My Struggle: Book 3 Read Online Free PDF

two penguins. It had stopped raining. A light wind shook the tops of the tall, slim pine trees scattered round the gardens below. A thin stream ran down the hill, alongside the road, taking with it little heaps of pine needles, the tiny, yellow
v
’s or bones strewn everywhere.
    In the sky behind us the cloud cover had opened. The scenery around us, with all the rooftops, lawns, clumps of trees, ridges, and slopes, was now suffused with a kind of glow. From the hill above our house, which we called the mountain, a rainbow had risen.
    “Look,” I said. “A rainbow!”
    “Wow!” Geir said.
    Up at the house, Trond had closed the door. He started running toward us.
    “There’s a rainbow over the mountain!” Geir said.
    “Shall we go and look for the pot of gold?”
    “Yes, let’s!” Trond said.
    We ran down the slope. On Karlsen’s lawn Anne Lene, Kent Arne’s little sister, stood watching us. She was wearing a safety harness; it was attached to a strap so that she wouldn’t run off. Her mother’s red car was parked in the drive. A light shone from a wall lamp. Outside Gustavsen’s house Trond slowed down.
    “I’m sure Leif Tore would like to join us,” he said.
    “I don’t think he’s at home,” I said.
    “We can ask anyway,” Trond said, walking between the two brick gateposts, which were not hung with any gates and therefore subject to my father’s ridicule, and into the drive. A hollow metal globe, from which protruded an arrow, all carried by a naked man with a bent back, was cemented to the top of the posts. It was a sundial, and my father made fun of that, too, for what was the point of
two
sundials?
    “Leif Tore,” Trond shouted. “Are you coming out?”
    He looked at us. Then we all shouted.
    “Leif Tore! Are you coming out?”
    A few seconds passed. Then the kitchen window was opened, and his mother stuck out her head.
    “He’s coming now. He’s just putting on his rain gear. You don’t need to shout anymore.”
    I had a precise picture of this pot. Large and black, with three legs, full of glittering objects. Gold, silver, diamonds, rubies, sapphires. There was one at each end of the rainbow. We had looked for it before, without any luck. It was important to be quick, rainbows never lasted long.
    Leif Tore, who for a while now had been a shadow behind the yellow glass of the door, opened it at last. A wave of warm air streamed out from behind him. It was always so hot in their house. I caught a slight odor of something that was both acrid and sweet. That was how it smelled in their house. All the houses apart from ours had their own smell, this was theirs.
    “What are we going to do?” he said, slamming the door behind him and making the glass rattle.
    “There’s a rainbow on the mountain. We’re going to search for the pot of gold,” Trond said.
    “Come on then!” Leif Tore said, breaking into a run. We followed, down the last part of the hill and onto the road going up toward the mountain. Yngve’s bike still wasn’t back in its place, I could see, but both Mom’s green Beetle and Dad’s red Kadett were there. Mom had been doing the vacuuming when I left, it was awful, I hated the sound, it was like a wall pressing itself against me. And they opened the windows while they were cleaning, the air indoors was freezing cold, and it was as if the cold were transmitted to Mom as well, she had no space left in her for anything else when she stood leaning over the wash tub, wringing the cloth, or when she pushed the broom or the Hoover across the floor, and since it was only in this surplus space that there was room for me, I also got cold on these Saturday mornings, in fact so cold that the chill penetrated my head and even made it difficult to lie on the bed reading comics, which normally I loved, so that in the end I had no choice but to get dressed and run outside and hope there was something happening there.
    Both Mom and Dad did the cleaning in our house, which was not the