All the things mothers do for their sons, she did for us. If I was ill and in bed with a temperature she was the one who came in with a cold compress and placed it on my forehead, she was the one who put the thermometer up my backside to take my temperature, she was the one who came in with water, juice, grapes, cookies, and she was the one who got up in the night and came in wearing her nightgown to see how I was.
She was always there, I know she was, but I just can’t remember it.
I have no memories of her reading to me and I can’t remember her putting a single bandage on my knees or being present at a single end-of-term event.
How can that be?
She saved me because if she hadn’t been there I would have grown up alone with Dad, and sooner or later I would have taken my life, one way or another. But she was there, Dad’s darkness had a counterbalance, I am alive and the fact that I do not live my life to the full has nothing to do with the balance of my childhood. I am alive, I have my own children, and with them I have tried to achieve only one aim: that they shouldn’t be afraid of their father.
They aren’t. I know that.
When I enter a room, they don’t cringe, they don’t look down at the floor, they don’t dart off as soon as they glimpse an opportunity, no, if they look at me, it is not a look of indifference, and if there is anyone I am happy to be ignored by it’s them. If there is anyone I am happy to be taken for granted by, it’s them. And should they have completely forgotten I was there when they turn forty themselves, I will thank them and take a bow and accept the bouquets.
Dad knew what the situation was. Lack of self-knowledge was not one of his failings. One evening at the beginning of the eighties, he said to Prestbakmo that it was Mom who had saved his children. The question is whether it was enough. The question is whether she was responsible for exposing us to him for so many years, a man we were afraid of, always, at all times. The question is whether it is enough to be a counterbalance to the darkness.
She made a decision: she stayed with him, she must have had her reasons.
The same applies to him. He also made a decision, he also stayed. Throughout the seventies and the beginning of the eighties this is the way they lived, side by side, in the house in Tybakken, with their two children, their two cars, and their two jobs. They had a life outside the house, a life in the house in the way they were to each other, and a life in the house in the way they were to us. We, as children, were like dogs in a crowd of people, only interested in other dogs or doggy things, we were never aware of what else was happening, over our heads. I had a vague sense of who Dad was outside the house, for something seeped down, even to me, but it never made any sense. He was always well turned out, I was aware of that, but not what significance it carried, only when I was older and met some of his former students could I see him in that role. A young, slim, well-dressed teacher stepping out of his Opel Ascona, walking with a determined stride up to the faculty lounge, putting down his briefcase full of papers, pouring a cup of coffee, exchanging a few words with colleagues, going to his class when the bell rang, hanging his brown cord jacket on the chair and scanning the class, who sat quietly looking at him. He had a well-groomed black beard, sparkling blue eyes, and a handsome face. The boys in the class feared him; he was strict and tolerated no nonsense. The girls in the class were in love with him because he was young, had a strong aura, and looked nothing like any of the other teachers. He liked teaching and was good at it, he held his classes in a spell when he spoke about subjects that engaged him. Obstfelder was his favorite. But he also liked Kinck and, of the contemporary writers, Bjørneboe.
He was very correct in his dealings with colleagues, but also kept his distance. The distance lay in his attire; many of the other teachers would wear smocks and jeans or the same suit for months on end. The distance lay in the impartiality he exhibited. The distance lay in his body language, his posture, his aura.
He always knew more about them than they knew about him. It was a rule in his life, which applied to everyone, even his parents and brothers. Or perhaps especially to them.
When he came home from school he went into his study and prepared the evening meetings; he was a Venstre representative on the council, as well as sitting on several committees, and at one point he was a possible Storting candidate for his party, according to him. But what he said wasn’t always true, he was notorious for manipulating the truth in the circles in which he moved, although not in his work at school or in politics, where he was proper and seemly. He was also a member of a philately club in Grimstad and showed his collection at a variety of exhibitions. In the summer he devoted himself to the garden, where he was also ambitious and a perfectionist, if such is conceivable in a garden around a house on an estate in the seventies. He had inherited his interest in everything that grew from his mother, and that was perhaps what they spoke about most: various plants, bushes, and trees and the experiences they’d had with them. Sun, soil, moisture, acidity levels. Grafting, pruning, watering. With no friends, his social intercourse took place in the staff room and the family. He visited his parents, brothers, uncles, and aunts frequently and received frequent visits from them. With them he used a tone of voice that was unfamiliar to Yngve and me, and we therefore viewed it with suspicion.
Mom’s life differed in many ways from his. She had lots of friends, mostly because of her job, but also in other places, not least among the neighbors. With them she would sit and chat, or “prattle,” as Dad would say, and smoke and eat the cakes they had baked — if, that is, they weren’t knitting in the thick cloud of tobacco smoke that hung in so many living rooms in the seventies. She had an interest in politics, was in favor of a strong state, a well-developed health system, and equal rights for all, and was probably committed to women’s liberation and the peace movement, was against capitalism and the growing materialism, and sympathized with Erik Dammann’s The Future in Our Hands movement, in short she was on the left. She said she had hibernated during her twenties, everything was about her job, her children, and making ends meet, the budget was tight, you had to fight to keep to it, although in her early thirties she focused on herself and the society she was living in. While Dad rarely read anything other than what he had to, she was genuinely interested in literature. She was an idealist, he was a pragmatist; she was contemplative, he was practical.
They brought us up together even if I never experienced my upbringing as such; I always drew a strict distinction between them and perceived them as two utterly separate beings. But for them it must have been different. In the evenings when we were asleep they sat up talking — about the neighbors, colleagues, us, unless they were discussing politics or literature. Once in a while they went on holiday alone, to London, to the Rhine Valley, or into the mountains, while Yngve and I were with either Mom’s or Dad’s parents. They were more equal than the parents of my friends as far as chores in the house were concerned: Dad cleaned and cooked, which none of the other fathers did, not to mention all the food gathering they did at that time, all the fish he caught on the far side of the island and the hundreds of kilos of berries we picked on trips to the mainland in late summer and autumn, which afterward they converted into juice and jam and poured into bottles and jars to stand on the shelves in the cellar all winter, glowing dimly in the light from the little window at the top of the wall. Raspberries, blackberries, blueberries, cowberries, and cloudberries, which would excite Dad so much he would shout out if he found any. Sloes for wine. In addition, they would pay to pick fruit from gardens on Tromøya, and it was from there we had apples, pears, and plums. Then there was the cherry tree belonging to Dad’s uncle Alf in Kristiansand and, of course, both grandmothers had fruit trees. Our days were structured and clear: on Sundays it was lunch with dessert, on weekdays it was generally a variety of shapes and variants of fish. We always knew when we had school on the following day, how many lessons we had in which subjects, and not even the course of the evening was without a framework, as it was seasonally determined: if there was snow or ice on the ground, then it was skiing and skating. If the water temperature rose above fifteen degrees, well then, swimming was the order of the day, come rain come shine. The sole really unpredictable factor in this life, from autumn to winter, spring to summer, from one school year to the next, was Dad. I was so frightened of him that even with the greatest effort of will I am unable to recreate the fear; the feelings I had for him I have never felt since, nor indeed anything close.