“It will always be home.”

“Not for me.”

“I’ll talk to you about that in a few years.”

“If you’re so certain it will remain home, we can just as well move farther away.”

“Bergen is good.”

“Bergen is wet.”

“Wet is good.”

“Home is where the heart is.”

“What?”

“They say home is where the heart is. But it’s a cliché and besides that, weak, linguistically speaking. Hearts can’t be somewhere without the people who have them.”

“Fine. I’ll stop calling Eidesdalen and Ringfjorden home.”

“You can call it what you want as far as I’m concerned.”

“You are home to me.”

“How sweet.”

“Isn’t it.”

“And that’s pretty feeble as well, linguistically speaking.”

“I figured you’d say that.”

But we stayed in Bergen, I accepted it. I accepted a lot from him during that period. We attended the same university college, he studying engineering, I studying journalism, but our free time was our own and we took only the minimum number of classes because there were so many other things going on. It was as if the city, the country of Norway, had just woken up. We looked toward the world, became a part of a huge movement, fought alongside people from all over the world against the Vietnam War, nuclear power, atomic test bombings in the Pacific Ocean. But we also fought our own battles, against the European Community, for legalized abortion and the right to choose, for the conservation of Norwegian natural resources and wildlife.

I remember the back of his neck in front of me in the First of May parade. He always walked a bit more quickly than I did, but unintentionally. He would stop from time to time, catch himself doing it, smile apologetically, and take my hand. Then we would walk a few yards together, before something or other distracted him and pulled him ahead of me again. So I would walk and look at the back of his neck, thinking that he wasn’t wholly mine, but nonetheless knowing that he was. I remember thinking that he walked quickly because of his enthusiasm, engagement. It wasn’t until later that I understood that he maybe just wanted to get it over with.

We each had our own bedsit, but always slept together, usually in his bed—it was wider than mine and his bedsit larger. He had a separate bed recess, almost a separate bedroom. There was something homey about having the living space divided up like that, I thought, something adult, and he had also put more effort into fixing up his apartment, had worked hard to create a home. Mine was just a room where I stayed when I needed a place to sleep and he wasn’t around.