“Is she an alcoholic?”
Yngve shrugged.
“Thing is she wants a drink now. And she needs our permission.”
“Shit,” I said. “What a mess this is.”
“It’s fine, but surely it wouldn’t hurt to have a little drink now, would it? She is in shock, kind of.”
“So what do we do?” I said.
“Well, we can ask her if she wants a drink? Then we can have one with her.”
“Okay, but not right now, surely?”
“Let’s finish up for the evening. And then ask her. As though it were nothing out of the ordinary.”
Half an hour later I had finished the bookcase and went onto the terrace, where it had stopped raining and the air was full of fresh fragrances from the garden. The table lay under a film of water; the seat covers were dark with moisture. Plastic bottles lying on their sides on the brick floor were dotted with raindrops. The bottlenecks reminded me of muzzles, as if they were small cannons with their barrels pointing in all directions. Raindrops hung in clusters along the underside of the wrought-iron fence. Now and then one let go and fell onto the wall beneath with an almost imperceptible plop. That Dad had been here only three days ago was hard to believe. That he had seen the same view three days ago, walked around the same house, seen Grandma as we saw her and thought his thoughts only three days ago was hard to grasp. That is, I could grasp that he had been here recently. But not that he couldn’t see this now. The veranda, the plastic bottles, the light in the neighbor’s windows. The flakes of yellow paint that had peeled off and now lay on the red terrace by the rusting table leg. The gutter and the rainwater still running down it into the grass. I could not grasp that he wouldn’t see any more of this, however hard I tried. I did grasp that he wouldn’t see Yngve or me again, that had something to do with our emotions, in which death was interwoven in a completely different way from the objective, concrete reality that surrounded me.
Nothing, just nothing. Not even darkness.
I lit a cigarette, ran my hand over the wet chair seat a couple of times and sat down. I only had two left. So I would have to go to the newsstand before it closed.
A cat slunk along the fence at the end of the lawn. Its coat was a grizzled gray and it looked old. It stopped with one paw raised, staring into the grass for a while, then went on. I thought about our cat, Nansen, on which Tonje lavished her affections. It was no more than a few months old and slept under her duvet with its head just peeping out.
I hadn’t given Tonje a single thought during the day. Not one. What did that mean? I didn’t want to call her because I had nothing to say, but I would have to for her sake. If I hadn’t thought about her, she would have thought about me, I knew that.
In the air high above the harbor a seagull was flying toward us. It was heading for the veranda, and I felt myself smile, it was Grandma’s seagull on its way for supper. But with me sitting there it didn’t dare approach and landed on the roof instead, where it leaned back and squawked its seagull squawk.
Bit of salmon wouldn’t go amiss, would it?
I stubbed the cigarette out on the veranda, put it in a bottle, stood up, and went to Grandma, who was watching TV.
“Your gull’s here again,” I said. “Shall I give it some salmon?”
“What?” she said, turning toward me.
“The gull’s here,” I said. “Shall I give it some salmon?”
“Oh,” she said. “I can do that.”
She got to her feet and walked with her head hunched into the kitchen. I grabbed the TV remote control and lowered the volume. Then I went into the dining room, which was empty, and sat by the telephone. I dialed home.
“Hello, Tonje here.”
“Hi. Karl Ove here.”
“Oh hi …”
“Hi.”
“How’s it going?”
“Not wonderfully,” I said. “It’s hard going here. I’m in tears almost all the time. But I don’t really know what I’m crying about. Dad being dead, of course, but it’s not just that …”
“I should have gone with you,” she said. “I miss you so much.”
“It’s a house of death,” I said. “We’re wading through his death. He died in the chair in the room next door, it’s still there. And then there’s everything that happened here, I mean, a long time ago, when I was growing up, all that’s here too, and it’s surfacing. Do you understand? I’m somehow very close to everything. To the person I was when I was younger. To the person Dad was. All the feelings from that time are resurfacing.”
“Poor Karl Ove,” she said.
Grandma came through the door in front of me, carrying a dish of cut-up salmon. She didn’t see me. I waited until she was in the other room.
“No, don’t feel sorry for me,” I said. “It’s him we should feel sorry for. His life was so awful at the end you wouldn’t believe it.”
“How’s your grandmother taking it?”
“I don’t quite know. She’s in shock, she seems senile. And she’s so damn thin. They just sat here drinking. Her and him.”
“Her as well. Your grandmother?”
“Absolutely. You wouldn’t believe it. But we’ve decided to clean everything up and have a wake here after the funeral.”
Through the glass door to the veranda I could see Grandma putting down the dish. She stepped back and peered around.
“That sounds like a good idea,” Tonje said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But that’s what we’re going to do now. Clean the whole damn house and then fix it up. Buy tablecloths and flowers and …”
Yngve stuck his head through the door. When he saw I was on the phone he raised his eyebrows and withdrew, just as Grandma came in from the veranda. She stood in front of the window and looked out.
“I was thinking of coming down a day before,” Tonje said. “Then I can give you a hand.”
“The funeral’s on Friday,” I said. “Can you get a day off work?”
“Yes. So, I’ll come in the morning. I miss you so much.”
“What have you been doing today?”
“Mm, nothing special. Had lunch with Mom and Hans. Love from them, they were thinking about you.”
“Mm, that was nice of them,” I said. “What did you have to eat?”
Tonje’s mother was a fantastic cook; meals in her house were an experience, if you were the foodie type. I wasn’t, I didn’t give a rat’s ass about food, I was just as happy to eat fish fingers as baked halibut, sausages as fillet of Beef Wellington, but Tonje was, her eyes lit up when she started talking about food, and she was a talented cook, she enjoyed working in the kitchen; even if it was only pizza she was making, she put her heart and soul into it. She was the most sensuous person I had ever met. And she had moved in with someone who regarded meals, home comforts, and closeness as necessary evils.
“Flounder. So it’s just as well you weren’t there.”
I could hear her grinning.
“But, oh, it was fantastic.”
“That I don’t doubt,” I said. “Were Kjetil and Karin there too?”
“Yes. And Atle.”
A lot had happened in her family, as in all families, but this was not something they talked about, so if it was manifest anywhere, it was in each of them, and the atmospheres they created collectively. One of the things Tonje liked best about me, I suspected, was that I was so fascinated by precisely that, by all the contexts and potential of various relationships, she wasn’t used to that, she never speculated along those lines, so when I opened her eyes to what I saw she was always interested. I had this from my mother, right from the time I went to school I used to carry on long conversations with her about people we had met or known, what they had said, why they might have said it, where they came from, who their parents were, what kind of house they lived in, all woven into questions to do with politics, ethics, morality, psychology, and philosophy, and this conversation, which continued to this day, had given my gaze a direction, I always saw what happened between people and tried to explain it, and for a long time I also believed I was good at reading others, but I was not, wherever I turned I only saw myself, but perhaps that was not what our conversations were about primarily, there was something else, they were about Mom and me, that was how we became close to each other, in language and reflection, that was where we were connected, and that was also where I sought a connection with Tonje. And it was good because she needed it in the same way that I needed her robust sensuousness.