My Struggle: Book 3 (34 page)

Knives and forks clinking on plates, elbows moving, heads held stiff, straight backs. No one saying a word. That is us three, a father and two sons, sitting and eating. Around us, on all sides, it is the seventies.

The silence grows. And we notice it, all three of us, the silence is not the kind that can ease, it is the kind that lasts a lifetime. Well, of course, you can say something inside it, you can talk, but the silence doesn’t stop for that reason.

Dad put the bone on the plate with the potato skin and took another chop. Yngve and I were given only one each.

Yngve had finished.

“Thank you, Dad,” he said.

“There’s dessert,” Dad said.

“Don’t want any,” Yngve said. “Thanks anyway.”

“Why don’t you want any?” Dad said. “It’s pineapple and cream. You like it.”

“It makes my face break out,” Yngve said.

“I see,” Dad said. “You can leave the table.”

He looked at me when Yngve got up, as though he didn’t exist.

“But you want some, don’t you, Karl Ove?”

“You bet,” I said. “It’s my favorite.”

“Good,” he said.

I sat looking out of the window waiting for him to finish. Listening to the music from Yngve’s room. A crowd of children had gathered in the road, they put two rocks on the ground as a goal, immediately afterward there was the sound of heavy thuds as boots hit an underinflated ball and of low shouts, which always increase in volume when soccer is played, whatever form it takes.

At last Dad got up, took the plates, and scraped them clean over the trash can. He put a bowl of pineapple and cream in front of me and one in front of himself.

We finished the dessert without saying a word.

“Thanks, Dad,” I said, getting up. Dad said nothing, but got up as well, filled the coffee pot with water, and took a packet of coffee from the cupboard.

Then he turned.

“Karl Ove?” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

“Now don’t you tease Yngve about his pimples, do you understand what I’m saying? I don’t ever want to hear a word about it again.”

“OK,” I said and stood waiting to see if there was more to come.

Dad turned and cut off the corner of the coffee packet, and I went into Yngve’s room, where he was playing his electric guitar, a black Les Paul copy I had been so surprised to hear the first time, as I was convinced not a sound would come from it without an amplifier. But it did, a low plunking sound, he was sitting there and playing with a face full of pimples.

“Want to play something?” I said.

“I already am,” he said.

“A game, you chump,” I said.

“Fifty-two-card pick-up?” he said.

“Ha ha,” I said. “You can only do that once and I’ve already done it. Can you teach me a chord?”

“Not now. Another time.”

“Please.”

“Just one then,” he said. “Sit here.”

I sat down beside him on the bed. He put the guitar in my lap. Placed three fingers on the finger board.

“That’s an E,” he said, and took his hand away.

I put my fingers where he’d had his.

“Good,” he said. “Now strum.”

I strummed, but not all the strings made a sound.

“You have to press harder,” he said. “And you have to watch your other fingers don’t catch the free strings.”

“OK,” I said and tried again.

“That was good,” he said. “That’s the way. Now you can do E.”

I passed him the guitar and got up.

“Do you remember which strings are which?” he said.

“EADGBE,” I said.

“That’s right,” he said. “Now all you need is a band.”

“But then I would have to borrow your guitar,” I said.

“You can’t have it.”

I said nothing because things could change so quickly.

“When do you start tomorrow?” I said instead.

“First hour,” he said. “And you?”

“No, at eleven, I think.”

“Think?”

“Know. Dad?”

“First lesson, dead sure.”

That was good news. I would be alone for a few hours.

I turned and went into my room. The new satchel was by the desk leg. The square, blue one I’d had for years had become too small and childish. The one I had now was dark green and made of some synthetic material that smelled wonderful.

I sniffed at it for a while. Then I put on
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
and lay back on my bed staring at the ceiling.

The music lifted me at once, I beat the air with one hand and rocked my head backward and forward, happy to the core.
Bettåh, bettåh, bettåh!
I sang.
Bettåh, bettåh, bettåh!

There was the school building, black, with all its many windows glinting, as we stormed off the bus. We were among the older pupils now and knew both how to behave and what to expect. While the new kids, hair combed and smartly dressed, stood with their parents listening to the head teacher’s welcome talk by the flagpole, we swaggered around and spat or leaned against the wall of the wet-weather shed talking about what we had done that summer. Three cows on a farm was no longer good enough, but even if our only holiday trip had been to Sørbøvåg, where I had stayed with Jon Olav and the others, alone for a week, I definitely had something to offer because there had been a girl there, my second cousin, whose name was Merete, she had blonde hair and lived outside Oslo. I went out with her, I said, and although that was not quite as impressive as Liseberg in Gothenburg, northern Europe’s biggest amusement park, it was better than nothing.

Some of the girls unfurled their skipping elastic from what were to me hidden places and started jumping.

No,
dancing.

We managed to persuade them to play the high jump instead, so that we could join in without losing face in front of the other boys. Two of the girls held the elastic between them, and then, one after the other, we ran toward it, launched both legs, and brought our feet down on it to land on the other side.

It was a pleasure to watch the girls as they took off, legs first, in their elegant, controled fashion.

Whoosh,
you heard, and then they were safely on the other side.

Then the height was raised until there was only one person left.

I hoped it would be me because Anne Lisbet had joined us now as well, but it was, as so often before, Marianne.

Tap, tap, tap, you heard, as she ran forward,
whoosh,
you heard when she jumped, and then she was over.

She smiled shyly, swept her shoulder-length blonde hair to one side with a finger, and I wondered if she would be the one I fell in love with this year.

Probably not. She was in my class.

Perhaps it would be someone in the A class?

Or, hey, future of dreams, perhaps someone from another school?

After we had been given the schedule and some new books in the first lesson we had to tell the class what we had done over the summer, one after the other. In the second lesson we had to hold an election for the new student council. I had been the class rep with Siv in the previous year and I thought being reelected would be a formality until Eivind put up his hand and said he would also like to stand as a candidate. There were six names to choose from. Eivind’s involvement led to my breaking the unwritten rule that you never, under any circumstances, voted for yourself. I thought the election might be touch and go, so one vote could be decisive. I considered the chances of anyone finding out that I had voted for myself unlikely in the extreme. After all, it was a secret ballot, and the only person who would see what we wrote and could spot our handwriting, and could therefore expose me, was Frøken, and she wouldn’t say anything.

How cruelly mistaken I was.

I wrote KARL OVE in capital letters on the little scrap of paper, folded it, and gave it to Frøken when she came around with a hat. On the board she wrote the names of the six candidates, and then she called on Sølvi, of all people, to read out the ballot slips. Every time Sølvi read out a name she put a cross by the appropriate person on the board.

It was taking time for my votes to start coming in. At first Eivind got most of the boys’ votes. Then I realized to my horror that there were no more votes. I hadn’t received a single one! How was that possible?

But there. At last.

“Karl Ove,” Sølvi said, and Frøken put a cross behind my name.

“Eivind,” Sølvi said.

“Eivind.”

“Eivind.”

“And that must be it, isn’t it? Now let’s see. The class reps on the council this year are therefore Eivind and Marianne!”

I looked down at the desk in front of me.

One vote.

How was that possible?

And, to cap it off, the one vote was my own.

But I was the best student in the class! At least in Norwegian! And natural and social sciences! And in math I was the second best, or perhaps the third. But, altogether, who could be better than me?

OK, Eivind won. But one vote? How was that possible?

Hadn’t anyone voted for me?

There had to be a mistake somewhere.

No one?

When I opened our front door Dad was standing inside.

I gave a start of surprise.

How had he managed that?

Had he been waiting for me?

“You’ve got to go to B-Max for me,” he said. “Look.”

He passed me a shopping list and a hundred-krone note.

“I want all the change back, OK?”

“Yes,” I said, put down my satchel, and ran into the road.

If there was one area in this world where I was meticulous it was with Dad’s change. When B-Max had just opened Yngve returned home with less change than there should have been. Dad gave him the beating of his life. And that was no small matter because Yngve had been on the receiving end of quite a few beatings. Many more than me. Yes, I got off lightly with everything. Even my bedtimes were lenient compared with his.

I looked at the list.

Pineapple?
Were we going to have dessert again? On a Monday?

I put all the items in a basket, stood flicking through some magazines on the shelf by the counter, paid, put the change in my pocket, and ran home with the heavy bag hanging from my hand.

I passed it to Dad upstairs in the kitchen with the change, which he pocketed while I waited for him to say I could go. But he didn’t.

“Sit!” he said, pointing to the chair.

I sat.

“Straighten your back, boy!” he said.

I straightened my back.

He took the potatoes, which were covered in soil, from the bag and started peeling them.

What was it he wanted?

“Well?” he said, turning to look at me while his hands worked under the water from the tap.

I looked at him in surprise.

“What did Frøken have to say?” he said.

“Frøken?”

“Yes,
Fwøken.
Didn’t she have anything to say to all of you on your first day?”

“Yes, she did, she welcomed us back. Then we were given our schedule and some books.”

“What’s your schedule like then?” he said, walking over to the cupboard by the stove and taking out a saucepan.

“Shall I go and get it?”

“No, no. You must remember some of it, don’t you? Did it look good?”

“Yes,” I said. “Great.”

“That’s good,” he said.

That evening I realized what Mom’s absence meant.

The rooms were lifeless.

Dad sat downstairs in his study, and the living room and kitchen were “out there,” dead. I tiptoed toward them, and the feeling that came over me when I was alone in the forest, when the forest was sufficient unto itself and it didn’t want to incorporate me, reemerged here as well.

The rooms were only rooms, a gaping space I entered.

But not my room, thank goodness. It wrapped itself around me, soft and friendly as it had always been.

The next day Sverre and Geir Håkon came over to me in B-Max. Several kids from the class were standing around us.

“Who did you vote for yesterday, Karl Ove?” Geir Håkon said.

“It’s a secret,” I said.

“You voted for yourself. You got only one vote, and that was the one you gave yourself.”

“No, it wasn’t,” I said.

“Yes, it was,” Sverre said. “We’ve asked everyone in the class. No one voted for you. So you’re the only one left. You voted for yourself.”

“No,” I said. “That’s not true. I didn’t vote for myself.”

“Who did then?”

“I don’t know.”

“But we’ve asked everyone. No one voted for you. You voted for yourself. Come on, admit it.”

“No,” I said. “It’s not true.”

“But we’ve asked everyone. There’s only you left.”

“Then someone’s lying.”

“Why would anyone lie?”

“How should I know?”

“You’re the one who’s lying. You voted for yourself.”

“No, I didn’t.”

The rumor spread through the school, but I denied everything. And kept denying it. Everyone knew what had happened, but as long as I didn’t admit it, they couldn’t be
absolutely
sure. They thought it was typical of me. I thought I
was
someone. But I didn’t think that. A person who votes for himself is a nobody. The fact that I never went scavenging, never did any shoplifting, never fired a slingshot at birds or a pea-shooter loaded with cherry pits at cars or passers-by, and never joined in when others locked the gym teacher behind the garage door in the equipment room or when others put drawing pins on the supply teachers’ chairs or dunked their sponges until they were sopping wet, plus the fact that I told them they shouldn’t do these things, told them it was wrong, did not do a great deal for my reputation, either. I knew, however, that I was right and what the others were doing was wrong. Occasionally I would pray to God to forgive them. If they swore, for example. Then a prayer might come into my mind.
Dear God, Forgive Leif Tore for swearing. He didn’t mean to.
I said things like: heck, blast, golly, gosh, drats, jeez, my foot, goodness, fudge, holy cow, bother, and yikes. But despite this, despite not swearing, not lying, except in self-defense, not stealing or vandalizing or playing up teachers, despite being interested in clothes and my appearance and always wanting to be right and the best, which meant my general reputation was poor and I was not someone others said they liked, I wasn’t shunned or avoided, and if I was, by Leif Tore and Geir Håkon, for instance, there were always boys I could turn to. Such as Dag Lothar. Or Dag Magne. And when all the kids got together in big groups no one was rejected, everyone was accepted, including me.

Of course, it was easier to be at home reading.

Nor did it do much for my reputation that I was a Christian. Actually, that was Mom’s fault. One day, the year before, she had banned the reading of comics. I had come home early from school, run up the stairs, happy and excited, since Dad was still at work.

“Are you hungry?” she said, sitting on a chair in the living room with a book in her lap and looking at me.

“Yes,” I said.

She got up and went into the kitchen, where she took a loaf from the bread box.

The rain outside was like stripes in the air. Some stragglers were coming down the road from the bus, heads bowed beneath the hoods of their rain jackets.

“I was looking at some of your comics today,” Mom said, cutting a slice of bread. “What
do
you read? I’m aghast.”

“Aghast?” I said. “What does that mean?”

She put a slice on the plate in front of me, opened the fridge, and took out some mild, white cheese and margarine.

“What you read is absolutely awful! It’s just violence! People shooting one another and laughing! You’re too young to read stuff like this.”

“But everyone does,” I said.

“That’s no argument,” she said. “It doesn’t mean
you
have to.”

“But I like it!” I said, spreading the margarine with my knife.

“Yes, that’s what’s so bad about it!” she said, sitting down. “That kind of magazine gives a terrible view of humanity. Especially of women. Do you understand? I don’t want your attitudes to be shaped by that.”

“By the killing?”

“For example.”

“But it’s not meant seriously!” I said.

Mom sighed. “You know Ingunn’s writing a university thesis about the violence in comics, don’t you?”

“No,” I said.

“It’s not good for you,” she said. “Simple as that. At least you understand. That it’s not good for you.”

“So am I not allowed?”

“No.”

“Eh?”

“It’s for your own good,” she said.

“I’m not allowed? But Mom, Mom … Never?”

“You’ll have to read Donald Duck.”

“DONALD DUCK?” I yelled. “No
one
reads DONALD DUCK!”

I burst into tears and ran to my room.

Mom followed me, sat on the edge of the bed, and stroked my back.

“You can read books,” she said. “That’s much better. You can go to the library, you and me and Yngve. To Arendal, once a week. Then you can borrow as many books as you like.”

“But I don’t want to read books,” I said. “I want to read comics!”

“Karl Ove,” she said, “my mind is made up.”

“But
Dad
reads comics!”

“He’s an adult,” she said. “It’s not the same.”

“So no more comics
ever
again?”

“I have to work this evening. But tomorrow we can go to the library,” she said and got up. “Shall we leave it at that?”

I didn’t answer, and she left.

She must have stumbled on a comic in the
Kamp
series or
Vi Vinner,
which were about war, in which all the Germans, or Fritz or Sauerkraut or whatever they were called, were killed with a smile on their lips, and the pages were littered with
Donnerwetters
and
Dummkopfs
or whatever they shouted to one another in the heat of battle, or she could have found
Agent X9
or
Serie Spesial,
where most of the women wore bikinis and often not even that. It was just great to see Modesty Blaise undressing, though only when I was alone, normally nudity was incredibly embarrassing. Every time
Agaton Sax
was on children’s TV I blushed if Mom and Dad were there because in the intro he was ogling a naked woman through binoculars. Sometimes there was actually some sex in the cartoons or films on TV, and if it took place when I was allowed to watch, it all became unbearable. There we were, the whole family, Mom, Dad, and their two sons watching TV, and then a couple screwed – in the middle of our living room, where did you look?

Oh, that was dreadful.

But I kept the comics in my room; Mom had never so much as cast a glance at them.

Now, out of the blue, I wasn’t allowed to read them.

How unfair was that?

I cried, I was incensed, I went to see her again and said she had no right to ban them, knowing that the battle was lost, she had made up her mind, and if I didn’t stop protesting she would just tell Dad, after which further resistance would be hopeless.

The comics I had borrowed were returned; the others were thrown away. The next day we went to the library, we were each given a membership card, and then it was done, from this moment on books held sway. Every Wednesday I came down the steps outside Arendal Library with a carrier bag full of books in each hand. I went with Mom and Yngve, who had likewise borrowed vast quantities, then it was back to the car, go home, lie down on my bed, read almost every evening, all Saturday and all Sunday, a pattern broken only by shorter or longer excursions outside, all depending on what was going on, and when the week was up it was back to the library with the two bags of finished books and two new bags. I read all the series they had, I liked Pocomoto best, the little boy who grew up in the Wild West, but also Jan, and the Hardy Boys, of course, and the Bobbsey Twins and Nancy Drew, the Girl Detective. I liked the Famous Five series and I plowed through a series of books about real people, reading about Henry Ford and Thomas Alva Edison, Benjamin Franklin and Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, John F. Kennedy, David Livingstone, and Louis Armstrong, always with tears in my eyes over the last pages, because, naturally enough, they all died. I finished the
Vi Var Med
series, about all the known and unknown expeditions of discovery in the world, I read books about sailing ships and space travel, Yngve got me into books by von Däniken, who thought that all the great civilizations had come about as a result of encounters with extraterrestrial creatures, and books about the Apollo program, starting with the astronauts’ fighter-plane pasts and their attempts to set speed records. I also read all Dad’s old Gyldendal books for boys, of which the one that made the greatest impression was probably
Over Kjølen i Kano,
where a father goes on a camping trip with two boys and sees a great auk everyone thought was extinct. I also read a book about a boy who was picked up by a zeppelin in England during the years between the wars, I read Jules Verne’s many books, my favorites being
Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea
and
Around the World in Eighty Days,
also one called
The Lottery Ticket
about a poor family in Telemark who won a fortune in a lottery. I read
The Count of Monte Cristo
and
The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After
and
The Black Tulip.
I read
Little Lord Fauntleroy,
I read
Oliver Twist
and
David Copperfield,
I read
Nobody’s Boy
and
Treasure Island
and
The Children of the New Forest,
which I loved and read again and again as I had been given it and didn’t borrow it. I read
Mutiny on the Bounty,
Jack London’s books, and books about the sons of Bedouins and turtle hunters, stowaways and race car drivers, I read a series about a Swede who was a drummer boy in the American Civil War, I read books about boys who played soccer and I followed them season after season, and I read the more social-issue-style books that Yngve brought home, about girls who got pregnant and were going to have a baby, or who ended up on Skid Row and started taking drugs, it made no difference to me, I read everything, absolutely everything. At the annual flea market in Hove I found a whole series of the Rocambole books, which I bought and devoured. A series about a girl called Ida was another I read even though there must have been all of fourteen titles. I read all Dad’s old copies of
Detektivmagasinet,
and bought books about Knut Gribb, the Oslo detective, when I had enough money. I read about Christopher Columbus and Magellan, about Vasco da Gama and about Amundsen and Nansen. I read
A Thousand and One Nights
and Norwegian folk tales, which Yngve and I were given one Christmas by Grandma and Grandad. I read about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. I read about Robin Hood, Little John, and Maid Marian, I read about Peter Pan and about poor boys who swapped their lives for those of rich men’s sons. I read about boys who participated in sabotage operations during the German occupation of Denmark, and about boys who rescued someone from an avalanche. I read about a strange little man who lived on a beach and survived on what he could salvage from shipwrecks, and about young English boys who were cadets on naval vessels and Marco Polo’s adventures at the court of Genghis Khan. Book after book, bag after bag, week after week, month after month. From everything I read I learned that you had to have courage, that courage was perhaps the supreme attribute, that you have to be honest and sincere in all your dealings and that you must never let others down. In addition, that you must never give in, never give up, because if you have been resolute, upright, brave, and honest, however lonely it has made you and however alone you stand, in the end you are rewarded. I thought a lot about that, it was one of the thoughts I embraced when I was alone, that one day I would be back here and be someone. That I would be someone big whom everyone in Tybakken would be forced, whether they liked it or not, to admire. It wouldn’t come any day soon, I knew that, for it wasn’t respect I won when Asgeir made a derogatory comment about me and a girl I liked – I went for him and he simply forced me to the ground, straddled me, and started prodding my chest and cheeks, laughing and jeering. I happened to have a yellow Fox in my mouth and I tried to spit it out at him, to no avail, which was underhanded, everyone knew that, but the sticky yellow mess went all over my face. You smell of piss, you shit, I said to him, and it was true, he did. And, if that wasn’t enough, he had two sets of teeth, just like a shark, one row inside the other, and I pointed this repugnant sight out to the crowd milling around, not that it helped, I was on my back, vanquished, utterly powerless. You couldn’t get further from the ideals I had acquired through reading – which in fact were also valid among children, there were many of the same concepts of honor, although that precise word was not used, but that was what it was about. I was weak, slow, cowardly; not strong, quick, courageous. What good was it that, unlike them, I had been in contact with the ideals, that I knew them inside out, better than any of them ever would, when I couldn’t live up to them? When I cried for no reason? It felt unjust that I, of all people, who knew so much about heroic bravery, should be saddled with such frailties. But then there were books about frailties as well, and one of them carried me on a wave that would last several months.