Doppler by Erlend Loe

the hint and don’t knock, but I grab the bottle and head for the tent, where I drink myself senseless before going out to the pissing place and surveying Oslo, thinking that my resolutions for the New Year are to build a totem pole in memory of my father and otherwise do as little as humanly possible. I’m going to cultivate doing nothing to a level few have achieved before me. And I’m not going to return to civilisation, not bloody likely. And since I’m there I start shouting. I’m the King and the Prime Minister and I hold a speech to the nation. My dear compatriots, I shout, I don’t like you. Pull yourselves together. Raise your sights and stop being so bloody smug. And, you right-wingers, get rid of your sodding dogs and wipe off those self-satisfied smiles of yours, and start bartering. And cycling. We have to cycle and barter like buggery if we’re going to have any chance of surviving. And who owns the wind rustling in the trees and the flowers in the field? And may the Teletubbies burn in hell, and shit, I come to a halt, I’m too drunk to retain my train of thought through a New Year’s speech, but Løvenskiold, I shout, you give the forest back to the people because actually you don’t own it, no one should be able to own a forest, and Dad, I continue, you’ve gone and I didn’t know you and I feel alone, I’ve always felt alone and I push everyone away because I’m a prat like everyone else, and no one knows me and I fear no one will ever know me for as long as I live, and I give up and in the end I just shout shit, shit, shit until I lose my voice.
    Poor Bongo doesn’t recognise me. It’s irresponsible of me to drink so much with a youngster like him nearby. After all, I’m his guardian and I’m setting an embarrassingly bad example. But it does me good to shout. So I continue to drink and shout and rave incoherently and I’m aware that right now for Bongo I must be behaving like the decibel scale. Ten minutes with me in this condition can just about be tolerated, but twenty minutes doesn’t mean a doubling of the effect, as you might believe, but a hundred times more, and thirty minutes is a thousand times more. That’s how decibels behave. And that’s how I behave as we enter the New Year. A New Year with niceness and devilry and belief and hope and love in the world.
    But the greatest of all is the forest.

JANUARY

There’s not much to say about January.
    It’s dark and it’s cold and I stoke the fire like a madman to keep warm.
    One of the first things I do in the New Year is to renew the milk agreement. I wrap up a large piece of meat and leave it where I usually collect the milk. In many ways the milk is the foundation stone on which the fragile edifice of Doppler rests. Without milk he, I that is, is as good as nothing. But now I’m approaching a milk-rich time, and as long as there is skimmed milk there is hope.
    Straight after New Year huge amounts of snow fall and this makes me less grumpy than for a long time. I fetch my skis from the garage at home and I spend several days criss-crossing the landscape to find a suitable trunk as a totem pole. Bongo jogs along after me, thinking snow is fun even if it’s harder for him to move about.
    One beautiful night the almost four-metre-long tent pole breaks. It’s about zero degrees outside, it has started to snow like crazy after we fall asleep and it seems the tent is not designed for these conditions. Bongo and I wake up with the tent canvas weighing heavily on us and I flounder around looking for the opening and crawl out. I remove the snow from the tent, cut myself a new pole from the undergrowth and erect the tent once again. After recovering from the shock, building up the fire and chatting long enough for us to feel debriefed and calm, we both fall asleep again.
    Eventually I find a suitable tree for the totem pole. But it’s quite a distance from the tent. I chop it down, and using Bongo as a draught moose I spend almost