Before I Burn: A Novel Read online

  When summer was over I still hadn’t got down to writing about the fires. There was something creating a mental block, but I couldn’t say exactly what it was. However, I had gained an overview of the events that occurred, although I hadn’t yet spoken to anyone involved. I had worked through the extant newspapers and interviews and seen the item that had been shown on the main news. NRK had put it on a DVD and sent it to me from Oslo. I played it again and again. When I was about to watch it for the first time I was very tense, nervous even. At home, alone in the house at Kleveland, I inserted the disc into the machine and watched it disappear. This was the first time I would see living pictures of the countryside where I had been born, of Finsland in the summer of 1978, the countryside which the whole of Norway had seen that night more than thirty years ago when the news item was broadcast. It took a few seconds, then the picture appeared and I pressed play. I recognised the location at once, even though there was something slightly alien and unfamiliar about it all. Something had changed, but I couldn’t put my finger on what. Was it the forest? Was it the houses? Was it the roads? I don’t know. There was something distant, bygone about the images, yet I could still see that this was home. There is the village of Kilen, it struck me, no doubt about that, and there’s sparkling Lake Livannet, almost the same as today, and there are the long plains of Brandsvoll, the power lines that spread like a scar through the area, and Anders and Agnes Fjeldsgård’s house as good as unchanged. Everything was there, and everything was almost as I knew it. All the TV coverage was characterised by a kind of paradoxical serenity. The camera work was slow, the reporter gave a very full commentary as the pictures glided in a leisurely manner across the screen, and this slowness and the long-winded reporting meant the item lacked drama. You saw the billowing forests, the tall sky, the clouds as light as flecks of froth, birds sitting motionless on the telephone lines, a gentle breeze wafting through the leaves on the trees. You saw houses, you saw cars and you saw clothes drying in the wind. It was like any peaceful summer day in 1978, or it could have been ten years earlier or ten years later. It was timeless countryside, yet it was in precisely this countryside where I was later to become an adult, and which in some ways I would never leave. It seemed a long time ago; however, I felt that at any moment I could take my eyes off the TV, look outside and there it would all be, unchanged. The black, smoking ruins, the few onlookers standing around in untidy groups. They were still there. There were mothers with children in their arms. There were children on bikes, hanging over their handlebars. Older people huddled together as if supporting one another, preventing each other from falling, and there was a man with a hat who looked at first glance like Reinert Sløgedal, the old sexton and schoolteacher, and father of Bjarne Sløgedal, the organist at Kristiansand Cathedral.

  Finally, there was Alfred, hosing down Sløgedal’s ravaged barn. That, too, was an image of simplicity and composure: one solitary, bare-headed man. The sky above. A razed building. Thin, white smoke slowly rising, being borne away on the wind. The jet of water sluicing the wall and the scorched earth, splashing against the distorted sheets of roofing.

  It must have been just a few hours before he delivered the news.

  Then the item was over and the screen went black.

  I watched the DVD a second time. And once more. It was as if I couldn’t have enough of it, as if I hoped to catch a glimpse of myself, or my father. Or anyone else I knew. After all, that wasn’t completely beyond the realms of possibility. I knew, of course, that my father had been outside the house in Vatneli on the night it was reduced to ashes, and I knew for certain that I had myself been to the devastated farm belonging to Olga Dynestøl on the Sunday, straight after the christening, even though I had been fast asleep in the travel bag the whole time.

  V.

  IN SEPTEMBER I set my writing aside and went to Italy, to the northern Italian town of Mantua, to take part in the sizeable literary festival there. As always when I am on my travels, I was quite tense, but I didn’t know then, nor do I know now, exactly what caused this tension.

  It was a hot evening in Mantua with a fierce gusting wind that had apparently come all the way from the Sahara, and I was due to do a reading from one of my books in Piazza San Leonardo, a small square in the centre of town. I walked from my hotel, which was situated close by Piazza Don Leoni. It was half past eight on a Saturday evening with lots of smiling people about. There was laughter and music in the narrow, crowded streets, but I felt quite alone. I followed Corso V. Emanuele to Piazza Cavallotti. There, I bore left across a car park with a long line of parked and abandoned scooters. I continued down a few cramped alleyways with no names, at any rate, I didn’t see any signs, up Via Arrivabene, and then it was straight ahead to the square beside the stone church.

  By then I was already soaked in sweat. Quite an audience had assembled, because several writers were going to do readings, before and after me. I was nervous, as I always am before I mount a stage. I greeted my interpreter, a woman in her fifties who had lived in Stockholm over thirty years ago, but who nevertheless spoke almost fluent Swedish. When at length it was my turn the audience was in darkness, while up on stage a strong white light shone into my face. It was still suffocatingly hot, and the wind was so strong that it howled like thunder in the microphone. I don’t know whether it was the heat or the dry desert wind, or whether it was something I had eaten or drunk, or perhaps the intense light, but standing in front of the microphone, I suddenly felt unwell. Within a few seconds all my strength seemed to ebb out of me. My arms went slowly numb and my knees were giving way beneath me. I felt as if I was going to faint. The sea of faces began to heave. A mist veiled my eyes. It was like a bitterly cold afternoon a long time ago when I fell and hit my head on the ice of Lake Bordvannet, and my senses switched off one by one. Lying supine, I had felt the cold, hard ice against my head and shoulders and thought I was dying. So this was how I would die, I had time to think, on my back, ten years old, on my own in the middle of the lake. First my eyesight shut down, it slowly lost all colour, the forest disappeared, the pale sky above me, everything went, until I lay there completely blind. Next all the sounds faded and then I was gone, as the snow continued to fall quietly on my face. Now the same was about to happen to me here, watched by several hundred curious Italians. Or almost the same. For that was when I caught sight of some familiar faces down in the crowd. At first I didn’t know exactly who they were, but I was aware I knew them, and I couldn’t fathom why no one had come over to me before I went on stage, because surely it is natural enough for old acquaintances so far from home to say hello to one another? I was unable to place them, either, but then I spotted Lars Timenes, whom I remembered from when he lived in the former telephone exchange in Kilen. I clung to him, as it were, as he stood there, small and down at heel, while I called to mind how he used to sit in a chair in the middle of the sitting room, mercilessly illuminated by the constant flicker from the television. Straight afterwards I spotted Nils, my neighbour at home, standing in front of the stage as well, Nils, of whom I have no more than a fleeting memory, a friendly back as he walked away. There was Nils, and there was Emma, who used to sit staring at me from the corridor in the rest home when I went to visit my father, and there was her daughter Ragnhild, who was a grown-up yet still a child and who lived in another part of the country, but came home every summer and talked like a stranger. There was Ragnhild, and there was Tor, who one night left a party, went behind the house and shot himself, and there was Stig, next to whom I stood in the youth choir and with whom I sang beneath three Roman arches in a church, or in the chapel beneath a picture of a man with a hoe, or at the rest home in Nodeland. Stig, who went swimming and vanished from sight, who sank deeper and deeper and wasn’t rescued until it was too late, Stig who just managed to make it to voice-breaking age, he was there in the audience, too. And there were more. Teresa was there. Teresa, who taught me piano for a whole winter. Who always stood over my shoulder with a slight stoop,
waiting, now she was there with all the others, watching. And there were more. Jon was there, who taught my father, who was always called Teacher Jon to distinguish him from other Jons in the area. I remembered Teacher Jon from the elk hunts because he used to set off before all the others. He set off while it was still dark and sat ready and waiting for several hours before the hunt began. Now he was waiting in front of me. Ester was there, too. Ester, who always played the elf when we celebrated Christmas at my grandmother’s. Ester laughed in a way that made everything inside you melt. Ester was there. And Tønnes was there, a little to the back. Tønnes died only a few days after my grandmother, as though it was inconceivable that he should be the only neighbour left alive. And there were even more. There were many I recognised, whom I had seen at one time or another, perhaps at the post office counter, or in front of the postcard stand at Kaddeberg’s, or at the Christmas party in the chapel when the chairs were pushed back against the walls so that there was room for four concentric circles of people, each alternate circle rotating in the opposite direction around the Christmas tree while the snow swirled against the windows, and everyone’s cheeks were flushed as they sang. It was as though I knew them without knowing who they were. Even those I had never seen before. For all I knew, Johanna was there as well, and Olav, and maybe Kåre had made an appearance on his crutches at the fringes where the darkness made it impossible to see. Perhaps Ingemann and Alma were there, too. Perhaps Alma was there, too, with both legs intact, closing her eyes and leaning her head back. And who knows, perhaps Dag was there as well? Perhaps he was standing there with his arms crossed, right at the back of the church steps where I couldn’t see him.

  I have no idea where they came from, but they stood there, silent, serious, pale and reserved, waiting for me to begin.

  They had come to listen to me.

  Somehow I managed to collect myself enough to get through the three or four pages I had chosen. I read a story about a father who falls off a ladder and a son who knows he cannot carry him indoors to the sofa.

  When I finished there was a burst of applause. I wasn’t prepared for it. After all, I had read the passage in Norwegian, and no one, apart from my interpreter, would have understood a word. Nonetheless, the applause was resounding and sincere. Like a storm around me, the clapping merged with the wind, and the moment I raised my eyes I saw Pappa. He was right at the back, at the top of the church steps, with the massive door behind him. I had seen him once before, a few years earlier. On that occasion we had both been sitting in our respective cars. It was night. I had been driving in the deserted, well-lit tunnel beneath Baneheia, the Nature Park in Kristiansand. Then a car came towards me. I could see from quite some distance it was him. Yet only after he had passed by did it strike me that neither of us had waved. And so it was this time, too. Neither of us waved. Not long afterwards I saw Grandma standing there as well, with Grandad directly behind her. They stood to the right of Pappa. I don’t know whether they were smiling. I don’t know what they were thinking. But I saw them. And they saw me.

  The next day I took a taxi to Bologna airport. I was behind schedule, and we sped off at a 170 kilometres an hour on a motorway called the A1, which went straight to Rome. I just made it to the airport in time, boarded the KLM flight and found my seat by a window on the right, at the front. I sat down and, full of a kind of expectation, watched all the others who would be traversing Europe, all the way to Schiphol, Amsterdam. But I was unable to recognise any of those who entered and took their seats. All the dead had remained with the crowd in the darkened square in Mantua. Somehow I was reassured, and as the plane roared up the runway and lifted into the air I fell into a doze. We made a wide arc over the Po Plain; I saw the river winding like a snake, the tin roofs of the houses shining with a matt gleam, not a sign of life. Just flat, rust-red countryside. After a while the plane straightened and before long I could see the Alps rising beneath us. With a strange serenity, bordering on happiness, I thought of all the newspaper cuttings lying at home waiting for me, how I always feel before a job which, from a distance, appears both alluring and intimidating, and as we passed over Lake Constance I saw a ripple extending outwards in the water like a feather.

  So, I had to go to a little square in Mantua to begin my story about the fires, that was how it felt at any rate as I sat high above Germany flicking through my black notebook, the one in which I had written nothing while at home staring across Lake Livannet.

  There, at a height of 8,000 feet, I began to write about the eighth fire, the one that began early in the morning of 5 June 1978, the one that broke out in the kitchen and culminated with Olav and Johanna Vatneli’s house in ruins. Every so often I peered out of the window and looked down on the continent gliding peacefully by beneath me. Lake Constance slipped slowly behind us and was gone, and I turned back to my notebook. Across Europe, high above Stuttgart, Mannheim, Bonn and Maastricht, until we descended towards Amsterdam I wrote about these two people I had never met but whom I soon felt I knew. And it wasn’t until we had taken off again, from Schiphol on course for Kristiansand, that I managed to get the fire out of my head. As we flew over the North Sea I was at ease, clear in my mind, and I stared out of the window, through my reflection, into the blackness and down at the sea I knew was beneath me.

  VI.

  THE FOLLOWING NIGHT I knuckled down, and ever since sitting in the darkness over the North Sea I had known where I was going to start.

  I set off from home in the dusk, turned left at the crossing outside the library in Lauvslandsmoen and continued northwards. The drive took only four or five minutes and I left the car by a high granite wall. It was a quiet September evening, no one was around, only the cows in the fields. A gentle wind from the west. A storm was approaching, heading in from the sea. I am always so at peace when a storm is on the way. I don’t know why, but that was how it was this evening as well; I felt like sitting on a bench, lying down, stretching out, sleeping.

  I didn’t see any swallows even though I stood very still for a long time. Perhaps they had migrated south, or perhaps it is only in my dreams that they have nests in the church tower?

  Earlier that day I had been to see the church verger in Nodeland, and had been allowed to see the cemetery records, a leather-bound book with the number 5531 on the title page. I was given permission to take it home. It contained 616 names. Minus the stillborn babies, that is; they were merely given a number, but they were still included. All were allocated a row and a grave number. Everything was ordered and well organised. This was the closest I could get to a map of the cemetery.

  However, it transpired that I didn’t need a map. Now, I walked straight to the grave. It was the second one on the right after entering the gate. I hadn’t known beforehand that was where it would be. It was almost frightening. But there they were, Olav and Johanna, the woman who had gone into the burning house and up to the first floor for her bag. The man who had been in shock at that point, standing outside gawping like a child, and who later that morning, when the sun was rising, lay on a sofa in Knut Karlsen’s house, screaming.

  As I stood by the grave I remembered the interview that was carried out a few days afterwards. Once everything was over and Olav was back to his normal self. I remembered almost verbatim what he had said: I am so soft like that. Johanna is quite different. She’s so calm, she is.

  That was what he said, the old stonemason. He was so soft. She was so calm.

  I stayed in the cemetery until I felt the first raindrops on my hair. At length I found Ingemann and Alma thirty paces away, and beside them, Dag. They were separated by a two-metre-wide wall of earth. He had been given a black headstone, a bit smaller than the others, with room for only one name.

  Before getting into my car I walked over to Pappa, whose last wish had been to be buried in the same grave as Great-Great-Grandfather Jens Sommundsen. And so it came to be. His wish was fulfilled. It was – according to the records – grave number 102. Jens, who had faced so man
y ordeals in his life and had become so gentle as a consequence. He lost two wives. And two children. He was the type of man people sought out if they needed to unburden themselves. I think Pappa had a desire to be like him, and that was why he wished to be buried in the same grave.

  I didn’t find Kåre. According to the ledger he should have been in grave number 19, but that wasn’t much use. Grave number 19 no longer existed.

  VII.

  A FEW DAYS LATER I RANG ALFRED. Briefly I explained the reason for my call. As always when I am nervous, I struggled to find the words. He answered in a voice that was measured and distant and close all at the same time.

  ‘I remember everything as if it were yesterday,’ he said.

  We spoke for two, perhaps three, minutes about the fires. Then I told him about the TV news item in which he had been standing with his back to the camera, hosing down Sløgedal’s ravaged barn. He hadn’t seen the item himself, he told me; it had been shown on the evening of 5 June, when he had been in quite a different place. He said, ‘I wasn’t aware of anyone filming me.’

  I went to visit him and his wife Else that same evening. I took my black notebook with me, nothing else. It was a mild night, and I set off from home at a little after six. The trees had begun to bud, and this had happened almost without my noticing; some leaves were lemon-yellow, others were orange, akin to a flaming red, and then there were those the wind had blown off, which lay on the tarmac, brown and shrivelled. In the gardens forgotten apples hung from the branches, and wild rose bushes blossomed with blood-red hips which we always used to prise open with our teeth. I remembered the smooth skin, the taste on my lips and the sight of the furry seeds huddled together like tiny sleeping children.