The next day Sverre and Geir Håkon came over to me in B-Max. Several kids from the class were standing around us.
“Who did you vote for yesterday, Karl Ove?” Geir Håkon said.
“It’s a secret,” I said.
“You voted for yourself. You got only one vote, and that was the one you gave yourself.”
“No, it wasn’t,” I said.
“Yes, it was,” Sverre said. “We’ve asked everyone in the class. No one voted for you. So you’re the only one left. You voted for yourself.”
“No,” I said. “That’s not true. I didn’t vote for myself.”
“Who did then?”
“I don’t know.”
“But we’ve asked everyone. No one voted for you. You voted for yourself. Come on, admit it.”
“No,” I said. “It’s not true.”
“But we’ve asked everyone. There’s only you left.”
“Then someone’s lying.”
“Why would anyone lie?”
“How should I know?”
“You’re the one who’s lying. You voted for yourself.”
“No, I didn’t.”
The rumor spread through the school, but I denied everything. And kept denying it. Everyone knew what had happened, but as long as I didn’t admit it, they couldn’t be absolutely sure. They thought it was typical of me. I thought I was someone. But I didn’t think that. A person who votes for himself is a nobody. The fact that I never went scavenging, never did any shoplifting, never fired a slingshot at birds or a pea-shooter loaded with cherry pits at cars or passers-by, and never joined in when others locked the gym teacher behind the garage door in the equipment room or when others put drawing pins on the supply teachers’ chairs or dunked their sponges until they were sopping wet, plus the fact that I told them they shouldn’t do these things, told them it was wrong, did not do a great deal for my reputation, either. I knew, however, that I was right and what the others were doing was wrong. Occasionally I would pray to God to forgive them. If they swore, for example. Then a prayer might come into my mind. Dear God, Forgive Leif Tore for swearing. He didn’t mean to. I said things like: heck, blast, golly, gosh, drats, jeez, my foot, goodness, fudge, holy cow, bother, and yikes. But despite this, despite not swearing, not lying, except in self-defense, not stealing or vandalizing or playing up teachers, despite being interested in clothes and my appearance and always wanting to be right and the best, which meant my general reputation was poor and I was not someone others said they liked, I wasn’t shunned or avoided, and if I was, by Leif Tore and Geir Håkon, for instance, there were always boys I could turn to. Such as Dag Lothar. Or Dag Magne. And when all the kids got together in big groups no one was rejected, everyone was accepted, including me.
Of course, it was easier to be at home reading.
Nor did it do much for my reputation that I was a Christian. Actually, that was Mom’s fault. One day, the year before, she had banned the reading of comics. I had come home early from school, run up the stairs, happy and excited, since Dad was still at work.
“Are you hungry?” she said, sitting on a chair in the living room with a book in her lap and looking at me.
“Yes,” I said.
She got up and went into the kitchen, where she took a loaf from the bread box.
The rain outside was like stripes in the air. Some stragglers were coming down the road from the bus, heads bowed beneath the hoods of their rain jackets.
“I was looking at some of your comics today,” Mom said, cutting a slice of bread. “What do you read? I’m aghast.”
“Aghast?” I said. “What does that mean?”
She put a slice on the plate in front of me, opened the fridge, and took out some mild, white cheese and margarine.
“What you read is absolutely awful! It’s just violence! People shooting one another and laughing! You’re too young to read stuff like this.”
“But everyone does,” I said.
“That’s no argument,” she said. “It doesn’t mean you have to.”
“But I like it!” I said, spreading the margarine with my knife.
“Yes, that’s what’s so bad about it!” she said, sitting down. “That kind of magazine gives a terrible view of humanity. Especially of women. Do you understand? I don’t want your attitudes to be shaped by that.”
“By the killing?”
“For example.”
“But it’s not meant seriously!” I said.
Mom sighed. “You know Ingunn’s writing a university thesis about the violence in comics, don’t you?”
“No,” I said.
“It’s not good for you,” she said. “Simple as that. At least you understand. That it’s not good for you.”
“So am I not allowed?”
“No.”
“Eh?”
“It’s for your own good,” she said.
“I’m not allowed? But Mom, Mom … Never?”
“You’ll have to read Donald Duck.”
“DONALD DUCK?” I yelled. “No one reads DONALD DUCK!”
I burst into tears and ran to my room.
Mom followed me, sat on the edge of the bed, and stroked my back.
“You can read books,” she said. “That’s much better. You can go to the library, you and me and Yngve. To Arendal, once a week. Then you can borrow as many books as you like.”
“But I don’t want to read books,” I said. “I want to read comics!”
“Karl Ove,” she said, “my mind is made up.”
“But Dad reads comics!”
“He’s an adult,” she said. “It’s not the same.”
“So no more comics ever again?”
“I have to work this evening. But tomorrow we can go to the library,” she said and got up. “Shall we leave it at that?”
I didn’t answer, and she left.
She must have stumbled on a comic in the Kamp series or Vi Vinner, which were about war, in which all the Germans, or Fritz or Sauerkraut or whatever they were called, were killed with a smile on their lips, and the pages were littered with Donnerwetters and Dummkopfs or whatever they shouted to one another in the heat of battle, or she could have found Agent X9 or Serie Spesial, where most of the women wore bikinis and often not even that. It was just great to see Modesty Blaise undressing, though only when I was alone, normally nudity was incredibly embarrassing. Every time Agaton Sax was on children’s TV I blushed if Mom and Dad were there because in the intro he was ogling a naked woman through binoculars. Sometimes there was actually some sex in the cartoons or films on TV, and if it took place when I was allowed to watch, it all became unbearable. There we were, the whole family, Mom, Dad, and their two sons watching TV, and then a couple screwed — in the middle of our living room, where did you look?
Oh, that was dreadful.
But I kept the comics in my room; Mom had never so much as cast a glance at them.
Now, out of the blue, I wasn’t allowed to read them.
How unfair was that?
I cried, I was incensed, I went to see her again and said she had no right to ban them, knowing that the battle was lost, she had made up her mind, and if I didn’t stop protesting she would just tell Dad, after which further resistance would be hopeless.
The comics I had borrowed were returned; the others were thrown away. The next day we went to the library, we were each given a membership card, and then it was done, from this moment on books held sway. Every Wednesday I came down the steps outside Arendal Library with a carrier bag full of books in each hand. I went with Mom and Yngve, who had likewise borrowed vast quantities, then it was back to the car, go home, lie down on my bed, read almost every evening, all Saturday and all Sunday, a pattern broken only by shorter or longer excursions outside, all depending on what was going on, and when the week was up it was back to the library with the two bags of finished books and two new bags. I read all the series they had, I liked Pocomoto best, the little boy who grew up in the Wild West, but also Jan, and the Hardy Boys, of course, and the Bobbsey Twins and Nancy Drew, the Girl Detective. I liked the Famous Five series and I plowed through a series of books about real people, reading about Henry Ford and Thomas Alva Edison, Benjamin Franklin and Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, John F. Kennedy, David Livingstone, and Louis Armstrong, always with tears in my eyes over the last pages, because, naturally enough, they all died. I finished the Vi Var Med series, about all the known and unknown expeditions of discovery in the world, I read books about sailing ships and space travel, Yngve got me into books by von Däniken, who thought that all the great civilizations had come about as a result of encounters with extraterrestrial creatures, and books about the Apollo program, starting with the astronauts’ fighter-plane pasts and their attempts to set speed records. I also read all Dad’s old Gyldendal books for boys, of which the one that made the greatest impression was probably Over Kjølen i Kano, where a father goes on a camping trip with two boys and sees a great auk everyone thought was extinct. I also read a book about a boy who was picked up by a zeppelin in England during the years between the wars, I read Jules Verne’s many books, my favorites being Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea and Around the World in Eighty Days, also one called The Lottery Ticket about a poor family in Telemark who won a fortune in a lottery. I read The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After and The Black Tulip. I read Little Lord Fauntleroy, I read Oliver Twist and David Copperfield, I read Nobody’s Boy and Treasure Island and The Children of the New Forest, which I loved and read again and again as I had been given it and didn’t borrow it. I read Mutiny on the Bounty, Jack London’s books, and books about the sons of Bedouins and turtle hunters, stowaways and race car drivers, I read a series about a Swede who was a drummer boy in the American Civil War, I read books about boys who played soccer and I followed them season after season, and I read the more social-issue-style books that Yngve brought home, about girls who got pregnant and were going to have a baby, or who ended up on Skid Row and started taking drugs, it made no difference to me, I read everything, absolutely everything. At the annual flea market in Hove I found a whole series of the Rocambole books, which I bought and devoured. A series about a girl called Ida was another I read even though there must have been all of fourteen titles. I read all Dad’s old copies of Detektivmagasinet, and bought books about Knut Gribb, the Oslo detective, when I had enough money. I read about Christopher Columbus and Magellan, about Vasco da Gama and about Amundsen and Nansen. I read A Thousand and One Nights and Norwegian folk tales, which Yngve and I were given one Christmas by Grandma and Grandad. I read about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. I read about Robin Hood, Little John, and Maid Marian, I read about Peter Pan and about poor boys who swapped their lives for those of rich men’s sons. I read about boys who participated in sabotage operations during the German occupation of Denmark, and about boys who rescued someone from an avalanche. I read about a strange little man who lived on a beach and survived on what he could salvage from shipwrecks, and about young English boys who were cadets on naval vessels and Marco Polo’s adventures at the court of Genghis Khan. Book after book, bag after bag, week after week, month after month. From everything I read I learned that you had to have courage, that courage was perhaps the supreme attribute, that you have to be honest and sincere in all your dealings and that you must never let others down. In addition, that you must never give in, never give up, because if you have been resolute, upright, brave, and honest, however lonely it has made you and however alone you stand, in the end you are rewarded. I thought a lot about that, it was one of the thoughts I embraced when I was alone, that one day I would be back here and be someone. That I would be someone big whom everyone in Tybakken would be forced, whether they liked it or not, to admire. It wouldn’t come any day soon, I knew that, for it wasn’t respect I won when Asgeir made a derogatory comment about me and a girl I liked — I went for him and he simply forced me to the ground, straddled me, and started prodding my chest and cheeks, laughing and jeering. I happened to have a yellow Fox in my mouth and I tried to spit it out at him, to no avail, which was underhanded, everyone knew that, but the sticky yellow mess went all over my face. You smell of piss, you shit, I said to him, and it was true, he did. And, if that wasn’t enough, he had two sets of teeth, just like a shark, one row inside the other, and I pointed this repugnant sight out to the crowd milling around, not that it helped, I was on my back, vanquished, utterly powerless. You couldn’t get further from the ideals I had acquired through reading — which in fact were also valid among children, there were many of the same concepts of honor, although that precise word was not used, but that was what it was about. I was weak, slow, cowardly; not strong, quick, courageous. What good was it that, unlike them, I had been in contact with the ideals, that I knew them inside out, better than any of them ever would, when I couldn’t live up to them? When I cried for no reason? It felt unjust that I, of all people, who knew so much about heroic bravery, should be saddled with such frailties. But then there were books about frailties as well, and one of them carried me on a wave that would last several months.