Things gradually improved for the Albrigtsens. Most of the islanders condemned the attack on them and their home and those people who didn’t openly express support and sympathy for Lasse and Lene tended to adopt a different and more pleasant tone when speaking of the “hippie family” after that incident. The headmaster of our school, Harald Hansen, even suggested throwing a big party for the Albrigtsens to show that the ordinary people of Otterøya did not want to be classed with Albert and the other yobs who had vandalized the townies’ vegetable plot. This party didn’t come to anything, it’s true, partly because Lasse and Lene let it be known that they found the idea a bit tacky and over-the-top, and partly because its initiator and organizer, Harald Hansen, was forced to resign when he was struck by what could be called a personal tragedy. It came to light that he had faked his CV before his appointment as headmaster of Otterøya Primary and Lower Secondary School. Not only that, but in the course of the subsequent inquiry it came out that he had also falsified several of the main and most important sources cited in his university dissertation. Poor Mr Hansen, he lost his wife, his job and his good name because of this and pretty much all of his life from then on was spent trying to make amends and prove to himself and everyone else that he was, nonetheless, a decent and honourable person. Well, why else would he force himself to go on living here on the island, as my Dad always says, and why else would he invest all his time and energy in helping others?
But enough of that.
Another reason why people changed their opinion of the Albrigtsens, and possibly a more important one than their neighbours’ desire to dissociate themselves from the attack and the vandalism, was that Lasse and Lene proved to be of much stronger stuff than the islanders could have imagined when the family first moved to Otterøya. As I’ve said, there were a lot of people on the island, my dad and Erik included, who had almost been looking forward to seeing Lasse and Lene struggle and eventually have to admit defeat. It wasn’t that they were in any way spiteful, they simply wanted to be proved right in their belief that country life was far too tough and demanding for two fancy-pants Oslo types with romantic notions of living off the land. This in turn would make them feel better about themselves. Contrary to all expectations, however, Lasse and Lene proved to be every bit as enterprising, hard-working and tough as they needed to be in order to be accepted as “good people” by the locals. They were a bit disorganized, it’s true, and they had way too many projects on the go at one time, with the result that a lot of things were left half-done or unfinished, but they stuck at it and never gave up, not even when one particularly bad year was topped off by a gale that ripped off the new roof on the old farmhouse and smashed it to smithereens on the shingle – and that despite the fact that they weren’t insured, because for some reason the Albrigtsens were against insurance.
That Lasse and Lene were always cheerful and smiling if you ran into them at the Co-op, that they had a sense of humour and could laugh at themselves, these qualities also had a lot to do with their gradual acceptance by the community. Take the day when you and I were over at Hauk’s and Dad came to collect me. Lene was out on the lawn, emptying some bottles of home-made elderberry cordial that had gone mouldy and was undrinkable and Lasse told Dad that she was making a libation to Mother Nature, asking her to grant them a bountiful harvest. Dad just stood there gawking. But when Lasse could no longer hold back his laughter and Dad realized that he’d been pulling his leg he roared with laughter himself and called Lasse a “rotten bugger” – a clear sign that Lasse had been welcomed into the fold and was almost considered his equal.
It wasn’t long before you and Hauk and I were like the Three Musketeers, and as I say we spent a lot of time at the Albrigtsens’ place back then. Although we were a bit scared of Grim, it’s true. I don’t know if he was ever diagnosed as being mentally disabled, but even though he was a big, lanky lout of sixteen he was happiest in the company of the Bruun lad, a young thug of just twelve years old, and your mother wasn’t overstating it when she said he was “a bit simple”. He couldn’t concentrate on anything for long, his mind tended to wander and he had a hard time taking in the most basic, straightforward information. No matter how many times we tried to explain to him the punchline of some joke we had told, he would still come out with a comment or a question that showed he just hadn’t got it. It was probably to compensate for the sense of inferiority this must have given him that he was so “physical”, as Lene used to say. He was all right most of the time, but if for any reason he was reminded of how simple-minded he was he could turn really nasty.
Hauk was the same age as you and me, but very different in nature. He was tall and slightly built with long fair hair, blue eyes and clean-cut, almost feminine features – looks that made him infuriatingly popular with the girls. When he was thinking hard he always raised one eyebrow and this gave him a slightly hawkish appearance, which for some reason I felt fitted with his being as intelligent as he actually was. He soon showed himself to be the best in the class at maths, I remember, and on his wall, next to a picture of the 1977 Liverpool team, hung a diploma certifying that he had won the Junior Chess Championship in Oslo in 1978 – we were very impressed by that, you and I. This last, along with the fact that he was an exceptionally good football player, won him a lot of respect and made him popular with us and our chums, but even more importantly he was “such a nice boy”, as your mum was always saying. He was the kind of kid who brought us grapes when we were sick or who could get upset and start to cry if he saw or heard about someone being unfairly treated or suffering some other misfortune.
But still there could be long spells of time when we had nothing to do with him at all. For one thing he never joined us in our favourite pastime: playing up at our camp. Even though building huts, climbing trees and running around in the forest were all things that Lasse and Lene encouraged him to do, they would not allow him to play with us up there because, as pacifists and members of the peace movement and CND, they felt that all games which involved fighting, violence or weapons could damage the fragile mind of a child.
A little of Hauk could go a long way, though. You used to get particularly sick of what you called his girly tantrums: his habit of sulking and moaning and resorting to tears whenever things didn’t go his way, for example, or running telling tales to the grown-ups if somebody so much as laughed at him or slung some remark at him, and – not least – the way he sucked up to the teachers and was totally shameless when it came to boasting about his own achievements. All of this could make you and I so fed up with him that we would give him a wide berth. In fact that was why we eventually fell out with him completely. We were in your living room one day, playing some board game. He always got really mad and childishly determined to get his own back if we beat him at something he felt he was really good at, like nine men’s morris or draughts or four in a row, especially if his parents could see that he was losing a game. His eyes would glisten with panic and desperation and if he didn’t pretend to tip over the board by accident, scattering counters all over the floor and making it impossible to carry on with the game, he would either try to convince everybody that he had let us win or he would be overcome by a kind of pent-up rage that he couldn’t control and that almost always led him to try to hurt us in some way.
The day we stopped being friends with him it was because of this last.
“Oh, by the way, is it true that Berit’s been selling her body to Steinar?” he asked, looking at me and grinning spitefully.
I’m not sure he even knew what it meant to “sell one’s body”,but I’m pretty certain he didn’t know what a terrible thing it was to say, because he was surprised, to put it mildly, by how angry Lasse and Lene were when they heard it. They both looked as if they wanted to leap out of their seats and tear the boy apart with their bare hands, but you and I knew of course that Hauk had only said what he said because he had heard his parents say it, and since our anger was therefore directed as much at them as it was at Hauk, there was no way they could act as referees, as they then tried to do. We got up and left and we never set foot in that house again.
Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe we went back there lots of times after that and I’ve simply invented this rift between us because it fits with the rage we – but most of all you – felt when you realized that the Albrigtsens had thought of and spoken about your mother the way they obviously had, I don’t know.
It’s not for me to judge either Dad or your mum for having an affair and thus hurting Mum in a way that made life even harder for her than it already was. I don’t know much about Berit, but I suppose that as a single woman she, like everyone else, must have dreamed of meeting the great love of her life. And even though he was married, Dad was also, to all intents and purposes, on his own, certainly after Mum was admitted to the psychiatric unit in Namsos.
Because of course she had to go into hospital. It wasn’t safe to keep her at home, not for Mum herself or for Dad, who was just about dead on his feet by then. He had a sort of unspoken agreement with Mum’s sister that she would take her now and again to give him a break, but that wasn’t nearly enough because Mum was getting worse and worse. It had got to the point where quite frankly it was an absolute nightmare being in the house with her. It was terrible to see her lying in bed, limp and lifeless, smoking and crying for weeks on end, and it was just as terrible to watch her frantic attempts to pull herself together. But then she started to develop some rather more paranoid traits. She had been suspicious of Dad and me for a long while, accusing us of all sorts of ridiculous things, probably because she had no control over us when she was bedridden. She had no idea what we were doing, where we were or who we were with, and so she began to “get ideas”, as Dad put it. But as time went on these ideas became positively morbid. We were used to hearing her say that we didn’t love her, that Dad was running around with one woman or another and that I was only hoping that he would trade her in for somebody else so that I could have a new mother, but there came a point when she seemed to actually start believing these things herself. Her accusations were no longer simply an expression of the sadness, anger and self-loathing that her illness brought with it, they had been thought and voiced so many times that suddenly they seemed true to her. We could tell from the way she spoke to us, of course: there was a new weight to her accusations. But it wasn’t until she started acting on her suspicions that we realized she was losing touch with reality. One day when we were having breakfast she got it into her head that we had injected poison into her boiled egg. She had spotted the tiny pinprick in the eggshell when she lifted the egg out of its cup, she said. What was that, if she might ask? Dad explained that we always made a little hole in the egg before boiling it so it was less likely to crack, but even though she couldn’t argue with this she was far from convinced. Dad even offered to give her his egg instead, but she still wouldn’t eat it. And she got worse. More and more often she would demand that we taste her food before she ate it, or she would suddenly decide to take my plate or Dad’s and shove her own over to us. She was convinced that we had it in for her, and her efforts to keep tabs on us in order to catch us red-handed, as it were, became more and more extreme. She had been listening in on Dad’s telephone conversations for some time, but one day we found a bag of cassettes in a cupboard and when Dad played them he discovered that she had hidden the cassette recorder under the telephone table and taped all our calls. It was a pathetically amateurish attempt at phonetapping, of course, but it was done in deadly earnest and when I think back on that day I find it strange that my dad let it go so far before having her hospitalized.
But eventually he’d had enough. The proverbial last straw came when she rigged up a sort of alarm system that was supposed to wake her up if Dad tried to sneak in and kill her while she was asleep. She had quite simply knotted one end of a length of string round the leg of the bed and the other to three pots that were tied together and balanced on the very edge of a chair. When Dad went into the bedroom to ask her about something the whole lot crashed to the floor with a terrible clatter. That did it. Dad said as little about this as he had about all the other things she had done, but he called the psychiatric unit in Namsos more or less immediately and the very next day he enticed Mum into the car. He was going into town to pick up some paint for the cottage living room, he said, and he would like her to come with him and help him to choose the colour because he wasn’t so good at that sort of thing. And surprisingly enough Mum fell for it. It wasn’t until they turned onto the road to the hospital that she realized what was happening and it was all Dad could do to stop her from jumping out of the moving car. She freaked out completely, biting and punching and clawing, and Dad told me later that he’d had to pick her up bodily and carry her into the hospital. The worst of it was, though, that this only went to show that she’d been right in what Dad and I had always called her groundless accusations. She’d been claiming for ages that we wanted rid of her and clearer proof of this would have been hard to imagine.
I don’t know when my dad and your mum started seeing one another. Dad seems to have had a reputation for being something of a charmer and a ladykiller in his younger days, so for all I know it could have happened long before Mum became ill, but at any rate it was while she was in the hospital that Berit started coming to see us much more often than she had ever done before. The excuse given to neighbours and everyone else was that with Mum in the hospital Dad needed help in the house and on the farm and that was true enough up to a point, but even though Berit did clean the house and cook and help out in the barn, the work was plainly not the main reason for her visits. The neighbours didn’t latch on to this, not right away, but I did. As I say, I was only nine or ten at the time, which is probably why Dad and Berit made no great effort to hide their relationship from me. I suppose they thought I was too young to understand what was going on. But the mere fact that Berit stayed the night was enough for me to get the picture. Not that it was unusual for people to stay the night at our place, especially if the grown-ups had had a bit of a party, but Berit stayed even when not a drop of alcohol had been consumed and she stayed the night more and more often. Granted, she always slept on the sofa in the living room while Dad was in the bedroom upstairs, but it wasn’t at all unusual for me to come down in the morning and find Dad’s clothes lying scattered around the living room floor, or for Berit to have to nip upstairs to fetch hers.
But however careless they might have been, they obviously didn’t want me to know what was going on between them. If, for example, I accidentally walked in on them when they were kissing and cuddling Dad would make the most ridiculous excuses. Like the day when I caught them sitting at the kitchen table, holding hands: “Oh, yes,” he said quickly, “I think your watch is running a bit fast.” As if I was dumb enough to believe it was Berit’s wristwatch he’d been so busy stroking. And then there was the time when my football training was cancelled and I came home to sighs and groans and creaking bedsprings. I knew better than to walk in on them, of course. I was even considerate enough to blunder accidentally on purpose into the coat stand in the hall and knock it over, to warn them and give them the chance to finish and compose themselves before coming out and carrying on as if nothing had happened. And they did make some effort to act normal, but Dad was so embarrassed and flustered that he just couldn’t. He tried to fob me off with a different explanation for the groaning and creaking, even though I knew very well what had been going on. “Bloody hell, that wardrobe was heavier than I thought,” he said as they came down the stairs. “I didn’t realize it was solid oak. I worked up a helluva sweat there, so I did.”
Later that night, after I’d gone to bed I heard them laughing and joking about this little incident. “Solid oak,” your mother giggled. “I came up against something in that bedroom that felt like solid oak, but it was no wardrobe,” she said. “And I worked up a sweat as well,” she added and then they both howled with laughter.
Actually, that’s what I remember best from that time, that she brought laughter and joy into our house again. Because Dad had been miserable for a long time. He’d been run off his feet, almost all of his time taken up with looking after Mum or working in the house and on the farm. And when he did have a little time to himself he usually spent it just sitting in an armchair staring into space. I still remember how much of an effort he made to look cheerful when I came home. He would paste on a strained smile and ask how I’d got on at school, but he could never concentrate on my reply, certainly not if it amounted to more than a few words. If it did he would usually interrupt me, with a gentle, but weary “Oh, really, is that right?” and then he would turn away, still smiling, and stare at the wall again.
But when your mother starting coming to the house, slowly but surely he became his old self again. She was so full of life, she talked all the time, laughed easily and often, and her good humour rubbed off on everybody around her. Dad started talking again, he became more enthusiastic and interested, he was happier and more carefree, and this man who had for so long been dour and dismal was suddenly transformed into a wit and a wisecracker, a role that he thoroughly enjoyed, I could tell. I remember, for example, the time when he fell off the ladder while painting the barn. This was after your mother had started bringing you with her when she came over during the day, so you were there too, in the garden with me, eating waffles, and Berit was sitting on the front step smoking a cigarette, tired out after cleaning the house.
“For heaven’s sake, what have you done to yourself?” she suddenly exclaimed, and when we looked up we saw Dad coming limping across the yard, his eyes screwed up and his face all twisted in what was obviously pain.
“I fell off the ladder,” he said, sinking down into one of the garden chairs with a groan.
“Oh, my God,” Berit said, “you poor thing. Were you high up?”
“To start with, yeah,” Dad said.
We had a good laugh at that.
Mum couldn’t stand that side of him. It infuriated and annoyed her when he made quips like that, and this in turn annoyed Dad and brought a sneer to his lips and sarcastic edge to his voice as he remarked that being half-Nordlander she was probably incapable of laughing at anything that didn’t include the word “horsedick” and the Trøndelag sense of humour was obviously too sophisticated for her.
Berit, on the other hand, laughed her head off when he came out with one of his wry comments and, no matter how hard Dad tried to act as though he couldn’t see what was so funny, it was no good. He could stay perfectly deadpan for two or three seconds, but then his face would start to crack and eventually he would give up and burst out laughing too.
They were well-matched, so I wasn’t the least bit surprised when Dad came to me one day and told me that you and Berit were going to move into the cottage. I don’t know whether he was aware of it himself but not a day went by without him saying or doing something that testified to him and your mother wanting to live together. He became more and more keen to know what I thought of her. “Berit says you’re such a good lad and so likeable,” he might say, for instance, after Berit and I had spent some time together just the two of us. Or: “Berit was really impressed by what a big help you were with the firewood yesterday,” he might say, even though Berit had shown up when we only had a little firewood left to stack, so she couldn’t possibly know whether I had been a big help or not. I was just a little boy, but these reminders of how much Berit liked me were so frequent and could be so over-the-top that I realized his main aim was to assure me that I had nothing to fear if Berit moved in with him. Although I’m sure he would also have liked me to say as many nice things about Berit as he reported her saying about me. He also began to take an interest in how you and I were getting along together even though we’d been chums for years and Dad had never given any more thought to our friendship than he had to my friendship with Per, say, but now all of a sudden he kept wanting me to say things that would confirm what good friends we were, you and I. He dug and probed and asked leading questions designed to get me to sing your praises. He even started making special arrangements for you and me to meet and spend time together. “Would you and David like to go to the pictures this evening,” he might ask. Or: “Why don’t you and David bike down to the Co-op and buy yourselves an ice-cream.” It was as if he wanted everything I did or was planning to do to include you as well, and if it so happened that it didn’t he would look surprised and wonder if there was something wrong. “So where was David?” he would ask if I’d been with Hauk and Per, just the three of us. “There’s nothing wrong, is there? You haven’t fallen out?”
One day when we were winding fuse wire round the spokes of our bike wheels I remember I tried to talk to you about what was going to happen. And to show you that I had nothing against Dad and Berit being together and them moving in with us I did more or less the same as Dad had done with me: I started talking about the four of us as if we were a family. “Maybe we should ask Dad and Berit if we can go fishing tomorrow?” and “D’you think Dad and Berit would let us watch Centennial tonight?” – that sort of thing. But you got so mad, I remember. Dad and Berit were still trying to make us believe that Berit was only working at the farm and that it was simply more practical for you and her to move into the cottage. But even though you must have known what was going on between them you asked me what I was babbling on about. “Have you gone off your rocker as well now?” you said, a remark which obviously hurt me and upset me because it made me think of my mum. I didn’t speak to you for a couple of days after that.
I’m not sure why it was easier for me to acknowledge what was happening than it was for you. Maybe it was because it’s easier for a son to share his dad with someone than to share his mother with someone, I don’t know. All I know is that I no longer felt I was betraying Mum when I accepted that Berit was a part of Dad’s life. Because I had done to begin with. I had felt really guilty about Mum and even though I was a cautious child, almost too well behaved, I suppose I did sometimes take my distress and anger out on Dad and Berit. When she first came to live with us I was huffy and moody. I’d often make a point of mentioning Mum and asking whether we weren’t going to go and visit her soon, as if to remind Dad of what he was giving up and probably also to pile some of the guilt I felt onto him. I remember I used to get out family snaps from the time when he and Mum were still happy together and leave them lying around, where I knew he and Berit couldn’t help but see them.
But after a while all this changed. Mum’s absence probably made me realize how hard, not to say really awful, it had eventually been to have her living at home, and even though I wasn’t an old guy like him I understood that Dad had to get on with his life. Besides which, I could see how fond he was of Berit, how happy he was when he was with her.
But once the two of you were settled in the cottage your aforementioned dislike of the new arrangement soon vanished. Although you did try for some time to maintain the impression that you weren’t happy. Our drinking water tasted of iron, you said, and there were a lot more midges and mosquitoes here than at your own place because of all the birch trees and bushes that grew so close to the house, and the television reception was so rotten that you didn’t even want to talk about it, it made you so mad.
But you only said these things because you felt you would be letting Erik and your childhood home down if you didn’t protest against moving into the cottage, of that I’m sure. Because other than that, from the way you spoke and acted it was clear that you liked living with us. In fact you perked up a lot after you moved in. You’d always been moody and unpredictable, there were times when you seemed to withdraw into yourself and wouldn’t talk to anybody, and there were times when those of us who were with you had to watch what we said or did because you could fly into a terrible rage over the slightest thing.
After you moved in with us, though, I saw little or no sign of this. I seem to remember you being more even-tempered, more relaxed. Which isn’t to say that you were quieter in a physical sense, because you weren’t. Quite the opposite, really: you were brighter and livelier than ever, firing on all cylinders from morning till night. But you seemed more easy in your mind, more secure somehow, less tense, less wary. You weren’t so quick to take offence at things I said or did, nor did you have the same need to dominate me and boss me around. This may have had something to do with your having moved in to my home and feeling therefore a bit like a guest in the house, feeling that here at least you weren’t in charge. In any case you certainly didn’t seem to resent the fact that I was now on a more equal footing with you. You didn’t kick against it, if I can put it like that.
I might be exaggerating this and representing the change in you as greater than it actually was, maybe because subconsciously I want to paint a rosy picture of our life on the farm, yes, I’m sure I do, but still: it’s perfectly true that I remember you as being particularly cheerful and contented back then, maybe because you saw how happy your mother was. I don’t know, but it’s possible. I certainly felt very peaceful and secure when I saw how good Dad and Berit were together. I remember one day we were in the garden and a flock of little birds flew down and landed on the berry-laden redcurrant bushes. The bushes were swarming with them, they seemed to come alive and Berit pointed to them, wide-eyed.
“Look!” she cried, “look at that!”
“Hmm?” Dad said, looking up from his newspaper.
“Look at all the birds!” Berit cried.
Dad turned round slowly and looked at the redcurrant bushes.
“That’s not all the birds,” he said, totally deadpan, then he disappeared behind the newspaper again.
Silence for a couple of seconds.
And then all four of us burst out laughing.
Oh, I remember plenty of incidents like that from those days, incidents that testify to how happy Dad and Berit were together. And obviously this happiness somehow transmitted itself to you and me.
And of course the fact that Dad did his utmost to make you feel welcome must also have had something to do with your sunnier frame of mind. Not only was he better than ever at suggesting things for us to do together – us menfolk, as he said. And not only was he a bit more expansive and easygoing than usual, he also did all he possibly could to treat you and me exactly the same. We weren’t living in the same house, I know, and the story still was that you and Berit were living in the cottage because it was more practical, what with her working at the farm. But the fact that we were actually becoming more like one big family was clear from the way he assigned us both much the same chores and accorded us much the same rights. We both had to muck out the barn and tramp silage and help out with all the other jobs on the farm, and we were both given pocket money and other forms of payment for this, always the same amount for each of us and always as often. Looking back on it, I almost find it a bit strange, admirable even, that he didn’t make more difference between us than he did. He could, of course, have succumbed to the temptation to give me preferential treatment because I was his son, but he could also have gone so much out of his way to make you and hence Berit feel welcome that he ended up treating you better than me. But he did neither. This strategy even extended to him calling the two of us “my lads”. In the Community Centre Café in Namsos on a Saturday, for example, and other places where no one knew us he always referred to us as “my lads”: “And coconut buns and squash for my lads”, he’d say. Or: “They’re a bit boisterous, my lads, but if they’re making a nuisance of themselves just let me know.” That’s how he went on. There was one time, I remember, when he took it so far that I actually felt a little bit jealous. We had gone to pick Dad up after he’d been on manoeuvres with the Territorial Army and one of the other TA soldiers started talking about you and me as his two sons. Not only did Dad say nothing to correct him, but when the man pointed to you and said you were the spitting image of your father – the exact same eyes, he said – Dad actually said: “Aye, he struck lucky there, the lad!”
But I wasn’t normally jealous of you, not at all. We got on extremely well and I thought it was brilliant that I always had someone to play with. You were the brother I had always wanted and it got so I could hardly do without you. If, for instance, I happened to get up very early in the morning I wasn’t supposed to wake you, but I would either go out and start up the lawnmower or find something else to do that would make such a racket you’d wake you anyway and come on out. I simply couldn’t wait, we had so much fun together: we made bombs that we let off behind the barn, shot at targets and hunted squirrels and crows with air rifles; we played pranks on Erik’s brother Albert and on Johanna Mørck, the classic ones such as ringing their doorbell and running away and rubbing their windows with polystyrene; we made bike trails through the forest, played football on the lawn and as I write this I’m looking at the old pouffe in which I used to keep all the Lego that we still enjoyed playing with.
But what we liked best of all was to be up at the camp with the other Indians.
One day: warm and sunny, the occasional breeze sweeping through the forest and making lovely rustling sounds in the tall birch trees.
So, still perfect.
But suddenly a scream pierced the air.
“The Husvikings!”
It was Per. He was up on the hilltop, keeping watch, and he had spotted someone coming up the path from the housing estate. It was the Husvikings. “They’re coming!” he cried. “It’s really them! The Husvikings are coming!”
Uproar in the camp. War cries and calls to arms and urgings to fight to the last man. “Charge!” you yelled, brandishing your spear above your head. And one of the little kids, the one that had picked crowberries and made warpaint from them, smeared three red stripes on each of his cheeks and muttered that it was now or never.
Ah, but there weren’t as many Husvikings as we might have imagined, no horde, not nearly as many as there were bison on the Prairie. In fact there were only a couple of them and what’s more they came in peace.
“Can we play too?” one of them asked when you were standing right in front of them, fearless, arms folded. I don’t think you took too kindly to them showing up like this and then refusing to be your enemy, but at least we had shown that we were prepared for the worst and not to be trifled with, so you decided to be magnanimous and show them mercy. Yes, of course, they could stay, you announced, after consulting Per and me, we three being ten years old and the elders of the tribe. There was plenty of room, they could park themselves over by the big rock covered in green moss. Go right ahead. The two Husvikings were very happy about this and they showed their gratitude by raving about what a brilliant place we had up here. “Aw, jeez, what fantastic shelters – especially yours, David,” they said, keen to butter up our chief. And it was very wise of us to have a lookout post and stockades, they went on, because Grim had been saying that some day, if the mood took him, he might just come up and tear down our camp.
“Let him come,” you said, seizing this golden opportunity to show what you were made of. And the rest of us were eager to do the same:
“He’ll get a welcome he won’t forget in a hurry,” I said.
“He’s got no idea what he’s got coming to him,” you said, looking as though you couldn’t help but laugh at the thought.
“Oh yeah?” one of the Husvikings said, grinning at you expectantly. “So what does Grim have coming to him?”
But then your mind seemed to wander for a moment.
“Hmm?” the Husviking said, not to be put off.
You scowled at the little pest.
“You’ll find out soon enough,” you growled, not about to give anything away.
But this particular Husviking was a right little pain in the butt. “Grim could beat the shit out of everybody up here with one hand tied behind his back, so what were you thinking of doing? Were you going to set a trap for him?” he said. “Hmm? Was that the plan?”
That did it, your patience snapped. It was bad enough him going on and on at you like some bloody woman, but then he had the nerve to suggest that you couldn’t run rings around anybody who came along. That was going too far. Beat the shit out of you with one hand tied behind his back, he had said. And in front of the girls, at that. In front of Karoline. You couldn’t help but shake your head and laugh, it was so ridiculous, but I knew right away that you wouldn’t be content with that. And sure enough, it wasn’t long before you found a focus for your fury because it stood to reason of course that these Husvikings had been sent here to infiltrate our camp – you’d seen that straight away.
Huh?
Aw, it was no use playing the innocent. Why else had he been so keen to hear all about our plans and strategies, if you might ask?
But…?
Ah, see, he had no answer to that.
The Husvikings protested their innocence, they swore they were innocent, but innocent or guilty, they had been found out once and for all, and the mood in the camp was heated now.
Scum!
Dirty dogs!
They’d pay for this, you told them and you gave orders for both Husvikings to be marched over to the totem pole and tied to it.
We had dreamed for ages of getting hold of an anthill and placing it right underneath the totem pole, but so far we’d had no luck with that, so the Husvikings could actually think themselves lucky, we informed them. Okay, so we did throw tomahawks and shoot arrows at them while they begged for mercy, but at least they were spared being eaten alive by ants.
They’d have had to be pretty hungry ants in that case, one of the Husvikings declared.
Two short grunts of laughter from the other Husviking.
Silence.
What had we here? A couple of tough guys? Well, we’d see how cocky they were when we were finished with them, you said.
You dealt one of them a little slap on the back of the head, gave us the nod and we dragged the Husvikings over to the totem pole. Now they were going to get what was coming to them.
“I wouldn’t be in your shoes,” I said.
But the Husvikings still weren’t scared enough for our taste. They neither begged nor pleaded for mercy, and when it turned out that we had run out of rope and had nothing to tie them to the totem pole with, they actually looked at one another and laughed, calling us amateurs. They shouldn’t have done that, because if you hadn’t been furious before you certainly were now. Okay, so we could either make them run the gauntlet or scalp them, you declared, and when, after a careful head count, we came to the conclusion that there weren’t enough of us to make them run the gauntlet, the time had come for a bit of scalping.
“Down in the dirt, where you belong,” you snapped and you grabbed one of the Husvikings, hurled him to the ground and sat on his back. He was a year older than you, but even though he wriggled and squirmed and struggled to break free he didn’t stand a chance. “Ole, gimme your sheath knife,” you said. I promptly handed you the knife and, while Per and two of the little kids held back the other Husviking, you began to hack of your victim’s hair. He howled and screamed, no longer taking it like a man, but you were blind with rage and beyond showing mercy. You said not a word, let the knife do the talking for you.
Silence.
“Look, he’s got a bald spot,” Per said after a while, looking at me round-eyed and pointing to the Husviking.
“Yeah,” I said. “He looks like that guy that drives the school bus.”
Laughter from everybody round about.
But you weren’t laughing, you grinned and let the knife do some more talking, then you stuck your hand in the air, holding up the Husviking’s scalp for all to see.
Wild whoops from all the warriors.
Then it was the other Husviking’s turn. He could no longer see the funny side of this either, but he could have saved himself all his tears and curses, because you were out for blood, hell-bent on revenge and soon you were waving another scalp in the air for the whole tribe to see.
Once more the forest rang with wild whoops. Then a hush fell again.
“Now get out of here,” you told the two Husvikings. “And let that be a lesson to you.”
And the two Husvikings slunk off home. Per and I and some of the little kids followed them down the hill a little way, leaping and dancing round about them, and they had to put up with a fair bit of jeering and sneering for having lost their hair and grown middle-aged from one second to the next. Oh, how they sobbed and wept, those two. They were devastated.
But immediately afterwards, when we returned to the camp, it was my turn to feel devastated, because there was Karoline, gazing at you in awe and being so nice to you. Oh, my stomach knotted at the sight. She had never looked at me like that, never, not even when I worked myself half to death building a shelter for her.
“Had you any idea what you were doing when you got so mad earlier on?” she wanted to know.
“We – ell,” you said, wagging your head.
She just didn’t know what had got into you, she said, you were like a wild beast, she had almost been scared herself, seeing you like that.
Really? Oh but she didn’t need to be, you said, you could never hurt her.
“No?”
“No, of course not, what do you take me for?”
Your eyes met and held for a second or two, then Karoline blinked and looked at the grass, just the way she should. She waited a moment, then she looked up at you again and smiled. Oh, how it hurt to see this. I had a good mind to break in with a question, any question, whatever came into my head, but I didn’t. It was time I stopped kidding myself, there was nothing I could do and there never had been, I had no wild beast inside me, like you had, and a brave who has no wild beast inside him will find it hard to get a squaw to share his tepee.
And to a great extent this was, of course, what it was all about, I see that now. The camp was our training ground, where we learned to become real men, that’s true, but it was also where we learned about becoming family men, about making a life for ourselves with a house and wife and children and all the other things that go along with this. We didn’t know it then, of course, but the more I think about it, the more certain I am that that is how it was.