Before I Burn: A Novel Read online

  I read a bit of The Troll Elk by Mikkjel Fønhus, and re-started Trygve Gulbranssen’s Bjørndal trilogy, skimming the pages for the place where tears had begun to flow when I was thirteen, but I couldn’t find it, and in any case the story now seemed empty and devoid of meaning. I lay reading, but only managed to concentrate for a few minutes at a time before my mind filled with thoughts that went their own ways.

  Then, one evening, I took out my lecture pad, tore out all the pages of notes, settled down and started writing. I remembered the words Ruth had sown in me long ago when she held me back after class. I hadn’t forgotten them, and now I was trying. I wrote one page, two. Tore out the pages, and lay down to sleep. The following day I read through everything I’d written and was ashamed. It was deeply, deeply shaming. But, come the evening, there I was again with the pad on my knee, writing. I don’t remember what about, or even if it was about anything. I just wrote. It felt good in a strange, remote way, as though actually it had nothing to do with me. And that was how the summer continued. My father’s health deteriorated and it became a strain living in the house with him. In the evenings I would take his car, the old pickup, and go on a long drive. I took my pad with me, and stopped here and there to do some writing. I drove to Brandsvoll, turned left by the old shop, passed Else and Alfred’s house, turned right in front of Teresa’s house, and drove past the quiet, white house where I never saw anyone, what people called the pyromaniac’s house. Next I passed the fire station, Sløgedal’s house, and drove uphill towards Hønemyr. Then I turned into the square outside the military camp and sat there with my pad on the steering wheel, writing.

  In August, Pappa became so unwell that Mamma could no longer cope with him at home. He had been on a sickbed in the middle of the sitting room for some weeks, and when the ambulance came to collect him, she wasn’t at home. I think she may have been out shopping; at any rate, there were just the two of us in the house when the bell rang and I went to answer the door. On the steps were two men of my age who said they had come to collect my father. Then it all became too much for me. I don’t remember exactly what happened, just that I let them in, showed them the way, then left them in the sitting room with him while I went to the cellar. I heard them talking in hushed tones, as if they were planning a burglary. I heard my father’s calm voice and the cold snap of the metal legs as they folded them and lifted the stretcher off the floor. I could hear them trying to carry him through the front door, but it was too narrow, so they had to trudge back and put the bed on the floor while they discussed another solution. I stayed in my room in the cellar staring into space. I couldn’t face going upstairs, for I knew it would be the last time, and I knew in my heart that I wouldn’t be able to watch him being carried out of the house, and I imagined that he wouldn’t want me to see that, either. Eventually, after a fair bit of to-ing and fro-ing, they got him and the bed through the veranda door, and once they were outside I coolly ascended the stairs and just caught a glimpse of his legs disappearing into the ambulance. Then they closed the doors, got in on opposite sides, and drove off, and Pappa had nothing at all from the house he had lived in since the summer of 1976, not even a small handful of ash.

  My very last visit to see him was in the middle of September 1998. At that time he had a room of his own at the rest home in Nodeland, where ten years earlier I had sung with the youth choir in front of an audience of elderly people. I had been back in Oslo since the middle of August, although I hadn’t resumed my studies. I had also given up writing. The days were spent in the Deichman Library, I sat there reading and was transported, and every evening I was roused by the voice saying that they were closing the doors.

  One Friday I caught the train home to Kristiansand. Deep down I knew this would be the last time I would see him. Mamma came to pick me up at the station, and on the next day I drove down to the rest home in his red pickup. I passed through Finsland feeling people’s eyes on me. After all, they knew the vehicle, no one else in these parts had a red pickup, and they must have thought my father was at the wheel, but just as they raised their hands to wave they saw that of course it wasn’t him. They saw that it wasn’t him, but they waved anyway. And I waved back. I passed the disused chapel in Brandsvoll, the one that had now become a sort of agricultural building, and I wondered what had happened to the bottle-green lectern, and the picture of the man with a hoe, the man with an angel of the Lord hovering above him, the one that hovered above us when we sang there; I passed the community centre, which was hardly used any more, just for the odd bridge evening, a meeting of the Farmers’ Association, the Nynorsk Language Society, that was all. I drove across Fjeldsgård Plain, arrived at the new chapel, which had been erected as a community project in the mid-1990s. I passed the bank, where ten years later I would be writing this. I came to Kaddeberg’s old shop, which had been abandoned years ago, and had a sudden vision of Kaddeberg in his old blue smock and horn-rimmed glasses with a stump of a pencil tucked behind one ear, mumbling pleasantries behind the counter. I remembered all the times I had stood on the worn floor in front of the till with Pappa, when a bar of chocolate was thrust into my hand, a Hobby or a Stratos, or one of the small chewing-gum balls with the sweet-smelling wrappers, and my whole being must have brightened because I remembered that old Kaddeberg always used to remove his glasses and keep rubbing them on his shirt front. Everything seemed to come back to me. My entire childhood, the entire landscape, the forests, the lakes, the sky, everything was too long ago, and everything was still there, bathed in the gentle September sun. My new life in Oslo was so far away all of a sudden. I had left Grandad’s coat in my bedsit, together with my new glasses. I didn’t need either now; they felt completely out of place. I changed down, drove slowly uphill and saw Lake Livannet beneath me, saw it glittering in a gust of wind that swept from east to west.

  I was early, turned left and parked just a few steps from the fountain. I walked through the corridor of the rest home, where the smell of coffee, musty old clothes and pee met me head-on; the sounds of TV from rooms, laughter and community singing seemed to come from somewhere deep below ground.

  Pappa looked better than he had for a long time; when I opened the door he was sitting on the edge of the bed in his red tracksuit and dangling his legs.

  ‘There you are,’ he said jauntily.

  ‘I hope I’m not too early,’ I said.

  ‘Early, not at all,’ he replied. ‘I’ve done nothing all day except wait for you.’

  He said it in such a robust, casual way that we could both hear it was not his normal tone, yet we behaved as if nothing was different. I had a bag of Freia chocolates, which I knew he liked, or at least he had done. As I went to empty the bag into the bowl I had filled the previous time, I saw it was still half-full.

  ‘And are you alright?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m alright,’ he said.

  ‘Shall I take off my shoes?’ I asked.

  ‘No, no,’ he answered in the same robust manner. ‘It’s not me who has to do the cleaning here.’

  We laughed, and I felt a need to follow up in the same tone that he had set.

  ‘Stay here much longer,’ I exclaimed, ‘and you’ll be sporting a perm.’

  He gave a faint smile but didn’t laugh as I had hoped he would; he slid to the floor and poked his feet into the same slippers he had shuffled around in at home. When he was upright I could see how thin he had become; the cord in his tracksuit had been pulled tight around the waist, and his watch hung loosely from a wrist. It was as though neither the tracksuit nor the watch belonged to him but were stolen goods, things he had snatched in a hurry and which didn’t fit. He walked unsteadily to the open window, where he stood holding the sill and looking out. From the window it was only fifty metres to the railway line; a long goods train thundered past, and in the enormous din it seemed as if he might snap in two or crumble to dust at any moment. When it was quiet again he turned, shuffled back to the bed and picked up a chocolate with fingers resemb
ling delicate claws, which shook so much that several of the chocolate balls spilled out of the bowl onto the floor and rolled off in all directions. I scrabbled around on my knees picking them up, some under the table, others in the middle of the floor, the last under the bed, right next to a glass bedpan, a kind of carafe with a kink in the neck, partly full with dark urine, and beside it lay the sweet, looking like the head of a tiny seal popping up from the sea.

  ‘I thought we could go for a little drive,’ I said when all the balls were back in the bowl.

  ‘A drive, yes,’ he said.

  ‘In your pickup,’ I said.

  He nodded, and I said no more, for I knew my voice would crack, and neither of us wanted that.

  I pushed Pappa in the wheelchair he usually kept in a corner of the room, one that could easily be folded and unfolded. I pushed him gently and noiselessly along the shiny floor of the rest home corridor, and at that point, on the short trip from his room to the front door, we were all alone. He was no weight, he seemed to float along, although, slumped there, he might have appeared heavy. He floated in front of me, and I floated behind him, and at a point some way from the door I gave the chair a firm push and let go of the handles and Pappa sailed away, a couple of metres perhaps, without noticing that I wasn’t holding on. He was wearing his jacket with the Lillehammer Winter Olympics logo on the sleeve and chest. The jacket hung like a sack over his bony shoulders and rustled like newspaper whenever he moved. He had bought it because in fact he had considered going to Lillehammer. He had wanted to see ski jumping from the large hill. That was all. The man who in his youth had set off down old Slottebakken, the slope that was later adjudged to be too dangerous, where you could jump to the very bottom, almost down to the plain if the wind got hold of you, and for that reason it was closed down, people were simply jumping too far; that was in 1960, six years after Kåre Vatneli fell and fractured his leg, and the year after he died. But three years before the new ski jumping slope in Stubrokka was built and Pappa climbed up the tower and set off downhill with an utter disregard of personal safety that no one could fathom, and of which in 1998 I knew nothing. What he had most wanted to see at the 1994 Winter Olympics was the ski jumping from the large hill, but then something came up, so there was no trip to Lillehammer on that occasion. But at least he had the jacket, and when he saw the televised pictures of Espen Bredesen taking off in slow motion and flattening out in the air, and when he saw the mass of spectators and all the flags and heard the roar from the landing area, Pappa probably felt he had almost been there anyway.

  I folded up the wheelchair and deposited it on the empty flatbed of the truck while Pappa got onto the passenger seat.

  ‘First we have to go to the shop,’ he said. ‘I have to hand these in before six o’clock.’ It was only now that I saw he was holding two lottery coupons in his hand.

  ‘Are you still doing the lottery?’ I asked.

  ‘This time I know I’ve got a row of winners,’ he said without looking at me. ‘It’s now or never,’ he added, and we could both hear how sinister this sounded.

  I stopped outside the shop by the roundabout, went in and handed over the two coupons while Pappa waited in the car. I saw all the scratchy crosses he had drawn, how they seemed to form a simple pattern that I couldn’t understand, but which was simple nonetheless. They were seven well-considered numbers, I knew, because my father had been doing the lottery for as long as I could remember, he had even acquired books about probability theory. I stood there with the two coupons in my hand remembering that I had laughed at him when I heard about the books, I had laughed at the naive belief that he would win, or that he had a row of winners, as he put it, and now there I was, paying, without a hint of irony, for his two very last coupons.

  ‘It’s now or never,’ I said to the man behind the till.

  ‘That’s what they all say,’ he said with a smile.

  ‘Where shall we go?’ I asked my father as I got back into the car.

  ‘You decide,’ he replied.

  ‘To town?’ I suggested.

  ‘To town,’ he said.

  He had become a kind of annoying echo, and I didn’t say anything for a long while. I felt empty, outside myself; we picked up speed, turned left onto the E18, and soon we were motoring along towards Kristiansand with the wheelchair sliding to and fro and banging around at the back. We drove alongside the glistening Lake Farvannet and passed the place where the man who had played the role of Sørlandet in the children’s stories about Stompa & Co died in a car accident. Pappa had once told me that as we drove by the lake a long time ago, and since then I had always remembered this fact, both because I loved listening to Stompa on Saturday morning radio and because I felt that the entire Stompa series – Tørrdal, the confused teacher, Brandt the reflective teacher and the cheery music – harked back to my father’s carefree childhood.

  ‘I thought we could watch the boats coming in,’ I said, traversing Vesterveien. He didn’t respond, which I took as assent. I turned right under the high bridge and parked by the statue of Vilhelm Krag. I pushed the wheelchair up the little hill, and soon we were sitting in front of Krag and looking across the fjord and the still, black Vestergap waters to the lighthouse on Oksøy Island in the distance. We didn’t say a great deal; actually, I don’t remember us talking at all. We just sat there beside each other. He was in the wheelchair, I was on a bench, and behind us was the huge bronze statue of Krag, who was staring out as well, the way he had for all my life and long before. The sun was still and hot on my chest and face. Pappa had folded his hands in his lap. I had never seen him in this pose before, as though he were old and tired of living and not just fifty-five, which was what he was. He sat there serenely, watching the lethargic September flies sucking the juice from the rotting apple cores. He just sat there, and I just sat there, and everything was still even though we had the E18 twenty metres behind us and the whole of the harbour and the seaward approach before us. Everything was still and we just sat there as boats left white wakes across the fjord, long stripes that were sharp at first, then widened and disintegrated, we just sat there as the Stavanger train clanked into the railway station fifteen minutes late, we just sat there observing the blackbirds as they waited inside the rose-hip bushes, not moving, keeping a watch on us with eyes like diamonds.

  ‘You didn’t say how the exams went,’ he said out of nowhere. My blood froze for an instant and I licked my lips.

  ‘They went fine,’ I said, somewhat distractedly.

  ‘What did you get, then?’ he asked, regarding me for the first time since we had left the rest home.

  ‘What did I get?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you mean the grade?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I got a distinction,’ I said.

  ‘You got a distinction?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘Imagine you getting a distinction,’ he said, staring across the water. I didn’t answer, staring across as well.

  ‘Now I can relax, now I know you are set fair,’ he said, and at that moment I felt I would have to cry whether I wanted to or not. I sprang to my feet and said over my shoulder that I had left my wallet in the pickup. I walked down the path with fast, thumping strides as I tried to quell the sobs bubbling up in my stomach. I leaned over the hot bonnet until I had regained control, then I walked back to him.

  At that moment I made a decision. Or something inside me did, I don’t know what. Nor do I know exactly what I decided, or why. All I knew was how it would happen.

  After perhaps a quarter of an hour in the sun with the sea in front of us and Krag at our backs we trundled back to the car. We then drove the ten kilometres or so to the rest home in Nodeland with the radio on low. We didn’t talk about exams any more, or the future, or anything at all. I only noticed that he was reassured, he had relaxed.

  I pushed Pa
ppa across the car park as small birds played in the fountain, splashing water everywhere, but when we went too close they took to the wing and sat in the trees waiting for us to go. We rolled through the doors and along the shiny floor without a sound. A piece of paper with his name written by hand hung outside his room, stuck to his door with a bit of tape and fluttered whenever anyone went in or out. It could come unstuck at any moment, or simply be torn off and replaced with another name, which was probably the idea.

  Pappa was tired after the trip, worn out. I had to stand behind and support him as he tried to get up. I shuddered when I felt how light he was. It was like lifting nothing at all. I could feel his hard ribs through the Olympic Games jacket as I managed to manoeuvre him onto the bed, and once there he lay back against the pillow and closed his eyes. I had lied to him, the last thing I did for my father was to lie to him, and the lie gave him peace. That was how it was. Now he was lying there motionless, only his large eyeballs moved, he lay there stretched out on the bed in the jacket that was far too big for him, the zip was open and I could see the red tracksuit, with the white puma poised to leap from his chest into thin air. It was as if he were floating, he was stretched out in the air, he had taken off from the ramp and lay flat, and he was floating, he had the air and the darkness roaring in his face.

  V.

  FROM THE AFTERNOON OF SATURDAY, 3 June 1978, the community centre in Brandsvoll was converted into a police station. Police were brought in from Søgne, Marnardal, Audnedal and Vennesla, plus Lensmann Knut Koland and two forensics officers from Kristiansand, in all around twenty-five people. Extra tables and chairs had to be transported from the cellar and placed in the old council room, where there was an antique wood burner with a black elk embossed in the cast iron, and pictures of the region’s former chairmen hanging on the northern wall, between the two doors.