She says nothing and her eyes grow round with surprise behind her glasses, and they do not look at me but at something just by my ear. I raise my hand, but there is only my ear. I try again and she gives a little cough again and a cautious smile, standing very still. She does not understand what I say. The sound of the words is perfectly clear in my head, but they are not the ones that she is hearing. I don’t know what she hears. Then I see the fridge full of bottles on the outside of the counter. Of course, it is self-service. I turn and take hold of the handle, and because I feel so weak I pull it rather hard so I will not be embarrassed if it wont open at the first try. The door flies open, the fridge shakes and two bottles come sailing out, crash to the floor and roll away, but they do not break, they are half-litre plastic ones. One is a Fanta, the other a Coke. I bend down and wince as the pain in my side stabs at me, and I pick them up like a very old man and put the Fanta back in the fridge and the Coke on the counter. She doesn’t say a word, just looks straight past me with her round eyes. I feel in my jacket pocket and mercifully find my wallet there. It is a miracle, I realise that. I open it cautiously. The Visa card is in its place and the bonus cards for Shell and Fina and Texaco and the library cards for Lørenskog and Rælingen. But no sign of notes and coins. She looks at my wallet and I take out the Visa card instead and then she stares at it as if it were a completely new invention. I look at the till. It might date from the early sixties, and anyway it does not have a card facility. I don’t know what to do. I am so thirsty I can think of nothing else. She clears her throat and says distinctly and very slowly with generous movements of her mouth so I can read her lips: “You need not pay. It’s on the house.” She looks straight at me for the first time and gives me a big smile. It is an offer I cannot refuse. I ought to say something. I lick my lips, but my mouth is totally dry, my tongue swollen, and then I just pick up the Visa card and the newspaper and the Coke and back out of the kiosk. The light is blinding, so I walk diagonally across the street to avoid the sun and over the car park where there used to be a Texaco station and between the museums towards the University Hall and the railway station. Halfway there I can hold out no longer. I stop and open the bottle. The brown Coke spurts out of the nozzle all over my trousers, my shoes and the newspaper. I start to weep. I have been on my way down for a long time, and now I am there. At rock bottom. I hold the bottle away from my body until it stops running and then, weeping, drink what little is left, and I throw the empty bottle into the nearest litter bin. I chuck the wet paper after it. Without glasses I couldn’t read it anyway. And then I walk on.
2
THERE IS A ringing sound. I wake and I switch the alarm clock off. It goes on ringing. I fumble for the telephone in the dark, find it, and what I hear is the dialling tone. And then it rings again. It is the door. I switch on the lamp over the bed and look at the clock. It is not six, it is one. I pull my jeans on and a T-shirt, go out into the hall and open the front door. There is no-one there so I walk barefoot across the hallway, past the letterboxes, and then I see the Kurdish family from the third floor standing beyond the outside glass door in the cold. Three children: two girls, and a little boy crying quietly. The mother stares at the ground with her headscarf right down over her forehead, and though it is dark outside between the blocks, the light from the stairway shines red and blue and yellow in the flowers on her scarf, and the father with the big moustache smiles, he points at the lock and is bleeding from a cut on his cheek. He is my age, maybe slightly older. I go to the door and hold it open until they are all inside, and then I lock it again. He takes my hand and says thanks. I point at his cheek and look as enquiring as I can but he just shakes his head and smiles. Nothing to worry about. Right. He wears a white shirt under his grey jacket, and there are spots of blood on the collar. It looks dramatic, as in a film. He puts his hand on my shoulder and I feel that hand, he says thanks again, and then he points at my bare feet. It is so cold on the floor I am curling up my toes. Smiling, he pushes me towards my door, and then he opens his arms and puts them around his family and leads them gently and firmly upstairs, talking in a low, intense voice in a language I do not understand. The little boy is still crying. They have only been here for a few weeks, but he has learned to say “thanks”. That will come in handy, no question. They are from northern Iraq. That is all I know.
I stay at the bottom of the stairwell listening to his voice fading and their steps fading on the way up. I could have invited him in, he could have come down when the children were in bed, and we could have had a drink or a cup of hot chocolate if that’s what he would prefer, being a Muslim, and we could talk about having a family, that it’s not that easy, or we could talk of Saddam Hussein, anything he likes. Maybe he can speak German, I know a bit of German, more people than you’d think know German, and the last thing I hear before the door slams shut two floors up is the boy crying loudly. With no stranger watching he doesn’t hold back. Silence settles on the stairwell, and it is very cold. Beneath my thin T-shirt the elastic bandage is tight and uncomfortable, and I shiver uncontrollably.
It wasn’t lung cancer; I had two fractured ribs. Not until I got home from town and walked, half bent over, past the mirror in the hall did I notice that I had a black eye as well. Everyone on the train and on the bus from the station had seen it, people I know and have said hello to for several years, only I didn’t know. All the pains had converged into one big one, and I could not distinguish one from the other. And then I lay in bed, for days and nights, head spinning, before I called the doctor, dizzy from the want of air and thoughts of death, trying to unravel what had happened when I was far out of this world.
I go into my apartment and shut the door. Only the light over my bed is on. In the bedroom I ease one of my father’s old sweaters over my head, it is washed out and soft to the touch, and then I put socks on before turning out the light, walking through the dark hall to the living room and turning on the lamp over the desk. The first thing I did when I found myself alone was to move the desk into the living room. There are two books on it and about a hundred pages of manuscript with a coating of dust on the top sheet. NEW BOOK is written under the dust. I find my cheap spare glasses, turn on my veteran Mac and click my way to the program I use now, then open a new file. I write:
“Early November. It is nine o’clock. The titmice are crashing against the windowpanes. Sometimes they fly unsteadily off after the collision, at other times they fall to the ground and lie floundering in the fresh snow before they get back on the wing. I do not know what I have that they want. I look out of the window across the field to the woods. There is a reddish light above the trees towards the lake. The wind is getting up. I can see the shape of the wind on the water.”
I am writing myself into a possible future. Then the first thing I must do is to picture an entirely different place, and I like to do that, because here it has become impossible. And then there is a ringing. I look into the hall to the door, but this time it is the telephone. It is almost two o’clock. It is my brother. He is three years old than I am, a partner in a firm of architects, making money.
“Hi,” he says.
“Do you know what time it is?” I say. “It’s Tuesday, damn it, or it was Tuesday. Don’t you have to work tomorrow?’
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi. Are you drunk?”
“Not quite. Not quite yet . I think I’m going to be divorced.”
“Oh boy! Welcome to the club. Does Randi know?”
“She’s the one who knows. She hasn’t told me yet. But soon she will. She’s not here. I’m alone.”
“Hey. Really. Who had long hair first? I did. And who cut it off first. Me again. I was the one to stick Mao on the wall, and I was the one who took him down again. I liked Bob Dylan first, and I liked opera best, and Steve Forbert I liked first, and the Smiths and Billy Bragg, and I was the one who said Ken Loach would be important, and now you don’t watch anyone else’s films. I read Pelle the Conqueror first, and
I read The Arch of Triumph first and went to the off-licence to ask for calvados, and it cost more than 200 kroner, in 1973! I was the one who first went to a Vietnam demonstration. By the time you came along the war was almost over. I was married first and divorced first. You beat me by three days with the first child, but that was because I used condoms longer than you did. Maybe you’d never used condoms. Hell, you’re three years older than me. You ought to come up with something I haven’t already done. You could start to paint again, only you know how to do that.”
“That’s a lot of balls, I could make just as long as list. And anyway, I knew Dad better than you did.”
“Why do you talk about him now? Christ, Dad. Why do you say Dad? Isn’t is Papa any longer? We’ve always said Papa.”
“You’ve always said Papa.”
“Oh, no, I didn’t.”
“Listen, Arvid. Remember when we got back from Copenhagen after laying the wreaths on the sea along with all the firefighters and policemen and psychiatrists and priests, the whole shebang; and we went straight to Harald and borrowed his blue van and drove to Veitvet and stuffed it full of things from the flat. And then we went off again, to Gothenburg to cross with the ferry one more time with all the stuff we didn’t actually know why we were moving, and we were so bushed that we fell asleep at the wheel before we had gone an hour so we had to stop at a Wayside Inn and flop on the benches outside, and I asked you if you felt guilty about Dad. You almost fell off the bench even though you were so tired.”
“What are you talking about? I didn’t fall off the bench. I thought we were talking about divorce.”
“I’m talking about divorce. I have no idea what you are talking about.”
“Don’t talk to me about divorce. Shit, I know all about divorce.”
“Right, that’s good,” he says, and hangs up, and I sit there with the phone in my hand, and then I hang up too, and the night is quiet again. It is dark in the hall, and it is dark outside, there is only light in one window in the next-door block. Mrs Grinde lives there. The neighbours say she has binoculars, and it may be so, I don’t know anything about her, but she cannot be using them now, not unless they are army ones, and I do not think they are. I read the words on my screen: “I see the shape of the wind on the water.” Did I write that?
I didn’t make a speech on my father’s seventy-fifth birthday. I had nothing against making a speech, but it did not occur to me for a moment that I should. We didn’t make speeches in my family. Not for birthdays, not for confirmations, never had any one of us risen at the table to pay tribute to another. With a single exception. The previous year my mother had been sixty, and I gave a long speech in verse from all her children. I think she liked that, and I think she felt that at last they were getting some dividend for voting Labour and being loyal union members most of their lives so that we should have a better and richer life. It was a fine speech, and although it might not have won me the Nobel Prize for Literature I was quite proud of it. So on my father’s seventy-fifth birthday I realised she was sitting there staring at me across the table. Dinner was well advanced, I was expecting nothing but peace, so I returned her gaze, and suddenly I realised that she was waiting for the speech I would be making for my father, and her expression told me she was really wondering what had I thought up this time.
I had not thought up anything. Nor could I spontaneously stand up and invent something. I had nothing to say. I turned and looked at the others at the table, my two brothers who were still alive and all the children and uncles and aunts, and they were all looking at me. The only one who was not looking at me was my father. And suddenly silence fell at the table.
I get up from the desk, walk into the hall, open the door to the stairwell and listen. I take a few steps, lean over the banisters and gaze up. Not a sound. It is the middle of the night, but maybe someone is standing up there and not moving. I clear my throat quietly, but the sound comes out loud and makes an echo and that is embarrassing, and I go in again to the dark hall and close the door. The two rooms next to my bedroom are empty now, but the doors are open, and it is dark in there too and not as before when at least one of the two girls had to sleep with a spotlight right in her face, yellow light under her eyelids and on into her dream. Now they do that in another place, another man maybe turns on those lights. I close both of their doors. Then I go into the kitchen. I won’t be able to sleep anyway, I may as well have some coffee.
When my brother and I drove on from Vestby Wayside Inn that early summer of 1990 after the journey to Copenhagen when we had tossed wreaths on to the sea and drunk toasts in the bar with police inspectors, psychiatrists, firefighters and danced with nurses more attractive than we had ever seen before, we were really in trouble from lack of sleep, we had probably only had half an hour on the benches outside the inn, and that was far too little, but the sun was baking and it was impossible to lie there any longer. The van was hard to drive, at least for me it was, its gear lever on the steering column, which I wasn’t used to, and anyway I hadn’t driven a car for a long time. By the time we reached the Swedish border I was so tired and frustrated, getting into second every time I meant to be in fourth, that I let him drive the rest of the way to Gothenburg. He did so gladly. After all, he was Big Brother and I was Little Brother, and it was his neighbour who owned the vehicle.
“I envy you being able to put words to all that has happened,” he said as we swung into the bend past the Lysekil turn-off, where we had been a few weeks before when the burning ship had been towed in to the nearest harbour, with hoses spraying from a retinue of fireboats, and we stood on the quay and looked up at the empty hull lying under a blue sky with great fan-shaped black patches around the portholes, and a policeman wouldn’t let us go on board. It was Sunday and there were tourists there and people walking and small boats with dazzling white sails on their way out of the harbour, but no-one looked at the ship except us, and we started to argue with the Swedish policeman there on the long wharf, for we had driven so far, and we did want to go on board, but it was no use, and then I started to cry and I wanted to go for the policeman. My brother held me back and whispered something in my ear, I cannot remember what, but I went back to the car without resisting. Then we just sat in our seats and looked out of the windows.
He was wrong. I was body only and no words, just as he was, and no matter how much we talked there was always air between what we said and what we did. It was like champagne. I had tasted champagne at a publisher’s party some time before and could get my name wrong when someone asked me who I was. Almost everything we said was wrong.
What we did was drive. We drove the whole time, we spent thousands of kroner on petrol. We couldn’t sit still. We dived under the spaghetti junction on the way in to Gothenburg, and when we came out of the tunnel we drove straight into a wall of water. The rain poured down harder than we had ever seen, it slammed on the roof of the car and streamed over the windscreen and we couldn’t see a metre in front of us. The world was glittering and milky-white and impenetrable with red dots that grew and grew, and I shouted: “Brake,” and my brother hit the brake. The vehicle in front was suddenly dead ahead with huge rear lights. It was a massive trailer, stock still in the middle of the 70 limit, where it had given up. My brother stood on the pedal and spun the wheel at the same time, the car swerved and ended up crosswise on the road with the door on my side slap up against the back end of the trailer. T.I.R. it said in huge letters above the number plate.
I started to laugh, hit the dashboard with my palm and said: “A split second more and the whole Jansen family would have been wiped out. Not bad, that two months, and all gone. Some disappearing act.”
My brother sat with his forehead on the wheel, and didn’t feel like laughing, but then he had to, and then he cried a while, and then it stopped raining. Quite suddenly.
For the rest of the way to the boat we drove in silence, with the new light coming in through the windows, past the bridges and the steep wall of r
ock on the left, and turned off where the old America boats had moored, and the emigrants went on board with their chests and trunks for third class right down into the bowels of the ship, and had there been a car deck in those days, it would have been under the car deck, in cramped quarters with no other light than a dim bulb in the bulkhead, and what hope had left them. The sea sparkled, flat calm in the sunshine, and from Stigberget the remains of the shower came, as if from an unknown lake, in waterfalls down the long staircases and streamed out across the asphalt so the spray leaped up from the wheels of the van.
The crossing only took three hours. We could have sat in the saloon and read the bulky Swedish and Danish papers as we usually did, but we were drained and hungry and went straight to the restaurant. We ordered a three-course meal with beer and schnapps although before we had always just gone to the cafeteria, and we paid by Visa cards which were furry with insurance money. We spent two hours eating, and the third one we sat on deck in low chairs with our backs to the land we were approaching. A man stood at the rail gazing into the water. He didn’t move an inch the whole time I was there, and I thought of maybe getting up and going over to stand there with him, but I never found the energy.
It was evening when we drove ashore, a light evening with warm sea air over the docks, and we drove through the harbour with the windows open and past the new railway station where the goods wagons lay in tight rows on the rails with rusty red fittings and Carlsberg painted on their sides in green. Outside the rebuilt merchant navy college a white-painted container crane stood on the lawn looking like something from a science-fiction movie. We drove north on the coast road with marram grass along the asphalt the whole way and the sea to the east and the sandy shore right down where we once found a dead seal, and the island with the lighthouse furthest out without its beam now for all we could see, and then on for the last bit where the gravel crunched under the tyres and the rosa rugosa bushes scraped our paintwork at the first turn. It was never going to get dark that evening, only the slanting half-light and the rows of shining seagulls in the shallows as far as the eye could reach. We turned into the avenue of willow trees, drove to the end and parked by the wall, switched off the engine and sat there saying nothing. The cabin was newly painted yellow, the light in the west behind it and the windows darker than everything else around us. A pheasant strutted across the lawn and into the field beyond. My brother watched it go, biting his lip, and I said: “We forgot to buy booze on the boat.”