The Waiter

by Matias Faldbakken

  “That means you’re the cellar master, then.”

  “I mean, in principle, no. I’m upstairs, well, but . . .”

  “Since you’re a Kellner and everything.”

  “No. I mean, it’s an old term.”

  “ ‘Cellar door,’ ” she says, placing far too large a banknote on the plate.

  “What?”

  “The most beautiful words in the English language, wasn’t that it? ‘Slide down my cellar door . . .’ ”

  “. . .”

  “You know, the song.”

  “I’ll just get your change,” I say. “Excellent.”

  To my horror, she doesn’t leave this time, either, but sits down at the marble-topped table over by the curtain. What is she? A moray eel lying rigidly in wait by the entrance of the hole?

  OLD JOHANSEN

  WE SEE THAT TOO LITTLE sleep is unhealthy for schoolwork. We see a clear relationship between a lack of sleep and underperformance. We see that. They said so on the radio this morning. They see such things, the people looking for them. We’ll also see it in Anna later. When was she coming again? Four? Five? She didn’t get much sleep last night, thanks to Edgar’s eagerness to press himself onto Sellers and the group. We’ll see a tired, slightly worn-out Anna when she comes in with her oversized schoolbag on those slim, bony shoulders, six to eight hours from now. How can they send her off with so many books?

  She must have to walk with her back bent almost 45 degrees just so that she doesn’t tip over and end up like an upside-down tortoise or beetle. Poor child. Poor innocent Anna.

  Old Johansen is playing tunes, and they’re sad, I want to say melancholy; are they expressing the wretch? The poor beggar? The bloke with the beggar’s stick? Is Old Johansen on the mezzanine a wretch? He probably is. He began with Pachelbel this morning, and it’s gone downhill since. It’s rare for the Maître d’ to allow Johansen to drape such a mourning cloak of music over the restaurant. We can’t let him build up (down) to Anna’s entrance like this.

  What follows is something I’ve never done before in my time here at The Hills: I decide to twist my body up the spiral wrought-iron staircase, onto the mezzanine, up to Old Johansen. The staircase is an effort to climb. How does Old Johansen even manage it? He’s as round as a barrel. I’ve never thought about it before, but he’s always up there already when I get to work. I’ve never seen him climbing the stairs. Have I seen him go down? No. He’s there when I leave, too. I twist up the stairs. From the top step, where I have to stand with my neck completely bent because of the low ceiling, I can see his shirt-clad back, divided by his antiquated braces with leather loops and buttonholes into a large, black X. (He probably chose these X-shaped suspenders over the Y-shaped ones because of his width; a hefty man like Old Johansen needs two anchoring points on the back of his trousers.)

  “Johansen, what shift are you even working?”

  Old Johansen lifts his chin up and slightly to the side; he doesn’t jump at all, as though there are constantly people coming up onto the mezzanine, behind his back, asking unexpected questions.

  “Pardon?”

  “What shift are you working, Johansen?”

  “The same shift I’ve always worked.”

  He’s sitting on a double piano stool, a high-quality so-called duet stool, with two separate and adjustable seats, again because of his width, I’m assuming. The stool has a dial on each side, one for each seat, and the cushions are covered in first-class velvet in deep burgundy, almost oxblood. The actual body of the stool is made from heavily varnished beech. And this comes as something of a surprise: beneath the heels of Johansen’s polished shoes is a pedal extender, an old-fashioned pedal footrest. So he’s shorter than I thought, in relation to his width. Old Johansen is practically round.

  “Hey, Johansen . . .,” I say.

  “You’re welcome,” says Johansen.

  (“You’re welcome”? Have I received something? What have I been given?)

  “You know that the Maître d’ thinks Pachelbel’s Canon is a tad too melancholic? Since you started the morning with it, you’ve entered territory that’s even more gloomy. Could you lighten it up a bit?”

  “Pachelbel’s Canon is in D major.”

  “OK, but can you just make it a bit less melancholic?”

  “It is what it is. I can’t make it any less melancholic. I don’t know what you mean,” Johansen says while he continues to produce smooth melancholy with all ten fingers.

  “We’ve been asked whether you would be so kind as to lighten the mood a little.”

  Is Johansen a part of the mezzanine? One thing is the relationship between body width/spiral staircase. Another is the piles of notebooks and papers surrounding the piano. All kinds of printed matter and musical literature, it looks like, are stacked up against the walls. The arching of the vault begins no more than a meter and a half above the mezzanine floor, but this meter and a half is more or less covered in these piles. And, wouldn’t you know it, the stickers on the wainscoting down in the restaurant have also made their way up here. They’ve crept up the spiral staircase: you can see them behind Johansen’s stacks. Old, cracked cuttings, labels, and overlappings; in some places they’re so yellowed and stained that it looks like they might have been coated with layers of coffee-colored shellac. At waist height, to the left, someone has drawn a series of musical notes on the wall; it looks like some kind of inexperienced scrawl: note heads, stems, and flags are clumsily drawn in charcoal or dry crayon, possibly chalk. In front of the notes, there are several stacks of plates, all different heights. I can see flat dining plates for solid food, deep soup bowls for liquid meals, and several serving plates, in addition to one stack after another of side plates. A number of them are the Egersund faience that I went on about to the Child Lady. Isn’t the Maître d’ constantly looking for these? There are piles of knives, forks, and spoons on the top plate of each stack, all soiled with food; it looks like Johansen has been stacking and collecting for a long time. The floor is covered in everything from bouquet glasses to fine crystal champagne flutes, all over the place; many of them have forks and other basic pieces of cutlery sticking up out of them. I can see a crab spoon peeping up from a finger bowl, also crystal, along with a set of snail tongs, four three-pronged fish forks, and, believe it or not, the finest caviar spade we have. Not far from Johansen’s pedals, there is a pair of grape shears on top of a deer pan, plus a handful of gourmet spoons and the handsome game service inherited from Benjamin Hill himself. Who carries all this up here but not back down? What kind of gluttony is this?

  “You’ve got an entire restaurant up here, Johansen,” I say.

  Johansen doesn’t reply; instead he throws back his head slightly, making his hair shake. His hair is dry, like wire wool. There’s a bit of length at the back of his neck, but on top it’s completely thinned out, and he has halfheartedly pushed the hair at the side over his crown—it looks like some kind of Deleuzian comb-over frizz. When he shakes his head in a dramatic punctuation of one moment of the music or another, his hair sways firmly; it isn’t “thrown”—a dry, hard swing, the way you can imagine tree moss swaying if the rock or trunk it’s growing on is given a kick.

  Almost imperceptibly, the notes coming from the piano become lighter and, as far as I can tell, less melancholy. Is Johansen obeying? Is he going for a major key? Or is this a modulation already in the piece? Old Johansen conjures the notes from the instrument with such ease. How is it possible for such fat, emperor-like fingers to move so freely over the keys? How heavy is the piano? What a monster. What a beast. My chest tightens at the thought of the instrument once having been hauled up here onto the mezzanine. It can’t have come up the spiral stairs—that much is clear. But how? There’s a hatch window beneath the vault to the right, but it’s no more than sixty centimeters wide, so it can’t have been that way, either. Did they cut through the roof at some point, to haul this monstrous musical instrument inside? Did they haul Old Johansen in a
t the same time?

  “Is that Heifetz on the wall over there?” I ask, pointing—even though Johansen is sitting with his back to it—to a small, framed woodcut squeezed in and half-hidden behind the stacks.

  “It’s Heifetz,” says Johansen.

  “Funny, you can recognize him by the sharp nostrils.”

  “It’s not much to look at. The cut was done by a forgotten Norwegian printmaker. No Heifetz, exactly,” says Johansen.

  “No, no Heifetz.”

  “Wonderful,” says Johansen, still without turning around. The music is definitely lighter now. More lively.

  “Great,” I say, ready to go back downstairs.

  “Can I stop You for a moment?”

  He actually uses the formal address on me. I turn back and remember that I’ve been addressing Johansen informally for as long as I’ve been up here.

  “Yeah?”

  “I think You seem a bit frazzled.”

  “What?”

  “I think You seem hectic.”

  “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “Shaky. Frail.”

  “Is that so?”

  “It’s like Winnicott claims,” Johansen says, accompanied by his own now-lively playing: “The ego organizes defenses against breakdown of the ego-organization.”

  “And that is?”

  “When the ego’s organization falters, collapse rears its head, you know.”

  So I radiate wretchedness, even through my imaginary armor and shield of service, routine, and predictability. Old Johansen doesn’t even need to turn around to be able to sense my advanced wretchedness.

  •

  “I wonder that a soothsayer doesn’t laugh whenever he sees another soothsayer,” Cicero said, or so I’ve heard, though probably not in English, likely in Latin, and with that I think that the wretch’s advantage is, possibly, that he doesn’t start crying when he sees another wretch, another poor beggar. I’m moved, affected, gripped more quickly, when I think of myself as a wretch than when I, for example, see other wretches come into The Hills. I get easily annoyed by other wretches. There, I said it. But I allow my own wretchedness to affect me. It’s because I know a lot (but not everything) about the causes of my own wretchedness. And if I think about these reasons—something I should by no means do here—I can see that I have clear reasons for being a wretch, and the thought of these reasons, which have led to flaws in me, can move me in a second if I bring them up. I might think that it’s not my fault I’ve become wretched, and feel that it’s unfair that I have these shortcomings. But if I see another wretch, then all I see is that wretch. I don’t see their flaws. I definitely don’t see the sure-to-be-moving and unfair causes of his or her wretchedness. I just see the wretchedness and think that he or she should get a grip. He or she needs to pull themselves together and not be so miserable. We all have our problems, I think. Now make sure you pull yourself together. I stand, stooped, and think this. Pull yourself together, I think in my stoopedness, about another person; I think it coldly and without any compassion, at the very sight of someone radiating one kind of misery or another. I can stand there, completely crazed inside, stooped and crooked over my own faults and gaps, internal wounds which never heal, which split open at the slightest irregularity or reminder. I can stand like that, utterly cold, and be irritated by a wretched fellow human and their faults, their cracks, and their crookedness.

  SCROLL

  WIDOW KNIPSCHILD HAS TOTTERED OVER to her table and pointed to a crumble; I have placed it in front of her, followed by a dessert spoon which I put down, gentle as a cat’s paw, above the pie plate. Gray, subdued, and pale colors are the common thread, if I may say so, linking Widow Knipschild’s outfit. She is as colorless as ash, Widow Knipschild. I’ve always liked her. Elegant lady. Intelligent being. She was a professor in cultural history in her day. “You know,” she once said. “You know I worked at Plantin-Moretus alongside my studies in Antwerp?” I knew it; she had told me before, in her senile way. “You know, back then we actually snuck in to print pamphlets on the old printing presses at night?” That I didn’t know. “I printed my first pamphlet on the oldest press there, which, as you might have heard, is the second oldest preserved printing press on earth. And it’s still in the place where it has always been, since a handful of years after Gutenberg. You can see it on the floor; its feet have eaten into the woodwork.” “Fantastic,” I said. “Do you know what the first leaflet I printed said?” No, how could I have known that? “It said, ‘The great are only great because we are on our knees. Let us rise. Proudhon.’ ” “You don’t say,” I said, surprised, following up with a question about whether she did the printing with the old lead they have at the museum. “Oh yes,” she said then. “What else?” And then she cut a piece of the pear tart I had placed in front of her, light as an eiderdown, and spent a long time tasting it before she finished: “The reason I’m always here at The Hills is because it’s the place in Oslo—well, perhaps even the whole of Scandinavia—which reminds me most of Plantin-Moretus.” “That might be laying it on thick,” I said. “No it isn’t,” said Widow Knipschild. “It’s how it is. This is the place for the long lines.”

  •

  I said that I never use my phone during working hours, but that’s gone a bit off the rails today. From time to time I have to check for news from Edgar, or possibly from Anna. It might be too early to expect a message, but what if they’ve sent one? I try to sneak past the chef, but it’s in vain. The passage between his rounded back and the blackened, greasy, pan-covered wall on the way to the cramped wardrobe corner where my all-weather jacket is hanging is so narrow that it feels like a sexual act to squeeze through there. The chef is frying mushrooms and onions; he’s literally throwing the mushrooms and onions around in the frying pan. He tosses the mushrooms and onions with firm flicks, and in between they, the mushrooms and onions, fly high in the air, almost a meter above the pan, or that’s how it seems. He glares at the mushrooms and onions when they’re at eye level. The mushrooms and onions hang in the air in front of his face. Then they fall, the slices of mushroom and slivers of onion, all together, back into the frying pan. Accompanying this tossing of vegetables are sharp elbow movements, his lower arm is moving back and forth like the piston of a locomotive, and I’m immediately concerned about passing behind him. What if I bump? I clear my throat. The chef pauses. A sign that I can pass. The mushrooms and onions are sizzling, I have to hurry before they burn. He cooks at high temperatures, the chef.

  Anna has sent zero messages, and there’s not a peep from Edgar. It’s only a little after ten. When will Anna arrive? I wonder. I use the two-handed, straight-arm phone technique typical of old people. The phone is in my left hand while a crooked finger pads across the glass like a dry croissant. I don’t even understand how the phone can react to my jabbing fingertip. I watch some videos produced by drones while I’m in here, inside, out there, online. You have to deal with a lot of drone recordings nowadays. These drones have recorded crystal clear images of a tank attack in the Jobar district of Damascus. Down in the bathroom, here at the restaurant, there has long been a beautiful pattern of black-and-white stone on the floor. The black stones are possibly dark green. Or are they more blue? Oxford blue, verging on black? In any case, the repeated dark and white pattern reminds me of the old Damascus. The drone images in my feed show a Damascus which looks, more than anything, like Widow Knipschild’s crumble. Nothing but sand-colored grains and lumps. The oldest continuously inhabited city in the world, as it’s known by some, that’s what I’m seeing here, completely in ruins. I scroll a little more. That can’t be illegal. Now I see an image of a girl standing on the hooves of a horse which is lying on its back, a bit like a dog. A cat that says “cock.” A hand being chopped off, Islamist style. An article about the relationship between screen radiation and the yellowing of teeth. What do you know. My teeth are fairly white. Maybe it’s because of my limited screen time, in combination with my healthy skepticism of t
echnology? An unexpected bonus. Why, and not least how, would Anna have sent me a message at ten past ten? Using phones is bound to be forbidden at school—not that I know anything in particular about that. The agreement is clear. She’ll come here when she’s finished. Why would she bother texting? Does she even have a phone? And Edgar is probably on a plane or busy in his important meeting. The urgent business, as he called it. I send him a quick message:

  THE MYSTERIES OF THE BRAIN AND THE HEART REVEAL THEMSELVES IN THE SMALL, REMARKABLE, AND UNEXPECTED COMBINATION OF LETTERS AND WORDS. YOU LEECH.

  After that, I scroll a bit further. I see a puma looking after a tiny frog, a dwarf frog. A 105-year-old tells us that it might not be worth spending your entire life on a strict diet, free from processed meat, since the last thirty years are doomed to be repetitive and joyless anyway. I also see a girl wearing Idi Amin’s uniform, a copy down to the very last detail, for Halloween. She looks quite like him. A she-Amin in miniature.

  “Hey,” I hear the chef say outside. Is it me he’s talking to as I stand here, besotted with my phone?

  “Sorry?”

  “They’re calling for you.”

  I shove my telephone back into my all-weather jacket before I expose myself in the most embarrassing way by having to squeeze past the chef. I strut into the restaurant with flared nostrils and scrolled-out eyes. The florist has cut the stamen from the lilies, OK, but what about the colored kale from Thursday? Has he forgotten about that? The colored kale, or ornamental kale, as the florist calls it, has started to smell. I catch a hint of rotten ornamental kale. There’s a sharp note in the air, tormenting us. Widow Knipschild sits in the middle of all that, shrouded in her own cloud of perfume, which, for her, certainly curbs the awful smell of stale ornamental kale, but it’s not her who needs my attention. And nor is it the beer-drinking actor. It’s the Maître d’.