“Yeah,” I said. “But that’s not a problem, Helle and I can easily split the cost of her ticket.”
“I’ll see what I can do, but it’s fine. I’m really looking forward to it.”
“Me too,” I lied, thinking of the boat and already dreading it.
Then we discussed how early we needed to leave Stavanger to catch the ferry from Bergen at three, about who had a car and who’d drive, we bought another beer, laid plans, talked about what the Faroe Islands were like, why we hadn’t ever been there before, and we didn’t really know why, had no idea, but we’d never thought of going, drank beer and talked about how fantastic Perkleiva was, up there with the very best recent bands, it was going to be great, a great concert, the Faroe Islands, we bought another beer, me and Jørn in Alexander, June 1999, and I strolled back to Storhaug that same night, and this time it was Helle who was asleep when I came in the bedroom, lay noiselessly at her side, didn’t sleep, tried to be all heart, to convince myself we were okay.
I’d been together with Helle for twelve and a half years. Four thousand and fifty-nine days. 109,416 hours. Six and a half million minutes. 6,564,960 in figures. A long time. A very long time. In half a year we would enter the third decade in which I’d loved her. But she still didn’t want to get married. Didn’t believe it would work. I remember the first time I plucked up the courage, we were twenty-five, midsummer’s eve up at Våland’s Tower, Våland Forest all around us, a view all the way to the center of the city and the surrounding areas, we stood with our arms around each other, it was cold and we were wearing warm clothes, saw the bonfires burning here and there outside town, I turned, had a slight cold, stood there sniffing, not very romantic maybe, but I remember I stood behind Helle, held around her and looked at her, looked at that short, blond hair of hers, the ugly little jacket she always used during cold snaps in the summer, the jacket I was nonetheless fond of, and she stood in front of me, little Helle, letting me hold her as she tossed her head this way and that, humming a song in her head, and suddenly I thought that I felt so good it was hard to bear. There were no more compliments left to give her, it was now or never, my hands went clammy at the thought, I went weak at the knees, but I let go of her, stood in front of her, readied myself, but couldn’t do it, the words lodged in the middle of my mouth, a traffic jam, Helle wondered what the problem was: “Nothing,” I said, “I just need the bathroom.” I stood and pissed against a tree in Våland Forest, looked up at the plateau where everybody was standing, saw Helle among them, looking much as she had at the fancy dress ball, once in a galaxy far, far away, and I had a piece of paper in my pocket, a pen, everything I needed, and I wrote: Will you marry me? Then, when I came back up, I slipped the note into her jacket pocket, didn’t mention it, but it felt good, even though she didn’t find it until the following day, I think, at least she didn’t say anything about it, we went out for a few beers, I waited and waited, but she behaved as though nothing had happened, I sweated, had bags under my eyes, problems concentrating, but didn’t want to ask, found a note from her in my pocket when I got back to my apartment that night, felt the paper through the padding of my jacket, unfolded it carefully, read it slowly, not that that was possible: Ask me again another time, it said. And I did, every other year maybe, it went almost without a hitch in the end, but she wasn’t quite convinced, it would make her old, she thought, and I said that’s fine, we can come back to it, I said, but at least I got her to move in with me, which was when we got the apartment in Storhaug, the rooms we lived in now, I wanted children, but she didn’t have time, advertising wasn’t the profession for maternity leave, so I waited, grew a beard, shaved it off and waited some more.
We walked a lot in those first years, nearly every day. It was just about all we did. We walked through the entire city, wore out our sneakers in summer and covered the city step by step in the snow in winter, walked and talked, I got to know her, and she was the most beautiful person I’d ever seen, to my eyes at least, she peeled oranges with one hand, could cycle without holding the handlebars, couldn’t blow Hubba Bubba bubbles, never achieved it, couldn’t curl her tongue in her mouth, but could bend her fingers almost all the way back, played the piano, wasn’t brilliant, danced ballet and had more success with that, I was dragged to performances, sat watching as she danced across stage, back and forth, didn’t quite get her fascination for it, but she looked sweet enough, up on her toes, and I put plasters on her toe-nails and dried her tears after performances, went around to her place on Sundays, where her father, the policeman, made Sunday lunch, a good man, a single arm-of-the-law dad, after he separated from her mother, she moved to the Netherlands later, found another policeman over there, and more or less disappeared from the picture, apart from the Christmas cards she sent to Helle every year, a picture of herself wearing a Father Christmas hat, equally tragic every Advent.
And the summers spent at her father’s cabin in Sørland, me sitting on the jetty, feet in the water, and Helle swimming around out there, diving to the bottom, brown legs sticking up for an instant before they disappeared beneath the surface and her face came up again, an old bicycle wheel or something else in her hands that she’d snatched up from the bottom, old junk she wanted to bring back ashore, to clean and fix, to hang on the cottage wall, in the end a fine collection of bicycle wheels that nobody knew what to do with lay in the shed at the back of the cabin.
And I remember the presents she gave me, she was always so clever with presents, always got it right, even when I didn’t know what I wanted. She liked Jørn and Roar from the first moment, and she had her own girlfriends, so many of them, I always had problems remembering who was who, and they adored her. Helle, who I loved for the thirteenth year and who was almost never home, who was asleep when I came, who was slowly but surely letting me go, she was being dragged away by gravity and I didn’t know what to do.
I’d just come in the door, Helle walked toward me, gave me a hug, seemed happier than usual, smiled, said she’d talked with Nina, she’d just rung, wanted us to go on a trip with them. On Saturday. This Saturday? I asked. And she said yes, this Saturday.
Which was why I sat by the quay in Stavanger that Saturday, waiting to take the boat out to Lysefjorden, out to Flørli Powerstation, we’d walk up to Kjeragbolten from that side, it was Jørn’s idea in fact, an unusual choice, but still, that was what we were going to do, and I stood waiting for the boat to come into the fjord, to moor at the express boat terminal, and Helle stood some way behind me, trying to ring one of the others, Claus, perhaps, he’d still not arrived, and we began to get worried, he was always late, and the boat was coming into view way out in the fjord. I bent down automatically, lifted my backpack, put it on, got ready, I liked to be out there early, I didn’t like boats, I didn’t like being on water. I like to be prepared. I just wanted it to stand still. Helle got through to Claus, he wasn’t far and he came around the corner at that instant and they both came off the telephone.
There were six of us. Friends. Going on an outing. It was a Saturday in early July, and I wasn’t altogether keen on it, but Helle wanted to go, and I came along. And here I was. A wind was blowing. There would be waves. I didn’t want to go, but I’d said yes. Service with a smile.
There weren’t so many waves after all, and it was good to be out, noticed it, as we stood on deck, in the light rain, anoraks done up tightly, Helle in my arms, Claus beside us. Claus had taken the day off, was beginning to get nervous at home, circling his pregnant girlfriend, waiting to fling himself in the car at any moment, to drive to the hospital, even though there were three weeks still before the birth. He stood fumbling now with an old Nagra, recording vacation sound effects, the boat noises and humming of the motor, that he intended to mix and use as backing to one of Perkleiva’s tracks. And Jørn and Nina were there. Nina was pregnant too, due in January, and they looked good together, I thought. Real Kodak people. Things weren’t good between Helle and me. We thought things were fine, but it wasn’t tr
ue. Didn’t know what it was, but there was something there, between us, a lump that didn’t melt away when one squeezed it, but just grew bigger, like a muscle infection. I thought of Steve Martin. I thought of my favorite film, L.A. Story: Let us just say I was deeply unhappy, but I didn’t know it, because I was so happy all the time. That was how it was.
But right now we pretended we loved each other, and I put my arms around Helle on the deck, gripped her around the waist mechanically, my mind elsewhere. Let the games commence. All you need is love.
Actually I’d always loved traveling, taking trips. Unlike father who gripped the chair arm tight, and clung to the sofa cushions and didn’t, didn’t want to, going out into the world was something I’d generally loved. Jørn and I had traveled around Europe a lot at the end of the eighties, early nineties, interrail, we’d gone by train from Denmark, across Poland, West Germany, France, Benelux, and Italy, we’d taken six months off, stood on the platform in Bari, Southern Italy, in the spring of 1992, looked out toward Yugoslavia, debated at length over whether to take the ferry over to Dubrovnik and go into Mostar, Sarajevo, we’d both been to Dubrovnik when we were small, seaside holidays in the seventies, but now? Now, it wasn’t sure that we’d get ever out again, if we went in, Bosnia-Herzegovina had declared independence, it might explode at any moment, but Jørn was convinced nothing would happen in Sarajevo, he’d read up about it, the town’s inhabitants were from all camps, Bosnian Muslims and Serbs, Croatians, no, he was convinced Sarajevo would be a refuge, but I wasn’t so sure, I got him to wait a couple of days and we hung around in Bari, sat on the beach, waiting to see how things turned out, and then the country was blocked from all directions, so we decided to go through Spain instead, Gibraltar, the boat over to Tangiers, Morocco, Jørn wanted to see Casablanca to look for his Ilsa Lund, I wanted to go into the desert, we did both, milled around in Morocco with neither maps nor plans, with youthful arrogance and taking an almost continuous train journey back through the whole of Europe, the night train, only waking up in our bunks when we arrived in cities and light flooded through the curtains of our compartment, caught enough trains for a whole lifetime in those six months, so in the years that followed we flew, went to Asia, Vietnam, Japan, Tokyo, USA, New York, Los Angeles, disagreed regularly, met people on their home turf, was Uncle Traveling Mac, the globetrotter, I just wanted to blend in, I wanted to walk down Fifth Avenue without arousing interest, dash through Shinjuku in Tokyo on a Friday as one of the millions, not as a tourist, but somebody who knew the city, who had grown up there, I wanted to slip into the picture, much easier in New York than Tokyo, of course, but the attempt was always there, to become at one with the surroundings, without disturbing the lives that we trampled right into. Mine was a simple plan: I came, I saw, I disappeared. And I erased my traces as I went back up to the hotel from the beach.
The journey to Flørli was easier, the ferry came in alongside the dock at Flørli Powerstation, now closed down, a new and more modern station having been built inside the mountain and we were the only people to get off here, all the other tourists remained on the ferry as it pulled out again, photographing—click, click, click—their way in towards Lysebotn, making their necks stiff from staring thousands of feet up the mountain wall in the hope of catching a glimpse of the Pulpit, which they had already passed over an hour ago, the landmark announced over crackly loudspeakers in a thick, cooped-in local dialect.
We made our way up the path, up the mountain, a tough walk but manageable, and everyone kept going, Helle, Jørn, and Nina up at the front, me and Claus coming up behind, panting, I felt heavy and the sweat ran down my back, the rain had let up now and the sun blazed high above us and further behind Roar followed, forming the rear guard.
But it was fabulous when we finally reached the vast plateau, found a suitable spot and sat ourselves on the rocks, ate the packed lunches we’d brought, bread with cheese and salami, whatever we’d had on hand, fruit sodas in bottles and it was good to be here, amazingly good, not a soul for miles around and the plateau stretching thousands of feet in all directions, and we looked out over Lysefjorden, farther down the fjord, on the other side was the Pulpit, crammed full of people now probably, standing packed together to the edge, sardines on a mountaintop, about to tumble over the edge in the jostling, saw them in my mind’s eye sailing down the side of the mountain, cameras in their hands.
Helle was talking to me more than she had for weeks, she seemed lighter, happier, even if she still seemed distant, and I thought maybe things had at last begun to lighten up for her at work, maybe she was getting some breathing space at last, so we might do things together again, go places, make love on the dining room table, if that’s what it took, I was ready for anything, incredibly ready—and I had a really positive feeling about things, I felt it in my own mood, things were going well, I was in good form, truly, my step was lighter, I felt more athletic, talked more than usual, to Nina, to Claus, despite not knowing them that well, I was good company and I began to think things might not be so bad between Helle and I after all, all that was needed was a little time perhaps, and right now the whole summer lay before us.
It was no more than a ten or twenty minute walk from the plateau to Kjeragbolten, the great boulder that lies wedged fast between mountain walls, the perfect postcard view, blue writing on the back of a card; Hi down there, today we were up on Kjeragbolten in Lysefjorden. The rock is wedged in between mountain walls, and when you stand on it, there’s a nearly three-thousand-foot drop. And the rock’s only two or three yards in diameter. Some day the rock will work its way loose, but today isn’t the day! Everything’s great. Say hi to everyone. Claus was out on the rock right away, Nina took pictures of him, and then I had to take pictures of Jørn and Nina, as they stood there clinging to each other and swaying in the wind. I didn’t want to go, it looked slippery, it was a long way down and I was sure my shoes were wet from the path leading down here, from the patches of snow that still lay on the ground here. But Helle wanted to, of course Helle wanted to go out onto the rock, that’s why we came all the way up here, wasn’t it, she said, of course we’re going out on the rock, come on, she said, taking my arm and pulling me after her, I followed obediently, she led the way, lowered herself onto the block of rock, stretched her hand out to help me over. I clasped her firmly, holding on as hard as I could, and Jørn shouted out that he was going to take a picture of us, we had to face him, and we looked around at the camera, Helle turned slightly away, I kissed her on the neck, but she waved my hand away, laughing tensely, and I thought how much I loved her, twelve and a half years on and I was still in love, and this was a perfect moment for such things, so I whispered in her ear, I felt so assured, even my voice was firm, so while Jørn took pictures, while Nina and Claus stood watching us, I said, I was wondering if you’d marry me? And Helle’s head jerks away, she looks at me, straight at me, and her face is tired, I can see that now, and tears begin to flow from her eyes and she says No, Mattias, and then, quietly and calmly, I’m leaving you. Then she looks down, looks away, and I know she means it.
Emergency liftoff.
Game over.
Before you get a chance to blink.
It takes approximately ten seconds before my pulse rate rises. Before I find it difficult to breathe. Before the nausea settles heavily in my stomach. I can’t think what to say. Not a thing. Binary codes rush through my brain, tallying up all the reasons in the world for her leaving me, the prognosis for rescuing us from this. It doesn’t look great. There’s a burning behind my eyes. I feel so hot. I want to take my pullover off, but there’s not the space to do it out here on the rock, there’s hardly space for two people. I turn to go back. To the mountain. I bump into Helle, and automatically we both step back, and suddenly she loses her foothold, slips, and I have to grab hold of her arm to stop her falling, and there we are standing together once more, balancing on a rock. “None of the others know,” she says and I look up, smiling falsely at Jørn who keeps
on taking picture after picture, film I’ll never develop.
My first impulse is just to step forward. To walk gently out over the edge. Fall nearly three thousand feet down, dragging her with me perhaps. That would be something, just to let myself lean out. The sensation of air rushing past my ears as I accelerate toward the maximum speed for falling bodies, to be mangled by the rocks on the beach below. It would take a week to clear me away. If they could find everything. Perhaps my head would come loose, roll into the fjord and be lost forever.
We were back on safe ground and Jørn passed the camera back to me, I took it, hung it around my neck. Helle told everyone that she had to find somewhere to pee and Mattias, can you come and help me find somewhere? I followed her up the path, listless, walking several feet behind her. I knew she didn’t need to go to the toilet, I didn’t have a thought in my head.
“Mattias,” she said.
“Yes,” I said, frustrated. “Yes?”
She drew a breath. She had big lungs. I had stopped breathing.
We had been together for nearly thirteen years. Six and a half million minutes. This was the last day. Day zero. She was scraping her boot in the gravel, an unpleasant sound, but I didn’t ask her to stop, for fear she might come to a halt altogether, her entire machinery.
‘I wanted …” she began, drew another breath, looked out across the landscape. I couldn’t begin to comprehend what she found to look at out there. As far as I was concerned the whole landscape could just go to the devil, by express delivery. “I’d planned to tell you, this evening—tomorrow or this evening … after we’d gotten back home, because …”
“Because?”
More gravel scraping. Breathing. Tears. I had no idea what to say. Not a cloud in the sky.
Steve Martin.
“Because I wanted us to have one last good memory together,” she said. “Things haven’t been so good lately.” She had a small nose, slightly turned up, a broad mouth, and thin lips.