They were young women, but we didn’t know that.
Mom rummaged through her bag for the car key.
“You were all so good,” Martha said.
“Thank you,” I said.
Geir said nothing, just squinted into the sun.
“Oh, here it is,” Mom said at length. She unlocked the car and we got in, adults in the front, children in the back. They both lit up cigarettes. And then we drove home in the sunshine.
That evening I stood in the doorway watching Mom drying her hair in their bedroom. Occasionally, when Dad wasn’t there, I followed her round the house and talked her ears off. Now I was quiet, the whine of the hairdryer made it impossible to speak, instead I watched her as she bent her head and lifted her hair up with a brush in one hand to the dryer in the other. She sent me sporadic glances and smiled. I went into the room. On the little table by the wall there was a letter. I didn’t mean to pry, but even at some distance I could see the first name was Sissel, Mom’s name, and that the full name was longer than Mom’s, because between Sissel and Knausgård, which I recognized rather than read, there was a third name. I went closer. “Sissel Norunn Knausgård,” it said.
Norunn?
Who was that?
“Mom!” I said.
She lowered the hairdryer, as though that would make my voice clearer, and looked at me.
“Mom,” I said again. “What does that envelope say? What kind of name is that?”
She switched off the hairdryer.
“What did you say?”
“What kind of name is that!”
I nodded toward the envelope. She leaned over and took it.
“That’s my name.”
“But it says Norunn! Your name’s not Norunn!”
“Yes, it is. It’s my middle name. Sissel Norunn.”
“Has it always been your name?”
I felt my chest tighten with despair.
“Ye-es. All my life. Didn’t you know?”
“No! Why didn’t you say?”
Tears were running down my cheeks.
“But, darling,” Mom said, “I didn’t think it mattered. Sissel is the name I use. Norunn is just a middle name. A kind of extra name.”
I was shaken to the core. Not by the name in itself, but by the fact that I hadn’t known it. That she’d had a name I didn’t know.
Was there anything else I didn’t know?
A month later, in the middle of the long summer holiday, we drove up to Sørbøvåg by Åfjorden in Ytre Sogn, where my mother’s parents lived, and we stayed there for two weeks. I had been looking forward to this so much that on the morning we were due to leave and I was woken at the crack of dawn, there was a tinge of unreality about it. The trunk was packed to the gunnels, Mom and Dad sat at the front, Yngve and I in the back, we would be in the car all day and evening, and even the most familiar sight, the road down to the crossroads and up to Tromøya Bridge, seemed cast in a different light. Now it didn’t belong to the house and our existence in it, now it belonged to the great expedition we had set out on, which lent every crag and every rock, every islet and every skerry, excitement and anticipation.
When we came to the crossroads by the bridge I folded my hands as usual and said the short prayer that had worked every time so far:
Dear God,
Please don’t let us crash.
Amen
We drove across the mainland, through vast, monotonous, coniferous forests, past Evje with its long, low military barracks and pine plains, past Byglandsfjord and the campsite, up into Setesdalen, with its age-old enclosed fields and farms and the many silversmith signs, along a road that in some places almost seemed to go through people’s drives. Slowly buildings disappeared, it was as if the houses lost their hold on us and fell by the wayside one by one, like children fell off the enormous inner tube someone had roped to a boat earlier that summer. As the boat’s speed increased only the tube was left. I saw glinting sandbanks along the sides of the river, green-clad hills rising more and more steeply, the occasional enormous, bare mountainside, in every shade of gray, with some flame-red pine trees on top. I saw rapids and waterfalls, lakes and plains, everything bathed in the glow of the clear, bright sun, which, as we drove, had risen higher and higher in the sky. The road was narrow, and it gently and unobtrusively followed all the countryside’s dips and climbs, curves and bends, with trees like a wall on both sides in some places, towering over everything in others, in sudden and unexpected vantage points.
Sporadically, rest areas appeared during the journey, small graveled areas beside the road where families could sit and eat at rough-hewn timber tables, their cars next to them, generally with doors and trunks open, under the shade of trees, often close to a lake or a river. Everyone had a thermos on the table, many had a cooler bag, some also a Primus stove. “Aren’t we going to stop for a break soon?” I would ask after seeing such a rest area because breaks, alongside ferry crossings, belonged to the high points of the journey. We, too, had a cooler bag in the trunk; we, too, had a thermos, juice, and a little pile of plastic glasses, cups, and plates with us. “Don’t pester me,” Dad would say then, desperate to cover as many kilometers as he could in one go. That meant that, at the very least, we would have to drive to the end of Setesdalen, past Hovden and Haukeligrend and up Mount Haukeli, before the question of a break even came into consideration. Then we would have to find a suitable place because we would not take the first opportunity, oh no: if the stops were few and far between, then the location of the rest area had to be something special.
In the uplands the terrain was completely flat. There wasn’t a tree or a bush to be seen anywhere. The road continued dead straight. Some areas were littered with boulders strewn across the ground, covered with a kind of coating I thought might have been lichen or moss. Others were unbroken rock face, clean, scrubbed. Here and there water sparkled, snow glinted. Dad drove faster as there was such a clear view. At intervals, along the roadside, we saw tall poles, and Yngve said it was quite incredible, they were markers and so high because the snow in winter could reach up to the top. That was several meters!
The sun shone, the mountain plateau stretched in all directions, and we, we were racing ahead. One rest area after another was left in our wake until, without warning, Dad signaled, braked, and pulled in.
It was situated right next to a lake, oval and utterly black. Beyond it the ground rose gently while at the side there was a big snowdrift, bluish in color and hollow underneath where the water disappeared down an opening.
Around us it was perfectly still. After so many hours with the regular hum of the engine the silence felt artificial, as though it didn’t belong to the landscape but to us.
Dad opened the trunk, took out the cooler bag, and put it on the coarse wooden table, where Mom immediately began to unpack it as he fetched the thermos and the bag with the cups and plates. Yngve and I ran to the water, bent down, and dipped a hand. It was freezing cold!
“How about a swim here, boys?” Dad said.
“Oh no, it’s freezing!” I said.
“Sissies,” he said.
“But it’s freeezing!” I said.
“Yes, I’m sure it is. I was only joking. We haven’t time for a swim anyway.”
Yngve and I walked over to the snowdrift. It was so solid we couldn’t make snowballs from it, as we had hoped. And walking across the top, with the water underneath, wouldn’t be in the cards if Mom and Dad were there.
I broke off a clump and threw it into the lake, where it bobbed up and down like a mini iceberg. Now at least, when we were home, I could say we had thrown snowballs in the middle of July.
“Come and eat,” Mom called.
We sat down. We each had a packed lunch. Three slices of bread with boiled egg on top. In addition, there was a package of cookies on the table. In our glasses there was juice. The plastic gave it a different taste, but I liked it, it reminded me of the trips we used to have when we picked berries and went on camping holidays. We hadn’t had that many, there’d been basically only one, last summer when we went to Sweden with Grandma and Grandad. A car raced up from behind me, it was as though the sound vibrated as it increased in volume, then after a kind of boom it went quieter again until it was gone. Steam rose from Mom and Dad’s coffee. A car towing a trailer came from the other direction. I watched it as I finished my juice. It was creeping along. Then it signaled. As it pulled over into the rest area Dad turned.
“What’s that idiot doing?” he said. “There’s only one table here. Can’t he see?”
He turned back, put his coffee cup down, and took the fox-emblazoned pouch of tobacco from his breast pocket.
The car with the trailer stopped only a few meters from us. The door opened and a fat man dressed in a pair of beige shorts and a yellow T-shirt, with a brown bucket hat, emerged. He opened the door of the trailer and disappeared inside as a woman came out of the other car door. She was also fat and wore light-gray elasticized slacks with a crease and a woolen sweater. From her mouth hung an unlit cigarette, her hair was big and gray and yellow, and over her eyes she wore a pair of large glasses with tinted lenses. She went to stand by the lake, lit her cigarette, and gazed across as she smoked.
I started on the last slice of bread.
The man reemerged with a camping table in his hands. He erected it between the car and our table. Dad turned again.
“Haven’t they got any manners?” he said. “We’re sitting here eating and he’s intruding.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Mom said. “It’s beautiful here.”
“It
was
beautiful here,” Dad said. “Until that fathead came.”
“He can hear you,” Mom said.
The man put a clinking cooler bag down beside the table. The woman went over to him.
“They’re Germans,” Dad said. “They don’t understand. We can say whatever we like.”
He took a last swig from his cup and jumped to his feet.
“Well, we’d better be moving on.”
“The boys haven’t finished eating yet,” Mom said. “We’re not in
such
a hurry, are we?”
“In fact, we are,” Dad said. “Eat up, come on. Be quick about it.”
He flicked his half-smoked cigarette to the ground, took the glasses and cups to the lake, rinsed them and put them in the bag with the plates and thermos. Zipped up the top of the cooler bag and put everything in the trunk. The man and woman said something I didn’t understand as they stared up the gentle slope on the other side of the lake. He was pointing. Something was moving in the distance. Mom scrunched up the wax paper from the
smørbrød
, put them in a bag, and got up.
“Let’s go then,” she said. “We’ll have to eat the cookies the next time we stop.”
That was what I had feared.
Dad pushed the seat forward for me and I got in. After the fresh air outside, the smell of smoke inside hit you. Yngve clambered in through the other door. He wrinkled his nose.
“I don’t think the car-sickness tablets are working anymore,” he said.
“Say if you feel sick,” Mom said.
“It would help if you didn’t smoke all the time,” he said.
“That’s enough of that,” Dad said. “Don’t whine. We’re on holiday.”
Slowly the car pulled out onto the road. I glanced across, past the lake, up to the spot where the man had been pointing. There was something there. A gray patch in all the green, moving slowly. What on earth could it be?
I nudged Yngve and pointed through the window when I had his attention.
“What’s that?” I said.
“Reindeer maybe,” he said. “We saw them last year, too. Don’t you remember?”
“Oh yes,” I said. “But they were much closer. These ones are so small they’re like mice!”
Then we sank into the trancelike state car travel can induce. We crossed the rest of the mountain range, descended into Røldal, and drove on to Odda, the dirty little town at the end of Hardangerfjord, which despite its run-down, polluted appearance still shared some of the magic the far end of the mountains evoked, so dizzyingly and, at bottom, incomprehensibly different from the world we had left only a few hours earlier. While Sørland for the most part consisted of low crags and knolls, small bedraggled forests with a wide-ranging selection of trees standing side by side in countryside that was both wide open and restricted, and while on the island where I lived the tallest mountain was no more than 120 meters high, this countryside here, which you always stumbled on, was remarkable for its
immense
mountains, so dominating in their purity and simplicity that all other details of the surroundings were forced to adjust to them, they disappeared, utterly and completely: who cared about a birch tree, however tall, when it stood beneath one of these endlessly beautiful and eternally immutable mountains? The most conspicuous difference, however, was not the dimensions but the colors, which seemed deeper here – nowhere is the color green so deep as in Vestland – or so clear – even the sky, even its blue was deeper and clearer than the blue of the sky where I came from. The sides of the valley were green and cultivated, in the spring and early summer the blossoming fruit trees a Japanese white, the mountain peaks a hazy blue, snow-tipped here and there, and, oh, between the ridges, which rose in a long line on both sides, lay the fjord itself, greenish in some places, bluish in others, gleaming in the sun everywhere, as deep as the mountains were high.
To travel in a car through this landscape was always overwhelming because nothing of what you had seen so far prepared you for what was waiting here. And then, as we drove along the northern side of the fjord, all the other unfamiliar features appeared, like the electric fences, like the red barns, like the old, white timber houses, like the cows grazing, like the long rows of hay-drying racks scattered across the sides of the valley. Tractors, forage harvesters, manure cellars, long brown boots on doorsteps, shady farmyard trees, horses, shops in the basements of normal houses. Children selling wild cherries or strawberries from small stands with handwritten signs along the road. Life here was different from life at home: I could see a stooped old woman wearing a flowery dress and a neckerchief, you didn’t see that where I came from, or a stooped old man in blue overalls and a black peaked cap in some field or along some gravel track. But however much of an impression the places here made on me, the unusual names they bore played a part, of course – Tyssedal, Espe, Hovland, Sekse, Børve, Opedal, Ullensvang, Lofthus, and Kinsarvik, which because of the strange sound was my favorite: all right,
vik
was an inlet, but a
kinsar,
what on earth was
that
?
–
and however bright the colors and however different the myriad of details, an atmosphere of extravagance also hung over these regions, not over the people and their activities but over the space they moved in, it seemed much too big for them, perhaps it was the flood of sunlight that did it, perhaps the blueness of the vast sky or perhaps the range of mountains stretching up into it, or else it was simply the fact that we were only passing through, we didn’t stop anywhere, apart from at the bus shelter where Yngve staggered out to throw up, we didn’t know anyone here and were in no way connected with what we saw. For when we did finally reach Kinsarvik and left the car, which Dad had parked in the queue, this sense of extravagance was no longer noticeable; on the contrary, everything seemed nice and cozy here with the sound of car radios, doors being opened and closed, people stretching, walking to and fro, children quietly kicking a ball about next to the queue or doing what Yngve and I were doing, walking to the kiosk at the end to see whether there was anything we could spend some of our holiday money on.