My Struggle: Book One (16 page)

Grandad was not interested in the garden at all, and when Grandma and Dad or Grandma and Gunnar, or Grandma and Grandad's brother Alf discussed various plants, flowers, or trees, our family had quite a passion for anything that grew, he preferred to take out a newspaper and flick through it, unless, of course, it was a pools coupon and the week's league tables he was consulting. I always thought it was so strange that a man whose job was about figures also spent his free time with figures and not, for example, doing gardening or carpentry or other hobbies that exercised the whole body. But no, it was figures at work, tables and figures in his leisure time. The only other thing I knew he liked was politics. If the conversation moved that way he always livened up, he had strong opinions, but his eagerness to debate was stronger, so if anyone contradicted him he appreciated that. At any rate, his eyes expressed nothing but kindness the few times Mom had presented her left-wing views, even though his voice grew louder and sharper. Grandma, for her part, always asked him to talk about something else, or calm down, on such occasions. She often made a sarcastic comment and could also be quite caustic, but he took it, and if we were present she would send us a wink so that we understood that it wasn't meant that seriously. She laughed easily and loved to recount all the amusing incidents she had experienced or had heard. All the funny remarks Yngve had made when he was little she remembered, those two were especially close, he had lived there for six months when he was a young boy, and had been there a lot later too. She also told us about the strange things Erling had experienced at his school in Trondheim,
but her richest store was the stories from the 1930s when she had worked as a chauffeur for an elderly, presumably senile, capitalist's wife.

Now they were in their seventies, my grandma a few years older than my grandad, but both were hale and hearty, and they still traveled abroad in the winter, as they always had.

No one had spoken for some seconds. I strained to come up with something to say. Looked out of the window to make the silence less obtrusive.

“How's it going at the Cathedral School?” Grandad eventually asked. “Has Stray had anything sensible to say?”

Stray was our French teacher. He was a small, squat, bald, energetic man of around seventy who owned a house close to my grandfather's office. As far as I had gleaned they had been at loggerheads over something, perhaps a boundary issue; I didn't quite know whether it had gone to court, or even whether the matter had been settled, but at any rate they no longer greeted each other, and hadn't for many a year.

“Well,” I said. “He just calls me ‘the brat in the corner.'”

“Yes, I'm sure he does,” Grandad says. “And old Nygaard?”

I shrugged.

“Fine, I suppose. Keeps doing the same old stuff. He's old-school, that one. How do you know him, by the way?”

“Through Alf,” Grandad said.

“Oh of course,” I said.

Grandad got up and walked over to the window, stood with his hands behind his back peering out. Apart from the sparse light that came through the windows, it was completely dark on this side of the house.

“Can you see anything, Father?” Grandma asked, with a wink at me.

“This place is very nicely situated,” Grandad said.

At that moment Mom came into the living room carrying four cups. He turned to her.

“I was just telling Karl Ove that this house is very nicely situated!”

Mom stopped, as if unable to say anything while walking.

“Yes, we're very happy with the location,” she said. Stood there with the
cups in her hands, looking at Grandad with a tiny smile playing on her lips. There was something . . . yes, approaching a flush on her face. Not that she was blushing or she was embarrassed, it wasn't that. It was more that she wasn't hiding behind anything. She never did. Whenever she spoke it was always straight from the heart, never for the sake of speaking.

“The house is so old,” she said. “These walls have years in them. That's both good and bad. But it's a nice place to live.”

Grandad nodded and continued to stare out into the darkness. Mom went to the table to set the cups down.

“What has become of my host then?” Grandma asked.

“I'm here,” Dad said.

Everyone turned. He was standing by the laid table in the dining room, stooping beneath the ceiling beams, with a bottle of wine, which he had obviously been studying, in his hands.

How had he got in there?

I hadn't heard a sound. And if there was one thing I was aware of in this house it was his movements.

“Will you get some more wood in before you go, Karl Ove?” he said.

“Okay,” I answered, got up, and went into the hall, booted up, and opened the front door. The wind blasted my face. But at least it had stopped snowing. I crossed the yard and went into the woodshed under the barn. The light from the naked bulb hanging from the ceiling glared against the rough brick walls. The floor was almost completely covered with bark and wood chips. An ax was lodged in the chopping block. In one corner lay the orange-and-black chain saw my father had bought when we moved here. There had been a tree on the property he wanted to fell. When he was ready to set to work he couldn't get the saw to start. He eyed it for a long time, cursed it, and went to call the shop where he had bought it to complain. “What was wrong?” I asked on his return. “Nothing,” he replied, “it was just something they had forgotten to tell me.” It must have been a safety device of some kind, I inferred, to prevent children from using them. But now he had it started, and
after felling the tree he spent the entire afternoon cutting it up. He liked the work, I could see that. Once it was done though, he had no further use for the saw, and since then it had been lying on the floor in here.

I loaded myself up with as many logs as I could carry, kicked open the door, and staggered back across the yard – the thought of how impressed they would be uppermost in my mind – levered off my boots and walked leaning backward slightly, almost collapsing under the weight, into the living room.

“Look at him!” said Grandma as I came in. “That's quite a load you've got there!”

I halted in front of the wood basket.

“Hang on a sec, I'll give you a hand,” Dad said and came toward me, took the top logs, and put them in the basket. His lips were drawn, his eyes cold. I knelt down and let the rest tumble in.

“Now we've got enough wood until summer,” he said.

I straightened up, picked some splinters of wood off my shirt, and sat in the chair while Dad crouched down, opened the stove door and pushed in a couple of logs. He was wearing a dark suit and a dark-red tie, black shoes, and a white shirt, which contrasted with his ice-blue eyes, black beard, and lightly tanned complexion. He spent the whole of the summer in the sun whenever he could, by August his skin was usually very dark, but this winter he must have gone to a tanning salon, it struck me now, unless he had eventually had so much sun that the tan had become permanent.

Around his eyes the skin had begun to crack, the way dry leather does, and form fine, closely set wrinkles.

He looked at his watch.

“Gunnar will have to get a move on if we're going to eat before midnight,” he said.

“It's the weather,” Grandma said. “He'll be driving carefully tonight.”

Dad turned to me.

“Isn't it time you were on your way?”

“Yes,” I said. “But I was going to say hello to Gunnar and Tove first.”

Dad gave a snort.

“Off you go and enjoy yourself. You don't have to sit here with us, you know.”

I got up.

“Your shirt's hanging over the cupboard in the other room,” Mom said.

I took it up to my room with me and changed. Black cotton trousers, wide at the thigh, narrow at the calf, and with side pockets, white shirt, black suit jacket. I rolled up the studded belt I had planned to wear and put it in the bag, for though they might not actually forbid me to wear it, they would notice, and I didn't want to go through all that now. I added a pair of black Doc Martens, an extra shirt, two packs of Pall Mall mild, some chewing gum, and pastilles. When I was finished I stood in front of the mirror. It was five past seven. I should have been on my way, but had to wait for Gunnar for as long as possible because if he hadn't come there was a risk I would meet him on the road. With two bags of beer in my hands that was not a great idea.

Apart from the wind, and the trees at the forest edge, which you could just make out on the periphery of the light from the house, nothing stirred.

If they weren't here within five minutes, I would have to go anyway.

I put on my outdoor clothes, stood at the window for a moment straining to hear the drone of a car engine while staring down at the place where the headlights would come into view first, then turned, switched off the light, and went downstairs.

Dad was in the kitchen pouring water into a large pan. He looked up as I went in.

“Are you going?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Have a nice evening,” he said.

At the bottom of the hill, where the morning's tracks had been covered over by the wind and snow, I stood stock-still and listened for a few seconds. When I was sure there were no cars coming I went up the slope and into the trees. The bags were where I had left them, covered with a thin layer of
snow that slid down the smooth plastic when I picked them up. With one in each hand I walked back down, stopped behind a tree to listen, and when there was still nothing to be heard, I struggled over the bank of snow at the roadside and loped down to the bend. Not many people lived out here, and through-traffic used the road on the other side of the river, so if a car did come there was a good chance it would be Gunnar's. I walked up the hill, around the bend where William's family lived. Their house was set back a bit, right up against the forest that rose steeply behind it. The blue shimmer from the television flickered through the living room. The house was a seventies' build, the plot unworked, full of stones, uncovered rock, with a broken swing, a pile of wood under a tarpaulin, a wrecked car, and some tires. I didn't understand why they lived like that. Didn't they want to live like normal people? Or couldn't they? Didn't it matter to them? Or did they in fact think that they were living like normal people? The father was kind and gentle, the mother always angry, the three children always dressed in clothes that were either too big or too small.

One morning on my way to school I had seen the father and daughter clambering up a pile of rocks on the other side of the road, both bleeding from the forehead, the girl with a white scarf drenched with blood tied around her head. There had been something animal-like about them, I remember thinking, because they didn't say anything, didn't shout, just calmly climbed up the rocks. At the bottom, with its hood against a tree, was their truck. Beneath the trees flowed the dark, lustrous river. I had asked them if I could help, the father had told me they didn't need any help; they were fine, he had called from the slope, and even though the sight was so unexpected that it was almost impossible to drag yourself away, it also felt wrong to stand there watching, so I continued on my way to the bus stop. On turning, the one time I had allowed myself to do so, I saw them hobbling along the road, he was dressed in overalls as always, with his arm around his daughter's fragile eleven-year-old body.

We used to tease her and William, it was easy to make them lose their tempers and easy to put them in their place, words and ideas were not their
strong suits, but I didn't realize this had any impact on them until one ordinary boring summer's day Per and I had rung William's doorbell to get him to come out and play soccer and their mother had come onto the veranda and given us an earful, especially me, because I thought I was superior to everyone else, and her son and daughter in particular. I answered her back, it turned out she was not very adept with words either, but her anger on the other hand was not to be quelled, so all I gained was Per's laughing admiration for my wit, which was forgotten a few hours later. But the people living on the bend did not forget. The father was too kind to intervene, but the mother . . . her eyes darkened every time she saw me. To me they were people I could lord it over, nothing more. If William came to school wearing trousers at half-mast he had made a monumental blunder; if he misused a word, there was no reason he shouldn't hear about it. That was only the truth, wasn't it? And it was up to him to stop our fun or find a way to overcome it. I was not exactly invulnerable, my weaknesses were there for all to see and exploit, and the fact that they didn't, because they didn't have enough insight to be able to see them, was surely not my problem. The conditions were the same for all. At school William hung out with a crowd who smoked in the wet weather shed, the ones who rode mopeds from the age of thirteen, who began to drop out of school when they were fourteen, who had fights and drank, and they too made fun of William, but in a way he could tolerate, because there was always something he could compare himself with, there were always ways of getting his own back. With us, that is, those who lived in the houses up here, it was different, here it was sarcasm, irony, and the killer remark that held sway, things which could drive him insane as it all was beyond his reach. But he needed us more than we needed him, and he kept coming back. For me this was a question of freedom. When I moved there, no one knew me, and although I was basically the same person as before it gave me the chance to do things I had never done. There was, for example, an old-fashioned village shop by the bus stop in which goods were bought and sold over the counter, and that was owned by two sisters aged around seventy. They were nice, and particularly slow off the mark. If you asked them
for something on one of the top shelves they turned their backs to you for a minute or two, and this was your chance to stuff as much chocolate and as many sweets as you could in your jacket. Not to mention the opportunities if you asked them for something from the cellar. In Tromøya I would never have dreamed of doing such a thing, but here I didn't hesitate, here I was not only a person who stole chocolate and sweets from old ladies but also a person who enticed others into doing the same. They were a year younger than me and had hardly been out of the local area; compared to them I felt like a man of the world. They had all scrumped strawberries, for example, but I introduced a touch of refinement and got them to take plates, spoons, milk, and sugar into the strawberry field.