My Struggle: Book 3 (53 page)

“Yes, ambiguous sexual identity. A bit woman, a bit man.”

He looked at me.

“It’ll pass, Karl Ove.”

“Doesn’t seem like it,” I said, turning and walking back home while Yngve continued up the hill.

I was right, it never stopped, but somehow I became accustomed to it, that was how it was, I was the jessie, and even if thoughts about it tormented me in a way I had not experienced before, and the shadows it cast were long, there was enough happening around me, most of such an intensity it nullified everything else while this carried on.

We drifted around, that was what we did. Actually I always had but whereas the point for Geir and me during all these years had been to seek out secret places, places for ourselves, the opposite was now the case, with Lars we sought places where something might happen. We hitchhiked everywhere, to Hove if there was something going on there, over to Skilsø, to the east of the island, hanging around outside B-Max in the hope that something might happen, someone might come, hanging out around the Fina station, drifting around town, cycling up to the new sports hall even though we weren’t going to do any training, up to the parish hall where Ten Sing had their rehearsals, because at the sports hall there were girls, at Ten Sing there were girls, and that was all we talked and thought about. Girls, girls, girls. Who had big breasts and who had small ones. Who might become attractive and who was attractive. Who had the nicest butt. Who had the best legs. Who had the nicest eyes. Who we might have a chance with. Who was unattainable.

One dark winter evening we caught the bus to Hastensund, where there was a girl who went to Ten Sing, she had blonde hair, was a bit on the chubby side, but was stunningly beautiful, we were interested in her even if she was a year older, we knocked at the door, and then we sat there in her room, chatting shyly about this and that, burning with lust, and on the bus home we were so full of emotion we could barely utter a word.

One weekend Mom visited Dad in Kristiansand and Lars stayed over with me, we ate potato chips, drank Coke, ate ice cream, and watched TV, it was in the spring, the night before the first of May, the TV was showing a rock concert that night to keep Oslo kids indoors who might otherwise be wandering the streets and throwing stones. We didn’t have any porn magazines, I didn’t dare keep any in the house despite the fact that we were on our own, so we had to make do with
Insect Summer
by Knut Faldbakken, the passage I had read so many times the book automatically opened at the right page. We decided we couldn’t be alone, we had to invite some girls, and Lars suggested Bente.

“Bente?” I said. “Which Bente?”

“The one who lives up here,” Lars said. “She’s lovely.”

“
Bente?
” I almost shrieked. “But she’s
younger
than us!”

I had seen her all my life, she had always been smaller, never a girl I had considered. But now she had developed, Lars declared, he had seen, she had breasts and everything. And she was a beauty. A real beauty!

I hadn’t noticed, but now that he said it …

We threw on our jackets and ran up the hill and rang her doorbell. She was surprised to see us, but down to our house, no, she couldn’t do that, not tonight.

OK, we said, another time then!

Yes, another time.

So back we went and sat down in front of the TV to watch one band after the other while discussing what we saw and all the girls we would have liked to watch it with. Siv from our class, whom I hadn’t considered either, suddenly became the focus of our interest, we rang her doorbell, too. What would happen afterward we had no idea.

And so we went on, drifting around, restless, full of ungovernable desire. We read porn magazines, it physically hurt to look at the pictures, they were so close and yet so far, so endlessly far away, not that that prevented them from arousing all these tremendously powerful feelings in us. I felt like shouting as loudly as I could every time I saw a girl, knocking her over, and tearing off all her clothes. The thought made my throat constrict and my heart pulsate. It was incredible, the thought that they were naked under the clothes they were wearing beside us, all of them, and they could, theoretically, remove them themselves. It was an impossible thought.

How could everyone walk around knowing that, without ultimately running completely amok?

Did they repress it? Were they acting cool?

I couldn’t do that. I thought of nothing else, it was all I had in my head from the moment I woke up in the morning to the moment I went to bed at night.

Yes, we looked at porn magazines. We also played cards, we pulled out the pack everywhere and in all situations, we went to friends’ homes, we went to the youth club, listened to music, played soccer, went swimming for as long as it was possible, went apple scrumping, drifted around, hung out here, hung out there, and chatted nonstop.

Kjersti?

Marianne?

Tove?

Bente-Lill?

Kristin?

Lise?

Anne Lisbet?

Kajsa?

Marian?

Lene?

Lene’s sister?

Lene’s
mother
?

Never, later in life, have I had my finger on the pulse the way I had then with the girls living around us in those years. Later I may have doubted whether Svein Jarvoll’s
Journey to Australia
was a good or a bad novel, or whether Hermann Broch was a better writer than Robert Musil, but I was never ever in any doubt that Lene was a good-looking girl and that she was in quite a different league from, for example, Siv.

Lars had a lot going on around him as well, he sailed quite a bit, with his mother and father, and alone in the Europe dinghy. He was good at skiing, light years better than me, sometimes he went with his father to Åmli or Hovden and he had his old pals out there, too, Erik and Sveinung. When he was busy I stayed in my room, played music, read books, talked to Yngve or Mom. I never went into the forest, up into the hills, down to the pontoons, or into Gamle Tybakken anymore.

One Sunday at the end of the winter I cycled out to see Lars. He was going to Åmli with his father and Sveinung to ski down the slalom slope there. I couldn’t join them as it had already been planned for a long time. I was so disappointed and it came so unexpectedly that my eyes filled with tears. Lars saw, and I turned away and cycled off. Tears, that was no good, that was the worst.

He called when I got home. There was room for me, too. They could drop by and pick me up. I should have said no, to show that I wasn’t upset and should have explained to him that the tears – I had seen from his expression that he didn’t like them – were not tears, I had something in my eye, the wind had upset my cornea. But I couldn’t, Åmli was a big slalom slope with a lift and everything, I had never been there, so I swallowed my pride and joined them.

His father skied with a fifties elegance I had never seen before.

But the tears had disappointed Lars, and they had disappointed me. Why couldn’t they stay away now that I was thirteen years old? Now that they could not be excused?

One woodworking lesson John started to tease me, I cried, and was so angry I hit him over the head with a wooden bowl as hard as I could, it must have hurt and I was thrown out of the classroom, into the corridor, but he just laughed and came over to me afterward and apologized, I didn’t realize it would make you cry, he said. I didn’t mean it. Everyone had seen how feeble and pathetic I was, and suddenly all the efforts I had made to appear tough, to be one of the tough boys, had gone down the drain. John, who had shown his butt to the teacher on the first day at the new school and who had come in one morning with his eyebrows shaved off and who had started ditching classes. Everyone was expecting him to be one of those looking for a job while still in the eighth class. He had to be rescued. I tried to rescue myself. Lars had weights in his father’s garage, but he pumped iron, too, and one afternoon I asked if I could have a try.

“Be my guest,” he said.

“How much do you lift?” I said.

He told me.

“Can you put the weights on for me?” I said.

“Can’t you do that yourself?”

“I don’t know how to.”

“OK. Come with me.”

I went downstairs with him. He added the weights and put the bar in position. Looked at me.

“I have to do this on my own,” I said.

“Are you kidding?” he said.

“No. Go ahead, I’ll be up soon.”

“OK.”

When he had gone I lay down on the bench. I couldn’t budge the bar. I couldn’t lift it a centimeter. I removed half of the weights. But I still couldn’t lift it. A fraction, though, perhaps two or three centimeters.

I knew you had to lower the bar onto your chest and raise it with your arms fully stretched.

I removed two more.

But I still couldn’t do it.

In the end, I had removed all of the weights and lay there lifting the bar, and nothing but the bar, up and down a few times.

“How was it?” Lars said as I emerged. “How much did you manage?”

“Not as much as you,” I said. “I had to take off two of the weights.”

“Hey, that’s not bad!” Lars said.

“Isn’t it?” I said.

Through all these years, right from the time when I was with Anne Lisbet in the first class, I thought I had learned something each time. That it would get better and better with every new girl I was with. After Kajsa there would be no more setbacks. After her, yes, it would all be fine, now I knew what it was about and could avoid any more mistakes.

But that was not how it turned out.

I fell in love with Lene. She was in the parallel class. She was the best-looking girl in the school. No contest, she won hands down. She was more beautiful than anyone else, but also shy, and I had never experienced that before. There was a fragility about her it was hard not to be attracted by and dream about.

She had a sister who was in the ninth class called Tove and she was the complete antithesis, although also beautiful, but in a boisterous, provocative, mischievous way. Both were very popular with the boys.

Lene only indirectly, though, she was the kind you looked at and pined for in secret. At least I did. Her eyes were narrow, her cheekbones high, cheeks soft and pale, often with a slight flush, she was tall and slim, she held her head at an angle, and often interlaced her fingers as she walked. But she also had something of her sister in her, you could occasionally see it when she laughed, the glint that appeared in her turquoise eyes, and in the obstinacy and unshakable certainty that sometimes shone through, so difficult to reconcile with the otherwise predominant impression of dreamy fragility. Lene was a rose. I looked at her and started to tilt my head the same way she did. That’s how I made contact with her, that’s how we had something in common. I couldn’t hope for more really, because I had set her on too high a pedestal to dare make any kind of approach. The thought of asking her to dance, for example, was absurd. Talking to her was unthinkable. I contented myself with looking and dreaming.

Instead I went out with Hilde. She asked me, I said yes, she was in the same class as Lene, she had a broad, powerful body, almost masculine, was half a head taller than me, with delicate features and a lovely, friendly personality, and she ended it with me two days later because, as she put it, you’re not in the slightest bit in love with me. With you, there is only Lene. No, I said, you’re wrong, but of course she was right. Everyone knew, I thought of nothing else, and when we were in the playground during the break I always knew where she was and who she was with, and that attentiveness couldn’t go unnoticed.

One day Lars said he had heard someone say they had heard her say she wasn’t at all ill-disposed toward me. Despite the fact that I was a jessie. Despite the fact that I had cried in the woodworking class. Despite the fact that I was slow on the soccer field and could barely manage a bench lift.

I looked at her on the playground, she met my eyes and smiled and turned away with pink cheeks.

I decided that I should strike while the iron was hot. I decided that it was now or never. I decided that I had nothing to lose. If she said no, well, nothing had changed.

If she said yes, on the other hand …

One Friday, therefore, I sent Lars over to her with a question. They had been in the same class for six years, he knew her well. And he returned with a smile playing around his lips.

“She said yes,” he said.

“Really?”

“Yes, really. Now you’re going out with Lene.”

Then it started again.

Could I go over to her now?

I looked in her direction. She smiled at me.

What should I say when I was there?

“Off you go now,” Lars said. “Give her a kiss from me.”

He didn’t push me across the playground, but it wasn’t far from it.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi,” she said.

She looked down; one foot squirmed around on the tarmac.

God, how beautiful she was.

Ay yay yay yay.

“Thank you for saying yes,” my mouth said.

She laughed.

“My pleasure,” she said. “What class do you have now?”

“Class?”

“Yes.”

“Err … is it Norwegian?”

“Don’t ask me,” she said.

The bell rang.

“Will we see each other afterward?” I said. “After school, I mean?”

“All right,” she said. “I’ve got training in the sports hall. We can see each other afterward.”

The question was not how this would go, the question was how many days it would last before it stuttered and she brought it to an end. I knew that, but I tried anyway, I had to put up a fight, you could never be sure, and she was present inside me for every single waking minute, partly as a kind of unconstrained, excited feeling, a constant sensation, partly as a more nebulous perception of her essence and character. Yes, I would have to fight, even though I didn’t really have anything to fight with. I didn’t even know what the fight was about. To keep her, yes, but how? By being myself? Don’t make me laugh. No, I would have to draw on others, I realized that, and during these days I sought out the company of others with her so that all the conversation didn’t rest on my shoulders. Up to the sports hall with Lene, over to Kjenna’s with Lene, over to the Skilsø ferry with Lene. We had all been given a Bible at school, the preparations for our confirmation would start next autumn, and it struck me that I could ask her what she had done with her Bible and then I could say I had ditched mine, and I would have a theme going, so that I could ask people I met what they had done with their Bible. Lene listened, Lene followed me, Lene started to get bored. She was a rose, we kissed at a crossroads, and we walked hand in hand on the playground, but I was only a little boy and even though I had perfectly even, white teeth after my braces had been taken off, that wasn’t enough, Lene was bored with me, and one evening when she came to soccer practice with me I saw her leave the spectators’ stand and disappear, she was gone for the whole of the last hour, I went in and changed with the others, suspecting that something was wrong, stopped in the entrance hall where the reception desk and the Coke machine were and looked outside: there was Lene Rasmussen, there was Vidar Eiker, they were chatting and laughing, and I could see from the way she was laughing it was over. Vidar Eiker had left school the year before, he was one of the group who hung around at the Fina station, and he had a moped, which he was leaning on at this minute.