The Half Brother

by Lars Saabye Christensen

  And it’s on this night too that Arnold begins to feel bored. He’s not just been crowned the skin-dead king, he’s also been elevated to the status of the greatest lowliness, for he can listen but not speak. And there was something about his mother’s words that terrified him, that filled him with restlessness, with unbearable anxiety. He hears his mother crying out in her room, the dog whimpering at the door, and his father banging the table. And on the same morning Arnold hears too the heavy sound of oars out on the sound, the cries of the oarsmen as they keep up the rhythm of their rowing, and the hymn that booms through the storm and drowns out the roar of the breakers: God is God though every land laid waste.

  Arnold just can’t help himself. He gets up. He rises from the skin-dead and looks out of the window. He sees the boat rolling in toward the dock, the men rowing in a circle of white sea, and at the stern there stands an almighty form, the vicar himself, his arms outstretched. He resembles a giant cormorant, a black sail, and it’s he who’s singing God is God though every man were dead. Arnold gets shivers down his spine and shouts, “The fatty’s coming! The fatty’s coming!” Then his father steps out of the shadow by the door, whirls Arnold around and smacks him full in the face, a blow that burns as hotly in Everts fist as on Arnold’s cheek, for Evert has punched in wicked delight, in grand terror, almost as if another power controlled his arm in that instant. And he looks down benevolently, almost shamefully, at his own son standing ablaze on his bed. “That’s no fatty! That’s the vicar, you little bugger!” And his father drags the terrified Aurora with him and races to the dock to meet the vicar and send him back where he came from as quickly as possible, for Arnold is compos mentis and has recovered his speech and is in need of no vicar. “The boy’s up and about!” Evert shouts to them one and all. “Go home while there’s still time!” But the vicar’s already standing steady on the dockside and he places his hands on Everts trembling shoulders. “Well, well, my good man,” he says. “If your boy’s truly awakened, then I’d like to speak to the miracle in person.”

  And no one can say no when a vicar invites himself. Before long the whole population is trooping up to Evert and Auroras house. The men have laid aside their equipment, the women leave their washing lying in the tub and the children are only too happy to come in late to Hoist the teacher’s first lesson. And the teacher himself, quite out of breath, is the last one to join the long, expectant trail of humanity that has designated an ordinary morning in October a holy day.

  Arnold sees them from the window. Arnold sees all the approaching faces; the vicar’s red chin shrouded by its black beard, his parents’ nervous hands, Elendius’ quick smiles, the teachers thin hair beneath his wet hat. And all the figures are leaning forward, as if someone’s pushing them from behind, and Arnold knows there and then that they’ve caught up with him, that he’s been overtaken. He was lost, but at that moment he’s found, and it’s now that Arnold Nilsen’s second life begins.

  He lies down, shuts his eyes, and hears the vicar whispering out on the doorstep, and it’s both a terrifying comfort and a friendly threat: “I want to speak with the boy alone.” And when Arnold opens his eyes next the vicar is leaning over him in all his might and says, “Tell me. Tell me what it was like to be skin-dead.” Arnold doesn’t know how to respond and so he decides to say nothing. The broad head waits above him, and Arnold searches for some kind of sign, a hint in the man’s face, a clue to follow — anything that might indicate what’s right to reveal or withhold. Then a heavy drop falls from the vicar’s shining nose onto Arnold’s forehead. The vicar lifts an edge of his cloak and wipes the great drop away. “It was fine to begin with,” Arnold says. “But in the end it became a bit depressing.” The vicar nodded slowly. “Yes, I can appreciate that all right. Jesus only endured three days.” Arnold sits up on the bed, and the vicar places his hand on his head and Arnold leans forward. “Look me in the eye,” the vicar says. Arnold looks up as much as he’s able and meets the vicar’s gaze. “You are to honor your father and mother,” the vicar says. “Yes,” Arnold whispers. “You shall honor the sea that is the dwelling place of the fish and the heavens where the birds have their home.” “Yes,” Arnold whispers. “And you shall honor the truth!” “And that too,” Arnold says. The vicar has come even closer, he’s no more than a whisker away. “Yes, not least that!” the vicar cries, and Arnold tumbles backward, but it makes no difference because the vicar follows after. “And what, pray, is the truth?” he asks. Arnold thinks and thinks. He doesn’t know. He’s stuck for an answer. “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry,” he says instead. The expression quivers and breaks into a smile. He breathes deeply, draws his hand over his eyes and smiles, and that smile is just like a bow between laughter and tears. “No,” he says. “That’s exactly what we poor, amazing humans just don’t know. Whether to laugh or to cry.” The vicar gets up and stands in the middle of the floor with his back to Arnold. His cloak is like a black pillar about him. Outside there is the sound of anxious voices. Someone knocks on the door. Apart from that everything’s still. Then the vicar turns back to face Arnold and is about to say more, but Arnold beats him to it, for he has something on his mind. “I want to go away,” he says. “That’s the truth.” The vicar listens and smiles a second time. “You’ve traveled far, Arnold. But you went in the wrong direction, son.” “Thank you,” Arnold whispers. And for a second time he receives the vicar’s hand on his head. “And now it’s time to go back to our people,” the vicar says. “Where we belong.” The following morning Arnold’s there at the schoolroom door, and the whole crowd turns in his direction and someone shouts from the rear bench: “The fatty’s coming!” The laughter tumbles from their faces, and Arnold laughs himself; he laughs and realizes that everyone knows just about everything. Not absolutely everything, for only the vicar knows that — but they know just about everything, and that’s more than enough. For everything he says and has said and will say flits from person to person, words he’d prefer to keep to himself; they’re like a shoal caught in someone else’s nets. And Arnold thinks as he laughs, It’s too small here. Its too cramped. And Arnold laughs the loudest of the lot. Then the teacher bangs his pointer on his table and gives Arnold a bow in the sudden ensuing silence. “Welcome back, Arnold Nilsen. Sit down so we don’t think you’re going to leave us again.” Arnold walks between the rows and finds his place. His desk is just as big as it was before the summer. Perhaps it’s even bigger. His feet don’t reach the floor. His feet are left hanging in thin air, heavy as lead. Hoist the teacher comes toward him. He has his hands behind his back. He’s smiling. Perhaps he’s smiling because he’ll leave for the Lofotens that very evening to rest there for fourteen wonderful days. He stops right in front of Arnold. “So you’re going to sell wind?” the teacher says. And the laughter starts once more. The laughter has been skin-dead too and now it’s come back to life. Hoist the teacher lets it take its course, until he’s had enough. Then he stamps hard and the laughter falls away. “But tell me, Arnold Nilsen, are you going to sell wind by the pound or the gallon?” Arnold can’t get a word in because Hoist is thoroughly enjoying himself and is not about to be stopped. “I know,” he goes on. “You’ll sell it by the ton. Quite simply, you’ll find the wind in tons and send it all south so that when it’s calm on the Oslo Fjord — exactly what it is most of the time — and the sailing boats can’t move a jot, they can just open one of Arnold Nilsen’s tons of wind and pour it into the sails!” The class roars. They hang over their desks laughing. Hoist the teacher looks down on Arnold and shoves his pointer under his chin to force him to look up, and Arnold feels the end of it pressing against his throat, against his Adam’s apple, as the laughter keeps pealing about him. “But how are you going to manage to close your containers before the wind’s escaped again, little Arnold?” But now it’s Arnold’s turn to laugh, and he laughs more than all the others put together. “I’ll just put your fat bum on them first,” he replies. There’s utter silence. Hoist the te
acher drops the pointer. He barely manages to bend down to pick it up, very slowly, and his breathing is more like quick wheezing. “What did you say, Arnold Nilsen?” “That I’ll just put your fat halibut of a bum on the containers first!” Arnold laughs, and that instant the pointer whams down on the bridge of his nose. Arnold just gapes in amazement at Hoist who is already on his way back to his table to sit down; thereafter he leafs through the hefty register and dips the nib of his pen in ink. It’s at that point Arnold first becomes aware of the pain — it’s like an aftershock, delayed, too late and awful — the blood swells behind his forehead and gushes into his mouth, drips onto the floor in great big drops. And Arnold slides down from his seat, gets up in bewilderment and leaves the classroom; behind him the silence is more profound than ever and Hoist the teacher lets him go. For he has more than enough to do recording incidents in the registers columns, clearer than the black ink with which he’s compiling his account in oblong columns beside appalling test marks, so that future generations will know the barbaric conditions in which he had to work, out here in the very mouth of the sea.

  Arnold stops on the doorstep. He glimpses his father down at the dockside. He goes there and his father turns toward him. “Have you gone and fallen again?” he asks. Arnold carefully shakes his head and more blood comes, he has to tilt his head backward and look up at the heavy, gray skies. “No,” he whispers. “I haven’t.” His father takes a step toward him, impatient. “What’s happened then, boy?” “Hoist the teacher caught me with the pointer.” His father bends down. “You mean he hit you?” Arnold nods, equally carefully, as if everything in his face is loose and could fall to pieces at any moment. His father pulls a rag from his pocket, quickly dips it in water and gives it to his son. Arnold wipes away the blood and starts crying, even though he is determined not to. But it stings, it stings so badly and something inside him has shattered. “I think your nose is squint now,” his father tells him, and he takes the blood-soaked rag from Arnold, spits on it and rubs off the marks on his chin, and it amazes the boy that those massive hands can be so gentle. “You’re not crying?” his father asks him. “No,” Arnold replies, and swallows. “Not now.” “That’s good. You won’t die of a crooked nose. Did he really hit you with the pointer?” “Yes, with the full force of it.” His father ponders a moment. Then he starts walking away from the dockside. “Where are you going?” Arnold calls after him. “Don’t go.” But his father doesn’t turn around. “To have a chat with Hoist the teacher.”

  And Arnold hurries after his father with his hand covering his sore and out-of-joint nose. His father doesn’t stop until he reaches the classroom door and is looking in on Hoist who closes his register with a bang. “I am Arnold Nilsen’s father,” he announces loud and clear. The teacher looks up quickly and uncertainly, his eyes swivel a bit before he glances at the register again and smiles. “Yes, Evert Nilsen. Naturally I recognize the fathers of my dear pupils.” Hoist the teacher got up. “And your son has learned an important lesson today. For my part I consider the matter of no consequence and will not pursue it any further, either here or in the portals of my superiors.” Evert Nilsen stands there dumb and dark, as if he’s forgotten quite why he’s there. His broad figure casts a long gray shadow through the room. Arnold waits behind him, hidden. He tugs his father’s jacket hard because he knows he can’t cope with too many words at one time — they just bewilder and exhaust him. “And now we must continue our class,” the teacher says, getting up and looking right past Evert Nilsen. “Arnold, would you be so kind as to sit down at your desk?” But his father holds him back. Then he goes forward to the teacher’s table, between the restless pupils who realize already that something’s about to happen they’ll never forget. Evert Nilsen says nothing. Enough has been said already. Hoist the teacher looks at him in amazement. And Evert Nilsen takes the pointer and hits Hoist on the forehead; the blow isn’t perhaps all that hard, but he folds up all the same, more in astonishment than in pain. He howls and clutches at his face, and Arnold considers that it was his father who first hit him, then Hoist the teacher who hit him, and now his father has hit Hoist, as if the one action has led to the next with a kind of justice that Arnold can’t quite fathom. Evert Nilsen then snaps the pointer and drops the two halves over Hoist the teacher, who’s still kneeling in front of the class. He leaves the classroom and takes Arnold with him, out into the mighty wind where there’s room for everyone. “You’ll never go back there,” his father tells him.

  The following day Arnold goes out in the boat with his father. Aurora says no to begin with, but Father stands his ground. The boy has to be toughened up. The boy’ll survive all right. There’s nothing else to consider. It’s simple, obvious and fine. That’s what it all comes down to. Now Arnold’s sitting on the hatch, his blue nose packed into a rough bandage so he has to breathe through his mouth. He sits there gaping while his father rows with a slow, inexorable rhythm, taking them out from land. It’s calm, calm indeed for October; the sea lies dark and broody like a black mirror. But as soon as they’ve passed the breakwater and can see the lighthouse standing like some wide neck in a collar of foam, the breakers start beneath them, lifting the boat in a constant, intolerable motion. The father smiles and looks at his son; he rows and doesn’t take his eyes off him. The breakers roll beneath them and nothing is still any longer; there isn’t a single thing to hold on to. Not his father either, who smiles, rows, rows them out, farther still, until they can only glimpse the island like a plateau in the very depths of the fog. Arnold shuts his mouth and can barely get breath. He is shut in himself. The breakers fill him with a warm queasiness. He tears off the bandage and chokes back his own scream, chucks the dirty thing onto the water and breathes in quick, blissful gulps of air. His father looks at him and smiles, keeps rowing, for they haven’t got there yet. Arnold carefully feels his nose; it’s tender and soft and runs jagged down his face. “You look like a boxer now,” his father says all at once. Arnold looks up at him in surprise. “A boxer? Do I?” “The one there was a picture of in the newspaper. Don’t you remember?” “No. Who do you mean, Father?” “The one who’s actually boxed in America. Otto von Parat.” For a moment Arnold forgets his queasiness and senses instead a wonderfully good feeling. His father has spoken to him. His father’s said he looks like a boxer. Arnold punches the air and laughs. It hurts high up in his forehead. He’s happy and it hurts. But just as the good pain passes, the sick feeling grows once more, and he notices that his father is sculling back the water as if he’s trying to moor the boat on the waves themselves. Then he puts one oar over his thighs and points behind Arnold. “Pay attention now,” he tells him. “When the flagpole crosses the beacon and the lighthouse is in line with the breakwater, you’re lying right.” Arnold turns and looks, while his father keeps talking, and it’s a long while since Evert Nilsen has said so much, and perhaps he’s happy too at that moment being there with his son. “Those are our landmarks, Arnold. The flagpole, the beacon, the lighthouse and the breakwater. It’s like a constellation. When everything’s confusion and currents, they’ll stand firm. Never forget that, Arnold.” And Arnold screws up his eyes and looks, looks at these landmarks that create this strange form, this image that is broken if they move by a single pull of an oar in one direction or the other. And the more Arnold stares at the landmarks, the sicker he becomes, and it dawns on him that out of everything in the whole world he’s the only thing that can’t manage to stand still. “What was it you said to the teacher?” his father suddenly asks. Arnold has to think. “I just said that his bum was bigger than a halibut.” His father laughed loudly. “Bigger than a halibut! Did you really say that to that great bag of wind!” “Yes!” Arnold exclaimed. “Twice! I said it twice!” Arnold looks at his father. They’re outside the normal conventions of behavior. It’s just the two of them. They’re free, were it not for the waves and the queasiness. His father falls silent again and Arnold sits as still as he can, for he doesn’t want to destroy th
is moment. Then his father asks, “What was it the vicar said to you?” Arnold has to think again. “He said I should honor my father and mother.” “Did the vicar really say that?” “Yes, that I should honor you and Aurora.” And as he says those words Arnold vomits. He vomits up the contents of his guts right into his father’s lap. His father swears and raises his arm as if to lash out, and Arnold has to vomit again; he cries and vomits and through a film of tears he sees that the landmarks have disappeared. Everything slides apart. He’s out of rhythm. He sinks down into the bottom of the boat and closes his eyes. “Now I don’t much look like a boxer,” he whispers.

  His father rows back. He’s silent the rest of the day. Aurora puts out food on the table. Arnold can’t face eating. He goes to bed early. Everything’s still rolling. He’s brought the breakers home. His bed is a boat. The boat bears Arnold. It bears him out to the landmarks of his dreams.

  His father rouses him early the following morning. “Find the landmarks,” he orders him. When they have passed the breakwater his father changes places with Arnold and gives him the oars. Arnold rows. The waves press against them. Arnold rows and watches. His father doesn’t take his eyes off him. The oars lift aside the surface of the water like huge, slippery spoons. Arnold turns and gazes in toward land. But the landmarks aren’t where they should be. They’ve moved around. The beacon has moved in front of the flagpole, the lighthouse has sunk into the sea, and the waves are tearing down the breakwater, stone by stone. The constellation has been thrown to the four winds. Arnold thinks to himself, My landmarks are here, there and everywhere! Here, there and everywhere are my landmarks] My crooked nose’ 11 point me in the right direction. His father grasps him by the shoulder. “Further out!” he cries. And Arnold rows further out. He makes up his mind. He’ll do it now. He’s an oarsman — Arnold the oarsman! And Arnold rows into the heart of the breakers. He rows through the waves. He rows into the storm. The oars aren’t spoons, they’re trees. And each trees crown is the blade of the oar that pushes the sky backward. But he doesn’t find the landmarks. The landmarks aren’t there. Nothing at all will stand still. The wind is gnawing at their hills and soon there’ll be nothing but dust on the surface of the water, like fly shit on the windowsill. His father shouts something, but it’s impossible to hear a word. His father points, but there’s nothing to see. Arnold rows through rain and foam. He rows with his mouth open and he gulps the sea and throws it up; the ocean on whose floor he stood and made his most secret plans. His father rips him away from the hatch, takes the oars and rows in once more. Arnold tumbles down between his huge boots. He wets himself. He cries. His father kicks him away. “Are you out of your mind, boy?” he shrieks. “Are you trying to ruin my boat?” Arnold can’t say a thing. His father rows, giving long pulls to the oars. His father swears and rows. Arnold gets up and sees to his amazement that the water is dead calm. Aurora is standing right out on the breakwater. She is a patient, black shadow. And Arnold goes onto land for good. He follows his mother up to the house, hearing the laughter of the boys over at the classroom. “Don’t worry,” his mother whispers. “I’m not a bit worried,” Arnold replies and clenches his teeth. “Did you go green again?” she asks him. Arnold doesn’t answer. He is the land crab encircled by sea. He is the seasick one, born on an island. “My father,” Aurora says. “He got seasick too. Every single day he got queasy and vomited.” She laughs, and her laughter is queer, and she takes his hand. Arnold is silent, for he doesn’t know if this is meant as a comfort or a threat. No, it’s not a threat, but it’s poor comfort.