Хьелль Аскильдсен - The Dark Blue Winter Overcoat and Other Stories from the North

A few hours later the room was boiling hot, so I hardly got a wink of sleep all night.

At dawn, as the traffic started thundering by, I opened the window and looked out. The people down on the street looked so ridiculously small beneath the towering buildings; dwarfs in a city built for giants.

It all suddenly seemed a little unreal. At the passport desk a forbidding official had asked me what my intentions were in this country. Just suppose I’d explained the situation to him, that I’d told him there had been an envelope lying on the hall floor one morning, with an air ticket and a note from Dad’s new wife asking me to come and visit, and at the same time pointing out to me that Dad wasn’t able to write personally because he’d turned into a dog? Maybe I should have followed your advice and stayed at home.

There is an almost childlike logic to the layout of this town with its numbered streets at right angles to the avenues. It’s effective and unimaginative. It was easy to find where they lived on the map, and I decided to go by bus. This was easier said than done. The bus driver wasn’t the slightest bit interested in my dollar bill. He pointed at a glass container beside him, which looked like an old-fashioned money box, then reeled off a long speech I couldn’t understand. I shrugged my shoulders and tried to edge back into the bus, but that caused a terrible commotion until a young man took the dollar bill out of my hand and put a yellow token into this “money box”. I sat down and tried to look calm and collected; you know how you get stared at at home, well, no one so much as looked in my direction. That’s the way things seem to be in this city. Furthermore, when someone happens to glance at you, you still don’t have that feeling of having been looked at, rather the feeling of merely having been accidentally caught in someone’s gaze.

A few blocks later I noticed I was travelling in the wrong direction: south instead of north. I don’t understand how this came about. It really seemed so simple when I looked at the map.

The apartment was huge and elegant. The front door was opened by a fat black woman, who had a cigar in one hand and a vacuum cleaner in the other. So they can afford to have some domestic staff here, I thought, and I told her I had come to meet my father. The cleaning lady nodded and showed me into a well-lit lounge, with a lot of pictures on the walls and a three-piece suite over by the window.

Dad was lying on the sofa in a curious, hunched-up position.

He was much thinner than I remembered, and had lost nearly all his hair.

“Hello Dad,” I said.

“Wuff,” he replied.

I didn’t know what to say at all then.

“So you’ve gone and turned into a dog?”

“Wuff, wuff,” said Dad.

This was embarrassing, especially as the cleaning lady had stayed in the doorway and was watching with interest.

“Do you know where his wife is?” I asked, and the cleaning lady nodded and smiled, and then at once I understood that I had made a stupid mistake and felt myself going very red in the face.

“I’m very sorry.”

The woman laughed, loudly and hoarsely. “That doesn’t matter at all,” she said.

Dad had begun to swing his leg to and fro, his foot moving back and forth like a windscreen wiper in the air.

“Is something wrong?”

“Not at all,” said the woman. “He’s just wagging his tail.”

From now on, whenever I continue a letter to you, Mum, I’m doing so not from my hotel room, but from a room behind the kitchen in Dad’s apartment. I haven’t ended up here of my own accord; on the contrary, I tried to insist to the very last that I liked it at the hotel. However, it was no use. His new wife put me in the car and drove me to the hotel, settled my bill, packed my things in the suitcase and put both myself and the suitcase back into the car. She had already made up a bed into the bargain, put a potted plant on the windowsill and hung up a clean towel in the bathroom with my name written on a small label sticking above it.

She smokes her cigars continuously, hums to herself and takes charge; it’s pointless even to try contradicting her.

Why did you never tell me Dad had got married again to a black woman?

Not that it makes any difference, of course, but it feels a little silly, as if I’d been tricked in some way.

And now about Dad’s new wife… they’ve been married for years.

Her name is Melaine. She’s an amazing person. Dad’s condition doesn’t seem to worry her.

“Men get up to everything under the sun,” she says, and laughs her hoarse, hearty laugh.

When we eat, she dishes up the food onto Dad’s plate, cuts it up into small pieces and puts the plate on the floor alongside my chair. Dad then gets on all fours, picking up the pieces with his mouth. He chews them slowly and meditatively, at the same time looking at me continuously.

It feels odd. He has changed. He seems to have shrunk and funnily enough has something doglike about him. He chews and chews and swallows with difficulty, as if it was painful, and regards me with the melancholy, slightly anxious eyes of an old dog.

In actual fact, it feels damned unpleasant. Furthermore, I can’t get him to talk to me.

He never really has done, in actual fact, so I don’t know why it’s making me so bad-tempered at the moment. I remember when he paid us short visits at home, he always used to spill coffee on our tablecloths; “sorry” was practically all he ever said.

“Dad,” I keep saying, “why don’t you want to talk to me?”

He hangs his head limply and whimpers pitifully.

“Dogs have their own language,” says Melaine and laughs. She has a strange sense of humour.

“Am I supposed to feel sorry for you?” I ask. Dad crawls over to Melaine and rubs himself against her legs; she scratches his chest.

“There, there,” she wheedles.

It sickens me.

“You’ve never given a damn about me,” I say angrily. “Why should I feel sorry for you?”

He turns away. His body shakes and twitches all over. Then he crawls up to the toilet door and scratches at it with his hand.

“Good doggy,” says Melaine, and lets him in, closing the door after him and laughing again.

She never ceases to amaze me. This morning she appeared at breakfast in a silk skirt and suede jacket, with a white shirt and black bow, and had an elaborate hairstyle with small bows here and there. She looked like a cutting from a fashion magazine.

“I’ve got to go to work now, sweethearts,” she said and sailed out in a cloud of cigar smoke and expensive perfume.

What kind of person is she really?

I don’t like this.

Furthermore, she left me alone with Dad. I didn’t like that either.

He had sat down at my feet as usual, his head on one side. He looked at me searchingly and attentively, as if he wanted to imprint my face upon his memory.

“What does she do at work?” I asked in an indifferent tone, in order to coax him into beginning a conversation.

But he was silent.

“Dad, say something!”

He looked worried and wagged his foot apologetically.

He was beginning to irritate me.

“What kind of damn stupid idea is it to get me trekking halfway across the world, just so that we can sit here and stare at one another?”

He barked three times as if in protest.

He was beginning to do more than just irritate me.

“Lie down!” I commanded.

He blinked and looked frightened. Then he lay down obediently. I picked up a slice of bread and flung it across the floor.

“Fetch!”

He obeyed. He crawled over to the slice of bread, took it in his mouth, crawled back and placed it at my feet.

This made me furious.

“Lie down!”