I Curse the River of Time

  I remember getting up from the sofa and walking naked to the window, and it was cold December and snow on the bushes along the brick wall right below me and snow on the tarmac outside. I leaned out with the icy windowsill against my stomach, and it should have been a grey dawn now, almost morning, but the orange blue light I could see in the distance made everything around it look black.

  ‘What’s going on?’ she said.

  ‘There’s a house on fire down the road somewhere,’ I said, ‘a tenement by the Munch Museum.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ she said, ‘not the Munch Museum,’ for we went there at least every other Sunday, stood waiting outside until the doors were opened.

  ‘No, not that far down. The Munch Museum will be all right,’ I said. ‘But that house will not.’

  She crossed the floor right behind me and we stood by the window shoulder to shoulder, she and I, and me with no clothes on and she wrapped in the warm duvet. In Finnmarkgata there were glowing circles on the snow below the street lamps, and the lights had come on in several flats across the road, and she said:

  ‘But aren’t you cold?’ I shivered and said:

  ‘Yes, I guess I am,’ for I suddenly realised that I was freezing, like the naked sculptures in Frognerparken, glittering with hoar frost, in December, January, and then she opened the duvet and pulled me in, and we stood a while in our own warmth.

  She tiptoed back to the sofa with the duvet tightly around her, and lay down and said:

  ‘Please don’t wake me again, I need my beauty sleep.’

  ‘No problem,’ I said, thinking: you couldn’t be any prettier than this, and I closed the window and got dressed in a cold shirt and cold trousers, and barefoot I walked out into the kitchen with my socks and shoes in my hands, closed the door quietly, carefully behind me, and then she called out:

  ‘Be my comrade and leave the door open, please,’ so I opened the door and did not switch the light on and lifted the lid of the old cooker I had brought with me when I moved from Veitvet. I held my hands above the hotplate in the dark and rubbed them hard before I put the kettle on. Drops of water hissed under the kettle and cracked against the glowing cast iron, where heat rose from the filaments through the cylinder in a muted rumble, and the sound from the kettle was a fine sound, a sound I knew, a sound I had heard almost every morning standing on a stool with my hands outstretched half an hour on the dot after my father had caught the bus to the factory, and only she and I would be in the kitchen this early. Everyone else was asleep, it was dark outside in the street, dark inside the living room, only the yellow light on the cooker in the kitchen was lit, and there was a crack like airgun shots under the kettle when she heated milk to make cocoa. It was just she and I, for my brothers always slept late, my baby brother, my big brother, and they did not even know I was awake, that I had been lying in bed listening for the click of the door and my father’s fading steps on the flagstones in front of the house. They did not know that I was waiting under the duvet, counting his long strides up the hill, past the red telephone booth, past the shopping centre, all the way up to Trondhjemsveien where the bus stopped that would take my father into town. Then I got up and dressed in the pitch dark, so the others would not see what I was doing if they suddenly woke up to go to the toilet. I tiptoed down the stairs to the living room and along the hall where my uncle from Denmark hung in a silver frame. His name was Jesper, and he wore a blue cap with stripes and a tassel and a Danish army uniform and died right after that photo was taken, only thirty-three years old, like Jesus was when he died.

  And then I reached the kitchen and quietly stood on the threshold. She was standing in front of the cooker with her back to the door.

  ‘Is that you?’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it’s me,’ and every single time she knew that it was me, every single time she knew that it was me who stood there, even though I came barefoot and noiseless when I came, like a Kiowa through the woods, I was mysterious and dark, and she said:

  ‘Can’t you sleep?’ and I said:

  ‘No, you know I can’t,’ and then she almost certainly smiled to herself before turning around, and she turned around and was not smiling very much, not really smiling, but nor was she displeased for she knew that it was me coming. She took the stool from under the kitchen counter and placed it in front of the cooker and bent down to get the milk from the bottom shelf of the cupboard by the hatch that was covered with mesh to keep the mice out. I climbed on to the stool, knees first, then stood with my arms outstretched over the open hotplate to feel the shimmering heat seep up along my hands, along my chest, all the way up to my chin and my mouth, and the kettle banged on the hotplate and I had not even started school yet, so I could stand there for as long as I wanted.

  * * *

  I sat down at the table with the hot coffee in a pale yellow mug and thought about the burning building down the road and the people living in the flats that were burning, waking up in the middle of the night with the red hot air around them, running with their children in their arms, down the stairs to the ground floor, and at the last minute stumbling into cold December, and the cold felt like a shock to their faces. But everything that must be done was done by those who knew how, and I did not want to go out to stand there staring like the others and be one of them. And I had to get going, it would soon be six o’clock. I closed the lid of the hotplate, and made myself a packed lunch and put it in a bag, which looked like the bag my father always carried, a leather bag with one big compartment containing my lunch and copies of Arbeiderbladet and Klassekampen, folded so the logo could not be seen, and two pockets at the front with my notebook and my pen and the latest resolutions from the Party leadership, as well as the book I was reading at the time.

  I went into the living room to watch her sleep in the grey, muted, slanted light from the window. I stood there and did not say anything that might wake her, because soon she would have to get up and go to school in town. Sometimes when she was asleep and I was awake I felt a little uneasy, for she looked so young on the pillow, only a girl, and I thought, she is so young, and in her sleep she had whispered: Oh, Arvid, from her floating state between here and there, and no embarrassing slip did she make in the dark, no other name rose from some previous embrace, no Gunnar, no Espen, no Tommy, no, certainly no Tommy, but Arvid, only Arvid, for he who bore the name Arvid was the first, was the one who held it all in his hands, held everything in balance, and sometimes when these thoughts came over me, I found it hard to bear. She did not feel young, she said, and she did not feel young to me, not young in that way, she knew things that I did not, but she was young. It troubled me sometimes.

  I felt her warmth and the warmth from the stove still inside me, it was early morning on Carl Berners Plass. I crossed the tramlines, cut my way beneath the cables that powered the trams and the neon signs were not yet switched on, and it felt right that they were not; half blinded you embraced your own body, and with the warmth still under your jacket, you walked up the pavement along the square, moving through the grey light, and let your thoughts seep softly in, undisturbed, on the way up to the station, but also walking as one of many in the chill of December. I liked the feeling of being a we, being more than myself, being larger than myself, being surrounded by others in a way I had never experienced before, of belonging, and it made no difference if those who walked to the left or the right of me, in front or behind me on this street, did not share the same feeling. We were the proletariat on our way to the Underground station, to the places where we toiled, and everyone in the Party was annoyed because I often said the peuple rather than the working class. It was an anachronism, it was just nonsense, they said, but I would never stop saying that, it felt right to me in a way they did not understand. None of them had read Victor Hugo, they only read what was in front of them, they did not know that what had failed in the revolutionary years of 1830, 1848, 1871, was what we were going to achieve, once and for all, and in my bag I had the latest resoluti
ons from the Party’s leadership. I knew well that I would never be able to carry them through, in fact I did not carry much through, I was too shy, I was too alone, I had my back against the wall, I did not want to be alone, but it did not matter just now, in the half-dark on the way to the Underground station, whether I knew that I would succeed or not. Everyone around me knew so much more than me anyway, all the women around me, all the men. I knew too little. And still there was nothing I wanted more than to walk here, towards the station in the grey light and be surrounded by them all.

  Past the loading ramp, through the plastic double-doors, cold outside, warm inside, the forklift trucks parked along the wall. The concourse was quiet and there was a freshness to the air you did not normally feel in here between the machines, no dull blows against your earmuffs, no whirls of dust in your eyes, no heat, no smell of burnt plastic from the melting chamber, no hum from the assembly lines, or itching or sticky sweat. The old-timers in their blue work clothes hung around the coffee machine, small-talking about things of no consequence, and Elly, sleepy Elly so remote in her pale blue apron, standing there, or sometimes sitting, five pallets up dangling her legs. No one was called Elly any more, except Elly. She had nice legs. She was ten years older than me, perhaps more, and I guess it showed, but it was hard not to look at her. She smiled to me above the shoulders of the old men, and she winked, and I winked back and walked the stairs down to the basement and the locker rooms where at last I had been given one, after someone had left. Having your own locker was important. You could hold your head high.

  Two hours into the shift the foreman came over. The air was thick with dust, every machine was rolling, the small one and the two big ones and I was standing at one of them and time after time I had to run to the forklift truck to bring forward new pallets with seven stacks of paper so the belt would not stop. The A team was doing well even though two of us were off work that day. I removed my earmuffs, bent down and turned my naked ear to the foreman’s mouth and he told me I had to go and see the personnel director. Now. He looked at me and left. I looked down the belt, along the platform we were standing on, feeding our stations, Elly and Reidun and Reidar and I, and I waved to Hassan who was running the machine and pointed to my chest and then to the door leading through to the office block. I filled my stations elegantly with thirty-two pages of folded, hard fibre, porous paper manufactured in Norway by Follum Factories. Hassan came over. He showed me five stiff fingers on his right hand and counted them one after the other with the index finger of his left hand, right in front of my face to make sure I got everything right. I nodded, and he smiled, and as everything was running smoothly, he took over my station. Hassan was all right. I stepped down from the platform and walked through the concourse and out through the soundproof door to the part of the business that had carpets on the floors and potted plants by the lift.

  Four floors up. It just said Tommy on the door, suggesting he was one of the boys, was one of us all in every department and to give the door an intimacy I was not sure I liked. I did not like it. I knocked on the door and entered.

  ‘Yes?’ I said.

  ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Just a moment.’

  I stood there waiting for several minutes. Was he trying to psych me out, I wondered, make me look like an idiot, make me feel less than I was? I grew uncertain. Not scared, but uncertain. Perhaps he knew something I did not, something that could harm me? If that was the point he was doing a good job, but he didn’t know that. I smiled vaguely the whole time, and then he raised his head and said:

  ‘Do you know why we gave you a job here?’

  ‘Because I applied, I suppose.’

  ‘Because your father called to ask if we would. Give you a job.’

  ‘I see,’ I said.

  ‘We liked your father here. He gave his all, every single shift, he was never ill, never caused any trouble. It was not his fault that the shifts and the overtime became too much for him. He’s not a young man any more.’

  ‘I know,’ I said.

  ‘That was the only reason.’

  ‘I see,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, that was all.’

  I turned and headed for the door, and when I got there and had my hand on the door handle, I stopped and said:

  ‘Do you know who the peuple is?’

  ‘I don’t give a shit.’

  ‘I thought so,’ I said with something that was meant to be a sarcastic smile, but it was clear that he did not give a damn about the peuple, nor why I asked the question, and anyway he was already looking at his papers again and did not see my smile. And I thought, am I a man who could step forward and kick the personnel director called Tommy so hard on the shin he would be forced to give me the sack, and yet leave the factory with my head held high? But I knew that I was not, and on my way down in the lift from the fourth floor I was gasping for air.

  20

  I did not understand. It felt so long since I walked down the gangplank of the Holger Danske and into this town, and it was early morning. This day. It should have been over by now. It was November, it was evening, it should have been dark, but the sun was still hanging low above the rooftops to the west, where it glowed faintly and refused to let go.

  I cycled past the Palads Theatre in the far north of the town. In front of the old cinema there were long shadows falling in razor sharp lines across the houses on the opposite side, but they were not long enough, not dark enough to soften this angular, insistent light.

  At a kiosk that was still open, there were newspapers stacked on a stand outside, and in large bold typeface on every front page it said THE WALL TUMBLES, and I could not breathe, where had I been? This was bad, I had not paid attention, it was really bad, and I started to cry. I felt my tears flow right through town from Gammeltorv, and they flowed across the junction with the Løve Pharmacy and then down across the square by the Svane Pharmacy. Time had passed behind my back and I had not turned to look, that was really, really bad, and I cycled on with tears flowing down my face along Søndergade all the way to the south of town, to a place where I used to drink beer in the olden days. It was almost as far as Møllehuset and the mill brook and the ice cream stall that was closed now, like everything else was closed, and all the way out to the Bangsbo Manor park with its two golden tigers which everyone thought were lions resting on plinths to either side of the entrance. The manor was a museum now and had been for many years. I had gone there several times with the girls. It was a good museum. We entered the big, horseshoe-shaped main building to look at the exhibits from places around the town and from the coast and inland, and there was furniture a hundred years old or even more, and clothes with lace and wide shirt fronts, and work clothes and vast numbers of photographs in off white and sepia on the walls. On the way out we bought lollies from the counter and stood on the white painted bridge across the moat and fed stale bread to the ducks from a bag we had brought with us. We broke the bread into suitable chunks and threw them into the water one by one, and the ducks came swimming at full speed from all directions in a splash of foam, flapping to get there ahead of each other in a whirling chaos, and sometimes the carp would come darting, straight out of nowhere, their backs red, and would get there first and drag the pieces of bread down into the tea-coloured water and disappear towards the bottom.

  I made a turn towards the manor park and wiped my face, that was cold now in the cold wind and clammy against my palms, but the tears were no longer running from my eyes and I thought of all the photographs from Berlin I had seen, and especially the one with the soldier in his shiny helmet and spotless uniform floating across the no man’s land between East and West, his gun on his back, muzzle down, stock up, hanging there suspended in the air with the coiled barbed wire beneath him for almost thirty years, and wondered if he finally was allowed to land now.

  With the bicycle between my legs I stood for a while gazing past the towering ash and chestnut trees and beeches towards the large, white house at the far end of the pa
rk; the white bridge, everything bare now, unflowering, pure and clean. Only one man was wandering along the footpaths with burlap sacks under his arm covering the pruned flowers that would die when the frost came. If it came.

  Then I turned the bicycle around and went back a bit the same way I had come, up Søndergade to the place where I used to drink when the wall was still standing, but when I got there, I could not find it. I pushed the bicycle along the building. There was the usual second-hand furniture, clothes and the unloved books for sale in the Santal Mission charity shop, and to the right of its large windows was the door I could have sworn led to the bar where I had planned to have a beer. But there was not even a sign with CLOSED hung up behind the glass or Moved to this or that address. The café was simply gone. Above the window it said FONA in hard blue neon lights. I shielded my eyes with both hands and leaned towards the window and peered through the glass, and inside there were rows of television sets and stereos for sale.

  ‘Goddamnit,’ I said out loud, and suddenly the urge for a beer was stronger than usual. There was a fissure in my life, a void, and that void, only beer could fill.

  A man passed me on the pavement. He had probably heard me swearing and walked on in a strange and cautious way to a door a bit further down in the next house. Almost always there were white pots with red geraniums on a windowsill if it was an apartment. And sure enough, there they were, the geraniums, and the man pulled a key out of his pocket, but then he turned and looked my way, and walked back when he realised why I was standing there and could see from my blue bicycle that I was not Danish, for all Danish bicycles are black.