Aftermath

by Carl Frode Tiller

  When I told him it was over, Torkild was shocked and upset, I knew him inside out so I could tell, but it was beneath his dignity to let it show, so he tried to look bored, as if I had come to him with a piece of old news. All he said was “Well, there are some practical matters to be sorted out, how are we going to play this?” and when I asked him if he didn’t want to sit down and talk about how it had come to this before we started discussing custody of Malin or who was to have what and so on, he asked what good that would do. “I’m more interested in looking forward than in looking back,” he added and immediately turned to talking about the practicalities: the studio apartment in his parents’ basement was currently empty, so he could move in there and I could stay here, oh, and we’d have to remember to cancel our planned trip to Iceland. He all but yawned when he said it.

  And that was how he behaved from then on. He showed a demonstrative lack of interest in me and how things were with me. We met only to hand over Malin when she was moving from my place to his and vice versa, which is to say once a week, and on those occasions he never asked a single question that didn’t concern her, not one. And if I began, all unbidden, to tell him about what I’d be doing, if only to be civil, he would immediately cut me off and say sorry but he was in a hurry. He simply did not want us to be on close and friendly terms, he wanted to have roughly the same relationship with me as he had with the checkout lady at the local supermarket.

  I understood of course that he was bitter and angry and that he wanted to punish me by making out that I was no great loss. But if this strategy worked and I felt disappointed and upset by his behavior, it didn’t last long. The time that followed marked one long upswing for me. The weeks when I had Malin were much the same as they are for all parents of young children, but when Malin was with Torkild, I lived a life largely devoted to making up for lost time.

  I loved going to parties with you and your friends. Things were always so unpredictable, anything could happen. In the middle of a deeply serious discussion of different forms of postmodern theory—a frequent topic of conversation among your crowd at that time—you were quite liable to break into an impromptu piece of performance art. Like the time in Café in 3B when some people came in and sat down at the table next to ours and you suddenly let your mouth hang open and pretended to be mentally disabled. You drooled and spoke in a slow, deep growl and became, all in all, alarmingly reminiscent of Leonardo DiCaprio in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. I didn’t know what was going on at first, but your best pal and drinking buddy, Terje, immediately recognized his cue to take on the part of your social worker. When you said you didn’t want to be there anymore and that it was really mean of him to spend all your money on beer, he turned to the people at the next table and grinned as shiftily as he could, well aware that they would interpret this as a sinner’s attempt to absolve himself. And so the charade continued: you didn’t like him forcing you to drink beer either, you said, you thought it tasted horrible and it made you feel dizzy. And, you went on, you certainly didn’t like all the things he did to you after you’d both had a few beers. At this Terje grabbed your wrist, hauled you out of your seat, and dragged you toward the door, snarling that he’d warned you what would happen if you mentioned that in front of other people, well, now you’d gone and done it and you’d be sorry. When I joined the two of you outside moments later, you were staggering about, howling with laughter. “Did you see their faces? Huh? Did you see them?” you both gasped.

  And then there was the time when Terje left his jacket in a local pub, Den Gode Nabo. We were headed for a party somewhere up Singsaker way and had just jumped out of a pirate cab when he discovered the loss.

  “Shall I go back with you?” you asked.

  “Nah, it’s okay, I’ll pick it up on Monday.”

  “Okay, but in that case I’ll give my jacket to that guy over there,” you said, pointing to a man walking along hand in hand with his girlfriend on the other side of the street. “Then we’ll be starting even!”

  “Starting even? For what?”

  You didn’t reply, simply marched off across the road, pulling off your jacket as you went. You handed it to the somewhat baffled man and said: “Here, I’d like you to have this, it’s a great jacket, real leather and everything.” That done, you strode back across to us. Right, so where was this party again, you wanted to know. As if what had just happened wasn’t worth commenting on, far less explaining.

  Not long afterward I learned that this incident was in fact an impromptu reenactment of a scene from a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I had been impressed by the inventiveness and originality that had to lie behind such a whimsical gesture, so I remember being slightly disappointed by this discovery, but when I told you this, you laughed and called me a hopeless romantic. Nothing comes from nothing, you said, and being original had never meant anything but putting old things together in new ways. You then proceeded to give a long and impassioned lecture inspired by Saussure’s reflections on how we are born into a preexisting language system and concluded with a wholehearted tribute to Aphex Twin and his use of sampling, Tarantino and his use of 1970s B movies, and Lars von Trier and his take on the soap opera genre in what you hailed as the best television series in the world, The Kingdom. There’s nothing new under the sun, you said, not even the words I’ve just said.

  Romantic was, in other words, a dirty word as far as you were concerned. I’m sorry to say that you had the same mistaken notion of Romanticism as so many self-confessed postmodernists in the nineties. To you, Romantics were soppy, genius-worshiping idiots with no sense of history or tradition, who believed that art and literature were the result of divine inspiration. You used to say that there was nothing more boring than all those intense and supposedly agonized budding authors, lounging around half-drunk in Café 3B, smoking and explaining that they wrote because they “had to.” Pompous Romantics the lot of them, so full of themselves and so unintentionally funny, you said. I never saw you laugh, though. Anything but, actually. Whenever we did get talking to such characters—which, as regulars of 3B, we were forever doing—you would become so infuriated, I mean so over the top, that it became hard for you to maintain the wry tone you always adopted when you wanted to put down someone you felt the need to put down.

  This fury surprised me, I remember. Not least because your own lifestyle inevitably called to mind the romantic myth of the bohemian artist that you were always so keen to mock. The first time I visited your place, for example, I couldn’t help thinking of Dostoyevsky’s description of Raskolnikov’s living conditions. Or, as Terje said: “You almost expect to meet some guy suffering from consumption when you walk into your place, David! Are you sure there’s no blood on your hankie?”

  Your tiny apartment lay on the first floor of a lopsided old workers’ cottage next to the railway line with a swaybacked roof and a hallway that stank of dampness and mold. Despite the fact that together the two rooms measured no more than 150 to 200 square feet, it was nigh on impossible to keep it warm on the coldest winter days. Even with the oil-fired radiator working full blast around the clock, ice still formed on the inside of the windows and the windowsill, you could see your breath in the morning when you woke, and often when I came to see you, especially in the forenoons, I would find you sitting eating in the kitchen, wrapped in your winter coat. And as if that weren’t enough: apart from two Chilean immigrants living in Møllenberg you were the only person I knew who still had an outhouse. An outhouse! In the late nineties! I thought you were joking when you told me this, but you weren’t. In the backyard was a long, low bathroom containing three stalls and a shower, which you shared with the other tenants.

  Not that your place didn’t have its charm, though. It gave one the feeling of having stepped into a jam-packed secondhand bookstore or antiques store. Full use had been made of every square inch and one almost had the urge to spend an hour simply browsing around. There were huge stacks of CDs, newspapers, and magazines everywhere and the
walls were covered in old maps, film club posters (The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, Fitzcarraldo, and Pulp Fiction), and pictures of your favorite writers and artists. On the windowsill, the desk, and the decidedly dusty shelves lay hash pipes, boxing gloves, fossils, cactuses, a plaster bust of Beethoven, and a mojo you had bought from an American blues musician on tour in Norway. And then, of course, there were all the books: books you introduced me to, quoted from, and read aloud from, books we never tired of discussing. By Duun, Flaubert, Hamsun, Fosse, Mann, Munro, Askildsen, Ulven, Céline, and many, many others.

  But for all its charm, not many people would have been willing to rent that place, not even someone as hard up or more so than you. I may be prejudiced, but I find it difficult to picture a science and technology student, say, taking over your apartment, unless the person concerned actually wanted to be an artist and was only doing science and technology in order to have something to fall back on if all else failed. Because, as I’ve already intimated, it was the perfect place for an artist, and that, of course, was one of the main reasons why you and other students of literature, music, film, and drama had gravitated to that area. True, they wouldn’t have been living there if it hadn’t been cheap and close to the city center, but all students want to live cheaply and close to the center so if it had been purely a matter of cost and location, this corner of Lademoen would have been crawling with students of every hue. But it wasn’t, and I believe this had something to do with the neighborhood’s down-at-heel air, which fitted so well with the way you saw yourselves and the way you wanted other people to see you. These were houses that gave the impression of being home to real artists and bohemians, houses that made them feel that they were the true heirs to the writers and artists who had given rise to all those struggling-artist myths.

  Oh, I can see you now, in that poky, drafty apartment, working on the novel you’d been writing for over two years but wouldn’t let anyone read so much as a paragraph of. I can see that one eyebrow that was always cocked when you were concentrating, the thin face you would bury in your hands every now and again, particularly when you were stuck for words. When that happened, you could sit with your face in your hands for minutes at a time, as if you didn’t want anyone to see how frustrated you were. I can see you, see your rumpled hair, the oversized white linen shirt you used to wear, so big it was more like a tunic and always left unbuttoned to midchest, I see all of the yellow notes on which you had scribbled a sentence or two and then stuck to your computer and the wall behind it. The ashtray, your pipe, the specially imported tobacco you used to buy from the tobacconist’s in Dronningens gate and, of course, to the right of your keyboard the obligatory glass of red wine, which you carried out to the kitchen every now and again, held under the siphon on the demijohn, and refilled before going back to your writing.

  A living, breathing cliché.

  But why, when you were normally so easygoing, were you so infuriated by all of the other living, breathing clichés around us, that was what I asked myself. Why, when we fell into conversation with people who seemed so much like you, were you so filled with contempt for them? For a long time I thought it had to do with how important, nay sacred, writing was to you. Because it really was. No one spends two to three hours every single day for years writing a novel if it doesn’t mean a great deal to them, especially when the chances of making money from it or of winning fame and acclaim are as slim as they are. When writing is so important to a person, I told myself, when you work so hard on a book, in addition to what is and should be your proper work, when a person devotes so much time and energy to this, then one can hardly blame them for being offended by dilettantes masquerading as “real” writers, amateurs who are more interested in looking like writers than in actually writing. Not until much later did I see that this anger was mainly attributable to what Terje described as a conflict between the sophist and the Platonist in you.

  Trondheim, June 29th, 2006. A good burger

  “SO WHERE WAS THIS JOB?” Mette asks.

  I look at her and smile. We’ve been talking about poor Agnes for over an hour and it feels good to change the subject, good to talk about something more cheerful.

  “Adresseavisen,” I say, taking a sip of my wine. I eye Mette as I put my glass down again, she’s wearing incredibly well, she’ll be forty-five in September, but she looks younger than me.

  “But why turn it down then? If you really wanted it?”

  “I don’t know,” I say with a faint shrug. “Maybe I don’t want to admit that I’m almost middle-aged,” I add with a little laugh, don’t know why I say that, possibly as an extension of the thought that Mette looks younger than I do.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” she asks. She props her elbow on the table, rests her chin on her hand, and smiles at me.

  “I don’t know, but … saying no to a steady job that I would really like, well … maybe it’s because I don’t want to accept that I am in fact getting older and my needs have changed. I’d like more security in my life, but I don’t dare admit it to myself because that would be tantamount to admitting that I’m not as young as I used to be.” I’ve no idea where all this is coming from, but it sounds pretty reasonable, I’m really quite pleased with myself for coming up with such a good reply to something I’ve been wondering about myself. “That could be part of it, I suppose. Deep down,” I add.

  “I understand what you’re saying, but I think you’re wrong,” Mette says. “Turning down your dream job, giving in to a whim, in other words, that’s so like you, Susanne. You’ve always been the same, you haven’t changed a bit, that’s the problem.”

  “As hopeless as ever?” I say.

  “Well, certainly as hard to figure out,” she says.

  “Yeah, for a control freak like you, anyway,” I say.

  We look at each other and laugh as we pick up our glasses. It’s so nice just to sit here with her, drinking wine. It strikes me that I’ve missed her. I mean it’s not as though I think about her every day but when I see her again I realize that I’ve missed her, we really ought to get together more often, it’s hard to believe we live in the same city, we see so little of each other. I set down my glass but leave my fingers curled around the stem, tap it gently with my index finger, trying to follow the beat of the music drifting softly from the loudspeakers hanging around the café, I can’t remember the name of the song, but it’s by a Swedish band, Bo Kaspers Orkester.

  “So what did Mom say?” Mette asks as she sticks her hand into the purse hanging over the back of her chair and takes out a tube of lip balm.

  “You don’t think I’ve told Mom, do you?” I say. “Are you crazy?”

  She lets out a little laugh as she removes the top from the lip balm and gives the revolving base a quick twist to push up the stick slightly.

  “Yeah, well, it’s maybe better to spare her that. I spoke to her on the phone the day before yesterday and she was worried enough about you as it was,” she says. She closes her mouth, runs the lip balm back and forth across her lips, then presses them together as she drops the tube back into her purse.

  “Oh?”

  “She thinks you don’t look after yourself properly.”

  I smile at Mette and give a little wag of my head, say nothing for a moment, I don’t really mind Mom saying I don’t look after myself properly, not at all, because it could just as easily mean that she thinks I’m very hardworking, or self-sacrificing, caring more about poor children in the third world than I do about myself, and from that point of view it’s more of a compliment, albeit the sort of compliment I don’t much care for, the sort you occasionally come across in obituaries: “She put the needs of others before her own” or words to that effect. Such tributes always get my back up, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like that said about a man, the deceased is invariably a woman and I’ve always regarded this as proof of an attitude that says that women ought to disregard their own needs, that it’s laudable of them to be self-effacing and
self-sacrificing. And yet here I am, feeling more pleased than annoyed that my mother says the same about me, I’m not sure why, maybe it’s because I know she means well, and because I appreciate the love that lies behind it.

  “I don’t look after myself properly?” I repeat. “That’s just Mom’s way of saying that I don’t lead the kind of life she would like me to lead. You know what she’s like,” I say, glancing at my watch. It’s already past nine so Mom probably won’t be coming after all, which is fine really, it’s good to have some time alone with Mette.

  “Oh, I know,” Mette says, nodding at me. But she obviously has her own thoughts on this subject, there’s a more serious light in her eyes, which says she’s not sure I do take proper care of myself, she almost looks as if she’s a little worried about me and there’s a part of me that likes the thought of her being worried on my behalf. I have the urge to say something to make her think she’s right—just a hint, but enough to convince her that I’m not really okay so I can bask in her concern, have the urge to use this as an excuse to get even closer to her, I’ve missed her and it’s good to feel close to her. But I don’t and I won’t, I’m absolutely fine, I’m leading the life I’ve chosen to lead and there’s no need to get too sentimental.

  “I’ll just nip to the bathroom before the food gets here,” Mette says. She grins at me as she gets up and I grin and nod back, watch her as she walks off toward the restroom. It’s amazing how well she’s wearing, she’s forty-five but she has the body of a twenty-year-old. I take a sip of my wine, put the glass down again, hear the soft clunk as the foot hits the table a little harder than expected. The next second there comes an unusually loud burst of talk and laughter from over by the bar. I turn to look, some middle-aged rocker types have just walked in—a bunch of guys, all pushing fifty, with long hair, skinny legs, and sagging bellies. They look like they must be, or have been, in a band. They sit down at a window table directly opposite the bar, peel off their jackets, and start shouting for service. It’s so typical—men of that age, it doesn’t matter where they go, they always act as though they own the place, it beggars belief, the sheer arrogance of it. I feel a flicker of annoyance, turn away. There are some grains of salt on the table, bright against the dark brown surface, I lean forward and blow them over the edge.