This ghetto-like state of incompleteness is what I call my childhood.
Memory is not a reliable quantity in life. And it isn’t for the simple reason that memory doesn’t prioritize the truth. It is never the demand for truth that determines whether memory recalls an action accurately or not. It is self-interest that does. Memory is pragmatic, it is sly and artful, but not in any hostile or malicious way; on the contrary, it does everything it can to keep its host satisfied. Something pushes a memory into the great void of oblivion, something distorts it beyond recognition, something misunderstands it totally, something, and this something is as good as nothing, recalls it with sharpness, clarity, and accuracy. That which is remembered accurately is never given to you to determine.
In my case, any memory of my first six years is virtually nonexistent. I remember hardly anything. I have no idea who took care of me, what I did, who I played with, it has all completely gone, the years 1969–1974 are a great big hole in my life. The little I can muster is of scant value: I am standing on a wooden bridge in a sparse, high-altitude forest, beneath me rushes a torrent, the water is green and white, I am jumping up and down, the bridge is swaying and I am laughing. Beside me is Geir Prestbakmo, a boy from the neighborhood, he is jumping up and down and laughing, too. I am sitting on the rear seat of a car, we are waiting at the light, Dad turns and says we are in Mjøndalen. We are going to an IK Start game, I’ve been told, but I can’t remember a thing about the trip there, the soccer match, or the journey home. I am walking up the hill outside the house pushing a big plastic truck; it is green and yellow and gives me an absolutely fantastic feeling of riches and wealth and happiness.
That is all. That is my first six years.
But these are canonized memories, already established at the age of seven or eight, the magic of childhood: my very first memories! However, there are other kinds of memories. Those that are not fixed and cannot be evoked by will, but that at odd moments let go, as it were, and rise into my consciousness of their own accord and float around there for a while like transparent jellyfish, roused by a certain smell, a certain taste, a certain sound … these are always accompanied by an immediate, intense feeling of happiness. Then there are the memories associated with the body, when you do something you used to do: shield your eyes from the sun with your arm, catch a ball, run across a meadow with a kite in your hand and your children hard on your heels. There are memories that accompany emotions: sudden anger, sudden tears, sudden fear, and you are where you were, as if hurled back inside yourself, propelled through the ages at breakneck speed. And then there are the memories associated with a landscape, for landscape in childhood is not like the landscape that follows later; they are charged in very different ways. In that landscape every rock, every tree had a meaning, and because everything was seen for the first time and because it was seen so many times, it was anchored in the depths of your consciousness, not as something vague or approximate, the way the landscape outside a house appears to adults if they close their eyes and it has to be summoned forth, but as something with immense precision and detail. In my mind, I have only to open the door and go outside for the images to come streaming toward me. The gravel in the driveway, almost bluish in color in the summer. Oh, that alone, the driveways of childhood! And the 1970s cars parked in them! VW Beetles, Citroën DS 21s, Ford Taunuses, Granadas, Consuls, Opel Asconas, Kadetts, Ladas, Volvo Amazons … Well, OK, across the gravel, along the brown fence, over the shallow ditch between our road, Nordåsen Ringvei, and Elgstien, which traversed the whole area passing two estates apart from our own. The slope of rich, dark earth from the edge of the road down into the forest! The way small, thin, green stems had almost immediately begun to shoot up from it: fragile and seemingly alone in the new black expanse, and then the rampant multiplication of them the year after until the slope was completely covered with thick, luxuriant shrubbery. Small trees, grass, foxgloves, dandelions, ferns, and bushes eradicating what earlier had been such a clear division between road and forest. Up the hill, along the sidewalk with its narrow brick curb, and, oh, the water that trickled and flowed and streamed down there when it rained! The path off to the right, a shortcut to the new supermarket B-Max. The bog beside it, no bigger than two spaces in a parking lot, the birches thirstily hanging over it. Olsen’s house at the top of the little hill and the road that cut in behind. Grevlingveien, it was called. In the first house on the left lived John and his sister Trude, it stood on a plot that was little more than a pile of rocks. I was always frightened when I had to walk past that house. Partly because John might be lying in ambush there, ready to throw stones or snowballs at any passing child, partly because they had an Alsatian … That Alsatian … Oh, now I remember it. What a dreadful beast that dog was. It was tied up on the veranda or in the drive, barked at all the passersby, slunk back and forth as far as its tether would allow, whimpering and howling. It was lean with yellow, sickly eyes. Once it came tearing down the hill toward me, with Trude hard on its heels and the leash dragging behind it. I had heard that you shouldn’t take flight when an animal is after you, for example, a bear in the forest; the secret was to stand perfectly still and act cool, so I did, stopping the instant I saw it bounding toward me. It didn’t help a scrap. It couldn’t care less whether I was motionless or not, just opened its jaws and sank them into my forearm, next to my wrist. Trude caught up with it a second later, grabbed the leash, and yanked so hard it was wrenched backward. I hurried off, crying. Everything about that animal frightened me. The barking, the yellow eyes, the saliva that ran from its jowls, the round, pointed teeth, of which I now had an imprint in my arm. At home I didn’t breathe a word about what had happened, for fear of being told off, because an incident like this offered so many opportunities for reproach: I shouldn’t have been where I was at the time, or I shouldn’t have whined or, a dog, was that any reason to be frightened? From that day on, terror had me in its grip whenever I saw the brute. And it was fatal because not only had I heard that you should stand still when a dangerous animal attacks, I had also heard that a dog can smell fear. I don’t know who told me that, but it was one of the beliefs that people passed on and that everyone knew: dogs can smell if you are frightened. Then they can become frightened or aggressive themselves and go on the attack. If you’re not afraid they are nice to you.
How that occupied my mind. How could they
smell
fear? What did fear
smell
like? And was it possible to pretend you weren’t frightened, so that the dogs would smell that and wouldn’t notice the
real
feelings that lay beneath?
Kanestrøm, who lived two houses up from us, also had a dog. It was a golden retriever called Alex and as meek as a lamb. It ambled after Herr Kanestrøm wherever he went, but also after every one of the four children if it could. Kind eyes and, somehow, gentle, friendly movements. But I was even afraid of this one. Because when you came into view on the hill and were about to go in to ring the doorbell it barked. Not tentative, friendly, or inquisitive barking, but vigorous, deep-throated, and resonant. Then I would stop in my tracks.
“Hi, Alex,” I might say if no one was around. “I’m not frightened, you know. It’s not that.”
If someone was there I would feel forced to carry on, act as if nothing were happening, plow my way through the barking, as it were, and when the dog was in front of me, its jaws agape, I would bend down and pat it a couple of times on its side with my heart pounding and every muscle trembling with fear.
“Quiet, Alex!” Dag Lothar would say, as he came running up the narrow gravel path from the cellar door or rushing from the front door.
“You’re frightening Karl Ove with your barking, you stupid dog.”
“I’m not frightened,” I would counter. Dag Lothar would just look at me with a kind of stiff smile, which meant “Don’t give me that.”
Then off we went.
Where did we go?
Into the forest.
Down to Ubekilen, to a bay.
Down to the pontoons.
Up to Tromøya Bridge.
Down to Gamle Tybakken.
Over to the plastic boat factory.
Up into the hills.
Along to Lake Tjenna.
Up to B-Max.
Down to the Fina gas station.
Unless, that is, we just ran about in the road where we lived, or hung around outside one of the houses there, or sat on the curb, or in the big cherry tree no one owned.
That was everything. That was the world.
But what a world!
An estate has no roots in the past, nor any branches into the skies of the future, as satellite towns once had. Estates arrived as a pragmatic answer to a practical question, where are all the people moving into the district going to live, ah yes, in the forest over there, we’ll clear some plots and put them up for sale. The only house there belonged to a family called Beck; the father was Danish and had built the house himself in the middle of the forest. They didn’t have a car, or a washing machine, or a television. There was no garden, only a drive made from pounded soil in among the trees. Piles of wood under tarpaulins and, in the winter, an upturned boat. The two sisters, Inga Lill and Lisa, went to the local middle school and looked after Yngve and me for the first years we lived there. Their brother was called John, he was two years older than me, wore strange, homemade clothes, wasn’t in the slightest bit interested in what we were interested in, and devoted his attention to other matters, which he never told us about. He built his own boat when he was twelve. Not like us, not like the rafts we tried to cobble together from dreams and a lust for adventure, but a proper, real rowboat. You would have thought he would be bullied, but he wasn’t, in a way, the distance was too great. He wasn’t one of us and he didn’t want to be. His father, the cycling Dane, who perhaps had nurtured an urge to live alone in the middle of the forest ever since his time in Denmark, must have been mortified when the plans for the estate were drawn up and approved and the first construction machinery rolled into the forest just beyond his house. The families who moved in were from all over the country and all of them had children. In the house across the road lived Gustavsen, he was a fireman, she was a housewife, they came from Honningsvåg, their children were called Rolf and Leif Tore. In the house opposite us lived Prestbakmo, he was a schoolteacher, she was a nurse, they came from Troms, their children’s names were Gro and Geir. On the same side was Kanestrøm, he worked at the post office, she was a housewife, they came from Kristiansund, their children were called Steinar, Ingrid Anne, Dag Lothar, and Unni. On the other side was Karlsen, he was a sailor, she was a shop assistant, they were from Sørland, their children were Kent Arne and Anne Lene. Above them was Christensen, he was a sailor, I don’t know what she did, their children were called Marianne and Eva. On the other side lived Jacobsen, he was a typographer, she was a housewife, both were from Bergen, their children were Geir, Trond, and Wenche. Above them, Lindland, from Sørland, their children were Geir Håkon and Morten. Around there, I began to lose track, at least as far as the parents’ names and jobs were concerned. The children there were: Bente, Tone Elisabeth, Tone, Liv Berit, Steinar, Kåre, Rune, Jan Atle, Oddlaug, and Halvor. Most were my age, the oldest seven years above me, the youngest four years below. Five of them would later be in my class.
We moved there in the summer of 1970, when most of the houses on the site were still being built. The shrill warning siren, which sounded before an explosion, was a common feature of my childhood, and that very distinctive feeling of doom you can experience when the shock waves from the explosion ripple through the ground causing the floor of the house to tremble was common, too. It was natural to think of connections above the ground – roads, electric cables, forests, and seas – but more disturbing to think of them being beneath the ground as well. What we stood on, shouldn’t that be absolutely immovable and impenetrable? At the same time all the openings in the ground had a very special fascination for me and the other children I grew up with. It was not uncommon for us to flock around one of the many holes being dug in our area, whether for sewage pipes or electric cables, or for the foundations of a cellar, and to stare down into the depths, yellow where there was sand, black, brown, or reddish brown where there was soil, gray where there was clay, and sooner or later the bottom was always covered with an opaque layer of grayish-yellow water, its surface sometimes broken by the top of a huge rock or two. Above the hole towered a shiny yellow or orange excavator, not unlike a bird, with its bucket like a beak at the extreme end of a long neck, and beside it a stationary truck, with headlights like eyes, the radiator grille like a mouth, and the tarpaulin-covered rear, a back. In the case of large construction projects there would also be bulldozers or dump trucks, usually yellow, with enormous wheels and treads that were a hand’s width. If we were lucky we would find piles of detonation cord in or near the hole, which we pinched because the cord had a high swap and utility value. Besides this, there were normally drums nearby, the height of a man, wooden bobbin-like constructions from which cables were unfurled, and piles of smooth, reddish-brown plastic pipes measuring the approximate diameter of our forearms. There were further piles of cement pipes and precast cement wells, so rough and wonderful, a bit taller than us, perfect for climbing on; long, immovable mats of old, cut-up car tires, which they used during the blasting; mounds of wooden telephone poles, green from the preservative they had been impregnated with; boxes of dynamite; sheds where the workmen changed their clothes and ate. If they were there we kept a respectful distance and watched what they were doing. If they weren’t, we clambered down the holes, onto the dump-truck wheels, balanced on the piles of pipes, rattled the shed doors and peered through the windows, jumped down into the cement wells, tried to roll the drums away, filled our pockets with cable clippings, plastic handles, and detonation cord. In our world no one had greater status than these workmen; no work seemed more meaningful than theirs. The technical details were of no interest to me, they meant as little as the make of the construction machines. What fascinated me most, apart from the changes in the landscape the workmen wrought, were the manifestations of their private lives that came with them. When one of them produced a comb from his orange overalls or baggy, almost shapeless, blue trousers and combed his hair, safety helmet under his arm, amid all the droning and pounding of the machines, for example, or the mysterious, indeed almost incomprehensible, moment when the workmen emerged from the shed in the afternoon wearing absolutely normal clothes and got into their cars and drove off like absolutely normal men.