Almost Autumn Read online

  To Jens, Maren, and Liv

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Text

  Afterword

  For more information

  About the Authors

  Copyright

  SUMMER IS OVER.

  The leaves in the dusty streets congregate in great piles along the tenement buildings, dry and crisp, yellow and red, all awaiting inevitable disintegration. The air is bracing and tinged with something, a scent, a rupture. Before long the wind will gather pace and the rain will pour, hammering against windows and asphalt, creating deep furrows in the gravel. Before long the earth will become damp and cold, teeming with reptiles, worms, and beetles that eagerly take all that they need from the soil. Before long the ground will become hard and impenetrable; before long there will be snow. A hard shell will form over the freezing water and white, frosty, rigid blades of grass, giving rest to all that is dead.

  The sun continues to shine, faint and low in the sky, the light falling at an angle across a gateway in the Grünerløkka district of Oslo. Out of the gate emerges Ilse Stern. She walks quickly, smiling. She turns around where she stands on Biermanns gate, the street she’s lived on her whole life. The gray tenement building stands like an empty shell in the dwindling afternoon light, a dormant wall of bricks and closed windows. From the outside it looks like any other tenement building. Four floors, dark curtains, a wrought-iron gate leading to a passageway that houses rubbish bins and a shady backyard beyond it. There is no movement to be seen in the windows of the third floor. From outside it is impossible to see all that moves inside, every breath and pulse and life within.

  Ilse hurries around the corner and out onto Toftes gate. She has done it. She has successfully made her way out of the apartment without her mother ruining her plans with her usual incessant nagging. Not a word about her inconsiderate attitude, or how she only thinks of herself, no demands to consider this or that or the other, and nothing about being back at home before curfew.

  They were both having a snooze after their meal when she left, her mother and father snoring in perfect harmony. Sonja and Miriam were in Torshovdalen Park. Miriam had pestered Ilse to go with them, please Ilse, come with us, we can race each other down the hill. Ha! As if a race at Torshovdalen Park could measure up to Ilse’s plans for that Saturday afternoon; what kind of suggestion was that, today of all days?

  Like a snake, Ilse had slithered stealthily around the cramped apartment to avoid waking her snoozing parents, their heads lolling forward as they napped. Her mother’s handbag hung on one of the pegs in the hallway. Ilse looped the handle over the hook and carefully opened it, rummaging around in the tangle of tissues and receipts until she finally located what she was looking for. She stood before the kitchen mirror and applied the lipstick in thick layers. She pouted, cocked her head to one side, closed her eyes, felt the cool of the glass mirror reflect back onto her face, watched as her breath created a light film of condensation on the surface. Red, pink, full-lipped, ready for kissing. She had brushed her hair one hundred times, first on one side and then the other. She had gazed at her reflection for a long while, checking her profile from the right-hand side and smiling. The kitchen floor was covered in dark hair by the time she had finished. Her mother didn’t like it when she brushed her hair in the kitchen; it’s unhygienic, Ilse, you’ll get hair in our food. Ilse bent over to pick up the stray hairs, gathering them into a ball in her hand and throwing them in the bin. She left a note on the kitchen table before leaving: “Out for a walk.” No further explanation.

  She feels the warmth of the sun on her face and basks in the light, dust blowing up from the road and the leaves crackling beneath her feet as she wades through them. Toftes gate stretches out before her like a broad avenue; she just needs to follow the road down and straight ahead. She is on her way. Everything begins now. She is wearing her summer dress, the white one with red polka dots that Sonja sewed for her; it’s too late in the year to be wearing such a lightweight dress, she knows that, but all the same, if there is one day to wear her summer dress, to really show off her best side, that day is today. It has short sleeves and is made from fine cotton, and one day during the summer, well, on the sixteenth of July at just past four o’clock in the afternoon, to be exact, Hermann had seen her wearing it and had commented on how well it suited her. Now she feels the way that the cold air blows through the fabric, goose bumps rising, the fine hairs on her bare forearms standing up like black antennae. She’ll have to keep her arms behind her back so he won’t notice.

  Ilse quickens her pace as she makes her way along the narrow footpaths through Birkelunden Park. There is no music playing in the pavilion today, there hasn’t been for some time now. Her family often used to spend their Sundays here with many of their neighbors from the same building on Biermanns gate; food in baskets, bottles of pop, and plenty of blankets to go around. She and Sonja would run around with Hermann and Dagny and the other children. Ole Rustad from the fourth floor would ask his wife to dance, moving across the grass with aplomb as he sang and everyone laughed. Things are so different now, so quiet; everyone seems to be on their guard. Paulus Church is just across the street. She looks up at the spire. When she was young, Sonja had convinced her that a man lived up there, a servant in the church with a wooden leg and long, tangled hair. Sonja had told her that the man held a girl captive in a specially created dungeon, starving her until she was no more than a skeleton in spectacles—because she had spectacles, the girl in the story. Ilse had always squeezed Sonja’s hand tightly as they crossed through Birkelunden Park, right up until she must have been twelve years old. She had had so many nightmares about the bespectacled skeleton, had taken so many detours to avoid this very place.

  The large birch trees whisper in the wind. The streets seem wider than usual; there is less dust, less litter. There are four words in her head, four words that have popped up out of nowhere, like a chorus, a march: Everything starts this autumn. Everything starts this autumn. One, two, three, four. Everything starts this autumn. Something is waiting for her; someone is waiting for her. The leaves may plummet from the treetops, the earth may become hard and impenetrable, the rain may fall and the wind may tear through the streets, and the war, the stupid war, it can carry on regardless, because she, Ilse Stern, fifteen and a half years old and in her summer dress and lipstick, she is heading for something warm and red that beats strong, and there is nothing that can stop her.

  People sit chatting in Olaf Ryes Square, some on the grass and others on the green benches positioned in a semicircle around the fountain. Water continues to gurgle and the tall trees cast shadows over the open square where children play tag, running after one another as they laugh and squeal. It seems so long ago that she was one of them, a scruffy little city child with skinny pigtails, darting around in the streets and parks of Grünerløkka.

  Ilse looks for a slender boy with fair, bristly hair and a gap between his front teeth, a boy with delicate, dry hands and a familiar stroll, a boy who smells like Hermann. He is nowhere to be seen. The wind rustles in the trees. She waits.

  A few days prior to this, at quarter past six on Tuesday evening, to be exact, she had heard a knock on her front door. He stood casually in the stairwell, one hand concealed behind his back.

  “Ilse Stern,” he said, as he always did. Except this wasn’t quite like every other time; there was something different about his voice this time, something new.

  “Hermann Rød,” she replied.

  Both fell silent for a moment. Ilse Stern and Hermann Rød. Neither said a word. Ilse stepped out into the stairwell, closing the door behind her. Her mother was sulking in the living room following an argument with Ilse, no doubt gearing up for
her next attack. Was that why Hermann had come; had she and her mother really argued that loudly? Her mother’s voice had reached falsetto levels when she had found out about the flour; what kind of nonsense of yours is this, Ilse, smearing flour all over your face? It was a stupid argument, one of many. Had Hermann been at home, listening to them both as they had screamed at each other? Did she still have any flour on her face? She quickly wiped her cheek.

  “What is it, Hermann?” she asked, a hint of uncertainty in her voice.

  He drew his hand out from behind his back to reveal two slips of paper, waving them in the air before leaning in close to her.

  “Meet me at the pictures on Saturday, five o’clock,” Hermann said. “Row seven, seats eight and nine.”

  Since then she had imagined it all so clearly: Hermann appearing under the canopy of trees as she sits on the bench looking summery in her favorite polka dot dress, the way he gently places his arm around her shoulders and leads her into the darkness of the pictures.

  Oh no, the family from the fourth floor are out for a walk, all of them, the girls running in front and Mr. and Mrs. Rustad not far behind them. Why didn’t she bring a handbag? She could have rummaged through the contents or casually read a book. If only she could hide somehow; she doesn’t want to talk to them, not now. Ole Rustad always makes such a fuss about nothing, joking and laughing, well well well, sitting here in your summer dress, Ilse Stern, we’ll have to tell your mother about this, and who exactly are you waiting for? Ilse turns away, pretends to have discovered something interesting hovering between the tree trunks, moves as if to look more closely, but it’s too late, it’s no good, they’ve already seen her. Ole lifts his hand and begins waving frantically; Karin and Lilly come running toward her.

  “Goodness me,” says Ole Rustad, an inquisitive look on his face. “Is that the young Miss Stern in lonely full bloom?”

  Why does he have to talk like that, making everything sound so over the top?

  “And who is to have the pleasure of your company this evening, my dear?”

  Of course. He just had to ask. She doesn’t want to tell him that it’s the boy next door that she’s waiting for, all dressed up and blue with the cold.

  “Greta Green,” she quickly replies without thinking.

  “Oh really? Greta Green, eh?” Ole repeats, winking mischievously back at her.

  Greta Green. Where on earth did she pull that name from?

  Another half hour passes. She sees no sign of his saunter, his thick, fair hair blowing in the breeze, she can’t smell his Hermann-like scent, and a queue has begun to form outside the cinema. Was it in the park that they had agreed to meet? Or outside the cinema, perhaps? Suddenly she feels unsure, was it five o’clock, row seven, seats eight and nine? On the board outside she can see that the film is due to be screened twice that evening—once at five o’clock and again at seven o’clock. The doors open and the audience files in. Ilse remains alone outside. Her legs are trembling slightly, the hairs on her arms standing up like tiny black barbs; could it possibly have been seven o’clock, row five, seats eight and nine?

  SUMMER. IT HAS BEEN SO BEAUTIFUL. Long, warm days, the sun baking hot and high in the sky above the tenement buildings. Afternoons spent in the cool shade of the lilac tree in the backyard, insects buzzing, Ilse seated on the bench beneath the tree with an open book in her lap. She could just as well have been reading a Chinese dictionary or her mother’s knitting patterns for what it was worth, as the words transformed into tiny black reptiles, inching off the pages, creeping hastily or in their own good time as Ilse stared at the windows to the right-hand side of the third floor of their building. If he were in there then he’d soon catch sight of her, lean out of his kitchen window, call out to her, wave, come down? The creaking of the window latch, footsteps over the wooden floorboards of the passageway, voices, the thud of the building door, the clang of the wrought-iron gate—she analyzed every signal, sat upright, held the book open before her. Her eyes peered out over the top like those of a soldier in a trench, keenly observing everyone who walked from the gate to the door and the door to the gate. And when Hermann appeared, whether coming home or leaving, then she would be there; quite by chance and perfectly poised, an ornamental plant that had suddenly blossomed in the gray backyard. She rested the book in her lap for a moment, shifting ever so slightly to the left to make space for him beside her on her right; her right side was her best side, her profile looked more mature from that angle, he had to see her at her best. They could sit that way for hours. The sun disappeared over the rooftops of the tenement buildings leading toward Vogts gate, the air was cool, there was dew on the grass, they laughed, talked, close to each other on the bench where they sat. Her mother had a habit of interrupting things by leaning out of the bedroom window and waving Ilse inside with quick, irritating hand gestures.

  “Do you know what?” he said one day as they sat in the same spot. He looked at her, smiled cautiously, secretive, as if there was something he simply couldn’t resist telling her. Could this be the moment he would—what was it they always said in her books?—despair his love for her? At the end of every novel that she read there was always a scene like that; the young couple were brought together and all the loose ends in the story were neatly tied up. She straightened up, readied herself, shook her head.

  “I’m starting an apprenticeship with a painter.”

  A tiny stab of disappointment.

  “A painter?”

  He nodded.

  She couldn’t picture it. Hermann had never told her that he could paint or draw; he’d never had any interests of that kind. A painter? Maybe there were things she didn’t know about him, no matter how close they were.

  “Why?”

  “Because I want to,” he said. “And now the opportunity has come up. I’m starting next week.”

  Ilse didn’t know what to say. Congratulations, how nice for you, at least now you won’t be destined to heave crates of beer around forever? She knew how much he hated his work at the brewery. She looked at him. Hermann Rød, the world-famous painter from Grünerløkka, son of a working-class family who now spent his days frequenting splendid cafés; popular, highly acclaimed, yet eternally faithful to the woman who never failed to stand by him through thick and thin: the beautiful Ilse Stern.

  “What are you thinking about, Ilse?”

  She looked at him. His clear blue eyes told of his combined excitement and trepidation.

  “What does your dad have to say about it?” she asked him after a moment.

  Hermann furrowed his brow, his white-blond eyebrows curling upward.

  “I haven’t told him yet,” he replied, picking at the dried paint on the bench. “But I don’t imagine he’ll like it much.”

  Ilse had no trouble imagining that to be true: Hermann’s father, a burly man who had dedicated his life to his work at the Ringnes brewery, securing his own son a job there, a proper job as far as he saw it, and that same son now fancied taking up painting. No, Tinius probably wouldn’t be overjoyed at the prospect.

  But that was what she liked so much about Hermann. He made his own decisions; he did what he wanted to do. Perhaps he had discovered that he was an artist at heart, and that his work at the brewery wasn’t right for him; maybe this had been a long-held dream of his without him ever uttering a word about it to anyone. And so he went for it all the same, because he wanted to.

  “Good luck,” she said, as she caught sight of her mother’s hands waving from the open bedroom window.

  It was something that had sneaked up on her that summer, something that she hadn’t been prepared for, but now there it was, it had latched on, like an insect savoring sweet, fresh blood. Love. Everything that she had read about it, everything that she had readied herself for, all she had imagined, and yet here it was. Would it really appear here, in a backyard in Grünerløkka, in a dark passageway that smelled of all the things that people threw out, in the same place where they used to catch rats
and mice? They had lived side by side all their lives, each in their own family’s apartment on the third floor of number ten Biermanns gate, three steps separating the door of one apartment from the door of the other. They had been married beneath the lavender tree when she was five and he was seven. Dagny Larsen from the first floor had presided over the ceremony; do you take this woman to be your lawfully wedded wife, she had solemnly asked, giggling with the other children who stood in a circle around the couple. I do, Hermann had announced loud and clear, and then Dagny had told them that they had to kiss, everybody had to when they got married, how horrible, Ilse had been having such fun up until the part with the kissing, she had cast aside her dandelion bouquet and hidden in the building’s basement.

  Hermann Rød. The hero. A hero who wasn’t tall and olive-skinned, like they usually were in novels. Ilse said no when she meant yes and yes when she meant no, her palms were prone to sweating, and it was an effort simply to coordinate the movement of her arms and legs. And suddenly there she sat, glued fast to the gray planks every afternoon on the bench under the lavender tree, waiting. They were friends. Oh yes. But at the same time, wasn’t there something about his hands, his rough fingers, the way they stroked her arm, the way that he always nudged her as they chatted; was it purely coincidental?

  And now here she is, wet through in the passageway and with no idea what to think. She had waited for the next show to start, queued up yet again, hoped that she had made an error, that perhaps it was seven o’clock, row five, seats eight and nine that he had said after all. Two men in uniform had approached her, spoken to her in German, offered her a cigarette. She had turned away, the two men had continued walking, but then they had stopped a little way from her, stood there and stared at her, and they had laughed, yes, they had so obviously laughed at her. In the light from the windows of the cinema she had seen her own reflection: pale with pursed lips, her wet hair sticking to her face, her body shapeless and scrawny, trembling with cold in her polka dot dress. She had felt the rain tickling her hairline, the damp, heavy air and the steam rising from the pavement.