It was as if she wanted to give me away. As if she didn’t care who I was with, as if she didn’t care where, didn’t care when. As long as I was not with her.
For a long time it was I who went to bed early. She would be home late, and a time would pass, but she didn’t come to bed, instead she would sit down on the floor of the living room, and sometimes I could hear her come from the hallway in the faint light and practically fall to the floor and maybe she’d been drinking, and she didn’t take off her jacket or shoes, but straight away began to pull records from the shelf, with music that was not my music, nor was it our music, it was her music, music that had entered the house over the past few years via people other than me, maybe the man with the ponytail and yellow jacket, it was the music of the colourful, and she wept softly while she sang the songs they always listened to together, her voice close and intimate over Morrissey’s voice, to die by your side is such a heavenly way to die, and so on in that way and obviously she didn’t mean my side. I hated that music. She took possession of that music. She robbed me of that music. Gradually all other music seemed irrelevant and almost annoying, all of the sixties, the seventies gone with the wind, fluttering about, except maybe the Mozart records, which were eighteenth century and not nineteen sixties or seventies, but I couldn’t play Mozart when she was at home. What use was Mozart to her, the piano concertos, number nineteen, number twenty, number twenty-one, the finest. Absolutely none.
The girls were asleep in their room, and still she played if a ten-ton truck kills the both of us and so on and so forth and not that low either. One time I heard the door to the living room open, one of the girls must have been standing in the doorway, it was Tine, she was six years old and didn’t know English, but she knew her mother, she said, are you sad, Mummy, and Turid said, just a little bit, sweetie, but I’m going to bed soon, and then I’ll feel better. That’s good, level-headed Tine said, then I can go back to sleep can’t I. Yes, you can, Turid said.
But she didn’t, she didn’t come to bed, there was nothing to draw her into my anguished silence, for all the darkness that was in me pressed against the walls from the inside and filled the room to bursting point and there was no space for anyone but me and it would have pushed her out the minute she tried to cross the threshold. So she kept to the living room, and there she played the boy with the thorn in his side, behind the hatred there lies a murderous desire for love, as if he wasn’t me, the boy with the thorn in his side with his wild longing for love, it was I who had a festering thorn in my side, it was I who had a barb in the flesh, and yes, I could mime that it didn’t hurt, it was my great talent, and it didn’t make things better when I suddenly realised that was why she was playing that song, she was playing it for me, because she knew that the boy with the thorn in his side was me, that’s what she wanted to tell me, but that she couldn’t come into the dark room and pull the sharp thorn out of my body, out of my side, so instead she sent signals, the semaphore of music, the semaphore of the soul, you’ll have to go elsewhere, Arvid Jansen, and she raised her arms, she lowered her arms, she held her arms out to the side the way the Beatles did on their album HELP!, with movements so plainly visible that even I could see them right through the closed door, I have to save myself, the arms said, I have to give you away.