Aftermath Read online

  “You ought to take a bit more part in the conversation, Marius,” he says. “If only to give yourself a reality check every now and again.”

  “Okay” is all I say, my voice suddenly very flat, I feel flat too, flat and empty.

  “You seem to want things between us to be the same as they were fifteen or twenty years ago,” he says. “You want us to be the same as we were back then and you seem to regard any change in Jan Olav or me as a betrayal of some sort. That’s why … that’s why you’re so afraid of change and so fucking wary of it, you see ghosts in broad daylight and you paint a picture of me that … well, that I simply don’t recognize. The man you’ve just described, Marius, he doesn’t exist anywhere except inside that terrified mind of yours.”

  “Okay,” I say again, staring fixedly at the fire, hot and red-faced. I swallow.

  “All right, guys, now let’s all calm down, otherwise the whole weekend will be ruined,” Jan Olav says.

  Silence.

  Kristian looks at the ground, snorts again, and gives a little shake of his head, sits a moment, then takes a deep breath and sighs.

  “I’ll drink to that,” he says.

  Namsskogan, July 12th, 2006

  December 23rd, 1993: I had just got off the local train from Trondheim to Steinkjer and thought I had plenty of time to walk up into the town center and grab a hot dog before the bus left for Namsos. I would have had too, I’m sure, if I weren’t so notoriously clumsy. As it was, I managed to sprain my ankle pretty badly in stepping off an unexpectedly high curb and instead had to limp slowly back, moaning and groaning, only to see my bus leave the station and turn out onto the road, much too far away for there to be any point in frantically waving my arms in the air, which of course is exactly what I did. So there was nothing to do but park myself on one of the benches inside the station building and wait for the next bus. And then I saw her: Aunt Rebekka. I hadn’t laid eyes on her since she had packed her bags and left Bangsund several years earlier. She looked even fatter, her face even puffier and flabbier, but her step was as firm as ever, her red lipstick as vividly scarlet; she was wearing a big red hat with matching gloves and a dark brown, almost black coat that looked to me like fur but was most likely a cheap fake. She was genuinely happy to see me and even happier when I told her that my bus didn’t leave for another two hours and that I had both the time and the inclination to go home with her for a cup of coffee.

  It turned out that she lived only a couple of minutes away, in an apartment that her son, the much-talked-of but to me as-yet-unknown son who had been fostered out, had bought for her when he moved to Steinkjer some years earlier. “He’s an architect,” Aunt Rebekka told me. Not once, not twice, but a whole five times.

  I remember thinking, as I sat there eating Christmas cookies, sponge cake, and almond wreath—which she said she was so glad to have help to finish—that she had decorated her surprisingly spacious apartment for Christmas in typical Aunt Rebekka fashion. On every windowsill and table, on every free space on the floor she had arranged homemade Christmas elves and little families of mice dressed in dolls’ clothes so rich in detail that they must have taken her years to make. The walls and doors were decked with wreaths, seasonal wall hangings, and bellpulls proclaiming “Merry Christmas.” Ornaments, baubles, and tinsel had been hung from curtain rods and festive curtains and the plastic Christmas tree was so heavily adorned it was a wonder the branches could bear the weight. In short, Aunt Rebekka had decorated her home according to the late, lamented Liberace’s motto that too much of a good thing is wonderful. And that was my aunt to a T: she was too much of a good thing and she was wonderful. But there was one thing missing, I noticed: there were no presents under the tree. I distinctly recall sitting there staring at the bare Christmas-tree foot and suddenly being filled with a sense of sadness, one that grew and grew. I tried to dismiss this feeling by accusing myself of being too sentimental. She was bound to have lots of women friends; she probably wasn’t as lonely as the absence of parcels might suggest, I told myself, but it did no good, and a moment later our eyes met and I could see that she knew what I was thinking. There was silence for a second or two and then, out of the blue, I found myself saying I wished she would come to Bangsund and spend Christmas with Rikard and me and Mom and Dad, nobody should be on their own at Christmas.

  Unfortunately that was not possible, she told me, before proceeding to give me an explanation that began with the words: “As I’m sure you realized long ago”—although this could not have been more wrong, since it had never occurred to me that she and Dad “were a little more than just good friends when I was staying with you,” as she put it. “We tried to fight it, but we can’t always control these things. You’re old enough to know that, I’m sure,” she went on, and while I sat there, feeling dazed, confused, and more than a little shocked to think that my father—whom I had never imagined as having any more sex drive than was needed to get Mom pregnant twice—had in fact been unfaithful to her, and with her sister at that, she went on at length about how jealous Mom had always been and how livid she was when she walked in on my dad and my aunt in the office one morning. “I left that very evening and I haven’t spoken to Klara since. She wanted nothing to do with me and to be perfectly honest I don’t think she’d be too happy about you being here now either,” Aunt Rebekka said, lighting a menthol cigarette and blowing the smoke out of the corner of her mouth. “You mustn’t blame Kåre, though, he really tried to fight his feelings for me, but he couldn’t, he was as much in love with me as I was with him and you have to remember that this was just after he had been told that he wasn’t your father, so he was convinced that your mother had been unfaithful to him, you know? And he felt he had the right to do the same. It wasn’t till much later that they found out you had been mixed up with another baby in the maternity ward and that Klara wasn’t your mother, you see.”

  My face must have been an absolute picture.

  “Oh, dear God in heaven. You didn’t know? They never told you? After all these years? Not a word?”

  That same evening I confronted Mom and Dad with what my aunt had said and they were forced to tearfully admit that it was all true. The blood tests that had been taken to find a suitable kidney donor had revealed that I couldn’t possibly be Dad’s biological son and it was this news and not his kidney trouble that had been mainly to blame for the manic depression I described earlier. The same went for Mom. She had never slept with anyone else, she told both Dad and the doctors, so I had to be his son. But more tests were done, with exactly the same result, and this, together with the fact that she could only look on helplessly as Dad and Aunt Rebekka grew closer and closer with every day that passed, led her to sink into the same darkness as Dad. The day after she kicked our aunt out, she and Dad had agreed it would be best if they got a divorce and I’m sure they would have done, if yet another discussion with the doctors had not revealed that there was no match between her blood group and mine either, so we couldn’t possibly be mother and son.

  I felt bewildered, stunned, and angry at them for having known about this for five or six years and never saying anything to me about it, but by the next day I had recovered enough to speak and think relatively rationally about what had happened and by the end of that evening, Christmas Eve of all nights, we had all kissed and made up and assured one another that we loved each other every bit as much as before. My biological origins didn’t matter, we agreed. They were my parents and I was their son, nothing could change that, and I was no more interested than they were in tracing my real parents and the boy with whom I had been confused.

  But only days after this, late in the evening on New Year’s Day, something happened that put that love to the test. Because Mom began to wonder how on earth Aunt Rebekka could have known that she was not my real mother.

  “I’ve never told a soul, and certainly not Rebekka, I haven’t seen or spoken to her since the day she left this house,” she said.

  “Must have
been a breach of confidence,” Dad muttered, suddenly finding it necessary to bend down and hunt for something in the newspaper basket. “What?” he said, when eventually forced to look up and act as if he had just noticed that Mom was still sitting staring at him. She didn’t say a word. “Well—er,” he said with a shrug. “They happen all the time, don’t they—breaches of confidence, or so I’ve heard, and once word gets out, it spreads fast in a small town like Namsos.”

  Mamma said nothing for a moment.

  Then she said: “And another thing I’ve been thinking about over the past day or two. That apartment in the center of Steinkjer, how could she afford that, I wonder? I mean, Rebekka’s on disability benefit.”

  Dad shot her a look, as if to say what the hell was she insinuating, but it didn’t quite work. The surprised, hurt, angry expression left his face as soon as his eyes met Mom’s and he was left looking exposed, frightened, and uncomfortable.

  “So, she finally did it,” Mom said with a short, sad laugh and a shake of her head. “From the moment I was born, she’s been jealous of me, she begrudged me everything I had and anything she couldn’t take away from me she would do her best to destroy: I actually thought I had managed to save our marriage, but no. She never gave you up, Kåre, she never gave up you or your money. Well, I have to congratulate her, because it looks like she won in the end.”

  I had been meaning to leave the next day anyway, but since I couldn’t bear to see or speak to Mom and Dad, I got up earlier than planned, left a brief note on the kitchen table, and headed back to Trondheim to continue my studies. At first I tried to do what my parents and I had agreed would be best: pretend that nothing had changed. I had had a happy childhood, I loved my mom and my dad, and I told myself that I didn’t need to know anything about my real parents or about you, David. But as time went on I began to see my life from another angle, so to speak, especially my life as it had been in recent years. To cut a long story short, I began to see how differently my parents—and my father in particular—had treated Rikard and me after they learned about the hospital mix-up. Dad had never made any difference between us before, but as soon as he learned that I wasn’t his natural son, he started planning for Rikard to take over the business after him. He did this in such subtle and reasonable fashion that I never thought twice about it at the time. It was only once I was back in my studio apartment in the early days of 1994 that it suddenly dawned on me why, for example, he had never interfered in my choice of study but had insisted that Rikard—who had never shown any more aptitude for or interest in economics and business management than I had—should go to business school and then to the Norwegian School of Economics. And not only that, suddenly Dad wanted Rikard to learn how the company worked, he tried to involve him in the day-to-day running of it and was keen to discuss ideas, plans, and business strategies with him. I remember how proud and pleased he was when Rikard graduated from business school with flying colors. My grades in my last year at senior high, which were, quite frankly, even better than Rikard’s, did not meet with anything like the same enthusiasm. Nor did he try to involve me in his business affairs in any way. Not that he was dismissive on those rare occasions when I showed an interest and asked about things to do with the company, but he didn’t exactly encourage my interest. Quite the reverse, really. He spoke and acted as if he thought it was perfectly okay, and actually quite endearing, when I said something that proved how little I knew about economics and business management. “Ah, well, we’re all different,” he chuckled when I misunderstood the term insider trading, and “It’s just as well you’re going to be a biologist,” he chortled when I confessed to having no idea what stocks and bonds actually were. If Rikard had done the same, Dad would have got annoyed and told him to pull himself together, but he seemed to regard this inadequacy on my part as a welcome confirmation that he had done the right thing in choosing Rikard to take over the business.

  The more I thought about it, alone in my studio apartment in Stadsingeniør Dahls gate in Trondheim, the harder it became to convince myself that genetics didn’t matter. Since apparently it did, to Dad at any rate. When you got right down to it, I couldn’t compete with Rikard, not now, not ever, and nothing could change that, not even the fact that Dad liked me better as a person than he did Rikard. And he did, I was sure of that. Because as time went on, Rikard became harder and harder to like. Dad had hoped and believed that he would shake off his preppy mentality and yuppie ideals as he got older and become more mature, but instead he did the very opposite, becoming more and more extreme, until he had not only turned into what, a few years earlier, Dad would have called a greedy, irresponsible capitalist, he actually became a representative of a social elite given to cynicism and arrogance in all particulars, highfliers who didn’t even try to hide the fact that they regarded anyone earning a paltry 200,000 kroner a year as an inferior species. I visited Rikard in Oslo one summer and I’ll never forget how surreal it was to meet the people he mixed with. We tend to imagine that all the stereotypes and prejudices we have about people will be confounded once we get to know them a little better and I honestly did not believe that such people actually existed. I was reminded of characters from a costume drama set in a decadent upper-class society in which everyone wore a stiff upper lip, but these people were real, they were living, breathing Norwegians. To the best of my knowledge they had all grown up with the same social-democratic ideals and values as you and I, David, and yet they had espoused a lifestyle and a mode of behavior whereby it was evidently perfectly natural to order champagne costing thousands of kroner per bottle on a night in town and everyone considered it a terrific joke when a young man of their number decided one evening to see how far a poor junkie in a blue-striped tracksuit was willing to go for the thousand kroner, which was apparently the street price for a hit. “Give me twenty push-ups and the same number of sit-ups,” Rikard’s friend said. “That’s it, yeah. Okay, now twenty high knee lifts.” That was how he went on, while the others stood around them on the pavement, watching this ritual humiliation and hooting with laughter. Afterward, the party continued at a modernist villa belonging to parents who were on a skiing holiday somewhere in the Alps. I clearly remember the glammed-up party girls with their eye-wateringly expensive handbags constantly vying with one another to see who could be the most bitchy and sarcastic. Seemingly innocent questions proved, in fact, to be snide insinuations, and what sounded like kind words and compliments were more likely to be gross insults. To begin with I could make next to nothing of what was going on. These young women had their own tribal language and I probably would never have caught on to the fact that they were being bitchy had it not been for the reaction when some veiled insult hit home. “You look fabulous in that tent dress, Sonja,” one girl remarked to another and not until a few seconds later, when Sonja responded by spilling champagne into the first young lady’s lap accidentally on purpose, did I realize that Sonja had just been called fat. Likewise, when a girl who bore a striking resemblance to Agnetha Fältskog of ABBA as she looked in the seventies, explained how she loved to stay at Jenny’s after a night in town because she didn’t have to shower and put on makeup before she went out to get breakfast. It didn’t dawn on me until the next day, when I asked Rikard why Jenny had been in such a bad mood for the rest of the evening, that this was a way of poking fun at her because she lived in a slightly less stylish neighborhood than the other people there.

  It was strange to see Rikard moving in circles so far removed from the world in which he had grown up. But there he was. Not only that, but he appeared to be something of a leading light within the group, someone whom the others looked up to and liked to be seen with. It did no harm, of course, that he was also good at his job, that he had made a lot of money out of buying and selling stocks and shares in his spare time, and, not least, that at some point in the not too distant future he looked likely to become the main shareholder in a company that had the potential to make it very big. It seems to me, howev
er, that it must have been just as important for him to suppress and jettison, so to speak, the last traces of the person he had once been. But that he actually managed to do this, and—not least—that he wanted to do so, that was what I found so hard to understand. The mere fact that he had decided to drop his native Trøndelag dialect and switch to speaking the Bokmål of the southeast, for example. I hadn’t known anything about this beforehand and when he and his new girlfriend picked me up at the airport and Rikard started talking to me in a perfect Oslo drawl, I simply assumed that either he was joking or that his girlfriend was foreign and still learning Norwegian.

  But no, I was wrong on both counts. This was how he spoke now, he told me, without batting an eyelid. It has to be said, though, that later that day, when I met his aforementioned friends, I began to see why he had done this, because not only did they keep asking me to repeat Trøndelag words and phrases they evidently found incredibly funny, and not only did Jenny and Sonja agree that they felt like putting on their national costumes when they heard me talk, but the girl who looked like Agnetha Fältskog expected everyone to believe her when she said she couldn’t understand a word I said and suggested that they all speak English when I was there. Nonetheless: I can’t imagine many people changing the way they talk simply because they’ve encountered such ridiculous prejudice. And as if that wasn’t enough, Rikard carried on talking like a southerner even when we were alone. I remember how ridiculous I thought that was. We were brothers, we had spent our entire childhood and most of our youth under the same roof, yet there we were, carrying on a conversation in two different languages. Now and then I almost caught myself wondering how this guy could know my mom and dad, he seemed such a stranger.