The northwest central part of Oslo, just between the big pill-shaped Bislett Stadium and the brick block silos of the university campus, is the part of town I call home. It is called Adamstuen. Fighting for parking spots around here is like racing all the men of China to the world’s last cigarette. Last night I found a spot right in front of my apartment building. This morning I go out the front door and a guy in a grey suit is leaning over the hood of my car. Next to him a schoolchild was nudging with his toe a half-eaten kebab that lay on the sidewalk. The pita-bread and candy-coloured wax paper wrapping had ejected the guts of the kebab – some brown hunks of sweatsteak, an assortment of unripe garden vegetables and a livid orange ooze – like an exclamation point on the sidewalk.
This was no accident. This kebab had leapt to its death from some balcony above us; it was a late-night suicide. The kid’s father seemed to be finishing up whatever it was he was up to, as he clapped the windshield wiper on my car up and down. He swiveled around and saw me standing there. “Er det noe?” That’s what I said, more startled than angry. He wanted to know if it was my car, if I had any sense in my head, if I happened to notice how close I had parked, if I had kids to take to the pre-school, if I didn’t give a shit why did I have to go around messing up other people’s mornings, if I didn’t mind could I move the car right away, if it mattered anyway, if I didn’t completely lack a brain, if it all wasn’t just a big waste of time and if I didn’t mind – I was in the way – and (after I’d moved) off he went down the sidewalk kid in tow. I retrieved the white note from under the windshield wiper and unfolded it. He had written: “Tenker du noen gang på andre som må levere barn i barnehagen og rekke jobben før ni når du parkerer? Tenker du i det hele tatt?” It was unsigned.
On the way to the street-car stop, I see a pile of urine-soaked newspapers some university student didn’t get up early enough to deliver. Now they’re wallpapering the corner of our street with yesterday’s news. I turn when I hear a shout – a twenty-something girl in high heels lost her footing on the slimy papers and landed her tush on the soggy newsprint. Across from my street-car stop, a grocery store clerk bearing out one tray of fleshy tomatoes and another of shrink-wrapped peppers has a sneezing attack. The tray of peppers tilts off his arm and all the cellophaned green heads bounce lop-sided around the opposite tram-stop and into the street. Curiously discriminating now, he gathers the peppers on the sidewalk but leaves those that ended up in the street.
One of the girls waiting for my tram tells a tall and swarthy friend that she was awake all night talking to someone – I couldn’t catch the name – in the United States. It is apparently her American agent. Then I recognize her. It is one of the debutantes that have graced Norwegian Idol, and most recently ejected, if I’m not mistaken. She speaks in an alarmingly loud voice, announcing that she is in the latter end of her 15 precocious, parabolic months of fame. Her friend observes that he’s never heard of her agent. I get on the tram and don’t find a seat, which means I’ll have to cling to one of the posts with my nose in some Viking’s armpit for the next ten minutes.
Most of Oslo’s tram drivers twitch like chihuahuas. The tram screeches into the next stop as if municipal authorities had moved it overnight. Thrown, I stumble, and tread on the feet of a Britney Spears look-a-like, who says something very un-Disneylike. Her boot-tips look like the heads of two Zulu spears. At my stop, I tumble out of the tram with the majority of other passengers. My office is perched on the fifth floor of a comely neo-Victorian-style building at Solliplass – a restive place where a glowering statue of Winston Churchill opposes a fence in a swastika pattern and two neighbouring towers compete for ugliness in the socialist post-war architecture competition. On a sunny winter afternoon, when the pale white globe cuts a thin slice across the southern horizon, these towers throw their shadows over: probably a couple dozen cafés (including one café/hairdresser melange for people who like their espresso with a mouthful of stubble), a grocery store, two or three or four banks, a post office, a national library that shouldn’t be judged by its cover, a McDonalds, one good restaurant, one bad one, one award-winning one (I won’t say which), a couple of convenience stores and one chain book-store. There is only one permanent resident – a crusty beggar who patiently holds out a paper cup and inhabits the corner in front of one of the banks. He has all the calm of a Sufi; many of the passers-by feel an urge to slap at his cup, then repress it.
After lunch, I stroll down to a greengrocer run by Lebanese people. They carry a selection of nuts and salty snacks so great one wonders if it’s part of their business license. For example, you can buy a sack of dried banana chips as big as your two fists for less money than a pack of gum. An elderly man has lost his way in the back of the shop while browsing the tea selection. As the proprietor guides the stiff gentleman to the door, he gets a lecture on prudent shop-floor planning. Back on the street, a strident bell stabs at the peace of an urban Nordic afternoon. If any babies in strollers nearby were holding it, they just peed themselves. A cyclist has gotten his tires stuck in the tram rail. The tram rings again. The cyclist frantically tears at his stubborn bike. Another, longer bell. Finally, the bike removed, the tram roars forward. Shaken and bitter, the cyclist curses the tram driver. On the opposite corner, a phalanx of winter-coat-clad people sipping cappucinos at the sidewalk café look up in unison, eager to find the source of this proximate threat. The cursing cyclist is stared down, demonstratively, albeit now in absentia.
School lets out in the early afternoon, and the sidewalk fills up with this affluent neighbourhood’s teenage pupils. One of these miniature downtown monarchs, stiffened by a high allowance for shoes and jackets, sometimes manages to fill up a three-meter wide sidewalk alone. I slalom my way back to the office.
At the end of the workday, I take a bus two stops down Henrik Ibsens gate (basically, good, old-fashioned Drammensveien with a brand-new literary swagger) to one of the two faux poles of downtown Oslo: Nationaltheatret. Arriving at the bus-stop, I almost run into a large black man in combat fatigues and a rastafarian hat. He is bleeding from the forehead and swaying. “Du ser ikke på meg, for fæn!” he says, to no one in particular. Most of the people surrounding the bus-stop are, in fact, looking at him, most of them quite sternly.
A violinist plays a halting, tinny version of a song by Stevie Wonder to the streams of commuters flowing in and out of the subway station. I can’t tell if he scratches intentionally or not each time a coin lands in the furry lining of his violin case. He wears a thick winter cap with ear-flaps (Norwegians call this kind of hat a bear pussy) and his neck steams slightly from underneath. At a men’s shop in Steen & Strøm, one of Oslo’s ritziest downtown shopping centers, a 20-something salesman tells me I might find what I’m looking for at Gunerius, one of Oslo’s most down-at-the-heel shopping centers. As the guy speaks, he rubs his nose so emphatically that I, for a moment, wonder if he’s sending me a snot-signal. In the bathroom, a girl no older than eight stands alone in the corner, near the air-blown hand-dryers. She holds a knap-sack in front of her and, after glancing at me, locks her gaze on one of the stalls. Coming out of my stall, I see that the girl is still waiting, so I dry my hands on my trouser legs. Another salesman at another store at Steen & Strøm finds precisely what I was looking for.
On the way to the tram-stop, I meet an old acquaintence and we walk together. He tells me he has moved to a suburb called Hanaborg. Where’s Hanaborg? “Circa en halv-time den veien” he says, and points roughly eastward. He says he couldn’t live in Oslo anymore. Me, I take the tram straight home and decide I’ll starve for dinner tonight.
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