We have to drive on a bit to find the driveway, and I keep looking for the blue letterbox that used to be a landmark before, but the box has fallen off and is lying on the ground, and I have to back up the car. I turn into the driveway and pick up speed, and as I remember it, there was a pothole in the road so muddy after rains that you had to have a tractor pull you out if you got stuck, and it probably isn’t any better now. And it isn’t. I put my foot down and shoot across, the mud flying everywhere. The rear of the Opel bounces into the air and Arvid jumps around in his seat and shouts:
‘Hey, take it easy, for fuck’s sake. This is my dad’s car! He’ll kill me!’ But I am driving fast now, because I have second thoughts and wonder how I got myself into this. But it’s too late to turn back, and I want this over and done with.
There are three cars in the yard. Not one of them has four wheels. They have stood there for a good while and one of them I remember very well. It’s an old Volvo station wagon that was used for everything from transporting piglets to delivering the dead on commission, and these were the only times the car was washed. The other two are what Egil called ‘crash cars’. You buy them as wrecks, get the engine running and drive them until they fall apart and leave them wherever they break down. A chicken cackles and sticks its head out of a smashed window. From where I am standing, I see nothing that can move under its own steam: even the wheelchair by the farmhouse door is missing a wheel and is lying on its back, rusting where someone left it.
A man in stained overalls comes round the corner of the barn and stands squinting, shading his eyes from the sun.
‘Hi, Bjørn,’ I say, and he shakes his head and strokes his jaw. Then he scuttles into a shed without saying or doing anything.
‘Who was that?’ Arvid asks.
‘Bjørn. Farm boy.’
‘Farm boy? He must be at least seventy.’
I scratch my head. ‘About seventy-two.’
‘Is he always so talkative?’
‘Bjørn never says a word.’ I walk over to the house and knock at the door. No one answers, so I push it and go in through porch and call through the open kitchen door:
‘Hello, anyone at home?’ I hear a shuffle of feet and a woman of about thirty I have never seen before comes from the kitchen and looks surprised. There is something wrong with her legs. She doesn’t lift them when she walks.
‘Does Leif still live here?’
‘He sure does.’
‘My name’s Audun Sletten. I spent a summer here a few years back and I thought I would come by and say hello.’
‘Well, I don’t know, he’s asleep.’
Fine, I think, we’ll be out of here, but then I hear his voice from the living room.
‘Who is it, Ingrid?’
‘Young man called Audun. He’s come by, he says.’
‘Audun? Is that Audun, you say? I’ll be damned, be right there.’ There is a bit of a commotion, he groans as if he is making a serious effort, and then comes wheeling into the kitchen. He looks exactly as he used to, the grey crew-cut hair, his sculpted face like some bust I have seen in a magazine, and his upper body like a chunk of rock. But his legs are thinner, they don’t seem to carry him any more. There was some trouble with his legs before, but I didn’t see the wheelchair coming. I go up to him and shake his hand and he holds mine in both of his.
‘Well, if it ain’t Audun. It’s been a while.’
‘Summer of ’65.’
‘And now it’s 1970, that makes it more than five years. I’ll be damned, you’re big now. And strong too, I can see that. You’ve got a friend with you, a long-haired baboon?’ He laughs without malice, Arvid grins and goes to shake hands.
‘Arvid Jansen. I look after Audun.’
‘Oh, so he still needs that, does he? Well, I guess we too did that for a while, back then. I’m only joking. Audun was a boy who could look after himself. Be wrong to say anything else. He came here with that white bum of his, and welcome he was, that’s for sure. He could graft like an adult even though he was no more than a half-pint.’
‘White bum?’ Arvid whispers.
‘Shh,’ I say. ‘And Signe, is she here?’
Leif takes a deep breath and says:
‘I guess she moved. Lives somewhere in Trøndelag I’ve heard, I’m not really sure.’ He smacks his hands on the wheelchair. ‘And here I sit. But it’s fine, it’s fine. Ingrid helps me indoors and Bjørn outdoors. It’s fine.’
But I don’t see how it can be fine out here, or going anywhere but down the drain. Something must have happened, and I cannot ask. Signe with the large bosom and her large smile, Signe with her soft hands on her way up to the first floor where I was lying in bed that last summer, full of yellow fever and not able to sleep. Their children had moved out a long time ago, so the whole room was mine. Her white shift in the grey from the skylight, Signe with her white gentle words, Signe so kind. But I cannot ask. Once I sent a card, but there was no answer.
‘You see, somehow she fell ill. Well, let’s not talk about that now. Jesus, it’s nice to see you again, Audun. How’s your mother getting on down there?’
‘A lot better,’ I say. ‘A heck of a lot better.’
He looks at me with those fiercely blue eyes. ‘Yes, I guess she is.’ He strokes his chin and his bristles rasp loud enough for all of us to hear. He clears his throat takes another deep breath and says:
‘You know, your father was here a month ago. Strange you should come now. He was out of here, he said. He left his accordion, it was too heavy to carry with him. He said he was going far. I could just keep it, he didn’t give a shit, if you’ll pardon the expression. There it is.’ He points to a corner of the large kitchen. All the junk is still there, I remember a lot of it, and straight away I recognise the worn, brown case. I go over and open the case and there it is, black and white with red stripes on the bellows, a Paolo Soprani. I bend down and run my fingers across the keys as if the notes might come, but they don’t. For people with thick blood, I think. I look up at Leif. He is looking at me.
‘He didn’t look too friendly when he left, Audun, I have to say. But I don’t know what to do with that squeezebox. None of us here can play. Perhaps you could take it with you? That would be good. Then it would stay in the family, like.’
He crossed the line there speaking of family, and he knows it, so I don’t answer. I look down at the accordion.
‘Fine,’ I say, ‘we’ll take it with us,’ and Arvid, who has heard about this accordion, is about to speak, but then he catches himself before the words come out. The air in the kitchen goes quiet, and we stand there hardly daring to breathe. I think fast and say:
‘What happened to Toughie, the fox you kept on a chain behind the barn?’
‘Oh him,’ Leif says and tells the story of the fox that thought he was a dog and was kept on a rope behind the barn, and the hens refused to sit on their eggs as long as he was there. But everybody loved that fox and didn’t want to let him go, so Leif had to brood the eggs in his armpits and in the end Signe, Bjørn and all the guests were walking around with eggs in their armpits until they had aches and pains all over. Dinner was especially difficult, Leif says, and demonstrates how they had to sit at the table with their arms down by their sides, all posh like, and hold their knives and forks like aristocrats.
‘In the end we had better manners than the Sun King,’ Leif says, and Arvid laughs, and Ingrid hums by her bench, and as we leave I grab the case by the handle and promise to be back soon now that I have my driver’s licence.
We put the accordion on the rear seat and drive out of the yard. After the pool of mud Arvid says:
‘Why did you take the accordion?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You can’t even play it.’
‘I’m telling you, I don’t know.’
‘I don’t think your mother will be too happy about it, now that you know he’s close by. Do you believe in fate now or what?’
‘For fuck?
??s sake, I don’t know, I keep telling you! Goddamnit, why can’t you leave me in peace!’ I come out of the drive and turn too sharply round the bend and hit a fence post and it scrapes against the door, and I jump on the brakes. We both sit there. Arvid’s face is white.
‘Oh shit, I’m sorry,’ I say.
‘It was my fault. I should’ve kept my mouth shut.’
We open the doors. Leif’s house is on the opposite side of a hollow, but if anyone is standing in the window, I can’t see them. The car door is not as bad as I thought, but there is quite a scratch in the paintwork. But no dent. Arvid runs his hand along the door.
‘It won’t be cheap. The whole door will have to be resprayed.’
‘I can pay. I’m going to stop anyway,’ I say.
‘Stop what?’
‘Stop school.’
‘That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. You’ve got less than a year left. Weren’t you going to be a writer?’
‘You won’t be a writer just because you finish school. Did Jack London finish school? Did Gorky? Or Lo-Johansson or Nexø, or Sandemose, or anyone else worth reading?’
‘For Christ’s sake, Audun, that was a hundred years ago! No one went to school for long then! Today everybody does!’
‘Not me. I’m going to get a job.’
Arvid sits down in the ditch and starts throwing stones into the field, small ones at first and then bigger and bigger and he gets up and finds himself a big piece of rock and heaves it with both hands as far and as hard as he can and he yells:
‘Goddamnit!’ He turns. ‘What’s happening here?’ he says.
‘Nothing. I’ll just quit school.’
‘It’s not only that,’ he says, ‘and you know it.’
6
EGIL WAS TWO years younger than me, and I am pretty certain I can remember when he was born. Or maybe I am mixing it up with stories Kari has told me.
One story goes like this.
Kari and I are alone at home. She is six and is supposed to be looking after me. My mother and father are away. She is at Stensby hospital having Egil, but I don’t understand that, only that both of them are away and Kari is with me, and anyway this is not the first time. It’s funny the things you don’t forget. There is a knock on the living-room window and I turn and see my father’s face through the glass. He looks strange. He is waving one hand and making faces, and his face fills the window. The door is locked, and he has lost his key. Kari goes to open it. She doesn’t really want to. I hear a bang and run into the hall and see my father lying face down on the floor. He is laughing into the floorboards. I hurry over and sit on his back, but then he gets up and I fall off, hitting my shoulder on the shoe rack. It hurts. I scream, but he doesn’t care. He goes over to the cupboard in the living room, it is called grandfather’s cabinet, I already know that. He bursts into laughter and says:
‘Now there are three of you. We have to celebrate.’ I don’t understand what he means, but he takes the pistol from the cupboard. I must have seen it before. It has been one object among many; now it is different. He lifts his arm and fires three shots into the ceiling. We cover our ears, the loud cracks make our bodies shake.
‘I’ll never forget it,’ Kari says. ‘I thought my head would explode.’ We have been to the Grorud Cemetery and are walking along Trondhjemsveien on our way home. My mother is a few steps behind us, she’s crying and wants to be left alone. It’s Egil’s sixteenth birthday. It’s a Friday in October. I have taken the day off from school, and when we get home, Jussi Björling will be on the turntable. She always plays opera when something is wrong, she plays opera when nothing is wrong, she always plays opera no matter what. Sometimes she locks the door, turns the volume up and stands on a chair conducting with her eyes closed. I have seen her through the window on my way from friends’ houses at Linderud, I have looked across the little hollow with the stream and into our apartment on the third floor and seen how my mother is standing on a chair conducting the music I cannot hear, and wondered how many other people have seen her.
And almost always it is Jussi Björling. There is a signed photograph of him on the living-room wall. How she got hold of that, no one knows, but it has always seemed impressive, has given her records some extra meaning, and it was on the wall of our house in the country. My father couldn’t stand it, he did not like opera, he liked tango and anything else was for people with thin blood. On his own accordion he could play the tango, and people said he was pretty good.
‘Jussi Björling? Hell, he looks like a pen pusher!’ he used to say, and once, when he was in a drunken haze, he smashed some of her records.
‘We were lucky the neighbours called the police,’ Kari says. ‘Things could have got out of hand. You were only two years old, for Christ’s sake. He was so drunk. He was always so goddamn drunk. Was I happy when we moved at last.’
We talk about him as though he, too, were dead, we do that every time we talk about him. It’s not often. But he isn’t dead.
We walk down Trondhjemsveien. Flaen and Kaldbakken are on the lower side where many from my class live. Among them is Venke. I know exactly which window is hers. I have been there with her, kissing on her bed with my hand up her skirt and her hand down my pants, and with her mouth against my neck she whispered: ‘I think maybe I love you, you’re so strong.’ That really scared me, so I took off.
These houses seemed so important before, but now they look like something from a cartoon, compared with the high-rises at Ammerud. Rødtvet is on the upper side, and behind it is forest and more forest, for hours and days if that’s what you want. You can go in there and keep wandering and come out again far into the countryside.
‘It took him five years to get here,’ I say. ‘He must have fallen asleep on the way.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘He’s here now. I saw him just over a week ago, at the end of my paper round.’
‘Who’s here now?’
‘The person we’re talking about. Dad.’
What a word! Dad. But there is no other.
‘He was standing there, at the top of that hill.’ I point to where the footpath slopes down from Trondhjemsveien, by the Metro bridge. ‘The man in the black suit. The man with the shiny pistol. I wonder if he still has it. Perhaps it’s in his rucksack. And it was definitely his rucksack.’
‘You must be kidding! Are you sure?’ Kari grabs my arm and walks a bit faster to leave our mother further behind.
‘Of course I’m sure. Do you think I have forgotten what he looks like?’
‘Have you told her?’ Kari tries not to turn round, but doesn’t quite succeed.
‘What would be the point of that? I don’t want to move again. Not now, at least. I’m not scared of him.’
‘Oh no?’ She looks at me, and I know as well as her that I am scared to death. He is the only person who really scares me. Everything else is child’s play.
‘I’ll kill him,’ I say.
‘Shh, don’t talk like that. But what does he want? What do you think he wants? We’ll have to work out something. It’s too bad I have to go home on the bus tonight.’
‘To your car spray hotshot?’
She blushes. ‘You mind your own business!’
‘There’s nothing to work out. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens.’
We stop until my mother has caught up with us so we can walk together down Grevlingveien. She is not crying any more, and Kari slips her arm under hers, and she smiles at us.
My mother is small and fair-haired, quite slim, and if you are not standing too close and can’t see the lines around her eyes and mouth, thirty-six is not the first age that springs to mind. I suppose you could say she is attractive, I don’t know, it’s hard for me to say. Once, around where we used to live, I saw her turn a man’s head on the road, but maybe she had smudged her lipstick or had a black eye that day. She had one from time to time. So did I. When my father was home for long enough, we all did
.
She has always wanted curly hair, but it is straight as a waterfall, just like mine, and it seems to me that fair-haired people are not as curly as dark-haired people. Anyway, she has tried curlers and tongs and once she saved up to have a perm. When she came home she stood crying in front of the mirror because the curls were compact and tight and not what she had pictured and dreamt about, and, to be frank, she did look terrible. For almost an hour she stood over the basin trying to smooth her hair out again, and she stayed indoors for several days. So much money down the drain. What she does now is fill the kettle, put it on the stove, and when the water boils she hangs her hair over the gushing steam, and then the tips curl and give her what she calls a natural wave.
Since we moved, she has really had only one good friend. His name is Robert, but he calls himself Roberto, and he rented our spare bedroom the first difficult year in Veitvet. Now he lives in a smart one-room flat in Majorstua on the west side. He drives a white MGB, digs opera and is a homo. That doesn’t seem to bother him much, and it doesn’t bother me either. Sometimes he pinches my bum, but that’s just teasing, to show he knows that I know that he isn’t actually pinching my bum. Or something like that.
Every Wednesday afternoon Roberto drives to Veitvet from Majorstua to listen to opera with my mother. The white car floats down Beverveien with the roof rolled back, round the curve, and Roberto waves his hand to the boys standing along the road and the boys wave back, and it doesn’t seem to bother anyone that he is a homo. But I may be wrong there.
As we go up the steps in the tower and along the Sing-Sing gallery he is standing outside our door with a bouquet of flowers and a plastic bag in his hand, even though it’s only two days since he was last here, and I think that maybe homos have a feel for that kind of thing, like girls do. Anyway, my mother smiles and pulls herself together and is happy. Now there is someone to share the opera with, and I’m happy too, because I don’t have to stay at home and be a comfort. Some days it makes me feel claustrophobic and today is one of them.