Doppler (13 page)

I nod.

And if you’re not there, I’ll come and get you, he says.

No problem, I say.

I can see that my brother-in-law is relieved. He had no doubt expected more resistance. Maybe he had been dreading it, but then everything turns out fine, pleasant almost. The reason for this is that I’m lying. But he doesn’t know that. A lie is a splendid device, far too seldom used. It’s incredibly effective. You say one thing and you mean something completely different. Fantastic.

When my brother-in-law leaves I stand on the trunk of the totem pole and wave him goodbye in a friendly, brother-in-law-like manner, but as soon as he turns away I pull tiny faces at him, and of course Gregus sees this.

Why did you do that, Dad? he asks.

Do what? I ask.

You did this with your face, he says, mimicking me.

Düsseldorf follows the conversation without saying a word, but I suspect that he’s eager to see how I will tackle the situation. I’ve told him on several occasions how intensely negative my attitude to my brother-in-law is and I’ve recounted anecdotes about how hopeless our relationship has been over the years.

I got a midge in my eye, I say, but can see Düsseldorf discreetly shaking his head. That one won’t wash.

There aren’t any midges here, says Gregus. As bloody logical as always.

OK, OK, I say. I did it because I think Uncle Tom is, I hesitate, a bit of a drag. We’re very different. We don’t really speak the same language. At times he can be alright, such as when he helped me to build the garage, but at other times he’s short on grey matter, to put it bluntly. And right now I’m tending to think the latter.

Düsseldorf discreetly nods to applaud my directness.

Got a nice cabin, though, Gregus says.

True enough, I say.

Things are going progressively downhill around here. Düsseldorf has begun to drink quite heavily. He’s shuttling between the
vinmonopol
and the tent. He’s got himself a pair of snowshoes. He also brings back food, especially takeaway pizzas, and that helps to buoy the mood. There’s not much left of Bongo’s mother, and out of consideration for Bongo I don’t think I can kill another moose for the time being. I could bag a deer maybe, but they’re so bloody shy. And of course there aren’t any bears or wolves up here. The authorities have fenced them all in farther east to make it easier for the indigenous population to exterminate them on the quiet.

There has been a lot of snow this winter, but now it’s melting away in chunks by the day. When the snow has gone, I’m off. Then nobody will be able to follow my tracks. Then I’ll be free.

Gregus has grown tired of the totem pole and spends most of his time inside the tent. Armed with a pile of newspapers for lighting the fire, and a few tips from a drunken Düsseldorf, Gregus has learned to read. Goodness me, it’s frightening how this drive to achieve is embedded in the genes. There’s no stopping it. It finds its own way. Just like water, it erodes any obstacles in its path and gets to wherever it wants to go. For me this is the last straw. If he can read at the age of four before you know it he’s going to be doing quadratic and cubic equations. He has to be stopped. His urge to conform has to be nipped in the bud. Gregus is not going down to civilisation. He’s going to stay in the forest with me. And I’m going to start lighting the fire with birch bark. The newspapers will have to be burned right away, so if Gregus wants to do some more reading he will have to write the texts himself. He’ll have to carve them in bark or write them in blood. That’ll put the skids under his reading pursuits, I reckon.

We don’t see much of the reactionary. He’s already finished his totem pole. It’s an eyesore and very unlikely to be used anywhere on earth to create peace. We helped him to erect it a few days ago. We had to light a fire to thaw the ground under the snow, but somehow we finally got it up. There it stands as a shining monument to the reactionary’s failed act of penance and forlorn search. Now he’s now gone back to the people to pin posters to notice boards in shops, vegetarian restaurants and on lamp posts, inviting people to come to the festival of brotherhood which is to be held here on 16th and 17th May. Luckily, Gregus and I will not be here at that time. We’ll be over the hills and far away by then. So they can form all the brotherhoods they want on their own. Why he’s chosen to hold the festival at the same time as Independence Day I’ve no idea. The combination of religion and the founding of the Constitution is even more repulsive of course, but I think he should just get on with it. I’m not going to form any brotherhoods with anyone. That’s for bloody certain.

To complete the chaos up here, Toolman Roger has also turned up. His girlfriend has kicked him out. She’d had enough of him squirting his sperm all over the place. As ill luck would have it, he squirted over a book that his girlfriend had just unwrapped and was looking forward to reading. That was one squirt too far, and now he’s here by the fire drinking with Düsseldorf. They’ve become pally and Roger is complaining that his girlfriend didn’t make her views clear enough. He had begun to sense that perhaps she didn’t think all the squirting was so amusing any more, but he didn’t get the requisite unambiguous signals for him to stop. Only a few days ago, for example, he had squirted on a bill from the Norwegian Automobile Association, and both of them had had a good laugh at that. So why not a book from the book club? That’s women for you, says Roger. It’s impossible to know where you stand with them. Something that has been okay for ages is suddenly wrong. It changes from one second to the next.

While the others drink or sleep I carve away at the totem pole for all I’m worth, reflecting that I don’t recognise my own forest any more. The forest that was once so quiet and peaceful. Bongo and I were here from morning till night in a kind of harmonious balance, and didn’t adapt for anyone. On the contrary, we did just as we pleased. And I was slowly closing in on my goal, which was to do nothing. But that was before. Now there is not much left of the forest I once knew. We must have come to the wrong forest, I say to Bongo. It’s so strange here.

One problem with people is that as soon as they fill a space it’s them you see and not the space. Large, desolate landscapes stop being large, desolate landscapes once they have people in them. They define what the eye sees. And the human eye is almost always directed at other humans. In this way an illusion is created that humans are more important than those things on earth which are not human. It’s a sick illusion. Perhaps moose are the most important creatures when it comes down to it, I say to Bongo. Perhaps you’re the ones who know best but you’re extremely patient. I doubt that, of course, but who knows? It’s definitely not humans anyway. I refuse to believe that.

Things take their unusual course and the snow disappears. Gregus reads, Roger and Düsseldorf drink themselves stupid, the reactionary hangs up his brotherhood notices in vegetarian restaurants and I put the finishing touches to my painstakingly crafted totem pole. The intricate detail is beginning to stand out, and I can see that I’ve created a fine piece of work. This is something of which I can be proud. Any idiot will be able to see that the totem pole depicts a man sitting on an egg, with another man on his head, sitting on a bike, and that this other man has a year-old moose on his head and on this moose sits a little boy. It’s figurative to the nth degree but at the same time stylised so as not to reveal our actual identities. Now it has to be rubbed down with sandpaper and painted in bright colours. I’ll avoid making the same blunder that the North American West Coast Indians always made. They carved their fantastic totem poles and stood them in the ground without treating them in any way. Consequently they lasted only a few decades before nature reclaimed them. They simply fell and rotted away. Which was completely in keeping with the Indians’ beliefs in wholeness and cycles and all that kind of thing. Earth to earth etc. I suppose my thinking differs here from the Indians. After all, I am not an Indian, but a man of my time. A failed man of my time. Or just a man of a failed time. Depending on how you look at it. Either way, I want to make a thorough job of it. I’m going to give it the works with several coats of creosote and woodstain and then paint it in bright colours capable of withstanding the Norwegian winter. It should definitely be able to last a thousand years. Minimum. A thousand sounds good. That’s the optimum number.

One quiet spring night I make my way down to Ullevaal Stadium and smash the window of the ironmonger’s shop. I’m sure I could have got the money from Düsseldorf, but he’s drunk and fatherless all the time these days, and not only that, I like the idea of making a totem pole for nothing. I like everything that doesn’t cost money. I’m immediately on my guard if projects come with a budget. That’s how it is now. I’ve changed. I’ll soon have been in the forest for a whole year and I’m not the person I was. It’s not easy to say when the change occurred. It most likely came about gradually, as most changes do, but the fact that something has happened is beyond doubt. The forest gives and it takes. And it shapes those who take refuge there in its own image. I’m in the process of becoming a forest myself. The forest, that’s me, I think, as I’m met by the infernal sound of the alarm and calmly calculate that I have about five minutes to do the job. I carry out pot after pot of paint and lacquer and woodstain and whatever else I can lay my hands on. I run as fast as I can and after five minutes I’ve managed to hide a considerable amount of paint products behind the same skip that the ICA manager has been putting my milk behind for some months now. When I reckon I have what I need, I crouch down on top of all the pots and wait for Securitas to come. At length, a guard appears, but much later than I had thought. And the police turn up and there’s quite a lot of note-taking and phoning, and finally the shopkeeper himself arrives. I recognise him from the countless small purchases I made in connection with our endless redecorating. A paintbrush here, bit of tape there, sunflower seeds for the birds. I’ve always been a man for the birds. They have a lot to thank me for, the birds do, and I’ve been on nodding terms with this shopkeeper for years, but now I’ve taken the step of smashing the window in his shop and helping myself to what I need. That kind of thing should come as no surprise to him. It’s part and parcel of having a shop. He patches up the window with some Plexiglass-like material and eventually leaves. I have a couple of hours before the locals wake up, and I take Bongo to the edge of the forest and load him up with inhuman amounts of woodstain and paint, and it takes us three round trips to get all the goods back home.

On May 1
st
, the reactionary returns. And to provoke me he has brought along a bin bag full of old leaves, which he proceeds to burn outside his tent, standing there with a rake he pokes in the bonfire while it’s burning. I ignore him. I haven’t time to do anything else. I don’t even take time off to celebrate International Workers’ Day. I have more important things to do. And, as a matter of fact, who are the workers in Norway today? Damned if I know. So I paint. The egg shaker becomes fire-engine red, and Dad is given a variety of colours on his upper and lower body. I feel he deserves that. I myself go green, like the forest, and I paint the bike in extremely realistic colours, using my own bike as the model. Bongo goes yellow and Gregus a sort of turquoise. Individual features on the faces, such as eyes, mouth and nose, are painted in contrasting colours. I coat the plinth with everything that is left. It probably gets twenty coats of all sorts of weird and wonderful things, and I doubt whether a thousand years of moisture will make any inroads.

As I paint, Gregus irritates me by spelling his way through old newspaper articles about all kinds of rubbish. Politics and science and art and culture. And not only does he painstakingly read them out, letter by letter, but he tries to analyse the content, to the best of his meagre abilities, and is eager to discuss what it means. Forget it, I say. It means nothing. It’s just words. It must mean something, Gregus says. Nope, I say. People just write things to show how smart they are, and that’s the last thing the world needs. It’s just words, words, words. Maybe a small percentage of it is slightly more than words, but to know which bit you have to be smarter than most and I forbid you to have that as your goal at such an early stage in your life.

I don’t believe it doesn’t mean anything, says Gregus.

What you do when you come of age is none of my business, I say. I promise to release my hold over you when that time comes. But that’s many years in the future. And the only thing that matters right now is this totem pole. It’s going to stand for a thousand years and bear witness to the fact that you and I and Grandad and Bongo have been here. We have been on earth. We have had our time and did our best and even so were useless in a useless way, and when it’s finished you and I are going to head off, I say. And the newspaper articles aren’t coming with us. You can just forget all about your reading project. And the same goes for school. You’re not going to get a sniff of school until you’re eighteen. We’re going to be in the forest, I say. With Bongo. You might as well get used to the idea right now.

I can make my own decisions, can’t I? he says.

Forget it, I say.

But there’s something here about a school called the London School of something, yes, here it is, London School of Economics, says Gregus. Isn’t that where Peter Pan comes from?

That’s right, I say.

I bet it’s great going to school there, he says.

Bear in mind that if you ever start at that school I’ll come and live in the forest outside London and give you a good hiding every single day.

But I’ll be allowed to live in London, won’t I? says Gregus.

Yes, of course, I say. It’s an exhilarating city. But you can just hang around there a bit, can’t you? Or go to a school that isn’t so nice and conventional? Maybe something arty? A school that gives you the skills to extend boundaries rather than maintain them?

I don’t understand what you’re talking about, says Gregus.