“Yes, you are!” I said, starting to cry. “You are Yngve! Yngve! Say you’re Yngve!”
“Now you will come down to the cellar with me,” he said. “Heh heh heh …”
“YNGVE!” I screamed.
He smiled at me.
“I’m only joking,” he said. “You didn’t seriously think I was a cyborg, did you?”
“Don’t do that,” I said. “Switch the light on right now.”
He took a step toward me.
“NO!” I shouted.
“OK, OK,” he laughed. “Let’s switch on the light then. Shall we eat now or what? Are you hungry?”
“Switch on the light first,” I said.
He switched on the wall lights and the lamp on the TV, where the news had already started. Then we went into the kitchen and had our supper. Yngve made us some tea, which was fine as long as we made sure to clear up after us, it must have been inconceivable for Dad that we could actually use the stove and boil water when he wasn’t here. Afterward we unpacked our soccer game on the living-room table, with the door to his room open and my favorite Queen record –
A Night at the Opera –
playing.
When we heard Dad’s car outside we hurriedly cleared the table and went into our separate rooms. Sometimes he summoned Yngve if we had been alone and asked what we had been doing and how it had been, but this evening he walked straight into the living room and sat down in front of the television.
It was actually a relief that he kept his distance the way he did, but there was more to it than that, I had a sense he didn’t want things to be like this, it was as though the air in the house was weighed down with this feeling, a demand no one could fulfill.
When he came up to us next time it was dreadful. I had been under the weather, I had a cold and a temperature that had risen dramatically in the last hour, and I was sitting in Yngve’s bed, leaning against the wall and reading one of his magazines. He was doing his homework at the desk, and the Boomtown Rats were playing on the turntable.
Bang, the door opened, and there was Dad looking at us.
He was in a good mood, his eyes beaming with energy.
“You’re playing music,” he said. “It sounds good. What’s their name?”
“The Boomtown Rats,” Yngve said.
Dad translated the name into Norwegian. “Do you remember how you laughed when I said Crystal Palace was Krystallpalasset? You didn’t believe me!”
He smiled and came into the room.
“Do you like the music, too, Karl Ove?” he said.
I nodded.
“Come on. Let’s dance,” he said.
“I’m sick, Dad. I think I’ve got a temperature. I don’t feel like it.”
“Course you do,” Dad said, grabbing my hands, dragging me to my feet, and swinging me round.
“Stop it, Dad!” I said. “I’m sick! I don’t want to dance!”
But he carried on, swung me round, faster and faster, wilder and wilder. It was unbearable and I was on the point of throwing up.
“PACK IT IN, DAD!” I shouted in the end. “PACK IT IN!”
He stopped as quickly as he had started, threw me down on the bed, and left.
Every Friday Mom came home, I would always be close at hand so that I could be with her first because if I was first Dad couldn’t send me to my room, which he could do if they were sitting and talking. By the time she left again on Sunday night or Monday morning it was as if Dad had come closer to us, or at least me, for again he called me to the kitchen to tell him what had happened during the day while he cooked. We ate in silence and after doing the dishes he disappeared down to his study without fail. Occasionally he came to watch TV with us, but usually he was downstairs until supper, and so it was as if Yngve and I were on our own at home. Not that I spent my time much differently from how I would have done if he hadn’t been there. Mostly I lay on my bed reading. As Mom no longer drove us regularly to the library, and I had read all the books in the school library, I started on Mom and Dad’s shelves. I read Agatha Christie and I read Stendhal,
Le Rouge et Le Noir,
I read a book of French short stories, I read a book by Jon Michelet and a biography of Tolstoy. I started writing a book myself, it was going to be about a sailing ship, but after I had written the first ten pages, which consisted largely of listing all the people on board, what kinds of provisions they had, and what cargo they were carrying, Yngve said no one wrote books about sailing ships nowadays, they did when sailing ships existed, now people write about what it’s like to be alive today, and so I stopped. I also compiled a newspaper that autumn, in triplicate, which I put in three mailboxes, one for Karlsen, one for Gustavsen, and one for Prestbakmo, but I never heard any more, they just seemed to disappear into a void, as if they had never existed.
I lived one life indoors and another outdoors, as it had always been and as I suppose it was for all children; in front of the TV on Saturday night, surrounded by their parents and brothers and sisters, they were probably very different, much gentler and more accepting than when I saw them down in the forest, where freedom was total and nothing prevented them from following their smallest inclinations. The difference was particularly pronounced in the autumn. In the spring and summer so much of life was lived outdoors, the degree of contact between a child’s life and an adult’s life was changed, but when autumn came and the nights drew in so early it was as if the ties were cut and we slipped into our own worlds as soon as the front door closed behind us. The brief, dark, cold evenings were laden with all the excitement that exists in the unseen and the hidden. The autumn was darkness, earth, water, and hollow spaces. It was breathing, laughter, torchlight, dens, bonfires, and a flock of children drifting here and there. And not least the bedrooms afterward. Even though I never got permission to have anyone at home and none of the kids on the estate had ever been to my bedroom, I was always allowed to go to theirs. To some occasionally, to others often. That autumn it was the turn of Dag Lothar’s bedroom. Red-faced after running through the darkness, we would sit in his room and play Monopoly while listening to one of his two Beatles albums, the red one or the blue one, on the cassette recorder. I liked the red one better, with their first songs, they were simple and happy, we would sing along loudly with the chorus, almost shouting, in English, not bothering too much about the semantics, only the sound, although the blue one was played more and more as we began to enjoy the somber, more unfamiliar tunes on it.
These evenings are among the happiest in my life. It is strange because there was nothing exceptional about them, we did what all young people did, sat playing games, listening to music, chattering away about whatever came into our heads.
But I liked the smell in their house, I liked being there. I liked the darkness we had just come from, which lent everything an unaccustomed quality, especially when it was damp and you could feel it in your whole body, not only see it with your eyes. I liked the light from the street lamps. I liked the atmosphere that arose when there were lots of us together, the voices in the night, the bodies moving around me. I liked the sound of the foghorn from the open sea. My thinking on these evenings: anything can happen. I liked just dashing around, coming across the unexpected – objects, features, situations. The huts that had been erected in the forest above the pontoons, they were empty in the evening, the windows were lit, and we peered in. Were those porn mags lying there? Yes, they were. No one dared to smash a window and go in and take them, but now all of a sudden it was a possibility, and we knew someone would do it soon, perhaps even we would. This was a time when one morning there could be a centerfold from a porn magazine lying in the road outside the house. This was a time when you could find porn mags in the ditches, in fields, and under bridges. Who had left them there we had no idea, they were scattered as if by God’s hand, a part of nature, like wood anemones, catkins, swollen streams, or rain-smooth rocks. And the elements marked them, too: they were either spongy with moisture or bone dry or the paper had cracked after having dried out again, often they were sun-faded, soil-stained, and discolored.
A thrill went through me when I thought about the magazines. It had nothing to do with the way we talked about them, we talked tough, we laughed and ogled them greedily, but the thrill lay somewhere else, so deep that rational thought never reached it.
There were many young guys on the estate you could imagine would have pornographic magazines at home, and they were without exception the same ones you could imagine buying a moped when the time came, starting to smoke and playing hooky from school, in short, the ones who hung out at the Fina station. The bad boys. So within me there were two incompatible entities. The magazines belonged to the bad, but what they filled me with, the intense thrill that forced me to gulp again and again, was also something I desired with a wild urgency. I went weak at the knees when I got to see one of the naked women. It was fantastic, it was terrible, it was the world opening and hell revealing itself, the light shining and the darkness falling, we just wanted to stand there flicking through the pages, we could have stood there for all eternity, beneath the heavy boughs of the spruce trees, with the aroma of damp earth and wet mountain, leering at the pictures. It was as though these women rose from the bog, straight up from the autumn-yellow grass, or at least were closely related to it. Parts of the pictures were often obliterated, but we saw enough of both the soft and the hard to know with certainty that these feelings existed and never left us, and every rumor of the existence of a magazine was always followed up at once.
Geir was one of the keenest in this regard. Already in the second class he had borrowed a copy of his father’s
Vi Menn
and we sat down in the forest to study the topless women while, to ward off any suspicions, we talked in high-pitched voices about what Donald and Dolly were doing as though we were reading cartoon strips.
Now there were porn mags in the huts.
We circled them, but the doors were locked and we didn’t have the nerve to smash the glass, undo the catch on the windows, and steal the magazines.
But the desire was aroused and it cast around in other directions. The clumps of trees around the car wreck in the forest?
The ditch behind the bus stop by B-Max?
The trees under the bridge?
The garbage dump, but of course! There had to be some there, didn’t there? Hundreds? Thousands?
Sunday morning, the end of September, Dad fishing in his boat, Mom in the living room, Yngve on his bike somewhere on the east of the island, and me out of the door and across the wet gravel, wearing my beige jacket and my blue jeans, on my way up to Geir’s, butterflies in my stomach, we were finally going to the garbage dump. The sun was shining, but it had rained early in the morning and the tarmac was still black and wet in those places the sun didn’t reach, such as in the shade under the spruce trees outside our house.
Geir was standing outside, ready, when I arrived, and we sprinted off. Up the hill, over the long plain where there were boats under tarpaulins in front gardens, mostly plastic boats but also some small dinghies, and one cabin cruiser, renowned far and wide. The lawns were brown, the trees behind the houses orange and red, the sky was blue. We had taken off our jackets and knotted them around our waists. Walked up past Ketil’s house, onto the gravel road and through the gate that marked the end of the road and the start of the path. On the other side of the field was the new parish hall, where Ten Sing, with all the blonde girls, rehearsed and had their meetings.
The stream alongside the path was full, cool green water, flowing lazily down the gentle slope. It got its color from the heather, the grass, and the plants the water flowed and lay across. Only minor ripples on the surface revealed that it was moving. Where the hill became steeper and the stream fell with a roar we began to run. The white stones littering the path were a matte gray in the shadow, a gleaming yellow in the sun. Ahead of us someone was walking uphill and we slowed down. It was an elderly couple. She had gray hair and a cardigan; he had a cord jacket with leather patches on the elbows and a stick in his hand. His mouth was open and his jaw trembled.
We turned and looked after them.
“That was Thommesen, that was,” Geir said.
We hadn’t seen him since he had us in the second class.
“I thought he’d died ages ago!” I said.
We took the old shortcut through the forest and emerged on the edge above the garbage dump. The mountain of white plastic bags and black garbage bags glinted in the full sun. A dozen or so seagulls were screaming and flapping their wings. We clambered down the slope and wove our way between all the objects, which in some places were stacked high, perhaps four times higher than us, and in others lay strewn about with nothing on top. We were looking for bags and cardboard boxes, and there was no shortage of them, also containing magazines, weeklies that the elderly read:
Hjemmet
and
Allers
and
Norsk Ukeblad,
weeklies for girls:
Starlet
and
Det Nye
and
Romantikk,
piles of newspapers, mostly
Verdens Gang
and
Agderposten,
but also
Vårt Land
and
Aftenposten
and
Dagbladet
; we found
A-Magasinet
and
Kvinner og Klær,
horsey magazines for girls,
Donald Duck
comics and a fat
Fantomet
album from the late sixties that I immediately put to one side, a
Tempo
album as well, some
Kaptein Miki
comics, and one
Agent X9
paperback, which I was pretty pleased with, but it didn’t alter the fact that what we were searching for, that is, magazines like
Alle Menn, Lek, Coctail,
and
Aktuell Report,
and perhaps even a few foreign magazines, because there were quite a few Danish ones in circulation, one called
Weekend Sex,
for example, and some Swedish and English ones, was nowhere to be found. We didn’t find a single porn magazine! What was going on? Had someone beaten us to it? They had to be here!