‘OK, OK, I’m coming!’ he called down.
When I went back mum was standing next to grandma in the middle of the floor, holding her arm and guiding her slowly towards the table, where grandad and Yngve were already seated, grandad was telling him all about the various types of salmon breeding. If he had been younger that is what he would have done, he said. One of the neighbours had done it, down below in the fjord there was a small breeding station, he was earning so much money it was as if he had won the lottery.
I sat down and poured myself a cup of tea. Kjartan came into the hallway, closed the door after him, went straight to a chair and sat down.
‘Are you studying political science?’ he asked Yngve.
‘Hi, Kjartan,’ Yngve said. As Kjartan didn’t respond to the discreet reproof, Yngve simply nodded. ‘Or comparative politics, as it’s called in Bergen. But it’s the same thing,’ Yngve said.
Kjartan returned the nod.
‘And you’re at gymnas?’ he said to me.
‘Yes,’ I said.
I stood up and pulled back a chair for grandma. She slowly lowered herself onto it, mum pushed the chair into the table, sat down on her other side while Kjartan started talking. He didn’t look at us. His hands transported bread and meat, buttered bread and raised it to his mouth, poured tea and milk into a cup and raised it to his mouth, all somehow independently of himself and what he was saying, this long unstoppable stream of words that issued from his lips. Occasionally he corrected himself, he laughed a little, he even peeked up at us, but otherwise it was though he had disappeared in order to let the speaker in him speak.
He talked about Heidegger, held a ten-minute monologue about the great German philosopher and his struggle with him, then stopped in midstream and fell quiet. Mum picked up on something he had said, asked whether that was what he meant, had she understood him correctly? He looked at her, smiled briefly and then continued his monologue. Grandad, who had previously dominated the conversations around this table, said nothing as he ate, stared down at the table in front of him, occasionally glanced around the table, a cheery expression on his face as though he had remembered something and was about to tell us what, but held back and lowered his eyes again.
‘Not everyone here has heard of Heidegger,’ Yngve said in an unexpected lull. ‘Surely there must be other topics we can discuss apart from some obscure German philosopher?’
‘Yes, I suppose there are,’ Kjartan said. ‘We can talk about the weather. But what shall we talk about then? The weather is what it always is. The weather is what existence reveals itself through. Just as we reveal ourselves through the mood we are in, through what we feel at any given moment. It’s not possible to imagine a world without weather or ourselves without feelings. But both elements automate das Man. Das Man talks about the weather as though there is nothing special about it, in other words he doesn’t see it, not even Johannes,’ Kjartan said, nodding towards grandad, ‘who spends an hour every day listening to the weather forecast, and always has done, who absorbs all the details, not even Johannes sees the weather, he just sees rain or sun, mist or sleet, but not as such, as something unique, something which reveals itself to us, through which everything else reveals itself in these moments of, well, grace perhaps. Yes, Heidegger is close to God and the divine, but he never fully embraces it, he never goes the whole way, but it’s there, in close attendance, perhaps even as a prerequisite for the thinking. What do you say, Sissel?’
‘Well, what you say sounds quasi-religious,’ she said.
Yngve, who had rolled his eyes when Kjartan had started talking about the weather, speared a piece of salmon with his fork and put it on his plate.
‘Is it going to be lamb ribs and pork belly this year as well?’ Yngve said.
Grandad looked at him.
‘Yes, it is. We’ve dried the lamb in the loft. Kjartan bought the pork yesterday.’
‘I’ve brought some aquavit with me,’ Yngve said. ‘You need that.’
Mum raised a glass of milk to grandma’s mouth. She drank. A white stream ran from the corner of her mouth.
The countryside was like a tub filled to the brim with darkness. The next morning the bottom slowly became visible as the light was poured in and seemingly diluted the darkness. It was impossible, I reflected, to witness this without feeling it involved movement. Wasn’t Lihesten, that immense vertical wall of rock, creeping closer with the daylight? Wasn’t the grey fjord rising from the depths of darkness in which it had been hidden all night? The tall birches on the other side of the meadowland, where the fence to the neighbouring property was, weren’t they advancing metre by metre?
The birches: five or six riders who had kept watch on the house all through the night and now had to pull hard on the reins to curb the restless horses beneath them.
During the morning the mist thickened again. Everything was grey, even the winter-green spruces growing on the ridge beyond the lake were grey, and everything was saturated with dampness. The fine drizzle in the air, the droplets collecting under the branches and falling to the ground with tiny, almost imperceptible, thuds, the moisture in the soil of the meadow that had once been a marsh, the squelch it gave when you trod on it, your shoes sinking in, the mud oozing over them.
At eleven I walked with Yngve to Kjartan’s car, he had borrowed it, we were going to Vågen to buy the last bits and pieces for the Christmas dinner. Sauerkraut, red cabbage, some more beer, nuts and fruit and fizzy drinks to quench the thirst that lamb ribs always produced. And some newspapers, if there were any, I needed them to kill the time until the evening, for childhood Christmases were so deeply rooted in me that I still looked forward to them.
With the wipers swishing to and fro across the windscreen we drove across the yard, through the gate and down to the road in front of the school, where we turned right and set out on the narrow two-kilometre carriageway to Vågen, which had seemed an interminable distance to me as a child. Almost every metre along the road constituted a special place, the most exciting by far, however, was the bit leading to the bridge over the river, where I used to hang over the railings for hours just looking.
By car, it took three, maybe four minutes. If I hadn’t had my previous attachment to the area I wouldn’t have noticed anything. The trees would have been any trees, the farms any farms, the bridge any bridge.
‘Kjartan’s incredible,’ Yngve said. ‘He doesn’t take any account of others at all. Or does he believe everyone’s as interested in what he says as he is?’
‘Dunno,’ I said. ‘Speaking for myself, I have no idea what he’s talking about. Do you?’
‘A bit,’ Yngve said. ‘But it’s not as impressive as it sounds. It’s just a question of reading.’
He turned in and parked, we walked towards the co-op shop. A woman in a long raincoat came out of the door clutching a small child. She was startled to see us.
‘Goodness, Yngve! Is that you!’ she said.
Who was she?
They hugged.
‘This is my brother, Karl Ove,’ Yngve said.
‘Ingegerd,’ she said, sticking out a hand.
I smiled. Her child clung to her.
‘You’ve got grandparents here,’ she said. ‘Now I remember. How funny to see you here!’
I wandered across and gazed over Vågen. The water was perfectly still. Some boats were moored to buoys, which glowed red in the middle of the fjord in all the grey. When we were small the Bergen boat used to dock here. Once we had caught it at night, slept on a hard bench, there had been a smell of petrol and coffee and sea, what an adventure it had been. Kommandøren it had been called. Now the hurtigbåt, the express boat, had superseded it. The boat didn’t stop here any more.