His footsteps on the stairs — was he coming to see me?
The wild glare in his eyes. The tightness around his mouth. The lips that parted involuntarily. And then his voice.
Sitting here now, hearing it in my inner ear, I almost start crying.
His fury struck like a wave, it washed through the rooms, lashed at me, lashed and lashed and lashed at me, and then it retreated. Then it could be quiet for several weeks. However, it wasn’t quiet, for it could just as easily come in two minutes as two days. There was no warning. Suddenly, there he was, furious. Whether he hit me or not made no difference, it was equally awful if he twisted my ear or squeezed my arm or dragged me somewhere to see what I had done, it wasn’t the pain I was afraid of, it was him, his voice, his face, his body, the fury it emitted, that was what I was afraid of, and the terror never let up, it was there for every single day of my entire childhood.
After the confrontations I wanted to die. Dying was one of the best, most enjoyable fantasies I had. He would have fun then. He would be standing there thinking about what he had done. He would be feeling remorse then. Oh, what remorse he would feel! I visualized him standing there and wringing his hands in despair with his head turned to heaven in front of the tiny coffin where I lay, with my prominent teeth, unable to pronounce my r’s.
What sweetness there was in that image! It almost put me in a good mood again. And that was how my childhood was; the distance between good and evil was so much shorter than it is now as an adult. All you had to do was stick your head out of the door and something absolutely fantastic happened. Just walking up to B-Max and waiting for the bus was an event, even though it had been repeated almost every day for many years. Why? I have no idea. But when everything glinted with moisture in the mist and your boots were wet from the slush on the road, and the snow in the forest was white and sunken, and we stood in a gang chatting or playing, or we ran after girls to trip them, grab their stocking caps, or simply throw them into a snowdrift, and I felt one of them against me as I squeezed my arms around her waist as tight as I could, perhaps Marianne, perhaps Siv, perhaps Marian, because they were the girls I prized and thought about most, all my nerves were a-quiver, my chest bubbled with joy — and why? Oh, because of the wet snow. Because of the wet down jackets. Because of the many good-looking girls. Because of the bus rattling along with chains on its tires. Because of the condensation on the windows when we went inside, because of the screaming and shouting, because Anne Lisbet was there, as happy and lovely, as dark-haired and red-mouthed, as she had ever been. Every day was a party, in the sense that everything that happened pulsated with excitement and nothing was predictable. Nor was it over when the bus came, it had only just begun, for the whole school day stretched out before us, with the transformation we went through when our wet clothes were hanging on hooks and we shuffled into the classroom in stockinged feet, with red cheeks and messy hair, wet at the tips because it had been outside the hat. The tingling in your body as the break beckoned, and we ran up the stairs, through the corridors, down the outside steps, across the playground, down the slope, and onto the field. And afterward, going home, playing music, reading, perhaps putting on skis and racing down the steep hill to Ubekilen, where the others always were, and all this at the intensity that only exists in childhood, standing at the bottom, back up herringbone style, racing down, until the darkness was so dense we could hardly see a hand in front of our faces and hung over our ski sticks chatting about everything and nothing.
The glimpse of ice on the bay covered by a shallow layer of water. The lights from the houses on the estate, which formed a kind of cupola over the forest above us. All the sounds the darkness amplified whenever someone shifted weight and the blue mini skis scraped against each other or cut into the soft snow. The car that came down the narrow gravel road, it was a Beetle, belonging to the people who lived there, the light shining a path across the ground, making everything spookily visible for a moment or two and then the darkness closing around us again.
Childhood consisted of an infinity of such moments, all equally compact. Some of them could raise me to dizzying heights, like the evening I got together with Tone and half ran, half slid down the hill, which must have just been cleared by the snowplow, judging by the shiny surface, and when I arrived at the dark patch between the roads outside our house, I lay down in the snow on my back and looked up at the dense, clammy, and lightless night above me and was utterly happy.
Others could open a void beneath me, like the evening Mom told us she was going to start studying the following year. We were at the table eating supper when she told us.
“The school’s in Oslo,” she said. “It’s just for one year. I’ll come home every Friday and I’ll be here all weekend. Then I’ll go back on the Monday. So that’s three days here and four there.”
“Are we going to be alone here with Dad?” Yngve said.
“Yes. It’ll be fine. You’ll see a bit more of each other.”
“Why are you going to go to school?” I said. “You’re an adult.”
“There’s something called further education,” she said. “I’m going to learn more about my profession. It’s very exciting, you know.”
“I don’t want you to go,” I said.
“It’s just for a year,” she said. “And I’ll be here for three days a week. And all the holidays. I’m going to have long holidays.”
“I still don’t want you to go,” I said.
“I understand,” Mom said. “But it’ll be fine. Dad wants to spend time with you. And next year it will be the other way around. Dad will do a further education course and I’ll be at home.”
I took the last mouthful of tea, closed my mouth, and let it seep through, as I blocked the many wet, black tea leaves at the bottom with my lips.
I half-rose and lifted the heavy teapot over to the cup with both hands, poured, and put it back. The tea was almost black, it had been brewing for so long. I added a generous portion of milk and three large spoonfuls of sugar.