I remained in the car in the car park behind the chapel at Alfaset cemetery. The mistress had driven off. Helene. My mind had gone blank. I looked at my watch, it was odd how the hours extended on this day, they stretched, they got longer, they were elastic, it seemed they could contain everything. I still had plenty of time. I turned the key and drove out on the road and straight down under both bridges, the railway bridge, then the bridge below Østre Aker vei and didn’t turn to either side but went up Veitvetveien past the school, which still looked as it did when I was a pupil, and on up and parked in front of the bowling alley right below the Underground station and got out of the car and walked up the little hill, into the upper deck of the shopping centre and past the kiosk we used to call the Invalid when I was a boy. There was nothing wrong with the man behind the counter that I had seen, but then I had never seen him anywhere else than behind the counter. It could have been anything wrong. The kiosk was open now, but nothing else. It was Sunday.
By the statue of the naked pigeon-lady I ran into Magnar, he was sitting on a bench, smoking, I hadn’t seen him in twenty years, not since I moved, but I knew him at once. Hi, Magnar, I said. Arvid, he said and smiled, it’s been a long time. He got up, he had filled out, but he was smartly dressed. He was back then too, twenty years ago. He had a mother from Finnmark and a father from Bergen and they didn’t let him forget it. Maybe they were still alive, mine were not, but he didn’t mention them, and I was grateful for that. He seemed happy to see me, we were in the same class in primary school, he always sat in the last row, not because he was long-sighted, but because he wanted his back to the wall. We shook hands. So you are riding the old hunting grounds too, I said a little flippantly, but in fact I wasn’t, this was not where I was headed. No, I live here, he said, I moved back three years ago, I was always homesick for Veitvet. Wow, you were. Yes, he said. Weren’t you. No, I said. Or yes, in a way I suppose I was. I’ve missed the sledges, but that’s not something you can move back to, and I’ve missed Inger Johanne, to be honest, her I have missed, and Magnar said, you mean her in our class, Hanne, who sat up front by the door. Yes, I said. But she sat by the teacher’s desk, didn’t Øyvind sit by the door. Yes, maybe you’re right, but Jesus, Arvid, Hanne wore glasses, Magnar said. So what, I said. No, maybe you’re right. There was something about her, Magnar said, but what was it. It was her mouth, I said. What was it about her mouth, then. I don’t know, I said. But it was definitely the mouth. Magnar stroked his lips with two fingers, then he nodded, it was pretty, he said, but it must have meant more to you than it did to me. And that had to be true. How could it have meant more to anyone than it did to me. It could not. And how she got so mad at times, I said. That much is true, Magnar said. He laughed. He offered me a cigarette. Prince with filters. I didn’t really like ready-made cigarettes other than my party smokes, Blue Master, without filter, but I said thanks, broke the filter off and stuck the cigarette in my mouth, and he lit it for me, with a match and a cupped hand, as in a film noir from the forties, we always did it that way. I drew the smoke down and slowly let it flow out again. It tasted pretty good. Prince was a strong cigarette. So how was it, moving back, I said, did you find what you were homesick for. He wasn’t laughing any more, you know what, he said, I had forgotten how miserable I was, it’s so hopelessly stupid, how could I have forgotten, I, who dreaded going to school every single day, and to put it grandly I have walked up and down along the paths of childhood, and to tell you the truth I didn’t find one fucking metre that gave me any joy. God, the things that happened on those paths.
He wanted to be poetic, but it was true, I too remembered, they wouldn’t leave him alone. I was not one of them, but I didn’t protect him either. You weren’t so bad, he said. Maybe not, I said. We stood there in silence, he said nothing, I said nothing, and then I said, how could you forget, but it wasn’t really a question, and he said, how could I forget, and it wasn’t really an answer. It’s incredible, he said, how could I forget. Now I just want to get away, it’s the only thing I want, but selling the flat is difficult. Are you back on Beverveien, I said. Yes, he said, in the same building, I live just two doors down from the flat I grew up in. It’s so stupid. And what a dump. I didn’t quite agree. Audun had lived on the floor above Magnar before he moved in with Abrahamsen, in the bend where I lived, and I had liked it at Audun’s. I liked walking along the Sing-Sing balcony with the wire mesh fence and the doors all in a row, like in a prison, to ring Audun’s doorbell at the very end. I liked the opera records his mother played, but would never have played them myself. And I liked his neighbours just as I liked my own neighbours, they were the same kind of people all over Veitvet, there were shuttering carpenters and bricklayers, brewery workers, there were sailors and lorry drivers, tinsmiths and plumbers and office workers and two or three teachers, and a doctor, actually, in the same building as me, but he moved. Down the road there was a journalist, a deacon or two, and a sexton in purple stockings, even though he was a man. Several old Nasjonal Samling members lived there, they had supported the Norwegian Nazi Party during the war, they were the exception, I guess, and I knew well who they were, but there were even more communists. Why wouldn’t I like them, they were the same as me, my father was a factory worker, my mother a factory worker, and I felt more at home among them than I did at the university, which anyway came to nothing. I had passed the preparatory exams. I had registered for a basic course in history and turned up at the faculty along with students from the whole country speaking different dialects, and the lecturer delivered a short introduction about Africa in the colonial era, which was the theme we had chosen, and when he had finished, he said, next time it would be good if you split up into colloquium groups. Colloquium groups. I looked around me, they were all young, as I was, unfinished, keen, and wanted nothing more than to get started, to move on, first degree, another degree, maybe a Master’s, and they wrote down in their notebooks which books to buy, and they laughed and helped each other with the spelling. I didn’t know any of them. And I realised I wasn’t going to ask anyone in the room what a colloquium group was. I didn’t have it in me. Okay, I thought, that’s it, then. I slowly withdrew from the crowd and walked down the corridor and down the staircase and quietly out through the glass door on the ground floor, across the big wide cobbled square and all the way to the loop where the trams turned, and sat down at the very back of the first blue one that arrived and rode it down all the hills into the centre of Oslo.
The week after, I got a job at the main post office in Prinsens gate, in the package sorting department. It was a half-time position, but I didn’t need much, just money for books and food.
You can look back, Magnar said, you can long to go back and make yourself believe things, but you can’t go back. To me that sounded fairly obvious, but maybe it was easy to forget all the same, and I said, you have a point there, no doubt, and decided not to walk down past the red telephone booth and the house where Inger Johanne had lived, which I easily might have done being already at Veitvet, and then walk along the flagstones past the doors at the back of the eight-family dwelling I grew up in at the bottom of the hill and maybe meet an old neighbour or two and talk to them about what had been and how life had turned out for this one and that one, for Ellen and Uno, for Johnny and Rita, for Tor Erik, but they would definitely want to talk about the burning ship too, and I did not.
I bent down and put out what was left of the cigarette against the plinth where the pigeon-lady stood, just as I had done twenty years earlier, and blew the ashes off the stub and put the stub in my jacket pocket, which I also did back then. I looked at my watch. Suddenly I was short of time. I said, Magnar, I have to go now. I hope you manage to sell that apartment soon. I took his hand and said, hopefully we’ll see each other before too long. I’m sure we won’t, Magnar said. Who knows, I said, why not. But he was right, and I asked myself if I minded, but I didn’t. I couldn’t remember thinking about him a single time in twenty years and was certain to forget him and forget his despair.