I Curse the River of Time

  ‘Shouldn’t you be at work now?’ I said.

  ‘Where? At Freia?’

  ‘Yes. Where else?’

  ‘I don’t work at Freia any more.’

  ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘No, how could you,’ she said.

  I put three tablespoons of coffee into a filter, poured the water, and I stood there waiting until the coffee was ready, looking out the window towards Finnmarkgata and the nearly bare trees on the hill called Ola Narr, and I looked at the windowsills I had painted a clear and luminous shade of red and I knew I would have to paint them white again if I were ever to move, and I guess I would, one day. I poured the fresh coffee into a flask which was as orange as the windowsills were red and placed it on the table and was about to sit down when she said:

  ‘Cups and plates,’ and I had barely sat down before I had to get up again and fetch the cups and plates from the cupboard. I opened the top drawer in the kitchen counter and found a spatula I used as a cake slicer whenever I had some cake in the house and placed it next to the two Napoleon cakes and sat down, and that seemed to be fine with her. She took the spatula, carefully lifted the two cakes on to the plates, and then she stood up after all, went over to the counter, opened the top drawer and came back with two forks.

  ‘Right,’ she said, ‘let’s taste these cakes and then we’ll say no more about it.’

  Say no more about it. And we hadn’t said a word. She cut back to a point before anything had happened, and there was nothing wrong with the cakes, I had not tasted any better in a long time, and we are talking about an expert here, me, that is, and we were well into autumn now, outside the window came the wind in great spirals of dust and leaves from chestnut trees, maples, and lime trees, and the tarmac looked harder than it did in the summer, like a crust you could fall on and really hurt yourself. But in my kitchen the heat rose from a radiator, up my legs and to my stomach, and the radiator too I had painted red. But really it was too late. It suddenly struck me. That it might be too late. She should have come earlier, or I should have taken the Underground to the house with the thin cardboard walls you could kick a hole in so your foot would crash into your neighbour’s living room, and I realised that she too knew it, that it might be too late, and she knew that I knew, but as long as we didn’t talk about it and ate our Napoleon cakes, we could keep that knowledge at bay. Nor had she come to apologise, she had come because I was her son. That’s how it was. She had come because she was a mother. And yet it was too late. Something was broken, a wire had been stretched too taut and had started to fray and it snapped with a crack you could hear between the walls. And I knew she heard it as well as I did.

  But the ball was in my court, and there it could not stay. So as a joke, and to inject a little humour into the shiny red kitchen, I said:

  ‘So did he kick you out, the foreman at Freia?’ and I smiled because I did not think such a thing could really happen.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I kicked him.’

  ‘You kicked him?’

  ‘Yes, on the shin. Quite hard, actually, and then I left. For good.’

  ‘But you can’t just walk out on a job like that? There are rules, aren’t there? You must have been there ten years, you’ll lose all your rights.’

  ‘Frankly, I don’t give a shit about that, if you pardon a mother such an expression,’ and I guess I could excuse an expression like that, but I knew that my father would never have done such a thing, nor would I, even though I was the one who had thrown it all away and left a college where I learned the things I had always wanted to learn, and was now an industrial worker, like she was, and my father was, but they, of course, because they had to.

  ‘So what are you doing now? I mean, have you got yourself another job?’

  ‘I’m a maid at Park Hotel,’ she said harshly, and looked me in the eye with a defiant stare, as though I was someone who might be condescending about that kind of job, but I did not even know what a maid was, and said so, and then she said:

  ‘I hoover rooms, make beds, clean toilets and so on,’ she said, and I who had not spent a single night in a hotel in my entire life, understood that what she did at the Park Hotel was the same as she had done in the flat on Veitvet and always had done and always hated, and that is what I said, I said:

  ‘But Mother, you’ve always hated that kind of work,’ and she said:

  ‘That’s true, but now I don’t really mind. Now I’m paid for it, and that makes all the difference, doesn’t it?’ And, of course, there was a difference.

  And so there we sat, she and I, on either side of the table in the kitchen with the red painted windowsills, eating Napoleon cakes, with a view of Finnmarkgata and Ola Narr and nothing more, right between the Munch Museum and Carl Berners Plass, and the room fell silent, we said nothing, nor did we look at each other, and I started to think about all the films we had seen together, on TV in black and white, or at Sinsen Kino, at Grorud Kino, at Ringen Kino, right up the street from where my flat was, and an evening ten years ago came to mind, when we had gone to the Colosseum Kino in Majorstua in Oslo, just she and I, to see the film Grand Prix with Yves Montand and James Garner starring as the two racing drivers. We had dressed up for the occasion, she in a blue dress with yellow flowers, I in my grey Beatles jacket, without a collar, but trimmed with narrow black ribbon all the way around, and early into the film I was already a big fan of Yves Montand. He was firm and determined behind his wheel, but he had something more, something in his eyes, a sadness maybe, which James Garner did not have. Do you ever get tired? Of the driving, Yves Montand said. No, said James Garner. I sometimes get tired, Yves Montand said, but perhaps this sadness was nothing more than the fact that he was French, and my mother could easily understand why Yves Montand was my favourite.

  But he died in the film. He died the very moment he realised he was about to find the happiness he had so longed for, with Eva Marie Saint, who might have taken that sad, French look from his eyes, and then he swerved off the track in a sea of burning petrol, and I covered my eyes, I sobbed my heart out, and when we left the cinema, my mother had to stop by the car park on the way to Majorstua Station to comfort me. And then we heard the vrooom from the cars in the car park where grown men elated by the film revved their engines before popping the clutch so the tyres spun on the tarmac and gave off a screeching sound and then turned out into the wide world. A bit too fast, a bit too hard in the curves, chasing the pure line, and then, of course, they just drove home. My mother laughed, loud and bubbly, almost lovingly, I thought, in her dark voice, and I laughed too, loud and enchanted, in my high-pitched voice, I was still only a boy then, my eyes filled with tears, and I looked up into her face for I understood what was going on, I understood why the men revved their engines like that after seeing the film, and she laughed because she thought they were childish, but also because she loved them for doing it, and if we had had a car, she and I, we would have done the same thing, skidded around the corner of the car park with a roar, and driven through the streets of Oslo, she and I, with me at the wheel.

  ‘Do you recall Grand Prix?’ I said.

  ‘The Eurovision Song Contest?’

  ‘No. I mean the film we saw together, you and I, at the Colosseum, the one with Yves Montand.’

  ‘And James Garner? Oh yes, I remember it well. It was exciting. Fast cars, Monte Carlo, the whole works,’ she said with a faint smile. ‘But he died in the film, Yves Montand. It was so sad, you cried like a whipped dog. But it wasn’t just you and I, was it? Surely your brother was there too?’

  And suddenly I remembered. That my big brother was there, that we sat either side of her in the wide, tall dark that was the Colosseum Kino. It was not just she and I, because my brother had been there too, and so all three of us must have been stood in the car park when I cried like a whipped dog, which I am certain my brother did not, when the elated drivers, so inspired by the film that they revved their engines before popping the clutch, had vanished
down the street in a roar and rounded the corner on two wheels, at Majorstua Station. But my brother was not in the picture I carried with me from that evening. I had erased him at once. Like Stalin erased Trotsky.

  And then it was over. We had eaten the Napoleon cakes, scraped the plates clean, and both hands on the table she stood up and folded the small cardboard tray four times, crumpled up the white box and threw them in the bin.

  ‘So, will we be seeing you on Sunday? For dinner. Your brothers are coming.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that sounds great. Unless I have to go to a meeting.’

  ‘I see,’ she said, and she stood there with her back straight as a board, and maybe there was something she wanted to add, but if so, she changed her mind, and I followed her through the hall and opened the door, and without turning once she went down the stairwell where I had washed every single step with the Zalo, instead of Krystall soft soap.

  III

  12

  Some weeks before I sailed to Denmark on the old, rundown ferry, the Holger Danske to seek out my mother, I found a letter in my letterbox among the junk mail and the two newspapers I had subscribed to since I left home more than seventeen years earlier. I opened the letter and sat down on the second step of the stairwell outside my flat, just left of the letterboxes. My behind grew quickly cold, but it is the place I always sit down when there is something urgent I have to respond to and I thought this might be one of those occasions.

  Inside the A5 envelope was a postcard with an art motif on the front. On the back of the card a woman had filled all the available space in a handwriting that must have been formed some time in the Fifties.

  This is how the text began:

  On Saturday October 28th we passed each other at Oslo Central Station. A brief moment. I wore a black cap with multicoloured pompoms. Then I saw how much you look like your father, as I remember him. I grew up in Vålerenggata 5 – right across the landing from your family. I remember them well. Your father, your mother – her especially.

  She had signed her name, a name I had never heard of or seen, and below it in brackets she had written ‘née Frantzen’.

  Vålerenggata 5! The square apartment building on the corner of Smålensgata and Vålerenggata, where the tram went past. I remember the old dairy there, with tiles on the floor, and walking past you could see through the archway to the clothes lines in the backyard where white vests were hanging like dead men, like corpses, while my father’s checked shirts swayed, always waving at me from the washing line. To the left after the entrance you reached the first stairwell with a door and a small window of safety glass and then up the stairs to the second floor with that special smell lingering between the walls, which I thought had something to do with my grandfather, his clothes, his brown jacket, the polka dot bow tie he always wore even when he had taken his jacket off, or his shirts, his brown shoes, something he had in his hair, something viscous in tiny bottles with snuff-coloured labels, but there were seven families living on that stairwell, including the caretaker on the ground floor, so surely he alone could not be responsible for that smell. For all I knew every single stairwell in Oslo smelled like that. They said he was a good man. A good Christian. Personally I could curb my enthusiasm. As could my mother.

  It said Frantzen on the door across from us. I recall the metal letterbox that opened out and not in and the spyhole way above my head. The Frantzens’ door was the first thing I saw when my mother and I came hand in hand up the stairs after a trip to the shops or a ride on the tram up from town, and our bodies felt a mutual resistance, like some electric current passing from one arm to the other and back again down our legs, that made them hard to lift, and the reason I have always remembered the nameplate was the ‘z’ – a letter I thought was used only by Zorro.

  The Frantzens’ door was to the right on the second floor and ours was to the left. My grandfather’s name was on our nameplate. His middle name Adolf had been reduced to an ‘A’, which was no surprise, in the years after the war. I am named after him, I have his first and last name and I have always hated them. But the Adolf in the middle I escaped because the vicar in our church put his foot down.

  Behind the door with the A in the middle lived my mother and my father, and two of his brothers and their father, who was my grandfather, and then my older brother and me. There were two rooms and a kitchen, and they were not very big rooms and the kitchen was not a big kitchen. The walls of the flat were dark in a way that today I would describe as murky, and the blinds were nearly always down. I do not know why. Someone must have thought that shutting the light out would keep the rooms cooler.

  I had no idea that my mother knew the people across the landing where it said Frantzen with a ‘z‘ on the nameplate. I never saw anyone coming out of that door or anyone going in, but of course I did not notice everything, I was quite small when we moved from there. Helter-skelter, I later thought, under cover of darkness, in a lorry heading for Økern and Bjerke, and up through Groruddalen, towards the woods and the light, towards Vesletjern and Alunsjøen and Breisjøen.

  Sometimes when my father and the other men in the flat had gone to work at the Salomon shoe factory on Kiellands Plass, then someone might ring the bell of our second floor flat in the middle of the day and my mother left the room where my brother and I were sleeping top to tail on the couch, and she looked through the spyhole, to see if the man on the other side was not too grim or too creepy, and if he wasn’t she opened the door and let him into the hallway where he was allowed to sit on a chair beneath the coat pegs. She went into the kitchen and made him a lunch bag. The men who rang the bell were always unshaven, men with no work or money, in scruffy coats from before the war, men without homes who slept under trees and the bushes at night, in the park by Vålerenga Church, in the doorways of Galgeberg and Enebakkveien by the US style petrol station on the corner of Strømsveien, or the big house on the bend where the Salvation Army War Academy was based, where Christian men in uniform practised sabre attacks on the third floor, in their socks, I liked to imagine, to protect the parquet flooring, and more than once my mother gave the men who rang the bell an old pair of shoes, if they were in want of one, and they often were.

  When I was little I used to imagine that one of those men might be my real father for I often felt that this would solve a problem I had, if somewhere out there was an unknown and unnamed father still wandering the streets at night in his old coat and the shoes my mother had given to him, restlessly, impatiently searching for a place where he would fit in, just a small place, where I might be, where I might be sitting in a dark corner with my thighs against my stomach and my forehead resting on my knees, barely moving, barely breathing, waiting until one night I would hear his steps between the houses and know them at once. And even though I stopped fantasising like this several decades ago, it hit me hard reading the first few lines of the postcard I received from the woman born Frantzen, with a ‘z’, from Vålerenggata 5. I knew I looked like my father, but no one said so any more. No one had mentioned it for years. Probably because they were all dead now, the people who knew we looked like each other.

  I did not want to look like him. I did not want to look in the mirror and see my father there. But from early on I realised that the day would come when everyone could see how much I resembled my father. It would separate me from my mother for good. Even though the two of them were married. And shared a life. But that was not how I saw it. That they shared a life. And it would tie me to my father for good because I looked like him and perhaps thought like he did, and against my will would find myself on the other side of the great divide, the great chasm where he lived in the murky twilight among the crammed furniture, where his father was with his Adolf in the middle, and his brothers, who were my uncles, a small crowd of gloomy men standing shoulder to shoulder nailed to a place where my mother did not belong, because she was different from them, because she had been carried away to this place, and so in some strange way was free.

/>   Wherever she went my brother went too, the eldest, for he was the unwanted child, a child born in secrecy and shame off the coast of Denmark, among the marram grass and the grazing sheep on an island called Læsø. She had travelled there in haste with my brother like a shimmering fish in her belly, and it bound them to each other with an ease which did not embrace me. He had sunshine and pain in his body inside the foamy blue and glittering room where he was so safe and so unwanted, like an outlaw, and the first thing he saw in his life was a sheepdog roaming the heath and gulls soaring above the port and the vault of blue sky above the island. The first thing I saw was my father’s face and three grey, scrawny pigeons on the dusty windowsill behind the dangling blinds and the tram on Vålerenggata. I was the only one of four sons who was planned, who was wanted by them both, and they told me this, time after time, and each time as good news, as something to celebrate, and it gave me a legitimacy I could have done without. I longed to be an outlaw like my mother was, and my brother, to be with them and share their pain and in secret wander the dark streets at night in search of a place where I could belong, I would open the door to strangers and hide behind a mask like Zorro did, because it did not come easily to me, what the two of them shared. It scared me. So, as the years passed I became the Lone Ranger, looking for unsafe ground, and I clung to her, did tricks for her, performed for her, pulled laughter out of her with my silly jokes whose punchlines were lost in linguistic confusion. As soon as I opened my mouth the sentences came tumbling out at a shocking speed, I stayed in nappies longer than other children to tie myself to her, I could spell before I was out of nappies. But no matter how hard I tried, I was still like my father.