The door opened behind me. It was Yngve. He was holding a cup of coffee in one hand.
“Tonje sends her love,” I said.
“Thanks,” he said. “How is she?”
“Fine,” I said. “She started work on Monday. She had an item on the news on Wednesday. Fatal accident.”
“You said,” he said, sitting down.
What was that? Was he grumpy?
We sat for a while without speaking. In the sky above the blocks of flats to the left of us, a helicopter flew past. The distant whump of the rotor blades was muffled. The two girls from the play area came walking up the road. Someone from one of the gardens farther away shouted a name. Bjørnar, it sounded like.
Yngve took out a cigarette and lit up.
“Have you taken up golf?” I said.
He nodded.
“You should give it a try. You’re bound to be good. You’re tall and you’ve played soccer and you’ve got that killer instinct. Feel like having a few whacks? I’ve got some practice balls lying around somewhere.”
“Now? I don’t think so.”
“It was a joke, Karl Ove,” he said.
“Me playing golf or trying it now?”
“Trying it now.”
The neighbor, who was standing just behind the hedge separating the two gardens, stopped, straightened up and ran his hand across his bare, sweaty skull. On the veranda sat a woman dressed in a white T-shirt and shorts, reading a magazine.
“Do you know how Grandma is?” I said.
“No, I don’t,” he said. “But she was the one who found him. So you can imagine she probably isn’t feeling too good.”
“In the living room, right?”
“Yes,” he said, stubbing out his cigarette in the ashtray and getting up.
“Well, shall we go in and have a bite to eat?”
The next morning I was woken by Ylva standing at the bottom of the stairs in the hall and howling. I half-propped myself up in bed and raised the blinds so that I could see what time it was. Half past five. I sighed and sank back down. My room was full of packing cases, clothes, and various other things that had not yet found their place in the house. An ironing board stood by one wall, piled with neatly stacked clothes, next to it an Asian-looking screen, folded and leaning against the wall. Beyond the door I could hear Yngve’s and Kari Anne’s voices, soon afterward their footfalls on the old wooden staircase. The radio being switched on downstairs. We had decided to set off at around seven, then we would be in Kristiansand at about eleven, but there was nothing to stop us going earlier, I supposed, swung my feet onto the floor, put on my trousers and T-shirt, leaned forward and ran a hand through my hair while inspecting myself in the wall mirror. No traces of yesterday’s emotional outbursts visible; I just looked tired. So, back to where I was. Because yesterday had not left any traces internally either. Feelings are like water, they always adapt to their surroundings. Not even the worst grief leaves traces; when it feels so overwhelming and lasts for such a long time, it is not because the feelings have set, they can’t do that, they stand still, the way water in a forest mere stands still.
Fuck, I thought. This was one of my mental tics. Fuck, ferk, fuckeroo was another. They flashed into my consciousness at odd intervals, they were impossible to stop, but why should I stop them, they didn’t do anyone any harm. You couldn’t see from my face that I was thinking them. Shit a brick, I thought, and opened the door. I saw straight into their bedroom, and looked down, things existed that I did not want to know, pulled the little wooden gate aside and went downstairs into the kitchen. Ylva was sitting on her Tripp Trapp chair with a slice of bread in her hand and a glass of milk in front of her, Yngve was standing by the stove and frying eggs while Kari Anne shuttled back and forth between the table and cupboards, setting the table. The coffee machine light was on. The last drops from the filter were on their way into the pot. The extractor hood hummed, the eggs bubbled and spat in the pan, the radio blared out the traffic news jingle.
“Good morning,” I said.
“Good morning,” said Kari Anne.
“Hello,” said Yngve.
“Karl Ove,” said Ylva, pointing to the chair opposite her.
“Shall I sit there?” I asked.
She nodded, sweeping head movements, and I pulled the chair out and sat down. Of her parents, she looked more like Yngve, she had his nose and eyes, and oddly many of his expressions also appeared in them. Her body had not yet outgrown the baby fat stage, there was something soft and rounded about all her limbs and parts, so that when she frowned and her eyes assumed Yngve’s knowing air, it was hard not to smile. It didn’t make her older but him younger: suddenly you saw that one of his typical expressions was not associated with experience, maturity, or worldly wisdom, but must have lived its life unchanged and independent of his face right from the time it was forming at the beginning of the 1960s.
Yngve slipped the spatula under the eggs and transferred them, one by one, onto a broad dish, put it on the table, beside the bread basket, fetched the pot of coffee, and filled the three cups. I generally drank tea at breakfast and had since I was fourteen, but I didn’t have the heart to point this out, instead I took a slice of bread and flipped an egg on top with the spatula Yngve had rested against the dish.
I scoured the table for salt. But there was none to be found.
“Any salt?” I asked.
“Here,” Kari Anne said, handing it to me across the table.
“Thank you,” I said, flipping open the little plastic cap and watching the tiny grains sink into the yellow yolk, barely puncturing the surface, as the butter melted and seeped into the bread.
“Where’s Torje?” I said.
“He’s upstairs asleep,” said Kari Anne.
I bit a chunk off the bread. The fried egg-white was crispy underneath, large brownish-black pieces crunched between palate and tongue as I chewed.
“Does he still sleep a lot?” I said.
“Well. . sixteen hours a day possibly? I don’t know. What would you say?” She turned to Yngve.
“No idea,” he said.
I bit into the yolk and it ran, yellow and lukewarm, into my mouth. Took a swig of coffee.
“He was so frightened when Norway scored,” I said.
Kari Anne smiled. We had seen the second of Norway’s World Cup games here, and Torje had been sleeping in a cradle at the other end of the room. Whence a high-pitched howl arose, after our cheering to celebrate the goal had subsided.
“Shame about the Italy game by the way,” Yngve said. “Have we actually talked about it?”
“No,” I said. “But they knew what they were doing. You just had to give Norway the ball and everything broke down.”
“They must have been on their knees after the Brazil game,” Yngve said.
“I was too,” I said. “Penalties are just too painful. I could hardly watch.”
I had seen the match in Molde, with Tonje’s father. As soon as it was over I called Yngve. We were both close to tears. Behind our choked voices lay an entire childhood supporting a national soccer team that had not had a sniff of success. Afterward I had gone down to the town center with Tonje, it had been full of cars honking their horns and people waving flags. Strangers were hugging, the sounds of shouting and singing came from all corners, people were running around with flushed faces, Norway had beaten Brazil in a decisive World Cup match, and no one knew how far this team could go. The whole way maybe?
Ylva slid down from her chair and held my hand.
“Come on,” she said.
“Karl Ove has to eat first,” Yngve said. “Afterward, Ylva!”
“No, don’t worry,” I said, joining her. She dragged me over to the sofa, took a book from the table and sat down. Her short legs didn’t even reach to the edge.