A House in Norway

by Vigdis Hjorth

  On rare occasions there would be a party in the Pole’s apartment. Then there would be a line of small torches along the short path from Alma’s front door to the entrance to the apartment, so that no one could be mistaken and think the party was in the big house, so that no one would accidentally knock on Alma’s door. Nevertheless it looked a tad pre-tentious, Alma thought, and wondered what the occasion was, perhaps a birthday party for the child or a Polish holiday Alma didn’t know about; the number plates of the many cars that filled the drive or were parked on the grass, where she had repeatedly asked her tenant not to park, would all appear to be Polish-registered, though she couldn’t exactly go out and study them individually.

  The Pole did what she could to be a good mother, Alma understood, in her own eyes and in those of social services and the neighbours. More and more toys appeared on the small lawn she seemed to think belonged to the apartment. It was probably because the girl was growing up, she might well have made friends with girls her own age at nursery, whose houses she might have been invited to, and then the Pole felt that she in return had to invite the girls back to her fifty cramped square metres. The Pole was also storing things in Alma’s woodshed at the end of the house, which made it difficult to reach the logs, and she had done so quite without asking. Alma often thought that she would have to tell her tenant to move them, but she dreaded doing so and kept putting it off. On the patch of grass nearest the apartment were now a tiny trampoline and a tiny, unstable plastic climbing frame that blighted the garden and ruined the log cabin effect, but Alma didn’t want to say anything because there was something pathetic and helpless about it all. Because she understood what the Pole was trying to do; it should be nice to visit Izabela, which was the little girl’s name, and which was a much easier name to remember than the difficult Slawomira, which Alma didn’t learn until the story turned into a saga.

  No, she said nothing, but at times she wished she could afford not to rent out the apartment, so that she could have complete control over the whole house and choose what kind of things should be left out in full view and what cars should be parked in the drive, and so that her children could stay in the apartment when they visited rather than invade her space, but she was nowhere near being able to afford that. And she told herself that these were just superficial things. Then again surfaces matter to a textile artist.

  Her daughter visited, and Alma asked her opinion. It was September and they were walking under fiery autumn leaves by the sea. What did her daughter think was more difficult: being poor among rich people where the wealth gap was obvious, but also benefit from their resources? Like her daughter who had visited friends’ cabins and gone sailing with them in the Greek islands when she was growing up, friends who compensated for what Alma couldn’t afford to do. Or being poor among poor people? Less shameful, but with less access to resources. She hastened to add that when she said resources she meant not only material resources but also those that stem from being around people with a high level of education, stimulating conversation and so on. And she stressed that other, more important resources, the more human, such as solidarity, were often found in greater supply among the poor, although strictly speaking she had no basis for her claim. How often had she not, while her children grew up, mocked her rich neighbours who treated themselves to cars and extensions, but turned out to be self-important, prejudiced and narrow-minded at parents’ evenings? Or perhaps greater solidarity among the poor was a myth, she thought to herself, but didn’t have time to put forward her theory about solidarity before her daughter replied that she had understood the question and didn’t need politically correct clarifications. She said she thought it was better to be poor among the rich. Although it might be challenging, as it was for, say, the little Polish girl, ultimately she was growing up in a nice neighbourhood, not in some poor ghetto on the east side of Oslo among benefit claimants and the unemployed. Alma was about to protest at this description of east Oslo, this bigoted description of a few poorer neighbourhoods to the east, but at the same time she had to agree with her daughter that there were ghetto-like neighbourhoods in east Oslo where foreigners or people of foreign heritage or whatever the current phrase was, lived and spoke their own language instead of learning Norwegian, who didn’t take part in social activities and didn’t learn Norwegian values. But the moment she thought about ‘Norwegian values’ she immediately wanted to correct herself because she was one of those people who often mocked and scorned typical ‘Norwegian values’ and now she was arguing that they did matter after all. She lost herself in a tangle of hopeless contradictions, so she didn’t hear what her daughter said and then her daughter accused her, quite rightly, of not listening. Why do you ask, if you can’t be bothered to listen to what I have to say, she protested, and Alma replied that she had heard that her daughter had said that she would rather be poor among the rich. I said more than that, her daughter said. What then? Alma said. Oh, it’s too late now, her daughter snapped.

  But they made up under the autumn sky above the autumn sea with a shower of yellow birch leaves in their hair and her daughter asked if she remembered Tina. And Alma did remember Tina who was one of her daughter’s best friends; they had been at school together, she was often in Alma’s house, and had celebrated Christmas with Alma several times. Her daughter reminded Alma that Tina’s real name was Martyna and that she was Polish. One hundred per cent Polish, i.e. biologically Polish, and thus from an ethnic minority. She had no contact with her Polish father and barely knew who he was. Her mother fell pregnant when she was just sixteen and the relationship ended, but her mother met a Norwegian man she visited in Norway, made Norwegian friends and then met another Norwegian man she started going out with, a man who owned a house in Alma’s neighbourhood. And this Norwegian man became like a father to Martyna and he adopted Martyna, whom they called Tina for short. When her mother left him for another man, Tina stayed with her father half the time and more often than that because she went to school in Alma’s neighbourhood, while her mother had moved to Oslo. No one ever thought about Tina as Polish. If she didn’t know it, which Alma almost didn’t, she wouldn’t have realised it. Tina was originally the child of a young Polish woman with no education, whom chance had brought to an affluent neighbourhood in Norway, and it had turned out well for her. Did Alma understand what her daughter meant? Yes, Alma said, that her daughter thought it was a good thing that you couldn’t tell that Tina was Polish, but was it? Tina thought so, her daughter said. She was adamant. Alma didn’t say anything, but thought it was because Tina was probably sensitive about her secret Polishness, because she had assumed society’s prejudices against the Poles, which had arisen because political decisions had meant that in the last decade of young Tina’s life, Norway had been flooded with Poles, to whom no one had previously given much thought and therefore harboured no prejudices against. And because Tina and her daughter were immature, Alma thought, and hadn’t thought things through the way Alma was trying to do.

  The chairman of the Constitution Bicentenary committee had asked for pictures of her work in progress, but what little she had made of the idyllic landscape by the River Ågårdselven wouldn’t give much of an impression. Alma had written to the regional archives in Østfold for more information about Ninja B. and her mother, but had yet to hear back from them; ultimately she might have to make something up.

  Sometimes when Alma was expecting a letter or something in the post, she would look inside her tenant’s letter box where her difficult name had been stuck on the outside. Alma had never got as far as that, on hers it just said ‘7’ – which was her house number. She would look inside because occasionally Alma’s letters had ended up in the Pole’s letter box. Postmen these days weren’t as conscientious as they used to be. Or perhaps it was because so many new houses had been built in the area, which no longer had the rural feel it had had when Alma first moved here. That was how she experienced the passing of time. Not by looking in the mirror
where her face naturally aged, but because she saw it so often, the change seemed to happen imperceptibly. Whereas the houses that shot up in the neighbourhood would appear to do so overnight. She would go for a walk, a route she hadn’t taken for months, and when she turned a corner, expecting to see a field, she would instead see three identical, detached houses ready to move into. And when she fetched her mushroom basket from the basement and headed for the woods where she had picked mushrooms the year before, it was half the size it used to be, and where there was once a huge, green peat bog on the other side of the brook where the best hedgehog mushrooms would grow, there were now two rows of terraced houses. And in the open carports between them were prams and sports cars and bicycles in every size and skateboards and other things that young people play with these days, and in the garages would be estate cars, one after the other. And the bus routes were changed to include the new residential areas and the buses ran more frequently because the population had grown and that benefited Alma. However, it did present new challenges for the postman in such enterprising areas, no wonder that they sometimes accidentally put Alma’s letters in the Pole’s letterbox with the difficult name stuck on the outside. So it happened on the odd occasion, as previously mentioned, that Alma would look in her tenant’s letter box, not in order to pry, but only because in her experience the postmen made mistakes. The Pole, however, might have thought that Alma was snooping if she happened to look out of the window as Alma lifted up the green lid and peered inside. Whatever the reason, one day there was a new, modern, much bigger and lockable letter box where her tenant used to have her small, simple green one, which Alma had put up with a nail next to her own a long time ago. Alma saw it in all its glory from a distance as she came driving and felt under suspicion. But she hadn’t been snooping, why would she? Did the Pole really think Alma cared about her single-parent life and cleaning job? That Alma thought she lived an interesting life, a life worth snooping on and being curious about? As if Alma had nothing better to do than obsess about her Polish tenant. Besides, she couldn’t help but notice that there was hardly ever any post in the tenant’s letter box, and yet she had gone and bought a new and rather elegant, lockable gadget, much smarter than Alma’s simple green one, so passers-by would think that the smart new letter box with the lock belonged to the main house and the battered little green one to the apartment, oh, the irony. Then she remembered the man she had bumped into in the apartment, who had minded that she had let herself in, how they had wanted her to leave as quickly as possible when she brought them the smoke detectors. And she began to worry that her tenant really might have something to hide. That she might get letters which Alma absolutely mustn’t know about, that something illegal might be going on. Those were the thoughts in her head when she saw the new letter box, because it was what everyone would think, she assumed, since that was what she did. Then she brushed them aside because she didn’t really care. She had more important things to think about. The Pole would have to answer for her own actions.

  While she waited for a reply from the regional archives and Soli Brug Manor, she read up on Norway’s Constitution. According to the 1814 Constitution, only one group of people was allowed to vote in elections: men over twenty-five years old who owned property or were state officials. To own property was the decisive factor, to own or not to own that was the question, perhaps it still was, although several democratic reforms had been carried out since then, so that tenants, for example, now had greater rights. And that was a good thing because what would the world be like if landlords could treat tenants as they pleased and put whole families with young children on the streets. She remembered heart-breaking scenes she had seen on film, fictitious as well as documentaries, where poor labourers were evicted by force and their meagre possessions thrown onto the pavement by burly police officers and bailiffs while sobbing children and pleading mothers looked on helplessly. And Alma had always sided with the weak and the defenceless against the rich, who didn’t care how long the family had lived in the neighbourhood, or how many strong links the children had to the house, the street and its residents. So she favoured all laws that defended the weak, while she reluctantly conceded that tenants’ relatively recent legal rights made it difficult for her to evict the Pole, should she ever want to. And Alma had the feeling that the Pole knew this and so didn’t worry much about Alma, and was able to act as if she owned the apartment, pretty much with the law on her side. Planting thujas on Alma’s land and putting out that hideous trampoline not far from Alma’s front door. She would appear to be thinking long term, and Alma had mixed feelings about this. On the other hand, it was nice that the money reached her account regularly. However, for every day the Pole stayed, it became harder to throw her out, and the Pole knew this and was secretly making the apartment her own without conferring with Alma, as if she had an agenda. Barricading herself in the apartment, being on guard and in a state of readiness, battening down the hatches as you would for bad weather. Or was it merely the kind of apprehension which the weak automatically feels towards the stronger?

  Alma, however, wasn’t strong because she had received a reply from the regional archivist, who had found documents which proved that Ninja’s father, the vicar Bottolf Benneche, had had a hand in his wife’s enforced admission. He had written to the doctor at the asylum about ‘the darkness of her mind’ and ‘her childish inclinations’ while he himself presumably both admonished her and beat her, and forced himself on her night after night, and he really wasn’t very attractive, Alma could see from the attached picture. Not a single hair on his head, but many on his chin, his eyebrows stuck out like two brooms, he had hairs coming out of his ears and his mouth drooped to one side, revealing tiny, sharp teeth; who wouldn’t run away if they were forced to sleep in the same bed as him? Because it was a kind of forced marriage arranged by Johanna’s aunt and the miller because Johanna had fallen ill after the breakup with the son from the manor house, and could no longer work at the clothing factory, and thus needed to be provided for. And the son from the manor house for his part was forced to marry an anaemic girl called Ane because the timber mill had lost a lot of money, something which was well documented as were the financial transactions between the respective fathers-in-law. The fathers’ finances had triumphed over the happiness of the young people. Alma also felt sorry for poor Ane who, in addition to being anaemic, had a dreadful underbite, Alma could see from the wedding photograph where the bride was in profile. Because there was a picture of the bride and a handsome but glum-looking Viktor, because rich people were depicted in photographs and paintings and their image preserved for eternity, while there were no photographs, let alone a painting of Ninja B.’s mother. There were so many barriers, so many bars that limited people’s lives; it was almost unbearable to think that they had really existed. How would she ever communicate it? Autumn had brought cold and darkness and slush, and major roadworks had begun to widen the road and construct pavements and cycle paths, and that was great though the council for that very reason had expropriated parts of Alma’s land without her being able to object because the public good outweighed private ownership and Alma agreed with that. Her drive would be changed and the council had started work on felling several huge trees that had hitherto given her privacy and she felt exposed in her own home. They also chopped down the tree on which the non-matching letter boxes hung; the letter boxes were dumped in the mud on the ground and were moved about as the work progressed. There were piles of branches and heaps of gravel and mud in her front garden, but she could live with that; the pneumatic drilling that started at seven thirty in the morning was worse, it made sleep impossible. In addition she received a letter from the council saying that she probably had a paraffin tank buried on her plot, which she needed to remove because if she didn’t, it might deteriorate and the paraffin leak out, and then Alma would be financially liable for any pollution suffered by her neighbours and the environment. She imagined the paraffin leaking and evaporati
ng and poisoning the neighbours, the Pole and her daughter, then the grass turning yellow, the flowers withering and birds lying dead on her drive and her having to pay for everything. She immediately called the number suggested to get help to drain and remove it, and the man who answered the telephone turned up the next day to assess the situation. They stood in the overgrown flower bed and had just found the pipes which proved that the tank was there, and Alma had just been told that the work would cost about twenty thousand kroner or more, when the Pole came driving with her daughter. And, as so many times before, they got out almost without acknowledging her, without greeting Alma with anything more than a quick glance, a brief nod, and the girl, who was growing up and therefore becoming more curious, stared at the man in the flower bed and his strange measuring instruments, until her mother dragged her along as if even being in Alma’s presence was harmful. And Alma felt like shouting that at this very moment she was spending twenty thousand kroner or more so that her pink kid wouldn’t be poisoned because that was a typically Norwegian value, just so you know it, to act responsibly and be environmentally aware, and that the Pole had no idea about the kind of worries a house owner struggles with. She didn’t, but when she received an electricity bill the next day which she couldn’t pay and the temperature dropped to -2C°, she decided that her tenant must pay for her own electricity. She called the National Landlords Association, which alerted her to the six months’ notice period she already knew about, and pointed out that it must be at least two years since she last increased the rent, which it soon would be. A rent rise could be achieved by the tenant paying for her own electricity, which was what Alma wanted, but then a separate meter would have to be installed and the tenant would have to enter into a separate contract with the electricity provider, if she wanted to receive a bill in her own fancy letter box; in addition to the electricity she used, she would also have to pay a subscription. But two subscriptions for one household were an unnecessary expenditure, so it was probably better to insist on a rent increase to ‘the going rate’. An experienced estate agent would inspect the apartment and pronounce what similar accommodation in a similar neighbourhood, utilities included, would cost. Alma searched on www.finn.no to check what landlords charged for similar flats in similar areas, and it was much more than she charged. She wrote a letter, as business-like as she could, setting out the date and place and the full name of her tenant, stating that due to ever-increasing electricity costs, she had no choice but to increase the rent from March 2013, and it could be done in two ways as recommended by the National Landlords Association – she found it only natural to inform her tenant that she was in frequent contact with them. She listed the two options and said that if her tenant decided to enter into her own contract with an electricity provider, Alma would need to be told in plenty of time before the New Year as a second meter would need to be installed. But, she added, it would be unnecessarily expensive because the tenant would then also have to pay for her own subscription, which Alma currently paid for both of them. Yours sincerely, Alma.