I looked at my watch. If I was lucky I could get home before the rain.
I locked the office, ran out to the car and started it up a second before the first, large drops fell like albumen on the windscreen. Before I had reached Stølen, the flashes of lightning were illuminating the flaking paint on the house walls, planting sudden furrows of anxiety in the faces of the people hurrying past, making dogs race back home with their tails between their legs and giving me the feeling I was climbing the steep wall of a wave of rumbling thunder.
I parked quickly, drew my coat partly over my head and ran doubled up into my alleyway and in through the main entrance below.
Inside my flat, I peeled off my wet clothes, lit some old newspapers in the stove, put on the water for a cup of tea and went into the bedroom.
I walked over to one of the wardrobes, opened the door and stood on tiptoes to reach the top shelf. At the back, against the wall, was an old photograph album with a cardboard cover, worn leather edges and a brown leather spine embossed with the word FOTO in gold letters.
I took the album back to the sitting-room, went into the kitchen and let the tea brew, then sat down in the good chair with my cup of tea on the table beside me and the past in my lap.
Outside the windows, the claps of thunder were fainter and the flashes of lightning fewer and fewer. I didn’t notice. I was already on my way back in time to a childhood that felt like it was a terribly long while ago, to a part of Bergen called Nordnes – and a girl called Rebecca.
12
Opening a photograph album is like being captured by the past. But because this was a past when there were only black-and-white photographs, usually taken outdoors, and most commonly in holiday mode, it was a map with a lot of blank spaces.
The largest part of my life lay enclosed between these covers. Most of the photographs were from before 1956, when my father – the tram conductor who studied Norse mythology in his free time and furthermore was a busy amateur photographer – died; and from after 1958, when I was given a cheap camera as a birthday present and started taking my first, tentative shots. My mother never took photographs.
The first one must have been from 17th May, 1945. I am sitting on a bench in Nordnes park, holding the tiny Norwegian flag towards the photographer and squinting frantically into the sun. I have short, fair hair, a fringe, and I am wearing a kind of boiler suit, colour unknown.
Then there are some photographs that must have been taken the same day in a garden somewhere, visiting some people I don’t recognise. The men are sporting 17th May bow ties, there are cups of coffee and cake dishes on the table, and I have a bottle of pop and a straw in my hands. Even then my father had the corpulent, compact body that I remembered from his last years, but his face is younger and somehow brighter, and my mother is still dark-haired. They seem unfamiliar to me. I don’t recall them looking like this.
Then there are all the holiday snaps from the summers in Ryfylke at my maternal grandfather’s house. He was a vet. There are pictures of a boat on a fjord, my mother and I sitting on the deck beneath a low sun with a pile of wooden crates beside us. There are pictures of long hay-drying racks, us drinking coffee on the front doorsteps, seaside snaps of a stony beach, women still wearing one-piece bathing costumes and men’s trunks that seem to have been knitted. There is Bamse, the buhund dog, which was run over on the main road in the late fifties; there are close and distant relatives, long-deceased aunts and uncles, male and female cousins with whom I have lost contact.
There are photographs of my grandfather who took me on fishing trips, quiet, grey mornings when the water lay around us like a mirror, and before the first birds struck up the dawn chorus in the trees. Photographs of my grandfather gutting fish, rowing, keeping an eye on the weather, drinking coffee and eating waffles. His thinning hair, rugged complexion and strong, thin fingers that had handled more new-born calves than anyone else in the district. At eighty-five years of age he suddenly stopped rowing and fishing. But the boat was still tethered at its mooring. One dark August evening when I was eighteen he took me down there, took a half-bottle of export from the space under the rear thwart, mumbling that one of my uncles had left it there when he last used the boat, opened it and let me take a swig. Without saying much more we sat there that late-summer evening, sharing the bottle. It was then that I had first felt I was a grown-up. Later that autumn he died, as suddenly as he had stopped rowing.
There aren’t many photographs of Nordnes though. Taking snaps was for holidays. The album pages are full of summer holidays in Ryfylke, a rare trip to Sunnfjord, a visit to the capital (always squinting into the sun because my father, the amateur photographer, in exemplary fashion, made sure that he had the sun behind him, which meant that his shadow crept in – a discreet signature in the bottom corner of many photos). Nordnes is in only a few – always from a great distance – in one from Tollbodalmenningen on Nordnæs Battalion’s foundation day on 3rd May, but there are none of the great centenary celebrations in 1958. By then my father, the amateur photographer, had long entered the eternal darkroom and I still hadn’t been given a camera.
In one picture a handful of children are sitting on the doorstep in front of our house. It must have been the last shot of a film that needed to be finished. We would have been seven or eight years old, so the year must have been 1949–50.
There we are. Me in breeches made from a pair of huge trousers, Jan Petter in solid pitch-seamed boots and thick, patterned woollen socks, Paul with a scampish Peter Pan expression in a windcheater with an elasticated waist, Pelle’s hair hanging over his forehead, and he was holding up a magnifying glass in one hand, because at that time he had been intending to become one of the world’s greatest private detectives. And then there are some girls. There is Irene, who was Pelle’s sister and two years younger than him, with plaited hair wound up over her head. There is Karen, who was dark-haired and chubby, and would later end up in a sea-food shop, sentenced to a life in Bergen because her face gradually acquired the colour of finely minced fish, but who was sitting on the doorstep of our house because she was Irene’s best friend that year. And then there is Rebecca.
Even though I can’t have been more than four years old, I still imagine that I can remember the day Rebecca moved into our street. A green flatbed lorry had parked in Nordnesveien with the back full of old suitcases, cardboard boxes secured with rope, kitbags and grey, typically Norwegian rucksacks: a removal van. Rumours ran wild through the alleyways, and soon all the kids (and some adults) poured up the street to see what was going on.
A robust strawberry blonde in a blue woollen coat, her hair tied in a bun at the back, and a tall, thin man in a grey coat, wearing a soft hat, were unloading the lorry, helped by the driver, a small, thickset man in worn blue overalls. ‘Have you got any children?’ asked one of the boldest kids at the front. The woman gave a friendly nod and raised three fingers.
It wasn’t until a few days later that the three children appeared on the street. The smallest one was a girl and her name was Rebecca.
To begin with, all the children spoke a strange dialect, and later we found out that they had moved to Bergen from Hardanger. Their surname was Holmefjord and Rebecca’s father was an office-machinery repairman in working hours and a lay preacher in his free time. In this way he took assiduous care of people’s earthly and spiritual accounts. Rebecca’s mother was – like all mothers at that time – a housewife. There were her two elder brothers, too big for us ever to have any contact with them. And then there was … Rebecca.
Moving to Nordnes in those days was no simple matter. It was not for nothing that this part of town was often called the Republic of Nordnes, especially by its own residents. It was situated on a peninsula in By fjord, surrounded by saltwater on three sides, and if some Bergensians could occasionally say ‘We’re not from Norway; we’re from Bergen’, it was not at all unlikely that one might also occasionally hear ‘I’m not from Bergen; I’m from Nordnes’.
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bsp; In Nordnes we were largely self-sufficient. We still had a bakery, a dairy shop, a greengrocer’s and a fishmonger’s in most streets. On top of that, there were laundries, tailors, vinmonopols and cobblers, doctors and dentists, cycle-repair shops and scrap dealers. Down in Strandgate you could buy everything your heart could desire, from clothes to toys, from cheap coffee service sets to garish lamps, because the boats from the fjord districts put in on this side of the peninsula, so most could get a good deal here. If once in a while you went through Muren, which stood like an old-fashioned city gate between Nordnes and the rest of Bergen, it was because you were going for a Sunday walk in the mountains, or on a rare trip to the cinema or theatre, or because you had to go to hospital, the police station, the Post Office (before the branch in Nordnes was opened) or to some other public body. Mothers might take a trip to the market square for vegetables in season or live fish whenever the need arose, but that was still the exception rather than the rule. Most people stayed in the part of town where they lived.
From Nordnes you had a tremendous view: over to Askøy where many spent their summer holidays, east to Skoltegrunn quay, Skuteviken and the distant rock formations in Sandviken, west across Pudde fjord to Laksevåg, which was outside the city limits and therefore was part of the coastal and rural region known as Strileland. Boats passed in the fjord and we could recognise most of them by the sound and the chimneys. There were the small, stocky tugs with names like Titan and Vulcanus; there were the Bergen—Newcastle boats MS Leda and MS Venus and the Norwegian America Line’s Stavangerfjord, Oslofjord and Bergensfjord. There were the express coastal steamers north, freighters with a whiff of foreign harbours, like Rio and Frisco, Havana and Cadiz; there were fjord boats and lighters, and last but not least there were fishing vessels, loaded to the gunwales with herring in the stupendous-catch years of the mid-fifties when the whole town lay in a haze of fried herring fumes, and the illustrator Audun Hetland made one of his famous drawings, which appeared on page four of the Bergens Tidende, in which a father comes home from work exhausted, the cat is lying in the hall chewing herring bones, the mother is in the kitchen frying and the typical Bergensian brat waiting in the doorway looks up at his father and says: ‘Guess what we’re having for tea!’
But Nordnes also had wounds to lick after the war. Large parts of the eastern side of peninsula had been bombed and razed to the ground, and the big explosion of 1944 had left its mark on the area until well into the fifties. The ruins between the burnt-out red-and-white brick foundations were an endless playground for the youngest children. We fought fierce cowboy and Indian battles and built pioneer villages from the shuttering we fetched from the many building sites that were gradually appearing and slowly but surely changing Nordnes from an open plot of land into a concrete city. Civilisation caught up with this part of town, soon it was given over to car sales and all of us kids were becoming too big to play anyway.
To Nordnes, one late-summer’s day in 1946, came a little four-year-old girl with a Hardanger dialect. A girl called Rebecca.
In the picture taken by the front step of our house in 1949–50 she was small and thin with an unruly fringe, wearing a grey patterned cardigan, a red-and-white dress and white knee-length socks, her hands wrapped protectively around her knees and a shy, semi-solemn smile for the unfamiliar photographer. Because my father, the amateur photographer, was an exotic bird for the children in the street. He had never been known for his social ease. No one dared dodge the tram fare when he was the conductor.
We were children from an era that will never return. When we were that small there was no difference between boys and girls, and even Anita, who was two years older than us but hadn’t developed breasts yet, sat digging in the sand with us.
In the winter we sledged down Nordnesveien, which wasn’t treated with salt, or down ‘Death Hill’ in Nordnes park when we were big enough to enjoy high speeds.
In the spring we played commandos in the alleyways, lay on all fours and followed the ants into a rock between Nordnesveien and Nordnesgaten, caught woodlice under the leaves behind the sailmaker’s house and followed the Nordnæs Batallion on Saturdays when they were doing their drills between the barracks by the old place of execution, where they later built the Aquarium and the Institute of Marine Research and laid a football pitch.
In the summer we went to the sea baths with mothers or elder siblings, and through the wooden walls we heard the high-pitched voices of the girls changing in a different room, then we went into the country and were there for a few weeks: the summers in Ryfylke with my grandad the vet.
And then came autumn with darker evenings, long shadows between the alleyways, new hide-and-seek games and – some years later – postman’s knock.
For some years the girls disappeared from our lives, only to return with renewed vigour. For some years it was Paul and Varg and Pelle and Jan Petter and the whole lot of us. Once in a while Jakob and Piddi from Klosteret came along, but generally it was the boys from our area who stuck together. We played footie in the street and down by the quays. In the children’s park by the maritime high school we had a fort, which we defended against the Red Indians from Haugeveien. We played traditional Bergen games and from the age of ten we had bikes which we raced through the town with bits of cardboard held to the frame by clothes pegs so that they sounded like planes when we arrived.
And then, suddenly, the girls were back. And one of them was Rebecca.
I had probably been in love with her all the time, without being able to articulate the feelings growing in me. For seven years we had been in parallel classes at Nordnes school, which stood majestically in the shadow of Frederikberg’s granite-grey fortress, a reddish-yellow plastered façade and glazed, reddish-brown roof tiles, and surrounded by deciduous trees: in summer, nicely packaged in a rich green; in autumn, rotting leaves strewn across the playground; in winter, black marbling against a pale, grey sky.
Boys and girls were separated for classes. When we had singing lessons we were led with a firm hand to the girls’ side of the school, past the rows of girls. Whoever, in their youthful exuberance, stepped out of line risked being sent directly to the headmaster’s office. However that was a punishment most survived because Bernhard Steen governed with a gentle hand, rocking on the balls of his feet as he delivered his sermon, and never without a twinkle in the eye.
Girls were a country we were not allowed to know about, we were never tested on in geography, but the name of whose capital we all knew. The rude version had four letters and was written on a cubicle door in the boys’ toilet so that we would never forget.
During the first school years they were held in tantalising isolation, on the other side of an invisible line drawn across the playground. If nothing else, at least it taught us to understand what the Iron Curtain was.
Then, in one of the final years, the border was lifted. At first we still largely kept to our side of the playground, but by the time mixed classes were introduced, we were already mixing freely.
During my last school years I always kept an eye on where the girls were, and when she finally appeared, usually at the last minute, running through the gates as the bell rang, consciously or unconsciously, I would stand watching until she merged into the crowd and was lost from view.
And so she ran through my childhood, her legs longer with every year that passed, until at the age of twelve or thirteen, when her breasts had begun to develop, she had a strangely disproportionate body, legs still too long, hips still narrow, torso slightly too short and her head oddly slanting on a slim, white neck around which she wore a chain with a crucifix.
But by then we had long shared our first moments of immediate affinity, the way a boy and a girl of the same age can be playmates, later good friends and then all of a sudden so close that we could almost be siblings.
Sometimes I had been allowed to go to her house.
I came from a rather humdrum home – the only child of parents who were slightly too old.
My father, the tram conductor, sat poring over his many books about Norse mythology, smoked roll-ups, had a nasty cough and made his personal notes for a book that would never be written, while my mother sat over needlework, and I read books about the Wild West or ghosts, and the radio broadcast pointless weather forecasts and news, record-request and music programmes, quizzes and whodunnits. On the walls hung rocky landscapes of windblown Norwegian nature – heirlooms showing Ryfylke and Sunnfjord.
In Rebecca’s house, and in the houses of other children, I experienced insights into other kinds of family life, where there was a different kind of togetherness.
In Pelle’s house there were watercolours of places such as Rome and Paris on the walls, and parents and children passed the time playing cards and Monopoly together, while we drank pop from tall glasses surrounded by chairs and a coffee table painted red, blue and yellow.
Rebecca’s family gathered for communal singing, prayers and Bible reading. On the walls there were family portraits and pictures of Jesus, but around the clinking coffee cups and over thick slices of lefse there was still a warm cheer, which I only very seldom experienced with my father, the heathen, and his wife.
Before we ate we lowered our heads to say grace. I mumbled indecipherable words to myself and glanced across at Rebecca’s folded hands with slender, white, hairless fingers. While her father read the day’s Bible extract about how Jesus fed the five thousand with two fish and five loaves of bread, I snatched some stolen glimpses of her thirteen-year-old face, soft, no make-up, sensitive lips, nostrils that had barely begun to smell life, a nose that was big enough to make her beauty interesting, greyish-blue eyes with warm pupils and dark-blonde hair that wasn’t so unruly now, but brushed back from her forehead and held in check with a pink hairband before falling naturally over her ears towards her delicate shoulders. Beneath the white blouse were her budding breasts, and my gaze lighted on them as we again lowered our heads and finished off with the Lord’s Prayer.
Fallen Angels Page 8