My Struggle: Book One (61 page)

“Unravelling” was our family euphemism for senility. Grandad's brother, Leif, his brain “unravelled” when, on several occasions, he wandered from the old people's home to his childhood home, where he hadn't lived for sixty years, and stood shouting and banging on the door all through the night. His second brother, Alf, his mind had started unravelling in recent years; it was most obvious in his merging of the present and the past. And Grandad's mind also started unravelling at the end of his life when he sat up at night fiddling with an enormous collection of keys, no one knew he had them, let alone why. It was in the family; their mother's mind unravelled eventually, if we were to believe what my father had said. Apparently the last thing she did was climb into the loft instead of going down into the cellar when she had heard a siren; according to my father, she fell down the steep loft staircase in her house and died. Whether that was true or not, I don't know, my father could serve up all manner of lies. My intuition told me it wasn't, but there was no way of finding out.

I carried the pot to the stove and put it on the burner. The ticking of the safety device filled the kitchen. Then the damp pot began to crackle. I stood with folded arms, peering at the top of the steep hill outside the window, at the imposing white house. It struck me that I had stared at that house all my life without ever seeing anyone in or around it.

“Where's Yngve then?” Grandma asked.

“He had to go back to Stavanger today,” I said, addressing her. “To his family. He'll be back for the f … for Friday.”

“Yes, that was it.” She nodded to herself. “He had to go back to Stavanger.”

As she grasped the pouch of tobacco and the small, red-and-white roller machine, she said, without looking up: “But you're staying here?”

“Yes,” I said. “I'll be here all the time.”

I was happy that she so clearly wanted me to be here, even though I gathered that it was not me especially that she wanted here, anyone would do.

She cranked the handle of the machine with surprising vigor, flipped out the freshly filled cigarette and lit it, brushing a few flakes from her lap again and sat staring into space.

“I thought I would carry on cleaning,” I said. “And then I'll have to work a bit later this evening and make a few phone calls.”

“That's fine,” she said and looked up at me. “But you aren't so busy that you don't have time to sit here for a while, are you?”

“Not at all, no,” I answered.

The coffeepot hissed. I pressed it down harder on the burner, the steam hissed louder, and I removed it, sprinkled in some coffee, stirred with a fork, banged hard, once, on the stovetop and placed it on the table.

“There we are,” I said. “Now it'll just have to brew for a bit.”

The fingerprints on the pot, which we hadn't washed off, must have included Dad's. I visualized the nicotine stains on his fingers. There had been something undignified about doing this. Inasmuch as the trivial life it demonstrated did not go together with the solemnity death evoked.

Or that I wanted death to evoke.

Grandma sighed.

“Oh dear,” she said. “Life's a pitch, as the old woman said. She couldn't pronounce her ‘b's.'”

I smiled. Grandma smiled too. Then her eyes glazed over again. I racked my brain for something to say, found nothing, poured coffee in the cup even though it was more a golden color than black, and tiny coffee grains floated to the surface.

“Do you want some?” I asked. “It's a bit thin, but …”

“Please,” she said, nudging her cup a few centimeters along the table.

“Thank you,” she said when it was half-full. Grasped the yellow carton of cream and poured.

“Where's Yngve then?” she asked.

“He's gone to Stavanger,” I answered. “Home to his family.”

“That's right. He had to go. When's he coming back?”

“On Friday, I think,” I said.

I rinsed the bucket in the sink, ran the tap, poured in some green soap, put on rubber gloves, grabbed the cloth on the table with one hand, lifted the bucket with the other, and went to the back of the living room. Outside, darkness was beginning to fall. A faint bluish glimmer was visible in the light at ground height, around the foliage on the trees, their trunks, the bushes as far as the fence to the neighbor's plot. So faint was it that the colors were not muted as they would gradually become in the course of the evening, on the contrary, they were strengthened because the light no longer dazzled, and the dulled background allowed their fullness to come to the fore. But to the southwest, where you could just see the lighthouse in the sea, daylight was still unchallenged. Some clouds had a reddish glow, as though powered by their own energy, for the sun was hidden.

After a while Grandma came in. She switched on the TV and sat down in the chair. The sound of commercials, louder than the program, as always, filled not only the living room but also reverberated against the walls.

“Is the news on now?” I asked.

“I suppose so,” she said. “Don't you want to see it as well?”

“Yes, I do,” I said. “I'll just finish up here first.”

After washing all the paneling along one wall I wrung out the cloth and went into the kitchen, where the reflection of my figure, in the form of vague, lighter and darker patches, was visible in the window, poured the water into the sink, draped the cloth over the bucket, stood motionless for a second, then opened the cupboard, pushed the paper towels to the side and pulled out the vodka bottle. I fetched two glasses from the cupboard above the
sink, opened the fridge and took out the Sprite bottle, filled one glass with it, mixed the other with vodka and carried both into the living room.

“I thought we might allow ourselves a little drink,” I smiled.

“How nice,” she smiled back. “I think we might too.”

I passed her the glass with the vodka, took the one with the Sprite, and sat down in the chair beside her. Terrible, it was terrible. It tore me apart. But there was nothing I could do about it. She needed it. That's the way it was.

If only it had been cognac or port!

Then I could have served it on a tray with a cup of coffee, and that would have given, if not a completely normal impression, then at least one not as conspicuous as clear vodka and Sprite.

I watched her opening her aged mouth and swallowing down the drink. I had been determined that this would not happen again. But now, there she was, sitting with a glass of alcohol in her hand. It cut me to the quick. Fortunately she didn't ask me for more.

I got up.

“I'll go and make some phone calls.”

She turned her head toward me.

“Who are you going to call at this hour?” she asked.

Again she seemed to be addressing someone else.

“It's only eight o'clock,” I said.

“It's not later?”

“No. I thought I would call Yngve. And then Tonje.”

“Yngve?”

“Yes.”

“Isn't he here then? No, of course, he isn't,” she said. Then she focused her attention on the TV as though I had already left the room.

I pulled out a chair from under the table, sat down, and dialed Yngve's number. He had just walked in the door, everything had gone fine. In the background I could hear Torje screaming and Kari Anne hushing him.

“I was wondering about the blood,” I said.

“Yes, what
was
that?” he said. “There must have been more going on than Grandma told us.”

“He must have fallen or something,” I said. “On a hard surface because his nose was broken. Did you see that?”

“Of course.”

“We ought to have a word with someone who was here. Preferably, with the doctor.”

“The funeral director probably has his name,” Yngve said. “Do you want me to ask him?”

“Yes, could you?”

“I'll call tomorrow. It's a bit late now. Then we can talk about it.”

I had thought of talking more about all the things that had happened here, but detected a certain impatience in his voice, and that was not so surprising. His daughter, Ylva, who was two years old, had waited up for him. And, of course, it was hardly more than a few hours since we had seen each other. However, he didn't make a move to end the conversation, so I had to do it myself. After hanging up I dialed Tonje's number. She had been waiting for me to call; I could hear it in her voice. I said I was very tired, that we could chat more the following day and that in a couple of days she would be down here very soon anyway. The conversation lasted only a few moments, nonetheless I felt better afterward. I fished out my cigarettes, snatched a lighter from the kitchen table, and went onto the veranda. The bay was full of returning boats. The mild air was filled with the town's smell of timber, as always when the wind came from the north, the scent of plants from the garden below and the faint, barely detectable, tang of the sea. In the room inside, the light from the TV flickered. I stood by the black wrought-iron gate at the end of the veranda, smoking. I extinguished the cigarette against the wall, and the glowing ash fell like tiny stars into the garden. Again I checked that Grandma was sitting in the living room before going upstairs to my bedroom. My suitcase lay open beside the bed. I picked up the cardboard box containing the manuscript, sat down on the edge of the bed, and tore off the tape. The thought that this had actually become a book which would soon be
published struck me with full force when I saw the title page, set out so differently from the proof version to which I had become accustomed. I quickly put it at the bottom, couldn't spend time thinking about that, found myself a pencil from the pocket in the suitcase, picked up the sheet with a key to the proofreader's marks, slipped into bed with my back to the headboard and rested the manuscript on my lap. This was urgent, so I had planned to go through as much as I could during the evenings here. So far there hadn't been any time. But with Yngve in Stavanger and the evening still young I had at least four hours in front of me, if not more.

I started reading.

The two black suits, each one hanging on a half-open wardrobe door by the wall, disrupted my concentration, for while I was reading I was aware of them, and even though I knew they were only suits the perception that they were real bodies cast a shadow over my consciousness. After a few minutes I got up to move them. I stood with a suit in each hand, looking around for somewhere to hang them. From the curtain rod above the window? They would be even more visible there. From the door frame? No, I would have to walk through. In the end I walked into the adjacent loft drying room and hung them on separate clotheslines. Hanging freely, they looked more like people than before, but if I closed the door at least they were out of sight.

I went back to my room, sat down on the bed, and continued reading. In the streets below a car accelerated. From the floor below came the noise of the TV. In the otherwise quiet, empty house it sounded absolutely insane, there was a madness in the rooms.

I looked up.

I had written the book for Dad. I hadn't known, but that was how it was. I had written it for him.

I put down the manuscript and got to my feet, walked to the window.

Did he really mean so much to me?

Oh, yes, he did.

I wanted him to see me.

The first time I had realized what I was writing really was something, not
just me wanting to be someone, or pretending to be, was when I wrote a passage about Dad and started crying while I was writing. I had never done that before, never even been close. I wrote about Dad and the tears were streaming down my cheeks, I could barely see the keyboard or the screen, I just hammered away. Of the existence of the grief inside me that had been released at that moment, I had known nothing; I had not had an inkling. My father was an idiot, I wanted nothing to do with him, and it cost me nothing to keep well away from him. It wasn't a question of keeping away from something, it was a question of the something not existing; nothing about him touched me. That was how it had been, but then I had sat down to write, and the tears poured forth.

I sat down on the bed again and placed the manuscript on my lap.

But there was more.

I had also wanted to show him that I was better than he was. That I was bigger than he was. Or was it just that I wanted him to be proud of me? To acknowledge me?

He hadn't even known I was having a book published. The last time I met him face to face before he died, eighteen months previously, he had asked me what I was doing with myself, and I had answered that I had just started writing a novel. We had been walking up Dronningens gate, we were going to eat out, sweat was running down his cheeks even though it was cold outside, and he asked, without looking at me, obviously to make conversation, if anything would come of it. I had nodded and said that one publishing house was interested. Whereupon he had glanced at me as we were walking, as though from a place in which he still was the person he had once been, and perhaps could be again.