Child Wonder (5 page)

It turned out, you see, that Kristian was a fan of numbers, like me, lap times, dates, car registration numbers, once something was in my head, it stayed there. He knew, for example, that there were more than 60,000 T.V.s in Norway, which was almost one for every ten households; in the U.S.A. almost every single home had a colour set. He used words like “intelligent”, “development” and “sporadic”, concepts of which Mother and I had no more than the vaguest of notions. After the fish, the screen was filled with a large Asian face, which we were to discover belonged to the man with the ridiculous-sounding name of U Thant, whom we had heard on the radio and had had a good laugh about, but Kristian knew that U Thant was reportedly both intelligent and had vision, or “so it’s said”, he added. And this view of U Thant’s intellectual apparatus was not only the opinion of one lodger but also the judgement of something close to a majority, a truth conveyed by the somewhat speculative “it’s said” and “reportedly” – there was an insidious, irresistible magic to almost every sentence Kristian uttered. And even though in the following minutes, he used the words “arsehole” (once), “lame”, “radiator” and not least “absenteeism”, again the thought crossed our minds that he might be educated, and I could tell by Mother’s face that this unsettled her more than the vulgar language; I mean, anyone and everyone can swear, the air had turned pretty blue when the door to my old room was being moved. So it must have been the combination that put her nose out of joint, that one and the same person could use words like “arsehole” and “sporadic”, as if the man were a half-breed, a man without a home town, who everyone knows is a gypsy, which in turn implies false and unreliable; did we have a Trojan horse stabled here in our idyll?

The evening came to an end with a brief comment from Mother:

“Yes, well, I think it’s bedtime.”

She rose to her feet and pulled down the hem of her skirt. Then Kristian also jumped up, as if he had been caught
in flagrante.

“Yes, tomorrow’s another day. Goodnight.”

He went to his room, but came out again and said, “Thank you for supper, I forgot to say that, I think,” and placed a black five-øre piece on the T.V., said I could have it, a five-øre coin from the war, told me he had collected coins himself at one time, and supposed I did, too?

Mother and I were at length able go to the bathroom to perform our nightly ablutions, which had become more extensive since the lodger’s arrival, as she now had to wait till the last moment to remove her shoe-shop make-up, with me sitting on the edge of the bathtub holding a toothbrush in one hand and the coin in the other.

“What do you think?” she said, looking at me in the mirror.

“Alright,” I said, referring to the T.V., although it – because of the programmes, I suppose – had not quite lived up to expectations, but this could easily be rectified, at least I had something to tell people at school the next day.

“Strange,” she said.

“What is?”

“Just hope we haven’t done anything stupid here.”

“What?”

“Didn’t you see his hands? He’s not a builder, not in a million years.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you’ve seen Frank’s … er … herr Syversen’s hands.”

I had no idea what she was driving at, but looked down at my left hand, the one with the coin, nothing out of the ordinary there.

“Hope he’s not a snob,” Mother said.

I didn’t know what a snob was, but I didn’t think it bore much relation to Kristian after she had explained.

In the ensuing days it appeared that the new lodger had a number of items that anyone would covet, a bayonet from the time when he had been a soldier, a microscope in a wooden box with brass fittings, a leather pouch containing twenty-eight steel balls that had been in the bearings of yellow earth-movers and could be used as marbles or just to hold in your hand – what wonderful objects to hold in your hand. In another wooden box he had a little brass spinning top with a painted green spiral pattern that made you go dizzy when you watched it. As well as that there was a chess set with steel pieces which he claimed he had made himself, like the spinning top; he was a toolmaker by trade, he told me. But he hadn’t liked being a toolmaker, for reasons which he explained but of which I didn’t understand a word. So he had gone to sea instead, which he had enjoyed until he was wrecked west of Ireland. Then he didn’t want to sail the seas any longer, and returned to his old profession, but it had not changed in the intervening years, so, in the end, he turned his hand to the building trade.

We didn’t hear any more of this job of his, which, according to Mother, was not consistent with the state of his hands, until one evening when she asked him outright, after he had paid his rent – on time – for the first month.

“I do union work for the most part,” he said with a pointed stare, and went into his room, leaving Mother and me looking at each other in bewilderment.

“Heavens,” Mother said.

With this, one mystery gave way to another. Why could Kristian not put his cards on the table, as we had done, now that he was living here and was affable in a way that made us like him?

Now it was Mother’s turn to be concerned. I had long come to terms with Kristian having been a seaman and a toolmaker, so much so that
that
became an issue too, in as much as Mother refused to let me go into his room whenever I felt like it, and that was by and large every evening. I knocked, he said “Come in” and I went in and stood gawping until he looked up from the newspaper and nodded to the one spindle-back chair there was room for, next to the armchair in which he was seated. He carried on reading for another minute or two while I sat with my hands wedged between my knees surveying his books, the bag of ball bearings hanging from a hook on the wall and the chess board, until he had finished reading and asked if I had done my homework.

“Yes,” I said.

“I never did any homework,” he said.

That didn’t cut much ice with me. I had lots of friends who didn’t do their homework, and that just got them into trouble; besides, words and numbers were fun, and he must have seen that in me.

“You’re a funny chap,” he said.

“You are, too,” I said. “Can we look down the microscope?”

“Go on then, get it out.”

I pulled out the microscope and fitted the mirrors and the glass slides, and we studied the surface of a krone coin; it didn’t look much, scratches all over the place, as deep as ravines, all the things the naked eye cannot see.

“Do you know what that is?” Kristian asked.

“No.”

“It’s the history of the coin, look here, the date, 1948, it has passed through thousands of hands since then, it’s been shaken about in piggy banks, cash tills, pockets and slot machines and perhaps it fell out of a taxi and pinged around Storgata one rainy night and was driven over by a bus before a little girl found it on her way to school the next morning, took it home and put it in her piggy bank. All these are
tracks,
the history of the coin, do you know what history is, lad? Well, it’s wear and tear. Look here, for example, at my face, it’s full of wrinkles, even though I’m only 38, and look at yours, as smooth as a baby’s bum, and so the sole difference between us is wear and tear, a meagre thirty years’ wear, like the difference between that coin there and a krone that was minted yesterday, such as this one.” He produced a brand new coin, with a horse where the crown had been before, and let me examine it under the microscope. True enough, it was as smooth as a windless sea. Until we changed the lens and looked even closer, then we saw that even the surface of a new coin is matt, covered with billions of tiny particles that Kristian called crystalline chips, which wear and tear were destined to remove. “In other words a coin is not at its shiniest, at its peak as a coin, that is, when it’s spat out by the stamping machine, it’s more like the time when the twenty-sixth or forty-third owner fishes it out of his pocket and pays for a sausage with potato cakes and mustard at Åsbua in Bjerke –
that
is the apex of the coin’s history, as it slips out of the hands of a hungry customer and lands on the counter of a well-fed sausage vendor. From thereon everything is downhill all the way, inexorably, even though it takes time. Have you ever seen any coins that have been worn right down?”

“No.”

“Nip into the sitting room and get your mother’s encyclopaedia, the volume with S on the spine.”

I did as he said, and we looked up King Sverre, himself a pinnacle in the wear and tear of our country, but Sverre had not just been a warrior and king and turned the nation on its head, he had also had coins minted that were pictured in the encyclopaedia. On them you could barely make out
Suerus Magnus Rex,
which was Latin; they were as thin as leaves, so like shimmering tinsel that if you held them up to the light you would be able to see the sun through them. But here, of course, we were talking about no fewer than
800
years of wear and tear, so that was alright, for coins, mind you, Kristian pointed out in conclusion.

I looked at him, perplexed.

“And, leading on from this,” he said philosophically, “when would you judge a human being to be at his peak?”

I had a think.

“Your age, maybe,” he said with a sly smile.

That night I took the encyclopaedia with me to bed and read the whole article about King Sverre, and although there were several words which not even Kristian used, I felt that he had been quite right.

Mother, however, did not like these visits of mine to his room. I should not disturb the lodger, I was told, and furthermore she didn’t like me staying inside for so long after I had knocked and waited for him to say “Come in” – sometimes he didn’t say “Come in”, and then I didn’t go in. The worst thing was that I came back out with all kinds of information, the average temperature in the Svalbard archipelago or the Norwegian consumption of aquavit, 3.3 million litres per year, but they had not managed to pour more than a tenth as much red wine down their throats, this was not the sort of thing to stuff into the head of a young kid.

“I am not a young kid.”

Moreover, I could tell her that what we had always called“red sausage” was in fact known as salami and that Einar Gerhardsen, the Prime Minister, was not to be trusted even though we voted him in time after time. So an end was put to these evening visits of mine. I was not even allowed to go in and return the microscope I had been lent to study the mesh in Mother’s nylon stockings. She did it for me. But when she re-emerged her cheeks were red, and she wanted to know if the lodger always hung his underwear over the curtain rod to dry.

I had no idea. But she collected herself for a new foray and ran in again to say that she did not want any underwear hanging in the window for the whole estate to see.

“Alright,” Kristian said, unmoved. “But where should I dry it? Or wash it?”

The upshot was that he would have his own basket for dirty laundry, so that he could carry it down to the wash-house when it was her turn to wash, and throw it into the drum, after which she would hang it up for him, in the drying room. I had a feeling that this arrangement was to avoid having to touch his dirty clothes. That was Kristian’s interpretation, too. And there wasn’t much contact between us over the next few weeks.

That autumn the suppliers went on strike, Omar Hansen’s more or less ran out of stock, and it took Mother ages to find all the things we needed on her way home fromhe shoe shop. One afternoon, though, we found a large box in the hallway, with margarine, bread, potatoes, fish balls, a tube of caviar, liver paste, two bottles of Solo, three bars of Freia milk chocolate and right at the bottom two copies of a cowboy comic for me.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” Mother said.

“Why not?” Kristian said, who, like Frank, had connections, in the union, he said, and Mother didn’t. On the contrary, it was her union that was behind the strike.

“You could at least keep it in the fridge for me, couldn’t you?”

It was the same sort of arrangement as with the T.V., which Mother and I now watched every night, legally, since she had paid the licence fee in her name. Kristian was making greater and greater inroads into our lives, no matter what she did.

“How much do you want for it?” she ventured.

“What is it with you?” he said with annoyance and went into his room, closing the door after him. And the box stood there for an hour or two before Mother came to her senses and put the items in the fridge.

“There’s something not quite right about this,” she said. But then added: “Oh, well.” And she gave me one of the Solos. A Solo in the middle of the week again.

Afterwards we had one of the chocolate bars as well, and switched on the T.V. to watch “Hit Parade” and a long documentary about a horse carting crates of beer from a brewery round the shops in town. His name was Bamse, bruiser, and he was thirty-two years old, which is a formidable age for a horse. The whole point was that Bamse’s era was over now, not only for him but for the whole of his melancholy race, it was giving way to motorised transport and tarmac and, not least, speed. The programme became more and more depressing, and more and more forlorn the longer we sat there gawping, we both had tears in our eyes. Fortunately, though, it ended with Bamse and his ancient owner strolling around a meadow on a large farm and he saw his days out with the sun shining, the flowers swaying and the larks singing.

“Thank goodness,” Mother said, hurriedly switching off. We sat blinking with the glare from the T.V. in our eyes until she suddenly exclaimed:

“I’ll deduct it from his rent!”

Then Linda arrived. She arrived by bus. Alone. Because Mother had no desire to meet the girl’s mother again, that was my impression.

It was a Saturday. We ambled down to the bus stop by Aker Hospital in good time and waited for the Grorud bus, which was due at 1.26, I had been to school and had barely got home with my satchel, I hadn’t told a living soul about this turn of events, about Linda, because I couldn’t find the words. But in a very indirect way I had touched on the subject with a chum of mine, Roger, who had two elder brothers, I had asked him what it was like to have several siblings, an issue which he was quite unable to grasp, until he seemed to understand what I was getting at after all, and said with a smirk: