I Curse the River of Time Read online

  I had barely sat down on the bed to take off my shoes when there was a loud knock on the door. For a moment there, I literally froze with fear. I slowly stood up. I didn’t know what to do. I stood listening and there was a second knock, a sharp, dry sound, and then I suddenly knew exactly what to do. I clenched my right fist hard and walked the few steps to the door, tore it open and lashed out. The corridor was dim, and I could not see his face, in fact I could not see a damn thing, but I hit him on the jaw, right below the ear, I could feel it on my hand and he crashed into the opposite wall. More from the shock than the force of my blow, I guessed. But as I slammed the door shut and quickly double-locked it, I felt a stinging pain in my knuckles. I stood there, listening, holding my breath, but there was no sound from the corridor, and I stood there a bit longer, but it was still quiet, and I lay down on my bed and kept listening until I could not stay awake any longer and I fell asleep and in the early morning a woman was banging on my door:

  ‘We’ve docked, we’ve docked already! Get yourself up!’ And it seemed as if what had happened only a few hours earlier had taken place in a dream I was already starting to forget. But my hand was still sore and I could barely open it or clench it.

  Now I was walking across the quay, shivering a little in the wind. I felt sick. I felt dizzy. I had my old reefer jacket on and a bag, that looked like a sailor’s bag, slung over my shoulder and I walked up the winding Lodsgade, with all its memories, past Bar Sinatra, which was called the Ferry Inn when I was little.

  I stopped outside the window of a small off-licence right next to what used to be the Palace Theatre on the long Danmarksgade. I often went to the Palace when I was a boy, my mother and I watched Mutiny on the Bounty there, with Marlon Brando starring as Fletcher Christian. She was a big fan of Brando, his sulky acting style, inarticulate and yet so clear, and she also loved the young Paul Newman in The Hustler, they both had something extra, some explosive quality, she said, whereas James Dean was all right. She did not really like James Dean, he was too whiny, too immature, he was spineless, she thought, and would quickly be forgotten. Montgomery Clift was undeniably the greatest; in From Here to Eternity, in The Misfits: his vulnerability, his eyes, his dignity.

  The off-licence had not opened yet and I really had no need for the goods on its shelves, not after my night on the ferry, but I glanced at it anyway and then the sight of three bottles on display in the window made me stop, three different bottles containing the French spirit, Calvados, of three different qualities then, I assumed, and it suddenly occurred to me that I had never tasted Calvados. I decided that I could afford to buy the middle one, which would be good enough for me, if I walked to the summer house rather than take a taxi as I had intended to. I did have a car of my own, but just now it was in a garage in Norway with a broken drive shaft, and for all I knew it had already been repaired, but I had not got around to picking it up yet. So, at home, I walked or took the bus whenever I needed to go somewhere. That suited me well, for I could sleep on the bus, and I did. A lot. I slept as much as I could. There was nothing I liked better. But I was here now, and I really wanted one of those bottles of Calvados, and then I would have to walk. That’s the way I am.

  I did not feel like walking, I was tired, I could not remember the last time I was that tired, I was so tired it almost felt good and I weighed up the pros and cons and waited ten minutes for the shop to open its door, and went inside to buy the bottle in the middle and it was handed to me in a brown paper bag. A bit like they do in the movies, I thought, because I am Norwegian and in Norway we never get our liquor in brown paper bags and I liked the feeling of being in a film. I could be a man in a film. The walk to the summer house would be easier, if I was a man in a film.

  Years before we had talked at length about Calvados, my mother and I, when she had urged me to read Arch of Triumph by Erich Maria Remarque.

  ‘It’s a good book,’ she said, ‘a bit sentimental perhaps, but you’re the right age for it,’ she said, and I was still not twenty and did not even take offence because I was not entirely sure what sentimental meant, not really, and did not realise that perhaps it was a slighting remark to make; that something was sentimental yet at the same time right for a young man not yet twenty. But that was not what she meant at all, it was not how she thought of me, she was merely stating the fact that I might benefit from reading it, and I did, too, benefit from that book, it was bull’s eye, young as I was. We said to each other, my mother and I, wouldn’t it be great one day to taste this liquor; a liquid that for me turned into the true magic potion, a golden nectar flowing through Remarque’s novel and on in multiple streams, acquiring a strange, powerful significance and that, of course, because it was unobtainable, because they only sold one single brand at the state monopoly and it was way beyond my means. But in Arch of Triumph they were forever ordering Calvados, Boris and Ravic, the two friends in the book who were refugees from Stalin and Hitler respectively, in Paris in the years before the German occupation, and it was Armageddon then, on all fronts, both back and forth in time, and the conversations they had about life left the same bitter taste in my mouth as singing the hymn, which goes: Thank you for memories, thank you for hope, thank you Oh Lord for the bitter gift of pain, which in fact I did at a funeral not long ago. Sing that hymn.

  And so I walked up Danmarksgade in the half-light, the bottle tucked under my arm so the brown paper bag could been seen by all, and I was a man who had just bought this bottle of French alcohol very early in the morning, as soon as the shops had opened their doors, a man to be found in the movies only, and in certain books, mostly older books, written at the time of the Second World War, or just before, where the action was bound to a time that was long gone, and yet here I came walking, right there and then, adrift in time and space.

  When I got to the summer house, I walked across the lawn, past the shed under the heavy dark pine branches with my bag over my shoulder and the bottle tucked under my arm, but my mother was not in the summer house though the door was unlocked. In fact she never locked it, not while she was there, not until she went back to Norway, and then she would turn everything off anyway, the water and electricity; my father was the one who locked up. He was always locking things; suitcases, bicycles and doors, and then later he would search like a maniac for the key while the rest of us stood there impatiently, shuffling our feet and freezing our arses off, waiting to get inside, thinking, how typical, how bloody typical. ‘You can never be too careful,’ he would snap, his face blushing in the cold.

  There was a book on the table, not Günter Grass this time, but Somerset Maugham, in English, an old Penguin paperback of The Razor’s Edge, about an American pilot who travelled to India after the First World War where he experienced a spiritual change, and that book had always annoyed me, it is a hippie book, I thought, or at least has turned into one, why the hell would she want to read that book now? I put my bag down and went back outside, still holding the bottle, and walked between the pine trees, along the gravel road to the end where the dog roses grew thick and left the road to follow the path through the marram grass to the beach. It was quite windy and I saw her at once. She was sitting on a low sand dune with her warm coat wrapped tightly around her and her collar turned up against the wind, and the wind whipped her dark curls, and I thought, she has not gone grey yet, at least not much, though she was now over sixty, and she sat there alone, her head held high like she always did in a way some found arrogant. But really she was just preoccupied and was staring dreamily across the sea, probably thinking about something quite different than what was in front of her while she smoked a cigarette; a Cooly I guessed, or a Salem, or, more likely, the cheaper Danish menthol brand, Look.

  I am sure she heard me coming, but she did not turn around. When I was quite close to her, I called out softly:

  ‘Hello!’

  Still she did not turn around, merely said: ‘Don’t start talking right away.’

  ‘It’s me,’ I said.
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  ‘I know who it is,’ she said. ‘I heard your thoughts clatter all the way down from the road. Are you broke?’

  Jesus Christ, I knew she was ill, that she might even die; it was why I was here, it was why I had come after her, I was sure of it, and yet I said:

  ‘Mother, I’m getting a divorce.’

  And I may have seen it from her back, how she pulled herself together and shifted her weight from one place inside her body to another, from where she was, to where she thought maybe I was.

  ‘Come here, sit down,’ she said. And she moved to one side as if to make room for me, though there was plenty of it and she patted the wiry grass and said almost impatiently:

  ‘Come on then!’ and I walked up and sat down beside her on the ledge. I took the bottle from the brown paper bag and placed it between my feet, twisted it into the white, powdery sand, so it would not keel over, but I do not think she noticed. In fact, she did not even look at me, and that made me feel uncomfortable.

  5

  Many years before, in the early Seventies, I went to a college in the Dælenenga district of Oslo, on the corner of Dælenenggata and Gøteborggata. In order to get there I had an almost ridiculously short distance to walk every morning because I had a small flat right down the road from the college, at Carl Berners Plass. I had just turned twenty, it was the first place I lived which was not my childhood home: the terraced house in Veitvet where I grew up in the late Fifties and Sixties, and I had moved out as soon as I got my student loan. That was what you did back then, whether you wanted to or not, if you were allowed to go further, as it was still called, in our street, and in many other streets.

  The first thing I did was to go into town and buy a stereo with some of the money, a TR 200 Tandberg amplifier, a Lenco record player and a couple of 20 watt loudspeakers of a make I can no longer recall, but the sound was superb, and to be honest the whole thing was identical to the stereo my eldest brother had put together and bought with his student loan. I was going through a phase where I copied him a lot. Not in everything, of course. I was a Communist in those days, a Maoist, which he was not; but he was so talented with his hands, with carpentry, drawing and painting, that it did not even occur to me to try and emulate him. Instead I read books. Many books, and I guess to him it looked so intriguing and intense, the way I lost myself in those books, that sometimes he tried to copy me, and that made me happy.

  If I walked from the college at the corner and down Gøteborggata, which I often did, I soon reached the Freia chocolate factory. My mother worked there. She stood at the assembly line in Confectionery eight hours a day, five days a week, plus overtime and had done so for many years. All over Dælenenga and Rodeløkka there was a smell of chocolate, of cocoa, in the mornings especially, when the air was sharp and a little damp maybe, and it was only when I had been out drinking too many pints the night before that I found the smell unpleasant. Otherwise there was a feeling of comfort about it that brought back to me certain days in my childhood, with certain faces attached and family gatherings with tables laid and tablecloths and the slanting sun through gleaming white blinds and then me, in the middle of it all with this sudden feeling that everything around me was so fine, so perfect. Sometimes, in the late nights, in my small flat at Carl Berners Plass, in Dælenenga, I allowed that feeling to well up from the past, and then I would long for my childhood with such teeth grinding intensity that I almost frightened myself.

  When classes were over or I was just fed up sitting in the canteen, I would often stroll down Gøteborggata and turn right towards Dælenenga Stadium where the workers’ entrance to Freia was, and I would stop and lean against the brick wall surrounding the factory and they smelled good those bricks, they smelled of nature, smelled of places I had been with my father, the forests of Østmarka, Lillomarka, and I gaped up at Arnold Haukeland’s heavy, shiny, slowly rotating metal sculpture on a plinth near the entrance. It had been there only two or three years at the time, and was supposed to be a wind harp, and sounds were meant to fold out from it when the wind blew, like music, I had been told, but no music had ever been heard as far as I knew. I smoked the Petterøe 3 cigarette I had rolled myself, and I had all the time in the world in a way I have never had since. I stood in the sunshine and waited for my mother who would soon come from the huge building and walk along the flagstoned path to the gate when her shift was over. I could see her from afar when she came through the door, and every time she did, I found myself thinking of Rudolf Nilsen’s poem which begins:

  Long had I seen you as you came

  for always did I know when you were near,

  which, strictly speaking, was a poem to his girlfriend some time back in the Twenties. But I thought about it because of where I was, right between Dælenenga and Rodeløkka and Grünerløkka on the eastern side of central Oslo which, after all, was Rudolf Nilsen’s territory, just outside a factory where many of the girls he knew had probably worked, and even if it was my mother who was walking towards the gate and not my fiancée, then surely she was near to me, as it says in the poem; it felt that way.

  I straightened up, left the wall to support itself and called out:

  ‘Freia chocolate!’

  ‘Not for me,’ she called.

  ‘Freia toffee?’

  ‘Not bloody likely,’ she said, blushing because the security guard was listening and laughing at us.

  ‘So, what are you doing here?’ she said in a hushed voice when she reached the gate and the guard had let her out. ‘Are you broke?’ she said.

  Of course I was. I always was, but I said:

  ‘What? Are you insinuating that I’ve been standing here waiting for my mother who is coming from the factory exhausted after a hard day’s work just because I happen to be a bit broke and then hope that she might spare me some change. Honestly, Mother.’

  ‘How much do you need?’ she said.

  I shrugged.

  ‘Look here,’ she said and stuck her hand into her small handbag, found her worn brown purse which she opened in a furtive manner that was studied and practised over many years to prevent inspection from a nosy husband who no longer had the economic power in the family, and she deftly eased out a hundred kroner note she had folded into a tiny chip which she pressed into my seemingly reluctant palm.

  ‘Take it,’ she said.

  I saw at once what kind of note it was. ‘Jesus Christ, Mother, a hundred kroner. That’s too much.’

  And in fact it was. In comparison, my rent was 170 kroner a month.

  ‘And we’ll say no more about it,’ she said. ‘Not a word to your father, either.’

  ‘Him I never see,’ I said.

  ‘That’s not entirely his fault, is it?’ my mother said, and she was right about that, and it was fine, I would not tell him anything, why would I? And there was no doubt the money came in handy. But the reason I was there that day was not just the fact that I was broke, not at all, being broke was a way of life, I hardly noticed it any more. I was there because I had something to tell her, something she could not have known and would never have guessed.

  ‘Why don’t we have a coffee before you go home?’ I said. ‘At Bergersen’s?’ And it was such an unusual suggestion that she said yes without thinking twice. What we normally did was walk together up Gøteborggata, along Dælenenggata to Carl Berners Plass, past the Ringen Cinema, where I watched Zorro’s Fighting Legion in two parts when I was eleven, on two Saturdays with an unbearably long week in between, and then we would cross the junction and walk up Grenseveien to the Underground station while we talked about books we had read, new films we had seen and old films we had seen again, such as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning with the young Albert Finney in the lead, which that very week had been on TV. My mother liked him a lot too, Albert Finney, when he stood there at his lathe in the bicycle factory right at the start of the film with his shirt sleeves rolled up and bluntly declaimed what he thought of the older workers and the way they were stuck in the mud of t
he pre-war years and all the things he definitely was not going to waste his life on, and there was no bloody way that he would ever allow himself to be kept down like they had been:

  ‘I’d like to see anybody try to grind me down, that’ll be the day. What I’m out for is to have a good time, all the rest is propaganda!’ he said through tight lips and, of course, that was so much childish nonsense, my mother knew that better than anyone. Yet she waved her glowing cigarette and like Albert Finney in the factory concourse she said: ‘All the rest is propaganda!’ in a rather loud voice right there on Carl Berners Plass, with narrow eyes and rolling Nottinghamshire ’r’s and a sudden dark laughter that made me a bit anxious, though I, too, thought it was a cool thing to say. Then we changed the subject and started talking about the foreman in Confectionery who took liberties with the female workers, and there were almost nothing but female workers at Freia, or at any rate in Confectionery. She couldn’t stand him any longer, the slimy bastard, and was now planning a counter-attack, and she and I discussed how such a counter-attack might be carried out.

  We were walking up to Bergersen’s café, which in fact was not its name, I just called it Bergersen’s because a man called Bergersen sat on a chair in the corner by the window every single day, reading the same newspaper. Look, there’s Bergersen, the staff would say. The café was in a short street which ran diagonally behind the Ringen Cinema and was an extension of Tromsøgata, and bore the same name, but here it turned into a blind alley, an almost anonymous place.

  Once inside we ordered two coffees and Napoleon cakes, and took off our coats and hung them on the coat stand by the entrance, and I was already away, explaining to her what was happening in my life, that I had decided to stop attending the college at the corner of Dælenenggata and Gøteborggata where I had been a student for two years with my student loans and stereo and late nights with pints of beer and everything that went with it, because the Communist Party I was a member of had launched a campaign to persuade as many of its members as possible to become industrial workers. Not by force or anything, but a man from the central committee had come to my small flat and had spoken passionately for a good while and explained how the new Great War would soon be upon us, maybe even early in the New Year when you considered how the Soviet Union was arming herself, surely that was something I had realised after this year’s summer camp on Håøya? And then it made no sense, did it, to remain where I was right now, surely we all wanted to be with the boys, didn’t we, where they were? That was the expression he used, the boys, and by the boys he meant the industrial workers, and he pointed with conviction out of the window, into the world, but in fact in the wrong direction, for he was not pointing to where my mother laboured only a few blocks away as an industrial worker, and was one of the boys, so to speak, even though the majority were women in that factory, nor did he point to where my father worked as an industrial worker and was one of the boys only a few stops away on the Underground. What he pointed at was the Munch Museum at the end of Finnmarkgata. I often went to the Munch Museum on Sundays to stand before the colourful, soft yet sinister paintings I loved so much, and I really didn’t want to disappoint anyone, that’s the way I have always been. So it was easy to tell where this was heading.