My Struggle: Book 3 (27 page)

“That’s the last resort,” he said.

He found a parking spot in Tyholmen. He set off at a good clip between the tall timber houses, and I had to jog to keep up. I was ashamed of my clothes, I looked like such an idiot in them, and I kept a close eye on the people we passed to see if they were staring or laughing.

At the fish market Dad scanned the glass counters while waiting his turn.

“Let’s have some shrimp, shall we, eh, Karl Ove?” he said.

I nodded.

“And perhaps that piece of cod?”

I didn’t say anything.

He smiled and looked at me.

“I know you don’t like cod, but it’s good for you. When you grow up you’ll get a taste for it.”

“I doubt it,” I said.

I felt like chatting and telling stories, the way I did with Mom, but I couldn’t even get off the ground with him. However, I was glad he had brought me along and it was important he knew that.

When it was his turn and he pointed out what he wanted to the assistant, one of the other women behind the counter stared at him. Realizing that I was watching her, she lowered her gaze and continued to pack the fish on the cutting board in front of her. There was something about Dad, in the crowd by the counter, his pointing and talking, that made me think he wanted to dispel from his mind everything that existed around him. Not his appearance, not the face dominated by the beard, not the light-blue eyes, not the slightly curled lips, nor his tall, slim body, there was something else, something he “radiated.”

“There we are,” he said as he received his change and held the white bag of fish and shrimp in his hand. “Let’s go then!”

Outside, beneath the gray sky, with people packing all the sidewalks and pedestrian areas, as always on Saturdays, we walked around Pollen, the central bay area, heading for the record shop, I did a few skips beside him, to show him I was happy. When he looked at me I smiled. The wind coming off the sound ruffled his hair and he patted it back in place.

“Could you carry the bag for me for a bit?” he said inside Musikkhjørnet. I nodded and held it in my hand while he nimbly flicked through the records.

My parents used to play music when we had gone to bed, especially on Friday and Saturday evenings. Often it was the last thing I heard before I fell asleep. Every now and again he played records when he was alone in his study. Steinar had told me once that he had brought a Pink Floyd LP into the classroom and played it. He had said this with awe in his voice.

“Wouldn’t you like to choose a cassette?” Dad remarked, without taking his eyes off the records he had in front of him.

“But I don’t have a cassette recorder,” I said.

“You can borrow Yngve’s,” he said. “And then we’ll see you get one of your own for Christmas. It’s good to have a few cassettes lying around. No point having a recorder without any cassettes!”

Shyly I went over to the cassettes, which were not in boxes like the records but in racks on the wall. One was full of Elvis cassettes. I picked out one with the cover showing him in a leather suit, sitting with a guitar in his lap and smiling.

Dad bought two records, and when he placed them on the counter he told the assistant that I would point out a cassette I wanted. He came over to the rack with a little key in his hand. I indicated the Elvis cassette, he unlocked the glass door, took it out, and put it in its own little bag beside Dad’s big bag.

“Good choice,” Dad said as we walked toward the car. “You know Elvis was number one when I was growing up. Elvis the Pelvis, we called him. I still have some of his old records. They’re at Grandma and Grandad’s. Perhaps we should bring them back next time we go? So that you can listen to them?”

“Yes, that would be good,” I said. “Maybe Yngve would like it, too.”

“They must be worth a mint today,” he said. Stopped and took the keys from his pocket. I looked over at the massive oil tankers laid up in Galtesund, on the Tromøya side of the strait. They were so big that, set against the low hills, they seemed to come from another world.

Dad opened the door on my side.

“Can I sit in front on the way home, too?” I said.

“You can. But only today, OK?”

“OK,” I said.

He put the bags on the back seat and lit a cigarette before strapping himself in, which I had already done, and started the car. On the way home I sat partly looking at the cover of the cassette and partly out of the window. There was a line of traffic the entire length of Langbrygga, it started moving more freely in the bay around the headland, with Bai Radio and TV on one side and the fish auction hall, with its low, white-brick buildings and fluttering flags on the other. Across the sound and its choppy white-tipped waves lay Skilsø, a collection of timber houses situated along a hill, with a ferry terminal below, beyond which was Pusnes Mekaniske Verksted, marine suppliers, and then it was mostly forest along the coast of the island, while on the mainland, where the road wound up and down, there were houses and jetties all the way to the gas station, after which came Songe, Vindholmen, and the road that led to Tromøya Bridge. All ruffled and tousled, as it were, by the wind from the south. As we drove, the thought of Anne Lisbet crept up on me and darkened my mood. Perhaps it was the Condeep platform that had triggered it because I had been thinking of going with Geir and the girls up to Tromøya Bridge and watching it being towed out to sea. Now I wouldn’t. Or would I? She still hadn’t been to my room, which I imagined every night before going to sleep, that one day she would be sitting there, on my bed, surrounded by my things, and the thought always set off fireworks of joy in my brain, Anne Lisbet, here, next to me!

Why should Eivind suddenly visit her instead of me? We’d had so much fun!

Eivind had to go. We had to get back together.

But what could be done?

Beneath us Tromøya Sound stretched to the east and the west. A double-ender was coming in, approaching land, I saw a figure standing at the stern with the tiller in his hand.

Dad indicated left and slowed down, waited for two passing cars, and then he crossed the road and arrived at the last hill up toward our house. Leif Tore, Rolf, Geir Håkon, Trond, Big Geir, Geir, and Kent Arne were playing soccer in the road. They glanced at us as we passed them and parked in the drive.

I raised a hand to them as I got out.

“Gonna join in?” Kent Arne shouted.

I shook my head.

“I’ve got to eat.”

As we walked toward the house, out of sight of the boys in the road, Dad grabbed my hand.

“Let me have a look,” he said. “So the warts haven’t gone yet?”

“No,” I said.

He let go.

“Do you know how to get rid of them?”

“No.”

“I’ll tell you. I have an old method. Come into the kitchen afterward and I’ll tell you. You want to get rid of them, don’t you?”

“You bet.”

The first thing I did upstairs was to throw the trousers and the sweater in the dirty linen basket and put on the clothes I was wearing earlier. Then I propped the cassette, face up, against the wall on my desk so that I could see it wherever I was in the room and went to the kitchen, where Dad was sitting with a little bowl of shrimp in front of him. Rice pudding was cooking on the stove; Mom was in the living room watering the flowers.

“We can just fit this in before we eat,” Dad said. “It’s a kind of magic. My grandmother did it for me when I was small. And it worked. My hands were covered with warts. After a few days they were all gone.”

“What did she do?”

“You’ll see,” he said. He got up, opened the fridge, and took out something wrapped in white paper that he placed on the table and unfolded. There was bacon inside.

“First of all, I’m going to grease your fingers with the bacon. And then we’ll go into the garden and bury the bacon. Then, in a few days’ time, your warts will be gone.”

“Is that true?”

“Yes! That’s what’s so strange! But they do disappear. Just wait and see! Pass me your paws.”

I gave him one hand. He held it in his, took a rasher of bacon, and carefully rubbed it around all the fingers, the palm, and the back of my hand.

“Now the other one,” he said. I gave him my other hand and he took another rasher and did the same. “Have I greased everything now?”

I nodded.

“Let’s go outside then. Now you have to carry the bacon and bury it.”

I followed him downstairs, put my boots on without touching them with my hands – I had the rashers of bacon in them – and walked behind him – he was carrying a spade – around the house into the kitchen garden by the fence bordering the forest. He thrust the spade into the ground, pressed with his foot, and began to dig. After a few minutes he stopped.

“Drop the bacon in there then,” he said.

I did as he said, he filled in the hole, and we left.

“Can I wash my hands now?” I asked.

“Yes, of course,” he said. “The bacon we buried will remove the warts.”

“How long does it take?”

“We-ell … a week or two. It depends on how much you believe.”

After dinner I went into the road. No one was playing soccer any longer, but Geir Håkon, Kent Arne, and Leif Tore were still outside, they were running at the wall alongside the road to see how far they could climb before they fell. If they ran fast enough they managed three, perhaps four, steps before gravity took hold and dragged them down. If they got too far up they landed on their backs, so this was an activity that required caution. I was wary at the first attempt, my only attempt, in fact, because straight afterward Geir Håkon was too ambitious and fell in the ditch with a thump, knocking all the air out of his lungs. He filled them again and let out a loud, tremulous howl while fighting off tears, which purged us of any desire we had to continue.

Geir Håkon got to his feet, averted his face, and, with his back to us, recovered his regular breathing. When he turned, everyone could see he had been crying, but no one said a word.

Why not?

If it had been me, they would have said something.

“What shall we do now?” Kent Arne said.

At that moment Kleppe came down the hill on his bike. He was wobbling from side to side, dressed in a black jacket and black cap, his bloated red features sagging and drooping, a bit like the two B-Max bags he had hanging from either side of the handlebars. He was the father of Håvard, a boy living in the house furthest from ours, who was already seventeen, someone we admired but seldom saw. The father, it was rumored, was a boozer. When he turned into the road where we were I saw my chance. I ran beside him for a little way pretending to be looking inside the bags on the handlebars.

“He’s got beer bottles in the bags!” I shouted to the others and stopped.

Kleppe did not so much as send me a glance. But the others laughed.

The next day we sat in Geir’s bedroom and wrote a love letter to Anne Lisbet. His parents’ house was identical to ours, it had exactly the same rooms, facing in exactly the same directions, but it was still unendingly different, because for them functionality reigned supreme, chairs were above all else comfortable to sit in, not attractive to look at, and the vacuumed, almost mathematically scrupulous, cleanliness that characterized our rooms was utterly absent in their house, with tables and the floor strewn with whatever they happened to be using at that moment. In a way, their lifestyle was integrated into the house. I suppose ours was, too, it was just that ours was different. For Geir’s father, sole control of his tools was unthinkable, quite the contrary, part of the point of how he brought up Geir and Gro was to involve them as much as possible in whatever he was doing. They had a workbench downstairs, where they hammered and planed, glued and sanded, and if we felt like making a soap-box cart, for example, or a go-kart, as we called it, he was our first port of call. Their garden wasn’t beautiful or symmetrical as ours had become after all the hours Dad had spent in it, but more haphazard, created on the functionality principle whereby the compost heap occupied a large space, despite its unappealing exterior, and likewise the stark, rather weed-like potato plants growing in a big patch behind the house where we had a ruler-straight lawn and curved beds of rhododendrons.

Geir’s room was where mine was, his sister, Gro, had her room where Yngve’s was, and his parents had theirs between the two, exactly the same as in our house. Geir walked freely from room to room, ran up and down the stairs, and if he felt like a
smørbrød
he helped himself to whatever was in the fridge and made one. The same applied to me in his house, I could run between their rooms if I wanted or make myself something to eat with Geir. Often we sat in the living room listening to a Knutsen & Ludvigsen record he had, and laughed at it, or at him, because not only did he know all the lyrics, he could also perform them with the same tones and mannerisms. He was hopeless at soccer, hopeless at all ball games, there was something about his coordination that wasn’t quite right, there was something about his enthusiasm that wasn’t quite right, he never burned with a passion to play, as I often did, and playing soccer on a field for an entire afternoon but still yearning for more when darkness fell and everyone had left was completely alien to him. He wasn’t much good at school, either. He was poor at reading, poor with figures, could seldom reproduce anything he had read or heard in the lesson, though he coped well for all that, nothing depended on soccer or school as far as he was concerned. He was good at imitating people and had started to attract whole crowds around him at school. He liked that, laughter would egg him on to become more and more adventurous, as though it were a kind of fuel, but not even that was important to him. He seemed to have his own small worlds. Such as drawing. He could sit for a whole day in his room drawing. Or building model airplanes, which he often did. His laughter was raucous and it could turn hysterical. Perhaps more than anything else, he liked farting; at any rate there was a lot of experimentation and discussion about it.

Having an older sister was perhaps the reason he wasn’t drawn to the girls’ world in the same way that I was, not initially anyway. But the idea of a love letter excited him. I would write the letter and he would add a drawing, which showed a boy trampling on a heart and two boys standing by watching. Beneath it I wrote in a red felt pen,
Eivind breaking our hearts.
The letter itself consisted of five lines.

We couldn’t hand this letter and the drawing to her. For all we knew, she might show them to people, perhaps even people at school, and then we would become a laughingstock. Instead we decided to
show
them to her. With the letter and drawing rolled up like a treaty in our hands, we walked to her house. Up along the rock from Fru Hjellen’s, into her garden, under her window. We threw some gravel up and she appeared. First we held the drawing and the letter up for her to see, then we tore them into pieces and stamped on them, and then we walked off. Now at least she knew how we felt. Now it was up to her.

Geir stopped at the crossroads.

“I’m going up to Vemund’s,” he said. “Coming?”

I shook my head. On the way down I thought I should go and visit a new friend, too. Dag Magne perhaps? But that would seem out of character, so I went home instead. Lay down on the bed reading until Yngve came in and asked if I wanted to play soccer with him in the road. I did. There was nothing I liked more than doing things with Yngve. Indoors we usually played games or listened to music together, while outdoors, we went our separate ways, him with his friends and me with mine, apart from during the holidays when we went swimming or played soccer or table tennis or badminton and in cases like now, when he was bored and had no one else to play with other than me.

For more than an hour we kicked a ball back and forth between us. For a while Yngve took shots at me in goal and I practiced goal kicks. Then we did some passing.

As if by a miracle my warts disappeared. They got smaller and smaller, and then, perhaps three weeks later, they had completely gone. My hands were so smooth it was hard to imagine they had ever been any different.

But Anne Lisbet didn’t come back. Whereas before she had squealed with pleasure whenever I had taken her cap or pulled her scarf or covered her eyes from behind, now she was irritated or even angry. I felt a stab of pain when I saw her and Solveig going to the bus accompanied by Eivind and Geir B, and every night before I went to sleep I imagined a situation in which I rescued them or somehow stood in a light that enabled her to see the error of her ways and return to me, unless, that is, I was imagining I was dead, and the immense sorrow that would overwhelm her, and the remorse when she realized that what she actually wanted – to be with me – was no longer possible, as I was lying in a coffin bedecked with wreaths and flowers. Death was generally a sweet thought at that time because it was not only Anne Lisbet who would regret what she had done but also Dad. Standing by my coffin, weeping for me, the prematurely departed. The whole estate would be there, and all the opinions they had held about me would have to be reevaluated because now I was gone and the person I had really been would appear in the utmost clarity for the first time. Yes, death was sweet and good and of great comfort. However, even if I was upset about Anne Lisbet, she was still there, I saw her every day at school, and as long as she was at school, there was hope, though precious little. The darkness that thinking about her could generate inside me was therefore of a different order from the other darkness that sometimes came over me, which had a depressing and burdening effect on everything, and which Geir also felt, it transpired. One evening we sat in his room and he asked me what was up with me.

“Nothing much,” I said.

“You’re so quiet!” he said.

“Oh, that,” I said. “I’m just fed up.”

“What about?”

“I don’t know. There’s no particular reason. I’m just fed up.”

“I feel like that sometimes, too,” he said.

“Do you?”

“Yes.”

“You’re just fed up for no particular reason?”

“Yes. I’m like that, too.”

“I didn’t realize,” I said. “Didn’t realize others could feel like that, too.”

“That’s what we’ll have to call it,” he said. “
Like that.
We can say it when we’re in that mood. ‘I’m like that today,’ we can say, and then the other person will understand right away.”

“That’s a good idea,” I said.

There were other new words being added as well, for example, the one Yngve taught me, the real name for fucking was “intercourse,” and this knowledge was so shocking that I took Geir to the top of the mountain before I dared tell him. “It’s called
intercourse
,” I told him, “but don’t say you heard it from me! You’ve got to promise me!” He promised. He was spending more and more time at Vemund’s house, and Vemund was coming down to see him now and then. I simply didn’t understand that and I told him so. Why do you spend time with Vemund? He’s fat and stupid and the worst in the class. He never really gave me a decent answer, just said he liked being there. Why? I said. What do you do that’s so fantastic? Well, Geir said, we sit and draw most of the time … Even in lessons it was Vemund he turned to when we had to work in pairs, instead of me, which he had done automatically before. I joined him a couple of times at Vemund’s, also to be close to Anne Lisbet, but I found what they did boring and when I said so and suggested something else they stuck together and wanted to continue what they were doing. That was fine by me, if he wanted to be with the class dunce, let him. Besides, we were still neighbors, it was still me he came to in the afternoons, and that spring we started going to soccer together. Almost all the kids in our road did. The training sessions were in Hove, and Mom and Geir’s mom took turns driving us there. Mom bought me a tracksuit when it started. It was my first, and I had great hopes before the day, imagining a sparkly-blue Adidas one, like Yngve’s, or even better, a Puma, or at least a Hummel or an Admiral. But the one she bought wasn’t a brand name. It was brown with white stripes, and even though I considered the color ugly, that wasn’t the worst thing about it. The worst was that the material wasn’t shiny but matte, a bit coarse, and it didn’t hang off your body, it clung to you, making my butt stick out even more than usual. When I put on the tracksuit that was all I could think about. Even when I ran onto the field and training began, it was all I could think about. My butt is sticking out like a balloon, I would think, running after the ball. My tracksuit is brown and ugly, I would think. I look like an idiot in it, I would think. An idiot, an idiot, an idiot.

However, I never said this to Mom. I pretended to be happy when I was given it because it had cost a lot of money, she had gone all over Arendal looking for it, and if I said I didn’t like it, she would first think I was ungrateful and then she would be sad that she had bought the wrong thing. And I didn’t want that. So I said, How nice. Great. Really. Just what I wanted.

The odd thing about the training sessions that spring was that there was such a big difference between the person I was inside and the person I was on the field. Inside myself I was full to the brim with thoughts and emotions about scoring and dribbling, about the terrible tracksuit I had, and my big butt and, by extension, my protruding teeth – whereas on the field, running around, I was, to all intents and purposes, completely invisible. There were so many kids on the field, an enormous melee of arms, legs, and heads following the ball like a swarm of mosquitoes, and the coaches didn’t know the names of more than a handful of them, the ones from their immediate neighborhood presumably, their sons, and their friends. The first time I stood out from the crowd was an evening when someone had kicked the ball into the forest behind the goal, where it was lost, and everyone was ordered over to look for it. Two, perhaps three, minutes of intensive searching followed. No one could find the ball. Then suddenly I saw it in front of me. Under a bush, it glowed, white and wonderful, in the dusk. I knew this was my opportunity, I knew I ought to shout, “Got it!” and carry it with me onto the field, so that the rightful credit fell to me, but I didn’t dare. Instead I just kicked it onto the field. “There’s the ball!” someone shouted. “Who found it?” someone else shouted. I emerged from the forest with all the others and said nothing, so it remained a mystery.

The second time was a similar situation, though even more flattering to me. I was running in a pack of players, maybe ten to twelve meters from the goal, the ball landed among us, everything was a vortex of limbs, and when the ball came free, a meter from me, I booted it as hard as I could and it rocketed in by the bottom of the post.

“Goal!” they roared.

“Who scored it?”

I said nothing, did nothing, stood stock-still.

“Who scored? No one?” the coach called. “No, OK! Let’s carry on!”