While the others drink or sleep I carve away at the totem pole for all I’m worth, reflecting that I don’t recognise my own forest any more. The forest that was once so quiet and peaceful. Bongo and I were here from morning till night in a kind of harmonious balance, and didn’t adapt for anyone. On the contrary, we did just as we pleased. And I was slowly closing in on my goal, which was to do nothing. But that was before. Now there is not much left of the forest I once knew. We must have come to the wrong forest, I say to Bongo. It’s so strange here.
One problem with people is that as soon as they fill a space it’s them you see and not the space. Large, desolate landscapes stop being large, desolate landscapes once they have people in them. They define what the eye sees. And the human eye is almost always directed at other humans. In this way an illusion is created that humans are more important than those things on earth which are not human. It’s a sick illusion. Perhaps moose are the most important creatures when it comes down to it, I say to Bongo. Perhaps you’re the ones who know best but you’re extremely patient. I doubt that, of course, but who knows? It’s definitely not humans anyway. I refuse to believe that.
Things take their unusual course and the snow disappears. Gregus reads, Roger and Düsseldorf drink themselves stupid, the reactionary hangs up his brotherhood notices in vegetarian restaurants and I put the finishing touches to my painstakingly crafted totem pole. The intricate detail is beginning to stand out, and I can see that I’ve created a fine piece of work. This is something of which I can be proud. Any idiot will be able to see that the totem pole depicts a man sitting on an egg, with another man on his head, sitting on a bike, and that this other man has a year-old moose on his head and on this moose sits a little boy. It’s figurative to the nth degree but at the same time stylised so as not to reveal our actual identities. Now it has to be rubbed down with sandpaper and painted in bright colours. I’ll avoid making the same blunder that the North American West Coast Indians always made. They carved their fantastic totem poles and stood them in the ground without treating them in any way. Consequently they lasted only a few decades before nature reclaimed them. They simply fell and rotted away. Which was completely in keeping with the Indians’ beliefs in wholeness and cycles and all that kind of thing. Earth to earth etc. I suppose my thinking differs here from the Indians. After all, I am not an Indian, but a man of my time. A failed man of my time. Or just a man of a failed time. Depending on how you look at it. Either way, I want to make a thorough job of it. I’m going to give it the works with several coats of creosote and woodstain and then paint it in bright colours capable of withstanding the Norwegian winter. It should definitely be able to last a thousand years. Minimum. A thousand sounds good. That’s the optimum number.
One quiet spring night I make my way down to Ullevaal Stadium and smash the window of the ironmonger’s shop. I’m sure I could have got the money from Düsseldorf, but he’s drunk and fatherless all the time these days, and not only that, I like the idea of making a totem pole for nothing. I like everything that doesn’t cost money. I’m immediately on my guard if projects come with a budget. That’s how it is now. I’ve changed. I’ll soon have been in the forest for a whole year and I’m not the person I was. It’s not easy to say when the change occurred. It most likely came about gradually, as most changes do, but the fact that something has happened is beyond doubt. The forest gives and it takes. And it shapes those who take refuge there in its own image. I’m in the process of becoming a forest myself. The forest, that’s me, I think, as I’m met by the infernal sound of the alarm and calmly calculate that I have about five minutes to do the job. I carry out pot after pot of paint and lacquer and woodstain and whatever else I can lay my hands on. I run as fast as I can and after five minutes I’ve managed to hide a considerable amount of paint products behind the same skip that the ICA manager has been putting my milk behind for some months now. When I reckon I have what I need, I crouch down on top of all the pots and wait for Securitas to come. At length, a guard appears, but much later than I had thought. And the police turn up and there’s quite a lot of note-taking and phoning, and finally the shopkeeper himself arrives. I recognise him from the countless small purchases I made in connection with our endless redecorating. A paintbrush here, bit of tape there, sunflower seeds for the birds. I’ve always been a man for the birds. They have a lot to thank me for, the birds do, and I’ve been on nodding terms with this shopkeeper for years, but now I’ve taken the step of smashing the window in his shop and helping myself to what I need. That kind of thing should come as no surprise to him. It’s part and parcel of having a shop. He patches up the window with some Plexiglass-like material and eventually leaves. I have a couple of hours before the locals wake up, and I take Bongo to the edge of the forest and load him up with inhuman amounts of woodstain and paint, and it takes us three round trips to get all the goods back home.
On May 1st, the reactionary returns. And to provoke me he has brought along a bin bag full of old leaves, which he proceeds to burn outside his tent, standing there with a rake he pokes in the bonfire while it’s burning. I ignore him. I haven’t time to do anything else. I don’t even take time off to celebrate International Workers’ Day. I have more important things to do. And, as a matter of fact, who are the workers in Norway today? Damned if I know. So I paint. The egg shaker becomes fire-engine red, and Dad is given a variety of colours on his upper and lower body. I feel he deserves that. I myself go green, like the forest, and I paint the bike in extremely realistic colours, using my own bike as the model. Bongo goes yellow and Gregus a sort of turquoise. Individual features on the faces, such as eyes, mouth and nose, are painted in contrasting colours. I coat the plinth with everything that is left. It probably gets twenty coats of all sorts of weird and wonderful things, and I doubt whether a thousand years of moisture will make any inroads.
As I paint, Gregus irritates me by spelling his way through old newspaper articles about all kinds of rubbish. Politics and science and art and culture. And not only does he painstakingly read them out, letter by letter, but he tries to analyse the content, to the best of his meagre abilities, and is eager to discuss what it means. Forget it, I say. It means nothing. It’s just words. It must mean something, Gregus says. Nope, I say. People just write things to show how smart they are, and that’s the last thing the world needs. It’s just words, words, words. Maybe a small percentage of it is slightly more than words, but to know which bit you have to be smarter than most and I forbid you to have that as your goal at such an early stage in your life.
I don’t believe it doesn’t mean anything, says Gregus.
What you do when you come of age is none of my business, I say. I promise to release my hold over you when that time comes. But that’s many years in the future. And the only thing that matters right now is this totem pole. It’s going to stand for a thousand years and bear witness to the fact that you and I and Grandad and Bongo have been here. We have been on earth. We have had our time and did our best and even so were useless in a useless way, and when it’s finished you and I are going to head off, I say. And the newspaper articles aren’t coming with us. You can just forget all about your reading project. And the same goes for school. You’re not going to get a sniff of school until you’re eighteen. We’re going to be in the forest, I say. With Bongo. You might as well get used to the idea right now.
I can make my own decisions, can’t I? he says.
Forget it, I say.
But there’s something here about a school called the London School of something, yes, here it is, London School of Economics, says Gregus. Isn’t that where Peter Pan comes from?
That’s right, I say.
I bet it’s great going to school there, he says.
Bear in mind that if you ever start at that school I’ll come and live in the forest outside London and give you a good hiding every single day.
But I’ll be allowed to live in London, won’t I? says Gregus.
Yes,
of course, I say. It’s an exhilarating city. But you can just hang around there a bit, can’t you? Or go to a school that isn’t so nice and conventional? Maybe something arty? A school that gives you the skills to extend boundaries rather than maintain them?
I don’t understand what you’re talking about, says Gregus.
You’re lucky, I say.
And thanks to this meaningless conversation I go around singing the I Can Fly song from the Peter Pan film for days. As I paint I hum the tune and sing the chorus, and I do it hundreds of times and in the end I feel genuinely sorry that I can’t fly.
The totem pole is finished.
In the final stages I use the confiscated head lamp and work around the clock. The very last thing I do is to paint a large sexual organ on my father. I give him the Doppler family hallmark. After that I take a few steps back and can see that the result is fantastic. It has become a totem pole the like of which the world has never seen. It is deeply meaningful and personal, and it’s colourful, if not garish. It’s uplifting. And I, Doppler, I made it. With my own hands. I have honoured my father in a way he would never have imagined possible, and I have felt close to him.
As soon as it’s finished I set about digging a hole in the ground. I choose a spot down by the pissing place. From there, as I’ve already mentioned, you can see large tracts of Oslo, and a bit of piss won’t do any harm, I think. On the contrary. It is, as I see it, recognition of the fact that my father took pictures of toilets in his later years. Granted, he never pissed here. But he definitely would have done if he’d had the chance. Pissing against the totem pole will be like consecrating the family bonds, I think. Doppler piss is as thick as blood, more or less, and it binds us together. Later generations of Dopplers will make pilgrimages to this place to pay their respects to earlier Dopplers by pissing on the family totem pole.
But half a metre down I hit bedrock. There’s so much bedrock in this bloody country of ours that I can’t even be bothered to make jokes about it. Suffice it to say there’s enough bedrock for everyone and this virtually encyclopaedic fact blows my schedule to smithereens. I had envisaged that Gregus and Bongo and I would be miles away by the middle of May, and my brother-in-law would have had to return empty-handed when he came to fetch me, but now I’m not so sure any more. Maybe I’ll have to stay here and fight. In that case I’ll have to let fly with an arrow just as I did with the reactionary. That would serve him right, that’s for sure, but it would jeopardise my escape plans and I’d prefer not to do that.
For two weeks I have a bonfire going constantly in the hole and pour water down to get the rock to crack. Bonfire after bonfire. I spend the days chopping wood and carrying water. Gregus helps me, but the others booze and are a dead loss. Fair enough. I’ve no intention of trying to making them see the error of their ways. If they want to drink, that’s their business. I’ve been alive long enough to know that there are umpteen reasons for drinking yourself silly and everyone has to do what they think best. The reactionary doesn’t drink. Let that be said. He’s working hammer and tongs in the forest somewhere. He’s taking the brotherhood festival seriously. No doubt about that. He’s making benches and tables and a small stage where I presume he’s going to stand and talk about peace on earth and reconciliation between peoples of the world.
It’s difficult to say where one bonfire ends and a new one begins, but after forty or fifty of them I’ve made a hole of a metre or so down into the rock, and after just as many more fires I’m getting close to two metres. That’s good. But it’s May now, indeed it’s almost the middle of May. The snow has gone and the forest is dry. White and blue anemones are flowering everywhere and a new generation of moose is on its way all over the forest. You’re not the youngest any more, I say to Bongo, and you may think that obliges you to grow up fast, but you shouldn’t think like that. I think you should hold on to your youthful freedom and independence. Do crazy things. Have a party. Be a stirrer and raise hell. This is me Doppler saying this, I say. And Doppler was possibly one of the most conformist yuppies in the country at one time. Now he’s retired and works more on a free-lance basis. As a consultant, you might say. To himself and to those who care to listen. There are not so many of them, it seems.
We can’t lift the totem pole. Even with the reactionary lending a reluctant hand we don’t stand a chance. The damned thing weighs too much. Bongo and I managed to drag it through the snow, but four men, a child and a moose can’t lift it into the hole.
How many people do you think will be coming to the brotherhood festival? I ask the reactionary.
Thirty or forty maybe, he says.
Would you mind if I used them? I ask.
I suppose not, he says. It might bring them together.
Exactly, I say. You can’t beat symbolically-laden hard graft for uniting people.
The middle of May comes and goes. I sit all day with my bow drawn, listening for my brother-in-law’s fleet footfalls, but he fails to appear, and the only reason he fails to appear must be that the birth is overdue. That’s perfect. The forces of nature are on my side, but I don’t attribute that to fate. It’s sheer good luck. Chance is my friend today, and I use the opportunity to enjoy a small glass with Düsseldorf and Roger. At night I sleep with my bow and arrow under my pillow, but fortunately I see nothing of my brother-in-law, neither in my dreams nor in so-called reality.
Next morning the brotherhood festival begins. The reactionary has adorned himself in something as unreactionary as a workman’s smock. Maybe he feels it makes it easier for him to step into a different sphere, a more elevated spirituality, I don’t know, he’s standing there anyway, ready to receive good people from all the religions of the world, but they’re not exactly arriving in droves. Four or five hours after the festival should have started he’s forced to acknowledge that there are only four takers for the festival. A Muslim has turned up, as well as a Jew, a Christian and a journalist from the evening edition of Aftenposten. All four of them are sitting on a log waiting for the reactionary to say something. At long last, he steps forward and declares the festival open. He is unable to conceal his disappointment, but nonetheless reels off some fairly credible phrases about each individual, in such troubled times as ours, having to look inside ourselves to examine how deep our tolerance runs etc. We must understand one another, and the key to understanding lies in knowing one another. Quite simply, we need to learn more about each other. We need to know what others think and believe and fear, but also more commonplace things, such as what time they get up in the morning, and what they have for dinner. Everything is useful. In truth we can never learn too much about each other. And these two days are to be spent doing just that. We will exchange information about everything under the sun. The three believers nod and the journalist takes notes.
The first exercise is to let yourself fall backwards hoping and trusting that the others will catch hold of you. There are so few of us that this presents some problems. The burly Muslim hits the ground a couple of times, but is soon up on his feet, insisting that it’s his own fault. All the rest of us land safely in others’ outstretched arms. Actually, it gives me a certain amount of pleasure. I fall back, lose control and for a split second find myself between heaven and earth, and then instead of hitting the ground with a bang I am caught by the soft and tender arms of my fellow man.
The next item on the programme is to form pairs and blindfold one of the partners and then guide him around the vicinity. The blind partner has to learn to rely on the sighted person. It’s a great little exercise from which we all learn something, even though Bongo, who I team up with, once again demonstrates to all and sundry that he’s a bit slower on the uptake than the rest of us when it comes to getting the gist of a very clear message. As we pass the Jew and the Aftenposten journalist, I notice that the latter is crying while walking along blindfolded. It must be a bit too much for him, I suppose. He’s used to verbal flights of fancy and here it’s suddenly physicality that’s in the ascendan
cy, and there’s intimacy and other unfamiliar things. It can soon become too much. And of course the wily old foxes on the editorial staff may have made sure they wriggled out of an assignment like this, and instead conspired to send the young trainee with the frayed nerves.
The third exercise is, after some coercion from me, to raise the totem pole. Everything is prepared beforehand, and with a concerted effort we force the totem pole into place. It’s child’s play, or as good as. The monster is carried to the hole and is then slowly shoved and pulled up into an upright position with the aid of an ingenious system of ropes. After that, the festival continues without me.
As Gregus and I hammer wedges into the ground around the totem pole, I can hear that the brotherhood process in the forest is becoming more intense. There’s some sort of group work going on. The reactionary’s irritated voice rings out from time to time, but I don’t feel it has anything to do with me. A festival like this is a praiseworthy initiative, no doubt about that, and the idea is spot on: nations and religions of the world need a helping hand if we’re to get out of the pickle we’re in. Nobody will be happier than me if they succeed. But I have to admit that I don’t have any confidence in it happening. I think we’ve missed the boat. I believe that those of us who are alive today are destined to die out and will be replaced by a new species of humans. Who will start with a clean sheet and fewer aggressive traits. A more good-natured species of humans. A variant which has the ability to be more liberal.