In the Wake

by Per Petterson

  I will tell you something about my father. He was past forty when I was born, but he was different from the other men where we lived. He was an athlete. I mean a real pro. He had taken his body as far as it could go and filled it with a strength you would think it could not hold, and you could see it in the way he walked and in the way he ran, in the way he talked and in the way he laughed that there was a fire inside him that no-one could ignore, and it was clear from the way that he was seen that he was body and energy both, that he reached out and was heading somewhere, that there was something about him. And he had been that way for as long as anyone could remember. He had trained and trained to make his body into a crowbar, a vaulting pole to break free with and be lifted by. He had worn tracks into mountainsides on his way up and on his way down to strengthen his legs to get better on the football pitch, on the ski run and in the boxing ring, and on his way through town to the factory from Galgeberg and Vålerenga where he lived, and no-one had a strength like his. He had crossed the Østmark by every single path, up every single ridge and down on the other side, and it made him into an all-rounder. Good at everything and best at nothing. He was not fast enough. He could keep running in the tracks longer than most, but weaker men crossed the finishing line before him. He was never frontman, never anchorman, and even though no-one was untouched by his capacity for taking a beating in the ring, standing firm with his little smile, driving his opponent crazy, for much longer than anyone thought possible, it was hardly ever enough to make him one of the chosen few sent out to tournaments to fight for the club and its colours and be seen by the crowd the way he had longed for. He had the strength and he had the will, but he did not have the speed nor the imagination to give him that little extra. But that did not break him, as you might have thought. He just went on, year after year, and far beyond the point in time when what he trained for would be possible, and it made him different from all the other grown men I knew. He could endure anything. And now he stood leaning against the yellow wall of the corridor in Aker Hospital crying because he was in pain. We had not had a proper talk for as long as I could recall, maybe not since the year I was twelve and we sat by a bonfire far into the Lillomark Forest, and he showed me how a boy only 142 centimetres tall could make an asshole of 160 afraid. I suddenly felt faint and ill. There were only the two of us in that corridor, and I could not take another step. No way. I stood there for I don’t know how long, and I remember thinking it was incredibly hot, that I was thirsty and wanted a drink, but I am sure he did not know I was there, for he never turned round, just held his hand to his stomach and his face to the wall as he wept, and that was what saved me. I held my breath, turned silently and walked away. Straight out of the hospital, into the car and then drove home.

  I sit on the chair beside Mrs Grinde’s door looking at the floor and talk and talk and do not know whether what I say and what I think are the same things, but if they are it is hard to believe, for in the years that have passed since that day at Aker Hospital I have never told anyone what happened. Not my mother while she lived, not the one who left her make-up in the bathroom, not my brother, now hovering in a stable way down in the valley between this and a different world entirely, and G. Grinde stands in front of me in the hall biting her lip and running her hand through her hair. I can’t see her doing it, but I know she is, and she shifts her weight from foot to foot, not impatiently but restlessly maybe, at a loss. But when I look up she peers at me short-sightedly and says: “Are you sure he didn’t know you were there?”

  I look down at the floor again and say: “No.”

  She makes a decision then which I do not catch on to, because I am gazing down between my knees with my hands pressed to my temples, swallowing again and again and I do not see her face. It’s not until much later when we lie close in the heavy warmth, and she has in fact switched the light off, that I realise it was then it happened, and yet again it strikes me what a story can accomplish.

  I wake once, and it is still dark. I raise myself on my elbow and look out the window and see the light from my apartment in the opposite block, and two floors up there is light in the Hajo family home. My friend the family father stands at the centre of the room, his head bowed and his face in his hands, his whole body rocking back and forth, I can see him quite clearly, but I cannot find a way to think about it with this unknown perfume making me drowsy, and when I lie down again she turns to me under the duvet and does something that makes me gasp, it almost hurts. I cannot remember when anyone last did just that to me. And she is so warm, and her hair smells of the same perfume, it tickles my face and the way her skin touches mine makes me think of an animal whose name I do not know but would have liked to see, and once she strokes my chest and shoulders and says: “You’re so fine.”

  “I’m like a whited sepulchre,” I say. “You’re the one who is fine.”

  She laughs then, deep down in her throat, and I laugh too although I did not mean to be funny, and she asks if I am still cold, and then I answer no, and someone says: “Do you like it when I do this?” but afterwards I do not remember which one of us it was, and then I ask: “What’s your first name?” and she definitely answers something with a G, but I am already sleeping then and do not hear a thing.

  6

  I AM FLYING a soundless helicopter above Oslo town. I am not yet born. That doesn’t matter because I am high up and merely looking and shall not interfere. But everything is known to me. There is glass around me on all sides and a rushing silence. The city lies beneath me. It is early morning. The helicopter circles from Nydalen to the fjord, I can see the forests and the Holmenkollen ski jump and the river running through the city like a silvery-grey ribbon with all the bridges and the small boats moored to poles right down by the mouth, and nothing moves except a pale speck on its way to the river and one of the bridges crossing to the Maridalsveien on the other side. It is my father. The war is over, the party is over, spring has gone and summer has passed with its male choirs singing and laughter across the country and Norwegian flags flying from newly painted poles; the summer he rode on old buses with his white chorister’s cap on his head or on the back of old lorries decorated with beech leaves and red, white and blue ribbons, the stench of bad diesel burning his nose, and he sang at the top of his voice. Now the rubbish rolls along the pavements.

  Everything is black and white again, as in films. Autumn is coming, and he turns on to the bridge with the old leather briefcase under his arm, and that briefcase is so worn out that he keeps a rope tied round it to hold it together, and the late summer wind buffets his back with a hint of the first cold and it pulls at his coat, which is the same one he had ten years earlier when he bought it second-hand. It is almost white now. For five years he learned things he would never have dreamed of, and they cannot be used for anything now, cannot be told to anyone. He stops on the bridge and leans against the white-painted iron railing where the paint is peeling off in big flakes and the iron is rusty beneath. He stands there gazing into the running water until it makes him dizzy, then he has to sit down on the coarse planks with his back to the railing and his case on his lap and close his eyes. Up the road across the bridge is the factory, but he just sits there quite still as the minutes pass, seven o’clock has come and gone, and I fly around him in big circles and can see him up close and at the same time as a little white fleck, and then he straightens his back, stretches his arms out to the sides and starts breathing deeply. Slowly in and out with closed eyes, in and out with his case on his lap, in the nearly white coat and the river under the bridge and the waterfall he hears but cannot see, but which I can see quite clearly foaming white, and it falls and it falls, and then I start to weep so loudly it wakes me.

  I am sopping wet in the face and my back is stiff. I don’t know what time it is, but when I turn round it is light outside, and there’s a scrap of paper on the pillow beside me. I see it at once. I run my hand over the sheet. The warmth has gone. I lie on my back looking up at the ceiling, and
then I get that feeling of a film I sometimes have, though not as often as when I was younger, but sometimes, in certain situations. As if I am this man in a film and have to get inside him to play him properly and feel what he feels after a night when everything possible has happened and he wakes up in the bed of a woman he has not even talked to before, and he lies staring up at the ceiling letting everything sort of sink in, and I look at him and at the same time I am him. It is rather an unpleasant feeling. Because in fact it is only play-acting, and perhaps when I look up at the ceiling I do not feel anything, although I am the one that all this has happened to. This is what it’s like, at times, but it was more frequent before, and it usually stops the minute I manage to move.

  So I pick up the note and read:

  “Didn’t want to wake you. First to nursery school, then to work. Someone has to keep the wheels turning. There’s a clean towel in the bathroom. Make sure the door locks when you leave. See you.”

  There is no name. I get out of bed and go out into the hall stark naked and open the door of the adjoining room. It is a child’s room. A boy. I’ll be damned. I must have seen them together many times, but last night I did not give it a thought. I concentrate and try to remember what he looks like, and perhaps I see the outline of a figure, a certain height, a certain width, a certain softness of the body, but I cannot see a face. I go into the living room in search of a photograph. Single mothers always have photographs of their sons on the wall. There is one above the sofa. A boy with smooth fair hair, maybe four. He is probably older now, but not much so if he goes to nursery school still. He is the boss already. He looks at me with that look. I am standing naked in his living room, with tears drying on my face and I am forty-three years old, and he challenges me. I lean over the sofa and turn his face to the wall.

  “All right, you just glare away there,” I say aloud. And then I laugh. He has been lying behind the thin wall all night hugging a teddy bear in his arms while I have had his mother in my arms and hugged her even harder, and when he was deep in a dream about a red fire engine or a spaceship with laser cannons or maybe Postman Pat with his black-and-white-cat, I was deep inside his mother both here and there and closer to her than he has been for more than four years.

  “You lost,” I say, “two-nil at home,” and laugh again, but it does not sound too good, so I stop at once and go into the bathroom to take the shower I sorely need, and I lock the door when I leave.

  *

  The caretaker looks at my clothes, he is pissed off because everyone loses their keys, because he has to go out and walk several hundred metres to each block with the master key, and he is forever writing orders for new ones. He has other things to do, he says. If that is so, it has escaped me; there are light bulbs missing in most of the basement corridors, in one stairwell a pane of glass has been broken since New Year’s Eve, and the mechanism of the garage door has disintegrated, and the door has been left open for two weeks. He twists the key in my lock and flings the door wide with a condescending air, and glances inside. He knows about the likes of me, he has seen pictures of me in the papers and knows what I’m up to, and he thinks it is crap. Then he gives me the slip of paper with the key number on and permission to have a new one cut.

  “It will cost you,” he says, “it always does when you chuck things around. Don’t let it happen again. OK?”

  But he doesn’t hold out much hope, that’s obvious, and then he goes off, on his way to his long list of chores. It is a tough life, being a caretaker.

  I go in and slam the door behind me. I stand still for a moment. Then I turn and look at myself in the mirror. The swelling under my eye has quite gone and the colour is normal. My hair is still damp and has started to curl. The pale, frozen man I saw last night has vanished, you would think I lived a normal life, that I was on my way out to the bus for work after a shower. But I am not on my way to anything my father would have called a job.

  The keys are on the shelf below the mirror. I cannot remember putting them there. I’ve never put them there before. I pick them up and stuff them in my right trouser pocket where they belong, and in the kitchen I throw the permit into the bin. Suddenly I feel so hungry it hurts. I open the fridge. There is not much left inside, and what there is I put in a paper towel and chuck out, and pour the dregs of the milk into the sink. Then I fetch a bucket, squirt detergent in and fill it with hot water, find a clean cloth in the hall cupboard, and then I wash the fridge and thoroughly dry it. After that I attack the dishes which have cluttered the worktop for ages, almost tap-dancing with impatience because I am so hungry. I wash the worktop and the kitchen table and polish the brass bowl, and I wash all the cupboard doors and the wall behind the sink and the top and the sides of the stove where I can reach, and then I stand back and study it all, and finally, not quite satisfied, I fill another bucket and wash the floor.

  I change my trousers in the bedroom. I make the bed and take my dirty clothes out to be washed, then vacuum the carpet and sort the heap of books into two piles on the bedside table with Tranströmer’s Baltics on top. “It was before the time of radio masts./ Grandfather had just become a pilot.”

  I must have read it ten times. It makes me think of my own grandfather who was a joiner, not a pilot, but who went down to the harbour every single day for most of his life and along the quay to look out on the sea and the changing weather towards the lighthouse far out where everything ended. He did not keep a log-book, but took careful note of ships arriving and ships departing, and at regular intervals I was on board one of them. He is dead now and has been for ten years, but I miss his silence and his dry windblown eyes and the town where he lived with him in it and the bottle of Aalborg aquavit he brought across the sea every Christmas. Lifeline schnapps, we called it.

  While I’ve been doing all this I have had my pea jacket on. Now I take it off and go out on the balcony in the cold with a brush and a little cold coffee in a cup, and I brush away at the dried stains from last night, splash a little coffee on them and brush some more. It’s a trick I learned from my mother, and the jacket comes perfectly clean. Not once do I look over at the window in the next block.

  I switch all the lights off when I leave, feel the keys in my pocket and take the stairs two floors down to the garage under the block. For I do have a car, even though I forget sometimes. It is a thirteen-year-old white Mazda 929, a station wagon, and the first thing one of my neighbours said when I parked it in front of the block, was “Have you bought yourself an immigrant’s car?”

  In fact, I did buy it from a Pakistani in Tveita for 15,000 kroner, but I did not know that what I did was not quite kosher. I don’t keep up with car fashions. The Mazda is really good enough, a bit rusty here and there, but it has a strong motor and holds the road well, and is as soft to drive as an American car. I haven’t used it for a fortnight, so I walk round it to check whether there is a flat tyre, but everything seems fine except that someone has written “Wash me” in the dust on the bonnet. I get in and it starts at the first try as it always does, and I can drive straight out as the garage door has more or less fallen apart and stays open the whole time.

  I do what the writing tells me. I drive to the Texaco station on the main road and pay fifty-five kroner for a wash with wax, buy a newspaper, then drive into position and sit in the car reading the arts section by the overhead light. That is soon done even with cheap glasses at this time of year, and the sports pages are boring now at the end of the skiing season before the football gets going. Now everyone is just waiting, and the water splashes the windows and shuts out the view, and the brushes rumble and sweep over the car, and they’re green and blue and make me want to sleep, and if I wanted to sleep I could do that in a den like this, where I cannot be expected to do anything but wait.

  But then the water stops, the brushes pull back and stop rotating, and hang there like the dead animals hunted for their fur that I’ve seen in Helge Ingstad’s books. The door in front of me bangs open, a panel lights up ov
er the door saying “Drive out” and I put the car into gear and it starts without problems. It is unpleasantly light outside, and I am so hungry now that my body feels numb. I had really intended to drive to a shop just a bit further away than my own Co-op to avoid the neighbours, but I cannot find one I like the look of, just drive past one place after another until I am nearly in Lillestrøm. Then I take the right turn towards Enebakk immediately before the big bridge, up the long hill through Fjerdingby, and there are several shops along the road, but I do not stop, and then there is nothing but farms and fields and forest. The road runs beside the big lake in wide curves, and sometimes you see it and sometimes you don’t. Everything is in black and white like in films from the forties, the spruces are black, the snow is white and the ice still covers the lake right across to the other side where there is forest as well, and farms and grey-white fields and then forest again as far as the eye can see. This is what I like, just driving here, and it starts to snow, a few small specks at first, and then suddenly huge flakes that stick to the windscreen, and I turn the wipers on. One makes a scraping sound each time it moves to the left, but that does not matter. I turn them up to full speed and push my hand under my jacket and shirt and in to my bare chest and feel them beat in time with my heart. The snow whips against the glass and then it is swept away, hits the glass and is swept away, I drum on the gear lever and hum a tune, the whole car thumps in the same rhythm, and so does everything outside, and I feel so light, light, and I do not think of my brother or Mrs Grinde at all.