Before I Burn: A Novel Read online

  I.

  ON THE MORNING OF 3 JUNE, Grandma writes in her diary:

  Olga’s old house has burned down. The outbuilding as well. It’s not possible. But it has actually happened. Kasper Kristiansen owns it now, but I can remember Olga living there so clearly. I remember when Kristen and Steinar and I accompanied Olga to Oslo with a patient. It was a girl who had been too difficult to have at home. She had to go to Gaustad Asylum. So we drove all the way to Oslo. It was just after the war. And now Olga’s house has burned down. Lord help us all.

  Faedrelandsvennen, Saturday, 3 June. Front page:

  At eight o’clock this morning, Lensmann Knut Koland and his officers gathered for a crisis meeting at his Søgne office to discuss last night’s blazes, in addition to other recent incidents in Finsland. An arsonist is on the loose in the district. So far he has limited his activities to unoccupied houses and agricultural buildings. Last night a farm, an outhouse and a storehouse were set alight at Lauvsland and Dynestøl, in Finsland.

  The Oslo newspapers are beginning to mention the case. One short item in Aftenposten. An article in Verdens Gang, both relatively unemotional accounts without photographs. NRK radio broadcasts a longer report, but no TV reports as yet, not until Monday evening.

  II.

  I HAD HEARD THE STORY of the female patient who had to be taken to Gaustad, but I wasn’t aware that Pappa had been involved. Nor was I aware that they had transported her from the house at Dynestøl; nor that the patient had lived there with Olga and that it was from this house that she took the ash from the wood-burning stove.

  Having mental patients living in your house wasn’t so unusual. Most of them came from Eg Hospital in Kristiansand, and they were taken on by farms in the hope that this would have a beneficial effect. It was the old idea that work was a blessing. They should be taken out of their grey, passive institutional lives. Into the fresh air. Into the sunshine, into the rain, into the wind and cold. So that they could use their bodies and give a helping hand. And perhaps, slowly but surely, they would get better. Perhaps even recover and return to their normal lives. Furthermore, you got a few kroner for keeping them. It was a kindly thought, but often things didn’t go as hoped. There are many stories about patients, but the details are vague. I know that Olga had several patients over the years, but I know almost nothing about them. What their names were, who they were, what they did at her place. How long they stayed. Where they went afterwards. If they are dead or alive. I know nothing, and no one I have asked can provide any more information.

  Except for the ash anecdote.

  This one is true.

  Things had got to such a pass with the patient that Olga was unable to have her living on the farm any longer. The patient had started having loud discussions with Our Lord; apparently this had been going on for a long time, but when she repeatedly tried to knock Our Saviour off the heavenly throne with a pole, things boiled over for Olga. The patient couldn’t stay there any more; however, there was no room for her at Eg, either. This went on until she had to be transferred to Gaustad in Oslo. It was a trip of more than four hundred kilometres, and Olga didn’t have a car, of course. So she asked Grandad – who had a Nash Ambassador from 1937 with the split windscreen – whether he would consider undertaking the long journey to the country’s capital with her and the patient. Grandad said he would, and Grandma went along as well, and my father too, because there was no one to look after him. So, early in the morning one June day in 1947, the black car started up in the yard, and the small family set off. After some kilometres they parked in front of the house at Dynestøl. Grandad got out and knocked on the door. It was quite a while before Olga answered the door. It transpired that she and the patient had cleaned the whole house, from cellar to loft; all that was now left was to remove the ash from the wood-burning stoves, and that was what they had been doing when Grandad knocked. They had to wait a few more minutes until everyone was ready to leave, and moments before the female patient got in she took the ash from the sitting room stove, filled a tin can with it and deposited it in her handbag. Then she, too, was ready. It was the only thing she wanted to take with her: a tin of ash, which she put in her bag. Whereupon she sat, squeezed up against the others, for a good four hundred kilometres with the bag on her lap.

  After Grandma died, in the winter of 2004, a photograph appeared from nowhere. I had never seen it before. It was of Pappa. He must have been about four years old that summer because he was wearing knee breeches and a short-sleeved shirt. He was sitting on one of two bronze lions outside Kunstnernes Hus, a contemporary art house in Oslo, laughing. As I held the photograph in my hands I knew nothing about the two lions, I didn’t know they were still there, in exactly the same place, clutching the flagpoles on either side of the entrance. Pappa had the same wavy hair as in his baby photograph, which had been taken by Harme of Kristiansand and was hand-coloured and not quite true to life, making him look like a little bronze angel. As a child I flatly refused to believe that it was my father in the baby picture. I insisted it was an angel.

  The new photograph must have been taken during the stay in Oslo, presumably after the patient and the ash had been delivered to Gaustad Mental Hospital. The long journey was over, finally they had arrived in Norway’s capital city, and I suppose they wanted to see the Royal Palace. Which must have seemed like life’s greatest experience, both for Pappa and for my grandparents, and I presume also for Olga Dynestøl, who had never travelled anywhere. After all, it was only two years since the war had finished, and they wanted to see the Royal Palace and the guards in their black uniforms, standing as silent as the grave in the broiling hot sun. Afterwards they wandered around the Palace Gardens, strolled past the residence where the great Arnulf Øverland lived, and then saw the lions. And what could be better than to take a photograph of a little boy on the back of a snarling lion?

  That was how it was. The story of the long journey, the photograph of Pappa and the story of the ash from the stove at Dynestøl. The stories intertwine and are all connected with the stories of the fires. It was ash from the same chimney that on the morning of 3 June 1978 was left blackened and solitary like a tree denuded of its branches.

  You gather all the fragments, even ash.

  III.

  I PHONED KASPER KRISTIANSEN, but it was Helga, his wife, who answered. She knew who I was, of course, as did Kasper; they have both known me since I was born. Kasper might also have remembered me from the elk hunt when I was with my father, when Kasper held the bloody heart in his hand.

  I went into great detail explaining what I was after. Said that I was in the process of writing about their house, which they lost early in the morning of 3 June more than thirty years ago, and asked if they would mind telling me what happened. I had no idea how they would feel about this, whether it was something they could discuss or whether it was still too painful.

  The answer, however, was: Not at all.

  They received me the very next evening.

  We chatted for ages. Not only about the fires; other stories also came up, interwoven into previous ones, and in this way the conversation extended into a picture that grew bigger and bigger, and in the end it was unstoppable. It was as though I had touched upon something that had gone missing long ago. Something I was closely related to, yet of which I still knew very little. We talked about Grandma and Grandad, whom they had both known, and about Great-Grandfather Sigvald, who tanned leather in the loft at his Heivollen home, and about Great-Great-Grandfather Jens, who was so gentle.

  However, it was the Dynestøl blaze I had come to hear about.

  At just after one o’clock on the morning of 3 June 1978, the telephone rang in Helga and Kasper’s house. They were then living in Nodeland; they had bought the Dynestøl house from Olga a few months earlier, but had barely begun the renovation work on it. Kasper had bought, among other things, new double-glazed windows for the entire house, but they hadn’t yet been installed and were standing outside Dynest�
�l, leaning against the house wall. In addition, Kasper’s tractor, a Fiat, was parked in the yard between the house and the barn.

  Helga picked up the phone. At the other end was a voice she recognised. It was Olga Dynestøl. She sounded distant and subdued, as if she were ringing from another world.

  At first Olga could only utter four words:

  Dynestøl is on fire.

  Then she collected herself and said she had seen and heard the fire engine. She had dashed into the yard outside her house in the Løbakke hills. She had seen Per Lauvsland’s burning storehouse, which was across the field, and next the billowing sea of flames over Lake Homevannet, and she knew. Soon after there were four terrible explosions, with an interval of a few minutes between each one, and each explosion caused the flames to boil over. Alone in the yard, she realised it was her old house in Dynestøl that was on fire. The house where she had been born seventy-three years before, her brother Kristen the year after, and from where both parents had been carried out feet first. She stood watching the flames across the sky while reciting something akin to a prayer. Her lips scarcely moved. Then she turned and went indoors. She had not spoken to anyone before ringing Helga and Kasper. No one had come to tell her what was happening. She simply knew.

  Kasper and Helga jumped into their car and drove off to see for themselves what had happened. They passed through Nodeland, Hortemo, Stokkeland. Kasper stayed calm. He didn’t believe it could be true. The buildings at Dynestøl? They were set apart and were so quiet and peaceful. Olga must have been dreaming. That was the explanation. Or it was something she had imagined while she lay in bed unable to sleep. She was getting on in years.

  As they motored down the slope towards Kilen it was light enough for them to see the clear sky and the undulating hills to the west. They couldn’t see any smoke or any sea of flames. Nothing. Kasper was becoming fairly confident that his surmises were correct, but when, a few minutes later, they passed the school in Lauvslandsmoen, they spotted Hans Aasland’s burned-down outhouse, the one opposite the school. There was nothing left of it, just a black stain on the ground, from which rose thin, grey smoke. They turned towards Dynestøl, and after a couple of hundred metres they were met by the sight of Per Lauvsland’s razed barn. There was no one around. Everything was destroyed, and here too smoke rose from the collapsed structure. There was a strange abandoned atmosphere. The cows were grazing in the field, apparently unconcerned. Behind, they could see the house where Olga now lived, but there were no lights in any of the windows. That was when it slowly dawned on them what was awaiting them. They drove the last few kilometres. Lake Homevannet lay black and still, with the mist hovering above it, and around it pine trees stood in distorted poses, seemingly stretching out their branches to try to hold on tight. Neither of them said a word. They couldn’t see any flames. Nor any light. Nor people. Nor cars. They couldn’t see anything. It was as if they were in a dream. Olga had rung them in the dream to say that her old house was on fire. Now they were driving slowly along the road in the dream, and when in a while they arrived they would wake up at home in bed. They would be lying there blinking up at the ceiling as the dream gently sank back to whence it had come. Then they could get up and start the day.

  But, of course, this was no dream.

  As they approached the last hill they saw that the gravel had been gouged up. A large vehicle must have been there before them. Then they reached their destination. Kasper stopped the car. They got out, leaving the doors open. Helga said nothing. Kasper said nothing. It was chilly, almost cold, they should have brought warmer clothing, they realised that at once. Helga had only her thin woollen jacket, Kasper a faded shirt. They walked the few metres to the firemen standing around in a ragged group. The men had finished hosing down the house, or they had given up long ago. They seemed exhausted, their faces were drawn, and blackened with soot and smoke, their clothes filthy, their shirts unbuttoned. They gave the impression of just having awoken, and that what they had awoken to was way beyond their comprehension. They were barely recognisable, even though Kasper and Helga knew everyone. That was Knut. There was Arnold. And there were Jens and Peder and Salve, and several others. Helga suddenly felt dizzy. No one could utter a word. There was as good as nothing left of the house or the barn. There were just the foundation walls, and the chimney, immovable and blackened with soot. The whole site was transformed. Now it was impossible to see how everything had actually been. The house with its shiny windows, the barn with its moss-covered bridge, the few tiny doorsteps from the grass leading inside. The door with the faintly squeaking hinges, the cold porch, the hall with the rag rug, the kitchen with the white utility sink, the steep stairs to the loft. But it wasn’t just the buildings; the whole landscape appeared to have changed – the sloping fields, the road, the green hills, the surrounding forest, everything was different now that the house and barn had gone.

  They caught sight of Alfred. His shirt was open, showing all of his pale chest. He came over and shook hands with both of them.

  ‘There was nothing we could do.’

  ‘I didn’t believe it was true,’ Kasper said.

  ‘No, none of us did,’ Alfred replied.

  ‘What do we do now?’ Helga asked, but no one answered.

  What could you say? What do you say to two people who have just lost their house?

  ‘We were too late,’ Alfred said in a low voice. ‘We were too late.’

  They stared at the chimney towering up in the half-light. The tractor was there too, black and burned out, resembling a beetle that had slowly rotted in the sun. It was a Fiat, 1965 model, but as good as new. It was the tractor that had produced the four explosions. The tyres had caught fire, they must have been alight for some time, all four of them, before they burst with enormous force. That was what Olga had heard. That was what had made the flames boil over.

  It was then that the fire engine returned. They heard the sirens approaching. Next they saw the flicker of the blue lights and heard the roaring of the motor up the last inclines. Not until the vehicle was stationary were the sirens and blue lights switched off. Out jumped a young man, though more a boy. They recognised him at once: it was the son of the fire chief, Ingemann at Skinnsnes. Inside the cabin he had a carrier bag full of food.

  ‘Have you been shopping?’ someone asked, but the boy didn’t respond. He put the bag down on the ground. It toppled over as soon as he turned his back. Kasper and Helga watched him roam around the site for a while. Then he came back and searched for something in the bag. They hadn’t noticed, but there was smoke still rising from the house and the barn. It was thin, grey smoke, almost like steam, and it dispersed at once.

  ‘Who wants a hot dog?!’ the boy yelled.

  He had to step into the trees to find a suitable stick. Then he poked it through a sausage from the bag and lurched into the ruins, more or less where the living room had been. In his white shirt he wasn’t warmly dressed, and he held out his arms as if he were walking on glass. He walked along the foundation wall for some of the way, but then turned and came back. There were no flames left, just ash and the thin, grey smoke. He cursed aloud. He had driven all the way to Kaddeberg’s to buy sausages and now there weren’t any flames or embers to cook them over! What the hell was going on? No one spoke. He started laughing. The firemen watched him, turned away and pretended there was work to be done. Helga wrapped her jacket tighter around her.

  ‘Then we’ll have to eat them cold,’ the boy continued, clearly miffed. ‘What do you say? Cold sausages!’ He jumped down from the wall, went from one fireman to the next offering cold, slippery sausages straight from the packet.

  IV.

  IT WAS LATE SUMMER, 1998. I had been at home since June and seen how he was slowly getting worse. His eyes were growing, and when I was sure that had to be it, they couldn’t possibly get any bigger in that emaciated face, they grew a tiny bit more. I had told neither him nor my mother about my exams. A few days after the night in Vår Frelse
r cemetery I caught the train home from Oslo, and during the first evenings I lay in my old room listening for sounds from my parents’ bedroom. My father was alone there now, while my mother had rigged up a bed on the sitting room sofa. He slept so badly and was always in pain. I heard him mumbling to himself, but couldn’t catch what he was saying. I lay awake during the light summer evenings, unable to do anything at all. I had no contact with my old classmates from school. I had grown apart from them, and they had no doubt grown apart from me. I had nothing, other than my books, which I had left here when I departed for Oslo. I lay for hours in the darkness flicking through the books I had once read with such incomprehensible voracity.