Novel 11, Book 18

by Dag Solstad

  Dr Lustinvas treated Bjørn Hansen with great respect and with routine medical expertise. Bjørn also came to suspect that he had not been given ordinary hospital food but a special diet, for he could find no fault with his meals. Dr Lustinvas alternated between giving him encouraging words and showing him sympathy. On the day when he came to report that what had occurred was irrevocable, in the sense that he must now confront the fact that he had to spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair, the doctor pressed his hands as he told him. He had sat down right beside Bjørn Hansen; indeed, he had moved his chair, which already stood near the bed, putting it exactly in such a way that, when he sat down on it, he was eye to eye with his patient. That day, too, he had a procession of nurses with him. They were lined up along the wall as he broke to Bjørn Hansen the news that there was no going back, and they stood there with grave faces, staring straight ahead and looking deeply grieved, including the two young women who had received him the first evening and who later had taken turns nursing him. They stood there in the background like a wailing Greek chorus, albeit dressed in white.

  Bjørn had visitors. First, the leader of the Lithuanian delegation, who lived in Vilnius, and later the secretary of the Norwegian embassy in Warsaw. During both these visits Dr Lustinvas was present, and when the Lithuanian was there he often took the floor himself, probably telling his countryman in their common language something about the accident and its consequences for his Norwegian patient. When the embassy secretary was there, Dr Lustinvas did not say anything, but he was there all along, in the background. This last meeting, by the way, came off very smoothly, with talk about this and that, and it was clear that the embassy secretary also was reluctant to touch directly on the reason why Bjørn Hansen found himself in a Vilnius hospital.

  He was Dr Lustinvas’s own patient and the doctor watched him zealously. He might suddenly pop up at Bjørn Hansen’s bed, often alone. Then he would sit down and look at him, ask him how he felt and whether he found any fault with the treatment. Suddenly he would begin talking about himself. About his being a Lithuanian and a Catholic. About the Lithuanian steppes, where he had spent his childhood. About how he hated Russians and communism, yet had much to thank them for. Without them, he would not have been a doctor, but a slave of the soil. Without them, Vilnius would not have been the capital of Lithuania, but a city in Poland. ‘Tomorrow, perhaps, Vilnius will again be a city in Poland. It depends on the Germans. We have wandered a lot and will continue to wander. Perhaps to the banks of the Dnieper, what do I know? But if Germany wants to have Stettin and Breslau, Königsberg, Danzig and Memel back, then Poland will want to have Vilnius back and we must start wandering eastwards. But I’ll manage,’ Dr Lustinvas added, ‘because God is behind it all.’ This is what he told his patient. This remarkable man from the rich West who was lying full length in his bed, bandaged and plastered by the book. A man to weep over, if you sat down at his bedside and reflected on what had happened, seen from the patient’s point of view. But Dr Lustinvas did not think about that. He was very vague when he touched on such things. But he was glad to sit at Bjørn Hansen’s bedside. Bjørn Hansen thought that the two sweet nurses must have been initiated; they were in on the secret. But no one else needed to know anything. Only Dr Lustinvas and two dark-haired beauties in nurse’s uniforms.

  Dr Lustinvas sat by the bedside of this remarkable man, who must have transformed the doctor’s life. That, perhaps, was why he came so often, in order to be in the vicinity of this man who had made an entirely new life possible for him, a future he had not even dared dream of before Bjørn Hansen showed up. The sum of $10,000 had fallen from the sky straight down into Dr Lustinvas’s lap. A wealthy man with a crazy idea in his head had turned up in his life. This bandaged and plastered man from the West was God’s gift to Dr Lustinvas, and that was also how the doctor treated Bjørn Hansen. One day Dr Lustinvas will have to go to confession, of course, Bjørn Hansen thought, though he is not likely to do so until I’ve left; but will he then speak about this as a sin he has committed or as an undeserved miracle on life’s journey and a blessing?

  And those two little sweet nurses treated Bjørn Hansen in the same way. With great respect and much consideration. One day Dr Lustinvas rolled a wheelchair into Bjørn Hansen’s room, closely followed by both nurses. The nurses helped Bjørn Hansen into it, and after Dr Lustinvas had instructed him in the use of it – as well as given him, in vague terms, some good advice about how a paralysed man actually behaves, both when he is being helped into a wheelchair and when he sits in it – the two nurses rolled Bjørn Hansen out into the corridor and placed him on a covered veranda. Bjørn Hansen could then verify that spring had arrived in Lithuania. The birds were singing and the trees were sprouting fresh leaves. Soon he would leave the hospital and Vilnius. He spent yet another week there, mostly taken up with getting used to sitting in a wheelchair; he pushed himself up and down the corridors, or sat on the covered veranda with a blanket over his knees. Dr Lustinvas would sometimes turn up as Bjørn sat there, sit beside him and explain what it meant to have been born in Lithuania. He had brought a worn photo album and showed him pictures. Of his father, the kolkhoz peasant. Of his mother, a heavy-set Lithuanian country wife. Of his three brothers and his sister. He showed him a pendant of the sister, for she was dead; she died at sixteen, and so her picture was inside a pendant that Dr Lustinvas carried on a chain around his neck. Bjørn was shown pictures of Dr Lustinvas as a child, a young man, as a student, and as a junior doctor. Of Mrs Lustinvas and the two children, photographed inside a cramped, over-furnished flat. Mrs Lustinvas was also a doctor. Here in the hospital. ‘Too bad you haven’t met her,’ Dr Lustinvas said. The two children were six and eight. All the pictures looked typically stuffed, contrived. You were at the photographer’s, even if the photographer was a father (of the children), husband (of Mrs Lustinvas), or son (of his father and mother). The very interiors appeared stuffed, with all those things piled up on the rickety dining-room table around which the Lustinvas family were seated, except for Dr Lustinvas, who took the pictures. Dr Lustinvas dreamed of a Pax Romana: peace for the Lithuanians within the walls of the new German-Roman nation, which would check German expansion along the Baltic coast and towards the Oder–Neisse border, and in which Poles, Lithuanians and White Russians could live in eternal peace – with the Russians as the barbarians on the other side of this new Roman wall. Dr Lustinvas’s children sat at the table and stared at Bjørn. Mrs Lustinvas stared at him. Dr Lustinvas as a young student stared at him. He had placed his hand on the shoulder of a fellow student, and both stared at Bjørn, inscrutably. Grandmother Lustinvas stared at her son, who had returned to the countryside as a junior doctor with a camera in order to take a photograph of his mother, and from inside that picture she now stared at Bjørn Hansen, the man from the West. Dr Lustinvas asked no questions about Bjørn Hansen’s family situation. He came from the Other Side and had no history. He came to Dr Lustinvas from outside, rich and unknown, asking a favour, and so he had changed Dr Lustinvas’s life, while he himself, for some unfathomable reason, sat in a wheelchair as a cripple. Dr Lustinvas had no questions to ask him. Not even about the world of wealth he came from did Dr Lustinvas ask any questions.

  And so Bjørn Hansen was discharged. He was wheeled into Dr Lustinvas’s office, where he received a number of signed and stamped documents, which explained in detail his stay in Vilnius Hospital. Then he was driven to the airport. He was wheeled into the departure hall by the two dark-haired nurses. They walked side by side behind the wheelchair, both holding on to the handlebar while they pushed him towards the check-in window. Then one of them checked him in, while the other stood waiting behind the wheelchair. Afterwards they wheeled him towards the passport check and the international departure hall, still side by side, like two sisters, behind him. At the passport check stood a Scandinavian Airlines stewardess waiting for him. The two Lithuanian nurses handed the wheelchair over to this woman, who would now bear respo
nsibility for all further transportation. But before delivering him to the stewardess, they bent down, both of them, first one and then the other, and embraced him, while bursting into tears.

  It caught them unawares, both the cool stewardess, who stepped back a little, and Bjørn Hansen, who now slumped over, anxious both about being taken through the passport check and through those long corridors to the plane. But also about what would come afterwards. Meanwhile the stewardess seized the handlebar of the wheelchair, wheeled him through the passport check and through a door, which then closed, and since he sat with his eyes looking straight ahead and couldn’t turn round, he was no longer able to see the two nurses, who stood side by side watching him disappear through the automatic door and into his own world, which they did not even get a glimpse of before the door was closed.

  On the plane he was given a seat at the very back, beside a single seat reserved for the crew, where the stewardess sat down, beside him, while holding firmly on to the handlebar of the wheelchair with one hand during the ascent. He shook his head when they brought the trolleys with food and drinks – anyway, it was ‘his’ stewardess who was in charge of serving drinks in this section of the plane. He sat looking straight ahead, hunched up, deep in thought. He was on his way home. He had never been so afraid, and on top of that he was worried that his fear would make him tremble all over. He feared he would not be able to go through with his project. He was sitting up in the air over Europe somewhere. Inside the cramped long body of an aircraft, at the very back. He sat hunched up in a wheelchair, looking glumly straight ahead. When the plane went down for landing, the stewardess sat down in the vacant seat beside him, keeping the same firm hold on the handlebar of the wheelchair. At Kastrup he was handed over to another stewardess for the last lap of the journey, between Copenhagen and Oslo. At Fornebu the personnel of an ambulance from Kongsberg Hospital took over. They were waiting as the stewardess wheeled him through the door to the open lobby, where the buzz of loud Norwegian voices hits you as you come out of the international departure hall, right after customs. He was immediately handed over to two white-clad men.

  Spring had arrived in Norway, but it was cool, as he noticed during the short trip from the exit to where the ambulance was parked. It was mid-April, Tuesday of Holy Week, two days before Maundy Thursday, for Easter was late this year. He had been away for eight weeks. The ambulance drove to Kongsberg, via Drammen and Hokksund. Had he not always liked Norwegian landscapes, especially the landscape along the Drammen River, between Drammen and Hokksund, and that between Hokksund and Kongsberg, with its flat fields and steep hills? The two white-clad men sat in the front seat, telling each other what they were doing for the Easter holidays, while Bjørn Hansen sat in the back, in his wheelchair, hunched up as before. When they arrived at the Kongsberg Hospital he was carried out in the wheelchair and taken straight to Dr Schiøtz, who was expecting him.

  Dr Schiøtz received him in a manner befitting a practised physician: friendly but distant. There was also a nurse in the office, who assisted him. Among other things, she was helpful in transferring Bjørn Hansen from the wheelchair onto the examination table. My withered legs, Bjørn Hansen thought, remember that. But it was Dr Schiøtz who did the examination, the nurse was never in direct contact with Bjørn Hansen’s body. After the examination Bjørn Hansen was taken up to the X-ray department and Dr Schiøtz went along. The doctor took the X-ray pictures himself, turned Bjørn Hansen over on his stomach without assistance, and afterwards remained behind to wait for the developed pictures, while Bjørn Hansen was wheeled back to Dr Schiøtz’s office. Then he was alone with the nurse, but they did not talk. He lay with his eyes closed, covered by a sheet, until Dr Schiøtz returned with the X-rays in his hand. He looked worried. He waved to the nurse and they helped Bjørn Hansen up from the examination table and back into the wheelchair. My withered legs, Bjørn Hansen thought. Dr Schiøtz sent the nurse out, on the pretext of fetching some documents, so they could be alone, which the nurse understood.

  With an expression of concern and in a low, friendly voice brimming with sympathy, Dr Schiøtz told him that the examination he had just undertaken fully confirmed the diagnosis made in Vilnius, a copy of which had been sent to Kongsberg Hospital. Bjørn Hansen, therefore, had to take it like a man, there was nothing else for it. Dr Schiøtz knew it was painful to have to adjust to there being no hope, but it couldn’t be helped. Dr Schiøtz had no problem understanding that Bjørn Hansen would now slide into a state of self-pity, perhaps for months. It was entirely human, but he still hoped that Bjørn Hansen would gradually realise that life had to and could go on, with him as a participant, in a society which, after all, devoted a great many resources to enable the handicapped to live a satisfactory life.

  Bjørn Hansen desperately tried to achieve eye contact with the physician. He searched for his glance, deep within. He himself sat with his eyes wide-open, boring them into Dr Schiøtz’s eyes, into those eternally remote eyes, which remained remote, refusing to allow Bjørn Hansen’s glance to reach him, in that he just moved his glance the moment Bjørn Hansen sought it. He heard the addicted physician tell him that society would do all it could to give Bjørn Hansen a good life. He knew that Bjørn Hansen was having a hard time now, he said, but he should know, at this moment, that the rest of them would do everything in their power to help and support him, and as he said that he turned his eyes towards the man in the wheelchair, giving him a remote but friendly glance that betrayed nothing at all of the secret they shared, which Dr Schiøtz could have acknowledged without any cost to himself. Bjørn Hansen stared into the friendly physician’s eyes, which answered his gaze with the same imperturbable friendliness. There was a gentle knock on the door and the nurse came in; she placed a pile of papers to be filled out on the doctor’s desk. It was done as requested.

  He was taken home to his flat. And left there. He remained alone. Bjørn Hansen sat in a wheelchair in his own flat. After a while the doorbell rang and Bjørn Hansen wheeled up to open the door. It was anything but simple. First, he had to unlock the door and leave it ajar, before turning the wheelchair around and backing up sufficiently to leave the one standing outside enough room to open the door and come in. It was the community nurse. A pleasant woman of about sixty who came to help him.

  She asked what he would like for dinner, and when he couldn’t think of anything in particular she smiled knowingly and said that, in that case, she would buy something she thought was good. She came back with a bagful of food, which he paid for. She served him salmon with cucumber salad. While he ate she walked about in the flat and smartened it up. She had bought flowers and decorations. Yellow catkins which she put on the tables and shelves. Ten yellow tulips which she put into two vases, one on the coffee table and one on the windowsill. By his plate she put a flaming yellow napkin. Now they could ring in Easter, she said. When he had finished eating, she took his plate, glass and cutlery and washed up. Then she left.

  He sat in a wheelchair in a newly cleaned (Mari Ann), tidy and smartened-up flat. His son was not there, but he had left a letter. He wrote that he had found another furnished room, it was the most practical thing to do. Anyway, he had never intended to stay with him longer than necessary, only until he had got himself another place. Now he had found one in a residential area, a short distance from the town centre, in the basement of a villa, where he had a bachelor flat with a private entrance. Incidentally, he would visit him one day at Easter, since he would not be going away but would stay home and read. Best regards from Peter.

  At Easter a community nurse came every day and prepared food for him, did the housework and helped him with what he needed; there were two of them taking turns now and after the holiday he would become acquainted with several more. They all had a key and let themselves in. Already before Easter was over they insisted that Bjørn Hansen should try to take part in preparing his own meals – that was the best way, they said, one had to try to do as much as possible oneself – ‘It
’s for your own good. Being self-reliant gives you a positive attitude to life,’ they said.

  One day the doorbell rang. Twice. But Bjørn Hansen didn’t open. For some reason or other he got the idea that it might be Turid Lammers and he didn’t want to see her. He hadn’t seen her in the five years since he moved out of the Lammers villa, apart from a few times at a considerable distance, and then he had turned round or made a detour. Nor had she looked him up, but it occurred to him nevertheless that it could be Turid Lammers when the doorbell rang. She was bound to be driven by a deep need to see him, with her own eyes, sitting in a wheelchair. And then they could have resigned themselves, she to her pity, he to his purification. He would do everything in his power not to be seen, and to avoid talking to Turid Lammers in his present physical condition. But it did not need to have been Turid Lammers who rang the bell. It could, for example, have been Herman Busk. But he wouldn’t open for him either. Not now. Not yet.

  However, it had not been Herman Busk. He rang up right after Easter and had been away at the time. He wanted to come over and see Bjørn Hansen, but Bjørn Hansen told him that, honestly, he wasn’t up to it yet, he must become stronger first, and Herman Busk understood. But a week later he rang again, and then about once a week for some time. Bjørn Hansen declined to meet him, but for entirely different reasons from the one he had for avoiding Turid Lammers.