“Can we
have
them?” Geir said.
“Be my guest.”
He kicked the bike stand, raised a hand to say goodbye, and set off up the hill with one hand in the middle of the handlebars. It looked as if he were leading an animal.
It was so obvious to us both that Geir would have to hide the magazines in his room that we didn’t even talk about it when we parted outside my house an hour later.
Mom’s pizzas had thick bases that rose around the edges, making the filling of minced meat, tomato, onions, mushrooms, peppers, and cheese look like a plain surrounded by long ranges of mountains on all sides. We were sitting at the living-room table, as always on Saturday evenings. We had never eaten in front of the television; that belonged to the realm of the unimaginable. Dad cut a piece for me and put it on my plate, I poured myself a glass of Coke from the liter bottle where the words Coca-Cola were printed in white on the greenish glass, not on a red label, which you also saw. Pepsi-Cola wasn’t sold in Sørland, I had drunk it only at the Norway Cup, and apart from the Metro and the breakfast where we could help ourselves to as many bowls of cornflakes as we wanted, that had been one of the tournament’s biggest attractions.
When the pizza was finished, Dad asked if we felt like playing a new game.
We did.
Mom cleared the table; Dad fetched a pad of paper and four pens from his study.
“Would you like to join in, Sissel?” he shouted to Mom, who had started washing up.
“Love to,” Mom said and joined us. She had soap lather on one arm and her temple. “What are we going to play? Yahtzee?”
“No,” Dad said. “We each have a piece of paper and we write down six headings: country, town, river, sea, lake, and mountain. One column for each. Then we choose a letter and the idea of the game is to jot down as many names as we can that begin with the respective letter in three minutes.”
We hadn’t played this one before. But it seemed like fun.
“Is there a prize?” Yngve said.
Dad smiled.
“Only the honor. Whoever wins becomes the family champion.”
“You start,” Mom said. “I’ll put some tea on for us.”
“We can do a trial run,” Dad said. “Then we can actually play when you’re back.”
He looked at us.
“M,” he said. “So, the letter M. Are you with me?”
“Yes,” Yngve said, and was already writing, with one arm shielding his work.
“Yes,” I said.
Mont Blanc, I wrote under mountain. Mandal, Morristown, Mjøndalen, Molde, Malmö, Metropolis, and Munich under town. I couldn’t think of any seas, or rivers. Next was countries. Were there any countries beginning with an M? I went through all the countries I could think of. But no. Moelven. Was that a river? Mo in Rana, that was a town anyway. Midwest? Oh, right, Mississippi!
“Time’s up,” Dad said.
A quick glance at their pieces of paper was enough to confirm that they had beaten me.
“You read yours out, Karl Ove,” Dad said.
When I got to Morristown both Dad and Yngve were laughing.
“Don’t laugh at me!” I said.
“Morristown only exists in
The Phantom
,” Yngve said. “Did you think it really existed?”
“Sure. And why not? Sala works in the UN building in New York, and that exists, doesn’t it? Why shouldn’t Morristown?”
“Good answer, Karl Ove,” Dad said. “You get half a point for that.”
I made a face at Yngve, who smirked back.
“Tea’s ready,” Mom said. We went into the kitchen and took a cup. I added milk and sugar.
“OK, let’s play properly now,” Dad said. “We’ll do three letters. That’s probably as much as we can manage before bedtime.”
Mom knew almost as few names as I did, it turned out. Or else she wasn’t concentrating as much as Yngve or Dad. However, it was good for me; it was the two of us against them.
After Dad had counted the points from the first round, Mom said she had changed her name.
“I’ve gone back to my old maiden name. So now I’m Hatløy and not Knausgård anymore.”
My blood ran cold.
“You’re not called Knausgård anymore?” I said, staring at her with my mouth open. “But you’re our mother!”
She smiled.
“Yes, of course I am! I always will be!”
“But why? Why aren’t you going to have the same name as us?”
“I was born Sissel Hatløy, as you know. That’s my name. Knausgård is Dad’s name. And your names!”
“Are you getting divorced?”
Mom and Dad smiled.
“No, we’re not getting divorced,” Mom said. “We’re just going to have different names.”
“But a rather stupid consequence of this,” Dad said, “is that we can’t meet Grandma and Grandad for a while. My parents don’t like your mother changing her name, so they don’t want to see us anymore.”
I gaped at him.
“What about at Christmas?” I said.
Dad shook his head.
I started crying.
“This is nothing to cry about, Karl Ove,” Dad said. “It’ll pass. They’re just angry now. And then it’ll pass.”
I scraped my chair back, got up, and ran to my room. After closing my door I heard someone follow. I lay down on the bed and bored my head into the pillow while sobbing loudly with tears flowing as they had never flowed before.
“But, Karl Ove,” Dad said behind me. He sat on the edge of the bed. “Don’t get so upset. Is it that much fun with Grandma and Grandad?”
“Yes!” I shouted into the pillow. My whole body was contorted in convulsive sobs.
“But if they don’t want to see your own mother. It’s not much fun seeing them then, is it? Surely you understand, don’t you? They don’t want to see us.”
“Why should she change her name?” I shouted.
“It’s her real name,” Dad said. “It’s what she wants. And neither you nor I nor Grandma nor Grandad can deny her that right. Can we?”
He placed his hand on my shoulder for a fleeting moment. Then he stood up and left the room.
When the tears had dried up I picked up the book Mom had bought me and carried on reading. At the back of my mind I was aware that Yngve had gone to bed, that the sliding door was closed, that they were playing music in the living room, but without a scrap of it sticking. From the first sentence I plunged headlong into the story and fell deeper and deeper. The main character was Ged, a boy who lived on an island and had special gifts, and when this was discovered he was sent to a school for wizards. There it came out that his gifts were extra-special, and once when he had to perform for the others, in an act of excessive arrogance, he opened the door to the other world, the underworld, the kingdom of death, and a shadow stole out. Ged was dying, he was weak, with failing powers, for many years afterward, marked for life, and the shadow pursued him. He fled from it, hid in some obscure place somewhere in the world, abandoned all his ambitions knowing that what he had done, the simple wizardry tricks, was just empty gestures and pretense, that there was another, a more profound kind of magic woven into all existence, and it was to maintain the balance here that was a wizard’s real responsibility. All objects and all creatures had names corresponding to their essence, and only by knowing the objects’ and creatures’ real names could they be controlled. Ged could do that, but he didn’t reveal that he could, because every spell, every act of wizardry, affected the balance, something else could happen somewhere else, which could not be foreseen. The villagers where he had settled thought therefore that he was a poor wizard; after all he wouldn’t perform even the simplest tricks with which every village wizard plied his trade. He was young, serious, there was a large scar across his face, he was sensitive to cold, but when the chips were down, when he really had to use his gifts, he did. Once there was a child dying. He followed it into the kingdom of death and brought it back, even though he shouldn’t have, even though it was dangerous, for if there was one balance that should not be upset, it was that between life and death. But he did it and almost died in the process. The villagers saw for the first time who he was. And the shadow that he had released from beyond, who all this time had been flitting around the world after him, saw him, because whenever he used his powers, it noticed and came closer. He had to leave. And he did, in a boat on the sea between islands to the furthest shore. The shadow came closer and closer. After several confrontations, with Ged near to death, came the final showdown. All the while he had been trying to find the name of the shadow. He had scoured reference works about creatures from the oldest times, asked other, more intelligent wizards, but in vain, the creature was unknown, nameless. Then he knew. On the sea, alone in a boat, with the shadow getting closer and closer, he knew. The shadow was called Ged. The shadow had his name. The shadow was himself.
When I turned off the light, after reading the last page, it was nearly twelve o’clock and my eyes were full of tears.
He was the shadow!
At least once, often twice, a week during that autumn and winter I was on my own in the house. Dad was at meetings, Yngve was at rehearsals with the school band or training with the volleyball or soccer teams, or at his friends’ houses. I liked being at home on my own, it was a wonderful feeling not to have someone telling me what to do, yet I didn’t like it that much either because the nights were drawing in and the reflection from the windows, of my figure wandering around, was extremely unpleasant to see, it smacked of death and the dead.
I knew this was not how it was, but what good did this knowledge do?
It was especially spooky when I was engrossed in what I was reading because it was as if I wasn’t attached
anywhere
when I lifted my head from my page and got up. All alone, that was the feeling I had, I was absolutely alone, isolated by the darkness that rose like a wall outside.
Oh, I could always run the bath if I had enough time before Dad returned, he didn’t like me having a bath at all hours, once a week he felt was enough and he kept a beady eye on this, like everything else I did. But if I took a liberty now and ran the bath, got in, switched on my cassette recorder, and let the hot water wash over my body, I could see myself from the outside, my mouth
agape,
as it were, as though my head were a skull. I sang, the voice rebounded, I submerged my head and was terrified: I couldn’t see anything! Someone could sneak up on me! Was anyone there? The two, three, four seconds I had been underwater represented a hole in time, and someone might have snuck in through that hole. Perhaps not into the bathroom, no, there was no one there, but they could have snuck into the house.
The best I could do in this situation was to switch off the kitchen light, or my bedroom light, and look out because outside, when there was no reflection from the windows, there were the other houses, there were the other families, and sometimes the other children, too. Nothing made you feel more secure than that.
On one such evening I was kneeling on a kitchen stool in the darkness and staring out, it was snowing and a gale was blowing. The wind was howling across the landscape, rushing down the chimney, and the roof gutters were rattling. It was pitch black outside, under the yellow glow from the street lamps, there wasn’t a soul, only gusting snow.
A car drove up. It turned into Nordåsen Ringvei, coming toward our house. Was it coming here?
It was. It came into our drive and parked.
Who could it be?
I ran out of the kitchen, down the stairs, and onto the porch.
There I stopped.
Surely no one was coming to visit us?
Who could it be?
I was frightened.
Went to the door and pressed my nose against the wavy glass. I didn’t need to open the door; I could stand there and see if I recognized the late-night visitor.
The car door opened and a figure
fell
out!
The figure was moving
on all fours
!
Oh no! Oh no!
Swaying from side to side like a bear, it came toward me. It stopped by the bell and rose onto two legs!
I backed away.
What sort of creature was this?
Ding dong, the bell went.
The figure dropped to all fours again.
The abominable snowman? Lightfoot?
But here? In Tybakken?
The figure raised itself again, rang the bell, and fell back onto all fours.
My heart was pounding.
But then it hit me.
Oh, of course.
It was the local councilman, the one who was paralyzed.
It had to be.
The abominable snowman didn’t drive a car.
I opened the door as the figure was starting to crawl away. It turned.
It
was
him.
“Hello,” he said. “Is your father at home?”
I shook my head.
“No,” I said. “He’s at a meeting.”
The man, who had a beard and glasses and a bit of saliva at the corners of his mouth, and who often drove around with young people in his custom-designed car, sighed.
“Say hello and tell him I was here,” he said.
“OK,” I said.
He dragged himself to the car using his arms, opened the door, and lifted himself up into the seat. I watched him through widened eyes. In the car, his slow, helpless movements were transformed, he revved the engine and reversed up the incline at speed, shot down the road, and was gone.
I closed the door and went to my room. No sooner was I lying on the bed than the door downstairs opened.
From the sounds I worked out that it was Yngve.
“Are you here?” he shouted up the stairs. I got up and went out.
“I’m so hungry,” he said. “Want to have supper now?”
“It’s only a little after eight,” I said.
“The earlier, the better,” he said. “And I can make some tea for us. I’m absolutely ravenous.”
“Call me when it’s ready,” I said.
A quarter of an hour later we were at the table eating bread, each with a big mug of tea in front of us.
“Was there a car here this evening?” Yngve said.
I nodded. “The paralyzed guy on the council.”
“What did he want?”
“How should I know?”
Yngve looked at me.
“Someone was talking about you today,” he said.