I Is Another

by Jon Fosse

  I see you’ve hung up your paintings, he says

  and The Man in Charge looks at a box of nails and a hammer that Asle has put down on the floor

  Yes, Asle says

  It went fine, I carried the pictures from home, it took a few trips but it went fine, it was easy, he says

  And you hung them up today? The Man in Charge says

  With nails, he says

  Yes, Asle says

  You didn’t think about whether you’d be leaving marks on the walls? The Man in Charge says

  And the auditorium’s been painted pretty recently too you know, he says

  But the pictures couldn’t just sit on the floor, Asle says

  No I suppose not, The Man in Charge says

  But maybe you could’ve put them on chairs, each one on its own chair? he says

  We take the chairs out whenever there’s a dance, otherwise they’re stacked up in the side room there, he says

  and he points at a door

  Well what’s done is done, The Man in Charge says

  and then he goes round and looks at the pictures and then stops and he looks at Asle and he says that these pictures were different from what he’d expected, Asle used to paint differently, he painted so that you could see what it was in the picture, sometimes you could even see that it was your own house he’d painted, but now, well, now it was impossible to tell what any of the pictures was supposed to be of, he’d just smeared paint around, no, why had he painted pictures like this? he’d painted so many good pictures before, yes, they were hanging in practically every house in Barmen and some in Stranda too, pictures Asle had painted of houses, people’s homes, of the barn, the farm, the fruit trees in bloom and the fjord and the cliff, but these paintings, no, they don’t look like anything, if he’d known that Asle was wanting to show paintings like these at his exhibition he doesn’t know if he’d have given him permission to show them at The Barmen Youth Centre, no indeed, The Man in Charge of The Barmen Youth Group says and he says he doesn’t think any of the village folks are going to like these pictures at all, probably some’ll come to look at the exhibition but once they start telling their friends how the pictures are painted probably not many more people will come to look, he says

  No, no, I thought these pictures would look different, he says

  That they’d look like something, the way your other pictures do, he says

  and Asle thinks that The Man in Charge of The Barmen Youth Group doesn’t understand pictures and art any better than a cow and maybe the other people in Barmen don’t either, they probably don’t understand pictures and art any better than a cow either, Asle thinks and I sit in my car that’s parked next to Beyer’s car in one of the parking spaces outside The Beyer Gallery and I think that now Beyer really has to come back to his gallery soon, I think, and I look at the snow covering the windshield and I see Asle sitting there behind a table in front of the stage in The Barmen Youth Centre and there’s a sketchpad on the table in front of him and he’s holding a pencil in his hand and Asle thinks that now there’ve been some people at the exhibition, people he’s painted pictures for before, and they all say the same thing, he thinks, they say that this wasn’t what they were expecting, they don’t understand these pictures, and he, Asle, can paint so much better than this, because anyone can paint pictures like these, they say, you just smear some paint around, or however they put it, and then Asle sits there longer and no one comes and it doesn’t really matter, he thinks, because he has his sketchpad and pencil and so he can sit there alone in the middle of all these paintings he’s painted and sketch, he can sketch out new pictures he’s thinking about painting, yes, he has nothing better to do anyway, does he? Asle thinks and every single sketch is something Asle thinks he’ll paint in oil on canvas someday, because he’s sketching out pictures he’s seen and that are stored up in his head and that he wants to paint away, Asle thinks and then he thinks that Father, after he hadn’t sold a single painting after several days, told him that maybe it’d be a good idea to thumbtack a slip of paper saying Sold under a couple of the pictures, because people are like that, once one person wants something other people want it, Father says

  Yes that’s how people are, he said

  Once one person has something other people want it too, he said

  and then Asle put up a slips of paper saying Sold, with thumbtacks, under five of the paintings and as soon as he’d done that, Asle thinks, someone comes in who’d been by to look at the exhibition before and he starts going from painting to painting and he looks at each painting for a long time and Asle stands up and goes over to him

  Do you like the pictures? Asle says

  and he thinks that this man had come and looked at the pictures once before already, there haven’t been so many visitors to the exhibition that Asle can’t remember every one of them, he thinks, and this man is especially easy to remember because he takes up so little space, he’s so quiet, so short and slim

  Are you from Stranda? Asle says

  No, the man says

  and Asle can hear right away that the man is from Bjørgvin and the man from Bjørgvin nods and then he says that he’s from Bjørgvin, as Asle could probably hear, he says and he holds out his hand and Asle shakes it and the man says Beyer and Asle says Asle and then the man named Beyer says that he might like to buy a picture, he was here and he looked at the paintings a few days ago too and ever since then he couldn’t forget them, he says

  Yes, it’s strange, Beyer says

  There’s something about these pictures that sticks in my mind, he says

  and it was especially one of the pictures that stuck in his mind, and he really wanted to buy that picture, but now there’s a slip of paper under it saying Sold so he guesses he’ll just buy a different one, he says, but the question of course is how much Asle wants for the picture, he says and Asle thinks that he wants to make back what the picture cost him in any case and then he can maybe add a few kroner on top of that but not too much, because otherwise he probably won’t sell a single picture, he thinks and then he says what he wants for the painting and Beyer says that he can certainly afford that much and so it’s settled and then he walks around the room and looks at the pictures one after another and then he stops in front of one and looks at it for a long time and then he goes over to one of the picture with a Sold sign tacked up under it and then he goes over to Asle and says that he’s found a painting he wants to buy, but he really regrets that not coming back out here sooner so that he could’ve bought the picture he saw so clearly in his mind, saw it again and again too, he says and Asle says that he can ask the person who bought that picture if he’d consider buying another one instead, so if Beyer could come back tomorrow maybe he’d be able to work things out so that he can buy the picture he’d rather have, Asle says

  Thank you, Beyer says

  Thanks very much, he says

  Thank you, Asle says

  and he says that not too many paintings have sold, he can see that for himself, and then Beyer leaves and now I’m tired of sitting and waiting, now Beyer really needs to come soon so I can drop off the paintings, I think, and I look at the snow that’s covering the windshield and I see Asle sitting behind a table in The Barmen Youth Centre and he sees Beyer come walking up to him and Asle says that he got the other buyer to pick another picture instead so Beyer can have the picture he wants, Asle says and then Beyer says then he’ll buy it and also the other one he liked, so two pictures, if they both cost the same, he says and Asle says that they do and then Beyer hands him the money and he says that since he has to drive back to Bjørgvin soon he’d appreciate it if he could take the pictures with him now and Asle says that’s easy enough and then he writes Sold on two sheets of paper in the sketchpad and tears them out and then goes and takes down the two paintings Beyer’s bought and puts them on the floor and then he hangs the sheets of paper saying Sold on the nails the paintings had been on and then Beyer takes the paintings and he says pleas
ure doing business with him and that he hopes they’ll meet again, and that Asle needs to keep painting, he has a talent for painting, yes, he’s very talented, he says, and then Beyer leaves and then Asle sits there and sketches some more and three more people come and say pretty much the same thing, that now that they’d thought about it there was something about these pictures after all and now they want to buy one, says each of the three people one after the other, they all say pretty much the same thing, and the strange thing is that Asle doesn’t know any of them, but maybe that’s not so strange, because they’re all from Bjørgvin, and each of them chooses a painting and they ask how much he wants for it and Asle sticks to the same price for every painting, the price he’d told Beyer, and one after the other the people from Bjørgvin hand over the money and pay Asle and they ask if it’s all right for them to take the painting with them right away and Asle says that’s fine and after they’ve left he goes and takes down the signs saying Sold from under the pictures because there are signs under every one of the four pictures left, but none of them have really been sold, and he puts them up on the nails where the paintings that really did sell had been hanging, and now Asle has sold five pictures, so now it says Sold in five empty places on the wall and there are just four pictures left that haven’t been sold, and now there’s no sign saying Sold under any of them, Asle thinks, but it’s not bad to have sold five paintings, he thinks and he sits down behind the table in front of the stage and then he sits there and sketches and he thinks that this is probably as good as it gets for him, he thinks, but he realizes he misses the pictures that were sold, that are gone, Asle thinks and before long he’s filled a sketchpad with designs for pictures that he has stuck in his head and he thinks that he’ll paint all these sketches at some point, or maybe not all, but most of them anyway, yes, some of the sketches anyway will turn into oil on canvas, he thinks, will turn into paintings, Asle thinks and then he sees Beyer, the man who’s already bought two paintings, come back in, and it’s really about time someone came, Asle thinks, because there hasn’t been anyone in to look at his exhibition for a while and he has only four paintings left to sell, so he thought what’s the point of sitting here anymore, but he did write down an opening and closing date for the exhibition so he has to stick to it, Asle thinks and Beyer nods at Asle and says hello and then he goes and looks at the four paintings still hanging there, he goes from one painting to the other and he takes his time, he looks at painting after painting for a long time and Asle thinks it’s strange that Beyer as he’s called came back, and then Beyer comes walking up to Asle and he says that he likes Asle’s pictures so much that he wants to buy all four that are still left, yes, if he can get them for the same price as before, he says