“Have you LOST your sock?”
“Yes!” I shouted.
He shook me. Then let me go.
“How old are you now? And how much money do you think we’ve got? Do you think we can afford to lose items of clothing?”
“No,” I said to the floor, my eyes full of tears. He held my ear and twisted it.
“You little brat!” he said. “Keep an eye on your things!”
“OK,” I said.
“You can’t go to the swimming pool anymore. Is that understood?”
“Eh?”
“YOU CAN’T GO TO THE SWIMMING POOL ANYMORE!” he said.
“But …,” I sobbed.
“NO IFS OR BUTS!”
He let go of my ear and marched to the door. Turned to me.
“You’re not old enough. You’ve shown that tonight. You can’t go there again. This was the last time. Have you got that?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Good. Go to your room. There’ll be no supper for you. You can go straight to bed.”
The following week I didn’t go swimming, but I missed it so much that the next week I acted as if nothing had happened, packed my things, and caught the bus with Geir and Dag Lothar. My fears trickled through at various points, but something inside me said I would be fine, and I was, on my return everything was as normal and so it stayed, he never said another word about my not being able to continue the class.
At the start of December, three days before my birthday and two days before Mom came home again, I was sitting on the toilet, taking a dump, when the familiar sound of Dad’s car turning and parking in the drive was not followed by the equally familiar sound of a door being opened and closed but by the door bell ringing.
What could this be?
I hurriedly wiped myself, pulled the chain, yanked up my trousers, opened the window above the bathtub, and poked my head out.
Dad was standing beneath me wearing a new anorak. On his legs he wore knee-length breeches and long, blue socks, and on his feet a pair of blue-and-white boots, all equally new.
“Come on!” he said. “We’re going skiing!”
I got dressed in a flash and went outside, where he was tying my skis and sticks to the roof rack beside a pair of brand new, long, wooden Splitkein skis.
“Did you buy some skis?” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “Isn’t it great? So we can go skiing together.”
“OK,” I said. “So where are we going?”
“Let’s go to the west of the island,” he said. “To Hove.”
“Are there slopes there?”
“There? Oh yes!” he said. “They’ve got the best.”
I doubted it, but didn’t say anything, got in the car beside him, how unfamiliar he looked in his new clothes, and then we left for Hove. Not a word was said until he parked and we got out.
“Here we are!” he said.
He had driven through Hove Holiday Center, which consisted of a large number of red houses and huts originating from the last war, most probably built by the Germans, like the firing range, which, I had heard rumored, had been an airfield, like the concrete gun placements towering above the sea-smoothed rocks and the pebble beaches close to the edge of the forest, and the fascinating low bunkers among the trees, where we used to play on the roofs and in the rooms when we were here in the afternoon on 17th of May celebration days, he had driven past all this, along a narrow road into the forest, which came to an end by a small sand quarry, where he stopped and parked.
After taking the skis off the roof, he came over with a little case full of ski-waxing equipment he had also bought, and we waxed the skis with blue Swix, which, after reading the back of one of the tubes, he said had to be the best. Apparently unfamiliar with bindings, it took him a bit longer to put on his skis than it did me. Then he put his hands through the loops on the poles. But he didn’t do it from underneath so that the loop wouldn’t slip off even if he lost hold of the pole. No, he put his hands straight through.
That was how little kids who didn’t know any better held them.
It hurt me to watch, but I couldn’t say anything. Instead I took my hands out and then threaded them through again so that, if he was paying attention, he could see how it was done.
But he wasn’t watching me; he was looking up at the little ridge of hills above the sand quarry.
“Let’s get going then!” he said.
Although I had never seen him ski before, I could never have dreamed in my wildest imagination that he couldn’t ski. But he couldn’t. He didn’t glide with the skis, he walked as he normally walked, without skis, taking short, plodding steps, which on top of everything else were unsteady, which meant that every so often he had to stop and poke his poles into the snow so as not to topple over.
I thought perhaps this was just the beginning and soon he would find his rhythm and glide as he should glide along the piste. But when we reached the ridge, where the sea was visible between the trees, gray with frothy white-flecked waves, and started to follow the ski tracks he was still walking in the same way.
Occasionally he would turn and smile at me.
I felt so sorry for him I could have shouted out aloud as I skied.
Poor Dad. Poor, poor Dad.
At the same time I was embarrassed, my own father couldn’t ski, and I stayed some distance behind him so that potential passers-by wouldn’t associate me with him. He was just someone out ahead, a tourist, I was on my own, this was where I came from, I knew how to ski.
The piste wound back into the forest, but if the view of the sea was gone its sounds lingered between the trees, rising and falling, and the aroma of salt water and rotten seaweed was everywhere, it blended with the forest’s other faintly wintry smells, of which the snow’s curious mixture of raw and gentle was perhaps the most obvious.
He stopped and hung on his ski poles. I came alongside him. A ship was moving on the horizon. The sky above us was light gray. A pale, grayish-yellow glow above the two lighthouses on Torungen revealed where the sun was.
He looked at me.
“Skis running well?” he said.
“Pretty well,” I said. “How about you?”
“Yes,” he said. “Let’s go on, shall we? It’ll soon be time to head home. We have to make dinner as well. So, away you go!”
“Don’t you want to go first?”
“No, you head off. I’ll follow.”
The new arrangement turned everything in my head upside down. If he was behind me he would see how I, someone who knew how to ski, skied and realize how clumsy his own style was. I saw every single pole plant through his eyes. They cut through my consciousness like knives. After very few meters I slowed down, I began to ski in a slower, more staccato style, not unlike his, just not as clumsy, so that he would understand what I was doing, and that was even worse. Beneath us, the white, frothy breakers washed lazily onto the pebble beach. On the rocks, in some places, the wind whirled snow into the air. A seagull floated past, its wings unmoving. We were approaching the car, and on the last little slope I had an idea, I changed the tempo, and went as fast as I could for a few meters, then pretended to lose balance and threw myself into the snow beside the piste. I got up as quickly as possible and was brushing my trousers down as he whistled past.
“It’s all about staying on your feet,” he said.
We drove home in silence, and I was relieved when we finally turned into our drive and the skiing trip was definitively over.
Standing in the hall and taking off our skiing gear, we didn’t say anything, either. But then, as he opened the door to the staircase, he turned to me.
“Come and keep me company while I’m cooking,” he said.
I nodded and followed him up.
In the living room he stopped and looked at the wall.
“What on earth …,” he said. “Have you noticed this before?”