I Curse the River of Time (13 page)

‘Jesus Christ,’ I said. ‘It’s an omen,’ and on my way through the hedge I could feel the eye burning into my back.

15

I
t was Saturday, it was just before midnight. I was walking along Trondhjemsveien towards town after celebrating my mother’s fiftieth birthday. I had made up my mind to walk all the way home to Carl Berners Plass even though I could easily have got there in less than fifteen minutes by Underground, but I had to get the party out of my system.

It was a long way to Carl Berners Plass, the night was dark, but the street lights lit up the road, and some were yellow and some almost orange, and some had a cold, blue glare.

I had walked this road for many years, but before I left home, I nearly always walked in the opposite direction,
out
of Oslo, because I wanted the traffic to flow
with
me on the side of the road I preferred to walk, the right hand side that is, and if I did not, it would feel like the people in the cars, looking out of their windows, and rolling their windows down, would point at me, and say to each other that I was probably the only person in the whole world that was heading in the wrong direction with his life.

But I no longer lived in my parents’ home, I had not lived there for three years. Now I was walking into town one late autumn night after my mother’s fiftieth birthday party, towards central Oslo, past Årvoll and further on under the Sinsen roundabout, down past Torshovdalen and the
Rosenhoff School standing grey and sad at the end of a street to the right. I had been a pupil there two years before I went on to college. The building looked like a seventeenth-century prison, like the Bastille in Paris, and my time at that school had not been a time of joy. But now I put the school behind me along with those years, and walked on down the long slope towards Carl Berners Plass.

When I finally got there, I thought, as I often did, what a fine square it was, like a sun beaming out to all sides, like a square in the years between the wars, in a big city, Berlin perhaps, Erich Kästner’s Berlin in
Emil and the Detectives
, or in Zurich, or in Basel, or in Budapest, for all I knew, where trams and buses criss-crossed in carefully designed patterns of shiny steel curves in the cobblestones, and above me in the air, raised high above the traffic, above the tram cogs and rubber wheels, a myriad taut cables ran from the buildings on one side of the street via beautiful metal posts across to the opposite side and were attached to the buildings there. It was like a roof you could walk under without getting your feet wet. It felt like that.

The whole square was a world of its own with the broad majestic avenue, Christian Michelsens Gate, to the west; the green lime trees in straight rows either side of it, or, like now, with their branches bare and grey against the grey night. To the east, Grenseveien sloped up the hill past the Underground station where it vanished beyond the houses, and there were neon signs on the façades of the buildings on Grenseveien, and neon signs around the corner, towards Finnmarkgata, and across the square towards the petrol station there were neon signs too, and to the right or the
left, depending on which way you came, lay Ringen Kino with its glowing stripes of red neon above the entrance from Trondhjemsveien, on the same side as the bookshop, but after the film you would come out, half-blind, into Tromsøgata right opposite Bergersen’s café.

I felt better once I was on my way across the square, my head no longer spinning, it was late, it was night, the dark whirling around me, and snowflakes whirling in the wind from the north and the traffic was sparse on the streets into town. So here I could walk in the middle of the big square as long as I wanted, across the cobblestones and tramlines, it was my square, it was my big city square, known as Red Square before the war, as the only one of its kind on the east side of the river, and later in the Seventies was called Red Square, because almost everyone was convinced the traffic lights here were always that colour.

In the stairwell the fresh scent of Zalo met me on the ground floor, and on the first I turned the key in the lock and entered my flat. Carefully I eased the door shut behind me, so that nothing could be heard but the low click of the latch.

I knew right away that she was there, sensed it in my gut that she was there, my stomach lurching and trembling and to stop that sensation from going away, to hold on to it for as long as I could, I went straight to the kitchen in my socks and did not say
hello
through the half open door to the living room, where the sofa bed stood behind the bookcases.

I had given her a set of keys. She could come and go as
she pleased. Do her homework here when she wanted to. Come here early on the Underground before school if she wanted to and have breakfast with me. She could take a break from her family and cry if she wanted to, take a break from the train journeys to school, to the city centre because she always had to step out of the carriage at Økern Station and run behind the shelter there to throw up, and then throw up at Hasle Station. When she had stayed the night with me, and I walked her to the tram at Carl Berners Plass and then again walked her all the way up to school, she would throw up behind the colonnade at the Deichman Library. Once I had been waiting at the entrance to the station right by the block of flats where she lived, and had seen through the window her mother punch her in the face because she put on the wrong coat, which was her brother’s blue confirmation coat, on her way out to join me. We were going to see
Klute
starring Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland. It was showing a second time at Frogner Kino. I had seen it before, but she had not.

Silently, I placed my keys on the kitchen counter and silently I took a bottle of orange juice from the fridge, poured myself a glass and sat down at the table where the book I was reading,
Les Misérables
by Victor Hugo, was lying. I had finished the first volume and was well into the second.

I drank the juice and leafed through the book to remind myself of what I had read in bed earlier that morning, it was a Saturday, I had been lying under my duvet reading until around half-past eleven with the book on my pillow. This was not what I usually did in the morning, but I felt it was important to work through as many pages as possible
before the day got going and the time came when I had to take the Underground six stops up through Groruddalen to celebrate my mother’s fiftieth birthday.

I undressed in the kitchen, hung my clothes over one of the chairs and went to the small bathroom and washed the whole evening and the party off my skin, brushed my teeth and tiptoed into the living room to the sofa bed behind the bookcases in the dark and around the table stocked with more books. On the wall was the picture of Mao at his desk, but I could not see him now. Carefully I crawled under the duvet. This sofa bed was really not made for two, but we did not need that much room, and I had planned that she would carry on sleeping in my arms and then wake up in the early morning wondering when it was I’d come back. But she was so warm under the duvet and I was so cold that she woke up at once, turned to me and said:

‘Is that you?’

‘Of course, it’s me.’

‘OK, if you say so.’

‘Stop it, you’re making me jealous.’

‘Am I?’

‘Of course you are,’ I said.

‘That’s good.’

‘But, it’s just you and me,’ I said, ‘it’s just you and me against the world.’

‘Oh, yes that’s true,’ she said, ‘that’s it. You and me, you and me, and then your Party. Which I’m going to join.’

‘Yes, you are. But you’re still a bit young.’

‘Perhaps. I don’t feel young.’

‘I know,’ I said, ‘and in a way you’re not young,’ but she
was
young. Several years younger than me, and I was young too, and I leaned across her and rubbed my hands together to make them warm and said: ‘Feel this,’ and then I touched her in a very special way, and she lay completely still, and then she said in a soft voice:

‘Oh God, that was good,’ and this very thing, this very special thing, was something only she and I had together, that no one else had, that only she and I knew about, but we were so young then, and we did not know very much.

‘But hey, there’s no time for this now,’ she said.
‘Oh God, that was good
. How far have you got?’

‘Quite far. A lot further than the last time you were here.’

‘Oh, that’s good,’ she said, and we lay on our backs, shoulder to shoulder, hand in hand looking up at the ceiling, and we could not see the ceiling because the room was pitch black, and the sofa bed so small that she was squashed against the wall, and my left leg dangled over the edge. And then I started to tell the story from where we had stopped the last time we were lying here and had to stop because I hadn’t read any further, and she told me to hurry and read some more because it was so much better to hear me tell the story than reading it herself, she could see things then, that she did not see when it was light, and I had read on as quickly as I could. And now we were lying here again, like so many times before, and I told her about Jean Valjean who was sent to the gallows for stealing a loaf of bread. But one day when there was a fire he escaped, and was free and changed his name and identity, and as a different man he rose through the ranks to become mayor. And then suddenly he had to run a second time because that hateful,
persistent bloodhound of a police inspector Javert had recognised him.

In the novel it was 1832, and that night I told her how Jean Valjean was stumbling through the catacombs under Paris, the sewers of Paris, with Marius unconscious on his back. And he was the boyfriend of his beloved Cosette, and in the streets above, the revolution was raging, the
peuple
were fighting in the streets, the impatient ones, it was their turn now, and
they
were as we were, or rather we wanted to be like them. And the
peuple
built barricades between the houses in the narrow streets, for this was before the time of avenues, avenues that later would be built and made so wide it would be impossible to build barricades from one side to the other, which is the whole point of a barricade, and instead made room for the army to march forward in wide columns and crush the slightest attempt at rebellion, which is the whole point of avenues.

She did not sleep like children do, at night when you tell them stories. She was wide awake in the dark with her blue eyes, warm hands and a greedy mouth, and she said:

‘It must have been so hard to carry Marius all that way through the sewers even though Jean Valjean was strong.’

‘Yes, I’m sure it must have been. There is no way I could ever do the same,’ I said.

‘Don’t tell yourself that. You’re quite strong, you are.’

‘Do you think so?’

‘I don’t think it,’ she said. ‘I
know
it,’ and I liked it when she said things like that.

When I had finished today’s text, or the evening’s or
even the night’s text if you like, I was quite exhausted and she said:

‘Can we eat now?’

‘I have to get some sleep, if you don’t mind. I’m totally worn out after that party.’

‘Why don’t you tell me about the party? How did it go? Did your mother like your present?’

‘No,’ I said.

I had not bought her a present. I had written a speech, but when it was time for me to stand up, I was drunk.

‘Oh, well,’ she said. ‘That’s all right with me, but I need to eat something. It’s strange, but lying here listening makes me so hungry.’

‘You get yourself something to eat,’ I said.

‘You get yourself some sleep,’ she said and patted my cheek, and she climbed over me on the sofa and before she had touched the floor in the dark, very blonde, very slender and very young, I was long gone.

16

T
hat morning I had been lying in bed reading Victor Hugo until I could no longer stay in bed without feeling ashamed, and so I got up, had a shower, and walked barefoot and wet out into the kitchen where I stood in front of the table reading the speech I had left there. I had read it through several times. I had written that speech instead of buying her a present, it was an idea I had, that I would reach out my hand, and not just an idea, I really meant it. I would say something about the Rio Grande, how big it was, how it kept continents apart, cultures, and was so wide that it was hard to cross from one bank to the other, from the USA to Mexico, that is if you weren’t a gunslinger desperately running from the law, so it was easy then to imagine the problems we had had in the past, she and I, standing on opposite banks, not even able to call out to each other across the great divide.

‘It’s called the Rio Grande, right?’ I was going to say. ‘That means big, huge, enormous,’ and then I would say, but the good news, Mother, is that the river has dried up. It’s a total surprise, all the experts are knocked out, and only a trickle remains so now it is easy to cross, for there has been no rain this autumn, not this summer, nor this spring,’ I would say, and laugh, ‘so you see, nothing’s too late for us, we can walk right across or meet halfway and
only get our feet a little wet, and that’s not a big deal, is it?’ That was what I intended to say, and that was what I had written on the two A4 sheets.

I pulled all the clothes I had out of the closet and lined them up on the floor. They were surprisingly few, but I could not turn up for a fiftieth birthday party in the shabby army jacket I normally wore. I chose the dark tweed jacket my mother had given me as a present once when I had to look decent, at the funeral of one of my father’s many brothers. He was the uncle who stayed on in the flat in Vålerenga after our escape to Groruddalen. A bachelor smell lingered between the walls there, of the same meals week in week out, year after year, of the same brand of coffee and the same shoe polish and washing up liquid, of the same vests and underpants in the middle drawer of the cabinet, of chocolate bought for one person only, crumbly and white with age on the top shelf, and in the bottom drawer there were brown socks neatly folded, every single pair of them bought from the Salvation Army. He had lived there until he died on the sofa, in the darkly lit living room among all that furniture with the cream-coloured blinds lowered so that only needle-thin stripes of light seeped through. But two years had passed since that funeral, and I had not worn the jacket since.