The Half Brother: A Novel (9 page)

The Old One attempted to close the door yet again, but the caretaker leaned his frame in and the smile had disappeared now. “I think you forgot this on the stairs.” He rummaged in his jacket pockets and at last produced a bunch of clothespins. “Careful with those. Someone might have had a nasty fall. Hope your hand’s better soon. And Vera.”

Bang limped up to the housewives, who immediately encircled him. The Old One shut the door, put the clothespins in a drawer and hurried out to the bathroom. Vera sat in the empty bath, the towel over her shoulders, hugging herself, her head against her bony knees. Boletta gently caressed her back and Vera allowed her to do so. Together they carried Vera into the bedroom again. There they put on her blankets and quilts, silks and creams, and she fell into dreams immediately in the warm light. “I looked at the towels in the laundry basket,” Boletta whispered. “She hasn’t bled any more.” “Good. That means we won’t have to get the doctor here.” They went out into the dining room so as not to wake Vera. Still dust glittered over the furniture and along the walls, on lampshades and over paintings. The windows were streaked with soot and dirt. Soon they would have to begin the spring cleaning. “Who was it who called?” Boletta asked. “That fool of a handyman.” “Don’t call him a handyman, Mother. His name is Bang. He’s the caretaker.” The Old One stared out of the window. “What did you say?” “His name is Bang!” The Old One laughed. “That handyman had a whole flag in his buttonhole. And what did he do in the war? Search the attics for Jews?” “Be quiet!” Boletta snapped. “Don’t tell me to keep quiet! I’ll say what I want to.” “What did he want then?” “To hand in the clothespins. That you dropped on the floor.” “Did he say anything?” “What about?” “Perhaps he’d seen something.” The Old One sat down on the divan and sighed. “It’s only nine in the morning, and it’s already been a long day. I’m exhausted.” “Why don’t you lie down with Vera then?” “I’ll keep an eye on her, that’s for sure. Off you go to your work. And if you happen to see a bottle of Malaga on the way, please bring it home with you.”

The Old One turned around and fell asleep without another word. Boletta went into the bathroom to wash. There was no more hot water, so she drenched herself in the perfume she’d been saving up for long enough now. At least she wouldn’t smell bad when she arrived late for work at the Telegraph Exchange on the first day after the end of the war.

She peeped in on Vera. She was asleep, and at that moment, in such light, she resembled the child she had been, not so very long ago.

The Old One heard the bang of the door and the quick steps on the stairs. She clasped her hands over her breast and gave up a short prayer, almost shameful, for hadn’t God, if He was indeed somewhere in us or between us, in the power of word and thought, enough to sort out as it was?

The Telegraph Exchange

Eighteen women sit beside each other in front of the switchboard on the first floor of the Telegraph Exchange, and the nineteenth still hasn’t got there even though its already nineteen minutes to ten. Seat number eight from the right is not occupied, and Boletta hurries through the low, rounded room and just manages to hang up her coat by the director’s table before taking her seat, for she has seen Miss Stang. The manageress herself (she is the one who has been here longest), and the one, as a result, who has the stiffest neck and the most frequent headaches, makes a careful note in her logbook, and gives Boletta a hard stare as the newcomer plugs in and affixes earphones and microphone. The other women turn toward her momentarily and give her a resigned smile. Everything’s chaotic today anyway. Today the network is in tatters. Today all that can be done is to make the best of it, and there are just these nineteen women and the manageress controlling Norway now. They send signals along power lines across mountains, in cables beneath towns; they weave in to the right apparatus in this apartment and that home, so all of a sudden it rings and someone can lift the receiver to hear a voice they thought was lost, the voice of someone they may love who has something precious and beautiful to say. And they connect all these voices to conversations, they bind the country tight with threads of words, in a flood of sound waves, they open the lines to a thrill of electricity, they conduct this language and decide who it is who gets through. A fisherman from Nyksund will talk to his daughter, who is a maid in Gabel Street. A woman from T0nsberg wants to be put through to Room 204 at the Bristol. A girl from Hamar is trying to find her fiance and begs tearfully for the numbers to Victoria Terrace, 19 M0ller Street, and each and every hospital across the city. Someone too wants to call Grini, and a teacher from Drammen is searching for a colleague in Vads0, but Finnmark is closed, Finnmark is still out of touch and it never ends, there’s a line on the lines from Stockholm and Copenhagen and London, they’re red hot and the relays are burning and sometimes the lines get crossed and several conversations end up confused on the same line. But it doesn’t matter, because today everything is chaotic anyway — a true chaos — for peace has broken out and these nineteen women, Boletta number eight from the right, are Norway’s shadow cabinet. I saw them once, and I remember it with a curious clarity and intensity, because it was the day both the Old One and King Haakon died. I was seven and Mom had fetched me from school and taken me with her to the Exchange to tell Boletta, to tell her that the Old One had died in a traffic accident and that Fred was in Ullevål Hospital, uninjured, but in shock and unable to talk. We went first into the enormous public hall, and I saw the painting that all but covered the furthermost wall inside, and then we went up to the first floor, the switchboard, and Mom stood in the doorway and held my hand. We couldn’t see Boletta among the women who sat there, all thin and in black they were, and I believed they already knew the Old One was dead, that that was why they were so gloomy and gaunt, but that was impossible since only Mom and I knew that the Old One had been knocked over at the Palace Park, when she went there with Fred to look at the mourning wreath that hung from the balcony on the day of King Haakon’s passing — September 21, 1957. But at that moment I imagined there was nothing they didn’t know, for after all they heard everything that was being said, and now they were passing it on, that the Old One was dead. They talked and talked into tiny mouthpieces and wore heavy ear muffs that crackled, and as we stood looking for Boletta an even older woman came over to us (she was in black too), and with a completely bent neck as if her head had been screwed on at the wrong angle and couldn’t move. And she asked, in a not over-friendly way, what we wanted, and Mom said that we were looking for Jebsen — it was so strange when she said it, her whole name, Boletta Jebsen. Was it perhaps her break now? Then the woman smiled as crookedly as her head was fixed, and told us that Boletta Jebsen didn’t work here any longer, at this very switchboard, because she had been moved down to the basement several years ago, and were we not aware of that? Mom went red and all funny, and we went down to the public hall again and she asked me to wait there while she went to fetch Boletta. I stayed there in the high vaulted hall and looked at Alf Rolf sen’s fresco. There were only men in the picture, men clearing broad swathes through forests, men heaving cables across mountains and under towns, men erecting telegraph posts. It was a heavy, precise ballet of labor, and these pictures resembled sacred stories, as I remember them now, like the stations of the cross. And after that it was the women who blessed this labor by connecting it — connecting the electric signals in relays and sending them off on their journeys. And perhaps it’s just me adding to my own recollection, connecting my writing and pictures to the memory in some great dialogue with myself, but I state it nonetheless — I was seven years old and I believed I was standing in a church. The telegraph building in Tolbu Street became a cathedral, that day the Old One and King Haakon died and Fred was struck dumb, and the thin black-clad women were souls in mourning who called on God through their cords and apparatus. I remember Mom being gone a good while. Then at last she came back, alone, and she still hadn’t found Boletta. “She must be eating,” she whispered. And now we went to the canteen, but she wasn’t eating. She was standing behind the counter serving coffee. When we sat together in the taxi to go up to Ullevål Hospital, Boletta said that coincidence knew no limits; the Old One had come to Norway in 1905, the very year King Haakon came, and now they had left this life on the very same day. “God has to have a sense of humor,” she said, and lit a cigarette. Mom was suddenly enraged and told her to be quiet, but all this is far in the future, and I should realize that myself, that one shouldn’t break a narrative like this. How many times have editors scrapped a
flashback,
without even bothering to read it, for flashbacks mean trouble, and
flashforward
even more. These become the detritus of the editing room, and on the occasions when I have painstakingly researched poetic retrospective reflections, as well as all the anticipated memories, I’ve been told that what you can’t convey in the present tense, in hard currency, is nothing but bullshit and artistic ambition that you can take back home and make short films with.

And instead I cut back to Boletta, to where she’s sitting number eight from the right on that first day after the end of the war, threading the electric signals through the country as she thinks of Vera. But there isn’t time to think of anything other than the conversations that have to be connected, for everyone in the country is falling over each other to get a word in edgeways and Boletta is in the
present tense,
she is
now.
She is aware of an incipient headache; it creeps along her neck and spreads out toward her forehead like a magnetic wind — and they call the pain
Morse.
For it will attack sooner or later and render many of them sleepless and nerve-racked, and when finally one o’clock comes Boletta can go to the staff room along with half the duty team, but the conversations continue in there — conversations that have to be listened to. Boletta remains silent, thinking about Vera and Vera’s blood, and the other women pay no attention, for they’re used to Boletta’s silence — she has never become one of them, one of these telegraph women, all of whom resemble one another despite their different ages. They come from spacious apartments in Thomas Heftye Street, Bygd0y Alley and Park Road; they are perhaps the youngest from a flock of brothers and sisters, and have suddenly found themselves left over. They have spent at least one summer in France — in Nice or Biarritz — where they ventured down to the beach, their parasols at the ready, and the oldest among them are even paler thanks to the vinegar they rubbed on their skin. They are unmarried, childless, have barely known the touch of a man’s hand, and speak two languages stiltedly. Boletta is a spinster too, but she has a daughter, and this is not only unusual, it is unheard of. They’ve never quite got to the bottom of this scandal, and they’ve long since given up hope of finding out more than they already know, and that’s almost less than nothing. All they do know is that Boletta Jebsen lives with her Danish mother, who apparently was a star of the silent film world in her younger years, and with her daughter Vera, who was born in 1925, and although these bird-like women from the Exchange go to church each Sunday, read their Bibles and are otherwise God-fearing in every respect, they don’t set much store by virgin births and miracles of that kind. But now they’re falling over each other to get a word in, of lost fathers released from Grini and brothers they imagined were dead but who suddenly emerged from hiding places in the depths of Nordmarka. Each one has a hero in their family today, and each has at least one story to tell, but suddenly they fall silent almost as if someone has unplugged them, and Boletta realizes they’re all looking in the direction of the door — she turns and Stang is standing there. The manageress, who is by no means a participant in chitchat at break times, would have preferred the professional discretion of official silence. She’s looking in Boletta’s direction and nods, her head bent. “Director Egede wants to talk to you. Now.” Miss Stang returns to her table before Boletta can ask what this is about, and none of the others says anything at that moment, but perhaps they’re thinking, not without a certain triumph and Schadenfreude, that now the Director’s had enough and the top floor’s going to put its foot down — Boletta Jebsen has come in to work late for the very last time, and there are plenty of young women of spotless conduct who would give their eye teeth for positions at the Exchange. Perhaps they do think that way, privately, but to say so openly isn’t allowed, for when put in front of Egede, the man behind the door on the floor above, they will stand together with military precision. Instead they help Boletta to tidy her hair, they lend her a pocket mirror and powder, and she’s moved by their thoughtfulness as she’s given a word of encouragement for the long journey up to Egede’s office. And when she finally knocks on the door, she thinks this herself, but with no hint of triumph,
Today I’ve arrived late for the very last time, and now were going to be left high and dry.
She hears Egede’s order to
Come in,
and she barely remembers opening the door and closing it behind her. Egede is sitting in his leather chair behind his enormous desk, and Boletta walks slowly toward him, collects herself and curtsies; she curtsies like a schoolgirl before the headmaster, and it angers her — and the anger does her good.