Child Wonder (20 page)

“Oh yes.”

“Don’t you know what electricity is?”

“No-oo …”

“Electricity, you must have heard about it.”

“No-oo …”

“Finn!”
I heard Mother shout from the kitchen, at her shrillest, and I called back, at my most obnoxious, two roles which, once we had adopted them, we did not find so easy to throw off. But the great thing about roles is that at least you do not waste time wondering what to do. I asked whether the man thought I should plug in the T.V. so that he would get a real thunderbolt and perhaps drop down dead, then Mother appeared and dragged me into the kitchen and asked me what the devil I thought I was playing at.

“Perhaps I should start in the special class,” I said. Her expression threatened another slap, but I retreated smartly, and then something quite different struck me.

“I want to see the photographs.”

“Which photographs?”

“Of my father.”

“What are you talking about?”

I went back to the sitting room and asked the man if I could borrow a screwdriver.

“There you go.”

“Haven’t you got a bigger one?”

He gave me a bigger screwdriver and I went back through Mother’s minefield and into the bedroom and inserted the screwdriver in the crack above the locked dressing table drawer and sat down on her bed – two metres between me and the mighty crowbar which so far had not done any damage, but was there, a deed waiting to be done, which took Mother’s breath away as she ran in after me.

“You say she looks like him,” I said.

“What?”

“You say Linda looks like my … our father. I want to see if it’s true.”

She seemed to be on the point of acquiescing when I felt the next sentence taking shape. “Are you her mother?”

“What on earth do you mean?”

“Are
you
her mother?”

“Finn, please!”

Tears poured down my cheeks, I could barely see. “You say she not only looks like him,” I said. “But she’s like
you
too.”

She stood for a while, then sat down and started stroking my hair, clumsily tousling and ruffling it, but for once I didn’t mind, and so we sat looking at the huge screwdriver, the well-worn wooden handle smeared with grease and black oil, fearing that this might pass, this apparent reconciliation.

“It’s difficult to explain, Finn,” she said. “But I don’t mean
like
in that way, a family resemblance.”

“How then?”

“Perhaps that we’ve had the same
experiences,
in our childhoods …”

“Bad experiences?”

She pondered and said:

“Yes.”

I probably gave the impression I understood what she was talking about, even though I didn’t want to hear any more. She brushed a few strands of hair from my face, leaned forward and lifted her jewellery box from the bedside table drawer, opened it and gave me a sheet of paper which was in fact a stamped document proving I was who I was, Finn, born in Aker Hospital at half past eight in the morning on the right day of the right year, the crane driver’s son and hers, yes, even the name Finn, for they had already decided to call me that when I was planned, it had been my grandfather’s name – if I turned out to be a boy, that is.

“This is the most valuable thing I possess,” she said gently.

“Uhuh,” I said, looking down at the document, there was also a signature, a doctor’s.

“That’s why I keep it in this box. Do you understand?”

I nodded. She held up the envelope and showed me it was empty.

“And there is no other birth certificate here, see?”

I nodded again, a few kilos lighter for each spoonful she fed me. “There’s just this one,” she continued.

“Mhm, mhm, mhm,” I said, mostly to myself.

She put the certificate back into the envelope, fished out a little key, went to the dressing table and removed the screwdriver.

“You can have a look at
one,”
she said, and inserted the key into the lock. “Our wedding photograph.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, getting up. I had discovered that although she might have been worse than useless over the special class business, she was still my mother and if this confrontation had not been about precisely
this
when it started, it had certainly become so, the most important of all questions had been answered with a yes. For lack of anything better to do I grabbed the screwdriver, took it back and apologised once more.

“Well,” she said behind me. “Now at least you know where the key is.”

A couple of days later Kristian was sitting with us over supper. I had spent the afternoon trying to pen a letter to Tanja, a letter which in addition to including such names as Rumania, Moldova, Albania and so forth was to encompass the whole immeasurable beauty of my life, coupled with the equally gigantic headache of making it all cohere.

But for once I could not find the words.

Standing between slices of bread and a glass of milk there was a bottle of red wine with two stem glasses which Mother kept in the sideboard and as a rule appeared only when they needed to be dusted. Linda was in a good mood, she compiled a list of four things to make sandwiches with and asked us to vote on them while Kristian was talking about the earthquake in Persia that had cost thousands of lives, he explained what the Richter Scale was and pointed out how lucky we were to live in Norway and not in a divide between two tectonic plates. Meanwhile Mother was drinking red wine, now and then dabbing her lips with a napkin, and she said to me with a trace of a smile on her face:

“Fancy you standing up to the headmaster and saying that.”

“Yes, I have to say that boy
has
got something,” Kristian chuckled, seizing the opportunity, but he was put in his place at once by Mother’s glare, the glare which says, here she is, having to listen to something from a lodger’s mouth which might be construed as criticism.

“What else could I have done?” she cried with cheeks ablaze.

“It’s not the children there’s anything wrong with,” Kristian muttered. “It’s the fact that they insist on putting them into …”

Mother had to come to his aid.

“Pigeon-holes?”

“Er … yes, that’s it.”

He forced a smile, looked around for a way out and caught sight of Linda. “How’s it going, Linda?” he said in a booming voice. “Are you enjoying school?”

“Yes,” said Linda, running into the room for her exercise book and a pencil and she began to write what were supposed to be letters, Mother had to put a hand over her eyes and restrain herself.

“Why do you always speak to her in such a loud voice?” I asked Kristian.

“Do I?”

“Yes.”

“I hadn’t noticed.”

“What are you getting at, Finn?”

Mother had removed her hand from her eyes and fixed them on me, with her threatening expression. I laid my head to the table top, turned to face the kitchen unit and whispered softly:

“Linda?”

“Yes,” Linda said, engrossed in her scribbles on the other side of the table.

There appeared to be something on Mother’s mind, while Kristian again looked as though he had missed an opportunity, then for some unaccountable reason he flew into a temper. But straightaway Mother placed a hand over his – and in a flash I saw it, not only what Linda was doing to us, showing us who we were, unveiling us, but also the inane face of a man who had lost control of himself, and I wondered for one dazed second whether I should finally tell her what had happened to my ribs, that the lodger had skied after me on that freezing cold winter day an eternity ago and tried to knock some sense into me, as he called it, so that I wouldn’t tell Mother that he had called Linda retarded, this fateful secret that I had been carrying around for all these months, without knowing why, it just would not come out, and her calming hand which covered his, the intimate calming hand, it had been there before.

I got up, went into the sitting room, switched on the T.V. and was watching a children’s programme without taking in the measurements of a bird box for a starling, without hearing what was said about the boys’ marching band at a school in Valdres, as various instruments glided by, French horn, clarinet, trumpet … when another row erupted in the kitchen, and Kristian jumped to his feet and headed for his room, only to be stopped in his tracks by Mother’s shrill tone once again.

“We were going to celebrate today, weren’t we?”

They were going to celebrate the fact that Mother had been promoted, she was going to work in the garments and hats department as well, it was not a promotion as such, but most likely it meant a bit extra in the pay packet.

There was just this letter of mine I had to write to Tanja.

So far I had written two essays about the holidays, one about Linda and me on the island and one for Freddy 1, about his stay on the same island. We had been on holiday together, each in our own tent. Freddy 1’s was green and a little less spectacular, for once he hadn’t made a fool of himself, and I had made him write it in ink for just half of the money he offered me. We both benefited from this.

So what was it about this letter to Tanja that was hard to write?

Was Tanja expecting a letter from me in the first place? It is not easy to say, enigma that I am. I had a quiff, I was a bit shorter than she was and had not said a word to her until just recently. And of course there is something unique about a letter; every time anything serious happens, a letter follows; only matters so important that they cannot be uttered aloud are in a letter; the purpose of letters is to tidy up, in all kinds of ways, they function as written evidence, legal formulations, letters are for ever – and at last the blockage was gone.

I switched off the T.V. and went to my room and wrote a four-page letter to Tanja, even shed a tiny tear, the type of crying Mother calls good, for want of anything to be happy about, I suppose, and slipped it into an envelope on which I wrote her name, Tanja, it was almost as overwhelming as Rumania. Then I sat musing on whether to draw a stamp on it as well, but concluded it was childish and instead settled down to read
The Unknown Soldier.
In the meantime another bottle of red wine had appeared on the kitchen table.

I didn’t often go to bed before Linda, but now it had happened twice in less than a week. I read through the first seven pages again. Like Linda. But I had written an important letter and had felt the feverish unease flow out through my fingers and the pen nib onto the paper, as neat handwriting, images from inside me that were suddenly there, so tangible, on a piece of paper and could be
read
– and the secret that Mother had stirred into life by touching the lodger’s hand went dormant – but why, actually? Kristian’s dirty laundry had become an integral part of ours, string vests, socks and large trade union trousers hanging side by side with my shirts and Linda’s tights in the cellar drying room, the wardrobe of a nuclear family of four, there had also been some snide remarks in the street.

“What are your mother and that lodger of yours up to?”

He sat at the kitchen table almost every evening, he stood on the stairs chatting with Frank as if they were neighbours, he had even taken part in local community work, building the new sandpit down by the bus turnaround, in addition to his ever-increasing number of comments about Linda and me, as if it was any of his business, served up with those stock expressions you could read on the mugs of all the other
fathers.
So why didn’t I tell her about my ribs?

Because I didn’t trust her, however much she looked after this document in her jewellery box that proved I was who I was, it didn’t prove anything at all. But then I did have Tanja …

Now, I never handed over this letter. Although I carried it around in my satchel for some time. And the mere knowledge that it was in this bag which I slung on my back every morning, which I lined up with the other satchels in front of the entrance to the school playground, laying satchels, as the school calls it, this school bag that I swung around my head and fought with and hurled across the ice and kept my pencil case and books in – it was like walking around with a huge power inside me, a latent ability, a hand grenade waiting to explode. The thought that at any moment I could take out this letter which had succeeded in reconciling me with my inner unrest and slap it down on Tanja’s desk was so immense that it overshadowed all the defeats I experienced when my courage failed me at potential hand-over moments because I discovered something about her, about Tanja, which made me feel that perhaps she, like Mother, had not deserved such a long letter; after all, this was the type of letter you write just once in a lifetime, the one time you really mean it; all subsequent letters pale by comparison with this one, are reduced to copies and fakes because they are based on the experience of the first letter, the first and the only one. You don’t sweet-talk in the letter of your life. You tell the truth.

At the end of September the miracle came about at long last, also in the form of a letter. It was a Wednesday, it was like a summer day that had got the seasons muddled. I ran home at extra high speed planning to do a quick turnaround in the hallway and join a street cart race when Mother suddenly turned up, two hours before her normal time and in the same furious state she had been after receiving the telephone call from the headmaster. With a letter in her hand.

“Is this your doing as well?” she barked.

I had the letter shoved under my nose like a revolver muzzle and understood nothing from the typed lines except that Linda would be transferred next week to the class for which she had been originally registered, for a trial period, it stated, along with “after due consideration” and “in consultation with the special class teacher and the school nurse” … Greetings, Flintstone.

“No,” I said, which was the truth.

However, I suppose I must have looked as if I needed time to think, as I always do when Mother corners me, there are a lot of aspects you have to consider. She took this as a confession though and strode out of the door to pay a visit to Eriksen in the adjacent block, he had a telephone, and, shaking with indignation, she rang the headmaster on his home number.