by Jo Nesbo
As for me, I guess I just became more of what I always had been. More self-assured, of course. Because I knew now that, when it really mattered, I was capable of doing what had to be done.
* * *
—
‘Are you sitting here, reading?’ Carl said one Saturday evening. It was gone midnight, he’d just come home, obviously a bit tipsy, and I was sitting in the winter garden with An American Tragedy open on my lap.
And in a flash it was as though I saw the two of us from outside. That I had taken his place now. Alone in a room without company. Only it wasn’t his place. It was just him who had borrowed mine for a while.
‘Where have you been?’ I asked.
‘At a party,’ he said.
‘Didn’t you promise Uncle Bernard you would take it easy with the partying?
‘Sure,’ he said. There was laughter in his voice, but real regret too. ‘I broke my promise.’
We laughed.
It was good to laugh with Carl.
‘You have a good time?’ I asked, closing the book.
‘I danced with Mari Aas.’
‘Oh yeah?’
‘Yes. And I think I’m a little bit in love.’
I don’t know why, but the words cut me like a knife.
‘Mari Aas,’ I said. ‘The chairman’s daughter and an Opgard boy?’
‘Why not?’ he said.
‘Well, sure, there’s no law against dreaming,’ I said, and heard how ugly and mean my own laughter sounded.
‘Guess you’re right,’ he said with a smile. ‘I’ll head up and dream a bit.’
* * *
—
One day a few weeks later I saw Mari Aas at the coffee shop.
She was very pretty. And apparently ‘dangerously intelligent’, as someone put it. One thing was for certain, she sure knew how to speak. According to the local newspaper she’d seen off aspiring politicians much older than herself when she represented AUF in a debate in Notodden before the local election. Mari Aas stood there, leaning forward slightly, chubby, blonde pigtails, breasts pressing against the Che Guevara T-shirt, and the cold, blue eyes of a wolf, and a gaze that passed over me there in the coffee shop as though I wasn’t there, as though in search of something worth hunting for and I wasn’t it. A gaze without fear, that’s what I thought. The gaze of something at the very top of the food chain.
* * *
—
Summer returned and Rita Willumsen – who had been on a trip to America with him, her husband – sent a text message saying she wanted to meet at the cabin. She wrote that she’d been missing me. She, who always made the decisions, had started to write stuff like that in her messages, especially since I never turned up at her home through the basement door that weekend she was alone.
When I got to the cabin she seemed unusually excited. She had presents for me, and I unwrapped a pair of silk underpants and a little bottle of so-called perfume-for-men, both bought in New York City itself, she said. But best of all were the two cartons of Berry’s moist snuff, even though I wasn’t allowed to take any of it home, it belonged to our world at the cabin, she said. So the snuff was stored in the fridge there. And I realised she thought of it as an extra incentive for me once I ran out at home.
‘Take your clothes off,’ I said.
She looked at me in astonishment for a moment. Then she did as I had told her.
Afterwards we lay in the bed, sweating, and slippery with bodily fluids. The room felt like a baker’s oven, the summer sun roasting the roof, and I pulled myself free of Rita’s literally damp embrace.
I picked up the book of Petrarch’s sonnets from the bedside table, opened it at random and began reading aloud:
Clear, sweet fresh water where she, the only one who seemed woman to me.
I closed the book with a thump.
Rita Willumsen blinked uncomprehendingly. ‘Water,’ she said. ‘Let’s go for a swim. I’ll bring some wine.’
We got dressed, she with a bathing costume underneath, and I followed her up to the mountain lake that lay behind some knolls above the cabin. There, beneath some overhanging birch trees, lay a little red dinghy that obviously belonged to the Willumsens. In the space of that short walk it had clouded over, but we were still warm and damp from the lovemaking and the steep climb, so we lifted the boat out onto the water, and I rowed until we were so far from land that we were sure no one passing by could identify us.
‘Swim,’ said Rita when we were halfway through the bottle of sparkling wine.
‘Too cold,’ I said.
‘Softie’ she said, and started taking off the clothes she was wearing over the swimming costume, which was tight in all the right places, as people say. And I remembered her explanation for her athletic body and broad shoulders, how in her youth she’d been a promising competitive swimmer. She stood on the thwart on one side, and I had to lean out the other side so the dinghy wouldn’t capsize. The wind had risen and the surface of the water had turned a greyish white, like the coating of a blind eye. Small waves came in quick, rushing succession, actually more like ripples, and it occurred to me just as she bent her knees to dive off.
‘Wait!’ I shouted.
‘Ha ha!’ she said, and kicked off. Her body described an elegant parabola through the air. Because like so many swimmers, Rita Willumsen knew the art of diving. But she didn’t know the art of gauging depth from the way the wind shapes the surface of water. Her body cut soundlessly down into the water before suddenly stopping. For a moment she looked like the diver on a Pink Floyd album cover Uncle Bernard had shown me, the one where the guy is standing on his hands underwater and his body seems to be growing out of the mirror-smooth surface of the water. Uncle Bernard told me it took the photographer several days just to get that one picture, and that the main problem was from the air bubbles ruining the surface when the diver breathed out air from the cylinder he was using. What ruined the picture here was that fru Willumsen’s straight legs and the lower part of her upper body collapsed. It was like that footage you see on television showing the controlled demolition of a tower block, only without the control.
And when she stood up, a furious look on her face, greenish slime on her forehead and the water only reaching to her navel, I lay back, laughing so hard the dinghy almost capsized.
‘Idiot!’ she hissed.
I could have stopped there. I should have stopped there. Maybe blame it on the wine, say I wasn’t used to it. But anyway, I grabbed the orange life jacket that lay under the thwart and tossed it out to her. It hit the water next to her and lay there and floated, and that was when I understood it was too late. Rita Willumsen, the woman who had towered over me at the workshop that first time, who had commanded me and guided me every step of the way we had taken, at that moment looked like a lost soul, an abandoned young girl dressed up as an older woman. Because now, in the merciless light of day, her make-up all washed off, I could see the wrinkles and years that lay between us. Her skin was white, with goose bumps from the cold, and it sagged around the edges of her swimsuit. I had stopped laughing, and maybe she read what I had seen in my face, because she crossed her arms in front of her, as though to protect herself from my gaze.
‘Sorry,’ I said. Maybe it was the only right thing to say, and maybe it was the worst thing. Maybe it would have made no difference what I said.
‘I’m swimming back,’ she said, and glided away below the surface, vanished from sight.
I didn’t see Rita Willumsen again for a long time.
She swam faster than I rowed, and when I reached the shore I saw only the wet prints of her naked feet. I pulled the dinghy out of the water, emptied what was left of the wine, and picked up her clothes. And by the time I reached the cabin she had already left. I lay down on the bed, took a wad of Berry’s from the silver snuffbox and checked the clock
to see how long was left of the prescribed half-hour. Felt the burn of that fermented tobacco against the inside of my upper lip, and the shame on the inside of my heart. Shame at having caused her to feel shame. Why was that so much worse than the shame at my own inadequacy? Why was it worse to have laughed a little too heartily at a woman who had chosen you, just a kid, as her lover, than it was to have killed your own mother and dismembered a sheriff? I don’t know. It just was.
I waited twenty minutes. Then I drove home. Even though I knew I wouldn’t be coming back, I resisted the temptation to take the carton of Berry’s with me.
35
IT WAS A SUNDAY, TOWARDS the end of the summer. As arranged Uncle Bernard arrived at Opgard with a casserole of lapskaus which I heated up while he sat at the kitchen table and talked about everything except his health. He was by now so thin it was a topic we both avoided.
‘Carl?’
‘He’ll be along,’ I said.
‘How’s he doing?’
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Doing well at school.’
‘Does he drink?’
I chewed on it a moment before shaking my head. Knew Uncle Bernard was thinking of Dad’s thirst.
‘Your father would be proud of you,’ he said.
‘Yeah?’ was all I said.
‘He wouldn’t have said so in so many words, but believe me.’
‘Well, if you say so.’
Uncle Bernard sighed and looked out the window. ‘And I am certainly proud of you. Here comes your little brother, by the way. Got company.’
I hadn’t time to look out the window before Carl and his company had disappeared round the northern side of the house. Then I heard footsteps in the hallway and low, almost intimate voices, one of them female. Then the kitchen door opened.
‘This is Mari,’ said Carl. ‘Is there enough lapskaus?’
I got to my feet and just stared at my now big, erect kid brother and the tall blonde with the wolf’s eyes. My hand mechanically stirred the spoon around in the bubbling casserole.
Had I seen it coming or hadn’t I?
On the one hand this was straight out of a fairy tale; the orphaned son of a mountain farmer who’d won the king’s daughter, the princess whom no one could silence. On the other hand there was something almost inevitable about it, they were quite simply the logical couple, the way the moon and the stars shone down over Os just then. All the same I stared at him. To think that he, my kid brother, the one I’d held my arms around, the one who couldn’t put Dog out of his misery, who panicked and called me for help on the Fritz night, that he had dared to do something I would never have dared. To approach a girl like Mari Aas, talk to her, introduce himself. Believe himself worthy of her attention.
And I stared at her. She looked quite different now from the last time, down at the Kaffistova. Now she smiled at me, and that cold, hunter’s gaze had been replaced by something open, inviting, almost warm. I realised of course that it wasn’t me personally, it was the situation that brought out that smile, but right there and then it felt almost as though she was raising me too, the big brother from the little farm, up into her own sphere.
‘Well?’ said Uncle Bernard. ‘Serious or just good friends?’
Mari gave a high, trilling laugh that was just a touch nervous. ‘Oh, well, I guess we’d say—’
‘Serious,’ Carl interrupted her.
She swayed slightly away from him and looked at him with raised eyebrows. Slipped her hand in beneath his arm.
‘Well, then let’s say that,’ she said.
* * *
—
Summer ended and the autumn was long and wet.
Rita rang once in October and once in November. I saw the R on the screen but didn’t take the call.
Uncle Bernard was hospitalised again. With each passing week he grew sicker, weaker and smaller. I worked too much and ate too little. Drove to the hospital in Notodden two or three times a week. Not because I thought I had to, but because I enjoyed the minimalist conversations I had with Uncle Bernard, and the long drives alone up and down the highway listening to J. J. Cale.
Carl came with me sometimes, but he had a lot to do. He and Mari had become the village’s glamorous couple. There were always things going on around them socially, and when I had the time I joined them. For some reason or other Carl liked me to come along, and on top of that it dawned on me I had no friends of my own. Not that I’d been lonely, or not had anyone to talk to, it was just something I didn’t do. Would have found it boring, preferred to spell my way through one of the books Rita had recommended and which I usually found in the library at Notodden. Since I read so slowly I couldn’t borrow too many at once, but what I did read I read thoroughly. On the Road. Lord of the Flies. The Virgin Suicides. The Sun Also Rises. The Wasp Factory. And I read out loud to Uncle Bernard from one called Post Office by Charles Bukowski, which made him – who had never read a book all the way through in his life – laugh so much he ended up having a coughing fit. Afterwards he looked tired. He said thanks for coming, but now it was best if I went.
And then came the day when he told me he was going to die. And followed that up with a Volkswagen joke.
And his daughter came and took the keys to the house.
I had expected Carl to start blubbing when I gave him the news about Uncle Bernard, but he seemed prepared for it, at least he shook his head sorrowfully for a while, as though it was something you could shake off. The way he seemed to have shaken off the Fritz night. Sometimes it seemed almost as though he had forgotten what had happened. We never spoke of it, as though we both understood that if we packed it in enough layers of silence and time it might one day become an echo from the past, like those flashbacks of old nightmares that for a fraction of a second seemed to have really happened, before you remember, and your pulse drops back down to normal again.
I told Carl I thought he should move into Mum and Dad’s bedroom, on the grounds that he was eight centimetres taller than me and needed a longer bed. But really it was because I slept so badly there in the boys’ room. Carl no longer heard the screams from Huken. Now I was the one hearing them.
Carl gave a long and wonderful eulogy for Uncle Bernard at the funeral, about how fine and genuine and funny he was. Maybe some people thought it was odd that Carl and not me, who was the older brother, spoke for us both, but I had asked him to do it, being afraid I would simply break down and cry. Carl said yes and got the material from me, all the anecdotes and thoughts, since I had been closer to Bernard than him. Carl had taken notes, written, rewritten, added his own lines, rehearsed in front of the mirror and really given the task his all. I had never realised he had so many refined thoughts in him, but then that’s how things are: you think you know someone like the back of your own hand, and then suddenly they show you sides of themselves you had no idea about. But the truth is that trouser pockets – even your own – are just a darkness you fumble about in. Now and then you find a ten-øre coin, a lottery ticket or a foil-wrapped aspirin in the lining. Or you can be so hopelessly in love with a girl that you’re on the verge of topping yourself, even though you don’t really know her. So you start wondering is that ten øre maybe just from yesterday, that love just something you’ve made up, that she’s just an excuse, a reason to go somewhere you long to go: anywhere that’s away from here? But I never drove further than the county line when I just wanted to think, or to Notodden, if I wanted to borrow books. Never thought about driving into the mountain by the tunnel opening at the end of that long, straight stretch, or doing a repeat of what happened up at Huken. I always came back. Ticked off one day and waited for the next. One where I would see Mari, or I wouldn’t see Mari.
It was around this time I started hitting people.
36
THE PERIOD AFTER UNCLE BERNARD’S death was a bleak time. I had taken over the workshop and was worki
ng all hours, and I think that was what saved me. That, and the fighting at Årtun.
The only relief were those Saturday-evening dances, with Carl getting drunk and flirting and me waiting for some poor jealous bastard to lose control so I could plant my fist in my own, pathetic mirror-image, punch it to the ground over and over again, week in and week out.
It was often the early hours of the morning before we got home from those Saturday night dances. Carl would collapse on the lower bunk, hung-over, farting and giggling. And once we had finished going through the night’s adventures he might exclaim:
‘God but it’s good to have a big brother!’
And that warmed my heart, even though it was a lie. Because we both knew that by now it was him who was the big brother.
Not once did it occur to me to tell him I was in love with his girlfriend. I hadn’t told Uncle Bernard either, or given any sign at all to Mari, obviously. The shame I felt was something I had to bear alone. I could hardly even endure my own reflection in the mirror. Was that something Dad had felt too? Had he thought that a man who lusts after his own son doesn’t deserve to fucking well live, and left that shotgun outside the barn in the hope that I would do it for him? I believe I understood more of him now, and it scared all kinds of hell out of me, and didn’t exactly do anything to lessen my self-contempt.