Unikum 08 October nett

I was stumbling and slipping on
the slushy ground. Up ahead,
I could make out the dark
shadow of a long, gigantic
building from which the light
was coming. As I came up to
it, the harsh, insistent cawing
of a crow cut through the
wind and the rain and with
a start I realised that there
was another shadow moving
about outside the building. The
light, which seemed to be coming
through the chink of a massive
door, was momentarily blocked
and I saw that there was another shadowy
figure at the door. This person was knocking
at the door and shouting to attract attention.
I was about 100 meters away when I saw the door
open slightly. A hefty-looking woman wearing an
old-fashioned skirt and bodice. A sense of relief
surged over me. I decided to throw in my lot with
this stranger and started running, so that I could
ask for shelter together with him or her. However,
as I got closer, I realised things were not going
according to plan. The woman was gesticulating
with rapid gestures and saying something to him –
she seemed angry.
Finally, she slammed the door quite violently just
as I got there. The stranger who had been looking
for shelter before me seemed to be in shock. Now in
the faint light coming from the home, I saw that
he was probably a tramp. He was wearing a loose
cloak made of some coarse material and carrying
a crumpled bag in one hand and a long, sturdy,
walking stick in the other. As he turned around to
look at me, his face came into the light- a gaunt,
long-suffering countenance, with a straggly white
beard that was dripping with water and wet hair
that seemed plastered to his scalp. At the spot where
his left eye should have been was a red, fleshy wound.
There was something both ravaged and terrifying
about him. He exuded the same energy – a mix
of madness, shrewdness, pain and world-weary
experience that I have seen in the faces of the
homeless and the drug addicts in big cities all over
the world. Perhaps he’s one of those, I thought to
myself, one of this tribe that I have seen hanging
around on the benches of the park next to the
Kristiansand cathedral. Rage bubbled up inside
me even as I thought this. Did the woman shut the
door in his face just because he looked homeless?
How could someone be so inhuman as to refuse
shelter in the middle of a storm?
Fuelled by this rage, I started beating on the door.
Louder and louder, I shouted till the door suddenly
opened and out came the same woman. Up close, she
seemed even bigger, with a face like Erling Haaland
and a physique to match. Faced by this amazon, my
anger suddenly melted as she started shouting at me. I
could barely make out two or three phrases….’stikk av’,
‘Elfablot’, ‘idiot’, ‘drit’ and so on.
Anyway, long story short, this paragon of Norwegian
physicality basically shook a stick at us, shouted a
bundle of abuses and once again slammed the door
shut. This time though, there was no anger inside me.
Also, in trying to get away from her, I had basically
slipped and was now lying ass down in the mud as I
looked up at the old man. He offered me a hand and
started saying something as he helped me up.
Unfortunately, my Norwegian is really basic and it
looked like he couldn’t understand my English. And so
we were at an impasse, as I racked my brain for all the
wonderful things I had learnt in Norwegian class. Now
let’s see, I could fluently say things like ‘han reiser med
tog fra Oslo til Trondheim’, ‘Tom og Lisa drikker kaffe’
and ‘Det er Magnus. Han kommer fra Bergen’. I could
also count from zero to thirty in Norwegian numerals
and tell the time ‘Klokka er fem over fem’ for instance.
However, he hadn’t asked me the time and nor was he
interested in that blasted Magnus (or Tom og Lisa for
that matter), so there was not much that I could offer by
way of conversation.
After some gesticulations on both sides, I pointed him to
the ash tree and we quickly hot-footed it there. It must
have had a really thick canopy of leaves, for despite all
the rain and wind, the ground underneath was still
remarkably dry. The old man, started wringing the water
out of his beard and cloak, as I took off my backpack
to check how wet it had gotten. To my surprise, I found
three packets of McDonalds chicken McNuggets that I
had bought earlier and stuffed into the backpack in the
morning. This cheered me up and led to a brainwave. I
had finally thought of something intelligent I could say
in Norwegian to my companion.
‘Hi, Jeg heter Rahul, Hva heter du?’
The old man perked up on hearing this and let loose
with a whole torrent of Norsk. It was as if I had lobbed
one small pebble from a catapult and been answered
with a machine gun volley. I did make out that
however, that he was heter’ed Váfuðr and was
myself forced to admit that ‘Beklager, jeg
snakker ikke Norsk.’ At this the old man
looked visibly disappointed as he peered
at my face with his one remaining good
OCTOBER 2022 UNIKUM NR 8 29