Ю Несбё - The Kingdom

THEY SAY I’M THE ONE who’s most like Dad.

Silent and steady. Kind and practical. An average, hard-working type with no obvious talent for anything in particular but will always get by, perhaps mostly because he never asks too much of life. Bit of a loner but sociable when necessary, with enough empathy to know when someone’s in trouble, but enough sense of shame not to interfere in other people’s lives. The way Dad didn’t let others interfere in his. They said he was proud without being arrogant, and the respect he showed others was reciprocated, though he was never the village bellwether. He left that to the more literary, the more eloquent, the more pushy, the more charismatic and visionary, the Aases and the Carls. Those with less shame.

Because he did feel shame. And that quality is something I very definitely inherited from him.

He felt ashamed of what he was and what he did. I felt ashamed of what I was and what I didn’t do.

Dad liked me. I loved him. And he loved Carl.

As the older son I was given a thorough grounding in how to run a mountain farm with thirty goats. The goat population of Norway had been five times greater in my grandfather’s day, and the number of goat farmers had fallen by half just over the last ten years, and my father probably realised that in the future it wouldn’t be possible to make a living from goat farming on such a small scale at Opgard. But as he said: there’s always the chance that one day the power would go, the world be hurled into a chaos in which it was every man for himself. And people like me will still get by.

And people like Carl will go under.

And maybe that’s why he loved Carl more.

Or maybe it was because Carl didn’t worship him the way I did.

I don’t know if that’s what it was, a mixture of Dad’s protective instincts and a need to be loved by his son. Or that Carl was so like my mother when she and my dad first met. Alike in the way they talked, laughed, thought and moved, and even in the photos of Mum from back then. Carl was as good-looking as Elvis, Dad used to say. Maybe that’s what he fell for in Mum. Her Elvis looks. A blonde Elvis, but with the same Latino or Indian features: almond-shaped eyes, smooth, glowing skin, prominent eyebrows. The smile and the laughter that seemed always to be just below the surface. Maybe my father fell in love all over again with Mum. And then with Carl.

I don’t know.

All I know is that Dad took over the bedtime reading in the boys’ room and that he spent longer and longer doing it. That he carried on long after I had fallen asleep in the upper bunk, and that I knew nothing about it until one night I was woken by Carl’s crying and Dad trying to hush him up. I peered over the edge of the bunk and saw that Dad’s chair was empty, that he must have sneaked into bed beside Carl.

‘What’s the matter?’ I asked.

There was no answer from down below, so I repeated the question.

‘Carl was just having a bad dream,’ said my father. ‘Go back to sleep, Roy.’

And I went back to sleep. I slept the guilty sleep of the innocent. And I went on doing so until one night Carl was crying again, and this time Dad had left, so my little brother was alone with no one to comfort him. So I climbed down to his bunk, wrapped my arms around him and told him to tell me what he had dreamed, because then the monsters would all disappear.

And Carl sniffed and said the monsters had said he wasn’t to tell anybody, because then they would come and take me and Mum too, take us down into Huken and eat us.

‘But not Dad?’ I asked.

Carl didn’t reply, and I don’t know if I understood and repressed it right there, or if I only understood later, wanted to understand it: that the monster was our father. Dad. And I don’t know either if Mum wanted to understand it but that in her case the will was lacking, because it was happening right in front of our eyes and ears. And that made her as guilty as me in looking the other way and not trying to stop it.

When I finally did it I was seventeen years old and Dad and I were alone in the barn. I was footing the ladder as he shifted light bulbs up under the ridge. Barns on mountain farms aren’t all that high, but still I felt I was a risk for him, standing there a few metres below him.

‘You’re not to do what you do to Carl.’

‘All right then,’ said Dad quietly, and finished changing the light bulbs.

Then he climbed down the ladder, with me holding it as steady as I could. He put the used bulbs down before attacking me. He didn’t hit me in the face, only on the body, in all the soft places where it hurt the most. As I lay in the hay, unable to breathe, he leaned over me and whispered in a thick, hoarse voice: ‘Don’t you accuse your father of something like that or I’ll kill you, Roy. There’s only one way to stop a father and that’s by keeping your mouth shut, wait for your chance and then kill him. You understand?’

Of course I understood. That was what Little Red Riding Hood should have done. But I couldn’t speak, couldn’t even nod, just raised my head very slightly and saw that he had tears in his eyes.

Dad helped me to my feet, we ate supper, and that night he was with Carl in the lower bunk again.

Next day he took me into the barn where he’d suspended the big punchbag that came over with him from Minnesota to Norway. For a time he’d wanted Carl and me to box, but we hadn’t been interested, not even when he told us about the famous boxing brothers Mike and Tommy Gibbons from Minnesota. Tommy Gibbons was Dad’s favourite – he’d shown us pictures of him, said how Carl looked like the tall, blond heavyweight Tommy. I was more like Mike, the big brother who was nevertheless smaller, and whose career wasn’t so successful. Anyway, neither of them had been champions, Tommy came closest in 1923, when he went fifteen rounds and lost on points to the great Jack Dempsey. It was in the little town of Shelby, a crossing on the Great Northern Railway which the railway director Peter Shelby – the place was named after him – called ‘a godforsaken mudhole’. The town had been promised that the fight would put them on the map in the USA and they invested all they had and more in it. A big stadium was built, but only seven thousand turned up to watch, plus a handful that sneaked in without paying, and the whole town – including four banks – went bankrupt. Tommy Gibbons left a town in ruins, without a title, without a cent in his pocket, with nothing but the knowledge that he had at least tried.

‘How’s your body feeling?’ asked Dad.

‘Fine,’ I said, though I still ached all over.

Dad showed me how to stand and the basic punches, then he tied his worn-out old boxing gloves on me.

‘What about the guard ?’ I asked, recalling a newsreel I had seen from the Dempsey–Gibbons fight.

‘You hit hard and you hit first, so you don’t need that,’ he said, and positioned himself behind the bag. ‘This is the enemy. Tell yourself you’ve got to kill him before he kills you.’

And I killed. He kept a firm hold on the bag to stop it swinging too much, but now and then he peered out from behind it, as though to show me who it was I was training to kill.

‘Not bad,’ he said as I stood there bent double, dripping sweat, my hands on my knees. ‘Now we’ll tape your wrists and do it again without gloves.’

Within three weeks I had punched holes in the bag and the cloth had to be sewn up with thick twine. I bloodied my knuckles hitting those stitches, let them heal for two days and then bloodied them again. It felt better that way, the pain deadened the pain, deadened the shame I felt just standing there and punching, unable to do anything else.