‘Jesus Christ, you look just like your father,’ he said, and his voice made the air quiver.
‘I know it,’ I said.
‘Especially in those clothes,’ he said. ‘For a moment I thought … you know what I mean.’
I did, but any answer I could have given him had been used up long ago. He sat on the edge of his terrace, put the monkey wrench down with that dry little sound only a monkey wrench makes, and wiped his hands on a bright orange rag, which he then stuffed into his back pocket.
‘I’ll never get this piece of crap running again,’ he said.
‘Why, what’s wrong with it?’
‘I really don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’ve tried everything. It just won’t start. So I guess I’ll have to row instead.’
Hansen was no athlete. He looked like Andy Capp, but in a lovable way. He used to put eel traps in the river and sometimes he fished for plaice from a small boat with this outboard motor attached to the stern. He had had it for years. He never bought anything new. He preferred simple tools, antique outboard motors, a small moped. Old things, used things, things with uncomplicated mechanics, things he had bought from people he knew from the railway. Buying something new seemed senseless to him. He never had any money, and I don’t think he even found money interesting.
‘Well don’t row too much, then, it may ruin your health,’ I said, and that was not much of a thing to say, but it was all I had, and then it fell quiet and Hansen said:
‘Listen, Arvid my friend, tell me something. Is it true that you’re getting a divorce?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s correct.’
‘Jesus Christ. My condolences.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t think it kills you.’
‘Don’t be too sure,’ Hansen said. ‘Anything can happen. Let’s have a beer,’ he said. He stood up with a groan and went inside his shed through a ramshackle glasshouse, the orange rag hanging from his back pocket like an angry flag, a railway flag, I thought, for explosive cargo, trains of thought, maybe: Lenin on the train on his way home from his exile in Geneva, heading for the Finland Station in Petrograd, and Hansen shouting: Look out! Look out! But he was not that old, of course. Instead he swiftly returned with a bottle of beer in each hand. He passed me one, it was cold in my hand, and I said:
‘Long live the people,’ and then I said: ‘Down the hatch!’ And we drank deeply, and then Hansen said:
‘That didn’t hurt none.’
The wind cut through my clothes as I sat on the edge of the terrace, my hands were cold. The trees around us were bare now, hazel and oak and beech trees were bare, and willow and alder, and ancient plum trees, and all kinds of other trees, and they were all stripped of their leaves. And the wind came from the north, from the town of Skagen, from icy Norway with its spruce forests and granite, and my father heading along winding paths for he did not know where else to take his body.
Hansen waved me over and said:
‘Come, let’s enter Crystal Palace. We can take off our coats in there, if that’s what we want to do.’ And it was. He had an electric heater which was red hot behind the mesh, and it sent waves of heat out into the room, and we sat down on white plastic chairs holding our shiny green bottles of beer. I raised the bottle to my mouth and took a big swig, and with the Calvados already in my stomach like a small bullet, it tasted so good. I might start drinking, I thought, drink often, every day, just to feel like this, close my eyes and feel the alcohol flowing through my body. I closed my eyes. Crystal Palace was quiet. It was warm. Only a low fizz from the bottles and some gulls above the trees outside could be heard.
‘Your mother,’ Hansen said.
‘Yes,’ I said, but I kept my eyes closed.
‘She’s ill,’ Hansen said.
‘I know,’ I said. ‘That’s why I’m here,’ and it went quiet, and he said nothing and then I said:
‘That’s why I’ve come. Why else would I at this time of the year? It’s not summer exactly,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t planning to get a tan or anything.’
‘No, it’s not summer, that’s true,’ he said.
I opened my eyes. On the wall there was a large framed picture of the Christian Radich, fully rigged on the ocean blue, in the Bay of Biscay perhaps, or in the North Sea on her way to Newcastle. My mother had given the picture to Hansen many years ago, for his fiftieth birthday. Next to the picture was a bookcase, packed with novels by John Steinbeck; a handsome two-volume edition of East of Eden, and Three Comrades by Erich Maria Remarque was there too. I had read it before I turned twenty, and one called Heaven Has No Favourites which I had read too. It was about a racing driver and the woman he loved, who had TB, and was now staying at a sanatorium where he often went to see her, in the Swiss Alps, Bella Vista, it was called. There was always a woman with TB in Remarque’s books. Frankly I was a little fed up with it.
I stood up with my beer in my hand and went over to the small bookcase and took out Three Comrades and looked at the fine jacket with a colourful drawing of Karl, das Chaussegespenst, which was the name of the racing car they owned, the three comrades, who were the characters in the book. And then there was the woman with TB, the fourth comrade, as in The Three Musketeers, which was not about three characters either, but about four, and the fourth was D’Artagnan.
‘How is she doing in there?’ Hansen said.
‘She was tired,’ I said, ‘she has gone to lie down.’
‘I can understand that. Would you be offended if I did the same?’
‘Did what?’ I said.
‘Lie down for a bit?’
‘Are you ill as well?’
‘No, I don’t think so. But I’m tired, I am, and not as young as you.’
‘No, of course not,’ I said. ‘You go and lie down.’ I took two steps towards the door thinking, does he want me to leave?
‘That’s what I’ll do then,’ Hansen said, and then he got up and drained the rest of his beer, and said: ‘You can stay here where it’s warm. You’re always welcome.’ And he went into the bedroom at the back of Crystal Palace with his revolutionary cloth still hanging from his back pocket.
Always welcome. I stood with the bottle in my hand. I did not know if I should go or sit down again and maybe read a bit of Three Comrades. But the air was heavy in there, too warm, and there was something wrong with the book. I felt cheated.
I quickly left Crystal Palace, taking the beer with me; I might as well go home to Norway, I thought. Nobody wants me here.
I crossed the small terrace and walked past the sawhorse with the outboard motor on top, and as I turned to look back, there was a pheasant standing dead still in the stripy shadow of a leafless bush, its strange, long tail feathers pointing towards the road, and it was brown and green and red within a silence so compact I found it menacing. Only one shiny eye was moving inside its red frame and it followed every step I took, and this eye frightened me.
‘Jesus Christ,’ I said. ‘It’s an omen,’ and on my way through the hedge I could feel the eye burning into my back.
15
It was Saturday, it was just before midnight. I was walking along Trondhjemsveien towards town after celebrating my mother’s fiftieth birthday. I had made up my mind to walk all the way home to Carl Berners Plass even though I could easily have got there in less than fifteen minutes by Underground, but I had to get the party out of my system.
It was a long way to Carl Berners Plass, the night was dark, but the street lights lit up the road, and some were yellow and some almost orange, and some had a cold, blue glare.
I had walked this road for many years, but before I left home, I nearly always walked in the opposite direction, out of Oslo, because I wanted the traffic to flow with me on the side of the road I preferred to walk, the right hand side that is, and if I did not, it would feel like the people in the cars, looking out of their windows, and rolling their windows down, would point at me, and say to each other that I was probably the only person in
the whole world that was heading in the wrong direction with his life.
But I no longer lived in my parents’ home, I had not lived there for three years. Now I was walking into town one late autumn night after my mother’s fiftieth birthday party, towards central Oslo, past Årvoll and further on under the Sinsen roundabout, down past Torshovdalen and the Rosenhoff School standing grey and sad at the end of a street to the right. I had been a pupil there two years before I went on to college. The building looked like a seventeenth-century prison, like the Bastille in Paris, and my time at that school had not been a time of joy. But now I put the school behind me along with those years, and walked on down the long slope towards Carl Berners Plass.
When I finally got there, I thought, as I often did, what a fine square it was, like a sun beaming out to all sides, like a square in the years between the wars, in a big city, Berlin perhaps, Erich Kästner’s Berlin in Emil and the Detectives, or in Zurich, or in Basel, or in Budapest, for all I knew, where trams and buses criss-crossed in carefully designed patterns of shiny steel curves in the cobblestones, and above me in the air, raised high above the traffic, above the tram cogs and rubber wheels, a myriad taut cables ran from the buildings on one side of the street via beautiful metal posts across to the opposite side and were attached to the buildings there. It was like a roof you could walk under without getting your feet wet. It felt like that.
The whole square was a world of its own with the broad majestic avenue, Christian Michelsens Gate, to the west; the green lime trees in straight rows either side of it, or, like now, with their branches bare and grey against the grey night. To the east, Grenseveien sloped up the hill past the Underground station where it vanished beyond the houses, and there were neon signs on the façades of the buildings on Grenseveien, and neon signs around the corner, towards Finnmarkgata, and across the square towards the petrol station there were neon signs too, and to the right or the left, depending on which way you came, lay Ringen Kino with its glowing stripes of red neon above the entrance from Trondhjemsveien, on the same side as the bookshop, but after the film you would come out, half-blind, into Tromsøgata right opposite Bergersen’s café.
I felt better once I was on my way across the square, my head no longer spinning, it was late, it was night, the dark whirling around me, and snowflakes whirling in the wind from the north and the traffic was sparse on the streets into town. So here I could walk in the middle of the big square as long as I wanted, across the cobblestones and tramlines, it was my square, it was my big city square, known as Red Square before the war, as the only one of its kind on the east side of the river, and later in the Seventies was called Red Square, because almost everyone was convinced the traffic lights here were always that colour.
In the stairwell the fresh scent of Zalo met me on the ground floor, and on the first I turned the key in the lock and entered my flat. Carefully I eased the door shut behind me, so that nothing could be heard but the low click of the latch.
I knew right away that she was there, sensed it in my gut that she was there, my stomach lurching and trembling and to stop that sensation from going away, to hold on to it for as long as I could, I went straight to the kitchen in my socks and did not say hello through the half open door to the living room, where the sofa bed stood behind the bookcases.
I had given her a set of keys. She could come and go as she pleased. Do her homework here when she wanted to. Come here early on the Underground before school if she wanted to and have breakfast with me. She could take a break from her family and cry if she wanted to, take a break from the train journeys to school, to the city centre because she always had to step out of the carriage at Økern Station and run behind the shelter there to throw up, and then throw up at Hasle Station. When she had stayed the night with me, and I walked her to the tram at Carl Berners Plass and then again walked her all the way up to school, she would throw up behind the colonnade at the Deichman Library. Once I had been waiting at the entrance to the station right by the block of flats where she lived, and had seen through the window her mother punch her in the face because she put on the wrong coat, which was her brother’s blue confirmation coat, on her way out to join me. We were going to see Klute starring Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland. It was showing a second time at Frogner Kino. I had seen it before, but she had not.
Silently, I placed my keys on the kitchen counter and silently I took a bottle of orange juice from the fridge, poured myself a glass and sat down at the table where the book I was reading, Les Misérables by Victor Hugo, was lying. I had finished the first volume and was well into the second.
I drank the juice and leafed through the book to remind myself of what I had read in bed earlier that morning, it was a Saturday, I had been lying under my duvet reading until around half-past eleven with the book on my pillow. This was not what I usually did in the morning, but I felt it was important to work through as many pages as possible before the day got going and the time came when I had to take the Underground six stops up through Groruddalen to celebrate my mother’s fiftieth birthday.
I undressed in the kitchen, hung my clothes over one of the chairs and went to the small bathroom and washed the whole evening and the party off my skin, brushed my teeth and tiptoed into the living room to the sofa bed behind the bookcases in the dark and around the table stocked with more books. On the wall was the picture of Mao at his desk, but I could not see him now. Carefully I crawled under the duvet. This sofa bed was really not made for two, but we did not need that much room, and I had planned that she would carry on sleeping in my arms and then wake up in the early morning wondering when it was I’d come back. But she was so warm under the duvet and I was so cold that she woke up at once, turned to me and said:
‘Is that you?’
‘Of course, it’s me.’
‘OK, if you say so.’
‘Stop it, you’re making me jealous.’
‘Am I?’
‘Of course you are,’ I said.
‘That’s good.’
‘But, it’s just you and me,’ I said, ‘it’s just you and me against the world.’
‘Oh, yes that’s true,’ she said, ‘that’s it. You and me, you and me, and then your Party. Which I’m going to join.’
‘Yes, you are. But you’re still a bit young.’
‘Perhaps. I don’t feel young.’
‘I know,’ I said, ‘and in a way you’re not young,’ but she was young. Several years younger than me, and I was young too, and I leaned across her and rubbed my hands together to make them warm and said: ‘Feel this,’ and then I touched her in a very special way, and she lay completely still, and then she said in a soft voice:
‘Oh God, that was good,’ and this very thing, this very special thing, was something only she and I had together, that no one else had, that only she and I knew about, but we were so young then, and we did not know very much.
‘But hey, there’s no time for this now,’ she said. ‘Oh God, that was good. How far have you got?’
‘Quite far. A lot further than the last time you were here.’
‘Oh, that’s good,’ she said, and we lay on our backs, shoulder to shoulder, hand in hand looking up at the ceiling, and we could not see the ceiling because the room was pitch black, and the sofa bed so small that she was squashed against the wall, and my left leg dangled over the edge. And then I started to tell the story from where we had stopped the last time we were lying here and had to stop because I hadn’t read any further, and she told me to hurry and read some more because it was so much better to hear me tell the story than reading it herself, she could see things then, that she did not see when it was light, and I had read on as quickly as I could. And now we were lying here again, like so many times before, and I told her about Jean Valjean who was sent to the gallows for stealing a loaf of bread. But one day when there was a fire he escaped, and was free and changed his name and identity, and as a different man he rose through the ranks to become mayor. And then sudden
ly he had to run a second time because that hateful, persistent bloodhound of a police inspector Javert had recognised him.
In the novel it was 1832, and that night I told her how Jean Valjean was stumbling through the catacombs under Paris, the sewers of Paris, with Marius unconscious on his back. And he was the boyfriend of his beloved Cosette, and in the streets above, the revolution was raging, the peuple were fighting in the streets, the impatient ones, it was their turn now, and they were as we were, or rather we wanted to be like them. And the peuple built barricades between the houses in the narrow streets, for this was before the time of avenues, avenues that later would be built and made so wide it would be impossible to build barricades from one side to the other, which is the whole point of a barricade, and instead made room for the army to march forward in wide columns and crush the slightest attempt at rebellion, which is the whole point of avenues.
She did not sleep like children do, at night when you tell them stories. She was wide awake in the dark with her blue eyes, warm hands and a greedy mouth, and she said:
‘It must have been so hard to carry Marius all that way through the sewers even though Jean Valjean was strong.’
‘Yes, I’m sure it must have been. There is no way I could ever do the same,’ I said.
‘Don’t tell yourself that. You’re quite strong, you are.’
‘Do you think so?’
‘I don’t think it,’ she said. ‘I know it,’ and I liked it when she said things like that.
When I had finished today’s text, or the evening’s or even the night’s text if you like, I was quite exhausted and she said:
‘Can we eat now?’
‘I have to get some sleep, if you don’t mind. I’m totally worn out after that party.’