Before I Burn: A Novel (13 page)

One evening the telephone rang.

‘Just me,’ Pappa said. That was how all our telephone conversations started. Either he said that or I did. Just me.

And then it came.

He had been a bit unwell recently, he began. He had been to the doctor in Nodeland, and they did a few tests. From there he was sent to Kristiansand Hospital to have an X-ray. It transpired his lungs were full of fluid. He had been sent post-haste to the acute admissions unit and taken in a wheelchair to a room where he was laid on his side while a drain was inserted in his back. One lung, then the other, were drained of fluid. As he lay there he had seen for himself how the transparent bags had slowly filled with something resembling blood, only it was lighter in colour and mixed with tiny, white particles. In the end, they had drawn four and a half litres.

His voice was as always. Even. It was Pappa. Once it was said, he asked me what the weather was like in Oslo that evening. I felt odd, in a kind of daze, and had to go to the window, open the curtain and look out.

‘I think it’s snowing,’ I said.

‘There’s a starry sky here,’ he answered.

‘Mhm,’ I said.

‘And it’s cold,’ he added. ‘Cold and starry.’

That was all. That was the beginning.

A shadow was found over one kidney, the right-hand one. It was April and the ice had thawed. I had turned twenty. Then he had almost a litre of fluid drained. I couldn’t understand how it had been possible to breathe with litres of water in his lungs, he couldn’t either, and for that matter neither could the doctors. But he had.

He rang me from his hospital bed. It was evening, but still light. Clear, mild April weather with turbid, almost dirty air.

‘Just me,’ he said.

Then we chatted for perhaps five minutes. A quiet, gentle conversation about next to nothing.

‘I suppose you have exams soon?’ he enquired.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Soon.’

‘And you’re studying?’ he asked.

I heard the faint sounds of music in the background. It seemed to be seeping through from the recesses of the receiver. Very faint music.

‘What’s the weather like?’ I asked, hearing at once that this was his question, not mine, and even though he was four hundred kilometres or so away, I could feel myself blushing.

‘I don’t know,’ he said, and was as he always was. ‘I can’t get up. There are loads of tubes and things here. And in Oslo?’

‘It’s spring here,’ I replied.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘I think it’s spring here, too.’

At the end of April I went home to see my parents. By then he was back at Kleveland, back at the farm. The first thing that struck me on seeing him was that his eyes had grown. He was lying on the sofa under a blanket looking at me with those new eyes of his, and it took me all evening and large parts of the next day to get used to them. It was as though they could see through everything, yet understood nothing of what they saw.

A few days later I took him for a check-up at Kristiansand Hospital. It was a forty-minute trip, but it felt like longer. We drove through the region, past the school in Lauvslandsmoen which we had both attended, with an interval of thirty years, past the community centre, Kilen, Lake Livannet, which glistened and quivered, though not close to the shore where the water lay still and black. There was an odd, oppressive atmosphere in the car, as if we had both been on long journeys, each in our own way, and had so much to tell one another that we didn’t know where to begin, and so refrained. After a while we were nearing the coast, and to the west of the town we could see across the whole of the seaward approach. The sea was grey, lifeless. No boats. It reminded me of something, but I wasn’t sure what.

Ashes?

All the smokers were clustered outside the hospital entrance. Dressed in Adidas and Nike tracksuits, they were, one and all, eaten up by cancer. Yet, they had somehow managed to make their way into the fresh air. They cupped their cigarettes in their hands as though someone might come along and steal them at any moment, and they regarded us with large, frightened eyes. As we went in a gust of wind blew, I smelt the smoke coming from them, and it was then that I realised they all had the same large eyes as Pappa.

I sat on a chair in the corridor and waited.

On Pappa’s return I saw something had changed. His face was stiff and odd, as though he had been shouting and screaming, or laughing for several minutes. But he said nothing.

‘Everything alright?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Everything’s fine.’

Then we walked towards the exit. The smokers had gone, but the smell of smoke still hung in the air. Pappa could do with some new clothes, he said, so we drove through the town on our way home. There was an offer on track suits at Dressman, so we went there. I let him wander around on his own and pick out whatever he wanted. I watched him in front of the stand. There was no one else in the shop. He was flicking through the clothes with a determined mien, seeming to know exactly what it was he was after. Then he pulled out a tracksuit. It was red with a white puma in full leap on the breast. That was the one he wanted. It cost only 200 kroner. He went to the counter, paid, smiled at the young girl, and as he turned, his face still split with a smile, I suddenly knew what had happened. I realised Pappa had been crying. Suddenly it was clear to me: the man I had never seen shed a tear had been sitting in front of a doctor he didn’t know, crying.

It was the day he was told there was nothing else they could do for him.

VIII.

HE HAMMERED THE fire engine for all it was worth to Breivoll, to the crossroads where the road divided into three. He jumped on the brakes, did a U-turn and continued down to Lauvslandsmoen. By Jens Slotte’s house he almost veered off the road. He skidded round where the road curved down towards Finsåna but managed to stay on the carriageway. When he came to the school the road divided into three again. He stopped and asked an elderly man the way. The flashing blue lights were on and he had to shout from the window. He waited behind the wheel while he was given painstaking directions. Then he repeated them himself. Afterwards he put on the sirens, drove two hundred metres in the direction of Laudal, bore left onto the road to Finsådal, passed Stubrokka and the road ascending to Lauvsland. He raced on, whizzing past Haugeneset and the concrete elk that has been standing at the edge of the forest and peering out for as long as I can remember. Then he sped onto the flatlands of Moen where Teacher Jon’s house lay all by itself. Two women were walking on the road ahead of him. It was Aasta and her mother, Emma. Emma was hard of hearing, nearly deaf, and she couldn’t hear the sirens. Aasta turned to see a cloud of dust and smoke approaching at a menacing speed. She just managed to shove her mother into the ditch in time, and seconds later the fire engine screamed past. They had been a hair’s breadth from being mown down, both of them, and stood gawping in the haze of dust and exhaust fumes. The barn in Skogen, which was situated over the municipal border, in Marnardal, started to smoulder after sunrise, it was said, and that didn’t fit the pattern of the previous blazes. The fire engine appeared at a little after eleven o’clock, and by then the building was well and truly alight. Several hundred metres of hose had to be rolled out to a small lake nearby, and while this was being done they had to use the water from the fire engine. The 1,000 litres were pumped out until the tank was empty, after which they had the muddy water from the lake in the pipes, but by then it was already too late. The barn burned to the ground, while the farmhouse was severely damaged. The heat was so intense that the wall caught fire even though it was quite a distance from the burning barn. The external cladding had to be hacked at and cut away with fire axes, the tiles had to be torn off, and then the house was sprayed with water so that everything inside – the porch, the hall and some of the kitchen – was left soaking wet.

The question afterwards was why the blaze had started in daylight. That was quite new.

Later, after the fire had been put out, Lensmann Koland made a statement to the newspaper. Only now, after the fourth blaze, had this become a matter for the police. There was no longer any doubt. Koland said the police were sure that the Tønnes’ barn near Leipsland had been deliberately set alight. The same could be asserted with reasonable certainty about the summer storehouse in Haeråsen. And now there was the barn in Skogen. Three fires since 17 May. Four in total. There was good reason to believe they were dealing with an arsonist. It had been confirmed that all four fires had occurred within a radius of ten kilometres from Lauvslandsmoen School. From this, one might conclude that the arsonist lived in the vicinity and was familiar with the area. The police were interested to hear from anyone who had seen anything suspicious by the roadside. A search had been mounted to identify cars which had been on the six-kilometre stretch from Finsådal to Lauvslandsmoen between two o’clock and ten o’clock on Friday morning. Everything was of interest, even those things which at first sight might appear to be of no consequence. Furthermore, people were being warned to keep their eyes peeled and report any suspicious persons. That was all for now. No panic as yet.

IX.

TERESA MADE AN ENTRY IN HER DIARY. Five lines. It was Friday afternoon, a few hours after the fire in Skogen had been extinguished, but before all hell broke loose. In the morning she had been to the church to rehearse for a funeral – Anton Eikeli was due to be interred – and it was while she was sitting alone at the organ that the alarm had gone off. But she hadn’t heard it; she was in the middle of ‘Lead, Kindly Light’.

The five lines are about Dag and Ingemann. From her window she saw them lying side by side in the yard on the Friday afternoon shooting at a target. She describes the scene in precise detail. The bodies recoiling with every shot, the ear-piercing crack of the bullet, the echo that rolls around between the mountain ridges. The way they got up afterwards and march across the field to study the two targets. It is a distance of 100 metres. Dag first, his rifle slung over his shoulder; then Ingemann, his hands thrust into his pockets. She thinks Ingemann suddenly seems old. This procedure is repeated a few times. Then Ingemann walks alone across the field to check the targets. He walks with his hands in his pockets as the swallows swoop and the grass sways in the wind. And she sees Dag lying with the rifle sights to his eye. He is motionless as Ingemann crosses the field. Dag takes aim while Teresa watches from the window and Ingemann ambles onwards. This lasts for perhaps fifteen seconds. Nothing happens. But she is sure. He aims at his father.

Reading Teresa’s description I was reminded of the time Pappa shot an elk right through the heart. I would have been around ten years old. Some days previously he had been lying in the yard and breaking in his rifle. I stood a few metres behind him and felt the gunshots like a clenched fist in the solar plexus. I stared at his cheek resting against the rifle stock. I had never seen him rest his cheek against anything or anyone in the same way as he did against the smooth rifle butt. So sensitive and gentle and careful against the untidy wood grain. It was as if he were settling down to sleep before the first shot shattered everything. I looked at the smoking spent cartridges that were ejected, empty, red-hot, all of them accompanied by a strange, hollow song, like a kind of cheer. Five shots in all. Then he got up from the old beach mat he had been lying on, put the gun down with care, walked across the field to the target and studied it closely while I picked up the cartridges, which were still too hot to hold to your lips and blow on.

A few days later he took his shooting test. I was with him at the range, the one that lay secluded about half way between the church and the shop in Breivoll. He lay down on his front and fired a series of ten shots at the silhouette of an elk that appeared from a pit. It transpired that all the shots were within the magic circle drawn around the heart and lungs.

He had passed.

The man who had never shot an animal. The man who had never been interested in hunting. Yet he turned out to be an accurate marksman. The question is: what prompted him to take a shooting test and go elk hunting? This was a conundrum for me. It still is, even now, more than twenty years later. I knew he wasn’t interested in hunting. He wasn’t like that. He was too gentle, too much of a dreamer. He might perhaps have dreamed of doing it, thought about it, talked about it. But not of actually going through with it. Yet he did. He did go through with it. Pappa became a hunter. And when, a few weeks later, he was in situ with a rifle resting on his lap, I was sitting right behind him. I remember staring at his back and thinking it wasn’t Pappa there, it was a stranger, someone I had never met; however, if he turned I would immediately see that it was him.

X.

TWO DAYS AFTER Pappa had bought the new tracksuit I returned to Oslo. It was May 1998, exams were approaching, but I couldn’t concentrate on my studies. I couldn’t concentrate on anything. After the first weeks it was as if all my willpower had crumbled inside me. I had a lie-in every morning, and didn’t get up until the sun peered in through the window. I got dressed, ate whatever food I had lying around and didn’t go to the reading room before twelve. I found a free seat, piled my books in front of me and sat staring at the steady flow of traffic down St Olavs gate. I couldn’t read. I could barely open a book. My brain was absolutely blank. It was frightening. I had never experienced anything like it. I was on the point of losing control, but I was still absolutely unperturbed. Why was I reacting in this way? There were many other people in similar situations. There were many people who had a dying father at home, weren’t there? There were many people in the same situation as I was who had to take exams and still managed to work in the reading room, and who lived apparently normal lives. Weren’t there?

I forgot both my grandfather’s coat and my new glasses. I completely forgot to be intellectual. I forgot about everything and everyone. Now there was only me. I didn’t know what was going to happen; however, I was quite unconcerned. I sat in the canteen and ate meals with the others, as usual. Queued up like a good boy, took a plate with three potatoes, a pile of grated carrots and pollock fish cakes in sauce, and moved on to the till where I paid. I placed my tray with the food on the table where the others were already sitting, poured myself a glass of water and fetched salt, pepper and serviettes. I was as before. I ate as before, talked with the others as before. The only difference was that I was prone to sudden fits of laughter. If someone told a joke, or a funny story, I could laugh so much I almost fell off my chair. The others looked at me and smiled. Food went down the wrong way and I had to go to the toilet to recover. But, aside from the fits of laughter, everything was fine. The exams were getting closer, and I hadn’t read a line for many weeks. The books stayed in my bedsit. I didn’t open them any more. I was unemotional all the time, and discovered how easy it was. It was easy, I was unemotional and in a way I was in control. I walked through the corridors outside the reading room in the Domus Nova building in the centre of Oslo, in the centre of the town that was supposed to be mine, and let absolutely everything slide.