Per Petterson - In The Wake

She bites her lip again and says: “Maybe you had better come in for a while. You don’t look too well.” She opens the door wider and steps aside. I can see into the hall and straight into the mirror hanging on the opposite wall. If that is me in the mirror by God I don’t look well, my face white and unfamiliar, my hair sticking out in all directions and there are big stains on my jacket and the knees of my trousers. How does she dare, I wonder.

She keeps it nice and warm in her place. I feel it on my face as I cross the threshold. There is a chair just to the right of the door. I sit down on that. I do not want to intrude, I don’t know what I am doing here really, it is just that I can’t find my keys. But I have not told her that yet. She stands barefoot in the middle of the hall with a dressing gown tied tightly round her waist with a leather belt, like a paramilitary dressing gown, I think, and she runs her hand through her hair and bites her lip, and I close my eyes and let the heat ooze gently in through my clothes, through my skin until my hands and feet start to tingle so sharply that it hurts, and I could not have moved if I wanted to. But I do not want to. I want to sit right here.

When I open my eyes again she looks different. Her hair has been brushed back from her face.

“I can’t see very well without glasses,” she says. “I thought you were drunk, you frightened me a bit.”

I nod. “I’m not drunk,” I say.

“No,” she says. “You’re not drunk. I can see that now.”

She stands short-sighted in front of me, and I sit on the chair. We are waiting for something. Here in the no man’s land right inside her door; the to-and-fro place, but no place really. Finally, she sits down on the chest underneath the mirror. She is tired.

“Could I just sit here for a bit?” I say. “Then I’ll go away. You go back to bed. I’ll be fine.”

She runs her hand through her hair. “Oh, but I can’t do that,” she says.

No, of course she can’t. We wait again. She thinks my eyes are closed, and they are, in a way, at least very nearly, but I can see her all the same and I like her and I like the skin of her throat and know how warm it is just there and then on and on into extents and roundings beyond comprehension. But she doesn’t know that, I can see she does not, and I would have to talk her out of that belt and that dressing gown and into her bed and then do what I had to do, which I honestly have nothing against, but really am not up to right now, to get into that warmth and thaw myself out as Erik Lagus did in the Stockholm of The Class Warrior thirty-three years ago when I was only ten and knew all there was to know about skin without even giving it a thought, for the warmth was everywhere then, in the walls of houses and rough stones and in the bark of the tall pine tree by the path down to Dumpa and in the hoods of black cars and in my father’s blue T-shirt and what was inside that shirt. But all that was lost long ago, and I do not have the strength to try. It is hard work. It would take me at least an hour to get her there even if it was at all possible, and I only have a few minutes left before I must leave. It is too late now to say I have no keys.

I open my eyes wide, looking straight at her, and then she gets up from the chest, not impatiently, but restlessly maybe, at a loss.

“May I tell you something?” I ask.

“About what?”

“Something about my father.”

She bites her lip again and does not know what to say, and then she says: “I suppose you may. Will it take long?”

“Oh, no,” I say.

*

Only six months before my father died he had to go to hospital. He had been there earlier for a minor operation. Now they were afraid he had cancer. He was seventy-six, but on the few occasions I saw him he looked the same as he had always done. Maybe I was being dim. I don’t know. There were so many other things. My head was full of cotton wool. I was always tired. My first book had just been published. Almost everything in that book was about him, and I knew he had read it, my mother said he had, but he never mentioned it when I went home to visit. Their neighbours too had read it and the other old chaps stopped him on the road in front of the house and said: “Well, well, Frank, we didn’t know you used to be such a tough guy,” and then he just smiled secretively and would not say a word. Perhaps he was a little proud, or he smiled because he had no choice. I will never know. But he and I could not talk.

Then my mother called one day.

“Your father has been in hospital for several days,” she said. “You have to go and see him.”

I’m sure I knew he was there. One of my brothers must have told me, but I hadn’t taken it in. It was nothing to do with me. I had never been to see anyone in hospital before. But now I did go.

It took less than half an hour to drive to Aker Hospital. It was early October and the rowan berries hung in heavy clusters at the edge of the forest alongside Gamleveien on the journey in. All the leaves had blown away in a few nights, all the colour was gone, and the berries hung as the only decorations, and had ripened and fermented in the cold weather and were about to split, and I had heard the thrushes liked them especially just then. They gobbled them up and afterwards were so intoxicated they were not able to fly straight. They could not get enough of them. It’s the truth. Someone I trust had told me, and that was what I was thinking about as I drove in to the hospital along Gamleveien, past Lørenskog station and on to Økern and Sinsen; how the thrushes ate fermented rowan berries and got drunk. I had never seen it myself, but I could picture it clearly, and I remember I wished the road to Aker Hospital would be longer than that half-hour. But it was not, and there was hardly any traffic, so it took even less time. So I stayed in the car in the car park for more than ten minutes. Several more cars arrived as I sat there, and almost everyone who got out carried flowers or nicely wrapped boxes of chocolate, and some had brought books for the people they were visiting. I hadn’t brought anything.

In the end I got myself out of the car and walked towards the entrance to the surgical wards where a porter gave me directions, and then went two floors up. When I came through the glass door from the staircase and out into the corridor my father stood at the other end. I saw him at once and stopped. I don’t know whether he had had the operation and was on his feet again, or if he was still waiting. I am sure he did not see me because he stood with his face to the wall, one hand above his head and the other on his stomach, and it struck me as an odd way to stand. I looked around and there was no-one else in the corridor just then. Only him at one end and me at the other, and I took a few steps towards him, and then I saw that his body was shaking, was trembling, and I went on a few more steps before I realised my father was crying. Then I stopped completely. Never once in my life had I seen him cry, and I realised from the way he was clutching his stomach that he cried because he was in pain, and he must have been in tremendous pain.

I will tell you something about my father. He was past forty when I was born, but he was different from the other men where we lived. He was an athlete. I mean a real pro. He had taken his body as far as it could go and filled it with a strength you would think it could not hold, and you could see it in the way he walked and in the way he ran, in the way he talked and in the way he laughed that there was a fire inside him that no-one could ignore, and it was clear from the way that he was seen that he was body and energy both, that he reached out and was heading somewhere, that there was something about him. And he had been that way for as long as anyone could remember. He had trained and trained to make his body into a crowbar, a vaulting pole to break free with and be lifted by. He had worn tracks into mountainsides on his way up and on his way down to strengthen his legs to get better on the football pitch, on the ski run and in the boxing ring, and on his way through town to the factory from Galgeberg and Vålerenga where he lived, and no-one had a strength like his. He had crossed the Østmark by every single path, up every single ridge and down on the other side, and it made him into an all-rounder. Good at everything and best at nothing. He was not fast enough. He could keep running in the tracks longer than most, but weaker men crossed the finishing line before him. He was never frontman, never anchorman, and even though no-one was untouched by his capacity for taking a beating in the ring, standing firm with his little smile, driving his opponent crazy, for much longer than anyone thought possible, it was hardly ever enough to make him one of the chosen few sent out to tournaments to fight for the club and its colours and be seen by the crowd the way he had longed for. He had the strength and he had the will, but he did not have the speed nor the imagination to give him that little extra. But that did not break him, as you might have thought. He just went on, year after year, and far beyond the point in time when what he trained for would be possible, and it made him different from all the other grown men I knew. He could endure anything. And now he stood leaning against the yellow wall of the corridor in Aker Hospital crying because he was in pain. We had not had a proper talk for as long as I could recall, maybe not since the year I was twelve and we sat by a bonfire far into the Lillomark Forest, and he showed me how a boy only 142 centimetres tall could make an asshole of 160 afraid. I suddenly felt faint and ill. There were only the two of us in that corridor, and I could not take another step. No way. I stood there for I don’t know how long, and I remember thinking it was incredibly hot, that I was thirsty and wanted a drink, but I am sure he did not know I was there, for he never turned round, just held his hand to his stomach and his face to the wall as he wept, and that was what saved me. I held my breath, turned silently and walked away. Straight out of the hospital, into the car and then drove home.