Tore was thirty-six, I was forty. We were adults, but we behaved like teenagers, drank beer, played pop music, joked. He had two children, I had three. We had both become the only thing we wanted to be: novelists. That thought could still gladden my heart. Once we had put an advertisement in Dagbladet, this was during the Christmas period toward the end of the nineties. It said, The New Sentimentalists wish the Norwegian nation a merry Christmas and a very happy New Year.
“Do you remember the ad we put in the paper?” I said, sitting in a chair and smoking while he was trying on a freshly ironed shirt in the hall.
“Which ad?” he said.
I told him.
He laughed.
“Oh, yes, Jesus. That’s true.”
“Perhaps there’s someone out there somewhere still trying to figure out what it meant,” I said.
“Yes, it didn’t exactly become a national movement, did it.”
“Your division of books you cry over and books you don’t is definitely up there too,” I said.
“Tie or bow tie or nothing?” he said.
“Nothing,” I said.
He put on a plaid jacket and a cloth cap.
“Shall we go then?”
I nodded, rose to my feet, and then we took a taxi to the café, where Frode Grytten had already arrived. He introduced us to his brother, who was a meteorologist or something else equally distant from cultural life. Tore and Frode had become friends. He had shown Tore respect, not all writers did, so I liked him for that reason alone.
People stared at me. As they had done at the airport. A girl came over to me outside, where I was smoking, she could hardly articulate what she wanted to say, something about me had intimidated her.
We did our readings, and afterwards we went to Cementen and drank beer, Tore told me a terrible story about his life, it was grim and shocking, an abyss. There were such abysses in his life, but they were not apparent in his manner, the way he behaved, what he talked about, yet they defined him, at least to my mind, he was someone who believed he would sink into the ground if he stood still, so he didn’t.
On the plane I reflected that I had given away all of myself, I had nothing left of my own, I was a no one. Perhaps it was because I had been drinking the night before that I had these thoughts, although I hadn’t drunk much, but it was enough for me to feel angst, maybe because there had been so many people looking at me, and as a result I understood what I had actually done, everyone could read everything about me, even total strangers, and think what they liked. I had put Vanja, Heidi, and John in their hands.
* * *
I met Tore again not so long afterwards, at a literature festival in Odda. I flew to Bergen, rented a car to drive along the fjord, appeared onstage with Tore, drove back to the airport the next day, and flew home. The festival organizer was Marit Eikemo, we had worked with her on Student Radio. Yngve and Asbjørn came to watch; Selma Lønning Aarø, whom I remembered from student days when she won a novel-writing competition, was there; and Pedro Carmona-Alvarez, I knew who he was, he played in Sister Sonny, sometimes wore makeup when he went out, I had never spoken to him, but I’d written about him in the summer, that is, about his latest novel, Rust, which had impressed me, he was there, and we sat drinking in the hotel bar, all of us, and there too I had the feeling that the nineties weren’t over, they just kept going and going. At the actual performance Tore produced many old letters and e-mails I had sent him during that period, there was also one about my father, which he read out while we were all sitting onstage, and at first I was unable to comment on it because I couldn’t remember ever having written it.
My father died two weeks ago. He passed away in an armchair in the house where he grew up, it is hard to believe, I can’t believe it, and now I’m over it, now I’m here in Bergen and I’m writing to you, Tore, my friend, in Iceland. Yngve called to say what had happened, I caught the next plane down to his, and together we drove to Kristiansand the day after. I cried every day for a week. I had often wondered: what if he dies – but I had never imagined this is how I would react. So what was I grieving over? I don’t know. It has nothing to do with rationality, it was just feelings, they kept gushing up, I lay alone in my grandmother’s house, in tears. Now I’m over it again, now it’s as if it hasn’t happened.
I was moved as I sat there because the voice came from August 20, 1998, and because it was still stricken with grief, perhaps without even knowing. It was there, onstage, that I really understood for the first time what it meant that Dad was dead. It was as though it was only then, in Odda, that he died for me. That was why the whole world suddenly became so incomprehensible.
* * *
The next morning I met the editor in chief at Spartacus, Frode Molven, in the hotel café. I’d sent him Geir’s book, which after six years’ toil was finally finished. It was called Baghdad Indigo and was a unique piece of work. It was about the human shields who had traveled to Baghdad to stop the U.S. invasion by occupying the most important bombing targets. Geir went with them, all the way from Istanbul to Baghdad, on board a red double-decker bus, and he was a human shield in Baghdad throughout the invasion. He interviewed all sorts of people in the war zone, even when the sky above them was exploding and the windows behind them were being blown out. What was war, and why was it so appealing to so many, even to those who had gone there to stop it? That formed the core of the book. Unlike the journalists, who were looked after by the regime and were either bussed around town or sat in their hotel rooms, Geir was free to go wherever and whenever he wanted. When Baghdad fell and elite U.S. soldiers were standing by the waterworks where he and a handful of other activists were staying he grabbed his backpack and lived with them for a few weeks. He interviewed them; they had come straight from the fighting and were more than happy to talk. The book was more than eleven hundred pages long, and that meant the three months it spanned had enormous importance, like something beyond time. He had captured a fragment of time. Practically no one did this anymore; journalists’ reports and books from the war zone were light, noncommittal, the authors had moved on even before the corpses had gone cold. The specifics of time and place disappear in their unspecific, similar voices; conflicts merge into one, regardless of whether they take place in Afghanistan, Libya, or Somalia. When I read Geir’s book it was like reading something from the Spanish Civil War in the thirties, not because the conflict was similar, but because the approach was the same as in many books from that period, namely existential. Baghdad Indigo was an excellent book, of that I had no doubt, so I had told Geir it would be easy to get it published. He was skeptical, he didn’t want to take anything for granted, and didn’t listen to me. I thought it best to send the manuscript to a publishing house before it was finished, so that they could be involved earlier in the process, it was such unusually comprehensive material. Geir listened to me, and I sent it to Aslak Nore, the nonfiction editor at Gyldendal. He had read Geir’s previous book, he said in his e-mail back to me, he liked it, was interested in the topic, and was looking forward to reading the latest. He also wanted to ask me a little favor while I was there, would I mind writing a blurb for the book? Just a couple of words. Of course I couldn’t say no as his decision regarding Geir’s book was so important. I wrote a recommendation, however Nore not only rejected Geir’s book but also went on the attack with a vengeance, calling it immoral. The second person I sent the manuscript to was Halvor Fosli at Aschehoug, but he was halfhearted, lukewarm, he never read the book, which became apparent when he said it was anti-American, which it was not, he had only skimmed it, he must have read a few lines of the interviews with the peace activists and assumed they reflected the book’s main thrust. Fosli said he would talk about the book at a meeting with the other editors, which of course produced nothing. So Geir gave up on this strategy and decided to wait until the manuscript was completely finished. Which it was now. I couldn’t imagine that anyone would say no. I knew Molven a little from Bergen, he seemed flattered th
at I had contacted him now, and Spartacus was a serious publishing house. But when we sat down in Odda he initially wanted to speak about something else. No, he didn’t want any blurbs; he had in mind a biography about Axel Jensen, however, and wondered if I would like to write it. I didn’t say no, even though I would never write a biography about anyone for as long as I lived, nor did I say yes. When that was clear we spoke a little about Geir’s book. He said it sounded interesting and he would like to read it. We shook hands, and I walked over to Yngve, who had been sitting nearby waiting, we were going to drive to the ferry. I decided not to tell Geir that Molven had asked me to write a biography for him. There was something unpleasant about everyone on all sides trying to get a chunk of me, I owed Geir so much and I didn’t want his book to be about my name.
On the ferry Yngve and I had a coffee, on the quay on the other side we had a smoke, and then he drove to Voss while I made my way toward Flesland Airport. It was autumn, the air was cold, sharp, and clear, the sky cloudless and blue, the sun heavy and drunk with light. Yngve had lent me a CD, it was the first by Dire Straits, I had it on full volume in the rental car, it was the one we played when I was in fifth grade and he was in ninth at Tybakken, and the atmosphere of that time filled my head, the Norwegian seventies, the soft snow, quilted jackets.
Alongside the glinting fjord. Past red, yellow, brown, green trees. Up the mountainside. And then, ahead of me on the road, a dog. I jumped on the brakes, but ran over it anyway, there was a thud and the dog was thrown into the ditch. I stopped the car, switched off the engine, and got out, a man came walking across a yard toward me. I looked for the dog, but it wasn’t there. The man pointed. The dog was running up a path on the other side of the road. How was that possible? I had been doing at least fifty kph when I hit it. I keep telling them they should keep the dog on a leash, said the man, who was in his forties, as he came to a halt in front of me. What happened? I said. How could the dog have survived that? You hit it with your bumper. It might be hurt, but it doesn’t look like it, he said. Does it come from up there? I said, nodding toward the farm above the road. He nodded. I’d better go up and tell them, I said. He nodded again and accompanied me. The dog was lying in the yard when we arrived, it wasn’t squealing or anything, seemed healthy and happy. An old man was there, I walked over to him, explained what had happened and apologized, the dog seemed to be fine though. Thank you, he said. And then I walked back down, got into the car, and drove on. I thought about Vanja, as she loved dogs more than anything else. She knew the names of most breeds and we had to read to her from a dog book almost every day. If we were out and came across a dog we had to ask if she could pet it. Sometimes she asked if she could borrow my phone and take pictures of the dogs we saw. She wasn’t allowed to have a dog until she was twelve, which she negotiated down to ten. Now she was eight. I was looking forward to telling her about the incident. If the dog had died I wouldn’t have said a word. But it had been fine. I could tell her.
At Flesland I parked the rental car, handed over the keys, checked in, and flew home.
* * *
In the following weeks I finished off the third novel. In Odda, Tore had promised to help me with it because it was long and shapeless, that is, its sole principle of form was chronology. Tore had read it, made a few suggestions, which I had accepted, but it hadn’t been enough, something more radical was needed, some twist or other. While I was working in Malmö the evening before I had to hand it in, Tore was skimming through it in Stavanger, and he called when he found a turning point around which the whole novel could revolve, and sent me lots of texts throughout the evening and night. By the morning it was finished. I had followed his instructions to the letter. Just a few days later Book 2 came out. Geir called in the morning, and even though I had told him not to mention a word that was written about me, he insisted on reading the Aftenposten review. You’ve got to hear it, he said. Come on, you can take it. But it’s not what it says or doesn’t say that bothers me, I said. It’s the fact that it’s there at all. You know how it fucks me up inside. Come on, he said. Just this once. Never again. OK, I said. And he read it to me. All I remember from it is one sentence: “Well, is the case actually statute-barred?” and I was described as “the possible perpetrator.” The reviewer was wondering if I was the perpetrator of a sex offense and if the case was statute-barred. I remember because Geir was laughing so much as he read and because he repeated it several times. Have they lost their minds? he said. Have they utterly gone off their rockers? A few hours later I received an agitated e-mail from Tonje. She quoted from the same review, in which the following appeared: “For example the writer’s former wife appears by name, and you can only imagine how unpleasant this publication must be for her now,” and Tonje asked what that meant and why she hadn’t been given the novel before it came out, if it was about her. Previously I’d sent her an e-mail where I asked her not to read the novel. I had done that because it wasn’t about her, but about Linda and my feelings for Linda, and it had occurred to me that it might hurt Tonje to read about how in love I was only a few weeks after we had broken up. Now Tonje thought I had kept this from her, that I had deceived her. All of Norway would be reading about her while she was left in the dark. That I might have done something to spare her was so naïve that she didn’t believe me for a second. The pressure was so great, the phone calls from the media so incessant that it was impossible to maintain this perspective. The damage was done in the book, not when she read it. I hadn’t written about her, but I had written about something of which she had no knowledge and which had happened while we were together: I had fallen in love with Linda. Wham. She was the one. An arrow to the heart. But what kind of heart? Everything was a blur during those days, I fell headlong, there was no reciprocation, Linda turned away, and I cut up my face, left everything, and traveled home. It was the most intense experience of my life. I had been in a place I didn’t know existed. The world was a river of impressions and I was connected to them, that was how it felt, everything had significance, I could examine an acorn for ten minutes as though it contained the secret of the universe, which it did, that was why I stared at it. In that state I saw Linda and was hypnotized by her, but nothing happened, we didn’t even touch. She was becoming manic; I was, without any doubt, manic. Writing a book about my life was inconceivable without including the feelings I’d had then and what happened to me. But it was a torment for Tonje and I was the tormentor. I e-mailed and tried to explain, but that only made things worse, you cannot be both tormentor and consoler. She sent a furious e-mail to my editor, who had publicly stated that all the characters appearing in the novel had been given the manuscript to read beforehand. She had not. So, in the gloom of the Internet café reading her e-mail and all the others that had come in over the past two months, I found myself in a place I had never been before, in a world of lawyers who scrutinized every word I wrote, with threats of legal action and public accusations of lying, reviews calling me immoral and where everyone I had been or was close to suffered because of me. While I was writing I didn’t think about them, but as the publication date approached they suddenly loomed large, as they really were, and the repercussions revealed themselves to me. The conflict was between the novels and their consequences. The approach I chose was to publish the novels, allow whatever happened to happen, with all the pain I’d inflicted that brought, and hope the wounds could be healed. In general terms I was able to defend this approach as I knew what I was looking for and the value of it, but not in specific cases, regarding the consequences for every individual I had written about. No one has the right to inflict injury on another person. Sitting in front of the screen in the computer games bunker, I was afraid, desperate, and sorry, but I also knew these feelings would disappear when I wrote and would therefore come and go because in the written “I” the social “we” disappeared and the “I” was free. It was only when I got up and left my desk that the “we” returned and I was able to feel ashamed at what I had wr
itten and thought, with varying degrees of intensity, according to how deeply I was in the writing process. The social dimension is what keeps us in our places, which makes it possible for us to live together; the individual dimension is what ensures that we don’t merge into each other. The social dimension is based on taking one another into consideration. We also do this by hiding our feelings, not saying what we think, if what we feel or think affects others. The social dimension is also based on showing some things and hiding others. What should be shown and what should be hidden are not subject to disagreement because they are connected with the “we.” The regulatory mechanism is shame. One of the questions this book raised for me when I was writing it was what was there to gain by contravening social norms, by describing what no one wants to be described, in other words, the secret and the hidden. Let me put it another way: what value is there in not taking others into account? The social dimension is the world as it should be. Everything that is not as it should be is hidden. My father drank himself to death, that is not how it should be, that has to be hidden. My heart yearned for another woman, that is not how it should be, it must be hidden. But he was my father and it was my heart. I shouldn’t write that because the consequences affect not only me, but also others. Yet it is true. To write these things you have to be free, and to be free you have to be inconsiderate to others. It is an equation that doesn’t work. Truth equals freedom equals being inconsiderate and is on the individual side of the equation; being considerate and secrecy are on the social side, but only as an abstraction, like an inner entity in the “I” because in reality there is no such thing as the social dimension, only single human beings, our “you” in other words, also on the individual side. Tonje isn’t a “character.” She is Tonje. Linda isn’t a character. She is Linda. Geir Angell isn’t a character. He is Geir Angell. Vanja, Heidi, and John, they exist, they are in bed asleep about a hundred kilometers away from where I am sitting at this moment. They are real. And if you want to describe reality as it is, for the individual, and there is no other reality, you have to really go there, you can’t be considerate. And it hurts. It hurts not to be considered and it hurts not to be considerate. This novel has hurt everyone around me, it has hurt me, and in a few years, when they are old enough to read it, it will hurt my children. If I had made it more painful, it would have been truer.
My Struggle, Book 6 Page 115
