A Very Scandinavian Christmas, Page 3

  Then a lad came and chopped the tree into small pieces, till a large bundle lay in a heap on the ground. The pieces were placed in a fire under the copper, and they quickly blazed up brightly, while the tree sighed so deeply that each sigh was like a pistol shot. Then the children, who were at play, came and seated themselves in front of the fire, and looked at it and cried, “Pop, pop.” But at each “pop,” which was a deep sigh, the tree was thinking of a summer day in the forest; and of Christmas evening, and of “Humpty Dumpty,” the only story it had ever heard or knew how to relate, till at last it was consumed. The boys still played in the garden, and the youngest wore the golden star on his breast, with which the tree had been adorned during the happiest evening of its existence. Now all was past; the tree’s life was past, and the story also—for all stories must come to an end at last.

  1845

  ANOTHER STAR

  Ingvar Ambjørnsen

  LESTER CALLED AROUND TEN O’CLOCK. IT WAS THE NIGHT BEFORE Christmas Eve, and the streets in town were about to disappear under all the snow. A strong wind was blowing in from the fjord; it whipped the crystals into the smallest cracks, and formed a fairy-tale landscape out in the backyard. I had been sitting in my chair by the window drinking red wine. I had probably reverted to my childhood, because something of a boy’s enjoyment over a heavy snowfall blossomed in me. It was lovely to see the neighbor’s gateway being slowly choked, becoming covered with all this whiteness. I sat there alone with my Christmas peace. The woodstove whistled and hissed by itself as the humidity in the birch logs was squeezed out through the flues.

  I didn’t want to answer the phone, but then I remembered that I had a frail mother in another part of the country.

  As I said, it was Lester. He felt it was high time to share a Christmas star or two. And to my own surprise, I said yes. I got dressed at once and walked outside.

  The town was almost deserted. Only from the bars could I hear noise and laughter. Lester lived in one of the old shacks down by the river. The streets were not ploughed there; I was walking in snow halfway up to my knees. When I arrived, I brushed the worst off before I went into the stairwell. He had left the door open a crack on the first floor. I could hear him rummaging around in the kitchen.

  “You were sitting in your chair again, weren’t you?” He was making himself a huge packed lunch. Slices of bread covered the whole table; he cut long yellow strips off the cheese.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “That chair will eat you one day. It’s not just me who’s worried.”

  I sat down on the log crate.

  “This weather’s quite a gift,” he continued. “And the forest stands exactly where it stands, indeed.” I tried to get him to see that he had, indeed, gone mad.

  “You make the tea,” he continued. “Water’s boiling.” He piled the slices of bread on top of one another, and made two huge parcels. Later we filled two two-liter thermoses with tea.

  “I’m not dressed for any North Pole expedition,” I said.

  “No,” he said. “I know that.”

  I shouldn’t really have been surprised. I had known him for so long. Lester was a man of objects. The whole house was filled to the brim with furniture and lamps, brass candleholders, paintings, carpets and ornaments. In the bedroom he had a closet the size of my own living room. But when he took me in there and showed me the two Italian pilot uniforms from the Second World War, I still became a little dumbfounded. I’d never seen an Italian pilot uniform before. It was sown as one piece, and from the crotch a zipper ran all the way up to the neck. The hood could be pulled down to the top of the eyes, and tied up. The uniforms were fully lined, both the legs and the sleeves, and they were stiff from green impregnation. When I’d managed to get into mine, I looked like the Michelin Man. The boots were original, too. They, too, were lined, and made of thick leather that Lester had greased with pork fat. They reached up to my knees, and when I folded the trouser legs over them and tied them, I was armed for the Pole journey I had talked about after all. A snowstorm here in Norway was no big deal. I helped Lester to put on his outfit. Then we took our backpacks and waddled back to the kitchen. It was hard to move. Your arms were pushed out from the body, and you automatically attained a broad gait.

  Lester found the two red stars. They were tiny and lay sparkling in his sweaty hand. I recognized them from before, and felt they were safe. It was strong stuff, but with a somewhat speedy engine, which made it quite easy to keep control. We ate one each. Then we packed our backpacks and left.

  Outside the weather had now gone totally insane. We had to lean into the wind. Now and then the gusts hit us with such force that we almost toppled over. I was still feeling warm and cozy behind my impregnated shield. When we were halfway to the town center, Lester stopped and pulled off his backpack. He rummaged in it, and pulled out two pairs of goggles that belonged to the armor. We now looked completely and utterly like two Italian pilots from the Second World War. The plane was the only thing missing. I even had a pair of stripes on my sleeves, and a single distinction of some sort above the left breast pocket.

  We caught the very last bus from the bus terminal. Every time we stopped to pick up new passengers, there were people who thought they were seeing things. The bus rose slowly up above the town, and its lights lay flickering beneath us in the sea of snow. In between the heavy trees we caught glimpses of lit-up windows in villas we couldn’t see. We were the only ones who got off the bus at the last stop. The old bus turned and drove back. There were no houses up here, nothing but dark forest and white snow. When we took our first steps into this eerie witch’s wood, I noticed the LSD seeping through me like a warm, electric quiver. Here there was no path. We cut in through the spruce trunks, and the white layer came up to our thighs. But it was colder up here in the hills. The snow was dry, and it was easy to wade through it. The contrast between the black forest and the white snow was overwhelming. We were moving inside a black-and-white film. The colors were dead, and that gave us a sense of great peace. We didn’t talk; it wasn’t necessary, besides it was impossible. The wind would sweep our words out into the nothingness before they reached the other person’s ear. And I thought it was good this way. Good to walk in this wordless landscape of friendly spruce trees and piercing wind. The thought that only a couple of hours ago I was sitting in an armchair drinking wine, seemed absurd. This is where I belonged. I was an immense landscape, an ur-mensch; it breathed, I breathed in it, it breathed in me. As we got deeper into the forest, the snow was reaching up to our chests, we let ourselves fall forward, we sank down into the whiteness. I became a pupa; a fluid solution encapsulated in a shell; soon I would step forth as something new, something different. How utterly fed up I was with all those years I had behind me, years in the pupa phase, all the time which had been lost to meaningless word-wrangling.

  After more than two hours we arrived at a cleared forest path. We brushed the snow off our pilot uniforms and continued into the nothingness. We had no idea where we were, just that we found ourselves at quite a distance from the social democratic control system, where two and two had a nasty habit of turning out to be four. We stopped somewhere to eat our sandwiches. They hit the spot … I can’t describe it, but I understood that it was the first real bread I had ever had in my mouth. I could clearly feel how the nourishment forced its way into my body as I chewed and swallowed.

  We kept going. It was approaching five o’clock in the morning, and the twists of fate led us once more in the direction of civilization. The forest path we had followed turned into an avenue of villas; we suddenly found ourselves among the most expensive properties at the top of the ridge. One villa after the other became visible through the snowfall; they looked like huge UFOs, millionaire mansions from another planet. The yellow outdoor lights in entrances and entryways danced in front of our eyes, pulsated, grew, contracted. The top of the snowbanks were above our heads; it was like walking in a glittering tunnel.

  Here! Leste
r thought. He didn’t say it, I’m absolutely sure of that, and at that very moment I noticed how tired I was. We had a massive physical exertion behind us. Now our legs gave up on us. The acid was thumping around in my consciousness, I saw myself from outside, I saw that my own batteries were almost flat, saw the aura that contracted toward the body. I couldn’t go on. I just wanted to sleep until next year.

  Lester took off his backpack and took out his collapsible spade of light metal. It seemed so natural, I remember. Like all Norwegians, it came through our mothers’ milk. Trouble in heavy snow? Dig yourself down. Dig yourself down in time. Lester attacked the snowbank, and I used my hands to help. He cut neat blocks out of the compact snow, and put them aside; they would form the outer wall. Later we dug ourselves straight in, before we continued at a sharp right angle.

  It was another world. Another star. We lay next to each other on Lester’s ground pad. The round concave roof above us made me think of the uterus I came from. It wasn’t cold. We had lit a candle, and lay and watched the flame, and the shadows playing across the smooth walls. Because of the heat created by us and the candle, a thin layer of ice, a fine glazing, was forming over walls and ceiling. It was utterly impossible to grasp that we were actually lying in a cave in one of the town’s most exclusive residential streets. Outside it was still dark, but now and then the odd car drove past. As they passed the covered-up cave entrance where the snow cover was at its thinnest, the front lights threw a warm glow into our room. There was something almost physical about that light, we could put our hands into it, fetch warmth from it.

  Lester took out two more trips. We had one each. Then we fell asleep.

  I had never experienced anything like it. Waking up from an LSD high. It’s a state beyond anything else, because the memory of what you have ingested has totally gone. When you wake up in a snow cave under such conditions, you’re instinctively one with the cave, it’s a part of you, it has always been like that. For an infinite time, I, together with this strange figure next to me, the one who is another aspect of myself —have been here. Here I am in my own ur-form, the cave man, the embryo. The muffled sounds from outside, the lights sweeping across the arched ceiling every time something passes out there in the strangeness, that’s everything I can’t know anything about. I’ve no desire to be born one more time. I remember in details the sound and light shocks from the last time, the intense discomfort of physical existence in time and space.

  Lester woke up, too. He said something. I don’t know what, but it was green and pink. He lit the candle again, and I happened to glance at my watch. It was an amusing watch. When I moved my left arm back and forth, the green light from the luminescent hands trailed behind like thin threads. For some reason the watch showed four thirty. That didn’t tell me much. I had no idea that I’d slept for almost twelve hours. In a residential area. In a snow cave in a snowbank. I was utterly and fully present in the here and now, bereft of morals, ideas, doubts and beliefs. I was here. In what was my own. The wall was smooth when I moved my hand over it. There was something sensual about this cold, this wetness. Now and then we could hear voices from people out on the road. They approached. Then they went away again. I didn’t understand a word, but enjoyed lying like this in half-darkness listening to the melody of the language.

  Time passed. Or time stood still. I don’t know. We were in this vacuum. The candle burning. The sound of our own breaths. Our heartbeats. Then: heavy turns of a shovel. Someone was digging in the snowbank from the side facing the garden.

  “Hello? Is someone there?”

  Language comprehension returned. I was almost in tears, there was something painful about the fact that the blind melody of the words disappeared. The picture of myself as caveman, an embryo swaddled in white, disappeared.

  “Hello?”

  We didn’t answer. We sat utterly motionless in the glow of the candle.

  It was the voice of an adult man. He swore and dug.

  The breakthrough came just at the angle between the narrow passageway and the cave itself. We saw a glimpse of the shiny spade; then the wall fell into the space, and the winter evening revealed itself to us. In the garden three people were buried in snow up to their knees. A man and a woman and a girl aged five or six. The man rested his arms on the spade and looked at us, while he kept shaking his head.

  “I don’t believe it,” he said. “I refuse to believe what I’m seeing.”

  “My God!” said the woman.

  The child began to cry.

  I could understand them. I won’t claim otherwise. I could understand the crying child, the woman who called on the Lord, and the man who couldn’t believe his own eyes. It’s not every day you happen upon two Italian pilots from the Second World War in your own garden. Especially not sitting in a snow cave. On the other hand: Who’s expecting everyday events on Christmas Eve itself?

  “Take it easy,” Lester said. “We’re leaving”

  The man wanted to know who we were, and we explained it to him as best we could, even if I, personally, was not totally sure. Who is anyone, anyway?

  “Did you sleep there last night?” the woman asked.

  “Yes,” we did.

  The child cried and cried.

  “There, there,” the father said and rumpled his daughter’s hair. And to us:

  “It was Helene who found you. She saw the light flicker in the snow.”

  “Thanks a lot,” Lester said. “You remember the story about the three wise men, who followed the light from the star?”

  She nodded, sobbing.

  “It’s Christmas Eve,” the woman said. Then she checked herself, and threw herself into deep Christian waters. “You shall not walk away from here on an empty stomach. The turkey’s in the oven.”

  The man looked embarrassed, but didn’t protest.

  “Nothing much happens up here,” she said. “Everything stands still. It …” She had been drinking much and fast, and the hand that cut the turkey was not quite steady. The set table was swimming in colors; I was clinging to a wineglass. Over in a corner of the living room the lit-up Christmas tree pulsated from electric lights and glass beads. The little lady had long ago waved goodbye to her fears, now she was drinking soda while she was studying us with curiosity. We had taken off our Italian pilot uniforms, but we were still from another planet.

  “Nothing much’s happening anywhere,” Lester said. “It’s snowing and blowing. Now and then Christmas comes.”

  “Well, cheers!” the man said.

  We clinked glasses. It was good wine from their own cellar.

  “I must say!” said the man. “When I tell them this at work. That you …” He laughed happily.

  The turkey swelled in my mouth. For some reason the burning candles on the table made me think about Christ.

  “Imagine!” she said. “That you slept there all night.”

  “Yes,” I said. “And you slept in here. It’s a strange world.”

  “Afterwards we must dance around the Christmas tree,” the child said. “And sing all the songs.”

  “You can bet on it!” Lester said.

  We danced around the tree. We sang all the songs. The woman got drunker and drunker, but she had good manners, and pulled herself together.

  Then there were the presents. The sound of the crackling paper. The colors. Red, green and blue crackling in my brain. The man of the house had, inexplicably, managed to smuggle two bottles of vintage wine under the tree. This touched me, I burst into tears, while Lester was already building a medieval castle with the little girl’s Lego set. I walked into the hallway and cut the distinctions out of my pilot uniform. I gave them to the man, at the same time as I explained to him that he now had a new hobby. My knife I gave to the little girl, who was now Lester’s best friend and master builder. I wanted to give my silver ring to the woman, but she had withdrawn. I saw her in my mind’s eye, lying across a double bed somewhere far inside the large villa.

  The man and I sat an
d talked past each other for a few hours, while we laboriously worked our way through his wine cellar. I became more and more sober for each glass; it was the LSD pulling out of me. Lester was still high; far into his own world of builders. He was working on the eastern tower now, while he constantly reeled off intricate fairy tales linked with the castle. The little girl sat there with big round eyes and open mouth.

  Finally I’d had enough. The man had a good heart, but a social intelligence which allowed him only to circle around French vineyards, plus the importation of luxury cars. Besides, as he got more and more wasted, he entered into a self-reproaching phase, in which he aimed at making me understand that he regretted having arranged his life the way he had. From now on, to hell with material comforts. To hell with status, stress and false friendships. As a young man he’d been very good at drawing. Now he wanted to start drawing again. He wanted to shove the whole job where it belonged, and then he would seriously start to draw. Quite simply, he would become like Lester and me. He probably took it for granted that we dabbled in the arts, as our hair was so messy, and besides, we were walking around in Italian pilot uniforms from the Second World War.