by Dag Solstad
86. Love of luxury. Vanity. Clothing. Sparkling wines. Life in all its incomparableness. I can’t help the fact that I’m going to miss it, thought Armand. I’m totally dependent on it. This is what everything in me has striven toward, and I’ve achieved it. You.
“Me?”
“Yes, you.”
“Thanks,” she said.
“For what?”
“For describing life in all its incomparableness. I’m an old gray-haired but beautiful woman from the upper class in a little town in Vestland, close to the Atlantic Ocean.”
“I’ve been there.”
“I know. I was there back then too, at home, with you.”
* * *
87. This book will remain in chaos until New Year’s. After that I’ll write it down in its final version. See, by the way, footnotes 83A-K (about the fact that the finished novel exists beforehand and merely has to be written down, along with all sorts of possible dead ends and almost-attempts, which are due to our inadequacy).
* * *
88. Armand’s dream. The darkness of the theater is filled with expectant spectators as Armand steps onto the illuminated stage. He is strangely excited about this meeting with his audience, and he’s looking forward to launching into his eternal monologue. But suddenly he discovers that he’s a fox. He is looking at himself from the outside and sees that he has a fox face, a fox body, and a thick fox tail. This terrifies him, and he looks for a means of escape. Then he notices the twin sister sitting on the stage, ready to sing. Armand throws himself at her, hiding his head in her arms. Now nobody will see that I’m a fox, he thinks.
* * *
89. This book will remain in chaos until New Year’s. After that I’ll write it down in its final version. But everything depends on the sacrifice of the son. God = U.S.A. God = U.S.A. That means that Armand accepts the dominance of the U.S.A. (And hasn’t he actually already done that in my footnotes?)
* * *
90. Somewhere or other, at a military airstrip in Norway, in the eastern region, two military planes take off, on their way toward a mission. Two big war planes. In my consciousness there are two planes, not one. Two big war planes.
* * *
91. Finally, the last appointment. The trip to London. Moving into the residence in one of London’s prestigious neighborhoods, an embassy residence highly regarded among the corps diplomatique in this cosmopolitan city. The moving van: a big semitruck. The workers unload the heavy, privately owned furniture and carry everything inside the residence. As in a movie. A more detailed description of the residence will have to wait, the same holds true for a description of the private quarters. A big day. But it can’t be concealed that the person writing this is more naively enthusiastic than the one he’s writing about, who is now going to live here.
* * *
92. On his way to the Palace. Taken by carriage. The horses. Through the narrow streets to Buckingham Palace. Up the wide staircase. Huge doors are thrown open by guards. He waits. Then, inside for the audience. Delivering his credentials from His Majesty the King of Norway. Her Majesty the Queen of England accepts them. All of this Armand experienced with no sense of irony. He was participating in a game. He felt the ritual’s gravity. He was vain down to his fingertips because he was the one who had the great honor of playing a role in this drama. He felt like an important fool in a vast historic machinery. Afterward, he refused to talk about it.
* * *
93. While Armand was getting settled in London, his son returned home. Still in uniform. This time the father didn’t see the son’s return because he was in London, but that didn’t matter because the son didn’t see anything either. He was blind. A blind soldier returned home. To Norway. To Oslo. To the big hospital that could not effect a cure.
* * *
94. As soon as the father heard what had happened, he went to Oslo. He went to see his son at the hospital, sitting down on the edge of his son’s bed in the private room. For the first time in many years he also met his son’s mother, to whom he was married many years ago. He had a long talk with the specialist who was treating his son. After a month he returned to London. Together with his son. The father went to get his son in Oslo and brought him to London, where he was the Norwegian ambassador. The son was sent to the best doctors this cosmopolitan city could offer, and it turned out nothing could be done. But before that became clear, the father devoted himself to getting his son the best training in how to read Braille. Time passed. The son acquired a white cane, which he used to make his way around the residence of the Norwegian embassy in London. He made progress at reading Braille. The father tried to help his young son keep up his courage. He constantly pointed out that it was necessary for his son to show strength of will and not allow himself to be completely trapped by the discouraging knowledge that he was blind and would be for the rest of his life.
* * *
95. In the month of July, the son flew alone to Oslo in order to vacation with his mother in Norway. A couple of weeks later Armand also flew to Norway and took his son for a weeklong stay in the mountains. They booked rooms in the B and B run by the twin sister. The father introduced the twin sister as “the mother” of the son’s half sister, the one whose father was Armand. They went on very short mountain hikes that nevertheless took a long time, because the son didn’t yet feel confident about navigating the mountainous terrain now that he could no longer see. His white cane gleamed as he, along with his spry and gray-haired father, stumbled his way forward. His father spoke quietly about the ever-shifting clouds in the sky and about what the relationship was like between the blue sky and the cloud formations at any specific time. He, meaning Armand, noticed that the color yellow kept reappearing, both when he described the sky and when he described nature in general. He’d never noticed this before, that the yellowness of nature played such a big role, both in the sky and on the mountain slopes; it wasn’t the dominant color, but there was still a remarkable dynamism about the yellow, almost hidden as it often was, behind a gray veil in the sky. In addition to describing their surroundings, he also frequently challenged his son to feel the wind gusting toward them.
And as the rain began to fall from the now black sky, striking them as big, clear, individual drops, he said: “Feel that? It’s starting to rain, so we need to turn around.”
And they would head back to the twin sister’s B and B, and they were often soaking wet before they got there, even though it wasn’t far away, but the son couldn’t walk very fast. Other times they would both notice that rain was coming their way because they heard thunder. Then Armand would propose they should keep walking, because it could be a while before the thunderstorm was overhead. So they continued on until they reached a high-plateau landscape, surrounded on all sides by towering slopes that got blacker and more intense in color as the thunder got closer.
“I think we’ll turn around,” said Armand. “Hear that? The thunder is right above the nearest ridge.”
At that moment lightning flashed. The air was split open by wild lightning, again that yellowness of Armand’s description, but it was now a completely different kind of yellow, more glaring. A lightning bolt struck only sixty or seventy meters from where they were standing. Armand was just about to exclaim: “Did you see that! Did you see that!” but he managed to restrain himself. The worst thing was that he was convinced his son had, in fact, seen it, even though he was blind. Then it started to rain. Even though they found themselves in a desolate landscape, apparently closed in by mountains on all sides, Armand knew that they were only a few hundred meters from the twin sister’s B and B, and he began leading his son in that direction. Soaking wet, they arrived at the B and B where they dried off and changed every stitch of clothing they had on. After that, they ate lunch in the dining room. There were other guests, but they were able to get a table all to themselves, as they usually did. After lunch the weather cleared, as Armand lay on his bed and relaxed in his room. He
got up and threw open the window. How wonderfully clean the air was outside! He left his room and went across the hall to knock on his son’s door, and when his son answered, he went in. He said the weather was now glorious and all of nature had been cleansed by the morning storm, so he suggested they spend the afternoon going on a long hike. By “long” he meant of course lengthy in terms of time, not distance. But his son didn’t want to do that. He said he was tired, he didn’t have the energy. Armand knew that his son had good reason to feel worn out, maybe even disheartened. Getting dressed and undressed had now become an unfamiliar and strenuous task for him; having to shed soaking wet clothes had proved especially disheartening, a feeling that only time would heal. But Armand refused to give in, he used his obvious powers of persuasion, and finally the son relented. He grabbed his white cane and followed his father downstairs to the lobby and then outside into the fresh air. They took a different hiking trail this time, heading up a slope, and suddenly they heard the jangling of rusty bells. It was a flock of goats on the scree, and the animals had now noticed them and approached.
“Sheep,” said the son, quite pleased.
Armand said nothing, but when the goats came so close that it was possible to touch them, he took his son’s hand, put it on the goat’s shaggy coat, and said: “Feel that, feel that!”
The son kept his hand on the goat’s shaggy coat for a while, touching and sniffing (breathing in the cleansed air), and then he said: “Goats. They’re goats.” At that the startled goat bounded away from him, followed by the whole flock. But they stopped to regroup a short distance away, and a few minutes later once again approached. Armand and his son walked slowly through the flock of goats, listening to the rusty bells on the lead goat, the scree glittering with raspberries, and they continued upward, along a narrow trail, and the son used his cane to feel his way forward, the whole time encouraged by his old father, who offered comments, speaking in a serious and matter-of-fact tone of voice. After a while they agreed to turn around and go back to the B and B to rest before dinner was served at seven. It had been a long day, invigorating in a way, but also strenuous, just as every day would be from now on, all of them continuing to be strenuous and taxing.
* * *
96. The argumentation.
In London as the Norwegian ambassador, with his blind son, the young disabled soldier. They were now back after their stay in the Norwegian mountains during the summer. Armand had to make certain he didn’t turn against those who had instigated this war which had made his son into a disabled veteran. His own country was a participant in this war, and as a diplomat he had acted fully within the appropriate parameters and in accordance with the prevailing views. The fact that he considered the war unwise, even rash, was another story which never, even for a moment, affected the views he represented. It’s true that he had allowed himself a few, shall we say ironic, remarks about the war, but they were so disguised that hardly anyone else understood the irony in his words; he had also been able, in the strictest privacy, when he was alone in his own bedroom in the residence of the magnificent Norwegian embassy in South Kensington, London, after a long day, to cast aside his official attire and allow himself to sink into a much longed-for and malicious merriment at the impossible world he lived in, as an obedient servant to those in power, both willingly and unwillingly; willingly because with open eyes he had voluntarily entered the diplomatic corps in his younger days, and unwillingly because the small country whose diplomatic corps he had joined acted as an obedient servant to the major world power, which was something he — by the way and of course — had been fully aware of when he joined the Norwegian foreign service. Yet this stopped when he received word about what had happened to his son.
It came as a shock to him. Even though he knew that his son was on a secret military mission, he hadn’t ceased his biting and sarcastic comments in the presence of others with regard to that very war, something about which he laughed long and hard whenever he was alone in his own bedroom, freed from his official attire. Naturally it had crossed his mind that something might happen to his son, but he had dismissed the idea as highly unlikely, since he had told himself that of course a father, from a psychological point of view, has reason to worry about a son who is on a military mission in the Far East; but he shouldn’t forget that statistically it was no more dangerous to be in uniform and armed to the teeth, serving with a superior Western military power in impoverished Asia, than it was to be in civilian clothes behind the wheel of a car, exposed to a potentially slippery fate on one of the countless highways that lead into London, for example. So he had dismissed the idea that his son might be in great danger in this war, which he personally opposed, yet which he, as a diplomatic official, had to support. Then word came about his son’s abrupt return home from the Asian mountain plateau. A young man without sight. Blind forevermore. And since then he had been focused on his son’s future.
Armand did all he could to make sure his son would be able to endure his fate. He had brought him to London and the ambassador’s residence because of the proximity to the city of a highly respected institute or school for the blind, and he’d managed to get his son accepted there, not simply because he was an ambassador, but also because the cause of his son’s blindness had opened all doors, both official and unofficial. That was where his son now spent the weekdays, busily occupied with trying, if at all possible, to make his ruined sight into less of an overwhelming tragedy. There he learned to see with his fingers, with his sense of smell, with his ears, with his mouth, his skin, even with his shoulder blades, and thereby also to see what those with sight couldn’t see, meaning what existed and moved on the other side, away from the direction in which the eyes always looked. On weekends the son went to stay with his father in his residence. In the beginning Armand would pick him up in one of the embassy cars, sitting in the driver’s seat himself, but the goal was for his son eventually to take the train on his own, so his father could meet him at the station in London.
Most of the time during these weekend visits in London the son would stay indoors, inside the residence, except for a short walk in a public park, either on Saturday or Sunday morning, as suggested by his father. Armand also liked to take him to concerts and the theater. Concerts as a respite, and the theater so that he could learn to bear his fate, because even though he would never see again, he could still, if he used all the other senses in his possession, experience the atmosphere inside the theater, and maybe even, at moments, find joy. Armand also hoped that in the big, glorious theater halls his son might be inspired to throw himself into practicing his new skills, which were now utterly vital to his life. Listening to the silence in the hall during the performance, the intense listening and attentiveness of the audience, the words spoken on stage, which he could apprehend just as well as anyone else even though he couldn’t actually see the stage set and props, or the lighting, etc., but he could capture all of this in other ways, if need be by having his companion, Armand, whisper to him what he was able to see on the stage.
One play they went to see was Brand by Henrik Ibsen. By virtue of his position as the Norwegian ambassador, Armand had been invited to the premiere at the National Theatre, and his son went with him, taking along his white cane. During the performance they both paid close attention; the son because he found it amusing to listen to this play, which he knew in his own language, now being performed in English, with English rhyme schemes, and Armand because he had a certain relationship to this particular play and was wondering how this excellent cast would manage to relate to what Armand called the Brand-folly of our time. After the performance they were invited to a reception backstage, where they said hello to the theater management and actors, and where Armand used the occasion to offer a toast, such as was appropriate for Norway’s ambassador in London, one that was brief, to the point, and dryly witty, since he knew this was what the Brits would appreciate.
Armand was carrying out his duties. E
ven though he’d suffered a personal tragedy within his immediate family, it did not strip him of his ability to act as the Norwegian ambassador in London. He did not turn against those who had instigated this war from which his son had returned a disabled veteran. If he felt a deep rage toward the United States, he never expressed it. If he had, the result would have been that he would be honorably discharged from his position as the Norwegian envoy, and he would have then entered the ranks of retirees. It would have been no more than a mild and tactful reaction on his part, if the rage at those who had involved us in this war, which had ruined his son’s life, had been allowed to surge in his breast. And subsequently led to this tactful breach on his part. Quiet but irrevocable. And if he’d actually accessed the depths of his rage, then he would have proclaimed to his Norwegian employer, for whom he’d spent the past forty years working, the true nature of his blistering protest, which would make it necessary for him to leave the foreign service immediately, and he wouldn’t hesitate to make his reason public in a letter to the editor sent to one of his country’s biggest daily newspapers. But none of this happened. Truth be told, he never even considered such a possibility. Not even the first possibility of the tactful but decisive breach. Armand had apparently not accessed the depths of his rage. Why not? Could it be because that sort of deep rage did not exist inside him, that there was no snarling beast in there that wished to free itself from its human (civilized) chains?
Armand continued in his official position. There was nothing astonishing about that. On the contrary, anything else would have been astonishing. If Armand had possessed a deep rage inside him, and if he had accessed this uncivilized beast way down inside, at the very bottom, he still couldn’t have behaved differently than he did. Most likely such a deep rage did exist, but it was of no use, and if Armand had been confronted by this claim, he would have, again most likely, nodded agreement, and added: And that’s a good thing. Armand continued in his official position. He cursed no one. It was of no use. And that was a good thing. Armand carried on as he had before. He was nearing the end of his career, which he was finishing up in the sought-after position as the Norwegian ambassador in London. An incomprehensible tragedy, however, had resulted in him being constantly, both visibly and invisibly, accompanied by a young man with a white cane as he carried out his duties. Enabling his son to bear his fate was something that was always on his mind, both day and night. Every Sunday evening he would drive his son back to the first-class institute that would help him prepare for his new life, which was now based on greatly limited conditions, and he would say goodbye on the steps leading to the pleasant reception area, which his son preferred to enter alone. What was Armand thinking about after he delivered his son to the institute and drove back to London late on a Sunday evening, sitting comfortably on the leather seat behind the wheel and the technically advanced dashboard in his steel-reinforced embassy car, which, seen from the outside, was merely two bright headlights among all the other dual sets of lights moving forward in a long line toward the metropolis on that evening? This and the following are an attempt to explain. It has to do with Armand’s lengthy series of arguments, which he, point by point, could not avoid pursuing on his journey toward the inevitable, something about which he’d always known, yet had never intended to pursue. Such that when all this is combined, put together, it will end with the inevitable, which cannot be pursued.