“You’d better come down,” Leif Tore said. “I have to go home soon anyway.”
“Me too,” I said.
He didn’t seem disappointed, though, up there. Determined would be a more accurate term.
“I’ll jump down then,” he said.
“Isn’t it a bit high?” Leif Tore said.
“Not at all,” Geir said. “Just have to put my mind to it.”
He squatted down and stared at the ground while taking deep breaths as though intending to dive into water. For a second all the tension in his body was gone, he must have changed his mind, but then he braced himself and he jumped. Fell, rolled around, bounced up again like a spring, and started brushing his thigh to signal composure, almost before he was upright.
Had I been the only one of us to climb the roof, it would have been a great triumph. Leif Tore would never have given in. Even if he had spent all night climbing up and falling off he would have gone on trying to reduce the imbalance that had suddenly become apparent. Geir was different though. In fact, he could pull off the most amazing feats, like jumping five meters through the air into a snowdrift, something no one else would dare, and it meant nothing to him. It was of no real consequence. Geir was just Geir, whatever he got it into his head to do.
Without another word, we walked up the hill. In some places the water had carried parts of the road surface along with it, in others there were long sunken dips. We stopped for a while and pressed our heels into an especially soft patch, the wet gravel oozed over the edge of our boots, it was a good feeling. My hands were cold. When I squeezed them my fingers left white marks in the red flesh. But the warts, three on one thumb, two on the other, one on an index finger, three on the back of my hand, didn’t change color, they were a dull reddish-brown color as always and covered with a layer of small dots you could scratch off. Then we went into the other part of the field, the bit that came to an end by a stone wall and the forest behind it; it was as though it was bordered by a long ridge, quite steep, perhaps ten meters high, clad with a line of spruce trees, broken occasionally by a knoll of bare rock. Walking here or in similar areas, I often happily indulged the notion that the countryside resembled the sea. And that fields were the surface of the sea with mountains and islands rising from them.
Oh, to sail in a boat through the forest! To swim among the trees! Now
that
would be something.
We sometimes used to drive to the far side of the island when the weather was good, park the car on the old shooting range, and walk down to the sea-smoothed rocks, our regular spot, not so far from Spornes beach, where of course I would have preferred to be, as there was sand and I could wade out to a depth that suited me. By the rocks the water was immediately very deep. There was, however, a little inlet, a kind of narrow cleft that filled up with water, which you could climb down into, where you could swim, but it was small and the sea bottom was uneven, covered with barnacles, seaweed, and shells. The waves beat against the rocks outside, causing the water to rise inside, sometimes up to your neck, and the Styrofoam floats on the life jacket I wore were lifted up to my ears. The sheer walls amplified the gurgling and slopping of the water, making them somehow sound hollow. Terrified, I would stand there, suddenly incapable of drawing breath in any other way than with great, shuddering gasps. It was just as creepy when the waves receded and the water level inside sank with a slurp. When the sea was calm, Dad would sometimes inflate the yellow-and-green raft, which I was allowed to lie on and float close to the shore, where, with my bare front stuck to the wet plastic and my back hot and dry from the burning sun, I would splash around, paddling with my hands in the water, which was so fresh and salty, watching the seaweed languidly sway to and fro along the rocks it was attached to, looking for fish or crabs or following a boat on the horizon. In the afternoon the Danish ferry came in, we could see it in the distance when we arrived, and it would be in the Galtesund strait when we left, white, enormous, towering above the low islands and reefs. Was it MS
Venus
? Or was it
Christian IV
? Kids all along the southern and western sides of the island, and presumably also the kids living on the other side of Galte Sound, on the, for us, foreign island of Hisøya, would go swimming when it came because its wake was immense and notorious. One afternoon, as I was paddling around on the raft, the sudden waves made me sit up and I toppled into the water. I sank like a stone. The water would have been about three meters deep there. I thrashed around with my arms and legs, shouted in panic, swallowed water, which only increased my fear, but it didn’t last more than twenty seconds because Dad had seen everything. He dived in and dragged me to the shore. I regurgitated some water, I was very cold, and we went home. I hadn’t been in any real danger and the incident had no lasting effect, except to leave me with the feeling I had as I walked up the hill to tell Geir what had happened: the world was something I walked on top of, it was impenetrable and hard, it was impossible to sink through it, no matter if it rose in steep mountains or fell in deep valleys. Of course I had known it was like that, but I had never felt it before, the sense that we were walking on a surface.
Despite this incident and the unease I could occasionally feel when I was paddling in the narrow inlet, I always looked forward to these trips. Sitting on a towel beside Yngve and scanning the light-blue, mirror-glass sea that only ended on the horizon, where big ships glided slowly past like hour hands, or looking at the two lighthouses on Torungen, the white a sharp contrast with the bright blue sky: not much was better than that. Drinking pop that had been in the red-checked cooler bag, eating cookies, perhaps watching Dad as he walked to the edge of the rocks, tanned and muscular, and dived into the sea two meters below a second later. The way he shook his head and stroked back the hair from his eyes when he emerged, the rush of bubbles around him, a rare gleam of pleasure in his eyes as he swam to shore with those slow, ponderous lunges of his arms, his body bobbing up and down in the swell. Or walking to the two sinkholes nearby, one a man’s depth with distinct spiral marks in the rock on the way down, filled with salty seawater, covered by green sea plants and at the bottom clusters of seaweed, the second less deep but no less beautiful for that. Or up to the shallow, extremely salty, hot pools that filled the hollows in the rock, refreshed only when there were storms, the surface thick with tiny, swirling insects and the bottom bedecked with yellow, sickly-looking algae.
On one such day Dad decided to teach me how to swim. He told me to follow him down to the water’s edge. Perhaps half a meter below the surface, a small, slippery ridge overgrown with seaweed jutted into the sea, and that was where I was to stand. Dad swam out to a reef four or five meters from the shore. And turned to face me.
“Now you swim over here to me,” he said.
“But it’s deep!” I said. Because it was, the seabed between the two reefs was barely visible, it was probably three meters down.
“I’m here, Karl Ove. Don’t you think I could rescue you if you sank? Come on, swim. It’s not in the slightest bit dangerous! I know you can do it. Launch yourself and do the strokes. If you do that you can swim, you know! Then you can swim!”
I crouched down in the water.
The seabed was a greenish glimmer a long way down. Would I be able to float over that?
My heart only beat this hard when I was frightened.
“I can’t,” I shouted.
“Course you can!” Dad shouted back. “It’s so easy! Just push off, do a couple of strokes, and you’ll be here.”
“I can’t!” I said.
He studied me. Then he sighed and swam over.
“OK,” he said. “I’ll swim beside you. I can hold a hand under your tummy. Then you
can’t
sink!”
But I
couldn’t
do it. Why didn’t he understand?
I started to cry.
“I can’t,” I said.
The depth of the water was in my head and in my chest. The depth was in my arms and legs, in my fingers and toes. The depth filled all of me. Was I supposed to be able to
think
that away?
There weren’t any more smiles to be seen now. With a stern expression he clambered onto the land, walked over to our things, and returned with my life jacket.
“Put this on then,” he said, throwing it to me. “Now you
can’t
sink even if you tried.”
I put it on, even though I knew it didn’t change anything.
He swam out again. Turned to face me.
“Try now!” he said. “Over here to me!”
I crouched down. The water washed over my trunks. I stretched my arms under the water.
“That’s the way!” Dad said.
All I had to do was push off, do a few strokes, and it would all be over.
But I couldn’t. I would never ever be able to swim across that deep water. Tears were rolling down my cheeks.
“Come on, boy!” Dad shouted. “We haven’t got all day!”
“I CAN’T!” I shouted back. “CAN’T YOU HEAR?”
He stiffened and glared at me, his eyes furious.
“Are you being belligerent?” he said.
“No,” I answered, unable to suppress a sob. My arms were shaking.
He swam over and took a firm grip of my arm.
“Come here,” he said. He tried to tow me out. I twisted my body toward the shore.
“I don’t want to!” I said.
He let go and took a deep breath.
“You don’t say,” he said. “We know that much.”
Then he went to where we had left our clothes, lifted the towel with both hands, and rubbed his face. I took off the life jacket and followed him, stopping a few meters away. He raised one arm and dried underneath, then the other. Bent forward and dried his thighs. Threw the towel down, picked up his shirt, and buttoned it while surveying the perfectly calm sea. Then he pulled on a pair of socks and stuck his feet in his shoes. They were brown leather shoes without laces, which matched neither the socks nor his bathing trunks.
“What are you waiting for?” he said.
I pulled the light blue Las Palmas T-shirt I had been given by my grandparents over my head and laced up my blue sneakers. Dad tossed the two empty pop bottles and the orange peel into the cooler bag, slung it over his shoulder, and set off, the wet towel crumpled up in his other hand. He said nothing on the way to the car. Opened the trunk, put in the cooler bag, took the life jacket from my hands, and placed it next to the bag together with his towel. The fact that I also had a towel didn’t seem to enter his head and I certainly didn’t intend to bother him with that.
Even though he had parked in the shade, the car was in the sun. The black seats were boiling hot and burned against my thighs. I wondered briefly whether to put my wet towel over the seat. But he would notice. Instead I placed my palms downward and sat on them, as close to the edge as I could.
Dad started the car and drove off at walking speed; the whole of the open gravel area, known as the firing range, was full of large stones. The road he took afterward was pitted with potholes, too, so he drove equally slowly along there. Green branches and bushes brushed the hood and roof, sometimes there was the odd thump, as a branch hit the car. My hands were still stinging, but less so now. It was only then it struck me that Dad was also wearing shorts on a red-hot seat. I glanced at his face in the mirror. It was grim and uncommunicative, but there was no indication that his thighs were burning.
When we came out onto the main road below the church he accelerated away and drove the five kilometers home at far above the speed limit.
“He’s frightened of water,” he told my mother that afternoon. It wasn’t true, but I said nothing. I wasn’t stupid.
A week later my grandparents on my mother’s side came to visit us. It was the first time they had been to Tybakken. Back on their farm in Sørbøvåg they weren’t the slightest bit out of place, they fit in perfectly, Grandad with his blue overalls and black narrow-brimmed hats, long brown rubber boots and constant spitting of tobacco, Grandma with her worn but clean, flowery dresses, gray hair, and broad body, and hands that always trembled slightly. But when they got out of the car in the drive in front of our house, after Dad had picked them up from Kjevik, I could see at once they didn’t fit in. Grandad was wearing his gray Sunday suit, light blue shirt, and a gray hat, in his hand he held his pipe, not by the stem, the way Dad did, but with his fingers round the bowl. He used the stem to point with, I noticed, when later they were being shown around our garden. Grandma wore a light-gray coat, light-gray shoes and on her arm she carried a bag. No one dressed like that here. You never saw anyone dressed like that in Arendal, either. It was as though they came from another era.
They filled our rooms with their strangeness. Mom and Dad suddenly behaved differently, too, mostly Dad, who behaved just as he did at Christmas. His invariable “No” became “Why not?”; his ever-watchful eyes became affable, and a friendly hand could even be placed on my or Yngve’s shoulder as a casual greeting. But even though he chatted to Grandma with interest, I could see that in fact he wasn’t interested, there were always brief moments when he looked away, and then his eyes tended to be utterly lifeless. Grandad, cheerful and enthusiastic, but somehow smaller and more vulnerable here than he was at home, never appeared to notice this trait of Dad’s. Or perhaps he just ignored it.
One evening when they were with us Dad bought some crabs. For him they were the apotheosis of festive food, and even though it was early in the season there was meat in the ones he had managed to find. But my grandparents, they didn’t eat crab. If Grandad got crabs in the net, well, he would throw them back. Dad would later tell stories about this, he viewed it as comical, a kind of superstition, that crabs should be less clean than fish, just because they crawled over the seabed and didn’t swim as they pleased through the water above. Crabs might eat dead bodies, since they eat everything that falls to the bottom, but what were the odds of
these
crabs having chanced upon a corpse in the depths of the Skagerrak?