Oslo

Oslo. I walk your quiet streets flanked by quiet houses capped with handsome mansard roofs, these quiet, neat streets, with autumn trees holding green, the quiet skies darkening earlier and earlier. The soft moaning sigh of a passing tram, the harmony of a raw wind from off the fjord, a wind danced by seabirds. A trio of Swedish girls, teenagers, all matching in Helly Hansen puffy parkas and dusty foundation and jingling charms, their hair fashioned wet and swept sideways (as though licked by a large horse), their mouths stuck in scowling singsong and dipthongs. Street corners colonised by 7-Elevens, by Narvesens, by Delis-de-Luca. A sound, a silence, a sound.

Home is the border line between Grünerløkka and Grønland, between hipsterdom and the migrant quarter. Along the Aker river African men stand in position making hissing noises and whispering hash? hash?, their hands clenched around tiny parcels, while the water gushes and trickles towards the fjord. Blond men pushing strollers. Bass guitar from the warehouses. The two sides of the Anker bridge, guarded by statues of human-animal teams from Norwegian fairy tales - Per Gynt and the reindeer, Kvitebjørn Kong Valemon with requisite bear, Veslefrikk med fela and Kari Trestakk - and in the middle, a Roma couple playing accordion and tambourine. My apartment is part of a massive complex, eleven connected buildings round a central square, where Somali women talk to friends through ground level curtained windows, where bored looking Kurdish teens hang out by the little playground, where white students pass by, heads down, where Arab men stand against the wall listening to Arab pop songs on the fuzzy speaker of their mobile phones. From Anker: down Torggata, the Turkish and Vietnamese grocers, the Kurdish kebab and pizza shops, the cobbled squares, the worn out, greybearded gypsy beggar, always in the same doorway with his paper cup. Up Markveien, the second hand stores, the keffiyahed indie kids, the bars with antique furniture, the smell of coffee, the ghosts of industry.

I spend a lot of afternoons in the Nasjonalbiblioteket, the National Library, in its big reading room, rimmed by bookshelves, under disc shaped ceiling lights that look like UFOs, listening to the symphony of paper shuffling, zips, computer keys, the tap and squeak of stepping shoes and the occasional punctuation of sniffs or coughs. I spend a lot of nights in bed, under the doona with my back against the window sill, reading Sigrid Undset or my Ethics textbook and listening to Efterklang or Pärt. I spend the mornings sitting naked, mindlessly trawling the internet for items updated while I was sleeping. I spend the other mornings in class, in which I am one of 16 students from seven countries. I spend the darkness dreaming about people I have never met, and of hideous circumstances. I spend most breakfasts eating ICA muesli clusters with dehydrated strawberries and dried yogurt clumps. I spend a lot of my time thinking about one person, one girl, one smile, one set of eyes, one city, south of here, a city that feels as much like home as any other at this point.


But, Oslo, you hold me safe for now, you appease me for now, you with your rolling skies and cold sea air and colourful streets and lanterns and fountains and construction sites and drug addicts and freckled girls and accordion players and sighing trams and oil-proud Hummers and sad looking trees and street-corner berry sellers and graffiti and nervousness and wooden houses and hills; you with your song.

You smug city, Oslo; you'll do for now.