In so saying, I met my mother’s gaze and my voice cracked. I took the glass, gulped down water, tried to smile, but it was not so easy, I had a sense that some sort of sympathy for me had arisen around the table, and I found it difficult to cope with. All I wanted to do was give a speech, not plumb the depths of my own sentimentality.
‘Well,’ I said. ‘Now you’re sixty. The fact that you’re not planning life as a pensioner and that you’ve just finished your main subject in your studies says a lot about who you are: first of all, you’re lively and energetic and you have intellectual curiosity; secondly, you never give up. That applies to you in your life, but it also has something to do with how you are with others: things have to take time. Things have to take the time they need. When I was seven and about to start school, I didn’t know how to appreciate this. You drove me to school on my first day, I remember it well, you weren’t a hundred per cent sure of the way to school, but you were sure we would be fine. We ended up in a residential area. Then in another. I sat there in my light blue suit with my satchel on my back, hair combed, and we drove around Tromøya while my new friends stood in the schoolyard listening to all the speeches. When we finally made it to the school it was all over. There’s an endless list of similar anecdotes I could tell. For example, you’ve driven a fair few kilometres completely lost, literally, kilometre after kilometre through unfamiliar territory without realising you were not on the Oslo road until you ended up on a tractor path in a dark field at the end of some remote valley. There are so many of these I’ll limit myself to the most recent. A week ago, on your sixtieth birthday, you invited colleagues to your house for coffee. They came, but you’d forgotten to buy coffee, so all of you had to sit there drinking tea. Sometimes I think the absent-minded side of your personality is the very precondition for you to be so present in our conversations and in those you have with others.’
Again I was stupid enough to meet her gaze. She smiled at me, my eyes moistened and then, no, oh no, she got up and wanted to give me a hug.
The other guests clapped, I sat down again, full of disgust with myself, because even though losing control of my emotions made a good impression, gave extra emphasis to what I had said, I was ashamed that I had revealed such weakness.
A few seats down, mum’s eldest sister, Kjellaug, got to her feet, she spoke about the autumn of our lives and was met with a couple of good-natured boos, but her speech was good and full of warmth, and after all sixty wasn’t forty, was it.
During the speech Linda came in, sat down beside me and placed her hand on my arm. Everything all right? she whispered. I nodded. Is she asleep now? I whispered, and Linda nodded and smiled. Kjellaug sat down, and the next speaker rose, and so it went on until all the guests around the table had spoken. The exceptions were Vidar and Ingrid, of course, since they didn’t know my mother at all. But they were enjoying themselves, at least Vidar was. Gone was the slightly rigid old man’s slow-wittedness, occasionally noticeable when he was at home; here he was at his ease, happy and smiling, his cheeks and eyes ablaze, with something to say to everyone, genuinely interested in what people said and quick to respond with a rich variety of anecdotes, stories and arguments. It was harder to say how Ingrid felt. She seemed excited, laughed out loud and cast around superlatives to excess — everything was wonderful and fantastic — but that was as far as she got, she seemed to be stuck there, she didn’t really get into, or come down into, the mood of the evening either because she was unable to tune in, they weren’t people she knew, or because her state of mind was too exalted, or simply because the distance from the life she usually led was too great. I had seen that many times with old people: they couldn’t manage abrupt change very well, they didn’t like being moved from their environment, but first of all something stiff and regressive came over them, which did not exactly describe Ingrid’s behaviour, it was more the opposite, and secondly Ingrid was not old, at least not by today’s yardstick. When we travelled back next day to get ready for the christening her manner persisted, but with more space around her it was less conspicuous. She was anxious about the food, tried to prepare as much as possible the night before, and when the day of the christening arrived she was afraid the door of the house might be locked and she wouldn’t be able to have everything ready for the guests, and, on her own in the kitchen, she might not find the necessary equipment.
The priest was a young woman, we stood around her by the font, Linda held Vanja as her head was moistened with water. Ingrid left when the ceremony was over, the rest of us stayed seated. It was a communion. Jon Olav and his family stood up and knelt before the altar. For some reason I got up and followed suit. Knelt before the altar, had a wafer placed on my tongue, drank the communion wine, was given the blessing, got up and went back, with mum’s, Kjartan’s, Yngve’s and Geir’s eyes on me, disbelieving to varying degrees.
Why had I done it?
Had I become a Christian?
I, a fervent anti-Christian from early teenage years and a materialist in my heart of hearts, had in one second, without any reflection, got to my feet, walked up the aisle and knelt in front of the altar. It had been pure impulse. And, meeting those glares, I had no defence, I couldn’t say I was a Christian. I looked down, slightly ashamed.
Many things had happened.
When dad died I had spoken to a priest, it had been like a confession, everything poured out of me, and he was there to listen and to give solace. The funeral, the ritual itself, was almost physical, something to hold on to for me. It turned dad’s life, so miserable and destructive towards the end, into a life.
Wasn’t there some solace in that?
Then there was what I had been working on over the last year. Not what I wrote, but what I was slowly realising I wanted to explore: the sacred. In my novel I had both travestied and invoked it, but without the hymnic gravity I knew existed in these tracts, in these texts I had started to read; and the gravity, the wild intensity in them, which was never far removed from the sacred, to which I had never been or would ever go, yet which I sensed all the same, had made me think differently about Jesus Christ, for it was about flesh and blood, it was about birth and death, and we were linked to it through our bodies and our blood, those we beget and those we bury, constantly, continually, a storm blew through our world and it always had, and the only place I knew where this was formulated, the most extreme yet simplest things, was in these holy scriptures. And the poets and artists who dealt with similar themes. Trakl, Hölderlin, Rilke. Reading the Old Testament, particularly the third Book of Moses with its detailed accounts of sacrificial practices, and the New Testament, so much younger and closer to us, nullified time and history, it was just a swirl of dust, and brought us to what was always there and never changed.
I had thought a lot about this.
And then there was the trivial matter of the local priest being somewhat reluctant to christen Vanja because we weren’t married, I was divorced and when she enquired about our faith and I couldn’t say, yes, I am a Christian, I believe that Jesus was God’s son, a wild notion I could never entertain as a belief, and instead just skirted round it, tradition, my father’s funeral, life and death, the ritual, I felt hypocritical afterwards, as though we were christening our daughter under false pretences, and when the communion came I suppose I wanted to revoke this, with the result that I appeared even more hypocritical. Not only had I had my daughter christened without being a Christian, now I was taking bloody communion as well!