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Authors: Dag Solstad

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All that time, Elias was close to them, as the family friend, and especially Johan’s friend. Every once in a while Johan would call and invite him to Grorud. And Elias Rukla went. Took first the tram from Majorstua to the National Theatre, underground, walked down Karl Johans gate from the National Theatre to Railway Square, where he took the T-bane to Grorud, entered the high-rise building and took the lift up to the ninth floor, where they were expecting him. It seemed to him he was part of everything they ever did. Dined with them, went on rambles with them, took part in the care of the baby (only as an interested spectator, to be sure), and he also went along, with both or with one of them, to the supermarket, where he insisted on sharing the bill, in return sticking his nose into what was to be purchased. It also happened that he stayed the night, on the living-room sofa. In the wintertime they went skiing in Lillomarka. Eva, Johan (with little Camilla in a reindeer sleigh), and Elias Rukla. Eva attracted enormous attention – the male skiers stopped instantly when she passed by, staring open-mouthed after her. They tried, all three of them, to ignore it, but at times Johan could not refrain from laughing, and so they would all three of them laugh, a bit resignedly, though Elias was unable to imbue his laughter with any authentic resignation, because, after all, he was also dazzled by Eva Linde’s unearthly beauty. He would walk beside her, behind
Johan
, who was pulling the reindeer sleigh. She saw to it that little Camilla did not have the sun in her face. Elias Rukla saw to it as well, all the while engaging in small talk. He liked the way she talked. Her voice, when she talked, had a certain timbre that came from way inside her vocal cords somewhere, something veiled, something he could not find words for and had never heard before. The attractive young woman searched for words, tasted them, as if asking herself, and not least others, and in this case Elias Rukla, who was walking beside her, behind Johan (who was pulling the reindeer sleigh with the small child), Can I really say this? Now and then she would laugh at something he said, quite exuberantly, which pleased Elias. But he could not say that he ‘knew’ her. No, that he could not say, he knew little or nothing about her, but even so he felt close to her, as a friend, not least in situations like this, where other men stared open-mouthed after her when the three of them, Johan (with Camilla on the sleigh), Eva and he, Elias Rukla, passed them by while skiing in Lillomarka. He experienced her as a beauty that had to be protected, also by him, Johan’s friend. He was thrilled by the way she showed off her face. Which required the greatest thoughtfulness on his part not to say anything wrong, such as describing it in so many words, because he suspected she would not feel flattered but, quite the contrary, be irritated, and so strongly that she would dislike him, maybe even so strongly that she would speak ill of him to Johan Corneliussen. Accordingly, he was very discreet with her, in order not to offend what he assumed to be her
fragile
beauty. So he was mostly engaging her in conversation, trying to amuse her rather than get to know her. When all was said and done, he associated her beauty with being asleep. In his innermost self he associated Eva Linde’s beauty with sleep. When she showed off her face, as when they went skiing in Lillomarka, it was clear, to be sure, purged of its origin in sleep, but at the same time it had an impersonal aspect, something she obviously could not help and therefore did not like to be remarked upon, he assumed, and so it was right, well, chivalrous, of Johan to laugh resignedly at those lingering glances and also for him, Elias, to join in this resigned laughter as best he could. But her beauty’s home was in the repose of sleep, that was clear to him. Maybe it was because he so often experienced her precisely as being asleep, behind the door to her and Johan’s bedroom in their Grorud apartment. After all, his connection with Eva Linde and Johan Corneliussen was based on the fact that he was Johan Corneliussen’s friend, and Johan Corneliussen’s friend from his bachelor days, when so many of their joint activities consisted of going on the spree together, through thick and thin, one might say, and that their friendship still consisted in going on the spree together, though not to the same extent as before. But Johan often met Elias in town. And, too, after closing time he often invited Elias to come along to Grorud to continue the bender. Then Eva would be asleep behind a closed door facing the living room. While Johan and Elias engaged in discussion and talked together. About life in general (that is to say, philosophy,
literature
, art, politics, etc., etc., and often with reference to their own lives). As a rule Elias would then stay the night on the living-room sofa, take the tram back to the city early in the morning, and go directly to his first class at Fagerborg. Before he hurried off, Johan had got up, along with little Camilla. Eva was still asleep. Her beauty sleep, he presumed. So that every time he really saw her, say, on Sundays when they went skiing in Lillomarka, she was in Elias’ perception of her enveloped in an aura of sleep. With her soft face, satisfied and soothed by sleep, she belonged to the restfulness of sleep; that was where she came from, though he had never seen her sleep, only known that she was lying behind that closed bedroom door facing the living room, a rectangle clearly separate from the wall, with a doorknob a little below the middle, to the left, which Johan Corneliussen pressed down to let himself in at least once every time they sat like that on the ninth floor of a high-rise building at Grorud till late in the night, closed the door gently behind him, and then, shortly afterwards, came out again, but without saying anything. Johan Corneliussen’s indescribably attractive wife. Johan Corneliussen and Elias Rukla in the living room. Johan Corneliussen going up to the window to look out. The lights below. The four-lane highway, illuminated, and now at night without a single car. The philosopher Johan Corneliussen who taught Elias Rukla so many things. Johan Corneliussen who talked and Elias Rukla who came out with objections, dry comments, trying to display a healthy scepticism towards Johan Corneliussen’s deep-probing thoughts and ideas. They
tried
to speak in low voices, but now and then they became too excited, and one of them had to intervene and hush the other. But once when Elias hushed Johan Corneliussen in this way, the latter said, It’s not necessary. She isn’t sleeping anyway. She pretends to be asleep, but she’s listening. I’ve caught her repeating conversations we’ve had when supposedly she was fast asleep. This made a strong impression on Elias Rukla. And every time since when he was at Grorud with Johan late at night, drinking and discussing with him, he kept thinking of her lying behind that door, immersed in sleep, enveloped by the soft shell of sleep, but listening. And his heart filled with sadness, because this woman who, lying there in the ambience and posture of sleep, was listening to the voices of her husband and the latter’s friend, voices that, rising, sank into her slumbering consciousness, made Elias Rukla think about his own solitary situation. It must have been in 1974 that Johan Corneliussen suddenly came out with this statement about his young wife listening in her sleep, and Elias Rukla was then a bachelor of thirty-four and had long ago given up the idea of finding a life partner. Actually, he did not mind; he liked to be alone, and one of the reasons why he had always withdrawn from women (after he had asked them for a date and walked them home, at the moment when one usually tries to make an overture, Elias had done the opposite, held out his hand and thanked them for a lovely evening, often to the young lady’s disappointment, he had noticed, though, to be sure, only after he got home) was, in fact, that he was
afraid
of losing himself by getting involved with someone who, all things considered, was a total stranger, with whom he would have to share everything, and the feeling of being smothered, held tight, which then rose in him, had been so strong that he had decided to live alone, as a bachelor, because that suited him best; but now and then he would be overcome by sadness, a feeling that he suffered from a lack, which not only made him contemptible in the eyes of others, for that he knew he was, but also made him a half-person, insofar as the drive towards ‘the other’ was absent from his life at the age of thirty-four. And so, here he sat on the ninth floor of a high-rise building at Grorud, in his friend’s apartment, together with his friend, knowing he was half a person who would never be whole and feeling overcome with grief at the prospect of never becoming whole, inasmuch as he knew that behind that door lay Johan Corneliussen’s wife, who made Johan Corneliussen whole, listening to her husband’s (and the latter’s friend’s) voice in her slumbering state, and in this way, he thought, I steal into a woman’s slumberous state, as the shadow of Johan Corneliussen that I am. And this he thought without bitterness, as an affirmation of the facts of the case, because these were, after all, the circumstances under which his life was lived, and by and large Elias Rukla thought at that time, in 1974, that he was living as rich a life as one might reasonably expect to live, with a meaningful job, great personal freedom, and an undiminished intellectual curiosity about life and the scope and limits that life defines for you, not least in a social
perspective
. And so, soon afterwards, he would take the sheet, duvet cover, and pillowcase that Johan Corneliussen handed him and begin to make a bed for himself on the sofa, preparing to stay the night as so often before, while Johan Corneliussen padded about the apartment, turned out the lights, and checked the electric switches before quietly disappearing into the bedroom, to his still-just-as-attractive wife, Eva Linde.

This was the situation. It was in 1974 that Johan Corneliussen had disclosed that Eva Linde used to listen to their conversations, giving them a different hue than before. Did Elias Rukla love Eva Linde? Did he lie on the sofa outside her and Johan Corneliussen’s bedroom door for seven years waiting for her? No, Elias Rukla could honestly say that this was not so. It was simply unthinkable. He was taken with her, that he would admit, but it was as Johan Corneliussen’s spouse that he was taken with her. She had no value at all for him by herself; that was not only forbidden, it was unthinkable. Had he then suffered from an unthinkable love for her? That was something Elias Rukla could not dismiss out of hand, and it would, if true, explain the twinges he used to feel in certain situations, of sadness, even grief, as well as a state of excitement, like the time when Johan Corneliussen disclosed that Eva Linde was listening to them behind her closed door. So it is not impossible that, between 1969 and 1976, from when he was twenty-eight until he turned thirty-six, when he started his career as senior master at the Fagerborg school in a mood of high expectation, established himself in an apartment of his own in Jacob
Aalls
gate, tried, albeit somewhat half-heartedly, to find a life partner, not least among his younger colleagues at Fagerborg and other secondary schools, amused himself in his leisure time mixing with old acquaintances from his student days, cultivated and kept up his particularly close friendship with Johan Corneliussen – it is not impossible that, in reality, he was suffering from, and letting his steps be controlled by, an unthinkable love for Eva Linde. But if that was so, no trace of this love can be found anywhere, except possibly for those brief occasional twinges in the course of those seven long years, not even in the rather odd geographical fact that, when Elias Rukla and Johan Corneliussen met in town, they did not follow it up with an evening in Jacob Aalls gate but in remote Grorud, a suburban village a good six miles from downtown Oslo with its restaurants, forcing Elias Rukla to get up at the crack of dawn the next morning and leave in a hurry to get to his job as senior master, whereas if they had ended up in Jacob Aalls gate, Johan Corneliussen could have taken it easy, because he did not have such obligations early the next morning. But it was Johan who insisted that they should go to his place, and that was due to the fact that it was his job to take care of Camilla when she awoke in the morning (so that Eva could sleep), and so he had to get home. Therefore, if they were to continue, it had to be at his place. So it was not the sleeping Eva who tempted Elias Rukla to undertake this rather strange trip to Grorud, but the company of Johan Corneliussen. Nevertheless, Elias Rukla could not dismiss the possibility that he had all along suffered from an unthinkable love of Eva Linde, but, if so,
it
had not even once been allowed to control his anything but remarkable steps, and if something had not happened that was beyond his control, creating an entirely new situation, he could have lived his whole life, to this day, when this is being written, that is NOW, without his having had the least suspicion that he was suffering from an unthinkable passion, whose source was the gradually rather fading beauty Eva Linde Corneliussen.

It was in 1974 that Elias Rukla had felt this twinge of pain that made him wrought up, and subsequently wistful, at the thought that, behind the door where Eva Linde was asleep, there was a listening woman in a state of slumber. By that time, however, Johan Corneliussen must unconsciously have reached the decision that made Elias Rukla’s unthinkable love thinkable. The proof of this is contained in his strange decision not to apply for the large fellowship that would have taken him and his family to the University of Heidelberg for two years. His justification was that the family could not afford it and that he did not want to go there by himself. Due to family reasons, that is, he decided not to apply for the fellowship (which he had been urged to apply for), something Elias, and many others, already then thought was odd, because the small family would have managed without any special problems, given the economic circumstances in which Dr Corneliussen, PhD, would find himself in Heidelberg. But this oddity also pointed to something else, something of much greater scope and seriousness by this, Johan Corneliussen declared that he was no longer going all out for philosophy. Through this decision Johan Corneliussen
showed
(to those who wanted to see, which nobody did at the time) that he would no longer devote his life to becoming a contributor to nothing less than the dossier of human thought, which, after all, he had asserted that the literature about Immanuel Kant actually was. So something must have happened to Johan Corneliussen that was rooted in his thinking.

BOOK: Shyness And Dignity
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