I Curse the River of Time (16 page)

She did not turn around. ‘Is that you?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ I said, and she said nothing, so then I had to. ‘I was certain you were asleep back in the summer house,’ I said.

‘As you can see, I’m not.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I can see that.’

I took a deep breath. I felt fine.

‘Do you want a hand?’ I said.

She half turned and looked up. She had been crying, it was clear to see.

‘What happened to your forehead?’ she said.

‘I bumped into a tree,’ I said.

‘Just now?’

‘Yes.’

‘Were you drunk?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t get drunk on a glass of Calvados. And a beer.’

‘A beer?’

‘Yes, with Hansen.’

‘I see,’ she said. ‘And what did the two of you talk about?’

‘We talked about Lenin,’ I said.

‘Lenin?’

‘Yes,’ I said, and she shook her head and pointed past me along the path, and her face was swollen, the skin puffy under her eyes.

‘You can fetch one of those buckets. By the door to the shed.’

I turned and looked in that direction. There was a pile of buckets at the door to a brick outhouse with a pointy roof of red tiles, and it looked nice in an old fashioned, slightly snobbish way.

There was a small concrete basin with a tap above it on the wall.

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Why not.’ I walked the few metres and took a bucket from the top of the pile, went back and gave it to her. She placed it firmly between her knees and gathered the dead flowers and the twigs with her hands, and suddenly she stuffed it all violently into the bucket. She straightened up, took off her gloves and ran a hand through her hair and sat there in silence. It felt a little awkward so I decided to tell her now.

‘I pulled that pine tree down,’ I said, and at once I realised it was not the right time.

‘Did you?’

‘I sure did,’ I said.

‘That’s good,’ she said, ‘but to be honest, you owe your father that much, he’s not strong enough any more; he has done so much for you,’ she said, and I thought, what the hell has my father ever done for me? and she said: ‘You’re the strong one now. Your father is an old man. Do you understand that?’

‘Yes, I understand,’ I said.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Sure I’m sure. I understand that,’ I said, ‘but I didn’t quite finish the job. So far the tree is just lying there. There are still the branches. That will take a while,’ I said.

‘Yes, of course,’ she said, but she had already forgotten about the pine tree. I looked down at my shoes. ‘Do you ever think of your brother?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I do.’

‘Every single day I think about him,’ my mother said.

It was six years since he died, and I could not say the same. But I thought about him often, about the day he died and every single time with a guilty conscience. I had had that feeling for so long it was a part of who I was.

‘You don’t think about
me
every day,’ I said.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Why should I?’

‘No, why should you,’ I said. ‘I don’t think about you every day, either.’ But that was not true, so I said: ‘Yes, I do.’

‘That’s not necessary,’ she said with her back to me.

‘Yes, it is,’ I said.

She turned and looked up into my eyes while at the same time pushing her bare hands against the gravel and got stiffly to her feet and was about to say something I was certain I would not like to hear, but then she let it go.

‘It’ll be dark soon,’ she said. ‘Shall we cycle home to the summer house together?’ And I said:

‘I was thinking of going into town.’

‘Then I hope you’ve got lights on your bicycle.’

‘Oh, yes, I have,’ I said. And I did, but there was no dynamo. It was lost long ago and was probably on some other bicycle. Or just dumped somewhere. What did I know?

We walked together up to the gate. The cemetery was closing, a man in overalls came towards us. He nodded and my mother nodded back, and then we were outside and walked up to our bicycles.

‘Very well,’ she said and got on her bicycle seat, turning her back to me, and I climbed on to mine and we went our separate ways. When I reached the junction, I turned to the left before the care home and further down the road my chest started to hurt badly and I shouted:

‘Fuck! Fuck!’ and I could have flung my old bicycle on the tarmac and ripped the saddle off the pole, twisted the handlebars into an ‘S’ with my hands and stamped the spokes around the hub into spaghetti, or turned around in the middle of the road and raced her to the petrol station and declaimed a sentence that would build a stunning bridge from my heart to hers. But I did none of those things. I just cycled down the street into town, across Gammeltorv,
past Dommergaarden with the drunk tank to the right, where once I had been forced to stay the night, and after that I sailed across Nytorv and along the Danmarksgade, which was the main street in this town.

19

I
t was night on Carl Berners Plass. I was sleeping, I was dreaming, and then I woke up and forgot my dream. Cold it was against my face in the dark in the living room and I felt her body close to mine, and my chest was burning and my heart too, and a house somewhere in the city was burning, not far from this room. One man was shouting frightened words to another man who shouted back and both of them were panting, running as the fire engine howled past in the dark, crashing through red lights at the crossing where no one walked. I heard it all crashing through the open window in the cold, and the flashing blue lights hit the glass and were thrown back out, and it was burning down along my arm, around her shoulder and her arm around my chest was burning, and how strange it did not happen here, I thought, with the burning heat between her skin and my skin; how strange we did not burst into flames.

I remember getting up from the sofa and walking naked to the window, and it was cold December and snow on the bushes along the brick wall right below me and snow on the tarmac outside. I leaned out with the icy windowsill against my stomach, and it should have been a grey dawn now, almost morning, but the orange blue light I could see in the distance made everything around it look black.

‘What’s going on?’ she said.

‘There’s a house on fire down the road somewhere,’ I said, ‘a tenement by the Munch Museum.’

‘Oh, no,’ she said, ‘not the Munch Museum,’ for we went there at least every other Sunday, stood waiting outside until the doors were opened.

‘No, not that far down. The Munch Museum will be all right,’ I said. ‘But that house will not.’

She crossed the floor right behind me and we stood by the window shoulder to shoulder, she and I, and me with no clothes on and she wrapped in the warm duvet. In Finnmarkgata there were glowing circles on the snow below the street lamps, and the lights had come on in several flats across the road, and she said:

‘But aren’t you cold?’ I shivered and said:

‘Yes, I guess I am,’ for I suddenly realised that I
was
freezing, like the naked sculptures in Frognerparken, glittering with hoar frost, in December, January, and then she opened the duvet and pulled me in, and we stood a while in our own warmth.

She tiptoed back to the sofa with the duvet tightly around her, and lay down and said:

‘Please don’t wake me again, I need my beauty sleep.’

‘No problem,’ I said, thinking: you couldn’t be any prettier than this, and I closed the window and got dressed in a cold shirt and cold trousers, and barefoot I walked out into the kitchen with my socks and shoes in my hands, closed the door quietly, carefully behind me, and then she called out:

‘Be my comrade and leave the door open, please,’ so I opened the door and did not switch the light on and lifted the lid of the old cooker I had brought with me when I moved from Veitvet. I held my hands above the hotplate in the dark and rubbed them hard before I put the kettle on. Drops of water hissed under the kettle and cracked against the glowing cast iron, where heat rose from the filaments through the cylinder in a muted rumble, and the sound from the kettle was a fine sound, a sound I knew, a sound I had heard almost every morning standing on a stool with my hands outstretched half an hour on the dot after my father had caught the bus to the factory, and only she and I would be in the kitchen this early. Everyone else was asleep, it was dark outside in the street, dark inside the living room, only the yellow light on the cooker in the kitchen was lit, and there was a crack like airgun shots under the kettle when she heated milk to make cocoa. It was just she and I, for my brothers always slept late, my baby brother, my big brother, and they did not even know I was awake, that I had been lying in bed listening for the click of the door and my father’s fading steps on the flagstones in front of the house. They did not know that I was waiting under the duvet, counting his long strides up the hill, past the red telephone booth, past the shopping centre, all the way up to Trondhjemsveien where the bus stopped that would take my father into town. Then I got up and dressed in the pitch dark, so the others would not see what I was doing if they suddenly woke up to go to the toilet. I tiptoed down the stairs to the living room and along the hall where my uncle from Denmark hung in a silver frame.
His name was Jesper, and he wore a blue cap with stripes and a tassel and a Danish army uniform and died right after that photo was taken, only thirty-three years old, like Jesus was when he died.

And then I reached the kitchen and quietly stood on the threshold. She was standing in front of the cooker with her back to the door.

‘Is that you?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it’s me,’ and every single time she knew that it was me, every single time she knew that it was me who stood there, even though I came barefoot and noiseless when I came, like a Kiowa through the woods, I was mysterious and dark, and she said:

‘Can’t you sleep?’ and I said:

‘No, you know I can’t,’ and then she almost certainly smiled to herself before turning around, and she turned around and was not smiling very much, not really smiling, but nor was she displeased for she knew that it was me coming. She took the stool from under the kitchen counter and placed it in front of the cooker and bent down to get the milk from the bottom shelf of the cupboard by the hatch that was covered with mesh to keep the mice out. I climbed on to the stool, knees first, then stood with my arms outstretched over the open hotplate to feel the shimmering heat seep up along my hands, along my chest, all the way up to my chin and my mouth, and the kettle banged on the hotplate and I had not even started school yet, so I could stand there for as long as I wanted.

*   *  *

I sat down at the table with the hot coffee in a pale yellow mug and thought about the burning building down the road and the people living in the flats that were burning, waking up in the middle of the night with the red hot air around them, running with their children in their arms, down the stairs to the ground floor, and at the last minute stumbling into cold December, and the cold felt like a shock to their faces. But everything that must be done was done by those who knew how, and I did not want to go out to stand there staring like the others and be one of them. And I had to get going, it would soon be six o’clock. I closed the lid of the hotplate, and made myself a packed lunch and put it in a bag, which looked like the bag my father always carried, a leather bag with one big compartment containing my lunch and copies of
Arbeiderbladet
and
Klassekampen
, folded so the logo could not be seen, and two pockets at the front with my notebook and my pen and the latest resolutions from the Party leadership, as well as the book I was reading at the time.

I went into the living room to watch her sleep in the grey, muted, slanted light from the window. I stood there and did not say anything that might wake her, because soon she would have to get up and go to school in town. Sometimes when she was asleep and I was awake I felt a little uneasy, for she looked so young on the pillow, only a girl, and I thought, she is so young, and in her sleep she had whispered: Oh, Arvid, from her floating state between here and there, and no embarrassing slip did she make in the dark, no other name rose from some previous embrace, no Gunnar, no Espen, no Tommy, no, certainly no Tommy, but
Arvid, only Arvid, for he who bore the name Arvid was the first, was the one who held it all in his hands, held everything in balance, and sometimes when these thoughts came over me, I found it hard to bear. She did not feel young, she said, and she did not feel young to me, not young in that way, she knew things that I did not, but she
was
young. It troubled me sometimes.

I felt her warmth and the warmth from the stove still inside me, it was early morning on Carl Berners Plass. I crossed the tramlines, cut my way beneath the cables that powered the trams and the neon signs were not yet switched on, and it felt right that they were not; half blinded you embraced your own body, and with the warmth still under your jacket, you walked up the pavement along the square, moving through the grey light, and let your thoughts seep softly in, undisturbed, on the way up to the station, but also walking as one of many in the chill of December. I liked the feeling of being a
we
, being more than myself, being larger than myself, being surrounded by others in a way I had never experienced before, of belonging, and it made no difference if those who walked to the left or the right of me, in front or behind me on this street, did not share the same feeling. We were the proletariat on our way to the Underground station, to the places where we toiled, and everyone in the Party was annoyed because I often said the
peuple
rather than the working class. It was an anachronism, it was just nonsense, they said, but I would never stop saying that, it felt right to me in a way they did not understand.
None of them had read Victor Hugo, they only read what was in front of them, they did not know that what had failed in the revolutionary years of 1830, 1848, 1871, was what we were going to achieve, once and for all, and in my bag I had the latest resolutions from the Party’s leadership. I knew well that I would never be able to carry them through, in fact I did not carry much through, I was too shy, I was too alone, I had my back against the wall, I did not want to be alone, but it did not matter just now, in the half-dark on the way to the Underground station, whether I knew that I would succeed or not. Everyone around me knew so much more than me anyway, all the women around me, all the men. I knew too little. And still there was nothing I wanted more than to walk here, towards the station in the grey light and be surrounded by them all.