by Dag Solstad
Bjørn turned fifty. The day was celebrated quietly in his own company, in the splendid isolation of his flat in a Kongsberg tower block. He had made clear in advance that he did not wish any attention, and it was respected. He received an offer from Aftenposten to have the day noted there, if he sent in a picture and gave his vital statistics, as he put it when he mentioned it to Herman Busk. Also the local paper, Lågendalsposten, gave him a call to arrange an interview, but he asked to be spared so nicely that they realised he really meant it when he said that he didn’t want to have a single word in the newspaper, and they left him alone.
He began having stomach pains. After he had eaten. It troubled him and he thought he must see a doctor. But he hoped the pains would go away of themselves, so he put off going to the doctor. They did not. But were the pains really all that intense? He checked how he felt. There was a dull throb of pain, one might say. He had a throb in his teeth and a throb in his stomach. Neither went away. But he did not feel like going to see his good friend Herman Busk, the dentist, in and out of season, choosing to wait until he received his annual reminder. Instead, he decided to go to the doctor. He rang up Dr Schiøtz at the hospital, to whom he used to go. He knew Dr Schiøtz in a way, they had both been walk-ons in various musicals staged by the Kongsberg Theatre Society, and although that was four years ago, he could still continue to use him as his doctor. Dr Schiøtz gave him an appointment straightaway.
He showed up at the hospital at the appointed time and was shown into Dr Schiøtz’s office. Seated behind his desk in a white coat, Dr Schiøtz asked the sort of questions he was used to doctors asking. Bjørn Hansen replied and Dr Schiøtz nodded. He felt his stomach and asked if it hurt when he pressed. ‘No, nothing special,’ Bjørn Hansen said. Dr Schiøtz wrote out a request for an X-ray as he chatted about the old days, relating en passant that he, too, had given up on the Society. ‘The years go by,’ he said. ‘I prefer to sit at home listening to my Mozart.’ That, Bjørn Hansen thought, also seemed better suited to this tall, quiet doctor with his long pianist’s fingers.
After some time he was given a call by Dr Schiøtz. He asked him to come to the hospital. The result of the X-ray had come in. Bjørn Hansen turned pale and took himself there at once. He was shown into Dr Schiøtz’s office, where the doctor sat behind his desk like the last time. He was studying the X-ray. ‘It’s impossible to find anything,’ he said. ‘We must have more tests. We shall get to the bottom of this.’ Bjørn Hansen nodded. Dr Schiøtz listened to Bjørn Hansen’s chest with his stethoscope. Quiet, remote, as always. But suddenly he said, ‘How many patients do you think I’ve had? In my whole life?’ Bjørn Hansen shook his head, astonished at the question. He didn’t know what to say. Dr Schiøtz suddenly looked straight at him, intensely, but with that absent look in his eyes, which everyone had interpreted as reclusiveness and modesty. ‘To have a completely healthy patient cannot be called satisfying from a physician’s point of view, can it? What? It must surely be more satisfying to have someone very ill. It’s a sick person, after all, that the physician can cure. Don’t you agree?’
Bjørn Hansen felt uneasy. It was so strange here. Dr Schiøtz had changed, and this was quite unexpected. It was what he said that made the difference, rather than his manner, which was as Bjørn Hansen had always remembered it. Suddenly Bjørn Hansen understood it all. The man was a drug addict, of course. Why hadn’t he realised that earlier? Dr Schiøtz on stage at the Kongsberg Cinema, the two of them, he and Bjørn Hansen, dancing in the chorus and singing the refrain in cowboy outfits or fishermen’s jumpers, or whatever it was. Always absent. Never properly ‘with it’, though he was bursting with a restless energy and sang resoundingly, but always with a quiet, idiotic smile on his lips. Oh yes, that was Dr Schiøtz, the quiet drug addict. Bjørn Hansen felt dizzy. That no one had seen it before! It was so obvious, after all. But it was obvious now, and only because Dr Schiøtz had used this deviant language. In other words, Bjørn Hansen realised it now only because Dr Schiøtz had given him an invitation to realise it.
This made such a violent impression on him that he barely knew what he was doing. He looked incredulously at Dr Schiøtz, who sat behind his desk in his white coat, his thin fingers fiddling with the stethoscope and his mild gaze absent. Is this real? Why me? Why does Dr Schiøtz wish to initiate me of all people in this? But Dr Schiøtz gave no answer, he just sat there as before, remote and quiet behind his desk. Suddenly Bjørn heard himself say, ‘What bothers me is that my life is so unimportant.’ He had never admitted that to a soul before, not even to himself, although it had been on the tip of his tongue for many years, well, all along, and now he said it. He looked in surprise at Dr Schiøtz. Dr Schiøtz’s absent gaze fluttered, as when someone is moved without wanting to show it. A fluttering, absent gaze, deep inside. ‘And there are still thirty years to go, or something like that, seventeen in any case until I retire with a pension. I have no illusions, at least I don’t think I have.’ He heard himself talking, aloud and in such a curiously innocent tone of voice. What in the world was this? Dr Schiøtz’s gaze fluttered again. Then he smiled, a heartfelt smile. The contact was made.
His stomach was throbbing. Dr Schiøtz was busy trying to find out what it was. He inclined towards the view that the stomach pains were a symptom of something else and did several tests. Which were all negative – or positive, depending on what you were looking for. This meant that Bjørn Hansen had several appointments with this most highly respected hospital physician. He could hear himself talking about things that he hadn’t even talked about with himself before, while the doctor listened, elated. In a state of mild intoxication, most likely. ‘Nearly everything is totally indifferent to me,’ Bjørn Hansen would hear himself say. ‘Time is passing, boredom is everlasting.’ Words that made Dr Schiøtz sincerely glad, he could see, as the doctor was doing his investigations. Could it be the throat? Open your mouth. Could it be the ears? What do the ears have to do with the stomach? Who knows, who knows?
‘You know, I find myself in this town by pure chance, it has never meant anything to me. It’s also by pure chance that I’m the treasurer here. But if I hadn’t been here, I would’ve been somewhere else and have led the same kind of life. However, I cannot reconcile myself to that. I get really upset when I think about it,’ Bjørn Hansen said, once more shaken in his innermost self by the fact that he was really expressing himself in this way in the presence of another person. ‘Existence has never answered my questions,’ he added. ‘Just imagine, to live an entire life, my own life at that, without having found the path to where my deepest needs can be seen and heard! I’ll die in silence, which frightens me, without a word on my lips, because there’s nothing to say,’ he said, hearing the desperate appeal in his words. Spoken to another person who had long ago ceased to function as a human being, who was nothing but an empty shell in his relations with the society in which he had a high and important position. Oh, that sun shining in through the municipal curtains on the window of this doctor’s office at the Kongsberg Hospital! Those nauseating sunbeams in the window frame. The translucent glass in the rectangular windowpanes, sponged down every day as part of the aura of security a hospital must radiate in societies like ours. He was a bit ashamed of his words, for it offended him that a man past fifty spoke about death, and now he had done so himself, loud and clear. A man of thirty can do so, for his death is a disaster, from whatever viewpoint it is seen, being snatched away from his career in one gulp, but for him, Bjørn Hansen, who had recently turned fifty, death would only be the conclusion of a natural process, albeit somewhat early, statistically, and so he simply had to put up with it all, without a whimper, done is done, and the race moves on towards its natural conclusion. Yet he had expressed his horror at having to die without a word to say about it all, not even to himself, and this was, and remained, unbearable to him.
And what did Dr Schiøtz say to all of this? Not much. He was simply elated. He did his investigations, sealed the tests
, sent them for analysis, received the results, summoned Bjørn Hansen to another appointment and did new tests. Meanwhile Bjørn Hansen continued to talk about matters of this kind. It was as if he had entered an altogether different space simply by walking towards Dr Schiøtz, sitting or standing and with his mild, absent gaze, which occasionally fluttered with a quiet joy that someone had come to him in this way. Now and then he would refer to his drug addiction, always by calling it his ‘fate’. ‘With my fate,’ he might say, ‘it’s not so easy to relate to anything at all, even the most quotidian task is a torture to me when I think about it. Oddly enough, not when I do it, but when I think about it, before or after.’ At long last Dr Schiøtz had undertaken a complete check-up of Bjørn Hansen’s body and had found nothing whatsoever. ‘There’s nothing wrong with you,’ he said, ‘that I can guarantee,’ and then he snickered. It was a bad habit that the doctor had developed in his consultations with Bjørn Hansen. A suppressed snicker, which Bjørn Hansen disliked, but accepted because it meant that Dr Schiøtz now trusted him so implicitly that he could let out this expression of being caught up in a permanent mild intoxication, which he otherwise had to take great care not to let slip from his innermost being, where he lived his own life, only for himself, in himself, totally indifferent to anything except the intoxication that was wreaking havoc so soothingly in his invisible veins. And with that Bjørn Hansen’s role as patient was over. He said thank you and goodbye and left the hospital, a bit surprised that it was over and that these strange sessions were now a closed chapter.
But then Dr Schiøtz began to seek out Bjørn Hansen privately. In his flat. Mostly late at night, and often more intoxicated than he used to be in his office. He did not come often, maybe once a week, sometimes more seldom. But the conversations continued. Bjørn Hansen talked and Dr Schiøtz alluded to his fate, which he was glad to be able to give voice to in a natural and straightforward manner. When Dr Schiøtz had left, Bjørn Hansen continued the conversation by himself, with the doctor as a fictitious interlocutor. In this way he became increasingly absorbed by thinking openly in the language that had somehow taken hold of him. It was all about his inability to reconcile himself to the fact that this was it. He felt outraged. He refused to put up with it. Somehow or other he had to show it, that he refused to put up with it. And so he hatched a plan. An insane project, which he decided to present to Dr Schiøtz the next time he called.
It was a plan whereby Bjørn Hansen would actualise his No, his great Negation, as he had begun to call it, through an action that would be irrevocable. Through a single act he would plunge into something from which there was no possibility of retreat and which bound him to this one insane idea for the rest of his life. He very much looked forward to presenting it to Dr Schiøtz, not least because the plan depended on the doctor’s cooperation, so that it bound them together in a way that completed the relationship which had by now sprung up between them. He therefore looked forward to Dr Schiøtz’s coming, and when he finally rang the doorbell late one evening, more remote than ever, in another world, one could safely say, Bjørn Hansen heard a peculiarly expectant tone in his own voice when he said, ‘Ah, it’s you, come in, come in!’ Dr Schiøtz sat down and straightaway Bjørn Hansen began to explain his plan, in brief outline. What it consisted of, what Bjørn Hansen was going to do, and why, and where Dr Schiøtz came into it. However, Dr Schiøtz said at once that he would not take part in it. It was too risky. But Dr Schiøtz was completely necessary, without him it could not be implemented. Bjørn Hansen was astonished by the doctor’s negative reaction, which suggested that he looked at it as ‘reality’ and not as an ‘idea’, the way it was intended on Bjørn Hansen’s part; but if an ‘idea’ is to be carried to its logical conclusion as an ‘idea’, it must be trumpeted as ‘reality’, something that Dr Schiøtz had not been willing to accept. Maybe the ‘idea’ was no good, Bjørn Hansen thought, trying to explain it further to the doctor. He did not feel he got it quite right. He vouched fully for the ‘idea’, or vision, but had difficulty putting it into words. Not what was going to happen, but why in the world he could take it into his head to think like that, even if only as a game. In the end he simply had to tell him: ‘I cannot explain why I think as I do,’ he said. ‘But that’s how I’m thinking, all right,’ he added, laughing, slightly confused at himself. Shortly afterwards Dr Schiøtz said ‘Good night’ and left.
But he came back. He had changed his mind. ‘But I want half of the insurance money,’ he said, something Bjørn Hansen was glad to offer him. ‘For you’re taking a great risk,’ he said. Dr Schiøtz gave a shrug.
From then on the doctor tackled the plan. With his expertise, he at once pounced on three weak elements in it. ‘The place in question cannot be here,’ he said. ‘It must be somewhere else altogether. In Eastern Europe, maybe. Do you have any opportunity of going there for a plausible reason?’ Bjørn Hansen thought it over. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I think so.’ And then there was one thing that had to be prevented. No one else must get involved. If they could see to that, things would work out. ‘Those who will come to grips with the problem as part of their everyday routine won’t have the least suspicion, that’s human nature,’ the doctor said. ‘We won’t be found out, unless you crack up.’ But Bjørn Hansen would not crack up. If for nothing else than out of consideration for Dr Schiøtz. If he should feel an urge to confess, he had someone other than himself to consider, and that would seal his lips, he said passionately, and again he noticed that Dr Schiøtz was touched.
After the insane ‘idea’ had been gone over in meticulous detail by Dr Schiøtz, it took on the nature of a clinical operation, in which one dealt with points of surgery, whose alternatives and possible obstacles were carefully reviewed. For now that Dr Schiøtz had decided to participate actively in the game, he made it very concrete. What from the beginning had been merely an expression of Bjørn Hansen’s profound yearning for something irrevocable, now became a feasible project within the structure of the health service, where one had to take advantage of the fact that it is possible to make, from the inside, little holes, thin and dark, in every conceptual system, as well as in every social network.
For Bjørn Hansen, Dr Schiøtz’s espousal of his project meant that it became both more uncanny and more fascinating. Soon he could not tell whether it was a game or real. Well, he was himself of the opinion that it was a game, a sick figment of his imagination – oh yes, that’s what he called it, this logic of lunacy in his own brain which he was so fascinated by and which he shared with Dr Schiøtz, like a vote of confidence. But as one word led to another and he pointed out to Dr Schiøtz that it was a ‘game’, even insisting on it, though very discreetly, indirectly, Dr Schiøtz looked scornfully at him, as if he wouldn’t budge, failing to understand what Bjørn Hansen meant by referring to a sort of ‘game’. The plan was to be carried out. That was entirely real. They merely lacked a locale, and that would present itself in due course. Dr Schiøtz was not playing a game. Bjørn Hansen felt a tightening in his throat. Wasn’t he the treasurer at Kongsberg? Wasn’t Dr Schiøtz a highly respected doctor at Kongsberg Hospital? What was this anyway? A game that, even as a game, must never reach anyone’s ears, the embarrassment would be too great. The treasurer and the doctor. But Dr Schiøtz was a drug addict. He needed a fellow conspirator, and not only to play a ‘game’. He had taken a personal risk to track down a ‘healthy’ person who spoke the language of the ‘sick’, in earnest, as a fellow conspirator; Dr Schiøtz did not hesitate to enter into a business agreement with such a brother.
Bjørn Hansen came to feel strongly ambivalent both about Dr Schiøtz and the plan as the doctor became more and more absorbed in its preparation. He was provoked by the doctor’s clinical way of discussing a future event that would leave his life fundamentally altered, indeed, catastrophically altered; it was about a descent into the unknown and the absolutely irrevocable, and since Bjørn Hansen suspected Dr Schiøtz of eagerly espousing this plan despite the fa
ct that he, as a physician, must consider it to be not only stupid but self-destructive, well, ‘sick,’ it must mean that the doctor was trying to make him ‘fall’, because only then could they become equals, beyond everything, each with his own secret suffering. Nevertheless he became so fascinated by the plan, not least its possible execution, that he often thought: ‘I’ll do it. I’ll do it, God help me! Nobody can stop me from doing it, at last. But it is insane, of course, insanely tempting, it is madness!’ And in the end, when he understood that he was gambling so desperately with his own life that he considered, in all seriousness, to go through with this enterprise, he exclaimed aloud if he was by himself, ‘No, no, this isn’t true! This isn’t me!’
But then he had a letter from his son. It arrived at the end of May and took him completely by surprise. He had not seen his son since he was fourteen, when Peter, who lived with his mother and stepfather in Narvik, stopped seeing him in the summer, since it did not fit into the youth’s other, more exciting plans. But they had not been completely out of contact. They talked on the telephone several times a year, at Christmas and on birthdays. And Peter had often called him when he had something exceptionally joyful to tell him, as when he had received particularly good marks in school, or his team, or he himself, had excelled on the sports ground. But this was the first time Bjørn had received a letter from him.
Peter Korpi Hansen was now twenty years old. He was in the army and was to be discharged in a few weeks, at the beginning of June. The letter had been posted from his barracks and on the back of the envelope his son had entered his service number before his name, along with the troop and the company to which he belonged. He wrote that come autumn he would start at Kongsberg Engineering College, where he had been admitted to the optics programme. In that connection he wondered whether he could stay with his father during the first term, or at least until he had found suitable lodgings at a reasonable price.