I would have preferred to lie down and read until the match started, but I couldn’t say no to Dad, and bearing in mind what could have happened I had to count myself lucky.
The rice was so cold that I ate it in a couple of minutes.
“Are you full?” Dad said.
I nodded.
“Let’s go then,” he said.
He scooped the empty crab shells into the trash can, put the plates on the counter, and went out, with me hard on his heels. From Yngve’s room came the sound of music. I looked at the door, nonplussed. How could
that
be? His bike wasn’t there.
“Come on,” Dad said, already on the landing. I followed him. On with my jacket and boots, out onto the gravel, wait for him. He came a few minutes later with an ax in his hand and a playful glint in his eye. Follow him over the flagstones, then across the waterlogged lawn. We weren’t allowed to walk on the grass, but when I was with him, such edicts could be lifted.
Quite a long time ago he had chopped down a birch tree by the fence in the kitchen garden. All that remained of it was a pile of logs that he wanted to split now. I wasn’t supposed to do anything, just stand there and watch, to “keep him company,” as he called it.
He removed the tarpaulin, took a log, and placed it on the chopping block.
“Well?” he said, raising the ax above his shoulder, concentrating for a second, and letting fly. The blade bit into the white wood. “Everything going well at school?”
“Yes,” I said.
He lifted the log with the ax wedged in and hit it against the block a few times until it split into two. Held the parts and split them, placed them on the ground by the rock face, wiped his brow with his hand, and straightened up. I could see from his body that he was happy.
“And Frøken?” he said. “Torgersen was her name, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said. “She’s nice.”
“Nice?” he said, taking a new log and repeating the procedure.
“Yes,” I said.
“Is there anyone who isn’t nice?” he said.
I hesitated. He suspended his chopping activities for a moment.
“Well, since you say that she’s nice, there must be someone who isn’t nice. Otherwise the word loses all its meaning. Do you understand?”
He resumed his work.
“I think so,” I said.
There was a silence. I turned away and saw the water rising above the grass beyond the path.
“Myklebust, he’s not so nice,” I said, turning back.
“Myklebust!” Dad said. “I know him.”
“Do you?” I said.
“Sure. He comes to the meetings at the Teachers’ Association. Next time I see him, I’ll tell him you said he wasn’t nice to your class.”
“No, please don’t do that!” I said.
He smiled.
“Of course I won’t,” he said. “Don’t worry.”
Then there was another silence. Dad worked, I stood there with my arms hanging down by my sides, motionless, watching. My feet were beginning to get cold. I wasn’t wearing thick socks. And my fingers were beginning to get cold.
There was no one out. Apart from the occasional car that went past, there wasn’t a soul around. The lights in the houses were beginning to get brighter, apparently regulated and intensified by the nascent twilight, which, in contrast with the open sky, seemed to rise from the ground. As though beneath us there was a reservoir of darkness that seeped through thousands, no, millions of tiny holes in the ground every afternoon.
I watched Dad. Sweat was running down his forehead. I rubbed my palms against each other several times. He leaned forward. Just as he was grabbing the log and about to straighten up, he farted. Caught in the act.
“You said we should only fart in the toilet,” I said.
At first he didn’t answer.
“It’s different when you’re outside in the open air,” he said, without meeting my gaze. “Then you can, well, let your farts go free.”
He brought down the ax onto the log and split it in half at the first attempt. The sound of the blow rebounded off the house wall and the cliff above, the latter with a strange delay, as though there were a man up there swinging an ax exactly one second after Dad.
Dad swung again and threw the four pieces of wood on the pile. Took another log.
“Could you start piling them up, Karl Ove?” he said.
I nodded and went over to the small pile.
How should I do it? What did he have in mind? Alongside the rock or coming off it? A narrow pile or a wide one?
I looked at him again. He didn’t notice. I squatted and picked up a piece of wood. Placed it up against the rock, on end. Placed another piece next to it. When I had laid five in a row, I laid one crosswise on top of them. It was exactly the same length as the width of the five logs. So I laid four more on top, making two equally large squares. Now I could either make two squares next to it, identical, or start a new layer on top.
“What
are
you doing?” Dad said. “Are you completely stupid? You don’t stack wood like that!”
He bent down and scattered the logs with his big hands. I watched him with tears in my eyes.
“You lay them lengthwise!” he said. “Have you never seen a woodpile before?”
He looked at me.
“Don’t stand there weeping like a girl, Karl Ove. Can’t you do anything right?”
Then he went on chopping. I started stacking the logs the way he told me. Sobs shook me every so often. My hands and toes were freezing. At least it wasn’t difficult stacking them lengthwise. The only question was when to stop. When I had laid them all in a row I stood up with my hands down by my sides and watched him as I had done before. The glint in his expression was gone; I saw that as soon as he glanced at me from the corner of his eye. But that didn’t necessarily mean something would happen, as long as I didn’t say or do anything that might irritate him. At the same time the thought of the match on TV was gnawing at me. It must have started ages ago. He had forgotten about it, but I couldn’t remind him, not the way the situation was. My toes and fingers were hurting me more and more. Dad just kept chopping. He paused and occasionally flicked back his hair in a typical gesture of his, a kind of slow toss of his head along with his hand.
We had just been given a post office box in Pusnes, which meant we no longer received mail in our mailbox on the hill, only a newspaper, and Dad had to drive there to collect our mail. Last Saturday I had sat in the car with him, and he had combed his hair in the mirror, perhaps for a whole minute, patting his thick, shiny locks afterward, and then got out. I had never seen that before. And when he went in, a woman had turned to look at him. She was unaware that someone who knew him was sitting in the car watching what went on. But why had she turned? Did she know him? I had never seen her before. Perhaps she was the mother of someone in his class?
I put the new logs he threw over on top of the first row. Wriggled my toes backward and forward in my boots, not that it helped, they hurt, hurt, hurt.
I was about to say that I was freezing cold, took a deep breath, but then I paused. Turned again and looked at the shiny pool that shouldn’t have been there. Watched a large transparent bubble breaking the surface right above the rusty manhole cover. When I turned back, Steinar was walking along the road. He was carrying a guitar case over his back, with his head bent, his long black hair falling over his shoulders and swaying gently to and fro.
“Hello there, Knausgård!” he said as he passed.
Dad stood up and sent him a nod.
“Hi there,” he said.
“Doing a bit of wood chopping, I see!” Steinar said, without slowing down.
“I am,” Dad said.
He resumed work. I paced backward and forward, backward and forward.
“Stop doing that,” Dad said.
“OK, but I’m freezing cold!” I said.
He sent me an icy stare.
“Oh, you’re fweezing, are you?” he said.
My eyes filled with tears again.
“Stop parroting me,” I said.
“Oh, so I can’t pawwot you now?”
“NO!” I yelled.
He stiffened. Dropped the ax and came toward me. Grabbed my ear and twisted it round.
“Are you talking back to me?” he said.
“No,” I said, looking down at the ground.
He twisted harder.
“Look at me when I’m talking to you!”
I raised my head.
“Do not talk back to me! Have you got that?”
“Yes,” I said.
He let go, turned, and put another log on the block. I was crying so much I could barely breathe. Dad ignored me and kept on chopping. There were only a couple of logs left now, then he was finished.
I walked back to the low stack of wood and added the new logs. Wriggled my toes in my boots. The tears receded, there was just the odd surreptitious aftershock in the form of an untimely and wholly uncontrollable sob. I dried my eyes on my sleeve, Dad tossed four logs over, I put them on the stack, when a thought fluttered in to lift me out of my misery. I wouldn’t watch the soccer. I would go straight to my room and let Yngve and him watch it without me.
Yes.
Yes.
“There we are,” he said, throwing over the last four. “That’s us finished.”
I followed him without a word, took off my boots and my coat and hung it up, went upstairs, gathered from the noise in the living room that Yngve was watching the match, and went into my room.
I sat down at my desk and pretended to read.
Just so that he got the message.
He did. A few minutes later he opened the door.
“The match has started,” he said. “Come on.”
“I don’t want to see it,” I said, without meeting his eyes.
“Are you being headstrong now?” he said.
He came into the room, grabbed my arm, and dragged me to my feet.
“Come on,” he said. He let go of my arm.
I stood still.
“I DON’T WANT TO SEE THE MATCH!” I said.
Without another word, he grabbed my arm again and dragged me crying out of my room, through the hall, and into the living room, where he hurled me onto the sofa next to Yngve.
“Now you sit there and watch the game with us,” he said. “Have you got that?”
I had thought of closing my eyes if he forced me into the living room, but now I didn’t dare.
He had bought a bag of glacier mints and a bag of English chocolate toffees. The toffees were my favorite, but the glacier mints were good as well. As usual, he had the bags next to him on the table. Now and then he threw one to me and Yngve. Today he did the same. But I wouldn’t eat them; I left them untouched in front of me. In the end, he reacted.
“Eat your candy,” he said.
“I don’t feel like them,” I said.
He stood up.
“Now you eat your candy,” he said.
“No,” I said, and started crying again. “I don’t want to. I don’t want to.”
“Now you EAT them!” he said. He grabbed my arm and squeezed.
“I-don’t-want-any … candy,” I gasped.
He seized the back of my head and pressed it forward, almost down to the table.
“There they are,” he said. “Can you see them? Eat them. Now.”
“OK,” I said, and he let go. Stood over me until I had unwrapped a chocolate-coated toffee and put it in my mouth.
The next day we were going to Kristiansand to visit my father’s parents. We often did that on the Sundays when IK Start was playing at home. First of all, we had dinner there, then Yngve, Dad, and Grandad went to the match, sometimes Mom did as well, while I stayed with Grandma because I was too small.
Both Mom and Dad had put on better clothes than usual. Dad wore a white shirt, a brown tweed jacket with brown patches on the elbows, and light-brown cotton slacks, Mom wore a blue dress. Yngve and I wore shirts and cords, Yngve’s were brown, mine were blue.
Outside, the sky was overcast, but the clouds were of the fluffy whitish-gray variety that, while they may have shut out the sky, did not carry rain. The road was dry and gray, the gravel dry and blue gray, and the trunks of the pines standing tall at the top of the estate dry and reddish.
Yngve and I got into the back, Mom and Dad the front. Dad lit a cigarette before starting the car. I was behind him, so he couldn’t see me unless I leaned to the side. As we reached the crossroads below the slope up to Tromøya Bridge I folded my hands and said to myself, “Dear God, please don’t let us crash today. Amen.”
I prayed like this whenever we went on longer trips because Dad drove so fast, he was always above the speed limit, always overtaking other cars. Mom said he was a good driver, and he was, but every time the car accelerated and we crossed the white line, a feeling of terror took me in its grip.
Speed and anger went hand in hand. Mom drove carefully, was considerate, never minded if the car in front was slow, she was patient and followed. That was how she was at home as well. She never got angry, always had time to help, didn’t mind if things got broken, accidents happened, she liked to chat with us, she was interested in what we said, she often served food that was not absolutely necessary, such as waffles, buns, cocoa, and bread fresh out of the oven, while Dad on the other hand tried to purge our lives of anything that had no direct relevance to the situation in which we found ourselves: we ate food because it was a necessity, and the time we spent eating had no value in itself; when we watched TV we watched TV and were not allowed to talk or do anything else; when we were in the garden we had to stay on the flagstones, they had been laid for precisely that purpose, while the lawn, big and inviting though it was, was not for walking, running, or lying on. Yngve and I had never celebrated a birthday at home, and that was rooted in the same logic, it was unnecessary, a cake with the family after dinner was sufficient. We weren’t allowed to have friends at home and that was also another aspect of the same logic, because why would we want to be indoors, where we only made a mess and created havoc, when the world outside existed? Our friends would have been able to tell their parents how we lived, and that may well have been a factor; actually the same logic applied here, too. Actually it explained everything. We weren’t allowed to touch any of Dad’s tools, not a hammer, not a screwdriver, not a saw or a pair of pliers, a snow shovel or broom, nor were we allowed to cook in the kitchen, nor even cut a slice of bread, nor switch on the TV or radio. If we had been allowed to do that, the house would have been turned upside down, whereas the way it was organized now everything was orderly, as it should be, and if anything was used, by him or Mom, it was done in a methodical, appropriate fashion. It was the same with driving: he wanted to progress as speedily as possible, with the fewest possible hold-ups, from one point to the next. In this case, from Tromøya to Kristiansand, the hometown of this thirty-year-old schoolteacher.