Dancing in the Dark: My Struggle Book 4 (29 page)

She had forgotten to bring a knife and the cheese slicer.

I got up to fetch them.

‘What’s the matter?’ she said. ‘Have I forgotten something?’

‘Knife and cheese slicer,’ I said.

‘You stay put. I’ll get them!’

She went to the drawer and placed them next to me.

‘There we are,’ she said again. ‘
Now
you’ve got everything you need.’

She smiled. I smiled back.

The crust on the rolls was so crispy that I had crumbs all around my mouth. I ate quickly, not only because this was a habit, but also because they weren’t eating, they were sitting quietly while I munched away, so that every slightest movement I made, even if it was only to brush the crumbs off the table, was somehow emphasised.

‘Mum’s looking forward to the holidays too,’ I said as I spread margarine over the second roll.

‘Yes, I can imagine,’ grandma said.

‘She hasn’t been to Sørbøvåg since the summer, and her parents are getting on now. Especially her mum. She’s quite ill, as you know.’

‘Yes,’ said grandma, nodding. ‘Yes, she is.’

‘She can’t even walk any more,’ I said.

‘Can’t she?’ grandma said. ‘Is it that bad?’

‘She’s got a rollator though,’ I said, swallowed and wiped a few crumbs off my lips. ‘So she can get about at home. But she doesn’t go out any more.’

I had never thought about that. She didn’t go out any more, she was always indoors in those small rooms.

‘She’s got Parkinson’s, hasn’t she?’ grandad said.

I nodded.

‘But mum’s enjoying her job,’ I said. ‘There’s not
so
much new stuff any more.’

Grandma suddenly got up, lifted the curtain and looked out.

‘Thought I heard someone,’ she said.

‘You were just imagining it,’ grandad said. ‘We’re not expecting anyone.’

She sat down again. Ran her hand through her hair, looked at me.

‘Oh yes,’ she said and got to her feet again. ‘We mustn’t forget the Christmas presents!’

She was gone for a moment, and I looked at grandad, who had his eyes on the folded football paper on the table beside him.

‘Here you are,’ grandma said from the hall and came in with two envelopes in her hand. ‘Well, it’s not much, but it’ll help a bit. One for you and one for Yngve. Do you think you can carry them both all the way up to Sørbøvåg?’

She was smiling.

‘Yes, of course,’ I said. ‘Thank you very much!’

‘Our pleasure,’ grandma said.

I got up.

‘Have a good Christmas,’ I said.

‘And a good Christmas to you too,’ grandad said.

Grandma walked downstairs with me, gazed into the air while I put on my black jacket and wound the black scarf around my neck.

‘Is it OK if I spend some of my present on the bus fare home?’ I said, looking at her.

‘No, it isn’t,’ she said. ‘The whole idea is for you to buy something nice. Haven’t you got any money?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘I’ll have a look to see if I’ve got some coins somewhere,’ she said, taking her purse from the pocket of the coat hanging in the wardrobe, and passed me two ten-krone coins.

‘Happy Christmas,’ I said.

‘Happy Christmas,’ she said, smiled at me and closed the door.

As soon as I was out of sight of the house I opened the envelope bearing my name. There was a hundred-krone note inside. Perfect. I could nip along and buy two records before going home.

In the shop it struck me that actually I could buy four. Yngve had been given a hundred as well, hadn’t he? Yes, he had.

I could give him the hundred from my own money. It wasn’t as if the note was marked.

We arrived at Sørbøvåg in the evening. Rain, a couple of degrees above freezing, the darkness as solid as a brick wall as we carried our luggage up the road to the illuminated house. The countryside around us was saturated, everywhere water dripped and trickled.

Mum stopped, put down her suitcase and opened the brown wooden door with the grooves and the window at the top. The smell, a touch musty from grandad’s cowshed gear hanging in the hall, wafted towards me, and together with the sight of the door and the white wall at the end of the hall unlocked my whole childhood in an instant.

In those days they would have met us on the drive or at least come out the second the door was opened, but now nothing happened: we deposited our cases on the floor and removed our jackets to the sound of our own breathing and the rustle of our clothes.

‘Right,’ mum said. ‘Shall we go in then?’

Grandad, who was sitting on the sofa, stood up with a smile to greet us.

‘The Norwegian population is going through a growth spurt, I can see!’ he said, looking up at Yngve and me.

We smiled.

Grandma was sitting on a chair in the corner looking at us. Her whole body trembled and shook. She was completely in the grip of the illness now. Jaws, arms, feet, legs, everything twitched.

Mum sat down on a stool beside her and held her hands in hers. Grandma tried to say something, but all that came out was a hoarse whisper.

‘We’ll just carry up our bags,’ Yngve said. ‘We’ll be sleeping upstairs, I suppose?’

‘You can do whatever you like,’ grandad said.

We went up the creaky staircase. Yngve took Kjartan’s old room, I took the former children’s room. Switched on the main light, put my rucksack down by the old cot, drew the curtain and tried to peer through the darkness outside. It was impenetrable, but I sensed the landscape there nevertheless, the wind gusting through seemed to open it up. The windowsill was covered with dead flies. In the corner under the ceiling hung a spider’s web. The room was cold. It smelled old, it smelled of the past.

I switched off the light and went downstairs.

Mum was standing in the middle of the floor. Grandma was watching TV.

‘Shall we make some supper then?’ mum said.

‘OK,’ I said.

It was grandad who did the cooking in this house. He had learned to cook when his mother died, he had been twelve years old and the responsibility had fallen on him. Not many men of his generation had experience of this kind and he was proud that he could cope. But he wasn’t very fussy about washing pots and pans and ladles and so on. The grease that had collected in a thick yellowish-white layer at the bottom of the frying pan appeared to have melted and solidified countless times, the saucepans in the cupboard bore scum marks around the top from boiling fish and there were bits of overcooked potato stuck to the bottom. Otherwise the kitchen wasn’t dirty, a cleaner came twice a week, but it was run-down.

Mum and I scrambled some eggs, made some tea and took in a selection of sliced meats and cheese while Yngve set the table. When supper was ready I went to fetch Kjartan, who had built himself a house beside the old one a few years ago. Light droplets of rain settled on my face as I walked the three metres to his door and rang the bell. I opened the door, went into the hall and shouted up the staircase that supper was ready.

‘OK, OK, I’m coming!’ he called down.

When I went back mum was standing next to grandma in the middle of the floor, holding her arm and guiding her slowly towards the table, where grandad and Yngve were already seated, grandad was telling him all about the various types of salmon breeding. If he had been younger that is what he would have done, he said. One of the neighbours had done it, down below in the fjord there was a small breeding station, he was earning so much money it was as if he had won the lottery.

I sat down and poured myself a cup of tea. Kjartan came into the hallway, closed the door after him, went straight to a chair and sat down.

‘Are you studying political science?’ he asked Yngve.

‘Hi, Kjartan,’ Yngve said. As Kjartan didn’t respond to the discreet reproof, Yngve simply nodded. ‘Or comparative politics, as it’s called in Bergen. But it’s the same thing,’ Yngve said.

Kjartan returned the nod.

‘And you’re at
gymnas
?’ he said to me.

‘Yes,’ I said.

I stood up and pulled back a chair for grandma. She slowly lowered herself onto it, mum pushed the chair into the table, sat down on her other side while Kjartan started talking. He didn’t look at us. His hands transported bread and meat, buttered bread and raised it to his mouth, poured tea and milk into a cup and raised it to his mouth, all somehow independently of himself and what he was saying, this long unstoppable stream of words that issued from his lips. Occasionally he corrected himself, he laughed a little, he even peeked up at us, but otherwise it was though he had disappeared in order to let the speaker in him speak.

He talked about Heidegger, held a ten-minute monologue about the great German philosopher and his struggle with him, then stopped in midstream and fell quiet. Mum picked up on something he had said, asked whether that was what he meant, had she understood him correctly? He looked at her, smiled briefly and then continued his monologue. Grandad, who had previously dominated the conversations around this table, said nothing as he ate, stared down at the table in front of him, occasionally glanced around the table, a cheery expression on his face as though he had remembered something and was about to tell us what, but held back and lowered his eyes again.

‘Not everyone here has heard of Heidegger,’ Yngve said in an unexpected lull. ‘Surely there must be other topics we can discuss apart from some obscure German philosopher?’

‘Yes, I suppose there are,’ Kjartan said. ‘We can talk about the weather. But what shall we talk about then? The weather is what it always is. The weather is what existence reveals itself through. Just as we reveal ourselves through the mood we are in, through what we feel at any given moment. It’s not possible to imagine a world without weather or ourselves without feelings. But both elements automate
das Man
.
Das Man
talks about the weather as though there is nothing special about it, in other words he doesn’t see it, not even Johannes,’ Kjartan said, nodding towards grandad, ‘who spends an hour every day listening to the weather forecast, and always has done, who absorbs all the details, not even Johannes sees the weather, he just sees rain or sun, mist or sleet, but not as such, as something unique, something which reveals itself to us, through which everything else reveals itself in these moments of, well, grace perhaps. Yes, Heidegger is close to God and the divine, but he never fully embraces it, he never goes the whole way, but it’s there, in close attendance, perhaps even as a prerequisite for the thinking. What do you say, Sissel?’

‘Well, what you say sounds quasi-religious,’ she said.

Yngve, who had rolled his eyes when Kjartan had started talking about the weather, speared a piece of salmon with his fork and put it on his plate.

‘Is it going to be lamb ribs and pork belly this year as well?’ Yngve said.

Grandad looked at him.

‘Yes, it is. We’ve dried the lamb in the loft. Kjartan bought the pork yesterday.’

‘I’ve brought some aquavit with me,’ Yngve said. ‘You need that.’

Mum raised a glass of milk to grandma’s mouth. She drank. A white stream ran from the corner of her mouth.

The countryside was like a tub filled to the brim with darkness. The next morning the bottom slowly became visible as the light was poured in and seemingly diluted the darkness. It was impossible, I reflected, to witness this without feeling it involved movement. Wasn’t Lihesten, that immense vertical wall of rock, creeping closer with the daylight? Wasn’t the grey fjord rising from the depths of darkness in which it had been hidden all night? The tall birches on the other side of the meadowland, where the fence to the neighbouring property was, weren’t they advancing metre by metre?

The birches: five or six riders who had kept watch on the house all through the night and now had to pull hard on the reins to curb the restless horses beneath them.

During the morning the mist thickened again. Everything was grey, even the winter-green spruces growing on the ridge beyond the lake were grey, and everything was saturated with dampness. The fine drizzle in the air, the droplets collecting under the branches and falling to the ground with tiny, almost imperceptible, thuds, the moisture in the soil of the meadow that had once been a marsh, the squelch it gave when you trod on it, your shoes sinking in, the mud oozing over them.

At eleven I walked with Yngve to Kjartan’s car, he had borrowed it, we were going to Vågen to buy the last bits and pieces for the Christmas dinner. Sauerkraut, red cabbage, some more beer, nuts and fruit and fizzy drinks to quench the thirst that lamb ribs always produced. And some newspapers, if there were any, I needed them to kill the time until the evening, for childhood Christmases were so deeply rooted in me that I still looked forward to them.

With the wipers swishing to and fro across the windscreen we drove across the yard, through the gate and down to the road in front of the school, where we turned right and set out on the narrow two-kilometre carriageway to Vågen, which had seemed an interminable distance to me as a child. Almost every metre along the road constituted a special place, the most exciting by far, however, was the bit leading to the bridge over the river, where I used to hang over the railings for hours just looking.

By car, it took three, maybe four minutes. If I hadn’t had my previous attachment to the area I wouldn’t have noticed anything. The trees would have been any trees, the farms any farms, the bridge any bridge.

‘Kjartan’s incredible,’ Yngve said. ‘He doesn’t take any account of others at all. Or does he believe everyone’s as interested in what he says as he is?’

‘Dunno,’ I said. ‘Speaking for myself, I have no idea what he’s talking about. Do you?’

‘A bit,’ Yngve said. ‘But it’s not as impressive as it sounds. It’s just a question of reading.’

He turned in and parked, we walked towards the co-op shop. A woman in a long raincoat came out of the door clutching a small child. She was startled to see us.

‘Goodness, Yngve! Is that you!’ she said.

Who was she?

They hugged.

‘This is my brother, Karl Ove,’ Yngve said.