My Struggle: Book One (10 page)

One evening she called me.

“Hi, Karl Ove, this is Rita,” she said.

“Rita?” I repeated.

“Yes, you cretin. Rita Lolita.”

“Oh, yes,” I said.

“I have a question for you,” she said.

“Yes?”

“Would you like to date me?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“One more time. Would you like to date me? It's a simple question. You're supposed to say yes or no.”

“I don't know . . .” I said.

“Oh, come on. If you don't want to, just say so.”

“I don't think I do . . .” I said.

“Alright then,” she said. “See you at school tomorrow. Bye.”

And she hung up. The next day I behaved as if nothing had happened, and she behaved as if nothing had happened, though she was perhaps even keener to get a dig in whenever the opportunity arose. She never mentioned it, I never mentioned it, not even to Jan Vidar or Kjetil, I didn't want to be one up on them.

After I had said goodbye to Mom and she had switched the vacuum cleaner back on, I wrapped myself up warm in the hall and ventured out, my head ducked into the wind. Dad had opened one garage door and was dragging out the snowblower. The gravel inside was snow-free and dry, which aroused a faint unease in me, as always, because gravel belonged outdoors, and whatever was outdoors should be covered in snow, creating an imbalance between inside and outside. As soon as the door was closed I didn't think about it, it never crossed my mind, but when I saw it . . .

“I'm just off to see Per,” I shouted.

Dad, who was having a tremendous battle with the snowblower, turned his head and nodded. I half-regretted having suggested meeting on the hill, it might be too close, my father tended to have a sixth sense when it came
to deviations from the norm. On the other hand, it was quite a while now since he had taken any interest in me. On reaching the mailbox I heard the snowblower start. I looked up to check whether he could see me. He couldn't, so I walked down the hill, hugging the side to reduce the chance of being observed. At the bottom I stopped and gazed across the river while I waited. Three cars in succession drove past on the other side. The light from their headlights was like small stabs of yellow in the immense grayness. The snow on the flats had turned the color of the sky, whose light seemed to be enmeshed by the falling darkness. The water in the channel of the iced-up river was black and shiny. Then I heard a car charging down along the bend a few hundred meters away. The engine sounded tinny, it must have been an old car. Tom's probably. I peered up the road, raised a hand as it appeared around the bend. It braked and came to a halt beside me. Tom rolled down the window.

“Hi, Karl Ove,” he said.

“Hi,” I said.

He smiled.

“Did you get an earful?” I asked.

“What a stupid bastard, he is,” said Jan Vidar, sitting in the seat beside him.

“No big deal,” Tom said. “So, you boys are going out tonight?”

“Yes. And how about you?”

“May have a wander.”

“Everything okay otherwise?”

“Yep, fine.”

He looked at me with those good-natured eyes of his and smiled.

“Your stuff's in the trunk.”

“Is it open?”

“Yep.”

I went around and opened the trunk, took the two red-and-white bags lying among the clutter of tools, toolboxes, and those elastic thingies with hooks to secure stuff to the car roof.

“Got them,” I said. “Thanks, Tom. We won't forget this.”

He shrugged.

“See you then,” I said to Jan Vidar.

He nodded, Tom wound up the window, cheerfully saluted with his fingers to his temple as always, put the car in gear and drove up the hill. I stepped over the bank of snow and went into the trees, followed the snow-covered stream perhaps twenty meters uphill, laid the bottles under an easily recognizable birch trunk and heard the car passing on its descent.

I stood at the edge of the forest waiting for a few minutes so that I wouldn't have been away for a suspiciously short time. Then I walked up the hill where Dad was busy clearing a broader path to the house. He was wearing neither gloves nor a hat as he walked behind the machine dressed in his old lambskin coat with a thick scarf loosely wrapped around his neck. The fountain of snow that was not carried off by the wind cascaded onto the ground a few meters away. I nodded to him as I passed, his eyes registered me fleetingly, but his face was impassive. When I went into the kitchen, after hanging my outdoor clothes in the hall, Mom was sitting there smoking. A candle flickered on the windowsill. The clock on the stove said half past three.

“Everything under control?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “It's going to be nice. Do you want something to eat before you go?”

“I'll make a few sandwiches,” I said.

On the counter was a large white packet of lutefisk. The sink was full of dark, unwashed potatoes. In the corner the coffee machine light was on. The pot was half full.

“I think I'll wait a bit though,” I said. “Don't have to go before seven or so. When are they coming?”

“Dad's going to fetch your grandparents. Think he's off soon. Gunnar will be here at around seven.”

“Then I'll just manage to catch them,” I said, and went into the living room, stood in front of the window and gazed across the valley, went to the coffee table, took an orange, sat down on the sofa and began to peel. The
Christmas tree candles shone, the flames in the fire sparkled and the crystal glasses on the laid table at the far end glistened in the room lights. I thought of Yngve, wondered how he had coped with these things when he was at gymnas. Now at any rate he didn't have any problems; he was at a cabin in Aust-Agder with all his friends. He had come home at the latest possible moment, on Christmas Eve, and departed as soon as he could, on the twenty-seventh. He had never lived here. The summer we moved he was set to start the third and final year and did not want to leave his friends. That had made Dad furious. But Yngve had been uncompromising, he was not moving. He took out a study loan, because Dad refused to give him a single krone, and he rented digs not so far from our old house. Dad barely exchanged a word with him the few weekends he spent with us. The atmosphere between them was icy. The year after, Yngve did his national service, and I remember him coming home one weekend with his girlfriend, Alfhild. It was the first time he had done anything like this. Dad had of course stayed away, it had been just Yngve and Alfhild, Mom and me there. Not until the weekend was over and they were on their way downhill to catch the bus did Dad drive up. He stopped the car, rolled down the window, and gave them a friendly hello to Alfhild. The smile that accompanied it was something I had never seen on him before. It was radiant with happiness and fervor. He had certainly never looked at any of us in such a way. Then he shifted his gaze, put the car in first, and drove up the hill while we continued our descent to the bus.

Was that our father?

All Mom's kindness and thoughtfulness toward Alfhild and Yngve was completely overshadowed by Dad's four-second gaze. For that matter, this is how Mom had probably been on weekends as well, when Yngve was here alone and Dad stayed on the ground floor of the barn as much as possible, only turning up for meals, at which his refusal to ask Yngve a single question or grace him with even a minimum of attention is what lingered in the mind after the weekend, despite all Mom's efforts to make Yngve feel at home. It was Dad who set the tone at home; there was nothing anyone could do.

Outside, the roar of the snowblower suddenly stopped. I got up, grabbed
the orange peel, went into the kitchen, where Mom was scrubbing potatoes, opened the cupboard beside her and dropped the peel in the wastebasket, watched Dad walk across the drive, running a hand through his hair in that characteristic way of his, after which I went upstairs to my room, closed the door behind me, put on a record and lay down on my bed again.

We had pondered for a while how we were going to get to Søm. Both Jan Vidar's father and my mother would certainly have offered to give us a ride, which in fact they did as soon as we told them of our plans. But the two bags of beer ruled out that possibility. The solution we arrived at was that Jan Vidar would tell his parents that my mother was taking us while I would say that it was Jan Vidar's father who was taking us. This was a bit of a risk because our parents did occasionally meet, but the odds on the driver question surfacing in conversation were so minute it was a chance we were prepared to take. Once that was resolved there was just the matter of getting there. Buses didn't come out here on New Year's Eve, but we found out that some passed the Timenes intersection about ten kilometers away. So we would have to hitch a ride – if we were lucky a car would take us the whole way, if not, we could catch the bus from there. To avoid questions and suspicion it would all have to happen after the guests had arrived. That is, after seven o'clock. The bus left at ten past eight, so with a bit of luck everything would work out fine.

Getting drunk required careful planning. Alcohol had to be procured safely in advance, a secure place for storage had to be found, transport there and back had to be arranged, and parents had to be avoided when you got home. After the first blissful occasion in Oslo I had therefore got drunk only twice. The second time threatened to go awry. Jan Vidar's sister Liv had just got engaged to Stig, a soldier she had met in Kjevik, where her and Jan Vidar's father worked. She wanted to get married young, have children, and be a housewife, a rather unusual dream for a girl of her age, so even though she was only a year older than us, she lived in quite a different world. One Saturday evening the two of them invited us to a little gathering with some of
their friends. Since we didn't have any other plans, we accepted and a few days later were sitting on a sofa in a house somewhere drinking homemade wine and watching TV. It was meant to be a cozy evening at home, there were candles on the table and lasagne was served, and it probably would have been cozy had it not been for the wine, of which there was an immense quantity. I drank, and I became as euphoric as the first time, but on this occasion I had a blackout and remembered nothing between the fifth glass and the moment I woke up in a dark cellar wearing jogging bottoms and a sweatshirt I had never seen before and lying on top of a duvet covered with towels, my own clothes next to me bundled up and spattered with vomit. I could make out a washing machine by the wall, a basket of dirty laundry beside it, a chest freezer by the other wall with some waterproof trousers and jackets on the lid. There was also a pile of crab pots, a landing net, a fishing rod, and a shelf full of tools and junk. I took in these surroundings so new to me in one sweep of the eye, then woke up rested and with a clear head. A door a few strides from my head was ajar, I opened it and walked into the kitchen where Stig and Liv were sitting, hands interlaced and glowing with happiness.

“Hi,” I said.

“Well, if it isn't Garfield,” Stig said. “How are you?”

“Fine,” I said. “What happened actually?”

“Don't you remember?”

I shook my head.

“Nothing?”

He laughed. At that moment Jan Vidar came in from the living room.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi,” I said.

He smiled.

“Hi, Garfield,” he said.

“What's with this Garfield?” I asked.

“Don't you remember?”

“No. I can't remember a thing. But I see that I must have thrown up.”

“We were watching TV. A Garfield cartoon. Then you got up and beat your chest and shouted ‘I'm Garfield.' Then you sat down again and chuckled.
Then you did it again. ‘I'm Garfield! I'm Garfield!' Then you threw up. In the living room. On the carpet. And then you were out like a light. Bang. Thud. Sound asleep. In a pool of vomit. And it was absolutely impossible to communicate with you.”

“Oh, shit,” I said. “I'm sorry.”

“Don't worry about it,” Stig said. “The carpet's washable. Now we have to get you two home.”

It was only then that fear gripped me.

“What's the time?” I asked.

“Almost one.”

“No later? Oh, well, that's okay. I said I would be at home by one. I'll just be a few minutes late.”

Stig didn't drink, and we followed him down to the car, got in, Jan Vidar in the front, me in the back.

“Do you really not remember anything?” Jan Vidar asked me as we drove off.

“No, I don't, nothing at all.”

That made me proud. The whole story, what I had said and what I had done, even the vomiting, made me feel proud. It was close to the person I wanted to be. But when Stig stopped the car by the mailboxes and I walked up the dark driveway clad in someone else's clothes, with my own in a bag hanging from my wrist, I was scared.

Please let them be in bed. Please let them be in bed.

And it looked as if they were. The kitchen lights were off at any rate, and that was always the last thing they did before going to bed. But when I opened the door and tiptoed into the hall, I could hear their voices. They were upstairs on the sofa by the TV chatting. They never did that.