My Struggle: Book One (17 page)

Down in the factory building we had to fill in lists of the work we had done and were paid accordingly, and apparently it had never even occurred to them that the system could be abused and it was possible to cheat. But that was where we came in. The most important change in my behavior, however, was linguistic; I had discovered the edge that words gave you to bully others. I taunted and harassed, manipulated and ridiculed, and never, not once, did it strike them that the basis of this power I had was so insecure that one single well-directed blow could have knocked it flying. I had a speech impediment, you see! I couldn't say my “r”s. After having been shown up by me it would have been enough for them to mimic me and I would have been crushed. But they never did.

Well, actually, Per's brother, who was three years younger than me, did do it once. Per and I were talking in their stable, which his father had just built onto the garage, to house the pony he had bought for his daughter, Per and Tom's little sister, Marit, we had been out all evening and ended up here, in the snug, warm room that smelled of horse and hay, when Tom, who didn't like me, presumably because I laid claim to the brother who previously had always been at his disposal, suddenly mimicked me.

“Fowd Siewa?” he said. “What's a Fowd Siewa when it's at home?”

“Now, now, Tom,” Per reproved.

“A Fowd Siewa's a car,” I said. “Never heard of one?”

“I haven't heard of any cars being called Fowds,” he said. “And certainly not a Siewa.”

“Tom!” Per shouted.

“Oh, you mean
Ford
!” Tom said.

“Yes of course,” I answered.

“Why didn't you say so then?” he said. “Forrrrrd! Sierrrra!”

“Get lost, Tom,” Per said. When Tom showed no signs of moving he punched him on the shoulder.

“Ow!” Tom howled. “Stoppit!”

“Scram, you brat!” Per said, and punched him again.

Tom left and we continued to chat as if nothing had happened.

It was remarkable that this was the only time any of the kids up there had made fun of my weaknesses, especially considering I pushed them around all the time. But they hadn't. Up there I was king, king of the young kids. But my power was limited. If anyone appeared who was as old as me, or who lived farther down the valley, it ceased to exist. So I kept a beady eye on those around me, then as now.

I put the bags down on the road for a second, opened my jacket and pulled out the scarf, and wound it around my face, grabbed the bags again, and kept on walking. The wind whistled round my ears, whisked up the snow on all sides, swept it into the air and swirled it around. It was four kilometers to Jan Vidar's place so I needed to hurry. I broke into a jog. The bags hung from my arms like lead weights. Farther along the road, on the far side of the bend, two headlights came into view. The beams sliced through the forest. The trees there seemed to flare up, one by one. I stopped, put one foot on the edge of the ditch and carefully rested the bags in the ditch below me. Then I walked on. I turned my head as the car passed. An old man I didn't recognize was in the driver's seat. I walked back the twenty meters and retrieved the bags from the ditch, carried on walking, rounded the bend, passed the house where the old man lived alone, emerged from the forest to see the factory lights, hazy in the snow-flurried darkness, walked past the small, dilapidated farm, in darkness
tonight, and had almost reached the last house before the intersection with the main road when another car came along. I did the same as before, quickly hid the bottles in the ditch and carried on walking, empty-handed. It wasn't Gunnar this time either. After the car had passed I ran back, picked up the bags and set off even faster; it was already half past seven. I hurried along and was not far from the main road when three more cars appeared. I put down the bags again. Let it be Gunnar, I thought, because as soon as he had gone by I wouldn't need to keep stopping to hide the beer. Two of the cars drove across the bridge, the third turned off and passed me, but that wasn't Gunnar either. I collected the bags and made for the main road, followed it past the bus stop, the old-fashioned shop, the garage, the old houses, all of them bathed in light, all of them windblown, all deserted. Approaching the top of the long, gentle gradient I saw the headlights of another car coming over the brow. There was no ditch here, so I had to put the bottles in the banked up snow, and as they were visible, hurriedly put a few meters between them and me.

I peered into the car as it passed. This time it was Gunnar. He turned his head at that moment and, on recognizing me, braked. With a trail of swirling snow, reddish in the brake lights, the car gradually slowed down and when, twenty meters farther on, it finally came to a halt, he began to reverse. The engine was whining.

He opened the door when he was alongside me.

“Is that you out in this weather!” he cried.

“Brrr, yes,” I answered.

“Where are you off to?”

“To a party.”

“Jump in, and I'll drive you there,” he said.

“No, don't bother,” I said. “I'm almost there. I'm fine.”

“No, no, no,” Gunnar said. “Jump in.”

I shook my head.

“You're late as well,” I said. “It's almost eight.”

“No problem at all,” Gunnar said. “Hop in. After all, it's New Year's Eve
and all that. We can't have you walking in the freezing cold, you know. We'll take you there. End of discussion.”

I couldn't protest anymore without arousing suspicion.

“Okay then,” I said. “That's very kind of you.”

He snorted.

“Jump into the back,” he said. “And tell me where to go.”

I got in. It was nice and warm. Harald, their soon three-year-old son, was sitting in the child seat and silently watching me.

“Hi, Harald,” I said to him with a smile.

Tove, who was sitting at the front, turned to me.

“Hi, Karl Ove,” she said. “Good to see you.”

“Hi,” I said. “And Merry Christmas.”

“Let's go then,” Gunnar said. “I assume we have to turn around?”

I nodded.

We drove to the bus stop, turned, and drove back up. As we passed the place where I left the bags I resisted leaning forward to see if they were there. They were.

“Where are you going?” Gunnar asked.

“First to a pal's in Solsletta. Then we're going to Søm, to a party there.”

“I can drive you all the way if you like,” he said.

Tove sent him a look.

“No need,” I said. “We're going to meet some others on the bus anyway.”

Gunnar was ten years younger than my father and worked as an accountant in quite a large firm in town. He was the only one of the sons to follow in his father's footsteps; both the others were teachers. Dad at an upper secondary school in Vennesla, Erling at a middle school in Trondheim. Erling was the only one for whom we used the epithet “uncle,” he was more laidback and not so status conscious as the other two. We didn't see much of my father's brothers when we were growing up, but we liked them both, they were always fooling around, especially Erling, but also Gunnar, whom both Yngve and I liked best, perhaps because he was relatively close to us in age. He had long hair, played the guitar, and not least, he kept a boat with a twenty
horse power Mercury engine at the cabin outside Mandal where he stayed for long stretches at a time in the summer when we were growing up. In my mind, the friends he talked about were wreathed in an almost mythical glow, partly because my father didn't have any, partly because we hardly ever saw them, they were just people he went out to meet in his boat, and I imagined their lives as an endless cruise between islets and skerries in racing boats during the daytime, with their long, blond hair fluttering in the wind and tanned, smiling faces; playing cards and strumming guitars in the evenings, when they were in the company of girls.

But now he was married and had children, and even though he still had the boat the aura of island romanticism had gone. The long hair too. Tove came from a police family somewhere in Trøndelag, and worked as a primary school teacher.

“Have you had a good Christmas?” she asked, turning to me.

“Yes, great,” I said.

“Yngve was home, I heard?” Gunnar said.

I nodded. Yngve was his favorite, no doubt because he was the first-born and had been at my grandparents' for so long while Gunnar still lived there. But also presumably because Yngve had not been as fragile and weepy as I had been as a child. He had had great fun with Yngve. So when I saw them together I tried to counteract that, tried to be funny, to crack lots of jokes, to show them I was just as easygoing as they were, just as fun-loving, just as much of a Sørlander as they were.

“He went back a couple of days ago,” I said. “Off to a cabin with some friends.”

“Yes, he's turning into an Arendaler, you know,” Gunnar said.

We passed the chapel, drove around the bend by the ravine where the sun never shone, crossed the tiny bridge. The windshield wipers beat a rhythm. The fan hummed. Beside me Harald sat blinking.

“Whose party is it?” Gunnar asked. “Someone in your class, I suppose?”

“Girl in the parallel class actually,” I said.

“Yes, everything changes when you go to gymnas,” he said.

“You went to the Cathedral School, didn't you?” I asked.

“I did,” he said, twisting his head far enough to meet my eyes before returning his attention to the road. His face was long and narrow, like my father's, but the blue of his eyes was darker, more like Grandad's than Grandma's. The back of his head was big, like Grandad's and mine, while his lips, which were sensitive and almost revealed more information about his inner being than his eyes, were the same as Dad's and Yngve's.

We left the forest behind, and the light from the headlights which had for so long picked out trees and crags, sides of houses and escarpments, finally had some space around them.

“It's at the end of this stretch,” I said. “You can pull up over by the shop there.”

“Okay,” said Gunnar. Slowed to a stop.

“Have a nice time,” I said. “And Happy New Year!”

“Happy New Year to you too,” Gunnar said.

I slammed the door and started to walk towards Jan Vidar's house while the car turned around and drove back the way we had come. When it was out of sight I began to run. Now we really were pressed for time. I jumped down the escarpment to their property, saw the light in his room was on, went over and banged on the window. His face appeared a second later, staring out into the dark through narrowed eyes. I pointed toward the door. When, at last, he saw me, he nodded, and I walked around to the other side of the house.

“Sorry,” I said. “But the beers are up by Kragebo. We'll have to get a move on and fetch them.”

“What are they doing there?” he asked. “Why didn't you bring them with you?”

“My uncle came along while I was walking here,” I said. “I just managed to sling the bags in the ditch before he stopped. And then bugger me if he didn't insist on driving me here. I couldn't say no, he would have become suspicious, wouldn't he.”

“Oh no,” Jan Vidar said. “Shit. What a drag.”

“I know,” he said. “But come on. Let's get going.”

A few minutes later we were clambering up the slope to the road. Jan Vidar had his hat down over his forehead, his scarf wrapped around his mouth, jacket collar up over his cheeks. The only part of his face that was visible was the eyes, and then only because the round John Lennon glasses he was wearing were misted up, which I noticed as he met my gaze.

“Let's go for it then,” I said.

“I guess we'd better,” he agreed.

At a steady pace, dragging our legs so as not to use up all our energy at once, we began to run along the road. We had the wind in our faces. The snow swept past. Tears trickled from my tightly pinched eyes. My feet began to go numb, they no longer did what I wanted them to do; they just lay inside my boots, stiff and loglike.

A car drove past, making our lack of speed painfully obvious as a moment later it rounded the curve at the end of the road and was gone.

“Shall we walk for a bit?” Jan Vidar asked.

I nodded.

“Let's just hope the bags are still there!” I said.

“What?” Jan Vidar shouted.

“The bags!” I said. “Hope no one's taken them!”

“There's no bugger around now!” Jan Vidar yelled.

We laughed. Came to the end of the flat and broke into a run again. Up the hill, where the gravel road led to the strange manorlike property by the river, over the little bridge, past the ravine, the ramshackle garage-cum-repair shop, the chapel and the small white 1950s houses on both sides of the road, until we finally arrived at the spot where I had left the two bags. We grabbed one each and began to walk back.