Child Wonder

  CHILD WONDER

  ROY JACOBSEN

  Child Wonder

  A Novel

  Translated from the Norwegian by

  Don Bartlett with Don Shaw

  Graywolf Press

  Copyright © 2009 by Cappelen Damm AS

  Translation © 2011 by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw

  This publication is made possible by funding provided in part by a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, through an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and private funders. Significant support has also been provided by Target; the McKnight Foundation; and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

  A Lannan Translation Selection

  Funding the translation and publication of exceptional literary works

  This translation has been published with the financial support of NORLA.

  Published by Graywolf Press

  250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600

  Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401

  All rights reserved.

  www.graywolfpress.org

  Published in the United States of America

  First published in Norwegian under the title Vidunderbarnby Oktober

  Forlag, Oslo, in 2008.

  English translation first published by MacLehose Press, London, in 2011.

  ISBN 978-1-55597-595-1

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-037-6

  2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

  First Graywolf Printing, 2011

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2011930483

  Cover design: Kyle G. Hunter

  Cover photo: © Juice Images/Corbis

  Wallpaper design: © Pavel Konovalov

  Author’s Note

  My heroes are kids. Brave, struggling kids. Growing up in a working-class area outside Oslo in the early sixties – a time of confusion, excitement and unrefined and rather rough social experimentation. Before oil. Before anybody had any money at all. When a social-democratic welfare state was no more than a vague and desperate idea, so unlike the nouveau-riche society it produced within just a few decades. This was a change so abrupt, radical and unheard of in Norway’s history that all that is left of it is an ambiguous nostalgia and real stories on that eternal subject: how to lose one’s innocence without losing one’s soul. This novel is dedicated to those kids who made it. And to those who didn’t. I love them all.

  ROY JACOBSEN

  1

  It all started when Mother and I had some decorating to do. That is, I painted the lowest part of the wall, as I was rather lacking in height – it was a struggle – while she stood on a kitchen chair and concentrated on the bit below the ceiling. At that rate it would actually take several months to finish one wall. But one evening fru Syversen came round, eyed our handiwork, her arms folded across her ample bosom, and said:

  “Why don’t you try wallpaper, Gerd?”

  “Wallpaper?”

  “Yes, come with me.”

  We followed fru Syversen, who lived across the corridor from us, I had never been in her flat before, even though we had been living opposite each other for several years, and Anne-Berit lived there, a girl of my age in the class parallel to mine, as well as her two little sisters, six-year-old twins whose names frequently came up whenever Mother had a bone to pick with me.

  “Look at Reidun and Mona,” came the refrain. Or she invoked Anne-Berit, who, according to fru Syversen, considered being indoors, where her bed and food were, more fun than being out in the street, where life was forged with its immense array of boards and building blocks and roof tiles strewn around between blocks of flats, and down beyond, the grass-covered fields with tree stumps and logs and uncluttered brooks and thick scrub and hidden clay paths, where you could light fires from roofing felt and lumps of tar and scraps of wood, and build two-storey huts, over which famous battles were fought, by the great and the invincible, edifices which could be razed to the ground from one moment to the next and would have to be rebuilt the day after, never by those who had torn them down. Those who build and those who destroy are never one and the same. I mention this because I was a builder, even though I was small, and I shed many a tear at finding our castles in ruins; there was talk of reprisals and bloodcurdling vengeance, but the vandals had nothing to lose save their good humour and broad smirks, already there were traces here of a division, between those who have something to lose and those who have never had and never will have plans to acquire a bean. And this world had nothing to offer Anne-Berit and her sisters, they neither built nor destroyed, they sat around the kitchen table eating supper, all day long as far as I could see, this time with herr Syversen, presiding from the head of the table in a string vest with braces hanging down over impressive bulldozer thighs that bulged over the edge of his fragile chair.

  On the sitting-room walls of the Syversen family flat we saw for the first time the large-flower pattern wallpaper that would in the course of the Sixties turn Norwegian working-class homes into minor tropical jungles, with slender book shelves made of teak and supported by smart brass fittings between the lianas, and a striped corner sofa in brown, beige and white, illuminated by tiny invisible lamps mounted beneath the shelving like glittering stars. I could see the cool, faraway look in my mother’s eyes, an initial girlish enthusiasm that might last for three to four seconds, I knew, before giving way to her natural timidity, which in turn would end in the expression of a realistic mind-set: “No, that’s not something we can afford. We can’t do that.” Or: “That’s no good for us.” And so on. And there was quite a lot of “That’s not for us” at that time for Mother and me, because she worked only part-time at the shoe shop in the Oslo district of Vaterland so that she would be at home and ready whenever I ambled in from school, and therefore she could not see herself having the means to send the lad on holiday, which she said every time spring was in the offing, as if indeed I wanted to be sent anywhere, I wanted to be at home with my mother, even in the summer; there were many others on the estate who stayed at home during the summer, although it was common for people to pretend they didn’t, or at least to say they had no wish to go on holiday.

  “Isn’t it rather costly?” she asked, a word she only uses when we are with others; on our own we say “dear”, and we mean it.

  “Not at all,” said fru Syversen, who was wont to read Swedish women’s magazines – in contrast to Mother who read only Norwegian ones – and produced a pile of Swedish magazines off a shelf in the tropical rain forest and flicked open to an article from Malmø, summoning herr Syversen from the kitchen as she did so and instructing him to show Gerd the receipts.

  I watched the big man, who chuckled Right you are, and was willingness itself, and as he lumbered over to the bookcase and pulled out a drawer hardly big enough to hold much more than a picture postcard, the strange aroma of hard-working adult man assailed my nostrils and I thought, as I always did whenever this large human being came too close to me, on the stairs and in the hobby room, that perhaps being without a father was not such a bad thing after all, even though herr Syversen was good-natured and harmless enough, and always had a pleasant remark to make about some topic that did not interest me. In other words, it was his wife who was responsible for these three well-brought-up girls, who were still sitting in the kitchen and silently chomping away while casting surreptitious glances at us.

  What was remarkable was that Mother was unable to dismiss these receipts with her usual set phrases; in fact, the wallpaper was indeed not very “costly”, and it had not been bought in Sweden either, but in a hardware shop, Agda Manufaktur og Myklebust, at the Årvoll Senter, next to the bank, where we did our food shopp
ing if for some reason we did not go to Lien in Traverveien or Omar Hansen in Refstad allé and from whom, until last year, Mother had also rented a freezer until it became too dear or until we discovered we did not know what to do with it; after all, these were the years of the Berlin Wall and President Kennedy, most of all though I suppose it was the era of Yuri Gagarin, the Russian who had astounded the whole world by returning alive from certain death. It was, moreover, also the time a Mark II Jaguar cost 49,300 Norwegian kroner, a snippet of information I mention here not simply as a curiosity, but also because I saw this price, and the car, at a car exhibition at Bjerke Trotting Stadium and have never been able to forget it, perhaps encouraged by the fact that I knew we had made a down payment to the Housing Co-op of 3,200 kroner and that meant the Jaguar was worth the same as sixteen flats, a whole block, in other words. And any system that equates a car with the homes of seventy-six alive and kicking human beings of all ages, such as those living in No. 3, that’s the kind of knowledge that hits you like a goods train when you are young, and it never leaves you. Think of all the smells, every family has its own smell, distinct from all others, and all the faces and voices, the estate’s discordant choir, look at their bodies, clothes and movements as they sit there with their shirtsleeves rolled up, eating dinner and arguing or laughing or crying or keeping their mouths shut and chewing thirty-two times on each side. What can a Jaguar have to compare with all this? A revolver in the glove compartment? At the very least. I have thought a lot about the car, probably much too much, it was bottle-green.

  “But then there’s the price of the paste on top of that, you know,” fru Syversen continued, as if it had occurred to her that things were going too smoothly.

  “No, there isn’t,” herr Syversen interrupted. His Christian name, it now transpired, was Frank.

  “What did you say, Frank?” fru Syversen said in a sharp tone, taking the receipts off him and subjecting them to critical scrutiny through a pair of jet-black hexagonal glasses, which had not been easy to find among the multitude of light-blue porcelain figures and oval pewter ashtrays on shelf after shelf, shelves which, in my opinion, should have been filled with books, didn’t they have any books in this family? But Frank just shrugged, smiled at Mother, placed a leaden hand on my cropped head and said:

  “Well, Finn, so you’re the boss at home, are you?”

  A remark I presumed was prompted by the green paint on my face, on my fingers and in my hair, and I must have looked as if I were doing a man’s work to keep our two lives afloat.

  “Yes, he’s so good …” and at that point Mother’s voice broke, “I could never have managed without him.”

  Which is a sentence I quite like, because it did not take a lot to knock Mother off her perch at that time, even though we lived in a house of reinforced concrete with swallows’ nests in the loft and neighbours who sat on their balconies leisurely drinking coffee, or stood with their heads under car bonnets for hours on end; I could read and write better than most, and her wages arrived on time, every fortnight, well, even though nothing at all ever happened here, it was as though we were forever surrounded by perils which we had been lucky enough to avoid so far because, to quote Mother, you cannot learn anything from things that never happen.

  “You know, I’m not as strong as I used to be,” she mumbled when something or other was looming, and then she alluded – although I never asked and she never gave an explanation – to her divorce, which I suppose must have hit her like an avalanche and was only the first of a series of small incidents in a kind of enduring misery. For this may have been the era of Yuri Gagarin, but it was by no means the era of divorce, it was the era of marriage, and only a year after the divorce he also passed away, as Mother puts it, the consequence of an accident at work. My father died in a crane accident at Akers Mekaniske Verksted, a shipbuilding company. I can neither remember him nor the divorce, nor the accident, but Mother remembers for us both, even though you can never get any specific details out of her, about for example what he looked like or what he liked doing, or did not like doing in his free time, if he had any, that is, or where he came from or what they talked about in the happy years they must have had while they were waiting for me; even her photographs she keeps close to her chest; in short, this is an era we have put behind us.

  In the wake of the two disasters there followed yet another, this time connected with a widow’s pension; you see, my father managed to get hitched again before he fell to his death, and to have another child, a girl, whose name we did not even know, so that now there was another widow somewhere out there, receiving the money that Mother and I should have had, and squandering it on the pools and taxis and perms.

  “Well, don’t ask me what’s happened to them,” fru Syversen said, resigned, waving the invoices for the wallpaper but not the paste. However, now at least Mother was able to round up proceedings with her simple:

  “Hm, well, we’ll have to see about that.” And by sending the girls a goodbye smile. They stared back at us with mouths agape and three big milky moustaches. “Thank you for letting us have a peep. It’s really nice.”

  2

  The very next day we were in the Årvoll Senter looking at wallpaper. And that is pretty sensational, for Mother is not only beset by perils, she also takes her time to think things through; the green paint we had just wasted our money on, for example, was no mindless caprice, but the result of laborious calculations that had been going on since last Christmas when we were invited to coffee and cakes by an elderly couple on the ground floor, where all the walls had been painted a different colour from our own, and it turned out they had done it themselves, the slow way, with a brush.

  On another occasion she had dropped by to pick me up from a friend’s, from Essi’s flat where the father had moved the door to the smallest bedroom from the sitting room out into the hall, so that Essi’s big sister, who was sixteen, as good as had her own entrance, from the hallway. And now it was as if all of these considerations – along with the fact that the store we were in oozed the future, new opportunities and innovation, yes, there was a sense of purity and optimism about the paint pots and the assistants’ blue coats in this shop that could move a mountain – it was as if all of this fused into one momentous conclusion.

  “Right,” Mother said. “Then we’ll have to take a lodger after all. There’s no way round it.“

  I glanced up at her in surprise, we had in fact discussed this before, and also come to a kind of agreement, as I understood it, that we would not take a lodger, no matter how hard up we were, for that meant I would have to give up the room I loved so much and move in with her.

  “I can sleep in the sitting room,” she said before I could open my mouth.

  Accordingly, that afternoon we not only bought wallpaper and paste, but also composed an advertisement to insert in Arbeiderbladet, headed LODGER WANTED. Once again we contacted the mighty bull of a man, Frank: could Frank, who had a job on the new building sites over at Groruddalen driving a bulldozer, see his way to working evenings and move the door from our smallest bedroom into the hall, so that we would be spared having the lodger disturb our private lives with his, or her, comings and goings, not to mention a total stranger traipsing in and out of our newly wallpapered sitting room?

  In other words, we were moving into exciting times.

  It turned out that, as a joiner, Frank was nothing to write home about. He made a dreadful racket taking out the door. Not only that, he worked in a string vest, panted and sweated in bucket-loads, and from the first evening began to call Mother “darling”.

  “What d’you think, darlin’, d’you wanna keep these architraves or shall I get you some new ones?”

  “Depends what they cost,” Mother said.

  “Won’t cost you much, darlin’. I’ve got contacts.”

  Fortunately, Mother wasn’t put out by being called “darling” all the time. And fru Syversen made sure to drop by at regular intervals to tell us she had som
e food ready or to inform us that the dust cart would be late today. I have to confess that I also kept an eye on proceedings, since Mother put on lipstick and removed her curlers before every session, I had hardly any time to go out into the street. Now and then fru Syversen sent over Anne-Berit, her eldest daughter, so we stood watching the solidly built Frank humping around heavy doors and sheets of plywood. Black hair covered his shoulders and back like tufts of over-wintering grass, it poked through the holes of a faded vest more reminiscent of a trawling net than an item of clothing, and in mid-toil he would groan, “Hammer!” “Nails!” “Tape measure!”, in a teasing way, as if we were his minions, it was a joy. But when the door was at last in position, and the other doorway was sealed, after a week or so, with new architraves and everything, and the question of payment was broached, Frank wanted nothing.

  “Are you out of your mind?” Mother said.

  “Though if you had the odd dram handy, darlin’,” he said in a soft voice, as if now they shared some secret understanding following the successful completion of the job. Mother tripping around with an open purse and two or three blue five-kroner notes between her freshly varnished fingernails, plenty more where this comes from, Frank, all you have to do is ask – none of that made any difference, Frank was and remained a gentleman, and in the end all he took was two glasses of Curaçao.

  “One for each leg.”

  But now he was gone, too, and the wallpapering could begin.

  Everything went swimmingly. Again Mother was on a kitchen chair under the ceiling and I was down on the floor. The wall we had spent a whole week painting was papered in one evening. Then we spent two evenings doing all the fiddly bits around the balcony door and the large sitting-room window, and one final evening on the wall adjoining my bedroom, which was now to be the lodger’s. The change was there for all to see, it was explosive, it was ear-splitting. We had not gone so far as to invest in a jungle, Mother wanted something more discreet, but we stayed well within the same botanical genre anyway, with rounded borders and flowers, like golden brown scrubland in the autumn. And when two people came round the very next day to look at the room, we were in business.