My Struggle: Book One

Part 1

For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops. Sooner or later, one day, this pounding action will cease of its own accord, and the blood will begin to run towards the body’s lowest point, where it will collect in a small pool, visible from outside as a dark, soft patch on ever whitening skin, as the temperature sinks, the limbs stiffen and the intestines drain. These changes in the first hours occur so slowly and take place with such inexorability that there is something almost ritualistic about them, as though life capitulates according to specific rules, a kind of gentleman’s agreement to which the representatives of death also adhere, inasmuch as they always wait until life has retreated before they launch their invasion of the new landscape. By which point, however, the invasion is irrevocable. The enormous hordes of bacteria that begin to infiltrate the body’s innards cannot be halted. Had they but tried a few hours earlier, they would have met with immediate resistance; however everything around them is quiet now, as they delve deeper and deeper into the moist darkness. They advance on the Havers Channels, the Crypts of Lieberkühn, the Isles of Langerhans. They proceed to Bowman’s Capsule in the Renes, Clark’s Column in the Spinalis, the black substance in the Mesencephalon. And they arrive at the heart. As yet, it is intact, but deprived of the activity to which end its whole construction has been designed, there is something strangely desolate about it, like a production plant that workers have been forced to flee in haste, or so it appears, the stationary vehicles shining yellow against the darkness of the forest, the huts deserted, a line of fully loaded cable- buckets stretching up the hillside.

The moment life departs the body, it belongs to death. At one with lamps, suitcases, carpets, door handles, windows. Fields, marshes, streams, mountains, clouds, the sky. None of these is alien to us. We are constantly surrounded by objects and phenomena from the realm of death. Nonetheless, there are few things that arouse in us greater distaste than to a see a human being caught up in it, at least if we are to judge by the efforts we make to keep corpses out of sight. In larger hospitals they are not only hidden away in discrete, inaccessible rooms, even the pathways there are concealed, with their own elevators and basement corridors, and should you stumble upon one of them, the dead bodies being wheeled by are always covered. When they have to be transported from the hospital it is through a dedicated exit, into vehicles with tinted glass; in the church grounds there is a separate, windowless room for them; during the funeral ceremony they lie in closed coffins until they are lowered into the earth or cremated in the oven. It is hard to imagine what practical purpose this procedure might serve. The uncovered bodies could be wheeled along the hospital corridors, for example, and thence be transported in an ordinary taxi without this posing a particular risk to anyone. The elderly man who dies during a cinema performance might just as well remain in his seat until the film is over, and during the next two for that matter. The teacher who has a heart attack in the school playground does not necessarily have to be driven away immediately; no damage is done by leaving him where he is until the caretaker has time to attend to him, even though that might not be until sometime in the late afternoon or evening. What difference would it make if a bird were to alight on him and take a peck? Would what awaits him in the grave be any better just because it is hidden? As long as the dead are not in the way there is no need for any rush, they cannot die a second time. Cold snaps in the winter should be particularly propitious in such circumstances. The homeless who freeze to death on benches and in doorways, the suicidal who jump off high buildings and bridges, elderly women who fall down staircases, traffic victims trapped in wrecked cars, the young man who, in a drunken stupor, falls into the lake after a night on the town, the small girl who ends up under the wheel of a bus, why all this haste to remove them from the public eye? Decency? What could be more decent than to allow the girl’s mother and father to see her an hour or two later, lying in the snow at the site of the accident, in full view, her crushed head and the rest of her body, her blood-spattered hair and the spotless padded jacket? Visible to the whole world, no secrets, the way she was. But even this one hour in the snow is unthinkable. A town that does not keep its dead out of sight, that leaves people where they died, on highways and byways, in parks and parking lots, is not a town but a hell. The fact that this hell reflects our life experience in a more realistic and essentially truer way is of no consequence. We know this is how it is, but we do not want to face it. Hence the collective act of repression symbolized by the concealment of our dead.

What exactly it is that is being repressed, however, is not so easy to say. It cannot be death itself, for its presence in society is much too prominent. The number of deaths reported in newspapers or shown on the TV news every day varies slightly according to circumstances, but the annual average will presumably tend to be constant, and since it is spread over so many channels virtually impossible to avoid. Yet that kind of death does not seem threatening. Quite the contrary, it is something we are drawn to and will happily pay to see. Add the enormously high body count in fiction and it becomes even harder to understand the system that keeps death out of sight. If the phenomenon of death does not frighten us, why then this distaste for dead bodies? It must mean either that there are two kinds of death or that there is a disparity between our conception of death and death as it actually turns out to be, which in effect boils down to the same thing. What is significant here is that our conception of death is so strongly rooted in our consciousness that we are not only shaken when we see that reality deviates from it, but we also try to conceal this with all the means at our disposal. Not as a result of some form of conscious deliberation, as has been the case with funeral rites, the form and meaning of which are negotiable nowadays, and thus have shifted from the sphere of the irrational to the rational, from the collective to the individual — no, the way we remove bodies has never been the subject of debate, it has always been just something we have done, out of a necessity for which no one can state a reason but everyone feels: if your father dies on the lawn one windswept Sunday in autumn, you carry him indoors if you can, and if you can’t, you at least cover him with a blanket. This impulse, however, is not the only one we have with regard to the dead. No less conspicuous than our hiding the corpses is the fact that we always lower them to ground level as fast as possible. A hospital that transports its bodies upward, that sites its cold chambers on the upper floors is practically inconceivable. The dead are stored as close to the ground as possible. And the same principle applies to the agencies that attend them; an insurance company may well have its offices on the eighth floor, but not a funeral parlor. All funeral parlors have their offices as close to street level as possible. Why this should be so is hard to say; one might be tempted to believe that it was based on some ancient convention that originally had a practical purpose, such as a cellar being cold and therefore best suited to storing corpses, and that this principle had been retained in our era of refrigerators and cold-storage rooms, had it not been for the notion that transporting bodies upward in buildings seems contrary to the laws of nature, as though height and death are mutually incompatible. As though we possessed some kind of chthonic instinct, something deep within us that urges us to move death down to the earth whence we came.

It might thus appear that death is relayed through two distinct systems. One is associated with concealment and gravity, earth and darkness, the other with openness and airiness, ether and light. A father and his child are killed as the father attempts to pull the child out of the line of fire in a town somewhere in the Middle East, and the image of them huddled together as the bullets thud into flesh, causing their bodies to shudder, as it were, is caught on camera, transmitted to one of the thousands of satellites orbiting the Earth and broadcast on TV sets around the world, from where it slips into our consciousness as yet another picture of death or dying. These images have no weight, no depth, no time, and no place, nor do they have any connection to the bodies that spawned them. They are nowhere and everywhere. Most of them just pass through us and are gone; for diverse reasons some linger and live on in the dark recesses of the brain. An off-piste skier falls and severs an artery in her thigh, blood streams out leaving a red trail down the white slope; she is dead even before her body comes to a halt. A plane takes off, flames shoot out from the engines as it climbs, the sky above the suburban houses is blue, the plane explodes in a ball of fire beneath. A fishing smack sinks off the coast of northern Norway one night, the crew of seven drown, next morning the event is described in all the newspapers, it is a so-called mystery, the weather was calm and no mayday call was sent from the boat, it just disappeared, a fact which the TV stations underline that evening by flying over the scene of the drama in a helicopter and showing pictures of the empty sea. The sky is overcast, the gray-green swell heavy but calm, as though possessing a different temperament from the choppy, white-flecked waves that burst forth here and there. I am sitting alone watching, it is some time in spring, I suppose, for my father is working in the garden. I stare at the surface of the sea without listening to what the reporter says, and suddenly the outline of a face emerges. I don’t know how long it stays there, a few seconds perhaps, but long enough for it to have a huge impact on me. The moment the face disappears I get up to find someone I can tell. My mother is on the evening shift, my brother is playing soccer, and the other children on our block won’t listen, so it has to be Dad, I think, and hurry down the stairs, jump into shoes, thread my arms through the sleeves of my jacket, open the door, and run around the house. We are not allowed to run in the garden, so just before I enter his line of vision, I slow down and start walking. He is standing at the rear of the house, down in what will be the vegetable plot, lunging at a boulder with a sledgehammer. Even though the hollow is only a few meters deep, the black soil he has dug up and is standing on together with the dense clump of rowan trees growing beyond the fence behind him cause the twilight to deepen. As he straightens up and turns to me, his face is almost completely shrouded in darkness.

Nevertheless I have more than enough information to know his mood. This is apparent not from his facial expressions but his physical posture, and you do not read it with your mind but with your intuition.

He puts down the sledgehammer and removes his gloves.

“Well?” he says.

“I’ve just seen a face in the sea on TV,” I say, coming to a halt on the lawn above him. The neighbor had felled a pine tree earlier in the afternoon and the air is filled with the strong resin smell from the logs lying on the other side of the stone wall.

“A diver?” Dad says. He knows I am interested in divers, and I suppose he cannot imagine I would find anything else interesting enough to make me come out and tell him about it.

I shake my head.

“It wasn’t a person. It was something I saw in the sea.”

“Something you saw, eh,” he says, taking the packet of cigarettes from his breast pocket.

I nod and turn to go.

“Wait a minute,” he says.

He strikes a match and bends his head forward to light the cigarette. The flame carves out a small grotto of light in the gray dusk.

“Right,” he says.

After taking a deep drag, he places one foot on the rock and stares in the direction of the forest on the other side of the road. Or perhaps he is staring at the sky above the trees.

“Was it Jesus you saw?” he asks, looking up at me. Had it not been for the friendly voice and the long pause before the question I would have thought he was poking fun at me. He finds it rather embarrassing that I am a Christian; all he wants of me is that I do not stand out from the other kids, and of all the teeming mass of kids on the estate no one other than his youngest son calls himself a Christian.

But he is really giving this some thought.

I feel a rush of happiness because he actually cares, while still feeling vaguely offended that he can underestimate me in this way.

I shake my head.

“It wasn’t Jesus,” I say.

“That’s nice to hear,” Dad says with a smile. Higher up on the hillside the faint whistle of bicycle tires on tarmac can be heard. The sound grows, and it is so quiet on the estate that the low singing tone at the heart of the whistle resonates loud and clear, and soon afterward the bicycle races past us on the road.

Dad takes another drag at the cigarette before tossing it half-smoked over the fence, then coughs a couple of times, pulls on his gloves, and grabs the sledgehammer again.

“Don’t give it another thought,” he says, glancing up at me.

I was eight years old that evening, my father thirty-two. Even though I still can’t say that I understand him or know what kind of person he was, the fact that I am now seven years older than he was then makes it easier for me to grasp some things. For example, how great the difference was between our days. While my days were jam-packed with meaning, when each step opened a new opportunity, and when every opportunity filled me to the brim, in a way which now is actually incomprehensible, the meaning of his days was not concentrated in individual events but spread over such large areas that it was not possible to comprehend them in anything other than abstract terms. “Family” was one such term, “career” another. Few or no unforeseen opportunities at all can have presented themselves in the course of his days, he must always have known in broad outline what they would bring and how he would react. He had been married for twelve years, he had worked as a middle-school teacher for eight of them, he had two children, a house and a car. He had been elected onto the local council and appointed to the executive committee representing the Liberal Party. During the winter months he occupied himself with philately, not without some progress: inside a short space of time he had become one of the country’s leading stamp collectors, while in the summer months gardening took up what leisure he had. What he was thinking on this spring evening I have no idea, nor even what perception he had of himself as he straightened up in the gloom with the sledgehammer in his hands, but I am fairly sure that there was some feeling inside him that he understood the surrounding world quite well. He knew who all the neighbors on the estate were and what social status they held in relation to himself, and I imagine he knew quite a bit about what they preferred to keep to themselves, as he taught their children and also because he had a good eye for others’ weaknesses. Being a member of the new educated middle class he was also well-informed about the wider world, which came to him every day via the newspaper, radio, and television. He knew quite a lot about botany and zoology because he had been interested while he was growing up, and though not exactly conversant with other science subjects he did at least have some command of their basic principles from secondary school. He was better at history, which he had studied at university along with Norwegian and English. In other words, he was not an expert at anything, apart from maybe pedagogy, but he knew a bit about everything. In this respect he was a typical school teacher, though, from a time when secondary school teaching still carried some status. The neighbor who lived on the other side of the wall, Prestbakmo, worked as a teacher at the same school, as did the neighbor who lived on top of the tree-covered slope behind our house, Olsen, while one of the neighbors who lived at the far end of the ring road, Knudsen, was the head teacher of another middle school. So when my father raised the sledgehammer above his head and let it fall on the rock that spring evening in the mid 1970s, he was doing so in a world he knew and was familiar with. It was not until I myself reached the same age that I understood there was indeed a price to pay for this. As your perspective of the world increases not only is the pain it inflicts on you less but also its meaning. Understanding the world requires you to take a certain distance from it. Things that are too small to see with the naked eye, such as molecules and atoms, we magnify. Things that are too large, such as cloud formations, river deltas, constellations, we reduce. At length we bring it within the scope of our senses and we stabilize it with fixer. When it has been fixed we call it knowledge. Throughout our childhood and teenage years, we strive to attain the correct distance to objects and phenomena. We read, we learn, we experience, we make adjustments. Then one day we reach the point where all the necessary distances have been set, all the necessary systems have been put in place. That is when time begins to pick up speed. It no longer meets any obstacles, everything is set, time races through our lives, the days pass by in a flash and before we know what is happening we are forty, fifty, sixty. . Meaning requires content, content requires time, time requires resistance. Knowledge is distance, knowledge is stasis and the enemy of meaning. My picture of my father on that evening in 1976 is, in other words, twofold: on the one hand I see him as I saw him at that time, through the eyes of an eight-year-old: unpredictable and frightening; on the other hand, I see him as a peer through whose life time is blowing and unremittingly sweeping large chunks of meaning along with it.

The crack of sledgehammer on rock resounded through the estate. A car came up the gentle slope from the main road and passed, its lights blazing. The door of the neighboring house opened, Prestbakmo paused on the doorstep, pulled on his work gloves, and seemed to sniff the clear night air before grabbing the wheelbarrow and trundling it across the lawn. There was a smell of gunpowder from the rock Dad was pounding, of pine from the logs behind the stone wall, freshly dug soil and forest, and in the gentle northerly breeze a whiff of salt. I thought of the face I had seen in the sea. Even though only a couple of minutes had passed since I last considered it, everything had changed. Now it was Dad’s face I saw.

Down in the hollow he took a break from hammering at the rock.

“Are you still there, boy?”

I nodded.

“Get yourself inside.”

I started to walk.

“And Karl Ove, remember,” he said.

I paused, turned my head, puzzled.

“No running this time.”

I stared at him. How could he know I had run?

“And shut your maw,” he said. “You look like an idiot.”

I did as he said, closed my mouth and walked slowly around the house. Reaching the front, I saw the road was full of children. The oldest stood in a group with their bikes, which in the dusk almost appeared as an extension of their bodies. The youngest were playing Kick-the-Can. The ones who had been tagged stood inside a chalk circle on the pavement; the others were hidden at various places in the forest down from the road, out of sight of the person guarding the can but visible to me.

The lights on the bridge masts glowed red above the black treetops. Another car came up the hill. The headlights illuminated the cyclists first, a brief glimpse of reflectors, metal, Puffa jackets, black eyes and white faces, then the children, who had taken no more than the one necessary step aside to allow the car to pass and were now standing like ghosts, gawking.

It was the Trollneses, the parents of Sverre, a boy in my class. He didn’t seem to be with them.

I turned and followed the red taillights until they disappeared over the summit of the hill. Then I went in. For a while I tried to lie on my bed reading, but could not settle, and instead went into Yngve’s room, from where I could see Dad. When I could see him I felt safer with him, and in a way that was what mattered most. I knew his moods and had learned how to predict them long ago, by means of a kind of subconscious categorization system, I have later come to realize, whereby the relationship between a few constants was enough to determine what was in store for me, allowing me to make my own preparations. A kind of metereology of the mind. . The speed of the car up the gentle gradient to the house, the time it took him to switch off the engine, grab his things, and step out, the way he looked around as he locked the car, the subtle nuances of the various sounds that rose from the hall as he removed his coat — everything was a sign, everything could be interpreted. To this was added information about where he had been, and with whom, how long he had been away, before the conclusion, which was the only part of the process of which I was conscious, was drawn. So, what frightened me most was when he turned up without warning. . when for some reason I had been inattentive. .

How on earth did he know I had been running?

This was not the first time he had caught me out in a way I found incomprehensible. One evening that autumn, for example, I had hidden a bag of sweets under the duvet for the express reason that I had a hunch he would come into my room, and there was no way he would believe my explanation of how I had laid my hands on the money to buy them. When, sure enough, he did come in, he stood watching me for a few seconds.

“What have you got hidden in your bed?” he asked.

How could he possibly have known?

Outside, Prestbakmo switched on the powerful lamp that was mounted over the flagstones where he usually worked. The new island of light that emerged from the blackness displayed a whole array of objects that he stood stock-still ogling. Columns of paint cans, jars containing paintbrushes, logs, bits of planking, folded tarpaulins, car tires, a bicycle frame, some toolboxes, tins of screws and nails of all shapes and sizes, a tray of milk cartons with flower seedlings, sacks of lime, a rolled-up hose pipe, and leaning against the wall, a board on which every conceivable tool was outlined, presumably intended for the hobby room in the cellar.

Glancing outside at Dad again, I saw him crossing the lawn with the sledgehammer in one hand and a spade in the other. I took a couple of hasty steps backward. As I did so the front door burst open. It was Yngve. I looked at my watch. Twenty-eight minutes past eight. When, straight afterward, he came up the stairs with the familiar, slightly jerky, almost duck-like gait we had developed so as to be able to walk fast inside the house without making a sound, he was breathless and ruddy-cheeked.

“Where’s Dad?” he asked as soon as he was in the room.

“In the garden,” I said. “But you’re not late. Look, it’s half past eight now.”

I showed him my watch.

He walked past me and pulled the chair from under the desk. He still smelled of outdoors. Cold air, forest, gravel, tarmac.

“Have you been messing with my cassettes?” he asked.

“No,” I answered.

“What are you doing in my room then?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“Can’t you do nothing in your own room?”

Below us, the front door opened again. This time it was Dad’s heavy footsteps traversing the floor downstairs. He had removed his boots outside, as usual, and was on his way to the washroom to change.

“I saw a face in the sea on the news tonight,” I said. “Have you heard anything about it? Do you know if anyone else saw it?”

Yngve eyed me with a half-curious, half-dismissive expression.

“What are you babbling on about?”

“You know the fishing boat that sank?”

He gave a barely perceptible nod.

“When they were showing the place where it sank on the news I saw a face in the sea.”

“A dead body?”

“No. It wasn’t a real face. The sea had formed into the shape of a face.”

For a moment he watched me without saying anything. Then he tapped a forefinger on his temple.

“Don’t you believe me?” I said. “It’s absolutely true.”

“The truth is you’re a waste of space.”

At that moment Dad switched off the tap downstairs, and I decided it was best to go to my room now so that there was no chance of meeting him on the landing. But, I did not want Yngve to have the last word.

“You’re the one who’s a waste of space,” I said.

He could not even be bothered to answer. Just turned his face toward me, stuck out his top teeth and blew air through them like a rabbit. The gesture was a reference to my protruding teeth. I broke away and made off before he could see my tears. As long as I was alone my crying didn’t bother me. And this time it had worked, hadn’t it? Because he hadn’t seen me?

I paused inside the door of my room and wondered for moment whether to go to the bathroom. I could rinse my face with cold water and remove the telltale signs. But Dad was on his way up the stairs, so I made do with wiping my eyes on the sleeve of my sweater. The thin layer of moisture that the dry material spread across my eye made the surfaces and colors of the room blur as though it had suddenly sunk and was now under water, and so real was this perception that I raised my arms and made a few swimming strokes as I walked toward the writing desk. In my mind I was wearing a metal diver’s helmet from the early days of diving, when they bestrode the seabed with leaden shoes and suits as thick as elephant skin, with an oxygen pipe attached to their heads like a kind of trunk. I wheezed through my mouth and staggered around for a while with the heavy, sluggish movements of divers from bygone days until the horror of the sensation slowly began to seep in like cold water.

A few months before, I had seen the TV series The Mysterious Island, based on Jules Verne’s novel, and the story of those men who landed their air balloon on a deserted island in the Atlantic had made an enormous impact on me from the very first moment. Everything was electric. The air balloon, the storm, the men dressed in nineteenth-century clothing, the weather-beaten, barren island where they had been marooned, which apparently was not as deserted as they imagined, mysterious and inexplicable things were always happening around them. . but in that case who were the others? The answer came without warning toward the end of one episode. There was someone in the underwater caves. . a number of humanoid creatures. . in the light from the lamps they were carrying they saw glimpses of smooth, masked heads. . fins. . they resembled a kind of lizard but walked upright. . with containers on their backs. . one turned, he had no eyes. .

I did not scream when I saw these things, but the horror the images instilled would not go away; even in the bright light of day I could be struck with terror by the very thought of the frogmen in the cave. And now my thoughts were turning me into one of them. My wheezing became theirs, my footsteps theirs, my arms theirs, and closing my eyes, it was those eyeless faces of theirs I saw before me. The cave. . the black water. . the line of frogmen with lamps in their hands. . it became so bad that opening my eyes again did not help. Even though I could see I was in my room, surrounded by familiar objects, the terror did not release its grip. I hardly dared blink for fear that something might happen. Stiffly, I sat down on the bed, reached for my satchel without looking at it, glanced at the school timetable, found Wednesday, read what it said, math, orientation, music, lifted the satchel onto my lap and mechanically flipped through the books inside. This done, I took the open book from the pillow, sat against the wall and began to read. The seconds between looking up soon became minutes, and when Dad shouted it was time for supper, nine o’clock on the dot, it was not horror that had me in its thrall but the book. Tearing myself away from it was quite an effort too.

We were not allowed to cut bread ourselves, nor were we allowed to use the stove, so it was always either Mom or Dad who made supper. If Mom was on the evening shift, Dad did everything: when we came into the kitchen there were two glasses of milk and two plates, each with four slices of bread plus toppings, waiting for us. As a rule, he had prepared the food beforehand, and then kept it in the fridge, and the fact that it was cold made it difficult to swallow, even when I liked the toppings he had chosen. If Mom was at home there was a selection of meats, cheeses, jars on the table, either hers or ours, and this small touch, which allowed us to choose what would be on the table or on our sandwiches, in addition to the bread being at room temperature, this was sufficient to engender a sense of freedom in us: if we could open the cupboard, take the plates, which always made a bit of a clatter when they knocked against each other, and laid them on the table; if we could open the cutlery drawer, which always rattled, and place the knives beside our plates; if we could set out the glasses, open the fridge, take the milk and pour it, then you could be sure we would open our mouths and speak. One thing led naturally to another when we had supper with Mom. We chatted away about anything that occurred to us, she was interested in what we had to say, and if we spilt a few drops of milk or forgot our manners and put the used tea bag on the tablecloth (for she made us tea as well) it was no huge drama. But if it was our participation in the meal that opened this sluice gate of freedom, it was the extent of my father’s presence that regulated its impact. If he was outside the house or down in his study, we chatted as loudly and freely and with as many gesticulations as we liked; if he was on his way up the stairs we automatically lowered our voices and changed the topic of conversation, in case we were talking about something we assumed he might consider unseemly; if he came into the kitchen we stopped altogether, sat there as stiff as pokers, to all outward appearances sunk in concentration over the food; on the other hand, if he retired to the living room we continued to chat, but more warily and more subdued.

This evening, the plates with the four prepared slices awaited us as we entered the kitchen. One with brown goat’s cheese, one with ordinary cheese, one with sardines in tomato sauce, one with clove cheese. I didn’t like sardines and ate that slice first. I couldn’t stand fish; boiled cod, which we had at least once a week, made me feel nauseous, as did the steam from the pan in which it was cooked, its taste and consistency. I felt the same about boiled pollock, boiled coley, boiled haddock, boiled flounder, boiled mackerel, and boiled rose fish. With sardines it wasn’t the taste that was the worst part — I could swallow the tomato sauce by imagining it was ketchup — it was the consistency, and above all the small, slippery tails. They were disgusting. To minimize contact with them I generally bit them off, put them to the side of my plate, nudged some sauce toward the crust and buried the tails in the middle, then folded the bread over. In this way I was able to chew a couple of times without ever coming into contact with the tails, and then wash the whole thing down with milk. If Dad was not there, as was the case this evening, it was possible of course to stuff the tiny tails in my trouser pocket.

Yngve would frown and shake his head when I did that. Then he smiled. I returned the smile.

In the living room Dad stirred in his chair. There was the faint rustle of a box of matches, followed by the brief rasp of the sulfur head across the rough surface and the crackle as it burst into flame, which seemed to merge into the subsequent silence. When the smell of the cigarette seeped into the kitchen, a few seconds later, Yngve bent forward and opened the window as quietly as he could. The sounds that drifted in from the darkness outside transformed the whole atmosphere in the kitchen. All of a sudden it was a part of the country outside. It’s like we’re sitting on a shelf, I thought. The thought caused the hairs on my forearm to stand on end. The wind rose with a sough through the forest and swept over the rustling bushes and trees in the garden below. From the intersection came the sound of children, still crouched over their bikes, chatting. On the hill up to the bridge a motorbike changed gear. And, far off, as if raised above all else, was the drone of a boat on its way into the fjord.

Of course. He had heard me! My feet running on the shingle!

“Want to swap?” Yngve mumbled, pointing to the clove cheese.

“Alright,” I said. Elated to have solved the riddle, I washed down the last bite of the sardine sandwich with a tiny sip of milk and started on the slice Yngve had put on my plate. The trick was to eke out the milk because if you came to the last and there was none left it was almost impossible to swallow. Best of all, of course, was to save a drop until everything was eaten, the milk never tasted as good as then, when it no longer had to fulfill a function, it ran down your throat in its own right, pure and uncontaminated, but unfortunately it was rare for me to manage this. The needs of the moment always trumped promises of the future, however enticing the latter.

But Yngve did manage it. He was a past master at economizing.

Up at Prestbakmo’s, there was a click of bootheels on the doorstep. Then three short cries cut through the night.

“Geir! Geir! Geir!”

The response came from John Beck’s drive after such a time lag that everyone who heard concluded that he had been considering it.

“Right,” he shouted.

Straight after, there was the sound of his running feet. As they approached Gustavsen’s wall, Dad got up in the living room. Something about the way he crossed the floor made me duck my head. Yngve ducked too. Dad came into the kitchen, walked over to the counter, leaned forward without a word, and closed the window with a bang.

“We keep the window closed at night,” he said.

Yngve nodded.

Dad looked at us.

“Eat up now,” he said.

Not until he was back in the living room did I meet Yngve’s glance.

“Ha, ha,” I whispered.

“Ha ha?” he whispered back. “He meant you as well.”

He was two slices ahead of me and was soon able to leave the table and slip into his room, leaving me to chew for a few more minutes. I had been planning to see my father after supper and tell him they would probably be showing the story with the face in the sea on the late-night news, but under the circumstances it was probably best to ditch that plan.

Or was it?

I decided to play it by ear. After leaving the kitchen I usually stuck my head into the living room to say good night. If his voice was neutral or, if luck was with me, friendly even, I would mention it. Otherwise not.

Unfortunately he had chosen to sit on the sofa at the back of the room, and not in one of the two leather chairs in front of the TV, as was his wont. To gain eye contact I could not just poke my head in at the door and say good night, en passant, as it were, which I could have done if he had been sitting in one of the leather chairs, but would have had to take several steps into the room. That would obviously make him aware that I was after something. And that would defeat the whole purpose of playing things by ear. Whatever tone he replied in I would have to come clean.

It wasn’t until I was out of the kitchen that I realized this and was caught in two minds. I came to a halt, all of a sudden I had no choice, for of course he heard me pause, and that was bound to have made him aware I wanted something from him. So I took the four steps to enter his field of vision.

He was sitting with his legs crossed, his elbows on the back of the sofa, head reclining, resting on his interlaced fingers. His gaze, which had been focused on the ceiling, directed itself at me.

“Good night, Dad,” I said.

“Good night,” he said.

“I’m sure they’ll be showing it again on the news,” I said. “Just thought I’d tell you. So that you and Mom can see it.”

“Showing what?”

“The face.” I said.

“The face?”

I must have been standing there with my mouth agape, because he suddenly dropped his jaw and gawked in a way I understood was supposed to be an imitation of me.

“The one I told you about,” I said.

He closed his mouth and sat up straight without averting his eyes.

“Now let’s not be hearing anymore about that face,” he said.

“Alright,” I said.

As I made my way down the corridor I could feel his glare relinquishing its hold on me. I brushed my teeth, undressed, got into pajamas, switched on the lamp above my bed, turned on the main light, settled down, and started reading.

I was only allowed to read for half an hour, until ten o’clock, but usually read until Mom came home at around half past ten. Tonight was no exception. When I heard the Beetle coming up the hill from the main road, I put the book on the floor, switched off the light, and lay in the dark listening for her: the car door slamming, the crunch across the gravel, the front door opening, her coat and scarf being removed, the footsteps up the stairs. . The house seemed different then, when she was in it, and the strange thing was that I could feel it; if, for example, I had gone to sleep before she returned and I awoke in the middle of the night, I could sense she was there, something in the atmosphere had changed without my being able to put my finger on quite what it was, except to say that it had a reassuring effect. The same applied to those occasions when she had come home earlier than expected while I was out: the moment I set foot in the hall I knew she was home.

Of course I would have liked to speak to her, she of all people would have understood the face business, but it did not seem like a burning necessity. The important thing was that she was here. I heard her deposit her keys on the telephone table as she came up the stairs, open the sliding door, say something to Dad and close it behind her. Now and then, especially after evening shifts on the weekend, he would cook a meal for when she arrived. Then they might play records. Once in a while there was an empty bottle of wine on the counter, always the same label, a run-of-the-mill red, and on rare occasions, beer, again the same Vinmonopolet label, two or three bottles of pils from the Arendal brewery, the brown 0.7 liter one with the yellow sailing ship logo.

But not tonight. And I was glad. If they ate together they did not watch TV, and they would have to if I was to accomplish my plan, which was as simple as it was bold: at a few seconds to eleven I would sneak out of bed, tiptoe along the landing, open the sliding door a fraction, and watch the late news from there. I had never done anything like this before, nor even contemplated it. If I wasn’t allowed to do something, I didn’t do it. Ever. Not once, not if my father had said no. Not knowingly at any rate. But this was different since it was not about me, but about them. After all I had seen the image of the face in the sea, and did not need to see it again. I just wanted to find out if they could see what I had seen.

Such were my thoughts as I lay in the dark following the green hands of my alarm clock. When it was as quiet as it was now, I could hear cars driving past on the main road below. An acoustic racetrack that started as they came over the ridge by B-Max, the new supermarket, continued down the cutting by Holtet, past the road to Gamle Tybakken and up the hill to the bridge, where it finished as quietly as it had begun half a minute earlier.

At nine minutes to eleven the door of the house across the road opened. I knelt up in bed and peered out the window. It was Fru Gustavsen; she was walking across the drive with a garbage bag in her hand.

I only realized how rare a sight this was when I saw her. Fru Gustavsen hardly ever showed herself outside; either she was seen indoors or in the passenger seat of their blue Ford Taunus, but even though I knew that, the thought had never struck me before. But now, as she stood by the garbage can, removing the lid, chucking the bag in and closing the lid, all with that somewhat lazy grace that so many fat women possess, it did. She was never outdoors.

The streetlamp beyond our hedge cast its harsh light over her, but unlike the objects she was surrounded by — the garbage can, the white walls of the trailer, the paving slabs, the tarmac — which all reflected the cold, sharp light, her figure seemed to modulate and absorb it. Her bare arms gave off a matte gleam, the material of her white sweater shimmered, her mass of grayishbrown hair appeared almost golden.

For a while she stood looking around, first over at Prestbakmo’s, then up at the Hansens’, then down at the forest across the road.

A cat strutted down towards her, stopped and watched her for a moment. She ran one hand up her arm a few times. Then she turned and went inside.

I glanced at the clock again. Four minutes to eleven. I shivered and wondered briefly whether I should put on a sweater, but concluded that would make everything seem too calculated if I was caught. And it was not going to take very long.

I crept warily to the door and pressed my ear against it. The only real element of risk was that the toilet was on this side of the sliding door. Once there, I would be able to keep an eye on them and have a chance to retreat if they should get up, but if the sliding door was closed, and they came toward me, I wouldn’t know until it was too late.

But in that case I could pretend I was going to the toilet!

Pleased with the solution, I cautiously opened the door and stepped into the passage. Everything was quiet. I tiptoed along the landing, felt the dry wall-to-wall carpeting against my sweaty soles, stopped by the sliding door, heard nothing, pulled it open a fraction, and peered in through the crack.

The TV was on in the corner. The two leather chairs were empty.

So they were on the sofa, both of them.

Perfect.

Then the globe with the N sign whirled round on the screen. I prayed to God they would show the same news report, so that Mom and Dad could see what I saw.

The newscaster started the program by talking about the missing fishing boat, and my heart was pounding in my chest. But the report they showed was different: instead of pictures of calm sea a local police officer was being interviewed on a quay, followed by a woman with a small child in her arms, then the reporter himself spoke against a background of billowing waves.

After the item was over there was the sound of my father’s voice, and laughter. The shame that suffused my body was so strong that I was unable to think. My innards seemed to blanch. The force of the sudden shame was the sole feeling from my childhood that could measure in intensity against that of terror, next to sudden fury, of course, and common to all three was the sense that I myself was being erased. All that mattered was precisely that feeling. So as I turned and went back to my room, I noticed nothing. I know that the window in the stairwell must have been so dark that the hall was reflected in it, I know that the door to Yngve’s bedroom must have been closed, the same as the one to my parents’ bedroom and to the bathroom. I know that Mom’s bunch of keys must have been splayed out on the telephone table, like some mythical beast at rest, with its head of leather and myriad metal legs, I know that the knee-high ceramic vase of dried flowers and straw must have been on the floor next to it, unreconciled, as it were, with the synthetic material of the wall-to-wall carpet. But I saw nothing, heard nothing, thought nothing. I went into my room, lay down on my bed, and switched off the light, and when the darkness closed itself around me, I took such a deep breath that it quivered, while the muscles in my stomach tightened and forced out whimpering noises that were so loud I had to direct them into the soft, and soon very wet, pillow. It helped, in much the same way that vomiting helps when you are nauseous. Long after the tears had stopped coming I lay sobbing. That had a soothing effect. When it too had worn itself out I lay on my stomach, rested my head against my arm, and closed my eyes to sleep.

As I sit here writing this, I recognize that more than thirty years have passed. In the window before me I can vaguely make out the reflection of my face. Apart from one eye, which is glistening, and the area immediately beneath, which dimly reflects a little light, the whole of the left side is in shadow. Two deep furrows divide my forehead, one deep furrow intersects each cheek, all of them as if filled with darkness, and with the eyes staring and serious, and the corners of the mouth drooping, it is impossible not to consider this face gloomy.

What has engraved itself in my face?

Today is the twenty-seventh of February. The time is 11:43 p.m. I, Karl Ove Knausgaard, was born in December 1968, and at the time of writing I am thirty-nine years old. I have three children — Vanja, Heidi, and John — and am in my second marriage, to Linda Boström Knausgaard. All four are asleep in the rooms around me, in an apartment in Malmö where we have lived for a year and a half. Apart from some parents of the children at Vanja and Heidi’s nursery we do not know anyone here. This is not a loss, at any rate not for me, I don’t get anything out of socializing anyway. I never say what I really think, what I really mean, but always more or less agree with whomever I am talking to at the time, pretend that what they say is of interest to me, except when I am drinking, in which case more often than not I go too far the other way, and wake up to the fear of having overstepped the mark. This has become more pronounced over the years and can now last for weeks. When I drink I also have blackouts and completely lose control of my actions, which are generally desperate and stupid, but also on occasion desperate and dangerous. That is why I no longer drink. I do not want anyone to get close to me, I do not want anyone to see me, and this is the way things have developed: no one gets close and no one sees me. This is what must have engraved itself in my face, this is what must have made it so stiff and masklike and almost impossible to associate with myself whenever I happen to catch a glimpse of it in a shop window.

The only thing that does not age in a face is the eyes. They are no less bright the day we die as the day we are born. The blood vessels in them may burst, admittedly, and the corneas may be dulled, but the light in them never changes. There is, in London, a painting that moves me as much every time I go and see it. It is a self-portrait painted by the late Rembrandt. His later paintings are usually characterized by an extreme coarseness of stroke, rendering everything subordinate to the expression of the moment, at once shining and sacred, and still unsurpassed in art, with the possible exception of Hölderlin’s later poems, however dissimilar and incomparable they may be — for where Hölderlin’s light, evoked through language, is ethereal and celestial, Rembrandt’s light, evoked through color, is earthy, metallic, and material — but this one painting which hangs in the National Gallery was painted in a slightly more classically realistic, lifelike style, more in the manner of the younger Rembrandt. But what the painting portrays is the older Rembrandt. Old age. All the facial detail is visible; all the traces life has left there are to be seen. The face is furrowed, wrinkled, sagging, ravaged by time. But the eyes are bright and, if not young, then somehow transcend the time that otherwise marks the face. It is as though someone else is looking at us, from somewhere inside the face, where everything is different. One can hardly be closer to another human soul. For as far as Rembrandt’s person is concerned, his good habits and bad, his bodily sounds and smells, his voice and his language, his thoughts and his opinions, his behavior, his physical flaws and defects, all the things that constitute a person to others, are no longer there, the painting is more than four hundred years old, and Rembrandt died the same year it was painted, so what is depicted here, what Rembrandt painted, is this person’s very being, that which he woke to every morning, that which immersed itself in thought, but which itself was not thought, that which immediately immersed itself in feelings, but which itself was not feeling, and that which he went to sleep to, in the end for good. That which, in a human, time does not touch and whence the light in the eyes springs. The difference between this painting and the others the late Rembrandt painted is the difference between seeing and being seen. That is, in this picture he sees himself seeing whilst also being seen, and no doubt it was only in the Baroque period with its penchant for mirrors within mirrors, the play within the play, staged scenes and a belief in the interdependence of all things, when moreover craftsmanship attained heights witnessed neither before nor since, that such a painting was possible. But it exists in our age, it sees for us.

The night Vanja was born she lay looking at us for several hours. Her eyes were like two black lanterns. Her body was covered in blood, her long hair plastered to her head, and when she stirred it was with the slow movements of a reptile. She looked like something from the forest lying there on Linda’s stomach, staring at us. We could not get enough of her and her gaze. But what was it that lay in those eyes? Composure, gravity, darkness. I stuck out my tongue, a minute passed, then she stuck out her tongue. There has never been so much future in my life as at that time, never so much joy. Now she is four, and everything is different. Her eyes are alert, switch between jealousy and happiness at the drop of a hat, between sorrow and anger, she is already practiced in the ways of the world and can be so cheeky that I completely lose my head and sometimes shout at her or shake her until she starts crying. But usually she just laughs. The last time it happened, the last time I was so furious I shook her and she just laughed, I had a sudden inspiration and placed my hand on her chest.

Her heart was pounding. Oh, my, how it was pounding.

It is now a few minutes past eight o’clock in the morning. It is the fourth of March 2008. I am sitting in my office, surrounded by books from floor to ceiling, listening to the Swedish band Dungen and thinking about what I have written and where it is leading. Linda and John are asleep in the adjacent room, Vanja and Heidi are in the nursery, where I dropped them off half an hour ago. Outside, at the front of the enormous Hilton Hotel, which is still in shadow, the lifts glide up and down in three glass shafts. Next door there is a redbrick building which, judging by all the bay windows, dormers, and arches, must be from the end of the nineteenth century or early twentieth. Beyond that, there is a glimpse of a tiny stretch of Magistrat Park with its denuded trees and green grass, where a motley gray house in a seventies style breaks the view, and forces the eye up to the sky, which for the first time in several weeks is a clear blue.

Having lived here for a year and a half, I know this view and all its nuances over the days and the year, but I feel no attachment to it. Nothing of what I see here means anything to me. Perhaps that is precisely what I have been searching for, because there is something about this lack of attachment that I like, may even need. But it was not a conscious choice. Six years ago I was ensconced in Bergen writing, and while I had no intentions of living in the town for the rest of my life I certainly had no plans to leave the country, let alone the woman to whom I was married. On the contrary, we envisaged having children and maybe moving to Oslo where I would write a number of novels and she would keep working in radio and television. But of the future we shared, which actually was just an extension of the present with its daily routines and meals with friends and acquaintances, holiday trips, and visits to parents and in-laws, all enriched by the dream of having children, there was to be nothing. Something happened, and from one day to the next I moved to Stockholm, initially just to get away for a few weeks, and then all of a sudden it became my life. Not only did I change city and country, but also all the people. If this might seem strange, it is even stranger that I hardly ever reflect on it. How did I end up here? Why did things turn out like this?

Arriving in Stockholm, I knew two people, neither of them very well: Geir, whom I had met in Bergen and saw for a few weeks during the spring of 1990, so twelve years previously, and Linda, whom I had met at a debut writers’ seminar in Biskops-Arnö in the spring of 1999. I emailed Geir and asked if I could stay with him until I had found a place of my own, he said yes, and then I phoned in a “Flat Wanted” ad to two Swedish newspapers. I received more than forty replies, from which I selected two. One was in Bastugatan, the other in Brännkyrkgatan. After viewing both, I opted for the latter, until in the hallway my eye fell on the list of tenants, which included Linda’s name. What were the chances of that happening? Stockholm has more than one and a half million inhabitants. If the flat had come to me via friends and acquaintances the odds would not have been so slim, for all literary circles are relatively small, irrespective of the size of the town, but this had come about as a result of an anonymous advertisement, read by several hundred thousand people and, of course, the woman who responded knew neither Linda nor me. From one moment to the next I changed my mind, it would be better to take the other flat because if I were to take this one Linda might think I was pursuing her. But it was an omen. And one laden with meaning, it turned out, for now I am married to Linda and she is the mother of my three children. Now she is the woman with whom I share my life. The sole traces of my previous existence are the books and records I brought with me. Everything else I left behind. And while I spent a lot of time thinking about the past then, almost a morbid amount of time, I now realize, which meant that I not only read Marcel Proust’s novel À la recherche du temps perdu but virtually imbibed it, the past is now barely present in my thoughts.

I believe the main reason for that is our children, since life with them in the here and now occupies all the space. They even squeeze out the most recent past: ask me what I did three days ago and I can’t remember. Ask me what Vanja was like two years ago, Heidi two months ago, John two weeks ago, and I can’t remember. A lot happens in our little everyday life, but it always happens within the same routine, and more than anything else it has changed my perspective of time. For, while previously I saw time as a stretch of terrain that had to be covered, with the future as a distant prospect, hopefully a bright one, and never boring at any rate, now it is interwoven with our life here and in a totally different way. Were I to portray this with a visual image it would have to be that of a boat in a lock: life is slowly and ineluctably raised by time seeping in from all sides. Apart from the details, everything is always the same. And with every passing day the desire grows for the moment when life will reach the top, for the moment when the sluice gates open and life finally moves on. At the same time I see that precisely this repetitiveness, this enclosedness, this unchangingness is necessary, it protects me. On the few occasions I have left it, all the old ills return. All of a sudden I am beset by every conceivable thought about what was said, what was seen, what was thought, hurled, as it were, into that uncontrollable, unproductive, often degrading, and ultimately destructive space where I lived for so many years. The yearning is as strong there as it is here, but the difference is that there the goal of my yearning is attainable, but not here. Here I have to find other goals and come to terms with them. The art of living is what I am talking about. On paper it is no problem, I can easily conjure up an image of Heidi, for example, clambering out of a bunk bed at five in the morning, the patter of little feet across the floor in the dark, her switching the light on and a second later standing in front of me — half asleep and squinting up at her — and then she says: “Köket. Kitchen!” Her Swedish is still idiosyncratic; her words carry a different meaning from what is usual, and “kitchen” means muesli with curdled blueberry milk. In the same way, candles are called “Happy birthday!” Heidi has large eyes, a large mouth, a big appetite, and she is a ravenous child in all senses, but the robust, unadulterated happiness she experienced in her first eighteen months has been overshadowed this year, since John’s birth, by other hitherto unknown emotions. In the first months she took almost every opportunity to try to harm him. Scratch marks on his face were the rule rather than the exception. When I arrived home after a four-day trip to Frankfurt in the autumn, John looked as if he had been through a war. It was difficult because we didn’t want to keep him away from her either, so we had to try to read her moods and regulate her access to him accordingly. But even when she was in high spirits her hand could shoot out in a flash and slap or claw him. Alongside this, she was beginning to have fits of rage, the ferocity of which I would never have considered her capable two months before. In addition, an equally hitherto unsuspected vulnerability surfaced: the slightest hint of severity in my voice or behavior and she would lower her head, shy away, and start to cry, as though wanting to show us her anger and hide her feelings. As I write, I am filled with tenderness for her. But this is on paper. In reality, when it really counts, and she is standing there in front of me, so early in the morning that the streets outside are still and not a sound can be heard in the house, she, raring to start a new day, I, summoning the will to get to my feet, putting on yesterday’s clothes and following her into the kitchen, where the promised blueberry-flavored milk and the sugar-free muesli await her, it is not tenderness I feel, and if she goes beyond my limits, such as when she pesters and pesters me for a film, or tries to get into the room where John is sleeping, in short, every time she refuses to take no for an answer but drags things out ad infinitum, it is not uncommon for my irritation to mutate into anger, and when I then speak harshly to her, and her tears flow, and she bows her head and slinks off with slumped shoulders, I feel it serves her right. Not until the evening when they are asleep and I am sitting wondering what I am really doing is there any room for the insight that she is only two years old. But by then I am on the outside looking in. Inside, I don’t have a chance. Inside, it is a question of getting through the morning, the three hours of diapers that have to be changed, clothes that have to be put on, breakfast that has to be served, faces that have to be washed, hair that has to be combed and pinned up, teeth that have to be brushed, squabbles that have to be nipped in the bud, slaps that have to be averted, rompers and boots that have to be wriggled into, before I, with the collapsible double stroller in one hand and nudging the two small girls forward with the other, step into the elevator, which as often as not resounds to the noise of shoving and shouting on its descent, and into the hall where I ease them into the stroller, put on their hats and mittens and emerge onto the street already crowded with people heading for work and deliver them to the nursery ten minutes later, whereupon I have the next five hours for writing until the mandatory routines for the children resume.

I have always had a great need for solitude. I require huge swathes of loneliness and when I do not have it, which has been the case for the last five years, my frustration can sometimes become almost panicked, or aggressive. And when what has kept me going for the whole of my adult life, the ambition to write something exceptional one day, is threatened in this way my one thought, which gnaws at me like a rat, is that I have to escape. Time is slipping away from me, running through my fingers like sand while I. . do what? Clean floors, wash clothes, make dinner, wash up, go shopping, play with the children in the play areas, bring them home, undress them, bathe them, look after them until it is bedtime, tuck them in, hang some clothes to dry, fold others, and put them away, tidy up, wipe tables, chairs and cupboards. It is a struggle, and even though it is not heroic, I am up against a superior force, for no matter how much housework I do at home the rooms are littered with mess and junk, and the children, who are taken care of every waking minute, are more stubborn than I have ever known children to be, at times it is nothing less than bedlam here, perhaps we have never managed to find the necessary balance between distance and intimacy, which of course becomes increasingly important the more personality is involved. And there is a quite a bit of that here. When Vanja was around eight months old she began to have violent outbursts, like fits at times, and for a while it was impossible to reach her, she just screamed and screamed. All we could do was hold her until it had subsided. It is not easy to say what caused it, but it often occurred when she had had a great many impressions to absorb, such as when we had driven to her grandmother’s in the country outside Stockholm, when she had spent too much time with other children, or we had been in town all day. Then, inconsolable and completely beside herself, she could scream at the top of her voice. Sensitivity and strength of will are not a simple combination. And matters were not made any easier when Heidi was born. I wish I could say I took everything in stride, but sad to say such was not the case because my anger and my feelings too were aroused in these situations, which then escalated, frequently in full public view: it was not unknown for me in my fury to snatch her up from the floor in one of the Stockholm malls, sling her over my shoulder like a sack of potatoes and carry her through town kicking and punching and howling as if possessed. Sometimes I reacted to her howls by shouting back, throwing her down on the bed and holding her tight until it passed, whatever it was that was tormenting her. She was not very old before she found out exactly what drove me wild, namely a particular variety of scream, not crying or sobbing or hysteria but focused, aggressive screams that, regardless of the situation, could make me totally lose control, jump up, and rush over to the poor girl, who was then shouted at or shaken until the screams turned to tears and her body went limp and she could at last be comforted.

Looking back on this, it is striking how she, scarcely two years old, could have such an effect on our lives. Because she did, for a while that was all that mattered. Of course, that says nothing about her, but everything about us. Both Linda and I live on the brink of chaos, or with the feeling of chaos, everything can fall apart at any moment and we have to force ourselves to come to terms with the demands of a life with small children. We do not plan. Having to shop for dinner comes as a surprise every day. Likewise, having to pay bills at the end of every month. Had it not been for some sporadic payments being made into my account, such as rights fees, book club sales, or a minor amount from schoolbook publications or, as this autumn, the second installment of some foreign income I had forgotten, things would have gone seriously wrong. However, this constant improvisation increases the significance of the moment, which of course then becomes extremely eventful since nothing about it is automatic and, if our lives feel good, which naturally they do at times, there is a great sense of togetherness and a correspondingly intense happiness. Oh, how we beam. All the children are full of life and are instinctively drawn to happiness, so that gives you extra energy and you are nice to them and they forget their defiance or anger in seconds. The corrosive part of course is the awareness that being nice to them is not of the slightest help when I am in the thick of it, dragged down into a quagmire of tears and frustration. And once in the quagmire each further action only serves to plunge me deeper. And at least as corrosive is the awareness that I am dealing with children. That it is children who are dragging me down. There is something deeply shameful about this. In such situations I am probably as far from the person I aspire to be as possible. I didn’t have the faintest notion about any of this before I had children. I thought then that everything would be fine so long as I was kind to them. And that is actually more or less how it is, but nothing I had previously experienced warned me about the invasion into your life that having children entails. The immense intimacy you have with them, the way in which your own temperament and mood are, so to speak, woven into theirs, such that your own worst sides are no longer something you can keep to yourself, hidden, but seem to take shape outside you, and are then hurled back. The same of course applies to your best sides. For, apart from the most hectic periods, when first Heidi, then John, were born, and the emotional life of those who experienced them was dislocated in ways that can only be described as tantamount to a crisis, their life here is basically stable and secure, and even though I do occasionally lose my temper with them, they are still at ease with me and come to me whenever they feel the need. Their demands are very basic, there is nothing they like better than outings with the whole family, which are full of adventure: a trip to the Western Harbor on a sunny day, starting with a walk through the park, where a pile of logs is enough to keep them entertained for half an hour, then past the yachts in the marina, which really capture their attention, after that lunch on some steps by the sea, eating our panini from the Italian café, that a picnic didn’t occur to us goes without saying, and afterward an hour or so to run around and play and laugh, Vanja with her characteristic lope, which she has had since she was eighteen months, Heidi with her enthusiastic toddle, always two meters behind her big sister, ready to receive the rare gift of companionship from her, then the same route back home. If Heidi sleeps in the car we go to a café with Vanja, who loves the moments she has alone with us and sits there with her lemonade asking us about everything under the sun: Is the sky fixed? Can anything stop autumn coming? Do monkeys have skeletons? Even if the feeling of happiness this gives me is not exactly a whirlwind but closer to satisfaction or serenity, it is happiness all the same. Perhaps even, at certain moments, joy. And isn’t that enough? Isn’t it enough? Yes, if joy had been the goal it would have been enough. But joy is not my goal, never has been, what good is joy to me? The family is not my goal either. If it had been, and I could have devoted all my energy to it, we would have had a fantastic time, of that I am sure. We could have lived somewhere in Norway, gone skiing and skating in winter, with packed lunches and a thermos flask in our backpacks, and boating in the summer, swimming, fishing, camping, holidays abroad with other families, we could have kept the house tidy, spent time making good food, being with our friends, we could have been blissfully happy. That may all sound like a caricature, but every day I see families who successfully organize their lives in this way. The children are clean, their clothes nice, the parents are happy and although once in a while they might raise their voices they never stand there like idiots bawling at them. They go on weekend trips, rent cottages in Normandy in the summer, and their fridges are never empty. They work in banks and hospitals, in IT companies or on the local council, in the theater or at universities. Why should the fact that I am a writer exclude me from that world? Why should the fact that I am a writer mean our strollers all look like junk we found on a junk heap? Why should the fact that I am a writer mean I turn up at the nursery with crazed eyes and a face stiffened into a mask of frustration? Why should the fact that I am a writer mean that our children do their utmost to get their own way, whatever the consequences? Where does all the mess in our lives come from? I know I can change all this, I know we too can become that kind of family, but then I would have to want it and in which case life would have to revolve around nothing else. And that is not what I want. I do everything I have to do for the family; that is my duty. The only thing I have learned from life is to endure it, never to question it, and to burn up the longing generated by this in writing. Where this ideal has come from I have no idea, and as I now see it before me, in black and white, it almost seems perverse: why duty before happiness? The question of happiness is banal, but the question that follows is not, the question of meaning. When I look at a beautiful painting I have tears in my eyes, but not when I look at my children. That does not mean I do not love them, because I do, with all my heart, it simply means that the meaning they produce is not sufficient to fulfill a whole life. Not mine at any rate. Soon I will be forty, and when I’m forty, it won’t be long before I’m fifty. And when I’m fifty, it won’t be long before I’m sixty. And when I’m sixty, it won’t be long before I’m seventy. And that will be that. My epitaph might read: Here lies a man who grinned and bore it. And in the end he perished for it. Or perhaps better:

Here lies a man who never complained

A happy life he never gained

His last words before he died

And went to cross the great divide

Were: Oh, Lord, there’s such a chill

Can someone send a happy pill?

Or perhaps better:

Here lies a man of letters

A noble man of Nordic birth

Alas, his hands were bound in fetters

Barring him from knowing mirth

Once he wrote with dash and wit

Now he’s buried in a pit

Come on, worms, take your fill,

Taste some flesh, if you will

Try an eye

Or a thigh

He’s croaked his last, have a thrill

But if I have thirty years left you cannot take it for granted that I will be the same. So perhaps something like this?

From all of us to you, dear God

Now you have him beneath the sod,

Karl Ove Knausgaard is finally dead

Long is the time since he ate bread

With his friends he broke ranks

For his book and his wanks

Wielded pen and dick but never well

Lacked the style but tried to excel

He took a cake, then took one more

He took a spud, then ate it raw

He cooked a pig, it took a while

He ate it up and belched a Heil!

I’m no Nazi, but I like brown shirts

I write Gothic script until it hurts!

Book not accepted, the man blew his top

He guzzled and belched and couldn’t stop

His belly it grew, his belt got tight,

His eyes glared, his tongue alight

“I only wanted to write what was right!”

The fat it blocked his heart and vein

Till one day he screamed in pain:

Help me, help me, hear me wailing

Get me a donor, my heart is failing!

The doctor said no, I remember your book

You’ll die like a fish, like a fish on a hook.

Do you feel much pain, are you near the end?

The stab in the heart, this is death, my friend!

Or perhaps, if I am lucky, a bit less personal?

Here lies a man who smoked in bed

With his wife he wound up dead

Truth to say

It is not they

Just some ashes, it is said

When my father was the same age as I am now, he gave up his old life and started afresh. I was sixteen years old at the time and in the first class at Kristiansand Cathedral School. At the beginning of the school year my parents were still married and although they were having problems I had no reason to suspect what was about to happen with their relationship. We were living in Tveit then, twenty kilometers outside Kristiansand, in an old house on the very edge of the built-up area in the valley. It was high in the mountains with the forest at our backs and a view of the river from the front. A large barn and an outhouse also belonged to the property. When we moved in, the summer I was thirteen, Mom and Dad had bought chickens, I think they lasted six months. Dad grew potatoes in a patch beside the lawn, and beyond that was a compost heap. One of the many occupations my father fantaszed about was becoming a gardener, and he did have a certain talent in that direction — the garden around the house in the small town we came from was magnificent, and not without exotic elements, such as the peach tree my father planted against the south-facing wall, and of which he was so proud when it actually bore fruit — so the move to the country was full of optimism and dreams of the future, where slowly but surely irony began to rear its head, for one of the few concrete things I can remember about my father’s life there during those years is something he came out with as we sat at the garden table one summer evening barbecuing, he and Mom and I.

“Now we’re living the life, aren’t we, eh!”

The irony was plain, even I caught it, but also complicated because I did not understand the reason for it. For me an evening like the one we were having was living the life. What the irony implied ran like an undercurrent throughout the rest of the summer: we swam in the river from early morning, we played soccer on grass in the shade, we cycled to the Hamresanden campsite and swam and watched the girls, and in July we went to the Norway Cup, a youth soccer tournament, where I got drunk for the first time. Someone knew someone who had a flat, someone knew someone who could buy beer for us, and so I sat there drinking in an unfamiliar living room one summer afternoon, and it was like an explosion of happiness, nothing held any danger or fear anymore, I just laughed and laughed, and in the midst of all this, the unfamiliar furniture, the unfamiliar girls, the unfamiliar garden outside, I thought to myself, this was how I wanted things to be. Just like this. Laughing all the time, following whatever fancies took me. There are two photographs of me from that evening, in one I am lying under a bundle of bodies in the middle of the floor, holding a skull in one hand, my head apparently unconnected with the hands and feet protruding on the other side, my face contorted into a kind of euphoric grimace. The other photo is of me on my own, I am lying on a bed with a beer bottle in one hand and holding the skull over my groin in the other, I am wearing sunglasses, my mouth is wide open, roaring with laughter. That was the summer of 1984, I was fifteen years old and had just made a new discovery: drinking alcohol was fantastic.

For the next few weeks my childhood carried on as before, we lay on the cliffs beneath the waterfall and dozed, dived into the pool now and then, caught the bus into town on Saturday mornings, where we bought sweets and went round the record shops, while expectations of upper secondary school, the gymnas, which I was soon to start, loomed on the horizon. This was not the only change in the family: my mother had taken a sabbatical from her job at the nursing school, and was going to study that year in Bergen, where Yngve already lived. So the plan was that my father and I would live alone up there, and we did for the first few months, until he suggested, presumably to get me out of the way, that I could live in the house my grandparents owned on Elvegata, where Grandad had for many years had his accounting office. All my friends lived in Tveit, and I didn’t think I knew the kids at my new school well enough to spend time with them after school, so when I wasn’t at soccer training, which I had five times a week in those days, I sat on my own in the living room watching TV, did my homework at the desk in the loft, or lay on the bed next door reading and listening to music. Once in a while I popped up to Sannes, as our house was called, to pick up clothes or cassettes or books, sometimes I slept there as well, but I preferred the digs at my grandparents’, a chill had settled over our house, I suppose because nothing went on there anymore, my father ate out for the most part, and did only a minimum of chores at home. This left its mark on the aura of the house which, as Christmas was approaching, had taken on an air of abandonment. Tiny, desiccated lumps of cat shit littered the sofa in front of the TV on the first floor, old unwashed dishes on the kitchen drainer, all the radiators, apart from an electric heater which he moved to the room where he was living, were turned off. As for him, his soul was in torment. One evening I went up to the house, it must have been at the beginning of December, and after depositing my bag in my ice-cold bedroom I bumped into him in the hall. He had come from the barn, the lower floor of which had been converted into a flat, his hair was unkempt, his eyes black.

“Can’t we put on the heating?” I asked. “It’s freezing in here.”

“Fweezing?” he mimicked. “We’re not putting on any heating, however fweezing it is.”

I couldn’t roll my “r”s, never had been able to say “r”, it was one of the traumas of my late childhood. My father used to mimic me, sometimes to make me aware that I couldn’t pronounce it, in a futile attempt to make me pull myself together and say “r” the way normal Sørland folk did, whenever something about me got on his nerves, like now.

I just turned and went back up the stairs. I did not want to give him the pleasure of seeing my moist eyes. The shame of being on the verge of tears at the age of fifteen, soon sixteen, was stronger than the ignominy of his mimicking me. I did not usually cry anymore, but my father had a hold on me that I never succeeded in breaking. But I was certainly capable of registering a protest. I went up to my room, grabbed some new cassettes, stuffed them in my bag and carried it down to the room beside the hall, where the wardrobe was, put a few sweaters in, went into the hall, put on my coat, slung the bag over my shoulder, and headed into the yard. The snow had formed a crust; the lights above the garage were reflected in the glistening snow which was all yellow below the streetlamps. The meadow down the road was also bright because it was a starry night and the almost full moon hung above the uplands on the other side of the river. I began to walk. My footsteps crunched in the ruts left by tires. I stopped by the mailbox. Perhaps I should have said that I was going. But that would have ruined everything. The whole point was to make him consider what he had done.

What was the time, I wondered?

I yanked the mitten half off my left hand, pulled up my sleeve and peered. Twenty to eight. There was a bus in half an hour. I still had time to go back.

But no. Not likely.

I slung the bag over my back again and continued down the hill. Glancing up at the house for a last time, I saw smoke rising from the chimney. He must have thought I was still in my room. Obviously he had felt remorse, carried in some wood, and lit the stove.

The ice on the river creaked. The sound seemed to ripple along and climb the gentle valley slopes.

Then there was a boom.

A thrill went down my spine. That sound always filled me with joy. I looked up at the sweep of stars. The moon hanging over the ridge. The car headlights on the other side of the river tearing deep gashes of light into the darkness. The trees, black and silent, though not hostile, stood dotted along the banks of the river. On the white surface, the two wooden water-level gauges, which the river covered in the autumn but now, at low water, were naked and shiny.

He had lit the fire. It was a way of saying he was sorry. So, leaving without a word no longer had any purpose.

I retraced my steps. Let myself in, began to unlace my boots. I heard his footsteps in the living room and straightened up. He opened the door, paused with his fingers on the handle, and looked at me.

“Going already?” he asked.

That I had already gone and come back was impossible to explain, so I just nodded.

“Reckon so,” I said. “Start early tomorrow.”

“Yes, of course,” he said. “Think I’ll pop by in the afternoon. Just so you know.”

“Okay,” I said.

He watched me for a few seconds. Then he closed the door and went back into the living room.

I opened it again.

“Dad?” I said.

He turned and looked at me without speaking.

“You know it’s parents’ evening tomorrow, don’t you? At six.”

“Is it?” he asked. “Well, I’d better go then.”

He turned around and continued into the living room, whereupon I closed the door, laced up my boots, slung my bag over my shoulder, and set off for the bus stop, which I reached ten minutes later. Below me was the waterfall which had frozen in great arcs and arteries of ice, dimly illuminated by the light from the parquet factory. Behind it and behind me rose the uplands. They surrounded the scattered, illuminated habitation in the river valley with darkness and impersonality. The stars above seemed to be lying at the bottom of a frozen sea.

The bus rolled up, its lights sweeping the road, I showed my card to the driver and sat down one seat from the back on the left, which I always did if it was free. There wasn’t much traffic, we zipped along Solsletta, Ryensletta, drove by the beach at Hamresanden, into the forest on the way to Timenes, out onto the E18, over Varodd Bridge, past the gymnas in Gimle, and into town.

The flat was down by the river. Grandad’s office was on the left as you came in. The flat was on the right. Two living rooms, a kitchen, and a small bathroom. The first floor was also split into two, on one side there was a huge loft, on the other the room where I lived. I had a bed, a desk, a small sofa, and a coffee table, a cassette player, a cassette rack, a pile of schoolbooks, a few magazines including some music mags, and in the cupboard a heap of clothes.

The house was old, it had once belonged to my father’s paternal grandmother, in other words, my great-grandmother, who had died there. As far as I had gathered, Dad had been close to her when he was growing up and spent a lot of time down here then. For me she was a kind of mythological figure, strong, authoritative, self-willed, mother of three sons, of whom my father’s father was one. In the photographs I had seen she was always dressed in black buttoned-up dresses. Toward the end of her life, that began in the 1870s, she had been senile for almost an entire decade or had started to “unravel” as the family called it. That was all I knew about her.

I took off my boots and went up the staircase, steep as a ladder, and into my room. It was cold; I put on the fan heater. Switched on the cassette player. Echo and the Bunnymen, Heaven Up Here. Lay down on the bed and began to read. I was halfway through Dracula by Bram Stoker. I had already read it once, the year before, but it was just as intense and fantastic this time. The town outside, with its low, steady drone of cars and buildings, was absent from my consciousness, returning only in waves as though I were in motion. But I was not, I lay reading, completely motionless, until half past eleven when I brushed my teeth, undressed, and went to bed.

It was a very special feeling to wake up in the morning, all alone in a flat, it was as though emptiness were not only around me but also inside me. Until I started at the gymnas I had always woken to a house where Mom and Dad were already up and on their way to work with all that entailed, cigarette smoke, coffee drinking, listening to the radio, eating breakfast, and car engines warming up outside in the dark. This was something else, and I loved it. I also loved walking the kilometer or so through the old residential area to school, it always filled me with thoughts I liked, such as that I was someone. Most of the kids at school came from town or neighboring areas, it was only me and a handful of others who came from the country, and that was a huge disadvantage. It meant that all the others knew one another and met outside school hours, hung around together in cliques. These cliques were also operative during school hours, and you couldn’t just tag along, not at all, so during every break there was a problem: where should I go? Where should I stand? I could sit in the library and read, or sit in the classroom and pretend to be going through homework, but that was tantamount to signaling I was one of the outsiders and was no good in the long run, so in October that year I started smoking. Not because I liked it, nor because it was cool, but because it gave me somewhere to be: now I could skulk around doorways with the other smokers in every break without anyone asking questions. When school was over and I was walking back to my place the problem ceased to exist. First of all, because I would usually go to Tveit to train or to meet Jan Vidar, my best pal from the last school, and secondly because no one saw me and therefore could not know that I sat on my own in the flat all those evenings that I did.

It was different in the lessons. I was in a class with three other boys and twenty-six girls, and I had a role, I had a place, I could speak there, answer questions, discuss, do schoolwork, be someone. I had been brought together with others, all of them had been, I had not forced myself on anyone and my being there was not questioned. I sat at the back in the corner, beside me was Bassen, before me Molle, at the front of the same row Pål, and the rest of the classroom was occupied by girls. Twenty-six sixteen-year-old girls. I liked some better than others, but none of them enough to say I was in love. There was Monica, whose parents were Hungarian Jews, she was as sharp as a razor, knowledgeable, and doggedly defended Israel to the bitter end when we debated the Palestine conflict, a stance I could not understand, it was so obvious, Israel was a military state, Palestine a victim. And there was Hanne, an attractive girl from Vågsbygd, who sang in a choir, was a Christian and quite naïve, but someone whose appearance and presence cheered you up. Then there was Siv, blond, tanned, and long-legged who on one of the first days had said the area between the Cathedral School and the Business School was like an American campus, a statement which singled her out for me at first as she knew something I didn’t, about a world of which I would have liked to be part. She had lived in Ghana for the last few years and boasted too much and laughed too loud. There was Benedicte too with sharp, almost fifties-like facial features, curly hair, clothes with a hint of class. And Tone, so graceful in her movements, dark-haired and serious, she sketched, and seemed more independent than the others. And Anne, who had braces on her teeth and whom I had made out with in Bassen’s mother’s hairdressing chair at a class party that autumn; there was Hilde, fair-haired and rosy-cheeked, firm of character but still somehow anonymous, who often turned around to me; and there was Irene, the girls’ focal point, she had that attractiveness that can dazzle and wilt in the space of one glance; and there was Nina who had such a robust, masculine frame but also something fragile and bashful about her. And Mette, small, edgy, and scheming. She was the one who liked Bruce Springsteen and always wore denim, the one who was so small and laughed all the time, the one who dressed in clothes that were as provocative as they were vulgar and smelled of smoke, the one whose gums were visible every time she smiled, attractive apart from that, but her laughter, a kind of constant giggle that accompanied everything she said, and all the stupid things she came out with, and the fact that she had a slight lisp, detracted from her beauty, in a way, or invalidated it. I was in the midst of a deluge of girls, a torrent of bodies, a sea of breasts and thighs. Seeing them in formal surroundings alone, behind their desks, only made their presence stronger. In a way it gave my days meaning, I looked forward to entering the classroom, sitting where I was entitled to sit, together with all these girls.

That morning I went down to the canteen, bought a bun and a Coke, then took my place and consumed my snack while flicking through a book, as the classroom around me slowly filled with pupils, still sluggish in both movement and expression after a night’s sleep. I exchanged a few words with Molle, he lived in Hamresanden; we had been in the same class at our old school. Then the teacher came, it was Berg, wearing a smock, we were going to have Norwegian. Besides history, this was my best subject, I was on the cusp between an A and an A plus, couldn’t quite make the top grade, but I was determined to try for it at the exam. The natural sciences were of course my weakest subjects, in math I was getting a D, I never did any homework, and the teaching was already way above my head. The teachers we had for math and natural sciences were old-school, for math we had Vestby, he had lots of tics, one arm jiggled and writhed the whole time. In his lessons I sat with my feet on the table chatting to Bassen until Vestby, his compact, fleshy face ablaze, screeched out my name. Then I put my feet down, waited until he had turned and continued to chat. The science teacher, Nygaard, a small, thin, wizened man, with a satanic smile and childlike gestures, was approaching retirement age. He too had a number of tics, one eye kept blinking, his shoulders twitched, he tossed his head, he was a parody of a tormented teacher. He wore a light-colored suit in the summer months, a dark suit in the wintertime, and once I had seen him use the blackboard compasses as a gun: we were hunched over a test, he scanned the classroom, clapped the compasses together, put the instrument to his shoulder and sprayed the class with jerking motions, an evil smile on his face. I could not believe my own eyes, had he lost his senses? I chatted in his classes too, so much so that now I had to pay the penalty for whoever did any talking: Knausgaard, he said if he heard some mumbling somewhere, and raised his palm: that meant I had to stand beside my desk for the rest of the lesson. I was happy to do so because inside me I had a rebellious streak developing, I longed not to give a damn about anything, to start skipping classes, drinking, bossing people around. I was an anarchist, an atheist, and became more and more anti — middle class with every day that passed. I flirted with the idea of having my ears pierced and my head shaved. Natural sciences, what use was that to me? Math, what use was that to me? I wanted to play in a band, to be free, to live as I pleased, not as others pleased.

In this I was alone, in this I had no one with me, so for the time being it remained unrealized, it was a thing of the future and was as amorphous as all future things are.

Not doing any homework, not paying attention in class was part and parcel of the same attitude. I had always been among the best in every subject, I had always enjoyed showing it, but not anymore, now there was something shameful about good grades, it meant you sat at home doing your homework, you were a stick-in-the-mud, a loser. It was different with Norwegian, I associated that with writers and a bohemian lifestyle, besides you couldn’t gut it out, it required something else, a feeling, a natural talent, personality.

I doodled my way through lessons, smoked outside the doorway in breaks, and this was the rhythm for the whole day, as the sky and the countryside beneath slowly brightened, until the bell rang for the last time at half past two, and I could make my way home to my digs. It was the fifth of December, the day before my birthday, my sixteenth, and Mom was coming home from Bergen. I was looking forward to seeing her. In many ways it was fine being alone with Dad, in the sense that he kept as far away as possible, stayed at Sannes when I stayed in town and vice versa. When Mom came this would end, we would all be living together up there until well into the new year, so the disadvantage of meeting Dad every day was almost completely outweighed by Mom’s presence. She was someone I could talk to. I could talk to her about everything. I couldn’t say anything to Dad. Nothing beyond purely practical things such as where I was going and when I was coming home.

When I arrived at the flat his car was outside. I went in, the hall reeked of frying; from the kitchen I could hear clattering noises and the radio.

I poked my head in.

“Hello,” I said.

“Hello,” he said. “Are you hungry?”

“Yes, quite. What are you making?”

“Chops. Take a seat, they’re ready.”

I went in and sat down at the round dining table. It was old, I assumed it had belonged to his grandmother.

Dad put two chops, three potatoes, and a small pile of fried onions on my plate. Sat down and heaped his plate.

“Well?” he said. “Anything new at school?”

I shook my head.

“You didn’t learn anything today?”

“No.”

“No, of course not.”

We ate in silence.

I didn’t want to hurt him, I didn’t want him to think this was a failure, that he had a failed relationship with his son, so I sat wondering what I could say. But I couldn’t come up with anything.

He wasn’t in a bad mood. He wasn’t angry. Just preoccupied.

“Have you been up to see Grandma and Grandad recently?” I asked.

He looked at me.

“Yes, I have,” he said. “Dropped in yesterday afternoon. Why do you ask?”

“No special reason,” I said, feeling my cheeks flushing. “Just wondered.”

I had cut off all the meat I could with the knife. Now I put the bone in my mouth and began to gnaw. Dad did the same. I put down the bone and drank the water.

“Thanks for making me a meal,” I said, and got up.

“Was the parents’ evening at six, did you say?” he asked.

“Yes,” I answered.

“Are you staying here?”

“Think so.”

“Then I’ll come and get you afterward and we can drive up to Sannes. Is that alright?”

“Yeah, course.”

I was writing an essay about an advertisement for a sports drink when he came back. The door opening, the surge of sounds from the town, the thudding of footsteps on the hall floor. His voice.

“Karl Ove? Are you ready? Let’s get going.”

I had packed everything I would need in my bag and satchel, they were at bursting point because I was staying for a month and didn’t quite know what I might need.

He watched me as I came downstairs. He shook his head. But he wasn’t angry. There was something else.

“How did it go?” I asked without meeting his eyes, even though that was one of his bugbears.

“How did it go? Well, I’ll tell you how it went. I was given an earful by your math teacher. That’s how it went. Vestby, isn’t it?’

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? I had no idea. I was caught completely off-guard.”

“So what did he say?” I asked and started to get dressed, infinitely relieved that Dad had kept his temper.

“He said you sat with your feet on the table in lessons, and that you were obstreperous and smart-alecky, and talked in class and you didn’t do class-work or your homework. If this continues he will fail you. That’s what he said. Is it true?”

“Yes, I suppose it is in a way,” I said, straightening up, dressed and ready to go.

“He blamed me, you know. He went on at me for having such a lout as a son.”

I cringed.

“What did you say to him?”

“I gave him an earful. Your behavior at school is his responsibility. Not mine. But it wasn’t exactly pleasant. As I’m sure you understand.”

“I do,” I said. “Sorry.”

“Fat lot of good that is. That’s the last parents’ evening I’ll ever go to, that’s for sure. Well then. Shall we go?”

We went out to the street, to the car. Dad got in, leaned over, and unlocked my side.

“Can you open up at the back as well?” I asked.

He didn’t answer, just did it. I put the bag and the satchel in the trunk, closed the lid carefully so as not to rouse his ire, took a seat at the front, pulled the belt across my chest, and clicked the buckle into the locking mechanism.

“That was excruciatingly embarrassing, no two ways about it,” Dad said, starting the engine. The dashboard lit up. The car in front of us and a section of the slope down to the river as well. “But what’s he like as a teacher, this Vestby?”

“Pretty bad. He’s got discipline problems. No one respects him. And he can’t teach either.”

“He got some of the top university grades ever recorded, did you know that?” Dad said.

“No, I didn’t,” I said.

He reversed a few meters, swung out onto the road, turned, and began to head out of town. The heater roared, the tire studs bit into the tarmac with a regular high-pitched whirr. He drove fast as usual. One hand on the wheel, one resting on the seat beside the gear stick. My stomach quivered, tiny flashes of happiness shot into my body for this had never happened before. He had never taken my side. He had never chosen to overlook anything reprehensible in my behavior. Handing over my report before the summer and Christmas holiday was always something I had anticipated with dread during the previous weeks. The slightest critical remark and his fury washed over me. The same with parents’ evenings. The tiniest comment about my talking too much or a lack of care was followed by a venting of anger. Not to mention the few times I had been given a note to take home. That was Judgment Day. All hell broke loose.

Was it because I was becoming an adult that he treated me in this way?

Were we becoming equals?

I felt an urge to look at him as he sat there with his eyes fixed on the road as we raced along. But I could not, I would have to say something then, and I had nothing to say.

Half an hour later we went up the last hill and entered the drive in front of our house. With the engine still running, Dad got out to open the garage door. I walked to the front door and unlocked it. Remembered our bags, went back as Dad switched off the engine and the red taillights died.

“Could you open the trunk?” I asked.

He nodded, inserted the key, and twisted. The lid rose like the tail of a whale, it seemed to me. Going into the house, I knew at once he had been cleaning. It smelled of green soap, the rooms were tidy, the floors shiny. And the dried-up cat shit on the sofa upstairs, that was gone.

Of course he had done it because my mother was coming home. But even though there was a specific reason and he had not done it simply because it had been so unbelievably filthy and disgusting there, it was a relief to me. Some order had been reestablished. Not that I had been worried or anything, it was more that I found it unsettling, especially as it had not been the only sign. Something about him had changed during the autumn. Presumably because of the way we lived, he and I together, barely that, it was palpable. He had never had any friends, never had people around at home, apart from the family. The only people he knew were colleagues and neighbors, when we were in Tromøya, I should add; here he didn’t even know the neighbors. Although just a few weeks after Mom had moved to Bergen to study he had organized a gathering with a few work colleagues in the house at Sannes, they were going to have a little party, and he wondered whether I might perhaps spend that night in town? If I felt lonely I could always go up to my grandparents’ if I wanted. But being alone was the last thing I feared, and he dropped by in the morning with a frozen pizza, Coke, and chips for me, which I ate in front of the television.

The next morning I caught the bus to Jan Vidar’s, stayed a few hours, and then bussed back up to our house. The door was locked. I opened the garage to check whether he had just gone for a walk, or taken the car. It was empty. I walked back to the house and let myself in. On the table in the living room there were a few empty bottles of wine, the ashtrays were full, but considering no one had cleaned up it didn’t look too bad, and I thought it must have been a small party. The stereo set was usually in the barn, but he had put it on a table beside the radiator, and I knelt down in front of the limited selection of records partly stacked against a chair leg and partly scattered across the floor. They were the ones he had played for as long as I could remember. Pink Floyd. Joe Dassin. Arja Saijonmaa. Johnny Cash. Elvis Presley. Bach. Vivaldi. He must have played the last two before the party started, or perhaps it was this morning. But the rest of the music wasn’t very party-like either. I stood up and went into the kitchen, where there were a few unwashed plates and glasses in the sink, opened the fridge, which apart from a couple of bottles of white wine and some beers was as good as empty, and continued up the stairs to the first floor. The door to Dad’s bedroom was open. I went over and looked inside. The bed from Mom’s room had been moved in and was next to Dad’s in the middle of the floor. So it had got late, and since they had been drinking and the house was so far off the beaten track that a taxi to town, or Vennesla, where Dad worked, would have been much too expensive, someone had slept over. My room was untouched, I grabbed what I needed, and although I had planned to sleep there I went back to town. Something unfamiliar had descended over all the things in the house.

Another time I had gone up there without warning, it was evening, I was too tired to go back to town after soccer practice, and Tom from the team had driven me. In the light from the kitchen I could see Dad sitting with his head supported on one hand and a bottle of wine in front of him. That was new too, he had never drunk before, at least not while I had been around, and certainly not alone. I saw it now and didn’t want to know, but I couldn’t go back, so I kicked the snow off my shoes as loudly and obviously as I could against the steps, jerked the door open, slammed it shut again, and so that he would be in no doubt as to where I was, I turned on both bath taps, sat on the toilet seat and waited for a few minutes. When I went into the kitchen no one was there. The glass was on the drainer, empty, the bottle in the cupboard under the sink, empty, Dad was in the flat beneath the hayloft. As if this were not mysterious enough I also saw him driving past the shop in Solsletta one early afternoon; I had skipped the last three classes and gone to Jan Vidar’s before the evening training session in Kjevik sports hall. I was sitting on the bench outside the shop smoking when I saw Dad’s snot-green Ascona, it was unmistakeable. I threw away the cigarette, but saw no reason to hide, and stared at the car as it passed, even raised my hand to wave. He didn’t see me, he was talking to someone in the passenger seat. The next day he came by, I mentioned this to him, it had been a colleague, they were working together on a project and had spent a few hours after school at our house.

There was a great deal of contact with his colleagues during this period. One weekend he went to a seminar in Hovden with them, and he went to more parties than I can ever remember him going to before. No doubt because he was bored, or didn’t like being on his own so much, and I was glad, at that time I had begun to see him with different eyes, no longer the eyes of a child, rather those of someone approaching adulthood, and from that point of view I preferred him to socialize with friends and colleagues, as other people did. At the same time I did not like the change, it made him unpredictable.

The fact that he had defended me at the parents’ evening contributed to this view of him. Indeed, it was perhaps the most significant factor of them all.

I collected together the clothes in the room, replaced the cassettes one by one in the rack on the desk and stacked the schoolbooks in a neat pile. The house had been built in the mid-1800s, all the floors creaked, sounds permeated the walls, so I knew not only that Dad was in the living room below but also that he was sitting on the sofa. I had planned to finish Dracula but I didn’t feel I could until the situation between us had been clarified. In other words, until he knew what I was planning to do and I knew what he was planning to do. Furthermore, I couldn’t just go downstairs and say: “Hi, Dad, I’m upstairs reading.” “Why are you telling me that?” he would ask, or at least think. But the imbalance had to be rectified, so I went downstairs, took a detour through the kitchen, something to do with food maybe, before taking the final steps into the living room, where he was sitting with one of my old comics in his hand.

“Are you eating this evening?” I asked.

He glanced up at me.

“You just help yourself,” he said.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll be up in my room afterward, alright?”

He didn’t answer, kept reading Agent X9 in the light from the sofa lamp. I cut off a large chunk of sausage and ate it while sitting at the desk. He probably hadn’t bought me a birthday present, it occurred to me, Mom would be bringing one with her from Bergen. But wasn’t it his job to order a cake? Had he thought about it?

When I returned home from school the next day, Mom was there. Dad had picked her up from the airport, they were sitting at the kitchen table, there was a roast in the oven, we ate with candles on the table, I was given a check for five hundred kroner and a shirt she had bought in Bergen. I didn’t have the heart to say I would never wear it, after all she had gone around a string of shops in Bergen looking for something for me, found this, which she thought was great and I would like.

I put it on, we ate cake and drank coffee in the living room. Mom was happy, she said several times it was good to be home. Yngve rang to say happy birthday, he probably wouldn’t be home until Christmas Eve, and I would get my present then. I left for soccer practice; when I returned at around nine they were up at the flat in the barn.

I would have liked to chat with Mom on my own, but it didn’t look as if that was going to be possible, so after waiting up for a while I went to bed. The next day I had a test at school, the last two weeks had been full of them, I walked out of every one early, frequented record shops or cafés in town, sometimes with Bassen, sometimes with some of the girls in the class, if it happened casually and couldn’t be interpreted as my forcing myself on them. But with Bassen it was okay, we had begun to hang out together. One evening I had been at his place, all we did was play records in his room, even so I was flushed with happiness, I had found a new friend. Not a country boy, not a heavy metal fan, but someone who liked Talk Talk and U2, the Waterboys and Talking Heads. Bassen, or Reid, which was his real name, was dark and good-looking, immensely attractive to girls, although this didn’t seem to have gone to his head, because there was nothing showy about him, nothing smug, he never occupied the position he could have, but he wasn’t modest either, it was more that he had a ruminative, introverted side to him which held him back. He never gave everything. Whether that was because he didn’t want to or he couldn’t, I don’t know, often of course they are two sides of the same coin. For me his most striking feature, though, was that he had his own opinions about things. Whereas I tended to think in boxes, for example in politics, where one standpoint automatically presupposed another, or in terms of taste, where liking one band meant liking similar bands, or in relationships, where I never managed to free myself from existing attitudes regarding others, he was an independent thinker, using his own more or less idiosyncratic judgments. Not even this did he boast about, on the contrary, you had to know him for quite a while before it became apparent. So this was not something he used, it was what he was. If I was proud to be able to call Bassen a friend it was not only because he had so many good qualities, or because of the friendship itself, but also, and not least, because his popularity might rub off on me as well. I was not conscious of this, but in retrospect, if nothing else, it is patently obvious; if you are on the outside you have to find someone who can let you in, at any rate when you are sixteen years old. In this case the exclusion was not metaphorical, but literal and real. I was surrounded by several hundred boys and girls of my age, but could not enter the milieu to which they all belonged. Every Monday I dreaded the question they would all ask, namely, “What did you do over the weekend?” You could say “Stayed at home watching TV” once, “Played records at a friend’s house” once as well, but after that you had to come up with something better if you didn’t want to be left out in the cold. This happened to some on day one, and that was how it stayed for the rest of their time at school, but I didn’t want to end up like them at any price, I wanted to be one of those at the center of things, I wanted to be invited to their parties, go out with them in town, to live their lives.

The great test, the year’s biggest party, was New Year’s Eve. For the last few weeks people had been talking about nothing else. Bassen was going to be with someone he knew in Justvik, there was no chance of hanging onto his shirttails, so when school broke up for Christmas I had not been invited anywhere. After Christmas I sat down with Jan Vidar, who lived in Solsletta, about four kilometers down the hill from us, and that autumn had started to train as a pâtissier at the technical college, to discuss what possibilities were open to us. We wanted to go to a party and we wanted to get drunk. As far as the latter was concerned, that would not be much of a problem: I played soccer for the juniors, and the goalkeeper, Tom, was an all-round fixer and he wouldn’t mind buying beer for us. A party, on the other hand. . There were some ninth-class semicriminal, dropout types who apparently were getting together in a house nearby, but that was of no interest whatsoever, I would rather have stayed home. There was another crowd we knew well, but we were not part of it, they were based in Hamresanden and included people with whom we had either gone to school or played soccer, but we had not been invited and although we could probably have gate-crashed somehow they didn’t have enough class in my eyes. They lived in Tveit, went to the technical college or had jobs, and those of them who had cars had fur-covered seats and Wunderbaum car fresheners dangling from the mirror. There were no alternatives. You had to be invited to New Year’s parties. On the other hand, at twelve o’clock people came out, assembled in the square and at the intersection to fire off rockets and let the new year in amid screams and shouts. No invitation needed to participate in that. Lots of people at school were going to parties in the Søm area, I knew, so what about going there? It was then Jan Vidar remembered that the drummer in our group, whom we had accepted out of sheer desperation, an eighth-class kid from Hånes, had said he was going to Søm for New Year’s Eve.

Two telephone calls later and everything had been arranged. Tom would buy beer for us and we would be with kids from the eighth and ninth classes, hang around in their cellar till midnight, then go to the intersection where everyone gathered, find some people I knew from school and hook up with them for the rest of the evening. It was a good plan. When I got home that afternoon, in a studied casual way, I told Mom and Dad I had been invited out on New Year’s Eve, there was a party in Søm with some of my class, was it all right if I went? We had guests coming, my father’s parents and brother, Gunnar, and his family, but neither Mom nor Dad had any objections to my going.

“How nice!” Mom said.

“That’s alright,” Dad said. “But you’ve got to be home by one.”

“But it’s New Year’s Eve,” I said. “Couldn’t we make it two?”

“Okay. But two o’clock then, not half past. Is that understood?”

So, on the morning of the thirty-first we cycled to the shop in Ryensletta, where Tom was waiting, gave him the money, and were handed two bags, each containing ten bottles, in return. Jan Vidar hid the bags in the garden outside his house, and I cycled home. Mom and Dad were in full swing, cleaning and tidying in preparation for the party. The wind had picked up. I stood outside my bedroom window for a moment watching the snow whirl past, and the gray sky that seemed to have descended over the black trees in the forest. Then I put on a record, grabbed the book I was reading and lay down on the bed. After a while Mom knocked on the door.

“Jan Vidar on the phone,” she said.

The telephone was downstairs in the room with the clothes cupboards. I went down, closed the door, and picked up the receiver.

“Hello?”

“Disaster,” Jan Vidar said. “That bastatd Leif Reidar. .”

Leif Reidar was his brother. He was twenty-something years old, drove a souped-up Opel Ascona, worked at the Boen parquet factory. His life was not oriented toward the southwest, toward the town, toward Kristiansand, like mine and most other people’s, but toward the northeast, to Birkeland and Lillesand, and because of the age gap I never quite got a handle on him, on who he was, what he actually did. He had a moustache and often wore aviator sunglasses, but he was not the average poser, there was a correctness about his clothes and behavior that pointed in another direction.

“What’s he done?” I asked.

“He found the bags of beer in the garden. Then he couldn’t keep his damn mitts off, could he. The bastard. He’s such a hypocritical jerk. He told me off, him, of all people. I was only sixteen and all that crap. Then he tried to make me tell him who had bought the beer. I refused of course. Doesn’t have shit to do with him. But then he said he was going to tell my dad if I didn’t spill the beans. The fucking hypocrite. The. . Jesus Christ, I had to say. And do you know what he did? Do you know the little shit did?”

“No,” I said.

In the gusts of wind, the snow projected like a veil from the barn roof. The light from the ground-floor windows shone softly, almost clandestinely, into the deepening dusk. I glimpsed a movement inside, it must have been Dad, I thought, and sure enough, the next second his face took shape behind the windowpane, he was looking straight at me. I lowered my eyes, half-turned my head.

“He forced me into the car and drove down to Tom’s with the bags.”

“You’re kidding.”

“What a prick he is. He enjoyed it. He seemed to be fucking reveling in it. Taking the moral high ground all of a sudden, the shit. Him. That really pissed me off.”

“What happened?” I asked.

When I glanced over at the windows again the face had gone.

“What happened? What do you think? He gave Tom an earful. Then he told me to give the bags of beer to Tom. So I did. And then Tom had to give me the money. As though I were a little brat. As if he hadn’t done the same when he was sixteen. Fuck him. He was lapping it up, he was, wallowing in it. The indignation, driving me there, giving Tom hell.”

“What are we going to do now? Go there without the beer? We can’t do that.”

“No, we can’t, but I winked at Tom as we left. He got the message. So I called him when I got home and said sorry. He still had the beers. So I told him to drive up to your place with them. He’s picking me up on the way, so I can pay him.”

“Are you coming here?”

“Yes, he’ll be at my place in ten minutes. So we’ll be with you in fifteen.”

“I’ve got to think.”

It was then I noticed that the cat was lying in the chair beside the telephone. It looked at me, started licking one paw. In the living room the vacuum cleaner roared into life. The cat turned its head in the direction of the sound. The next second it relaxed. I leaned over and stroked its chest.

“You can’t drive all the way up. That’s no good. But we can just leave the bags at the roadside somewhere. No one will find them up here anyway.

“Bottom of the hill maybe?”

“Below the house?”

“Yes.”

“Bottom of the hill below the house in fifteen minutes?”

“Yes.”

“All right. So remember to tell Tom not to turn around in our drive, and not by the mailboxes either. There’s a shoulder a bit higher up the road. Can he use that?”

“Okay. See you.”

I hung up and went into the living room to Mom. She switched off the vacuum cleaner when she saw me.

“I’m off to see Per,” I said. “Just want to wish him a happy new year.”

“Fine,” Mom said. “Send our regards if you see his parents.”

Per was a year younger than me and lived in the neighboring house a couple of hundred meters down the hill. He was the person I spent the most time with in the years we lived here. We played soccer as often as we could, after school, on Saturdays and Sundays, during vacations, and a lot of that was spent finding enough players for a decent game, but if we couldn’t, we played two-a-side for hours, and if we couldn’t do that, it was just Per and me. I booted the ball at him, he booted it at me, I crossed to him, he crossed it to me, or we played twosies, as we called it. We did this, day in, day out, even after I had started at the gymnas. Otherwise we went swimming, either under the waterfall, in the deep part of the pool and where you could dive from a rock, or down by the rapids where the torrent swept us along. When the weather was too bad to do anything outside, we watched a video in their cellar or just hung around chatting in the garage. I liked being there, his family was warm and generous, and even though his father could not stand me I was welcome all the same. Yet despite the fact that Per was the person I spent the most time with, I did not consider him a friend, I never mentioned him in any other context, both because he was younger than me, which was not good, and because he was a country boy. He wasn’t interested in music, hadn’t a clue about it, he wasn’t interested in girls or drinking either, he was quite content to sit at home with his family on the weekends. Turning up for school in rubber boots didn’t bother him, he was just as happy walking around in knitted sweaters and cords as jeans he’d outgrown and T-shirts emblazoned with Kristiansand Zoo. When I first moved here he had never been to Kristiansand on his own. He had hardly ever read a book, what he liked was comics, which for that matter I also read, but always alongside the endless list of MacLean, Bagley, Smith, Le Carré, and Follet books I devoured, and which I eventually got him interested in as well. We went to the library together some Saturdays, and to Start FC’s home games every other Sunday, we trained with the soccer team twice a week, in the summer we played matches once a week, in addition to which we walked together to and from the school bus every day. But we didn’t share the same seat, for the closer we got to school and the life there, the less of a friend Per became, until by the time we got to the playground we had no contact at all. Strangely enough, he never protested. He was always happy, always open, had a well-developed sense of humor and was, like the rest of his family, a warm person. Over the Christmas period I had been down to his place a couple of times, we had watched some videos and we had skied on the slopes behind our house. It had not occurred to me to invite him out on New Year’s Eve, the idea didn’t even exist as a possibility. Jan Vidar had a non-relationship with Per, they knew each other, of course, as everyone knew everyone else up here, but he was never alone with him and saw no reason to be either. When I moved here Jan Vidar hung out with Kjetil, a boy our age who lived in Kjevil, they were best friends and always in and out of each other’s houses. Kjetil’s father was in the service, and they had moved around a lot, from what I understood. When Jan Vidar started to spend time with me, mostly because of a common interest in music, Kjetil tried to win him back, kept calling and inviting him over, made inside jokes that only they understood when the three of us were together at school; if that didn’t work he resorted to more devious methods and invited both of us. We cycled around the airport, hung out in the airport café, went to Hamresanden and visited one of the girls there, Rita. Both Kjetil and Jan Vidar were interested in her. Kjetil had a bar of chocolate which he shared on the hill with Jan Vidar, without offering me any, but that fell flat as well because all Jan Vidar did was break his piece in two and pass me half. Then Kjetil released his grip, directed his attention elsewhere, but for as long as we went to the same school he never found any friends who were as close as Jan Vidar had been. Kjetil was a person everyone liked, especially the girls, but no one wanted to be with him. Rita, who was generally cheeky and tough, and never spared anyone, had a soft spot for him, they were always laughing together and had their own special way of talking, but they were never more than friends. Rita always saved her most mordant sarcasm for me, and I was always on my guard when she was around, I never knew when or how the attack would be launched. She was small and delicate, her face thin, her mouth small, but her features were well-formed and her eyes, which were often so full of scorn, shone with a rare intensity; they almost sparkled. Rita was attractive, but still wasn’t seen as such, and could be so unpleasant to others that perhaps she never would be.

One evening she called me.

“Hi, Karl Ove, this is Rita,” she said.

“Rita?” I repeated.

“Yes, you cretin. Rita Lolita.”

“Oh, yes,” I said.

“I have a question for you,” she said.

“Yes?”

“Would you like to date me?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“One more time. Would you like to date me? It’s a simple question. You’re supposed to say yes or no.”

“I don’t know. .” I said.

“Oh, come on. If you don’t want to, just say so.”

“I don’t think I do. .” I said.

“Alright then,” she said. “See you at school tomorrow. Bye.”

And she hung up. The next day I behaved as if nothing had happened, and she behaved as if nothing had happened, though she was perhaps even keener to get a dig in whenever the opportunity arose. She never mentioned it, I never mentioned it, not even to Jan Vidar or Kjetil, I didn’t want to be one up on them.

After I had said goodbye to Mom and she had switched the vacuum cleaner back on, I wrapped myself up warm in the hall and ventured out, my head ducked into the wind. Dad had opened one garage door and was dragging out the snowblower. The gravel inside was snow-free and dry, which aroused a faint unease in me, as always, because gravel belonged outdoors, and whatever was outdoors should be covered in snow, creating an imbalance between inside and outside. As soon as the door was closed I didn’t think about it, it never crossed my mind, but when I saw it. .

“I’m just off to see Per,” I shouted.

Dad, who was having a tremendous battle with the snowblower, turned his head and nodded. I half-regretted having suggested meeting on the hill, it might be too close, my father tended to have a sixth sense when it came to deviations from the norm. On the other hand, it was quite a while now since he had taken any interest in me. On reaching the mailbox I heard the snowblower start. I looked up to check whether he could see me. He couldn’t, so I walked down the hill, hugging the side to reduce the chance of being observed. At the bottom I stopped and gazed across the river while I waited. Three cars in succession drove past on the other side. The light from their headlights was like small stabs of yellow in the immense grayness. The snow on the flats had turned the color of the sky, whose light seemed to be enmeshed by the falling darkness. The water in the channel of the iced-up river was black and shiny. Then I heard a car charging down along the bend a few hundred meters away. The engine sounded tinny, it must have been an old car. Tom’s probably. I peered up the road, raised a hand as it appeared around the bend. It braked and came to a halt beside me. Tom rolled down the window.

“Hi, Karl Ove,” he said.

“Hi,” I said.

He smiled.

“Did you get an earful?” I asked.

“What a stupid bastard, he is,” said Jan Vidar, sitting in the seat beside him.

“No big deal,” Tom said. “So, you boys are going out tonight?”

“Yes. And how about you?”

“May have a wander.”

“Everything okay otherwise?”

“Yep, fine.”

He looked at me with those good-natured eyes of his and smiled.

“Your stuff’s in the trunk.”

“Is it open?”

“Yep.”

I went around and opened the trunk, took the two red-and-white bags lying among the clutter of tools, toolboxes, and those elastic thingies with hooks to secure stuff to the car roof.

“Got them,” I said. “Thanks, Tom. We won’t forget this.”

He shrugged.

“See you then,” I said to Jan Vidar.

He nodded, Tom wound up the window, cheerfully saluted with his fingers to his temple as always, put the car in gear and drove up the hill. I stepped over the bank of snow and went into the trees, followed the snow-covered stream perhaps twenty meters uphill, laid the bottles under an easily recognizable birch trunk and heard the car passing on its descent.

I stood at the edge of the forest waiting for a few minutes so that I wouldn’t have been away for a suspiciously short time. Then I walked up the hill where Dad was busy clearing a broader path to the house. He was wearing neither gloves nor a hat as he walked behind the machine dressed in his old lambskin coat with a thick scarf loosely wrapped around his neck. The fountain of snow that was not carried off by the wind cascaded onto the ground a few meters away. I nodded to him as I passed, his eyes registered me fleetingly, but his face was impassive. When I went into the kitchen, after hanging my outdoor clothes in the hall, Mom was sitting there smoking. A candle flickered on the windowsill. The clock on the stove said half past three.

“Everything under control?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s going to be nice. Do you want something to eat before you go?”

“I’ll make a few sandwiches,” I said.

On the counter was a large white packet of lutefisk. The sink was full of dark, unwashed potatoes. In the corner the coffee machine light was on. The pot was half full.

“I think I’ll wait a bit though,” I said. “Don’t have to go before seven or so. When are they coming?”

“Dad’s going to fetch your grandparents. Think he’s off soon. Gunnar will be here at around seven.”

“Then I’ll just manage to catch them,” I said, and went into the living room, stood in front of the window and gazed across the valley, went to the coffee table, took an orange, sat down on the sofa and began to peel. The Christmas tree candles shone, the flames in the fire sparkled and the crystal glasses on the laid table at the far end glistened in the room lights. I thought of Yngve, wondered how he had coped with these things when he was at gymnas. Now at any rate he didn’t have any problems; he was at a cabin in Aust-Agder with all his friends. He had come home at the latest possible moment, on Christmas Eve, and departed as soon as he could, on the twenty-seventh. He had never lived here. The summer we moved he was set to start the third and final year and did not want to leave his friends. That had made Dad furious. But Yngve had been uncompromising, he was not moving. He took out a study loan, because Dad refused to give him a single krone, and he rented digs not so far from our old house. Dad barely exchanged a word with him the few weekends he spent with us. The atmosphere between them was icy. The year after, Yngve did his national service, and I remember him coming home one weekend with his girlfriend, Alfhild. It was the first time he had done anything like this. Dad had of course stayed away, it had been just Yngve and Alfhild, Mom and me there. Not until the weekend was over and they were on their way downhill to catch the bus did Dad drive up. He stopped the car, rolled down the window, and gave them a friendly hello to Alfhild. The smile that accompanied it was something I had never seen on him before. It was radiant with happiness and fervor. He had certainly never looked at any of us in such a way. Then he shifted his gaze, put the car in first, and drove up the hill while we continued our descent to the bus.

Was that our father?

All Mom’s kindness and thoughtfulness toward Alfhild and Yngve was completely overshadowed by Dad’s four-second gaze. For that matter, this is how Mom had probably been on weekends as well, when Yngve was here alone and Dad stayed on the ground floor of the barn as much as possible, only turning up for meals, at which his refusal to ask Yngve a single question or grace him with even a minimum of attention is what lingered in the mind after the weekend, despite all Mom’s efforts to make Yngve feel at home. It was Dad who set the tone at home; there was nothing anyone could do.

Outside, the roar of the snowblower suddenly stopped. I got up, grabbed the orange peel, went into the kitchen, where Mom was scrubbing potatoes, opened the cupboard beside her and dropped the peel in the wastebasket, watched Dad walk across the drive, running a hand through his hair in that characteristic way of his, after which I went upstairs to my room, closed the door behind me, put on a record and lay down on my bed again.

We had pondered for a while how we were going to get to Søm. Both Jan Vidar’s father and my mother would certainly have offered to give us a ride, which in fact they did as soon as we told them of our plans. But the two bags of beer ruled out that possibility. The solution we arrived at was that Jan Vidar would tell his parents that my mother was taking us while I would say that it was Jan Vidar’s father who was taking us. This was a bit of a risk because our parents did occasionally meet, but the odds on the driver question surfacing in conversation were so minute it was a chance we were prepared to take. Once that was resolved there was just the matter of getting there. Buses didn’t come out here on New Year’s Eve, but we found out that some passed the Timenes intersection about ten kilometers away. So we would have to hitch a ride — if we were lucky a car would take us the whole way, if not, we could catch the bus from there. To avoid questions and suspicion it would all have to happen after the guests had arrived. That is, after seven o’clock. The bus left at ten past eight, so with a bit of luck everything would work out fine.

Getting drunk required careful planning. Alcohol had to be procured safely in advance, a secure place for storage had to be found, transport there and back had to be arranged, and parents had to be avoided when you got home. After the first blissful occasion in Oslo I had therefore got drunk only twice. The second time threatened to go awry. Jan Vidar’s sister Liv had just got engaged to Stig, a soldier she had met in Kjevik, where her and Jan Vidar’s father worked. She wanted to get married young, have children, and be a housewife, a rather unusual dream for a girl of her age, so even though she was only a year older than us, she lived in quite a different world. One Saturday evening the two of them invited us to a little gathering with some of their friends. Since we didn’t have any other plans, we accepted and a few days later were sitting on a sofa in a house somewhere drinking homemade wine and watching TV. It was meant to be a cozy evening at home, there were candles on the table and lasagne was served, and it probably would have been cozy had it not been for the wine, of which there was an immense quantity. I drank, and I became as euphoric as the first time, but on this occasion I had a blackout and remembered nothing between the fifth glass and the moment I woke up in a dark cellar wearing jogging bottoms and a sweatshirt I had never seen before and lying on top of a duvet covered with towels, my own clothes next to me bundled up and spattered with vomit. I could make out a washing machine by the wall, a basket of dirty laundry beside it, a chest freezer by the other wall with some waterproof trousers and jackets on the lid. There was also a pile of crab pots, a landing net, a fishing rod, and a shelf full of tools and junk. I took in these surroundings so new to me in one sweep of the eye, then woke up rested and with a clear head. A door a few strides from my head was ajar, I opened it and walked into the kitchen where Stig and Liv were sitting, hands interlaced and glowing with happiness.

“Hi,” I said.

“Well, if it isn’t Garfield,” Stig said. “How are you?”

“Fine,” I said. “What happened actually?”

“Don’t you remember?”

I shook my head.

“Nothing?”

He laughed. At that moment Jan Vidar came in from the living room.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi,” I said.

He smiled.

“Hi, Garfield,” he said.

“What’s with this Garfield?” I asked.

“Don’t you remember?”

“No. I can’t remember a thing. But I see that I must have thrown up.”

“We were watching TV. A Garfield cartoon. Then you got up and beat your chest and shouted ‘I’m Garfield.’ Then you sat down again and chuckled. Then you did it again. ‘I’m Garfield! I’m Garfield!’ Then you threw up. In the living room. On the carpet. And then you were out like a light. Bang. Thud. Sound asleep. In a pool of vomit. And it was absolutely impossible to communicate with you.”

“Oh, shit,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Stig said. “The carpet’s washable. Now we have to get you two home.”

It was only then that fear gripped me.

“What’s the time?” I asked.

“Almost one.”

“No later? Oh, well, that’s okay. I said I would be at home by one. I’ll just be a few minutes late.”

Stig didn’t drink, and we followed him down to the car, got in, Jan Vidar in the front, me in the back.

“Do you really not remember anything?” Jan Vidar asked me as we drove off.

“No, I don’t, nothing at all.”

That made me proud. The whole story, what I had said and what I had done, even the vomiting, made me feel proud. It was close to the person I wanted to be. But when Stig stopped the car by the mailboxes and I walked up the dark driveway clad in someone else’s clothes, with my own in a bag hanging from my wrist, I was scared.

Please let them be in bed. Please let them be in bed.

And it looked as if they were. The kitchen lights were off at any rate, and that was always the last thing they did before going to bed. But when I opened the door and tiptoed into the hall, I could hear their voices. They were upstairs on the sofa by the TV chatting. They never did that.

Were they waiting for me? Were they checking up on me? My father was the type to smell my breath. His parents had done that, they laughed about it now, but I bet he hadn’t at the time.

It would have been impossible to sneak past them, the top of the stairs was right next to them. May as well face the music.

“Hello?” I said. “Anyone up there?”

“Hello, Karl Ove,” Mom said.

I trudged up the stairs and stopped when I was in their field of vision.

They were sitting beside each other on the sofa, Dad with his arm resting on the side.

“Did you have a nice time?” Mom asked.

Couldn’t she see?

I couldn’t believe it.

“It was okay,” I said, advancing a few steps. “We watched TV and had some lasagne.”

“Nice,” Mom said.

“But I’m pretty tired,” I said. “Think I’ll hit the hay.”

“You do that,” she said. “We’ll be on our way soon.”

I stood on the floor four meters from them, wearing someone else’s jogging pants, someone else’s sweatshirt, with my own soiled clothes in a plastic bag. And reeking of booze. But they didn’t notice.

“Good night then,” I said.

“Good night,” they said.

And that was that. I didn’t understand how I had managed it; I just accepted my good fortune. I hid the bag of clothes in a cupboard, and the next time I was alone in the house I rinsed them in the bath, hung them up to dry in the bedroom wardrobe, then put them in the laundry basket as usual.

Not a word from anyone.

Drinking was good for me; it set things in motion. And I was thrust into something, a feeling of. . not infinity exactly, but of, well, something unlimited. Something I could go into, deeper and deeper. The feeling was so sharp and distinct.

No bounds. That was what it was, a feeling of boundlessness.

So I was full of anticipation. And even though it had passed off well enough previously I had taken a few precautionary measures this time. I would take a toothbrush and toothpaste with me, and I had bought eucalyptus pastilles, Freshmint, and chewing gum. And I would take an extra shirt.

In the living room below I could hear Dad’s voice. I sat up, stretched my arms over my head, bent them backward, then stretched them out as far as they would go, first one way, then the other. My joints ached, and had all autumn. I was growing. In the ninth-class photograph, taken in late spring, my height was average. Now I was suddenly approaching six two. My great fear was that I would not stop there but just keep growing. There was a boy in the class above me at school who was close to six eight, and as thin as a rake. That I might follow in his shoes was something I imagined with horror several times a day. Now and then I prayed to God, in whom I did not believe, not to let this happen. I didn’t believe in God, but I had prayed to him as a young boy, and doing it now was as if my childlike hope had returned. Dear God, please let me stop growing, I prayed. Let me stay six two, let me reach six two and a half or six three, but no more! I promise to be as good as gold if you do. Dear God, dear God, can you hear me?

Oh, I knew it was stupid, but I did it anyway, there was nothing stupid about my fear, it was just unbearable. Another even greater fear I had at that time was the one I had experienced on discovering that my dick was bent upright when I had an erection. I was deformed, it was misshapen, and ignorant as I was, I didn’t know if there was anything you could do about it, have an operation or whatever options there had been then. At night I got out of bed, went to the bathroom and made myself erect to see if it had changed. But no, it never had. It was nearly touching my bloody stomach! And wasn’t it crooked as well? It was as crooked and distorted as a fucking tree root in the forest. That meant I would never be able to go to bed with anyone. Since that was the only thing I really wanted, or dreamt about, my despair knew no bounds. It did enter my head of course that I could pull it down. And I did try, I pushed it down as far as it would go, until it ached. It was straighter. But it hurt. And you couldn’t have sex with a girl with your hand on your dick like that, could you? What the hell should I do? Was there anything I could do? This preyed on my mind. Every time I had a hard-on, I was desperate. If I was making out with a girl on a sofa, and perhaps got my hand up her sweater, and my dick was as stiff as a ramrod against my trouser leg, I knew that was the closest I would get, and it would always be the closest I would get. It was worse than impotence because this not only rendered me incapable of action, but it was also grotesque. But could I pray to God for this to stop? Yes, in the end I could, and did, too. Dear God, I prayed. Dear God, let my sexual organ straighten when it fills with blood. I will only pray for this once. So please be kind and let my wish come true.

When I started at gymnas all the first-years were assembled one morning on the stage at Gimle Hall, I no longer remember the occasion, but one of the teachers, a notorious nudist from Kristiansand, who was said to have painted his house wearing no more than a tie, and was generally scruffy, dressed in a provincial bohemian manner, had curly, unkempt, white hair, anyway he read us a poem, walking along the rows on the stage proclaiming and, to general laughter, suddenly singing the praises of the upright erection.

I didn’t laugh. I think my jaw fell when I heard that. With mouth agape and eyes vacant I sat there as the insight slowly sank in. All erect dicks are bent. Or, if not all, then at least enough of them to be eulogized in a poem.

Where did the grotesqueness come from? Only two years earlier, when we moved here, I had been a small thirteen-year-old with smooth skin, unable to articulate my “r”s and more than happy to swim, cycle, and play soccer in the new place where, so far at least, no one had it in for me. Quite the opposite, in fact, during the first few days at school everyone wanted to talk to me, a new pupil was a rare phenomenon there, everyone wondered of course who I was, what I could do. In the afternoons and on weekends girls sometimes cycled all the way from Hamresanden to meet me. I could be playing soccer with Per, Trygve, Tom, and William when, who was that cycling along the road, two girls, what did they want? Our house was the last; beyond it there was just forest, then two farms, then forest, forest and more forest. They jumped off their bikes on the hill, glanced across at us, disappeared behind the trees. Cycled down again, stopped, looked.

“What are they doing?” Trygve asked.

“They’ve come to see Karl Ove,” Per said.

“You’re kidding,” Trygve said. “They can’t have cycled all the way from Hamresanden for that. That’s got to be ten kilometers!”

“What else would they come up here for? They certainly didn’t come here to see you,” Per said. “You’ve always been here, haven’t you.”

We stood watching them scramble through the bushes. One was wearing a pink jacket, the other light blue. Long hair.

“Come on,” Trygve said. “Let’s play.”

And we continued to play on the tongue of land extending into the river where Per’s and Tom’s father had knocked together two goals. The girls stopped when they came to the swathe of rushes about a hundred meters away. I knew who they were, they were nothing special, so I ignored them, and after standing there in the reeds for ten minutes, like some strange birds, they walked back and cycled home. Another time, a few weeks later, three girls came up to us while we were working in the large warehouse at the parquet factory. We were stacking short planks onto pallets, each layer separated by stays, it was piecework, and once I had learned to throw an armful at a time, so that they fell into place, there was a bit of money in it. We could come and go as we pleased, we often popped in on the way home from school and did one stack, then went home and had a bite to eat, went back and stayed for the rest of the evening. We were so hungry for money we could have worked every evening and every weekend, but often there wasn’t anything to do, either because we had filled the warehouse or because the factory workers had done the work during their normal hours. Per’s father worked in the office, so it was either through Per or William, whose father was employed as a truck driver for the firm, that the eagerly awaited announcement came: there is work. It was on one such evening that the three girls came to see us in the warehouse. They lived in Hamresanden too. This time I had been warned, a rumor had been circulating that one of the girls in the seventh class was interested in me, and there she was, considerably bolder than the two wading birds in the rushes, for Line, that was her name, came straight over to me and rested her arms on the frame around the stack, stood there confidently chewing gum, watching what I was doing while her two friends kept in the background. On hearing that she was interested, I had thought that I should strike while the iron was hot, for even though she was only in the seventh class, her sister was a model, and even if she hadn’t gotten that far herself yet, she was going to be good. That was what everyone said about her, she was going to be good, that was what everyone praised, her potential. She was slim and long-legged, had long, dark hair, was pale with high cheekbones and a disproportionately large mouth. This lanky, slightly gangly and calflike quality of hers made me skeptical. But her hips were nice. And her mouth and eyes too. Another factor to count against her was that she could not say her “r”s, and there was something a tad stupid or scatterbrained about her. She was known for it. At the same time she was popular in her class, the girls there all wanted to be with her.

“Hi,” she said. “I’ve come to visit you. Does that make you happy?”

“There you go,” I said. Turned aside, balanced a pile of planks on my forearm, hurled them into the frame where they clattered into place, pushed in the ones sticking out, grabbed another armful.

“How much do you earn an hour?” she asked.

“It’s piecework,” I said. “We get twenty kroner for a stack of doubles, forty for a stack of fours.”

“I see,” she said.

Per and Trygve, who were in the parallel class to hers, and had repeatedly expressed their disapproval of her and her crowd, were working a few meters away. It struck me that they looked like dwarfs. Short, bent forward, grimfaced, they stood in the middle of the enormous factory floor with pallets up to the roof on all sides, working.

“Do you like me?” she asked.

“Well, what’s not to like?” I said. The moment I had seen her coming through the gates I had decided to go for it, but now, with her standing there and an open road ahead, I still couldn’t do it, I still couldn’t come up with the goods. In a way I didn’t quite understand, yet sensed nonetheless, she was far more sophisticated than I was. Okay, she may have been a bit dim, but she was sophisticated. And it was this sophistication that I could not handle.

“I like you,” she said. “But you already know that, don’t you.”

I leaned forward and adjusted one of the stays, flushing quite unexpectedly.

“No,” I said.

Then she didn’t say anything for a while, just lolled over the frame, chewing gum. Her girlfriends over by the pile of planks appeared impatient. In the end, she straightened up.

“Right,” she said, turned and was gone.

Passing up the opportunity was not a huge problem for me; far more important was the way it had happened, not having the pluck to take the final steps, to cross that last bridge. And when the novelty interest in me had died down nothing was served on a plate anymore. On the contrary, the old judgments of me slowly trickled back. I could sense them close at hand, felt the reverberations, even though there was no contact between the two places I had lived. On the very first day at school I had spotted a particular girl, her name was Inger, she had beautiful narrow eyes, a dark complexion, a childish short nose which broke up otherwise long, rounded features, and she exuded distance, except when she smiled. She had a liberating, gentle smile that I admired and found endlessly appealing, both because it did not embrace me or others like me, it belonged to the very essence of her being, to which only she herself and her friends had recourse, and also because her top lip was slightly twisted. She was in the class below me, and in the course of the two years I spent at that school I never exchanged a single word with her. Instead, I got together with her cousin, Susanne. She was in the parallel class to mine, and lived in a house on the other side of the river. Her nose was pointed, her mouth small, and her front teeth a touch harelike, but her breasts were well-rounded and pert, her hips just the right width and her eyes provocative, as if they were always clear about what they wanted. She was always comparing herself with others. Whereas Inger in all her unattainability was full of mystery and secrets, and her appeal consisted almost entirely of things unknown, suspicions, and dreams, Susanne was more of an equal and more likeminded. With her I had less to lose, less to fear, but also less to gain. I was fourteen years old, she was fifteen and within a few days we drifted together, as can often happen at that age. Shortly afterward Jan Vidar got together with her friend, Margrethe. Our relationships were located somewhere between the world of the child and that of the adult and the boundaries between the two were fluid. We sat on the same seat on the school bus in the morning, sat beside each other when the whole school gathered for morning assembly on Fridays, cycled together to the confirmation classes held once a week in the church, and hung out together afterward, at an intersection or in the parking lot outside the shop, all situations where the differences between us were played down and Susanne and Margrethe were like pals. But on weekends it was different, then we might go to the cinema in town or sit in some cellar room eating pizza and drinking Coke while we watched TV or listened to music, entwined in each other’s arms. It was getting closer, the thing we were all thinking about. What had been a huge step forward a few weeks ago, the kiss, had long been achieved: Jan Vidar and I had discussed the procedure, the practical details, such as which side to sit, what to say to initiate the process that would culminate in the kiss, or whether to act without saying anything at all. By now it was well on the way to becoming mechanical: after eating pizza or lasagne the girls sat on our laps and we started canoodling. Occasionally we stretched out on the sofa too, one couple at each end, if we felt sure no one would come. One Friday evening Susanne was alone at home. Jan Vidar cycled up to my place in the afternoon, we set off along the river, over the narrow footbridge and up to the house where she lived. They were waiting for us. Her parents had made a pizza, we ate it, Susanne sat on my lap, Margrethe on Jan Vidar’s, Dire Straits was on the stereo, “Telegraph Road,” and I was kissing Susanne, and Jan Vidar was fooling around with Margrethe, for what seemed like an eternity in the living room. I love you, Karl Ove, she whispered in my ear after a while. Shall we go to my room? I nodded, and we got up, holding hands.

“We’re going to my room,” she said to the two others. “So you can have a bit of peace here.”

They looked up at us and nodded. Then they went back to it. Margrethe’s long, black hair almost completely covered Jan Vidar’s face. Their tongues went round and round in each other’s mouths. He was stroking her back, up and down his fingers went, his body otherwise motionless. Susanne sent me a smile, squeezed my hand harder, and led me through the hall and into her bedroom. It was dark inside, and colder. I had been there before, and liked being in her house, even though her parents were always there, and in principle we only did what Jan Vidar and I normally did, that is, we sat chatting, moved into the living room and watched TV with her parents, had a bite to eat in the kitchen, went for long walks along the river, for this was not Jan Vidar’s dark, sweaty room we were sitting in, with his amplifier and stereo equipment, his guitar and records, his guitar magazines and comics, no, this was Susanne’s light, perfumed room, with its white flowery wallpaper, its embroidered bedspread, its white shelf full of ornaments and books, its white cupboard with her clothes nicely folded and hung up. When I saw a pair of her blue jeans there, or hanging over a chair, I gulped, because she would be pulling these very trousers over her thighs, hips, zipping up and buttoning. Her room was filled with such promise, which I could barely put it into words, it just sent surges of emotion through me. There were other reasons I liked being there. Her parents, for example; they were always friendly, and there was something in the family’s manner that made it clear I meant something to them. I was a person in Susanne’s life, someone she told her parents and younger sister about.

Now she went over to close the window. Outside it was misty, even the lights in the neighboring houses were almost invisible in the grayness. On the road below, a few cars drove past with their stereos throbbing. Then it went quiet again.

“Hmm,” I said.

She smiled.

“Hmm,” she said, sitting down on the edge of the bed. I had no expectations, other than that we would lie here rather than nestling against each other. Once I had put my hand inside her Puffa jacket and placed it on a breast, and she had said no, and I had removed it again. The “no” had not been sharp or reproachful, more a statement of fact, as if it invoked some law to which we were subject. We did some caressing, that was what we did, and even though I was always ready for it whenever we met, I soon became tired of it. After a while I felt almost nauseous because there was something futile and unresolved about this caressing, my whole being longed for a way out, which I knew existed, but it was not a route that could be taken. I wanted to move on, but was forced to remain where I was, in the vale of rotating tongues and hair perpetually falling over my face.

I sat down beside her. She smiled at me. I kissed her, she closed her eyes and leaned back onto the bed. I crawled up on top of her, felt her soft body beneath mine, she groaned a little, was I too heavy? I lay beside her instead, with my leg over hers. Caressed her shoulder and down, along her arm. When my hand reached her fingers she squeezed it hard. I lifted my head and opened my eyes. She was looking at me. Her face, white in the semidarkness, was serious. I bent forward and kissed her neck. I had never done that before. Rested my head on her chest. She ran her hand through my hair. I could hear her heart beating. I stroked her hips. She tensed. I lifted her top and placed my hand on her stomach. Leaned forward and kissed it. She grabbed the hem of her top and slowly pulled it up. I couldn’t believe my eyes. There, right in front of me, were her naked breasts. In the living room, “Telegraph Road” was played again. I did not hesitate and closed my mouth around them. First one, then the other. I rubbed my cheeks against them, licked them, sucked them, finally put my hands on them and kissed her, for a few seconds I had completely forgotten her. My dreams or imagination had never stretched beyond this point, and now I was there, but after ten minutes there was the same sense of satedness, all of a sudden it was not enough, not even this, however great it was, I wanted to move on wherever it led, and made an attempt, started fumbling with her trouser button. It came open, she said nothing, lay with her eyes closed as before and her sweater pulled up under her chin. I undid the zip. Her white panties came into view. I swallowed hard. I tugged her trousers around her hips and drew them down. She said nothing. Wriggled a bit so that it was easier to remove them. When they were down to her knees I put my hand on her panties. Felt the soft hair beneath. Karl Ove, she said. I lay on top of her again, we kissed, and while we kissed I pulled down her panties, not a lot, but enough to slip in a finger, it glided down through the hair, and the moment I felt her moistness against my fingertip, something in me seemed to crack. It was like a pain shooting through my abdomen, followed by a kind of spasm in my loins. The next second everything was alien to me. From one moment to the next, her naked breasts and her naked thighs lost all meaning. But I could see that she was not having the same experience as me, she was lying as before, with eyes closed, mouth half-open, breathing heavily, engrossed in what I had been engrossed, but was not any longer.

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “But perhaps we should join the others?”

“No,” she said. “Let’s wait a bit.”

“Okay,” I said.

So we resumed. We embraced, but it did not arouse anything in me, I might just as well have been cutting a slice of bread, I kissed her breasts, that aroused nothing in me, everything was strangely neutral, her nipples were nipples, her skin was skin, her navel a navel, but then to my amazement and delight, everything about her suddenly changed back, and again there was nothing I would rather do than lie there kissing everything I touched.

That was when someone knocked on the door.

We sat up; she quickly wriggled her trousers into position and pulled down her top.

It was Jan Vidar.

“Are you coming out?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Susanne. “We’re on our way. Hang on.”

“It’s half past ten, you know,” he said. “We’d better be off before your parents come back.”

While Jan Vidar was collecting his records I met Susanne’s eyes and smiled at her. When we were in the hall, ready to go, about to kiss them goodbye, she winked at me.

“See you tomorrow!” she said.

Outside, it was drizzling. The light from the streetlamps we walked under seemed to merge with every single water particle in large haloes.

“Well?” I said. “How did it go?”

“The usual,” said Jan Vidar. “We made out. I’m not sure I want to be with her much longer.”

“Oh yeah,” I said. “You’re not exactly in love then.”

“Are you?”

I shrugged.

“Maybe not.”

We arrived at the main road and set off up the valley. On one side there was a farm, the waterlogged ground that glistened in the light by the road disappeared in the darkness and did not reappear until the farmhouse, which was brightly illuminated. On the other side there were a couple of old houses with gardens reaching down to the river.

“How did it go with you?” Jan Vidar asked.

“Pretty well,” I said. “She took off her top.”

“What? Really?”

I nodded.

“You’re lying, come on! She didn’t.”

“She did.”

“Not Susanne surely?”

“She did.”

“What did you do then?”

“Kissed her breasts. What else?”

“You lying toad. You didn’t.”

“I did.”

I didn’t have the heart to tell him she had also taken off her panties. If he had made any progress with Margrethe, I would have told him. But as he hadn’t I didn’t want to brag. Besides, he would never have believed me. Never.

I could hardly believe it myself.

“What were they like?” he asked.

“What were what like?”

“Her breasts of course.”

“They were great. Just the right size and firm. Very firm. Stood up even though she was lying down.”

“You bastard. It’s not true.”

“It is, for Christ’s sake.”

“Shit.”

After that we didn’t say anymore. Crossed the suspension bridge where the river, so shiny and black, silently swelled, went through the strawberry field, and onto the tarmac road which, after a sharp bend, climbed a steep pass with black spruce trees leaning over, and then after a couple of curves at the top passed our house. Everything was dark and heavy and wet, apart from my consciousness of what had happened, which overrode everything and rose to the light like bubbles. Jan Vidar had accepted my explanation, and I was burning to tell him that her breasts were not the whole story, there was more, but as soon as I saw his sullen look I let it go. And that was fine too, to keep it a secret between Susanne and me. Yet the spasm worried me. I had almost no pubes on my dick, just a couple of long, black hairs, otherwise it was mostly down, and one of the things I feared was that this would come to the ears of the girls, and in particular Susanne’s. I knew I couldn’t sleep with anyone until the hair was in situ, so I assumed the spasm was a kind of false orgasm, and that I had done more and gone further than what my dick was actually up to. And that was why it had hurt. That I had had a kind of “dry” ejaculation. For all I knew it might be dangerous. On the other hand, my underpants were wet. It might be pee, it might also be semen. Or blood even? The latter two I considered unlikely, after all I was not sexually mature, and I had not experienced pains in my loins until that moment. Whatever the reason, it had hurt, and I was concerned.

Jan Vidar had left his bike outside our garage, we stood there chatting, then he cycled home, and I went in. Yngve was at home that weekend, he was sitting with Mom in the kitchen. I could see them through the window. Dad must have been in the flat in the barn. After taking off my outdoor clothes, I went to the toilet, locked the door, dropped my trousers to my knees, lifted my underpants and pressed my forefinger against the damp patch. It was sticky. I raised my finger, rubbed it against my thumb. Shiny and sticky. Smelt of the sea.

Sea?

That must be semen then?

Of course it was semen.

I was sexually mature.

Exultant, I went into the kitchen.

“Do you want some pizza? We saved a few slices for you,” Mom said.

“No thanks. We ate out there.”

“Did you have a good time?”

“Of course,” I said, unable to suppress a smile.

“His cheeks are all red,” Yngve said. “Is that with happiness, I wonder?”

“You’ll have to invite her here one day,” Mom said.

“Yes, I will,” I said and just went on smiling.

The relationship with Susanne came to an end two weeks later. Long ago I had made a deal with Lars, my best friend in Tromøya, to swap pictures of the most beautiful girls there with pictures of the most beautiful girls here. Don’t ask me why. I had forgotten all about it until one afternoon when I received an envelope in the mail containing photographs. Passport photos of Lene, Beate, Ellen, Siv, Bente, Marianne, Anne Lisbet, or whatever they were all called. They were Tromøya’s finest. Now I had to get my hands on pictures of Tveit’s finest. I conferred regularly with Jan Vidar over the next days, we drew up a list and then all I had to do was get hold of the photos. I could ask some girls directly, such as Susann, the friend of Jan Vidar’s sister, who was old enough for me to care about what she thought; I could get Jan Vidar to ask others for pictures of their girlfriends. As for myself, my hands were tied because asking for a photo was tantamount to showing an interest in them, and since I was going out with Susanne such an interest would be inappropriate enough for rumors to spread. But there were other methods. Per, for example, did he have any photos of Kristin in his class perhaps? He did, and in this way I eventually managed to scrape together six photos. That was more than enough, but the jewel in the crown, the most beautiful of them all, Inger, whom I very much wanted to show Lars, was missing. And Inger was Susanne’s cousin. .

So one afternoon I got my bike out of the garage and cycled to Susanne’s. We hadn’t made any arrangement and she seemed happy when she came downstairs to answer the door. I said hello to her parents, we went to her room and sat down for a while, discussed what we would do, without making any plans, chatted a bit about school and the teachers, before I presented my question as casually as I could. Did she have a photo of Inger I could borrow?

Sitting on the bed, she stiffened and stared at me with incredulity.

“Of Inger?” she queried, at length. “What do you want that for?”

It hadn’t occurred to me that this might cause a problem. After all, I was going out with Susanne, and the fact that I was asking her, of all people, could only imply that my motives were pure.

“I can’t tell you,” I said.

And it was true. If I told her that I was going to send photos of the eight most attractive girls in Tveit to a pal in Tromøya she would expect to be among them. She was not, and I could not tell her that.

“You’re not having a photo of Inger until you tell me what you’re going to do with it,” she said.

“But I can’t,” I said. “Can’t you just give me a photo? It’s not for me if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“Who’s it for then?”

“I can’t say.”

She got up. I could see she was furious. All her movements were truncated, clipped as it were, as if she no longer wanted to give me the pleasure of seeing them unfold freely and thereby let me share their fullness.

“You’re in love with Inger, aren’t you,” she said.

I didn’t answer.

“Karl Ove! Aren’t you? I’ve heard lots of people say you are.”

“Let’s forget about the photo,” I said. “Forget it.”

“So you are?”

“No,” I said. “Perhaps I was when I first moved here, right at the beginning, but I am not any longer.”

“What do you want the photo for then?”

“I can’t tell you.”

She started to cry.

“You are,’ she said. “You’re in love with Inger. I know you are. I know.”

If Susanne knew, it suddenly struck me, then Inger must know as well.

A sort of light flashed in my head. If she knew, then it might not be so difficult to get off with Inger. At a school party, for example, I could go over and ask her to dance and she would know what was what, would know she was not just one among many. She might even begin to show some interest in me. Sobbing, Susanne went to her desk at the other end of the room and pulled out a drawer.

“Here’s your photo,” she said. “Take it, and I never want to see you here again.”

She held one hand in front of her face and handed me the photo of Inger with the other. Her shoulders were quivering.

“It’s not for me,” I said. “I promise. It’s not me who wants it.”

“You sack of shit,” she said. “Get out of here!”

I took the photo.

“Is it over then?” I asked.

Two years had passed since that freezing cold, windblown New Year’s Eve when I lay on my bed reading while waiting for the night’s festivities to begin. Susanne had found someone else just a few months later. His name was Terje; he was small, plump, with a perm and an idiotic moustache. To me it was incredible that she could allow someone like him to take my place. All right, he was eighteen years old and, fair enough, he did have a car which they drove around in after school and on the weekends, but nevertheless: him instead of me? A short, fat dolt with a moustache? In that case, it definitely didn’t matter about Susanne. That was what I had thought, and that was what I still thought, lying on the bed. However, now I was no longer a child, now I was sixteen years old, now I wasn’t at Ve Middle School but Kristiansand Cathedral School.

From outside came the grating, unlubricated sound of the garage door being opened. The thud as it fell into position, the car being started straight afterward, its engine idling briefly. I went to the window and waited until the two red lights vanished around the bend. Then I went downstairs to the kitchen and boiled some water, took some of the Christmas fare, ham, brawn, lamb sausage, liver paté, cut a few slices of bread, fetched the newspaper from the living room, spread it out over the table and sat down to read it as I ate. It was pitch-black outside now. Inside it was nice and cozy with the red cloth on the table and the small candles flickering on the windowsill. When the water was boiling I warmed the teapot, dropped a couple of fingerfuls of tea leaves, and poured on the steaming hot water, calling: “Mom, do you want any tea?”

No answer.

I sat down and kept eating. After a while I picked up the teapot and poured. Dark brown, almost like wood, the tea rose inside the white cup. A few leaves swirled and floated up, the others lay like a black mat at the bottom. I added milk, three teaspoons of sugar, stirred, waited until the leaves had settled on the bottom, and drank.

Mmm.

Down on the road a snowplow raced past with lights flashing. Then the front door was opened. I heard the sound of shoes being kicked against the step and turned in time to see Mom, wearing Dad’s capacious lambskin jacket, come in the door with an armful of wood.

Why was she wearing his clothes? That wasn’t like her.

She went into the living room without a glance in my direction. She had snow in her hair and on her lapels. A loud thud in the wood basket.

“Would you like some tea?” I asked when she came back.

“Yes, please,” she said. “I’ll just get my things off first.”

I stood up and found her a cup, placed it on the other side of the table and poured.

“Where have you been?” I asked as she sat down.

“Out fetching wood, that’s all,” she said.

“But before that? I’ve been sitting here for a while. It doesn’t take twenty minutes to fetch wood, does it.”

“Oh, I was changing a lightbulb on the Christmas tree. So now it works.”

I turned and looked through the window in the other room. The spruce tree at the end of our plot glittered in the darkness.

“Is there anything I can do to help?” I asked.

“No, everything’s ready now. I just need to iron a blouse. And then there’s nothing to do until the food has to be cooked. But Dad’ll do that.”

“Could you iron my shirt while you’re at it?” I asked.

She nodded.

“Just put it on the ironing table.”

After eating I went up to my room, switched on the amplifier, plugged in the guitar, and sat down to play a little. I loved the smell the amplifier gave off when it got warm, I could play for that reason alone, almost. I also loved all the accessories guitar-playing involved, the fuzz box, the chorus pedal, the leads, the plugs, the plectrums, and the small packets of strings, the bottleneck, the capo, the lined guitar case and all its small compartments. I loved the brand names: Gibson, Fender, Hagstrøm, Rickenbacker, Marshall, Music Man, Vox, and Roland. I went into music shops with Jan Vidar and inspected the guitars with the air of a cognoscente. For my own guitar, a cheap Stratocaster imitation I had bought with my confirmation money, I had ordered new pick-ups, state of the art I was told, and a new pick guard from one of Jan Vidar’s mail order catalogues. All that was great. The playing, on the other hand, was not so great. Even though I had been playing regularly and tenaciously for a year and a half, I had made very little progress. I knew all the chords and had practiced all the scales ad infinitum, but I never managed to free myself from them, never managed to play, there was no rapport between my mind and my fingers, my fingers didn’t seem to belong to me, but to the scales, which they could play with ease, and what then emerged from the amplifier had nothing to do with music. I could spend a day or two learning a solo note by note, and then I could play it, but no more than that, it always stopped there. It was the same for Jan Vidar. But he was even more ambitious than me, he really practiced a lot, he did virtually nothing else at times, but his amplifier too produced nothing more than scales and copies of solos. He filed his nails so that they would be better for playing with, he let the nail of his right thumb grow so that he could use it as a pick, he bought a kind of training apparatus for his fingers which he was always flexing to strengthen them, he rebuilt his guitar, and with his father, who was an electrical engineer in Kjevik, he experimented with a kind of homemade guitar synthesizer. I often took my guitar to his place, the case dangling from one hand, while I steered my bike with the other, and even though what we played in his room didn’t sound brilliant, it was still okay because I at least felt like a musician when I was carrying the case, it looked really cool, and if we were not yet where we would like to be, things might well change one day. We didn’t know what the future might hold; no one could know how much practice was necessary for the situation to ease. A month? Six months? A year? In the meantime we kept playing. We also managed to get a sort of band up and running; one Jan Henrik in the seventh class could play a bit of guitar, and even though he wore yachting shoes and posh clothes and used hair cream we asked him if he wanted to play bass with us. He did, and I, being the worst guitarist, had to start playing drums. The summer we were about to begin the ninth class, Jan Vidar’s father drove us up to Evje where we picked up a cheap drum kit we had pooled together to buy, and we were all set. We spoke to the headmaster, were given permission to use a classroom, and once a week we assembled the drums and amplifiers and away we went.

The year before, when I moved, I had been listening to groups like The Clash, The Police, The Specials, Teardrop Explodes, The Cure, Joy Division, New Order, Echo and the Bunnymen, The Chameleons, Simple Minds, Utravox, The Aller Værste, Talking Heads, The B52s, PiL, David Bowie, The Psychedelic Furs, Iggy Pop, and Velvet Underground, all of them via Yngve, who not only spent all his money on music but also played guitar, with his very own sound and distinctive style, and wrote his own songs. In Tveit there was no one who had even heard of all these groups. Jan Vidar, for example, listened to people like Deep Purple, Rainbow, Gillan, Whitesnake, Black Sabbath, Ozzy Osbourne, Def Leppard, and Judas Priest. It was impossible for these worlds to meet, and since an interest in music was what we shared, one of us had to give way. Me. I never bought any records by these bands but I listened to them at Jan Vidar’s and familiarized myself with them whereas I reserved my own bands, who at that time were extremely important to me, for when I was alone. And then there were a few “compromise bands,” which both he and I liked, first and foremost Led Zeppelin, but also Dire Straits, for his part because of the guitar riffs. Our most frequent discussion concerned feeling versus technique. Jan Vidar would buy records by a group called Lava because they were such good musicians, and he wasn’t averse to TOTO, who had their two hits at that time, while I despised technique with all my heart, it went against everything I had learned from reading my brother’s music magazines, where musical competence was the foe, and the ideal was creativity, energy, and power. But no matter how much we talked about this or how many hours we spent in music shops or poring over mail order catalogues, we couldn’t get our band to swing, we were useless at our instruments, and remained so, and we did not have the wit to compensate, by writing our own music for example, oh no, we played the most hackneyed, uninventive cover versions of them all: “Smoke on the Water” by Deep Purple, “Paranoid” by Black Sabbath, “Black Magic Woman” by Santana, as well as “So Lonely” by The Police, which had to be in our repertoire because Yngve had taught me the chords for it.

We were utterly hopeless, completely out of our depth, there was not a snowball’s chance in hell of anything coming of this, we wouldn’t even be good enough to perform at a school party, but although this was the reality we never experienced it as such. On the contrary, this was what gave our lives meaning. It wasn’t my music we played, but Jan Vidar’s, and it went against everything I believed in, yet this is what I trusted. The intro to “Smoke on the Water,” the very incarnation of stupidity, the very antithesis of cool, was what I sat practicing at Ve School in 1983: first the guitar riff, then the cymbal, chicka-chicka, chicka-chicka, chicka-chicka, chicka-chicka, then the bass drum, boom, boom, boom, then the snare, tick, tick, tick, and then the stupid bass line kicked in, where we often looked at each other with a smile while nodding our heads and shaking our legs as the chorus, played completely out of sync, took off. We didn’t have a vocalist. When Jan Vidar started at technical college he heard about a drummer from Hånes, admittedly he was only in the eighth class, but he would have to do, everything had to do, and he also had access to a practice room out there, with drums and PA, the whole thing, so there we were: me, first-year gymnas student dreaming about a life in indie music, but unmusical, on rhythm guitar; Jan Vidar, trainee pâtissier who practiced enough to be a Yngwie Malmsteen, an Eddie van Halen, or a Ritchie Blackmore, but who couldn’t free himself from his finger exercises, on lead guitar; Jan Henrik whom we would have preferred to avoid outside the group, on bass, and Øyvind, a happy, thickset kid from Hånes without any ambitions at all, on drums. “Smoke on the Water,” “Paranoid,” “Black Magic Woman,” “So Lonely” and, eventually, early Bowie’s “Ziggy Stardust” and “Hang onto Yourself,” for which Yngve had also taught me the chords. No singer, only the accompaniment. Every weekend. Guitar cases on the bus, long conversations on the beach about music and instruments, on the benches outside the shop, in Jan Vidar’s room, in the airport café, in Kristiansand. Later on, we recorded our practice sessions, which we carefully analyzed in our futile, doomed attempt to raise the band to the level we were at in our heads.

Once I had taken a cassette recording of our sessions to school. I stood in the break with the headset on listening to our music while wondering whom I could play it to. Bassen had the same musical taste as I did, so that was no use, because this was quite different, and he would not understand it. Hanne maybe? She was a singer after all, and I liked her a lot. But that would be too big a risk to take. She knew I played in a band and that was good, it gave me a kind of elevated status, but my status might crumble if she heard us playing. Pål? Yes, he could listen to it. He played in a band himself, Vampire it was called, played fast, Metallica-inspired. Pål who was usually shy, sensitive, and delicate to the point of being almost effeminate, but who wore black leather, played bass, and howled onstage like the devil incarnate, he would understand what we were doing. So in the next break I went over to him, told him we had recorded a few songs the previous weekend, would he have a listen and say what he thought? Of course. He put on the headset and pressed play while I anxiously scrutinized his face. He smiled and stared at me quizzically. After a few minutes he started laughing and removed the headset.

“This is crap, Karl Ove,” he said. “This is a joke. Why are you bothering me with this? Why should I listen to this stuff? Are you kidding me?”

“Crap? What do you mean crap?”

“You can’t play. And you don’t sing. There’s nothing in it!”

He threw out his arms.

“I’m sure we can improve,” I said.

“Give up,” he said.

Do you think your band is so great then? I thought of saying, but I didn’t.

“Okay, okay,” I said instead. “Thanks, anyway.”

He laughed again and sent me a look of astonishment. No one could fathom Pål because of his whole speed-metal thing, and the clueless side of him which made the class laugh, and which did not square with his shyness at all, which in turn did not square at all with the almost complete openness he could display making him unafraid of anything. Once, for example, he showed us a poem he had had published in a girls’ magazine, Det Nye, which had also interviewed him. Outspoken, brazen, sensitive, shy, aggressive, rough. That was Pål. In a way it was good that it was Pål who heard our band because Pål’s response didn’t mean anything, whatever made him laugh didn’t matter. So I calmly put the Walkman back in my pocket and went into class. He was probably right that we weren’t very good. But since when was it important to be good? Hadn’t he heard of punk? New Wave? None of those bands could play. But they had guts. Power. Soul. Presence.

Not long after this, in early autumn 1984, we got our first gig. Øyvind had set it up for us. Håne Shopping Center was celebrating its fifth anniversary; the occasion was to be marked with balloons, cakes, and music. The Bøksle Brothers, who had been famous all over the region for two decades with their interpretations of Sørland folk songs, were going to play. Then the center owner also wanted something local, preferably with some youth interest, and, since we practiced only a few hundred meters from the mall, we fitted the bill perfectly. We were to play for twenty minutes and would be paid five hundred kroner for the job. We hugged Øyvind when he told us. At long last it was our turn.

The two weeks before the gig, which was scheduled for eleven o’clock on a Saturday morning, passed quickly. We rehearsed several times, the whole band and Jan Vidar and I on our own, we discussed the order of our set list to and fro and back and forth, we bought new strings well in advance so that we could break them in, we decided what clothes we would wear, and when the day arrived we met early in the practice room to go through the set several times before the performance, for even though we were aware there was a risk we would peak too soon, we figured it was more important to feel at home with the songs.

How good I felt as I strolled across the parking lot of the shopping center, guitar case in hand. The equipment was already set up on one side of the passage leading to the square in the middle. Øyvind was adjusting the drum set, Jan Vidar was tuning his guitar with the new tuner he had bought for the occasion. Some kids were standing around watching. Soon they would be watching me too. I’d had my hair cut very short, I had a green military jacket on, black jeans, studded belt, blue-and-white baseball cleats. And of course the guitar case in my hand.

On the other side of the passage the Bøksle Brothers were already singing. A small crowd of people, maybe ten in all, was watching. There was a steady stream of passersby on their way to or from the shops. The wind was blowing, and something about it reminded me of The Beatles’ concert on the roof of the Apple building in 1970.

“Everything alright?” I asked Jan Vidar, put down the guitar case, took out the guitar, found the strap and hung it over my shoulder.

“Yeah,” he said. “Shall we plug in? What time is it, Øyvind?”

“Ten minutes past.”

“Ten to go. Let’s wait a bit. Five minutes, okay?”

He went over to the amplifier and took a swig of Coke. Around his forehead he had tied a rolled-up scarf. Otherwise he was wearing a white shirt with the tails hanging over a pair of black trousers.

The Bøksle Brothers were still singing.

I glanced at the set list stuck up behind the amplifier.

Smoke on the Water

Paranoid

Black Magic Woman

So Lonely

“Can I borrow the tuner?” I asked Jan Vidar. He passed it to me, and I plugged in the lead. The guitar was tuned, but I fiddled with the knobs anyway. Several cars drove into the parking area and slowly circled, looking for an empty spot. As soon as the doors were open the children on the rear seats crawled out, ran around a bit on the tarmac and grabbed their parents’ hands on their way towards us. Everyone stared as they went by, no one stopped.

Jan Henrik plugged his bass into the amplifier and twanged a string hard.

It resounded across the tarmac.

BOOM.

BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.

Both the Bøksle Brothers glared over at us while they were singing. Jan Henrik stepped over to the amp and fiddled with the volume button. Played a couple more notes.

BOOM. BOOM.

Øyvind tried a few thumps on the drums. Jan Vidar played a chord on the guitar. It was incredibly loud. Everyone in sight stared in our direction.

“Hey! Pack that in!” shouted one of the Bøksle Brothers.

Jan Vidar stared them out, then turned and took another swig of Coke. There was sound in the bass amp, there was sound in Jan Vidar’s guitar amplifier. But what about mine? I lowered the volume on the guitar, struck a chord, raised it slowly until the amplifier seemed to leap at the sound and then raised it some more, all the time staring at the two guitar-strumming men on the other side of the passage, with legs akimbo and a smile on their faces, singing their droll ballads about seagulls, fishing boats, and sunsets. The moment they looked across at me, with glares it is difficult to describe as anything other than ferocious, I lowered the volume again. We had sound, everything was okay.

“What’s the time now?” I asked Jan Vidar. His fingers were gliding up and down the neck of the guitar.

“Twenty past,” he said.

“Retards,” I said. “They should have finished by now.”

The Bøksle Brothers represented everything I was against, the respectable, cozy, bourgeois world, and I looked forward to turning up the amplifier and blowing them off the block. So far my rebelliousness had consisted of expressing divergent opinions in class, resting my head on the desk and falling asleep and, once when I had thrown a used paper bag on the pavement and an elderly man had told me to pick it up, I told him to pick it up himself if it was so damn important to him. When I walked off, my heart was pounding so hard in my chest I could scarcely breathe. Otherwise, it was through listening to the music that I liked, uncompromising, anticommercial, underground, bands that made me a rebel, someone who did not accept conventions, but fought for change. And the louder I played it, the closer I came to that ideal. I had bought an extra-long guitar lead so that I could stand in front of the hall mirror and play, with the amplifier upstairs in my room at full blast, and then things really started to happen, the sound became distorted, piercing, and almost regardless of what I did, it sounded good, the whole house was filled with the sound of my guitar, and a strange congruence evolved between my feelings and these sounds, as though they were me, as though that was the real me. I had written some lyrics about this, it had actually been meant as a song, but since no tune came to mind, I called it a poem when I later wrote it in my diary.

I distort my soul’s feedback

I play my heart bare

I look at you and think:

We’re at one in my loneliness

We’re at one in my loneliness

You and me

You and me, my love

I wanted to be out, out in the great, wide world. And the only way I knew how, the only way I had, was through music. That was why I was standing outside this shopping center in Hånes on this day in early autumn, 1984, with my white-lacquered confirmation present, an imitation Stratocaster, hanging from my shoulder and my forefinger on the volume control, ready to flick it the moment the Bøksle Brothers’ last chord faded.

The wind suddenly picked up across the square, leaves whirled past, rustling as they went, an ice cream ad spun round and round, flapping and clattering. I thought I felt a raindrop on my cheek, and peered up at the milky white sky.

“Is it starting to rain?” I asked.

Jan Vidar held out his palm. Shrugged his shoulders.

“Can’t feel anything,” he said. “But we’ll play whatever. Even if it pisses down.”

“Yes,” I said. “You nervous?”

He resolutely shook his head.

Then the brothers were finished. The few people who were standing around clapped and the brothers gave a slight bow.

Jan Vidar turned to Øyvind.

“Ready?” he asked.

Øyvind nodded.

“Ready, Jan Henrik?”

“Karl Ove?”

I nodded.

“Two, three, four,” said Jan Vidar, mostly to himself, and he played the first bars of the riff on his own.

The next second the sound of his guitar tore across the tarmac. People jumped with alarm. Everyone turned toward us. I counted in my head. Placed my fingers on the fret. My hand was shaking.

ONE TWO THREE — ONE TWO THREE FOUR — ONE TWO THREE — ONE TWO.

Then I was supposed to come in.

But there was no sound!

Jan Vidar stared up at me, his eyes frozen. I waited for the next round, cranked the volume up, came in. With two guitars it was deafening.

ONE TWO THREE — ONE TWO THREE FOUR — ONE TWO THREE — ONE TWO.

Then the hi-hat came in.

Chicka-chicka, chicka-chicka, chicka-chicka, chicka-chicka.

The bass drum. The snare.

And then the bass.

BOM-BOM-BOM bombombombombombombombombombom-BOM

BOM-BOM-BOM-bombombombombombombombombombom-BOM

It was only then I looked at Jan Vidar again. His face was contorted into a kind of grimace as he strained to say something without using his voice.

Too fast! Too fast!

And Øyvind slowed down. I tried to follow suit, but it was confusing because both the bass and Jan Vidar’s guitar kept going at the same tempo, and when I changed my mind and followed them they suddenly slowed down, and I was the only one left playing at breakneck speed. Amidst this chaos I noticed the wind blowing through Jan Vidar’s hair, and that some of the kids were standing in front of us with their hands over their ears. The next moment we had reached the first chorus and were more or less in synch. Then a man in tan slacks, a blue-and-white striped shirt and a yellow summer blazer came marching across the tarmac. It was the shopping center manager. He was heading straight for us. Twenty meters away he waved both arms as if trying to stop a ship. He kept waving. We continued to play, but as he stopped right in front of us, still gesticulating, there was no longer any doubt that he was addressing us, and we stopped.

“What the hell do you think you are doing!” he said.

“We were asked to play here,” Jan Vidar answered.

“Are you out of your tiny minds! This is a shopping center. It’s Saturday. People want to shop and have a good time. They don’t want to listen to that goddawful racket.”

“Shall we turn it down a bit?” Jan Vidar asked. “We can easily do that.”

“Not just a bit,” he said.

A crowd had gathered around us now. Maybe fifteen, sixteen people, including the kids. Not bad.

Jan Vidar craned around and lowered the volume on the amplifier. Played a chord and sent the shop owner an inquiring look.

“Is that okay?” he asked.

“Lower!” said the manager.

Jan Vidar lowered the volume a bit more, struck a chord.

“Is that alright then?” he asked. “We’re not a dance band, you know,” he added.

“Right,” said the manager. “Try that, or even lower.”

Jan Vidar made another adjustment. He seemed to be fiddling with the knob, but I saw he was only feigning.

“There we are,” he said.

Jan Henrik and I also adjusted our volume.

“Let’s start again,” Jan Vidar said.

And we started again. I counted in my head.

ONE TWO THREE — ONE TWO THREE FOUR — ONE TWO THREE — ONE TWO.

The manager was walking back towards the main entrance to the shopping center. I watched him as we played. When we got to the part where we were interrupted he stopped and turned. Looked at us. Turned back, took a few steps toward the shops, turned again. Suddenly he came toward us, once again gesticulating furiously. Jan Vidar didn’t see him, he had his eyes closed. Jan Henrik, however, did and raised an eyebrow.

“No, no, no,” the manager yelled, stopping in front of us.

“It’s no good,” he said. “Sorry, you’ll have to pack it in.”

“What?” objected Jan Vidar. “Why? Twenty-five minutes you said.”

“It’s no good,” he said, lowering his head and waving his hand in front of it.

“Sorry, guys.”

“Why?” Jan Vidar repeated.

“I can’t listen to that,” he said. “You don’t even sing! Come on. You’ll get your money. Here you are.”

He took an envelope from his inside pocket and held it out to Jan Vidar.

“Here you are,” he said. “Thanks for pitching up. But that wasn’t what I had in mind. No hard feelings, okay?”

Jan Vidar grabbed the envelope. He turned away from the manager, pulled the plug from the amplifier, switched it off, lifted the guitar over his head, went to his guitar case, opened it and replaced the guitar. People around us were smiling.

“Come on,” Jan Vidar said. “We’re going home.”

After that the status of the band was shrouded in doubt; we practiced a few times but our hearts weren’t in it, then Øyvind said he couldn’t make the next session, and the time after that there was no drum set, and the time after that I had soccer practice. . Meanwhile Jan Vidar and I saw less of each other since we went to different schools, and some weeks later he mumbled about having met someone in another class he jammed with, so when I played now it was mostly to pass the time.

I sang “Ground Control to Major Tom,” strummed the two minor chords I liked so much and thought about the two bags of beer lying in the forest.

When Yngve had been home for Christmas he had brought a book of Bowie songs. I had copied them into an exercise book which I now pulled out, complete with chords, lyrics and notes. Then I put “Hunky Dory” on the record player, track four, “Life on Mars?” and began to play along, softly so that I could hear the words and the other instruments. It sent a shiver down my spine. It was a fantastic song and as I followed the chord sequence on the guitar it was as if the song was opening itself up to me, as if I were inside it, and not outside, which was how it felt when I only listened. If I were to open a song and enter it unaided I would need several days because I couldn’t hear which chords were being played, I had to grope my way painstakingly forward, and even if I found some chords which sounded similar I was never sure they were really the same ones. I put down my pen, listened with intense concentration, picked up the pen, strummed a chord. Hmmm. . Put down the pen, listened once again, played the same chord, was it that one? Or perhaps this one? Not to mention all the other guitar techniques that went on in the course of a song. It was hopeless. While Yngve, for example, only had to listen to a song once and then he could play it to perfection after a couple of stabs. I had known other people like him, they seemed to have the gift, music was not distinct from thinking, or it had nothing to do with thinking, it lived its own life inside them. When they played, they played, they didn’t mechanically repeat some pattern they had taught themselves, and the freedom in that, which was what music was actually about, was beyond me. The same was true of drawing. Drawing conferred no status, but I liked it all the same and spent quite some time doing it when I was alone in my room. If I had a specific model, such as a cartoon character, I could make a tolerable attempt, but if I didn’t copy and just sketched freehand the result was never any good. Here too I had seen people who had the gift, perhaps Tone in my class for one, who with minimal effort could draw whatever she wanted, the tree in the grounds outside the window, the car parked beyond it, the teacher standing in front of the board. When we had to choose optional subjects I wanted to take Form and Color, but since I knew how things stood, that the other students knew how to draw, had the gift, I decided against it. Instead I chose cinematography. The thought of this could sometimes weigh me down because I wanted so much to be someone. I wanted so much to be special.

I got up, placed the guitar on its stand, switched off the amplifier and went downstairs where Mom was ironing. The circles of light around the lamps above the door, and on the barn walls outside, were almost completely covered with snow.

“What weather!” I said.

“You can say that again,” she said.

As I walked into the kitchen I remembered a snowplow had recently driven past. Perhaps it would be a good idea to clear the ridge of snow.

I turned to Mom.

“I think I’ll go and shovel some snow before they come,” I said.

“Fine,” she said. “Can you light the torches while you’re at it? They’re in the garage, in a bag hanging on the the wall.”

“Sure. Do you have a lighter?”

“In my handbag.”

I put on my outdoor things and went out, opened the garage door, grabbed the shovel, knotted the scarf around my face, and went down to the intersection. Even with my back to the snow sweeping across the fields it stung my eyes and cheeks as I dug at the pile of new snow and the old clumps. After a few minutes I heard a bang, faraway and muffled, as if inside a room, and raised my head in time to see a flash of light from a tiny explosion in the depths of the windswept darkness. It must have been Tom and Per and their father testing the rockets they had bought. That may have excited them, but it drained me, for the only thing the tiny flash had done was intensify the feeling of uneventfulness that followed. There was not a car, not a soul around, just the murky forest, the driving snow, the motionless ribbon of light along the road. The darkness in the valley below. The scraping of the shovel’s metal blade against the rock-hard lumps of compressed snow, my own breathing, somehow amplified by the scarf tightly trussed around my hat and ears.

When I had finished I went back up to the garage, replaced the shovel, found the four torches in the bag, lit them one by one in the dark, not without pleasure, for the flames were so gentle, and the blue in them rose and sank according to which way the current of air carried them. I considered for a moment what positions would be best and concluded that two should be placed on the front doorstep and two on top of the wall in front of the barn.

I had hardly put the torches out, the two on the wall with a small protective shield of snow behind them, and closed the garage door, when I heard a car coming around the bend below the house. I opened the garage door again and hurried into the house, I had to be completely ready before they came, with no visible signs of my recent activities. This little obsession grew so strong in me that I ran into the bathroom at full tilt, grabbed a towel, and dried my boots on it, so that the fresh snow would not be seen on them in the hall, after which I took off my outdoor clothes, that is, coat, hat, scarf, and mittens, in my room. Going downstairs, I saw the car idling outside, with the red taillights lit. My grandfather was waiting with his hand on the car door as my grandmother climbed out.

When I was at home on my own, every room had its own character, and though not directly hostile to me they were not exactly welcoming, either. It was more as if they did not want to subordinate themselves to me, but wanted to exist in their own right, with their own individual walls, floors, ceilings, skirting boards, yawning windows. I was aware of a deadness about the rooms, that was what made me uncomfortable, by which I mean not dead in the sense of life having ceased, but rather life being absent, the way that life is absent from a rock, a glass of water, a book. The presence of our cat, Mefisto, was not strong enough to dispel this, I just saw the cat in the yawning room; however, were a person to come in, even if it were only a small baby, the yawning room was gone. My father filled the rooms with disquiet, my mother filled them with gentleness, patience, melancholy, and on occasion, if she came home from work and was tired, also with a faint yet noticeable undercurrent of irritability. Per, who never ventured farther than the front hall, filled it with happiness, expectation, and submission. Jan Vidar, who was so far the only person outside my family to have been in my room, filled it with obstinacy, ambition, and friendliness. It was interesting when several people were present because there wasn’t any space for the sway of more than one, at most two wills in a room, and it was not always the strongest that was the most obvious. Per’s submissiveness, for example, the politeness he displayed to adults, was at times stronger than my father’s lupine nature, such as when he came in, barely nodding to Per as he walked past. But it was rare there was anyone at home apart from us. The exception was visits by my father’s parents and his brother Gunnar and family. They came every so often, perhaps seven or eight times a year, and I always looked forward to their arrival with pleasure. Partly because the person my grandmother had been for me while I was growing up had not changed to take account of the person I was now, and the radiance that emanated from her — which was not so much a result of the presents she always brought but stemmed from her genuine love of children — still shone in my image of her. But my pleasure was partly due to my father always perking up for such events. He became more friendly towards me, took me into his confidence, so to speak, and regarded me as someone to be considered, but this was not the most important thing, for this friendliness he showed to his son was merely one aspect of a greater magnanimity that infused him on such occasions: he became charming, witty, knowledgeable, and entertaining, which in a way justified the fact that I had such mixed emotions about him and was so preoccupied with them.

When they came into the porch, Mom opened the door to meet them.

“Hello, and lovely to see you!” she said.

“Hello, Sissel,” said Grandad.

“What foul weather!” Grandma said. “Have you ever seen anything like it? But the torches were great, I must say.”

“Let me take your coats,” Mom said.

Grandma was wearing a dark, round fur hat, which she took off and slapped against her hand a few times to shake off the snow, and a dark fur coat, which she passed to Mom with the hat.

“Good thing you came to pick us up,” she said, turning to Dad. “We certainly couldn’t have driven in this weather.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Grandad said. “But it is quite a distance, and a windy road as well.”

Grandma came into the hall, straightened her dress with her hands, and adjusted her hair.

“So there you are!” she said to me with a quick smile.

“Hello,” I said.

Behind her came Granddad, carrying his gray coat. Mom took a stride past Grandma and grabbed it, hung it on the hall stand beside the mirror under the stairs. Outside, Dad came into view; he was kicking the snow off his shoes against the side of the doorstep.

“Hello there, you,” Grandad said. “Your father says you’re going to a New Year’s Eve party.”

“That’s right,” I said.

“How you children have grown,” Grandma said. “Just imagine, a New Year’s Eve party.”

“Yes, seems like we’re not good enough anymore,” Dad said from the hall. He ran his hand through his hair, shook his head a couple of times.

“Shall we go into the living room?” Mom said.

I followed them in, sat in the wicker chair by the garden door as they took a seat on the sofa. Dad’s heavy footsteps could be heard as he went upstairs, and then above the ceiling at the back of the living room, where his bedroom was.

“I’ll go and put some coffee on,” Mom said, getting up. The ensuing silence in the room after she had gone became my responsibility.

“Erling’s in Trondheim, isn’t he?” I said.

“I suppose he is, yes,” Grandma said. “They should be at home relaxing this evening.”

She was wearing a blue silk dress with a black pattern on her chest. White pearls in her ears, gold chain around her neck. Her hair was dark, it must have been dyed, but I wasn’t sure, because if it was, why wasn’t the gray lock over her forehead dyed? She wasn’t fat, or even plump, yet somehow she still had a full figure. Her movements, always so lively, were in marked contrast to this. But what you noticed when you saw my grandmother, what struck you first about her, was her eyes. They were light blue and crystal clear, and whether it was because of their unusual color or because it contrasted with her otherwise dark appearance, they seemed almost artificial, as if they were made of stone. My father’s eyes were exactly the same, and gave the same impression. Apart from her love for children, her other most prominent quality was her green thumb. When we visited her during the summer she was generally in the garden and when I thought about her it was often in a garden setting. Wearing gloves, her hair ruffled by the wind, walking across the lawn with an armful of dry twigs to be burnt, or kneeling in front of a little hole she had just dug, carefully loosening the bag around the roots to plant a tiny tree, or glancing over her shoulder to check that the sprinkler has started to rotate as she turns on the tap under the veranda and then standing with her hands on her hips enjoying the sight of the water being hurled into the air, sparkling in the sunlight. Or crouching on the slope behind the house to weed the beds that had been made in all the dips and hollows of the rocky mountainside, similar to the way that water forms pools on the sea-smoothed rocks in the archipelago, cut off from their original environment. I remember feeling sorry for these plants, positioned on their separate crags, lonely and exposed, how they must have yearned for the life they saw unfolding beneath them. Down where the plants merged into one another, continuously forming new combinations according to the time of day and year, like the old pear and plum trees she had once brought from her grandparents’ country cottage, where the shadows flickered over the grass as the wind swept through the foliage on one of those lazy summer days while the sun was setting beyond the horizon at the mouth of the fjord and you could hear the distant sounds from the town rising and falling like the swell of waves in the air, mingling with the hum of wasps and bees at work among the rosebushes against the wall, where the pale petals shone white and calm in all the green. The garden already had the character of something old, a dignity and a fullness that only time can create and no doubt was the reason she had positioned a greenhouse at the bottom, half hidden behind a rock, where she could extend her handiwork and also cultivate rarer trees and plants without the rest of the garden being marred by the industrial and provisional nature of the construction. In the autumn and winter we caught glimpses of her down there, a faint silhouette of color behind the shiny walls, and, it was not without a touch of pride that she remarked, in a casual sort of way, that the tomatoes and cucumbers on the table didn’t come from the shop but from her greenhouse in the garden.

Grandad was not interested in the garden at all, and when Grandma and Dad or Grandma and Gunnar, or Grandma and Grandad’s brother Alf discussed various plants, flowers, or trees, our family had quite a passion for anything that grew, he preferred to take out a newspaper and flick through it, unless, of course, it was a pools coupon and the week’s league tables he was consulting. I always thought it was so strange that a man whose job was about figures also spent his free time with figures and not, for example, doing gardening or carpentry or other hobbies that exercised the whole body. But no, it was figures at work, tables and figures in his leisure time. The only other thing I knew he liked was politics. If the conversation moved that way he always livened up, he had strong opinions, but his eagerness to debate was stronger, so if anyone contradicted him he appreciated that. At any rate, his eyes expressed nothing but kindness the few times Mom had presented her left-wing views, even though his voice grew louder and sharper. Grandma, for her part, always asked him to talk about something else, or calm down, on such occasions. She often made a sarcastic comment and could also be quite caustic, but he took it, and if we were present she would send us a wink so that we understood that it wasn’t meant that seriously. She laughed easily and loved to recount all the amusing incidents she had experienced or had heard. All the funny remarks Yngve had made when he was little she remembered, those two were especially close, he had lived there for six months when he was a young boy, and had been there a lot later too. She also told us about the strange things Erling had experienced at his school in Trondheim, but her richest store was the stories from the 1930s when she had worked as a chauffeur for an elderly, presumably senile, capitalist’s wife.

Now they were in their seventies, my grandma a few years older than my grandad, but both were hale and hearty, and they still traveled abroad in the winter, as they always had.

No one had spoken for some seconds. I strained to come up with something to say. Looked out of the window to make the silence less obtrusive.

“How’s it going at the Cathedral School?” Grandad eventually asked. “Has Stray had anything sensible to say?”

Stray was our French teacher. He was a small, squat, bald, energetic man of around seventy who owned a house close to my grandfather’s office. As far as I had gleaned they had been at loggerheads over something, perhaps a boundary issue; I didn’t quite know whether it had gone to court, or even whether the matter had been settled, but at any rate they no longer greeted each other, and hadn’t for many a year.

“Well,” I said. “He just calls me ‘the brat in the corner.’”

“Yes, I’m sure he does,” Grandad says. “And old Nygaard?”

I shrugged.

“Fine, I suppose. Keeps doing the same old stuff. He’s old-school, that one. How do you know him, by the way?”

“Through Alf,” Grandad said.

“Oh of course,” I said.

Grandad got up and walked over to the window, stood with his hands behind his back peering out. Apart from the sparse light that came through the windows, it was completely dark on this side of the house.

“Can you see anything, Father?” Grandma asked, with a wink at me.

“This place is very nicely situated,” Grandad said.

At that moment Mom came into the living room carrying four cups. He turned to her.

“I was just telling Karl Ove that this house is very nicely situated!”

Mom stopped, as if unable to say anything while walking.

“Yes, we’re very happy with the location,” she said. Stood there with the cups in her hands, looking at Grandad with a tiny smile playing on her lips. There was something. . yes, approaching a flush on her face. Not that she was blushing or she was embarrassed, it wasn’t that. It was more that she wasn’t hiding behind anything. She never did. Whenever she spoke it was always straight from the heart, never for the sake of speaking.

“The house is so old,” she said. “These walls have years in them. That’s both good and bad. But it’s a nice place to live.”

Grandad nodded and continued to stare out into the darkness. Mom went to the table to set the cups down.

“What has become of my host then?” Grandma asked.

“I’m here,” Dad said.

Everyone turned. He was standing by the laid table in the dining room, stooping beneath the ceiling beams, with a bottle of wine, which he had obviously been studying, in his hands.

How had he got in there?

I hadn’t heard a sound. And if there was one thing I was aware of in this house it was his movements.

“Will you get some more wood in before you go, Karl Ove?” he said.

“Okay,” I answered, got up, and went into the hall, booted up, and opened the front door. The wind blasted my face. But at least it had stopped snowing. I crossed the yard and went into the woodshed under the barn. The light from the naked bulb hanging from the ceiling glared against the rough brick walls. The floor was almost completely covered with bark and wood chips. An ax was lodged in the chopping block. In one corner lay the orange-and-black chain saw my father had bought when we moved here. There had been a tree on the property he wanted to fell. When he was ready to set to work he couldn’t get the saw to start. He eyed it for a long time, cursed it, and went to call the shop where he had bought it to complain. “What was wrong?” I asked on his return. “Nothing,” he replied, “it was just something they had forgotten to tell me.” It must have been a safety device of some kind, I inferred, to prevent children from using them. But now he had it started, and after felling the tree he spent the entire afternoon cutting it up. He liked the work, I could see that. Once it was done though, he had no further use for the saw, and since then it had been lying on the floor in here.

I loaded myself up with as many logs as I could carry, kicked open the door, and staggered back across the yard — the thought of how impressed they would be uppermost in my mind — levered off my boots and walked leaning backward slightly, almost collapsing under the weight, into the living room.

“Look at him!” said Grandma as I came in. “That’s quite a load you’ve got there!”

I halted in front of the wood basket.

“Hang on a sec, I’ll give you a hand,” Dad said and came toward me, took the top logs, and put them in the basket. His lips were drawn, his eyes cold. I knelt down and let the rest tumble in.

“Now we’ve got enough wood until summer,” he said.

I straightened up, picked some splinters of wood off my shirt, and sat in the chair while Dad crouched down, opened the stove door and pushed in a couple of logs. He was wearing a dark suit and a dark-red tie, black shoes, and a white shirt, which contrasted with his ice-blue eyes, black beard, and lightly tanned complexion. He spent the whole of the summer in the sun whenever he could, by August his skin was usually very dark, but this winter he must have gone to a tanning salon, it struck me now, unless he had eventually had so much sun that the tan had become permanent.

Around his eyes the skin had begun to crack, the way dry leather does, and form fine, closely set wrinkles.

He looked at his watch.

“Gunnar will have to get a move on if we’re going to eat before midnight,” he said.

“It’s the weather,” Grandma said. “He’ll be driving carefully tonight.”

Dad turned to me.

“Isn’t it time you were on your way?”

“Yes,” I said. “But I was going to say hello to Gunnar and Tove first.”

Dad gave a snort.

“Off you go and enjoy yourself. You don’t have to sit here with us, you know.”

I got up.

“Your shirt’s hanging over the cupboard in the other room,” Mom said.

I took it up to my room with me and changed. Black cotton trousers, wide at the thigh, narrow at the calf, and with side pockets, white shirt, black suit jacket. I rolled up the studded belt I had planned to wear and put it in the bag, for though they might not actually forbid me to wear it, they would notice, and I didn’t want to go through all that now. I added a pair of black Doc Martens, an extra shirt, two packs of Pall Mall mild, some chewing gum, and pastilles. When I was finished I stood in front of the mirror. It was five past seven. I should have been on my way, but had to wait for Gunnar for as long as possible because if he hadn’t come there was a risk I would meet him on the road. With two bags of beer in my hands that was not a great idea.

Apart from the wind, and the trees at the forest edge, which you could just make out on the periphery of the light from the house, nothing stirred.

If they weren’t here within five minutes, I would have to go anyway.

I put on my outdoor clothes, stood at the window for a moment straining to hear the drone of a car engine while staring down at the place where the headlights would come into view first, then turned, switched off the light, and went downstairs.

Dad was in the kitchen pouring water into a large pan. He looked up as I went in.

“Are you going?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Have a nice evening,” he said.

At the bottom of the hill, where the morning’s tracks had been covered over by the wind and snow, I stood stock-still and listened for a few seconds. When I was sure there were no cars coming I went up the slope and into the trees. The bags were where I had left them, covered with a thin layer of snow that slid down the smooth plastic when I picked them up. With one in each hand I walked back down, stopped behind a tree to listen, and when there was still nothing to be heard, I struggled over the bank of snow at the roadside and loped down to the bend. Not many people lived out here, and through-traffic used the road on the other side of the river, so if a car did come there was a good chance it would be Gunnar’s. I walked up the hill, around the bend where William’s family lived. Their house was set back a bit, right up against the forest that rose steeply behind it. The blue shimmer from the television flickered through the living room. The house was a seventies’ build, the plot unworked, full of stones, uncovered rock, with a broken swing, a pile of wood under a tarpaulin, a wrecked car, and some tires. I didn’t understand why they lived like that. Didn’t they want to live like normal people? Or couldn’t they? Didn’t it matter to them? Or did they in fact think that they were living like normal people? The father was kind and gentle, the mother always angry, the three children always dressed in clothes that were either too big or too small.

One morning on my way to school I had seen the father and daughter clambering up a pile of rocks on the other side of the road, both bleeding from the forehead, the girl with a white scarf drenched with blood tied around her head. There had been something animal-like about them, I remember thinking, because they didn’t say anything, didn’t shout, just calmly climbed up the rocks. At the bottom, with its hood against a tree, was their truck. Beneath the trees flowed the dark, lustrous river. I had asked them if I could help, the father had told me they didn’t need any help; they were fine, he had called from the slope, and even though the sight was so unexpected that it was almost impossible to drag yourself away, it also felt wrong to stand there watching, so I continued on my way to the bus stop. On turning, the one time I had allowed myself to do so, I saw them hobbling along the road, he was dressed in overalls as always, with his arm around his daughter’s fragile eleven-year-old body.

We used to tease her and William, it was easy to make them lose their tempers and easy to put them in their place, words and ideas were not their strong suits, but I didn’t realize this had any impact on them until one ordinary boring summer’s day Per and I had rung William’s doorbell to get him to come out and play soccer and their mother had come onto the veranda and given us an earful, especially me, because I thought I was superior to everyone else, and her son and daughter in particular. I answered her back, it turned out she was not very adept with words either, but her anger on the other hand was not to be quelled, so all I gained was Per’s laughing admiration for my wit, which was forgotten a few hours later. But the people living on the bend did not forget. The father was too kind to intervene, but the mother. . her eyes darkened every time she saw me. To me they were people I could lord it over, nothing more. If William came to school wearing trousers at half-mast he had made a monumental blunder; if he misused a word, there was no reason he shouldn’t hear about it. That was only the truth, wasn’t it? And it was up to him to stop our fun or find a way to overcome it. I was not exactly invulnerable, my weaknesses were there for all to see and exploit, and the fact that they didn’t, because they didn’t have enough insight to be able to see them, was surely not my problem. The conditions were the same for all. At school William hung out with a crowd who smoked in the wet weather shed, the ones who rode mopeds from the age of thirteen, who began to drop out of school when they were fourteen, who had fights and drank, and they too made fun of William, but in a way he could tolerate, because there was always something he could compare himself with, there were always ways of getting his own back. With us, that is, those who lived in the houses up here, it was different, here it was sarcasm, irony, and the killer remark that held sway, things which could drive him insane as it all was beyond his reach. But he needed us more than we needed him, and he kept coming back. For me this was a question of freedom. When I moved there, no one knew me, and although I was basically the same person as before it gave me the chance to do things I had never done. There was, for example, an old-fashioned village shop by the bus stop in which goods were bought and sold over the counter, and that was owned by two sisters aged around seventy. They were nice, and particularly slow off the mark. If you asked them for something on one of the top shelves they turned their backs to you for a minute or two, and this was your chance to stuff as much chocolate and as many sweets as you could in your jacket. Not to mention the opportunities if you asked them for something from the cellar. In Tromøya I would never have dreamed of doing such a thing, but here I didn’t hesitate, here I was not only a person who stole chocolate and sweets from old ladies but also a person who enticed others into doing the same. They were a year younger than me and had hardly been out of the local area; compared to them I felt like a man of the world. They had all scrumped strawberries, for example, but I introduced a touch of refinement and got them to take plates, spoons, milk, and sugar into the strawberry field.

Down in the factory building we had to fill in lists of the work we had done and were paid accordingly, and apparently it had never even occurred to them that the system could be abused and it was possible to cheat. But that was where we came in. The most important change in my behavior, however, was linguistic; I had discovered the edge that words gave you to bully others. I taunted and harassed, manipulated and ridiculed, and never, not once, did it strike them that the basis of this power I had was so insecure that one single well-directed blow could have knocked it flying. I had a speech impediment, you see! I couldn’t say my “r”s. After having been shown up by me it would have been enough for them to mimic me and I would have been crushed. But they never did.

Well, actually, Per’s brother, who was three years younger than me, did do it once. Per and I were talking in their stable, which his father had just built onto the garage, to house the pony he had bought for his daughter, Per and Tom’s little sister, Marit, we had been out all evening and ended up here, in the snug, warm room that smelled of horse and hay, when Tom, who didn’t like me, presumably because I laid claim to the brother who previously had always been at his disposal, suddenly mimicked me.

“Fowd Siewa?” he said. “What’s a Fowd Siewa when it’s at home?”

“Now, now, Tom,” Per reproved.

“A Fowd Siewa’s a car,” I said. “Never heard of one?”

“I haven’t heard of any cars being called Fowds,” he said. “And certainly not a Siewa.”

“Tom!” Per shouted.

“Oh, you mean Ford!” Tom said.

“Yes of course,” I answered.

“Why didn’t you say so then?” he said. “Forrrrrd! Sierrrra!”

“Get lost, Tom,” Per said. When Tom showed no signs of moving he punched him on the shoulder.

“Ow!” Tom howled. “Stoppit!”

“Scram, you brat!” Per said, and punched him again.

Tom left and we continued to chat as if nothing had happened.

It was remarkable that this was the only time any of the kids up there had made fun of my weaknesses, especially considering I pushed them around all the time. But they hadn’t. Up there I was king, king of the young kids. But my power was limited. If anyone appeared who was as old as me, or who lived farther down the valley, it ceased to exist. So I kept a beady eye on those around me, then as now.

I put the bags down on the road for a second, opened my jacket and pulled out the scarf, and wound it around my face, grabbed the bags again, and kept on walking. The wind whistled round my ears, whisked up the snow on all sides, swept it into the air and swirled it around. It was four kilometers to Jan Vidar’s place so I needed to hurry. I broke into a jog. The bags hung from my arms like lead weights. Farther along the road, on the far side of the bend, two headlights came into view. The beams sliced through the forest. The trees there seemed to flare up, one by one. I stopped, put one foot on the edge of the ditch and carefully rested the bags in the ditch below me. Then I walked on. I turned my head as the car passed. An old man I didn’t recognize was in the driver’s seat. I walked back the twenty meters and retrieved the bags from the ditch, carried on walking, rounded the bend, passed the house where the old man lived alone, emerged from the forest to see the factory lights, hazy in the snow-flurried darkness, walked past the small, dilapidated farm, in darkness tonight, and had almost reached the last house before the intersection with the main road when another car came along. I did the same as before, quickly hid the bottles in the ditch and carried on walking, empty-handed. It wasn’t Gunnar this time either. After the car had passed I ran back, picked up the bags and set off even faster; it was already half past seven. I hurried along and was not far from the main road when three more cars appeared. I put down the bags again. Let it be Gunnar, I thought, because as soon as he had gone by I wouldn’t need to keep stopping to hide the beer. Two of the cars drove across the bridge, the third turned off and passed me, but that wasn’t Gunnar either. I collected the bags and made for the main road, followed it past the bus stop, the old-fashioned shop, the garage, the old houses, all of them bathed in light, all of them windblown, all deserted. Approaching the top of the long, gentle gradient I saw the headlights of another car coming over the brow. There was no ditch here, so I had to put the bottles in the banked up snow, and as they were visible, hurriedly put a few meters between them and me.

I peered into the car as it passed. This time it was Gunnar. He turned his head at that moment and, on recognizing me, braked. With a trail of swirling snow, reddish in the brake lights, the car gradually slowed down and when, twenty meters farther on, it finally came to a halt, he began to reverse. The engine was whining.

He opened the door when he was alongside me.

“Is that you out in this weather!” he cried.

“Brrr, yes,” I answered.

“Where are you off to?”

“To a party.”

“Jump in, and I’ll drive you there,” he said.

“No, don’t bother,” I said. “I’m almost there. I’m fine.”

“No, no, no,” Gunnar said. “Jump in.”

I shook my head.

“You’re late as well,” I said. “It’s almost eight.”

“No problem at all,” Gunnar said. “Hop in. After all, it’s New Year’s Eve and all that. We can’t have you walking in the freezing cold, you know. We’ll take you there. End of discussion.”

I couldn’t protest anymore without arousing suspicion.

“Okay then,” I said. “That’s very kind of you.”

He snorted.

“Jump into the back,” he said. “And tell me where to go.”

I got in. It was nice and warm. Harald, their soon three-year-old son, was sitting in the child seat and silently watching me.

“Hi, Harald,” I said to him with a smile.

Tove, who was sitting at the front, turned to me.

“Hi, Karl Ove,” she said. “Good to see you.”

“Hi,” I said. “And Merry Christmas.”

“Let’s go then,” Gunnar said. “I assume we have to turn around?”

I nodded.

We drove to the bus stop, turned, and drove back up. As we passed the place where I left the bags I resisted leaning forward to see if they were there. They were.

“Where are you going?” Gunnar asked.

“First to a pal’s in Solsletta. Then we’re going to Søm, to a party there.”

“I can drive you all the way if you like,” he said.

Tove sent him a look.

“No need,” I said. “We’re going to meet some others on the bus anyway.”

Gunnar was ten years younger than my father and worked as an accountant in quite a large firm in town. He was the only one of the sons to follow in his father’s footsteps; both the others were teachers. Dad at an upper secondary school in Vennesla, Erling at a middle school in Trondheim. Erling was the only one for whom we used the epithet “uncle,” he was more laidback and not so status conscious as the other two. We didn’t see much of my father’s brothers when we were growing up, but we liked them both, they were always fooling around, especially Erling, but also Gunnar, whom both Yngve and I liked best, perhaps because he was relatively close to us in age. He had long hair, played the guitar, and not least, he kept a boat with a twenty horse power Mercury engine at the cabin outside Mandal where he stayed for long stretches at a time in the summer when we were growing up. In my mind, the friends he talked about were wreathed in an almost mythical glow, partly because my father didn’t have any, partly because we hardly ever saw them, they were just people he went out to meet in his boat, and I imagined their lives as an endless cruise between islets and skerries in racing boats during the daytime, with their long, blond hair fluttering in the wind and tanned, smiling faces; playing cards and strumming guitars in the evenings, when they were in the company of girls.

But now he was married and had children, and even though he still had the boat the aura of island romanticism had gone. The long hair too. Tove came from a police family somewhere in Trøndelag, and worked as a primary school teacher.

“Have you had a good Christmas?” she asked, turning to me.

“Yes, great,” I said.

“Yngve was home, I heard?” Gunnar said.

I nodded. Yngve was his favorite, no doubt because he was the first-born and had been at my grandparents’ for so long while Gunnar still lived there. But also presumably because Yngve had not been as fragile and weepy as I had been as a child. He had had great fun with Yngve. So when I saw them together I tried to counteract that, tried to be funny, to crack lots of jokes, to show them I was just as easygoing as they were, just as fun-loving, just as much of a Sørlander as they were.

“He went back a couple of days ago,” I said. “Off to a cabin with some friends.”

“Yes, he’s turning into an Arendaler, you know,” Gunnar said.

We passed the chapel, drove around the bend by the ravine where the sun never shone, crossed the tiny bridge. The windshield wipers beat a rhythm. The fan hummed. Beside me Harald sat blinking.

“Whose party is it?” Gunnar asked. “Someone in your class, I suppose?”

“Girl in the parallel class actually,” I said.

“Yes, everything changes when you go to gymnas,” he said.

“You went to the Cathedral School, didn’t you?” I asked.

“I did,” he said, twisting his head far enough to meet my eyes before returning his attention to the road. His face was long and narrow, like my father’s, but the blue of his eyes was darker, more like Grandad’s than Grandma’s. The back of his head was big, like Grandad’s and mine, while his lips, which were sensitive and almost revealed more information about his inner being than his eyes, were the same as Dad’s and Yngve’s.

We left the forest behind, and the light from the headlights which had for so long picked out trees and crags, sides of houses and escarpments, finally had some space around them.

“It’s at the end of this stretch,” I said. “You can pull up over by the shop there.”

“Okay,” said Gunnar. Slowed to a stop.

“Have a nice time,” I said. “And Happy New Year!”

“Happy New Year to you too,” Gunnar said.

I slammed the door and started to walk towards Jan Vidar’s house while the car turned around and drove back the way we had come. When it was out of sight I began to run. Now we really were pressed for time. I jumped down the escarpment to their property, saw the light in his room was on, went over and banged on the window. His face appeared a second later, staring out into the dark through narrowed eyes. I pointed toward the door. When, at last, he saw me, he nodded, and I walked around to the other side of the house.

“Sorry,” I said. “But the beers are up by Kragebo. We’ll have to get a move on and fetch them.”

“What are they doing there?” he asked. “Why didn’t you bring them with you?”

“My uncle came along while I was walking here,” I said. “I just managed to sling the bags in the ditch before he stopped. And then bugger me if he didn’t insist on driving me here. I couldn’t say no, he would have become suspicious, wouldn’t he.”

“Oh no,” Jan Vidar said. “Shit. What a drag.”

“I know,” he said. “But come on. Let’s get going.”

A few minutes later we were clambering up the slope to the road. Jan Vidar had his hat down over his forehead, his scarf wrapped around his mouth, jacket collar up over his cheeks. The only part of his face that was visible was the eyes, and then only because the round John Lennon glasses he was wearing were misted up, which I noticed as he met my gaze.

“Let’s go for it then,” I said.

“I guess we’d better,” he agreed.

At a steady pace, dragging our legs so as not to use up all our energy at once, we began to run along the road. We had the wind in our faces. The snow swept past. Tears trickled from my tightly pinched eyes. My feet began to go numb, they no longer did what I wanted them to do; they just lay inside my boots, stiff and loglike.

A car drove past, making our lack of speed painfully obvious as a moment later it rounded the curve at the end of the road and was gone.

“Shall we walk for a bit?” Jan Vidar asked.

I nodded.

“Let’s just hope the bags are still there!” I said.

“What?” Jan Vidar shouted.

“The bags!” I said. “Hope no one’s taken them!”

“There’s no bugger around now!” Jan Vidar yelled.

We laughed. Came to the end of the flat and broke into a run again. Up the hill, where the gravel road led to the strange manorlike property by the river, over the little bridge, past the ravine, the ramshackle garage-cum-repair shop, the chapel and the small white 1950s houses on both sides of the road, until we finally arrived at the spot where I had left the two bags. We grabbed one each and began to walk back.

As we reached the chapel, we heard a car behind us.

“Shall we hitch a ride?” Jan Vidar suggested.

“Why not?” I said.

With our left hands clutching the bags and our right thumbs raised we stood with a smile on our faces until the car came. It didn’t even dip its headlights. We jogged on.

“What are we going to do if we don’t get a ride?” Jan Vidar asked after a while.

“We’ll get one,” I answered.

“Two cars go by every hour,” he said.

“Have you got any better suggestions since you’re asking the questions?” I said.

“None,” he said. “But there are a few people at Richard’s.”

“No way,” I said.

“And Stig and Liv are in Kjevik with some friends,” he said. “That’s a possibility too.”

“We decided on Søm, didn’t we,” I said. “You can’t start suggesting new places to go on New Year’s Eve! This is New Year’s Eve, you know.”

“Yes, and we’re standing at the roadside. How much fun is that?”

Headlights approached behind us.

“Look,” I said. “Another car!”

It didn’t stop.

By the time we got back to Jan Vidar’s house, it was eight thirty. My feet were frozen, and for a brief instant I was at the point of suggesting we should give the beer a miss, go to his house and celebrate New Year’s Eve with his parents. Lutefisk, soft drinks, ice cream, cakes, and fireworks. That was what we had always done. As our eyes met I knew the same thought had struck him. But we went on. Out of the residential area, past the road down to the church, around the bend up to the little cluster of houses where, among others, Kåre from our class lived.

“Do you think Kåre has gone out tonight?” I asked.

“Yes, he has,” Jan Vidar said. “He’s at Richard’s.”

“Yet another reason not to go there,” I said.

There was nothing wrong with Kåre, but neither was there anything right. Kåre had large protruding ears, thick lips, thin, sandy hair, and angry eyes. He was invariably angry, and probably had good reason to be. The summer I began at the school he had been in the hospital with broken ribs and a broken wrist. He had been in town with his father to pick up some building materials, plasterboard, and they had put the sheets on the trailer behind the car, but failed to secure them properly so, as they were approaching Varodd Bridge, Kåre’s father had asked him to get out and sit in the trailer to make sure the materials didn’t move. He had been blown off along with the materials and knocked senseless. We laughed at that all autumn, and it was still one of the first things that came to mind whenever Kåre made an appearance.

Now he had got himself a moped and had started hanging around with the rest of the moped gang.

On the other side of the bend was Liv’s house, Liv, for whom Jan Vidar had always had a soft spot. I could control myself. She had a nice body, but there was something boyish about her humor and manner that seemed to cancel out her breasts and hips. Besides, I had been sitting in front of her in the bus once when she waved her hands at some of the other girls, waved them about madly, and then said, “Yuck, they’re so horrible! Those long hands of his! Have you seen them?” Surprised by the lack of reaction — the girls she was addressing were staring straight at me — she turned to me and blushed in a way I had never seen her blush, thereby removing any doubt that may have lingered about whose hands she found so disgusting.

Below was the community center, then came a short but steep hill down to the shop where the vast Ryen Plain began and finished at the airport.

“I think I’ll have a smoke,” I said, nodding in the direction of the bus stop on the other side of the community center. “Shall we stand there for a bit?”

“Go on, you have a smoke,” Jan Vidar said. “It’s New Year’s Eve after all.”

“How about a beer as well?” I suggested.

“Here? What’s the point of that?”

“Are you in a bad mood or what?”

“Depends what you call bad.”

“Oh come on now!” I said. I took off my rucksack, found the lighter and the packet of cigarettes, fished one out, shielded it against the wind with my hand, and lit up.

“Want one?” I asked, proffering the packet.

He shook his head.

I coughed and the smoke that seemed to get trapped in the upper part of my throat sent a feeling of nausea through my stomach.

“Agh, shit,” I said.

“Is it good?” Jan Vidar asked.

“I don’t usually cough,” I said. “But the smoke went down the wrong way. It’s not because I’m not used to it.”

“No,” Jan Vidar said. “Everyone who smokes takes it down the wrong way and coughs. It’s a well-known phenomenon. My mother has been smoking for thirty years. Every time she smokes it goes down the wrong way and she coughs.”

“Ha ha,” I said.

Around the bend, out of the darkness, came a car. Jan Vidar took a step forward and stuck out his thumb. The car stopped! He rushed over and opened the door. Then he turned to me and waved. I threw away the cigarette, slung the rucksack onto my back, grabbed the bag, and walked over. Susanne stepped out of the car. She bent down, pulled a little lever, and slid the seat forward. Then she looked at me.

“Hi Karl Ove,” she said.

“Hi Susanne,” I said.

Jan Vidar was already on his way into the darkness of the car. The bottles clinked in the bag.

“Do you want to put the bag in the trunk?” Susanne suggested.

“No thanks,” I said. “It’s fine.”

I got in, squeezed the bag down between my legs. Susanne got in. Terje, who was behind the wheel, turned around and looked at me.

“Are you hitchhiking on New Year’s Eve?” he asked.

“We-ell. .,” Jan Vidar hedged, as if he considered that this was not actually hitchhiking. “We’ve just been pretty unlucky this evening.”

Terje put the car in gear, the wheels spun around until they caught up with the engine, and we rolled down the hill and onto the flat.

“Where are you going, boys?” he asked.

Boys.

What an idiot.

How could he go around with a perm and imagine it looked good? Did he think he looked tough with the moustache and the perm?

Grow up. Lose twenty kilos. Get rid of the stache. Get your hair cut. Then we can start talking.

What did Susanne see in him?

“We’re going to Søm. To a party,” I said. “How far are you going?”

“Well, we’re just going to Hamre,” he answered. “To Helge’s party. But we can drop you at the Timenes intersection if you like.”

“Great,” Jan Vidar said. “Thanks. Very nice of you.”

I looked at him. But he was staring out of the window and didn’t catch my look.

“Who’s going to Helge’s then?” he asked.

“The usual suspects,” Terje said. “Richard, Ekse, Molle, Jøgge, Hebbe, Tjådi. And Frode and Jomås and Bjørn.”

“No girls?”

“Yes of course. Do you think we’re stupid?”

“Who then?”

“Kristin, Randi, Kathrine, Hilde. . Inger, Ellen, Anne Kathrine, Rita, Vibecke. . Why? Would you like to join us?”

“No, we’re going to another party,” I said before Jan Vidar could say a word. “And we’re pretty late already.”

“Especially if you’re going to hitch,” he said.

Ahead of us, the airport lights came into view. On the other side of the river, which we crossed the very next second, the little slalom slope below the school was bathed in light. The snow had an orange tint.

“How’s it going at commercial school, Susanne?” I asked.

“Fine,” she said from her inviolable seat in front of me. “How’s it going at Cathedral School?”

“It’s fine,” I said.

“You’re in the same class as Molle, aren’t you,” Terje said, sending me a quick glance.

“That’s right.”

“Is that the class with twenty-six girls?”

“Yes.”

He laughed.

“Quite a few class parties then?”

The camping site, snow-covered and forlorn, appeared on one side of the road; the little chapel, the supermarket, and the Esso garage on the other. The night sky above the rooftops of the houses huddled together on the hillside was riven with flares and flashes from fireworks. A crowd of children stood around a Roman candle in the parking lot, it was shooting up tiny balls of light that exploded in a myriad of sparks. A stream of cars crawled, bumper to bumper, along the road that ran parallel to ours for a stretch. On the other side was the beach. The bay was hidden beneath a white layer of ice that fissured and broke into a sea of blackness a hundred meters out.

“What time is it?” Jan Vidar asked.

“Half past nine,” Terje said.

“Shit. That means we won’t manage to get drunk before twelve,” Jan Vidar said.

“Have you got to be home by twelve?”

“Ha ha,” said Jan Vidar.

A few minutes later Terje pulled in by the bus stop at the Timenes intersection, and we climbed out and waited under the bus shelter with our bags.

“Wasn’t the bus supposed to leave at ten past eight?” Jan Vidar asked.

“It was,” I replied. “Could be late though?”

We laughed.

“Christ,” I said. “Well, at least we can have a beer now!”

I couldn’t open the bottles with the lighter, so I passed it to Jan Vidar. Without saying a word, he whipped the tops off both and handed me one.

“Oooh, that was good,” I said, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. “If we knock back two or three now we’ve got ourselves a base for later.”

“My feet are fucking frozen,” Jan Vidar said. “How about yours?”

“Same,” I said.

I put the bottle to my mouth and drank for as long as I could. There was just a drop left after I lowered it. My stomach was full of froth and air. I tried to belch, but no air came up, just bubbles of froth that ran back into my mouth.

“Open another, will you,” I said.

“Okay,” Jan Vidar said. “But we can’t stand here all night.”

He flipped off another cap and passed me the bottle. I put it to my mouth and closed my eyes in concentration. I downed just over half. Another frothy belch followed.

“Oh Christ,” I moaned. “Maybe not such a good idea drinking this fast.”

The road we were standing by was the main thoroughfare between the towns in Sørland. It was normally packed with traffic. But in the ten minutes we had stood there only two cars had passed, both heading for Lillesand.

The air beneath the powerful streetlamps was full of swirling snow. The wind, made visible by the snow, rose and fell like waves, sometimes in long, slow surges, sometimes with sudden twists and twirls. Jan Vidar kicked his left foot against his right, the right against the left, the left against the right. .

“Come on, drink” I said. I knocked back the rest, threw the empty into the forest behind the shelter.

“Another one,” I demanded.

“You’ll be chucking up soon,” Jan Vidar said. “Take it easy.”

“Come on,” I said. “One more. Soon be damn near ten o’clock, won’t it?”

He flipped the top off another bottle and passed it to me.

“What shall we do?” he asked. “It’s too far to walk. The bus has gone. There are no cars to get a lift with. There isn’t even a telephone box nearby so that we can ring someone to pick us up.”

“We’re going to die here,” I said.

“Hey!” Jan Vidar shouted. “There’s a bus. It’s an Arendal bus.”

“Are you kidding?” I said, staring up the hill. He wasn’t, for there, around the bend at the top, came a wonderful, tall bus.

“Come on, sling the bottle,” Jan Vidar said. “And smile nicely.”

He stuck out his hand. The bus flashed, stopped, and the door opened.

“Two to Søm,” Jan Vidar said, handing the driver a hundred-krone note. I looked down the aisle. It was dark and completely empty.

“You’ll have to wait to drink that,” the driver said, taking the change from his bag. “Okay?”

“Of course,” Jan Vidar said.

We took a seat in the middle. Jan Vidar leaned back and placed his feet against the panel that shielded the door.

“Aahh, that’s better,” I said. “Nice and warm.”

“Mm,” Jan Vidar concurred.

I bent forward and started to unlace my boots.

“Have you got the address of where we’re going?” I asked.

“Elgstien something or other,” he said. “I know more or less where it is.”

I removed my feet from the boots and rubbed them between my hands. When we came to the small unmanned service station, which had been there for as long as I could remember and had always been a sign that we were approaching Kristiansand and on our way to see my grandparents, I put my feet back, tied the laces, and was finished just as the bus pulled into the Varodd Bridge stop.

“Happy New Year,” Jan Vidar shouted to the driver, before leaping into the darkness after me.

Even though I had driven past on numerous occasions I had never set foot here, except in my dreams. Varodd Bridge was one of the places I dreamt of most. Now and then I just stood at the foot and gazed at the towering mast, or I walked onto it. Then the railing usually disappeared and I had to sit down on the road and try to find something to hold onto, or the bridge suddenly disintegrated and I slid inexorably toward the edge. When I was smaller it was Tromøy Bridge that fulfilled this function in my dreams. Now it had become Varodd Bridge.

“My father was at the opening,” I said, nodding toward the bridge as we crossed the road.

“Lucky him,” Jan Vidar said.

We plodded in silence toward the built-up area. Normally there was a fantastic view from here, you could see Kjevik and the fjord that came into the land on one side and stretched far out to the sea on the other. But tonight everything was as black as the inside of a sack.

“Has the wind dropped a bit?” I asked at some point.

“Seems like it,” Jan Vidar said, turning to me. “Have those beers had any effect, by the way?”

I shook my head.

“Nothing. What a waste.”

As we walked, houses began to appear. Some were empty and dark, some were full of people dressed in party clothes. Here and there people were letting off rockets from verandas. In one place I saw a gaggle of children waving sparklers in the air. My feet were frozen again. I had curled up my fingers in the mitten not holding the bag of bottles, to little effect. Now we would soon be there, according to Jan Vidar, who then stopped in the middle of an intersection.

“Elgstien’s up there,” he pointed. “And up there. And down there, and down there too. Take your pick. Which one shall we take?”

“Are there four roads called Elgstien?”

“Apparently so. But which one should we take? Use your feminine intuition.”

Feminine? Why did he say that? Did he think I was a woman?

“What do you mean by that?” I asked. “Why do you think I have feminine intuition?”

“Come on, Karl Ove,” he said. “Which way?”

I pointed to the right. We started to walk that way. We were looking for number thirteen. The first house was twenty-three, the next twenty-one, so we were on the right track.

Some minutes later we were standing outside the house. It was a seventies build, and looked a bit run-down. The snow on the path to the front door had not been cleared, not for a long time, judging by the line of knee-deep tracks that wound toward the house.

“What was his name, the boy whose party this is?” I asked as we stood by the door.

“Jan Ronny,” Jan Vidar said, and rang the bell.

“Jan Ronny?” I repeated.

“That’s his name.”

The door opened, it must have been the host standing in front of us. He had short, blond hair, pimples on his cheek and around the top of his nose, wore a gold chain around his neck, black jeans, a cotton lumberjack shirt, and white tennis socks. He smiled and pointed at Jan Vidar’s stomach.

“Jan Vidar!” he said.

“Right first time,” Jan Vidar said.

“And you are. .,” he said, brandishing his finger at me. “Kai Olav!”

“Karl Ove,” I said.

“What the fuck. Come on in! We’ve already started!”

We took off our outdoor clothes in the hall and followed him downstairs to a cellar room, where there were five people. Watching TV. The table in front of them was covered with beer bottles, bowls of chips, packs of cigarettes and tobacco pouches. Øyvind, who was sitting on the sofa with his arms around his girlfriend, Lene, only in the seventh class but still great and so forward you never thought about the age difference, smiled at us as we went in.

“Hi there!” Øyvind said. “Great you could make it!”

He introduced the others. Rune, Jens, and Ellen. Rune was in the ninth class, Jens and Ellen were in the eighth while Jan Ronny, who was Øyvind’s cousin, was at technical school, a budding mechanic. None of them had dressed up. Not so much as a white shirt.

“What are you watching?” Jan Vidar asked, sitting on the sofa and taking out a beer. I leaned against the wall under the low cellar window, which was completely covered by snow on the outside.

“A Bruce Lee film,” Øyvind replied. “It’s almost over. But we’ve got Bachelor Party as well, and a Dirty Harry film. And Jan Ronny’s got a few of his own. What would you like to see? We’re easy.”

Jan Vidar shrugged.

“I’m easy. What do you say, Karl Ove?”

I shrugged.

“Is there a bottle opener around?” I asked.

Øyvind bent forward and took a lighter from the table, tossed it over to me. But I couldn’t open bottles with lighters. Nor could I ask Jan Vidar to open the bottle for me, that was too homo.

I took a bottle from the bag and put the top between my teeth, twisted it so the cap was right over a molar and bit. The cap came off with a hiss.

“Don’t do that!” said Lene.

“It’s fine,” I said.

I downed the beer in one gulp. Apart from all the carbon dioxide filling my stomach with air, which meant I had to swallow the tiny belches that came up, I still didn’t feel anything. And I couldn’t manage another beer in one go.

My feet ached as the warmth began to return.

“Anyone got any liquor?” I asked.

They shook their heads.

“Just beer, I’m afraid,” Øyvind said. “But you can have one if you want.”

“Already got some, thanks,” I said.

Øyvind raised his bottle.

“Clink’n’sink!” he said.

“Clink’n’sink!” the others said, touching bottles. They laughed.

I fished out the pack of cigarettes from the bag and lit up. Pall Mall mild, not exactly the coolest cigarette around and, standing there with the all-white cigarette in my hand — the filter was white too, I regretted not having bought Prince. But my mind had been focused on the party we were going to after twelve, the one that Irene from the class was throwing, and Pall Mall mild would not be too conspicuous there. It was, also, the brand that Yngve smoked. At least it had been the one time I had seen him smoking, one evening in the garden when Mom and Dad had been at Alf’s, Dad’s uncle’s.

Time for another bottle. I didn’t want to use my teeth again, something told me that sooner or later I would come up short, sooner or later the molar would give way and break. And now that I had shown that I could open bottles with my teeth, perhaps it wouldn’t seem so homo to let Jan Vidar open it for me.

I went over to him, nabbed a few chips from the bowl on the table.

“Can you open this for me?”

He nodded, without taking his eyes off the film.

Over the last year he had been doing some kickboxing. I kept forgetting, was just as surprised every time he invited me to a session or some such thing. Of course I always refused. But this was Bruce Lee, the fighting was the whole point, and he had one foot in the door.

With a beer bottle in my hand I went back to my place by the wall. No one said anything. Øyvind looked at me.

“Take the weight off your feet, Karl Ove,” he said.

“I’m fine standing,” I said.

“Well, skål, anyway!” he said, raising his bottle to mine. I took two paces over to him, and we clinked.

“Down in one, John!” he said. His Adam’s apple pumped up and down like a piston as he drained the bottle.

Øyvind was big for his age, and unusually powerful. He had the body of a grown man. He was also good-natured, and didn’t take much notice of what was going on around him, or at least he was always relaxed about it. As if he were immune to the world. He played drums with us, yes, why not, might as well. He went out with Lene, yes, why not, might as well. He didn’t talk much to her, dragged her around to see his friends mostly, but that was fine, she wanted to be with him more than anyone else. I had checked her out once, a couple of months ago, just to see how the land lay, but even though I was two years older than them she was not in the slightest bit interested. Oh, how stupid that was. Surrounded by girls at the gymnas and I tried it on with her. Girl from the seventh class. But her breasts looked great under her T-shirt. I still wanted to take it off. I still wanted to feel her breasts in my hands, whatever her age. And there was nothing about her body or manner that indicated she was only fourteen.

I put the bottle to my lips and downed the rest. I really wouldn’t be able to keep this up, I thought as I placed it on the table and opened another with my teeth. My stomach was exploding with all the carbon dioxide. Any more and froth would be oozing out of my ears. Fortunately, it was nearly eleven now. At half past eleven we would leave and then be at the other party for the rest of the night. If not for that, I would have gone long ago.

A boy called Jens suddenly half-rose from the sofa, grabbed the lighter from the table and held it to his ass.

“Now!” he said.

He farted as he flicked the lighter, and a ball of flame flared out behind him. He laughed. The others laughed too.

“Stop that!” Lene said.

Jan Vidar smiled, and was careful not to meet my gaze. Bottle in hand, I wandered over to the far door in the room. Behind it there was a small kitchen. I leaned over the counter. The house was on a slope, and the window, well above ground level, faced the back of the garden. Two pine trees were swaying in the wind. There were more houses farther down. Through the window of one I saw three men and a woman standing, glass in hand, talking. The men wore black suits, the woman a black dress with bare arms. I went to the other door and opened it. A shower. On the wall was a wetsuit. Well, that’s something at least, I thought, closed the door and went back to the living room. The others were sitting, as before.

“Can you feel anything?” Jan Vidar asked.

I shook my head.

“No. Not a thing. You?”

He smiled.

“A bit.”

“We’ll have to be off soon,” I said.

“Where are you going?” Øyvind asked.

“Up to the intersection. Where everyone’s going at twelve.”

“But it’s only eleven! And we’re going there too. We can go together, for Christ’s sake.”

He looked at me.

“Why do you want to go there now?”

I shrugged.

“I’ve arranged to meet someone there.”

“She’ll wait for you, don’t worry,” Jan Vidar said.

It was half past eleven when we made a move to go. The quiet residential area where, apart from a few people on the odd veranda or drive, there had not been a soul half an hour earlier was now full of life and activity. Smartly dressed partygoers streamed out of the houses. Women with shawls over their shoulders, glasses in their hands and high-heeled evening shoes on their feet, men with coats over their suits, patent leather shoes, holding bags of fireworks, excited children running among them, many with fizzing sparklers, filled the air with shouts and laughter. Jan Vidar and I were carrying our white plastic bags of beer and walking alongside the pimply schoolkids dressed in everyday clothes with whom we had spent the evening. In actual fact, we were not alongside them. I kept a few steps ahead in case we should meet anyone I knew from school. Pretended to look with interest this way and that so it would be impossible for anyone who saw us to imagine we were together. Which of course we were not. I looked good, white shirt, sleeves rolled up the way Yngve had told me they should be that autumn. Over the suit jacket and my black suitlike trousers I was wearing a grey coat, on my feet Doc Martens, and leather straps around my wrists. My hair was long at the back and short, almost spiky, on top. The only thing that didn’t belong was the bag of beer. Of that, however, I was painfully aware. It was what also linked me with the shabby crowd lurching along behind me, because they had plastic bags as well, each and every one of them.

At the intersection, which was on higher ground, and had been an assembly point because you could see the whole bay from there, there was total chaos. People stood shoulder to shoulder, most were drunk, and everyone was letting off fireworks. There were bangs and crackles on all sides, the smell of gunpowder tore at your nostrils, smoke drifted through the air and one after another multicolored rockets exploded beneath the cloudy sky. It shook with flashes of light looking as if it could rupture and burst at any moment.

We stood on the perimeter of the noise. Øyvind, who had brought along fireworks, took out a huge, dynamite-shaped stick and placed it in front of his feet. He seemed to be swaying to and fro as he did so. Jan Vidar was jabbering away, as he did when he was drunk, with a permanent smile on his lips. At the moment he was talking to Rune. They had found a common theme in kickboxing. His glasses were still misted up, but he could no longer be bothered to remove or wipe them. I was standing a few steps away and allowed my gaze to wander through the crowd. When the stick exploded for the first time and a red light was eructated right next to me I jumped out of my skin. Øyvind burst out laughing.

“Not bad!” he shouted. “Shall we try it again?” he said, putting down another firework and lighting it, without waiting for an answer. It immediately began to spew forth balls of light, and this, the steady succession of the explosions, excited him so much that he rummaged around in feverish haste for a third even before this one had died.

He couldn’t contain his laughter.

Beside us, a man in a light-blue jacket, white shirt and red leather tie tumbled headlong into a snowdrift. A woman ran over to him in her high heels and pulled at his arm, not hard enough to lift him but enough to motivate him to stand up under his own steam. He brushed himself down while staring straight ahead as though he had not just been lying in the snow but had merely stopped to get a better overall view of the situation. Two boys were standing on the bus shelter roof, each holding a rocket at an angle; they lit them, and with their faces averted, gripped them in their hands as they hissed and fizzed until the rockets took off, flew a couple of meters and exploded with such intensity and power that all the bystanders looked round.

“Hey, Jan Vidar,” I said. “Can you open this one as well?”

With a smile, he flipped the top off the bottle I passed him. At last I could feel something, but not pleasure nor a somberness, more a rapidly increasing blunting of the senses. I drank, lit a cigarette, looked at my watch. Ten to twelve.

“Ten minutes to go!” I said.

Jan Vidar nodded, went on chatting with Rune. I had decided not to look for Irene until after twelve. Those at the party would stick together until twelve, I was sure of that, then they would hug and wish one another a happy New Year, they already knew one another, they were friends, a clique, like everyone at my school they had their own, and I was too far outside this one to mingle. But after twelve, things would loosen up, they would stand around drinking, they would not return right away, and with the clique in this vaguely spontaneous, loose state, I would be able to make contact, chat and casually, or at least without revealing any obvious intentions, wheedle my way in and stay.

The problem was Jan Vidar. Would he want to come with me? They were all people he didn’t know, people I had more in common with than he did. He seemed to be enjoying himself where he was, didn’t he?

I would have to ask him. If he didn’t want to come with me, that was up to him. But I would definitely never set foot in that damn cellar again, that was for certain.

And there she was.

Some distance away, perhaps thirty meters from us, surrounded by her party guests. I tried to count them, but outside the inner circle it was difficult to work out who belonged to her party and who belonged elsewhere. I was sure it was somewhere between ten and twelve people. I had seen almost all the faces before; she hung out with them during the breaks. She was not beautiful, I suppose, she had a bit of a double chin and chubby cheeks — although she was not in any way fat — blue eyes and blond hair. She was short and there was something duck like about her. But none of this mattered one bit in my judgment of her, for she had something else, which was more important: she was a focal point. No matter where she went or what she said, people paid attention. She was out every weekend, in Kristiansand or at private parties, unless she was staying in a chalet at a skiing center or in some other big town. Always with her clique. I hated these cliques, I really did, and when I stood listening to her going on about all the things she had done recently I hated her too.

Tonight she was wearing a dark-blue, knee-length coat. Underneath I glimpsed a light-blue dress and skin-colored tights. On her head she had. . well, yes, it was a diadem, wasn’t it? Like some little princess?

Around me the intensity had gradually increased. Now all you could hear was bangs and explosions and shouting on all sides. Then, as if from above, as though it was God himself making his pleasure known at the advent of the New Year, the sirens began to sound. The cheering around us rose in volume. I looked at my watch. Twelve.

Jan Vidar met my gaze.

“It’s twelve o’clock!” he shouted. “Happy New Year!”

He started to trudge toward me.

No, shit, he wasn’t going to hug me, was he?

No, no, no!

But over he came, put his arms around me and pressed his cheek against mine.

“Happy New Year, Karl Ove,” he said. “And thanks for everything in the old one!”

“Happy New Year,” I said. His stubble rubbed against my smooth cheek. He thumped me on the back twice, then took a step back.

“Øyvind!” he said, going toward him.

Why the hell did he have to hug me? What was the point? We never hugged. We weren’t the sort of guys who would hug.

What a pile of shit this was.

“Happy New Year, Karl Ove!” said Lene. She smiled at me, and I leaned forward and gave her a hug.

“Happy New Year,” I said. “You’re so beautiful.”

Her face, which seconds before had floated around and been part of everything else that was happening, froze.

“What did you say?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “Thank you for the old year.”

She smiled.

“I heard what you said,” she said. “Happy New Year too.”

As she moved away, I had a stiffy.

Oh, not that as well.

I drank the rest of my beer. There were only three left in the bag. I ought to have saved them, but I needed something to occupy myself with, so I took one, opened it with my teeth and gulped it down. I lit a cigarette as well. They were my tools; with those in my hands I was equipped and ready to go. A cigarette in the left hand, a bottle of beer in the right. So I stood there lifting them to my mouth, first one, then the other. Cigarette, beer, cigarette, beer.

At ten past, I slapped Jan Vidar on the back and said I was going to join some friends, would be back soon, don’t go away, he nodded, and I made my way through to Irene. At first she didn’t notice me, she was standing with her back to me talking to some people.

“Hi, Irene!” I said.

As she didn’t turn, presumably because my voice could not be heard over the ambient noise, I felt obliged to tap her on the shoulder. This was not good, this approach was too direct, tapping someone on the shoulder is not the same as bumping into them, but I would have to take a chance.

At any event, she did turn.

“Karl Ove,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

“We’re at a party nearby. Then I saw you up here and thought I would wish you a happy New Year. Happy New Year!’

“Happy New Year!” she said. “Are you enjoying yourself?”

“Certainly am!” I said. “And you?”

“Yes, having a great time.”

There was a brief silence.

“You’re throwing a party, aren’t you?” I said.

“Yes.”

“Anywhere near?”

“Yes, I live over there.”

She pointed up the hill.

“In that house?” I said, nodding in the same direction.

“No, behind it. You can’t see it from the road.”

“I couldn’t tag along, could I?” I said. “Then we could chat a bit more. That would be nice.”

She shook her head and wrinkled her nose.

“Don’t think so,” she said. “It isn’t a class party, you see.”

“I know,” I said. “But just for a little chat? Nothing more. I’m at a party quite close by.”

“Go there then!” she said. “We can see each other at school in the New Year!”

She had completely out-maneuvered me. There was nothing else to say.

“Nice to see you,” I said. “I’ve always liked you.”

Then I about-faced and walked back. It had been hard to articulate the stuff about always liking her, because it was not true, but at least it would deflect her attention from the fact that I had tried to cadge an invitation to her party. Now she would think I asked because I was coming on to her. And I was coming on to her because I was drunk. Who doesn’t do that on New Year’s Eve?

Bitch. Fucking bitch.

Jan Vidar looked up at me when I got back.

“There won’t be any party,” I said. “We’re not invited.”

“Why not? Thought you said you knew them.”

“Invited guests only. And we’re not. Assholes.”

Jan Vidar snorted.

“We’ll just go back. It was great there, wasn’t it.”

I sent him a vacant stare and yawned, to let him know how great it was. But we had no choice. We couldn’t call his father before two o’clock. We couldn’t very well call at ten minutes past twelve on New Year’s Eve. So once again it was the crowd of pimply schoolkids dressed in everyday clothes that I walked ahead of through the residential district of Søm on that windblown New Year’s Eve of 1984/1985.

At twenty past two Jan Vidar’s father pulled up outside the house. We were ready and waiting. I, who was less drunk, sat in the front while Jan Vidar, who only one hour earlier had been jumping around with a lampshade on his head, sat in the back, as we had planned. Fortunately, after he had thrown up and after drinking a few glasses of water and washing his face thoroughly under the tap, he was in a state to phone his father and tell him where we were. Not very convincingly. I stood beside him and heard him almost spewing up the first part of the word, then swallowing the last, but he did manage to spit out the address, and I don’t suppose our parents imagined we were nowhere near alcohol on occasions such as these.

“Happy New Year, boys!” his father said as we got in. “Have you had a good time?”

“Yes,” I said. “Lots of people out and about at twelve. Quite a scene. How was it in Tveit?”

“Fine,” he said, stretching his arm along the back of my seat and craning his neck to reverse. “Whose house was it, actually?”

“Someone Øyvind knows. The one who plays drums in the band.”

“Oh yes,” the father said, changing gear and driving back the way he had just come. The snow in some of the gardens was stained with fireworks. A few couples were walking along the road. The occasional taxi passed. Otherwise all was quiet and peaceful. There was something I had always liked about gliding through the darkness with the dashboard illuminated beside a man who was confident and calm in his movements. Jan Vidar’s father was a good man. He was friendly and interested, but also left us in peace when Jan Vidar indicated we had had enough. He took us on fishing trips, he repaired things for us — once when my bike had been punctured on the way there he had fixed the tire for me, without a word, it was all ready when I had to leave — and when they went on family holidays they invited me. He asked after my parents, as did Jan Vidar’s mother, and whenever he drove me home, which was not so seldom, he always had a chat with Mom or Dad, if they were around, and he invited them over to his place. It wasn’t his fault that they never went. But he also had a temper, I knew that, even though I had never seen any evidence of it, and hatred was also among the many feelings Jan Vidar had for him.

“So it’s 1985,” I said as we joined the E18 by Varodd Bridge.

“Indeed,” Jan Vidar’s father said. “Or what do you say in the back?”

Jan Vidar didn’t say anything. And he hadn’t when his father got there either. He had just stared straight ahead and got in. I twisted around in my seat and looked at him. He was sitting with his head transfixed and his eyes focused on a point in the neck rest.

“Lost your tongue?” his father asked, smiling at me.

Still total silence from the rear.

“Your parents,” his father went on. “Did they stay at home tonight?”

I nodded.

“My grandparents and my uncle came over. Lutefisk and aquavit.”

“Glad you weren’t there?”

“Yes.”

Onto the Kjevik road, past Hamresanden, along Ryensletta. Dark, peaceful, nice and warm. I could sit like this for the rest of my life, I thought. Past their house, into the bends up by Kragebo, down to the bridge on the other side, up the hill. It hadn’t been cleared and was covered with five centimeters of fresh snow. Jan Vidar’s father drove more slowly over the last stretch. Past the house where Susann and Elise lived, the two sisters who had moved here from Canada, and no one could quite figure out, past the bend where William lived, down the hill, and up the last bit.

“I’ll drop you here,” he said. “Then we won’t wake them if they’re asleep. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said. “And thank you very much for the ride. See you, Jayvee!”

Jan Vidar blinked, then opened his eyes wide.

“See you, yes,” he said.

“Are you going to sit in the front?” Jan Vidar’s father asked.

“I don’t,” Jan Vidar said. I closed the door, raised my hand to wave goodbye and heard the car reversing behind me as I walked up the road to the house. “Jayvee”! Why had I said that? The nickname that signaled a friendship I didn’t need to signal; I had never used it before since, in fact, we were friends.

The windows in the house were unlit. So they must have gone to bed. I was glad, not because I had anything to hide, but because I wanted to be left in peace. After hanging up my outdoor clothes in the hall I went into the living room. All traces of the party had been removed. In the kitchen the dishwasher was humming softly. I sat down on the sofa and peeled an orange. Although the fire had gone out you could still feel the heat from the wood burner. Mom was right, it was good living here. On the wicker chair the cat lazily raised its head. Meeting my gaze, it got up, padded across the floor and jumped onto my lap. I got rid of the orange peel, which the cat hated.

“You can lie here for a bit,” I said, stroking it. “You can. But not all night, you know. I’m going to bed soon.”

It began to purr as it curled up on me. Its head sank slowly, resting on one paw, and its eyes, which first had closed with pleasure, were closed in sleep within seconds.

“It’s alright for some,” I said.

The next morning I awoke to the radio in the kitchen, but stayed where I was, there was nothing to get up for anyway today, and I soon fell sleep again. The next time I awoke it was half past eleven. I got dressed and went downstairs. Mom was sitting at the kitchen table reading and looked up as I came in.

“Hi,” she said. “Did you have a good time last night?”

“Yes,” I said. “It was fun.”

“When did you get home?”

“Half past two-ish. Jan Vidar’s Dad brought us back.”

I sat down and spread some liver pâté on a slice of bread, succeeded after several attempts in spearing a pickle with a fork, put it on top, and lifted the teapot to feel if it was empty.

“Is there any left?” Mom asked. “I can boil some more water.”

“Could probably squeeze a little cup out,” I said. “But it might be cold.”

Mom got up.

“Stay where you are,” I said. “I can do it myself.”

“It’s fine,” she said. “I’m sitting right by the stove.”

She filled the saucepan and put it on the burner, which soon began to crackle.

“And what did you have to eat?” she asked.

“It was a cold buffet,” I said. “I think the girl’s mother made it. It was the usual. . you know, shrimp and vegetables in jelly, transparent. .?”

“Shrimp in aspic?” Mom queried.

“Yes, shrimp in aspic. And ordinary shrimp. And crab. Two lobsters, there wasn’t enough for everyone, but we all got to taste a bit. And then, oh yeah, some ham and other things.”

“Sounds good,” Mom said.

“Yes, it was,” I said. “Then we went out at twelve, down to the intersection where everyone gathered and let off rockets. Well, we didn’t, but lots of the others did.”

“Did you meet anyone new?”

I hesitated. Took another slice of bread, scanned the table for something to put on it. Salami with mayonnaise, that looked good.

“Not exactly,” I said. “Mostly I stuck with people I know.”

I looked at her.

“Where’s Dad?”

“In the barn. He’s off to Grandma’s today. Feel like going?”

“No, I’d rather not,” I said. “There were so many people last night. I feel like being on my own now. Perhaps I’ll wander down to Per’s. But that’s all. What are you going to do?”

“I’m not sure. Read a bit, maybe. And make a start on my packing. The plane leaves early tomorrow morning.”

“That’s right,” I said. “When’s Yngve off?”

“In a few days, I think. Then it’ll be just you and Dad here.”

“Yes,” I said. I clapped my eyes on the brawn Grandma had made. Perhaps brawn wouldn’t be a bad idea for the next slice? And then one with lamb sausage.

Half an hour later I was ringing the doorbell at Per’s house. His father opened. He appeared to be on his way out: he was wearing a lined, green military jacket over a shiny blue tracksuit and had light-colored boots on; in his hand he had a lead. Their dog, an old Golden Retriever, was wagging its tail between its legs.

“Ah, it’s you,” he said. “Happy New Year.”

“Happy New Year,” I said.

“They’re in the living room,” he said. “Just go right in.”

He walked past me, whistling, onto the forecourt and over to the open garage. I kicked off my shoes and went into the house. It was large and open, built not so many years ago, by Per’s father, as far as I had understood, and you had a view of the river from almost all the rooms. From the hall there was first the kitchen, where Per’s mother was working, she turned her head as I passed, smiled and said hello, then the living room, where Per was sitting with his brother Tom, sister Marit, and best friend Trygve.

“What are you watching?” I asked.

“Guns of Navarone,” Per said.

“Been watching it long?”

“No. Half an hour. We can rewind it if you want.”

“Rewind?” said Trygve. “Aw, we don’t want to see the beginning again.”

“But Karl Ove hasn’t seen it,” Per said. “It won’t take long.”

“It won’t take long? It’ll take half an hour,” Trygve said.

Per went to the video player and knelt down.

“You can’t decide that unilaterally,” Tom said.

“Oh?” Per said.

He pressed stop and then REWIND.

Marit got up and headed for the staircase.

“Call me when we’re back to where we were,” she said. Per nodded. The video machine click-clacked a few times while emitting some tiny hydraulic whines until it was ready to start, and the tape began to whir backwards with ever-increasing speed and volume until it came to a stop well before the end, whereafter the last part rotated extremely slowly, in a manner reminiscent of a plane which after flying at breakneck speed through the air approaches the ground at reduced speed and brakes on the runway, and then calmly and carefully taxis toward the terminal building.

“I suppose you were at home with Mommy and Daddy last night?” I said, looking at Trygve.

“Yes?” he said. “And I suppose you went out drinking?”

“Yes,” I said. “I was having a drinky-winky, but I wish we’d stayed at home. We didn’t have a party to go to, so we just trudged around in the storm each lugging a bag of beer bottles. We walked the whole way to Søm. But just wait. Soon it will be your turn to wander around aimlessly with plastic bags at night.”

“Okay,” Per said.

“Oh, this is fun,” Trygve said as the first frames from the film appeared on the screen. Outside, everything was still, as only winter can be. And even though the sky was overcast and gray, the light over the countryside shimmered and was perfectly white. I remember thinking all I wanted to do was sit right there, in a newly built house, in a circle of light in the middle of the forest and be as stupid as I liked.

The next morning Dad drove Mom to the airport. When he returned, the buffer between us was gone, and we resumed the life we had lived all that autumn without further delay. He was back in the flat in the barn, I caught the bus down to Jan Vidar’s house where we plugged into his amplifier and sat around playing for a while until we got sick of that and ambled over to the shop, where nothing happened, ambled back and watched some ski-jumping on TV, played a few records, and talked about girls. At around five I caught the bus back up, Dad met me at the door, asked if he could drive me to town. Great, I said. On the way he suggested dropping in on my grandparents, I was probably hungry, we could eat there.

Grandma stuck her head out of the window as Dad parked the car outside the garage.

“Oh, it’s you!” she said.

A minute later she unlocked the front door.

“Nice to see you again!” she said. “It was lovely at your house.”

She looked at me.

“And you had a good time too, I heard?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Give me a hug then! You’re a big boy now, but you can still give your grandmother a hug, can’t you!”

I leaned forward and felt her dry, wrinkled cheek against mine. She smelled good, of the perfume she had always used.

“Have you eaten?” Dad asked.

“We’ve just had a bite, but I can heat something up for you, that’s no problem. Are you hungry?”

“I think we are, aren’t we?” Dad said, looking at me with a wry smile.

“I am at any rate,” I said.

In my inner ear I heard how that must have sounded to them.

“At any wate.”

We took our jackets off in the hall, I put my boots neatly at the bottom of the open wardrobe, hung my jacket on one of the ancient, chipped golden clothes hangers, Grandma stood by the stairs watching us with that impatience in her body she had always exhibited. One hand passed over her cheek. Her head twisted to one side. Her weight shifted from one foot to the other. Apparently unaffected by these minor adjustments she kept talking to Dad. Asked whether there was as much snow higher up. Whether Mom had left. When she would be back next. Mm, right, she said each time he said anything. Right.

“And what about you, Karl Ove,” she said, focusing on me. “When do you start school again?”

“In two days.”

“That’ll be nice, won’t it.”

“Yes, it will.”

Dad snatched a glance at himself in the mirror. His face was calm, but there was a visible shadow of displeasure in his eyes, they seemed cold and apathetic. He took a step toward Grandma, who turned to climb the stairs, lightly and nimbly. Dad followed, heavy-limbed, and I brought up the rear, eyes fixed on the thick, black hair at the back of his neck.

“Well, I’ll be darned!” Grandad said as we entered the kitchen. He was sitting on a chair by the table, leaning back with legs apart, black suspenders over a white shirt buttoned up to the neck. Over his face hung a lock of hair that he pushed back into place with his hand. From his mouth hung an unlit cigarette.

“How were the roads?” he asked. “Icy?”

“They weren’t so bad,” Dad said. “Worse on New Year’s Eve. And there was no traffic to speak of either.”

“Sit yourselves down,” Grandma said.

“No, then there’s no room for you,” Dad said.

“I’ll stand,” she said. “I have to heat your food up anyway. I sit all day, I do, you know. Come on, sit down!”

Grandad held a lighter to his cigarette and lit up. Puffed a few times, blew smoke into the room.

Grandma switched on the burners, drummed her fingers on the counter and whistled softly, as was her wont.

In a way Dad was too big to sit at the kitchen table, I thought. Not physically, there was plenty of room for him, it was more that he looked out of place. There was something about him, or whatever he radiated, that distanced itself from this table.

He took out a cigarette and lit it.

Would he have fit better in the living room? If we had been eating in there?

Yes, he would. That would have been better.

“So it’s 1985,” I said to break the silence that had already lasted seconds.

“Yes, s’pose it is, my boy,” Grandma said.

“What have you done with your brother?” Grandad said. “Is he back in Bergen?”

“No, he’s still in Arendal,” I said.

“Ah yes,” Grandad said. “He’s become a real Arendal boy, he has.”

“Yes, he doesn’t come by here so often any more,” Grandma said. “We had such fun when he was small.”

She looked at me.

“But you come though.”

“What is it he’s studying now?” Grandad asked.

“Isn’t it political science?” Dad wondered, looking at me.

“No, he’s just started media studies,” I said.

“Don’t you know what your own son’s studying?” Grandad smiled.

“Yes, I do. I know very well,” Dad said. He stubbed out his half-smoked cigarette in the ashtray and turned to Grandma. “I think it’ll be ready now, Mother. It doesn’t have to be scalding hot. It must be hot enough by now, don’t you think?”

“Probably,” Grandma said, and fetched two plates from a cupboard, placed them before us, took cutlery from a drawer and put it beside the plates.

“I’ll do it this way today,” she said, picking up Dad’s plate and filling it with potatoes, creamed peas, rissoles, and gravy.

“That looks good,” Dad said as she put his plate down in front of him and took mine.

The only two people I knew who ate as fast as me were Yngve and Dad. Our plates had hardly been put in front of us before they were picked clean. Dad leaned back and lit another cigarette, Grandma poured a cup of coffee and handed it to him, I got up and went into the living room, looked across the town with all its glittering lights, the gray, almost black, snow piled up against the walls of the warehouses along the quay. The harbor lights rippled across the shiny, pitch-black surface of the water.

For a moment I was filled with the sensation of white snow against black water. The way the whiteness erases all the detail around a lake or a river in the forest so that the difference between land and water is absolute, and the water lies there as a deeply alien entity, a black hole in the world.

I turned. The second living room was two steps higher than the one I was in and separated by a sliding door. The door was half-open and I went up, not for any particular reason, I was simply restless. This was the fancy room, they used it only for special occasions, we had never been allowed in there alone.

A piano stood adjacent to one wall, above it hung two paintings with Old Testament motifs. On the piano were three graduation photographs of the sons. Dad, Erling, and Gunnar. It was always strange to see Dad without a beard. He was smiling with the black graduation cap perched jauntily at the back of his head. His eyes shone with pleasure.

In the middle of the floor there were two sofas, one on either side of a table. In the corner at the very back of the room, which was dominated by two black leather sofas and an antique rose-painted corner cabinet, there was a white fireplace.

“Karl Ove?” Dad shouted from the kitchen.

I quickly took the four paces to the everyday living room and answered.

“Are we going?”

“Yes.”

When I entered the kitchen he was already on his feet.

“Take care,” I said. “Bye.”

“You take care,” Grandad said. As always, Grandma came down with us.

“Oh, I almost forgot,” Dad said when we were in the hall putting on our coats and scarves. “I’ve got something for you.”

He went out, opened and closed the car door, and then returned carrying a parcel which he passed to her.

“Many happy returns, Mother,” he said.

“Oh, you shouldn’t have!” Grandma said. “Goodness me. You shouldn’t buy presents for me, dear!”

“Yes, I should,” Dad said. “Come on. Open it!”

I didn’t know where to look. There was something intimate about all this, which I had not witnessed before and had no idea existed.

Grandma stood with a tablecloth in her hand.

“My, how beautiful!” she exclaimed.

“I thought it would match the wallpaper upstairs,” Dad said. “Can you see that?”

“Lovely,” Grandma said.

“Well,” Dad said in a tone that precluded any further embellishments, “we’ll be off now.”

We got into the car, Dad started the engine, and a cascade of light struck the garage door. Grandma waved goodbye from the steps as we reversed down the little slope. As always, she closed the door behind her when we were turning, and by the time we drove onto the main road she was gone.

In the next days I occasionally thought about the little episode in the hall, and my feeling was the same every time: I had seen something I shouldn’t have seen. But it passed quickly; I wasn’t exactly concerned with Dad and Grandma, so much else was happening during those weeks. In the first lesson of the new school year Siv handed out an invitation to everyone, she was going to have a class party the following Saturday, and this was good news, a class party was something I was entitled to attend, where no one could accuse me of trying to gate-crash, and where familiarity with the others could be extended into the wider world, which in class enabled me to come quite close to behaving in ways consistent with the person I really was. In short, I would be able to drink, dance, laugh, and perhaps pin someone against a wall somewhere. On the other hand, class parties had lower status precisely for that reason, it wasn’t the kind of party you were invited to because of who you were but rather where you were, in this case class 1B. However, I didn’t allow that to sour my pleasure. A party was not just a party, even if it was that too. The problem of acquiring alcohol was the same as before New Year’s Eve, and I considered whether to call Tom again, but decided it was best to risk it myself. I may have been only sixteen but I looked older, and if I acted normally no one would even think of refusing me. If they did, it would be embarrassing, but that was all and I would still be able to ask Tom to organize it. So, on the Wednesday I went to the supermarket, put twelve lagers in my cart, with bread and tomatoes as alibis, queued up, put them on the conveyor belt, handed the checkout-girl the money, she took it without so much as a glance at me, and I hurried excitedly home with a clinking plastic bag in each hand.

When I came home from school on Friday afternoon, Dad had been in the flat. There was a message on the table.

Karl Ove,

I am at a seminar all this weekend. Coming home Sunday night. There are some fresh shrimp in the fridge and there’s a loaf in the bread basket. Enjoy yourself!

Dad

On top there was a five-hundred-krone note.

Oh, this was just perfect!

Shrimp was what I loved most. I ate them in front of the television that evening, afterward I went for a walk through town, playing my Walkman, first “Lust for Life” by Iggy Pop and then one of the later Roxy Music albums, something to do with the distance between the inside and the outside worlds arose then, something that I liked so much; when I saw all the drunken faces of people who had gathered by the bars it was as if they existed in a different dimension from mine, the same applied to the cars driving by, to the drivers getting in and out of their cars at the gas stations, to the shop assistants standing behind counters with their weary smiles and mechanical movements, and to men out walking their dogs.

The next morning I dropped by my grandparents, ate fresh rolls with them, then went to town, bought three records and a big bag of sweets, a few music magazines and a paperback, Jean Genet, Journal du Voleur. Had two beers while watching a televised English soccer match, one more while showering and changing, another while smoking the last cigarette before going out.

I had arranged to meet Bassen at the Østerveien intersection at seven o’clock. He stood there smiling as I lumbered up with the bag of beer in my hand. He had all his in a backpack, and the second I saw that I felt like smacking my forehead. Of course! That was the way to do it.

We walked along Kuholmsveien, past my grandparents’ place, up the hill and into the residential district around the stadium, where Siv’s house was.

After searching for a few minutes we found the right number and rang the doorbell. Siv opened and let out a loud squeal.

Even before I awoke I knew that something good had happened. It was like a hand stretching down to me where I lay at the bottom of consciousness, watching one image after another rushing past me. A hand I grabbed and let lift me slowly, I came closer and closer to myself until I thrust open my eyes.

Where was I?

Oh, yes, the downstairs living room in the flat. I was lying on the sofa, fully clothed.

I sat up, supported my throbbing head in my hands.

My shirt smelled of perfume.

A heavy, exotic fragrance.

I had been making out with Monica. We had danced, we had drifted to the side, stood under a staircase, I had kissed her. She had kissed me.

But that’s not what it was!

I got up and went into the kitchen, poured water into a glass and gulped it down.

No, it wasn’t that.

Something fantastic had happened, a light had been lit, but it wasn’t Monica. There was something else.

But what?

All the alcohol had created an imbalance in my body. But it knew what I needed to redress the balance. Hamburger, fries, hot dog. Lots of Coke. That’s what I needed. And I needed it now.

I went into the hall, glanced at myself in the mirror while running a hand through my hair. I didn’t look too bad, only slightly bloodshot eyes; I could definitely show my face like this.

I laced my boots, grabbed my jacket and put it on.

But what was it?

A button?

With Smile on it?

Yes, that was it!

That was the good thing!

“No,” I said. “Not at all. I like being alone. And I’m up in Tveit a lot of the time.”

I put on my jacket, still adorned with the Smile button, a scarf, and boots.

“Just have to go to the bathroom, and we’ll be off,” I said. Closed the bathroom door behind me. Heard her singing to herself in a low voice. The walls were thin in this house, perhaps she was trying to drown out what was going on here, perhaps she just wanted to sing.

I put the toilet lid up and tugged out the frankfurter.

All at once I realized it would be impossible to pee while she was outside. The walls were thin, the hall so small. She would even be able to hear that I hadn’t done anything.

Oh hell.

I squeezed as hard as I could.

Not a drop.

She was singing and walking back and forth.

What must she be thinking?

After thirty seconds I gave up, turned on the tap, and let the water run for a few moments, so that at least something had happened in here, then turned it off, opened the door and went out, to meet her embarrassed, downcast eyes.

“Let’s be off then,” I said.

The streets were dark, and the wind was blowing, as it did so often in Kristiansand in winter. We didn’t say much on the way. Talked a bit about school, the people who went there, Bassen, Molle, Siv, Tone, Anne. For some reason she started talking about her father, he was so fantastic. He wasn’t a Christian, she said. That surprised me. Had she become one on her own initiative? She said I would have liked her father. Would have? I wondered. Mm, I mumbled. He sounds nice. Laconic. What does laconic mean? she asked, her green eyes looking at me. Every time she did that I almost fell apart. I could smash all the windows around us, knock all the pedestrians to the ground and jump up and down on them until all signs of life were extinguished, so much energy did her eyes fill me with. I could also grab her around the waist and waltz down the street, throw flowers at everyone we met and sing at the top of my voice. Laconic? I said. It’s hard to describe. A bit dry and matter-of-fact, perhaps exaggeratedly matter-of-fact, I said. Sort of understated. But here it is, isn’t it?

A venue in Dronningens gate, it had said. Yes, this was it, the posters were on the door.

We went in.

The meeting room was on the first floor, chairs, a speaker’s platform at the top end, an overhead projector next to it. A handful of young people, maybe ten, maybe twelve.

Beneath the window there was a large thermos, beside it a small bowl of cookies and a tall stack of plastic cups.

“Would you like some coffee?” I asked.

She shook her head and smiled. “A cookie maybe?”

I poured myself some coffee, took a couple of cookies, and went back to her. We sat down in one of the rows at the very rear.

Five or six more people drifted in, and the meeting started. It was under the auspices of the AUF, the Young Socialists, a kind of recruitment drive. Anyway, the AUF policies were presented, and then there was some discussion of youth politics in general, why it was important to be committed, how much you could actually achieve, and as a little bonus, what you yourself could get out of it.

Had Hanne not been sitting beside me, one leg crossed over the other, so close that inside I was ablaze, I would have got up and left. Beforehand, I had imagined a more traditional arrangement, a packed hall, cigarette smoke, witty speakers, gales of laughter sweeping through the room, a kind of a tub-thumping Agnar Mykle — type event, with the same Mykle-like significance, young men and women who were keen and eager, who burned inside for socialism, this magical fifties word, but not this, boring boys in boring sweaters and hideous trousers talking to a small collection of boys and girls like themselves about boring and uninspiring things.

Who cares about politics when there are flames licking at your insides?

Who cares about politics if you are burning with desire for life? With desire for the living?

Not me at any rate.

After the three talks there was to be be a short interval and then a workshop and group discussions, we were informed. When the interval came I asked Hanne if we should go, sure, she said, and so we were out in the cold, dark night again. Inside, she had hung her jacket on the back of her chair, and the sweater that was revealed, thick and woolen, bulged in a way that had made me gulp a few times, she was so close to me, there was so little that separated us.

I said what I thought about politics on the way back. She said I had an opinion about everything, how did I have the time to learn about it all? As for herself, she hardly knew what she thought about anything, she said. I said I hardly knew anything either. But you’re an anarchist, aren’t you! she said. Where did you get that idea from? I barely know what an anarchist is. But you’re a Christian, I said. How did that come about? Your parents aren’t Christians. And your sister isn’t either. Just you. And you don’t have any doubts. Yes, she said, you’re right there. But you seem to do a lot of brooding. You should live more. I’m doing my best, I said.

We stopped outside the flat.

“Where do you catch the bus?” I asked.

“Up there,” she said, nodding up the road.

“Shall I go with you?” I offered.

She shook her head.

“I’ll go on my own. I’ve got my Walkman with me.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Thanks for this evening,” she said.

“Nothing much to thank me for,” I answered.

She smiled, stretched up on her toes and kissed me on the mouth. I pulled her to me, tightly, she returned the embrace, then tore herself away. We briefly looked into each other’s eyes, and she went.

That night I couldn’t sit still, I walked around the flat, to and fro in my room, up and down the stairs, in and out of the downstairs rooms. I felt as if I were bigger than the world, as if I had everything inside me, and that now there was nothing left to strive for. Humanity was small, history was small, the Earth was small, yes, even the universe, which they said was endless, was small. I was bigger than everything. It was a fantastic feeling, but it left me restless because the most important thing in it was the longing, for what was going to be, not for what I did or had done.

How to burn up all that was inside me now?

I forced myself to go to bed, forced myself to lie without moving, not to move a muscle, however long it took before sleep came. Strangely enough, it came after only a few minutes, it snuck up on me like a hunter stalking an unsuspecting prey, and I would not have felt the shot, had it not been for a sudden twitch in one foot, which alerted me to my thoughts, which were in another world, something about standing on the deck of a boat while an enormous whale dived into the depths close by, which I saw despite the impossible position. It was the beginning of a dream, I realized, the arm of the dream, which dragged my ego in, where it transformed into its surroundings, for that was what happened when I twitched, I was a dream, the dream was me.

I closed my eyes again.

Don’t move, don’t move, don’t move. .

The next day was Saturday and a morning training session with the senior team.

Many people could not understand why I was playing with them. I was no good, after all. There were at least six, perhaps even seven or eight players in the junior team who were better than me. Nevertheless, only I and one other player, Bjørn, had been promoted to the senior team that winter.

I understood why.

The senior team had a new coach, he wanted to see all the juniors, so we each had a week at their training sessions. That meant three opportunities to showcase your abilities. All that autumn I had run a lot and was in such good shape that I had been selected to represent the school in the 1500 meters even though I had never done any track or field events before. So when it was my turn to train with the seniors and I presented myself on the snow-covered shale field near Kjøyta, I knew I had to run. It was my only chance. I ran and ran. In every sprint up the field I came first. I gave everything I had every time. When we started to play it was the same, I ran and ran, ran for everything, all the time, I ran like someone possessed, and after three sessions of that I knew it had gone well, and when the announcement came that I was promoted I was not surprised. But the others in the junior team were. Whenever I failed to control the ball, whenever I made a bad pass, they let me know, what the hell are you doing with the seniors? Why did they pick you?

I knew why, it was because I ran.

You just had to run.

After practice, when the others laughed at my studded belt in the changing room as usual, I got Tom to drive me up to Sannes. He dropped me off at the mailboxes, did a U-turn, and went back down while I walked up to the house. The sun was low in the sky, it was clear and blue, the snow sparkled all around me.

I hadn’t given prior notice that I was coming, I didn’t even know if Dad was at home.

I tentatively pressed the door. It was open.

Music streamed out of the living room. He was playing it loud, the whole house was full of it. It was Arja Saijonmaa singing the Swedish version of “Gracias a la vida.”

“Hello?” I said.

The music was so loud he probably couldn’t hear me, I thought, and took off my shoes and coat.

I didn’t want to burst in on him, so I shouted “Hello!” again in the corridor outside the living room. No answer.

I went into the living room.

He was sitting on the sofa with his eyes closed, his head moving back and forth in time with the music. His cheeks were wet with tears.

I noiselessly retraced my steps, into the hall, where I snatched my coat and shoes and hurried out before there was a break in the music.

I ran all the way to the bus stop with my bag on my back. Fortunately a bus arrived just a few minutes later. During the four or five minutes it took to go to Solsletta I debated with myself whether to jump off and see Jan Vidar or go all the way to town. But the answer was in fact self-evident, I didn’t want to be alone, I wanted to be with someone, talk to someone, think about something else, and at Jan Vidar’s, with all the kindness his parents always showed me, I would be able to do that.

He wasn’t at home, he had gone to Kjevik with his father, but they would be back soon, his mother said, wouldn’t I like to sit in the living room and wait?

Yes, I would. And that is where I was sitting, with the newspaper spread out in front of me and a cup of coffee and a sandwich on the table, when Jan Vidar and his father arrived an hour later.

As evening approached I went back to the house, he wasn’t there, and I didn’t want to be either. Not only was it dirty and messy, which somehow the sunlight must have masked since it hadn’t struck me earlier in the day, but the waterpipes were frozen, I discovered. And must have been frozen for quite a while; at all events, there was already a system with buckets and snow in place. There were some buckets in the toilet with snow that had melted to slush which he must have used to flush the toilet. And there was a bucket of slush by the stove which I presumed he melted in saucepans and used for cooking.

No, I did not want to be there. To lie in bed in the empty room in the empty house in the forest, surrounded by clutter and without any water?

He would have to sort that out by himself.

Where was he, anyway?

I shrugged, even though I was all alone, put on my coat and walked to the bus, through a landscape that lay as if hypnotized beneath the moonlight.

After the kiss outside my flat, Hanne withdrew somewhat, she would not necessarily respond to my notes at once now, nor would we automatically sit together chatting during the breaks. However, there was no logic, no system; one day, out of the blue, she agreed to one of my suggestions, yes, she could go with me to the cinema that night, we were to meet at ten to seven in the foyer.

When she came in through the door, looking for me, I had a taste of what it would be like to be in a relationship with her. Then all the days would be like this one.

“Hi,” she said. “Have you been waiting long?”

I shook my head. I knew the situation was finely poised and I would have to tone down anything that might suggest to her that what we were doing was the sort of activity only couples indulged in. At all costs she must not regret being here with me. Must not look around uneasily to check if anyone we knew was nearby. No arm around her shoulders, no hand in hers.

The film was French and being shown in the smallest auditorium. It was my idea. Betty Blue it was called, Yngve had seen it and was wildly enthusiastic, now it was running in town and obviously I had to see it, it wasn’t often we had quality films here, normally everything was American.

We sat down, took off our jackets, leaned back. There was something a little strained about her, wasn’t there? As if she didn’t really want to be here.

My palms were sweaty. All the strength in my body seemed to dissolve, to disperse and vanish inside me, I no longer had any energy.

The film began.

A man and a woman were screwing.

Oh no. No, no, no.

I didn’t dare to look at Hanne, but guessed she felt the same, didn’t dare to look at me, I gripped the arms of the chairs tight, longing for the scene to end.

But it didn’t. The couple was screwing on the screen without let-up.

Jesus Christ.

Shit, shit, shit.

I was thinking about that for the rest of the film, and the fact that Hanne was presumably also thinking about it. When the film was over I just wanted to go home.

It was also the natural thing to do. Hanne’s bus went from the bus station; I had to go in the opposite direction.

“Did you like it?” I asked, stopping outside the cinema.

“Ye-es,” Hanne said. “It was good.”

“Yes, it was,” I said. “French, anyway!”

We had both taken French as our optional subject.

“Did you understand any of what they were saying, without reading the subtitles, I mean?” I asked.

“A tiny bit,” she said.

Silence.

“Well, I should be getting home, I think. Thank you for coming this evening!” I said.

“See you tomorrow,” she replied. “Bye.”

I turned around to look at her, to see if she had turned around, but she hadn’t.

I loved her. There was nothing between us, she didn’t want to be my girlfriend, but I loved her. I didn’t think of anything else. Even when I was playing soccer, the only place where I was completely spared from invasive thoughts, where it was all about being physically present, even there she appeared. Hanne should have been here to see me, I thought, that would have surprised her. Whenever something good happened, whenever one of my comments hit the mark and made people laugh, I thought, Hanne should have seen that. She should have seen Mefisto, our cat. Our house, the atmosphere there. Mom, she should have sat down for a chat with her. The river by the house, she should have seen that. And my records! She should have heard them, every single one. But our relationship was not going in this direction, she wasn’t the one who wanted to enter my world, I was the one who wanted to enter hers. Sometimes I thought it would never happen, sometimes I thought one blast of wind and everything would change. I saw her all the time, not in a scrutinizing or probing way, that wasn’t how it was, no, it was a glimpse here, a glimpse there, that was enough. Hope lay in the next time I would see her.

In the midst of this spiritual storm spring arrived.

Few things are harder to visualize than that a cold, snow-bound landscape, so marrow chillingly quiet and lifeless, will, within mere months, be green and lush and warm, quivering with all manner of life, from birds warbling and flying through the trees to swarms of insects hanging in scattered clusters in the air. Nothing in the winter landscape presages the scent of sun-warmed heather and moss, trees bursting with sap and thawed lakes ready for spring and summer, nothing presages the feeling of freedom that can come over you when the only white that can be seen is the clouds gliding across the blue sky above the blue water of the rivers gently flowing down to the sea, the perfect, smooth, cool surface, broken now and then by rocks, rapids, and bathing bodies. It is not there, it does not exist, everything is white and still, and if the silence is broken it is by a cold wind or a lone crow caw-cawing. But it is coming. . it is coming. . One evening in March the snow turns to rain, and the piles of snow collapse. One morning in April there are buds on the trees, and there is a trace of green in the yellow grass. Daffodils appear, white and blue anemones too. Then the warm air stands like a pillar among the trees on the slopes. On sunny inclines buds have burst, here and there cherry trees are in blossom. If you are sixteen years old all of this makes an impression, all of this leaves its mark, for this is the first spring you know is spring, with all your senses you know this is spring, and it is the last, for all coming springs pale in comparison with your first. If, moreover, you are in love, well, then. . then it is merely a question of holding on. Holding onto all the happiness, all the beauty, all the future that resides in everything. I walked home from school, I noticed a snowdrift that had melted over the tarmac, it was as if it had been stabbed in the heart. I saw boxes of fruit under an awning outside a shop, not far away a crow hops off, I turned my head to the sky, it was so beautiful. I walked through the residential area, a rain shower burst, tears filled my eyes. At the same time I was doing all the things I had always done, going to school, playing soccer, hanging out with Jan Vidar, reading books, listening to records, meeting Dad now and then, a couple of times by chance, such as when I met him in the supermarket and he seemed embarrassed to be seen there, or else it was the artificiality of the situation he reacted to, the fact that we were both pushing shopping carts and completely unaware of each other’s presence, afterward we each went our separate ways, or the day I was on my way to the house and he came driving down with a colleague in the passenger seat, who I saw was completely gray though still young, but as a rule we had planned it, either he popped by the flat and we ate at my grandparents’, or up at the house where, for whatever reason, he avoided me as much as possible. He had relinquished his grip on me, so it seemed, though not entirely, he could still bite my head off, such as on the day I had both ears pierced, when we ran into each other in the hall, he said I looked like an idiot, that he couldn’t understand why I wanted to look like an idiot and that he was ashamed to be my father.

Early one afternoon in March I heard a car parking outside my flat. I went down and peered out the window, it was Dad, he had a bag in his hand. He seemed cheery. I hurried up to my room, didn’t want to be a busybody with my face glued to the glass. I heard him clattering around in the kitchen downstairs, put on a Doors cassette, which Jan Vidar had lent me, I had wanted to listen to it after reading Beatles by Lars Saabye Christensen. Fetched the pile of newspaper cuttings about the Treholt spy case, which I had collected as I was sure it would come up in the exams, and was reading them when I heard his footsteps on the stairs.

I glanced up at the door as he entered. He was holding what looked like a shopping list in his hand.

“Could you nip down to the shop for me?” he said.

“Okay,” I replied.

“What’s that you’re reading?” he asked.

“Nothing special,” I said. “Just some newspaper cuttings for Norwegian.”

I got up. The rays from the sun flooded the floor. The window was open, outside there was the sound of birdsong, birds were twittering on the branches of the old apple tree a few meters away. Dad handed me the shopping list.

“Mom and I have decided to separate,” he said.

“What?” I said.

“Yes. But it won’t affect you. You won’t notice any difference. Besides, you’re not a child anymore and in two years you’ll be moving to a place of your own.”

“Yes, that’s true,” I said.

“Okay?” Dad asked.

“Okay,” I said.

“I forgot to write potatoes. And perhaps we should have a dessert? Oh, by the way, here’s the money.”

He handed me a five-hundred-krone note, I stuffed it in my pocket and went down to the street, along the river, and into the supermarket. I wandered between the shelves, filling the shopping basket. Nothing of what Dad had said managed to emerge above this. They were going to separate, fine, well, let them. It might have been different if I had been younger, eight or nine, I thought, then it would have meant something, but now it was of no significance, I had my own life.

I gave him the groceries, he made lunch, we ate without saying much.

Then he left.

I was pleased he did. Hanne was going to sing in a church that evening, and she had asked whether I wanted to go and watch, of course I did. Her boyfriend would be there, so I didn’t make my presence known, but when I saw her standing there, so beautiful and so pure, she was mine, no one else’s feelings could hold a candle to those I cherished. Outside, the tarmac was covered with grime, the remaining snow lay in dips and hollows and up shadowy slopes on both sides of the road. She sang, I was happy.

On the way home I jumped off at the bus station and walked the last part through town, although that did nothing to diminish my restlessness, my feelings were so varied and so intense that I couldn’t really deal with them. After arriving home I lay on my bed and cried. There was no despair in the tears, no sorrow, no anger, only happiness.

The next day we were alone in the classroom, the others had left, we both lingered, she perhaps because she wanted to hear what I thought of the concert. I told her that her singing had been fantastic, she was fantastic. She lit up as she stood packing her satchel. Then Nils came in. I felt ill at ease, his presence cast a shadow over us. We were together in French class, and he was different from the other boys in the first class, he hung out with people who were a lot older than himself in the town’s pubs, he was independent in his opinions and his life as a whole. He laughed a lot, made fun of everyone, me included. I always felt small when he did that, I didn’t know where to look or what to say. Now he started talking to Hanne. It was as if he were circling her, he looked into her eyes, laughed, drew closer, was standing very close to her now. I would not have expected anything else of him, that was not what upset me, it was the way Hanne reacted. She didn’t reject him, laugh off his advances. Even though I was there she opened herself to him. Laughed with him, met his gaze, even parted her knees at the desk where she was sitting, when he went right up to her. It was as if he had cast a spell over her. For a moment he stood there staring into her eyes, the moment was tense and full of disquiet, then he laughed his malicious laugh and backed away a few steps, fired a disarming remark, raised a hand in salute to me and was gone. Wild with jealousy, I looked at Hanne, she had gone back to packing her bag, though not as if nothing had happened, she was enclosed inside herself now, in quite a different way.

What had gone on? Hanne, blond, beautiful, playful, happy, always with a bemused, often also naïve, question on her lips, what had she changed into? What was it that I had witnessed? A dark, deep, perhaps also passionate side, was that her? She had responded, it was only a glimpse, but nonetheless. Then, at that moment, I was nobody. I was crushed. I, with all the notes I had sent her, all the discussions I’d had with her, all my simple hopes and childish desires, I was nothing, a shout on the playground, a rock in scree, the hooting of a car horn.

Could I do this to her? Could I have this effect on her?

Could I have this effect on anyone?

No.

For Hanne, I was a nobody and would remain so.

For me, she was everything.

I attempted to make light of what I had seen, also in my attitude to her, by continuing just as before, pretending that things were fine. But they were not, I knew that, I was never in any doubt. The only hope I had was that she shouldn’t know. But what actually was this world I was living in? What actually were these dreams I believed in?

Two days later, when the Easter holiday started, Mom came home.

Dad had implied that the divorce was done and dusted. But when Mom came home, I could see that was not the way she saw things. She drove straight up to the house, where Dad was waiting for her, and they were there for two days while I wandered around town trying to kill time.

On Friday she parked her car outside my flat. I spotted her from the window. She had a large bruise around one eye. I opened the door.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “But that’s not what happened. I fell. I fainted, I do that once in a while, you see, and this time I hit the edge of the table upstairs. The glass table.”

“I don’t believe you,” I said.

“It’s true,” she said. “I fainted. There’s no more to it than that.”

I stepped back. She came into the hall.

“Are you divorced now?” I asked.

She put her suitcase down on the floor, hung her light-colored coat on the hook.

“Yes, we are,” she said.

“Are you sorry?”

“Sorry?”

She looked at me with genuine surprise, as if the thought had never struck her as a possibility.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Sad maybe. And you? How will you be?”

“Fine,” I said. “So long as I don’t have to live with Dad.”

“We talked about that too. But first I need a cup of coffee.”

I followed her into the kitchen, watched while she put the water on to boil, sat on a chair, bag in hand, rummaged for her pack of cigarettes, she had started smoking Barclay in Bergen, evidently, took one out and lit up.

She looked at me.

“I’m moving up to the house. We two will live there. And then Dad can live here. I assume I’ll have to buy him out, don’t know quite how I’ll manage that, but don’t worry, I’ll find a way.”

“Mhm,” I mumbled.

“And you?” she asked. “How are you? It’s really good to see you, you know.”

“Same here,” I said. “I haven’t seen you since Christmas. And so many things have happened.”

“Have they?”

She got up to fetch an ashtray from the cupboard, took the packet of coffee, and placed it on the counter as the water began to hiss. It sounded a bit like the sea as you get close.

“Yes,” I said.

“Good things by the look of it?” she smiled.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m in love. Hook, line, and sinker.”

“Lovely. Anyone I know?”

“Who would you know? No, someone from the class. That bit is perhaps not very smart, but that’s how it is. It’s not exactly something you can plan, is it.”

“No,” she agreed. “What’s her name?”

“Hanne.”

“Hanne,” she said, looking at me with a faint smile. “When do I get to meet her?”

“That’s the big question. We’re not going out together. She has someone else.”

“It’s not so easy then.”

“No.”

She sighed.

“No, it isn’t always easy. But you look good. You look happy.”

“I’ve never been so happy. Never.”

For some insane reason tears welled up in my eyes when I said that. It wasn’t just that my eyes glazed over, which often happened when I said something that moved me, no, tears were coursing down my cheeks.

I smiled.

“They’re really tears of happiness,” I said. And then I let out a sob and had to turn away. Fortunately the water was boiling by then and I could take it off the stove, add coffee, press down on the lid, bang the pot on the burner a few times and pour two cups.

As I put them on the table I was fine again.

Six months later, one evening toward the end of July, I got off the last bus at the stop by the waterfall. Over my shoulder I was carrying a seaman’s bag, I had been to Denmark for a soccer training camp, and after that, without going home first, to a class party in the skerries. I was happy. It was a few minutes past ten thirty, what darkness there was had fallen and lay like a grayish veil across the countryside. The waterfall roared beneath me. I walked uphill and along the road bordered with curbstones. Below, the meadow sloped toward a row of deciduous trees growing by the river bank. Above was the old farm with the tumbledown barn gaping open from the road. The lights were off in the main farmhouse. I walked around the bend to the next house, the guy who lived there was sitting in the living room with the TV on. A truck was rumbling along on the other side of the river. The sound reached me after a time lag; I didn’t hear the change of gears as it sped up the small incline until it was at the top. Above the treetops, against the pale sky, I saw two bats, and I was reminded of the badger I often bumped into on my way home from the last bus. It used to come down the road beside the path of the stream as I was climbing. For safety’s sake I always held a stone in each hand. Sometimes I encountered it on the road too, when it would stop and look at me before scuttling back with its distinctive jog-trot.

I stopped, threw down my bag, put one foot on the curb and lit a cigarette. I didn’t want to go home right away, I wanted to drag the time out for a few moments. Mom, with whom I had been living all spring and half the summer, was in Sørbøvåg now. She still had not bought out my father and he had stuck to his rights and would be living there until school started again, together with his new girlfriend, Unni.

Over the forest came a large plane, it banked slowly, straightened up, and a second later passed overhead. The lights on the wingtips were flashing and the undercarriage was being lowered. I followed the plane until it was out of sight, and all that remained was the roar, though weaker and weaker, until it too was gone, just before it landed in Kjevik. I liked planes, always had. Even after living for three years under a flight path I still looked up with pleasure.

The river glinted in the summer darkness. The smoke from my cigarette did not rise, it drifted sideways and lay flat in the air. Not a breath of wind. And now the roar of the plane was gone, there was not a sound. Yes, there was, from the bats which soared and plummeted wherever their roaming took them.

I stuck out my tongue and stubbed out my cigarette on it, threw the butt down the slope, slung the bag over my shoulder, and continued on my way. The lights were on in the house where William lived. Above the approaching bend the tops of the deciduous trees were so close together that the sky was not visible. A few frogs or toads were croaking down in the marshlike area between the road and the river. Then I glimpsed movement at the bottom of the hill. It was the badger. It hadn’t seen me and was trotting across the tarmac. I headed for the other side of the road to allow it a free passage, but it looked up and stopped. How elegant it was with its black-and-white striped chic snout. Its coat was gray, its eyes yellow and sly. I completed my maneuver, stepped over the curb and stood on the slope below. The badger hissed, but continued to look at me. It was clearly assessing the situation because the other times we had met it had turned at once and run back. Now it resumed its jog-trot and to my great delight disappeared up the hill. It was only then, as I stepped back onto the road, that I heard the faint sounds of music that must have been there the whole time.

Was it coming from our house?

I hurried down the last part of the hill and looked up the slope where the house stood, all lights ablaze. Yes, that was where the music was coming from. Presumably through the open living room door, I thought, and realized there was a party going on up there because a number of dark, mysterious figures were gliding around the lawn in the grayish light of the summer night. Usually I would have followed the stream to the west of the house, but with the party up there, and the place full of strangers, I didn’t want to crash in from the forest, and accordingly followed the road all the way around.

There were cars all the way along the drive, parked half on the grass, and beside the barn and in the yard as well. I stopped at the top of the hill to collect my thoughts. A man in a white shirt walked across the yard without seeing me. There was a buzz of voices in the garden behind the house. At the kitchen table, which I could see through the window, were two women and a man, each with a glass of wine in front of them, they were laughing and drinking.

I took a deep breath and walked toward the front door. A long table had been set up in the garden close to the forest. It was covered with a white cloth that shimmered in the heavy darkness beneath the treetops. Six or seven people were sitting at the table, among them Dad. He looked straight at me. When I met his gaze he got up and waved. I unhitched the bag, put it beside the doorstep and went over to him. I had never seen him like this before. He was wearing a baggy white shirt with embroidery around the V-neck, blue jeans, and light-brown leather shoes. His face, tanned dark from the sun, had a radiant aura. His eyes shone.

“So, there you are, Karl Ove,” he said, resting his hand on my shoulder.

“We thought you would have been here earlier. We’re having a party, as you can see. But you can join us for a while, can’t you? Sit yourself down!”

I did as he said and sat down at the table, with my back to the house. The only person I had seen before was Unni. She too was wearing a white shirt or blouse or whatever it was.

“Hi, Unni,” I said.

She sent me a warm smile.

“So this is Karl Ove, my youngest son,” Dad said, sitting down on the opposite side of the table, next to Unni. I nodded to the other five.

“And this, Karl Ove, is Bodil,” he said, “my cousin.”

I had never heard of any cousin called Bodil and studied her, probably in a rather quizzical way because she smiled at me and said:

“Your father and I were together a lot when we were children.”

“And teenagers,” Dad said. He lit a cigarette, inhaled, blew the smoke out with a contented expression on his face. “And then we have Reidar, Ellen, Martha, Erling, and Åge. Colleagues of mine, all of them.”

“Hi,” I said.

The table was covered with glasses, bottles, dishes, and plates. Two large bowls piled with shrimp shells left no doubt as to what they had been eating. The colleague my father had mentioned last, Åge, a man of around forty, with large, thinly framed glasses was observing me while sipping a glass of beer. Putting it down, he said:

“I gather you’ve been at a training camp?”

I nodded.

“In Denmark,” I said.

“Where in Denmark?” he asked.

“Nykøbing,” I said.

“Nykøbing, on Mors?” he queried.

“Yes,” I said. “I think so. It was an island in the Limfjord.”

He laughed and looked around.

“That’s where Aksel Sandemose came from!” he declared. And then he looked straight at me again. “Do you know the name of the law he devised, inspired by the town you visited?”

What was this? Were we at school or what?

“Yes,” I said, looking down. I didn’t want to articulate the word; I didn’t want to tell him.

“Which is?” he insisted.

As I raised my eyes to meet his, they were as defiant as they were embarrassed.

“Jante,” I said.

“You got it!” he said.

“Did you have a good time there?” Dad asked.

“Yes, I did,” I said. “Great fields. Great town.”

Nykøbing: I had walked back to the school where we were lodged, after spending the whole evening and night out with a girl I had met, she had been crazy about me. The four others from the team who had been with me had gone back earlier, it was just me and her, and as I walked home, drunker than usual, I had stopped outside one of the houses in the town. All the detail was gone, I couldn’t remember leaving her, couldn’t remember going to the house, but once there, standing by this door, it was as if I came to myself again. I took the lit cigarette out of my mouth, opened the letter box, and dropped it on the hall floor inside. Then everything went fuzzy again, but somehow I must have found my way to the school, got in, and gone to bed, to be woken for breakfast and training three hours later. When we were sitting under one of the enormous trees around the training area chatting, I suddenly remembered the cigarette I had thrown in through the door. I got up, chilled deep into my soul, booted a ball up the field and began to give chase. What if it had started to burn? What if people had died in the fire? What did that make me?

I had succeeded in repressing it for several days, but now, sitting at the long table in the garden on my first evening home, fear reared up again.

“Which team do you play for, Karl Ove?” one of the others asked.

“Tveit,” I said.

“Which division are you in?”

“I play for the juniors,” I said. “But the seniors are in the fifth division.”

“Not exactly IK Start then,” he said. From his dialect I deduced that he came from Vennesla, so it was easy to come back with a retort.

“No, more like Vindbjart,” I said. Vindbjart from Vennesla. Second Division, group three.

They laughed at that. I looked down. It felt as if I had already attracted too much attention. But when, immediately afterward, I let my gaze wander to Dad, he was smiling at me.

Yes, his eyes were shining.

“Wouldn’t you like a beer, Karl Ove?” he said.

I nodded.

“Certainly would,” I replied.

He scanned the table.

“Looks as if we’ve run out here,” he said. “But there’s a crate in the kitchen. You can take one from there.”

I got up. As I made for the door two people came out. A man and a woman, entwined. She was wearing a white summer dress. Her bare arms and legs were tanned. Her breasts heavy, stomach and hips ample. Her eyes, in the somehow sated face, were gentle. He, wearing a light blue shirt and white trousers, had a slight paunch, but was otherwise slim. Even though he was smiling and his inebriated eyes seemed to be floating, it was the stiffness of his expression that I noticed. All the movement had gone, just the vestiges remained, like a dried-up riverbed.

“Hi!” she said. “Are you the son?”

“Yes,” I said. “Hello.”

“I work with your father,” she said.

“Nice,” I said, and luckily did not have to say anything more, for they were already on their way. As I went into the hall the bathroom door opened. A small, chubby, dark-haired woman with glasses stepped out. She barely glanced at me, cast her eyes down, and walked past me into the house. Discreetly I sniffed her perfume before following her. Fresh, floral. In the kitchen were the three people I had seen through the window when I arrived. The man, also around forty, was whispering something in the ear of the woman to his right. She smiled, but it was a polite smile. The other woman was rummaging through a bag she had on her lap. She looked up at me as she placed an unopened packet of cigarettes on the table.

“Hello,” I said. “Just come for a beer.”

There were two full crates stacked against the wall by the door. I grabbed a bottle from the top one.

“Anyone got an opener?” I asked.

The man straightened up, patted his thighs.

“I’ve got a lighter,” he said. “Here.”

He made to throw it underarm, at first slowly, so I could prepare myself to catch it, then, with a jerk, the lighter came flying through the air. It hit the door frame and clunked to the floor. But for that I would not have known how to resolve the situation because I didn’t want any condescension because I let him open the bottle for me, but now he had taken the initiative and failed, so the situation was different.

“I can’t open it with a lighter,” I said. “Perhaps you could do it for me?”

I picked up the lighter and handed it to him with the bottle. He had round glasses, and the fact that half of his scalp was hairless, while the hair on the other half rose too high, like a wave at the edge of an endless beach on which it would never break, lent him a somewhat desperate appearance. That, at any rate, was the effect he had on me. The tips of his fingers, now tightening around the lighter, were hairy. From his wrist hung a watch on a silver chain.

The beer cap came off with a dull pop.

“There we are,” he said, passing me the bottle. I thanked him and went into the living room, where four or five people were dancing, and out into the garden. A little gathering of people stood in front of the flagpole, each with glass in hand, looking across the river valley as they chatted.

The beer was fantastic. I had drunk every evening in Denmark, and all the previous evening and night, so it would take a lot for me to get drunk now. And I didn’t want that either. If I got drunk I would slip into their world, in a sense, allow it to swallow me up whole and no longer be able to see the difference, I might even begin to get a taste for the women in it. That was the last thing I wanted.

I surveyed the landscape. Looked at the river flowing in a gentle curve around the grass-covered headland where the soccer goals were, and between the tall deciduous trees growing along the bank, which were now black against the dark-gray, shiny surface of the water. The hills that rose on the other side and then undulated down toward the sea were also black. The lights from the clusters of houses lying between the river and the ridge shone out strong and bright, while the stars in the sky — those close to the land grayish, those higher up a bluish hue — were barely visible.

The group by the flagpole were laughing at something. They were only a few meters from me, but their faces were still indistinct. The man with the slight paunch emerged from around the corner of the house, he appeared to glide. The confirmation photograph of me had been taken there, in front of the flagpole, between Mom and Dad. I took another swig and went toward the far end of the garden where no one else seemed to have found their way. I sat there with legs crossed, by the birch. The music was more distant, the voices and laughter too, and the movements from my vantage point even less distinct. Like apparitions, they floated in the darkness around the illuminated house. I thought of Hanne. It was as if she had a place inside me. As if she existed as a real location where I would always be. That I could go there whenever I wanted felt like an act of mercy. We had sat talking on a rock by the sea at a class party the previous night. Nothing happened, that was all there was. The rock, Hanne, the bay with the low islets, the sea. We had danced, played games, gone down the steps from the quay, and swum in the dark. It had been wonderful. And the wonder of it was indelible, it had stayed with me all of the next day, and it was in me now. I was immortal. I got up, aware of my own power in every cell of my body. I was wearing a gray T-shirt, calf-length military green trousers, and white Adidas basketball shoes, that was all, but it was enough. I was not strong, but I was slim, supple, and as handsome as a god.

Could I give her a call?

She had said she would be home this evening.

But it had to be close to twelve by now. And although she didn’t mind being woken up, the rest of the family would probably take a different view.

What if the house had burned down? What if someone had been burned to death?

Oh, shit, shit, shit.

I started to walk across the lawn as I tried to push the thought to the back of my mind, ran my eyes along the hedge, over the house, the roof, to the big lilac bushes at the end of the lawn whose heavy pink blossoms you could smell right down by the road, took the last swig from the bottle as I walked, saw a couple of flushed women’s faces, they were sitting on the steps by the door with their knees together and cigarettes between their fingertips, I recognized them from the table and gave a faint smile as I passed, on through the door into the living room, then the kitchen, which was empty now, took another bottle, went upstairs and into my room where I sat down in the chair under the window, leaned back, and closed my eyes.

Mm.

The speakers in the living room were directly beneath me, and sound traveled so easily in this house that I heard every note loud and clear.

What were they playing?

Agnetha Fältskog. The hit from last summer. What was it again?

There was something undignified about the clothes Dad was wearing tonight. The white shirt or blouse or whatever the hell it was. He had always, as far as I could remember, dressed simply, appropriately, a touch conservatively. His wardrobe consisted of shirts, suits, jackets, many in tweed, polyester trousers, corduroy, cotton, lambswool or wool sweaters. More a senior master of the old variety than a smock-clad schoolteacher of the new breed, but not old-fashioned, that wasn’t where the difference lay. The dividing line was between soft and hard, between those who try to break down the distance and those who try to maintain it. It was a question of values. When he suddenly started wearing arty embroidered blouses, or shirts with frills, as I had seen him wearing earlier this summer, or shapeless leather shoes in which a Sami would have been happy, an enormous contradiction arose between the person he was, the person I knew him to be, and the person he presented himself as. For myself, I was on the side of the soft ones, I was against war and authority, hierarchies, and all forms of hardness, I didn’t want to do any sucking up at school, I wanted my intellect to develop more organically; politically I was way out on the left, the unequal distribution of the world’s resources enraged me, I wanted everyone to have a share of life’s pleasures, and thus capitalism and plutocracy were the enemy. I thought all people were of equal value and that a person’s inner qualities were always worth more than their outer appearance. I was, in other words, for depth and against superficiality, for good and against evil, for the soft and against the hard. So shouldn’t I have been pleased then, that my father had joined the ranks of the soft? No, for I despised the way the soft expressed themselves, the round glasses, corduroy trousers, foot-formed shoes, knitted sweaters, that is, because along with my political ideals I had others, bound up with music, which in a very different way had to do with looking good, cool, which in turn was related to the times in which we were living, it was what had to be expressed, but not the top ten chart aspect, not the pastel colors and hair gel, for that was about commercialism, superficiality, and entertainment; no, the music that had to be expressed was the innovative but tradition-conscious, deeply felt but smart, intelligent but simple, showy but genuine kind that did not address itself to everyone, that did not sell well, yet expressed a generation’s, my generation’s, experiences. Oh, the new. I was on the side of the new. And Ian McCulloch of Echo & the Bunnymen, he was the ideal in this respect, him above all. Coats, military jackets, sneakers, dark sunglasses. It was miles away from my father’s embroidered blouse and Sami shoes. On the other hand, this could not be what it was about because Dad belonged to a different generation, and the thought that this generation should start dressing like Ian McCulloch, start listening to British indie music, take any interest in what was happening on the American scene, discover REM’s or Green on Red’s debut album and perhaps eventually include a bootlace tie in their wardrobe was the stuff of a nightmare. What was more important was that the embroidered blouse and the Sami shoes were not him. And that he had slipped into this, entered this formless, uncertain, almost feminine world, as though he had lost a grip on himself. Even the hard tone in his voice had gone.

I opened my eyes and turned to look through the window at the table on the edge of the forest. Only four people were there now. Dad, Unni, the person she had called Bodil, and one more. At the back of the lilac bush, out of sight from them, but not from me, a man was peeing while staring across to the river.

Dad raised his head and directed his gaze up at the window. My heart beat faster, but I did not move, for if in fact he had seen me, which was not at all certain, it would be like admitting that I was spying. Instead I waited for a few moments, until I was sure that he had noticed that I had seen him watching, if he had seen that is, then withdrew and sat at my desk.

It was no good spying on Dad, he always noticed, he saw everything, had always seen everything.

I swigged some beer. A cigarette would have been good now. He had never seen me smoking, and perhaps it would become an issue if he did. On the other hand, had he not just told me to help myself to beer?

The desk, my property for as long as I could remember, orange like the bed and the cupboard doors, had been in my old room, was, apart from a rack of cassettes, completely clear. I had cleaned everything up at the end of the school year and had hardly been here, except to sleep. I put down the bottle and whirled the rack around a few times while reading the titles written in my own childish capitals on the spines. BOWIE — HUNKY DORY. LED ZEPPELIN — 1. TALKING HEADS — 77. THE CHAMELEONS — SCRIPT OF THE BRIDGE. THE THE — SOUL MINING. THE STRANGLERS — RATTUS NORVEGICUS. THE POLICE — OUTLANDOS D’AMOUR. TALKING HEADS — REMAIN IN LIGHT. BOWIE — SCARY MONSTERS (And super creeps). ENO BYRNE — MY LIFE IN THE BUSH OF GHOSTS. U2 — OCTOBER. THE BEATLES — RUBBER SOUL. SIMPLE MINDS — NEW GOLD DREAM.

I got to my feet, grabbed the guitar leaning against the small Roland Cube amplifier and strummed some chords, put it back, looked out over the garden again. They were still there, under the darkness of the treetops, which the two kerosene lamps did not dispel, but did soften, in that their faces took on the color of the light. Giving them dark, coppery complexions.

Bodil, she must be the daughter of Dad’s father’s second brother, whom I had never met. For some reason he had been banished from the family, long ago. I heard about him by chance for the first time a couple of years ago, there was a wedding in the family, and Mom mentioned that he was also there, and that he made a passionate speech. He was a lay preacher in the Pentecostal Church in town. A mechanic. Everything about him was different from his two brothers, even the name. When they, after consultation with their imposing mother, and upon entering the academic world and university, had decided to change their name from the standard Pedersen to the rather less standard Knausgaard, he had refused. Perhaps that is what caused the break?

I went out of the room and downstairs. As I came into the hall, Dad was in the room with the wardrobes, the light was off and he was staring at me.

“Is that where you are?” he said. “Wouldn’t you like to join us?”

“Yes,” I said. “Of course. I’ve just been having a look around.”

“It’s a great party,” he said.

He twisted his neck and patted some hair into place. He had always had that mannerism, but there was something about his shirt and those trousers, which were so profoundly alien to him, that suddenly made it seem effeminate. As though this quirk had detected the conservative, reserved manner in which he had always dressed, and neutralized it.

“Everything alright with you, Karl Ove?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Fine. I’ll come out and join you.”

A gust of wind stirred the air as I emerged. The leaves on the forest edge trembled, almost reluctantly, as if waking from a deep sleep.

Or was it just that he was drunk, I thought. Because I wasn’t used to that either. My father had never been a drinker. The first time I saw him in an inebriated state was one evening only two months before when I visited him and Unni in the flat in Elvegaten, and was served fondue, another thing which he would never have considered remotely possible in his own home on a Friday night. They had been drinking before I arrived, and although he was kindness itself, it was threatening nonetheless; not directly, of course, because, sitting there, I didn’t fear him, but indirectly because I could no longer read him. It was as if all the knowledge I had acquired about him through my childhood, and which enabled me to prepare for any eventuality, was, in one fell swoop, invalid. So what was valid?

As I turned and walked toward the table I caught Unni’s eye, she smiled and I returned the smile. Another gust of wind, stronger this time. The leaves on the tall bushes by the barn steps rustled. The lightest branches of the trees above the table swayed up and down.

“How are you doing?” Unni asked as I went over to them.

“Fine,” I said. “But I’m a bit tired. Think I’ll crash soon.”

“Will you be able to sleep in this racket?”

“Oh, that won’t bother me!”

“Your father spoke so warmly about you this evening,” Bodil said, leaning across the table. I didn’t know what to say, so I just gave a cautious smile.

“Isn’t that right, Unni?”

Unni nodded. She had long, completely gray hair although she was only in her early thirties. Dad had been the supervisor during her teacher training. She was wearing flared green slacks and a similar smocklike affair to the one Dad had on. A necklace of wooden beads hung around her neck.

“We read one of your essays this spring,” she said. “You didn’t know perhaps? I hope you don’t mind that I was allowed to see it. He was so proud of you.”

Impossible. What the hell was she doing reading one of my essays?

But I was also flattered, that went without saying.

“You’re like your grandfather, Karl Ove,” Bodil said.

“My grandfather?”

“Yes. Same shape of head. Same mouth.”

“And you’re Dad’s cousin, right?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “You’ll have to come and see us one day. We live in Kristiansand too, you know!”

I didn’t know. Before tonight I didn’t even know she existed. I should have said that. But I didn’t. Instead I said that was nice, and asked what she did, and after a while if she had any children. That was what she was talking about when Dad returned. He sat down and looked at her, straining to tune into the topic of conversation, but then he leaned back, one foot resting on his knee, and lit a cigarette.

I got up.

“Are you going to leave now that I’ve come?” he asked.

“No. Just going to get something,” I said. Opened my bag by the doorstep, took out the cigarettes, put one in my mouth on the way back, paused for a second to light up, so that I could already be smoking when I sat down. Dad said nothing. I could see that he had considered saying something, for a twinge of disapproval appeared around his mouth, but after a brief glare it was gone, as though he had told himself he was no longer like that.

That at least was what I thought.

“Skål,” Dad said, raising his glass of red wine to us. Then he looked at Bodil, and added: “Skål to Helene.”

“Skål to Helene,” Bodil said.

They drank, looking into each other’s eyes.

Who the hell was Helene?

“Haven’t you got anything to toast with, Karl Ove?” Dad asked.

I shook my head.

“Take that glass,” he said. “It’s clean. Isn’t it, Unni?”

She nodded. He passed me the bottle of white wine and poured. We said skål again.

“Who’s Helene?” I asked, looking at them.

“Helene was my sister,” Bodil said. “She’s dead now.”

“Helene was. . well, we were very close when I was growing up. We were together all the time,” Dad said. “Right up to our teenage years. Then she fell ill.”

I took another sip. The couple from earlier appeared from behind the house, the buxom woman in the white dress and the man with the slight paunch. Two other men followed, one of whom I recognized as the man from the kitchen.

“So this is where you are,” said the man with the paunch. “We were wondering. You’re not taking very good care of your guests, I have to say.” He patted my father’s shoulder. “It’s you we want to see, now that we’ve come all this way.”

“That’s my sister,” Bodil whispered to me. “Elisabeth. And her husband, Frank. They live down in Ryen, you know, by the river. He’s an estate agent.”

Had these people my father knew always been around us?

They sat down at the table and things immediately livened up. And what, when I came, had been faces devoid of meaning or substance and which, consequently, I had only regarded in terms of age and type, more or less as if they had been animals, a bestiary of forty-year-olds, with all that that entailed, lifeless eyes, stiff lips, pendulous breasts and quivering paunches, wrinkles and folds, I now saw to be individuals, for I was related to them, the blood that was in their veins was in mine, and who they were suddenly became important.

“We were talking about Helene,” Dad said.

“Helene, yes,” the man called Frank said. “I never met her. But I’ve heard a lot about her. It was a great shame.”

“I sat at her deathbed,” Dad said.

I gaped. What was all this?

“I adored her.”

“She was the most beautiful girl you could ever imagine,” Bodil said to me, still in a whisper.

“And then she died,” Dad said. “Ohh.”

Was he crying?

Yes, he was crying. He was sitting there with his elbows on the table and his hands folded in front of his chest as the tears ran down his cheeks.

“And that was in the spring. It was spring when she died. Everything in flower. Ohh. Ohh.”

Frank lowered his eyes and twirled the glass between his fingers. Unni placed her hand on Dad’s arm. Bodil looked at them.

“You were so close to her,” she said. “You were the most precious thing she had.”

“Ohh. Ohh,” my father cried, closing his eyes and covering his face with his hands.

A gust of wind blew across the yard. The overhanging flaps of the table cloth fluttered. A napkin went flying across the lawn. The foliage above us swished. I lifted my glass and drank, shuddered as the acidic taste hit my palate, and once again recognized that clear, pure sensation that arose with approaching intoxication, and the desire to pursue it that always followed.