‘You’re getting pork fat in your hair,’ I said, but she wasn’t listening, she stroked her hand across her face, and it left dark stripes on her cheek. It looked like warpaint.
‘I have to go to Aker Hospital to identify him. I could wait until after Christmas, but I’d rather do it now and get it over with. The funeral and all that will have to be sorted out. I don’t know how. You’ll come with me, Audun.’
‘No way,’ I said. She looked at me then, in her new way. I didn’t like it. I stood up, and Jack London fell and slid down the stairs, the stout photograph in black and white on the jacket knocking against the rails. The book belonged to Arvid’s father, they never ran out of stuff at their place, and I bent down to save the cover, and as I stood up, I could see how angry she was.
‘Oh yes you will!’ she said. ‘It’s your father, for God’s sake!’
‘Hell, I don’t have a father,’ I mumbled, and I meant it, but then she was towering over me, unbending and hard, and she forced me up the stairs, step by step, grabbing my hair.
‘Now we’ve both got pork in our hair,’ I said, but she was deaf in that ear.
‘I am not doing this on my own, Audun. You’re eighteen years old and a grown-up now, and you’ve seen worse. If I can do this, so can you.’
And of course she was right.
‘Fine,’ I said, ‘I’ll come with you. I can ring Arvid’s father and ask if I can borrow his car. That’d be quicker.’
‘That would be great,’ she said and let go of my hair.
I rang and told him what had happened, and he listened quietly until I had finished the story. I was starting to like the man, and then he said:
‘That’s fine, Audun. You just come and get it. I’ll leave the key in the car, so all you have to do is drive off. But forgive my asking, what’s up with you lot?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what’s up with us. Things just are what they are.’
‘Well, fine then, you give my regards to your mother and tell her Happy Christmas and all good wishes.’
‘Thank you,’ I said.
It’s not far to Aker Hospital. We drove ten minutes down a very quiet Trondhjemsveien, and of course it was him. I never doubted it. What my mother was thinking, I do not know, but there we were, standing in front of the steel table with his body on it, looking at the white face, and neither of us had really seen it for more than five years. We didn’t cry, and I don’t know why we should have. My mother gave the man in the white coat a nod and said yes, that is Tormod Sletten, and then she leaned over my father and stroked his hair.
‘You were a stylish man. No one can take that away from you,’ she said, and turning to me, she said, ‘You’re starting to look like him, Audun, but of course, you’ve got my hair. There’s no denying that.’ She smiled and stroked my hair, too, and my cheek, and then it got a little awkward. Luckily she started talking to the white coat about the funeral, he could arrange it for the 29th he said, and I made for the wall and leaned against it and looked over at the table in the middle of the tiled floor. He was different now, his hair was grey, almost white, and his face was white, smooth even, and the furrows down his cheeks were not so distinct. Maybe they have done something to him, I thought, and carefully passed my hand over my own face.
As we left they gave us a bag with his personal effects. ‘We had to confiscate the gun,’ the doctor said. ‘We searched through his things, but couldn’t find a licence for it.’
‘That’s fine by me,’ my mother said. She gave me the bag, and we walked along the corridors. We could hear our footsteps between the walls the whole way down, and there were red and green Christmas decorations hanging from every lamp, and on the door out there was a huge wreath with a bell. Back behind the wheel, I opened the bag and looked into it. There wasn’t much: his knife, a few keys he had kept for long-forgotten doors, two fifty-kroner notes and a small black and white photograph. I picked it up, and the woman in it, I had never seen before. She had short, black hair and was sitting on a rock by a lake, maybe Aurtjern, the bay seemed familiar to me. Marianne it said on the back in his messy handwriting. I sat looking at the name, and then it came all the way back to me.
‘Marana,’ I said.
My mother leaned over the handbrake to study the photograph.
‘Well, I never, that’s Marianne Røkken,’ she said. ‘She was in my class at school. We were friends for a few years. She too fell in love with your father. I remember well when that photo was taken, because I was the one who took it. Fancy him carrying it around. That man!’ She shook her head, and I looked more closely at the photo and realised it was the clothes that made her seem like a woman. She was probably no older than I am now. And it struck me that there were things in my mother’s and father’s lives that I would never get to know.
It was a strange Christmas Eve. When we came back from Aker Hospital, Kari was in the kitchen talking to Roberto. He had stopped by with presents and silly jokes, singing arias, and had just started a rendering of ‘Jerusalem’ that was the worst I had ever heard. He was making more noise than the four of us put together. I drew Kari aside and told her what had happened, and we agreed not to tell what we’d known the last few months. There was enough going on already.
At last the roast pork was in the oven. The aroma spread slowly up to the first floor and mingled with the sauerkraut and the burning candle wax, and the dead man’s name was never mentioned. At three o’clock I watched Disney’s Christmas programme as I always do.
Last year there were only the two of us at the table, and I cannot deny it felt a little dreary. This time the table was crowded: Kari sitting with her little one, and Alf had come down to be with his daughter on Christmas Eve, he was loaded with presents, but we were not impressed, and Olav, my mother’s new boyfriend, rang the doorbell at five sharp. He brought plastic bags almost bursting at the seams and was visibly nervous. I decided to be nice and shook his hand. That helped a little, he started to relax, and my mother giggled and gave me a hug. He wasn’t exactly my type, pretty plump all round and almost bald, but his arms bulged under his shirt, and when he smiled he even looked a little bright. I asked him if he read books, and he said he liked Mikkjel Fønhus. That was fine with me, I had read a few myself, and they were not bad. He was a printer at Aas & Wahl and after a few aquavits that gave us enough to talk about. But watching my mother shimmy round the table, sweaty and smiling as I’d never seen her smile before, I knew that there was only room for one of us. Then and there I decided to pay old Abrahamsen a visit, once this weekend was over. He had a spare room, and maybe he could use the extra money.
And then the 29th comes around. At Grorud Cemetery, the gravedigger has been thawing the ground for two days. I get up at the crack of dawn and start reading The Apache Indians by Helge Ingstad. Arvid gave it to me for Christmas. It’s a nice-looking edition from Gyldendal’s travel series, which he stumbled across in a second-hand bookshop, and there are several dedications on the inside leaf as well as the one to me. One of them says: To Arvid from Minna, Arthur and the boys. He liked that, and we have made up stories about who these people might be. But it’s hard to concentrate even though Ingstad could really write. It’s dark outside, and I can hear Olav snoring in the room next to mine, and my mother talking in her sleep. It drives me down to the kitchen. It’s dark there, too. I light a few candles and open the lid on the stove, put water on for coffee and flick through the book until the water is boiling. Then I sit down at the table and smoke and drink coffee and watch the coming day. The smell is different, there is someone breathing in every room, I hear little one whimpering in the one next to the kitchen. Soon she’ll be awake and crying. In the glow from the candles, I take out the photograph of Marianne and look at it. The face is familiar now. She is only eighteen years old in the photograph, and it’s summer, and if I ever get to write anything solid and good, I will start with that photograph.