Only Human

by Kristine Naess

  Finn can say all kinds to his own mother. You can be very cruel, she shouts at him when he talks about how she is. You bundle of nerves, he says. Did you have to be so self-centred? It is mean of him to say it. But she knows him, her Finn is so terribly, terribly kind. A rascal, but the kindest of all her children. Reliable and devoted to a fault, she knows him through and through. He is like her. When they sit in the afternoon sun on the balcony drinking beer, and he taunts her, it is fun, she can sense they have the same urges, they want to be borne away, taken somewhere. When he drives her to the doctor, to the shops, or out to Bygdøy to visit friends and he speeds up, jams on the brakes, goes through a red light, he does it to provoke her. True, she is scared, but she likes it, that is how it is, she likes it.

  It is peculiar however that he has never criticised her for being mean to Linda. She knows she has been, and in some respects she knows why. She is not well-born, that wife of his, but she puts on airs, thinks she is something because she comes from a bookish family. They might be bookish but when all is said and done they are blue collar, really working class when you get down to brass tacks, and yet so sure of themselves. No, she is not quite sure what it is, but she has felt ill at ease the times she has been to visit Linda’s parents. They are lovely, it is not that. But my God, what do they know about her, those people who think they know everything? Do they actually understand that her life is in ruins? Everything she owned belongs to someone else now. The fancy woman in Vettakollen. As though all that time she and Hartvig spent building a home no longer matters, does not exist, has vanished into thin air. The children she gave birth to, the work she did, it is nothing in the fancy woman’s eyes. Hartvig waves her away as though she were a fly, and Linda’s parents sit there offering her coffee and cake. No doubt they feel sorry for her, divorced and living alone in a little flat in the city. While Linda’s mother has been at home looking after her big family all these years, they have allowed themselves that luxury. Now she and her husband live in the same little two-up two-down and, what is more, it is on the east side. They have no business looking down at her, just because she is alone and has nothing, is nothing.

  Anyway, the divorce was a long time ago, besides which she is only too happy to be spared Hartvig, ugh. It is just, no, see, she does not know. But, in any case, Finn has never upbraided her for that, for not thinking Linda is good enough. In her own mind she knows, a loud voice within tells her: and neither were you, Cessi, you with your alcoholic father, you came from a rotten background, and they saw that, they saw right through you, Hartvig’s parents, how little you brought, how little there was to build on, no money, no means, no grace, you with your coarse, selfish laughter.

  And there were worse things than that, everything is much worse than anyone could guess. But there are no proper words for it.

  It is ironic. She still keeps the accounts, even though she has told Hartvig once and for all that she is never going to submit them for his inspection again, never. That had to come to an end, her mind was made up, and maybe that was the reason he gave in so easily, just muttered something about her being dependent on his support after all, so how could she expect to get a loan from him in the future, if she continued living beyond her means.

  Living beyond her means, her! She does not know how to respond to something so preposterous. Liking the food you eat, is that living beyond your means? Buying good butter, prawns and smoked salmon at the weekends. Inviting the grandchildren over, dishing up hot chocolate and cream, inviting them to the cinema, was that living beyond your means? Because it was cosy to sit in that dark cinema at Gimle. It was actually a relief to admit to herself that she liked moving pictures a million times more than the theatre. You go to the theatre, Hartvig, together with that boring wife of yours, I am delighted to be spared that.

  Perhaps she lived a trifle beyond her means when it came to beer and wine. She had made herself a solemn vow to enter all those kinds of expenses into the household account book, and she nearly managed to keep her promise, she wrote them up: wine, kr. 17 –. For special occasions and entertaining guests she bought a slightly more expensive one. It was only when she was at the Vinmonopolet twice a week that she neglected to write it up, because she did not think she could indulge in more than one bottle a week, preferably no more than two a month. But she comforted herself with the fact that it was so seldom she failed to keep her promise, so it ought to be possible to turn a blind eye to it. Anyway, some weeks she did not buy any at all, so it balanced out, as it were.

  After all I have to stay alive, she said to herself, I am all alone here, it is just me, and I have to go on living, there are limits to how resourceful I can be on my own. Not that she was lonely. She had Alice, and all her other friends. The children and the grandchildren. Her correspondence to America. But inside, the gnawing never let up. She scarcely knew what it was, but it hurt so, almost constantly, and she felt such unease within. It was her lot and fate. Was she not then entitled to drink a little wine?

  22

  I walk down to the shops in Slemdal. Drab food. Good thing I have wine at home. It will make the bread taste a little better. I do not see him standing behind me in the queue. I have been getting so many looks from people. I am shrouded in suspicion after all. But as I stand bagging my groceries I see who it is. The man from the Red Cross rescue team. My heart pounds, I become instantly nervous, and do not know if I should cast my eyes downwards or look at him. I look at him. What a handsome man. He is about to punch in his code and pushes his glasses up onto his forehead. He must sense my eyes upon him because he suddenly looks up and right at me, his gaze sweeping my breasts. It happens quickly, but is unmistakable, I have seen it before, when someone likes looking at me. I nod to him, and he seems to blush, but he turns his head at the same time to accept his receipt. I am not certain he has recognised me. He shakes open a plastic bag, I glance at his groceries: full-fat milk, butter, wholemeal bread, crisps. Vegetable mayonnaise. Bachelor fare, I think, no woman would eat that much fat.

  I finish filling my shopping bags, place them on the floor between my feet and pretend to rummage for something in my shoulder bag. When I lift my head he gives me a slight bow.

  You were the one who was in my garden, I say, do you remember me?

  Yes, aren’t you the local writer? he says.

  I’m the one whose house has been on the TV, I say. The neighbourhood witch. They think I eat children. You probably think the same, do you?

  He breaks eye contact, but remains standing in front of me with his bag in his hand. They’re only doing their job, I suppose, he says. It’s an awful business.

  Yeah, you just have to keep searching, I reply. Keep searching and hope for the best.

  I am well able to do that too. Carry on that way. Not hop over the preliminary platitudes and get right down to business. Best to hold back a little, that is what Knut said to me at the outset of our relationship. But that was when we were having sex.

  He looks at me and nods seriously. Things going okay with you? he asks.

  Yes, considering the circumstances, I say, not too bad. Just think about the parents.

  We walk together towards the exit. He stops right outside and takes a bunch of keys from his trouser pocket. I’m heading down this way, he says, motioning in the direction of Vinderen.

  Does he live nearby, I think, so close to me that we go to the same shop, how could I have failed to notice him?

  I hope things improve for you, he says, and I nod, say that if they could only find her, they would, and preferably alive.

  I cut across the car park, and as I look back I see him throw his leg over a bicycle and freewheel down towards Vinderen. A tall, thin man with long legs in a checked, short-sleeved shirt.

  I walk uphill and home. I put the food in the fridge and cry. Pour red wine into the cup and sit outside the house. Sun-warmed plastic at my back. My toes in the moss. An hour passes. I cry some more, my nose runs, and I feel sorry for myself, but then the w
ine takes effect and I realise I am not as sad as I think, on the contrary. There is a throbbing throughout my entire body. It is happiness. Completely out of control. He liked me. I saw it. And now I have thought it. It just happens, comes, takes me over, consumes me. I cannot, will not, it is not on. But it comes: I am excited.

  It is like rain falling inside my head. I try to think but my head is filled with drops. Clear, translucent drops. They contain everything I want to know, insight, but the rain falls quickly and heavily, I see, but do not see. That was the way it was in my relationship with Ketil M as well.

  We got together after a members’ meeting in the Authors’ Union. I was a lot more involved in that kind of thing previously: turned up at meetings, festivals and seminars, went to publishers’ parties and dinners. Driven by a longing, a feeling of not making it, ever. I do not know why I thought other writers could help me with that. Or that I would find a man among them to be happy with. Was I never going to be happy? Or if not happy then at least content. I told myself that: being content is sufficient. But my fantasies had greater ambitions, they were wild and uninhibited, I wanted bliss, orgasms, fusion, not a trace of loneliness, my other half was not to feel extraneous. Everything was to be harmonious, a fellowship, perhaps something even more lofty, a spiritual convergence.

  My attraction to Ketil was purely physical. He was big, everything about him was big, his hands, upper arms, his chest. His legs were long, and you could just picture the size of his penis, and I did, every time I ran into him, which was pretty often, he was constantly to be seen at writers’ events, as was I.

  At first he showed no interest. I was not surprised. Ketil likes women who are tall, blonde and outgoing, well-endowed. And beautiful, of course. Not that I am ugly. But I am not striking either, and I am dark-haired, reserved. For the most part. Except for when I was chasing after Ketil, then I was neither nervous nor hesitant but chatted away. That was a red flag. Men whom I am not afraid of approaching are the most dangerous, they are the kind who let you down or will not let you go.

  His books were boring. At least the one I read was. It was not the story that bored me, more the words. He wrote about the wonderful tranquillity of the forest and the dark mystery of women, something along those lines anyway, maybe not quite as bad as that, but still. Perhaps it was not so much the words that bugged me, even though they testified to literary weakness. No, it was his ideas about great literature, what was required, how a sentence should be sculpted in order for it to be art at the level of a master novel. I was more poetic, in his opinion, my work was about displaying the contents in the toolbox of language, and that was all well and good, but was still only the first step in the development of a writer. Ideally, the language of the novel should be transparent, he said, the craftsmanship should not be visible. That was his goal, what Ketil was aiming for. I was tempted to tell him he was mistaken, that I, as opposed to him, had come so far in my development that I did not know if I wanted to be a writer any longer, or rather did not know where the line went: when was I a writer, when was I not? No, I could not have said anything like that at that time, because I did not think so much then, or did not want to think, acknowledge my discomfort. It was the contrast between his ideas and those feeble sentences of his that made it uncomfortable, embarrassing, turning it into something I wanted to overlook, because it would most likely improve, I reckoned, when he became more confident. That was the way I thought back then. That love was not dependent on intellectual parity. It was not intelligence that mattered. But I was wrong about that. No, I lied about that. My ideas masked something else: the fear of finding an equal. The fear of the sexual side of things then eating their way into my soul. Into every perceptible aspect of me. That devotion would lead to self-destruction. Were not even my thoughts to be free? My very core.

  We became a couple in November, at the closing party after the members’ meeting. At the table, when the meal was finished and everyone was mingling. Some people danced, and we held hands on the white tablecloth.

  I could see the very moment he decided upon me. His gaze stopped wandering, he began to flirt, or rather, he simulated flirting. So what, I thought, so what. The difference between flirting falsely and the real thing is negligible, nobody can tell them apart. I knew he would say yes, so I asked him if he wanted to go back to my place. My body felt so light, small and delicate alongside his large form, it never felt like that otherwise. A love affair, I thought, finally something that can work out. But something was ever so slightly amiss. Something in his eyes, not quite right. I think he felt that walking along with me resembled something that had been. As for me: walking along with him resembled something that could have been.

  The last time we made love was also on my sofa. My body did not respond, I had no desire for him any more, but did not say anything. Instead I stroked him up and down his back and along his sides. He held out so long that I came all the same, and then it was like something in my head burst, something water-like, and for a moment I could see the past in one sweep, I smelled it, just as I could perceive the smell of semen long before Ketil came, I saw where it was coming from, a room I had been in, followed by a different room, a different man, several men, rooms, sofas, beds. In every instance I was much too young and an odour of soil pervaded, where did that smell come from? I remembered some coloured lights in a tree, warm night air, a market or a neighbourhood party somewhere in the south of Europe one summer I was travelling. A woman was selling paintings beneath one of the lights, she had hung them from the branches of a tree, they were pure kitsch. I passed by her with my arms wrapped around a man I did not know, gloating, poor her, I thought, does she really think what she paints is nice? But the night was dark and dense, music was playing, and the aroma of fried, spicy meat drifted from a shack. The whole scene resembled something good, everything about it, I made myself believe I was loved, I had sex with the stranger on the ground in a back yard because I confused the likeness with the original, I thought the image of what was good was good itself. And lying with this person on top of me. Ketil. I should have been able to love him, but I could not love. The drop burst and the water divided, the way back lay open. I saw how love lost. I think it’s over, Ketil, I said after we had put our clothes on. It’s good you say that, he replied, because I’ve also been thinking about it for a while, ending things.

  When he had left I slept half-sitting up on the sofa, dreaming I had written a novel comprised of a single sentence: You must search in the darkness for your dreams, not in your dreams for the darkness.

  Memory is dangerous. I am standing at the sink looking down at the dishwater. The red wine is within reach, the handle of the washing-up brush has soap-froth stuck to it. There is a programme on the radio about memory techniques. A researcher is relating what people did to recall events, names and words before they had a written language to rely on: associated them with buildings, rooms and objects in the rooms. It is dangerous, I sense: the rooms, the demands they make. That unexpected opportunity of understanding what is happening. The opportunity of transgressing the material, of physics, even though such an intellectual condition is of course physical, the particles that make the brain move beyond its own memories or right to the core of them, reliving. And something more. Suddenly over to something else. And the shimmer of light that takes me beyond a specific place and time. To another specific place, in a room next to my own time. To the Roman Empire, to Berlin, to the Middle Ages. To Lillestrøm.

  A council house between the towns of Strømmen and Lillestrøm in the late seventies. Open plan between the kitchen and living room, pine-panelled walls, a fireplace. A mother, father and some teenagers – I am one of them. A wooden bowl, buffed and scorched with letters in one of the children’s woodworking classes.

  I am visiting a friend. She can play the guitar and I have a vague desire for something or other.

  She lives right by the railway line. I went past the house on the train, before getting off at the station and f
ollowing a gravel road back along the tracks. The sound of the doorbell resounded through the house. The hallway is full of shoes. Clogs, sandals, gym shoes.

  Are there crisps in the bowl?

  Yeah, help yourself.

  The atmosphere in the house is happy and unconstrained. The friend later becomes a well-known singer-songwriter. I have brought my sleeping bag along, but I do not stay the night all the same. I have to get home, I say, I have to get back. I never go round there again. Even though it bears a resemblance. The house resembles home. I am taken aback by the feeling of fellowship. That it exists but I cannot partake. I cannot identify myself, even though it should be the easiest thing in the world here, where everything is so alike. I take the train home.

  Come on, come back. I have a recollection of my friend, shouting this to me, her head out the window as I make my way down the road. I also remember never finding my way there, never making it to the house, even though I was invited. I couldn’t find it, I tell her later over the phone. Who was disappointed, me or my friend? She who could have become a friend, but did not? I who could have been like her, but was not? She who could play guitar. I who could write. We were on equal terms, and yet were not.

  The living room in that house resembled the one in the house Granny and Granddad built. Not the wood panelling but the layout. The door to the garden. The sliding doors between the dining and living rooms. The fireplace to the left, a dark hole. That was how it was when we lived there too, when I was small.

  One family like this, another like that. One life in dark readiness, another in enthusiasm. The similarity, and the hair’s breadth of margin between.

  23

  She likes the month of June. Has done ever since she was small, because her birthday is on the fifteenth. Most of the time that falls in the middle of flowering season, unless May has been extraordinarily warm, which has happened in the past. But usually the lilac and fruit trees are in full bloom right on her birthday, they emit fragrances, quiver in all their white, pink and violet, like in a painting, as she goes out through the gate. The evenings are bright, they can also be warm, and she likes walking the streets then. Joy is to be found somewhere, and she needs to get out of the apartment, because joy is a terrible thing to feel when she is indoors, it makes her almost want to take her life. Of course, meaning is not found out of doors either, but she can feel its echo, the brush of it, and outside she can still believe she is a part of everything. That her age is not obvious, because they do not know, nobody who sees her is aware of what she conceals within. She walks between people and enjoys the sight, many of them already tanned and lightly clothed, there is laughter and subdued voices. She can believe she is like them, the beautiful people. The lilac hangs over picket and wrought-iron fences, strewing leaves on the pavements, she steps on them in her light shoes and thinks that despite everything, none of them, not the children, not Mama, not Hartvig, knows who she is and where she is going. She thinks about the lost erotic escapade. She does not know where she got that term from, but it is apt, it is gone. She only remembers the briefest flashes of how it was. Like when she is walking along now lost in her own thoughts, she can suddenly become aware of a person nearby, one who is real and waiting, a man who is her equivalent. Just as shameless and forthright, equally daring, equally greedy. Marked by danger. What they call lascivious. She is not quite sure how she came up with the word, or if it is the right one. It is just like a stirring in the streets. And a certainty. Of something beyond. Like that husky laughter she hears over there. Like the gaze of the man on the bench by Frogner church. Yes, not that he is looking at her, God forbid, she is well over sixty, but he is past his prime himself, and it is unmistakable, how he is staring at the women walking past as he sits there on a bench in Bygdøy allé smoking his pipe. His eyes know, his body knows, sitting quite still, he is a mature, experienced animal and she walks by unseen, she is no sight to behold. At home, the warm floors await. The stuffy apartment which the evening sun has heated up to breaking point. The night will not end, she will not be free from it until the heat eases off, which will be late, and God willing it rains tomorrow, so she can get some rest and forget her sorrows. But tonight, tonight. She is still here.