‘This is not for real,’ I say.
‘What isn’t?’
‘All this. Henrik with his French, Twisty and his booklets, the whole school.’
‘Sure it is,’ Arvid says.
We have Rønning, the deputy headmaster, for English. He is the only teacher I like. He is sort of a show-off in his West-Norwegian way, parading the classroom pulling at his red braces, his jacket dangling from his shoulders, his grey hair whirling round his head, and he speaks English with a heavy Stord Island accent. He loves for us to laugh at his jokes, but we don’t understand them. He is passionate about his subject, though, and feeds us extra reading; in his office the spirit duplicator works overtime. It will soon be on its knees with metal fatigue. When he comes down the corridors, a cloying smell of spirit drifts behind him.
Our textbook is the Anglo-American Reader. The English in it is tiresome, with a faint taste of bog water at the edges, but the American has a sky above it that I feel comfortable with. We are reading about the Melting Pot. The Golden America, the land of freedom and equality, the haven for the homeless and persecuted, the melon they all want a slice of, the fields they all want to plough. Poor folk from Hardanger in Norway, the Abruzzi in Italy, and the Ukraine fleeing from landowners, Cossacks and the taxman, the bastards who bleed the smallholder dry until there is nothing left to eat except granite, and if you are not an Indian or a Negro, you may have a chance to see a future ahead of you and a patch of land on the prairie. I am not an idiot, I know about the napalm in Vietnam, I know about Wounded Knee and the Ku Klux Klan; for as long as I have lived I have seen the race riots on TV. They shot Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, I have read Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice and felt the flames of his hatred. But there is something about those people. They are for real. They step out of the shadows and set out on journeys never to return. A girl in the book writes about her grandmother coming to America on board the SS Imperator sailing past the Statue of Liberty to Ellis Island. There is winter in the air, and she walks down the gang plank in her colourful clothes and her black hair to the gates where the wheat is separated from the chaff, snowflakes drifting, and she is cold and the girl writes: the snow like stars in the night of her hair. She is happy with that sentence, and so am I. I turn to Arvid and say:
‘Isn’t it good?’ He reads the piece twice and looks up at me.
‘Purple prose,’ he says.
‘What the hell do you mean by that?’
‘Too much. Sentimental. US propaganda.’
‘But, for Christ’s sake, don’t you get it? Those people just took off, burned all their bridges and this girl is trying to show how afraid they were, and at the same time how grand their deed was.’
‘Maybe, but it’s still purple prose.’
I snatch the book back.
‘Sometimes, Arvid, Christ,’ I say, and read on to myself. Maybe he is right, maybe it is purple prose, but I like it.
‘Is what you’re doing of any importance to the rest of us?’ Rønning says. He’s standing by the dais with his thumbs tugging at his braces, gazing down the row of desks.
‘There was just something in the text. I thought it was good. I didn’t mean to interrupt.’
‘I see. Perhaps you might like to read it aloud for us?’ It’s like he’s rolling his ‘r’s even more than usual today. I look at him pleadingly, but he grins and splays his hands. Hell. I read. I read the whole page and finish with that sentence, the grandmother almost chokes me, my voice cracks, and everyone turns to look at me. I’m supposed to be the tough guy in the class, the strongest, the best athlete and generally as dour as shit. It just turns out that way, I don’t know why. I stare back, they think I am strange, it’s fine by me, they’re like mist, I hardly see them. Arvid’s and Venke’s faces are the only ones I can really make out. There is a shine in Venke’s eyes.
‘That’s not bad at all,’ Rønning says.
‘Forget it,’ I say.
After the lesson Rønning stops me at the door. He waits until everyone has left and says, ‘I am sorry. I shouldn’t have pushed you into reading aloud. I wasn’t aware it meant so much to you.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Well that’s good then. Is everything OK with you? You have been a little, what shall I say, reserved these days.’ He smiles. I shrug.
‘I think maybe I’m going to stop coming here.’
‘Now? Well into your final year? Well, school isn’t everything. Don’t think I believe that. There are many other things you can do. Perhaps you need a break. Sleep on it for a week, then come to me, and we can talk about it.’
‘OK, that’s fine,’ I say.
‘By the way, I have a book at home about Ellis Island. It might be of interest to you.’
9
WHEN WE PUT Egil in his grave, it was Easter. Kari was supposed to move to Kløfta the week before. There had been some fine days, it was spring for real, nature was going berserk, and her boyfriend was standing in the sun outside the block with his lorry waiting. He couldn’t be bothered helping us, and that was just fine with me. I couldn’t stand either him or his lorry. I went to my room to fetch something I had bought for Kari, an old Supremes album I had got hold of at Ringstrøm’s Records, and I was standing by the window looking down at him. He was leaning against the red bonnet smoking, flicking the ash from his cigarette, and running his hand through his Brylcreemed hair. Then he stubbed out the butt on the footpath and looked up at the windows with sleepy eyes and a sullen smile. He was James Dean, and he had made this long trek to rescue Kari from suburban hell.
Egil came out of the stairway and walked up to the lorry with a large box in his arms. He’d been in a lot of trouble over the last year, and now he had stayed close to home for a while, but I could see how he was restless, he had this scowl on his face. He shoved the box on to the back of the lorry and the two of them started chatting. Egil was keen and unable to stand still, and after a few minutes he was sitting behind the wheel and had started the engine. It began to roll down Beverveien and rounded the bend at the end of the road. When I came out with Kari, he had driven the whole loop and was on his way back down from the top. I gave Kari the record.
‘Here you are,’ I said. ‘Listen to this and dream about the old days.’ She looked at me in surprise and was so happy that she hugged me right in front of her boyfriend.
‘Silly you. Thank you so very much. You think of everyone, don’t you?’
‘Yuk,’ I said. I didn’t want anyone to think that about me. It wasn’t even true. But she was my sister, and she had always been OK.
‘Don’t get married straight away,’ I said. ‘Think about it first,’ and she laughed, but her boyfriend sneered, and when the lorry was back in place, I walked up close to him and brushed him pretty hard with my shoulder as I hurled a bag of clothes on to the back.
‘Hell,’ he said, and spun round, but I didn’t even look at him, just kept him behind me, and he had to stand there panting on his own.
Egil stepped out of the cabin. He was excited, his whole body shaking.
‘Cool wheels,’ he said, gazing at Kari’s guy as though he really was James Dean, and right away James Dean was in a much better mood and combed his hand through his greasy hair and said:
‘Of course it’s cool, I fixed it and did the paint job myself. You know, Egil, if it’s a job you’re after, there’s enough to do around my place.’
‘Do you mean that?’ Egil said, and was even more excited.