My Struggle: Book Three

Another world was revealed with the fire, and departed with it again. This was the world of air and water, earth and rock, sun and stars, the world of clouds and sky, all the old things that were always there and always had been, and which, for that reason, you didn’t think about. But the fire came, you saw it. And once you had seen it you couldn’t help seeing it everywhere, in all the fireplaces and wood-burning stoves, in all the factories and workshops, and in all the cars driving round the roads and in garages or outside houses in the evening, for fire burned there, too. Also cars were profoundly archaic. This immense antiquity actually resided in everything, from houses — made of brick or wood — to the water flowing through the pipes into and out of them, but since everything happens for the first time in every generation, and since this generation had broken with the previous one, this lay right at the back of our consciousness, if it was there at all, for in our heads we were not only modern 1970s people, our surroundings were also modern 1970s surroundings. And our feelings, those that swept through each and every one of us living there on these spring evenings, were modern feelings, with no other history than our own. And for those of us who were children, that meant no history. Everything was happening for the first time. We never considered the possibility that feelings were also old, perhaps not as old as water or the earth, but as old as humanity. Oh no, why would we? The feelings running through our breasts, which made us shout and scream, laugh and cry, were just part of who we were, more or less like fridges with a light that came on when the door was opened or houses with a doorbell that rang if it was pressed.

Did I really think it would last?

Yes, I did.

But it didn’t. One day toward the end of April I told Anne Lisbet we were going to go up to their place after school, and she said we couldn’t come.

“Why not?” I said.

“Someone else is coming over,” she said.

“Who?” I said, thinking perhaps it was an uncle or an aunt.

“It’s a secret,” she said, smiling her sly smile.

“Someone from the class?” I said. “Marianne or Sølvi or Unni?”

“It’s a secret,” she said. “You and Geir can’t come. Bye!”

I went over to Geir and told him what she had said. We decided to sneak over after school and spy on them. After dropping off our satchels at home we took the other way up, cut through the building site in the forest below, where the foundations for the new houses had already been built, crept through the trees, over the bog, and up to the cul-de-sac between their houses.

No one.

Were they indoors?

We couldn’t ring the bell, of course; we weren’t supposed to be there. We walked down. Geir had the brilliant idea of ringing the bell at Vemund’s house. He came out and stood in the doorway with that same stupid expression on his round face. Yes, they had gone down the hill some time ago.

Alone?

No, they were with two others.

Who?

‘Fraid he hadn’t seen.

Boys or girls?

Boys, he thought. At first he had assumed it was us, as we were here so much, but now he could see of course it must have been someone else!

He laughed. Geir laughed, too.

Who could it be?

And what were they doing with them?

“Come on, let’s follow them,” I said to Geir.

“But they didn’t want us with them,” Geir said. “Wouldn’t it be better to go to Vemund’s for a while?”

I stared at him, my eyes as wide as they could be.

“OK,” he said.

“Don’t say anything to the others,” I said to Vemund. He nodded, and then we walked across their property and down to the road.

Where could they be?

For all we knew, they could have gone all the way down to the shop. But something told me they would stay near the house. We joined the road below theirs. Four of them. They should be easy to see and hear.

“Should we go up?” I said, stopping at the crossroads where one road led up to Dag Magne’s and theirs.

Geir shrugged.

We walked up the gentle slope. Dag Magne’s house lay in a little dip. There was a garage adjacent to it, full of bikes and tools and car tires. Under the veranda there was a pile of wood.

Reaching the summit of the slope, we saw Dag Magne in a window looking out at us. To avoid giving the impression that we were on our way to see him we cut across their property without looking at him and down into the forest on the other side. Spring was in the air, the grass that had been white for so long was turning green, but there were no leaves on the trees, so we could see a long way into the young forest.

There. Directly below the slope to Solveig’s house I saw something blue and red moving.

“There they are,” Geir said.

We stopped and stood still.

They were laughing and chatting excitedly.

“Can you see who it is?” I whispered.

Geir shook his head.

We went closer. Hiding behind trees as far as we could. When we were about twenty meters away, we crouched down behind a rock.

I poked my head up and watched them.

It was Eivind and Geir B with them.

Eivind and Geir B.

Oh god, would you believe it! Eivind and Geir B, they were in our class! They were neighbors and best friends, and lived just along from Sverre, who lived just along from Siv, whose house we could see from our road.

What was the difference between them and us?

There was almost no difference!

They were best friends, we were best friends. Eivind was one of the best students in the class; I was one of the best students in the class. Geir B and Geir both just hung out with us two.

But Eivind was better looking than me. He had curly hair, high cheekbones, and narrow eyes. I had protruding teeth and a protruding bum. And he was stronger than me.

Now he was hanging from a dead tree trying to break it. Geir B was on the other side pushing as hard as he could. Anne Lisbet and Solveig stood watching.

They were showing off.

Oh flippin’ hell!

What should we do? Go over and act cool? Make a group of six?

I turned to Geir.

“What shall we do?” I whispered.

“I don’t know,” he whispered back. “Beat them up?”

“Ha ha,” I whispered. “They’re stronger than us.”

“We can’t stay here all day, anyway,” he whispered.

“Should we get out of here?”

“Yes, let’s go.”

As carefully as we had come, we crept off. At the crossroads, Geir asked if I wanted to go up to Vemund’s.

“No way!” I said.

“I’ll go then,” he said. “See you.”

“See you.”

After a few meters I turned and watched him. He had found a twig and was whacking one knee and then the other as he walked on the sidewalk alongside the wall. I cried almost all the way home and kept to the path past the soccer field so that no one would see.

This happened on a Friday. Early on the Saturday morning I ran up to Geir’s, but he was going to Arendal with his parents. Mom and Dad were cleaning the house and vacuuming, Yngve had caught the bus to Arendal with Steinar, so I was left to my own devices. I went into the bathroom and locked the door, rummaged through the dirty linen basket and found my ugly brown cords, which were filthy around the knees. I put them on, ran into my room, and searched for my disgusting yellow sweater, put it on, went downstairs unobserved and into the boiler room, where my rubber boots were, the ugliest footwear I possessed, carried them into the hall, and put them on. From the hook I grabbed the thin gray jacket I had been given last spring, too small now and pretty grubby, on top of which the zipper didn’t work, so I would have to walk with it undone. That suited me fine because the yellow sweater underneath would be visible then.

Dressed like this, in the ugliest clothes I could muster, I set off for the estate where Anne Lisbet lived. With eyes downcast all the while, I wanted people who saw me to realize how upset I was. And if I bumped into Anne Lisbet, which was the object of the exercise, I wanted her to see what she had done. The filthy, ugly clothes I was wearing, the drooping head, all of this was for her benefit, so that she would understand.

I didn’t want to ring, or else I would have to talk to her. No, the whole point was that she would happen to catch a glimpse of me and realize for herself how upset I was about what she had done.

When I reached Vemund’s house, and there was still no sign of her, I entered the road leading to her house, even though it could ruin my plan, because what was I actually coming here for, if not to meet them?

To meet Bjørn Helge perhaps?

He was a year younger, and the idea of playing with him was inconceivable. Although he played soccer and was quite grown-up for his age.

I stood for a moment at the cul-de-sac wondering whether to go up to Bjørn Helge’s. But just seeing the house where she lived upset me, so after a while I went down into the forest, past the newly blasted building sites. The construction machines and portacabins stood idle, staring ahead through vacant, black windows onto the road along the flat land. I looked for a while at the new parish hall that was being built, then at the field where we used to play soccer and the gate to the path leading to the garbage dump, which was a hundred meters further on. Slowly I began to descend. In the middle of the hill I walked past, hidden behind rocky outcrops and trees, lived Eivind and Geir B. We had been up there a couple of times to play, and in the winter before the snow fell we had taken them to Lake Tjenna and gone skating. Once we had also been to Geir B’s birthday party. And once to Sverre’s. That time I had lost the ten kroner that had been meant for him, the envelope was empty when I arrived dressed in my Sunday best, I began to cry, it wasn’t good, it wasn’t good at all, but there was a reason, ten kroner was a lot of money. His father fortunately went with me to find it, we walked back up the road I had come along, and there, bright blue on the black tarmac, was the ten-krone note. So they could no longer think I had tricked them, taken the money myself, and pretended I had lost it.

On a lawn in a garden by the road stood the boy with the long, black hair and the Indian features playing keepie-uppie with a soccer ball.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi,” I said.

“How many can you do?” he said.

“Four,” I said.

He laughed. “That’s nothing.”

“How many can you do then?”

“Did sixteen not long ago.”

“Show me,” I said.

He dropped the ball and placed his foot on top. With one swift flick he sent the ball into the air. One, two, three kick-ups and then the ball was too far from him and the last kick, a wild lunge with his leg, sent the ball into the hedge.

“That was four,” I said.

“It’s because you’re watching,” he said. “You make me think about what I’m doing. I’ll have another go. Will you wait?”

“Yes.”

This time he got the ball up to knee height, and then it was easy, the ball went from knee to knee five times before he lost control.

“Eight,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “But now I’ll show you.”

“I’ve got to run,” I said.

“OK,” he said.

His father, a fat man with glasses and thick, gray hair, was in the window watching us. I ran across the road, suddenly realized what clothes I was wearing, slowed down, and started to walk with my head bowed again.

When I came down the hill Dad was reversing the car out of the drive. He waved me over, leaned across the seat, and opened the door.

“Jump in,” he said. “We’re going to town.”

“But my clothes,” I said. “Can I change first?”

“Nonsense,” he said. “Jump in, now!”

I pulled the little lever at the side of the seat and was about to push it forward.

“Sit in the front,” he said.

“In the front?” I said.

This never happened.

“Yes,” he said. “We haven’t got all day! Come on now!”

I did as he said. After I had closed the door he put the car in gear and we set off down the hill.

“Your clothes are a bit dirty,” he said. “But we’re only going for a little trip. It won’t matter.”

I started fiddling with the seat belt and didn’t see a lot until it had clicked into position and we were on Tromøya Bridge.

“I felt like going to the fish market,” he said. “And the record shop. Do you want to join me?”

“Yes,” I said.

He steered with one hand on the wheel. The other was on the gearshift, a cigarette burning between his fingers. He drove fast as always.

For a long time we said nothing.

On the left was Vindholmen, and the shipyard with the huge cranes like monitor lizards and the fiberglass hall. The parking lot outside was just under half full. There was an enormous oil platform in the sound. A Condeep platform that was due to be towed out the following week.

After we had driven through the little tunnel and come into the town of Songe, he glanced at me.

“Have you been out with Geir today?” he said.

“No,” I said. “They’re in Arendal.”

“We might bump into them then.”

There was another silence.

It bothered me; he was in such a good mood and didn’t deserve to be met with silence. But what could I say?

After a while I thought of something.

“Where are you going to park?”

He shot me a sidelong glance.

“We’ll find somewhere,” he said.

“Maybe in Skytebanen? There’s always room on Saturdays.”

“That’s the last resort,” he said.

He found a parking spot in Tyholmen. He set off at a good clip between the tall timber houses, and I had to jog to keep up. I was ashamed of my clothes, I looked like such an idiot in them, and I kept a close eye on the people we passed to see if they were staring or laughing.

At the fish market Dad scanned the glass counters while waiting his turn.

“Let’s have some shrimp, shall we, eh, Karl Ove?” he said.

I nodded.

“And perhaps that piece of cod?”

I didn’t say anything.

He smiled and looked at me.

“I know you don’t like cod, but it’s good for you. When you grow up you’ll get a taste for it.”

“I doubt it,” I said.

I felt like chatting and telling stories, the way I did with Mom, but I couldn’t even get off the ground with him. However, I was glad he had brought me along and it was important he knew that.

When it was his turn and he pointed out what he wanted to the assistant, one of the other women behind the counter stared at him. Realizing that I was watching her, she lowered her gaze and continued to pack the fish on the cutting board in front of her. There was something about Dad, in the crowd by the counter, his pointing and talking, that made me think he wanted to dispel from his mind everything that existed around him. Not his appearance, not the face dominated by the beard, not the light-blue eyes, not the slightly curled lips, nor his tall, slim body, there was something else, something he “radiated.”

“There we are,” he said as he received his change and held the white bag of fish and shrimp in his hand. “Let’s go then!”

Outside, beneath the gray sky, with people packing all the sidewalks and pedestrian areas, as always on Saturdays, we walked around Pollen, the central bay area, heading for the record shop, I did a few skips beside him, to show him I was happy. When he looked at me I smiled. The wind coming off the sound ruffled his hair and he patted it back in place.

“Could you carry the bag for me for a bit?” he said inside Musikkhjørnet. I nodded and held it in my hand while he nimbly flicked through the records.

My parents used to play music when we had gone to bed, especially on Friday and Saturday evenings. Often it was the last thing I heard before I fell asleep. Every now and again he played records when he was alone in his study. Steinar had told me once that he had brought a Pink Floyd LP into the classroom and played it. He had said this with awe in his voice.

“Wouldn’t you like to choose a cassette?” Dad remarked, without taking his eyes off the records he had in front of him.

“But I don’t have a cassette recorder,” I said.

“You can borrow Yngve’s,” he said. “And then we’ll see you get one of your own for Christmas. It’s good to have a few cassettes lying around. No point having a recorder without any cassettes!”

Shyly I went over to the cassettes, which were not in boxes like the records but in racks on the wall. One was full of Elvis cassettes. I picked out one with the cover showing him in a leather suit, sitting with a guitar in his lap and smiling.

Dad bought two records, and when he placed them on the counter he told the assistant that I would point out a cassette I wanted. He came over to the rack with a little key in his hand. I indicated the Elvis cassette, he unlocked the glass door, took it out, and put it in its own little bag beside Dad’s big bag.

“Good choice,” Dad said as we walked toward the car. “You know Elvis was number one when I was growing up. Elvis the Pelvis, we called him. I still have some of his old records. They’re at Grandma and Grandad’s. Perhaps we should bring them back next time we go? So that you can listen to them?”

“Yes, that would be good,” I said. “Maybe Yngve would like it, too.”

“They must be worth a mint today,” he said. Stopped and took the keys from his pocket. I looked over at the massive oil tankers laid up in Galtesund, on the Tromøya side of the strait. They were so big that, set against the low hills, they seemed to come from another world.

Dad opened the door on my side.

“Can I sit in front on the way home, too?” I said.

“You can. But only today, OK?”

“OK,” I said.

He put the bags on the back seat and lit a cigarette before strapping himself in, which I had already done, and started the car. On the way home I sat partly looking at the cover of the cassette and partly out of the window. There was a line of traffic the entire length of Langbrygga, it started moving more freely in the bay around the headland, with Bai Radio and TV on one side and the fish auction hall, with its low, white-brick buildings and fluttering flags on the other. Across the sound and its choppy white-tipped waves lay Skilsø, a collection of timber houses situated along a hill, with a ferry terminal below, beyond which was Pusnes Mekaniske Verksted, marine suppliers, and then it was mostly forest along the coast of the island, while on the mainland, where the road wound up and down, there were houses and jetties all the way to the gas station, after which came Songe, Vindholmen, and the road that led to Tromøya Bridge. All ruffled and tousled, as it were, by the wind from the south. As we drove, the thought of Anne Lisbet crept up on me and darkened my mood. Perhaps it was the Condeep platform that had triggered it because I had been thinking of going with Geir and the girls up to Tromøya Bridge and watching it being towed out to sea. Now I wouldn’t. Or would I? She still hadn’t been to my room, which I imagined every night before going to sleep, that one day she would be sitting there, on my bed, surrounded by my things, and the thought always set off fireworks of joy in my brain, Anne Lisbet, here, next to me!

Why should Eivind suddenly visit her instead of me? We’d had so much fun!

Eivind had to go. We had to get back together.

But what could be done?

Beneath us Tromøya Sound stretched to the east and the west. A double-ender was coming in, approaching land, I saw a figure standing at the stern with the tiller in his hand.

Dad indicated left and slowed down, waited for two passing cars, and then he crossed the road and arrived at the last hill up toward our house. Leif Tore, Rolf, Geir Håkon, Trond, Big Geir, Geir, and Kent Arne were playing soccer in the road. They glanced at us as we passed them and parked in the drive.

I raised a hand to them as I got out.

“Gonna join in?” Kent Arne shouted.

I shook my head.

“I’ve got to eat.”

As we walked toward the house, out of sight of the boys in the road, Dad grabbed my hand.

“Let me have a look,” he said. “So the warts haven’t gone yet?”

“No,” I said.

He let go.

“Do you know how to get rid of them?”

“No.”

“I’ll tell you. I have an old method. Come into the kitchen afterward and I’ll tell you. You want to get rid of them, don’t you?”

“You bet.”

The first thing I did upstairs was to throw the trousers and the sweater in the dirty linen basket and put on the clothes I was wearing earlier. Then I propped the cassette, face up, against the wall on my desk so that I could see it wherever I was in the room and went to the kitchen, where Dad was sitting with a little bowl of shrimp in front of him. Rice pudding was cooking on the stove; Mom was in the living room watering the flowers.

“We can just fit this in before we eat,” Dad said. “It’s a kind of magic. My grandmother did it for me when I was small. And it worked. My hands were covered with warts. After a few days they were all gone.”

“What did she do?”

“You’ll see,” he said. He got up, opened the fridge, and took out something wrapped in white paper that he placed on the table and unfolded. There was bacon inside.

“First of all, I’m going to grease your fingers with the bacon. And then we’ll go into the garden and bury the bacon. Then, in a few days’ time, your warts will be gone.”

“Is that true?”

“Yes! That’s what’s so strange! But they do disappear. Just wait and see! Pass me your paws.”

I gave him one hand. He held it in his, took a rasher of bacon, and carefully rubbed it around all the fingers, the palm, and the back of my hand.

“Now the other one,” he said. I gave him my other hand and he took another rasher and did the same. “Have I greased everything now?”

I nodded.

“Let’s go outside then. Now you have to carry the bacon and bury it.”

I followed him downstairs, put my boots on without touching them with my hands — I had the rashers of bacon in them — and walked behind him — he was carrying a spade — around the house into the kitchen garden by the fence bordering the forest. He thrust the spade into the ground, pressed with his foot, and began to dig. After a few minutes he stopped.

“Drop the bacon in there then,” he said.

I did as he said, he filled in the hole, and we left.

“Can I wash my hands now?” I asked.

“Yes, of course,” he said. “The bacon we buried will remove the warts.”

“How long does it take?”

“We-ell … a week or two. It depends on how much you believe.”

After dinner I went into the road. No one was playing soccer any longer, but Geir Håkon, Kent Arne, and Leif Tore were still outside, they were running at the wall alongside the road to see how far they could climb before they fell. If they ran fast enough they managed three, perhaps four, steps before gravity took hold and dragged them down. If they got too far up they landed on their backs, so this was an activity that required caution. I was wary at the first attempt, my only attempt, in fact, because straight afterward Geir Håkon was too ambitious and fell in the ditch with a thump, knocking all the air out of his lungs. He filled them again and let out a loud, tremulous howl while fighting off tears, which purged us of any desire we had to continue.

Geir Håkon got to his feet, averted his face, and, with his back to us, recovered his regular breathing. When he turned, everyone could see he had been crying, but no one said a word.

Why not?

If it had been me, they would have said something.

“What shall we do now?” Kent Arne said.

At that moment Kleppe came down the hill on his bike. He was wobbling from side to side, dressed in a black jacket and black cap, his bloated red features sagging and drooping, a bit like the two B-Max bags he had hanging from either side of the handlebars. He was the father of Håvard, a boy living in the house furthest from ours, who was already seventeen, someone we admired but seldom saw. The father, it was rumored, was a boozer. When he turned into the road where we were I saw my chance. I ran beside him for a little way pretending to be looking inside the bags on the handlebars.

“He’s got beer bottles in the bags!” I shouted to the others and stopped.

Kleppe did not so much as send me a glance. But the others laughed.

The next day we sat in Geir’s bedroom and wrote a love letter to Anne Lisbet. His parents’ house was identical to ours, it had exactly the same rooms, facing in exactly the same directions, but it was still unendingly different, because for them functionality reigned supreme, chairs were above all else comfortable to sit in, not attractive to look at, and the vacuumed, almost mathematically scrupulous, cleanliness that characterized our rooms was utterly absent in their house, with tables and the floor strewn with whatever they happened to be using at that moment. In a way, their lifestyle was integrated into the house. I suppose ours was, too, it was just that ours was different. For Geir’s father, sole control of his tools was unthinkable, quite the contrary, part of the point of how he brought up Geir and Gro was to involve them as much as possible in whatever he was doing. They had a workbench downstairs, where they hammered and planed, glued and sanded, and if we felt like making a soap-box cart, for example, or a go-kart, as we called it, he was our first port of call. Their garden wasn’t beautiful or symmetrical as ours had become after all the hours Dad had spent in it, but more haphazard, created on the functionality principle whereby the compost heap occupied a large space, despite its unappealing exterior, and likewise the stark, rather weed-like potato plants growing in a big patch behind the house where we had a ruler-straight lawn and curved beds of rhododendrons.

Geir’s room was where mine was, his sister, Gro, had her room where Yngve’s was, and his parents had theirs between the two, exactly the same as in our house. Geir walked freely from room to room, ran up and down the stairs, and if he felt like a smørbrød he helped himself to whatever was in the fridge and made one. The same applied to me in his house, I could run between their rooms if I wanted or make myself something to eat with Geir. Often we sat in the living room listening to a Knutsen & Ludvigsen record he had, and laughed at it, or at him, because not only did he know all the lyrics, he could also perform them with the same tones and mannerisms. He was hopeless at soccer, hopeless at all ball games, there was something about his coordination that wasn’t quite right, there was something about his enthusiasm that wasn’t quite right, he never burned with a passion to play, as I often did, and playing soccer on a field for an entire afternoon but still yearning for more when darkness fell and everyone had left was completely alien to him. He wasn’t much good at school, either. He was poor at reading, poor with figures, could seldom reproduce anything he had read or heard in the lesson, though he coped well for all that, nothing depended on soccer or school as far as he was concerned. He was good at imitating people and had started to attract whole crowds around him at school. He liked that, laughter would egg him on to become more and more adventurous, as though it were a kind of fuel, but not even that was important to him. He seemed to have his own small worlds. Such as drawing. He could sit for a whole day in his room drawing. Or building model airplanes, which he often did. His laughter was raucous and it could turn hysterical. Perhaps more than anything else, he liked farting; at any rate there was a lot of experimentation and discussion about it.

Having an older sister was perhaps the reason he wasn’t drawn to the girls’ world in the same way that I was, not initially anyway. But the idea of a love letter excited him. I would write the letter and he would add a drawing, which showed a boy trampling on a heart and two boys standing by watching. Beneath it I wrote in a red felt pen, Eivind breaking our hearts. The letter itself consisted of five lines.

Dear Anne Lisbet

Our hearts are broken

Come back to us

Can you hear

We love you so much

We couldn’t hand this letter and the drawing to her. For all we knew, she might show them to people, perhaps even people at school, and then we would become a laughingstock. Instead we decided to show them to her. With the letter and drawing rolled up like a treaty in our hands, we walked to her house. Up along the rock from Fru Hjellen’s, into her garden, under her window. We threw some gravel up and she appeared. First we held the drawing and the letter up for her to see, then we tore them into pieces and stamped on them, and then we walked off. Now at least she knew how we felt. Now it was up to her.

Geir stopped at the crossroads.

“I’m going up to Vemund’s,” he said. “Coming?”

I shook my head. On the way down I thought I should go and visit a new friend, too. Dag Magne perhaps? But that would seem out of character, so I went home instead. Lay down on the bed reading until Yngve came in and asked if I wanted to play soccer with him in the road. I did. There was nothing I liked more than doing things with Yngve. Indoors we usually played games or listened to music together, while outdoors, we went our separate ways, him with his friends and me with mine, apart from during the holidays when we went swimming or played soccer or table tennis or badminton and in cases like now, when he was bored and had no one else to play with other than me.

For more than an hour we kicked a ball back and forth between us. For a while Yngve took shots at me in goal and I practiced goal kicks. Then we did some passing.

As if by a miracle my warts disappeared. They got smaller and smaller, and then, perhaps three weeks later, they had completely gone. My hands were so smooth it was hard to imagine they had ever been any different.

But Anne Lisbet didn’t come back. Whereas before she had squealed with pleasure whenever I had taken her cap or pulled her scarf or covered her eyes from behind, now she was irritated or even angry. I felt a stab of pain when I saw her and Solveig going to the bus accompanied by Eivind and Geir B, and every night before I went to sleep I imagined a situation in which I rescued them or somehow stood in a light that enabled her to see the error of her ways and return to me, unless, that is, I was imagining I was dead, and the immense sorrow that would overwhelm her, and the remorse when she realized that what she actually wanted — to be with me — was no longer possible, as I was lying in a coffin bedecked with wreaths and flowers. Death was generally a sweet thought at that time because it was not only Anne Lisbet who would regret what she had done but also Dad. Standing by my coffin, weeping for me, the prematurely departed. The whole estate would be there, and all the opinions they had held about me would have to be reevaluated because now I was gone and the person I had really been would appear in the utmost clarity for the first time. Yes, death was sweet and good and of great comfort. However, even if I was upset about Anne Lisbet, she was still there, I saw her every day at school, and as long as she was at school, there was hope, though precious little. The darkness that thinking about her could generate inside me was therefore of a different order from the other darkness that sometimes came over me, which had a depressing and burdening effect on everything, and which Geir also felt, it transpired. One evening we sat in his room and he asked me what was up with me.

“Nothing much,” I said.

“You’re so quiet!” he said.

“Oh, that,” I said. “I’m just fed up.”

“What about?”

“I don’t know. There’s no particular reason. I’m just fed up.”

“I feel like that sometimes, too,” he said.

“Do you?”

“Yes.”

“You’re just fed up for no particular reason?”

“Yes. I’m like that, too.”

“I didn’t realize,” I said. “Didn’t realize others could feel like that, too.”

“That’s what we’ll have to call it,” he said. “Like that. We can say it when we’re in that mood. ‘I’m like that today,’ we can say, and then the other person will understand right away.”

“That’s a good idea,” I said.

There were other new words being added as well, for example, the one Yngve taught me, the real name for fucking was “intercourse,” and this knowledge was so shocking that I took Geir to the top of the mountain before I dared tell him. “It’s called intercourse,” I told him, “but don’t say you heard it from me! You’ve got to promise me!” He promised. He was spending more and more time at Vemund’s house, and Vemund was coming down to see him now and then. I simply didn’t understand that and I told him so. Why do you spend time with Vemund? He’s fat and stupid and the worst in the class. He never really gave me a decent answer, just said he liked being there. Why? I said. What do you do that’s so fantastic? Well, Geir said, we sit and draw most of the time … Even in lessons it was Vemund he turned to when we had to work in pairs, instead of me, which he had done automatically before. I joined him a couple of times at Vemund’s, also to be close to Anne Lisbet, but I found what they did boring and when I said so and suggested something else they stuck together and wanted to continue what they were doing. That was fine by me, if he wanted to be with the class dunce, let him. Besides, we were still neighbors, it was still me he came to in the afternoons, and that spring we started going to soccer together. Almost all the kids in our road did. The training sessions were in Hove, and Mom and Geir’s mom took turns driving us there. Mom bought me a tracksuit when it started. It was my first, and I had great hopes before the day, imagining a sparkly-blue Adidas one, like Yngve’s, or even better, a Puma, or at least a Hummel or an Admiral. But the one she bought wasn’t a brand name. It was brown with white stripes, and even though I considered the color ugly, that wasn’t the worst thing about it. The worst was that the material wasn’t shiny but matte, a bit coarse, and it didn’t hang off your body, it clung to you, making my butt stick out even more than usual. When I put on the tracksuit that was all I could think about. Even when I ran onto the field and training began, it was all I could think about. My butt is sticking out like a balloon, I would think, running after the ball. My tracksuit is brown and ugly, I would think. I look like an idiot in it, I would think. An idiot, an idiot, an idiot.

However, I never said this to Mom. I pretended to be happy when I was given it because it had cost a lot of money, she had gone all over Arendal looking for it, and if I said I didn’t like it, she would first think I was ungrateful and then she would be sad that she had bought the wrong thing. And I didn’t want that. So I said, How nice. Great. Really. Just what I wanted.

The odd thing about the training sessions that spring was that there was such a big difference between the person I was inside and the person I was on the field. Inside myself I was full to the brim with thoughts and emotions about scoring and dribbling, about the terrible tracksuit I had, and my big butt and, by extension, my protruding teeth — whereas on the field, running around, I was, to all intents and purposes, completely invisible. There were so many kids on the field, an enormous melee of arms, legs, and heads following the ball like a swarm of mosquitoes, and the coaches didn’t know the names of more than a handful of them, the ones from their immediate neighborhood presumably, their sons, and their friends. The first time I stood out from the crowd was an evening when someone had kicked the ball into the forest behind the goal, where it was lost, and everyone was ordered over to look for it. Two, perhaps three, minutes of intensive searching followed. No one could find the ball. Then suddenly I saw it in front of me. Under a bush, it glowed, white and wonderful, in the dusk. I knew this was my opportunity, I knew I ought to shout, “Got it!” and carry it with me onto the field, so that the rightful credit fell to me, but I didn’t dare. Instead I just kicked it onto the field. “There’s the ball!” someone shouted. “Who found it?” someone else shouted. I emerged from the forest with all the others and said nothing, so it remained a mystery.

The second time was a similar situation, though even more flattering to me. I was running in a pack of players, maybe ten to twelve meters from the goal, the ball landed among us, everything was a vortex of limbs, and when the ball came free, a meter from me, I booted it as hard as I could and it rocketed in by the bottom of the post.

“Goal!” they roared.

“Who scored it?”

I said nothing, did nothing, stood stock-still.

“Who scored? No one?” the coach called. “No, OK! Let’s carry on!”

They might have thought it was an own goal and that was why no one owned up to the shot. Even though I didn’t dare say I had scored, it was my very first goal, and the thought of that burned inside me for the rest of the session, and in the car on the way home. The first thing I said when we ran to the car, where Mom was waiting, was that I had scored.

“I scored a goal!” I said.

“Oh, great!” Mom said.

When we returned home and I was sitting at the kitchen table to eat supper, I said it again.

“I scored today!”

“Was it a match?” Yngve said.

“No,” I said. “We haven’t had any matches yet. It was training.”

“Then it means nothing,” he said.

A couple of tears detached themselves and rolled down my cheeks. Dad looked at me with that stern, annoyed expression of his.

“For Christ’s sake, you can’t cry about THAT!” he said. “There must be SOMETHING you can take without blubbering!”

By then the tears were in full flow.

Crying so easily was a big problem. I cried every time anyone told me off or corrected me, or when I thought they would. Usually it was Dad. He only had to raise his voice to make me cry, even though I knew he hated me doing it. I couldn’t help myself. If he raised his voice, and he often did, I began to cry. I seldom cried because of Mom. Through the whole of my childhood it had only happened twice. Both times during the spring when I started soccer training. The first was the most disturbing. I had been down in the forest with a gang of kids, we were standing in a sort of circle, Yngve was there, Edmund from his class was there, as well as Dag Lothar, Steinar, Leif Tore, and Rolf. Tongues were going nineteen to the dozen. Gulls were screaming from Ubekilen, the sky was still light, although darkness was creeping across the hill and beneath the trees above the forest floor. The conversation turned to school and teachers, skipping classes, detentions, and having to report to school early. Then it moved to a boy in Yngve’s class who was extremely intelligent. I had just been listening, happy to be with the older boys, but there was a sudden lull in the conversation that I was able to fill.

“I’m the best in my class,” I said. “At least at reading and writing and natural and social sciences. And local history.”

Yngve stared at me.

“Don’t brag, Karl Ove,” he said.

“I’m not bragging. It’s true!” I said. “There is no doubt about it! I learned to read when I was five, before anyone else in the class. Now I can read fluently. Edmund, for example, is four years older than me, and he can’t read at all! You said that yourself! That means I’m smarter than him.”

“Stop that bragging right now,” Yngve said.

“But it’s true,” I said. “Isn’t it, Edmund? It’s true that you can’t read, isn’t it? That you have a special teacher? Your sister’s in my class. She can’t read, either. Or only a little. That’s not a lie, is it?”

Now something strange happened: Edmund had tears in his eyes. He wrenched himself away and set off up the slope.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Yngve hissed at me.

“But it’s true,” I said. “I’m the best in my class and he’s the worst.”

“Go home,” Yngve said. “Now. We don’t want you here with us.”

“It’s not up to you,” I said.

“Shut your mouth and go home!” he snapped, putting his hands on my shoulders and shoving me.

“OK, OK,” I said and set off up the hill. Crossed the road, slipped through the door, and took off my outdoor clothes. It was true what I had said, so why had he shoved me?

Tears were in my eyes as I lay on my bed and opened a book. It was unfair, what I had said was true, it was so unfair, so unfair.

Mom came home from work, brewed up some tea, and prepared a bite to eat. Yngve was still out, so we ate alone. She asked if I had been crying, I said yes, she asked why, I said Yngve had pushed me, she said she would take the matter up with him. I showed her a letter I had written to Grandad, she said he would really like it, gave me an envelope, I put the letter in, she wrote down the name and address and promised to post it the following day. When it was done I went for a rest. I heard Yngve come home while I was reading, the footsteps up the staircase and into the kitchen where Mom was. Now she would tell him he shouldn’t push me and tell me to shut up, I thought, lying there, and I imagined Yngve’s bowed head. Then came the sound of their voices and footsteps on the landing, and the door was opened.

I could see at once that Mom was angry and sat up.

“Is it true what Yngve has told me?” she said. “That you made a fool of Edmund because he can’t read?”

I nodded.

“Sort of,” I said.

“Don’t you understand that Edmund was upset? Don’t you understand that you mustn’t talk about other people in that way?”

She stepped forward until her face was in front of mine. Her eyes were narrow; her voice was loud and sharp. Yngve stood behind her, watching me.

“Karl Ove, don’t you?” she said.

“He cried,” Yngve said. “And it was you who made him cry. Do you understand?”

And suddenly I did understand. What Mom said cast an implacable light over what had happened. Edmund was the one she felt sorry for, even though he was four years older. He was upset and I was the one who had upset him.

I started crying as I had never done before.

Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, I sobbed. Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh.

Mom leaned over and stroked my cheek.

“Sorry, Mom,” I wept. “I’ll never do it again. Never, ever. I promise you with all my heart.”

The loud sobs and my shouted rather than spoken apologies pacified my mother but not Yngve; several days were to pass before the events receded into the past for him. And that despite Edmund not being central to his life, not one of his best friends, just someone who was in his class. I both understood and I didn’t.

The second time Mom made me cry was when we went out one evening, she wanted to buy something from the Fina station and preferred to walk there, and I, who loved having her to myself, joined her. I took a flashlight along, the path was dark, but before we got there I shone the flashlight through the darkened living-room window of a house we passed.

“Don’t do that!” Mom hissed. “There are people living there! You can’t invade their privacy like that!”

I shone the flashlight on the ground at once, and fought back tears for a few seconds, until I had to admit defeat and they streamed out amid great gasps and sobs.

“Was that so upsetting?” Mom said, looking at me. “I had to tell you. Surely you understand. What you did wasn’t very polite.”

I started crying not because I had been told off but because she had told me off.

But at least she didn’t get angry because I was crying.

Outside the house I hardly ever cried. Unless, of course, I hurt myself, everyone did, no one could restrain the tears then. The fact that no one was exactly beating a path to our door says more about other things, over which I had no control. I quarreled a lot with the others, especially Leif Tore, we disagreed on a wide range of matters, including who gave the orders, and even though we were similar in that neither of us would yield it was still him everyone wanted to play with and not me. As long as there were lots of us, such as when we built dens down in the spruce forest or played soccer on the field, it wasn’t noticeable, it was only when there were three or four of us that it became apparent. Nor was it a problem when I was with older boys, such as Dag Lothar, I just sort of adapted, followed his example without a protest, didn’t say a word, and it felt natural, after all he was a year older. Once I pointed out to Geir that Dag Lothar told me what to do, and I told Geir what to do and Geir told Vemund what to do. He went sullen and said I didn’t tell him what to do. Yes, I do, I said. I say what we’re going to do. But you don’t tell me what to do, Geir said. What difference does it make? I said. I said Dag Lothar told me what to do. And that you tell Vemund what to do. So what difference does it make if I tell you what to do? Well, it evidently did make a difference. Geir’s face went all stiff in the way it did, his body had that mutinous look and soon he was gone. Others got annoyed about even less. Like the time when Geir Håkon, Kent Arne, Leif Tore, and I were standing by the road one early afternoon after school, alone on the estate, and a huge truck drove past with a load of boulders from some blasting work they were doing further up.

“Did you see that?” I said. “It was a Mercedes!”

I wasn’t interested in cars, boats, or motorbikes, I knew nothing about them, but as all the others did, I had to make an effort now and then, just to show that I too was clued in.

“No, it wasn’t,” Geir Håkon said. “Mercedes doesn’t make trucks.”

“Didn’t you see the star then?” I said.

“Are you blind or what? That was not a Mercedes star,” he said.

“Yes, it was,” I said.

Geir Håkon snorted. For a moment his puffy cheeks were even fatter than usual.

“Anyway, Mercedes does make trucks. I’ve read about it in a book I have.”

“I’d like to see that book,” Geir Håkon said. “You’re lying through your teeth. You know nothing about trucks.”

“And I suppose you do, just because your Dad works on construction machines?” I said.

“Yes, as a matter of fact I do,” he said.

“Oooh,” I said sarcastically. “You think you know all about slalom skis, too, just because your Dad has bought you a pair. But you can’t slalom. You’re useless at skiing. So what are you doing with all that gear? If you can’t use it. Everyone says you’re spoiled. And you are. You get everything you point a finger at.”

“I do not,” he said. “You’re just jealous.”

“Why would I be jealous of you?” I said.

“Give it a rest, Karl Ove,” Kent Arne said.

Geir Håkon had not only averted his face now but his whole body.

“Why should I give it a rest, and not Geir Håkon?” I said.

“Because Geir Håkon’s right,” Kent Arne said. “It wasn’t a Mercedes. And he’s not the only person who has slalom skis. I’ve got some, too.”

“That’s just because your Dad’s dead,” I said. “That’s why your mother buys you all sorts of things.”

“That’s not why,” Kent Arne said. “It’s because she wants me to have them. And we can afford it.”

“But your mother works in a shop,” I said. “You don’t exactly earn a lot of money there.”

“Is being a teacher any better?” Leif Tore said, who wanted to put in his two cents now. “Don’t you think we’ve seen the wall at your place? It’s full of cracks and falling down because your father didn’t know it needed reinforcement. He only used cement! How stupid can you get?”

“And then he reckons he’s something special because he’s on the council,” Kent Arne said. “Salutes us with one finger and stuff when he drives past. So you can just shut up.”

“Why should I shut up?”

“Well, in fact, you don’t have to. You can stand here and rattle on as you usually do. We definitely don’t want to play with you.”

And then they ran off.

The disagreements never lasted long, a few hours later I was playing with them again, if I wanted, but there was something awry, I was finding myself in situations with my back against the wall more and more often, the others were moving away more and more often when I approached, even Geir, in fact, on occasion I realized they were actually hiding from me. On the estate when anyone said something about someone it was immediately repeated by others, and then it suddenly became something everyone said. About me it was said that I always knew best and I was always boasting. But I did know best, I knew much more than the others, so why should I pretend anything else? If I knew something, it was because that was how it was. And as far as boasting was concerned, everyone boasted, all the time. Dag Lothar, for example, whom everyone liked, didn’t he start every other sentence with “I don’t mean to brag but …” and go on to tell us about something good he had done or something good someone had said about him?

Yes, he did. So this wasn’t about what I did but about the person I was. Why otherwise would Rolf call me “Mr. Pro” when we played soccer in the road? I hadn’t done anything special, had I? You think you’re so good at soccer, don’t you, he said, eh, Mr. Pro? But all I had done was to say what was what, and why shouldn’t I if I went to a soccer camp and actually knew? We shouldn’t run around in a pack, we had to spread out and then pass the ball or dribble, not mill around the way we did.

But I also had the last word that spring. For when the lessons at school were reorganized to make preparations for the end-of-the-year celebrations and Frøken handed out booklets of the play that we were to perform for all the parents on the biggest day of the year, namely the last, who was allocated the principal role but me?

Not Leif Tore, not Geir Håkon, not Trond, and not Geir.

But me.

Me, me, me.

None of them would be capable of learning so many lines by heart, it was something only Eivind and I, and perhaps Sverre, of the boys, could do, and the fact that Frøken chose me in the end was by no means fortuitous.

I was so happy when she told me that I didn’t know what to do with myself.

Every day of the last week we rehearsed, every day I was the center of attention in the class, Anne Lisbet’s, too, and when the final day arrived, in radiant sunshine, all the parents came as well. Dressed in their finest outfits, they sat on chairs by the wall, took photos, were hushed when we enthusiastically said our lines, and burst into applause at the end.

Then we played recorders, sang, were presented with our grade books, Frøken wished us a good summer, and we ran out into the playground and down to the waiting cars.

Grade book in hand, I stood impatiently with Geir in front of Mom’s Beetle. She strolled along with Martha, they were chatting and laughing and didn’t see Geir and me until they were a few meters away.

Mom was wearing beige trousers and a rust-red sweater with the sleeves turned up over her forearms. Her hair hung a long way down her back. On her feet she wore a pair of light-brown sandals. She had just turned thirty-two, while Martha, who was wearing a brown dress, was two years older.

They were young women, but we didn’t know that.

Mom rummaged through her bag for the car key.

“You were all so good,” Martha said.

“Thank you,” I said.

Geir said nothing, just squinted into the sun.

“Oh, here it is,” Mom said at length. She unlocked the car and we got in, adults in the front, children in the back. They both lit up cigarettes. And then we drove home in the sunshine.

That evening I stood in the doorway watching Mom drying her hair in their bedroom. Occasionally, when Dad wasn’t there, I followed her round the house and talked her ears off. Now I was quiet, the whine of the hairdryer made it impossible to speak, instead I watched her as she bent her head and lifted her hair up with a brush in one hand to the dryer in the other. She sent me sporadic glances and smiled. I went into the room. On the little table by the wall there was a letter. I didn’t mean to pry, but even at some distance I could see the first name was Sissel, Mom’s name, and that the full name was longer than Mom’s, because between Sissel and Knausgård, which I recognized rather than read, there was a third name. I went closer. “Sissel Norunn Knausgård,” it said.

Norunn?

Who was that?

“Mom!” I said.

She lowered the hairdryer, as though that would make my voice clearer, and looked at me.

“Mom,” I said again. “What does that envelope say? What kind of name is that?”

She switched off the hairdryer.

“What did you say?”

“What kind of name is that!”

I nodded toward the envelope. She leaned over and took it.

“That’s my name.”

“But it says Norunn! Your name’s not Norunn!”

“Yes, it is. It’s my middle name. Sissel Norunn.”

“Has it always been your name?”

I felt my chest tighten with despair.

“Ye-es. All my life. Didn’t you know?”

“No! Why didn’t you say?”

Tears were running down my cheeks.

“But, darling,” Mom said, “I didn’t think it mattered. Sissel is the name I use. Norunn is just a middle name. A kind of extra name.”

I was shaken to the core. Not by the name in itself, but by the fact that I hadn’t known it. That she’d had a name I didn’t know.

Was there anything else I didn’t know?

A month later, in the middle of the long summer holiday, we drove up to Sørbøvåg by Åfjorden in Ytre Sogn, where my mother’s parents lived, and we stayed there for two weeks. I had been looking forward to this so much that on the morning we were due to leave and I was woken at the crack of dawn, there was a tinge of unreality about it. The trunk was packed to the gunnels, Mom and Dad sat at the front, Yngve and I in the back, we would be in the car all day and evening, and even the most familiar sight, the road down to the crossroads and up to Tromøya Bridge, seemed cast in a different light. Now it didn’t belong to the house and our existence in it, now it belonged to the great expedition we had set out on, which lent every crag and every rock, every islet and every skerry, excitement and anticipation.

When we came to the crossroads by the bridge I folded my hands as usual and said the short prayer that had worked every time so far:

Dear God,

Please don’t let us crash.

Amen

We drove across the mainland, through vast, monotonous, coniferous forests, past Evje with its long, low military barracks and pine plains, past Byglandsfjord and the campsite, up into Setesdalen, with its age-old enclosed fields and farms and the many silversmith signs, along a road that in some places almost seemed to go through people’s drives. Slowly buildings disappeared, it was as if the houses lost their hold on us and fell by the wayside one by one, like children fell off the enormous inner tube someone had roped to a boat earlier that summer. As the boat’s speed increased only the tube was left. I saw glinting sandbanks along the sides of the river, green-clad hills rising more and more steeply, the occasional enormous, bare mountainside, in every shade of gray, with some flame-red pine trees on top. I saw rapids and waterfalls, lakes and plains, everything bathed in the glow of the clear, bright sun, which, as we drove, had risen higher and higher in the sky. The road was narrow, and it gently and unobtrusively followed all the countryside’s dips and climbs, curves and bends, with trees like a wall on both sides in some places, towering over everything in others, in sudden and unexpected vantage points.

Sporadically, rest areas appeared during the journey, small graveled areas beside the road where families could sit and eat at rough-hewn timber tables, their cars next to them, generally with doors and trunks open, under the shade of trees, often close to a lake or a river. Everyone had a thermos on the table, many had a cooler bag, some also a Primus stove. “Aren’t we going to stop for a break soon?” I would ask after seeing such a rest area because breaks, alongside ferry crossings, belonged to the high points of the journey. We, too, had a cooler bag in the trunk; we, too, had a thermos, juice, and a little pile of plastic glasses, cups, and plates with us. “Don’t pester me,” Dad would say then, desperate to cover as many kilometers as he could in one go. That meant that, at the very least, we would have to drive to the end of Setesdalen, past Hovden and Haukeligrend and up Mount Haukeli, before the question of a break even came into consideration. Then we would have to find a suitable place because we would not take the first opportunity, oh no: if the stops were few and far between, then the location of the rest area had to be something special.

In the uplands the terrain was completely flat. There wasn’t a tree or a bush to be seen anywhere. The road continued dead straight. Some areas were littered with boulders strewn across the ground, covered with a kind of coating I thought might have been lichen or moss. Others were unbroken rock face, clean, scrubbed. Here and there water sparkled, snow glinted. Dad drove faster as there was such a clear view. At intervals, along the roadside, we saw tall poles, and Yngve said it was quite incredible, they were markers and so high because the snow in winter could reach up to the top. That was several meters!

The sun shone, the mountain plateau stretched in all directions, and we, we were racing ahead. One rest area after another was left in our wake until, without warning, Dad signaled, braked, and pulled in.

It was situated right next to a lake, oval and utterly black. Beyond it the ground rose gently while at the side there was a big snowdrift, bluish in color and hollow underneath where the water disappeared down an opening.

Around us it was perfectly still. After so many hours with the regular hum of the engine the silence felt artificial, as though it didn’t belong to the landscape but to us.

Dad opened the trunk, took out the cooler bag, and put it on the coarse wooden table, where Mom immediately began to unpack it as he fetched the thermos and the bag with the cups and plates. Yngve and I ran to the water, bent down, and dipped a hand. It was freezing cold!

“How about a swim here, boys?” Dad said.

“Oh no, it’s freezing!” I said.

“Sissies,” he said.

“But it’s freeezing!” I said.

“Yes, I’m sure it is. I was only joking. We haven’t time for a swim anyway.”

Yngve and I walked over to the snowdrift. It was so solid we couldn’t make snowballs from it, as we had hoped. And walking across the top, with the water underneath, wouldn’t be in the cards if Mom and Dad were there.

I broke off a clump and threw it into the lake, where it bobbed up and down like a mini iceberg. Now at least, when we were home, I could say we had thrown snowballs in the middle of July.

“Come and eat,” Mom called.

We sat down. We each had a packed lunch. Three slices of bread with boiled egg on top. In addition, there was a package of cookies on the table. In our glasses there was juice. The plastic gave it a different taste, but I liked it, it reminded me of the trips we used to have when we picked berries and went on camping holidays. We hadn’t had that many, there’d been basically only one, last summer when we went to Sweden with Grandma and Grandad. A car raced up from behind me, it was as though the sound vibrated as it increased in volume, then after a kind of boom it went quieter again until it was gone. Steam rose from Mom and Dad’s coffee. A car towing a trailer came from the other direction. I watched it as I finished my juice. It was creeping along. Then it signaled. As it pulled over into the rest area Dad turned.

“What’s that idiot doing?” he said. “There’s only one table here. Can’t he see?”

He turned back, put his coffee cup down, and took the fox-emblazoned pouch of tobacco from his breast pocket.

The car with the trailer stopped only a few meters from us. The door opened and a fat man dressed in a pair of beige shorts and a yellow T-shirt, with a brown bucket hat, emerged. He opened the door of the trailer and disappeared inside as a woman came out of the other car door. She was also fat and wore light-gray elasticized slacks with a crease and a woolen sweater. From her mouth hung an unlit cigarette, her hair was big and gray and yellow, and over her eyes she wore a pair of large glasses with tinted lenses. She went to stand by the lake, lit her cigarette, and gazed across as she smoked.

I started on the last slice of bread.

The man reemerged with a camping table in his hands. He erected it between the car and our table. Dad turned again.

“Haven’t they got any manners?” he said. “We’re sitting here eating and he’s intruding.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Mom said. “It’s beautiful here.”

“It was beautiful here,” Dad said. “Until that fathead came.”

“He can hear you,” Mom said.

The man put a clinking cooler bag down beside the table. The woman went over to him.

“They’re Germans,” Dad said. “They don’t understand. We can say whatever we like.”

He took a last swig from his cup and jumped to his feet.

“Well, we’d better be moving on.”

“The boys haven’t finished eating yet,” Mom said. “We’re not in such a hurry, are we?”

“In fact, we are,” Dad said. “Eat up, come on. Be quick about it.”

He flicked his half-smoked cigarette to the ground, took the glasses and cups to the lake, rinsed them and put them in the bag with the plates and thermos. Zipped up the top of the cooler bag and put everything in the trunk. The man and woman said something I didn’t understand as they stared up the gentle slope on the other side of the lake. He was pointing. Something was moving in the distance. Mom scrunched up the wax paper from the smørbrød, put them in a bag, and got up.

“Let’s go then,” she said. “We’ll have to eat the cookies the next time we stop.”

That was what I had feared.

Dad pushed the seat forward for me and I got in. After the fresh air outside, the smell of smoke inside hit you. Yngve clambered in through the other door. He wrinkled his nose.

“I don’t think the car-sickness tablets are working anymore,” he said.

“Say if you feel sick,” Mom said.

“It would help if you didn’t smoke all the time,” he said.

“That’s enough of that,” Dad said. “Don’t whine. We’re on holiday.”

Slowly the car pulled out onto the road. I glanced across, past the lake, up to the spot where the man had been pointing. There was something there. A gray patch in all the green, moving slowly. What on earth could it be?

I nudged Yngve and pointed through the window when I had his attention.

“What’s that?” I said.

“Reindeer maybe,” he said. “We saw them last year, too. Don’t you remember?”

“Oh yes,” I said. “But they were much closer. These ones are so small they’re like mice!”

Then we sank into the trancelike state car travel can induce. We crossed the rest of the mountain range, descended into Røldal, and drove on to Odda, the dirty little town at the end of Hardangerfjord, which despite its run-down, polluted appearance still shared some of the magic the far end of the mountains evoked, so dizzyingly and, at bottom, incomprehensibly different from the world we had left only a few hours earlier. While Sørland for the most part consisted of low crags and knolls, small bedraggled forests with a wide-ranging selection of trees standing side by side in countryside that was both wide open and restricted, and while on the island where I lived the tallest mountain was no more than 120 meters high, this countryside here, which you always stumbled on, was remarkable for its immense mountains, so dominating in their purity and simplicity that all other details of the surroundings were forced to adjust to them, they disappeared, utterly and completely: who cared about a birch tree, however tall, when it stood beneath one of these endlessly beautiful and eternally immutable mountains? The most conspicuous difference, however, was not the dimensions but the colors, which seemed deeper here — nowhere is the color green so deep as in Vestland — or so clear — even the sky, even its blue was deeper and clearer than the blue of the sky where I came from. The sides of the valley were green and cultivated, in the spring and early summer the blossoming fruit trees a Japanese white, the mountain peaks a hazy blue, snow-tipped here and there, and, oh, between the ridges, which rose in a long line on both sides, lay the fjord itself, greenish in some places, bluish in others, gleaming in the sun everywhere, as deep as the mountains were high.

To travel in a car through this landscape was always overwhelming because nothing of what you had seen so far prepared you for what was waiting here. And then, as we drove along the northern side of the fjord, all the other unfamiliar features appeared, like the electric fences, like the red barns, like the old, white timber houses, like the cows grazing, like the long rows of hay-drying racks scattered across the sides of the valley. Tractors, forage harvesters, manure cellars, long brown boots on doorsteps, shady farmyard trees, horses, shops in the basements of normal houses. Children selling wild cherries or strawberries from small stands with handwritten signs along the road. Life here was different from life at home: I could see a stooped old woman wearing a flowery dress and a neckerchief, you didn’t see that where I came from, or a stooped old man in blue overalls and a black peaked cap in some field or along some gravel track. But however much of an impression the places here made on me, the unusual names they bore played a part, of course — Tyssedal, Espe, Hovland, Sekse, Børve, Opedal, Ullensvang, Lofthus, and Kinsarvik, which because of the strange sound was my favorite: all right, vik was an inlet, but a kinsar, what on earth was that? — and however bright the colors and however different the myriad of details, an atmosphere of extravagance also hung over these regions, not over the people and their activities but over the space they moved in, it seemed much too big for them, perhaps it was the flood of sunlight that did it, perhaps the blueness of the vast sky or perhaps the range of mountains stretching up into it, or else it was simply the fact that we were only passing through, we didn’t stop anywhere, apart from at the bus shelter where Yngve staggered out to throw up, we didn’t know anyone here and were in no way connected with what we saw. For when we did finally reach Kinsarvik and left the car, which Dad had parked in the queue, this sense of extravagance was no longer noticeable; on the contrary, everything seemed nice and cozy here with the sound of car radios, doors being opened and closed, people stretching, walking to and fro, children quietly kicking a ball about next to the queue or doing what Yngve and I were doing, walking to the kiosk at the end to see whether there was anything we could spend some of our holiday money on.

An ice cream?

Oh yes.

Yngve bought an ice cream in a boat-shaped wafer, I bought a tub with a little red spatula and we ambled over to the quay with them in our hands. We sat on a brick wall and looked down at the water and the seaweed lying in wet, greasy clusters against the rocks. In the distance we saw the ferry arriving. The air smelled of salty water, seaweed, grass, and exhaust fumes, and the sun burned our faces.

“Are you still feeling sick?” I said.

He shook his head.

“Too bad we forgot the soccer ball,” he said. “But they’ve probably got one in Våjen.”

He said Våjen the way Grandma did.

“Yes,” I said, squinting into the sun. “Do you think we’ll get on this one?”

“Don’t know. Hope so.”

I dangled my legs. Loosened a big chunk with the spatula and put it in my mouth. It was so big and cold that I had to jiggle it to and fro with my tongue to prevent the icy texture from becoming intolerable. While doing this, I turned and glanced at our car. Dad was sitting with the door open and one leg on the ground, smoking. The sun glinted on his sunglasses. Mom was standing beside him with a basket of wild cherries on the roof and helping herself every now and then.

“What shall we do tomorrow?” I said.

“I’m going to be with Grandad in the cowshed anyway. He said he would teach me everything so that I can take over one day.”

“Do you think it’s possible to swim there now?”

“Are you out of your mind?” he said. “It’s as cold in the fjord as it was in the mountain lake.”

“Why is that?”

“It’s so far north of course!”

Some of the cars started their engines. The bow doors of the ferry opened. Yngve got up and walked toward the car. I ate my ice cream as quickly as possible and followed him.

After the ferry trip to Kvanndal the next high point of the journey was climbing Vikafjellet. The steep, narrow road wound upward, round and round, round and round, so steep in some places I was frightened the car would tip over and fall backward.

“There are probably quite a few tourists who get a bit of a shock here,” Dad said as we drove up and I sat trembling and peering down at the precipice beneath us. “They use the brakes to slow down, you see. That could be fatal.”

“What do we use?” I said.

“We use the gears,” he said.

We weren’t tourists, we knew what was what, we weren’t the motorists you saw behind clouds of steam issuing from an open hood at the roadside. But immediately afterward things almost did go wrong, because at the next hairpin bend we met a car towing a trailer, we were only a few meters away from a collision, but Dad jumped on the brakes and the other car did the same. Dad reversed down until the road was wide enough for both of us. The other driver waved to us as he passed.

“Did you know him, Dad?” I said.

In the mirror I saw he was smiling.

“No, I didn’t know him. He waved to thank me for making room for him.”

Then it was on to the next mountain, and down to the next fjord. The mountains here were as high as by Hardangerfjord, but they were gentler in a way, not as steep, and the fjord here was wider, at some junctures almost like a lake. What’s the problem? the Hardangerfjord mountains said. Take it easy, these mountains said. Everything’s hunky-dory.

“Shall we take turns sleeping?” Yngve said.

“Fine by me,” I said.

“Great,” he said. “Me first then?”

“OK,” I said. And he laid his head on my lap and closed his eyes. It was good to have him sleeping there, his head was nice and warm, and it was as though something was going on in two places at once, the countryside outside the window, which was changing constantly and I never took my eyes off it, and Yngve’s head asleep on my lap.

When we parked in the queue for the next ferry, he woke up. We stood on the deck and enjoyed the wind blowing into our faces. Half an hour later we were back in the car and it was my turn to rest my head on Yngve’s lap.

I woke up and knew we were getting close. The nearer we got to the sea, the lower the uplands and the denser the vegetation, but of course nowhere near Sørland’s scrubbed-clean terrain and gnarled qualities. None of the roads here had stuck in my mind; I looked out of the window without connecting what I saw with anything until I suddenly recognized Lihesten, the vertical drop that plunged several hundred meters on the other side of the fjord from my grandparents’ house. We’d had the mountain in front of us for ages, but it was unrecognizable from all other angles except the one we had now, as we approached it from the side. The excitement constricted my chest. We were there! Oh yes, there’s the waterfall! There’s the chapel! There’s the hotel! There’s the Salbu sign! And there’s the house! Grandma and Grandad’s house!

Dad slowed down and turned into the gravel path. It led first past the neighbor, and then through the gate, with the shed on the right, up the last steep incline to the front of the house. I opened the door almost before the car had stopped and jumped out. On the other side of the enclosed field I saw Grandad. He was standing by the beehives in his beekeeper outfit. White overalls, white hat with a long, white veil around his head. All his movements were slow, also the hand he raised to greet us. It was as if he was submerged beneath water or on an alien planet with different gravity. I lifted my hand and waved, then I ran into the house. Grandma was in the kitchen.

“We almost crashed into a car on Vikafjellet! We were climbing like this,” I said, depicting the gradient on the yellow vinyl tablecloth with my finger while she smiled at me with her warm, dark eyes.

“And then a car with a trailer came. Like this …”

“I’m glad you got here safe and sound,” she said. Mom came in through the other door. In the hall I could hear what must have been Dad carrying in all the baggage. Where was Yngve? Had he gone over to Grandad? With all the bees buzzing around?

I dashed out onto the drive. Nope. Yngve was helping Dad to unload the car. Grandad was still there in his white spacesuit. With infinite patience he lifted some frames from the hive. The sun had gone from the farm, but was shining on the spruces growing on the slope behind the pond. A light wind blew past the house, rustling the treetops above me. Kjartan walked over from the cowshed. He was wearing overalls and boots. Longish black hair, square glasses.

“Good evening,” he said, stopping by the car.

“Oh, hi, Kjartan,” Dad said.

“Good trip?” Kjartan said.

“Yes, it was fine.”

Kjartan was ten years younger than Mom, so in his early twenties that summer. There was something stern, almost angry about him, and even though I had never experienced his anger, I was still afraid of him. He was the only one of the children to live at home: Kjellaug lived in Kristiansand with her husband, Magne, and their two children, Jon Olav and Ann Kristin, who would soon be coming here, while the next youngest, Ingunn, was a student and lived in Olso with Mård and their two-year-old daughter, Yngvild. Kjartan and Grandma quarreled a lot, he was not as she would have liked her only son to be, I gathered. The idea was that he would take over the smallholding when the time came. Now he was training to become a pipe fitter on ships and planning to work at a yard somewhere in their county of Hordaland. But the most important thing to know about Kjartan, which was frequently mentioned when talk turned to him, was that he was a communist. A fervent communist. When he discussed politics with Mom and Dad, which he was wont to do on their visits, for some reason their conversations always ended up there, and his somewhat shy, evasive eyes changed and became fiery. At home when the subject of Kjartan came up, Dad tended to laugh at him, mostly to tease Mom, who was not exactly a communist, but who nonetheless disagreed with Dad on most matters concerning politics. Dad was a teacher and voted for Venstre, a center party.

“I’d better take this off and have a shower so I don’t smell of cowshed, now that we have such refined company,” Kjartan said. “I think there is food for you in there.”

Even outside I could hear the stairs creak when he went up to the bathroom on the first floor. How the stairs creaked here!

And indeed a table had been set for us in the living room. There was a pile of still-hot pancakes and a dish of griddle cakes, as well as bread and various spreads. Mom shuttled to and fro between living room and kitchen. Although she had left home when she was sixteen, married Dad, given birth to Yngve when she was twenty, and lived with her own family ever since, she merged into the household effortlessly as soon as she arrived. Even the way she spoke changed and became much more like the way her parents spoke. With Dad it was the opposite: he was always lost in the background. When he was talking to Grandad, who loved chatting and had a story for every occasion, often from his own experience, there was something formal about Dad that made him so alien but which I still recognized, it was the manner he adopted when he spoke to other parents and colleagues. Grandad wasn’t polite in that way, he was completely and utterly himself, so why would Dad sit there nodding and saying, I see, oh yes, really, mhm, mhm? Mom was different here, too, she laughed and chatted more, and these changes amounted to a plus for us, in fact, an enormous plus: Dad was in the background, Mom was livelier, and there were no house rules, and unlike where we came from, here we could do as we liked. If one of us knocked over a glass of milk it wasn’t a catastrophe, Grandma and Grandad understood that accidents can happen, we could even put our feet on the table here, well, if Dad wasn’t in the room at that point, of course, and we could sit on the brown sofa with orange and beige stripes, as slumped as we wanted, even lie on it if we felt like it. And all the work they did, we did, too, on our own minor scale. We were not unwanted. On the contrary, it was expected of us that we would help as far as we could. Rake the mown hay on the field, lay it on the drying rack, collect the eggs, shovel muck into the cellar, set the table for meals, and pick red currants, black currants, and gooseberries when they were ripe. The doors here were open and people came in without even knocking, they just shouted from the hallway and were suddenly in the living room, made themselves at home and drank coffee with Grandad, who didn’t bat an eyelid, just started chatting as though their conversation had only been interrupted for a few seconds. These people who came were strange, one in particular, a fat-bellied, sloppily dressed, and slightly malodorous man with a high voice who used to wobble up the hill on his moped in the evening. His accent was so broad I barely understood half of what he said. Grandad’s face lit up when he came, but whether that was because he liked him all that much was hard to say as his face lit up whenever anyone came. I was sure he liked us although I doubted whether the thought had ever struck him; we existed, that was enough for him. For Grandma it must have been different, at least it appeared so from the interest she showed when we talked.

Mom stood staring at the table, probably to check that everything was there. Grandma took the coffee pot off the stove in the kitchen and the steadily increasing noise of the whistle died with a little sigh. Dad deposited the luggage in the room above our heads. Grandad came into the hall after hanging up his beekeeper outfit in the basement.

“The Norwegian population is going through a growth spurt, I see!” he said when he saw us. He came over and patted me on the head as though I were some kind of dog. Then he patted Yngve’s head and sat down as Grandma came in from the kitchen carrying the coffee pot, and Dad and Kjartan both came down the stairs.

Grandad was small, his face was round, and apart from a thin wreath of white hair around his head he was bald. The corners of his mouth were often stained with tobacco juice. The eyes behind his glasses were sharp, but were totally transformed once took them off. Then they were like two small children who had just woken up.

“Looks like I came at just the right moment,” he said, putting a slice of bread on his plate.

“We heard you in the basement,” Mom said. “Nothing to do with luck.”

She turned to me.

“Do you remember the time we heard you in the hall ten minutes before you arrived?”

I nodded. Dad and Kjartan sat down on opposite sides of the table. Grandma went to pour coffee into the cups.

Grandad, who was spreading butter over the bread with his knife, looked up.

“You heard him before he came?”

“Yes, strange, isn’t it?” Mom said.

“That’s a vardøger, that is. A kind of guardian angel,” Grandad said. “It means you’ll have a long life.”

“Is that what it means?” Mom said with a laugh.

“Yes,” Grandad said.

“Surely you don’t believe that, do you?” Dad said.

“Did you two hear him when he wasn’t there?” Grandad said. “That’s what’s remarkable. Is it so remarkable that it has some significance?”

“Hm,” Kjartan said. “You’ve become superstitious in your old age, Johannes.”

I looked at Grandma. Her hands were trembling, and as she poured, the pot was moving up and down so much it was only with the greatest effort of will that she managed to direct the jet from the spout into the cup without spilling the coffee. Mom looked at her, too, and was on the point of getting up, presumably to take over, only to lean back and reach for the bread basket instead. It was both painful to watch Grandma because she was so slow — in fact some coffee did end up in a saucer — and also unheard of that she, an adult, was unable to manage such a simple task as pouring coffee without spilling it, and the strangeness of seeing someone with hands shaking nonstop, almost with a mind of their own, meant that I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

Mom placed her hand on mine.

“Wouldn’t you like a griddle cake?” she said.

I nodded. She reached for one and put it on my plate. I spread a thick layer of butter on it and sprinkled sugar. Mom lifted the jug of milk and filled my glass. The milk came straight from the cowshed; it was warm and yellowish with tiny lumps floating round. I looked at Mom. Why had she filled my glass? I couldn’t drink that milk, it was disgusting, it had come straight from the cow, and not just any cow but one standing outside and pissing and shitting.

I ate the griddle cake and took another while Dad asked Grandad some questions, which he answered in his own time. Kjartan sighed louder than he would have if he’d been alone. Either he had heard all this before or he didn’t like what he heard.

“We were thinking of going up Lihesten this year,” Dad said.

“Is that so?” Grandad said. “Well, it’s a good idea. Yes, it’s nice there. You can see over seven parishes from the top.”

“We’re looking forward to it,” Dad said while Mom and Grandma were talking about an oak and a holly tree they had brought from Tromøya the previous year that they were now growing here.

I decided I would go and have a look at them.

Dad’s glare stopped me in my tracks.

“Aren’t you going to drink your milk, Karl Ove?” he said. “It’s straight from the cow, you know. You won’t get better milk anywhere.”

“I know,” I said.

As I didn’t make a move to drink it, he fastened his eyes onto mine.

“Drink the milk, boy,” he said.

“But it’s warm,” I said. “And there are lumps in it.”

“Now you’re offending your grandparents,” Dad said. “You have to eat and drink whatever you’re served. And that’s that.”

“The boy’s used to pasteurized milk,” Kjartan said. “From a carton in the fridge. They sell it in the shop here, too. Of course he can have some of that! We can buy it tomorrow. He’s not used to milk straight from the cow.”

“That seems unnecessary,” Dad said. “The milk here is just as good. If not better. What nonsense to buy milk just because he’s pampered.”

“I like pasteurized milk best myself,” Kjartan said. “I agree wholeheartedly with your son.”

“OK,” Dad said. “Just so long as you’re not taking the side of the underdog as usual. But this is more about manners.”

Kjartan smiled and studied the table. I put the glass of milk to my mouth, stopped breathing through my nose, tried to think about something other than the white lumps, and drank it all in four long swigs.

“See,” Dad said. “It was good, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said.

After the meal we asked if we were allowed to go for a little walk even though it was late. We were. On with our shoes, into the yard, and down the road to the barn. The dusk was tenuous and hung like a spider’s web all around us. The shapes were intact; the colors were absent or had gone gray. Yngve undid the catch of the cowshed door and pushed. The door was stuck and he had to put all his weight behind it to open up. Inside it was dark. Dim light from the dirty peepholes above the stalls made it possible for us to glimpse contours. The cows, lying in their stalls, stirred when they heard us. One turned its head.

“It’s OK, cows.”

It was nice and warm inside. The small calf, which was isolated in a kind of pen on the other side of the muck channel, was stamping around. We leaned over toward it. It looked at us with frightened eyes. Yngve patted it.

“Don’t be scared, little calf,” he said.

It wasn’t only the door that was overgrown; all the walls and the floor and the windows were as well, as though the room had sunk at some point and was now submerged beneath water.

Yngve opened the barn door. We climbed into the hay that was lying there, clambered up onto the barn bridge, and opened the door to the small henhouse. The floor was covered with sawdust and feathers. The chickens sat motionless on the roosts staring straight ahead.

“Doesn’t look like there are any eggs,” Yngve said. “Want to go up and have a look at the minks too?”

I nodded. When he pushed the tall barn door to, a white cat shot past us like an arrow and disappeared under the bridge. We went down and called it, knowing it was hiding somewhere, and finally we gave up and headed for the three mink huts that stood to the far west of the property, right by the forest. The acrid smell that met us as we approached was almost unbearable and I started breathing through my mouth.

There was a rustling and a banging in all the cages as we stopped in front of them.

How unpleasant it was.

It was darker here by the forest. The minks’ claws clinked against the metal of the cages as they paced back and forth. We went up close to one. The black animal shrank as far back as it could, turned its head, and hissed at us. Its teeth shone. Its eyes were black like black stones and when, twenty minutes later, I was lying on the bed in our room on the first floor, alongside Yngve, who had his head on the pillow at the other end and was reading a soccer magazine, it was them I was thinking of. Of them moving back and forth in the cages all night while we slept. Suddenly voices were raised in the living room beneath us. It was Mom and Dad talking with Kjartan. Raised voices didn’t mean anything worrying; on the contrary, there was something reassuring about them. They wanted something, and they wanted it so much it couldn’t be whispered or mumbled, it had to be shouted.

The next morning Grandad came in and asked if we would like to help pull up the fishing nets. We did, and a few minutes later we followed him down the path to the fjord, carrying an empty, white tub between us.

The boat was moored to a red float in the water. The mist was so dense it seemed to be hovering in the air. Grandad pulled the boat ashore, we jumped on board, and after he had shoved off with an oar against the bottom Yngve sat down on the thwart by the oarlocks and began to row. Grandad sat at the stern directing him whenever necessary; I sat in the bow looking into the mist. Lihesten, on the other side, was almost completely lost from view, visible only as something hard and gray in all the moist haze.

“It’s very unusual for there to be mist here,” Grandad said. “And especially at this time of year.”

“Have you been to the top of Lihesten, Grandad?” Yngve said.

“Oh yes, you bet I have,” Grandad said. “Many times. But it’s a few years now since the last time.”

He sat forward with his arms over his thighs.

“Once I went there as part of a rescue mission. It was Norway’s first real plane crash. Have you heard about it?”

“No,” Yngve said.

“It was misty, like now. The plane flew straight into Lihesten. We heard the bang, you see. We didn’t know what it was, though. But then the plane was reported missing, and the local police chief needed men to go up with him. So I went.”

“Did you find it?” I said.

“Yes, but there were no survivors. I saw the captain’s head. That’s a sight I’ll never forget. His hair was perfect! Combed back. Not a strand out of place. No, I’ll never forget that.”

“Where did it crash? Into the wall of the mountain?” Yngve said.

“No, we can’t see it from here. But there’s a pinnacle on the plateau. It crashed there. We had to climb up to the wreck. Bit to port!”

Yngve’s eyes narrowed, presumably trying to work out which side port was.

“That’s it, yes,” Grandad said. “You’re a good oarsman, Yngve! Well, it was a big affair at that time. It was in all the papers. And there was lots of talk about it on the radio.”

In front of us, the float above the net shone red through all the gray.

“Grab it, will you, Karl Ove!” Grandad said. I leaned over with a pounding heart and caught it in both hands. But it was slippery and I lost hold at once.

“Scoop your hands underneath,” Grandad said. “Let’s try again! Row back a bit. That’s it, yes.”

This time I managed to bring it on board. Yngve drew in the oars. Grandad began to drag in the net. The fish were revealed first as small, twinkling lights deep in the black depths, then they grew in size and clarity until a moment later they were dragged wriggling over the side. So shiny and clean with their gray-brown or bluish markings on their spines, their yellow eyes, pale red mouths, and razor-sharp fins and tails. I held one of them in my hands, where it writhed with such force it was hard to imagine it could be the fish I saw lying still on the boards at my feet the very next moment.

Grandad patiently extricated them from the mesh of the net and threw them into the tub. We had twenty. Mostly saithe but also the odd cod and pollock, plus two mackerel.

When Yngve began to row back I suddenly heard a simultaneous low whoosh and splash, not unlike the noise yachts make when they travel at speed, and I turned my head. Perhaps thirty meters away I could see some dark dorsal fins moving through the water.

I was scared.

“What’s that?” Yngve said, raising the oars. “Over there.”

“Where?” Grandad said. “Oh! Porpoises. They’ve been here a few days now. It’s quite rare, but not that unusual. Have a good look at them. Seeing porpoises is a good omen, you know.”

“Is it?” I said.

“Oh yes,” he said.

Grandad gutted the fish over the sink in the basement, which was more like a grotto than a room in the house. The concrete floor was often wet and slippery, the ceiling was so low that Dad couldn’t stand up straight — not a problem for Grandad as he was quite short — and the shelves on the walls were crammed with all sorts of objects and tools that had accumulated over their many years there. When he had finished, and the fish that only a few hours earlier had been alive and wriggling were in the freezer wrapped in plastic, we helped him to clean the net, standing in the rain on the grass by the shed, until Mom called us in for dinner.

After eating they usually had a nap. Dad, restless already after just one day, beckoned to me from the hall.

“Join me for a walk,” he said.

I put on my boots and waterproof jacket and followed him across the fields. He walked with long strides and appeared to assimilate the countryside in long panoramic sweeps of his eyes. The mist hung over the spruce forest in front of us. The water in the lake shone black between the tree trunks. A tractor came down the road on the other side.

“Are you enjoying yourself here?” Dad said.

“Ye-es,” I said, unsure where this was leading.

He stopped.

“Could you imagine living here?”

“Ye-es,” I said.

“We might take over the farm here one day. Would you like that?”

“Living here?”

“Yes. When the time comes it’s a real possibility.”

I thought Kjartan would take over the farm, but I didn’t say so, it would have ruined a wonderful moment for him.

“Come on, let’s have a look around,” he said, striding out again.

Live there?

Oh, that was certainly a novel idea. It was impossible to visualize Dad there, in that house, surrounded by those things. Dad drying hay? Dad mowing hay and putting it in the silo? Dad spreading muck on the fields? Dad sitting in his chair in the living room listening to the weather forecast?

Even though history didn’t exist for me when I went there as a child and everything belonged to the moment, I could still feel its presence. Grandad had lived there all his life, and in some way or other that influenced the image I had of him. But if there was one image or notion that embodied Grandad, it was not everything he had done in his life, of that I knew very little, and the little I did know, I had nothing to compare it with, no, the one thing that embodied Grandad was the little two-stroke tractor he used for a multitude of purposes. That tractor was the very essence of Grandad. It was red and a bit rusty, needed to be kick-started, and had a small gear stick, a column with a black ball on top, on one hand lever, while the accelerator was on the other. He used it for mowing, walking behind it while an enormous scissor-like attachment on the front cut down the grass in its path. And he used it to transport heavy items; then he put a trailer on the back with a green seat, from which he steered what all of a sudden had become a truck-like vehicle. There was little I rated higher than being with him then, sitting on the back and chugging toward the two shops in Vågen, for example, where he would collect cans of formic acid or sacks of feed or artificial manure. The vehicle was so slow you could walk beside it, but that didn’t matter, speed wasn’t of any consequence, all the rest was: the rattle of the engine, the exhaust fumes that smelled so good and wafted across the road as we drove, the feeling of freedom in the trailer, being able to hang over one side, then the other, all the things there were to see on the journey, including Grandad’s slight figure and his peaked cap in front of me, and getting out at the shop, where the Bergen boat docked, and being able to walk around, often with an ice cream in our hands while Grandad did whatever he had to do.

They also had a handcart with which they used to transport heavy items over short distances, such as the milk canisters that were trundled down to the milk ramp by the road for collection. The cart was made of metal and the wheels were as big as those on a bike. Other things no one else had at home were: scythes, the three big ones with wooden shafts and the small ones that you had to bend down to use, and the big whetstone outside the shed, where they were sharpened; the pitchforks with their three long, thin prongs. The flat, heavy shovels used to toss cow muck into the cellar, which was beneath a hatch in the floor of the cowshed. The electric fence, which Yngve tricked me into pissing on for the first and last time. The hay racks, these strange, extended, timid creatures standing outside all farms waiting for alms, unless you saw them from a distance or in the darkness, in which case they looked more like military units lined up ready for battle. The large, round griddle Grandma cooked her cakes on. The black waffle maker. The filters and the flat metal filtering devices used for the milk, and even the milk canisters with their plump bodies and short, headless necks, the way they stopped their flustered mumbling and chattering when filled to the top with milk and how they were then placed on the cart and trundled down to the ramp, side by side, suddenly solemn and dignified, that is, if one of them didn’t gaily rock to and fro whenever the wheel hit a pothole in the road. And, oh, Grandad standing by the cowshed and singing the cows inside every afternoon.

“Come by here, my cows!” he sang. “Kum by ya! Kum by ya!”

How could I tell my friends at home about all this when they asked where we had been and what we had done over the holidays? It was impossible, and it was supposed to be impossible, there was a Chinese wall between the two worlds, both in my mind and the world outside.

In the two weeks we were there the unfamiliar became familiar and homely, while home, after a long day of traveling by car, had become unfamiliar, or had been lowered into the pool of unfamiliarity, for as we drove down the hill after Tromøya Bridge and turned into the last stretch up to the house, brown with red frames, surrounded by a lawn parched and scorched, the dark windows staring at us through sorrowful eyes, it was as if I both recognized it yet didn’t, because although my gaze was accustomed to all it saw, it put up some resistance, a bit like a pair of new sneakers can, lying there, gleaming in their un-used-ness and, as it were, refusing to adapt to their latest surroundings, insisting on their distinctive character, until the resistance has been worn down over a few weeks and they are just one pair among many. Some of this feeling of newness was conferred on the estate when we arrived, it had been stirred up, so to speak, and wasn’t to settle for quite a few days.

Dad parked and switched off the engine. A little white kitten lay sleeping on Mom’s lap. It had meowed and squealed in the cage all morning, and when it was finally let out it had run around the back seat and on the ledge under the rear window until Mom caught it and at last it fell asleep and was quiet. It had completely red eyes, and although its coat was big and furry, underneath it was tiny. Especially the head, I thought as I was petting it and felt the small cranium in my hand, but also the neck. It was so thin.

“Where’s Whitie going to live?” I said.

“Oh, what a name,” Dad said, opening the door and getting out.

“We’ll have to give it a room in the cellar,” Mom said, lifting the kitten to her bosom with one hand and opening the door with the other.

Dad pulled the seat forward and I stepped out onto the gravel, my legs like jelly. Yngve got out on the opposite side, and together we followed Dad to the house. He unlocked the door and went into the laundry room, where he opened the hatch and poked the hose through. He screwed the other end to the tap, and then he walked out with the sprinkler in his hand while Mom, Yngve, and I went into the cellar storeroom, where the kitten, who was still sleeping, was given a basket with a blanket in it, a bowl of water, and a bowl containing some pieces of sausage from the fridge, and then we put a low, plastic tray of sand in the corner.

“Now we’ll close all the doors except this one,” Mom said. “So he can’t run away when he wakes up.”

While the thin jets of water from the sprinkler rotated around the lawn and Dad carried in the baggage from the car below us, Yngve, Mom, and I sat having supper in the kitchen. It was Sunday, all the shops were closed, and so Mom had brought a loaf and some butter, meat, and cheese from Sørbøvåg. We drank tea; I had it with milk and three spoonfuls of sugar.

Suddenly we heard the kitten squeaking from the hallway. We got up, all of us, and went out. He was at the top of the stairs. On seeing us, he ran down again. We followed. Mom called him. He shot across the floor, darted past us, bounded up the stairs and into the living room, where he hid. For several minutes we went around searching and calling until Yngve found him. He was in the narrow gap between the bookcase and the wall, impossible to reach unless you moved the whole bookcase.

Mom went downstairs to fetch the bowls of food and water, put them beside the bookcase, and said he would come out when he wanted them. When I went in next morning he still hadn’t moved. In the evening he came out and ate something, then he disappeared again. He stayed there for three days. But when he did eventually come out it was for good. He was still a bit jittery at first, but he got more and more used to us and after a week he was running around and playing and jumping onto our laps and purred whenever we stroked him. Every evening he stood in front of the TV smacking whatever appeared on the screen with his paw. He was particularly interested in soccer. He ignored all the players, he only had eyes for the ball, which he watched with the utmost attention. Now and then he padded behind the TV set to look for it.

When school started again, he began to cough. It was comical, it sounded as if there were a person downstairs in the cellar. Slowly and imperceptibly, the mornings became cooler until one day there was a thin, glassy layer of ice on the puddles in the road, which had melted after a few hours, but nevertheless autumn was at the door. The leaves on the trees straddling the hill above our house turned yellow and red and spiraled down from the branches when the wind gusted in. Mom was unwell and in bed when I left for school in the morning and returned some hours later. I went in to talk to her and she could barely raise her head. At the same time Whitie fell ill; he lay in his basket coughing. At school I kept wondering how he was and on my return the first thing I did was to go into the cellar storeroom. If only he would get well soon! But the opposite happened, he got worse and, one day when I ran in to see him, he wasn’t in his basket but in the corner, on the concrete floor, writhing to and fro and wheezing. I placed my hand on him, but he kept on writhing.

“Mom! Mom!” I shouted. “He’s dying! He’s dying!”

I flew up the stairs and wrenched open the door to her room. She turned sleepily to me with a smile.

“You’ve got to call for a vet!” I shouted. “Right now! It’s urgent!” She sat up gingerly.

“What’s going on?” she said.

“Whitie’s dying! He’s writhing around on the floor. He’s in so much pain! You’ve got to call for a vet! At once!”

“But we can’t, Karl Ove,” Mom said. “I don’t think anything will help. And I’m not well …”

“You’ve got to call now!” I shouted. “Mom, Mom, he’s dying! Don’t you understand?”

“I can’t, don’t you understand. I’m sorry. It’s terrible.”

“But Whitie’s dying!”

She gently shook her head.

“But Mom!”

She sighed.

“He was probably already ill when we took him with us. He’s an albino as well. They’re often a bit weaker. There’s nothing we can do. Nothing.”

I looked at her with my eyes full of tears. Then I slammed the door and ran down to the cellar. He was lying on his side, pulling himself along by his claws on the floor and wheezing. Spasms shook through him. I bent down and stroked him. Then I ran out, down into the forest, right down to the water. Up again on the other side. Crying nonstop. When our house came into sight again I ran as fast as I could, I had to try and persuade her again. She wasn’t a vet, what did she know about what they could or couldn’t do? I opened the door and paused. Inside the house there was silence. Carefully, I crept into the storeroom. He was back in his basket, lying still, with his head rolled back.

“Mom!” I yelled. “Come here!”

I dashed up the stairs and opened the door to her room again.

“He’s not moving,” I said. “Could you check to see if he’s dead? Or if he’s recovered.”

“Do you think you can wait until your father comes?” she said. “He won’t be long.”

“No!” I said.

Mom stared at me.

“OK, I can do it,” she said. She lifted the duvet, placed her feet on the ground and stood up, all at the same slow speed. She was wearing a white nightgown. Her hair was in a mess, her face pale and softer than when she was well. She steadied herself with one hand against the wardrobe. I ran downstairs and waited for her outside the storeroom. I didn’t want to be inside on my own.

She leaned forward and felt the kitten.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “But I think he’s dead.”

She looked at me and got up. I put my arms around her.

“He won’t be in any more pain,” she said.

“No,” I said.

I wasn’t crying.

“Should we bury him right away?” I said.

“It’s best to wait until Dad and Yngve come home, don’t you think?”

“Yes,” I said.

And so we did. While Mom was in bed Dad carried the kitten to a corner of the garden, followed by Yngve and me, dug a hole in the ground, put the kitten in, and shoveled earth over him. He wouldn’t hear of a cross.

There are two pictures of the kitten. In one he’s standing in front of the television with a raised paw, trying to catch a swimmer. In the other he’s lying on the sofa beside Yngve and me. He has a blue bow tie around his neck.

Who put the bow tie on?

It must have been Mom. That was the sort of thing she would do, I know that, but during the months I have been writing this, in the spate of memories about events and people who have been roused to life, she is almost completely absent, it is as if she hadn’t been there, indeed as if she were one of the false memories you have, one you have been told, not one you have experienced.

How can that be?

For if there was someone there, at the bottom of the well that is my childhood, it was her, my mother, Mom. She was the one who made all our meals and gathered us around her in the kitchen every evening. She was the one who went shopping, knitted or sewed our clothes; she was the one who repaired them when they fell apart. She was the one who supplied the bandage when we had fallen and grazed our knees; she was the one who drove me to the hospital when I broke my collarbone and to the doctor’s when I, somewhat less heroically, had scabies. She was the one who was out of her mind with worry when a young girl died from meningitis and at the same time I got a cold and a bit of a stiff neck. I was bundled straight into the car, off to Kokke-plassen, her foot flat on the accelerator, concern flashing from her eyes. She was the one who read to us, she was the one who washed our hair when we were in the bath, and she was the one who laid out our pajamas afterward. She was the one who drove us to soccer practice in the evening, the one who went to parents’ meetings and sat with other parents at our end-of-term parties and took pictures of us. She was the one who stuck the photos in our albums afterward. She was the one who baked cakes for our birthdays and cakes for Christmas and buns for Shrovetide.

All the things mothers do for their sons, she did for us. If I was ill and in bed with a temperature she was the one who came in with a cold compress and placed it on my forehead, she was the one who put the thermometer up my backside to take my temperature, she was the one who came in with water, juice, grapes, cookies, and she was the one who got up in the night and came in wearing her nightgown to see how I was.

She was always there, I know she was, but I just can’t remember it.

I have no memories of her reading to me and I can’t remember her putting a single bandage on my knees or being present at a single end-of-term event.

How can that be?

She saved me because if she hadn’t been there I would have grown up alone with Dad, and sooner or later I would have taken my life, one way or another. But she was there, Dad’s darkness had a counterbalance, I am alive and the fact that I do not live my life to the full has nothing to do with the balance of my childhood. I am alive, I have my own children, and with them I have tried to achieve only one aim: that they shouldn’t be afraid of their father.

They aren’t. I know that.

When I enter a room, they don’t cringe, they don’t look down at the floor, they don’t dart off as soon as they glimpse an opportunity, no, if they look at me, it is not a look of indifference, and if there is anyone I am happy to be ignored by it’s them. If there is anyone I am happy to be taken for granted by, it’s them. And should they have completely forgotten I was there when they turn forty themselves, I will thank them and take a bow and accept the bouquets.

Dad knew what the situation was. Lack of self-knowledge was not one of his failings. One evening at the beginning of the eighties, he said to Prestbakmo that it was Mom who had saved his children. The question is whether it was enough. The question is whether she was responsible for exposing us to him for so many years, a man we were afraid of, always, at all times. The question is whether it is enough to be a counterbalance to the darkness.

She made a decision: she stayed with him, she must have had her reasons.

The same applies to him. He also made a decision, he also stayed. Throughout the seventies and the beginning of the eighties this is the way they lived, side by side, in the house in Tybakken, with their two children, their two cars, and their two jobs. They had a life outside the house, a life in the house in the way they were to each other, and a life in the house in the way they were to us. We, as children, were like dogs in a crowd of people, only interested in other dogs or doggy things, we were never aware of what else was happening, over our heads. I had a vague sense of who Dad was outside the house, for something seeped down, even to me, but it never made any sense. He was always well turned out, I was aware of that, but not what significance it carried, only when I was older and met some of his former students could I see him in that role. A young, slim, well-dressed teacher stepping out of his Opel Ascona, walking with a determined stride up to the faculty lounge, putting down his briefcase full of papers, pouring a cup of coffee, exchanging a few words with colleagues, going to his class when the bell rang, hanging his brown cord jacket on the chair and scanning the class, who sat quietly looking at him. He had a well-groomed black beard, sparkling blue eyes, and a handsome face. The boys in the class feared him; he was strict and tolerated no nonsense. The girls in the class were in love with him because he was young, had a strong aura, and looked nothing like any of the other teachers. He liked teaching and was good at it, he held his classes in a spell when he spoke about subjects that engaged him. Obstfelder was his favorite. But he also liked Kinck and, of the contemporary writers, Bjørneboe.

He was very correct in his dealings with colleagues, but also kept his distance. The distance lay in his attire; many of the other teachers would wear smocks and jeans or the same suit for months on end. The distance lay in the impartiality he exhibited. The distance lay in his body language, his posture, his aura.

He always knew more about them than they knew about him. It was a rule in his life, which applied to everyone, even his parents and brothers. Or perhaps especially to them.

When he came home from school he went into his study and prepared the evening meetings; he was a Venstre representative on the council, as well as sitting on several committees, and at one point he was a possible Storting candidate for his party, according to him. But what he said wasn’t always true, he was notorious for manipulating the truth in the circles in which he moved, although not in his work at school or in politics, where he was proper and seemly. He was also a member of a philately club in Grimstad and showed his collection at a variety of exhibitions. In the summer he devoted himself to the garden, where he was also ambitious and a perfectionist, if such is conceivable in a garden around a house on an estate in the seventies. He had inherited his interest in everything that grew from his mother, and that was perhaps what they spoke about most: various plants, bushes, and trees and the experiences they’d had with them. Sun, soil, moisture, acidity levels. Grafting, pruning, watering. With no friends, his social intercourse took place in the staff room and the family. He visited his parents, brothers, uncles, and aunts frequently and received frequent visits from them. With them he used a tone of voice that was unfamiliar to Yngve and me, and we therefore viewed it with suspicion.

Mom’s life differed in many ways from his. She had lots of friends, mostly because of her job, but also in other places, not least among the neighbors. With them she would sit and chat, or “prattle,” as Dad would say, and smoke and eat the cakes they had baked — if, that is, they weren’t knitting in the thick cloud of tobacco smoke that hung in so many living rooms in the seventies. She had an interest in politics, was in favor of a strong state, a well-developed health system, and equal rights for all, and was probably committed to women’s liberation and the peace movement, was against capitalism and the growing materialism, and sympathized with Erik Dammann’s The Future in Our Hands movement, in short she was on the left. She said she had hibernated during her twenties, everything was about her job, her children, and making ends meet, the budget was tight, you had to fight to keep to it, although in her early thirties she focused on herself and the society she was living in. While Dad rarely read anything other than what he had to, she was genuinely interested in literature. She was an idealist, he was a pragmatist; she was contemplative, he was practical.

They brought us up together even if I never experienced my upbringing as such; I always drew a strict distinction between them and perceived them as two utterly separate beings. But for them it must have been different. In the evenings when we were asleep they sat up talking — about the neighbors, colleagues, us, unless they were discussing politics or literature. Once in a while they went on holiday alone, to London, to the Rhine Valley, or into the mountains, while Yngve and I were with either Mom’s or Dad’s parents. They were more equal than the parents of my friends as far as chores in the house were concerned: Dad cleaned and cooked, which none of the other fathers did, not to mention all the food gathering they did at that time, all the fish he caught on the far side of the island and the hundreds of kilos of berries we picked on trips to the mainland in late summer and autumn, which afterward they converted into juice and jam and poured into bottles and jars to stand on the shelves in the cellar all winter, glowing dimly in the light from the little window at the top of the wall. Raspberries, blackberries, blueberries, cowberries, and cloudberries, which would excite Dad so much he would shout out if he found any. Sloes for wine. In addition, they would pay to pick fruit from gardens on Tromøya, and it was from there we had apples, pears, and plums. Then there was the cherry tree belonging to Dad’s uncle Alf in Kristiansand and, of course, both grandmothers had fruit trees. Our days were structured and clear: on Sundays it was lunch with dessert, on weekdays it was generally a variety of shapes and variants of fish. We always knew when we had school on the following day, how many lessons we had in which subjects, and not even the course of the evening was without a framework, as it was seasonally determined: if there was snow or ice on the ground, then it was skiing and skating. If the water temperature rose above fifteen degrees, well then, swimming was the order of the day, come rain come shine. The sole really unpredictable factor in this life, from autumn to winter, spring to summer, from one school year to the next, was Dad. I was so frightened of him that even with the greatest effort of will I am unable to recreate the fear; the feelings I had for him I have never felt since, nor indeed anything close.

His footsteps on the stairs — was he coming to see me?

The wild glare in his eyes. The tightness around his mouth. The lips that parted involuntarily. And then his voice.

Sitting here now, hearing it in my inner ear, I almost start crying.

His fury struck like a wave, it washed through the rooms, lashed at me, lashed and lashed and lashed at me, and then it retreated. Then it could be quiet for several weeks. However, it wasn’t quiet, for it could just as easily come in two minutes as two days. There was no warning. Suddenly, there he was, furious. Whether he hit me or not made no difference, it was equally awful if he twisted my ear or squeezed my arm or dragged me somewhere to see what I had done, it wasn’t the pain I was afraid of, it was him, his voice, his face, his body, the fury it emitted, that was what I was afraid of, and the terror never let up, it was there for every single day of my entire childhood.

After the confrontations I wanted to die. Dying was one of the best, most enjoyable fantasies I had. He would have fun then. He would be standing there thinking about what he had done. He would be feeling remorse then. Oh, what remorse he would feel! I visualized him standing there and wringing his hands in despair with his head turned to heaven in front of the tiny coffin where I lay, with my prominent teeth, unable to pronounce my r’s.

What sweetness there was in that image! It almost put me in a good mood again. And that was how my childhood was; the distance between good and evil was so much shorter than it is now as an adult. All you had to do was stick your head out of the door and something absolutely fantastic happened. Just walking up to B-Max and waiting for the bus was an event, even though it had been repeated almost every day for many years. Why? I have no idea. But when everything glinted with moisture in the mist and your boots were wet from the slush on the road, and the snow in the forest was white and sunken, and we stood in a gang chatting or playing, or we ran after girls to trip them, grab their stocking caps, or simply throw them into a snowdrift, and I felt one of them against me as I squeezed my arms around her waist as tight as I could, perhaps Marianne, perhaps Siv, perhaps Marian, because they were the girls I prized and thought about most, all my nerves were a-quiver, my chest bubbled with joy — and why? Oh, because of the wet snow. Because of the wet down jackets. Because of the many good-looking girls. Because of the bus rattling along with chains on its tires. Because of the condensation on the windows when we went inside, because of the screaming and shouting, because Anne Lisbet was there, as happy and lovely, as dark-haired and red-mouthed, as she had ever been. Every day was a party, in the sense that everything that happened pulsated with excitement and nothing was predictable. Nor was it over when the bus came, it had only just begun, for the whole school day stretched out before us, with the transformation we went through when our wet clothes were hanging on hooks and we shuffled into the classroom in stockinged feet, with red cheeks and messy hair, wet at the tips because it had been outside the hat. The tingling in your body as the break beckoned, and we ran up the stairs, through the corridors, down the outside steps, across the playground, down the slope, and onto the field. And afterward, going home, playing music, reading, perhaps putting on skis and racing down the steep hill to Ubekilen, where the others always were, and all this at the intensity that only exists in childhood, standing at the bottom, back up herringbone style, racing down, until the darkness was so dense we could hardly see a hand in front of our faces and hung over our ski sticks chatting about everything and nothing.

The glimpse of ice on the bay covered by a shallow layer of water. The lights from the houses on the estate, which formed a kind of cupola over the forest above us. All the sounds the darkness amplified whenever someone shifted weight and the blue mini skis scraped against each other or cut into the soft snow. The car that came down the narrow gravel road, it was a Beetle, belonging to the people who lived there, the light shining a path across the ground, making everything spookily visible for a moment or two and then the darkness closing around us again.

Childhood consisted of an infinity of such moments, all equally compact. Some of them could raise me to dizzying heights, like the evening I got together with Tone and half ran, half slid down the hill, which must have just been cleared by the snowplow, judging by the shiny surface, and when I arrived at the dark patch between the roads outside our house, I lay down in the snow on my back and looked up at the dense, clammy, and lightless night above me and was utterly happy.

Others could open a void beneath me, like the evening Mom told us she was going to start studying the following year. We were at the table eating supper when she told us.

“The school’s in Oslo,” she said. “It’s just for one year. I’ll come home every Friday and I’ll be here all weekend. Then I’ll go back on the Monday. So that’s three days here and four there.”

“Are we going to be alone here with Dad?” Yngve said.

“Yes. It’ll be fine. You’ll see a bit more of each other.”

“Why are you going to go to school?” I said. “You’re an adult.”

“There’s something called further education,” she said. “I’m going to learn more about my profession. It’s very exciting, you know.”

“I don’t want you to go,” I said.

“It’s just for a year,” she said. “And I’ll be here for three days a week. And all the holidays. I’m going to have long holidays.”

“I still don’t want you to go,” I said.

“I understand,” Mom said. “But it’ll be fine. Dad wants to spend time with you. And next year it will be the other way around. Dad will do a further education course and I’ll be at home.”

I took the last mouthful of tea, closed my mouth, and let it seep through, as I blocked the many wet, black tea leaves at the bottom with my lips.

I half-rose and lifted the heavy teapot over to the cup with both hands, poured, and put it back. The tea was almost black, it had been brewing for so long. I added a generous portion of milk and three large spoonfuls of sugar.

“Sugar in tea,” Yngve said.

“And?” I said.

At that moment there was the sound of footsteps on the stairs.

Oh, and I had filled the cup to the brim! I would have to sit there until it was drunk. But Yngve had no such reservations; he stood up and was gone.

Dad walked past with a somber step. He switched on the television and sat down on a chair.

“Would you like some supper?” Mom said.

“No,” he said.

I poured in more milk to make the tea colder and drank it up in three long swigs.

“Thank you, Mom!” I said, getting up.

“My pleasure,” Mom said.

The news was shocking, but I wasn’t shocked as I went to my room afterward, it was April now and the course she was doing didn’t start until August. That was four months away and for a child four months is an eternity. Mom’s further education course belonged to the future in the same vague way that my next school did or confirmation or my eighteenth birthday. We were in midchildhood and time was suspended there. That is, the moments raced along at breakneck speed while the days that contained them passed almost unnoticed. Even when the last day of school arrived and we were no longer in the third class I didn’t think that soon she would be off. Wasn’t there the whole of the long summer holiday to go yet? It was only when she was in her bedroom taking out her clothes and a suitcase lay open on the floor that I realized. At the same time there were so many other things going on, the next day school would be starting again, when we, the fourth class, would definitively be among the oldest. We would have a new classroom, and more importantly, a new class teacher. Inside my room there was a new satchel, in the wardrobe there were new clothes. The thought of all this made my stomach tingle, and although I was sad watching her pack I was no sadder than I usually was when she went to work.

She stopped packing and looked at me.

“I’ll be back on Thursday,” she said. “It’s only four days.”

“I know,” I said. “Have you got everything?”

“You know what, I think I have,” she said. “Would you mind helping me with the suitcase? Put your knee there so that I can close it properly?”

I nodded and did as she asked.

Dad came up the stairs.

“Are you ready?” he said with a nod at the suitcase. “I’ll take it.”

Mom gave me a hug and then she followed him downstairs.

I watched them from the bathroom window. As she got into the green Beetle it was exactly like any afternoon when she had to go to work — apart from the suitcase in the trunk, that is. I waved, she waved back, started the engine, reversed up the incline, put the car in first gear, and it beetled down the hill the way it always did and was gone.

What would happen now?

What would the days be like now?

It was Mom who bound us all together, it was Mom who was at the center of Yngve’s and my life, we knew that, Dad knew that, but perhaps she didn’t. How else could she leave us like this?

Knives and forks clinking on plates, elbows moving, heads held stiff, straight backs. No one saying a word. That is us three, a father and two sons, sitting and eating. Around us, on all sides, it is the seventies.

The silence grows. And we notice it, all three of us, the silence is not the kind that can ease, it is the kind that lasts a lifetime. Well, of course, you can say something inside it, you can talk, but the silence doesn’t stop for that reason.

Dad put the bone on the plate with the potato skin and took another chop. Yngve and I were given only one each.

Yngve had finished.

“Thank you, Dad,” he said.

“There’s dessert,” Dad said.

“Don’t want any,” Yngve said. “Thanks anyway.”

“Why don’t you want any?” Dad said. “It’s pineapple and cream. You like it.”

“It makes my face break out,” Yngve said.

“I see,” Dad said. “You can leave the table.”

He looked at me when Yngve got up, as though he didn’t exist.

“But you want some, don’t you, Karl Ove?”

“You bet,” I said. “It’s my favorite.”

“Good,” he said.

I sat looking out of the window waiting for him to finish. Listening to the music from Yngve’s room. A crowd of children had gathered in the road, they put two rocks on the ground as a goal, immediately afterward there was the sound of heavy thuds as boots hit an underinflated ball and of low shouts, which always increase in volume when soccer is played, whatever form it takes.

At last Dad got up, took the plates, and scraped them clean over the trash can. He put a bowl of pineapple and cream in front of me and one in front of himself.

We finished the dessert without saying a word.

“Thanks, Dad,” I said, getting up. Dad said nothing, but got up as well, filled the coffee pot with water, and took a packet of coffee from the cupboard.

Then he turned.

“Karl Ove?” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

“Now don’t you tease Yngve about his pimples, do you understand what I’m saying? I don’t ever want to hear a word about it again.”

“OK,” I said and stood waiting to see if there was more to come.

Dad turned and cut off the corner of the coffee packet, and I went into Yngve’s room, where he was playing his electric guitar, a black Les Paul copy I had been so surprised to hear the first time, as I was convinced not a sound would come from it without an amplifier. But it did, a low plunking sound, he was sitting there and playing with a face full of pimples.

“Want to play something?” I said.

“I already am,” he said.

“A game, you chump,” I said.

“Fifty-two-card pick-up?” he said.

“Ha ha,” I said. “You can only do that once and I’ve already done it. Can you teach me a chord?”

“Not now. Another time.”

“Please.”

“Just one then,” he said. “Sit here.”

I sat down beside him on the bed. He put the guitar in my lap. Placed three fingers on the finger board.

“That’s an E,” he said, and took his hand away.

I put my fingers where he’d had his.

“Good,” he said. “Now strum.”

I strummed, but not all the strings made a sound.

“You have to press harder,” he said. “And you have to watch your other fingers don’t catch the free strings.”

“OK,” I said and tried again.

“That was good,” he said. “That’s the way. Now you can do E.”

I passed him the guitar and got up.

“Do you remember which strings are which?” he said.

“EADGBE,” I said.

“That’s right,” he said. “Now all you need is a band.”

“But then I would have to borrow your guitar,” I said.

“You can’t have it.”

I said nothing because things could change so quickly.

“When do you start tomorrow?” I said instead.

“First hour,” he said. “And you?”

“No, at eleven, I think.”

“Think?”

“Know. Dad?”

“First lesson, dead sure.”

That was good news. I would be alone for a few hours.

I turned and went into my room. The new satchel was by the desk leg. The square, blue one I’d had for years had become too small and childish. The one I had now was dark green and made of some synthetic material that smelled wonderful.

I sniffed at it for a while. Then I put on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and lay back on my bed staring at the ceiling.

Getting so much better all the time!

It’s getting better all the time!

Better, better, better!

It’s getting better all the time!

Better, better, better!

Getting so much better all the time!

The music lifted me at once, I beat the air with one hand and rocked my head backward and forward, happy to the core. Bettåh, bettåh, bettåh! I sang. Bettåh, bettåh, bettåh!

There was the school building, black, with all its many windows glinting, as we stormed off the bus. We were among the older pupils now and knew both how to behave and what to expect. While the new kids, hair combed and smartly dressed, stood with their parents listening to the head teacher’s welcome talk by the flagpole, we swaggered around and spat or leaned against the wall of the wet-weather shed talking about what we had done that summer. Three cows on a farm was no longer good enough, but even if our only holiday trip had been to Sørbøvåg, where I had stayed with Jon Olav and the others, alone for a week, I definitely had something to offer because there had been a girl there, my second cousin, whose name was Merete, she had blonde hair and lived outside Oslo. I went out with her, I said, and although that was not quite as impressive as Liseberg in Gothenburg, northern Europe’s biggest amusement park, it was better than nothing.

Some of the girls unfurled their skipping elastic from what were to me hidden places and started jumping.

No, dancing.

We managed to persuade them to play the high jump instead, so that we could join in without losing face in front of the other boys. Two of the girls held the elastic between them, and then, one after the other, we ran toward it, launched both legs, and brought our feet down on it to land on the other side.

It was a pleasure to watch the girls as they took off, legs first, in their elegant, controled fashion.

Whoosh, you heard, and then they were safely on the other side.

Then the height was raised until there was only one person left.

I hoped it would be me because Anne Lisbet had joined us now as well, but it was, as so often before, Marianne.

Tap, tap, tap, you heard, as she ran forward, whoosh, you heard when she jumped, and then she was over.

She smiled shyly, swept her shoulder-length blonde hair to one side with a finger, and I wondered if she would be the one I fell in love with this year.

Probably not. She was in my class.

Perhaps it would be someone in the A class?

Or, hey, future of dreams, perhaps someone from another school?

After we had been given the schedule and some new books in the first lesson we had to tell the class what we had done over the summer, one after the other. In the second lesson we had to hold an election for the new student council. I had been the class rep with Siv in the previous year and I thought being reelected would be a formality until Eivind put up his hand and said he would also like to stand as a candidate. There were six names to choose from. Eivind’s involvement led to my breaking the unwritten rule that you never, under any circumstances, voted for yourself. I thought the election might be touch and go, so one vote could be decisive. I considered the chances of anyone finding out that I had voted for myself unlikely in the extreme. After all, it was a secret ballot, and the only person who would see what we wrote and could spot our handwriting, and could therefore expose me, was Frøken, and she wouldn’t say anything.

How cruelly mistaken I was.

I wrote KARL OVE in capital letters on the little scrap of paper, folded it, and gave it to Frøken when she came around with a hat. On the board she wrote the names of the six candidates, and then she called on Sølvi, of all people, to read out the ballot slips. Every time Sølvi read out a name she put a cross by the appropriate person on the board.

It was taking time for my votes to start coming in. At first Eivind got most of the boys’ votes. Then I realized to my horror that there were no more votes. I hadn’t received a single one! How was that possible?

But there. At last.

“Karl Ove,” Sølvi said, and Frøken put a cross behind my name.

“Eivind,” Sølvi said.

“Eivind.”

“Eivind.”

“And that must be it, isn’t it? Now let’s see. The class reps on the council this year are therefore Eivind and Marianne!”

I looked down at the desk in front of me.

One vote.

How was that possible?

And, to cap it off, the one vote was my own.

But I was the best student in the class! At least in Norwegian! And natural and social sciences! And in math I was the second best, or perhaps the third. But, altogether, who could be better than me?

OK, Eivind won. But one vote? How was that possible?

Hadn’t anyone voted for me?

There had to be a mistake somewhere.

No one?

When I opened our front door Dad was standing inside.

I gave a start of surprise.

How had he managed that?

Had he been waiting for me?

“You’ve got to go to B-Max for me,” he said. “Look.”

He passed me a shopping list and a hundred-krone note.

“I want all the change back, OK?”

“Yes,” I said, put down my satchel, and ran into the road.

If there was one area in this world where I was meticulous it was with Dad’s change. When B-Max had just opened Yngve returned home with less change than there should have been. Dad gave him the beating of his life. And that was no small matter because Yngve had been on the receiving end of quite a few beatings. Many more than me. Yes, I got off lightly with everything. Even my bedtimes were lenient compared with his.

I looked at the list.

1 kilo of potatoes

1 packet of rissoles

2 onions

Coffee (for boiling)

1 tin of pineapple slices

¼ kilo of whipping cream

1 kilo of oranges

Pineapple? Were we going to have dessert again? On a Monday?

I put all the items in a basket, stood flicking through some magazines on the shelf by the counter, paid, put the change in my pocket, and ran home with the heavy bag hanging from my hand.

I passed it to Dad upstairs in the kitchen with the change, which he pocketed while I waited for him to say I could go. But he didn’t.

“Sit!” he said, pointing to the chair.

I sat.

“Straighten your back, boy!” he said.

I straightened my back.

He took the potatoes, which were covered in soil, from the bag and started peeling them.

What was it he wanted?

“Well?” he said, turning to look at me while his hands worked under the water from the tap.

I looked at him in surprise.

“What did Frøken have to say?” he said.

“Frøken?”

“Yes, Fwøken. Didn’t she have anything to say to all of you on your first day?”

“Yes, she did, she welcomed us back. Then we were given our schedule and some books.”

“What’s your schedule like then?” he said, walking over to the cupboard by the stove and taking out a saucepan.

“Shall I go and get it?”

“No, no. You must remember some of it, don’t you? Did it look good?”

“Yes,” I said. “Great.”

“That’s good,” he said.

That evening I realized what Mom’s absence meant.

The rooms were lifeless.

Dad sat downstairs in his study, and the living room and kitchen were “out there,” dead. I tiptoed toward them, and the feeling that came over me when I was alone in the forest, when the forest was sufficient unto itself and it didn’t want to incorporate me, reemerged here as well.

The rooms were only rooms, a gaping space I entered.

But not my room, thank goodness. It wrapped itself around me, soft and friendly as it had always been.

The next day Sverre and Geir Håkon came over to me in B-Max. Several kids from the class were standing around us.

“Who did you vote for yesterday, Karl Ove?” Geir Håkon said.

“It’s a secret,” I said.

“You voted for yourself. You got only one vote, and that was the one you gave yourself.”

“No, it wasn’t,” I said.

“Yes, it was,” Sverre said. “We’ve asked everyone in the class. No one voted for you. So you’re the only one left. You voted for yourself.”

“No,” I said. “That’s not true. I didn’t vote for myself.”

“Who did then?”

“I don’t know.”

“But we’ve asked everyone. No one voted for you. You voted for yourself. Come on, admit it.”

“No,” I said. “It’s not true.”

“But we’ve asked everyone. There’s only you left.”

“Then someone’s lying.”

“Why would anyone lie?”

“How should I know?”

“You’re the one who’s lying. You voted for yourself.”

“No, I didn’t.”

The rumor spread through the school, but I denied everything. And kept denying it. Everyone knew what had happened, but as long as I didn’t admit it, they couldn’t be absolutely sure. They thought it was typical of me. I thought I was someone. But I didn’t think that. A person who votes for himself is a nobody. The fact that I never went scavenging, never did any shoplifting, never fired a slingshot at birds or a pea-shooter loaded with cherry pits at cars or passers-by, and never joined in when others locked the gym teacher behind the garage door in the equipment room or when others put drawing pins on the supply teachers’ chairs or dunked their sponges until they were sopping wet, plus the fact that I told them they shouldn’t do these things, told them it was wrong, did not do a great deal for my reputation, either. I knew, however, that I was right and what the others were doing was wrong. Occasionally I would pray to God to forgive them. If they swore, for example. Then a prayer might come into my mind. Dear God, Forgive Leif Tore for swearing. He didn’t mean to. I said things like: heck, blast, golly, gosh, drats, jeez, my foot, goodness, fudge, holy cow, bother, and yikes. But despite this, despite not swearing, not lying, except in self-defense, not stealing or vandalizing or playing up teachers, despite being interested in clothes and my appearance and always wanting to be right and the best, which meant my general reputation was poor and I was not someone others said they liked, I wasn’t shunned or avoided, and if I was, by Leif Tore and Geir Håkon, for instance, there were always boys I could turn to. Such as Dag Lothar. Or Dag Magne. And when all the kids got together in big groups no one was rejected, everyone was accepted, including me.

Of course, it was easier to be at home reading.

Nor did it do much for my reputation that I was a Christian. Actually, that was Mom’s fault. One day, the year before, she had banned the reading of comics. I had come home early from school, run up the stairs, happy and excited, since Dad was still at work.

“Are you hungry?” she said, sitting on a chair in the living room with a book in her lap and looking at me.

“Yes,” I said.

She got up and went into the kitchen, where she took a loaf from the bread box.

The rain outside was like stripes in the air. Some stragglers were coming down the road from the bus, heads bowed beneath the hoods of their rain jackets.

“I was looking at some of your comics today,” Mom said, cutting a slice of bread. “What do you read? I’m aghast.”

“Aghast?” I said. “What does that mean?”

She put a slice on the plate in front of me, opened the fridge, and took out some mild, white cheese and margarine.

“What you read is absolutely awful! It’s just violence! People shooting one another and laughing! You’re too young to read stuff like this.”

“But everyone does,” I said.

“That’s no argument,” she said. “It doesn’t mean you have to.”

“But I like it!” I said, spreading the margarine with my knife.

“Yes, that’s what’s so bad about it!” she said, sitting down. “That kind of magazine gives a terrible view of humanity. Especially of women. Do you understand? I don’t want your attitudes to be shaped by that.”

“By the killing?”

“For example.”

“But it’s not meant seriously!” I said.

Mom sighed. “You know Ingunn’s writing a university thesis about the violence in comics, don’t you?”

“No,” I said.

“It’s not good for you,” she said. “Simple as that. At least you understand. That it’s not good for you.”

“So am I not allowed?”

“No.”

“Eh?”

“It’s for your own good,” she said.

“I’m not allowed? But Mom, Mom … Never?”

“You’ll have to read Donald Duck.”

“DONALD DUCK?” I yelled. “No one reads DONALD DUCK!”

I burst into tears and ran to my room.

Mom followed me, sat on the edge of the bed, and stroked my back.

“You can read books,” she said. “That’s much better. You can go to the library, you and me and Yngve. To Arendal, once a week. Then you can borrow as many books as you like.”

“But I don’t want to read books,” I said. “I want to read comics!”

“Karl Ove,” she said, “my mind is made up.”

“But Dad reads comics!”

“He’s an adult,” she said. “It’s not the same.”

“So no more comics ever again?”

“I have to work this evening. But tomorrow we can go to the library,” she said and got up. “Shall we leave it at that?”

I didn’t answer, and she left.

She must have stumbled on a comic in the Kamp series or Vi Vinner, which were about war, in which all the Germans, or Fritz or Sauerkraut or whatever they were called, were killed with a smile on their lips, and the pages were littered with Donnerwetters and Dummkopfs or whatever they shouted to one another in the heat of battle, or she could have found Agent X9 or Serie Spesial, where most of the women wore bikinis and often not even that. It was just great to see Modesty Blaise undressing, though only when I was alone, normally nudity was incredibly embarrassing. Every time Agaton Sax was on children’s TV I blushed if Mom and Dad were there because in the intro he was ogling a naked woman through binoculars. Sometimes there was actually some sex in the cartoons or films on TV, and if it took place when I was allowed to watch, it all became unbearable. There we were, the whole family, Mom, Dad, and their two sons watching TV, and then a couple screwed — in the middle of our living room, where did you look?

Oh, that was dreadful.

But I kept the comics in my room; Mom had never so much as cast a glance at them.

Now, out of the blue, I wasn’t allowed to read them.

How unfair was that?

I cried, I was incensed, I went to see her again and said she had no right to ban them, knowing that the battle was lost, she had made up her mind, and if I didn’t stop protesting she would just tell Dad, after which further resistance would be hopeless.

The comics I had borrowed were returned; the others were thrown away. The next day we went to the library, we were each given a membership card, and then it was done, from this moment on books held sway. Every Wednesday I came down the steps outside Arendal Library with a carrier bag full of books in each hand. I went with Mom and Yngve, who had likewise borrowed vast quantities, then it was back to the car, go home, lie down on my bed, read almost every evening, all Saturday and all Sunday, a pattern broken only by shorter or longer excursions outside, all depending on what was going on, and when the week was up it was back to the library with the two bags of finished books and two new bags. I read all the series they had, I liked Pocomoto best, the little boy who grew up in the Wild West, but also Jan, and the Hardy Boys, of course, and the Bobbsey Twins and Nancy Drew, the Girl Detective. I liked the Famous Five series and I plowed through a series of books about real people, reading about Henry Ford and Thomas Alva Edison, Benjamin Franklin and Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, John F. Kennedy, David Livingstone, and Louis Armstrong, always with tears in my eyes over the last pages, because, naturally enough, they all died. I finished the Vi Var Med series, about all the known and unknown expeditions of discovery in the world, I read books about sailing ships and space travel, Yngve got me into books by von Däniken, who thought that all the great civilizations had come about as a result of encounters with extraterrestrial creatures, and books about the Apollo program, starting with the astronauts’ fighter-plane pasts and their attempts to set speed records. I also read all Dad’s old Gyldendal books for boys, of which the one that made the greatest impression was probably Over Kjølen i Kano, where a father goes on a camping trip with two boys and sees a great auk everyone thought was extinct. I also read a book about a boy who was picked up by a zeppelin in England during the years between the wars, I read Jules Verne’s many books, my favorites being Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea and Around the World in Eighty Days, also one called The Lottery Ticket about a poor family in Telemark who won a fortune in a lottery. I read The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After and The Black Tulip. I read Little Lord Fauntleroy, I read Oliver Twist and David Copperfield, I read Nobody’s Boy and Treasure Island and The Children of the New Forest, which I loved and read again and again as I had been given it and didn’t borrow it. I read Mutiny on the Bounty, Jack London’s books, and books about the sons of Bedouins and turtle hunters, stowaways and race car drivers, I read a series about a Swede who was a drummer boy in the American Civil War, I read books about boys who played soccer and I followed them season after season, and I read the more social-issue-style books that Yngve brought home, about girls who got pregnant and were going to have a baby, or who ended up on Skid Row and started taking drugs, it made no difference to me, I read everything, absolutely everything. At the annual flea market in Hove I found a whole series of the Rocambole books, which I bought and devoured. A series about a girl called Ida was another I read even though there must have been all of fourteen titles. I read all Dad’s old copies of Detektivmagasinet, and bought books about Knut Gribb, the Oslo detective, when I had enough money. I read about Christopher Columbus and Magellan, about Vasco da Gama and about Amundsen and Nansen. I read A Thousand and One Nights and Norwegian folk tales, which Yngve and I were given one Christmas by Grandma and Grandad. I read about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. I read about Robin Hood, Little John, and Maid Marian, I read about Peter Pan and about poor boys who swapped their lives for those of rich men’s sons. I read about boys who participated in sabotage operations during the German occupation of Denmark, and about boys who rescued someone from an avalanche. I read about a strange little man who lived on a beach and survived on what he could salvage from shipwrecks, and about young English boys who were cadets on naval vessels and Marco Polo’s adventures at the court of Genghis Khan. Book after book, bag after bag, week after week, month after month. From everything I read I learned that you had to have courage, that courage was perhaps the supreme attribute, that you have to be honest and sincere in all your dealings and that you must never let others down. In addition, that you must never give in, never give up, because if you have been resolute, upright, brave, and honest, however lonely it has made you and however alone you stand, in the end you are rewarded. I thought a lot about that, it was one of the thoughts I embraced when I was alone, that one day I would be back here and be someone. That I would be someone big whom everyone in Tybakken would be forced, whether they liked it or not, to admire. It wouldn’t come any day soon, I knew that, for it wasn’t respect I won when Asgeir made a derogatory comment about me and a girl I liked — I went for him and he simply forced me to the ground, straddled me, and started prodding my chest and cheeks, laughing and jeering. I happened to have a yellow Fox in my mouth and I tried to spit it out at him, to no avail, which was underhanded, everyone knew that, but the sticky yellow mess went all over my face. You smell of piss, you shit, I said to him, and it was true, he did. And, if that wasn’t enough, he had two sets of teeth, just like a shark, one row inside the other, and I pointed this repugnant sight out to the crowd milling around, not that it helped, I was on my back, vanquished, utterly powerless. You couldn’t get further from the ideals I had acquired through reading — which in fact were also valid among children, there were many of the same concepts of honor, although that precise word was not used, but that was what it was about. I was weak, slow, cowardly; not strong, quick, courageous. What good was it that, unlike them, I had been in contact with the ideals, that I knew them inside out, better than any of them ever would, when I couldn’t live up to them? When I cried for no reason? It felt unjust that I, of all people, who knew so much about heroic bravery, should be saddled with such frailties. But then there were books about frailties as well, and one of them carried me on a wave that would last several months.

One autumn I fell ill, during the day I lay in bed and was bored and one morning before going to work Dad brought me some books. He’d had them in the cellar, they were from his childhood in the fifties and I was free to borrow them. A handful had been published by a Christian company and for some reason they were the ones that made the strongest impression on me, one of them indelibly. It was about a boy whose father had died and who stayed at home to look after his sick mother; they lived in poverty and were completely dependent on the boy’s efforts to make ends meet. He was confronted by a group, or a gang more like, of boys. Not only did they hound and beat up this boy who was so different from them, they swore and stole as well and the inequity of this gang’s successes, in the light of the constant setbacks suffered by the honest, loving, and upright protagonist, was almost impossible to bear. I cried at the unfairness of it, I cried at the evil of it, and the dynamics of a situation whereby good was suppressed and the pressures of injustice were approaching bursting point shook me to the core of my soul and made me decide to become a good person. From then on I would perform good deeds, help where I could, and never do anything wrong. I began to call myself a Christian. I was nine years old, there was no one else in my close vicinity who called himself a Christian, neither Mom nor Dad nor the parents of any of the other kids — apart from Øyvind Sundt’s parents, who warned him off Coke and candy and watching TV and going to the cinema — and of course no young people, so it was a fairly solitary undertaking I initiated in Tybakken at the end of the seventies. I began to pray to God last thing at night and first thing in the morning. When, in the autumn, the others gathered to go apple scrumping down in Gamle Tybakken I told them not to go, I told them stealing was wrong. I never said this to all of them at once, I didn’t dare, I was well aware of the difference between group reactions, when everyone incited each other to do something or other, and individual reactions, when each person was forced to confront an issue head-on with no hiding place in a deindividuated crowd, so that was what I did, I went to those I knew best, my peers, and said to each one that apple scrumping was wrong, think about it, you don’t have to do it. But I didn’t want to be alone, so I accompanied them, stopped by the gate, and watched them sneak across the age-old fields in the dusk, walked beside them as they scoffed apples on the way back, their winter jackets bulging with fruit, and if anyone offered me anything I always refused, because dealing was no better than stealing.

When one Easter I made a new friend while visiting my grandparents in Sørbøvåg, I implored him again and again to stop swearing. I can remember how afraid I was that he would disobey my instructions when he came in with me and said hello to Grandma and Grandad, and how many times I had told him to promise not to swear. Afterward he avoided me and I coped with this by thinking that I had done the right thing. I offered my seat to elderly people on the bus, asked if I could carry something for them when they came out of supermarkets, never held on to the back of cars, never broke anything, never fired a slingshot at birds, looked where I walked so as not to tread on ants or beetles, and even when I picked flowers in the spring with Geir or anyone else to give to Mom or Dad, my heart sank at the thought of the lives I was taking.

In winter, after snowfalls, I wanted to help old people shovel it away. On one such day — it was a Monday after school and it had snowed heavily all night — I tried to persuade Geir to come with me to clear someone’s drive. It was only by hinting that the old man would probably give us a tip for helping him out that I managed to get Geir to join me. Dad had just bought a new snow shovel, the type called the Sørland shovel, red and shiny, and as he had shoveled our drive that morning I assumed he wouldn’t need it any more that day, so I went off with it, side by side with Geir, who was pushing his family’s green Sørland shovel in front of him. The house I had chosen was on the bend and, when we rang, the face of the old man opening the door lit up when he realized that we weren’t there to throw snowballs at his house, which many did, but to help him clear his drive. It was heavy work but fun; we dug a channel along which we could push the snow, over the edge into the ditch, we tipped it here and it rushed down like mini avalanches. The sky was a leaden gray, the snow so wet that water ran from it if you packed it together. From Torungen we heard the blare of the foghorn. Children raced downhill on sleds or skis, cars going up the hill on their way home from work skidded and spun. It took us an hour to finish the drive. We went to the front door and told the old man, he thanked us, and then he closed the door. Geir sent me an accusatory look.

“Weren’t we supposed to get money for this?” he said.

“Ye-es. Actually we were. But it’s not my fault he didn’t give us any …”

“Have we done all this for nothing?”

“Looks like it,” I said. “Doesn’t matter. Come on, let’s go.”

He followed me, grumbling. As we reached the road in front of our house I saw Dad standing in the doorway. My heart felt as though it had stopped beating. My stomach contracted and I could hardly breathe. His eyes were wild.

“Now you come here this minute!” he shouted when I was in the drive. I fixed my eyes on the ground over the last few steps.

“Look at me!” he said.

I raised my head.

He slapped my face.

I gasped.

Then he grabbed the lapels of my jacket and pressed me against the wall.

“Did you take my Sørland shovel?” he said. “It’s brand new! And it’s mine! Don’t touch my things! Do you understand? You didn’t ask me for permission! I thought it had been stolen!”

I was crying and sobbing so much I barely heard what he said. He grabbed my jacket again, pushed me through the door, and sent me flying into the wall on the other side.

“Don’t you ever do that again! Never! Go up to your room and stay there until I tell you otherwise! Have you understood?”

“Yes, Dad,” I said.

He slammed his study door and I began to remove my outdoor clothes. My hands were shaking. I took off my mittens and hat, I wriggled out of my boots, then the Puffa pants, then the jacket, then the thick sweater. In my room I lay down on my bed. Everything inside me was red raw. I sobbed and tears streamed down over my pillow as a fearful anger took hold of me, tore me this way and that, I didn’t know what to do with it. I hated him and I had to get my revenge. I would get my revenge. He’d soon see. I would crush him. Crush him.

Then it struck me: what would a nice boy do? What would a true Christian do?

He would forgive.

Once the thought was there, a warmth spread through me.

I would forgive him.

It was a big thought.

And it made me a big person.

But only when I was alone. When I was in the same room as him it was as though he swallowed up everything inside me, there was only him left, I couldn’t think about anything else.

The first day alone with Dad was to form a pattern for all the other days of the year to follow. Breakfast ready on the table, packed lunch in the fridge, off shopping when I came home, sitting and answering questions while he cooked, interspersed with little jibes followed by the constant Straighten your back, boy — sometimes I had to stay there until he had finished, sometimes he could suddenly say, Off you go, as though he did actually understand what a torment I found these half-hour sessions where I was supposed to keep him company — then we ate and for the rest of the evening I was alone with Yngve upstairs, or outdoors, while he was either at meetings or working in his study. Once a week we went to Stoa after school to do a big shop. In the evenings he would sometimes watch TV with us. We gave him nothing: we sat stiff-backed, without moving and without speaking. If he asked us something we answered in monosyllables.

Gradually he began to turn away from Yngve and spend more and more time with me. I never dared to be as sullen and tight-lipped as my brother.

But it didn’t always work.

His footsteps on the stairs, they were an ominous sign. If I was playing music I kept it down low. If I was reading on my bed I sat up so as not to seem too casual.

Was he coming here?

He was.

The door opened, there he stood.

It was eight o’clock; he hadn’t been upstairs since the meal at four.

His eyes took in the room. And stopped at the desk.

“What have you got there?” he said. Came in, lifted the pack of cards. “Shall we play?”

“Yes, if you like,” I said, putting down my book.

He sat beside me on the bed.

“I’ll teach you a new game,” he said. Lifted the pack and threw all the cards around the room.

“Fifty-two card pick-up, it’s called,” he said. “Away you go. Pick them up!”

I had thought he really wanted to play cards and was so disappointed he was only messing around and I had to go down on my knees and pick up all the cards while he sat on the bed laughing that I muttered an expletive.

I would never have said it if I had been thinking.

But I hadn’t been, and it slipped out.

“Bloomin’ heck!” I said. “Why did you do that?”

He stiffened. Grabbed my ear and stood up as he twisted.

“Are you swearing at your own father?” he said and twisted harder and harder until I burst into tears.

“Now you pick the cards up, boy!” he said, keeping hold of my ear while I bent down and started picking up the cards.

Once it was done he let go and left. When it was time for supper he was in his study and when we went into the kitchen he had prepared everything.

The next day he didn’t call me in while he was cooking, as he usually did. A call from the kitchen only came when the food was ready. We sat down, helped ourselves without a word, whale steak with gravy and onions and potatoes, we ate in total silence, thanked him, and left the table. Dad washed up, ate an orange in the living room, I could tell by the aroma, and drank a cup of coffee, I could hear from the hiss of the coffee pot, went down to his study, where he played some music before putting on his coat, going to the car, and driving off.

As the drone of the car faded down the hill, I opened the door and went into the living room. Draped myself over the brown leather chair and put my feet on the table. Got up, went into the kitchen, opened the fridge, and looked inside: two plates of sandwiches, ready-made, that was our supper. Opened the cupboard next to it, took out the box of raisins, filled my hand, and tossed them into my mouth with one hand while flattening the level of the raisins in the box with the other. Munching, I walked into the living room and switched on the TV. At half past six there was a repeat of Blindpassasjer. It was a series about a spaceship, unbelievably scary, broadcast on Friday night, and we weren’t allowed to watch, but neither Mom nor Dad knew anything about the repeats, which, to our great good fortune, were on when they weren’t here.

Yngve came in and reclined on the sofa.

“What are you eating?” he said.

“Raisins,” I said.

“I want some, too,” he said.

“Don’t take too many,” I said as he got up, “or Dad’ll notice.”

“All right,” Yngve said. He opened the cupboard door.

“Do you want some almonds as well?” he called.

“Yes, please,” I said. “But not many.”

The street lamp outside shone orange in the darkness. The tarmac beneath glistened the same color. And some of the spruce tree behind it. But the forest behind that was as dark as the grave. From the steepest part of the hill came the whine of a moped.

“There you go,” Yngve said, releasing some almonds into my palm. I could clearly recognize his odor. It was acrid yet faint, almost metallic. Not his sweat, that smelled different, but his skin. It smelled of metal. When we wrestled I could smell it, when he tickled me I could smell it, and sometimes when he was lying down and reading, for example, I could put my nose to his arm and breathe in the smell. I loved him, I loved Yngve.

Five minutes before Blindpassasjer started, Yngve got up.

“Let’s lock the front door,” he said. “And then let’s switch off all the lights to make it scary.”

“No!” I said. “Don’t do that!”

Yngve laughed.

“Are you scared already?”

I got up and stood in his way. He fastened his arms around me, lifted me up, and sat me back down and continued toward the stairs.

“Don’t!” I said. “Please!”

He laughed again.

“I’m going downstairs now to lock the door,” he said from the stairs.

I ran after him.

“I mean it, Yngve,” I said.

“I know you do,” he said. Locked the door and stood by it. “But I’m in charge when we’re on our own.”

He switched off the light.

In the murk, illuminated only by the light from the adjacent room, there was something satanic about his smile. I ran upstairs and sat in the chair. Listened to him switching off light after light. The hall, the lamp over the living-room table, the ceiling lamp in the kitchen. Then the four small wall lamps above the sofa and, finally, the lamp on top of the television. Apart from the faint shimmer from the outside lamp and the blue flickering glow from the screen it was completely dark when the episode began. It was scary right from the opening scene, a man was standing and swinging a scythe somewhere, and then he turned, and his face wasn’t a face but a mask. I felt a tingle at the very tips of my fingers and toes and my innards were taut with fear. But I watched, I had to watch. When it was over, half an hour later, Yngve got up behind me.

“Don’t say anything,” I pleaded. “Don’t do anything!”

“Do you know what, Karl Ove?” he said.

“Oh, no!” I said.

“I’m not who you think I am,” he said, coming toward me.

“Yes, you are!” I said.

“I’m not Yngve,” he said. “I am another.”

“No, you’re not!” I said. “You’re Yngve! Tell me you’re Yngve.”

“I’m a cyborg,” he said. “And this …” He stretched out his hand and lifted his sweater. “This is not flesh and blood. This is metal and cables. It looks like flesh and blood, but it isn’t. I am not a human being.”

“Yes, you are!” I said, starting to cry. “You are Yngve! Yngve! Say you’re Yngve!”

“Now you will come down to the cellar with me,” he said. “Heh heh heh …”

“YNGVE!” I screamed.

He smiled at me.

“I’m only joking,” he said. “You didn’t seriously think I was a cyborg, did you?”

“Don’t do that,” I said. “Switch the light on right now.”

He took a step toward me.

“NO!” I shouted.

“OK, OK,” he laughed. “Let’s switch on the light then. Shall we eat now or what? Are you hungry?”

“Switch on the light first,” I said.

He switched on the wall lights and the lamp on the TV, where the news had already started. Then we went into the kitchen and had our supper. Yngve made us some tea, which was fine as long as we made sure to clear up after us, it must have been inconceivable for Dad that we could actually use the stove and boil water when he wasn’t here. Afterward we unpacked our soccer game on the living-room table, with the door to his room open and my favorite Queen record — A Night at the Opera — playing.

When we heard Dad’s car outside we hurriedly cleared the table and went into our separate rooms. Sometimes he summoned Yngve if we had been alone and asked what we had been doing and how it had been, but this evening he walked straight into the living room and sat down in front of the television.

It was actually a relief that he kept his distance the way he did, but there was more to it than that, I had a sense he didn’t want things to be like this, it was as though the air in the house was weighed down with this feeling, a demand no one could fulfill.

When he came up to us next time it was dreadful. I had been under the weather, I had a cold and a temperature that had risen dramatically in the last hour, and I was sitting in Yngve’s bed, leaning against the wall and reading one of his magazines. He was doing his homework at the desk, and the Boomtown Rats were playing on the turntable.

Bang, the door opened, and there was Dad looking at us.

He was in a good mood, his eyes beaming with energy.

“You’re playing music,” he said. “It sounds good. What’s their name?”

“The Boomtown Rats,” Yngve said.

Dad translated the name into Norwegian. “Do you remember how you laughed when I said Crystal Palace was Krystallpalasset? You didn’t believe me!”

He smiled and came into the room.

“Do you like the music, too, Karl Ove?” he said.

I nodded.

“Come on. Let’s dance,” he said.

“I’m sick, Dad. I think I’ve got a temperature. I don’t feel like it.”

“Course you do,” Dad said, grabbing my hands, dragging me to my feet, and swinging me round.

“Stop it, Dad!” I said. “I’m sick! I don’t want to dance!”

But he carried on, swung me round, faster and faster, wilder and wilder. It was unbearable and I was on the point of throwing up.

“PACK IT IN, DAD!” I shouted in the end. “PACK IT IN!”

He stopped as quickly as he had started, threw me down on the bed, and left.

Every Friday Mom came home, I would always be close at hand so that I could be with her first because if I was first Dad couldn’t send me to my room, which he could do if they were sitting and talking. By the time she left again on Sunday night or Monday morning it was as if Dad had come closer to us, or at least me, for again he called me to the kitchen to tell him what had happened during the day while he cooked. We ate in silence and after doing the dishes he disappeared down to his study without fail. Occasionally he came to watch TV with us, but usually he was downstairs until supper, and so it was as if Yngve and I were on our own at home. Not that I spent my time much differently from how I would have done if he hadn’t been there. Mostly I lay on my bed reading. As Mom no longer drove us regularly to the library, and I had read all the books in the school library, I started on Mom and Dad’s shelves. I read Agatha Christie and I read Stendhal, Le Rouge et Le Noir, I read a book of French short stories, I read a book by Jon Michelet and a biography of Tolstoy. I started writing a book myself, it was going to be about a sailing ship, but after I had written the first ten pages, which consisted largely of listing all the people on board, what kinds of provisions they had, and what cargo they were carrying, Yngve said no one wrote books about sailing ships nowadays, they did when sailing ships existed, now people write about what it’s like to be alive today, and so I stopped. I also compiled a newspaper that autumn, in triplicate, which I put in three mailboxes, one for Karlsen, one for Gustavsen, and one for Prestbakmo, but I never heard any more, they just seemed to disappear into a void, as if they had never existed.

I lived one life indoors and another outdoors, as it had always been and as I suppose it was for all children; in front of the TV on Saturday night, surrounded by their parents and brothers and sisters, they were probably very different, much gentler and more accepting than when I saw them down in the forest, where freedom was total and nothing prevented them from following their smallest inclinations. The difference was particularly pronounced in the autumn. In the spring and summer so much of life was lived outdoors, the degree of contact between a child’s life and an adult’s life was changed, but when autumn came and the nights drew in so early it was as if the ties were cut and we slipped into our own worlds as soon as the front door closed behind us. The brief, dark, cold evenings were laden with all the excitement that exists in the unseen and the hidden. The autumn was darkness, earth, water, and hollow spaces. It was breathing, laughter, torchlight, dens, bonfires, and a flock of children drifting here and there. And not least the bedrooms afterward. Even though I never got permission to have anyone at home and none of the kids on the estate had ever been to my bedroom, I was always allowed to go to theirs. To some occasionally, to others often. That autumn it was the turn of Dag Lothar’s bedroom. Red-faced after running through the darkness, we would sit in his room and play Monopoly while listening to one of his two Beatles albums, the red one or the blue one, on the cassette recorder. I liked the red one better, with their first songs, they were simple and happy, we would sing along loudly with the chorus, almost shouting, in English, not bothering too much about the semantics, only the sound, although the blue one was played more and more as we began to enjoy the somber, more unfamiliar tunes on it.

These evenings are among the happiest in my life. It is strange because there was nothing exceptional about them, we did what all young people did, sat playing games, listening to music, chattering away about whatever came into our heads.

But I liked the smell in their house, I liked being there. I liked the darkness we had just come from, which lent everything an unaccustomed quality, especially when it was damp and you could feel it in your whole body, not only see it with your eyes. I liked the light from the street lamps. I liked the atmosphere that arose when there were lots of us together, the voices in the night, the bodies moving around me. I liked the sound of the foghorn from the open sea. My thinking on these evenings: anything can happen. I liked just dashing around, coming across the unexpected — objects, features, situations. The huts that had been erected in the forest above the pontoons, they were empty in the evening, the windows were lit, and we peered in. Were those porn mags lying there? Yes, they were. No one dared to smash a window and go in and take them, but now all of a sudden it was a possibility, and we knew someone would do it soon, perhaps even we would. This was a time when one morning there could be a centerfold from a porn magazine lying in the road outside the house. This was a time when you could find porn mags in the ditches, in fields, and under bridges. Who had left them there we had no idea, they were scattered as if by God’s hand, a part of nature, like wood anemones, catkins, swollen streams, or rain-smooth rocks. And the elements marked them, too: they were either spongy with moisture or bone dry or the paper had cracked after having dried out again, often they were sun-faded, soil-stained, and discolored.

A thrill went through me when I thought about the magazines. It had nothing to do with the way we talked about them, we talked tough, we laughed and ogled them greedily, but the thrill lay somewhere else, so deep that rational thought never reached it.

There were many young guys on the estate you could imagine would have pornographic magazines at home, and they were without exception the same ones you could imagine buying a moped when the time came, starting to smoke and playing hooky from school, in short, the ones who hung out at the Fina station. The bad boys. So within me there were two incompatible entities. The magazines belonged to the bad, but what they filled me with, the intense thrill that forced me to gulp again and again, was also something I desired with a wild urgency. I went weak at the knees when I got to see one of the naked women. It was fantastic, it was terrible, it was the world opening and hell revealing itself, the light shining and the darkness falling, we just wanted to stand there flicking through the pages, we could have stood there for all eternity, beneath the heavy boughs of the spruce trees, with the aroma of damp earth and wet mountain, leering at the pictures. It was as though these women rose from the bog, straight up from the autumn-yellow grass, or at least were closely related to it. Parts of the pictures were often obliterated, but we saw enough of both the soft and the hard to know with certainty that these feelings existed and never left us, and every rumor of the existence of a magazine was always followed up at once.

Geir was one of the keenest in this regard. Already in the second class he had borrowed a copy of his father’s Vi Menn and we sat down in the forest to study the topless women while, to ward off any suspicions, we talked in high-pitched voices about what Donald and Dolly were doing as though we were reading cartoon strips.

Now there were porn mags in the huts.

We circled them, but the doors were locked and we didn’t have the nerve to smash the glass, undo the catch on the windows, and steal the magazines.

But the desire was aroused and it cast around in other directions. The clumps of trees around the car wreck in the forest?

The ditch behind the bus stop by B-Max?

The trees under the bridge?

The garbage dump, but of course! There had to be some there, didn’t there? Hundreds? Thousands?

Sunday morning, the end of September, Dad fishing in his boat, Mom in the living room, Yngve on his bike somewhere on the east of the island, and me out of the door and across the wet gravel, wearing my beige jacket and my blue jeans, on my way up to Geir’s, butterflies in my stomach, we were finally going to the garbage dump. The sun was shining, but it had rained early in the morning and the tarmac was still black and wet in those places the sun didn’t reach, such as in the shade under the spruce trees outside our house.

Geir was standing outside, ready, when I arrived, and we sprinted off. Up the hill, over the long plain where there were boats under tarpaulins in front gardens, mostly plastic boats but also some small dinghies, and one cabin cruiser, renowned far and wide. The lawns were brown, the trees behind the houses orange and red, the sky was blue. We had taken off our jackets and knotted them around our waists. Walked up past Ketil’s house, onto the gravel road and through the gate that marked the end of the road and the start of the path. On the other side of the field was the new parish hall, where Ten Sing, with all the blonde girls, rehearsed and had their meetings.

The stream alongside the path was full, cool green water, flowing lazily down the gentle slope. It got its color from the heather, the grass, and the plants the water flowed and lay across. Only minor ripples on the surface revealed that it was moving. Where the hill became steeper and the stream fell with a roar we began to run. The white stones littering the path were a matte gray in the shadow, a gleaming yellow in the sun. Ahead of us someone was walking uphill and we slowed down. It was an elderly couple. She had gray hair and a cardigan; he had a cord jacket with leather patches on the elbows and a stick in his hand. His mouth was open and his jaw trembled.

We turned and looked after them.

“That was Thommesen, that was,” Geir said.

We hadn’t seen him since he had us in the second class.

“I thought he’d died ages ago!” I said.

We took the old shortcut through the forest and emerged on the edge above the garbage dump. The mountain of white plastic bags and black garbage bags glinted in the full sun. A dozen or so seagulls were screaming and flapping their wings. We clambered down the slope and wove our way between all the objects, which in some places were stacked high, perhaps four times higher than us, and in others lay strewn about with nothing on top. We were looking for bags and cardboard boxes, and there was no shortage of them, also containing magazines, weeklies that the elderly read: Hjemmet and Allers and Norsk Ukeblad, weeklies for girls: Starlet and Det Nye and Romantikk, piles of newspapers, mostly Verdens Gang and Agderposten, but also Vårt Land and Aftenposten and Dagbladet; we found A-Magasinet and Kvinner og Klær, horsey magazines for girls, Donald Duck comics and a fat Fantomet album from the late sixties that I immediately put to one side, a Tempo album as well, some Kaptein Miki comics, and one Agent X9 paperback, which I was pretty pleased with, but it didn’t alter the fact that what we were searching for, that is, magazines like Alle Menn, Lek, Coctail, and Aktuell Report, and perhaps even a few foreign magazines, because there were quite a few Danish ones in circulation, one called Weekend Sex, for example, and some Swedish and English ones, was nowhere to be found. We didn’t find a single porn magazine! What was going on? Had someone beaten us to it? They had to be here!

After an hour’s searching we gave up and flopped down in the heather to read the normal magazines we had found. Perhaps because I’d had my mind set on something quite different and had felt the expectation all day, I wasn’t really happy about just sitting there. Something was missing, and I got up, paced between the trees, looked down at the stream, perhaps a wade in the water was the answer?

“Want to go for a wade?” I called.

“Sure. Just got to read this first,” Geir said without looking up from his magazine.

I went over to the two bags of bottles we had found. Most of them were the long, brown ones with the yellow Arendals Bryggeri label, but there was also the odd dumpy, green Heineken bottle. I took one of them out. There was a bit of earth and grass stuck to the outside, and I wondered if it had been lying on the edge of a lawn for a while and had been picked up when the garden was being prepared for winter.

The lust was still there in my stomach.

I rotated the bottle in my hand. The dark-green glass lit up in the sun.

“Do you think it’s possible to stick your willy in this?” I said.

Geir rested the magazine on his lap.

“Ye-eah,” he said. “If the neck’s not too narrow. Are you going to try?”

“Sure,” I said. “Are you?”

He got up and came over. Took a bottle.

“Think anyone can see us here?” he said.

“No, are you crazy?” I said. “We’re in the middle of the forest. But we could move over there, to be on the safe side.”

We walked toward the trunk of a large pine tree. I undid my belt and dropped my trousers to my knees, took out my willy with one hand and held the bottle in the other. I pressed my willy into the top, the glass neck was cold and hard against my soft, warm skin, and actually too narrow, but with a bit of humping and pumping and wriggling, it slipped inside. A tingle ran down my back as my willy throbbed and the bottle seemed to tighten around it, harder and harder.

“I can’t get it in,” Geir said. “It won’t go.”

“I’ve done it!” I said. “Look!”

I turned to him.

“But I can’t budge it,” I said. “There’s no room. It’s stuck!”

To show how stuck it was, I let go of the bottle. It hung between my legs.

“Ha ha ha,” Geir laughed.

I was about to pull my willy out when I felt a sharp pain shoot up.

“Ow. Ow, ow, ow, shit!”

“What’s the matter?” Geir said.

“Ow! Ow! Oh, FUCK!”

It was a stabbing pain, as if from a knife or a jagged piece of glass. I pulled as hard as I could and got my willy out of the bottle.

On the tip of it there was a black beetle.

“OH! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK!” I howled. I gripped the beetle or whatever it was, it was black with big claws, pulled it off, and hurled it as far as I could, while running back and forth waving my arms.

“What’s the matter?” Geir said. “What’s the matter? What’s the matter, Karl Ove?”

“A beetle. It was biting my willy!”

At first he stared at me, slack-jawed. Then he burst into laughter. It was exactly his kind of humor. He rolled around in the heather laughing.

“Don’t tell anyone!” I said, doing up my belt. “Have you got that?”

“Yeah-heh-heh-heh!” Geir said. “Ha ha ha ha!”

Three times I made him promise he wouldn’t tell anyone as we walked uphill, each carrying a bag and with the sun beating down on our necks. I also said a short prayer to apologize for my swearing.

“Should we go down and get the deposit on the bottles at Fina now?” Geir said.

“Do they take beer bottles there?” I said.

“Oh, that’s right,” Geir said. “We’d better hide them then.”

We walked back across the field, jumped over the stream, and there, on the other side, in a clump of trees below the chapel, we left the bags of bottles. Pulled up some ferns and tufts of grass and covered them as well as we were able, glanced around to make sure no one was nearby, then calmly moved away, knowing that if you ran you drew attention to yourself, up the road next to the chapel, which we then started to follow.

Outside the cellar door of the house where he lived stood Ketil, his bike turned upside down in front of him. He was revolving the rear wheel with a pedal in one hand while lubricating the chain with a small plastic bottle of oil he was holding in the other. His smooth, black hair hung down in front of his face.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi,” we said.

“Where’ve you been?”

“To the dump.”

“What were you doing there?”

“Searching for porn mags,” Geir said. I sent him a glare. What was he doing? This was a secret!

“Did you find any?” Ketil said, smiling at us.

Geir shook his head.

“I’ve got a pile of them in my room,” he said. “Would you like to borrow them?”

“Oh yes!” Geir said.

“Is that true?” I said.

He nodded.

“Do you want them now?”

“I’ve got to go home and eat,” I said.

“Me, too,” Geir said. “But we can take them with us and hide them in the forest.”

Ketil shook his head.

“No chance. Then they’d be ruined. You’ll have to take them home. But that’s OK. I can bring them over this afternoon.”

“That’s great. But then we’ll have to meet you outside. No ringing the bell. Agreed?”

“Oh?” he said, smiling with narrowed eyes. “Are you frightened I’ll show the mags to your Dad, or what?”

“No, but … he asks a lot of questions. And you haven’t been there before.”

“Fine,” he said. “Be outside at five and I’ll be there. OK?”

“That’s when the soccer’s on,” I said.

“Six then. And don’t tell me you want to watch children’s TV!”

“OK. Six.”

Mom was sitting in the kitchen reading a book with the radio on and rice boiling on the stove. The whole of one side of the pan was white with milk and in the area between the hotplates there was also milk and rice, almost dried up from the heat, so I could see it had boiled over.

“Hi,” I said.

She put the book down.

“Hi,” she said. “Where have you been?”

“Mm,” I said. “Around and about. We found some bottles and we’re going to get the money back on Monday.”

“Nice,” she said.

“Are you going to make pizza this evening?” I said.

She smiled.

“That’s what I’d planned.”

“Great!” I said.

“Have you started the book you got?”

I nodded.

“I started yesterday. It seems really good. I’m going to go to my room and read some now in fact.”

“You do that,” she said. “Food’ll be ready in a quarter of an hour.”

She always brought something when she came on Fridays, and this time it had been a book. A Wizard of Earthsea, written by someone called Ursula K. Le Guin, and already after the first few pages I knew that this was an absolutely fantastic book. Yet I didn’t settle down with the book without some hesitation, because Mom was at home and I wanted to be with her as much as possible. On the other hand, she was here and almost all the qualities her presence brought to my life were in place, not least the fact that Dad never did anything awful when she was here, never had one of his furious outbursts, always controlled himself, even though I was lying on my bed and she was in the kitchen.

I watched the English Football League match with Yngve and Dad. He had bought toffees as usual, and both Yngve and I had been given a pools coupon with eight rows of twelve matches each. I got five correct results, which the others laughed at because that was less than half and I might just as well have rolled a dice. Dad said it was as hard to get five as it was ten. But whereas those who got ten right were sent money by Norsk Tipping, those who got five had to pay money to them, he said. Yngve got seven right and Dad got ten, but unfortunately this time there was no payout for ten.

By the time all the results were in it was two minutes to six. Outside, Ketil came whizzing down the hill on his bike with a bulging plastic bag strapped to the luggage rack. I jumped up and said I had to go.

“What are you going to do now?” Dad said. “Children’s TV is starting.”

“I’m not in the mood for it,” I said. “And I’m meeting Geir.”

“Meeting, eh?” Dad said. “Well, that’s fine. Just make sure you’re back home by eight.”

“Are you going out?” Mom said from the doorway. “And here I was thinking you could help me make the pizza.”

“I’d love to, but I’ve arranged to meet someone,” I said.