In The Wake (7 page)

The only one who is no way near the picture is my brother. He was put away on a farm belonging to someone my mother knew on an island off the coast of Denmark. There he trudged around among sheep and sheepdogs and thought that
all was well with the
world
. He had very fair hair and was almost eighteen months old. I don’t know how many knew he existed. My father knew, or he would not have been standing outside the tabernacle saying: “Nailed to a cross on earth.”

My brother’s hair is darker now, and thinner. He is forty-six. There is a tube in his mouth and another through his nose, and one is fastened to the back of
his hand, and there is a screen by the wall where a curve moves up and down, up and down towards a point it will never reach, and it looks as though it moves a little unevenly, but then I don’t understand such things. I pull a chair to the end of the bed and sit down. It is evening. As I walked down the corridor to ask my way, the nurse on duty stuck her head out and said: “That was none too soon.”

“I couldn’t get here before,” I replied.

But that was not true. I had walked around the apartment for quite a while, and in the end I lay down on the sofa and fell asleep at once, and when I woke up it was far into the evening. I emptied a glass I had poured from a bottle I kept in the kitchen cupboard, brushed my teeth and then got dressed and left.

“I mean he survived by a hair’s breadth.
Half an hour more . . .” she said, leaving the rest to drift. “Are you family?”

“I’m his brother,” I said. “I am the only family he
has
,” and even if that is not true either, the look she gave me made me so furious that I was still shaking as I went on down the corridor.

“He is stable now,” she said icily behind me, but I did not turn round, merely found the right door and went into the intensive
care ward and stopped by his bed.

I sit there for a long time just watching him. His eyes are closed. His eyelids are swollen as his face is swollen, and he looks big and seems immensely heavy beneath the thin duvet on the bed of this white-painted room. He was the first one in our family to pass his examination to go to university. He was the first one in our
street
to go to university. That’s
more than twenty-five years ago. I can remember the black student’s cap that was kept tidily wrapped in soft paper on the top shelf of the cupboard in the hall, and he used it that once only, when he enrolled at the university, because it embarrassed him, but he thought he had to, and then he put it away for good. When I passed my student’s examination three years later and enrolled at the university,
it never occurred to anyone that I might want a student’s cap. But then nothing came of it. I never showed up. I lost my courage, or something else was lost, and with my hand upon my heart I cannot say my father was sorry for it.

My brother’s bare chest rises and falls slowly and
evenly
and the graph makes the same movements on the screen, then he suddenly raises himself on his elbows and starts
to speak in a language only drunk men understand. One of the tubes comes loose and falls onto the duvet, and he opens his eyes and looks straight at me.

“You’re stable,” I say. “Relax, for Christ’s sake.” But he does not relax, he starts to shout, and if the name he shouts is mine, I do not recognise it. I go and fetch the nurse. She lays her hand on his forehead and fastens the loose tube, and
then he slides down on to the pillow again.

“He doesn’t seem very stable,” I say.

“He is stable, but he doesn’t know you’re here. If you come again tomorrow you may get through to him. He’s full of poison now.”

I feel offended on his behalf. “There’s nothing the matter with my brother, he just can’t stop looking back.”

“Is that so?” she says, smoothing the duvet and straightening the tubes,
and looking at the screen as she mumbles: “Of course he’s stable,” and then she says more audibly: “Do you want to sit here a while longer?”

“A bit longer, maybe.” I sit down again and she leaves, and I sit perfectly still looking at him, and then I fall asleep, and when I wake up she is standing in the doorway. She smiles.

“I’ve made some cocoa. Would you like a cup? You can come along to the
office with me.”

I haven’t tasted cocoa since I made a jug the morning my daughters moved out. It seems a long time ago. I say yes, please, and get up and follow her. The big hospital is quiet, there are thousands of people here, but they do not make a sound. Only one patient suddenly coughs behind the curtain in the corridor as I go by, and I try to walk without a sound in my lace-up boots,
but it’s not easy. In the nurses’ office she pours me a cup, and I sit down on a spare chair drinking the hot cocoa slowly, letting it warm my stomach while she writes a report or whatever it is that nurses write at night. She looks up at me once or twice and smiles. I like her better now.

“It tastes good,” I say, and she smiles and nods and goes on writing, and then I start to cry and get up
with the cup in my hand and stand by the window until it has passed and then I sit down again and say: “He’s going to be divorced, you know, but that’s not what this is about.”

Carefully, she puts down her pen and looks at me with absolute calm, and then I tell her about the boat and the fire and all those who died in the flames, and died from the poisonous smoke, and how they lay close together
in the companionways, side by side like a single conjoined body, and many lay on top of their children to shield them from the smoke, and some
were
in the shower with the water running, and that did not help them at all, but there was nowhere else to go, and only those having a ball in the bar had all their clothes on, because it was the middle of the night, the way it is now. And she nods, she
remembers that fire,
everyone
remembers that fire, that’s why it is so difficult to talk about, they all nod and grow quiet, and it is like beating a duvet filled with down; completely numb and dumb, and they nod and nod, but she merely pours me a second cup of cocoa, and I drink it slowly, for it warms my stomach so pleasantly. I wonder whether it is proper cocoa or one that takes five seconds
with a teaspoon and boiling water, because it reminds me of the kind my mother made when I was a child, and I look around for the packet to see what it says, and then I tell her of all the discussions we have had since then, my brother and I, about how they died, my two younger brothers and my mother and my father, and I have said it again and again, that they were asleep and died from the smoke
and never knew what had happened to them, while
he
is convinced they were awake and tried to get out, and then could not because the flames were so fierce at that particular place in the boat and the smoke was so thick, and he cannot stop thinking about what their thoughts were just then, what their last feelings were, and I have said it does not do any good to go on thinking like that. “But he
cannot stop,” I say. “Six years have gone by,
and
goddamnit, he cannot stop thinking about it.”

“Shall I make some more cocoa?” she asks, picking up the empty pitcher. For a moment I think that that would be great, and I could see how she makes it, and then just sit there drinking really good cocoa, but I do not say that, I say: “No, thanks, I’m fine.”

She puts the pitcher back and looks out
of the window down at Gamleveien where the line of street lights glitter, and then it is dark all the way up to the ridge where I live in an apartment block in a satellite town I usually call the Eagle’s Nest.

“If he had succeeded in what he was trying to do, then you would have been left alone,” she says, and my heart sinks, I know that song, I don’t have to listen to that crap, and anyway it’s
not true, I am not alone, there are people in my life although none comes to mind at this very moment, but she may not be talking to me, as she is just sitting there looking out of the window, she may be talking to herself.

“I cope,” I say. “I always have.” I put my cup on her desk and stand up. She turns, but she didn’t like that last remark, that’s obvious. She does not want me to cope, she
wants us to be dependent on each other and hold each other’s hands and have dinner together every bloody Sunday and be a close and happy family with a summer house on the coast and have smiles on our faces no matter what happens. She belongs to the Christian People’s Party, I can tell from her dialect.

“You want to look in on him again?” she asks.

“No, I’ll come back tomorrow. Maybe he won’t
be so stable then.”

She does not think I am funny at all.

In the lift going down there is a woman who cannot stop weeping, and I do not know which department she has left, maybe maternity a few floors up, where I have been twice in an earlier life, and if she comes from there and is weeping still it must be because she has a daughter of fourteen who has had her first baby and will not tell who
the father is. Her tears trickle down her face and she looks at me as if I might say something wise at any moment, and that is what she needs right now, for me to say something wise to make her stop feeling such a lousy mother, but she has got the wrong man. I have nothing to say. At the ground floor I walk from the lift and can hear her behind me, sniffing all the way through the vast, empty entrance
hall to the door.

It is cold outside, and immediately dark as I walk out of the ring of lights that circles the yard in front of the hospital. The ambulance helicopter is parked on a pad some distance away like an enormous insect with long shadows, and when I turn into the walkway to Gamleveien I hear a man shouting and motors starting up and the fluttering rush of the rotor blades, and I turn
and watch the helicopter take off tail first and
then
rise in an arc around the hospital block and vanish high up over the ridge with its searchlights aiming for the Østmark and the great lake and the forests on the other side.

I come down to Gamleveien and walk alongside the lamp-posts up the first slopes which are not too steep, and it is dark on both sides, but I know how the fields undulate
and rise to the right towards the ridge lying there huge and heavy, and I know how steep it is and dread the last long slope. Suddenly a car comes down the road. The headlights dazzle me so I have to stop and stand still for a moment, and as it goes past I see the compartment light is on. The car is crammed with people and they laugh, and one has a bottle in his hand, and they are all quite young.
There is music howling from the car stereo, and the driver leans on his horn to greet me, a middle-aged man on his way through the night on foot, and they do not have a care in the world at this moment. I turn and watch the car with its lit interior and red rear lights until it disappears round the bend before the church and how it rushes past, and the last thing I hear is the bass thumping out
through the half-open windows.

I walk on again. Everything is quieter now, the asphalt glittering with frost. I am freezing in my pea jacket, I put on speed and find a pace I can manage without exhausting myself. When I come to the foot of
the
last hill I am warm and sweating and a little mad, so instead of following the walkway along the ridge I take the path that goes up through the spruce
trees, which is twice as steep but much shorter. Halfway up I have to stop. I do not know what is wrong. I cannot take another step. My legs are shaking and my side hurts. I lean against a tree practically panting, then lie down with my feet resting against the trunk to stop myself from sliding. Through the trees I see the lights of the hospital in the valley and the street lamps along Gamleveien
and otherwise nothing. I close my eyes, I hear the wind in the treetops, and it is a good sound. I have heard it both summer and winter on hundreds of cross-country treks with my father, when we rested and my breath was not the only sound I could hear, and sometimes the wind in the treetops was the only thing that
was
good. And sometimes it was good when he stood there on the ski track in front
of us with his arms stretched out to his sides taking deep breaths and then keeping the air down for a long time, and letting it out again and passed it all on to us who were his sons when the hills were steep on the way up to Lilloseter and Sinober, deep into the forest. We stood there in a line, with our skis on whether we wanted to or not, our arms stretched out, with thick gloves and dangling
ski poles, and he said: “Close your eyes, breathe deeply, and let the air out again slowly, and you will see that it helps.” And we did that in chorus. Took deep breaths
with
loud gasps, and the forest that surrounded us grew quiet, and the world held its breath while we held ours, and when we let the air out again a wind came that lifted us all for years until it could carry us no more. And I
never asked myself why, never looked back to find out whether he was still standing there, but now I am sitting in the middle of this steep slope on a ridge north-east of Oslo with my feet against the base of a spruce tree to stop me from slipping, and there is not much snow now, but it is well below freezing, and I stretch my arms out to the sides and suck the air in, keep it down for a long time
and slowly let it out again, and I do it once more and then again until I find a rhythm I can keep. I gently pump
space
into my chest which has been cramped for a long, long time, until the silence inside me matches the silence that surrounds me. I lie down again with my back in the pine needles, and it feels good to breathe the ice-cold air. I look up between the tree trunks to the sky, which
is completely clear and full of stars, and it slowly turns around, the whole world turns slowly around and is a huge, empty space. Silence is everywhere, and there is nothing between me and the stars, and when I try to think of something, I think of nothing. I close my eyes and smile to myself.

5

A ROARING SOUND
wakes me. I hear it from the inside of something which is not a dream, which is different from a dream, and the sound gets louder and louder, and I want it to stop, but it does not. A white crack opens and there is light streaming in, and even if I squeeze my eyes shut the light just gets stronger. The roaring sound pushes me down and fills my head, and then I have to open my
eyes, and I see the helicopter’s searchlight sweep down the ridge, and its rear lights, and the pressure of the air from the rotor blades makes the treetops above me thrash against each other. All the space around me undulates and swirls, and I am lifted up and sink again, like a carpet in
A Thousand and One Nights
, and it is night now, I remember that. And then the roar grows fainter as the helicopter
follows the hill on its way down and makes an arc around the hospital block before landing, and then it disappears.