she was just being silly, but still, that was what she thought. “I should really have been rich and successful,” she used to tell Paula and then she would launch into a description of what this life of wealth and luxury would have been like. She had two different scenarios, and if I understand Paula rightly it depended on how she was feeling, mentally and physically, which one she would pick on any particular day. One version saw her happily married to a handsome, well-dressed gentleman, and during the day, when he was out attending to business, she had her hands full looking after three bonny, rosy-cheeked children, running the house and seeing to it that the housekeeper and the other staff did what they were supposed to do both inside and outside the family mansion. In the other, she painted a picture of a rather decadent, opulent existence in which she lounged around feeling bored in an interesting and charming fashion; a life laced with irony and sarcasm in which she stayed in her silk dressing gown till mid-afternoon, smoked cigarettes in a holder and sipped drinks while waiting for her secret lover.
But the most interesting thing about this is that Berit actually seems to have tried to win back the life that she believed her grandfather had cheated her of. The year after you were born, she took a job as a cleaner at the dairy in Namsos, but when she heard that Anton Dyrbakk the sawmill owner was looking for a maid of all work for the aforementioned mansion in Bjørum, she left the dairy and went to work for Dyrbakk instead, even though it was a more demanding and less well-paid job. Her reason for doing this was, of course, that this was the family and the house that she had once been cheated out of. In other words, applying for and getting the job as a maid with the Dyrbakks was the first step in a bigger plan to regain what she had lost.
And as I understand it from Paula, Berit was well aware that this was what she was trying to do. Speaking of it later, she would say that she had had a vague idea that she would start by impressing the Dyrbakks by being exceptionally conscientious and hard-working and in due course, either by accident or chance, it would come out that she was actually one of them and she would immediately be accepted as such. Yes, and not only accepted, Paula says, but as one would expect in such a classic, not to say almost archetypal, tale, your mother saw herself staying there with them and eventually marrying the son of the house, a good-looking young man who was studying economics and wore a suit every day.
And the first part of her dream did in fact come true. Berit showed herself to be an excellent maid of all work and she hadn’t been at the house for more than a few weeks before the lady of the house happened to hear that she was related to her husband. The only problem was that Anton Dyrbakk wasn’t particularly interested in this revelation. He asked her a few questions about herself, just to be polite, and that was that. Nothing more was said to Berit about them being related and she certainly noticed no change in their attitude towards her. Later, when she talked about it she would laugh and say that she had been hopelessly naive, but according to Paula she felt both angry and bitter towards the Dyrbakk family, not only because they had failed to fulfil her naive and totally unrealistic expectations of winning back what she believed—or no, not believed, but felt—was rightfully hers, but also becaus
e a year later they had given her the sack, and in the most humiliating fashion. You see, the lady of the house found out that Berit had you, David, and that you had been born out of wedlock, and since Mrs Dyrbakk refused to have a young woman of loose morals in the house she was kindly asked to leave that very day.
All of this suggests that your mother was a woman with ambitions of getting on in life, something which Paula can confirm today and which is also clear from this entry in Paula’s diary.
Otterøya, July 13th, 1977
Bit of an upset tummy today. Sat out in the yard, smoking and drinking currant wine with Berit until three in the morning. We talked about what we always talk about. Getting away from here and starting afresh somewhere else. A new life in a new place. As far as I’m concerned this is just a stupid dream. I know that. It’s only when I’m with Berit, a bit tipsy and encouraged by how seriously she takes all our talk that I find it possible to believe in our plans. And even then there’s a part of me that knows this is just a nice little bit of escapism, a pipe dream. I won’t see forty again and I’m never going to get away. There’s no way that’s ever going to happen and all the currant wine in the world won’t fool me into thinking otherwise. It’s different for Berit. She’s not even twenty-five yet and she feels like she has all her life in front of her. And she has no husband to stop her. She’s free to do whatever she likes and even though she has David, she sees no reason why we two couldn’t move to Namsos and open a clothing store, the way we spent all night discussing. Oh, God. If I know her she’ll already be looking for premises. And I’d bet anything that before the day’s over she’ll have rung the bank to ask about the chances of getting a loan. She’s so enthusiastic, so full of get-up-and-go that I often feel like an old woman when I’m with her. She believes she can do anything, everything’s possible. And when she comes to see me, to show me the premises she’s found or to tell me what the bank said, it’ll go the way it always goes, I’ll start looking for gentle ways to demolish our plans. I hate myself for it. I’m the biggest coward in the world.
According to Paula it was this ambition to better herself and get on in life that led Berit to take up with several of the men she did in fact take up with. I don’t mean she let herself be bought in any way, far from it. But she always had an eye for a man with money, in principle at least. Such an attitude is not unusual among people from poor backgrounds, of course. Not at all, it’s probably more the rule than the exception, but still there’s something slightly indecent about making wealth and status the criteria for choosing a partner, it seems at odds with the romantic ideal that we subscribe to today so most people won’t admit that they do it.
Not Berit, though, according to Paula. She never made any secret of the fact that she went to this party or that simply because she had heard that one of the biggest landowners on Otterøya would be there. She mimicked and made fun of the high-pitched voice and effeminate appearance of a young man of her own age on the other side of the island but when out of the blue he inherited his uncle’s grocery store she somehow managed to overlook these faults and enter into a relationship with him that Paula described as hopeless and doomed to failure. “Well, I just like the idea of being able to buy whatever I want, don’t you?” she said bluntly when one of her friends reminded her of what she had once said about this young man.
And she was equally frank and outspoken when she broke up with Steinar Olsen in the early 80s. Or to say “broke up with” is possibly not quite right since they had never really been together—not officially at least. Steinar was a married man, you see, and his affair with Berit was only possible because his wife was ill and confined to the psychiatric unit in Namsos. Nonetheless, according to Paula no one, not even the staff at the psychiatric unit, believed that Steinar’s wife would ever get better, so both Steinar and Berit felt that they were home and dry. It was only a matter of time before Steinar could get a divorce and their relationship could become common knowledge—as if it weren’t common knowledge already, Paula remarked.
But then Berit discovered that Steinar Olsen wasn’t as well off as she had thought. He was apparently one of the farmers who had done best out of the agricultural restructuring carried out in the 70s. He had bought land and some of the machinery from a neighboring farm that had been forced to shut down, he had invested in a big new barn and done up both the farmhouse and the farm cottage. So everything seemed to be perfect. But one evening when Steinar was sitting with a pile of bills in front of him, doing his accounts he suddenly broke down in front of Berit and said he simply didn’t know what to do. The farm wasn’t paying any longer, he was unable to pay off all his loans and was on the brink of bankruptcy.
Obviously Berit didn’t break it off with Steinar right then and there, Paula says. She wasn’t that cold and cynical. Nonetheless it was because of his money troubles that she made up her mind to leave him. “No way am I ever going to marry a bankrupt,” as she said straight out to her friends in the sewing circle, “I’ve got enough worries as it is.”
As it happens it was Berit’s affair with Steinar that caused the rift between her and Dagny. Although their friendship had been on the wane for some time before Berit and Steinar started seeing one another. Your mother’s mood swings had become worse and worse during the latter half of the 70s and when they met at sewing circle evenings or other gatherings, Berit could be downright horrible to Dagny, there’s no getting away from it. She could, as I say, be rude and nasty to anyone when she was in one of her black moods, but Dagny was particularly easy prey. The jibes aimed at her were worse, they were more frequent and came more readily.
This may well have had something to do with Dagny being such a cheery person and always so infuriatingly happy. Her cheerfulness contrasted sharply with the way Berit felt when she was in one of her black moods. Well, Dagny reminded your mother of all the things she wasn’t, but would have liked to have been and this must have filled Berit with the urge to punish her. And obviously it didn’t help matters that Dagny was as naive as she was. She had never really known hardship or pain and as a result she was capable of telling Berit in all seriousness that “You have to think positively” and “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” and if there’s one thing that can really antagonize someone like Berit it’s that sort of talk, because even though it’s well-meant, it sounds and feels as though the person saying it is belittling the problem and turning it into something that can be fixed with a pat on the back and a good night’s sleep. But it can’t, of course. Far from it.
Anyway it was Berit’s affair with Steinar that put an end to this once close friendship. Because you see in 1980 Dagny’s husband had been diagnosed as suffering from motor neuron disease. He died less than a year later after a dreadful decline during which he slowly but surely lost control of his muscles and his respiratory tract. According to Paula, this happened around the same time as Steinar’s wife’s condition really started to deteriorate, so the heartbreaking experience of having to watch one’s spouse gradually waste away was something that Steinar and Dagny shared. They understood one another, and out of this understanding grew a more emotional attachment. Open and ingenuous as she was Dagny told her friends at the sewing circle all about this, Paula says. She told them what she and Steinar had said to one another, what they had done together and, not least, how much they were coming to care for each other.
Whether it was solely in order to punish Dagny that, well knowing all of this, the younger and far more enigmatic and exciting Berit then seduced Steinar, Paula is not sure, but she has no doubt that your mother did take a certain malicious pleasure in stealing Steinar from Dagny. You just had to look at her and listen to her to know that. Granted, Berit used to say that she shouldn’t do the things she did and that she felt bad about Dagny, but then—after adding that, well, no one could control who they fell in love with—she would grin wickedly, making it clear to Paula that love for Steinar was not the main thing here.
But still, she didn’
t do it simply for the pleasure of getting back at Dagny. The drama and excitement of the situation were probably as great an incentive. As I said Berit was something of a dreamer, fond of picturing herself in the sort of worlds she saw in films and read about in her weekly magazines and romantic novels, and according to Paula she clearly relished playing the part of the secret mistress and femme fatale. For Dagny this was deadly serious, but to Berit it was just a game. She loved all the lying and the subterfuge it entailed; she loved to sit there with the rest of the sewing circle dropping hints that might give her away, and the time when she had had to hide in Steinar’s bedroom while he was downstairs, explaining to Dagny why it wasn’t the best time for her to call, marked a high point in this adventure that she never tired of describing to Paula.
But when Berit realized that Steinar’s wife was unlikely ever to get better and that Steinar actually meant it when he said that he wanted to be with her, it became less of a game and more serious for her too. It was then that the social climber in Berit came into play. At a sewing circle evening that turned out to be anything but pleasant she informed Dagny and her other friends that she had fallen in love with a man whom she knew someone else present was also in love with. All the air seemed to be sucked out of the room the moment she said this, according to Paula. Everyone sat perfectly still, holding their breath, eyes fixed on the needlework in their laps, and it wasn’t until Berit started going on about how nobody could control who they fell in love with and that she hoped they could all still be friends, no matter what happened, that Dagny got up and dashed out of the room in tears.
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