In The Wake (5 page)

I pull the sweater off and the
T-shirt and stand in front of the mirror half naked with the bandage round my chest, and I still look like him. I am not like him, I smoke and drink when I feel like it, and I often feel like it. On Sundays I sit at home reading whether it’s sunny or raining or snowing. I haven’t owned skis since I was thirty. But I have trained for several years, sometimes a lot and sometimes less, I have lifted
most things around me, chairs and tables and boxes of books, ten-kilo sacks of potatoes I have bought, I’ve stood in the kitchen and just lifted them; shopping bags full of milk cartons, I’ve lifted them up and down, up and down until the sinews by my wrists have tensed like bowstrings. I have attended health studios for six months at a time, and if I need to go to the shopping centre three kilometres
away I walk, and I walk fast. All the way along the footpath past the football pitch, past endless rows of housing blocks and past roundabouts and two schools and a new sports ground and on down past the houses in Station Road which have been there for thirty, forty, maybe fifty years, to the centre beside the old E6, and then back again at the same pace up all the hills and especially the
last one which is so long and steep that the breath burns
in
my throat and the lactic acid bubbles in my thighs right up to this satellite town at the north-east end of the Østmark Forest. When I get indoors I set the shopping bags on the floor and breathe like a man coming up for air before I do twenty push-ups in the hall, and then twenty more, and there is not one sweater that belonged to him
that I cannot fill today.

I dress again and go to the telephone in the living room and stop and stand still. Then I lift the receiver and dial my brother’s number. I let it ring five times before I put the receiver down. He is probably sleeping now, heavy as a soaked mattress, his brain swaddled in black velvet, and Randi is in town and won’t be home until she knows what she wants, and he just
has to wait.

I am not breathing so heavily any more. I circle the floor a few times and suddenly I feel fine. I take Svante Foerster’s
The Class Warrior
from the bookcase and lie on the sofa to read it again. It is two years since the last time, and that’s a long enough wait. I read the first sentences, and they feel as right as ever and my expectations rise. But I’m tired too, and the book is
heavy, it is a big memorial edition with beautiful typography, and my thirty-kroner glasses make my eyes swim. I lay the book down on my stomach for a moment thinking that maybe Mrs Grinde is looking at me through her binoculars now, that I ought to do something indecent, and then I fall asleep.

3

THERE IS A
ringing and I wake up. It is the front doorbell, I realise that straight away. I’m lying on the sofa. I look at the clock on the wall. It says eleven. I have slept for more than six hours and I’ve dreamed about him. I know I remember the dream, that it is inside me perfectly clear and plain, that I can watch it like a video, but then the bell rings again.

It is light outdoors and
light indoors, I’ve got my thirty-kroner glasses on my nose,
The Class Warrior
is on the floor. I sit up and rub my eyes hard. That hurts, I had forgotten about the swelling. Damn, I say aloud and pick up the book from the floor and put it on the coffee table and go through the hall to open the door. It is the Kurd from the third floor. He stands there smiling.

“Hi,” he says in good Norwegian.
It is a short word, though, about the same as “Thanks,” I could have managed that too, in Kurdish or whatever his language is called, if someone instructed me first. I feel suddenly shy, I haven’t quite woken up yet, I don’t know what to say.

“Hi,” I say. He holds something under his arm, a
small
parcel. He gives it to me, I don’t get the point, is it meant for me? He nods.

“Thanks,” he says,
but it is I who should say thanks, if the parcel is for me, so I too say: “Thanks,” and then he smiles even more, and we stand there with our two short words, his cut on the cheek and the remains of my black eye, and have a conversation. Suddenly I am not shy any longer, I start to laugh, and we both laugh. I open my door wide and invite him in using international body language: fling my right arm
out and make a slight bow, but then he laughs again and raises his hands palms outward and shakes his head. He points up the stairs, he has a family waiting, and in fact I don’t mind that because I’m not too sure what state my flat is in. He raises his hand in farewell and says: “Hi,” and I do the same, raise my hand and say: “Hi,” nodding. I have understood, the little gift is for last night,
because I interrupted my sleep to let him and his family in when he stood outside in the cold, bleeding, so far from the high mountains of Kurdistan with the moon so close and the deep valleys with their winding roads of fine-cut chippings and the good neighbours in white-painted houses with no locks on the doors.

He starts to go upstairs. The sound of his steps is one I already know, on the
way up.

“Thanks,” I say, waving the little parcel, and he turns and smiles and says: “Hi.”

We cannot take it any further, there is nothing more
to
say. I close the door and walk through the hall to the living room and sit on the sofa. I unwrap the parcel and put it on the coffee table. It is a small dish, a very shiny brass bowl with a design I imagine is Arabian or oriental at least, I’m really
no good at the art of ornamentation, it might be Inuit for all I know. The famous Inuit brass artefacts.

I go to the kitchen and look into the cupboard and find two apples in a plastic bag. The skins are wrinkled, but they still have some colour and I go back and put them in the bowl and place
The Class Warrior
close to it. Two Norwegian apples in a bowl from a far country and a thick Swedish
book on a white table. A still life from the home of a healthy intellectual, a man who has travelled the world. I sit there gazing. Two apples seem a little cramped, so I take one out, but that looks odd. I take them both away, roll a cigarette and light up, and as I smoke I tap the ash into the bowl. When the cigarette is half smoked, I stub it out in the middle of the oriental pattern. That really
seems wrong. I have been given a present, and then I stub out my fag in it. I go back to the kitchen with the bowl in my hand, hold the stub under running water to be certain it’s extinguished before I throw it in the bin, then I rinse out the bowl and polish it with the dishcloth. It is
not
an ashtray. I put the bowl in the middle of the kitchen table. It may shine there in the light from the
overhead lamp.

I go into the bathroom and undress, take off the bandage and have a long shower. Then I turn off the taps, dry myself slowly, wipe the steam from the mirror with the corner of the towel and study my face. Not so bad. There is a stick of make-up in the medicine cupboard left by someone whose face I have forgotten, who doesn’t need make-up any more because her face has gone, like
the years have gone when I saw nothing except that face. I rub the stick lightly once or twice over the purple stain under my eye and spread it evenly with a fingertip. It looks almost natural. Perhaps I have just been sleeping badly, one eye open, always on the watch, as a writer should be.

I slam the door from the outside for the first time in a week. As I walk across the stairwell past the
letter boxes on my way out, I hear a telephone ringing. It is mine. I stop, turn round and wait before turning back and then I open the door to the walkway outside. It is not locked now, it’s the middle of the day. The ringing goes on in there, but I have been at home for so long that whoever wants me could have called me before. I want to go out.

It is March. Cold sunshine over the roofs, wind
over the hills, hard snow in the shadows between the blocks, and the banks of snow alongside the walkway to the Co-op are sunken and hard as bone. All else is bare and dusty dry, the air is like Perrier. It pricks and stings the throat. I cough and swallow air, housewives
come
out with children in warm suits, and I cough again. They stare at me. I slowly breathe and hold the air as long as I can,
I restrain from coughing and just as slowly let the air out again. I feel their eyes and the wind on my back. I pull my collar up to the neck and walk between the blocks and past the Co-op and the bus stop, and on to the walkway slanting alongside the steep hill and the road where a blue bus changes down on its way up. Grey clouds sweep along high above the ridge. They block out the sun for a
moment and pass on, their shadows travel along the edge of the forest above the fields towards the tall block of the Central Hospital down in the valley, and turn to yellow what was grey. I stop and stand still. I close my eyes.

There’s a strong wind. I stand alone on the hillside. I don’t know where I am going. This was not what I had expected, but I cannot go up again. So I go on downhill to
the shopping centre by the main road, staring straight in front of me until I cross with the green light and walk between the cars ranked close in the car park, and in through the tall glass doors.

It is Wednesday and only one o’clock, but there are people in all the shops on the ground floor and in all the ones in the gallery on the first floor, and high up under the ceiling there are great
blue-painted beams across the whole span with long rails where the big cranes moved back and forth when this was a steelworks. It seems a long time ago now, but it is only
fifteen
years. I knew people who worked here. Reidar did, but Reidar is dead. He too wanted to write, and he did in the end, and then he died. But we were everywhere then, we who wanted the world to be new; in factories, on
building sites, in print shops and tram drivers’ seats, we wanted to assault the Winter Palace in the light of Lenin, see our muscles swell in the glimmer of molten steel, hear the tigersaw howl in red forests and stretch cables and groan and vigorously sing like the Volga boatmen, da da daa da, haaa! da da daa da, haaa! We wanted light over the land, and even if the world was like we said it was,
almost all we did was wrong, for in every living room the lamps were lit and the TV sets flickered far into the night, and the world grew newer than we had ever imagined. Now the steelworks is a shopping centre, and a stone’s throw away was my father’s last shoe factory, where he jumped when the boss said jump until the factory collapsed under the weight of cheap Italian shoes, and then nothing was
left. But I did not see him, did not want to see him. I saw the thousands on their march to Jenan and Dimitrov standing up against Hitler, I saw the masses of Petrograd and Mayakovsky’s posters. I saw the mountains of Albania covered with guns and draped in red banners, and compared with all that he almost became invisible.

I walk among the shops in the big hall as far as the patisserie at the
other end and take my place in the
queue
for a coffee and Napoleon cake. You can say what you like about Napoleon, but he
could
make a cake, my father used to say, and that was about as funny as he could get. He really loved Napoleon cakes. So do I. I take my tray with the coffee and cake and walk towards a table where smoking is allowed, and as I’m about to sit down I remember the dream I was
having before the Kurd from the third floor rang my doorbell.

In the dream it was Easter time. I was twelve. We had gone out to the cottage by the Bunnefjord, it was morning and the sun shone sharply on the bare birch crowns where the crows roosted in dark clusters. They were unusually big. We had heard them carrying on quite early, before we got up, and we could hear them still. All else was
quiet. My brother and I had climbed the rocks along the fjord towards Roald Amundsen’s house until we were stopped by a high wire fence running down the steep slopes from the gravel road and continuing several metres out into the sea. We could see the house through the fence some way up from the shore, pale grey and huge in the sunshine, and the windows were dark. Roald Amundsen had been dead for
a long time, but the house was still there and had been renovated, and if you paid the entrance fee you could go inside and look at his books and all the maps and polar bear skins and maybe a few old anoraks, but we had never done that, my brother and I. I stuck my fingers through the holes in the fence
and
put my face to it and shouted up at the house:

“I don’t give a shit about Roald Amundsen!”
I heard the sound of my voice so clear and metallic and I knew that I meant what I said, and what I said was momentously new. Now we were free to do as we pleased. We could smell the melting snow and the heather and the sun-warmed pines. It was springtime. The ice had broken on the fjord, only last night big patches had opened and lay darkly where before there was white in white, and the whole
time floes broke free and floated on the current towards Oslo, and some of them ran inshore and hit the rocks with heavy thuds we could feel in our bones before the current turned them around and sent them on. There was a light wind. We stood on the smoothly polished rock that sloped down into the water, looking out over the fjord with the sun on our backs and our backs to Roald Amundsen’s house.
It was cold and warm both. We waited. The first floe was too small. We helped it on its way with two long poles we had found in a pile beside the fence. The next one looked fine. Rough and massive, but it was too far out, it would drift past and hit the shoreline much closer to town, and then we pushed the poles out to bring it to a halt, and it slowed down and turned towards the shore, and my brother
yelled: “Jump.” And then he jumped, and I jumped after him. We landed on the floe which kept swinging and crashed into the rock with a boom, slid
up
the bare rock some way and then began to turn over.

“Fucking hell,” my brother yelled.

“Fucking hell,” I yelled and dropped to my knees so I wouldn’t slide off the floe and into the icy cold water, and my brother did what I did. We shoved our poles
against the rock and pushed as hard as we could. And we did it. The floe slid off with a scraping noise and was flat on the water again, and then we were safe.