I was also given a pair of light-blue trousers, a light-blue jacket and a pair of dark-blue sneakers with white stripes over the instep. Several times, when Dad was out, I put on my new clothes and paced in front of the hall mirror, sometimes with the satchel on my back, so when the day finally arrived and I posed on the gravel outside the door for Mom to take a photograph of me, it wasn’t just the excitement and the uncertainty giving me butterflies but also the strange, almost triumphant, feeling I would have when I wore particularly attractive clothes.
The evening before, I’d had a bath, Mom had washed my hair, and when I woke in the morning it was to a quiet sleeping house, with a sun that was still climbing behind the spruce trees down beyond the road. Oh, what a pleasure it was to take my new clothes out of the wardrobe and put them on at last! Outside, the birds were singing, it was still summer, behind the veil of mist the sky was blue and immense, and the houses that now stood quiet on both sides of the road would soon be teeming with impatience and anticipation, like on Independence Day. I took the comics out of my satchel, hung it on my back, adjusted the straps, and took it off again. Pulled the zipper on the jacket up and down and speculated: it looked best with the zipper up, but then you couldn’t see the T-shirt underneath … Went into the living room, looked out of the window at the sun, a reddish-yellow, fiery orange behind the green trees, went into the kitchen without touching anything, peered across at Gustavsen’s house, where there was no sign of life. Stood in front of the hall mirror, pulling the zipper up and down … the T-shirt looked so good … it would be a shame if it couldn’t be seen …
Brush my teeth! I could do that.
Into the bathroom, out with the brush from the tooth glass, a drop of water and on with the white toothpaste. I brushed energetically for several minutes while studying myself in the mirror. The sound of the brush against my teeth seemed to fill the whole of my head from the inside, so I didn’t notice that Dad was up until he opened the door. He was wearing only underpants.
“Are you brushing your teeth before you’ve had breakfast? How stupid can you be? Put that brush down right now and go to your room!”
As I set foot on the red wall-to-wall carpet on the landing he slammed the door behind him and started pissing loudly into the toilet bowl. I knelt on my bed and looked up at Prestbakmo’s house. Was that two heads I could see in the darkness of the kitchen window? Yes, it had to be. They were up. It would have been good to have a walkie-talkie so that I could talk to Geir! That would have been perfect!
Dad left the bathroom and went into the bedroom. I could hear his voice, and then Mom’s. So she was awake!
I stayed in my room until she was up and on her way to the kitchen, where Dad had already been clattering around for a while. In the shelter of her back I sat down at my place. They had bought cornflakes, we almost never had them, and after she had put out a bowl and a spoon for me, and I had poured milk over the golden, somewhat perforated, irregularly formed flakes, I came to the conclusion that cornflakes were best when they were crispy, before the milk had soaked into them. But after I had been eating for a while and they were beginning to go soft, filled as it were with both their own taste and that of the milk, plus the sugar, of which I had sprinkled a liberal quantity, I changed my mind; that was when they were at their best.
Or was it?
Dad went into the living room with a cup in his hand, he didn’t usually have breakfast, but sat in there smoking and drinking coffee instead. Yngve came in, sat down on his chair without saying a word, poured out some cornflakes and milk, sprinkled sugar over the top, and started wolfing it down.
“Looking forward to it?” he said at length.
“A little,” I said.
“It’s nothing to look forward to,” he said.
“Yes, it is,” Mom said. “You certainly looked forward to starting school anyway. I can remember it well. Can you?”
“Ye-es,” Yngve said. “I suppose I can.”
He cycled to school, usually a little while before Dad left, unless Dad had some work to do before the first lesson, that is, which was sometimes the case. Yngve was not allowed to have a lift, except on very special occasions, such as when it had snowed a lot overnight, because he wasn’t to have any advantages just because his father was a teacher at the school.
When breakfast was finished and they had left, I sat with Mom in the kitchen. She read the newspaper, I chatted.
“Do you think we’ll have to write in the first lesson, Mom?” I asked. “Or is it usually math? Leif Tore says we’ll have drawing so that we can relax a bit at the beginning, and not everyone can write. Or add and subtract. Only me actually. As far as I know at least. I learned when I was five and a half. Do you remember?”
“Remember when you learned to read? What do you mean?” Mom said.
“That time outside the bus station when I read the sign? ‘Kaffe-fetteria?’ You laughed. Yngve laughed, too. Now I know it’s called ‘kafeteria.’ Shall I read some headlines?”
Mom nodded. I read aloud. Bit staccato, but everything was correct.
“You managed that nicely,” she said. “You’ll do really well at school.”
She scratched an ear as she read, the way only she could, she held her ear between her fingers and moved them back and forth incredibly fast, just like a cat.
She put down the newspaper and looked at me.
“Are you looking forward to it?” she asked.
“And how,” I said.
She smiled, patted me on the head, got up, and started to clear the table. I went to my room. School didn’t begin until ten o’clock as it was the first day. Nevertheless, we ended up being short of time, which was often the case with Mom, she was pretty absentminded when it came to matters like this. From the window I saw the excitement mounting outside the houses where there were children starting school, that is, in the families with Geir, Leif Tore, Trond, Geir Håkon, and Marianne, hair was combed, dresses and shirts were straightened, photographs taken. When it was my turn to stand outside, smiling at Mom, with one hand shielding my eyes from the sun, which had moved above the tops of the spruce trees by this time, everyone had gone. We were the last, and all of a sudden we were late, so Mom, who had taken the day off work for the occasion, hurried me along, I opened the door of the green VW, pushed the seat forward, and got in the back while she rummaged for the key in her shoulder bag and inserted it in the ignition. She lit a cigarette, reversed after casting a quick glance over her shoulder, put the car in first gear a few meters up the hill, and drove down. The roar of the engine resounded off the brick walls. I moved to the middle of the car so that I could see between the two seats at the front. The two white gas holders across Tromøya Sound, the wild cherry tree, Kristen’s red house, then the road down to the marina where we almost never went, along the route where in the course of the next six years I would become familiar with every tiniest clearing and stone wall, and out to the small places on the east of the island, where Mom didn’t know her way, which made her a bit agitated.
“Was it this way, Karl Ove, do you remember?” she said, stubbing out the cigarette in the ashtray as she peered into the mirror.
“I don’t remember,” I said. “But I think so. It was on the left, anyway.”
Below, there was a shop by a quay and a clump of houses encircling it, no school. The sea was a deep blue, bordering on black beneath the shadow of the buildings; untouched by the high temperatures, this fullness distinguished it from most of the other colors in the landscape, which were as though bleached after the weeks-long heat wave. The sea’s cool blue contrasted with the yellow and brown and the faded green.