It was spring, it was April. Nothing had bloomed yet, but you could feel it in the air, even within the city the sweet fragrance of restless birches drifting through the streets, in the parks the lime trees stood sated with their own scent, and it pressed against the bark from the inside so hard the bark burst open in big gashes, and in Nordre cemetery you felt the warmth of stones and granite slabs when you held your palms against them. I did that, I couldn’t help myself. It was as if there was something deeper within the stones, a deeper warmth, not deeper in a geological sense, but deeper in its wholeness, its stoneness. What a short while ago had been frozen crystalline tissue in the soil, now rose as steam in the milder air, it was Oslo, now. April is my choice, said the writer Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson. We stood shoulder to shoulder.
Dark fell later now, and the days were clear. I’d been up on the heights, past the Torshov valley at Sinsen, on the doorstep of the Rendezvous restaurant, also known to us as ‘Renna’, at the top of the hill, where I was supposed to meet a woman I had struck up a conversation with on the way out of Eldorado cinema after watching the fifth movie about the boxer Rocky Balboa. The conversation was not about Rocky, not about boxing either, but I always went to see boxing movies the few times they showed one. I had seen Raging Bull with De Niro and Somebody Up There Likes Me with Paul Newman. I never got started myself, but boxing was the only sport I had ever wanted to practise. It probably had something to do with my father, with how he looked in the ring when he was young, his dancing, wiry body and his dancing red locks of hair, his confident smile even in adversity, the soft tight-fitting shoes with the long laces, my father swaying on his toes in full control, all this long before I was born, on photographs in black and white, I only knew that his hair was red, it no longer was when I grew up. I had felt a sympathy for Rocky in the first movie, it had a surprising freshness, a warmth, against all expectations, despite the obvious ending, and then they got worse and worse, and the fifth was so bad I felt sad and embarrassed.
But that evening I couldn’t go through with it. I couldn’t bring myself to enter ‘Renna’ and instead I stood by the door I had just opened, and unlike all the times when the din had pulled me in, the compact noise from the inside, the laughter and the jolly singing from every nook and corner, the cigarette smoke and the dense warmth, the smell of beer and cheap food, turned into a wall I didn’t have the strength to penetrate alone, and I was always alone when I came, although I was often not when I left. The woman I was supposed to carry on a conversation with had not yet arrived. I suddenly got anxious that I wouldn’t recognise her, but if I closed my eyes, I could easily summon her up, and when I opened them again, she was nowhere in the room, and I didn’t wait. I turned on the threshold and went back out onto the pavement and started walking down the long hill to the centre of town, all the way to the harbour, which was where I went when I went alone, and for the most part I walked along the docks from City Hall, past Kontraskjæret and the cliff below Akershus fortress, where the monument to the one hundred and fifty-nine dead would be erected so many years too late, and when it was finally put up, I would stand there cold and tired amid the crowd, listening to the speeches and not shed a tear.
Just as often I came from the opposite direction, from Østbanestasjonen, which was no longer called Østbanestasjonen but was called Oslo Central station and had been for ten years, and walked along the ponderous, majestic harbour warehouse, that was no longer a warehouse but a fashionable office block, on my way out to the crooked pier at Vippetangen, where I stopped at the short end of the quay the ferries docked at when I was a boy, and the gangway didn’t go up, but stuck straight out and sometimes a little down with a railing of coarse rope and nothing more. Then it wasn’t more than three or four steps forward, and you were over the narrow sickening rainbow-coloured strip of water and safely aboard the boat, where a man in full uniform bid you welcome with a bow and a smile, even if you were well under twelve years old and had a free ticket, and still smiling examined your passport if you were an adult. I knew everything about those boats, I had run up every staircase and down again, run up and down every corridor with my brothers, my big brother, my little brother, my littlest brother, when we were all alive. I knew every square metre of deck and knew exactly which crannies and corners behind the lifeboats you could hide in if you had to. And it was not without its dangers, I had read Captains Courageous and knew how badly things could turn out and was certain that no fishing boat would come and pick me up if I fell overboard, as the men on the fishing boat in Kipling’s story had picked up Harvey, the spoiled upper-class boy. I wasn’t rich enough, I thought, which took away the whole point, at least for the script, and so I would drown.
On this particular evening I walked down along Trondhjemsveien, across Carl Berners plass and finally over Karl Johans gate and on between the ramparts at Akershus fortress at the end of Kongens gate where the girls stood waiting their turn up in the shadows beneath the wall and the cars rolled hesitantly past. It felt awkward to be walking down the street without being a customer, and being one was unthinkable to me, and it didn’t exactly make me anxious, but I felt very shy, for it was as if the girls beneath the stone wall were members of a secret society which pushed me away, a secret sisterhood, a masonic order of prostitutes, if you like, and I could feel a sudden sorrow over not feeling what they felt, and not being able to be where they were and see the world from their place, and this because I was on the outside, while they were on the inside of real life where important things were at stake, and what timidity I felt walking past them in the middle of the street with a good distance to either side, made me feel ill at ease.
And at the same time each one of them could have been a girl I had grown up with and knew well, or someone else had grown up with and knew well and went sledding with in the wintertime and played split the kipper with in summer.
I came out onto the quay much later than I usually did when I ended up there. It was almost midnight, it was dark, the tall grain silo rose unseen into the low night, as did the turrets of Akershus fortress. It was a little cold now, despite it being spring. It was completely still. The naval college lay massively still on Ekebergåsen hill. You could disappear in time and hardly notice and struggle to get back.
I didn’t see her at once, but instead I stood there gazing at all the ships that had set sail from this port more than thirty years before and vanished for ever, the hollow space they left behind, the empty darkness, I sniffled over my lost childhood.
She was standing in the lee of a stack of Euro-pallets that came up to shoulder height, and her head barely showed above the top and might easily have been an object placed on the uppermost pallet by someone working at the docks, but I quickly realised it was not, and then I thought she might be one of the girls who had come down here from Kongens gate, along the containers and out onto the quay, and even had a customer at this very moment, behind the pallets, that I couldn’t see. But it was not like that, for suddenly she strode alone across the pier, out of the shadows where she had been standing for a good while, and came out in a green coat into the yellow glare of the lamp on the wall of the terminal building. It lit up her back, and her shoulders, but not her face. She stood only ten or twelve metres away from me right at the end of the pier, and she didn’t see me, but looked down into the oil-slick water, leaning forward at an ominous angle, and I didn’t think and didn’t wait, but walked quickly straight up to her and grabbed her arm and pulled her away from the edge. She gave a violent start and turned half towards me and struck me hard in my face with the flat of her hand, and then I started too, it was not what I had expected, and it hurt, she was strong, or very desperate. Let go of me, dammit, she said, and I let go. What the hell were you thinking, she said, that I was about to jump in. Yes, I said. That’s how it looked to me. Did it. Yes, I said. Definitely. She let her hand drop. I don’t want to talk about it, she said. That’s fine with me, I said. It’s none of my business. But it would be nice if you didn’t jump in, at least not when I’m around. I smiled, but she didn’t smile back, not that I could see, it was too dark. I touched my cheek where she had hit me, and rubbed it carefully, and it still stung. The water’s not especially clean either, I said, that ought to count for something, but she didn’t respond to my bit of witticism and said instead, does it hurt, and I said, yes, which was true. I’m sorry, she said. I guess maybe I could have said something before I attacked you, I said, and she replied, yes, you could have. Anyway, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to hit you so hard. Oh yes, you did, I said. There was a moment of silence, then she gave a short laugh and said, maybe I did. So then, what is it that you don’t want to talk about, I said, what is it that makes you stand out here with me in the middle of the night instead of being with someone else or at home in your bed, sleeping. She shook her head faintly. She didn’t want to talk about it. She’d already said so. Fine. Did your boyfriend break up with you, I said, and so you’ve come down here all miserable to throw yourself in the water, and that would have served him right, and I thought, that was a flippant thing to say, you idiot, now she’ll be upset, but she just ignored it, she said, it wouldn’t have bothered him one bit. Believe me. I had no reason not to believe her, so I said, in that case he’s a fool, and she said, fool is a very weak word for that man. Anyway, I don’t want to talk about it, are you not listening, and he has nothing to do with this, with me standing here now. Okay then, I said, that’s fine, I won’t ask any more, and then I kept silent, and then I said, but it’s not easy to hold back. You’ll have to, she said. Or else I’m leaving. I hadn’t assumed she would do any different, why would she stay. Don’t leave, I said. Can’t we just stay here a little longer. Sure we can, she said.
We stood at the edge of the quay practically shoulder to shoulder and looked down into the water and over towards Hovedøya island and the lights from the small marina out there, and to the left we saw the lights from the Postgiro building, high up, from one of the offices. It felt fine. We didn’t say anything for a while. Then I said, did you really not intend to jump, and she said, would I throw myself into the water because of that idiot, and I thought, maybe not because of someone, but something. Not for anyone else either, she said, in case you’re interested, and suddenly I was, I was interested, so now you don’t have a boyfriend, then, I said, and she laughed a little. It doesn’t look that way, she said. No, I said. I guess it doesn’t. But then why are you standing here, I said, if not for love lost. Is that why you’re here, she said. Yes, I said, what else. Then why don’t you go ahead and jump in, she said, and I was certain she was smiling, though I couldn’t actually see it, the light still fell on her back and shoulders, which made her face indistinct, shadowy, almost enigmatic, although we were standing so close to each other. Of all the ways to die, drowning must be the worst, I said, and she probably agreed, but I couldn’t see her face or what she was feeling, it was too dark; I can’t see your face, I said, it’s too dark, I don’t know what you look like. But she didn’t move, didn’t turn towards the light. I’m quite good-looking, she said. Are you, I said. Yes, she said, I have to be honest. I had no reason to doubt it, but I didn’t know if it was important, I didn’t really think so, you could kiss me, she said. That was a bit sudden, it wasn’t what I had expected her to say. Yes, I said, I guess I could, or, why yes, of course I can, absolutely. She still had the light from the lamp on her back, and her face was unclear despite the short distance, but it was a very fine kiss, very soft, it touched me, a lot, and I thought of all the kisses that hadn’t been like that, so full of good will, so open without reservations, I’ve changed, I thought, it was easy to kiss her, I wasn’t used to it, and I didn’t give it all I had, that would have implied something more later on, and I didn’t know if I wanted that, not this night. But the truth was I never gave all I had, not ever. I didn’t understand why, but it was as if the trapdoor could open at any moment if I did, and in any case it was too late, for she felt it at once, that I held back, and we slid apart, out of each other’s arms, she let go of my elbow and said, all right, I guess it stops there, and I said, yes, I guess it does. That’s okay, she said, and then she fell silent, maybe she was waiting for something, her arms hanging limply on either side, and at last she said, you go first, then, and I’ll wait here. I thought for a moment. I don’t know, I said, you came first, so maybe you leave first. All right, she said, that’s fine, then I’ll go first, and she turned around at once and started walking, and the shadow followed her and spread around her shoulders like a shawl, erasing the green of her coat, and still I didn’t have a clear picture of her face, if it was pretty or not, it probably was, but I would never recognise her in the street, and it felt bad knowing that. Thanks for the talk, I said rather loudly, and thanks for the kiss, it was a very fine kiss, I will remember it. She could hear me perfectly, but she didn’t turn around and didn’t say anything, just walked quickly on along the terminal building towards the containers, while I stood at the edge of the quay with my back to the dark water and the naval college on Ekebergåsen hill, and I thought, it was a lot worse seeing her walk away than I had imagined.
As she was swallowed up by the darkness, I called out, you were going to jump, weren’t you.
I didn’t know why I said that. I was far from sure. Maybe she was just like me. Why was I there.