I walk down to the shops in Slemdal. Drab food. Good thing I have wine at home. It will make the bread taste a little better. I do not see him standing behind me in the queue. I have been getting so many looks from people. I am shrouded in suspicion after all. But as I stand bagging my groceries I see who it is. The man from the Red Cross rescue team. My heart pounds, I become instantly nervous, and do not know if I should cast my eyes downwards or look at him. I look at him. What a handsome man. He is about to punch in his code and pushes his glasses up onto his forehead. He must sense my eyes upon him because he suddenly looks up and right at me, his gaze sweeping my breasts. It happens quickly, but is unmistakable, I have seen it before, when someone likes looking at me. I nod to him, and he seems to blush, but he turns his head at the same time to accept his receipt. I am not certain he has recognised me. He shakes open a plastic bag, I glance at his groceries: full-fat milk, butter, wholemeal bread, crisps. Vegetable mayonnaise. Bachelor fare, I think, no woman would eat that much fat.
I finish filling my shopping bags, place them on the floor between my feet and pretend to rummage for something in my shoulder bag. When I lift my head he gives me a slight bow.
You were the one who was in my garden, I say, do you remember me?
Yes, aren’t you the local writer? he says.
I’m the one whose house has been on the TV, I say. The neighbourhood witch. They think I eat children. You probably think the same, do you?
He breaks eye contact, but remains standing in front of me with his bag in his hand. They’re only doing their job, I suppose, he says. It’s an awful business.
Yeah, you just have to keep searching, I reply. Keep searching and hope for the best.
I am well able to do that too. Carry on that way. Not hop over the preliminary platitudes and get right down to business. Best to hold back a little, that is what Knut said to me at the outset of our relationship. But that was when we were having sex.
He looks at me and nods seriously. Things going okay with you? he asks.
Yes, considering the circumstances, I say, not too bad. Just think about the parents.
We walk together towards the exit. He stops right outside and takes a bunch of keys from his trouser pocket. I’m heading down this way, he says, motioning in the direction of Vinderen.
Does he live nearby, I think, so close to me that we go to the same shop, how could I have failed to notice him?
I hope things improve for you, he says, and I nod, say that if they could only find her, they would, and preferably alive.
I cut across the car park, and as I look back I see him throw his leg over a bicycle and freewheel down towards Vinderen. A tall, thin man with long legs in a checked, short-sleeved shirt.
I walk uphill and home. I put the food in the fridge and cry. Pour red wine into the cup and sit outside the house. Sun-warmed plastic at my back. My toes in the moss. An hour passes. I cry some more, my nose runs, and I feel sorry for myself, but then the wine takes effect and I realise I am not as sad as I think, on the contrary. There is a throbbing throughout my entire body. It is happiness. Completely out of control. He liked me. I saw it. And now I have thought it. It just happens, comes, takes me over, consumes me. I cannot, will not, it is not on. But it comes: I am excited.
It is like rain falling inside my head. I try to think but my head is filled with drops. Clear, translucent drops. They contain everything I want to know, insight, but the rain falls quickly and heavily, I see, but do not see. That was the way it was in my relationship with Ketil M as well.
We got together after a members’ meeting in the Authors’ Union. I was a lot more involved in that kind of thing previously: turned up at meetings, festivals and seminars, went to publishers’ parties and dinners. Driven by a longing, a feeling of not making it, ever. I do not know why I thought other writers could help me with that. Or that I would find a man among them to be happy with. Was I never going to be happy? Or if not happy then at least content. I told myself that: being content is sufficient. But my fantasies had greater ambitions, they were wild and uninhibited, I wanted bliss, orgasms, fusion, not a trace of loneliness, my other half was not to feel extraneous. Everything was to be harmonious, a fellowship, perhaps something even more lofty, a spiritual convergence.
My attraction to Ketil was purely physical. He was big, everything about him was big, his hands, upper arms, his chest. His legs were long, and you could just picture the size of his penis, and I did, every time I ran into him, which was pretty often, he was constantly to be seen at writers’ events, as was I.
At first he showed no interest. I was not surprised. Ketil likes women who are tall, blonde and outgoing, well-endowed. And beautiful, of course. Not that I am ugly. But I am not striking either, and I am dark-haired, reserved. For the most part. Except for when I was chasing after Ketil, then I was neither nervous nor hesitant but chatted away. That was a red flag. Men whom I am not afraid of approaching are the most dangerous, they are the kind who let you down or will not let you go.
His books were boring. At least the one I read was. It was not the story that bored me, more the words. He wrote about the wonderful tranquillity of the forest and the dark mystery of women, something along those lines anyway, maybe not quite as bad as that, but still. Perhaps it was not so much the words that bugged me, even though they testified to literary weakness. No, it was his ideas about great literature, what was required, how a sentence should be sculpted in order for it to be art at the level of a master novel. I was more poetic, in his opinion, my work was about displaying the contents in the toolbox of language, and that was all well and good, but was still only the first step in the development of a writer. Ideally, the language of the novel should be transparent, he said, the craftsmanship should not be visible. That was his goal, what Ketil was aiming for. I was tempted to tell him he was mistaken, that I, as opposed to him, had come so far in my development that I did not know if I wanted to be a writer any longer, or rather did not know where the line went: when was I a writer, when was I not? No, I could not have said anything like that at that time, because I did not think so much then, or did not want to think, acknowledge my discomfort. It was the contrast between his ideas and those feeble sentences of his that made it uncomfortable, embarrassing, turning it into something I wanted to overlook, because it would most likely improve, I reckoned, when he became more confident. That was the way I thought back then. That love was not dependent on intellectual parity. It was not intelligence that mattered. But I was wrong about that. No, I lied about that. My ideas masked something else: the fear of finding an equal. The fear of the sexual side of things then eating their way into my soul. Into every perceptible aspect of me. That devotion would lead to self-destruction. Were not even my thoughts to be free? My very core.
We became a couple in November, at the closing party after the members’ meeting. At the table, when the meal was finished and everyone was mingling. Some people danced, and we held hands on the white tablecloth.
I could see the very moment he decided upon me. His gaze stopped wandering, he began to flirt, or rather, he simulated flirting. So what, I thought, so what. The difference between flirting falsely and the real thing is negligible, nobody can tell them apart. I knew he would say yes, so I asked him if he wanted to go back to my place. My body felt so light, small and delicate alongside his large form, it never felt like that otherwise. A love affair, I thought, finally something that can work out. But something was ever so slightly amiss. Something in his eyes, not quite right. I think he felt that walking along with me resembled something that had been. As for me: walking along with him resembled something that could have been.
The last time we made love was also on my sofa. My body did not respond, I had no desire for him any more, but did not say anything. Instead I stroked him up and down his back and along his sides. He held out so long that I came all the same, and then it was like something in my head burst, something water-like, and for a moment I could see the past in one sweep, I smelled it, just as I could perceive the smell of semen long before Ketil came, I saw where it was coming from, a room I had been in, followed by a different room, a different man, several men, rooms, sofas, beds. In every instance I was much too young and an odour of soil pervaded, where did that smell come from? I remembered some coloured lights in a tree, warm night air, a market or a neighbourhood party somewhere in the south of Europe one summer I was travelling. A woman was selling paintings beneath one of the lights, she had hung them from the branches of a tree, they were pure kitsch. I passed by her with my arms wrapped around a man I did not know, gloating, poor her, I thought, does she really think what she paints is nice? But the night was dark and dense, music was playing, and the aroma of fried, spicy meat drifted from a shack. The whole scene resembled something good, everything about it, I made myself believe I was loved, I had sex with the stranger on the ground in a back yard because I confused the likeness with the original, I thought the image of what was good was good itself. And lying with this person on top of me. Ketil. I should have been able to love him, but I could not love. The drop burst and the water divided, the way back lay open. I saw how love lost. I think it’s over, Ketil, I said after we had put our clothes on. It’s good you say that, he replied, because I’ve also been thinking about it for a while, ending things.
When he had left I slept half-sitting up on the sofa, dreaming I had written a novel comprised of a single sentence: You must search in the darkness for your dreams, not in your dreams for the darkness.
Memory is dangerous. I am standing at the sink looking down at the dishwater. The red wine is within reach, the handle of the washing-up brush has soap-froth stuck to it. There is a programme on the radio about memory techniques. A researcher is relating what people did to recall events, names and words before they had a written language to rely on: associated them with buildings, rooms and objects in the rooms. It is dangerous, I sense: the rooms, the demands they make. That unexpected opportunity of understanding what is happening. The opportunity of transgressing the material, of physics, even though such an intellectual condition is of course physical, the particles that make the brain move beyond its own memories or right to the core of them, reliving. And something more. Suddenly over to something else. And the shimmer of light that takes me beyond a specific place and time. To another specific place, in a room next to my own time. To the Roman Empire, to Berlin, to the Middle Ages. To Lillestrøm.
A council house between the towns of Strømmen and Lillestrøm in the late seventies. Open plan between the kitchen and living room, pine-panelled walls, a fireplace. A mother, father and some teenagers – I am one of them. A wooden bowl, buffed and scorched with letters in one of the children’s woodworking classes.
I am visiting a friend. She can play the guitar and I have a vague desire for something or other.
She lives right by the railway line. I went past the house on the train, before getting off at the station and following a gravel road back along the tracks. The sound of the doorbell resounded through the house. The hallway is full of shoes. Clogs, sandals, gym shoes.
Are there crisps in the bowl?
Yeah, help yourself.
The atmosphere in the house is happy and unconstrained. The friend later becomes a well-known singer-songwriter. I have brought my sleeping bag along, but I do not stay the night all the same. I have to get home, I say, I have to get back. I never go round there again. Even though it bears a resemblance. The house resembles home. I am taken aback by the feeling of fellowship. That it exists but I cannot partake. I cannot identify myself, even though it should be the easiest thing in the world here, where everything is so alike. I take the train home.
Come on, come back. I have a recollection of my friend, shouting this to me, her head out the window as I make my way down the road. I also remember never finding my way there, never making it to the house, even though I was invited. I couldn’t find it, I tell her later over the phone. Who was disappointed, me or my friend? She who could have become a friend, but did not? I who could have been like her, but was not? She who could play guitar. I who could write. We were on equal terms, and yet were not.
The living room in that house resembled the one in the house Granny and Granddad built. Not the wood panelling but the layout. The door to the garden. The sliding doors between the dining and living rooms. The fireplace to the left, a dark hole. That was how it was when we lived there too, when I was small.
One family like this, another like that. One life in dark readiness, another in enthusiasm. The similarity, and the hair’s breadth of margin between.