This morning I took your newspaper advertisement over to the care home to speak to the residents about you. Otterøya isn’t a big place, as you know, so just about everyone up there remembers you and Berit and Erik and they were bursting to talk about the old days now that they had the chance. You should have seen them: people who’ve been more dead than alive for years suddenly perked up and launched into descriptions of family histories and connections, of working life and everyday life, births and deaths, good times and bad, accidents and disasters, progress and optimism. You should see what you’ve started up here, David, you’ve breathed life into the old folk, something I’ve been trying to do ever since I retired. I go up to the residential care home almost every day to read the newspapers to those who can’t manage it themselves. I’ve filled in pools and lotto coupons for them, I’ve read poetry and epigrams, told tall tales and funny anecdotes, organized bingo sessions and quizzes and occasionally I’ve taken along my accordion and got them up for some old-time dancing. But even though they’ve taken an interest in and enjoyed most of these activities it’s nothing compared to what I witnessed this morning. At long last someone was interested in hearing the stories these old folk had to tell, not just listening out of politeness, but really listening to them, taking what they said seriously. Because presumably this was what had fired their enthusiasm: the thought that they were being taken seriously, being appreciated, being of use.

It was particularly interesting to listen to my former fellow teacher, Odd Aune. He is an old local historian and co-author of several books on the area and he treated me to a vivid and detailed account of how your great-great-great-grandfather on your mother’s side brought the steam-powered saw to Namdal, thus enabling Namsos to grow into the largest and most important town in the Namdal region. Prior to that, all the timber in Namdal had been cut with a water-powered saw, he told me, and for a water-powered saw to work you had to have falls and rapids with a drop of at least twelve feet. This meant that all sawmills had to be built farther up the valley where the falls and rapids were. The timber was felled in the forest, transported to the water-powered sawmill, cut there and then floated down the River Namsen to Namsos for stacking and shipping.

But one day in the 1840s a ship docked at the mouth of the Namsen and on board this ship was your great-great-great-grandfather Oliver Dyrbakk, a young engineer, entrepreneur and businessman. With him on this ship he had a steam-powered saw and this, along with the abolition of the sawmill monopoly some years later, spelled the start of a new era in Namdal. Not only was the steam-powered saw far more efficient than its water-powered forerunner, it was not dependent on falls and rapids. The timber could be floated down the Namsen and cut at the river mouth where a large, ice-free shipping harbour had been built.

All this was to have great, not to say massive, consequences. As you probably know industrialization came only relatively slowly to Norway, but in the latter half of the nineteenth century, in timber production hubs such as Namsos, here in Namdal, there really was talk of an industrial revolution, of a fundamental transformation of society, economically, politically, socially and culturally. Within a very short space of time more than twenty sawmills sprang up in Namsos and the surrounding area, some small, some large, and all of them in need of workers. Many of these workers brought wives and children with them when they moved to the area and naturally these workers and their wives and children had to have food and clothing and medicines, so then came the general store and the chemist and the draper’s shop. They had to bury their dead and christen their newborn, so a church was built and a vicar hired. They wanted their children to go to school, so a schoolhouse was built and a schoolteacher hired. They wanted help when they were sick, so a hospital was built and doctors and nurses hired. In due course they discovered that they also needed a newspaper. And a townhouse. And a public hall and so on and so forth. And in no time at all Namsos was unrecognizable. Within just a few years what had once been a handful of buildings clustered around a jetty had grown into a small town, a sawmill town. According to Odd Aune one can gain some impression of what happened here by looking at the censuses for this area. In the nineteenth century the county of North Trondheim was divided into three bailiwicks, he told me, and while the population of the Stjørdalen and Verdalen bailiwick remained static and the population of the Inderøen bailiwick fell during the latter half of the century, the population of Namdal rose by fifty-five per cent. And this despite the fact that migration to America had been as great from Namdal as from the other two bailiwicks. Given that more or less the whole increase occurred in Namsos itself, then it is quite clear that we are talking here of a genuine industrial revolution.

And your great-great-great-grandfather played a central part in this revolution, David. Not only did he introduce the steam-powered saw to Namsos. His sawmill, Vigen Saw & Planing Mill, was also the most successful in the keen competition that gradually developed between the local mills. As a qualified engineer he kept abreast of new developments in sawmill technology and since he had the capital to invest in new innovations he was always able to run his mill more efficiently and systematically than his competitors. He also had an excellent head for business. He bought up the quotas of the smaller mills as one by one they went bankrupt, and by cultivating various diplomatic contacts he also succeeded in securing contracts which, in practice, granted him sole rights to export sawn timber to England and the Netherlands, where there was a great shortage of forest and timber and a desperate need for wood. Of all the Namdal mills Vigen Sawing & Planing was also the one with the highest sales to the tree-poor areas of Nordland County and Svalbard.

It’s no secret that all of this made Oliver Dyrbakk a rich man. Just how rich was brought home to me when Therese Skorstad disappeared into her room and came back with a Lions Club Calendar containing pictures of old Namsos which she handed round for everyone to see. In this calendar was a photograph of the house that your great-great-grandfather built for himself and his family on the leafy outskirts of the town at Bjørum. I have that photograph lying in front of me as I write and what I am looking at is nothing short of a mansion, not unlike the houses in that television series on Norwegian mansions. It is a black wooden house with arched windows, two balconies and an imposing flight of steps sweeping from the veranda down to a huge garden full of fruit trees and shrubs, with a fountain in the middle of the lawn. The grounds are surrounded by a wall of what looks like fieldstone and at the bottom of the gravel path is a black, cast-iron gate leading to a long avenue lined with oak trees that runs up to and round the side of the house, to what I assume must be the front entrance.

Vigen Sawing & Planing Mill has been in the hands of the Dyrbakk family ever since, and even though the fortunes of the sawmill business and the timber trade fluctuated during the rest of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, the family has always been extremely wealthy, and major shareholders and directors of the company have wielded a lot of influence in Namsos, both politically and financially.

But there was one specific chapter of the family history, an incident which occurred during the first half of the twentieth century, that got everyone talking at once when it came up in the conversation in the dayroom this morning. At some point your great-grandfather, Erik’s father that is, severed all ties with the Dyrbakk family. He changed his surname and after a brief period during which he worked in the planing yard of the Namsen Timber Association he moved to Otterøya, where he supported his family by fishing and farming until his death in the late 1950s.

Then as now Otterøya was a small close-knit community so almost everyone, and certainly all of us in that dayroom I think, had heard about this rift – well, it had been the talk of the town at the time. But there were various theories as to the actual reason for it. Sylvia Skog had heard that your great-grandfather had got a housemaid pregnant and when his father tried to force him to marry the girl he quite simply walked out and never went back. Therese Skorstad on the other hand had been told that your great-grandfather had been his father’s close confidant and colleague, as well as the natural heir to the business and his fortune, but that they had become estranged when your great-grandfather tried to save a lot of money by not insuring a small sawmill owned by the family. When this mill burned to the ground, your great-great-grandfather was so enraged by the loss and this breach of faith that he disowned his son.

But none of these theories is correct, Odd Aune says. According to him your great-grandfather broke with the family for political reasons. Even as a young boy your great-grandfather was troubled by the huge differences he saw between the lives of his own wealthy family and all the poor men working themselves half to death at the sawmill, so Odd says, and when he joined the company he was far more open to discussing things and cooperating with the workers and the trade union than your old-fashioned, deeply paternalistic and pretty uncompromising great-great-grandfather. While your great-grandfather supported the union’s demand for a cost-of-living allowance after the outbreak of the First World War, your great-great-grandfather rejected it on the grounds of high war taxes and an uncertain timber market; while your great-grandfather defended the workers’ right to free firewood from the sawmill, your great-great-grandfather stuck to his decision to deprive them of this right, and while your great-grandfather was prepared to give in to the demands for higher and higher wages, your great-great-grandfather would not yield. And so it went on. They held fundamentally different views on the relationship between employer and employee and this led to violent clashes that rendered relations between them more and more strained. The friction between them did not escape the notice of the workers and union men, who exploited it for all it was worth – which in turn made the relationship between father and son even more fraught.

Eventually something had to give. The son was every bit as stubborn, proud and hard-headed as the father and neither of them was willing to make any concessions. Far from it, the more personal the feud became, the wider the gulf between them grew until the day when your great-grandfather simply upped and left the company. And not only that. Inspired by the Russian Revolution and a trade union movement that was becoming more and more radicalized, he announced that he was now a socialist, said so long and farewell to his old life and took a job as a sawmill worker with the Namsen Timber Association. But that wasn’t such a good move, Odd says. Your great-grandfather was a tall, strapping young man so the work itself was no problem for him, but to the other workers he was still a Dyrbakk, and no matter how hard he tried to fit in he was never accepted. He was shunned and cold-shouldered and so after only a year or two he moved to Otterøya, where he built a little wooden house down on the shingle.

And many, many years later you would grow up in that same house.

Odd Aune is a knowledgeable and, not least, an honest and reliable chap, so I’ve no doubt that he’s right and that most of what he says is true. But still, I can’t help thinking that he and those who were most in agreement with him are as much intent on conveying a message that’s important to them as they are to presenting an accurate account of past events. It seems to me that they are creating an image of your great-grandfather that will reflect their own ideal of a sober, thrifty character, content with little. Their admiration for and animated accounts of a man who lived a life of affluence and had everything but chose to forsake all this wealth to live instead much the same sort of life as themselves, the life of a fisherman and farmer on the island of Otterøya, are as much an attempt to invest their own lives with value and meaning as to tell the truth about your great-grandfather. And naturally they want you to learn from this, David, they want you to identify with the great-grandfather they speak of and embrace the values and the qualities which they say he possessed. Not, of course, that I think they do this consciously or that it’s in any way planned. They do it instinctively, they present it this way because it feels good and right to present it this way, it satisfies a need in them, that’s all.

Actually it was interesting to talk to Paula about this afterwards. Because she told me that this aspect of your family history meant a surprisingly great deal to your mother. Berit felt cheated, you see, Paula says. She felt that, in choosing to cut himself off from his family, her grandfather had deprived her of the chance of a happy, carefree life. She knew it was ridiculous to think like that, she even laughed and said she was just being silly, but still, that was what she thought. “I should really have been rich and successful,” she used to tell Paula and then she would launch into a description of what this life of wealth and luxury would have been like. She had two different scenarios, and if I understand Paula rightly it depended on how she was feeling, mentally and physically, which one she would pick on any particular day. One version saw her happily married to a handsome, well-dressed gentleman, and during the day, when he was out attending to business, she had her hands full looking after three bonny, rosy-cheeked children, running the house and seeing to it that the housekeeper and the other staff did what they were supposed to do both inside and outside the family mansion. In the other, she painted a picture of a rather decadent, opulent existence in which she lounged around feeling bored in an interesting and charming fashion; a life laced with irony and sarcasm in which she stayed in her silk dressing gown till mid-afternoon, smoked cigarettes in a holder and sipped drinks while waiting for her secret lover.

But the most interesting thing about this is that Berit actually seems to have tried to win back the life that she believed her grandfather had cheated her of. The year after you were born, she took a job as a cleaner at the dairy in Namsos, but when she heard that Anton Dyrbakk the sawmill owner was looking for a maid of all work for the aforementioned mansion in Bjørum, she left the dairy and went to work for Dyrbakk instead, even though it was a more demanding and less well-paid job. Her reason for doing this was, of course, that this was the family and the house that she had once been cheated out of. In other words, applying for and getting the job as a maid with the Dyrbakks was the first step in a bigger plan to regain what she had lost.

And as I understand it from Paula, Berit was well aware that this was what she was trying to do. Speaking of it later, she would say that she had had a vague idea that she would start by impressing the Dyrbakks by being exceptionally conscientious and hard-working and in due course, either by accident or chance, it would come out that she was actually one of them and she would immediately be accepted as such. Yes, and not only accepted, Paula says, but as one would expect in such a classic, not to say almost archetypal, tale, your mother saw herself staying there with them and eventually marrying the son of the house, a good-looking young man who was studying economics and wore a suit every day.

And the first part of her dream did in fact come true. Berit showed herself to be an excellent maid of all work and she hadn’t been at the house for more than a few weeks before the lady of the house happened to hear that she was related to her husband. The only problem was that Anton Dyrbakk wasn’t particularly interested in this revelation. He asked her a few questions about herself, just to be polite, and that was that. Nothing more was said to Berit about them being related and she certainly noticed no change in their attitude towards her. Later, when she talked about it she would laugh and say that she had been hopelessly naive, but according to Paula she felt both angry and bitter towards the Dyrbakk family, not only because they had failed to fulfil her naive and totally unrealistic expectations of winning back what she believed – or no, not believed, but felt – was rightfully hers, but also because a year later they had given her the sack, and in the most humiliating fashion. You see, the lady of the house found out that Berit had you, David, and that you had been born out of wedlock, and since Mrs Dyrbakk refused to have a young woman of loose morals in the house she was kindly asked to leave that very day.

All of this suggests that your mother was a woman with ambitions of getting on in life, something which Paula can confirm today and which is also clear from this entry in Paula’s diary.

Otterøya, July 13th 1977

Bit of an upset tummy today. Sat out in the garden, smoking and drinking redcurrant wine with Berit until three in the morning. We talked about what we always talk about. Getting away from here and starting afresh somewhere else. A new life in a new place. As far as I’m concerned this is just a stupid dream. I know that. It’s only when I’m with Berit, a bit tipsy and encouraged by how seriously she takes all our talk that I find it possible to believe in our plans. And even then there’s a part of me that knows this is just a nice little bit of escapism, a pipe dream. I won’t see forty again and I’m never going to get away. There’s no way that’s ever going to happen and all the redcurrant wine in the world won’t fool me into thinking otherwise. It’s different for Berit. She’s not even twenty-five yet and she feels like she has all her life in front of her. And she has no husband to stop her. She’s free to do whatever she likes and even though she has David, she sees no reason why we two couldn’t move to Namsos and open a clothes shop, the way we spent all night discussing. Oh, God. If I know her she’ll already be looking for premises. And I’d bet anything that before the day’s over she’ll have rung the bank to ask about the chances of getting a loan. She’s so enthusiastic, so full of get-up-and-go that I often feel like an old woman when I’m with her. She believes she can do anything, everything’s possible. And when she comes to see me, to show me the premises she’s found or to tell me what the bank said, it’ll go the way it always goes, I’ll start looking for gentle ways to demolish our plans. I hate myself for it. I’m the biggest coward in the world.

According to Paula it was this ambition to better herself and get on in life that led Berit to take up with several of the men she did in fact take up with. I don’t mean she let herself be bought in any way, far from it. But she always had an eye for a man with money, in principle at least. Such an attitude is not unusual among people from poor backgrounds, of course. Not at all, it’s probably more the rule than the exception, but still there’s something slightly indecent about making wealth and status the criteria for choosing a partner, it seems at odds with the romantic ideal that we subscribe to today so most people won’t admit that they do it.

Not Berit, though, according to Paula. She never made any secret of the fact that she went to this party or that simply because she had heard that one of the biggest landowners on Otterøya would be there. She mimicked and made fun of the high-pitched voice and effeminate appearance of a young man of her own age on the other side of the island but when out of the blue he inherited his uncle’s grocery shop she somehow managed to overlook these faults and enter into a relationship with him that Paula described as hopeless and doomed to failure. “Well, I just like the idea of being able to buy whatever I want, don’t you?” she said bluntly when one of her friends reminded her of what she had once said about this young man.

And she was equally frank and outspoken when she broke up with Steinar Olsen in the early 80s. Or to say “broke up with” is possibly not quite right since they had never really been together – not officially at least. Steinar was a married man, you see, and his affair with Berit was only possible because his wife was ill and confined to the psychiatric unit in Namsos. Nonetheless, according to Paula no one, not even the staff at the psychiatric unit, believed that Steinar’s wife would ever get better, so both Steinar and Berit felt that they were home and dry. It was only a matter of time before Steinar could get a divorce and their relationship could become common knowledge – as if it weren’t common knowledge already, Paula remarked.

But then Berit discovered that Steinar Olsen wasn’t as well off as she had thought. He was apparently one of the farmers who had done best out of the agricultural restructuring carried out in the 70s. He had bought land and some of the machinery from a neighbouring farm that had been forced to shut down, he had invested in a big new barn and done up both the farmhouse and the farm cottage. So everything seemed to be perfect. But one evening when Steinar was sitting with a pile of bills in front of him, doing his accounts he suddenly broke down in front of Berit and said he simply didn’t know what to do. The farm wasn’t paying any longer, he was unable to pay off all his loans and was on the brink of bankruptcy.

Obviously Berit didn’t break it off with Steinar right then and there, Paula says. She wasn’t that cold and cynical. Nonetheless it was because of his money troubles that she made up her mind to leave him. “No way am I ever going to marry a bankrupt,” as she said straight out to her friends in the sewing circle, “I’ve got enough worries as it is.”

As it happens it was Berit’s affair with Steinar that caused the rift between her and Dagny. Although their friendship had been on the wane for some time before Berit and Steinar started seeing one another. Your mother’s mood swings had become worse and worse during the latter half of the 70s and when they met at sewing circle evenings or other gatherings, Berit could be downright horrible to Dagny, there’s no getting away from it. She could, as I say, be rude and nasty to anyone when she was in one of her black moods, but Dagny was particularly easy prey. The jibes aimed at her were worse, they were more frequent and came more readily.

This may well have had something to do with Dagny being such a cheery person and always so infuriatingly happy. Her cheerfulness contrasted sharply with the way Berit felt when she was in one of her black moods. Well, Dagny reminded your mother of all the things she wasn’t, but would have liked to have been and this must have filled Berit with the urge to punish her. And obviously it didn’t help matters that Dagny was as naive as she was. She had never really known hardship or pain and as a result she was capable of telling Berit in all seriousness that “You have to think positively” and “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”, and if there’s one thing that can really antagonize someone like Berit it’s that sort of talk, because even though it’s well-meant, it sounds and feels as though the person saying it is belittling the problem and turning it into something that can be fixed with a pat on the back and a good night’s sleep. But it can’t, of course. Far from it.

Anyway it was Berit’s affair with Steinar that put an end to this once close friendship. Because you see in 1980 Dagny’s husband had been diagnosed as suffering from motor neurone disease. He died less than a year later after a dreadful decline during which he slowly but surely lost control of his muscles and his respiratory tract. According to Paula, this happened around the same time as Steinar’s wife’s condition really started to deteriorate, so the heartbreaking experience of having to watch one’s spouse gradually waste away was something that Steinar and Dagny shared. They understood one another, and out of this understanding grew a more emotional attachment. Open and ingenuous as she was Dagny told her friends at the sewing circle all about this, Paula says. She told them what she and Steinar had said to one another, what they had done together and, not least, how much they were coming to care for each other.

Whether it was solely in order to punish Dagny that, well knowing all of this, the younger and far more enigmatic and exciting Berit then seduced Steinar, Paula is not sure, but she has no doubt that your mother did take a certain malicious pleasure in stealing Steinar from Dagny. You just had to look at her and listen to her to know that. Granted, Berit used to say that she shouldn’t do the things she did and that she felt bad about Dagny, but then – after adding that, well, no one could control who they fell in love with – she would grin wickedly, making it clear to Paula that love for Steinar was not the main thing here.

But still, she didn’t do it simply for the pleasure of getting back at Dagny. The drama and excitement of the situation were probably as great an incentive. As I said Berit was something of a dreamer, fond of picturing herself in the sort of worlds she saw in films and read about in her weekly magazines and romantic novels, and according to Paula she clearly relished playing the part of the secret mistress and femme fatale. For Dagny this was deadly serious, but to Berit it was just a game. She loved all the lying and the subterfuge it entailed; she loved to sit there with the rest of the sewing circle dropping hints that might give her away, and the time when she had had to hide in Steinar’s bedroom while he was downstairs, explaining to Dagny why it wasn’t the best time for her to call, marked a high point in this adventure that she never tired of describing to Paula.

But when Berit realized that Steinar’s wife was unlikely ever to get better and that Steinar actually meant it when he said that he wanted to be with her, it became less of a game and more serious for her too. It was then that the social climber in Berit came into play. At a sewing circle evening that turned out to be anything but pleasant she informed Dagny and her other friends that she had fallen in love with a man whom she knew someone else present was also in love with. All the air seemed to be sucked out of the room the moment she said this, according to Paula. Everyone sat perfectly still, holding their breath, eyes fixed on the needlework in their laps, and it wasn’t until Berit started going on about how nobody could control who they fell in love with and that she hoped they could all still be friends, no matter what happened, that Dagny got up and dashed out of the room in tears.

After that Berit was quite simply banned from the sewing circle and the other women would have nothing to do with her, so Paula says. Although it wasn’t something they discussed, one sewing circle meeting after another was ostensibly cancelled and they started getting together without inviting Berit. Pauls feels a bit bad talking about this, she says. Well, she was Berit’s best friend and she didn’t like going behind her back, but she enjoyed the evenings with her other women friends so much that she couldn’t bring herself to refuse. “But at least I did try to stand up for Berit when I was there and get them to see it from her side,” she told me, as if trying to excuse herself. Not that it did any good. Berit was and remained persona non grata, and it’s no secret that she was the subject of a lot of talk and much malicious gossip back then. She was pretty much a regular topic of conversation at sewing circle meetings, Paula says, to the point where they had what they called “the Berit story of the day”.

Naturally the gossip spread to everyone else on Otterøya. And people lapped up what they heard, then revised it and added a little bit here and there depending on who they happened to be speaking to and what impression they wanted to make, until it got to the stage where your mother was, by all accounts, the most despicable creature on God’s earth. And it has to be said that Johanna Mørck played no small part in all of this. Johanna bore a grudge against Berit for firing her from her job as childminder, so now she made full use of her storytelling skills to blacken your mother’s name. There was no end, it seemed, to what she had seen, heard and had to put up with while she was minding you, each thing worse than the one before, but worst of all, according to Johanna herself, was the story of your father’s identity. Oh yes, she said, she had heard it from Berit herself so she knew it was true.

When she told this story she always started by piquing the curiosity of her audience. This I know because she also told it to me. “No, no, I can’t say, I really can’t,” she muttered, closing her eyes, shaking her head and trying to look as if it were simply too painful for her to reveal what she knew. But then, when I started to press her, insisting that if she started then she had to finish, she made a show of giving in, as if to say that whatever came out now it would be as much on my head as on hers. She began by telling me how everyone knew that when it came to money and property your mother would trample over anybody to get what she wanted. And then – after keeping me in suspense with a long digression on how she was never paid for minding you, she got her meals and that was that – at long last she revealed what she claimed to know for a fact, but which Paula says is absolute rubbish, namely, that your father was none other than Albert from up the hill, Erik’s brother and Berit’s own uncle. Berit had quite simply sold her body to her own uncle for two thousand kroner, Johanna said, and it had come as a shock to them both when she became pregnant with you. It was a dreadful thing, but it was true enough. Well, why else did I think it was so frightfully important for Berit to keep your father’s identity a secret? Had it been anyone else she would certainly have told you, she said.

How many people actually believed this rumour I don’t know, probably not many, because Johanna changed the story and made it a little bit more dramatic every time she told it, which didn’t exactly do much for her credibility. But no matter how untrue it was, those were terrible times for Berit, and for you too of course. Not only did you get called a bastard, it was also suggested that your mutism was a result of inbreeding. “Ah, now it’s all starting to make sense,” people said. “Now I understand why that lad’s a bit touched and thinks he’s a robot.”

Obviously the grown-ups on the island didn’t say such things when you were within earshot, but everything that was said round the dinner and coffee tables of Otterøya was picked up by the children and teenagers and they weren’t necessarily as considerate. One of the biggest sinners in this respect was Grim Albrigtsen, a half-grown lout who was always eager to repair his battered self-esteem by hurting and doing down other people. According to Paula, many’s the time you came home in a terrible state because Grim had sneered at you and called you a freak or told you you were lucky you hadn’t been born with one eye and twelve fingers or something like that. On one occasion he sneaked into the commentary box at the football pitch on Otterøya and announced over the loudspeaker that David was asked to go immediately to the car park where “his father, Albert, is waiting for him”. You ran home in tears and it was several days before your mother could persuade you to leave the house again.

Deep down you knew, of course, that Berit could not help what went on, or so Paula says, but since everything you had to put up with could be traced back to her, so to speak, she was the one who had to bear the main brunt of your tremendous and ever-growing anger. It was painful to watch, Paula said. To see and hear you snarling and roaring and saying the most awful things to your own mother, repeating the rumour put about by Johanna Mørck and accusing her of the same thing. Oh yes, because that’s what you did. You knew it was only a rumour, a piece of malicious gossip, but you were so distraught and so furious that you did it anyway, you accused your mother of having slept with her own uncle; you lashed out at her, screaming at her to admit it. “Albert’s my father,” you yelled at her, “he is, I know he is.” Perhaps you did this in the hope that your mother would break down and tell you who your real father was, thus putting an end to the awful way the two of you were treated. It’s hard to say, but it was certainly painful to watch.

And it was worse for you, Paula says. Berit could put two and two together, she understood why you were reacting as you did, so she didn’t let it get to her and she never blamed you. You, on the other hand, were racked by guilt afterwards, Paula says. Indeed, the way she sees it, this feeling of guilt led you to enter into what was to be your longest bout of silence so far. You went for almost a whole month without saying a single word. According to Paula it was as if you did this because you were scared that you would lash out at your mother again. So the psychologist was right, she says, your mutism was a kind of anxiety disorder.

And then, as if things weren’t bad enough already, Berit tried to kill herself. Whether it was all the rumours and muckraking and being ostracized by her women friends that drove her to it is hard to say, but it was probably a combination of a lot of things. Like her unpredictable moods, for example. She was never diagnosed as suffering from any particular condition, but her mood swings became worse and worse around that time, and there were those, including Paula, who began to wonder whether she might be manic depressive – that is, after all, an illness that has driven many individuals to commit suicide. And that she had left Steinar some time before the worst rumours began to circulate and had, therefore, one less person to help her through that dreadful time, obviously did not help matters.

Here is what Paula wrote in her diary about this incident:

Otterøya, January 11th, 1982

A week ago Berit tried to kill herself. Erik had given me a lift home from the Co-op. We were just driving into their yard when we caught sight of Berit out on the ice. As soon as we saw her we knew what she was doing and we both started to run. If she hadn’t slipped and fallen as she tried to get away from us, she would have managed it too, because the ice just ahead of her was paper-thin. She came back with us without protest. She said not a word on the walk home, she didn’t cry either. The first thing she did when she got to the house was to go to the bathroom, brush her teeth and gargle with mouthwash. As if it was just any ordinary evening. Oddly enough, that was what really struck me about it, that she did exactly the same as she did every other night in the year. Somehow this seems like proof that she really meant to do it. It wasn’t just a cry for help. If it had been, she would most probably have taken this opportunity to talk about what was troubling her, she would have wanted to be soothed and comforted, she would have wanted sympathy. But only someone who wants to go on living needs all that. A person who has made up their mind to die as soon as they have the chance doesn’t need to waste time and energy on talking about what’s troubling them. All the pain and the problems will soon be gone anyway, death will see to that, so the person who’s about to die can just relax while they’re waiting.

But Berit won’t be allowed to die. I won’t give up on her. I’ve been staying at her house for a week now and I’m not leaving until I’m sure it’s safe to do so. I don’t trust the psychologists. I know she’s serious about it and I think it’s crazy that they won’t admit her to hospital. Luckily Erik agrees with me. We take it in turns to keep an eye on her. We never leave her alone and we’ve removed all the keys from the inside doors so she can’t lock herself in any of the rooms. We’ve also hidden her sleeping pills. And the razor blades from the bathroom, of course. And the biggest, sharpest kitchen knives.

She’s not happy about this, obviously. Sometimes she pretends to be sweeter and nicer and more docile. Probably so we’ll think the danger is over and stop keeping an eye on her. Other times she tries to make us give up by being mean and nasty. Yesterday she laughed in my face and told me I was only trying to compensate for not being able to save my own family. That being here for her and David was my way of redeeming myself. It hurt to hear her say that, but I can take it. I won’t give up on her. And I won’t give up on David either. He must be feeling so bad right now. The worst of it is that she left a note, and it was him who found it. He refuses to talk about it, but he must have been terrified, poor little soul. And he’s still terrified. He’s trying to block it out. He does his best to talk and act as if nothing has changed, but it’s no use. It’s almost painful to watch him playing with his friends. He tries too hard, throwing himself into their games in a way that isn’t normal. It’s like he’s trying to escape into the game, lose himself in make believe. And he’s obviously even worse when there are no adults around. Yesterday Per’s father came to the door. The boys had been playing Red Indians up in the forest and David and a couple of others had taken Per prisoner and tied him to a stake. They said they were going to torture him. The other boys had only said it for fun, but not David. It was all they could do to stop him lighting a fire around Per’s feet, it could have gone terribly wrong.

As usual Erik is trying to make light of the whole thing. Boys will be boys, is all he says, but to me it seems quite clear that David is trying to escape from what has happened. And not only escape. This is a way of giving vent to all his feelings. All the distress and anger and resentment he feels over Berit’s attempted suicide, he’s trying to burn off in their games. I’m sure that’s the the explanation.

But I won’t give up. I have to make Berit see that David needs her and that she has to go on living, for his sake if nothing else. And then I have to convince David that she’s not going to leave us. He must have seen her suicide attempt as a betrayal and yet another rejection, and if she were to try it again I think he might have some sort of breakdown. But if I can just make him feel that it’s the thought of him that has kept Berit alive and helped her to get through this difficult time then I think he’ll be all right, then he’ll feel every bit as loved as a child ought to feel.