“A nectarine,” she said.
“But we haven’t got any,” I said. “An apple.”
“OK,” she said.
I followed her through the hallway. The whole of one wall was built-in cupboards, whose light-brown color and fittings harked back to the fifties. Some were so full that clothes and shoes fell out if you opened them. Baggy coveralls, ankle-length boots, thick sweaters, everything from winter was here, as well as all the other stuff we didn’t need on a daily basis. Behind the jackets and coats on their hangers under the hat shelf there were hooks in the wall where we hung all the backpacks and tote bags that over the years had accumulated to such an extent that they no longer really hung there at all, but were more like a growth. In the children’s smooth backpacks were sandwich boxes whose contents, when we forgot to empty them, molded away, and the thought of their organic matter following the laws of the organic while buried among layers of synthetic materials, independently, without being in contact with any like matter, was something that fascinated me, at least after the box had been discovered, its contents thrown out and its plastic surfaces scrupulously cleaned. All over the floor, though mainly up against the wall, under the row of cupboards on the one side, the mirror and a long white bench on the other, were toys and dolls, scattered like debris from a plane crash. Normally I tidied up and did the cleaning if we were having visitors, but this time it was only Geir and I hadn’t bothered. Besides, I’d been too worried. But today Linda would be back, and Christina was coming too, so there were no two ways about it. It would have to be done after I took the kids to the nursery, I told myself, following Vanja into the kitchen. The sun had moved upward and across the room in the short time we’d been awake, and its light no longer shone horizontally into the kitchen, but slanted down onto the wall where the counter and the dishwasher were. Vanja went to the cupboard and opened it, took one of the big red apples from the plastic bowl we kept our fruit in, and handed it to me.
It was a Red Delicious, most likely genetically modified, for the white flesh never went brown in the air the way the apples of my childhood always did, and they never seemed to rot, either. It was scary and went radically against all my conceptions of right and wrong. The fact that I still bought them was because Red Delicious had been such a luxurious apple when I was growing up, something special that we normally only ever had at Christmas, when they nestled, shiny and red and magical, in the fruit bowl, simultaneously hard, crisp, and succulent, the way no other apples were.
“What are you giving it to me for?” I said.
“The label,” she said, putting her finger on the little sticker with the fruit company’s logo on it, a little red-and-black ladybug on a white background.
I took the apple in my hand and scratched at the label with my fingernail, but it was so short it wouldn’t catch, and I had to press through the skin of the apple in order to remove it.
“You ruined it!” Vanja said as I handed it back to her. “I want a new one!”
“Well, you can’t have one!”
My reaction was so firm she gave up at once, put the apple down on the table, and marched off. I followed her. When she went into their own room, I went into the living room, where Heidi was sitting on the sofa drawing, John was sprawled on his back with his feet up, gazing at the ceiling, and Njaal was crouched on the floor putting Brio train tracks together. I sensed Geir was in the other room and went over to the sliding door and looked in. He was standing in front of the bookshelf with a book open in his hands.
“What have you got there?” I said.
“A book about Joyce,” he said, holding it up so I could see the cover.
“Oh, that,” I said. “Someone who knew Joyce in Trieste. A ship’s captain, I think. Not literary at all, as far as I remember. They became friends and he wrote a book about him years after.”
I turned toward Heidi.
“Time we were off,” I said. “Go and put your sandals on.”
“Is Njaal coming?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“Njaal’s on holiday. Aren’t you, Njaal?”
He didn’t answer, his brown eyes looked at me nonplussed.
Heidi got down. I followed her out into the hall, brushed her teeth, then Vanja’s and John’s, said goodbye to Njaal and Geir, and went out onto the landing, not unnoticed by the neighbors, I imagined, for the children’s noise levels were always in the upper reaches whenever we were on our way in or out, and the sound they made ricocheted off the walls and down through the floors. I had often heard them on the sixth floor while standing waiting for the elevator at street level.
That’ll be the Norwegian’s family setting off, I imagined them thinking. They’re running late today. Or else, That damned Norwegian and his kids again.
* * *
Arriving at the nursery, Vanja keyed in the code, I opened the gate. The children already there were out on their trikes, the staff were sittting about on the benches. Heidi clung to me, her arms around my legs.
“I’ve got to go now. Mommy’s picking you up today.”
“Is Mommy coming home?” said Heidi.
I nodded.
“And it’s Friday today. You can all have ice cream.”
I lifted my hand and gave the staff a wave, pressed the door opener, opened the gate, and went back the same way we came.
It was hot in the sun, but in the patches of shade I passed through the air was cool and had a dampness about it, as if the autumn had come too early and decided to wait there so as not to disturb the grandness of summer, master of all seasons.
I veered right into Hemköp and went in through the doors that automatically slid aside, grabbed a basket before going through the two barriers that likewise opened automatically, glanced up at the monitor above the fruit display, and saw my image looking up and to the right, something Heidi and Vanja had yet to understand, for how could they be looking to the side when they were staring straight at the screen? Vanja and Heidi would sometimes do a little dance there on the supermarket floor, while John waved to himself from the trolley, we were like a traveling circus with dwarfs. I put some tomatoes in one of the plastic bags that weren’t entirely transparent but grayly translucent as if they were full of smoke. The tomatoes were from the Netherlands and still attached to their little green vine stems, in contrast to the Swedish ones next to them, which lay packed together, red and shining, with neither vine nor stalks, presumably the reason why they cost five kronor more per kilo. After putting the bag of tomatoes in the basket, I picked up a shrink-wrapped cucumber and placed it next to them, then went over to the cheese display and tried to decide between a Danish Gouda, which was cheap, a Swedish Grevé, which Linda preferred, and a Norwegian Norvegia, which tasted much the same as the Grevé but cost almost twice as much. We had guests, I told myself, we could save money another day. Besides, the advance on the novel would be paid soon. What difference did forty kronor make?
With the Norvegia cheese in the basket, I went on to the bread. The bakery was one of the supermarket’s biggest sections, I guessed they had somewhere between fifty and seventy different kinds of bread, maybe more, all arranged on displays that stood like islands in the middle of the floor. In Sweden bread came sliced and wrapped in plastic. That way it had a long life, but was always soft and lacking both crispness and the very particular good taste of fresh bread. Here, though, they also had a shelf of fresh-baked loaves, mostly with names evoking a simpler, more natural life, words like rustic, country, or farmer’s were splashed all over them, and they emphasized the grain varieties too, unlike the sliced breads wrapped in plastic, which were more inclined to words such as sport, energy, and health. When I was growing up, in an age that to my children would one day appear as remote as the 1950s of my own parents had to me, bread came in paper bags, and its consistency and taste changed from day to day, from the delicious freshness of the first evening, when the crust was still crisp and the crumbs soft and moist, until the last hard crust was de
voured two or three days later, with all possible degrees of taste and consistency in between. I remember many other families put their bread in a plastic bag as soon as they brought it home, which kept it moist a lot longer, but the crust would lose its crispness. We kept ours in a paper bag, meaning the crust stayed crisp, whereas the moisture disappeared. There weren’t nearly as many different kinds of bread back then, I could think of only five off the top of my head: Kneippbrød, grovbrød, wittenberg, loff, and one that was introduced when I was maybe eight or nine, grahambrød. That was it.
I had become a man of yesteryear, and it had happened fast, I thought to myself, and turned to the shelves of fresh-baked bread. They had seven rolls for ten kronor, so I took one of the paper bags meant for loaves and put seven rolls inside, scrunched the top end together and dropped it in the basket, then moved on to the milk and dairy, grabbing a packet of coffee and a one-and-a-half-liter Pepsi Max on the way.
I also remembered the supermarket where we used to buy our bread. I remembered what it looked like outside, and what it looked like inside. I remembered when it was built, the enormous flat expanse of concrete they laid next to the road only a few hundred meters from our house, and the shop that rose up bit by bit on top of it, with its name proudly displayed on the side, like on a boat: B-MAX. To us it was Bemaks, a place on the same footing as other places in the vicinity, like “ubekilen,“ “the fell,” “the main road,” “Gjerstadholmen,” “the floating jetties,” “the bridge.” Even after the supermarket changed its name, it was still referred to as Bemaks. It was my first supermarket; before that there was nothing. Not a single recollection of a single shop. I was about five when they built it. God knows where my parents did their shopping before.
Besides Bemaks, we soon had Stoa, the cash-and-carry where we went maybe twice a year to buy in bulk. Ten-kilo sacks of sugar for preserving fruit or making fruit syrup in the autumn, a crate of lemonade for Christmas or the summer holiday, economy bags of flour, that kind of thing. Dad was fond of it, I think, he liked shopping for food, not in the local shop, where people would recognize him and where it was only ever the day-to-day items we tended to buy, he left that to me or Yngve or Mom, but in the bigger supermarkets outside the center, where you bought in bulk, he liked that. I think he liked the idea of throwing his money around on those occasions, the big man about town, that must have been it. Or maybe it was the opposite he was looking for, the security of gathering provisions, keeping a stock.
I stopped at the dairy section and took a carton of milk; it was for the children, so I chose the one with the highest fat content, 3.5 percent, then moved on and picked up half a dozen eggs the box said came from “cage-free hens indoors,” prompting me to scan the other kinds to see if there were any from “mistreated hens crammed together in cages,” which didn’t seem to be the case, and so I carried on toward the checkout, along the deserted aisles, between the refrigerated counters and the shelves of shampoo, through a small section of “organic sweets,” then the glitzy inferno of normal sweets, which took up about the same amount of space as the bread.
But from all the numerous times I’d been to Bemaks, and it was from Bemaks I caught the bus to school, to Bemaks I came running with a shopping list in my hand from Dad at least twice a week through all those years, I had retained only one real memory. It was one time when I was there with Mom. I’d seen a special offer sign saying the yellow boxes of Nesquik, the chocolate milk powder, were down to only one krone. It was so cheap I felt sure Mom could be talked into buying some. Only one krone, only one krone, I kept saying as I dragged her over to where the cardboard sign was. But it says minus one krone, she said. They cost one krone! I insisted. No, she said, it means one krone off. There’s a difference. And so I had to do without Nesquik that day. But the memory has stayed with me.
Why would that be? There were myriad things I’d seen and done there, a whole galaxy of events.
I stood in line at the checkout to the left. There were only two people in front of me, both with so few items they held them in their hands, as was often the case at this time of day. In the afternoons the place came alive with customers dragging the new wheelie baskets along behind them. It was one of the saddest sights I knew, all semblance of human dignity evaporated the moment a person went with that of all options. The feeble, characterless action of trundling instead of carrying. The fussy little wheels, the long black handle, the basket that followed on behind like a small dog. The clatter of the wheels was earsplitting from the moment one became aware of it.
The very thought deflated me.
Life was there to be felt, that was what we strove for, but why? For our headstones to say, “Here lies a person who liked to sleep”?
* * *
When I opened the front door I found the apartment completely silent. For a moment I wondered if they’d gone out, but then I heard a noise from the children’s room and guessed it to be Njaal playing while Geir sat reading somewhere.
“Anyone home?” I called out.
“Ah, there you are,” said Geir from the living room.
“I bought some bread rolls if anyone wants some,” I said, took my shoes off and put them in the cupboard, picked up the bag and went into the kitchen. The dishwasher was finished, so I dumped the shopping on the table, switched it off, and opened the door, the steam billowing out into my face, making me step back instinctively.
I took the cutting board out and put it on the table, found a bread basket in the cupboard, and tipped the rolls into it. Fresh rolls with lots of butter and yellow cheese, I could hardly think of anything better. But my tastes were simple. The salt of the cheese and the butter against the mild wheat flavor of the bread, and the thin, yet hard, crisp crust that broke into pieces the moment you bit into it was something I’d never grown tired of. So my mouth was watering as I cut into one of the rolls and covered its surface with butter and three thick slices of cheese.
“Njaal wants one too,” said Geir, coming to the table.
“Help yourself,” I said.
“Don’t speak with your mouth full,” he replied.
“Have I told you what Vanja’s excuse is whenever she does something wrong?” I said.
He shook his head.
“She says it’s our fault for not bringing her up properly. And not only that, she says it’s too late now.”
“She may have a point there,” Geir said, angling the knife and scraping it across the surface of the butter, causing it to collect at the blade like a lateral moraine.
“Of course she has. I just hadn’t thought it would be so obvious to her, that’s all.”
Geir spread the butter over his bread, picked up the cheese slicer, and cut off a slice.
“No fingers on the cheese!” I said.
“Seriously?” he said. “You mean there’s a rule against it?”
“Isn’t there?” I answered. “You’re the sociologist.”
“Amazing how much I get to be the sociologist here, isn’t it?”
“I only mentioned it once yesterday, and once now.”
“Well, it’s twice too often,” he said, taking the two halves of the roll into the living room. I went after him, cramming the last bite into my mouth.
“I was thinking of cleaning up a bit before we go out. If it’s OK.”
“I’ll give you a hand, if you want.”
“Great.”
Njaal sat with his elbows on the table, bread in hand, looking at me while he ate.
“When will Vanja and Heidi be coming back?” he asked.
“This afternoon. About three o’clock, I imagine.”
“And what are we going to do today?” he said, and looked across at his father.
“We’re going to Lund,” Geir said.
I started picking up all the towels, trousers, tops, and socks that were lying around the living room.
“Can I take my bike?” said Njaal.
“Of course you can,” said Geir. He gathered some apple cores
together on a plate and stacked some plastic cups. I went into the bathroom and pressed the clothes down into the laundry baskets, which were already full. I straightened up again. Maybe I should check and see if the laundry room was available in the basement?
No, it would only complicate things.
I left the bathroom and picked up the dolls that were scattered around and put them in the dolls’ bed in the children’s room. One of them had blue marks drawn on its face, they looked like a tribal tattoo, a rather unnerving contrast to its innocent baby features, which made me turn it facedown. I gathered up all the soft toys and dumped them on the end of Heidi’s bed; she was so small she only took up a third of its length. Mostly, they were dogs, cats, and rabbits, but there was a lynx too, as well as a panda, a lion, a tiger, a parrot, a crow, a lamb, a cow, an elephant, and a crocodile. I positioned them so they were all looking out into the room, above and below each other, and that was unnerving too, perhaps because there was something accusatory about the combination of staring eyes and silence, or else it was because they looked like dead creatures with faces and eyes that seemed to be watching us from the other side. I picked up the toys strewn about the living-room floor and put them away in the round brown ottoman and the three mesh baskets we used for the purpose, while Geir picked up all the children’s books and magazines he could find.
“I want to help,” said Njaal.
“You can pick up the toys in the hall and put them … I don’t know, where should he put them?” Geir said, looking up at me.
“I’ll get you a basket,” I said, went and got it and put it down on the floor in the hall. But after putting a few odd toys in it, Njaal decided he would rather play with them instead. Geir tousled his hair as he went past with a pair of purple plastic shoes in one hand, I noticed, and I stepped aside to let him through, then emptied the dishwasher in the kitchen; the heat had nearly left the dishes now, but remained in the cutlery.
“It always looks a lot worse than it is,” I said to Geir. He was standing in the doorway now, looking like he was about to ask for another job.
My Struggle, Book 6 Page 32
