I change my trousers in the bedroom. I make the bed and take my dirty clothes out to be washed, then vacuum the carpet and sort the heap of books
into two piles on the bedside table with Tranströmer’s
Baltics
on top. “It was before the time of radio masts./ Grandfather had just become a pilot.”
I must have read it ten times. It makes me think of my own grandfather who was a joiner, not a pilot, but who went down to the harbour every single day for most of his life and along the quay to look out on the sea and the changing weather towards
the lighthouse far out where everything ended. He did not keep a log-book, but took careful note of ships arriving and ships departing, and at regular intervals
I
was on board one of them. He is dead now and has been for ten years, but I miss his silence and his dry windblown eyes and the town where he lived with him
in
it and the bottle of Aalborg aquavit he brought across the sea every Christmas.
Lifeline schnapps, we called it.
While I’ve been doing all this I have had my pea jacket on. Now I take it off and go out on the balcony in the cold with a brush and a little cold coffee in a cup, and I brush away at the dried stains from last night, splash a little coffee on them and brush some more. It’s a trick I learned from my mother, and the jacket comes perfectly clean. Not once do I look
over at the window in the next block.
I switch all the lights off when I leave, feel the keys in my pocket and take the stairs two floors down to the garage under the block. For I do have a car, even though I forget sometimes. It is a thirteen-year-old white Mazda 929, a station wagon, and the first thing one of my neighbours said when I parked it in front
of
the block, was “Have you bought yourself
an immigrant’s car?”
In fact, I did buy it from a Pakistani in Tveita for 15,000 kroner, but I did not know that what I did was not quite kosher. I don’t keep up with car fashions. The Mazda is really good enough, a bit rusty here and there, but it has a strong motor and holds the road well, and is as soft to drive as an American car. I haven’t used it for a fortnight, so I walk round it to check
whether there is a flat tyre, but everything seems fine except that someone has written “Wash me” in the dust on the bonnet. I get in and it starts at the first try as it always does, and I can drive straight out as the garage door has more or less fallen apart and stays open the whole time.
I do what the writing tells me. I drive to the Texaco station on the main road and pay fifty-five kroner
for a wash with wax, buy a newspaper, then drive into position and sit in the car reading the arts section by the overhead light. That is soon done even with cheap glasses at this time of year, and the sports pages are boring now at the end of the skiing season before the football gets going. Now everyone is just waiting, and the water splashes the windows and shuts out the view, and the brushes
rumble and sweep over the car, and they’re green and blue and make me want to sleep, and if I wanted to sleep I could do that in a den like this, where I cannot be expected to do anything
but
wait.
But then the water stops, the brushes pull back and stop rotating, and hang there like the dead animals hunted for their fur that I’ve seen in Helge Ingstad’s books. The door in front of me bangs open,
a panel lights up over the door saying “Drive out” and I put the car into gear and it starts without problems. It is unpleasantly light outside, and I am so hungry now that my body feels numb. I had really intended to drive to a shop just a bit further away than my own Co-op to avoid the neighbours, but I cannot find one I like the look of, just drive past one place after another until I am nearly
in Lillestrøm. Then I take the right turn towards Enebakk immediately before the big bridge, up the long hill through Fjerdingby, and there are several shops along the road, but I do not stop, and then there is nothing but farms and fields and forest. The road runs beside the big lake in wide curves, and sometimes you see it and sometimes you don’t. Everything is in black and white like in films
from the forties, the spruces are black, the snow is white and the ice still covers the lake right across to the other side where there is forest as well, and farms and grey-white fields and then forest again as far as the eye can see. This is what I like, just driving here, and it starts to snow, a few small specks at first, and then suddenly huge flakes that stick to the windscreen, and I turn
the wipers on. One makes a scraping sound each time it moves to the left, but that does not matter. I turn them
up
to full speed and push my hand under my jacket and shirt and in to my bare chest and feel them beat in time with my heart. The snow whips against the glass and then it is swept away, hits the glass and is swept away, I drum on the gear lever and hum a tune, the whole car thumps in
the same rhythm, and so does everything outside, and I feel so light, light, and I do not think of my brother or Mrs Grinde at all.
I drive through Kirkebygda where the writer Jens Bjørneboe lived and wrote
The Dream and the Wheel
, across the little river beyond the schoolhouse, past the road to the manor house where Ragnhild Jølsen of that book was born, and just after that I hit the sharp curve,
and to keep up the rhythm I do not brake. This makes the car slide to the left, and as I keep a firm grip on the wheel and refuse to change course, the rear end wags and lurches, and I end up almost beam on across the road, and had there been a car coming the other way that would have meant trouble. But there isn’t. I hold my breath and force the car into position, tyres screeching, and the
snow turns into rain, the mercury’s rising, spring must be on its way, I can feel it in my bones. Then the road straightens out along a flat stretch, and I cut the speed and lay the backs of both hands against the wheel so my fingers are free to roll a cigarette while I keep driving and peer out into the rain. The first drag tastes good, but the next one makes me feel so sick and dizzy that I stop
the car at once,
open
the door and stagger out on to the verge, and stand there throwing up. There is not much in my stomach, but cramps take a violent hold and I stay there bent over the ditch in the rain bellowing like a cow and cannot stop.
“Holy shit,” I say aloud in one of the intervals, “fucking misery.” Tears pour down as I brace knees and feel the rain running down my neck. The fit finally
passes, I straighten my back and see there is a house on a lawn just on the other side of the ditch. Behind it there is thick forest, almost flattened by something I could have written “was like steaming rain”. On the first floor a small boy stands with his nose to the windowpane, mouth half open, staring at me with eyes almost out of his head. For a few seconds we just look at each other, he
from the circle and I from the stage, and then I place my right hand on my stomach, hold the left one to the side and make a deep bow with the water streaming from my hair.
“Da capo,” I mumble, stick my finger down my throat and vomit again. My stomach contracts, I cough and the pain in my side is suddenly back, oh, how welcome, old friend. My balance falters, but I jerk myself into a standing
position, and now the boy in the upstairs window has both hands to his temples and his lips clenched into a line. I wipe my mouth and retreat until I feel the car against my back, raise my hand and start to wave and go on doing that until I can see he
cannot
help himself and waves back, and then his mother emerges from the dark room behind him. She bends forward to find out who he is waving to,
and then I go around the car and get in.
When the house is out of sight I do not drive much further, just turn on to a forest track and stop a few metres along and lean back in my seat with eyes closed until my stomach feels less upset. Then I sleep for a quarter of an hour, and when I wake up I’m feeling better. It is something new in my life, this being able to fall asleep anywhere at any time.
I do not know what to think about that.
I start the engine and reverse on to the road and drive through the forest and out on the other side along a field where two horses stand in the rain. One is brown, the other is black, and the sun breaks through the clouds while the rain keeps falling on the forest and the field and the farm on the hill, all seasons are queuing in the same line while everything
slowly slides from grey white to dirty yellow. The two horses glitter in the slanting light as the shining rain falls mercilessly upon them, I can see each single drop as they strike like icy cold pellets and how they spurt up again, and the horses stand motionless, their heads down and their muzzles together close up to the fence, abandoned by all, being only horses with the rain coming
down and down upon them, and they share no hope in this world. The sight of them totally unhinges me, I clench
my
jaw and I clench my fist and beat at the steering wheel, and my foot hits the gas, and all this merely because I haven’t had anything to eat. But then I think: it would all be different if I had owned a horse.
There used to be a shop here I know has closed down, because I have driven
this way several times, and then it has been shut. But when I come round the curve it is open, with a new sign above the door. No doubt an idealist from Oslo wants to run a country store in a godforsaken place, far from the madding crowd, but is it far enough? I don’t think so. Anyway, it is open now, and I stop the car on the gravel outside, go in the door which has a sheep-bell at the top and
is supposed to ring as in the good old days, and a young woman comes out of the room at the back. She smiles expectantly. No doubt, I am the first customer today, and all I want is some brown bread and a litre of milk. I put a Kvikk Lunsj chocolate bar on the counter to give my purchase more substance. She is wearing a huge apron with big stains of what looks like clay. Through the half-open door
behind her I can see not an office but a pottery workshop, and when I turn round I see one end of the shop is full of bowls and vases and candlesticks and cups. All the same blue colour. I think the colour is pretty, and I think
she
is pretty. I go over, pick up a cup and weigh it in my hand, but there is no price tag on it, so I ask: “Are you expensive?”
“That one is a hundred kroner,” she says,
and her voice breaks slightly and she clears her throat as if it were a long time since she last spoke. It seems a lot, a hundred kroner for a cup, but then I don’t know much about pottery, it may not be so costly. It is suddenly such a beautiful blue that I could not think of leaving without it.
“That’s not so bad,” I say, carrying the cup to the counter and putting it down in front of her.
“I’ll have it.”
And she wraps it in tissue paper and enters the items in the till, then puts everything into a plastic bag and she looks so pretty in her apron doing this that I would not mind seeing her wearing just that apron and nothing else, and as I am thinking this she blushes. She is no mind reader so it must be the look on my face that makes her blush, and I look away, blushing myself,
thinking: where on earth did that come from? But now it is there, and it may have something to do with Mrs Grinde, and then I think of her for the first time since I left her flat and how I could
feel
her and I blush again and look down at my hands as I get out my wallet and put the money on the counter. One hundred and twenty-seven kroner, ping. I would have liked to have stayed there to look
at her a bit longer, watch her do things and maybe talk about pottery, but it is impossible now, and the scent of fresh brown bread seeps up from the bag and right into my face and
makes
my stomach feel really hollow, and I cannot very well go and buy two cups.
“Come again,” she says as I am on my way out the door, and I turn in surprise and say: “Thanks.”
But it is not very likely – that I
will be back, or that she will be here when I do. On my way to the car I glance through the window, and she is still standing there behind the counter not looking at me or at anything at all, just straight ahead.
There is a slight breeze, but the rain has stopped. I am blinded by the low sun; it looks as if it is steaming, and the fields are steaming and the woods are, behind the shop. The gravel
glitters, and when I start up there’s a lump in my throat, but before I’m round the curve I tear off the first bite of bread.
7
WHILE MY FATHER
was alive I knew nothing about the photograph he had in the breast pocket of his suit the day he got married. Not until several years after his death did I hear about it from Solgunn, my aunt, on the telephone. She and Uncle Trond live in Stavanger. That is where she comes from. We have a talk from time to time. Not often, but more often than before, and it is usually one of
them
who calls. I am not so good at that, I never was.
She said: “One Christmas before you were born your mother came up to me and asked: ‘How would you have liked it if the man you had been married to for two years kept a photograph of another woman in his wallet?’ She used the Danish name for wallet, she was Danish, you know.”
“I know she was Danish,” I said, “Christ! But what did you say?”
“I answered: ‘I wouldn’t have liked that.’ ”
“Was that all?”
“What was I to say? After all, it was true. I wouldn’t have liked it at all. Luckily, Trond has never done anything like that, you know.”
I didn’t say what I thought, that how could she know, not everyone is as clumsy as my father and drops pictures out of his wallet.
“Well,” I said, “that’s great for the two of you.”
“I don’t know
what more I can say,” she said, but of course she did, and we talked for quite a while.
I think of this as I drive along the gravel road from Lake Lysern and back on to the main road and over Tangen Bridge, and the road makes a bend past a shopping centre with a completely new housing area on the right, big groups of dreary houses slung up over the hillside with a view of a small lake where wooden
bathing jetties are stuck in the ice along the shore.