“I’m going out for a bit,” I said to Mom, slipping off the stool.
“Fine,” she said. “Where are you going?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t go far then.”
“No, I won’t,” I said, and hurried down, opened the door so that Geir wouldn’t think the house was empty and go away, said hi, and put on my sneakers.
“I’ve got a box of matches,” he whispered, patting his shorts pocket.
“You haven’t!” I also whispered. “Where did you get hold of them?”
“Home. They were in the sitting room.”
“You just took them?”
He nodded.
I straightened up and went out, closing the door after me.
“Let’s set fire to something,” I said.
“Yes, let’s,” he said.
“What then?”
“Doesn’t matter, does it. We’ll just find something. The box is half full. We can set fire to a lot of things.”
“But we’ll have to go somewhere no one can see the smoke,” I said. “Up on the mountain maybe?”
“OK.”
“And we’ll need something to put the fire out with,” I said. “Just a sec. I’ll get a bottle of water.”
I opened the door again, kicked off my shoes, and went upstairs to Mom, who turned to me as I walked in.
“We’re going for a walk,” I said. “I need a bottle of water.”
“Wouldn’t you prefer juice? You can take some, you know. It’s still your first school day!”
I hesitated. It had to be water. But that might make her suspicious because I always preferred juice to water. I looked at her and said, “No, Geir’s got water, so that’s what I want, too.”
My heart beat faster as I spoke.
“As you like,” she said. She found an empty juice bottle in the cupboard under the sink, dark green glass, almost opaque, she filled it with water, screwed on the top, and passed it to me.
“Would you like some
smørbrød
as well?”
I considered her offer.
“No,” I said. “I mean yes. Two with liver paste.”
As she took the bread and started to cut it, I pushed the window further open and poked my head out.
“Be down in a minute!” I shouted. Geir looked up at me with grave eyes and nodded.
After she had made and wrapped the
smørbrød
, I put them in a plastic bag with the bottle and hurried back down. Soon we were on our way up the hill. The heat had made the edge of the road soft and crumbly. It was harder where the cars went. Sometimes we lay down on the tarmac like cats and let the heat give us a good baking. But now we had other things on our minds.
“Can I see them?” I asked.
Geir stopped and dug the box up from his pocket. I shook it a little. Full. Then I opened it. All the matchheads were red.
Start a fire, start a fire.
“It’s a new box,” I said, giving it back. “Won’t they notice you’ve taken it?”
“I don’t think so,” he said. “And if they do I’ll just say it wasn’t me. They can’t
prove
anything.”
We had reached Molden’s house and set off up the path. The grass was dry and yellow, brown in places. In Geir’s house it was his mother who was strict and his father who was nice. In Dag Lothar’s they were both nice, perhaps the father was a tiny bit stricter. With all the others, it was the father who was strict and the mother who was nice. But no one was as strict as Dad, that was for sure.
Geir stopped and bent forward with the box of matches in his hand. He took out a match and was about to strike it against the side.
“What are you doing?” I said. “Not here! Everyone can see!”
“Hee hee hee,” he giggled. But straightened up anyway, put the match back in the box, and walked on.
At the top of the hill we turned and cast our gaze across the sea as usual. I counted four small, white triangles in Tromøya Sound. A larger boat with what looked like an excavator on board. There were two small boats moored on Gjerstadholmen.
Start a fire, start a fire.
As we continued into the forest my stomach was churning with excitement. Sunbeams lay on the forest floor like small, quivering creatures of light between the shadows of branches. We stopped by the huge roots of an upturned tree, I took the bottle of water from my bag, and held it at the ready while Geir leaned forward, struck a match, and held the small, almost invisible flame to one of the wispy blades of grass growing there. It caught fire at once. Spread to the grass beside it. When the flame was as broad as an adult’s hand I sprayed water over it. A thin ribbon of smoke floated through the air, alone as it were, independent of what had just happened.
“Do you think anyone could see?” Geir asked.
“You can see smoke from an incredible distance,” I answered. “Indians saw smoke signals from kilometers off.”
“It caught fire straightaway,” Geir said. “Did you see?”
He smiled and quickly ran a hand through his hair.
“Yes,” I said.
“Shall we try somewhere else?”
“Yes, but this time I want to light the match.”
“OK,” he said, handing me the box and scouring the area for another suitable spot.
Geir was always impatient before any activity and totally absorbed when in the thick of it. Of all the boys I knew he was the one most in thrall to his imagination. Whenever we played – explorers, sailors, Indians, race car drivers, astronauts, robbers, smugglers, princes, monkeys or secret agents, for example – he could keep at it for hours, unlike Leif Tore or Geir Håkon, who were soon bored and wanted to do something else, completely untouched by the gleam that imagination could bring to bear on everything, but Geir was more than happy with the object itself, such as the old car wreck in the clump of narrow willow trees on the flat stretch between the playground and the soccer field, in which the seats, the steering wheel, gearshift, pedals, dashboard, glove compartment, and doors were still intact, where we used to play so often, and they just pretended it was a car, which of course it was, pressed the clutch, pulled the gearshift, turned the wheel, adjusted the broken side mirrors, jumped up and down on the seats to give the illusion of speed while Geir would be entertained by any embellishments you could add, such as being on the run after a bank robbery, and the windows, which were still a shower of glass fragments strewn across the black-rubber floor mats, had been shot to pieces; then one of us would drive and the other wriggle out through the window onto the roof to open fire on our pursuers, a game that could be extended to include parking the car in a garage and getting out to share the swag, or even further, for weren’t the pursuers close on our heels as we slunk between the trees on our way home in the glow of the evening sun? Or else we might be in a moon-mobile and the landscape around us was actually lunar landscape where, after getting out of the car, we were unable to walk in a normal fashion, we had to hop – or it was one of the many streams we were surrounded by, and of all the boys I knew, only Geir would be interested in following it to find the source. What we did most often was to go out in search of new places or to one of the places we had already found. It might be a big old oak with a hollow trunk; a deep pool in a river; a cellar in an unfinished house that was full of water; the concrete foundations of the enormous bridge pylon; or the first few meters of the thick cable stays that ran from the bottom of an anchoring in the forest up to the top and that you could climb; a ramshackle shed with planks that were slippery and dark with decay between Lake Tjenna and the road on the other side, which so far was the furthest outpost of our explorations, we had never ventured any further; the two dumped cars; the little pool with the three islands no bigger than tufts of grass, one almost completely covered by a tree, and where the water was so deep and black, even though it was right next to a road embankment; the white, crystalline rock from which you could hammer small chunks, beside the path to the Fina station; the boat factory on the other side of Tromøya Bridge beyond Gamle Tybakken, all the factory buildings there, the shells of the boats, the rusty block and tackle and the machines, the smell of oil and tar and salty water, which was so good. We crisscrossed this area, which extended over one or two kilometers in all directions, nearly every day, and the whole point of what we found or visited was that it was secret and it was ours. With the other children we played flip the stick or kick the can, kicked a soccer ball around or went skiing; when we were alone we searched out places with features that attracted us. That was how it was with Geir and me.
But on this day the magic lay in what we were doing, not where we were.
Start a fire, start a fire.
We walked over to a spruce tree a few meters away. The branches hanging just above the ground were gray and bare and looked extremely old. I broke off a bit between my thumb and first finger. It was brittle and crumbled easily. Grass grew sparsely on the small mound where the tree stood, between a patch of dry soil and a mass of desiccated, orangey spruce needles. I knelt down, drew the red match head across the black abrasive surface, and put the flame into the grass, which immediately caught fire. At first the flame was invisible, no more than a quiver of air above the blades of grass, which soon curled and crumpled. But then the tuft caught fire, and from there the flame spread, both quickly and slowly, like a swarm of frightened ants fleeing quickly if you see them as individuals, slowly if you view them as a group. All of a sudden the flames were up to my waist.
“Put it out! Put it out!” I shouted to Geir.
He shook the bottle over the fire, which hissed and shrank, while I beat the low flames in the grass at the edge with my hand.
“Phew!” I said a minute later, when the fire was out.
“That was close!” Geir laughed. “It really got a hold there!”
I stood up.
“Do you think anyone could see it? Shall we go to the cliff edge and see if anyone’s looking up here?”
Without waiting for an answer I rushed across the soft moss and heather-covered forest floor between the trees. The sudden fear seemed to contract my insides, and whenever my thoughts turned to what had happened it was as if a ravine opened in me. It was bottomless. Oh, what would happen now? What would happen now?
At the cliff edge I stopped and put a hand to my brow to shield my eyes. Dad’s car was in the drive. He was nowhere to be seen. But he could have been outside and gone in. Gustavsen was walking across the grass. He could have seen and told Dad. Or would tell him later.
The very thought of Dad, the fact that he existed, caused fear to pump through my body.
I turned to Geir, who sauntered over with my plastic bag dangling from one hand. Down below, a child resembling Geir Håkon’s little brother was playing in the sand by the concrete barriers between our road and Elgstien. A car came up the hill, encased in itself like an insect, the black windshield its expressionless eye, turned left, and disappeared from view.
“We can’t go straight down anyway,” I said. “If someone’s seen the smoke they’ll put two and two together.”
Why had we done it? Why, oh why?
“They can see us here, too,” I said. “Come on!”
We descended the tree-clad slope beneath us. When we were at the bottom we stumbled homeward through the forest, which was perhaps ten meters from the road. We stopped by the big spruce beside the wide, shallow, turbid stream where all the colors were green and murky, its bark stained with sticky resin, not unlike burned sugar in color, with the pungent smell of juniper. Between the slender trunks of the nearby rowan trees you could see our house. I glanced at my hands to see if there was any soot on them. Nothing. But there was a faint burned smell, so I plunged them in the water and rubbed them dry on my trousers.
“What shall we do with the box of matches?” I said.
Geir shrugged.
“Hide it, I s’pose.”
“If they find it, don’t say anything about me,” I said. “About what we did.”
“Course not,” Geir said. “Here’s the bag, by the way.”
We started to walk up to the road.
“Are you going to set fire to anything else today?” I said.
“I don’t think so,” he said.
“Not even with Leif Tore?”
“Maybe tomorrow,” he said. And his face brightened. “Should I take the matches to school with me, what do you think?”
“Are you out of your mind?!”
He laughed. We reached the road, and crossed it.
“See you!” he said, running up the hill.
I passed Mom’s VW, parked on a patch of scorched yellow grass just outside the fence, beside the gray garbage can, and stepped onto the gravel. I felt the fear rising in me again. Dad’s red car gleamed in the fierce sunshine. I looked down, unwilling to meet the gaze that might await me in the kitchen window. The mere thought of it sent waves of despair shooting through me. When I reached the front doorstep and couldn’t be seen from the windows on the first floor I clasped my hands together and closed my eyes.
Almighty God, I uttered silently. Let me get through this and I promise I’ll never do anything wrong again. Never ever. I promise by all that is holy. Amen.
I opened the door and went in.
It was cooler in the hall than outside, and after the bright sunshine, almost completely dark. The smell of stew lay heavy in the air. I bent down and untied my shoelaces, carefully placed my shoes by the wall, slunk upstairs, trying to make my face appear normal, and stopped on the landing in a quandary. What would I normally do, go up to my room right away or go into the kitchen to see if dinner was ready?
Voices, the clinking of cutlery on plates.
Was I late?
Had they already started eating?
Oh no, oh no.
What should I do?
The notion of turning on my heel, calmly walking outside, up the hill and into the forest, never to return, came as a joyful clarion call amid all the tension.
Then they would be sorry.
“Is that you, Karl Ove?” Dad shouted from the other side of the door.
I swallowed, shook my head, blinked a few times, and took a deep breath.
“Yes,” I said.
“We’re eating!” he shouted. “Come on in!”
God had heard my prayer and done as I asked. Dad was in a good mood, I could see that as soon as I entered, he was leaning back in the chair with his legs stretched out, his arms wide apart, and his eyes glinting with mischief.