I Curse the River of Time

  for it showed the human Mao, someone I was drawn to, someone who had felt how time was battling his body, as I had felt it so often myself; how time without warning could catch up with me and run around beneath my skin like tiny electric shocks and I could not stop them, no matter how much I tried. And when they let up at last and everything fell quiet, I was already a different person than I had been before, and it sometimes made me despair.

  But the Seventies were long gone. Only half a year before this November, I and a crowd of people I used to know back then, in the Seventies, had been standing side by side on the pavement opposite the Chinese Embassy in Oslo shouting slogans and protests and had delivered a letter to His Excellency the Chinese Ambassador, and I do not recall if he himself or someone else came to the gate, or if anyone at all came out to receive the letter. Just the same, we pleaded urgently with the Chinese authorities, the Chinese Communist Party we had held in such high regard for so many years, to stop killing the students in the square they called Tiananmen, stop killing the young workers who had joined the students, we begged them to stop the stream of blood which in June 1989 flowed to every corner of the big square like the streams in a delta of red, and just as urgently, we called for democracy in China, and it felt strange to stand there shouting for democracy in the great country that had once been our Jerusalem, where the sun no longer rose in the east for anyone but those who lived there. Soon to be a billion strong. Mao had died nearly thirteen years earlier and thousands of us marched through the Oslo night with pictures on poles and black flags in the wind and black mourning bands around our arms and I remember thinking, what do we do now? But in June 1989 it just felt strange and a little sad. Many of those around me I had not seen for ten years and they all looked older, some with narrow stripes of grey at their temples, and there was nothing more we could do, and the air fell empty as it had been before we came, and I left the pavement opposite the Chinese Embassy with the woman who had been my life for fifteen years, but did not want me any more.

  8

  I found a job in a factory not far from Økern Station on the eastbound Underground line. I had worked there for two months now. I stood by a machine and watched the light spill into the hall in many slanted columns from the huge windows to the car park. In the grey dust the columns looked so compact that you could bang your head if you walked into them, and it was almost strange that no one did. I hoped the air was not so dense, so grey between the pallets at the assembly line where I stood, but of course it was, and denser still. It was from there the dust came.

  In the evenings the windows were black. The slanted columns dissolved and vanished, and the light shifted from the windows to the air above the machines where fluorescent tubes hung suspended from the ceiling in long, furry chains, and the dust too shifted and whirled above our heads like glittering confetti.

  Most days we worked the same shifts and stood together at the assembly line, we who formed what I called the A Team, which everyone called it now, but on other days we worked in a rota and there might only be the two of us on the platform along the machine working with other people from other shifts. I never got used to it. It was like coming home from holiday after two months away and my father had rearranged the living room, so everything was back to front, and for days I would turn from the hall and crash into a chair when my brothers and I came in to watch TV.

  The workers from the other shift had no idea how to support each other like we did on the A Team; the rhythm would fall apart, and I was always more tired after days like that. Each time I rushed off to get the forklift to bring more pallets of paper I would then lower on to the lifts we used to save our backs, the supply of paper at my station would run out. Then the whole belt had to be stopped because the folded sheets with text and pictures were trapped on the chain and didn’t fall into place like they should. Then the man we called Sony Amerika got incredibly angry and would scream at me and try to stare me down with his merciless look in a way that Hassan, the machine operator from the A Team would never have done. They had the same job, but never worked the same shift, and why the hell didn’t Sony Amerika drive the forklift himself, why did I always have to do it? My job was to feed my station. I should have got furious, abandoned the machine and sat on a pallet rolling a cigarette with my back to Sony, but they would call it sabotage, and not one from that shift would have backed me, this I knew. So I did not do it, just gave him an evil and merciless stare in return.

  On the production line, it was Elly I got on with best. We had the same rhythm, the same stops and starts and we caught each other’s eye and laughed when, more than often, we moved in such harmony as if we were one person with four arms, and she would solve crossword puzzles and I would read books when our stations were full and everything was running smoothly. Then Hassan was happy and rested his legs on the chain guard and read magazines with porous pages and Arabic type. When I ran across the hall to get the forklift, Elly would move over and fill my station so the machine did not stop. No one else did that.

  Every half-hour we swapped places. We filled five of the stations with bulky paper that whirled dust into our faces, but was kind to our hands and produced by Follum in Norway. In the last station we put shiny, stiff paper produced in Finland by Kirkniemi.

  When we swapped stations, Elly nearly always bumped into me with a swing of her hip that pushed me head first into the pallets sending paper flying to all sides when I landed, and her round hip left its imprint on my thigh, and there it would stay, and she laughed, and I laughed and Hassan threw up his hands in despair.

  At times, when I was fed up with him, and he was not there, I mimicked Sony Amerika’s Deep South accent, an accent he would never get rid of, and many thought I was good at it. But I always felt bad about it a few hours later, after the early shift or the late shift or after overtime at night on my way down the hill between the factories towards the Økern Centre to catch the Underground home. My job was to make the workers unite, not divide them, that was the party line, and Sony Amerika was not the enemy.

  * * *

  I came off the night shift and stood waiting on the platform when the train on the opposite side arrived, stopped, let passengers off and let new ones in, it took a long time that, and then the train left. A stream of warmly dressed people in puffa jackets and dark coats, in short jackets of tweed, of wool, got off at this station, with scarves around their necks and gloves on their hands, or mittens, and they were all on their way to companies in the area. There were more of them here than at any other station in the valley.

  When they had all gone up the steps, a girl came out from behind the shelter, I had seen her before. She must have got off the train that had just left and instead of floating with the crowd up the steps, through the barriers to the square outside, she had slipped behind the back of the shelter with its arched roof, like a Chinese pagoda, and was now standing at the edge of the platform waiting for the next train. She wiped her mouth with the blue sleeve of her jacket, or rather her coat, it looked a bit short on her, she looked a bit cold, she had a fringe and long blonde hair like Joni Mitchell on the cover of the album, Blue, but she was younger. And then my train arrived, the doors crashing open and I stepped in and went to the window in the opposite door and stood there watching her until we left. She saw me looking at her, and she turned away.

  This happened several times when I was going home from the night shift; she would come out from behind the shelter and stand there in her blue jacket or coat with the too short sleeves and look frozen waiting for the next train and then turn away when she saw that I was looking at her.

  This was something you could see in the early morning if you paid attention and did not allow yourself to be drowned in the noise around you, and even more when you were tired and exhausted and only able to concentrate on one thing at a time.

  Then the train stopped at Carl Berners Plass, the blue station; Tøyen was green, Grønland was yellow, beige, almost, and so on in a system which was
not a system, and it always annoyed me that it was not, for it would have been so good if there had been a system rather than everything being so hopelessly, half-heartedly Norwegian as it was now, but instead a bit European, a little bit continental, because, hey, here was a station of grey concrete for no apparent reason and it looked completely unfinished and raw with its rough damp walls, and would remain like this for ever because someone thought it artistic.

  Anyway, I got off at Carl Berners Plass, the blue station. I was on my way home after a double shift, which meant overtime and good money. I was so tired I felt drunk. During the last few hours at the machine before the new shift was on we fooled about and laughed at the most feeble jokes and our heads were light as helium balloons. My body felt loose, like rubber, but in a way I enjoyed it. I enjoyed being so exhausted, we were all exhausted.

  I walked down the slope from the platform with my legs trembling. There was a queue at the till in the Narvesen kiosk, they were people on their way to work, not coming home like I was, and they were buying newspapers and Norsk Ukeblad and Cokes in the kiosk, and I joined the queue and when it was my turn, I bought Dagbladet. I felt strangely important, my body not like the bodies in front of me or behind me in the queue. I was one of those who kept the wheels turning, all day and night, if necessary. In a dignified way I walked towards the exit, up to the glass doors, and outside it was surprisingly cold, still dark, it would soon be winter. I walked on downhill towards the square, Carl Berners Plass, and onwards around the corner to the left, and then the last bit along Trondhjemsveien before it turned to the city centre, and at the junction I went straight to my small flat on Finnmarkgata.

  On the pedestrian crossing I met a man I knew. We stopped in the middle of the street; he was older than me, nearly ten years older, and a member of the same Communist Party. His name was Frank. He was a skilled worker in a factory close to Hasle Station, he had roots there going back many years, he had been there all his adult life, and not like me with only two months to show. But of course Frank was not his name, it was an alias, I did not know what he was called. I called myself Arne, it was my alias for Arvid, and I often chose the wrong name because both began with an ‘A’ and had two syllables. It was hopeless, but I had picked it myself, so I guess I could not change it now. He said:

  ‘Good morning, comrade, you’re already off to work?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m on my way home, I’ve worked the night shift. I live there,’ I said, pointing to my window that faced the junction where we were standing.

  He turned to look, then turned back.

  ‘So you’ve done overtime,’ he said, and I said yes, I had, I was exhausted, and he said that was good, because night shifts welded the workers together, boosted solidarity and made it easier to be a Communist, he said.

  ‘You’re probably right,’ I said, but to be honest, I had forgotten to be a Communist that night. I had manned the machine and then messed around at break time and had a laugh with the others. And the one time Hassan was cursing and bashing away with a spanner because a loose, badly folded sheet was jammed at the end of the line and forced the straps and rollers out of position, we played football beside the forklift trucks with a big ball of orange rags we had tied together with elastic bands and string, like children used to do in the yards before the war. The World Cup was that year, and we could still feel the enthusiasm, even though Holland was beaten by West Germany in the final.

  A car came down the street and honked loudly, and we were still standing in the middle of the junction, and then Frank whose name was not Frank said:

  ‘Go get yourself some sleep and wake up fit for a fight,’ and I said I surely intended to. Then he crossed to his side and I crossed to mine and the car drove past and I walked through the arch and crossed to the stairwell and up the two flights of stairs and stuck my key in the lock.

  The flat was quiet. It smelled of dust. There was a droning in my head and my body still felt the rasping beat of the machines, thump, thump, thump, my temples were pounding, and my ears ringing. If I went to bed now, I would not fall asleep.

  I felt like some coffee, but that would only make it worse. I opened the door to the fridge to see if I had a beer, just a half, but there was no beer, and I did not want juice. So I drank a glass of water. I sat down at the table, rested my head in my hands and closed my eyes and sat like this for a while. Sometimes it troubled me that what we produced in the factory was so completely unnecessary, stupefying even, but I knew that this was not important. It was the work itself that was important.

  I stood up and went to the living room to fetch the book that I was reading from the coffee table: Jan Myrdal on Afghanistan, Crossroad of Cultures, where lines crossed from east to west, from west to east, caravans of visions and barely audible songs in the thin air. I sat down at the kitchen table to read. There was a wide open sky over Jan Myrdal’s sentences. The world unfolded in all its majesty, back in time, forward in time, history was one long river and we were all borne along by that river. People all over the world had the same yearnings, the same dreams and stood hand in hand in one great circle around the globe.

  I went into the living room, undressed and glanced at Mao who was hanging there between Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell before I slipped under the duvet. I read a few pages, and then my eyes grew tired. I put the book aside, I can sleep now, I thought, we will manage, I thought, it will be all right.

  9

  I got up from the old sofa bed and went to the window. Between our summer house and Hansen’s was a well trodden path through the willow hedge and on that path I saw my mother’s back and Hansen’s back disappear, as my own back and the back of a girl called Inger had done more than twenty years ago on our way to the other side of the hedge to kiss and hug when she had the house to herself. I just presumed it would carry on like this for ever, until one summer I came down and they had sold their summer house and she was gone. I have never really been able to see enormous changes coming until the last minute, never seen how one trend conceals another, as Mao used to say, how the one flowing right below the surface can move in a whole different direction than the one you thought everyone had agreed on, and if you did not pay attention when everything was shifting, you would be left behind alone.

  I went to the door where my boots were, laced them up and put on my reefer jacket and went outside and around the summer house where the old pine tree stood. Ten years ago there had been three of them, but winter storms had knocked the two over and my father had spent a full summer cutting them into logs which he split into firewood and stacked by the shed under corrugated iron he fastened with a rope against the wind. But the last pine was still standing and refused to be moved or knocked over by any wind and it had grown tall, and more than tall, and its needles and sprigs were thick and dense and blocked the sun in the evenings, and the lower branches stretched out across our roof and creaked and groaned when the wind came in from the sea. My mother wanted it down. She had been saying so for years, she wanted it down now, but time went by and my father withdrew from the task, he was no longer a young man, I could see that, and he had my sympathy.

  I walked past the gap in the hedge where the path led to Hansen’s summer house, and down the gravel road and walked the same route I had walked a couple of hours earlier. It felt ridiculous, as if I was getting nowhere and was only repeating what I had done already.

  An elderly woman came cycling past me on her way to town. A brown bag hung from the handlebars and I knew at once who she was. She was the mother of a girl called Bente, that my brother used to know, not my eldest brother, nor the one who came last, but the one who came after me and had already died. It happened six years earlier. That he died. I gave her a nod, but she did not recognise me, or she did not want to, and simply kept going on her black, Danish bicycle, leaving me with the sight of her back. She too had a summer house out here. She lived on the southern side of town, less than one hour away on a bicycle.

  Fifteen, twenty
metres further on she suddenly put her feet awkwardly to the ground and started braking that way. She nearly fell over, bicycle, bag and all. Then she made a half-turn with one hand on the saddle.

  ‘Is that you, Arvid?’ she almost yelled. Mrs Kaspersen was her name. Else Marie Kaspersen in full, but we had never said that.

  I walked up to her, stopped by the handlebars of her bicycle and said:

  ‘Yes, it is. It’s me.’

  ‘Are you here now?’ she said. ‘Is your mother here?’

  ‘Yes, she is.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking so much about her. How is she?’

  ‘She’s fine,’ I said. ‘Just fine.’

  ‘That’s good to hear.’ She looked down at the pedals. ‘It was so sad what happened to your brother. He was such a nice lad.’

  My brother, I thought, what brother, I have forgotten my brother, I thought, but of course I had not. I had not forgotten my brother.

  ‘You know, for a long time I hoped he would be my son-in-law.’

  ‘Well, Bente didn’t want him, did she?’

  ‘Is that so? I thought he was the one that ended it,’ Mrs Kaspersen said.

  ‘I don’t think so. Not as far as I remember.’

  ‘You may be right. I don’t know. But I wouldn’t have minded him for a son-in-law,’ she said.

  ‘I know that,’ I said.

  ‘It was so sad what happened.’

  ‘Yes, it was sad,’ I said, but that was not what I was thinking. I thought, stupid cow, what do you know about sad, what do you know about sad? Nothing, I thought. Nothing.

  ‘I remember it like yesterday,’ she said.

  ‘Well, it’s been six years now,’ I said.

  ‘Has it really been that long?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  She shook her head and bit her lip, she was probably thinking about her daughter. Perhaps Bente was not doing that well, perhaps she had married an idiot. And then I thought: Maybe she should have chosen my brother after all, and he would not have died.