Per Petterson - In The Wake

“What on earth are you doing?”

“I am Zorba,” I say.

“What?” she asks, but I do not reply. I walk across the room with Mrs Grinde in my arms, thinking: let the brain take the first step; and on the way into the bedroom I feel her weight like a tugging in the pit of my stomach, and then the feeling is there. I laugh aloud and shout:

“Here comes Zorba, make way, make way,” and I lay her down on the bed not quite as elegantly as I had planned, and it is like a lousy film we both enjoy, although Zorba is not a lousy film. I stroke her hair and undress her as carefully as I possibly can, and she says:

“You don’t have to be that chivalrous,” and I reply:

“Oh, but I do,” and under her clothes there are other garments she would never have worn on an everyday evening, and there is no doubt they are meant for me. That makes me pretty shaky and even sad, for she certainly has taken a chance, and I do not know if this is something I am able to receive, this boy she has carried in her arms past all the windows in the block, these clothes or rather lack of clothes right next to her skin, and she sees what I am looking at and blushes and bites her lip and refuses to meet my eyes and almost gets angry. Then I sink to my knees with my hands on her knees and a lump in my throat, and if it is not like it was last night it still is great and even more, for Christ’s sake, and afterwards she lies quite still listening for sounds from the living room. But all is quiet there too, the boy is sleeping, and she turns to me with her face aflame and says:

“Tell me some more about your father.”

“There’s not much more to tell.”

“Isn’t there?”

“No.”

“I must have missed something,” she says.

THE LAST TIME I spoke to him was on the telephone. He had been ill. It was cancer, but the operation had been successful and he was better now. He called on a Thursday, I was at work in the bookshop where I was still employed. We rarely talked to each other on the phone, and the few times it happened it was usually I who called my mother to give a message or to ask her advice, and it was he who picked up the receiver. Then it would not take him long to pass it over to her.

Now he said:

“Hi there, this is Dad. How is the writer doing?” And then he laughed, embarrassed, before stopping abruptly.

He was seventy-eight, I was thirty-seven, and it was so strange hearing him that I just stood there behind the counter with the phone in my hand, gazing into the air. There were books everywhere and lots of people, but I saw nothing. You had a very strange expression on your face, said my colleagues later.

“Hi,” I said. “Well,” I said, “not so bad.” Around me were boxes of books sent all the way from America, and the books were all by Raymond Carver. He had died two years before of lung cancer at just fifty years old, and we were going to have a memorial exhibition of all the titles published in stylish new editions. I had one of them in my hand. It was called Where I’m Calling from .

“Where are you calling from?” I asked.

“I’m at home,” he said. “I’m standing here in the hall.” And I saw him standing there in the hall with the striped wallpaper in white and gold I thought was tasteless, and I had thought so since I lived at home almost twenty years earlier. He stood by the mirror and the small table with its open drawer and the telephone directory open at T in front of him, for he could not remember the number of my workplace although I had been there for ten years. Before that I had been a workman like him for six years, but that was by my own choice, whereas he never had a choice.

It was just before Easter. On Saturday they were going down to Denmark by ferry as usual, but there had been a mistake over the tickets, he said, and sounded bewildered. They had been made out for this particular boat, but now that had been sold to the Swedes as a dormitory for refugees, and there was to be another one. He did not even know what it was called. When he called the firm and asked, they were as confused as he was at the other end of the line. Was there going to be a boat at all? Did I know anything about it? And wasn’t I supposed to go with them?

I had forgotten that. I was supposed to go with them. My mother had called me one morning and said:

“Now you just come along. I will pay for your ticket if it’s a question of money.”

“I have my own money,” I said.

There were things they had to bring with them, and things that must be done in the spring, heavy things he could not manage any more; the old willow hedge needed clipping, a spruce tree must have its roots cut off and be pulled down with a rope and later chopped up and stacked for logs. Other things had to be taken away, and they had no car, nor a driving licence.

“Your father is an old man now,” she said, “do you understand what I’m saying? I do not want him to do it all on his own.” But he had always been old and he had always been strong, and on the few occasions I tried to help him he just pushed me aside and said:

“This is nothing.”

That was not even true, goddamnit. That much I had learned. Everything was some thing. Just ask Basho.

But now I said:

“Sure, OK, I will come, I will bring the girls,” and not until later did I realise that my two younger brothers were supposed to come too. That they could have dealt with the job, if it was help he wanted. That she might have had other reasons for putting pressure on me. And then I forgot all about it. Raymond Carver filled my days.

“Hello, are you still there?” I said.

“Yes, I’m here,” he said.

“Something has come up,” I said, “I can’t get away before Monday.” That was a sheer lie, and I knew as I spoke that I wished it unsaid, for the fact that he was the one to call really touched me. I do not know why, he had never touched me before, not that I could remember. But I had no possible way of getting tickets in two days, not for the Saturday before Palm Sunday. And now I really wanted to go. I could feel it. I don’t know what came over me.

“But then I will come,” I said. “I have borrowed a car and will go via Gothenburg. I am sure the problem with those tickets will sort itself out. They must have got hold of a boat since you have not heard otherwise.”

“Oh, well, they probably have,” he said, still with that hesitant voice old men have when they lose their sense of direction, but the conversation had ended, so we both understood. I was certain he knew I had lied, and at that moment it was not a nice feeling.

Two days later I was woken by the telephone. It was seven o’clock. I should have been up already.

“Switch on the TV,” the voice said, and then there was a click, and all I heard was the dialling tone. I did not catch whose voice had spoken, but it had to be someone I knew. Asleep beside me in bed lay the woman whose face I have forgotten, and the girls slept in their rooms with the light full on their faces. I rose and went into the living room and put the TV on. It was tuned to Sweden. The test image played, so I changed channel to NRK. The screen flickered, and suddenly there was a boat there on the open sea quite alone, filmed from the air, first from the one side and then the whole way round from the other, from in front and behind in continuous circles. A helicopter, I thought, and listened for the flapping sound of the rotor blades, but I heard nothing. It was morning and grey dawn, the sea was calm and blue, the boat was blue and white, and everything was quiet and a bit confusing. I had never seen that boat before. I was tired. I had been drunk the night before. I did not get the point. But there was smoke coming from the boat, white smoke and black smoke that rose in a column to the sky and spread and lay like a filter against the light, and the helicopter turned and flew down as low as it could get, and then I saw flames break out from the windows along the whole of one side and from the aft deck many metres up in the air. I did not see any people, but I saw the name of the boat. It was a nice name, a suitable name. And suddenly my feet felt icy cold. A paralysing cold which hurt, and I stared at the screen, I turned up the sound and heard the voice from the studio telling me why precisely that boat was on television so early on a Saturday morning, on April 7, 1990. The paralysis rose from my feet up my thighs to the hips, and then I could not stand on my feet any more, there was something quite wrong with my legs, I’ve got MS, I thought, it’s a wheelchair from now on, and then I slid down on the sofa and grabbed the telephone I had in the living room and dialled my brother’s number without taking my eyes off the screen.