We were on our way up to the camp one day: grey sky, the air hot and close and flies buzzing around us as we walked up the path. We were sweating and the flies liked our sweat so they kept landing on us and bothering us. Ah, but even though they were driving us crazy we paid them no mind, not at all, because we weren’t townies, we were children of the forest and all the creatures of the forest were our brothers and sisters, including those bloody flies. We trod quietly. Every now and again you would raise a hand, signalling for us to stop and we would stand still, alert and listening for a moment or two before carrying on. You first and me right behind you, we didn’t sound like a herd of bison the way townies did when they lost their way in the wild. We didn’t step on dry twigs and we didn’t wag our tongues all the time in the way of women, we were silent and if we had something to say that absolutely could not wait we communicated instead with the aid of mysterious signs and gestures. The flick of the hand you had just given might, for example, have been the signal for us to pick blueberries for making warpaint. That at any rate was what you did. You hunkered down, crushed some berries in the palm of your hand and drew a purplish streak across each cheek.
Then all of a sudden a wild light came into your eyes, you put one index finger to your lips and pointed with the other. And yes, there was something, there actually was something lying in the bushes, half covered by moss and twigs. I saw it myself, this time it was for real. With one hand you reached out behind you and plucked an arrow from your quiver. then you placed the arrow to your bowstring and began to creep forwards. I gripped my spear a little tighter and followed you, slowly and lithely as a cat.
And then we saw it.
It wasn’t the enemy, it was Karoline. We could tell by the pale-blue T-shirt. She’d had her name printed on it at one of the stalls at the Namsos Fair the year before. We crept up to her, slowly, half-crouching and still on the alert. She didn’t move. By Manitu, she was dead. The yellow dogs had killed her. They didn’t even let women and children go free. She was lying on her back with her arms by her sides, from the waist down she was covered with moss and twigs and her berry pail lay next to her. She must have been out picking berries when they jumped her. Damned cowards, they had taken the life of a defenceless squaw. Karoline could be a bit of a wildcat at times, it’s true, she’d shown that on a number of occasions, but she hadn’t had a chance here, they had shown no mercy, they had made short work of her and now here she lay with her eyes wide and staring and purplish fingermarks around her throat. Oh, they would pay dearly for this, this would not go unavenged. I stood quite still and just stared at her. Karoline had gone to the happy hunting grounds, I couldn’t take it in. You knelt down beside her, you slipped off your quiver and placed it on the mossy ground along with your bow, then you pulled off your T-shirt and laid it over her face, exactly the way one was supposed to do.
This is the best and most correct way I can come up with to describe what happened. We found Karoline raped and murdered in the forest and we experienced and interpreted this event in the language of our Red Indian world. Maybe this was some sort of defence mechanism kicking in, maybe we found it hard to take in such a terrible thing or maybe we were trying to render this situation harmless and distance ourselves from it by sticking to words associated only with our play. Or maybe we were simply slow to adjust, maybe we were so absorbed in our game and our imaginary world that we weren’t able to drop the Indian talk straight away. I don’t know. What I do remember, though, is how weird it felt to stand there looking down on her and feeling more and more that something wasn’t right. I mean, strictly speaking it all fitted so well, the language we thought in and that we immersed ourselves when we were up at the camp was tailor-made to describe events like this – well, not rape, of course, I don’t think we even knew what that was, but assault and murder, attack and defence, most of what we got up to at the camp related to this sort of thing, but still, even though everything here seemed more right than it ever had, it became more and more clear to me that in fact nothing about this was right at all.
Obviously this was reality starting to intrude. This was no game, this was real. And this was where you and I differed. I don’t of course know exactly what was going through your mind, but it seems to me now that you took our discovery of Karoline as proof that our imaginary world wasn’t imaginary at all, that it was real. Or maybe that’s going too far. Part of you knew all the time that what we got up to at the camp was only make-believe, just a game, I’m pretty sure of that, but you wanted so much for it not to be make-believe and you got so caught up in our games up there that you actually greeted the discovery of Karoline’s body with a kind of delight and gratitude – not because you were in any way a bad person, far from it, but quite simply because the sight of Karoline’s dead body made it even easier for you to pretend that our Red Indian world was real. The discovery of Karoline represented a concrete realization, so to speak, of your imaginary world. See, we did have an enemy, here was the proof. That must have been more or less what you were thinking, and I’ve never seen anyone look as intent and electrified as you did when you stood up and began to search for tracks.
“David,” I said.
But you didn’t hear me, you paced back and forth, eyes scanning the ground.
“David.”
Then you stopped short. You stood perfectly still, staring at the ground for a moment or two, then you raised your eyes and looked down the path.
“Follow me,” you said, and off you went. We ran for all we were worth, the forest like a green waterfall on either side of the path, and we didn’t stop until we were down on the road, because there was Albert, talking to Eva’s dad.
“Grim’s killed Karoline,” you screamed. “She’s dead, she’s lying up there, near our camp.”
Looking back on it I can see that this was where you put the final touch to your work. The two little Husvikings had already identified Grim as our enemy and by picking up on this and blaming Grim for the actual killing of one of the little Indians from our camp, you managed to make our imaginary world merge with the grown-up world. Not consciously, of course. Most likely you were simply satisfying a need or an urge to follow a logical line of reasoning and a pattern you had detected, what do I know. But whatever the case, these words were to have serious consequences, because as more and more people flocked to the spot and began to question us, you didn’t just stick to your story that it was Grim who had killed her, you even went so far as to say that we had seen him running away from the scene and that he had had “this really crazy look in his eyes”.
If only I had stepped in at that point, if only I had had the courage to speak up and say that we hadn’t seen Grim or anyone else up in the forest, then none of what actually happened would have happened. But I didn’t speak up. I didn’t dare and the more the lie was repeated the more difficult it became for me to do so, because then people would have wondered why I hadn’t said something right away. That must have been my thinking, and before I knew it there I was, telling exactly the same story as you had just told. And due to the way the grown-ups reacted to what we told them I eventually began to believe our lies, because even before the police arrived the mood had become that of a lynch mob. I’ve never seen anything like it before or since. And this: to be ten or eleven years old and experience the hate and the lust for revenge displayed by our male role models in particular as they stood there telling each other what they ought to do to Grim, that they should go straight over there and cut off his balls before the bloody social workers showed up and started going on about what a shame it was for him, this left us convinced that Grim was capable of doing what we had accused him of doing, and of course it was only a short step from there to believing that he probably had done it – no matter what we actually had or hadn’t seen.
The way I see it, it’s in the macho culture on Otterøya that one will find the key explanations for why things went the way they did. Because we were living in a fantasy world that mirrored the macho society we had grown up in and we interpreted everything around us – including the horrible thing that happened to Karoline – according to the values and norms instilled in us by that macho society. At the end of the day that is what prompted you to accuse Grim. Our male role models had taught us that a real man was brave and strong and smart and proud and dynamic and I don’t know what else, and if that was the image we wanted to project, both to each other and to girls, we desperately needed to have an enemy, we needed someone to fight, to defend ourselves against and ultimately beat, and since we had no such enemy we had to invent one. And so you invented Grim, or to be more precise, you reinvented the real Grim as a terrible foe and a serious threat to us and to our camp. The only trouble was that you found it rather hard to distinguish between make-believe and the truth, not only because you were a little boy with a lively imagination, but also because, as I’ve said, our fantasy world closely resembled and was to a great extent a reflection of the reality we normally inhabited. And it was this, as well as a particularly powerful need to reshape reality and present your own version of it and the fierce grudge you bore against the Albrigtsens for having insulted Berit, that caused you to persist in maintaining that we had seen Grim running away from the scene of the crime, even after the police arrived.
Actually it’s quite frightening to think back on how easy it was to persuade people that it was Grim who had murdered Karoline, not just because the Husvikings had said that Grim had been planning to come up and wreck our camp, and not just because he was big enough to be capable of committing rape but at the same time a bit “simple” and incapable of understanding the consequences of his actions, but also because he was from Oslo and because it confirmed a lot of the preconceived notions held by the islanders about towns and town dwellers that he, of all people, should be identified as the killer. The goodwill that people had begun to show towards the Albrigtsen family instantly evaporated at any rate and suddenly people were vying with each other as to who had been most sceptical of the family when they first moved to the island and who had been the first to realize that it would all end in disaster. “I knew the minute I saw them that they didn’t fit in,” as Dad said. “This was the most peaceful place in the world until those bloody hippies came here,” Berit said.
Fortunately Grim was cleared of all charges, he had been wandering around on his own when the murder was committed, so he had no real alibi, but as the trial progressed you and I began to seem less and less sure that he was the person we had seen. Neither of us would admit that we had made it all up, but the more the defending counsel questioned us, the less and less certain we became and it ended with us saying that we thought we had seen someone running off into the forest and that this person had looked like Grim. But although his acquittal was a victory for Grim and the rest of the Albrigtsen family, the damage had already been done. The killer was never caught and since Grim had no alibi, and since the islanders needed an actual person to blame, they persisted in believing that Grim had done it. “It’s the legal system that’s at fault,” as Erik said. “The laws are made by a bunch of wishy-washy, bleeding-heart social workers who’re more interested in protecting the criminal than the victim.”
The worst of it was, though, that Lasse didn’t believe his own son when he said he was innocent and this tore apart the whole Albrigtsen family. I don’t know very much about what happened because they left Otterøya long before the trial was over, but word had it that Lene had left Lasse and taken the kids with her, which was sad enough in itself, of course, but what was even worse was that without Lasse, who had helped her to get out of the drug scene and stay out of it, Lene ended up using again and obviously this hurt Hauk and Grim as much if not more than it hurt her.
On you, me, Dad and Berit the trial had the opposite effect. When we came under pressure and the defending counsel began to sow serious doubt on what we had or had not seen, and when the newspapers reported everything he had said and everyone began to discuss it and form opinions, obviously Dad and Berit did their best to support and stand up for us and this common cause brought our “family” even closer together than before. Officially, you and Berit were still living in the cottage, but more and more often you slept at the big house with us, and one night when I got up to pee I heard Dad and Berit in the living room, talking about how as soon as the trial was over and things had settled down Dad would get a divorce and they could finally put an end to all the lies and all the secrecy. “I want to marry you, Berit,” I remember him saying.
But that was never to be.
Only a couple of days before we were due to give evidence for the last time, Dad was run over by the tractor. He had knocked against the gear stick while he was trying to switch over a plug under the seat, the tractor jerked forward and he was thrown off and crushed under one of the wheels. If it hadn’t been for the fact that it happened out on the moor, where the ground was soft and spongy, he would have been killed outright. Luckily he wasn’t, but he was left paralysed from the waist down and confined to a wheelchair for ever and that changed everything, of course, for him and for all of us who were close to him.
Dad, the workaholic whose day usually started around five or five-thirty in the morning and who scarcely took time to swallow his lunch before he was back out there, hard at it again; who took pride in being a free and independent farmer and would put off asking anyone for help for as long as possible – suddenly he was stuck in a wheelchair unable to do anything for himself. He had to have help with everything: to get dressed, to go to the toilet, everything.
And then, in the midst of all this, something else happened that no one, absolutely no one, could have expected. When Dad woke up in the hospital after having been in an induced coma for almost a week, it wasn’t Berit who was sitting by his bedside, watching over him, it was Mum.
Looking back on it now it has occurred to me that it must be my memory that has linked these two events to one another. That Mum should suddenly have got better just around the time when she heard that Dad had been in a serious accident simply seems so unlikely that I find it hard to believe. It must be my imagination playing tricks on me, because both events were so crucial for me personally, ushering in as they did a new phase, as it were, in my life. So it makes sense to think of them as one big event, that’s what I must have thought, or something along those lines.
But that really is what happened, and according to a psychologist I’ve spoken to it probably wasn’t as much of a miracle as one might think. It was surprising, yes, but he had seen something similar happen several times before and there was a perfectly good explanation for it. The fact that Dad had been paralysed and suddenly needed help just when I was involved in a long and unpleasant court case, the fact that both he and I needed her more than ever must quite simply have galvanized her into dredging up reserves of strength that no one – neither we nor the psychiatrists nor Mum herself – could have imagined she possessed, and her illness suddenly left her just like that. Well, not just like that perhaps, it has to be said that she had been showing signs of improvement for some time before this happened, and it should also be said that she did have a number of minor relapses in the years that followed.
I don’t know whether Berit and Dad had any chance to speak to one another after the accident, all I know is that Mum as good as chased Berit out of the hospital when Dad was in a coma and that was the end of that. Whether it was the gossip and rumours alone that prompted you and your mother to leave the island completely and move to Namsos not long afterwards I can’t say, but I did hear that your mother was given a hard time of it after the two of you left the farm, so I suppose it had something to do with it. She was a trollop, a single mother who’d tried to get her hands on our farm by getting into bed with my dad, people said. She’d taken advantage of Dad when he was feeling lonely and needed help on the farm, and then the brazen hussy cold-bloodedly upped and left more or less on the very day that he was injured and suddenly found himself in sore need of support.
And while Berit was treated with contempt and condemnation by large sections of the community Dad got off scot-free: partly because he had been at such a low ebb and was easy prey when Mum was ill, partly because the sympathy he got after his accident was so great that it absolved him, so to speak, of all previous sins, and partly because he was a man from a society that set great store by macho values.
But there was one person who never absolved Dad and that was Mum. I may be exaggerating slightly when I say this, but even though Mum never said one word about his infidelity and his betrayal of her, not a day went by when she didn’t punish Dad and remind him of what he’d done to her. I don’t know how else to explain the excessively selfless devotion she displayed. Not only did she nurse Dad and take care of me, and not only did she do all the housework, but even though Dad felt it would be best to sell the farm she insisted on holding onto it and running it herself, single-handed. Granted, I was a big help and granted she hired extra help during the busiest periods, but the amount of work she had to do herself to keep the place going was nonetheless so enormous that it was anything but healthy. But she felt she had to do it for Dad’s sake and mine, as she always said if people asked. After all, the farm had been in my father’s family for generations. And the way I see it, this – that she always made sure Dad knew she was standing by him even though he had let her down when she was at her lowest ebb – was her way of punishing him. The way she sacrificed herself and drove herself to unreasonable and unwarranted lengths not only made Dad feel even smaller and more pathetic than the accident had already made him feel, it also meant that he owed her a debt of gratitude he could never repay. In many ways he was even more trapped and powerless in his marriage to Mum, paralysed in fact in more than one sense of the word.
When I look out of the window now, as I write this, I can see Dad sitting on the porch of the cottage eating his supper and Mum is out in the yard, getting ready to mow a lawn that really doesn’t need mowing at all; it strikes me that she’s never been entirely well, that her illness is still there inside her, working on her. At other times it occurs to me that her behaviour is simply a sign of what it was like to be a woman in the sort of macho society that Otterøya was back then. Everyone needs to be in charge of themselves and their own life and when both a person’s spouse and the society they are a part of try to hinder them in this, he or she may well seek other, more subtle, ways of gaining power. This may have had a lot to do with Mum’s manner and her behaviour, in fact one might even say there was a link between this and her illness, I don’t know.
As I say, shortly afterwards you and Berit moved to Namsos. You came back to Otterøya now and again to visit Erik and we saw each other then, of course, but since his death sometime in the late 1980s I’ve only seen you once and that was at the Namsos Fair in 2003. I remember I’d been to a D.D.E concert and I was pretty drunk. I was standing in the middle of the festival ground, fumbling with my mobile, trying to call for a taxi when you walked by. Our eyes met and you immediately looked the other way and made to walk on like you hadn’t seen me, but as I say I was drunk so that didn’t bother me.
“David,” I shouted, way too loudly of course, so loudly that people turned to look at me and at you. You weren’t happy about this, I could tell, but you tried to smile and put a good face on it as you strolled over to me, and once we’d exchanged the necessary pleasantries I asked if you’d like to pop over to Uncle Oscar’s Bar for a beer, and you actually said yes. And one beer was all we had – well, it was understandable really. Not only was I way too drunk to be able to carry on a decent conversation, I’d also just been given the brush-off by a woman I really liked and who I had thought liked me too, so I was in a pretty maudlin frame of mind and you got the brunt of it, there’s no denying. I poured out all my sorrows to you, went on and on about much I loved this woman and about all the things I’d done to make her see that I was the only one for her. I had done everything right, or so I thought. I was always bright and cheerful when we met and genuinely interested in everything she said. I’d given her to understand that I was comfortably off and led a settled, steady life, and I behaved like a true gentleman, pulling out chairs, lighting her cigarettes, opening doors for her.
But she’d still given me the brush-off, I told you. While D.D.E. were playing “E6” at that. Could you believe that? And did you know how hurt I had been? While up on the stage Bjarne Brøndbo sang that beautiful love song, I had tried to take her hand for the first time and she had given me the brush-off. She had smiled wanly, pulled her hand away and said: “No, I don’t think so, Ole.” Had you any idea how much that had hurt? That’s how I went on, I was drunk, maudlin and shamelessly self-centred and in your situation plenty of people would have made some excuse to get up and move to another table as soon as they saw where this was going. But you stayed put. You tried to console me by saying there were “plenty more fish in the sea” and by letting me know that you were single and childless yourself, but that didn’t mean your life was empty and meaningless. What you had to do, you said, was to focus instead on all the things life had to offer, all the things we could do that guys with wives and children couldn’t. “The freedom we have,” as you said, “think of that.” But I was inconsolable. “You may be free, but I’m not,” I remember saying. “Because you have a choice, David, you could get a girl any time. So I can see why you might look at it that way, the single life, when you can opt out of it any time you choose,” I said. “But look at me, I’m skinny and bald and my head’s way too big for my body. When it comes to women I can’t pick and choose the way you can, so I feel like I’m stuck with being single, I’m not free at all.
I could tell that it embarrassed you to hear me speaking so frankly, being so upfront, but that still didn’t stop me. I talked and talked and talked until eventually – surprise, surprise – you’d had enough. You pretended to have spotted an old friend up at the bar and just like that you were gone, without me having learned much about how you were and what you were doing with your life. Or, at least, a few details had come out during our conversation. You were single and childless, as I said, and you were living in Trondheim where you had a job as a traffic warden of all things. I seem to remember that you said yes when I asked if it was true that you’d had a novel published under a pseudonym a year or two earlier. It embarrasses me now, David, as I sit here writing this, to think of all we had to talk about, all we had been through together, all the things I had wondered about and all the things you must have wondered about. Here was our chance to talk about all of that and I blew it with my sentimental, drunken ramblings. Oh, well, I hope this letter will repair at least some of the damage.