An ice cream?
Oh yes.
Yngve bought an ice cream in a boat-shaped wafer, I bought a tub with a little red spatula and we ambled over to the quay with them in our hands. We sat on a brick wall and looked down at the water and the seaweed lying in wet, greasy clusters against the rocks. In the distance we saw the ferry arriving. The air smelled of salty water, seaweed, grass, and exhaust fumes, and the sun burned our faces.
“Are you still feeling sick?” I said.
He shook his head.
“Too bad we forgot the soccer ball,” he said. “But they’ve probably got one in Våjen.”
He said Våjen the way Grandma did.
“Yes,” I said, squinting into the sun. “Do you think we’ll get on this one?”
“Don’t know. Hope so.”
I dangled my legs. Loosened a big chunk with the spatula and put it in my mouth. It was so big and cold that I had to jiggle it to and fro with my tongue to prevent the icy texture from becoming intolerable. While doing this, I turned and glanced at our car. Dad was sitting with the door open and one leg on the ground, smoking. The sun glinted on his sunglasses. Mom was standing beside him with a basket of wild cherries on the roof and helping herself every now and then.
“What shall we do tomorrow?” I said.
“I’m going to be with Grandad in the cowshed anyway. He said he would teach me everything so that I can take over one day.”
“Do you think it’s possible to swim there now?”
“Are you out of your mind?” he said. “It’s as cold in the fjord as it was in the mountain lake.”
“Why is that?”
“It’s so far north of course!”
Some of the cars started their engines. The bow doors of the ferry opened. Yngve got up and walked toward the car. I ate my ice cream as quickly as possible and followed him.
After the ferry trip to Kvanndal the next high point of the journey was climbing Vikafjellet. The steep, narrow road wound upward, round and round, round and round, so steep in some places I was frightened the car would tip over and fall backward.
“There are probably quite a few tourists who get a bit of a shock here,” Dad said as we drove up and I sat trembling and peering down at the precipice beneath us. “They use the brakes to slow down, you see. That could be fatal.”
“What do we use?” I said.
“We use the gears,” he said.
We weren’t tourists, we knew what was what, we weren’t the motorists you saw behind clouds of steam issuing from an open hood at the roadside. But immediately afterward things almost did go wrong, because at the next hairpin bend we met a car towing a trailer, we were only a few meters away from a collision, but Dad jumped on the brakes and the other car did the same. Dad reversed down until the road was wide enough for both of us. The other driver waved to us as he passed.
“Did you know him, Dad?” I said.
In the mirror I saw he was smiling.
“No, I didn’t know him. He waved to thank me for making room for him.”
Then it was on to the next mountain, and down to the next fjord. The mountains here were as high as by Hardangerfjord, but they were gentler in a way, not as steep, and the fjord here was wider, at some junctures almost like a lake. What’s the problem? the Hardangerfjord mountains said. Take it easy, these mountains said. Everything’s hunky-dory.
“Shall we take turns sleeping?” Yngve said.
“Fine by me,” I said.
“Great,” he said. “Me first then?”
“OK,” I said. And he laid his head on my lap and closed his eyes. It was good to have him sleeping there, his head was nice and warm, and it was as though something was going on in two places at once, the countryside outside the window, which was changing constantly and I never took my eyes off it, and Yngve’s head asleep on my lap.
When we parked in the queue for the next ferry, he woke up. We stood on the deck and enjoyed the wind blowing into our faces. Half an hour later we were back in the car and it was my turn to rest my head on Yngve’s lap.
I woke up and knew we were getting close. The nearer we got to the sea, the lower the uplands and the denser the vegetation, but of course nowhere near Sørland’s scrubbed-clean terrain and gnarled qualities. None of the roads here had stuck in my mind; I looked out of the window without connecting what I saw with anything until I suddenly recognized Lihesten, the vertical drop that plunged several hundred meters on the other side of the fjord from my grandparents’ house. We’d had the mountain in front of us for ages, but it was unrecognizable from all other angles except the one we had now, as we approached it from the side. The excitement constricted my chest. We were there! Oh yes, there’s the waterfall! There’s the chapel! There’s the hotel! There’s the Salbu sign! And there’s the house! Grandma and Grandad’s house!
Dad slowed down and turned into the gravel path. It led first past the neighbor, and then through the gate, with the shed on the right, up the last steep incline to the front of the house. I opened the door almost before the car had stopped and jumped out. On the other side of the enclosed field I saw Grandad. He was standing by the beehives in his beekeeper outfit. White overalls, white hat with a long, white veil around his head. All his movements were slow, also the hand he raised to greet us. It was as if he was submerged beneath water or on an alien planet with different gravity. I lifted my hand and waved, then I ran into the house. Grandma was in the kitchen.
“We almost crashed into a car on Vikafjellet! We were climbing like this,” I said, depicting the gradient on the yellow vinyl tablecloth with my finger while she smiled at me with her warm, dark eyes.
“And then a car with a trailer came. Like this …”
“I’m glad you got here safe and sound,” she said. Mom came in through the other door. In the hall I could hear what must have been Dad carrying in all the baggage. Where was Yngve? Had he gone over to Grandad? With all the bees buzzing around?
I dashed out onto the drive. Nope. Yngve was helping Dad to unload the car. Grandad was still there in his white spacesuit. With infinite patience he lifted some frames from the hive. The sun had gone from the farm, but was shining on the spruces growing on the slope behind the pond. A light wind blew past the house, rustling the treetops above me. Kjartan walked over from the cowshed. He was wearing overalls and boots. Longish black hair, square glasses.
“Good evening,” he said, stopping by the car.
“Oh, hi, Kjartan,” Dad said.
“Good trip?” Kjartan said.
“Yes, it was fine.”
Kjartan was ten years younger than Mom, so in his early twenties that summer. There was something stern, almost angry about him, and even though I had never experienced his anger, I was still afraid of him. He was the only one of the children to live at home: Kjellaug lived in Kristiansand with her husband, Magne, and their two children, Jon Olav and Ann Kristin, who would soon be coming here, while the next youngest, Ingunn, was a student and lived in Olso with Mård and their two-year-old daughter, Yngvild. Kjartan and Grandma quarreled a lot, he was not as she would have liked her only son to be, I gathered. The idea was that he would take over the smallholding when the time came. Now he was training to become a pipe fitter on ships and planning to work at a yard somewhere in their county of Hordaland. But the most important thing to know about Kjartan, which was frequently mentioned when talk turned to him, was that he was a communist. A fervent communist. When he discussed politics with Mom and Dad, which he was wont to do on their visits, for some reason their conversations always ended up there, and his somewhat shy, evasive eyes changed and became fiery. At home when the subject of Kjartan came up, Dad tended to laugh at him, mostly to tease Mom, who was not exactly a communist, but who nonetheless disagreed with Dad on most matters concerning politics. Dad was a teacher and voted for Venstre, a center party.
“I’d better take this off and have a shower so I don’t smell of cowshed, now that we have such refined company,” Kjartan said. “I think there is food for you in there.”
Even outside I could hear the stairs creak when he went up to the bathroom on the first floor. How the stairs creaked here!
And indeed a table had been set for us in the living room. There was a pile of still-hot pancakes and a dish of griddle cakes, as well as bread and various spreads. Mom shuttled to and fro between living room and kitchen. Although she had left home when she was sixteen, married Dad, given birth to Yngve when she was twenty, and lived with her own family ever since, she merged into the household effortlessly as soon as she arrived. Even the way she spoke changed and became much more like the way her parents spoke. With Dad it was the opposite: he was always lost in the background. When he was talking to Grandad, who loved chatting and had a story for every occasion, often from his own experience, there was something formal about Dad that made him so alien but which I still recognized, it was the manner he adopted when he spoke to other parents and colleagues. Grandad wasn’t polite in that way, he was completely and utterly himself, so why would Dad sit there nodding and saying, I see, oh yes, really, mhm, mhm? Mom was different here, too, she laughed and chatted more, and these changes amounted to a plus for us, in fact, an enormous plus: Dad was in the background, Mom was livelier, and there were no house rules, and unlike where we came from, here we could do as we liked. If one of us knocked over a glass of milk it wasn’t a catastrophe, Grandma and Grandad understood that accidents can happen, we could even put our feet on the table here, well, if Dad wasn’t in the room at that point, of course, and we could sit on the brown sofa with orange and beige stripes, as slumped as we wanted, even lie on it if we felt like it. And all the work they did, we did, too, on our own minor scale. We were not unwanted. On the contrary, it was expected of us that we would help as far as we could. Rake the mown hay on the field, lay it on the drying rack, collect the eggs, shovel muck into the cellar, set the table for meals, and pick red currants, black currants, and gooseberries when they were ripe. The doors here were open and people came in without even knocking, they just shouted from the hallway and were suddenly in the living room, made themselves at home and drank coffee with Grandad, who didn’t bat an eyelid, just started chatting as though their conversation had only been interrupted for a few seconds. These people who came were strange, one in particular, a fat-bellied, sloppily dressed, and slightly malodorous man with a high voice who used to wobble up the hill on his moped in the evening. His accent was so broad I barely understood half of what he said. Grandad’s face lit up when he came, but whether that was because he liked him all that much was hard to say as his face lit up whenever anyone came. I was sure he liked us although I doubted whether the thought had ever struck him; we existed, that was enough for him. For Grandma it must have been different, at least it appeared so from the interest she showed when we talked.
Mom stood staring at the table, probably to check that everything was there. Grandma took the coffee pot off the stove in the kitchen and the steadily increasing noise of the whistle died with a little sigh. Dad deposited the luggage in the room above our heads. Grandad came into the hall after hanging up his beekeeper outfit in the basement.
“The Norwegian population is going through a growth spurt, I see!” he said when he saw us. He came over and patted me on the head as though I were some kind of dog. Then he patted Yngve’s head and sat down as Grandma came in from the kitchen carrying the coffee pot, and Dad and Kjartan both came down the stairs.
Grandad was small, his face was round, and apart from a thin wreath of white hair around his head he was bald. The corners of his mouth were often stained with tobacco juice. The eyes behind his glasses were sharp, but were totally transformed once took them off. Then they were like two small children who had just woken up.
“Looks like I came at just the right moment,” he said, putting a slice of bread on his plate.
“We heard you in the basement,” Mom said. “Nothing to do with luck.”
She turned to me.
“Do you remember the time we heard you in the hall ten minutes
before
you arrived?”
I nodded. Dad and Kjartan sat down on opposite sides of the table. Grandma went to pour coffee into the cups.
Grandad, who was spreading butter over the bread with his knife, looked up.
“You heard him
before
he came?”
“Yes, strange, isn’t it?” Mom said.
“That’s a
vardøger,
that is. A kind of guardian angel,” Grandad said. “It means you’ll have a long life.”
“Is that what it means?” Mom said with a laugh.
“Yes,” Grandad said.
“Surely you don’t believe that, do you?” Dad said.
“Did you two hear him when he wasn’t there?” Grandad said. “That’s what’s remarkable. Is it so remarkable that it has some significance?”
“Hm,” Kjartan said. “You’ve become superstitious in your old age, Johannes.”
I looked at Grandma. Her hands were trembling, and as she poured, the pot was moving up and down so much it was only with the greatest effort of will that she managed to direct the jet from the spout into the cup without spilling the coffee. Mom looked at her, too, and was on the point of getting up, presumably to take over, only to lean back and reach for the bread basket instead. It was both painful to watch Grandma because she was so slow – in fact some coffee did end up in a saucer – and also unheard of that she, an adult, was unable to manage such a simple task as pouring coffee without spilling it, and the strangeness of seeing someone with hands shaking nonstop, almost with a mind of their own, meant that I couldn’t take my eyes off her.
Mom placed her hand on mine.
“Wouldn’t you like a griddle cake?” she said.
I nodded. She reached for one and put it on my plate. I spread a thick layer of butter on it and sprinkled sugar. Mom lifted the jug of milk and filled my glass. The milk came straight from the cowshed; it was warm and yellowish with tiny lumps floating round. I looked at Mom. Why had she filled my glass? I couldn’t drink that milk, it was disgusting, it had come straight from the cow, and not just any cow but one standing outside and pissing and shitting.