by Dag Solstad
After Eva Linde’s daughter, Camilla Corneliussen, had moved out of the apartment in Jacob Aalls gate, only the two of them were left there. A rather sottish senior master and his wife, a former beauty. Could it be said that Eva Linde’s indescribable beauty had disintegrated? To Elias Rukla this was not the correct way of expressing it. He could say, perhaps, that her beauty was gone, or that she had lost her beauty, but in that case he had to leave out the notion of ‘indescribable’ from her former beauty, because he would have perceived it as quite inadequate, even misleading, to say that Eva Linde’s indescribable beauty was gone, or that she had lost her indescribable beauty. Eva Linde could not lose her indescribable beauty. The biologically conditioned change that had taken place with her had to be described otherwise than with reference to what had been the very sign of the beauty she had once possessed. What he could have said, and he did say to himself, in his heart, was that he had difficulty retrieving Eva Linde’s charm in the figure and behaviour she now appeared to him in and with. She had become quite filled out and, in consequence, she could appear rather heavy. That is, she moved in a different way through the room now than at the time he had got to know her, and when he heard her footsteps he often came to think of that. Her face had also lost that softness which had undeniably distinguished it earlier on and helped make her person so attractive to men. But when Elias Rukla saw young women, he thought their faces had a smoothness about them rather than the softness he associated with Eva Linde at the same age, which he had to confess he missed. But he missed this softness only by looking at Eva, not at young women. Eva would sit before the mirror applying her make-up as before. Elias Rukla noticed that she could see her own drawn face, where the refined features had disappeared and, along with them, the line of her throat as she bent over, her hair falling slightly forward, causing her to brush it away as before. As he stood behind her in the doorway to the bedroom, looking at his wife before the mirror of her make-up table, Elias Rukla came out with encouraging comments about woman’s everlasting vanity, such as men with exceptionally beautiful wives can often permit themselves by way of a joke, as though nothing had befallen her. He felt obliged to come out with such comments, though as a matter of fact it had not been necessary. True, Eva Linde tried as best she could to repair her faded appearance, but she did not seem to mind very much that things had gone the way they had. What had happened had happened. On the whole, she appeared relieved, if anything, that her beauty was gone. She let the wrinkles and the creases emerge without the least sign of hysteria at having lost the lightness and the indefinable charm that had previously been inextricably associated with her person. For that matter, she had never understood her own beauty, viewing it as a fortuitous attribute of herself, and had felt bothered rather than flattered by men’s glances on account of this fortuitousness. Now she was liberated from it, and it seemed to agree with her. When Elias Rukla now stood behind her on the threshold to the bedroom and remarked upon her ‘vanity’ as she was making her toilet as usual, she had to smile; she liked the fact that he was doing it, but it had not been necessary, he did not keep up her spirits by doing so.
Already, before Camilla moved out, Eva Linde had decided on a new future. She left her job as a secretary at the Oslo Cinemas because she wanted to study to become a social worker. Elias had supported her in this, for she had a strong desire for more meaningful work than she felt she was doing at the Oslo Cinemas, or as a secretary in general. So she began to take a number of watches at various institutions, especially such as had to do with drug addicts. All this to collect points in order to be admitted to Norway’s College of Municipal and Social Affairs. Elias Rukla found it a bit difficult to understand her sudden interest in drug addicts, she had never expressed it before, but it may have been related to Camilla’s youth and her fear, as a mother, that her daughter might, through bad luck or a quest for excitement, end up in milieus that turned young people into drug addicts almost before they knew it themselves. But she had not expressed a specific fear of that kind, nor, as far as they knew, had Camilla given her any grounds for it. Elias himself was of the opinion that, mainly, she was no longer satisfied with her work as a secretary and did not want to continue with it, especially when envisaged as something she was to do for decades ahead, and that she was therefore more or less looking for something new and then, more or less by chance, hit on the idea of becoming a social worker, because the work with drug addicts looked exciting to her, an impression which must have been confirmed by her daily association with them for two or three years as a substitute, since she had not given it up and started something else, or for that matter anything at all, which she had also had the possibility to do, as Elias Rukla’s homebound wife, in any case theoretically. Why working with drug addicts could appear exciting and challenging to her, Elias Rukla was at a loss to understand; to him it looked like a heavy grind, with few bright spots, in a milieu that could scarcely make anyone feel jolly, as Elias had gathered when Eva came home from her watches – from night-watches early in the morning, for example. But the fact was that she preferred it to being a secretary, and without hesitation, even when she came home physically worn out and psychologically exhausted after a night-watch. Elias Rukla suspected there was a connection between Eva’s loss of interest in working as a secretary and the fading of her beauty. This was not exactly the sort of theory that he would air to others, least of all Eva herself. But at the time when she was indescribably beautiful, she had been happy as a secretary, and that was, Elias Rukla suspected, because her beauty gave her a kind of protection. Against men’s glances, however paradoxical that might sound. Her beauty had an educational effect on men who entered the office, where she sat behind the counter. On most, in any case. They became friendly and polite in their whole manner when they saw her, pulling themselves together somehow and making the utmost effort to be courteous, matter-of-fact and informative as far as their business was concerned. She had liked that. And those who did not, those who tried to get fresh with her, puffing themselves up and ruffling their feathers, did so in a situation where they made themselves look utterly absurd and could easily be ridiculed by a pointed or rude rejoinder from Eva’s mouth, often in the presence of another secretary or a male superior. Those fugitive glances that Eva otherwise had had to endure, which she could never get the better of, those furtive sidelong glances which she felt in her back and never could stare down, she finally could put paid to and get even for in the office of the Oslo Cinemas, to her great delight. Elias felt he had a basis for maintaining this in light of what Eva had told him about her work. But when her beauty faded, without her showing any bitterness incidentally, this pleasure disappeared, and all that remained was just routine office work; consequently, she looked for something else, something more rewarding, and she chose to become a social worker and take watches, and she had never regretted it. This very autumn, only three weeks ago, she had started at Norway’s College of Municipal and Social Affairs, after receiving the happy news early in the summer that she had been accepted. That meant that Eva Linde, who was now in her late forties, had a demanding three-year college course ahead of her. It also meant that he and Eva had to manage for the duration on one income, his teacher’s salary, which was not overly high but high enough to allow them to cope fairly well if they were thrifty and observed a sober lifestyle. In any case, Elias was pleased that he had a wife who, in her late forties, had made up her mind to provide herself with a good and, in her eyes, meaningful education, instead of going around being unsatisfied with her work, whether as a secretary or as – and this would have been absurd – a homebound teacher’s wife. Incidentally, he had often proposed, from the very moment they were married, in the mid-1970s, that she should resume her studies, but then there had been so many ifs and buts, what with Camilla and one thing and another, that half of it would have sufficed, Elias Rukla had thought.
