Before I Burn: A Novel (3 page)

On Monday night it was all over, barely twenty-four hours after Olav and Johanna’s house had been set alight. It was still 5 June, just before midnight, after interviews lasting three hours. Before that, Alfred had conveyed the sad message to Lensmann Knut Koland, who, along with detective colleagues from Kristiansand and KRIPOS from Oslo, had set up a base in the old council room in Brandsvoll Community Centre. The sad and liberating message. Alfred had to do it, not Ingemann, even though the latter had probably put two and two together a long time ago. When the evidence came to light, however, he couldn’t do it himself. Neither Ingemann nor Alma could – Alma, who at that time was lying in bed, unable to move.

An arrest soon followed, and then the quiet avalanche of events.

During the final thirty minutes before midnight, cars drove from house to house around the whole district. There were four police patrol cars, plus a number of private vehicles. There was no need to knock: generally there was someone sitting on the front steps keeping watch. The vehicle would stop, or drive by slowly, as someone shouted through the window:

He’s been arrested.

The news spread. People walked in the darkness, over the night dew, across fields to neighbours’, identified themselves and passed on the message that he had been arrested. They said the name, and then all went quiet for a few seconds until the listeners could collect themselves.

Him?

Everyone was notified, including Sløgedal, the cathedral organist, who sat in hiding a short distance from his homestead at Nerbø, waiting with a loaded gun. Later he told me about that night. How light and celestial it had been, how dark and earthbound and unreal, all at once. The police knew Sløgedal had taken up this position; they were the ones who gave him the gun, so they drove up with the news. At last he was able to get to his feet, return the rifle and ask:

Who is it?

John dropped by Kleveland. He stood on the lawn outside my parents’ bedroom, whispering until my mother woke. He kept whispering her name until she dressed and came to the door so that he, too, could say the four magic words that were passed from mouth to mouth that night:

He has been arrested.

And so it spread like wildfire. It even got onto NRK’s late-night news bulletin. The police had notified the Norwegian News Agency and asked them to circulate the information as quickly as possible to allay fears. But by the time it was read out from Marienlyst in Oslo, the whole region knew.

He had been arrested.

Everyone could go to bed, lights were switched off one by one, but doors were still locked, after all, you could never be certain. From now on, no one would ever be certain.

Household after household in the region eventually settled down. At last you could sleep, and next morning you would wake up believing it had all been a dream.

This had been no dream, though.

Faedrelandsvennen
published a total of three front-page spreads in four days, the first on the morning of Saturday 3 June when the region woke to news of four more torched buildings. In addition, there was a front page in
Verdens Gang
and in
Dagbladet
, both of them national newspapers. Two in
Sørlandet.
Two in
Lindesnes
as well. A front page and one inside page in
Aftenposten
, also a national paper. On this same Saturday there was also an interview with Ingemann on page three of
Lindesnes
; that was the one where he was pictured standing next to the fire engine with a hand on the water pump and an inscrutable expression on his face.

Apart from this, there were a variety of minor mentions in regional newspapers and NRK’s daily radio updates. As well as a four-minute slot on the main TV news broadcast on Monday evening when in fact it was all over, but panic still hung in the air everywhere like fog. The news item showed a distant shot of Anders and Agnes Fjeldsgård’s house, the maple trees on either side of the front entrance where the windows had been smashed and petrol poured over the floor. The two maples are still there, and I was surprised to see that they hadn’t grown in more than thirty years. The clip showed the restless shadows of leaves flapping above the walls of the house while first the reporter, and then Lensmann Koland, described the sequence of events. Next, the cameras focused on the scene in Vatneli: the smoking ruins and the chimney that towered in the air like a huge tree bereft of its branches. That was all that was left of Olav and Johanna Vatneli’s house. Two firemen walked past on the road. They were both bare-headed. One was holding what looked like an ice axe, as though he were a glacier hiker on his way into the frozen wastes. The other was empty-handed, and I didn’t recognise either of the men. Towards the end of the item there was footage of the smoking heap of rubble, which was all that remained of the Sløgedals’ barn at Nerbø. That was fire number ten. A solitary man stood there hosing down the debris as if there were something planted in the heap of ashes that needed watering. Thousands of litres of water. It was Alfred. I recognised him even though he was more than thirty years younger and, what was more, had his back to the camera.

IV.

IT WAS SUMMER. Everything had turned green, leaves had appeared on the trees, the lilacs were in flower and throughout June I sat on the first floor of the ex-bank in Kilen trying to work out how all the pieces fitted together. I had rented the room for a spell in the hope that the silence and the view would bring me closer to myself and my writing. I sat alone in the room, which had been stripped bare of almost everything, with only the sky, the forest and a view of Lake Livannet in front of me. I had a basic chair, a rickety table and an old-fashioned, red office lamp that had been left in one of the storerooms, the kind that seems to stoop over your work like a curious onlooker. I settled myself and saw the birch tree swaying in the wind directly outside the window. I was sitting in the midst of the countryside in which I had grown up, in the midst of everything that had marked and shaped me and in some way made me who I was. I saw leaves fluttering and shaking and shadows darkening tree trunks, I saw the road and scattered houses leading up to Vatneli, I saw the sun glistening on an open window and continuing to glisten when the window was closed. I saw the sky and clouds drifting slowly in off the sea from the south-west, I saw them change form as I gazed, I saw the birds, which had long been busy in the short, hectic summer, I saw the winter-pale chicks splashing at the water’s edge on the other side, just below the garden belonging to what had been Syvert Maessel’s house and last of all I saw the lake, and the wind that caused the surface to ripple all day and sparkle, even in the shadows where the water was usually black and still.

The next day I was there again. Staring out. Didn’t write a thing. All of a sudden it felt impossible. The third day I became aware of a large bird by the shore. It was balancing on one leg with its head and a long, pointed beak lowered. It was a heron. I waited for it to take off, or to dive into the water, or at least to change legs. But it did none of those things. It stood there, unmoving, until I got up and went home.

And so the days passed. I sat for a few hours with Lake Livannet in front of me. Tried to make things happen, without any success. Afterwards I let myself out, went down the steep staircase that had been erected on the outside of the building especially for me, and drove the few hundred metres to the shop to buy some things. I wandered around in the bright, congenial atmosphere, picked up some milk, bread and coffee. It was good to stroll around like this, picking up something solid and simple and putting it in the shopping trolley. In the aisles I bumped into people I knew, people who had known me all my life, who had known my parents and my father’s parents, who had seen me as a child, who had seen me grow up and move away, who had seen me become a writer, and who now said they were pleased I had moved back, even though I always emphasised that it was only for a shortish period. I hadn’t come back to stay, I said, but now, right now, I’m here.

When summer was over I still hadn’t got down to writing about the fires. There was something creating a mental block, but I couldn’t say exactly what it was. However, I had gained an overview of the events that occurred, although I hadn’t yet spoken to anyone involved. I had worked through the extant newspapers and interviews and seen the item that had been shown on the main news. NRK had put it on a DVD and sent it to me from Oslo. I played it again and again. When I was about to watch it for the first time I was very tense, nervous even. At home, alone in the house at Kleveland, I inserted the disc into the machine and watched it disappear. This was the first time I would see living pictures of the countryside where I had been born, of Finsland in the summer of 1978, the countryside which the whole of Norway had seen that night more than thirty years ago when the news item was broadcast. It took a few seconds, then the picture appeared and I pressed play. I recognised the location at once, even though there was something slightly alien and unfamiliar about it all. Something had changed, but I couldn’t put my finger on what. Was it the forest? Was it the houses? Was it the roads? I don’t know. There was something distant, bygone about the images, yet I could still see that this was home. There is the village of Kilen, it struck me, no doubt about that, and there’s sparkling Lake Livannet, almost the same as today, and there are the long plains of Brandsvoll, the power lines that spread like a scar through the area, and Anders and Agnes Fjeldsgård’s house as good as unchanged. Everything was there, and everything was almost as I knew it. All the TV coverage was characterised by a kind of paradoxical serenity. The camera work was slow, the reporter gave a very full commentary as the pictures glided in a leisurely manner across the screen, and this slowness and the long-winded reporting meant the item lacked drama. You saw the billowing forests, the tall sky, the clouds as light as flecks of froth, birds sitting motionless on the telephone lines, a gentle breeze wafting through the leaves on the trees. You saw houses, you saw cars and you saw clothes drying in the wind. It was like any peaceful summer day in 1978, or it could have been ten years earlier or ten years later. It was timeless countryside, yet it was in precisely this countryside where I was later to become an adult, and which in some ways I would never leave. It seemed a long time ago; however, I felt that at any moment I could take my eyes off the TV, look outside and there it would all be, unchanged. The black, smoking ruins, the few onlookers standing around in untidy groups. They were still there. There were mothers with children in their arms. There were children on bikes, hanging over their handlebars. Older people huddled together as if supporting one another, preventing each other from falling, and there was a man with a hat who looked at first glance like Reinert Sløgedal, the old sexton and schoolteacher, and father of Bjarne Sløgedal, the organist at Kristiansand Cathedral.

Finally, there was Alfred, hosing down Sløgedal’s ravaged barn. That, too, was an image of simplicity and composure: one solitary, bare-headed man. The sky above. A razed building. Thin, white smoke slowly rising, being borne away on the wind. The jet of water sluicing the wall and the scorched earth, splashing against the distorted sheets of roofing.

It must have been just a few hours before he delivered the news.

Then the item was over and the screen went black.

I watched the DVD a second time. And once more. It was as if I couldn’t have enough of it, as if I hoped to catch a glimpse of myself, or my father. Or anyone else I knew. After all, that wasn’t completely beyond the realms of possibility. I knew, of course, that my father had been outside the house in Vatneli on the night it was reduced to ashes, and I knew for certain that I had myself been to the devastated farm belonging to Olga Dynestøl on the Sunday, straight after the christening, even though I had been fast asleep in the travel bag the whole time.

V.

IN SEPTEMBER I set my writing aside and went to Italy, to the northern Italian town of Mantua, to take part in the sizeable literary festival there. As always when I am on my travels, I was quite tense, but I didn’t know then, nor do I know now, exactly what caused this tension.

It was a hot evening in Mantua with a fierce gusting wind that had apparently come all the way from the Sahara, and I was due to do a reading from one of my books in Piazza San Leonardo, a small square in the centre of town. I walked from my hotel, which was situated close by Piazza Don Leoni. It was half past eight on a Saturday evening with lots of smiling people about. There was laughter and music in the narrow, crowded streets, but I felt quite alone. I followed Corso V. Emanuele to Piazza Cavallotti. There, I bore left across a car park with a long line of parked and abandoned scooters. I continued down a few cramped alleyways with no names, at any rate, I didn’t see any signs, up Via Arrivabene, and then it was straight ahead to the square beside the stone church.

By then I was already soaked in sweat. Quite an audience had assembled, because several writers were going to do readings, before and after me. I was nervous, as I always am before I mount a stage. I greeted my interpreter, a woman in her fifties who had lived in Stockholm over thirty years ago, but who nevertheless spoke almost fluent Swedish. When at length it was my turn the audience was in darkness, while up on stage a strong white light shone into my face. It was still suffocatingly hot, and the wind was so strong that it howled like thunder in the microphone. I don’t know whether it was the heat or the dry desert wind, or whether it was something I had eaten or drunk, or perhaps the intense light, but standing in front of the microphone, I suddenly felt unwell. Within a few seconds all my strength seemed to ebb out of me. My arms went slowly numb and my knees were giving way beneath me. I felt as if I was going to faint. The sea of faces began to heave. A mist veiled my eyes. It was like a bitterly cold afternoon a long time ago when I fell and hit my head on the ice of Lake Bordvannet, and my senses switched off one by one. Lying supine, I had felt the cold, hard ice against my head and shoulders and thought I was dying. So this was how I would die, I had time to think, on my back, ten years old, on my own in the middle of the lake. First my eyesight shut down, it slowly lost all colour, the forest disappeared, the pale sky above me, everything went, until I lay there completely blind. Next all the sounds faded and then I was gone, as the snow continued to fall quietly on my face. Now the same was about to happen to me here, watched by several hundred curious Italians. Or almost the same. For that was when I caught sight of some familiar faces down in the crowd. At first I didn’t know exactly who they were, but I was aware I knew them, and I couldn’t fathom why no one had come over to me before I went on stage, because surely it is natural enough for old acquaintances so far from home to say hello to one another? I was unable to place them, either, but then I spotted Lars Timenes, whom I remembered from when he lived in the former telephone exchange in Kilen. I clung to him, as it were, as he stood there, small and down at heel, while I called to mind how he used to sit in a chair in the middle of the sitting room, mercilessly illuminated by the constant flicker from the television. Straight afterwards I spotted Nils, my neighbour at home, standing in front of the stage as well, Nils, of whom I have no more than a fleeting memory, a friendly back as he walked away. There was Nils, and there was Emma, who used to sit staring at me from the corridor in the rest home when I went to visit my father, and there was her daughter Ragnhild, who was a grown-up yet still a child and who lived in another part of the country, but came home every summer and talked like a stranger. There was Ragnhild, and there was Tor, who one night left a party, went behind the house and shot himself, and there was Stig, next to whom I stood in the youth choir and with whom I sang beneath three Roman arches in a church, or in the chapel beneath a picture of a man with a hoe, or at the rest home in Nodeland. Stig, who went swimming and vanished from sight, who sank deeper and deeper and wasn’t rescued until it was too late, Stig who just managed to make it to voice-breaking age, he was there in the audience, too. And there were more. Teresa was there. Teresa, who taught me piano for a whole winter. Who always stood over my shoulder with a slight stoop, waiting, now she was there with all the others, watching. And there were more. Jon was there, who taught my father, who was always called Teacher Jon to distinguish him from other Jons in the area. I remembered Teacher Jon from the elk hunts because he used to set off before all the others. He set off while it was still dark and sat ready and waiting for several hours before the hunt began. Now he was waiting in front of me. Ester was there, too. Ester, who always played the elf when we celebrated Christmas at my grandmother’s. Ester laughed in a way that made everything inside you melt. Ester was there. And Tønnes was there, a little to the back. Tønnes died only a few days after my grandmother, as though it was inconceivable that he should be the only neighbour left alive. And there were even more. There were many I recognised, whom I had seen at one time or another, perhaps at the post office counter, or in front of the postcard stand at Kaddeberg’s, or at the Christmas party in the chapel when the chairs were pushed back against the walls so that there was room for four concentric circles of people, each alternate circle rotating in the opposite direction around the Christmas tree while the snow swirled against the windows, and everyone’s cheeks were flushed as they sang. It was as though I knew them without knowing who they were. Even those I had never seen before. For all I knew, Johanna was there as well, and Olav, and maybe Kåre had made an appearance on his crutches at the fringes where the darkness made it impossible to see. Perhaps Ingemann and Alma were there, too. Perhaps Alma was there, too, with both legs intact, closing her eyes and leaning her head back. And who knows, perhaps Dag was there as well? Perhaps he was standing there with his arms crossed, right at the back of the church steps where I couldn’t see him.