My Struggle: Book 2: A Man in Love (78 page)

Not a soul. Yes, there was. A huddle of children.

‘You’ve gone quiet,’ Geir said. ‘Are you overwhelmed?’

‘Overwhelmed? No, more like underwhelmed. This is so small. There isn’t anything here. I’ve never experienced that before. There’s nothing at all. And at one time it was my everything.’

‘Ye-es, Karl Ove,’ he said with a smile. ‘Straight on?’

‘Let’s drive round the island, shall we? Tromøya Church? That’s wonderful. Thirteenth century. There are some fantastic headstones from the seventeenth century, with skulls and hourglasses and snakes. I used an inscription from one of them in the first decent short story I wrote. As an epigraph.’

All the places I carried inside me, which I had visualised so many, many times in my life, passed outside the windows, completely aura-less, totally neutral – the way they were, in fact. A few crags, a small bay, a decrepit floating pier, a narrow shoreline, some old houses behind, flatland that fell away to the water. That was all.

We got out of the car and went to the cemetery. Wandered around, looked across towards the sea, but even that, even the sight of the pine trees growing down to the pebble beach, smaller and smaller the closer they got to the raw wind, aroused nothing in me.

‘Come on, let’s go,’ I said. Saw the fields where I had worked in the summer, the road leading to the water, where we could go swimming as early as 17 May. Sandum Bay. My teacher’s house, what was her name? Helga Torgersen? Must be getting on for sixty now? Færvik, the petrol station, the house on the other side, where the girls in the class had got so excited at the party the night before I left, the supermarket, which I could remember them building.

There was nothing. But lives were still being lived in these houses, and they were still everything for the people inside. People were born, people died, they made love and argued, ate and shat, drank and partied, read and slept. Watched TV, dreamed, ate an apple gazing across rooftops, autumn winds shaking the tall slim pine trees.

Small and ugly, but all there was.

An hour later I was sitting at the living-room table, alone, eating shrimps at top speed, served by Geir’s father, who wasn’t having any himself but wanted me to have a Sørland experience before I left. Then I shook hands, thanked them for having me, got into the car beside Geir again and was driven to the airport. We took the route via Birkeland because I wanted to see what my other childhood home, the one in Tveit, was like now.

Geir pulled up outside the house. He laughed.

‘Did you live
there
?’ In the middle of the forest? It’s completely isolated! There isn’t a soul here! So deserted . . . Pure
Twin Peaks
, if you ask me. Or
Pernille and Mr Nelson
, if you can remember the TV programme? It frightened the life out of me when I was a child.’

He continued to laugh as I pointed out places. And I had to laugh too because I saw them with his eyes. All these derelict old houses, these wrecks of cars on the drives, lorries parked outside, the distances between houses and the evident poverty. I tried to explain to him how nice our house had been, how good living here had been, that everything was here, but . . .

‘Come on!’ he said. ‘Living here must have been penal servitude.’

I didn’t answer, I was piqued, I felt the need to put up a defence. But I couldn’t be bothered. It was the same here, the inner experience, which made everything glow with meaning, it had no counterpart on the outside.

We shook hands in the car park, he got back into his car and I walked towards the departures hall. The flight was to Oslo, where I would change and fly to Billund in Denmark, where I would change again for Kastrup, Copenhagen. I didn’t get home until ten in the evening. Linda hugged me when I arrived, a long, passionate hug, we sat down in the living room, she had made something to eat, I told her about the trip, she said the last day had been better, but she had realised we would have to do something to break the vicious circle we were in, I agreed, it couldn’t go on, it couldn’t, we had to find a way out and make a new path. At half past eleven I went into the bedroom and switched on my computer, opened a new document and began to write.

In the window before me I can vaguely see the image of my face. Apart from the eyes, which are shining, and the part directly beneath, which dimly reflects light, the whole of the left side lies in shade. Two deep furrows run down the forehead, one deep furrow runs down each cheek, all filled as it were with darkness, and when the eyes are staring and serious, and the mouth turned down at the corners it is impossible not to think of this face as sombre.

What is it that has etched itself into you?

The next day I continued. The idea was to get as close as possible to my life, so I wrote about Linda and John sleeping in the adjacent room, Vanja and Heidi, who were at the nursery, the view from the window and the music I was listening to. The next day I went to the allotment cabin, I wrote more there, some ultra-modernistic-style passages about faces and the patterns that exist in all big systems, sand heaps, clouds, economies, traffic, occasionally went into the garden to smoke and watch the birds flying hither and thither in the sky, it was February and there was no one around in the enormous allotment compound, just row upon row of small well-kept doll’s houses in small gardens, so perfect they looked like living rooms. In the evening a huge flock of crows flew over, there must have been several hundred, a dark cloud of flapping wings drifting past and flying on. Night fell, and apart from what was lit up by the light streaming out of the open door at the other end of the garden, everything around me was dark. So still was I, where I sat, that a hedgehog shuffled by half a metre from my feet.

‘Well, hello there,’ I said and waited until it had reached the hedge before getting up and going in. The next day I began to write about the spring dad moved out from mum and me, and even though I hated every sentence I decided to persist, I had to come to terms with it, to tell the story I had tried for so long to tell. Back at home I continued with some notes I made when I was eighteen and for some reason had not disposed of, ‘bags of beer in the ditch’ caught my eye, a reference to one New Year’s Eve when I was a teenager, I could use that as long as I wasn’t too bothered and shelved any idea of aiming for the sublime. The weeks passed, I wrote, walked the children to the nursery or collected them, spent the afternoons with them in one of the many parks, cooked dinner, read to them and put them to bed, worked on reader reports and other odd jobs in the evenings. Every Sunday I cycled to Limhamnsfältet and played football for two hours, that was my only leisure activity, everything else was either work or children. Limhamnsfältet was an enormous grassy area outside the town, by the sea. Since the end of the 1960s a motley collection of men have gathered there every Sunday at a quarter past ten. The youngest are sixteen or seventeen while the oldest, Kai, is closer to eighty – he is on the wing and the ball has to be played to his feet, but if he gets it, there is still enough football left in him to whip in a centre, and now and then he even scores a goal. But the majority of the players are between thirty and forty, come from all walks of life and all they really have in common is the joy of playing football. The last Sunday in February Linda and the children came along, Vanja and Heidi cheered me on for a bit, then they went to the play area by the beach while I carried on playing. There had been a ground frost, the usually soft layer of grass was rock hard, and when after half an hour I was sent flying by a tackle and landed smack on my shoulder I realised at once that something was wrong. I stayed down, the others gathered round, I was nauseous with the pain, hobbled slowly, shoulder hunched, to behind the goal, the others knew that this wasn’t just a little knock and the game was called off, it was half past eleven anyway.

Fredrik, a fifty-something writer and classic poacher who still bangs in goals in Swedish non-league football, drove me to hospital while Martin, a two-metre-plus giant of a Dane I knew through the nursery undertook to inform Linda and the children about what had happened. A & E was full, I took a number from the machine and sat down to wait, my shoulder burned and there was a stab of pain every time I moved it, but it was bearable for the half-hour it would take before it was my turn. I explained the situation to the nurse in reception, who came out to give me a quick examination, grabbed my arm and moved it slowly to the side. I screamed from the top of my lungs. AAAAAAgggghhh! Everyone stared at me. A man approaching forty wearing an Argentina national shirt and football boots, his long hair tied with an elastic band in a knot like a pineapple on top of his head, howling with pain.

‘You’d better come with me,’ the nurse said. ‘So we can have you examined properly.’

I went into a room nearby, she asked me to wait, a few minutes later another nurse came, she made the same movement with my arm, I screamed again.

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘But I can’t help it.’

‘No problem,’ she said, gently removing my tracksuit top. ‘We’ll have to take your shirt off as well,’ she said. ‘Do you think that’ll be OK?’

She pulled at the sleeve, I screamed, she paused, tried again. Took a step back. Looked at me. I felt like an overgrown child.

‘We’ll have to cut it off.’

Now it was my turn to look at her. Cut up my Argentina shirt?

She came back with some scissors and cut up the sleeves, then asked me to sit on a bed once the shirt was off and stuck a needle in my lower arm just above the wrist. She was going to give me a bit of morphine, she said. After it was done, although I noticed nothing, she pushed me in a wheelchair into another room, perhaps fifty metres deeper into the labyrinthine building, where I was left alone to wait for an X-ray, not without some dread because I thought my shoulder must have been dislocated and, if so, I knew putting it back would be painful. But it was a fracture, the doctor confirmed. It would take between eight and twelve weeks to heal. They gave me some painkillers, a prescription for more, tied a bandage in a taut figure of eight over and under the shoulders, hung my tracksuit top on me and sent me home.

When I opened the door to the flat Vanja and Heidi came towards me at a run. They were excited, daddy had been to hospital, it was an adventure. I told them and Linda, who followed with John on her arm, that I had broken my collarbone and had a sling, it was nothing major, but I couldn’t lift or carry or use my arm for the next two months.

‘Are you serious?’ Linda asked. ‘Two months?’

‘Three at worst,’ I said.

‘You must never play football again, that’s for definite,’ Linda said.

‘Oh?’ I said. ‘So that’s your decision, is it?’

‘It’s me who has to put up with the consequences,’ she said. ‘How am I going to take care of the children on my own for two months, if I might ask?’

‘It’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘Relax. I’ve broken my collarbone after all. It hurts, and it’s not as if I did it on purpose.’

I went into the living room to sit down on the sofa. I had to make every movement slowly and plan it in advance. Every little deviation sent a pain through me. Agh, Ohh, Oooh, I said, slowly lowering myself. Vanja and Heidi watched with saucer eyes.

I smiled at them while trying to put the big cushion behind my back. They came up close. Heidi ran her hand across my chest as if to examine it.

‘Can we have a look at the bandage?’ Vanja asked.

‘Afterwards,’ I said. ‘It hurts a little to take clothes off and put them back on, you see.’

‘Food’s up!’ Linda shouted from the kitchen.

John was sitting in his baby chair banging his knife and fork on the table. Vanja and Heidi stared at me and my slow, laborious movements as I sat down.

‘What a day!’ Linda said. ‘Martin didn’t know a thing, only that you’d been taken to A & E. He brought us home, luckily, but when I was opening the door the key broke. Oh my God. I visualised us having to stay with them tonight. But then I double-checked my bag, and there it was, Berit’s key. What a stroke of luck! I hadn’t hung it up. And then you come home with a broken collarbone . . .’

She looked at me.

‘I’m so tired,’ she said.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘It’ll probably only be the first few days that I can’t do anything. And then one arm will be perfectly OK.’

After eating I lay down on the sofa with a cushion behind my back watching an Italian football match on TV. In the four years we’d had children I had only done something like this once. At the time I was so ill I couldn’t move, I lay on the sofa for a whole day, saw ten minutes of the first Jason Bourne film, slept for a bit, saw ten minutes, slept for a bit, threw up intermittently, and even though my whole body ached and basically it was absolutely unbearable, I still enjoyed every second. Lying on the sofa and watching a film in the middle of the day! Not one single obligation! No clothes to be washed, no floor to be scrubbed, no washing-up to be done, no children to look after.

Now I had that same feeling. I was
not
in a position to do anything. However much my shoulder burned and stung and ached, the pleasure at being able to lie in total peace was greater.

Vanja and Heidi circled round me, coming close every so often and gently stroking my shoulder, then they went out of the room to play, and came back. For them this was probably unprecedented, I mused, me being completely passive and still. It was as though they had discovered a new side to me.

When the match was over I went for a bath. We didn’t have a holder for the showerhead, we had to hold it in one hand, and that option was out of the question now, so all I could do was run the bath and climb into the tub with difficulty. Vanja and Heidi watched me.

‘Do you need any help with washing, daddy?’ Vanja asked. ‘Can we wash you?’

‘Yes, that would be nice,’ I said. ‘Can you see the cloths there? Take one each, and then dip it in the water and rub some soap into it.’

Vanja followed the instructions precisely, Heidi copied her. And they stood there, leaning over the edge of the bath and washing me with their cloths. Heidi laughed, Vanja was serious and business-like. They washed my arms, neck and chest. Heidi was bored after a few seconds and ran into the living room while Vanja stayed for a while longer.