Before I Burn: A Novel (9 page)

When he had finished he sat with bowed head staring at the keys.

‘That was lovely,’ she said in a hushed voice.

‘Would you like to hear more?’ he asked.

She nodded.

Then he played ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee’, for he knew this was the one she really wanted to hear. She sat on the edge of the table and closed her eyes. The tears began to flow, she couldn’t hold them back, the ground gave way inside her, and he played simply and crisply, without a single false note. She was sitting like this when he sprang to his feet and slammed the lid with a crash and a doleful echo.

‘Now you can tell me,’ she whispered.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Tell me everything, Dag,’ she said, rising to her feet as well.

Then the telephone rang.

She stared at him in horror for a second. There was no time for more, because he was already in the hall picking up the telephone and speaking in a low voice. She went to the door and watched him making notes on a pad.

Then he called Ingemann.

Fire! Fire!

She hastily prepared two packed lunches, slicing more bread and spreading it with Prim and some cheese, and then she poured the rest of the coffee into the thermos. At just that moment the alarm went off in the half-light. It was Dag who had been outside to sound it; he must have run because he came back in almost straightaway, sweating and panting. The sound was so ear-splitting that the elegant glasses in the cupboard jangled. Ingemann came down the stairs doing up the last of the buttons on his shirt. He was groggy with sleep, his eyes swimming, his hair pointing in all directions, but that made no difference. A house was ablaze, and he was the fire chief. There was no time to waste. Get the fire engine out, start the sirens, put on the blue lights. Drive for all you were worth. Arrive. Assess the situation. Dag had been ready for some time; he had buttoned his shirt up to the neck and was shuffling his feet in the hall.

‘Aren’t you going to put on any more clothes?’ Alma asked.

‘There’s a fire, Mamma. I don’t have the time.’

‘But you’re only wearing a shirt, Dag.’

That was all she managed to say. He was already out of the door and bounding through the dawn towards the fire station. A few minutes later she heard the sirens merging with the protracted wailing of the alarm. She hurriedly slipped the packed lunches into a bag, which Ingemann grabbed on his way out of the door to the fire engine and Dag, who was waiting behind the wheel.

VIII.

ON 7 JUNE 1978,
Faedrelandsvennen
carries a lengthy interview with Olav and Johanna Vatneli. It is a good two days after the fire. It is the same interview that I remembered when I was standing by the grave, the one in which Olav referred to himself as soft and Johanna as calm.

The two of them are sitting in Knut Karlsen’s basement flat. Olav on the edge of the bed, wearing a checked shirt and loose braces, staring into the air apathetically. Johanna on a chair alongside him with her hands limp in her lap and a faint smile around her mouth, as though none of this really concerns her. Behind them a bracket lamp with the plug dangling down.

The previous day they had gone to town to buy clothes. Two summer dresses, a pair of trousers, shirts, underwear. Two pairs of shoes. In addition, they had both been measured for new dentures.

Bereft of everything, Olav and Johanna sit in their neighbour’s flat wondering what will become of them.

Johanna talks about the blaze again, the explosion in the kitchen, the sea of flames, the shadow outside the window and the events that followed. Earlier that day, they had received a visit from Alma and Ingemann. This is said in one sentence, never to be mentioned again, yet the sentence seems to lie there, flashing on the page.

Later in the interview they talk about Kåre. I suppose it felt natural to talk about him, after all, they had lost everything else. There, in Knut Karlsen’s cellar, it is nineteen years since he died. He was the only child they had. After Kåre there was nothing, and after the house and the rest were gone, Kåre seemed to return.

That is the situation.

The whole business is so unreal. It is unimaginable. Olav struggles to his feet, but as yet he isn’t strong enough to venture down and see the scorched ruins. He still wants to wait a few days, then he will go down, and he will go on his own. The outbuilding was saved, you see, he says, and he has a lot of good oak there. He thinks the oak will come in handy now. The only problem is that they don’t have a stove in which to burn it, nor a house to heat. In the outbuilding with the wood there is also a bike. I don’t know for certain, but it may be Kåre’s. He did eventually teach himself to ride.

They are seventy-three and eighty-three years old and have to start a new life. They have a little wood, a few thousand kroner and an old bike. That is all.

It was through the visit to Alfred and Else that I came to Aasta. I wanted to know more about Johanna and Olav, and about Kåre. All of a sudden it felt important. Aasta, Johanna Vatneli’s sister-in-law and therefore Kåre’s aunt, was forty-eight years old in 1978, and now, fifty years after he died, she was one of the few still to remember him.

On one of the first evenings in November I left home and walked the kilometre or so to the yellow house where Aasta lived. She has known me all my life: she was one of those to visit my mother while she was still at the maternity ward in Kongens gate and I was no more than a few days old.

We sat chatting for several hours. We talked about the fire, and the pyromaniac. I asked about Olav and Johanna. And about Kåre. I took notes.

Kåre’s story was as follows. He had an open wound on his leg, from falling on a ski slope, Slottebakken Hill, the one with the meticulously constructed ski jump and the unusually steep landing area. It was a straight plunge. I recalled my father had spoken about Slottebakken, having jumped there himself many times. He was of course one of the very best – at least that was what he said – and he may well have been there on that evening in the 1950s when Kåre called out in the darkness, crouched down and set off.

Kåre had performed an immense take-off and hovered high on his descent. A gasp ran through the watching crowd. No one had ever seen such a long jump. He continued to hover, his overalls filling out like a taut sail across his back, everyone held their breath, then the skis smacked down on the icy landing strip and scattered cheers broke out on that freezing cold evening. He landed safe and sound, but then fell headlong. It wasn’t a nasty fall, but was enough for him to call it a day. He sat in a snowdrift holding his leg.

The next day he gave school a miss and stayed at home. It was a Friday. By Monday he was no better. Quite the contrary, he had a high temperature. Some days later he and Johanna went to see the doctor, who had surgery hours from eleven to four on the bend opposite Knut Frigstad’s house in Brandsvoll. His name was Dr Rosenvold, he had the gentle but elusive eyes that you never really saw behind his glasses. He was able to confirm that Kåre had a wound which wouldn’t heal. A glistening, evil-smelling liquid leaked from it, and for the time being there was nothing they could do. They would have to wait and see. Johanna tore rags into strips and dipped them in a special vinegar mixture and bound them round his leg. It was diagnosed as a
fracture.
Subsequently it transpired that it was a great deal more serious, but they didn’t dare to articulate the word. At that time he was fourteen years old and about to change schools and no one articulated the word. Dr Rosenvold visited Olav and Johanna’s home, the white house beside the road. It was late summer, the cherry tree in the garden was bulging with dark red fruit and the black car pulled up in the yard between the house and the barn. Dr Rosenvold ascended the stairs in leisurely fashion and went into the room where the boy lay in bed. He closed the door behind him and was inside for a long time. On his return downstairs, his eyes were still gentle but nowhere near as elusive.

A few days later it was decided that the leg would have to be cut off, slightly above the knee. The left one. They had waited too long.

So.

The leg was
cut off
, as they say in common parlance, and some weeks later Kåre was hobbling across the yard, up the stairs and into the kitchen.

He had to teach himself to walk on crutches. Everything had to be re-learned from scratch, and he lost a year. He had to catch up with the rest of his life, and this delay seemed to give him the motivation to teach himself things that were considered scarcely possible. He learned to walk again, he learned to cycle and he even learned to ride a moped. It was as though nothing was impossible any longer. Aasta told me Kåre lived with her and her husband Sigurd for a short period while he went to school in Lauvslandsmoen. After all, he had to attend school like everyone else. That must have been the winter of 1958. It was easier to live there than at home. From Vatneli it was more than seven kilometres and Olav and Johanna didn’t have a car, while from Aasta’s house the school was only a couple of hundred metres. He slept in the loft, she said, in the room facing west, and they lit the wood-burner there so it was nice and warm. Her face lit up as all these hazy memories returned. She recalled things she hadn’t thought about in years: minor details and trifles she assumed would not interest me. Her eyes wandered, as though somewhere in the middle distance she could see life fifty years ago, like a flimsy, shimmering film. She told me she was always so frightened whenever Kåre had to negotiate the steep staircase on his crutches. The steep staircase without a rail, and Kåre wobbling downwards from step to step. But he always managed, and gradually he became a past master at getting around. He hobbled about on his crutches and sang, she could remember that. In the evenings he came down from the loft, singing as he swung, making the walls vibrate with the sound. It was a love song, she believed. Yes, it was; a love song. She didn’t remember which, it was in English; the only word that stuck in her mind was
darling.

‘He was so chirpy,’ she said, the film in front of her eyes appearing to have stopped.

‘How do you mean?’ I asked.

‘So chirpy, so bright and breezy. How can I put it? There isn’t a better word. So chirpy, so chirpy.’

We went on to talk about Johanna. The woman who became the person who never laughed or cried. She was followed by a large, dark shadow. Or she herself had become a shadow. It was as though the birds fell silent when she appeared. Seven years after Kåre’s death, Aasta asked her if it felt easier now that so much time had passed.

The answer was no.

She still went around gathering the fragments.

Johanna would have liked so much to have a family photograph. That was after she and Olav found themselves alone, and her greatest wish was that all three of them would be in the picture. She and Olav with Kåre in the middle. She had asked Aasta and Sigurd for help. There had to be a way of doing it, surely? This was in the 1960s. The only way to do it was to cut the old wedding photograph in two and then place Kåre’s confirmation photograph between the two halves. Then you could take a new photograph of the two originals. By destroying them you would have a new picture. But they couldn’t do that, of course, and as they couldn’t Johanna dismissed the whole idea: if Kåre wasn’t in, nothing else mattered. It was him in the middle or nothing.

That was Johanna’s story. She was serenity itself. Everything she did she did with serene movements. She had an old spinning wheel, and she spun for Husfliden, the crafts shop. The yarn ran forever through her fingers.

Towards the end, after the Vatnelis had also lost their house, Aasta washed Johanna’s clothes for her. Johanna no longer had the energy. She had acquired a new spinning wheel, but mostly it stood unused in the corner. In her last months she sat staring blankly at it. It was during this time – when Aasta was washing her clothes – that Aasta discovered all the blood. Not so many months after the fire. It must have come from her womb.

Aasta accompanied me to the door. It was dark outside; white mist hung over the fields, and above the northern sky you could glimpse traces of light from the floodlit church. I was full of Kåre’s story, of his brief but apparently carefree life. I asked her if she knew anyone who could tell me any more. She had to give the matter some thought. In the end, she shook her head. She was the only person. She said:

‘You know, they’re all dead.’

After Olav and Johanna died she had tended Kåre’s grave every summer until it had been levelled. That happened during the 1990s. She had given her blessing. And, of course, one can understand why. Everyone had gone. The entire little family. There was nothing left.

Oh yes, there was. Something was left: Johanna’s spinning wheel.

Before I went I gave Aasta a hug. For a few brief seconds we stood in the darkness gently holding each other. Then I walked the short distance home. It was murky now and quite cold. The first frost could not be far away. I thought of all the times I had walked this route as a child. After I had passed Aasta and Sigurd’s house it would be pitch black right until I reached the letter boxes. It was a stretch of approximately half a kilometre and my heart was in my mouth every time. The road led first through the spruce forest in Vollan, then opened up. When I was a child I used to sing my way through the trees and all the way to the stream that flowed beneath the road and cascaded down the rocks on the other side. I would be on my way home from a meeting at Von Youth Club, where we had been taught about the damaging effects of alcohol; however, alone in the darkness, I would forget all about the abdominal pains and going green in the face and being abandoned by your entire family. At that very moment I was just filled with a chilling terror, and I hoped that singing would ward off the man I feared might suddenly loom up before me in the night. I sang and sang, an exalted medley of songs from the youth choir, Samantha Fox and Michael Jackson. It was ‘What a Mighty God We Have’, ‘Nothing’s Gonna Stop Me Now’ and ‘Bad’, all mixed up. The crucial thing was that I sang. That there wasn’t a second’s silence. And that I kept it going as far as the waterfall. That was the dividing line. If only I could get past that I was saved.