It was still early in the day, it was not yet ten. I was driving from Skjetten over Gjelleråsen to Sinsen junction and on over Sandaker, past the yeast factory by the river. Turid had been collected and delivered and had left a very distinct sensation, an almost exhausting heaviness in my body, my thighs heavy, my shoulders heavy, my hands heavy on the wheel.
Now I swung up to the right by Bentsebrua bridge and parked in my usual place in front of the yellow brick building on Dehlis plass and walked in through the gateway to the cobbled courtyard with the old stable at the far end. There my neighbour with the greatest seniority was standing on his stool, balancing on the cobblestones at an alarming angle, washing his ancient, already thoroughly polished Volvo Duett, a station wagon, soon to be a vintage car, and the coal-grey lacquer shone and the weather had lightened up, there was sun now between the clouds and it felt warmer, there was a wind all of a sudden, almost cheerfully chasing around the courtyard, and I felt I had to say hello, so I said, Hi Jondal, what a Sunday it is. His name was Jondal, but he didn’t come from Jondal, he was from Hamar, he had lived there when he was little, he grew up there, his father ran a kiosk not far from the railway station. He had met Rolf Jacobsen many times as a boy, when the poet came to buy tobacco for his pipe, but he hadn’t read any of Jacobsen’s poems, I have never been tempted to, Jondal said once when I asked him, and I remember it struck me as a bit odd. I would have read them. As in fact I had. By now he had been my neighbour for years, and I couldn’t recall a single conversation between us that I would have called sensible, or interesting, at least not to me. He straightened up in his spotless boiler suit with the dripping, frothy sponge in his hand and said, yes, it is, isn’t it Jansen, isn’t the weather delightful, and I said I have never seen better. He was a Christian. Christians often said that things were delightful, I had noticed, ‘delightful is the Earth’, ‘I know a delightful garden where roses bloom’, et cetera, but it wasn’t a word I would have used, it was stretching it I thought.
When Turid moved out, Jondal’s wife came over a few days after and knocked on my door rather late at night and said, my condolences Arvid, and I said, but Mrs Jondal, no one here is dead, not this time, except me, maybe, a little dead, but it was a lousy joke, the both of us knew, and to be honest I was in a state of bottomless despair, it was the worst time, by far, I felt quite naked, quite cold. Oh, that’s what I meant, she said, this sad thing now with Turid, on top of the terrible thing that happened last year, and she blushed and said, not that anyone has died, not now, those were the wrong words, I’m sorry, condolences was the wrong word, but I have baked a cake. She raised the cake to chin level, so I could see it properly. It was a chocolate cake sprinkled with shredded coconut, it looked really good, and she liked me, that much I had gathered, a lot better than she liked Turid, and I liked her a lot better than I liked Jondal. He was a good deal older than her, he had to be. He was away that day, he was in Hamar with his father and was going to stay there for a week. His father had to go into a nursing home, he couldn’t remember his own name, everyone around him changed personality, it frightened him, and Jondal hadn’t driven there, of course, but had taken the train instead, and so the Volvo was out in the cold for a whole week, and I had a feeling that Mrs Jondal was planning to seduce me. I wouldn’t have minded, in fact it would have been good to have someone to put my arms around that night and the nights to come, it would have felt good with her, Mrs Jondal, it would have felt good to breathe slowly into the back of her neck. I was certain she was warm, she looked warm, and I would have welcomed that warmth without a second thought, but it wasn’t proper for me to take the initiative, and then she didn’t either, maybe her courage failed her, or maybe I was all at sea, maybe the chocolate cake was just a cake. It might well have been. But I was a little disappointed.
And now she stood in the kitchen window in the flat right across from mine and looked down into the courtyard at Jondal and the Volvo and me, and him standing on the stool with the bucket in his hand and the swollen sponge and the Volvo all glazed and glistening and I, on the cobblestones, with a wind whistling around my ears and the long drive to Bjørkelangen in my body, and to add to it, the long drive back again via Skjetten, which was not a big detour but had become one just the same. I looked up at her and almost imperceptibly raised my hand to greet her, and she did the same, in the same way, as if it was something more than a greeting, a code between us that we might have had, but we didn’t. Mind the lacquer, I said to Jondal, so it doesn’t get too thin, and he laughed and said, it won’t get too thin, what we have here, you see, is a Volvo, and I said that it certainly was. I’m taking it for a long drive today, he said, all the way to Hamar, it will go like a dream, he said. It will be a delightful trip. Jesus, I thought, is he actually going to drive the car. Is it your father, I said, and he said, yes, he’s not doing so well. Well, have a good trip, then, I said, and let’s hope the car makes it all the way there. You can be sure of that, Arvid Jansen, Jondal said, this is a Volvo we have in front of us here, and I said I had gathered that much by now. And then I walked across the cobblestones towards the door and up the stairs where every crack in the tiles was an old acquaintance.
Inside the apartment it was cold. The bedroom window still stood wide open onto the parking space and the bus stop. I had started to sleep with the window open again, even though autumn was well under way, but had forgotten to close it in the rush this morning, and a cold draught was coming all the way into the hallway, and in the living room it was even worse, the curtains billowed and the art calendar let the months flutter by, and it was just so damn cold. I walked quickly towards the bedroom to shut the window and pulled it hard into place in the crooked frame and turned around and saw the chaotic bed, the sheet half on the floor, the duvet aslant, and I made the bed up the way I once had learned to, with military precision, and came back into the living room, and it was still cold. I had a paraffin stove in the living room in the corner near the stairwell, but I knew that the ten-litre tank on the wall was empty, as were the two plastic jerrycans holding five litres each that stood in the hallway at the ready as they had been for the past three weeks, for I should have stopped by Tollefsen’s paint shop on the ground floor and filled the cans there, so I had something to help me face winter, when winter came, but I hadn’t, I hadn’t thought of it, the weather had been too mild. It was the same every year. It was almost like a joke. I had a small electric heater in the kitchen and a small one in the bedroom, that was all, and it was Sunday and the paint shop was closed. I went out into the hallway and put on an extra jacket, pulled the reefer jacket on over the James Dean jacket and sat down on the sofa and rolled a cigarette and looked around the room while I smoked, my pictures, a reproduction of Munch’s The Day After, or really just a poster that had been with me all the way back from my boyhood bedroom and in every place I had lived since, the Chinese characters for no that I had copied from the cover of Sven Lindquist’s The Myth of Wu Tao-tzu in a silver frame over my desk, and on the desk the silver Buddha with an incense bowl in his lap which I had secretly taken from my mother’s belongings after she died and the rest of them died. It had always fascinated me, ever since I was little, and now it was mine. And then all the records, and all the bookshelves, and all the years with all the books, my only real friends besides Audun, and behind every spine there was an open door onto a life that was not my life, but perhaps might have been, and in a way already was because I had moored them all to a buoy in my heart, every single one of them, yes, all the way throughout the years from high school and here I had kept them with me, and who would I have been without them, who would I have been without de Beauvoir, without Sandemose, Cora Sandel, Hamsun, who would I have been without Jan Myrdal, Hemingway and Jayne Anne Phillips, without Jean Rhys and Melville, Isaac Babel, Strindberg. All of them and more. Yes, who would I have been. I didn’t know. I would have been someone else, someone I would rather have been, perhaps I would have traded it all for a little more love. No. Yes. I was thirty-eight years old, Turid was four years younger, we had been together since I was nineteen, which meant our relationship was illegal, but her mother had pushed us into it and practically told me, please, be my guest, now you can take over, I won’t tell anybody. Nor did she, and I had received no less from Turid than I had given back to her. But it hadn’t been enough. The love you take is equal to the love you make, the Beatles sang as the last line in the last song they ever recorded. Or maybe it wasn’t the very last one, the debate still rages. In any event it was a sweeping finale. More mature than she loves you yeah yeah yeah. But then it was quite a decade that lay behind them.
I stubbed out the cigarette and got up from the sofa with my two jackets on and walked over to the window and looked down on the parking space where it stood, the champagne-coloured Mazda I had bought off a man from Morocco for fifteen thousand kroner behind the shopping centre at Stovner. He had stood in the shadow of the loading ramp and slowly counted every five-hundred note I had given him, and it felt like we were gangsters, a police car would soon come around the corner of the shopping centre and they would catch us red-handed at something that most likely wasn’t illegal at all, but it was a bargain, even though the man who sold me the car wanted to squeeze the most out of not very much. When I took it for a trial drive, it ran out of petrol after a single spin around the shopping centre, and then a friend of his drove up in another Mazda with a five-litre jerrycan in the boot and poured it into the tank, but not all five. When we had shaken hands and sealed the deal and I was on my way home, the temperature gauge began to rise ominously already at Økern, and when I got out to check the oil, it was almost empty. I had to walk two kilometres to the nearest petrol station and buy a couple of litres, I didn’t dare not to, the engine could have seized up at any moment.
A bus came down Bergensgata and pulled into the bus stop on its way into town and stopped quietly in front of the building, and then came the familiar sigh from its doors, and through the gateway right below me Mrs Jondal came rushing out and just barely made it to the bus, as if she was running away from her husband, because she’d had enough, it was over, she wanted another life with another man, a man like me, preferably, but Jondal made a good husband, he was kind, which I was not, not so you noticed, I didn’t feel kind.
I looked at her back in her coat as she climbed aboard the bus, and I had a tenderness for her I am certain I wouldn’t have felt if she’d really made a pass at me a year ago, or I a pass at her.
But who knows.
I went back and sat down on the sofa and rolled a new cigarette, I was restless, I’ve already said that, but I stubbed it out after only a few puffs and lay down and tried to think of nothing, nothing except where I was lying at that very moment, and who I was, right in the middle of time, nothing ahead and nothing behind, only this me in this room, a thin pencil line, the way a grey-bearded yogi had taught me once on the first floor in a tenement building halfway up the heavy stone steps in Wilses gate, between Deichmans gate and Fredensborgveien at the top. I was only seventeen then, it was twenty years ago, but now I couldn’t do it. The yogi had given me a mantra, a word that was mine and mine alone to use when I meditated, which he claimed after fifteen minutes of talk had been specially adapted to my personality, and it was crucial that I told it to no one, especially not the one I had come there with, who also wanted to learn at the yogi’s feet, Audun, my closest friend among the members of the human race. The only one, in fact. When we were back outside on the stone steps after a good half-hour altogether in the glow of two candles placed behind two oranges on a white cloth we’d been asked to bring with us, that for lack of anything better was my mother’s biggest handkerchief, then right away we told each other which mantra we had been given, and of course it was one and the same, even though you’d be hard put to find personalities more different than ours. But I couldn’t remember now which word he had given us, which mantra, so instead reluctantly I started to think about how I had lain in this same spot exactly one year ago, on the same sofa, in the same position, when one of Turid’s girlfriends came in from the landing through the door which for some reason I hadn’t locked. It was Merete, and she just walked right in without knocking and came in from the hallway with a big cardboard box in her arms and walked through the living room and past the sofa where I lay flat out on my back staring at the ceiling with nothing on besides a pair of boxer shorts and a singlet, for it was warmer then than it was now, a heatwave had flooded the city, an Indian summer, and she caught sight of me, and she laughed and said, so this is where you’re hiding, God, how pathetic. But I couldn’t answer her and couldn’t get up, I weighed two hundred kilos and was glued to the sofa, and she laughed again and went out into the kitchen and began taking cups and plates out of the kitchen cupboards, my cupboards and my cups and plates, to the best of my knowledge. I’d not been informed that Turid still had things left in the apartment that were hers, in the kitchen, in the cupboards, or that she wanted more things than those we had agreed on, and if she did, had sent this friend of hers, Merete, on a mission all the way here, because she couldn’t stand doing it herself. Because of me.
And Merete returned from the kitchen with a full box, and she glanced down at me as she passed, but this time she didn’t say anything, she just laughed, she was pretty, she had kissed me once at a party, in a big house on Malmøya, we were both a little drunk, I could remember that she tasted good, even very good, and it wasn’t that long ago either, it was more than a year, maybe two, but not much more, not long enough to forget a kiss of such quality, but I don’t think she remembered, how good it was, or remembered the kiss at all. She was drunker than I was, but she kissed me more than willingly, that’s for sure, as if it were something she had longed to do, to kiss me, and she well may have, but she didn’t now.
The cardboard box was heavy with all the crockery in it, she had to rest it first on one knee, then on the other and hoist it jerkily up to her breasts twice before she had got as far as the door, and then with much effort and very slowly I got up from the sofa, I have to help her, I thought, she can’t manage to carry what is mine out of my home all on her own. And then I was standing and I raised my hands and said, here, let me carry that, and then she laughed again and said, Arvid, just lie the hell back down, God, how pathetic, and it confused me, how could she talk to me in that way, in my own home, so coarsely. She was not a friend of mine, but once at a party we had kissed each other, and I thought she was ugly, being so pretty and talking to me like that at the same time, and it was very uncomfortable, for she had brought me to my knees, and I couldn’t understand why. I hadn’t done her any harm, quite the opposite, but there was nothing I could say, nothing that she wanted to hear, I was nothing to her.
I let myself drop back down on the sofa. I could see her at the end of the hallway making her way out the door onto the landing with the cardboard box in her arms and her short hair cropped close at the nape of her neck like a boy in a very attractive way and heard the bang when she kicked the door shut with her heel. Someone must have been waiting for her downstairs and would come to give her a hand with the heavy box, for I lived on the second floor, and the ceilings were high and there were many steps, and maybe the yellow Caravelle that had been parked not so long ago in front of the building was back again, right by the bus stop, and maybe one or more of Turid’s friends were inside the car, waiting in their colourful clothes. Clothes I wouldn’t be seen dead in.
The hallway fell silent. I could barely hear her steps fading down the staircase. I remained on the sofa. I looked down at my own body in its white defenceless boxer shorts and singlet, and I thought, I don’t look the way I looked before. These heavy arms, this flat chest, these bony knees, all the things that together made up my body, I didn’t recognise them, and at the same time I couldn’t remember how I had looked at any other time, at any other age, before that day. It was confusing, but I didn’t feel sorry for myself. I was a free man. I decide for myself when it will hurt, I thought, that’s what I’ve always said and always believed, but suddenly I was not so sure. What force of will can pull me up out of this, I thought. Not mine, anyway. I’ll let go, I thought, and let whatever happens happen. I’m letting go, I thought, now You take over.
And I let go. And it was just as I had always feared. A trapdoor with screeching hinges opened abruptly under my feet, and deep down the water was black as oil, and it was twilight, or dusk, and I fell down through all this moist and sticky grey disgusting swampiness and felt the ice-cold shock against my skin and could even hear the splash as I hit the surface, and it grew dark and silent around me, and there was nothing I could hear, nothing I could see, and when I woke up it was night and the room was dark. I was freezing infernally there on the sofa, and my first thought was, did He, did He take over while I was gone, while I was asleep. It didn’t seem that way, there was nothing extra that I could feel, I had nothing now that I didn’t have before, and then I felt an unexpectedly huge and until that day unnamed disappointment, for no surplus value had been added, no lightness, there was no suppleness in the body that He had granted me, on the contrary it felt stiff and almost impossible to shake up, and when I made an attempt, it hurt all the way down to my fingertips. And so everything was back in my own hands where it had always been, and my disappointment was enormous. I gazed up at the strangely drifting ceiling, and it was as I had read when I was young, Sartre, it must have been, in one of his books: We are condemned to freedom. Condemned. But I didn’t want to be free, I was tired, I wanted someone to take me in their arms and lift me up, carry me forth, into a room I had never been in before, a serene balmy room where I could sleep and not dream.
A whole year had passed since that day when Merete came in through my door and slammed it shut behind her when she left, but I could recall how I froze so badly on the sofa that I stood up from it by my own free but reluctant will, I pulled myself together, as my mother used to say, for God’s sake Arvid, pull yourself together, although I always hoped for something else, that she would say something else. And then slowly I made it to the bathroom and got the water running in the tiny, cramped shower cabinet filled with all the girls’ unused, useless shower things and shampoos and stood under the hot, beating water in my singlet and boxer shorts until I felt the cold let go of my shoulders. But when I was out on the floor with the bath towel draped over my head, I thought, how old am I now. I couldn’t remember any birthday party, but it seemed to be autumn already and a chill in the air, so there must have been, if not a party, then at least some kind of gathering, for it was sunny the day I was born, it was summer, there was clover in the grass and bumblebees, there were meadows, freshly mown after haymaking, there was ice cream and marram grass and salt water, I was a child of the sun. But that wasn’t what struck you now. It wasn’t what struck her first, who only a couple of hours before had kicked the door shut on her way out of my home. That I was a child of the sun.