I might as well leave. But there was no ferry until the next day, and my mother was sleeping, and I did not feel like sitting in a chair waiting for her to wake up. I looked at the pine tree. Its twisted top. The branches scraping against the roof in the wind. I finished the beer and put the bottle down in the thicket at the foot of the hedge. Suddenly I knew what to do, and I decided to start right away, and when I had finished, she would wake up, pull back the curtain, look out while resting her forehead against the glass and suddenly feel elated as she had not done for a long time and at first she would not grasp that this had something to do with me. She would look out of the window and instantly see what it was that had changed while she slept, and then she would realise that I had been able to do what my father could not.
I opened the creaking door to the woodshed, and light fell on the tall chopping block in the middle of the dirt floor with an axe planted in it, a new cleaving axe my father had been given for his fifty-seventh birthday. He was still strong for an old man, but I was stronger than him, and had been for a long time, and he knew it.
There was another axe in the corner. Its shaft was shorter and its head was rusty. We had used it for splitting wood before, but now there were deep dents to its edge, and the shaft was fraying where it joined the head. No one had sharpened it, no one had looked after it for a long time. But this was the one I wanted to use. I put on some workman’s gloves and took the axe and a spade and a hoe along with me as I left, and a hemp rope that was hanging on a hook I also took and went over to the pine tree. I had not done this before, I had not taken down a tree with roots and all, but I had once seen Hansen do it, before winter, to a tree he thought looked menacing. I got hold of the bottom branch which stretched out across our roof and climbed up and took the end of the rope with me and tied it around the trunk a fair bit above its middle and secured it with a knot I had learned as a Boy Scout twenty-five years earlier. I did not remember much from my Scouting days, but the knot was still in my fingers.
I sat up there on a branch. I ran the rope through the crook of my arm and down to the ground where it fell in a coil. I took off my gloves and tugged them under my jumper and rolled a cigarette and lit it with the blue lighter. I inhaled the smoke deep into my lungs and sat in the pine tree, on the branch, with my back against the trunk, smoking. I squashed the stub against the trunk and let it fall. Then I sat there for a while longer.
I looked down on to Hansen’s plot. It was deserted. He was not there. The pheasant too was gone. The outboard motor was white and still attached to the sawhorse. I looked across the roofs of the summer house towards the sea. There were stripes of foam from the north wind, and it was crinkled like a piece of dark cloth or crêpe paper, and it looked numbingly cold, and was lilac in a forbidding way, the horizon a bright white and the sun shining out there, but here it was gone. The sky was low and grey. The wind was getting up, a cold wind hit my back, and around me on all sides the wind came through the pine tree. I don’t know what happened. Maybe I passed out briefly, but when I came to, my face was soaking wet, my hands tightly around the rope and my knuckles white. I wiped my face, rubbed my eyes hard with the palm of my hand, put on my gloves and climbed down carefully, one hand on the branches, the other around the rope. I abseiled like a mountaineer, and at the foot of the pine I passed out again, hit my forehead against the trunk and came to at once.
I took a deep breath and then another one and checked if I could use my right hand. I opened and clenched it, and it did hurt a little, but no more than I could cope with. I took the spade and started digging a circle around the trunk in the sandy soil. I felt dizzy, but this was what I wanted to do. I dug another circle, inside the first, and another circle to get deeper down, and then a fourth, a slightly wider circle, and the fifth time the spade hit the root. I dug on and made an even wider circle, and more roots appeared, shiny red and white against the spade.
I sat down to rest with my feet in the trench I had dug. I pulled the gloves off and rolled another cigarette and lit it with my lighter and smoked it all the way down with my eyes closed. The cigarette tasted strangely good. It made me smile.
I lifted my legs out from the trench and stood up and reached for the axe. It felt good in my hands. I swung it a couple of times, like I had seen people on TV swing golf clubs, and then I drove it hard and aslant into the first root, and it snapped just from the speed of the axe head, and I hoped that the sound would not wake my mother. But I guessed she was too exhausted, too tired and unwell, and the axe rushed deep into the sandy soil and must have dented its edge even more but I didn’t care. I worked my way around the trunk, and some roots yielded right away while others needed many blows, and most were tough and filled with sap down from the core of the earth and would not let go. But they had to let go. There was no mercy and I swung the axe from left to right until nothing hung together any more.
I straightened my aching back, picked up the rope and walked the fifteen paces to the woodshed and dug both heels into the ground. I leaned back with the rope taut from high up on the trunk, and pulled as hard as I could. I heard it creak and felt in my arms how the pine tree started to give and bend towards me, but then it swung back and stood like it did before. Each time I pulled, the same thing happened, and I thought: maybe this will not work, I thought, maybe not, and when she wakes up and pulls back the curtains and looks out, then nothing will have changed, nothing will have happened, and everything will be as it always was.
I let go of the rope and went back to the pine tree, raised the spade and dug even deeper under the tree and slowly the biggest root became visible. It had dug itself straight into the earth like an anchor. I dropped the spade, then clutched the handle of the axe, and I whacked it full force, and hit with a bang, and the axe recoiled. A pain shot through my forearms which went numb at once, and I let the axe fall and I shouted out: ‘Goddamnit, I can’t take any more’, but I did not know what it was I could not take.
When the pain died down, I fell on to my knees and closed my eyes until everything inside me fell into place, and I rubbed my hand against my chest and shook my head and got up to have another go at a different angle, and it took me more than twenty blows, but then the root cracked with a subterranean metallic singing sound, as though a wire had snapped down there. I walked towards the shed where I picked up the rope, braced myself, and then I pulled with all my force, and it toppled at once, and the whole pine tree came whooshing, and I threw myself to one side, rolled over several times and it was a close escape. Jesus, I thought, lying on my back in the grass and the sky above me was full of wind, was low and grey, but it did not matter now, I had done it, and I laughed, and I laughed all alone. Life lay ahead of me. Nothing was settled.
I stayed on my back to rest a bit until the cold seeped through my father’s jumper. I listened for sounds from the house, but the house was quiet. No sounds from the kitchen. She had probably taken a sleeping pill. I sat up and pretended I was trying to decide whether I should cut the branches off at once. Or whether I should wait. I sat for a while in case there was someone watching me, before I decided it could wait.
I got back on my feet, brushed dirt and pine needles off my jumper and off the seat of my trousers and went over to untie the rope from the trunk of the pine tree and pick up the tools I had used and carried everything back to the woodshed and leaned them against the wall, coiled the rope around my hand and elbow and finished it with a nice little knot before I hung it back on its hook, closed the door and crossed the grass towards the old shed.
Twilight would soon set in, the black autumn dark would roll in from the sea, the outer dark, so to speak, would come all the way from the horizon like a thick tarpaulin and blanket the coast and the beaches to the south and to the north and lie flat across the fields and the heath and every single road and every single path and then maybe weigh me down, so I would not be able to stand up straight.
But there were still some hours left. I opened the door to the shed and
entered the familiar air of long-damp brickwork. I wanted to see if my old bicycle was still in there. And it was. Leaned up against the far wall. It was a Norwegian Svithun, metallic blue with white stripes. Both tyres were flat, but I found a rusty pump in a corner, and with some effort I blew them both up, and they had no punctures, had merely been left unattended for so long the air had seeped out many years ago. I carried the bicycle on to the grass, pushed it along and swung myself up on the saddle. It felt like something I had never done, and the chain was rusty and noisy inside the shiny chain guard, but I gave it my best and tried to look swift on my way into town.
18
I cycled into town along the Skagen Road, pleased with myself and the pine tree that was lying across the yard in all its Danish majesty. I pedalled smoothly past the old DK petrol station where we so often had stopped to buy new stocks of beer when the other shops were shut. More than once I had come in my car, half drunk and parked so close to the petrol pump I could hardly get out.
And I cycled past the shop called Storkøb on my right and further along the long stone wall to the left, with Flagstrand church behind it, its whitewashed walls blinding in the late afternoon sunshine, and I freewheeled along the cemetery that shared its tall trees with the small park, Plantagen, at the far end where they seamlessly merged. Halfway there I stopped and leaned my bike against the stone wall. There was only one other bike there, a ladies’ bike, and I took my tobacco pouch out of my pocket and rolled a cigarette, and leaning against the wall I smoked the cigarette, holding it between my fingers like Albert Finney from the bicycle factory would have held his, had he been able to travel through time to stand here in this place next to me. I looked up at the undertaker’s across the street. A row of shiny, smooth, square gravestones was on display either side of the entrance, and bronze doves peered down from atop the stones in a modest and annoyingly Christian manner. I turned my head and looked down the road in the other direction, towards the hospital and the care home at the junction. It had balconies running all the way around the three floors. In a wicker chair my grandmother had sat out the last years of her life before she finally was buried in the cemetery right behind me, and on one of the few occasions I had gone there to visit with one of the girls in tow, or with both of them, she had had a piece of paper in her lap where it said: Arvid’s coming today. But she forgot about the piece of paper, and it lay loosely in her hand on the knitted blanket that was always draped across her knees, and she did not know who I was.
I didn’t understand what it was about my body, if it was the cigarette I was smoking, if it had some narcotic effect, or it was the sunlight that still found its way over the rooftops, but I suddenly felt better than I had done for weeks. And as I was feeling so good, so high, even, I decided I might as well take a walk through the cemetery, among the trees, along the gravel paths while it was still light, because I liked that cemetery, I had walked there many times before.
The bare trees made it seem unfamiliar, and light was streaming through the branches, unlike in summer, when I would normally walk here, and you could see a long way even though the sun was setting. In the cemetery there were rows of neatly trimmed hedges, at strict angles around each grave, and chains were hanging between the path and the gravestone and some had small white painted cast iron gates in the low hedge, and more than half of the gravestones had doves on top of them, and one or two turned out to be real ones. As I walked by they spread their wings and flew off as doves do.
I knew where I was going, but I did not want to go there right away, so I turned left and walked onwards along the paths, and then approached the grave from a different direction than I usually did, this time facing the names carved into the stones, and that, of course, made the grave easier to find.
She was kneeling on the gravel in front of the gravestone with the three names on it, weeding, pulling twigs and dried dead flowers from the small pots she had placed there on her last visit. The time for flowers was long gone, but no one had been here for months to tend the grave. I stopped a few metres behind her and waited.
She did not turn around. ‘Is that you?’ she said.
‘Yes,’ I said, and she said nothing, so then I had to. ‘I was certain you were asleep back in the summer house,’ I said.
‘As you can see, I’m not.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I can see that.’
I took a deep breath. I felt fine.
‘Do you want a hand?’ I said.
She half turned and looked up. She had been crying, it was clear to see.
‘What happened to your forehead?’ she said.
‘I bumped into a tree,’ I said.
‘Just now?’
‘Yes.’
‘Were you drunk?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t get drunk on a glass of Calvados. And a beer.’
‘A beer?’
‘Yes, with Hansen.’
‘I see,’ she said. ‘And what did the two of you talk about?’
‘We talked about Lenin,’ I said.
‘Lenin?’
‘Yes,’ I said, and she shook her head and pointed past me along the path, and her face was swollen, the skin puffy under her eyes.
‘You can fetch one of those buckets. By the door to the shed.’
I turned and looked in that direction. There was a pile of buckets at the door to a brick outhouse with a pointy roof of red tiles, and it looked nice in an old fashioned, slightly snobbish way.
There was a small concrete basin with a tap above it on the wall.
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Why not.’ I walked the few metres and took a bucket from the top of the pile, went back and gave it to her. She placed it firmly between her knees and gathered the dead flowers and the twigs with her hands, and suddenly she stuffed it all violently into the bucket. She straightened up, took off her gloves and ran a hand through her hair and sat there in silence. It felt a little awkward so I decided to tell her now.
‘I pulled that pine tree down,’ I said, and at once I realised it was not the right time.
‘Did you?’
‘I sure did,’ I said.
‘That’s good,’ she said, ‘but to be honest, you owe your father that much, he’s not strong enough any more; he has done so much for you,’ she said, and I thought, what the hell has my father ever done for me? and she said: ‘You’re the strong one now. Your father is an old man. Do you understand that?’
‘Yes, I understand,’ I said.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Sure I’m sure. I understand that,’ I said, ‘but I didn’t quite finish the job. So far the tree is just lying there. There are still the branches. That will take a while,’ I said.
‘Yes, of course,’ she said, but she had already forgotten about the pine tree. I looked down at my shoes. ‘Do you ever think of your brother?’ she said.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I do.’
‘Every single day I think about him,’ my mother said.
It was six years since he died, and I could not say the same. But I thought about him often, about the day he died and every single time with a guilty conscience. I had had that feeling for so long it was a part of who I was.
‘You don’t think about me every day,’ I said.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Why should I?’
‘No, why should you,’ I said. ‘I don’t think about you every day, either.’ But that was not true, so I said: ‘Yes, I do.’
‘That’s not necessary,’ she said with her back to me.
‘Yes, it is,’ I said.
She turned and looked up into my eyes while at the same time pushing her bare hands against the gravel and got stiffly to her feet and was about to say something I was certain I would not like to hear, but then she let it go.
‘It’ll be dark soon,’ she said. ‘Shall we cycle home to the summer house together?’ And I said:
‘I was thinking of going into town.’
‘Then I hope you’ve got lights on your bicycle.’
‘Oh, yes, I have,’ I said. And I did, but there was no dynamo. It was lost long ago and was probably on some other bicycle. Or just dumped somewhere. What did I know?
We walked together up to the gate. The cemetery was closing, a man in overalls came towards us. He nodded and my mother nodded back, and then we were outside and walked up to our bicycles.
‘Very well,’ she said and got on her bicycle seat, turning her back to me, and I climbed on to mine and we went our separate ways. When I reached the junction, I turned to the left before the care home and further down the road my chest started to hurt badly and I shouted:
‘Fuck! Fuck!’ and I could have flung my old bicycle on the tarmac and ripped the saddle off the pole, twisted the handlebars into an ‘S’ with my hands and stamped the spokes around the hub into spaghetti, or turned around in the middle of the road and raced her to the petrol station and declaimed a sentence that would build a stunning bridge from my heart to hers. But I did none of those things. I just cycled down the street into town, across Gammeltorv, past Dommergaarden with the drunk tank to the right, where once I had been forced to stay the night, and after that I sailed across Nytorv and along the Danmarksgade, which was the main street in this town.
19
It was night on Carl Berners Plass. I was sleeping, I was dreaming, and then I woke up and forgot my dream. Cold it was against my face in the dark in the living room and I felt her body close to mine, and my chest was burning and my heart too, and a house somewhere in the city was burning, not far from this room. One man was shouting frightened words to another man who shouted back and both of them were panting, running as the fire engine howled past in the dark, crashing through red lights at the crossing where no one walked. I heard it all crashing through the open window in the cold, and the flashing blue lights hit the glass and were thrown back out, and it was burning down along my arm, around her shoulder and her arm around my chest was burning, and how strange it did not happen here, I thought, with the burning heat between her skin and my skin; how strange we did not burst into flames.
I Curse the River of Time Page 12