One of Us

by Åsne Seierstad

  Suddenly it had a hollow ring to it.

  ‘So I don’t know,’ she faltered. ‘I don’t really have the right to wear it.’

  ‘Now you just listen,’ said her father. ‘If anyone asks, then say that you had a great-great-great-great-great-grandmother who fell in love with a Norwegian Viking who was on a raid in Baghdad. To escape the honour killing that would be her fate for falling in love with a non-believer, she had to run away with him,’ he said. ‘To Trysil!’

  Bano had to smile. She gave her father a hug and went back down to her room, and carefully finished getting dressed, before her mother plaited ribbons into the wavy, chestnut-brown hair that reached nearly to her waist. Bano drank her morning cup of tea carefully to keep her blouse clean. So did Lara, who was wearing a new white lacy dress from a popular chain store. It was a dress that her mother both disliked and liked. Disliked because it was so short. Liked because its neckline was not low cut.

  The two sisters, so alike except that Lara had ended up with long legs and Bano with a big bust. They had the same eyes, the same long brown hair. Now they emerged onto the front steps of their terraced house, one in a proper traditional costume, the other in a revealing miniskirt. Little Ali was in a suit, as was Mustafa, and Bayan had put on a simple dress. They were all wearing national-day rosettes in the Norwegian colours – red, white and blue.

  As the sisters walked side by side down the path to the main road they could already hear the brass bands. Bano gave her younger sister a serious look. ‘This bunad is going to be passed down,’ she said, stroking the beautiful embroidery, ‘to whichever of us has a daughter first. That girl is going to inherit it.’

  Lara smiled. Typical of Bano to have it all planned out.

  ‘And you can borrow it when I’m a russ,’ promised Bano. In the last year at upper secondary you were known as a russ, from the Latin depositurus, ‘one who is going to deposit’ – in their case, exam papers.

  Bano was thinking ahead to the school graduation celebrations the following year and had already started to save up with her gang of girlfriends for an old van to decorate. She had been put in charge of the finances and had opened a savings account for the group, so everything would be transparent and above board. There were already eight thousand kroner in it. In the course of the year she would take her driving test. How she was looking forward to putting on the red russ overalls and cap next year!

  A russ van drove past them. There were two teenage girls on top, clinging on to the roof. Her mother stared at them open-mouthed, shaking her head of curls that were just starting to go grey, and gave her elder daughter a stern look.

  ‘Bano, you’re not to do that when you’re a russ! Those girls could fall and hurt themselves!’

  ‘Don’t worry Mum, I won’t,’ said Bano and smiled.

  Her mother was not reassured and gave a heavy sigh.

  ‘You know that, Mum,’ said Bano. ‘By the time I’m a russ I’ll have my licence. So I’ll be at the wheel, not on the roof!’

  Soon the whole peninsula would see her costume. The new silver brooch glistened on her breast. Its pin was stuck through the fine, white fabric of her blouse, level with her heart.

  The President’s Speech

  The grass was turning green but the trees were still without leaves.

  The air temperature had risen above zero but on the shadier slopes and along the mountainsides around the village there was still snow, browny-grey with dust and soil. This far north, spring only crept up on winter slowly.

  There was a murmur beneath the snow. Hardy plants were starting to send out shoots. Soon everything would blossom into a short, intense summer, bathed in light.

  Throughout the winter, beautiful ice patterns had formed on the surface of the sea. The salty waves had frozen into little mountains of ice, waiting to be set free. In the night-time cold the ice in the fjord compacted, and in the spring sunshine it expanded. Rifts formed as the ice crazed and thin cracks spread at speed, making the ice tremble. The vibrations emitted a deep sound, a heavy rumble. It was the ice singing.

  A procession of children made its way into the field in front of the sports hall. Their faces were hot and rosy-cheeked from marching through the village chanting and carrying flags. They had laid wreaths at the memorial stones raised for those from Salangen who had been lost at sea, and in memory of those fallen in the Second World War.

  There were bands, there were choirs, there were dignitaries. Some families were dressed in sturdy traditional costumes from the deep valleys or narrow fjords of Norway, all with warm woollen underwear. Others were wearing the colourful kofte or long jerkin of the Sami people, complete with reindeer-skin moccasins and a knife in the belt. The pastor was in a full-length white robe with gold embroidered edging, while the Scottish head of the asylum seekers’ centre stood there in a purple tartan kilt and lace-up shoes, with a camera dangling round his neck and legs planted wide apart. The younger asylum seekers from Afghanistan clustered together in a group on their own, as did the Somalis and the Chechens. That year, the residents of Sjøvegan State Asylum Centre had carried their own banner in the procession. It was sky blue, with appliqué designs depicting the changing seasons, summer and winter, midnight sun and polar night, grass and snow, a silver fox and a leaping salmon. The whole thing was crowned with a Norwegian flag. Like the rest of the village, the asylum seekers were wearing the best clothes they had, and from the lectern a voice sang of ‘how good and beautiful Norway is’.

  A listless gang dressed in red, looking rather the worse for wear, stood out from the rest in the square. Their heads were pounding. Their eyes were slits. There they huddled, some lying down, stifling yawns, a couple even asleep. Their red boiler suits were covered in dirt, seagull droppings and beer. These were the russ, the final-year students who were leaving Sjøvegan upper secondary school. Most of them had been up all night and many had been partying since the first day of May. They had danced and drunk, necked and vomited. Some had found a boyfriend or girlfriend, while others had lost theirs. Only the drivers had stayed sober. They had all taken it in turns to drive, one night each, in the clapped-out old vans that got even more scratched and dented as the russ season drew to a close.

  Now the leavers were gathered with the rest of the town for the first time. Not yelling from open van windows as they screeched by, but assembled with the rest here on the sports field, where they had been running about not so many years ago, trying to wheedle ice creams and treating the russ like rock stars.

  Now all they had to do was last out until the final item on the agenda: the russ president’s speech.

  They pulled their red caps over their ears; the alcohol was breaking down in their bodies and they were freezing. They all had their names on the peaks of their caps, names to live up to or be ashamed of, given to them by the name committee at the start of the festivities. Their nicknames didn’t feel quite so funny now, among that crowd of solid fellow citizens, where the speeches and poetry readings inevitably conjured up a ceremonial mood. Baptism was the worst bit of the russ season. What power they suddenly wielded, those teenagers in the name committee, when they sat in judgement on their fellow students. It showed what a fine line there can be between teasing and bullying. A few drops of seawater on your forehead and the verdict was delivered right there on the pebbly shore, in white letters on the shiny black peak of your cap, some of them so rude you couldn’t show your cap at home. After the baptism one boy was left sitting on the beach, saying he would throw himself into the sea, in despair at being given the name Hole-in-One – a reference to an abortive sexual encounter in a red VW Golf that the whole school knew about. It was the russ president who decided the name had to go. He scraped the lettering off the peak with a blunt stone, took the soaking wet boy and his cap home to Heiaveien in the middle of the night, found some paint and began writing a new name with an unsteady hand. The name was to be Einstein. He started with the E, but then had an even better idea. E = mc2 was just ri
ght for a brainy type.

  The name committee was furious; this was blatant abuse of power on the part of the president. Baptism was their business. But they let the boy keep his cap with Einstein’s formula on the peak.

  Simon had been the obvious choice when the russ came to choose their president; most people were surprised that anybody else even bothered to stand against him, doomed to defeat as they must be. Simon won, naturally, while the runner-up was put in charge of the russ revue.

  So there he was now, that Simon, looking pale with dark rings under his eyes, waiting for the neatly turned out boy from the lower secondary school to finish his poem. His own hair was stiff with gel beneath his red cap and his fingers felt numb.

  Down in the crowd Tone, Gunnar and Håvard were waiting. Simon’s parents had been far from happy when he came home the previous autumn and told them he’s been elected president. ‘There goes his russ season,’ they sighed. For they knew that Simon got so involved in everything, in joys and sorrows, his own and others’, and as president he was bound to get drawn into disputes, caught between a rock and a hard place, between the school management and the demanding russ. The bitterest clash of all was over something as minor as a hundred kroner.

  The russ had worked and collected money to donate to the paediatric department at Tromsø’s University Hospital. There turned out to be some money left over, amounting to a hundred kroner per russ, and the committee proposed that everyone would receive it in the form of a discount on the cost of the coach they were taking to a party in the neigbouring village of Finnsnes. Simon thought that was wrong, and that the money should rather go to the school’s project in Cambodia, where they were helping to sponsor a clean-water project for poor rural communities. ‘We earned it’ clashed with ‘Cambodia needs it more’. Positions that would later harden into political divisions created factions and cliques. Nobody was prepared to give in.

  In the end, Simon got his way. As he usually did.

  * * *

  But now it was nearly over. It was his turn at the microphone.

  His hoarse voice rang out across the square.

  ‘We have been celebrating the completion of our years of study, something that has required hard work day and night!’

  Rousing cheers from the russ.

  ‘We are, if not reborn, then at least re-baptised over here at Brandy Bend,’ he bellowed to renewed howls.

  ‘But there’s no disgrace in a name,’ Simon went on; he knew when it was time to bury the hatchet. ‘They named me J. F. Kennedy. He was a president like me, you know. But unfortunately he got shot in Dallas.’

  Simon smiled out over his audience.

  ‘I’m too much of an optimist to sit waiting for the same fate!’

  His parents grinned with relief. Gunnar had persuaded Simon to take the time to write his speech out properly, rather than just scribbling a few notes as he generally did. This was going really well!

  From the podium Simon cautioned against bullying, in daily life, at school and above all on the internet, where the pillorying of those unable to defend themselves ‘could have far-reaching consequences’. He ended with how much money they had raised, their contribution to the water aid project in Cambodia and the campaign against the closure of Sjøvegan Upper Secondary School.

  Then he paid tribute to the Constitution and his homeland, and the school band struck up the Norwegian national anthem, ‘Yes, we love this country’.

  Hundreds of voices were raised and blown out to sea by the wind. As the final notes faded, the square came to life. Parents and young children moved on to their local parties with cake and games, the old folk headed back to their care home, the lonely returned to empty houses and the asylum seekers plodded back up the steep hill to their centre. Their sky-blue banner with the silver fox and the Norwegian flag would be stowed away in a box room until it was time to take it out again, unroll it and press it for another 17 May.

  The russ were off to slump in their rooms. In rooms that still harboured half-forgotten memories of a time when they were pink or pale blue. Spiderman and Britney Spears stickers still adorned the walls; football posters hung side by side with district champion certificates and school timetables. Some of the rooms were even home to a few overlooked soft toys, and their owners could carry on being children for just a little while longer, for one more short summer.

  Most of them would gradually disperse from this town of scarcely two thousand inhabitants, with one clothes shop, a chemist, a sports hall and an asylum-seekers’ centre. They would go out into the world, get down to their studies or do their military service. Some would stay on and work at the supermarket or the care home, and others didn’t quite know what to do, there were too many options, so they would take a gap year to think it over.

  Simon dutifully accompanied his parents and Håvard to the local party in Upper Salangen, where they had once lived, next door to his grandparents. Now he was the hero; just imagine, the russ president himself had put in an appearance. He played along and stayed in his role, while the children competed for his attention.

  The midnight sun was just three days away. In the months to come, the sun would never set.

  The Sæbø family turned into the drive of the blue house on the bend, just below the church, where the key was always under the doormat. Simon stumbled into his room, pulled off his russ overalls and collapsed into bed. By the window looking out over the fjord, the red and yellow Manchester United logo painted on the wall stood out boldly. To shield himself from the bright evening light he had closed the curtains. The design on the fabric was of a boy with a skateboard under one arm and a football under the other.

  Still, it was not entirely dark. Above his bed shone a heart. It was made out of fluorescent stars. Stars his girlfriend had stuck on his ceiling one evening.

  A few more weeks of school and then summer stretched ahead, shiny and glorious.

  He had got himself a job in the churchyard, just up the hill behind the house. All he had to do was cross the garden, step over the fence and walk a little way along the road, then he could go in through the gate by the church. His job would be to cut the grass, weed and water and keep the graves tidy throughout the summer holidays, apart from a couple of weeks, for which he had other plans. It would make a nice change to potter round the peaceful churchyard, be outside, feel the sun and get away from the classroom.

  So, at last: over the summer, real life would begin. JFK had it all mapped out.

  In one of the books on his shelf there was a quotation: ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.’

  One day he was going to make speeches like Kennedy too.

  Poison

  A thousand kilometres further south, in one of Norway’s thickest forests, a man stood in an open yard, boiling up sulphuric acid. The clear, viscous liquid was bubbling on an improvised hotplate and a stench of rotten eggs hung in the air. He was in the lee of a red-painted barn and could not be seen from the road. An electric cable, ten metres long, trailed to a socket inside the barn.

  The farm consisted of a white-painted house, the barn, a summer cowshed, farmhands’ quarters and a red storehouse raised on pillars, plus a garage. It lay on the eastern side of the Glomma river and looked out over dense forest to the east, while the view to the west was of green pasture and fields. The coltsfoot was blooming at the edges of the ditches and white wood anemones carpeted the dark ground beneath the fir trees.

  Vålstua, built around 1750, was the first smallholding attached to the larger farm of Vål, a bit further down the wide river. Some ground and a small patch of forest went with it, but it was quite a few years since the place had been properly farmed. The owner was in prison for having run a hash plantation there. Presumably he had thought it was easy to hide away in the country, people said, shaking their heads. But no, if there was one place where the locals kept their eyes open it was here, and everybody knew there had been funny business going on at Vålstua.
You hardly ever saw the people who lived there, yet there had been feverish activity in the outbuildings. People noticed things like that.

  Before he began his sentence, the owner advertised the farm for rent on various websites. A young man from Oslo got in touch. He was going to start sugar beet production, he said. When he came to look round, he told the owner that he had completed three thousand hours of self-tuition in agronomy, and knew someone at the agricultural college at Ås. The farm was idyllic, and the place got the sun late into the evening, the owner responded. Afterwards he told his girlfriend he’d been surprised that the well-dressed young West Ender did not say a word about the beautiful views and scarcely bothered to look at the main farmhouse.

  They agreed on a rent of ten thousand kroner a month. The owner wished his new tenant the best of luck and went off to serve his sentence of a couple of years.

  * * *

  The sound of drums and trumpets carried from the nearby hamlets. A light morning mist lay over the landscape, but sunny intervals were forecast for later in the day.

  No 17 May celebration would be complete without some mild admonitions from the local paper. This year, Østlendingen had advised local residents not to buy confetti spray, which contained harmful solvents. Customs had stopped large quantities of it at the Swedish border in the run-up to National Day, the paper reported. And the russ had been banned from bringing water pistols to their procession in case they frightened children, prompting vehement protests from the russ.

  These were the topics of conversation as the children played and the older people took wood anemones and wreaths of birch leaves to their family graves in the churchyard, in accordance with local tradition.