I think perhaps we should go so that you can continue with the model, I say after a short time.
Do you really think so? Düsseldorf says, visibly relieved.
Yes, I say. You seem to have been very preoccupied with something.
Funny you should say that, he says, because that’s just what I was. It’s my father’s face. I think I’m onto something. I’m getting close. I’ve got the smile, and now it’s the eyes.
We both go over to the table where the stand holding the small plastic soldier is in the same position as before. There’s a photograph of his father beside it and it’s easy to see that Düsseldorf’s right when he says he’s onto something. There’s a frightening similarity between the figure and the man in the photograph.
I’m speechless, I say.
Mm, says Düsseldorf. There’s not a lot to say.
I’m sorry about the dinner, he says. We could try again on New Year’s Eve.
Don’t worry, I say. There will be more Christmases.
Let’s hope so, Düsseldorf says.
On the way out I take the cloudberries with me, more frozen than thawed. Düsseldorf has enough presence of mind to tie a red ribbon around the freezer bag so that it doesn’t look so unlike a kind of gift.
Thank you, I say. And Merry Christmas.
Thank you and the same to you, Düsseldorf says.
Approaching the tent, I see that Toolman Roger has dropped by with a gift. He’s written a note to thank me for the DVD player and the DVDs. His kids were really pleased with them, he writes. I unwrap the present and find a picklock and have to swallow a couple of times. That’s what I call a pal. The rest of the day is spent slurping half-frozen cloudberries. Bongo goes to sleep early and I sit by the fire for a long time thinking that Düsseldorf sets an excellent example when it comes to honouring your father. My father ought to be honoured like that. Even though I didn’t know him. Or perhaps precisely because I didn’t know him. He went through life doing what he wanted. The same way I do. He was just there. As I am also just here.
If I don’t honour my father, no one will. I’m going to make a totem pole in his memory. Suddenly it’s all very clear to me that this may be the only right thing to do. I’ll carve it with my own hands and erect it here in the forest. I fall asleep as, in my mind’s eye, I rough out what a totem pole of this kind should look like.
Over Christmas we stay a lot of the time. It’s cold and unpleasant outside and the snow is still overdue. For the most part I sit in front of the fire whittling objects that fifty or a hundred years ago I could have sold in the town market during the summer, but today you can buy them for next to nothing in IKEA. Mass production has knocked the bottom out of the barter economy. It laughs at people like me. But I’m not going to give in. I keep whittling, and every now and then I try to teach Bongo a few simple words, but before long I realise that he hasn’t a hope. He can manage the occasional vowel if we’re not too strict about the articulation but he’s nowhere near pronouncing the consonants. You’ve got a long way to go, you have, Bongo, I say. No doubt about that. But I’ll be with you every step. You can be sure of that. I’ll be with you every step of the way.
On New Year’s Eve Düsseldorf hasn’t progressed much from where he was on Christmas Eve. The difference this time is that he knows it and on the doorstep he has placed a bottle of vodka with a red bow round. I’m getting there, it says on a card painted by mouth and foot artists. And Happy New Year. I take the hint and don’t knock, but I grab the bottle and head for the tent, where I drink myself senseless before going out to the pissing place and surveying Oslo, thinking that my resolutions for the New Year are to build a totem pole in memory of my father and otherwise do as little as humanly possible. I’m going to cultivate doing nothing to a level few have achieved before me. And I’m not going to return to civilisation, not bloody likely. And since I’m there I start shouting. I’m the King and the Prime Minister and I hold a speech to the nation. My dear compatriots, I shout, I don’t like you. Pull yourselves together. Raise your sights and stop being so bloody smug. And, you right-wingers, get rid of your sodding dogs and wipe off those self-satisfied smiles of yours, and start bartering. And cycling. We have to cycle and barter like buggery if we’re going to have any chance of surviving. And who owns the wind rustling in the trees and the flowers in the field? And may the Teletubbies burn in hell, and shit, I come to a halt, I’m too drunk to retain my train of thought through a New Year’s speech, but Løvenskiold, I shout, you give the forest back to the people because actually you don’t own it, no one should be able to own a forest, and Dad, I continue, you’ve gone and I didn’t know you and I feel alone, I’ve always felt alone and I push everyone away because I’m a prat like everyone else, and no one knows me and I fear no one will ever know me for as long as I live, and I give up and in the end I just shout shit, shit, shit until I lose my voice.
Poor Bongo doesn’t recognise me. It’s irresponsible of me to drink so much with a youngster like him nearby. After all, I’m his guardian and I’m setting an embarrassingly bad example. But it does me good to shout. So I continue to drink and shout and rave incoherently and I’m aware that right now for Bongo I must be behaving like the decibel scale. Ten minutes with me in this condition can just about be tolerated, but twenty minutes doesn’t mean a doubling of the effect, as you might believe, but a hundred times more, and thirty minutes is a thousand times more. That’s how decibels behave. And that’s how I behave as we enter the New Year. A New Year with niceness and devilry and belief and hope and love in the world.
But the greatest of all is the forest.
JANUARY
There’s not much to say about January.
It’s dark and it’s cold and I stoke the fire like a madman to keep warm.
One of the first things I do in the New Year is to renew the milk agreement. I wrap up a large piece of meat and leave it where I usually collect the milk. In many ways the milk is the foundation stone on which the fragile edifice of Doppler rests. Without milk he, I that is, is as good as nothing. But now I’m approaching a milk-rich time, and as long as there is skimmed milk there is hope.
Straight after New Year huge amounts of snow fall and this makes me less grumpy than for a long time. I fetch my skis from the garage at home and I spend several days criss-crossing the landscape to find a suitable trunk as a totem pole. Bongo jogs along after me, thinking snow is fun even if it’s harder for him to move about.
One beautiful night the almost four-metre-long tent pole breaks. It’s about zero degrees outside, it has started to snow like crazy after we fall asleep and it seems the tent is not designed for these conditions. Bongo and I wake up with the tent canvas weighing heavily on us and I flounder around looking for the opening and crawl out. I remove the snow from the tent, cut myself a new pole from the undergrowth and erect the tent once again. After recovering from the shock, building up the fire and chatting long enough for us to feel debriefed and calm, we both fall asleep again.
Eventually I find a suitable tree for the totem pole. But it’s quite a distance from the tent. I chop it down, and using Bongo as a draught moose I spend almost ten days dragging it back home to the camp. Bongo is completely exhausted, the poor thing. He loses a lot of weight and at night I ski down to the farms in Maridalen and fill my sack with hay for him. He is insatiable. According to the moose calendar, he’s on the cusp of becoming a teenager, I would guess. This is a sensitive and defiant period, and we have many long discussions about it. Bongo leaves the tent in a temper several times, but happily he always comes back.
On one of the trips to Maridalen I pick up a couple of good axes. I already have one of course, but these are almost brand new. They are sturdy Fiskars axes. And specially designed for forestry work, as far as I can judge. One of them is large and the other small, and I suppose the poor farmer must have been given them for Christmas. But that’s life. It’s give and take. I haven’t ruled out the possibility that I might give t
hem back when the totem pole is finished, though.
On the last day of January I realise that it’s over a month since I’ve spoken to another human. No problem there. All the things we can say to others, and yet I haven’t said anything. I’m living proof that there’s basically not much to say. I’m proud of myself.
It’s a good start to the year.
FEBRUARY
I spend a whole day enthusiastically humming a melody I can’t place. I’m feeling on top of the world as I cheerfully chip away at the bark on the totem pole. Bits fly off into the forest as I work my way round the trunk, lost in my own world, humming and whistling all the while. Snatches of the lyrics begin to emerge by the evening, and I sing them uncritically for quite a time before I realise, in a cold sweat, that what I’m churning out is the signature tune to an Australian TV show, Bananas in Pyjamas. Not even out here in the forest am I spared the poisoned darts of children’s culture. It’s like a disease. You contract it through hearing. Even mild exposure to the source is sufficient to allow the virus to attack the brain without mercy. It can lie there quietly incubating for months while you go about your own business, not bothering anyone, and then suddenly it rears its ugly head. For the rest of the night it’s like a running battle between me and Bananas in Pyjamas. I try to keep the song out, but back it comes. As soon as I lower my defences, I hum it again. It’s like an obsession. It’s like a film I saw many years ago where the main character’s hand turns evil and tries to kill him. In the end, he cuts it off with a chain saw. He holds the chain saw in his healthy hand and pulls the starting cord with his mouth. Off with the evil arm.
I use bits of charcoal to draw the motif on the totem pole. At the bottom I leave a couple of metres’ space as I’m going to dig it in later. Then above the ground there should be a base of about half a metre and after that there’ll be an approximately two-metre high egg, actually a rhythm egg shaker, but you wouldn’t be able to see that with the naked eye unless you knew my father, and nobody did, which I think I’ve already mentioned. So you wouldn’t be able to see what it was. A casual passer-by would think it was an ordinary egg and that’s alright by me. My father will be sitting on top of this egg shaker with his legs up under his chin and his arms out to the sides, and I’ll be sitting on my father’s head. On my bike. I get this idea while I’m drawing. It comes to me out of the ether, a wonderful inspiration, and I think, why not? I’ll damn well carve myself a figure that’s a representation of me sitting on my bike on top of my father. That would be so beautiful. And then on my head I’ll have a miniature of Bongo standing erect and surveying the town. He deserves that after dragging this monster of a tree trunk up to the camp. He would have deserved it in any case. Simply because he’s Bongo. But after he’s quite literally invested kilos of himself in getting the totem pole up here, incorporating him in the work is no longer just a possibility, it’s a necessity.
Two metres under the ground plus a plinth of half a metre plus two metres of egg shaker plus four metres of Dad plus two metres of me on my bike plus Bongo. We’re talking eleven metres of totem pole here, of which nine are above the ground. I’m in business.
Since this is my first totem pole I’ve no realistic idea how long it will take to carve. To begin with, I reckon it will take a few days, a couple of weeks at most, but as time passes I start extending my estimate and soon realise that it will take all winter and spring. The axes from Maridalen will be my closest companions during this period. I use one of them for rough hacking and the other for the more delicate work. Eventually I suppose I’ll also need some chisels and a file and, doubtless, a not insubstantial amount of sandpaper. Bongo is no help whatsoever in this process. He wanders around me restlessly as I chip away. I try to explain to him that he’s already done his bit. I would never have got this tree to the camp without you, I say. You’re one of the most important players in the game, and it’s not your fault that you’re a moose and can’t use tools. You missed the boat millions of years ago. That happened when some representatives of our common origins broke with one another and went their separate ways. Those who were to be my ancestors went in the direction of the fascinating world of tools and fine motor skills, and those who were to become your ancestors made a different choice. And that was that. In hindsight, you might say that they should have given it more thought, but it wasn’t so easy to know, and in spite of everything, in my opinion, under the circumstances, you moose are doing alright. In my opinion, things have turned out well for you despite the pretty sorry start. But Bongo doesn’t want to know. He finds it boring with me chipping away all day and he wants some attention. He springs up onto the totem pole and leaps down again, careering around in a spectacular, foolhardy manner. And he runs head first at trees trying to break them. Pull yourself together, Bongo, I say. I quite understand that you consider this boring, but I have to honour my father and you have to accept that. You can honour your own father and mother if you want. I won’t stand in your way. But I must warn you against practising the kind of extreme sport of which I’ve seen signs just now. It will all end in tears or maybe something even worse. Have you any idea how many moose come to grief in bogs or fall off steep precipices every year through downright carelessness? You’ve got this one chance, I say. I don’t know what you moose believe in, but I can tell you that if that mother of yours deluded you into imagining there’s a life after death, then you can just forget it. It’s all lies. You are here now and you’ll never be here again. And it’s not cool being dead. Don’t ever forget that.
After three weeks I have carved out the plinth and the egg shaker and they do actually resemble a plinth and an egg. I’m rather proud of myself, even if I say so myself. I’m not the most experienced wielder of an axe in this world, but somehow I’ve still managed. Every evening in the tent I fall asleep from exhaustion, after having had my fill of Bongo’s mother, who is holding up quite well.
Bongo has begun to go for walks on his own. He usually hangs around the camp for the first few hours after breakfast, but then he heads off and seldom returns before nightfall. What he gets up to, I’ve no idea, but I presume it’s the usual moose things and nothing I need worry about. I suppose he has a need to be on his own a little, as indeed I have. I imagine he’s subject to the contradictory forces of the teenage years tearing at his soul, veering from one extreme to the other several times a day: from the soft to the hard, the poetic to the vulgar. And, naturally, there will be questions about things with which I can’t really help him. I can give him a secure base and the certainty that he’s loved, but he has to go out into the world himself. In fact, it is harsh out there. Even for moose.
One evening after work I went with Bongo to see how Düsseldorf was getting on. To be honest, I was a bit worried. When I saw him at Christmas he had already reached a stage in his obsession where you began to wonder just how healthy this all was for him. A positive outcome was by no means a foregone conclusion. But now, as he opens the door, I can see that a lot has happened, and whatever it is that has happened has the potential to surprise me. I can hardly recognise him. He is well-groomed and nicely dressed, and the house is immaculate. The village from 1944 is still spread out on the living-room floor, but the table with all the model-building paraphernalia has been cleared. He receives us with warmth and serves dinner in the twinkling of an eye.
You’re looking good, I say.
Thank you very much, Düsseldorf says.
Did you finish your father? I ask.
My father? he asks, as though it were strange of me to mention him at all.
You were painting his face, I say.
Oh, that, Düsseldorf says. Funny you should remember that. I put all that behind me a long time ago.
This reply makes me slightly uneasy. I’m no expert on the human mind and its labyrinths, but now a little alarm bell is ringing, I can hear.
What happened? I ask.
Düsseldorf doesn’t answer. He leans back in his Stressless chair and his mind w
anders.
Maybe we should talk about something else, he says. It seems so long ago. I don’t know how relevant it is any longer.
It’s relevant, I say.
OK, OK, he says. If you say so.
He closes his eyes and appears to be concentrating.
I finished, he says. I finished painting my father’s face. It took me a long time. But it looked just like him. It was him, in a way. And when it had become completely him I put him in the car and placed him in the street. Düsseldorf nods in the direction of the huge model of the village laid out on the floor. I turn towards the living room to have a look, and sure enough there is his father sitting in the car. He’s approaching the fateful crossroads, and the clock on the town hall tower shows it’s approaching twenty past two. It’s going to happen and it has happened. It is, in fact, an impressively pleasing and detailed image. I admire what Düsseldorf has done for his father. But it seems it might have cost him some of his sanity.
What else? I ask
What do you mean? Düsseldorf asks.
What else did you do? I ask.
He hesitates before replying.
I tossed things around in my head for a while, he says. But finally I went and got my shotgun. And then I loaded it and lay on the sofa and stuck the end of the barrel in my mouth, but I didn’t pull the trigger. I thought why all the hurry, and then I thought I might just as well switch on the TV, as the remote was close at hand, I could switch channels and everything without taking the barrel out of my mouth. I saw the whole of the news lying like that, and it must have been a Friday because right after the news came Norway Countrywide, and it had been a long time since I’d seen Norway Countrywide, so I watched that, too. Do you watch Norway Countrywide? he asks me.