And then, some months later, she changed to another shipping line. The steward couldn’t remember what she gave as a reason, but when she went ashore in Singapore to catch another boat before it departed and left the busy city-state, he felt a relief so great that it made him ashamed. The new company wasn’t Norwegian and didn’t dock in Oslo or Bergen or any other Norwegian town. Nor did it dock anywhere else in Europe, but sailed between countries in South East Asia and the east coast of Africa, and leaning over the railing, watching her cool, slim back in her yellow blouse grow smaller on her way down the gangway, he had a strange feeling he was the last person to see her alive.
TOMMY ⋅ SEPTEMBER 2006
SO I RANG off. He wasn’t dead. Right.
I had seen my father only once in forty years. He was standing by the entrance to Lillestrøm station, the old one, smoking under the clock there, leaning against the wall. He had a beard he didn’t have before. He held his jacket together at the neck, it was a grey jacket, a kind of blazer, or an old, threadbare suit jacket, the way Salvation Army jackets had always looked, but it should have been a coat, a down jacket, something warm, something with a lining, it was so goddamn cold that day, it was December and way below zero, but I didn’t walk up to my father to give him my coat. No peace. Not the other cheek.
And now that too was many years ago, and he looked old even then, and I was convinced I wouldn’t know him if I went up to the police station in Upper Romerike. And yet it was my name, Tommy Berggren’s name, he had given when they must have asked after close relatives they could contact. Was he so sure that he would know me, or didn’t he have anyone else they could ring. It seemed unlikely after all the years that had passed. And what would happen if I didn’t turn up, if I just let it pass. It would have been so easy. I didn’t know what would happen. Was it an important decision I had to take, and if I didn’t go, would it trouble me for the rest of my life. I didn’t know that, either.
I got up from the desk, went into the corridor, opened the door to the office next to mine, poked my head in and said:
‘I’m going now,’ and they looked at their watches, I had only just come, they thought, a few minutes ago. ‘I’m taking the day off,’ I said, and then they said, go, just go, you’ve earned it, they said, the market won’t collapse just because Tommy Berggren takes this day off, away with you, they said, take the day off. But I could take any day off. I worked too hard, for long hours. I was well paid but my blood pressure was going haywire. I had to take pills.
And then back down to the garage in the lift, and when I put my hand on the bonnet the metal was still warm. I got in and turned the key, and the car started first time, it would have been a scandal if it didn’t, given the money I had paid for it. It was a quarter-past eight, and the police had rung me early, it was a shot in the dark on their part and they hit the mark. I drove through the centre of Oslo, alongside the railway line at first and a cream-coloured mist was drifting over the rails towards the Ekerberg Ridge, the same way I was going, like a river it rolled between the platforms and looked like something you saw only in dreams. And I drove into the tunnels beneath Vålerenga, Etterstad and further north-east, past Karihaugen, Lørenskog and the hotel called Olavsgaard, where the bar on the ground floor was known as the Last Chance Shed, and if you went home alone from that bar in the early hours, there was something wrong with your person you needed to do something about. I had been there a few times myself, several years ago, and when I left I was never alone.
After half an hour I passed the station where Jim and I had stood so often on the platform, waiting for the train so we could go to Oslo to buy records and clothes when we had money or just to walk up and down Karl Johans gate looking at girls in shorter skirts than the girls we knew had ever worn. I always had some money after the summer. Every school holiday Jonsen fixed me up with five weeks’ work at the Kallum Saw Mill, and there I measured the lengths of boards with a folding rule and wrote them down at one end of the boards with a carpenter’s pencil and loaded planks on to lorries and drove the forklift between piles of timber, and Jonsen had worked there himself for many years, at first as a saw sharpener and then at all sorts of jobs. At times he ran the mill almost single-handedly, on the floor, but also inside the office, where he wrote invoices and reminders and whatever was necessary when the boss was away, and he was away often. And I helped him as much as I could, I had a head for figures, Jonsen said, I thought maybe it was my only strong point, at school that is, I was good at maths, and at woodwork as well, and I was living with him then, from when I was thirteen, fourteen, and for a good many years he was the only adult I ever trusted, and in the end he gave me a permanent job at the mill.
But I didn’t turn off at that station. Jonsen had died a few weeks before this day in September, and Jim and his mother didn’t live there any more, they moved into Oslo as soon as Jim was discharged from hospital. Other people lived in their house now, and now the house I had lived in had burned down in May the year before, and everyone thought I had set fire to it. It was a long time before a new house was built there for a new family. The police sergeant died suddenly a couple of months after the fire. It was sad, it was something to do with his heart, it was too big apparently, and all this happened more than thirty years ago. Siri was in Asia now, in Afghanistan, in Sri Lanka or anywhere that children were in trouble, in Kosovo, in the Caucasus, she sent me a postcard now and then, and I hadn’t seen the twins when I was back in the neighbourhood to visit Jonsen, in fact I didn’t know where they were. That was not good of course, but there was nothing I could do about it. So I no longer knew anyone in Mørk I had any wish to talk to, and anyway I still had twenty kilometres to drive.
I had passed the turn-off to Lillestrøm, and the Skedsmo crossroads and Frogner, and kept up a steady hundred on the E6, you were allowed to now, the signs said 100 and then of course most people were doing 110 or more, that’s the way it always has been, I used to be one of them myself. Finally I turned off the motorway to the east in a long curve over the bridge and back west and into the village and along the main street and parked by the police station. I sat in the car for a few minutes. It was the right thing, to come. It wasn’t that. It wasn’t peace. It wasn’t the other cheek. But I felt like ringing Jim. He could have gone in with me. We could carry that weight together. He knew what my father was like. How easy it was to think of Jim now. How difficult it had been, but when I saw him on the bridge and knew him at once despite the dark, the woollen cap, it came so suddenly I didn’t have time to be anything but happy. But I shouldn’t have said what I said about expensive cars, not to Jim, not if he was now the way he was before. I looked at my watch, it was gone nine.
Behind a counter sat a uniformed officer, wearing a light blue shirt with a golden lion on his upper arm, on the sleeve, just below his shoulder, and I went over and said:
‘Good morning. My name’s Tommy Berggren. I’ve come to fetch my father.’
‘Your father,’ the man said.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘my father. His name’s Walle Berggren.’
‘Walle. Is that a “v” or a “w”.’
‘W.’
‘Then I’m sure his name is Waldemar, that’s his name, isn’t it,’ he said. ‘I’ll write Waldemar.’
‘You’d better write Waldemar, then,’ I said. ‘I don’t care what you write. Anyway, you rang me.’
The policeman turned and called to a second man sitting a bit further back in the room, by a window, in plain clothes.