by Dag Solstad
This was how Bjørn Hansen’s existence had shaped up. This was his life. At Kongsberg. With Turid Lammers, this woman he had to live with because he feared he would otherwise regret everything. Turid Lammers was the life and soul of the circle. Her beauty and sophistication dazzled everyone. Why didn’t they get married? Because Bjørn Hansen assumed that Turid Lammers would consider such a question coming from him to be infra dig. Hadn’t he left everything and come to Kongsberg, to her, to live with her without any guarantees? To the others in the circle, Bjørn Hansen’s presence in the Lammers villa was completely natural. He was a man who had been offered the chance to leave everything, and to do so in the company of Turid Lammers. When Bjørn Hansen saw Turid Lammers shining so brightly in the surroundings of the Kongsberg Theatre Society, he too thought that way. But he had also caught sight of something else about her, namely, that she was all the time under the influence of something that had long ago come to an end, which did not exist. Turid Lammers was not going anywhere, there was no direction to her life, except to remain where she was and sparkle. All this enthusiasm, all these plans, all this energy finding an outlet every hour of the day, in the classroom, in the florist’s, in the Society, in her life with Bjørn Hansen – all this had no meaning beyond itself.
Was he playing a dangerous game? In any case, he awoke one night to find her side of the bed empty. It might have been about a year after he arrived in Kongsberg. He had become accustomed to his new life. He saw that she wasn’t there. He looked at the time. Four. She had gone out in the evening, to a rehearsal. He couldn’t sleep, just lay there twisting and turning. When she came it was half-past five. Where had she been? Where she had been? Was she not a free human being? Bjørn Hansen could not bring himself to enter into a discussion of human freedom on such premises and went to sleep. When he got up two hours later, she sat at the breakfast table, as usual. She revealed that she had been talking with Jan at his place, his digs, all night. Bjørn Hansen nodded. Jan was the strikingly beautiful railway employee who played Sigismund in Summer in Tyrol, which they were rehearsing; he had a scene with Turid Lammers. ‘I see.’ – ‘I see, I see, is that anything to get jealous about?’ – ‘I’m not jealous!’ – ‘You’re not jealous?’ Turid Lammers laughed. Aloud, scornfully. She kept at it until Bjørn Hansen admitted that he had been jealous, that he was bothered by her staying with Jan.
And that had been true. He had actually been jealous. He had known that Jan was going to the same rehearsal as her, and when he woke up at four o’clock and she was not sleeping beside him, it occurred to him that she was perhaps sleeping somewhere else, with an Adonis from the railway, this homo ludens who had suddenly awakened her innermost desire. He had felt forsaken, and so afraid of losing her. Turid was pleased with his admissions. She maintained that it was unworthy of him to be jealous and that, in fact, it was also an insult to her. Nothing had happened, as he ought to have known. She had been having a deep conversation with Jan. The hours had flown by, because Jan had been telling her about his expectations of life, and she had been listening. She had been listening to a young man who still believed that life was really something that should be lived somewhere wholly different from here, in places where he wished he lived, and she had been so taken by the sudden openness of this man – who was so attractive and such a dreamer – that she had completely lost track of the time. If she had known it was so late and that Bjørn had woken up and felt tormented by such thoughts, she would have come home long ago. For some reason or other, Bjørn believed her, and afterwards he always believed her assurances that there had been nothing going on.
For it happened that Turid Lammers began to come home in the early morning hours in much the same way, after a rehearsal which she (but not he) had attended, and it also happened that she very reluctantly broke away from a rehearsal they had both attended, or after a party, of which there were many in the circle around the Society, to return home with him because he wanted to leave (but not she), because she was all sparkle sitting in her stage outfit with some man, a genuine and self-important homo ludens who now, inspired by her presence, put on a performance in which he pushed himself to the limit, with a self-taught text conceived on the spur of the moment, which now collapsed, of course, since she had to get up and go home with her partner, because the Treasury opened at nine in the morning and for some incomprehensible reason everything would grind to a halt if the treasurer hadn’t had enough sleep, the number of hours determined arbitrarily by the treasurer himself. Incomprehensible. Kongsberg Secondary School, after all, continued to function even if Miss Lammers went straight to her teacher’s desk from a party at the Society, a fact sufficiently proven by the diplomas awarded to her pupils. Well, even the florist’s shop of the Lammers sisters opened punctually at nine in the morning, and the saleswomen would, as a matter of fact, all be there, and the customers would not stay away even if the youngest Lammers sister had danced through the night, until the crack of dawn, instead of having been suddenly interrupted and dragged home by a jealous partner. On such occasions Bjørn Hansen walked beside her, as stiff as a poker. But he believed her assurances that his fear of losing her was completely groundless.
Why, then, did he get jealous? Why did he walk home from a party as stiff as a poker beside her? Why did he sometimes tremble with suppressed fury once the members of the merry Theatre Society had left the Lammers villa after a party, and scream out his real message to her, his feeling that now he had lost her, forever? It happened time and again. Turid Lammers as a dazzling focal point. The circle lost in admiration around her. Among them her partner, Bjørn Hansen. That Turid was at the centre of things did not mean that she sat in the middle, quite the contrary, because part of Turid Lammers’s charm was also her modesty. Not only did she leave the principal roles to others, she also left the geometrical midpoint to others; she herself felt happiest at the small tables on the periphery, where she was first surrounded by both men and women, then by three or, alternatively, two men, until finally she was alone with one man, who immediately launched into his self-taught script as if for the first time – a teacher educated at Eik Teachers College who was now performing the scintillating script of how he had been cast under a spell in the mountainous Kongsberg area, because at long last he had acquired the sort of audience every amateur actor desires for his monologue, ever ready to be delivered: two starry eyes, waiting lips, a woman with French gestures, at once distant and approachable, and he did not notice that this secret monologue, to be privately performed for her alone, at a discreet side table, turned into a crowd scene in which he, as the lone walk-on, represented them all, on their knees in front of the admired Turid Lammers. Wasn’t everyone now casting sidelong glances at Bjørn Hansen? No, as the years went by, only new members shot sidelong glances his way, at first. But not later. For everyone learned that Turid Lammers was faithful to her Bjørn, which didn’t lessen their admiration for her, at the same time as she let herself be unrestrainedly admired, even conquered, by a chosen one who sat spellbound at her table, although even he knew that he would in the end get up and go home, alone. (Or, if not, at any rate sleep alone, for Turid Lammers always left the chosen one’s house or flat or rented room without allowing herself to be kissed passionately, but at most gently and sweetly, as she sometimes admitted openly to Bjørn, although the whole night might pass before that happened.) And Bjørn Hansen knew this. Which was why he could maintain his mask. But no sooner had the Society’s members left the house than he blew his top, allowing all his jealousy to emerge. Turid Lammers thought so anyway. In reality it was nothing but a pretence on his part. He did it for her sake.
For he did not dare entertain the thought that Turid might display all of her feminine charm vis-à-vis the evening’s chosen member of the Society without her partner becoming beside himself with jealousy. He could not bear the thought of causing her so much pain. Because what would happen then? Well, after Jan has been courting her for three hours, he gets up and leav
es, together with the other guests. She is alone. Her husband is reading a novel in an adjacent room and now he comes to her and asks in a friendly voice, ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ Then he might as well have packed his belongings and moved. Out of the Lammers villa. Away from Kongsberg. What bound them to one another would have been lost.
So Bjørn Hansen watched his beloved. His mind darkened by jealousy, he watched her as she sat chatting with Deputy Judge Stabenfeldt or the theatre-mad Per Brønnum, who was a regular worker she flirted with for a while, and with whom she also spent hours at night in her coquettish way in his condemned flat in the centre of Old Kongsberg. But actually Bjørn didn’t care. He didn’t believe that Turid Lammers was cheating on him – couldn’t, in fact, picture it to himself in his wildest dreams; if she did, she would have told him straight out.
Yet he would have fits of jealousy, in which he showed her all the classic signs. And he was not just pretending, but felt the dark recesses of jealousy inside himself – a deep sense of being forsaken and a dark rage, repulsion and rejection, all of which streamed through him, darkly and deeply and quiveringly. But it was only play-acting. He was observing himself coldly all the time as he paced the floor, showering her in his despair with accusations that she accepted with a show of emotion. This was his way of keeping her afloat. His way of worshipping the very ground she trod on.
That is, he was in the know. He knew what he was doing. He had made up his mind to live with Turid Lammers at Kongsberg. As the Kongsberg town treasurer. In his leisure time he was involved in amateur theatre. His love for her was so great that he could have gone mad out of jealousy. Had he not renounced everything in order to cultivate the temptation in all its intensity, for what was left, after all, except this intensity? But he was in the know. He knew what he was doing. He fully realised that, after living with Turid for seven years, his chief contribution to preserving their relationship consisted in these outbursts of fake jealousy. He had seen through her. He had no illusions about her.
Life. He had lived with Turid Lammers for seven years and soon would be forty, a middle-aged man. What had he got out of his life? He was the town treasurer at Kongsberg, which was something. He had become convinced that he possessed some talent as an amateur actor, and for six evenings in the autumn he trod the boards at the Kongsberg Cinema and felt the joy of it. Oh yes, he felt the joy of it. It was a strange, deep feeling. After seven years as Turid Lammers’s partner in the Lammers villa he knew everything about the joy of intoning, along with two teachers and Dr Schiøtz at the hospital, the same stanza at exactly the same time, in precisely the same tone of voice, while all four of them stamped their left feet on the floor with exactly the same force in precisely the same moment in the heated atmosphere of the stage of the Kongsberg Cinema, standing in the spotlight and before the compact public in the darkness out there, down there. A shudder through your body, the sensual pleasure of the precision. In the dark out there, those thousand mouths, those two thousand eyes hidden in the dark watching them all, including the four walk-ons, who were showing what they were capable of. Yes, he really liked it, to step forward in this way, in addition to helping to see through an entire production by being part of a team. But was it really life? This was what Bjørn Hansen asked himself as he more and more often sought refuge among his books, where he could breathe, and brood. Who was Turid Lammers? She saw that Bjørn Hansen was asking himself questions and burning the midnight oil, and she wanted to share his books but noticed that he was not particularly eager to do so. She, too, was approaching forty, but she was still capable of twisting a man round her little finger, as they say.
He kept an eye on her. While he constantly watched over her and kept up his jealousy, he contemplated her. She was the natural centre of the Kongsberg Theatre Society, an association of enthusiasts who filled their lives by laboriously setting up and carrying through six performances a year of some of the most popular operettas of our time. In full public view. On the stage. In the limelight. For seven years Bjørn Hansen had been one of these enthusiasts. Treasurer in the day, enthusiast in the evening. Was that enough? Could there not be more? Bjørn Hansen was going on forty, and he screamed for something more. He began to throw out hints that perhaps they should try for something big. All this enthusiasm, all this experience of how to conduct oneself on the stage, all this delight in precision and in displaying one’s abilities – couldn’t it be used for something more than performing operettas, which, while capable of kindling a gaiety of spirit both in the actors and, not least, in the public, could nevertheless make one feel rather dejected, or outright weary, with all their intellectual vacuity, everything considered, after the lights had come up in the hall, the public had gone home, and they sat in the dressing room removing their make-up? What if they rose to a level where one could feel the blast of real life? What if they had a shot at Ibsen?
For two years Bjørn Hansen kept hinting that they should have a shot at Ibsen. It evoked little response. In particular, his effort to arouse their enthusiasm by pointing out the feelings of emptiness they were left with once a performance was over, due to an operetta’s lack of intellectual substance, cut no ice. It was an attack on everything they stood for, and it was foolish on Bjørn Hansen’s part to call attention to it, although they had certainly felt this dejection, some of them in any case. However, he was supported by two of the Society’s members, and they were not just anybody. One of them was the singing dentist, Herman Busk.
Herman Busk had an exceptionally fine baritone voice, which many thought was fit to be heard on more important stages than the one in the Kongsberg Cinema six times a year. He was one of the guiding spirits of the Society, and if he did not take the lead, he had in any case the next most important male role. But it was at rehearsals that he was most impressive, usually outside the programme. How many times had the others packed up, about to leave, when Herman Busk suddenly began to sing the melody they had heard him rehearse all evening. Everything was in place. All of his painstaking practice had suddenly produced results, and they listened spellbound, all of them thinking, ‘This will be a stunning number on stage.’ As it turned out to be, although perhaps falling short of their predictions. Maybe the expectations were too great; Herman Busk never reached the truly great heights on the stage proper – he was good enough to brilliantly defend his moniker ‘The Singing Dentist’, but not to fulfil the expectations that had been awakened in those cramped rehearsal rooms with one’s hand on the door, about to step out into the evening darkness and the deserted streets. Now, however, Herman Busk became interested in the Society doing Ibsen, and Bjørn Hansen’s idea could no longer be dismissed. Incidentally, due to this surprising stand, Herman Busk and Bjørn Hansen became better acquainted with one another; they would sit and discuss things for hours and became intimate friends – indeed, Bjørn Hansen came to look upon Herman Busk as his best friend.
The other person who backed him was Turid Lammers. That was a surprise, for Turid had no relationship to Ibsen. She spoke nicely about him, of course, and treated him as a classic, but she did not care very much for his plays. This he knew because they had seen Ibsen performances at the National Theatre in the capital several times, but these she had suffered in silence. So that she might now actively work to have her own dear Theatre Society put on The Wild Duck was unbelievable to him. In reality she did not care about operettas either, as a spectator. It was too banal fare for her, despite everything; true, she was eager for them to go to Oslo when the Norwegian Theatre put on one of its annual musicals, but that was simply to pick up a few tricks. Still, operettas were what she felt closest to. Originally he had thought that her kind of theatre would be avant-garde, as it had been when he was her lover as a married man in Oslo, but when she moved back to Kongsberg with its Theatre Society, it was all operettas and there was no more talk about avant-garde theatre; in some way, however, avant-garde theatre and operettas had one thing in common for her, namely, that the content signified
nothing, the masquerade everything. What she had been absorbed by in avant-garde theatre were the masks and nothing else. They had no children together. Turid Lammers did not become a mother; she would sometimes allude flirtatiously to her not having children, calling it the tragedy of her life. But actually Turid Lammers did not want children, she was not prepared for that. Not now. If she were to have had children, she would have had them with her first husband, in France, in the 1960s, and Bjørn could have pictured to himself her leaving France head over heels, holding a small child on her arm as she waited at Gare du Nord for the night train to Copenhagen (and from there to Oslo) to be set up. But when she came back to Oslo after seven years in Paris, it was without a child. As a solitary woman, free, restless, who took a lover, a man to whom she later bound herself and took with her when she returned to the town of her childhood. Turid Lammers was childless and wanted to remain childless – in her innermost self she wanted to be the last. Operettas were to her a brilliant pretext to carry into effect what to Turid Lammers was theatre: costumes, masks, wigs, quick changes, pace, pace. But now she supported her partner’s idea that the Kongsberg Theatre Society should stage The Wild Duck by Henrik Ibsen, and very actively at that. Was it to show her loyalty? Towards him and towards the others? Did she want to present herself as Bjørn Hansen’s loyal partner, willing to fight in order for him to realise this plan that he felt so passionately about, and which she too felt passionately about now, since it was his plan, although everyone understood that in reality she didn’t care a damn, except for the fact that her partner happened to feel so passionately that the Society should stage something which would give them all a lift, The Wild Duck by Henrik Ibsen.
