But none of this mattered now, I didn’t want to think about it any more. She died, things became what they became, and whether or not she had rung around to friends and acquaintances to tell them not to visit me in the Bunker, she definitely must have rung Tommy.
TOMMY ⋅ JIM ⋅ 1971
WE STOOD OUTSIDE by the entrance to the Central Hospital. Jim had a cigarette between his lips, the smoke drifted towards the doors in the wind and was sucked through to the foyer whenever someone passed on their way in or out, and when the smoke got in his face he squeezed his eyes shut. His skin was black beneath his eyes and the skin around the bridge of his nose was red, as though his glasses had left marks, but he didn’t use glasses. He looked like Dylan on Blonde on Blonde, that tense. The weather was spring-like, the days had been light and warm, but then it suddenly changed and the temperature was in free fall, and the roads were unexpectedly slippery and icy as I came in from Mørk very early in the morning in Jonsen’s old Opel Kapitän. He had given me a day off from the sawmill. He had known Jim as long as he had known me and was worried and felt sorry for him. Tell him I said hello, Jonsen said.
There was a smoking room on every floor in the hospital, but Jim didn’t want to smoke inside, he wanted to smoke outside by the entrance. He didn’t smoke inside the house either, in Mörk, his mother didn’t want any of it, it’s not appropriate behaviour for a Christian, she said, and then he had to go out on the doorstep, and there he often stood. It was a well-known sight in the neighbourhood.
‘You don’t smoke in a hospital,’ he said. ‘You don’t do that, do you. You don’t.’
‘Jesus. Sure you don’t.’
Jim was wearing a thin, white hospital smock with only a T-shirt underneath, and he was so cold he was trembling, but not a line in his face moved. He stared into the air past my ear and smoked and thought hard about something that concerned himself only, not me, or so I assumed, as he didn’t say anything, and I felt out of place, lonely, an odd feeling to have when you’re standing next to your best friend in the cold, and I had driven so far to get here, more than forty kilometres, and he was constantly shifting his weight from one foot to the other, and it looked strange, but I don’t think it was because he was cold. I don’t know why he was doing that. We hadn’t seen each other much over the recent months although the distance between our houses, between Jonsen’s house and his mother’s, was still the same. But he went to the gymnas in Valmo and caught the bus early in the morning and came home late and was the star pupil there, even at gym he had become pretty good, in spite of the smoking, and I, for my part, worked overtime several days a week. The prices for timber were high now, and many farmers had taken out great swathes of timber from their forests that winter and just as many were at the other end, waiting impatiently to build new houses now that spring had arrived, and not only farmers, there were lots of different people wanting to build, it was like a boom. So we were cutting planks and battens as fast as greased lightning, and then everything had to go through the drier, and on both sides of the supply chain there was a queue, it was non-stop and it was driving us crazy. I barely had any sleep, and in fact I was absolutely exhausted. I would have loved to spend a day under the duvet, or more, but Jim looked like a junkie now, his face was haggard like a junkie’s face, that’s what struck me the first time I went to see him down in the Bunker, as it was called by the inmates. He had tried to hang himself in the woodshed. But the heating season was still on and his mother found him at the last minute when she went to the shed to fetch firewood in the bin, and after two days in intensive care and two more in rehab he was moved to the psychiatric ward, in the Bunker.
‘Jonsen says hello,’ I said.
‘What,’ Jim said.
‘Jonsen says hello. He told me to tell you.’
‘Oh, right.’
I had been to the hospital before he was moved to the psychiatric ward. That first night I drove in when he was still in intensive care. His mother had rung me and said, I guess you want to know that your friend has tried to take his own life. There was something about the way she said it. I had always assumed that she liked me, even if she must have thought I took God’s name in vain too easily, and the Devil’s too, but there was an edge to her voice now that hadn’t been there before, and I was not only sorry and frightened for Jim, I felt ill at ease. He’s at the Central Hospital, she said, and rang off, and I stood there with the receiver in my hand, and then I too put the phone down and went to Jonsen and asked him if I could borrow his car. My old Mercedes was in Lysbu’s garage with faulty brakes.
‘Of course you can borrow the car,’ he said. ‘Has something happened.’
He lay in bed in intensive care with his eyes wide open staring at the ceiling, but he did not see me. He probably didn’t see anything, and if he was thinking anything at all, as he was lying there, almost strapped to the bed, I had no idea what it would be. He had bandages around his neck, and his breath was wheezing in and out and not like he used to breathe all those times I listened to him at night after my father had gone wild and I had to stay over at Jim’s house and lie beside him in bed, and his breathing was so quiet you’d have thought he was dead and you had to lean over to make sure he wasn’t, and sometimes nudge his shoulder a little. Then he woke up at once and opened his eyes and smiled an invisible smile and said, just five minutes more, Mum, and went back to sleep. As quietly as before. Or the time we slept on the ridge by the fire lookout tower. We had set off straight after school and up through the woods. It was early autumn, and crisp, and there was hoar frost in the morning, frost in the evening, and we were going to put up a bivouac and make the roof as weatherproof as we could and sleep inside if there was rain. Or snow. But then darkness fell much quicker in the forest than we had expected, and we couldn’t put anything up.
‘Forget it then,’ Jim said. ‘We’ll just take the sleeping bags and lie in the heather. It’s not going to rain. Inshallah.’
‘What,’ I said.
‘As God wills. that’s what they say. The Arabs.’
‘How the hell do you know that.’
‘I know a lot of stuff.’
‘That’s right, you do,’ I said. ‘OK. Inshallah. That’s fine by me. We’ll sleep in the heather.’
And we did. And in the night I awoke several times and watched the grey, drifting sky up between the treetops. The wind came high through branches and made a sound so powerful, so peaceful, and the cold air gently stroked my face, and it never rained that night, and it didn’t snow, and Jim lay beside me, sleeping soundlessly with heather in his hair, and when I leaned over, he wasn’t dead, and each time I went back to sleep, we were fifteen years old, and life and sleep were the same floating thing, and there was nothing wrong in this world.
Jim took the final drag of his cigarette and dropped the butt on to the ground and crushed it with his foot and turned and looked at me, and hell, I don’t know, he had always shown me respect, as I had shown him respect, but now he had been somewhere that I hadn’t, just him alone and not the two of us together, and he had seen things there I could not have imagined, and there was a look of superiority in his eyes that unsettled me.
‘Well, how is it going down in the Bunker,’ I said.
‘Just fine, there are lots of crazies there, but they don’t bother me. I’m busy with my own stuff.’
‘And what is it that you do, then,’ I said.
‘Things,’ he said. ‘I think up things.’
‘Like what.’
‘I can’t tell you now. I can maybe try and explain it later some time, well, try anyway, if it’s even possible.’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘That could be interesting.’
‘Maybe not to you,’ Jim said.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘And why not,’ but he shrugged and took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and counted how many he had left. Just two.
‘Maybe you could buy me a pack of cigarettes,’ he said, and I thought, he is probably skint, and I??
?m the one earning money, and I had always thought that whatever money I had, we could share, if it came to that, so I said:
‘Sure I can,’ and we walked back into the foyer and over to the shop they had there in one corner, where they sold flowers and Kong Haakon chocolate boxes and novels with soft covers and bright colours on the jacket you could bring with you up to all those who were ill and feeling bad on every floor and needed something extra in their lives, something brightly coloured and soft they could lose themselves in, and at that shop, in early March, I bought for Jim a pack of twenty Marlboro filter tips with a red flip-top lid and put it into his left breast pocket, next to his beating heart beneath the thin shirt, and I could feel it against my fingertips, boom, boom, it went, boom, boom, it went, a little too hard, a little too fast if you asked me, and I thought maybe he would say thank you, I’ll pay you back later, and I had never doubted that he would, that I would get back what he owed me, I always did, although it wasn’t necessary. He could have whatever he wanted that was mine, and keep it. But he didn’t say thank you and he didn’t look at me, and I thought, right, what the hell, and so we left the shop and walked towards the stairs and the lifts, and halfway across the floor we stopped, and he said:
‘You think it was on purpose, what happened on Lake Aurtjern, on the ice, don’t you, that I held you back to save myself, that’s what you think, isn’t it, that I wanted to save myself, sure, that’s what you think. But you’ll never understand any of that, you’ll never understand the truth of it,’ he said, and he was tapping his forehead with his index finger, and of course I knew what he was referring to, I remembered it well, it was only two or three months earlier, and it was cold then, and December and in the middle of the night, but cross my heart, I’d had so much work to do I hadn’t had time to give it a thought. I didn’t want to, either. And yet, when he brought it up, it didn’t surprise me, it was rather like something that fell into place. But that wasn’t what I said, I said:
‘Have you really been thinking about that. It was nothing. Damnit, Jim. You shouldn’t think about it, it won’t do you any good, it was nothing. I just fell over. That’s all.’
‘You don’t know anything about this, Tommy. Things are not as you think they are, I know something about that and you don’t. I know you think I did it on purpose, out there on Lake Aurtjern, that I wanted to save myself and held you back on purpose, so that you would drown and I wouldn’t. But you have no idea what was going on,’ he said, and he tapped his forehead again, and he said: ‘Only I know,’ and his skin lay taut across his forehead and his cheekbones, his face was completely white, and he really looked like a junkie now, but suddenly I got irritated, I was tired of this, I couldn’t listen to this rubbish any more. I said:
‘Jim, I understand that you’re ill. I didn’t know it was this bad. Honestly. I’m really sorry about it, and I am really sorry about what has happened. And if it has something to do with me, Jesus, but Jim, you can’t stand here and be ill. You can be ill down in the Bunker with all the other crazies, that’s fine by me, but goddamnit, you can’t stand in front of me and be ill. You’re my friend, not my patient. So save that crap for when I’ve gone. I can’t listen to it,’ I said. ‘I’m going,’ I said. ‘If you need me, you can ring. If you ring, it will make me very happy,’ I said, and I turned and headed for the entrance, past the shop, and I thought, I need some chocolate, a Melkesjokolade, a Kvikk Lunsj, anything, a Firkløver, but I can’t stop and buy one while Jim’s watching me. I am sure his eyes are on my back, I thought, and now I felt unwell, dizzy.
After a few steps, he said in a loud voice behind me:
‘Hey, Tommy.’
I stopped and turned.
‘What,’ I said.
‘Do you think I’ll ring.’
‘I don’t know. I hope so.’
‘Heads or tails,’ he said.
‘Heads or tails what.’
He took a coin, a krone, from his pocket. He flicked it into the air, where it twirled round and glistened and landed smack into his hand. He held it up.
‘What’s your choice. Heads or tails,’ he said, and I said:
‘Cut it out, Jim.’
‘What’s your choice.’
I was in despair. I weighed two hundred kilos, something was pulling me to the floor, a huge force had taken hold of me and was dragging me down. What shall I do, I thought. What shall I do. I’ll let go, I thought. I’ll let go.
‘Heads,’ I said.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘Heads I ring. Tails I don’t.’
He spun the coin into the air, and it rose and rose until it hung there up beneath the ceiling and was spinning and didn’t want to come back down, and it made a sound I was certain everyone could hear, it was whistling and flashing and wouldn’t come down, it was Newton suspended, and I looked around the foyer and everything was completely silent, everything frozen, not a soul moved in any direction. I held my breath until my temples throbbed, and then suddenly everybody started moving again, and there was talk and laughter in every corner, and the krone began to fall, slowly at first and then faster and faster, and Jim lifted his right arm and spread his fingers as though his hand were a funnel, a glove, and he grabbed the coin from the air so quickly you could barely see it and closed his hand around it and held it for a moment before slapping it against the back of his left hand and stood still. He stared at his hand. Then he raised it slowly.
‘Tails,’ he said.
We stood straight looking at each other, there were no more than a few metres between us, I will not yield, I thought. But he held my gaze. His eyes glittered, triumphant, I thought. This was what he wanted, I thought. This is how he wants it to be.
‘OK,’ I said, ‘that’s it then,’ and I turned and walked to the entrance and out through the doors and up to where Jonsen’s car was parked.
TOMMY ⋅ JIM ⋅ 1971
TOMMY STOOD ON the doorstep of Jonsen’s house very early in the morning, watching Sletten’s van come down the road and pull up in front of Jim’s house before anyone had left for work or the school bus had arrived. Not a car had moved. After some time Jim and his mother came out with rolled-up carpets and boxes and bags of bed linen in their arms and put it all in the back, and Sletten helped them with the furniture, and then Lien too was there to give a hand, and he and Sletten came out with the heavy, red sofa between them, and Sletten had to walk backwards and do whatever Lien told him, left, right, down a bit, he called, up a bit, he called, and Sletten didn’t like Lien telling him what to do, but still, they managed to manoeuvre the sofa all the way through the hall and out through the porch, and out of the door and down the steps to the van, and it would have been the most natural thing in the world for Tommy to go down and help, but there was no way he could. There was a wall of glass between the houses. You saw everything, but you couldn’t get through it.
The sun was up already, it shone through the window at a low angle, and on both sides the light was blinding. Tommy could hear the woodpecker at the top of the telegraph pole tapping against the metal in the still air. It was anemones and snowfall. It was spring in full bloom, it was summer, it was winter. It was everything at once. He stood watching for a while. Then he turned and went back in and closed the door. People die in wars too, he thought. They are here, and bang, they’re gone.
III
FRU BERGGREN ⋅ 1964 ⋅ 1965
THE MAINLAND LAY alongside the Oslofjord, looking salt and peppery. It was morning now, but not very obvious, not very convincing. She could only just make out the pale, milky, white-scrubbed lights from the two towns facing each other, one either side of the fjord, and it was winter, just before Christmas, and the snow came in over the railings at great speed and it had settled on the hills to the east and west and coloured the waters of the fjord a porridge-grey and had settled on the island that slowly hove into view, closer to one coast than the other. Young offenders were imprisoned here when they were indisputably beyond reform, and all you could do was
to strand them on this island, with freedom in plain sight, but only look, don’t touch. The strongest of them, the impatient ones, would sooner or later attempt to escape and then choose the shortest route across the water, through the waves and the wake of ships to reach the shore, but not at this time of year, not now. They would freeze to death.
She stood on deck at the front of the ship with her coat collar turned up and her left hand holding the lapels together at her neck, and she gazed across the fjord, but she didn’t see anything special, there was nothing special she was looking for. Only a few hours earlier she had boarded the ship at one of the quays on the west side of Oslo. Between the edge of the quay and the ship’s hull there was slush and ice, squeezed into a narrow line of froth on the cold water beneath her as she took the step from the quay to the gangway. A solitary lamp burned against the yellow wall of the terminal building. Jonsen sat in his car with the engine running and the headlights dipped and the rear lights gave to the snow a porous, red sheen. It was dark inside the car. He saw the lamp on the wall, and it cast a circle of light on the side of the ship and made the hawsers shine a frozen silver, and it singled out her slim figure in the grey coat on her way up the gangway, and with the suitcase in hand she reached the top and stepped on to the deck. He waited for a sign from her, and she did half turn, but didn’t really pause and didn’t wave, and suddenly he realised how sinister it was, the scene that was being played out here in the gloom on the quay right now, as though what she did was letting her soul sink into the dark well of perdition with no more than a hurried, already vacant glance over her shoulder before she let go and fell, and whatever warmth she might have had, she snuffed out like a burnt-down candle. She took nothing with her, she left nothing behind.
The car stood by the boat for a while yet until Jonsen sat up in his seat and put it into first gear and made a tight turn on the snow-cleared space on the quay and in second gear he picked up speed and even more in third beneath the cranes alongside the huge warehouse until it could no longer be distinguished from the buildings and the ships and what belonged to the ships.