A month had passed since Turid’s abdication. Perhaps a little more. Vigdis and I had driven in from Old Hadelandsvei and stopped at a clearing right by Stråtjern lake. The nights had become cooler, the narrow leaves of the rowan had turned red, the leaves of the aspen yellow. It was really not a good place to park, just a wide path full of stones and thick roots crossing it like speed bumps when we turned off from the main road, but it was sheltered from the few cars that drove past and opened onto the water. I had been here before, alone, to pick lingon-berries, and had managed to back out again. I had never seen anyone else here, not even wheel tracks. On the opposite side the lake ended in a bog that stretched in between the trees, you could see water lilies that had shed their petals, the course of a brook and a little way out from the bank two black ducks with some white near the wings, tufted ducks was my guess, that would soon migrate towards the southern coast of Norway when the final cold set in, but on our side the rock sloped down into the water, and it was nice and dry. It would soon be dusk. We had come from Jevnaker high up over the ridge to the east and down the steep hills towards Roa on the other side and driven past the Chinese restaurant they had there for some reason, and I suppose we could have stopped to eat, but I wanted to keep going a little further still, so we drove right through Roa, it took two minutes at most, and out onto the new Hadelandsveien a bit further south and turned off on the old one straight into the hills and then all the way up through the wide bends and past the abandoned cabins by the summer pastures almost at the top and on towards Maura along the narrow crest of the hill. There was forest down along both sides and yet in a way it was like driving in the mountains, you felt you were high up, and the air had a special clarity to it, a sharpness, when we stopped to stretch our legs, but it might have had something to do with autumn. The thing about the air. Are you okay, I said. I’m fine, Vigdis said. My legs hurt a little. Mine too, I said, but then we’ve been driving for a long time. And it was true, we had been driving for several hours.
We walked back and forth, stretching our limbs, and with knees straight we bent down and touched the ground in front of our feet, I with my fingertips, Vigdis with both palms, and suddenly she began to run, legging it away, shouting, first one to the tree stump. A bit further down the road stood a huge, crooked tree stump deep in the ditch, a spruce had once fallen across the road, and I made a dash for it, but Vigdis was quick, she had shot up in the past year, her legs were long and we were going fast, and I didn’t catch up with her until we reached the stump, maybe a few centimetres ahead of her, or a few behind. You won, I shouted and at the same time I grabbed her under her arms and lifted her and swung her around, and to be honest she was a little too heavy, she really had grown, but I held on to her and set her down, and then she began to cry, and I said, were you scared. She shook her head. No, she said. Did it hurt, I said, did I hurt you. No, she said. Shall we go on, then, I said, it’s not that far to the place I know of. Okay, Daddy, she said and dried her tears and got into the car, and I didn’t know what to say, if I should do my best to drag something out of her. I chose not to. Sometimes you just have to hold back and hold your tongue.
When I got my grant and could quit the job at the factory, I had gone out to the car more and more often, not just to sleep, but to drive, after Turid’s departure at all hours. I felt more at home behind the wheel than I did in my own bed, at least I was calmer, whether the car was standing still or I was driving fast, which to me was the whole point about a car, and it felt as if the Mazda had always been mine and no one else’s, even though Turid used it too. She paid as much as I did when we bought it, and she was the first to get a driving licence. And yet she used to say almost as a joke, can I borrow your car, back when we both lived at Bjølsen, and out of sheer forbearance she was granted permission. When she moved out, the Mazda remained parked in front of the building as a matter of course, and she bought her own car, a Toyota, an almost new metallic-blue Corolla with red wheel rims. I had never seen anything like it, where did she get the money, what new money could there be, besides my modest child maintenance, she would never have come up with such a thing when we were together. A car like that. But it was a celebration. She hoisted the flag of the colourful.
Later the girls told me that most of the time the Toyota stayed in the shared garage where no one could see it or see its red wheel rims, and if that was not a comfort, it was something like comfort. You might say she lowered the flag to half-mast. But honestly, it gave me no pleasure. Who could have taken pleasure in that.
When autumn arrived in earnest and Turid was gone, I no longer went out to sleep in the car, not because it was growing colder, but I felt freer now. If I still had to get out, I took a sleeping bag with me or even my duvet, and drove to a less public place, up towards the hills behind Kjelsås, and sometimes the hills behind Tonsenhagen, Linderud, to woods I practically grew up in, where I still had a clear image of almost every tree’s location, of every crag and every lake, the course of every brook, and still have today. I parked on grass-covered plains where hikers left their cars before disappearing into the woods on Sunday trails and timber roads, but at night there were never any cars there, nor was I seen by anyone.
A Mazda 929, a 1979 model and moreover a station wagon, was a pretty big car. You could push the back seats down, and I had cut out a foam rubber mattress that covered the full breadth of the boot and fitted around the arches over the back wheels, and then there was plenty of room for two persons to sleep next to each other, and so we had, Turid and I, a couple of times before Vigdis was born and the Mazda was still new, but then she didn’t want to any more, she thought I was too needy.
Now the mattress had reappeared, and at some point or other I must have told the girls about this new invention of mine, for early one Friday which was not my Friday, Vigdis called and said, Daddy, Mummy wants us to go to Trondheim this evening. With the night train, I mean. Tine and Tone want to, but I don’t. Can I stay with you this weekend. I replied without thinking, of course you can, I said, but that was not my plan at all, I had other appointments, I was still seeing people in those days, on the weekends that were Turid’s, and I was supposed to meet Audun for dinner at Lompa that evening, but I would have to cancel, I couldn’t say no, so I said, should I come and pick you up, then. Yes, she said, I suppose you have to. Now, I said, right away. Soon, I think, Vigdis said, Mummy says we must make up our minds fast, she’s going to call for tickets, and she doesn’t know how many. I see, I said, and Vigdis said, so maybe we can go on a trip just the two of us and sleep in the car like you do. In the back, I mean.
We could, I said.
She didn’t have her own sleeping bag. I should have bought her one a long time ago, all three of them should have had one as they grew older, I ought to have encouraged the outdoor life, but I hadn’t. I don’t know why exactly, but I suppose I had felt it lay behind me, my own childhood behind me, every single day of it, my father in the forest and all that, the blue-marked hiking trails, the red-marked cross-country ski trails, every goddamn hill down into the deep and the snow coming at you. I’d had it up to here without really reflecting on it and it didn’t even cross my mind that I was depriving the girls of a whole range of childhood experiences. But I did have two sleeping bags, the old one I hadn’t touched since the summer camps in the Party when I promised myself I would never sleep in a tent again and in fact hadn’t, and a new sleeping bag I had bought not long before the Friday we are talking about here, for the sole purpose of spending nights in the car with the best possible equipment, given how things had turned out. I had bought new woollen underwear and a new torch, I was armed for the cold dark autumn nights. I guess it couldn’t really be called the outdoor life, but if I had to go out, I was prepared.
We were not there yet. When I picked Vigdis up at Skjetten, the weather was warm, inside the car we only had T-shirts on. Turid had been outside on the stairs when I arrived, but I didn’t walk all the way over, I stopped near the end of the house where I had the car, and she waved, but I barely raised my hand to greet her. I had nothing to give. It was too early. It felt like it would always be too early.
Daddy, do you have a plan, Vigdis said when she climbed in. It was something they said, all three of them, practically every Friday when they came to spend the weekend with me at Bjølsen, they had rehearsed it beforehand, they got into the car and said in one voice, Daddy, do you have a plan, and expected precisely that, not simply that they would stay with me, be with me, there had to be something extra. It was my own fault. The first few times I picked them up, the mood in the car was tense. We were self-conscious and already felt a little foreign to each other, all four of us nervous and almost resigned to the situation we suddenly found ourselves in, but then I said, relax girls, I have a plan, which was a line they knew from watching some old Olsen-gang films on video not long before Turid and I got divorced, and that lightened the mood, but then I had to say it every single time we swung out of the parking space at Skjetten, just as Egon Olsen had to say it in every single Olsen-gang film when he came out of prison, I have a plan, and actually have one.
Vigdis was cheerful and light on her feet, as much for not having to meet a great-grandfather in a cramped apartment in Trondheim as for going on a car trip with me. But the look on her face was also expectant and wide open. I think so, I said.
It was hardly a plan. I hadn’t had time to make one, other than maybe drive around Oslo in a circle big enough to contain twenty-four hours including a sleep-out, and I thought we might follow that circle in the same direction the clock moved, so if Skjetten was at 16.00 hours, we had to go west, first in a loose arc via the south and then up again towards 20.00, where Sandvika ought to be as far out from the centre to the west as Skjetten was to the east, and then head north, barely grazing the Tyrifjord on the way to Hønefoss, Jevnaker, up that way, towards midnight somewhere in Hadeland.
The plan is to go on an expedition, I said. That’s great Daddy, Vigdis said. She was clever. She knew it wasn’t a real plan, that it was something I had made up on the spur of the moment barely an hour ago, but she was fine with that.
A good while later we stopped at a Shell station not far from Lysaker to buy provisions. When we crossed the border to Bærum west of Oslo over the Lysaker river, I felt as always a flicker of unease, of ‘let’s get the hell out of here’, for I was certain there were other laws in force on this side of the border that I would never be able to fathom, and it rubbed off on Vigdis, who said, maybe we should shop somewhere else. She looked reluctant, standing in the car park halfway between the car and the shop. There’s no point, I said, it’s going to be Bærum for a good while yet. We’ll be fine, Vigdis. Okay Daddy, she said.
The young woman behind the counter wore the tightfitting blue clothes favoured by the girls on the west side of the river; blue trousers, blue sweater, she was blonde with pink lipstick, pink socks and blue sailing shoes, but she was friendly and helpful and smiled in a way that made Vigdis feel safe and included. We filled two plastic bags with cinnamon buns and pre-packaged lefse spread with butter and sugar and crisps and an almond macaroon cake wrapped in aluminium foil and two bottles of Fanta, and I paid for a small sack of birch wood I could pick up on the way out to the car. You’re really having a party this weekend, the girl behind the counter said. It’s not a party, Vigdis said, we’re on an expedition. Isn’t that something, the girl said.
As we walked out with our full plastic bags, Vigdis turned around and said, goodbye, and the young woman behind the counter said, goodbye to you too my girl, although she was hardly more than a girl herself.
We came in towards Sandvika on the motorway. It felt cramped on both sides, Høviklandet and Høvik church on the left side close up to the road, the steep slope to the right and the not-so-grand houses in clusters behind the noise barrier, and then the fjord, suddenly wide open with all its islands, and the pedestrian bridge over to Kalvøya, where I had once heard Frank Zappa playing famously and Jens Bjørneboe reading his poems at one and the same concert. He wore a purple suit in the blazing sun, Bjørneboe did, it had been a great experience, it would never happen again. My youth would never happen again.
Right after Bærum’s white town hall we took off to the right over the hill towards Sundvollen and the apple orchards and forests to the north.
I admit that on a few occasions I have claimed that Vigdis was born in a taxi on the way to the hospital, that I held her in my hands kneeling in the back seat between Turid’s legs. It’s not true, she first saw the light of day at the delivery ward nearly two hours later, but I thought about it going into the city and on through the streets in the taxi towards Frogner and the Red Cross hospital not far from Gimle cinema, that it might well happen that way. I could see it clearly, Turid’s tanned knees sticking up from her wide skirt, one foot braced hard against the right front seat, the other against the car window behind me, and my slimy, slightly bloodied hands around the little head making its way out into the world, and the first faint scream and the driver’s desperate glances over his shoulder, what will happen to the seats, he was thinking, how expensive to get them cleaned, and I could easily hear what we said to each other, hear my own shouts of encouragement, Turid’s groans and grim determination, hear my words of comfort so loudly that in the years that followed, the birth in the taxi was the first thing that surfaced and at times the only thing. You tell lies so much you believe them yourself, Turid had said many times, and I can’t rule out that she may have been right. I often believed the stories I told, although they weren’t always entirely correct, to put it mildly, but I didn’t lie, I just remembered it differently.
I was still working at the factory then, I had been there for five years. We had moved out of the city for a while, to a new area with new people, it wasn’t long after the blow on Bentsebrua bridge, but it was buried and I didn’t think about it any more, and it was Turid who wanted out of the city, it was better for children, was her opinion, and maybe it was true, but everything was half-finished up there at the edge of the forest, construction cranes still stood on the hillside, spindly, tall, pencil-yellow against the heavy shadows lining the woods at the back, and there were grey-flecked orange concrete mixers and circular saws on four legs and workers with tool belts and white helmets in full stride between the buildings and huge spools rolled out with cables for all things electrical, not even the shuttering boards were removed from the basement walls when we came out as one of the first couples in a borrowed van, the key in my hand. When, together, we carried the few pieces of furniture we owned into the ground-floor apartment, the scaffolding was still standing against the end wall of the building. I remember the long steep climb up the hillside and the nasty bend at the top. Already the first time I was on my way up I was sure the car would lose its grip and stop and slide back down again, that’s how steep it was. It never did, not even in winter, not my car, but several others did, and I knew I was going to hate that hill. After two years I’d had enough, Turid wanted to stay but I didn’t, so we moved back to Oslo. Back to Bjølsen, to the same tenement, for more or less accidental reasons. I had nothing against it.
But that day Arne came running out on the shop floor. With a hundred decibels in the air no one could hear anything beyond the deafening machines, but he waved his arms dramatically, and I realised it was me he was trying to get hold of, so I started to run towards the door, towards Arne, where he was standing right next to Number Three which was thundering along, and he shouted that Turid was on the line, it’s your wife, he shouted, it sounds like it’s serious, and he flung his arms out, palms up, and I ran past him out to the staircase where the phone was mounted on the wall in a plastic enclosure against the noise, and there was a shelf beneath and on the shelf lay the receiver, so I picked it up and said with my breath high up in my throat, Turid, what’s wrong, although I knew exactly what it was.
She thought she had wet the bed, but it was her waters that had broken. We didn’t have a phone, and there was no telephone booth up on the hill yet, only wires sticking out of the concrete slab on the slope we could see from the balcony, and we didn’t know anybody beyond nodding terms, so she got dressed and walked gingerly down the stairs to the garage beneath the building where our first Mazda stood and drove down the long, nasty hill to the next neighbourhood, which was older and had a telephone booth not far from the high-rise and the Co-op. Now she was standing inside the phone booth calling the factory, and I said, for God’s sake, don’t move, Turid, I’m on my way, and just dropped the receiver and ran back to the shop floor and over to Arne and shouted, you drive me, right, for I took the bus to work on the first shift, it was much simpler, almost door to door on weekdays, the late shift was another story, but enough of that, for Arne was happy to drive me, it gave him a reason to get out of the din for a while, and the foreman said it was all right, it was an emergency, after all.
When we got there, she was still standing inside the phone booth with one hand splayed against the glass wall and the receiver in the other and her feet apart like a sailor in a monsoon crossing the Indian Ocean, and I thought, how fearless she is.
I didn’t want to be the one driving to town with Turid in labour on the back seat, but fortunately there was a solitary taxi standing there, right by the high-rise, which meant Arne could go back to work, I guess I have to, he said, and Turid and I climbed in, and all the way into town towards the west end I was thinking that the baby could just as well arrive in the car long before we got there. I had read about it, it often happened and especially in taxis, but it didn’t happen. Vigdis was born in the maternity ward, and I was there to give support, and I pushed so hard every time Turid pushed that I was asked to leave the room.
I did as I was told and went out into the corridor and on to a roof terrace and lit a cigarette. After a single puff I almost fainted, but we were never again as close as we were on that day, Turid and I. And Vigdis.
We sat silently in the car, looking out at the lake. Not a breath of wind brushed the surface, not a ripple. Then Vigdis climbed out, and I got out and opened the back door on the left side and pushed the button close to the window and lowered the seat. Vigdis watched what I was doing and pushed the button on her side and lowered the other seat, and I walked around the car and opened the back hatch and took the rolled-up mattress I had fastened with a piece of string and a bowknot that was easy to untie, like a shoelace. I unfolded the mattress and moved it back and forth until it fitted perfectly into the boot space. There, I said. Then I unrolled one of the sleeping bags, and Vigdis unrolled the other, we were practically in step, and it was fun.
I built a circle of stones and started laying out the firewood from the little sack, and sent Vigdis out into the forest to gather kindling and tinder and soon she returned with enough to light the fire with the help of Dagbladet’s art pages. It was burning briskly, and with the fire going it got darker, and the glass of the car’s headlamps sent the flames back and they wound their yellow way across the lake, and the shadows fell upon the other shore which silently, discreetly withdrew, and then there was just the two of us by the fire with our faces lit up as in a painting by Rembrandt.
We ate most of what we had in the plastic bags from the petrol station and drank the Fantas and tried out some Beatles tunes, to see if they would do as campfire songs, and that worked fine as long as they were slow. It was strange how well she knew the lyrics, but once in a while she stumbled in a way that reminded me she didn’t have a clue what she was singing.
By and by night fell, if not for me, then for Vigdis. I helped her into the new sleeping bag and said, goodnight, see you in the morning, and she said the same, she was sleepy and tired after all the driving and the heat of the campfire. I rolled down both back windows, it was not so cold, and she could see me and see the campfire, and the whole time I had the feeling there was something she wanted to tell me, but then she didn’t say anything. Maybe it was difficult to get started, maybe it made her shy, but there was nothing I could do to help. I couldn’t interrogate her.
I sat there watching the small campfire slowly burn down and the flames on the water fade. I lit a cigarette. It wasn’t so bad sitting there, in fact I was pleased we had gone on this trip, pleased that Vigdis had called me.
After half an hour alone I filled the Fanta bottles and poured the water on the campfire until it fizzled and died.
I had my usual difficulties falling asleep, but this time I couldn’t go out to the car, as I was already in the car. All the same I slowly felt my body growing loose, and heavy, and perhaps it was something to do with the air, with the scent of spruce and the forest floor, of open water, some kind of generosity I could sink into, as in a gently swaying net that let me fall and at the same time carried me down in my sleep, so I didn’t sink all the way into the wet greyness, and then suddenly I heard Vigdis say, I think Mummy regrets it, and at once I was back again, out of the net, out of the sway, and it was completely dark, and no matter which way I looked, I saw nothing. I thought she had fallen asleep a long time ago. What could I say. Finally I said, I’m not so sure about that. She cries at night, Vigdis said. Does she, I said. Yes, she does, Vigdis said. Well, so do I, I was about to say, but of course I couldn’t. I see, I said. I don’t know why it surprised me, I guess I had imagined she felt free and happy with her colourful friends, with a new energy. I hadn’t really wanted to think about it. I’m sorry to hear that, I said. I thought Mummy was happy. She’s not happy at all, Vigdis said. Well if you say so, I said, but that doesn’t mean she regrets it. I really don’t think she regrets it. You don’t know what I know, Vigdis said. I’m the one who knows what I know. But she’s probably just feeling sad, I said, everyone is sad once in a while, when they feel alone. She has us, Vigdis said, and she meant herself and her sisters, not me, and I almost said, yes she does, and I don’t, but I couldn’t say that either. She regrets it, that’s what she does, she regrets it, Vigdis said, I know it, and her voice rose a notch, she was close to tears now, and then she began to cry, and I thought, is that why we are here, is this what she wanted to tell me, and I had to stop her, she regrets it, she regrets it, Vigdis shouted and struck the window, and struck again as hard as she could, it must have hurt her hand, and she wouldn’t stop. I leaned over and put my arms around her in the sleeping bag and held her fast, I said, Vigdis, don’t hit out any more, and she tried to hit out and she fought back, but I didn’t let go of her, you have to breathe in Vigdis, I said, as deep down as you can and hold it there until you start to feel funny, and then you breathe out again. Do as I say, I said. And she did, she held her breath until I knew she was starting to feel funny, and breathed out again, and she grew calmer, and I said, can I let go Vigdis, and she drew her breath again hard and said, okay Daddy, you can let go, and I let go and said, maybe you’re right, I don’t know. I’m the one who knows, Vigdis said. Okay, I said, maybe so. But that wasn’t why Turid cried, I was sure of it. I didn’t know why she cried and didn’t want to know, but that wasn’t why. Vigdis was suddenly perfectly calm, she said, I have to sleep now Daddy, it’s the middle of the night. I smiled, although no one could see it, I wouldn’t have been able to see it myself, even in a mirror. You go ahead and sleep Vigdis, and I’ll see you in the morning.
It was early dawn when I woke up. Against my habit I lay there for a while. I remembered the episode from last night, but it seemed so distant, so transparent now, that it had already lost its importance. It didn’t make me sad thinking about it, nor uncomfortable. It had been dark last night and everything seemed more dramatic, now it no longer did. But how would Vigdis feel, now that it was light and she had managed to say what she wanted to say. She was still asleep, with her long hair coiled about her head.
The back hatch was closed and couldn’t be opened from the inside, so I opened the back door on my side and wriggled out of the sleeping bag, out the door hands first onto the grass and then on my knees in the grass wearing only my briefs and stood up and took the clothes from the front seat and got dressed in the clean air and walked a short way into the woods to pass water, as my father used to say, and I remember feeling embarrassed, but I can’t remember why, maybe because no one else said it like that. He couldn’t do or say much that in my eyes was wrong, before I thought him foolish. It didn’t bear thinking about, now that he was dead. I didn’t give him many chances.
Not far from here, two neo-Nazis had executed two other neo-Nazis with shots to the neck and then riddled them with bullets from a sub-machine gun. Not for politics, but for money. It was ten years ago, it came to me while I stood there looking in among the trees, remembering how uncomfortable I had felt driving along this road for a long time afterwards, but now I felt nothing.
I walked down to the lakeside to wash my hands. The water was smooth as glass and the air milky white, the haze hung over the opposite shore, and you couldn’t see the bog, nor the edge of the forest, but the ducks were in the same place they had been the evening before, dimly visible. It was a bit chilly, so I walked up and fetched a blanket I always had in the car, pushed the door quietly shut and walked back and sat on the rock right above the water and unfolded the blanket and draped it around my shoulders and lit a cigarette. Sometimes it’s easy to think about nothing, other times your thoughts form an impatient queue. Now it was easy. So I thought about nothing.
I stubbed the cigarette and tossed it into the water and heard a car door slam, and I turned around, and there was Vigdis walking from the car past the campfire, and the sight of her was like a jump starter in my heart.
She came all the way down and sat next to me on the rock, and I lifted the blanket and wrapped it round our shoulders. Did you sleep well, I said, and she said, I dreamed a lot. One time I woke up and felt sad. I can’t remember why. Then I fell asleep again. Are you fine now, I said. Yes, she said. I am fine now. Should we have some breakfast, I said. What do we have that we can eat, she said. Almond macaroon cake, I said. Vigdis smiled. We can’t tell Mummy that, she said. No, are you crazy, I said.