I Curse the River of Time Read Online Free PDF Page A

my mother and I watched Mutiny on the Bounty there, with Marlon Brando starring as Fletcher Christian. She was a big fan of Brando, his sulky acting style, inarticulate and yet so clear, and she also loved the young Paul Newman in The Hustler , they both had something extra, some explosive quality, she said, whereas James Dean was all right. She did not really like James Dean, he was too whiny, too immature, he was spineless, she thought, and would quickly be forgotten. Montgomery Clift was undeniably the greatest; in From Here to Eternity , in The Misfits: his vulnerability, his eyes, his dignity.
    The off-licence had not opened yet and I really had no need for the goods on its shelves, not after my night on the ferry, but I glanced at it anyway and then the sight of three bottles on display in the window made me stop, three different bottles containing the French spirit, Calvados, of three different qualities then, I assumed, and it suddenly occurred to me that I had never tasted Calvados. I decided that I could afford to buy the middle one, which would be good enough for me, if I walked to the summer house rather than take a taxi as I had intended to. I did have a car of my own, but just now it was in a garage in Norway with a broken drive shaft, and for all I knew it had already been repaired, but I had not got around to picking it up yet. So, at home, I walked or took the bus whenever I needed to go somewhere. That suited me well, for I could sleep on the bus, and I did. A lot. I slept as much as I could. There wasnothing I liked better. But I was here now, and I really wanted one of those bottles of Calvados, and then I would have to walk. That’s the way I am.
    I did not feel like walking, I was tired, I could not remember the last time I was that tired, I was so tired it almost felt good and I weighed up the pros and cons and waited ten minutes for the shop to open its door, and went inside to buy the bottle in the middle and it was handed to me in a brown paper bag. A bit like they do in the movies, I thought, because I am Norwegian and in Norway we never get our liquor in brown paper bags and I liked the feeling of being in a film. I could be a man in a film. The walk to the summer house would be easier, if I was a man in a film.
    Years before we had talked at length about Calvados, my mother and I, when she had urged me to read Arch of Triumph by Erich Maria Remarque.
    ‘It’s a good book,’ she said, ‘a bit sentimental perhaps, but you’re the right age for it,’ she said, and I was still not twenty and did not even take offence because I was not entirely sure what sentimental meant, not really, and did not realise that perhaps it was a slighting remark to make; that something was sentimental yet at the same time right for a young man not yet twenty. But that was not what she meant at all, it was not how she thought of me, she was merely stating the fact that I might benefit from reading it, and I did, too, benefit from that book, it was bull’s eye, young as I was. We said to each other, my mother and I,wouldn’t it be great one day to taste this liquor; a liquid that for me turned into the true magic potion, a golden nectar flowing through Remarque’s novel and on in multiple streams, acquiring a strange, powerful significance and that, of course, because it was unobtainable, because they only sold one single brand at the state monopoly and it was way beyond my means. But in Arch of Triumph they were forever ordering Calvados, Boris and Ravic, the two friends in the book who were refugees from Stalin and Hitler respectively, in Paris in the years before the German occupation, and it was Armageddon then, on all fronts, both back and forth in time, and the conversations they had about life left the same bitter taste in my mouth as singing the hymn, which goes: Thank you for memories, thank you for hope, thank you Oh Lord for the bitter gift of pain , which in fact I did at a funeral not long ago. Sing