The funeral reception back in 1998 is over, and Viggo is standing watching his relatives leave the chapel basement like a little black stream. Not, he thinks, to run out into the black sea of sorrow, but to put their everyday clothes back on and continue doing whatever it was they were doing before they got dressed in black, dreading the grief of the chapel, to reminisce and cry. The fishmonger’s daughter says goodbye to him on her way out, with a little hesitation, she doesn’t know whether she should stop or not, so she stops when she’s almost past him, almost, he thinks, like syncopation, like a note that’s held longer, an arc between stopping and walking. And in the middle of the syncopation’s two legs: a little fishmonger’s daughter with flat, flyaway hair and a reticent expression. He forgot to ask her name! What’s your name? he childishly calls after her. Elida, she replies, and waves. Elida.
* * *
He stands there until everyone has left and then looks at the room around him: the green curtains that are blowing ever so slightly because someone has forgotten to close a window, the sad, square wooden ceiling lights and the linoleum floor, gray and worn. And the tables: cold. And the chairs: naked, tired, brown, and hard, with thin legs that look like steel bones. And he thinks: Is this really where I loved being as a child? Running around between the tables, hiding from Grandma behind the pillars? Sitting on her lap and eating waffles, buying raffle tickets when there was a bazaar? Drawing the raffle tickets and maybe winning a set of bathroom scales or a pair of knitting needles? Yes. And look at the room now! So Grandmaless, so lacking a bazaar, and so of itself. This is how it looked before as well, when I wasn’t here. And the room has stood like this, unchanged, for all these years and allowed people to come in and out, it’s just stood here and stood here, and one day I walked out and didn’t know that I wouldn’t come back before today, and one day Gran walked out and didn’t know that she would never come back, and none of us knew that it was here we would meet again, at this meeting that isn’t a meeting. This is what the room looks like when there’s no one in it. And that’s what it looked like back then, only I couldn’t see it. I only saw Grandma, the other grandmothers, raffle tickets and prizes. Viggo suddenly sees the orange bucket standing in the corner of the room, full of flowers, the orange bucket that she used to keep her gardening tools in, they’ve taken it here with them and gathered up all the bouquets. He stares and stares at the bucket. Orange, full of flowers. It won’t explode, he says quietly to himself. He feels a lump in his throat. He wants to cry.
* * *
Being here, where he hasn’t been since he was a child and came to the bazaar with his grandma, brings everything back again, and he sees himself and Ståle playing by the river near the churchyard, three minutes’ walk from school, Ståle, whom he was put beside in primary school to calm him down, as he was a quiet and clever boy. The positive consequences of this pairing were obvious: the noisiest pupil in the class learned a poem by heart and recited it with panache at the Christmas show at the end of the first year that Viggo and Ståle sat beside each other. A touching memory for Viggo, he has to admit, when he remembers how he and Ståle sat in the small storeroom at school where they kept all the puppets and costumes and flags and banners and musical instruments, which seemed to hang in such a way that he now recalls them as nearly falling off the walls on top of them, even though it obviously wasn’t like that, but it must have just seemed like it because he remembers it from below, from a height of about 4.43 feet, if he’s going to be precise. And how he read line after line of the poem and Ståle repeated and repeated it, and he directed him: “More feeling there, take a pause there,” and how he encouraged him and said things like “You’re so good!” when Ståle remembered a verse and recited it with conviction and all the right pauses, and how Ståle seemed to rise up onto his toes when he said something with a lot of feeling. And how finally Ståle lit up when he managed the whole thing by heart, and how he recited it at the Christmas show, so confident, with conviction and all the right pauses, and rising up on his toes, and how he himself, Viggo, sitting in the audience, felt when the applause erupted that he had done something good in this life. Viggo’s eyes filled with tears. But back to the list of consequences of putting a noisy pupil alongside a quiet pupil: the first consequence was (a) that the noisy pupil learned poems by heart, and this was the consequence that the teachers saw. But they didn’t see consequence (b) that the noisy pupil paid the quiet pupil to do his math homework, or consequence (c) that despite this mercantile relationship, a genuine friendship developed between the quiet and the noisy pupil, which meant that the noisy pupil always defended the quiet pupil, both verbally and physically, when other pupils (ranging from the merely noisy to the uncontrollable to the complete idiots) threw fir cones or stones at the quiet pupil when he sat in the bicycle shed reading books while the others played football. Or consequence (d) a slight doubt in the quiet pupil that the friendship was really real, and not just bought and paid for, or consequence (e) that this slight doubt would vanish when he many years later met Ståle again by accident, at Universitetsplassen, and Ståle was in charge of the business school’s annual show and got drugs for his fellow students and looked after Viggo. Nor did the teachers see consequence (f) that Viggo drank and partied and drifted and drank for three weeks, until in the end there came the sad consequence (g) that the quiet pupil had completely left himself behind.
* * *
Viggo thinks, as he sits by the orange bucket and the tears have stopped rolling down his cheeks, that he just has to cut through everything and take action, he has to do something with the situation now, that is to say, his life: he needs to be himself again. He must, suddenly it’s very clear to him, become himself again! He feels the urge to stand up, hold out his arms, and stand there with his arms up, and let the perspective rotate around him, up and up through the air, until one sees him only as a tiny person standing on the surface of the earth with his arms outstretched, embracing everything: the world and his own fate as a reader, as a dreamer, as a thinker, and not as a party animal, and, because the perspective is rotating up and up from a tiny man with outstretched arms in a chapel basement, we’re filled with a strange sensation of centrifugal force: total encapsulation and expansion, and extreme concentration, around a single point. Which is Viggo. And inside Viggo: Viggo’s heart. But the rotating perspective reaches no farther than the chapel roof, where it has to give up with a dull thud. And Viggo drops his arms again, feels just as tremulous as before.