Child Wonder by Roy Jacobsen Read Free Book Online

with a sly smile.
    That night I took the encyclopaedia with me to bed and read the whole article about King Sverre, and although there were several words which not even Kristian used, I felt that he had been quite right.

5
    Mother, however, did not like these visits of mine to his room. I should not disturb the lodger, I was told, and furthermore she didn’t like me staying inside for so long after I had knocked and waited for him to say “Come in” – sometimes he didn’t say “Come in”, and then I didn’t go in. The worst thing was that I came back out with all kinds of information, the average temperature in the Svalbard archipelago or the Norwegian consumption of aquavit, 3.3 million litres per year, but they had not managed to pour more than a tenth as much red wine down their throats, this was not the sort of thing to stuff into the head of a young kid.
    “I am not a young kid.”
    Moreover, I could tell her that what we had always called“red sausage” was in fact known as salami and that Einar Gerhardsen, the Prime Minister, was not to be trusted even though we voted him in time after time. So an end was put to these evening visits of mine. I was not even allowed to go in and return the microscope I had been lent to study the mesh in Mother’s nylon stockings. She did it for me. But when she re-emerged her cheeks were red, and she wanted to know if the lodger always hung his underwear over the curtain rod to dry.
    I had no idea. But she collected herself for a new foray and ran in again to say that she did not want any underwear hanging in the window for the whole estate to see.
    “Alright,” Kristian said, unmoved. “But where should I dry it? Or wash it?”
    The upshot was that he would have his own basket for dirty laundry, so that he could carry it down to the wash-house when it was her turn to wash, and throw it into the drum, after which she would hang it up for him, in the drying room. I had a feeling that this arrangement was to avoid having to touch his dirty clothes. That was Kristian’s interpretation, too. And there wasn’t much contact between us over the next few weeks.
    That autumn the suppliers went on strike, Omar Hansen’s more or less ran out of stock, and it took Mother ages to find all the things we needed on her way home fromhe shoe shop. One afternoon, though, we found a large box in the hallway, with margarine, bread, potatoes, fish balls, a tube of caviar, liver paste, two bottles of Solo, three bars of Freia milk chocolate and right at the bottom two copies of a cowboy comic for me.
    “You shouldn’t have done that,” Mother said.
    “Why not?” Kristian said, who, like Frank, had connections, in the union, he said, and Mother didn’t. On the contrary, it was her union that was behind the strike.
    “You could at least keep it in the fridge for me, couldn’t you?”
    It was the same sort of arrangement as with the T.V., which Mother and I now watched every night, legally, since she had paid the licence fee in her name. Kristian was making greater and greater inroads into our lives, no matter what she did.
    “How much do you want for it?” she ventured.
    “What is it with you?” he said with annoyance and went into his room, closing the door after him. And the box stood there for an hour or two before Mother came to her senses and put the items in the fridge.
    “There’s something not quite right about this,” she said. But then added: “Oh, well.” And she gave me one of the Solos. A Solo in the middle of the week again.
    Afterwards we had one of the chocolate bars as well, and switched on the T.V. to watch “Hit Parade” and a long documentary about a horse carting crates of beer from a brewery round the shops in town. His name was Bamse, bruiser, and he was thirty-two years old, which is a formidable age for a horse. The whole point was that Bamse’s era was over now, not only for him but for the whole of his melancholy race, it was giving way to