In the Wake

by Per Petterson

  Now he said:

  “Hi there, this is Dad. How is the writer doing?” And then he laughed, embarrassed, before stopping abruptly.

  He was seventy-eight, I was thirty-seven, and it was so strange hearing him that I just stood there behind the counter with the phone in my hand, gazing into the air. There were books everywhere and lots of people, but I saw nothing. You had a very strange expression on your face, said my colleagues later.

  “Hi,” I said. “Well,” I said, “not so bad.” Around me were boxes of books sent all the way from America, and the books were all by Raymond Carver. He had died two years before of lung cancer at just fifty years old, and we were going to have a memorial exhibition of all the titles published in stylish new editions. I had one of them in my hand. It was called Where I’m Calling from.

  “Where are you calling from?” I asked.

  “I’m at home,” he said. “I’m standing here in the hall.” And I saw him standing there in the hall with the striped wallpaper in white and gold I thought was tasteless, and I had thought so since I lived at home almost twenty years earlier. He stood by the mirror and the small table with its open drawer and the telephone directory open at T in front of him, for he could not remember the number of my workplace although I had been there for ten years. Before that I had been a workman like him for six years, but that was by my own choice, whereas he never had a choice.

  It was just before Easter. On Saturday they were going down to Denmark by ferry as usual, but there had been a mistake over the tickets, he said, and sounded bewildered. They had been made out for this particular boat, but now that had been sold to the Swedes as a dormitory for refugees, and there was to be another one. He did not even know what it was called. When he called the firm and asked, they were as confused as he was at the other end of the line. Was there going to be a boat at all? Did I know anything about it? And wasn’t I supposed to go with them?

  I had forgotten that. I was supposed to go with them. My mother had called me one morning and said:

  “Now you just come along. I will pay for your ticket if it’s a question of money.”

  “I have my own money,” I said.

  There were things they had to bring with them, and things that must be done in the spring, heavy things he could not manage any more; the old willow hedge needed clipping, a spruce tree must have its roots cut off and be pulled down with a rope and later chopped up and stacked for logs. Other things had to be taken away, and they had no car, nor a driving licence.

  “Your father is an old man now,” she said, “do you understand what I’m saying? I do not want him to do it all on his own.” But he had always been old and he had always been strong, and on the few occasions I tried to help him he just pushed me aside and said:

  “This is nothing.”

  That was not even true, goddamnit. That much I had learned. Everything was something. Just ask Basho.

  But now I said:

  “Sure, OK, I will come, I will bring the girls,” and not until later did I realise that my two younger brothers were supposed to come too. That they could have dealt with the job, if it was help he wanted. That she might have had other reasons for putting pressure on me. And then I forgot all about it. Raymond Carver filled my days.

  “Hello, are you still there?” I said.

  “Yes, I’m here,” he said.

  “Something has come up,” I said, “I can’t get away before Monday.” That was a sheer lie, and I knew as I spoke that I wished it unsaid, for the fact that he was the one to call really touched me. I do not know why, he had never touched me before, not that I could remember. But I had no possible way of getting tickets in two days, not for the Saturday before Palm Sunday. And now I really wanted to go. I could feel it. I don’t know what came over me.

  “But then I will come,” I said. “I have borrowed a car and will go via Gothenburg. I am sure the problem with those tickets will sort itself out. They must have got hold of a boat since you have not heard otherwise.”

  “Oh, well, they probably have,” he said, still with that hesitant voice old men have when they lose their sense of direction, but the conversation had ended, so we both understood. I was certain he knew I had lied, and at that moment it was not a nice feeling.

  Two days later I was woken by the telephone. It was seven o’clock. I should have been up already.

  “Switch on the TV,” the voice said, and then there was a click, and all I heard was the dialling tone. I did not catch whose voice had spoken, but it had to be someone I knew. Asleep beside me in bed lay the woman whose face I have forgotten, and the girls slept in their rooms with the light full on their faces. I rose and went into the living room and put the TV on. It was tuned to Sweden. The test image played, so I changed channel to NRK. The screen flickered, and suddenly there was a boat there on the open sea quite alone, filmed from the air, first from the one side and then the whole way round from the other, from in front and behind in continuous circles. A helicopter, I thought, and listened for the flapping sound of the rotor blades, but I heard nothing. It was morning and grey dawn, the sea was calm and blue, the boat was blue and white, and everything was quiet and a bit confusing. I had never seen that boat before. I was tired. I had been drunk the night before. I did not get the point. But there was smoke coming from the boat, white smoke and black smoke that rose in a column to the sky and spread and lay like a filter against the light, and the helicopter turned and flew down as low as it could get, and then I saw flames break out from the windows along the whole of one side and from the aft deck many metres up in the air. I did not see any people, but I saw the name of the boat. It was a nice name, a suitable name. And suddenly my feet felt icy cold. A paralysing cold which hurt, and I stared at the screen, I turned up the sound and heard the voice from the studio telling me why precisely that boat was on television so early on a Saturday morning, on April 7, 1990. The paralysis rose from my feet up my thighs to the hips, and then I could not stand on my feet any more, there was something quite wrong with my legs, I’ve got MS, I thought, it’s a wheelchair from now on, and then I slid down on the sofa and grabbed the telephone I had in the living room and dialled my brother’s number without taking my eyes off the screen.

  “Hello,” he said wearily.

  “Switch on the TV,” I said. He switched his TV on, keeping hold of the telephone. I heard the voice from the studio in the room he was in. I heard him breathe, but he said nothing.

  “I should have been on that boat,” I said, “but I forgot, you know, I just forgot about it, and then it was too late. If I had not forgotten it, if I had just gone with them, then nothing would have happened.”

  “Oh, God,” he said, his voice completely flat, “please, be quiet, please.”

  I wake up once, and it is night. I must have gone on talking in my sleep, my lips are still moving and they feel swollen, and there is an echo of words in a hollow in my head. I raise my hand and run it over my face. It is soaking wet again. There is a pain in my side, and something in my throat burns and irritates. I cautiously clear it. Someone is breathing in the darkness beside me as if nothing has happened, as if life has stood still, and for a moment I do not remember who it is and panic and switch on the light over the bed. She smiles in her sleep and puts her arm over her eyes and turns, not away from me but towards me, and the relief I feel is overwhelming. I turn off the light and go back to sleep, and dream that my brother has made himself a fortune out of insurance shares and bought himself a sailing boat.

  “We, the rich, have it made,” he says, “I wouldn’t have been poor for all the money in the world.”

  We are on board that boat, just him and me, and there is a fresh breeze out past Færder lighthouse in the wake of bigger boats, and we lie so low in the water that you only have to lean over the gunwale to get a handful of foaming salt water. And I do that, I lean over the gunwale and scoop up the water in my hands and rinse my face and get some in my mouth and swallow and think: it has a n
ew taste, it was not like this before. Then I tease my brother about his new sailing shoes, which only upper-class people use, in my opinion. I would not touch a pair like that even if someone paid me to.

  “Is tennis the next thing then, or what?” I ask and laugh through clenched teeth – “or golf maybe, or buy slalom skis and mix with the in-crowd?”

  “But it was Dad who made them,” he says through tears, “he wanted me to have them.”

  “That is not true,” I say.

  *

  That dream plunges me into such despair that I wake up. I lie stiffly, holding my breath, and there is not a sound in the room. I am alone. I slide my arm over the pillow, it is still warm, but she has not left a note. I do not want to be alone. I jump out of bed and run into the hall. In the mirror I see a face, and I stop and without thinking grab the first thing I see, a metal box standing on the chest, and hurl it at the mirror. The glass breaks with an incredibly loud noise, it disintegrates into glittering fragments raining silver on the floor, and I stand there watching them spread all over the hall like the aftermath of an explosion in a film on TV. One of the fragments slices into my arm and blood trickles out, not much but enough to show red against the white skin. I raise my arm and lick the blood up, and then I hop slalom between the glass splinters into the living room. The boy has gone from the sofa, only the impression in the cushions reveals he was there. I run over to the big window gasping for breath, hand to my side, and I stop close to it with my nose on the glass, and stare across to the next block. She is standing at her window in her dressing gown. I am as naked as I was the previous time, and I see her turning and looking back at me, and we just stand there and then she lets her dressing gown drop without thinking of those who may be awake, as we are awake, and can see her from this side. Her skin shines dimly and is whiter than anything else I can see, and she lifts both hands and lays their palms against the pane, and then I do the same, lift my hands and lay the palms against the pane, and it’s as if it was just that one window, a few millimetres of glass between her and me on a night when the rain has stopped and the moon hangs transparent and clear above the block right in front of me, and I stand naked in my own living room with hands and nose on the window, and I hear my breath wheezing and my heart beating, but otherwise all is silence.

  I do not know how long we stand like this, perhaps a minute, perhaps five minutes, but then it is over. She raises one hand and covers her face, and with the other makes a movement meant only for me, that most people would call indecent indeed, and I know she is laughing, and she waves and I wave back and then she is gone.

  It will soon be morning, but I go back to bed and sleep until the day is far advanced. I have no dreams I can remember when I wake up, but I am sweating under the duvet and have a headache. There is sunshine in the room. The air is thick, and I get up and open the window and look straight out to the path and the space in front of the block where the usual ladies walk past with the usual kids in rather lighter clothes today on their way to the playground or on their way back, and it is late March and suddenly warm. The men I see are refugees from very different parts of the world, and they do not play with their children as I might have done just a few years ago in front of this very block, no, they stand quite still and rigid by the sandpit with their hands in their pockets or arms crossed on their chest, with a stiff smile round their mouth and a dreaming expression in their eyes looking right through the blocks and far, far away.

  A couple of Norwegian men who are on social security walk past very slowly with a slight but pronounced limp. It is wasted on me, I have no reason to doubt their disability. It is mine I doubt. When one of the neighbours had seen me staying at home for the third month on end, he came up to me one day at the Co-op and asked timidly:

  “So, are you on benefit now?”

  “No,” I said, “I am on a scholarship,” and he gave a sympathetic nod, understanding it was something to do with my nerves.

  “Well, it’s not easy,” he said.

  “No,” I said, “it’s not.”

  He stayed at home himself, and told me he did not dare go shopping before the middle of the day. I took his point. That was a couple of years ago. After that we have greeted each other like two men with a fate in common. Now I see him walking along the path on his way to the Co-op, so it must be late.

  I go from the open bedroom window through the hall close to the wall as carefully as I can and into the living room where the desk is tidy and dusted with the little Mac switched off and quiet. Beside it lies a not particularly thick pile of typescript. I put on my spectacles and riffle lightly through the pile, and it seems as if I had not seen it before, page after page with unreadable, indifferent writing, from a world no longer mine. If it ever was. I pick up the pile from the table and walk into the kitchen and throw everything into the plastic bag beneath the sink. Two years straight into the bin. I feel neither one thing nor another. I take the plastic bag out and tie the drawstring and go back to the living room, switch the Mac on, wait, click on “hard disk” and get the menu, then use the mouse to log on to the file named “new book” and drag it round the whole screen to the waste bin in the bottom right-hand corner. It always makes me think of the first Fleetwood Mac LP I bought in 1968 when Peter Green was young and his brain not yet bombed. I’ve got a hellhound on my trail, it sings inside of me, the bin bulges and widens in the middle, and I find the icon for “empty waste bin”. “Click,” I say aloud and push my index finger down, and the waste bin gets slim again. Then I find the file with the few sentences I wrote some days ago, which run: I see the shape of the wind on the water, and switch on the printer to make a copy. I click off and close down, pick up the one sheet and put it in the top drawer. Brush invisible dust from the table top. Get up. That was that. Now I must go out.

  I put my boots on and lace them up, then the pea jacket with only a T-shirt underneath, trying not to look down at the floor still covered with glass splinters. I pick up the rubbish bag and stuff the dog-eared, much-read edition of 100 Haiku in Norwegian in my pocket, and then I go out and lock the door and throw the bag down the rubbish shaft, and on my way through the entrance hall I open the letter box. There lies The Class Struggle and two letters. One is from my publisher. Not long ago I would have torn it open at once and gone to sit by myself to read in peace, but now I leave it all where it is, shut the box and go out into the sunshine. It is Friday, I think. The blocks lie in a row shutting out the view, and further up there are terraced houses for those who can afford them and want to get on in the world and have a little lawn they can mow. Some think that important. It will soon be time for the annual voluntary spring-cleaning. Then we must all go out together on the caretaker’s orders to sweep the paths and hose away refuse and dog mess and plant shrubs and paint the fence in front of two square metres of grass on each side of the entrance doors, and though there is not one of us who gives a damn, we have to chat. I simply hate it. I do not know anyone any more, do not know who lives on my stair apart from Naim Hajo although I am the one who has been here longest. No-one in their right mind stays for more than three years.

  But at least the sun is shining. The windows sparkle and it’s not nearly as warm as it seemed inside the apartment. I am glad about that. I walk the pathway further up the hill through the neutral zone that divides the area between blocks and terraced houses, and the nursery school is just opposite the small football pitch. All the children are outside. I stop by the fence and stand watching them at play, and see G’s boy on top of a sand heap in a thick jumper and waterproof trousers. He is talking loudly, he waves a little red spade and points. He knows what he wants. He is the boss. And then he notices me standing there watching him, and he has no idea we have been twice in combat, that he was beaten both times, at home and away both. I nod to him with a slight smile, I feel obliged to, and he looks straight at me, and he does not know who I am. He makes a face and then sticks his tongue out. The little bastard. I laugh and shake my head.
He is suitably miffed and turns his back and with his little spade starts to shovel sand with great force.

  I walk away from the fence and up to the summit where the terraced houses have the finest view of the forest and the valley and all that is nice, and their hedges and lawns will soon be subjected to a strict ritual before spring breaks out in earnest, and right at the top I drop down below the road on a pathway leading into the forest on the other side. The whole time I have had eyes on my back from windows and doorways, and although it has not been as bad as it usually is I stop in the semi-darkness beneath the little bridge to rest and roll a cigarette before deciding whether to turn and go back the same way or take the road round the whole housing area or perhaps some other way altogether. I can go from here and get on to the ancient paths and walk there for days, seeing no other houses than long-forgotten smallholdings with their buildings falling down or crumbled long ago and after that just the occasional log cabin. That is what the neighbours say. I have lived here for fourteen years and never been further in than a few hundred metres to collect fir cones when the girls were quite small and fascinated by small things.

  I stand smoking in the shadow of the little concrete bridge, watching the sun shining on the spruces closest by and on the path that bends and disappears behind a cliff. A cluster of birches filters the light in yellow and shining black through its bare branches, and it looks like a magazine illustration or an old print from China or Japan, and I could have hung that picture on my wall. So why not? I finish my smoke and stub the butt out with the toe of my boot and start walking. I turn twice and look back, and the houses are still there, but the third time they have gone. I try to recall the last time I could not see a house or was close to one or inside one, and it must be long since.