Aftermath Page 17

  “Susanne, are you all right?” she asks.

  “Yes, thanks. And you, Nina?”

  Silence.

  “Susanne, what is it?” Tone asks, staring at me.

  “I’m angry,” I say, speaking calmly, almost cheerfully. “As a woman, everywhere I go I’m forever being confronted with people who say and do things that ought to be regarded as grossly offensive. In the last five minutes alone I’ve been subjected to things that are every bit as disrespectful and degrading as what I said to Antony, but these are things we women are so used to hearing and experiencing that we actually tolerate them. In fact, not only do we tolerate them, we actually believe that this is as it should be. We don’t recognize humiliating behavior when we see it and hear it, and even if we did, if we do feel hurt or angry or resentful, we automatically think there must be something wrong with us. We start to blame ourselves, we feel guilty, and we … we … we think we’re so fucking liberated and equal,” I cry, flinging out a hand. “People in our field in particular … we look down on women in the countries we work with, although we’d never admit it. We say we admire them and that the women are the driving force in third world societies, but in actual fact we look down on them because they put up with being as oppressed by men as they are. But we’re actually just as oppressed,” I say, getting it all off my chest now, saying exactly what I think. “We struggle with low self-esteem, with eating disorders, depression and anxiety and we don’t realize that most of this springs from different forms of oppression. We think there’s something wrong with us. Always!”

  “Susanne?” Tone says, a note of concern in her voice now, she looks concerned too, she thinks I don’t mean what I’m saying, she thinks this is something I’m saying to hide the fact that I’m having a hard time of it at the moment or something like that, that’s why she looks so concerned, I know it is.

  “She’s drunk,” Antony says under his breath so I won’t hear, but I do hear, I look at him, he half closes his eyes, gives a faint shake of his head, and sends the International Socialists a look, as if to say: pay no attention to her.

  “Since a lot of what I’m saying touches you and the other men here, Antony, I can see why you would want to belittle my comments and dismiss them as drunken ramblings,” I say. “But I’ve had two gin and tonics and believe it or not even a mere woman can handle that.”

  “Susanne,” Nina says, concern in her voice too now. She comes over to me quietly, places a hand on my arm, and eyes me sympathetically. “I know this is a difficult time for you, what with your niece being in the hospital and everything,” she says softly. I gaze at her in bewilderment, she clearly thinks my outburst has something to do with Agnes’s accident, she simply cannot believe that anyone could actually mean the things I’ve just said, not really, although she’s said much the same thing herself in discussions and conversations, as have Tone and all the other women here, but it doesn’t run very deep, not with any of them, and as soon as they meet someone who takes equal rights seriously, they assume there has to be an ulterior motive. There’s no ulterior motive here, though, I mean what I say, mean it with all my heart, it’s not the drink talking, and it certainly has nothing to do with Agnes. I look Nina straight in the eye, feel my temper rising, it’s so infuriating to have people belittling my opinions, putting my outburst down to problems in my personal life. God, I hate it when people do that.

  “Come on, Susanne,” Nina says, giving me a gentle, kindly nudge backward, obviously wanting us to go somewhere where we can be alone and I can get all the stuff about Agnes off my chest or something. I allow myself to be pushed back a step or two, then I close my eyes and lift her hand off my arm, open my eyes, and meet her sad, solicitous gaze, feel an instant stab of anger in the pit of my stomach and am just about to say that’s it, the party’s over, all set to tell the whole lot of them to get the hell out of here, but fortunately I manage to stop myself, I meant everything I said and I have a right to be angry, but I can’t kick people out after I’ve invited them, I have to get a grip, have to swallow my anger and be the perfect hostess for the rest of the evening.

  “No, Nina,” I say, smiling as brightly as I can and shaking my head gently, making it quite clear that I’ve no intention of going to the bathroom or the bedroom to get anything off my chest.

  Trondheim, July 28th, 2006

  Dear David,

  “(…) oxytocin is commonly referred to as the love hormone or mothering hormone. Immediately prior to and during birth the female brain releases large amounts of oxytocin, which, as well as stimulating the organs involved during childbirth—synthetic oxytocin is often administered to ease a difficult labor—stimulates the flow of milk to the breasts. More interesting in this context, however, is the fact that such large amounts of oxytocin greatly heighten the mother’s sense of smell and the scent of the infant is thus associated with the feeling of well-being, which the hormone gives her. This in turn strengthens the social bond between her and the child. It is quite simply the mother’s oxytocin level that determines the depth of her mother love. Experiments carried out on rats and sheep have shown that blockage of the oxytocin receptors causes the mother to reject her offspring and, conversely, if the animal is given a dose of synthetic oxytocin, it will exhibit maternal feelings and happily adopt strange young.”

  The last time I saw you was just before Christmas last year. The restaurants and cafés had just stopped serving and my friends and I had gone into Burger King to grab a bite to eat before we went home when I suddenly heard that old, familiar voice of yours drawling on about some half-finished novel you were writing, which, according to you, dealt with “the secure but deadly boring middle-class existence in oil-rich Norway.” I didn’t say anything, I didn’t even turn to look at you, I simply picked up my cola and my burger, got up, and walked out into the chilly, star-frosted Trondheim night, leaving my friends wondering what was going on. Only then did I turn around to look at the table where you were sitting; you had a stylish woman in her early twenties on your knee and you looked fitter, not to say younger, than you did all those years ago, something that didn’t just surprise me, it annoyed me and made me even angrier than I already was, I remember. I simply didn’t feel you deserved to look so good.

  That was the last time.

  The first time I met you was in the cafeteria at Dragvoll in 1996. I was sitting with a few of my fellow students, I remember, leafing through the orange student handbook and discussing which subjects we would take once we had completed the General Education course in history of philosophy and history of science, and some of the others admitted that they weren’t only not sure, but utterly daunted by the range of options available to them. I wasn’t the slightest bit daunted, though. Not because I felt I had plenty of time and could afford to try and fail, as some of us did, but because I had already made up my mind to go into environmental protection when I left university so I had my course of study pretty well worked out: I had already done a foundation course in political science and biology; after completing my GEs, I would take a foundation course in social anthropology, followed by political science at intermediate level, and then—if I got in, as I used to say, well aware that anybody who knew me would laugh and say of course I would get in, I was so clever—the plan was to persuade my boyfriend at the time, Torkild, to move with me to Oslo where I would write my political science thesis, either on the opening of the Barents Sea to drilling and exploration in 1989 or the role of climate policy in Norwegian oil production. “It’s so easy for you, you’ve found your calling in life,” I remember Kjersti Håpnes saying, and even though I eventually did something quite different from what I had envisaged back then, she was to some extent right. At least I didn’t lie sleepless at night fretting about making the wrong choice as she appeared to do.

  Anyway, it was almost lunchtime. The lecture halls, seminar rooms, and reading rooms began to empty and the cafeteria was starting to fill up. A few of us had already found ourselves a table and wer
e sitting there talking and eating the hot dish of the day when you and two or three of your pals came over, each balancing a tray, and asked if you could join us. I had noticed you before, not because you had “eyes that made me go weak at the knees,” as Kjersti Håpnes would say later, but because you had a weird thrift-shop way of dressing and used to ride around on an ancient black DBS bike with an old army rucksack strapped to the baggage rack—all of which marked you out as an adherent of the left-wing of Norwegian politics, as was I. I don’t know, but I’m pretty certain that it was the vague sense of fellow feeling kindled by this that emboldened me to ask, with a slightly mocking smile, whether you had really meant it when you told your friends that you had just read Erlend Loe’s latest novel and thought it was brilliant.

  I had read Naïve. Super as soon as it was published and I can’t remember now what I thought of it when I finally put it down. I may have enjoyed it, but if I did, I soon forgot that, because my boyfriend, Torkild, didn’t, and at that time I took all of his opinions for my own, the way young insecure women with older and more experienced boyfriends often do, unfortunately. Oh, I’m almost embarrassed to think how much I admired Torkild back then. Not that I don’t still admire him just as much, or more in fact, but in a completely different way. In those days I was dazzled mainly by all the things he knew and, not least, by the panache and aplomb with which he expressed himself when he “climbed down off his high horse and shared some of his wisdom with us ordinary mortals,” as I remember one disgruntled opponent saying after Torkild had stepped up to the lectern at the union and wiped the floor with him in a debate on civil disobedience. When I met him, he had a BA in the unusual combination of chemistry, philosophy, and political science, he had been among the best in his year in all three subjects, and yet he did not see himself pursuing an academic career, nor did he have any plans to do a master’s, never mind a PhD. No way was he going to spend his life writing articles that no one outside of academia would ever read or understand, he would say, before going on to describe graduate and doctoral theses so narrow in scope that it bordered on the absurd: “There are actually people who spend three, four, or even five years of their lives writing about the use of the dative case in the Verdal dialect—even though they know no one is ever going to read it,” he would say, and then he would throw out his arms and shake his head to show how flabbergasted he was. He, on the other hand, meant to make a difference in the world, to use his own words, he meant to do something that really mattered, and what really mattered, what was in fact the greatest and most pressing issue of the day, was of course environmental protection. When we met, he had almost finished his stint of civilian national service, working with Friends of the Earth (Norway), and had been asked to stay on with them, an invitation he had accepted, despite having been offered a job with a consultancy firm by three old friends from university—a job for which he would have been paid almost double what he was getting with Friends of the Earth—and even though Friends of the Earth really couldn’t afford to hire him at all and the job with them was, therefore, very insecure. When I told him that I admired him for staying true to his convictions and not thinking only about the money, he tried to look as though he didn’t know what I meant, but he kept bringing the conversation around to it again, so it wasn’t hard to see that he was pretty pleased with himself as well. In fact we were very pleased with ourselves altogether in those days, as I recall, pleased to the point of smugness and arrogance. When I see young radicals on the street in Trondheim today, I often find myself smiling and thinking how sweet they seem, but back in the nineties it would never have occurred to me that anyone over thirty-five might think the same of me and my friends. Never. I was quite certain that we won respect and recognition wherever we went. Granted we did have the odd sarcastic remark hurled at us, usually something stupid, such as “Get your hair cut and get a job,” and granted we were frequently told that we were naïve idealists who would soon swap our bikes for cars once we came up against the realities of everyday life, but I automatically interpreted such comments as lame excuses from people who weren’t selfless or strong enough to do what they knew, deep down, was the right thing. In other words: even they respected and admired people like me. Or so I thought. And who could fail to look up to us as we came striding across Elgeseter Bridge, on our way to yet another Saturday meeting at the union, Torkild in his Icelandic sweater and faded jeans, me in an old, battered combat jacket with a badge on the collar (“Hands off my buddy”) and a Palestinian kaffiyeh around my neck and both of us wearing big black Doc Martens boots, an essential part of any would-be radical’s uniform in the nineties? We had commitment, responsibility, and altruism written all over us. We were the advance guard of a generation that was going to change the world, we were the nineties’ answer to the WACs and resistance fighters of WWII, who could help but look up to us?

  But to get back to Naïve. Super. Torkild had slaughtered this book. Not in the scathing way in which he would blast an academic work or article with which he violently disagreed, but more in the manner of a father reading an essay by a son or daughter who has no talent for writing; he assumed the air of a long-suffering reader, one who was not happy with what he was reading but was doing his best to find something good to say about it. It wasn’t that it was exactly bad, he explained to me, it was fairly enjoyable and had actually made him laugh a few times. But it was not, of course, serious literature, it was a bit of fluff, a harmless piece of entertainment.

  It wasn’t till later, long after we split up, that I realized this was how he spoke and acted when he was unsure whether what he was saying was correct, or rather: not just unsure, it was how he often spoke when he was saying something he didn’t actually mean. So I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that he had actually enjoyed Naïve. Super. It could well be that this book struck a chord with him as it did with many members of his generation, but he couldn’t bring himself to admit this to himself or to me. Maybe it was hard for him to accept that a book as seemingly apolitical as Naïve. Super could speak to someone as politically aware as himself, I don’t know. But his verdict was at any rate clear: here one had yet another sign that the younger generation of Norwegian writers were egocentric, nostalgia ridden, and passive. These young writers did not involve themselves in and come to grips with the most vital questions of their day, as writers such as Solstad and Fløgstad (Torkild’s favorites) had done and still did. Instead they covered page after page with descriptions of their own childhoods and youths, of banana-or licorice-flavored bubblegum and Apache bikes with speedometers and pennants flying from the back, of BRIO pounding benches, beloved Children’s Hour characters and down jackets with leather patches on the shoulders. Charming enough in parts, of course, but deeply unsatisfying.

  When I adopted Torkild’s thoughts and opinions, I usually adjusted them slightly here and there to make it easier to convince others, but mainly, perhaps, to convince myself that I was an independent-thinking individual. And that was exactly what I did when I got into a discussion with you about Naïve. Super in the cafeteria at Dragvoll. Which is to say, the opinions I expressed and the points I made were essentially Torkild’s, but I didn’t present them in the forbearing and rather condescending tone that he had used. Like most insecure young people I was more Catholic than the pope, taking everything a bit further and making myself out to be more extreme than my role model. I gave the impression that I couldn’t stand Naïve. Super, that I positively hated it in fact. Where Torkild had said that Loe’s book was self-indulgent and self-absorbed, I maintained that it epitomized the rampant individualism and egoism we saw all around us in smug, oil-sated Norway, and where Torkild had confined himself to calling the book dull and inconsequential, I declared that it served to draw attention away from books that addressed the key issues of our time and was, therefore, damaging and dangerous. “And you’ve actually recommended people to spend time on something like that?” I asked.

  Your reply threw me completely, I r
emember. You hadn’t meant to overhear, you said, but hadn’t we just been looking through the student handbook and talking about how bewildered we were by the range of options available to us, and how we even lay awake at night worrying about choosing the wrong subjects?

  Er, yes.

  But that was exactly what Naïve. Super was about, you said—kids like us. It was neither self-obsessed nor nostalgic, it wasn’t an example of a passive form of literature that cultivated the subjective and the personal and shied away from the big, important social questions. Far from it. Naïve. Super endeavored to depict and analyze how our generation related to an age and a society characterized by rapid change, fragmentation, and a vast stream of information, by globalization and the breakdown of traditions, by the discrediting of old truths and ideologies. It wasn’t exactly easy to be a small individual trying to find one’s way, to get one’s bearings, to put things into perspective and see the bigger picture in such a society and in such an age. These days young people like us had no idea what to choose, we were so afraid of making the wrong decision and thereby wasting the little time we had on this planet that we often tried to avoid having to choose. We might let other people make the decisions for us by following the crowd or some authority figure, for instance; we might put off making a decision till later or we might react as the central character in Naïve. Super does: by regressing, by retreating and escaping into an earlier or imaginary world where we feel safe, confident, and in command. So Loe’s book was not passive, you said, it was about a passive generation and how and why this generation was passive, and you simply could not understand why I, who was clearly a politically radical and socially conscious young woman, did not embrace a book like this instead of dismissing it out of hand.