Almost Autumn Read online

  Her skirt and jacket lie behind the waste bin in a crumpled pile. The plan had been so clear when she had left the house that afternoon, her mother would never know a thing about the summer dress, she would change into her jacket and skirt before entering the apartment upon her return, but it hadn’t occurred to her that it might rain. Should she put her jacket and skirt on over the wet dress, or change out of the dress first? She pulls the dry clothing on top of the dress, which clings to her body. It is late, far too late; why had she waited like that at Olaf Ryes Square?

  She is sure she can hear her mother’s voice even from where she stands in the stairwell, short-tempered, thorny, accusatory; she already knows what to expect. She is thoughtless, she has no consideration for others, she can’t saunter around in the belief that she can come and go as she pleases, she is a member of this family and she has to follow the same rules as everyone else. Then the accusations, the pokes and prods at her guilty conscience. They’ve been so worried, her mother was close to a nervous breakdown, any one of these days the stress might break her, she could just snap in two, behaving this way just isn’t acceptable.

  As she reaches the third floor she leans in close to the door of the neighboring apartment. Silence within. Complete and utter silence. She just doesn’t get it; why didn’t he come? He had stood there in front of her, tickets in hand, bought and paid for, five o’clock, row seven, seats eight and nine, she just knows it, she can recite the words by heart. Her summer dress and lipstick, the way she had run along the streets, everything starts this autumn, ugh, she feels embarrassed at the mere thought. She certainly won’t tell Hermann that she waited so long for him, he can never know. If he had forgotten about her then she can forget about him too, exclude him from her thoughts, banished, gone.

  She takes a deep breath before reaching for the door handle. Hello, she calls out as cheerfully as she is able, stepping into the narrow hallway.

  HERMANN LINGERS FOR SOME TIME outside Ilse’s door when he arrives home that evening. In one hand he holds the painting; the other is free. He clenches his fist, his knuckles red and dry. Should he knock? Does he dare? He had imagined that he’d feel calm, as long as he made it home, as long as he made it in through the gate, up the stairs, snatched a moment to compose himself, to shake off his fear. He really thought he might feel clear, determined, firm.

  There is silence within the apartment. Not a sound to be heard. Is she still awake? No, it’s late, she must have gone to bed by now. If he were to knock then he’d have to explain why he hadn’t turned up, and he can’t do that. That is to say, he knows why he couldn’t come, but an explanation that Ilse would believe, something reasonable and straightforward? That’s not something he’s managed to come up with quite yet.

  He makes his way to his own front door and lets himself in.

  The room is dimly lit. The blackout curtains have been drawn, but a lamp continues to burn. His father sits in the armchair by the window. The lamplight illuminates his face, which takes on an unexpectedly soft hue in the dim room. His father is in his string undershirt, his large belly expanding like a taut ball as he breathes in, his chest hairs sticking out through the holes in his shirt. On the table before him are two empty beer bottles and one half full. He takes it easy on Saturday evenings, never drinking until he’s drunk but instead sitting in his armchair and enjoying large, greedy gulps of his beer. He always used to listen to the radio; he would sit and hum to himself, snapping his fingers to the beat. Now he simply sits, drinking his beer and staring blankly ahead.

  “Father?”

  Hermann places his hand gently on his father’s shoulder.

  “Father? Shouldn’t you head to bed?”

  His father jumps, sitting up abruptly in his chair and looking at Hermann as if he were a stranger.

  “There you are,” he says after a moment. “What time do you call this?”

  He wipes his mouth, drawing one hand over his face for a moment before reaching out for the half-full bottle and taking a swig.

  “I know it’s late. I hope you weren’t waiting up for me.”

  “Not me, son,” he responds. “I’d spend a lot of my life in this chair if I made a habit of waiting for you to come home.”

  “Have you had a good evening?” Hermann asks, somewhat hesitantly.

  “No,” his father replies shortly.

  “Sorry to hear that—why not?”

  His father gives a resigned groan, drawing shallow breaths and shaking his head.

  “Your mother’s been out of her mind with worry all evening. We’re getting tired of you not telling us where you disappear off to. Then Mr. Stern came over here asking if you were with Ilse.”

  Hermann can tell from his father’s intonation that the final utterance is more a question than a statement. Hermann had intended to tell his father that he’d been out with Ilse, at the pictures and then for a walk, that time had just run away from them. That won’t work now. He’ll be caught out.

  “I’ve been in Frogner,” he says. Plan B. “Didn’t I tell you?”

  He holds up the painting as evidence, a watercolor landscape in various shades of pastel.

  “Did you paint that?”

  “I did,” Hermann replies, “what do you think?”

  His father snorts.

  “I’ve always said that I don’t know a thing about art. Anyway, what sort of class goes on at this time on a Saturday night?”

  Hermann says nothing. He doesn’t know what to say. No matter his explanation, it will be wrong and his father will resort to the same old comebacks. What was the point in these artistic endeavors, where did Hermann’s sudden interest come from, wasn’t his work at the brewery enough to keep him busy, was he suddenly too good for all that?

  All through the summer Hermann had wondered how he should explain things to his father. First he’d told Ilse. She seemed to find the whole idea exciting. A little strange, perhaps, that he’d kept his talent a secret for all this time, but overall she had seemed impressed. His father, however, reacted somewhat differently.

  “A painter?” he blurted. “Did I hear you right? You want to start an apprenticeship with a painter?”

  He almost spat out the words, as if they were a poison that he couldn’t rid himself of quickly enough.

  “Yes,” Hermann replied. “I’ve always wanted to learn to paint.”

  His father stared at him, openmouthed. He called Hermann’s mother into the room and pointed at Hermann as if he were a rare species of animal in a cage on display.

  “The lad’s going to take up painting,” he boomed, pointing a quivering finger at Hermann’s face. “Do you hear that, Ingeborg? He’s taking up painting!”

  His mother stared, equally openmouthed upon hearing the news. The way they were reacting it was clear that Hermann could just as well have admitted to having shot a man or announced his imminent departure for an expedition to the North Pole.

  “And how do you plan on going about this?” his father asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What I mean,” he repeated in a mocking tone, “is that you have work to attend to. When exactly are you planning on carrying on with this painting malarkey?”

  “In the afternoons,” Hermann replied. “It’s on the other side of town, in Frogner.”

  “Oh, I see, in Frogner is it,” his father replied sarcastically. “I suppose they have plenty of time for that sort of thing on the posh side of town.”

  “I won’t let it affect my work,” Hermann mumbled.

  But it had affected his work. On several occasions he had arrived late, lacked concentration, and fought sleep deprivation after a long night spent on the other side of the city. Once he had lost his grip while transporting a load and twenty-four bottles of beer had come crashing to the floor, smashing into pieces all around him. He felt the foreman’s eyes boring holes into him, clearly suspicious—a suspicion he couldn’t escape, even at home. His mother would swoop in toward him, smelling his
breath. She and his father had convinced themselves that he was drinking too much, spending his time taking booze-fueled wanders on the west side of the city, and that this must be the reason for his late returns each night.

  His father shuffles across the room and into his bedroom, closing the door behind him without saying good night. Hermann tidies up in the living room, unfolds the bedsheet, and lays it out over the sofa before fetching his bedcovers from the blue chest. He lies there for a long while, his eyes fixed on a crack in the painted ceiling.

  If Isak had come looking for Ilse it meant only one thing: She hadn’t come home either. Maybe she’d stood there and waited for him; he can see her now, wonders what she’s thinking. If he knows her as well as he thinks, there will be no shortage of thoughts racing through her head. She can be so dramatic, she’ll no doubt have concocted all manner of stories to explain his absence. Perhaps she’d been afraid for him, imagined that something might have happened to him. He feels warm for a moment as the thought occurs to him.

  He wonders what he’ll tell her when they next meet. How will he work his way out of this? Won’t Ilse be suspicious? There are so many things to keep on top of, so many versions of everything all the time. It’s as if he’s dragging a bureau with an endless number of drawers around behind him, and he has to be constantly aware of exactly which drawer he is opening and which he has to keep closed. He won’t have a chance to speak to her tomorrow morning either: At ten o’clock he has to be back in Frogner with Einar Vindju. We have a lot to do now, Einar had told Hermann before he left this evening.

  Hermann had walked all the way to Frogner that day. The air was cold and crisp but the sun shone, suspended over the city, faint and far off, gently warming the earth below. He arrived at the building on the corner of Frederik Stangs gate, giving three short, sharp rings on the bell. Einar Vindju stood in his doorway when Hermann reached the top of the stairs. Inside the apartment, the glass doors leading into the parlor were open; his studio was filled with tubes of paint, brushes and easels, blank canvases and paintings set out to dry. The scent of chemicals tore at his nostrils. The apartment was enormous; the location was perfect. The neighbors are hard-of-hearing pensioners, Einar had told him on one of his first visits, and they love me.

  Hermann had told Einar about his date at five o’clock.

  “Aha,” Einar said, blowing smoke rings into the air. “With the young Ilse Stern, I presume?”

  Hermann nodded.

  “Yes,” he said, slipping his hand into his jacket pocket to check that he had brought the tickets.

  Why had he done it, bought those tickets? He’d been struck with the idea quite suddenly, hadn’t given himself the chance to change his mind, had simply turned up at the box office and paid. Ilse so wanted to go to the pictures, as did he; he really just wanted to sit down, to disappear into something that had nothing to do with himself. Now the tickets are tucked inside the same jacket pocket, untouched, and he has a problematic explanation on his hands. He is nervous. He can’t get mixed up in anything else, not now, he has enough on his plate. He can’t allow somebody to get close to him, he’s too anxious for that, it would only give him more to keep track of, too many loose threads, too many drawers in the nightmarish bureau that have to remain firmly locked. Things had been so good that summer, he and Ilse out in the backyard. But now, now it is autumn and everything has changed. It won’t work, not now, he has enough to keep on top of. More than enough, really.

  He can’t help but imagine how Ilse will react when he sees her next. He closes his eyes and once again he pictures her, her dark hair, her neck, her body, her little snub nose that he’s so fond of. She’ll be angry with him and he’ll have to take it, as usual, like a pig to the slaughter. He turns over, pulls the bedcovers over his head and hears the sound of his own breathing, short and irregular. He had never anticipated that it would be this tiring to keep on top of everything when they had asked him to be a part of things; he had imagined it all with such clarity, he had been so incredibly angry. Now he longs to renounce his role as the unreliable, inconsiderate boozer and aspiring artist. All he needs is one bloody drawer, just one, one drawer that can remain open regardless of who he is with. Deep within his heart he feels tired of being Hermann Rød. And tomorrow it all continues. The same again the day after that, and the day after that. But for how long, he wonders as he lies with his face turned to the wall, for how long can it really be worth it?

  EVERYTHING IS WHITE.

  Ilse isn’t wearing any shoes. She is up to her knees in snow, standing in nothing but her nightdress; she can feel the cold wind as it rushes through the flimsy material, hitting her body like tiny, sharp pins. She can see the others; soft and blurred, vague figures in the white landscape, wrapped up well against the weather. Mum, Dad, Sonja, and Miriam. She calls out to them, tells them to stop, to wait for her. They can’t hear her, they don’t turn around. They continue to walk away from her, toward a faint, yellowish light that looks like a fire in the process of dying. She watches them walk away, until she can no longer see them and they vanish into a thick, steamy smog.

  “Ilse?”

  A voice. There, from deep within the snow. Slowly it makes its way through the cold air, through the snow and the ice and the smog and all the way to her ear, warm and pleasant. She lies there for a few seconds with her eyes closed as Miriam repeats her name.

  She starts to pick up on other sounds: the clatter of metal and aluminum in the kitchen sink, her mother’s quick, hardworking hands juggling saucepans, the sloshing of the water. Her father whistles a melody from the living room, she’s heard it before, what is it called? The ticktock of the alarm clock on the bedside table, the tram outside the window, and the acute, high-pitched screech of the tracks; they must have opened the window slightly, it all seems louder than usual. Sound carries from the Rustads’ apartment on the fourth floor: Karin and Lilly arguing, one of them crying, another shouting. Everything is so much louder when she lies with her eyes closed like this. Everything seems so fine and delicate, so easily broken.

  “Ilse?” Miriam’s face is at the edge of the bed. “Why did you shout?”

  She’s sitting on the floor with a sheet of paper in her lap and colored pencils scattered by her side: red, green, yellow.

  “Did I shout?”

  “Yes.”

  Ilse sits up in bed; she can feel a prickling sensation in her arm, she must have slept with it beneath her head at a strange angle. She gives it a little shake as if to bring it back to life once again and feels the way that the blood streams back to the affected area, tingling as it makes its way to each finger.

  “What did I say?”

  Miriam looks at her, curious. It’s usually Sonja who talks in her sleep, mumbling words into the darkness; Ilse and Miriam are often woken up by her.

  “I don’t want to be alone.”

  Miriam’s eyes are large and filled with questions.

  “Did I really say that?”

  “Mhm,” Miriam replies. “And then you made a face like this.” She screws up her face and makes a little round shape with her mouth. “Why did you say that, Ilse?”

  Ilse has to think for a moment. What was it that she had been dreaming about? She closes her eyes to help her remember. The snow has disappeared. She is wearing her nightdress but she is warm beneath her covers, at home in her own bed. The others haven’t vanished into a hazy smog. They’re here, all at home in their apartment. It’s a Sunday like any other. The usual sounds resonate throughout the rooms; the usual smells fill the air. Ilse tells Miriam about her dream, her eyes still tightly closed.

  “But there’s no snow now, Ilse. The sun is shining, look.”

  Their mother enters the room. She pauses in the doorway with her arms folded, standing there for a moment without uttering a word. Her green apron is knotted tightly around her waist, her hair in rollers under a thin hairnet, just like any other Sunday.

  “I don’t like it when you stay out so late,
Ilse.”

  Here we go again, God! She had apologized to her mother when she came in yesterday evening, sorry again and again and again, she had allowed her mother to harp on until she had run out of words, and not once had she retorted with a single hurtful word of her own. When Ilse had let herself in, her mother had been sitting at the kitchen table, bolt upright in her chair. Then came the words, a barrage of them, like small bullets fired from a revolver. She should be more considerate. She was a member of this family too, and there were rules, and those rules applied to everyone. She was no exception. Ilse had said that she was sorry, that it wouldn’t happen again. Her mother had calmed down eventually, and before she had gone to bed she had lifted a hand to Ilse’s face and stroked her cheek. But now she was at it again, it was clear that she wasn’t quite done.

  “I didn’t do it on purpose,” Ilse mumbles.

  “You never do, do you? And yet it’s hardly a rare occurrence!”

  Her mother whips off her hairnet in one swift wave and begins to unfurl the hair wrapped around one of the rollers. There’s something about her straight-faced expression, an extra crease at the corners of her mouth. Her nimble fingers set to work teasing out roller after roller, each of which she places in the pocket of her apron as she huffs and puffs through tightly pursed lips.

  “You don’t know what it’s like for us, Ilse. We worry about you. Your father even went over to ask the neighbor if he knew where you were.”

  Ilse sits up. She hadn’t mentioned that part yesterday.

  “The neighbor?”

  “Yes,” her mother continues, “we thought that you might have been with Hermann.”

  “And?”