Per Petterson - In The Wake

That’s what I’ve tried to do. Several times.

I stub out my fag in the revolting yellow cream and get up and leave. I could have stayed there for a while to see if Thor the poet from Skjetten would turn up on his bike as he often does at this time of day to get a cup of coffee when he’s desperate with writer’s block, which is often the case, and we could have talked about how hopeless it is, the path we have chosen and gossip over colleagues who may have received a big grant from the state or do not sell books at all, and why that isn’t in the least odd. Instead, I go by the escalator up to the first floor and go into the bookshop to see what others are up to while I am stuck. That is not inspiring. The piles left over from Christmas are still there and have not diminished at all, and there are none of mine on the shelves. That is not so strange. It is more than three years since I last published anything, and the woman behind the counter does not recognise me although I have at least twice sat in front of that counter at a small table signing books. I remember myself at eighteen reading Keats and Shelley and Byron and dreaming of publishing one book, or maybe two, which would be on everyone’s lips and be everyone’s mirror, and when they looked in that mirror they would see the people they might have been and they would have to cry, and after that I would just disappear, become one of the young dead and thus immortal, but now I am one of the middle-aged forgotten. I enquire after the lady who runs the shop because she will know who I am, and we often have a chat. But she is in hospital with a stroke, she has lost the power of speech, the lady behind the counter says in a confidential, solemn voice, without even recognising me, and then I ask if they have any books on Kurdistan or at least on northern Iraq, and she tells me I should go to the library. But I do not go to the library, I go home. That is, I go to the bus stop.

Several of the neighbours are there, standing in the queue, and then they get on the bus with me. They greet me warily. I nod and turn away and walk between the seats to the back, then sit down by the window and lean my forehead against the window glass. The bus starts, I feel a vibration in my chest, in my stomach and groin. Even since I was small I have ridden in buses with my forehead to the window and gazed out without really looking or thinking, just concentrating on the vibration in my body, until my body was that vibration, and when I get off it is like a sleep it hurts to wake up from, my skin electric and open to whatever may strike it and rip it to shreds, and yet the worst thing is when someone gets on that I know and sits down on the seat beside me with a big smile and wants to talk.

On my way in to the stairwell I hear the ringing again. I don’t care, I don’t want to talk to anyone. I open the letter box calmly and fish out The Class Struggle and a flyer from the Co-op and Rælingen parish magazine, and then take out the key and run to my door, fumble with the lock, swear out loud and run into the hall and pick up the phone.

“Just a moment,” I say. I clutch the receiver to my chest and breathe heavily and hold a hand to my side, where it suddenly hurts. Maybe the doctor made a mistake, maybe it is not the rib, maybe it is something else entirely. Then I lift the receiver. It is Randi. Why doesn’t my brother call himself, why is his wife calling?

“I’ve been trying to reach you all day,” she says.

“You have? I have been out. I do sometimes go out, as a matter of fact.”

“It’s your brother. He’s in the Central Hospital,” she says, but that cannot be right, because I have stood looking down at that hospital today, and I should have felt something if he was there, but I did not feel anything.

“What’s he doing there?”

“He’s been admitted.”

“But shit, I’ve just been talking to him.”

“You have? When?”

“Last night. He called me.”

She gets mad, she says something quickly, hard, but she doesn’t speak into the receiver, so I do not catch it, and there is a silence; she is breathing, and I am breathing. I stand in front of the mirror in the hall. It is difficult to focus, but there is someone there, I’ve seen him before. I nod, and he nods, and then I recognise myself.

“So tell me what’s happened.”

“A bottle of port and a hundred Sarotex is what has happened. A hundred Sarotex without capsules so they would work quicker. The capsules were in the bathroom when I came home this morning, and the bottle was in the living room, empty. I rushed all over the house, but I couldn’t see him anywhere. In the end I found him in the shed. It was cold out there, Arvid, I don’t think I can take this any longer,” she says, and that’s probably true. She starts to cry, and I wonder what the hell is Sarotex, and I try to remember when it was I last saw my brother, face to face, but all that comes to mind is that once we fought in the hall at home when he was twelve and I was nine, and we were alone and rolled on the floor and punched and punched each other and tore the coats down from the hooks and knocked the chest over and tipped the vacuum cleaner out of the cupboard which was open, and it burst apart and everything that was in it spilled out on the floor and made a massive cloud of dust and dirt, and then we suddenly stopped because we realised both at the same time that we hadn’t anything to fight about. We never did have. And we were both so embarrassed that he went straight to his room and shut the door and I went out. I ran round the block the longest way and sat down under the poplars beside the dustbin where the blackbird used to sing, and I thought I had lost myself, that I did not know who I was, because I was the one who had attacked him, and I had no idea why.

WHEN MY MOTHER and father came out of the tabernacle in Hausmannsgate after they had stood before the priest and both said yes, my father stared at the ground with a frown on his face, and turned to one of his brothers, Trond, and said: “Nailed to a cross on earth.” And then he laughed.

I don’t know how many people heard what he said, but I heard it from Uncle Trond on the telephone only a month ago, and you might think I would feel my father was a shit for saying a thing like that, for if anything I was a mother’s boy, but I did not, I thought: Christ, did he say that?

It was October, it was sunny, and my mother had not learned to speak Norwegian yet, but she made herself perfectly well understood, and “ja” was more or less the same in Danish, so she got that right. She was slim again, or as slim as she could be. She had let her hair grow down to her shoulders after keeping it short for several years, and it was more curly now than frizzy, and she had a white flower stuck into it above one ear about where Billie Holiday used to wear hers, and like Billie Holiday she needed no clasp to fasten it with. She pushed it in and it stayed put. She probably needed that flower, for not one of her family was there in Oslo that day.

They all were on my father’s side. Four brothers and two sisters and my grandfather Adolf Jansson, a Baptist from the countryside south of Sunne in Värmland, Sweden, who was finally awarded the King’s silver medal of merit for long and acquiescent service at Salomon Shoe Factory, where he had been all his working life, where all his children worked, a factory he must have chosen because of its name or because the people who ran it shared his brand of faith.

Now they were clustered on the pavement. My mother smoked a cigarette, the only one who did, except for maybe Uncle Alf who had ambitions and wanted to leave the factory, and I do not know whether she took in my father’s biblical sense of humour. Anyway, there was complete silence. She stood at the edge of the little group. A whirlwind spiralled in the grey street and lifted her hair, made it big and sparkling in the autumn sunshine, and her dress was pale blue and swung around her strong calves, and it looked like a dance, but I do not think she thought that was what she was doing. Dancing. Her hair settled again, and her dress fell into place, and she stubbed out her fag with the toe of her shoe on the side of a kerbstone, pushed a hand in under her blouse to straighten a bra strap, while my father looked the other way, while they all looked the other way, and then they went down the street to the photographer round the corner in Storgata.