The Blue Room (Coming of Age Series)

by Hanne Ørstavik

  Ivar will be at Gardermoen Airport by now, with his guitar and rucksack. I imagine him standing by the big windows watching the planes take off. He looks at his watch, turns and leans against a pillar, watching the crowds that pour out of the Airport Express, up the escalator and through the swing doors. He is looking for me.

  There’s a newspaper cutting on the pinboard next to the loo: The woman most in need of liberation is the woman that each man holds prisoner in his soul. There’s also a poem that I’ve written out and pinned up there, it starts: ‘Love yourself, love yourself through.’ I think that’s how the world works. I can’t just sit and expect someone else to come and fill me with all the good feelings I need. I am responsible for myself. And I have to be the first to give. I was thinking of Ivar. Looking back, I can see how much strength I had. How happy I was. I gave thanks to Our Father, to the fount of all love. There was so much goodness around me suddenly, pouring into my life. I found myself humming a song from Christian Camp: Never alone, never alone, never alone, with the hope you gave. I opened my mouth and sang it aloud, several times. It was much too long since I’d cleaned the bathroom last, I had to scrub very hard to get rid of the grime in the corner behind the toilet.

  I came out of the bathroom, my scalp sweating under my thick hair. Mum was in the lounge. She’d changed into her silk-lined Chinese dressing gown, filing the hard skin on her toes as she listened to ‘I Just Called to Say I Love You’, by that blind black guy whose name I forget. She didn’t look at me. I put the blue bucket back under the kitchen sink, then went into my room and shut the door.

  I lie on my bed now with my Bible. I always have it beside my pillow for protection at night, when it’s dark. I pray for God to speak to me. I do not need comfort, O Father, I do not need help. Just give me calm, endurance and the serenity to wait. With closed eyes I open the Scriptures up at a random page and read. Psalm 77: I cry aloud to God, aloud to God, and he will hear me. In the day of my trouble I seek the Lord; in the night my hand is stretched out without wearying.

  This is my room. Here I am. Inside a small cube. Floor area: six square metres. Height: three and a half metres. Twenty-one cubic metres. Under my bed are two small armchairs, bought at a jumble sale, and a round wooden table. Lying on the table are some books, novels, and beside them a candle in a broken holder. On the floor a stripy carpet. Everything in various shades of blue. Nearest me is a desk, a pine top with IKEA legs, on it my PC, an old model I got cheaply from a student on my course. On the shelf are my writing things and a sable watercolour brush. To the left of my loft bed is the window, almost filling the entire wall. I look down into the courtyard. I can’t decide which is my favourite: blue or grey. There’s something muted about grey, undemanding. I like it. It absorbs all the other colours into itself, takes its place at their side, is loyal. Blue, on the other hand, a luminous ultramarine, vibrates, is utterly itself, apologizes for nothing.

  It was too early to leave for Mass, so I sat at my desk, searching out the tones of grey in the courtyard. It takes practice to be able to see nuances of colour. The bluish grey of the wall straight ahead, the deeper grey of the roof, and the purplish grey behind the grey-green plastic bins with their grey-black lids. I pushed my PC in towards the wall, placed the keyboard on top of it, then took down my paintbox and paper, and my old water jug. I mixed my colours in the little egg-shaped hollows in the plastic palette. I’ve no ambitions with my painting. I was doing this for pleasure, as a form of meditation.

  Oh, so beautiful, said Mum. Suddenly she was standing behind me in the doorway, wearing a new outfit, all in grey: grey tights, iron-grey blouse, my scarf with a hint of purple-blue tied tightly around her neck. She was holding a book, her index finger keeping her place, the one I’d borrowed from the Social Sciences library about the pioneers of Gestalt therapy. She must have found it in my bag. Now she was leaning against the doorframe, wanting to read me a passage. I wasn’t listening. I was watching the colours run into each other on the paper, their edges blurring. I decided I’d wait for it to dry and then go over it with pencil. Blücher, the German cruiser, the Battle of Drøbak Fjord, a massive explosion, Mum’s hair in flames, like the burning bush. Perhaps Mum is my bush, I thought, perhaps she’s the bearer of the message I’m meant to hear. An insistent buzzing sound met my ears, the doorbell. That’ll be Svenn, said Mum, giving me a meaningful glance. Svenn is her friend. They visit places together, go for walks, to concerts, exhibitions, parks. Mum went to open the door. Suddenly it came over me again and I started to cry. No sobbing, just tears. Water, I thought, nothing but salt water, dropping onto the paper, making minuscule white suns. Clearly the salt had an effect on the colours, erasing them. I didn’t understand what was happening inside me. Then it passed, like a rain cloud, drifting away.

  I looked at the colours I had mixed. I always try to choose many shades of a single colour, then slice into it, break the colour up with something unexpected. Now they were both in my doorway. Mum and Svenn, smiling at me. They’ve succeeded, I thought, in each finding someone they resemble to the point of disappearing. Their sight reminded me of a development theory for the human personality: each of us is born with tendencies or traits that drive us to seek certain stimuli, and these, in turn, lead us on further, reinforcing the original traits which caused us to make our initial choices. Research was carried out on identical twins who had been raised apart. Meeting again as adults, they were often shocked at the similarity of their choices: both might have six silver rings on the left hand, the same moustache, a rose tattoo in exactly the same place on their shoulders, enjoy the same films, order the same dish at a Chinese restaurant. Svenn stroked Mum’s back as he told me about an exhibition I ought to see, painting as I did. He’d been himself already, and now he’d come to see if Mum wanted to go. I’m glad for her that she has him, I think he’s kind. Gentle and sensitive. He’s married with four children, so they only meet now and then. I read in the Christian Times that if one person in a couple is a believer, both are saved, the one’s faith saving the other. That got me thinking of Ivar again. I wanted to save him. I imagined we were on a sinking ship; I stretched my hand out to him from a lifeboat and he grabbed me just in time. I had to slap my hand hard. You deserved that, Johanne. Idiotic fantasies. Mum and Svenn had gone into the lounge and closed the door. I heard the clacking of Mum’s shoes. Svenn always pads about softly in socks. I went into the hall and looked on the mirror shelf. There was the envelope. I looked inside. A 100-kroner note. I began putting my outdoor clothes on. An envelope containing money is our agreed sign, a necessity when living in such a cramped space. It meant I had to stay out for a while. The money was so that I could go to a café. A 100-kroner note. I wondered why it was so much. I wanted to open the door and tell Mum she was being too generous. But I needed the money, so I didn’t. You’re so easily bought, Johanne. It’s unprincipled. Immoral. I put the cash in my inside pocket and decided to go for a walk before going into town for Mass.

  The neighbour’s cat was sitting out in the courtyard. It made me think of Harlow’s research with monkeys. His research would have been impossible with cats, I thought, since they seem not to have any real need for close communication. Dogs, on the other hand, are different, I mused. I went out of the front gate and crossed the street. I took a little path that rises steeply up the slope on the other side. At the top is a large house. I wandered into the garden at the back. I could look straight into our apartment, see the whole of the lounge where Mum sleeps. But I was quite far away. They were too small for me to see anything clearly. I stood for a moment on the wet lawn. It must have been raining again. There was a strange smell under that big tree, I didn’t know what. A sweet, rotten odour. I saw Svenn walk through the room; he was naked. He bent down by the door, as though he was fetching something before walking back to the bed.

  The pavement was wet. I crossed Riddervolds Square. I had to watch my step: the fallen leaves were slippery from the rain. I remember those leaves, part
icularly their yellow colour and the way they’d started to rot. I thought about Ivar. I had to try not to let him come too close. I mustn’t forget my plans. My professional clinical psychology course, living with Mum during my studies so as to avoid taking out a loan, and then eventually moving into The Barns, the little development that Mum talks about building around Granny’s house. A place where she and my brother and I can all live. As long as I kept to my plan, I’d manage. I stepped on something slippery and nearly fell. The soles of my shoes had worn smooth. I felt a wrench in my back and it immediately stiffened. Entering Universitetsgaten, I stayed on the side of the road with the grass verge, walking under the trees and avoiding the bookshop window displays. I was going to Mass, so I needed a clear head. I tried to get myself into a state of openness, of sensitivity and focus. Leaning my head back, I looked up at the sky. As an exercise I tried to imagine a sun.

  Karin was standing on the landing with the smokers; I saw her as I came up round the bend in the staircase. She was smiling. She’d shaved off her hair, making her smile seem even bigger, her dimples more distinct. She was in a discussion with one of the boys on her theology course. Dressed in black, he had long, curly dark hair and a long dark coat, and I saw a scruffy leather-bound Bible poking out of his pocket. I realized I liked to see Karin this way, to watch her without her knowing. He noticed me coming up behind her. I knew him vaguely and he told her I was coming. She smiled again, a smile that reached out to him, then turning she ran towards me, hugged me, put her arm around me. You’ve got to come and back me up in this hopeless debate, she said. It’s about women pastors again. She held me round the waist and together we went over. The boy and I greeted each other with a nod. How do we know, I asked, that God is a man? There are so many basic premises that are just taken for granted. Don’t you have any tradition of basic critical analysis in theology? He looked at me and smiled. He seemed happy to capitulate. Karin’s cheeks were flushed, her blue eyes shone, their whites pure white. More people I knew arrived; we smiled, hugged, laughed. The others started drifting into the chapel. Karin and I followed them, going in last, taking our service sheets and hymn books and sitting at the back on the creaky chairs. We were in a side chapel. The altar stood in the corner beneath the window, draped in a white cloth with a red runner, bathed in light from the little candles that were ranged along the sill behind it. The window looked out on the National Gallery. Sometimes, when there were a lot of people here, it would be open and then we could hear the passing cars on Universitetsgaten and the traffic lights bleeping for the green man.

  One of the boys was playing a service prelude on the piano. The room was hushed even before he began. Then he hit a single key, the same note over and over again, until the notes started to climb, up and up, as if he was trying to reach something high above him, as though the music were made of light. I tried to enter into the music with my whole self. Tried to see God in the light that I could hear in the music. Father, I thought, where can we find You if not here? Then it occurred to me that I shouldn’t look at all. The point wasn’t to find. All I had to do was open myself up and God would come. Just be, I thought. In the here and now. Then it came over me again. But there was nothing bad about it this time, no tears, just a sense of sadness, perfect stillness, emptiness, like a gentle blessing. I didn’t put anything in the collection box. I had a 100-kroner note in my inside pocket, but I gave nothing.

  It’s my fault. Or maybe it’s a punishment for having sex outside marriage and it’s God keeping me here at home. I ought to be furious, smash the window, hammer on the walls. That’s what they do in films, they react, they let it out. I’m not sure why I don’t. Perhaps I find it hard to express my anger. Or maybe I’ve too much wisdom; I see the situation from every perspective and then anger appears unnecessary, unreasonable, childish – egotistical.

  Karin looked up from the table and smiled at me with cream on her top lip. We hadn’t stayed for refreshments after Mass, we’d gone to a café instead – naughty really, since being the positive, resourceful girls we were, we had some responsibility for the social scene down there. I felt bad. We went Dutch on the hot chocolate. I should have treated Karin but didn’t. Johanne thinks only of herself. Karin stroked the soft stubble at the back of her head, tugged at the earrings in her right ear and smiled as she told me about the job she’d been offered as a stand-in pastor outside Trondheim next summer. I imagined her in her robes with that shaved head. They’ll be in for a shock. She told me I had to visit her. I said Mum and I were planning a trip to England. Your mother’s so nice, she said. I told her how easy it was living with Mum, like being in a collective, that she was my best friend. Apart from you, I said, smiling. We sat in silence for a moment, eyes meeting tenderly, heads inclined. The music in that café, the melodious instrumentals, I can hear them now, making me feel as though it happened long ago, as though years had passed since we sat there, instead of just two weeks. My song. I asked her about the boy she’d been talking to when I arrived. She described how, during a lecture, he’d suddenly got up and made a furious statement before marching out. We both laughed at the self-importance of young men. She’s in love, I thought. I was suddenly aware of how much I liked her, how happy I was to be sitting here with her. Just as I always felt joy when I knelt beside her to take Holy Communion, her arm touching mine. For a split second I saw right inside her left ear; it had a fantastic lustre. You’re going to look great in your robes, I said. She couldn’t wait, she said, for the sense of ritual, for leading the ceremony. A celebration of God. To be able to stand at the altar after the postlude, stretching her arms out and saying, ‘Go in peace, to love and serve the Lord.’

  Shall we go for a walk? I asked. Thinking back now, it was as though there was a motor in my body that had been set in motion, running uncontrollably; I wasn’t the one making decisions. Karin agreed. She got up, talking about the sedentariness of student life, her bad back, all the exercises she had to do. I knew where we’d go. Of course. I stood up too and put my coat on. I had to bend my knees and go down with a straight back to pick up my bag from the floor. It was a damp evening, but mild, so I felt less guilty for luring Karin out on an evening walk, the motive for which she could not suspect. We headed towards Bislett. My aim was to go to the top of St Hanshaugen to look out over the town and be close to God, before walking back down towards Gamle Aker. It might bring us luck, good fortune, and then perhaps we might meet him. This isn’t like you, Johanne, said Karin, laughing, you’re generally in bed by five past ten. I smiled. There’s so much you don’t know, Karin, I thought. So much I can’t tell you. If I did, it would evaporate, lose all energy, become flat and ordinary, a thing one just talks about with a friend. This is my everything. My whole life. When a thing isn’t put into words, it can’t be destroyed. So it’s better to keep it inside.