To Siberia

by Per Petterson

  “You won. But there is a waiting list. That book shouldn’t even have been on the shelf. But I know you read quickly.” Then she winks, puts her hand to her mouth, and turns her back. Her shoulders shake, and I laugh the whole way down the steps and ask a friendly-looking man the way to the nearest kaffistove.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t speak Norwegian. I’m new here, you see. Arrived only yesterday. From London.”

  “Oh. What I did was I asked you for directions to the nearest kaffistove, but then you wouldn’t know.”

  “No, I wouldn’t. What’s a kaffistove, by the way? It sounds like an oven of some sort.”

  “It’s a café. For people from the countryside.”

  “You’re from the country, then?”

  “Yes, but not from this one.” I smile, he looks at me, bewildered, and I say:

  “I’m Danish. So I’m from another country.”

  “Oh, I see. Very funny. So am I then. From the country, but not from this one. Oh well, a kaffistove sounds good to me. May I buy you a cup of coffee, if we find one?”

  “You certainly may,” I say, laughing, and he likes it when I laugh, that’s what he says anyway.

  We go to Bondeheimen, the Farmer’s Rest, I’ve known where it is the whole time, and we have coffee there and speak English. I thought it would be difficult, but when I open my mouth it just pours out. Everything I have read lines up to be spoken. He is a good listener, and when he finally asks me back to his hotel room, I feel badly about it and say yes.

  I wake up, and it’s still day. There is light on my eyelids and light in the room when I open my eyes. The window is wide open. I hear a tram in the street, and realize it is not my room. There is a chandelier hanging from the ceiling with chains of cut-glass pieces meant to look like crystal. I must have fallen asleep, but I do not remember when. Maybe right away. That would have been something. I roll around under the bedclothes. He is sitting naked on the edge of the bed leafing through my books. I don’t like him. I don’t like his back. I have changed my mind. I don’t want to go to London after all.

  “You’re a communist,” he says without turning round.

  “Of course I am,” I say, “we’re all communists here. Take your hands off my books.”

  “My suspicions exactly, this place is crawling with communists,” he says; but I am not a communist, I don’t know any communists. Jesper may be a communist, but I do not think so. Uncle Peter is not a communist either, but in his house there were sometimes long lunches when ten or maybe fifteen lodgers debated for hours. The sixty-year-old man who is not my uncle, but my mother’s, sat hungover with his ruined lungs at the head of the table, more of a chairman than a landlord, and what they were discussing was the Spanish Civil War and not the big one that had just ended. Johannes with a shade over one eye had stood in the streets of Barcelona feeling the stench of fouled powder from discarded rifles tear at his nose, and he felt the same in his sleep ten years later. In his dreams he heard the screams of his comrades, and the communists were not popular at that table. They had betrayed the Catalonian syndicalists and shot them in the back in the hour of destiny.

  I usually sat listening, and a lot of what was said was meant for me. I was a woman and young, and they grew red in the face and excited, with their hands in the air competing for who would come out with the most brilliant riposte. Those elderly men infected me with their enthusiasm, they did not speak in one voice, they interrupted each other and dressed up history in words and flickering yellow-brown pictures until it felt like a home, and I was the guest of honor. They took me to a momentous event in Folkets Hus at Klara to hear the young author and editor Stig Dagerman presenting his views on anarchism. His was the new voice in their choir and the hope of the future until late one night when he went into the garage beside his house, closed the doors and ventilators, and ran the car engine at full throttle.

  But at Klara he was only two years older than I was and had six more years to live. I sat in the hall listening to everything he said with his sad eyes and childlike smile, and when the meeting ended Uncle Peter took me by the hand and led me up through the rows of chairs to the podium to meet him. He came down from the lectern with his briefcase under his arm, and his hand was no bigger than mine. We sat there talking about horses. He described the brown one they had on the farm where he grew up. It could take off his grandfather’s hat to get at the sugar lump on his head underneath it and put the hat on again, and I told him about Lucifer who vanished into thin air after my grandfather had hanged himself in the cow barn. He wanted to use that story in a book sometime, if I would give him permission. I did.

  When he picked up his briefcase to leave, he said:

  “Hasta luega, compañera,” and I said:

  “No pasaran,” which was the only thing I could say in Spanish and saluted with clenched fist as was Jesper’s habit. It may have been the wrong thing to do, but he smiled and did the same and turned to go out of the door.

  But in Oslo I don’t know any syndicalists. The naked Englishman sits on the edge of the bed leafing through my books. He lays a finger on the name Ilya Ehrenburg and says I am a communist, and that’s fine with me. I’ll gladly be a communist to him. I go across the room naked to fetch my clothes and put them on slowly, garment after garment. He turns and gazes, but I go on as if he were nothing, and he is left alone with his ridiculous white body.

  “My books, please,” I say, and he hands me the whole pile, and I put them under my arm and walk out of the room and down the stairs to the reception.

  I walk and walk, smell the dust on the edge of the sidewalks and the house walls and the indefinable dampness from the river that runs through the town and the sour sweetness from Schou’s Brewery where the great copper boilers tower, shining on the inside when I go past and where there is always someone standing shading their eyes with their hands gazing in through the windows. I walk down Trondhjemsveien in the evening to save the cost of the bus fare and use the money on the cinema instead, I go to everything that’s on. I sit in the dark of a full house, evening after evening, staring at the screen, feature films, news films, documentary films, cartoons, I watch Tom and Jerry, and a lady in the sixth row can’t stop laughing. She goes on after everyone else has stopped, they all turn around in the dark to look at her but she cannot stop. She can’t have laughed for a long time, she starts to feel ill and has to be carried out, the light streams in from the door at the back and goes out again, and we hear her weeping and laughing on the other side and shouting:

  “No, no. I don’t want to.”

  I don’t want to either. I get up and excuse myself to flickering faces, and everyone has to stand up the whole way along the row so I can get by. I go out past the box office and right out to the street where the evening is still light and the shadows lengthening, and the low sun shines straight at me on my way up Karl Johansgate. There are no familiar faces anywhere, and I think, why doesn’t Jesper write me a letter. I get a letter from my mother once a month, and she writes: “If you have the light on your brow and Jesus in your heart, good fortune will go with you.” Along Studenterlunden I have the light straight in my eyes, but Jesus deserted me a long time ago.

  There is a letter for me forwarded from Denmark. From Helga in Magdeburg. The postmark tells me it has taken several months to get here. The last time I heard from her was in the summer of 1939, and I sent a reply. We were to meet, we said, but then came five years of bombs and flames and two years of silence, and now she lives in the Russian-occupied zone and doesn’t go out. The soldiers march about the streets singing, and her dog Kantor howls.

  It is a long time since I have felt like thinking of her.

  I read the letter in my room with the window open on to the courtyard. It is evening, the air does not move, nothing moves except the pages each time I put one down on the bed. It is a long letter full of bitter words. Walter died at Stalingrad, her father died of grief, and then a long list of things they cannot get, which they tho
ught they would find now it is three years since the war ended, and I wish I could feel sorry for her. To her the war was a tidal wave that came and went, and no one could do anything about it, and the shame she does in fact feel makes her angry. Now at least everything should be as it was before. But nothing is as before. They live in a cellar with the four-story house in ruins above them, it is still winter, the water runs down the walls and they have a coal fire that is just as damp, it smokes and spreads soot over everything. I do look awful, she writes.

  I drop the last page on to the bed in irritation and just sit there.

  “Aren’t you feeling well, my dear?” asks Aunt Kari. She stands in my doorway with her black silk dressing gown around her odd body. She is fifty-nine and almost as broad as she is tall, and it is her heart that takes up so much room. She has a dark shadow of mustache over her lips that are always red and curlers in her hair that is unnaturally dark.

  I tidy the pages into a pile and look at her.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Take a look at yourself in the mirror, my girl.”

  But I do not. Dear Helga, I write, this is probably not the right moment, your before is not like my before, I write, but I do not send it.

  He is persevering. He is on night shift from Friday to Saturday and he comes across the square in the light under the trees just before opening time and stands there in front of the door with hands in pockets waiting till I let him in. He wants breakfast. This is new. I am under increasing siege. His eyes are red from lack of sleep and he is not so supple as when he steps out among the tables to show the basic movements in skiing or dances around with invisible boxing gloves on, one fist before his face, and the other whirling around my head or Aunt Kari’s, and then suddenly blushes, smiles shyly and goes back to his place.

  Now he sits in the alcove nearest the window and says:

  “Excuse me a moment,” puts his arms on the table and his head on his arms and stays like that for at least ten minutes before he straightens his back and orders rolls and coffee. He suffers a little for appearance’s sake, for my sake. That is sweet, but not impressive.

  At the Central Telephone Exchange in Copenhagen I worked double shifts many times and sometimes three in a row, to earn a bit extra, and then I took pep pills that Luise got for me, she had started work there the same day as I had. We teamed up and shared a flat in Vesterbro, and I do not know what was in those pills, she got them from a doctor she knew, but we could keep on working for two days and nights without sleep, and then we flopped into bed and slept for twenty-four hours. When we woke up we were empty-headed with no memory, and a hollow feeling in the body that made our legs shake, and we could hardly put on our dressing gowns and stagger out onto Istedgate to the bakery on the next corner to buy bread and milk. We sat on the front steps eating breakfast there in our dressing gowns before we could get ourselves up the stairs again.

  And then it was back to work. When the weekend came the extra earnings went to the flicks and the switchback railway at Bakken amusement park outside town. We rode and rode until our spines were like jelly, and we shrieked and screamed until our voices gave up and our stomachs turned themselves inside out. When the gondola finally stopped, we stumbled out and ran around the bushes behind the big framework to the fence, and there we leaned our foreheads against the wire netting and vomited spun sugar and baked apples until our stomachs were quiet again, and then Luise started to laugh and then I laughed, and we wiped our mouths and got out the last of our money and had one more ride. We were two girls from the provinces who screamed the evenings away and could never get enough.

  The days and weeks with Luise went by in one stream, at work and after work, in the dark streets at night and the dark cinemas, in the flickering light of the screen where Cary Grant never stopped talking and in the light on the wet asphalt of Kongens Nytorv on humming bicycle wheels along phosphorous tramlines, to and fro, to and fro, on fixed routes. And I liked my work despite the military organization with head duty manager and duty manager and duty submanager and strict supervision of clothes and language. I felt I was good at German and English and would soon be moved over to international where more help was needed, and I wanted that, so I never refused overtime when I was asked. And I was asked more and more often. I did late shift one day and double shift the next. Luise gave me a pill before I went downstairs in the morning and got out my bike and bowled along Istedgate and through the King’s Town in pouring rain on my way to the telephone exchange among thousands of other cyclists. Not until late in the evening did I look up at the big clock on the wall, and then it was always ten, and there was another hour before I could get home to bed.

  But it was too much in the end. It was the third week of three double shifts at a stretch. I knew I was tired, but I did not feel it. What I felt was a sensation around my eyes as if the skin was cardboard, and I heard a buzzing that irritated me, and I thought it came from bad telephone lines, but when I took off my earphones it did not go away. The voices I heard came from the bottom of tin buckets, and even though I understood what everyone said and answered all the questions correctly and connected the right wire to the right line, I had forgotten everything the next moment. A light came on again, I plugged in, and a blurred voice said:

  “Can I speak to my wife?”

  “Does she work here?”

  “Are you suggesting my wife works at the telephone exchange?”

  “Well, I don’t know, do I, it was you who asked for your wife.”

  “Tell me something, young lady, are you being impertinent?”

  He’d certainly had a few, that was obvious, and it had not done his temper any good.

  “No, not at all.”

  “That’s good. I can hear you are from North Jutland. I have had a lot of unpleasant experiences of North Jutlanders, I can tell you. So now you will just set up a conversation for me with my wife without further ado.”

  He speaks slowly and very clearly as drunk men do when they want to show they are not drunk, and I felt I wanted to get home, that I had no more to give.

  “As to where I come from that’s nothing to do with you, and as to your wife I haven’t the slightest idea who she is or where she might be, so it will be pretty difficult to connect you. If you had helped me along a little it would have been fine.”

  “Tell me one thing, young lady, don’t you know who my wife is?”

  “It’s a pity to have to admit it, but I don’t.”

  “And you don’t know who I am either?”

  “Haven’t a clue. But you’ve obviously had a couple of schnapps too many, so now I think you should go and lie down. Take a big glass of water and two aspirins on your way to bed. That’s my advice. Good-bye.”

  I disconnected him, and that was that. It was five to eleven, so I shut down my position and went home to sleep like a stone until far into the next day when I was due on late shift. I ate my lunch standing at the counter still asleep and cycled the whole way to the exchange with my body full of dreams, and in the corridor I met Luise on her way out from early duty. She looked at me with big eyes.

  “You’re to go to the duty manager at once. They’re completely hysterical in there.”

  “What’s it about?” I said, and she threw out her arms.

  “I would have thought you knew that, but whatever it’s about, it’s something outrageous.”

  I went in through the switchboards looking at the ceiling, the voices dropped and there was silence in the big hall, the only thing I heard was my own footsteps on the floor. My shoes were new and rather expensive, and now I had no more money for the rest of the month. At the duty manager’s office on the other side I looked in through the glass door, and saw her standing there stiffly behind the desk with two stripes on her sleeves, and out on the floor stood a man in a gray coat and one in a gray suit. That was the director, I knew, for he always greeted people with his whole body and smiled with glossy eyes at every female under twenty-five.

 
I knocked and went in, closing the door behind me.

  What they said was that the drunk man who wanted to talk to his wife the night before was the King. The King of Denmark. They did not say he had been drunk. I had been insolent to the King of Denmark, and since there was still a week left of my probationary period of six months, I was dismissed as of today. They didn’t ask me for my version, and I didn’t ask them to listen to it either, because if I have to ask for something, I no longer want it.

  “How did they know it was you?” said Luise.

  “I’m the only North Jutlander in the whole telephone exchange. The King has had nothing but bad experiences of people from that part of the country.”

  I borrowed some money from Luise and traveled to Stockholm to become an apprentice glassblower with the Danish immigrant Peter Aaen in the working-class district of Søder, and I tell all this to the man in the alcove nearest the window on to Uelandsgate, that I was kicked out of the central telephone exchange in Copenhagen because I had been impertinent to the King of Denmark.

  He grows thoughtful. No one in his family has ever been fired from a job. They have turned up faithfully at the factory every single morning at six or seven o’clock, his father, his brothers, year in and year out, and he says he has only stayed away from work one single time when he had to go to hospital with a back he had ruined ski jumping.

  “It’s not healed yet,” he says. “When it gets too bad I have to wear a corset. As tight as hell.”

  And they have a different way of thinking about the King here than we have in Denmark. No one offends the King of Norway and makes jokes of it next day even though the King is Danish, and I didn’t tell it to make a joke either. But it’s given him something to ponder as he takes the bus in from Waldemar Thranesgate instead of relaying the latest news from the boxing ring or the old boys’ team at Vålerenga where he still plays soccer twice a week.