“In my handbag.”
I put on my outdoor things and went out, opened the garage door, grabbed the shovel, knotted the scarf around my face, and went down to the intersection. Even with my back to the snow sweeping across the fields it stung my eyes and cheeks as I dug at the pile of new snow and the old clumps. After a few minutes I heard a bang, faraway and muffled, as if inside a room, and raised my head in time to see a flash of light from a tiny explosion in the depths of the windswept darkness. It must have been Tom and Per and their father testing the rockets they had bought. That may have excited them, but it drained me, for the only thing the tiny flash had done was intensify the feeling of uneventfulness that followed. There was not a car, not a soul around, just the murky forest, the driving snow, the motionless ribbon of light along the road. The darkness in the valley below. The scraping of the shovel’s metal blade against the rock-hard lumps of compressed snow, my own breathing, somehow amplified by the scarf tightly trussed around my hat and ears.
When I had finished I went back up to the garage, replaced the shovel, found the four torches in the bag, lit them one by one in the dark, not without pleasure, for the flames were so gentle, and the blue in them rose and sank according to which way the current of air carried them. I considered for a moment what positions would be best and concluded that two should be placed on the front doorstep and two on top of the wall in front of the barn.
I had hardly put the torches out, the two on the wall with a small protective shield of snow behind them, and closed the garage door, when I heard a car coming around the bend below the house. I opened the garage door again and hurried into the house, I had to be completely ready before they came, with no visible signs of my recent activities. This little obsession grew so strong in me that I ran into the bathroom at full tilt, grabbed a towel, and dried my boots on it, so that the fresh snow would not be seen on them in the hall, after which I took off my outdoor clothes, that is, coat, hat, scarf, and mittens, in my room. Going downstairs, I saw the car idling outside, with the red taillights lit. My grandfather was waiting with his hand on the car door as my grandmother climbed out.
When I was at home on my own, every room had its own character, and though not directly hostile to me they were not exactly welcoming, either. It was more as if they did not want to subordinate themselves to me, but wanted to exist in their own right, with their own individual walls, floors, ceilings, skirting boards, yawning windows. I was aware of a deadness about the rooms, that was what made me uncomfortable, by which I mean not dead in the sense of life having ceased, but rather life being absent, the way that life is absent from a rock, a glass of water, a book. The presence of our cat, Mefisto, was not strong enough to dispel this, I just saw the cat in the yawning room; however, were a person to come in, even if it were only a small baby, the yawning room was gone. My father filled the rooms with disquiet, my mother filled them with gentleness, patience, melancholy, and on occasion, if she came home from work and was tired, also with a faint yet noticeable undercurrent of irritability. Per, who never ventured farther than the front hall, filled it with happiness, expectation, and submission. Jan Vidar, who was so far the only person outside my family to have been in my room, filled it with obstinacy, ambition, and friendliness. It was interesting when several people were present because there wasn’t any space for the sway of more than one, at most two wills in a room, and it was not always the strongest that was the most obvious. Per’s submissiveness, for example, the politeness he displayed to adults, was at times stronger than my father’s lupine nature, such as when he came in, barely nodding to Per as he walked past. But it was rare there was anyone at home apart from us. The exception was visits by my father’s parents and his brother Gunnar and family. They came every so often, perhaps seven or eight times a year, and I always looked forward to their arrival with pleasure. Partly because the person my grandmother had been for me while I was growing up had not changed to take account of the person I was now, and the radiance that emanated from her — which was not so much a result of the presents she always brought but stemmed from her genuine love of children — still shone in my image of her. But my pleasure was partly due to my father always perking up for such events. He became more friendly towards me, took me into his confidence, so to speak, and regarded me as someone to be considered, but this was not the most important thing, for this friendliness he showed to his son was merely one aspect of a greater magnanimity that infused him on such occasions: he became charming, witty, knowledgeable, and entertaining, which in a way justified the fact that I had such mixed emotions about him and was so preoccupied with them.
When they came into the porch, Mom opened the door to meet them.
“Hello, and lovely to see you!” she said.
“Hello, Sissel,” said Grandad.
“What foul weather!” Grandma said. “Have you ever seen anything like it? But the torches were great, I must say.”
“Let me take your coats,” Mom said.
Grandma was wearing a dark, round fur hat, which she took off and slapped against her hand a few times to shake off the snow, and a dark fur coat, which she passed to Mom with the hat.
“Good thing you came to pick us up,” she said, turning to Dad. “We certainly couldn’t have driven in this weather.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Grandad said. “But it is quite a distance, and a windy road as well.”
Grandma came into the hall, straightened her dress with her hands, and adjusted her hair.
“So there you are!” she said to me with a quick smile.
“Hello,” I said.
Behind her came Granddad, carrying his gray coat. Mom took a stride past Grandma and grabbed it, hung it on the hall stand beside the mirror under the stairs. Outside, Dad came into view; he was kicking the snow off his shoes against the side of the doorstep.
“Hello there, you,” Grandad said. “Your father says you’re going to a New Year’s Eve party.”
“That’s right,” I said.
“How you children have grown,” Grandma said. “Just imagine, a New Year’s Eve party.”
“Yes, seems like we’re not good enough anymore,” Dad said from the hall. He ran his hand through his hair, shook his head a couple of times.
“Shall we go into the living room?” Mom said.
I followed them in, sat in the wicker chair by the garden door as they took a seat on the sofa. Dad’s heavy footsteps could be heard as he went upstairs, and then above the ceiling at the back of the living room, where his bedroom was.
“I’ll go and put some coffee on,” Mom said, getting up. The ensuing silence in the room after she had gone became my responsibility.
“Erling’s in Trondheim, isn’t he?” I said.
“I suppose he is, yes,” Grandma said. “They should be at home relaxing this evening.”
She was wearing a blue silk dress with a black pattern on her chest. White pearls in her ears, gold chain around her neck. Her hair was dark, it must have been dyed, but I wasn’t sure, because if it was, why wasn’t the gray lock over her forehead dyed? She wasn’t fat, or even plump, yet somehow she still had a full figure. Her movements, always so lively, were in marked contrast to this. But what you noticed when you saw my grandmother, what struck you first about her, was her eyes. They were light blue and crystal clear, and whether it was because of their unusual color or because it contrasted with her otherwise dark appearance, they seemed almost artificial, as if they were made of stone. My father’s eyes were exactly the same, and gave the same impression. Apart from her love for children, her other most prominent quality was her green thumb. When we visited her during the summer she was generally in the garden and when I thought about her it was often in a garden setting. Wearing gloves, her hair ruffled by the wind, walking across the lawn with an armful of dry twigs to be burnt, or kneeling in front of a little hole she had just dug, carefully loosening the bag around the roots to plant a tiny tree, or glancing over her shoulder to check that the sprinkler has started to rotate as she turns on the tap under the veranda and then standing with her hands on her hips enjoying the sight of the water being hurled into the air, sparkling in the sunlight. Or crouching on the slope behind the house to weed the beds that had been made in all the dips and hollows of the rocky mountainside, similar to the way that water forms pools on the sea-smoothed rocks in the archipelago, cut off from their original environment. I remember feeling sorry for these plants, positioned on their separate crags, lonely and exposed, how they must have yearned for the life they saw unfolding beneath them. Down where the plants merged into one another, continuously forming new combinations according to the time of day and year, like the old pear and plum trees she had once brought from her grandparents’ country cottage, where the shadows flickered over the grass as the wind swept through the foliage on one of those lazy summer days while the sun was setting beyond the horizon at the mouth of the fjord and you could hear the distant sounds from the town rising and falling like the swell of waves in the air, mingling with the hum of wasps and bees at work among the rosebushes against the wall, where the pale petals shone white and calm in all the green. The garden already had the character of something old, a dignity and a fullness that only time can create and no doubt was the reason she had positioned a greenhouse at the bottom, half hidden behind a rock, where she could extend her handiwork and also cultivate rarer trees and plants without the rest of the garden being marred by the industrial and provisional nature of the construction. In the autumn and winter we caught glimpses of her down there, a faint silhouette of color behind the shiny walls, and, it was not without a touch of pride that she remarked, in a casual sort of way, that the tomatoes and cucumbers on the table didn’t come from the shop but from her greenhouse in the garden.