Beatles (49 page)

‘At any rate, I’m fine now, Kim. Haven’t been frightened since the day you entered the classroom.’

‘Why didn’t
you
go to the party?’ I asked.

‘I get bored. Parties like that bore me.’

I needed a leak and crept out into the chamber of horrors. The mother was there in an instant, my smile was not contagious, she just stood there keeping me in check with her festering suspicion and ominous secret.

‘Loo?’ I slurred and she pointed to the door next to me. She was without language and voice, her eyes were dead, there was something she had seen which had reduced them to ashes.

I went to the loo and emptied my bladder. Afterwards I happened to see my face in the mirror. It was pale and unhealthy-looking. But I had washed my hair and it crackled all the way round my head like black electric wires. I combed it and heard it crackle in my comb as though visions were on their way out of my skull.

Jørgen was sitting on the windowsill flicking through an acting copy.

‘Thought any more about the drama group?’ he asked.

‘No.’

He threw the pages over to me.
War and Peace.

‘We’ve got a role for you,’ he said with enthusiasm.

‘Me? Nothin’ doin’. Hate the theatre. Went to see
Brand
with my mother once and almost had a haemorrhage.’

Jørgen laughed.

‘The theatre is the truth,’ he exclaimed, in all seriousness. ‘Isn’t it? We’re acting all the time, with each other. It makes us lie. We fool each other and pretend not to notice. But on the stage everyone is clear about their role. Only on the stage are we truly
honest
.’

‘Last time you said you wanted to be an actor because you were bored.’

‘I’m bored with lying,’ Jørgen said. ‘I’m bored with people talking at cross purposes.’ He sent me a quick glance. ‘And you wanted to be a singer!’

‘Because I wanted to drown out all the bullshit,’ I laughed.

Jørgen sat down beside me.

‘We need to fill one more role,’ he said, flicking through the manuscript. ‘The messenger. We need a powerful voice!’

‘How many lines?’ I asked.

‘One,’ Jørgen said.

‘I’ll think about it,’ I said.

As I trundled home that night and the wind swept across Vestkanttorvet and the moon crossed the sky like a football, I thought that Jørgen, Jørgen was going to be my fixed point in the time to come, Jørgen was the anchor, Jørgen was the eye of the storm: the circle of calm in the midst of all the chaos.

Gunnar dropped by one evening, with a pile of leaflets as usual. He smuggled them into my room and started sorting them. I had to distribute
No To Rationalisation
the day after. There was no urgency about the solidarity committee’s reaction to the lie that American troops were being withdrawn. It was fine if I handed them out on Saturday in the lunch break.

Gunnar spoke fast, in a staccato way, didn’t even have time for a cup of tea. Was on his way to a student council meeting.

I started perspiring at the back of my knees.

‘Is there no one else who could distribute them?’ I asked cautiously.

Gunnar’s eyes bored into me like harpoons.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I agree with the content, no question, but I don’t quite get the standin’ in squares and holdin’ speeches.’

Gunnar shuffled the piles of leaflets.

‘I don’t reckon that’s what’s botherin’ you most,’ he said.

‘Why’s that?’

‘Think you’ve yelled in squares quite a few times,’ he went on. ‘At the school dance. At Dolphin.’

‘Right. That’s why I’d been thinkin’ of keepin’ a low profile this year. Takin’ things easy.’

Gunnar’s glare didn’t waver.

‘That’s a pretty weird attitude. It’s fine that you don’t want to make a prat of yourself, but political work is not the bloody same, is it.’

‘Didn’t say it was, but you’re still in the spotlight, aren’t you.’

‘Spotlight, yes. Aren’t you joinin’ the drama group?’

He had me.

‘Ye-ah. One line.’

‘And so you don’t want to hand out leaflets?’

‘Didn’t say I didn’t want to.’

‘What are you sayin’? Do you think the revolutionary movement has time for such trivialities? Monopoly capitalism is earnin’ fat profits on that crap. Are you gonna distribute leaflets or not?’

‘Give me them, you bugger.’

He counted a hundred of each and grinned.

‘Good, comrade Kim. You’ll get another pack next month.’

I put the leaflets in the drawer where I used to hide pornographic films in the old days, and Gunnar was already on his way out. A wild sound came from the sitting room. He stopped and looked at me.

‘It’s just Pym,’ I said.

‘Pym?’

‘Dad’s budgie.’

In fact, he had taught it to whistle on command now. He coaxed the notes out of the poor green creature by chirping himself. Sometimes I wondered who had the upper hand, wondered whether it might be Pym who was making Dad sing. It was beginning to get on my nerves.

We stood listening for a while, Gunnar and I. Now Dad was whistling.

‘Not havin’ a great time, our fathers, are they,’ Gunnar whispered.

I shook my head.

‘Dad’s on the point of packin’ it in. And Mum’s joined a Christian sewin’ circle.’

That was when I noticed Gunnar was trying to grow a beard.

‘Can lend you my mower,’ I grinned, stroking his chin.

He blushed and hurried out of the room. In the hall my mother was staring at the badges on his jacket. He had the full complement: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, FNL. Gunnar puffed out his chest and then scooted off.

Mum held me back.

‘Is Gunnar a Young Socialist?’ she said.

It sounded so comical. She said it as though it were a venereal disease, worse than syphilis, incurable and contagious for many generations to come. I think she felt she ought to wash her mouth out with turps after saying it.
Young Socialists
. Her lips were cracking.

‘What are you laughing at?’ she shouted.

‘Nothing.’

‘You didn’t answer. Is Gunnar… a Young Socialist?’

She rubbed the back of her hand across her mouth.

‘Don’t know,’ I said.

‘Are
you
?’

Pym and Dad were whistling in unison.

‘
Are
you?!’ Mum repeated, sounding demented.

‘No,’ I said.

‘They do weapon training, you know! In Nordmarka. They’ve got supplies of arms!’

‘I don’t know anything about that.’

‘They said so on TV!’

‘If you believe everything they say on the box, things are in a bad way.’

I made a beeline for my room.

Mum stomped after me.

‘Are you suffering from nerves, Kim?’

‘Nerves? Why?’

‘You walk so fast. I’ve noticed that for a long time now. You walk… as though someone’s after you!’

‘Take it easy now, Mum. There’s no one following me, is there!’

‘Are you sure you’re not taking drugs?’

‘Have you read that somewhere too? That addicts walk fast, eh?’

‘Answer me honestly, Kim!’

‘I’ve just been elected to the Supreme Soviet and I’ve been a junkie for nine years.’

I slammed the door behind me. Mum tore it open.

‘Don’t you dare talk to me like that, Kim! Don’t you dare!’

‘And you keep your hands off my wallet. From now on I want my contraceptives left alone!’

Her face fell, all her strength seemed to ebb away, she slowly closed the door.

Then she ran into the sitting room and I heard a medley of her sobs and Dad and Pym.

Those were the days.

After the class party which I did not attend I was met by glares everywhere I went, I became agitated, I was unable to take a step in peace, felt the eyes all over my body, like suckers. In one break Beate ambled up to me and stood there with that vinegary smile of hers and faced me down.

‘Shame you couldn’t come to the class party,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ I said, staring beyond her. Over by the rubbish bins there was a group of girls grinning and whispering.

‘You’re such fun at parties, aren’t you?’ Beate continued.

I scented a crisis looming and began to look for a way out.

‘False rumours,’ I said.

‘It was in the school paper,’ she cooed.

‘The editor got the boot,’ I parried.

‘But you and Jørgen had a cosy time, did you?’

My voice stuck in my throat. Beate tossed back her hair.

‘There he is by the way. I won’t disturb you.’

She wiggled back to the circle, they stood watching Jørgen and me.

‘What the hell did the bitch mean by that?!’ I said.

‘Nothing to worry about,’ Jørgen mumbled. ‘Have you learned your line?’

‘Napoleon’s comin’! Think she’s got it in for me. Why’s Beate so bloody pissed off with me, eh?’

‘You have to put more feeling into the words, Kim. You have to make the audience quake!’

The bell rang and we trooped off to class. There was a suspicious silence when we arrived, a gasp ran through the rows. Jørgen took his seat, distant, condescending, superior. I stopped, stared at the blackboard. Dick was there, a strapping lad from Smestad, closeset eyes, he had drawn a large heart and written names inside. Jørgen + Kim. Something hot and painful descended into my stomach, my head burned. The laughter exploded and Dick stood there, grinning proudly, the laughter washed over me, sticky and
sour like mildewed syrup, wet sugar, I had to fight my way out of the laughter lava streaming from their gaping, red, slavering mouths.

‘Wipe it off,’ I said.

The class went quiet.

Dick wrote on the board: Please leave!

The laughter burst out anew, I was drowning in the laughter, gasping for air and I knew I was on the point of losing control.

Dick walked back to his desk. I stopped him. He peered down at me. Then I spat into his face, a magnificent, thick green gobbet.

It went quiet again. A squeal of surprise emerged from Dick, he raised his hands.

Then I struck. I hit him with a force I never knew I possessed. My arm was a bomb, a canon, my fist an iron ball, and Dick folded in the middle like a french loaf. I grabbed him by the scruff of his neck, hauled him up to the board and wiped it with his face and hair.

The room was stunned into silence.

Blood and fury raged through my veins.

I let Dick go and sat down. Jørgen was white, motionless. No one looked at me.

The teacher burst in as Dick was crawling along the floor. I had to keep a firm hold on my chair. The backwash was on the point of dragging me through the window.

‘What’s going on here?’ Klausen whined.

No one answered. There was a two-fold silence. Dick lugged himself onto his chair. Klausen tapped with her pointer and then she began to talk about case and conjugations.

So I no longer had a low profile, I was as visible as a rose-painted monolith. But strangely enough I was not pestered any more, they directed their suckers elsewhere now, Jørgen and I were left in peace. I was allowed to go in peace in the way a leper is: everyone avoids him. Everyone knows what he is like. Jørgen was the only person who wanted to know anything about me. He didn’t once make any mention of the drawing on the board.

Things continued like this until I lost my self-confidence. I quite simply lost my confidence and couldn’t bring myself to distribute leaflets at the gate, it was like putting yourself in the firing line, I
couldn’t do it. I lied to Gunnar’s face and accepted more leaflets about rationalisation at school, VAT, class cooperation, Vietnam, the pile grew in the drawer, my bad conscience grew in my stomach, I had the same feeling I had when I didn’t eat the packed lunches my mother made and they swelled in my school bag, green and foulsmelling. I couldn’t bring myself to throw away the leaflets, either. Every day I put it off. Soon I would be wading in leaflets and I still hadn’t received an answer from Nina, the only letter I had received was from the army, I would be summoned to a call-up medical in April next year.

My mother was overjoyed when she heard I had joined the drama group. She changed from that very instant, as though she had snapped her fingers and decided to trust me in the future, not a word about Young Socialists or drugs, she just talked about the theatre and said something very similar to what Jørgen had said, that the theatre was the truth. I didn’t quite understand that, but I was relieved that my mother had calmed down and would not be having a nervous breakdown every time I went to the toilet or picked my nose. But the truth they had talked about, I couldn’t see that. Sometimes I lay awake at night thinking about what truth was, I did, and I tried to list a few examples. Dick is a shit. But Beate certainly didn’t think so. She was positive I was the shit. The Beatles is the best group in the world. But my mother and father definitely did not agree. I compressed my thoughts: I am me. My brain was steaming. Who the hell was I? Who was I in others’ eyes? Jørgen’s? Gunnar’s? Was I just as many people as there were eyes? In Nina’s?

Didn’t sleep a lot on such nights.

There were many such nights.

And I didn’t discover the truth in the drama group, either. That was for certain. We rehearsed in the gym every Thursday. The coach was a huge woman with a bosom that projected into the room like the Alps. Her name was Minni. She insisted that
War and Peace
was about people today even though it had been written in the previous century. Tolstoy was ahead of his time, like all great artists. As background music she had chosen Jan Johansson’s
Jazz in Russian,
she almost went weak at the knees at the brilliance of her own idea: it would give the audience a hint that the play was also about our time,
wouldn’t it. I suggested projecting pictures from
The War Game
on a big canvas in the background, but that didn’t meet with approval, on the contrary, it was a pathetic idea. One must not frighten the audience, alienate them, it was a balancing act, a balancing act between war and peace, between the performers and the audience, as Minni expressed it. That sounded impressive. And I was searching for the truth, but I could not find it. Tolstoy’s brick of a novel had been planed down to a one-act show. Jørgen played someone called Pierre. His counterpart was a girl from the second class, Astrid, she was to bring Natasha to life. There were nine others plus me, the messenger with one fateful line. In Tolstoy’s novel there were a good five hundred characters.