Per Petterson - Ashes in My Mouth, Sand in My Shoes

Dad came bursting out of the cabin door. He had taken off his blue T-shirt and now he was pulling his white shirt on, his head was not through the neck yet and the two sleeves were flapping wildly in the air, and then he tripped and fell off the bottom step, and there was a stain on his shirt and he was furiously trying to wipe it off with his hand. Aunt Kari stood stock still in her bathing suit, the towel drooped onto the ground, and there were pine needles all over it. Uncle Rolf had actually got up from the deckchair and was on his way to the car.

Arvid turned away, for there was something so strange about his dad’s face that he couldn’t look. He looked at the treetops, he looked at the cabin roof, at the sky and the shimmering fjord. When he turned back, his dad was inside the car, and it reversed slowly towards the gate, pulled onto the road and stopped for a moment, and set off again and was gone. No one waved.

Aunt Kari went into the cabin to change, and her back was so naked she could have taken off her bathing suit and Arvid wouldn’t have seen the difference.

‘You two come here,’ Mum said, and they too went in and she sat them at the table in the hall, and she looked at them, they looked at each other, and then she said:

‘Be good children now, because your Granddad has died.’

And then they had cocoa and mocha biscuits, although it wasn’t Saturday or anything, and as Arvid was blowing into his hot cup he was thinking:

Now it’s Dad who’s the boss around here, and I can go out in the canoe.

Beyond the house and the flagstone path was a large green lawn, and that was where he was sitting with his red fire engine. When he squatted like this, as he did on this particular day, all he could see was the lawn, and the whole world was nothing but green grass and a red fire engine. It was difficult to make it move because the grass was wet and quite long, he pushed and pushed, and then Gry came down the road and shouted:

‘Hey, Arvid, guess what!’

He turned and the world became roads and houses, telephone wires and sky, a sky so big his head filled with air. He blinked.

No, he couldn’t guess what.

‘The king is dead. He slipped in the bathtub and died.’

Arvid put her words into his mouth. The king slipped in the bathtub and died. It didn’t taste of anything. It didn’t say a thing to him. He didn’t know the king, although he did know there was a man called the king, but he had never seen the king and no one had a bathtub in their house. Just showers, there wasn’t room for anything else, so he shrugged, turned to the fire engine, and Gry was disappointed and said:

‘Hell, you’re so little you don’t understand one bit! Anyway, you’ve got to go in now. We’re leaving soon.’

And when he looked up he saw his mother in the window. That was it, they had to go, he had forgotten. That was why he had his new trousers on. He stood up and then he saw it, close by. It was a bullfinch, that was for sure. Arvid had seen bullfinches many times, in the bullfinch tree and in the bird book he kept in his room. There was a picture of it and the letters underneath spelt ‘bullfinch’ when they were read out.

He knelt down, his trousers were wet at once and stained with soil and grass, but he didn’t notice and he held the bullfinch in his hand. It was so small, it was soft and warm. He could feel its heart beating against his fingers and he thought: Birds have a heart that beats!

He placed it on its thin legs. He let go and it toppled over and lay just as it had when he found it. The beak opened and closed, but it didn’t say anything. Birds couldn’t talk, but it moved its beak as if it wanted to.

He tried once more, but it fell again. His mind went blank. He couldn’t leave, couldn’t pretend he hadn’t seen, but staying there didn’t help either, for the bullfinch couldn’t stand. He picked it up and threw it high in the air to see if it would fly, but it plummeted to the ground. He stood watching, it was red against the green grass, and then he started to cry. He couldn’t leave, he would have to stay there, maybe for a long time.

Dad opened the window above and looked out.

‘Arvid! What’s up with you? Aren’t you coming in?’

Arvid couldn’t answer, he just pointed. Dad closed the window and after a little while he came out. Arvid stood where he stood. Dad bent down, picked up the bullfinch and said:

‘Move away now, turn round and close your eyes.’

Arvid took a few steps, half-turned, but did not close his eyes. From the corner of one eye he saw his dad raise his arm and hurl the bird against the wall.

When he came in he was scolded for the stains on his trousers. But it was too late to change, and anyway he had only one pair of decent trousers, so he would have to go as he was, like a mucky pup.

Then the taxi arrived. It came rolling down the slope from the telephone box, parked by the dustbin, and all the kids in the street came to watch and asked if they were going on holiday.

‘Kiss my arse,’ Arvid said, and Mum said:

‘Arvid, please! We’re going to a funeral!’ And then they got into the taxi and drove off. Through the rear window he could see them standing on the tarmac.

At the funeral there were many grown-ups in black clothes, and first they had to enter an old yellow timber house called EBENEZER, Gry read the word aloud for Arvid. Inside EBENEZER Uncle Rolf was sitting in a chair looking sad. When the people in black came in they went over to him and said something in low voices and Uncle Rolf smiled a little and said thank you.

Uncle Rolf had once had a monkey, a big toy monkey with great shiny eyes hanging from a standard lamp. It used to hang from that lamp and look down at Arvid with a canny look on its face, and Arvid liked it so much that once when he and his mother were there to visit he asked:

‘Can I have it?’ He meant borrow, but that wasn’t what he said.

‘Christ, if the boy’s envious he might as well have it as far as I’m concerned,’ Uncle Rolf said with a smile that made Arvid wince.

At home Arvid took the monkey up to his room to play with it, but it was different now, its eyes were dull and stupid so he tossed it in the bin under the sink. There Mum found it and she called to Arvid and asked what the hell the monkey was doing in the dustbin.

‘It died,’ Arvid said.

Now Granddad too was dead and Uncle Rolf had to live alone in the flat at Vålerenga, and he didn’t like that because he was forty years old and had never been alone. Before, the whole family had lived in that flat with Granddad and Uncle Rolf, but it made Mum so worn down the doctor said she had to move as soon as possible and prescribed a new flat in a terraced house in Veitvet. At least that was what the woman next door said, and she ought to know because she often dropped by and spoke to Mum and drank coffee in the morning, and Arvid was sitting under the kitchen table playing, and he could hear them talking.

Arvid moved among the black stockings and the trousers, eating chocolate cake and listening. Above him voices buzzed and some were talking about the king, who had been such a steadfast Norwegian during the war although he was a Dane, and some talked about Granddad, who had been so very kind. Arvid didn’t agree, even though it was true to say that Granddad gave him a chocolate bar each time he came to visit. But the chocolate tasted stale and it was because Granddad always bought enough chocolate for six months at a time and kept it all in the top drawer of the old dresser he had in the hall. That was the sensible thing to do, Dad said, but Arvid didn’t think sensible was the same as kind. Once, Mum had said that Granddad treated her like a maid when they lived in Vålerenga, and when Dad defended him Mum lost her temper and said, and this I have to hear from a socialist!