That Turid was gone meant there was a fair chance the girls were not in the vicinity either, not at Bjølsen, anyway. The first six months they came every other weekend and an occasional Wednesday, and if I got out of bed and went into the living room and sat down on the sofa to smoke a cigarette or went into the kitchen through the hallway in the feeble fifteen-watt light of the ceiling lamp, most likely I would not run into any of them, not Vigdis, not Tine, not Tone, and all this emptiness stuck to my mind and made me uncomfortable in my own home. After a while it became difficult to get up at night and go to the bathroom, because the column of darkness crammed into the space behind the open doors could easily hold a grown-up person if that person squeezed himself into the corner and stood there, silent and mute, patiently waiting for me to come past on my way to the toilet or the kitchen and then attack me.
Sometimes in the evening, although it was still light outside and the TV was constantly tuned to a Swedish channel so I wouldn’t miss a programme about August Strindberg they had announced but for some reason had postponed, I could still hurry out to the kitchen and take from the drawer the long knife I had bought in Crete ten years before from a man in traditional garb with all the trappings in a mountain village where most of the children to my surprise had blue eyes, and then pull the knife from its wooden sheath and shove it into a crack between the sofa cushions and keep it at the ready in case someone were to come crashing through my locked door to do me in. I placed it in different positions using my right hand, my left hand, to find the grip that felt most natural, most precise and efficient. The fact that the person who wanted to kill me might be able to wrest the knife out of my hand and instead use it against my person, my body, was a consideration I was forced to think through carefully, but the last years of restlessness had made me quick and erratic, also to myself, and in my judgement there would be time enough to get the better of him before he got the better of me, if my technique was good and I stabbed him in the neck.
Friday afternoons, every other weekend after school was out, I had stood in the parking space waiting for the girls close to the house at Skjetten. First they had to leave their satchels at home and then come out again with the bags that were already packed, full of clothes and things they didn’t need which Turid was certain they needed, but I let that pass, it was nothing to argue about, we were only going up the stairs to the second floor, and to my thinking we’d had a fine time together and I was certain the girls thought the same.
Then after Christmas they didn’t want to come for the weekends any more, not even level-headed Tine who was always fair wanted to come. It wasn’t easy to take in. It was Vigdis who called, it was the end of December, between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, my body hurt in more than a few places after an incident late on Christmas Eve I was certain no one had heard about. I had a small Christmas tree on a stool in the corner by the paraffin stove, and in the window overlooking the roundabout hung a semi-communist red Christmas star. Vigdis was twelve years old and the big sister, so she took it upon herself to make the call and didn’t leave it to her mother. It turned out to be a formal conversation, she said, Daddy, we are not coming to stay with you for weekends any more, we have all agreed, we can come one more time before school starts, but after that it’s not really convenient. Straight away I felt a burning in my stomach, but I didn’t dare ask what the reason was, for I could not be sure that the answer I’d get was an answer I could live with, so instead I took note of it, and without batting an eyelid I renounced rights I was clearly entitled to and could claim with full justification, but I couldn’t demand of them something that they did not want to give. I didn’t have it in me. Oh, I said, that was rather a tough message for me to receive, but if you have all agreed, I guess I have to yield. I didn’t know what else to say, she was so serious, and I didn’t want to make it any harder for her, I just couldn’t, but at least I said, is there anything I can do, or say, to make you change your decision. I don’t think so, Daddy, and I said, I see. Now my stomach burned terribly, and it was as if I was falling and falling, with a rushing noise the way Saul had fallen on the road to Damascus, an unbearable blinding light in his eyes, and had turned into someone else, into Paul, and in the middle of that same dusty blazing hot road I too lost myself and became a different person from the one I had been, a different father, and I could not speak, and Vigdis said, Daddy, are you there, and I said, yes, now I’m here. But I wasn’t. Someone else was. I have to hang up now, Vigdis said, goodbye Daddy, I love you a lot, maybe we can talk on the phone many more times, she said, but now very informally, I could hear she was about to cry, so I said as fast as I could, of course we can, I love you a lot too, goodbye Vigdis, and we’ll talk soon.
I may have felt tired sometimes, standing out in the sun in the parking space by the house at Skjetten, my shoulder against the car door or my head against the window inside the car when it rained, if I’d been down in the city centre the day before, on Thursday nights, but it didn’t happen often. I was never under the influence, and the way I saw it, I was careful, and I was pleased with the months that had passed since Turid moved out and with the winter so far, and that the girls did not share my opinion came as a blow right out of the blue. So after New Year everything changed, and I went out less and less often, not counting the evenings, of course, but during daytime, the working days, Saturdays. My life became very narrow.
For a time I thought about death a lot, that I was going to die, I couldn’t help it. Not die ‘in the end’, as we all shall, but that I was going to die in not such a long time, in less than a year, or even sooner, in a few months, of some mysterious disease no one had heard of before, at least not in Norway, which had come here on board a ship from Africa or South East Asia, a tanker momentarily empty of Norwegian oil and a crew savagely decimated in the course of their journey, or that I would die in agony of lung cancer, which was more likely. I dreamed about that too, and when I did, I always woke with a start and got out of bed and went into the living room and rolled a cigarette, yes, a cigarette, and stayed there on the sofa smoking, looking out over the perpetual roundabout and the memorial, or I walked down the stairs and got into the car and drove away from Bjølsen through the night, to the city centre or out on the country roads in the half-dark, the full dark, almost always towards the east, and I didn’t know whether I really was afraid of dying, no inner voice gave me a clear message but every time I passed a place that was familiar to me, a square or a street, a petrol station, maybe, where I had often filled the tank, or a café I’d stopped at for a Pilsner or two, then I couldn’t help thinking, I’m seeing this for the last time, now I’m seeing this café with the lamps lit in rows through the room, I’m seeing it for the last time, seeing the people at the tables for the last time, the silhouettes by the windows for the last time, seeing them from outside in the darkness and into the yellow light, which was no longer my light, and so I couldn’t add that light to the sum of light, as Tolstoy is supposed to have said, add your light to the sum of light, for it was not my light, I had no light in me any more, and I could say it aloud to myself, this is the last time I will see this place, I’ll never come here again. The fact that I said it out loud made it more powerful, more likely, although it was just a figment of my imagination. At least it made me melancholic, sad, sometimes so sad I was close to tears, and that sounds pathetic, I know, but the point was that soon I became convinced that it was true, that it would happen in the near future, I couldn’t see any other way out of the state I was in. And being unable to get out under my own steam, it would take an accident, or an illness.
I had to shop for food, obviously, and I went for walks too, especially on Sunday mornings. I could walk up Bjølsengata, up the hill through the park with the tall sturdy old trees and past the allotments; it was nice there, sheltered, muted, as if in a room of its own, a world apart with only me behind a glass wall so far from the madding crowd, and after a while leave that room and walk down along the bustling Stavangergata, into Nordre cemetery from its northern gate and along the footpaths between the glistening gravestones with their names in gold and Gothic, walk up and down, back and forth, thinking, or trying to think, but I was not able to think forth a life that was different from the life I was living now, at this time, to see another world unfolding, I wasn’t able to follow my train of thought all the way to the end, nothing left behind, until it stopped of its own accord in the fullness of meaning. I just couldn’t do it.
I didn’t know anyone lying in the ground at Nordre cemetery, no one from the families that were buried there. I couldn’t find my own kin, which was not so strange since my mother was Danish and my father was born to Swedish parents in the district of Vålerenga in a city that was still called Kristiania and would remain so for another thirteen years until it was renamed Oslo, and that suited me fine, not for all the money in the world would I want to have a past here, nor did I come here to say hello to old acquaintances, but I could read the double, triple names out loud to myself, if they had something about them. Some did. What I did not do was go down to the city centre in the daytime, that would have to be for a very special reason. I didn’t want to mix the days with the nights, I didn’t want to meet anyone during the day whom I would rather meet in the evening, it had to do with the light, I thought, it would be too sharp and everyone would see me come up along Karl Johans gate without a stitch on my body and feel embarrassed on my behalf and turn their faces away, I could not do that, so when I had finished writing, or rather was done trying to write, I stayed at home. I slept. I stared out the windows, at Ole Dehli’s verdigris silhouette on the memorial, at the buses and the people getting off, getting on. I tried to read. When the restlessness came over me and the pages mysteriously never quite came into focus, I would go down to the Mazda very early in the morning and drive to Sweden, far away to the small town of Arvika in Värmland county, the first county across the border, on Wednesdays or Saturdays, which were market days in that town, where I had often gone on talking drives with my best friend Audun in times that were long gone, when Turid still did not exist and we talked and talked, freely and candidly in his pale blue Ford Taunus.
The first time I went there alone was a few weeks after Turid’s falling away. It took me well over two hours in the car, I burned enough petrol to fill a lake, but suddenly that was where I wanted to go. Out of the country.
They had a pastry shop there, in Arvika, named City Konditori, on the corner of Storgatan right across from the music school and the bus station, and apparently everything inside looked the way it had, shortly after the war, in 1947, when the pastry shop opened its doors for the first time, and it reminded me vaguely of Aunt Kari’s Café, where my mother waited tables in the years right after the German occupation, on the corner of Bjerregaards gate and Uelands gate in Oslo, as I had heard it looked in the years before I was born, but had never seen.
I sat down where I always sat, at a table on the first floor with a coffee and a vanilla custard cake as similar to our own Napoleon’s cake as possible and a view of the music school and the Swedes walking past in the street. They seemed strange to me, unpredictable, they felt foreign, which they obviously were, but they didn’t look it, the way they dressed, they looked like us, in Norway. I had no idea why I thought like that. It was pretty childish.
By the wall stood a jukebox that didn’t work, beneath a lamp with two lampshades of frosted glass there was a big picture of Marilyn Monroe in black and white, but with a fire-engine-red mouth, and a little further away James Dean in the rain on Times Square with his long coat and the cigarette between his lips. In the steep spiral staircase down to the ground floor there was an equally big picture of Elvis with a considerable kink in his knees and his hand curled around the microphone stand, his whole body lurching ominously to one side. The lampshades had turned yellow with age and the walls could have done with a clean and the chairs were upholstered in a burgundy material which the older of my dead brothers always called ‘fake imitation leather’, and on one of them the smooth hard material had cracked with age and a little of the old foam rubber stuffing poked out, but it really didn’t look that bad.
I ate the cake, had another coffee and opened my book on the table by the window and sat reading for an hour, maybe more, without any problem. I felt such calm. Then I walked down the steep stairs and over to Systembolaget, the alcohol monopoly, on the other side of the busy square across from the railway station where the trains halted for a quarter of an hour before they ran on across the great plains towards Stockholm. At Systembolaget I always bought a half-bottle of Calvados, and on the way back I stopped in at The Book Tree, a small Christian book shop, where the man behind the counter always smiled broadly when he saw me come in with the bell chiming over my head and coins clinking in my pocket, if not literally, for he knew I always left money behind, sometimes a lot of money, but not for Christian books, he had other stuff too, almost everything by Selma Lagerlöf, who was from Värmland and, come to think of it, was a Christian, and Swedish classics I was more familiar with than with the classics of Norway; Strindberg, Hjalmar Bergman, Lars Ahlin, Nils Ferlin. You read a great deal, he said, and I said that I did, but still a good deal less than before, I’m too restless, I thought, too woozy. But I buy as much as I used to, I said, I can’t help myself. I’m sure it will get better with time, he said, and I said, yes, it will probably pick up again. The reading, I mean. I hope so, he said, then you’ll be back. I’ll be back anyway, I said, and that made him happy. One time I bought Hjalmar Söderberg’s collected novels and short stories on sale and read them all on a high, but then it stopped again. Another time I bought a Bible for my collection, in Swedish translation, in ‘the original language’, as the author Vilhelm Moberg once insisted it was when he was offered a Danish edition and refused to accept it, he wanted it in the original language, he said. That made the man at The Book Tree even more happy. You’re the most Christian of us, Turid had said one Sunday when we were at a christening and I didn’t want to sing. I found it difficult, while she for her part could sing every psalm at the top of her voice because she was an indifferent non-believer and so was free to do whatever she wanted. But I couldn’t sing. I wasn’t free. I felt observed, not by the others in the church, who were relatives and friends and people I knew, but by God, who could see how false I was, how hypocritical, when I sang the psalms under the burden of doubt and at the same time insisted on my heathenism, and God laughed when He saw me sitting in the pews in despair, and His irony stung my heart, and I choked. I couldn’t sing.
The trip to Arvika and back again took most of the day, which was the point.
Sometimes I tried to write at the Swedish, more than forty-year-old table on the first floor at City Konditori at the high end of Storgatan, with a pencil, most often on folded sheets of A4 copy paper, and not in notebooks, which were more problematic, they made it feel too much of a commitment in a way that undermined the writing. But still, it did feel a bit romantic; the classic author sitting in a café writing with a pencil in a foreign country, like Hemingway did in Paris in the twenties, sharpening the pencil and letting the pencil shavings fall into the saucer as he too had done, letting them fall on the napkin that had ‘City Konditori’ printed in sweeping green letters in one corner, but after a while I could feel my own sceptical gaze on the back of my neck, and most often it came to nothing, it was pushing it too far. I should stick to reading.