There were other workmen we watched closely, indefatigably. If anyone from Televerket appeared in the vicinity, the news spread like wildfire among the groups of children. There was the car, there was the workman, a telecom engineer, and there were his
fantastic
climbing shoes! With those on his feet and a tool belt around his waist he clicked on a harness that went around both him and the pole, and then, with a series of slow and deliberate, but for us completely mystifying, movements he began to mount the pole. How was this
possible
? Straight-backed, with no visible sign of effort, no visible use of force, he
glided
up to the top. Wide-eyed, we stared at him while he worked aloft. Not one of us would leave because soon he would be climbing down again, in the same easy, effortless, incomprehensible way. Imagine having shoes like those, with the curved metal hook that wrapped itself around the post, what couldn’t you do?
And then there were the men working on the drainage. The ones who parked their cars by one of the many manhole covers in the road, which were either set in the tarmac or placed on top of a brick circle somewhere close by, and who, after putting on rubber boots reaching up to their
waists
!, levered up the round, enormously heavy, metal lid with a crowbar, shifted it to the side and climbed down. We watched as first their calves disappeared from view, into the hole under the road, next their thighs, then their stomachs, then their chests and finally their heads … And what was there beneath if not a tunnel? Where water flowed? Where you could walk? Oh, this was just great. Perhaps one of them was over there now, beside Kent Arne’s bike, which was lying strewn across the sidewalk, about twenty meters away, except that he was
under
the ground! Or were these manholes kinds of stations, like wells, where you could inspect the pipes and draw water when there was a fire? No one knew; we were always told to keep well away when they climbed down. No one dared ask them. No one was strong enough to lift off the heavy, coin-shaped metal covers on his own. So it remained a mystery, like so much else in those years.
Even before we started school we were free to roam wherever we wanted, with two exceptions. One was the main road, which ran from Tromøya Bridge to the Fina station. The other was the lake. Never go down to the lake on your own! the adults instilled in us. But, actually, why not? Did they think we would fall into the water? No, that wasn’t it, someone said when we were sitting on the rocks beyond the little meadow where we sometimes played soccer and looking down over the edge of the steep cliff into the water, perhaps thirty meters beneath us. It was the water sprite. It abducted children.
“Who says so?”
“Mom and Dad.”
“Is it
here
?”
“Yes.”
We gazed down at the grayish surface of the water in Ubekilen. It didn’t seem improbable that there was something lurking beneath.
“Only here?” someone asked. “If so, we can go somewhere else. Lake Tjenna?”
“Or Little Hawaii?”
“There are other sprites there. They’re dangerous. It’s true. Mom and Dad told me. They kidnap children and drown them.”
“Could it come up here?”
“Dunno. No, I don’t reckon so. No. It’s too far. It’s only dangerous by the water’s edge.”
I was scared of the sprite after that, but not as scared as I was of foxes, the thought of them terrified me, and if I saw a bush stir or I heard something rustle past, then I was off, running to safety, to an opening in the forest, that is, or up to the estate, where the foxes never ventured. In fact, I was so frightened of foxes that Yngve only had to say, I am a fox, and I am coming to get you – he was in the upper bunk and I was in the lower one – and I froze in terror. No, you aren’t, I would say. Yes, I am, he would say, hanging over the edge and hitting out at me. Despite this and even though he did frighten me now and then, I missed having him there when we each had our own room and suddenly I had to sleep alone. It was all right, after all, it was
inside
the house, the new room, but it wasn’t as good as having him there, in the bunk above me. Then I could just ask him things, such as, “Yngve, are you frightened now?” and he might answer “No-oo, why should I be? There’s nothing to be frightened of here.” And I would know he was right and feel reassured.
The fear of foxes must have worn off when I was about seven. The vacuum it left, however, was soon filled by other fears. One morning I was walking past the TV, it was on although no one was watching, there was a matinee film, and there, oh no, oh no, there was a man with no head walking up a staircase! Aaagh! I ran into my room, but that didn’t help, I was just as alone and defenseless there, so off I went in search of Mom, if she was at home, or Yngve. The image of the headless man pursued me, and not just in the night, which the other fearful visions I had did. No, the headless man could appear in broad daylight, and if I was alone it made no difference that the sun was shining or the birds were singing, my heart pounded and fear spread like fire to every tiniest nerve ending in my body. It upset me more that this darkness could also appear in the daylight. In fact, if there was one thing I was really frightened of, it was this darkness in the light. And the worst of it was that there was nothing I could do about it. Shouting for someone didn’t help, standing in the middle of an open area didn’t help, and running away didn’t help. Then there was the front cover of a crime magazine that Dad once showed me, a comic he’d had when he was a child, showing a skeleton carrying a man over its back, and the skeleton had turned its head and was looking straight at me through its hollow eye sockets. I was afraid of that skeleton as well; it too appeared in all sorts of expected and unexpected contexts. I was also afraid of the hot water in the bathroom. Because whenever you turned on the hot tap a shrill scream traveled through the pipes, and immediately afterward, if you didn’t turn it off at once, they started banging. These noises, which were one unholy racket, scared the wits out of me. There was a way of avoiding them, you had to turn on the cold water first, and then somehow fiddle with the hot tap until the temperature was right. That was what Mom, Dad, and Yngve did. I had tried, but the shrill scream that penetrated the walls and was followed by a crescendo of banging, as though something down below was working itself up into a fury, started the second I touched the hot-water tap, and I turned it off as fast as I could, and ran out, my body shaking violently with fear. So, in the morning, I either washed in cold water or took Yngve’s dirty but lukewarm water.
Dogs, foxes, and plumbing were concrete, physical threats, I knew where I was with them, either they were there or they weren’t. But the headless man and the grinning skeleton, they belonged to the kingdom of death, and they couldn’t be handled in the same way, they could be anywhere and everywhere, in a cupboard if you opened it in the dark, on the stairs as you were going up or down, in the forest, indeed even under the bed or in the bathroom. I associated my own reflection in windows with the creatures from beyond, perhaps because they only appeared when it was dark outside, but it was a terrible thought, seeing your own reflection in the black windowpane and thinking, that image is not me, but a ghoul staring in at me.
The year we started school none of us believed in sprites, pixies, or trolls anymore, we laughed at those who did, but the notion of ghosts and apparitions persisted, perhaps because we didn’t dare ignore it; dead people did exist, and we knew that, all of us. Other notions we had, coming from the same tangled realm, that of mythology, were of a happier, more innocent nature, such as that of the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. Even that autumn when we started the first class we still believed the myth enough for us to go in search of the rainbow. It must have been one Saturday in September, the rain had been pouring down all morning, we were playing on the road below the house where Geir Håkon lived, or, to be more precise, in the ditch that was flooded with water. At this exact spot the road passed a blasted rock face, and water was dripping and trickling down from its moss, grass, and soil-covered top. We were wearing rubber boots and thick, brightly colored oilskin trousers and jackets, with the hoods tied around our chins, thus displacing all sound; your own breathing and the movements of your head, where your ears met the inside of the hood, were always loud and clear while everything else was muffled and seemed to be happening a long distance away. Between the trees on the other side of the road and at the top of the mountain above us the mist was thick. The orange rooftops on both sides of the road downhill wore a dull sheen in the gray light. Above the forest at the bottom of the slope the sky hung like a swollen belly, penetrated by the pouring rain, which continued to dance on our hoods and now oversensitive ears.
We made a dam, but the sand we shoveled up kept collapsing, and when we caught sight of Jacobsen’s car coming up the hill, we didn’t hesitate, we dropped our spades and ran down to their house, where the car was parking at that moment. A bluish ribbon of smoke floated in the air behind the exhaust pipe. The father got out on one side, as thin as a stick, with a cigarette stub in the corner of his mouth, he bent down, pulled the lever underneath the seat, and pushed it forward, so that his two sons, Big Geir and Trond, could get out, while the mother, small and chubby, red-haired and pale, let out their daughter, Wenche, on her side.
“Hi,” we said.
“Hi,” said Geir and Trond.
“Where have you been?”
“To town.”
“Hello, boys,” their father said.
“Hi,” we said.
“Do you want to hear what 777 is in German?” he said.
“Yes.”
“
Siebenhundertsiebenundsiebzig
!” he said in his hoarse voice. “Ha ha ha!”
We laughed with him. His laughter morphed into coughing.
“Right then,” he said when the fit was over. He inserted the key in the car-door lock and twisted. His lips kept twitching, and one eye, too.
“Where are you off to?” Trond asked.
“Dunno,” I said.
“Can I join you?”
“Of course you can.”
Trond was the same age as Geir and me, but much smaller. His eyes were as round as saucers, his lower lip was thick and red, his nose small. Above this doll-like face grew blond, curly hair. His brother looked completely different: his eyes were narrow and crafty, his smile was often mocking, his hair straight and sandy brown, the bridge of his nose freckly. But he was small, too.
“Put your rainjacket on,” his mother said.
“I’ll just get my jacket,” Trond said, and ran indoors. We stood waiting without saying a word, our arms down by our sides like two penguins. It had stopped raining. A light wind shook the tops of the tall, slim pine trees scattered round the gardens below. A thin stream ran down the hill, alongside the road, taking with it little heaps of pine needles, the tiny, yellow
v
’s or bones strewn everywhere.
In the sky behind us the cloud cover had opened. The scenery around us, with all the rooftops, lawns, clumps of trees, ridges, and slopes, was now suffused with a kind of glow. From the hill above our house, which we called the mountain, a rainbow had risen.
“Look,” I said. “A rainbow!”
“Wow!” Geir said.
Up at the house, Trond had closed the door. He started running toward us.
“There’s a rainbow over the mountain!” Geir said.
“Shall we go and look for the pot of gold?”
“Yes, let’s!” Trond said.
We ran down the slope. On Karlsen’s lawn Anne Lene, Kent Arne’s little sister, stood watching us. She was wearing a safety harness; it was attached to a strap so that she wouldn’t run off. Her mother’s red car was parked in the drive. A light shone from a wall lamp. Outside Gustavsen’s house Trond slowed down.
“I’m sure Leif Tore would like to join us,” he said.
“I don’t think he’s at home,” I said.
“We can ask anyway,” Trond said, walking between the two brick gateposts, which were not hung with any gates and therefore subject to my father’s ridicule, and into the drive. A hollow metal globe, from which protruded an arrow, all carried by a naked man with a bent back, was cemented to the top of the posts. It was a sundial, and my father made fun of that, too, for what was the point of
two
sundials?
“Leif Tore,” Trond shouted. “Are you coming out?”
He looked at us. Then we all shouted.
“Leif Tore! Are you coming out?”
A few seconds passed. Then the kitchen window was opened, and his mother stuck out her head.
“He’s coming now. He’s just putting on his rain gear. You don’t need to shout anymore.”
I had a precise picture of this pot. Large and black, with three legs, full of glittering objects. Gold, silver, diamonds, rubies, sapphires. There was one at each end of the rainbow. We had looked for it before, without any luck. It was important to be quick, rainbows never lasted long.
Leif Tore, who for a while now had been a shadow behind the yellow glass of the door, opened it at last. A wave of warm air streamed out from behind him. It was always so hot in their house. I caught a slight odor of something that was both acrid and sweet. That was how it smelled in their house. All the houses apart from ours had their own smell, this was theirs.
“What are we going to do?” he said, slamming the door behind him and making the glass rattle.
“There’s a rainbow on the mountain. We’re going to search for the pot of gold,” Trond said.
“Come on then!” Leif Tore said, breaking into a run. We followed, down the last part of the hill and onto the road going up toward the mountain. Yngve’s bike still wasn’t back in its place, I could see, but both Mom’s green Beetle and Dad’s red Kadett were there. Mom had been doing the vacuuming when I left, it was awful, I hated the sound, it was like a wall pressing itself against me. And they opened the windows while they were cleaning, the air indoors was freezing cold, and it was as if the cold were transmitted to Mom as well, she had no space left in her for anything else when she stood leaning over the wash tub, wringing the cloth, or when she pushed the broom or the Hoover across the floor, and since it was only in this surplus space that there was room for me, I also got cold on these Saturday mornings, in fact so cold that the chill penetrated my head and even made it difficult to lie on the bed reading comics, which normally I loved, so that in the end I had no choice but to get dressed and run outside and hope there was something happening there.