Before I Burn: A Novel (17 page)

‘Hello?’ he whispered.

No answer.

‘Who are you?’

Still nothing.

‘I know you’re there. Come out, wherever you are.’

He glared into the darkness. He thought he saw something move. Someone was standing there, reluctant to come out.

‘Are you afraid?’ he asked.

The figure didn’t answer. He suddenly realised who it was.

‘Pappa?’ he said.

The figure came a little closer. Reached out his hands while he himself was rooted to the spot.

‘Don’t come any nearer,’ he growled. ‘Do not come any nearer.’

The figure glided slowly towards him.

Then he lit a match. The room flared up around him. No one there. Neither Ingemann nor anyone else. Just old tools and other scrap leaning against the wall. But when the match went out he could see his father again. He seemed to be kneeling.

‘Pappa? There won’t be any more fires, Pappa. Do you hear me?’

No answer.

‘I’m telling you there won’t be any more fires.’

He lit another match, his father disappeared, and in the few seconds the flame lasted he managed to locate a suitable place.

Then the match died and his father reappeared, kneeling in the darkness.

‘I don’t want you here, I said.’

He saw his father get to his feet, stand in front of him and reach out his hands.

‘Get out. Otherwise you’ll be burned alive!’

His father stood with hands outstretched, motionless.

Then Dag lit another match and the bare room returned. There was an old horse cart in the corner with several empty crates and planks piled on top. He slopped some petrol over a wheel, a shaft and the planks. He managed to close the cap and get out before the match burned down.

‘If that’s the way you want it,’ he said to his father in the darkness. ‘Don’t blame me.’

Then the room flared up again, but this time it was utterly and irrevocably lit. Once more he had chosen the perfect spot. The flames rose at once. It was as though they had been hiding somewhere, waiting for this moment. The wheel was alight, and the planks and the empty crates, and the room was hot and intensely alive. So far, only the cart was well ablaze: the spokes in the wheel glowed red and began to spit onto the floor, but then the flames seemed to regroup, gather their strength. The old hay immediately caught and the fire raced towards the wall. In a few seconds the flames whooshed up the wall, so high that the topmost tongues were licking at the roof. And now it had begun, the rest would take care of itself. He backed towards the door.

‘Do you hear me, Pappa? Praying won’t help!’

He hesitated for a few seconds as he stared into the inferno. The room was aglow in the unreal, flickering light. He saw the rafters and girders in the roof, and along the cross-beams small, black holes. They were swallow nests. He stiffened for an instant when he saw the tiny birds’ heads peering over the edge of a nest, he saw the beaks opening and closing, he heard the reedy cheeping, and then he spotted the swallows desperately circling in the dense smoke beneath the roof.

He got out and slammed the door behind him. Staggered backwards, rubbing his eyes. He had petrol on his fingers and it stung; it felt as if his entire face was on fire. At length, he sank to his knees, snatched at tufts of wet grass and wiped his eyes, and soon the worst was over. That was when he discovered the eyes. They shone.

‘So that’s where you are,’ he said to the quiet, black beast and then saw that there were several cows in the field. They were scattered around, standing or lying in the gloom, but only the nearest of them had seen everything. The cow lifted its black head and stared at him until it lost interest and resumed munching at the grass by the fence.

He didn’t have time to wait. The noise inside was increasing. He ran to the car and drove slowly towards the school. After a few hundred metres he stopped the car and looked back. The sky above Lake Homevannet was still dark. No smoke, no sea of fire. Nothing.

Reaching the school, he pulled up in front of the little outhouse, opposite the old school building where they used to have woodwork in the cellar and PE on the ground floor and at the top there was a loft you could sneak up to and sit in peace. He got out of the car and stood for a few seconds gazing at the school building, then turned on his heel and walked towards the outhouse.

He made short work of it. There wasn’t a moment for anything else. Cars might pass by on the road at any moment. He doused a number of poles with the remains of the petrol. A single match and the flames raced high up the wall. The wood cladding was cracked and tinder-dry and burned as easily as cardboard. It couldn’t have been simpler. A couple of seconds and it was done. He had an effervescent feeling inside as he hastened back to the car, stowed the can on the rear seat and drove slowly and with composure across the plain, past Lake Bordvannet and past the house belonging to Anders and Agnes Fjeldsgård in Solås. At the junction in Brandsvoll he switched on the headlamps. His eyes had grown accustomed to driving in the darkness, so the sudden light was overwhelming. Now he could see everything. Whirring insects, the sharply defined grass at the roadside, the trees and the network of branches woven into the night. As he turned left at the Brandsvoll crossroads the headlamps swept through the fragile windows of the disused shop, and he saw the old shelves and drawers that had once been stacked with flour and peas and oats and coffee, but which now lay gathering dust. Soon afterwards he passed the house belonging to Alfred and Else, and he saw the light from a solitary bulb in Teresa’s house. Then he turned right, crossed the bridge and the tranquil river, and he was home. He tiptoed in, went to the bathroom and washed, stood for a moment studying some cuts and grazes to his forehead; his fingers still smelled faintly of petrol. His eyes were radiant and the tiredness was gone. There was grass in his hair. He shut his eyes and saw the swallows circling in the smoke under the roof. Then he switched off the light, mounted the staircase in four strides, had enough time to fling off his clothes, creep under the cool duvet and lie with closed eyes before the telephone started to ring in the hall.

I.

ON THE MORNING OF 3 JUNE, Grandma writes in her diary:

Olga’s old house has burned down. The outbuilding as well. It’s not possible. But it has actually happened. Kasper Kristiansen owns it now, but I can remember Olga living there so clearly. I remember when Kristen and Steinar and I accompanied Olga to Oslo with a patient. It was a girl who had been too difficult to have at home. She had to go to Gaustad Asylum. So we drove all the way to Oslo. It was just after the war. And now Olga’s house has burned down. Lord help us all.

Faedrelandsvennen
, Saturday, 3 June. Front page:

At eight o’clock this morning, Lensmann Knut Koland and his officers gathered for a crisis meeting at his Søgne office to discuss last night’s blazes, in addition to other recent incidents in Finsland. An arsonist is on the loose in the district. So far he has limited his activities to unoccupied houses and agricultural buildings. Last night a farm, an outhouse and a storehouse were set alight at Lauvsland and Dynestøl, in Finsland.

The Oslo newspapers are beginning to mention the case. One short item in
Aftenposten.
An article in
Verdens Gang
, both relatively unemotional accounts without photographs. NRK radio broadcasts a longer report, but no TV reports as yet, not until Monday evening.

II.

I HAD HEARD THE STORY of the female patient who had to be taken to Gaustad, but I wasn’t aware that Pappa had been involved. Nor was I aware that they had transported her from the house at Dynestøl; nor that the patient had lived there with Olga and that it was from this house that she took the ash from the wood-burning stove.

Having mental patients living in your house wasn’t so unusual. Most of them came from Eg Hospital in Kristiansand, and they were taken on by farms in the hope that this would have a beneficial effect. It was the old idea that work was a blessing. They should be taken out of their grey, passive institutional lives. Into the fresh air. Into the sunshine, into the rain, into the wind and cold. So that they could use their bodies and give a helping hand. And perhaps, slowly but surely, they would get better. Perhaps even recover and return to their normal lives. Furthermore, you got a few kroner for keeping them. It was a kindly thought, but often things didn’t go as hoped. There are many stories about patients, but the details are vague. I know that Olga had several patients over the years, but I know almost nothing about them. What their names were, who they were, what they did at her place. How long they stayed. Where they went afterwards. If they are dead or alive. I know nothing, and no one I have asked can provide any more information.

Except for the ash anecdote.

This one is true.

Things had got to such a pass with the patient that Olga was unable to have her living on the farm any longer. The patient had started having loud discussions with Our Lord; apparently this had been going on for a long time, but when she repeatedly tried to knock Our Saviour off the heavenly throne with a pole, things boiled over for Olga. The patient couldn’t stay there any more; however, there was no room for her at Eg, either. This went on until she had to be transferred to Gaustad in Oslo. It was a trip of more than four hundred kilometres, and Olga didn’t have a car, of course. So she asked Grandad – who had a Nash Ambassador from 1937 with the split windscreen – whether he would consider undertaking the long journey to the country’s capital with her and the patient. Grandad said he would, and Grandma went along as well, and my father too, because there was no one to look after him. So, early in the morning one June day in 1947, the black car started up in the yard, and the small family set off. After some kilometres they parked in front of the house at Dynestøl. Grandad got out and knocked on the door. It was quite a while before Olga answered the door. It transpired that she and the patient had cleaned the whole house, from cellar to loft; all that was now left was to remove the ash from the wood-burning stoves, and that was what they had been doing when Grandad knocked. They had to wait a few more minutes until everyone was ready to leave, and moments before the female patient got in she took the ash from the sitting room stove, filled a tin can with it and deposited it in her handbag. Then she, too, was ready. It was the only thing she wanted to take with her: a tin of ash, which she put in her bag. Whereupon she sat, squeezed up against the others, for a good four hundred kilometres with the bag on her lap.

After Grandma died, in the winter of 2004, a photograph appeared from nowhere. I had never seen it before. It was of Pappa. He must have been about four years old that summer because he was wearing knee breeches and a short-sleeved shirt. He was sitting on one of two bronze lions outside Kunstnernes Hus, a contemporary art house in Oslo, laughing. As I held the photograph in my hands I knew nothing about the two lions, I didn’t know they were still there, in exactly the same place, clutching the flagpoles on either side of the entrance. Pappa had the same wavy hair as in his baby photograph, which had been taken by Harme of Kristiansand and was hand-coloured and not quite true to life, making him look like a little bronze angel. As a child I flatly refused to believe that it was my father in the baby picture. I insisted it was an angel.

The new photograph must have been taken during the stay in Oslo, presumably after the patient and the ash had been delivered to Gaustad Mental Hospital. The long journey was over, finally they had arrived in Norway’s capital city, and I suppose they wanted to see the Royal Palace. Which must have seemed like life’s greatest experience, both for Pappa and for my grandparents, and I presume also for Olga Dynestøl, who had never travelled anywhere. After all, it was only two years since the war had finished, and they wanted to see the Royal Palace and the guards in their black uniforms, standing as silent as the grave in the broiling hot sun. Afterwards they wandered around the Palace Gardens, strolled past the residence where the great Arnulf Øverland lived, and then saw the lions. And what could be better than to take a photograph of a little boy on the back of a snarling lion?

That was how it was. The story of the long journey, the photograph of Pappa and the story of the ash from the stove at Dynestøl. The stories intertwine and are all connected with the stories of the fires. It was ash from the same chimney that on the morning of 3 June 1978 was left blackened and solitary like a tree denuded of its branches.

You gather all the fragments, even ash.

III.

I PHONED KASPER KRISTIANSEN, but it was Helga, his wife, who answered. She knew who I was, of course, as did Kasper; they have both known me since I was born. Kasper might also have remembered me from the elk hunt when I was with my father, when Kasper held the bloody heart in his hand.

I went into great detail explaining what I was after. Said that I was in the process of writing about their house, which they lost early in the morning of 3 June more than thirty years ago, and asked if they would mind telling me what happened. I had no idea how they would feel about this, whether it was something they could discuss or whether it was still too painful.

The answer, however, was:
Not at all.

They received me the very next evening.

We chatted for ages. Not only about the fires; other stories also came up, interwoven into previous ones, and in this way the conversation extended into a picture that grew bigger and bigger, and in the end it was unstoppable. It was as though I had touched upon something that had gone missing long ago. Something I was closely related to, yet of which I still knew very little. We talked about Grandma and Grandad, whom they had both known, and about Great-Grandfather Sigvald, who tanned leather in the loft at his Heivollen home, and about Great-Great-Grandfather Jens, who was so gentle.