Per Petterson - In The Wake

I keep that photograph in a drawer, and it’s just the two of them there, but I can sense the others, they push against the edges of the picture wanting to be in it, and my father likes that, I can see it by the way he smiles. He is at ease again, surrounded by his family, and as long as that lasts he does not have to think about how bewildering it is to find himself there at this moment. For a while it was difficult, but now they stand close, and he has a lady beside him with long dark curly hair. She is Danish. He does not know her very well. She looks obstinate, but she is good-looking in a southern way, like an Italian, or maybe Moroccan, and in the inside pocket of the jacket he fills to bursting point there is a picture of another lady who is Danish too, stuffed between the notes his father gave him for a wedding present. It is stupid and he knows it, but he cannot part with it, and in fact it is not that bad to stand shoulder to shoulder with one attractive lady and have another in his wallet. He thinks of that too as he looks at the photographer and faintly smiles.

The only one who is no way near the picture is my brother. He was put away on a farm belonging to someone my mother knew on an island off the coast of Denmark. There he trudged around among sheep and sheepdogs and thought that all was well with the world. He had very fair hair and was almost eighteen months old. I don’t know how many knew he existed. My father knew, or he would not have been standing outside the tabernacle saying: “Nailed to a cross on earth.”

My brother’s hair is darker now, and thinner. He is forty-six. There is a tube in his mouth and another through his nose, and one is fastened to the back of his hand, and there is a screen by the wall where a curve moves up and down, up and down towards a point it will never reach, and it looks as though it moves a little unevenly, but then I don’t understand such things. I pull a chair to the end of the bed and sit down. It is evening. As I walked down the corridor to ask my way, the nurse on duty stuck her head out and said: “That was none too soon.”

“I couldn’t get here before,” I replied.

But that was not true. I had walked around the apartment for quite a while, and in the end I lay down on the sofa and fell asleep at once, and when I woke up it was far into the evening. I emptied a glass I had poured from a bottle I kept in the kitchen cupboard, brushed my teeth and then got dressed and left.

“I mean he survived by a hair’s breadth. Half an hour more…” she said, leaving the rest to drift. “Are you family?”

“I’m his brother,” I said. “I am the only family he has,” and even if that is not true either, the look she gave me made me so furious that I was still shaking as I went on down the corridor.

“He is stable now,” she said icily behind me, but I did not turn round, merely found the right door and went into the intensive care ward and stopped by his bed.

I sit there for a long time just watching him. His eyes are closed. His eyelids are swollen as his face is swollen, and he looks big and seems immensely heavy beneath the thin duvet on the bed of this white-painted room. He was the first one in our family to pass his examination to go to university. He was the first one in our street to go to university. That’s more than twenty-five years ago. I can remember the black student’s cap that was kept tidily wrapped in soft paper on the top shelf of the cupboard in the hall, and he used it that once only, when he enrolled at the university, because it embarrassed him, but he thought he had to, and then he put it away for good. When I passed my student’s examination three years later and enrolled at the university, it never occurred to anyone that I might want a student’s cap. But then nothing came of it. I never showed up. I lost my courage, or something else was lost, and with my hand upon my heart I cannot say my father was sorry for it.

My brother’s bare chest rises and falls slowly and evenly and the graph makes the same movements on the screen, then he suddenly raises himself on his elbows and starts to speak in a language only drunk men understand. One of the tubes comes loose and falls onto the duvet, and he opens his eyes and looks straight at me.

“You’re stable,” I say. “Relax, for Christ’s sake.” But he does not relax, he starts to shout, and if the name he shouts is mine, I do not recognise it. I go and fetch the nurse. She lays her hand on his forehead and fastens the loose tube, and then he slides down on to the pillow again.

“He doesn’t seem very stable,” I say.

“He is stable, but he doesn’t know you’re here. If you come again tomorrow you may get through to him. He’s full of poison now.”

I feel offended on his behalf. “There’s nothing the matter with my brother, he just can’t stop looking back.”

“Is that so?” she says, smoothing the duvet and straightening the tubes, and looking at the screen as she mumbles: “Of course he’s stable,” and then she says more audibly: “Do you want to sit here a while longer?”

“A bit longer, maybe.” I sit down again and she leaves, and I sit perfectly still looking at him, and then I fall asleep, and when I wake up she is standing in the doorway. She smiles.

“I’ve made some cocoa. Would you like a cup? You can come along to the office with me.”

I haven’t tasted cocoa since I made a jug the morning my daughters moved out. It seems a long time ago. I say yes, please, and get up and follow her. The big hospital is quiet, there are thousands of people here, but they do not make a sound. Only one patient suddenly coughs behind the curtain in the corridor as I go by, and I try to walk without a sound in my lace-up boots, but it’s not easy. In the nurses’ office she pours me a cup, and I sit down on a spare chair drinking the hot cocoa slowly, letting it warm my stomach while she writes a report or whatever it is that nurses write at night. She looks up at me once or twice and smiles. I like her better now.

“It tastes good,” I say, and she smiles and nods and goes on writing, and then I start to cry and get up with the cup in my hand and stand by the window until it has passed and then I sit down again and say: “He’s going to be divorced, you know, but that’s not what this is about.”

Carefully, she puts down her pen and looks at me with absolute calm, and then I tell her about the boat and the fire and all those who died in the flames, and died from the poisonous smoke, and how they lay close together in the companionways, side by side like a single conjoined body, and many lay on top of their children to shield them from the smoke, and some were in the shower with the water running, and that did not help them at all, but there was nowhere else to go, and only those having a ball in the bar had all their clothes on, because it was the middle of the night, the way it is now. And she nods, she remembers that fire, everyone remembers that fire, that’s why it is so difficult to talk about, they all nod and grow quiet, and it is like beating a duvet filled with down; completely numb and dumb, and they nod and nod, but she merely pours me a second cup of cocoa, and I drink it slowly, for it warms my stomach so pleasantly. I wonder whether it is proper cocoa or one that takes five seconds with a teaspoon and boiling water, because it reminds me of the kind my mother made when I was a child, and I look around for the packet to see what it says, and then I tell her of all the discussions we have had since then, my brother and I, about how they died, my two younger brothers and my mother and my father, and I have said it again and again, that they were asleep and died from the smoke and never knew what had happened to them, while he is convinced they were awake and tried to get out, and then could not because the flames were so fierce at that particular place in the boat and the smoke was so thick, and he cannot stop thinking about what their thoughts were just then, what their last feelings were, and I have said it does not do any good to go on thinking like that. “But he cannot stop,” I say. “Six years have gone by, and goddamnit, he cannot stop thinking about it.”