In this house you really ought to be able to play Pippi Longstocking, I thought.
I put the guitar back and grabbed the pop magazine again as Kari Anne came downstairs with Torje in her arms. He was hanging there and grinning from ear to ear. I got up and went over to them, leaned forward and said booh to him, an unusual and unnatural action for me, I immediately felt stupid, but that clearly didn’t bother Torje, who hiccupped with laughter, and looked at me expectantly when he stopped laughing, he wanted me to do it again.
“Booh!” I said.
“Eeha eeha eeha!” he said.
Not all rituals involve ceremonies, not all rituals are rigidly demarcated, there are those that take shape in the midst of everyday life, and are recognizable by the weight and charge they give the otherwise normal event. As I stepped out of the house that morning and followed Yngve to the car, for a moment it was as if I was entering a larger story than my own. The sons leaving home to bury their father, this was the story I suddenly found myself in, as I stopped by the passenger door while Yngve unlocked the trunk and stowed his bag, and Kari Anne, Ylva, and Torje stood watching us from the front door. The sky was grayish-white and mild, the estate quiet. The slam of the trunk lid, which reverberated against the house wall on the other side, sounded almost obtrusively clear and sharp. Yngve opened the door and got in, leaned across and unlocked my side. I waved to Kari Anne and the children before squeezing into the seat and closing the door. They waved back. Yngve started the engine, hung his arm across the back of my seat and reversed, up to the right. Then he too waved, and we set off down the road. I leaned back.
“Are you tired?” Yngve asked. “Just sleep if you want.”
“Sure?”
“Of ourse. So long as I can play some music.”
I nodded and closed my eyes. Heard him press the CD player button, hunt for a CD on the narrow shelf under the dashboard. The low hum of the car. Then the disc being slipped in, and straight afterward, a folksy mandolin intro.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Sixteen Horsepower,” he said. “Do you like it?”
“Sounds good,” I said, closing my eyes again. The sensation of the great story had gone. We were not two sons, we were Yngve and Karl Ove; we were not going home but to Kristiansand; this was not a father we were burying, it was Dad.
I wasn’t tired, and didn’t manage to fall asleep, but it was pleasant sitting with my eyes closed, mostly because it was undemanding. When we were growing up, I chatted all the time with Yngve and we never had any secrets, but at some juncture, perhaps as early as when I was at upper secondary, this changed: from then on I was immensely conscious of who he was and who I was when we were talking, all spontaneity vanished, every statement I made was either planned in advance or analyzed retrospectively, mostly both, apart from when I was drinking, then I regained the old freedom. With the exception of Tonje and my mother, that was how I behaved with everyone, I couldn’t sit and chat with people anymore, my awareness of the situation was too acute, and that put me outside it. Whether it was the same for Yngve I didn’t know, but I didn’t think so, it didn’t seem so when I saw him with others. Whether he knew that was how I felt, I didn’t know, but something told me he did. Often it felt to me as if I were false, or deceitful, since I never played with an open deck, I was always calculating and evaluating. This didn’t bother me any more, it had become my life, but right now, at the outset of a long car journey, now that Dad was dead, I experienced a yearning to escape from myself or at least the part that guarded me so assiduously.
Shit a brick.
I straightened up and flicked through his CDs. Massive Attack, Portishead, Blur, Leftfield, Bowie, Supergrass, Mercury Rev, Queen.
Queen?
He had liked them ever since he was small, had always stayed true to them, and was ready to defend them at the drop of a hat. I remembered him sitting in his room copying one of Brian May’s solos note for note on his new guitar, a black imitation Les Paul, bought with his confirmation money, and the Queen fan club magazine he got through the mail. He was still waiting for the world to come to its senses and accord to Queen what Queen was rightfully due.
I smiled.
When Freddie Mercury died, the revelation that shocked was not the fact that he was gay but that he was an Indian.
Who could have imagined that?
Buildings were few and far between now. The traffic in the oncoming roadway had increased for a while, as rush hour approached, but was beginning to die down as we emerged into the unpopulated area between towns. We passed huge, yellow cornfields, vast expanses of strawberries, patches of green pastureland, newly plowed fields of dark brown, almost black soil. Occasional copses, villages, some river or other, some lake or other. Then the terrain totally changed character and became almost mountainous with green, treeless, uncultivated upland. Yngve drove into a gas station, filled up, poked his head in and asked if I wanted anything, I shook my head, but on his return he passed me a bottle of Coke and a Bounty bar.
“Feel like a smoke?” he said.
I nodded and clambered out. We walked to a bench at the end of the parking lot. Behind it flowed a little stream, with a bridge farther on. A motorbike roared by, then a juggernaut, then one more.
“What did Mom actually say?” I said.
“Not much,” Yngve said. “She needs time to think things through. But she was sad. Probably thinking about us mostly, I would imagine.”
“Borghild’s being buried today,” I said.
“Yes,” he said.
A juggernaut drove into the gas station from the west, parked with a sigh at the other end, a middle-aged man jumped down from the cab and held his windblown, flapping hair in place as he walked to the entrance.
“Last time I saw Dad he talked about setting up as a truck driver,” I said with a smile.
“Oh,” Yngve said. “When was that?”
“Winter, um, year and a half ago. When I was in Kristiansand, writing.”
I unscrewed the bottle top and took a swig.
“When did you last see him?” I said, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand.
Yngve stared across the flatland on the other side of the road and took a couple of drags from the dying cigarette.
“Must have been at Egil’s confirmation. May last year. But you were there too, weren’t you?”
“Shit, I was,” I said. “That was the last time. Or was it?” Now I wasn’t so sure.
Yngve lowered his foot from the bench seat, replaced the top on the bottle and set off for the car as the truck driver came out of the door with a newspaper under his arm and a hot dog in his hand. I chucked the smoking cigarette onto the tarmac and followed. By the time I reached the car the engine was already running.
“Right,” Yngve said. “Two hours to go, give or take. We can eat when we get there, can’t we?”
“Okay,” I said.
“Anything you’d like to hear?”
He halted at the junction, glanced a few times back and forth, then we were on the main road again, and he accelerated.
“No,” I said. “You decide.”
He chose Supergrass. The music I had bought in Barcelona, where I had accompanied Tonje while she went to some European local radio seminar. We had seen them live there, and since then I had played them nonstop, along with a couple of other CDs, while writing the novel. The mood of that year suddenly overwhelmed me. So it had already become a memory, I marveled. So it had already become “the time in Volda when I wrote around the clock while Tonje was left to twiddle her thumbs.”