My Struggle: Book One (24 page)

Early one afternoon in March I heard a car parking outside my flat. I went down and peered out the window, it was Dad, he had a bag in his hand. He seemed cheery. I hurried up to my room, didn't want to be a busybody with my face glued to the glass. I heard him clattering around in the kitchen downstairs, put on a Doors cassette, which Jan Vidar had lent me, I had wanted to listen to it after reading
Beatles
by Lars Saabye Christensen. Fetched the pile of newspaper cuttings about the Treholt spy case, which I had collected as I was sure it would come up in the exams, and was reading them when I heard his footsteps on the stairs.

I glanced up at the door as he entered. He was holding what looked like a shopping list in his hand.

“Could you nip down to the shop for me?” he said.

“Okay,” I replied.

“What's that you're reading?” he asked.

“Nothing special,” I said. “Just some newspaper cuttings for Norwegian.”

I got up. The rays from the sun flooded the floor. The window was open, outside there was the sound of birdsong, birds were twittering on the branches of the old apple tree a few meters away. Dad handed me the shopping list.

“Mom and I have decided to separate,” he said.

“What?” I said.

“Yes. But it won't affect you. You won't notice any difference. Besides, you're not a child anymore and in two years you'll be moving to a place of your own.”

“Yes, that's true,” I said.

“Okay?” Dad asked.

“Okay,” I said.

“I forgot to write potatoes. And perhaps we should have a dessert? Oh, by the way, here's the money.”

He handed me a five-hundred-krone note, I stuffed it in my pocket and went down to the street, along the river, and into the supermarket. I wandered between the shelves, filling the shopping basket. Nothing of what Dad had said managed to emerge above this. They were going to separate, fine, well, let them. It might have been different if I had been younger, eight or nine, I thought, then it would have meant something, but now it was of no significance, I had my own life.

I gave him the groceries, he made lunch, we ate without saying much.

Then he left.

I was pleased he did. Hanne was going to sing in a church that evening, and she had asked whether I wanted to go and watch, of course I did. Her boyfriend would be there, so I didn't make my presence known, but when I saw her standing there, so beautiful and so pure, she was mine, no one else's feelings could hold a candle to those I cherished. Outside, the tarmac was covered with grime, the remaining snow lay in dips and hollows and up shadowy slopes on both sides of the road. She sang, I was happy.

On the way home I jumped off at the bus station and walked the last part
through town, although that did nothing to diminish my restlessness, my feelings were so varied and so intense that I couldn't really deal with them. After arriving home I lay on my bed and cried. There was no despair in the tears, no sorrow, no anger, only happiness.

The next day we were alone in the classroom, the others had left, we both lingered, she perhaps because she wanted to hear what I thought of the concert. I told her that her singing had been fantastic, she was fantastic. She lit up as she stood packing her satchel. Then Nils came in. I felt ill at ease, his presence cast a shadow over us. We were together in French class, and he was different from the other boys in the first class, he hung out with people who were a lot older than himself in the town's pubs, he was independent in his opinions and his life as a whole. He laughed a lot, made fun of everyone, me included. I always felt small when he did that, I didn't know where to look or what to say. Now he started talking to Hanne. It was as if he were circling her, he looked into her eyes, laughed, drew closer, was standing very close to her now. I would not have expected anything else of him, that was not what upset me, it was the way Hanne reacted. She didn't reject him, laugh off his advances. Even though I was there she opened herself to him. Laughed with him, met his gaze, even parted her knees at the desk where she was sitting, when he went right up to her. It was as if he had cast a spell over her. For a moment he stood there staring into her eyes, the moment was tense and full of disquiet, then he laughed his malicious laugh and backed away a few steps, fired a disarming remark, raised a hand in salute to me and was gone. Wild with jealousy, I looked at Hanne, she had gone back to packing her bag, though not as if nothing had happened, she was enclosed inside herself now, in quite a different way.

What had gone on? Hanne, blond, beautiful, playful, happy, always with a bemused, often also naïve, question on her lips, what had she changed into? What was it that I had witnessed? A dark, deep, perhaps also passionate side, was that her? She had responded, it was only a glimpse, but nonetheless. Then, at that moment, I was nobody. I was crushed. I, with all the notes I
had sent her, all the discussions I'd had with her, all my simple hopes and childish desires, I was nothing, a shout on the playground, a rock in scree, the hooting of a car horn.

Could I do this to her? Could I have this effect on her?

Could I have this effect on
anyone
?

No.

For Hanne, I was a nobody and would remain so.

For me, she was everything.

I attempted to make light of what I had seen, also in my attitude to her, by continuing just as before, pretending that things were fine. But they were not, I knew that, I was never in any doubt. The only hope I had was that she shouldn't know. But what actually was this world I was living in? What actually were these dreams I believed in?

Two days later, when the Easter holiday started, Mom came home.

Dad had implied that the divorce was done and dusted. But when Mom came home, I could see that was not the way she saw things. She drove straight up to the house, where Dad was waiting for her, and they were there for two days while I wandered around town trying to kill time.

On Friday she parked her car outside my flat. I spotted her from the window. She had a large bruise around one eye. I opened the door.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I know what you're thinking,” she said. “But that's not what happened. I fell. I fainted, I do that once in a while, you see, and this time I hit the edge of the table upstairs. The glass table.”

“I don't believe you,” I said.

“It's true,” she said. “I fainted. There's no more to it than that.”

I stepped back. She came into the hall.

“Are you divorced now?” I asked.

She put her suitcase down on the floor, hung her light-colored coat on the hook.

“Yes, we are,” she said.

“Are you sorry?”

“Sorry?”

She looked at me with genuine surprise, as if the thought had never struck her as a possibility.

“I don't know,” she said. “Sad maybe. And you? How will you be?”

“Fine,” I said. “So long as I don't have to live with Dad.”

“We talked about that too. But first I need a cup of coffee.”

I followed her into the kitchen, watched while she put the water on to boil, sat on a chair, bag in hand, rummaged for her pack of cigarettes, she had started smoking Barclay in Bergen, evidently, took one out and lit up.

She looked at me.

“I'm moving up to the house. We two will live there. And then Dad can live here. I assume I'll have to buy him out, don't know quite how I'll manage that, but don't worry, I'll find a way.”

“Mhm,” I mumbled.

“And you?” she asked. “How are you? It's really good to see you, you know.”

“Same here,” I said. “I haven't seen you since Christmas. And so many things have happened.”

“Have they?”

She got up to fetch an ashtray from the cupboard, took the packet of coffee, and placed it on the counter as the water began to hiss. It sounded a bit like the sea as you get close.

“Yes,” I said.

“Good things by the look of it?” she smiled.

“Yes,” I said. “I'm in love. Hook, line, and sinker.”

“Lovely. Anyone I know?”

“Who would you know? No, someone from the class. That bit is perhaps not very smart, but that's how it is. It's not exactly something you can plan, is it.”

“No,” she agreed. “What's her name?”

“Hanne.”

“Hanne,” she said, looking at me with a faint smile. “When do I get to meet her?”

“That's the big question. We're not going out together. She has someone else.”

“It's not so easy then.”

“No.”

She sighed.

“No, it isn't always easy. But you look good. You look happy.”

“I've never been so happy. Never.”

For some insane reason tears welled up in my eyes when I said that. It wasn't just that my eyes glazed over, which often happened when I said something that moved me, no, tears were coursing down my cheeks.

I smiled.

“They're really tears of happiness,” I said. And then I let out a sob and had to turn away. Fortunately the water was boiling by then and I could take it off the stove, add coffee, press down on the lid, bang the pot on the burner a few times and pour two cups.

As I put them on the table I was fine again.

Six months later, one evening toward the end of July, I got off the last bus at the stop by the waterfall. Over my shoulder I was carrying a seaman's bag, I had been to Denmark for a soccer training camp, and after that, without going home first, to a class party in the skerries. I was happy. It was a few minutes past ten thirty, what darkness there was had fallen and lay like a grayish veil across the countryside. The waterfall roared beneath me. I walked uphill and along the road bordered with curbstones. Below, the meadow sloped toward a row of deciduous trees growing by the river bank. Above was the old farm with the tumbledown barn gaping open from the road. The lights were off in the main farmhouse. I walked around the bend to the next house, the guy who lived there was sitting in the living room with the TV on. A truck was
rumbling along on the other side of the river. The sound reached me after a time lag; I didn't hear the change of gears as it sped up the small incline until it was at the top. Above the treetops, against the pale sky, I saw two bats, and I was reminded of the badger I often bumped into on my way home from the last bus. It used to come down the road beside the path of the stream as I was climbing. For safety's sake I always held a stone in each hand. Sometimes I encountered it on the road too, when it would stop and look at me before scuttling back with its distinctive jog-trot.

I stopped, threw down my bag, put one foot on the curb and lit a cigarette. I didn't want to go home right away, I wanted to drag the time out for a few moments. Mom, with whom I had been living all spring and half the summer, was in Sørbøvåg now. She still had not bought out my father and he had stuck to his rights and would be living there until school started again, together with his new girlfriend, Unni.

Over the forest came a large plane, it banked slowly, straightened up, and a second later passed overhead. The lights on the wingtips were flashing and the undercarriage was being lowered. I followed the plane until it was out of sight, and all that remained was the roar, though weaker and weaker, until it too was gone, just before it landed in Kjevik. I liked planes, always had. Even after living for three years under a flight path I still looked up with pleasure.

The river glinted in the summer darkness. The smoke from my cigarette did not rise, it drifted sideways and lay flat in the air. Not a breath of wind. And now the roar of the plane was gone, there was not a sound. Yes, there was, from the bats which soared and plummeted wherever their roaming took them.

I stuck out my tongue and stubbed out my cigarette on it, threw the butt down the slope, slung the bag over my shoulder, and continued on my way. The lights were on in the house where William lived. Above the approaching bend the tops of the deciduous trees were so close together that the sky was not visible. A few frogs or toads were croaking down in the marshlike area between the road and the river. Then I glimpsed movement at the bottom of the hill. It was the badger. It hadn't seen me and was trotting across the
tarmac. I headed for the other side of the road to allow it a free passage, but it looked up and stopped. How elegant it was with its black-and-white striped chic snout. Its coat was gray, its eyes yellow and sly. I completed my maneuver, stepped over the curb and stood on the slope below. The badger hissed, but continued to look at me. It was clearly assessing the situation because the other times we had met it had turned at once and run back. Now it resumed its jog-trot and to my great delight disappeared up the hill. It was only then, as I stepped back onto the road, that I heard the faint sounds of music that must have been there the whole time.