‘Dunno,’ I mumbled.
‘You don’t know!’ Gunnar was all over me. ‘What d’you mean by that?’
‘Don’t remember a thing. Word of honour.’
They exchanged glances, and began to laugh. There were no limits to my humiliation. They fell about and their anoraks shook. I made up my mind to leave, but I was restrained by force.
‘Don’t remember a thing?’ gasped Gunnar.
‘Zero.’
‘But then we’ll bloody well go tonight. All of us!’
Too right! A warm flow of blood coursed through me. We piled our money onto the table, enough for tickets and a packet of twenty, and then we jumped on our skis and set new PBs to Lake Sognsvann even though Ola had to lean on his sticks, but we shoved him up slopes and downhill took care of itself, no problem there.
We got front row tickets at the Eldo, sat in line with our medals on our chests and full fringes. The screams from behind were like squalls against the back of our necks and there was a hail of sweet papers and pastilles from the gallery. We sat in the front seats and were no further from the screen than it would take to stand up and touch them.
Snow glinted in the streets as we emerged. We stood admiring the photos showing scenes from the film and were drained, tired and happy.
‘One thing is definite,’ Gunnar said. ‘At least we’re better skiers than The Beatles!’
‘We’ll have to get ourselves some of those t-t-trunks for the summer,’ Ola said. ‘With s-s-stripes!’
‘Do you know what we could do in the summer?’ Gunnar suggested. ‘Go on a fishing trip in Nordmarka. With tents and all the gear.’
Then we headed home. Talking about all the things we were going to do. About The Snafus. About how famous we would be. About summer, even though winter had barely begun. About all the summers of our lives. We talked about when we would begin at the gymnas and when we would finish school for ever. We became effusive and beautiful birds flew out of our mouths. We had a sneak preview of the future and it looked damn good.
The snow lay for three days, then it melted away and all was bare and mild for a week. Then another batch arrived and the snow stuck. It piled up into banks, you had to walk round the whole block before you could find an opening, the mercury quivered on minus twenty, ice covered the fjord allowing us to skate to Nesodden and to jig cod by Dyna lighthouse. And the snow lay deep in the playground. Ola was sure it would happen now, but nothing happened, the gymnas students didn’t stick our heads in the snow, they walked past us, we were air, nothing, nihil, we sighed with relief, our breath froze around our heads like bands of fog, but deep down we felt a bit cheated, just like with the fork jab. The bike had to be stored in the cellar, now I delivered flowers on foot, with an inclement weather supplement of fifty øre per packet, or I caught the tram, but there was always some fool who had parked on the lines, because you couldn’t see them for all the snow, and there was a lot of bell-ringing and shouting and brouhaha, for those were the days when Oslo had real winters.
On just such a day I had delivered a packet of flowers to the plastic surgery clinic in Wergelandsveien, I left, sweaty and nauseous, couldn’t stand the sight of all the mangled faces there, faces without noses and chins, without mouths and eyes and ears, it was like being in a field hospital in a Vietnamese jungle. I stood swaying in Wergelandsveien and pumping air into my system when I heard someone shout my name. I followed the sound and saw a figure standing outside Kunsternes Hus waving to me, it was Henny, Henny in a big coat with a hat down over her forehead. I trotted over to her. She was on her way to the National Gallery and asked if I fancied joining her, and I did, because there were no more flowers that day anyway. We strolled past Aars og Foss school and Henny chatted about pictures, about Munch, whether I had been to the Munch museum, I hadn’t, I should go, we ought to view the Munch Room at least, now we were there. We wandered up to the first floor, past glistening black bodies, it reminded me of summer, and I dutifully followed her across the creaking floor, feeling weak at the knees. Then we arrived. Horses leapt off the wall. Girls stood on the bridge. Henny pointed:
‘Can you see that green face?’ she said. Now a face isn’t green, is it. Nevertheless it seems to me that exactly that face has to be green.
She looked at me. Had I understood?
‘Yes,’ I said, going green in the face.
‘Can you see the angst?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ I said, seeing the angst.
Then all of a sudden I heard a picture. It is true. I did hear it. I swivelled round and looked straight at an insane figure standing on a bridge holding her ears and screaming with all her might. In the background the countryside was burning and blood coursed across the sky. I heard it. It’s true. I stood rooted to the spot in front of the picture, Skrik it said on the frame, my insides froze, the scream grated in my ears and she was not the only one to scream, the mountain ridges behind her did, too, and the sky and the water and the bridge on which she was standing, the whole world was one big scream, it had to be the little Vietnamese girl’s mother. A huge yell was building up inside me, it rose like a pillar in my throat, I swallowed and restrained myself, I could not scream here, in a museum, that would not do, I turned away and ran over to Henny, chilled to the marrow.
‘I fancy some cocoa,’ she said on a sudden whim. ‘Do you?’
We schlepped out again and found a narrow window table in the Ritz. Henny bought vanilla slices. We ate with small teaspoons and drank from dainty blue cups.
‘Have you seen any paintings like that before?’ she asked.
‘I saw a painting this summer,’ I told her, breathless. ‘In front of Stortinget. About Vietnam.’
‘What did you think of it?’
‘I don’t know. It was… it was ugly. Ugly and beautiful at the same time.’
Henny studied me over her cup, with serious eyes.
‘That’s what I think, too. That’s the point. You can’t paint a nice picture of something so awful, can you.’
‘US bombers drop napalm,’ I said in a low voice.
She nodded slowly.
Staring into the empty cup, I ruminated.
‘There was an old man there who hacked the painting to pieces. Why did he do that?’
‘Because he disagreed with it.’
I didn’t understand.
‘Disagreed with the picture?’
‘Yes, he supported the Americans in Vietnam.’
‘But isn’t the napalm stuff true?’
‘Yes, it is.’
‘But how…?’
Henny interrupted me.
‘Because he’s a reactionary, a fascist. He would kill all the communists if he had his way.’
I scraped the plate clean and licked the teaspoon. The clock over the door showed that I was too late for lunch. And we had piles of homework and the deadline was approaching, and this evening there was a meeting at Gunnar’s place where we would discuss the repertoire for The Snafus. But I wouldn’t have gone, even if she had sat there for a week.
‘I’m going to Paris the day after tomorrow,’ she said suddenly. ‘I’m going to an art school there.’
‘For how long?’
‘Two years. But I’ll be back for the summer.’
That was why Hubert was so out of sorts when I took him the apples. And I suddenly felt very flat. I also had a girl abroad, to whom I had promised I would write and whom I would visit in the spring.
‘It’ll be great,’ I murmured. ‘Paris. Long way.’
She caught sight of the clock too and jumped up, almost knocking over the table.
‘I have to be off,’ she laughed. ‘Had to be somewhere half an hour ago.’
I got a big, wet kiss on the cheek and she made for the door in her huge coat. I sat there dazed, heard someone laughing at another table, stared after her, but she was long gone. Only now did I realise that Christmas decorations had been put up in the streets. It was snowing.
Christmas Eve at h
ome, that was how I had always experienced Christmas Eve, there were no other Christmases to my knowledge. It was us three plus Uncle Hubert, and then there was Mum’s mother and Dad’s father, because Mum’s father was dead and so was Dad’s mother, I just remember them hanging over a pram like large trees in which there were lots of birds and sounds, and occasionally a fir-cone fell on top of me. Now they had been dead for a long time, but the others were more than enough. Grandma was a small woman with long, red nails, thin blue hair and a green budgie in a cage. She could breathe with the most tragic sighs I had ever heard and she always held her knife and fork as if they were infected. Granddad was of a rougher hew, Grandma never held his hand after he broke three of her nails on Christmas Eve 1962. He was an old railwayman, laying sleepers at the age of eighteen, a sedentary job in the office when he was fifty, now he sat in the chair by the window in an old folks home in Alexander Kiellands plass flicking through the railway timetable. His ears twitched whenever he heard a train, and he didn’t hear it until long afterwards because he was hard of hearing and a bit senile, but it must have been like a song to him, at some point, long after the sound and the train had passed, the song of rails, points, rhythm and journeys.
‘That was the express,’ he always said. ‘It won’t be long before they come to fetch me, too.’
It was when we opened the presents that things always went awry for Uncle Hubert. After removing all the paper he would wrap his present again. And he would do that twenty-one times, I counted, unwrapping and wrapping the present. Grandma would have to go into another room and Granddad would slap his thigh, guffaw and say out loud, ‘Well, isn’t that just like Hubert! Now he’s forgotten to wrap the presents again!’
I received mostly soft packages, shirts, sweaters, new hiking trousers. And a couple of hard ones, an old book from Grandma, a Hamsun, a fishing reel from Hubert, an open reel Abu, bullseye. And an ice hockey stick from Dad; as I was opening it my heart was racing, of course I thought it was a microphone stand, because that was at the top of my wish list, but it was an ice hockey stick, and Dad stood there beaming, so I had to swallow hard, shake his hand and look happy, too.
Right at the end it was my turn to tense with excitement. There was nothing left under the tree and Mum gave me the last present, square and flat, there was no mistaking it, an LP. I jumped into the chair and tore off the paper.
‘Read who it’s from,’ said Mum.
I looked at the card and at last Christmas reached my face, too. I couldn’t believe my eyes. From Nina.
‘Who’s it from?’ Hubert shouted.
My voice deserted me.
‘It’s from Kim’s girlfriend,’ my mother kindly explained. ‘She sent it from Copenhagen.’
I was pretty taken aback, but in my confusion there was a solid pillar of pleasure. It was the new Beatles LP. Rubber Soul. I held it up in front of me. And then the pillar of pleasure was smashed. The temple it supported was a ruin. I didn’t know the reason, yes, I did know, but I didn’t understand it. I hardly recognised the four faces bent down towards me, yes, they were standing over me and looking down on me, four hostile, alien faces on the record cover.
Later that evening I stood in my room staring blindly at the record. I didn’t dare play it. I didn’t dare play it without Gunnar, Seb and Ola being there. Then Uncle Hubert came in puffing on a cigarette, he had bags under his eyes, his face was blue and sad.
‘So that’s where you are,’ he said.
I nodded.
‘Aren’t you going to play the record?’
‘I think I’ll wait a bit,’ I said.
We said nothing for a while. That was what was so good about Uncle Hubert, you didn’t have to talk all the time, even if he was with you. But, despite that, I said, ‘Uncle Hubert?’
‘Yes.’ He looked at me.
‘Uncle Hubert. My girlfriend has moved away, too.’
For a second his eyes wandered, then a great clarity came over him, great and pure, we two, we two had understood everything now, and he hugged me. Above us Jensenius, the fattest of angels, was singing a carol, Deilig er jorden, and we unravelled, thread by thread, that Christmas Eve of 1965.
It was the day after Christmas and we were sitting in Seb’s room gazing at Rubber Soul. No one said anything for a long time. We sat bent over the record, silent, almost angry, just as John, George, Ringo and Paul stood over us returning stony looks.
We didn’t recognise ourselves.
‘What’s it like?’ Seb asked in a hushed voice.
‘Haven’t listened to it yet.’
They looked at me and nodded. Now I had made up for the Help gaffe. I carefully took the record out of the sleeve, Seb placed it on the new Gerard player, pressed ON and the pick-up rose automatically and sank onto the grooves, as gently as a cat’s paw.
We sat around for the rest of the evening playing the record again and again, our ears were large shells and we were lying on the bottom of the sea, listening intently, trying to decipher the songs as they came to us. Gunnar pointed in despair at the picture of John in the spruce forest as we listened to ‘Norwegian Wood’, and we didn’t understand a thing.
‘Norwegian wood!’ Gunnar moaned. ‘Norwegian wood! And what the hell is a sitar!’
Seb had his head in the loudspeaker trying to hear a sitar, had to be a pretty weird thing. But Ola was happy with ‘What Goes On’, had found a couple of pencils he was tapping, he was on the road to recovery. ‘Michelle’ was a bit too soppy for me, but ‘Girl’ hit me like a thunderbolt, made me feel bitter and warm. ‘Nowhere Man’ passed me by, way over my head. Gunnar was on the verge of tears, sweat was trickling down his forehead, his mouth wide open, speechless.
‘What’s actually h-h-happened?’ Ola mumbled.
At that moment the door was flung open and Seb’s father, the captain, stood there with tanned face, white shirt unbuttoned, sleeves rolled up, all the hair on his chest and arms issuing forth like black moss.
‘Hello, boys. You look down in the mouth!’
‘Dad,’ Seb began. ‘What’s a sitar?’
He came into the room and spread his legs as if the seas were rough.
‘Sitar? Well, I’ll tell you what it is. Once we were transporting oil to Bombay. And the cook was an Indian. Worked like a Trojan. You need quite a bit of food on board a boat, you know. And that Indian… you see, Indians don’t eat meat, because they think their forefathers might suddenly reappear one day as cows or grasshoppers, and hence they don’t eat meat. But our Indian had to cook meat every single day and you can’t imagine how that must have been for him, to believe that you were serving up your grandfather every day. Well, anyway, there was never any hassle with that Indian.’
Seb cleared his throat.
‘Dad, what’s a sitar?’
‘Don’t rush me. There was no hassle with this man, no, that is, there was a helluva lot of hassle because, you see, he played the sitar every night. That was his comfort. A big instrument. Must have had a hundred strings. Sounds like crotchety women.’
‘So it’s an Indian guitar?’ Seb asked.
‘Right. Nice to meet you boys.’
With that, the captain was gone. We put ‘Norwegian Wood’ on again.
Wow. India?
It was a strange Christmas holiday. We did the same as we always did, skied like crazy in Nordmarka, played ice hockey in Urra Park, chucked snowballs through open windows. Yet it was different. More snow fell than ever before, banks of snow grew up to the skies, people had to spend the night in snow caves just attempting to cross the road. That was exactly how it was. Huge piles of snow on all sides. It was as though we had lost something, a part of ourselves. The four alien faces, distorted, were always looking down at us and we avoided their gaze. In the evening I lay looking at the old pictures on the walls, The Beatles in Arlanda each with a bouquet, The Beatles with medals, Ringo on John’s back straddled by Paul and George. It was a long time ago now, I longed to be back then, when everything w
as ordered and great. But at the same time it was exciting, it felt like an electric shock going up and down my spine. And when I closed my eyes Rubber Soul spun inside me, and I fell back, further than before, and one night I screamed in my sleep and woke the whole town, my mother and father at any rate. They came rushing in, but by then it was all over.
I sent Nina a New Year’s card, spent an entire day toiling over four lines. In the end I wrote everything back to front with my left hand, just as Leonardo da Vinci had done. And the card was a picture of Munch’s Scream.
New Year’s Eve came, we went to Gunnar’s in the evening and had ice cream and chocolate sauce. We sat in his room with the same expressions and the same muddled brains and as the gramophone played Rubber Soul we began to get quite desperate.
‘The sitar is pretty cool,’ Seb ventured.
We looked at him.
‘I mean, it’s pretty hard to try somethin’ like that, I mean, no one’s ever bloody done it before!’
Stig suddenly appeared at the door with a beer in each hand.
‘Rubber Soul is the best album The Beatles have made,’ he said. ‘I prostrate myself in obeisance.’
He bowed to the floor with a huge flourish. We understood nothing.
‘Do you agree?’ he said as he rose.
‘Ye-es.’
‘Bloody hell, what kind of drips are you! Compare “Love Me Poo” and “Piss Piss Me” with “Nowhere Man” and “Norwegian Wood”! Eh!’
It went quiet. Stig stared at us in astonishment, then burst into laughter, put the beer down on the bookcase and joined us on the floor.
‘Bob Dylan said The Beatles should sharpen up their bloody lyrics! Just listen to “Nowhere Man”. That’s how it is, isn’t it. Everyone walks around wearing blinkers. They don’t give a damn about anythin’, they don’t give a damn about havin’ atomic bombs hangin’ over our heads, they close their eyes to all the cruelty and only think about plastic and materialism. That’s what it’s about, isn’t it!’
We put the record on again. Stig was well into it.