My Struggle: Book One (34 page)

In the winter they went south and complained to the travel guides, I saw this in a letter I happened to find when I was staying with them once, there had been a legal case, Dad had collapsed and been taken to the hospital by ambulance, he had had violent chest pains and had sued the travel company because he claimed his medical treatment had brought on the heart attack, to which the company responded rather drily that it had not been a heart attack, but a collapse caused by alcohol and pills.

Eventually they left northern Norway and moved back to Sørland where Dad, now fat and bloated, with an enormous gut, drank nonstop. Staying sober enough for a few hours to be able to pick us up by car was now out of the question. They split up, Dad moved to a town in Østland where he had a new job, which he lost some months later, and then there was nothing left – no marriage, no job, and barely a child, because although Unni wanted them to spend time together, and in fact allowed him to do so, which did not work out very well, visiting rights were eventually withdrawn, not that that affected him much. Nevertheless he was furious, presumably because it
was his right, and he held firm to his rights at every opportunity now. Terrible things happened, and all Dad had left was his flat in Østland, where he hung out drinking, when he wasn't in the pubs in town, hanging out there drinking. He was as fat as a barrel, and even though his skin was still tanned, it had a kind of matte tone, there was a matte membrane covering him, and with all the hair on his face and head and his messy clothes he looked like some kind of wild man as he charged around in search of a drink. Once he went missing for several weeks, and it was as if he had vanished into the bowels of the earth. Gunnar called Yngve and said he'd reported Dad missing to the police. He reappeared in a hospital somewhere in Østland, bedridden, unable to walk. The paralysis, however, was not permanent, he struggled to his feet again, and after a few weeks spent in a detox clinic he carried on where he had left off.

During this phase I had no contact with him. But he visited his mother more and more often, and stayed longer and longer each time. In the end, he moved in with her and erected a barricade. He stowed what belongings he had in the garage, got rid of the home-help Gunnar had organized for Grandma, who was no longer capable of looking after herself, and locked the door. He remained inside with her until the day he died. Gunnar had called Yngve on one occasion and told him how the land lay. Told him, among other things, how he had once gone over and found Dad lying on the living room floor. He had broken his leg, but instead of asking Grandma to phone for an ambulance to take him to the hospital, he had instructed her not to say a word to anyone, not even Gunnar, so she didn't, and he lay there surrounded by plates of leftovers, bottles of beer and spirits that she had brought him from his abundant stockpile. Gunnar didn't know how long he had been lying there, perhaps a day, perhaps two. The sole interpretation of his telephone call to Yngve was that he felt we should intervene and remove our father from the house, because he would die there, and we did discuss this, but decided not to do anything, he would have to plow his own furrow, live his own life, die his own death.

Now he had.

I got up and went to the counter for some more coffee. A man wearing a dark, elegant suit, with a silk scarf around his neck and dandruff on his shoulders, was pouring coffee as I arrived. He set the white cup, full to the brim with black coffee, on the red tray, and looked at me quizzically as he lifted the pot.

“I'll help myself, thank you,” I said.

“As you wish,” he said, replacing the pot on one of the two hotplates. I guessed he was an academic of some kind. The waitress, a substantial woman in her fifties, a Bergensian for certain, I had seen that face all over town in the years I had lived there, on buses and in the streets, behind bars and in shops, with that same short dyed hair and the square glasses that only women of that age can admire, stretched out her hand as I raised my cup.

“Top off?”

“Five kroner,” she said in a broad Bergen accent. I placed a five-krone coin in her hand and went back to my table. My mouth was dry and my heart was beating fast, as if I were excited, but I was not, on the contrary, I felt calm and sluggish as I sat staring at the small plane hanging from the enormous glass roof beneath which the light shimmered as if from a reflection, and glanced at the departures board where the clock showed a quarter past five, and then down at the people lined up, walking across the concourse floor, sitting and reading newspapers, standing and chatting. It was summer, clothes were vibrant, bodies tanned, the mood light, as always wherever people gather to travel. Sitting like this, as I sometimes did, I could experience colors as bright, lines as sharp, and faces as incredibly distinct. They were laden with meaning. Without that meaning, which is what I was experiencing now, they were distant and somehow hazy, impossible to grasp, like shadows without the darkness of shadows.

I twisted around and glanced toward the gate. A crowd of passengers, who must have just arrived, were making their way along the tunnel-like jet bridge from the plane. The departure lounge door opened, and with jackets folded over their arms, and bags of all descriptions hanging against their thighs, the passengers came in, looked up for the baggage claim sign, turned right and disappeared from sight.

Two boys walked past me carrying paper cups of Coke. One had some fluff over his top lip and on his chin, and must have been about fifteen. The other was smaller, and his face was hairless, although that did not necessarily mean he was younger. The taller of the two had big lips which stayed open, and, in combination with the vacant eyes, made him look stupid. The smaller boy had more alert eyes but the way a twelve-year-old is alert. He said something, both laughed, and as they came to the table he must have repeated it, for the others sitting there laughed too.

I was surprised by how small they were, and it was impossible to imagine that I had been that small when I was fourteen or fifteen. But I must have been.

I pushed away my coffee cup, got up, folded my jacket over my arm, grabbed my suitcase, and walked to the gate, sat down by the counter, where a uniformed woman and man each stood working at a computer screen. I leaned back and closed my eyes for a few seconds. Dad's face appeared again. It was as though it had been lying in wait. A garden in the mist, the grass slightly muddy and trampled, a ladder up a tree, Dad's face turns to me. He is holding the ladder with both hands, he is wearing high boots and a thick knitted sweater. Two white tubs beside him in the field, a bucket hanging from a hook on the top rung.

I opened my eyes. I couldn't remember ever experiencing this, it was not a memory, but if it was not a memory, what was it?

Oh, no, he was dead.

I took a deep breath and got up. A short line had developed by the counter, here passengers interpreted everything the staff did, as soon as there was any evidence to suggest that departure was imminent, they were there, physically.

Dead.

I took my place behind the last person in the queue, a broad-shouldered man half a head shorter than me. There was hair growing on the nape of his neck and in his ears. He smelled of aftershave. A woman joined the line behind me. I craned my neck to catch a glimpse, and saw her face, which with its neatly applied lipstick, rouge, eyeliner, and powder, looked more like a mask than a human physiognomy. But she did smell good.

The cleaning staff scurried up the bridge from the plane. The uniformed woman talked into a telephone. After putting it down she picked up a small microphone and announced that the plane was ready for boarding. I opened the outside pocket of my bag and took out the ticket. My heart beat faster again, as though it was on a trip of its own. It was unbearable standing there. But I had to. I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, bent my head forward to see the runway through the window. One of the small vehicles towing the baggage carts drove past. A man in overalls with ear protectors walked across, he was holding those things like ping-pong rackets used to direct planes into position. The line began to inch forward. My heart was beating rapidly. My palms were sweaty. I yearned for a seat, yearned to be high in the air and looking down. The squat fellow in front of me was handed the stub from his ticket. I passed mine to the uniformed woman. For some reason she looked me straight in the eye as she took it. She was attractive in a severe way with regular features, nose perhaps a bit pointed, mouth narrow. Her eyes were bright and blue, the dark circle around the iris unusually distinct. I returned the gaze for a brief moment, then lowered it. She smiled.

“Have a good flight,” she said.

“Thank you,” I replied and followed the others down the tunnel-like gang-way into the plane, where a middle-aged stewardess nodded a welcome to the new arrivals, moved down the aisle, as far as the last row of seats. Up went my bag and coat into the overhead compartment, down I flopped into the cramped seat, on with the belt, out with my feet, back I leaned.

That's the way.

Meta-thoughts, that I was sitting on the plane on my way to bury my father while thinking that I was sitting on the plane on my way to bury my father, increased. Everything I saw, faces, bodies ambling through the cabin, stowing their baggage here, sitting down, stowing their baggage there, sitting down, was followed by a reflective shadow that could not desist from telling me that I was seeing this now while aware that I was seeing this, and so on ad absurdum, and the presence of this thought-shadow, or perhaps better, thought-mirror, also implied a criticism, that I did not feel more than I did.
Dad was dead, I thought – and an image of him flashed up before me, as though I needed an illustration of the word “Dad” – and I, sitting in a plane on my way to bury him, am reacting coldly to it, I think, as I watch two ten-year-old girls taking a seat in one row and what must have been their mother and father taking a seat on the other side of the aisle to them, I think that I think that I think. Events were racing through me at great speed, nothing that made any sense. I started to feel nauseous. A woman put her case in the overhead compartment above me, took off her coat and put it in, met my gaze, smiled automatically, and sat down beside me. She was around forty, had a gentle face, warm eyes, black hair, was short, a bit chubby, but not fat. She was wearing a kind of suit, that is, pants and jacket of the same color and design, what did women call them? An outfit? And a white blouse. I faced the front, but my attention was not on what I saw there, it was on what I saw through the corner of my eye, that was where “I” was, I thought, looking at her. She must have been holding a pair of glasses which I hadn't noticed because now she perched them on the tip of her nose and opened a book.

There seemed to be something of the bank teller about her. Not the gentleness, though, nor the whiteness. Her thighs, which seemed to spread outward in the fabric when pressed down against the seat, how white would they be in the dark late one night in a hotel room somewhere?

I tried to swallow, but my mouth was so dry that the little saliva I could muster was not enough to cover the distance to my throat. Another passenger stopped by our row, a middle-aged man, sallow, stern and thin, dressed in a gray suit, he occupied the aisle seat without a sideways glance at either her or me.
Boarding completed
, a voice said in the intercom. I leaned forward to look at the sky above the airport. To the west the bank of cloud had split open, and a strip of low forest was lit up by the sun, a shiny, almost glistening green. The engines were started. The window vibrated faintly. The woman beside me had marked her page with a finger and was staring ahead.

Dad had always had a fear of flying. They were the only times in my childhood that I could recall him drinking. As a rule, he avoided flying, we traveled by car if we were going anywhere, regardless of how far it was, but sometimes
he had to, and then it was a case of knocking back whatever alcoholic drinks were available at the airport café. There were several other things he avoided as well, but which I had never considered, had never seen, because what a person does always overshadows what he does not do, and what Dad didn't do was not so conspicuous, also because there was nothing at all neurotic about him. But he never went to the barber's; he always cut his own hair. He never traveled by bus. He hardly ever did his shopping at the local shop, but always at the large supermarkets outside town. All these were scenarios where he might have come into contact with people, or have been seen by them, and even though he was a teacher by profession and so stood in front of a class every day, occasionally summoned parents to meetings, and also spoke to his colleagues in the staff room every day, he still consistently avoided these social situations. What was it they had in common? That he might be assimilated into a community with no more than chance as its basis? That he might be seen in a way over which he had no control? That he felt vulnerable sitting on the bus, in the barber's chair, by the supermarket till? That was all quite possible. But when I was there I didn't notice. It was only many, many years later that it struck me I had never seen Dad on a bus. And that he had never taken part in any of the social events that sprang up around Yngve's and my activities. Once he attended an end-of-term show, sat close to the wall to see the play we had rehearsed, in which I performed the main role, but unfortunately I had not studied it hard enough, after the previous year's success I was suffering from child hubris, I didn't need to learn all the lines, everything would be fine, I had thought, but standing there, affected I suppose by my father's presence, I could barely remember a line, and our teacher prompted me all the way through a long play about a town of which I was supposed to be the mayor. In the car on the way home he said he had never been so embarrassed in his life and he would never attend any of my end-of-term shows again. That was a promise he kept. Nor did he go to any of the countless soccer matches I played in as I was growing up, he was never one of the parents who drove to away games, never one of the parents who watched home matches, and I didn't react to that either, I didn't even
consider it unusual, for that was the way he was, my father, and many other fathers like him, this was the end of the seventies and the beginning of the eighties, when being a father had a different and, at least on a practical level, a less comprehensive significance than today.