‘We mean speak it properly,’ they retorted.
The Rashid girls were different from the others in so many ways. For their school lunches their mother often gave them leftover portions of yesterday’s dinner. ‘Eugh, your lunches stink!’ someone said. ‘Don’t sit near us!’
The other girls had pink rucksacks with hearts or Barbies on, the Rashid sisters had cheap brown ones. They were endlessly picked on for those rucksacks, for their clothes from the second-hand shop, for their weird parents, their weird accents; they were even teased for having extra Norwegian lessons. ‘What do you two actually do in your extra lessons? You never seem to learn anything!’
So much for diversity.
Nesodden is known as an open-minded sort of place, one where advocates of alternative teaching methods and vegetarianism have more supporters than other parts of the country, and where the concentration of artists, both established and unrecognised, supplies the idyll with local colour. But for the two Kurdish girls, it was narrow-mindedness that dogged them at the start.
Bullying behaviour was not always picked up on at the after-school club, and every day Lara’s school bag would be hidden somewhere different.
‘Tell me where it is!’ begged Lara.
‘Eh? What did you say? We don’t understand what you’re saying!’
One day they poured milk into her shoes. She never said anything about the bullying at home. Her mother and father still hadn’t found jobs, and they were out of sorts and missing their former home.
But when a new gang of boys started hassling Lara, she finally told her mother. Bayan went round to see the parents of each of the boys and demanded they be made to stop.
‘Crybaby!’, ‘Telltale!’ were the names hurled at Lara the next day at school.
‘My mum took no notice of yours anyway,’ said one of the worst offenders. ‘She couldn’t tell what she was saying! Ha ha!’
And this was supposed to be some sort of paradise?
They had ended up in the wrong place.
At the after-school club, the sisters would often sit drawing. Lara always drew princesses with wavy, light yellow hair, blue eyes and pastel-coloured dresses. She could have wallpapered her room with all her versions of yellow hair and pink tulle.
Bano’s lines were rougher. If she drew princesses, hers always had dark skin and black hair.
‘That’s the wrong colour,’ a girl said to Bano.
Bano gave her a hard stare. ‘It’s my picture,’ she replied. ‘I’ll draw what I like.’
‘But it looks ugly.’
Bano just went on with her colouring. She made the face on the sheet of paper darker and darker. She added thicker strokes of black to the hair.
Then she held the picture up in front of her.
‘There,’ she said. ‘Now she’s exactly the way I want her.’
Bano found a drawing pin and put the dark girl up on the wall.
Lara kept her eyes fixed on her big sister.
That was how she wanted to be. Almost imperceptibly she raised her head, putting down the light yellow crayon.
A Place on the List
Get rich or die trying.
He’s walking with the West End at his back, towards Youngstorget square.
Right after New Year he had received the invitation to the inaugural meeting. He had marked the date on the calendar and put on a suit to mark the occasion. He often dressed that way these days, in a perfectly ordinary suit, nothing fancy, but it had to look expensive. He was good at wearing things with flair so they seemed expensive; he’d got that from his mother. She often found cheap clothes in sales that could be made to look exclusive in combination with her cool, blonde appearance. From her he had also learned to treat his clothes with care. He always hung them up on hangers after he’d worn them, or put them back in the cupboard, neatly folded. He always changed when he got home to make his nicer, brand-name garments last longer.
He held himself upright as he made his way along the slushy street. His steps were a little cautious. He called himself metrosexual; he dressed up, wore make-up and used vitamin-enriched hair products. He had ordered Regaine from America, which promised to stop hair loss and trigger the follicles into new growth. He could still conceal his incipient bald patch with a good cut but his hairline was definitely receding. There was a great deal about his appearance that grieved him and he spent a long time in front of the mirror. Too long, thought his friends, who would laugh whenever he overdid the make-up. When he started wearing foundation, they teased him even more. It’s concealer, he objected. In summer he applied bronzing powder, and he kept a whole row of aftershaves in the bathroom.
His nose was new. An experienced surgeon had made a small incision, removed some bone and cartilage from below the bridge and sewn the skin tautly back in place. When the bandage was removed, his nose was just as he wanted it, as it ought to be: a straight profile, quite simply, an Aryan nose.
At secondary school they had made fun of his bumpy nose. The kink in the bone had annoyed him since his early teenage years. Later he complained to friends that the shape of his nose made him look like an Arab. As soon as he could afford it he booked himself in for surgery at Bunæs, one of Norway’s leading plastic surgery clinics. He also asked about a hair transplant, but was told the results were unpredictable and the transplant process could leave disfiguring scars, so he had not made up his mind yet.
He crossed the government quarter, where you could walk straight through the main building, past the reception area under the Prime Minister’s office. That was the quickest route; it saved some metres and several minutes not having to go round what was known as the Tower Block.
The government quarter was a fusion of functionalism and brutalism dating from the 1950s. The architect commissioned to design it, modernist Erling Viksjø, made so bold as to ask Pablo Picasso if he would design murals for the complex. Enthused by the Norwegian architect’s raw concrete, the artist agreed to produce some sketches. If he liked them, the Norwegians could use them. The project was kept strictly secret, under the code name Operation Pedersen. Picasso’s lines were marked into the concrete before the wall was pebble-dashed with rounded river stones and the lines were then sandblasted. It was Picasso’s first monumental work. The reliefs of his The Fishermen took up the entire end wall of one of the buildings, and if lucky enough to be invited to the higher floors you could admire several more of Picasso’s works adorning the staircase in the Tower Block.
The Prime Minister’s office was at the top of the building, on the seventeenth floor. On this unusually mild January evening in 2002, the incumbent was Kjell Magne Bondevik of the Christian Democratic Party. For now, the office was empty because the Prime Minister was in Shanghai, where he had just enjoyed a fine array of fish dishes prepared by Chinese and Norwegian chefs using raw ingredients from the fish farms along the Norwegian coast. In his speech, the Prime Minister spoke enthusiastically about aquaculture and generously offered Norwegian fishery expertise to a billion Chinese.
One government building from the turn of the previous century was preserved when the old neoclassical quarter was demolished; its decoration was inspired by medieval motifs and incorporated dragon-style ornamentation derived from Snorri Sturluson’s history of the Norse kings. On the pediments flanking the main entrance were the opening words of the national anthem, ‘Yes, we love this country,’ with the line of music engraved alongside. These buildings which the young man was just passing housed Norway’s centre of power. The High Court was here, the Prime Minister’s office and the major government departments.