I Curse the River of Time (6 page)

‘I’ve never been divorced myself, so I really don’t know much about it,’ Hansen said, and a pause followed, and then I heard him say: ‘What have you got there?’

‘It’s a bottle Arvid bought,’ my mother said. ‘It’s Calvados, French spirit.’

‘Well, the lad’s all right for money then,’ Hansen said. ‘Come on, let’s talk politics on my side of the hedge. I’ll treat you to a cup of coffee and some cake too, if you are up for it,’ and maybe he touched her cheek just then.

I heard them rise from the table and walk towards the door. They had been discussing Gorbachev, the man with the map of an unknown nation on his forehead, who was now leader of the Soviet Union, appointed to that post the year before, who would turn out to be the last leader of a state which was a seventy year long experiment where everything had gone to hell a long time ago. But no one realised that yet. That Gorbachev would be the last. Not even he.

My youngest brother had gone to the Soviet Embassy in Oslo and convinced the staff it was important to give him a photo of their president, even though the cult of personality was finally over and done with, even in China where it really took off for some years, it could not be denied, and my brother carefully carried the photo home and had it framed and gave it to my mother for her birthday.

‘Hang that above your bed,’ he said, ‘then you can talk to him before you fall asleep. Like Arvid used to talk to Mao.’

And she did, for fun really, but it was not true that I used to speak to Mao. That would have been childish. I did have a picture of Mao above my sofa bed in the early Seventies, that is true, because that was the only place I had for it. But I had a picture of Bob Dylan there too and one of Joni Mitchell on a beach in California (
Oh California, California, I’m coming home)
and a reproduction of a landscape by Turner, the English painter, for I had read somewhere that he painted his pictures with brushes dipped in tinted steam, and I thought that was a beautiful way to put it, so when I came across this poster of one of his paintings of the sea from outside the town of Whitby on the English coast, a town I had been to the year before, I bought it because I was certain I could see that it was true.

The picture of Mao I had was the well-known retouched photograph where he sits hunched over his desk writing with one of those Chinese brush pens, and I always thought, or hoped, that it was not one of his political or philosophical articles he was writing, but one of his poems, perhaps the one which begins:

Fragile images of departure, the village back then.

I curse the river of time; thirty-two years have passed
.

for it showed the human Mao, someone I was drawn to, someone who had felt how time was battling his body, as I had felt it so often myself; how time without warning could catch up with me and run around beneath my skin like tiny electric shocks and I could not stop them, no matter how much I tried. And when they let up at last and everything
fell quiet, I was already a different person than I had been before, and it sometimes made me despair.

But the Seventies were long gone. Only half a year before this November, I and a crowd of people I used to know back then, in the Seventies, had been standing side by side on the pavement opposite the Chinese Embassy in Oslo shouting slogans and protests and had delivered a letter to His Excellency the Chinese Ambassador, and I do not recall if he himself or someone else came to the gate, or if anyone at all came out to receive the letter. Just the same, we pleaded urgently with the Chinese authorities, the Chinese Communist Party we had held in such high regard for so many years, to stop killing the students in the square they called Tiananmen, stop killing the young workers who had joined the students, we begged them to stop the stream of blood which in June 1989 flowed to every corner of the big square like the streams in a delta of red, and just as urgently, we called for democracy in China, and it felt strange to stand there shouting for democracy in the great country that had once been our Jerusalem, where the sun no longer rose in the east for anyone but those who lived there. Soon to be a billion strong. Mao had died nearly thirteen years earlier and thousands of us marched through the Oslo night with pictures on poles and black flags in the wind and black mourning bands around our arms and I remember thinking, what do we do now? But in June 1989 it just felt strange and a little sad. Many of those around me I had not seen for ten years and they all looked older, some with narrow stripes of grey at their temples, and there was nothing more we could do, and the air fell empty
as it had been before we came, and I left the pavement opposite the Chinese Embassy with the woman who had been my life for fifteen years, but did not want me any more.

8

I
found a job in a factory not far from Økern Station on the eastbound Underground line. I had worked there for two months now. I stood by a machine and watched the light spill into the hall in many slanted columns from the huge windows to the car park. In the grey dust the columns looked so compact that you could bang your head if you walked into them, and it was almost strange that no one did. I hoped the air was not so dense, so grey between the pallets at the assembly line where I stood, but of course it was, and denser still. It was from there the dust came.

In the evenings the windows were black. The slanted columns dissolved and vanished, and the light shifted from the windows to the air above the machines where fluorescent tubes hung suspended from the ceiling in long, furry chains, and the dust too shifted and whirled above our heads like glittering confetti.

Most days we worked the same shifts and stood together at the assembly line, we who formed what I called the A Team, which everyone called it now, but on other days we worked in a rota and there might only be the two of us on the platform along the machine working with other people from other shifts. I never got used to it. It was like coming
home from holiday after two months away and my father had rearranged the living room, so everything was back to front, and for days I would turn from the hall and crash into a chair when my brothers and I came in to watch TV.

The workers from the other shift had no idea how to support each other like we did on the A Team; the rhythm would fall apart, and I was always more tired after days like that. Each time I rushed off to get the forklift to bring more pallets of paper I would then lower on to the lifts we used to save our backs, the supply of paper at my station would run out. Then the whole belt had to be stopped because the folded sheets with text and pictures were trapped on the chain and didn’t fall into place like they should. Then the man we called Sony Amerika got incredibly angry and would scream at me and try to stare me down with his merciless look in a way that Hassan, the machine operator from the A Team would never have done. They had the same job, but never worked the same shift, and why the hell didn’t Sony Amerika drive the forklift himself, why did I always have to do it? My job was to feed my station. I should have got furious, abandoned the machine and sat on a pallet rolling a cigarette with my back to Sony, but they would call it sabotage, and not one from that shift would have backed me, this I knew. So I did not do it, just gave him an evil and merciless stare in return.

On the production line, it was Elly I got on with best. We had the same rhythm, the same stops and starts and we caught each other’s eye and laughed when, more than often,
we moved in such harmony as if we were one person with four arms, and she would solve crossword puzzles and I would read books when our stations were full and everything was running smoothly. Then Hassan was happy and rested his legs on the chain guard and read magazines with porous pages and Arabic type. When I ran across the hall to get the forklift, Elly would move over and fill my station so the machine did not stop. No one else did that.

Every half-hour we swapped places. We filled five of the stations with bulky paper that whirled dust into our faces, but was kind to our hands and produced by Follum in Norway. In the last station we put shiny, stiff paper produced in Finland by Kirkniemi.

When we swapped stations, Elly nearly always bumped into me with a swing of her hip that pushed me head first into the pallets sending paper flying to all sides when I landed, and her round hip left its imprint on my thigh, and there it would stay, and she laughed, and I laughed and Hassan threw up his hands in despair.

At times, when I was fed up with him, and he was not there, I mimicked Sony Amerika’s Deep South accent, an accent he would never get rid of, and many thought I was good at it. But I always felt bad about it a few hours later, after the early shift or the late shift or after overtime at night on my way down the hill between the factories towards the Økern Centre to catch the Underground home. My job was to make the workers unite, not divide them, that was the party line, and Sony Amerika was not the enemy.

*   *  *

I came off the night shift and stood waiting on the platform when the train on the opposite side arrived, stopped, let passengers off and let new ones in, it took a long time that, and then the train left. A stream of warmly dressed people in puffa jackets and dark coats, in short jackets of tweed, of wool, got off at this station, with scarves around their necks and gloves on their hands, or mittens, and they were all on their way to companies in the area. There were more of them here than at any other station in the valley.

When they had all gone up the steps, a girl came out from behind the shelter, I had seen her before. She must have got off the train that had just left and instead of floating with the crowd up the steps, through the barriers to the square outside, she had slipped behind the back of the shelter with its arched roof, like a Chinese pagoda, and was now standing at the edge of the platform waiting for the next train. She wiped her mouth with the blue sleeve of her jacket, or rather her coat, it looked a bit short on her, she looked a bit cold, she had a fringe and long blonde hair like Joni Mitchell on the cover of the album,
Blue
, but she was younger. And then my train arrived, the doors crashing open and I stepped in and went to the window in the opposite door and stood there watching her until we left. She saw me looking at her, and she turned away.

This happened several times when I was going home from the night shift; she would come out from behind the shelter and stand there in her blue jacket or coat with the too short sleeves and look frozen waiting for the next train and then turn away when she saw that I was looking at her.

This was something you could see in the early morning if you paid attention and did not allow yourself to be drowned in the noise around you, and even more when you were tired and exhausted and only able to concentrate on one thing at a time.

Then the train stopped at Carl Berners Plass, the blue station; Tøyen was green, Grønland was yellow, beige, almost, and so on in a system which was not a system, and it always annoyed me that it was not, for it would have been so good if there had been a system rather than everything being so hopelessly, half-heartedly Norwegian as it was now, but instead a bit European, a little bit continental, because, hey, here was a station of grey concrete for no apparent reason and it looked completely unfinished and raw with its rough damp walls, and would remain like this for ever because someone thought it artistic.

Anyway, I got off at Carl Berners Plass, the blue station. I was on my way home after a double shift, which meant overtime and good money. I was so tired I felt drunk. During the last few hours at the machine before the new shift was on we fooled about and laughed at the most feeble jokes and our heads were light as helium balloons. My body felt loose, like rubber, but in a way I enjoyed it. I enjoyed being so exhausted, we were all exhausted.

I walked down the slope from the platform with my legs trembling. There was a queue at the till in the Narvesen kiosk, they were people on their way
to
work, not coming home like I was, and they were buying newspapers and
Norsk Ukeblad
and Cokes in the kiosk, and I joined the queue and when it was my turn, I bought
Dagbladet
. I felt strangely important, my body not like the bodies in front of me or behind me in the queue. I was one of those who kept the wheels turning, all day and night, if necessary. In a dignified way I walked towards the exit, up to the glass doors, and outside it was surprisingly cold, still dark, it would soon be winter. I walked on downhill towards the square, Carl Berners Plass, and onwards around the corner to the left, and then the last bit along Trondhjemsveien before it turned to the city centre, and at the junction I went straight to my small flat on Finnmarkgata.

On the pedestrian crossing I met a man I knew. We stopped in the middle of the street; he was older than me, nearly ten years older, and a member of the same Communist Party. His name was Frank. He was a skilled worker in a factory close to Hasle Station, he had roots there going back many years, he had been there all his adult life, and not like me with only two months to show. But of course Frank was not his name, it was an alias, I did not know what he was called. I called myself Arne, it was my alias for Arvid, and I often chose the wrong name because both began with an ‘A’ and had two syllables. It was hopeless, but I had picked it myself, so I guess I could not change it now. He said:

‘Good morning, comrade, you’re already off to work?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m on my way home, I’ve worked the night shift. I live there,’ I said, pointing to my window that faced the junction where we were standing.

He turned to look, then turned back.

‘So you’ve done overtime,’ he said, and I said yes, I had, I was exhausted, and he said that was good, because night shifts welded the workers together, boosted solidarity and made it easier to be a Communist, he said.

‘You’re probably right,’ I said, but to be honest, I had forgotten to be a Communist that night. I had manned the machine and then messed around at break time and had a laugh with the others. And the one time Hassan was cursing and bashing away with a spanner because a loose, badly folded sheet was jammed at the end of the line and forced the straps and rollers out of position, we played football beside the forklift trucks with a big ball of orange rags we had tied together with elastic bands and string, like children used to do in the yards before the war. The World Cup was that year, and we could still feel the enthusiasm, even though Holland was beaten by West Germany in the final.