I finish off Veitvetsvingen as quickly as I can, and only Grevlingveien is left. People are standing on their steps, waiting, and they are not happy. But I don’t look at them or apologise or anything, just push the paper into their hands and hurry on. At the end of the route, by the last house, Fru Karlsen is standing by her door. The dress she is wearing is really something, her shoulders still tanned after the summer have a faint glow, warm, as though she is just out of bed, and I have pictured it white and white, and myself in it, and my own skin close to the skin I can see now, her hands everywhere, and my hands everywhere, where she is soft and different, and the dizzying fragrance of Fru Karlsen, but straight away I can see that there is something amiss, for her arm is rigid as she runs her hand through her hair, and I just want to turn and get the hell out of there. But I can’t, I have to give her the newspaper, it’s my job, and I walk slowly towards her on the flagstone footpath.
‘Well, if it isn’t Speedy Gonzales,’ she says. Her mouth is distorted in a way I have never seen before, and I pass her the newspaper. She doesn’t take it, doesn’t look at it, her eyes are glaring straight at me. It makes me feel uncomfortable.
‘What the hell do you mean by being late when you know I am waiting for you! Can’t you see I’m all dressed up?’ She seems a little drunk, but she can’t have been drinking, it’s barely half-past six, and yet, there is this shine in her eyes, and she looks cold wearing that dress well into October. She is freezing, and she has dressed herself up for me.
‘Things happened on the way round, I had to sort that out first. You’re not the only person who is pissed off.’
‘The only person! You foolish boy! You could have had anything you liked! Do you understand what I’m saying? I could have given you anything you liked! But I am not waiting for anyone, especially not a baby like you!’ And then she slaps me. There is no time to duck, and it stings like hell. I back a few steps, squeeze the newspaper hard, it’s thick today, and heavy, and I sling it at her. It hits her where she is really soft. Whether it hurts or not I cannot tell, but she is startled, her eyes change colour, and I say in a low voice:
‘You old hag! Get back inside to that old man of yours! I wouldn’t touch your wrinkled skin if you paid me!’
8
WE HAVE FRENCH for the first lesson. Henrik has to read aloud from the text we’ve had to prepare. He sits at the very back. He can’t do French, neither reading nor writing it, but he is a good imitator. That’s what he can do, and with a little help he has bluffed his way through two years, and is close to the abyss. If we have a French oral, he is done for. But Starheim is hard of hearing, he leans forward with a cautious smile, his eyes glued to Henrik’s face. It sounds like French, he is almost certain. Everyone can see he really doesn’t catch what Henrik is reading, but it does sound French, and Henrik throws his whole body into it, so it looks French as well. Henrik really doesn’t say anything, it’s just babble, but Starheim is vain, he won’t be caught saying what? or eh? so he just goes for it:
‘Très bien, merci, Henri. Audun, you can take it from there.’
I have no idea where Starheim thinks Henrik stopped reading, so I choose a place at random and keep going. Henrik’s face is like a mask, and Starheim does not bat an eyelid. I used to think this was funny. I have done my homework, I understand what I am reading, but my pronunciation is not great, and it’s enough for Starheim to smile with relief and say:
‘Pas mal, Audun. A little more practice on your pronunciation, and you’ll be fine.’ Henrik looks triumphant, this is killing him, his face tense and almost desperate and his eyes filled with tears. Tiny sounds come from his mouth. He can’t hold it back much longer. A few students have to look out the window.
‘Not bloody likely,’ I say under my breath, so only those next to me can hear.
On our way out Arvid says:
‘Henrik’s skating on thin ice. I don’t think the examiners are quite as deaf. But it’s funny.’
‘I don’t understand why he bothers.’
‘What’s the matter with you? You knew your stuff, didn’t you.’
‘Nothing’s the matter with me. I’m just a little tired.’ I close my eyes and see Fru Karlsen and her face when the newspaper hit her. Arvid pats my shoulder. I feel like telling him about Fru Karlsen, but all that’s another world.
‘Have you heard about the Stakhanov Prize?’ he says. ‘It was a prize Stalin gave to the most industrious workers during the first five-year plan. It was named after a man who worked his ass off. You’re in the semi-finals.’
We walk across the schoolyard between students from our class, and we stand in the sun with our backs to the gymnasium. I look around me, and then I turn the corner where there is nothing but trees and sit down on the grassy slope leading up to the teachers’ houses and fish out half a cigarette from my pocket and light it up. I sit smoking in the strip of sunlight with my eyes closed. Arvid follows me.
‘Give us a drag,’ he says. I pass him the cigarette. He inhales, and then he slowly blows out smoke and looks at me.
‘Seen any more of your dad?’
I shake my head.
‘Weird business,’ he says, and that’s all he can say, because it’s something he doesn’t understand. It’s not his fault, I know that, but still it’s irritating.
‘It’ll be fine,’ I say.
‘I hope so.’ He gives me back my cigarette, and I take the final drag just before I burn my fingertips, and I am about to throw it away, when a head pokes round the corner.
‘Gotcha!’ I drop the butt and stamp on it. It’s Twisty, one of our teachers. He is called Twisty because of the way he walks, but it is meant kindly, he is well liked by all the students. He walks all the way round and says:
‘Shit, do you have to smoke when I’m on duty? You’ll get me into trouble. Look here,’ he says, putting a hand up his jacket, ‘the new polec booklets have come.’
He is a SUF-er, a Young Socialist member, they have their own lingo and ‘polec’ means political economy. Arvid has joined a study group. He is eager, he grabs the booklet, and Twisty reaches for another.
‘Are you joining as well?’ he says to me. ‘We start on Tuesday.’
I shake my head.
‘He’s not ripe yet,’ Arvid says, ‘but he will be, don’t push him.’
‘That would be great,’ Twisty says. ‘Do you know, Arvid, the membership of the NLF group has doubled since the stunt with the flag? That was a class act.’ Arvid blushes, and I agree. It was a class act.
‘I have to be off. The bell will go in a couple of minutes. No more smoking, please.’ He twists back around the corner, and we get up and brush the pine needles off our trousers.
‘This is not for real,’ I say.
‘What isn’t?’
‘All this. Henrik with his French, Twisty and his booklets, the whole school.’
‘Sure it is,’ Arvid says.
We have Rønning, the deputy headmaster, for English. He is the only teacher I like. He is sort of a show-off in his West-Norwegian way, parading the classroom pulling at his red braces, his jacket dangling from his shoulders, his grey hair whirling round his head, and he speaks English with a heavy Stord Island accent. He loves for us to laugh at his jokes, but we don’t understand them. He is passionate about his subject, though, and feeds us extra reading; in his office the spirit duplicator works overtime. It will soon be on its knees with metal fatigue. When he comes down the corridors, a cloying smell of spirit drifts behind him.
Our textbook is the Anglo-American Reader. The English in it is tiresome, with a faint taste of bog water at the edges, but the American has a sky above it that I feel comfortable with. We are reading about the Melting Pot. The Golden America, the land of freedom and equality, the haven for the homeless and persecuted, the melon they all want a slice of, the fields they all want to plough. Poor folk from Hardanger in Norway, the Abruzzi in Italy, and the Ukraine fleeing from landowners, Cossacks and the taxman, the
bastards who bleed the smallholder dry until there is nothing left to eat except granite, and if you are not an Indian or a Negro, you may have a chance to see a future ahead of you and a patch of land on the prairie. I am not an idiot, I know about the napalm in Vietnam, I know about Wounded Knee and the Ku Klux Klan; for as long as I have lived I have seen the race riots on TV. They shot Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, I have read Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice and felt the flames of his hatred. But there is something about those people. They are for real. They step out of the shadows and set out on journeys never to return. A girl in the book writes about her grandmother coming to America on board the SS Imperator sailing past the Statue of Liberty to Ellis Island. There is winter in the air, and she walks down the gang plank in her colourful clothes and her black hair to the gates where the wheat is separated from the chaff, snowflakes drifting, and she is cold and the girl writes: the snow like stars in the night of her hair. She is happy with that sentence, and so am I. I turn to Arvid and say:
‘Isn’t it good?’ He reads the piece twice and looks up at me.
‘Purple prose,’ he says.
‘What the hell do you mean by that?’
‘Too much. Sentimental. US propaganda.’
‘But, for Christ’s sake, don’t you get it? Those people just took off, burned all their bridges and this girl is trying to show how afraid they were, and at the same time how grand their deed was.’
‘Maybe, but it’s still purple prose.’
I snatch the book back.
‘Sometimes, Arvid, Christ,’ I say, and read on to myself. Maybe he is right, maybe it is purple prose, but I like it.
‘Is what you’re doing of any importance to the rest of us?’ Rønning says. He’s standing by the dais with his thumbs tugging at his braces, gazing down the row of desks.
‘There was just something in the text. I thought it was good. I didn’t mean to interrupt.’
‘I see. Perhaps you might like to read it aloud for us?’ It’s like he’s rolling his ‘r’s even more than usual today. I look at him pleadingly, but he grins and splays his hands. Hell. I read. I read the whole page and finish with that sentence, the grandmother almost chokes me, my voice cracks, and everyone turns to look at me. I’m supposed to be the tough guy in the class, the strongest, the best athlete and generally as dour as shit. It just turns out that way, I don’t know why. I stare back, they think I am strange, it’s fine by me, they’re like mist, I hardly see them. Arvid’s and Venke’s faces are the only ones I can really make out. There is a shine in Venke’s eyes.
‘That’s not bad at all,’ Rønning says.
‘Forget it,’ I say.
After the lesson Rønning stops me at the door. He waits until everyone has left and says, ‘I am sorry. I shouldn’t have pushed you into reading aloud. I wasn’t aware it meant so much to you.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Well that’s good then. Is everything OK with you? You have been a little, what shall I say, reserved these days.’ He smiles. I shrug.
‘I think maybe I’m going to stop coming here.’
‘Now? Well into your final year? Well, school isn’t everything. Don’t think I believe that. There are many other things you can do. Perhaps you need a break. Sleep on it for a week, then come to me, and we can talk about it.’
‘OK, that’s fine,’ I say.
‘By the way, I have a book at home about Ellis Island. It might be of interest to you.’
9
WHEN WE PUT Egil in his grave, it was Easter. Kari was supposed to move to Kløfta the week before. There had been some fine days, it was spring for real, nature was going berserk, and her boyfriend was standing in the sun outside the block with his lorry waiting. He couldn’t be bothered helping us, and that was just fine with me. I couldn’t stand either him or his lorry. I went to my room to fetch something I had bought for Kari, an old Supremes album I had got hold of at Ringstrøm’s Records, and I was standing by the window looking down at him. He was leaning against the red bonnet smoking, flicking the ash from his cigarette, and running his hand through his Brylcreemed hair. Then he stubbed out the butt on the footpath and looked up at the windows with sleepy eyes and a sullen smile. He was James Dean, and he had made this long trek to rescue Kari from suburban hell.
Egil came out of the stairway and walked up to the lorry with a large box in his arms. He’d been in a lot of trouble over the last year, and now he had stayed close to home for a while, but I could see how he was restless, he had this scowl on his face. He shoved the box on to the back of the lorry and the two of them started chatting. Egil was keen and unable to stand still, and after a few minutes he was sitting behind the wheel and had started the engine. It began to roll down Beverveien and rounded the bend at the end of the road. When I came out with Kari, he had driven the whole loop and was on his way back down from the top. I gave Kari the record.
‘Here you are,’ I said. ‘Listen to this and dream about the old days.’ She looked at me in surprise and was so happy that she hugged me right in front of her boyfriend.
‘Silly you. Thank you so very much. You think of everyone, don’t you?’
‘Yuk,’ I said. I didn’t want anyone to think that about me. It wasn’t even true. But she was my sister, and she had always been OK.
‘Don’t get married straight away,’ I said. ‘Think about it first,’ and she laughed, but her boyfriend sneered, and when the lorry was back in place, I walked up close to him and brushed him pretty hard with my shoulder as I hurled a bag of clothes on to the back.
‘Hell,’ he said, and spun round, but I didn’t even look at him, just kept him behind me, and he had to stand there panting on his own.
Egil stepped out of the cabin. He was excited, his whole body shaking.
‘Cool wheels,’ he said, gazing at Kari’s guy as though he really was James Dean, and right away James Dean was in a much better mood and combed his hand through his greasy hair and said:
‘Of course it’s cool, I fixed it and did the paint job myself. You know, Egil, if it’s a job you’re after, there’s enough to do around my place.’
‘Do you mean that?’ Egil said, and was even more excited.
‘Dead right I do. You’re a natural.’ He gave a generous swing of his arm, and glanced at me.
Egil turned. ‘Did you hear that, Audun?’
‘Sure I did. You’re welcome!’ I said and walked straight to the stairway and didn’t look back. That was the last thing I said to him. I met my mother on my way up. She was crying because Kari was moving out.
‘Is something the matter?’ she sniffled.
‘No. I’m just getting the last few things.’
Egil went with them up to the country to help unload the truck and have a look at the place where he might be working. He didn’t come back. Two days later he drove one of James Dean’s Volvo Amazons into the river Glomma and drowned.
On Good Friday, spring was cancelled and the next day the sleet came. It stuck to our faces as we came out of the church with the coffin between us. I had thought it would be heavier. I was holding one handle, and behind me came Arvid and behind him it was Kari. On the other side was my mother, and behind her Roberto, and last came Egil’s teacher from school. He had stood up for Egil many times, had pleaded for him when he broke into the Co-op, but it was no good. Egil had been his special vocation, and now it was over.
There was no one else. JD said he didn’t feel too good, so he stayed in bed back at Kløfta and drank blackcurrant toddies. It was fine by me. There had been talk about letting my father know, but I refused and said if he showed his face I would take off into the woods and stay there until he had left.
The priest was bad. He had been to our flat to offer his comfort and ask about Egil and what he was like, so he could prepare his talk for the church. He was the priest, so we told him the truth, he had been a pain in the ass, and when we were halfway through the truth, he got up from the sofa and took his coa
t.
‘OK, that’s enough. I think I will do it my way.’
And he did. Nothing of what we had told him was included. Just some waffle about the shining light he had been to those around him, how his youthful vigour had been brought to such a sudden end and then the after-life with its eternal restoration, sunshine beyond compare and twittering of birds, and I just switched off, my mother stopped crying and Kari sat staring up at the ceiling. Not a tear between us.
‘What a sack of shit, he is,’ Arvid whispered behind me as we came out into the slush and laid the coffin on the long trolley and started hauling it across the gravel. ‘He got Egil mixed up with Little Lord Fauntleroy.’
I didn’t answer, I did not even think, just looked down at my shoes and tried to steer the coffin, and then I looked at the trees that were covered by white curtains, and we followed the priest on his way to the open grave. The air was full of flakes that came down upon us, and when I stared up at them, it felt as if we were running, and that was exactly what I was thinking, that I would run away from all this. We were moving slowly towards the grave, and when finally we got there and were about to lift the coffin from the trolley, I had to look down. There was sleet at the bottom of the grave and water and wet clay. It looked cold and awful and I remembered the Easter when Egil and I had been poaching in a reservoir north of where we lived. Three perch we caught, and there were more there for the taking. We had sneaked out early, my father was still asleep, so I reckoned we would be all right. Egil was just a kid, but he was a demon at fishing, and I was sure that his eagerness to do it again was so great that he would keep his mouth shut. The plan was to hide our rods in the woodshed on the way back and say we had been playing cards at my pal Frank’s house because Good Friday was so boring. So my father thought too, and he was a keen poker player. The fish we had already given away to a woman we met on the road. We liked fishing, but we didn’t like fish. The problem was that Egil had stumbled into the lake, he was soaked to the knees, and I still had the rods under my arm when we walked up the path from the gate.