I’m almost a bit embarrassed by the kind of goody-goody, comic-book language I used the other day in my description of our life at the camp. I kind of feel as if it was written by someone trying to make fun of the kids being depicted or at best someone who sees only their cute, harmless sides and doesn’t take them seriously. But that’s not the case at all, believe me. Obviously we didn’t talk exactly the way I’ve written, we may not have used expressions such as “armed to the teeth” and “yellow dogs” all that often. But if I’m to present a clear picture of the imaginary world we inhabited up there in the forest and of how we saw ourselves and each other when we were running about up there, then this is the language I have to use. It’s much the same as me writing that we wore feathers in our hair and loincloths made from cut-up sheets. I seem to remember that one of us did show up in a get-up like that one summer’s day in the late 70s or the early 80s, but it wasn’t a regular thing. Most of us wore perfectly ordinary shorts or faded bell-bottom jeans, I think. But if I’m to show how we saw ourselves and each other and, not least, how we would have been viewed by outsiders, then it’s more correct to kit us out with loincloths than with jeans. Because in our minds we were all Red Indians.
And this Wild West-inspired fantasy world was very much your creation. It was you who decided what rules applied in the camp, what it was okay to do and what wasn’t okay, how we should or shouldn’t talk. The rest of us interpreted your rules in our own way, of course, and acted accordingly, and since most of us read the Silver Arrow comics, the Deerfoot books and various other key sources of inspiration, naturally we sometimes came up with our own suggestions or ideas about how to shape our fantasy world. But everything that was said or done still had to be approved by you before it could be incorporated into this part of our boyish society, if I can call it that. You made no comment, for example, if I called myself Swift Horse or Per wanted to be known as Strong Bear, but when one of the little kids said he wanted to be called Obi-Wan Kenobi, you got annoyed and told him to find himself a proper name at once. Nor did you like it if we said things like “I’ve got to get back for dinner” or “My mum and dad said I had to be home by six” because that brought elements from the real world into our imaginary universe and as you’ll see from my last letter this could confuse and spoil things, jolting us out of the dream world we inhabited. But the worst sin anyone could commit was to remind us of what we all knew really: that we didn’t actually have any enemy. Both the real-life camp and the imaginary universe that went with it were built, after all, around the idea that we had an enemy that we had to defend ourselves against. The fact that we kept watch, that we made weapons and built stockades around our brush shelters, that we practised hand-to-hand fighting and laid all sorts of plans for attacking and retreating, all of this we did because we had to defend ourselves against an enemy. So to say out loud that this enemy didn’t actually exist, to admit that the kids from Husvika were no threat to us and probably never would be, would be tantamount to destroying the whole foundation of everything we did, all the effort we had put into it would seem worthless without an enemy, all the pleasure we got from playing at the camp would be gone, our life up there in the forest would become meaningless.
And that was exactly why, as chief, you would take drastic action to keep alive the notion that we were under constant threat. Not only would you get angry and upset and attack the culprit both verbally and physically, the way you did with Karoline and Hauk, but in order to repair the damage I know for a fact that one night you actually sneaked out of the house and up to the forest and tore down everything we had built. Shelters, stockades, lookout post, you destroyed the whole lot, and afterwards not only did you blame the Husvikings, you were even crafty enough to plant clues which confirmed that this had indeed been the work of the kids from Husvika. “Look!” Per cried, pointing to what we all recognized as a baseball cap belonging to one of the Husvikings. Only later did you admit that the Husviking concerned had left the cap lying in one of the goals at the football pitch and that you had taken it and left it next to the toppled totem pole, where Per found it.
And you achieved your aim, of course. “Revenge!” Per cried. “Death to the Husvikings!” I screamed. “No mercy!” you yelled, brandishing your spear above your head.
And as if that weren’t enough, just after this, when we’d got over the shock and were busy rebuilding the camp, who should come strolling up the path but Hauk and the girls, each carrying a berry pail.
Well, we asked, now did they believe us, now did they see what sort of enemy we were up against?
The girls were stunned, they just stood there staring at the ruins.
So it was true after all, they mumbled. We hadn’t been speaking with forked tongues when we told them about the Husvikings.
You frowned.
“Why on earth would we lie about a thing like that?”
No, the girls had no answer to that. But at least they no longer doubted us. And could they help us to rebuild the camp?
We shrugged and did a good job of hiding the fact that there was nothing in the world we would like more. Well, we said, they could always lend a hand.
“But weren’t we going berry picking?” Hauk asked, looking at Eva and Karoline.
“Oh, honestly, Hauk,” the girls burst out. They couldn’t just shut their eyes and pretend that nothing had happened. They had to help, of course they did, they could pick berries any time.
“Okay, be like that,” Hauk said.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, can’t you help as well?” the girls asked.
“Nah,” Hauk muttered, the look on his face saying he wasn’t interested.
A sniff and a grunt.
“Jeez, how selfish can you get,” Karoline said.
“I didn’t think you were like that,” Eva said.
And they tossed their heads, letting Hauk know that he had gone down drastically in their estimation.
Hauk, poor sod, said not a word as he slunk off into the raspberry thicket, but it wasn’t hard to see that he was hurt. I felt a twinge of guilt as I watched him go because he was a good friend and, like you, I knew that his mum and dad had forbidden him to take part in our activities at the camp, so he couldn’t have helped us to rebuild it however much he might want to.
But we didn’t say anything about that to the girls. No, no. We let them get themselves all worked up and indignant at the idea that anyone could be so selfish and, even though I did feel kind of guilty, that didn’t stop me from feeling a little bit pleased too. There was no getting away from the fact that most girls thought Hauk was handsome, so it was good to have him out of the way for a while.
Then we got back to work.
Per mended the lookout post up in the birch tree and two of the littlest kids tried to dig a deeper hole for the totem pole to stand in. Meanwhile Karoline was wrestling with one of the stakes for the stockade. We hurried across as casually as we could, you and I. “Let me get that for you, Karoline,” you said, beating me to it. I had thought, not to say hoped, that she might be a bit mad at you for knocking her berry pail out of her hands, but she didn’t seem to be. Quite the opposite, in fact. Not only did she immediately let you relieve her of her burden, she even thanked you in the way you liked best of all:
“You don’t find that at all heavy?” she asked when she noticed that you were only using one hand to carry the stake.
“Heavy?” you said. Your face was scarlet, your arm all but breaking in two, but you acted as though you had no idea what she was talking about.
Laughter from Karoline.
“What?” you said, looking more and more puzzled.
“Oh, nothing,” Karoline laughed, not wanting to say it.
And you shook your head and sauntered on, chuckling, with the stake under your arm. “Women!” you muttered.
As well you might. Well, I for one didn’t understand them. I mean, how could she be so keen on you so soon after you had tramped all over most of the raspberries she had picked? It was unbelievable. But I wasn’t giving her up that easily. As soon as all of our joint projects were finished I started to give the girls some advice on how to build a good, solid brush shelter that wouldn’t collapse at the first faint breeze to sweep through the forest. If Karoline and Eva were me they would, for example, borrow Per’s tomahawk and use that to sharpen the ends of the poles, I told them, because then you could stick them more firmly in the ground and the shelter would be more stable.
The girls were impressed.
“I never thought of that,” Eva said.
“You’re so smart, Ole,” Karoline said.
Oh, I didn’t know about that, but I had built a few shelters in my time, that I couldn’t deny. Well, I didn’t have to tell them, Karoline informed me. I was thrilled to hear her talking to me like this and it was all I could do not to let it show.
“But it’s not as easy as you might think to sharpen a pole if you’ve never done it before,” I said, keeping my delight in check by becoming all matter-of-fact and technical: you had to do this and this, and for heaven’s sake mind your fingers. But, well, I was right here, as she could see, so if they needed help all she had to do was ask and I’d be at her service – if I had the time and the possibility, that was.
Okay, so did I happen to have the time and the possibility right now?
“We – ell,” I said, trying to play hard to get by dragging it out.
No, no, she could ask David instead.
So then I had a busy time convincing them that I wasn’t all that busy. I scratched my chin and had a good think. “No, actually I can leave that till later,” I murmured to myself. Then I looked up at Karoline and nodded. Yes, of course I could give them a hand now, that shouldn’t be any problem.
“Oh, great. Thanks a lot, Ole.”
And then all I had to do was borrow Per’s tomahawk and get to work. I sharpened the poles we had, nipped into the wood to cut down some more and once I’d sharpened those it was time to start building the framework for what was to be their tepee. My forehead glistened with sweat, but the girls didn’t need to help me, I assured them, they would only be in the way, I’d be just as quick doing it alone. And I’d rustle up pine branches for the tepee covering while I was at it.
Wow. But wasn’t I at least going to take a break? Karoline wondered.
A break? What for?
They both laughed, they just didn’t know what I was made of.
Oh, it was so good to hear them say things like that.
Well, okay, they said. They might as well go and collect some bracken while I was working.
Bracken?
Yes, for the floor. So it would be nice and soft to sit on.
What? Well I never – the girls thought the ground was too hard to sit on comfortably? Okay, okay, I laughed, then they’d better go off into the forest and find their bracken, and in the meantime I’d finish making the tepee.
Oh, this was the life. Not only had we an enemy we could stand against shoulder to shoulder, now we also had women whom we could help and maybe even give our lives for if the situation demanded it.
Perfect, in other words. Your diversionary tactic had worked and everything was perfect in the camp again.
This just shows, by the way, why of all of us you were the brains behind our imaginary world. Because there was no one to touch you when it came to storytelling and yarn-spinning. In fact I’ve never known anyone like you. If, for example, I asked you what you’d done the day before, you might say that you’d been coley fishing with your grandfather, even though you hadn’t been coley fishing at all, you’d actually gone blueberry picking. As if the fact that you’d been blueberry picking was something you wanted to hide, or as if you felt that there was something special about going coley fishing that made it worth boasting about. At other times you would launch, all unasked, into descriptions of books you’d read or television programmes you’d seen – books and television programmes you couldn’t possibly have read or seen, or that might even prove to be non-existent. And if we happened to be talking about someone, whether it was a kid or a grown-up, you almost always had some story about them that nobody else knew and that would later turn out to be a pack of lies. And it didn’t need to be anything dramatic, designed to spellbind us, your audience. Sometimes it was, but just as often all you would have to tell us was that this person or that had an uncle who was a welder, or that the person concerned was really good at drawing.
I’ve often wondered why you did things like this, why you lied without any thought of gaining some kind of benefit or advantage from it. I mean, you risked getting a name for being the sort of person the other kids couldn’t trust and whom they wouldn’t want anything to do with. I spoke to Eva about this when I ran into her down at the Co-op today. She works as a psychologist in Namsos and she cited your family situation as a possible explanation for why you were the way you were. Berit, your mother, wouldn’t tell you or anyone else who your real father was, and since you and she had lived with your grandfather he had, to all intents and purposes served as a father figure for you. And, since he was such a domineering control freak, you had a particularly strong need to create for yourself a world in which you and only you called the shots, or so she thought. So from that point of view, all the lying, the yarn-spinning, the fantasizing, was actually a survival mechanism, she said. Your imaginary world was a place in which you had the power you didn’t have in your normal everyday life.
This all sounds very neat and logical, but I’m not so sure that it’s correct. Unlike today, when the lives of most kids are totally regulated and supervised by adults, we were given plenty of scope and had more than enough time to ourselves. None of the kids on Otterøya went to nursery school, not as far as I can remember, because when we were at that age, our mothers were at home. Or if they went out to work they had grandparents or childminders to look after their kids, and this meant that we were free to run around the farms and roam the forest and the seashore. And later, when we started school and more and more of our mothers started going out to work, there were no after-school clubs where we could be looked after. Hardly anyone on Otterøya ever locked their door, but the few that did gave their children their own doorkeys to hang on strings round their necks and when we came home from school, alone or with a chum, we could look forward to hours to ourselves without any adult interference. So I find it kind of hard to see how excessive control on Erik’s part could have forced you to take refuge in an imaginary world in which you ruled the roost.
There was no doubt, though, that Erik could be controlling and domineering, not to say a bit of a tyrant. Years after your mum got together with Arvid and you moved from Otterøya to Namsos, I had a summer job at the sawmill where Erik worked for the last few years before he retired and there he behaved pretty much like a general among the rank and file.
“Johnsen, come here,” he said to one man who had just been taken on.
“It’s Johansen,” the man corrected him.
“If I say your name’s Johnsen then Johnsen it is,” Erik retorted, and if he was trying to be funny then he hid it well, because he neither laughed or smiled, and to the guys at the sawmill that poor sod was Johnsen until the day Erik retired. If anyone wasn’t pulling their weight or made a mistake, especially if that mistake held us back or caused problems for the gang in some other way, Erik would usually punish the culprit by refusing to let him make up for it. His language could get pretty colourful at times, but usually he would simply dismiss the person concerned with a brusque wave of the hand and fix the fault himself, quickly, neatly and efficiently, leaving the sinner feeling useless. The only positive thing I can find to say about this side of Erik was that he was the same with everyone, high or low. He was as far from being a yes-man or an arse-licker as you could get and he could be as rough on an odd-job man or the owner himself as he was on the other men at the sawmill.
The only reason he was able to act like this without it having greater, more serious consequences was, of course, that he was as big and as strong as he was. He was well over six feet tall, took a size twenty in a shoe and had an enormous pear-shaped face with two close-set black eyes. With a mug like that he could scare the wits out of just about anybody and if anyone was stupid enough not to be scared they soon would be, when he tore off his shirt, baring his chest – as he was quite liable to do when he was staggering around the community centre, blind drunk and spoiling for a fight. As with all the local gatherings, everyone, from teenyboppers to pensioners, attended the parties in Årnes and Devika, and when I was a lad it wasn’t unusual to see a half-naked Erik “rearranging” somebody’s face, as he was wont to put it. But no sooner had Erik beaten the living daylights out of his opponent – and I never saw it turn out any other way – than he would do a complete about-turn and be as nice as could be, showering the other man with kindness and compassion. This was probably a sign that he was capable of remorse and possibly that he was afraid he might have gone too far, but such abrupt changes of mood, and the fact that remarkably often Erik and his fellow brawlers were the best of pals again as soon as they lowered their fists, also shows that there was seldom any serious or deep-rooted issue behind their battles. Brawling at a party was more a kind of ritual, it seemed, a right good fight had a value and a function that did not primarily have anything to do with revenge or injustice, or a slight or insult of any sort. In fact insults tended rather to be welcomed and regarded as the perfect excuse for finally starting a fight. I think these brawls acted partly as a purge, allowing the combatant to give vent to his feelings and expend energy that he could not use or find outlet for in other ways, and partly as a way of proving to himself and everyone else that he was a real man, one who would never walk away from an honest-to-goodness fist-fight.
This last was important on Otterøya. The macho culture is still strong out here, but it was even stronger back then and each in their own way the island men all strove to live up to an ideal of manhood that most town and city dwellers would have considered hopelessly out of date. A true Otterøya man preferred home-brewed hooch to brand name booze from the state wineshop; he smoked roll-ups, wore checked flannel shirts and when he wasn’t out walking with that blokeish, slightly rolling gait that townies claimed we had and have, he was driving around in a car or a boat a little bigger than he could actually afford on the money he made at the herring oil factory in Vikan, the mink-feed processing plant at Fosslandsosen or wherever he happened to work – if he wasn’t a fisherman or farmer and thus self-employed.
This is of course something of a caricature, but most caricatures have a grain of truth in them. Otterøya was a community in which men were men, as they say, and even my dad, who I knew had voted Socialist Left in more than one general election, hated poofs and laughed at women who tried their hand at traditional male jobs. He never ceased to be amazed, for example, by Hauk’s and Grim’s mother and father when they moved from Oslo to Otterøya, because when they went anywhere in the car it was just as likely to be the wife that drove as the husband. I’m sure Dad was never aware of it himself, and he would probably have sworn it wasn’t true if anyone had suggested it to him, but for him being in charge of the car seemed to be a metaphor for being in charge of the family and it went without saying that that was a man’s job. The only valid reason for a woman to get behind the wheel when her husband was in the vehicle was if he’d been drinking and wasn’t fit to drive, although even that wasn’t always a good enough excuse. “I’d have to be pretty damn drunk to be as much of a danger on the road as the wife,” as Dad always said.
All this can, of course, be seen as typical of the brash way middle-aged men have always behaved – convinced as they are that they and their ilk have been selected by nature to run society. But if you ask me the macho culture on Otterøya has made a lot of men far more full of themselves than normal. For instance, I’ve always tried as far as possible to avoid going shopping in Namsos with my dad, because he’s never satisfied with the quality of the service or the merchandise, and if he spots an article with a little flaw in it you can bet your life that’s the one he’ll want, just so that when he reaches the checkout he can demand to get it for half-price. “No, I’m sorry, I can’t let you have it for that,” I remember the checkout girl at the hardware store saying once, when he demanded a discount on a toaster with an almost invisible scratch on the enamel. “Aw, c’mon now, of course you can,” Dad said and he didn’t look like he was joking. He seemed totally unconcerned by the queue forming behind us, he simply stood there staring at the assistant, waiting to see what she would do and, young and unsure as she was, she didn’t dare to do anything but agree to giving him a discount. Dad walked out of that shop afterwards having had confirmed yet again what he was always angling to have confirmed when he did this sort of thing: that he was a real man and that, like all other real men, he wasn’t easily fooled, he knew his rights and he always stood his ground.
Likewise, he believed he had a perfect right to say exactly what he thought, no matter how little he knew about a subject, and not just a perfect right: he seemed to feel he had a duty to share his usually very strong opinions with other people. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him get information from anywhere except the Namdal Workers’ Weekly, the television news and Nationen, but even when talking to people he must have known to be better informed and more abreast of events than he was, like the headmaster at the school or the highly knowledgeable chairman of the local historical society, for example, he would lay down the law, telling the person concerned exactly “what was wrong with society today”. He was a real man and real men “didn’t mince their words”, they “called a spade and spade” and “didn’t beat about the bush”, to quote three expressions he was fond of using of himself.
But still there was one thing that real men in general and my dad in particular did not talk about and that was, of course, feelings. Because feelings could knock a person off-balance and since a real man had to be ready at all times to make important decisions on behalf of himself and his family, he always had to be in control, he had be rational and “keep a cool head”, as Dad used to say. The only time when an exception could be made to this rule was when he was drunk, or raging mad or both, because naturally real men had a karsk or two on a Saturday night and as I say they weren’t easily fooled. If provoked it was quite permissible to “see red”, “lose the rag”, or “blow a gasket” – all of these also favourite expressions of Dad’s.
I first became aware of this inability and reluctance to talk about one’s feelings when it began to dawn on me that my mum was mentally ill. I was in early primary school at the time, Primary Two maybe, I don’t really remember. But at any rate I noticed that she was beginning to neglect her personal hygiene, she stopped washing herself and her clothes and she started to smell. Both this and the fact that she spent less and less time on the housework and more and more lying on the sofa, doing absolutely nothing, made me feel more and more worried. She could be up one day, down the next, but during her worst spells she would lie in bed upstairs for days on end, just crying and smoking. She hardly spoke at all and if she did open her mouth it was mostly only to moan and complain and make unfair accusations, mostly aimed at herself, but also at Dad and me. Dad believed that hard work was the cure for all ills that weren’t of a physical nature, and in an attempt to force her to get out of bed and get on with her chores on the farm I remember he tried refusing to tend to her and wait on her as long as she stayed in the bedroom. But then she went from skimping on her appearance and personal cleanliness to not washing or caring for herself at all, and from eating far too little to eating nothing. And as with all the other strategies he had tried he had to abandon this one too.
Even worse, though, were the times when Mum actually did try to pull herself together. After weeks at a time when simply turning over in bed appeared to take a massive effort, she would suddenly seem to find reserves of energy that only minutes before neither she nor Dad nor I would ever have imagined she possessed. She would hop out of bed, pull on her clothes and start tidying up, washing floors, mucking out the barn or going over all the homework I had had since the last time she had been up. It was as if she had a clear moment when she saw how bad things were and then she panicked and attempted to catch up on everything she’d left undone – and all in the course of the first day. She had to cut my hair, wash the windows and bake bread; she had to call on the woman next door, rearrange the furniture in the living room and darn Dad’s socks and mine. Nothing could wait. Everything was done at breakneck speed, with no thought for anything else – until she ran out of steam or began to see how ridiculously she was behaving. Then she could throw a fit because she had missed a little bit of dust on a windowsill; she could freak out because she had forgotten to post a letter that wasn’t the slightest bit urgent, or dissolve into tears because I wouldn’t eat the food she had just cooked – even though it was the second hot meal she had dished up that morning and even though I had already told her I was full and didn’t want anything. I didn’t like her cooking, she would sob, she was totally useless, she was a burden to everybody around her, she’d be better off dead. Slowly but surely all of her new-found energy would drain away until there was nothing for Dad to do but take her upstairs and put her back to bed.
But even though I stopped bringing friends home because I was afraid the other kids would notice that somethng was wrong with her; even though I took on more and more of my mum’s household chores and even though there were times when I was so worried about her that I couldn’t sleep properly at night or concentrate on my schoolwork during the day, Dad made no move to talk to me about what was going on, not to begin with anyway. Or at least, he may have made the odd hesitant, half-hearted attempt to do so, clapping me on the shoulder and asking how I was doing, but when – me being my father’s son – I said I was okay he just left it at that and fooled himself into believing that I really was okay. I’m not sure, but I don’t actually think he was capable of talking to me about it, I don’t think he had the words for it. Dad preferred us to “find something to do together”. We went camping at Salsnes and took a drive across the Swedish border to Østersund, and he made a start on several little projects on the farm that he tried to get me involved in. He meant well, I’m sure, and it was all fine as far as it went, but it didn’t help one little bit, and these days I always look a bit doubtful when I hear someone talk about there being a more physical, manly way of dealing with emotional upsets. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve tried taking refuge in work myself when things got tough, but that never solved anything.
Physical pain was a very different matter. Not that a true Otterøya man could ever say anything that made it sound as though he was moaning or complaining, but it was important to let everyone know if you were in pain, because there was a lot of prestige to be won from “gritting your teeth” and “taking it like a man”. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard the story of the time when Erik’s brother Albert, who lived next door to you, had an accident with a cross-cut saw in which his right hand “was severed from the rest of my body”, as he put it. At any rate, he picked up the hand, walked down to the road and stopped a passing tourist who was on his way from Aglen Campsite into town.
“Sorry about the limp handshake,” Albert had said, smiling and holding out his severed hand.
How true this story was I don’t know, but that’s not really the point. The variety and popularity of such yarns shows that strength and toughness were valuable assets among the island men and that this was the image of the typical Otterøyan male most of them cherished. Those few who dared to openly undermine this image were usually vilified and ridiculed and jeered at when the other men were together. And in the case of particularly drastic, blatant rejections of the macho values – if someone came out as a homosexual, for instance – the individual concerned ran the risk of having the shit kicked out of him. Like most men on the island, Dad would never have done such a thing, but when one of the players on Otterøya’s sixth division team came out of the closet and had all of his front teeth knocked out by a teammate who “couldn’t bear the thought that he had taken so many showers alongside a bum bandit”, my dad seemed to have more sympathy with the assailant than with the victim. “Maybe he went a bit too far, but what a fucking thought, eh? To have to stand there being drooled over by another man,” as he put it when we were having dinner one day.
But it wasn’t just poofs and women that the men of Otterøya tried to distance themselves from in their efforts to seem like “real men”. City folk also came in for their fair share of abuse. Although it’s true that bad-mouthing townies had as much to do with local pride and creating some sort of identity for oneself as an Otterøyan. It had to do with experiencing a sense of fellowship and solidarity by highlighting and preferably exaggerating how different one was from people elsewhere and – there’s no getting away from it– for many it also had to do with concealing and living with a feeling of being inferior because they came from the provinces.
But the Otteroya man’s attempt to distance himself from town and city dwellers was also an attempt to live up to the macho image of a real man. Whenever my dad and Erik were discussing townies the underlying assumption was that they were priggish, stuck-up, fussy and far too full of themselves. According to my dad it was hard to tell the women from the men when you walked down Havnegata in Namsos, and he was sure that the Oslo guy who had bought the cottage plot on the other side of the bay would sell it again as soon it came time to fertilize the fields. Well, did we think a man from Oslo would be able to take the smell of slurry mingling with his whisky and soda on the terrace of an evening?
The reception given to Hauk’s and his big brother Grim’s hippie family when they moved to Otterøya from Oslo in 1979 or 1980 was another sign of much the same attitude.
Lasse and Lene Albrigtsen, Hauk’s parents, had no friends or relatives in Otterøya and when people asked them what had made them move from the capital to this of all places they would often start to talk, without a trace of irony, of how they had longed to experience the true, authentic life of the countryside. They would wax lyrical about the joys of growing your own herbs and vegetables and breathing clean, fresh air. But even though this was actually true, it wasn’t the whole truth, because it didn’t take long for word to get around that Lene was a drug addict and that Lasse had forced her to come with him to this remote corner of Norway in a desperate attempt to get her as far away from the drugs scene as possible.
I can still remember how exciting we thought it was the first time we visited their house, and how intriguingly different it was from what we were used to. Our houses smelled of soft soap, tobacco smoke or boiled cod, but when we walked into the Albrigtsens’ living room we were met by a sweetish scent that my dad insisted in his worldly-wise fashion, when we described it to him, had to be marijuana, but which later turned out to be incense. The walls were hung with the Albrigtsens’ own brightly coloured works of art; from the attic, where Hauk’s mum practised what I later learned was yoga, came the sound of soft, Indian-inspired music and after we’d been there for a while – once we’d said yes to staying and having dinner with them and a barefoot Lasse Albrigtsen not only served up an emerald-green soup he had made from nettles he’d picked from the hedgerow outside, but also instructed us to sit on the floor with our legs crossed while we ate – we really felt we were doing something we had always dreamed of doing.
It’s easy now to see that the Albrigtsens’ lifestyle appealed to the Red Indian in us and that it was this that made us feel so much at home there, on that first day and all the days after that. Lasse Albrigtsen had long hair that he sometimes kept in place with a headband. He went around barefoot and often bare-chested, the time of year and weather permitting, and since he had been practising meditation and yoga all of his adult life he was as lithe and supple as we imagined a redskin would be. I don’t think it would have surprised us if he had said “Ugh” or greeted us by raising one hand and saying “How”, he seemed so much like a Red Indian to us.
Years of drug-taking had left Lene with a coarse, husky voice and a rather worn, haggard face and this was not how the comic books and films had taught us that squaws should look. But she also had her own pottery workshop in the basement, where she made pots inspired by the art of the Pueblo Indians, and she often wore dresses trimmed with long fringes that would have looked good on any woman in Silver Arrow.
Obviously, though, it wasn’t just the more superficial aspects that fired our American Indian fantasies when we were at the Albrigtsens’ place. Both Lasse and Lene talked about self-sufficiency and living in tune with nature. In their garden they grew potatoes and cabbages, not to mention courgettes (which none of us had ever heard of) and they picked plants that grew all around us but that we had always thought of as weeds, or at best no more than animal fodder, and used them in weird vegetarian dishes or made tea from them or hung them from the kitchen ceiling to dry and used them as herbs. To us, this last was a sure sign that Lasse and Lene possessed the same secret skills as the medicine man of an Indian tribe and although we never said anything we were very impressed.
Mind you, I seem to remember that Hauk and Grim weren’t as wild about those sides of Lasse and Lene that we admired, or not all of them, at any rate. Their parents would not have a television in the house, for example, because apparently television made you lethargic and apathetic and killed the art of conversation. And when, incredible though it seemed, they eventually did give in to pressure and buy a TV, they put it in a small, cold, unfurnished room that would be so uncomfortable to sit in that no one would think of doing so unless there was “something worth seeing” on, as Lasse said. And it was Lasse and Lene who decided what was worth seeing, because while they may have been more easy-going than our parents where most things were concerned, on this one matter they were anything but. Hauk and Grim weren’t allowed, for example, to watch the Westerns that we loved more than anything else, because they were American, they glorified violence and were almost always racist in the way they portrayed Native Americans. Besides which, John Wayne was a fascist according to Lasse, and anyway he wasn’t nearly as tough in real life as he was in his films: “Did you know he’s actually terrified of horses?” he used to say to us and then he would laugh at how ridiculous he thought the man was – thus also letting us know how stupid he thought we were for idolizing him.
But as I may have hinted earlier, when I wrote about the Otterøyans and their efforts to present themselves in a certain light by distancing themselves from other people, after a while we began to see that the very things we found so fascinating and appealing about the Albrigtsens were more or less the same things that made them seem so suspect to my mum and dad and to Erik and Berit. At first, just after word got out that Lene had been a drug addict, they had quite naturally been afraid that the home of the hippie Albrigtsen family would become a “drug den in our safe little Otterøya”, as Dad put it. But no one ever saw anything to suggest that Lasse and Lene used drugs. And anyway, everybody on the island knew that certain shadier local characters had already approached the Albrigtsens, hoping that by mixing with such liberated individuals they might have the chance to give rein to sides of themselves that the small village community did not normally allow them to express – “They’re probably hoping they’ll get to take part in orgies of sex and drugs,” as your mother said. The fact that Lasse sent them all packing reassured the locals and led most of them to abandon their suspicions and speculations concerning Lasse and Lene and their possibly drug-fuelled, debauched Bohemian lifestyle.
There were other things about the Albrigtsens, though, that the Otterøyans still weren’t too sure about. Okay, so Lasse did his sowing by the stars and the apple tree that Lene had brought with her from Oslo was planted on top of the placenta from Grim’s birth. Such things were just seen as adding an eccentric dash of colour to everyday life on Otterøya and were a source of much hilarity to the locals. But the Albrigtsen family’s general behaviour and lifestyle acted as a constant reminder that there were alternatives to the way in which the fairly homogeneous population of the island lived and this in turn was regarded by many as a threat. My dad, for example, could get extremely hot under the collar over the fact that Lasse and Lene went in for organic farming. Instead of showing an interest in it, keeping an open mind and possibly learning something from Lasse’s and Lene’s farming methods, he took it as a criticism of the way he and all the other farmers on Otterøya farmed their land. Lasse’s and Lene’s relaxed easy-going, take-things-as-they-come attitude to most things was automatically interpreted by your mother as laziness and sloppiness, and that they built their new shed out of logs and chose to give it a grass roof was in Erik’s opinion one of many examples that they were only playing at farming and that they were going to “get a real smack in the face from reality some day”, as he put it.
That Lasse and Lene dared to realize sides of themselves that the small village community did not allow the islanders to express and which were therefore left to smoulder inside them as suppressed urges and longings, this also did its part to fuel hostility to the Albrigtsens when they first moved in. Even though Lasse was in no way effeminate in his character or his gestures he was definitely a “new” man and the fact that he dared to have long hair and wear colourful clothes, and that he never made any effort to seem tough and strong and brave, all this felt like a serious provocation to many Otterøya men who struggled and strove every single day to follow all the rules and regulations imposed on them by the island’s macho culture. So, not surprisingly, a rumour spread that Lasse was actually a “bum bandit” and, as if that weren’t enough, one night after the family had been living on the island for about six months, Albert and a gang of younger men who believed that such scum had no place on the island paid them a visit and in a collective fit of rage tore up some of their vegetable crop, trampled flowerbeds and painted “fucking poof” on the wall of their house – obviously in an attempt to convince themselves, each other and everyone else that they were real macho men from Otterøya.
But I shouldn’t exaggerate: there were also situations in which the men of Otterøya showed themselves in a more nuanced light and even undermined their image as macho men, of course they did. I remember, for example, one of the first occasions when your mother paid one of her secret visits to our house. Mum was over at her sister’s in Levanger and I can still remember how Dad almost seemed to become a different person when Berit walked into the room. I’d never seen him light candles before, but he did that night and all of a sudden he no longer seemed to think that red wine tasted like “undiluted blackcurrant cordial”, because he poured a glass for her and for himself, and in the long-stemmed blue crystal glasses at that, the ones that Mum had bought at the pottery in Grong and that Dad had sworn he would never drink from because it was pretentious crap and sheer madness to spend so much money on glasses when you could get ten times as many for half the price in an ordinary shop. And it didn’t stop there, because he didn’t drain his glass in two or three gulps, he didn’t curse and swear and he didn’t start pontificating on this subject or that. But what impressed me most of all was that he didn’t just listen to Berit when she started coming out with what my dad would normally have dismissed as “rubbish” or “drivel”, “sentimental claptrap” or “female tittle-tattle”, he actually had a conversation with her and spoke frankly about himself and his affairs in a way I’ve never heard before or since.
I was nine or ten at the time. I sat up in my room, listening in on their conversation. At some point my dad had changed into a man I didn’t recognize. Today it saddens me to think of that little incident. I realize of course that I was witnessing a scene in which a man was entering into a relationship with a woman and so it’s not all that surprising that Dad turned himself into the sort of man he thought Berit would like. But it wasn’t just an act, of that I’m sure, and so I can’t rid myself of the thought that Dad showed some of his actual potential as a man and a human being that night. In fact this little incident makes me wonder what he might have been like if the Otterøyan macho culture hadn’t set such clear limits for what a man could and could not be in everyday life. Maybe he would have been able to reveal those sides of himself a little more often, maybe he would have been a little less angry, less brusque and stern, a little gentler and easier to live with.
I may be rambling a bit here, but what I’m trying to say, what I’m getting at, is that we grew up with male role models who always did their best to seem like “real men”. And here, perhaps, lies the answer to why you made up stories and lied as much as you did. Perhaps your lies and your tall tales – or many of them, at least – were attempts to present yourself in much the way you imagined Erik to be. I’m not sure, but I think the imaginary Wild West-inspired world that you dreamed up and became so absorbed in when we were playing up at the camp also had something to do with this. Because our Indian universe allowed you to play at being Erik. Everything we had read and heard about Indians – that they were brave, strong and proud, that they were wild and noble and could never be intimidated – these were all qualities we recognized from the way Erik and the other men around us tried to appear. So it wasn’t only the Albrigtsens who had something in common with the culture of the North American Indians as we knew it. The ideals, values and norms depicted in the Deerfoot books and the Silver Arrow comics, in Captain Miki and Commander Mark, in Centennial and How the West was Won, were pretty much the same as the ideals, values and norms we knew from the macho culture on Otterøya, and when we thought we were being little Indians, in many ways we were being little Otterøya men.