Before I Burn: A Novel (29 page)

At half past eleven the court adjourned.

Alma and Ingemann, who had been silent and virtually motionless throughout, stayed where they were while the journalist, the prosecution counsel, the defence counsel and the two experts got up and disappeared down the corridor. Dag stayed put as well. For a brief period there were only the three of them in the room. Dag turned and smiled. Ingemann sat bent over, looking at the floor.

‘How are things at home?’ Dag asked.

‘Fine,’ Alma said. ‘It’s…’

‘And you’re in your workshop, Pappa, like before?’

Ingemann’s head shot up.

‘Yes, I am,’ he answered. ‘I have to be, of course.’

‘And you, Mamma, I suppose you’re still dusting my trophies?’

This time she couldn’t produce an answer, she just smiled. It was a big, warm smile, the kind only she could give him and only he could receive. It lasted several seconds. Then it burst. She lurched forwards, gasping for breath as if she were being suffocated. Ingemann grabbed her by the arm as the usher bounded over; Dag got up, but didn’t move from his place, and watched his mother being helped out of the room. From outside the sound of her sobbing could be heard, grossly magnified and distorted by the long corridor.

When the trial resumed, however, at just past twelve, both she and Ingemann were back. They wouldn’t be deterred. She seemed to hold her head even higher than before. She looked right through everything and everyone and it was impossible to discuss or explain what she saw.

He was instructed to stand while his personal details were read out. Then he was instructed to sit down. He sat back in his chair while the prosecution counsel gave a brief résumé of his life. Born in 1957. Raised in the sixties and early seventies. A good-natured, helpful boy. Bright at school. Excellent references from everyone. Unblemished record. In short: a boy with a future.

And so.

The sentence was passed on Monday, 12 March. The day before my first birthday. It was a cold day with the wind coming from the north-east. The courtroom was the same as the one when the case came up a month earlier, but on this occasion neither Alma nor Ingemann was present. Alma had sent him a new, warm woolly jumper some days before and he was wearing it when he was led into the courtroom.

Chief Justice Oug didn’t let the grass grow beneath his feet; as soon as court sat he delivered the judgement. Dag was sitting too, and followed with rapt attention.

There was no punishment and there were no insurance claims. Only five years’ detention in a psychiatric hospital.

Then it was over. It had taken no more than a few minutes. Dag rose and walked into the corridor with his defence counsel and the two men who had accompanied him from Eg Mental Hospital. Was that all? No punishment? No prison? No compensation? Nothing. Just five years in a mental institution. He was almost elated as he crossed the newly polished courthouse floor to go out into the bitterly cold morning. Five years. What was five years? He would only be twenty-seven when he was released, and he would still have his life ahead of him. It was almost too good to be true. The car taking him to Eg was waiting, sparkling white in the sun. He stepped over the sheets of ice with a sense of jubilation. He felt like singing, or playing the piano. The only thing that marred his pleasure was that neither Alma nor Ingemann had been there to see him, their only son, being sentenced.

III.

HOW IN FACT had it all started?

In Lauvslandsmoen School loft when I found the photograph of myself? In the square in Mantua where all the dead had assembled to listen to me? Or was it long before that?

I sit with Lake Livannet before me, putting the pieces together. It rains for four successive days. Then the frost returns like the last throe of winter. April comes. The nights are mild and light. The scent of spring is in the air. Then one day the lake thaws. I flick through Grandma’s diaries. After the year of sorrow when Grandad died the diaries become less and less emotional, except when Pappa sickens and dies ten years later. Towards the end there are only simple, mundane comments about odds and ends, people she meets, work in the house and garden. There is a regular flow of dry facts that can appear fairly inconsequential. Yet to me she feels quite close, precisely because of this scant communication.

Both she and Grandad feel closer. Their lives rise out of Grandma’s neat handwriting.

During the last year of Grandad’s life he got himself a summer job. In fact he was a pensioner, but a vacancy arose for a driver on City Train, the small tourist train that crisscrossed Kvadraturen, Kristiansand town centre, from the market square with the cathedral through Kongens gate, past old St Joseph’s Hospital, where I was born, past Aladdin Cinema, then to the left by the theatre, along the esplanade, past sights such as King Christian’s round fortress and back to the market square. They were looking for an experienced driver. And that was Grandad. He had been driving since before the war. He had had a Nash Ambassador, and had even driven it to Oslo and back.

He applied and got the job. And Grandma documents the news in May of 1987. It came to my ears through Pappa, who informed me with a wry smile. I didn’t quite know whether to be proud or embarrassed. Surely no one else had a grandfather who was the driver of City Train? On the other hand, there were very few people who had a grandfather who wore an all-white uniform and a large, white chauffeur’s cap. I was proud and embarrassed. These feelings would not let each other go, in the end they belonged together, or they clung to each other.

Grandad was in a picture postcard of Kristiansand. He was standing beside City Train in his handsome white uniform. In the background was the towering cathedral, and the sea of flowers and vegetables on the stalls in the square, and further back the top of the courthouse, where he fell down dead a few months later. I saw this postcard on the small stand in Kaddeberg’s shop, the one by the till, which made a deep creaking sound whenever you rotated it. There were long rows of them, and they were mounted next to other, similar cards with pictures of elk and trolls, idyllic small Sørland towns with wooden fishing smacks chugging towards the wharf. The postcards with Grandad stayed on display even after he was gone. I remember it well because by then the pride and embarrassment had let go of each other and inside me there was a silent candle that hurt. City Train also wound its way round Kvadraturen the following summer but with a different driver in Grandad’s white uniform. The driver was different, but Grandad was still driving on the postcard. For several years, I think. Whenever I was in Kaddeberg’s the postcards were there as a constant reminder that he had passed on. I wished they would disappear, I wished someone would buy them one by one, send their best wishes and post them. But no one did. No one ever came to buy them. The cards were there, and Grandad was as erect as ever, the train as shining white. Once I did think of buying them all myself. Instead of having my piggy bank opened at the bank in the community centre, I could do it myself, smash it and place the money on Kaddeberg’s counter. The only problem was that I had no one to whom I could send the cards. I couldn’t write to any of my friends, that would be too strange, no one sent cards without a reason, and besides we lived so close to one other. All I could do was send them to people I didn’t know. I could consult the telephone directory, pick a name I liked, someone I felt was bound to be nice and in need of a few words. I could send my regards and post it. I imagined people receiving the card and staring at the picture; they would see the man with the erect back that was my grandfather, and read what I had written, and their faces would light up in a smile.

In the diaries there are several photographs I haven’t seen before, wedged firmly between the pages as if they are of particular significance. In one, Grandad is standing on the underwater part of the cliff, more or less in the middle of Lake Homevannet. To know exactly where it is you have to have swum out there. It protrudes perhaps thirty metres from the shore, and all of a sudden you can stand up. In the second picture, Grandma is standing in exactly the same place. First of all he swam out alone and stood on the rock while she stayed on land to take the photograph, then she swam out and he swam back. Or could it have been vice versa? He is already completely white-haired, lean and bony against the dark forest in the background; she is wearing the black swimming costume from my memory of her. They must have had great fun making this discovery, and must have looked forward to seeing the pictures after they had been developed. They would have been in their mid-sixties, in which case it was probably around 1980. They both loved swimming.

I read my way through time, through the spring, summer and autumn of 1998, and two days after Pappa’s funeral she writes:
Rain and strong winds. Gaute was here this evening. It was so wonderful.

That was all. It was the evening I told her I was going to be a writer.

Further on, towards the end of her life. The last entry she ever made. Tuesday, 28 October 2003:
I was given an injection. Nice weather, mild.

I sit with the black, still Lake Livannet before me, remembering the final days and weeks. I was in Prague at that time. It was one evening towards the end of January 2004, and I was sitting in a church in the city centre. I don’t recall its name. I had happened to be strolling past and saw a little notice advertising a concert. On the spur of the moment I had decided to buy a ticket through a little hatch by the entrance, then gone in and found myself a seat. It was early evening. Outside, people were pulling coats tight around themselves; it was around minus fifteen degrees and lightly drifting snow filled the floodlit sky above the market square and the old town and the towering city hall with the astronomical clock, which I had just walked past. The organist was playing a fantasy based on
Ave Maria.
Perhaps it was Gounod’s version, the same one that Teresa and Bjarne Sløgedal presented in Finsland Church on the first day of peace in 1945? I don’t know. It was, at any rate, music that filled me with a special silence.

Back in Norway, Grandma had been admitted to Sørland Hospital. A few hours before, a light metal instrument known as a punch forceps was inserted into her trachea to take a tissue sample from her lungs. It was supposed to be a standard intervention. Previously a bulge in one bronchus had been located, which was diagnosed as a change in tissue. Instead it turned out to be the main artery.

Her lungs filled with blood in seconds.

I had never anticipated that she would die. Not at that time. Not while I was in Prague and the entire church was filled with pure music and pure silence, and freezing cold. She couldn’t die.

And I was proved right.

A passage was freed to the second bronchus so that she could get air. She woke up, and she told the doctor leaning over her where she had been: on a sandy beach by a large lake. When I heard this story I at once thought it had to be Lake Homevannet. It seemed obvious. Standing on the beach by the Kristiansand Automobilklub cabin, where the public bathing resort was, looking towards the underwater cliff. Where you could suddenly rise out of the water. She had been standing there with an indescribable desire to start swimming, but then something had prevented her, and she had woken.

She asked the doctor to be allowed to return. He smiled and said they weren’t permitted to offer that kind of help in hospitals.

It was as if the music that evening in Prague gave her a few more days. My sitting there and listening.

A few more. A few more. A few more.

Then there was another haemorrhage.

That was 4 February 2004.

But the greatest of these is love.
This was the sentence from Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians that she wanted on the gravestone when Grandad died. I can clearly remember her saying what she wanted, even though I was only ten years old at the time. I happened to be in her kitchen when she told Pappa, and it must have left quite an impression because I can still remember it. I pretended I didn’t understand what they were talking about. But I did. It was her opinion that
this
was the only fitting inscription for the gravestone; the sentence was the only one that could describe what she felt. And it is the one that was engraved beneath her name too.

She wrote that in her diary as well. Suddenly, on 15 December 1988, a good month after he died. More snow came in the night, and then it cleared and it was numbingly cold.

But the greatest of these is love.

Epilogue

THE FOLLOWING HAPPENED one Sunday in August 2005. I was at home in Finsland for a short period to finish a large writing project, a novel about Friedrich Jürgenson, the man who tried to interpret the voices of the dead.

On that particular Sunday afternoon I decided to go for a long walk to clear my head. I was alone at Kleveland, I let myself out and walked down the road. I continued as far as the main road and down towards the school. Passing Aasta’s house, I saw a helicopter flying low over the pinelands behind the school. It made a wide arc, descended with circumspection and landed in the middle of the grass pitch in Lauvslandsmoen. I had been so preoccupied with my writing that I hadn’t taken on board that this Sunday it would be possible to fly over our region in a helicopter. The flights were in connection with the Finsland Days, which every alternate year brought together many thousands of people for a selection of cattle shows, flea markets and fairs, and above all this hovered a helicopter. As I approached the pitch I had already made up my mind. There stood the helicopter like a big, slightly sad insect with its rotor blades still and bent over. I was somewhat taken aback because there was no queue as I had expected. The helicopter stood there, strangely alone; the pilot had clambered out and was speaking to a second man, also alone. It transpired that this was the last trip for the day and there had to be at least two passengers for it to take place. With my arrival we were quorate. I got into the front, and the man sat at the back. I noticed that he was wearing a red jacket that crackled as he twisted to find a comfortable position in his cramped seat, and I felt his knees push into the back of my own seat. Then I put on the headset and the door was closed securely from outside by an assistant on the ground. I fastened the belt across my chest, then the engine started. There was a sudden intense smell of fuel and I glanced over at the pilot with a little concern. Straightaway I heard his reassuring voice in the headset, the blades rotated faster and faster above us, the engine roared, the pilot gently eased the joystick, and then the helicopter started moving. It cautiously shook itself free of the ground, and we climbed into the air, as easy as anything. It had all happened so quickly; from sitting at home engrossed in my writing until I decided to go out, then spotting the helicopter, and now, racing forwards, forty, sixty, eighty metres above the ground, at first above the old school building where a few years later I was to find the photograph of myself, above the library where the road divided into four, above cars and people, above Aasta’s house, and in the end above tall trees with long, frozen shadows. I was twenty-seven years old, and it was the first time I had seen everything from the air. I was sitting in a glass ball, the ground was down below, beneath my shoes, there was a terrible racket around me, but in the headset the pilot’s voice was soft and pleasant. He asked me where I wanted to go, and I pointed towards Kleveland. We banked and for a moment I was hanging in the seat belt, weightless, we shot over the school again, over the main road, and suddenly we were over the house, my home, which I both recognised and had never seen before. We climbed even higher and I saw for kilometres around me. We were over Mandalselva River and I saw Lake Manflåvannet to the north and Lake Øydnavannet in the north-west; as we pitched around once again I hung in my seat belt and my heart was in my mouth. Then we were over Laudal. I saw the church under my right shoe. Down there are buried my great-grandparents, Danjell and Ingeborg, from whom I have nothing except for a handful of pictures, among them a hunting photograph where Danjell is holding up a dead hare by its rear legs as though it were poised for an enormous leap. Then we swung east, and soon we were over Lake Hessvannet and Hundershei, and somewhere down there Pappa shot the elk. Then we were over Lauvsland, and the top of the ski-jumping tower in Stubrokka, off which Pappa launched himself some time in the sixties. We flew directly above Olga Dynestøl’s house and barn, now long occupied by people I didn’t know. We arced northwards and at once I saw the church down to the left. I saw the two cemeteries, one like a diadem around the church, where Grandma and Grandad and several of the others who appeared in Mantua four years later are buried. Some distance from the church is the other churchyard, which was strictly rectangular, and where Kåre and Pappa lay, even though at that point I only knew about one of them.