Now the son doesn’t have to move the daybed, because Berit is singing. Had she been singing the whole time, he wouldn’t have needed to knock over the jar. And he wouldn’t have needed to know what he now knows—incidentally knows. We get to find out a lot of things. But much of what we learn, we forget. Even though it’s often said that we don’t forget anything. And by the time he puts the jar of green beads back on the desk behind the inkwell, he has already forgotten what the sensation of certainty meant. It was horrible, and horrible things are the easiest to forget. But they are also the easiest to remember. Before Berit started singing, he was standing by the desk and thinking that it isn’t his mother he’s been missing for the past three months. It’s the noise that came from her being alive.
Berit comes singing into the room, but when they realize it’s she, they ask her to stop. Then she tells them it’s nine o’clock. The clock hasn’t chimed, because it has stopped. And it has stopped because the key is gone. One evening, almost all the keys were gone. But out of habit the father still looks at the clock. For a month now, the father has been used to it showing half past eleven when he wakes up in the daybed in the mornings, and the same time when he turns out the lights at night.
Now it is showing three o’clock.
It’s impossible, but when he looks at the dial again, it still shows three. Then he looks from the dial to the son, who is standing by the window. And it’s by the window where the son will become so dreadfully afraid. In fact, he didn’t even realize he had gone up to it. But standing there, all of a sudden he knows he is there because he wants to look down at the glistening bull’s head, look at it and remember—because it’s three o’clock. Now it is always three. So he should stand by the window forever.
It’s three o’clock, or a few minutes past nine, and everything is ready. Berit, however, can’t seem to accept that everything is ready. She moves the cups and plates around, arranges the heap of cookies so that they look beautiful, moves the glasses from their places, and puts the wine bottle in a new spot. Not even the cake may stay where it is. She suddenly takes the cake tray and puts it on top of the plate at the fifth place setting. Since this causes one cup to be left over, she turns it over and hides it in the shadow of the large cake. But this also leaves a candle, so she puts it at the place setting where it was never meant to be. She puts everything in place. Berit always puts everything in place. She does this because she means well. When she is finished, it is still three o’clock but several minutes past nine, and instead of a table for five, it has suddenly become for four. The father sees this and keeps it to himself. But Berit doesn’t notice.
The son hasn’t noticed anything either. He has been standing with his back to everything and only heard that something had happened but not what had happened. Finally, the commotion at the table stops. Then the father coughs and says:
What are you doing at the window, Bengt?
He did ask gently and friendly, but the crushing answer is still painfully clear. There is only one answer, and Bengt already has it on the tip of his tongue: Because it’s three o’clock, he wants to say. Really, the father would say, is it three? I thought it was ten past nine. He would say this, too, very warmly because he is being nice tonight. He is afraid and when he’s afraid, he is always nice. But even though he is being nice, there is also only one answer to his other question, and even this answer is crushing: Look at the clock yourself. Don’t you see it’s three? Since Mother died, your clock is always three.
All of this should have been said, but it isn’t said. He only gives the first answer and not the others. This is partly because the father says something he isn’t supposed to say. And partly because the son becomes afraid.
Because it’s three o’clock, the son answers. And you know very well why I’m at the window at three o’clock.
This is true. The father does know. But because he knows, he doesn’t ask why the clock has been changed. In fact, he knows that he shouldn’t ask. Besides, he knows that he wouldn’t be able to prove it. So he says:
To think that they took the head down.
By head he means the gilded bull’s head above the doors of the butcher shop. It’s been gone for a few days now, probably so that it can be freshly gilded or because someone suddenly noticed that it wasn’t exactly pretty. Nevertheless, one might consider this a rather harmless statement about a harmless fact. But it terrifies the son immensely. Standing there at the window, the son looks out and notices something absolutely dreadfuclass="underline" he has failed to see that the head is gone. At once, he realizes his thoughts are deceiving him. He didn’t go to the window to see the butcher shop straight across from him. He wasn’t standing there because it was three in the afternoon, but because it’s almost a quarter past nine in the evening. He is standing there so he can see her coming.
When he realizes that this is the reason, the son feels genuine dread. Then he starts to hate not himself or his thoughts but her, the one who is coming, because she is the one who duped him with his own thoughts. And anyone who does such a thing to us deserves our hate.
For a few minutes it’s absolutely silent in the room. And amid the silence, the father starts feeling bad. And he feels bad because he’s afraid of what might happen because of his own carelessness. But he only regrets his carelessness. And nothing else. At one point in the evening, the son put his coat out so that his fiancée could brush it outside in the hallway. The father stood there feeling the pockets, explaining that he was looking for matches. When he felt nothing hard in them, nothing that felt like a weapon, he started laughing. Berit thought he was laughing at her and started imagining things. But he was laughing at his own fear, which had allowed him to believe that his son was armed. He wasn’t laughing before this. Nor was he laughing after. Because now he was imagining all the things one could hide in the pockets of a pair of pants.
As for Berit, she is merely afraid in the silence. She has nothing to be sorry about. She only has to put things in place, and she has already arranged a few things. And now that it’s so quiet, she notices for herself that there will only be four at the table, four people for tea, some who love each other and because of that love, there is someone who hates one of them and maybe more. She is afraid of hate, and she herself has never hated anyone. She has only ever liked people, because she’s also a little afraid of love. The only thing she isn’t afraid of is to like. Quietly, she moves the cups and glasses around a bit so everything will be just right. It’s a quarter past nine when she lays the matches next to the candle.
Then the son sees her coming. Alone in the bright night, which has its own natural lamps, she turns around the corner. Then she crosses the street. She is walking quickly in a short unbuttoned fur coat that glistens as it catches a ray of the twilight sun. In one hand she is holding a bouquet of flowers wrapped in tissue paper. She holds the bouquet with the flowers pointed down because it’s easier to carry it that way. With her other hand, she is clutching her coat so that it won’t blow open. However, a tiny slit remains and through it he can see she is wearing a red dress. The dress is as short as the fur coat. His mother’s red dress was long, partly because she was tall, partly because she didn’t like short dresses. She steps onto the curb, where a red bicycle is. She doesn’t have particularly long legs, but they are quite fair underneath the dark fur coat. And when she looks up at the apartment, he notices that she is blonder than he imagined. He also sees that she’s wearing a black hat over her blonde hair. Furthermore, he notices that she must have already known where they live because she looks straight at their window. He takes two steps back into the room and stands with his back to it.