Authors: Erlend Loe
I understand that, too, I said. But I don’t live in the forest for fun. I live in the forest because I have to be in the forest and you don’t have the wherewithal to understand that because you’ve never felt that you have to be in the forest. And you always function so well and I function so badly, and you like mixing with people and it’s easy for you, but I don’t like to do that and it’s difficult for me.
You’re getting to be just like your father, she said, turning on her heel.
May was the last word I heard her say. And she stopped and repeated it. May.
This was a lot to digest in one go. Mixing with people down below was asking for trouble. I said that to the moose, but I didn’t take sufficient heed myself. I should, of course, have made sure that my wife wasn’t in the shop before I started swaggering around like an ordinary man. But now the damage was done and sensitive information has changed hands and I’m going to be a father again. Horror of horrors. That means even more years with cynically composed children’s songs from morning till night and I’m not sure my mental state is up to it. I wish I had a smaller penis. A penis my wife didn’t yearn for. A teeny weeny limp organ she could live without. But you have to live with the organ you’ve been allocated and I’ve never ever seen an advert or an email offering a reduction in the size of such organs, and one saving grace of children is that, despite everything, they provide a bit of charm which, in small doses, can be something special. But birth and death. It’s a revolting circus. My father disappears and a new life appears. One I never knew is replaced by another which I will never ever really know.
And if there’s one thing I am not becoming, it’s like my father. How could she say that? I hate it when she blurts out things like that. As if she knows things I don’t. As if she’s been thinking about it for a long time and suddenly decides to share a bit of her knowledge with me, but only a bit, the tip of the iceberg, only a hint, so that I have something to chew on, so that I can work out the rest of the picture myself. This is a technique she often uses and next time I see her I’m going to tell her to stick it up her arse.
I’ll call the calf Bongo after my father, I decide as I’m strolling back into the forest. Even though my father wasn’t called Bongo I’ll name the calf Bongo after him. Sometimes you’ve got to be open to associations of this kind.
And in the sack I have some milk, some flour, some eggs, some oil and other staples, but above all milk, of course, as well as animal lotto which I exchanged for some meat in the book shop. Almost half a kilo it cost me. The moose is versatile and can be used in multiple ways. And, talking of milk, I stop on the edge of the forest, bid farewell to the last houses and knock back a litre. I carefully fold up the carton and take it along to start the fire.
In fact, I only live a hundred metres inside the forest, but nobody ever comes past. People stick to the paths. And they’re all over the place here. Hundreds of them. I live only a little way into the forest, but it’s still deep forest because nobody ever comes by. Løvenskiold, the owner of the forest, knows nothing about it. For three days you are allowed to erect a tent in the same place, whereas mine has been here for almost two hundred. I don’t think he’d like that, Løvenskiold wouldn’t. And the right-wing voters who promenade on Sundays in their breeches or else when they have a few days off or are walking their dogs, they don’t know anything, either. They rush past absorbed in their right-wing thoughts, no more than fifty metres away the whole time, on the way to Vetakollen to look out over the town and to receive confirmation that they live in one of the best places in town, and they have no idea that I’m there. While thinking whether they should invest another handful of money in low risk stocks or whether they shouldn’t force their neighbour to prune the tree which before very long will be blocking a little bit of their view over the fjord or some of the sun from their garden. I’m sitting in my tent and I don’t like them, and they don’t know and I like that. That gives me something. Strangely enough. I think it’s all to do with how good it is to hide. That wonderful old-time pleasure of not being seen. Being as quiet as a mouse and crouching down and feeling confident that no one will find you. It’s invigorating.
Bongo is almost beside himself with joy when I come back and we spend the rest of the day in the tent. We play board games and have a nice time together and I feel some of the old pally feeling I had at school. You just hang out together. Don’t talk about anything special. But Bongo’s hopeless at lotto. He’s really going to have to pull himself together if he wants me to keep on playing. I particularly chose animal lotto so as to give him a fair chance, but while I cover board after board with foxes and beavers and squirrels and wood pigeons, Bongo doesn’t match a single pair. He’s quite incapable of remembering where cards are. I point them out to him and expect him to give me a little sign such as a sound or a nod or something, but nothing. Not a sound. Not a nod. Bongo, Bongo, Bongo, I say. You may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer. But you are a real friend. And a lovely pillow.
I’ve earned my last krone, that’s for sure, I tell Bongo, as I lie enjoying my victory. He takes the defeat with great composure. I’ll give him that. No airs or graces about him in that department. But I’ve gone from being more interested in money than anything else to being as uninterested as it’s possible to be in our culture. Throughout my studies I thought about money and profit and regarded those who studied non-finance subjects as complete prats, I say to Bongo. And now I discover that nothing concerns me less than not having money. It’s completely insignificant. Like a Donald Duck joke. A bang on the head made all the difference. I was obsessed with money and organised my time and spent all my time and energy trying to accumulate as much of it as possible. Then I fall off my bike and get a bit of a knock on my head and hey presto, I’m not interested in money any more. Not in much else either, I have to admit, sadly, but I have some hope I soon will be. And maybe I also have the prequisites. I have a tent in the forest; I have loads of time and meat. And I’ve got Bongo, my new pal. It feels as if we’ve known each other for ever. And my wife is completely deluded if she thinks I’m going to go down to her and the new baby and the other people in May. I have no plans to do so. On the contrary, I have plans not to do so, I can feel. She’ll have to come and fetch me. Carry me. And she won’t be able to do that when she’s in the latter months. No chance.
I’ve toed the line for so long.
I’ve been so nice.
I’ve been so bloody nice.
I was nice in the nursery school. I was nice in primary school. I was nice in secondary school. At grammar school I was revoltingly nice, not only work-wise but also socially. I was nice without being a swot, without just fulfilling the requirements, I was sometimes rebellious and cheeky and was close to overstepping the mark with my teachers, and still they liked me more than the others, and to be able to do that you have to be nice in an almost infinitely disgusting manner, I can see that now. I was a nice student and had a super-nice girlfriend whom I married in a nice way with nice friends after being offered a nice job that gave the finger to other nice jobs. Later we had children to whom we were nice and we acquired a house which we decorated to look nice. I had been wading up to my neck in all this niceness for years. I woke up to it, went to sleep in it. I breathed niceness and slowly it was killing me. That’s how it was, I tell myself. God forbid that my children should become nice like me.
But my daughter has been showing worrying signs of niceness and I think it was the right time to move into the forest, it was also good for her. My time in the forest, which she regards as bordering on madness, may make her unsure of herself and thereby help her to mark out a way which is less nice and make her achieve less and generally speaking lower the bar. Unless it’s already too late. Unless this niceness has already taken root within her and has taken complete control. I fear this is the case because niceness is habit-forming. Once you’ve become nice there are no limits to what you will do to continue to evince positive feedback from the world around you. It’s a self-reinforcing spiral that never needs to stop. You can be nice as a pupil and student and later you can be nice in your professional life, in your community life, you can be a nice partner and friend and spouse, a nice parent and consumer, in fact there is nothing you can’t do in a nicer way than other people, you can be nice about getting old, you can get ill nicely, and you can die in a nice way, which no doubt I would have done if I hadn’t fallen off my bike and hit my head. But now it’s not going to happen. I’m going to die un-nicely and I’m never going to try to achieve anything again as long as I live. I’m not going to achieve anything. I have achieved for the last time and I have been nice for the last time.
Fortunately my son has not yet been infected with this niceness and I have some hope that he can still be saved. My absence may save him, I constantly think. Missing me may create some unease in him, a longing, an imbalance, I imagine, and this imbalance may save him from niceness. My wife could also do with being less nice. With me being away for such a long time she’ll become exhausted and may start making mistakes. Probably she’ll get tired and angry and unreasonable with the children, and she’ll sleep less and hopefully lack the usual energy which makes her nice and dependable at work and unerringly leads to her having a bad conscience and there is little that makes her so un-nice as a bad conscience. I’m going to save the whole family by staying in the forest. They think it’s a handicap living out here, but in truth it’s the salvation for us all. We’ll have a lot to thank the forest for, my family and I, should I decide to return one day.
However, I can’t see anything that might make me leave. Up here I’m not at the mercy of other people, and other people are not at the mercy of me. Other people are protected from my sarcasm and spitefulness, and I am protected from their niceness and stupidity. To me, it’s a great arrangement.
Moreover, I’m getting used to solitude. I’m learning to live with it. As my father did. Perhaps without knowing. He was completely alone, my father. He had my mother for a great part of his life, but was alone all the same. In the last forty years of his life he had me and my siblings, but was no less alone for that. What was in his mind when he awoke in the morning, when he went to bed or when he went skiing or photographing toilets, I have no idea. Never did have. It’s all gone now. And you can argue that it never existed because it only existed in him. Maybe there was something there and maybe not. It’s like with Schrödinger’s cat. You put a cat in a box with an atom of some radio-active material which, as it breaks down, triggers a mechanism which releases a fatal acid. But as you can’t see inside the box you won’t know whether it’s happened or not. And therefore you have to accept that the cat is both alive and dead. My father lived in a box like that. Maybe he thought a lot and maybe a little. Maybe he felt okay and maybe not. He was both fully alive and completely dead at the same time. And now he’s just dead.
We’re born alone and we die alone. It’s just a question of getting used to both of them. Being alone is fundamental to the whole construct. It is, so to speak, the corner stone. You can live with other people, but
with
generally means
next to
. And that’s fine. You live side by side with others and for short, happy spells you can perhaps even live with them. You sit in the same car, eat the same dinner and celebrate the same Christmas. But that’s not the same as being in the car together, eating dinner together or celebrating Christmas together. It’s two extremes. Two planets. And now, by the way, they’ve found a heavenly body some say is a new planet and some say isn’t. We believe we know so much, but in reality we don’t even know what planets are, and even less who our fathers are. Or were. And you certainly don’t know, I say to Bongo. You have no idea who your father is. Perhaps he lives in a box, too. In a box in the forest. The only thing you know for sure is that he’s a moose, I say. And most probably quite a big moose, since he managed to mate with your mother, who herself was quite a size, not to say large. You’re going to be big too, I say, and take him outside the tent and measure him against a fir tree. I see to it he keeps his head up, and place a book on top and cut a notch in the tree and carve in the date. So that we can keep track of how quickly you grow, I say.
A few days later, in the evening, as the fire is burning out, it occurs to me that the comparison between Schrödinger’s cat and my father was too nice. I was trying to be nice again. Even when I’m alone and I’ve decided not to be nice, I’m nice. It’s a sickness.
Another, and in many ways, rather disturbing piece of information my mother gave me about my father was that during one of their many journeys to southern Europe, after an evening of good food and drink, if I understood her correctly, he had said that if he died before her she should make sure he was buried with a rhythm egg shaker. She was to put it in one of his suit pockets, he had said, and then she should tell the undertakers to dress him in the suit. She had taken him seriously even though the context had been Mediterranean and animated. And that was as much as my mother could remember; the only time in his life my father had used the expression ‘rhythm egg shaker’. After he died we had a lively discussion about whether we should comply with his wish or not. My sister didn’t think we should, but in the end we did. I went to a music shop and bought a red egg shaker. It wasn’t very expensive and I shook it a few times as I left the shop to see if it worked. It was impressive. Exciting, in a way. And I had no problem imagining how it could helped to build up a hypnotic atmosphere when combined with several other instruments. First of all, a base rhythm, of course. Afterwards a more complex beat with intriguing syncopation. And then the egg shaker on top. As a kind of sublime seasoning. You don’t think about it when it’s there, but you can feel there’s something missing when it’s not. That’s the way it is with the egg shaker. And at the same time that’s how my father is. But, to my knowledge, he never expressed any particular liking for rhythms or rhythm instruments. Perhaps he had had a bit to drink that night on southern shores and was happy and his head was full of the Mediterranean music which would have accompanied them through the night, and with a sudden flash of insight, the kind one sometimes has, it struck him his life ought to contain more rhythms, more dance and music and abandon, and fewer of the normal, dutiful and tedious things, you can easily slip into this kind of thinking, in flashes, there’s nothing wrong with that, virtually everyone does it, I assume, one’s life is filled with something or other it shouldn’t be filled with and we notice it lacks something that others have got, for instance rhythms or happiness or depth or children or something that is generally felt to be good and meaningful. My father may have had such a moment down there in southern climes. Or it may have been an attack of nerves about the hereafter and a notion that an egg shaker might somehow be able to assist him on his way, that he could conjure himself up with it after death, that it could accompany him and help him to tackle obstacles and challenges. I’m speculating, naturally. But I know he read a lot. And what he read, by and large he kept to himself. He read classical literature. And there’s a lot of death in that, I have learnt, and not so little about various kingdoms of the dead and what you have to do to get there, and so on. But I’m sure there are very few egg shakers in classical literature. No egg shakers in ancient Greek literature, I’m guessing. And not a lot in Roman. So where my father got this idea from is nothing short of a mystery. But now they’re both under the ground. Dad. And the egg. I hope they can work something out, given time.