In the Wake

by Per Petterson

  Now he lies behind a screen with his face to the wall refusing to talk to me, and he is all that I have, except perhaps for a nurse in green with a first name that begins with a G and a Kurd who can speak no Norwegian except “Hi” and “Thanks”. Surely that cannot be right, but it feels like that when I drive into the garage under the block and park the Mazda with its bonnet against the wall in my corner so the neighbours will not see the big scrape along the front wing.

  I go up the stairs to the ground floor and let myself in and undress in the bedroom with the radio on and I hear the Østland programme announcing that the world’s most beautiful cat has run away from its owner in Stovner. It is large with ginger stripes and is the pride of the neighbourhood, says the presenter, and I get into bed and close my eyes and sleep until the telephone starts to ring. I open my eyes again. The room is dark now. The radio is still on and the alarm clock shows it is late evening. I get up and go into the living room over to the window while the telephone rings. It is raining a little between the blocks. I have no clothes on, but in the living room too it is dark so no-one can see in. There is light in Mrs Grinde’s apartment. She stands by the dumb waiter with the telephone in her hand. That is what it looks like, at least at a distance, and my phone is still ringing. She turns and looks out of the window towards my apartment, and then she lowers her arm. The ringing stops. I stay there in front of the big window and she goes on standing in front of hers with a hand on what must be the telephone, and I am sure she is biting her lip and shifting her weight from foot to foot. Not impatiently, but restlessly maybe, at a loss.

  I go back to the bedroom and switch the radio off and lie down under the duvet, close my eyes and try to go back to sleep. But it is no good. I try to think of nothing, but that doesn’t work either, and then I just lie looking up into the darkness, thinking about my father. The Danish lady in his wallet. She was never mentioned. I try to recall what it was Aunt Solgunn told me: that he met her in Copenhagen a year before he got married when he went there with leave from the factory where he had been since he was fourteen. He was like the others in the family, with the exception perhaps of Uncle Alf, and never had a day’s absence, if you don’t count four days in hospital after a ski-jumping accident which turned his back into his weakest point, and now he had been given a grant to go and see how the Danes made shoes, whether he could learn something there, which he doubted, but still he was eager to go. There had been a fire at his factory, everything had to be rearranged and they were waiting for new machinery, and if he was to go, it had to be then. So they let him go, and when he was back he was sure they would make him foreman.

  The first factory was owned by a co-operative run on trade union lines, and the thing that struck him straight away was that the workers thought he was Swedish, and they did not understand what he said if he talked at his usual speed, although he understood them well enough. He thought that was funny and slightly irritating, for if my grandfather was Swedish, my father was Norwegian, and the biggest things for him after the establishment of the Norwegian Federation of Labour was Fridtiof Nansen’s skiing journey across the Greenland ice and Roald Amundsen’s victorious race to the South Pole. The second thing he noticed was that beer and schnapps were on sale at lunchtime in the canteen, where the workers played dice incessantly, and he thought that even more funny and quite exotic, even though he could not see how it might increase production. But they had music while they worked and ten minutes’ obligatory exercise towards the end of the shift every single day. He liked both things and he liked the idea of the workers having their own factory which supplied them with good shoes they could buy in their own shops all over the country and not the cheap shit he knew was on its way on to the market from places where they did not have a clue. And he liked the daughter of the assistant manager who was put in charge of him for the first week. He met her at the office on the second day, where she sat behind a desk and was a secretary with very smooth, shining blonde hair. She talked efficiently on the telephone, her left hand drawing pictures in the air he had to follow with his eyes, and when she raised her head and said something in Danish he thought was the beginning of a song, he was a goner. Her father, the assistant manager, had once been a worker and later foreman, and after a few days my father thought if he just persevered and learned still more, nothing was impossible. He had thought that before, quite often, in fact, and time was running out. If it was to be done, it must be done now.

  And there was something about him. He was reaching out. He was still shining. The assistant manager’s daughter saw that at once. She kept her eyes on him all through the week he was at the factory, and when he went on to the next one, she kept in touch.

  “I never give up,” he solemnly said at the gate, “it is not in my nature,” and then he laughed in his shy way, and she did not doubt him for a moment. Two weeks later they were secretly engaged, and when he left for home she promised to follow him soon to see what it was in his life that made him shine.

  And she came. What she saw was grey rocks and ponderous spruce trees, and everything seemed suddenly so small and cramped about the narrow fjord where the forest shut out the sun, and she saw the little room where he lived alone at Number 1 Enebakkveien with the books he had bought by the greatest Norwegian authors and then some, perhaps to find something there that he could aspire to, but he never got through them. The books were dusty now, and then she would not know the titles of any of them. On the floor above were the premises of the Baptist Congregation where his father ruled like a patriarch over his family and a handful of workers whose souls had been saved, and she went out and looked at the shabby town which was not in the least like Copenhagen; no canal and golden domes, no great squares and extensive parks, no towering grandeur. But she saw the childish pride he took in all this, and her heart sank like a stone from summer to far below zero. She began to study train timetables and boat routes and presumably she said, as they used to say in B films of that era:

  “Sorry, Buster, no deal,” or something to that effect, and then she left after only a few days; quite quietly and unnoticed she went back to the assistant manager and the King’s Town.

  That night my father disappeared. There was to be a family gathering with all the brothers and sisters and their wives and husbands in honour of the Danish fiancée, which was no longer a secret. They wanted to see Frank Jansen finally crossing the finishing line. He was thirty-seven. But she did not come. Nor did he, and the next day he was not at work. It was a sensation. Nobody knew where he was, no-one could remember when they had actually seen him last, and after a day had passed they grew frightened and began to search. First among the friends he had, boxers and football players of the Olympic team in Berlin in 1936 which he never got to, although he had trained and trained, and then among those he knew in Bryn male voice choir, but he was not with any of them, and they searched in the cafés he went to from time to time to have a ginger ale and talk, and they were afraid he might be drunk although no-one had ever seen him drunk at any time. Finally, they organised a search party in the Østmark Forest. They carried on for three days, and the wind was howling and the rain came down as if Domesday was near, and still more and more people joined in; shoemakers and cross-country skiers, preachers and members of the choir, and one or two wrestlers with upper arms thick as birch trunks came rolling along, and they divided the forest into sections among themselves and walked past lakes and hills, up tortuous paths and down still more tortuous trails made by roe deer and elk. In the evenings they crowded together in the congregational hall with dripping clothes and spread maps out on the table in front of them where they ticked off the areas they had already covered, and next morning lorries trundled up to the parking place by the Østmark café, and from there they walked into the forest again. They shouted and sang baritone and bass through the rain that fell so heavily the voices were felled to the ground, and they shook their heads at each other, the water splashing off their sou’westers, the wet oilskins
shining among the tree trunks when they flung out their arms in frustration, and they were close to giving up.

  And then, on the third day, just before nightfall, the low sun broke through the steel-grey layer of clouds and sent a ray of light slanting down through the trees on to a solitary hut, and those among them who were Baptists saw it as a sign and went in. There he lay on a bunk sleeping like one dead, with the picture of the Danish fiancée clutched in one hand. He had not eaten for four days, his clothes were in rags, he had bruises on his face from his own fists, and they woke him, and he did not know where he was or what had happened.

  “Has the referee counted to ten,” he said. The men standing in the hut stroked their faces with sopping wet hands, and they looked at each other, fearing the worst, but he did recover, although he was never the same again.

  Some months later he received a letter telling him he had a child in Denmark, in Jutland, with a lady he had met in a café near the factory and had spent a short time with the previous autumn, and who then just vanished. And it was not that he did not remember her, but it was more like a dream, for he had taken her to the cottage at Bunnefjord one night when the snow drifted past the walls and blew across the water, but inside it was warm and the night was warm, and when he woke up next morning she had gone and the snow had gone, and he did not see her again. Then his family kept on until she came alone on the Oslo boat, and after just a few days they went to the tabernacle together, and when they came out again they stopped on the pavement in the group of brothers and sisters, and he laughed and said: “Nailed to a cross on earth.”

  I am not sure now what Aunt Solgunn has told me and what I have made up myself, but what I think as I lie in the dark under the duvet looking up at the ceiling is that I would never have believed he was capable of it: passions, deep despair. All that. And would it have made any difference if it was something I had known while he lived?

  “Without a doubt,” I say aloud, “it would have made a great difference,” and I know that is true, and nothing I can do or anything I can say will make time stop and go into reverse and make that difference less. And then the doorbell rings. I lie there listening. It does not ring again, but I am sure someone is standing outside waiting. I cannot ignore it now I have heard it, and maybe it is the Kurd on the third floor, perhaps he needs help again, perhaps the door to the stairwell is locked and he is standing in the rain without a key. I get up and put my trousers on and go out into the hall and open the door. Mrs Grinde is standing there. Her hair is wet. Her son is in her arms, swaddled in a woollen blanket. He is asleep with his head falling backwards. There are shining drops on his face. He does not look so bossy now.

  “Hi,” I say. She makes no reply. I stand there like an idiot, looking at her, and she bites her lip and gazes past me with the heavy boy in her arms, and I say:

  “Do you want me to hold him for a bit?”

  She shakes her head. Then I open the door wide and say:

  “Come in, then.”

  Without hesitation, she walks past me, and that almost makes me scared. I do not know whether I can handle this. It is so long since anyone I have known in that way was here, two years in fact, that I do not remember what the form is, and with the boy it seems strangely intimate, almost like family. I do not know if I want family any more. It is too risky. I close the door, and follow her into the living room and say: “You can put him on the sofa.”

  And she does, she lays him down on the sofa very carefully with the woollen blanket tightly round his body, and he sleeps just as soundly. Slowly, she straightens her back as she takes off her coat and places it over the back of a chair, and then she turns towards me and runs her hand through her hair with her head on one side and says:

  “I couldn’t leave him alone.”

  “Of course not,” I say.

  “Why didn’t you answer the phone?” she says. She is not wearing her glasses, but she does not peer either. How did she know I was here and could pick up the telephone?

  “Do you wear contact lenses?” I say, and then she blushes quite visibly although the light is not on, and she faintly nods, and I say:

  “I don’t know. I do not know why I did not answer the phone. So many people call. It keeps on ringing.” That is not really true, but it is true that I don’t know why.

  “You were quite visible though, standing there, in the light from the pathway,” she says and smiles for the first time and now I am the one to blush. How many other people saw me? The naked man on stairwell F. She takes the few steps towards me, lifts her hand and places it lightly on my chest.

  “You looked good,” she says, and then leans forward and lays her head just as lightly over her hand and says:

  “I am taking a chance here.” Her hair tickles my chest and her mouth tickles, I am well aware I am standing here in my trousers and nothing else, and it is perfectly quiet and dark around us. Only the boy breathing on the sofa, and I cautiously place an arm round her shoulders, not committing myself.

  “I know,” I say. “You are brave.”

  “You were brave too, last night.”

  “That was different. I was sick then, and cold and bombed out of my mind. Maybe I still am. I don’t know. Last night is a long time off.”

  “Is it?” she says.

  “Yes,” I say. “Just about everything has happened since then.” I feel her hand grow stiff, she starts to push, and then I tighten my grasp of her shoulder and hold her fast, and say:

  “Why did you look at your watch, out there by the hospital?”

  She grows softer in my arm and laughs deep down in her throat.

  “That was so silly. I saw you standing there in front of the main entrance, and then I thought, is there time to go up to him for a moment, I just wanted a look at your face, and then, instinctively, I glanced at my watch. I didn’t even see what time it was. It was just daft, we had a man to save.”

  “It was half past four,” I say. “How is the man doing?”

  “He died on the way in. He’d had a collision in the fog on the motorway. His chest was crushed against the wheel.”

  There is not much I can say to that, and I really do not feel like saying anything, so I just go on standing with my arm tightly round her shoulder, and it is a fine shoulder, and it fits me well, not being a tall man. Everything is almost perfect. I feel her relax with her cheek on my neck, and her breath tickling, and her hair too, and I stand waiting for the feeling that will push me on, for the ball is in my court now, I know the next step, and it is no more than right. But the feeling does not come. I do not know what is wrong. Perhaps it is the boy on the sofa.

  “Why don’t you ask why I was at the hospital?” I say.

  “Because I know. I found out,” she mumbles.

  I see. She has found out, and now that she knows why I was at the hospital, she will give me the comforting hug. But she does not, she stands quietly without changing position, just breathes on my neck and she is not here to comfort me, but to get what she is entitled to, and I am all with her there, and we cannot go on like this for many more seconds before something happens. I do not know what to do. Then I suddenly remember the film about Zorba the Greek, the scene where Anthony Quinn bawls out the Englishman Alan Bates because he has committed the greatest sin a man can possibly commit. He had made a pass at the proud widow and succeeded, and perhaps she gave him a chance because he was different, but when it came to the crunch he had not the courage to go through that door she held open for him, and that stripped her bare and cost her her life.

  I bend down slightly and put an arm round her back and the other behind her knees, and pick her up with a jerk. She clings to my neck, giggling.

  “What on earth are you doing?”

  “I am Zorba,” I say.

  “What?” she asks, but I do not reply. I walk across the room with Mrs Grinde in my arms, thinking: let the brain take the first step; and on the way into the bedroom I feel her weight like a tugging in the pit of my stoma
ch, and then the feeling is there. I laugh aloud and shout:

  “Here comes Zorba, make way, make way,” and I lay her down on the bed not quite as elegantly as I had planned, and it is like a lousy film we both enjoy, although Zorba is not a lousy film. I stroke her hair and undress her as carefully as I possibly can, and she says:

  “You don’t have to be that chivalrous,” and I reply:

  “Oh, but I do,” and under her clothes there are other garments she would never have worn on an everyday evening, and there is no doubt they are meant for me. That makes me pretty shaky and even sad, for she certainly has taken a chance, and I do not know if this is something I am able to receive, this boy she has carried in her arms past all the windows in the block, these clothes or rather lack of clothes right next to her skin, and she sees what I am looking at and blushes and bites her lip and refuses to meet my eyes and almost gets angry. Then I sink to my knees with my hands on her knees and a lump in my throat, and if it is not like it was last night it still is great and even more, for Christ’s sake, and afterwards she lies quite still listening for sounds from the living room. But all is quiet there too, the boy is sleeping, and she turns to me with her face aflame and says:

  “Tell me some more about your father.”

  “There’s not much more to tell.”

  “Isn’t there?”

  “No.”

  “I must have missed something,” she says.

  11

  THE LAST TIME I spoke to him was on the telephone. He had been ill. It was cancer, but the operation had been successful and he was better now. He called on a Thursday, I was at work in the bookshop where I was still employed. We rarely talked to each other on the phone, and the few times it happened it was usually I who called my mother to give a message or to ask her advice, and it was he who picked up the receiver. Then it would not take him long to pass it over to her.