“That’s where Aksel Sandemose came from!” he declared. And then he looked straight at me again. “Do you know the name of the law he devised, inspired by the town you visited?”
What was this? Were we at school or what?
“Yes,” I said, looking down. I didn’t want to articulate the word; I didn’t want to tell him.
“Which is?” he insisted.
As I raised my eyes to meet his, they were as defiant as they were embarrassed.
“Jante,” I said.
“You got it!” he said.
“Did you have a good time there?” Dad asked.
“Yes, I did,” I said. “Great fields. Great town.”
Nykøbing: I had walked back to the school where we were lodged, after spending the whole evening and night out with a girl I had met, she had been crazy about me. The four others from the team who had been with me had gone back earlier, it was just me and her, and as I walked home, drunker than usual, I had stopped outside one of the houses in the town. All the detail was gone, I couldn’t remember leaving her, couldn’t remember going to the house, but once there, standing by this door, it was as if I came to myself again. I took the lit cigarette out of my mouth, opened the letter box, and dropped it on the hall floor inside. Then everything went fuzzy again, but somehow I must have found my way to the school, got in, and gone to bed, to be woken for breakfast and training three hours later. When we were sitting under one of the enormous trees around the training area chatting, I suddenly remembered the cigarette I had thrown in through the door. I got up, chilled deep into my soul, booted a ball up the field and began to give chase. What if it had started to burn? What if people had died in the fire? What did that make me?
I had succeeded in repressing it for several days, but now, sitting at the long table in the garden on my first evening home, fear reared up again.
“Which team do you play for, Karl Ove?” one of the others asked.
“Tveit,” I said.
“Which division are you in?”
“I play for the juniors,” I said. “But the seniors are in the fifth division.”
“Not exactly IK Start then,” he said. From his dialect I deduced that he came from Vennesla, so it was easy to come back with a retort.
“No, more like Vindbjart,” I said. Vindbjart from Vennesla. Second Division, group three.
They laughed at that. I looked down. It felt as if I had already attracted too much attention. But when, immediately afterward, I let my gaze wander to Dad, he was smiling at me.
Yes, his eyes were shining.
“Wouldn’t you like a beer, Karl Ove?” he said.
I nodded.
“Certainly would,” I replied.
He scanned the table.
“Looks as if we’ve run out here,” he said. “But there’s a crate in the kitchen. You can take one from there.”
I got up. As I made for the door two people came out. A man and a woman, entwined. She was wearing a white summer dress. Her bare arms and legs were tanned. Her breasts heavy, stomach and hips ample. Her eyes, in the somehow sated face, were gentle. He, wearing a light blue shirt and white trousers, had a slight paunch, but was otherwise slim. Even though he was smiling and his inebriated eyes seemed to be floating, it was the stiffness of his expression that I noticed. All the movement had gone, just the vestiges remained, like a dried-up riverbed.
“Hi!” she said. “Are you the son?”
“Yes,” I said. “Hello.”
“I work with your father,” she said.
“Nice,” I said, and luckily did not have to say anything more, for they were already on their way. As I went into the hall the bathroom door opened. A small, chubby, dark-haired woman with glasses stepped out. She barely glanced at me, cast her eyes down, and walked past me into the house. Discreetly I sniffed her perfume before following her. Fresh, floral. In the kitchen were the three people I had seen through the window when I arrived. The man, also around forty, was whispering something in the ear of the woman to his right. She smiled, but it was a polite smile. The other woman was rummaging through a bag she had on her lap. She looked up at me as she placed an unopened packet of cigarettes on the table.
“Hello,” I said. “Just come for a beer.”
There were two full crates stacked against the wall by the door. I grabbed a bottle from the top one.
“Anyone got an opener?” I asked.
The man straightened up, patted his thighs.
“I’ve got a lighter,” he said. “Here.”
He made to throw it underarm, at first slowly, so I could prepare myself to catch it, then, with a jerk, the lighter came flying through the air. It hit the door frame and clunked to the floor. But for that I would not have known how to resolve the situation because I didn’t want any condescension because I let him open the bottle for me, but now he had taken the initiative and failed, so the situation was different.
“I can’t open it with a lighter,” I said. “Perhaps you could do it for me?”
I picked up the lighter and handed it to him with the bottle. He had round glasses, and the fact that half of his scalp was hairless, while the hair on the other half rose too high, like a wave at the edge of an endless beach on which it would never break, lent him a somewhat desperate appearance. That, at any rate, was the effect he had on me. The tips of his fingers, now tightening around the lighter, were hairy. From his wrist hung a watch on a silver chain.
The beer cap came off with a dull pop.
“There we are,” he said, passing me the bottle. I thanked him and went into the living room, where four or five people were dancing, and out into the garden. A little gathering of people stood in front of the flagpole, each with glass in hand, looking across the river valley as they chatted.
The beer was fantastic. I had drunk every evening in Denmark, and all the previous evening and night, so it would take a lot for me to get drunk now. And I didn’t want that either. If I got drunk I would slip into their world, in a sense, allow it to swallow me up whole and no longer be able to see the difference, I might even begin to get a taste for the women in it. That was the last thing I wanted.
I surveyed the landscape. Looked at the river flowing in a gentle curve around the grass-covered headland where the soccer goals were, and between the tall deciduous trees growing along the bank, which were now black against the dark-gray, shiny surface of the water. The hills that rose on the other side and then undulated down toward the sea were also black. The lights from the clusters of houses lying between the river and the ridge shone out strong and bright, while the stars in the sky — those close to the land grayish, those higher up a bluish hue — were barely visible.
The group by the flagpole were laughing at something. They were only a few meters from me, but their faces were still indistinct. The man with the slight paunch emerged from around the corner of the house, he appeared to glide. The confirmation photograph of me had been taken there, in front of the flagpole, between Mom and Dad. I took another swig and went toward the far end of the garden where no one else seemed to have found their way. I sat there with legs crossed, by the birch. The music was more distant, the voices and laughter too, and the movements from my vantage point even less distinct. Like apparitions, they floated in the darkness around the illuminated house. I thought of Hanne. It was as if she had a place inside me. As if she existed as a real location where I would always be. That I could go there whenever I wanted felt like an act of mercy. We had sat talking on a rock by the sea at a class party the previous night. Nothing happened, that was all there was. The rock, Hanne, the bay with the low islets, the sea. We had danced, played games, gone down the steps from the quay, and swum in the dark. It had been wonderful. And the wonder of it was indelible, it had stayed with me all of the next day, and it was in me now. I was immortal. I got up, aware of my own power in every cell of my body. I was wearing a gray T-shirt, calf-length military green trousers, and white Adidas basketball shoes, that was all, but it was enough. I was not strong, but I was slim, supple, and as handsome as a god.