I remember one house I was in. I lay on the sofa in the living room trying to recover, I might have been to a party the night before and I felt worn out and left out, I had no family any more, everything was lost. Then my father came downstairs. I knew his step from all others, the weight of him, and he walked past me across the floor to the window and pulled the curtain aside. A faint light came in.
“The fog is lifting,” he said. “We must get going. They are on your trail.” I turned and saw the light on his face, a soft grey light, like invisible smoke in the room. He was as old as I am now, and what he said did not frighten me, for he was keeping watch and knew what we had to do. But there wasn’t much time, I had to pull myself together.
It must have been a dream, of course, because I do not remember what that house looked like from outside or what he saw from the windows or why we were actually there. I remember a lot of dreams. Sometimes they are hard to distinguish from what has really happened. That is not so terrible. It is the same with books.
I walk a kilometre or two over easy slopes both up and down, and then the path bends steeply towards the top of a knoll. I really have to make my legs work, and though my breathing is not that good, the going is better than expected and that makes me enthusiastic. I could have had a dog like Glahn has in Hamsun’s Pan, and it could have bounded in front of me along this path and its name could be Aesop or Lyra, and each time a person or an animal was going to cross our path it would warn me at once so I could retreat among the trees and watch them pass, and the dog would sit there obediently at my feet. I could have had a gun and lived on what I managed to shoot, small game and large birds, and lived in a cabin with the few things I needed: some books, an old-fashioned typewriter, clothes for all seasons and enough dry firewood, I could have been a Tibetan monk, I could have been someone completely different from the person I am, of course, but I am not, and when I get to the top of the knoll and there is a view, I see forest whichever way I turn. Far down to the right is a long narrow lake, and from where I stand I cannot see where it begins or ends. There is ice on the lake with open patches, and I would not have tried to walk on that ice. In the shadows on the other side there is snow on the slope. There ought to have been an elk walking beside that lake, but there is no elk in sight, and everything is quiet, nothing moves but a thin wisp of smoke from some place deeper into the forest.
I sit down by a rock with a view of the lake and roll a cigarette, and when it’s lit I take the book of haiku from my pocket. It is a long time since I read it, but I leaf through and find the poem about the night falling on to the road where no-one walks, and I read it a couple of times and then some more poems, and then one about a willow tree that paints the wind without a brush, and I know willows well from Denmark where you can see them everywhere and there is always a wind, and I can picture it clearly. I close the book and put out the cigarette and look across the lake to the thin wisp of smoke that still hangs there above the forest some miles away and barely moves, and then I close my eyes and rest my head against the rock with the sun on my face and sleep for a while. When I wake what I remember is just something about the wind and a white house by the water.
On the way home I call in at the Co-op and buy the things I did not get yesterday. I just make it before closing time, and in truth I buy rather more than I need, and then I walk up the pathway with the bag in my hand. Clouds have come up and it is cold again, but not that cold. I see no-one in front of the block. Inside the hall I take my post from the letter box, and when I get to my door, Naim Hajo, the Kurd from the second floor, is ringing my doorbell. He has a book under his arm.
“Hi,” I say, and he says:
“Hi” with a smile, and I unlock the door, push it open and make a slight bow with one arm out. The arm trembles, and I do not know why. Perhaps because I have forgotten to eat again. He does not miss that.
“Go on in,” I say. And so he does, takes a step across the threshold, then stops short and looks at the splinters of glass sparkling like a carpet right over to the living-room door, and he looks at me and grows serious. He points at the floor with an enquiring look on his face.
“That’s nothing,” I say.
He looks as if he understands what I say, and he looks as if he does not agree. Perhaps he has read Basho. He shakes his head and says: “Problem.” Just like that. And then he points at me, and not at my face, rather at where my heart is. I consider whether I have a problem in that area, but there is none that I can explain to him, not in the language he and I use. What I have is a broken mirror. But I know I am glad he is concerned. And he has three words now. That almost elates me.
“One moment,” I say and stop him with my hands. I fetch a brush and a dustpan and sweep a way for us through the glass splinters from the front door to the living room, and I wave him on.
“Come on in,” I say. “Coffee?” I ask, and he smiles and understands that word well without any trouble and follows me into the kitchen. I indicate one of the chairs with my hand, and he sits down and takes the book from under his arm and places it on the table in front of the brass bowl. The bowl glitters newly polished in the light from the window. I can see it makes him pleased. I am pleased too. I take the groceries out of the shopping bag and spread them out on the worktop, and for want of something more oriental I make some ferociously strong coffee with the Co-op’s green brand, the way I hope he will like it. Fortunately there is a clean cloth on the table, and I lay cups and bowls and plates from the same service, the finest I have, which I inherited from my mother, who brought it with her from Denmark in the early fifties. Suddenly the way everything looks seems important, that everything is for real, and that he understands that, because in his part of the world the drinking of coffee is more than filling a mug and taking it out on the balcony. After all, I am not completely ignorant. I pour milk into a small jug and put sugar in a matching bowl, and find two teaspoons that are actually silver. I get a packet of oatcakes from the shopping bag, tear it open and take out a suitable number and spread them with light margarine, put them in a small basket that someone who once lived here left behind, and for a moment I wonder whether to light some candles. But I do not have any candles, and anyway it is the middle of the day, and with candles it might have looked like a rendezvous.
When there is nothing more to be done, I sit down and pour out his coffee and wait until he has helped himself to sugar and stirred with the spoon and taken the first mouthful. He nods and smiles. That is a proper cup of coffee, is what he thinks, and I fill my own cup and have a taste.
“A bit on the strong side if you ask me,” I say, “but then I am Norwegian.” and he is with me, whether he understands what I say or not, and I take a biscuit and he takes a biscuit, and we chew and drink coffee for a while without saying anything, and then I remember the dream of the house I was in with my father, that they were after me, and that he helped me get out before it was too late.
“Is your father alive?” I ask, then wait before saying:
“My father is dead. That’s not so strange, he would have been more than eighty now and maybe dead no matter what had happened. It is really much worse than the others are dead. But the odd thing is that it took me six years to realise it is unbearable. Can you understand that?” I say, shaking my head, and he points at me and says:
“Problem,” and I do not deny it. When you run naked through your hall in the night and on impulse smash the wall mirror into powder, you do have a small problem, that goes without saying. I nod and openly admit it, and he points to his own heart.
“Problem,” he says again. And I can understand that. He is thousands of miles from the place where he has lived for most of his life, and perhaps he has a father in a village in the far north of Iraq and he will never see him again, or that father is dead, and someone did kill him, and then he comes here, and the first word he learns is “thanks” and the third is “problem”. Then “hi” in the middle is not of much help. I nod again.
&nbs
p; “I have seen you at night, you know,” I say. He cocks his head and looks at me enquiringly, and then I put my face in my hands and rock my body back and forth, and while I am doing this I realise I may have gone too far. I cautiously glance up at him. His eyes are shining and he strokes his moustache again and again, but he nods. Very slightly. I hasten to fill up his cup and pass him the basket of oatcakes. He is polite and takes some and has a mouthful of coffee, and then he puts his hand on the book and pushes it towards me and then opens his hands. I am to receive yet another gift. It is too much, really. I turn it over and see it is Memed, my Hawk by Yasar Kemal. I remember well when I read it fifteen years ago. Remember the chair I was sitting in and the colour of the curtains and the colours of the paint on the walls in the apartment in Bjølsen where I lived then, and the humming sound of buses on their way in to the roundabout outside my windows and the brakes at the bus stop and the doors opening. Remember the Irish music I played each day that became linked for ever with the burning thistles on the Tsjukorova plain and the stockings that Memed’s sweetheart knitted in a unique pattern meant especially for him. And I remember who gave me that book, and that I asked if she could knit a pair of stockings like that for me. And she did, as well as she could from Kemal’s description in the book. And suddenly her face is back, and the years when I saw that face, and the scent of her and the way she walked, and the way she ran her fingers through her hair to push it away from her eyes, and then the face again as it was in the labour ward twice with me on my knees by her bed, and once more as it was at the end, distorted and furious, and at once my throat starts to hurt. I desperately clear it and stand up, I take his hand and say:
“Thanks,” and I cough again. “Just a moment,” I say and put down the book and leave the table and walk through the living room to the bathroom in the hall. There I turn on the tap and put the plug in and let the water fill the basin more than halfway up. I take a deep breath and hold it down and bend and push my face into the water. It is icy cold, but I stand like that until I have to breathe. This time I dry my face thoroughly in a big towel hanging on the wall. I run my hands through my hair and look at myself in the mirror. I do not know whom I resemble any more. Then I go back. He sits on his chair and has not moved. He looks at me, and I know what he is going to say. I nod.
“Problem,” I say. No question.
12
TIME SLIDES INTO April. It is spring, no doubt about it. I reread books. I have made a list of the twenty I have liked the best, and after several sittings it is down to ten. Memed, my Hawk is one of them. I am looking for something, but I do not know what.
My brother is discharged from hospital after a short stay in the psychiatric ward in the basement, the bunker, as it is called. I do not visit him. There is no point, and anyway they cannot give him any help there that he would accept. So he does not stay long, and when he gets home he is into divorce proceedings at once. I talk to Randi on the telephone. She is the one who calls me.
“He is completely apathetic,” she says. “He doesn’t give a damn. Won’t you talk to him?”
What am I to say to that? She likes to fight, and now there is no resistance. That makes her confused and angry. But it is not my problem.
“Just get it over with,” I say.
“It shouldn’t be that easy,” she says.
“Oh, yes, it should,” I say. “Here today, gone tomorrow. That’s how it is.”
*
She moves out one Saturday, with David and a good deal more, and then he is alone in the big empty house on Fetsund. He buys her share of the house, and that cleans him out and then some. The house is mortgaged up to the hilt.
I call him on April 7, early in the day. He is at home on sick leave.
“Hello,” he says.
“Hi,” I say, “it’s me. Your brother. You’ll remember me if you search your mind. It is a kind of jubilee today, is it not. Want to go for a beer?”
“Your treat?”
“Sure thing.”
“OK,” he says. “Can you pick me up? She took the car.”
“If my car will start, I will.”
It does, of course, it never lets me down. Give me any car at all, as long as it’s Japanese and begins with an m and ends with an a. I have replaced the scratched bumper with one from a scrapyard, and it is really posh, and even has the same paint colour as the original.
I drive down the hills to Lillestrøm, cross the bridge over the Nitelva and in through the first streets past the station. All the snow has gone, not a patch to be seen on the way down. There are coltsfoot beside the roadside ditches, the April sun is shining, and the workers on the new railway to Gardermoen airport wear orange trousers and white T-shirts that are still quite clean. They are laying rails with huge machines and signal to each other with gloved hands. The gloves are yellow and can be seen from a long way off. I catch myself singing “Somewhere” from West Side Story, and not quite like in the original version by Leonard Bernstein, but more like Tom Waits on the Blue Valentine LP from before he stopped smoking. To my ears it sounds quite similar, but I’m not sure everyone would support that view. “There’s a place for us,” I bellow in a gurgling voice, and then I start coughing. I ought to stop smoking myself. My father would have liked that. Or maybe not. It would have made him less unique among us, with his body like a temple; no whited sepulchres in sight. His temple got cancer, but that can happen to anyone; a genetic time bomb placed there by chance at birth, ticking and running, and then one day: Bang. If that happens to me it will be far from chance. That is the difference between us, and it is a big difference.
But I feel better now than I have for a long time. I do.
They are building a new railway station beside the old one in Lillestrøm, and it looks good. I like railway stations made of glass and steel, I like airports, I like big bridge spans and concrete constructions if they are bold enough, I can drive long diversions to see a power station in the mountains or in the depths of a valley, I like high-tension cables in straight lines through the landscape, and presumably that is because I read too many Soviet novels at a certain age. Light over the land, that is what we want. Light in every lamp, light in every mind.
I drive out of Lillestrøm following the roundabouts by Åråsen football stadium where LSK plays its home matches, but I have never liked LSK in their canary-yellow colours, have never been into that ground, only heard the heart-rending jubilation when Vålerenga gets knocked out again and again, and then I turn out on to the road to Fetsund and step on the gas to about ninety kilometres an hour straight over the big plain where the rivers meet and break their banks at the end of spring every single year when the melt water from the mountains comes down through the valleys and all the way here. Sometimes the cattle stand in the meadows beside the highway with water above their hocks in the mist looking like water buffalo in films from the Yangtze, Mekong; I remember women on bicycles in round pointed hats with grenades on the handlebars and grenades in their carriers in the rain and the water up to the hubs on their way through the forest to the front.
“Jesus, they’re all so good-looking,” my friend Audun said when we sat there in the packed hall at college. The black-and-white images flickered in our faces and lit up the FNL badges we wore on our lapels. We were eighteen, and in the dark all hands were raised to stroke the shiny emblems.
That was twenty-five years ago, I have not seen Audun for fifteen. I guess he has got along all right. We do get along, in some way or other.
When the plain is behind me, the road rises steeply to the ridge in a long hill before swooping over the top and then going down on the other side and out on to the big bridge over the Glomma River. Far down on the right the old timber booms shine in the sun and cut the water up into squares, and the little red lumberjacks’ cabins float above the river where before you could hear the cries of command and the sound of singing and arrogant laughter right up until I was twenty years and more, and the dull boom of log hitting log fille
d the dreams of many, and many risked their life balancing with only a few inches of soapy smooth timber between their boot soles and the icy cold flood water for the sake and profit of the forest barons. Now everything is newly painted and nice looking and as quiet as a museum. Not one person in sight. The water is almost green and flows massively under the bridge and heavily out into the vast lake. It heaves and bulges, full of itself.
On the other side of the bridge I just start up the next hill before turning right by the Hydro station and in past the county hall and the school. His house is straight ahead with a view of the river through the trees. It is a dark bluish-red in colour; and he designed it himself. That was his dream, to pull himself out of the terraced houses and apartment blocks and to live in a house that was built to his own design, and now he does, alone. The tracks of a car show on the gravel in front of the door. I park in the tracks to fill the vacancy and switch the ignition off. I wait in the car. Some stay inside when they hear a car and wait until the doorbell rings, while others hear the car and come out on to the steps to welcome their visitor. My brother has always been of the latter. But no-one comes out. Perhaps he is at the shop. It is not too far for him to walk. I wait for a few moments. Suddenly I get anxious and push the car door open and get out and run across the gravel to the entrance. The door is not locked, so I go on into the hall which is almost as big as the hall in an American soap on television, and I run straight downstairs to the room in the basement with the big windows on to the river. What was once a television room is now filled with cardboard boxes. The walls are bare. The room seems enormous. There is nothing in it apart from a small stereo outfit and an easel in front of one window, and my brother stands at the easel with a brush in his hand and headphones on his curly head. He does not notice me and I stand there behind him and see what he is painting is the island with the lighthouse just off the coast of Denmark where our cabin is. He must have a photograph somewhere. So do I, I think. He is painting the childhood horizon. His childhood, and mine.
In the Wake Page 14