“Early November. It is nine o’clock. The titmice are crashing against the windowpanes. Sometimes they fly unsteadily off after the collision, at other times they fall
to
the ground and lie floundering in the fresh snow before they get back on the wing. I do not know what I have that they want. I look out of the window across
the field to the woods. There is a reddish light above the trees towards the lake. The wind is getting up. I can see the shape of the wind on the water.”
I am writing myself into a possible future. Then the first thing I must do is to picture an entirely different place, and I like to do that, because here it has become impossible. And then there is a ringing. I look into the hall to the door,
but this time it is the telephone. It is almost two o’clock. It is my brother. He is three years old than I am, a partner in a firm of architects, making money.
“Hi,” he says.
“Do you know what time it is?” I say. “It’s Tuesday, damn it, or it
was
Tuesday. Don’t you have to work tomorrow?’
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi. Are you drunk?”
“Not quite. Not quite yet . I think I’m going to be divorced.”
“Oh boy! Welcome to the club. Does Randi know?”
“She’s the one who knows. She hasn’t told me yet. But soon she will. She’s not here. I’m alone.”
“Hey. Really. Who had long hair first? I did. And who cut it off first. Me again. I was the one to stick Mao on the wall, and I was the one who took him down
again
. I liked Bob Dylan first, and I liked opera best, and Steve Forbert I liked first, and
the Smiths and Billy Bragg, and I was the one who said Ken Loach would be important, and now you don’t watch anyone else’s films. I read
Pelle the Conqueror
first, and I read
The Arch of Triumph
first and went to the off-licence to ask for calvados, and it cost more than 200 kroner, in 1973! I was the one who first went to a Vietnam demonstration. By the time
you
came along the war was almost
over. I was married first and divorced first. You beat me by three days with the first child, but that was because I used condoms longer than you did. Maybe you’d never used condoms. Hell, you’re three years older than me. You ought to come up with something I haven’t already done. You could start to paint again, only you know how to do that.”
“That’s a lot of balls, I could make just as long
as list. And anyway, I knew Dad better than you did.”
“Why do you talk about him now? Christ,
Dad
. Why do you say
Dad
? Isn’t is
Papa
any longer? We’ve always said
Papa
.”
“
You’ve
always said Papa.”
“Oh, no, I didn’t.”
“Listen, Arvid. Remember when we got back from Copenhagen after laying the wreaths on the sea along with all the firefighters and policemen and psychiatrists and priests, the
whole shebang; and we went straight to Harald and borrowed his blue van and
drove
to Veitvet and stuffed it full of things from the flat. And then we went off again, to Gothenburg to cross with the ferry one more time with all the stuff we didn’t actually know why we were moving, and we were so bushed that we fell asleep at the wheel before we had gone an hour so we had to stop at a Wayside Inn
and flop on the benches outside, and I asked you if you felt guilty about Dad. You almost fell off the bench even though you were so tired.”
“What are you talking about? I didn’t fall off the bench. I thought we were talking about divorce.”
“I’m talking about divorce. I have no idea what you are talking about.”
“Don’t talk to me about divorce. Shit, I know all about divorce.”
“Right, that’s
good,” he says, and hangs up, and I sit there with the phone in my hand, and then I hang up too, and the night is quiet again. It is dark in the hall, and it is dark outside, there is only light in one window in the next-door block. Mrs Grinde lives there. The neighbours say she has binoculars, and it may be so, I don’t know anything about her, but she cannot be using them now, not unless they are
army ones, and I do not think they are. I read the words on my screen: “I see the shape of the wind on the water.” Did I write that?
I didn’t make a speech on my father’s seventy-fifth birthday. I had nothing against making a speech, but it
did
not occur to me for a moment that I should. We didn’t make speeches in my family. Not for birthdays, not for confirmations, never had any one of us risen
at the table to pay tribute to another. With a single exception. The previous year my mother had been sixty, and I gave a long speech in verse from all her children. I think she liked that, and I think she felt that at last they were getting some dividend for voting Labour and being loyal union members most of their lives so that we should have a better and richer life. It was a fine speech, and
although it might not have won me the Nobel Prize for Literature I was quite proud of it. So on my father’s seventy-fifth birthday I realised she was sitting there staring at me across the table. Dinner was well advanced, I was expecting nothing but peace, so I returned her gaze, and suddenly I realised that she was waiting for the speech I would be making for my father, and her expression told
me she was really wondering what had I thought up this time.
I had not thought up anything. Nor could I spontaneously stand up and invent something. I had nothing to say. I turned and looked at the others at the table, my two brothers who were still alive and all the children and uncles and aunts, and they were all looking at me. The only one who was not looking at me was my father. And suddenly
silence fell at the table.
I get up from the desk, walk into the hall, open the door to the stairwell and listen. I take a few steps, lean
over
the banisters and gaze up. Not a sound. It is the middle of the night, but maybe someone is standing up there and not moving. I clear my throat quietly, but the sound comes out loud and makes an echo and that is embarrassing, and I go in again to the
dark hall and close the door. The two rooms next to my bedroom are empty now, but the doors are open, and it is dark in there too and not as before when at least one of the two girls had to sleep with a spotlight right in her face, yellow light under her eyelids and on into her dream. Now they do that in another place, another man maybe turns on those lights. I close both of their doors. Then I go
into the kitchen. I won’t be able to sleep anyway, I may as well have some coffee.
When my brother and I drove on from Vestby Wayside Inn that early summer of 1990 after the journey to Copenhagen when we had tossed wreaths on to the sea and drunk toasts in the bar with police inspectors, psychiatrists, firefighters and danced with nurses more attractive than we had ever seen before, we were really
in trouble from lack of sleep, we had probably only had half an hour on the benches outside the inn, and that was far too little, but the sun was baking and it was impossible to lie there any longer. The van was hard to drive, at least for me it was, its gear lever on the steering column, which I wasn’t used to, and anyway I hadn’t driven a car for a long time. By the time we
reached
the Swedish
border I was so tired and frustrated, getting into second every time I meant to be in fourth, that I let him drive the rest of the way to Gothenburg. He did so gladly. After all, he was Big Brother and I was Little Brother, and it was
his
neighbour who owned the vehicle.
“I envy you being able to put words to all that has happened,” he said as we swung into the bend past the Lysekil turn-off,
where we had been a few weeks before when the burning ship had been towed in to the nearest harbour, with hoses spraying from a retinue of fireboats, and we stood on the quay and looked up at the empty hull lying under a blue sky with great fan-shaped black patches around the portholes, and a policeman wouldn’t let us go on board. It was Sunday and there were tourists there and people walking and
small boats with dazzling white sails on their way out of the harbour, but no-one looked at the ship except us, and we started to argue with the Swedish policeman there on the long wharf, for we had driven so far, and we did want to go on board, but it was no use, and then I started to cry and I wanted to go for the policeman. My brother held me back and whispered something in my ear, I cannot remember
what, but I went back to the car without resisting. Then we just sat in our seats and looked out of the windows.
He was wrong. I was body only and no words, just as he was, and no matter how much we talked there was
always
air between what we said and what we did. It was like champagne. I had tasted champagne at a publisher’s party some time before and could get my name wrong when someone asked
me who I was. Almost everything we said was wrong.
What we did was drive. We drove the whole time, we spent thousands of kroner on petrol. We couldn’t sit still. We dived under the spaghetti junction on the way in to Gothenburg, and when we came out of the tunnel we drove straight into a wall of water. The rain poured down harder than we had ever seen, it slammed on the roof of the car and streamed
over the windscreen and we couldn’t see a metre in front of us. The world was glittering and milky-white and impenetrable with red dots that grew and grew, and I shouted: “Brake,” and my brother hit the brake. The vehicle in front was suddenly dead ahead with huge rear lights. It was a massive trailer, stock still in the middle of the 70 limit, where it had given up. My brother stood on the
pedal and spun the wheel at the same time, the car swerved and ended up crosswise on the road with the door on my side slap up against the back end of the trailer. T.I.R. it said in huge letters above the number plate.
I started to laugh, hit the dashboard with my palm and said: “A split second more and the whole Jansen family would have been wiped out. Not bad, that two months, and all gone.
Some disappearing act.”
My brother sat with his forehead on the wheel, and didn’t feel like laughing, but then he had to, and then he cried a while, and then it stopped raining. Quite suddenly.
For the rest of the way to the boat we drove in silence, with the new light coming in through the windows, past the bridges and the steep wall of rock on the left, and turned off where the old America
boats had moored, and the emigrants went on board with their chests and trunks for third class right down into the bowels of the ship, and had there been a car deck in those days, it would have been
under
the car deck, in cramped quarters with no other light than a dim bulb in the bulkhead, and what hope had left them. The sea sparkled, flat calm in the sunshine, and from Stigberget the remains
of the shower came, as if from an unknown lake, in waterfalls down the long staircases and streamed out across the asphalt so the spray leaped up from the wheels of the van.
The crossing only took three hours. We could have sat in the saloon and read the bulky Swedish and Danish papers as we usually did, but we were drained and hungry and went straight to the restaurant. We ordered a three-course
meal with beer and schnapps although before we had always just gone to the cafeteria, and we paid by Visa cards which were furry with insurance money. We spent two hours eating, and the third one we sat on deck in low chairs with our
backs
to the land we were approaching. A man stood at the rail gazing into the water. He didn’t move an inch the whole time I was there, and I thought of maybe getting
up and going over to stand there with him, but I never found the energy.
It was evening when we drove ashore, a light evening with warm sea air over the docks, and we drove through the harbour with the windows open and past the new railway station where the goods wagons lay in tight rows on the rails with rusty red fittings and Carlsberg painted on their sides in green. Outside the rebuilt merchant
navy college a white-painted container crane stood on the lawn looking like something from a science-fiction movie. We drove north on the coast road with marram grass along the asphalt the whole way and the sea to the east and the sandy shore right down where we once found a dead seal, and the island with the lighthouse furthest out without its beam now for all we could see, and then on for
the last bit where the gravel crunched under the tyres and the
rosa rugosa
bushes scraped our paintwork at the first turn. It was never going to get dark that evening, only the slanting half-light and the rows of shining seagulls in the shallows as far as the eye could reach. We turned into the avenue of willow trees, drove to the end and parked by the wall, switched off the engine and sat there
saying nothing. The cabin was newly painted yellow, the light in the west behind it and the windows
darker
than everything else around us. A pheasant strutted across the lawn and into the field beyond. My brother watched it go, biting his lip, and I said: “We forgot to buy booze on the boat.”
“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.”