I Curse the River of Time

  ‘Ah well, the past, no one can change it,’ she said, ‘but please give my best to your mother. Tell her I’ll come by if she’s staying a few days.’

  You won’t come by, I thought. Not you. No bloody way.

  ‘I will tell her,’ I said. ‘I promise.’ And she was happy. Then a worried expression fell over her face like a blind coming down.

  ‘Well, I must not be late. It’s a bit chilly, isn’t it. It’s November, and all.’

  ‘That much is true,’ I said, ‘it is November.’ And she said:

  ‘Goodbye then, Arvid,’ and I said:

  ‘Take care, Mrs Kaspersen,’ and she cycled off on her black bicycle. I waited until she had gone around the bend with the dog roses and then I walked on to the beach.

  When I got there, I sat down in the same spot I had sat earlier that morning, where my mother had sat too. I looked around me and saw that the ribbon of reeds had expanded these last few years and now made swimming on this beach difficult unless you came equipped with a large machete, and this because a small river ran into the sea just north of here turning the water brackish and gave to this stretch of coast a different character. When I was a boy, there was a bridge over the river and the reeds, so we could walk out to the good bathing spots without getting our feet wet, but not even a pole was left of it. Those who wanted to swim had to move closer to town and the beaches there.

  I closed my eyes and buried my hands in the sand, and I just wanted to sit here and then I suddenly knew that familiar scent and the air on my skin I had felt down the years in precisely this place, but never like when I was seven years old, even though everything was different then, the season was different, the whole beach was different, no reeds or scrub back then, everything more horizontal, one line behind another, again and again, right out to the last line, where the clouds tumbled like smoke. But this was where we sat, at the foot of the dunes, and it was not yet the Sixties. Straight to the east lay the island with the lighthouse. It was hazy out there, and the lighthouse was not lit up, but I knew every minute where the lighthouse was. I had it in the corner of my eye.

  It had been a very hot day, there was a sharp smell of drying seaweed in the air, of half-dead jellyfish baking in the splintering light, the smell of the sea and the prickling scent of marram grass and the tang of newly opened bottles of sweet orange squash. Black-haired and small, I sat with a spade in my hand digging in the dark, moist sand, and all around me were my blond, full-grown, coarse-limbed brothers. There were only two of them at the time, and they were nice, but they took up a lot of space. Every time I turned around, one of them was there.

  A man with bare feet came along the path from the north. He had rolled up his trouser legs, showing ankles as white as chalk. He stared as he passed us and then he stopped a few steps further on and looked down at my mother who was lying on her side on a tartan rug in the sun with a smoking cigarette in one hand. She was still not afraid of lung cancer, so the cigarette was a Carlton, not a menthol. In the other hand she held a novel by Günter Grass, a thick one, I recall, that someone must have sent up from Germany: The Tin Drum, probably, which had been published that year, it was a sensation. She was tanned in her swimming costume, it was red with blue piping, I remember it well, the crêpe, its sly folds, I often dreamt about it.

  ‘I just had to tell you, madam,’ the man said, ‘how very charitable of you I think it is to take a little refugee child on holiday within your own family.’

  That was how he phrased it and he spoke in Danish, but we had no problem with that, nor was there any doubt which child he was referring to even though I was not so goddamn little that year, and they all turned as one and stared at me, and my brothers looked embarrassed for reasons I did not comprehend. They blushed and my mother smiled, she too a bit awkward, it seemed. But she made no reply, and the man, he raised his hat, a straw hat, I am certain it was, a Panama with a black band, and then he swaggered on, his hands behind his back, barefoot and pleased with himself and the modest lady on the rug and a remark he did not doubt was correct, but where was I supposed to have fled from? From Korea, or the mountains of Tibet? But I did not look Oriental at all, nor was I a refugee from the war in Algiers, and yes, I was dark in those days, but not that dark, so then maybe I was running from Hungary, from the crisis down there? And still there were countries to choose from, but maybe he had no special country in mind, just the fact that I looked different and it was obvious to everyone that I was not like my brothers, and that made me a refugee child, and he was the kind of man who could not keep his mouth shut.

  I wish he had never spoken those words on the beach that day. I would never forget them. And no matter how much I came to resemble my father, and no matter how much they assured me that I was not an accident, in fact the only one who was not, that in itself confirmed what I had already suspected, that my place in the family was not as evident as I would have wished.

  When the man left, my game was ruined. Yet we stayed on the beach for a good while longer and my mother lit another cigarette and returned to her book, but from where I sat in the sand I could see that she never raised her hand to turn the page. She must have read the same lines over and over, distracted, or no longer in the mood, or maybe she was not reading at all, just staring at the printed page. It made me uneasy, things were not as they should be, and the only thing I could do was pretend to play a game I no longer gave a damn about.

  But what I found out that summer, the last summer before the Fifties ended and the Sixties kicked off, before the wall was built between East and West, was that I could swallow whatever hit me and let it sink as if nothing had happened. So I mimicked a game that meant nothing to me now, I was going through the motions, and then it looked as if what I was doing had a purpose, but it did not.

  There was still a path in the sand alongside the reeds to where the bridge had once been, and in some places even right through the reeds, and I stood up, I was thirty-seven years old and brushed the sand off my trousers and followed the path for a while and suddenly I could not see the lighthouse any more or the sea, but only thick, rustling, yellow stems on both sides, like a wall of bamboo, I thought, in China, on the banks of the Yangtze Kiang. So then for a while I was Chinese, my legs trembling like the legs of a weary soldier fighting the Japanese invasion, or like the poet Tu Fu many centuries before, on one of his long and hazardous journeys.

  A jetty had been built at a bend in the river right in front of me, and three rowing boats were moored to it, each painted a different colour, red and green and blue. The oars were neatly placed across the thwarts. There was not a soul in sight, on land nor at sea, only the path and the reeds and an open patch of grass in front of the jetty, and I cautiously climbed into the one boat that had no water in it and sat down on the middle thwart with my back against the jetty and the shore. I did not touch the oars, just sat there, very still, looking across the water in the river. It was green and shiny as a mirror in a way the open sea could never be, and I had never felt as unhappy as I did right then.

  I don’t know how long I sat in that boat, but when I stood up from the thwart to step ashore, my body felt cold and stiff. I took a long step over to the jetty, and as I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, I slipped off the plank and right down between the boat and the jetty, and the gap was so narrow that the back of my head hit the side of the boat as I fell. Sparks flew in the great dark inside my brain and it hurt so badly I was scared and when I opened my mouth to call for help, the brackish water poured in and the water seeped into my jacket and my jumper grew heavy and dragged me down. I coughed and spluttered and thrashed my arms about trying to swim, but there was no room. Then I realised where I was, that I could probably touch the bottom, and so I stood up and the water only came to my chest. I could not haul myself up between the boat and the jetty, the gap was too narrow, so I sacrificed what dignity I had left, took a deep breath and ducked under the jetty and with my knees against the sandy bottom moved to the ot
her side and up on to the planks. I lay there, stretched out, until the cold got such a grip of me that my teeth were chattering and I was forced to stand up.

  There were two ways out of this mess, one was to go back on the path on which I came, or I could walk along the river, past the houses where the people lived who owned the rowing boats, but I did not want them to see me in the shape I was in, and so I ran back across the open grassy mounds and along the path with the tall reeds on either side, and I did not feel Chinese now, and I ran all the way back and came stomping in my boots past our shed, around the pine tree that blocked the sun and around the corner by the terrace where the door to the living room was open, and my mother stood alone inside with her head bent and both hands in her hair. When she heard me coming she took hold of the door frame, and I could have been the man in the moon or anyone at all by the look she gave me, but then she stared me right in the eye and said:

  ‘But, Arvid, where did you come from?’

  Water was dripping from the sleeves of my jacket, from my hair, and I turned and pointed towards the road and the sea behind the trees.

  ‘I came from down there,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, dear God,’ my mother said, shaking her head. ‘That was not what I meant.’

  ‘OK,’ I said. I kept looking at her. She didn’t look well.

  ‘What are you staring at?’ she said.

  ‘You,’ I said, ‘I’m looking at you.’

  ‘Well, you can stop that,’ she said and went into the living room.

  10

  What Mrs Else Marie Kaspersen had in mind and took the liberty of bringing up was the following.

  My eldest brother called me at work one morning and told me to go to Ullevål Hospital.

  ‘Don’t even sit down,’ he said, ‘just go.’

  It concerned the brother who came after me in the queue, whom Mrs Kaspersen so badly had wanted as her son-in-law. That was in 1983. I was working in a bookshop then, in the centre of Oslo, right by the National Gallery. I had been there for two years. Before that I had worked in a factory where we produced a thick slick weekly magazine, and I manned the last stage of the production line for five years. I thought I had to. But I didn’t.

  I had just got to work when I heard the telephone ring. I switched the lamp on, leaned over the counter and picked up the receiver from the telephone that was squashed between two stacks of catalogues from publishers in England and the US. I was the only one who was in this early. Every day except Sundays and every other Saturday I would come down the stairway at home, run along the footpath between the houses and take my seat on the bus, leaning against the vibrating window all the way into Oslo. I was usually the first one to lock myself into the shop and would happily have gone there on Sundays too. I was happy with my work as I had never been before. It was the first time I would wake up in the morning and think, I am going to work, and not feel any reluctance whatsoever. I was so happy in that bookshop that it took me a long time to understand that it was not just the job in itself, but the fact that every morning I could close the door behind me, and just let go.

  It was not difficult to get to Ullevål Hospital from the street where the bookshop was. I could simply run to Pilestredet, a parallel street, where the trams stopped in those days, and catch one there and it would take fifteen minutes to get to the hospital.

  It was early autumn and the sky was clear. I sat by the window in the tram, my face pressed against the glass and looked out at the strange, low sunlight which gave to the buildings a surreal shade of yellow, like in a stage play, I thought, from hidden spotlights, and I could not recall that I had ever seen such an incredibly yellow light, but of course I must have.

  I was well aware of what was waiting for me at the other end of this tram ride, but I did not want to think about it yet. I had a whole quarter of an hour I could spend on something else. A whole life could be contained in those fifteen minutes, yes, it was as though that quarter of an hour might never end, but instead expand like a space where nothing could ever end, even though I knew that after fifteen minutes, a few seconds and a certain number of stops I would reach Ullevål Hospital and would have to step off the tram to walk the hundred metres on the pavement along Kirkeveien and turn left through the archway in the tower and walk to the hospital block which had my second-youngest brother locked up somewhere on the twelfth floor.

  ‘Take the corridor to the right after the lift, and ask for the duty nurse,’ my brother explained on the telephone, ‘and say his name loud,’ he said in an insistent voice I only rarely heard him use, but I did not know if I could do that, say his name out loud.

  But all this would happen soon enough, and I started to think about something quite different in the section of the brain I thought might have some capacity to spare. I believed I could cover quite a few topics if only I was able to concentrate, and the first that for some reason occurred to me was the episode in Hemingway’s book A Moveable Feast where Hemingway himself and his older more established colleague, Scott Fitzgerald, go to the men’s room in a café on the corner of rue Jacob and rue des Saints-Pères in Paris to estimate the size of Fitzgerald’s equipment. His wife, Zelda, had spoken scornfully about it and claimed that the happiness in a relationship such as theirs was a question of length, and that Fitzgerald would never be able to make a woman happy the way he had been put together; and now the man was crushed. But in the men’s room, Hemingway was able to confirm that everything was fine, you’re all right, Scott, he said. But when you see it from above you get a false impression, look at yourself in profile in a mirror, he lectured, then go to the Louvre and look at the statues there, and you’ll realise how fortunate you are. And it was not that the advice was bad, but when I read it again after I had turned thirty, the year we are talking about now, 1983, then the first thing that struck me was the condescending tone in which the episode had been written. More than thirty years after Paris, Hemingway still needed to humiliate Fitzgerald, even though Fitzgerald at the time this took place was already on his way down and would end his life practically forgotten, wasted away in alcohol, while Hemingway was on his way up, and would stay there for a long time. It was the sign of a pettiness which recurred in his work, and I especially found the incident in the men’s room in rue Jacob painful, as though it concerned me personally, and I began to wonder how much it told about Hemingway’s writing, the fact that he could clearly be a bastard, and I think I could have underlined my argument with several examples if the tram I was in had not at that very moment turned past the redbrick buildings that make up the Veterinary College in Oslo. It was on the right hand side of the tramlines on the road through an area of west Oslo called Adamstuen, a part of the city I did not know anything about and I could not have told you where it was, if my life depended on it, had it not been for the one time the year before when I came in a car that was not mine, the long way from where I lived north-east of Oslo, with a map spread out on the passenger seat, going to the Veterinary College to have a dog put down, that also did not belong to me.

  I cannot understand why I had volunteered to do this, but I had. It was a bitch that belonged to someone in the family. For reasons that were none of my business they could no longer keep her. I knew the dog quite well and had often taken her for walks in the early morning to help out when things were not easy. I think we liked each other in a distant and polite way, and after all, we had known each other since she was a puppy and I was a younger man. But she also annoyed me, for she was half hunting dog, half beagle, I think, and she found it hard to walk to heel the way I wanted her to. Instead she was the kind of dog who strained and strained at the leash until I felt torn in half from frustration, and if I let her loose, she was gone with the wind. I found that embarrassing, especially if I had to catch the bus into Oslo, and instead was forced to run around calling out for her among the trees that surrounded the suburb where I lived then and still do. And I remember thinking I was glad she was not my dog.

  As I turne
d into the car park of what I supposed was the clinic for animals of medium size, she sat calmly in the back seat gazing out of the window of the car, which was the red Opel Kadett she always rode in. For once she walked calmly and obediently by my side through the door and over to the hatch where a woman was sitting behind glass looking with her blue eyes so deeply into mine I felt uneasy, and when she asked what it was about, I said it was about putting this dog down.

  ‘I see,’ she said, and she leaned forward to look at the dog, and the dog looked back and cautiously wagged its tail.

  ‘You’ll have to take a seat over there and wait with the others,’ she said, and pointed. It was not necessary, I could easily find my way. I went over and sat down, still holding the dog by its leash, and now I had a numbered ticket in my hand. She settled down on the floor right in front of me with her paws on the toes of my shoes, and I thought I ought to talk softly to her the last few minutes she had left to live, and give her some words of comfort, but I could not think of anything appropriate. Besides, she was calm now, a little introverted even, though there were people on the chairs to my left and right with cats in cages and hamsters and all sorts of other creatures.

  After some time a man in a white coat opened a door and called out the number on my ticket. I stood up and went to the door and gave him the leash with the dog at the other end of it, and she followed him willingly. I went back and sat down to wait, even though he had not told me to. What worried me was that no one had asked if the dog was really mine. It felt unsafe, ambiguous, anything could happen, to anyone, if the one it was happening to had a trusting heart.

  It took less than ten minutes before the man reappeared in the doorway in his coat, which was still as white as it was before. He called me over. I stood up and walked to the door, and he opened it wide so I could walk past him and he held out his hand in a bidding gesture towards the next door.