I drive through Kirkebygda where the writer Jens Bjørneboe lived and wrote The Dream and the Wheel, across the little river beyond the schoolhouse, past the road to the manor house where Ragnhild Jølsen of that book was born, and just after that I hit the sharp curve, and to keep up the rhythm I do not brake. This makes the car slide to the left, and as I keep a firm grip on the wheel and refuse to change course, the rear end wags and lurches, and I end up almost beam on across the road, and had there been a car coming the other way that would have meant trouble. But there isn’t. I hold my breath and force the car into position, tyres screeching, and the snow turns into rain, the mercury’s rising, spring must be on its way, I can feel it in my bones. Then the road straightens out along a flat stretch, and I cut the speed and lay the backs of both hands against the wheel so my fingers are free to roll a cigarette while I keep driving and peer out into the rain. The first drag tastes good, but the next one makes me feel so sick and dizzy that I stop the car at once, open the door and stagger out on to the verge, and stand there throwing up. There is not much in my stomach, but cramps take a violent hold and I stay there bent over the ditch in the rain bellowing like a cow and cannot stop.
“Holy shit,” I say aloud in one of the intervals, “fucking misery.” Tears pour down as I brace knees and feel the rain running down my neck. The fit finally passes, I straighten my back and see there is a house on a lawn just on the other side of the ditch. Behind it there is thick forest, almost flattened by something I could have written “was like steaming rain”. On the first floor a small boy stands with his nose to the windowpane, mouth half open, staring at me with eyes almost out of his head. For a few seconds we just look at each other, he from the circle and I from the stage, and then I place my right hand on my stomach, hold the left one to the side and make a deep bow with the water streaming from my hair.
“Da capo,” I mumble, stick my finger down my throat and vomit again. My stomach contracts, I cough and the pain in my side is suddenly back, oh, how welcome, old friend. My balance falters, but I jerk myself into a standing position, and now the boy in the upstairs window has both hands to his temples and his lips clenched into a line. I wipe my mouth and retreat until I feel the car against my back, raise my hand and start to wave and go on doing that until I can see he cannot help himself and waves back, and then his mother emerges from the dark room behind him. She bends forward to find out who he is waving to, and then I go around the car and get in.
When the house is out of sight I do not drive much further, just turn on to a forest track and stop a few metres along and lean back in my seat with eyes closed until my stomach feels less upset. Then I sleep for a quarter of an hour, and when I wake up I’m feeling better. It is something new in my life, this being able to fall asleep anywhere at any time. I do not know what to think about that.
I start the engine and reverse on to the road and drive through the forest and out on the other side along a field where two horses stand in the rain. One is brown, the other is black, and the sun breaks through the clouds while the rain keeps falling on the forest and the field and the farm on the hill, all seasons are queuing in the same line while everything slowly slides from grey white to dirty yellow. The two horses glitter in the slanting light as the shining rain falls mercilessly upon them, I can see each single drop as they strike like icy cold pellets and how they spurt up again, and the horses stand motionless, their heads down and their muzzles together close up to the fence, abandoned by all, being only horses with the rain coming down and down upon them, and they share no hope in this world. The sight of them totally unhinges me, I clench my jaw and I clench my fist and beat at the steering wheel, and my foot hits the gas, and all this merely because I haven’t had anything to eat. But then I think: it would all be different if I had owned a horse.
There used to be a shop here I know has closed down, because I have driven this way several times, and then it has been shut. But when I come round the curve it is open, with a new sign above the door. No doubt an idealist from Oslo wants to run a country store in a godforsaken place, far from the madding crowd, but is it far enough? I don’t think so. Anyway, it is open now, and I stop the car on the gravel outside, go in the door which has a sheep-bell at the top and is supposed to ring as in the good old days, and a young woman comes out of the room at the back. She smiles expectantly. No doubt, I am the first customer today, and all I want is some brown bread and a litre of milk. I put a Kvikk Lunsj chocolate bar on the counter to give my purchase more substance. She is wearing a huge apron with big stains of what looks like clay. Through the half-open door behind her I can see not an office but a pottery workshop, and when I turn round I see one end of the shop is full of bowls and vases and candlesticks and cups. All the same blue colour. I think the colour is pretty, and I think she is pretty. I go over, pick up a cup and weigh it in my hand, but there is no price tag on it, so I ask: “Are you expensive?”
“That one is a hundred kroner,” she says, and her voice breaks slightly and she clears her throat as if it were a long time since she last spoke. It seems a lot, a hundred kroner for a cup, but then I don’t know much about pottery, it may not be so costly. It is suddenly such a beautiful blue that I could not think of leaving without it.
“That’s not so bad,” I say, carrying the cup to the counter and putting it down in front of her. “I’ll have it.”
And she wraps it in tissue paper and enters the items in the till, then puts everything into a plastic bag and she looks so pretty in her apron doing this that I would not mind seeing her wearing just that apron and nothing else, and as I am thinking this she blushes. She is no mind reader so it must be the look on my face that makes her blush, and I look away, blushing myself, thinking: where on earth did that come from? But now it is there, and it may have something to do with Mrs Grinde, and then I think of her for the first time since I left her flat and how I could feel her and I blush again and look down at my hands as I get out my wallet and put the money on the counter. One hundred and twenty-seven kroner, ping. I would have liked to have stayed there to look at her a bit longer, watch her do things and maybe talk about pottery, but it is impossible now, and the scent of fresh brown bread seeps up from the bag and right into my face and makes my stomach feel really hollow, and I cannot very well go and buy two cups.
“Come again,” she says as I am on my way out the door, and I turn in surprise and say: “Thanks.”
But it is not very likely – that I will be back, or that she will be here when I do. On my way to the car I glance through the window, and she is still standing there behind the counter not looking at me or at anything at all, just straight ahead.
There is a slight breeze, but the rain has stopped. I am blinded by the low sun; it looks as if it is steaming, and the fields are steaming and the woods are, behind the shop. The gravel glitters, and when I start up there’s a lump in my throat, but before I’m round the curve I tear off the first bite of bread.
7
WHILE MY FATHER was alive I knew nothing about the photograph he had in the breast pocket of his suit the day he got married. Not until several years after his death did I hear about it from Solgunn, my aunt, on the telephone. She and Uncle Trond live in Stavanger. That is where she comes from. We have a talk from time to time. Not often, but more often than before, and it is usually one of them who calls. I am not so good at that, I never was.
She said: “One Christmas before you were born your mother came up to me and asked: ‘How would you have liked it if the man you had been married to for two years kept a photograph of another woman in his wallet?’ She used the Danish name for wallet, she was Danish, you know.”
“I know she was Danish,” I said, “Christ! But what did you say?”
“I answered: ‘I wouldn’t have liked that.’ ”
“Was that all?”
“What was I to say? After all, it was true. I wouldn’t have liked it at all. Luckily, Trond has never done anything like that, you
know.”
I didn’t say what I thought, that how could she know, not everyone is as clumsy as my father and drops pictures out of his wallet.
“Well,” I said, “that’s great for the two of you.”
“I don’t know what more I can say,” she said, but of course she did, and we talked for quite a while.
I think of this as I drive along the gravel road from Lake Lysern and back on to the main road and over Tangen Bridge, and the road makes a bend past a shopping centre with a completely new housing area on the right, big groups of dreary houses slung up over the hillside with a view of a small lake where wooden bathing jetties are stuck in the ice along the shore.
I have had my fill now, I ate half the loaf and drank milk out of the blue cup, and I did that sitting in the car in the courtyard of my former trade union’s holiday camp where I drove in just after I left the shop. I had not planned to go there, I had not planned anything, but that is where I went. From the car I could see the Lysern stretching in a narrow neck of water behind the main building, and I saw the suspension bridge crossing to the chalets on the other side. I don’t know how many times I have crossed that bridge. There was ice on the water now, but the last time I was there people stood along the shore with their fishing rods and pails with perch in them, and there were rowing boats on the water and it was summer and laughter all over the place. I was going to be divorced, and I knew it. I had been waiting there a week for the woman I had seen behind me in the mirror almost every morning for fifteen years, and now I was trying to forget what she looked like. It was so hot I felt paralysed, the sun was baking, and all I wanted to do was to sit on a chair with a strong drink, but I could not do that, I had my daughters with me and had to fill the days with all kinds of things that belonged to summer so the girls would think it was a perfectly ordinary holiday. My brother had been there with his son and we had talked and talked until there was nothing more to say, until what we said grew into something that made us embarrassed, and then he had left and I was alone not knowing what to do with my days other than fill them. But on the last evening before she arrived, when the girls were in bed and I knew they were asleep, I put on the new boots I had bought because I was certain it would rain the whole week. I walked across the grass where dew had fallen and over the bridge with a wire fence along the sides which had been almost flattened by youngsters who loved to dive and jump from the edge and several metres down into the water, and on up the path I went, to the nearest chalet on the other side. The man who was staying there with his family had invited me for a drink several times, but I had refused, I could not drink, and the only thing we had in common was that we had once been members of the same union.
I knocked, someone shouted, and the boy who opened the door was in his pyjamas. He looked scared. I thought it was the sight of my face, I had not shaved or looked in a mirror for over a week and had no idea what I looked like, but over the boy’s shoulder I saw his father sitting in the only easy chair the place boasted, with a glass in his hand. He called out:
“Talk of the devil, come in, come in,” and it was all so stupid, I didn’t even like him, and he shouted again: “Another glass, pronto.”
His wife came from the kitchen and put a glass in my hand, and I went up to the chair, and he filled it to the brim with vodka. I can’t take gin or vodka, but it was too late to refuse, I didn’t know what to say, so I half emptied the glass in one big gulp, and it burned my throat and spread through my stomach like glowing lava, and I could not help coughing.
“Christ, you’re not that young, you should be able to take a dram,” he said, and I replied:
“Forty,” when the coughing fit subsided.
“Hell, you’re older than me, then. Look here,” he said and filled my glass again, “try once more, and let’s have a toast,” and I took another swallow, and this time my stomach was prepared. But it tasted nauseous, like drinking aftershave.
“Well, sit yourself down, then,” he said, but I stayed on my feet, and then he said: “Well, yes, we’ve seen you going to and fro, you and your chum, and we talked about it and thought for a while maybe you were gays, but then the wife said gays don’t have kids, so there you are. I’m only joking, you know, so don’t get mad.”
“Well, we’re not gay,” I said, looking at his wife who was standing in the kitchen doorway, she did not want to sit down either, although there was plenty of room on the sofa and several stools. “It was my brother.”
“Well, there you go. And then I had a word with one of your girls, and she said your wife is coming tomorrow, and we got the idea of the whole gang of you coming along Friday evening, and then we could have a real party, two regular families on holiday, right?”
“Ye-es, well, I don’t know,” I said, still standing in the middle of the floor, and he sat in the easy chair, and I knew I would never sit down in that chalet.
“I think I’d better get going again,” I said, “the kids are alone.”
“Shit, you can’t just go off at once like that, for Christ’s sake,” he said, and I saw his eyes turn black and frightened like two mirrors, and he grabbed my arm and said: “Hey, don’t go.”
“But I really must,” I said, emptying the glass. That was a mistake, for now I had downed two glasses of vodka without any water in a quarter of an hour, and there was only a scrap of chocolate and potato crisps in my stomach from an improvised feast with the girls on the last evening when everything was as it used to be, and I felt sick. I pulled my arm away and quickly made for the door.
“Just march in and drink people’s booze and then bunk off again,” I heard behind me, and the door slammed. I tried not to stagger, but it was not easy, it was dark now and the path was rough down to the bridge. I couldn’t take vodka, and I swallowed hard to avoid throwing up. What if the girls had woken up, I couldn’t go to the bathroom without hearing them call me. I walked faster and got to the bridge. Now I had to throw up, and I leaned on the rail, but there wasn’t any rail. Jesus, I thought as I fell, this is too ridiculous. I must have made a great splash, but I did not hear a splash. I just fell and felt how cool the water was when I hit the surface, and the stillness when it closed over me, and how my boots filled up and pulled me right down as soon as I went under, and I clearly saw the newspaper headlines as I squeezed my mouth shut and tried to pull off my boots: NEWLY DIVORCED MAN DROWNS IN LAKE AT ENEBAKK, FOUR METRES FROM DRY LAND.
But someone saw me fall, and they yelled and screamed and woke the whole area and I did not drown. When I rose to the surface at last and could breathe again, I saw lights everywhere, and out of the chalets people came crowding on to the bridge, and some had torches, and two men, eager for action, played the hero, and stripped off and jumped into the water. I wanted to manage by myself and put up a fight, but they didn’t back off and they pulled me ashore by my jacket collar, and there was an awful fuss, and the girls had woken up and were running in their nightdresses among the chalets searching for me, and they all thought I was pissed although I was not. Some old hags even started to mumble about child neglect, and that was how I lost my right of access to the girls when I was divorced in double-quick time a few weeks later. At first it made me furious, and then I was relieved, because I realised that if I added one thing to the other until it was all way out of control, and at the same time made myself numb and just looked straight ahead, that was a way of living that I could manage.
The traffic gets thicker. I am approaching Oslo. I drive past a sign which reads: Svartskog 3 km. Just after that I stop, signal and make a U-turn, drive back and on to the Svartskog road, up the steep hill with sharp corners I always thought looked eerie when I was small and sat right at the back of the bus looking out of the window and could not see the road at all, but only straight down into the abyss. Then I go over the top where the road levels out, and drive past Svartskog church and the big oak tree which isn’t as big as I remember, but still pretty sizeable, with strong bare branches I could build houses in if I we
re thirty years younger or more, and then past the post office, which is still here in the middle of no man’s land, and I roll down the hills alongside the forest to Bunnefjorden. At Bekkensten Quay the old kiosk has vanished without trace. No-one is fishing from the rocks now as the ice is thick along the shoreline and hundreds of metres out, and I park in the space where the kiosk used to be and walk up the hill on the gravel road with cottages on the right side of the incline to the fjord, which gets steeper and steeper as it gets to the top. The last cottage stands back from the road with a yellow-painted fence alongside the road and a yellow-painted gate hinged firmly to two posts carefully built with large stones, and in the narrow garden is a flagpole with a slack line. The cottage looks as it always looked; red-painted timbers with a slate roof, but it is so hopelessly much smaller than I remember, and it is hard to realise it can hold everything I have filled it with since I was last here in 1971. I was nineteen then. The cottage was being sold, and I had gone with my father to fetch some of his things, tools mainly and one or two chairs, and I knew he did not want to sell and had been outvoted by his brothers and sisters. They needed the money, they said. So did my father, of course, but hell, he had almost built that cottage single-handed, and even though he had good reason not to be there much any more, it was painful for him to see it go. I could understand that.
In those years my brother was at school in England, and that was why I went with my father to Bunnefjorden and not him, and it was so unusual for one of the family to be at school in another country, in England even, that hardly anyone talked about it. I felt abandoned. I did have two other brothers, but they were younger, and I had been Little Brother for so long that it was all I was fit for, so they lived their life independently of me, and that was something my mother held against me for as long as she lived. I do not know what she thought I could have contributed.
In the Wake Page 8