Child Wonder (28 page)

“Tear it to pieces.”

It was hot that day. It would soon be the summer holidays, the beginning of another silence. I went out again, up Hagan to view the blocks of flats, my mountain range, to see if I could see anything. And I saw a childhood which had gone, and a childhood which would always be there, two worlds which had nothing to do with each other. Satisfied with that, I walked back home, to the letter which reminded me of all the other letters that had been received and read with so much fear and trembling in this flat.

Her handwriting was rounded and girlish and flawless and as steady as a rock, formed by a hand that at one time could lift not one but all the Mikado sticks from a kitchen table ablaze with hysteria. And she was fine. Yes, there was quite a bit to say about how fine she was.

But she pointed a kind of accusatory finger at us, in the shape of a concluding question, the same question I had asked myself several thousand times, but had never dared to ask Mother: why did we just let her go like that?

So, she hadn’t suffered in any way – but how on earth could we be at peace with ourselves knowing someone had broken into our lives and stolen a childhood?

Then I remembered the time I was about to leave school in Sinsen, when Flintstone caught sight of me and called me one final time into that smoke-filled temple of his because, as he put it, he wished to share an observation with me.

“I have worked in this school since it was built,” he said with that yellow smile I still couldn’t work out. “And in the course of all these years I have never experienced anything like what you and that strange classmate of yours did when your sister was being bullied. Never.”

I had no idea where he was heading.

“It was quite unforgivable,” he said. “You two almost killed the fellow.” After a short pause, he went on, “Children don’t do that kind of thing.”

“Eh?”

“Children don’t stick up for each other in that way, not even siblings.”

He looked as if he had said something of great import. All the same, I was only able to repeat my perpetual “eh?” And now he was beginning to become impatient.

“So perhaps that was not how it happened?”

“How what happened?”

“How you two set about him in order to stick up for your sister.
Could there have been something else at play?”
At last I saw the light.

“You mean we just
felt
like beating him up?”

“For example.”

He had risen to his feet and stood waving a cigarette about.

“Yes, well, maybe,” I said obligingly, but with an old feeling I thought Linda had taken with her for good, because if Freddy 1 had not been wilder than me that evening, if he had not gone completely berserk,
I
would have done, and Dundas would have never got to his feet again. But this was not what Flintstone wanted to hear. And I was no longer sure of my motivation, that I had had it in me.

“Mhm, alright,” he said. “Let’s leave it at that then.”

I stayed on the balcony until I saw Mother rounding the corner of No. 2 in her new summer outfit, skirt and blouse and a short, light-coloured jacket – past the drying frame and up the flagstones to the front entrance, an elegant walk, purposeful and precise. There was still time to rush in and remove the letter. But I stayed put until I heard the key in the door, and, soon after, her voice inside the flat:

“Haven’t you put on the potatoes?”

“No,” I called back. “We’ve got a letter. It’s on the kitchen table.”

There was a long silence. Eventually she came out onto the balcony with the letter in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other and sat down on the camp chair, resting her feet on the stool I used to stand on when I washed up as a child. She had been to the bathroom and had removed her make-up, and perhaps not just that, for she had long since stopped hiding her tears – she was an attractive, successful woman with a patched-up childhood, the branch manager with her books balanced, all her life balanced, seen from the distant perspective of a lodger.

“Thank goodness,” she said with her eyes on the letter.

“Are you going to answer it?” I asked when nothing else was forthcoming.

“Of course.”

“I mean – are you going to answer her
question?”

“Of course,” she repeated. And read the letter once more.

“And what are you going to say?”

She looked up, but not at me.

“She would have been alright here, too,” she said thoughtfully. “But I didn’t know that at the time. I suppose, maybe, that’s why I didn’t do anything …”

“So it was
alright
that they came and took her?”

“I didn’t say that,” she answered as I got up and clenched my fists around the balcony railing and stared over to Essi’s mountain. “Our case simply wasn’t good enough, you see.”

I turned. And now she did look at me. “They knew everything about us.”

“Eh?”

Again this expression she adopts when I don’t understand the obvious.

“The lodger?” I asked. I did understand after all. “Because you refused to marry him?”

She nodded evasively.

“I don’t know for sure, but …”

She paused. “I tried to find her once.”

“Without telling me?”

“You were just a child, Finn.”

I considered whether I had ever been a child and noted that neither of us had called the lodger by his right name since he left us, and in fact I had known all along. Kristian, the tram conductor and seaman, toolmaker, construction worker and trade union man, tent owner and wear-and-tear philosopher in a poplin mac, was so full of tales I should never have been in any doubt.

“You liked him, didn’t you?” Mother asked.

“I don’t know.”

“You tried anyway.”

I suppose I did do my best, yes, for her sake. And now I felt I could either do the same as she did, nod with a kind of satisfaction that everything had gone well for Linda and leave it at that, or I could go into my room and smash the microscope and chop up the chess board. But I couldn’t do either.

“I think
you
should write,” she said. “You’re the clever one after all.”

“And tell her it didn’t matter that they took her away?” I sniped and regretted it instantly. “Of course,” I corrected myself. “Of course I’ll write.”

“Let’s do it right now,” she said and got up to fetch a pen and paper.

For a while I stood looking down at her coffee cup which she had placed like a paperweight on Linda’s letter, so that the wind wouldn’t catch it, the final acquittal, I suppose that was how Mother viewed it, then I stared into Essi’s mountain, without averting my eyes, wondering if I was really ready to find out whether I had it in me, whether I had ever had it in me.

FINIS

Funding the translation and publication of exceptional literary works

The Scattered Papers of Penelope
by Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke, edited and translated from the Greek by Karen Van Dyck

The Last Brother
by Nathacha Appanah, translated from the French by Geoffrey Strachan

The Accordionist’s Son
by Bernardo Atxaga, translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa

The Lovers of Algeria
by Anouar Benmalek, translated from the French by Joanna Kilmartin

The Star of Algiers
by Aziz Chouaki, translated from the French by Ros Schwartz and Lulu Norman

Child Wonder
by Roy Jacobsen, translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett with Don Shaw

A House at the Edge of Tears
by Vénus Khoury-Ghata, translated from the French by Marilyn Hacker

Nettles
by Vénus Khoury-Ghata, translated from the French by Marilyn Hacker

She Says
by Vénus Khoury-Ghata, translated from the French by Marilyn Hacker

A Wake for the Living
by Radmila Lazic, translated from the Serbian by Charles Simic

No Shelter
by Pura López-Colomé, translated from the Spanish by Forrest Gander

New European Poets,
edited by Wayne Miller and Kevin Prufer
Look There
by Agi Mishol, translated from the Hebrew by Lisa Katz

I Curse the River of Time
by Per Petterson, translated from the Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund with Per Petterson

Out Stealing Horses
by Per Petterson, translated from the Norwegian by Anne Born

To Siberia
by Per Petterson, translated from the Norwegian by Anne Born

Shyness and Dignity
by Dag Solstad, translated from the Norwegian by Sverre Lyngstad

Meanwhile Take My Hand
by Kirmen Uribe, translated from the Basque by Elizabeth Macklin

Without an Alphabet, Without a Face
by Saadi Youssef, translated from the Arabic by Khaled Mattawa