Aftermath Read online

  Actually, I remember us being just as embarrassed and almost as angry when we were nine and ten, the one time we managed to pester him into taking us to see a film with a PG-13 rating, when he brought along a plastic soup tub full of homemade popcorn rather than buy popcorn at the cinema kiosk, which, according to Dad, was ridiculously overpriced. As far as he was concerned, it would do us no harm that the other kids laughed at us and were still talking about it long afterward. Quite the opposite, we had to learn to do what was right and have the courage of our convictions, even if we were mocked and criticized for it. So from that point of view, he told us later, the incident with the soup tub was a good thing:

  “You saved twenty kroner by making popcorn at home, lads.”

  “Dad. Don’t start!”

  “So in effect those pals of yours who bought popcorn at the cinema kiosk gave away twenty kroner to the shopkeeper, right?”

  “Dad.”

  “Okay, now let’s say, for simplicity’s sake, that those same pals go to the cinema and buy popcorn there five times a year. That’s a hundred kroner a year, right?”

  “Aw, stop it!”

  “A hundred kroner’s not an awful lot, you might think. But let’s say that this popcorn purchase isn’t an isolated instance but a sign of a habit they have formed. Let’s say that they give away two hundred kroner a year to the bookshop and maybe three hundred to the sports shop and so on and so forth.”

  “Da-ad. We get it!”

  “And then let’s say that they carry this habit with them into adult life, when their car and their house and electricity and food all have to be paid for. How much do you think we’re talking about then? How many hundreds of thousands, not to say millions, do you think that eventually comes to? Eh, Marius?”

  “Dunno.”

  “Rikard?”

  “Dunno.”

  “No, neither do I. But I can assure you we’re talking about sums of money that make it worth putting up with a bit of scoffing in the schoolyard.”

  Oh, he could drive us crazy when he carried on like that. He was a pain in the neck. A real drag. Not that there wasn’t an element of humor and playacting in there too, because there most certainly was. Dad could always laugh at himself and secretly enjoyed being seen as a caricature of himself. He liked pretending to be even more of an eccentric, pigheaded old cheapskate than he actually was and liked to see Rikard and me acting even more frustrated and exasperated by him than we actually were. And Rikard and I enjoyed it too. For both Dad and us it was a way of expressing love, so we actively sought and provoked such discussions and wrangling matches, all three of us. At the same time, though, I knew that he used all the jokes and the laughter to slightly soften his extremely common-sensical and strictly rational way of thinking and acting. Even so, I was always aware that there was a limit to how far you could push him. To put it simply, he could joke and laugh at himself so long as he got his way, but on those rare occasions when Rikard or I stuck to our guns and refused to follow his advice, he would lose his temper and was capable of punishing us in ways that can best be described as childish. Take, for example, the time when Rikard didn’t put at least two-thirds of his pay in the bank so he could see how money gathers interest, as we were expected to do, but chose instead to buy a down jacket with leather patches on the shoulders that cost the outrageous sum of 1,000 kroner.

  “Oh, by the way, Rikard, a bill arrived for you,” Dad said one day when we got home from school. He stood there puffing on his pipe of Capstan and doing his best to sound as though there was absolutely nothing unusual in fourteen-year-old Rikard receiving a bill in the post.

  Rikard ripped open the envelope: “Huh,” he said, “it’s my subscription to Okej.”

  “Oh?” Dad said, acting as though he didn’t already know that perfectly well.

  Rikard just stared at Dad for a moment.

  Dad removed his pipe from his mouth.

  “What’s the matter?” he said, smiling innocently and trying to look as though he couldn’t see how shocked Rikard was to find that he could no longer take for granted that Dad would pay for his subscription to his Swedish teen mag, as he had been doing so far.

  “Er, um … so do I have to pay it myself now?” Rikard stammered, thereby giving Dad his cue to come out with a remark that he’d made so often before, one which I’m sure he looked forward to uttering every single time.

  “Well, of course,” he said, totally unable to conceal the childish delight he took in this. “If you can afford to buy a jacket costing one thousand kroner, then you can afford that as well.” Then he popped his pipe back in his mouth and strolled off into the living room as casually as he could.

  Now that I think of it, it used to embarrass me that he smoked a pipe. Years later, when I was a freshman and willing to do anything to look intellectual, I took to smoking a pipe myself, but as a child and as a teenager it seemed terribly old-fashioned to me. It was bad enough that Dad had gray hair and was ten or fifteen years older than my friends’ parents without him behaving in ways that made him look even more like a retiree. And it wasn’t only the pipe that made him seem like an old man. The way he still persisted in using the old Danish-Norwegian forms of certain words rather than their modern equivalents and, according to Mom, wore suits and shoes that went out of style along with the top hat had the same effect. “They don’t make them like your dad anymore,” Mom told Rikard and me and she was right. He was like a relic of a bygone era. A fair but strict and autocratic father at a time when men appeared to be growing softer and the ideal parent was supposed to discuss things with their children and treat them like equals. He was also, not least, a businessman of the old school, a capitalist who thought and acted in a way I felt I recognized from novels I read set in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. A bit like the merchant Mack in Knut Hamsun’s Pan. Always looking for a way to make money, to run things better, more efficiently, but also so steeped in the traditions of the social-liberal wing of the Norwegian Conservative Party that he saw red every time he read or heard of instances of what we now call turbo-capitalism and the culture of greed. “With money comes responsibility,” he would say and as far as he was concerned, there was nothing worse than capitalists who were not mindful of this responsibility, businessmen who awarded themselves enormous salaries and might well be ruthlessly exploiting their resources and their workforce into the bargain. “No wonder people become socialists,” he would say as he sat at his horseshoe-shaped desk, wreathed in tobacco smoke and reading the business pages.

  For his own part he was strongly influenced by the paternalistic management style practiced by our grandad when he ran the family firm. He liked to see himself as a boss who cared about and looked after his workers to the best of his ability and as far as the company finances would allow, and who expected people to be conscientious, loyal, and obedient in return. He took it hard when the workers joined a union and his blood would boil if he felt that they were making unreasonable demands. They had no idea how difficult it was to survive in the market, he would growl. Demanding this, demanding that, but what would they say, he wondered, the day he went bankrupt and they were out of a job? And what thanks did he get for giving them firewood for Christmas every year? Not to mention all those Christmas baskets! Well, large cardboard boxes, actually, packed with Dutch Edam and Swedish gräddost, pickles and silverskin onions, anchovies, rolled lamb, headcheese, and plenty more, from him to them. And to the boxes for his three semiskilled workers, whom he depended on and was therefore terrified of losing, he even added a half bottle of brandy and a Cuban cigar from M. Sørensen’s tobacconist’s in Trondheim, the most reasonably priced brands, it’s true, but still. How many employers did that for their workers, he would ask, only then to answer himself: None! Absolutely none! And what thanks do I get? Yes, you guessed it, fresh demands. More, more, more.

  Some years later, in the early nineties to be exact, when I was a student radical in Trondheim and staying at Bangsund on
ly during the holidays, I criticized, not to say ridiculed, my dad for this paternalistic management style. Like most young men who have had more schooling than their fathers, I took it for granted that I knew more than he and I blush now to think how arrogant I must have seemed, sitting there sipping his whisky and lecturing him on how paternalism was a way of concealing the real balance of power between employer and employee. With a faint sneer on my lips I would remind him and anyone else who happened to be listening of how he had tried to make friends with the workers, citing the affectedly coarse language, the dirty jokes, and all the little mannerisms he adopted when he was with “the guys on the floor”: talking and laughing louder than usual, spitting remarkably often, and occasionally putting a finger to his nose, pressing one nostril, and sending a gob of snot shooting out of the other—things he would never have dreamed of doing in the company of his friends from the Masonic lodge, the Namsos Conservative Club, or his fellow businessmen in the local chamber of commerce. And those Christmas presents, what were they if not an attempt to bind people to him by putting them in his debt? I would ask before going on to harangue him on the devious way in which he would punish those employees who failed to show him the gratitude and loyalty that he felt he deserved. “And what about making Kalle Evensen shovel snow and do all sorts of rotten odd jobs just because he raised the problem of the air quality with the union?”

  I didn’t realize then how familiar and trivial such criticism was to Dad. While it would be an exaggeration to say that reading about paternalism at university was a momentous experience for me, I did recognize and felt I understood more about the way in which my father ran his company and the way the workers behaved toward him and, young and naïve as I was, I thought that he would too, that he would see the light, so to speak. But of course he didn’t. Not only had he had to listen to and defend himself against such accusations for years, from the unions, political opponents, and others, he was also far better read and far more knowledgeable than I had imagined; of course he knew all about paternalism and of course he was well aware that forming personal bonds with his employees made it harder for them to shirk their duties or be disloyal. I don’t know what infuriated him more, the know-it-all and fairly sarcastic tone of my accusations or the fact that his older son had suddenly gone and become a lefty, but infuriated he was. Particularly when I suggested that the solicitude he felt for his workers was not sincere and the chummy manner he adopted with them was a kind of opium for the masses. What the hell did I mean by that? he asked. Was he supposed to treat his employees worse? For the sake of sincerity or something? Was he supposed to stop being friendly and instead become an arrogant, authoritarian bastard of a boss just so the workers would understand that he was more powerful than them? As if they didn’t know that already. And anyway, he went on, surely I hadn’t been living away from home so long that I’d forgotten that Bangsund was a small town and the furniture factory was a small firm. Everybody rubbed shoulders with everybody else here whether they liked it or not, so it was in everybody’s best interests to tone down conflicts and foster good relations with the people around them, otherwise life would be damned intolerable. “But maybe that’s what you want?” he said. “The furniture factory is a good place to work, I think all my workers would vouch for that, but in your eyes, would it be better if it wasn’t? Crisis maximization, isn’t that what the Marxists call it?”

  While Dad was relatively uncomplicated, almost a caricature, in fact, of a typical thrifty inhabitant of Sunnmøre (he had lived in Ålesund until he was six years old), Mom was complex, un predictable, and a mass of contradictions. When I try to describe her she seems to elude me, not only now, as I write this letter, but at other times too. That’s how it’s been for as long as I can remember. When Rikard and I used to discuss and analyze our parents, for example, the way teenagers and young people tend to do from time to time, somehow we were never done talking about Mom. If I mentioned one thing about her, I always had the urge to cite some other aspect of her character that would moderate or contradict what I had just said, and unlike our chats about Dad our views of her were often diametrically opposed. “Practical? The woman who managed to paint herself into a corner when she varnished the living room floor,” Rikard might say. “Yeah, I know, but she did install that new shower stall without so much as looking at the instructions after Uncle Frederik had been struggling with it for hours and getting nowhere,” I said. This last was typical of Mom actually. She would do one thing with aplomb only then to suddenly make some amateurish mistake; she could be all thumbs in one situation only then to prove dazzlingly adept in another. She played little piano pieces by Chopin with exquisite technique and so much feeling that one of the music teachers at Nauma Senior High simply assumed she was a professional musician, but when he spoke to her afterward, he discovered that Mom had no idea what she had been playing or which key she had played it in. It was just something she had learned by heart years ago, she told him, before adding: “A musician, me? Ha-ha, I can’t even read music.” It was the same story with her general knowledge and level of education. She knew the names of all the main Egyptian pharaohs and when they had lived but thought that the Iron Age came before the Stone Age. She was very much on the offensive in debates on membership of the EU before the referendum in 1994 and showed herself to be impressively well informed, but then it came out that she didn’t know the name of the Norwegian foreign minister. Dad thought she was joking, but when he realized she wasn’t, he was shocked, then angry. “Damn it all, woman, you must know who the foreign minister of your own country is!”

  Uncle Frederik, Mom’s older brother, actually put this side of Mom’s character down to the fact that she had been an afterthought. She was fifteen years younger than him and seventeen years younger than Aunt Rebekka and, according to him, like most afterthoughts Mom had been spoiled rotten. Grandma and Grandad had done everything for her and this friction-free childhood had quite simply rendered her much too lazy to learn anything properly. She was exceptionally gifted in many areas, Uncle Frederik believed, but everything she turned her hand to was done half-heartedly and everything she started was left half-done. When he saw what the assurance that everything would turn all right in the end had done to Mom, well, he was very glad he had had something to push against when he was young, because this meant that he had learned to work hard and never give up, he said. Or no, he didn’t say that. He implied it. Uncle Frederik was a master when it came to insulting people in the nicest possible way and he managed very cunningly to make this theory, let’s call it that, sound like a huge compliment to Mom. “If I’d had only half your gifts fifty years from now I’d be in the history books,” he used to say.

  Aunt Rebekka said much the same. As a girl, with her long, blond curls, blue eyes, and milky-white skin, Mom had been very pretty and popular, she told us. Unfortunately, though, later in her teens her good looks had deserted her. At fifteen there were a lot of girls who were far prettier than her, and by the time she was seventeen, she really wasn’t pretty at all, no more than average looking. “The thing was … ,” Aunt Rebekka said to Mom, then paused for effect, as if to indicate that now she was getting to the nub of the matter. “The thing was that by then you had already managed to acquire a lot of the quirks displayed by girls who know they’re prettier than everybody else. You were used to always getting your way. You were used to getting away with being uppity, pert, and conceited,” she said, before rounding off with a remark she had made so many times that it had almost become her trademark: “Oh, well, you know me. I believe in calling a spade a spade.” As if the fact that she knew she was committing a character assassination was justification enough.

  Aunt Rebekka, “the Steamroller,” as Dad called her. Not only was she disconcertingly forthright and dauntless, she was also the sort of person who believed everyone was dying to hear what she thought about everything under the sun. She talked nonstop, far too loudly and in far too much detail, she interrupted people when s
he felt like it, and she could go for an entire evening without ever noticing that hardly anyone else had got a word in edgewise. She was like a landslide or a hurricane, a sort of blind force that swept through the room, leaving in its wake dazed and exhausted souls here and seething, smarting wretches there. She and Uncle Frederik paid us a visit every summer and every single time the same thing happened. It was like a ritual: on the third day our aunt and uncle would start to accuse Mom of having forgotten where she came from and of thinking she was better than them and then, after a somewhat hesitant phase during which Mom endeavored to be polite, she would start to fight back. Not by arguing clearly and calmly that she was not uppity or spoiled or lazy, but by adopting an ironic stance that she would maintain for the remainder of their visit. When Uncle Frederik said that she was more gifted than him but too lazy to do as well as he had (he owned a small car-repair shop in Fredrikstad and was extremely proud of this), she might, for example, smile sweetly and say something to the effect that an idiot will hail anyone who is semi-intelligent as a genius—if only to feel semi-intelligent themselves for a little while. And when Aunt Rebekka construed what Mom said and did as signs of arrogance, Mom didn’t say what she always said to Dad, which was that Aunt Rebekka was jealous and had an inferiority complex and that this had given her an insatiable urge to “drag me through the muck.” She chose instead to assume and then overplay the part of the snooty rich-man’s wife. I had never seen her use a cigarette holder, for example, but one summer when Aunt Rebekka was there, she kept saying that she simply didn’t know where she’d put her cigarette holder. She didn’t like smoking without a holder, she said, she found it rather common. “Shall we go through to the sitting room?” she said on one occasion. “I feel like having my coffee on the chaise longue.” And when Aunt Rebekka said: “The chaise what?” Mom simply smiled indulgently, much the way one would smile at a cute toddler who has asked about something that anyone over the age of four would know. “The sofa, then,” she said. That’s how she carried on. She’d say, for instance, that she was going up to change for dinner, or that she didn’t know how she had managed when we had only one car (this being a dig, of course, at our aunt, who could only dream of being able to afford a car) and more than once I heard her say that she thought we ought to have a gardener to “tend the grounds.” As if even in his wildest fantasies Dad would ever have agreed to spend money on something like that.