“Is that right?”
“Oh, yes, she’s never been much of a housewife.”
“Perhaps not,” I said.
“But she deserved better than this. We thought she could enjoy some good years after Grandfather died. We got her some home-help, you know, and they took care of the whole house for her.”
I nodded. “I heard about that,” I said.
“That was some help for us too. Before that, it was always us who helped them. With all sorts of things. They’ve been old for a long time, of course. And with your father being the way he was, and Erling in Trondheim, everything fell on us.”
“I know,” I said, raising my hands and eyebrows in a gesture that was supposed to show that I sympathized with her, but could not have done anything myself.
“Now, though, she’ll have to go into a home and be taken care of. It’s terrible to see her like this.”
“Yes,” I said.
She smiled again.
“How’s Sissel?”
“Fine,” I said. “She lives in Jølster, she seems to love it there. And she’s working at the nursing college in Førde.”
“Give her my love when you see her,” Tove said.
“Will do,” I said and smiled back. Tove picked up the cloth again, and I went down to where I had reached on the stairs, about halfway, put down the bucket, wrung the cloth and squirted a line of Jif over the banister.
“Karl Ove?” Yngve called.
“Yes?” I answered.
“Come down here a minute.”
He was standing in front of the hall mirror. A huge stack of papers on the oil-fired heater beside him. His eyes were shiny.
“Look at this,” he said, passing me an envelope. It was addressed to Ylva Knausgaard, Stavanger. Inside was a piece of paper on which Dear Ylva was written but otherwise it was blank.
“Did he write to her? From here?” I asked.
“Seems like it,” Yngve said. “It must have been her birthday or something. And then he gave up. Look, he didn’t have our address.”
“I didn’t think he’d registered that she existed,” I said.
“But he had,” Yngve said. “He must have thought about her as well.”
“She is his first grandchild,” I said.
“True,” Yngve said. “But this is Dad we’re talking about. It doesn’t have to mean a thing.”
“Shit,” I said. “It’s all so sad.”
“I found something else,” Yngve said. “Look at this.”
This time he passed me a typed, official-looking letter. It was from the State Educational Loan Fund. It was a statement to say his study loan had been repaid in full.
“Look at the date,” Yngve said.
It was June 29.
“Two weeks before he died,” I said, and met Yngve’s eyes. We started laughing.
He laughed.
And I laughed. “So much for freedom.”
We laughed again.
When Gunnar and Tove left an hour later, the atmosphere in the house changed again. With only us and Grandma at home, the rooms seemed to close around what had happened, as though we were too weak to open them. Or perhaps we were too close to what had happened and were a greater part of it than Gunnar and Tove. At any rate, the flow of life and movement abated, and every object inside, whether the television, the chairs, the sofa, the sliding door between the living rooms, the black piano, or the two baroque paintings hanging on the wall above it, appeared for what it was, heavy, immovable, laden with the past. Outside, it had clouded over again. The grayish-white sky muted all the colors of the landscape. Yngve sifted through papers, I washed the staircase, Grandma sat in the kitchen, immersed in her own gloom. At around four o’clock Yngve took the car and went to buy some lunch, and, conscious of the whole house around me, I fervently hoped that Grandma would not set out on one of her rare peregrinations and join me, for it felt as if my soul, or whatever it is other people, with such ease, leave their impressions on, was so fragile and sensitive that I would not be able to bear the strain that her grief and gloom-stricken presence would impose. But this hope was in vain, for after a while I heard the scrape of table legs upstairs, and soon afterward her footsteps, first into the living room, then on the staircase.
She held the rail tight, as though on the brink of a precipice.
“Is that you?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“But I’ll soon have finished.”
“Where’s Ynge then?”
“He’s gone shopping,” I said.
“Yes, that’s right, yes,” she said. She stood watching my hand, which, with the cloth held between my fingers, was moving up and down the banister. Then she looked at my face. I met her gaze, and a chill ran down my spine. She looked as though she hated me.
She sighed and flicked the lock of hair that kept falling over one eye to the side.
“You’re working hard,” she said. “You’re working very hard.”
“Ye-es,” I said. “But now that we’ve started it’s great to make some progress, isn’t it?”
There was the sound of a car engine outside.
“There he is,” I said.
“Who?” she asked. “Gunnar?”
“Yngve,” I said.
“But isn’t he here?”
I didn’t answer.
“Oh, that’s right,” she said. “I’m beginning to unravel too!”
I smiled, dropped the cloth in the turbid water, and grabbed the handle of the bucket.
“We’d better make something to eat,” I said.
In the kitchen, I poured out the water, wrung the cloth dry, and hung it over the rim of the bucket while Grandma sat in her place. As I removed the ashtray from the table she moved the lowest part of the curtain aside and peered out. I emptied the ashtray, walked back, took the cups, put them in the sink, wet the kitchen rag, sprayed the table with a detergent and was washing it when Yngve came in with a grocery bag in each hand. He set them down and began to unpack. First, what we would have for lunch, which he laid out on the counter, four vacuum-packed salmon steaks, a bag of potatoes stained dark with soil, a head of cauliflower, and a packet of frozen beans, then all the other goods, some of which he stowed in the fridge, some in the cupboard next to it. A 1.5 liter bottle of Sprite, a 1.5 liter bottle of CB beer, a bag of oranges, a carton of milk, a carton of orange juice, a loaf. I switched on the stove, took a frying pan from the cupboard under the counter and some margarine from the fridge, cut off a slice and scraped it in the pan, filled a large saucepan with water and placed it on the rear burner, opened the bag of potatoes, spilled them into the sink, turned on the tap, and started washing them, as the dollop of margarine slowly slid across the black frying pan. Again it struck me how clean and, for that reason, heartening the presence of these purchases was, their bright colors, the green and white of the frozen beans bag, its red writing and red logo, or the white paper around most of the loaf, though not all, the dark, rounded, crusty end peeped out like a snail from its shell, or, so it appeared to me, like a monk from his cowl. The orange tint of the fruit bulging through the plastic bag. Together, one globular shape hidden behind the other, they almost resembled a textbook model of a molecule. The scent they spread through the room as soon as they were peeled or cut open always reminded me of my father. That was how the rooms he had been in smelled: of cigarette smoke and oranges. Entering my own office and smelling the air there, I was always filled with good feelings.
But why? What was it that constituted the “good?”
Yngve folded up the two grocery bags and put them in the bottom drawer. The margarine was sizzling in the pan. The jet from the tap was broken by the potatoes I was holding beneath it, and the water that ran down the sides of the sink was not powerful enough to remove all the soil from the tubers and so formed a layer of mud around the plughole until the potatoes were clean and I removed them from the jet, which then swept everything with it in a second, to reveal once again the spotless, gleaming metal base.