In The Wake (6 page)

“Ho,” said my brother, smiling.

“Hoho,” I said.

Clutching the poles, we cautiously stood up. The floe turned gently and now we could see Roald Amundsen’s house from a fresh angle and on towards the end of the fjord, we saw the whole
of the Nesoddland up to the tip, and the islands nearest town, we saw Holmenkollen ski jump on the ridge, and then we saw it all a second time. After circling around three times, we had been taken by the current so far along we could see the shoreline to the plot that was ours and the path from the jetty up the hill to the cottage where my father came running down in his T-shirt as if it was summertime.
He was a fast runner for someone over fifty, and he shouted something we could not hear, for each time he opened his mouth the crows lifted from the trees, and the sound they made filled the air around us. I did not care. It was great to be standing on the floe. I had a clear view to all sides, and
everything
I saw was familiar and at the same time completely new, and it gave me such a weightless
feeling that my stomach seemed to dissolve, and I would not mind standing on that floe for ever, rushing along with the current and seeing the places I knew as if for the first time.

When we passed the jetty my father had come right down to the shore. We could hear what he was shouting now, it was our names, but I did not recognise mine. It sounded like it, but it was not mine. We were far from
land, and if he wanted to get hold of us he would have to swim, and that was his idea. He threw himself out, the water splashing from his body on both sides, but it was icy cold, I heard him gasp, and he had not come far when I saw his face go white and he had to turn back. Back on land he started to run back and forth along the shore, calling, water pouring from his hair, from his clothes, and
I heard the crows and his cries at the same time, and it was the name that was not mine and goddamnit, goddamnit, and then he caught sight of the rowing boat lying upside down in the shelter of a rock. It had been there since the previous autumn, covered with a tarpaulin, and he tugged and pulled it to turn it over and push it down to the water, but I knew the oars were not there. They were in the
storeroom under the veranda on two benches, so he would have to run the whole way up to the cabin and then down again, and it’s hard to carry two long oars and at the same time run. By
the
time everything was in its place and he was out on the water, we would be off. I turned and stood there looking straight across the fjord to Oslo while the ice floe gently rocked, and my brother was staring
stiffly back at the rowing boat and at my father, and I think perhaps
that
is the difference between my brother and me, that in spite of size and age he always looked back while I look straight ahead, and this is the way it always has been. Right up to now. I don’t know what has happened. It was something to do with a face. I had never seen it before, I did recognise it, but yet as it comes to
me now, the thought of it is unpleasant. Someone gave me a gin. I had had enough already, I see my hand around the glass, the glass is full, and then the whole time there was that face with staring eyes and mouth wide open, and someone standing on the stairs, screaming and breaking vases, and there were mirrors everywhere. Mirrors everywhere, and he was shouting at me, but I didn’t know who he was.
He was intimidating, he said things I did not want to hear, I had to defend myself. All the words I needed lay tightly in line, ready to be said. I would break him with words the way he was breaking vases, but nothing came out. My lips were numb, my tongue was stiff, and my words were the things being broken, one by one as I was about to say them. I felt myself getting furious, I still wanted to
defend myself, but when I looked at that face, I feared for my life, and then I do not remember anything more
until
I stood in front of the door of that bookshop in the centre of Oslo where I had not worked for three years. I kicked the door, but no one came to let me in.

What was it that he yelled? I have it on the tip of my tongue, but I cannot get it out. And the dream was so real, everything
fitted, everything was as it could have been except for the name that was not mine, and the crows. They were unusually big. But they did not scare me.

It’s a lousy Napoleon cake. The cream should be a pale yellowish white and light, but this one is feverish yellow and sticky. I eat just the top and leave the rest on the plate. I ought to complain, hold the cake up in front of the lady at the
counter and say: “This is a cheap imitation, I want my money back.” But I have never done that. I have never complained about anything except badly written books and the world situation, and you don’t get your money back when little Nepalese girls are sold by their families to brothels in Bangkok, or because the World Bank refuses to waive cruel loans to Uganda. On the contrary. And lousy books; they
just look at you and say: “Why don’t you write one yourself, then?”

That’s what I’ve tried to do. Several times.

I stub out my fag in the revolting yellow cream and get up and leave. I could have stayed there for a while to
see
if Thor the poet from Skjetten would turn up on his bike as he often does at this time of day to get a cup of coffee when he’s desperate with writer’s block, which is
often the case, and we could have talked about how hopeless it is, the path we have chosen and gossip over colleagues who may have received a big grant from the state or do not sell books at all, and why that isn’t in the least odd. Instead, I go by the escalator up to the first floor and go into the bookshop to see what others are up to while I am stuck. That is not inspiring. The piles left over
from Christmas are still there and have not diminished at all, and there are none of mine on the shelves. That is not so strange. It is more than three years since I last published anything, and the woman behind the counter does not recognise me although I have at least twice sat in front of that counter at a small table signing books. I remember myself at eighteen reading Keats and Shelley and
Byron and dreaming of publishing
one
book, or maybe two, which would be on everyone’s lips and be everyone’s mirror, and when they looked in that mirror they would see the people they might have been and they would have to cry, and after that I would just disappear, become one of the young dead and thus immortal, but now I am one of the middle-aged forgotten. I enquire after the lady who runs
the shop because
she
will know who I am, and we often have a chat. But she is in hospital with a stroke, she has lost the power of speech, the lady behind the
counter
says in a confidential, solemn voice, without even recognising me, and then I ask if they have any books on Kurdistan or at least on northern Iraq, and she tells me I should go to the library. But I do not go to the library, I go
home. That is, I go to the bus stop.

Several of the neighbours are there, standing in the queue, and then they get on the bus with me. They greet me warily. I nod and turn away and walk between the seats to the back, then sit down by the window and lean my forehead against the window glass. The bus starts, I feel a vibration in my chest, in my stomach and groin. Even since I was small I have
ridden in buses with my forehead to the window and gazed out without really looking or thinking, just concentrating on the vibration in my body, until my body
was
that vibration, and when I get off it is like a sleep it hurts to wake up from, my skin electric and open to whatever may strike it and rip it to shreds, and yet the worst thing is when someone gets on that I know and sits down on the
seat beside me with a big smile and wants to talk.

On my way in to the stairwell I hear the ringing again. I don’t care, I don’t want to talk to anyone. I open the letter box calmly and fish out
The Class Struggle
and a flyer from the Co-op and Rælingen parish magazine, and then take out the key and run to my door, fumble with the lock, swear out loud and run into the hall and
pick
up the phone.

“Just a moment,” I say. I clutch the receiver to my chest and breathe heavily and hold a hand to my side, where it suddenly hurts. Maybe the doctor made a mistake, maybe it is not the rib, maybe it is something else entirely. Then I lift the receiver. It is Randi. Why doesn’t my brother call himself, why is his wife calling?

“I’ve been trying to reach you all day,” she says.

“You have? I have
been out. I do sometimes go out, as a matter of fact.”

“It’s your brother. He’s in the Central Hospital,” she says, but that cannot be right, because I have stood looking down at that hospital today, and I should have felt something if he was there, but I did not feel anything.

“What’s he doing there?”

“He’s been admitted.”

“But shit, I’ve just been talking to him.”

“You have? When?”

“Last
night. He called me.”

She gets mad, she says something quickly, hard, but she doesn’t speak into the receiver, so I do not catch it, and there is a silence; she is breathing, and I am breathing. I stand in front of the mirror in the hall. It is difficult to focus, but there is someone there, I’ve seen him before. I nod, and he nods, and then I recognise myself.

“So tell me what’s happened.”

“A bottle of port and a hundred Sarotex is what has
happened
. A hundred Sarotex without capsules so they would work quicker. The capsules were in the bathroom when I came home this morning, and the bottle was in the living room, empty. I rushed all over the house, but I couldn’t see him anywhere. In the end I found him in the shed. It was cold out there, Arvid, I don’t think I can take this any
longer,” she says, and that’s probably true. She starts to cry, and I wonder what the hell is Sarotex, and I try to remember when it was I last saw my brother, face to face, but all that comes to mind is that once we fought in the hall at home when he was twelve and I was nine, and we were alone and rolled on the floor and punched and punched each other and tore the coats down from the hooks and
knocked the chest over and tipped the vacuum cleaner out of the cupboard which was open, and it burst apart and everything that was in it spilled out on the floor and made a massive cloud of dust and dirt, and then we suddenly stopped because we realised both at the same time that we hadn’t anything to fight about. We never did have. And we were both so embarrassed that he went straight to his room
and shut the door and I went out. I ran round the block the longest way and sat down under the poplars beside the dustbin where the blackbird used to sing, and I thought I had lost myself, that I did not know who I was, because I was the one who had attacked him, and I had no idea why.

4

WHEN MY MOTHER
and father came out of the tabernacle in Hausmannsgate after they had stood before the priest and both said yes, my father stared at the ground with a frown on his face, and turned to one of his brothers, Trond, and said: “Nailed to a cross on earth.” And then he laughed.

I don’t know how many people heard what he said, but
I
heard it from Uncle Trond on the telephone only a
month ago, and you might think I would feel my father was a shit for saying a thing like that, for if anything I was a mother’s boy, but I did not, I thought: Christ, did
he
say that?

It was October, it was sunny, and my mother had not learned to speak Norwegian yet, but she made herself perfectly well understood, and “ja” was more or less the same in Danish, so she got that right. She was slim
again, or as slim as she could be. She had let her hair grow down to her shoulders after keeping it short for several years, and it was more curly now than frizzy, and she had a white flower stuck into it above one ear about where Billie Holiday used to wear hers, and like Billie Holiday she needed no clasp to fasten it
with
. She pushed it in and it stayed put. She probably needed that flower,
for not one of her family was there in Oslo that day.

They all were on my father’s side. Four brothers and two sisters and my grandfather Adolf Jansson, a Baptist from the countryside south of Sunne in Värmland, Sweden, who was finally awarded the King’s silver medal of merit for long and acquiescent service at Salomon Shoe Factory, where he had been all his working life, where all his children
worked, a factory he must have chosen because of its name or because the people who ran it shared his brand of faith.

Now they were clustered on the pavement. My mother smoked a cigarette, the only one who did, except for maybe Uncle Alf who had ambitions and wanted to leave the factory, and I do not know whether she took in my father’s biblical sense of humour. Anyway, there was complete silence.
She stood at the edge of the little group. A whirlwind spiralled in the grey street and lifted her hair, made it big and sparkling in the autumn sunshine, and her dress was pale blue and swung around her strong calves, and it looked like a dance, but I do not think she thought that was what she was doing. Dancing. Her hair settled again, and her dress fell into place, and she stubbed out her
fag with the toe of her shoe on the side of a kerbstone, pushed a hand in under her blouse to straighten a bra strap, while my father looked the other
way
, while they all looked the other way, and then they went down the street to the photographer round the corner in Storgata.

I keep that photograph in a drawer, and it’s just the two of them there, but I can sense the others, they push against
the edges of the picture wanting to be in it, and my father likes that, I can see it by the way he smiles. He is at ease again, surrounded by his family, and as long as that lasts he does not have to think about how bewildering it is to find himself there at this moment. For a while it was difficult, but now they stand close, and he has a lady beside him with long dark curly hair. She is Danish.
He does not know her very well. She looks obstinate, but she is good-looking in a southern way, like an Italian, or maybe Moroccan, and in the inside pocket of the jacket he fills to bursting point there is a picture of another lady who is Danish too, stuffed between the notes his father gave him for a wedding present. It is stupid and he knows it, but he cannot part with it, and in fact it is not
that bad to stand shoulder to shoulder with one attractive lady and have another in his wallet. He thinks of that too as he looks at the photographer and faintly smiles.