Beatles

Beatles Read Free

Book: Beatles Read Free
Author: Lars Saabye Christensen
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always on, and it was always opera, and it sounded so lonely, sadder than anything I knew, songs from another world, a world that was grey and still, the singing was so cold and dead. On the walls around me were pictures of faces that also sang, but not a sound emerged, the guitars and drums were silent. The Rolling Stones, The Animals, The Dave Clark Five, The Hollies, TheBeatles. The Beatles. Pictures of The Beatles. And I dreamt about Ringo, John, George and Paul. I dreamt that I was one of them, that I was Paul McCartney, that I had his round, sorrowful eyes that all the girls screamed themselves half to death over. I dreamt I was left-handed and played bass guitar. I sat up in bed, wide awake. But I
am
one of them, I thought aloud, and laughed. I am one of The Beatles.
    It was half past eleven and Mum and Dad had gone to bed. I set to work. There were three titles. The first was impossible.
My Family
. Dad works in the bank and does crosswords. Mum wanted to be an actress when she was young. My name’s Kim. That was no good. The next title was:
A Day at School
. Impossible. Even lying has limits, even for me lying has limits. You can lie up to a certain point and make it sound good. After that it is just insane. I had to take the last one:
Your Plans After Leaving Folkeskole. Folkeskole
until sixteen, then
realskole
. I retrieved my exercise book from a pile of sandwiches. I had been given an E for my previous essay, but my father had written that one:
My Hobby.
Of course he thought that I should write about stamps, even though I only had two three-sided stamps from the Ivory Coast. My father got an E. Then I took a risk. I put a new cartridge in my fountain pen and wrote in ink straight on the page. There was no going back. My spine tingled, the excitement seemed to inspire me to greater things. First of all, I would finish
realskole
and afterwards
gymnas
. Then I would study medicine and become a doctor in a poor country where I would spend my life working with sick black people. I stretched it out to three and a half pages and finished with something about Fridtjof Nansen, but couldn’t quite get the North Pole to fit with black people, and I realised I should have taken Albert Schweitzer, but by then it was too late. I shut the book without reading through what I had written, and the time must have gone unusually fast because I heard the last train to Drammen thunder by, and the whole world was quiet. The rain had stopped. The trams had stopped running. Mum and Dad were asleep. And I was about to fall asleep myself when a limpid falsetto filled the room, coming from above, but it was not God, it was Jensenius, the nightingale, who had started his nocturnal wanderings, back and forth while singing old songs from the time he had been world-famous.
    With Jensenius singing upstairs it was impossible to sleep, even though his voice was nowhere near as sad as those on the radio. Listening to Jensenius was more on the creepy side, but when you saw him it was just comical. He was so colossally big, not so unlike the picture of the man on the IFA salt pastilles, and he was also an opera singer, by the way. That reminded me of something. In the fifth class I had cut out the signature of the man on the pastille packet, Ivar Frederik Andresen, and told Gunnar it was a rare autograph of a world-famous opera singer. Gunnar paid two kroner for it – he collected autographs from everyone from Arne Ingier to Comrade Lin Piao. Gunnar did wonder, though, why it was written on such thick paper. Not paper, I said.
Cardboard
. The finest quality. But why was it so very small? I cut it out of a secret letter, I explained. Three days later Gunnar came over to me and asked if I wanted a salt pastille. And then he took out a packet of IFA and thrust it in my face. He wasn’t angry. Just astonished. I refunded his money and since then there have been no further financial dealings between us.
    But, well, Jensenius, our block’s opera

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