My Struggle: Book Three

One mild, overcast day in August 1969, a bus came winding its way along a narrow road at the far end of an island in southern Norway, between gardens and rocks, meadows and woods, up and down dale, around sharp bends, sometimes with trees on both sides, as if through a tunnel, sometimes with the sea straight ahead. It belonged to the Arendal Steamship Company and was, like all its buses, painted in two-tone-light and dark-brown livery. It drove over a bridge, along a bay, signaled right, and drew to a halt. The door opened and out stepped a little family. The father, a tall, slim man in a white shirt and light polyester trousers, was carrying two suitcases. The mother, wearing a beige coat and with a light-blue kerchief covering her long hair, was clutching a stroller in one hand and holding the hand of a small boy in the other. The oily, gray exhaust fumes from the bus hung in the air for a moment as it receded into the distance.

“It’s quite a way to walk,” the father said.

“Can you manage, Yngve?” the mother said, looking down at the boy, who nodded.

“Course I can.”

He was four and a half years old and had fair, almost white hair and tanned skin after a long summer in the sun. His brother, barely eight months old, lay in the stroller staring up at the sky, oblivious to where they were or where they were going.

Slowly they began to walk uphill. It was a gravel road, covered with puddles of varying sizes after a downpour. There were fields on both sides. At the end of a flat stretch, perhaps some five hundred meters in length, there was a forest that sloped down to pebbled beaches; the trees weren’t tall, as though they had been flattened by the wind blowing off the sea.

On the right, there was a newly built house. Otherwise there were no buildings to be seen. The large springs on the stroller creaked. Soon the baby closed his eyes, lulled to sleep by the wonderful rocking motion. The father, who had short, dark hair and a thick, black beard, put down one suitcase to wipe the sweat from his brow.

“My God, it’s humid,” he said.

“Yes,” she replied. “But it might be cooler nearer the sea.”

“Let’s hope so,” he said, grabbing the suitcase again.

This altogether ordinary family, with young parents, as indeed almost all parents were in those days, and two children, as indeed almost every family had in those days, had moved from Oslo, where they had lived in Thereses gate close to Bislett Stadium for five years, to the island of Tromøya, where a new house was being built for them on an estate. While they were waiting for the house to be completed, they would rent an old property in Hove Holiday Center. In Oslo he had studied English and Norwegian during the day and worked as a nightwatchman, while she attended Ullevål Nursing College. Even though he hadn’t finished the course, he had applied — and had been accepted — for a middle-school teaching job at Roligheden Skole while she was to work at Kokkeplassen Psychiatric Clinic. They had met in Kristiansand when they were seventeen, she had become pregnant when they were nineteen, and they had married when they were twenty, on the Vestland smallholding where she had grown up. No one from his family went to the wedding, and even though he is smiling in all the photos there is an aura of loneliness around him, you can see he doesn’t quite belong among all her brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, male and female cousins.

Now they’re twenty-four and their real lives lie before them. Jobs of their own, a house of their own, children of their own. There are the two of them, and the future they are moving into is theirs, too.

Or is it?

They were born in the same year, 1944, and were part of the first postwar generation, which in many ways represented something new, not least by dint of their being the first people in this country to live in a society that was, to a major degree, planned. The 1950s were the time for the growth of systems — the school system, the health system, the social system, the transport system — and public departments and services, too, in a large-scale centralization that in the course of a surprisingly short period would transform the way lives were led. Her father, born at the beginning of the twentieth century, was raised on the farm where she grew up, in Sørbøvåg in the district of Ytre Sogn, and had no education. Her grandfather came from one of the outlying islands off the coast, as his father, and his before him, probably had. Her mother came from a farm in Jølster, a hundred kilometers away, she hadn’t had any education either, and her family there could be traced back to the sixteenth century. As regards his family, it was higher up the social scale, inasmuch as both his father and his uncles on his father’s side had received higher education. But they, too, lived in the same place as their parents, Kristiansand, that is. His mother, who was uneducated, came from Åsgårdstrand, her father was a ship’s pilot, and there were also police officers in her family. When she met her husband she moved with him to his hometown. That was the custom. The change that took place in the 1950s and 1960s was a revolution, only without the usual violence and irrationality of revolutions. Not only did children of fishermen and smallholders, factory workers and shop assistants start at university and train to become teachers and psychologists, historians and social workers, but many of them settled in places far from the areas where their families lived. That they did all this as a matter of course says something about the strength of the zeitgeist. Zeitgeist comes from the outside, but works on the inside. It affects everyone, but not everyone is affected in the same way. For the young 1960s mother, it would have been an absurd thought to marry a man from one of the neighboring farms and spend the rest of her life there. She wanted to get out! She wanted to have her own life. The same was true for her brothers and sisters, and that was how it was in families countrywide. But why did they want to do that? Where did this strong desire come from? Indeed, where did these new ideas come from? In her family there was no tradition of anything of this kind: the only person who had left the area was her uncle Magnus, and he had gone to America because of the poverty in Norway, and the life he had there was for many years hardly distinguishable from the life he’d had in Vestland. For the young 1960s father, things were different: in his family you were expected to have an education, though perhaps not to marry a Vestland farmer’s daughter and settle on an estate near a small Sørland town.

But there they were, walking on this hot, overcast day in August 1969, on their way to their new home, him lugging two heavy suitcases stuffed with 1960s clothes, her pushing a 1960s stroller with a baby dressed in 1960s baby togs, white with lace trim everywhere, and between them, tripping from side to side, happy and curious, excited and expectant, was their elder son, Yngve. Across the flat stretch they went, through the thin strip of forest, to the gate that was open and into the large holiday center. To the right there was a garage owned by someone called Vraaldsen; to the left large red chalets around an open gravel area and, beyond, pine forest.

A kilometer to the east stood Tromøya Church, built in 1150 of stone, but some parts were older and it was probably one of the oldest churches in the country. It stood on a small mound and had been used from time immemorial as a landmark by passing ships and charted on all nautical maps. On Mærdø, a little island in the archipelago off the coast, there was an old skip-pergård, a residence testifying to the locality’s golden age, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when trade with the rest of the world, particularly in timber, flourished. On school trips to the Aust-Agder Museum classes were shown old Dutch and Chinese artifacts going back to that time and even further. On Tromøya there were rare and exotic plants that had come with ships discharging their ballast water, and you learned at school that it was on Tromøya that potatoes were first grown in Norway. In Snorri’s Norwegian king sagas the island was mentioned several times; under the ground in the meadows and fields lay arrowheads from the Stone Age and you could find fossils among the round stones on the long, pebbled beaches.

However, as the incoming nuclear family slowly walked through the open countryside with all their bags and baggage it wasn’t the tenth or the thirteenth, the seventeenth or the nineteenth centuries that had left their marks on the surroundings. It was the Second World War. This region had been used by German forces; they had built the barracks and many of the houses. In the forest there were low-lying brick bunkers, completely intact, and on top of the slopes above the beaches several artillery emplacements. There was even an old German airfield in the vicinity.

The house where they were going to live during the coming year was a solitary construction in the middle of the forest. It was red with white window frames. From the sea, which could not be seen, though only a few hundred meters down the slope, came a regular crashing of waves. There was a smell of forest and salt water.

The father put down his suitcases, took out the key, and unlocked the door. Inside, there was a hall, a kitchen, a living room with a wood burner, a combined bath and washroom, and on the first floor, three bedrooms. The walls weren’t insulated; the kitchen was equipped with the minimum. No telephone, no dishwasher, no washing machine, no TV.

“Well, here we are,” the father said, carrying their suitcases into the bedroom while Yngve ran from window to window peering out and the mother stood the stroller with the sleeping baby on the doorstep.

Of course, I don’t remember any of this time. It is absolutely impossible to identify with the infant my parents photographed, indeed so impossible that it seems wrong to use the word “me” to describe what is lying on the changing table, for example, with unusually red skin, arms and legs spread, and a face distorted into a scream, the cause of which no one can remember, or on a sheepskin rug on the floor, wearing white pajamas, still red-faced, with large, dark eyes squinting slightly. Is this creature the same person as the one sitting here in Malmö writing? And will the forty-year-old creature who is sitting in Malmö writing this one overcast September day in a room filled with the drone of the traffic outside and the autumn wind howling through the old-fashioned ventilation system be the same as the gray, hunched geriatric who in forty years from now might be sitting dribbling and trembling in an old people’s home somewhere in the Swedish woods? Not to mention the corpse that at some point will be laid out on a bench in a morgue? Still known as Karl Ove. And isn’t it actually unbelievable that one simple name encompasses all of this? The fetus in the belly, the infant on the changing table, the forty-year-old in front of the computer, the old man in the chair, the corpse on the bench? Wouldn’t it be more natural to operate with several names since their identities and self-perceptions are so very different? Such that the fetus might be called Jens Ove, for example, and the infant Nils Ove, and the five- to ten-year-old Per Ove, the ten- to twelve-year-old Geir Ove, the twelve- to seventeen-year-old Kurt Ove, the seventeen- to twenty-three-year-old John Ove, the twenty-three- to thirty-two-year-old Tor Ove, the thirty-two- to forty-six-year-old Karl Ove — and so on and so forth? Then the first name would represent the distinctiveness of the age range, the middle name would represent continuity, and the last, family affiliation.

No, I don’t remember any of this, I don’t even know which house we lived in, even though Dad pointed it out to me once. All I know about that time I have been told by my parents or have gleaned from photos. That winter the snow was several meters high, the way it can be in Sørland, and the road to the house was like a narrow ravine. There Yngve is, pulling a cart with me in the back, there he is, with his short skis on, smiling at the photographer. Inside the house, he is pointing at me and laughing, or I am standing on my own holding on to the cot. I called him “Aua”; that was my first word. He was also the only person who understood what I said, according to what I have been told, and he translated it for Mom and Dad. I also know that Yngve went around ringing doorbells and asking if there were any children living there. Grandma always used to tell that story. “Are there any children living here?” she would say in a child’s voice and laugh. And I know I fell down the stairs, and suffered some kind of shock, I stopped breathing, went blue in the face, and had convulsions, Mom ran to the nearest house with a telephone, clutching me to her breast. She thought it was epilepsy, but it wasn’t, it was nothing. And I know that Dad thrived in the classroom, he was a good teacher, and that during one of these years he went on a trip into the mountains with his class. There are some photos from then, he looks young and happy in all of them, surrounded by teenagers dressed in the casual way that was characteristic of the early 1970s. Woolen sweaters, flared trousers, rubber boots. Their hair was big, not big and piled-up as in the sixties, but big and soft, and it hung over their soft teenage faces. Mom once said perhaps he had never been as happy as he was during those years. And then there are photos of Grandma on Dad’s side, Yngve, and me — two taken in front of a frozen lake, both Yngve and I were clad in large woolen jackets, knitted by Grandma, mine mustard yellow and brown — and two taken on the veranda of their house in Kristiansand, in one she has her cheek against mine, it is autumn, the sky is blue, the sun low, we are gazing across the town, I suppose I must have been two or three years old.

One might imagine that these photos represent some kind of memory, that they are reminiscences, except that the “me” reminiscences usually rely on is not there, and the question is then of course what meaning they actually have. I have seen countless photos from the same period of friends’ and girlfriends’ families, and they are virtually indistinguishable. The same colors, the same clothes, the same rooms, the same activities. But I don’t attach any significance to these photos, in a certain sense they are meaningless, and this aspect becomes even more marked when I see photos of previous generations, it is just a collection of people, dressed in exotic clothes, doing something that to me is unfathomable. It is the era that we take photos of, not the people in it, they can’t be captured. Not even the people in my immediate circle can. Who was the woman posing in front of the stove in the flat in Thereses gate, wearing a light-blue dress, one knee resting against the other, calves apart, in this typical 1960s posture? The one with the bob? The blue eyes and the gentle smile that was so gentle it barely even registered as a smile? The one holding the handle of the shiny coffee pot with the red lid? Yes, that was my mother, my very own mom, but who was she? What was she thinking? How did she see her life, the one she had lived so far and the one awaiting her? Only she knows, and the photo tells you nothing. An unknown woman in an unknown room, that is all. And the man who, ten years later, is sitting on a mountainside drinking coffee from the same red thermos top, as he forgot to pack any cups before leaving, who was he? The one with the well-groomed black beard and the thick black hair? The one with the sensitive lips and the amused eyes? Yes, of course, that was my father, my very own dad. But who he was to himself at this moment, or at any other, nobody knows. And so it is with all these photos, even the ones of me. They are voids; the only meaning that can be derived from them is that which time has added. Nonetheless, these photos are a part of me and my most intimate history, as others’ photos are part of theirs. Meaningful, meaningless, meaningful, meaningless, this is the wave that washes through our lives and creates its inherent tension. I draw on everything I remember from the first six years of my life, and all that exists in terms of photos and objects from that period, they constitute an important part of my identity, filling the otherwise empty and memoryless periphery of this “me” with meaning and continuity. From all these bits and pieces I have built myself a Karl Ove, an Yngve, a mom and dad, a house in Hove and a house in Tybakken, a grandmother and grandfather on my dad’s side, and a grandmother and grandfather on my mom’s side, a neighborhood and a multitude of kids.

This ghetto-like state of incompleteness is what I call my childhood.

Memory is not a reliable quantity in life. And it isn’t for the simple reason that memory doesn’t prioritize the truth. It is never the demand for truth that determines whether memory recalls an action accurately or not. It is self-interest that does. Memory is pragmatic, it is sly and artful, but not in any hostile or malicious way; on the contrary, it does everything it can to keep its host satisfied. Something pushes a memory into the great void of oblivion, something distorts it beyond recognition, something misunderstands it totally, something, and this something is as good as nothing, recalls it with sharpness, clarity, and accuracy. That which is remembered accurately is never given to you to determine.

In my case, any memory of my first six years is virtually nonexistent. I remember hardly anything. I have no idea who took care of me, what I did, who I played with, it has all completely gone, the years 1969–1974 are a great big hole in my life. The little I can muster is of scant value: I am standing on a wooden bridge in a sparse, high-altitude forest, beneath me rushes a torrent, the water is green and white, I am jumping up and down, the bridge is swaying and I am laughing. Beside me is Geir Prestbakmo, a boy from the neighborhood, he is jumping up and down and laughing, too. I am sitting on the rear seat of a car, we are waiting at the light, Dad turns and says we are in Mjøndalen. We are going to an IK Start game, I’ve been told, but I can’t remember a thing about the trip there, the soccer match, or the journey home. I am walking up the hill outside the house pushing a big plastic truck; it is green and yellow and gives me an absolutely fantastic feeling of riches and wealth and happiness.

That is all. That is my first six years.

But these are canonized memories, already established at the age of seven or eight, the magic of childhood: my very first memories! However, there are other kinds of memories. Those that are not fixed and cannot be evoked by will, but that at odd moments let go, as it were, and rise into my consciousness of their own accord and float around there for a while like transparent jellyfish, roused by a certain smell, a certain taste, a certain sound … these are always accompanied by an immediate, intense feeling of happiness. Then there are the memories associated with the body, when you do something you used to do: shield your eyes from the sun with your arm, catch a ball, run across a meadow with a kite in your hand and your children hard on your heels. There are memories that accompany emotions: sudden anger, sudden tears, sudden fear, and you are where you were, as if hurled back inside yourself, propelled through the ages at breakneck speed. And then there are the memories associated with a landscape, for landscape in childhood is not like the landscape that follows later; they are charged in very different ways. In that landscape every rock, every tree had a meaning, and because everything was seen for the first time and because it was seen so many times, it was anchored in the depths of your consciousness, not as something vague or approximate, the way the landscape outside a house appears to adults if they close their eyes and it has to be summoned forth, but as something with immense precision and detail. In my mind, I have only to open the door and go outside for the images to come streaming toward me. The gravel in the driveway, almost bluish in color in the summer. Oh, that alone, the driveways of childhood! And the 1970s cars parked in them! VW Beetles, Citroën DS 21s, Ford Taunuses, Granadas, Consuls, Opel Asconas, Kadetts, Ladas, Volvo Amazons … Well, OK, across the gravel, along the brown fence, over the shallow ditch between our road, Nordåsen Ringvei, and Elgstien, which traversed the whole area passing two estates apart from our own. The slope of rich, dark earth from the edge of the road down into the forest! The way small, thin, green stems had almost immediately begun to shoot up from it: fragile and seemingly alone in the new black expanse, and then the rampant multiplication of them the year after until the slope was completely covered with thick, luxuriant shrubbery. Small trees, grass, foxgloves, dandelions, ferns, and bushes eradicating what earlier had been such a clear division between road and forest. Up the hill, along the sidewalk with its narrow brick curb, and, oh, the water that trickled and flowed and streamed down there when it rained! The path off to the right, a shortcut to the new supermarket B-Max. The bog beside it, no bigger than two spaces in a parking lot, the birches thirstily hanging over it. Olsen’s house at the top of the little hill and the road that cut in behind. Grevlingveien, it was called. In the first house on the left lived John and his sister Trude, it stood on a plot that was little more than a pile of rocks. I was always frightened when I had to walk past that house. Partly because John might be lying in ambush there, ready to throw stones or snowballs at any passing child, partly because they had an Alsatian … That Alsatian … Oh, now I remember it. What a dreadful beast that dog was. It was tied up on the veranda or in the drive, barked at all the passersby, slunk back and forth as far as its tether would allow, whimpering and howling. It was lean with yellow, sickly eyes. Once it came tearing down the hill toward me, with Trude hard on its heels and the leash dragging behind it. I had heard that you shouldn’t take flight when an animal is after you, for example, a bear in the forest; the secret was to stand perfectly still and act cool, so I did, stopping the instant I saw it bounding toward me. It didn’t help a scrap. It couldn’t care less whether I was motionless or not, just opened its jaws and sank them into my forearm, next to my wrist. Trude caught up with it a second later, grabbed the leash, and yanked so hard it was wrenched backward. I hurried off, crying. Everything about that animal frightened me. The barking, the yellow eyes, the saliva that ran from its jowls, the round, pointed teeth, of which I now had an imprint in my arm. At home I didn’t breathe a word about what had happened, for fear of being told off, because an incident like this offered so many opportunities for reproach: I shouldn’t have been where I was at the time, or I shouldn’t have whined or, a dog, was that any reason to be frightened? From that day on, terror had me in its grip whenever I saw the brute. And it was fatal because not only had I heard that you should stand still when a dangerous animal attacks, I had also heard that a dog can smell fear. I don’t know who told me that, but it was one of the beliefs that people passed on and that everyone knew: dogs can smell if you are frightened. Then they can become frightened or aggressive themselves and go on the attack. If you’re not afraid they are nice to you.

How that occupied my mind. How could they smell fear? What did fear smell like? And was it possible to pretend you weren’t frightened, so that the dogs would smell that and wouldn’t notice the real feelings that lay beneath?

Kanestrøm, who lived two houses up from us, also had a dog. It was a golden retriever called Alex and as meek as a lamb. It ambled after Herr Kanestrøm wherever he went, but also after every one of the four children if it could. Kind eyes and, somehow, gentle, friendly movements. But I was even afraid of this one. Because when you came into view on the hill and were about to go in to ring the doorbell it barked. Not tentative, friendly, or inquisitive barking, but vigorous, deep-throated, and resonant. Then I would stop in my tracks.

“Hi, Alex,” I might say if no one was around. “I’m not frightened, you know. It’s not that.”

If someone was there I would feel forced to carry on, act as if nothing were happening, plow my way through the barking, as it were, and when the dog was in front of me, its jaws agape, I would bend down and pat it a couple of times on its side with my heart pounding and every muscle trembling with fear.

“Quiet, Alex!” Dag Lothar would say, as he came running up the narrow gravel path from the cellar door or rushing from the front door.

“You’re frightening Karl Ove with your barking, you stupid dog.”

“I’m not frightened,” I would counter. Dag Lothar would just look at me with a kind of stiff smile, which meant “Don’t give me that.”

Then off we went.

Where did we go?

Into the forest.

Down to Ubekilen, to a bay.

Down to the pontoons.

Up to Tromøya Bridge.

Down to Gamle Tybakken.

Over to the plastic boat factory.

Up into the hills.

Along to Lake Tjenna.

Up to B-Max.

Down to the Fina gas station.

Unless, that is, we just ran about in the road where we lived, or hung around outside one of the houses there, or sat on the curb, or in the big cherry tree no one owned.

That was everything. That was the world.

But what a world!

An estate has no roots in the past, nor any branches into the skies of the future, as satellite towns once had. Estates arrived as a pragmatic answer to a practical question, where are all the people moving into the district going to live, ah yes, in the forest over there, we’ll clear some plots and put them up for sale. The only house there belonged to a family called Beck; the father was Danish and had built the house himself in the middle of the forest. They didn’t have a car, or a washing machine, or a television. There was no garden, only a drive made from pounded soil in among the trees. Piles of wood under tarpaulins and, in the winter, an upturned boat. The two sisters, Inga Lill and Lisa, went to the local middle school and looked after Yngve and me for the first years we lived there. Their brother was called John, he was two years older than me, wore strange, homemade clothes, wasn’t in the slightest bit interested in what we were interested in, and devoted his attention to other matters, which he never told us about. He built his own boat when he was twelve. Not like us, not like the rafts we tried to cobble together from dreams and a lust for adventure, but a proper, real rowboat. You would have thought he would be bullied, but he wasn’t, in a way, the distance was too great. He wasn’t one of us and he didn’t want to be. His father, the cycling Dane, who perhaps had nurtured an urge to live alone in the middle of the forest ever since his time in Denmark, must have been mortified when the plans for the estate were drawn up and approved and the first construction machinery rolled into the forest just beyond his house. The families who moved in were from all over the country and all of them had children. In the house across the road lived Gustavsen, he was a fireman, she was a housewife, they came from Honningsvåg, their children were called Rolf and Leif Tore. In the house opposite us lived Prestbakmo, he was a schoolteacher, she was a nurse, they came from Troms, their children’s names were Gro and Geir. On the same side was Kanestrøm, he worked at the post office, she was a housewife, they came from Kristiansund, their children were called Steinar, Ingrid Anne, Dag Lothar, and Unni. On the other side was Karlsen, he was a sailor, she was a shop assistant, they were from Sørland, their children were Kent Arne and Anne Lene. Above them was Christensen, he was a sailor, I don’t know what she did, their children were called Marianne and Eva. On the other side lived Jacobsen, he was a typographer, she was a housewife, both were from Bergen, their children were Geir, Trond, and Wenche. Above them, Lindland, from Sørland, their children were Geir Håkon and Morten. Around there, I began to lose track, at least as far as the parents’ names and jobs were concerned. The children there were: Bente, Tone Elisabeth, Tone, Liv Berit, Steinar, Kåre, Rune, Jan Atle, Oddlaug, and Halvor. Most were my age, the oldest seven years above me, the youngest four years below. Five of them would later be in my class.

We moved there in the summer of 1970, when most of the houses on the site were still being built. The shrill warning siren, which sounded before an explosion, was a common feature of my childhood, and that very distinctive feeling of doom you can experience when the shock waves from the explosion ripple through the ground causing the floor of the house to tremble was common, too. It was natural to think of connections above the ground — roads, electric cables, forests, and seas — but more disturbing to think of them being beneath the ground as well. What we stood on, shouldn’t that be absolutely immovable and impenetrable? At the same time all the openings in the ground had a very special fascination for me and the other children I grew up with. It was not uncommon for us to flock around one of the many holes being dug in our area, whether for sewage pipes or electric cables, or for the foundations of a cellar, and to stare down into the depths, yellow where there was sand, black, brown, or reddish brown where there was soil, gray where there was clay, and sooner or later the bottom was always covered with an opaque layer of grayish-yellow water, its surface sometimes broken by the top of a huge rock or two. Above the hole towered a shiny yellow or orange excavator, not unlike a bird, with its bucket like a beak at the extreme end of a long neck, and beside it a stationary truck, with headlights like eyes, the radiator grille like a mouth, and the tarpaulin-covered rear, a back. In the case of large construction projects there would also be bulldozers or dump trucks, usually yellow, with enormous wheels and treads that were a hand’s width. If we were lucky we would find piles of detonation cord in or near the hole, which we pinched because the cord had a high swap and utility value. Besides this, there were normally drums nearby, the height of a man, wooden bobbin-like constructions from which cables were unfurled, and piles of smooth, reddish-brown plastic pipes measuring the approximate diameter of our forearms. There were further piles of cement pipes and precast cement wells, so rough and wonderful, a bit taller than us, perfect for climbing on; long, immovable mats of old, cut-up car tires, which they used during the blasting; mounds of wooden telephone poles, green from the preservative they had been impregnated with; boxes of dynamite; sheds where the workmen changed their clothes and ate. If they were there we kept a respectful distance and watched what they were doing. If they weren’t, we clambered down the holes, onto the dump-truck wheels, balanced on the piles of pipes, rattled the shed doors and peered through the windows, jumped down into the cement wells, tried to roll the drums away, filled our pockets with cable clippings, plastic handles, and detonation cord. In our world no one had greater status than these workmen; no work seemed more meaningful than theirs. The technical details were of no interest to me, they meant as little as the make of the construction machines. What fascinated me most, apart from the changes in the landscape the workmen wrought, were the manifestations of their private lives that came with them. When one of them produced a comb from his orange overalls or baggy, almost shapeless, blue trousers and combed his hair, safety helmet under his arm, amid all the droning and pounding of the machines, for example, or the mysterious, indeed almost incomprehensible, moment when the workmen emerged from the shed in the afternoon wearing absolutely normal clothes and got into their cars and drove off like absolutely normal men.

There were other workmen we watched closely, indefatigably. If anyone from Televerket appeared in the vicinity, the news spread like wildfire among the groups of children. There was the car, there was the workman, a telecom engineer, and there were his fantastic climbing shoes! With those on his feet and a tool belt around his waist he clicked on a harness that went around both him and the pole, and then, with a series of slow and deliberate, but for us completely mystifying, movements he began to mount the pole. How was this possible? Straight-backed, with no visible sign of effort, no visible use of force, he glided up to the top. Wide-eyed, we stared at him while he worked aloft. Not one of us would leave because soon he would be climbing down again, in the same easy, effortless, incomprehensible way. Imagine having shoes like those, with the curved metal hook that wrapped itself around the post, what couldn’t you do?

And then there were the men working on the drainage. The ones who parked their cars by one of the many manhole covers in the road, which were either set in the tarmac or placed on top of a brick circle somewhere close by, and who, after putting on rubber boots reaching up to their waists! levered up the round, enormously heavy, metal lid with a crowbar, shifted it to the side and climbed down. We watched as first their calves disappeared from view, into the hole under the road, next their thighs, then their stomachs, then their chests and finally their heads … And what was there beneath if not a tunnel? Where water flowed? Where you could walk? Oh, this was just great. Perhaps one of them was over there now, beside Kent Arne’s bike, which was lying strewn across the sidewalk, about twenty meters away, except that he was under the ground! Or were these manholes kinds of stations, like wells, where you could inspect the pipes and draw water when there was a fire? No one knew; we were always told to keep well away when they climbed down. No one dared ask them. No one was strong enough to lift off the heavy, coin-shaped metal covers on his own. So it remained a mystery, like so much else in those years.

Even before we started school we were free to roam wherever we wanted, with two exceptions. One was the main road, which ran from Tromøya Bridge to the Fina station. The other was the lake. Never go down to the lake on your own! the adults instilled in us. But, actually, why not? Did they think we would fall into the water? No, that wasn’t it, someone said when we were sitting on the rocks beyond the little meadow where we sometimes played soccer and looking down over the edge of the steep cliff into the water, perhaps thirty meters beneath us. It was the water sprite. It abducted children.

“Who says so?”

“Mom and Dad.”

“Is it here?”

“Yes.”

We gazed down at the grayish surface of the water in Ubekilen. It didn’t seem improbable that there was something lurking beneath.

“Only here?” someone asked. “If so, we can go somewhere else. Lake Tjenna?”

“Or Little Hawaii?”

“There are other sprites there. They’re dangerous. It’s true. Mom and Dad told me. They kidnap children and drown them.”

“Could it come up here?”

“Dunno. No, I don’t reckon so. No. It’s too far. It’s only dangerous by the water’s edge.”

I was scared of the sprite after that, but not as scared as I was of foxes, the thought of them terrified me, and if I saw a bush stir or I heard something rustle past, then I was off, running to safety, to an opening in the forest, that is, or up to the estate, where the foxes never ventured. In fact, I was so frightened of foxes that Yngve only had to say, I am a fox, and I am coming to get you — he was in the upper bunk and I was in the lower one — and I froze in terror. No, you aren’t, I would say. Yes, I am, he would say, hanging over the edge and hitting out at me. Despite this and even though he did frighten me now and then, I missed having him there when we each had our own room and suddenly I had to sleep alone. It was all right, after all, it was inside the house, the new room, but it wasn’t as good as having him there, in the bunk above me. Then I could just ask him things, such as, “Yngve, are you frightened now?” and he might answer “No-oo, why should I be? There’s nothing to be frightened of here.” And I would know he was right and feel reassured.

The fear of foxes must have worn off when I was about seven. The vacuum it left, however, was soon filled by other fears. One morning I was walking past the TV, it was on although no one was watching, there was a matinee film, and there, oh no, oh no, there was a man with no head walking up a staircase! Aaagh! I ran into my room, but that didn’t help, I was just as alone and defenseless there, so off I went in search of Mom, if she was at home, or Yngve. The image of the headless man pursued me, and not just in the night, which the other fearful visions I had did. No, the headless man could appear in broad daylight, and if I was alone it made no difference that the sun was shining or the birds were singing, my heart pounded and fear spread like fire to every tiniest nerve ending in my body. It upset me more that this darkness could also appear in the daylight. In fact, if there was one thing I was really frightened of, it was this darkness in the light. And the worst of it was that there was nothing I could do about it. Shouting for someone didn’t help, standing in the middle of an open area didn’t help, and running away didn’t help. Then there was the front cover of a crime magazine that Dad once showed me, a comic he’d had when he was a child, showing a skeleton carrying a man over its back, and the skeleton had turned its head and was looking straight at me through its hollow eye sockets. I was afraid of that skeleton as well; it too appeared in all sorts of expected and unexpected contexts. I was also afraid of the hot water in the bathroom. Because whenever you turned on the hot tap a shrill scream traveled through the pipes, and immediately afterward, if you didn’t turn it off at once, they started banging. These noises, which were one unholy racket, scared the wits out of me. There was a way of avoiding them, you had to turn on the cold water first, and then somehow fiddle with the hot tap until the temperature was right. That was what Mom, Dad, and Yngve did. I had tried, but the shrill scream that penetrated the walls and was followed by a crescendo of banging, as though something down below was working itself up into a fury, started the second I touched the hot-water tap, and I turned it off as fast as I could, and ran out, my body shaking violently with fear. So, in the morning, I either washed in cold water or took Yngve’s dirty but lukewarm water.

Dogs, foxes, and plumbing were concrete, physical threats, I knew where I was with them, either they were there or they weren’t. But the headless man and the grinning skeleton, they belonged to the kingdom of death, and they couldn’t be handled in the same way, they could be anywhere and everywhere, in a cupboard if you opened it in the dark, on the stairs as you were going up or down, in the forest, indeed even under the bed or in the bathroom. I associated my own reflection in windows with the creatures from beyond, perhaps because they only appeared when it was dark outside, but it was a terrible thought, seeing your own reflection in the black windowpane and thinking, that image is not me, but a ghoul staring in at me.

The year we started school none of us believed in sprites, pixies, or trolls anymore, we laughed at those who did, but the notion of ghosts and apparitions persisted, perhaps because we didn’t dare ignore it; dead people did exist, and we knew that, all of us. Other notions we had, coming from the same tangled realm, that of mythology, were of a happier, more innocent nature, such as that of the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. Even that autumn when we started the first class we still believed the myth enough for us to go in search of the rainbow. It must have been one Saturday in September, the rain had been pouring down all morning, we were playing on the road below the house where Geir Håkon lived, or, to be more precise, in the ditch that was flooded with water. At this exact spot the road passed a blasted rock face, and water was dripping and trickling down from its moss, grass, and soil-covered top. We were wearing rubber boots and thick, brightly colored oilskin trousers and jackets, with the hoods tied around our chins, thus displacing all sound; your own breathing and the movements of your head, where your ears met the inside of the hood, were always loud and clear while everything else was muffled and seemed to be happening a long distance away. Between the trees on the other side of the road and at the top of the mountain above us the mist was thick. The orange rooftops on both sides of the road downhill wore a dull sheen in the gray light. Above the forest at the bottom of the slope the sky hung like a swollen belly, penetrated by the pouring rain, which continued to dance on our hoods and now oversensitive ears.

We made a dam, but the sand we shoveled up kept collapsing, and when we caught sight of Jacobsen’s car coming up the hill, we didn’t hesitate, we dropped our spades and ran down to their house, where the car was parking at that moment. A bluish ribbon of smoke floated in the air behind the exhaust pipe. The father got out on one side, as thin as a stick, with a cigarette stub in the corner of his mouth, he bent down, pulled the lever underneath the seat, and pushed it forward, so that his two sons, Big Geir and Trond, could get out, while the mother, small and chubby, red-haired and pale, let out their daughter, Wenche, on her side.

“Hi,” we said.

“Hi,” said Geir and Trond.

“Where have you been?”

“To town.”

“Hello, boys,” their father said.

“Hi,” we said.

“Do you want to hear what 777 is in German?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Siebenhundertsiebenundsiebzig!” he said in his hoarse voice. “Ha ha ha!”

We laughed with him. His laughter morphed into coughing.

“Right then,” he said when the fit was over. He inserted the key in the car-door lock and twisted. His lips kept twitching, and one eye, too.

“Where are you off to?” Trond asked.

“Dunno,” I said.

“Can I join you?”

“Of course you can.”

Trond was the same age as Geir and me, but much smaller. His eyes were as round as saucers, his lower lip was thick and red, his nose small. Above this doll-like face grew blond, curly hair. His brother looked completely different: his eyes were narrow and crafty, his smile was often mocking, his hair straight and sandy brown, the bridge of his nose freckly. But he was small, too.

“Put your rainjacket on,” his mother said.

“I’ll just get my jacket,” Trond said, and ran indoors. We stood waiting without saying a word, our arms down by our sides like two penguins. It had stopped raining. A light wind shook the tops of the tall, slim pine trees scattered round the gardens below. A thin stream ran down the hill, alongside the road, taking with it little heaps of pine needles, the tiny, yellow v’s or bones strewn everywhere.

In the sky behind us the cloud cover had opened. The scenery around us, with all the rooftops, lawns, clumps of trees, ridges, and slopes, was now suffused with a kind of glow. From the hill above our house, which we called the mountain, a rainbow had risen.

“Look,” I said. “A rainbow!”

“Wow!” Geir said.

Up at the house, Trond had closed the door. He started running toward us.

“There’s a rainbow over the mountain!” Geir said.

“Shall we go and look for the pot of gold?”

“Yes, let’s!” Trond said.

We ran down the slope. On Karlsen’s lawn Anne Lene, Kent Arne’s little sister, stood watching us. She was wearing a safety harness; it was attached to a strap so that she wouldn’t run off. Her mother’s red car was parked in the drive. A light shone from a wall lamp. Outside Gustavsen’s house Trond slowed down.

“I’m sure Leif Tore would like to join us,” he said.

“I don’t think he’s at home,” I said.

“We can ask anyway,” Trond said, walking between the two brick gateposts, which were not hung with any gates and therefore subject to my father’s ridicule, and into the drive. A hollow metal globe, from which protruded an arrow, all carried by a naked man with a bent back, was cemented to the top of the posts. It was a sundial, and my father made fun of that, too, for what was the point of two sundials?

“Leif Tore,” Trond shouted. “Are you coming out?”

He looked at us. Then we all shouted.

“Leif Tore! Are you coming out?”

A few seconds passed. Then the kitchen window was opened, and his mother stuck out her head.

“He’s coming now. He’s just putting on his rain gear. You don’t need to shout anymore.”

I had a precise picture of this pot. Large and black, with three legs, full of glittering objects. Gold, silver, diamonds, rubies, sapphires. There was one at each end of the rainbow. We had looked for it before, without any luck. It was important to be quick, rainbows never lasted long.

Leif Tore, who for a while now had been a shadow behind the yellow glass of the door, opened it at last. A wave of warm air streamed out from behind him. It was always so hot in their house. I caught a slight odor of something that was both acrid and sweet. That was how it smelled in their house. All the houses apart from ours had their own smell, this was theirs.

“What are we going to do?” he said, slamming the door behind him and making the glass rattle.

“There’s a rainbow on the mountain. We’re going to search for the pot of gold,” Trond said.

“Come on then!” Leif Tore said, breaking into a run. We followed, down the last part of the hill and onto the road going up toward the mountain. Yngve’s bike still wasn’t back in its place, I could see, but both Mom’s green Beetle and Dad’s red Kadett were there. Mom had been doing the vacuuming when I left, it was awful, I hated the sound, it was like a wall pressing itself against me. And they opened the windows while they were cleaning, the air indoors was freezing cold, and it was as if the cold were transmitted to Mom as well, she had no space left in her for anything else when she stood leaning over the wash tub, wringing the cloth, or when she pushed the broom or the Hoover across the floor, and since it was only in this surplus space that there was room for me, I also got cold on these Saturday mornings, in fact so cold that the chill penetrated my head and even made it difficult to lie on the bed reading comics, which normally I loved, so that in the end I had no choice but to get dressed and run outside and hope there was something happening there.

Both Mom and Dad did the cleaning in our house, which was not the norm; to my knowledge none of the other fathers did it, with the possible exception of Prestbakmo, but I had never seen him do it and actually doubted whether he would submit to that kind of work.

But on this day Dad had been to town to buy crabs at the harbor, after which he had sat in his office smoking cigarettes and perhaps marking essays, perhaps reading documents, perhaps fiddling around with his stamp collection, or perhaps reading The Phantom.

On the other side of our creosoted garden fence, where the path to B-Max started, water from a manhole cover had flooded the forest floor. Rolf, Leif Tore’s brother, had said a few days ago that it was Dad’s responsibility. “Responsibility,” that was not a word he would normally use, so I guessed he had got it from his father. Dad was on the local council, they were the people who made the decisions on the island, and that was what Gustavsen, Leif Tore and Rolf’s father, had meant. Dad had to report the flooding so they could send someone to do the repairs. As we walked up and my attention was again caught by the unnaturally large amount of water between the small, thin trees, with the odd bit of white toilet paper floating in it, I decided to tell him if the opportunity arose. Tell him he would have to report it at the Monday meeting.

There he was! In his blue waterproof jacket, with no hood, his old jeans, which he wore whenever he was going to work in the garden, and his green knee-high boots, he rounded the corner of the house. His upper body was twisted slightly to one side as he was carrying a ladder with both hands across the lawn, and then he dug it into the ground, straightened up, and pushed it into position against the house roof.

I turned back and sped up to catch the others.

“The rainbow’s still there!” I shouted.

“We can see it, too!” Leif Tore cried.

I caught up with them at the start of the path, walked behind Trond’s yellow jacket between the trees, which shed a shower of rain every time anyone lifted a branch, down to the brown house where Molden lived. He didn’t have any young children, only a teenager with long hair, big glasses, brown clothes, and flared trousers. We didn’t even know what his name was, we just called him Molden.

The best way up to the top of what we called a mountain went past their garden, and that was the path we were taking now, slowly, because it was steep and the long, yellow grass here was slippery. Now and then I grabbed a sapling to pull myself up. Just below the summit, the mountain was bare and protruded outward, impossible to walk up, at least when it was as wet as it was now, but at the edge there was a crevice between the rock face and a gently projecting crag where you could get a foothold and easily clamber up the last few meters to the summit.

“Where’s it gone?” Trond said, the first man up.

“It was right there!” Geir said, pointing a few meters along the little plateau.

“Oh no,” Leif Tore said. “It’s down there. Look!”

Everyone turned and looked down. The rainbow was over the forest, a long way down. One end was above the trees below Beck’s house, the other near the grassy incline down to the bay.

“Shall we go down then?” Trond said.

“What if the treasure’s still here?” Leif Tore said, in the dialect we spoke. “We could at least have a peek.”

“It isn’t,” I said. “It’s only where the rainbow is.”

“Who took it then? That’s what I’d like to know,” Leif Tore said.

“No one did,” I said. “Are you stupid or what? No one brings it either, if that’s what you think. It’s the rainbow.”

“You’re the one who’s stupid,” Leif Tore said. “It can’t just disappear all on its own.”

“It seems it can,” I said.

“No, it can’t,” Leif Tore said.

“Yes, it can,” I said. “Take a look, then. See if you can find it!”

“I want to look, too,” Trond said.

“Me too,” Geir said.

“Count me out,” I said.

They turned and walked away, glancing from side to side. I wanted to go with them, I could feel myself drawn, but it wasn’t possible now. Instead I looked at the view. It was the best vantage point anywhere. You could see the bridge almost rising from the treetops, you could see the sound, where there were always boats crossing, and you could see the big, white gasometers on the other side. You could see the island of Gjerstadholmen, you could see the new road, the low concrete bridge it crossed, you could see Ubekilen Bay from the landward side. And you could see the estate. All the red and orange roofs among the trees. The road. Our garden, Gustavsen’s garden; the rest was hidden.

The sky above the estate was almost completely blue now. The clouds toward the town, white. While on the other side, behind Ubekilen, they were still heavy and gray.

I could see Dad down there. A tiny, tiny little figure, no bigger than an ant, on top of the ladder against the roof.

Could he see me up here? I wondered.

A gust of wind blew off the sea.

I turned to watch the others. Two yellow dots and one light green one moving to and fro between the trees. The rocky plateau was dark gray, much like the sky beyond, with yellow and, in some places, whitish grass in the cracks. A branch lay there, all its weight resting on the many needle-thin side branches in such a way that the thick main stem didn’t touch the ground. It looked strange.

I had hardly ever been in the forest that lay ahead. The furthest I had gone on the path was to a large, uprooted tree, perhaps thirty meters inside. From there you could see down a slope where nothing grew but heather. With the tall, slim pine trees on both sides and the denser-growing spruces like a wall beneath, it resembled a large room.

Geir said he saw a fox there once. I didn’t believe him, but foxes were no laughing matter, so for safety’s sake we had taken with us a packed lunch and bottles of juice to the edge of the mountain, where the whole of the world as we knew it lay beneath us.

“Here it is!” Leif Tore shouted. “Wow! The pot of gold!”

“Wow!” Geir shouted.

“You can’t fool me!” I shouted back.

“Yippeeeee!” Leif Tore cried. “We’re rich!”

“I don’t believe it!” Trond shouted.

Then it all went quiet.

Had they really found it?

Of course not. They were trying to trick me.

But the end of the rainbow had been on this precise spot.

What if Leif Tore was right and the treasure hadn’t disappeared with the rainbow?

I took a few steps forward and tried to see through the juniper bushes they were standing behind.

“Ohhh, man! Look at this!” Leif Tore said.

I made up my mind in a flash and hurried over, dashing between the trees and past the bushes, then stopped.

They looked at me.

“Gotcha! Ha ha ha! We gotcha!”

“I knew all the time,” I said. “I was just coming to get you. The rainbow will be gone if we don’t hurry.”

“Oh, yes,” said Leif Tore. “We really fooled you. Admit it.”

“Come on, Geir,” I said. “Let’s go and look for the pot of gold down there.”

Feeling uncomfortable, Geir looked at Leif Tore and Trond. But he was my best friend and joined me. Trond and Leif Tore ambled along after us.

“I need a piss,” Leif Tore said. “Shall we see who can piss the furthest? Over the edge? It’ll be one great big long jet!”

Piss outdoors when Dad was down there and might be able to see?

Leif Tore was already out of his waterproof pants and fumbling with his fly. Geir and Trond had taken up positions on either side of him and were wriggling their hips and pulling down their trousers.

“I can’t piss,” I said. “I’ve just had one.”

“You haven’t,” Geir said, turning toward me with both his hands around his willy. “We’ve been together all day.”

“I had a piss while you were looking for the treasure,” I said.

The next second they were enveloped in a cloud of steam as they pissed. I stepped forward to see who won. Surprisingly, it was Trond.

“Rolf pulled his foreskin back,” Leif Tore said, closing his fly. “So he pissed much further from the get-go.”

“The rainbow’s gone,” Geir said, shaking his dick for a last time before tucking it back.

Everyone looked down over the edge.

“What shall we do now?” Trond said.

“No idea,” said Leif Tore.

“Let’s go to the boathouse, shall we?” I suggested.

“What can we do there?” said Leif Tore.

“Well, we can climb onto the roof,” I said.

“Good idea!” Leif Tore said.

We zigzagged down the slope, fought our way through the dense spruce forest, and arrived five minutes later on the gravel road that ran around the bay. The grassy hill on the other side was where we usually went skiing in the winter. In the summer and autumn we seldom went there — what was there to do? The bay was shallow and muddy, no good for swimming, the jetty was falling to pieces, and the little island off the coast was covered with shit from the colony of gulls nesting there. When we wandered around there it was mostly because we were at loose ends, like this morning. High above us, between the sloping field and the edge of the forest, there was an old, white house in which an old, white-haired lady lived. We knew nothing about her. Not her name, nor what she did there. Sometimes we peered into the house, laid our hands against the window, and pressed our faces against the glass. Not for any particular reason, nor out of curiosity, more because we could. We saw a sitting room with old furniture or a kitchen with old utensils. Near the house, past the narrow gravel road, there was a red barn seemingly on the verge of collapse. And at the very bottom, by the stream running down from the forest, there was an old, unpainted boathouse with tarred felt on the roof. Along the bed of the stream grew ferns and some plants with, relative to their thin stems, enormous leaves; if you swept them aside with your hands, in that swimming stroke the way people do, to see past the unresisting foliage, the ground appeared naked, as though the plants were deceiving us, pretending they were lush and green while in reality, beneath the dense leaves, there was almost nothing but soil. Further down, closer to the water, the earth or clay or whatever it was was a reddish color, reminiscent of rust. Occasionally a variety of things got caught there, a bit of a plastic bag or a condom, but not on days like today, when the water gushed out from the pipe under the road in an enormous torrent and only abated when it reached the little delta-like area where the water fanned out before it met the bay.

The boathouse was gray with age. In some places you could insert a hand between the planks, so we knew what the inside looked like, without any of us having been in there. After peering through these gaps for a while we directed our attention to the roof, which we were going to try to climb. In order to do so we would have to find something to stand on. Nothing in the immediate vicinity was of any use, so we snuck up to the barn and sniffed around there. First of all, we made sure there were no cars up behind the house, there was one there sometimes, the owner was a man, perhaps her son, he would occasionally stop us crossing the drive when we wanted to extend our ski run, which she never did. So we kept an eye open for him.

No car.

Some white cans strewn by the wall. I recognized them from my grandparents’ farm; it was formic acid. A rusty oil drum. A door hanging off its hinges.

Over there, though! A pallet!

We lifted it. It had almost grown into the ground. Full of woodlice and small spiderlike insects crawling all over the place as we lifted. Then we carried it between us all the way across the field and down to the boathouse. Leaned it against the wall. Leif Tore, acknowledged to be the bravest among us, was the first to have a go. Standing on the pallet, he managed to get one elbow on the roof. With his other hand he took a firm grip on the edge of the roof, and then he launched one leg into the air. He got it over the edge, for an instant it rested on the roof, but as soon as his body followed, he lost his grip and plunged like a sack of potatoes, unable to break his fall with his hands. He hit the pallet with his ribs and slid down to the ground.

“Agh!” he screamed. “Oh, shit. Ooohh. Ow! Ow! Ow!”

He slowly got to his feet, studied his hands, and rubbed one buttock.

“Oooh, that hurt! Someone else can try now!”

He looked at me.

“My arms aren’t strong enough,” I said.

“I’ll give it a shot,” Geir said.

If Leif Tore was known for being brave, Geir was known for being wild. Not by nature, because had it been up to him he would have stayed at home drawing and pottering about to his heart’s content all day long, but when he was challenged. Perhaps he was a bit gullible. That summer he and I had built a cart, with a great deal of help from his father, and when it was finished I got him to push me around, just by saying it would make him strong. Gullible but also foolhardy, sometimes all boundaries ceased to exist for him, then he was capable of anything.

Geir chose a different method from Leif Tore’s. Standing on the pallet, he grabbed the protruding roof with both hands and tried to walk up the wall, with all of his weight invested in the fingers he was holding on with. That was, of course, stupid. Even if he had managed it, he would have been standing horizontal to the ground under the roof, in a much worse position than when he started.

His fingers slipped and he plunged butt first onto the pallet, after which he hit the back of his head.

He gave an involuntary grunt. When he stood up I could see that he had really hurt himself. He took a few determined paces to and fro, grunting. Nghn! Then he mounted the pallet again. This time he adopted Leif Tore’s method. Once he had his leg over the edge, a series of electric charges seemed to shoot through him, his leg banged against the roofing felt, his body writhed, and hey presto, there he was, kneeling on the roof and looking down on us.

“Easy!” he said. “Come on! I can pull you up!”

“You cannot. You aren’t strong enough!” Trond said.

“We can give it a try at any rate,” Geir said.

“You’d better come down,” Leif Tore said. “I have to go home soon anyway.”

“Me too,” I said.

He didn’t seem disappointed, though, up there. Determined would be a more accurate term.

“I’ll jump down then,” he said.

“Isn’t it a bit high?” Leif Tore said.

“Not at all,” Geir said. “Just have to put my mind to it.”

He squatted down and stared at the ground while taking deep breaths as though intending to dive into water. For a second all the tension in his body was gone, he must have changed his mind, but then he braced himself and he jumped. Fell, rolled around, bounced up again like a spring, and started brushing his thigh to signal composure, almost before he was upright.

Had I been the only one of us to climb the roof, it would have been a great triumph. Leif Tore would never have given in. Even if he had spent all night climbing up and falling off he would have gone on trying to reduce the imbalance that had suddenly become apparent. Geir was different though. In fact, he could pull off the most amazing feats, like jumping five meters through the air into a snowdrift, something no one else would dare, and it meant nothing to him. It was of no real consequence. Geir was just Geir, whatever he got it into his head to do.

Without another word, we walked up the hill. In some places the water had carried parts of the road surface along with it, in others there were long sunken dips. We stopped for a while and pressed our heels into an especially soft patch, the wet gravel oozed over the edge of our boots, it was a good feeling. My hands were cold. When I squeezed them my fingers left white marks in the red flesh. But the warts, three on one thumb, two on the other, one on an index finger, three on the back of my hand, didn’t change color, they were a dull reddish-brown color as always and covered with a layer of small dots you could scratch off. Then we went into the other part of the field, the bit that came to an end by a stone wall and the forest behind it; it was as though it was bordered by a long ridge, quite steep, perhaps ten meters high, clad with a line of spruce trees, broken occasionally by a knoll of bare rock. Walking here or in similar areas, I often happily indulged the notion that the countryside resembled the sea. And that fields were the surface of the sea with mountains and islands rising from them.

Oh, to sail in a boat through the forest! To swim among the trees! Now that would be something.

We sometimes used to drive to the far side of the island when the weather was good, park the car on the old shooting range, and walk down to the sea-smoothed rocks, our regular spot, not so far from Spornes beach, where of course I would have preferred to be, as there was sand and I could wade out to a depth that suited me. By the rocks the water was immediately very deep. There was, however, a little inlet, a kind of narrow cleft that filled up with water, which you could climb down into, where you could swim, but it was small and the sea bottom was uneven, covered with barnacles, seaweed, and shells. The waves beat against the rocks outside, causing the water to rise inside, sometimes up to your neck, and the Styrofoam floats on the life jacket I wore were lifted up to my ears. The sheer walls amplified the gurgling and slopping of the water, making them somehow sound hollow. Terrified, I would stand there, suddenly incapable of drawing breath in any other way than with great, shuddering gasps. It was just as creepy when the waves receded and the water level inside sank with a slurp. When the sea was calm, Dad would sometimes inflate the yellow-and-green raft, which I was allowed to lie on and float close to the shore, where, with my bare front stuck to the wet plastic and my back hot and dry from the burning sun, I would splash around, paddling with my hands in the water, which was so fresh and salty, watching the seaweed languidly sway to and fro along the rocks it was attached to, looking for fish or crabs or following a boat on the horizon. In the afternoon the Danish ferry came in, we could see it in the distance when we arrived, and it would be in the Galtesund strait when we left, white, enormous, towering above the low islands and reefs. Was it MS Venus? Or was it Christian IV? Kids all along the southern and western sides of the island, and presumably also the kids living on the other side of Galte Sound, on the, for us, foreign island of Hisøya, would go swimming when it came because its wake was immense and notorious. One afternoon, as I was paddling around on the raft, the sudden waves made me sit up and I toppled into the water. I sank like a stone. The water would have been about three meters deep there. I thrashed around with my arms and legs, shouted in panic, swallowed water, which only increased my fear, but it didn’t last more than twenty seconds because Dad had seen everything. He dived in and dragged me to the shore. I regurgitated some water, I was very cold, and we went home. I hadn’t been in any real danger and the incident had no lasting effect, except to leave me with the feeling I had as I walked up the hill to tell Geir what had happened: the world was something I walked on top of, it was impenetrable and hard, it was impossible to sink through it, no matter if it rose in steep mountains or fell in deep valleys. Of course I had known it was like that, but I had never felt it before, the sense that we were walking on a surface.

Despite this incident and the unease I could occasionally feel when I was paddling in the narrow inlet, I always looked forward to these trips. Sitting on a towel beside Yngve and scanning the light-blue, mirror-glass sea that only ended on the horizon, where big ships glided slowly past like hour hands, or looking at the two lighthouses on Torungen, the white a sharp contrast with the bright blue sky: not much was better than that. Drinking pop that had been in the red-checked cooler bag, eating cookies, perhaps watching Dad as he walked to the edge of the rocks, tanned and muscular, and dived into the sea two meters below a second later. The way he shook his head and stroked back the hair from his eyes when he emerged, the rush of bubbles around him, a rare gleam of pleasure in his eyes as he swam to shore with those slow, ponderous lunges of his arms, his body bobbing up and down in the swell. Or walking to the two sinkholes nearby, one a man’s depth with distinct spiral marks in the rock on the way down, filled with salty seawater, covered by green sea plants and at the bottom clusters of seaweed, the second less deep but no less beautiful for that. Or up to the shallow, extremely salty, hot pools that filled the hollows in the rock, refreshed only when there were storms, the surface thick with tiny, swirling insects and the bottom bedecked with yellow, sickly-looking algae.

On one such day Dad decided to teach me how to swim. He told me to follow him down to the water’s edge. Perhaps half a meter below the surface, a small, slippery ridge overgrown with seaweed jutted into the sea, and that was where I was to stand. Dad swam out to a reef four or five meters from the shore. And turned to face me.

“Now you swim over here to me,” he said.

“But it’s deep!” I said. Because it was, the seabed between the two reefs was barely visible, it was probably three meters down.

“I’m here, Karl Ove. Don’t you think I could rescue you if you sank? Come on, swim. It’s not in the slightest bit dangerous! I know you can do it. Launch yourself and do the strokes. If you do that you can swim, you know! Then you can swim!”

I crouched down in the water.

The seabed was a greenish glimmer a long way down. Would I be able to float over that?

My heart only beat this hard when I was frightened.

“I can’t,” I shouted.

“Course you can!” Dad shouted back. “It’s so easy! Just push off, do a couple of strokes, and you’ll be here.”

“I can’t!” I said.

He studied me. Then he sighed and swam over.

“OK,” he said. “I’ll swim beside you. I can hold a hand under your tummy. Then you can’t sink!”

But I couldn’t do it. Why didn’t he understand?

I started to cry.

“I can’t,” I said.

The depth of the water was in my head and in my chest. The depth was in my arms and legs, in my fingers and toes. The depth filled all of me. Was I supposed to be able to think that away?

There weren’t any more smiles to be seen now. With a stern expression he clambered onto the land, walked over to our things, and returned with my life jacket.

“Put this on then,” he said, throwing it to me. “Now you can’t sink even if you tried.”

I put it on, even though I knew it didn’t change anything.

He swam out again. Turned to face me.

“Try now!” he said. “Over here to me!”

I crouched down. The water washed over my trunks. I stretched my arms under the water.

“That’s the way!” Dad said.

All I had to do was push off, do a few strokes, and it would all be over.

But I couldn’t. I would never ever be able to swim across that deep water. Tears were rolling down my cheeks.

“Come on, boy!” Dad shouted. “We haven’t got all day!”

“I CAN’T!” I shouted back. “CAN’T YOU HEAR?”

He stiffened and glared at me, his eyes furious.

“Are you being belligerent?” he said.

“No,” I answered, unable to suppress a sob. My arms were shaking.

He swam over and took a firm grip of my arm.

“Come here,” he said. He tried to tow me out. I twisted my body toward the shore.

“I don’t want to!” I said.

He let go and took a deep breath.

“You don’t say,” he said. “We know that much.”

Then he went to where we had left our clothes, lifted the towel with both hands, and rubbed his face. I took off the life jacket and followed him, stopping a few meters away. He raised one arm and dried underneath, then the other. Bent forward and dried his thighs. Threw the towel down, picked up his shirt, and buttoned it while surveying the perfectly calm sea. Then he pulled on a pair of socks and stuck his feet in his shoes. They were brown leather shoes without laces, which matched neither the socks nor his bathing trunks.

“What are you waiting for?” he said.

I pulled the light blue Las Palmas T-shirt I had been given by my grandparents over my head and laced up my blue sneakers. Dad tossed the two empty pop bottles and the orange peel into the cooler bag, slung it over his shoulder, and set off, the wet towel crumpled up in his other hand. He said nothing on the way to the car. Opened the trunk, put in the cooler bag, took the life jacket from my hands, and placed it next to the bag together with his towel. The fact that I also had a towel didn’t seem to enter his head and I certainly didn’t intend to bother him with that.

Even though he had parked in the shade, the car was in the sun. The black seats were boiling hot and burned against my thighs. I wondered briefly whether to put my wet towel over the seat. But he would notice. Instead I placed my palms downward and sat on them, as close to the edge as I could.

Dad started the car and drove off at walking speed; the whole of the open gravel area, known as the firing range, was full of large stones. The road he took afterward was pitted with potholes, too, so he drove equally slowly along there. Green branches and bushes brushed the hood and roof, sometimes there was the odd thump, as a branch hit the car. My hands were still stinging, but less so now. It was only then it struck me that Dad was also wearing shorts on a red-hot seat. I glanced at his face in the mirror. It was grim and uncommunicative, but there was no indication that his thighs were burning.

When we came out onto the main road below the church he accelerated away and drove the five kilometers home at far above the speed limit.

“He’s frightened of water,” he told my mother that afternoon. It wasn’t true, but I said nothing. I wasn’t stupid.

A week later my grandparents on my mother’s side came to visit us. It was the first time they had been to Tybakken. Back on their farm in Sørbøvåg they weren’t the slightest bit out of place, they fit in perfectly, Grandad with his blue overalls and black narrow-brimmed hats, long brown rubber boots and constant spitting of tobacco, Grandma with her worn but clean, flowery dresses, gray hair, and broad body, and hands that always trembled slightly. But when they got out of the car in the drive in front of our house, after Dad had picked them up from Kjevik, I could see at once they didn’t fit in. Grandad was wearing his gray Sunday suit, light blue shirt, and a gray hat, in his hand he held his pipe, not by the stem, the way Dad did, but with his fingers round the bowl. He used the stem to point with, I noticed, when later they were being shown around our garden. Grandma wore a light-gray coat, light-gray shoes and on her arm she carried a bag. No one dressed like that here. You never saw anyone dressed like that in Arendal, either. It was as though they came from another era.

They filled our rooms with their strangeness. Mom and Dad suddenly behaved differently, too, mostly Dad, who behaved just as he did at Christmas. His invariable “No” became “Why not?”; his ever-watchful eyes became affable, and a friendly hand could even be placed on my or Yngve’s shoulder as a casual greeting. But even though he chatted to Grandma with interest, I could see that in fact he wasn’t interested, there were always brief moments when he looked away, and then his eyes tended to be utterly lifeless. Grandad, cheerful and enthusiastic, but somehow smaller and more vulnerable here than he was at home, never appeared to notice this trait of Dad’s. Or perhaps he just ignored it.

One evening when they were with us Dad bought some crabs. For him they were the apotheosis of festive food, and even though it was early in the season there was meat in the ones he had managed to find. But my grandparents, they didn’t eat crab. If Grandad got crabs in the net, well, he would throw them back. Dad would later tell stories about this, he viewed it as comical, a kind of superstition, that crabs should be less clean than fish, just because they crawled over the seabed and didn’t swim as they pleased through the water above. Crabs might eat dead bodies, since they eat everything that falls to the bottom, but what were the odds of these crabs having chanced upon a corpse in the depths of the Skagerrak?

One afternoon we had been sitting in the garden drinking coffee and juice, afterward I had gone to my room, where I lay on my bed reading comic books, and I heard Grandma and Grandad coming up the stairs. They didn’t say anything, trod heavily on the steps, and went into the living room. The sunlight on the wall of my room was golden. The lawn outside had great patches of yellow and even brown, although Dad switched on the sprinkler the instant the local council gave permission. Everything I could see along the road, all the houses, all the gardens, all the cars, and all the tools leaning against walls and doorsteps, was in a state of slumber, it seemed to me. My sweaty chest stuck uncomfortably to the duvet cover. I got up, opened the door, and went into the living room, where Grandma and Grandad were sitting in their separate chairs.

“Would you like to watch TV?” I asked.

“Yes, the news is on soon, isn’t it?” Grandma said. “That’s what interests us, you know.”

I went over and switched on the TV. A few seconds passed before the picture appeared. Then the screen slowly lit up, the “N” of Dagsrevyen grew larger and larger as the simple xylophone jingle sounded, ding-dong-ding-dooong, faint at first, then louder and louder. I took a step back. Grandad leaned forward in his chair, the pipe stem pointing away from his hand.

“There we are,” I said.

Actually, I wasn’t allowed to turn on the TV, nor the large radio on the shelf by the wall, I always had to ask Mom or Dad if they could do it for me when there was something I wanted to see or listen to. But now I was doing it for Grandma and Grandad, surely Dad wouldn’t object to that.

All of a sudden the picture started flickering wildly. The colors became distorted. Then there was a flash, a loud puff!, and then the screen went black.

Oh no.

Oh no, oh no, oh no.

“What happened to the TV?” Grandad asked.

“It’s broken,” I said, my eyes full of tears.

It was me who had broken it.

“It can happen,” Grandad said. “And actually we like the news on the radio better.”

He got up from his chair and shuffled over to the radio with his small steps. I went into my room. Chill with fear, my stomach churning, I lay down on the bed. The duvet cover was cool against my hot, bare skin. I took a comic from the pile on the floor. But I was unable to read. Soon he would come in, go over to the TV, and switch it on. If it had broken while I had been alone perhaps I could have acted as if nothing had happened, then he would have thought it had stopped working of its own accord. Although probably he would have figured out that it was me even so, because he had a nose for anything untoward, one glance at me was enough for him to know something was wrong and he put two and two together. Now, however, I couldn’t feign ignorance, Grandma and Grandad had been witnesses, they would tell him what had happened, and if I tried to hide anything it would make matters much, much worse.

I sat up on the bed. I had a knot in my stomach, but there was no hint of the warmth and softness that illness brought with it, it was cold and painful and so tight that no tears in the world could undo it.

For a while I sat crying.

If only Yngve had been at home. Then I could have stayed with him in his room for as long as possible. But he was out swimming with Steinar and Kåre.

A sense that I would be nearer to him if I went into his room, even though it was empty, brought me to my feet. I opened the door, tiptoed along the landing, and into his room. His bed had been painted blue, mine orange, in the same way as his cupboard doors were blue and mine were orange. The room smelled of Yngve. I went to the bed and sat down.

The window was ajar!

That was more than I had dared hope for. Now I could hear their voices down on the terrace without their knowing I was here. If the window had been closed I would have revealed my presence when I opened it.

Dad’s voice rose and sank in the calm manner it did when he was in a good mood. Now and then I caught Mom’s brighter, gentler voice. From the living room came the sound of the radio. For some reason I had the impression that my grandparents were asleep, each in their separate chairs, their mouths open and their eyes closed, perhaps they often sat like that in Sørbøvåg when we visited them.

There was a clink of cups outside.

Were they clearing the table?

Yes, because afterward I heard the flip-flop of Mom’s sandals as she walked around the house.

At once I wanted to have her for myself! Then I would be able to tell her first!

I waited until I heard the door below being opened. Then, as Mom came upstairs carrying a tray of cups, dishes, glasses, and the shiny coffee pot with the red lid atop a garland of clothespins that Yngve had made at Mom’s arts and crafts workshop I went out onto the landing.

“Are you inside in this hot weather?” she said.

“Yes,” I answered.

She was about to walk past, but then she stopped.

“Is there something the matter?” she asked.

I looked down.

“Is there?”

“The TV’s busted,” I said.

“Oh no,” she said. “That’s a pity. Are Grandma and Grandad in there?”

I nodded.

“I was just about to go and get them. It’s such a fantastic evening. You come out, too, come on. You can have some more juice if you want.”

I shook my head and went back into my room. Stopped inside the door. Perhaps it would be wisest to join them outside? He wouldn’t do anything if they were there, even if he found out I had broken the TV.

But that in itself could make him even more furious. Last time we had been to Sørbøvåg everyone had been sitting round the dinner table, and Kjartan had been saying that Yngve had had a fight with Bjørn Atle, the boy on the neighboring farm. Everyone had laughed at that, Dad too. But when Mom had taken me to the shop and the others were having a midday nap, and Yngve had gone to bed to read a comic, Dad had gone in, lifted him up, and shaken him about because he had been fighting.

Nope, the best would be to stay here. If Grandad or Mom said the TV was broken he might lose his temper while he was sitting there with them.

I lay back down on my bed. My chest trembled uncontrollably; another flood of tears was set in motion.

Ohhhh. Ohhhh. Ohhhh.

He would be coming soon.

I knew it.

Soon he would be here.

I put my hands over my ears and closed my eyes and tried to pretend nothing existed. Only this darkness and this breathing.

But a feeling of defenselessness overcame me, and I did the opposite, knelt on the bed and looked out of the window, at the flood of light falling across the landscape, the glowing roof tiles and glinting windowpanes.

The door downstairs was opened and slammed.

I cast around wildly. Got up, pulled the chair from under the desk, and sat down.

Footsteps on the stairs. They were heavy; it was him.

I couldn’t sit with my back to the door and got up again. Perched on the edge of the bed.

He thrust open the door. Took a step inside and stopped, looked at me.

His eyes were narrow, his lips clenched.

“What are you doing, boy?” he said.

“Nothing,” I said, eyes downcast.

“Look at me when you talk to me!” he said.

I looked at him. But I couldn’t. I looked down again.

“Something wrong with your ears as well?” he said. “LOOK AT ME!”

I looked at him. But his eyes, I couldn’t meet them.

He took three quick strides across the floor, grabbed my ear, and twisted it as he dragged me to my feet.

“What did I tell you about switching on the TV?” he said.

I fought for breath and was unable to answer.

“WHAT DID I SAY?” he said, twisting harder.

“That I … that I sh … sh … shouldn’t do it,” I said.

He let go of my ear, grabbed both of my arms, and shook me.

“NOW LOOK AT ME!” he yelled.

I raised my head. Tears almost blurred him out.

His fingers squeezed harder.

“Didn’t I tell you to keep away from the TV? Eh? Didn’t I tell you? Now we’ll have to buy a new TV and where will we get the money from? Can you answer me that, eh!”

“No-o-o-o,” I sobbed.

He threw me down on the bed.

“Now you stay in your room until I tell you otherwise. Have you understood?”

“Yes,” I said.

“You’re grounded tonight, and you’re grounded tomorrow.”

“OK.”

Then he was gone. I was crying so much I couldn’t hear where he went. My breathing was jerky, as though it was moving up a staircase. My chest was trembling, my hands were trembling. I lay there crying for twenty minutes perhaps. Then it started to ease. I knelt on the bed and gazed out of the window. My legs were still shaking, my hands were shaking, but it was loosening its hold on me, I could feel, it was as though I had entered a quiet room after a storm.

From the window I could see Prestbakmo’s house and the entire front of their garden, which bordered ours, Gustavsen’s house and the front of their garden, a bit of Karlsen’s house, and a bit of Christensen’s at the top. I had a view of the road as far as the mailbox stand. The sun, which seemed to become a touch fuller in the afternoon, hung in the sky above the trees on the ridge. The air was perfectly still, not a tree or a bush stirred. People never sat in their front gardens, that would be “displaying yourself,” as Dad would say, making yourself visible to all; behind the houses was where all the garden furniture and the grills were in this neighborhood.

Then something happened. Kent came out of the door of Karlsen’s house. I saw just his head above the parked car, the coruscating white hair gliding along like a puppet in a puppet show. He was gone for a few seconds, then he reappeared on his bike. He stood up on the pedals, jerking them backward to brake, shot out onto the road, and built up a pretty good speed before braking hard and swerving and coming to a halt in front of Gustavsen’s house. He had lost his father, who had been a sailor, two years ago. I could barely remember him; in fact, I had only one image of him, once when we were walking down the hill, it was sunny and cold, but there was no snow, I was holding my small orange skates with three blades and straps to attach them to your shoes, so we must have been on our way to Lake Tjenna. I could also remember when I found out that he had died. Leif Tore had been standing by the line of concrete barriers that separated Nordåsen Ringvei from Elgstien, just outside our house, and had said that Kent Arne’s father was dead. While he was telling me we looked up at their house. He had been trying to pull someone out of a tank that was being cleaned, it had been full of gas and they had fainted, and then he, too, had lost consciousness and died. We never talked about Kent Arne’s father when he was there, or about death. Another man had just moved in, whose name, strangely enough, was also Karlsen.

If Dag Lothar was number one, then Kent Arne was number two, even though he was a year younger than us and two years younger than Dag Lothar. Leif Tore was number three, Geir Håkon number four, Trond number five, Geir number six, and I was number seven.

“Leif Tore, are you coming out?!” Kent Arne shouted in front of the house. Soon after he emerged, wearing only blue denim shorts and sneakers, got on Rolf’s bike, and they cycled down the hill and were gone. Prestbakmo’s cat lay motionless on the flat rock between Gustavsen’s and Hansen’s properties.

I lay back on the bed. Read some comics, got up, and flattened my ear against the door to hear if anything was happening in the living room, but not a sound, they were still outside. My grandparents were visiting, so it was unthinkable that I wouldn’t be given any supper. Or was it?

Half an hour later they came upstairs. One of them went into the bathroom, which was adjacent to my room. It wasn’t Dad, I could tell that from the footsteps, which were lighter than his. But I couldn’t tell whether it was Mom, Grandma, or Grandad, until the flushing of the toilet was followed by a loud banging from the hot-water pipes, which only Grandma or Grandad could have caused.

Now I was seriously hungry.

The shadows that descended over the ground outside were so long and distorted that they no longer bore any resemblance to the forms that created them. As though they had sprung forth in their own right, as though there existed a parallel reality of darkness, with dark-fences, dark-trees, dark-houses, populated by dark-people, somehow stranded here in the light, where they seemed so misshapen and helpless, as far from their element as a reef with seaweed and shells and crabs is from the receding water, one might imagine. Oh, isn’t that why shadows get longer and longer in the evening? They are reaching out for the night, this tidal water of darkness that washes over the earth to fulfill for a few hours the shadows’ innermost yearnings.

I looked at my watch. It was ten minutes past nine. In twenty minutes it would be bedtime.

In the afternoon, the worst part of being grounded was that you couldn’t go out and you stood at the window watching everyone else outside. In the evening, the worst part was that there was no clear dividing line between the various phases that usually constituted an evening. After sitting up for some hours I simply pulled off my clothes and got into bed. The difference between the two states, which was normally so great, was almost completely eradicated when you were grounded, and that led to my becoming aware of myself in a way that I normally didn’t. It was as if the person I was while doing whatever I was doing, such as eating supper, brushing my teeth, washing my face, or putting on my pajamas, not only revealed itself but also filled my whole being, as if all of a sudden there was simply nothing else. I was exactly the same person when I was sitting on the bed fully dressed as I was lying in it without my clothes on. In fact, there were no real dividing lines or transitions.

It was an irksome feeling.

I went to the door and placed my ear against it again. At first it was quiet, then I heard some voices, then it was quiet again. I cried a few tears, then I took off my T-shirt and shorts and got into bed with the duvet drawn up to my chin. The sun still shone on the wall opposite. I read some comics, then I put them on the floor, and closed my eyes. My last thought before I fell asleep was that it hadn’t been my fault.

I woke up, looked at my wristwatch. The two luminous snakes showed it was ten minutes past two. I lay quite still for a while in an attempt to work out what had woken me. Apart from my pulse, which throbbed as if whispering in my ear, everything was silent. No cars on the road, no boats in Tromøya Sound, no planes flying overhead. No footsteps, no voices, nothing. Nor from our house.

I raised my head a little so that my ears weren’t touching anything and held my breath. After a few seconds I heard a noise from the garden. A noise so high-pitched that at first I didn’t catch it, but the moment I became aware of it I was terrified.

Eeee-eeee-eeeeee-eeeee. Eeeeeee-eeee-eeeeeee. Eeeeee.

I sat up on my knees, drew the curtain to the side, and peered through the window. The lawn was bathed in a weak light: the moon above our house was full. A gust of wind made it look as if the grass were racing away. A white plastic bag caught on the end of the hedge was flapping, and it struck me that someone who didn’t know that wind existed would have thought that the bag was moving of its own accord. As though I were perched high above the ground, the tips of my toes and fingers tingled. My heart was beating fast. The muscles in my stomach tightened, I swallowed, and swallowed again. Night was the time for ghosts and apparitions, night was the time for the headless man and the grinning skeleton. And all that separated me from it was a thin wall.

There was that sound again!

Eeee-eeeeeeeee- eee-eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee-eee-eeeeeee.

I scanned the gray lawn outside. Over by the hedge, perhaps five meters away, I caught sight of Prestbakmo’s cat. It was lying stretched out in the grass and smacking something with its paw. Whatever it was smacking, a gray lump, like stone or clay, was thrown a few meters closer to the window. The cat rose and followed. The lump lay still in the grass. The cat tentatively hit out at it a few more times, moved closer with its head, and seemed to nudge it with its nose, then opened its jaws and took it in its mouth. When the squeaking started again I guessed it was a mouse. The sudden noise appeared to confuse the cat. At any rate it tossed its head and flung the mouse in the air. This time it didn’t stay where it landed, it made a headlong dash across the lawn. The cat stood watching, motionless. It looked as if it was about to let the mouse go. But then, just as the mouse reached the bed by the gate to Prestbakmo’s garden, it set off. Three bounds and the cat had caught it again.

In the room beside mine I heard Dad’s voice. It was low and mumbling, without beginning or end, the way it often sounded when he was talking in his sleep. A moment later someone got up from his bed. From the lightness of foot I realized it was Mom. Outside, the cat had started jumping up and down. It looked like some kind of dance. Another gust of wind swept through the grass. I looked up at the pine tree and saw its tender branches bending and swaying, slim and black against the heavy, yellow moon. Mom opened the door to the bathroom. When I heard her lower the toilet seat I put my hands over my ears and started to hum. The sound issuing from her after that, a kind of hiss, as if she were letting off steam, was awful. Usually I shut out Dad’s thunderous torrents, too, even though they weren’t quite as difficult to endure as Mom’s hissing. Aaaaaaaaaaagh, I said, slowly counting to ten and watching the cat. Apparently tired of the game, it grabbed the mouse in its jaws and dashed through the hedge, across the road and into Gustavsen’s drive, where it dropped the mouse on the ground by the trailer and stood staring at it. The mouse lay as still as any living creature could. The cat jumped onto the wall and slunk toward one of the globe-shaped sundials on the gatepost at the end. I took my hands away from my ears and stopped humming. In the bathroom the cistern flushed. The cat turned sharply and stared at the mouse, which still hadn’t moved. A jet of water from the tap splashed against the porcelain sink. The cat jumped down from the wall, strolled into the road, and lay down like a small lion. Just as Mom pressed the handle and opened the door a twitch went through the mouse, as though the sound had released an impulse in it, and the next moment it set off on another desperate flight from the cat, which had obviously reckoned on this eventuality as it required no more than a fraction of a second to switch from resting to hunting. But this time it was too late. A sheet of white Eternit cladding left lying on the lawn was the mouse’s salvation as it squeezed itself underneath a second before the cat arrived.

The animals’ fleet movements seemed to linger on in me; long after I had gone back to bed my heart was still racing. Perhaps because it, too, was a little animal? After a while I changed position again, put the pillow at the foot of the bed, and drew the curtain to one side so that I could look up at the sky bestrewn with stars, so like grains of sand, a beach with a perimeter, invisible to us, against which the sea beat.

But what actually lay beyond the universe?

Dag Lothar said there was nothing. Geir said there were burning flames. That was what I believed, too; the image of the sea was more because the starry sky looked the way it did.

Mom and Dad’s bedroom was quiet again.

I pulled the curtain to and closed my eyes. Charged with the silence and darkness of the house, I was soon fast asleep.

When I got up next morning Grandma and Grandad were sitting with Mom in the living room drinking coffee. Dad was walking across the lawn with the sprinkler in his hand. He placed it at the edge of the lawn so that the thin jets of water, which resembled a waving hand, not only fell on the grass but also the vegetable garden below. The sun’s rays, on the other side of the house now, above the forest to the east, flooded into the garden. The air seemed to be as still as it had been the previous day. The sky was hazy; it almost always was in the morning. Yngve was sitting at the breakfast table. The white eggs in the brown egg cups reminded me that it was Sunday. I sat down in my regular place.

“What happened yesterday?” Yngve asked in a subdued voice. “Why were you grounded?”

“I broke the TV,” I said.

He sent me a quizzical look, holding a slice of bread to his mouth.

“Yes, I put it on for Grandma and Grandad. Then it went puff. Haven’t they said anything?”

Yngve took a large bite from the slice of bread, which he had spread with clove cheese, and shook his head. I sliced the top off the egg with my knife, opened it like a lid, scooped out the soft white with a spoon, reached for the salt shaker, and tapped it with my forefinger so that only a sprinkling came out. Spread margarine onto some bread and poured a glass of milk. Downstairs, Dad opened the door. I ate the white of the egg, poked the spoon into the yolk to see whether it was hard- or soft-boiled.

“I’ve been grounded for today as well,” I said.

“The whole day? Or just the evening?”

I shrugged. The egg was hard-boiled, the yellow yolk disintegrated against the edge of the spoon.

“The whole day, I think,” I said.

The road outside was empty and gleamed in the sun. But in the ditch beneath the dense branches of the spruces it was dark and shadowy.

A bicycle came tearing down the hill at full speed. The boy sitting on it, he must have been fifteen, had one hand on the handlebars and the other on the red gasoline canister he had tied to the luggage rack. His hair was black and fluttered in the wind.

On the stairs came the sound of Dad’s footsteps. I sat up straight in my chair, cast a hurried glance across the table to see if everything was in place. A bit of the hard-boiled egg had ended up on the table. I quickly brushed it off the edge into my waiting hand and immediately put it on the plate. Yngve delayed the moment until it was almost too late to push his chair into the table and sit up straight, but only almost, for when Dad came in his back was erect and his feet were firmly planted on the floor.

“Pack your swimming trunks, kids,” he said. “We’re off to Hove for the day.”

“Me, too?” I wanted to ask, but I held back, because he might have forgotten he had grounded me and the question would have jolted his memory. Also, if he remembered but had changed his mind, it would be best not to mention it, as it could be interpreted as his having made a mistake yesterday, his having done something wrong, and I didn’t want him to think that. So I went for my trunks and a towel from the line in the boiler room, put them in a plastic bag with the diving goggles, which would come in handy if we were going to one of the two beaches in Hove, and sat down in my room to await departure.

Half an hour later we left for the far side of the island, on what was perhaps the best day of the year, with the sea so calm it barely made a sound and therefore lent the surroundings, the previously so silent bare rocks and the previously so silent forest above, a semblance of something unreal, such that every footstep on the rocks and every clink of a bottle sounded as if it was the very first time, and the sun, which was at its zenith in the sky, appeared as something deeply primitive and alien on this day, when you could see the sea curve and disappear down into the depths beyond the horizon, above which the sky floated so airily with its light, soft, misty blueness; and Yngve and I and Mom and Dad put on our swimsuits and each of us in our own way dipped our bodies, hot from the sun, into the lukewarm water, while Grandma and Grandad sat there in their finery, apparently unmoved by their surroundings and our activities, as though the 1950s and Vestland were not only features that had stamped themselves on them superficially, through their clothes, behavior, and dialect, in other words externally, but also internally, to the depths of their respective souls, to the innermost core of their respective characters. It was so strange to see them there, sitting on the rocks, squinting into the bright light coming at us from all directions, it seemed so alien.

The day after, they went home. Dad drove them to Kjevik, grabbed the opportunity to visit his own parents while he was there while Mom took Yngve and me to Lake Gjerstad, the idea being that we could swim and eat cookies and relax, but first of all Mom couldn’t find a road to the lake, so we had to go on a long detour through a forest full of scrub and thickets; secondly, the part of the lake we arrived at turned out to be green with algae and the rocks slippery; and thirdly, it started to rain almost as soon as we had put down the cooler bag and the basket with the cookies and oranges.

I felt so sorry for Mom, who had wanted to take us on a nice trip, but it hadn’t worked out. There was no way to express this to her. It was one of those things you had to forget as quickly as possible. And that was not at all difficult; there were so many new experiences in store for us during those weeks. I would soon be starting school, and as a result so many new objects would become mine. Above all, a satchel, which, the next Saturday morning, I went to Arendal with Mom to buy. It was square, blue and all shiny and glossy, with white straps. Inside, there were two compartments, where I immediately put the orange pencil case I had also been given, containing a pencil, a pen, an eraser, and a pencil sharpener, and one of the notebooks we had bought, with orange and brown squares on the front, the same as on Yngve’s, plus some comics I put in to plump it up. There, nestling against the leg of the desk, it stood every night when I went to bed, not without some mental anguish for me, for there was still quite a time to go to the big day when I, along with almost everyone I knew, would be starting the first class. We had already been to school for a day, that past spring, we had had a chance to meet the woman who was to be our teacher and to do a bit of drawing, but this was different, this wasn’t anywhere near the same, this was the real thing. There were those who said they hated school, indeed, almost all the older children said they hated school, and strictly speaking we knew we should, too, but at the same time it was so alluring, what was about to happen, we knew so little and we expected so much, in addition to the fact that starting school in itself elevated us into the same league as the older children, from one day to the next, in one fell swoop we were like them, and then we could certainly afford to hate school, but not now…. Did we talk about anything else? Hardly. In fact the school we applied to, Roligheden, where both Dad and Geir’s father worked and where all the older children went, had no room for us, the year’s intake was too big, too many families had moved into the area, so we had to go to a school on the east of the island, five or six kilometers away, with all the kids we didn’t know from around there, and we were to be transported by bus. It was a great privilege and an adventure. Every day a bus would come to pick us up!

I was also given a pair of light-blue trousers, a light-blue jacket and a pair of dark-blue sneakers with white stripes over the instep. Several times, when Dad was out, I put on my new clothes and paced in front of the hall mirror, sometimes with the satchel on my back, so when the day finally arrived and I posed on the gravel outside the door for Mom to take a photograph of me, it wasn’t just the excitement and the uncertainty giving me butterflies but also the strange, almost triumphant, feeling I would have when I wore particularly attractive clothes.

The evening before, I’d had a bath, Mom had washed my hair, and when I woke in the morning it was to a quiet sleeping house, with a sun that was still climbing behind the spruce trees down beyond the road. Oh, what a pleasure it was to take my new clothes out of the wardrobe and put them on at last! Outside, the birds were singing, it was still summer, behind the veil of mist the sky was blue and immense, and the houses that now stood quiet on both sides of the road would soon be teeming with impatience and anticipation, like on Independence Day. I took the comics out of my satchel, hung it on my back, adjusted the straps, and took it off again. Pulled the zipper on the jacket up and down and speculated: it looked best with the zipper up, but then you couldn’t see the T-shirt underneath … Went into the living room, looked out of the window at the sun, a reddish-yellow, fiery orange behind the green trees, went into the kitchen without touching anything, peered across at Gustavsen’s house, where there was no sign of life. Stood in front of the hall mirror, pulling the zipper up and down … the T-shirt looked so good … it would be a shame if it couldn’t be seen …

Brush my teeth! I could do that.

Into the bathroom, out with the brush from the tooth glass, a drop of water and on with the white toothpaste. I brushed energetically for several minutes while studying myself in the mirror. The sound of the brush against my teeth seemed to fill the whole of my head from the inside, so I didn’t notice that Dad was up until he opened the door. He was wearing only underpants.

“Are you brushing your teeth before you’ve had breakfast? How stupid can you be? Put that brush down right now and go to your room!”

As I set foot on the red wall-to-wall carpet on the landing he slammed the door behind him and started pissing loudly into the toilet bowl. I knelt on my bed and looked up at Prestbakmo’s house. Was that two heads I could see in the darkness of the kitchen window? Yes, it had to be. They were up. It would have been good to have a walkie-talkie so that I could talk to Geir! That would have been perfect!

Dad left the bathroom and went into the bedroom. I could hear his voice, and then Mom’s. So she was awake!

I stayed in my room until she was up and on her way to the kitchen, where Dad had already been clattering around for a while. In the shelter of her back I sat down at my place. They had bought cornflakes, we almost never had them, and after she had put out a bowl and a spoon for me, and I had poured milk over the golden, somewhat perforated, irregularly formed flakes, I came to the conclusion that cornflakes were best when they were crispy, before the milk had soaked into them. But after I had been eating for a while and they were beginning to go soft, filled as it were with both their own taste and that of the milk, plus the sugar, of which I had sprinkled a liberal quantity, I changed my mind; that was when they were at their best.

Or was it?

Dad went into the living room with a cup in his hand, he didn’t usually have breakfast, but sat in there smoking and drinking coffee instead. Yngve came in, sat down on his chair without saying a word, poured out some cornflakes and milk, sprinkled sugar over the top, and started wolfing it down.

“Looking forward to it?” he said at length.

“A little,” I said.

“It’s nothing to look forward to,” he said.

“Yes, it is,” Mom said. “You certainly looked forward to starting school anyway. I can remember it well. Can you?”

“Ye-es,” Yngve said. “I suppose I can.”

He cycled to school, usually a little while before Dad left, unless Dad had some work to do before the first lesson, that is, which was sometimes the case. Yngve was not allowed to have a lift, except on very special occasions, such as when it had snowed a lot overnight, because he wasn’t to have any advantages just because his father was a teacher at the school.

When breakfast was finished and they had left, I sat with Mom in the kitchen. She read the newspaper, I chatted.

“Do you think we’ll have to write in the first lesson, Mom?” I asked. “Or is it usually math? Leif Tore says we’ll have drawing so that we can relax a bit at the beginning, and not everyone can write. Or add and subtract. Only me actually. As far as I know at least. I learned when I was five and a half. Do you remember?”

“Remember when you learned to read? What do you mean?” Mom said.

“That time outside the bus station when I read the sign? ‘Kaffe-fetteria?’ You laughed. Yngve laughed, too. Now I know it’s called ‘kafeteria.’ Shall I read some headlines?”

Mom nodded. I read aloud. Bit staccato, but everything was correct.

“You managed that nicely,” she said. “You’ll do really well at school.”

She scratched an ear as she read, the way only she could, she held her ear between her fingers and moved them back and forth incredibly fast, just like a cat.

She put down the newspaper and looked at me.

“Are you looking forward to it?” she asked.

“And how,” I said.

She smiled, patted me on the head, got up, and started to clear the table. I went to my room. School didn’t begin until ten o’clock as it was the first day. Nevertheless, we ended up being short of time, which was often the case with Mom, she was pretty absentminded when it came to matters like this. From the window I saw the excitement mounting outside the houses where there were children starting school, that is, in the families with Geir, Leif Tore, Trond, Geir Håkon, and Marianne, hair was combed, dresses and shirts were straightened, photographs taken. When it was my turn to stand outside, smiling at Mom, with one hand shielding my eyes from the sun, which had moved above the tops of the spruce trees by this time, everyone had gone. We were the last, and all of a sudden we were late, so Mom, who had taken the day off work for the occasion, hurried me along, I opened the door of the green VW, pushed the seat forward, and got in the back while she rummaged for the key in her shoulder bag and inserted it in the ignition. She lit a cigarette, reversed after casting a quick glance over her shoulder, put the car in first gear a few meters up the hill, and drove down. The roar of the engine resounded off the brick walls. I moved to the middle of the car so that I could see between the two seats at the front. The two white gas holders across Tromøya Sound, the wild cherry tree, Kristen’s red house, then the road down to the marina where we almost never went, along the route where in the course of the next six years I would become familiar with every tiniest clearing and stone wall, and out to the small places on the east of the island, where Mom didn’t know her way, which made her a bit agitated.

“Was it this way, Karl Ove, do you remember?” she said, stubbing out the cigarette in the ashtray as she peered into the mirror.

“I don’t remember,” I said. “But I think so. It was on the left, anyway.”

Below, there was a shop by a quay and a clump of houses encircling it, no school. The sea was a deep blue, bordering on black beneath the shadow of the buildings; untouched by the high temperatures, this fullness distinguished it from most of the other colors in the landscape, which were as though bleached after the weeks-long heat wave. The sea’s cool blue contrasted with the yellow and brown and the faded green.

Now Mom was driving along a gravel road. Dust whirled up behind us. As the road narrowed and nothing of any significance seemed to lie ahead, she turned and drove back. On the other side, down by the water, there was another road she tried. That didn’t lead to any school, either.

“Are we going to be late?” I asked.

“Maybe,” she replied. “Fancy not bringing a map with me!”

“Haven’t you been here before then?” I said.

“Yes, I have,” she said. “But my memory’s not as good as yours, you know.”

We drove up the hill we had come down ten minutes earlier and turned onto the main road by a chapel. At every sign and crossroads she slowed down and leaned forward.

“There it is, Mom!” I shouted, pointing. We still couldn’t see it, but I remembered the green to the right; the school was at the top of the gentle gradient that followed. A narrow gravel road led down to it, there were lots of parked cars, and as Mom turned into it, I spotted the school playground swarming with people and a man everyone was staring at was gesticulating on top of a rock, beneath the flagpole.

“We’ve got to hurry!” I said. “They’ve started! Mom, they’ve started!”

“Yes, I know,” Mom said. “But we have to find somewhere to park first. There, maybe. Yes.”

We had ended up right down by the woodwork-room-cum-gym hall. A large, white building from the olden days, and outside it, on tarmac, Mom parked the car. We weren’t exactly familiar with the school layout, so instead of going to the end and taking the shortcut across the soccer field, we followed the road on the other side up to the playground. Mom scooted along, with me in tow. The satchel bumped up and down so wonderfully as I ran, every bump reminding me of what I had behind me, shiny and glossy, and hot on the heels of that thought, the light-blue trousers, the light-blue jacket, the dark-blue shoes.

When we finally reached the playground, the crowd was slowly moving into the low school building.

“We seem to have missed the welcome ceremony,” Mom said.

“That doesn’t matter, Mom,” I said. “Come on!”

I caught sight of Geir and his mother, ran over to them with Mom holding my hand, they smiled in greeting, and we went up the steps in the middle of the crowd of parents and children. Geir’s satchel was identical to mine, as most of the boys’ satchels were, whereas, from what I could glean in passing, the girls sported quite a wide variety.

“Where are we going? Do you know?” Mom asked Martha, Geir’s mother.

“I’m afraid I don’t.” Martha laughed. “We’re following their teacher.”

I looked in the direction she nodded. And there, sure enough, was our Frøken. She stopped in front of the staircase and said that all those who were in her class should go ahead, and Geir and I ran down the stairs, through all the people, and along the corridor to the end. But Frøken stopped in front of a room close to the staircase, making us not the first, as we had imagined, but almost the last.

The room was full of children dressed in smart clothes and their mothers. Through the windows you looked down onto a narrow field; the forest was close behind. Frøken stood at her desk, which was on a little dais; on the blackboard was written HELLO, CLASS 1B in pink chalk with a flowery border around it. On the wall above the desk there were maps and charts.

“Hello, everyone,” Frøken said. “And welcome to Sandnes School! My name is Helga Torgersen, and I’m going to be your class teacher. I’m really looking forward to this, I can tell you! We’re going to have a lot of fun. And do you know what? You are not the only ones who are new to this school. I am new, too. You are my very first class!”

I looked around me. All the adults were smiling. Almost all the children were craning their necks and glancing at one another. I knew Geir Håkon, Trond, Geir, Leif Tore, and Marianne. And the boy who used to throw stones at us and had that frightening dog. I had never seen the others before.

“Now we are going to do a roll call,” Frøken said from the dais. “Do you know what a roll call is?”

No one answered.

“You call out a name and the person with that name answers,” I said.

Everyone looked at me. I put on a broad smile over my protruding teeth.

“That’s correct,” Frøken said. “And we start with the letter A. That’s the first letter in the alphabet, you see. You’ll learn all about that later. So, A. Anne Lisbet!”

“Yes,” said a girl’s voice, and everyone turned toward the sound, I did, too.

The voice belonged to a thin girl with shiny, black hair. She looked like an Indian.

“Asgeir?” Frøken said.

“Yes!” said a boy with big teeth and long hair.

After the roll call we sat down at our desks while our parents stood by the wall. Frøken gave everyone a recorder, an exercise book and a notebook, a schedule with our lessons printed on it, as well as a money box and a leaflet with a picture of a yellow ant on it from a local savings bank. Then she told us about some of the events that would be taking place during the autumn, one of which was a swimming class to be held in a pool at a school on the next island, as there wasn’t a swimming pool on Tromøya. She handed out a piece of paper with a slip you could fill in and return if you were interested. Then we did some drawing, with our parents still there watching, and then it was over. The following day school would start in earnest, we would catch the bus on our own, and be there for three hours without our parents breathing down our necks.

As we left the classroom I was still wide-eyed with all the newness and strangeness, and the feeling continued when everyone in the new class got into their respective cars with their parents, normally it was only on the seventeenth of May that there was this level of synchronous vehicle activity, that a location was left simultaneously by so many children, but as we were driving home disappointment began to set in, and I became more and more dejected the closer we came to home.

Nothing had happened.

I could read and write, and I had counted on having a chance to show that on the first day. A bit at least! And I had been looking forward to having break time, to the bell ringing at the end of one lesson and the start of the next. To using my new pencil case and the compartments in the satchel.

No, the day hadn’t lived up to my expectations, and I had to take off the clothes I looked so good in and hang them up in their place in my wardrobe, to await future formal occasions. I sat on the kitchen stool chatting to Mom while she made dinner, it was rare I had her to myself in the middle of the day, and on top of this she had been with me where it counted most, so I exploited the opportunity for all it was worth, and babbled away.

“I wish we had a cat I could play with,” I said. “Can’t we have a cat?”

“That would be nice,” Mom said. “I like cats. They’re good company.”

“So is it Dad who doesn’t like them then?”

“I don’t know,” Mom said. “He’s just not that interested, I think. And he probably thinks they’re a bit too much work.”

“But I can take care of it,” I said. “That’s no problem.”

“I know,” Mom said. “We’ll have to wait and see.”

“Wait and see, wait and see,” I said. “But if Yngve wants a cat, that’ll make three of us.”

Mom laughed.

“It’s not that simple,” she said. “You’ll have to be patient. Who knows what will happen.”

She put the peeled carrot on the board and chopped it up, lifted the board, and slid the pieces into the large pot where there were already bones and bits of meat. I looked out of the window. Through the many small holes in the orange curtain Mom had crocheted I could see the road outside was empty, which it invariably was in the middle of the day.

There was a sudden pungent smell of onions, and I turned to Mom, who was peeling one with her arms outstretched and her eyes full of tears.

When I turned back I saw Geir come bounding down the hill. He had also changed into his normal clothes. A second later I heard a crunch of gravel through the half-open window as he walked up the drive.

“Karl Ove, are you coming?” he shouted.

“I’m going out for a bit,” I said to Mom, slipping off the stool.

“Fine,” she said. “Where are you going?”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t go far then.”

“No, I won’t,” I said, and hurried down, opened the door so that Geir wouldn’t think the house was empty and go away, said hi, and put on my sneakers.

“I’ve got a box of matches,” he whispered, patting his shorts pocket.

“You haven’t!” I also whispered. “Where did you get hold of them?”

“Home. They were in the sitting room.”

“You just took them?”

He nodded.

I straightened up and went out, closing the door after me.

“Let’s set fire to something,” I said.

“Yes, let’s,” he said.

“What then?”

“Doesn’t matter, does it. We’ll just find something. The box is half full. We can set fire to a lot of things.”

“But we’ll have to go somewhere no one can see the smoke,” I said. “Up on the mountain maybe?”

“OK.”

“And we’ll need something to put the fire out with,” I said. “Just a sec. I’ll get a bottle of water.”

I opened the door again, kicked off my shoes, and went upstairs to Mom, who turned to me as I walked in.

“We’re going for a walk,” I said. “I need a bottle of water.”

“Wouldn’t you prefer juice? You can take some, you know. It’s still your first school day!”

I hesitated. It had to be water. But that might make her suspicious because I always preferred juice to water. I looked at her and said, “No, Geir’s got water, so that’s what I want, too.”

My heart beat faster as I spoke.

“As you like,” she said. She found an empty juice bottle in the cupboard under the sink, dark green glass, almost opaque, she filled it with water, screwed on the top, and passed it to me.

“Would you like some smørbrød as well?”

I considered her offer.

“No,” I said. “I mean yes. Two with liver paste.”

As she took the bread and started to cut it, I pushed the window further open and poked my head out.

“Be down in a minute!” I shouted. Geir looked up at me with grave eyes and nodded.

After she had made and wrapped the smørbrød, I put them in a plastic bag with the bottle and hurried back down. Soon we were on our way up the hill. The heat had made the edge of the road soft and crumbly. It was harder where the cars went. Sometimes we lay down on the tarmac like cats and let the heat give us a good baking. But now we had other things on our minds.

“Can I see them?” I asked.

Geir stopped and dug the box up from his pocket. I shook it a little. Full. Then I opened it. All the matchheads were red.

Start a fire, start a fire.

“It’s a new box,” I said, giving it back. “Won’t they notice you’ve taken it?”

“I don’t think so,” he said. “And if they do I’ll just say it wasn’t me. They can’t prove anything.”

We had reached Molden’s house and set off up the path. The grass was dry and yellow, brown in places. In Geir’s house it was his mother who was strict and his father who was nice. In Dag Lothar’s they were both nice, perhaps the father was a tiny bit stricter. With all the others, it was the father who was strict and the mother who was nice. But no one was as strict as Dad, that was for sure.

Geir stopped and bent forward with the box of matches in his hand. He took out a match and was about to strike it against the side.

“What are you doing?” I said. “Not here! Everyone can see!”

“Hee hee hee,” he giggled. But straightened up anyway, put the match back in the box, and walked on.

At the top of the hill we turned and cast our gaze across the sea as usual. I counted four small, white triangles in Tromøya Sound. A larger boat with what looked like an excavator on board. There were two small boats moored on Gjerstadholmen.

Start a fire, start a fire.

As we continued into the forest my stomach was churning with excitement. Sunbeams lay on the forest floor like small, quivering creatures of light between the shadows of branches. We stopped by the huge roots of an upturned tree, I took the bottle of water from my bag, and held it at the ready while Geir leaned forward, struck a match, and held the small, almost invisible flame to one of the wispy blades of grass growing there. It caught fire at once. Spread to the grass beside it. When the flame was as broad as an adult’s hand I sprayed water over it. A thin ribbon of smoke floated through the air, alone as it were, independent of what had just happened.

“Do you think anyone could see?” Geir asked.

“You can see smoke from an incredible distance,” I answered. “Indians saw smoke signals from kilometers off.”

“It caught fire straightaway,” Geir said. “Did you see?”

He smiled and quickly ran a hand through his hair.

“Yes,” I said.

“Shall we try somewhere else?”

“Yes, but this time I want to light the match.”

“OK,” he said, handing me the box and scouring the area for another suitable spot.

Geir was always impatient before any activity and totally absorbed when in the thick of it. Of all the boys I knew he was the one most in thrall to his imagination. Whenever we played — explorers, sailors, Indians, race car drivers, astronauts, robbers, smugglers, princes, monkeys or secret agents, for example — he could keep at it for hours, unlike Leif Tore or Geir Håkon, who were soon bored and wanted to do something else, completely untouched by the gleam that imagination could bring to bear on everything, but Geir was more than happy with the object itself, such as the old car wreck in the clump of narrow willow trees on the flat stretch between the playground and the soccer field, in which the seats, the steering wheel, gearshift, pedals, dashboard, glove compartment, and doors were still intact, where we used to play so often, and they just pretended it was a car, which of course it was, pressed the clutch, pulled the gearshift, turned the wheel, adjusted the broken side mirrors, jumped up and down on the seats to give the illusion of speed while Geir would be entertained by any embellishments you could add, such as being on the run after a bank robbery, and the windows, which were still a shower of glass fragments strewn across the black-rubber floor mats, had been shot to pieces; then one of us would drive and the other wriggle out through the window onto the roof to open fire on our pursuers, a game that could be extended to include parking the car in a garage and getting out to share the swag, or even further, for weren’t the pursuers close on our heels as we slunk between the trees on our way home in the glow of the evening sun? Or else we might be in a moon-mobile and the landscape around us was actually lunar landscape where, after getting out of the car, we were unable to walk in a normal fashion, we had to hop — or it was one of the many streams we were surrounded by, and of all the boys I knew, only Geir would be interested in following it to find the source. What we did most often was to go out in search of new places or to one of the places we had already found. It might be a big old oak with a hollow trunk; a deep pool in a river; a cellar in an unfinished house that was full of water; the concrete foundations of the enormous bridge pylon; or the first few meters of the thick cable stays that ran from the bottom of an anchoring in the forest up to the top and that you could climb; a ramshackle shed with planks that were slippery and dark with decay between Lake Tjenna and the road on the other side, which so far was the furthest outpost of our explorations, we had never ventured any further; the two dumped cars; the little pool with the three islands no bigger than tufts of grass, one almost completely covered by a tree, and where the water was so deep and black, even though it was right next to a road embankment; the white, crystalline rock from which you could hammer small chunks, beside the path to the Fina station; the boat factory on the other side of Tromøya Bridge beyond Gamle Tybakken, all the factory buildings there, the shells of the boats, the rusty block and tackle and the machines, the smell of oil and tar and salty water, which was so good. We crisscrossed this area, which extended over one or two kilometers in all directions, nearly every day, and the whole point of what we found or visited was that it was secret and it was ours. With the other children we played flip the stick or kick the can, kicked a soccer ball around or went skiing; when we were alone we searched out places with features that attracted us. That was how it was with Geir and me.

But on this day the magic lay in what we were doing, not where we were.

Start a fire, start a fire.

We walked over to a spruce tree a few meters away. The branches hanging just above the ground were gray and bare and looked extremely old. I broke off a bit between my thumb and first finger. It was brittle and crumbled easily. Grass grew sparsely on the small mound where the tree stood, between a patch of dry soil and a mass of desiccated, orangey spruce needles. I knelt down, drew the red match head across the black abrasive surface, and put the flame into the grass, which immediately caught fire. At first the flame was invisible, no more than a quiver of air above the blades of grass, which soon curled and crumpled. But then the tuft caught fire, and from there the flame spread, both quickly and slowly, like a swarm of frightened ants fleeing quickly if you see them as individuals, slowly if you view them as a group. All of a sudden the flames were up to my waist.

“Put it out! Put it out!” I shouted to Geir.

He shook the bottle over the fire, which hissed and shrank, while I beat the low flames in the grass at the edge with my hand.

“Phew!” I said a minute later, when the fire was out.

“That was close!” Geir laughed. “It really got a hold there!”

I stood up.

“Do you think anyone could see it? Shall we go to the cliff edge and see if anyone’s looking up here?”

Without waiting for an answer I rushed across the soft moss and heather-covered forest floor between the trees. The sudden fear seemed to contract my insides, and whenever my thoughts turned to what had happened it was as if a ravine opened in me. It was bottomless. Oh, what would happen now? What would happen now?

At the cliff edge I stopped and put a hand to my brow to shield my eyes. Dad’s car was in the drive. He was nowhere to be seen. But he could have been outside and gone in. Gustavsen was walking across the grass. He could have seen and told Dad. Or would tell him later.

The very thought of Dad, the fact that he existed, caused fear to pump through my body.

I turned to Geir, who sauntered over with my plastic bag dangling from one hand. Down below, a child resembling Geir Håkon’s little brother was playing in the sand by the concrete barriers between our road and Elgstien. A car came up the hill, encased in itself like an insect, the black windshield its expressionless eye, turned left, and disappeared from view.

“We can’t go straight down anyway,” I said. “If someone’s seen the smoke they’ll put two and two together.”

Why had we done it? Why, oh why?

“They can see us here, too,” I said. “Come on!”

We descended the tree-clad slope beneath us. When we were at the bottom we stumbled homeward through the forest, which was perhaps ten meters from the road. We stopped by the big spruce beside the wide, shallow, turbid stream where all the colors were green and murky, its bark stained with sticky resin, not unlike burned sugar in color, with the pungent smell of juniper. Between the slender trunks of the nearby rowan trees you could see our house. I glanced at my hands to see if there was any soot on them. Nothing. But there was a faint burned smell, so I plunged them in the water and rubbed them dry on my trousers.

“What shall we do with the box of matches?” I said.

Geir shrugged.

“Hide it, I s’pose.”

“If they find it, don’t say anything about me,” I said. “About what we did.”

“Course not,” Geir said. “Here’s the bag, by the way.”

We started to walk up to the road.

“Are you going to set fire to anything else today?” I said.

“I don’t think so,” he said.

“Not even with Leif Tore?”

“Maybe tomorrow,” he said. And his face brightened. “Should I take the matches to school with me, what do you think?”

“Are you out of your mind?!”

He laughed. We reached the road, and crossed it.

“See you!” he said, running up the hill.

I passed Mom’s VW, parked on a patch of scorched yellow grass just outside the fence, beside the gray garbage can, and stepped onto the gravel. I felt the fear rising in me again. Dad’s red car gleamed in the fierce sunshine. I looked down, unwilling to meet the gaze that might await me in the kitchen window. The mere thought of it sent waves of despair shooting through me. When I reached the front doorstep and couldn’t be seen from the windows on the first floor I clasped my hands together and closed my eyes.

Almighty God, I uttered silently. Let me get through this and I promise I’ll never do anything wrong again. Never ever. I promise by all that is holy. Amen.

I opened the door and went in.

It was cooler in the hall than outside, and after the bright sunshine, almost completely dark. The smell of stew lay heavy in the air. I bent down and untied my shoelaces, carefully placed my shoes by the wall, slunk upstairs, trying to make my face appear normal, and stopped on the landing in a quandary. What would I normally do, go up to my room right away or go into the kitchen to see if dinner was ready?

Voices, the clinking of cutlery on plates.

Was I late?

Had they already started eating?

Oh no, oh no.

What should I do?

The notion of turning on my heel, calmly walking outside, up the hill and into the forest, never to return, came as a joyful clarion call amid all the tension.

Then they would be sorry.

“Is that you, Karl Ove?” Dad shouted from the other side of the door.

I swallowed, shook my head, blinked a few times, and took a deep breath.

“Yes,” I said.

“We’re eating!” he shouted. “Come on in!”

God had heard my prayer and done as I asked. Dad was in a good mood, I could see that as soon as I entered, he was leaning back in the chair with his legs stretched out, his arms wide apart, and his eyes glinting with mischief.

“What was so good that you lost track of time?” he said.

I sat down next to Yngve. Dad was sitting at the end to the right, Mom at the end to the left. The Formica table with a gray-and-white marble pattern and gray edging, shiny legs, and gray rubber feet was set: brown dinner plates, green glasses with Duralex written on the bottom, a basket of crispbread, a big pot from which protruded a wooden ladle.

“Been out with Geir,” I said, leaning forward to check if there was a piece of meat in the ladle I lifted out a moment later.

“Where did you go then?” Dad asked, lifting his fork to his mouth. Something pale yellow, perhaps onion, was lodged in his beard, on his chin.

“Down to the forest.”

“Oh yes?” he said, chewing several times and swallowing, his eyes trained on me the whole time.

“I thought I saw you on your way up the hill?”

I sat transfixed.

“It wasn’t us,” I said at length.

“Nonsense,” he said. “What devilry were you up to there since you won’t admit that’s where you were?”

“But we weren’t on the hill,” I said.

Mom and Dad exchanged glances. Dad said no more. I could move my hands again. I filled my plate and started eating. Dad helped himself to another portion, still with the same apparent gliding movements. Yngve had finished eating, and sat next to me looking down in front of him, one hand resting on his thigh, the other on the edge of the table.

“And how was the schoolboy’s first day?” Dad asked. “Did you get any homework?”

I shook my head.

“Was the teacher nice?”

I nodded.

“What was her name again?”

“Helga Torgersen,” I said.

“That’s right,” Dad said. “She lives … did she say?”

“In Sandum,” I said.

“She seemed so lovely,” Mom said. “Young and pleased to be there.”

“But we got there late,” I said, relief spreading through my body at the turn the conversation had taken.

“Oh?” Dad said, looking at Mom. “You didn’t mention that?”

“We got lost,” she said. “So we arrived a few minutes late. But I don’t think we missed anything important. Did we, Karl Ove?”

“No,” I mumbled.

“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” Dad said.

I swallowed.

“All right,” I said.

“And what about you, Yngve?” Dad said. “Any surprises on the first day?”

“No,” Yngve said, sitting up straight in his chair.

“You have soccer practice today, don’t you?” Mom said.

“Yep,” Yngve said.

He had changed teams, had left Trauma, which was the island team where all his friends played, with its fantastic uniform, blue shirts with a white diagonal stripe, white shorts and blue-and-white socks, for Saltrød, a club in a little town just across Tromøya Sound. Today was his first session there. He would have to cycle over the bridge alone, which he had never done before, and all the way to the training ground. Five kilometers, he had said it was.

“Didn’t anything else happen at school today then, Karl Ove?” Dad said.

I nodded and swallowed.

“We’re going to have a swimming class,” I said. “Six lessons. At another school.”

“There you go,” Dad said, running the back of his hand across his mouth, but without removing the ribbon of onion from his beard. “That’s not a bad idea. You can’t live on an island and not be able to swim.”

“And it’s free, too,” Mom said.

“But I need a swimming cap,” I said. “Everyone does. And maybe some new swimming trunks? Not shorts, but the kind … well.”

“We can find a cap for you. But your shorts will have to do you for now,” Dad said.

“And goggles,” I said.

“Goggles as well?” Dad said, looking at me with a teasing expression. “We’ll have to see about that.”

He shoved his plate away and leaned back.

“Great meal, Mom!” he said.

“Thanks, Mom,” Yngve said, and snuck off. Five seconds later we heard the sound of his bedroom door being closed.

I stayed at the table for a little longer, in case Dad wanted to chat with me. He gazed out the window for a while, at the four boys hanging over the handlebars of their bikes by the second crossroads, then he got up, put his plate in the sink, took an orange from the cupboard, and went down to his study, the newspaper folded under his arm, without saying another word to anyone. Mom started clearing the table and I went to Yngve’s room. He was packing his bag. I sat down on his bed and watched. He had real soccer cleats, a pair of black Adidas with screw-on studs, decent Umbro shorts and some yellow-and-black IK Start socks. Mom had bought black-and-white Grane socks for him at first; he didn’t want them, so he gave them to me. But the best equipment he had was the Adidas tracksuit, it was blue with white stripes, in some smooth, shiny material, not that matte, crepe, elastic, gymsuit-style material that all tracksuits used to be made of. Sometimes I sniffed it, buried my nose in the smooth material, because it smelled wonderful. Perhaps I thought that because I wanted one myself so much the smell was imbued with my own desire, perhaps I thought it because the smell, so thoroughly synthetic, didn’t remind me of anything else — it didn’t seem to belong to this world. That in some way it bore a promise of the future. In addition to this tracksuit, he also had some blue-and-white Adidas wet-weather gear.

He said nothing as he packed. Pulled the big, red zipper to and sat down at his desk. Looked at the schedule lying on it.

“Did you get any homework?” I said.

He shook his head.

“We didn’t either,” I said. “Have you covered your books yet?”

“No, we’ve got the whole week to do it.”

“I’m going to do it tonight,” I said. “Mom’s going to help me.”

“Good for you!” he said, getting up. “I’m off. If I’m not back before midnight the headless man’s devoured me. I’d like to see how he manages that!”

He laughed and went downstairs. I watched him from the bathroom window, saw him put first one foot on the pedal, then shove off with the other and swing it over the crossbar and pedal as fast as he could in the highest gear until he reached the hill at such a speed that he could freewheel down to the crossroads.

When he had disappeared from view I went onto the landing, stood motionless for a moment to locate Mom and Dad. But all was silent.

“Mom?” I called softly.

No answer.

I went into the kitchen, she wasn’t there, then into the back room, she wasn’t there, either. Could she have gone to their bedroom?

I went there and stood outside the door for a moment.

No.

In the garden perhaps?

From various windows I scoured all four sides of the garden without catching a glimpse of her.

And the car was parked outside, wasn’t it?

Yes, it was.

Not knowing where she was somehow loosened my hold on the house, it was slackened in a confusing, quite disturbing way, and to counter it I went into my room and sat down on the bed to read some comics; that was when it struck me that of course she was downstairs in Dad’s office.

I almost never set foot in there. The few times I had, it had been to ask about something, if I could stay up and watch a particular TV program, for example, after knocking first and waiting for him to say, “Come in.” Knocking on the door came at a great cost, often so high that I preferred to go to bed without seeing the program. On a couple of occasions he had actually asked us to come in, when he wanted to show us something or give us something, such as envelopes with stamps on them. We put them in the sink in the spare kitchen, which, as far as I knew, was used exclusively for that purpose, to dissolve the gum, and, after drying them for a few hours, we were able to put them in our albums.

Otherwise I never went there. Even when I was on my own at home it never occurred to me. The risk that he would find out was much too great, he would discover anything untoward that was going on, he would sniff it out by some means or other, however well I tried to cover my tracks.

As he had with the hill when we were having dinner. Even though he hadn’t seen anything, only us on our way up, he knew we had been doing something wrong. Had he not been in such a good mood he would have brought everything into the open.

I lay on my stomach and started reading a Tempo. It was Yngve’s, he had borrowed it from Jan Atle, I had already read it many times. It was for older kids and for me it had a strong aura of belonging to a distant but utterly radiant world. I didn’t have any particular preferences regarding the settings of the comic books — it made no difference whether it was the Second World War, as in På Vingene or the Kamp series; nineteenth-century America, as in Tex Willer, Jonathan Hex, or Blueberry; England between the two World Wars, as in Paul Temple; or the fantasy realities, which the Phantom, Superman, Batman, the Fantastic Four, and all the Disney characters appeared in — but my feelings for them were different, they aroused different emotions in me, such that some of the series in Tempo, for example, the one that took place on a racetrack, or some in Buster, for example, Johnny Puma and Benny Goldenfoot, were particularly absorbing, perhaps because they were closer to the reality that I knew existed. In the summer you could see motorcyclists wearing the leathers and helmets with Formula 1 visors, you could see the low-slung cars with all those spoilers on TV, where they occasionally crashed into the barriers or one of the other cars, rolling over and catching fire, the driver being either burned to death or emerging from the flaming wreckage and calmly walking away.

Usually I was totally engrossed by these stories, without giving them a thought, the whole point of course was that you didn’t think, at least not with your own thoughts, you just followed the action. That afternoon, however, I quickly put the comic to one side, for some reason I couldn’t sit still, and it wasn’t much later than five o’clock, so I decided to go out again. I stopped at the top of the stairs, not a sound, she was still down below. What was she doing? She was hardly ever there. At least not at this time, I thought, bending down for my shoes in the hallway and tying the laces. I knocked on the door to Dad’s study. That is, the door leading to the corridor into which three rooms opened: the bathroom, the study, and the kitchen with the little box room at the end. In fact, it was a self-contained flat, but we had never rented it out to anyone.

“I’m going out!” I shouted. “Up to Geir’s!”

That is what I had been told to do, to tell them if I was going anywhere and say where.

Nevertheless, after a few seconds of silence, Dad’s irritated voice sounded from inside the study.

“All right, all right!” he shouted.

A few more seconds of silence passed.

Then Mom’s voice, friendlier, as if to compensate for Dad’s.

“That’s fine, Karl Ove!”

I shot out, closed the door carefully behind me, and ran up to Geir’s. I stood outside, called a few times until his mother came around the house. She had gardening gloves on, and was otherwise wearing khaki shorts, a blue blouse, and a pair of black clogs. In her hand she was holding a red trowel.

“Hi, Karl Ove,” she said. “Geir went out with Leif Tore a while ago.”

“Where did they go?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t say.”

“OK. Bye.”

I turned and walked slowly down the drive with my eyes glazed with tears. Why hadn’t they called at my house?

I stopped by the barrier between the two roads. Stood for a moment stock-still, listening. Not a sound. I sat down on one of the barriers. The rough concrete chafed against my thighs. Dandelions grew in the ditch below, all gray with dust. There was a grid next to it, rusty and with a sun-faded cigarette packet stuck between the bars.

Where could they have gone?

Down to Ubekilen?

Down to the pontoons?

To the soccer field and the play area?

Had Geir taken Leif Tore to one of our places?

Up the mountain?

I scanned the mountain. No sign of them there anyway. I got to my feet and started to make my way down. At the crossroads by the cherry tree there were three ways to choose among, if you were going to the landing stages. I chose the one to the right, through the gate, along the path covered with soil and twigs beneath the deep shadows from the tops of the enormous oaks, down to the field where we usually played soccer even though it sloped on both sides and the grass was knee-high, trampled from very early spring, there were also sapling trees growing on it, past the cliff with its grayish crags, generally bare but with some low scattered cover, and on through the forest to the road. Beyond it there was the new marina, blasted out of the rock, with three identical quays, all with wooden gangways and orange pontoons.

They weren’t there, either. I walked along one pontoon anyway; a double-ender had just moored at the tip, it belonged to Kanestrøm, and I went over to see what was happening. Kanestrøm was alone on board and peered up as I stood by the bow.

“So it’s you who’s out and about, is it?” he said. “I’ve been doing a bit of fishing, as you can see.”

The sun glinted on his glasses. He had a moustache, short hair, a little bald patch on top, and wore denim shorts, a checked shirt, and sandals.

“Would you like to see?”

He held up a red bucket in my direction. It was full of thin, slippery mackerel with bluish, glistening skin. Some were twitching, and the movement seemed to spread to the other bodies lying so close to one another it was as though it were one and the same creature.

“Wow!” I said. “Did you catch all of them?”

He nodded.

“All in the space of a few minutes. There was a huge shoal just offshore. Now we’ve got enough food for several days!”

He put the bucket down on the narrow gangway. Lifted an old gasoline canister, and put it down beside the bucket. Then some fishing lines and a can of hooks and lures. Humming an old song all the while.

“Do you know where Dag Lothar is?” I said.

“No, I’m afraid I don’t,” he said. “Are you looking for him?”

“Yes, sort of,” I said.

“Would you like to sit at the front here?”

I shook my head.

“Not really. In fact I’m a bit busy.”

“All right,” he said, and stepped onto the pontoon, bent down, and grabbed his gear. I hurried off so as not to have to walk alongside him. Ran across the stony car park and balanced on the high curbstone all the way up to the main road, where a rather steep path plunged down into the forest. It led to the Rock, the place where everyone on the estate went swimming, where you could dive off a two-meter-high rock and swim across to Gjerstadholmen, on the other side of a maybe ten-meter-wide channel. Even though the water was deep and I couldn’t swim, I sometimes went along because so much happened there.

Now I could hear voices from the forest. A high-pitched child’s voice and a slightly deeper youth’s. A second later Dag Lothar and Steinar came into view between the sun-flecked tree trunks. Their hair was wet and both of them were carrying towels.

“Hey, Karl Ove!” Dag Lothar shouted, catching sight of me. “I saw an adder on my way down here!”

“Really?” I said. “Where did you see it? Here?”

He nodded and stopped in front of me. Steinar also stopped and adopted a posture that made it obvious he had no intention of chatting, he wanted to be on his way as soon as possible. Steinar was in the eighth class at Dad’s school. He had long, dark hair and a shadow on his upper lip. He played the bass and had his room in the cellar with its own entrance.

“I was running down,” Dag Lothar said, pointing along the path. “As fast as I could, pretty much, and as I was charging around the bend there was an adder in front of me, on the path. I almost didn’t manage to stop!”

“What happened?” I said.

If there was anything I was frightened of in this world it was snakes and worms.

“It shot off like lightning into the bushes.”

“Are you sure it was an adder?”

“Absolutely. It had the zigzag markings on its head.”

He smiled at me. His face was triangular, his hair blond and soft, his eyes were blue, and the expression in them frequently intense and passionate.

“You don’t dare go there now, do you?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Are Geir and the others down there?”

He shook his head.

“Just Jørn and his little brother, and Eva and Marianne’s mom and dad.”

“Can I go up with you?” I said.

“Of course,” Dag Lothar said. “But I can’t play. We’re going to have dinner now.”

“I have to go home, too,” I said. “Have to cover my books.”

When we reached the road outside our house and Dag Lothar and Steinar went on to their homes, I didn’t go in; I stood around looking for Geir and Leif Tore instead. They were nowhere to be seen. Irresolute, I started walking. The sun, which was just above the ridge, was burning down on my shoulders. I cast a final glance along the road, in case they might have appeared, and then I ran to the path behind the house. The first part went alongside our garden fence, the second skirted Prestbakmo’s stone wall, half hidden behind the many slim aspen saplings growing there, which in afternoons throughout the summer stood trembling whenever the sea breeze blew. Then the path parted company with the estate, ran through an area of dense, young deciduous trees, came to some boggy land, at the far end of which was a small meadow beneath an enormous beech tree growing at an angle to a steep incline and immersing everything around it in shadow.

It was strange how all large trees had their own personalities, expressed through their unique forms and the aura created by the combined effect of the trunk and roots, the bark and branches, the light and shadow. It was as if they could speak. Not with voices, of course, but with what they were, they seemed to stretch out to whoever looked at them. And that was all they spoke about, what they were, nothing else. Wherever I went on the estate or in the surrounding forest, I heard these voices, or felt the impact these extremely slow-growing organisms had. There was the spruce by the stream, below the house, so incredibly wide at the bottom of the trunk, yet with damp bark and roots that became visible, like coils of thick rope, so far away from it. The way the branches cascaded, pyramid-like, to the ground, at a distance apparently stocky and smooth, but, close up, covered with small, dark green, perfectly formed needles. All those dry branches, light gray and porous, that could grow within the canopy of branches that were not gray but almost totally black. The pine tree on Prestbakmo’s land, long and slim like a ship’s mast, with red-flecked bark and small, green, lightly swaying whorls at the end of each branch, which didn’t start growing until very near the tip. The oak tree behind the soccer field, whose trunk at the bottom was more like stone than wood, but which had nothing of the spruce’s compactness because the oak’s branches spread outward forming a sparse vault of foliage above the forest floor, so light that you would never believe there was not only a connection between the lowest part of the trunk and the slender extremities of the branches, but it was also their origin and source. In the middle of the trunk there was something that resembled a grotto, as if the tree had bulged out to form a softly contoured yet hard and gnarled oval, the inner cavity the size of a small head. And the leaves, like all leaves, wherever they sprouted, repeated the same beautiful, partly curved, partly jagged pattern, both when they hung from a branch, green, thick, and smooth, and when they lay on the ground a few months later, reddish brown and brittle. Around this tree the ground was always covered with a thick carpet of leaves in the autumn, flaming yellow and green at the beginning, darker and softer as time passed.

And then there was the tree on the slope by the boggy land. I didn’t know what species it was. It wasn’t compact like the other large trees but grew out from four equally proportioned trunks, they wound outward, serpent-like, with grayish-green bark full of extended hollows, and in this way it covered just as large an area as an oak or a spruce, but the effect was not as magnificent, it was more subtle. From one of the branches hung a rope and a wooden bar, probably put there by the boys living on the road opposite, they lived as close to this place as we did. No one was there now, and I went up the slope under the branches, grabbed the bar with both hands, and launched myself. I did it twice more. Then I stood for a while under the tree wondering what to do next. From the house facing the slope, occupied by a couple with a small child, came the sound of voices and the clinking of cutlery. I couldn’t see anything, but guessed they had to be in the garden. Somewhere in the distance there was the drone of a plane. I took a few steps into the dried-up bog, peering at the sky. A small seaplane was approaching from the coast, flying very low, the sun gleaming on the white fuselage. Once it had gone behind the ridge I broke into a run again, into the shadow of the hill on the other side, where the air was a touch cooler. I looked up at Kanestrøm’s house, thinking they were probably at the table eating mackerel at this very minute, there was no one outside at any rate, and then I looked down to the path, where I knew every stone, every dip, every tuft, and every mound. If a run had been arranged here, from our house along the path to B-Max, I would have been invincible. I could have run along that path with my eyes shut. Without ever needing to stop, always knowing what was waiting around the next bend, always knowing where it was best to tread. When we raced on the road Leif Tore won every time, but I would win here, of that I had no doubt. It was a good thought, a good feeling, and I tried to hold on to it for as long as possible.

Well before I reached the soccer field I heard the voices coming from it, screams and shouts and laughter, as if from a distance, as if heard through the forest, there was something almost apelike about it. I stopped in the clearing. The field before me was swarming with children of all ages, many of whom I had barely seen before, most crowded around the ball, with everyone trying to kick it away, the hubbub drifting from place to place, backward and forward, in fits and starts. The field was dark, trampled ground in the middle of the forest, and it sloped slightly up on one side, where quite a number of roots broke through the surface. At each end there was a big goal made with wooden beams, without a net. One side was considerably truncated by protruding rock while the other extended across an uneven patch of large tufts of stiff grass. Almost all my dreams originated here. Running around in this place was bliss.

“Can I join in?” I shouted.

Every kick of the ball returned in a dull echo off the hillside.

Rolf, who was in goal, turned to me.

“You can be goalie if you like,” he said.

“OK,” I said, running toward the goal, which Rolf left with a slow, rolling gait.

“Karl Ove’s in goal for us!” he shouted.

I positioned myself carefully between the posts and started to follow the game, gradually distinguishing who was in my team, leaned forward, and was ready when the ball approached, and when the first shot came, a loose ball along the ground, I crouched down and took it, bounced it three times on the ground and booted it up the field. The ball gave against my foot, it was big and soft and worn, the same color as the sun-baked ground. The orange tongue flashed beneath the stitching. The ball’s trajectory wasn’t high, but it went a long way nevertheless, bounced on the right-hand side of the field, and it was a joy to see the pack of boys running after it. I wanted to be a goalkeeper. I went into goal as often as I could, nothing could compare with the feeling of hurling yourself at a shot and stopping it. The problem was that I could only hurl myself to one side, the left. Hurling myself to the right appeared to be contrary to the laws of nature, I couldn’t do it, so if the ball came on that side I had to stick out my leg instead.

The trees cast long shadows across the field, and flickering patches of murk pursued the running boys, who merged into a mass and dispersed again and again. But some boys had started walking instead of running, some were bent over, supporting themselves on their knees, and to my disappointment I realized the game was coming to an end.

“Well, I’d better be getting home,” one said.

“Me, too,” a second said.

“Let’s keep going for a bit,” a third said.

“I’ve got to be off, too.”

“Shall we make new teams then?”

“I’m off.”

“Me, too.”

Within a couple of minutes the whole scene had evaporated, and the field was empty.

The wrapping paper Mom had bought was blue and semitransparent. We sat in the kitchen, I unrolled a piece and cut it to size; if the edge was uneven and jagged Mom straightened it. Then I placed the book on top, spread out the two wing-like flaps, folded the paper over them, and taped down the corners. Mom adjusted what needed to be adjusted along the way. Otherwise she sat knitting a sweater that was meant for me. I had chosen it from one of her pattern magazines, a white sweater with dark brown edges, it was different, because the collar was high and straight and there was a split on each side at the bottom so that it hung a bit like a loincloth. I really liked the Indian style and kept a weather eye on how far she had got with it.

Mom did a lot of needlework. She had crocheted the curtains in the living room and the kitchen, and she had sewn the white curtains in our bedrooms, Yngve’s with a brown hem and brown floral print, mine with a red hem and a red floral print. In addition, she knitted sweaters and woolly hats, darned socks, patched trousers and jackets. When she wasn’t doing that, or cooking and washing up, or baking bread, she read. We had whole shelves full of books, something none of the other parents had. She also had friends, unlike Dad, mostly women of the same age at her workplace, whom she visited now and then, if they didn’t come here, that is. I liked all of them. There was Dagny, whose son and daughter, Tor and Liv, I went to kindergarten with. There was Anne Mai, who was fat and happy and always brought us some chocolate, she drove a Citroën and lived in Grimstad, where I had visited her once with the kindergarten. And there was Marit, who had a son, Lars, the same age as Yngve, and a daughter, Marianne, who was two years younger. They didn’t come here often, Dad didn’t like it, but perhaps once a month one or more of them came; then I was allowed to sit with them for a while and bask in the radiance. And occasionally in the evening we went to the arts and crafts workshop in Kokkeplassen, it was the kind of place where you could do all sorts of things, the children of other employees at my mothers workplace went there, too, and that was where we used to make our Christmas presents.

Mom’s face was gentle but serious. She had tucked her long hair behind her ears.

“Dag Lothar saw an adder today!” I said.

“Oh?” she said. “Where was that then?”

“On the path to the Rock. He almost stepped right on it! Fortunately, though, it was just as frightened as he was and slithered off into the bushes.”

“Lucky for him,” she said.

“Were there adders when you were growing up?”

She shook her head.

“There aren’t any adders in Vestland.”

“Why not?”

She chuckled.

“I don’t know. Perhaps it’s too cold for them?”

I dangled my legs and drummed my fingers on the table while humming, Kisses for me, save all your kisses for me, bye bye, baby, bye bye.

“Kanestrøm caught tons of mackerel today,” I said. “I saw them. He showed me the bucket. It was full to the brim. Are we going to get a boat soon, do you think?”

“Take it easy now,” she said. “A boat and a cat! Well, it’s not impossible, but not this year, that’s for certain. Next year maybe. It all costs money, you know. But you can ask Dad.”

She passed me back the scissors.

You ask Dad, I thought, but didn’t say anything, trying to slide the blade of the scissors along without making a cut, but it stopped, I squeezed the handles together and made a jagged cut.

“Goodness, Yngve’s late,” she said, looking out of the window.

“He’s in safe hands,” I said.

She smiled at me.

“I suppose so,” she said.

“The note,” I said. “The swimming class. Can you sign it now?”

She nodded. I got up and ran along the landing into my room, took the form from my satchel, and was about to run back when the door downstairs opened and I realized what I had done as my heart skipped an extra beat.

Dad’s heavy footsteps sounded on the stairs. I stood motionless outside the bathroom as his gaze met mine.

“No running indoors!” he said. “How many times do I have to tell you? It makes the whole house bang and shake. Is that understood?”

“Yes.”

He came up and walked past me, his broad back in the white shirt. When I saw he was heading for the kitchen all my happiness evaporated. But I had to go back in there, where he was.

Mom was sitting as before. Dad was standing at the window, looking out. I put the form carefully down on the table.

“Here,” I said.

There was one book left. I sat down and made a start on it. Only my hands moved, everything else was still. Dad was mulling over something.

“Yngve’s not home yet, is he?” he said.

“No,” Mom said. “I’m getting a bit uneasy.”

Dad looked down at the table.

“What’s that you’ve brought?” he asked.

“The swimming class,” I answered. “Mom was going to sign it.”

“Let me have a look,” he said, taking the form and reading it. Then he took the pen from the table, wrote his name, and passed the form to me.

“There we are,” he said, nodding in the direction of the table. “Now you take all this stuff to your room. You can finish it there. We’re going to have supper now.”

“Yes, Dad,” I said. Put the books in a pile, rolled up the paper, and stuffed it under my arm, grabbed the scissors and the Scotch tape with one hand, the books with the other, and left the kitchen.

While I was at the desk cutting the paper for the last book, a bike rolled up on the gravel outside. Just then the front door opened.

Dad stood waiting for him in the hall when he came up the stairs.

“What time’s this supposed to be?” he said.

Yngve’s answer was too subdued for me to hear, but the explanation must have been good because the next moment he went into his room. I laid the book on the paper I had cut out, folded it, and placed another book on top as a weight while I tried to pick the tape free from the roll. When I finally loosened a corner and pulled some off, it tore and I had to start again.

Behind me the door opened. It was Yngve.

“What are you up to?” he said.

“Wrapping my books, as you can see,” I said.

“We had buns and pop after the training,” Yngve said. “In the clubhouse. And there were girls on the team. One of them was really good.”

“Girls?” I said. “Is that allowed?”

“Apparently. And Karl Frederik was great.”

Through the open window came the sound of voices and footsteps going up the hill. I stuck the bit of tape I had on my finger on the paper and went over to see who it was.

Geir and Leif Tore. They had stopped outside the drive to Leif Tore’s and were laughing about something. Then they said bye, and Geir ran the short distance to his drive. When he turned in there and I saw his face for the first time there was a little smile on his lips. His hand was clenched around something in his shorts pocket.

I turned to Yngve.

“What position are you going to play?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Probably defense.”

“What color’s your strip?”

“Blue and white.”

“Just like Trauma’s?”

“Close,” he said.

“Come and eat!” Dad called from the kitchen. When we went in, there was a plate with three slices of bread on it and a glass of milk in our places. Clove cheese, brown cheese, and jam. Mom and Dad were in the living room watching TV. The road outside was gray, and so, almost, were the branches on the trees at the edge of the road, whereas the sky above the trees, across Tromøya Sound, was blue and open, as though it arched above a different world than the one we were in.

The next morning I was woken by Dad opening the bedroom door.

“C’mon, up, sleepyhead!” he said. “The sun is shining and the birds are singing.”

I pulled the duvet to the side and swung my feet onto the floor. Apart from the sound of Dad’s footsteps, fading as they went down the landing, the house was perfectly quiet. It was Tuesday. Mom started work early, Yngve had to be at school early while Dad didn’t have to start until the second period.

I went to the wardrobe and searched through the piles of clothes, chose a white shirt, which was the best I had, and blue cords. But the shirt was probably too smart, I thought, he would notice, perhaps ask why I was all tarted up, perhaps tell me to take it off. Better to wear the white Adidas T-shirt.

With my clothes under my arm I went into the bathroom. Fortunately Yngve had remembered to leave the water in the sink. I closed the door behind me. Lifted the toilet seat and peed. The pee was a greenish yellow, not dark yellow as it often was in the morning. Even though I tried carefully to make sure all the drops fell inside the bowl when I shook myself dry, some landed on the floor, small transparent globules of moisture on the bluish-gray linoleum. I dried the floor with some toilet paper, which I threw in the bowl before pulling the chain. With the flushing noise in my ears I stood in front of the sink. The water was a pale-green color. Small transparent flakes of God knows what were floating in it. I cupped my hands, filled them with water, leaned forward, and dipped my head in. The water was a tiny bit colder than me. A shiver ran down my spine as it settled on my skin. I soaped my hands, rubbed them quickly over my face, closing my eyes as I did so, and rinsed and dried them and my face on the light-brown towel hanging on my hook.

Finished!

I pulled the bedroom curtain aside and peered out. The trees in the forest, above which the sun had just risen, cast long, dark shadows over the shimmering tarmac. Then I put on my clothes and went into the kitchen.

There was a bowl of cornflakes in my place, with a carton of milk beside it. Dad wasn’t there.

Had he gone to his study to get his things together?

No. I heard him moving in the living room.

I sat down and poured milk over the cornflakes. Dipped the spoon in and put it to my mouth.

Oh my God.

The milk was off, and the taste of it, which filled all my mouth, caused me to retch. I gulped it down because at that moment my father came across the floor. In through the doorway, across the kitchen, over to the counter, and leaned against it. He looked at me and smiled. I took another spoonful from the bowl and put it to my mouth. The mere thought of the taste made my stomach turn. But I breathed through my mouth and swallowed it after only a couple of chews.

Oh, yuk.

Dad showed no signs of wanting to leave and I continued eating. If he had gone to his study I could have emptied the dish into the bin and covered it with other rubbish, but as long as he was in the kitchen, or on the first floor, I had no choice.

After a while he turned to open a cupboard door, took out a bowl of the same kind as mine and a spoon from the drawer and sat opposite me.

He never did that.

“I’ll have some, too,” he said. Sprinkled some golden, crispy flakes from the box with the red-and-green cockerel on it and reached over for the milk.

I stopped eating. Knowing that a calamity was looming.

Dad placed his spoon in the bowl, filled it to the brim with milk and cornflakes, and put it to his mouth. The moment it was inside, his face contorted. He spat it out into the bowl without chewing.

“Ugh!” he said. “The milk’s off! Oh, good grief!”

Then he looked at me. I would remember that look for the rest of my life. His eyes were not angry, as I had expected, but amazed, as though he was looking at something he just could not comprehend. Indeed, as though he were looking at me for the very first time.

“Have you been eating cornflakes with sour milk on them?” he said.

I nodded.

“But you can’t do that!” he said. “I’ll get you some fresh milk!”

He got up, poured the carton of sour milk into the sink, shaking his arms wildly as he did so, rinsed it, scrunched it up, put it in the trash can beneath the sink, and grabbed a fresh carton from the fridge.

“Let me have that,” he said, taking my bowl, emptying the contents into the sink, scouring it with the washing-up brush, rinsing it again, and putting it back on the table in front of me.

“There we are,” he said. “Now help yourself to more cornflakes and milk. OK?”

“OK,” I said.

He did the same with his dish and we ate in silence.

Everything about school was new during this period, but all the days had the same format, and we became so familiar with it that it was only a few weeks before nothing surprised us anymore. What was said from the dais was true, and the fact that it was said there made even the most improbable probable. Jesus walking on water, that was true. God appearing as a burning bush at Moses’s feet, that was true. Illnesses originating from creatures that were so small no one could see them, that was true. All beings, including ourselves, consisting of tiny, tiny particles that were smaller than bacteria, that was true. Trees needing sunlight to live, that was true. But we not only accepted what the teachers said in this way, we also accepted what they did without a word. Many of our teachers were old, born before or during the First World War, professionally active since the 1930s or 1940s. Gray-haired and dressed in suits, they never learned our names, and what they had to offer as regards knowledge and wisdom never reached us. One of them was called Thommesen. He read a book to us once a week in the break, stooped over the table, his voice a touch snuffled, his complexion pale, almost yellow, and his lips a bluish red. The book he read was about an old woman in the wilderness, impossible to understand, not a word, so the time he may have regarded as cozy, a friendly gesture toward the small schoolchildren, was for us a torment because we had to sit still while he coughed and mumbled his way through the incomprehensible story.

Another teacher was in his fifties, his name was Myklebust, from somewhere in Vestland, but he lived on the island of Hisøya and was a stern disciplinarian. In lessons with him we not only had to stand in a line and march into the classroom, once we were in, we also had to remain standing beside our desks, whereupon he, from beside his desk, would slowly scan the class until there was total silence. Then he would raise himself onto the balls of his feet, bow, and say, “Good morning, class,” or, “Good day, class,” to which we would answer, “Good morning, teacher” or, “Good day, teacher.” He had no compunctions about slapping pupils in heated exchanges or throwing them against the wall. He often ridiculed those he didn’t like. His gym lessons were nothing short of drills. There were some women teachers of a similar age who were also strict and formal, surrounded by an aura we didn’t recognize but automatically respected and, not infrequently, also feared. One of them lifted me off the ground by my hair once after I said something inappropriate, I remember. Normally they were happy to send notes home, as detentions or early starts were impractical because of the buses. Alongside this band of old teachers, some of whom had been on the staff all their lives, there was also a new generation, the same age as our parents or even younger. Our teacher, Helga Torgersen, was one of them. She was what we called “nice,” that is, she never came down heavily on breaches of rules, never lost her temper, never shouted, never hit or pulled hair, but always solved conflicts through discussion, in a calm, controlled voice, and through involving herself as a person rather than playing the teacher role, such that there was little difference between who she was in private, when she was out with friends or at home with her husband, whom she had recently married, and who she was in the classroom. She wasn’t the only one, all the young teachers were like that, and they were the ones we liked to have. The headmaster of the school was young, too, his name was Osmundsen and he was around thirty years old, had a beard, and was strong, not so different from Dad, but we were afraid of him, perhaps more than the others. Not because of anything he did, but because of what he was. If you had done something seriously wrong you were sent to his office. The fact that he didn’t do any teaching on a daily basis, that he was a kind of shadowy figure in the school, did nothing to diminish our fear. He was also legendary for another reason. The year before, a slave ship had been found only a few meters off the rocks on the eastern coast of the island. It had gone aground there in 1768 and the find had been described in all the newspapers and even shown on TV. Our headmaster, Osmundsen, was one of the three divers who had found it. To me, someone who held diving in greater esteem than anything else, apart from perhaps sailing ships, he was the greatest man I could imagine. It was like having an astronaut as headmaster. Whenever I did drawings, it was always divers and wrecks, fishermen and sharks I drew, apart from sailing ships, page after page after page. Whenever I watched one of the nature programs on TV, about diving down to coral reefs or diving in a shark cage, I talked about it for weeks afterward. And here he was, the bearded man who, the year before, had broken the surface with an elephant tusk in his hands, from one of the few intact wrecks of a slave ship that has ever been found.

He came into the classroom on the second day to tell us a little about the school and which rules were important, and after he had gone Frøken said that one day in the not-too-distant future, he would come back and tell us about the wreck he had helped to find. She had been standing by the window with her hands behind her back and a smile on her face all the time he had been there, and she did the same when he returned two weeks later, as promised. My mind was ablaze with the stories he regaled us with, but I was also a tiny bit disappointed when it turned out the wreck lay in waters that were only a few meters deep. That detracted from the achievement to no small degree, I had expected a depth of say a hundred meters, with divers who had to hold the rope for a breather on their way up, taking maybe as much as an hour in all, because of the extreme pressure down below. An overwhelming darkness, flashing beams from their torches, perhaps even a little submarine or diving bell. But on the seabed near the coast, right beneath the feet of bathers, within the range of any boy with flippers and a diving mask? On the other hand, he did show pictures of the find, they had a diving boat moored some way out into the bay, they wore wetsuits and had diving cylinders, and it had all been planned down to the last detail with old charts and documents, etcetera.

Once Dad had almost been on TV, they had interviewed him and so on, about something political, but when we watched the news there was nothing, and the item didn’t come the next day, either, although we all gathered again to see it. However, he had been on the radio once, interviewed in connection with a stamp exhibition, I forgot all about it, so when I arrived home that day, it had already been broadcast and he had a go at me.

Many of the teachers chattered on about my name at first, they were colleagues of my father, I suppose, and assumed I was named after him, and I really liked that, their knowing about me, that I was the son of my father. From the very first day I did my utmost at school, above all in order to be the best in the class, but also because I hoped it would reach Dad’s ears how smart I was.

I loved school. I loved everything that went on there and the rooms where it went on.

Our chairs, low and old, made with iron piping, a slab of wood to sit on, and one to lean back against, our desks covered with cuts and ink from all those who had sat at them before. The board, the chalk, and the sponge; the letters that grew from the chalk in Frøken’s hand, an O, a U, an I, an E, an Å, an Æ, always white, which her hands soon became as well. The bone-dry sponge that darkened and swelled when she rinsed it in the sink, the great feeling it gave you when it rubbed out everything, leaving a trail of water that remained there for a few minutes, until the board was as green and pristine as before. Frøken, who spoke in Karmøy dialect, had big glasses and short hair, wore blouses and skirts, so much she asked us about and told us. She taught us not to speak all at the same time, and not just to shout out an answer but to put our hands up and speak only after she had pointed or nodded to us. Because at the beginning a forest of hands shot up in the classroom, waving impatiently to and fro, with students shouting me, me, me, because she didn’t ask us difficult questions, only ones everyone could answer. Then there were the breaks and all that happened in them, all the children who were there, large groups assembling and dispersing, activities blazing up and dying back. The pegs in the corridor outside the classroom where we hung our jackets, the smell of ten years of green soap, the smell of piss in the toilets, the smell of milk in the milk lockers, the smell of twenty lunch boxes with a variety of smørbrød being opened at the same time in a classroom. The system of monitors, whereby every week a pupil was responsible for handing out whatever had to be handed out, cleaning the board after the lesson, and collecting the cartons of milk in the long break. The feeling this gave you of being the chosen one. And the very special feeling of walking down the corridors when everyone else was sitting in class, how deserted they were, jackets hanging from the pegs on both sides, the low mumble from the rooms as you walked past, the shafts of daylight that lent the linoleum floor a dull gleam, and on sunny days caused thousands of specks of dust in the air to shimmer, like a miniature Milky Way. A door being thrown open, a boy charging out, could change the atmosphere down the entire length of the corridor, suck up all the attention and significance: suddenly he was all that counted. As though he drew in all the smells, all the dust, all the light, all the jackets, and all the mumbling, like a comet in the sky, one might imagine, where all the passing flotsam and jetsam were sucked into its long, pallid — by comparison with the shining center — tail.

I loved the moment when Geir rang the bell and we wandered up to the supermarket, the competition that had already evolved there, where you had to arrive early and put your satchel as far to the front of the queue as possible so that you could get the best seat on the bus. I loved waiting by the shop and watching the other kids drifting in from all sides. Some of them lived right at the top of the estates behind the shop, others came from down in Gamle Tybakken, and others still from the estates on the flat land beyond the hill. I especially loved watching Anne Lisbet. Not only did she have shiny black hair, she also had dark eyes and a big, red mouth. She was always so happy, she laughed so much, and her eyes, they were not only dark, they sparkled, as though she had so much happiness inside her they were always filled to the brim with it. Her red-headed friend was called Solveig, they were neighbors and were always together, just like Geir and me. Solveig was pale and had freckles, she didn’t say much, but she had kind eyes. They lived on the highest estate in Tybakken, in an area I had only visited a couple of times and where I knew no one. Anne Lisbet had a sister who was one year younger, she informed us when it was her turn to talk about herself in class, and a brother who was four years younger. Another boy in the class lived up there, his name was Vemund, he was a little plump and slow, perhaps even slowwitted, he was the last to run, the weakest, threw a ball like a girl, was useless at soccer, couldn’t read, but he liked drawing and most of the other things you could do sitting indoors. His mother was a big, strong, energetic woman with angry eyes and a piercing voice. His father was thin and pale and walked on crutches, he had some kind of muscle disease, and he was a hemophiliac, Vemund proudly told us. A hemophiliac, what’s that? someone asked. That’s when the blood doesn’t stop coming out, Vemund explained. When Dad has a cut and it starts bleeding, it never stops, it just bleeds and bleeds, so he has to take some medicine or go to hospital, and if he doesn’t he dies.

Anne Lisbet, Solveig, and Vemund’s neighborhood, where lots of other children lived, one or two years older or younger than us, was drawn into our world when we started school. The same applied to all the other neighborhoods where my classmates lived. It was as if a curtain went up, and what we had assumed was the whole stage turned out to be only the proscenium. The house on the hillside, whose completely level garden we could see from the top, balancing as it were on the edge of a white wall that plunged straight down, maybe five meters, with a green wire fence on top, was no longer just a house but the house where Siv Johannesen lived. Fifty meters further away, behind the dense forest, a road came to an end, and it was along there that Sverre, Geir B, and Eivind lived. A bit further down, but in a very different area, a very different world, lived Kristin Tamara, Marian, and Asgeir.

They all had their places, they all had their friends, and in the course of a few weeks at the end of the summer everything was opened to us. It was both new and familiar, we looked similar, we did the same things and were thus open to one another. Yet at the same time each one of us had something of his or her own. Sølvi was so shy she could barely talk. Unni worked at the market with her parents and brothers every Saturday, selling vegetables they had grown themselves. Kristin Tamara wore glasses with a patch over one eye. Geir Håkon, who had always been so tough, stood writhing with embarrassment in front of the blackboard. Dag Magne had a permanent grin on his face. Geir had received the last rites when he was born because they thought he was going to die. Asgeir always smelled vaguely of piss. Marianne was as strong as a boy. Eivind could read and write and was so good at soccer. Trond was small and ran like lightning. Solveig was so good at drawing. Anne Lisbet’s father was a diver. And John, well, he had more uncles than anyone else.

One day, when we had been at school for the first three lessons, and the bus had dropped us off by the supermarket at twelve, Geir and I walked home with John. The sun was shining, the sky was blue, the road dry and dusty. When we came to John’s house, he asked if we wanted to go up and have some juice. We did. We followed him up to the veranda, took off our satchels, and sat down on the plastic chairs they had. He opened the door to the house and shouted.

“Mom, we want some juice! I’ve got some boys from the class here!”

His mother came to the door. She was wearing a white bikini, her skin was tanned, her long hair dark blonde. The whole upper part of her face was covered by a pair of large sunglasses.

“How nice,” she said. “I’ll see if we’ve got some juice for you.”

She went into the sitting room and disappeared through a door. There was an empty feeling about the room. It looked like ours, but there was less furniture, and there were no pictures on the walls. Two of the girls from our class walked past on the road below. John leaned over the balcony and shouted after them, saying that they looked like monkeys.

Geir and I laughed.

The girls didn’t take any notice and went on their way. Marianne, who was taller than all the boys, had a high forehead, high cheekbones, and long, blonde hair hanging down either side of her face, like curtains. Now and then, when she was angry or desperate, she frowned and had a very special look in her eyes, which I liked. She could also lose her temper and give as good as she got, unlike the other girls.

John’s mother came out with a tray holding three glasses and a jug of juice, put a glass in front of each of us, and filled it. The ice cubes floated around close together at the top of the red juice. I watched her as she went back in. She wasn’t good-looking, yet there was something about her that made you notice her and watch.

“Were you looking at my mom’s ass?” John said with a loud laugh.

I didn’t know what he meant. Why would I look at his mother’s behind? It was embarrassing as well, because he had said it so loudly that she too must have heard it.

“No, I wasn’t!” I said.

He laughed even more.

“Mom!” he shouted. “Come out here a minute!”

She came, still in her bikini.

“Karl Ove was looking at your ass!” he said.

She slapped his face.

John continued to laugh. I looked at Geir: he was staring into space and whistling. John’s mother went inside. I emptied the glass of juice in one go.

“Would you like to see my room?” John said.

We nodded and followed him through the dark sitting room to his room. There was a poster of a motorbike on one wall and a semi-naked woman, her skin orange from all the sun, on the other.

“It’s a Kawasaki 750,” he said. “Would you like some more juice?”

“Not for me,” I said. “I’ve got to be getting home for dinner.”

“Me too,” Geir said.

The dog snarled at us as we left. We walked down the hill without speaking. John waved to us from the veranda. Geir waved back.

Why would I have looked at John’s mother’s butt? Was there something about butts I hadn’t understood? Why did he shout that out at me? Why did he tell her that? Why did she slap him? And why on earth did he continue laughing afterward? How could you laugh when your mother has hit you? In fact, when anyone has hit you?

I had looked at his mother, and had a vague sense of guilt when I did so, because she was almost naked, but not at her butt, why would I do that?

It was the first time I had been to John’s house, and it would be the last. We played soccer and went swimming with John, but he was not someone whose house we went to. Everyone was a bit frightened of him because even though we said he acted tough but actually wasn’t, we all knew that in fact he was. He sought the company of boys in the classes above us, was the only one of us who got into fights, and was the only boy who would talk back to teachers and refuse to do what they said. He was tired in the mornings because he was allowed to go to bed whenever he liked, and when he talked about his home life in class, which we all did, it was always about some uncle staying with them. Neither he nor any of us questioned the status of these men, and why would we? John had more uncles than anyone we knew, that was all there was to say about that.

A few days later, a Saturday at the beginning of September, one of those early-autumn days the summer has stretched into and filled to saturation, when the fields are hot and dusty, the sky deep blue, and the first withered leaves whirl through the air almost in a way that is contrary to nature, as the wind is still so mild and all the faces you see are glistening with sweat, Geir and I were walking up through the estate. With us we had a packed lunch and a bottle of juice. We had planned to follow a route we had heard about, it forked left at the end of a long, flat stretch, more or less where the path to the Fina station began. To get there we had to cross land belonging to a house we knew very little about, except that the owner could get angry because one Sunday that spring a crowd of us had been playing soccer on the grass at the far end of his property, bordered on one side by rocks and a stream on the other, when, after half an hour, he had stormed out and started yelling and shaking his fists at us almost before he was within hearing distance, whereupon we all ran away at once. But now we weren’t going to play soccer, now we were only going to cross his fields, along the stream toward the path, which was actually a little track, strewn with small, flat, mostly white, stones. We came to a gate, which we pushed aside, and then we were in a part of the island where we had never been before. The track, lined by tall trees, was in shadow, and it was like walking through a tunnel. Further down, there was a curve in the path and white rock glistened in the sunshine. That was the cliff where the stones we were walking on must have come from. We stopped in front of it. It wasn’t craggy or semi-rotten, so to speak, the way some more porous rocks might be after being blasted, nor was it flaky or slightly rough, the way bare rock and several of the uncovered crags you could come across in the forest were, no, this cliff was completely smooth, almost like glass, and consisted of many slanting surfaces. Was this a vein of gemstones we had stumbled upon? It seemed like it. On the other hand, it was too close to the estate for that, there was absolutely no chance that we had discovered something no one else had, we knew that, but we still filled our knapsacks with fragments of rock. Then we continued down. The stream followed the track, higher up it ran through a deep gully, then fell, where the slope began, trickling downward through a series of small terraces. At one point, where the stream ran almost level with the track, we tried to build a dam. We carried rock after rock to it, covered the crevices between them with moss, and after perhaps half an hour we had managed to make the water flow across the track. Suddenly we heard shots. We exchanged glances. Grabbing our knapsacks, we set off at a run. Shots? Could it be hunters? After a few hundred meters the track leveled out. It lay in deep greenish-black shadow, produced by dense rows of tall, overhanging spruce trees. A hundred meters or so away we caught sight of a tarmac road, and we stopped, for the shots were clearer now, and they were coming from our left. We walked between the trees, across the soft cover of blueberry bushes and heather and moss, up a gentle slope, and in front of us, perhaps twenty meters below, bathed in sunshine, there was an enormous clearing full of garbage.