In The Wake (15 page)

“You’re awake early,” I said.

He nodded.

“I am going away now,” I said, “to England. I shall be away for quite a long time.”

“I know,” he said, and then he was quiet, and then he said:

“Is it true that the Beatles aren’t together any more?”

“I’m afraid
it is.”

“You won’t meet them, then.”

He had heard that music since the cradle. It had always been there, on the radio and the record player, and now it was over, and that took a long time to sink in.

“Maybe I shall meet them separately. If I see Paul McCartney I will send him your love,” I said, and then he smiled. We had discussed it several times; he liked McCartney best, and I liked John
Lennon, but I felt generous that morning and several good songs came to mind that McCartney had written.

“That’s great.” He stood up and said: “Have a good time, then,” and shook my hand in a solemn manner.

“You have a good time too,” I said, and gave his hand a little squeeze, and he went up to bed again, and
I
took the tube into Oslo and walked along past Østbanestasjonen and the railway line
to Mosseveien, and there I took my place by a petrol station with my thumb out. There had been rain in the night, but now the sun was bright and there was a sharpness in the air that felt good and a sparkle on the fjord that I knew so well, but it had already turned into something different, and the town behind me seemed changed, and the Ekeberg ridge and the merchant navy college like a fortress
up there, and the pale blue tram on its way to the top had also changed.

I was wearing the old pea jacket I thought was like the one Martin Eden wore when he went ashore at San Francisco in Jack London’s best novel and was about to haul himself up by the hair into a new life of knowledge. That was what I wanted too. The jacket must have been ten years old, and I had bought it from the Salvation
Army, and even if I could not remember if Martin Eden
really
had a pea jacket in the book, he should have done, and I was fond of that jacket, I had used it almost every day for more than a year. I had pinned an FNL badge to the collar, and in my backpack I had a warm sleeping bag and a watertight notecase and three books to keep me linked to the world; Bobby Seale’s
Seize the Time
, about the
Black Panthers; Svend Lindqvist’s
The Myth of Wu Tao-tzu
, the one that ends with the question: Is social and economic liberation possible without violence? No. Is it possible
with
violence
? No. And I had Paal-Helge Haugen’s
Leaves from an Eastern Garden: 100 Haiku
. They were good to read early in the morning.

I was leaving my childhood behind and my father and all he stood for and all he was
not, and it had taken its time, but I felt fearless now standing at the edge of the road and free to choose my own life, full of love for the future, and only fifteen minutes later a trailer truck came panting out by Loenga and stopped a little way further along the road. The driver softly sounded his horn as a signal to me to join him.

Now I was walking in a Swedish night, with an all-Norwegian
pack on my back on my way through a town where the sea air blew in quite differently from the fjord at home, and the houses were not unlike those I was used to seeing, but still somehow different; somewhat higher and somewhat more beautiful, and all crafted with some other stone containing some other glow that I did not know, and canals traversed the town reflecting the street lights, and they
were yellow and orange and almost red in the oily water, and there was music from an open window. It was something from an opera, and I had never liked opera, but I did like opera now, and I remember singing, but I do not remember which song.

The truck driver was right. It was a long way. I had to walk right through the town in a semicircle around the harbour area and past the shipyards that
had not
yet
closed down, and on northwards almost right out to Torslanda airport and the Volvo factory, and I walked and walked, and when I got there the night was far advanced and there were no street lamps, only one or two chance lights and some lamps by the ferry quay where I could feel the sea like a sigh, but I could not see it.

There was an oil refinery there with BP painted in yellow and
green on the great shiny tanks and a tower where a gas flame crackled and burned at the top and threw enough light for me to find my way up between two big rocks. I decided it would not rain that night and unpacked my sleeping bag and spread it straight on to the ground and crept into it with all my clothes on. I was exhausted and happy and fell asleep at once, and the few times I woke I looked
straight up at the sky with its multitude of stars, and I knew the names of the biggest ones, and I saw the gas flame shining and heard it crackling and felt at home in the world.

What finally woke me was the sound of steps and the sound of bicycle wheels and the squeaking sound of pedals on chain guards and a bus stopping and opening its doors. I heard voices and someone laughing, and I sat
up in my sleeping bag, rubbed my eyes and peered over the top of the rough grey knoll in front of me. Everything was completely clear. I saw the sea straight out and bare sloping rocks and low islands in the light of a low sun, and at the quay lay a large boat with the
name
M/s Spero
painted on its side. The British ensign aft waved gently in the light wind, and it was a warm morning for September.
Between the rise where I was lying and the quay there was a road which was the same one I came along last night, and now a stream of people in blue were making their way from the south part of town to where the Volvo factory was situated with its great gates and its logo in a circle above them. It was clear to see at the end of the road. One man turned and looked at my head sticking up, and
even at a distance he was obviously smiling, and then I raised my hand and waved, and he waved back, and then several men turned, perhaps ten or twenty of them, and they all smiled and raised their hands and waved.

By the time the ferry had sailed I had read two haiku by Basho about the vast night falling on a road where nobody walks, and packed the book tidily in my rucksack again.

The sea
was quiet and calm off the coast of Sweden and a little boring across the Kattegat until we rounded the completely flat tip of Denmark at Skagen, and then we were in the North Sea with a wind sweeping the deck, and the boat rolling as it was meant to roll, and at breakfast time the cups flew off the table and hit the floor with a loud clatter, and some of them broke, and no-one managed to get a mouthful
in before the third try. Later on, there was a smell of dinner in the corridors, and not many people felt up to that, but I did,
as
I had known I would. I sat in the saloon reading for hours, and felt the boat lifting me up and letting me fly between sea and sky before dropping me down, and it had no effect on me at all. I stood a long time out on deck with a firm grip on the rail, staring into
the lashing grey and heard the wind howling in masts and cables, then I went inside with salt water in my hair, to the cafeteria where I sat down to talk with young Americans on their way through Europe to see a bit of the world just once before settling down, but they felt sick now and looked it too, and I laughed and said: “This is nothing.”

I showed them the FNL badge and told them that the
peasants with their round pointed hats and wide trousers would tear them to pieces in the end. I held out the Bobby Seale book so they could see the gloved fist on the cover, and I explained how the Black Panthers’ fight with the American government was more than ripe and completely justified, and they looked at me with seasick eyes as if I had taken leave of my senses. But I had never felt more
sensible, I was mental health personified, and I am sure I was laughing the whole voyage through, for I knew that when the boat finally reached its destination and glided quietly up the long Humber with its docks and fishing boats, past Grimsby on the way in to Hull where it would stop and moor up, then my brother would be on the quay waiting to share all that was his with me.

Now he lies behind
a screen with his face to the wall refusing to talk to me, and he is all that I have, except perhaps for a nurse in green with a first name that begins with a G and a Kurd who can speak no Norwegian except “Hi” and “Thanks”. Surely that cannot be right, but it feels like that when I drive into the garage under the block and park the Mazda with its bonnet against the wall in my corner so the neighbours
will not see the big scrape along the front wing.

I go up the stairs to the ground floor and let myself in and undress in the bedroom with the radio on and I hear the Østland programme announcing that the world’s most beautiful cat has run away from its owner in Stovner. It is large with ginger stripes and is the pride of the neighbourhood, says the presenter, and I get into bed and close my
eyes and sleep until the telephone starts to ring. I open my eyes again. The room is dark now. The radio is still on and the alarm clock shows it is late evening. I get up and go into the living room over to the window while the telephone rings. It is raining a little between the blocks. I have no clothes on, but in the living room too it is dark so no-one can see in. There is light in Mrs Grinde’s
apartment. She stands by the dumb waiter with the telephone in her hand. That is what it looks like, at least at a distance, and my phone is still ringing. She turns and looks out of the window towards my apartment, and then she lowers her arm. The ringing
stops
. I stay there in front of the big window and she goes on standing in front of hers with a hand on what must be the telephone, and I am
sure she is biting her lip and shifting her weight from foot to foot. Not impatiently, but restlessly maybe, at a loss.

I go back to the bedroom and switch the radio off and lie down under the duvet, close my eyes and try to go back to sleep. But it is no good. I try to think of nothing, but that doesn’t work either, and then I just lie looking up into the darkness, thinking about my father.
The Danish lady in his wallet. She was never mentioned. I try to recall what it was Aunt Solgunn told me: that he met her in Copenhagen a year before he got married when he went there with leave from the factory where he had been since he was fourteen. He was like the others in the family, with the exception perhaps of Uncle Alf, and never had a day’s absence, if you don’t count four days in hospital
after a ski-jumping accident which turned his back into his weakest point, and now he had been given a grant to go and see how the Danes made shoes, whether he could learn something there, which he doubted, but still he was eager to go. There had been a fire at his factory, everything had to be rearranged and they were waiting for new machinery, and if he was to go, it had to be then. So they
let him go, and when he was back he was sure they would make him foreman.

The first factory was owned by a co-operative run on
trade
union lines, and the thing that struck him straight away was that the workers thought he was Swedish, and they did not understand what he said if he talked at his usual speed, although he understood
them
well enough. He thought that was funny and slightly irritating,
for if my grandfather was Swedish, my father was
Norwegian
, and the biggest things for him after the establishment of the Norwegian Federation of Labour was Fridtiof Nansen’s skiing journey across the Greenland ice and Roald Amundsen’s victorious race to the South Pole. The second thing he noticed was that beer and schnapps were on sale at lunchtime in the canteen, where the workers played dice
incessantly, and he thought that even more funny and quite exotic, even though he could not see how it might increase production. But they had music while they worked and ten minutes’ obligatory exercise towards the end of the shift every single day. He liked both things and he liked the idea of the workers having their own factory which supplied them with good shoes they could buy in their own
shops all over the country and not the cheap shit he knew was on its way on to the market from places where they did not have a clue. And he liked the daughter of the assistant manager who was put in charge of him for the first week. He met her at the office on the second day, where she sat behind a desk and was a secretary with very smooth, shining blonde hair.
She
talked efficiently on the telephone,
her left hand drawing pictures in the air he had to follow with his eyes, and when she raised her head and said something in Danish he thought was the beginning of a song, he was a goner. Her father, the assistant manager, had once been a worker and later foreman, and after a few days my father thought if he just persevered and learned still more, nothing was impossible. He had thought that
before, quite often, in fact, and time was running out. If it was to be done, it must be done now.

And there was something about him. He was reaching out. He was still shining. The assistant manager’s daughter saw that at once. She kept her eyes on him all through the week he was at the factory, and when he went on to the next one, she kept in touch.

“I never give up,” he solemnly said at the
gate, “it is not in my nature,” and then he laughed in his shy way, and she did not doubt him for a moment. Two weeks later they were secretly engaged, and when he left for home she promised to follow him soon to see what it was in his life that made him shine.

And she came. What she saw was grey rocks and ponderous spruce trees, and everything seemed suddenly so small and cramped about the narrow
fjord where the forest shut out the sun, and she saw the little room where he lived alone at Number 1 Enebakkveien with the books he had bought by the greatest Norwegian authors and then some, perhaps to find
something
there that he could aspire to, but he never got through them. The books were dusty now, and then she would not know the titles of any of them. On the floor above were the premises
of the Baptist Congregation where his father ruled like a patriarch over his family and a handful of workers whose souls had been saved, and she went out and looked at the shabby town which was not in the least like Copenhagen; no canal and golden domes, no great squares and extensive parks, no towering grandeur. But she saw the childish pride he took in all this, and her heart sank like a stone
from summer to far below zero. She began to study train timetables and boat routes and presumably she said, as they used to say in B films of that era: