But I don’t see how it can be fine out here, or going anywhere but down the drain. Something must have happened, and I cannot ask. Signe with the large bosom and her large smile, Signe with her soft hands on her way up to the first floor where I was lying in bed that last summer, full of yellow fever and not able to sleep. Their children had moved out a long time ago, so the whole room was mine. Her white shift in the grey from the skylight, Signe with her white gentle words, Signe so kind. But I cannot ask. Once I sent a card, but there was no answer.
‘You see, somehow she fell ill. Well, let’s not talk about that now. Jesus, it’s nice to see you again, Audun. How’s your mother getting on down there?’
‘A lot better,’ I say. ‘A heck of a lot better.’
He looks at me with those fiercely blue eyes. ‘Yes, I guess she is.’ He strokes his chin and his bristles rasp loud enough for all of us to hear. He clears his throat takes another deep breath and says:
‘You know, your father was here a month ago. Strange you should come now. He was out of here, he said. He left his accordion, it was too heavy to carry with him. He said he was going far. I could just keep it, he didn’t give a shit, if you’ll pardon the expression. There it is.’ He points to a corner of the large kitchen. All the junk is still there, I remember a lot of it, and straight away I recognise the worn, brown case. I go over and open the case and there it is, black and white with red stripes on the bellows, a Paolo Soprani. I bend down and run my fingers across the keys as if the notes might come, but they don’t. For people with thick blood, I think. I look up at Leif. He is looking at me.
‘He didn’t look too friendly when he left, Audun, I have to say. But I don’t know what to do with that squeezebox. None of us here can play. Perhaps you could take it with you? That would be good. Then it would stay in the family, like.’
He crossed the line there speaking of family, and he knows it, so I don’t answer. I look down at the accordion.
‘Fine,’ I say, ‘we’ll take it with us,’ and Arvid, who has heard about this accordion, is about to speak, but then he catches himself before the words come out. The air in the kitchen goes quiet, and we stand there hardly daring to breathe. I think fast and say:
‘What happened to Toughie, the fox you kept on a chain behind the barn?’
‘Oh him,’ Leif says and tells the story of the fox that thought he was a dog and was kept on a rope behind the barn, and the hens refused to sit on their eggs as long as he was there. But everybody loved that fox and didn’t want to let him go, so Leif had to brood the eggs in his armpits and in the end Signe, Bjørn and all the guests were walking around with eggs in their armpits until they had aches and pains all over. Dinner was especially difficult, Leif says, and demonstrates how they had to sit at the table with their arms down by their sides, all posh like, and hold their knives and forks like aristocrats.
‘In the end we had better manners than the Sun King,’ Leif says, and Arvid laughs, and Ingrid hums by her bench, and as we leave I grab the case by the handle and promise to be back soon now that I have my driver’s licence.
We put the accordion on the rear seat and drive out of the yard. After the pool of mud Arvid says:
‘Why did you take the accordion?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You can’t even play it.’
‘I’m telling you, I don’t know.’
‘I don’t think your mother will be too happy about it, now that you know he’s close by. Do you believe in fate now or what?’
‘For fuck’s sake, I don’t know, I keep telling you! Goddamnit, why can’t you leave me in peace!’ I come out of the drive and turn too sharply round the bend and hit a fence post and it scrapes against the door, and I jump on the brakes. We both sit there. Arvid’s face is white.
‘Oh shit, I’m sorry,’ I say.
‘It was my fault. I should’ve kept my mouth shut.’
We open the doors. Leif’s house is on the opposite side of a hollow, but if anyone is standing in the window, I can’t see them. The car door is not as bad as I thought, but there is quite a scratch in the paintwork. But no dent. Arvid runs his hand along the door.
‘It won’t be cheap. The whole door will have to be resprayed.’
‘I can pay. I’m going to stop anyway,’ I say.
‘Stop what?’
‘Stop school.’
‘That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. You’ve got less than a year left. Weren’t you going to be a writer?’
‘You won’t be a writer just because you finish school. Did Jack London finish school? Did Gorky? Or Lo-Johansson or Nexø, or Sandemose, or anyone else worth reading?’
‘For Christ’s sake, Audun, that was a hundred years ago! No one went to school for long then! Today everybody does!’
‘Not me. I’m going to get a job.’
Arvid sits down in the ditch and starts throwing stones into the field, small ones at first and then bigger and bigger and he gets up and finds himself a big piece of rock and heaves it with both hands as far and as hard as he can and he yells:
‘Goddamnit!’ He turns. ‘What’s happening here?’ he says.
‘Nothing. I’ll just quit school.’
‘It’s not only that,’ he says, ‘and you know it.’
6
EGIL WAS TWO years younger than me, and I am pretty certain I can remember when he was born. Or maybe I am mixing it up with stories Kari has told me.
One story goes like this.
Kari and I are alone at home. She is six and is supposed to be looking after me. My mother and father are away. She is at Stensby hospital having Egil, but I don’t understand that, only that both of them are away and Kari is with me, and anyway this is not the first time. It’s funny the things you don’t forget. There is a knock on the living-room window and I turn and see my father’s face through the glass. He looks strange. He is waving one hand and making faces, and his face fills the window. The door is locked, and he has lost his key. Kari goes to open it. She doesn’t really want to. I hear a bang and run into the hall and see my father lying face down on the floor. He is laughing into the floorboards. I hurry over and sit on his back, but then he gets up and I fall off, hitting my shoulder on the shoe rack. It hurts. I scream, but he doesn’t care. He goes over to the cupboard in the living room, it is called grandfather’s cabinet, I already know that. He bursts into laughter and says:
‘Now there are three of you. We have to celebrate.’ I don’t understand what he means, but he takes the pistol from the cupboard. I must have seen it before. It has been one object among many; now it is different. He lifts his arm and fires three shots into the ceiling. We cover our ears, the loud cracks make our bodies shake.
‘I’ll never forget it,’ Kari says. ‘I thought my head would explode.’ We have been to the Grorud Cemetery and are walking along Trondhjemsveien on our way home. My mother is a few steps behind us, she’s crying and wants to be left alone. It’s Egil’s sixteenth birthday. It’s a Friday in October. I have taken the day off from school, and when we get home, Jussi Björling will be on the turntable. She always plays opera when something is wrong, she plays opera when nothing is wrong, she always plays opera no matter what. Sometimes she locks the door, turns the volume up and stands on a chair conducting with her eyes closed. I have seen her through the window on my way from friends’ houses at Linderud, I have looked across the little hollow with the stream and into our apartment on the third floor and seen how my mother is standing on a chair conducting the music I cannot hear, and wondered how many other people have seen her.