Dag Solstad - Novel 11, Book 18

Bjørn Hansen had a son in the house. The son had come and had put up at his place. He had unpacked his things. He had been out to inspect the college that was to be his admission ticket to adulthood with all its imperatives and obligations, which are the very bedrock upon which we construct the reality we like to call life. On the threshold of life. His first day. And then his good genius, Algot, hadn’t shown up. In spite of the fact that they had an agreement. When a twenty-year-old tells his father that we live in a tough world, what does it mean? When he also glorifies a poster advertising a red sports car as if it were high art? It was evening in Kongsberg. Evening in the treasurer’s living room. An evening in August. Dark and mild. The door to the balcony was ajar, so that the cool breeze could be felt in the room, but just barely. So, Peter has decided to study optics because he has a friend who will do so, the father thought. Otherwise he would never have done it. Well, life is full of fortuitous circumstances, of course, and our choices, not least where study is concerned, may depend on the oddest things. But it is the friend who has chosen for him. That’s it. It doesn’t have to mean an awful lot, but I’m worried about him, Bjørn Hansen thought. Especially since — but here his thoughts stopped short, because he happened to think of his son’s much too loud voice, which had irritated and troubled him all along, and that he found both profoundly unjust and frightening.

Peter had stepped out on the balcony. He was getting a breath of fresh air. Bjørn Hansen followed and stood beside his son. A soft August evening, dark. Dark sky. Dark air. Dark because of the steep hills that surrounded Kongsberg. In between the hills, the town was illuminated by a scattering of dim lights. Down here, out there. Dim lights from the shop windows and the streetlamps. From the service station below them, slightly to the left, with its enormous lifeless sheet of asphalt, came a dim light, likewise from a lone window in the Gyldenløve Hotel, the fourth floor. The platform of the railway station, with no trains, was dimly lit, and a dim light from a streetlamp hovered over a lone taxi parked by the rank outside the station. Barely a sound came from the town itself, straight ahead of them and below. But a steady hum could still be heard. It came from far away, at the outer edge of the area visible from the balcony, on both sides. On the left were the cars on the main road to Oslo, on the right the cars on the way to Geilo and Bergen. These two main roads went in a circle around Kongsberg, along with a third main road, the road to Notodden and over Haukelifjell to the West Country, but that one did not come within sight or sound of the two men standing on the balcony. But the two main roads that did, if only for a short distance, were brightly illuminated, much more so than the city streets, whose dim, scattered illumination was intensified by the strong floodlights shining above the roadway along which the cars, with their small moving yellow lights and their steady hum, were driving. From the town directly opposite and below them, in the middle of which they actually found themselves, came scarcely a sound. Now and then a car door being slammed, followed by an engine being turned on and revved up. A sudden laugh, interrupted. A car driving slowly along the street, two blocks off, and a streak of light just before it reaches the corner, which they can see from their vantage point on the balcony. Then footsteps on the asphalt directly below. And Lågen, the small bend of it to their right, just before the brightly illuminated main road to Geilo and Bergen, was completely still, a mere dark hole as seen from the balcony. ‘Look!’ Peter said and pointed. He pointed at a neon sign on the other side of the railway station, the sign which said that this was where city, the supermarket, was located. But it was not the supermarket that interested Peter, but the sign. That red neon sign. city. ‘We’re in city,’ he said, enraptured, but still with a residue of preachiness in his voice. In the middle of city. ‘Look!’ he said again, pointing. This time at another bright sign, also in red neon. It hung at the top of a tall mast, almost at the level of the balcony they were standing on. toyota, it shined. ‘Fantastic!’ Peter said. ‘This is powerful. I feel I’ll be happy here, my blood is fired up,’ he declared. ‘And tomorrow Algot will come.’

He abruptly tore himself away from the sight of Kongsberg by night and went back to the living room. The father thought his son had been inspired to plunge into the disco world, which in Kongsberg, too, thrived in basements where violent, pounding music and super-fast flashing lights produced a youthful enthusiasm, but, being played in basements, behind strictly guarded doors, such as, among other places, deep underground at the Grand Hotel, that music had not betrayed itself to the two standing on a third-floor balcony in this modern block of flats in the middle of Kongsberg, but it existed, and Bjørn Hansen thought that it had now enticed Peter. But no. His son wanted to go to bed. He had to get up early tomorrow. He liked to get a good night’s sleep. The city and its loud rhythms would have to wait. Until he and Algot would go there together. The son went to the bathroom, to get ready for the night. Or as his father thought, ‘To make his toilet for the night,’ for he could not help noticing the huge toilet bag that Peter had brought with him. What did he have in that damn bag? He decided, however, that regardless of how intrigued he might be by his son’s doings, he would never look into this bag, because he had convinced himself that it contained secrets he was reluctant to be initiated into. But his son certainly did not try to keep it secret. He could have kept the bag in his room, but instead he placed it on the glass shelf in the bathroom. And there it still was when at long last he came out of the bathroom. Wearing a bathrobe, he quietly ambled to his room and closed the door behind him, after first saying a brief goodnight. A gentleman, Bjørn Hansen thought, my son is a modern young gentleman. Well, well. He’s here now in any case. As a guest in my existence, he thought.

Algot did not come. Bjørn Hansen saw his young son go to his first day of instruction excited, a bit nervous, with newly purchased books in a bag, ballpoints, paper for note-taking, ring binders. On the threshold of life, ready to absorb knowledge. In a new T-shirt inscribed bik bok. But when he returned in the evening he was down in the dumps, though he tried to hide it. That Bjørn Hansen could see. His son let himself in and was heading at full speed for his room when he stopped, duty-bound, to exchange a few words with his father, who knew that it had been his first day at college. ‘We are forty,’ he said. ‘In the class. Carefully filtered out,’ he added. ‘From all over the Nordic countries, even one from Iceland. One staff member is a professor from England. He doesn’t live here but flies over once a week to teach us. NIT in Trondheim will send an expert from its Lighting Engineering Lab as soon as the need arises. I must say the set-up is professional.’ He was talking apropos of nothing, over the head of his father and with his face partly turned away. Then he said he had to study and hurried to his room, where he spent several hours. Late in the evening he came out in his dressing gown and went to the bathroom. He stayed a long time in there, then shuffled quietly out and went to his room. ‘Algot didn’t come,’ he said as he opened the door. ‘But he’ll probably turn up tomorrow,’ he added.

He didn’t. Peter came home in the early afternoon, when his father was having dinner; he asked if Peter would like to share his meal with him, but he shook his head. He was not hungry. On the other hand, he was indignant. ‘Algot won’t be coming,’ he said. ‘And the college doesn’t give a damn. They’re simply leaving his place open. Because they haven’t had any message from him.’ — ‘But then he’s likely to come, don’t you think?’ Bjørn Hansen said, ‘he’s just been delayed for a few days.’ — ‘No,’ Peter said, ‘for Algot is in London, I’ve found out.’