He was lying on his bed reading. Still dressed. He smiled when he saw me and sat up.
“You’re only wearing your underpants,” Yngve said.
“Who was that at the door?”
“Fru Gustavsen, I think,” he said. “And all the kids.”
“Oh? Why? And why did Mom go? Where did she go?”
Yngve shrugged.
“I think she drove them to some relatives.”
“Why?”
“Gustavsen’s drunk. Didn’t you hear him shouting at them a while ago?”
I shook my head.
“I was asleep. But was Leif Tore with them? And Rolf?”
Yngve nodded.
“Jeez,” I said.
“Dad’ll be coming back up,” he said. “You’d better go to bed. I’ll turn out the lights too now.”
“OK. Good night.”
“Good night.”
In my room, I drew the curtains aside and looked across to Gustavsen’s house. I couldn’t see anything unusual. Outside, at least, everything was still.
Herr Gustavsen had been drunk before, he was well known for it. One night that spring a rumor had spread that he was drunk, and three or four of us crept into their garden and stood by the living-room window looking in. But there was nothing to see. He was sitting on the sofa gazing into the distance without moving. At other times we had heard him shouting and yelling, through the open windows and on the lawn. Leif Tore just laughed. But perhaps this was something different? Escaping from him, they’d never done that before.
When I next woke it was morning. Someone was in the bathroom, I could hear, probably Yngve, and from the road outside, along the three-meter-high wall surrounding Gustavsen’s property and supporting the level lawn, came the drone of Mom’s car. She had to go to work early today. Yngve closed the bathroom door, returned to his room, and then went downstairs.
The bike!
Where was his bike?
I had completely forgotten to ask him.
But that had to be the reason he was leaving so early; he couldn’t cycle, he had to walk to school.
I got up, took my clothes into the bathroom, washed in the water he had remembered to leave, today, too, dressed, and went to the kitchen where Dad had made three smørbrød and put them on a plate in my place, as well as a glass of milk. The milk carton, the bread, the cheese, sliced meat, and jams had been cleared away. He was sitting in the living room, listening to the radio and smoking.
Outside it was raining. A steady drizzle, broken by intermittent gusts of wind, pitter-pattering against the windows and sounding like tiny drumming fingers.
Monday was the only day no one was at home when I came back from school. So I had my own key, which I carried on a piece of string around my neck. But there was a problem with the key: I couldn’t get it to open the door. The first Monday it had been raining and I bounded across the gravel in rubber boots and rain gear, the key nestling in my hand, overjoyed at the imminent prospect and filled with pride. I managed to get the key into the lock, but not to turn it. It would not budge however much force I used. The key was unmovable. After ten minutes I started crying. My hands were red and cold, the rain was bucketing down, and all the other children had been at home for ages. At that moment one of the neighbors I didn’t know so well passed — she was old and lived with her husband in the house at the very top by the forest above the soccer field — on her way down the road, and when I saw her, I didn’t hesitate, because she had no connection with my parents, I dashed over and asked, with tears running down my cheeks, if she could help me with the lock. She could. And for her it was no problem at all! She fiddled with the key and it turned. And, hey presto, the door was open. I thanked her and went inside. Knowing there was nothing wrong with the key, there was something wrong with me. The next time this happened it wasn’t raining, so I left my satchel by the step and ran up to Geir’s. Dad made a comment about the satchel when he came home, I wasn’t to leave it lying around, so the following Monday, when the weather was also dry, I simply took it with me, under the pretext of having to do some homework with Geir and thus needing my satchel close at hand.
In the meantime, I had worked out a method I could use when the weather got worse during autumn and winter, like today. In the boiler room there was a little window, more like a hatch, but not so small that I couldn’t crawl through. It was positioned about half a meter above my head. I had worked out that if I opened the window in the morning, and there was no great risk involved because the window stayed close to the frame even when the two catches were undone, I could pull over the trash can when I got home, stand on it, wriggle through into the boiler room, open the door from the inside, put the trash can back, close the window, and be indoors without anyone realizing I couldn’t get the key to turn. The sole doubt in my mind was when to undo the catches. However, if it was raining, it would be the most natural thing in the world to go into the boiler room, because that was where my rain gear usually hung, and all I had to do was lift the catches, impossible to see unless you stood close to the door. And I wasn’t so stupid that I would touch anything with Dad around in the hall!
I ate the three smørbrød and drank the glass of milk. Brushed my teeth in the bathroom, collected my satchel from my room, went downstairs and into the hot, narrow room with the two water cylinders. I stood absolutely still for two seconds. As there was no sound of footsteps on the stairs, I stretched up and unhooked the catches. Then I donned my rain gear, slipped on my satchel, went into the hall where my boots were, a pair of blue-and-white Viking rubber boots that I had been given despite my wanting white ones, shouted goodbye to Dad, and ran out, up to Geir’s, he poked his head out of the window and called that he was still having breakfast but would be down soon.
I walked over to one of the gray puddles in Geir’s family’s drive and started throwing stones in it. Their drive wasn’t covered in gravel as most of the others were, nor brick paving like at Gustavsen’s, but compacted reddish earth full of small, round stones. This wasn’t all that was different about them. At the back of the house they didn’t have a lawn but a little patch where they had planted potatoes, carrots, swedes, radishes, and various other vegetables. On the forest side they didn’t have a wooden fence, as we did, or wire netting, as many others did, but a stone wall that Prestbakmo had built himself. Nor did they throw all their garbage in the trash can, as we did; they kept all their milk and egg cartons to use in a variety of ways and they put all their food remains on a compost heap by the stone wall.
I straightened up and glanced at the cement mixer. The round green drum was partially covered by a white tarpaulin and it looked like a headscarf. Her mouth was open, it was big and toothless; what was it she could see that surprised her so much?
Down the hill came Geir Håkon’s father in his green Ford Taunus. I waved; he lifted his hand from the steering wheel in a fleeting response.
I was suddenly reminded of Anne Lisbet. The thought soared from my stomach and spread like an explosion of joy in my chest.
She hadn’t been at school on Friday. Solveig had said she was ill. But today was Monday. She was bound to be better now.
Oh, please let her be better!
I was dying to go up to B-Max and see her.
Her black glittering eyes. Her happy voice.
“Geir! Come on!” I shouted.
I heard his muffled voice from behind the door. The next instant he tore it open.
“Want to take the path?” he said.
“Sure,” I said.
So we ran behind the house, scrambled over the stone wall, and joined the path. From being no more than a mass of tufts with small dried-up channels in between, the bog was now full of water, impossible to cross dry-shod, even in boots, because your foot would sink in a puddle to way above the boot top, but we tried anyway, balancing on the quivering tufts, jumping to the next, slipping, putting out a hand to save ourselves and feeling the ground give, the water seeming to creep up our sweaters under the sleeves of our jackets. We laughed and shouted, telling each other what had happened, crossed the now muddy and slippery soccer field, and went between the deciduous trees to the right, up the broad avenue that might once have been a cart track, it was broader than a path at any rate and covered with a carpet of leaves. Red, yellow, and brown, they lay there, with the occasional splash of green. At the top there was a tiny field, the grass was long here, a yellowish white, and lay flat, plastered to the ground. Above it a bare tor towered, on which there stood an old telegraph pole. The former cart track continued for a while, then disappeared, devoured by the new main road running past, maybe twenty meters from the field. Below lay the forest, mostly oak trees, between two of them there was an abandoned car, in much worse condition than the one where we normally played, perhaps a hundred meters lower down, but no less appealing for that, in fact the contrary: hardly anyone ever played here.