Before I Burn: A Novel (14 page)

A frenetic, nervous atmosphere began to spread through the corridors, the reading room and the canteen. I caught fragments of conversation. Now and then someone asked me something.
What’s mea culpa in tort again? What does Falkinger say about it? Is there anything about it in Lødrup?
Yes, I answered without any qualms. I was positive that there was something in Lødrup, and perhaps also in Falkinger. I said I would go home and check. When I was home, however, I did nothing. I had let everything slip. All my dreams. My ambitions. Everything I had imagined. Everything I was going to work towards. An education. A career. A future.

And all because of Pappa.

My books gathered dust at home while I went out walking in town. I crossed St Olavs gate and continued down Universitetsgata, past the National Gallery and the large grey edifice housing the Norwegian publisher Gyldendal, and I squinted up at those sitting behind the windows deep in concentration. Perhaps they were reading a manuscript? Something that would one day be a book, a collection of poems, a novel? I remembered Ruth’s words from years ago, the ones that had never quite lost their hold on me. But I had never dared to believe them. I had even promised myself then that I would never tell another lie, and I had no dreams of becoming a writer. Quite the contrary. I was going to become a lawyer. I was going to have order and lucidity. I was going to know my law backwards and make a distinction between right and wrong. I was going to be someone quite different. I had no time for so-called artists, whom I considered dropouts, people who hadn’t been capable of completing an education, who had started painting, or writing, or some other endeavour that was supposed to give their lives a semblance of meaning and dignity.

All of those people who had ended up on the darker side of life. This concept was still ingrained in me.

And now, there I stood, staring up at the grey Gyldendal building that had acquired some allure in the hot May sun, and as I turned to go I realised it reminded me of the balcony on the old shop in Brandsvoll, the one with the flagpole mounted over the road. I had dreamed so often of standing there and looking out.

I walked on past the Norwegian Theatre, and eventually arrived in Akersgata. I mounted the broad steps by the government building and finally reached the Deichman Library. That was my destination. When I entered, everything was very quiet, not just around me but also inside me. Everything went quiet. I became placid and calm, and sat for several hours reading novels and poetry until my head was spinning. I did exactly the same thing the day after, and the next, and the day after that. I can still recall the dank atmosphere in the stairwell, the carpet in the middle of the staircase that was wet and squelched at the very bottom but was dry at the top, the banister that was worn and shiny from all the hands. And I remember all the shelves of books, probably several hundred times as many as in the library back in Lauvslandsmoen, and the unruffled woman’s voice over the loudspeaker just before eight o’clock every evening, the one that announced it was time to make your way homewards because the doors were closing.

The day before the exam he rang. It was in the evening and I had just returned home from Deichman with a bag of books. The mobile phone emitted its cheery ringtone in my pocket, and I put down my bag and went to the window.

His voice was more relaxed, as though he had been drinking. But of course he hadn’t; Pappa never drank. I stood by the window looking out at the lamp swinging on a wire stretched taut across the street.

‘Tomorrow’s the big day,’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘You’ve got an exam, haven’t you?’

‘Of course,’ I said.

‘And everything’s under control?’

‘Near as dammit,’ I said.

‘Good luck,’ he said.

‘Thank you.’

We chatted about other things, I have no memory of what, and then rang off. Him first. I stood for a long time with the phone in my hand. Then I grabbed my jacket and went to the Underwater Pub, which was close to where I was living, and ordered a half-litre of beer. It was the first time I had done this, and I am sure it was obvious. I didn’t know whether to say
Beer, please.
Or:
A pils.
Or:
Half a litre.
In the end I gave a brief nod of the head in the direction of the beer tap behind the bar, and the young girl working there probably thought I was a foreigner who couldn’t speak Norwegian or English. I waited at the bar, not quite at my ease, for the glass to be filled, then occupied a seat at the back of the room and took long swigs. Afterwards I got up, paid and went out into the mild evening air. I was scared someone I knew would see me, or I would meet someone from home, even though that was completely inconceivable. As it happened, I didn’t bump into anyone on the way and reached home without mishap. Where I stood in the middle of the room for a long time.

The following day I appeared for the exam at eight thirty on the dot. It was held in a large West Oslo gymnasium and I took a seat next to the wall. I printed my name and candidate number very clearly. Then I handed everything in and walked out into the sun. I had recently turned twenty, life was about to begin, real life. I had left my old life behind me to become the person I was. But, coldly, unemotionally, with my mind as clear as a bell, I wrote my name and handed in all the sheets of paper utterly blank. I walked in the hot sunshine listening to the birds twittering in the rose-hip bushes, went to the tram stop, the regular rumble of the town in my ears, and stood alone waiting for the tram to take me to the centre. My mind drifted. Wasn’t I the one who was going to become a lawyer? Wasn’t I the one who had travelled to Oslo to find himself? Yes, I was. However, it hadn’t happened. I was now sitting on a tram to the city centre, but in reality I was on my way into an unknown world. As the tram disappeared beneath the town I stared into my own hazy reflection, and when I surfaced in daylight in front of the fountain by the National Theatre, I knew: now you’re on the darker side of life. It will carry you away. No one can help you. You are where you vowed to yourself you would never end up. It is too late.

That afternoon I sat in the Underwater Pub until I felt I was a little more myself. Then I went home and rang Pappa.

‘It’s over now,’ I said in a bright tone which wasn’t my usual one. But the 400 kilometres between us saved me, and Pappa was unaware that anything was wrong.

‘Congratulations,’ he said.

‘Thank you,’ I answered.

‘How does it feel?’

‘I’m not quite sure,’ I replied.

‘I’m proud of you,’ he said, and he could never have said that if we had been in the same room, that I do know. I didn’t answer.

‘Now you’ve done what I’ve always dreamed of doing,’ he said.

‘Have I?’ I asked, staring out at the swaying street lamp, just as I had on the previous night.

‘I always dreamed of studying in Oslo when I was young,’ he said.

‘Did you?’

‘I dreamed of becoming someone, you know.’

‘But you did become someone,’ I said, immediately hearing my mistake. ‘I mean, you
are
someone.’

This time it was Pappa who didn’t answer. There was a silence, and I was unsure whether he was there, and again I thought I could hear faint music coming from somewhere as far from my father as it was from me.

XI.

I WASN’T QUITE finished with Kåre Vatneli. It emerged that he attended a confirmation service with Pappa in the autumn of 1957, barely two years before he died.

He got as far as being confirmed, he passed the start line, so to speak, and for confirmation he was given a long, black coat and hat, and this was for him, as for the other confirmands, a definitive indication that the world of childhood had now been left behind.

That was September 1957, the first year that white confirmation caps were worn. Pappa had just entered his fifteenth year, Kåre his sixteenth. After the ceremony they would finally be regarded as adults. As they entered the church they were ranked according to height, the tallest first. Medium height, in the middle. The smallest, last. First of all came the priest. Absalon Elias Holme, a name worthy of a priest. Then came Kåre. Pappa was quite close to the front. Grandma and Grandad were in the pews and had risen to their feet along with everyone else. Teresa was in the gallery playing the organ. The confirmands proceeded up the aisle, took their seats in the front rows beneath the pulpit. The music faded. Holme turned, made the sign of the cross and the service could begin.

Many more people than Aasta remembered Kåre Vatneli. At a later point I visited three of his childhood friends. It was November, I was at Otto Øvland’s house. I wasn’t aware that he and Pappa had been christened on the same day, with the same water. That was one of the first things Otto told me, as though it was important for him to say it at last.

Tom and Willy Utsogn were there that evening, with Otto, in his warm house. Both Otto and Willy had been to Kristiansand Hospital to visit Kåre that time in 1959. Tom, who was a bit younger, remembered the vehicle that came home with the coffin. He had no memory of the coffin itself, only the car. The car made a stronger impression on him. And that Kåre was lying in it.

They were able, incidentally, to confirm what I had already been told about Kåre: the carefree attitude, the unbelievable cheerfulness. When everyone around him was so marked by his illness, by the amputation, by what lay in the offing, why wasn’t he? How did he manage to retain his cheery spirits when both Johanna and Olav were barely able to keep themselves upright? There was no explanation. Kåre’s life, for me, was an enigma, baffling. It was inexpressible, almost erased, but also somehow beautiful. Like laughing in the shadow of death. Or it was a love song. His life had been a love song of which all that remained now, fifty years later, was the word
darling.

In addition, I was told the moped story:

They were going to see the priest for confirmation lessons, and everyone cycled together to the church. They always took their time, and when they arrived the church door was generally open. I remember Pappa telling me a story, I didn’t know whether it was true or not, about one occasion before the lesson when they lifted their bikes up the church steps and cycled around inside the church. Otto laughed and corroborated its authenticity. But that wasn’t all, he said. Someone rode a moped in the church, he recalled.
A moped?
Yes, indeed.
In the church?
Yes. Yes.
And who did that?
It was Kåre. The happy, easy-going Kåre had ridden his moped around the church. The one he had been given because he couldn’t cycle all the way with only one leg. So he had taught himself to walk again, then to ride a bike, then to ride a moped. He was still officially too young, but the local police authority had given him a dispensation because of his leg. He taught himself to ride a moped, and in the end, as one of very few, to ride a moped in church. The central aisle was very narrow, so it wasn’t easy to keep your balance. The others had looked on, stunned. He had crossed an invisible line, and the others stood holding their breath. First of all, he drove up the nave, then he turned by the altar, drove into both arms of the transept and back up to the altar. The church interior slowly filled with exhaust fumes which mixed with the bright peals of laughter. All of a sudden Holme was there. He advanced from behind the altar, white-faced, but still controlled. You can’t lose your temper with a one-legged fifteen-year-old. Even if he has crossed the line.

This had been merely one of many pranks, but people never talked about Kåre’s illness. And no one ever said the name of his illness aloud. It was taboo, it was the worst, it was as if it might infect others if it were mentioned. Kåre himself didn’t seem particularly bothered. The leg was amputated but he carried on. Evidently it would take more than that to worry him. To worry the boy who had been given a special dispensation to ride a moped by the lensmann himself.

Right up until some days before he was admitted to the hospital for the final time he was talking about how he would probably get a car when he was discharged. The car would be in the yard waiting for him as soon as he returned from hospital. Most probably a Triumph Herald, or a Chevrolet Impala, or perhaps a black Buick. One of the three. Most probably. It was Olav, his father, who had sat at his bedside and told him that. Father and son had imagined them, all polished and shiny, standing in the yard between the house and the barn. Then Kåre had got in behind the wheel and started the engine, Olav slipped into the passenger seat, and they had raced off.

Willy had been the last person to visit him. On the day before he died. Willy had been no more than fifteen years old and he travelled to Kristiansand with the sole purpose of seeing him. The visit lasted maybe half an hour. They didn’t exchange one word. Kåre lay under a white rug, skeletal. There was almost nothing left of him, only his chest rose above the level, white bed and resembled a rock beneath snow. And the head. And the eyes. He seemed to be floating. They didn’t say anything. Not even about cars. They just looked at each other. That was all. Johanna had been there with them. Willy remembered that he and Johanna had spoken, but not what they had spoken about. Most likely about quite ordinary things. The weather. The bus trip to town. Nothing one might remember fifty years later.

Johanna had been calm. Quite calm.

Then Kåre died, and the incomprehensibly happy and cheerful boy was gone.

As I was about to go Tom and Willy started to talk about Pappa. They had both known him, it transpired, and something happened to them when we touched on the subject. I don’t know if it was out of consideration for me, but they talked about him in an affectionate yet measured way. They talked about his ski jumping, for which he had evidently become well known.

‘No one could jump like your father,’ Tom said, and I understood that I should take that as a very special compliment. They went on to say he could do things others never achieved. Or dared. As soon as he took off from the ski jump he leaned perilously far forwards. It had been scary standing on the flat and watching, the tips of his skis were tilted so far upwards they were almost in his woolly hat, and that was how he lay, waiting for the lift that came once he had left the ramp. He leaned forwards and the lift came, and he floated for longer than anyone else. He had done the Slottebakken jump, and he had jumped off Stubrokka, they told me, and he had done many more ski jumps, and they reeled them off, but I have forgotten what they are all called. It was as though they wanted to tell me this, it was important for them to say that Pappa had been such an exceptional ski-jumper. That no one jumped further than he did, and that his secret was that rare combination of daring, courage and recklessness, and all of this carried him further than anyone else.