My Struggle: Book One (56 page)

Even though she had told the stories hundreds of times before, her telling of them was so vivid that it seemed to be the first. So the ensuing laughter was therefore utterly liberating: there wasn't a scrap of artificiality about it. And after we had drunk a bit, and the alcohol had brightened all the darkness that may have been in us, in addition to eradicating the observing eye, we had no compunction about joining in the party. One chorus of laughter led to another. Grandma drew from her profusion of anecdotes, collected over the eighty years of her life, but she did not stop there, for as her inebriation grew her defenses weakened, and she extended the familiar stories, told us more about what had happened in such a way that the point of them changed. For example, in the early 1930s she had worked as a chauffeur, we knew that already, it was part of the family mythology, there weren't many women with a driver's license at that time or, for that matter, who worked as chauffeurs. She had answered an advertisement, she said, she read the
Aftenposten
at home in Åsgårdstand and had spotted the position vacant, written a letter, accepted the job, and moved to Oslo. She worked for an elderly, eccentric, and wealthy woman. Grandma, who was in her early twenties then, had a room in her mansion and drove her wherever she wanted to go. She had a dog that used to hang its head out of the window and bark at passersby, and Grandma laughed when she described to us how embarrassed she had been. But there was another incident she used to mention to exemplify how eccentric and presumably senile the elderly lady had been. She kept her money
all over the house. There were wads of banknotes in kitchen cupboards, in saucepans and teapots, under rugs, under pillows. Grandma used to laugh and shake her head as she was speaking, we were reminded that she had just left home, that she came from a small town, and this was her first experience of not only the world outside but of the finer world outside. This time, sitting around the lit kitchen table, with the shadows of our faces on the darkening windows, and a bottle of Absolut vodka between us, she suddenly asked, rhetorically: “So what was I to do? She was stinking rich, you know, boys. And she had her money lying around everywhere. She wouldn't notice if some disappeared. Surely it wouldn't make any difference if I took a bit?”

“You took her money?” I probed.

“Yes, of course I did. It wasn't much, it meant nothing to her. And if she didn't notice, what was the problem? And she was a cheapskate. Yes, she was, the wages I got were a pittance. Because I did more than drive for her, I was responsible for everything else too, so it was only right that I should be better paid!”

She banged the table with her fist. Then she laughed.

“But that dog of hers! What a sight we were, driving through Oslo. There weren't many cars at that time, as you know. So we were noticed. We certainly were.”

She chuckled. Then she sighed.

“Oh well,” she said. “Life's a pitch, as the old woman said. She couldn't pronounce her ‘b's. Ha ha ha.”

She raised her glass to her lips and drank. I did the same. Then grabbed the bottle and refilled my empty glass, glancing at Yngve, who nodded, and I poured.

“Would you like some more?” I said, looking at Grandma.

“Please,” she said. “Just a finger.”

After I had attended to her glass, Yngve poured in some juice, but it ran out before the glass was half-full, and he shook the carton a few times.

“It's empty,” he said, looking at me. “Didn't you buy some Sprite in the shop?”

“I did,” I said. “I'll get it.”

I went to the fridge. As well as the three half-liters I had bought there was a 1.5 liter bottle Yngve had picked up earlier in the day.

“Had you forgotten this one?” I said, holding it up.

“Oh yeah,” Yngve said.

I put it on the table and left the room to go downstairs to the toilet. The darkened rooms lay around me, large and empty. But with the flame of alcohol burning in my brain I took no notice of the atmosphere that otherwise would have affected me, for although I wasn't outright happy, I was elated, exhilarated, motivated by the desire to continue this, which not even a direct reminder of Dad's death could shake, it was just a pale shadow, present but of no consequence, because life had taken its place, all the images, voices and actions that drinking alcohol conjured up at the drop of a hat and gave me the illusion that I was somewhere surrounded by a lot of people and merriment. I knew it wasn't true, but that was how it felt, and it was feeling that was leading me, also when I stepped on the stained wall-to-wall carpeting on the ground floor, illuminated by the dim light seeping in through the front door pane, and entered the bathroom that hissed and whistled as it had done for at least thirty years. On my way out I heard their voices above and hurried upstairs. In the living room, I took a few steps inside to see the place where he had died while I was in a different, a more carefree frame of mind. I was given a sudden sensation of who he had been. I didn't see him, it wasn't like that, but I could sense
him
, the whole of his being, the way he had been during his final days in these rooms. It was uncanny. But I didn't want to linger, nor could I perhaps, for the sensation lasted only a few moments, then my brain sank its claws into it and I went back to the kitchen where everything was as I had left it, except for the color of the drinks, which were shiny and full of small, grayish bubbles now.

Grandma was talking more about the years she had lived in Oslo. This story too was part of the family mythology, and this too she gave an unexpected, and for us new, twist at the end. I already knew that Grandma had been in a relationship with Alf, our grandfather's elder brother. At first they
had been a couple. Both the brothers had been studying in Oslo, Alf natural science, while Grandad studied economics. When the relationship with Alf finished Grandma married Grandad and moved to Kristiansand, as did Alf, but with Sølvi as his wife. She had had TB in her youth, one lung was punctured and she was sickly all her life, she couldn't have children, so at a relatively late age they had adopted an Asian girl. When I was growing up most of our get-togethers were with Alf plus family, and Grandma and Grandad plus family, they were the ones who visited us, and the fact that Alf and Grandma had once been a couple was often mentioned, it was no secret, and when Grandad and Sølvi were dead, Grandma and Alf met once a week, she visited him every Saturday morning, at the house in Grim, no one considered this strange, but there were a few kindly smiles, for was this not how it should have been?

Grandma told us about the first time she had met the two brothers. Alf had been the extrovert, Grandad the more introverted one, but both apparently showed an interest in the girl from Åsgårdstrand, for when Grandad saw which way the wind was blowing with his brother, who was charming her with his good humor and wit, he whispered to her:
He's got the ring in his pocket!

Grandma was laughing as she spoke.

“What was that?” I asked, despite having heard what he said.
He's got the ring in his pocket!
he repeated.
What kind of ring?
I asked.
An engagement ring!
he answered, boys. He thought I hadn't understood!”

“Was Alf already engaged to Sølvi at that time?” Yngve asked.

“Indeed he was. She lived in Arendal and was sickly, you know. He didn't expect it to last. But they made it in the end!”

She took another sip from the glass and licked her lips afterward. There was a silence, and she withdrew into herself as she had done so many times in the last two days. Sat with her arms crossed, staring into the distance. I drained my drink and poured myself a fresh one, took out a Rizla, laid a line of tobacco, spread it evenly to get the best possible draw, rolled the paper a few times, pressed down the end and closed it, licked the glue, removed any
shreds of tobacco, dropped them in the pouch, put the somewhat deformed roll-up in my mouth and lit it with Yngve's green, semitransparent lighter.

“We were going to travel south to the sun the winter Grandad died,” Grandma said. “We had bought the tickets and everything.”

I looked at her as I blew out the smoke.

“The night he collapsed in the bathroom, you know … I just heard a crash inside and I got up, and there he was on the floor, telling me to call for an ambulance. When I'd done that I sat holding his hand as we waited for it to come. Then he said,
We'll still go south
. And I was thinking,
It's a different south you're heading for
.”

She laughed, but with downcast eyes.

“It's a different south
you're
heading for!” she repeated.

There was a long silence.

“Ohh,” she said then. “Life's a pitch, as the old woman said. She couldn't pronounce her ‘b's.'”

We smiled. Yngve shifted his glass, looked down at the table. I didn't want her thinking about either Grandad's or Dad's death, and I tried to change the subject by returning to her previous subject.

“But did you come here when you moved to Kristiansand?” I asked.

“Oh, no,” she replied.

“We were farther down Kuholmsveien. We bought this house after the war. It was a wonderful location, one of the best in Lund because we had a view of course. Of the sea and the town. And so high up that no one can look in. But when we bought the plot there was another house here. Although to call it a house is a bit of an exaggeration. Ha ha ha. It was a real hovel. The people who lived here, two men as far as I remember, yes, it was … you see, they drank. And the first time we came to see the house, I remember it well, there were bottles everywhere. In the hall where we entered, on the stairs, in the living room, in the kitchen. Everywhere! In some places it was so thick with bottles you couldn't set a foot inside. So we got it quite cheap. We demolished the house and then we built this. There hadn't been a garden, either, just rock, a hovel on rock, that was what we bought.”

“Did you put a lot of work into the garden?” I asked.

“Oh yes, you can imagine. Oh yes, yes, I did. The plum trees down there, you know, I took them from my parents' house in ÅsgÃ¥rdstrand. They're very old. They're not that common anymore.”

“I remember we used to take bags of the plums home,” Yngve said.

“Yes,” I said.

“Do they still bear fruit?” Yngve asked.

“Yes, I think so,” Grandma said. “Perhaps not as much as before, but …” I reached for the bottle, which was nearly half-empty now, and poured myself another glass. Not so strange perhaps that it had not struck my grandmother that the wheel had come full circle with what had gone on here, I mused. Wiped a drop from the bottleneck with my thumb and licked it off while Grandma, on the other side of the table, opened the tobacco pouch and placed a fingerful in the roller machine. However extreme life had been for her over recent years, it barely constituted a tiny part of all the things she had been through. When she had looked at Dad she had seen the baby, the child, the adolescent, the young man; the whole of his character and all of his qualities were contained in that one look, and if he was in such a drunken state that he shat his pants while lying on her sofa, the moment was so brief and she so old that it would not, compared with all the immense span of time together that she had stored, have had enough weight to become the image that counted. The same was true of the house, I assumed. The first house with the bottles became “the house of the bottles” whereas this house was her home, the place where she had spent the last forty years and the fact that it was full of bottles now could never be what the house meant to her.

Or was it just that she was so drunk she couldn't think straight any longer? In which case she hid it well, for apart from her obvious blossoming there were few signs of drunkenness in her behavior. On the other hand, I was not the right person to judge anyone. Spurred on by the alcohol's ever brighter light, which was corroding more and more of my thoughts, I had begun to knock back the drinks almost like juice. And the pit was bottomless.

After pouring Sprite into my glass I took the Absolut bottle, which was obscuring my view of Grandma, and stood it on the windowsill.

“What are you doing?!” Yngve asked.

“You've put the bottle in the window!” Grandma cried.

Flushed and confused, I snatched the bottle and returned it to the table.

Grandma began to laugh.

“He put the bottle of booze in the window!”

Yngve laughed too.

“Of course. The neighbors have to see us sitting here and drinking,” he said.

“Okay, okay,” I said. “I wasn't thinking.”

“No, you weren't. You can say that again!” Grandma said, wiping tears of laughter from her eyes.

In this house where we had always been so careful to prevent others from prying, where we had always been so careful to be beyond reproach in everything that could be seen, from clothes to garden, from house front to car to children's behavior, the closest you could come to the absolutely unthinkable was to exhibit a bottle of booze in a brightly lit window. That was why they, and eventually I too, laughed as we did.

The light in the sky above the hill over the road, which could just be glimpsed through the reflection in the kitchen window, with us three resembling underwater figures, was a grayish-blue. This was as dark as the night sky ever got. Yngve had started to slur. To someone who didn't know him this would have been impossible to detect. But I noticed because he always slipped the same way when he drank, at first a touch unclear, then he slurred more and more, until toward the end, the moment before he passed out, he was almost incomprehensible. In my case the lack of clarity that went hand in hand with drinking was primarily an inner phenomenon, it was only there that it was manifest, and this was a problem because if it was not visible from the outside how utterly plastered I was, since I walked and talked almost as normal, there was no excuse for all the standards that at a later point I might let slip, either in language or behavior. Furthermore, my wild state always became worse for that reason, as my drunkenness was not brought to a halt by sleep or problems of coordination, but simply continued into the beyond, the primitive, and the void. I loved it, I loved the feeling, it was my favorite
feeling, but it never led to anything good, and the day after, or the days after, it was as closely associated with boundless excess as with stupidity, which I hated with a passion. But when I was in that state, the future did not exist, nor the past, only the moment and that was why I wanted to be in it so much, for my world, in all its unbearable banality, was radiant.