I Curse the River of Time (11 page)

I did not
want
to look like him. I did not
want
to look in the mirror and see my father there. But from early on I realised that the day would come when everyone could see how much I resembled my father. It would separate me from my mother for good. Even though the two of them were married. And shared a life. But that was not how I saw it. That they shared a life. And it would tie me to my father for good because I looked like him and perhaps thought like he did, and against my will would find myself on the other side of the great divide, the great chasm where he lived in the murky twilight among the crammed furniture, where his father was with his Adolf in the middle, and his brothers, who were my uncles, a small crowd of gloomy men standing shoulder to shoulder nailed to a place where my mother did
not
belong, because she was different from them, because she had been carried away to this place, and so in some strange way was free.

Wherever she went my brother went too, the eldest, for he was the unwanted child, a child born in secrecy and shame off the coast of Denmark, among the marram grass and the grazing sheep on an island called Læsø. She had travelled there in haste with my brother like a shimmering fish in her belly, and it bound them to each other with an
ease which did not embrace me. He had sunshine and pain in his body inside the foamy blue and glittering room where he was so safe and so unwanted, like an outlaw, and the first thing he saw in his life was a sheepdog roaming the heath and gulls soaring above the port and the vault of blue sky above the island. The first thing
I
saw was my father’s face and three grey, scrawny pigeons on the dusty windowsill behind the dangling blinds and the tram on Vålerenggata. I was the only one of four sons who was planned, who was wanted by them both, and they told me this, time after time, and each time as good news, as something to celebrate, and it gave me a legitimacy I could have done without. I longed to be an outlaw like my mother was, and my brother, to be with them and share their pain and in secret wander the dark streets at night in search of a place where
I
could belong, I would open the door to strangers and hide behind a mask like Zorro did, because it did
not
come easily to me, what the two of them shared. It scared me. So, as the years passed I became the Lone Ranger, looking for unsafe ground, and I clung to her, did tricks for her, performed for her, pulled laughter out of her with my silly jokes whose punchlines were lost in linguistic confusion. As soon as I opened my mouth the sentences came tumbling out at a shocking speed, I stayed in nappies longer than other children to tie myself to her, I could spell before I was out of nappies. But no matter how hard I tried, I was still like my father.

Nothing in the world was obvious to me back then, in Vålerenggata 5, nothing was simple. So I kept a sharp eye
on everything around me and I should have noticed that the woman whose body had once been so strong, so robust, at some point grew thinner and thinner, that her lap was no longer so soft. But I did not warn them, did not shout:
‘Danger!’
to the men in the flat who were all equally blind, for I was a late talker and knew only a few words of Norwegian at that age, so she had to work it out for herself, the pain, the weight loss, her random periods, and she had to drag herself off to a doctor, almost furtively, with my brother and me in tow, and leave us in waiting rooms where there was nothing to play with, not even Lego was invented yet. And there we sat, my brother and I, dangling our legs, staring at one another, or I sat on his lap and he showed me the pictures in
Norsk Ukeblad
or sometimes
Illustrert
and waited for what seemed like a lifetime, while
she
lay in there, cringing with shame, her legs in stirrups behind the soundproofed double doors, and the doctor finally pushed back his chair, took his glasses off and said:

‘I’m sorry, madam, let me be straight with you. This looks like cancer. We’ll see what we can do. You have children, don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I have children.’

When the three of us came home from our secret mission, to Sagene, I think, or maybe Bjølsen, the men were still at work, and as she had cleaned and tidied the flat before we left some hours earlier, my mother went across the landing to see Mrs Frantzen who was home from work and now
sitting in her kitchen with her daughter, who almost thirty years later would send me a letter.

My mother sat down by Mrs Frantzen’s table and she buried her face in her hands and started to cry because she was exhausted, because it had been such a long ride back through town from Sagene or Bjølsen with my brother and me in tow. And Mrs Frantzen, who knew about my mother’s condition, said:

‘So, my lass, how did it go?’

And my mother said:

‘I’ve got cancer, I’m going to die.’

‘You don’t know that,’ Mrs Frantzen said. ‘Many survive. And you have children.’

‘Yes,’ my mother said. ‘That’s true. I have children. I have two children. And in their brief lives they’ve barely had room to move in the flat across the landing, and now they’re going to be without a mother to take care of them and give them what they need and I’ve neglected them so badly.’

‘No, you haven’t,’ Mrs Frantzen said. ‘You can’t say that.’

‘Yes,’ my mother said, ‘I
can
say that, and they’ve never even tasted chocolate. Not once,’ she said, and that might have been true, that we had never tasted chocolate, but in that case it was not something we held against her. But from that day onwards she stuffed us with chocolate. Freia milk chocolate and Kvikklunsj bars, and every day was like a celebration, and then she would cry a little because she was going to die soon and would not be able to spend with us the years to come, the years that were queuing up one after another, but all the same it was a party, and she carefully put away the chocolate wrappers in small paper bags
and threw them in the neighbours’ bins, just as she carefully washed our faces before our men returned from work.

And then she did not die. She lived on and had two more sons, and I do not know how it was resolved, if the diagnosis was wrong or a successful operation was performed that I was not told about, or whether she was simply worn out by the twilight life with all those men behind the blinds on the second floor, and the weight started to drop off her and that the life she was leading was making her ill. You cannot rule that out, because shortly after we quickly moved from this place, from the flat on the corner of Smålensgata and Vålerenggata, where those damned tramlines ran, and up to the new and more affordable housing at Veitvet, which was completed that year, or at least our terraced house was, and my father came with us, but he only, and within a short time she felt much better and almost looked like her old self.

13

I
felt so cold. I was drenched. I followed my mother from the terrace into the living room and tugged at the reefer jacket, got the buttons out of buttonholes that were too small and pulled the jacket off and hell, it was hard work. She turned her back to me and I threw all my clothes on the floor as the water ran down my thighs. I rummaged through my bag and found no spare clothes, no trousers, no jumpers or shirts, but what I did find was writing equipment and notebooks with Chinese signs on the cover and secrets written down inside them, right back from the mid-Seventies, and no one ever knew about those notebooks, not even the girl in the blue coat, not one member of the Party, and I had kept them in my pockets all this time, in many different jackets, in leather jackets, army jackets, reefer jackets.
I can’t take it any more
, it said in one of them on an otherwise blank page,
so stupid
, it said.
It is too late
, it said on another page, but I could not recall exactly what it was that was too late. At the very bottom of the bag I found a blanket I had really no use for, as you were no longer allowed to sleep on the benches on the deck of the
Holger Danske
the way I used to. These days you had to pay for a cabin if you wanted to take the night ferry to Denmark, and besides it was too cold to lie under the open sky far out at sea in November, so when I packed the blanket it was more out of habit.

I took out the blanket, and with all my clothes in a soaking pile on the floor, I wrapped it tightly around me, and it was hard to breathe, I would catch pneumonia, no doubt about it, my head was pounding, I felt wretched. I kicked my clothes and was so confused and temple-throbbingly furious, but she had done me no harm.

Tilting her head, she studied me closely where I stood in the middle of the floor, water dripping from my hair, tightly wrapped in my blanket, and she should have given me a towel then, but she did not, and maybe just then, there was a smile on her lips, an ironic smile or any smile at all, but perhaps that was only wishful thinking. She went to the bedroom and opened a wardrobe in the corner and came back with several garments over her arm which I knew belonged to my father. I had not seen them in years, not since I was young and my body was younger and my father was younger and his body really filled those clothes. There was a charcoal jumper with red trim, a T-shirt that no longer had any colour and a pair of trousers that once upon a time had been beige or khaki, like a British uniform in hot and sun-scorched colonies, but they had faded now after decades of hardboiled washing. But the colour was not the point. The point was that when I had put on those clothes with shy and awkward movements because this time my mother did
not
turn her back to me, they fitted like a glove, as if they were made especially for me. But they were not. They were meant for my father and purchased especially for him twenty years ago or more. And it was good to feel dry, warm
clothes against my skin, but it was also odd to wear clothes that fitted so well, so comfortably, and yet belonged to another man.

‘That’s what I thought,’ my mother said. ‘That they would fit.’

I had not eaten that day, not on the ferry, no breakfast of crusty Danish rolls and Danish butter and delicious full-cream milk and coffee, I had not eaten a Kvikklunsj, or milk chocolate from Freia, and the dry clothes made me feel drowsy and dizzy, floating aimlessly about as if I were drunk.

‘Why don’t we eat,’ I said, ‘you do have food here?’

‘Of course I have food,’ she said.

‘Well, let’s eat then,’ I said.

She looked at me, turned and opened the fridge, and I went to the cupboard above the kitchen counter and took out plates and cups, as I had done when I was small and a good little boy in her presence, and I smoothed the tablecloth to both sides with the palms of my hands and tugged it slightly at each end and set out cutlery on the table. She fried eggs on the stove, and I heard her hum, or quietly sing, a soft Elvis song: ‘Are you lonesome tonight’ it was. Then she fried the bacon and toasted bread in the chrome toaster we had had on the kitchen counter since the dawn of time and switched on a fan above the stove which was so noisy it was impossible to talk. And that suited me fine.

We sat at the table to eat. It felt good to sit down. I closed
my eyes and opened them. It was an effort. It was like breaking cardboard. I lifted my cup and drank a mouthful of coffee. I had not tasted anything that good in a long time.

She looked at my hands. ‘What’s wrong with your hand?’ she said. I put the cup on the saucer and looked at my right hand. My knuckles were red and slightly swollen. I opened my hand and closed it again, clenched it hard. It hurt. I told her what was wrong with it.

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Arvid,’ she said. ‘When did you start getting caught up in that kind of thing?’

‘I haven’t. He was coming at me. He made up his mind the moment he saw me in the bar.’

‘I hardly think so,’ my mother said.

‘I guess that’s for me to know,’ I said. ‘I was the one who was there.’

‘There’s no doubt about that,’ she said.

When our plates were empty, I said:

‘Maybe you would like a drink now? A Calvados?’ I attempted a sly smile, as if I were joking, I mean, it was only one o’clock in the afternoon or something and I was a little startled when she replied:

‘Yes, please, I’d like that,’ she said. ‘Why don’t we have it on the terrace?’

‘Now? Won’t it be too cold?’

‘We’ll wrap our duvets around us.’

OK. We will wrap our duvets around us. I stood up. And then I got all excited and took the bottle from the table by the window and took two medium sized glasses from the cupboard behind me and went outside to the terrace in the
cold and placed them on the picnic table and poured two decent sized shots before I went back inside. She was waiting with the duvets. I took one, shook it out a bit, and then we went outside and sat in our chairs to drink Calvados with our duvets wrapped tightly around us. She was wearing woollen gloves. It was so cold our breath streamed from our mouths like frosty mist.

The glasses were on the table. She lit a cigarette, there was a smell of singed wool, and she said nothing, and the glasses stayed where they were, and I did not drink when she did not. I eased the blue packet out of my pocket and rolled a cigarette with stiff fingers. I smoked making no noise and just stared into the distance. After a while I leaned forward to look out across the big meadow stretching from the back of our plot towards a farm on the other side. There used to be horses in that meadow, and heifers sometimes. I had flown kites in that meadow when I was a boy, but it was a wilderness now, and the grass was so tall and dense there was no way you could walk through it unless you were a roe deer on its long legs. And there were hares and hedgehogs, too, and pheasants with chicks that were full grown now, in November, and rodents in abundance, and hawks in the sky above, and buzzards that came sweeping out of nowhere, and falcons hanging cruciform in the air before hurtling down, and there were owls in the oak trees in the evening, all quiet where they perched on a branch in the dark and stared their prey to death, and in the black night a marten darted between the trees and up across our roof, and there was plenty to eat for everyone.