The hill near the church is hard to climb, and as I pass along the line of trees I’m not as happy as I should be to see the green grass on either side of the path. And suddenly, behind some bushes, I spot a pair of legs. I stop. Right there, right on the path in front of me is a man wearing pants that are a little too short. I get the feeling he’s been waiting for me. Perhaps he’s from the nursing home next to the church. He reminds me of a man I saw on our lawn last summer. It was during that tropical heat wave and he looked like a windshield wiper as he bent over the sprinkler trying to get a drink. I want to turn around, but that would be too obvious, what if he gets offended? There’s only one thing to do — keep walking, pretend everything’s normal. I try to whistle, to show how unaffected I am by his presence, but I only push out air, not music, it’s like I’m trying to blow out a candle. When I’m only a couple of meters away, he looks right at me and I stop puffing, but keep on walking. “Excuse me,” he says, “do you have the time?” He says this like it’s the most natural thing in the world, and perhaps it is, but I know nothing about the time. My watch is up in the attic along with the almanac from my last year in school. “It’s half past nine,” I say as I pass him, my legs keep moving along. “Thank you,” he says. “No, thank you,” I say and the whole thing is over in seconds.
My heart is beating so fast, it feels like it’s ten meters in front of me, I just had a conversation, I just contributed to society, the stranger trusted me to give him the right time, and time is not to be taken lightly. “Time is everything,” I say aloud.
I’m running after my heart all the way home, the young mothers are still sitting on the grass, not paying attention to me, but that’s all right because I’m not really thinking about them either.
In the apartment, I put the groceries in the refrigerator. Then I sit in a chair and knit a pair of earwarmers in a complicated zigzag pattern while I try to picture the man’s head. Plato’s theory of forms must be wrong, because I can’t imagine that head-shape more perfect than it was in real life. After I’ve done three rows, I go into the kitchen and take out the jar of jam. Even though I try as hard as I can, I still can’t open it. I try warm water, cold water, rubber gloves, I stick a knife under the edge, and finally I try breaking the glass with a can opener.
I eat bread and gjetost for breakfast and lunch, and then I spend the whole afternoon and evening in front of the TV, just like I always do. Einar Lunde is the news anchor today, he’s dressed in burgundy, it clashes with his rosy complexion. He looks as stoic as ever, though, and I wonder if he doesn’t know that he’s going to die. Heavy the grief, great the loss, but greater still the gratitude.
~ ~ ~
IT’S AN EXAGGERATION to say I’m waking up because I think I never fell asleep, and if I fell asleep, I dreamed that I was awake and couldn’t sleep.
Epsilon always sleeps without moving. Before I get up, I usually lay awake with my eyes closed and try to guess whether he’s still beside me or not. Today I leave the room with my eyes closed.
I’ve lived longer than all the tired limbs and busy hands of the people in today’s obituaries, even though I haven’t done as much as any of them. I’ve hardly been outside; and maybe I haven’t had a full life. Perhaps I’d feel better if I’d tried to make the world a better place. Or if I’d traveled around the globe. I could’ve seen Sweden. Or Germany. Of course, what they did during the war wasn’t very nice, but I’m not one for holding grudges, and I could’ve sat at a café in Hamburg and flirted with a waiter: “Ich könnte dich auffressen, Reinhart,” and didn’t H. C. Anderson say that to travel is to live?
I think he also said action is all that gives life meaning, and today I’ve decided I’ll wear Epsilon’s wristwatch, I’m sure he won’t mind. “All you’ll be needing now is your internal clock,” I said when he came home on the day he retired, “just like a migratory bird.” Epsilon didn’t seem thrilled by this idea, but he took his watch off, and now it’s in the drawer of his nightstand. My hands shake as I pick it up. I fasten it on my left wrist, and I feel my back bending even more than usual, my arm weighs a ton, and so does my head. Epsilon is always careful to keep the watch wound, but now it’s stopped and it’s off by a week. So I wind it again. If I were brave enough to use the telephone, I’d call the lady at the Time of Day service, but I don’t have the courage, and besides, I don’t know how much I like her, really, she’s a little too presumptuous, so I set the time by “gefühlen.” There’s a chance that more people will ask me for the time, and I, who have never accomplished much, will be the new Miss Time of Day. Instead of Miss Nothing to Say.
But when I get outdoors no one asks me the time, so instead I imagine I’d be a greater success as the new Christopher Hansteen: climbing to the top of the building on Wednesdays and Sundays to hoist a two-colored cylinder up a flagpole. Then, when the clock strikes twelve, I’ll lower it so that boats in the harbor and people with telescopes or those in the city can set their watches by it.
I go to the store now and then, and occasionally to the library or around the play school. The good thing about the library is that, if it looks like someone’s going to talk to me, I can put my finger over my lips and hush them. Sometimes I do that at the play school too. I’ve never had to do it at the store. And not really at those other places either. There’s nothing to do at the library but read. If I find a book with an appealing cover, I’ll go ahead and read the last few pages, sometimes more, and that way I can tell Epsilon that I was there. “It’s good for you to get food for the mind,” he says. But he seldom appreciates my quotations. “When we hate a human being, we hate what, in him, reminds us of ourselves,” I said when he complained that I left the cupboard open all the time. “What isn’t in ourselves doesn’t upset us.” “I always close the cupboard,” Epsilon said. “But the door to your heart’s open wide,” I said. “That’s true,” Epsilon said.
One of the last verses in the Bible says: “I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: If anyone adds anything to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book.” I was rather surprised to turn the page and find more words.
Outside the play school, I sit on a bench and listen to the children over the fence, behind me. They taught me to say “homo” and I taught them to say “floozy,” although they weren’t listening. I sit there until a cat finds me, a cat always finds me.
When I get to the jam aisle, I choose another jar — a different brand this time. Hopefully it’ll be easier to open. When I try it, though, the lid stays stuck. I set my mind on asking the boy at the register to open it, but change my mind before I’ve finished the thought. I’m silent and spineless again; even though I was able to speak up once yesterday, I can’t rest on laurels like that for very long. Twenty-four hours at most. Every joyful hour in life is paid for with strife. Despite the depressing sentiment, at least this one rhymes.
They say old people go looking for pigeons and cats, but the opposite is true. Pigeons and cats come looking for you. “Coo, coo,” say the pigeons in front of the store, they walk right up to me, and I answer in a small, accusatory voice: “You-took-my-egg-you, you-took-my-egg-you,” which is what we learned in school the wild doves say. When I do that, the pigeons always scatter at once. What’s her kind doing here? they think. If a cat comes, though, I’m the one who has to scat. One time a big Siamese followed me all the way to the Tveita buildings. Epsilon went pale when I told him the story, because Tveita reminds him of communism and bad taste and everything else that can go wrong. It’s hard to know what his politics are; he was more reluctant to go to Tveita with me after someone wrote “anarchy or chaos” in big black letters on the hot-dog stand out front. He used to call me a little bohemian — that was when I was going out to the store barefoot and weaving rugs.