But here! I thought, lifting a slice of bread to my mouth while looking out of the window. The reflection of the mountains across the fjord was broken kaleidoscopically by the ripples in the water below. Here no one knew who I was, here there were no ties, no fixed patterns, here I could do as I liked. Hide away for a year and write, create something in secret. Or I could just take it easy and save up some money. It didn’t really matter. What mattered was that I was here.
I poured some milk into a glass and drank it in long swigs, placed the glass next to the plate and the knife on the worktop, returned the food to the fridge and went into the sitting room, plugged the typewriter in, put on my headset, turned the volume up full, inserted a sheet of paper into the typewriter, centred it and typed a figure 1 at the top. Looked down at the caretaker’s house. A pair of green wellies stood on the doorstep. A broom with red bristles leaned against the wall. There were some toy cars lying in the mixture of gravel and sand covering the area in front of the door. Between the two houses grew moss, lichen, some grass and a few slender trees. I tapped my forefinger against the table edge to the rhythm of the music. I wrote one sentence: ‘Gabriel stood at the top of the hill looking over the housing estate with an expression of disapproval on his face.’
I smoked a cigarette, brewed a jug of coffee and looked out across the village and fjord and up at the mountains beyond. I wrote another sentence: ‘Gordon appeared behind him.’ Sang along to the chorus. Wrote. ‘He grinned like a wolf.’ Pushed back my chair, put my feet on the table and lit another cigarette.
That was pretty good, wasn’t it?
I picked up The Garden of Eden by Hemingway and browsed through it to get a feel for the language. I had been given it by Hilde as a leaving present two days before, at Kristiansand railway station when I was about to leave for Oslo to catch a plane to Tromsø. Lars was there too, and Eirik, who went out with Hilde. Not forgetting Line. She was going to travel with me to Oslo and say goodbye there.
It was only now that I saw there was a dedication on the copyright page. She had written that I meant something special to her.
I lit a cigarette and sat looking out of the window while I chewed that over.
What could I mean to her?
She saw something in me, I felt that, but I didn’t know what she saw. To be friends with her was to be taken care of. But the care that resides in understanding always makes the recipient smaller too. It wasn’t a problem, but I was aware of it.
I wasn’t worth it. I pretended I was, and the strange thing was that she rose to it, because there was nothing wrong with her intelligence in such matters. Hilde was the only person I knew who read decent books, and the only person I knew who herself wrote. We had been in the same class for two years and at once she caught my attention, she had an ironic, sometimes also rebellious, attitude to what was said in the classroom, which I had never seen in a girl before. She despised the other girls’ mania for make-up, the way they always did their best to be proper, their often affected childishness, but not in any aggressive or bitter manner, she was not like that, she was kind and caring, she had a fundamentally gentle nature, but there was a sharpness to it too, an unusual stubbornness, which made me look in her direction more and more often. She was pale, she had pale freckles on her cheeks, her hair was a reddish-blonde colour, she was thin and there was something physically fragile about her, fragile in the sense of the opposite of robust, which in another, less sharp, less independent soul would perhaps evoke a need in those she met to take her under their wing, but there was definitely no need for this, quite the contrary, it was Hilde who took whoever crossed her path under her wing. She often went around in a green military jacket and plain blue jeans, which signalled politically that she was on the left, but culturally she was on the right, because what she was against was materialism, while what she was for was the mind. In other words, the internal in preference to the external. That was why she scorned writers like Solstad and Faldbakken, or Phallusbakken as she called him, and liked Bjørneboe and Kaj Skagen and even André Bjerke.
Hilde had become my closest confidante. Actually she was my best friend. I was in and out of the house where she lived, I got to know her parents, sometimes I stayed the night and had dinner with them. What Hilde and I did, occasionally with Eirik, occasionally on our own, was talk. Sitting cross-legged on the floor of her cellar flat, with a bottle of wine between us, the night pressing against the windows, we talked about books we had read, about political issues that interested us, about what awaited us in life, what we wanted to do and what we could do. She was very serious about life, she was the only acquaintance of my age who was, and she probably saw the same in me, while at the same time she laughed a lot and irony was never far away. There was little I liked better than being there, in their house, with her and Eirik and sometimes Lars; however, there were other things happening in my life which were irreconcilable, and this caused me to have a permanent guilty conscience: if I was out drinking at discos and trying to chat up girls I felt bad about Hilde and what I stood for when I was with her; if I was at Hilde’s place and talked about freedom or beauty or the meaning of everything I could feel pangs of guilt towards those I went out with, or towards the person I was when I was with them, because the duplicity and hypocrisy that Hilde, Eirik and I talked so much about was also present in my own heart. Politically, I was way out on the left, bordering on anarchy, I hated conformity and conventionality, and like all the other alternative young people growing up in Kristiansand, including her, I despised Christianity and all the idiots who believed in it and went to meetings with their stupid charismatic priests.
But I didn’t despise the Christian girls. No, for some strange reason it was precisely them I fell for. How could I explain that to Hilde? And although I, like her, always tried to see beneath the surface, on the basis of a fundamental yet unstated tenet that what lay beneath was the truth or the reality, and, like her, always sought meaning, even if it were only to be found in an acknowledgement of meaninglessness, it was actually on the glittering and alluring surface that I wanted to live, and the chalice of meaninglessness I wanted to drain — in short I was attracted by all the town’s discos and nightspots, where I wanted nothing more than to drink myself senseless and stagger around chasing girls I could fuck, or at least snog. How could I explain that to Hilde?
I couldn’t, and I didn’t. Instead I opened a new subdivision in my life. ‘Booze and hopes of fornication’ it was called, and it was right next to ‘insight and sincerity’, separated only by a minor garden-fence-like change of personality.
Line was a Christian. Not ostentatiously so, but she was, and her presence at the railway station, close to me, somehow made me feel ill at ease.
She had curly black hair, pronounced eyebrows and clear blue eyes. She moved with grace and was independent in that rare way that does not impinge on others. She liked drawing and did it a lot, perhaps she was gifted in that direction; after she had said goodbye to me she was going to study creative arts at a folk high school. I wasn’t in love with her, but she was good-looking, I was incredibly fond of her, and occasionally, after we had shared some white wine, passionate feelings for her could rise inside me nonetheless. The problem was that she had clear boundaries as to how far she would go. During the weeks we had been together I had asked her twice, begged her, to let me as we lay there, semi-naked, smooching in bed at her house or in my room at the Henhouse. But no, it wasn’t me she was saving herself for.