“Yes.”
“Can you take my skis off?”
I do not want to, but I must. I take off my own skis and walk round him in the snow. Then I see his foot. It is sticking out the wrong way and isn’t like anything I have ever seen before. I bend down
and pull hard on the buckle and he groans aloud. I stand up quickly and say:
“Shit, don’t do that,” and my father turns his face even closer to his shoulder, and in the white snow he seems a lot smaller. I bend down and pull again. His foot slides out, looking weird, and then I unfasten the other ski.
“Come here,” he says. His voice is stronger now. I take two steps and stand close to him, and
he takes a hold round my hips and starts to hoist himself slowly up.
“Now you just stay there,” he says, and his body grows big again, and heavy and about to drag me down through the snow and deep into the ground. I plant my feet firmly and look another way, look out on the water where the ski track crosses to the other shore. No-one has been on it for a long time, the snow looks wet and hellish,
and there is open water in two places.
He is standing up now, he leans on my shoulder, his knees are shaking, and he looks in the same direction as I do, saying: “I didn’t see it before it was too late, I just threw myself to the side, there was no time to turn.” And then there’s a scraping sound. Shivers run down my back as I realise my father is standing close to my ear grinding his teeth.
I twist aside, and he starts to slide.
“Fucking hell,” he says, and his hands scrape over my sweater, over the zigzag pattern and down my stomach, he is pulling me with him, it is an avalanche with us both right inside the fall, and we land in the snow with him on top. I hit out and kick to free myself, his wet anorak against my face, I cannot breathe, it’s like drowning, I get frightened and
scream:
“Let go of me,” and roll aside and get to my knees and then all the way up and I stand and breathe as best
I
can while my father groans again, clenches his teeth and lifts the damaged leg with both hands out from under his body. His forehead is wet and he looks at me as if I wasn’t his son at all and says: “It’s no good, Arvid. You must go for help.”
I look up the long hill. I could
never do that, neither with nor without skis.
“You can go across to the main track,” he says, “there are people there.” He indicates the direction I must take and I look that way, but I don’t give a damn about people.
“I don’t want to,” I say, and I mean it.
“You must, I’m afraid,” my father says. That is not true, he is afraid of nothing, but he is right, I have to go. And anyway I don’t want
to stay. I don’t want to go, and I cannot stay, so I just start to walk, without my skis, into the forest with the wet snow up to my ankles, and only once do I turn and see him sitting with his head against a tree, gazing into the air with his pale dripping wet forehead and his patriot’s hairstyle.
“You’ll be fine,” he says aloud, “you can do it,” and I can only just hear him and I feel the weight
of his head right over to where I am standing, but he does not turn, and it does not matter what he says, because everything closes off behind me and I am alone.
I walk. Snow begins to fall, wet flakes down my neck, and I don’t know what time of day it is, and I am hungry, and maybe it will soon be evening and
darkness
will fall. I choose a tree far ahead and walk until I reach it, and then choose
a new one and tell myself I can rest when that is behind me. But I do not stop, just pick out more trees until I cannot go on any further and sit down on a stump. The stump is next to a spruce with its branches weighed all the way down by snow to form a shelter only I can know. No-one can see me, all around is silence. Straight in front of me there is a round clearing all covered with snow.
I lean against the trunk and look up through the branches thinking there might be a squirrel at the top. I don’t know how long I sit there. When I stand up and look out on the clearing I see a shadow first and then a huge elk moves alongside the trees opposite me. Its long legs move cautiously and it does not like the going, its whole body quivers nervously, and each time a hoof sinks into the snow
it quickly comes up as if it was a dance. I feel the mild wind in my face and know I am well placed. It is my first elk, but I know it from the books of Mikkjel Fønhus, it is misshapen and beautiful, and heavy and light both, as it dances across the clearing like a creature from some other world and it will soon vanish among the trees on the opposite side. Calmly, I raise my hands and grip a gun
I do not have, close one eye tight and aim with the other, and shout: “Bang.”
The elk jumps and turns at the same moment. The great body hauls itself forward, but it does not get anywhere, for something holds it back, and it falls on
its
side in the snow. I look down at my hands, what has happened to them, what have they done; I didn’t mean any harm, didn’t mean any harm, I rush from my shelter
and out into the clearing, yelling:
“I meant no harm,” and then the elk kicks the empty air, whipping slush from its hooves in lofty curves and gets up in a way I will never forget, like a fall in a film in reverse, coming up and up in a snowy cascade, trembling and struggling to be standing again before trotting on across the clearing, into the shadows and is gone.
I run on and pass the big
hollow in the snow where the elk fell and I feel sick. But I control myself and just run on as if running is the only thing in the world I want to do, and I run across the clearing and in among the trees and do not stop until I get to a slope, and there I put on new speed and sail over the edge and slide on my slippery ski boots all the way down, and when I stop at the bottom I am standing in the
middle of the main ski track. The lamps are out, so it must be daytime still.
But where is everyone? I look up to the nearest bend. All is quiet that way and downhill it is quiet, nothing but my own breath and the misty air, and I do not know which way leads where. I close my eyes and stand completely still and imagine I can lift myself out of this forest, float away and be suddenly grown up,
and look back at this with time in between, or
not
look back and
forget
it all. And then the silence suddenly whirls away. There is the noise of dogs and voices, two teams come down the track from the hill above, the men shouting strange words, and the dogs reply. I place myself in the middle of the track with my arms out to both sides. They brake and the men shout again and then they come to
a stop. I look at them and they look at me and the dogs are panting. The nearest one has eyes that are completely yellow, and a smell comes from the dogs’ bodies that has nothing to do with my life, and I like that.
The tallest man walks round the sledge, stops in front of me and says: “Are you standing here waiting for a bus?” He smiles, but there is nothing I can say to that. I keep my arms
stretched out.
“Where are your skis?” he asks.
I point into the forest.
“Has something happened?”
“I shot an elk,” I say. The man starts to laugh, then he turns to his companion and says:
“Did you hear that? He’s shot an elk. Not bad, not bad at all.” He looks at me again.
“What with, if I may ask?”
I show him my hands, and my face and neck start to tingle, and then my neck and then my
fingertips.
“That’s not what I meant to say. It’s my father.”
“You have shot your father?”
I look at him. “I don’t know,” I say, and then I hear
a
rattling sound. It fills my head. It hurts. The man in front of me thrusts his hand into his anorak pocket and pulls out a chocolate bar, unwraps it and pushes it between my teeth. I bite it right off. And the odd thing is I don’t remember anything
after that. Not a thing.
Somebody is knocking at the windscreen of my car. I roll the window down. He puts a hand on the roof and almost leans inside.
“You can’t stay here,” he says. “Didn’t you see the sign?”
He is wearing overalls. There is something familiar about the way he leans against the car. He must be a caretaker. There is a notice on the garage wall: No Parking. Vehicles left here
will be toed away at owner’s cost. I had not seen it.
“There is a ‘w’ in ‘towed’,” I say.
“What?”
“There’s a ‘w’ in ‘towed’. It is spelled ‘t-o-w’. Can I sit in the car while they tow it?” I ask. He doesn’t answer that, so I ask: “Where will I be towed to, then?”
“Ullevål. It will cost you. It doesn’t pay to get lost.”
“I know,” I say, “I have heard that one before. Thanks for the offer,
but that would be the wrong direction.” I start the car, saying: “And thanks for the chat. I feel much better now.”
I roll the window up, he takes his hand off the roof and I back out and turn the car, drive past the garages
and
out on to the road back to the roundabout by the E6. He stays in the mirror in his overalls, hands on hips and head to one side, and I look around and see housing blocks
everywhere. The fog has lifted, it is Furuset. I am in Furuset. Then I can take the Gamle Strømsvei across Lørenskog and on home.
I drive along Strømsvei with a wall of rock on the right and the motorway straight down on the left and over a bridge to the other side past the big Publishers’ Centre warehouse where I am sure I haven’t got a book left, every unsold copy shredded, and on to Karihaugen
where a woman was murdered twenty years ago, driven away and buried under the snow in Nittedal. Her name was Berit and her husband was in the editorial office of
Dagbladet
, weeping because he missed her so and wanted to help
Dagbladet
with their daily reports on the investigation, and then of course he was the one who had done it. “I am Berit. I have gone away,” the poet Jan Erik Vold chanted
on his record of that year with Jan Garbarek on saxophone, and Dag Solstad wrote a novel a few years later. I still remember her picture in the paper. It was the first tabloid murder in Norway, and I think of it every time I drive past.
I stop at the optician’s in Lørenskog where I am pretty certain I have phoned and ordered new glasses. Tentatively, with an innocent smile, I ask if I can collect
them now, in case I
did
call, playing the distrait
professor
who forgets most things in everyday life and everybody knows he cannot be any different. The lady behind the counter laughs and joins in the joke and pulls out the drawer with completed orders in little brown bags and leafs through them, and there they are. I throw out my arms and laugh too, for after all it was just a joke, and of course
I did remember. But it will cost you when you lose things. Maybe more than I have got. I swallow and use my Visa card and hope for the best. I need those glasses. I want to work, and I can’t do that without them.
“Approved” comes up on the screen after a pause. I get a receipt I can use against tax and push the case with my new glasses deep down into my pocket. I leave and get into the car and
drive to Skårer and out on to Gamleveien, over the open country and up past the church and the school on the hill and on past farmland towards the ridge until I turn off the road up the bend to the hospital. The helicopter is on its pad with its insect wings at rest. It seems a long time since last I was here, but it is less than twenty-four hours.
It is daylight now. I thought it was easier
last night. And then I think about that night and the cocoa I had that tasted so mysteriously good and of the time when my brother and I came home from Denmark six years ago in a borrowed van we had far from emptied, and it was still a spring of some kind, the longest ever. He went off to his life, and I went off to mine, and then
silence
fell. I do not know what happened. I do not know what
didn’t
happen. We had a mission. We had to empty the flat we had grown up in and sell to the highest bidder as quickly as possible. It would actually take us a year to finish that job, but we did not know that then. He would call me early to say he was on the way from his home at Fetsund and coming round, for I had no car then, and after twenty minutes he bowled up in front of the block and we
drove down to Oslo and the suburb of Veitvet. We stayed there for an hour or less, picked things up and put them down again, went down to the basement to fetch tools, filled a cardboard box or maybe two and sat on the sofa going through old papers or old photographs of the cottage at Bunnefjorden from the time my father built it almost single-handedly, looking like Johnny Weissmuller or a sculpture
from ancient Greece. Like the guy with the discus. And then we gave up and locked the door and stood by the hedge in front of the terraced house talking with a neighbour we had always known, and he wondered how we were getting on. We had no idea how we were getting on. We did not fly any more, we did not float any more. We were on our way to the bottom, but we did not see that. And then we went
home. We used to stop at Gjeller Hill, on the way out of Oslo, at Morten’s Inn, and we had dinner there and glanced sideways at each other and looked out of the window and did not utter one sensible word. It was like
walking
through syrup. On the way out to the car my brother always went ahead of me, and he could look so heavy and exhausted, and he stared at the ground as if each thought was a
torture, and it made me so annoyed it almost frightened me.
9
I GO THROUGH
the doors and sit down in the arrival hall or vestibule or foyer or whatever it is called, where everyone passes on their way in or out and waits for the lift or buys the flowers they have forgotten, or sweets, or lousy novels in paperback editions because they do not remember the rules for hospital behaviour until they have them pointed out right here, or just sit waiting in dread
on a chair with a coffee or a Coke on the table in front of them to stretch the time.
The coffee tastes horrible. And I cannot smoke. I look around me. There is a dividing line here, I know it, a before and an after, in this very vestibule or foyer, and I know exactly where. It is over there by the lift. I can stride over and with a piece of chalk show where the line will go on the floor, if
anyone is interested, and I do not talk about much margin of error, a couple of centimetres at the most, and in a whole life that is not a lot. After all, I am forty-three. After all, I have seen plenty. In real life. On video. An elk falling dead and getting up again. A woolly penguin on a bunk. Water closing over and then falling silent. My father on the floor in a sea of beer, or was it blood,
skin to skin with
other
bodies. Suddenly I do not remember clearly, but I
know
I have seen it.