I Curse the River of Time

  ‘Why don’t you tell me about the party? How did it go? Did your mother like your present?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  I had not bought her a present. I had written a speech, but when it was time for me to stand up, I was drunk.

  ‘Oh, well,’ she said. ‘That’s all right with me, but I need to eat something. It’s strange, but lying here listening makes me so hungry.’

  ‘You get yourself something to eat,’ I said.

  ‘You get yourself some sleep,’ she said and patted my cheek, and she climbed over me on the sofa and before she had touched the floor in the dark, very blonde, very slender and very young, I was long gone.

  16

  That morning I had been lying in bed reading Victor Hugo until I could no longer stay in bed without feeling ashamed, and so I got up, had a shower, and walked barefoot and wet out into the kitchen where I stood in front of the table reading the speech I had left there. I had read it through several times. I had written that speech instead of buying her a present, it was an idea I had, that I would reach out my hand, and not just an idea, I really meant it. I would say something about the Rio Grande, how big it was, how it kept continents apart, cultures, and was so wide that it was hard to cross from one bank to the other, from the USA to Mexico, that is if you weren’t a gunslinger desperately running from the law, so it was easy then to imagine the problems we had had in the past, she and I, standing on opposite banks, not even able to call out to each other across the great divide.

  ‘It’s called the Rio Grande, right?’ I was going to say. ‘That means big, huge, enormous,’ and then I would say, but the good news, Mother, is that the river has dried up. It’s a total surprise, all the experts are knocked out, and only a trickle remains so now it is easy to cross, for there has been no rain this autumn, not this summer, nor this spring,’ I would say, and laugh, ‘so you see, nothing’s too late for us, we can walk right across or meet halfway and only get our feet a little wet, and that’s not a big deal, is it?’ That was what I intended to say, and that was what I had written on the two A4 sheets.

  I pulled all the clothes I had out of the closet and lined them up on the floor. They were surprisingly few, but I could not turn up for a fiftieth birthday party in the shabby army jacket I normally wore. I chose the dark tweed jacket my mother had given me as a present once when I had to look decent, at the funeral of one of my father’s many brothers. He was the uncle who stayed on in the flat in Vålerenga after our escape to Groruddalen. A bachelor smell lingered between the walls there, of the same meals week in week out, year after year, of the same brand of coffee and the same shoe polish and washing up liquid, of the same vests and underpants in the middle drawer of the cabinet, of chocolate bought for one person only, crumbly and white with age on the top shelf, and in the bottom drawer there were brown socks neatly folded, every single pair of them bought from the Salvation Army. He had lived there until he died on the sofa, in the darkly lit living room among all that furniture with the cream-coloured blinds lowered so that only needle-thin stripes of light seeped through. But two years had passed since that funeral, and I had not worn the jacket since.

  I hung the coat hanger with the tweed jacket on the toilet door, folded the two A4 sheets to A5 size and put them in the inside pocket and went down one floor in my socks to the letterboxes and fetched a book in a brown cardboard parcel; For Whom the Bell Tolls, I think it was, by Ernest Hemingway, the first of two volumes, then, and at the same time picked up the two newspapers and the green invoice for my rent, which was still 170 kroner.

  It was Saturday. I took the Underground the few stops from Carl Berners Plass, Hasle, Økern, Risløkka and beyond, the tall red Siemens building and the Østre Aker Vei to the right down the valley and the railway line to the right and the shunting yard to the right by Alnabru, where goods wagons rolled one after the other very quietly along shiny tracks in parallel rows or just stood strangely still, wrapped up in themselves, waiting their turn.

  The sun was still hanging over the ridge to the west, but in the valley it was dusk already, was the worst time of year, nothing but dark and rain, and the low clouds above the shunting yards sent a woolly reflection towards the ground below, but between the railway tracks you could not find your way.

  In all the years I lived in Veitvet, I had heard through the open window the goods trains moving out there in the night, heard the sound of steel wheels on tracks of steel and the long mournful song from the brakes, and then heard the wagons click into place behind each other, hand in hand, I used to imagine, shoulder to shoulder, a sound of comfort.

  I got up from my seat before Veitvet Station and headed for the door. There stood a man I had been acquainted with for many years. He was the father of a boy in my brother’s class, the one who came after me, not the one who came last.

  The man greeted me, and I greeted him.

  ‘Hello,’ he said, and I said:

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘You’ve moved,’ he said, and I said that I had, ‘but you’re getting off here anyway,’ he said, ‘at this station,’ and I said that I was, and the train stopped and the doors opened. And then I did not get off. He got off, but I stayed there, with my hand clenching the pole till the doors slammed shut. He stopped outside, turned and gave me a puzzled look through the window and suddenly he raised his fist and hammered on the door, shouting something I could not make out, but his face looked tight and contorted. For some reason the man flew into a rage, it’s true, he was furious.

  I pushed my mouth close to the glass and said with exaggerated lip movements:

  ‘Go to hell. You fucking idiot,’ and the next step would probably be sign language, so I raised my hands and made some gestures I thought might look like sign language.

  The man was still standing there with his hands on the door, but the train was leaving the station, so he had to let go, and I sat down, my temples throbbing and my breath stuck in my throat the four stops to Grorud Station. There I got off and walked up the steps from the platform and stopped at the top with the Narvesen kiosk behind me to the east and a view of the tracks to the west. I rolled a cigarette and smoked it right down to my fingertips before I walked down to the platform on the opposite side to wait for the westbound train which was due only five minutes later, and when it arrived I got on. This time I did not sit down, but instead clutched the pole tightly and stood with my legs apart as if the carriage was a ship, heaving high and falling hard and pitching against the waves like ships do in the North Sea when the weather is foul, and this time I got off at Veitvet Station.

  I walked down the stairs and out of the station behind the shopping centre and the bowling alley, where the same old dopeheads drifted aimlessly in the doorway where they always came together and smoked cigarettes with God knows what kind of shit in them and talked senseless, meaningless nonsense, and some of them were still wearing the same tattered Afghan coats they had always worn, wrapped tightly around their chests in the raw air.

  Suddenly I felt how ridiculous it would be to give a speech with only the five members of my family present, it would feel too transparent, too intimate. My mother and father did not have many friends. I could not recall a single time when I was little or in my teens that someone came to visit who was not family, only aunts, uncles, those kinds of people, or my grandfather from Vålerenga who was a Baptist preacher at the weekends and a worker in a shoe factory the rest of the week, and after that a pensioner until he keeled over the same year and the same week as King Haakon VII died; or that my mother and father had ever said they were going for an evening out and would be home late because they were meeting friends in town. At a café or in the cinema, or in their friends’ homes; at Lambertseter or Bøler, Oppsal, places like that where they might have known someone, given who they were and where my father worked. But they did not, they were not friends with anyone from those places or any other place that I was aware of. My father’s brothers with their wives did call on rare occasio
ns and every other Christmas my mother’s childless sister came up from Copenhagen acting upper class with her husband who worked in a firm importing French cars and was the creepy owner of a 8mm camera he used for all kinds of things, and my grandparents would also come, their palms worn and hard, from another, more puritanical town in the same country, in the same fashion, by ferry, grey hair, grey clothes, standing windswept and grey on the quay waiting for my father to come down along Trondhjemsveien in a rare taxi to pick them up and sometimes I, too, was in that taxi and they looked so small next to their big suitcases.

  I passed the nice-looking, red telephone booth and came to the slope where as children we risked our lives on toboggans running down the steep road between the houses, blue woollen caps pulled down over our ears in a childhood whirled away by time, and then past the bend down to Rådyrveien and further on along the terraces, down the flagstone footpath and at last through the door to my parents’ flat. The wallpaper in the hall was the same as it always had been, the same mirror, the same hat shelf which no one ever used except for storing boxes with long-forgotten mittens and forgotten scarves. I slammed the door behind me, but the sound was drowned by a wave of noise that came rolling towards me in the hall. In the small kitchen to the left I saw relatives from two countries, from countryside and town in both of them, standing between the table and the cooker, and some even sitting on the kitchen counter, either side of the sink, and in the living room there were neighbours from our own row of houses and the houses next to it and sitting on the stairs to the first floor, like doves in a dovecot, were people I had never even seen. They held glasses in their hands and cigarettes between their fingers, and there was laughter and talk in every corner. The old flat had expanded to all sides as far as it could.

  My aunt from Copenhagen handed me a welcome drink. She still looked upper class in a languorous way and sexy in her tight black dress, even though she was past forty and a little too fond of her drink. I had never liked her. She made the rest of us look like idiots.

  There was champagne in the glass and I had no idea where they found the money for champagne, but I knocked it back and took another glass from the tray on the sideboard, and when we sat down a little later to eat, each at our name card, I had drunk a third glass.

  A neighbour stood up to bid us all welcome, he always called me Arvars for some reason, but it was well meant and really quite pleasant, in fact, we were fond of each other, so I didn’t mind being Arvars to him if he found it amusing. He was a lorry driver with a passion for trotting horses, he had owned one himself before he moved up here, and on behalf of my mother and my father, who really should have been the first to speak, he welcomed everyone to this fiftieth birthday party to celebrate a woman who was so close to their hearts, who was one of them, and yet was not quite like them, and maybe that was what they liked about her. That she spoke of other things than what they were used to, about other phenomena, as he expressed it, and she probably did because she was Danish and read a lot of books, and thank God for that, said our friendly neighbour, for they could get rather monotonous, the conversations that took place out on the doorsteps after dinner, about the same dull subjects over and over again, he said. It could not be denied. So then it was good to have my mother sitting out there, with her Carlton cigarette, her secretive smile and her surprisingly deep laughter. Besides, she was not above giving good advice on the complexities of the illicit still the neighbour in question kept by his kitchen sink or sometimes down in the laundry room, in the old tub in the basement where it bubbled and gurgled away up to three times a year, and he did not know where that knowledge came from, if it was something you could learn from reading thick books in a foreign language. The whole L-shaped table erupted in laughter, and I laughed too, quite loudly in fact, and my mother did not blush at all, but sat very still on her chair with a smile on her lips and her hands in her lap next to her husband, my father, who was smiling shyly at the wall on the opposite side of the room.

  All this and more said the neighbour, who called me Arvars and whom I liked very much. I had never heard him talk like this before, nor since, for that matter: he was witty, elated even, and laughter wafted up and down the table, and when he rounded the whole thing off with a joke that had nothing to do with anything, which we had heard a thousand times before, the one about the two Lapps, it was a very crude joke in fact – what did they have in their laps? – he took his glass and raised it to the ceiling and proposed a toast for my mother, and then everyone raised their glasses high and drank, and I think I was the fastest drinker of them all.

  There were no more speeches, not that anyone expected one. It often grew awkward and silent around them, so when I stood up in the narrow gap between the table and the wall behind me and tapped my knife against my glass, which was empty already, everyone turned in surprise and smiled cautiously in my direction. They must have dreaded what was coming. Every single one of them knew that I was no longer a student at the college on the corner of Dælenenggata and Gøteborggata close to Carl Berners Plass, where my mother had more or less forced me to attend, and this because it was something she would have liked to do herself had it been possible. It had been a hot topic in two countries, and in this house, from doorstep to doorstep, the fact that I was now a Communist, a Maoist, even, which was something they had heard about only on TV, that I wanted to be part of the working class, which, for Christ’s sake I already was, and always had been. The whole point, for them, was that I should stop being working class so they could all be proud of me, because I had been allowed to go further. They wished me well, they liked me, and I liked them.

  Just as I was about to speak I realised I was drunk. I had not eaten that day, had no appetite or had simply forgotten to, and now I had downed three glasses of champagne on an empty stomach, and a glass of wine. So when I stood up, a roaring wind blew through my head, there was spring tide and breaking surf in my brain, I took one step to the side and bumped into a chair where a farmer in a suit was sitting, he smelled of cowshed and milk, an uncle, no doubt about it, I had seen him before, and I had nothing against that smell, on the contrary, it reminded me of childhood, not my childhood, but somebody’s childhood, and not only was I drunk, I had forgotten the two sheets of paper with the speech in my jacket, and my jacket hung in the hall with the other jackets. It was so hot inside the house now that no one had their jackets on, and to go out into the hall and fetch the speech was out of the question. It was too tight a squeeze. It was too embarrassing. Too many people would have to stand up, and besides, I had already tapped my knife against the glass.

  I was going to say something about the Rio Grande, that I could remember, but I could not remember what about the Rio Grande, what it was about that river that was important, and then I let it go and felt the consonants fill my mouth so awkwardly that I would not be able to pull them out in whole pieces. My mother looked at me in an almost dreamy way, slightly out of focus, I thought, and she waited, and my father stared at the opposite wall, and he was not the only one.

  I steadied myself on the chair of the man next to me. I did not feel well. I had not said anything yet, but I needed a pause. I looked for my glass to take a sip, but I could not find it, and besides, it was probably empty. Next to me, Uncle Farmer saw my fumbling hand, so he took the nearest bottle and poured a fair amount of wine into my glass and slipped it into my hand. I looked down at him, and he nodded and smiled faintly, and I nodded back, he was one fine uncle, the best I had, no question about it. I took a big swig and put the glass back on the table. I opened my mouth, stood like that for a good while before I closed it again. No sound could be heard, not a glass moved, not a knife, not a fork. I tried to concentrate, but I was drunk and it showed, and I looked down at my plate and rubbed my eyelids with the back of my hand like I used to when I was little, and that was it for today, goodnight goodnight.

  ‘Was there something you wanted to say, Arvid?’ my mother said in a mild and enquiring voice. I knew exactly
how she looked.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘I don’t remember anything about you,’ I said, ‘nothing at all,’ and then she said:

  ‘That’s probably just as well.’

  I looked up and saw my eldest brother at the far end of the table. He was staring at me, he was furious. Perhaps it was time to leave, but I did not know if I could. I took a sip from the glass. I leaned against my farmer and sat down, and then I held out my hand and he took it in his and shook it like farmers do.

  ‘Sorry,’ I whispered, ‘I don’t think that went very well.’

  ‘No, it didn’t,’ he said. ‘But next time I’m sure it will be better.’

  I turned to look at him. Suddenly I couldn’t recall the last time I saw him, or if I ever had seen him.

  ‘You’re my uncle, aren’t you?’ I said.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘but that’s all right.’

  I did not leave right away, but I do not remember the rest of the party very clearly, I do not remember if I said anything to anyone, or if anyone said anything to me, and it is possible that no one did, all things considered. When I finally realised it was time to leave, the clock in the kitchen showed well after eleven. That I do remember.

  In the hall I found my jacket with the folded speech in the inside pocket, I opened the door and stepped outside. I went down the flagstone path in the cold, bracing air, and decided then and there to walk all the way down to Carl Berners Plass.

  17

  The chill from the sea across my face. Clouds drifting. I felt cold inside my father’s sweater. I stood with my back to the hedge and Hansen’s summer house, and I was thinking about Inger, whom I had kissed behind that hedge. I remember her mouth, how it tasted strange, almost good, but I did not know what to do next. I was thirteen years old and she was fourteen, and we lay in the loft reading Nick Carter books. Nick was smoking in the living room. He looked out of the window. He turned and stubbed out his cigarette in an ashtray with a button in the middle you could press down and it would spin and the butt would disappear. Nick crossed the floor and pulled the blonde up from the sofa, carried her into the bedroom and threw her on the bed. ‘Wouldn’t you like to be in his place?’ Inger said. ‘Yes,’ I said, but I had no idea what she meant.