My Struggle: Book 3 (22 page)

“Let me see your pockets,” he said.

I stood up and thrust forward my hips.

He passed me the note.

“Put this in your pocket,” he said. “And don’t hang around.”

“OK,” I said. He went back to the kitchen. I put my boots back on, closed the door gently behind me, and set off at a run.

Yngve came home shortly before we were to have dinner and just made it to his bedroom before Dad shouted that the food was ready. He had fried some chops and onions and boiled some cauliflower and potatoes. Mom informed us that we were going to have a cleaning woman, an old lady called Fru Hjellen, who would come once a week, and she would be popping by this afternoon. Mom had rung her from work, she said, she had seemed very nice. I knew Dad didn’t want a cleaning woman, he had mentioned it once, but now he was quiet, so I supposed he must have changed his mind.

I was looking forward to her coming. The few times we had visitors it was always fun, perhaps because when they came they filled the house with something new and different. And it was good because they always showed Yngve and me some attention. “So those are your boys, are they?” they would say, if they had never seen us before, or, “How tall they’ve grown,” if they had, and sometimes they even asked us questions, such as how school was going or about soccer.

After eating I slipped into Yngve’s room. He took a cassette from the rack, it was Status Quo,
Piledriver,
and put it in the recorder.

“I saw you on the bus,” I said. “Where were you going?”

“To town,” he said.

He lay on the bed and started reading a comic.

“What did you do there?”

“That’s enough questions,” he said. “I had to buy a part for my bike.”

“Is it
broken
?”

He nodded. Then he looked me in the eye.

“Don’t tell anyone. Not even Mom,” he said.

“Cross my heart and hope to die,” I said.

“It’s up at Frank’s. You know the part the handlebars are attached to, well, it broke. But his father promised he would fix it for me. I get it back tomorrow.”

“Imagine if Dad had seen you,” I said. “In Arendal. Or someone he knows had seen you.”

Yngve shrugged and continued reading. I went into my own room. After a while the doorbell rang. I waited until Mom was downstairs in the hall before leaving my room. Shortly afterward an elderly, somewhat plump or perhaps I should say broad, lady with gray hair and glasses came up the stairs.

“This is Karl Ove,” Mom said. “Our younger son.”

I nodded to her. She smiled.

“My name’s Fru Hjellen,” she said. “I’m sure we’ll become good friends.”

She patted my shoulder. I felt a warmth suffuse my whole body.

“Our elder son, Yngve, is in his room,” Mom said.

“Should I get him?” I said.

Mom shook her head. “No need.”

She started showing her around, and I went back to my room. Outside, dusk was falling. The rain was drumming softly on the roof and wall. The gutters were swirling and gurgling. Large raindrops hit the window and rolled down in patterns it was impossible to predict. The headlights from a car lit up the spruce tree above the mailbox stand. Jacobsen returning from work. The green boxes and the stand to which they were attached glinted silently in the glare.
No, no,
they said.
Not the light, not the light.
I lay down on my bed and thought about Anne Lisbet. Tomorrow we would go there again. But first of all I wanted to see her at school! And it was enough to see her. I needed no more than that for the pleasure to spread through every part of my body. One day I would ask her to go out with me. One day I would be in her room and she would be in mine. Even though I wasn’t allowed to have anyone in my room, she would be allowed to come here, I would fix that. Even if we had to climb in through the little window in the boiler room!

I sat down at my desk, took the books from my satchel, and did my homework. Fru Hjellen left, and then I heard Yngve going to the kitchen. It was Monday today, and every Monday he had started making scones or waffles in the evening. I would sit in the kitchen with Mom while he worked, it was warm there, the aroma of scones or waffles was good, and we talked about everything under the sun. After Yngve had finished we ate the scones with butter, which melted on them, and brown cheese, or waffles with butter and sugar, which also melted, and drank tea with milk. Now and then, but not often, Dad joined us. By and large, though, he went back down to his study pretty quickly.

I did my homework at breakneck speed. I could do the letters, of course, it was just a question of scribbling down enough of them, and then I went into the kitchen, too. A light shone from the empty oven. Yngve stood stirring a bowl on the counter with his sleeves rolled up and an apron on. Mom sat knitting.

“Haven’t you finished yet?” I said, sitting down at my place.

“Another day or two,” she said, pulling at the wool, as though she were in a boat and jig fishing. “It depends on how much I get done.”

“Geir and I were up at Anne Lisbet and Solveig’s today,” I said.

“Oh?” Mom said. “Who are they? Some girls in your class?”

I nodded.

“Have you started playing with girls now?” Yngve said.

“Yes. And?” I said.

“Are you in love or what?”

I glanced at Mom hesitantly, then at Yngve.

“I think so,” I said.

Yngve laughed.

“You’re only seven! You can’t be in love!”

“Don’t laugh at him, Yngve,” Mom said.

Yngve blushed and studied the bowl in front of him.

“Feelings are feelings whether you’re seven or seventy. It means the same, you know.”

There was a silence.

“But it can’t go anywhere!” Yngve said.

“You might be right about that,” Mom said. “But you can feel something for others despite that, can’t you?”

“You were in love with Anne,” I said.

“I was not,” he said.

“You said you were.”

“Well, never mind,” Mom said. “How’s the mix going? Will it be ready soon?”

“Think so,” Yngve said.

“May I have a look?” Mom said, putting her knitting in the basket at her feet and getting up.

“Will you grease the tray, Karl Ove?”

She took the little pan with the melting butter off the heat, passed me a brush, and took the baking tray from the drawer at the bottom of the stove. The butter was ready; you could see that by the color: there were several inlets and some large lagoons of light brown in the thin yellow liquid. If you heated it slowly the color became fuller and purer. I dipped the brush in the pan and swept it over the baking tray. Butter heated slowly could make the bristles stiffen, so you had to dab rather than stroke it on, whereas with a thin brown liquid it was easier to cover a surface. It took ten seconds and the tray was ready. I sat down again and Yngve started shaping the scones. Downstairs a door opened. Straight afterward came the sound of Dad’s heavy footsteps on the stairs. I straightened up in my chair. Mom sat down again, put her knitting on her lap, and looked up as Dad appeared in the doorway.

“Everything’s in full swing here, I can see,” he said, tucking his thumbs through the loops of his belt and pulling up his trousers. “Soon be something to eat, I presume.”

“In a quarter of an hour or so,” Mom said.

“Are those scones you’re making, Yngve?” he said.

Yngve just nodded without looking up.

“Good,” Dad said. He turned and went into the living room. The floor creaked lightly under his weight. He stopped by the television, switched it on, and ensconced himself in the brown leather chair.

I knew that voice. It was the man on the doctor program. A bit hoarse, it sounded rusty, it issued from a face that always leaned backward as though addressing itself to the ceiling while his eyes always looked down, as though to direct his voice to the right place.

I got up and went into the living room.

The screen showed an open wound with blood and skin and flesh surrounded by blue linen.

“Is that an operation?” I said.

“It is indeed,” Dad said.

“May I watch?”

“Yes, I don’t think there would be any harm in that.”

I perched on the edge of the sofa. You could see deep into the body. There was a kind of shaft into it, held open by several metal clips, revealing a layer of flesh that the blood appeared to have just left, and a glistening, membrane-like organ at the very bottom, also stained with blood, all illuminated by a sharp, almost white, light. A pair of rubber-gloved hands rummaged around, apparently at home in these surroundings. Occasionally you saw a fuller picture. Then it became clear the shaft had been opened in a patient lying on a table otherwise completely covered by a blue plastic-like material and that the hands belonged to a surgeon who constituted the focal point of a circle of five people, all dressed in green, the two in the center leaning over the body under a saurian lamp, the other three next to them with trays of instruments and all sorts of equipment I had never seen before.

Dad got up.

“No, I can’t watch this,” he said. “How can they show this on TV on a Monday night!”

“Can I watch it anyway?” I said.

“Yes, of course,” he said, heading for the staircase.

The membrane at the bottom was pulsating. Blood streamed over it, and it sent the blood back, then seemed to rise, until the blood washed across again and once more it had to send it back and once more it had to rise.

Suddenly I realized this was a heart I was watching.

How incredibly sad.

Not because the heart was beating and couldn’t escape, it wasn’t that. The point was that the heart should not be seen, it should be allowed to beat in secret, hidden from our sight, it was obvious, you understood that when you saw it, a little animal without eyes, it should pound and throb inside your chest unseen.

But I kept watching. Medical programs were my favorite on TV, and especially the few that showed operations. A long time ago I had decided I would be a surgeon when I grew up. Mom and Dad sometimes mentioned this to others, it was intended to be amusing because I’d said it when I was so small, but I really meant it, that was what I wanted to do when I grew up, cut up other people and perform operations on them. I often did drawings or paintings of operations with blood and knives and nurses and lamps, and Mom had asked me many times why I drew and painted so much blood, why couldn’t I choose something else, houses and grass and sun, for example, and that was fine by me, but it wasn’t what I
wanted
to do. Divers, sailing ships, rockets, and operations, they were what I wanted to draw and paint, not houses and grass and sun.

When Yngve was very small and they lived in Oslo he had said he wanted to be a garbage collector when he grew up. Grandma laughed a lot about that and often mentioned it. In the same breath she said Dad had wanted to be an odd job man when he was small. She laughed just as much about that, sometimes so much tears rolled down her cheeks, even though she must have said it a hundred times. My wanting to become a surgeon wasn’t funny in the same way, it carried a different message, but then I was also a lot older than Yngve had been when he said he wanted to be a garbage collector.

Step by step all the clips and tubes were removed from the shaft in the body. Then the host of the show came on camera and talked about what we had just seen. I got up and went back into the kitchen, where the scones were cooling down on the tray on top of the stove, a pan of hot water for tea was steaming beside them, and Mom was setting the table with plates, cups, knives, and a variety of spreads.

The next day the temperature had fallen and the rain had stopped. My winter boots from last year were too small, and Mom found some woolen socks I could wear inside my rubber boots instead. The blue Puffa jacket still fit, so I wore that for the first time since last year. And then, as soon as I was out of the house, there was a blue bobble cap that I pulled down so far over my face that it formed a black ceiling to my vision. Anne Lisbet was wearing a light-blue Puffa jacket, in smooth, shiny material, unlike mine, which was coarse and matte, a white cap from which her black hair protruded, a white scarf, blue trousers, and a brand-new pair of red boots. She was standing with some girls and didn’t return my gaze when I looked at them.

The color of her jacket was just incredibly attractive.

I wanted one like it.

When we got to school and everyone had left their satchels in a line, I suggested to Geir that we steal their caps. He would take Solveig’s and I would take Anne Lisbet’s. She was standing with her back to us, and when I grabbed it, she whirled around with a scream. I waited until her eyes met mine, and then I ran off. I didn’t run so fast that she couldn’t catch me or so slowly that everyone would see I was waiting.

I could hear her footsteps on the tarmac behind me.

And then she wrapped her arms around me.

Oh! Oh! Oh!

Her wonderfully thick down jacket pressed against mine, she smiled, and shouted,
Let me have it, let me have it,
and I simply couldn’t drag the moment out any longer by holding the cap high above her head, the joy inside me was too strong, I just gave it to her and stood still and watched her put it on her head and walk away.

Then she turned and smiled at me!

And her eyes, oh, her eyes, so black and beautiful, they were gleaming! It was like entering a zone of shining light against which everything outside paled and lost meaning. The bell rang, we marched up the stairs, along the corridor, sat down at our desks, and took out our books. And I did what we were told, listened when we had to listen, chatted away as usual, drew my sunken wrecks and swimming frogmen, ate my packed lunch and drank my milk, played soccer at recess, sat beside Geir, and sang in the bus on the way home, ran through the flock of children with my satchel hanging off my back down the last hill, present in both body and soul, yet absent, because inside me there suddenly existed a new sky under whose vaults even the most familiar of thoughts and actions appeared new.

When we went to see Anne Lisbet that day she was standing in the middle of a crowd of kids on the cul-de-sac outside her house. Two of them were swinging a rope between them like a machine, it lashed the ground like a whip, and one after the other they slipped in, stood, and jumped up and down a few times, then slipped out, so that the next person could step in. She was wearing the same cap and the same scarf, and she smiled at us as we stopped in front of them.