I walk away
from the fence and up to the summit where the terraced houses have the finest view of the forest and the valley and all that is nice, and their hedges and lawns will soon be subjected to a strict ritual before spring breaks out in earnest, and right at the top I drop down below the road on a pathway leading into the forest on the other side. The whole time I have had eyes on my back from windows
and doorways, and although it has not been as bad as it usually is I stop in the semi-darkness beneath the little
bridge
to rest and roll a cigarette before deciding whether to turn and go back the same way or take the road round the whole housing area or perhaps some other way altogether. I can go from here and get on to the ancient paths and walk there for days, seeing no other houses than long-forgotten
smallholdings with their buildings falling down or crumbled long ago and after that just the occasional log cabin. That is what the neighbours say. I have lived here for fourteen years and never been further in than a few hundred metres to collect fir cones when the girls were quite small and fascinated by small things.
I stand smoking in the shadow of the little concrete bridge, watching the
sun shining on the spruces closest by and on the path that bends and disappears behind a cliff. A cluster of birches filters the light in yellow and shining black through its bare branches, and it looks like a magazine illustration or an old print from China or Japan, and I could have hung that picture on my wall. So why not? I finish my smoke and stub the butt out with the toe of my boot and start
walking. I turn twice and look back, and the houses are still there, but the third time they have gone. I try to recall the last time I could not see a house or was close to one or inside one, and it must be long since.
I remember one house I was in. I lay on the sofa in the living room trying to recover, I might have been to a party the night before and I felt worn out and left out,
I
had no
family any more, everything was lost. Then my father came downstairs. I knew his step from all others, the weight of him, and he walked past me across the floor to the window and pulled the curtain aside. A faint light came in.
“The fog is lifting,” he said. “We must get going. They are on your trail.” I turned and saw the light on his face, a soft grey light, like invisible smoke in the room.
He was as old as I am now, and what he said did not frighten me, for he was keeping watch and knew what we had to do. But there wasn’t much time, I had to pull myself together.
It must have been a dream, of course, because I do not remember what that house looked like from outside or what he saw from the windows or why we were actually there. I remember a lot of dreams. Sometimes they are hard
to distinguish from what has really happened. That is not so terrible. It is the same with books.
I walk a kilometre or two over easy slopes both up and down, and then the path bends steeply towards the top of a knoll. I really have to make my legs work, and though my breathing is not that good, the going is better than expected and that makes me enthusiastic. I could have had a dog like Glahn
has in Hamsun’s
Pan
, and it could have bounded in front of me along this path and its name could be Aesop or Lyra, and each time a person or an animal was going to cross our path
it
would warn me at once so I could retreat among the trees and watch them pass, and the dog would sit there obediently at my feet. I could have had a gun and lived on what I managed to shoot, small game and large birds,
and lived in a cabin with the few things I needed: some books, an old-fashioned typewriter, clothes for all seasons and enough dry firewood, I could have been a Tibetan monk, I could have been someone completely different from the person I am, of course, but I am not, and when I get to the top of the knoll and there is a view, I see forest whichever way I turn. Far down to the right is a long
narrow lake, and from where I stand I cannot see where it begins or ends. There is ice on the lake with open patches, and I would not have tried to walk on that ice. In the shadows on the other side there is snow on the slope. There ought to have been an elk walking beside that lake, but there is no elk in sight, and everything is quiet, nothing moves but a thin wisp of smoke from some place deeper
into the forest.
I sit down by a rock with a view of the lake and roll a cigarette, and when it’s lit I take the book of haiku from my pocket. It is a long time since I read it, but I leaf through and find the poem about the night falling on to the road where no-one walks, and I read it a couple of times and then some more poems, and then one about a willow tree that paints the wind without a
brush, and I know willows well from Denmark where you can see them everywhere and there is always a
wind
, and I can picture it clearly. I close the book and put out the cigarette and look across the lake to the thin wisp of smoke that still hangs there above the forest some miles away and barely moves, and then I close my eyes and rest my head against the rock with the sun on my face and sleep
for a while. When I wake what I remember is just something about the wind and a white house by the water.
On the way home I call in at the Co-op and buy the things I did not get yesterday. I just make it before closing time, and in truth I buy rather more than I need, and then I walk up the pathway with the bag in my hand. Clouds have come up and it is cold again, but not
that
cold. I see no-one
in front of the block. Inside the hall I take my post from the letter box, and when I get to my door, Naim Hajo, the Kurd from the second floor, is ringing my doorbell. He has a book under his arm.
“Hi,” I say, and he says:
“Hi” with a smile, and I unlock the door, push it open and make a slight bow with one arm out. The arm trembles, and I do not know why. Perhaps because I have forgotten to
eat again. He does not miss that.
“Go on in,” I say. And so he does, takes a step across the threshold, then stops short and looks at the splinters of glass sparkling like a carpet right over to the living-room door, and he looks at me and grows
serious
. He points at the floor with an enquiring look on his face.
“That’s nothing,” I say.
He looks as if he understands what I say, and he looks
as if he does not agree. Perhaps he has read Basho. He shakes his head and says: “Problem.” Just like that. And then he points at me, and not at my face, rather at where my heart is. I consider whether I have a problem in that area, but there is none that I can explain to him, not in the language he and I use. What I have is a broken mirror. But I know I am glad he is concerned. And he has three
words now. That almost elates me.
“One moment,” I say and stop him with my hands. I fetch a brush and a dustpan and sweep a way for us through the glass splinters from the front door to the living room, and I wave him on.
“Come on in,” I say. “Coffee?” I ask, and he smiles and understands that word well without any trouble and follows me into the kitchen. I indicate one of the chairs with my
hand, and he sits down and takes the book from under his arm and places it on the table in front of the brass bowl. The bowl glitters newly polished in the light from the window. I can see it makes him pleased. I am pleased too. I take the groceries out of the shopping bag and spread them out on the worktop, and for want of something more oriental I make some ferociously strong coffee with the
Co-op’s
green brand, the way I hope he will like it. Fortunately there is a clean cloth on the table, and I lay cups and bowls and plates from the same service, the finest I have, which I inherited from my mother, who brought it with her from Denmark in the early fifties. Suddenly the way everything looks seems important, that everything is for real, and that
he
understands that, because in
his
part of the world the drinking of coffee is more than filling a mug and taking it out on the balcony. After all, I am not completely ignorant. I pour milk into a small jug and put sugar in a matching bowl, and find two teaspoons that are actually silver. I get a packet of oatcakes from the shopping bag, tear it open and take out a suitable number and spread them with light margarine, put them in
a small basket that someone who once lived here left behind, and for a moment I wonder whether to light some candles. But I do not have any candles, and anyway it is the middle of the day, and with candles it might have looked like a rendezvous.
When there is nothing more to be done, I sit down and pour out his coffee and wait until he has helped himself to sugar and stirred with the spoon and
taken the first mouthful. He nods and smiles. That is a proper cup of coffee, is what he thinks, and I fill my own cup and have a taste.
“A bit on the strong side if you ask me,” I say, “but then I am Norwegian.” and he is with me, whether he
understands
what I say or not, and I take a biscuit and he takes a biscuit, and we chew and drink coffee for a while without saying anything, and then I
remember the dream of the house I was in with my father, that they were after me, and that he helped me get out before it was too late.
“Is your father alive?” I ask, then wait before saying:
“
My
father is dead. That’s not so strange, he would have been more than eighty now and maybe dead no matter what had happened. It is really much worse than the others are dead. But the odd thing is that
it took me six years to realise it is unbearable. Can you understand that?” I say, shaking my head, and he points at me and says:
“Problem,” and I do not deny it. When you run naked through your hall in the night and on impulse smash the wall mirror into powder, you do have a small problem, that goes without saying. I nod and openly admit it, and he points to his own heart.
“Problem,” he says
again. And I can understand that. He is thousands of miles from the place where he has lived for most of his life, and perhaps he has a father in a village in the far north of Iraq and he will never see him again, or that father is dead, and someone did kill him, and then he comes here, and the first word he learns is “thanks” and the third is “problem”. Then “hi” in the middle is not of much help.
I nod again.
“I
have
seen you at night, you know,” I say. He cocks his head and looks at me enquiringly, and then I put my face in my hands and rock my body back and forth, and while I am doing this I realise I may have gone too far. I cautiously glance up at him. His eyes are shining and he strokes his moustache again and again, but he nods. Very slightly. I hasten to fill up his cup and pass
him the basket of oatcakes. He is polite and takes some and has a mouthful of coffee, and then he puts his hand on the book and pushes it towards me and then opens his hands. I am to receive yet another gift. It is too much, really. I turn it over and see it is
Memed, my Hawk
by Yasar Kemal. I remember well when I read it fifteen years ago. Remember the chair I was sitting in and the colour of
the curtains and the colours of the paint on the walls in the apartment in Bjølsen where I lived then, and the humming sound of buses on their way in to the roundabout outside my windows and the brakes at the bus stop and the doors opening. Remember the Irish music I played each day that became linked for ever with the burning thistles on the Tsjukorova plain and the stockings that Memed’s sweetheart
knitted in a unique pattern meant especially for him. And I remember who gave me that book, and that I asked if she could knit a pair of stockings like that for me. And she did, as well as she could from Kemal’s description in the book. And suddenly her face is back, and the years when I saw
that
face, and the scent of her and the way she walked, and the way she ran her fingers through her hair
to push it away from her eyes, and then the face again as it was in the labour ward twice with me on my knees by her bed, and once more as it was at the end, distorted and furious, and at once my throat starts to hurt. I desperately clear it and stand up, I take his hand and say:
“Thanks,” and I cough again. “Just a moment,” I say and put down the book and leave the table and walk through the
living room to the bathroom in the hall. There I turn on the tap and put the plug in and let the water fill the basin more than halfway up. I take a deep breath and hold it down and bend and push my face into the water. It is icy cold, but I stand like that until I have to breathe. This time I dry my face thoroughly in a big towel hanging on the wall. I run my hands through my hair and look at myself
in the mirror. I do not know whom I resemble any more. Then I go back. He sits on his chair and has not moved. He looks at me, and I know what he is going to say. I nod.
“Problem,” I say. No question.
12
TIME SLIDES INTO
April. It is spring, no doubt about it. I reread books. I have made a list of the twenty I have liked the best, and after several sittings it is down to ten.
Memed, my Hawk
is one of them. I am looking for something, but I do not know what.
My brother is discharged from hospital after a short stay in the psychiatric ward in the basement, the bunker, as it is called. I do
not visit him. There is no point, and anyway they cannot give him any help there that he would accept. So he does not stay long, and when he gets home he is into divorce proceedings at once. I talk to Randi on the telephone. She is the one who calls me.
“He is completely apathetic,” she says. “He doesn’t give a damn. Won’t you talk to him?”
What am I to say to that? She likes to fight, and now
there is no resistance. That makes her confused and angry. But it is not my problem.
“Just get it over with,” I say.
“It shouldn’t be
that
easy,” she says.
“Oh, yes, it should,” I say. “Here today, gone tomorrow. That’s how it is.”
*
She moves out one Saturday, with David and a good deal more, and then he is alone in the big empty house on Fetsund. He buys her share of the house, and that
cleans him out and then some. The house is mortgaged up to the hilt.