Do you know what your problem is, Dad? she said.
I shook my head.
You don’t like people, she said. You’re not a people person.
And that’s why I don’t like you.
She got up and left.
She finished with me as if I were her boyfriend. That was actually quite impressive. For a moment I was almost proud of her. There goes my daughter, I thought, as she departed. She’ll make out fine. Afterwards I ordered a beer and filed the event in the folder for irrational behaviour, thinking that in a couple of days she would be herself again. And indeed she was, more or less.
But lying there in the heather a few days later feeling the pain in my hip and the sun on my face I realised that my daughter was right.
I don’t like people.
I don’t like what they do. I don’t like what they are. I don’t like what they say.
My daughter had put her finger on my affliction. She had put words to something I had been trying to avoid coming to terms with for a long time. In recent years I had gradually distanced myself more and more from the people around me. I had lost interest in my work and also to some extent in my home. My wife had commented on this several times. She thought there was something wrong with her and I let her believe that for want of a better explanation. Admitting that it’s you there’s something wrong with is totally untenable. At any rate, as long as there’s someone else ready to take the blame. I found myself almost constantly in a state where I registered what was going on in the world, but it never crossed my mind that it might have anything to do with me. And my daughter, in her elf outfit, said it did and hit the nail on the head.
I lay in the heather for a long time that afternoon. I threw up a couple of times and when after a while I got hungry I tried to knock down a squirrel with my cycle pump, but I failed. And then my wife rang wondering what had happened to me. I’ve fallen off my bike, I said, and tried to get to my feet. I managed somehow. I’m coming now, I said, and began to limp homewards supporting myself on my bike.
I had extensive grazing and a bruise which was yellow and reddish and the size of a wienerschnitzel, or something like that, and what I presumed was some kind of concussion. My wife bandaged the wounds and I said it wasn’t her there was something wrong with, it was me. Oh yes, she said. What’s wrong then? It’s a bit too early to say, I said. But I was thinking a bit when I was lying in the forest. Good, she said.
The following days I didn’t go to work. I got a sick note from the doctor and was told to take it easy for a week or two.
My daughter continued to watch Lord of The Rings again and again, and she made it clear she didn’t want any more sarcastic comments from me, and my son, Gregus, God knows why I ever agreed to him being called that, watched his excruciating videos at all hours of the day and night when he wasn’t in the nursery school. God bless the nursery school.
One day when my sick note was drawing to a close I began to flick through a pile of papers and pictures my mother had given me after my father had died. There were receipts and notes and lots of pictures of toilets, of all things. I rang my mother who explained that dad had been in the habit of taking pictures of toilets he had used in the final years of his life. He had never explained why he had taken the snaps and kept stumm. The result was hundreds of photos of toilets and trees and rocks and other places where you might have a piss outdoors. It struck me that I knew him even less well than I thought, but I liked the pictures and the thought of him having taken photos of all the places he’d had a piss. It was just like him. My father, the toilet photographer. As a consequence of this, or as a consequence of the feeling all this created in me, or at least hopefully as a consequence of something or other which had to do with something, I packed my bag on what seemed to be a sudden impulse, and which still feels like that, and wandered into the forest. I left a note on the kitchen worktop in which I briefly explained that I had gone for a walk in the forest and didn’t know how long I would be gone but they shouldn’t expect me for dinner. That’s about six months ago now and I’ve only seen my wife a handful of times since then. She’s been up to the tent twice to have sex and to persuade me to go home, and even though I’ve promised her both times to do so, I haven’t. I say I’ll go but I don’t. I suppose, in a way, it’s close to a lie, but so what, it’s my life and I need to be in the forest for a while.
My wife is concerned by what people think and believe, as she says. It doesn’t bother me any more. Nothing could bother me less than what people think. People can think what they like. In general I don’t like them anyway and seldom respect their opinions. I haven’t had any interest in our so-called friends for a long time. They pop by to see us and we them. It’s an eternal hassle with dinners and kids and weekend walking trips and rented houses in the summer. And of course I’ve always strung along and as a result in a despicable way been part and parcel of it. That must have made them think when I headed for the woods. Doppler, of all people, they must have thought. A good job, a nice family and a big house in the process of being tastefully redecorated; and what should I say to those who ask? my wife has said several times with desperation in her voice. Say what you want, I said. Say that I’ve become manically obsessed with flora and fauna, say that I’ve gone mad. Say what you want.
I realise that my behaviour has been very trying for my wife and I’ve tried to explain that my little adventure has nothing to do with her. That’s difficult for her to believe, I’ve noticed. At the start she suspected I had something going with another woman, but she doesn’t think so any longer. Now, in a sense, she has resigned herself to the fact that I live in a tent even though she doesn’t understand why. In good times and bad, they said when we got married. The problem with this is, of course, that any one time can be good for one person and bad for the other.
I’m pregnant, she then said, as we stood in front of the packet soup shelf in Norway’s biggest ICA supermarket.
Crikey, I said. Again? We’ve barely had any sex since I moved out into the tent. As I said, it could only be a matter of two or three times. She came to see me at night and left again after a short session during which she could hardly be bothered to remove her outer clothing.
Due in May, she said. And if you’re not back home by then you can forget the whole thing. Then it’s over. Got it?
I hear what you’re saying, I said.
And I’m sick of being on my own with the kids and not having your income any more, she said.
I understand that, too, I said. But I don’t live in the forest for fun. I live in the forest because I have to be in the forest and you don’t have the wherewithal to understand that because you’ve never felt that you have to be in the forest. And you always function so well and I function so badly, and you like mixing with people and it’s easy for you, but I don’t like to do that and it’s difficult for me.
You’re getting to be just like your father, she said, turning on her heel.
May was the last word I heard her say. And she stopped and repeated it. May.
This was a lot to digest in one go. Mixing with people down below was asking for trouble. I said that to the moose, but I didn’t take sufficient heed myself. I should, of course, have made sure that my wife wasn’t in the shop before I started swaggering around like an ordinary man. But now the damage was done and sensitive information has changed hands and I’m going to be a father again. Horror of horrors. That means even more years with cynically composed children’s songs from morning till night and I’m not sure my mental state is up to it. I wish I had a smaller penis. A penis my wife didn’t yearn for. A teeny weeny limp organ she could live without. But you have to live with the organ you’ve been allocated and I’ve never ever seen an advert or an email offering a reduction in the size of such organs, and one saving grace of children is that, despite everything, they provide a bit of charm which, in small doses, can be something special. But birth and death. It’s a revolting circus. My father disappears and a new lif
e appears. One I never knew is replaced by another which I will never ever really know.
And if there’s one thing I am not becoming, it’s like my father. How could she say that? I hate it when she blurts out things like that. As if she knows things I don’t. As if she’s been thinking about it for a long time and suddenly decides to share a bit of her knowledge with me, but only a bit, the tip of the iceberg, only a hint, so that I have something to chew on, so that I can work out the rest of the picture myself. This is a technique she often uses and next time I see her I’m going to tell her to stick it up her arse.
I’ll call the calf Bongo after my father, I decide as I’m strolling back into the forest. Even though my father wasn’t called Bongo I’ll name the calf Bongo after him. Sometimes you’ve got to be open to associations of this kind.
And in the sack I have some milk, some flour, some eggs, some oil and other staples, but above all milk, of course, as well as animal lotto which I exchanged for some meat in the book shop. Almost half a kilo it cost me. The moose is versatile and can be used in multiple ways. And, talking of milk, I stop on the edge of the forest, bid farewell to the last houses and knock back a litre. I carefully fold up the carton and take it along to start the fire.
In fact, I only live a hundred metres inside the forest, but nobody ever comes past. People stick to the paths. And they’re all over the place here. Hundreds of them. I live only a little way into the forest, but it’s still deep forest because nobody ever comes by. Løvenskiold, the owner of the forest, knows nothing about it. For three days you are allowed to erect a tent in the same place, whereas mine has been here for almost two hundred. I don’t think he’d like that, Løvenskiold wouldn’t. And the right-wing voters who promenade on Sundays in their breeches or else when they have a few days off or are walking their dogs, they don’t know anything, either. They rush past absorbed in their right-wing thoughts, no more than fifty metres away the whole time, on the way to Vetakollen to look out over the town and to receive confirmation that they live in one of the best places in town, and they have no idea that I’m there. While thinking whether they should invest another handful of money in low risk stocks or whether they shouldn’t force their neighbour to prune the tree which before very long will be blocking a little bit of their view over the fjord or some of the sun from their garden. I’m sitting in my tent and I don’t like them, and they don’t know and I like that. That gives me something. Strangely enough. I think it’s all to do with how good it is to hide. That wonderful old-time pleasure of not being seen. Being as quiet as a mouse and crouching down and feeling confident that no one will find you. It’s invigorating.
Bongo is almost beside himself with joy when I come back and we spend the rest of the day in the tent. We play board games and have a nice time together and I feel some of the old pally feeling I had at school. You just hang out together. Don’t talk about anything special. But Bongo’s hopeless at lotto. He’s really going to have to pull himself together if he wants me to keep on playing. I particularly chose animal lotto so as to give him a fair chance, but while I cover board after board with foxes and beavers and squirrels and wood pigeons, Bongo doesn’t match a single pair. He’s quite incapable of remembering where cards are. I point them out to him and expect him to give me a little sign such as a sound or a nod or something, but nothing. Not a sound. Not a nod. Bongo, Bongo, Bongo, I say. You may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer. But you are a real friend. And a lovely pillow.
I’ve earned my last krone, that’s for sure, I tell Bongo, as I lie enjoying my victory. He takes the defeat with great composure. I’ll give him that. No airs or graces about him in that department. But I’ve gone from being more interested in money than anything else to being as uninterested as it’s possible to be in our culture. Throughout my studies I thought about money and profit and regarded those who studied non-finance subjects as complete prats, I say to Bongo. And now I discover that nothing concerns me less than not having money. It’s completely insignificant. Like a Donald Duck joke. A bang on the head made all the difference. I was obsessed with money and organised my time and spent all my time and energy trying to accumulate as much of it as possible. Then I fall off my bike and get a bit of a knock on my head and hey presto, I’m not interested in money any more. Not in much else either, I have to admit, sadly, but I have some hope I soon will be. And maybe I also have the prequisites. I have a tent in the forest; I have loads of time and meat. And I’ve got Bongo, my new pal. It feels as if we’ve known each other for ever. And my wife is completely deluded if she thinks I’m going to go down to her and the new baby and the other people in May. I have no plans to do so. On the contrary, I have plans not to do so, I can feel. She’ll have to come and fetch me. Carry me. And she won’t be able to do that when she’s in the latter months. No chance.
I’ve toed the line for so long.
I’ve been so nice.
I’ve been so bloody nice.
I was nice in the nursery school. I was nice in primary school. I was nice in secondary school. At grammar school I was revoltingly nice, not only work-wise but also socially. I was nice without being a swot, without just fulfilling the requirements, I was sometimes rebellious and cheeky and was close to overstepping the mark with my teachers, and still they liked me more than the others, and to be able to do that you have to be nice in an almost infinitely disgusting manner, I can see that now. I was a nice student and had a super-nice girlfriend whom I married in a nice way with nice friends after being offered a nice job that gave the finger to other nice jobs. Later we had children to whom we were nice and we acquired a house which we decorated to look nice. I had been wading up to my neck in all this niceness for years. I woke up to it, went to sleep in it. I breathed niceness and slowly it was killing me. That’s how it was, I tell myself. God forbid that my children should become nice like me.
But my daughter has been showing worrying signs of niceness and I think it was the right time to move into the forest, it was also good for her. My time in the forest, which she regards as bordering on madness, may make her unsure of herself and thereby help her to mark out a way which is less nice and make her achieve less and generally speaking lower the bar. Unless it’s already too late. Unless this niceness has already taken root within her and has taken complete control. I fear this is the case because niceness is habit-forming. Once you’ve become nice there are no limits to what you will do to continue to evince positive feedback from the world around you. It’s a self-reinforcing spiral that never needs to stop. You can be nice as a pupil and student and later you can be nice in your professional life, in your community life, you can be a nice partner and friend and spouse, a nice parent and consumer, in fact there is nothing you can’t do in a nicer way than other people, you can be nice about getting old, you can get ill nicely, and you can die in a nice way, which no doubt I would have done if I hadn’t fallen off my bike and hit my head. But now it’s not going to happen. I’m going to die un-nicely and I’m never going to try to achieve anything again as long as I live. I’m not going to achieve anything. I have achieved for the last time and I have been nice for the last time.
Fortunately my son has not yet been infected with this niceness and I have some hope that he can still be saved. My absence may save him, I constantly think. Missing me may create some unease in him, a longing, an imbalance, I imagine, and this imbalance may save him from niceness. My wife could also do with being less nice. With me being away for such a long time she’ll become exhausted and may start making mistakes. Probably she’ll get tired and angry and unreasonable with the children, and she’ll sleep less and hopefully lack the usual energy which makes her nice and dependable at work and unerringly leads to her having a bad conscience and there is little that makes her so un-nice as a bad conscience. I’m going to save the whole family by staying in the forest. They think it’s a handicap living out here, but in truth it’s the salvation for us all. We’ll have a lot to thank the forest for, my fami
ly and I, should I decide to return one day.
However, I can’t see anything that might make me leave. Up here I’m not at the mercy of other people, and other people are not at the mercy of me. Other people are protected from my sarcasm and spitefulness, and I am protected from their niceness and stupidity. To me, it’s a great arrangement.
Moreover, I’m getting used to solitude. I’m learning to live with it. As my father did. Perhaps without knowing. He was completely alone, my father. He had my mother for a great part of his life, but was alone all the same. In the last forty years of his life he had me and my siblings, but was no less alone for that. What was in his mind when he awoke in the morning, when he went to bed or when he went skiing or photographing toilets, I have no idea. Never did have. It’s all gone now. And you can argue that it never existed because it only existed in him. Maybe there was something there and maybe not. It’s like with Schrödinger’s cat. You put a cat in a box with an atom of some radio-active material which, as it breaks down, triggers a mechanism which releases a fatal acid. But as you can’t see inside the box you won’t know whether it’s happened or not. And therefore you have to accept that the cat is both alive and dead. My father lived in a box like that. Maybe he thought a lot and maybe a little. Maybe he felt okay and maybe not. He was both fully alive and completely dead at the same time. And now he’s just dead.
We’re born alone and we die alone. It’s just a question of getting used to both of them. Being alone is fundamental to the whole construct. It is, so to speak, the corner stone. You can live with other people, but with generally means next to. And that’s fine. You live side by side with others and for short, happy spells you can perhaps even live with them. You sit in the same car, eat the same dinner and celebrate the same Christmas. But that’s not the same as being in the car together, eating dinner together or celebrating Christmas together. It’s two extremes. Two planets. And now, by the way, they’ve found a heavenly body some say is a new planet and some say isn’t. We believe we know so much, but in reality we don’t even know what planets are, and even less who our fathers are. Or were. And you certainly don’t know, I say to Bongo. You have no idea who your father is. Perhaps he lives in a box, too. In a box in the forest. The only thing you know for sure is that he’s a moose, I say. And most probably quite a big moose, since he managed to mate with your mother, who herself was quite a size, not to say large. You’re going to be big too, I say, and take him outside the tent and measure him against a fir tree. I see to it he keeps his head up, and place a book on top and cut a notch in the tree and carve in the date. So that we can keep track of how quickly you grow, I say.