Encircling (14 page)
Authors: Carl Frode Tiller
“Ah, there you are!” Eilert says, beaming delightedly and she tries to smile back, but doesn’t manage it, the corners of her mouth are turned down and she’s close to tears, she hasn’t seen Eilert in over a year, he told me, they haven’t seen one another since he fell ill, so it wouldn’t be all that surprising if she were to cry. She stands there looking at Eilert for a moment, then she sort of glides into the room, sorrow emanating from the very way she walks. Her arms hang limply by her sides, she looks almost as if she is moving by remote control. She goes up to him, puts her arms round him, rests her chin on his shoulder and clasps her hands behind his broad back. They stand there like that, swaying back and forth for a few moments and then she starts to cry, her narrow shoulders tremble and she buries her face in Eilert’s shoulder.
“There, there!” Eilert says. “There, there!”
They stand there hugging and swaying. Eilert pats her back to soothe her as she cries and cries.
“Oh, Dad,” she sobs, “dear Dad.”
“There, there,” Eilert says again.
A few moments pass. Then:
“Are you angry with me?” she asks. She sniffs, lifts her chin off his shoulder and takes a little step back. Her face is anguished, torn apart by grief and her eyes plead with him.
“Angry? Why should I be angry?” Eilert asks. He wrinkles his brow, acts as if he has no idea what she’s talking about, but his voice is a little too astonished to be credible, he may not be angry, but he knows very well what she’s thinking of and what she’s referring to.
“Because I didn’t come home earlier,” she says and swallows.
“Oh, sweetheart, no!” Eilert says. He raises his eyebrows, drops his jaw and tries to look even more flabbergasted.
“I should have come home the minute I heard you had cancer,” she sobs.
Keeping the flabbergasted expression on his face he looks her straight in the eye for a couple of seconds, shaking his head gently.
“Now, now, don’t talk daft, Helene,” he says and he gives a little laugh, acting as though this is so utterly preposterous that he has to laugh, although he has had the same thought as his daughter, I can tell, has wondered whether she was going to come home to see him, but he tries to make it look as though he’s never heard anything so ridiculous. She doesn’t say anything for a moment, she tries to hold his eye, but with no success, her face crumples, her eyes fall closed and she wraps her arms around him again, digs her fingers into that broad back and clings to him, presses her face against his shoulder and cries her heart out. “Yes,” she sobs, “I should have come home straight away, I should have come as soon as Mum called and said you were ill, now we’ve hardly any time left together.” And when she says that, Eilert raises his chin. He takes a great, deep breath, filling his lungs, and stands there with his round, bewildered eyes staring into space. He looks close to tears himself, the corners of his mouth twitch slightly, but he swallows hard and composes himself.
“Helene, pet, you had your studies to think about,” he says.
“What does that matter compared to this?” she sobs.
“Hey!” Eilert says, introducing a stern paternal note in his voice now. “Don’t say things like that,” he says, “If you’d neglected your studies because of me, then I’d have been angry, then I’d have felt guilty too,” he says, he’s not about to give in, he’s defending the choice she made, taking the guilt off her shoulders so that she’ll be able to carry on after he’s gone, and she cries and cries and cries both because she’s heartbroken and because she’s relieved by what she hears. I just sit here staring at them, feeling rather touched, because it is touching to see Eilert summon up such strength, to witness all this love.
“And anyway, you might not be rid of me as soon as all that,” Eilert goes on. “I’m every bit as tough and stubborn as you, you know,” he says and then he gives a little laugh, trying to make a joke of the whole thing.
“Oh, Dad,” his daughter says and they say no more, they simply stand there clinging to each other, big fat Eilert and his slip of a daughter. They put their arms around each other and I sit and watch them for a few seconds more, then I swallow and look down at my bed, don’t want to seem rude either, don’t want to intrude. I ease myself up in the bed, I should let them have the room to themselves until they recover, should let them be alone. I push back the duvet, slowly swing my legs over the edge of the bed, slide forward a bit, place my feet on the floor and stand up, carefully, to save my wound from hurting too much. I lean forward, pull the curtain round the bed, pick up the pale blue, striped pyjama trousers that are hanging over the spindle-back chair, then I sit down and draw them up over my legs. I don’t stand up right away. I sit still for a moment and catch my breath – I get out of breath so quickly, it doesn’t take much at all. A couple of seconds,
then I raise one hand and put it to my head, it must be months since the last wisp of hair disappeared, but I still find it odd, it feels like laying my hand on a bent knee. I cast a quick glance at Eilert and his daughter, they’re still standing there hugging each other, he’s rocking her gently from side to side, saying nothing. A second more, then I brace my hand on the bedside table and heave myself upright with a faint sigh. I work my feet into my slippers, draw back the curtain and head for the door.
In 1986 we took a new organist at the church. His name was Samuel, he was from Oslo, and to begin with, because he had no friends or relatives in Namsos, we often invited him over. But I took an immediate dislike to him. For one thing, he was a former volleyball player and desperate to demonstrate how fit and athletic he was. When he visited us he didn’t use the gate like everyone else, instead he hopped lightly and gracefully over the fence. And when he tied his shoelaces, so keen was he to show off the rippling muscles in his forearm that anybody would have thought he was making fast a hawser rather than a pair of laces. What was worse, though, was that as an Oslo man he looked down on us Namsos folk. As far as he was concerned Namsos was not a part of the real world, so it seemed, but a kind of north Norwegian fairyland inhabited by grunting weirdos who lived on porridge and answered in words of one syllable when spoken to, and he never missed an opportunity to talk and laugh about people and incidents that reinforced this distorted image of provincial Norway. He was condescending and smug and since he was not bright enough to see that he had no reason to be either he
was also extremely sure of himself, and this in turn made him seem charming and attractive to a lot of women, including your mum. It pains me a little to write this, David, but shortly after we first made his acquaintance I noticed that she started smartening herself up if he was paying us a visit. And if he showed up unannounced she would always pop into the bathroom and emerge smelling faintly of perfume or wearing a little more eyeshadow than she had been five minutes earlier. Not only that, but when he was there she talked and acted rather differently, I noticed. She toned down her accent, said “fish” and not “fesh”, she laughed at things she wouldn’t normally have found funny and she was more alert and attentive than usual, her eyes shone with a very particular light.
There were times when I got so jealous that it felt as though my insides were being tied in knots, but I never said anything, not to Mum or anyone else, possibly because I was too embarrassed, possibly because I was too much of a coward, I don’t know. In any case, instead of confronting her I withdrew. The only thing I did actively to put an end to it all was to stop inviting Samuel to the house; that and to lie, if he called to arrange something with us, and say that we would be away. Not that it did much good.
It was about this same time that you started going around with Jon and Silje. Jon was tall and skinny and pale, almost chalk-white. He always wore this chain around his neck with a death’s-head on it and from the kitchen window I would see him stopping on the front step and tucking it inside his shirt before he rang the bell, probably to save me, a vicar, from seeing it. Initially I found this quite funny, rather sweet even, he wanted to look tough, but he didn’t even dare to
be seen wearing something as innocuous as a death’s-head. He was also afraid to swear if I was within earshot, and if they happened to be sitting chatting in the same room as me I noticed that he tried to give the impression of being both a non-smoker and a non-drinker. It wasn’t long, though, before his insecurity began to seem anything but funny and sweet. It hurt to look at him sometimes. David, he wasn’t insecure in the way that most normal teenagers are, with Jon it was an affliction, a sickness. When he spoke to people he never met their eye and no matter how smiling and friendly I tried to be he would look anywhere but at me when we were talking. He was, of course, painfully aware of this himself and occasionally he would force himself to make eye contact, but after no more than a second or so he always dropped his gaze again. And his voice was liable to crack at any minute. I only had to ask him how he was getting on and even though everything was as usual and nothing out of the ordinary had been happening, when he replied it sometimes sounded as if he was about to dissolve into tears of pain and grief. At first I thought it had something to do with me, but as it turned out he was the same with everyone. He was so fragile, so close to breaking point all the time. It was worse when there were a lot of people present, as there often were at our house; when he walked into the living room with you he would try to make himself as invisible as possible, and on those rare occasions when you had time to sit down for a moment he seemed terrified that someone might speak to him. He would kind of curl up in his chair and sit there staring at his lap, not saying a word, and if anyone did speak to him his face would turn brick red and he would make some sullen, almost antagonistic response. Not that anyone took
offence, of course. His discomfort was written all over his face, as Mum used to say, and I think everyone felt sorry for him.
I liked Jon, he was a good lad, he was nice and basically harmless. But he was incredibly impressionable. He looked up to you and Silje and I saw how his face changed when you laughed at something he had said or done, how it perked him up, and how he strove to reap even more laughs or even more compliments. He was so easily led, so easily manipulated. “You’re not right in the head, you,” Silje might say when she wanted him to do something he wouldn’t normally have done, and Jon was weak-willed enough to give in and endeavour to live up to her picture of him. “You wouldn’t dare,” Silje would say, and despite his fears Jon would do whatever it was she said he didn’t dare to do. Matters were not helped by the fact that he had a crush on her and that she exploited this situation for all it was worth. Not only did she get him to play the fool and act the goat sometimes, just to give her something to laugh at, on several occasions I witnessed her getting him to run errands for her. “Could you bike down to the video shop and rent such and such a film?” “Pop down to the corner shop and pick up some sweets for us, would you.” That’s how she went on. To begin with Jon usually tried to make out that he wasn’t someone she could just order about as she pleased. “Do it yourself!” he would cry and then give a surprised laugh, designed to make it sound as if he had never heard such cheek. But it was never long before he did an about-turn: “Oh, all right, then,” he would bluster. “I’ll take a run down to the video shop. Since you keep going on about it,” he would add and then he’d look at Silje and laugh.
What I took to be an echo of my own unhappy teenage crushes ran through me when I overheard such exchanges and
even though they were sweet and rather amusing I sometimes cringed in my chair. I could scarcely stand to listen to them. When Mum, on the other hand, witnessed such scenes they simply confirmed for her the impression she had already formed of Silje. Where, at times, I saw a teenager struggling to conceal the fact that she was anxious and unsure of herself by adopting a pert and somewhat overconfident manner, your Mum saw, and I quote, “a cynical, manipulative, shameless little tart”. I remember being mildly surprised to hear her using such language of a friend of yours and even though Mum was startled by her own words and even though we had a bit of a giggle about it afterwards the shock of it stayed with me for some time. To me Silje was a vivacious girl, full of laughter and life and ideas, almost always smiling and cheerful without in any way seeming naive or shallow. Quite the opposite, in fact. She always came over to have a chat with me when she called at the house and at such moments she was invariably interested and attentive. She was not a religious person, but she was so curious about the ministry, about my beliefs and my thoughts on the big questions in life that I detected more than a hint of a religious longing in her, and – partly, no doubt, for this very reason – I can only say that it was a pleasure to talk to her. She was intelligent and articulate, and despite the fact that I was occasionally taken aback by her bluntness and her boldness she was such a fascinating and rewarding conversationalist that I had been known to put off doing other things simply in order to finish our discussions.
Mum, on the other hand, did her best to avoid her. Her face took on a rather sour expression whenever Silje visited the house and she could become almost childishly fractious and contrary, especially if Silje was the centre of attention. While
the rest of us laughed at some witty remark Silje had made, Mum would sit there looking determinedly po-faced; if Silje suggested that we do something, your Mum would always be against it, and if we were having a discussion and disagreed over some point, you could be one hundred per cent certain that Mum would side with whoever disagreed with Silje. It was so obvious it was almost comical.
To begin with I thought she was simply jealous, and although it was a tricky and a touchy subject I felt I had to let her know that it had not gone unremarked, before it went too far and she made a fool of herself. I remember one time when we were in the living room and you and Silje and Jon were playing croquet in the garden. Silje was wearing a white miniskirt that flew up in the wind from time to time. This, combined with the fact that Silje sometimes looked like a rather languid prima donna who felt that the world was altogether too dull and boring for her, prompted your mum to suddenly hiss: “Look at her! There she goes, trying to do a Marilyn Monroe again, bending over and going all misty-eyed, the little tart!” “Berit,” I said, “she’s playing croquet, it’s perfectly normal to bend over like that when you’re playing croquet.” Mum turned to me, studied me for a moment or two, then gave an exasperated shake of her head. “You’d have to be a man – and a vicar – not to see that that pose of hers is carefully calculated and planned,” she said caustically as she turned to look at you three again. “Berit,” I said, trying to keep a smile on my face, “they’re just friends.” She didn’t get my meaning at first, but when it dawned on her she gave me a look that was so cold and indignant that I never again dared to suggest she might be jealous.
Instead, I tried to convince her that you got a lot out of being with Silje and Jon, because you did. All three of you were
interested in the arts, and you inspired one another, learned from one another. You wrote poetry and short stories that I sometimes had the pleasure of hearing you read aloud to one another in our garden. You wrote and performed music which, to be honest, didn’t give me quite so much pleasure and – not least – you held lots of long conversations in which you discussed everything under the sun: politics, religion, art and literature, everything. And not a Saturday went by without you coming home with a little pile of books you had borrowed from the library. I regularly heard you telling the other two about what you had read since you last saw them – often books and authors I had never heard of and almost always literature of the gloom-and-doom variety, or so it sounded. At first I wasn’t overly concerned about this, I would hear you sitting here, at the same stone table I’m sitting at now, holding forth on nihilism and the pointlessness of life, but I simply took this as a youthful flirtation with certain relatively extreme theories. The pessimistic view of life, which you professed to embrace, did not accord with the ardour, enthusiasm and exuberance that you usually displayed, nor with the confident, well-balanced person I knew you to be, and I interpreted all of this merely as an attempt by three young people to form their own identity by becoming adherents of philosophers whom no one else of their age would have heard of. There were, in fact, some signs that this was indeed the case, that the idea was to create the impression of being well-read, of being intellectual. When you were expecting visitors I noticed, for instance, how you picked out certain books and magazines and placed them where anyone entering the room would be sure to see them, usually lying open at pages with passages underlined or notes in the margin, and usually scattered around somewhat haphazardly to make
the room look like the chaotic study of a scholar. And when you and Jon and Silje were talking I would frequently hear you trying to impress them by dropping great names from the worlds of philosophy and literature. You were forever referring to Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, but even though you cited them so naturally, almost as if you were speaking of close personal friends, I was pretty certain that you had not read anything by either of them. You might have borrowed their books from the library and you might even have dipped into them, read the odd passage, but not in any depth and not to any great profit, you were too young and immature for that, after all.
So, even if I wasn’t exactly pleased to find you so preoccupied with death and corruption, nihilism and pessimism, I couldn’t help chuckling to myself. I had great respect for all three of you, you were far more on the ball than I had been at that age, but there was also something charming, sweet and funny about your eagerness to seem so much gloomier than you actually were. Not that I ever said this to the three of you, of course, I would never have made fun of you. But I did mention it to Mum a few times, because she was worried about you being like this. “It’ll pass, Berit,” I said, “it doesn’t go that deep, he’s seventeen, he’s out there exploring, but he’ll come home again.”
As it was, I had other things to worry about just then. I had a suspicion that Mum and Samuel had started seeing one another behind my back and there were times when I felt torn apart by jealousy. I had no proof, but if we met Samuel after not seeing him for a while, certain remarks made me wonder. Like the time when we bumped into him in the street and your mum said, “Oh, by the way, that Isabel
Allende was excellent.” “See,” Samuel said, “I told you you’d like her. What did you read,
Eva Luna
or
The House of the Spirits
?” Afterwards, once we had gone our separate ways, I asked Mum as casually as I could when she and Samuel had been discussing Isabel Allende. She shrugged and said airily that he had mentioned some authors he liked at the dinner party at the catechist’s house. “Oh, I don’t remember that,” I said with a wry little grin. “Well, you were probably in the loo or something.” “No, I don’t remember going to the loo either,” I said. “What is all this?” she laughed. “Are you giving me the third degree?” “No, of course not,” I said and tried to laugh too.
The fact that your mum suddenly started reading novels was, to me, suspicious enough in itself, since she had never shown any interest in books before, and when she also began to “sample a bit of classical music,” as she put it, I was left in no doubt that she was trying to change in ways that would please Samuel. As with so many organists, Samuel’s favourite composer was Bach and one day, quite out of the blue, Mum came home with the first three
Brandenburg Concertos
. On the rare occasions when she put on some music it was usually one of those old compilation tapes of country and western music or old rock tunes and only once had I seen her actually buy a record – when Namsos-born rock musician Åge Aleksandersen’s
Light and Warmth
came out. And now here she was, carting Bach home, and on CD at that, a medium that was still very new and that your Mum had hardly dared touch, being, as she said, such a “technological ignoramus”.
