‘Here it comes,’ she said.
He could hear the drone of the diesel engine from up where the bus had carefully turned in off the main road to drive down this little road and out back again at the other end, and whether the snow had an amplifying effect and gave the sound an extra-dull boom, he didn’t know, but the whole house and his whole body seemed to vibrate, and she pressed her forehead against the window to see if she could catch a glimpse of her children getting on, a little lower down the road, and then the bus came past Jonsen’s house, and two of her children were on board: Siri who always sat in the middle of the bus and Tommy by a window at the rear, clearly visible above the drifts, and he was staring straight ahead without once looking to the sides, holding his packed lunch in the air, with his name written on the stiff, grey paper in looped handwriting, and it was hard not to think he had a reason to do that, just then, but of course he couldn’t have.
And she sat in her white vest on the divan with her eyes barely above the windowsill, staring out at the school bus driving through the neighbourhood with Tommy and Siri on board and watched them disappear, and it was hard to imagine that only an hour later she too would disappear, for ever, and it was him, Jonsen, who would drive her the sixty kilometres to Oslo through the snow to one of the quays where, at the last moment, she would sign on for work on a ship that soon after would drop moorings and sail down the Oslofjord, and not pull into quay again until Rotterdam.
JIM ⋅ SEPTEMBER 2006 ⋅ 1971
I CLOSED THE door of the Social Security office behind me, walked into the stairwell and stood straight for a couple of minutes. I felt a bit shaky, which was no surprise. But it was all right.
The stairs were quiet, no one was coming up, no one was going down. There was just a distant murmur from the mall and the shops below. The walls were painted the same colour as every stairwell of every public office in the whole world. If anyone came up here now, they would know for certain why I was there, where I had come from, and I really didn’t care, but just the same I walked quickly over to the lift, it was on the ground floor, I pressed the button and then changed my mind, went to the stairs and half ran down the three floors to street level and walked through the centre, into the big space, and took the escalator up to Level 2 and entered the café on the corner. I had often been there, it was a nice place. The café did not have a wall with a door to the concourse, you could go straight in from the gallery and the line of shops there, fashion boutiques mostly, Cubus, Dressman, that kind of shop, and inside the café I hung my jacket over the back of a chair, went to the counter and ordered a late lunch, or early dinner, depending on what part of the day you were looking from, and carried it to the table on a tray and went back for coffee and juice. It was always the same friendly woman behind the counter, and she knew me every single time I was there and asked me how things were going, and I never answered. I just nodded and smiled. What was I supposed to say. And the menu was the same every time, and every time I had the same dish. More than six months ago I decided that this was the way to go. It was much better than standing in front of the till having to choose from all the possible dishes and not being able to.
I sat down, quite heavily. I wasn’t really in such bad shape. The smoking set me back a bit, it goes without saying, but I often went for long walks in the forests surrounding the satellite town where I lived, and sometimes so far that I could barely find my way home in the murk along the paths because I had been thinking about everything but the route ahead. Things I could not remember later. But I’d had too little sleep for several nights in a row, and last night, for one, I awoke at four and got into my car and drove off, and at my age you pay the price.
I laid the napkin on my lap and loosened my tie, a rare tie, one of two in my possession, but you do make an effort, and isn’t it strange, I thought, that what I remember best from my time in the Bunker is how often I stood outside the large double doors of the hospital facing the car park and the low apartment buildings on the other side of the big square and the ambulances driving in and out with their sirens blaring. I stood there in all kinds of weather, smoking with nothing more over my top than the white hospital smock. There were smoking rooms inside, one on every floor, but at home I was always ordered out on the doorstep when I was dying for a cigarette, and after a while it felt like a deadly sin to smoke indoors, never mind in a hospital.
I could have changed into something else or put on a jacket to hide the easily recognisable shirt and the fact that I was a patient and not a visitor, but for some reason my standing there freezing my back off was an expression of pride, and defiance, as though it were a mission I had taken on, an important mission, a little like spending half of Saturday at a stand by Mørk railway station selling the magazine For Vietnam in solidarity with the NLF’s fight against the American soldiers in Vietnam and reaping nothing but abuse. So I stood there in the wind, a little heroically, as though protesting to the world: Psychiatric patients are people too! And of course, some might have had their doubts about that, but for my part, at least, I knew no one who did. And then most of those who walked past me on their way in or out of the Central Hospital probably thought I was a lunatic to stand outside smoking in the snow and the wind wearing only my paper-thin smock.
But then spring came, and it was warm outside and light in the morning, and the wind was soothing and welcome.
Tommy came a few times from Mørk and stood there with me. He was well wrapped up, but he didn’t smoke. He never had. On account of his father. And then he stopped coming. I don’t remember why. I don’t remember much of what he said. I don’t remember much of what I said, either. Or if we said anything important. I certainly hadn’t seen him since, not before that morning in September, on the bridge between the mainland and Ulvøya in Oslo, and it was thirty-five years between then and now. We moved from Mørk as soon as they let me out of the Bunker. My mother couldn’t get away soon enough. Early one morning, before anyone was up, we stowed all our possessions on the flatbed of a truck, tied them down and drove away. We didn’t say goodbye to anyone.
Even if Tommy didn’t come any more, I wasn’t always on my own outside the hospital. Fredrik came too, pretty often as time passed, and smoked next to me. It was because of me he had started, or to be more accurate, he had started because then he would have a more valid reason to stand where I stood, when I was standing there, by the entrance to the hospital. If he smoked. That was his reasoning, and especially at the beginning it was terrible to hear him coughing. Jesus Christ. He must be a little mad, I thought. And he was. That was why he was here. It was why I was here too.
He told me about his mother. He was an only child, his father died when he was five years old. He loved his mother. And she loved him. She had given her life to Fredrik, and he had accepted it willingly, and yet, she was everything, and he was nothing.
‘But if she’s given you her life, how can she be everything and you nothing.’
‘That’s what’s so damn strange,’ he said. ‘I can’t work it out. I’ve tried and tried,’ he said, ‘but I can’t work it out.’ He must have been fifteen years older than me, and I was the only person he spoke to. He hardly even spoke to the doctors. ‘All they want is to send me home,’ he said, ‘but I don’t want to go home. I’m better off here.’
We had a kind of telephone booth in the ward. Not like the wonderful red ones in the streets of Oslo, but a soundproof chamber with a Plexiglas window, so that those on the outside could see the person inside, but not hear what he was saying.
Every evening Fredrik called his mother.
‘I have to clock in,’ he said, and I was sure he was joking, but he wasn’t, and I said:
‘Do you really have to. You’re more than thirty years old.’ And then he said:
‘Are you mad. Of course I have to, what would it be like if I didn’t.’ We often said that to each other, are you mad, this or that, and then we laughed, but he wasn’t trying to be funny.
After he had been on the p
hone for a few minutes, I could see through the Plexiglas how he started to chew his lip, and then the snot started running, and finally he was squeezing his eyes and crying, and not how a man would cry, if a man cries at all: in a controlled, restrained way without any gestures. But when Fredrik cried, his mouth opened wide and his face split into two, like the face of a child does when it plays in the road, maybe hopscotch, or skipping, and suddenly falls and grazes its knee on the tarmac, and the mouth becomes one big, black gorge. I have seen it happen many times and heard the silent gasp before the wails begin. I am pretty sure that Fredrik was wailing, but he was inside the soundproof booth, and if he really was, I couldn’t hear him. Behind the Plexiglas his mouth opened without a sound and was wide and dark as a deep dish, and it looked very, very strange.
In retrospect it’s not easy to say in what way you were mad. I knew why I ended up in the Bunker, that’s not it. I tried to hang myself in the woodshed, I can well remember it: the firewood inside, birch mostly, but also ash and spruce, and I remember thinking that birch was superior by a mile to any other kind of wood when you lit a fire in the stove or in the fireplace. It didn’t crackle the way spruce did sending red and yellow sparks flying into the room and making dark brown burn marks on the floor, and birch also burned more slowly. On the other hand, birch was more expensive, if you didn’t have a wood yourself and had to buy it. That’s what I was thinking about. I stood there with the coarse rope in my hand pondering the economic aspects of wood heating as I was looking up at the ceiling to see if there was anything that would not break when I kicked away the stool I had brought with me.
But I couldn’t remember why I tried to hang myself. Actually I couldn’t remember being mad, either. Or ill. If that sounds better. In which way I was ill. On the contrary, I felt normal, I felt that the world was as I knew it, and I too was the way I was supposed to be. I felt I was in tune with the world. I really did. But something must have been wrong, because they kept me in the Bunker for almost four months and didn’t let me out until summer was at the door looking in.
But then a thought came to to me.
Suddenly I remembered a pack of cigarettes, twenty Marlboro, a white cardboard packet with black lettering and a red flip top, and how I was always skint at the time because I didn’t have a job like Tommy did, I was at the gymnas, and my mother didn’t earn a great deal as a teacher, and she definitely didn’t keep me in cigarettes. So someone must have bought the pack for me, and this someone had done that at the kiosk in the hospital foyer. There was something about those cigarettes, they had a terribly bitter taste, and it scared me and I wondered if some mistake had been made in the factory, or if they had added too much of an ingredient they used in the tobacco, a secret ingredient in fact, and the factory workers had to sign a statement saying they had no knowledge of it, and the purpose of this ingredient was of course to make me more than usually addicted to this particular brand of cigarette, and now the cigarettes in precisely this pack, produced not so many weeks before, had become so toxic they could kill me. And it must have been Tommy who bought me the pack because my mother would never have done it, no matter how much money she earned or didn’t earn, nor anyone else in the close family, which wasn’t that big anyway, but they were all of them Bible Belt Christians and fierce opponents of the disgusting habit I had acquired. And so the big question was: did Tommy know about the ingredient and what it might lead to if there was too much of it. Did he know what might happen to me. I couldn’t rule it out. That was my thinking then. That I couldn’t rule it out. That Tommy knew. And after two cigarettes I felt really ill and threw the pack in a skip behind the hospital, so no one else would find it and suffer harm, a tramp maybe or a desperate thirteen-year-old girl rooting around, and I waited until I was absolutely sure that this particular batch, manufactured on this particular day, a Monday probably, was out of circulation before buying another pack. It took all I had. For I was addicted because of this special ingredient. It required willpower. But I did it. And it was after that week that Fredrik started smoking. When I started again. There wasn’t much else I would rather do than smoke back then, so I didn’t take the opportunity to stop. I may have had regrets about that later, but it wasn’t an option at the time.
Twice Fredrik asked me how I had landed in the Bunker. That was how we phrased it: landed, we said, as though we were golf balls hit at random by an amateur player, and like balls we flew in a curve through the air and ended up in a bush or a copse, or landed here, of all places, and then of course this was where we’d been heading all along.
‘I tried to hang myself,’ I said, which was true. But that wasn’t enough for him. Yes, but why did I try to hang myself, there must be a reason for it, he said, and that was why I was here, wasn’t it, not because of the hanging itself. And when he said it like that, I became unsure, because he wasn’t stupid, he was just a little mad, and it sounded logical. But whenever I tried to think back to the time before the woodshed, everything disintegrated, all my thoughts, all my memories, all my words flowed to the corners of my brain, to the margins where things lay forgotten and abandoned, like in empty, disused factory buildings, and didn’t want to be reconnected.
So I didn’t know what to answer. He was probably right. But the thing was, I couldn’t remember why I had tried to hang myself. No one told me, either. Not the doctors, not my mother. Perhaps they didn’t know. Perhaps I spent four months there without anyone finding out why. And they just let time pass, popped pills down my throat and hoped for the best. It hadn’t struck me until now, here in this café in Lillestrøm, where I was having a late lunch or an early dinner, that I had always assumed that someone understood why I did what I did and had treated me accordingly, and even though I couldn’t remember anything, the doctors, or my mother, could have told me why at any given point, if that was what they had wanted to do, or if I had wanted them to. But that I hadn’t.
To begin with, I pretended that the ward I’d been placed in was just like any other ward. And that was fine for a while, I had always been good at that, thinking my way into a role and simply becoming it and going through the motions as though I had an invisible audience, but the strange thing was that the role I always ended up playing was myself. It’s not so easy to explain. But as time passed it was hard to ignore the fact that in other wards people lay in beds, not only at night, but also most of the day, and when they no longer had to, by and large they were sent home. In the Bunker we didn’t lie in bed during the day. Some of us didn’t lie in our beds at night either, but wandered restlessly through the corridors, and then we were given pills that knocked us out so fast that if we weren’t near our beds when we swallowed them, we might not have made it there, but instead have fallen asleep on the floor on our way back. It happened to me a couple of times too. They were some pills.
The weeks passed, and when Tommy stopped coming, my mother was my only visitor. I saw nothing of Siri, but it can’t have been easy for her, I understood that, and gradually she faded from my mind and in the end I didn’t think about her any more.
I had some friends in my class in Valmo, and I had a good relationship with a couple of the teachers. They thought I was clever, more than averagely clever, and attentive and often capable of giving to the classes something extra, which they appreciated, and sometimes we talked about history and sociology outside the classroom too, and then we would stand around in the playground, or in the corridor, talking for such a long time that even the teacher was late for class. It could have been with either of them. Most often it was with Mathiesen, who taught history. He was a member of the Sosialistisk Folkeparti.
Neither of them came to visit me. I thought it was a little strange, I must say, that more people didn’t come to see me, I had really thought that those I knew from school, a couple of them at least, would come, no matter which ward I was in. But, they didn’t. Sometimes I wondered whether my mother had perhaps rung around and told people I couldn’t have any visitors because I had t
o rest, although the doctors hadn’t said anything to that effect, rather the opposite, but it seemed unlikely, even to me in my state. And now here I was, in this café, more than thirty years later, and I realised that it was exactly what she had done.
My mother was dead now, so I couldn’t ask her to confirm that what I thought was correct. Perhaps she would have denied it. Perhaps not. We became closer at the end, she fell ill, it was cancer, there was nothing they could do, the doctors at the hospital said, it was too late. Then she told me who my father was. He wasn’t from Mørk, he was from the Sørland, I had never heard of him before, and when she told me, nothing happened, I felt nothing.
During the last weeks they gave her morphine to relieve the pain, and it sent her floating in and out of this world, while I mostly sat at the foot of the bed reading some literary classic, back then it would have been D.H. Lawrence, and his thirst for life lay burning in my hands inside the cool, darkened hospital room.
When she was conscious I sat by her pillow, and truly, we did have a nice time together, and I wondered whether she would know, when she was finally letting go and was about to depart, right then, at the moment when she slipped the moorings, whether she would feel her hand opening, and if she did, would it come as a relief, would she say to me: ‘Jim, I’m dying now. It’s fine. Don’t be sad.’
I was forty when she died. During her illness I went to see her every day at home and later at the hospital, if nothing very important cropped up, and mostly it didn’t. It was as though there had only ever been the two of us. That was not correct. There were long spells when I never saw her. She didn’t like my wife, Eva, I don’t know why, she just didn’t like her, and she made that so abundantly clear that I had to take the consequences and be loyal to the person I was married to, I had no choice, and as a result the stretches between my visits to her flat in Grorud became longer and longer, and when I did come, I always came alone.
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