Vivian, Live and Andrea came racing down the hill on their bikes. They waved and shouted to me as they passed, their hair flapping and their eyes scrunched up to meet the oncoming wind. I was smiling to myself long after they had passed. They were so funny, the way the immense seriousness they possessed was shattered internally by their equally immense childish glee.
I worked for a few hours on a short story about some boys who nailed a cat to a tree, then I heated a ready meal in the microwave for dinner, lay down on the sofa and read Doctor Faustus until it began to grow dark outside and I had to get ready to go out.
I hadn’t read Thomas Mann before. I liked the elaborate old-fashioned formal style, and the scenes at the beginning when the protagonists are children and the father of one of them, Adrian, shows them experiments with dead material which he brings to life, were fantastic, there was something eerie about them that at first forced itself to the front of your consciousness and then seemed to sink to the bottom. I was reminded of the open heart I had once seen on TV as a child, how it had throbbed in all that blood, like a small blind animal. It was alive and belonged to a different category from Adrian’s father’s experiments, but the blindness was the same and also the way it was subject to laws, moving according to them, not independently.
I was unable to grasp the bit about music and musical theory, but I was used to that in this kind of novel, there were always great expanses I just skimmed without understanding, more or less like the French dialogue that could suddenly crop up in some books.
I showered, changed, put a bottle of vodka in a bag and walked up to Edvald’s house, he was a fisherman, older than the others, around thirty-five, single, glad of a drop, and I stayed there until five in the morning, when I strolled back through the village with a head as empty and desolate as an unfrequented tunnel. On waking up at two the next day I remembered nothing apart from standing on the quay watching the sea birds bobbing on the water, wondering if they were asleep, and pissing against the shop wall. Everything else was gone. All the details and individual moments were lost. I had drunk a whole bottle of spirits, that was what you did here, and I was still drunk when I woke up. Writing was out of the question. Instead I lay on my bed reading, but that didn’t go very well either, my brain seemed to be soaking in a kind of yellow liquid, which I watched. If I stopped reading the feeling went away, it was as though it was me in the liquid.
At a few minutes to five there was a ring at the door. I had been asleep and jumped off the bed, it was Irene.
I opened the door.
‘Hi!’ she said with a smile. There was a bag on the ground beside her. I took two big steps back so that she couldn’t hug me.
‘Hi,’ I said. ‘Do you want to come in?’
Her eyes questioned me.
‘What is it, Karl Ove? Is there something up?’
‘Yes, actually there is,’ I said. ‘We have to talk.’
She stared at me.
‘I haven’t told you,’ I said. ‘But I was in a relationship before I came here. I received a letter from her after a few days. She finished it with me. I haven’t really got over that yet, you see. And now it’s begun to get serious with us. . But I don’t have the mental space, it’s too early, do you understand? I like you so much, but. .’
‘Are you finishing this?’ she said. ‘Before it’s even begun?’
I nodded. ‘I think so.’
‘What a shame,’ she said. ‘Just when I was starting to like you so much.’
‘Yes, I’m sorry. But it’s no good. It doesn’t feel right.’
‘Then perhaps it’s better we drop it,’ she said. ‘I wish you all the best for your life.’
She came over and hugged me. Then she grabbed her bag, turned and went to go.
‘Are you going?’ I said.
She turned her head.
‘Yes, we can’t sit here, can we. What’s the point of that?’
‘But the bus won’t be here for ages yet, will it?’
‘I’ll walk,’ she said. ‘I can get on the bus whenever it turns up.’
Watching her walk down the hill, with the bag in her hand, towards the road that ran alongside the fjord, I was full of regret. An enormous opportunity had gone begging. At the same time I was relieved that it had been so painless. Now it was over. Now there was nothing to think about.
~ ~ ~
The days became shorter, and they became shorter quickly, as though they were racing towards the darkness. The first snow arrived in mid-October, went after a few days, but the next time it fell, at the beginning of November, it came with a vengeance, day after day it tumbled down, and soon everything was packed in thick white cushions of snow, apart from the sea, which with its dark clean surface and terrible depths lay nearby like an alien and menacing presence, like a murderer who has moved into a neighbouring house and whose unheeded knife glints on the kitchen table.
The snow and the darkness changed the area beyond all recognition. When I first came, the sky had been high and luminous, the sea vast and the countryside open, nothing seemed to hold together the village with its random huddle of houses, it barely existed in its own right. Nothing stopped there, that was the feeling. Then came the snow and the darkness. The sky fell, it lay like a lid over the rooftops. The sea disappeared, its blackness merged with the blackness of the sky, no horizon was visible any longer. Even the mountains disappeared and with them the sensation of finding yourself in wide open country. What remained were the houses, which were lit day and night, always surrounded by darkness, and now the houses and the lights were the focal point to which everything gravitated.
An avalanche blocked the road, a ferry service was started, and the fact that you were only able to leave twice a day increased the feeling that this village was the only village, these people the only people. I was still getting lots of letters, and spent a lot of time answering them, but the life they represented was no longer the one that counted, the one that did was this: up in the morning, out into the snow, up the hill to school and into class. Stay there all day, in a low-roofed illuminated bunker, weighed down by the darkness, go home, go shopping, have dinner and then in the evening train in the gym with the youngest fishermen, watch TV at school, swim in the pool or sit at home reading or writing until it was so late that I could go to bed and sleep off the dead hours before the next day started.
At weekends I drank. Someone always came over and asked if I wanted to go to Finnsnes or a village a few hours away, if the road was open. When it was closed it was up to someone’s place or down to someone’s, there were always people sitting around and drinking and they always wanted company. I didn’t say no, I joined in, and a bottle of spirits over the evening was no longer the exception but the rule, so I was invariably wandering around doing things which I had forgotten by the next day. Once I fell out of the band bus, started walking away from the village instead of towards it, no one said anything until I had gone a hundred metres wearing only a shirt and a thin jacket, shivering and trembling, and then I heard their shouts, over here you twat, over here! At another party I danced with a substitute teacher from Husøya, her name was Anne, she came from somewhere in Østland and was pretty in that cold blonde way I was so attracted by, we stood smooching for ages in a corner of the corridor where the coat room was, I rang her a few days later, invited her to dinner at my place with her girlfriend and Tor Einar and Nils Erik, I tried to kiss her then but she lowered her head, she had a boyfriend, she said, she had someone else, what happened at the party should never have happened, I wasn’t her type at all, she had no explanation except that she had been drunk. And perhaps that it had been dark? I said, trying to make a joke out of it, but she didn’t laugh, she wasn’t the sort. Cold and sincere, that was Anne.