I was often reminded of that dream, how clear it was, how definite, and when I was, it never occurred to me that it was a pity or in any way sad, or unfortunate, that the firm hand in the dream was not Turid’s hand. Turid didn’t exist in the dream’s territory, she was not born there, nor created there. But in real life, in my waking state, it was different. There she had filled every room, filled morning and evening, filled east and west, there she overflowed, and there her spring slowly emptied, there she dried up and vanished, off to the colourful, and I often thought of that too, what did the colourful have that I didn’t. Other than colour. It only dawned on me slowly, although it was simple. They had Turid. I didn’t have Turid. The colourful had Turid, and they’d had her for a long time. They drew her in. I could see it in my mind’s eye, a huge candy-striped straw, a smiling Turid moving at speed through the straw towards all the colourful lips sucking her in, in a sort of diving pose, Supergirl, with her cape gaily flapping.
One time we were going to an island far out in Bunnefjorden. Maybe Malmøya. We were still married. It was before the ship burned, but not long before. Things had been difficult for a long time, and I was afraid. It was Saturday. Someone was looking after the girls. Maybe my mother. She wasn’t dead yet. Or one of my brothers. The first of them was already gone, soon one more would be lost.
We walked in pairs the whole way along the seaside, along the quays past the site where the Opera would open its tall glass doors nearly twenty years later, where the small ferry Holger Danske now lay moored, looking so absurdly little and frail that I thought, how did we survive all those years.
I cannot remember whom I walked next to, or if we said anything to each other, and in that case what. Turid walked three couples ahead of me. He was tall, he had long hair in a ponytail and a yellow jacket and couldn’t shut up, he raised his hands as he looked down at Turid and rattled on. After a while as if moving in a queue we came past the Tollpost Globe building, which was where my mother was now working and not long after this night would spend her very last days two notches up from the wash buckets. Behind her were the factories, all those evenings at all those schools, the gym rooms, the chaotic ship’s cabins, the parquet floors, the hotel corridors reeking of cigarette smoke, the toilets with the popstars’ needles and cascades of vomit, she hurled the wash rag at the wall and didn’t look back once, and from the window where her desk stood, there was a view of the fjord, and Tollpost Globe’s neon green tally glowing faintly on the wall facing the road.
It was dusk now, a peppery grey darkness surrounding us, but from Sjursøya the lamps of the cement silos lit us yellow and red, and from the harbour across the fjord the light came in a broad sweep, as it did from the streets of the city and the Royal Palace, and high on the hillside behind the city there were lights tracing the thin falling silhouette of the ski jump, and all of it spread out on the water like a multicoloured rug unrolled from a pier somewhere between Vippetangen and Aker Brygge, not a Persian rug, but an Impressionist rug woven from shimmering threads somewhere in the Andes, or more likely in one of the hanging houses way up in Nepal, whipping prayer flags, white flakes in the air, rushing down from the high Himalayas where the snow leopard last was seen. I was not sober. We were drinking more in those days, though no one had touched the bottles yet, except me, who had done so at home before I left, and uninvited, without warning had turned up on the sea side of the Central station, at the foot of the ruthlessly tall and oppressive sculpture just as they were getting ready to march off, and they were all younger than me, all of them colourful, only I was dark, not tall and dark, but rather short and dark, and my jacket was the dark jacket from my grandfather who had died not long before, the Danish cabinetmaker, everything being so dark in Denmark, dark and somehow backwardly sad to look at, the jackets were, the bicycles, the cars, but not the beaches, of course, nor the skies or the light over the heaths in the evening or the lighthouse’s mild cuffs on the ear. He had a hunchback from toiling in the fields when he was a young boy in the countryside, his spine bent by the yoke, his father was a brute, and the jacket still kept the shape of his back, but I thought it looked fine. It made me taller, was what I thought, I don’t know why, as of course it didn’t, quite the opposite, but that was before I’d acquired anything close to good taste.
It must have been Malmøya. We crossed a narrow bridge from the mainland to Ormøya, the first island, and then a second bridge over to Malmøya, the outermost island, a short bridge, then a long one, a small island, then a big one. I didn’t like Malmøya. The author Johan Borgen had lived there, someone said, but I was certain it was Sjursøya, before the cement silos and the asphalt. But all the same, it didn’t make it any better, the houses were too big, there were villas in Swiss chalet style there, a good number of them, private beaches, old money, I thought. In fact I had no idea, I’d never been there before, but it was what I thought, because of the houses. And I thought, what am I doing here. That was simple. Turid was there. Where else would I be, should I have stayed at home, having the thoughts I knew I would have, the hand that slowly opened, letting me go.
But it was I who I was supposed to have stayed at home with the girls. Turid was going to Malmøya with the colourful. Not me. She had become one of them, you could see it in her wardrobe on every hanger, but I had asked my mother, it must have been her, could you look after them until tomorrow, and she must have said yes, she always did, unless she was travelling to Denmark, going home, as she said, and she wanted to more and more, but not that Saturday. The girls got the double bed, all three of them under the duvet, shoulder to shoulder and well contented. A bed was made up for me in the basement so I could be back before the girls woke up, and my father slept on the sofa without protest, and my mother lay in the room which had once been mine, in my bed. I don’t mind, she said. Which I doubted. The mattress was too hard on her body, her weight, on her natural shape. She had survived a difficult year, but she was worn out after the operations and radiation, but as soon as I was out on the flagstones with my rucksack, I stopped thinking about it.
We were heading for one of the Swiss chalets. It was in Norse-inspired Jugendstil and painted grey, the ornaments beneath the gables all white and Viking-like, the windows pointy behind the veranda. It caught me unawares. Which of the colourful lived here, I thought, are none of them working class, are they all bourgeois, are only Turid and I working class, it had never struck me, I didn’t know the first thing about them, I hardly knew their names, it was like in the Party, where most of us had code names. And I had never seen any of them before, how was that possible in a town the size of Oslo, in that generation, I don’t even think any of them had children, though Turid had three; they floated free, they flew high, and yet, one day they were there, a part of her life, a big part, but not of mine. It was as if she was leaving home for the first time and I was her parent, standing in the draught from the wide-open door.
But the house finally gave me the opportunity to see one of them from the inside, and despise it, observe the height of the ceiling, three metres at least, and despise it, the multipaned windows with their red and blue glass in the corners, and then the staircase to the third floor, polished teak and carvings, large paintings at the bend of the stairs, I’d even seen one of them in a book, I gave the house a close inspection and despised it. I had no choice.
There were two motorcycles standing on the paved driveway in front of the house, one black, the other blue, with helmets red and white placed nonchalantly on their petrol tanks. I had heard about them, they belonged to two of the girls in the flock, it was very unusual, and one would have thought, then, that they would be dressed in black leather or some other material, protecting their narrow-shouldered bodies from the asphalt and the terrain if the whole show ended in the ditch, but they were not, you couldn’t tell the motorcyclists from the rest of the colourful, nor see the trace of a helmet in anyone’s hair, so then you could be talking to any one of them and not know if the person in front of you was a motorcyclist.
Not that I said much to anyone. Mostly I stood right among them, in the middle of the floor under the high ceiling with a glass in my hand or a bottle, and they talked past me, around me, and if accidentally I happened to stand between two of them, who felt they had something pressingly important and colourful to say to each other, they walked around me, they rounded me the way you would round a buoy, they smiled, they gesticulated, but not to me. I wasn’t used to it, I was used to more attention.
I turned around several times, to see where Turid was. I saw her, and I saw her not. When I did see her, she never turned in my direction, but acted instead like I wasn’t there, but that she was there, without me, in a way that was natural to her, because she felt at home and could move about freely. I couldn’t believe it. If her back was turned, it wasn’t easy to tell her from the others, not with those clothes on, and it shocked me when I suddenly realised that we were not we here.
I went out to the veranda. It was almost dark. Behind me the door stood open a crack. I could glimpse the fjord between the trees, its surface still, and behind the gravel paths, behind the ample but faded garden, lay several large villas, I saw the lamps glowing behind the curtains and heard faint music, as if they were giving a ball in there, a muted Jane Austen-type ball, that’s how big the houses were, and I saw the annoying imitation cowshed lanterns they all had over their front doors, and this made the darkness on the veranda even darker. Straight ahead of me I saw nothing, it was still cool, and the lamp above my head had not yet been lit. Maybe the bulb had burned out. I took the pack of Blue Masters from my pocket. I was glad I still smoked, I wouldn’t have given it up for anything in the world. Why should I.
On the veranda there was no one but me, and in a way it was sad, but a relief too. The cigarette gave me a reason to stand there, even though they were all smoking inside. I was drunk, but no drunker than when I’d come. I closed my eyes and drew the smoke slowly into my lungs. This could actually have been quite okay, I thought. For some reason or other.
I opened my eyes. I didn’t think any more, I just smoked, and I smoked the cigarette down, unhurried, almost Buddhistic in its slowness, and crushed it between the flagstones as best I could with the tip of my shoe.
I turned around and saw the narrow strip of light seeping tall as a man from the crack of the door. I stood there. I thought, I’m leaving. I still had two Pilsners inside and the rucksack they came in, but it couldn’t be helped, I couldn’t go back in.
And then the door suddenly swung open, and a woman came stumbling out with the light from inside flowing all Christian-like around her, and she shut the door and was short-haired like a boy, and she laughed, she was a motorcyclist, I saw it straight away, that’s why it didn’t show on her hair, because she wore it short. She too was drunk, she was drunker than me, so there you are, she said, quite loudly. If it’s me you mean, I said, well yes, I am. I could feel my voice trembling. Are you leaving, she said. I guess so, I said. Don’t leave yet, she said, and I said, why wouldn’t I. Come here, she said, but I did not. Obviously I should not have clung to Turid and come out here to this island, it was a blunder, but I wasn’t anyone’s poodle either, and then the short-haired walked the four steps up to me and took my face, my head, between her hands the way a boy would do with a girl, one hand against my cheek, the other behind my ear, and drew me lightly towards her and kissed me, and it felt surprisingly good and in fact it was a relief not having to take the lead, not having to make advances at the risk of being rejected, which in any case I would never have dared to, and I kissed her back and couldn’t remember a kiss that was better, she tasted good, she was eager, but not foolish, and we had to come up for air, and then she said, can we do it again just one more time, and we kissed again, for quite a while. And then it was over. We took one step away from each other, both out of breath, so what now, I thought, but apparently that was it, I waited, but I couldn’t see anything coming. And then she laughed and patted her cheek and patted my cheek in the same way, with the same hand, and said, you’re a sweet boy, Arvid Jansen, and turned away, opened the door and went back in under the lights and in the same instant became colourful again, her clothes unfolding like wings, her short hair glowing, and she shut the door so hard that not even the good old crack of light seeped out. And at first I wanted to follow her, which was not unreasonable after a kiss that good, but she hadn’t come outside to fetch me in, I was sure of that, she was bourgeoise, she had the self-confidence of a bourgeoise, and what was I to her, I was someone you could kiss and then just leave, so I couldn’t follow her. Not because Turid was inside and might be offended if I came in with the kisser, or more likely be indifferent, but because out here, alone, on this porch, I was somebody. In there I was nobody, other than a buoy you could sail around. So I couldn’t go inside. And now I took against her, and maybe it was nothing more than a bet they had made, which the woman with the motorcycle hair had won, or maybe lost, and I felt used, but still, it weighed heavily on me to have to go the long way home alone, because there suddenly was something for me to leave behind.
I pulled the soft blue pack from my pocket and put a new cigarette in my mouth and lit it with a match in my cupped hand, and then I smoked again, and it may have been a sound I heard, a very small sound, and I turned around, and at the end of the veranda, by the wall, there was a divan, and on the divan someone was lying. I hadn’t seen her earlier, most likely because of the dark clothes she was wearing. They merged with the shadows in the corner, and she had been quiet and perhaps asleep most of the time, she must have been, since I hadn’t noticed her, but now I saw the whites of her eyes, and she was leaning on her elbow studying me. Hi, she said. She said the little word slowly, with a slant, an ironic distance, with only two letters at her disposal she pulled it off, it was quite something. And I didn’t like it. Hi, I said, but now she said nothing, and I went over and sat on the edge of the divan, up against her knee, something I would never have done anywhere else than on Malmøya. She had a blanket around her shoulders and hips. Are you alone, I said, and she said, yes, and I said, so am I. No, you’re not, she said, you’re Turid’s husband, the one who writes books. Three books, I said, not very remarkable. Oh sure, three unremarkable books, she said, for Christ’s sake, I have read them, haven’t I, but you are not here alone. Perhaps not, I said, but you don’t understand what I mean. Oh yes I do, she said. And what could I say to that. I pulled a cigarette halfway out of the pack and offered it to her, and she took it, and I lit a match and leaned forward, and then we smoked together, me sitting at her knee, she half reclining. Are you sad, I said after a while. Yes, she said. Me too, I said, and she said, that’s not difficult to see. But it was quite the kiss, though, she said. It was, I said. Did it taste good, she said, and I said, it did, and I thought, maybe she wants me to kiss her too, and if she does, should I. But it was the short-haired who had kissed me, not the other way round. You’re not one of the colourful, I said, which was obvious, since she lay here next to me, up against my hip, in her dark trousers and black sweater. Who, she said. Those inside, I said. I haven’t noticed, she said, and I said, what, and she said, that they’re colourful. You haven’t. No, I haven’t, she said, I know several of them, they’re friends of mine. What colours would that be. They seem perfectly ordinary to me. That was not true, I thought, the clothes, the fluttering movements, everything I didn’t like, it was clear for all to see, and this woman here was not one of them, just as I was not one of them. Maybe she wants to rib me, I thought, that’s it, she wants to rub it in and pretend not to know, and I was getting sore. If they’re your friends, then why are you out here alone feeling sad, why aren’t they looking after you. But then she went all quiet again, and I thought, now she will feel even sadder. Do you want another one, I said and got out the Blue Masters, it was all I had to offer, there were only two cigarettes left, we could have smoked those together. No thanks, she said. And I too had had enough.
It was very dark now, and difficult to see where her clothes ended and the darkness began, do you want me to kiss you, I said, and the whites of her eyes vanished, and then they were back, and she said, don’t you think it’s a little too close to your last kiss. You probably still taste of her. She laughed briefly, but not happily, and I thought that she was probably right about that, it would be like kissing two women at the same time, which I guess I wouldn’t have minded, but I had no trouble understanding that she did. Not for a moment did I think of Turid. That she existed. Until afterwards. It was odd. I’m sorry, I said, I’m sure you’re right, I’m being too forward, I don’t usually do that. On the contrary, I thought. But is it really that important, she said, to kiss me. I don’t know, I said, maybe it is, maybe not to you, but to me. This conversation was absolutely meaningless, I didn’t know why I said what I said, it wasn’t important to me at all, and what in the world do I need this for, I thought, what in the world, but she raised her head, and I kissed her, and it was completely different, she was out of practice, that must be why she was lying out here on the divan all alone, and I regretted it at once, I would rather have kept the first kiss, let my mouth remember the first, but now it was too late. Did I taste of her, I asked. You did, she said, it was a bit weird, to tell you the truth, after all she is one of my closest friends, and when she said that I suddenly felt very tired, resigned, I didn’t want any of this, I didn’t want to hear about it, didn’t want to be a part of it, and everything turns into dust and comes to nothing, I thought, it all comes to nothing this way, and then I thought, come on, it’s not that bad. But it was, and I didn’t know what to do with myself, if there was a place for me, if there was anything I could hold on to, and it all comes to nothing, I thought, and everything turns into dust, everything vanishes, and the self in me can’t hold anything fast, and everything’s untied, one thing after the other flung out with a sickening swish and is loose and never comes back, as in Yeats’s poem, where the falcon cannot hear the falconer calling, but instead sails over the next stony crag and is gone somewhere between the peaks of Mongolia, or to the west of Ireland, near the Blasket Islands with their roofless houses and the tumbledown stone fences I once had seen through the rain from the tall cliffs at the coast.
For a moment I felt very dizzy. I reached out in the darkness to steady myself, and my right hand struck a window-sill, the left knocked a flowerpot over. Can I lie down here for a little while, I said. I don’t think there’s room enough, she said. There has to be, I said and put my knees up on the divan and leaned forward and squeezed in between her and the wall, and there was enough space, but only just, and I was afraid she might fall off and hit the floor, so I put my arm around her. Don’t go, I said. And closed my eyes and was gone.
I dreamed about my mother and father, it was late August in the dream, they were in the Danish house north of the town, by the sea, and were standing each by their own open door, the one that led from the kitchen onto the willow hedge, and the door to the terrace with a view of the meadow where the cows and their calves were grazing all summer long when I was a child, but now there were hares in the thicket, and pheasants, and roe deer, and right over them a buzzard hovering low and weightlessly patient, and further on beyond the meadow the horses were running along the big oak trees against the horizon, and the trees blocked out the light when they grew tall out there where the sun set in summer, to the west right on the opposite coast, that’s how narrow the land was up here in the north. You could hear the rain outside, as on a cassette, a slight distortion of the sound, an audible treble, porous, and a constant, mild and yet compact hush over the lawn and the willows and the tall poplars bordering the neighbouring house behind the hedge and the sound of thunder through the rain like rumbling cannons in the distance, but not menacing, as in a war. And inside it was silent, you could hear the difference, inside, outside, and the rain falling behind the silence so rain and thunder and silence filled the dream at the same time, and the one did not touch the other, but each had their own space, and then the two of them, my mother and my father, each by their open door facing the rain, and the silhouette of each of them seen from the inside against the wet grey daylight outside, and they looked like themselves, but not like in photographs in the drawer at home. She said, we’ll cycle in when it passes. Then there was silence again, and he said, it will soon be over. The sentences were far apart, and she said, yes, it will soon be over, and then she said, I made the beds up and closed the windows, and after a while he said, that’s good, they shouldn’t be open when we have left, it has to be tidy when we leave, and they were so gentle towards each other, so unconstrained, I couldn’t remember having heard them speak like that before, no impatience, no heaviness, merely a gossamer gentleness, I could have wept with relief. And then the rain died down, and steam rose from the ground in the low white muted light over the meadow, and out of the mist a bright silvery sun came sliding like a Danish five-kroner coin over the willow trees and made everything even whiter, intense and blinding, and still they stood there, motionless each in their own doorway, their silhouettes close to translucent and nearly dissolved, and they didn’t speak any longer, and then they were all gone, but the doors still stood open, empty, you could see steam rising to its full height and hear thunder in the distance, but not menacing as in a war. And slowly everything became quieter still, the summer house too dissolved, and it was colder without it, only the blackbird could be heard from its regular tree, its throat so clear it seemed freshly laundered, and it was with me still when Turid shook my arm. I didn’t realise at first that it was her, since she was not in the dream, and I was not out of it yet, it will be over soon, I thought, what is it that will be over.
Arvid, Turid said loudly, okay, then, we’ll leave. It didn’t sound like she wanted to. I raised my head and looked around and rubbed my eyes and could feel how my face was wet. From an open window came a golden flow, and it was the sound of music and eager voices, so the party in there was far from over, but Turid said, Arvid, come on. We can go home now. It’s all right. I still had my arm around the woman in black so she wouldn’t fall overboard, and maybe she was sleeping, or she was lying there with her eyes closed. She had spread the dark blanket over both of us, or someone else had, and I slowly loosened my hold, my wrist aching, and she really was only a few inches from falling off the divan, but I held her back and drew her carefully onto safe ground while I struggled to get up. She couldn’t possibly be asleep, the way I was carrying on, she let herself be tugged this way and that, but she didn’t open her eyes, she didn’t want to be the third party. It wasn’t so hard to understand.
We came walking from Ormøya out onto the mainland. A light rain was just beginning. It was no longer Saturday, it was night and there was little traffic, but a solitary taxi with its light on came sailing past us right out of nowhere, I could hear the gentle sound of tyres on the wet asphalt, and the taxi suddenly indicated to pull over on the pavement in front of us and stopped before we had time to hail it, but we got in, and I said, Veitvet, and the taxi driver pulled out again, he knew where it was. Is that where the girls are, Turid said, at your mother’s. Yes, I said. That’s where we’re going. There’s a bed made up in the basement. No, that’s where you are going, Turid said. I’m going to Bjølsen, I don’t want to go to Veitvet. What’s there for me. Your children are there, I said. Today is your day with them, Turid said, I had the night off. We’ll go to Bjølsen first, then you go to Veitvet, and I thought, this is not going to be cheap. I looked at the back of the driver’s head, how many couples must he have driven home from parties, in how many different states. Then I leaned back in the seat, I was so tired. All right then, I said, we’ll do it that way.
We turned into Hausmanns gate from Storgata, by the blocks of bedsits. We were silent in the back seat. Why didn’t you go with her, Turid said suddenly. Who, I said. Merete, Turid said. You mean her with the motorcycle hair, I said, why would I do that. I thought maybe you wanted to, Turid said. No, I didn’t want to, I lied. She wanted to, Turid said. I don’t think so, I said. You could have gone anywhere you wanted, Turid said, you could have gone upstairs. I didn’t understand, I felt weightless, numb, why would she say something like that. I didn’t know what to answer. Never mind then, Turid said, please yourself, and her voice sounded sleepy and suddenly distant. Did you wish I’d go upstairs with her, I said, that I’d go with her. Turid shrugged in the half-light. I wouldn’t have minded, she said.
I don’t remember anything else that we said in the taxi heading up Uelands gate and past Sagene church and Sagene Lunsjbar, if we said anything at all, what was there for her to say, or for me. She couldn’t say that I should have stayed at home, and I couldn’t say that she should have been we with me, when the whole point for her was the opposite, but when I let her go, out of the car on Advokat Dehlis plass, I remember thinking, if only I could stop giving a damn and be done with it. But I did give a damn. I didn’t want to be done with it.