I met the Mahler woman again a few weeks later, not at the Flat Iron this time, but at Café Nordraak. I was often to be found at Café Nordraak, even though it always felt a little cold in there between the brick walls. It served as a canteen of the Academy of Fine Art in the daytime, in the evening it was a café and bar. For me mostly a bar. I couldn’t remember ever having eaten there. It was also used for literary evenings. I had read from my work there a few times, but this evening was not one of them, and there was music, not literature, flowing from the loudspeakers, a lot of music, classical music, it must have been an evening for the dedicated flock.
To be frank I didn’t meet her, I saw her, standing in front of the bar, and she saw me. We didn’t exchange glances, but still she stared straight through me, right into my eyes without stopping, as if they were empty tunnels, and her gaze hit the wall behind my head with a bang and probably cut its way through that too, it was pretty advanced. I suppose she’d had some practice.
Instead I fell into conversation with a woman from Frogner. Frogner, Oslo, that is. She was perhaps a little older than me and lived midway between Gimle cinema and Hotel Norum on Bygdøy Allé. It was an impressive address. I had never been to that part of town, except for the Red Cross hospital, but she had grown up there. She told me about herself, and I told her about myself. Veitvet, she said, is that in Norway. It’s in Finland, I said, pretty close to the Soviet border. She wasn’t really listening, I didn’t know a thing about Finland, and the Soviet Union didn’t exist any more, but it did not register. We had been there for a while, we were drinking, and then they played Beethoven’s only violin concerto quite loud, and we sang wordlessly along with the tune during the third movement, and it must have been more than the two us in there who knew that concerto, after all it was sort of an artists’ café, but only she and I were singing, conducting the invisible orchestra. She knew that concerto by heart. So did I. I also knew every single Bob Dylan song by heart, I don’t think she did. But that evening it was Beethoven, and I left with her willingly, up the stairs to her seven-room apartment. It’s not very far, she had said as we left Nordraak in the rain, but to me it seemed far, I lost my bearings and sense of direction, and what I had to offer her in one of the seven rooms was not enough, she wanted more, and still more, and she didn’t give anything in return. It was confusing, I felt rejected and used, completely numb and alone, and as soon as she had fallen asleep, I left Frogner, as cold as when I came, but sober now, in the back seat of a costly night-time taxi, and if the driver had been an amateur and asked me which direction to take, I wouldn’t have been able to tell him. But he knew the way and drove through Majorstua, Ullevål, to Sagene and on up to Advokat Dehlis plass where the tall illuminated memorial in honour of the founder of the workers’ Co-op stood on the other side of the roundabout, glistening in the damp night.
I never went to Frogner again. I didn’t have to. For things went better after a while, and it amazed me how easy it was to make the women take me home, home to where they lived, how easy it was to get close to them, in such a short time, two hours at most. I didn’t quite understand what it was about me that made them interested, what they saw, other than my new boldness, but my experience was that I succeeded, if succeeded is the word, and most likely it had very little to do with me, but rather with them, with why they were where I was in the first place, at the same event, and a little later in the same bar, and that I could see it. See them. Or it was because I had become lousy at small talk. Small talk made me restless, so when I approached them, and unlike the person I used to be, just dived right in, I might say, what’s the best thing that’s happened to you in your life, what’s the worst, were you sad as a teenager, were you alone, did your father drink too much, do you believe in God, were you afraid of God when you were little, were you certain everyone else had sex before you did, which surprised me I had the nerve to ask, and most of them were certain everyone in their class had had sex before they did, and it made them feel trapped and anxious about what the future might bring, and it made everything worse. To my surprise many of them believed in God, some said, maybe. Maybe I do. And a few said, that’s none of your business, and I said, you’re right, I’m sorry, and made to leave. Then they wanted to talk after all. A handful just wanted to talk about this and that and all kinds of nonsense, but I couldn’t do it, it made me irritable, so I excused myself and moved away, and then after a short while they might come over and say, I was very sad when I was a teenager, no one wanted me, I was so ugly, and I replied, in that case you’ve really changed a lot, and that of course often did the trick, although I didn’t necessarily say it to flirt, but because it was manifestly true, if it was true that they had looked so bad. Who hadn’t. One of them said, my mother was the one who drank too much, not my father. He did the best he could, I have a lot to thank him for. That’s how it was in my family too, I said, but that was not really the case. My father didn’t drink, that much was clear, he trained, he boxed, he went skiing, he ran in the woods every Sunday, but my mother didn’t drink that much, at least I didn’t think so, she just liked to drink when the occasion offered. So did I. When the occasion offered. Which was often, as it did on the evenings I am talking about here, in the centre of Oslo, in a bar on St Olavs plass, in Stortingsgata, in Tollbugata or at Grünerløkka, yes, even in the neighbourhood of Frogner, which I have already said I’d never set foot in until that year, except for the hospital not far from Gimle cinema. The films there were often Italian, or French, and I liked the thought of that, that the action didn’t always have to play out west of Pecos, on Manhattan, or in Yorkshire, for that matter, but rather in the fountains of Rome, in Marseilles or Paris. But I had never dared go there. It would’ve felt like going to the theatre.
Was I afraid of God when I was little, the woman said and stared into my eyes so hard I had to lower my gaze. We were in a bar at St Olavs plass. She wore her hair up and drank double gins with Schweppes bitter lemon and four ice cubes, she was on her third that I had seen, it may well have been more, for she was already there when I arrived. She was standing at one of the busy tables leaning in with a lit cigarette between her fingers and her hand raised high and the glass in the other, deep in conversation with the young man on the chair closest to the window, he was younger than her, at least ten years younger. He was good-looking, he smiled politely, but didn’t really say anything. No one at the table said anything, she was the only one who spoke. When I came in, she turned around and saw me walking towards the bar to order my first. She straightened up, made a theatrical bow towards the four people at the table, and steadily enough she walked the short distance across the floor and stood beside me who was closer to her own age. Hello, she said, hello, I said. Do I know you, she said. I don’t know, do you. I am certain I do, she said. Do you remember Bjølsen. I live at Bjølsen, I said. Jesus, she said, are you still living there. We moved to the provinces, I said, but I couldn’t stand it, so far from Oslo, we stayed for two years, then we moved back. It was me who wanted to, not her. Does she feel better about it now, said the woman with the gin. You might say that, I said, she moved out again and took my girls with her. All three of them. Poor you, the woman at the bar said, yes, poor me, I said and laughed. We clinked glasses, I remembered her now, but she had changed, and not for the better, some might have said, and I would have understood what they meant, but that’s not how I would have put it. To me she was attractive. She wasn’t back then, ten years ago. She was also so unhappy it was difficult to stand still next to her. Other people’s misery can make you restless, above all because there is little you can do to help them. If you want to. Mostly you just want to flee. I had no idea what made her so unhappy, but I went home with her to a one-room flat at the top of Sars’ gate, at Carl Berners plass, just one door away from the one I had lived in myself when I finally moved out of my childhood home, nearly twenty years earlier. She was pretty drunk, but she knew where Veitvet was, she had friends there, she said, and she said, come on Arvid, come, and dragged me from the landing across the threshold and on through the hallway. I suppose I wasn’t too hard to ask, and I thought, this is the right thing to do, what I’m doing now, it was she who wanted to and badly, and I gave her what I thought that was, but when I stood fully dressed at the foot of the bed and saw her lying face down into the pillow, one arm over the back of her head as if to shield herself from a blow, it was more like walking into someone’s home without knocking, just because they had forgotten to lock the door.
Of course I was afraid, she had said. My father had a thick book of Bible stories which he read to me every Saturday evening instead of letting me listen to the radio play on the Children’s Hour, do you remember, The Dung Beetle Flies in the Twilight, those ones. Everyone else listened to them. I suppose I was past that age, I said, but I know the ones you mean, Maria Gripe, right. Yes, exactly, she said, but anyway I had to sit on his lap to look at the pictures in the book, I mean, he wasn’t a pervert or anything, but he wanted me to see the drawings, a famous artist had made them, Gustav something or other. Maybe Gustave Doré, I said. That’s the one, she said. I remember one of them in particular, it said Mountain Lions attack Samaria beneath the picture. And you know what. They ate people, in the picture they were eating people, and he wanted me to look at it. There were high walls everywhere, and they couldn’t escape, the lions got them, and they ate them. It was God who sent the lions, as punishment. All those times I have dreamed I was down there. And was eaten. Because that’s what God wanted.