Some hours earlier we had taken the bus from Ankerløkka, a fine square at Akerselva in Oslo, now filled with student flats, but back then it still was a bus station, right across from St Jacob’s Church, that was built of red brick like most churches in Oslo. It was pretty to look at standing there behind the naked trees that lined the road down towards the fairytale bridge and the river.
We caught the bus there, at Ankerløkka, and sat at the very back, and right on schedule the bus pulled slowly out into Storgata, and the wheels on the bus went round and round, as they do in the song. And then we drove through eastern Oslo, through Grønland and Gamlebyen and onwards along Mosseveien to the south, and we drove up the hills at Ljan Station or up Herregårdsveien, or a third route, and if we did I don’t remember which, but definitely down towards Hauketo where no high rises stood in those days, no terraced houses, more like it was in the countryside, in the woods. The diesel engine made the whole bus vibrate as we climbed higher and shuddering waves rose through our bodies, up our thighs to our stomachs and it was like an erotic sensation and she pressed both hands low down against her stomach and said:
‘More, more, I want more,’ and with a sensuous smile she closed her eyes. But then she took her hands away and laughed and blushed, and we sang the song of the Eighth Route Army softly to ourselves. We sang:
Soldier of the great people’s army,
Don’t forget our three commandments
Or the law of the eight rules
March, oh soldier, march.
and so on, and only a few passengers in the bus turned to look at us. We laughed at them a little, and the song too we laughed at, because here we were, sitting in a bus going through the woods in a country called Norway, where, of course, the class struggle was fought every single day, though not very visible to most of us, nor very fierce. But the song had a good rhythm, I mean, it was a march, wasn’t it? And we tapped out the beat on the seats in front of us as we sang.
The red, almost burgundy-coloured bus with the pale blue lines along the windows drove on, towards the junction at the roadside café where Hauketo railway station lay to the right and the sign to Enebakk pointed left. And that was the way we went, and everything was as it had been the last time I was here, each bend in the road, all the bus stops with their shelters and rusty signs, and the kiosks were all closed now, and in their worn-down nakedness they stood against the bare forest and were filled to the brim with emptiness and time which had come and now was gone again: no Kvikklunsj bars on the shelves, no chocolate from Freia, no cigarette packs in their colourful rows: Winston, South State, Blue Master and Tiedemanns Teddy.
The weather had just changed from sleet and rain, now winter was coming, the air was cold, was clear, but inside the bus it was warm. We were ten passengers or even fewer on board, although on that day at this time of year it was the only bus. No proletarians, not one member of the working class came to spend their holiday in the cabins by the lake, not one worker from Spikerverket, not one family from the construction workers’ union came to Loch Lysern, to fish in one of its many bays, to lie on their back on the thwarts of a rowing boat, the oars pointing to the sky and in their hands the workers’ newspaper, Arbeiderbladet, or for no other reason than to stare into the blue after one more year of piecework and double shifts.
The others on the bus lived by the main road, so just the two of us were going all the way out to the holiday camp. We sat at the back of the bus and saw through the windows the frozen glittery dust whirling up in the slipstream of the bus, or in its wake, as after a boat. It hung like yellow curtains across the winding road and then was pulled aside by the wind after each bend before drifting in between the trees where it was gone.
‘Are you happy?’ she said.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘I am,’ she said.
In the autumn and winter the bus stopped at the junction with the main road, Route 120, and did not go all the way up to the holiday camp, it was a surprise, we had to walk. And we did. The gravel road was hard as concrete in the sudden frost and the stubble fields were covered with icing. The road had frozen so solid it rang out beneath our boots with every step we took, like taps on a Spanish guitar, and it took us an hour to get there.
The main house was quiet when we crossed the yard in the cold quiet air and we stood on the doorstep sending fans of misty breath from our mouths, and it was nearly dusk already and above the lake was a blue transparent light and a muted yellow light from the lamp above the door. We knocked and then cautiously rang the brass bell by the entrance, and a woman in a quilted blue jacket came from behind the house, on the path from the lake with a bucket in her hand.
I unlocked the door and let her in, and dropped the bag by the door and walked around the cabin to fetch firewood from the woodpile and walked back with my arms loaded up to my chin, but when I came in, there was already a fire burning and there was firewood in a basket in the corner. I wondered if I should feel embarrassed that she was the one who got the fire going. But I did not.
‘Look what you can do,’ I said.
‘Girl Guides,’ she said. ‘I left only two years ago. Once a Guide, always a Guide,’ she said and sang:
When the shadows softly gather
Ere we close our eyes in sleep
We would thank thee, holy Father,
For thy keep.
Keep our loved ones free from sorrow
And in bed with us tonight
Let’s play our games till the morrow
Till the morning light
And she blushed as she always did, but I thought she was funny. She was funnier than I was.
* * *
We slept till late next morning. When I awoke the light was slowly coming; it was misty with a thin layer of white ice across the water to the other side of the bay as if someone had poured skimmed milk from a jug to let it freeze there. I looked at my watch and pulled my trousers on and my jumper I pulled over my head and closed the door softly on my way out and walked up to the main house. We were fresh out of tobacco, I had remembered the instant I woke up.
It was cold as hell on the way up, and past the tractor I saw her Ford in front of the kiosk shivering in the cold, pluming white fumes from the exhaust pipe. She was scraping ice off the windows on the other side of the car. I walked round and said:
‘Jesus Christ, it’s cold,’ and she nodded and smiled and kept on scraping, and I stood there waiting, stepping from one leg to the other right behind her, my bare feet in my worn-out boots. At long last she was finished and threw the blue plastic ice scraper on to the passenger seat.
‘We forgot the smokes,’ I said. ‘Would you mind?’
I fumbled with stiff fingers in a pocket and pulled out the pouch to show her which brand I wanted, in case she knew nothing about tobacco.
‘Yes, of course,’ she said, and I gave her the money she needed, and she looked at me and said: ‘Aren’t you freezing cold in that?’ And I was. The knitted jumper I had on was the first the girl in the cabin had ever completed, and my skin was showing through the coarse stitches. I am not sure, but I thought the manager looked me over a little too closely, before she finally got in her car and drove across the yard and up the gravel track towards Route 120 and the shop.
I turned and walked down to the cottage.
When I opened the door, I rubbed my hands, and I rubbed my ears until they burned. I went over to the stove and opened the little door and laid pieces of firewood inside so it looked in there like Stonehenge looked and pushed folded pages of Dagbladet between the logs. I put a match to the paper and let it burn almost down and then I did it two more times and left the door to the stove ajar and that did the trick. The wood was so dry that it took at once and the flames licked the logs. I closed the door fully and the stove started to rumble.
I heard her turn over in bed and could feel her eyes on my back. She said:
‘Hello, boy, come back to bed.’
‘I’m coming,’ I said, an
d pulled off my jumper and trousers and lay down next to her under the duvet.
‘Oh fuck, you’re cold,’ she said. ‘Goddamnit you’re cold,’ she said, and she started to rub me hard all over my body, and then what happens happened, and afterwards we lay as we always did, shoulder to shoulder, hand in hand, and the warmth seeped into my body from her body, and I did not know how I kept warm all those years before I met her.
‘Do you want to go rowing after breakfast?’
‘There’s ice on the water,’ I said.
‘But the ice is maybe not that thick?’
‘Oh no, it’s just a thin film.’
‘Then it would be fun,’ she said, and I thought so too.
‘But first I want to lie here for a little while,’ I said and closed my eyes, pressed myself against her and said: ‘I went up to ask for some more cigarettes. We forgot to bring them. We only have the one pack, and that’s not enough. I caught the manager just before she left.’ I opened my eyes. ‘Christ, did she stare at me, before she got in her car,’ I said.
‘She probably thought you looked good in that jumper.’
‘Do you think so?’
‘Of course. She could see right through those stitches.’
I laughed. ‘Does it matter to you that she did?’
‘Oh, no. That only means she and I have something in common. There’s nothing wrong with that. She has nothing to do with us.’
I closed my eyes and was pleased with her answer, which was the answer I had wished for. I heard a rumbling from the stove, and the cabin was slowly warming up with the sweet scent of birch wood surrounding us, and the old timber smelled like something I had always known and always liked.
We were only there for the one night and would travel back from the bus stop on Route 120 later that afternoon, and it was really not much time, so we had to make the most of this day, and then I fell asleep, and we both slept, and we woke up and went to sleep again. Finally we were both fully awake and we got dressed and had breakfast and our heads were still fuzzy from sleep and we walked down to the water and tipped the rowing boat on to its keel and found the oars in the heather beneath the boat and together we dragged it down over the rocks to the water and pushed the boat in. We slid the oars on board and put a fishing rod under the thwarts. It was her fishing rod. We could hear the thin ice crunch. Carefully I stepped into the boat and sat down facing the shore and placed the oars in the rowlocks, and she followed and first she knelt on the stern thwart to push us off and she turned around and then we sat facing each other. She smiled.
‘Why don’t you row?’ she said.
‘Oh, sorry. Did you want to?’ I said.
‘It’s fine. I can sit here and watch you toil. You just row.’
She was probably good at rowing. Canoeing was my thing. Red Indian. Rowing boat was cowboy.
‘I’m the man,’ I said and laughed.
‘That’s right,’ she said and looked at me with narrow, almost dreamy eyes.
With each stroke the blades of the oars crunched the brittle ice and made ragged holes either side of the wide wake behind the boat. It sounded as if the ice was hitting back, like the polar ship Fram or even Gjøa on its way through the Northwest Passage, thump thump, but of course it didn’t. It was plain sailing.
‘This is fun,’ she said. ‘The sound of it, right? Is it hard?’
‘No, no,’ I said, ‘it’s plain sailing.’
She had two woollen vests on and an Icelandic sweater and a purple scarf around her neck and a leather cap on her head like the caps that fishermen wore in northern Norway, in Lofoten, and she had mittens on her hands. She was really well wrapped up, and her cheeks were flushed, and I wore three checked flannel shirts that used to be my father’s, one over the other, and the jumper she had knitted and then my jacket and mittens. No cap. A cap was unmanly, and my ears grew quite cold, but not more than I could cope with.
‘Shall we fish now?’ she said.
‘Why not. But then you throw the line, I’m busy with these oars.’
‘That’s fine with me.’
She pulled off her mittens and took the fishing rod from under the thwarts, it was fibreglass, bottle green, and swung it back and let the spinner loose and pressed her thumb softly against the lock, and with a swift, almost invisible flick she launched the bait. She clearly knew what she was doing, and the spinner pierced the ice with a crisp plop out on the lake.
The rowing boat was fibreglass, plastic, and rode too high on the water, and did not pick up the momentum a wooden boat would, when finally I fell into a rhythm I could handle. So I struggled to keep her on a straight course, and I was starting to sweat, and it annoyed me. I saw her face flush in the cold air and her eager eyes watching the shiny line and the white scrubbed water, and along the shore was a mist still drifting among the trees turning them into mythical creatures from some heathen past. A pale rose streak was floating above the red cabins along the bay and from behind the mist, the sun was breaking through, and why so annoyed, I thought, this is fine, this is so fine, you could not have wished for better, why shouldn’t you sweat a little?
‘Jesus, this boat is hard work,’ I said.
‘I know,’ she said, ‘they’re like that, those plastic boats, they’re really too light.’ Then she got a bite. She jumped up and cried out: ‘Got one! Fucking hell, we’re going to get the bastard.’ she yelled, and I had not heard her swear like this before, and I liked it, truly, it was exciting.
She let the fish thrash around before slowly reeling it in and lifting it carefully over the side.
‘A perch,’ she said, ‘a big one.’
‘Congratulations,’ I said, and I meant it too, and she took a bow and dropped her head like maybe Chaplin would have done, or Pinocchio in the cartoon with his head on a string, and her cap tipped forward and she placed her left hand on her right breast and held the rod in an arc above her head and let the fish dangle there.
‘A small fish in your honour, my sweet.’
I laughed and together we got the perch off the hook and tossed it into the bottom of the boat where it flapped about, and poor little fish, she said, and I took a stick that was lying there for that purpose and whacked it pretty hard on the head, and it flapped a little more and then lay still.
I straightened up. I could feel the sun on my back, the fog melting away, the ice melting. Her face was golden, her hair golden, and she lifted her face to the sun and closed her eyes in the dazzling light.
‘Do I have a tan now?’ she said.
I laughed again. ‘You and I,’ I said. ‘Just you and I.’
‘Isn’t it fun,’ she said and she smiled. I let the oars rest in the rowlocks. The water around the boat fell silent, and silently the cabin was floating up above the rocks and the smoke rose softly from the chimney, and how impossible it was to grasp that in the end something as fine as this could be ground into dust.
IV
24
When we arrived at Lnsø, we walked up to a small hotel in Vesterø harbour, where the ferry from the mainland docked. The old hotel was only a stone’s throw from the quay, and my mother said that she was fine, she could walk the distance, she was no invalid for Christ’s sake. The hotel had a view of the fishing port where seagulls whirled like a tornado above the masts and filled the sky. Their chests were so incredibly white it hurt our eyes when the sun was out. And there were all kinds of gulls and terns with their black cap and heavy grey gulls and orange, green and canvas-coloured sails on the boats and the red buoys flapping pennants in the wind and the nets spread fan-like along the quays.
‘It’s different here now,’ my mother said.
‘Different to when?’ I said.
‘To forty years ago.’
‘You haven’t been here for forty years?’
‘No,’ she said.
We went through the door to the hotel and put down our bags. I did not have a bag, but I was carrying my mother’s blue one, and Hansen had a bag. I had my
father’s clothes on and my damp jacket. I had to get it dry. It was cold on the inside. I might catch something, I might be ill.
My mother went up to the reception and took out her worn, ancient purse from her handbag. There was plenty of money in it, and she was spending it like she never had before; it looked conspicuous, and I did not like it. I heard her ask about a room for someone who had not booked in advance, and that someone, I guessed, was me, and there was no problem, not this time of year. She sounded terribly Danish though, and not like she normally did.
We went up to our rooms. My mother had to rest for an hour, and Hansen did too. I took the bottle of Calvados from my inside pocket and placed it on the bedside table and hung my jacket on a radiator below the window, it was good and warm, and the room was warm and I sat on the bed and stayed there looking out of the window to the harbour and thought about things that needed thinking about. But that didn’t help me much.
I lay down on my back. The bed was soft. I closed my eyes and then time just vanished, and when I looked at my watch, an hour had passed. I put my steaming jacket on and went downstairs to eat with the others, and they were already there. I should have found it odd with Hansen sitting at the end of the table, and not my father. But I didn’t, and when I realised, I felt guilty.
We ate by the window. I was really hungry. After a while my mother leaned over the table and looked out at the road. She did this twice, and the third time she stood up, took her coat from her chair and said:
‘Right, time to go,’ and Hansen stood up and this time I did not ask where we were going. I just left my food on the plate even though I was far from finished and stood up to join them. Where else could I go? In the road was a cab with the engine running. We sat as we did before. Me in the front next to the driver and the two others in the back. I don’t know why it turned out that way, if it was something they decided that morning.