In The Wake (19 page)

I call him on April 7, early in the day. He is at home on sick leave.

“Hello,” he says.

“Hi,” I say, “it’s me. Your brother. You’ll remember me if you search your mind. It is a kind of jubilee today, is it not. Want to go for a beer?”

“Your treat?”

“Sure thing.”

“OK,” he says. “Can you pick me up? She took the car.”

“If
my
car will start, I will.”

It does, of course, it never lets me down. Give me any car at all, as long as it’s Japanese and begins with an m and ends with an a. I have replaced the scratched bumper with one from a scrapyard, and it is really posh, and even has the same paint colour as the original.

I drive down the hills to Lillestrøm, cross the bridge over the Nitelva and in through the first
streets past the station. All the snow has gone, not a patch to be seen on the way down. There are coltsfoot beside the
roadside
ditches, the April sun is shining, and the workers on the new railway to Gardermoen airport wear orange trousers and white T-shirts that are still quite clean. They are laying rails with huge machines and signal to each other with gloved hands. The gloves are yellow
and can be seen from a long way off. I catch myself singing “Somewhere” from
West Side Story
, and not quite like in the original version by Leonard Bernstein, but more like Tom Waits on the
Blue Valentine
LP from before he stopped smoking. To my ears it sounds quite similar, but I’m not sure everyone would support that view. “There’s a place for us,” I bellow in a gurgling voice, and then I start
coughing. I ought to stop smoking myself. My father would have liked that. Or maybe not. It would have made him less unique among us, with his body like a temple; no whited sepulchres in sight. His temple got cancer, but that can happen to anyone; a genetic time bomb placed there by chance at birth, ticking and running, and then one day: Bang. If that happens to me it will be far from chance.
That is the difference between us, and it is a big difference.

But I feel better now than I have for a long time. I do.

They are building a new railway station beside the old one in Lillestrøm, and it looks good. I like railway stations made of glass and steel, I like airports, I like big bridge spans and concrete constructions if they are bold enough, I can drive long diversions to see a power
station
in the mountains or in the depths of a valley, I like high-tension cables in straight lines through the landscape, and presumably that is because I read too many Soviet novels at a certain age. Light over the land, that is what we want. Light in every lamp, light in every mind.

I drive out of Lillestrøm following the roundabouts by Åråsen football stadium where LSK plays its home matches,
but I have never liked LSK in their canary-yellow colours, have never been into that ground, only heard the heart-rending jubilation when Vålerenga gets knocked out again and again, and then I turn out on to the road to Fetsund and step on the gas to about ninety kilometres an hour straight over the big plain where the rivers meet and break their banks at the end of spring every single year when
the melt water from the mountains comes down through the valleys and all the way here. Sometimes the cattle stand in the meadows beside the highway with water above their hocks in the mist looking like water buffalo in films from the Yangtze, Mekong; I remember women on bicycles in round pointed hats with grenades on the handlebars and grenades in their carriers in the rain and the water up to
the hubs on their way through the forest to the front.

“Jesus, they’re all so good-looking,” my friend Audun said when we sat there in the packed hall at college. The black-and-white images flickered in our
faces
and lit up the FNL badges we wore on our lapels. We were eighteen, and in the dark all hands were raised to stroke the shiny emblems.

That was twenty-five years ago, I have not seen
Audun for fifteen. I guess he has got along all right. We do get along, in some way or other.

When the plain is behind me, the road rises steeply to the ridge in a long hill before swooping over the top and then going down on the other side and out on to the big bridge over the Glomma River. Far down on the right the old timber booms shine in the sun and cut the water up into squares, and the
little red lumberjacks’ cabins float above the river where before you could hear the cries of command and the sound of singing and arrogant laughter right up until I was twenty years and more, and the dull boom of log hitting log filled the dreams of many, and many risked their life balancing with only a few inches of soapy smooth timber between their boot soles and the icy cold flood water for the
sake and profit of the forest barons. Now everything is newly painted and nice looking and as quiet as a museum. Not one person in sight. The water is almost green and flows massively under the bridge and heavily out into the vast lake. It heaves and bulges, full of itself.

On the other side of the bridge I just start up the next hill before turning right by the Hydro station and in past the
county hall and the school. His house is
straight
ahead with a view of the river through the trees. It is a dark bluish-red in colour; and he designed it himself. That was his dream, to pull himself out of the terraced houses and apartment blocks and to live in a house that was built to his own design, and now he does, alone. The tracks of a car show on the gravel in front of the door. I park
in the tracks to fill the vacancy and switch the ignition off. I wait in the car. Some stay inside when they hear a car and wait until the doorbell rings, while others hear the car and come out on to the steps to welcome their visitor. My brother has always been of the latter. But no-one comes out. Perhaps he is at the shop. It is not too far for him to walk. I wait for a few moments. Suddenly I get
anxious and push the car door open and get out and run across the gravel to the entrance. The door is not locked, so I go on into the hall which is almost as big as the hall in an American soap on television, and I run straight downstairs to the room in the basement with the big windows on to the river. What was once a television room is now filled with cardboard boxes. The walls are bare. The
room seems enormous. There is nothing in it apart from a small stereo outfit and an easel in front of one window, and my brother stands at the easel with a brush in his hand and headphones on his curly head. He does not notice me and I stand there behind him and see what he is painting is the island with the lighthouse just off the coast of Denmark where our cabin is. He must have
a
photograph
somewhere. So do I, I think. He is painting the childhood horizon. His childhood, and mine.

He is thinner. He used to look like a bear, while I have been more like a fox, and now he is pretty close to an elk, and I glimpse the brother I once went to see in Hull when everything in life was still before us and nothing was settled yet. We may be closer to that point than we have ever been during
the years in between. I could wish for that. But I am not sure. I feel nervous, there is something about that slim back, and then he turns quite calmly and is not surprised to see me standing there. He must have realised the whole time and just gone on with what he was doing, and that certainty does not reassure me. His face is thinner too, and he smiles crookedly with a new glint in his eye. He
knows something I do not know. He takes off the headphones and I can hear it is Steve Earle he is playing: “I’ve been to hell, and now I’m back again. I feel all right.”

“What do you think?” he asks and gestures at the easel. I look at the picture. It is good. It is very good. It is exactly as I imagine it; glimmering, floating, for ever shut.

“You have always been a good painter,” I say.

“It is a long time since I did anything. I have been at it for several days. You know where it is?”

I nod. “Oh, yes,” I say.

“What do you think when you look at it?” he asks. His face is crushingly calm. His eyes have dark shadows. I am not sure if I like him like this. Why does he suddenly have to ask me about that now?”

“I think all that has gone to hell,” I say.

“I don’t.”

“Good for you,”
I say.

I have often talked tough to him, felt free to do so as his little brother, but never like this, sharp, bitter. Something in his expression provokes me, the serenity he shows, and his new appearance, as if he has seen the Light. A quarter of an hour ago I felt quite good myself, but now my heart is in my mouth. In a few minutes only our roles have reversed. There is an itch at my back
and he smiles just as calmly and looks at me with that look, puts his brush in a jar and wipes his hands on a rag. Out of the window behind him I see a boat on the river, it pounds against the current and barely moves forward until it gives up and turns in a big arc towards the opposite shore and suddenly puts on speed and disappears.

“Well, it is,” he says, peering at me.

“Shall we go?” I ask.

“I just have to go up for a shower and a change. Get cleaned up.”

“Undoubtedly,” I say.

“It’s the seventh of April, Arvid. Cut it out,” he says without raising his voice.

I take a deep breath. “OK,” I say.

We both glance at the picture, and then walk up the stairs to the ground floor. He goes first and I follow, and his steps are not as heavy as they used to be, and he walks on up to the first
floor while I go into the kitchen and sit down by the specially designed table. Here almost everything is unchanged. Solid and simple with few colours and a lot of polished metal, like a ship’s galley or a communal kitchen, only much more expensive. The floor is composed of unusually wide planks, brought here from a sawmill in Høland. Even the door handles are masculine, Randi used to say. It
was not really her style, but he had it all planned in beforehand. Now she can do as she likes, and I am certain she will. I roll a cigarette and get up to find an ashtray. That’s not easy, neither of them smokes, and neither of them liked me to when I came to visit. But then I have not been to see them much since they moved to this place. I get a saucer from the cupboard and sit down at the table
to wait and smoke and look at the river. There are no boats on it now. Only the sun on the flowing green water and the booms on the other side.

When he comes downstairs he has showered and changed his clothes. They hang on him a bit, and his belt has more holes than it has had for twenty years. With his damp hair combed back the thinness of his face is even more obvious. He looks many years
younger
or perhaps just different. It is not easy to say. He stops and looks at my cigarette and says: “Haven’t you given those up yet?”

“They’re probably no worse than Sarotex,” I say, “or what do
you
think?” And the next moment I repent my words because his face goes blank, its calmness gone, and he takes one step forward and then one back, he moves his mouth and is about to say something, and
then he says nothing. I lower my eyes and look at the cigarette I hold between my fingers, stub it long and thoroughly on the saucer and look at the floor while I slowly get up from my chair. Then I look up again, and we stand staring at each other. His body grows heavier, his back bends, and his brow sinks, as if filled with the most terrible thoughts in the world and he alone had to carry them
on his shoulders as the only man with a painful past, and I suddenly do not feel repentant any more. It was well said, I think, goddamnit, it was well said, and
that
he can read in my eyes, for he clenches his hands and red spots appear on his pale face, and then he comes quickly towards me and with full conviction hits me on the chest with a clenched fist so hard I have to take one step back.

“You stupid ass,” he says, “you damned halfwit, you selfish little shit,” he says, hitting me again and still harder now, and I stand with my back against the table and can go no further and have to make a decision pretty quickly. I hit him back. Right on the chin.
Maybe
not that hard, but just hard enough. It feels good. He jumps back, and I hit him once more. In his stomach this time. I do not
know what he had expected, but he did not expect this. He bends over with his hand round his chin, and I slip away from the table to the middle of the room with my hands clenched and raised in front of my chest before lunging out again like my father did in the photograph above the radio at home when the world was young and he was still younger; his crazy body naked to the belt with its shining
shoulders and dancing feet and dancing curls and his left arm straight out in a punch like a battering ram. Or as in the picture cards I found in a bundle in a box in the attic; one card for each position with arrows for foot movements and arrows for the angle and direction of the arms, like a dancer’s beginner’s course, really, foxtrot, waltz and cha-cha-cha, but here on small cards with descriptions
underneath in tiny writing: straight left, left hook, right hook, uppercut, and so on, there were at least ten of those cards in all, and I can see them clearly before me now, and once or twice some years ago I tried them out for myself, step by step, blow by blow, behind a closed door and felt like an idiot. Maybe that’s what I
am
now, but I do not feel like it. I dance round my brother who straightens
up with a confused look in his eyes. He coughs after the blow in the stomach and tries to catch my eye and twists round as I keep on dancing,
and
I hit out a few times into the air.

“Selfish. Am I selfish? What about you trying to get out of everything and leave me alone. What about David? You fucking prick,” I shout, and he lets out a roar and throws himself at me, and neither right hook nor
straight left or any other blow I know is of any use, for he lands on my chest and I go down with him, and we fall on his elegant floor and roll around. I go on hitting out while he wraps his arms round my chest so hard I can scarcely breathe. My side really hurts and I am close to howling. I twist as much as I can and roll us on until we meet one table leg and push the table along the floor right
over to the bench where it stops and starts to crack, and then the leg breaks, and the table tips down over our heads. My brother lets go, air comes squealing into my lungs, and he screws himself into a sitting position holding on to the edge of the table and shouts: “Have you any fucking idea how much that table cost me?”