Child Wonder Read Free Page B

intertwine her long, slender fingers, as if splicing two ends of a rope, and spoke in a staccato manner, and at quite a speed, about her job, about demanding customers, as far as I was able to gather, who were always after her with all manner of criticism, not to mention the condescending owner, she also brought up a matter which made Mother totally change character and shoo me into the bedroom before I could glean any further clarification.
    Through the door I heard talking, intense mumbling and what sounded like crying.
    As time went on, they seemed to be on the verge of reaching agreement, there was even some hysterical laughter. And when at last Mother opened the door, I thought they had become the best of friends. Instead it turned out that Ingrid Olaussen had departed, leaving Mother more thoughtful than ever as she prepared dinner.
    “Isn’t she going to live here?” I asked.
    “No, she will not, I can promise you that,” she said. “She hasn’t got two øre to rub together. Her life is all over the place. And she’s not even called Ingrid Olaussen, either …”
    I wanted to ask how Mother could know all of this. Or to enquire how a total stranger might open her heart to her in this way. But a strange unease had settled over me in the course of the half hour I had spent in the bedroom, and the answers to the two questions must have been that Mother already knew her or she recognised herself in this woman. I didn’t want to hear confirmation of either, I preferred to concentrate on my food, but was nevertheless left with a quite tangible feeling that there were sides to Mother of which I had little understanding, not just her sudden absence the day before, on Thursday, for which ultimately there was a reason, a sofa, but the fact that a total stranger could enter our hitherto uneventful but now over-renovated home life, break down on the new sofa, divest herself of all her secrets and then be chased away again; I was not only facing an insoluble riddle but a riddle to which I perhaps never
wanted
to find a solution.
    I sat stealing furtive glances at her, my nervous, frightened of the dark but on the whole so stable and immortal mother, my bedrock on earth and my fortress in heaven, now wearing an unrecognisable face.

3
    The lodger project was now put on hold for a few weeks, as though Mother was afraid to have a new mystery darken her door. But, as I mentioned before, we had committed ourselves to an agreement to save backwards, so there was no option but to put another advertisement in the
Arbeiderbladet,
at fifty øre a word. She was still testy and distracted: she put the wrong things on my slices of bread, she didn’t listen when I was telling her things and she lost her place when she was reading aloud in the evenings.
    “Anyway you can read better than I can now,” she said defensively when I protested. But that was not why I had learned to read, we had a heap of books, and we were going to read them all, children’s books, Margit Söderholm, the Jalna series, an encyclopaedia called
Heimskringla
and Captain Marryat’s
Peter Simple,
as well as one solitary book left by my father, a Finnish book entitled
The Unknown Soldier
by Väinö Linna which we had not read yet and which, according to Mother, we had no plans to read, all piled up in a box in my bedroom waiting for the bookcase which we would buy on credit, if only we could hook this damned lodger of ours. And it was on one of those occasions when she wasn’t listening that it struck me I was someone else, I had changed. It wasn’t a clear or a palpable feeling, but intrusive enough all the same for me to ask:
    “Which of us are you talking to now: me or him over there?”
    This did not go down well.
    “What do you mean?” she snapped, and lectured me about my being quite incomprehensible at times, a lecture she had delivered once or twice before, perhaps it had something to do with my being aboy and her thinking life would have been easier