Only a week after that conversation I attended a meeting at the college along with the other students who shared my view of the world and of politics, and I was the one who gave the talk about how important it was for the party to grow deep roots in the working class in times such as these. It was a fairly good talk, but I could not shake off the feeling that the working class I spoke of was not quite the same as the one my mother and father belonged to on a daily basis. They resembled each other, it was true, but they had different qualities and, strictly speaking, belonged to separate worlds. This made me a little uncomfortable, but I must have been the only one who noticed, because when I had finished they all slapped me on the back and said it was a damned fine speech and how interesting it had been to listen to it, and I do not know which houses and streets they grew up in, the other students who attended the meeting, but when it was over, I was the only one to declare I would give up my place at college. And that I did. It was the same as when I was a Boy Scout. I was the only one in the Roe Deer Patrol who took the Scout’s oath seriously. In many ways it was the same.
All this I tried to tell my mother. I had hung my coat on the coat stand, I could see the lady from behind the counter on her way towards us with our coffees and Napoleon cakes on a tray and as I turned in my chair to sit face to face with my mother during this moment we had to ourselves, and the words still flowing from my mouth, I suddenly saw the flat of her hand come sweeping across the table like a shadow, and hit me on the cheek, and the sound it made was the loudest sound in the room. Outside the window was a man unloading crates of flowers from his van for the shop next door, the sun touched the brick wall of an apartment building across the street. Two girls came cycling on their way home from school with their bags on the pannier, they were no more than ten years old and looked a bit cold in their flimsy dresses, and deep inside I felt the old yearning for a sister, and if I had had a sister, my life would have been different, and I would not have been the person sitting here, at this moment, at Bergersen’s café. But of course I had only brothers, three even, and my cheek stung, I could feel it turn red and hot, and I did not know what to do or say. I stared down at the table, I stared at the counter; from the corner of my eye I saw my mother stand up from her chair. The room was completely silent, only the hum from the soft-ice machine could be heard, and the lady with the tray froze halfway to our table before she came all the way over, carefully put down the tray and vanished, and then I remembered the hundred kroner note. I put my hand in my pocket and pulled out the well-folded note.
‘Here,’ I said. ‘I guess you want this back.’ I felt the other cheek beginning to glow. I looked up. She stood with her coat over her arm, her face was pale and her eyes were moist.
‘You idiot,’ she said. And then she left.
I do not remember leaving the café, if I ate my Napoleon cake first or even ate them both, if I paid with the hundred kroner note, nor do I remember what I did during the next few days. But now I was sitting next to my mother on a sand dune by the coast in far north-eastern Denmark one early morning in November 1989 and remembered it all. Across the water was an island called Hirsholmen. On that island was a lighthouse I had seen every single summer of my entire life and my mother, too, had seen it her entire life, and I wondered how it might affect your way of thinking, if you always had a lighthouse in the corner of your eye.
She took the last drag of her cigarette and stubbed it out in the loose sand in front of her with a slow, somewhat heavy movement and turned towards me.
‘What have you got there?’ she said, pointing to the half-buried bottle between my feet.
‘Calvados,’ I said.
‘Calvados,’ she said, and then she nodded a little sleepily. ‘Arch of Triumph, then?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Arch of Triumph.’
She nodded again, a little distant still, a little heavy: ‘It’s a fine book,’ she said. ‘A little sentimental, perhaps. You’d best be under twenty when you read it for the first time.’
‘I guess you’re right,’ I said.
6
She thought she knew who I was, but she did not. Not on the beach that day in 1989, not in Bergersen’s café nearly fifteen years earlier, not before I was a Communist. She did not pay attention, she turned her gaze to other things. She saw me come in and didn’t know where I had been, she saw me go out and didn’t know where I was heading, how adrift I was, how sixteen I was without her, how seventeen, how eighteen, how desperately walking along Trondhjemsveien I was, up and down Route E6 between Veitvet and Grorud. In both directions, first past the women’s prison that lay gloomily to my right like a shadowy, secretive, improbable vacuum behind thick stone walls, before the low blocks on Kaldbakken appeared to the right and the tall blocks on Rødtvet to the left, rising up towards the woods that were so deep and so big that you could easily disappear in them and be lost for ever, if that was what you longed for.
And it was autumn when I walked, November, always November, late evenings with drizzling rain and the street lights flashing past high above my head and because I walked so fast, it was as though they came on and off, those lights, never stopping and could suddenly crackle sharply in the damp air and send off flashes of blue lightning around them while my words were circling in my brain and my thoughts sparkling like an electric current and perhaps looking blue as light sometimes does, if you could slice through my brain to study up close what was happening in there.
My school was down on Østre Aker Vei, by Grorud railway station and the star shaped blocks, as they were known, where the railway workers lived; train drivers, ticket collectors, engineers, but before I got as far as that I turned right at the junction with Trondhjemsveien where the football club was and the grass pitch and on past the church and the cemetery and zigzagged downhill before making a final detour past Heimdal, the red building where the young Christians came together on evenings like this, where I had tried to pass through the eye of a needle, but was turned away, by myself, halfway up the stairs every single time because of my lack of faith. And in the windows the lamps were lit each time I passed by, and there were young bodies moving inside, boys’ bodies like my own, but most of all girls with their girls’ bodies that were Christian from head to toe, that managed to be Christian, in spite of their curves and lines along their hips and the round breasts under their blouses and their smooth Christian skin glowing with an ease that I had not been granted. I merely felt embarrassed when I thought of what they had done: laid their lives in hands that were not their own, but in the hands of what they thought was a higher power, and this power threw such a brilliant light they could bathe their souls in, and they sang of that light without blushing or shame, with their eyes upturned and blissful smiles on their lips. And they were having such a good time, running around laughing out loud and no matter what they were up to, their Christian faith would protect them.
But I no longer stopped on the stairs or outside the windows looking in, I was beyond that, I no longer wished to be inside, I held my life in my own hands. But it was not easy to be alone and to be honest, I could not bear it.
I walked on around the bend and down to my school where the buildings stood dark in the autumn evening and looked strange, alien even, in an almost menacing way. When I got there, I crossed the empty courtyard and the sound of my boots threw echoes off the walls on both sides and suddenly I could feel that my mother was there. I’m not joking, she really was and she looked at me through the damp dark in the yard of Groruddalen School, and the windows on both sides showed no sign of life at this time of night, no one leaning out of a first floor window to call something nice to me, something embracing I had longed to hear, and I knew what she was thinking: Has the boy enough about him, she thought, will he manage on his own or is he too fragile? I was convinced she believed I was too fragile, that there was something about my personality that made her sceptical, that my character had a flaw, a crack in the foundations only she knew about, things had been hand
ed to me, was what she thought, but life was not like that, nor should it be.
7
When we came back to the summer house, we were both a little cold. I put the bottle on the table and went over to the Jøtul stove that my father had bought straight from the factory and fitted to the chimney that was already in place so my mother and father could keep the summer house warm to their hearts’ content and then stay on in the summer house through the colder seasons.
There was firewood in the basket. I knelt down and built a fire with plenty of kindling and because the draw was good, I got it going at my first attempt. It was a fine stove; the heat spread around the room as the flames took hold behind the cast iron, and I grew sleepy when the heat hit my face. I closed my eyes.
‘I’m getting a divorce,’ I said.
‘So you said,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t know why. Why you’re getting a divorce.’
She was behind me somewhere. In the kitchen, perhaps. I stared into the stove. The fire was burning nicely now.
‘It can’t go on,’ I said, and I could hear how it sounded like it was my idea, that it was my decision, but it was not.
‘I suppose she’s the one who wants the divorce,’ my mother said.
‘Why do you say that?’
‘I know you,’ she said.
‘You don’t know me,’ I said, but she did not even bother to reply.
‘You could have got divorced yourself,’ I said.
‘Oh, you think so. But I didn’t.’
‘If you know me so well, then why don’t you know why I’m getting divorced?’
‘Oh, Arvid,’ she said, ‘drop it.’
I opened my eyes. I was still kneeling in front of the stove. I stood slowly up and looked at her.
‘I need to lie down for a bit,’ I said. ‘Half an hour or so, if that’s all right with you?’
‘That’s quite all right,’ my mother said. She had sat down by the table and lit a cigarette and her voice sounded strangely subdued, flat almost, like it was coming from behind a wall, and so I did not go into one of the two small bedrooms as I otherwise would have done, but instead I lay down on the old sofa, for I did not want to be alone while I slept and did not want her to be without me while she was awake.
At first the sofa swayed like the ferry only a few hours earlier, and it made me feel a little sick, but then I got used to it and after a while it was quite pleasant. The coarse cover of the sofa smelled of summer and the Sixties, I could hear my mother leafing through a book at the table behind me, The Razor’s Edge, I supposed. And then I heard the tiny click of her lighter as she lit up another cigarette and I let go, went into freefall and was asleep before I hit the ground.
Before I was fully awake I knew I was not in my childhood home, nor in the flat where I lived, in a suburb I referred to as Eagles’ Nest, and I was not lying in the bed where I normally slept and woke up and had been lying so many nights staring into the dark, but instead I was in this summer house, which had been such an important part of my life. This small plot had saved me from Hudøy island again and again when I was still at school. Hudøy was a holiday camp way out in the Oslo Fjord where they sent the children who had nowhere else to go for the summer when both parents had to work or they did not have the money to go anywhere at all, or for no other reason than for the children to feel the sun on their faces, the wind in their hair and the salt water on their bodies. It was the common cure for anything and everything that might ail a child in the Sixties, but I knew even then that I would not be able to bear the pressure of the other boys in the dormitory, the dining hall, during morning exercises: that I would pray like the others prayed, on my knees by the bed at night, if pray was the thing to do. I did what the others did because I lacked the strength to stand alone in the crowd with my fear and my freedom.
As I rose through the layers of sleep I heard voices, my mother’s voice and a deep male voice I knew well and that was because its owner had never been able to keep the volume down no matter how hard he tried. The voice had a richness that regardless of which room it filled, made the walls rumble, the furniture even, and my chest rumbled as I lay on the sofa. But they were really trying their best to be quiet so as not to wake me, and I did not stir, but lay with my nose into the sofa cover and my hands folded at the back of my neck. I often woke up in this position back then, as if I had ducked for cover, or a weapon was pointed at my head, like in a news report from Africa, from Congo or Angola, or like I had seen in films from war, where the captured prisoners were lying like that, side by side, with their faces to the ground, dust in their nostrils, stripped of dignity, the scorching sun and the burning, cracked lips, the white smiles of the Allied soldiers and their white cigarettes.
I heard my mother say:
‘What he’s doing is absolutely necessary. It just couldn’t go on like that, the situation was intolerable. But many are against him, the army is against him, it’s all hanging by a thread. I don’t know what will happen now.’ And then she said: ‘I hope to God I live long enough to see how it all turns out,’ and she started to cry, and then she was silent and became furious instead. I could tell from the way she lit her cigarette, how she failed with her first, hectic attempts and the male voice said:
‘Let’s go over to my place and have some coffee and let the lad sleep. He looks like a calf on its way to the slaughterhouse.’ His deep voice resonated through my bones.
‘He’s getting a divorce,’ my mother said.
‘I’ll be damned,’ said the man, whose surname was Hansen, and he was never called anything but Hansen.
Hansen was my mother’s best friend even though the two of them spent most of their time in different countries, and I am certain that they never wrote to each other. Hansen was a retired railway worker. He lived in town in a low redbrick tenement and rode a moped to his summer house as often as he could, no matter what time of year it was.
‘I’ve never been divorced myself, so I really don’t know much about it,’ Hansen said, and a pause followed, and then I heard him say: ‘What have you got there?’
‘It’s a bottle Arvid bought,’ my mother said. ‘It’s Calvados, French spirit.’
‘Well, the lad’s all right for money then,’ Hansen said. ‘Come on, let’s talk politics on my side of the hedge. I’ll treat you to a cup of coffee and some cake too, if you are up for it,’ and maybe he touched her cheek just then.
I heard them rise from the table and walk towards the door. They had been discussing Gorbachev, the man with the map of an unknown nation on his forehead, who was now leader of the Soviet Union, appointed to that post the year before, who would turn out to be the last leader of a state which was a seventy year long experiment where everything had gone to hell a long time ago. But no one realised that yet. That Gorbachev would be the last. Not even he.
My youngest brother had gone to the Soviet Embassy in Oslo and convinced the staff it was important to give him a photo of their president, even though the cult of personality was finally over and done with, even in China where it really took off for some years, it could not be denied, and my brother carefully carried the photo home and had it framed and gave it to my mother for her birthday.
‘Hang that above your bed,’ he said, ‘then you can talk to him before you fall asleep. Like Arvid used to talk to Mao.’
And she did, for fun really, but it was not true that I used to speak to Mao. That would have been childish. I did have a picture of Mao above my sofa bed in the early Seventies, that is true, because that was the only place I had for it. But I had a picture of Bob Dylan there too and one of Joni Mitchell on a beach in California (Oh California, California, I’m coming home) and a reproduction of a landscape by Turner, the English painter, for I had read somewhere that he painted his pictures with brushes dipped in tinted steam, and I thought that was a beautiful way to put it, so when I came across this poster of one of his paintings of the sea from outside the town of Whitby on the English coast, a town I had been
to the year before, I bought it because I was certain I could see that it was true.
The picture of Mao I had was the well-known retouched photograph where he sits hunched over his desk writing with one of those Chinese brush pens, and I always thought, or hoped, that it was not one of his political or philosophical articles he was writing, but one of his poems, perhaps the one which begins:
Fragile images of departure, the village back then.
I curse the river of time; thirty-two years have passed.