“Is that where you are?” he said. “Wouldn’t you like to join us?”
“Yes,” I said. “Of course. I’ve just been having a look around.”
“It’s a great party,” he said.
He twisted his neck and patted some hair into place. He had always had that mannerism, but there was something about his shirt and those trousers, which were so profoundly alien to him, that suddenly made it seem effeminate. As though this quirk had detected the conservative, reserved manner in which he had always dressed, and neutralized it.
“Everything alright with you, Karl Ove?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Fine. I’ll come out and join you.”
A gust of wind stirred the air as I emerged. The leaves on the forest edge trembled, almost reluctantly, as if waking from a deep sleep.
Or was it just that he was drunk, I thought. Because I wasn’t used to that either. My father had never been a drinker. The first time I saw him in an inebriated state was one evening only two months before when I visited him and Unni in the flat in Elvegaten, and was served fondue, another thing which he would never have considered remotely possible in his own home on a Friday night. They had been drinking before I arrived, and although he was kindness itself, it was threatening nonetheless; not directly, of course, because, sitting there, I didn’t fear him, but indirectly because I could no longer read him. It was as if all the knowledge I had acquired about him through my childhood, and which enabled me to prepare for any eventuality, was, in one fell swoop, invalid. So what was valid?
As I turned and walked toward the table I caught Unni’s eye, she smiled and I returned the smile. Another gust of wind, stronger this time. The leaves on the tall bushes by the barn steps rustled. The lightest branches of the trees above the table swayed up and down.
“How are you doing?” Unni asked as I went over to them.
“Fine,” I said. “But I’m a bit tired. Think I’ll crash soon.”
“Will you be able to sleep in this racket?”
“Oh, that won’t bother me!”
“Your father spoke so warmly about you this evening,” Bodil said, leaning across the table. I didn’t know what to say, so I just gave a cautious smile.
“Isn’t that right, Unni?”
Unni nodded. She had long, completely gray hair although she was only in her early thirties. Dad had been the supervisor during her teacher training. She was wearing flared green slacks and a similar smocklike affair to the one Dad had on. A necklace of wooden beads hung around her neck.
“We read one of your essays this spring,” she said. “You didn’t know perhaps? I hope you don’t mind that I was allowed to see it. He was so proud of you.”
Impossible. What the hell was she doing reading one of my essays?
But I was also flattered, that went without saying.
“You’re like your grandfather, Karl Ove,” Bodil said.
“My grandfather?”
“Yes. Same shape of head. Same mouth.”
“And you’re Dad’s cousin, right?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “You’ll have to come and see us one day. We live in Kristiansand too, you know!”
I didn’t know. Before tonight I didn’t even know she existed. I should have said that. But I didn’t. Instead I said that was nice, and asked what she did, and after a while if she had any children. That was what she was talking about when Dad returned. He sat down and looked at her, straining to tune into the topic of conversation, but then he leaned back, one foot resting on his knee, and lit a cigarette.
I got up.
“Are you going to leave now that I’ve come?” he asked.
“No. Just going to get something,” I said. Opened my bag by the doorstep, took out the cigarettes, put one in my mouth on the way back, paused for a second to light up, so that I could already be smoking when I sat down. Dad said nothing. I could see that he had considered saying something, for a twinge of disapproval appeared around his mouth, but after a brief glare it was gone, as though he had told himself he was no longer like that.
That at least was what I thought.
“Skål,” Dad said, raising his glass of red wine to us. Then he looked at Bodil, and added: “Skål to Helene.”
“Skål to Helene,” Bodil said.
They drank, looking into each other’s eyes.
Who the hell was Helene?
“Haven’t you got anything to toast with, Karl Ove?” Dad asked.
I shook my head.
“Take that glass,” he said. “It’s clean. Isn’t it, Unni?”
She nodded. He passed me the bottle of white wine and poured. We said skål again.
“Who’s Helene?” I asked, looking at them.
“Helene was my sister,” Bodil said. “She’s dead now.”
“Helene was. . well, we were very close when I was growing up. We were together all the time,” Dad said. “Right up to our teenage years. Then she fell ill.”
I took another sip. The couple from earlier appeared from behind the house, the buxom woman in the white dress and the man with the slight paunch. Two other men followed, one of whom I recognized as the man from the kitchen.
“So this is where you are,” said the man with the paunch. “We were wondering. You’re not taking very good care of your guests, I have to say.” He patted my father’s shoulder. “It’s you we want to see, now that we’ve come all this way.”
“That’s my sister,” Bodil whispered to me. “Elisabeth. And her husband, Frank. They live down in Ryen, you know, by the river. He’s an estate agent.”
Had these people my father knew always been around us?
They sat down at the table and things immediately livened up. And what, when I came, had been faces devoid of meaning or substance and which, consequently, I had only regarded in terms of age and type, more or less as if they had been animals, a bestiary of forty-year-olds, with all that that entailed, lifeless eyes, stiff lips, pendulous breasts and quivering paunches, wrinkles and folds, I now saw to be individuals, for I was related to them, the blood that was in their veins was in mine, and who they were suddenly became important.
“We were talking about Helene,” Dad said.
“Helene, yes,” the man called Frank said. “I never met her. But I’ve heard a lot about her. It was a great shame.”
“I sat at her deathbed,” Dad said.
I gaped. What was all this?
“I adored her.”
“She was the most beautiful girl you could ever imagine,” Bodil said to me, still in a whisper.
“And then she died,” Dad said. “Ohh.”
Was he crying?
Yes, he was crying. He was sitting there with his elbows on the table and his hands folded in front of his chest as the tears ran down his cheeks.
“And that was in the spring. It was spring when she died. Everything in flower. Ohh. Ohh.”
Frank lowered his eyes and twirled the glass between his fingers. Unni placed her hand on Dad’s arm. Bodil looked at them.
“You were so close to her,” she said. “You were the most precious thing she had.”
“Ohh. Ohh,” my father cried, closing his eyes and covering his face with his hands.
A gust of wind blew across the yard. The overhanging flaps of the table cloth fluttered. A napkin went flying across the lawn. The foliage above us swished. I lifted my glass and drank, shuddered as the acidic taste hit my palate, and once again recognized that clear, pure sensation that arose with approaching intoxication, and the desire to pursue it that always followed.
Part 2
Having sat for some months in a basement room in Åkeshov, one of Stockholm’s many satellite towns, writing what I hoped would be my second novel, with the Metro a few meters from the window, such that every afternoon after darkness fell I saw the train cars passing through the woods like a row of illuminated rooms, at the end of 2003 I finally found an office in the center of Stockholm. It was owned by one of Linda’s friends, and it was perfect. In fact it was a studio, with a kitchenette, a small shower and a sofa bed in addition to a desk and bookshelves. I moved my things, that is, a pile of books and the computer between Christmas and the new year, and started work there on the first weekday of the new year. My novel was actually finished, a strange hundred-and-thirty-page affair, a short tale about a father and his two sons who were out fishing for crabs one summer’s night, which led into a long essay about angels, which in turn led into a story about one of the sons, now an adult, and some days he spent on an island where he lived alone and wrote and self-harmed.