My Struggle: Book One (51 page)

He twisted his head to the side of the pillow, as if sensing he was being observed and wanting to escape. I closed my eyes. He had told me often that Dad had totally crushed his self-esteem on a number of occasions, humiliated him as only Dad could, and that had colored periods of his life when he felt he was incapable of doing anything and was worthless. Then there were
other periods when everything went well, when there were no hitches, no nagging doubts. From the outside, all you saw was the latter.

Dad had also affected my self-image, of course, but perhaps in a different way, at any rate I never had periods of doubt followed by periods of self-confidence, it was all entangled for me, and the doubts that colored such a large part of my thinking never applied to the larger picture but always the smaller, the one associated with my closer surroundings, friends, acquaintances, girls, who, I was convinced, always held a low opinion of me, considered me an idiot, which burned inside me, every day it burned inside me; however, as far as the larger picture was concerned, I never had any doubt that I could attain whatever I wanted, I knew I had it in me, because my yearnings were so strong and they never found any rest. How could they? How else was I going to crush everyone?

The next time I woke, Yngve was standing in front of the mirror buttoning up his shirt.

“What time is it?” I said.

He turned.

“Half past six. Early for you?”

“Yes, you can say that again.”

He had put on a pair of light khaki shorts, the type that reach down to below the knees, and a gray-striped shirt with the shirttails hanging out.

“I'm going downstairs,” he said. “You coming?”

“Yep,” I said.

“You're not going back to sleep?”

“No.”

As his steps receded on the staircase, I swung my feet onto the floor and grabbed my clothes from the chair. Looked down with displeasure at my stomach where two rolls of fat still protruded at the sides. Pinched my back, no excess flesh there yet, fortunately. Nevertheless, I would definitely have to start running when I got back to Bergen. And do sit-ups every morning.

I held the T-shirt to my nose and sniffed.

Hm, probably wouldn't make another day.

I opened the suitcase and pulled out a Boo Radleys' T-shirt which I had bought when they played in Bergen a couple of years ago, and a pair of dark blue jeans with the legs cut off. It might not have been sunny outside, but the air was warm and close.

Downstairs, Yngve had put on coffee, set out bread and sliced meats and so on from the fridge. Grandma sat at the table in the same dress she had been wearing the previous day, smoking. I wasn't hungry and made do with a cup of coffee and a cigarette on the veranda before grabbing the bucket, the cloths and the detergents to start work on the ground floor. First, I went into the bathroom to inspect what I had done. Apart from the stained, sticky shower curtain, which for some reason I had not thrown out, it all looked pretty good. Run-down, of course, but clean.

I removed the pole that ran from wall to wall above the bath, pulled off the curtain and threw it into a garbage bag, washed the pole and the two grips, and put them back up. So the question was: what next? The laundry room and the two bathrooms were done. On this floor there was Grandma's room, the hall, the corridor, Dad's room and the big bedroom left to do. I wouldn't touch Grandma's room now, it would have felt like a transgression, because it would be obvious to her we could see the state she was in, and because she would have been deprived of her independence, the grandchild cleaning the grandmother's bedroom. I couldn't bring myself to start on Dad's room either, also because there were papers and much besides we would have to sort through first. The corridor with the wall-to-wall carpet would have to wait until we had contacted a carpet cleaner. So it would have to be the staircase.

I filled the bucket with water, took a bottle of Klorin, a bottle of green soap and a bottle of Jif scouring cream and started on the banisters, which could not have been washed for a good five years. There were all sorts of filth between the stair-rods, disintegrated leaves, pebbles, dried-up insects, old spiderwebs. The banisters themselves were dark, in some places almost completely black, here and there, sticky. I sprayed Jif, wrung the cloth and
scrubbed every centimeter thoroughly. Once a section was clean and had regained something of its old, dark golden color I dunked another cloth in Klorin and kept scrubbing. The smell of Klorin and the sight of the blue bottle took me back to the 1970s, to be more precise, to the cupboard under the kitchen sink where the detergents were kept. Jif didn't exist then. Ajax washing powder did though, in a cardboard container: red, white, and blue. It was a green soap. Klorin did too; the design of the blue plastic bottle with the fluted, childproof top had not changed since then. There was also a brand called OMO. And there was a packet of washing powder with a picture of a child holding the identical packet, and on that, of course, there was a picture of the same boy holding the same packet, and so on, and so on. Was it called Blenda? Whatever it was called, I often racked my brains over mise en abyme, which in principle of course was endless and also existed elsewhere, such as in the bathroom mirror by holding a mirror behind your head so that images of the mirrors were projected to and fro while going farther and farther back and becoming smaller and smaller as far as the eye could see. But what happened behind what the eye could see? Did the images carry on getting smaller and smaller?

A whole world lay between the trademarks of then and now, and as I thought about them, their sounds and tastes and smells reappeared, utterly irresistible, as indeed everything you have lost, everything that has gone, always does. The smell of short, freshly watered grass when you are sitting on a soccer field one summer afternoon after training, the long shadows of motionless trees, the screams and laughter of children swimming in the lake on the other side of the road, the sharp yet sweet taste of the energy drink XL-1. Or the taste of salt that inevitably gets into your mouth when you dive into the sea, even if you pinch your lips as your head sinks below the surface, the chaos of currents and rushing water beneath, but also the light playing on the seaweed and the sea grass and the bare rock face, clusters of mussels and fields of barnacles that all seem to radiate a still, gentle glow, for it is a cloudless midsummer day, and the sun is burning down through the high, blue sky
and sea. The water streaming off your body as you haul yourself up using hollows in the rock face, the drops left on your shoulder blades for a few seconds until the heat has burned them off, the water in your trunks still dripping long after you have wrapped a towel around yourself. The speedboat skimming over the waves, stuttering and disharmonious, the bow thrust upward, the buffeting of the waves that is heard through the roar of the engine, the unreality of it, since the surroundings are too vast and open for the boat's presence to leave an impression.

All of this still existed. The smooth, flat rocks were exactly the same, the sea pounded down on them in the same way, and also the landscape under the water, with its small valleys and bays and steep chasms and slopes, strewn with starfish and sea urchins, crabs and fish, was the same. You could still buy Slazenger tennis rackets, Tretorn balls, and Rossignol skis, Tyrolia bindings and Koflach boots. The houses where we lived were still standing, all of them. The sole difference, which is the difference between a child's reality and an adult's, was that they were no longer laden with meaning. A pair of Le Coq soccer boots was just a pair of soccer boots. If I felt anything when I held a pair in my hands now it was only a hangover from my childhood, nothing else, nothing in itself. The same with the sea, the same with the rocks, the same with the taste of salt that could fill your summer days to saturation, now it was just salt, end of story. The world was the same, yet it wasn't, for its meaning had been displaced, and was still being displaced, approaching closer and closer to meaninglessness.

I wrung out the cloth, hung it from the edge of the bucket and studied the fruits of my labors. The gleam in the varnish had come to the fore although there was still a scattering of dark dirt stains as though etched into the wood. I suppose I must have done a third of the woodwork up to the first floor. Then there were the banisters and railings to the third floor as well.

Yngve's footfalls echoed in the corridor above.

He appeared with a bucket in his hand and a roll of garbage bags under his arm.

“Have you finished downstairs?” he asked, on seeing me.

“No, I haven't. Are you out of your mind? I've done just the bathrooms and the laundry room. I was thinking of waiting to do the others.”

“I'm going to start on Dad's room now,” he said. “That's the biggest job, it seems.”

“Is the kitchen done?”

“Yes. Pretty damn close. Have to clean out a couple of cupboards. Otherwise it looks good.”

“Okay,” I said. “I'm going to take a break now. A bite to eat. Is Grandma in the kitchen?”

He nodded, and went past. I rubbed my hands, which were soft and wrinkled from the water, against my shorts, cast a last glance at the railings and went up to the kitchen.

Grandma was sitting in her chair brooding. She didn't even look up as I entered. I remembered the sedatives. Had she taken one? Probably not.

I opened the cupboard and took out the packet.

“Have you taken any today?” I said, holding it up.

“What is it?” she said. “Medicine?”

“Yes, the tablets you took yesterday.”

“No, I haven't.”

I fetched a glass from the cupboard, filled it with water, and passed it to her with a tablet. She put it on her tongue and washed it down. She didn't seem to want to say anymore, so to avoid being forced by the silence into talking, I grabbed a couple of apples, instead of the sandwiches I had planned, plus a glass of water and a cup of coffee. The weather was mild and gray, like yesterday. A light breeze blew off the sea, gulls screamed in the air above the harbor, metallic blows sounded from close by. The constant hum of urban traffic from below. A crane, high and fragile, steepled above the rooftops a couple of blocks from the quay. It was yellow with a white cabin or whatever the thingy the crane driver sat in at the top was called. Strange I hadn't seen it before. There were few things I found more beautiful than cranes, the skeletal nature of their construction, the steel wires running along the top and
bottom of the protruding arm, the enormous hook, the way heavy objects dangled when being slowly transported through the air, the sky that formed a backdrop to this mechanical provisorium.

I had just eaten one apple – seeds, stalk, and all – and was about to sink my teeth into the second when Yngve walked through the garden. He was holding a fat envelope.

“Look what I found,” he said, passing me the envelope.

I undid the flap. It was full of thousand-krone notes.

“There's about two hundred thousand in there,” he said.

“Wow,” I exclaimed. “Where was it?”

“Under the bed. It must be the money he got for the house on Elvegata.”

“Oh, shit,” I said. “So this is all that's left?”

“I guess so. He didn't even put the money in the bank, just kept it under his bed. And then he drank it, no less. Thousand-note by thousand-note.”

“I don't give a shit about the money,” I said. “The life he had here was just so sad.”

“You can say that again,” Yngve said.

He sat down. I put the envelope on the table.

“What shall we do with it?” he asked.

“No idea,” I said. “Share it, I suppose?”

“I was thinking more about inheritance tax and that kind of thing.”

I shrugged.

“We can ask someone,” I said. “Jon Olav, for example. He's an attorney.”

The sound of a car engine carried from the narrow street below the house. Even though I couldn't see it, I knew it was coming here by the way it stopped, reversed, and drove forward again.

“Who could that be?” I wondered.

Yngve got up, took the envelope.

“Who's going to look after this?” he asked.

“You,” I said.

“Anyway, the problems regarding funeral expenses have been solved now,” he said, walking past me. I followed him in. From the downstairs hall we
could hear voices. It was Gunnar and Tove. We were standing between the hall door and the kitchen door, physically ill at ease when they came up, as though we were still children. Yngve was holding the envelope in one hand.

Tove was as suntanned and as well-preserved as Gunnar.

“Hello there!” she exclaimed with a smile.

“Hello,” I said. “Long time, no see.”

“Yes, that's true,” she said. “Shame we should have to meet under such circumstances.”

“Yes,” I agreed.

How old could they have been? Late forties?

Grandma came out of the kitchen.

“So it's you,” she said.

“Sit down, Mother,” Gunnar said. “We just thought we should give Yngve and Karl Ove a hand with all this.”