In the Wake

  I dress again and go to the telephone in the living room and stop and stand still. Then I lift the receiver and dial my brother’s number. I let it ring five times before I put the receiver down. He is probably sleeping now, heavy as a soaked mattress, his brain swaddled in black velvet, and Randi is in town and won’t be home until she knows what she wants, and he just has to wait.

  I am not breathing so heavily any more. I circle the floor a few times and suddenly I feel fine. I take Svante Foerster’s The Class Warrior from the bookcase and lie on the sofa to read it again. It is two years since the last time, and that’s a long enough wait. I read the first sentences, and they feel as right as ever and my expectations rise. But I’m tired too, and the book is heavy, it is a big memorial edition with beautiful typography, and my thirty-kroner glasses make my eyes swim. I lay the book down on my stomach for a moment thinking that maybe Mrs Grinde is looking at me through her binoculars now, that I ought to do something indecent, and then I fall asleep.

  3

  THERE IS A ringing and I wake up. It is the front doorbell, I realise that straight away. I’m lying on the sofa. I look at the clock on the wall. It says eleven. I have slept for more than six hours and I’ve dreamed about him. I know I remember the dream, that it is inside me perfectly clear and plain, that I can watch it like a video, but then the bell rings again.

  It is light outdoors and light indoors, I’ve got my thirty-kroner glasses on my nose, The Class Warrior is on the floor. I sit up and rub my eyes hard. That hurts, I had forgotten about the swelling. Damn, I say aloud and pick up the book from the floor and put it on the coffee table and go through the hall to open the door. It is the Kurd from the third floor. He stands there smiling.

  “Hi,” he says in good Norwegian. It is a short word, though, about the same as “Thanks,” I could have managed that too, in Kurdish or whatever his language is called, if someone instructed me first. I feel suddenly shy, I haven’t quite woken up yet, I don’t know what to say.

  “Hi,” I say. He holds something under his arm, a small parcel. He gives it to me, I don’t get the point, is it meant for me? He nods.

  “Thanks,” he says, but it is I who should say thanks, if the parcel is for me, so I too say: “Thanks,” and then he smiles even more, and we stand there with our two short words, his cut on the cheek and the remains of my black eye, and have a conversation. Suddenly I am not shy any longer, I start to laugh, and we both laugh. I open my door wide and invite him in using international body language: fling my right arm out and make a slight bow, but then he laughs again and raises his hands palms outward and shakes his head. He points up the stairs, he has a family waiting, and in fact I don’t mind that because I’m not too sure what state my flat is in. He raises his hand in farewell and says: “Hi,” and I do the same, raise my hand and say: “Hi,” nodding. I have understood, the little gift is for last night, because I interrupted my sleep to let him and his family in when he stood outside in the cold, bleeding, so far from the high mountains of Kurdistan with the moon so close and the deep valleys with their winding roads of fine-cut chippings and the good neighbours in white-painted houses with no locks on the doors.

  He starts to go upstairs. The sound of his steps is one I already know, on the way up.

  “Thanks,” I say, waving the little parcel, and he turns and smiles and says: “Hi.”

  We cannot take it any further, there is nothing more to say. I close the door and walk through the hall to the living room and sit on the sofa. I unwrap the parcel and put it on the coffee table. It is a small dish, a very shiny brass bowl with a design I imagine is Arabian or oriental at least, I’m really no good at the art of ornamentation, it might be Inuit for all I know. The famous Inuit brass artefacts.

  I go to the kitchen and look into the cupboard and find two apples in a plastic bag. The skins are wrinkled, but they still have some colour and I go back and put them in the bowl and place The Class Warrior close to it. Two Norwegian apples in a bowl from a far country and a thick Swedish book on a white table. A still life from the home of a healthy intellectual, a man who has travelled the world. I sit there gazing. Two apples seem a little cramped, so I take one out, but that looks odd. I take them both away, roll a cigarette and light up, and as I smoke I tap the ash into the bowl. When the cigarette is half smoked, I stub it out in the middle of the oriental pattern. That really seems wrong. I have been given a present, and then I stub out my fag in it. I go back to the kitchen with the bowl in my hand, hold the stub under running water to be certain it’s extinguished before I throw it in the bin, then I rinse out the bowl and polish it with the dishcloth. It is not an ashtray. I put the bowl in the middle of the kitchen table. It may shine there in the light from the overhead lamp.

  I go into the bathroom and undress, take off the bandage and have a long shower. Then I turn off the taps, dry myself slowly, wipe the steam from the mirror with the corner of the towel and study my face. Not so bad. There is a stick of make-up in the medicine cupboard left by someone whose face I have forgotten, who doesn’t need make-up any more because her face has gone, like the years have gone when I saw nothing except that face. I rub the stick lightly once or twice over the purple stain under my eye and spread it evenly with a fingertip. It looks almost natural. Perhaps I have just been sleeping badly, one eye open, always on the watch, as a writer should be.

  I slam the door from the outside for the first time in a week. As I walk across the stairwell past the letter boxes on my way out, I hear a telephone ringing. It is mine. I stop, turn round and wait before turning back and then I open the door to the walkway outside. It is not locked now, it’s the middle of the day. The ringing goes on in there, but I have been at home for so long that whoever wants me could have called me before. I want to go out.

  It is March. Cold sunshine over the roofs, wind over the hills, hard snow in the shadows between the blocks, and the banks of snow alongside the walkway to the Co-op are sunken and hard as bone. All else is bare and dusty dry, the air is like Perrier. It pricks and stings the throat. I cough and swallow air, housewives come out with children in warm suits, and I cough again. They stare at me. I slowly breathe and hold the air as long as I can, I restrain from coughing and just as slowly let the air out again. I feel their eyes and the wind on my back. I pull my collar up to the neck and walk between the blocks and past the Co-op and the bus stop, and on to the walkway slanting alongside the steep hill and the road where a blue bus changes down on its way up. Grey clouds sweep along high above the ridge. They block out the sun for a moment and pass on, their shadows travel along the edge of the forest above the fields towards the tall block of the Central Hospital down in the valley, and turn to yellow what was grey. I stop and stand still. I close my eyes.

  There’s a strong wind. I stand alone on the hillside. I don’t know where I am going. This was not what I had expected, but I cannot go up again. So I go on downhill to the shopping centre by the main road, staring straight in front of me until I cross with the green light and walk between the cars ranked close in the car park, and in through the tall glass doors.

  It is Wednesday and only one o’clock, but there are people in all the shops on the ground floor and in all the ones in the gallery on the first floor, and high up under the ceiling there are great blue-painted beams across the whole span with long rails where the big cranes moved back and forth when this was a steelworks. It seems a long time ago now, but it is only fifteen years. I knew people who worked here. Reidar did, but Reidar is dead. He too wanted to write, and he did in the end, and then he died. But we were everywhere then, we who wanted the world to be new; in factories, on building sites, in print shops and tram drivers’ seats, we wanted to assault the Winter Palace in the light of Lenin, see our muscles swell in the glimmer of molten steel, hear the tigersaw howl in red forests and stretch cables and groan and vigorously sing like the Volga boatmen, da da daa da, haaa! da da daa da, haaa! We wanted light over the land, and even if the world was li
ke we said it was, almost all we did was wrong, for in every living room the lamps were lit and the TV sets flickered far into the night, and the world grew newer than we had ever imagined. Now the steelworks is a shopping centre, and a stone’s throw away was my father’s last shoe factory, where he jumped when the boss said jump until the factory collapsed under the weight of cheap Italian shoes, and then nothing was left. But I did not see him, did not want to see him. I saw the thousands on their march to Jenan and Dimitrov standing up against Hitler, I saw the masses of Petrograd and Mayakovsky’s posters. I saw the mountains of Albania covered with guns and draped in red banners, and compared with all that he almost became invisible.

  I walk among the shops in the big hall as far as the patisserie at the other end and take my place in the queue for a coffee and Napoleon cake. You can say what you like about Napoleon, but he could make a cake, my father used to say, and that was about as funny as he could get. He really loved Napoleon cakes. So do I. I take my tray with the coffee and cake and walk towards a table where smoking is allowed, and as I’m about to sit down I remember the dream I was having before the Kurd from the third floor rang my doorbell.

  In the dream it was Easter time. I was twelve. We had gone out to the cottage by the Bunnefjord, it was morning and the sun shone sharply on the bare birch crowns where the crows roosted in dark clusters. They were unusually big. We had heard them carrying on quite early, before we got up, and we could hear them still. All else was quiet. My brother and I had climbed the rocks along the fjord towards Roald Amundsen’s house until we were stopped by a high wire fence running down the steep slopes from the gravel road and continuing several metres out into the sea. We could see the house through the fence some way up from the shore, pale grey and huge in the sunshine, and the windows were dark. Roald Amundsen had been dead for a long time, but the house was still there and had been renovated, and if you paid the entrance fee you could go inside and look at his books and all the maps and polar bear skins and maybe a few old anoraks, but we had never done that, my brother and I. I stuck my fingers through the holes in the fence and put my face to it and shouted up at the house:

  “I don’t give a shit about Roald Amundsen!” I heard the sound of my voice so clear and metallic and I knew that I meant what I said, and what I said was momentously new. Now we were free to do as we pleased. We could smell the melting snow and the heather and the sun-warmed pines. It was springtime. The ice had broken on the fjord, only last night big patches had opened and lay darkly where before there was white in white, and the whole time floes broke free and floated on the current towards Oslo, and some of them ran inshore and hit the rocks with heavy thuds we could feel in our bones before the current turned them around and sent them on. There was a light wind. We stood on the smoothly polished rock that sloped down into the water, looking out over the fjord with the sun on our backs and our backs to Roald Amundsen’s house. It was cold and warm both. We waited. The first floe was too small. We helped it on its way with two long poles we had found in a pile beside the fence. The next one looked fine. Rough and massive, but it was too far out, it would drift past and hit the shoreline much closer to town, and then we pushed the poles out to bring it to a halt, and it slowed down and turned towards the shore, and my brother yelled: “Jump.” And then he jumped, and I jumped after him. We landed on the floe which kept swinging and crashed into the rock with a boom, slid up the bare rock some way and then began to turn over.

  “Fucking hell,” my brother yelled.

  “Fucking hell,” I yelled and dropped to my knees so I wouldn’t slide off the floe and into the icy cold water, and my brother did what I did. We shoved our poles against the rock and pushed as hard as we could. And we did it. The floe slid off with a scraping noise and was flat on the water again, and then we were safe.

  “Ho,” said my brother, smiling.

  “Hoho,” I said.

  Clutching the poles, we cautiously stood up. The floe turned gently and now we could see Roald Amundsen’s house from a fresh angle and on towards the end of the fjord, we saw the whole of the Nesoddland up to the tip, and the islands nearest town, we saw Holmenkollen ski jump on the ridge, and then we saw it all a second time. After circling around three times, we had been taken by the current so far along we could see the shoreline to the plot that was ours and the path from the jetty up the hill to the cottage where my father came running down in his T-shirt as if it was summertime. He was a fast runner for someone over fifty, and he shouted something we could not hear, for each time he opened his mouth the crows lifted from the trees, and the sound they made filled the air around us. I did not care. It was great to be standing on the floe. I had a clear view to all sides, and everything I saw was familiar and at the same time completely new, and it gave me such a weightless feeling that my stomach seemed to dissolve, and I would not mind standing on that floe for ever, rushing along with the current and seeing the places I knew as if for the first time.

  When we passed the jetty my father had come right down to the shore. We could hear what he was shouting now, it was our names, but I did not recognise mine. It sounded like it, but it was not mine. We were far from land, and if he wanted to get hold of us he would have to swim, and that was his idea. He threw himself out, the water splashing from his body on both sides, but it was icy cold, I heard him gasp, and he had not come far when I saw his face go white and he had to turn back. Back on land he started to run back and forth along the shore, calling, water pouring from his hair, from his clothes, and I heard the crows and his cries at the same time, and it was the name that was not mine and goddamnit, goddamnit, and then he caught sight of the rowing boat lying upside down in the shelter of a rock. It had been there since the previous autumn, covered with a tarpaulin, and he tugged and pulled it to turn it over and push it down to the water, but I knew the oars were not there. They were in the storeroom under the veranda on two benches, so he would have to run the whole way up to the cabin and then down again, and it’s hard to carry two long oars and at the same time run. By the time everything was in its place and he was out on the water, we would be off. I turned and stood there looking straight across the fjord to Oslo while the ice floe gently rocked, and my brother was staring stiffly back at the rowing boat and at my father, and I think perhaps that is the difference between my brother and me, that in spite of size and age he always looked back while I look straight ahead, and this is the way it always has been. Right up to now. I don’t know what has happened. It was something to do with a face. I had never seen it before, I did recognise it, but yet as it comes to me now, the thought of it is unpleasant. Someone gave me a gin. I had had enough already, I see my hand around the glass, the glass is full, and then the whole time there was that face with staring eyes and mouth wide open, and someone standing on the stairs, screaming and breaking vases, and there were mirrors everywhere. Mirrors everywhere, and he was shouting at me, but I didn’t know who he was. He was intimidating, he said things I did not want to hear, I had to defend myself. All the words I needed lay tightly in line, ready to be said. I would break him with words the way he was breaking vases, but nothing came out. My lips were numb, my tongue was stiff, and my words were the things being broken, one by one as I was about to say them. I felt myself getting furious, I still wanted to defend myself, but when I looked at that face, I feared for my life, and then I do not remember anything more until I stood in front of the door of that bookshop in the centre of Oslo where I had not worked for three years. I kicked the door, but no one came to let me in.

  What was it that he yelled? I have it on the tip of my tongue, but I cannot get it out. And the dream was so real, everything fitted, everything was as it could have been except for the name that was not mine, and the crows. They were unusually big. But they did not scare me.

  It’s a lousy Napoleon cake. The cream should be a pale yellowish white and light, but this one is feverish yellow and sticky. I eat just the top and leave the rest on the plate. I ought to
complain, hold the cake up in front of the lady at the counter and say: “This is a cheap imitation, I want my money back.” But I have never done that. I have never complained about anything except badly written books and the world situation, and you don’t get your money back when little Nepalese girls are sold by their families to brothels in Bangkok, or because the World Bank refuses to waive cruel loans to Uganda. On the contrary. And lousy books; they just look at you and say: “Why don’t you write one yourself, then?”

  That’s what I’ve tried to do. Several times.

  I stub out my fag in the revolting yellow cream and get up and leave. I could have stayed there for a while to see if Thor the poet from Skjetten would turn up on his bike as he often does at this time of day to get a cup of coffee when he’s desperate with writer’s block, which is often the case, and we could have talked about how hopeless it is, the path we have chosen and gossip over colleagues who may have received a big grant from the state or do not sell books at all, and why that isn’t in the least odd. Instead, I go by the escalator up to the first floor and go into the bookshop to see what others are up to while I am stuck. That is not inspiring. The piles left over from Christmas are still there and have not diminished at all, and there are none of mine on the shelves. That is not so strange. It is more than three years since I last published anything, and the woman behind the counter does not recognise me although I have at least twice sat in front of that counter at a small table signing books. I remember myself at eighteen reading Keats and Shelley and Byron and dreaming of publishing one book, or maybe two, which would be on everyone’s lips and be everyone’s mirror, and when they looked in that mirror they would see the people they might have been and they would have to cry, and after that I would just disappear, become one of the young dead and thus immortal, but now I am one of the middle-aged forgotten. I enquire after the lady who runs the shop because she will know who I am, and we often have a chat. But she is in hospital with a stroke, she has lost the power of speech, the lady behind the counter says in a confidential, solemn voice, without even recognising me, and then I ask if they have any books on Kurdistan or at least on northern Iraq, and she tells me I should go to the library. But I do not go to the library, I go home. That is, I go to the bus stop.