Authors: Roy Jacobsen
“I don’t know.”
She looked as if she were ready to lash out, but I wasn’t even afraid, just cold, at which she blurted out that there was no end to these wretched adoption papers, we were being scrutinised from top to toe, the school and the doctors and every conceivable public body had to give its opinion on how far we were capable of taking care of Linda.
“Are we going to adopt her?”
“Yes, don’t you want to?”
Of course I did, I had adopted her the day she arrived, but what was it with Mother, there she was, looking as if she wasn’t going to adopt anybody at all, and in a rambling attempt to get the matter clarified I happened to mention that we had seen Kristian on the tram today.
“On the tram?”
“Yes, in uniform. We were about to pay for our tickets, and there he was.”
“On the
tram?!”
This was beyond the bounds of comprehension, and in my eyes, too, he was strangely out of place, but I had seen him and knew that this was no mirage, I repeated that three times. Whereupon she sat shaking her head and looking as if she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. But then she perked up again.
“Next time you make sure you bring your satchels back with you,” she said.
“What do you mean, next time?”
“Next time, that’s what I mean. This will happen again, believe you me.”
I didn’t understand. “Look at me, Finn,” she said, grabbing me by the shoulders and staring deep into my inner soul. “If anything should happen, you two have to be model pupils, no matter what, both of you, do you understand! Now go in and teach her some arithmetic.”
“She hasn’t got any sums to do yet …”
“Go
in and teach her some arithmetic, I said!”
Sad to say, Mother was proved to be right. Flintstone was there again the very next day, his yellow finger plucked me out of the classroom, down the corridor and stairs we went, to where Linda was howling for Mamma. But this time we didn’t take the tram, we walked home, on foot, with our school bags, and did our homework as though we had become addicted to it.
The day after, it happened again, for the third time. And now the whole school knew what was going on, Tanja too, who in a spare minute came over to me and said she thought someone was picking on Linda.
“How do you know?”
She shrugged and tried to wriggle out of it. But for once her overwhelming beauty did not help her, besides the embarrassing bear was still fresh in my memory. “How do you know that?” I repeated with undisguisable irritation, but I was simply sent one of her many watery smiles and I watched her go back to the girls in whose gang she would never be accepted, in a way that betokened she knew she would never be accepted anywhere, and had recognised her own image in Linda.
Today Linda would not say anything, either. We walked home again and did our homework. I threatened and cajoled and scolded her, even explained that unless she told me what was going on, Mother would throw in the towel and leave us, for good!
Nothing was of any use. Linda would only hold a pencil and write letters and draw, the tip of her tongue sticking out of the left corner of her mouth and her cheek pressed against the paper, so concentrated that there could be no doubt that she was on a journey into a realm where neither a Norwegian primary school nor bewildered half-brothers or step-mothers could pursue her. Linda was not of this world, one day I would come to understand this – she was a Martian come down to earth to speak in tongues to heathens, to speak French to Norwegians and Russian to Americans. She was fate, beauty and a catastrophe. A bit of everything. Mother’s mirror and Mother’s childhood. All over again. The last remaining fragment of that which will never vanish. God must have had a purpose with her, a secret plan – but what was the plan?
“What’s that?” I ask.
“A giraffe,” Linda says, sending me the smile that means she knows bloody well it is neither a giraffe nor a dung beetle, but what does it matter, what the hell are we supposed to do with giraffes that look like giraffes? Put them in our piggy banks?
At last the moment had come.
I fetch the key from the jewellery box and unlock the dressing-table drawer that has been locked for two hundred years, and take out a pile of battered, sand-coloured, envelopes, an old album too, of photographs, which I spread over the kitchen table.
“Linda,” says Linda, placing her forefinger on a photo of me as a baby.
“No,” I say. “That’s me.”
She won’t have that, and we squabble until I give in, when my eye is caught by Mother and the man who must be our father, with Uncle Oskar and Gran and Tor and the rest of the family. They look normal. They are on the beach, in the forest, sitting outside an old-fashioned white tent each holding a coffee cup with no handle. In one photograph Mother and the stranger beside her are standing by a statue in Frogner Park which I know is called The Wheel of Life. In another, the same man is standing on a newly mown meadow with a young Uncle Bjarne, they each have a pitchfork in one hand and one arm around the other’s shoulders, like brothers. Nothing abnormal about any of that.
In other words, I see nothing at all. I see that by and large Mother is as good-looking as Marlene, in fact better-looking, and that our idiot of a father does not resemble us
that
much, neither me nor Linda, in short there is nothing of interest here.
If I had ever believed that we were afflicted by some illness, and indeed I have, and that the cause of it would be revealed by these photographs, like X-rays, then I was entirely mistaken. But does that mean that we are sound in mind and body now?
I sit with one photograph that will stay with me for the rest of my life and mean something through all its extraordinary phases, a picture of Tonsen estate while it was being developed, an estate under construction, with a crane in the midst of a sea of mud, swinging a concrete section into position in No. 4. Our father is in the cab of the crane, one hot summer’s day in 1953, he is doing voluntary community work, like the swarm of other men to be seen in the photograph, men with wheelbarrows and cement-mixers, men in checked shirts with braces and rolled-up shirtsleeves and cloth caps, earning us the right to live here. It is essentially a proud picture, at any rate it is not an embarrassing secret. But he is invisible here too, an invisible man operating a crane looking like an iron heron or a gallows, at work lifting numbered concrete panels into precisely designated slots, so that for several decades to come people will be able to live their lives there, have dinner and sleep and raise children who grow up and confront mysteries and harbour secrets that threaten to explode inside them.
This photograph that has always been under lock and key in a drawer puts me in a solemn mood, I sit with it in my lap and place it on the table and tap it against the salt cellar, almost shamefaced, I look out through our new pastel-coloured blinds that only Mother knows how to operate, with cords Linda and I tangle and tie knots in, looking across to Freddy 1’s mountain top, and down again at the picture, a black and white photograph of an invisible man at work.
My picture.
Linda has also found hers, a photograph of Mother sitting on the bumper of a black Ford which I immediately recognise as a 1936 model. She is wearing sandals and a white dress, with daisies in her hair, and seems to be smiling in response to a quip from someone like me, or Linda, someone she loves, at any rate. The most vibrant picture in the whole pile, a snapshot of a carefree moment in Mother’s life. Could
that
be what she doesn’t want to see again, or show us, a moment when she is smiling and happy?
Because it is a thing of the past?
I also find photographs of myself from a time that is past, alone in almost all of them, because Mother held the camera, and the rest are of her and me. Apart from the ones Marlene took this summer, where I am with Linda and Boris, and we don’t have a problem looking at them, do we? That is what we have got them for. We pick up and put down photos at will, feeling that something is right, we sit quietly, private, letting our memories speak to us in friendly tones. Furthermore, we are as normal as the crowd pictured in the pile on the table.
“I want
that
one,” Linda says, pointing to the photograph of Mother, goes to the kitchen unit, pulls out the drawer of things that neither belong together nor anywhere else, takes out a roll of tape and scissors and goes into her room while I gather up all the pictures and eventually follow her.
Linda has stuck Mother on the wall above her bed.
Now she is lying back with her arms behind her head gazing at Mother. I replace the envelopes and the album in the drawer, put the key in the jewellery box and sit down on the chair where we lay our clothes and look at the photograph. We are lying and sitting like this – and I think it is quite nice but also strange to see how little Mother has changed since then, and wonder what is so special about it that it needs to be hidden – when in she walks.
I can see from her tired eyes that she has recieved another call at work today and is prepared for yet another futile bout with Linda, for even more of all the things she cannot face. Instead, however, she notices the photograph and pauses and considers how to react, and says:
“You’ve looked at the photographs then, I see.”
She goes to hang up her coat in the hall and comes back and sits down beside Linda. We look at the picture together. Mother on a car bumper. It is on the wall between us. She behaves the same way I behave when looking at photographs, and I sense that we are all thinking in silent unison: My God, how wonderful it is to be normal.
Then, luckily, it was the weekend. Linda and I got up before Mother, boiled some eggs and set the table. We all had breakfast, dressed and caught the bus to Fornebu Airport where we went up and down the escalator twenty-six times and inserted fifty øre in a machine that admitted us to a long roof terrace where we could admire the aeroplanes, the frightening iron insects bound for Anchorage and Rumania, and which strangely enough had people sitting inside, normal people, like us who, according to Mother, might not even be afraid – hey had their hats and gloves in small pockets on the back of the seat in front, on the carpeted floor there were shoes and boots with tied laces; a girl of Linda’s age had her budgerigar in a golden cage, for almost nothing of what is in an aeroplane is visible from the outside.
It took me no more than three or four take-offs to realise that with all this noise around you could yell as loud as you liked and you would not be heard. Then Linda started shouting as well. We couldn’t hear a bloody thing. We stood there screaming our heads off and still you couldn’t hear a solitary sound.
Then Mother began to bawl as well, a bit timid at first, she must have been out of training, but gradually she improved, and we couldn’t hear her, either – we screeched at the top of our voices and laughed until our sides ached. Then we went into the restaurant and ate waffles and whispered to each other and we couldn’t hear that, either – it was one of those days that could have lasted for ever.
On the bus home we sat right at the back, Linda slept with her head on Mother’s lap, and Mother asked in a whisper if I had noticed anyone bothering Linda in the playground. I said no, and made the point that I had been on my guard, that is, in the few breaks we had been permitted last week.
“And what about at home, on the street?”
I hadn’t seen anything there, either. But …
“But what?”
“She calls you Mamma.”
Mother lost her thread for a moment and stared out at Wessels plass where we had once been, in our childhood, with a formidable kitbag, before she asked:
“And did she really learn to swim this summer?”
“Yes, she did.”
“Properly?”
“All round the bay. Up and down.”
Mother nodded and mumbled that Marlene had said the same, and the bus set off and it was empty, it was three o’clock on a Sunday afternoon at the end of October, and the bus was empty, it hisses and groans and stops and opens its concertina doors and no-one gets off and no-one gets on and it proceeds as though nothing has happened, still it was one of the days that, as far as I was concerned, could have gone on for ever.
“Have you told anyone she’s scared of watching T.V.?” Mother whispers.
“No,” I answer and point out she wasn’t any more, that was why.
“Have you told anyone she wets the bed at night?” “No. And she doesn’t do that any more, either.”
“But did you tell anyone when she
did?”
“No …”
“Are you sure you’re telling me everything, Finn?!”
“Well, Anne-Berit did once say our room smelled of pee.”
“What! When?”
“Oh, it’s a long time ago …”
Mother gives that some thought, I suppose she is counting and calculates that it is more than six months since she stopped putting a plastic cover on Linda’s mattress, and four months since Linda was bought a new one, which does not smell of anything at all.
She asks even more questions, about what I might or might not have told others, until it dawns on me that this conversation is about me, that Mother is trying to eliminate the perils that might befall us, and that in my frenzied thoughtlessness I may constitute one of them, a mere few months ago this would have made me furious, but now it just wearies me, we are wriggling about under the microscope, we are under surveillance, by the authorities.
I notice that Linda has opened her eyes and tell Mother. Mother breaks off and strokes Linda’s hair while staring at the sad facades of buildings in the Rosenhoff and Sinsen neighbourhoods and registers that it has started raining, the rain is getting heavier and heavier, as if we are hurtling into a waterfall, Linda asks:
“What
does
die mean?”
“What?”
“What does die mean?” she repeats, and Mother and I exchange glances.
“Why do you ask?”
But that is not the way to talk to Linda.
“Who said that?” I ask unflustered, looking out between the grey curtains.