Authors: Erlend Loe
So I was left high and dry and as the days passed I began, as is only natural, to get hungry. And I just got hungrier and
hungrier and in the end I could see no other way out, I had to lure your mother into an ambush and stick that large knife of mine in her skull. That’s what hunger does to you. Nothing else matters. You just have to have food, I said to the calf. Maybe you’ve experienced something similar yourself, maybe not. Let’s hope not.
The need for milk has become acute and I stuff fifteen to twenty kilos of elk-meat in the sack and make my way down to Ullevål Stadium. The calf trots after me, but in a stern voice I tell it that’s not on. You’ll have to wait here, I say. Wait, I repeat with conviction, as if talking to a slow-witted child. I’m unshaven and scruffy and look conspicuous enough without your help, so I don’t want to have an elk straggling behind me. Don’t worry, I say, I won’t be long. But it does worry. It doesn’t want me to go. Poor little elk, I say, you think I’m going to abandon you, but I won’t. I just have to go to the shop and get some milk and a few other things I need. This has no effect. Separation anxiety shines out of its eyes, and it concerns me that it is so clingy. I thought elk were more independent. It’s attaching itself to me in a way I’m not sure I’m ready for yet. I catch myself blaming its dead mother for taking the calf with her on a walk, slap bang in the middle of the hunting season. What was she thinking of?
I stop, put down my sack and cuddle the elk. Try to lift it up, but it’s too heavy, so instead I massage its head with my knuckles in a playful, affectionate way. I give it knuckle, as we
say in my family. Afterwards I explain the situation in an unhurried, orderly fashion. I’m a great believer in explaining things. I’ve always done that with my children too. Children can sense that there’s something up if you lie or withhold facts, I tell myself. Therefore I explain, using body language, that I’m going down among people and it’s much too dangerous for a little elk. There are cars and buses down there, and lots of noise and all sorts of confusing signals. In fact, that’s the most distinctive feature of humans, I say, they’re the masters when it comes to confusing signals, no one can match them, you can search for a thousand years, but you won’t find more confusing signals than those that come from humans.
And when elk happen to stray among humans they’re shot, I say, miming a stray elk being shot and dying a gruesome death. So, I say, it’s best for you to wait here. I’ll be back in a couple of hours, then we can get together and do something nice.
I wait for a sign that it’s understood me and that it agrees, but it’s not forthcoming. And despite all my explaining and all my kind intentions it still follows me. In the end I tie it to a tree. That settles that.
The manager at ICA is dubious. I can read him like a book. The doubt oozes from every pore. Help a poor old
hunter-gatherer
, I say, but I can see he thinks it’s weird.
We’re standing in the stockroom and he’s trying to put on
a stoic attitude, but despite all the smiling training and theories about how the customer is king, he radiates scepticism. What I’m asking is, of course, way beyond all the rules and regulations. I offer him elk meat in exchange for milk and a handful of other wares from his rich assortment, and he doesn’t like it. I know that most people think that this type of economy is a throwback, I say, but here I am anyway, and the meat is good, and besides it’s an excellent economic system. You barter. You do things for other people. I’m sure it’s on its way back, I say. It’s coming back, and if you go along with this you can boast later that you were ahead of your time. You were a trendsetter because it’s absolutely certain that bartering is coming back. In ten years’ time bartering will be the norm. It’s obvious, I say. Things can’t go on the way they are doing now. It’s no good. Open virtually any paper or magazine and you will see that nowadays there are hardly any discerning people who are in any doubt about how we have to change our consumer ways if we’re going to keep things going for more than a few decades. And I see that’s your view too, I say. You’re a thinker. I notice you haven’t said no.
He’s in his mid-thirties and actually pretty pleased with himself. It’s quite clear that he’s well-trained, for a shopkeeper, and thinks it’s exciting to be involved in building up ICA at Ullevål Stadium. The shop has been done up and everything. One of the country’s most modern supermarkets. Refrigerated counters as far as the eye can see, including, incidentally,
Parma hams costing thousands of kroner, cheeses as big as houses and no doubt a great work environment where people matter to each other and are committed to their workplace. And he’s in a quandary. He’s got a lot to lose, but what are the chances of anyone finding out, and anyway he likes elk meat. In a way, there’s no arguing with elk.
He looks around to make sure none of his staff is close enough to take note of what he’s going to say. What are you after? he says.
I say I’m after several items, but the most important thing is to set up a milk deal. A milk deal? he says. I nod. I, that is, my organs and cells, in short, my body, need a good litre of skimmed milk a day, I say. Therefore I’d like to find, every Monday and Thursday morning, when the shop opens at seven, three and four cartons respectively of skimmed milk placed outside the stockroom, for example between the waste skip and the wall.
Why skimmed milk of all things? he asks.
My good man, I say, skimmed milk represents the peak of human achievement to date. Any idiot has always been able to get ordinary cow milk, I say, but the leap up to skimmed milk requires a stroke of brilliance and sublime separation technology, which has only been made possible in modern times. And, in fact, I fear that humankind will progress no further. Skimmed milk will probably always reign supreme. But it does give us something to aspire to.
Skimmed milk ennobles mankind.
How many weeks is this supposed to go on for? he asks. As many as necessary, I say. Necessary for what? he asks. Time will tell, I say. And also I need some batteries and a few other small items from the shop. How much meat are we talking here? he asks. You can have what I’ve got in the sack here today, up front, and if this deal continues after Christmas, you’ll get more. Done, he says, and gives me his hand.
This is great. It’s a victory for the hunter-gatherer culture. Knife-slaughtered elk is exchanged for milk and other consumer goods. This is a breakthrough.
Maybe the world can still be saved.
Inside the shop I meet my wife of all people.
She’s usually at work at this time of day, but obviously not today. She has her reasons, I suppose.
Hi there, I say.
You look dreadful, she says.
I’m not exaggerating when I say my wife thinks it’s strange that I’m living up in the forest now. She doesn’t think much of it, it seems. I don’t blame her. I don’t know that I think much of it myself. My father had just died and been buried and my mother and my sisters and I had sorted out all the practical details and I was out cycling. That was in the springtime. And it was a joy to cycle in the forest again after a long winter. Of course I cycle all year. To work and home again. I’m a cyclist. Maybe I am a cyclist first and foremost. No road conditions can hold me back. In winter I use studded
tyres. I’ve got a helmet. Cycling gloves. Specially designed pants and jackets. A cycle computer. Lights. I cycle four thousand kilometres a year. And I think nothing of snapping off window screen wipers when cars don’t behave. I bang on bonnets. I bang on side windows. I shout myself hoarse and I’m not frightened when motorists stop and want to have a go at me. I argue them into the ground, sticking to my rights as a cyclist. And I move around fast. Much faster than cars. Best of all is the morning rush hour. For example, down Sognsveien, across Adamstuen and on down Thereses gate and Pilestredet. There are loads of cars and often several trams. The trams stop in the middle of Thereses gate and as there’s almost always oncoming traffic, the cars have to stop too, but I pull the bike up onto the pavement, steer well to the right of those about to get on the tram and shoot out again onto the road four to five metres in front of the tram and with plenty of time to spare before the tram sets off again. The pavement is a bit higher than normal just there and not only that there’s a slight incline, it’s a bit risky, and sometimes I land with both wheels wedged between the tramlines. It’s showy, but I don’t make a big song and dance about it. Whoever sees it, sees it. Perhaps some of them might be inspired to buy a bike. The thought of that is reward enough. I feed off that for the rest of the day while cycling to the next hurdle, which is the Bislet roundabout where I’ve also got a consummate technique that occupational drivers dislike and which may not be entirely legal. But as a cyclist you’re forced
to be an outlaw. You’re forced to live on the wild side of society and at odds with established traffic conventions which are increasingly focussed on motorised traffic, even for healthy people. Cyclists are an oppressed breed, we are a silent minority, our hunting grounds are diminishing all the time and we’re being forced into patterns of behaviour which aren’t natural to us, we can’t speak our own language, we’re being forced underground. But be warned because this injustice is so obvious, and it cannot surprise anyone that anger and aggression are accumulating in cyclists and that one fine day, when non-cyclists have become so fat that they can hardly manoeuvre themselves in and out of their cars, we will strike back with all our might and main.
I am a cyclist. And I’m a husband and a father and a son and an employee. And a house owner. And lots of other things. We are so many things.
Well, I was out cycling. This spring. And then I fell. Quite badly. As you know, the path goes downhill into the forest. And the margins are often small. I had left a kind of path and found myself in the heather on my way down a gentle slope when the front wheel got stuck between two rocks. I flew over the handlebars and hit my hip on a root and the bike landed on my head as well. I was knocked flat. At first it hurt like hell. I couldn’t move. I just lay still, looking up at some branches swaying in the breeze. And for the first time in several years everything was so quiet. Once the worst of the
pains had subsided I experienced a blissful peace. There was only forest around me. The usual mixture of all types of complex feelings and thoughts and duties and plans was gone. Suddenly there was just forest. And I didn’t have any of the enervating children’s songs on my brain. Which I usually had. The songs that accompany the films my son and his chums watch on DVD. They’re so insistent, so insidious. And they sit so heavily on my central nervous system. When I fell they’d been buzzing round my brain for months. They had been tormenting me for the whole winter. When I was at work, in my free time and when my father died. I considered seeking help because of it. Pingu, for example. This
German-produced
video-penguin that my son loves. Baa, baa, bababa, baa, baa, bababa, baba, baba, baba, baba, baba, baba, baaa, ba, ba, baa, BAAA! It could churn round my head for days on end. From when I opened my eyes in the morning until I went to sleep at night. When I was having a shower, having lunch, cycling to work, at meetings, cycling home again, shopping for tea, fetching the kid from the nursery school, and so on and so on. It was Pingu morning, noon and night. And on other days it was Bob the builder. For crying out loud. Booob the builder, can we fix it? Yes we can! Boom, boom, boomboomboomBOOOM! Or the Teletubbies. Horror of horrors. These, pardon my language, bloody quasi-cuddly figures which apparently were devised by a British psychologist to satisfy small children’s curiosity and hidden needs. It grooves like crazy if you’re two years old, but drives
all the rest of us up the wall. Tinky Winky! Dipsy! La La! Po! Teletubbies. Teletubbies. Say HE-LLO! You feel like shoving them through a compost grinder. And Thomas the Tank Engine. Well, OK. Perhaps not so bad. At least not the first fifty to sixty times. With his optimistic Ta-ta-ta-ta-
tata-taaaaaa
, ta-ta-ta-taaa-ta, ta-ta-ta-taaaa-ta and so on, accompanied by punctiliously constructed model railway landscapes which look a bit like England even though in fact the stories take place on the island of Sodor where the tiny engine happily chugs hither and thither with its carriages Annie and Clarabel and its locomotive friends Percy and Toby and James and whatever they’re called, as well as Harold the helicopter, Bertie the bus, Terence the tractor and the fat controller, or Mr Hat as we call him in our house, who constantly praises the trains when they’ve done something good, and that’s quite often. My word, you’re a useful little locomotive, Thomas, I can hear him say, or he can be tough like the time when the big locomotives got on their high horses and refused to pull their carriages themselves. He didn’t want to know.
But Mr Hat was gone from my mind as I lay there in the heather. The songs had fallen quiet. And by some miracle all my bathroom thoughts had called it a day. I could hardly remember the last time I wasn’t thinking about the bathroom. But now it had gone from my mind. All of a sudden I wasn’t thinking about whether we should have Italian tiles or Spanish ones or matt or gloss, or whether we should simply
treat ourselves to glass mosaic, which of course my wife was really keen on. Not to mention colour. I wasn’t even thinking about colours. Not about blue. Not about green. Not about white. It wasn’t that I no longer cared about the colour of the ceiling or the tiles, but the very idea of it had simply disappeared. I had been spared this eternal merry-go-round in my head. And I wasn’t thinking about the mixer taps, either, even though they are available in seven hundred different types and can be delivered in six weeks if they are in brushed steel or quicker if you’re happy with the standard model, but why make do with the standard model, or the bathtub which we’d had to discuss the same day as USA and England had begun their campaign in Iraq. I remember being irritated when I discovered that now we would also have to take a stance on this war. It was very distracting. As if it wasn’t enough to have to decide on all this bathroom stuff. Now we would have to take sides in Iraq. I didn’t like things going on in the world which in effect reduced what I used my brainpower on to trivia. Not only did I not have my perspectives clarified, but I didn’t want them to be. For weeks it had irritated me that they couldn’t wait to start the bombing down there until we had finished doing up the bathroom. To hell with them, I thought. Should we go for the Polish tub which was considerably cheaper than the Swedish one which we were also quite fond of? Or should we take a hard line and consistently go for quality over economy? After all, there were good and bad things to be said about both tubs.
It wasn’t as if the Swedish one was better in every respect. We discussed where to place the bath and drew up lists of the pros and cons of the Polish and Swedish models while the bombs rained down on the Euphrates, or maybe the Tigris, or both, on the TV, though we had turned down the sound, and this process is so exhausting, so absorbing that if you suddenly don’t think it’s important any more the whole project collapses, and perhaps the marriage, too.