Before I Burn: A Novel Read online

  She loved birds so much.

  She was quite proud of these diaries, but at the same time I recall they were highly confidential and somewhat taboo. I’d had no idea what was in them. On several occasions she said she was considering burning the whole lot and that under no circumstances would anyone get to read them until she was dead and gone.

  And that is now, of course.

  This is what she wrote when her neighbour Ester passed away:

  SUNDAY, 9 MAY 1999

  Snowing. Ester’s unconscious in hospital. God help us all.

  THURSDAY, 13 MAY

  Ascension Day. Sunny but cold. Ester died at three this afternoon. A bad day.

  FRIDAY, 14 MAY

  Sunny and cold. Painted ceiling. Yard’s deserted and quiet.

  Eight months earlier, at half past three in the morning, just after Pappa died:

  15 SEPTEMBER 1998

  Eventually he was given a morphine injection and that eased things, but he had to have another, and the pain went. He fell asleep and never woke again. The last thing he said was, Mm, that’s heaven.

  After a visit from the local priest eight years earlier:

  11 MAY 1990

  Colder. Cloudy. Austad came to visit. Rained in the evening.

  Two years before that, when Grandad suddenly fell down dead outside the courthouse:

  THURSDAY, 3 NOVEMBER

  I wake with a start. Is it true or did I dream that Dad was dead? Well, it’s true. I have such pain in my chest it feels physical. Holskog came by later in the day and is going to see to the funeral. It is all going to be as simple as possible. He asks me if I want to see him lying in the coffin. I say no. I want to remember him as the good-looking, youthful man I loved so much. Anna came. I see everything through a fog. The sun was out apparently, but I didn’t see it.

  Grief.

  FRIDAY, 4 NOVEMBER

  There were so many people here. I am so tired. It was good when night came. The tablet gave me some blessed hours of sleep. Got away from all the pain for a while.

  SUNDAY, 6 NOVEMBER

  Day feels so hard to bear. All the things I blame myself for, all the things I failed to do or say will take me to the grave. Night came as a friend with some sleep.

  She never wrote as much as she did in the year after his death. It was a natural reaction; it forced its way out and poured over the pages. Everything was possible, all she had to do was write, it came easily, and that was how she kept herself going. In fact, she was writing away her grief.

  I flicked back to 13 March 1978:

  A boy. He arrived today, a little before six o’clock. Everything went fine. Tomorrow Kristen and I are going to see him.

  That boy was me.

  She writes briefly about her visit the following day, later almost nothing about the newborn baby. I flicked forwards to April, then May. May 1978, in Norway, the month the entire country was stunned by the Inger Apenes murder in Fredrikstad, the one that was not to be solved until twenty-nine years later, in April 2007, when a man turned himself in and confessed. The month that Charlie Chaplin’s coffin turned up after vanishing into thin air from Corsier-sur-Vevey cemetery, Switzerland. The month that the 48th World Cup football championship moved to Argentinian shores. And in Kristiansand Cathedral, Cantor Bjarne Sløgedal was preparing for the annual church festival, which on this occasion was going to have an opening concert with the motet choir and Kristiansand Town Orchestra, as well as the English baritone Christopher Keyte. Later, on 3 June, Ingrid Bjoner was to sing Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater, and the festival would conclude with a concert by Kjell Baekkelund and Harald Bratlie performing Bach’s Kunst der Fuge.

  It is May and springtime in Norway. It has come late, but the weather is holding nicely, slightly overcast, sunshine. Then the heat comes with a vengeance. Leaves are out. Tractors plough the ground, turning over wings of earth. Hills go green, cows are put out to graze, swallows fly high and summer is on its way.

  III.

  WHO WAS THIS BOY WHO had just been born?

  When I went home in March, only a few days old, the whole district lay under a blanket of snow, and for as long as I can remember I have had this special relationship with snow: a desire for it to start falling, for it to fall while I am asleep, for it to come down thick over the trees, over the house, over the forest, for it to fall deep into my dreams, for the whiteness to cover everything, and when I wake in the morning, for the world to be new.

  Snow was part of what I first saw. But then came spring. And, soon after, summer.

  Who was I?

  According to Teresa, I didn’t relax when I played music. But I tried to let my fingers rest over the keys. I did what I was told. There was never any trouble with me. I was dutiful to a fault, and I never contradicted anyone. I did my homework with care, I was always prepared and always punctual. I set off on my bike to Lauvslandsmoen School at just before eight even though it took only four minutes and classes didn’t begin until half past eight. I stood in the darkness waiting for Knut, the caretaker, to open up, and as soon as he did I went into the warm corridor, put my rucksack in the classroom and patiently waited for the others to come and the school day to begin at last. Every Monday I had a singing rehearsal at the chapel in Brandsvoll. I stood in the youth choir singing all these songs that I can still remember by heart, without shoving, without pulling the girls’ hair and without forgetting the words. Every second Thursday I went to Von Youth Club and sat in the same chapel room learning about the ruinous effects of alcohol. I suppose I was eight or nine years old when I first learned that your face went green from drinking beer, and already then I knew that I must never accept a bottle of beer if a tall, pimply boy offered me one (it was always a tall, pimply boy); already I had learned that there was something called the darker side of life and that was where beer belonged. I learned that I had at all costs to avoid the darker side of life, or else beer would have me in its possession and I would be forced to drink it. I knew that I should stay on the sunny side of life, although I had little idea as to how in reality that was to be done. But it sounded like sensible advice to a nine-year-old who had always liked being outdoors in the sun.

  I wanted to be like everyone else, I didn’t want to stand out in any way, and that was why I was well behaved, that was why I did my homework, that was why I was an able pupil. There was just one snag: I often sat indoors reading. I began to cycle to the library in Lauvslandsmoen. Down around the mountain bends in Vollan, onto the plain, the wind in my hair, past Aasta’s house, across Stubekken River, past Stubrokka and across Finsåna River. I freewheeled almost the whole way there, but the ride home with a bag on the handlebars was all the harder for it. I began to read The Story of series of books. The Story of Edvard Grieg. The Story of Madame Curie. The Story of Ludwig van Beethoven. The Story of Thomas Alva Edison. These were books you could lose yourself in. I read with a passion and voracity no one understood, perhaps not even me. They were books that filled me with dreams. They were books that slowly did things to me, that made me wish myself in other places. Something inside me began to wander. At the beginning no one noticed anything, but something inside me had left a long time ago and I was in a slow outward drift. At the same time there was also something in me that wanted to stay. There was something that would remain forever in the safe and the secure, the familiar and the simple, in the region I, in my heart of hearts, loved so much. I felt so bound to this place, partly because my father was. He often sat leafing through the big, thick tome called Finsland: Gard og AEtt, the book with so many names, years of births, marriages and deaths, and he showed me how you can follow father and son, father and son down through the centuries, to his father and himself, and me, the last in the line for the time being. That was how it was. That was how the years passed and I didn’t know who the ‘me’ actually was, except that I was the last in the line. Sometimes what Ruth had said – You’re a writer, that’s what you are – came back to me. The words were still out there,
although I had completely stopped telling stories. I didn’t dare, for it might be considered that such behaviour might lead me into the ‘darker side of life’.

  This matter of the ‘sunny’ and the ‘darker’ sides of life was gradually becoming quite irksome. For this reason I began to camouflage myself. This worked fine for many years. In a way it was easy. I talked like the other kids, did as the others did. But I wasn’t like the others. I read books. In some way I became addicted to them. When I was twelve, Karin gave me permission to borrow books from the adult section of the library. It was like crossing an invisible border. I went straight from reading The Story of books to ones by Mikkjel Fønhus, which were about animals, or lonely men who went to wrack and ruin. That appealed to me, a boy who was so well behaved and always stayed on the sunny side. From then on I also read the books we had at home. In the early 1970s my parents had been members of the Book Club, the one where all the books looked identical, except for different colours and patterns on the spine. I began to read all those books that Mamma and Pappa may well have read at one time, I didn’t know whether they had or not. The exception to this was Trygve Gulbranssen’s Bjørndal trilogy, because Pappa had said I should read it. The idea that Pappa had read precisely these books gave me the motivation to tackle them, and there are no books, neither before nor since, that have gripped me in such a way. I was perhaps thirteen or fourteen, I wanted the books to go on for ever, and I shed solitary tears when the character of Old Dag died at the end of the second volume.

  A book had made me cry.

  It was unheard of. I was ashamed for a long time afterwards. I couldn’t bring myself to tell a living soul, but I wondered if the same had befallen Pappa and that was why he wanted me to read it.

  I wanted to live on the sunny side of life; I wanted that more than anything else.

  As I grew older it became apparent to other boys that I wasn’t like them. They could see it as well, of course. There was something strange, something intangible, something alien. They didn’t know where it came from, but they could see it. They knew me. It was me. Yet I was someone else. I wasn’t like them and they began to draw away. They began to avoid me, and I was left to my own devices in the breaks between lessons. They left me alone. They didn’t bother me, they didn’t say anything, they left me on my own. They were interested in other things, in fast cars and hunting and women. They began to smoke, they began to drink at the weekends, despite what had been instilled into us at the chapel some years ago. I went to parties too, I wasn’t unwelcome, but I sat there without smoking or drinking. After all, I was well behaved and proper and never did anything wrong. I felt myself that there was an aura of purity around me. Everyone talked about hunting and cars and parties, and even more drinking and booze and beer and moonshine. I sat there and was pure, and I wasn’t there. I was somewhere else. I was someone else. All these years, in reality, I had been on the move. All my life I had been someone else.

  I remember the very last New Year’s Eve I spent at someone’s house in the area. A school friend had locked himself in the toilet and then fallen asleep. I was the only person still sober, and I felt a certain responsibility to liberate him. The music was pounding away in the sitting room as I tackled the door with a screwdriver. Somehow or other I managed to release the lock, and when I burst in he was lying on the floor with his trousers round his knees and a pool of sick seeping from his mouth and over him. I locked the door at once so no one else would come in and see him like that. At length I succeeded in reviving him, removing all his clothes and placing him in the bathtub. Where I cleaned him up. We had gone to school together for nine years, we had been in Von Youth Club together, sung in the choir and been confirmed together, and now there I was, washing his lean white body as the thick vomit oozed from his mouth, down his neck, chest and stomach and into his crotch. I don’t know if he remembers that night – presumably not – yet I had a feeling that something inside him registered what was happening. Registered that someone had forced their way in, undressed him and put him in the bath, that someone was standing over him and rinsing him down, and that this someone was me. I remember that night and the scene in the bathroom because I knew there and then that it was all over. I knew I had to get away from all of this. Away from the sordid and the base, away from beer, alcohol and moonshine, away from Finsland, away from the simple and the familiar, away from the forests and everything that deep in my heart I loved. I was nineteen years old. In August I moved to Oslo and started at university, and I knew I would never be able to return.

  IV.

  FOR THE WHOLE OF MAY 1978, Grandma writes generally short mundane comments about the weather, about the dry spring, about what she and Grandad have been doing, who visited them and what she cooked. Nothing about the forest fire on 6 May, nor anything about the Tønnes’ storehouse. A brief note on 17 May about the church service, Omland’s speech, the procession and the party in the evening at Brandsvoll Community Centre.

  After the blaze in Haeråsen on 20 May there was a hiatus. No new fires for thirteen days. No suspicious persons or unfamiliar cars on the roads. It felt as though it was all over. The summer arrived with long, drowsy, sun-soaked days. The lilac trees were in blossom and their sweet fragrance hung heavily from garden to garden for those who walked outdoors in the evening.

  Perhaps, after all, it had been a dream?

  Neither Grandma nor Teresa made any special comments about the following days. Teresa received her last music pupils before the summer holidays. Grandma and Grandad went swimming for the first time in Lake Homevannet on the evening of 27 May; the water was eighteen degrees. Mamma went for slow walks pushing the pram, generally down to Lauvslandsmoen, past Aasta’s house and back again, and I slept the whole way.

  On 1 June the World Cup football championship started in Argentina, with the opening ceremony at the River Plate Stadium in Buenos Aires. Followed by the match between Poland and West Germany.

  People still talked about the three fires, but their tone had changed. There is probably some explanation, it was said. A cigarette, for example. Someone could have thrown a lit cigarette out of a car window, couldn’t they? Someone could have been inattentive, forgetful, couldn’t they? They inadvertently flicked a cigarette end out of the window. Drove on. And with all the dry weather there had been. That was the explanation. Thoughtlessness. Accidents. Of course. After all, the three fires had started by the roadside.

  Slowly, the region relaxed.

  V.

  IN THE END he found himself a job, as a fire officer at Kjevik Airport. It happened a few days after the previous fire. It was almost too good to be true. At last he had somewhere to go; the only drawback was that he had to work nights and sleep during the day. He left home at 6 p.m. and drove for up to an hour to the airport. Before starting work he took a training course over a few evenings. That was all. He knew most things already, though. The only new subject for him was emergency first aid and how to save lives. Then he paid very careful attention.

  When he applied for the job he attached a reference Ingemann had written. It said that he had almost grown up in a fire engine, that he had been involved in several emergencies and was already a better driver than his father, the fire chief. He had all the requisite qualifications, and he recommended his son without reservation.

  A few days later he was appointed.

  Alma was extremely relieved. For over a year he had been at home without a fixed occupation. Now, finally, he had a job outside the house, so it couldn’t be helped if he had to sleep all day.

  It was a lonely job. Often he was on his own in the duty office with a view of the runway and the flight approach. At around twelve, when the night was at its darkest, although it was still quite clear, he watched planes glide in from nowhere. A flashing dot that at first sight appeared to be stationary, but then the light grew and he saw that the flashing came from two small navigation lights on the wing tips. Then he heard the noise coming nearer, rolling across the sky
like thunder. A powerful strobe light was switched on. It was like a boat shining down on the sea beneath it. He counted the seconds. The aircraft fuselage hovered above the black Topdalsfjord. The wings rocked from side to side. He visualised the plane suddenly tilting over, or an engine catching alight, dragging a plume of smoke and fire across the sky before it struck the runway and skidded along.

  He stood by the window of the office and felt the glass vibrating. The wheels touched down with two tiny screeches. The plane raced along, the wing tips emitting sparks, then it slowed down, came to a halt, turned at the end of the runway and taxied to the control tower.

  This is what he did: he followed every single plane that descended from the skies. He couldn’t concentrate on anything else. He had to rub his eyes. In a way he felt tired, yet at the same time he was strangely clear-headed and alert. He rested his forehead against the glass. The planes came. They dropped from the sky. They landed. He thought he could see people sitting behind the small windows, laughing and enjoying themselves, making toasts and singing.

  A few hours later he drove home. It was already day by then, but his head was hazy, it was as though he had been to the cinema and seen a film which lasted seven long hours. Every so often he stopped the car at a deserted lay-by, opened the door, walked to the forest edge, lit a cigarette, but tossed it away after a few drags and stood for a moment or two staring into the unmoving mesh of branches.

  When he arrived home at Skinnsnes, Alma and Ingemann were sitting in the kitchen having breakfast, and as he took his place at the table he had the sense they had been up all night waiting for him. Alma sliced more bread and poured milk into his glass and steaming hot coffee into the cup next to him. It was almost like the old days when he came home from the gymnas and had news to tell them. They asked him how work had been and he said it had been fine. And that was true, of course. There wasn’t so much to tell. Nothing did happen. Planes came and went. He sat there keeping watch and nothing happened.