Per Petterson - In The Wake

“He is completely apathetic,” she says. “He doesn’t give a damn. Won’t you talk to him?”

What am I to say to that? She likes to fight, and now there is no resistance. That makes her confused and angry. But it is not my problem.

“Just get it over with,” I say.

“It shouldn’t be that easy,” she says.

“Oh, yes, it should,” I say. “Here today, gone tomorrow. That’s how it is.”

*

She moves out one Saturday, with David and a good deal more, and then he is alone in the big empty house on Fetsund. He buys her share of the house, and that cleans him out and then some. The house is mortgaged up to the hilt.

I call him on April 7, early in the day. He is at home on sick leave.

“Hello,” he says.

“Hi,” I say, “it’s me. Your brother. You’ll remember me if you search your mind. It is a kind of jubilee today, is it not. Want to go for a beer?”

“Your treat?”

“Sure thing.”

“OK,” he says. “Can you pick me up? She took the car.”

“If my car will start, I will.”

It does, of course, it never lets me down. Give me any car at all, as long as it’s Japanese and begins with an m and ends with an a. I have replaced the scratched bumper with one from a scrapyard, and it is really posh, and even has the same paint colour as the original.

I drive down the hills to Lillestrøm, cross the bridge over the Nitelva and in through the first streets past the station. All the snow has gone, not a patch to be seen on the way down. There are coltsfoot beside the roadside ditches, the April sun is shining, and the workers on the new railway to Gardermoen airport wear orange trousers and white T-shirts that are still quite clean. They are laying rails with huge machines and signal to each other with gloved hands. The gloves are yellow and can be seen from a long way off. I catch myself singing “Somewhere” from West Side Story , and not quite like in the original version by Leonard Bernstein, but more like Tom Waits on the Blue Valentine LP from before he stopped smoking. To my ears it sounds quite similar, but I’m not sure everyone would support that view. “There’s a place for us,” I bellow in a gurgling voice, and then I start coughing. I ought to stop smoking myself. My father would have liked that. Or maybe not. It would have made him less unique among us, with his body like a temple; no whited sepulchres in sight. His temple got cancer, but that can happen to anyone; a genetic time bomb placed there by chance at birth, ticking and running, and then one day: Bang. If that happens to me it will be far from chance. That is the difference between us, and it is a big difference.

But I feel better now than I have for a long time. I do.

They are building a new railway station beside the old one in Lillestrøm, and it looks good. I like railway stations made of glass and steel, I like airports, I like big bridge spans and concrete constructions if they are bold enough, I can drive long diversions to see a power station in the mountains or in the depths of a valley, I like high-tension cables in straight lines through the landscape, and presumably that is because I read too many Soviet novels at a certain age. Light over the land, that is what we want. Light in every lamp, light in every mind.

I drive out of Lillestrøm following the roundabouts by Åråsen football stadium where LSK plays its home matches, but I have never liked LSK in their canary-yellow colours, have never been into that ground, only heard the heart-rending jubilation when Vålerenga gets knocked out again and again, and then I turn out on to the road to Fetsund and step on the gas to about ninety kilometres an hour straight over the big plain where the rivers meet and break their banks at the end of spring every single year when the melt water from the mountains comes down through the valleys and all the way here. Sometimes the cattle stand in the meadows beside the highway with water above their hocks in the mist looking like water buffalo in films from the Yangtze, Mekong; I remember women on bicycles in round pointed hats with grenades on the handlebars and grenades in their carriers in the rain and the water up to the hubs on their way through the forest to the front.

“Jesus, they’re all so good-looking,” my friend Audun said when we sat there in the packed hall at college. The black-and-white images flickered in our faces and lit up the FNL badges we wore on our lapels. We were eighteen, and in the dark all hands were raised to stroke the shiny emblems.

That was twenty-five years ago, I have not seen Audun for fifteen. I guess he has got along all right. We do get along, in some way or other.

When the plain is behind me, the road rises steeply to the ridge in a long hill before swooping over the top and then going down on the other side and out on to the big bridge over the Glomma River. Far down on the right the old timber booms shine in the sun and cut the water up into squares, and the little red lumberjacks’ cabins float above the river where before you could hear the cries of command and the sound of singing and arrogant laughter right up until I was twenty years and more, and the dull boom of log hitting log filled the dreams of many, and many risked their life balancing with only a few inches of soapy smooth timber between their boot soles and the icy cold flood water for the sake and profit of the forest barons. Now everything is newly painted and nice looking and as quiet as a museum. Not one person in sight. The water is almost green and flows massively under the bridge and heavily out into the vast lake. It heaves and bulges, full of itself.

On the other side of the bridge I just start up the next hill before turning right by the Hydro station and in past the county hall and the school. His house is straight ahead with a view of the river through the trees. It is a dark bluish-red in colour; and he designed it himself. That was his dream, to pull himself out of the terraced houses and apartment blocks and to live in a house that was built to his own design, and now he does, alone. The tracks of a car show on the gravel in front of the door. I park in the tracks to fill the vacancy and switch the ignition off. I wait in the car. Some stay inside when they hear a car and wait until the doorbell rings, while others hear the car and come out on to the steps to welcome their visitor. My brother has always been of the latter. But no-one comes out. Perhaps he is at the shop. It is not too far for him to walk. I wait for a few moments. Suddenly I get anxious and push the car door open and get out and run across the gravel to the entrance. The door is not locked, so I go on into the hall which is almost as big as the hall in an American soap on television, and I run straight downstairs to the room in the basement with the big windows on to the river. What was once a television room is now filled with cardboard boxes. The walls are bare. The room seems enormous. There is nothing in it apart from a small stereo outfit and an easel in front of one window, and my brother stands at the easel with a brush in his hand and headphones on his curly head. He does not notice me and I stand there behind him and see what he is painting is the island with the lighthouse just off the coast of Denmark where our cabin is. He must have a photograph somewhere. So do I, I think. He is painting the childhood horizon. His childhood, and mine.

He is thinner. He used to look like a bear, while I have been more like a fox, and now he is pretty close to an elk, and I glimpse the brother I once went to see in Hull when everything in life was still before us and nothing was settled yet. We may be closer to that point than we have ever been during the years in between. I could wish for that. But I am not sure. I feel nervous, there is something about that slim back, and then he turns quite calmly and is not surprised to see me standing there. He must have realised the whole time and just gone on with what he was doing, and that certainty does not reassure me. His face is thinner too, and he smiles crookedly with a new glint in his eye. He knows something I do not know. He takes off the headphones and I can hear it is Steve Earle he is playing: “I’ve been to hell, and now I’m back again. I feel all right.”