Before I Burn: A Novel Page 11

  IX.

  TERESA MADE AN ENTRY IN HER DIARY. Five lines. It was Friday afternoon, a few hours after the fire in Skogen had been extinguished, but before all hell broke loose. In the morning she had been to the church to rehearse for a funeral – Anton Eikeli was due to be interred – and it was while she was sitting alone at the organ that the alarm had gone off. But she hadn’t heard it; she was in the middle of ‘Lead, Kindly Light’.

  The five lines are about Dag and Ingemann. From her window she saw them lying side by side in the yard on the Friday afternoon shooting at a target. She describes the scene in precise detail. The bodies recoiling with every shot, the ear-piercing crack of the bullet, the echo that rolls around between the mountain ridges. The way they got up afterwards and march across the field to study the two targets. It is a distance of 100 metres. Dag first, his rifle slung over his shoulder; then Ingemann, his hands thrust into his pockets. She thinks Ingemann suddenly seems old. This procedure is repeated a few times. Then Ingemann walks alone across the field to check the targets. He walks with his hands in his pockets as the swallows swoop and the grass sways in the wind. And she sees Dag lying with the rifle sights to his eye. He is motionless as Ingemann crosses the field. Dag takes aim while Teresa watches from the window and Ingemann ambles onwards. This lasts for perhaps fifteen seconds. Nothing happens. But she is sure. He aims at his father.

  Reading Teresa’s description I was reminded of the time Pappa shot an elk right through the heart. I would have been around ten years old. Some days previously he had been lying in the yard and breaking in his rifle. I stood a few metres behind him and felt the gunshots like a clenched fist in the solar plexus. I stared at his cheek resting against the rifle stock. I had never seen him rest his cheek against anything or anyone in the same way as he did against the smooth rifle butt. So sensitive and gentle and careful against the untidy wood grain. It was as if he were settling down to sleep before the first shot shattered everything. I looked at the smoking spent cartridges that were ejected, empty, red-hot, all of them accompanied by a strange, hollow song, like a kind of cheer. Five shots in all. Then he got up from the old beach mat he had been lying on, put the gun down with care, walked across the field to the target and studied it closely while I picked up the cartridges, which were still too hot to hold to your lips and blow on.

  A few days later he took his shooting test. I was with him at the range, the one that lay secluded about half way between the church and the shop in Breivoll. He lay down on his front and fired a series of ten shots at the silhouette of an elk that appeared from a pit. It transpired that all the shots were within the magic circle drawn around the heart and lungs.

  He had passed.

  The man who had never shot an animal. The man who had never been interested in hunting. Yet he turned out to be an accurate marksman. The question is: what prompted him to take a shooting test and go elk hunting? This was a conundrum for me. It still is, even now, more than twenty years later. I knew he wasn’t interested in hunting. He wasn’t like that. He was too gentle, too much of a dreamer. He might perhaps have dreamed of doing it, thought about it, talked about it. But not of actually going through with it. Yet he did. He did go through with it. Pappa became a hunter. And when, a few weeks later, he was in situ with a rifle resting on his lap, I was sitting right behind him. I remember staring at his back and thinking it wasn’t Pappa there, it was a stranger, someone I had never met; however, if he turned I would immediately see that it was him.

  X.

  TWO DAYS AFTER Pappa had bought the new tracksuit I returned to Oslo. It was May 1998, exams were approaching, but I couldn’t concentrate on my studies. I couldn’t concentrate on anything. After the first weeks it was as if all my willpower had crumbled inside me. I had a lie-in every morning, and didn’t get up until the sun peered in through the window. I got dressed, ate whatever food I had lying around and didn’t go to the reading room before twelve. I found a free seat, piled my books in front of me and sat staring at the steady flow of traffic down St Olavs gate. I couldn’t read. I could barely open a book. My brain was absolutely blank. It was frightening. I had never experienced anything like it. I was on the point of losing control, but I was still absolutely unperturbed. Why was I reacting in this way? There were many other people in similar situations. There were many people who had a dying father at home, weren’t there? There were many people in the same situation as I was who had to take exams and still managed to work in the reading room, and who lived apparently normal lives. Weren’t there?

  I forgot both my grandfather’s coat and my new glasses. I completely forgot to be intellectual. I forgot about everything and everyone. Now there was only me. I didn’t know what was going to happen; however, I was quite unconcerned. I sat in the canteen and ate meals with the others, as usual. Queued up like a good boy, took a plate with three potatoes, a pile of grated carrots and pollock fish cakes in sauce, and moved on to the till where I paid. I placed my tray with the food on the table where the others were already sitting, poured myself a glass of water and fetched salt, pepper and serviettes. I was as before. I ate as before, talked with the others as before. The only difference was that I was prone to sudden fits of laughter. If someone told a joke, or a funny story, I could laugh so much I almost fell off my chair. The others looked at me and smiled. Food went down the wrong way and I had to go to the toilet to recover. But, aside from the fits of laughter, everything was fine. The exams were getting closer, and I hadn’t read a line for many weeks. The books stayed in my bedsit. I didn’t open them any more. I was unemotional all the time, and discovered how easy it was. It was easy, I was unemotional and in a way I was in control. I walked through the corridors outside the reading room in the Domus Nova building in the centre of Oslo, in the centre of the town that was supposed to be mine, and let absolutely everything slide.

  A frenetic, nervous atmosphere began to spread through the corridors, the reading room and the canteen. I caught fragments of conversation. Now and then someone asked me something. What’s mea culpa in tort again? What does Falkinger say about it? Is there anything about it in Lødrup? Yes, I answered without any qualms. I was positive that there was something in Lødrup, and perhaps also in Falkinger. I said I would go home and check. When I was home, however, I did nothing. I had let everything slip. All my dreams. My ambitions. Everything I had imagined. Everything I was going to work towards. An education. A career. A future.

  And all because of Pappa.

  My books gathered dust at home while I went out walking in town. I crossed St Olavs gate and continued down Universitetsgata, past the National Gallery and the large grey edifice housing the Norwegian publisher Gyldendal, and I squinted up at those sitting behind the windows deep in concentration. Perhaps they were reading a manuscript? Something that would one day be a book, a collection of poems, a novel? I remembered Ruth’s words from years ago, the ones that had never quite lost their hold on me. But I had never dared to believe them. I had even promised myself then that I would never tell another lie, and I had no dreams of becoming a writer. Quite the contrary. I was going to become a lawyer. I was going to have order and lucidity. I was going to know my law backwards and make a distinction between right and wrong. I was going to be someone quite different. I had no time for so-called artists, whom I considered dropouts, people who hadn’t been capable of completing an education, who had started painting, or writing, or some other endeavour that was supposed to give their lives a semblance of meaning and dignity.

  All of those people who had ended up on the darker side of life. This concept was still ingrained in me.

  And now, there I stood, staring up at the grey Gyldendal building that had acquired some allure in the hot May sun, and as I turned to go I realised it reminded me of the balcony on the old shop in Brandsvoll, the one with the flagpole mounted over the road. I had dreamed so often of standing there and looking out.

  I walked on past the Norwegian Theatre, and eventually arr
ived in Akersgata. I mounted the broad steps by the government building and finally reached the Deichman Library. That was my destination. When I entered, everything was very quiet, not just around me but also inside me. Everything went quiet. I became placid and calm, and sat for several hours reading novels and poetry until my head was spinning. I did exactly the same thing the day after, and the next, and the day after that. I can still recall the dank atmosphere in the stairwell, the carpet in the middle of the staircase that was wet and squelched at the very bottom but was dry at the top, the banister that was worn and shiny from all the hands. And I remember all the shelves of books, probably several hundred times as many as in the library back in Lauvslandsmoen, and the unruffled woman’s voice over the loudspeaker just before eight o’clock every evening, the one that announced it was time to make your way homewards because the doors were closing.

  The day before the exam he rang. It was in the evening and I had just returned home from Deichman with a bag of books. The mobile phone emitted its cheery ringtone in my pocket, and I put down my bag and went to the window.

  His voice was more relaxed, as though he had been drinking. But of course he hadn’t; Pappa never drank. I stood by the window looking out at the lamp swinging on a wire stretched taut across the street.

  ‘Tomorrow’s the big day,’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

  ‘You’ve got an exam, haven’t you?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said.

  ‘And everything’s under control?’

  ‘Near as dammit,’ I said.

  ‘Good luck,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you.’

  We chatted about other things, I have no memory of what, and then rang off. Him first. I stood for a long time with the phone in my hand. Then I grabbed my jacket and went to the Underwater Pub, which was close to where I was living, and ordered a half-litre of beer. It was the first time I had done this, and I am sure it was obvious. I didn’t know whether to say Beer, please. Or: A pils. Or: Half a litre. In the end I gave a brief nod of the head in the direction of the beer tap behind the bar, and the young girl working there probably thought I was a foreigner who couldn’t speak Norwegian or English. I waited at the bar, not quite at my ease, for the glass to be filled, then occupied a seat at the back of the room and took long swigs. Afterwards I got up, paid and went out into the mild evening air. I was scared someone I knew would see me, or I would meet someone from home, even though that was completely inconceivable. As it happened, I didn’t bump into anyone on the way and reached home without mishap. Where I stood in the middle of the room for a long time.

  The following day I appeared for the exam at eight thirty on the dot. It was held in a large West Oslo gymnasium and I took a seat next to the wall. I printed my name and candidate number very clearly. Then I handed everything in and walked out into the sun. I had recently turned twenty, life was about to begin, real life. I had left my old life behind me to become the person I was. But, coldly, unemotionally, with my mind as clear as a bell, I wrote my name and handed in all the sheets of paper utterly blank. I walked in the hot sunshine listening to the birds twittering in the rose-hip bushes, went to the tram stop, the regular rumble of the town in my ears, and stood alone waiting for the tram to take me to the centre. My mind drifted. Wasn’t I the one who was going to become a lawyer? Wasn’t I the one who had travelled to Oslo to find himself? Yes, I was. However, it hadn’t happened. I was now sitting on a tram to the city centre, but in reality I was on my way into an unknown world. As the tram disappeared beneath the town I stared into my own hazy reflection, and when I surfaced in daylight in front of the fountain by the National Theatre, I knew: now you’re on the darker side of life. It will carry you away. No one can help you. You are where you vowed to yourself you would never end up. It is too late.

  That afternoon I sat in the Underwater Pub until I felt I was a little more myself. Then I went home and rang Pappa.

  ‘It’s over now,’ I said in a bright tone which wasn’t my usual one. But the 400 kilometres between us saved me, and Pappa was unaware that anything was wrong.

  ‘Congratulations,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you,’ I answered.

  ‘How does it feel?’

  ‘I’m not quite sure,’ I replied.

  ‘I’m proud of you,’ he said, and he could never have said that if we had been in the same room, that I do know. I didn’t answer.

  ‘Now you’ve done what I’ve always dreamed of doing,’ he said.

  ‘Have I?’ I asked, staring out at the swaying street lamp, just as I had on the previous night.

  ‘I always dreamed of studying in Oslo when I was young,’ he said.

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘I dreamed of becoming someone, you know.’

  ‘But you did become someone,’ I said, immediately hearing my mistake. ‘I mean, you are someone.’

  This time it was Pappa who didn’t answer. There was a silence, and I was unsure whether he was there, and again I thought I could hear faint music coming from somewhere as far from my father as it was from me.

  XI.

  I WASN’T QUITE finished with Kåre Vatneli. It emerged that he attended a confirmation service with Pappa in the autumn of 1957, barely two years before he died.

  He got as far as being confirmed, he passed the start line, so to speak, and for confirmation he was given a long, black coat and hat, and this was for him, as for the other confirmands, a definitive indication that the world of childhood had now been left behind.

  That was September 1957, the first year that white confirmation caps were worn. Pappa had just entered his fifteenth year, Kåre his sixteenth. After the ceremony they would finally be regarded as adults. As they entered the church they were ranked according to height, the tallest first. Medium height, in the middle. The smallest, last. First of all came the priest. Absalon Elias Holme, a name worthy of a priest. Then came Kåre. Pappa was quite close to the front. Grandma and Grandad were in the pews and had risen to their feet along with everyone else. Teresa was in the gallery playing the organ. The confirmands proceeded up the aisle, took their seats in the front rows beneath the pulpit. The music faded. Holme turned, made the sign of the cross and the service could begin.

  Many more people than Aasta remembered Kåre Vatneli. At a later point I visited three of his childhood friends. It was November, I was at Otto Øvland’s house. I wasn’t aware that he and Pappa had been christened on the same day, with the same water. That was one of the first things Otto told me, as though it was important for him to say it at last.

  Tom and Willy Utsogn were there that evening, with Otto, in his warm house. Both Otto and Willy had been to Kristiansand Hospital to visit Kåre that time in 1959. Tom, who was a bit younger, remembered the vehicle that came home with the coffin. He had no memory of the coffin itself, only the car. The car made a stronger impression on him. And that Kåre was lying in it.

  They were able, incidentally, to confirm what I had already been told about Kåre: the carefree attitude, the unbelievable cheerfulness. When everyone around him was so marked by his illness, by the amputation, by what lay in the offing, why wasn’t he? How did he manage to retain his cheery spirits when both Johanna and Olav were barely able to keep themselves upright? There was no explanation. Kåre’s life, for me, was an enigma, baffling. It was inexpressible, almost erased, but also somehow beautiful. Like laughing in the shadow of death. Or it was a love song. His life had been a love song of which all that remained now, fifty years later, was the word darling.

  In addition, I was told the moped story:

  They were going to see the priest for confirmation lessons, and everyone cycled together to the church. They always took their time, and when they arrived the church door was generally open. I remember Pappa telling me a story, I didn’t know whether it was true or not, about one occasion before the lesson when they lifted their bikes up the church steps and cycled around inside the church. Otto laughed and corro
borated its authenticity. But that wasn’t all, he said. Someone rode a moped in the church, he recalled. A moped? Yes, indeed. In the church? Yes. Yes. And who did that? It was Kåre. The happy, easy-going Kåre had ridden his moped around the church. The one he had been given because he couldn’t cycle all the way with only one leg. So he had taught himself to walk again, then to ride a bike, then to ride a moped. He was still officially too young, but the local police authority had given him a dispensation because of his leg. He taught himself to ride a moped, and in the end, as one of very few, to ride a moped in church. The central aisle was very narrow, so it wasn’t easy to keep your balance. The others had looked on, stunned. He had crossed an invisible line, and the others stood holding their breath. First of all, he drove up the nave, then he turned by the altar, drove into both arms of the transept and back up to the altar. The church interior slowly filled with exhaust fumes which mixed with the bright peals of laughter. All of a sudden Holme was there. He advanced from behind the altar, white-faced, but still controlled. You can’t lose your temper with a one-legged fifteen-year-old. Even if he has crossed the line.

  This had been merely one of many pranks, but people never talked about Kåre’s illness. And no one ever said the name of his illness aloud. It was taboo, it was the worst, it was as if it might infect others if it were mentioned. Kåre himself didn’t seem particularly bothered. The leg was amputated but he carried on. Evidently it would take more than that to worry him. To worry the boy who had been given a special dispensation to ride a moped by the lensmann himself.