Dag Solstad - Novel 11, Book 18

Bjørn turned fifty. The day was celebrated quietly in his own company, in the splendid isolation of his flat in a Kongsberg tower block. He had made clear in advance that he did not wish any attention, and it was respected. He received an offer from Aftenposten to have the day noted there, if he sent in a picture and gave his vital statistics, as he put it when he mentioned it to Herman Busk. Also the local paper, Lågendalsposten , gave him a call to arrange an interview, but he asked to be spared so nicely that they realised he really meant it when he said that he didn’t want to have a single word in the newspaper, and they left him alone.

He began having stomach pains. After he had eaten. It troubled him and he thought he must see a doctor. But he hoped the pains would go away of themselves, so he put off going to the doctor. They did not. But were the pains really all that intense? He checked how he felt. There was a dull throb of pain, one might say. He had a throb in his teeth and a throb in his stomach. Neither went away. But he did not feel like going to see his good friend Herman Busk, the dentist, in and out of season, choosing to wait until he received his annual reminder. Instead, he decided to go to the doctor. He rang up Dr Schiøtz at the hospital, to whom he used to go. He knew Dr Schiøtz in a way, they had both been walk-ons in various musicals staged by the Kongsberg Theatre Society, and although that was four years ago, he could still continue to use him as his doctor. Dr Schiøtz gave him an appointment straightaway.

He showed up at the hospital at the appointed time and was shown into Dr Schiøtz’s office. Seated behind his desk in a white coat, Dr Schiøtz asked the sort of questions he was used to doctors asking. Bjørn Hansen replied and Dr Schiøtz nodded. He felt his stomach and asked if it hurt when he pressed. ‘No, nothing special,’ Bjørn Hansen said. Dr Schiøtz wrote out a request for an X-ray as he chatted about the old days, relating en passant that he, too, had given up on the Society. ‘The years go by,’ he said. ‘I prefer to sit at home listening to my Mozart.’ That, Bjørn Hansen thought, also seemed better suited to this tall, quiet doctor with his long pianist’s fingers.

After some time he was given a call by Dr Schiøtz. He asked him to come to the hospital. The result of the X-ray had come in. Bjørn Hansen turned pale and took himself there at once. He was shown into Dr Schiøtz’s office, where the doctor sat behind his desk like the last time. He was studying the X-ray. ‘It’s impossible to find anything,’ he said. ‘We must have more tests. We shall get to the bottom of this.’ Bjørn Hansen nodded. Dr Schiøtz listened to Bjørn Hansen’s chest with his stethoscope. Quiet, remote, as always. But suddenly he said, ‘How many patients do you think I’ve had? In my whole life?’ Bjørn Hansen shook his head, astonished at the question. He didn’t know what to say. Dr Schiøtz suddenly looked straight at him, intensely, but with that absent look in his eyes, which everyone had interpreted as reclusiveness and modesty. ‘To have a completely healthy patient cannot be called satisfying from a physician’s point of view, can it? What? It must surely be more satisfying to have someone very ill. It’s a sick person, after all, that the physician can cure. Don’t you agree?’

Bjørn Hansen felt uneasy. It was so strange here. Dr Schiøtz had changed, and this was quite unexpected. It was what he said that made the difference, rather than his manner, which was as Bjørn Hansen had always remembered it. Suddenly Bjørn Hansen understood it all. The man was a drug addict, of course. Why hadn’t he realised that earlier? Dr Schiøtz on stage at the Kongsberg Cinema, the two of them, he and Bjørn Hansen, dancing in the chorus and singing the refrain in cowboy outfits or fishermen’s jumpers, or whatever it was. Always absent. Never properly ‘with it’, though he was bursting with a restless energy and sang resoundingly, but always with a quiet, idiotic smile on his lips. Oh yes, that was Dr Schiøtz, the quiet drug addict. Bjørn Hansen felt dizzy. That no one had seen it before! It was so obvious, after all. But it was obvious now , and only because Dr Schiøtz had used this deviant language. In other words, Bjørn Hansen realised it now only because Dr Schiøtz had given him an invitation to realise it.

This made such a violent impression on him that he barely knew what he was doing. He looked incredulously at Dr Schiøtz, who sat behind his desk in his white coat, his thin fingers fiddling with the stethoscope and his mild gaze absent. Is this real? Why me? Why does Dr Schiøtz wish to initiate me of all people in this? But Dr Schiøtz gave no answer, he just sat there as before, remote and quiet behind his desk. Suddenly Bjørn heard himself say, ‘What bothers me is that my life is so unimportant.’ He had never admitted that to a soul before, not even to himself, although it had been on the tip of his tongue for many years, well, all along, and now he said it. He looked in surprise at Dr Schiøtz. Dr Schiøtz’s absent gaze fluttered, as when someone is moved without wanting to show it. A fluttering, absent gaze, deep inside. ‘And there are still thirty years to go, or something like that, seventeen in any case until I retire with a pension. I have no illusions, at least I don’t think I have.’ He heard himself talking, aloud and in such a curiously innocent tone of voice. What in the world was this? Dr Schiøtz’s gaze fluttered again. Then he smiled, a heartfelt smile. The contact was made.

His stomach was throbbing. Dr Schiøtz was busy trying to find out what it was. He inclined towards the view that the stomach pains were a symptom of something else and did several tests. Which were all negative — or positive, depending on what you were looking for. This meant that Bjørn Hansen had several appointments with this most highly respected hospital physician. He could hear himself talking about things that he hadn’t even talked about with himself before, while the doctor listened, elated. In a state of mild intoxication, most likely. ‘Nearly everything is totally indifferent to me,’ Bjørn Hansen would hear himself say. ‘Time is passing, boredom is everlasting.’ Words that made Dr Schiøtz sincerely glad, he could see, as the doctor was doing his investigations. Could it be the throat? Open your mouth. Could it be the ears? What do the ears have to do with the stomach? Who knows, who knows?

‘You know, I find myself in this town by pure chance, it has never meant anything to me. It’s also by pure chance that I’m the treasurer here. But if I hadn’t been here, I would’ve been somewhere else and have led the same kind of life. However, I cannot reconcile myself to that. I get really upset when I think about it,’ Bjørn Hansen said, once more shaken in his innermost self by the fact that he was really expressing himself in this way in the presence of another person. ‘Existence has never answered my questions,’ he added. ‘Just imagine, to live an entire life, my own life at that, without having found the path to where my deepest needs can be seen and heard! I’ll die in silence, which frightens me, without a word on my lips, because there’s nothing to say,’ he said, hearing the desperate appeal in his words. Spoken to another person who had long ago ceased to function as a human being, who was nothing but an empty shell in his relations with the society in which he had a high and important position. Oh, that sun shining in through the municipal curtains on the window of this doctor’s office at the Kongsberg Hospital! Those nauseating sunbeams in the window frame. The translucent glass in the rectangular windowpanes, sponged down every day as part of the aura of security a hospital must radiate in societies like ours. He was a bit ashamed of his words, for it offended him that a man past fifty spoke about death, and now he had done so himself, loud and clear. A man of thirty can do so, for his death is a disaster, from whatever viewpoint it is seen, being snatched away from his career in one gulp, but for him, Bjørn Hansen, who had recently turned fifty, death would only be the conclusion of a natural process, albeit somewhat early, statistically, and so he simply had to put up with it all, without a whimper, done is done, and the race moves on towards its natural conclusion. Yet he had expressed his horror at having to die without a word to say about it all, not even to himself, and this was, and remained, unbearable to him.