I Curse the River of Time (2 page)

2

A
fter my mother had crossed the gangway of the
Holger Danske
and stepped on to the quay in the North Jutland town which was the town she grew up in and still referred to as home after forty years of fixed abode in Oslo, she walked along the harbourfront with the small brown suitcase in her hand and onwards past the shipyard which, in fact, had not been shut down, back then in the Eighties, when almost all other shipyards in Denmark collapsed like houses of cards. She walked past the old whitewashed gunpowder tower of Admiral Tordenskjold, which the town council had moved to the spot where it now stood from where it stood before, one hundred and fifty metres closer to the water. They had dug under the tower and laid down well worn railway sleepers, a giant winch was installed, and more than one thousand litres of soft soap were used to make the whole thing glide. And they did it. They dragged tons and tons of stone tower, centimetre by centimetre to its new location, which had been prepared in every possible way, so they could build a new dry dock for the shipyard without sacrificing one of the town’s very few attractions. But it was a long time now since that operation had been carried out and she was really not quite sure if the story about the soft soap and the railway sleepers was entirely true; it did sound a bit odd, and she was not there when it
happened. She was in Norway at the time, kidnapped by fate, like a hostage almost, but they did succeed. The tower had definitely been moved.

Three years earlier her father had been buried (irritable and impatient as he always had been) in the Fladstrand Church cemetery that bordered the lovely park, Plantagen, which shared with the cemetery its trees, shared its beech and ash and maple, in the same plot where her mother, wide eyed and confused, had lain down almost willingly two years before, where her brother had lain for thirty-five years, dazed and unwillingly after too short a life.

A dove was looking down from atop the family gravestone. It was made from metal so it could not fly away, but sometimes it went missing all the same and only a spike would remain. Someone had taken that dove, someone out there maybe had an entire collection of doves and angels and other small, Christian bronze sculptures in a cupboard at home and on long evenings would close the curtains and take them out and run his fingers gently over the smooth, cold bodies. Every time someone nicked the dove, she had to order a new one from the undertakers just up the road and ask them to put it back. Maybe they did not do a very good job. The dove had gone missing three times in three years.

When she visited the cemetery these days, she could no longer leave it as she used to and walk or cycle past the care home to a flat in the centre of the town with an outside toilet, in a street which ran from the high street to the harbour, Lodsgade, it was called, and point to the windows, to the potted plants on the first floor, and say that this was
where she had belonged, this was where she had become the person she was and then point to the window in the small room on the ground floor next to her mother’s dairy shop, and try to say something about who her brother had been, and fail. Nor could she drop by in the early morning and knock on the door behind the open cast iron gate with fresh rolls in a paper bag, having just arrived on the ferry from Norway. No one would open that door. It was no longer her street. So she did not walk up Lodsgade and into town, instead she walked along the harbour with a strange flickering sensation in her chest, still there after three years, and right up to the new railway station where she hailed a taxi. It signalled and pulled away from the kerb in the direction of Nordre Strandvej and drove past the nautical school and Tordenskjold’s Redoubt, concealed behind its neatly manicured ramparts and cannons, behind the tall poplars along the road, and then past the rowing club. They had a cafeteria there, and she often sat at a table with a Carlsberg by the glass wall facing the small harbour and the sea, looking out at the little blue and red boats chugging in through the narrow entrance in the breakwater, to dock or to go back out again with fishing tackle on board, but then only as a hobby, as all serious fishing along this coast had died out several years ago.

The taxi drove on across the windswept open stretch of marram grass and sand and scrub, which the wind kept down at knee height one year after the other, and the sea lay taut this early morning like a blue-grey porous skin and the sky above the sea was as white as milk. Where the tarmac turned into gravel, the car pulled in between the ancient
dog roses and gnarled pine trees and the whole trip lasted no more than a quarter of an hour. It was odd, she thought, for it felt like driving in slow motion, the gentle mist outside the car window, the grey light across the water, and the island out there where the beams from the lighthouse still cast pale, lazy flashes, and the last rosehips still hung from the bushes, each of them glowing red, blue almost, like little Chinese lanterns. When she looked out the opposite window, her head turned slowly from one side to the other, she moistened her lips with her tongue, looked down at her hands and slowly moved her fingers, and her skin felt numb and stiff, and she smiled for no reason.

Before she let the taxi go back to town she arranged with the driver to be picked up early in the morning four days later. The driver was only too happy to oblige, he said, it would get him up on time and that was not always the case, he had to admit, as he liked a beer or five in the evening.

‘I’ll tip you enough for ten beers,’ my mother said. ‘As long as you’re here on time. It’s important,’ she said, ‘I have a plan, you see,’ and she raised her finger to the driver in a threatening gesture, but the young man grinned and then my mother smiled too.

‘I’ll be on time,’ he said.

He got back into the driver’s seat after helping her up past the bushy pine tree to the terrace where he set down her suitcase and said: ‘See you soon then,’ and he backed the car in a semicircle before he drove across the lawn in
front of the summer house where he had accepted his payment and a substantial tip, and he waved to her from behind the window and drove back into town with the light on the roof switched on through what could still be called the grey of dawn on a Thursday morning, early in November.

II

3

I
did not realise that my mother had left. There was too much going on in my own life. We had not spoken for a month, or even longer, which I guess was not that unusual, in 1989, considering the things that happened back then, but it
felt
unusual. It felt unusual because it was intentional on my part. I was trying to avoid her, and I did so for I had no wish to hear what she might say about my life.

That afternoon when my mother took the Underground alone from Veitvet in Groruddalen down to Jernbanetorget with the brown suitcase in her hand to cross the damp square on the seaward side of the old Østbane Station, the headwind in her hair on her way to the flat, windswept terminal building that belonged to J.C. Hagen & Co., and the quay where the
Holger Danske
lay moored in what turned out to be her final week, I, at the same time came driving in a car that was not my own, from the gravel roads in Nittedal with my two daughters in the back, one ten years old, the other seven. The car was a 1984 silver-grey Volkswagen Passat that belonged to a man I had known for eight years, who would have given me his shirt, if I asked him for it.

It was starting to get dark, yes, the dark came rolling in like the tide used to do at the Jutland coast when I was as old as the girls were now, always surprisingly sudden, and it probably still does. It was early November, the girls in the back were singing a Beatles song they had learned from one of my old records, ‘Michelle’ it was, from
Rubber Soul
, and that song you would not call a masterpiece, but they liked Paul McCartney, he wrote songs that were easy for children to sing. And really, it sounded quite good, even the lines that were supposed to be in French sounded good, and I let go of the steering wheel as we drove the straight part of the road after Hellerudsletta towards Skjetten along the ridge and applauded as best I could.

It was good to have them both in the back seat. In that way they could talk to me about anything they wanted without having to look me in the eye, and I did not have to look
them
in the eye, and sometimes even they stopped looking at each other, and then the three of us would sit staring out of the windows in our separate directions without saying anything at all, while the car rolled along, and we all knew that things were not as they ought to be. The girls knew it, and I knew it, and she who was not in the car perhaps knew it best of all, and that was the reason she did not come with us on these trips.

This was the situation.

‘Do you want to go fieldwatching?’ I would sometimes shout from the hallway, and the girls nearly always replied:

‘Yes!’ from their two little bedrooms. ‘Yes, we do!’ and my wife would say:

‘You just go. I’ll stay here.’

And that was the whole point. That was what she was supposed to say. If she had said: ‘Yes, I want to come,’ then none of us would have known how a trip like that should be carried out, what to talk about, which roads to take.

So we went, the girls and I, down the stairs to the garage, through the yellow metal doors that slammed hard and hollow behind our backs, and most often we would go north to Nittedal, and sometimes to Nannestad, if there was time enough, and even all the way up to Eidsvoll and the river there, crossing the fine cast iron bridge while we stared into the water that flowed right below us and then park in the centre of that very place to eat waffles in a café we had been to before. But what we liked most of all were the gravel roads between the fields, the bumpy grey roads along the meadows and grainfields, going past the chequered sheep pens and the old electric fences with the white porcelain knobs on the posts, past the rusty, half-collapsed barbed wire fences. Just driving along those roads singing Beatles songs, uphill, downhill, on and on around the bends ahead, and the curves, the way it was that autumn, in 1989, in the fading light in Nittedal, at Nannestad and all the way up to Eidsvoll, the trees by the streams blown bare, and see it all arching up the colour of straw, in vast sheets and expanding rectangles, and around some bends see an orange colour come sneaking into view with a sickly glow where the stubble fields had been sprayed with Roundup only days ago, and then see them turn into the colour
purple and after that an all-consuming black where the farmers had ploughed the fields just in time before winter came falling, and all light was drained out of them and simply vanished. We drove a little faster past those scary spots and laughed a bit too and cried out in high-pitched frightened voices:

‘Watch out, for God’s sake,’ we screamed. ‘Here comes a black hole!’

And I had explained to them about black holes, how things were sucked into them and were gone, how lives were sucked down, whole worlds sucked down, maybe
our
world sucked down, and I swerved the car to the opposite verge, and the girls squealed in the back and we had a narrow escape. And then we sighed with relief and laughed again, as we had never been this close to the cosmic abyss, and sang ‘I Should Have Known Better’ in harmony, while I hammered out the beat on the steering wheel.

And then the early dark descended and there was nothing more to see. Inside the car it grew dark around our shoulders and dark around our hands. Only the girls’ hair was shining in the glow from the lights along the road, in red and in yellow, and the numbers glowed on the speedometer and the tiny blue light for the main beam went on and off with the oncoming traffic and we stopped our singing on the way past Skjetten and were silent on the bridge by the station at Strømmen.

Half a day might have passed since we left the garage beneath our block of flats at home, and by now we were famished, our heads were swimming and felt numb around the edges, if you could say that a head has edges, but none
of us wanted to break the silence inside the dark in the car where the indicator only ticked in green flashes to the right of the dashboard for a last detour along the edge of the forest, around the big hospital in a sharp curve before we turned in front of the old church and began the climb up the steep hill to the suburb where we lived, and I badly wanted to know what the girls were thinking about in the back. What
I
was thinking about was my divorce that came closer with each day, quietly swooping like an owl through the night, even though it was still just something we had agreed on, no date, no season set, we two who had held together for fifteen years and had these girls between us, with their shiny hair in red and in yellow, or to be honest, it was something she alone had agreed on. My face felt like a mask, my mouth was dry. If someone had asked me, how do you feel now? I would say, it hurts right here, and point to a place at the top of my chest, or rather at the very bottom of my throat. With each new morning, I left earlier for work. My eyelids stung when I sat on the bus. I did not know what I was facing. Perhaps it might get even worse, later, when I was all alone? I was afraid it might get worse. I was afraid of what it would do to my body, the pain I felt in my chest, that would get worse, the struggle to swallow the tiniest bit of food, that would get worse, and the unexpected numbness in my legs, my thoughts swirling around like damaged radio waves, and in my sleep the wild, endless falls; all this would probably get worse, and then the shocking realisation that there was nothing I could do about it. No act of will would get me out of this state, no leap of thought pull me up. At times the only option was
to sit in a chair and wait for the worst ravages to calm down so I could perform the most basic tasks: cut a slice of bread, go to the toilet, or drag myself all those exhausting metres through the hallway to lie down on my bed. More often than not I just gave up and slept where I sat and each time woke up with a start and a crackling blue light in my head when I heard her key in the door.