My Struggle: Book One (38 page)

Shit a brick.

I straightened up and flicked through his CDs. Massive Attack, Portishead, Blur, Leftfield, Bowie, Supergrass, Mercury Rev, Queen.

Queen?

He had liked them ever since he was small, had always stayed true to them, and was ready to defend them at the drop of a hat. I remembered him sitting in his room copying one of Brian May's solos note for note on his new guitar, a black imitation Les Paul, bought with his confirmation money, and the Queen fan club magazine he got through the mail. He was still waiting for the world to come to its senses and accord to Queen what Queen was rightfully due.

I smiled.

When Freddie Mercury died, the revelation that shocked was not the fact that he was gay but that he was an Indian.

Who could have imagined that?

Buildings were few and far between now. The traffic in the oncoming roadway had increased for a while, as rush hour approached, but was beginning to die down as we emerged into the unpopulated area between towns.
We passed huge, yellow cornfields, vast expanses of strawberries, patches of green pastureland, newly plowed fields of dark brown, almost black soil. Occasional copses, villages, some river or other, some lake or other. Then the terrain totally changed character and became almost mountainous with green, treeless, uncultivated upland. Yngve drove into a gas station, filled up, poked his head in and asked if I wanted anything, I shook my head, but on his return he passed me a bottle of Coke and a Bounty bar.

“Feel like a smoke?” he said.

I nodded and clambered out. We walked to a bench at the end of the parking lot. Behind it flowed a little stream, with a bridge farther on. A motorbike roared by, then a juggernaut, then one more.

“What did Mom actually say?” I said.

“Not much,” Yngve said. “She needs time to think things through. But she was sad. Probably thinking about us mostly, I would imagine.”

“Borghild's being buried today,” I said.

“Yes,” he said.

A juggernaut drove into the gas station from the west, parked with a sigh at the other end, a middle-aged man jumped down from the cab and held his windblown, flapping hair in place as he walked to the entrance.

“Last time I saw Dad he talked about setting up as a truck driver,” I said with a smile.

“Oh,” Yngve said. “When was that?”

“Winter, um, year and a half ago. When I was in Kristiansand, writing.”

I unscrewed the bottle top and took a swig.

“When did you last see him?” I said, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand.

Yngve stared across the flatland on the other side of the road and took a couple of drags from the dying cigarette.

“Must have been at Egil's confirmation. May last year. But you were there too, weren't you?”

“Shit, I was,” I said. “That was the last time. Or was it?” Now I wasn't so sure.

Yngve lowered his foot from the bench seat, replaced the top on the bottle and set off for the car as the truck driver came out of the door with a newspaper under his arm and a hot dog in his hand. I chucked the smoking cigarette onto the tarmac and followed. By the time I reached the car the engine was already running.

“Right,” Yngve said. “Two hours to go, give or take. We can eat when we get there, can't we?”

“Okay,” I said.

“Anything you'd like to hear?”

He halted at the junction, glanced a few times back and forth, then we were on the main road again, and he accelerated.

“No,” I said. “You decide.”

He chose Supergrass. The music I had bought in Barcelona, where I had accompanied Tonje while she went to some European local radio seminar. We had seen them live there, and since then I had played them nonstop, along with a couple of other CDs, while writing the novel. The mood of that year suddenly overwhelmed me. So it had already become a memory, I marveled. So it had already become “the time in Volda when I wrote around the clock while Tonje was left to twiddle her thumbs.”

Never again, she had said afterward, the first evening we sat in the new flat in Bergen, the next day we were going to Turkey on holiday. I'll leave you.

“In fact I did see him once after that,” Yngve said. “Last summer when I was in Kristiansand with Bendik and Atle. He was sitting on the bench outside the kiosk by Rundingen, as we drove past. He looked like a bit of a rascal, Bendik said when he saw him. And of course he was right.”

“Poor Dad,” I said.

Yngve looked at me.

“If there is anyone you shouldn't feel sorry for, it's him,” he said.

“I know. But you know what I mean.”

He didn't answer. The silence which in the first few seconds was charged, drifted into mere silence. I surveyed the scenery, which was sparse and windblown here so close to the sea. A red barn or two, a white farmhouse or two,
a tractor or two with a forage harvester in a field. An old car without wheels in a yard, a yellow plastic ball blown under a hedge, some sheep grazing on a slope, a train slowly trundling past on the raised railway track a few hundred meters beyond the road.

I had always suspected we had different relationships with Dad. The differences were not enormous, but perhaps significant. What did I know? For a while Dad had tried to get closer to me, I remembered that well, it was the year Mom had done a continuing education course in Oslo and had her practical in Modum, and we lived at home with him. It was as though he had given up on Yngve, who was fourteen, but still nourished a hope that he could reach me. At any rate, I had to sit in the kitchen every afternoon and keep him company while he made the meal. I sat on the chair, he stood by the stove frying something or other while asking me all sorts of questions. What the teacher had had to say, what we had learned in the English lesson, what I was going to do after the meal, whether I knew which teams were on the pools coupon for this weekend. I gave terse answers and writhed in the chair. It was also the winter he took me skiing. Yngve could do what he liked, so long as he said where he was going and was back by half past nine, and I envied him for that. The period stretched beyond the year Mom was away, however, because the autumn afterward Dad took me fishing in the morning before school, we used to get up at six, it was as dark outside as at the bottom of a well, and cold, particularly on the sea. I was frozen and wanted to go home, but I was with Dad, there was no point in whining, there was no point in saying anything, you had to tough it out. Two hours later we were back, just in time for me to catch the school bus. I hated this, I was always cold, the sea was freezing of course, and it was my job to grab the trawl floats and pull up the first lengths of net while he maneuvred the boat, and if I missed the floats he gave me an earful, more often than not I ended up trying to grab the damn things with tears in my eyes, as he powered back and forth, glaring at me with those wild eyes of his in the autumn darkness off Tromøya. But I know he did this for my sake, and he had never done it for Yngve.

On the other hand, I also know that the first four years of Yngve's life – when they were living in Thereses gate in Oslo, and Dad was studying at the
university and working as a night watchman, and Mom was doing a nursing degree while Yngve was in kindergarten – were good, perhaps even happy. I know that Dad was happy, and loved Yngve. When I was born we moved to Tromøya, at first into an old, former military, house in Hove, in the forest by the sea, then to the house on the estate in Tybakken, and the only thing I was told about that time was that I fell down the stairs and hyperventilated so much that I fainted, and Mom ran with me in her arms to the neighbor's house to call the hospital, as my face was going bluer and bluer, and I had screamed so much that in the end my father had dumped me in the bathtub and showered me with ice cold water to make me stop. Mom, who told me about the incident, had shielded us, and had given him an ultimatum: one more time and she would leave him. It didn't happen again, and she stayed.

Dad's attempts at closeness did not mean that he didn't hit me or yell at me in a rage or concoct the most ingenious ways of punishing me, but it did mean that my image of him was not clear-cut, which perhaps it was to a greater degree for Yngve. He hated Dad with a greater intensity, and that was simpler. I had no idea what relationship Yngve had with him above and beyond that. The notion of having children one day was not without its complications for me, and when Yngve told me that Kari Anne was pregnant it had been impossible to imagine what kind of father Yngve would make, whether what Dad had handed down to us was in our bone marrow or whether it would be possible to break free, maybe even without a problem. Yngve became a kind of test case for me: if all went well it would also go well for me. And it did go well, there was nothing of Dad in Yngve regarding his attitude to children, everything was very different and seemed to be integrated into the rest of his life. He never rejected them, he always had time for them whenever they went to him or he was needed, and he never tried to get close to them, by which I mean he didn't make them compensate for something in himself, or in his life. He handled such incidents as Ylva's kicking, wriggling, howling, and not wanting to get dressed with ease. He had been at home with her for six months, and the closeness they shared was still apparent. Yngve and Dad were the only models I had.

The countryside around us changed again. Now we were driving through
forest. Sørland forests with mountain crags here and there among the trees, hills covered with spruce and oaks, aspen and birch, sporadic dark moorland, sudden meadows, flatland with densely growing pine trees. When I was a boy I used to imagine the sea rising and filling the forests so that the hilltops became islets you could sail between and on which you could bathe. Of all my childhood fantasies this was the one that captivated me most; the thought that everything was covered by water had me spellbound, the thought that you could
swim
where now you were walking,
swim
over bus shelters and roofs, perhaps dive down and glide through a door, up a staircase, into a living room. Or just through a forest, with its slopes, cliffs, cairns, and ancient trees. At a certain point in childhood my most exciting game was building dams in streams, watching the water swell and cover the marsh, the roots, the grass, the rocks, the beaten earth path beside the stream. It was hypnotic. Not to mention the cellar we found in an unfinished house filled with shiny, black water we sailed on in two styrofoam boxes, when we were around five years old. Hypnotic. The same applied to winter when we skated along frozen streams in which grass, sticks, twigs, and small plants stood upright in the translucent ice beneath us.

What had been the great attraction? And what had happened to it?

Another fantasy I had at that time was that there were two enormous saw blades sticking out from the side of the car, chopping off everything as we drove past. Trees and streetlamps, houses and outhouses, but also people and animals. If someone was waiting for a bus they would be sliced through the middle, their top half falling like a felled tree, leaving feet and waist standing and the wound bleeding.

I could still identify with that feeling.

“Down there is Søgne,” Yngve said. “A place I've often heard about but have never been. Have you?”

I shook my head.

“Some of the girls at school came from there. But I've never been.”

It wasn't far to go now.

Soon the countryside began to merge into shapes I vaguely recognized,
it became more and more familiar until what I saw through the window coalesced with the images I had in my mind's eye. It felt as if we were driving into a memory. As if what we were moving through was just a kind of backdrop for my youth. Entering the suburbs, Vågsbygd, where Hanne had lived, the Hennig Olsen factory, Falconbridge Nikel Works, dark and grimy, surrounded by the dead mountains, and then to the right, Kristiansand harbor, the bus station, the ferry terminal, Hotel Caledonien, the silos on the island of Odderøya. To the left, the part of town where Dad's uncle had lived until recently, before dementia had taken him to an old folks' home somewhere.

“Shall we eat first?” Yngve said. “Or go straight to the undertaker's?”

“May as well jump right in,” I said. “Do you know where it is?”

“Elvegata. Don't remember the number.”

“Then we'll have to find the road from the top. Do you know where it starts?”

“No. But just drive. It'll turn up.”

We stopped at the traffic lights, Yngve bent over the wheel looking in all directions. The lights changed to green, he put the car into gear and slowly followed a small truck with a filthy, gray tarpaulin over the back, still peering to the sides, the truck picked up speed, and when he noticed the gap opening he straightened and accelerated.

“It was down there,” he said, nodding to the right. “We'll have to go through the tunnel now.”

“That doesn't matter,” I said. “We just come in from the other side.”

But it did matter. When we emerged from the tunnel and were on the bridge, the studio where I lived was on my right, I saw it from the road, and only a few meters beyond, on the other side of the river, hidden from us, was Grandma's house where Dad had died the day before.