Åsne Seierstad - One of Us

Two teachers with two children, an average Norwegian family.

Every weekend they were out and about around Pasvik with the boys in child carriers, fishing for wild salmon in the rivers, lighting bonfires under the midnight sun, before they all slept in the tent they carried with them. In July they picked bilberries, in August it was cloudberries, and in winter they wrapped the children up in sheepskin and pulled them out into open country on a little sledge.

If Simon and Håvard’s feet got cold, their parents would have them run barefoot on the crusted surface of the snow. An old American Indian trick, their father told them. The first time, he had to dance in the snow with bare feet himself before the two chilly boys were convinced. It worked: the blood was soon coursing round their veins.

Gunnar taught his boys to distinguish between the tracks of wild creatures and tame ones. Wild animals walked in a straight line, tame ones tended to wander more aimlessly. The lynx, with its big, round pawprints, always chose its course and stuck to it. So did the wolverine with its long, narrow prints.

He impressed on the boys that they had to be alert to the dangers of nature. Wolves could attack something as big as an elk, and scarcely an anthill was left undisturbed if bears were on the prowl.

One summer’s day, when the family was taking a break, on the hill behind them a wolf stood staring. Thin and grey, it almost blended into the rocky mountainside. Gunnar froze.

‘Keep still. Don’t move,’ he said to the two boys. Tone picked up Håvard and Gunnar led Simon away, walking backwards. Very calmly, without any sudden movements, they withdrew up the slope to the road. The wolf slipped between the trees and was gone.

‘It is time for the kids to get to know their kin,’ Tone said one day. Distances in northern Norway are vast, and trips are expensive. It was time to go home. In Kirkenes they had a council flat, it was a nice one, but it wasn’t theirs.

‘We need to find something of our own,’ Gunnar agreed.

They were lucky: the house next door to Gunnar’s grandparents fell vacant. So they moved one county south, to the place where Tone saw Gunnar for the first time: Salangen, in Troms.

‘What a romantic place,’ exclaimed Gunnar when he returned to Upper Salangen, a short distance up from the fjord on the way to the high fells, an untamed bit of the natural world.

‘We’ve got to make sure we meet people,’ Tone soon concluded. So she and the woman next door started a revue group. Then they needed writers and performers. Gunnar had once penned love poems, hadn’t he, so perhaps he could write some scripts? As for Tone, she was eager to try her hand as a stage diva.

The car was a great place for practising revue numbers. The whole family bellowing out. Håvard always the loudest.

A girl lives in Havana, makes her living how she can, sitting by her window, beckons to a man!

Every year, after the New Year’s Eve fireworks, the children of Upper Salangen put on a show. Astrid, the eldest of the neighbours’ children, was the director. The children devised comedy routines and practised their gymnastic displays. As the new year started, Reserved signs on cushions and chairs around the house showed the grown-ups where to sit.

Håvard usually opened proceedings with a show tune. Simon was too shy to stand on stage, so he was the lighting technician. Throughout the show he carefully kept the family flashlight trained on the performers on the stage. He was never prouder of his younger sibling than on New Year’s Eve, when Håvard stood up there alone on stage, expertly illuminated by his big brother.

Gunnar’s scripts and lyrics soon earned quite a reputation in the district, and schools and children’s clubs started to ring up and ask him to write something for them. The PE and IT teacher spent whole evenings writing and composing. He learnt to read and write music, and once the children were in bed he would sit, polishing up dialogues and scales.

The two boys learnt to trust in themselves early on. From Year 1 at school they went off on their own across the garden, up the lane to the main road, then along to the crossroads where the school bus stopped. In winter, when the polar night descended on northern Norway, it was mostly pitch dark, as neither the lane nor the main road had street lights. One morning Tone was standing at the window with her coffee when she saw a shadow in the early-morning gloom. A huge bull elk was bearing down at top speed on Simon, who was ploughing along, head down, through the squally wind and snow. The elk and the seven-year-old were on course to blunder straight into each other. Tone cried out as she lost them both from sight in the snowy storm. She rushed out in her slippers and yelled.

When she caught up with Simon, down by the road, he looked up at her and asked, ‘Why are you shouting?’

The boy hadn’t even noticed the elk. With his back to the wind Simon looked at his mother.

‘Don’t worry about me, Mum,’ he said calmly. ‘I’m a man of nature.’

Anders had to find a name. Before he could write on walls, he needed to find a really good writer name. It mustn’t have too many letters, preferably between three and five. Some letters were cooler than others, and it was important that they looked good together, leaning on each other. He experimented in his room with felt pens and paper, producing several rough sketches.

The more you wrote your name, the more the name became yours. He had admired the big boys’ signatures around the city. Bye-bye, dull, ordinary Anders, hello tagger. The name was supposed to express something of who you wanted to be, mark you out from the crowd.

He chose a character from Marvel Comics. The Marvel universe was ruled over by the all-powerful Galactus. One of his henchmen had betrayed his race by executing his own people. This executioner was fearless and unscrupulous, filled with defiance and greed – qualities that appealed to the mighty Galactus after several of his henchmen had fallen prey to pangs of conscience on being obliged to kill their own. Galactus entrusted him with the job of head executioner and gave him a double-edged axe to carry out the death raid. The executioner’s name was Morg.

M and O flowed nicely across the sheet of paper, the R was hypercool but the G was tricky.

Anders left the narrow footpath between the apartment blocks in Silkestrå, looking for flat surfaces. In place of a double-edged axe, the thirteen-year-old had equipped himself with marker pens and aerosol cans. He had bought them with the money he’d earned delivering papers in the neighbourhood. The world beyond the blue garden and the copse lay before him, waiting. He discarded his childhood like an old rag. Suddenly there were lots of identities he could choose from.

He was a tagger,

a writer,

an artist,

a hooligan,

an executioner.

It was 1992. He changed schools when he went up to secondary level. In his new form at Ris, the pupils came from a variety of different primary schools and only a few of them already knew him, so he could create himself all over again. The insecurity and hesitation of his childhood years were less evident. He was still quiet and cautious during lesson time, not one to put up his hand or try to speak, but outside the classroom he knew what he wanted.

Four boys in the form found each other. One called himself Wick , another Spok , and then there were Morg and Ahmed. Spok was new in town and didn’t know anybody at the start of the school year. He had a round, childish face with freckles and his hair parted in the middle, and he thought Anders seemed nice, a bit shy. Wick was tall and lanky with a distinctly square chin and forehead. Both lived near by. Ahmed was Anders’s Pakistani friend from primary. At secondary school, he was still the only immigrant in the class.