I walked out of the station and stopped at the taxi stand. The sky was grey and cold, the air damp. To the right was a jumble of roads and concrete bridges, behind them a lake, behind that a line of monument-like buildings. To the left, a broad street full of traffic; directly in front of me a street which some way off swung left alongside a filthy wall, beyond that a church.
Which way to go?
I placed one foot on a bench, rolled a cigarette, lit it and started walking down to the left. After a hundred metres or so I stopped. It didn’t look promising, everything here had been built with the cars which whizzed past in mind, and I turned and went back, tried the road ahead instead, which led into a wide avenue with an enormous brick department store on the other side. Beyond that was a kind of square, sunk into the ground as it were, from which rose a large glass construction on the right. KULTURHUSET it said in red letters, and I went in, took the escalator up to the first floor on which there happened to be a café, bought a baguette with meatballs and red cabbage salad and sat down by a window from where I had a view of the square and the street in front of the department store.
Was I going to live here? Was this where I lived now?
Yesterday morning I had been at home in Bergen.
Yesterday, that was yesterday.
Tonje had accompanied me to the train. The artificial light above the platforms, the passengers outside the carriages, who were already prepared for the night and talking in hushed voices, the rolling of suitcase wheels over the tarmac. She cried. I didn’t, just hugged her, brushed the tears from her cheeks, she smiled through the tears and I boarded the train, thinking I didn’t want to see her walk away, didn’t want to see her back, but I couldn’t stop myself, peered out of the window and watched her walk down the platform and disappear through the exit.
Would she stay there?
In our house?
I took a bite of the baguette and looked down at the black and white checked square to divert my thoughts. The line of shops on the other side was black with people. In and out of the doors to the Metro they went, in and out of the tunnel to the gallery, up and down the escalators. Umbrellas, coats, jackets, bags, plastic carrier bags, rucksacks, hats, buggies. Above them cars and buses.
The clock on the department store wall said ten minutes to three. Perhaps it would be best to have a haircut now to avoid having to rush it at the end, I thought. Going down the escalator, I took out my mobile phone and perused the names saved under contacts, but I didn’t feel I could ring any of them, there was too much that would have to be explained, too much that would have to be said, too little in return, so emerging into the dreary March afternoon again with a few heavy snowflakes falling, I switched it off and put it back in my pocket before heading down Drottninggatan on the lookout for a hairdresser’s. Outside the department store a man was playing the harmonica. Or rather, he wasn’t playing, he was just blowing into the instrument with all his might while jerking his body backwards and forwards. His hair was long, his face ravaged. The immense aggression he radiated flowed straight into me. As I passed him fear pounded in my veins. Behind him, by the entrance to a shoe shop, a young woman was bending down over a buggy and lifting up a child. It was swathed in a kind of fur-lined bag, with its head wreathed by a fur-lined hat, and staring straight ahead, seemingly unaffected by what was happening to it. She squeezed it to her chest with one hand and opened the shoe-shop door with the other. The snow that was falling melted as it hit the ground. A man was sitting on a folding chair holding a large sign proclaiming that fifty metres to the left there was a restaurant where you could buy a planked steak for the sum of 109 kroner. Planked steak? I wondered. Many of the women passing by looked alike: they were in their fifties, wore glasses, coats, were plump and carrying bags inscribed with Åhléns, Lindex, NK, Coop or Hemköp. There were fewer men of the same age, but many of them looked alike too, albeit in different ways. Glasses, sandy hair, pallid eyes, greenish or greyish jackets with a touch of casualness about them, more often thin than fat. I longed to be alone, but there was no chance of that, and I wandered up the street. All the faces I saw were of strangers, and would continue to be so for weeks and months as I didn’t know a soul here, but that didn’t prevent me from feeling that I was being watched. Even when I lived on a tiny island far out into the sea with only three inhabitants I felt I was being watched. Was there something wrong with my coat? My collar, shouldn’t it be turned up like that? My shoes, did they look the way shoes should? Was I walking a bit oddly? Leaning too far forward maybe? Oh, I was an idiot, what an idiot. The flame of stupidity burned bright inside me. Oh, such an idiot I was. What a stupid, idiotic bloody idiot. My shoes. My coat. Stupid, stupid, stupid. My mouth, shapeless, my thoughts, shapeless, my feelings, shapeless. Everything was spongy. There was nothing firm anywhere. Nothing solid, nothing vital. Soft, spongy and stupid. Oh fuck. Oh fuck, fuck, fuck, how stupid I was. I couldn’t find any peace in a café, within a second I had taken in everyone there, and I continued to do so, and every glance that came my way penetrated into my innermost self, jangled about inside me, and every movement I made, even if only flicking through a book, was likewise transmitted outwards to them, as a sign of my stupidity, every movement I made said, ‘This is an idiot sitting here.’ So it was better to walk, for then the looks disappeared one by one, admittedly they were replaced by others, but they never had time to establish themselves, they just glided past, there goes an idiot, there goes an idiot, there goes an idiot. That was the chorus as I walked. And I knew it didn’t make sense, this was of my own making, inside myself, but it didn’t help, because they still got inside, into my inner self, they rumbled around inside me, and even the most maladjusted of these people, even the ugliest, the fattest and the shabbiest of them, even that woman with the drooping jaw and the vacant idiot-eyes, even she could look at me and then say there was something wrong with me. Even her. That was how things were. There I was, walking through the crowds beneath the darkening sky, through falling snowflakes, past shop after shop with illuminated interiors, alone in my new town, without a thought as to how things would be here, because that made no difference, it really didn’t make any difference, all I was thinking about was that I had to get through this. ‘This’ was life. Getting through it, that was what I was doing.
I found a hairdresser’s I hadn’t seen when I passed by the first time, in a passage beside the big department store. I just had to take a seat. No wash, my hair was moistened with water from a spray. The hairdresser, an immigrant, a Kurd I guessed, asked how I wanted it, I said short, indicated with my thumb and first finger how short I had in mind, he asked what I did, I said I was a student, he asked where I came from, I said Norway, he asked if I was here on holiday, I said yes, and that was it. My locks fell on the floor around the chair. They were almost completely black. That was strange because when I looked in the mirror I had fair hair. It had always been like that. Even though I knew my hair was dark I couldn’t see it. I saw fair hair, as it had been in my boyhood and teens. Even in photos I saw fair hair. Only when it had been cut and I saw it separately, against white floor tiles for example, as here, could I see it was dark, almost black.