Aftermath Read online

  His eyes go back to the screen.

  “Cremate the guy and that’ll be one problem out of the way, at least.”

  “Okay … ?”

  “The guy Mom spoke to said it would cost ten thousand kroner to cremate the body and send the ashes home and two hundred thousand to fly Rune home in his coffin. And it makes no difference to the dead person whether they’re cremated or not. Well, that’s what I think anyway.”

  I don’t say anything, just stand there watching The Nutty Professor, feel the back of my head turn cold—it can be no accident that Torstein and Gunn Torhild omitted to mention that, how could they, they’re trying to rip me off, that’s what they’re doing, first they try to trick me into giving them 100,000 kroner, which they say will be spent on having Rune’s coffin sent home, then they’ll opt for the cremation, pay 10,000 for that, and pocket the rest, they’ve been planning this ever since I called to say I was going to come over, they must have been, or am I being paranoid again, I don’t know, and it doesn’t really matter anyway, I neither will nor can give them so much as a single krone. In any case, I’m leaving now, I can’t stay here any longer, as soon as I’ve had my coffee, I’ll say bye-bye and head back to the cottage. I breathe in and let out a little sigh, pull myself away from The Nutty Professor, and go back out onto the veranda.

  “Lovely sunset,” Torstein says, acting as if he’s forgotten all about my little outburst, smiling and nodding at the red sun that seems to be drifting across the blue mountain on the horizon.

  I nod and sit down.

  “You didn’t say anything to Simen, did you?” Gunn Torhild says. “About us selling the house, I mean?”

  I shake my head.

  “Good,” she says. “He’d only get upset and I’d like us to do absolutely everything we can to come up with the money some other way before we have to talk to him about moving. It’s his childhood home, you know, so it’s a big thing,” she adds, trying to play on my emotions again, that’s what she’s doing, I’m sure, she knows how keen I’ve been for Simen to accept me as his brother so she’s trying to blackmail me into giving them money by telling me how upset the boy will be if they have to sell the house and move somewhere else, that must be what she’s trying to do, or am I just being paranoid again, I know I do tend to become obsessed with exposing people who I think are out to get me, and maybe that’s what’s happening here, I don’t know. I look at Gunn Torhild and swallow.

  “Ah, we’ll get through this as well, Torstein, you’ll see,” she’s saying, smiling at him, doing her stiff-upper-lip act, she knows very well that it’s easier to like and take pity on a valiant victim than on one who whines and complains, so this is just another ploy to gain my sympathy, I’m sure it is.

  “I suppose we will, one way or another.”

  “What doesn’t kill you makes you strong, isn’t that what they say?” Gunn Torhild says, not about to give up, she’s doing everything she can to swindle me out of money for them to spend on drink and debauchery. God, the cold, calculating cheek of it, it’s unbelievable, just look at the way they keep reminding me how broke they are, they’ve been doing it ever since I got here, I was barely in the door before Gunn Torhild started moaning about the range hood, how useless it is and how expensive to fix.

  “Beg pardon?” Gunn Torhild says.

  I regard her mutely, she raises her brows and eyes me enquiringly.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “By what?”

  “Expensive to fix,” she says.

  I stare at her, frowning slightly, I must have done it again, spoken out loud without being aware of it, and now she’s alleging that I said “expensive to fix.”

  “That range hood you have is useless, but you can’t afford to get it fixed,” I say, trying to sound as though I was well aware of saying what I apparently just said. I look at her and swallow and she gazes at me wide-eyed, clearly not following me. “And the car’s a junk heap, but you can’t afford to take it in for repair,” I continue, I might as well tell the truth, there’s no point in concealing the fact that I’ve seen through them, I know what they’re up to, so I look at Gunn Torhild, shaking my head and laughing in a way that says the game is up and none of us needs to pretend any longer, a sort of “it was fun while it lasted”

  laugh, but she still won’t quit, she sits there trying to look as though she doesn’t know what I’m talking about.

  “And all those props. My cracked plate and the two final-demand letters that just ‘happened’ to be lying on the table where I couldn’t help but see them,” I go on, closing my eyes and making air quotes around the word happened. “They were all props in your little charade. It took a while for it to dawn on me, but I see it now. And … and all your efforts to act proper. You’ve done everything you could to convince me that you’ve shaped up since the last time I was here. Simen is told to wash his hands before dinner, even though he obviously isn’t used to doing so, and you, Gunn Torhild, you suddenly get the idea to serve light beer with dinner and refuse to have anything stronger, so I won’t worry that you’ll spend all the money on booze, right? Very clever, I have to hand it to you, very well done,” I say, nodding quickly several times. “And … and … and when you still can’t control yourself, Torstein, I’m obviously meant to put this down to the recent loss of your brother. You’re also a reformed character, that’s what I’m supposed to think, but right now you’re grief stricken and you need a drink to help you to switch off for a while.” A moment passes and then I realize that I’m hunched over with my eyes closed, chopping the air with my hands, exactly the way I was doing only minutes ago. I open my eyes and straighten up sharply. They both stare at me for a second, then they look at each other, turn to me again, arch their eyebrows, and do their utmost to look dumbfounded, they want me to believe they’ve no idea what I’m talking about, I can tell, they’re not going to admit anything.

  “Thanks for coffee” is all I say, then I rise and go into the living room. And there’s Simen, watching The Nutty Professor, I feel so sorry for him, he doesn’t deserve this.

  “Give me a call and I’ll help you find a place to stay,” I say. “I might even be able to help you with a job,” I add, looking back at him as I walk out of the living room and into the kitchen. He looks so like me it’s not true, I can’t get over it, it’s like seeing myself at sixteen, and maybe it’s because I see myself in Simen that I keep coming back here. When I see Simen and, not least, when I see Simen as he is with his father, I feel I have some idea of what it would have been like to grow up with Torstein, and maybe that’s exactly what I’m looking for when I come here. I stop short halfway across the kitchen, shut my eyes, and stand there nodding to myself. Yes, and when I feel sorry for Simen and want to save him by getting him away from Torstein, maybe it’s really myself I want to save. I suffered a trauma when I was robbed of a life with my biological parents and lifting my brother out of the life he has now could be a way of reenacting and thereby controlling that traumatic experience, yes, that has to be it, forcing myself to visit the biological father whom I cannot stand is, quite simply, a way of making sense of what happened in that maternity ward. I’ve been coming here because I needed to prove to myself not only that I can live with what happened back then, but that it was the best thing that could have happened. And this has become even more important since I cut all ties with Mom and Dad and Rikard. I’ve always known in my bones that it was a mistake to break with them and continuing to visit Torstein, even though I hate it here, is my body’s way of telling me that I have to get back in touch with them. I have actually sought out these strangers in order to remind myself of where I truly belong, that’s what all this is about, or is it, am I getting lost inside my own head again, are my thoughts running away with me and concocting theories again. My brain is overheating, or that’s how it feels.

  “Marius.”

  I open my eyes and look straight at Torstein.

  “Yes,” I say. I realize I
’m standing with my hands on my head and promptly lower them.

  “Are you okay?” he asks.

  “Yes, of course,” I say.

  Bangsund, July 14th, 2006

  It’s so strange to sit here gazing out of the window of my old room at home. When I see the fjord from this particular angle; when I see the blue mountains in which I used to look for faces as a child; when I see the avenue lined with the tall, leafy poplar trees, which are apparently riddled with rot and which Mom has, therefore, been nagging us to cut down for the past twenty years; when I see the gray stream where Rikard and I used to build dams in the autumn, the dog rose bushes where we used to pick the hips, to split them open and get at the seeds, which we then sprinkled on the backs of the necks of the girls next door (“itching powder” we called it); when I see all this, I can’t help thinking and feeling that here everything is just as it’s always been. But it isn’t, of course. It never has been, to paraphrase the old saying that history’s not what it used to be. Obviously it’s only my own nostalgia that tricks me into imagining that everything is still the same here in Bangsund, my own yearning for a time I recall as happy and carefree—that and my own craving for security and stability perhaps, I don’t know.

  But I can fool myself for only so long. Take this morning, for example, when I was sitting here with the window wide open, drinking coffee and listening to the chirping and twittering of the birds, the sound I used to wake up to as a boy. Suddenly the birdsong was drowned out by a deep and rapidly growing roar and when I got up from my chair and looked out of the window, I saw a helicopter coming in low over the hill. It circled the roof of the vaccination plant (which is still known as “the Furniture Factory,” by the way) before landing on the round tarmacked platform they’ve built where we used to store stuff in the seventies and eighties, and then, while the rotor was still spinning, the door opened and two Asian-looking men in suits stepped out, clearly afraid of being late for what I later discovered was a meeting concerning one of Rikard’s subsidiary companies, which had invested heavily in scampi farming somewhere in Southeast Asia—Thailand or Vietnam I think it was. There was nothing particularly unusual about that, not at all. But five minutes later, when I sat down again, I found myself viewing the scene outside my old room in a slightly different light; I noticed other things, not just those that had always been there and had scarcely changed since the seventies: at the quayside, where Dad’s thirteen-foot Rana used to lie, I saw the huge cabin cruiser that Rikard had bought, but that, according to his wife, he never had time to sail. Over by the white picket fence I saw Rikard’s gardener, caretaker, and odd-job man climb onto one of those tractor-style lawnmowers and proceed to cut the same grass that, twenty years ago, Rikard and I had taken turns at cutting with a rusty and heavy (to put it mildly) manual mower, and on the red paved square outside the window of the production plant stood the sculpture for which the company paid over 200,000 kroner last year and that annoys the blue blazes out of Dad: “What the hell is that supposed to be? Give me a hundred kroner and I’ll make you something a lot nicer than that.” The sight of the employees on their way to work wasn’t the same as it had been twenty or thirty years earlier either. From my window back then what I saw was a stream of roll-up-smoking men in flannel shirts and jeans coming over the hill, all carrying their lunch boxes and thermos flasks in Co-op tote bags. They showed up on heavy-pedaled Diamant and DBS bikes with chains that emitted a grating screech-screech as they rubbed against dented chain guards. Either that or they drove to work in ten-year-old Datsuns and Opels, which often refused to start on winter days when it was time to go home. This morning, on the other hand, what I saw were well-paid lab technicians of both sexes. Many arrived in gleaming new SUVs with four-wheel drive and engines far more powerful than they would ever need. But most of them, more in fact than twenty years ago, were cycling to work. Not on old boneshakers without any gears, of course, but on carbon-fiber bikes costing as much as 30,000 kroner and weighing next to nothing—no effort involved in lifting one of these into a bike rack—and not in flannel shirts and jeans with the wind in their hair, obviously, but in skin-tight cycling gear with helmets on their heads.

  This is 2006, this is Rikard’s time.

  Dad still owns the company, but since around 2000 he has been taking more and more of a back seat to the point where he has now resigned all his posts and has, it seems, dedicated his life almost exclusively to catching up on all the things he previously had to forgo because he was working so much and so hard. Several evenings a week he can be found down by the River Namsen, fishing for salmon, he has set up his own fly-tying bench in the basement, he and Mom have visited four European cities already this year and he can hardly wait to pick up Rikard’s children from kindergarten and take them to the beach, to a café in town, to the Namsskogan Family Park or simply to spend time with them here at home. I had expected, and I know Rikard had feared, that Dad would don the mantle of patriarch when he “took up his new position as Grandpa,” as he put it, but Mom says that hasn’t happened. According to her, during Dad’s first years in charge of the furniture factory, our own grandfather couldn’t resist interfering and Dad decided way back then that he would not make the same mistake when he retired. Besides which, he and Rikard have such very different ideas of how to run a business that Dad knew it would only end badly if he tried to shove his oar in, she says. He did so anyway, though, I know. Just before I severed all ties with the family, it came out that one of Rikard’s subsidiaries had sold eggs and fry carrying the highly infectious ISA virus and that the fish-farming industry in the importing country (somewhere in Latin America) had collapsed completely. This, in turn, led to mass layoffs and huge social problems in several areas along the coast. But what really made Dad’s blood boil was the fact that Rikard and the company denied all responsibility and refused to help clear up the mess they had made. And not only that: from what I can recall of Dad’s tirades in the living room, they tried to hush up the matter and conducted something approaching a witch-hunt against anyone who attempted to document what had happened and call attention to it. “Where there is no shame, there are no limits,” I remember Dad roaring.

  But that was then, not now. It may be that Mom tends to paint a rosy picture of things and that Dad plays the patriarch and does still interfere, I honestly don’t know, I’ve only just returned home after a fairly lengthy absence, but retirement certainly appears to agree with the Salmon King of Bangsund, in fact he seems to be very happy, not to say positively thriving in his old age, which is good to see. It’s also good, not least, to see that he and Mom have found each other again. It makes me so glad to see them sitting on the veranda in the evening, drinking red wine and surveying all they have built over a long life together; to see Mom fretting when Dad defies his seventy-five years and insists on climbing the local crag that we call “Klompen,” or to get up in the morning and find him preparing breakfast in bed for Mom. And the way they speak to each other, the warmth in their voices. The ease. And, not least, the humor. To listen, for example, to Mom pretending to be much more exasperated by Dad’s penny-pinching ways than she really is and the childish delight Dad takes in the opportunity this presents for him to parody himself: “Hey, go easy on that washing-up liquid,” he told Mom only yesterday, when she was washing a saucepan. “You use far too much when you squeeze the bottle like that. Just turn the bottle upside down and give it a little shake—a couple of drops is plenty for one little pan.” “Oh, thank goodness you pointed that out to me,” Mom said. “Now we’ll be able to pay the electricity bill this month as well!”

  That’s how they carried on. That’s how they carry on all the time and always while trying hard not to laugh.

  But you’ll soon be able to see all this for yourself, David, when you come to Bangsund. As I’m assuming, and hoping, you will. I wasn’t quite sure whether I should reply to that newspaper ad and tell you everything I’ve told you in this letter, but although I may not have lost my
memory, I have experienced something of what you’re going through now, I have also lived with uncertainty, I have also felt driven to learn more about who I am and where I come from, so I do understand what it’s like and I understand how important it is for you to know the truth. Which is why it didn’t take me long to decide that replying to the ad was the only right thing to do. This may sound very high-minded, it may even sound like I’m boasting. But I would like to add that it has done me a lot of good to write this letter, I’ve learned a lot about myself in the process, become wiser. Not only that, but for some time I’ve had the idea that you’re the only person who can identify with how I really feel, so from that point of view this letter also serves as an aid to self-help, or at least it will if it brings us together. We’ve been living each other’s lives and even though I’ve never met you, this is something we share, something that makes you the only person to whom I can ever hope to truly relate, it’s as simple as that.

  But to close by donning my Dear Abby hat again: I only hope that you will choose the right angle from which to view and understand your life, even after you’ve read this letter. And, not least, after you have met and got to know your new family in Bangsund.

  SUSANNE

  Trondheim, June 24th, 2006. Fake Rolex

  A LOUD CHEER GOES UP in the living room as someone puts on the Buena Vista Social Club. I tilt my head to one side, lift my hands to my right ear, and slip in an earring, looking at myself in the mirror on the wardrobe door as I do so, try to smile, not very successfully, I’m not exactly in the mood for a party, all I really want is for it to be over, but that’s not going to happen anytime soon, it’s only quarter past twelve, I can’t ask people to leave now, I have to be a good hostess, have to try to pull myself together. I could have a bit more to drink, of course, but I’m not sure I want to, there’s been enough drinking recently and I don’t feel like getting plastered again tonight, I’d be better off trying to dance myself into a good mood, it’s the right music for it anyway, real feel-good music. I look at myself in the mirror and stretch my lips into an even wider smile, try to look much the way I do when I’m in a good mood and ready to party, try to trick myself into feeling good, it’s helping too, I can tell, feel my spirits lifting. I give it a second, then turn, bend over the bed, and burrow my face in the hollow of Rex’s throat.