I change my trousers in the bedroom. I make the bed and take my dirty clothes out to be washed, then vacuum the carpet and sort the heap of books into two piles on the bedside table with Tranströmer’s Baltics on top. “It was before the time of radio masts./ Grandfather had just become a pilot.”
I must have read it ten times. It makes me think of my own grandfather who was a joiner, not a pilot, but who went down to the harbour every single day for most of his life and along the quay to look out on the sea and the changing weather towards the lighthouse far out where everything ended. He did not keep a log-book, but took careful note of ships arriving and ships departing, and at regular intervals I was on board one of them. He is dead now and has been for ten years, but I miss his silence and his dry windblown eyes and the town where he lived with him in it and the bottle of Aalborg aquavit he brought across the sea every Christmas. Lifeline schnapps, we called it.
While I’ve been doing all this I have had my pea jacket on. Now I take it off and go out on the balcony in the cold with a brush and a little cold coffee in a cup, and I brush away at the dried stains from last night, splash a little coffee on them and brush some more. It’s a trick I learned from my mother, and the jacket comes perfectly clean. Not once do I look over at the window in the next block.
I switch all the lights off when I leave, feel the keys in my pocket and take the stairs two floors down to the garage under the block. For I do have a car, even though I forget sometimes. It is a thirteen-year-old white Mazda 929, a station wagon, and the first thing one of my neighbours said when I parked it in front of the block, was “Have you bought yourself an immigrant’s car?”
In fact, I did buy it from a Pakistani in Tveita for 15,000 kroner, but I did not know that what I did was not quite kosher. I don’t keep up with car fashions. The Mazda is really good enough, a bit rusty here and there, but it has a strong motor and holds the road well, and is as soft to drive as an American car. I haven’t used it for a fortnight, so I walk round it to check whether there is a flat tyre, but everything seems fine except that someone has written “Wash me” in the dust on the bonnet. I get in and it starts at the first try as it always does, and I can drive straight out as the garage door has more or less fallen apart and stays open the whole time.
I do what the writing tells me. I drive to the Texaco station on the main road and pay fifty-five kroner for a wash with wax, buy a newspaper, then drive into position and sit in the car reading the arts section by the overhead light. That is soon done even with cheap glasses at this time of year, and the sports pages are boring now at the end of the skiing season before the football gets going. Now everyone is just waiting, and the water splashes the windows and shuts out the view, and the brushes rumble and sweep over the car, and they’re green and blue and make me want to sleep, and if I wanted to sleep I could do that in a den like this, where I cannot be expected to do anything but wait.
But then the water stops, the brushes pull back and stop rotating, and hang there like the dead animals hunted for their fur that I’ve seen in Helge Ingstad’s books. The door in front of me bangs open, a panel lights up over the door saying “Drive out” and I put the car into gear and it starts without problems. It is unpleasantly light outside, and I am so hungry now that my body feels numb. I had really intended to drive to a shop just a bit further away than my own Co-op to avoid the neighbours, but I cannot find one I like the look of, just drive past one place after another until I am nearly in Lillestrøm. Then I take the right turn towards Enebakk immediately before the big bridge, up the long hill through Fjerdingby, and there are several shops along the road, but I do not stop, and then there is nothing but farms and fields and forest. The road runs beside the big lake in wide curves, and sometimes you see it and sometimes you don’t. Everything is in black and white like in films from the forties, the spruces are black, the snow is white and the ice still covers the lake right across to the other side where there is forest as well, and farms and grey-white fields and then forest again as far as the eye can see. This is what I like, just driving here, and it starts to snow, a few small specks at first, and then suddenly huge flakes that stick to the windscreen, and I turn the wipers on. One makes a scraping sound each time it moves to the left, but that does not matter. I turn them up to full speed and push my hand under my jacket and shirt and in to my bare chest and feel them beat in time with my heart. The snow whips against the glass and then it is swept away, hits the glass and is swept away, I drum on the gear lever and hum a tune, the whole car thumps in the same rhythm, and so does everything outside, and I feel so light, light, and I do not think of my brother or Mrs Grinde at all.
I drive through Kirkebygda where the writer Jens Bjørneboe lived and wrote The Dream and the Wheel, across the little river beyond the schoolhouse, past the road to the manor house where Ragnhild Jølsen of that book was born, and just after that I hit the sharp curve, and to keep up the rhythm I do not brake. This makes the car slide to the left, and as I keep a firm grip on the wheel and refuse to change course, the rear end wags and lurches, and I end up almost beam on across the road, and had there been a car coming the other way that would have meant trouble. But there isn’t. I hold my breath and force the car into position, tyres screeching, and the snow turns into rain, the mercury’s rising, spring must be on its way, I can feel it in my bones. Then the road straightens out along a flat stretch, and I cut the speed and lay the backs of both hands against the wheel so my fingers are free to roll a cigarette while I keep driving and peer out into the rain. The first drag tastes good, but the next one makes me feel so sick and dizzy that I stop the car at once, open the door and stagger out on to the verge, and stand there throwing up. There is not much in my stomach, but cramps take a violent hold and I stay there bent over the ditch in the rain bellowing like a cow and cannot stop.
“Holy shit,” I say aloud in one of the intervals, “fucking misery.” Tears pour down as I brace knees and feel the rain running down my neck. The fit finally passes, I straighten my back and see there is a house on a lawn just on the other side of the ditch. Behind it there is thick forest, almost flattened by something I could have written “was like steaming rain”. On the first floor a small boy stands with his nose to the windowpane, mouth half open, staring at me with eyes almost out of his head. For a few seconds we just look at each other, he from the circle and I from the stage, and then I place my right hand on my stomach, hold the left one to the side and make a deep bow with the water streaming from my hair.
“Da capo,” I mumble, stick my finger down my throat and vomit again. My stomach contracts, I cough and the pain in my side is suddenly back, oh, how welcome, old friend. My balance falters, but I jerk myself into a standing position, and now the boy in the upstairs window has both hands to his temples and his lips clenched into a line. I wipe my mouth and retreat until I feel the car against my back, raise my hand and start to wave and go on doing that until I can see he cannot help himself and waves back, and then his mother emerges from the dark room behind him. She bends forward to find out who he is waving to, and then I go around the car and get in.