Child Wonder (9 page)

And I was able to slip away.

Up to Hagan, with the big boys.

I have never been any great shakes as a sportsman, but I can be quite brave, and a person like me who doesn’t give in, whatever comes his way, can easily earn the requisite dose of mocking respect; especially if on top of that he can ignore the jeers that are hurled at him.

Now there are also losers who try to get even in a way that lands them in more trouble, deeper and deeper, until the situation gets out of hand. I had a friend like that, Freddy1, he was big and heavy and angry, nothing special at school, and nothing special in the street; he didn’t have the mouth on him either, and for some reason he always wore clothes that were not quite right. That was what made him stand out, that was what gave him a personality, and the name Freddy1, placing him before Freddy 2, and Freddy 3, who just merged into the crowd, yes, the very fact that he was big and strong but slow, a catastrophic combination of much too much and much too little in one and the same person, that was what gave him number1, status.

When the gang grew tired of herringboning up Hagan and skiing down and herringboning up again and instead started taking the piss out of Freddy 1 about his skis, or hat, or stance, he responded with coarse insults and snowballs that never found their target. When the snowballs were returned, Freddy 1 ripped off his skis and flailed them around, to the mounting glee of the riff-raff, because he never actually hit anyone, just whirled round and spat and cried and fenced with his idiotic Bonna skis until he toppled over with a belch. Then the shouting stopped. Freddy 1 was on the ground, hurrah. The gang inched closer to see if he was dead. But Freddy 1 was not dead. He was just waiting for precisely this moment, his moment of glory.

“Are you dead, Numero Uno?”

With his last remaining energy he pounced on the boot of one of the smallest boys, knocked the poor devil over and fell on top of him and punched him in the face with his icy mittens until the victim’s nose started to stream with blood or until one of the bigger boys tugged at his scarf and presented him with the tough choice of laying off or being strangled. It usually ended with the latter. Freddy 1 was no longer of this world. But in his own. In the realm of fury and snot and tears. Nothing could crack Freddy 1, he endured the punishment and never learned, this was Traverveien’s toughest existence, to which statues should have been erected, in iron.

It was on one of these exhilarating evenings, as I heaved myself off the top of Hagan and raced down with the wind and snow battering all my senses, only to land with a thump on my kisser just where Hagan meets the estate, that I was observed by Kristian. Our lodger was standing there in his hat and coat and witnessed my fall, he had crossed over from the estate to see what the young ones were up to in the evening gloom.

Later that evening the topic of my skiing skills, which were by no means perfect, was brought up at the kitchen table, and the question was whether I wanted to go with Kristian on a cross-country excursion next Sunday, take the train to Movatn and ski home via Lillomarka, past legendary restaurants such as Sinober, Sørskauen and Lilloseter, as was customary for those children who had fathers.

I hesitated, not least because I was puzzled by the encouraging tones with which Mother met the invitation. When Kristian returned after the Christmas holidays she had confronted him and asked what the jewellery he had given her for Christmas was supposed to mean, an assault he had tried to ward off with roughly the same expression as when he had presented us with a box of provisions during the strike, with the same lack of success. So why this positive attitude of hers now, towards the man wishing to undertake some misguided notion of fatherly duties?

“What about Linda?” I asked.

“She’s too small.”

“Is it
that
far?”

“Not at all.”

I ended up saying yes. I had said yes far too often in my childhood, it was only later that I began to say no, not that it helped much. And for some reason we had to depart at the crack of dawn. At half past seven. On skis. Kristian looked alien and strange in a white anorak and oddly antiquated knickerbockers, and he was very tight-lipped as the freezing cold day broke. In Lofthusveien it was alternate gravel and ice. So even if it was downhill all the way, I was already whacked by the time we arrived at Grefsen railway station at five to eight. The train was packed and silent, a slumbering mass of men of all ages, only men, as if in thrall to a national solemnity, an army on its way to the front. And we had to stand, so I didn’t get a chance to recover. But off we set in the biting cold, and there were good trails, and it was nice and flat over the ice on Lake Movann. Thereafter, however, the nightmare began, the ascent.

“On the other hand, when we’re up top it’ll all be plain sailing,” panted Kristian at his lowest ebb.

The thing was we never got up top. It was just like walking up to the moon. I was merely a quivering shadow of myself when at length we swerved into the forecourt of Sinober, the first restaurant, a wondrous sight in the crystal clear winter landscape. But for some reason we were not going there. I couldn’t believe my ears. We were going on. To Sørskauen. We made it, too, by the skin of our teeth, but by then I was such a wreck I had difficulty swallowing the blackcurrant toddy and waffles that Kristian treated me to, I went to sleep with food in my mouth, and when he shook me back to consciousness, I asked if we couldn’t stay the night.

“Ha, ha,” he said, turning to the waitress. “The boy’s asking if we could stay the night.”

“Mm, fine thing that would be,” the woman said.

I had the misfortune to bump into one of my pals here, Roger, who was an excellent skier. But, as luck would have it, he was with his elder brothers, so we were almost equally red-faced sitting there, mute with exhaustion, beside each other on the shiny, worn wooden bench in the stuffy room reeking of wet clothes and wet men and rucksacks and bark and berries and spruce and all the Norwegian outdoor smells I have always associated with a combination of poverty and fathers. As luck would have it, Roger was dragged out before me.

But after we had had our fill of all the waffles and the toddies, we could not stay where we were, however much I begged, taking up room from a constant stream of groaning hordes crashing in through the door with loud voices and swaggering pitch-seam skiing boots, with steam and sweat and ice and snow and indefinable, thick storm-clouds of breath that they had gorged like greedy sharks for kilometre after kilometre through the frozen reality, only to release the whole foulness here in this much-too-cramped pressure-cooker of a primitive shack. The great Norwegian winter beast. The bear that never sleeps, but slashes and claws and makes an infernal racket alone and with others so as not to freeze to death, all the things I had missed because I didn’t have a father.

In short, there was nothing for it but to set out and struggle on, unrelenting, an extra layer of wax, alright, then. But it wasn’t grip that was the trouble, or the glide, it was my physical state. I was now so stiff and frozen after the merciless baking from the wood-burner that I was regurgitating waffles and blackcurrant toddy the whole way down to Lilloseter. Kristian had to dispense sympathy and scorn to keep me upright, for kilometre after kilometre. But by the time we arrived in Lilloseter, this last station on our socialist-democratic
via dolorosa,
it became apparent that we weren’t stopping here, either, I had definitely regained my body heat, and got shot of the food.

On top of that, Kristian had come a cropper a couple of times on the slopes down to Lake Breisjøen. I fell too, but his nose-dive was a more thorough-going affair, more time-consuming, one might say, it must have been something to do with age, and philosophy. Kristian was not the type to fall, he was more likely to determine himself when he would take a tumble, and here natural forces had got the better of him. But when at long last we hung trembling on our poles at the top of Årrollåsen squinting down towards the rifle club and Østreheim, at least his smirk was gone. Not just that. He had a brand new expression on that modern face of his. I think it must have been bitterness, even though he managed to force a grin, and said there was something he wanted to talk to me about, did I think my mother would mind him having guests in his room?

An unusual question, to me, and it wasn’t until there had been a bit of hemming and hawing that I realised a lady was involved. Did I think she would be allowed to stay a few days?

I answered that I doubted it.

“I thought as much,” he said, focusing his gaze on the hollow in which Oslo lay. “What is it that she wants?” he mumbled.

A son cannot answer that kind of question, it wasn’t even certain that he was referring to Mother, but then he said: “And what’s up with the girl, is she … retarded?”

I heard the drum rolls begin in earnest, and saw rainbows wreathe my field of vision. I gasped for breath, tightened my grip on the sticks and set off, managing to stay on my feet the whole way past the rifle club and down Østreheimsveien, but of course he caught me up again, and knocked me flying into the snow.

“For Christ’s sake, Finn, you don’t understand a thing!”

The lodger had turned into a monster. I could do nothing but close my eyes and be strong.

“Back already,” Mother said as we stumbled into the flat at last.

But I didn’t have much to say about the skiing trip, I was hot and uncommunicative and at the end of my tether, had to have help with my boots, and cleared off to my room in a kind of unarticulated, almost a physical attempt not to say anything. Perhaps I was even trying to believe that I had not heard the dreadful word. But there was Linda in the lower bunk, on her stomach, drawing a horse, a creature only Mother and I were able to identify, and if you can’t draw a horse in this life, you are doomed, you will sink like a lead weight, and this was an indecipherable horse repeated on sheet after sheet throughout the drawing pad I had given her for Christmas, for she loved horses, and they looked like ants and elephants and God knows what. She smiled and said:

“Cold?”

And I yelled:

“Can’t you bloody draw properly!”

But before her lower lip could quiver into a sob, Mother was there, screaming: “What on earth has got into you, Finn?!” And the dreadful word had not been forgotten.

“He called her retarded!” I bawled, and at that moment I saw a flustered Kristian behind Mother’s deathly pale face.

“What?” she said, her voice almost inaudible. And there was silence.

“The boy’s raving,” Kristian shouted, crimson-faced skier and idiot. “Don’t listen to him.”

But Mother has this ability to freeze her surroundings. And since Linda was the sole normal person among us, she just turned over the page and carried on fiddling with her crayons while Kristian and I stood to attention listening with fear and trembling to Mother’s softly spoken words.

“You called her
what?”

Kristian raised his arms to a great height, then dropped them again and tried to do an Uncle Tor, whispered into the bargain, out of consideration for Linda, I assume:

“But you must be able to see the child needs help. She can’t speak, can she?”

“You called her
what?”

That was him done for. Kristian stroked his forehead with one hand and did something I myself have never been able to quite bring myself to do, he apologised and looked as though he meant it.

“Sorry. It was inexpiable. But … no, there is no excuse, I know.”

He turned on his heel like the guilty man he was, in every cell of his body, and went to his room, while Mother was left standing like a steel spring, speechless and alien, until I took her hand, shook and pulled it.

“Inexpiable?” I heard from afar.

I didn’t know what it meant. But then she was back. “That man is finished here!”

I nodded, with enthusiasm. “And Linda can draw whatever horses she likes, Finn, I can tell you that!”

“Yes, fine, but …”

“But what?”

“I’ll have to teach her … something.”

By now Mother was at the end of her tether, too. She flopped down on the bed beside Linda and placed her hands in her lap and nodded slowly, mumbling, mhm mhm, before looking at me again, as if seeing me for the first time, or the state I was in, my puce cheeks and a body that was utterly drained.

“How was the skiing?” she asked.

“I’m hungry,” I said.

“Have a little lie-down,” she said. “And I’ll see to dinner.”

I had a lie-down. But not a little one. I didn’t wake up until dawn the following day.

I was shaking with cold and experiencing terrible breathing difficulties, I also had unbearable pains in my chest. What was left of my arms and legs seemed to be encased in lead. I was unable to get up and had to shout in whispers until Mother awoke in the early morning darkness.

“I’m cold.”

“You’ve got your duvet,” she mumbled drowsily.

“I … can’t get up.”

“What do you want to get up for? It’s not …”

“I need a pee.”

“Go on, then.”

“I
can’t.
I’ve told you.”

Then Mother was beside me.

“What do you mean? Get up now!”

“It’s not working,” I said, pointing to where I reckoned my heart was. What next, Mother wondered, as I recoiled with a fully fledged howl the moment she laid her hand on me, you see, we are never ill in our family; illness is treated with the utmost scepticism, it is something Mother has brought with her from her own home where everyone had a “lie-down” at times, in fact even Uncle Bjarne himself had a tendency to throw in the towel on the odd occasion and “go on a cure”, which Uncle Oskar told us about in a letter, news which made Mother snort, but which was never discussed at Christmas family gatherings. It would have been quite natural to ask “Well, Bjarne, how’s it going with the cure?”

Not a word.

Mother sent me a stern look.

“It’s not your heart, my lad, it’s your lungs.”

After muttering “damned lodger” and “damned cross-country skiing”, and repeating that the man was finished here, she gave me a thermometer that I first had to put under my arm and then in my mouth. But it showed only 37 degrees, and I was still sore.