Self-Control. Stig Saeterbakken

was why he’d gotten into the habit of answering every question he was confronted with so quickly and so pertinently … simply in order to cover up the fact that he was an extremely nervous person? That it was something he started doing because he was so terrified of not having an answer at hand, terrified of being at a loss for words, terrified of being caught out not knowing something? The thought delighted me. Maybe, I thought, all these years I’ve been confusing anxiety with wit, an anxiety Hans-Jacob has spent his whole life trying to hide? Helene’s always seemed pretty clear-sighted where it came to Elise and Hans-Jacob, over the years. But she’s never made the slightest suggestion that Hans-Jacob is in reality quite a different character than he pretends to be. She’s normally so good at being able to see through other people, read them like an open book … and suddenly it struck me … that Hans-Jacob’s role as the dominant party in our relationship had possibly … or most likely … come about as much of a result of importunity and obstinacy on his part, more than any actual intelligence or sophistication. Yes, perhaps even to compensate for the lack of these qualities, I thought, which if he’d had them would have afforded him the natural, as opposed to the hard-earned, role of leader in our almost lifelong friendship. Maybe, in reality … and the thought gave me goose bumps as I went around from machine to machine with the greasing log, jotting down the tiny digits from the counters on each, decimals and all … that it is I who am superior to him, since I find it so easy to allow him take the lead … since I’m so willing to let him triumph … since it doesn’t bother me much letting him outdo me, overwhelm me countless times in the course of a single evening when the four of us are together. And I couldn’t get this thought out of my head … and couldn’t help but ask myself … if this wasn’t true superiority? … this calm certainty … this untapped potential … as opposed to Hans-Jacob’s bluster and cheap triumphs? …

      But these were things I didn’t want to dwell on for too long, for fear of what I’d arrive at if I delved too deeply. I looked over the entries in the log … with feigned concentration … and compared them with last week’s figures … but couldn’t prevent my thoughts from following the trail they’d sighted. Could this be the reason I’ve always joked with Elise? I thought … always being slightly bold and rather inconsiderate toward her … maybe even bordering on offensive at times, for all I know? … with her it doesn’t take much anyway … in order to keep my real feelings about her, and Hans-Jacob too in fact, in check? Come to think of it, I’ve hardly exchanged a serious, let alone a sensible word with her. But there are certain people you have to joke with in order to endure being in their company. Elise is that kind of person. And by way of this jocularity I keep … in all likelihood perhaps have probably always kept … at arm’s length … the fact that I really can’t stand her.

      Of course, Helene for her part misunderstands the whole thing. She’s always perceived my little act with Elise … unavoidably perhaps … as flirting … albeit well within the bounds of decency … She still gets offended when she thinks I go too far. Then you just joke around with Hans-Jacob as much as I joke around with Elise, I was stupid enough to suggest in bed one night after they’d been to visit and we lay talking about the evening. Helene only needed to stick out her jaw and scratch her head like mad in order to get me to shut up and understand that I needn’t repeat my suggestion. It was this parody that first drew my attention to the fact that Hans-Jacob has a slightly protruding jaw, something I’d never previously noticed.

      Helene loves to criticize them after they’ve been to visit. She’s always noticing something about them, or else interpreting something in a particular way, taking this as a sign that things aren’t quite as they should be between them. I have to confess that her observations have been extremely keen, yes, almost eerily so at times, the awful implications she’s managed to draw from one thing or another. For a while she was sure that it was only a matter of time before Elise would leave Hans-Jacob … or Hans-Jacob leave Elise … every time we all met … and it was as though her sympathies switched every other time, as though she alternated between seeing Elise’s peevishness and inexhaustible self-pity with Hans-Jacob’s eyes, and subsequently all of Hans-Jacob’s bad sides with Elise’s eyes in turn, his tiresome patronizing, his puerile whims, his indolence, his vindictive streak, his bad-tempered reprimands of Elise that would often ruin an entire game of bridge, if he was in a bad mood to start off with. And every single evening the four of us spent together, Helene found something new to get caught up in, a new piece to fit into the big picture that was constantly telling her that the two of them really didn’t suit each other, that both of them were, in all likelihood, still just waiting for the right moment to leave the other one. When Kristoffer died it was almost as if she saw it as confirmation, nearly turning to me in triumph, the night Hans-Jacob rang, because now the opportunity had finally arisen to make the point, with the simple words she used to report the terrible news, that what was it she had said, she knew something would happen to that boy someday, the way they’d treated him since he was a baby!

      But I’m not completely blameless either. Over the years I’ve been greatly entertained by Helene’s interpretations and explanations, and I’ve also, to a certain degree, made my own contributions … maybe not so much to her actual criticism, but by way of certain insignificant remarks … the necessary affirmations she’s needed in order to fully justify her reasoning. Indeed, of course … you’re right, it did seem like that … that’s probably true … a kind of confirmation of what she saw and the way she perceived it. I’ve certainly never had anything against Helene’s interpretations, in the wake of Hans-Jacob and Elise’s visits, of how things actually were between them, how they felt about themselves and one another. Even though these descriptions, or accounts, have with few exceptions been extremely negative, and thus haven’t given Elise and Hans-Jacob much of a chance. When I think about it, I suppose I’ve pitched in with a few small observations of my own, in much the same vein as Helene’s, over the years. It’d probably be accurate to say that at some point it became a pastime for the both of us, with Helene in the driver’s seat mind you, this evaluation of Elise’s and Hans-Jacob’s marriage, examining and analysing it thoroughly based upon any new information that came to light. It simply became a habit that’s lingered, even though it’s lessened considerably, and which now as a rule limits itself to short statements, without further elaboration. Without the great pleasure either, in fact, that it once gave us.

      Chapter Three

      Saturday evening, a few minutes after eight, just as I opened the door and saw Elise and Hans-Jacob standing there … motionless, in their coats and scarves, like a photograph from a faded album … I suddenly had to cough … a tingling itch in my throat was driving me crazy … and brought up an unexpected amount of phlegm that lay like an oyster at the very back of my tongue. Any words of welcome were out of the question, I just waved them in without saying a thing, careful to put on a friendly face so they wouldn’t take my muteness to mean we weren’t glad they’d come. I waited in the hall while they removed their coats and helped Elise hang hers up, the lump of phlegm still on my tongue: the thought that I may not be able to swallow it had made it impossible for me to make the attempt. Hans-Jacob soon started going on about the wine they’d brought, after first having handed me the bag, which was heavy and made a hollow clinking sound: it was a new type that had just come out, and in the end the only thing he probably didn’t tell me about this formidable Rhine wine or whatever it was … and I’d say he really had to restrain himself in order not to … was that naturally it was also very expensive. It wasn’t until they were on their way into the living room … I practically pushed them through the door … that I swallowed what in the meantime had grown to fill almost my entire mouth.

      To prove that I hadn’t lost the power of speech, I made a few casual remarks. But it didn’t seem like either of them was really listening to what I said or even that they remembered that I hadn’t said anything when they arrived. Hans-Jacob followed me when I went into the kitchen with the wine, stood with his legs apart in the doorway so I couldn’t avoid listening to him while he took the ignoramuses to task, all the ignoramuses in the world, who buy wine for sixty or seventy kroners when all they had to do was spend ten or twenty kroners more in order to get something that was twice as good. That’s how he likes to measure things, Hans-Jacob, half or twice as much, a third or seventy percent,