He was very correct in his dealings with colleagues, but also kept his distance. The distance lay in his attire; many of the other teachers would wear smocks and jeans or the same suit for months on end. The distance lay in the impartiality he exhibited. The distance lay in his body language, his posture, his aura.
He always knew more about them than they knew about him. It was a rule in his life, which applied to everyone, even his parents and brothers. Or perhaps especially to them.
When he came home from school he went into his study and prepared the evening meetings; he was a Venstre representative on the council, as well as sitting on several committees, and at one point he was a possible Storting candidate for his party, according to him. But what he said wasn’t always true, he was notorious for manipulating the truth in the circles in which he moved, although not in his work at school or in politics, where he was proper and seemly. He was also a member of a philately club in Grimstad and showed his collection at a variety of exhibitions. In the summer he devoted himself to the garden, where he was also ambitious and a perfectionist, if such is conceivable in a garden around a house on an estate in the seventies. He had inherited his interest in everything that grew from his mother, and that was perhaps what they spoke about most: various plants, bushes, and trees and the experiences they’d had with them. Sun, soil, moisture, acidity levels. Grafting, pruning, watering. With no friends, his social intercourse took place in the staff room and the family. He visited his parents, brothers, uncles, and aunts frequently and received frequent visits from them. With them he used a tone of voice that was unfamiliar to Yngve and me, and we therefore viewed it with suspicion.
Mom’s life differed in many ways from his. She had lots of friends, mostly because of her job, but also in other places, not least among the neighbors. With them she would sit and chat, or “prattle,” as Dad would say, and smoke and eat the cakes they had baked – if, that is, they weren’t knitting in the thick cloud of tobacco smoke that hung in so many living rooms in the seventies. She had an interest in politics, was in favor of a strong state, a well-developed health system, and equal rights for all, and was probably committed to women’s liberation and the peace movement, was against capitalism and the growing materialism, and sympathized with Erik Dammann’s
The Future in Our Hands
movement, in short she was on the left. She said she had hibernated during her twenties, everything was about her job, her children, and making ends meet, the budget was tight, you had to fight to keep to it, although in her early thirties she focused on herself and the society she was living in. While Dad rarely read anything other than what he had to, she was genuinely interested in literature. She was an idealist, he was a pragmatist; she was contemplative, he was practical.
They brought us up together even if I never experienced my upbringing as such; I always drew a strict distinction between them and perceived them as two utterly separate beings. But for them it must have been different. In the evenings when we were asleep they sat up talking – about the neighbors, colleagues, us, unless they were discussing politics or literature. Once in a while they went on holiday alone, to London, to the Rhine Valley, or into the mountains, while Yngve and I were with either Mom’s or Dad’s parents. They were more equal than the parents of my friends as far as chores in the house were concerned: Dad cleaned and cooked, which none of the other fathers did, not to mention all the food gathering they did at that time, all the fish he caught on the far side of the island and the hundreds of kilos of berries we picked on trips to the mainland in late summer and autumn, which afterward they converted into juice and jam and poured into bottles and jars to stand on the shelves in the cellar all winter, glowing dimly in the light from the little window at the top of the wall. Raspberries, blackberries, blueberries, cowberries, and cloudberries, which would excite Dad so much he would shout out if he found any. Sloes for wine. In addition, they would pay to pick fruit from gardens on Tromøya, and it was from there we had apples, pears, and plums. Then there was the cherry tree belonging to Dad’s uncle Alf in Kristiansand and, of course, both grandmothers had fruit trees. Our days were structured and clear: on Sundays it was lunch with dessert, on weekdays it was generally a variety of shapes and variants of fish. We always knew when we had school on the following day, how many lessons we had in which subjects, and not even the course of the evening was without a framework, as it was seasonally determined: if there was snow or ice on the ground, then it was skiing and skating. If the water temperature rose above fifteen degrees, well then, swimming was the order of the day, come rain come shine. The sole really unpredictable factor in this life, from autumn to winter, spring to summer, from one school year to the next, was Dad. I was so frightened of him that even with the greatest effort of will I am unable to recreate the fear; the feelings I had for him I have never felt since, nor indeed anything close.
His footsteps on the stairs – was he coming to see me?
The wild glare in his eyes. The tightness around his mouth. The lips that parted involuntarily. And then his voice.
Sitting here now, hearing it in my inner ear, I almost start crying.
His fury struck like a wave, it washed through the rooms, lashed at me, lashed and lashed and lashed at me, and then it retreated. Then it could be quiet for several weeks. However, it wasn’t quiet, for it could just as easily come in two minutes as two days. There was no warning. Suddenly, there he was, furious. Whether he hit me or not made no difference, it was equally awful if he twisted my ear or squeezed my arm or dragged me somewhere to see what I had done, it wasn’t the pain I was afraid of, it was him, his voice, his face, his body, the fury it emitted, that was what I was afraid of, and the terror never let up, it was there for every single day of my entire childhood.
After the confrontations I wanted to die. Dying was one of the best, most enjoyable fantasies I had. He would have fun then. He would be standing there thinking about what he had done. He would be feeling remorse then. Oh, what remorse he would feel! I visualized him standing there and wringing his hands in despair with his head turned to heaven in front of the tiny coffin where I lay, with my prominent teeth, unable to pronounce my
r
’s.
What sweetness there was in that image! It almost put me in a good mood again. And that was how my childhood was; the distance between good and evil was so much shorter than it is now as an adult. All you had to do was stick your head out of the door and something absolutely fantastic happened. Just walking up to B-Max and waiting for the bus was an event, even though it had been repeated almost every day for many years. Why? I have no idea. But when everything glinted with moisture in the mist and your boots were wet from the slush on the road, and the snow in the forest was white and sunken, and we stood in a gang chatting or playing, or we ran after girls to trip them, grab their stocking caps, or simply throw them into a snowdrift, and I felt one of them against me as I squeezed my arms around her waist as tight as I could, perhaps Marianne, perhaps Siv, perhaps Marian, because they were the girls I prized and thought about most, all my nerves were a-quiver, my chest bubbled with joy – and why? Oh, because of the wet snow. Because of the wet down jackets. Because of the many good-looking girls. Because of the bus rattling along with chains on its tires. Because of the condensation on the windows when we went inside, because of the screaming and shouting, because Anne Lisbet was there, as happy and lovely, as dark-haired and red-mouthed, as she had ever been. Every day was a party, in the sense that everything that happened pulsated with excitement and nothing was predictable. Nor was it over when the bus came, it had only just begun, for the whole school day stretched out before us, with the transformation we went through when our wet clothes were hanging on hooks and we shuffled into the classroom in stockinged feet, with red cheeks and messy hair, wet at the tips because it had been outside the hat. The tingling in your body as the break beckoned, and we ran up the stairs, through the corridors, down the outside steps, across the playground, down the slope, and onto the field. And afterward, going home, playing music, reading, perhaps putting on skis and racing down the steep hill to Ubekilen, where the others always were, and all this at the intensity that only exists in childhood, standing at the bottom, back up herringbone style, racing down, until the darkness was so dense we could hardly see a hand in front of our faces and hung over our ski sticks chatting about everything and nothing.
The glimpse of ice on the bay covered by a shallow layer of water. The lights from the houses on the estate, which formed a kind of cupola over the forest above us. All the sounds the darkness amplified whenever someone shifted weight and the blue mini skis scraped against each other or cut into the soft snow. The car that came down the narrow gravel road, it was a Beetle, belonging to the people who lived there, the light shining a path across the ground, making everything spookily visible for a moment or two and then the darkness closing around us again.
Childhood consisted of an infinity of such moments, all equally compact. Some of them could raise me to dizzying heights, like the evening I got together with Tone and half ran, half slid down the hill, which must have just been cleared by the snowplow, judging by the shiny surface, and when I arrived at the dark patch between the roads outside our house, I lay down in the snow on my back and looked up at the dense, clammy, and lightless night above me and was utterly happy.
Others could open a void beneath me, like the evening Mom told us she was going to start studying the following year. We were at the table eating supper when she told us.
“The school’s in Oslo,” she said. “It’s just for one year. I’ll come home every Friday and I’ll be here all weekend. Then I’ll go back on the Monday. So that’s three days here and four there.”
“Are we going to be alone here with Dad?” Yngve said.
“Yes. It’ll be fine. You’ll see a bit more of each other.”
“Why are you going to go to school?” I said. “You’re an adult.”
“There’s something called further education,” she said. “I’m going to learn more about my profession. It’s very exciting, you know.”
“I don’t want you to go,” I said.
“It’s just for a year,” she said. “And I’ll be here for three days a week. And all the holidays. I’m going to have long holidays.”
“I still don’t want you to go,” I said.
“I understand,” Mom said. “But it’ll be fine. Dad wants to spend time with you. And next year it will be the other way around. Dad will do a further education course and I’ll be at home.”
I took the last mouthful of tea, closed my mouth, and let it seep through, as I blocked the many wet, black tea leaves at the bottom with my lips.
I half-rose and lifted the heavy teapot over to the cup with both hands, poured, and put it back. The tea was almost black, it had been brewing for so long. I added a generous portion of milk and three large spoonfuls of sugar.
“Sugar in tea,” Yngve said.
“And?” I said.
At that moment there was the sound of footsteps on the stairs.
Oh, and I had filled the cup to the brim! I would have to sit there until it was drunk. But Yngve had no such reservations; he stood up and was gone.
Dad walked past with a somber step. He switched on the television and sat down on a chair.
“Would you like some supper?” Mom said.
“No,” he said.
I poured in more milk to make the tea colder and drank it up in three long swigs.
“Thank you, Mom!” I said, getting up.
“My pleasure,” Mom said.
The news was shocking, but I wasn’t shocked as I went to my room afterward, it was April now and the course she was doing didn’t start until August. That was four months away and for a child four months is an eternity. Mom’s further education course belonged to the future in the same vague way that my next school did or confirmation or my eighteenth birthday. We were in midchildhood and time was suspended there. That is, the moments raced along at breakneck speed while the days that contained them passed almost unnoticed. Even when the last day of school arrived and we were no longer in the third class I didn’t think that soon she would be off. Wasn’t there the whole of the long summer holiday to go yet? It was only when she was in her bedroom taking out her clothes and a suitcase lay open on the floor that I realized. At the same time there were so many other things going on, the next day school would be starting again, when we, the fourth class, would definitively be among the oldest. We would have a new classroom, and more importantly, a new class teacher. Inside my room there was a new satchel, in the wardrobe there were new clothes. The thought of all this made my stomach tingle, and although I was sad watching her pack I was no sadder than I usually was when she went to work.
She stopped packing and looked at me.
“I’ll be back on Thursday,” she said. “It’s only four days.”
“I know,” I said. “Have you got everything?”
“You know what, I think I have,” she said. “Would you mind helping me with the suitcase? Put your knee there so that I can close it properly?”
I nodded and did as she asked.
Dad came up the stairs.
“Are you ready?” he said with a nod at the suitcase. “I’ll take it.”
Mom gave me a hug and then she followed him downstairs.
I watched them from the bathroom window. As she got into the green Beetle it was exactly like any afternoon when she had to go to work – apart from the suitcase in the trunk, that is. I waved, she waved back, started the engine, reversed up the incline, put the car in first gear, and it beetled down the hill the way it always did and was gone.
What would happen now?
What would the days be like now?
It was Mom who bound us all together, it was Mom who was at the center of Yngve’s and my life, we knew that, Dad knew that, but perhaps she didn’t. How else could she leave us like this?