My Struggle: Book One (25 page)

Was it coming from our house?

I hurried down the last part of the hill and looked up the slope where the house stood, all lights ablaze. Yes, that was where the music was coming from. Presumably through the open living room door, I thought, and realized there was a party going on up there because a number of dark, mysterious figures were gliding around the lawn in the grayish light of the summer night. Usually I would have followed the stream to the west of the house, but with the party up there, and the place full of strangers, I didn't want to crash in from the forest, and accordingly followed the road all the way around.

There were cars all the way along the drive, parked half on the grass, and beside the barn and in the yard as well. I stopped at the top of the hill to collect my thoughts. A man in a white shirt walked across the yard without seeing me. There was a buzz of voices in the garden behind the house. At the kitchen table, which I could see through the window, were two women and a man, each with a glass of wine in front of them, they were laughing and drinking.

I took a deep breath and walked toward the front door. A long table had been set up in the garden close to the forest. It was covered with a white cloth that shimmered in the heavy darkness beneath the treetops. Six or seven people were sitting at the table, among them Dad. He looked straight at me. When I met his gaze he got up and waved. I unhitched the bag, put it beside the doorstep and went over to him. I had never seen him like this before. He was wearing a baggy white shirt with embroidery around the V-neck, blue
jeans, and light-brown leather shoes. His face, tanned dark from the sun, had a radiant aura. His eyes shone.

“So, there you are, Karl Ove,” he said, resting his hand on my shoulder.

“We thought you would have been here earlier. We're having a party, as you can see. But you can join us for a while, can't you? Sit yourself down!”

I did as he said and sat down at the table, with my back to the house. The only person I had seen before was Unni. She too was wearing a white shirt or blouse or whatever it was.

“Hi, Unni,” I said.

She sent me a warm smile.

“So this is Karl Ove, my youngest son,” Dad said, sitting down on the opposite side of the table, next to Unni. I nodded to the other five.

“And this, Karl Ove, is Bodil,” he said, “my cousin.”

I had never heard of any cousin called Bodil and studied her, probably in a rather quizzical way because she smiled at me and said:

“Your father and I were together a lot when we were children.”

“And teenagers,” Dad said. He lit a cigarette, inhaled, blew the smoke out with a contented expression on his face. “And then we have Reidar, Ellen, Martha, Erling, and Åge. Colleagues of mine, all of them.”

“Hi,” I said.

The table was covered with glasses, bottles, dishes, and plates. Two large bowls piled with shrimp shells left no doubt as to what they had been eating. The colleague my father had mentioned last, Åge, a man of around forty, with large, thinly framed glasses was observing me while sipping a glass of beer. Putting it down, he said:

“I gather you've been at a training camp?”

I nodded.

“In Denmark,” I said.

“Where in Denmark?” he asked.

“Nykøbing,” I said.

“Nykøbing, on Mors?” he queried.

“Yes,” I said. “I think so. It was an island in the Limfjord.”

He laughed and looked around.

“That's where Aksel Sandemose came from!” he declared. And then he looked straight at me again. “Do you know the name of the law he devised, inspired by the town you visited?”

What was this? Were we at school or what?

“Yes,” I said, looking down. I didn't want to articulate the word; I didn't want to tell him.

“Which is?” he insisted.

As I raised my eyes to meet his, they were as defiant as they were embarrassed.

“Jante,” I said.

“You got it!” he said.

“Did you have a good time there?” Dad asked.

“Yes, I did,” I said. “Great fields. Great town.”

Nykøbing: I had walked back to the school where we were lodged, after spending the whole evening and night out with a girl I had met, she had been crazy about me. The four others from the team who had been with me had gone back earlier, it was just me and her, and as I walked home, drunker than usual, I had stopped outside one of the houses in the town. All the detail was gone, I couldn't remember leaving her, couldn't remember going to the house, but once there, standing by this door, it was as if I came to myself again. I took the lit cigarette out of my mouth, opened the letter box, and dropped it on the hall floor inside. Then everything went fuzzy again, but somehow I must have found my way to the school, got in, and gone to bed, to be woken for breakfast and training three hours later. When we were sitting under one of the enormous trees around the training area chatting, I suddenly remembered the cigarette I had thrown in through the door. I got up, chilled deep into my soul, booted a ball up the field and began to give chase. What if it had started to burn? What if people had died in the fire? What did that make me?

I had succeeded in repressing it for several days, but now, sitting at the long table in the garden on my first evening home, fear reared up again.

“Which team do you play for, Karl Ove?” one of the others asked.

“Tveit,” I said.

“Which division are you in?”

“I play for the juniors,” I said. “But the seniors are in the fifth division.”

“Not exactly IK Start then,” he said. From his dialect I deduced that he came from Vennesla, so it was easy to come back with a retort.

“No, more like Vindbjart,” I said. Vindbjart from Vennesla. Second Division, group three.

They laughed at that. I looked down. It felt as if I had already attracted too much attention. But when, immediately afterward, I let my gaze wander to Dad, he was smiling at me.

Yes, his eyes were shining.

“Wouldn't you like a beer, Karl Ove?” he said.

I nodded.

“Certainly would,” I replied.

He scanned the table.

“Looks as if we've run out here,” he said. “But there's a crate in the kitchen. You can take one from there.”

I got up. As I made for the door two people came out. A man and a woman, entwined. She was wearing a white summer dress. Her bare arms and legs were tanned. Her breasts heavy, stomach and hips ample. Her eyes, in the somehow sated face, were gentle. He, wearing a light blue shirt and white trousers, had a slight paunch, but was otherwise slim. Even though he was smiling and his inebriated eyes seemed to be floating, it was the stiffness of his expression that I noticed. All the movement had gone, just the vestiges remained, like a dried-up riverbed.

“Hi!” she said. “Are you the son?”

“Yes,” I said. “Hello.”

“I work with your father,” she said.

“Nice,” I said, and luckily did not have to say anything more, for they were already on their way. As I went into the hall the bathroom door opened. A small, chubby, dark-haired woman with glasses stepped out. She barely
glanced at me, cast her eyes down, and walked past me into the house. Discreetly I sniffed her perfume before following her. Fresh, floral. In the kitchen were the three people I had seen through the window when I arrived. The man, also around forty, was whispering something in the ear of the woman to his right. She smiled, but it was a polite smile. The other woman was rummaging through a bag she had on her lap. She looked up at me as she placed an unopened packet of cigarettes on the table.

“Hello,” I said. “Just come for a beer.”

There were two full crates stacked against the wall by the door. I grabbed a bottle from the top one.

“Anyone got an opener?” I asked.

The man straightened up, patted his thighs.

“I've got a lighter,” he said. “Here.”

He made to throw it underarm, at first slowly, so I could prepare myself to catch it, then, with a jerk, the lighter came flying through the air. It hit the door frame and clunked to the floor. But for that I would not have known how to resolve the situation because I didn't want any condescension because I let him open the bottle for me, but now he had taken the initiative and failed, so the situation was different.

“I can't open it with a lighter,” I said. “Perhaps you could do it for me?”

I picked up the lighter and handed it to him with the bottle. He had round glasses, and the fact that half of his scalp was hairless, while the hair on the other half rose too high, like a wave at the edge of an endless beach on which it would never break, lent him a somewhat desperate appearance. That, at any rate, was the effect he had on me. The tips of his fingers, now tightening around the lighter, were hairy. From his wrist hung a watch on a silver chain.

The beer cap came off with a dull pop.

“There we are,” he said, passing me the bottle. I thanked him and went into the living room, where four or five people were dancing, and out into the garden. A little gathering of people stood in front of the flagpole, each with glass in hand, looking across the river valley as they chatted.

The beer was fantastic. I had drunk every evening in Denmark, and all the
previous evening and night, so it would take a lot for me to get drunk now. And I didn't want that either. If I got drunk I would slip into their world, in a sense, allow it to swallow me up whole and no longer be able to see the difference, I might even begin to get a taste for the women in it. That was the last thing I wanted.

I surveyed the landscape. Looked at the river flowing in a gentle curve around the grass-covered headland where the soccer goals were, and between the tall deciduous trees growing along the bank, which were now black against the dark-gray, shiny surface of the water. The hills that rose on the other side and then undulated down toward the sea were also black. The lights from the clusters of houses lying between the river and the ridge shone out strong and bright, while the stars in the sky – those close to the land grayish, those higher up a bluish hue – were barely visible.

The group by the flagpole were laughing at something. They were only a few meters from me, but their faces were still indistinct. The man with the slight paunch emerged from around the corner of the house, he appeared to glide. The confirmation photograph of me had been taken there, in front of the flagpole, between Mom and Dad. I took another swig and went toward the far end of the garden where no one else seemed to have found their way. I sat there with legs crossed, by the birch. The music was more distant, the voices and laughter too, and the movements from my vantage point even less distinct. Like apparitions, they floated in the darkness around the illuminated house. I thought of Hanne. It was as if she had a place inside me. As if she existed as a real location where I would always be. That I could go there whenever I wanted felt like an act of mercy. We had sat talking on a rock by the sea at a class party the previous night. Nothing happened, that was all there was. The rock, Hanne, the bay with the low islets, the sea. We had danced, played games, gone down the steps from the quay, and swum in the dark. It had been wonderful. And the wonder of it was indelible, it had stayed with me all of the next day, and it was in me now. I was immortal. I got up, aware of my own power in every cell of my body. I was wearing a gray T-shirt, calf-length military green trousers, and white Adidas basketball shoes, that
was all, but it was enough. I was not strong, but I was slim, supple, and as handsome as a god.

Could I give her a call?

She had said she would be home this evening.

But it had to be close to twelve by now. And although she didn't mind being woken up, the rest of the family would probably take a different view.

What if the house had burned down? What if someone had been burned to death?

Oh, shit, shit, shit.

I started to walk across the lawn as I tried to push the thought to the back of my mind, ran my eyes along the hedge, over the house, the roof, to the big lilac bushes at the end of the lawn whose heavy pink blossoms you could smell right down by the road, took the last swig from the bottle as I walked, saw a couple of flushed women's faces, they were sitting on the steps by the door with their knees together and cigarettes between their fingertips, I recognized them from the table and gave a faint smile as I passed, on through the door into the living room, then the kitchen, which was empty now, took another bottle, went upstairs and into my room where I sat down in the chair under the window, leaned back, and closed my eyes.

Mm.

The speakers in the living room were directly beneath me, and sound traveled so easily in this house that I heard every note loud and clear.

What were they playing?

Agnetha Fältskog. The hit from last summer. What was it again?

There was something undignified about the clothes Dad was wearing tonight. The white shirt or blouse or whatever the hell it was. He had always, as far as I could remember, dressed simply, appropriately, a touch conservatively. His wardrobe consisted of shirts, suits, jackets, many in tweed, polyester trousers, corduroy, cotton, lambswool or wool sweaters. More a senior master of the old variety than a smock-clad schoolteacher of the new breed, but not old-fashioned, that wasn't where the difference lay. The dividing line was between soft and hard, between those who try to break down the distance
and those who try to maintain it. It was a question of values. When he suddenly started wearing arty embroidered blouses, or shirts with frills, as I had seen him wearing earlier this summer, or shapeless leather shoes in which a Sami would have been happy, an enormous contradiction arose between the person he was, the person I knew him to be, and the person he presented himself as. For myself, I was on the side of the soft ones, I was against war and authority, hierarchies, and all forms of hardness, I didn't want to do any sucking up at school, I wanted my intellect to develop more organically; politically I was way out on the left, the unequal distribution of the world's resources enraged me, I wanted everyone to have a share of life's pleasures, and thus capitalism and plutocracy were the enemy. I thought all people were of equal value and that a person's inner qualities were always worth more than their outer appearance. I was, in other words, for depth and against superficiality, for good and against evil, for the soft and against the hard. So shouldn't I have been pleased then, that my father had joined the ranks of the soft? No, for I despised the way the soft expressed themselves, the round glasses, corduroy trousers, foot-formed shoes, knitted sweaters, that is, because along with my political ideals I had others, bound up with music, which in a very different way had to do with looking good, cool, which in turn was related to the times in which we were living, it was what had to be expressed, but not the top ten chart aspect, not the pastel colors and hair gel, for that was about commercialism, superficiality, and entertainment; no, the music that had to be expressed was the innovative but tradition-conscious, deeply felt but smart, intelligent but simple, showy but genuine kind that did not address itself to everyone, that did not sell well, yet expressed a generation's, my generation's, experiences. Oh, the new. I was on the side of the new. And Ian McCulloch of Echo & the Bunnymen, he was the ideal in this respect, him above all. Coats, military jackets, sneakers, dark sunglasses. It was miles away from my father's embroidered blouse and Sami shoes. On the other hand, this could not be what it was about because Dad belonged to a different generation, and the thought that this generation should start dressing like Ian McCulloch, start listening to British indie music, take any
interest in what was happening on the American scene, discover REM's or Green on Red's debut album and perhaps eventually include a bootlace tie in their wardrobe was the stuff of a nightmare. What was more important was that the embroidered blouse and the Sami shoes were not him. And that he had slipped into this, entered this formless, uncertain, almost feminine world, as though he had lost a grip on himself. Even the hard tone in his voice had gone.