The broken drumstick was the height of pettiness for me. So this was what we were going to discuss, not the results I had achieved with Stian and Ivar?
Why choose the little picture when the bigger one existed?
I hated the little picture, and I wasn’t much good at dealing with trivialities, I had to confess. The HP instalments on the stereo had been passed on to a debt-recovery firm, and the case of the dinner suit I had rented a year before and had not returned because it was ruined — a rocket had torn the trouser leg to ribbons — had gone to court, I had been ordered to pay for it and in addition there had been a hefty fine for not appearing in court! A fine for not appearing! What did they imagine? That I would hop on a plane to Southern Norway all for the sake of a dinner suit?
But that was how it was, everyday life with its endless round of petty demands and obligations, petty conversations and arrangements, surrounded us like a fence. I lived this life, but not when I was drinking, then it was all open spaces and grand gestures, and even though the price was high, the fear afterwards great, I always paid, and only a day or two later again I would feel the itch to cast myself out into it, and sod what people said.
One night when I had been out drinking at a community centre at the other end of the island, Nils Erik was sitting up at home waiting for me.
‘You’ve got an enemy,’ he said.
‘Oh yes?’ I said from the doorway, drunk and weary.
‘I went to bed after you left. Then I was woken up by someone sitting on my bed. It was Vidar. He wanted to know where you were. He had a gun in his lap.’
‘You’re joking!’ I said. ‘Don’t mess about.’
‘It’s true. If I were you I’d lock the door. And then I’d get hold of Hege and tell her.’
‘But there’s never been anything between us!’
‘He doesn’t know that. She’s here two nights a week, minimum. That’s a lot of time to spend with someone.’
‘But for God’s sake I’m not even in the slightest bit interested!’
‘This is serious. He had a gun. I’m not kidding.’
I wasn’t frightened until the day after. I could bump into him at any moment, that was how it felt. That night I locked the door. And the following morning the first thing I did was to visit Hege and tell her what had happened.
‘He lost it,’ she said. ‘He won’t do it again. Were you scared?’
‘Me? No. I wasn’t even there. But Nils Erik was.’
‘It’s just nonsense really. He would never have used it, you know. He just wanted to frighten the living shit out of you.’
‘For what? For chatting to you?’
She nodded.
I was already looking forward to describing what had happened in the letters I wrote. It was as crazy as it was flattering; I lived in a place where people broke in brandishing a gun, and I was important enough for it to be me the nutter was after.
For the next few days I was nervous, not perhaps of being shot at, it was unpleasant enough imagining that he would probably beat me up if he got half a chance.
Did he really have a gun?
That is what I remember. But could it have been true?
Unlikely things happened in the north, things that only a year earlier would have seemed deeply alien, perhaps even impossible, and only a year later had that same deeply alien impossible quality although they seemed absolutely normal, a matter of course, when I lived there.
Nils Erik, who had brought back his diving equipment from home at Christmas and in the spring would go down to the harbour wearing a wetsuit and put on a mask, flippers and an oxygen cylinder, sit on the edge holding a harpoon and slip down into the clear transparent water, a shimmering figure who became fainter and fainter until he disappeared, only to reappear ten minutes later with a fish speared on the harpoon, which he cooked for dinner.
Did that happen?
Did he have any diving equipment?
Did he harpoon fish for dinner after school?
I have never been back, but I do sometimes have nightmares about it, really terrible nightmares which consist of me driving into the village again after all these years, nothing else. That is obviously bad enough.
Why?
Did terrible things happen there? Did I do something I shouldn’t have done? Something awful? I mean beyond staggering around drunk and out of control at night?
I once wrote a novel that took place there. I wrote it without a second thought. I paid no regard to the relationship between fiction and reality, for a world opened up when I wrote, it meant everything to me for a while, and it consisted partly of descriptions of real buildings and people, for the school in the book is the school as it was when I worked there, and partly of fictional ones, and it was only when the novel had been written and published that I began to wonder how it would be received up there in the north, by those who knew the world I described and who could see what was reality and what wasn’t. I used to lie awake at night in fear. The story had not been plucked out of the air. On the contrary, it had been in the air. I worked as a teacher for a year in the north, and when occasionally I was able to relish the thought of going to work in the morning it was because she was there.
She: Andrea.
A gaze, a hand cupping her forehead, a little foot bobbing up and down, a child who was a woman who was a child whom I liked to be in the same room with so much.
That was how it was during the months where day was night, and that was how it was when the light unveiled the room in the mornings, at first cold and shimmery, then, slowly and imperceptibly, full of warmth. The snow on the road disappeared, the enormous piles of snow dwindled, patches of shale began to peep through on the football pitch, and from all the roofs and raised surfaces water dripped and gurgled.
It was as though the light rose in the people living there too. Everywhere there was a mood of gaiety and expectation.
In one lesson Andrea and Vivian presented me with a diploma. They had chosen me as the school’s sexiest teacher.
I hung the diploma on the classroom wall and said that the competition might not have been that fierce.
They laughed.
A few days later, with the sun shining from the middle of the endlessly blue sky, I told them to go outside and write down what they saw. They could go wherever they wanted, write whatever they wanted, the sole conditions I set were that they should write down what they saw and it had to be at least two pages.
Some went down to the shop, others sat against the wall outside the school in the sun. I went behind the school building and smoked a cigarette, gazed across the football pitch, which was now almost completely free of snow, and at the glittering fjord beyond. Did the rounds of the pupils and asked how it was going. They squinted up at me.
‘It’s going fine,’ Andrea said.
‘Here comes Karl Ove,’ Vivian said slowly to show me that this was what she was writing as her pen moved across the page of her notebook. ‘He’s really sexy.’
Andrea looked away when she said that.
‘That’s what Andrea thinks anyway!’ Vivian said.
‘Don’t be so daft,’ Andrea said.
Both looked up at me and smiled. They had tied their jackets around their waists and were sitting there in T-shirts with their arms bare.
I was overcome by the same feelings that had filled me in the spring I was in the seventh class myself. When we ran after girls, held them tight, pulled up their T-shirts and fondled their breasts. The girls had screamed but never loud enough for a teacher to hear.