Aftermath Read online

  “I’d rather you went out onto the balcony if you’re going to smoke,” Jan Olav says.

  “You’d rather?” Julie says, looking at Jan Olav and fluttering her eyelids slightly. Jan Olav raises his eyebrows despairingly, but he keeps smiling. “Relax, Mister Best Man, I’m only joking,” Julie goes on, then she gets up, staggers across the room, and out onto the balcony.

  Silence.

  “Sorry about that,” I say, looking at Jan Olav.

  “Don’t give it a thought,” he says, smiling.

  “We’ve all had a bit too much to drink at one point or another,” Kjersti says, coming in with a little bowl of chocolates. “But I think maybe we’d better put the brandy back in the cabinet.”

  “Absolutely,” Jan Olav says. He picks up the bottle and crosses to the drinks cabinet.

  Kristian raises his eyebrows and opens his mouth, he knows why Jan Olav is putting the brandy back in the cabinet, but he’s acting as if he can’t believe his eyes.

  “I sincerely hope you’re not intending to be this boring when we go to the mountains,” he says.

  “No danger of that,” Jan Olav says as he closes the door of the drinks cabinet. “So how’s it going with your balance?” he asks, eyeing me as he pulls back his chair and sits down.

  “I get the results of the blood tests on Friday, but it’s been much better than it was, so I think it was just stress,” I say. “It’s been pretty hectic at work lately, I had so much to get done before I went on holiday.”

  “So you are coming to the mountains?”

  “Yes, of course,” I say.

  “Great,” he says. “And Kristian has promised to teach us how to fly-fish, haven’t you, Kristian?”

  “Mm-hmm,” Kristian says, shutting his eyes and nodding, he’s pretty well on himself now.

  Silence.

  Then suddenly there’s a short, piercing scream, followed by a dull thud on the gravel and I feel my blood run cold: it’s Julie, she’s fallen off the balcony, she must have been sitting on the railing, smoking, and she’s toppled backward.

  “What was that,” Kristian mumbles.

  “Oh, my God,” Kjersti cries.

  I dash out onto the balcony, Kjersti and Jan Olav right behind me.

  “Julie,” I call, planting my hands on the railing and leaning over it, peering down at the driveway, first right, then left, there’s a shattered window box on the gravel, but I can’t see Julie anywhere. Then I hear someone laugh behind me. I whip around and there she is, standing against the wall, she looks at us, points at us and shakes her head, laughing harder and harder.

  “You should have seen your faces,” she gasps, doubling up and putting her hands on her knees, laughing her head off at the looks on our faces. And we just stand there, don’t say anything for a moment. Jan Olav gapes at her and shakes his head in despair, Kjersti snorts and mutters a soft but infuriated “fuck” and after a second they both go back inside, fuming.

  “This really isn’t funny, Julie,” I say.

  She looks me in the eye and smiles.

  “I didn’t think it was particularly funny either, Marius, when you threatened to kill yourself,” she says.

  I don’t say anything for a moment, just stand there staring at her, is that what this is about, was that why she pretended to have fallen from the balcony, was it a way of getting back at me for what I did that time, it rather seems like it, but I don’t know, it could just as easily be that she’s ashamed of the way she behaved just now and is somehow attempting to link her own shame to an incident for which she was not to blame, so to speak, that it’s a way of blaming me for everything. She’s propped up against the wall, trying to laugh, but it’s no use, she’s close to tears now, her smile starting to crumple, she turns, looks away, then turns to me again. “Do you realize how worried I was about you?” she says, swallowing once, twice, then she puts a hand up to her face.

  “That was almost a year ago, Julie,” I say. “I thought we’d put that incident behind us.” I hear Kristian laughing in the living room as the words leave my mouth.

  “Was it just a joke?” he cries gleefully, he’s loving this, he clearly finds the whole thing hugely entertaining, moron that he is.

  “I’m just a little mouse,” Julie says through her sobs. Now she’s talking about being a little mouse, she’s drunk and incoherent and I’m having trouble following her train of thought. I lay a hand on her shoulder and draw her gently to me, feel the warmth of her body. We stand like that for a moment and then her shoulders start to shake.

  “Come on, Julie,” I say and I lead her back into the house. I raise my eyes and look at the others as we walk into the living room, see their solemn faces, even Kristian is managing to keep a straight face now, he stares at the table and twirls his beard.

  “I know that’s what I am to all of you, a little mouse,” Julie says, still sobbing. “I’m not as interesting as you lot, and I … I can’t follow your intellectual discussions, I ask stupid questions that confuse things and spoil the conversation and send it off in directions you don’t want it to go in … and … every time I try to start a conversation, you dismiss what I say as boring and irrelevant,” she says.

  I look at her and swallow, I love her so much and it hurts to hear her say this, it makes me cry inside.

  “Oh, Julie, that’s not true,” I say.

  “You think I didn’t see the way you all sat there rolling your eyes when I was talking about the wedding?” she says, trying to laugh, laughing and crying at the same time. “You think I didn’t see all the knowing looks and smiles you sent one another? I saw it as plainly as you did, Marius, and I know what it means, I’m not stupid, I know everybody in this room thinks I’m shallow and … but I’m not, I may not have spent ten years at university, but I’m no shallower than any of you,” she says, then she turns to Jan Olav, glares at him, the tears streaming down her cheeks. “Just because I make a big deal of my wedding, that doesn’t mean I’m shallow, you know. Unlike you, I wasn’t being ironic when I talked about my childhood, I … I haven’t always had it so easy and you know what, Jan Olav, ever since I was a little girl I’ve looked forward to the day when I would get married. I know you and everybody else here thinks that’s ridiculous and pathetic and terribly American, but that’s just how it is. Ever since I was a little girl I’ve dreamed of the day when I would be a princess, the center of attention, and walk up the aisle with everybody watching and thinking how beautiful I was. I played weddings with my dolls, I drew pictures of myself as a bride, and now that I’m grown up and am actually getting married, I want everything to be just right,” she says, then she pauses briefly, stands there looking at Jan Olav with the tears streaming down her cheeks, and I’m crying inside, I love Julie so much, I want so much for her to be happy, and it’s so hard to listen to this. “That’s why I talk so much about the wedding,” she continues. “Too much for your liking. But that doesn’t mean I’m shallow. It’s so easy for people like you to be flippant and say it’s shallow, but for someone like me, from my background, it’s a bit different, you see; where I come from a wedding means something other than, and more than, simply being able to inherit from one another.”

  Namsskogan, July 5th, 2006

  Dear David,

  My name is Marius Rosendahl and I want to help you to find out who you are and where you come from so I’ll come straight to the point. On the fifth of January, 1970, a mistake was made at Namsos Hospital. A member of staff in the maternity ward got two baby boys mixed up, with the result that I was given to your mother and sent home with her and you were given to my mother and sent home with her. In other words, you and I have been living each other’s lives. You should have grown up in the big yellow house in Bangsund, you should have had the room that my pals envied because it was so big and because it had a door onto a little balcony with a fire escape running down from it, making it easy for a teenager to sneak in and out of the house at eleven o’clock at night. Not that I ever d
id that. I was a very boring teenager, I’m afraid, and long after other boys of my age had started going dancing and playing snooker at the youth club—which we called “the Doctor’s” because it had been set up in the old doctor’s house—or getting drunk and throwing up at home-alone parties on Saturday nights, I was still holed up in my room, reading Science Illustrated and books about great men in history. Charles Darwin. Carl von Linné. Copernicus. Galileo Galilei. Magellan and Vasco da Gama. Scientists, inventors, and discoverers, in other words. This was my favorite reading and I remember wishing, as a child, that I was shortsighted and had to wear little round glasses like one of the boys next door because I thought that would make me look a bit more like a scientist. Because obviously I was going to be a scientist. Either a botanist or a paleontologist, although I felt the latter seemed a rather childish answer to give when grown-ups asked what I wanted to be when I grew up: a paleontologist, which is to say: somebody who studies dinosaurs. Even Roger Dahl in my class could have come up with that reply and he was a real dummy with absolutely no interest in or fascination with dinosaurs. With the exception of Tyrannosaurus rex, I suppose. No, then it was better to say I wanted to be a botanist. It sounded more grown-up. Besides which, I’d been drying and pressing plants and learning their Latin names since I was eight, so when Mom and Dad had visitors and I announced that I was “considering becoming a botanist,” all I had to do was show them my herbarium and nobody could be in any doubt that I really meant it and wasn’t just trying to make myself appear interesting. “Exceptionally bright, quite possibly a genius,” I imagined visitors thinking and could never resist the temptation to try to prove them right: “You’ve probably heard of Gregor Mendel,” I would say when we came to the pea plant in my herbarium, knowing full well that very few people had heard of Gregor Mendel. “No? Well, he’s my big hero, he’s regarded as the father of classical genetics,” I would say, often then proceeding to subject the listener to a brief lecture on how in 1856 Mendel conducted systematic hybridization experiments with different pea plants in the monastery garden where he worked, and how the sensational results of these experiments enabled him to formulate Mendel’s laws of heredity. The thought that this might lead to me being regarded as an irritating and really quite arrogant child never crossed my mind. Personally, I didn’t see how anyone could resist a kid who knew as much as I did, and when my invariably polite audience fled to the bathroom or took advantage of a break in my stream of words to turn to the other grown-ups and attempt to take part in their conversation, I would simply hang around, waiting for the chance to pick up where I had left off and share still more of my knowledge with them: “And did you know that Gregor Mendel was born in Austria in 1822? In later life he became abbot of the monastery. You know what an abbot is, right?”

  But if I was arrogant, inasmuch as I simply assumed that everyone was bound to be interested in hearing what I had to say, in other ways I was anything but. We weren’t as well-to-do back then as we became after Dad started the fish farm and production of fish vaccine, but the proceeds from the furniture factory had made us more than wealthy enough for Dad to consider it necessary to continually remind me and my brother, Rikard, that having money “didn’t make us better than ordinary people,” as he put it. If either of us was rude about one of our classmates, for example, he would immediately suspect us of looking down on the person concerned and we would be subjected to a minor interrogation, where it was up to us to convince him that this was not the case: “But I never said anything about Pål Nordbakk’s clothes being raggedy, I never said a word about his clothes, why would I? He spat on Else’s shoes, all right! That’s why I said he was disgusting. I should be able to say he’s disgusting if he’s going around spitting on people’s shoes.” That sort of thing. And if we didn’t have a good explanation and Dad’s totally mistaken suspicion that we were getting too big for our boots was confirmed, he wasn’t beyond punishing us. I’ve never seen Dad as angry, for example, as he was the day when Rikard came home with a note to say that he and some other boys had been picking on a new boy in the class because his mother cleaned the school bathrooms. He had never laid a hand on Rikard or me before, but when he read the note in Rikard’s orange report book, smoke came out of his nostrils as he laid his pipe in the ashtray and then, without saying a single word, slapped Rikard’s face hard. He deeply regretted doing this, I remember, and apologized shortly afterward, but that didn’t stop him from ordering Rikard to clean the bathrooms at the furniture factory every day for a week. Not that Rikard minded much. He knew he deserved it for nicknaming the new boy “Crapper Morten” and neither of us was a stranger to work. We learned early on that most people took it for granted that we were, but the truth was that we had to work far more than all the other children we knew. I clearly remember, for instance, how shocked I was when one of my friends told me that he had to tidy his room, make his bed, and take out the trash for his pocket money. As far as I was concerned, that wasn’t work at all. That was just what you did, a bit like getting dressed in the morning, and you didn’t expect anything for it. Those friends of mine who seemed to do most at home moaned and groaned about having to cut the grass, clear the dinner table, and possibly do the washing-up a certain number of days in the week, but even that didn’t impress us. Those were the sorts of chores that Rikard and I raced through before or after our real work, which is to say our work at the furniture factory. I don’t know when we started there, but what I do know is that by the time I was fourteen, Rikard and I were helping out there three evenings a week. Only two and a half hours each evening, it’s true, but that was as much as we could manage if we were also to have time for our homework and our various extracurricular activities. And that wasn’t counting our Saturday jobs at the sawmill, where we collected all the offcuts and put them into sacks for Dad to give to his workers as Christmas presents. “With warm wishes” he used to write on the cards, I remember, and I can still recall the day when it dawned on Mom that this greeting had a double meaning. “The wood doesn’t just come with a wish that it will warm their homes, he also hopes the gift of it will warm their hearts,” she said one winter day when Rikard and I were loading sacks onto the back of the truck. She looked at us as though she had just presented us with the answer to all the ills of the world or a new, groundbreaking theory on the origins of the universe and for the first time in my young life I dared to admit to myself what I had suspected for some time: that Mom was not as clever as I would have liked. Only later did I realize that she had a way of acting dumber than she actually was.

  Anyway: one might think that since Rikard and I worked as much as we did, we would get whatever we asked for, but no, far from it. Compared to the aforementioned Roger Dahl we were spoiled rotten, of course—Roger, who had to use his mother’s bike and turned up for the ski carousel with one of his skis broken and nailed back together—but I well remember being envious of the twenty-odd percent of kids in my class who always had the latest toys, games, and sports gear. If Rikard or I asked if we could have whatever they had, we were forced to go through a process whereby it was up to us to convince Dad that the item in question was useful and preferably essential if we were to keep up and make progress in a field in which he deemed it important that we kept up and made progress—e.g., at school, on the sports field, or in the development of a solid work ethic or a good, all-round education. So we could forget about asking for video games or the new little electronic games that our classmates played with in the schoolyard (Donkey Kong), because we would promptly be treated to a variation on the lecture we received the time when we hinted that we wouldn’t mind having cable TV installed so we could watch MTV and Sky Channel: first, scathing criticism of all the mind-numbing, stultifying entertainment programs that were now rife and ruining the youth of today, followed by a string of well-meant words of wisdom, all making the point that time is money and not, therefore, to be wasted. We did, however, persuade him to buy a VCR. To begin with he was as opposed to th
e idea as we had expected, but when a cunning Rikard put on his most solemn face and just happened to mention that he would have gone up at least one grade in German if he had been able to tape our favorite German detective series, Derrick, and watch it again and again, Dad went from being dead set against it to showing some interest and when Rikard quoted our German teacher’s assertion that it was essential to listen to native German speakers if you wanted to gain a proper command of the language, Dad said he would think about it. And sure enough, the following Saturday he came home from Namsos with a VHS video recorder and a carrier bag containing three blank tapes. “But if your German grade hasn’t improved by Christmas, I’m selling that machine straightaway,” I remember him saying. Not without a wry glint in his eye.

  In other words, things had to prove profitable, preferably in some concrete and readily quantifiable fashion. To say that playing computer games was fun or that we thought Levis jeans were better than Wranglers wasn’t enough and if we also made the mistake of resorting to the old, rather whiny, childish complaint that “everybody else has one,” we risked being given a real tongue-lashing, because that sort of language was a sign of a herd mentality and even though Dad didn’t want us to stand out from the crowd by flaunting the fact that we had a lot more money than other kids, there were few things that riled him more than the herd mentality. Maybe because he associated it with socialism in general and the trade unions in particular, I don’t know.

  This same logic was reflected in an almost morbid compulsion to repair old things time and again before reluctantly having to throw them away and to buy things secondhand rather than new. If I needed a new bike, having outgrown my old one, I had to wait till the autumn when the police auctioned off lost property, including bikes that had been stolen and never claimed by their rightful owners. And then there was the time when Mom asked him for a new Mixmaster and he came home with a five-year-old Husqvarna mixer, having got wind that the old folks’ home at Vemundvik was investing in a new kitchen and selling off old equipment cheaply. “The way Kåre reads the For Sale ads in the paper, you’d think it was pornography,” Mom said once when they had a dinner party and she’d got a bit tipsy on white wine, and the roars of laughter that greeted this remark were clear proof that their guests could just picture it. Auctions, secondhand stores, house clearances, flea markets, Dad was known to be a great one for such things. He loved to nose around, hunting for bargains, and he loved to haggle. Not just for the fun of it, as many notorious hagglers would maintain, but purely and simply because he enjoyed the feeling of having saved money. Oh, God, how Rikard and I used to cringe when he stood there wrinkling his nose and trying to look as though he was doing the dealer a favor merely by picking up and looking at an article that was already dirt cheap and that he had long since decided to buy. We thought he was the stingiest man in the whole world, and when he then began to reel off all the flaws and faults that made the item in question worth only half the asking price, if that, we would duck down behind shelves, nip behind bookcases, or flee as far back in the shop as we could go, beet red and furious at a father who was worth millions but acted as though saving fifty kroner was a matter of life or death.