Beyond the house and the flagstone path was a large green lawn, and that was where he was sitting with his red fire engine. When he squatted like this, as he did on this particular day, all he could see was the lawn, and the whole world was nothing but green grass and a red fire engine. It was difficult to make it move because the grass was wet and quite long, he pushed and pushed, and then Gry came down the road and shouted:
‘Hey, Arvid, guess what!’
He turned and the world became roads and houses, telephone wires and sky, a sky so big his head filled with air. He blinked.
No, he couldn’t guess what.
‘The king is dead. He slipped in the bathtub and died.’
Arvid put her words into his mouth. The king slipped in the bathtub and died. It didn’t taste of anything. It didn’t say a thing to him. He didn’t know the king, although he did know there was a man called the king, but he had never seen the king and no one had a bathtub in their house. Just showers, there wasn’t room for anything else, so he shrugged, turned to the fire engine, and Gry was disappointed and said:
‘Hell, you’re so little you don’t understand one bit! Anyway, you’ve got to go in now. We’re leaving soon.’
And when he looked up he saw his mother in the window. That was it, they had to go, he had forgotten. That was why he had his new trousers on. He stood up and then he saw it, close by. It was a bullfinch, that was for sure. Arvid had seen bullfinches many times, in the bullfinch tree and in the bird book he kept in his room. There was a picture of it and the letters underneath spelt ‘bullfinch’ when they were read out.
He knelt down, his trousers were wet at once and stained with soil and grass, but he didn’t notice and he held the bullfinch in his hand. It was so small, it was soft and warm. He could feel its heart beating against his fingers and he thought: Birds have a heart that beats!
He placed it on its thin legs. He let go and it toppled over and lay just as it had when he found it. The beak opened and closed, but it didn’t say anything. Birds couldn’t talk, but it moved its beak as if it wanted to.
He tried once more, but it fell again. His mind went blank. He couldn’t leave, couldn’t pretend he hadn’t seen, but staying there didn’t help either, for the bullfinch couldn’t stand. He picked it up and threw it high in the air to see if it would fly, but it plummeted to the ground. He stood watching, it was red against the green grass, and then he started to cry. He couldn’t leave, he would have to stay there, maybe for a long time.
Dad opened the window above and looked out.
‘Arvid! What’s up with you? Aren’t you coming in?’
Arvid couldn’t answer, he just pointed. Dad closed the window and after a little while he came out. Arvid stood where he stood. Dad bent down, picked up the bullfinch and said:
‘Move away now, turn round and close your eyes.’
Arvid took a few steps, half-turned, but did not close his eyes. From the corner of one eye he saw his dad raise his arm and hurl the bird against the wall.
When he came in he was scolded for the stains on his trousers. But it was too late to change, and anyway he had only one pair of decent trousers, so he would have to go as he was, like a mucky pup.
Then the taxi arrived. It came rolling down the slope from the telephone box, parked by the dustbin, and all the kids in the street came to watch and asked if they were going on holiday.
‘Kiss my arse,’ Arvid said, and Mum said:
‘Arvid, please! We’re going to a funeral!’ And then they got into the taxi and drove off. Through the rear window he could see them standing on the tarmac.
At the funeral there were many grown-ups in black clothes, and first they had to enter an old yellow timber house called EBENEZER, Gry read the word aloud for Arvid. Inside EBENEZER Uncle Rolf was sitting in a chair looking sad. When the people in black came in they went over to him and said something in low voices and Uncle Rolf smiled a little and said thank you.
Uncle Rolf had once had a monkey, a big toy monkey with great shiny eyes hanging from a standard lamp. It used to hang from that lamp and look down at Arvid with a canny look on its face, and Arvid liked it so much that once when he and his mother were there to visit he asked:
‘Can I have it?’ He meant borrow, but that wasn’t what he said.
‘Christ, if the boy’s envious he might as well have it as far as I’m concerned,’ Uncle Rolf said with a smile that made Arvid wince.
At home Arvid took the monkey up to his room to play with it, but it was different now, its eyes were dull and stupid so he tossed it in the bin under the sink. There Mum found it and she called to Arvid and asked what the hell the monkey was doing in the dustbin.
‘It died,’ Arvid said.
Now Granddad too was dead and Uncle Rolf had to live alone in the flat at Vålerenga, and he didn’t like that because he was forty years old and had never been alone. Before, the whole family had lived in that flat with Granddad and Uncle Rolf, but it made Mum so worn down the doctor said she had to move as soon as possible and prescribed a new flat in a terraced house in Veitvet. At least that was what the woman next door said, and she ought to know because she often dropped by and spoke to Mum and drank coffee in the morning, and Arvid was sitting under the kitchen table playing, and he could hear them talking.
Arvid moved among the black stockings and the trousers, eating chocolate cake and listening. Above him voices buzzed and some were talking about the king, who had been such a steadfast Norwegian during the war although he was a Dane, and some talked about Granddad, who had been so very kind. Arvid didn’t agree, even though it was true to say that Granddad gave him a chocolate bar each time he came to visit. But the chocolate tasted stale and it was because Granddad always bought enough chocolate for six months at a time and kept it all in the top drawer of the old dresser he had in the hall. That was the sensible thing to do, Dad said, but Arvid didn’t think sensible was the same as kind. Once, Mum had said that Granddad treated her like a maid when they lived in Vålerenga, and when Dad defended him Mum lost her temper and said, and this I have to hear from a socialist!
A man came into EBENEZER, with his eyes downcast, not looking at anyone, but still he found Uncle Rolf and whispered something in his ear. Uncle Rolf got to his feet and made a gesture and then everyone stood up and they were on their way to the cemetery.
At the cemetery there was a chapel and they all went inside and sat down and they saw the priest on his knees mumbling in front of the altar. Then suddenly he got up, made the sign of the cross and turned to the assembly, his cassock swirling round his legs like a ball gown, and everyone could see his green-checked socks. Arvid laughed, but a glare from Uncle Rolf made him shut up. The priest’s voice soared around the room and rose to the ceiling, and Arvid leaned back in the pew and looked up, but he couldn’t make out what the priest was saying, and he fell asleep and didn’t wake up until everyone was on their feet and ready to follow the coffin to the grave.
Outside it was pouring down, and Aunt Kari had to take one handle of the coffin even though she was a woman, for Uncle Rolf had been so upset after the service that he wasn’t up to being a pall-bearer, and then the rain took a turn for the worse. Almost everyone in the small procession produced an umbrella, and those who didn’t have one held newspapers over their heads, but the ones who carried the coffin couldn’t cover themselves and the water was running from their hair, down their faces and dripping from their ears and noses. Arvid walked beside his dad and held on to his coat, the water splashing round his shoes, and you couldn’t see the stains on them for everything was equally wet. Looking up, he saw his dad’s face was soaking, and it now seemed so sad that Arvid felt he was going to cry, but he didn’t want to because he didn’t like Granddad and his plan was to hold back, but then he cried a little after all.
He closed his eyes as he walked and imagined his dad lying in the coffin, and Mum and Gry and he carrying it and after thinking about it for a while he felt his chest tightening. He could hear himself sobbing and making little howls, and one of the ladies in the procession came over and stroked his hair and said:
‘Poor little boy, and you loved your grandfather so much. You shouldn’t have been here at all.’
‘No,’ Arvid said, and meant the part about loving his Granddad, but the woman didn’t get it and she scowled at Mum, and Mum blushed, rolled her eyes and sent Arvid a look as if he were Judas from the Bible. Arvid tightened his grip on Dad’s coat.
They reached the hole in the ground where the coffin was to be lowered, and everywhere it was muddy and slippery, and water was trickling over the edges and into the grave and mud flowing from the nearby mounds of earth. The six pall-bearers walked cautiously over the last stretch and slowly set the coffin on two bars laid across the grave. As it was almost in place Dad slipped and fell onto one knee, the coffin tipped and banged down onto one bar, and Arvid gave a start and he heard Mum gasp behind him. Dad stood up again with a dazed smile and Arvid could see the huge muddy stain on his knee.
The priest came and started to speak, but Arvid could not hear what he was saying because of the rain and the wind blowing straight into his face, and the priest was gazing at Strømsveien and the cars droning past instead of looking at the coffin as he should have done, and his voice was lost. He dug out some slimy mud with his little spade and tried to toss it onto the coffin, but his eyes were elsewhere, so it missed and hit the edge of the grave and started a small landslide. Arvid shivered when he heard the mud splash at the bottom.
There were six ropes on the ground which the bearers were supposed to use to lower the coffin, and they each grabbed one and threaded it through a handle so they could hold both ends of their rope, but Dad didn’t do what the others did. He tied it to the handle, and that was a mistake, Arvid could easily see that, everyone could, but no one said a word, just stared into the rain, pretending they hadn’t noticed. When the coffin was on its way down, Dad’s rope was too short and the further it was lowered the more Dad had to bend until he was balancing on the very brink.
‘Dad! Let go!’ Arvid yelled, and Dad let go and his rope went down with the coffin while the others got back theirs and placed them in a tidy heap.
Arvid could hear some strange noises behind him, and when he turned he saw Mum holding her hand in front of her mouth, her shoulders shaking and tears in her eyes, but behind her hand she was laughing, giggling even, and Arvid felt a trembling in his chest: what if Dad had not let go! He would have been down in the grave with Granddad, but Granddad was dead, the king was dead, the bullfinch was dead, but it didn’t matter because Dad was alive and Arvid was alive and he started to jump up and down, he was smiling all over his face, and he ran over to his dad and buried his face in his wet coat. Dad stumbled a bit, but then he lifted Arvid up high and carried him back, and Arvid was almost certain that the sound from his dad’s chest was laughter.