For a few minutes at a time I succeeded in engrossing myself totally in the book. Then the dreadful thoughts returned like an electric shock and everything became distorted. Again I had to force myself back into the confidence trickster’s world, where I could stay for several minutes until another shock reopened the sores.
Nils Erik came in and put on a record. It was half past five. He stood for a moment gazing across the fjord, then he sat down with a newspaper. His presence helped, what I had done didn’t seem so terrible when there was a friendly person in the room.
I read aloud a passage describing Krull’s view of the Jews.
‘He wasn’t so high-minded, this Thomas Mann,’ I said. ‘That’s pure anti-Semitism!’
Nils Erik looked at me.
‘You don’t think it’s ironic then?’
‘Ironic? No, do you?’
‘He’s famous for being ironic.’
‘So he doesn’t really mean it. Is that what you’re saying?’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t think so,’ I said, because I hated it when Nils Erik thought he knew better than me. Which he often did.
The image of the seventh year with her tousled hair and cheeky expression was clear in my mind’s eye again. And my lips closing on hers.
Why had I done it? Oh why, oh why!
‘What’s up?’ Nils Erik said.
‘What?’ I said.
‘You went like this,’ he said, and raised his head, narrowed his eyes and pinched his lips together hard.
‘Nothing in particular,’ I said. ‘I was just thinking about something.’
But nothing happened. I went to school the next day and no one there said anything about what had happened, everyone behaved as they normally did, even my pupils, who I thought might have heard about it, some of them probably knew her.
But no.
Could it simply pass, just like that?
The only place it existed was in me. And if I let it stay where it was, there was no problem, it would slowly lose its power and in the end vanish, as sooner or later all the other shameful things I had done had vanished.
Towards the end of May a letter from the akademi arrived in my post box, I tore open the envelope and read it standing outside the post office. I had been accepted. I lit a cigarette and started to walk back towards the school, I would ring mum and tell her, she would be pleased. And then I would ring Yngve because it meant I would be moving to Bergen that autumn. In a strange way I had expected to be accepted because although I knew what I had written might not have been that good and consequently they ought to have rejected me, it was me, however, who had done the writing and that, I felt, they would not be able to ignore.
May passed, June began and it was as though everything was dissolving into light. The sun no longer set, it wandered across the sky all day and night, and I had never seen anything like the light it cast over the wild terrain then. The light was reddish and full, it was as if it belonged to the ground and the mountains, it was them that were shining, as if after a catastrophe. On a couple of nights Nils Erik and I drove along the deserted coastal roads, and we seemed to be on a different planet, so alien was everything. Through sleeping villages, everywhere the reddish gleam and the strange shadows. The people were transformed too, out at night, couples walking, cars driving past, whole flocks of young people rowing out to the islands for picnics.
I received another letter from Ingvild. She said she had rolled up her trousers to her knees and was sitting with her feet in Sogne fjord while she was writing. I loved Sogne fjord, the feeling the surface gave of the enormous depth, the immense chains of mountains with the snowy peaks towering above it. All clear and still, green and cool. Ingvild, who was moving in these surroundings and who affected me in so many ways, wrote more about herself this time. But it wasn’t much. The tone approached self-irony, she was in defensive mode. Against what? She wrote that she had been an exchange student in the US for a year, that was why she was still in the third class. So we were the same age, I reflected. She was going back there in the summer for a holiday with her host family, they were going to cross the country in a camper van. She would write more from the States. In the autumn she would be going to Bergen to study.
The last day of school came. I wrote HAVE A GOOD SUMMER! on the board, handed out the grade books to my pupils, wished them luck for the rest of their lives, ate cake with the teachers in the staffroom, shook everyone’s hand and thanked them for the past year. As I walked downhill on my way home I was, as I had expected, neither happy nor relieved because I had been waiting for this day for more than six months, just empty inside.
In the afternoon Tor Einar dropped round. He had brought with him some gull eggs and a crate of Mack beer.
‘It’s a scandal you haven’t eaten seagull eggs before,’ he said. ‘There are two dishes which are the essence of Northern Norway. Mølje and seagull eggs. You can’t leave before you have tried them.’
Nils Erik had a temperature and was on the sofa, there was no question of him having beer or eggs, so it was left to Tor Einar and me to do them justice.
‘Shall we go down to the beach?’ Tor Einar said, eyeing me with that knowing grin of his. ‘It’s such fantastic weather.’
‘Can do,’ I said.
I had never quite found the right tone with Tor Einar. We were the same age and had a good deal in common, much more than I and Nils Erik had, but it didn’t help, it was irrelevant. I always assumed a role when I was with Tor Einar, which wasn’t the case with Nils Erik, and I didn’t like myself when I did, when there was a distance between the person I was and what I said, a kind of delay that allowed space for calculations, as if I wanted to say what he preferred to hear rather than what I had to say or talk about.
On the other hand, that is how I was with almost everyone, in fact it had even become like that with Jan Vidar, who was the closest friend I’d had for the last five years.
It wasn’t a problem, just rather unpleasant, and the only consequence was that by and large I tried to avoid being on my own with Tor Einar for any period of time.
Now this was not possible. Luckily, though, we had beer with us as we trudged down to the beach, it would only take a couple of bottles before such problems disappeared like blackboard chalk beneath a wet sponge.
Under the deep blue sky, beside the water, with the sun playing on it, we both sat down on a rock. Tor Einar opened a beer and passed it to me, opened one for himself, winked and said skål.
‘Now we’re laughing, eh!’ he said. ‘Last day of school, the sun’s shining and we’ve got enough beer for a long night.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
Some fishing boats were chugging shoreward, bobbing up and down on the waves in the middle of the fjord, with a trail of gulls behind them.
What a scene.
‘Let’s sum up then, shall we?’ said Tor Einar.
‘Regarding the school year?’ I said, producing a pouch of tobacco.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Has it fulfilled our expectations?’
‘I didn’t have any, I don’t think,’ I said. ‘I just came up here and hoped for the best. But you? Are you happy with the year?’
He hesitated.
‘Every year without a girlfriend is a bad year,’ he said, squinting into the sunlight. Then he turned to me.
‘You had a couple of adventures anyway. Ine and Irene? And that temp on Fugleøya, what was her name? Anne?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But it didn’t work out. Actually nothing worked out.’
‘Didn’t you have them?’
‘No.’