She chuckled. Then she sighed.
“Oh well,” she said. “Life’s a pitch, as the old woman said. She couldn’t pronounce her ‘b’s. Ha ha ha.”
She raised her glass to her lips and drank. I did the same. Then grabbed the bottle and refilled my empty glass, glancing at Yngve, who nodded, and I poured.
“Would you like some more?” I said, looking at Grandma.
“Please,” she said. “Just a finger.”
After I had attended to her glass, Yngve poured in some juice, but it ran out before the glass was half-full, and he shook the carton a few times.
“It’s empty,” he said, looking at me. “Didn’t you buy some Sprite in the shop?”
“I did,” I said. “I’ll get it.”
I went to the fridge. As well as the three half-liters I had bought there was a 1.5 liter bottle Yngve had picked up earlier in the day.
“Had you forgotten this one?” I said, holding it up.
“Oh yeah,” Yngve said.
I put it on the table and left the room to go downstairs to the toilet. The darkened rooms lay around me, large and empty. But with the flame of alcohol burning in my brain I took no notice of the atmosphere that otherwise would have affected me, for although I wasn’t outright happy, I was elated, exhilarated, motivated by the desire to continue this, which not even a direct reminder of Dad’s death could shake, it was just a pale shadow, present but of no consequence, because life had taken its place, all the images, voices and actions that drinking alcohol conjured up at the drop of a hat and gave me the illusion that I was somewhere surrounded by a lot of people and merriment. I knew it wasn’t true, but that was how it felt, and it was feeling that was leading me, also when I stepped on the stained wall-to-wall carpeting on the ground floor, illuminated by the dim light seeping in through the front door pane, and entered the bathroom that hissed and whistled as it had done for at least thirty years. On my way out I heard their voices above and hurried upstairs. In the living room, I took a few steps inside to see the place where he had died while I was in a different, a more carefree frame of mind. I was given a sudden sensation of who he had been. I didn’t see him, it wasn’t like that, but I could sense him, the whole of his being, the way he had been during his final days in these rooms. It was uncanny. But I didn’t want to linger, nor could I perhaps, for the sensation lasted only a few moments, then my brain sank its claws into it and I went back to the kitchen where everything was as I had left it, except for the color of the drinks, which were shiny and full of small, grayish bubbles now.
Grandma was talking more about the years she had lived in Oslo. This story too was part of the family mythology, and this too she gave an unexpected, and for us new, twist at the end. I already knew that Grandma had been in a relationship with Alf, our grandfather’s elder brother. At first they had been a couple. Both the brothers had been studying in Oslo, Alf natural science, while Grandad studied economics. When the relationship with Alf finished Grandma married Grandad and moved to Kristiansand, as did Alf, but with Sølvi as his wife. She had had TB in her youth, one lung was punctured and she was sickly all her life, she couldn’t have children, so at a relatively late age they had adopted an Asian girl. When I was growing up most of our get-togethers were with Alf plus family, and Grandma and Grandad plus family, they were the ones who visited us, and the fact that Alf and Grandma had once been a couple was often mentioned, it was no secret, and when Grandad and Sølvi were dead, Grandma and Alf met once a week, she visited him every Saturday morning, at the house in Grim, no one considered this strange, but there were a few kindly smiles, for was this not how it should have been?
Grandma told us about the first time she had met the two brothers. Alf had been the extrovert, Grandad the more introverted one, but both apparently showed an interest in the girl from Åsgårdstrand, for when Grandad saw which way the wind was blowing with his brother, who was charming her with his good humor and wit, he whispered to her: He’s got the ring in his pocket!
Grandma was laughing as she spoke.
“What was that?” I asked, despite having heard what he said. He’s got the ring in his pocket! he repeated. What kind of ring? I asked. An engagement ring! he answered, boys. He thought I hadn’t understood!”
“Was Alf already engaged to Sølvi at that time?” Yngve asked.
“Indeed he was. She lived in Arendal and was sickly, you know. He didn’t expect it to last. But they made it in the end!”
She took another sip from the glass and licked her lips afterward. There was a silence, and she withdrew into herself as she had done so many times in the last two days. Sat with her arms crossed, staring into the distance. I drained my drink and poured myself a fresh one, took out a Rizla, laid a line of tobacco, spread it evenly to get the best possible draw, rolled the paper a few times, pressed down the end and closed it, licked the glue, removed any shreds of tobacco, dropped them in the pouch, put the somewhat deformed roll-up in my mouth and lit it with Yngve’s green, semitransparent lighter.
“We were going to travel south to the sun the winter Grandad died,” Grandma said. “We had bought the tickets and everything.”
I looked at her as I blew out the smoke.
“The night he collapsed in the bathroom, you know … I just heard a crash inside and I got up, and there he was on the floor, telling me to call for an ambulance. When I’d done that I sat holding his hand as we waited for it to come. Then he said, We’ll still go south. And I was thinking, It’s a different south you’re heading for.”
She laughed, but with downcast eyes.
“It’s a different south you’re heading for!” she repeated.
There was a long silence.
“Ohh,” she said then. “Life’s a pitch, as the old woman said. She couldn’t pronounce her ‘b’s.’”
We smiled. Yngve shifted his glass, looked down at the table. I didn’t want her thinking about either Grandad’s or Dad’s death, and I tried to change the subject by returning to her previous subject.
“But did you come here when you moved to Kristiansand?” I asked.
“Oh, no,” she replied.
“We were farther down Kuholmsveien. We bought this house after the war. It was a wonderful location, one of the best in Lund because we had a view of course. Of the sea and the town. And so high up that no one can look in. But when we bought the plot there was another house here. Although to call it a house is a bit of an exaggeration. Ha ha ha. It was a real hovel. The people who lived here, two men as far as I remember, yes, it was … you see, they drank. And the first time we came to see the house, I remember it well, there were bottles everywhere. In the hall where we entered, on the stairs, in the living room, in the kitchen. Everywhere! In some places it was so thick with bottles you couldn’t set a foot inside. So we got it quite cheap. We demolished the house and then we built this. There hadn’t been a garden, either, just rock, a hovel on rock, that was what we bought.”
“Did you put a lot of work into the garden?” I asked.
“Oh yes, you can imagine. Oh yes, yes, I did. The plum trees down there, you know, I took them from my parents’ house in Åsgårdstrand. They’re very old. They’re not that common anymore.”
“I remember we used to take bags of the plums home,” Yngve said.
“Yes,” I said.
“Do they still bear fruit?” Yngve asked.
“Yes, I think so,” Grandma said. “Perhaps not as much as before, but …” I reached for the bottle, which was nearly half-empty now, and poured myself another glass. Not so strange perhaps that it had not struck my grandmother that the wheel had come full circle with what had gone on here, I mused. Wiped a drop from the bottleneck with my thumb and licked it off while Grandma, on the other side of the table, opened the tobacco pouch and placed a fingerful in the roller machine. However extreme life had been for her over recent years, it barely constituted a tiny part of all the things she had been through. When she had looked at Dad she had seen the baby, the child, the adolescent, the young man; the whole of his character and all of his qualities were contained in that one look, and if he was in such a drunken state that he shat his pants while lying on her sofa, the moment was so brief and she so old that it would not, compared with all the immense span of time together that she had stored, have had enough weight to become the image that counted. The same was true of the house, I assumed. The first house with the bottles became “the house of the bottles” whereas this house was her home, the place where she had spent the last forty years and the fact that it was full of bottles now could never be what the house meant to her.