Child Wonder (8 page)

“P’raps you’re just deaf?” Freddy 2 wondered.

“Yes,” Linda said.

They laughed even louder at that. But it was a good answer, which meant no more questions were asked, for the time being. We did some more sledging, to Linda’s mounting pleasure, because we kept to the shortest slope, in front of the house. When we got to the bottom she grabbed my mitten with more or less the same grip she had used on Mother. We tramped to the top and tobogganed down again. But then some bright spark asked:

“You – what’s your name, then?”

“Her name’s Linda, I’ve already told you!”

“Can’t she speak or what?”

“Say something, Linda!”

“D’you wanna toffee, Linda?”

“…”

When, after a couple of hours, frozen to the bone and aching with lumps of ice dangling from our sweaters and socks and scarves and woolly hats, we went back inside, Mother had to crack our laces to undo our boots and hugged us both, and was nice and said Linda had to have a bath now, she was as cold as ice, poor thing, and she loved having a bath, didn’t she?

“Yes.”

When at last she was sitting in the bathtub and whizzing her new duckling around, a pre-Christmas present, of which there had been quite a few, clothes mostly, and Mother had laid and unlaid and relaid and unlaid the table and changed the cloth before plumping for white, she said to me:

“You seemed to be enjoying yourselves on the slope.”

“You bet.”

“I noticed you were playing with the other kids.”

“Mm.”

“You were having a good time, I s’pose …?”

“…”

And because adults can never get it into their noodles what idiots children are, this too rose to the dizzying heights of Freddy 2-style conversation, that is, until I left her and knelt in front of the T.V. and pressed the “on” button, aware it was time for a Jiminy Cricket cartoon. But hardly had I immersed myself in it for more than a couple of minutes when the doorbell rang.

“Can you see who it is, Finn? Think it’s someone for downstairs.”

This someone was for upstairs.

It was Uncle Tor, who never visited us as a rule, even if he was working nearby, at Hesteskoen for instance, which we could see from the kitchen window, but today he had an errand, as he called it, standing there in his waiter’s suit with an alcoholic smile and his blond wavy locks smothered in Brylcreem.

“Well, Finn, are you looking forward to Christmas?” “

Yes, of course … erm it’s today, isn’t it.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Oh, it’s you, is it,” Mother said behind me, fidgeting with an earring, but not without a critical look, which must have registered – as did mine – that the guest was standing there without a single present in his empty hands, this was Uncle Tor, who could give me a pair of expensive skis one Christmas and not a sausage the next because he was broke, which he readily admitted with his pearly white charm. Uncle Tor was, according to Mother, the one member of the family who would never grow up, however old he became, and with some justice too, well, in fact he had been my age for as long as I had known him. He had dropped by to pick us up, he said, the car was waiting down in the street.

“The car?”

“Yes, a taxi.”

Mother dashed over to the balcony window.

“Are you out of your mind? Have you got a taxi waiting down there with the meter running?”

“Yes, aren’t you ready?” Tor said innocently, surveying the wallpaper, the sofa and the Christmas tree with evident admiration, and perhaps the T.V. in particular, which Mother switched off, and then installed herself in front of the screen with her hands on her hips and a steely glare.

“Is this something you and Bjarne thought up?”

Then things took their usual course. Uncle Tor flopped down on the sofa, sighing and fidgeting with the crease in his terylene trousers and thrust out his hands as if trying to shake his watch bracelet further down his arm.

“Yes,” he admitted, glancing at his watch.

“We’ve already been through all this,” Mother said reprovingly.

“Yes,” Uncle Tor said again, looking across at me, realising he ought to smile, did smile, then went back to being serious and continued to sit as if just being there was an argument in itself.

Mother said nothing, but I could see from her face that she was not only in total control of the situation, but might also even have been enjoying it. She went into her room and fetched her purse.

“You’ve got nothing to pay the taxi with, have you?”

“Er … no,” Uncle Tor said, gazing at the wallpaper again.

“Here you are. Say hello to the others and have a good time.”

Tor was on his feet.

“OK, Sis. You win, as always.”

He gave her a thumbs-up, grabbed the note and headed for the hall. But then he remembered something.

“Er … Could I have a word with the girl, too, while I’m here?”

“She’s having a bath,” Mother said curtly, and Uncle Tor looked down at his formal get-up, ill at ease.

“Yes, well, I suppose I should have brought her a present.”

“Yes, you should.”

There followed a few more moments of embarrassment before Uncle Tor showed us one of his party pieces, a three-step shuffle on the lino, chin on chest, shadow boxing with me:

“Watch out for the jab, lad, watch out for the jab …”

Upon which he opened the door, said oh well and Happy Christmas, and made off down the stairs.

“Rascal,” Mother said, then strode into the kitchen, turned, came back and said, as if mustering a troop of elite soldiers: “Come on, Finn, now you get yourself dressed and this year you’ll be smarter than ever before, both you and Linda.”

We plucked Linda out of the bath water, which had become quite cold in the meantime, so much so that she was shivering and her teeth were chattering. But she laughed when Mother tickled her through the towel, these lovely, almost inaudible gurgles we had heard only once. And indeed we did look smarter than ever before, and stiffer. That wasn’t such a problem for Linda who was to a large extent stationary. But I couldn’t sit still while eating the meal, which even today we ate in the kitchen, no ribs this year, it was roast leg of pork with oodles of gravy.

I had to read out the names on the presents as I was the best in the family at reading. And it is strange how you get a true picture of life standing like that, with a stiff collar chafing away at you, beside a sparkling Christmas tree, reading names on presents and working out who can be relied upon in this world and who cannot. Gran, for example, doesn’t get a very high score this year: Linda and I each get a card game, and Mother gets nothing. Uncle Bjarne and Aunty Marit have given us nice presents as usual, but neither has given Mother anything, while the previous year she at least got a weighty ornament which was more expensive than anything she could have afforded herself.

Only from Uncle Oskar did we all get what we wanted, Linda a jigsaw puzzle she couldn’t do, a magnifying glass for me, and Mother a primus stove. But she just snorted at it, even though she had said she wanted one just like it after the old one gave up the ghost on a picnic last autumn.

Kristian, too, had bought presents for everyone. Mother got some jewellery, which silenced and irritated her, and caused her to busy herself with anything else but what we were doing. Linda got a pair of Dutch skates and I got two books, number eighteen in “The Famous Five” series and the 1961 edition of
Hvem Hva Hvor,
an almanac, in which a bookmark had been inserted and a sentence underlined about the rapid rise of television viewing:

“It has been our experience that gifted children soon prefer reading books and magazines to spending their leisure hours in front of the screen, while there is an increasing tendency for less gifted children to spend their time watching television …”

“What’s he mean by that?” Mother said, snatching the book and perusing it with a furrowed brow before returning it and devoting her attentions to the strange jewellery which, squinting through the magnifying glass I was given by Uncle Oskar, I could see had 585 written on it; it was a hare holding its paws in front of its eyes.

Linda was given most presents, it turned out, including from me. But that didn’t matter, because most were clothes which had to be tried on and taken off and tried on again while we ate marzipan and cakes, and laughed and laughed until she fell asleep in bed amid the skates and all her clothes, and I was on the point of dropping off myself after no more than three pages of Kristian’s boring book, although at least it did have a picture of Yuri Gagarin, when, sad to say, Mother came into my room with tears in her eyes, whispering something about it having been nice on our own, hadn’t it?

I didn’t have an answer to that; in fact, there had never been so many of us.

But, as so often before, when she wanted to tell me something in confidence, other things came out first which had nothing to do with the main point, this time it was what the family might have said about her during the evening, another thing I couldn’t get worked up about.

The real problem didn’t surface until a while after Christmas. There were three of us now, weren’t there, she explained. But Linda would be going to school soon, and giving up the shoe-shop job was out of the question, it was much more likely she would go full-time. And then the nursery up behind the church had rejected our application, there might be a place in spring, fine, but what on earth would we do until then?

Even this question wasn’t addressed to me, though; Mother had already found a solution.

“How do I look?” she asked, it was the 28th of December, just after three in the afternoon.

She had put on some make-up and her shoe-shop dress, now she was draping her smartest cloak across her shoulders, she asked me to look after Linda and went out starting with No.1,then went from block to block, rang all the doorbells, said Happy Christmas and asked if there was anyone at home who might be able to take care of a little girl for five to six hours a day until spring. She got no further than No. 7, where she found the right person, a twenty-year-old by the name of Eva Marlene whom ever since we have called simply Marlene and who worked as a waitress in the evenings, at Kontraskjæret, and slept all morning in her parents’ flat. And Marlene seemed fine, even though Linda ran off and hid the instant she popped her head in.

“Come and say hello to Eva Marlene, Linda. She’s going to be looking after you while I’m at work.”

That didn’t have much of an effect, and I can’t say I blame her, the way she had been bundled from one woman to another, barely used to mother No. 2 before No. 3 was introduced. But Marlene, who at first sight could appear somewhat flighty and very nubile, judging by all the paintwork, turned out to be robust and down-to-earth, a realist, who strangely enough was employed in the same frivolous line of work as Uncle Tor, the fairy-tale industry, as Mother called it, where dreams and insanity were two sides of the same coin.

“Oh, she’ll get used to me,” Marlene said in the direction of the duvet beneath which Linda was hidden, and then started looking around to get an impression of what it would be like to spend time here. “I’ve got three small brothers and sisters, and I’m used to young kids.”

“I don’t think we’ll be able to hang onto her for long,” Mother said, in high spirits, when Marlene had gone home after downing three cups of coffee, with reference to both her nubile status and pleasing personality. “Just hope she survives till March … Well, if we’re very, very lucky maybe …”

On and on she went. For good fortune is always followed by bad, etc., etc.

So that was how the year of the Berlin Wall, the T.V. set and above all Yuri Gagarin ended, the year that had begun so like all the others, but because of something as prosaic as the combination of decoration fever and poverty had transformed Mother from being a divorced widow into a landlady and single mother of two, and me from being an only child to becoming one of two siblings in a bunk bed, not to mention what this must have meant for Linda. Though we were not so aware of that yet. If the truth be told, by and large, we don’t understand much of what is going on around us; as Mother is wont to say, by God’s good grace, life usually comes to us in bits and pieces.

The New Year began with snow. Piles and piles of it. On balconies and roofs and in fields and streets, with ski slopes and toboggan slides and children hanging on to bumpers as cars spun up Traverveien and got no further than Lien’s shop before having to seek refuge in Eikelundveien. And the ethereal tranquillity that can settle over a suburb which in fact has been designed for the complete opposite, for clamour and tumult, this tranquillity that descends as the banks of snow rise and cars in Trondhjemsveien disappear from view, and where only the yellow Schøyen bus tops are visible above the white mounds, bus roofs gliding like inaudible flying carpets over the Saharan expanses; this is the countryside come to town, woods and wide open spaces, one might even say the sea, which have superimposed themselves on the urban experiment.

There was no question of us limiting ourselves to the toboggan slope outside our block now, we had to cross the street and explore Hagan, an overgrown ridge with ancient oaks, fruit trees, gooseberry bushes and a white house with only one illuminated window. The old lady we used to call Ruby sat there, she was part of eternity too, like snow and horses, and if you sneaked up there late at night, you could hear a cosmic noise emerging from the darkened house to petrify anyone who lived on an estate.

And I had to go further afield now, away from the block and the short slope, and perhaps especially from Linda, who incidentally had succeeded in taming Anne-Berit, the indoor creature, who during the first weeks of January had been out in the streets more than she had in the whole of the previous year, and had taken it upon herself to spread a protective wing over Linda, a demanding and calculating mistress, Anne-Berit was.

“No, no, no, not like that, Linda. Look at me.”

Linda did make a few brave attempts to follow orders, which were met by a shaking of the head and laughter, but also with some crumbs of sympathy, after all she was nothing less than a little doll, easy to distract, who moreover did not cry needlessly, the perfect pet for someone like Anne-Berit, who was sick and tired of her own younger sisters and took Linda to the tennis courts, which had been sprayed with water and now served as skating rinks, where Linda learned to stump around on the leather uppers of her boots or otherwise sat on the drifts eating the snow off her mittens, where she was an audience for Anne-Berit’s pirouettes on the milky-blue ice as she sang Anita Lindblom’s Swedish version of “You Can Have Him” – everyone was singing “You Can Have Him” that winter, it was on the radio and T.V., I had even heard it on the bus and at the trotting track, most of all I had heard Marlene, who was unable to so much as peel a single potato without humming “You Can Have Him”.