Authors: Roy Jacobsen
“You know, I’m not as strong as I used to be,” she mumbled when something or other was looming, and then she alluded – although I never asked and she never gave an explanation – to her divorce, which I suppose must have hit her like an avalanche and was only the first of a series of small incidents in a kind of enduring misery. For this may have been the era of Yuri Gagarin, but it was by no means the era of divorce, it was the era of marriage, and only a year after the divorce he also passed away, as Mother puts it, the consequence of an accident at work. My father died in a crane accident at Akers Mekaniske Verksted, a shipbuilding company. I can neither remember him nor the divorce, nor the accident, but Mother remembers for us both, even though you can never get any specific details out of her, about for example what he looked like or what he liked doing, or did not like doing in his free time, if he had any, that is, or where he came from or what they talked about in the happy years they must have had while they were waiting for me; even her photographs she keeps close to her chest; in short, this is an era we have put behind us.
In the wake of the two disasters there followed yet another, this time connected with a widow’s pension; you see, my father managed to get hitched again before he fell to his death, and to have another child, a girl, whose name we did not even know, so that now there was another widow somewhere out there, receiving the money that Mother and I should have had, and squandering it on the pools and taxis and perms.
“Well, don’t ask me what’s happened to them,” fru Syversen said, resigned, waving the invoices for the wallpaper but not the paste. However, now at least Mother was able to round up proceedings with her simple:
“Hm, well, we’ll have to see about that.” And by sending the girls a goodbye smile. They stared back at us with mouths agape and three big milky moustaches. “Thank you for letting us have a peep. It’s really nice.”
The very next day we were in the Årvoll Senter looking at wallpaper. And that is pretty sensational, for Mother is not only beset by perils, she also takes her time to think things through; the green paint we had just wasted our money on, for example, was no mindless caprice, but the result of laborious calculations that had been going on since last Christmas when we were invited to coffee and cakes by an elderly couple on the ground floor, where all the walls had been painted a different colour from our own, and it turned out they had done it themselves, the slow way, with a brush.
On another occasion she had dropped by to pick me up from a friend’s, from Essi’s flat where the father had moved the door to the smallest bedroom from the sitting room out into the hall, so that Essi’s big sister, who was sixteen, as good as had her own entrance, from the hallway. And now it was as if all of these considerations – along with the fact that the store we were in oozed the future, new opportunities and innovation, yes, there was a sense of purity and optimism about the paint pots and the assistants’ blue coats in this shop that could move a mountain – it was as if all of this fused into one momentous conclusion.
“Right,” Mother said. “Then we’ll have to take a lodger after all. There’s no way round it.“
I glanced up at her in surprise, we had in fact discussed this before, and also come to a kind of agreement, as I understood it, that we would not take a lodger, no matter how hard up we were, for that meant I would have to give up the room I loved so much and move in with her.
“I can sleep in the sitting room,” she said before I could open my mouth.
Accordingly, that afternoon we not only bought wallpaper and paste, but also composed an advertisement to insert in
Arbeiderbladet,
headed LODGER WANTED. Once again we contacted the mighty bull of a man, Frank: could Frank, who had a job on the new building sites over at Groruddalen driving a bulldozer, see his way to working evenings and move the door from our smallest bedroom into the hall, so that we would be spared having the lodger disturb our private lives with his, or her, comings and goings, not to mention a total stranger traipsing in and out of our newly wallpapered sitting room?
In other words, we were moving into exciting times.
It turned out that, as a joiner, Frank was nothing to write home about. He made a dreadful racket taking out the door. Not only that, he worked in a string vest, panted and sweated in bucket-loads, and from the first evening began to call Mother “darling”.
“What d’you think, darlin’, d’you wanna keep these architraves or shall I get you some new ones?”
“Depends what they cost,” Mother said.
“Won’t cost you much, darlin’. I’ve got contacts.”
Fortunately, Mother wasn’t put out by being called “darling” all the time. And fru Syversen made sure to drop by at regular intervals to tell us she had some food ready or to inform us that the dust cart would be late today. I have to confess that I also kept an eye on proceedings, since Mother put on lipstick and removed her curlers before every session, I had hardly any time to go out into the street. Now and then fru Syversen sent over Anne-Berit, her eldest daughter, so we stood watching the solidly built Frank humping around heavy doors and sheets of plywood. Black hair covered his shoulders and back like tufts of over-wintering grass, it poked through the holes of a faded vest more reminiscent of a trawling net than an item of clothing, and in mid-toil he would groan, “Hammer!” “Nails!” “Tape measure!”, in a teasing way, as if we were his minions, it was a joy. But when the door was at last in position, and the other doorway was sealed, after a week or so, with new architraves and everything, and the question of payment was broached, Frank wanted nothing.
“Are you out of your mind?” Mother said.
“Though if you had the odd dram handy, darlin’,” he said in a soft voice, as if now they shared some secret understanding following the successful completion of the job. Mother tripping around with an open purse and two or three blue five-kroner notes between her freshly varnished fingernails, plenty more where this comes from, Frank, all you have to do is ask – none of that made any difference, Frank was and remained a gentleman, and in the end all he took was two glasses of Curaçao.
“One for each leg.”
But now he was gone, too, and the wallpapering could begin.
Everything went swimmingly. Again Mother was on a kitchen chair under the ceiling and I was down on the floor. The wall we had spent a whole week painting was papered in one evening. Then we spent two evenings doing all the fiddly bits around the balcony door and the large sitting-room window, and one final evening on the wall adjoining my bedroom, which was now to be the lodger’s. The change was there for all to see, it was explosive, it was ear-splitting. We had not gone so far as to invest in a jungle, Mother wanted something more discreet, but we stayed well within the same botanical genre anyway, with rounded borders and flowers, like golden brown scrubland in the autumn. And when two people came round the very next day to look at the room, we were in business.
No, we weren’t.
There was something wrong with both of the two prospective lodgers. Then a third came, who thought there was something wrong with the room. These setbacks were a blow to Mother’s confidence. Was the rent too high? Or too low? Before, she had talked about us having to move from Årvoll perhaps, to get something a bit simpler, in the area where she had lived earlier, perhaps, with her husband, in Øvre Foss, where people were still content with one room and a kitchen. But eventually a letter appeared, in spiky handwriting, from one Ingrid Olaussen, who was thirty-five years old and single, she wrote, she would like to see the room this Friday, if that were convenient?
“Certainly,” Mother said.
But then she took the drastic step of being absent the day after, when I returned from school with Anne-Berit and Essi.
I had never encountered this before.
A locked door. Which was not opened when I pressed the bell, again and again. This seriously threw me off-kilter. Essi took me to his place where his mother, who was one of the few mothers on whom I could rely, aside from my own, comforted me, saying Mother was sure to be out shopping, I would see, I could do my homework there in the meantime, with Essi, who needed some help in his struggle with spelling, he wasn’t much good at arithmetic, either.
“You’re so clever, aren’t you, Finn.”
Yes indeed, I was coping very well, it was part of the contract between Mother and me, the delicate balance in a family of two. I was given sliced bread with cervelat, which as a rule I relish, but I couldn’t get a mouthful down; the strange thing is that once you have had a mother, when she goes missing, this is no trifling matter. I sat beside Essi at his broad writing desk, holding a pencil, I was orphaned and didn’t write one single letter. This was so unlike her. More than an hour had passed now. (It was no more than fourteen minutes.) Only when almost two hours had passed did we hear a clatter on the road outside, which turned out to be the exhaust of a superannuated lorry trying to reverse up to the block of flats. Then I saw Mother jumping out of the driver’s cab in her long, flowery shoe-shop dress and running towards the entrance. On the burgundy vehicle’s doors it said “Storstein Møbler & Inventar” in gold-edged ornamental letters. A large man in a boiler suit let down the sides, another man jumped out and together they unveiled a sofa, a modern sofa bed in beige, yellow and brown stripes that Mother had gone out to buy on the flimsy basis of a letter from Ingrid Olaussen, and they hauled it off the lorry and started manoeuvring it towards the front door.
By that time I already had my school bag on my back and was galloping at full speed down to the ground floor, across the grass and up the stairs following the unwieldy piece of furniture that the two men, with curses and one cry of distress, managed to coax up to the second floor and in through the door which had been locked for an eternity, now open for the first time in my life.
Inside, Mother stood with a desperately strained expression on her face that came no closer to normality on catching sight of me, because of my wretched emotional state, no doubt, and at once began to apologise, “it had taken such a long time in the shop“. But there was no energy in her consoling words, and when she had signed a form and the new sofa was standing by the sitting-room wall where hitherto we had had nothing, but where actually it fitted very well, she had to lie down on it for a while. So did I. I lay beside her and drew in her fragrances and felt her arms around me as I instantly fell asleep: pansies, hair lacquer, shoe leather and 4711
eau de Cologne.
I didn’t wake until two hours later, under a blanket, while Mother was making supper in the kitchen, humming, as she always did.
There was no set dinner today, it was fried pork and eggs, the kind of supper that can still outdo any dinner. And over the meal she explained to me that there was something called H.P. which, in short, meant you didn’t have to save
before
you bought something, you could do it afterwards, which in turn meant there was a chance we wouldn’t need to wait so long to go and buy a bookcase either, not to mention one of those television sets that were invading the flats around us, so I wouldn’t have to run up to Essi’s every time there was something on which was not to be missed.
These were indeed heady prospects. But there was something about her that evening that still made me uneasy, something that seemed to have collapsed inside her and with it had gone her composure and peace of mind, and I – who had just been through a traumatic experience of my own – did not sleep as well that night as I usually did.
Next day I came straight back from school again, this time I found Mother at her post, ready to receive Ingrid Olaussen, and at once I got down to preparing myself, motivated by a number of reproving cautions, as though we were about to take an exam, they were quite unnecessary, it goes without saying, if there was anything I had taken on board, it was the seriousness of the matter.
“Are you alright?” I said.
“What do you mean?” she said, going over to look at herself in the mirror, returning and growling: “You haven’t got some little scheme up your sleeve, have you?”
I didn’t even know what she was referring to. And within no time at all she was herself again, shooting a sympathetic glance down at me, and saying she knew this wasn’t easy for me, but there was no alternative, did I realise that?
I realised that.
We were of one mind.
Ingrid Olaussen arrived half an hour late and turned out to be employed at the hair salon in Lofthusveien, she looked the part too, like a twenty-year-old, even though she must have been Mother’s age. She had heaped-up, rust-red hair, with a little grey hat perched on top, adorned with a string of pearls, black droplets, so it looked as though her hair was crying. Furthermore, she smoked filter cigarettes, and it wasn’t just her handwriting that was spiky, casting an eye over the room she had the nerve to say:
“Basic, right. Shouldn’t you have said that in the ad?”
I didn’t know what that meant, but Mother’s face went through three or four familiar stages before she blurted out that it was easy for someone who didn’t have a clue what it cost to put ads in the newspaper to say that.
Confronted with which statement, Ingrid Olaussen just took a long drag on her cigarette and cast around for an ashtray. But none was offered. Now Mother wanted to call off the whole business, and said that in fact we had changed our minds and needed the room ourselves.
“Sorry you’ve come on a wild goose chase.”
She even opened the front door for her. But then all of a sudden Ingrid Olaussen looked deeply unhappy. Her coiffed head slumped to her bosom, and her long, ungainly body began to sway.
“Goodness gracious, don’t you feel well?”
Mother led her by the coat sleeve into the sitting room, sat her down on the new sofa and asked if she wanted a glass of water or a cup of coffee.
Then something even more incomprehensible happened. Ingrid Olaussen did want a cup of coffee, yes, she did, but before Mother managed to put on the kettle, she began to intertwine her long, slender fingers, as if splicing two ends of a rope, and spoke in a staccato manner, and at quite a speed, about her job, about demanding customers, as far as I was able to gather, who were always after her with all manner of criticism, not to mention the condescending owner, she also brought up a matter which made Mother totally change character and shoo me into the bedroom before I could glean any further clarification.