Later, at upper secondary, we met other girls from other parts of the Bergen area. We learned to go on long cycling trips to Sandviken or up to Inndalen, we went to Paradis and Laksevåg and learned the names of new streets in the town centre and in Skansen. There were girls who were passing ships in the night and there were girls who stuck around for a while, whose names always sent a tingling sensation into your abdomen when you repeated them later. Girls who were etched in your brain, like pictures. Gro, with rain running down her face, a light-blue waterproof and a tense, white tendon on the side of her neck, 139under a tree somewhere in Fana, when the whole class was on a bike ride. Svanhild with straight, dark hair, who I had two long dances with on a school trip to Mjølfjell while the Everly Brothers sang ‘I’ll do my crying in the rain’. There were seasons that made your senses reel, grappling with bra straps and suspender belts, stocking elastic and tight bodices, the scents of lily and honey, freshly mown hay and ripe fruit. There were breathless rides across endless mountains of wanton desire, dreams upon dreams upon dreams, until one day, for one entrancing moment, one blessed soul offered you their goblet of wine to taste, gently, oh, so gently, with a condom purchased amid much clearing of the throat across the chemist’s counter in Jonsvollsgaten, pulled on like leggings to protect you against snowdrifts and sudden changes of temperature: a girl called Elisabeth who was short-sighted, but who had finally taken off her glasses, in her parents’ bed, in borrowed sheets…

Faces merging into faces. Only one was clearer than all of the others. Through all these years of to and fro, there was no one more present than Rebecca.

I closed my eyes.

Rebecca.

Rebecca and Johnny Solheim.

I opened them again and shook my head.

I hadn’t seen her for so many years, it was impossible for me to imagine her in his arms, unless it was another Rebecca, not the one I had seen in the photograph Jakob had given me. A younger Rebecca. ‘My’ Rebecca. Rebecca who moved from our street in 1956 and I met again two years later when we started at upper secondary.

A few moments remain fixed in my memory. One such moment was the time in the gallery of the local parish hall when 140our eyes met in a tacit vow while her father was preaching to the congregation below. Another was the August day in 1958 when we arrived at the venerable, yellow school building that concealed a ramshackle gymnasium evil tongues claimed was from Ludvig Holberg’s day and a new-build that still smelt of glue and paint, after only six months’ use. She stood there in a crowd of girls, her back half turned, and I walked in a semi-circle to catch her eye. I saw that it really was her, and she came over to me and said shyly: ‘Hi, Varg.’ I said: ‘Hi.’ Then it turned out we were in the same class.