Before I Burn: A Novel (11 page)

She loved birds so much.

She was quite proud of these diaries, but at the same time I recall they were highly confidential and somewhat taboo. I’d had no idea what was in them. On several occasions she said she was considering burning the whole lot and that under no circumstances would anyone get to read them until she was dead and gone.

And that is now, of course.

This is what she wrote when her neighbour Ester passed away:

SUNDAY, 9 MAY 1999

Snowing. Ester’s unconscious in hospital. God help us all.

THURSDAY, 13 MAY

Ascension Day. Sunny but cold. Ester died at three this afternoon. A bad day.

FRIDAY, 14 MAY

Sunny and cold. Painted ceiling. Yard’s deserted and quiet.

Eight months earlier, at half past three in the morning, just after Pappa died:

15 SEPTEMBER 1998

Eventually he was given a morphine injection and that eased things, but he had to have another, and the pain went. He fell asleep and never woke again. The last thing he said was, Mm, that’s heaven.

After a visit from the local priest eight years earlier:

11 MAY 1990

Colder. Cloudy. Austad came to visit. Rained in the evening.

Two years before that, when Grandad suddenly fell down dead outside the courthouse:

THURSDAY, 3 NOVEMBER

I wake with a start. Is it true or did I dream that Dad was dead? Well, it’s true. I have such pain in my chest it feels physical. Holskog came by later in the day and is going to see to the funeral. It is all going to be as simple as possible. He asks me if I want to see him lying in the coffin. I say no. I want to remember him as the good-looking, youthful man I loved so much. Anna came. I see everything through a fog. The sun was out apparently, but I didn’t see it.

Grief.

FRIDAY, 4 NOVEMBER

There were so many people here. I am so tired. It was good when night came. The tablet gave me some blessed hours of sleep. Got away from all the pain for a while.

SUNDAY, 6 NOVEMBER

Day feels so hard to bear. All the things I blame myself for, all the things I failed to do or say will take me to the grave. Night came as a friend with some sleep.

She never wrote as much as she did in the year after his death. It was a natural reaction; it forced its way out and poured over the pages. Everything was possible, all she had to do was write, it came easily, and that was how she kept herself going. In fact, she was writing away her grief.

I flicked back to 13 March 1978:

A boy. He arrived today, a little before six o’clock. Everything went fine. Tomorrow Kristen and I are going to see him.

That boy was me.

She writes briefly about her visit the following day, later almost nothing about the newborn baby. I flicked forwards to April, then May. May 1978, in Norway, the month the entire country was stunned by the Inger Apenes murder in Fredrikstad, the one that was not to be solved until twenty-nine years later, in April 2007, when a man turned himself in and confessed. The month that Charlie Chaplin’s coffin turned up after vanishing into thin air from Corsier-sur-Vevey cemetery, Switzerland. The month that the 48th World Cup football championship moved to Argentinian shores. And in Kristiansand Cathedral, Cantor Bjarne Sløgedal was preparing for the annual church festival, which on this occasion was going to have an opening concert with the motet choir and Kristiansand Town Orchestra, as well as the English baritone Christopher Keyte. Later, on 3 June, Ingrid Bjoner was to sing Pergolesi’s
Stabat Mater
, and the festival would conclude with a concert by Kjell Baekkelund and Harald Bratlie performing Bach’s
Kunst der Fuge.

It is May and springtime in Norway. It has come late, but the weather is holding nicely, slightly overcast, sunshine. Then the heat comes with a vengeance. Leaves are out. Tractors plough the ground, turning over wings of earth. Hills go green, cows are put out to graze, swallows fly high and summer is on its way.

III.

WHO WAS THIS BOY WHO had just been born?

When I went home in March, only a few days old, the whole district lay under a blanket of snow, and for as long as I can remember I have had this special relationship with snow: a desire for it to start falling, for it to fall while I am asleep, for it to come down thick over the trees, over the house, over the forest, for it to fall deep into my dreams, for the whiteness to cover everything, and when I wake in the morning, for the world to be new.

Snow was part of what I first saw. But then came spring. And, soon after, summer.

Who was I?

According to Teresa, I didn’t relax when I played music. But I tried to let my fingers rest over the keys. I did what I was told. There was never any trouble with me. I was dutiful to a fault, and I never contradicted anyone. I did my homework with care, I was always prepared and always punctual. I set off on my bike to Lauvslandsmoen School at just before eight even though it took only four minutes and classes didn’t begin until half past eight. I stood in the darkness waiting for Knut, the caretaker, to open up, and as soon as he did I went into the warm corridor, put my rucksack in the classroom and patiently waited for the others to come and the school day to begin at last. Every Monday I had a singing rehearsal at the chapel in Brandsvoll. I stood in the youth choir singing all these songs that I can still remember by heart, without shoving, without pulling the girls’ hair and without forgetting the words. Every second Thursday I went to Von Youth Club and sat in the same chapel room learning about the ruinous effects of alcohol. I suppose I was eight or nine years old when I first learned that your face went green from drinking beer, and already then I knew that I must never accept a bottle of beer if a tall, pimply boy offered me one (it was always a tall, pimply boy); already I had learned that there was something called
the darker side of life
and that was where beer belonged. I learned that I had at all costs to avoid the darker side of life, or else beer would have me in its possession and I would be forced to drink it. I knew that I should stay on the sunny side of life, although I had little idea as to how in reality that was to be done. But it sounded like sensible advice to a nine-year-old who had always liked being outdoors in the sun.

I wanted to be like everyone else, I didn’t want to stand out in any way, and that was why I was well behaved, that was why I did my homework, that was why I was an able pupil. There was just one snag: I often sat indoors reading. I began to cycle to the library in Lauvslandsmoen. Down around the mountain bends in Vollan, onto the plain, the wind in my hair, past Aasta’s house, across Stubekken River, past Stubrokka and across Finsåna River. I freewheeled almost the whole way there, but the ride home with a bag on the handlebars was all the harder for it. I began to read
The Story of
series of books.
The Story of Edvard Grieg. The Story of Madame Curie. The Story of Ludwig van Beethoven. The Story of Thomas Alva Edison.
These were books you could lose yourself in. I read with a passion and voracity no one understood, perhaps not even me. They were books that filled me with dreams. They were books that slowly did things to me, that made me wish myself in other places. Something inside me began to wander. At the beginning no one noticed anything, but something inside me had left a long time ago and I was in a slow outward drift. At the same time there was also something in me that wanted to stay. There was something that would remain forever in the safe and the secure, the familiar and the simple, in the region I, in my heart of hearts, loved so much. I felt so bound to this place, partly because my father was. He often sat leafing through the big, thick tome called
Finsland: Gard og AEtt
, the book with so many names, years of births, marriages and deaths, and he showed me how you can follow father and son, father and son down through the centuries, to his father and himself, and me, the last in the line for the time being. That was how it was. That was how the years passed and I didn’t know who the ‘me’ actually was, except that I was the last in the line. Sometimes what Ruth had said –
You’re a writer, that’s what you are –
came back to me. The words were still out there, although I had completely stopped telling stories. I didn’t dare, for it might be considered that such behaviour might lead me into the ‘darker side of life’.

This matter of the ‘sunny’ and the ‘darker’ sides of life was gradually becoming quite irksome. For this reason I began to camouflage myself. This worked fine for many years. In a way it was easy. I talked like the other kids, did as the others did. But I wasn’t like the others. I read books. In some way I became addicted to them. When I was twelve, Karin gave me permission to borrow books from the adult section of the library. It was like crossing an invisible border. I went straight from reading
The Story of
books to ones by Mikkjel Fønhus, which were about animals, or lonely men who went to wrack and ruin. That appealed to me, a boy who was so well behaved and always stayed on the sunny side. From then on I also read the books we had at home. In the early 1970s my parents had been members of the Book Club, the one where all the books looked identical, except for different colours and patterns on the spine. I began to read all those books that Mamma and Pappa may well have read at one time, I didn’t know whether they had or not. The exception to this was Trygve Gulbranssen’s Bjørndal trilogy, because Pappa had said I should read it. The idea that Pappa had read precisely these books gave me the motivation to tackle them, and there are no books, neither before nor since, that have gripped me in such a way. I was perhaps thirteen or fourteen, I wanted the books to go on for ever, and I shed solitary tears when the character of Old Dag died at the end of the second volume.

A book had made me cry.

It was unheard of. I was ashamed for a long time afterwards. I couldn’t bring myself to tell a living soul, but I wondered if the same had befallen Pappa and that was why he wanted me to read it.

I wanted to live on the sunny side of life; I wanted that more than anything else.

As I grew older it became apparent to other boys that I wasn’t like them. They could see it as well, of course. There was something strange, something intangible, something alien. They didn’t know where it came from, but they could see it. They knew me. It was me. Yet I was someone else. I wasn’t like them and they began to draw away. They began to avoid me, and I was left to my own devices in the breaks between lessons. They left me alone. They didn’t bother me, they didn’t say anything, they left me on my own. They were interested in other things, in fast cars and hunting and women. They began to smoke, they began to drink at the weekends, despite what had been instilled into us at the chapel some years ago. I went to parties too, I wasn’t unwelcome, but I sat there without smoking or drinking. After all, I was well behaved and proper and never did anything wrong. I felt myself that there was an aura of purity around me. Everyone talked about hunting and cars and parties, and even more drinking and booze and beer and moonshine. I sat there and was pure, and I wasn’t there. I was somewhere else. I was someone else. All these years, in reality, I had been on the move. All my life I had been someone else.

I remember the very last New Year’s Eve I spent at someone’s house in the area. A school friend had locked himself in the toilet and then fallen asleep. I was the only person still sober, and I felt a certain responsibility to liberate him. The music was pounding away in the sitting room as I tackled the door with a screwdriver. Somehow or other I managed to release the lock, and when I burst in he was lying on the floor with his trousers round his knees and a pool of sick seeping from his mouth and over him. I locked the door at once so no one else would come in and see him like that. At length I succeeded in reviving him, removing all his clothes and placing him in the bathtub. Where I cleaned him up. We had gone to school together for nine years, we had been in Von Youth Club together, sung in the choir and been confirmed together, and now there I was, washing his lean white body as the thick vomit oozed from his mouth, down his neck, chest and stomach and into his crotch. I don’t know if he remembers that night – presumably not – yet I had a feeling that something inside him registered what was happening. Registered that someone had forced their way in, undressed him and put him in the bath, that someone was standing over him and rinsing him down, and that this someone was me. I remember that night and the scene in the bathroom because I knew there and then that it was all over. I knew I had to get away from all of this. Away from the sordid and the base, away from beer, alcohol and moonshine, away from Finsland, away from the simple and the familiar, away from the forests and everything that deep in my heart I loved. I was nineteen years old. In August I moved to Oslo and started at university, and I knew I would never be able to return.

IV.

FOR THE WHOLE OF MAY 1978, Grandma writes generally short mundane comments about the weather, about the dry spring, about what she and Grandad have been doing, who visited them and what she cooked. Nothing about the forest fire on 6 May, nor anything about the Tønnes’ storehouse. A brief note on 17 May about the church service, Omland’s speech, the procession and the party in the evening at Brandsvoll Community Centre.