The Half Brother: A Novel (73 page)

But Fred still hadn’t shown up. And when this dragged on over a week — the first time he’d disappeared for such a stretch at one time — Mom came into my room while I was sitting composing the opening lines of what would become my story, “Fattening.” She came in without knocking and proceeded to go through his drawers, look in the wardrobe and peer under the bed. All she found was that nothing was missing — everything lay where it should lie, nor had he taken anything with him. Then she sat down beside me. I took the sheet of paper out of the machine and put it in my drawer. “Barnum,” she said. “We don’t need to keep secrets from each other, do we?” I didn’t answer that. I figured it was a trap, and that keeping quiet would be my strongest card. Mom’s face was pale and sleepless. “You can’t keep secrets,” she said, when she realized an answer was there in hiding. “Do you really think I didn’t find the condoms?” That was certainly something I couldn’t respond to, and for a time the two of us were silent. Then Mom gave a laugh. “Barnum, Barnum,” she said. It was Fred who’d gotten them. My mouth was under lock and key I realized I’d do pretty well under interrogation. Mom sighed and ran her hand through my curls, which had sprouted once more, higher than ever. “Has Fred said anything to you?” she murmured. “About where he is?” And I remembered what I’d promised him, and that brothers didn’t squeal on each other. “I don’t know,” I told her, my voice as quiet as possible, as though our conversation was being bugged. “Look me in the eyes, Barnum! You’re not lying to your own mother?” I looked her in the eyes. It was not a pretty sight. It was as if her eyes were hanging by two thin threads above shadows of skin. I couldn’t tell her there was a chance Fred had gone to search for the Greenland letter. “Perhaps he’s at Willy’s,” I said instead. Mom’s eyes narrowed. “Willy? That idiot of a trainer?” I nodded. “He’s been there before.” Mom found him in the telephone book and went over there in a taxi, to the other side of town, that same evening. She didn’t want to phone and give Fred the chance to slip away once more — if indeed he was there at all. Boletta and I sat at home in the living room waiting. Her headache had passed, but it was as if she were absent, and was disappearing gram by gram. Perhaps that was what it was like to die, that you dried up like a juicy piece of fruit that’s been in the sun too long. I wondered if I might use some of this for my fattening story. Boletta looked around at me and smiled. “You look thoughtful,” she said. “Or are you just sad?” “What do you thinks happened?” I asked her. “I’m too old to believe anything at all, Barnum. So I believe nothing before I know for sure.” Boletta was drinking tea, and she slowly stirred the spoon around her cup. “But then you don’t think,” I said. “You know.” Boletta sighed. “I only know that Fred is restless. He wanders.” I moved closer. I liked the aroma of the sweet tea. I liked having Boletta all to myself. “Wanders? Around in the streets? But then I’d have seen him.” “Oh, no. He wanders a lot farther afield now. Much farther. And there’s no one who can stop him.” “Can’t we?” Boletta shook her head. “Fred’s a night man, Barnum.” She drank up the last of her tea, and there was a clump of brown sugar left at the bottom of the cup that she ate with her spoon. “And I’m not?” I asked, my voice quiet. “No, Barnum. You’re no night man.” I went into the bedroom. I was no night man. I was the one who stayed. I’d travel in different ways. I had a laughter machine, a typewriter, and a measuring tape with two different sides. I managed. And I remember something, something I was told by someone, and I mention it now and pass it on. And it isn’t a story but rather a picture, a picture that floats up from a story rather like a photograph from developing fluid. A mother in Siberia stands beside a golden beach looking out over the sea day after day eating sunflower seeds she has in her hand. A stranger asks her what it is she’s looking for. “My son,” she replies. “He hasn’t come back yet.” “Has he been away long?” the stranger asks in ignorance. “Eighteen years,” the mother replies, and chews her sunflower seeds as she stares out over the sea.

Mom came back late that evening. I ran out into the living room. She’d already sat down on the sofa. There was something about her that was different. I’d never seen her like this before. She hadn’t taken off her coat and she clutched her handbag on her lap with both hands as if it was the only thing that kept her from falling. And yet there was the ghost of a smile on her lips, and it was this smile that somehow didn’t fit in with the rest of her. Boletta grew impatient but kept quiet and didn’t bang about with her stick, for she’d seen that there was something about Mom that evening too. And I could see that Boletta’s dry eyes were huge with wonder and not a little angst. At last Mom said something. “Fred’s gone to sea,” she said. Boletta sat down on the sofa. “To sea? Are you sure?” Mom whispered now. “Willy told me. Willy Halvorsen, I mean.” Boletta let out her breath. “Is he to be relied upon?” she asked. “A simple boxing trainer?” Mom nodded. “He helped Fred get hired.” Mom looked at me but said nothing. Boletta helped her off with her coat and still refused to be convinced. “How can you be so sure? That Willy Halvorsen couldn’t even teach Fred to box properly!” Mom got up. “I phoned the office, the ship owner’s office. Fred’s gone to sea.” We looked at each other. Boletta shrugged her small shoulders. “Well, well. It isn’t the worst thing that’s ever happened. But he could have said goodbye before he left.” It was only now Mom started crying. She had to sit down again. She shook. Boletta tried to hold her, but it didn’t help. And it came home to me that Mom was suddenly thinking she’d never see Fred again. And yet he did come back, but each time he left again it was like a small death, a small death that grew bigger all the time and became a memorial service in Majorstuen Church — a funeral with no body, just a huge sense of loss — and it was myself, as I’ve mentioned before, who gave the eulogy. Boletta let Mom cry till she had no more tears, and yet it wasn’t the tears that ran out but rather her own strength. And I had the same thought, that Fred had left us for good, for a moment later Boletta asked, “What sort of ship has he got himself mixed up with?” “The
Polar Bear,”
Mom breathed. “Yes, but where’s it bound for?” Mom looked at neither Boletta nor me but just down, down. “Greenland,” she said. And she looked up as she spoke the word, worried and all twisted, and she spoke the words we’d repeat so often when we tried to comfort ourselves. “And he didn’t even take a sweater with him.”

I went to the bedroom again, the bedroom that perhaps was mine now — perhaps that evening I’d gotten my own room — as Fred went on his way to Greenland aboard the
Polar Bear.
And if they passed R0st at that moment, before heading north toward the blue horizon and the sinking, green sun — I hoped that Skomvaer would light up for them, the final lighthouse, Fresnell’s crystal flash, to burn their image into the wind.
A warm greeting I send all of you at home from the land of the midnight sun in the land of ice and snow.
Perhaps Fred would find a musk ox. Perhaps he’d have to eat seal meat. Was that Fred’s thinking, that he had to follow in the same footsteps, sail in the wake of the SS
Antarctic
that went there to the northern seas sixty-six years before? Did he have to do that in order to find the letter? Did he have to see the same sun that greatgrandfather had seen — feel the cold and hear the shifting of the ice — before he started searching? Perhaps he’d find him, frozen in a glacier, a coat around a skeleton, and in the pocket of that coat a stub of a pencil that once had scribed the letter. I was happy, yes, happy that Fred had gone. But it gave me no joy. I put away the Diplomat — it was too late to compose any more, enough had been done already — and I lay in bed with the laughter machine instead. I put it on. It laughed away under the quilt. I listened to that mechanical laughter. It was heartless and evil. If snakes could have laughed they’d have laughed like that. The laughter I’d thought so generous when I listened to it with Peder, so generous and infectious, filled me now with great, restless blackness. And it came home to me that laughter doesn’t work when you’re alone. I had to write this down so I wouldn’t forget it. Perhaps I could make use of such a revelation. That laughter yearns for company. But I was asleep before I got that far, and the batteries in the mechanism went flat, and the laughter got slower and deeper and deeper. Finally it died out altogether with a tiny click, and only a low and distant hissing remained, like the wind in a long-abandoned house, I could imagine. Then the hissing died out too, and left in its wake fine thread spun with nothing my dreams could hang to dry on. Mom woke me. “We’re going to the Exchange,” she told me. “And there’s no need for you to sleep in Fred’s bed yet!” I got up at once, shameful and sleepy for I’d barely slept at all. “Can I come with you?” I did go with them. Boletta had on her finest garb, but right outside the heavy door in Tolbu Street her nerve failed her and she grew reluctant and demanded we should go back. She’d got her headache — the Morse — but Mom shoved her decisively inside, and there we stood, in the great hall in which Boletta hadn’t set foot since she resigned the day King Haakon and the Old One died nine years previously. It was no longer silent here, as in a church. Now the hall was more reminiscent of a repository, a repository for conversations and telegrams. There was humming everywhere, as if a giant swarm of bees was moving from corner to corner at a furious pace. Shoes chased over the stone floor. The clock on the wall jerked time forward with firm clicks. Mom gave Boletta a tug. “Don’t just stand there gawking!” But Boletta did just stand there gawking. “Changed,” she whispered. “What are you talking on about?” Mom demanded. “Ships’ names can be written as one word,” Boletta said. “As long as they don’t come to more than fifteen letters.” “The
Polar Bear”
Mom said, and quickly worked it out with her fingers. “That’s just twelve letters. Let’s get it sent.” And we climbed the broad stairs to the first floor. Boletta greeted some of the women, but they no longer had any idea who she was, and just hurried past And each time Boletta went unrecognized she became more stooped — yes, she grew smaller and smaller with every step. Not even Director Egede stopped — that poor wreck of humanity — he just halted on the landing below and looked at us, as if something dawned on him at the sight of Boletta, and she met his gaze stubbornly and expectantly. But it was to me the wretched creature spoke. “The little genius,” he said, and laughed. And Miss Stang, the manageress, the virgin of the relays — she’d been pensioned off long ago and sat at home in her dark, two-room apartment in Uranienborg with a damp cloth over her brow to ease her stinging headache. And she’d seen the black, Bakelite telephones exchanged for gray and white contraptions — low and discreet — which for a short period in the 1970s were replaced by impractical and ridiculous things in the most lurid colors — red, yellow and orange — colors that have nothing whatsoever to do with telephones. These phones actually stood on their own dial plates, and for that reason were called homophones by some quick-witted individuals — because you dialed the number from behind. And later the Exchange itself was shut down as there was one great explosion of verbal diarrhea in the 1990s; the whole industry was privatized and thrown to the four winds. It was impossible to get away from cordless conversation — the most intimate of things were shouted out at restaurant tables, secrets were spilled in supermarket lines and at bus stops. You were forced to listen to other people’s arguments, threats and billing and cooing — in short, society became one big bedroom where everyone talked to everyone else but mostly to themselves, and no one had anything to say

And so we came to the long-distance message section. There was a line. It was from here the most urgent communications were sent, those that were a matter of life and death and which couldn’t be calculated. Because the voice is an imprecise instrument; the voice is full of misunderstandings, changes of emphasis, slips of the tongue and exaggerations. But the telegram is unmistakable, silent and clear — the telegram is reserved for catastrophe and for affairs of the heart. Eight women were sitting here, each at individual desks. None of them knew Boletta either. We said nothing. The telephone is wearing on the nerves and on one’s hearing, and telephone operators shouldn’t work for any more than four hours at one stretch. The sending of telegraphs primarily affects the hand and the fingers, and can lead to cramping and arthritis. Mom had scribbled down her message on a scrap of paper, and she handed this to the operator once her turn came, and the operator found the right codes and keyed in the scant but significant words. And I saw in my mind’s eye that at that very moment, the wireless operator on board the
Polar Bear
could interpret the message, translate the various dots to letters, and go up and deliver it to the new boy, who wasn’t so much as green about the gills on this his first passage, and who’d seemingly been a promising boxer given a drubbing by a fairly mediocre opponent from Melhus. “Hi, Nilsen! Mommy’s missing you!” And the rest of the crew, all those there with him in the mess, would snicker and cackle, and Fred, I imagine, would simply crumple up the message and stuff it in his pocket, fed up and embarrassed. And later, when he was on watch, he’d dig it out again, read Mom’s scattering of words and chuck the bit of paper into the sea, where already the icebergs were drifting past like dirty crusts, thudding against the hull and keeping him awake when he should be sleeping.

He didn’t send Mom any reply. Every day she waited for a telegram from the
Polar Bear
— just a word, some sign of life, a ray of hope. It didn’t come. She rushed to the door whenever anyone rang the bell, only to discover it was some salesman or other wanting to palm off Tupperware, or else a rag-and-bone man or Jehovah’s Witness. She chased every one of them back down the stairs. She turned gray in the course of that time. Boletta and I walked on eggshells; the least thing could make her blow her top — and yes, for a time we really feared for her sanity. Boletta whispered to me that waiting was an art, one that took time to learn — few master it, and time itself is the teacher. And after a certain period had gone by without any sound, a single letter or message in Morse from Fred, she calmed down again. It was as if she accepted her fate and submitted to it — a quiescent rage — and one evening, just before the summer holidays, the bell rang once more and Mom didn’t leap for the door. We knew then that she’d entered that quiet time of waiting when one does nothing more than wait — just as the Old One had, before her, made an art of waiting, made it an element of the soul. It was me who went out to open the door. It was Peder. And right behind him was Vivian peering over his shoulder smiling. It was a while since I’d last seen them. I was delighted. I had friends over to visit. “Would it be here that the great, but rather small, writer lives?” Peder asked. I gave a deep bow and let them both in, and we sat down in our room, the room I still didn’t call my own, and Vivian wanted to listen to the laughter machine but I’d forgotten to change the batteries. Instead she asked, “Has Fred gone away?” “He’s in the army,” I replied. And I’d no idea why I said exactly that, but that was my answer all the same, that he was in the army. Peder gave a long, loud whistle. “Well, the country’s in safe hands. Now we can all sleep peacefully in our beds at night.” Vivian looked at me. “Where?” she asked. I had to think. The lie had started growing already. Like a worm it quite simply divided in the middle to become two lies, and in that way it would go on — it was pure science. “That’s secret.” Vivian lowered her gaze. “Secret?” Peder began to whistle again, and the liar had to find something else to talk about. I thumped Peder on the shoulder. “Couldn’t the model get us into that film club again?” I said, rather louder than necessary. Peder stopped whistling abruptly. “Mom’s finished with him.” “Finished? Is she completely finished with the painting?” Peder suddenly got annoyed and stood up. “Did you hear what I said, or not?” I’d heard what he’d said all right, but I didn’t understand what he meant. Vivian looked away so there was no salvation there. If only I’d remembered to buy batteries for the laughter machine, everything would have been different. I hurried to find the essay I owed Peder. He was still standing facing away. He just snatched the piece of paper out of my hands. I’d chosen
Describe a job you’ve done.
Peder looked at the title. “I said you should choose
The advantages and drawbacks of modern technology.
Damn it all!” “I’ve really managed to cover both topics in the same essay,” I told him cautiously. Peder started reading. “You’ve written about when we were extras in
Hunger,
you idiot!” “Yes, and so I’ve written about the development of the movie camera.” “Gosh,” Peder said. Vivian wanted to see it too and read aloud.
“It’s beyond all doubt that the lighter and smaller the camera becomes, the better it is for filming, because the director can follow the actors, or that which he might otherwise be filming, in a simpler way. But the cameras size mustn’t affect its ability to film in breadth as well as in depth. This was one of the things I came to realize when I, along with my two best friends, acted as an extra in the new film
Hunger,
which unfortunately has not yet had its premiere.”
Peder turned slowly and smiled. “Good, Barnum. This is good. I get the distinct whiff of an A here.” But Vivian just sat facing even more deliberately away. Peder and I looked at each other, and there followed a conversation I’ve pondered over a long while. And I really wish a telegraph operator had been present to punch everything out in Morse, so that a ribbon with those symbols could tick out one night when I understood more, a night when I was the great wireless operator who could see behind the signs and beneath the words. “What is it?” Peder asked. Vivian said nothing. “What is it?” I asked. Vivian glanced over her shoulder. “Am I just your best friend, Barnum?” I was confused. Just? And it struck me that a lie is more comforting than being bewildered — bewilderment had nothing in it to dull the pain, whereas a lie was total narcosis. Perhaps Dad had been right that time when he said it was only possible to understand about two percent of a woman, and that it would take your whole life to do so. “Yes, you and Peder,” I whispered. “Aren’t we?” And now Peder said something even stranger, to Vivian, something I’d really have liked in writing. “This is my essay, right. Not Barnum’s. He’s just written it for me.” We were silent for a time after that until Peder clapped his hands and clambered up onto a chair. “And anyway, I know when the premiere’s going to be!” Vivian got up too, and my hand slid quickly down her light blue sweater that lay in folds along the sharp ridge of her back. “When, you sot!” I shouted. Peder looked down at me. “It’s exactly 84 days away. And tomorrow it’ll be just 83.”