In the warm atmosphere of home, Rebecca’s father, Andreas Holmefjord, was a good-humoured man, with a horse-like face and a melancholic expression in his eyes, as though he knew in reality there was no reason to be good-humoured; but in the parish-hall pulpit somewhere in town he metamorphised into a fiery apostle, a prophet with doomsday visions on his slide projector, a baptiser of those who had found salvation, a redeemer of life’s vassals and a light in the darkness for those groping around in the mists of atheism, like the blind in Gethsemane. As a Sunday-evening preacher he placed his sensitive hands on the temples of young girls in white tunics, raised his face to the heavens and drew them from the swamp wherein they had found themselves; he helped alcoholics to recover, talked the desperate out of suicide and gave them something to live for, led the two-part hymn singing for Sunday-school children and on dark winter evenings showed slides of missionary work in Madagascar. He was Father Christmas and Jesus rolled into one, and it was to no one’s surprise that occasionally, in the privacy of his own home, he would stroke his face and appear endlessly tired and weary. But he had a mission to fulfil and a life to live. And when his life down here came to an end he had nothing to worry about. All he had to do was go home. Home to Jesus.
One November evening when we were thirteen Rebecca and I had hurried to the meeting where her father was going to speak, but we got there too late, and instead of entering and occupying a bench at the back we went upstairs to the gallery. Gripped by some sudden impulse we crept along the floor above, between the rows of chairs, hidden behind the balcony and so close to each other that our shoulders bumped as we crawled. Once by the balcony we sat secretly listening to Andreas Holmefjord’s voice without actually hearing the words. His voice had been like music, like an accompaniment to something that was still beyond our understanding. My eyes had been drawn to hers and hers to mine. I could have stretched out my hand and touched her, touched her hand, her mouth, her hair. But I didn’t. We just sat there in spellbound proximity, detached from time and place, and suddenly all alone with each other.
From the room below came the rousing hymn: ‘Promises cannot be broken. No, they are ever true…’ Like a choir of angels, the voices filled the ceiling vault above us: ‘Heaven and earth may burn. Mountains and hills may wane. But those who believe will find. Promises are eternal.’
Afterwards I often thought that we had tacitly made each other a promise, up there in the gallery of the parish hall where her father preached that November evening in 1955.
Later we went down and outside. Quietly, without saying anything important, we walked home, along the dark streets to Nordnes, in the clammy November air, our ears red, our hands stuffed deep in our pockets to keep warm.
In front of the house where she lived we said goodnight. For a moment her eyes found mine again and she stood still on the pavement as though something was holding her back, but then she was inside the door and gone. I walked home alone.
Six months later she and her family moved from Nordnes to another, newer, part of town. And in those days moving to another part of town meant someone was disappearing from your life.
But Rebecca didn’t disappear. Not for good. She returned.
13
I closed the photograph album and deposited the past in the cupboard. Then I had a shower, washed my hair and put on clean clothes. I went into the kitchen, boiled some water for coffee and started making some rice pudding.
While I was waiting for the pudding to finish I made myself comfortable in the sitting room. I took out the little amateur snap Jakob had given me. With the easily recognisable Blåmånen mountain behind her, Rebecca was sitting on a small crag surrounded by colourful September foliage. She was wearing an autumnal woollen jumper, brown speckled with red and orange. The photograph was like her, yet it wasn’t. I would have recognised her if I had met her in the street, of course, but the forty-four years had left their mark. The contours of her face were sharper, there was an ironic glint in her eyes and around her mouth a hint of resignation, but the autumn wind was lifting her hair and she was trying to keep it out of her eyes with her slender, girlish hand. Behind her, the sky was a calendar blue. Another page was about to be torn off. Another year was heading down the last slopes, to December.
I carefully put the photo away, as though afraid it might go up in smoke. Then I flicked nervously through the pile of Saturday papers. Nothing had changed. What they called news was nothing but old wine in new bottles. For the umpteenth time the local football team was planning to buy loads of players, hoping this would help them to keep their heads above the second division for a little more than one season. The year’s bestselling book was by a politician who was interviewed in a total of three newspapers, without revealing the politician’s or the newspapers’ allegiances. The northern arterial road was still being improved and there was hope for a breakthrough before 1990. And among the death notices I found the mother of an old classmate.
I looked around me. Once upon a time a family of six had lived in these rooms. There hadn’t been a sitting room, kitchen, bedroom or a shower then. On the floor below lived the same old married couple. They were at the kind of age when they didn’t seem a day older than when I moved in, thirteen years earlier, and they were of the type that looked as though they might live forever. In the summer they went to their cabin on Askøy every other weekend. In the winter they mostly stayed indoors. When I met them in the hall we talked about the weather, as we Norwegians do.
I had a quiet aquavit with my rice pudding and coffee. Afterwards I decided to take a trip round Nordnes before going back to see Jakob.
Returning to these streets was always sad. Even though much had changed there was always something still intact. A small cul-de-sac that hadn’t been tarmacked, a house that was still the same colour, a doorstep where I had once sat. A lot was gone, but the footprints of the children who had run around there would never be entirely erased until they themselves were, all of them, from the sketch-pad of time.
In many ways it was like walking through a post-war town, more now than in 1945, in fact. There was a sense of abandonment about this part of Bergen. Shops were closed down, people had moved to other districts, the fronts of buildings had changed beyond recognition and, worst of all, there was no life on the fjord. No tugs, no Norwegian America liners, no freighters setting a course for towns, other than Stavanger or Florø, and Bergen’s last sailors had long since checked into the old seafarers’ home up in Haugeveien.
I walked into Nordnes park. It was December there too. All the leaves had fallen from the trees, the branches pointed like dead fingers to the sky, the grass had no life and even the tarmac looked as though it might disintegrate at any moment.
I walked back to town, past the tall, dark windows of Nordnes school, where the children in the first class had drawn suns, cut them out and hung them up for show, as a promise of better times.
It was six o’clock by the time I rang the bell at Jakob’s.
He opened the door. His eyes looked past me as though he had been expecting me to arrive with someone. Then he let me in, almost reluctantly.
‘I’d been expecting to hear from you before,’ he mumbled as he ushered me into the sitting room.
From the record-player came: ‘I’m looking through you … You don’t look different, but you have changed…’
‘I often play Rubber Soul,’ he said. ‘It reminds me of our first happy years.’
I raised my eyebrows by way of a response.
We stood looking at each other. Then he said: ‘Well, was she there?’
I shook my head. ‘I even went to his home. Have you met his new wife – Bente?’
‘No. What was she like?’
‘She reminded me a bit of Anita. Somewhat bruised.’
‘But Rebecca wasn’t…’
‘No. I went to the video shop and asked him straight out.’
An expression of sudden pain flitted across his face. ‘Couldn’t you have bee
n a little more … discreet?’
‘Discretion is not necessarily a virtue, Jakob. More often than not it’s an unnecessary detour.’
‘OK, OK.’ He looked around helplessly. ‘What would you like to drink, Varg?’
‘Anything. A glass of beer maybe?’
He fetched a bottle and the next Beatles track was ‘In My Life’.
‘They really were happy years,’ I said, motioning to the record-player.
He sat down. In his hand he held a dark-brown stiffener. ‘I often think,’ he muttered, the glass a few chill centimetres from his mouth, ‘that the Beatles were just like a love affair.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘At first it’s all love and happiness. “I never danced with another girl since I saw her standing there”. On their first LP. Can you imagine anything more life-affirming than “Twist and Shout”? It was brilliant, uncomplicated classic rock. Afterwards there was With the Beatles and Beatles for Sale, then they began to understand that life had its dark sides too. A Hard Day’s Night and the need to shout for Help!’ The ice cubes in his drink clinked. ‘Do you agree?’
I nodded.
He carried on: ‘Of course, the question of when the Beatles were at their best is an endless discussion. In a way the turning point came with Revolver, as the name suggests, in 1966. Before it they sang relatively uncomplicated, happy rock songs with a few elements of youthful melancholy. Afterwards they went in every which way and triggered the greatest musical revolution since rock ‘n’ roll came onto the scene in the fifties.’
‘Music’s 1968 in other words?’
‘1967. Most people consider Sergeant Pepper a masterpiece. The White Album has its advocates too. For me, though, they were never better than on this one.’ He nodded towards the gramophone. ‘Rubber Soul, 1965. That was the peak of early marital bliss. Melancholy, charm, tunes that sing in your heart from the very first verse, but at the same time there’s an acknowledgement that times will change: “You won’t see me. Think for yourself, for I won’t be there with you. What goes on in your mind…” And so on and so on. And in Revolver the watershed’s been passed. “Eleanor Rigby”: “Ah, look at all the lonely people…” The retreat into the yellow submarine. Sergeant Pepper with all its experimental styles, followed by the even greater imaginative flights in The White Album, which in many ways is the best stuff they ever did before the downward curve started, along the lonely pavements of Abbey Road, until the split is a fact and they go their separate ways humming, with resignation: Let It Be.’
He looked at me. I grinned. ‘Impressive summary.’
‘What do you think is their best song, Varg?’
I gave the question some thought. ‘Some of the best songs are on the record you’re playing now. Of course, connoisseurs will never agree which is better between “Michelle” or “Girl”. Personally, I’ve always gone for “Girl”. But there’s another masterpiece on this LP. The one we’ve just listened to. “In My Life”, which is one of the most attractive love songs ever written.’
‘But…’
‘But … then you have “Hey Jude” of course, and “Lady Madonna” is one of the best rock songs they wrote, with a touch of Elvis from his Jailhouse Rock days. And then you have “Lucy in the Sky” and “All You Need Is Love”. For some inexplicable reason I’ve always had a soft spot for “Your Mother Should Know” from the Magical Mystery Tour double EP – my God, Jakob, so many masterpieces! Has there ever been anyone better?’
‘But…’
‘But when it comes to the crunch there’s nothing better than “Yesterday”. That’s the pinnacle. It could’ve been written for the harpsichord or a string quartet. It could’ve been a motif in a Schubert symphony. As far as I know, it’s as popular as the Bible, if I may put it like that. In the next century computers will be humming it as we go to work, in the same sad, melancholic way that we whistle it at any time at all, wherever we are and whoever we’re with.’
He nodded. ‘And it’s not just the melody that’s brilliant. It’s the lyrics telling us exactly what we all think we know. That yesterday was better.’
I nodded. We were yesterday’s standard-bearers. We had lived our lives a quarter of a century ago and ‘Yesterday’ was our recurring refrain. There was nothing we believed in more than yesterday. There was nothing we longed for more. But we were big enough to know that now. Yesterday will never come back. Yesterday is a place you have left forever.
I smiled wryly. Had we only known when we were at school a few decades earlier that one Saturday evening towards the end of the century we would be sitting in a dark sitting room, wifeless, Jakob with a whisky, me with a beer, listening to the Beatles. Had we only known that the years would pass so quickly, only to wash us ashore on an unknown beach, like Robinson Crusoe and Man Friday, in a decade where neither of us felt at home.
I stared into my glass. ‘When did you … fall in love with her?’
He stared over the rim of his glass, like a sort of land surveyor of life. ‘I don’t remember exactly. At the beginning it was pretty difficult to get to the head of the queue.’
‘Were there that many of us, then?’
‘On top of that, she never went to dances. It was always easier for us musicians to get girls from the stage. Then you didn’t have to say anything. You didn’t have to think up a funny pick-up line. It was enough to catch their eye, knock out an extra-special guitar solo or, after I’d changed instrument, stretch the organ tones into something slow and sensual. At any rate, snare them in a net of music.’
‘Sounds simple.’
‘There were others who went with her to the chapel.’
‘Parish hall,’ I said, setting the record straight.
‘But then … When was it?’
‘1962?’
He shot me a look. ‘1963 it must’ve been. We took our final exams in sixty-one, didn’t we? Anyway, at school there was always someone ahead of me in the queue.’
I suddenly looked straight at him. ‘Why do you call him “someone” all the time? I was the someone, Jakob. It was me.’
‘Yes, I know. The two of us were never closer than in those years. Why do you think I held back? I knew what she meant to you. Who the hell would want to take your best friend’s girl?’
‘She was never my girl,’ I muttered. ‘She was just someone I was interested in.’
‘Interested,’ he snorted.
‘But then … I came home. I went to sea from sixty-two to sixty-four, you might remember.’
‘Absolutely.’
‘And when I got home in November sixty-three I heard about … you two. And later that month, a Friday evening, I’d been standing in a doorway in Håkonsgaten talking to a girl. From an open car window somewhere nearby I’d heard Harry Belafonte singing in a Jamaican sun-drenched voice, as though the sugar canes themselves had opened their leaves: “So take me, take me, ’cause I’m feeling lonely. Take me back to Lucy’s door. But don’t let her mother know…” And then a radio was turned up so loud you couldn’t hear yourself think and an excited reporter was jabbering away. We caught only the words “President Kennedy” and “Dallas, Texas”. I was twenty-one years old and at that moment, precisely that moment, I knew that our age of innocence had definitively passed and only the rest of life remained.’
He looked away. The record had stopped. He walked over and turned it back to the A-side: “Baby, you can drive my car and maybe I’ll love you…”
After sitting down he nodded towards the record-player again and said: ‘1965. That was the year we got married…’
I didn’t answer.
He hesitated. ‘Where were you then, Varg?’
‘In 1965 I spent most of the year in Oslo.’ Bitterly, I added: ‘That was the year I tried law in Kristiania, the town that no one leaves without the devil’s mark on your soul … or whatever it says in Revelations.’
‘So you didn’t complete your studies?’
‘No, I realised pret
ty smartly that I couldn’t be anything but a cheap version of Bergen’s famous barrister, Alf Nordhus, so I went back home and drank my way through another six months while pretending to study languages, sleeping with any girls I could get my paws on, not to mention my dick, and making myself generally unpopular wherever I went. The following year I went to Stavanger and started studying social work, met Beate and began to get a handle on my life.’
We sat in silence, listening to the Beatles, trapped in an eddy of memories from the late sixties.
‘Were we sixty-eighters, Varg?’
‘No, we were more fifty-eighters. Brought up on Elvis and Tommy Steele, with James Dean and Marlon Brando as our idols, Khrushchev and Bulganin as the bad guys in black, and Paul Anka and Jiminy Cricket in our ears: “O-o-o-oh, I love you, baby. I love you so…” We wanted to make love to Brigitte Bardot and marry Shirley Jones in April Love or Debbie Reynolds in Tammy. We were the fifties schizophrenic spawn, growing up in a vacuum, no ideology, no God … All we had was music.’
‘And films.’
‘And films. I remember Pelle mooching around the lower end of Nordnesveien, scowling darkly and trying as hard as he could to look like James Dean in East of Eden.’
‘And Johnny who saw On The Waterfront and managed to find the same type of jacket that Brando wore and picked fights for several months afterwards, hoping to be given a similar beating to the one Brando got in the film.’
‘He didn’t need to go far for that. His dad would’ve given him one at home.’
‘Mhm.’
‘Do you remember the story about how James Dean rang Marlon Brando but didn’t say anything? He just put the receiver to the turntable playing Elvis: “You ain’t nothing but a hound dog … You ain’t no friend of mine”. There you have the whole triumvirate in one anecdote: Marlon, Jimmy and Elvis.’ Then suddenly he said: ‘We didn’t even have to marry, like so many others at that time.’
Fallen Angels Page 9