But what actually lay beyond the universe?
Dag Lothar said there was nothing. Geir said there were burning flames. That was what I believed, too; the image of the sea was more because the starry sky looked the way it did.
Mom and Dad’s bedroom was quiet again.
I pulled the curtain to and closed my eyes. Charged with the silence and darkness of the house, I was soon fast asleep.
When I got up next morning Grandma and Grandad were sitting with Mom in the living room drinking coffee. Dad was walking across the lawn with the sprinkler in his hand. He placed it at the edge of the lawn so that the thin jets of water, which resembled a waving hand, not only fell on the grass but also the vegetable garden below. The sun’s rays, on the other side of the house now, above the forest to the east, flooded into the garden. The air seemed to be as still as it had been the previous day. The sky was hazy; it almost always was in the morning. Yngve was sitting at the breakfast table. The white eggs in the brown egg cups reminded me that it was Sunday. I sat down in my regular place.
“What happened yesterday?” Yngve asked in a subdued voice. “Why were you grounded?”
“I broke the TV,” I said.
He sent me a quizzical look, holding a slice of bread to his mouth.
“Yes, I put it on for Grandma and Grandad. Then it went puff. Haven’t they said anything?”
Yngve took a large bite from the slice of bread, which he had spread with clove cheese, and shook his head. I sliced the top off the egg with my knife, opened it like a lid, scooped out the soft white with a spoon, reached for the salt shaker, and tapped it with my forefinger so that only a sprinkling came out. Spread margarine onto some bread and poured a glass of milk. Downstairs, Dad opened the door. I ate the white of the egg, poked the spoon into the yolk to see whether it was hard- or soft-boiled.
“I’ve been grounded for today as well,” I said.
“The whole day? Or just the evening?”
I shrugged. The egg was hard-boiled, the yellow yolk disintegrated against the edge of the spoon.
“The whole day, I think,” I said.
The road outside was empty and gleamed in the sun. But in the ditch beneath the dense branches of the spruces it was dark and shadowy.
A bicycle came tearing down the hill at full speed. The boy sitting on it, he must have been fifteen, had one hand on the handlebars and the other on the red gasoline canister he had tied to the luggage rack. His hair was black and fluttered in the wind.
On the stairs came the sound of Dad’s footsteps. I sat up straight in my chair, cast a hurried glance across the table to see if everything was in place. A bit of the hard-boiled egg had ended up on the table. I quickly brushed it off the edge into my waiting hand and immediately put it on the plate. Yngve delayed the moment until it was almost too late to push his chair into the table and sit up straight, but only almost, for when Dad came in his back was erect and his feet were firmly planted on the floor.
“Pack your swimming trunks, kids,” he said. “We’re off to Hove for the day.”
“Me, too?” I wanted to ask, but I held back, because he might have forgotten he had grounded me and the question would have jolted his memory. Also, if he remembered but had changed his mind, it would be best not to mention it, as it could be interpreted as his having made a mistake yesterday, his having done something wrong, and I didn’t want him to think that. So I went for my trunks and a towel from the line in the boiler room, put them in a plastic bag with the diving goggles, which would come in handy if we were going to one of the two beaches in Hove, and sat down in my room to await departure.
Half an hour later we left for the far side of the island, on what was perhaps the best day of the year, with the sea so calm it barely made a sound and therefore lent the surroundings, the previously so silent bare rocks and the previously so silent forest above, a semblance of something unreal, such that every footstep on the rocks and every clink of a bottle sounded as if it was the very first time, and the sun, which was at its zenith in the sky, appeared as something deeply primitive and alien on this day, when you could see the sea curve and disappear down into the depths beyond the horizon, above which the sky floated so airily with its light, soft, misty blueness; and Yngve and I and Mom and Dad put on our swimsuits and each of us in our own way dipped our bodies, hot from the sun, into the lukewarm water, while Grandma and Grandad sat there in their finery, apparently unmoved by their surroundings and our activities, as though the 1950s and Vestland were not only features that had stamped themselves on them superficially, through their clothes, behavior, and dialect, in other words externally, but also internally, to the depths of their respective souls, to the innermost core of their respective characters. It was so strange to see them there, sitting on the rocks, squinting into the bright light coming at us from all directions, it seemed so alien.
The day after, they went home. Dad drove them to Kjevik, grabbed the opportunity to visit his own parents while he was there while Mom took Yngve and me to Lake Gjerstad, the idea being that we could swim and eat cookies and relax, but first of all Mom couldn’t find a road to the lake, so we had to go on a long detour through a forest full of scrub and thickets; secondly, the part of the lake we arrived at turned out to be green with algae and the rocks slippery; and thirdly, it started to rain almost as soon as we had put down the cooler bag and the basket with the cookies and oranges.
I felt so sorry for Mom, who had wanted to take us on a nice trip, but it hadn’t worked out. There was no way to express this to her. It was one of those things you had to forget as quickly as possible. And that was not at all difficult; there were so many new experiences in store for us during those weeks. I would soon be starting school, and as a result so many new objects would become mine. Above all, a satchel, which, the next Saturday morning, I went to Arendal with Mom to buy. It was square, blue and all shiny and glossy, with white straps. Inside, there were two compartments, where I immediately put the orange pencil case I had also been given, containing a pencil, a pen, an eraser, and a pencil sharpener, and one of the notebooks we had bought, with orange and brown squares on the front, the same as on Yngve’s, plus some comics I put in to plump it up. There, nestling against the leg of the desk, it stood every night when I went to bed, not without some mental anguish for me, for there was still quite a time to go to the big day when I, along with almost everyone I knew, would be starting the first class. We had already been to school for a day, that past spring, we had had a chance to meet the woman who was to be our teacher and to do a bit of drawing, but this was different, this wasn’t anywhere near the same, this was the real thing. There were those who said they hated school, indeed, almost all the older children said they hated school, and strictly speaking we knew we should, too, but at the same time it was so alluring, what was about to happen, we knew so little and we expected so much, in addition to the fact that starting school in itself elevated us into the same league as the older children, from one day to the next, in one fell swoop we were like them, and then we could certainly afford to hate school, but not now…. Did we talk about anything else? Hardly. In fact the school we applied to, Roligheden, where both Dad and Geir’s father worked and where all the older children went, had no room for us, the year’s intake was too big, too many families had moved into the area, so we had to go to a school on the east of the island, five or six kilometers away, with all the kids we didn’t know from around there, and we were to be transported by bus. It was a great privilege and an adventure. Every day a bus would come to pick us up!