“a curtain had fallen”

“A curtain had fallen” is the expression the narrator uses for a rupture in ordinary perception after leaving the cabin by the river. Repeated at a later moment when he abandons his journeys to meet the train, it connects estrangement from the familiar world with the end of his expectation that his father will come home.

The Image of a Sudden Break

The first formulation makes the image both concealment and beginning: “It was as if a curtain had fallen, hiding everything I had ever known.” The narrator immediately qualifies the loss as something like rebirth, describing a world in which colours, smells, and the inward feel of things have changed. The curtain does not simply obscure particular memories; it marks a division between what had been known and a present that can no longer be experienced in the old way.

That change is not presented as unbroken misery. In the weeks after he leaves the cabin, the narrator sometimes feels happy and full of expectation, while also restless, prone to laughing without reason, and unable to concentrate. The image therefore holds opposing feelings together: happiness remains possible, but it belongs to a newly unfamiliar emotional world.

Familiar Places Made Strange

The narrator’s ride into Oslo gives the altered perception a precise route. He cycles down Nielsenbakken, past Ljan Station and along Mosseveien for seven kilometres, passing places he has known: Nesodden, Bunnefjord, the islands, the grain silo at Vippetangen Pier, and the fortress walls across the harbour. Their familiarity is not erased, but it no longer guarantees recognition. The late-August sky and the route to Østbane Station are at once known landmarks and parts of a world that feels changed.

The physical details sharpen this contrast. In the almost white sunlight, the narrator rides in grey shorts and an open shirt; gulls cry above the railway, whose sleepers smell of creosote, while salt water scents the air. Heat, speed, and singing belong to the same unsettled period as his difficulty concentrating. The prose moves through recognisable scenery in detail, yet that very precision makes the estrangement legible: the places have not changed, but the way they reach him has.

Repetition and the End of Waiting

The phrase returns during the long-awaited rain, when the narrator has been cycling into Oslo almost every other day to see whether his father has arrived on the train from Elverum. In a yellow sou’wester and oilskins, with Wellingtons on his feet, he rides through water running down from the Ekeberg ridge. The buildings seem to have lost their eyes, ears, and voices; the familiar city no longer tells him anything. Then he stops going in—not for one day, nor the next, nor the day after—and the account repeats the curtain and rebirth image.

The recurrence gives the expression a changed force. In its first appearance, it describes the narrator’s altered state after leaving the cabin; in the rain, the image accompanies a concrete withdrawal from the repeated journey and its expectation. The waiting ends before its cause is fully stated. Late that autumn, a letter postmarked Elverum tells the family that his father will not come home; it also authorises the narrator’s mother to collect the money owed in Karlstad for timber felled and sent downriver. The narrator had believed he had earned a special greeting, but the letter offers none. Against that news, the repeated image gathers separation, disappointment, and a changed sense of the world into a single figure without reducing them to one emotion.