In the Wake

  “Damn,” my brother said. “That’s true. That never happened before. And me dying for a drink. I’ve been thinking of it the whole way from the harbour.”

  “Me too. Maybe he’s left a drop. He always buys it, but he doesn’t drink much. Didn’t, I mean.”

  We got out of the van, not slamming the doors but pushing them shut, because of the silence around us, not a sound but the sea sighing as it always does behind the trees by the shore when I realise that is what I can hear and stop thinking it is silence itself. My brother walked ahead with the key in his hand round the cabin to the door. He was more than ten centimetres taller than me and a good deal broader and was a buffer to the wind whenever it blew, while I walked behind, lighter on my feet and was ready to run if I had to.

  It was colder inside than out. Two cups were on the worktop, and a half-finished crossword on the table. Time had come to a halt on the old ship’s clock above the door, and my brother went from room to room mumbling: “Where the hell has he hidden the booze?”

  I went out to the van and opened the back doors. A stove, a washing machine, several rag rugs, a couple of long shelves and a huge painting of a man smoking a pipe beside a house far into a Norwegian fjord. If I judged the perspective aright that man wouldn’t fit into a house twice that size on his knees. It had hung on the wall above the sofa as long as I could remember, and we had always thought it was ugly. But it was an original painting, and my father wanted it there. It is genuine, he said when we were small, and that was something we could not argue with. No-one else we knew had a genuine painting on their wall, except Bandini across the road, but he made them himself, so that didn’t count. I stood looking at all the things. There was a stove in the cabin already, and there was no room for a washing machine, nor plumbing for it. We knew that. I closed the doors and went inside again. My brother stood by the lavatory, saying: “I can’t find the booze. I can’t find the fucking booze.”

  “Have you looked in the bedroom?”

  “Yes. In both cupboards. Nothing.”

  I went into the bedroom. It was like a double cabin. A bed next to each wall with a narrow gangway between them, and I recalled a joke I had heard in the Boy Scouts almost thirty years before. The Scoutmaster said: My wife wants two single beds because she needs something in between sometimes, and I want a double bed because I want to get my something between sometimes too, and I blushed as I would have done then if it had made any sense to me. I was ten years old and after four years at Sunday school, as innocent as a nun. I kneeled down and put my cheek to the floor and looked under my father’s bed.

  “It’s crammed in here.”

  “With bottles?”

  “No, with shoes.”

  “Get them out. Make it snappy,” my brother said. He opened the window, he took the first pair and threw them on to the lawn. I heard them land and a shiver ran down my spine. I crawled further in and lay flat under the bed and pulled the shoes out, one pair after another, and some of them were old and some were brand new and had never been used. There was a strong smell of leather under the mattress there, and I recognised that smell from when I was small, on my way down the dimly lit stairs to the cellar where he stood at his workbench with rough leather in his rough hands and shiny tacks in his mouth, the yellow light and eerie shadows, and I do not know what we were up to, my brother and I, but I could not stop. My chest was bubbling, I felt like singing. I lay on my side and chucked the shoes as hard as I could along the floor, and my brother fielded them and hurled them on out of the window. At last there was nothing left under the bed. There had been twenty-five pairs in all, I had counted them, and every one was welted. He would never wear anything else. He hated cheap shoes. I backed away from the bed, stood up and went to the window and looked out. They lay on the lawn in a heap looking like something in a picture from Auschwitz.

  “Did you find anything?” my brother asked. I blinked in despair and stared at him, and then I realised he meant the liquor. I had forgotten about that. I lay down again and looked. All the way in beside one leg lay a full bottle of Famous Grouse. I grabbed it by the neck and crawled out with my behind in the air, proudly holding up the bottle.

  “Yess. I knew it,” he said.

  But of course it was I who had known, and for a second I felt completely without hope and did not understand why we were there just then, that I should not drink, it was the wrong moment, but I wanted a drink so badly. We went into the living room and I put the bottle on the table. He fetched glasses from the cupboard over the worktop and what was left in a litre bottle of Farris water we had bought at Svinesund on the border with Sweden. The fridge was still on, there were ice cubs in the freezer and a lonely Toblerone on the bottom shelf. He poured two stiff shots, then filled up with ice and a drop of mineral water.

  “Skål,” my brother said, raising his glass. I gripped mine and took a big gulp, staring at the oilcloth thinking I wanted an end to this, I couldn’t take it any longer. I did not want to think about it any more.

  But that’s what I am doing now. I rise from the table with the cup of coffee in my hand, walk over to the window and look out into the dark. I have been far out of this world, I do not know where, and now I am back, and I can’t stop thinking. I remember my thirty-fourth birthday in that very room, in the cabin where my brother and I sat drinking, in the far north of Denmark. It was four years earlier and darker then at the end of July, the bottles were on the table, and the lamps shone on the windowpanes. It was warm even though the door and several windows were open. I sat rocking on a chair in only a T-shirt, with my back to the kitchen counter. My mother and father had been there for several weeks, my brothers had come with their wives and children and sleeping bags and lilos. Not because it was my birthday but because it was summertime, and it was no longer a secret that a writer was what I wanted to be. My first story had been published in a magazine no-one had heard of before, but they had all read it anyway and were a little confused and uneasy because it was about my father. No-one was divorced yet, no-one had died, we went by boat as we had always done and slept through a familiar night. Lanterns and lighthouses lit our way from the fjord across the open sea and down past Skagen. Behind the boat the strip of wake lay foaming white and lifeline-like until it disappeared into the darkness. Now my father sat in a corner drinking. I had not seen him drink before. Not like that. We had not seen each other for a long time. He seemed smaller than before, but he was still strong, and I don’t think there was a time in my life when he couldn’t beat me with one arm tied behind his back. But he had never hit me, I had never even had a slap on the cheek except the once when he was trying to teach me to box and I refused to hit him and he became so annoyed that he slammed me on the chest and I fell over and landed on the floor and rolled under the sofa.

  He stared into the glass in his hand, then rose unsteadily and said: “Well, well, Hemningway, so you’re a writer.” He didn’t look at me but past me at something on the wall, or maybe he looked through the wall, and he smiled with his mouth only. I didn’t like that smile. He wanted me outside with him, I realised that, but I didn’t want to go. I was happy where I was, and so he went out alone. He had forgotten the cabin was a new one with an inside toilet, so he went outside as he had always done, across the lawn to the little outhouse and round the corner to the gap between the wall and the fence along the field. I saw his back in the dusk. Maybe it wasn’t that strong any longer. He leaned heavily against the wall before straightening up, swaying a little, and trying to lean back again. But then his body sailed in the opposite direction, and he lurched out to steady himself with his hands, clutched the fence and slipped before he had a good enough grip and clung there until he got his balance back. Then slowly he straightened himself and let go of the fence. I didn’t give it a thought until he came in again. That the fence was a barbed wire fence. His arms hung straight down and both palms were covered with blood. I was the only one who saw it. The others were chatting and laughing and celebra
ting my birthday, but between him and me there was a tunnel of silence. He paid no attention to his hands, just looked at the wall behind me and smiled in the same way and said: “Well, well, Hemningway, so you’re a writer. Good for you.”

  I didn’t know what to say. “Yes,” I said, but that wasn’t much, and no-one could hear it anyway. He stopped by his corner, picked up his drink and emptied what was left. When he put it down there were red smears all round the glass.

  “We must have some beers, Hemningway,” he said, and he turned on his heel and almost fell over, and then he walked across to the door, with full concentration, and went out and around the corner. The Tuborg bottles we kept in an outhouse called the Pigsty because it was used for pigs when we first came here. The outhouse was built of brick and we had put electricity in to keep two fridges going. To get there he had to go around the cabin and across the lawn. He walked close to the wall to support himself in the dark, I watched him through the curtain going past the big window, and then he disappeared from view and then I heard a thud. The others stopped talking for a moment and looked around before going on with their conversation. I sat waiting. After a while he came back with a bag full of bottles. His hands were still bloody and he was bleeding from a fresh cut on his forehead. The new windows tilted straight out, he had not seen them in the dark. The blood ran along his eyebrow down over his cheek and dripped on to his shirt collar. He was still smiling, rather stiffly now, and the room fell silent, everyone looked up, and yet only he and I were there. As he passed me on his way to the kitchen nook, he narrowed his eyes before he glanced sideways down at the chair I sat in and said: “Now then, Hemningway,” and then he stumbled over the rag rug. The bag of bottles hit the bench and there was a sound of glass smashing. It was a film in slow motion. I saw his face on the way down, an incredulous expression in his eyes, before he landed flat on his chest with the bloody hands out to his sides. Now he will die, I thought. Everyone shot up from their chairs and the chairs crashed over, and I didn’t want him to die, but I couldn’t get up. I sat glued to my chair. I saw him lying with his back on the floor between the worktop and the wall and the beer running out of the bag over the newly varnished floor towards my chair. It was so hot in the room that the air turned misty and then into fog, and I saw everything through that fog: the furniture, the orange oilcloth, the photographs on the wall with the whole family history, curtains and lamps and my father on the floor in a lake of beer, and I didn’t want him to die, I wanted to be ten years old again and have the smell of leather tickling my nose on my way down to the cellar, I wanted all that I looked upon to have a meaning and to surround and embrace me, and all that had happened to be gathered into one now and give me peace. I wanted my father to say Hemingway, not Hemningway.

  But he didn’t die then. He rose to his knees and impatiently pushed away the helping hands.

  “Cut it out,” he said. “This is nothing.” He stared at the floor and said: “Isn’t that so, Hemningway,” and he was right about that, and then four years went by in which everything changed. Now only my brother and I were left. We sat drinking at the same table in the same room. We drank far too much, he said skål all the time, and we were going to get drunk. I took gulp after gulp and swallowed away as if drinking was the only thing I wanted in this world, and I felt anger coming, and I looked around me and said: “Wait a bit. Hold on a moment.”

  It was those photographs on the wall. I couldn’t stand looking at them. And it was the curtains and the orange oilcloth and the knick-knacks on the window sill by the kitchen corner, it was the souvenirs from Germany and the journey to Siberia. I put my glass on the table, walked rapidly out to the car and found a roll of black plastic sacks behind the driving seat and went in again. I pulled off the first sack and started to tear at the curtains. They didn’t want to come down. I took a good grip with both hands and leaned on them with all my weight. The loops tore and broke off the rail right over to the wall, and I went down and landed on the floor in a heap of striped cloth.

  “For fuck’s sake, can’t you give me a hand?” I struggled up on all four. My brother got up from the table.

  “What are you playing at?” he said. I didn’t reply, just tore off another plastic sack and threw it to him and stuffed the curtains into the one I held. I pointed around me and he watched my finger and saw what it pointed at.

  “You’re crazy,” he said. But he opened the sack, pulled the cloth off the table and fed it in, went across the room and took one photograph off the wall, and then another, and pretty soon there were none left, he was efficient, and I went to the window sill, and with my underarm swept everything on it into the sack with the curtains. In no time we had cleared the room, the sacks were full and we carried them out to the heap of shoes and left them there.

  The cup is half full. The coffee has gone cold. I don’t know what I have been doing. It is still dark, it is still winter, there’s a cold draught from the balcony door. In the next block Mrs Grinde has put on her kitchen light again. It has been off for a while. I look at the clock. It says four. What is she doing up now, there’s no-one to spy on except me, and I’m not that interesting, or maybe I am, to her, and I picture her even though I have only ever seen her out of doors, on the way to the bus or at the Co-op; the stern eyes behind her glasses, her small body restlessly passing from room to room, one lit, one dark, then one lit again, in her dressing gown maybe, her brown hair gathered at the neck in a rubber band, and the binoculars on the window sill.

  I don’t know. I get up, take the cup and go into the kitchen, pour the coffee down the sink, rinse the cup in hot water and dry it on the dish cloth. Then I hurl the cup as hard as I can down into the sink. It breaks with an unexpectedly loud crash. Some of the pieces fly over the edge and land on the floor. I pick them up and put them into the sink with the others, take a bottle from the worktop and start to mash all the pieces, it makes a horrible noise, but I don’t stop until the cup has turned into a coarse powder. When I turn the taps on full, everything disappears down the drain. I suddenly hear myself breathing heavily through my nose. It sounds silly. I turn the taps off and all is quiet. Water has splashed up from the sink on to my sweater and my stomach is quite wet. I go to the cupboard in the hall and find another sweater, it is my father’s too, I have four of them, and then I hang the wet one over the edge of the bathtub to dry. I straighten up and look at my face in the mirror. There is still a swelling under my right eye, but it is much less now, the colour more purple than blue and not so obvious, no longer the first thing you’d notice. That’s what I think, anyway, but I don’t really know, I haven’t been out for almost a week, nor have I talked to anyone except the doctor and my brother and the Kurd on the third floor, and that was hardly a conversation.

  I go on looking at myself in the mirror. I am so like him it would make you laugh. It won’t be long before I reach the point where he was when I remember him way back, and I remember him well. If I screw up my eyes and stand there in the charcoal-grey sweater with the red band at the neck it looks like a photograph slightly out of focus from 1956. He was still boxing then. He was the eldest father in the block where we lived, but none of the others looked like him, at least not in the summer, in his shorts and nothing else on the lawn beside the road when there was voluntary work and a new path to be laid with flagstones, or when the balconies were being built and the whole house was out and there was not room enough for everyone in the photographs that were taken. We were twenty-five children and sixteen adults in eight apartments, there were bodies everywhere, white skin to the throat and sinewy arms, shabby belts and braces stretched like guy ropes over beer bellies, there were grazes on knees and spiky hair, there were big hands with crowbars and sledgehammers, and you could go wrong, you could pick the wrong parent, a sheepdog was needed to separate the families in the evening. I was the only one that never went wrong, for I always knew where he was. He was visible. In real life. In photographs.

  I pull the sweater off and
the T-shirt and stand in front of the mirror half naked with the bandage round my chest, and I still look like him. I am not like him, I smoke and drink when I feel like it, and I often feel like it. On Sundays I sit at home reading whether it’s sunny or raining or snowing. I haven’t owned skis since I was thirty. But I have trained for several years, sometimes a lot and sometimes less, I have lifted most things around me, chairs and tables and boxes of books, ten-kilo sacks of potatoes I have bought, I’ve stood in the kitchen and just lifted them; shopping bags full of milk cartons, I’ve lifted them up and down, up and down until the sinews by my wrists have tensed like bowstrings. I have attended health studios for six months at a time, and if I need to go to the shopping centre three kilometres away I walk, and I walk fast. All the way along the footpath past the football pitch, past endless rows of housing blocks and past roundabouts and two schools and a new sports ground and on down past the houses in Station Road which have been there for thirty, forty, maybe fifty years, to the centre beside the old E6, and then back again at the same pace up all the hills and especially the last one which is so long and steep that the breath burns in my throat and the lactic acid bubbles in my thighs right up to this satellite town at the north-east end of the Østmark Forest. When I get indoors I set the shopping bags on the floor and breathe like a man coming up for air before I do twenty push-ups in the hall, and then twenty more, and there is not one sweater that belonged to him that I cannot fill today.