Shyness And Dignity by Dag Solstad

Author:Dag Solstad [Solstad, Dag]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Norway
ISBN: 9781446496152
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2011-08-30T14:00:00+00:00

This was the situation. It was in 1974 that Johan Corneliussen had disclosed that Eva Linde used to listen to their conversations, giving them a different hue than before. Did Elias Rukla love Eva Linde? Did he lie on the sofa outside her and Johan Corneliussen’s bedroom door for seven years waiting for her? No, Elias Rukla could honestly say that this was not so. It was simply unthinkable. He was taken with her, that he would admit, but it was as Johan Corneliussen’s spouse that he was taken with her. She had no value at all for him by herself; that was not only forbidden, it was unthinkable. Had he then suffered from an unthinkable love for her? That was something Elias Rukla could not dismiss out of hand, and it would, if true, explain the twinges he used to feel in certain situations, of sadness, even grief, as well as a state of excitement, like the time when Johan Corneliussen disclosed that Eva Linde was listening to them behind her closed door. So it is not impossible that, between 1969 and 1976, from when he was twenty-eight until he turned thirty-six, when he started his career as senior master at the Fagerborg school in a mood of high expectation, established himself in an apartment of his own in Jacob Aalls gate, tried, albeit somewhat half-heartedly, to find a life partner, not least among his younger colleagues at Fagerborg and other secondary schools, amused himself in his leisure time mixing with old acquaintances from his student days, cultivated and kept up his particularly close friendship with Johan Corneliussen – it is not impossible that, in reality, he was suffering from, and letting his steps be controlled by, an unthinkable love for Eva Linde. But if that was so, no trace of this love can be found anywhere, except possibly for those brief occasional twinges in the course of those seven long years, not even in the rather odd geographical fact that, when Elias Rukla and Johan Corneliussen met in town, they did not follow it up with an evening in Jacob Aalls gate but in remote Grorud, a suburban village a good six miles from downtown Oslo with its restaurants, forcing Elias Rukla to get up at the crack of dawn the next morning and leave in a hurry to get to his job as senior master, whereas if they had ended up in Jacob Aalls gate, Johan Corneliussen could have taken it easy, because he did not have such obligations early the next morning. But it was Johan who insisted that they should go to his place, and that was due to the fact that it was his job to take care of Camilla when she awoke in the morning (so that Eva could sleep), and so he had to get home. Therefore, if they were to continue, it had to be at his place. So it was not the sleeping Eva who tempted Elias Rukla to undertake this rather strange trip to Grorud, but the company of Johan Corneliussen.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.