Cultural City Bergen 2000, Bergen Public Library

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Bibliography

Novels and
other prose

Poetry

World
premières

Articles
by Kjartan Fløgstad

Excerpts

Dollar Road

The Ultimate Questions

Heads or Tails

Fire and Water

Cockcrow

Translations

Of Kjartan Fløgstad

By Kjartan Fløgstad

Miscellaneous

About Kjartan Fløgstad

Excerpt from
Dollar Road

But no, it was the school path for me, first to Øystese and then to Bergen. The day before I left for Øystese to start the state high school there, Durdei said to me:
Rasmus.
Yes.
Tomorrow you go away to school. You'll get out of touch with a lot of things here at home. In some ways, you won't have no home or roots the rest of your life. If you'd have been born a little later, you'd have to go away to school even sooner, to a junior high school where they let you choose your main subjects. And this is how we want it, do you understand ? We went seven years to a real poor country school were we didn't have no choice about what we wanted to study. You probably didn't even know there's a difference in what they teach country kids at school and what they teach in town; kids in the country didn't have to learn much, just a few hymns and some cathechism went a long way. And we want our kids to go to school for as long as they want, at a school that's as good as the best town school, and that's divided up into classes with thirty kids all the same age, and that's got physics labs and gyms and media tech., or whatever it's going to be called, and where the teachers learned grammar and trigonometry and French at the university and ain't just students at teachers' college who talk a blue streak about back when King Olav Tryggvason walked out onto the oars of his ship, or who get lost in some fantasy about the Empire of Norway that includes Dublin and Vinland and the Isle of Man. This is how we want it, and that's why they've got to build central schools that you go away to when you're fifteen years old. Do you understand?
Yes.
And this fall, Uncle Sylfest is going to stop running his part of Høysand farm and move to Jørpeland and get a job at the steel mill. And I don't want you going around feeling bad about either him or me because of that. I won't allow it, you hear? Anyway, it's all for the best. I want the leaky old buildings at Høysand to fall down before the end of winter and the stones from the Høysand farm to be used to make a new four-lane highway where the newest cars can drive ninety kilometers an hour away from the poverty, and I want the Høysand ground to be covered with weeds and thistles and nettles that are black with exhaust and dust from the road and grow so thick over the meadows that no one will see that people had to live there once. And I want all of old Høysand's descendants to live in Odda or in Fylling Valley or in Grorud and have their own apartment or row house with hot and cold running water and a bathroom and a TV and a washing machine and a mixmaster and inlaid floors that don't have to be scrubbed, and to drive to the factory in their own cars, and find a good, wide, asphalted parking place and walk through the factory gate along with other well-dressed workers that are organized in the labour union on a solidarity basis and have just filled up their stomachs with healthy food from the supermarket. And I want them who raise the food to live on Jæren or in Denmark or America, or in Russia for that matter, on farms that are a whole lot bigger, where they drive around with hay tedders and mowing machines and horse-rakes and combines, and don't never have to work with just one scythe up under the tallest mountain peaks or roll the hay home in a hay net in the wintertime so they can feed one sheep. Do you understand?
Yes.
And in a few days I'm going into the hospital to have one breast operated away. I'm going to Bergen to lie in a white, fresh-made bed in a nice, light room at Haukeland Hospital with laboratories that have got all the newest equipment and body engineers in white coats who'll stand around my bed with X- rays and EKGs and intravenous tubes and nod their wise heads and look down at my body as if it was a Stang or Mohr or Vogt or Christie or Heuch or Sibbern or Selmer or Hagerup, and not Durdei Høysand they're making a diagnosis about. And I'm going to have the best treatment and the best care and real good food and be bowed out through the door when I'm well and I've got my strength back, and I ain't going to pay one single øre, because all my life I paid my taxes and my public health insurance. And there ain't no "barefoot doctor" going to be allowed to come near me with his first-aid kit while all the rich people in town get operated on by doctors with expensive Italian leather shoes at special hospitals. That's why we've got to have health centers and big central hospitals. Do you understand?
Yes.
Everybody who'll be young in the seventies ain't going to understand this. And there's lots of things in the seventies we ain't going to understand neither, all of us who'll be old then. But this is what we think, and this is how we want it until we die anyway, and we want the Labour party to do it for us. And I want you to promise me one thing when you turn Communist, which you'll do, because all smart young people in the seventies are going to turn Communist, and that is, that no matter what you do, you'll never travel around making a name for yourself by talking about the Social Democratic hell. Do you understand?
Yes, I said, and swallowed. I understand. I promise.
Then you can leave.
All of this lay two or three years behind me that August evening when I sat alone, among the mail sacks (containing letters and packages for people from Hardanger who had moved away) and crates of Foss and Seftaholm apples, riding the bus through Kvam Woods with my cardboard suitcase and the plastic raincoat and wearing a white nylon shirt and a tie, on my way to Bergen Business College, which had accepted me. In the administration office there at the school, a government student loan for 4,000 kroner (divided into 2,000 kroner per semester) was waiting for me, because now people no longer needed to ask wealthy people in the community to "guarantee" a loan when one of the sons (from a family of up to fourteen children) was going off to professional school. No, the state invested directly in me, risked money on me. But I felt the responsibility just as heavily.

Translated by Nadia Christensen