The Half Brother

by Lars Saabye Christensen

  Mom came back late that evening. I ran out into the living room. She’d already sat down on the sofa. There was something about her that was different. I’d never seen her like this before. She hadn’t taken off her coat and she clutched her handbag on her lap with both hands as if it was the only thing that kept her from falling. And yet there was the ghost of a smile on her lips, and it was this smile that somehow didn’t fit in with the rest of her. Boletta grew impatient but kept quiet and didn’t bang about with her stick, for she’d seen that there was something about Mom that evening too. And I could see that Boletta’s dry eyes were huge with wonder and not a little angst. At last Mom said something. “Fred’s gone to sea,” she said. Boletta sat down on the sofa. “To sea? Are you sure?” Mom whispered now. “Willy told me. Willy Halvorsen, I mean.” Boletta let out her breath. “Is he to be relied upon?” she asked. “A simple boxing trainer?” Mom nodded. “He helped Fred get hired.” Mom looked at me but said nothing. Boletta helped her off with her coat and still refused to be convinced. “How can you be so sure? That Willy Halvorsen couldn’t even teach Fred to box properly!” Mom got up. “I phoned the office, the ship owner’s office. Fred’s gone to sea.” We looked at each other. Boletta shrugged her small shoulders. “Well, well. It isn’t the worst thing that’s ever happened. But he could have said goodbye before he left.” It was only now Mom started crying. She had to sit down again. She shook. Boletta tried to hold her, but it didn’t help. And it came home to me that Mom was suddenly thinking she’d never see Fred again. And yet he did come back, but each time he left again it was like a small death, a small death that grew bigger all the time and became a memorial service in Majorstuen Church — a funeral with no body, just a huge sense of loss — and it was myself, as I’ve mentioned before, who gave the eulogy. Boletta let Mom cry till she had no more tears, and yet it wasn’t the tears that ran out but rather her own strength. And I had the same thought, that Fred had left us for good, for a moment later Boletta asked, “What sort of ship has he got himself mixed up with?” “The Polar Bear,” Mom breathed. “Yes, but where’s it bound for?” Mom looked at neither Boletta nor me but just down, down. “Greenland,” she said. And she looked up as she spoke the word, worried and all twisted, and she spoke the words we’d repeat so often when we tried to comfort ourselves. “And he didn’t even take a sweater with him.”

  I went to the bedroom again, the bedroom that perhaps was mine now — perhaps that evening I’d gotten my own room — as Fred went on his way to Greenland aboard the Polar Bear. And if they passed R0st at that moment, before heading north toward the blue horizon and the sinking, green sun — I hoped that Skomvaer would light up for them, the final lighthouse, Fresnell’s crystal flash, to burn their image into the wind. A warm greeting I send all of you at home from the land of the midnight sun in the land of ice and snow. Perhaps Fred would find a musk ox. Perhaps he’d have to eat seal meat. Was that Fred’s thinking, that he had to follow in the same footsteps, sail in the wake of the SS Antarctic that went there to the northern seas sixty-six years before? Did he have to do that in order to find the letter? Did he have to see the same sun that greatgrandfather had seen — feel the cold and hear the shifting of the ice — before he started searching? Perhaps he’d find him, frozen in a glacier, a coat around a skeleton, and in the pocket of that coat a stub of a pencil that once had scribed the letter. I was happy, yes, happy that Fred had gone. But it gave me no joy. I put away the Diplomat — it was too late to compose any more, enough had been done already — and I lay in bed with the laughter machine instead. I put it on. It laughed away under the quilt. I listened to that mechanical laughter. It was heartless and evil. If snakes could have laughed they’d have laughed like that. The laughter I’d thought so generous when I listened to it with Peder, so generous and infectious, filled me now with great, restless blackness. And it came home to me that laughter doesn’t work when you’re alone. I had to write this down so I wouldn’t forget it. Perhaps I could make use of such a revelation. That laughter yearns for company. But I was asleep before I got that far, and the batteries in the mechanism went flat, and the laughter got slower and deeper and deeper. Finally it died out altogether with a tiny click, and only a low and distant hissing remained, like the wind in a long-abandoned house, I could imagine. Then the hissing died out too, and left in its wake fine thread spun with nothing my dreams could hang to dry on. Mom woke me. “We’re going to the Exchange,” she told me. “And there’s no need for you to sleep in Fred’s bed yet!” I got up at once, shameful and sleepy for I’d barely slept at all. “Can I come with you?” I did go with them. Boletta had on her finest garb, but right outside the heavy door in Tolbu Street her nerve failed her and she grew reluctant and demanded we should go back. She’d got her headache — the Morse — but Mom shoved her decisively inside, and there we stood, in the great hall in which Boletta hadn’t set foot since she resigned the day King Haakon and the Old One died nine years previously. It was no longer silent here, as in a church. Now the hall was more reminiscent of a repository, a repository for conversations and telegrams. There was humming everywhere, as if a giant swarm of bees was moving from corner to corner at a furious pace. Shoes chased over the stone floor. The clock on the wall jerked time forward with firm clicks. Mom gave Boletta a tug. “Don’t just stand there gawking!” But Boletta did just stand there gawking. “Changed,” she whispered. “What are you talking on about?” Mom demanded. “Ships’ names can be written as one word,” Boletta said. “As long as they don’t come to more than fifteen letters.” “The Polar Bear” Mom said, and quickly worked it out with her fingers. “That’s just twelve letters. Let’s get it sent.” And we climbed the broad stairs to the first floor. Boletta greeted some of the women, but they no longer had any idea who she was, and just hurried past And each time Boletta went unrecognized she became more stooped — yes, she grew smaller and smaller with every step. Not even Director Egede stopped — that poor wreck of humanity — he just halted on the landing below and looked at us, as if something dawned on him at the sight of Boletta, and she met his gaze stubbornly and expectantly. But it was to me the wretched creature spoke. “The little genius,” he said, and laughed. And Miss Stang, the manageress, the virgin of the relays — she’d been pensioned off long ago and sat at home in her dark, two-room apartment in Uranienborg with a damp cloth over her brow to ease her stinging headache. And she’d seen the black, Bakelite telephones exchanged for gray and white contraptions — low and discreet — which for a short period in the 1970s were replaced by impractical and ridiculous things in the most lurid colors — red, yellow and orange — colors that have nothing whatsoever to do with telephones. These phones actually stood on their own dial plates, and for that reason were called homophones by some quick-witted individuals — because you dialed the number from behind. And later the Exchange itself was shut down as there was one great explosion of verbal diarrhea in the 1990s; the whole industry was privatized and thrown to the four winds. It was impossible to get away from cordless conversation — the most intimate of things were shouted out at restaurant tables, secrets were spilled in supermarket lines and at bus stops. You were forced to listen to other people’s arguments, threats and billing and cooing — in short, society became one big bedroom where everyone talked to everyone else but mostly to themselves, and no one had anything to say