Authors: Roy Jacobsen
“Over there,” we said, or simply “I don’t know”.
Mother had her own take on this, she was new to the island, she said, didn’t even have a tent, ha ha …
But now she had gone and wasn’t coming back.
A few errands? A few days?
Linda mentioned her three times. When Mother wasn’t there to see her swimming with her head above the water for the first time, a sight which would even have brought tears to the eyes of Our Lord. Otherwise, she was happy with Marlene who dressed her in a summer frock and then took it off, only to put on another one, like a present that could be wrapped and unwrapped, and given and received, again and again. After a while she made two friends, of the same robust calibre as Anne-Berit across the corridor at home, older, annoying girls, who looked at her as if she were an interesting pet, a reaction which, by the way, Linda was beginning to resent, something was happening in her too, or it had already happened, such a gradual process that it was impossible to discern until it was too late and it could never be undone. Then one day Boris too was gone. Without warning.
I got up early as usual and washed under the bucket and cleaned my teeth and gave breakfast a miss, there wouldn’t have been any until Jan had woken up anyway, Jan liked a “lie-in” after all the evening visits he made to the other tents occupied by dubious characters whom Marlene greeted with very measured hellos when they spoke to her on the beach in the light of day.
I went down to the camp site and on to the bay where I knew “uncle” had made his latest territorial conquest.
But there was just a light, sickly green patch of flattened grass. I proceeded to the site at Dragevika, didn’t find any Boris there either, and walked round the whole island in the course of the next hour without success, before returning to Daisy where Marlene and Linda had got up and were sitting on a blanket having breakfast.
“Where’s Mother?” I asked.
“At home …” Marlene said evasively.
“It’s almost three weeks since she left,” I continued, a hundred per cent sure of my facts as I had seen a calendar on the quay when I was trying to work out which boat Boris could have left on.
“It may take a little while longer as …”
“What
will take a little longer?”
Marlene sent me a serious look as I stood there thinking I had a right to an answer as I had not mentioned Mother one single time since she left. Somehow, not mentioning her was a way of clutching onto some faith in her, I realised now, because I didn’t receive an answer and it was as if she had gone for good.
That day it began to rain. Not for the first time. But now the heavens were opening. We sat in the tent listening to the hammering on the canvas, playing cards, and we were browner than ever before in the primus fume-saturated gloom. We played Crazy Eights, the one card game Linda knew, and we let her win until I was sick of it, because it was no longer necessary, and she had begun to take it for granted, all the things she couldn’t do, as if it did her any good, so I got up and went into the awning and put on my trunks and went down through the rain and felt the dust sticking to my feet, splashed and loped through the puddles across the sad camp sites, there wasn’t a person to be seen, down to our immortal beach, not a living soul, and nothing else either, just rain.
I waded out into the surprisingly warm water and started to swim, and I swam and swam, and this time I didn’t even turn towards the headland where before we had crawled ashore to have a look at F.T.B., but kept straight on, I was leaving, on my way from the island, from everything.
But I was not alone.
Marlene was swimming next to me, without making a sound. Marlene had got out of bed and come after me and caught me up with her superior crawl. Then she changed to breast stroke and we swam like Boris and I had, side by side. She said:
“Great, isn’t it?” without looking at me.
I saw no particular reason to look at her, either. I swam. “You’re a smart lad,” Marlene said. “You knew the whole time, didn’t you?”
I hadn’t known anything at all, but this nonsense made me see the light to the extent that I knew all I could do now was carry on doing what I was doing, swimming.
Marlene turned onto her back without losing any speed and said into the rain that was still beating down on us – the surface resembled a grey porcupine, and from the forest on both sides we heard a torrent of water crashing down on billions and billions of leaves, like an avalanche of sand and gravel and stones careering down from the sky over the forests and the sea – and Marlene said:
“Your mother is in hospital having treatment. It’s nothing serious. She just didn’t want you children to worry …”
My silence was not to be broken. I was on my back now as well, and opened my mouth for the raindrops that had grown colder while the water I was in was becoming warmer and warmer. “But perhaps that wasn’t such a good move?” Marlene continued, and with that everything went even quieter in the storm. But here at least it was possible to cry without anyone noticing. In a different tone of voice, Marlene said:
“I know I should have told you before.”
Two strokes. Three.
“Told me what?” I said.
“About your mother,” she said.
“Oh, that,” I said, feeling an unfamiliar toughness beginning to take shape. It was about time. The determination that this should never be allowed to repeat itself, the hatred and the bitterness at not being able to decide whether to thrust a knife in her or start to weep so that she could console me like a second Linda, for I was no child any more and yet I was, and I wanted to be neither, but someone else, again.
This is what it is like being on holiday. It makes you begin to see that you could have been someone else, had you only lived somewhere else, been surrounded by different people and houses from those that stand on either side of Traverveien like two intrepid mountain ranges containing mothers and sons and treachery and friendship. It is a deep revolutionary insight. You could say it was a warning sign, both the onset of a collapse and a new beginning.
We got up in the sun that always shines after the rain has done its job and discovered that for the first time we could see over to the mainland, through fresh, clear air. I showed Freddy 1 the kingdom of the eagle owl, the bird that can see into the future and therefore has no reason to live, yet it does. I showed him the dragon and F.T.B. and the football pitch and taught him to dribble with a ball, and we were always in the same team, The Gang F.C. I had become a Boris, initiating an invisible friend into all and sundry and not telling that stupid little sister a thing, Linda, who didn’t talk about Mother at all now and was incapable of experiencing the loss and the fury that I felt. I was nursing a secret, it was expanding and contracting inside me, like a pulse, great days, I suppose I have to admit that, we had become veterans who caught mooring ropes and positioned the gangplank and laughed at the helpless new arrivals, and I came to the realisation that if you are in any doubt as to whether you are any good, you just have to ask yourself if you are able to keep a secret that is bursting inside you,
someone else’s secret.
Then summer was over.
The boat was leaving. Our boat. We had seen hundreds of departures and this had made us think. Travelling home from an island like this is like carrying a grand piano from a condemned house, the past is irrevocable, childhood is over and all hope is gone – I arrived a month ago an innocent, naïve and happy child. With a mother. I am travelling back home as a cynical orphan, hanging over the railings, and staring down into the frothing wake from the chugging hulk of rust overcrowded with ignorant, sun-sated holidaymakers along the Nesodden peninsula.
We drag the kitbag and satchels and ice box up through the city centre and into the tropical heat of the bus and get off at Refstad with the kitbag and satchels and a box, which no longer contains dry ice and smoked sausages, and pause for a second or two in the diesel-laden air, and stare down Trondhjemsveien to the blocks of flats in Traverveien, and recognise ourselves again.
We not only recognise ourselves, we even nod in somewhat aggrieved acknowledgement of the fact that the buildings are still standing, strangely silent. It is always silence that puts the world in another light than its own. The silence of snow in winter. The silence of the industrial holiday. And now a silence which is not ours, because we are not in it, but standing outside ready to enter with kitbag and satchels and summer–tanned arms and legs and backs. We step into our town and do not recognise it because it is evident it has been ours even without us. We smile, a little nervous and shy, and we can hardly wait any longer, we have to run. And shout. There are echoes between the blocks and in the entrance hall. We want to hear the echoes. A
vox populi
from the mountains.
Is there
no-one
here to welcome us?
No, there is not. Estate stay-at-homes don’t stand on balconies and in doorways to receive estate holidaymakers. Estate people know better, even if they have never been to heaven.
This
is heaven.
This
is what counts. So don’t come all that abstract stuff about absence with me!
But at least there is a letter. On the kitchen table. And everything around this single letter is so unlived-in that Jan has to open the veranda door and the kitchen window so that the late summer can sweep through the stifling atmosphere, the way we aired a tent a month ago. But it doesn’t help. For the person who should have been here is not. Nor is the lodger. Just this accursed letter that Marlene opens with slow, concerned movements, which she manages to hide as usual, though not from me, I know better now, and she unfolds a sheet of paper and reads it before dropping a casual remark in our direction:
“O.K., she’ll be here in a couple of days.”
Then I do what summer has taught me. The absence and the paradise. I say:
“Let me see.”
“See what?”
“The letter,” I say coldly, demanding tangible proof that she is not lying. Marlene cannot give it to me.
“It’s addressed to me,” she says evasively.
“Let me see,” I repeat.
“It’s private,” she says.
“Alright,” I say and go into my room so as not to witness Linda again having to be spoon-fed the news that Mother is still not here, Linda who has been looking forward to seeing her ever since Marlene broached the subject, when we started packing at nine o’clock this morning and Linda didn’t want to go home and leave the salt water and the tent and the wonderful island, but she was coaxed into leaving with “There’ll be another summer next year” and, best of all, “Now we’re going home to Mamma!” Which she proceeded to talk about non-stop during the long trek on the boat and the bus and across the road and through the estate and up all the stairs, only to come here and find a bloody letter! Which Marlene opens and reads in all her radiant idiocy. I can’t look at it. I can’t listen to it. I go into my room and can’t be bothered to unpack. I sling my school bag onto the bed and open the window and sit on the sill and wrap my arms around my knees and scan the nearest mountain top waiting for Freddy 1 to appear in his window and recognise me. Freddy 1 does not. Freddy 1 stays true to form. And that is
something,
to quote Boris’ “uncle”.
We have all sorts on this estate. We have a blind boxer and a taxi-driver whose eyesight is not a lot better. We have two ancient sisters with a greying Alsatian which barks every time it hears the word newspaper. We have people who pick 123 litres of lingonberries every autumn and are nonetheless able to eat them all. We have a motley crew of energetic little scallywags who climb drainpipes and trees and build huts and smash windows. We have people who collect bottle tops and matchboxes and beer mats, but who never touch a pack of cards because it is godless. There are people here who stammer and lisp, there are tone-deaf men who whistle in the stairwells, we have a lady with a cleft palate and a family man who buys a new Moskvitch every spring to keep faith with the Sixties. There are people here who set off New Year rockets inside their flats and kick in doors and crack their heads on tarmac. We even have some right-wing voters. We are a whole world. A planet orbiting so gently and brutally through the Sixties, the decade that would change a hat and a coat into a blistering guitar solo, the decade when men became boys and housewives women, the decade that transformed the town from being something old and worn with its memory intact to something modern with galloping Alzheimer’s, the decade of inbuilt obsolescence, the Norwegian cultural revolution’s social rock-cruncher, when even the system of coordinates went to pot – you could send a pig in at the beginning of the Sixties and out would come a matchbox at the other end. An over-rated, duplicitous and misunderstood decade,
my
decade.
Then Mother returns home, four days after us, four days that we have spent in the flat with Marlene. The errant mother, a faraway look in her eyes, pale and dressed in new, unfamiliar garb, who smells different and has shorter hair as she hugs us and sobs and tells us how she never stopped thinking about us and missed us, and doles out her affection in equal portions between Linda and me, which of course Linda won’t stand for, she wants to have Mother all to herself and clings to her, and that is fine by me, because it gives us something to laugh about, perhaps, Mother who has had stomach trouble, she says, but now she is well again, Mother who reappears from the great unknown, claiming she has had an iffy stomach and is forced to hear an equally errant son’s first sentence:
“I don’t believe a word of that.”
“What did you say?”
It is amazing how adults can serve you up the most threadbare of lies and then take offence when they are caught out.
“You’ve been with Kristian,” I say, without quite knowing where the words come from.
“What
did you say!” she says, echoing her own stupidity. But Marlene grasps the seriousness of the situation.
“Show him your hand.”