WE HAVE FRENCH for the first lesson. Henrik has to read aloud from the text we’ve had to prepare. He sits at the very back. He can’t do French, neither reading nor writing it, but he is a good imitator. That’s what he can do, and with a little help he has bluffed his way through two years, and is close to the abyss. If we have a French oral, he is done for. But Starheim is hard of hearing, he leans forward with a cautious smile, his eyes glued to Henrik’s face. It sounds like French, he is almost certain. Everyone can see he really doesn’t catch what Henrik is reading, but it does sound French, and Henrik throws his whole body into it, so it looks French as well. Henrik really doesn’t say anything, it’s just babble, but Starheim is vain, he won’t be caught saying what? or eh? so he just goes for it:
‘Très bien, merci, Henri. Audun, you can take it from there.’
I have no idea where Starheim thinks Henrik stopped reading, so I choose a place at random and keep going. Henrik’s face is like a mask, and Starheim does not bat an eyelid. I used to think this was funny. I have done my homework, I understand what I am reading, but my pronunciation is not great, and it’s enough for Starheim to smile with relief and say:
‘Pas mal, Audun. A little more practice on your pronunciation, and you’ll be fine.’ Henrik looks triumphant, this is killing him, his face tense and almost desperate and his eyes filled with tears. Tiny sounds come from his mouth. He can’t hold it back much longer. A few students have to look out the window.
‘Not bloody likely,’ I say under my breath, so only those next to me can hear.
On our way out Arvid says:
‘Henrik’s skating on thin ice. I don’t think the examiners are quite as deaf. But it’s funny.’
‘I don’t understand why he bothers.’
‘What’s the matter with you? You knew your stuff, didn’t you.’
‘Nothing’s the matter with me. I’m just a little tired.’ I close my eyes and see Fru Karlsen and her face when the newspaper hit her. Arvid pats my shoulder. I feel like telling him about Fru Karlsen, but all that’s another world.
‘Have you heard about the Stakhanov Prize?’ he says. ‘It was a prize Stalin gave to the most industrious workers during the first five-year plan. It was named after a man who worked his ass off. You’re in the semi-finals.’
We walk across the schoolyard between students from our class, and we stand in the sun with our backs to the gymnasium. I look around me, and then I turn the corner where there is nothing but trees and sit down on the grassy slope leading up to the teachers’ houses and fish out half a cigarette from my pocket and light it up. I sit smoking in the strip of sunlight with my eyes closed. Arvid follows me.
‘Give us a drag,’ he says. I pass him the cigarette. He inhales, and then he slowly blows out smoke and looks at me.
‘Seen any more of your dad?’
I shake my head.
‘Weird business,’ he says, and that’s all he can say, because it’s something he doesn’t understand. It’s not his fault, I know that, but still it’s irritating.
‘It’ll be fine,’ I say.
‘I hope so.’ He gives me back my cigarette, and I take the final drag just before I burn my fingertips, and I am about to throw it away, when a head pokes round the corner.
‘Gotcha!’ I drop the butt and stamp on it. It’s Twisty, one of our teachers. He is called Twisty because of the way he walks, but it is meant kindly, he is well liked by all the students. He walks all the way round and says:
‘Shit, do you have to smoke when I’m on duty? You’ll get me into trouble. Look here,’ he says, putting a hand up his jacket, ‘the new polec booklets have come.’
He is a SUF-er, a Young Socialist member, they have their own lingo and ‘polec’ means political economy. Arvid has joined a study group. He is eager, he grabs the booklet, and Twisty reaches for another.
‘Are you joining as well?’ he says to me. ‘We start on Tuesday.’
I shake my head.
‘He’s not ripe yet,’ Arvid says, ‘but he will be, don’t push him.’
‘That would be great,’ Twisty says. ‘Do you know, Arvid, the membership of the NLF group has doubled since the stunt with the flag? That was a class act.’ Arvid blushes, and I agree. It was a class act.
‘I have to be off. The bell will go in a couple of minutes. No more smoking, please.’ He twists back around the corner, and we get up and brush the pine needles off our trousers.
‘This is not for real,’ I say.
‘What isn’t?’
‘All this. Henrik with his French, Twisty and his booklets, the whole school.’
‘Sure it is,’ Arvid says.
We have Rønning, the deputy headmaster, for English. He is the only teacher I like. He is sort of a show-off in his West-Norwegian way, parading the classroom pulling at his red braces, his jacket dangling from his shoulders, his grey hair whirling round his head, and he speaks English with a heavy Stord Island accent. He loves for us to laugh at his jokes, but we don’t understand them. He is passionate about his subject, though, and feeds us extra reading; in his office the spirit duplicator works overtime. It will soon be on its knees with metal fatigue. When he comes down the corridors, a cloying smell of spirit drifts behind him.
Our textbook is the Anglo-American Reader. The English in it is tiresome, with a faint taste of bog water at the edges, but the American has a sky above it that I feel comfortable with. We are reading about the Melting Pot. The Golden America, the land of freedom and equality, the haven for the homeless and persecuted, the melon they all want a slice of, the fields they all want to plough. Poor folk from Hardanger in Norway, the Abruzzi in Italy, and the Ukraine fleeing from landowners, Cossacks and the taxman, the bastards who bleed the smallholder dry until there is nothing left to eat except granite, and if you are not an Indian or a Negro, you may have a chance to see a future ahead of you and a patch of land on the prairie. I am not an idiot, I know about the napalm in Vietnam, I know about Wounded Knee and the Ku Klux Klan; for as long as I have lived I have seen the race riots on TV. They shot Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, I have read Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice and felt the flames of his hatred. But there is something about those people. They are for real. They step out of the shadows and set out on journeys never to return. A girl in the book writes about her grandmother coming to America on board the SS Imperator sailing past the Statue of Liberty to Ellis Island. There is winter in the air, and she walks down the gang plank in her colourful clothes and her black hair to the gates where the wheat is separated from the chaff, snowflakes drifting, and she is cold and the girl writes: the snow like stars in the night of her hair. She is happy with that sentence, and so am I. I turn to Arvid and say:
‘Isn’t it good?’ He reads the piece twice and looks up at me.
‘Purple prose,’ he says.
‘What the hell do you mean by that?’
‘Too much. Sentimental. US propaganda.’
‘But, for Christ’s sake, don’t you get it? Those people just took off, burned all their bridges and this girl is trying to show how afraid they were, and at the same time how grand their deed was.’
‘Maybe, but it’s still purple prose.’
I snatch the book back.
‘Sometimes, Arvid, Christ,’ I say, and read on to myself. Maybe he is right, maybe it is purple prose, but I like it.
‘Is what you’re doing of any importance to the rest of us?’ Rønning says. He’s standing by the dais with his thumbs tugging at his braces, gazing down the row of desks.
‘There was just something in the text. I thought it was good. I didn’t mean to interrupt.’
‘I see. Perhaps you might like to read it aloud for us?’ It’s like he’s rolling his ‘r’s even more than usual today. I look at him pleadingly, but he grins and splays his hands. Hell. I read. I read the whole page and finish with that sentence, the grandmother almost chokes me, my voice cracks, and everyone turns to look at me. I’m supposed to be the tough guy in the class, the strongest, the best athlete and generally as dour as shit. It just turns out that way, I don’t know why. I stare back, they think I am strange, it’s fine by me, they’re like mist, I hardly see them. Arvid’s and Venke’s faces are the only ones I can really make out. There is a shine in Venke’s eyes.
‘That’s not bad at all,’ Rønning says.
‘Forget it,’ I say.
After the lesson Rønning stops me at the door. He waits until everyone has left and says, ‘I am sorry. I shouldn’t have pushed you into reading aloud. I wasn’t aware it meant so much to you.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Well that’s good then. Is everything OK with you? You have been a little, what shall I say, reserved these days.’ He smiles. I shrug.
‘I think maybe I’m going to stop coming here.’
‘Now? Well into your final year? Well, school isn’t everything. Don’t think I believe that. There are many other things you can do. Perhaps you need a break. Sleep on it for a week, then come to me, and we can talk about it.’
‘OK, that’s fine,’ I say.
‘By the way, I have a book at home about Ellis Island. It might be of interest to you.’