Before I Burn: A Novel (18 page)

However, it was the Dynestøl blaze I had come to hear about.

At just after one o’clock on the morning of 3 June 1978, the telephone rang in Helga and Kasper’s house. They were then living in Nodeland; they had bought the Dynestøl house from Olga a few months earlier, but had barely begun the renovation work on it. Kasper had bought, among other things, new double-glazed windows for the entire house, but they hadn’t yet been installed and were standing outside Dynestøl, leaning against the house wall. In addition, Kasper’s tractor, a Fiat, was parked in the yard between the house and the barn.

Helga picked up the phone. At the other end was a voice she recognised. It was Olga Dynestøl. She sounded distant and subdued, as if she were ringing from another world.

At first Olga could only utter four words:

Dynestøl is on fire.

Then she collected herself and said she had seen and heard the fire engine. She had dashed into the yard outside her house in the Løbakke hills. She had seen Per Lauvsland’s burning storehouse, which was across the field, and next the billowing sea of flames over Lake Homevannet, and she knew. Soon after there were four terrible explosions, with an interval of a few minutes between each one, and each explosion caused the flames to boil over. Alone in the yard, she realised it was her old house in Dynestøl that was on fire. The house where she had been born seventy-three years before, her brother Kristen the year after, and from where both parents had been carried out feet first. She stood watching the flames across the sky while reciting something akin to a prayer. Her lips scarcely moved. Then she turned and went indoors. She had not spoken to anyone before ringing Helga and Kasper. No one had come to tell her what was happening. She simply knew.

Kasper and Helga jumped into their car and drove off to see for themselves what had happened. They passed through Nodeland, Hortemo, Stokkeland. Kasper stayed calm. He didn’t believe it could be true. The buildings at Dynestøl? They were set apart and were so quiet and peaceful. Olga must have been dreaming. That was the explanation. Or it was something she had imagined while she lay in bed unable to sleep. She was getting on in years.

As they motored down the slope towards Kilen it was light enough for them to see the clear sky and the undulating hills to the west. They couldn’t see any smoke or any sea of flames. Nothing. Kasper was becoming fairly confident that his surmises were correct, but when, a few minutes later, they passed the school in Lauvslandsmoen, they spotted Hans Aasland’s burned-down outhouse, the one opposite the school. There was nothing left of it, just a black stain on the ground, from which rose thin, grey smoke. They turned towards Dynestøl, and after a couple of hundred metres they were met by the sight of Per Lauvsland’s razed barn. There was no one around. Everything was destroyed, and here too smoke rose from the collapsed structure. There was a strange abandoned atmosphere. The cows were grazing in the field, apparently unconcerned. Behind, they could see the house where Olga now lived, but there were no lights in any of the windows. That was when it slowly dawned on them what was awaiting them. They drove the last few kilometres. Lake Homevannet lay black and still, with the mist hovering above it, and around it pine trees stood in distorted poses, seemingly stretching out their branches to try to hold on tight. Neither of them said a word. They couldn’t see any flames. Nor any light. Nor people. Nor cars. They couldn’t see anything. It was as if they were in a dream. Olga had rung them in the dream to say that her old house was on fire. Now they were driving slowly along the road in the dream, and when in a while they arrived they would wake up at home in bed. They would be lying there blinking up at the ceiling as the dream gently sank back to whence it had come. Then they could get up and start the day.

But, of course, this was no dream.

As they approached the last hill they saw that the gravel had been gouged up. A large vehicle must have been there before them. Then they reached their destination. Kasper stopped the car. They got out, leaving the doors open. Helga said nothing. Kasper said nothing. It was chilly, almost cold, they should have brought warmer clothing, they realised that at once. Helga had only her thin woollen jacket, Kasper a faded shirt. They walked the few metres to the firemen standing around in a ragged group. The men had finished hosing down the house, or they had given up long ago. They seemed exhausted, their faces were drawn, and blackened with soot and smoke, their clothes filthy, their shirts unbuttoned. They gave the impression of just having awoken, and that what they had awoken to was way beyond their comprehension. They were barely recognisable, even though Kasper and Helga knew everyone. That was Knut. There was Arnold. And there were Jens and Peder and Salve, and several others. Helga suddenly felt dizzy. No one could utter a word. There was as good as nothing left of the house or the barn. There were just the foundation walls, and the chimney, immovable and blackened with soot. The whole site was transformed. Now it was impossible to see how everything had actually been. The house with its shiny windows, the barn with its moss-covered bridge, the few tiny doorsteps from the grass leading inside. The door with the faintly squeaking hinges, the cold porch, the hall with the rag rug, the kitchen with the white utility sink, the steep stairs to the loft. But it wasn’t just the buildings; the whole landscape appeared to have changed – the sloping fields, the road, the green hills, the surrounding forest, everything was different now that the house and barn had gone.

They caught sight of Alfred. His shirt was open, showing all of his pale chest. He came over and shook hands with both of them.

‘There was nothing we could do.’

‘I didn’t believe it was true,’ Kasper said.

‘No, none of us did,’ Alfred replied.

‘What do we do now?’ Helga asked, but no one answered.

What could you say? What do you say to two people who have just lost their house?

‘We were too late,’ Alfred said in a low voice. ‘We were too late.’

They stared at the chimney towering up in the half-light. The tractor was there too, black and burned out, resembling a beetle that had slowly rotted in the sun. It was a Fiat, 1965 model, but as good as new. It was the tractor that had produced the four explosions. The tyres had caught fire, they must have been alight for some time, all four of them, before they burst with enormous force. That was what Olga had heard. That was what had made the flames boil over.

It was then that the fire engine returned. They heard the sirens approaching. Next they saw the flicker of the blue lights and heard the roaring of the motor up the last inclines. Not until the vehicle was stationary were the sirens and blue lights switched off. Out jumped a young man, though more a boy. They recognised him at once: it was the son of the fire chief, Ingemann at Skinnsnes. Inside the cabin he had a carrier bag full of food.

‘Have you been shopping?’ someone asked, but the boy didn’t respond. He put the bag down on the ground. It toppled over as soon as he turned his back. Kasper and Helga watched him roam around the site for a while. Then he came back and searched for something in the bag. They hadn’t noticed, but there was smoke still rising from the house and the barn. It was thin, grey smoke, almost like steam, and it dispersed at once.

‘Who wants a hot dog?!’ the boy yelled.

He had to step into the trees to find a suitable stick. Then he poked it through a sausage from the bag and lurched into the ruins, more or less where the living room had been. In his white shirt he wasn’t warmly dressed, and he held out his arms as if he were walking on glass. He walked along the foundation wall for some of the way, but then turned and came back. There were no flames left, just ash and the thin, grey smoke. He cursed aloud. He had driven all the way to Kaddeberg’s to buy sausages and now there weren’t any flames or embers to cook them over! What the hell was going on? No one spoke. He started laughing. The firemen watched him, turned away and pretended there was work to be done. Helga wrapped her jacket tighter around her.

‘Then we’ll have to eat them cold,’ the boy continued, clearly miffed. ‘What do you say? Cold sausages!’ He jumped down from the wall, went from one fireman to the next offering cold, slippery sausages straight from the packet.

IV.

IT WAS LATE SUMMER, 1998. I had been at home since June and seen how he was slowly getting worse. His eyes were growing, and when I was sure that had to be it, they couldn’t possibly get any bigger in that emaciated face, they grew a tiny bit more. I had told neither him nor my mother about my exams. A few days after the night in Vår Frelser cemetery I caught the train home from Oslo, and during the first evenings I lay in my old room listening for sounds from my parents’ bedroom. My father was alone there now, while my mother had rigged up a bed on the sitting room sofa. He slept so badly and was always in pain. I heard him mumbling to himself, but couldn’t catch what he was saying. I lay awake during the light summer evenings, unable to do anything at all. I had no contact with my old classmates from school. I had grown apart from them, and they had no doubt grown apart from me. I had nothing, other than my books, which I had left here when I departed for Oslo. I lay for hours in the darkness flicking through the books I had once read with such incomprehensible voracity.

I read a bit of
The Troll Elk
by Mikkjel Fønhus, and re-started Trygve Gulbranssen’s Bjørndal trilogy, skimming the pages for the place where tears had begun to flow when I was thirteen, but I couldn’t find it, and in any case the story now seemed empty and devoid of meaning. I lay reading, but only managed to concentrate for a few minutes at a time before my mind filled with thoughts that went their own ways.

Then, one evening, I took out my lecture pad, tore out all the pages of notes, settled down and started writing. I remembered the words Ruth had sown in me long ago when she held me back after class. I hadn’t forgotten them, and now I was trying. I wrote one page, two. Tore out the pages, and lay down to sleep. The following day I read through everything I’d written and was ashamed. It was deeply, deeply shaming. But, come the evening, there I was again with the pad on my knee, writing. I don’t remember what about, or even if it was about anything. I just wrote. It felt good in a strange, remote way, as though actually it had nothing to do with me. And that was how the summer continued. My father’s health deteriorated and it became a strain living in the house with him. In the evenings I would take his car, the old pickup, and go on a long drive. I took my pad with me, and stopped here and there to do some writing. I drove to Brandsvoll, turned left by the old shop, passed Else and Alfred’s house, turned right in front of Teresa’s house, and drove past the quiet, white house where I never saw anyone, what people called
the pyromaniac’s house.
Next I passed the fire station, Sløgedal’s house, and drove uphill towards Hønemyr. Then I turned into the square outside the military camp and sat there with my pad on the steering wheel, writing.

In August, Pappa became so unwell that Mamma could no longer cope with him at home. He had been on a sickbed in the middle of the sitting room for some weeks, and when the ambulance came to collect him, she wasn’t at home. I think she may have been out shopping; at any rate, there were just the two of us in the house when the bell rang and I went to answer the door. On the steps were two men of my age who said they had come to collect my father. Then it all became too much for me. I don’t remember exactly what happened, just that I let them in, showed them the way, then left them in the sitting room with him while I went to the cellar. I heard them talking in hushed tones, as if they were planning a burglary. I heard my father’s calm voice and the cold snap of the metal legs as they folded them and lifted the stretcher off the floor. I could hear them trying to carry him through the front door, but it was too narrow, so they had to trudge back and put the bed on the floor while they discussed another solution. I stayed in my room in the cellar staring into space. I couldn’t face going upstairs, for I knew it would be the last time, and I knew in my heart that I wouldn’t be able to watch him being carried out of the house, and I imagined that he wouldn’t want me to see that, either. Eventually, after a fair bit of to-ing and fro-ing, they got him and the bed through the veranda door, and once they were outside I coolly ascended the stairs and just caught a glimpse of his legs disappearing into the ambulance. Then they closed the doors, got in on opposite sides, and drove off, and Pappa had nothing at all from the house he had lived in since the summer of 1976, not even a small handful of ash.

My very last visit to see him was in the middle of September 1998. At that time he had a room of his own at the rest home in Nodeland, where ten years earlier I had sung with the youth choir in front of an audience of elderly people. I had been back in Oslo since the middle of August, although I hadn’t resumed my studies. I had also given up writing. The days were spent in the Deichman Library, I sat there reading and was transported, and every evening I was roused by the voice saying that they were closing the doors.

One Friday I caught the train home to Kristiansand. Deep down I knew this would be the last time I would see him. Mamma came to pick me up at the station, and on the next day I drove down to the rest home in his red pickup. I passed through Finsland feeling people’s eyes on me. After all, they knew the vehicle, no one else in these parts had a red pickup, and they must have thought my father was at the wheel, but just as they raised their hands to wave they saw that of course it wasn’t him. They saw that it wasn’t him, but they waved anyway. And I waved back. I passed the disused chapel in Brandsvoll, the one that had now become a sort of agricultural building, and I wondered what had happened to the bottle-green lectern, and the picture of the man with a hoe, the man with an angel of the Lord hovering above him, the one that hovered above us when we sang there; I passed the community centre, which was hardly used any more, just for the odd bridge evening, a meeting of the Farmers’ Association, the Nynorsk Language Society, that was all. I drove across Fjeldsgård Plain, arrived at the new chapel, which had been erected as a community project in the mid-1990s. I passed the bank, where ten years later I would be writing this. I came to Kaddeberg’s old shop, which had been abandoned years ago, and had a sudden vision of Kaddeberg in his old blue smock and horn-rimmed glasses with a stump of a pencil tucked behind one ear, mumbling pleasantries behind the counter. I remembered all the times I had stood on the worn floor in front of the till with Pappa, when a bar of chocolate was thrust into my hand, a Hobby or a Stratos, or one of the small chewing-gum balls with the sweet-smelling wrappers, and my whole being must have brightened because I remembered that old Kaddeberg always used to remove his glasses and keep rubbing them on his shirt front. Everything seemed to come back to me. My entire childhood, the entire landscape, the forests, the lakes, the sky, everything was too long ago, and everything was still there, bathed in the gentle September sun. My new life in Oslo was so far away all of a sudden. I had left Grandad’s coat in my bedsit, together with my new glasses. I didn’t need either now; they felt completely out of place. I changed down, drove slowly uphill and saw Lake Livannet beneath me, saw it glittering in a gust of wind that swept from east to west.