“Maybe a bit more like a negro,” says Solgunn, “only white.”
I have a round forehead, and now my hair is short the curls are thicker and more wiry.
“You must have been made for warmer climes,” says Solgunn. “Italy or Spain or maybe Morocco.”
“I was going to Siberia,” I say, “Jesper was going to Morocco, my brother, he’s there now, but he doesn’t write letters. He gets brown after just one day in the sun.”
“Siberia?” says Solgunn.
“Yes.”
“It gets cold enough here. Just you wait.”
“I’m used to the cold,” I say.
“Maybe you’re like Alberte,” she says, “in Cora Sandel’s books. She was always cold before she grew up and went to France. You’re aiming in the wrong direction.”
I have not read those books, and I don’t want to go anywhere now, I want to stay here. I fall asleep again, and when I wake up I’m still in the same chair with a rug over my knees and on the rug is Alberte and Jakob by Cora Sandel. It is dark outside now, and I see my face in the window in front of me and Solgunn standing behind me, her hands are on my shoulders, and she moves them up my neck, over the ears and through my hair like a comb. I cannot move, the rug is so heavy.
“Do you mind,” I say, but she replies:
“I want to make you warm. Don’t you want me to?” She comes around the chair and bends over me, her face covers mine and her fair hair tickles my cheek, I can’t see the window any more, my face is gone. I open my mouth slightly and she kisses me. Some women are like that, I am not like that, but if I allow her to kiss me I am sure she will let me sit in this chair as long as I like. She puts her hands around my head, presses it lightly back, and I think, now I can’t borrow books anymore.
I do not remember how long I was ill that time, whether it was days or weeks or even longer, whether I went to the doctor or the doctor came to us, but there were brown bottles on the bedside table and clear glass bottles of pills; I remember Aunt Kari’s face in the doorway and the pattern of the wallpaper that had vines in red and turquoise and little ladies with baskets over their arms. I remember I drank a lot of water, and the cold floor when I had to go to the lavatory with my legs shaking and the first dinner after my temperature was normal. The food all came up again because it had been too long since I last ate anything. I watched the day changing through the window on to the courtyard where the shadows rose and fell, rose and fell in a system I could not make out, because sometimes it was quick and sometimes slow, and I have a photograph that Aunt Kari sent me several years later. “My Bergen-Belsen Girl” she had written on the back. I thought that was obscene then, and it is obscene now, but I was thinner than I’d ever been before. I was skinny, not slim, and my round parts had edges on them, and it is true that I looked like some of the photographs in the newspapers the year after the war.
But I came through it and was back in the café before the leaves had fallen from the trees in Kiellands Square. It was dark out there when I arrived and dark when I left, and the wind tore at the trees and people held on to their hats, and the buses were heavier than before; I stood at the window looking out when there weren’t many customers and felt the vibration in my body when they drove past. It was as if the glass had grown thinner, or my skin had. On the fourth day he came across the square. It was cold outside and warm inside, and he came in with his coat collar turned up, blew on his hands and rubbed them together while he looked at me and said:
“Have you been ill?”
I make a decision. I walk from Carl Berners Square to Grønlandsleiret and on along the street in the dark between the lamps past the Olympen restaurant and the road up to the left beside the little park, to the building with a filling station where the Sportsklub 09 has training quarters upstairs. Vålerenga doesn’t have a boxing club so he trains at the 09. But he can’t enter boxing contests, you have to be under thirty-two for that.
“It’s a pity,” he said in the café, “because I’m good,” and he didn’t blush when he said that. I don’t know how good he is, it is hard for me to say, but I walk up the hill with cautious steps. It is October, and the coat Aunt Kari gave me is almost too warm. He asked if I would come and watch, and I said yes, because the nights are long and Solgunn has been to the door and rung the bell twice. She found my address in the lending library list, and when the bell rings I go into the living room and hide behind the curtain looking down on the sidewalk until she comes out again, and then I see how straight and slender her back is, how straight her hair has been cut below the ears, and she walks quickly up the street, stops suddenly and stands with her arms at her sides and her hands clenched, and I wait, and she does not look back, and then she starts to walk on again.
I go up the stairs and into the boxing hall, and there are only men there, I should have known that. I stand by the wall just inside the door and light a cigarette, and at first no one turns around. I stand quite still thinking this is probably silly, perhaps I should go away, and then they notice the smoke, and a man in a green tracksuit says without looking at me:
“Where did that lady come from?” Another man shrugs his shoulders, and they don’t turn around, they have eyes in the backs of their heads and at the same time they’re looking at the boxing ring in the middle of the floor where two men in boxing gloves and not much else circle around each other with lowered heads. One of them has just landed a blow on the other, and the one who struck is the man who invited me. His red curls flop about, his body is white in a whirling movement, he has freckles on his back and is powerful and at the same time slim and has lines and curves that constantly change and his feet dance as if they didn’t know what it was to stumble. Both of them gleam in the lamplight, and he gets another punch in, there’s a dull sound, that hurt, I think, and they stop and my man bends forward with his gloves on his knees and says:
“Damn, did that hurt? Sorry,” and it looks as if he meant it. The other smiles bravely, but it did hurt.
“That’ll do,” shouts the man in the green tracksuit, “go and get showered. Those taking part in the tournament this weekend line up, and try to keep quiet for once!”
No one has said anything, but out of every nook and cranny come men of my age and still younger in thick sweaters, which they slowly pull off, they arrange themselves in two rows, half-naked and shivering, and the two in the ring go towards the ropes. Then he sees me and waves his glove in the air. Everyone turns. A howl rises to the roof. It fills the room, rolls toward the door, hits the walls and crashes in again, and I press my back against the wall behind me. I’m dumb, I’m not the one I was, and the man in the tracksuit turns and waits, looking me in the eye before he yells:
“SHUT UP!” and silence falls. He smiles, he hates me, and I have never even seen him before.
The man I’m here for comes down between the rows, and it’s impossible to see what he is thinking, because he’s looking at the floor while he unfastens his gloves and stops right in front of me and says:
“Hold out your hands.” I put out my cigarette in an ashtray on the pedestal by the door and do as he says. He pulls the gloves over my hands and bends forward pointing at his chin.
“Hit me here,” he says seriously. I hit him lightly on the chin with the hand in the glove and he gives at the knees, squints, clutches his throat and staggers back, takes two steps to the side and falls to the floor. He makes sounds like a dying man. I have to laugh, Jesper could have done that. But no one else is laughing. The man in the tracksuit stares at me, and he’s not smiling now, they all look towards the door where I stand and I feel how hard it is to breathe in the room. I pull off the gloves, drop them on the floor and say:
“I’ll be outside waiting for fifteen minutes.”
I stand on the stairs with my hand on the wrought iron rail until silence has fallen behind the door. I wait. Finally the anger comes. I go back and open the door and slam it as hard as I can, and then I go on down. Out on the sidewalk I light
a fresh cigarette, cross the road and go in among the trees, stand in the shadows and look back at the lights of the filling station and the door to the stairs. I look at my watch. I wait. It starts to snow. It’s only October, but it is snowing through the trees and out on the street in the light of the lamps and in front of the filling station it’s snowing hard. The snow and the smoke of my cigarette swirls white among the branches above me. I take a few steps, then retrace them again. If I turn my back on the street I just see trees and snow. I am wearing lined snow boots with zippers and warm stockings. I try to run. It’s fine. I have snow on my coat and snow in my hair and snow on my nose which I blow off, and I run zigzag among the trees with the cigarette in one hand and my coat held tight at my throat with the other. I stop and stay there, hopping up and down. I look at my watch. Before the quarter of an hour is up he comes out. His hair is wet, he sees the snow and smiles, he sees ski slopes and spruce trees and hot soup, he looks at his watch and peers down the street, he looks up the street and down again. But I’m not there. I am miles away, in Vannverks forest gazing over the sea to Norway. I let him wait until he is about to give up, his shoulders sink and he bites his lips, and then I walk out of the shadows and cross the street laughing. He sees me and smiles cautiously.
“It’s snowing,” he says.
The night is dark and dense and unbelievably white. A car is coming up the hill. The snow flies before the lights and lies so thick on the road that the back of the car slips on the bend from Grønlandsleiret and it pulls itself upward on wheels that spin and spatter. He turns and looks after it.
“If I had a car I could just have gone,” he says, but where would he have gone? He suddenly looks so like an orphan that I take his arm and feel at once that I have never touched him before. I do not understand it. I thought I had, I have thought of it like that, many times. He stiffens, he is dark where he was light before, he is tense and hard as iron under his coat sleeve and I let go before he pulls his arm away.
“Where would you have gone?”
“I don’t know. I have been to Örebro in Sweden,” he says, “I could have gone to Örebro.”
“What did you do there?”
“All the Baptists who make shoes have been to Örebro. There’s a school there. But anyway I haven’t got a car.”
“It’s quite easy without one,” I say. “I go by bus, you can travel a long way by bus. Or train, you can travel to the Pacific by train.” But he still stands there looking after the red rear lights of the car that vanishes up the hill to Galgeberg and Vålerenga and the district where he lives. Perhaps he doesn’t want to go anywhere, perhaps he wants to go home. He looks at his watch again.
“Well, I don’t want to go home. The last bus for Svartskog leaves in fifteen minutes. We’ll catch it if we get it at Gamlebyen.”
“Svartskog?”
“Yes. Will you come with me?” He bites his lips again.
“All right,” I say. But he didn’t say anything about the bus back. When that goes. I have no idea where Svartskog is.
We start to walk without speaking, he goes first and I follow, but that’s all right, he is quite different now out here in the snow that fills every corner of the world and spreads a blanket over every thought and every house so the town disappears, and I can’t see which way we’re going. And then he comes to a halt. It has stopped snowing. The air is dark and shining like oil. The bus comes around the corner and I am blinded by its lights, it is in trouble and dares not stop at once, it needs room to brake and sails at an angle into the sidewalk farther on and opens up its doors. Only one-man buses run so late and we get in at the back and have to walk right down between the seats to the driver to pay. There are very few passengers, but I am too restless to sit down.
“Let’s stand at the back,” I say.
“It’s a long way,” he says, “over ten kilometers.”
“That doesn’t matter.”
We go back between the seats to the standing area at the end one step down, and we hang on to the bar while the bus lurches and shakes away from the lights of the town beside the fjord and the harbor, and there are red and yellow reflections from lanterns and ferries and houses lying close to the water. A big ship glides in among the cranes and comes to a stop. I follow it with my eyes until it disappears behind a promontory and the town is out of sight and only the snow shines white on the road and the trees.
He points up and out of the window on the opposite side. “Ekeberg is up there,” he says.
I turn, but I can only see the mountain wall a few meters from the bus.
“I was up there on the summit with a thousand other people watching the airship Norge take off. I’ll never forget it. It was fantastic. It was in 1926. It was going to Leningrad first and then further north. Nobile was on board, Amundsen was waiting at Spitsbergen. They were going to fly over the North Pole.”
“1926,” I say. “That was the year I was born.” He blushes in the half-darkness, and then he laughs.
“I suppose it was.”
The bus turns in from the main road along the fjord, all is dark. We glide through the night, and suddenly there are houses with lights in the windows on both sides of the road, and I might well have lived in a place like that, just as lonely and swallowed up, and then it is dark again, and sometimes I can see the black water between two ridges. We stand at the back without speaking, the bus stops sometimes to let people off, and finally we are the only ones left, but we do not sit down. Just hang on to the bar when there’s a sharp swing, and the bus changes down on its way up a steep slope with many bends, and the back is slung around and we are slung with it. Then it’s straight ahead again, and at last the bus stops, the engine goes quiet and dies, and it’s quite obvious that we’re not talking. The driver turns around and calls out too loudly:
“Last stop, Svartskog.” The back door opens and we get out. There is a shop there with black windows and a farm a little farther on and possibly more houses around the bend, but it is mostly dense forest in all directions. He starts to walk along the road, the driver strikes a match inside the bus, it is the only light I see. For a moment I hesitate, then I go up to the front door and knock. It snaps open. The driver leans forward with his cigarette in his mouth.
“Yes?” he says. I stand there staring at him; the narrow tie and uniform cap with its shiny peak and the shadow over his forehead so I cannot see his eyes, and I do not remember what I wanted.
“Yes?” he says again, a bit more sharply, and then I take the packet of cigarettes out of my coat pocket, shake one out and hold it between two fingers. He rattles his matches still sitting down and I stand there, but he does not get up. I have to go up the two steps. He lights a match, it is warm inside the bus, I bend and don’t look at his face.
“Thanks,” I say and go out again. The door shuts. I’m a bit dizzy, I take a drag and shut my eyes then open them again. I turn around. He is standing fifty meters farther on waiting. I take a couple more drags and then throw the cigarette down and walk towards him. Halfway there I stop and look back. The bus has not moved, it stands quiet in the darkness, the cigarette on the ground is still glowing.
We walked for a quarter of an hour along a path through the forest. It was dark, but he knew the way and did not take a single false step, the snow lay on the spruce trees and he called back when I had to be careful and held branches aside so they would not hit my face, and snow fell and hit me on the neck. And then the heavens opened and the moon came out, and we were through the forest. We came out on to a road where the snow lay white without any tracks, and on the other side of the road there was nothing. I went across and on to the edge to look down the steep slope at the water shining black in the light of the moon.
“The Bunnefjord,” he said. “Roald Amundsen’s house is a few hundred meters on the left, our cabin’s just over here on the right.”
We went along the road where the gravel crunched under the snow beneath our feet. It was a red-painted timber cabin c
lose to the road behind a fence, and there was a gateway we had to go through first with two big gateposts made up of stones, walled together so they looked as if they had always been together, and he had built them, he said, and it took three weeks and two days in bed with a bad back. The cabin looked welcoming even though there was snow heaped up against the windows and streaks of white on the walls, and snow on the roof, and there were big windows looking on to the fjord where you could sit in the evening and watch the sun going down through the trees on the other side of the water.
“Nesodden,” he said pointing, but I couldn’t see that far in the dark, only the water and the spruces down the slope to the water where there were steps built in and ledges on the bends along the steep path, and right at the bottom there was a canoe upside down on two trestles.
“That’s mine,” he said.
Inside there was a small entry with the big windows on the right and then a living room combined with a kitchen where there were piles of wood almost up to the ceiling along one wall and a black wood-burning stove in the middle. It was cold in the entry, our breath hung white around our faces, and the floor creaked under our feet.
“You need your clothes on in here,” he said.
I laughed. “We’d better get some heat going quickly then,” I said, and he looked at me, suddenly shy, and then he was eager.