Encircling

Carl Frode Tiller

Translated from the Norwegian by

Barbara J. Haveland

Dear David,

I was on the bus, on the way to the cottage, when I read that you’d lost your memory, and once I’d got over the shock and began to wonder what I could do to help you, there was one memory that kept coming back, although I’d no idea why, so I’ve decided to start this letter with it. In my mind I saw the two of us on one of our countless long walks around Namsos town centre. I didn’t even know I had it, this memory, until suddenly, sitting there on that bus, it came flooding back and I felt again what it was like to be seventeen and roaming the streets, just you and me, walking side by side, going nowhere in particular. I seem to remember we had some notion that we went on these walks because we were bored and had nothing else to do in the evening, but when I think back on the conversations we had, on how much we had to talk about, how caught up and how intense we could become and how quick we were to dodge down a side street if we spotted anybody we would have had to stop and speak to, I can only guess that we must have regarded those walks as being meaningful in themselves as well. Or, even if we didn’t think of them as meaningful, we must still have sensed that they were.

And maybe it was thanks to this unconscious sense of meaning that the first and brightest memory to pop up when I saw your ad was such an undramatic, everyday one. I don’t know, but an awful lot of the things I mention in this letter – opinions you held, for example, or descriptions of things that happened when I wasn’t there or of people you knew but that I never met – is drawn from these conversations.

In our earlier years at school I didn’t know much about you except that you had a stepfather who was a vicar, that you played football, and that you could throw the rounders ball further than anybody else at the school sports day. I don’t quite know why these last two stuck in my mind, maybe because I was hopeless both at throwing the rounders ball and at football. When it was my turn to throw the ball I threw it girl-fashion, underarm, and I was known for being the first and, so far, the only kid at Namsos Lower Secondary to make such a mess of a penalty kick that it ended up as a throw-in for the other side, something I actually claimed to be proud of once I got to know you.

We became friends in our first year at senior secondary. An anti-drug rally was being held in the gym, and I remember that I’d decided to skip it. I was cultivating a punky, anarchist image at that time and doing my best to hide my teenage insecurity behind a mask of apathy and bravado. So I slung my rucksack over my shoulders and sauntered as nonchalantly as I could towards the door, trying to convince everyone – including myself – that this was me striking a blow for what the alternative press called “consciousness-expanding substances”. That wasn’t it at all, though. My dad was in prison on a drugs charge and it was out of misplaced loyalty to him that I meant to boycott this rally, so when the headmaster called out my
name and told me to come back and sit down at once, and when everybody turned and stared at me, I was suddenly overcome by all the emotions that I’d managed to keep more or less in check up to that point and I dissolved into tears in front of the whole school. Most of the other kids probably knew that my dad was inside and what he’d done, but at that moment you were the only one to grasp the connection between that and this totally unexpected breakdown. After a few seconds of utter silence, during which the teachers and what must have been over three hundred pupils stared at me in amazement, I heard you ask the headmaster in a loud, clear voice: “How would you like to take part in a demonstration against your own father?”

Later, after I’d fallen in love with you and my love had refined my memory, I pictured you as a kind of James Dean figure when you said this. The way I remember it, you were sitting on one of the benches, leaning back against the wall bars with your elbows stuck through them, and you smiled as you looked straight at the headmaster with sure, steady eyes. That image has faded now, of course. All I know for sure is that you were wearing a white T-shirt and that you said what you said.

At first I felt that you had somehow shown me up, and I was furious with you for that, but the more distance I was able to put between myself and this incident, the more grateful I felt and it wasn’t long before I began to feel quite touched that you had defended me the way you did. I admired you for the courage and sense of fair play you’d shown and from then on until we became friends and started hanging out together all the time, I would go out of my way to turn up, accidentally on purpose, in places where I knew you’d be. If I heard that you were going to some party I’d do everything I
could to get an invitation to that same party; if I heard that you were going to the cinema I’d drop whatever I was doing and head for the cinema too, and on my way to school or down to the town centre I almost always took the route that led past the house where you lived with Arvid and Berit, just in case I might bump into you or simply see you. That this took a few minutes longer didn’t matter.

I did also try, though, to maintain a certain dignity. I kept my distance and never intruded. I would smile and say “Hi” when we met, but I never dared to strike up a conversation, and since you were the sort of strong, silent type who rarely said more than was absolutely necessary it’s a wonder to me that we ever got round to speaking to one another at all. But we must have done so, because by the end of the year we were inseparable.

I don’t have an internet connection at the cottage, so to send a mail to your psychologist, to ask how to go about helping you, I had to pop over to one of my neighbours. He let me in and allowed me to use his computer, but he was gruff and unfriendly and he clearly couldn’t wait to get rid of me again, so unfortunately I didn’t have time to ask all the questions I would have liked to ask. But as far as I could tell from the only email your psychologist got round to sending me, you were being kept in isolation, so I couldn’t visit you, as I really wanted to do. Any contact, I was told, would have to be by letter. And when I wrote these letters I wasn’t merely to try to revive your memory, I gathered. Even if nobody who wrote to you managed to bring back your memory, it was vital for you to learn as much as possible about the person you used to be, what sort of life you’d led, who your friends were, who your family were, where
you came from and so on, so your psychologist urged me to include absolutely everything I knew about you, not just the things we had seen and done together. So before I go on to tell you about us, you and me, I’ll try to write down the little I know and remember of your background and of the life you led before we met.

In the hall in your house hung an aerial photograph of a white wooden house sitting right down on the shingle on the island of Otterøya. Before Berit married Arvid and moved into his home in Namsos, you had lived in this house along with her and her father, your grandfather, Erik – a man I know of only from an old black-and-white photo of him when he was young: a big, burly road-worker with a shock of thick hair, a broad, hunched back and a bushy black moustache that stuck out like pigtails on either side of his face.

Berit had kept house for your grandfather ever since the death of your grandmother in the early Sixties. When she was about seventeen or eighteen she left home and moved into a bedsit in Namsos, where she started her training as an auxiliary nurse at the same time as my own mum. But within the year she was pregnant with you and had to move back to Otterøya. No one was ever told who your father was: for some reason Berit refused to say and she kept it a secret as long as she lived, even from you.

Mum used to tell me stories about your mother and what she was like back then: such a pale slip of a thing, she said, with red hair, freckles and a little turned-up nose. To begin with Berit had seemed shy and a little unsure of herself, but she had turned out to be anything but. Like lots of people who’ve had a tough upbringing and survived, she’d been hardened and according to Mum she seemed not the slightest bit shy or afraid, as folk from small towns often were when
they came to the city to study. She had a sharp tongue, talked nineteen to the dozen and always said exactly what she thought, no matter who she was talking to. She could be ruthlessly spiteful to anyone who crossed her and would go to almost any lengths to hurt and humiliate them. Physical defects, speech impediments, a dodgy past, it was all fair game to her and her jibes were so spot-on and so witty that no one listening could help but laugh, no matter how hard they tried. And if her victim gave as good as they got and commented, for instance, on her bad front teeth, she would just grin, baring those same teeth. Self-pity and sentimentality were luxuries she’d never been able to afford and she never let anything get to her. “If anyone had told me back then that one day she’d nab herself a vicar, I’d have died laughing!” Mum used to say.

Your grandfather found it hard to get used to the idea of his daughter marrying a vicar. According to you he was an atheist and a communist, red as they come, till the day he died. He shook his head and scoffed at a lot of what Arvid believed in and stood for and he never seemed to tire of asking for concrete descriptions of, or rational explanations for, various miracles and wonders mentioned in the Bible. “Could you not explain that business of the virgin birth in a way that a simple man from Otterøya can understand it?” he would say, and if Arvid chose to ignore the ironic undertone he detected in Erik’s voice and gave him a serious answer, your grandfather would listen with a gleeful look on his face, and when Arvid was finished he would chortle and shake his head indulgently. “Aye, those were the days!” he’d say. “You’d never see that happening now, that’s for sure!”

He thought these conversations were great fun, you told me, and the same went for teasing Berit by reminding her
of the sort of family and the sort of background she came from. His talk was broader and coarser than usual when he was with her and it was like he just always happened to remember the juiciest incidents from the old days, the one thing common to all these stories being that they didn’t go down at all well in the Christian circles which Berit was trying so hard to fit into and become part of. “Then there was that New Year’s Eve when you drank all the menfolk under the table,” he would say, roaring with laughter. And if your mother didn’t laugh along with him he would act surprised and puzzled. “Oh, don’t tell me you don’t remember that?” he’d say, then sit back, gloating, and wait for an answer while Berit turned white with rage.

You used to laugh when you told me all this, but at the time it had left you feeling uncomfortable and insecure. Arvid, on the other hand, did his best to pretend that it didn’t bother him. According to you, he might have been annoyed, angry even, but he wanted to convince you and your mother that it was beneath his dignity to be shocked by that sort of thing, so he would merely sit there smiling and showing endless patience and tolerance. This fits, as it happens, with my own impression of him as a person after we got to know one another and I began to spend a lot of time at your house. My memories of those days may be coloured by my hearing later that Arvid had had a mental breakdown after your mother died; still, though, I seem to remember thinking that he was the sort of man who hides inner turmoil behind a calm, solid exterior and who, without knowing it himself, overcompensates and ends up seeming intimidating. He had a smile so warm and gentle that it was hard to credit the love it was supposed to reflect, and he spoke so slowly and softly and with such sincerity that I for one felt uneasy
in his company and not calm and relaxed as I was probably meant to feel.

A lot of people misinterpreted his manner and took it as proof that the stereotype of the rather smug, pompous man of the cloth was actually true. As my mum said, “It’s easy to be gentle and kind and tolerant of people when you’re sure that you’re going to heaven and everyone else is going to hell!” But none of us who knew Arvid saw him as smug or pompous. Quite the opposite. He honestly seemed to see himself as a perfectly ordinary man who just happened to be a vicar, and wanted to be seen that way, as a man of the people. He couldn’t quite pull it off, though. When this rather straitlaced man wrapped his blue-and-white Namsos FC scarf round his neck and took his place on the terraces to cheer on the home team a lot of people laughed and eyed him with the contempt normally reserved for politicians indulging in the same sort of antics. To them this was all an act, an attempt to woo the man in the street. Not only that, but Arvid, like so many other clergymen, had an irritating habit of eventually bringing every conversation round to the subject of Christianity, something that tended to alienate people and make them feel uncomfortable. If, for example, we were sitting out on the steps at your place on a winter’s night, gazing up at the stars, I knew that at some point he’d be bound to mention the Star of Bethlehem – just by the bye, as it were – and if there was a natural history programme on TV that showed how well some species of animal was adapted to its surroundings, I’d be sitting there just waiting for him to express his amazement that there could actually be people who seriously believed something so wonderful could have come about purely by accident.

You said yourself that you hated this side of him. When you were younger you had often noticed how the
atmosphere changed when he walked into a room. A loud, lively conversation could fizzle out completely the minute he appeared and and the mood in the room became unsettled and edgy. There were always one or two people who made a show of talking and acting quite normally, but they were very much on their own and stood out so much from the rest that their efforts always seemed more strained and awkward than heroic, and in the end they either gave up and shut up or they did the same as everyone else and switched, instead, to talking about things they felt it was safe to talk about when the vicar was there. They gabbled on about nothing in particular, voiced opinions that no one in their right mind would disagree with. And while you burned with embarrassment, Arvid seemed quite oblivious to what was going on, or so you said. Thinking about it now, though, I’m not sure you were right about this. I remember Arvid as being both intelligent and observant, and I can imagine that such situations must have been every bit as painful and embarrassing for him as they were for you.