He nodded, sat down on his chair, and she poured him some coffee. I never quite understood what the power relationship was between Grandma and Grandad. On the one hand, she always served him food, cooked all the meals, did all the washing up and the housework, as though she were his servant; on the other hand, she was often angry or irritated with him, and then she gave him a mouthful or made a fool of him, she was sharp and not infrequently sarcastic, while he said very little, preferring not to respond. Was it because he didn’t need to? Because nothing of what she said altered anything important? Or because he couldn’t? If Yngve and I were present during such sparring, Grandma would wink at us, as if to say this wasn’t serious, or use us in her sally against him by saying such things as “Grandad can’t even change a lightbulb properly,” while Grandad, for his part, would look at us, smile, and shake his head at Grandma’s antics. I never saw any form of intimacy between them, other than in their verbal exchanges or the closeness that was evident when she served him.
“They lost, I heard?” she said again when Mom, Dad, and Yngve came up the stairs ten minutes later.
“Yes, they did. Eternally owned is but what’s lost,” Dad quoted. “Or what do you reckon, Dad?”
Grandad growled something or other.
When we left in the evening we were given a bag of plums, a bag of pears, and a bag of bread rolls. Grandad, reluctant to leave his chair, said goodbye to us upstairs while Grandma came down with us, gave us each a long hug, stood on the front doorstep, and waved until she could no longer see us.
Strangely enough, the journey back always seemed much faster than the journey there. I loved traveling in a car at night, with the dashboard lit, the muted voices from the front seats, the gleam of street lamps as we passed beneath, washing over us like breakers or waves of light, the long, completely dark stretches that cropped up intermittently, where all you saw, all that existed, was the tarmac lit up by the headlights and the countryside they illuminated on the bends. Sudden treetops, sudden crags, sudden sea inlets. It was always a particular pleasure to arrive at the house in the night as well, to hear footsteps on the gravel and the sharp slam of car doors and the rattle of keys, to see the light in the hall come on, revealing the presence of all the familiar objects. The shoes with the grommets as eyes and the tongue as a forehead, the chilly gaze from the white two-holed electric sockets above the baseboard, the hat stand in the corner, with its back turned. And in my room: the pens and pencils assembled like a gang of schoolchildren in the pen stand, some insolently leaning against the edge, ready at any moment to discharge a gobbet of spit to prove they were not interested in anyone or anything. The duvet and the pillow that were either tidy and puffed up, looking like something that shouldn’t be touched, a coffin or a capsule in a spaceship, or else were molded in the shape of my last movements, happy to be rearranged, but with no real inclination in that direction. The fixed stare of the lamps. The mouth of the keyhole, the two screw eyes of the metal fitting, the long, oddly positioned nose of the handle.
I brushed my teeth, shouted goodnight to Mom and Dad, and got into bed to read for half an hour. I had two favorite books, which I tried to quarantine long enough to be able to read them again in the same way I had the first time, but it never worked, I picked them up again much too soon. One was
Doctor Dolittle,
which was about a doctor who could talk to animals and one day went on a long voyage with them, to Africa, where, after being hunted and captured by some Hottentots, he finally found what he was looking for, the rare sausage animal that had two heads, one at each end. The second book was
Gangles,
which was about a girl who would stand on fountains of water and allow herself to be hurled into the air, and who, after several misadventures, ended up balancing above the sea on a spout of water blown out by an enormous whale. Tonight, however, I chose another book from the pile,
The Little Witch,
which was about a witch who was too small to join the coven in Bloksberg, but who snuck in anyway. She did lots of things she wasn’t supposed to do, like witchcraft on Sundays, which was almost unbearable to read about, she shouldn’t have done it, she would be caught … and indeed she was, but everything turned out fine in the end. I read a few pages, but as I knew the story so well I looked at the pictures instead. After flicking through it, I turned off the light, rested my head on the pillow, and closed my eyes.
I had almost let go, perhaps I had even fallen asleep, because it was as though I had suddenly been brought back to my bed and my room, summoned by a ring at the front door.
Diing-dong.
Who on earth could that be? No one rang our doorbell, except guests we were expecting, which in nine out of ten cases were Grandma and Grandad, plus the occasional salesman, or one of Yngve’s friends. But none of them would ring so late at night.
I sat up in bed. Heard Mom padding along the landing and down the stairs. Muffled voices from below. Then she came back up, exchanged a few words with Dad, which I didn’t catch, went downstairs, and must have put on her coat there because straight afterward the front door was slammed shut, and straight after that her car started up.
What in the world? Where was she going
now
? It was nearly
ten o’clock
!
A few minutes later Dad went downstairs as well. But he didn’t go out, he went into his study. When I heard that I got up, carefully opened the door, and snuck along the landing into Yngve’s room.
He was lying on his bed reading. Still dressed. He smiled when he saw me and sat up.
“You’re only wearing your underpants,” Yngve said.
“Who was that at the door?”
“Fru Gustavsen, I think,” he said. “And all the kids.”
“Oh? Why? And why did Mom go? Where did she go?”
Yngve shrugged.
“I think she drove them to some relatives.”
“Why?”
“Gustavsen’s drunk. Didn’t you hear him shouting at them a while ago?”
I shook my head.
“I was asleep. But was Leif Tore with them? And Rolf?”
Yngve nodded.
“Jeez,” I said.
“Dad’ll be coming back up,” he said. “You’d better go to bed. I’ll turn out the lights too now.”
“OK. Good night.”
“Good night.”
In my room, I drew the curtains aside and looked across to Gustavsen’s house. I couldn’t see anything unusual. Outside, at least, everything was still.
Herr Gustavsen had been drunk before, he was well known for it. One night that spring a rumor had spread that he was drunk, and three or four of us crept into their garden and stood by the living-room window looking in. But there was nothing to see. He was sitting on the sofa gazing into the distance without moving. At other times we had heard him shouting and yelling, through the open windows and on the lawn. Leif Tore just laughed. But perhaps this was something different? Escaping from him, they’d never done that before.
When I next woke it was morning. Someone was in the bathroom, I could hear, probably Yngve, and from the road outside, along the three-meter-high wall surrounding Gustavsen’s property and supporting the level lawn, came the drone of Mom’s car. She had to go to work early today. Yngve closed the bathroom door, returned to his room, and then went downstairs.
The bike!
Where was his bike?
I had completely forgotten to ask him.
But that had to be the reason he was leaving so early; he couldn’t cycle, he had to walk to school.
I got up, took my clothes into the bathroom, washed in the water he had remembered to leave, today, too, dressed, and went to the kitchen where Dad had made three
smørbrød
and put them on a plate in my place, as well as a glass of milk. The milk carton, the bread, the cheese, sliced meat, and jams had been cleared away. He was sitting in the living room, listening to the radio and smoking.
Outside it was raining. A steady drizzle, broken by intermittent gusts of wind, pitter-pattering against the windows and sounding like tiny drumming fingers.
Monday was the only day no one was at home when I came back from school. So I had my own key, which I carried on a piece of string around my neck. But there was a problem with the key: I couldn’t get it to open the door. The first Monday it had been raining and I bounded across the gravel in rubber boots and rain gear, the key nestling in my hand, overjoyed at the imminent prospect and filled with pride. I managed to get the key into the lock, but not to turn it. It would not budge however much force I used. The key was unmovable. After ten minutes I started crying. My hands were red and cold, the rain was bucketing down, and all the other children had been at home for ages. At that moment one of the neighbors I didn’t know so well passed – she was old and lived with her husband in the house at the very top by the forest above the soccer field – on her way down the road, and when I saw her, I didn’t hesitate, because she had no connection with my parents, I dashed over and asked, with tears running down my cheeks, if she could help me with the lock. She could. And for her it was no problem at all! She fiddled with the key and it turned. And, hey presto, the door was open. I thanked her and went inside. Knowing there was nothing wrong with the key, there was something wrong with me. The next time this happened it wasn’t raining, so I left my satchel by the step and ran up to Geir’s. Dad made a comment about the satchel when he came home, I wasn’t to leave it lying around, so the following Monday, when the weather was also dry, I simply took it with me, under the pretext of having to do some homework with Geir and thus needing my satchel close at hand.
In the meantime, I had worked out a method I could use when the weather got worse during autumn and winter, like today. In the boiler room there was a little window, more like a hatch, but not so small that I couldn’t crawl through. It was positioned about half a meter above my head. I had worked out that if I opened the window in the morning, and there was no great risk involved because the window stayed close to the frame even when the two catches were undone, I could pull over the trash can when I got home, stand on it, wriggle through into the boiler room, open the door from the inside, put the trash can back, close the window, and be indoors without anyone realizing I couldn’t get the key to turn. The sole doubt in my mind was when to undo the catches. However, if it was raining, it would be the most natural thing in the world to go into the boiler room, because that was where my rain gear usually hung, and all I had to do was lift the catches, impossible to see unless you stood close to the door. And I wasn’t so stupid that I would touch anything with Dad around in the hall!
I ate the three
smørbrød
and drank the glass of milk. Brushed my teeth in the bathroom, collected my satchel from my room, went downstairs and into the hot, narrow room with the two water cylinders. I stood absolutely still for two seconds. As there was no sound of footsteps on the stairs, I stretched up and unhooked the catches. Then I donned my rain gear, slipped on my satchel, went into the hall where my boots were, a pair of blue-and-white Viking rubber boots that I had been given despite my wanting white ones, shouted goodbye to Dad, and ran out, up to Geir’s, he poked his head out of the window and called that he was still having breakfast but would be down soon.
I walked over to one of the gray puddles in Geir’s family’s drive and started throwing stones in it. Their drive wasn’t covered in gravel as most of the others were, nor brick paving like at Gustavsen’s, but compacted reddish earth full of small, round stones. This wasn’t all that was different about them. At the back of the house they didn’t have a lawn but a little patch where they had planted potatoes, carrots, swedes, radishes, and various other vegetables. On the forest side they didn’t have a wooden fence, as we did, or wire netting, as many others did, but a stone wall that Prestbakmo had built himself. Nor did they throw all their garbage in the trash can, as we did; they kept all their milk and egg cartons to use in a variety of ways and they put all their food remains on a compost heap by the stone wall.
I straightened up and glanced at the cement mixer. The round green drum was partially covered by a white tarpaulin and it looked like a headscarf. Her mouth was open, it was big and toothless; what was it she could see that surprised her so much?
Down the hill came Geir Håkon’s father in his green Ford Taunus. I waved; he lifted his hand from the steering wheel in a fleeting response.
I was suddenly reminded of Anne Lisbet. The thought soared from my stomach and spread like an explosion of joy in my chest.
She hadn’t been at school on Friday. Solveig had said she was ill. But today was Monday. She was bound to be better now.
Oh, please let her be better!
I was dying to go up to B-Max and see her.
Her black glittering eyes. Her happy voice.
“Geir! Come on!” I shouted.
I heard his muffled voice from behind the door. The next instant he tore it open.
“Want to take the path?” he said.
“Sure,” I said.
So we ran behind the house, scrambled over the stone wall, and joined the path. From being no more than a mass of tufts with small dried-up channels in between, the bog was now full of water, impossible to cross dry-shod, even in boots, because your foot would sink in a puddle to way above the boot top, but we tried anyway, balancing on the quivering tufts, jumping to the next, slipping, putting out a hand to save ourselves and feeling the ground give, the water seeming to
creep
up our sweaters under the sleeves of our jackets. We laughed and shouted, telling each other what had happened, crossed the now muddy and slippery soccer field, and went between the deciduous trees to the right, up the broad avenue that might once have been a cart track, it was broader than a path at any rate and covered with a carpet of leaves. Red, yellow, and brown, they lay there, with the occasional splash of green. At the top there was a tiny field, the grass was long here, a yellowish white, and lay flat, plastered to the ground. Above it a bare tor towered, on which there stood an old telegraph pole. The former cart track continued for a while, then disappeared, devoured by the new main road running past, maybe twenty meters from the field. Below lay the forest, mostly oak trees, between two of them there was an abandoned car, in much worse condition than the one where we normally played, perhaps a hundred meters lower down, but no less appealing for that, in fact the contrary: hardly anyone ever played here.