I woke up, looked at my wristwatch. The two luminous snakes showed it was ten minutes past two. I lay quite still for a while in an attempt to work out what had woken me. Apart from my pulse, which throbbed as if whispering in my ear, everything was silent. No cars on the road, no boats in Tromøya Sound, no planes flying overhead. No footsteps, no voices, nothing. Nor from our house.
I raised my head a little so that my ears weren’t touching anything and held my breath. After a few seconds I heard a noise from the garden. A noise so high-pitched that at first I didn’t catch it, but the moment I became aware of it I was terrified.
Eeee-eeee-eeeeee-eeeee. Eeeeeee-eeee-eeeeeee. Eeeeee.
I sat up on my knees, drew the curtain to the side, and peered through the window. The lawn was bathed in a weak light: the moon above our house was full. A gust of wind made it look as if the grass were racing away. A white plastic bag caught on the end of the hedge was flapping, and it struck me that someone who didn’t know that wind existed would have thought that the bag was moving of its own accord. As though I were perched high above the ground, the tips of my toes and fingers tingled. My heart was beating fast. The muscles in my stomach tightened, I swallowed, and swallowed again. Night was the time for ghosts and apparitions, night was the time for the headless man and the grinning skeleton. And all that separated me from it was a thin wall.
There was that sound again!
Eeee-eeeeeeeee- eee-eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee-eee-eeeeeee.
I scanned the gray lawn outside. Over by the hedge, perhaps five meters away, I caught sight of Prestbakmo’s cat. It was lying stretched out in the grass and smacking something with its paw. Whatever it was smacking, a gray lump, like stone or clay, was thrown a few meters closer to the window. The cat rose and followed. The lump lay still in the grass. The cat tentatively hit out at it a few more times, moved closer with its head, and seemed to nudge it with its nose, then opened its jaws and took it in its mouth. When the squeaking started again I guessed it was a mouse. The sudden noise appeared to confuse the cat. At any rate it tossed its head and flung the mouse in the air. This time it didn’t stay where it landed, it made a headlong dash across the lawn. The cat stood watching, motionless. It looked as if it was about to let the mouse go. But then, just as the mouse reached the bed by the gate to Prestbakmo’s garden, it set off. Three bounds and the cat had caught it again.
In the room beside mine I heard Dad’s voice. It was low and mumbling, without beginning or end, the way it often sounded when he was talking in his sleep. A moment later someone got up from his bed. From the lightness of foot I realized it was Mom. Outside, the cat had started jumping up and down. It looked like some kind of dance. Another gust of wind swept through the grass. I looked up at the pine tree and saw its tender branches bending and swaying, slim and black against the heavy, yellow moon. Mom opened the door to the bathroom. When I heard her lower the toilet seat I put my hands over my ears and started to hum. The sound issuing from her after that, a kind of hiss, as if she were letting off steam, was awful. Usually I shut out Dad’s thunderous torrents, too, even though they weren’t quite as difficult to endure as Mom’s hissing.
Aaaaaaaaaaagh,
I said, slowly counting to ten and watching the cat. Apparently tired of the game, it grabbed the mouse in its jaws and dashed through the hedge, across the road and into Gustavsen’s drive, where it dropped the mouse on the ground by the trailer and stood staring at it. The mouse lay as still as any living creature could. The cat jumped onto the wall and slunk toward one of the globe-shaped sundials on the gatepost at the end. I took my hands away from my ears and stopped humming. In the bathroom the cistern flushed. The cat turned sharply and stared at the mouse, which still hadn’t moved. A jet of water from the tap splashed against the porcelain sink. The cat jumped down from the wall, strolled into the road, and lay down like a small lion. Just as Mom pressed the handle and opened the door a twitch went through the mouse, as though the sound had released an impulse in it, and the next moment it set off on another desperate flight from the cat, which had obviously reckoned on this eventuality as it required no more than a fraction of a second to switch from resting to hunting. But this time it was too late. A sheet of white Eternit cladding left lying on the lawn was the mouse’s salvation as it squeezed itself underneath a second before the cat arrived.
The animals’ fleet movements seemed to linger on in me; long after I had gone back to bed my heart was still racing. Perhaps because it, too, was a little animal? After a while I changed position again, put the pillow at the foot of the bed, and drew the curtain to one side so that I could look up at the sky bestrewn with stars, so like grains of sand, a beach with a perimeter, invisible to us, against which the sea beat.
But what actually lay beyond the universe?
Dag Lothar said there was nothing. Geir said there were burning flames. That was what I believed, too; the image of the sea was more because the starry sky looked the way it did.
Mom and Dad’s bedroom was quiet again.
I pulled the curtain to and closed my eyes. Charged with the silence and darkness of the house, I was soon fast asleep.
When I got up next morning Grandma and Grandad were sitting with Mom in the living room drinking coffee. Dad was walking across the lawn with the sprinkler in his hand. He placed it at the edge of the lawn so that the thin jets of water, which resembled a waving hand, not only fell on the grass but also the vegetable garden below. The sun’s rays, on the other side of the house now, above the forest to the east, flooded into the garden. The air seemed to be as still as it had been the previous day. The sky was hazy; it almost always was in the morning. Yngve was sitting at the breakfast table. The white eggs in the brown egg cups reminded me that it was Sunday. I sat down in my regular place.
“What happened yesterday?” Yngve asked in a subdued voice. “Why were you grounded?”
“I broke the TV,” I said.
He sent me a quizzical look, holding a slice of bread to his mouth.
“Yes, I put it on for Grandma and Grandad. Then it went
puff.
Haven’t they said anything?”
Yngve took a large bite from the slice of bread, which he had spread with clove cheese, and shook his head. I sliced the top off the egg with my knife, opened it like a lid, scooped out the soft white with a spoon, reached for the salt shaker, and tapped it with my forefinger so that only a sprinkling came out. Spread margarine onto some bread and poured a glass of milk. Downstairs, Dad opened the door. I ate the white of the egg, poked the spoon into the yolk to see whether it was hard- or soft-boiled.
“I’ve been grounded for today as well,” I said.
“The
whole
day? Or just the evening?”
I shrugged. The egg was hard-boiled, the yellow yolk disintegrated against the edge of the spoon.
“The whole day, I think,” I said.
The road outside was empty and gleamed in the sun. But in the ditch beneath the dense branches of the spruces it was dark and shadowy.
A bicycle came tearing down the hill at full speed. The boy sitting on it, he must have been fifteen, had one hand on the handlebars and the other on the red gasoline canister he had tied to the luggage rack. His hair was black and fluttered in the wind.
On the stairs came the sound of Dad’s footsteps. I sat up straight in my chair, cast a hurried glance across the table to see if everything was in place. A bit of the hard-boiled egg had ended up on the table. I quickly brushed it off the edge into my waiting hand and immediately put it on the plate. Yngve delayed the moment until it was almost too late to push his chair into the table and sit up straight, but only almost, for when Dad came in his back was erect and his feet were firmly planted on the floor.
“Pack your swimming trunks, kids,” he said. “We’re off to Hove for the day.”
“Me, too?” I wanted to ask, but I held back, because he might have forgotten he had grounded me and the question would have jolted his memory. Also, if he remembered but had changed his mind, it would be best not to mention it, as it could be interpreted as his having made a mistake yesterday, his having done something wrong, and I didn’t want him to think that. So I went for my trunks and a towel from the line in the boiler room, put them in a plastic bag with the diving goggles, which would come in handy if we were going to one of the two beaches in Hove, and sat down in my room to await departure.
Half an hour later we left for the far side of the island, on what was perhaps the best day of the year, with the sea so calm it barely made a sound and therefore lent the surroundings, the previously so silent bare rocks and the previously so silent forest above, a semblance of something unreal, such that every footstep on the rocks and every clink of a bottle sounded as if it was the very first time, and the sun, which was at its zenith in the sky, appeared as something deeply primitive and alien on this day, when you could see the sea curve and disappear down into the depths beyond the horizon, above which the sky floated so airily with its light, soft, misty blueness; and Yngve and I and Mom and Dad put on our swimsuits and each of us in our own way dipped our bodies, hot from the sun, into the lukewarm water, while Grandma and Grandad sat there in their finery, apparently unmoved by their surroundings and our activities, as though the 1950s and Vestland were not only features that had stamped themselves on them superficially, through their clothes, behavior, and dialect, in other words externally, but also internally, to the depths of their respective souls, to the innermost core of their respective characters. It was so strange to see them there, sitting on the rocks, squinting into the bright light coming at us from all directions, it seemed so alien.
The day after, they went home. Dad drove them to Kjevik, grabbed the opportunity to visit his own parents while he was there while Mom took Yngve and me to Lake Gjerstad, the idea being that we could swim and eat cookies and relax, but first of all Mom couldn’t find a road to the lake, so we had to go on a long detour through a forest full of scrub and thickets; secondly, the part of the lake we arrived at turned out to be green with algae and the rocks slippery; and thirdly, it started to rain almost as soon as we had put down the cooler bag and the basket with the cookies and oranges.
I felt so sorry for Mom, who had wanted to take us on a nice trip, but it hadn’t worked out. There was no way to express this to her. It was one of those things you had to forget as quickly as possible. And that was not at all difficult; there were so many new experiences in store for us during those weeks. I would soon be starting school, and as a result so many new objects would become mine. Above all, a satchel, which, the next Saturday morning, I went to Arendal with Mom to buy. It was square, blue and all shiny and glossy, with white straps. Inside, there were two compartments, where I immediately put the orange pencil case I had also been given, containing a pencil, a pen, an eraser, and a pencil sharpener, and one of the notebooks we had bought, with orange and brown squares on the front, the same as on Yngve’s, plus some comics I put in to plump it up. There, nestling against the leg of the desk, it stood every night when I went to bed, not without some mental anguish for me, for there was still quite a time to go to the big day when I, along with almost everyone I knew, would be starting the first class. We had already been to school for a day, that past spring, we had had a chance to meet the woman who was to be our teacher and to do a bit of drawing, but this was different, this wasn’t anywhere near the same, this was the real thing. There were those who said they hated school, indeed, almost all the older children said they hated school, and strictly speaking we knew we should, too, but at the same time it was so alluring, what was about to happen, we knew so little and we expected so much, in addition to the fact that starting school in itself elevated us into the same league as the older children, from one day to the next, in one fell swoop we were like them, and
then
we could certainly afford to hate school, but not now…. Did we talk about anything else? Hardly. In fact the school we applied to, Roligheden, where both Dad and Geir’s father worked and where all the older children went, had no room for us, the year’s intake was too big, too many families had moved into the area, so we had to go to a school on the east of the island, five or six kilometers away, with all the kids we didn’t know from around there, and we were to be transported by bus. It was a great privilege and an adventure. Every day a bus would come to pick us up!
I was also given a pair of light-blue trousers, a light-blue jacket and a pair of dark-blue sneakers with white stripes over the instep. Several times, when Dad was out, I put on my new clothes and paced in front of the hall mirror, sometimes with the satchel on my back, so when the day finally arrived and I posed on the gravel outside the door for Mom to take a photograph of me, it wasn’t just the excitement and the uncertainty giving me butterflies but also the strange, almost triumphant, feeling I would have when I wore particularly attractive clothes.
The evening before, I’d had a bath, Mom had washed my hair, and when I woke in the morning it was to a quiet sleeping house, with a sun that was still climbing behind the spruce trees down beyond the road. Oh, what a pleasure it was to take my new clothes out of the wardrobe and put them on at last! Outside, the birds were singing, it was still summer, behind the veil of mist the sky was blue and immense, and the houses that now stood quiet on both sides of the road would soon be teeming with impatience and anticipation, like on Independence Day. I took the comics out of my satchel, hung it on my back, adjusted the straps, and took it off again. Pulled the zipper on the jacket up and down and speculated: it looked best with the zipper up, but then you couldn’t see the T-shirt underneath … Went into the living room, looked out of the window at the sun, a reddish-yellow, fiery orange behind the green trees, went into the kitchen without touching anything, peered across at Gustavsen’s house, where there was no sign of life. Stood in front of the hall mirror, pulling the zipper up and down … the T-shirt looked so good … it would be a shame if it couldn’t be seen …