Several of the neighbours are there, standing in the queue, and then they get on the bus with me. They greet me warily. I nod and turn away and walk between the seats to the back, then sit down by the window and lean my forehead against the window glass. The bus starts, I feel a vibration in my chest, in my stomach and groin. Even since I was small I have ridden in buses with my forehead to the window and gazed out without really looking or thinking, just concentrating on the vibration in my body, until my body was that vibration, and when I get off it is like a sleep it hurts to wake up from, my skin electric and open to whatever may strike it and rip it to shreds, and yet the worst thing is when someone gets on that I know and sits down on the seat beside me with a big smile and wants to talk.
On my way in to the stairwell I hear the ringing again. I don’t care, I don’t want to talk to anyone. I open the letter box calmly and fish out The Class Struggle and a flyer from the Co-op and Rælingen parish magazine, and then take out the key and run to my door, fumble with the lock, swear out loud and run into the hall and pick up the phone.
“Just a moment,” I say. I clutch the receiver to my chest and breathe heavily and hold a hand to my side, where it suddenly hurts. Maybe the doctor made a mistake, maybe it is not the rib, maybe it is something else entirely. Then I lift the receiver. It is Randi. Why doesn’t my brother call himself, why is his wife calling?
“I’ve been trying to reach you all day,” she says.
“You have? I have been out. I do sometimes go out, as a matter of fact.”
“It’s your brother. He’s in the Central Hospital,” she says, but that cannot be right, because I have stood looking down at that hospital today, and I should have felt something if he was there, but I did not feel anything.
“What’s he doing there?”
“He’s been admitted.”
“But shit, I’ve just been talking to him.”
“You have? When?”
“Last night. He called me.”
She gets mad, she says something quickly, hard, but she doesn’t speak into the receiver, so I do not catch it, and there is a silence; she is breathing, and I am breathing. I stand in front of the mirror in the hall. It is difficult to focus, but there is someone there, I’ve seen him before. I nod, and he nods, and then I recognise myself.
“So tell me what’s happened.”
“A bottle of port and a hundred Sarotex is what has happened. A hundred Sarotex without capsules so they would work quicker. The capsules were in the bathroom when I came home this morning, and the bottle was in the living room, empty. I rushed all over the house, but I couldn’t see him anywhere. In the end I found him in the shed. It was cold out there, Arvid, I don’t think I can take this any longer,” she says, and that’s probably true. She starts to cry, and I wonder what the hell is Sarotex, and I try to remember when it was I last saw my brother, face to face, but all that comes to mind is that once we fought in the hall at home when he was twelve and I was nine, and we were alone and rolled on the floor and punched and punched each other and tore the coats down from the hooks and knocked the chest over and tipped the vacuum cleaner out of the cupboard which was open, and it burst apart and everything that was in it spilled out on the floor and made a massive cloud of dust and dirt, and then we suddenly stopped because we realised both at the same time that we hadn’t anything to fight about. We never did have. And we were both so embarrassed that he went straight to his room and shut the door and I went out. I ran round the block the longest way and sat down under the poplars beside the dustbin where the blackbird used to sing, and I thought I had lost myself, that I did not know who I was, because I was the one who had attacked him, and I had no idea why.
4
WHEN MY MOTHER and father came out of the tabernacle in Hausmannsgate after they had stood before the priest and both said yes, my father stared at the ground with a frown on his face, and turned to one of his brothers, Trond, and said: “Nailed to a cross on earth.” And then he laughed.
I don’t know how many people heard what he said, but I heard it from Uncle Trond on the telephone only a month ago, and you might think I would feel my father was a shit for saying a thing like that, for if anything I was a mother’s boy, but I did not, I thought: Christ, did he say that?
It was October, it was sunny, and my mother had not learned to speak Norwegian yet, but she made herself perfectly well understood, and “ja” was more or less the same in Danish, so she got that right. She was slim again, or as slim as she could be. She had let her hair grow down to her shoulders after keeping it short for several years, and it was more curly now than frizzy, and she had a white flower stuck into it above one ear about where Billie Holiday used to wear hers, and like Billie Holiday she needed no clasp to fasten it with. She pushed it in and it stayed put. She probably needed that flower, for not one of her family was there in Oslo that day.
They all were on my father’s side. Four brothers and two sisters and my grandfather Adolf Jansson, a Baptist from the countryside south of Sunne in Värmland, Sweden, who was finally awarded the King’s silver medal of merit for long and acquiescent service at Salomon Shoe Factory, where he had been all his working life, where all his children worked, a factory he must have chosen because of its name or because the people who ran it shared his brand of faith.
Now they were clustered on the pavement. My mother smoked a cigarette, the only one who did, except for maybe Uncle Alf who had ambitions and wanted to leave the factory, and I do not know whether she took in my father’s biblical sense of humour. Anyway, there was complete silence. She stood at the edge of the little group. A whirlwind spiralled in the grey street and lifted her hair, made it big and sparkling in the autumn sunshine, and her dress was pale blue and swung around her strong calves, and it looked like a dance, but I do not think she thought that was what she was doing. Dancing. Her hair settled again, and her dress fell into place, and she stubbed out her fag with the toe of her shoe on the side of a kerbstone, pushed a hand in under her blouse to straighten a bra strap, while my father looked the other way, while they all looked the other way, and then they went down the street to the photographer round the corner in Storgata.
I keep that photograph in a drawer, and it’s just the two of them there, but I can sense the others, they push against the edges of the picture wanting to be in it, and my father likes that, I can see it by the way he smiles. He is at ease again, surrounded by his family, and as long as that lasts he does not have to think about how bewildering it is to find himself there at this moment. For a while it was difficult, but now they stand close, and he has a lady beside him with long dark curly hair. She is Danish. He does not know her very well. She looks obstinate, but she is good-looking in a southern way, like an Italian, or maybe Moroccan, and in the inside pocket of the jacket he fills to bursting point there is a picture of another lady who is Danish too, stuffed between the notes his father gave him for a wedding present. It is stupid and he knows it, but he cannot part with it, and in fact it is not that bad to stand shoulder to shoulder with one attractive lady and have another in his wallet. He thinks of that too as he looks at the photographer and faintly smiles.
The only one who is no way near the picture is my brother. He was put away on a farm belonging to someone my mother knew on an island off the coast of Denmark. There he trudged around among sheep and sheepdogs and thought that all was well with the world. He had very fair hair and was almost eighteen months old. I don’t know how many knew he existed. My father knew, or he would not have been standing outside the tabernacle saying: “Nailed to a cross on earth.”
My brother’s hair is darker now, and thinner. He is forty-six. There is a tube in his mouth and another through his nose, and one is fastened to the back of his hand, and there is a screen by the wall where a curve moves up and down, up and down towards a point it will never reach, and it looks as though it moves a little unevenly, but then I don’t understand such things. I pull a chair to the end of the bed an
d sit down. It is evening. As I walked down the corridor to ask my way, the nurse on duty stuck her head out and said: “That was none too soon.”
“I couldn’t get here before,” I replied.
But that was not true. I had walked around the apartment for quite a while, and in the end I lay down on the sofa and fell asleep at once, and when I woke up it was far into the evening. I emptied a glass I had poured from a bottle I kept in the kitchen cupboard, brushed my teeth and then got dressed and left.
“I mean he survived by a hair’s breadth. Half an hour more . . .” she said, leaving the rest to drift. “Are you family?”
“I’m his brother,” I said. “I am the only family he has,” and even if that is not true either, the look she gave me made me so furious that I was still shaking as I went on down the corridor.
“He is stable now,” she said icily behind me, but I did not turn round, merely found the right door and went into the intensive care ward and stopped by his bed.
I sit there for a long time just watching him. His eyes are closed. His eyelids are swollen as his face is swollen, and he looks big and seems immensely heavy beneath the thin duvet on the bed of this white-painted room. He was the first one in our family to pass his examination to go to university. He was the first one in our street to go to university. That’s more than twenty-five years ago. I can remember the black student’s cap that was kept tidily wrapped in soft paper on the top shelf of the cupboard in the hall, and he used it that once only, when he enrolled at the university, because it embarrassed him, but he thought he had to, and then he put it away for good. When I passed my student’s examination three years later and enrolled at the university, it never occurred to anyone that I might want a student’s cap. But then nothing came of it. I never showed up. I lost my courage, or something else was lost, and with my hand upon my heart I cannot say my father was sorry for it.
My brother’s bare chest rises and falls slowly and evenly and the graph makes the same movements on the screen, then he suddenly raises himself on his elbows and starts to speak in a language only drunk men understand. One of the tubes comes loose and falls onto the duvet, and he opens his eyes and looks straight at me.
“You’re stable,” I say. “Relax, for Christ’s sake.” But he does not relax, he starts to shout, and if the name he shouts is mine, I do not recognise it. I go and fetch the nurse. She lays her hand on his forehead and fastens the loose tube, and then he slides down on to the pillow again.
“He doesn’t seem very stable,” I say.
“He is stable, but he doesn’t know you’re here. If you come again tomorrow you may get through to him. He’s full of poison now.”
I feel offended on his behalf. “There’s nothing the matter with my brother, he just can’t stop looking back.”
“Is that so?” she says, smoothing the duvet and straightening the tubes, and looking at the screen as she mumbles: “Of course he’s stable,” and then she says more audibly: “Do you want to sit here a while longer?”
“A bit longer, maybe.” I sit down again and she leaves, and I sit perfectly still looking at him, and then I fall asleep, and when I wake up she is standing in the doorway. She smiles.
“I’ve made some cocoa. Would you like a cup? You can come along to the office with me.”
I haven’t tasted cocoa since I made a jug the morning my daughters moved out. It seems a long time ago. I say yes, please, and get up and follow her. The big hospital is quiet, there are thousands of people here, but they do not make a sound. Only one patient suddenly coughs behind the curtain in the corridor as I go by, and I try to walk without a sound in my lace-up boots, but it’s not easy. In the nurses’ office she pours me a cup, and I sit down on a spare chair drinking the hot cocoa slowly, letting it warm my stomach while she writes a report or whatever it is that nurses write at night. She looks up at me once or twice and smiles. I like her better now.
“It tastes good,” I say, and she smiles and nods and goes on writing, and then I start to cry and get up with the cup in my hand and stand by the window until it has passed and then I sit down again and say: “He’s going to be divorced, you know, but that’s not what this is about.”
Carefully, she puts down her pen and looks at me with absolute calm, and then I tell her about the boat and the fire and all those who died in the flames, and died from the poisonous smoke, and how they lay close together in the companionways, side by side like a single conjoined body, and many lay on top of their children to shield them from the smoke, and some were in the shower with the water running, and that did not help them at all, but there was nowhere else to go, and only those having a ball in the bar had all their clothes on, because it was the middle of the night, the way it is now. And she nods, she remembers that fire, everyone remembers that fire, that’s why it is so difficult to talk about, they all nod and grow quiet, and it is like beating a duvet filled with down; completely numb and dumb, and they nod and nod, but she merely pours me a second cup of cocoa, and I drink it slowly, for it warms my stomach so pleasantly. I wonder whether it is proper cocoa or one that takes five seconds with a teaspoon and boiling water, because it reminds me of the kind my mother made when I was a child, and I look around for the packet to see what it says, and then I tell her of all the discussions we have had since then, my brother and I, about how they died, my two younger brothers and my mother and my father, and I have said it again and again, that they were asleep and died from the smoke and never knew what had happened to them, while he is convinced they were awake and tried to get out, and then could not because the flames were so fierce at that particular place in the boat and the smoke was so thick, and he cannot stop thinking about what their thoughts were just then, what their last feelings were, and I have said it does not do any good to go on thinking like that. “But he cannot stop,” I say. “Six years have gone by, and goddamnit, he cannot stop thinking about it.”
“Shall I make some more cocoa?” she asks, picking up the empty pitcher. For a moment I think that that would be great, and I could see how she makes it, and then just sit there drinking really good cocoa, but I do not say that, I say: “No, thanks, I’m fine.”
She puts the pitcher back and looks out of the window down at Gamleveien where the line of street lights glitter, and then it is dark all the way up to the ridge where I live in an apartment block in a satellite town I usually call the Eagle’s Nest.
“If he had succeeded in what he was trying to do, then you would have been left alone,” she says, and my heart sinks, I know that song, I don’t have to listen to that crap, and anyway it’s not true, I am not alone, there are people in my life although none comes to mind at this very moment, but she may not be talking to me, as she is just sitting there looking out of the window, she may be talking to herself.
“I cope,” I say. “I always have.” I put my cup on her desk and stand up. She turns, but she didn’t like that last remark, that’s obvious. She does not want me to cope, she wants us to be dependent on each other and hold each other’s hands and have dinner together every bloody Sunday and be a close and happy family with a summer house on the coast and have smiles on our faces no matter what happens. She belongs to the Christian People’s Party, I can tell from her dialect.
“You want to look in on him again?” she asks.
“No, I’ll come back tomorrow. Maybe he won’t be so stable then.”
She does not think I am funny at all.
In the lift going down there is a woman who cannot stop weeping, and I do not know which department she has left, maybe maternity a few floors up, where I have been twice in an earlier life, and if she comes from there and is weeping still it must be because she has a daughter of fourteen who has had her first baby and will not tell who the father is. Her tears trickle down her face and she looks at me as if I might say something wise at any moment, and that is what she needs right now, for me to say something wise to make her stop feeling such a lousy mother, but she has got the wr
ong man. I have nothing to say. At the ground floor I walk from the lift and can hear her behind me, sniffing all the way through the vast, empty entrance hall to the door.
It is cold outside, and immediately dark as I walk out of the ring of lights that circles the yard in front of the hospital. The ambulance helicopter is parked on a pad some distance away like an enormous insect with long shadows, and when I turn into the walkway to Gamleveien I hear a man shouting and motors starting up and the fluttering rush of the rotor blades, and I turn and watch the helicopter take off tail first and then rise in an arc around the hospital block and vanish high up over the ridge with its searchlights aiming for the Østmark and the great lake and the forests on the other side.
I come down to Gamleveien and walk alongside the lamp-posts up the first slopes which are not too steep, and it is dark on both sides, but I know how the fields undulate and rise to the right towards the ridge lying there huge and heavy, and I know how steep it is and dread the last long slope. Suddenly a car comes down the road. The headlights dazzle me so I have to stop and stand still for a moment, and as it goes past I see the compartment light is on. The car is crammed with people and they laugh, and one has a bottle in his hand, and they are all quite young. There is music howling from the car stereo, and the driver leans on his horn to greet me, a middle-aged man on his way through the night on foot, and they do not have a care in the world at this moment. I turn and watch the car with its lit interior and red rear lights until it disappears round the bend before the church and how it rushes past, and the last thing I hear is the bass thumping out through the half-open windows.