Johan Harstad Read online

  But in one place, in Stavanger, in the mid-eighties, 1986, some things went right. Amid the confusion.

  Helle.

  I went to Hetland College in Stavanger, it was the first day of the second year and still almost nobody knew me, almost nobody in the class knew who I was, they’d forgotten me over the summer, and that suited me fine, all I wanted was to sit in the middle of the classroom, with everybody around me, encircled. Anyway, I had Jørn, and Jørn had Roar. And though I wasn’t best friends with either of them, they were the ones I’d be around that year. Jørn and Roar.

  And Helle.

  She started in our class, that second year, one cold, wet morning in August, the third day after the holidays, I’d come into the classroom and put my backpack just inside the door, it was still early and I only intended to leave my bag and go out again, under the shed with the others, enjoy my last minutes before class began, Norwegian, the first Norwegian class in the second year, Fall 1986. We knew some newcomers would be starting, and that some of the class had left, some that nobody had talked to, a few who’d always been alone and couldn’t cope, that didn’t fit in, that nobody ever asked to stay, there were always some people who left, who walked out of college on the last day before summer vacation in the knowledge that I will never return, and nobody turned to look at them, nobody noticed them, as they walked through the gates with an extra heavy backpack or perhaps the lightest shoulders in the world, who knows.

  Some had left, and others had come to fill their vacant chairs.

  Helle.

  Helle had come to fill a vacant chair, to fill the room, to fill the world.

  But I didn’t know. As I dropped my backpack off in the classroom, I straightened up and turned, saw her there, saw she was pretty, at least in my eyes, knew I’d always remember her, assumed she’d been in here for her previous lesson and left something behind, or that she was in the first year, and that that was why I’d never seen her before. I made myself small, made space for her in the doorway, so she could slip past, and she snuck forward, flung her bag to the floor, slap, turned and went, and was back outside, her boots clack-clack-clacking across the asphalt before I’d quite managed to think the thought to its conclusion:

  She’s in my class.

  Fuck.

  Because you’ve been there too, haven’t you, you’ve been there in that class, when you’ve fallen in love with one of the others, on the first or third day, and the room seems to grow infinitely small, cramped and it’s hard to sit at your desk, and there’s nowhere to fix your gaze, because if you look at her, or him, everybody will notice, and if you look the other way, look up, look at the wall, look beyond them and at the blackboard, as if that one particular person doesn’t exist, they’ll notice that too, and they’ll think you really overrate yourself, sitting like that pretending you don’t care. Because it can’t be hidden. You’re totally transparent. Cellophane. And as breakable.

  I waited for a few seconds, looked around the room, where was she likely to sit? Should I take the plunge, try to get as close as possible to her, or lie low for a while? She’d sit way in the back. Guaranteed. I put my backpack next to the desk in one of the front rows, saw Jørn’s bag near the door too, fetched it and put it next to my desk. There.

  Then I ambled out, went quickly down the steps, jumping the last two and went past nearly my whole class, but nobody said hello, nobody said anything, they were busy talking about this and that, I passed by them unseen and found Jørn and Roar sitting on a bench, first years spread across the entire grounds, sitting on the asphalt in groups of two, three, four, clinging onto each other’s company, trying to look cool. Some of the new girls were taking a sneak look at Roar, he was considered one of the best lookers in the school, rumors about him traveled all the way from neighboring schools, he had so many friends, was friends with everyone and seemed totally unaffected by it, there seemed to be no division between important and unimportant people for Roar, as long as they were decent and reliable he was content no matter where he was.

  “Damn rain,” said Jørn, trying to roll a cigarette, the paper sticking to his fingers and lips, tobacco around his shoes, this was not his first attempt.

  “May I?” I said, pointing to his rollie, and he handed me the packet, peeled the Rizla paper off his fingers, scrunched the little pieces up and flicked them into the bushes, one, two.

  “Have you got any idea who’s left our class?” asked Jørn.

  “Nope,” answered Roar. I was busy rolling cigarettes. I had the knack, had the fingers for it, even though I didn’t smoke, swiftly made, they were perfect, two cigarettes of just the right thickness and there we sat, on a wet bench, in the second year, before Norwegian class, killing time.

  “I think Bertine’s left. Not sure, but I think somebody said it,” said Jørn.

  “Christ,” said Roar, “oh well, didn’t expect anything else. You know where she’s gone?”

  “No idea.”

  “So who was it that told you, then?”

  “It was Anniken that said it. Don’t know where she got it from, didn’t ask,” said Jørn.

  “But wasn’t Anniken going to leave? I thought she was going to Kongsgård.”

  “Yeah, that’s true,” said Jørn. “You’re right. Oh well, she’s still here anyway.”

  “Christ,” said Roar.

  It had almost stopped raining, just a fine drizzle now, but it was still wet in the air, our jackets clung to our arms, swamp-like.

  “So is there anyone new, then?” asked Roar.

  “In our class?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Not that I know of. Mattias?”

  “Don’t know,” I said, and added: “I think there’s a new girl. Bumped into one when I took my backpack in.”

  “Pretty?” asked Roar.

  I stared into the ground, it was boiling hot under my jacket, I felt huge, clumsy.

  “Kind of. All right, I guess.”

  Then they looked at me. For some moments. Jørn picking tobacco strands off his lips. You’ve got to be careful what you say. I’d only seen her once, for an instant. I might have been wrong. Or I might have been right. And if I’d said she was pretty, I’d have given them something to think about. Now they had to make up their own minds, and at worst I’d have the advantage. They’d have to take my verdict into account, judge whether their eyes were deceiving them, was she really that pretty? It was complicated, a Rommelian strategy. It was Norwegian next, and the bell went off.

  But we waited. We waited and didn’t go in, and Jørn slowly finished smoking his cigarette, while we watched the first years get to their feet determinedly, grab their backpacks and dash off clasping their schedules and classroom maps. We knew where to go, we’d been here before, we knew our teacher, that he was always late. We’d been in this country for a while now, I thought, gone through some decisive battles, we’d crawled around in this jungle for a whole year, hence our dark glances. The first graders had just been flown in, squeaky clean. Xin Loi. The noise of helicopter blades whirring up gold-brown dust and chewing gum wrappers in palm trees as Jørn stubbed his cigarette out and we began walking towards the classroom.

  I made sure to lag behind Jørn and Roar by a few feet, so as to be able to sneak in after them when they entered the classroom, and take a look around the room, see who was new, and in particular to see if She was there. I looked round. And there she was. Sitting, of course, at the very back of the classroom, as I’d assumed she would, alone, it seemed, but then Annette came and sat next to her, they began to chat, to get their books out, and I should have realized she’d end up being Annette’s friend. Nothing wrong with that. Annette was definitely one of the nicer girls, it seemed, even if I’d never talked to her. I went over to Jørn who’d sat down where I’d placed his bag, sat down next to him, began rummaging for my Norwegian textbook, I’ve no idea why, I knew exactly where it was, the third book in. It had been like that for years, frightened of forgetting my books I always t
ook them all with me, gave myself a bent back.

  Jørn had forgotten his pencil case, needed to borrow a pencil from me, no, he wanted a pen, I had one of those too, then the teacher came in, and he looked like a mimeograph copy of how he’d looked on the last day before the summer, just as pale, but with sharper contours, the same nine-day-stubble, the same glance, and if I wasn’t mistaken, and I wasn’t, he was wearing the same clothes. There was silence as he put his briefcase on the table, and we all expected him to let out a sigh, to sink into his chair, burned out. But Herr Holgersen, middle-aged Holgersen, smiled, smiled at us all. And he welcomed us back.

  Then he started talking, and we learned all there was to learn about Dag Solstad’s writing, his books about high-school teachers who’d had a tough time down the years, about the war, about betrayal, about all those hard-working folk, and I sat in one of the front rows, tried to take notes as usual, but I felt a burning somewhere in my neck, a stinging, I couldn’t concentrate properly, it was so hot, had to put a hand at the back of my head, and Jørn looked at me, half turned toward me to see if someone had thrown something or other at me, but nobody had, and I stared into the desktop, aware that sitting behind me in that room was a person about whom I still knew nothing, a person who had started in my class, for some reason, and who threatened to sweep me out of my anonymous existence and the classroom had become so much smaller, so cramped, since she’d arrived.

  During break times throughout the rest of the day I wandered aimlessly as usual, or sat with Jørn and Roar on the bench under the rain shelter, Jørn said something or other about his brother, and Roar answered, I didn’t catch what he said, I sat sniper-like waiting for her to come out, and she did, she came out every break, always a bit late, stood in the middle of the playground with a gang of girls from Class C, under the basketball net, obviously knew some of them from before, and that was about the only reason I could imagine for her being here at all, it was a well-known fact that kids that applied for Hetland College did so for one reason only. Hetland, and perhaps St. Svitun’s too, was the school you applied to if you weren’t prepared to work your arse off for the next three years, if you were already getting fed up. Rumors were rife, and the rumors said that Hetland was the school your average students disappeared to, the ones who cheated on tests, the ones that overslept for exams, the ones who didn’t turn up until third period, the ones that left early, turned homework in late, the ones that didn’t really know what to write on their university application forms two years later. I’d always imagined I’d go to Kongsgård, that was the Cathedral school in Stavanger, or perhaps St. Olav, I was a good student, did my homework, reviewed for tests, took notes in class, came prepared, tried to glide through it all without any glitches, didn’t get in anybody’s way, didn’t want to, aimed to be easy going, easy to get along with, which was probably why I ended up at Hetland, because Jørn wanted to go to Hetland, Hetland was, according to him, the happening place, it had a theatre society, The Munin Theatre Society, more underground than Kongsgård’s hundred year old Idun Society and thus more exciting. Progressive. Jørn liked drama, going on stage, standing up front, Jørn wanted to be seen, loved or hated, didn’t matter much which, and of course he got involved with the theatre, later Roar came into the picture too and built stage sets, Jørn got a part, not the one he’d wanted, the lead, he never got that, but one of the others, four lines in the second act of the show Wanna a Review? February 1986. I didn’t get tickets for the premiere, they were grabbed that year by the more excitable kids, elbowing their way to the front of the line by the door of the theatre club. Instead I waited until the performances were well underway, and one Wednesday evening in mid-February I took the bus out to Hetland, ticket in hand, hand in bobble-jacket pocket, tracked footprints in the snow up to the gym, that was where it all happened, there inside the gym and behind the big curtain, was the stage. Took my seat, had asked for a seat in the center of the hall, sat there, jacket on, hot under the oversized lighting rig that hung from the ceiling, and waited for Wanna a Review? to start. It wasn’t that great, Jørn recited his lines with precision, though they were rather quiet, rather shaky, and the thin flat Roar had built was rickety, it trembled every time somebody crossed the floor. But they did it, their review, and I was there, sitting in the middle of an enthusiastic, laughing crowd that I didn’t know, but that I’d become a part of somehow, in the dark, and we laughed, poked each other’s sides at the crudest jokes, the most mocking songs, and then, when the performance was over, we went our separate ways, me in mine and the others in theirs, and the next day I discovered Jørn had become massively popular, that was all it had taken. Four good lines. More people started coming over to where we stood during the break, people who wanted to talk to Jørn, or to Roar, when Jørn was busy. And then I’d move aside, take a step back, open the circle for new people, searched my brain to see if I had something to say, but never did, don’t know why, I just liked to stand there listening, an observer, pretending not to exist, as though I couldn’t be seen, which was why nobody ever talked to me apart from Jørn and Roar, or even looked in my direction. Which suited me fine. I had my place. I had control.

  But somewhere inside, deep inside me, I, the great cog, craved all the attention the world could offer. Just once.

  I’d take the bus into town after school, pick up my bicycle that was locked to the rack outside Romsøe Farm and trudge up toward Storhaug. That was my routine. In the morning I’d ride down from Kampen and into town, lock up my bike and take the bus to Hetland High, and then the reverse back home. Apart from on Wednesdays when I had a lesson with Fru Haug. Fru Haug was a singing teacher, I took private classes at her apartment in Nymannsveien, she hated anyone who arrived late or early, but loved boys who had pure singing voices and were neatly dressed, and to her eyes, modern.

  Actually it was none other than Alexander L. Kielland that got me singing in the first place. Not the author, I’ve never had much of a relationship with him, never got the point of Poison, never quite understood our teacher’s fascination for Garman and Worse with its bitter Pietists hiding behind their curtains. No, it was the oil rig. You remember? It happened in 1980, on March 27 of that year, out in the North Sea on the Ekofisk oil field, at 6:30 P.M.. You remember? One of the legs of the Alexander L. Kielland platform gave way in hurricane gales and giant waves, metal fatigue or an explosion in several of the stays caused one of its five legs to be torn loose, the Alexander L. Kielland keeled over and less than thirty seconds later the platform lay in the sea at a forty degree angle, less than twelve minutes more and the world was turned on its head, the derrick was scraping the bottom and the worst catastrophe in the offshore oil industry was a reality. On the mainland, Stavanger stopped for a moment, Stavanger held its breath, to no avail, only 88 out of the 211 men came back, came home, 123 people disappeared into the water, trapped, shut in the theater where they’d been spending the evening watching movies, unable to find their way out in the chaos and pitch dark, just twelve brief minutes divided an ordinary day from the worst, and a monumental hush settled over the town that day, almost everybody knew somebody who’d been on board or their families, but nobody knew what to say, and time passed, the rig was righted again, but not all the men were found, even after three years, some of them were gone forever and it was summer again, 1983. Jørn gave me a birthday present, his first, he was visibly proud as he handed me a flat package, stood grinning into my living room floor as I ripped the wrapping off and seconds later held an album in my hand, Mods—America. I was thirteen and the Mods were the best thing ever, for us and the rest of town, we were crazy about them, and on that album, their second, was a track called “Alexander,” a comparatively gloomy affair, with lyrics I found pathetic to put it mildly, thought they were about some teenage kid running away from home and tear-jerky family stuff, I didn’t make the connection until Jørn pointed it out, we were over at his house listening to the record for the third time that afternoon, and I was ranting
about how this was the weakest song on an otherwise perfect album.