He observed me while considering his response, then he countered my question with another. ‘What did you think when you got confirmed?’334

‘Me?’ I’d been head over heels in love with Rebecca, but she’d moved to another part of town that year so I found my consolation, for a short while, in preparations for confirmation. Perhaps that’s why I took them so seriously. ‘I…’

‘See? It’s not so easy to answer that question, is it,’ he said, looking at me earnestly.

‘Perhaps we should go to church tomorrow?’

‘Should we?’ He sent me a sceptical look, and we didn’t return to the topic until the following morning.

Yes, he was definitely on the way to becoming an adult. He had learned not to respond to what he was asked and to parry all unpleasant questions with a counter-question. There was nothing more I could say. It was like when we played chess; he knew the rules better than his own father. Now we were equals.

335

42

I woke to new light.

At first I didn’t understand what had happened. But then I knew. I had woken to the same light once a year ever since I had been born.

I swung my legs onto the cold floor and walked over to the window. It was overwhelming. It wasn’t only that the first snow had come. It was that there was half a metre of it, which was rare on our side of the country.

As if in muffled triumph, cascades of snow had fallen over the town, settled on roofs and cars, turned streets into unploughed fields of cotton and, because it was also Sunday, there was a silence over Bergen, the like of which I could not remember since the oil crisis and car-free Sundays.

The nearest modern humans come to creation is precisely the day the first snow falls. And God said: Let there be snow. And lo, there was.

I shuffled into the sitting room, where Thomas was asleep on the sofa and shouted: ‘Thomas. Wake up. It’s snowed.’

He grunted from deep in his winter lair, rolled over heavily and carried on sleeping.

I went into the kitchen, brewed some coffee and made some breakfast, surrounded by the same intense light. Getting to Laksevåg now seemed as impossible as skiing across Greenland. But if Fridtjof Nansen had managed the latter, I would manage the former.336

Almost an hour later we were stamping our way up the alley, leaving the first prints in a virgin wilderness, through air still thick with mist, although the sun was already beginning to shine through the thinnest patches.

We dug through the snow to the car, each from our own side, started the engine and skidded with the help of dogged front-wheel drive to the top of the first hill, reached the main arterial road from Mulen and used the ruts left by the morning bus, as deep as the wounds after broken love and as undeviating as a political manifesto.