How much of the twenty-year-old was left in me now?
Not much, I thought, sitting and looking up at the glimmering stars above the town. The feeling of being me was the same. The person I woke up to every morning and fell asleep to every night. But the quivering panic was gone. As was the immense focus on others. And its opposite, the megalomaniac importance I ascribed to myself had become smaller. Perhaps not much smaller, but smaller nevertheless.
When I was twenty it was only ten years since I had been ten. Everything in my childhood was still close. It was still my reference point, from it I made sense of things. Not now, not any more.
I got up and went in. Linda and John were asleep, lying close together in the darkness of the bedroom. John like a little ball. I lay down beside them, watched for a while, until I too fell asleep.
Ten days later, early in the morning, I landed at Kjevik Airport, outside Kristiansand. Even though between the ages of thirteen and eighteen I had lived ten kilometres away and the countryside was full of memories, it aroused little or nothing in me this time, perhaps because it was no more than two years since I had last been there, perhaps because I was further away than ever. I descended the steps from the plane with Topdalsfjord to the left sparkling in the light from the February sun, and Ryensletta to the right, where one New Year’s Eve Jan Vidar and I had dragged ourselves downhill through a snowstorm.
I walked into the terminal building, past the baggage carousel, to a kiosk, where I bought a cup of coffee and took it with me outside. Lit a cigarette, watched people coming out in dribs and drabs, heading for the airport bus or the line of taxis, everywhere I heard the southern Norwegian dialect, which filled me with such ambivalence. It belonged here, it was the very marker of belonging, both cultural and geographical, and I could still hear the smugness I had always heard in it so clearly, probably my own interpretation, because I didn’t belong here myself and never had done.
A life is simple to understand, the elements that determine it are few. In mine there were two. My father and the fact that I had never belonged anywhere.
It was no more difficult than that.
I switched on my mobile phone and looked at the clock. A few minutes past ten. I was supposed to give the day’s first talk at one at the new university in Agder, so I had plenty of time. The second was in Søgne, approximately twenty kilometres outside the town, at half past seven. I had decided to speak without a script. I had never done this before, and fear and nerves were washing through me about every ten minutes. I was weak at the knees too, and it felt as if the hand holding the cup was shaking. But it wasn’t, I confirmed. I stubbed the cigarette out on the ash-coloured grid above the rubbish bin and went through the automatic doors, back to the kiosk, where I bought three newspapers and sat down on one of the high barstools to read them. Ten years ago I had written about this room, it was where the main protagonist in Out of the World, Henrik Vankel, went to meet Miriam in the final scene of the novel. I had been up in Volda, on the west coast, writing, where the view of the fjord, ferries shuttling hither and thither, the lights in the harbour and beneath the mountains on the other side was a mere shadow in the rooms and the countryside I was describing, this Kristiansand I had once wandered around and was now revisiting in my mind. I might not have remembered what people said to me, I might not have remembered what had happened where; however I did remember exactly what it looked like and the atmosphere which surrounded it. I remembered all the rooms I had been in and all the landscapes. If I closed my eyes I could invoke all the details of the house in which I had grown up, and the neighbour’s house, and the countryside around, at least within a radius of a couple of kilometres. The schools, the swimming baths, the sports halls, the youth clubs, the petrol stations, the shops, my relatives’ houses. The same applied to the books I had read. What they were about was gone in weeks, but the places where the plot had taken place had stayed with me for years, perhaps they would for ever, what did I know?
I flicked through Dagbladet, followed by Aftenposten and Fædrelandsvennen, then sat watching people pass by. I ought to have spent the time preparing. All I had done thus far was read through some old papers the night before and print the texts I was going to read. On the plane I had written down ten points I would cover. I couldn’t bring myself to do any more because the thought that I was only going to talk, that there was nothing simpler, was so strong and so appealing. I was supposed to talk about the two books I had written. I couldn’t do that, so it would have to be about how the books came into being, those years of nothing until something definite began to take shape, how it slowly but surely took over, in such a way that in the end everything came by itself. Writing a novel is setting yourself a goal and then walking there in your sleep, Lawrence Durrell had once said that was what it was like, and it was true. We have access not only to our own lives but to almost all the other lives in our cultural circle, access not only to our own memories but to the memories of the whole of our damn culture, for I am you and you are everyone, we come from the same and are going to the same, and on the way we hear the same on the radio, see the same on TV, read the same in the press, and within us there is the same fauna of famous people’s faces and smiles. Even if you sit in a tiny room in a tiny town hundreds of kilometres from the centre of the world and don’t meet a single soul, their hell is your hell, their heaven is your heaven, you have to burst the balloon that is the world and let everything in it spill over the sides.