Ashes in My Mouth, Sand in My Shoes: Stories

  The priest came and started to speak, but Arvid could not hear what he was saying because of the rain and the wind blowing straight into his face, and the priest was gazing at Strømsveien and the cars droning past instead of looking at the coffin as he should have done, and his voice was lost. He dug out some slimy mud with his little spade and tried to toss it onto the coffin, but his eyes were elsewhere, so it missed and hit the edge of the grave and started a small landslide. Arvid shivered when he heard the mud splash at the bottom.

  There were six ropes on the ground which the bearers were supposed to use to lower the coffin, and they each grabbed one and threaded it through a handle so they could hold both ends of their rope, but Dad didn’t do what the others did. He tied it to the handle, and that was a mistake, Arvid could easily see that, everyone could, but no one said a word, just stared into the rain, pretending they hadn’t noticed. When the coffin was on its way down, Dad’s rope was too short and the further it was lowered the more Dad had to bend until he was balancing on the very brink.

  ‘Dad! Let go!’ Arvid yelled, and Dad let go and his rope went down with the coffin while the others got back theirs and placed them in a tidy heap.

  Arvid could hear some strange noises behind him, and when he turned he saw Mum holding her hand in front of her mouth, her shoulders shaking and tears in her eyes, but behind her hand she was laughing, giggling even, and Arvid felt a trembling in his chest: what if Dad had not let go! He would have been down in the grave with Granddad, but Granddad was dead, the king was dead, the bullfinch was dead, but it didn’t matter because Dad was alive and Arvid was alive and he started to jump up and down, he was smiling all over his face, and he ran over to his dad and buried his face in his wet coat. Dad stumbled a bit, but then he lifted Arvid up high and carried him back, and Arvid was almost certain that the sound from his dad’s chest was laughter.

  Like a Tiger in a Cage

  When Arvid was outside playing, he would sometimes sit down in silence and think about his mother. Then he would try to draw her with a stick in the sand the way he was used to seeing her, in front of the kitchen counter with one of her striped aprons on. She would lean against the sink with the one hand, holding a cigarette with the other, and when without thinking she would run her hand through her hair there would be a hiss and then the smell of burning. Arvid often sat waiting for that. She’d looked the way she always had for as far back as he could remember, and she still did right up until the day he happened to see a photograph of her from before he was born, and the difference floored him. He tried to work out what could have happened to her, and then he realised it was time that had happened and it was happening to him too, every second of the day. He held his hands to his face as if to keep his skin in place and for many nights he lay clutching his body, feeling time sweeping through it like little explosions. The palms of his hands were quivering and he tried to resist time and hold it back. But nothing helped, and with every pop he felt himself getting older.

  He cried, and said to his mother:

  ‘I don’t want to get older. I want to stay like I am now! Six and a half, that’s enough, isn’t it?’ But she smiled sadly and said, to every age its charm. And time withdrew to the large clock on the wall in the living room and went round alone in there, like a tiger in a cage, he thought, just waiting, and Mum became Mum again, almost like before.

  She used to work at the Freia chocolate factory, and those were the good days, for no one could deny that chocolate found its way from Grünerløkka to where they lived in Veitvet. But all good things must come to an end, and now she had a cleaning job at the music school in the evenings and that was not the same. One time when Arvid was allowed to come with her even though it was late, he looked for things they could take home, but sheet music was no good, and the pianos were too heavy.

  Now Dad was the one to sing Arvid to sleep in the evening, and that was not the same at all. Every night he sang the one about the cat stuck in the spruce tree or something. Arvid never understood what it was really about, and anyway he couldn’t care less. He soon realised that the only way he could escape the song was to fall asleep as quickly as possible, and Dad boasted and said it was his talent as a singer that made him succeed. There was only one song that was worse, and that was ‘When the Fjords Turn Blue’, but that one Dad only sang when there were guests and they’d had a drink or two. Then Mum went into the kitchen and waited there until he had finished.

  Sometimes, when his yodelling was at its worst, Dad went out onto the balcony because he wanted a view of the land as he sang. ‘When the fjords turn blue!’ he roared, but except for the bullfinch tree there was nothing out there, only the terraced houses and the tenement buildings, and then Mum would drag Dad back into the living room and say:

  ‘Now you damn well pull yourself together, Frank!’

  And he did, at least when he’d had no more than two of those drinks.

  But there were other things, Arvid could tell, for he didn’t always go to sleep at once, he just pretended to so his dad would stop singing. There were voices seeping up from the kitchen. They slipped out through the crack under the kitchen door, glided along the rug in the hall, over the worn carpet in the living room and up the stairs, wearing themselves shiny and sharp on the way. Sitting at the top of the stairs, Arvid could feel the voices skid off his body. He was cold, but inside him there was a heat, like a little flame only he could put out, and one day he would do that, he thought, put it out when they least expected and turn to ice, but he would never let anyone else make the flame go out, not even let them come near.

  The voices grew louder, the kitchen door must have been open now, and he heard a bang and the sound of something breaking. He knew what it was, it was the last plate in the set they had brought with them from their life in Vålerenga, and it was a sound Arvid knew well because it was he who had broken the last but one. It happened one day when he tried to carry a knife, a fork, a glass and a plate to the kitchen counter all in one go. The plate slithered out of his hands and smashed into a thousand pieces on the kitchen floor, and it startled Arvid and he was afraid his dad would get mad since he was so fond of that set, or so he said, but only Mum saw what happened and she said:

  ‘Don’t worry about it, Arvid. I couldn’t care less.’ And she looked like she didn’t as she swept up the pieces and threw them in the bin.

  Now Arvid could hear someone clattering around in the hall, and then Mum came rushing into the living room, boots on, wearing her raincoat and gloves, trying furiously to tie her headscarf under her chin.

  With one angry movement she snatched the pack of Cooly cigarettes from the coffee table, turned round and saw Arvid sitting on the second step from the top.

  ‘So that’s where you are, Arvid?’ she said in a strange voice.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Aren’t you cold?’

  ‘I am.’ He huddled up and was truly cold now.

  ‘You go upstairs to bed. I’ll be back soon. I’m just going out for a little walk.’

  He got up and his legs hurt, they had gone stiff, and as he was about to enter his bedroom he heard the front door slam.

  In the next room his big sister, Gry, was sleeping. He went in and shook her by the shoulder.

  ‘Gry! Wake up!’

  Gry twisted away and buried her face in the pillow.

  ‘What is it?’ she mumbled from the depths.

  ‘Mum is out walking again.’

  Gry rolled out of bed and together they went to the bedroom window. Outside it was night and wet, and they could see her striding out beneath the street lamp on her way up the slope, and there were raindrops glittering in the light above her headscarf. She was the only person out on the street, and when she was gone, past the shopping centre and towards Trondhjemsveien, it was deserted, only the street lamps and the rain.

  They knew where she was going, even though they were never allowed to come with her, and anyway she walked so fast there would have been n
o point, but she had told them. She walked up Trondhjemsveien, on the left-hand side, as far and as fast as she could. When she reached Grorud or thereabouts, she crossed the road and came all the way back at the same insane tempo, smoking non-stop. Arvid had seen how the pack of Cooly dwindled.

  ‘Why does she go out in weather like this?’ Arvid said.

  ‘She has to, don’t you see?’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘We women know that sort of thing, Arvid,’ Gry said, laying her hand on Arvid’s shoulder.

  ‘Jesus,’ Arvid said, wrenching himself away. ‘You’re only in the fourth grade.’

  And then he went back to his room. He had decided to stay awake until Mum returned, but he fell asleep and when he woke up he had wet the bed. His mind made a half-hearted attempt to remain in the trough of sleep, but in the end it had to come up and he felt that all-too-familiar freezing-cold sensation around his hips.

  He lay quite still and tried to go back to sleep, squeezing his eyes shut and thinking of sheep and clouds and all those things that Uncle Rolf had taught him to do, but it was rubbish and didn’t help, and he had to get up. Carefully he took off his sodden underpants and put them under the dresser. This was his secret trick and it always worked. Every time he had wet himself he put the clammy underpants under the dresser and the next night they were gone. It was like magic, but he tried not to think about it. He didn’t want the magic to go away.

  Mum was back. He could hear her light steps on the stairs and he jumped into clean underpants and got back into bed, close to the wall, and he almost curled around the wet patch he could do nothing about, but he knew it would be gone by morning. Mum came in to see if he was under the duvet. He pinched his eyes shut to show he was asleep, but she came up close and said:

  ‘Are you still awake, Arvid?’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘You should have been asleep hours ago.’

  ‘Mm. I know. But I have slept.’ He wondered if he should open his eyes, and then he did, and she sat down on the edge of his bed and stroked his hair.

  ‘Were you afraid for Mummy, Arvid?’

  Afraid? He was not. She always went for these walks when there was something up, and even if he didn’t like her going out when the weather was bad, he had never been afraid. He shook his head, but then he remembered something.

  ‘Mum?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Why do you cross the road? I mean, why do you cross the road when you’re almost in Grorud and you’re on your way back?’

  ‘Because I don’t want to walk with the cars heading in the same direction as me.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because it makes me feel they are all going away and I’m left standing there. You see?’

  ‘Mm. But what do you do?’

  ‘I don’t do anything. I think.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Nothing you have to bother your little head about.’

  She thought he didn’t understand a thing. Everyone thought he was stupid because he was only three feet seven inches tall. But he was not stupid, and he knew well enough what went through her head when she was out there walking, and when she said, ‘Goodnight,’ turned off the light, and went downstairs he was absolutely sure, because then he could hear them down below.

  ‘So you’re back. You’ve let off some steam, have you?’

  ‘Oh, that’s so typical of you, Frank! You don’t understand a thing! You just say wait and we have to think this over, but I don’t want to wait, do you understand? I’m not twenty any more!’

  Next morning when he woke he had slept longer than usual, the room was light and underneath him he had a clean sheet. How that could have happened he didn’t know, it was more magic, and as soon as he realised he tried to think about something else.

  Everywhere it was strangely quiet, he could not hear a sound, and he was the early riser, always awake before Gry, while Mum lay in bed reading, as she did no matter what time he poked his head round the door, and Dad would be in the kitchen making breakfast before he left for work. Then Arvid used to sneak down and stand by the kitchen counter eating a slice of bread, trembling with cold until Dad tousled his hair and left with the bag under his arm.

  Now Dad was away, and when Arvid looked into Gry’s room, her bed was empty. He tiptoed down the stairs to the living room, and that was empty too, but the cellar door was open, and if he listened carefully he could hear a faint splashing of water he knew came from the laundry room, and that meant his mother was down there.

  He was all alone in the flat, and it gave him such a chilling sensation of freedom that for a moment he stood still, it was so unexpected. He could do whatever he wanted, and then he knew exactly what he wanted to do. He quickly fetched a chair and placed it by the bookcase, stepped up onto it, and started to climb. He knew it was all right, the shelving was screwed into the wall. When he swung himself up to the very top he almost knocked off the old vase they had brought with them from Vålerenga, and even though Mum might not have cared about that either he managed to catch it at the last moment.

  Carefully he straightened up. It was a long way down to the floor, and for a fraction of a second he was balancing on the edge of the bookcase and felt the rush of fire in his stomach. Then he raised his arms as high as he was able to, which was not that high, but it was enough to touch the large clock. He pushed it off its hook, and for a moment it rested in his hands, and Jesus it was heavy, and then it tipped over and sailed through the air and landed on the floor with a crash that was a hundred times louder than he had expected. He stood on top of the bookcase in his underpants, and they were slowly getting wet, and he looked down at the splinters of glass, the scattered cogwheels and the two clock hands wobbling round in a meaningless void. From the cellar he heard the click-clack of his mother’s steps, ‘Arvid! Arvid!’ she cried, and then he pushed his face to the wall and held his hands to his ears.

  Fatso

  They called him Fatso, and fat he was, that is his belly was fat, it stuck out like an over-inflated balloon and was peculiar to look at from the side, but otherwise Fatso was slight. It was a long time since Fatso had used a belt for his trousers, because it just slipped under his belly, and then his trousers fell down and his wife was so embarrassed, she said, that she told him to find another solution. That’s why he wore braces, or ‘guy ropes’ as Dad said on the sly, and that was how he looked, like a tent.

  No one called him Fatso to his face. ‘Bomann’ they said, for that was his name, and as far as his belly was concerned there was only one thing wrong with it, Dad said, it was always full of beer. Builders drink a lot of beer, everyone knows that, and Arvid knew it too. But Fatso didn’t just drink beer; he had the biggest and most sophisticated home-brew kit in the street.

  There was bubbling and sputtering in almost every flat along the road, and those who didn’t have a kit themselves shared with a neighbour. The smallest set-up was Thomassen’s on the corner, but that was to be expected, Dad said, for Thomassen worked for the police and had to be discreet.

  It wasn’t long since Thomassen got his own kit, and until then especially Fatso, but not only him, had worried that Thomassen would report them, and great was the relief when the machinery was set up under his kitchen sink. Jon Sand, who lived next door to Thomassen and was the same age as Arvid, said all the neighbours had chipped in for the kit. They had been talking about it in the laundry room, and Thomassen couldn’t refuse when he was given it for his birthday. But Jon was always making out he knew just about everything, and it was common knowledge that his mother and father were the biggest gossips in Veitvet, so Arvid didn’t pay it any mind.

  One day Arvid’s mother called him the way she always did.

  ‘Arvid! Dinner!’ she yelled, and it was really annoying, why did she always have to shout so damn loud, she was the only person who did that, and the other kids grinned and said, ‘Arvid, your Mum’s shouting for you,’ as if he hadn’t heard! But it was Thursday
and offal, and unlike the rest of the family Arvid thought offal was really good (animal fodder, said Dad, cheap, said Mum) so he set off at a run. He ran a lot, he couldn’t keep his legs still for more than a couple of minutes at a time, and he raced like a terrier up the flagstone path in front of the house.

  Fatso was sitting on the front steps reading Arbeiderbladet, and Arvid could have sworn he stuck his leg out although it would be hard to prove, but anyway he fell flat on his face and screamed an air-quivering God damn it. Fatso lowered his paper, lifted his index finger and said:

  ‘You’re not allowed to swear, you’re too little!’

  ‘Mind your own business, Fatso!’ Arvid howled, for his knee hurt like the devil and tears gushed from his eyes when it started to bleed. But he had said what he wasn’t supposed to say out loud, too loud, he knew it at once, and now it was too late to take it back.

  Fatso stood up in one surprisingly quick movement considering the huge belly he was carrying.

  ‘What did you say?!’ he said, grabbing Arvid’s shoulder.

  ‘Fatso!’ Arvid screamed, for now he was both frightened and defiant, and Fatso dragged him hobbling to the door where it said JANSEN, and just then Arvid’s mother opened it.

  ‘Did you hear what he said, fru Jansen?’ said Fatso.

  ‘No, Bomann,’ Mum said. ‘I’ve just got here, haven’t I. So, what did he say?’

  ‘He called me Fatso,’ Fatso said. ‘No one calls me Fatso!’

  ‘No one does, Bomann.’

  ‘No, they don’t? This whelp of yours just did. Fatso, he said. No one calls me Fatso. I won’t have it and I bet he didn’t come up with it himself!’

  ‘I don’t understand, Bomann,’ Mum said. ‘I’ve never heard anyone call you anything except Bomann, that’s for sure, and the boy is only eight years old. Why should that bother you?’ Mum said, and Arvid, who was a bit annoyed with her because she was lying, was impressed too, for she lied so beautifully, she didn’t even blush, just looked at Fatso with her brown eyes in such a good-natured way, and Arvid had never heard her say anything but Fatso when they were by themselves.