In the Wake

  I leave the lift and walk down the corridor to the intensive care room and push the door open. A little too hard, maybe, I didn’t mean to. The man in the bed there is quite unknown to me. He is not my brother, anyway. He is wounded in the face and his head is bandaged, as are several places on his body, and there is plaster on both legs and a collar round his neck. His head is clamped in a kind of steel device screwed together on both sides, and only his eyes move. They grow big and frightened and stare at me as I burst in. I stop in the middle of the floor and the door shuts behind me with far too loud a sound, and I say:

  “I’m sorry, I took the wrong door. I will go again. Oh, shit.” This last is to myself mostly, and I back towards the door. He moves his lips. He wants to say something. I stop and go back to the bed and bend over him. His breath is faint on my face.

  “What?” I say.

  “Please,” he whispers. His eyes fill with tears, they run over in a rush and roll down his face that gets soaking wet, wounds and all, I have never seen such a flood, and he whispers: “Please, please.”

  “But for God’s sake, I am not going to hurt you,” I say, whispering too. I feel I’m getting really annoyed, this situation is meaningless. I straighten up and walk over to the door again.

  “I will fetch someone,” I say over my shoulder on the way out.

  I stand in the corridor with my back to the wall. It’s as if I had been running. I am breathless. And then I go to the nurses’ office. I knock on the door frame and put my head through the open door. It is the same nurse as last night.

  “Hi,” I say.

  She turns and recognises me. Reports or notes or whatever they are called are on the desk, and to the right is the jug of cocoa. That much cocoa can’t be good for you. She puts her pen down.

  “Your brother has been moved to the next floor down,” she says. “He is conscious now. How are you doing? Did you get a good night’s sleep?”

  “Couldn’t have been better. I slept like a baby. But the man in intensive care doesn’t feel so good.”

  “We know. That is why he is there.”

  “I think he wants to talk to someone.”

  “He mustn’t talk. He must have complete rest. It is important.”

  “OK,” I say, “that’s settled, then. You’re the boss. I had better slip down a floor then.”

  “Yes, you do that.”

  She turns to the desk and her journals again and picks up her pen. I should have said something about stability, I guess, but nothing comes to mind.

  I do not use the lift, but take the stairs down the one floor and go from the landing in through the glass doors to the ward. His bed is in the corridor. It is too sudden, I have no time to prepare myself, there is nowhere to hide and I cannot turn because he is not lying down, he is sitting up in bed waving his arms and laughing. His wife Randi is sitting on a chair by the bed. She catches sight of me and waves. I have not seen him this lively for ages. I walk up to them slowly, breathing as deeply as I can and letting the air slowly out, and I fetch a chair and sit down beside Randi. She looks at me, shrugs slightly, and does not seem to be having any fun at all.

  “There you are at last,” he says, “come to visit your brother. So now there is no-one else, is there? Now we are a plenary session.” He laughs loudly.

  “I was here last night,” I say.

  “You were?”

  “Yes.”

  He falls silent, he leans against the wall and smiles, but he is not smiling at me or at anyone else that I can see, and then he laughs again and says: “I was just telling Randi about the time you and I went up to Aluns Lake to fish in the drinking water even though it was strictly forbidden, and we met the tramp who had moved into the forest to avoid all the shops that sold beer and all the wine monopolies so he couldn’t get drunk, and now in the evenings he just sat looking at the lake, scouting for beavers, and lived on canned food, and how he helped us reel in the big pike we took home with us later and did not dare show anyone because we had broken the law, and then we put it in the basement store, and there it lay until it went completely rotten and started to stink like hell.”

  He takes a breath and goes on, and the thing is that nothing he says is true. It is something I once wrote in a novel mixed up with a story by Raymond Carver I know he has read, because I asked him to and we talked about it afterwards. It is only a year or two ago.

  “Do you remember the smell of him?” my brother says. “Of bonfire and pine needles and marshes, and how we loved that smell, and how we wanted to live a life like his, but we were too young, weren’t we, and we had to go to school, and how that made us furious.” He smiles, what he says is just crap, and I cannot understand why he talks like this, for we never have shared such an experience, never shared those words, but I can clearly remember thinking like this when I was a teenager and have often done so since, and I never heard my brother say he had the same ideas. It was my secret, all that, and no-one knew a thing about it until I started to write about it many years later.

  Randi bites her lip and looks at me to find out what to think about this stream of words, but I cannot help her and in fact do not want to, and then she steals a glance at her watch and says: “David has already been at home on his own for two hours, I’d better be going.”

  David is their son, he is the same age as my older daughter, barring three days. When my brother hears his name he blinks several times and his face goes stiff. Randi does not see that, she bends down and gives him a quick hug. Then she stands up, and he is just as stiff.

  “Take care,” she says, “see you tomorrow,” and walks down the corridor to the glass doors, and she is a stylish lady seen from behind, with brisk, determined steps on her way away from this place and maybe much further, maybe to a whole new life, and I stay on alone beside the bed with the vacant chair at my side. My brother stares at that chair.

  “I am so tired,” he says, not raising his eyes. He lies down and pulls the duvet up to his chin, closes his eyes and opens them again and looks up at the ceiling, and I think of how I would like to know what he sees up there, and then I realise that it is not true. It is just something people say when they do not know what else to say.

  People are walking along the corridor behind me, it is visiting time for others as well, and they laugh and talk loudly, and I turn and see they are correctly dressed in newly pressed civilian clothes, bringing flowers and chocolates, and even lousy novels in paperback editions under their arms. I stay twisted round in my chair staring after them, and I do not want to turn back. I have nothing to say. And then I say:

  “So you thought you could just go off and leave me on my own, did you?”

  The chocolates people are talking at the end of the corridor. Someone opens a door to another room and closes it again. There is someone crying in that room. Otherwise all is quiet. Maybe my brother has gone to sleep. I hope so. I look at him.

  “You won’t do,” he says. His voice is completely empty, there is nothing there for me.

  “OK,” I say.

  “I want to sleep,” he says, turning his face to the wall.

  “That’s OK.”

  I sit on the chair looking at his back and the back of his head with the curly hair growing thinner. He has a bald patch now. I do not recall seeing that before.

  “OK. So long,” I say.

  “So long,” he says to the wall.

  I get up and go. At the end of the corridor I stop and look back. A nurse comes along pushing a screen which she arranges in front of his bed.

  I do not wait for the lift, but make for the stairs, and there are many floors, six or seven, or maybe eight, I seem to lose count, and I more or less run the whole way down, and it’s like sinking, and there is hardly anyone on those stairs. Only once there are two men coming slowly up, side by side, step by step, and they talk and look at each other, and I do not want to go round them, to change direction, it is too much trouble, so I aim right between them. There is really not enough
room, so I snarl:

  “Out of the fucking way,” and push the one to the left in the shoulder. He curses and I hear them stop and feel them staring at my back. But I do not stop.

  On the ground floor, I stop running, but I still walk quickly, I can out-walk most people if I decide to, and through the big hall I slacken speed so much it almost looks normal. It is crowded with people and all the tables are taken. That is all right by me. I am on my way out.

  It is raining in front of the hospital. The helicopter has gone. I run again, across the tarmac in the rain to the car park, and suddenly I forget where I left my car. I run up and down the rows. There are many more than when I arrived, several rows of brand new cars. How people can afford such new cars is more than I can grasp, fuck it all, I shout, fuck it all, where the fuck is my old car, and the rain pours down as if possessed, and it cannot go on like this. I can’t take it any more. I must get away, I must go somewhere new, see completely different things than this misery here, see some other country with different people. And then there it is, my white Mazda with a handsome scrape on the left front wing. I unlock the door and get in, hair and shoulders sopping wet, and picture sea voyages when boats were boats and not floating casinos, and they rolled with the waves as they were meant to do, with wind sweeping the decks, and all the places I would dream about were far, far away.

  10

  I WAS NINETEEN and came down to Gothenburg late at night from off the Europa road, and it was late September and the sky was dark above the big town. The lorry driver had shown me which way I should go and which sign to look for to get out along the lighted streets to the harbour area at the other end and further on all the way to where the boat for England was moored, and it was a long stretch, he said, and it certainly would be dark there and quite deserted, but I liked the walking, I had plenty of time, my boat did not leave until next morning. I had taken no chances and would not miss it. Now I had a night before me.

  I had been up at dawn that morning to avoid disturbing my parents, and everything went well and quietly until I had to go into the living room to fetch something I had forgotten, and then my youngest brother sat on the stairs. He was seven years old and had very shiny, almost white hair, and he sat there in his pyjamas full of warm sleep, looking at me and waiting, and saying nothing. I really did not know him very well, I was twelve when he was born and had bought my first record player, and after that my eyes were looking in quite other directions than to the living room at home, but he was a good lad, and we were always very polite to each other. Now I went up and sat down on the same step.

  “You’re awake early,” I said.

  He nodded.

  “I am going away now,” I said, “to England. I shall be away for quite a long time.”

  “I know,” he said, and then he was quiet, and then he said:

  “Is it true that the Beatles aren’t together any more?”

  “I’m afraid it is.”

  “You won’t meet them, then.”

  He had heard that music since the cradle. It had always been there, on the radio and the record player, and now it was over, and that took a long time to sink in.

  “Maybe I shall meet them separately. If I see Paul McCartney I will send him your love,” I said, and then he smiled. We had discussed it several times; he liked McCartney best, and I liked John Lennon, but I felt generous that morning and several good songs came to mind that McCartney had written.

  “That’s great.” He stood up and said: “Have a good time, then,” and shook my hand in a solemn manner.

  “You have a good time too,” I said, and gave his hand a little squeeze, and he went up to bed again, and I took the tube into Oslo and walked along past Østbanestasjonen and the railway line to Mosseveien, and there I took my place by a petrol station with my thumb out. There had been rain in the night, but now the sun was bright and there was a sharpness in the air that felt good and a sparkle on the fjord that I knew so well, but it had already turned into something different, and the town behind me seemed changed, and the Ekeberg ridge and the merchant navy college like a fortress up there, and the pale blue tram on its way to the top had also changed.

  I was wearing the old pea jacket I thought was like the one Martin Eden wore when he went ashore at San Francisco in Jack London’s best novel and was about to haul himself up by the hair into a new life of knowledge. That was what I wanted too. The jacket must have been ten years old, and I had bought it from the Salvation Army, and even if I could not remember if Martin Eden really had a pea jacket in the book, he should have done, and I was fond of that jacket, I had used it almost every day for more than a year. I had pinned an FNL badge to the collar, and in my backpack I had a warm sleeping bag and a watertight notecase and three books to keep me linked to the world; Bobby Seale’s Seize the Time, about the Black Panthers; Svend Lindqvist’s The Myth of Wu Tao-tzu, the one that ends with the question: Is social and economic liberation possible without violence? No. Is it possible with violence? No. And I had Paal-Helge Haugen’s Leaves from an Eastern Garden: 100 Haiku. They were good to read early in the morning.

  I was leaving my childhood behind and my father and all he stood for and all he was not, and it had taken its time, but I felt fearless now standing at the edge of the road and free to choose my own life, full of love for the future, and only fifteen minutes later a trailer truck came panting out by Loenga and stopped a little way further along the road. The driver softly sounded his horn as a signal to me to join him.

  Now I was walking in a Swedish night, with an all-Norwegian pack on my back on my way through a town where the sea air blew in quite differently from the fjord at home, and the houses were not unlike those I was used to seeing, but still somehow different; somewhat higher and somewhat more beautiful, and all crafted with some other stone containing some other glow that I did not know, and canals traversed the town reflecting the street lights, and they were yellow and orange and almost red in the oily water, and there was music from an open window. It was something from an opera, and I had never liked opera, but I did like opera now, and I remember singing, but I do not remember which song.

  The truck driver was right. It was a long way. I had to walk right through the town in a semicircle around the harbour area and past the shipyards that had not yet closed down, and on northwards almost right out to Torslanda airport and the Volvo factory, and I walked and walked, and when I got there the night was far advanced and there were no street lamps, only one or two chance lights and some lamps by the ferry quay where I could feel the sea like a sigh, but I could not see it.

  There was an oil refinery there with BP painted in yellow and green on the great shiny tanks and a tower where a gas flame crackled and burned at the top and threw enough light for me to find my way up between two big rocks. I decided it would not rain that night and unpacked my sleeping bag and spread it straight on to the ground and crept into it with all my clothes on. I was exhausted and happy and fell asleep at once, and the few times I woke I looked straight up at the sky with its multitude of stars, and I knew the names of the biggest ones, and I saw the gas flame shining and heard it crackling and felt at home in the world.

  What finally woke me was the sound of steps and the sound of bicycle wheels and the squeaking sound of pedals on chain guards and a bus stopping and opening its doors. I heard voices and someone laughing, and I sat up in my sleeping bag, rubbed my eyes and peered over the top of the rough grey knoll in front of me. Everything was completely clear. I saw the sea straight out and bare sloping rocks and low islands in the light of a low sun, and at the quay lay a large boat with the name M/s Spero painted on its side. The British ensign aft waved gently in the light wind, and it was a warm morning for September. Between the rise where I was lying and the quay there was a road which was the same one I came along last night, and now a stream of people in blue were making their way from the south part of town to where the Volvo factory was situated with its great gates and its logo in a circle ab
ove them. It was clear to see at the end of the road. One man turned and looked at my head sticking up, and even at a distance he was obviously smiling, and then I raised my hand and waved, and he waved back, and then several men turned, perhaps ten or twenty of them, and they all smiled and raised their hands and waved.

  By the time the ferry had sailed I had read two haiku by Basho about the vast night falling on a road where nobody walks, and packed the book tidily in my rucksack again.

  The sea was quiet and calm off the coast of Sweden and a little boring across the Kattegat until we rounded the completely flat tip of Denmark at Skagen, and then we were in the North Sea with a wind sweeping the deck, and the boat rolling as it was meant to roll, and at breakfast time the cups flew off the table and hit the floor with a loud clatter, and some of them broke, and no-one managed to get a mouthful in before the third try. Later on, there was a smell of dinner in the corridors, and not many people felt up to that, but I did, as I had known I would. I sat in the saloon reading for hours, and felt the boat lifting me up and letting me fly between sea and sky before dropping me down, and it had no effect on me at all. I stood a long time out on deck with a firm grip on the rail, staring into the lashing grey and heard the wind howling in masts and cables, then I went inside with salt water in my hair, to the cafeteria where I sat down to talk with young Americans on their way through Europe to see a bit of the world just once before settling down, but they felt sick now and looked it too, and I laughed and said: “This is nothing.”

  I showed them the FNL badge and told them that the peasants with their round pointed hats and wide trousers would tear them to pieces in the end. I held out the Bobby Seale book so they could see the gloved fist on the cover, and I explained how the Black Panthers’ fight with the American government was more than ripe and completely justified, and they looked at me with seasick eyes as if I had taken leave of my senses. But I had never felt more sensible, I was mental health personified, and I am sure I was laughing the whole voyage through, for I knew that when the boat finally reached its destination and glided quietly up the long Humber with its docks and fishing boats, past Grimsby on the way in to Hull where it would stop and moor up, then my brother would be on the quay waiting to share all that was his with me.