The first woman I left with had slowly but steadily become impatient, why don’t you just take me, she said, Jesus, why don’t you just do it, but I didn’t, and then she’d had enough, which is to say, nothing. She tossed the duvet aside and crawled naked over me right across the bed and slid down to the floor, elbows first, in front of the stereo at the wall there and pulled records from the shelf with her knees still up on the bed and bottom in the air and found the album she wanted, which was Mahler’s ninth and last full symphony, with a Japanese conductor on the cover. The room was dark, but I caught a glimpse of his face and his half-longish grey-speckled hair in the narrow beam from the street light in front of the apartment building. The fourth movement, that’s the one, she said, just listen to it and you’ll see what I mean, measured against that you are a married man, do you understand that, Arvid Jansen, you are a married man. She was almost shouting. I had just got divorced, not many weeks ago, I had told her so, but I hadn’t heard that movement before, I hadn’t listened to Mahler much, to Gustav Mahler or any other classical composer for many years. After Guns and Songs of the IRA and folk music from Mali, from Telemark and Yorkshire in the seventies, there followed a lot of Nina Hagen and the Clash, David Bowie ten years delayed, the Police, ska music, the Specials above all, and for a brief period Sally Oldfield, who had very little to do with ska and in hindsight was embarrassing even thinking about, but there were valid reasons, at least I thought so at the time. It wasn’t something Turid had been able to find on her own, classical music, before I came noisily into her life with everything mine and culturally speaking took up most of the space, she was too young, and then I too let the classical records lie, which she had never picked up. But back home at Veitvet I often listened to Beethoven, the violin concerto especially, and the fourth piano concerto, but also Bach’s orchestral suites, and Rachmaninoff more than Tchaikovsky, and even Shostakovich in Soviet recordings on the label Melodia when my big brother was abroad and I had the room we shared all to myself. No one else in the family listened to classical music. If a symphony was played on the radio, a piano concerto, a string quartet, not least, the radio was switched off instantly, both the portable radio of the brand Kurér that stood in the kitchen and could be heard all day, and the Radionette cabinet in the living room which was turned on every Sunday after service and not a minute before, even though no one in the family went to church. No one except me, that is, during a limited period of panic.
The classical records I owned I had bought at Arne Gimnes’s book shop in Prinsens gate, where I didn’t have to engage with the experts behind the counter at Norsk Musikforlag on Karl Johans gate, and since it was books I was meant to buy there, I always bought at least one, if I also bought records. But I hadn’t caught on to Mahler. Now sehr langsam und zurückhaltend the first notes of the fourth and final movement of his ninth symphony unfolded in the darkness. I was naked and exposed and rather cold without the duvet, and she sat erect and white and suitably drunk in the middle of the bed, conducting the orchestra with her slender white arms, and unmarried in the sense of free was not the first word that came to mind when the music hit me. It sounded more like me, the way I felt just then, why couldn’t she hear the same thing that I did, that it was me. It was so simple. But she didn’t hear what I heard, she didn’t know who I was. I didn’t know who she was either. I hadn’t seen her before the literary event in a room in the building known as the Flat Iron, a place I would never have found my way back to in daylight. But still, it had worked out well in the sense that we were where we were now, in her bed in an apartment the size of a medium shipping container somewhere not on the east side of the river, nor on the west, we were in one of Oslo’s many intervals. I had spent almost all my life here in this city, I was born here, grew up here and had lived in several parts of it as a grown man, but I knew its intervals less well than many newcomers to the town; Oslo’s dim districts, the bedsit quarters, almost only observed from a taxi window speeding past, mostly at night; the confusing lamplit streets in the damp, elastic air, disconnected from the common thoroughfares, steeped in blue dusk and cold dawn, floating, undefined like Saramago’s Lisbon in the Ricardo Reis book, that’s where they lived, most of the women I tried to approach who were not married, or I thought were not married, in one of those neighbourhoods, and once I had left them, I was later unable to link them to other parts of town, in bird’s-eye view, I couldn’t locate them on a map next to an area I already knew from before, they were still disconnected. And I had thought maybe she was the one who could offer me the firm hand and the warmth I had never had but felt I was entitled to, and therefore not been able to pass on, to Turid above all. And although she had a, well, not exactly unfriendly but rather a tough look to her, there was something there which kept the door half open to my persistence, which was surprisingly intense and persuasive, including to myself, practically on fire, but when we had made it to where she lived, in one of these undefined areas, it didn’t go quite so well. Right before I closed the door behind us going into the flat she lived in, it felt imperative to look back to where I had come from, which for the most part now lay in ruins, you could still see brick and plaster crashing down from the last walls left standing, dust rising like smoke signals from the floors, the busted beams, roofs collapsing, and I saw all this, and completely without warning I turned into a pillar of salt, and she understood at once. She could have stopped me on the doorstep for the good of us both, and instead she led me all the way in. It must have been out of compassion more than anything else. But yet she grew impatient, she said, Arvid Jansen, what is wrong with you, but I was like a mattress left out in the rain, sodden, heavy, impossible to move, swathed in silence, and I couldn’t stay, but if I left, then who was I. So I played the highest card I had in the pack. I exonerated myself. I used the burning ship as a shield, I was shameless, I’m wounded, I said, that’s why. I didn’t use the divorce, which confusingly enough felt worse to me, but it didn’t to her, it wasn’t dramatic enough to make me special, I was a married man, she had said, although I no longer was, and maybe she said it disparagingly, or maybe she didn’t, either way I took it badly, she diminished me, made me smaller than I deserved, that’s how it looked to me where I now sat, half upright in her narrow bed about to bolt for the door. She lifted the needle off the record and replaced the tone arm carefully on its rest and bit her lip and sat there looking at me, lost, her eyes moist, for everyone had the newspaper photos in their minds that year and the year after, the furious flames, the toxic smoke, the corridors of death and the fleeing captain leaving the burning ship with most of the one hundred and fifty-nine still dying passengers onboard, in the middle of the sea between Norway and Denmark; the yellow blaze upon the dark water, the grey smoke against the dawning day, and the final motion of Mahler’s ninth symphony came to an abrupt end. And she sitting there, with her white arms and empty hands in the dark and suddenly so quiet room, and me thinking, death trumps everything. Death was my queen, death was my ace.
When I was back out on the street, I had no idea where I was. It was still night, it would soon be morning and the asphalt damp, a drizzle in the air and autumn with slippery pavements and wet, viscous leaves on the ground between the trees in the little park across the way. Not a sound to be heard, only my own short breaths and the empty street glistening and the street lamp just outside the window on the second floor shining obliquely in on her who was now maybe already in bed, asleep and in her dream had forgotten who I was and would never again remember, or she was standing behind the curtain observing me, thinking, why did he come home with me, what on earth happened to Arvid Jansen. I didn’t understand myself what had happened, I was numb from the hips down, I was like a man chained fast inside the muted room between pornography and bashfulness and had been there for a long time, no way out, impossible to think about, impossible to touch, and whatever it was she was willing to give me, I wasn’t capable of accepting it.
I lit a Blue Master. The street I was in sloped faintly in a direction I didn’t know, whether it was north or south, was east or west, but I thought, if I follow it all the way until it stops, then sooner or later I will end up in the city, down by the docks, by the fjord. I couldn’t miss. After that I didn’t have any thoughts.
There was a tram stop a little further down the street, so I walked over and stood there waiting. I stood for a good while, but no tram came. I dropped the cigarette butt on the ground, it hissed, and I snuffed it with my heel and started walking along the tracks, down the hills towards what I believed to be the centre of Oslo and was lost to myself and reappeared by Akerselva, the river dividing our town, as I was crossing Nybrua bridge, past the A&E and on towards the bus stop where I often stood, at the bottom of Hausmanns gate, not far from one of the few Baptist churches in town. In fact I was almost back where I started, in the place I had left a few hours earlier, hand in hand with the Mahler woman.
It had taken me nearly three-quarters of an hour to walk from her apartment and down here. Two of the three had vanished, I had no idea what had happened during that time, which way I had taken, but I finally arrived at the bus stop and halted there to wait for the bus. But there was no bus. It was too late, or too early, so I walked across Storgata, up past the Ankerløkka field which hadn’t looked remotely like a field for fifteen years, not since the main bus station had been there and hardly even then, when the space was still open and not packed as it was now, with blocks of bedsits in trashy colours. I stopped by Jakob church. I had been to mass there once, a long time ago. It didn’t help me much. I couldn’t sit still.
There was a man lying on the pavement in front of the pub on the opposite side of the street, on the corner with Torggata. The pub was closed, I heard him faintly sing down into the asphalt, and I thought, I have to help him to the detox centre, to the Blue Cross just down the road, otherwise he’s done for, for he was in a bad way there on the pavement, it was cold, and I remember the soft light from the window of the closed pub spreading over his back like a duvet, and as I stepped off the pavement to cross the street, I was gone again and didn’t surface until the day after in the bed that was mine, on my side, one could still say, even though Turid no longer had a side that was hers. Not here, anyway. I gazed up at the ceiling and tried to figure out what had happened during the night that had now turned into day, between the Flat Iron where I had read from my third book for a sizeable audience with a microphone and all that went with it, and my bed here, whether I remembered the Blue Cross and the man in front of the pub, which I did, the man, that is, but not what, if anything, I had done in that regard, if I had actually got him to the Blue Cross, or to any place at all, or remembered getting back home. But I didn’t.