“I’d better take this off and have a shower so I don’t smell of cowshed, now that we have such refined company,” Kjartan said. “I think there is food for you in there.”
Even outside I could hear the stairs creak when he went up to the bathroom on the first floor. How the stairs creaked here!
And indeed a table had been set for us in the living room. There was a pile of still-hot pancakes and a dish of griddle cakes, as well as bread and various spreads. Mom shuttled to and fro between living room and kitchen. Although she had left home when she was sixteen, married Dad, given birth to Yngve when she was twenty, and lived with her own family ever since, she merged into the household effortlessly as soon as she arrived. Even the way she spoke changed and became much more like the way her parents spoke. With Dad it was the opposite: he was always lost in the background. When he was talking to Grandad, who loved chatting and had a story for every occasion, often from his own experience, there was something formal about Dad that made him so alien but which I still recognized, it was the manner he adopted when he spoke to other parents and colleagues. Grandad wasn’t polite in that way, he was completely and utterly himself, so why would Dad sit there nodding and saying, I see, oh yes, really, mhm, mhm? Mom was different here, too, she laughed and chatted more, and these changes amounted to a plus for us, in fact, an enormous plus: Dad was in the background, Mom was livelier, and there were no house rules, and unlike where we came from, here we could do as we liked. If one of us knocked over a glass of milk it wasn’t a catastrophe, Grandma and Grandad understood that accidents can happen, we could even put our feet on the table here, well, if Dad wasn’t in the room at that point, of course, and we could sit on the brown sofa with orange and beige stripes, as slumped as we wanted, even lie on it if we felt like it. And all the work they did, we did, too, on our own minor scale. We were not unwanted. On the contrary, it was expected of us that we would help as far as we could. Rake the mown hay on the field, lay it on the drying rack, collect the eggs, shovel muck into the cellar, set the table for meals, and pick red currants, black currants, and gooseberries when they were ripe. The doors here were open and people came in without even knocking, they just shouted from the hallway and were suddenly in the living room, made themselves at home and drank coffee with Grandad, who didn’t bat an eyelid, just started chatting as though their conversation had only been interrupted for a few seconds. These people who came were strange, one in particular, a fat-bellied, sloppily dressed, and slightly malodorous man with a high voice who used to wobble up the hill on his moped in the evening. His accent was so broad I barely understood half of what he said. Grandad’s face lit up when he came, but whether that was because he liked him all that much was hard to say as his face lit up whenever anyone came. I was sure he liked us although I doubted whether the thought had ever struck him; we existed, that was enough for him. For Grandma it must have been different, at least it appeared so from the interest she showed when we talked.
Mom stood staring at the table, probably to check that everything was there. Grandma took the coffee pot off the stove in the kitchen and the steadily increasing noise of the whistle died with a little sigh. Dad deposited the luggage in the room above our heads. Grandad came into the hall after hanging up his beekeeper outfit in the basement.
“The Norwegian population is going through a growth spurt, I see!” he said when he saw us. He came over and patted me on the head as though I were some kind of dog. Then he patted Yngve’s head and sat down as Grandma came in from the kitchen carrying the coffee pot, and Dad and Kjartan both came down the stairs.
Grandad was small, his face was round, and apart from a thin wreath of white hair around his head he was bald. The corners of his mouth were often stained with tobacco juice. The eyes behind his glasses were sharp, but were totally transformed once took them off. Then they were like two small children who had just woken up.
“Looks like I came at just the right moment,” he said, putting a slice of bread on his plate.
“We heard you in the basement,” Mom said. “Nothing to do with luck.”
She turned to me.
“Do you remember the time we heard you in the hall ten minutes before you arrived?”
I nodded. Dad and Kjartan sat down on opposite sides of the table. Grandma went to pour coffee into the cups.
Grandad, who was spreading butter over the bread with his knife, looked up.
“You heard him before he came?”
“Yes, strange, isn’t it?” Mom said.
“That’s a vardøger, that is. A kind of guardian angel,” Grandad said. “It means you’ll have a long life.”
“Is that what it means?” Mom said with a laugh.
“Yes,” Grandad said.
“Surely you don’t believe that, do you?” Dad said.
“Did you two hear him when he wasn’t there?” Grandad said. “That’s what’s remarkable. Is it so remarkable that it has some significance?”
“Hm,” Kjartan said. “You’ve become superstitious in your old age, Johannes.”
I looked at Grandma. Her hands were trembling, and as she poured, the pot was moving up and down so much it was only with the greatest effort of will that she managed to direct the jet from the spout into the cup without spilling the coffee. Mom looked at her, too, and was on the point of getting up, presumably to take over, only to lean back and reach for the bread basket instead. It was both painful to watch Grandma because she was so slow — in fact some coffee did end up in a saucer — and also unheard of that she, an adult, was unable to manage such a simple task as pouring coffee without spilling it, and the strangeness of seeing someone with hands shaking nonstop, almost with a mind of their own, meant that I couldn’t take my eyes off her.
Mom placed her hand on mine.
“Wouldn’t you like a griddle cake?” she said.
I nodded. She reached for one and put it on my plate. I spread a thick layer of butter on it and sprinkled sugar. Mom lifted the jug of milk and filled my glass. The milk came straight from the cowshed; it was warm and yellowish with tiny lumps floating round. I looked at Mom. Why had she filled my glass? I couldn’t drink that milk, it was disgusting, it had come straight from the cow, and not just any cow but one standing outside and pissing and shitting.
I ate the griddle cake and took another while Dad asked Grandad some questions, which he answered in his own time. Kjartan sighed louder than he would have if he’d been alone. Either he had heard all this before or he didn’t like what he heard.
“We were thinking of going up Lihesten this year,” Dad said.