The Half Brother

by Lars Saabye Christensen

  It’s then the two men appear. They come out of the woods. They stop for a moment, look around them, or else at each other, and then continue in our direction. They’re wearing dark clothes, and they keep in step with each other. I just manage to catch a glimpse of Dad as he’s about to turn the key in the ignition, but it’s too late. He lets go, pulls the cushion from beneath me and puts it instead on his own seat, draws himself up and turns toward the two men — one cushion taller than normal. “A lovely day,” he says in a loud voice. “Arnold Nilsen?” “Yes, the name sounds familiar.” The other man opens the door. “We want to have a chat with you,” he says. Dad just sits there. It’s as if he’s keeping himself together by clinging to the steering wheel. His face becomes devoid of expression. And so he goes off with them, and they disappear between the trees. I don’t know what’s going to happen. Only that it can’t be any good because I’d seen Dad’s face. I’m afraid in a different way. Now Fred has to say something. “Say something,” I hiss. But he doesn’t. Isn’t he afraid? I turn around. I can’t distinguish any change, except that there’s a hint of a smile there. His lips curl around his mouth. I grow even more afraid. Whatever happens, I mustn’t make a mess in my pants or start crying. If I pulled up the handbrake between the seats now, the car would roll out and perhaps it wouldn’t stop before it landed with its front wheels in the Oslo Fjord. I clasp the lever; it’s warm to the touch, and I can feel it trembling between my fingers. Now I can break all the traffic rules. I get goosebumps down both arms. Suddenly Fred knocks me in the back of the head. I feel so happy. I let go my hand and want to thank him. But there isn’t time for that. Dad’s coming back with the two others. He stops by the open door and looks down at us. His pants are filthy. He’s lost his hat. His hair is in a mess. He tries to laugh, but all he can do is make the attempt. “Think you’re going to have to get out of the car, boys,” he says. I go and stand beside him. Fred doesn’t move from the backseat. “Get out of the car,” Dad says again. Is Fred going to begin talking again now? Is it at this moment he’ll say something to make the men flee, to make us laugh, and to make everything be the way it was before? That’s what I hope. It’s this liberating moment I’m always waiting for. But it never comes. Fred is no less silent. He’s just dawdling. Dad bends inside the door. “Please,” he whispers. Fred shrugs his shoulders, as if all this is beginning to bore him, and finally gets out of the car. The two men shove Dad out of the way and get in. The one who hasn’t gotten behind the wheel tosses the cushions out and roars with laughter. Then they drive off. They drive off in Dad’s Buick and disappear around the bend. We’re left standing there. It’s incomprehensible. It’s that scorching smell of sun and gas. Dad goes back into the woods to find his hat. It’s dented. “The cushions,” he whispers. I pick them up. We start down toward the city. None of us says a word. Dad leads the way; his breathing is heavy and his neck is wet — he’s a black square in the hot light. I walk in the middle. I carry the cushions. And its as I walk, a heavy cushion in each hand, that I decide to stop eating. There’s nothing else for it. Why didn’t I think of it before? It’s so simple. If I don’t eat, then I’ll get taller. Instead of growing outward (just as Dad might have done over the years, pressed down by his own weight), I’ll stretch, thin and weightless — hunger will raise me aloft. Dad wants to go into a place called the Bakkekro. He buys a beer for himself there. But before he drinks it, he disappears to the bathroom. Fred and I sit at a table by the window. A decoration of faded flowers is between us on the table. I’m sitting on the cushions. Soon I won’t need them anymore. When Dad comes back he’s combed his hair, straightened his hat, polished his shoes and cleaned his pants. He looks more like himself again, and yet not quite. There’s a shadow under his eyes he can’t get rid of. “Do you boys want a sandwich?” he asks. “No, thank you,” I reply. I’ve already begun not eating. I imagine I can almost feel myself growing. Dad drinks the dark beer in one gulp and puts down the glass carefully once more, as if the smallest sound could destroy everything, or else the little that still remains that hasn’t been destroyed a long time ago. Dad looks at me. “We’re not going to say anything about this to Mom,” he whispers. I shake my head many times. Dad nods and turns abruptly to Fred. “And if you start talking again now, then you’ve chosen the wrong time to do so! Keep up your aphasia!” Then we go home. Mom’s waiting for us. “What a long time you’ve been,” she says. Dad takes the cushions from me, goes straight into the living room and lies down on the divan. Mom watches him go, amazed. Fred changes his shoes and goes off again. I’m the one left standing there. “Was it a good trip?” she asks. “Oh, yes, Mom.” I have to think so hard so as not to say anything silly, something I shouldn’t. I mustn’t say too much. “Where did you drive to?” “To the same place where you fell for Dad, Mom.” For a second she’s taken aback and has to stop and think herself. Then she comes closer. “The button wasn’t in your pencil case, Barnum.” She turns toward Dad, who’s lying on the divan with the cushions pillowing his head and with the newspaper over his face. The pages flutter. “What do you want with the button?” I inquire. “Wash your hands,” she tells me. She hurries out to the kitchen because there’s a smell of something burning. I go into our room and get out my pencil case. She’s right. The button isn’t there. Either I’ve lost it at school, or else I know who’s taken it. And a long while will pass and a good number of years skip by before that button shows up again, like a little wheel that’s rolled through our lives. “The food’s getting cold!” Mom shouts. Dads wasting time in the living room. I’m wasting time in my room. I stand against the door frame and lay my hand flat on my head, but my height’s just the same, even if I add my curls. But then I’ve only just begun to starve myself, and saying no thanks to one simple sandwich at the Bakkekro can’t be expected to add any great degree of height. More food than that is going to have to be refused. Mom gets impatient and shouts even more loudly We sit down at the kitchen table. It’s fishballs again. Both Fred’s and Boletta’s places are empty. Mom pours water into our glasses. “Where have you parked the car?” she asks. Dad chews slowly — no, he just breaks the fishballs between his teeth. “Boletta’s back at the North Pole, is she?” he asks. Mom doesn’t reply. Dad fills his mouth with more fishballs. “Do you really think she should be there at her age?” Mom’s brow grows rigid. “I asked you where you’d parked the car,” she says again. And it strikes me that neither of them answers the questions they’ve been asked, and reply instead by asking something else. I’ve never seen Dad like this before. He doesn’t even manage to laugh it off. His eyes are restive the whole time. “It’s at the garage,” he mumbles. Mom leans across the table. “What did you say?” “It’s at the garage, damn it!” Now he’s doing anything but mumbling. He shouts. Mom crumples slightly “The garage? Did you break down?” Dad glances at me, as if he’s stuck. “The handbrake was making a noise,” I say Mom shrugs her shoulders and passes the dish around. I pass it on. “Aren’t you eating, Barnum?” “We had a sandwich at the Bakkekro,” Dad says. “Just beside the garage.” There’s quiet for a while. It’s as if peace has descended on us once more. But it doesn’t last long. “Was the handbrake making a noise?” she asks. Dad can’t take any more. “Since when have you been so knowledgeable about cars?” he asks testily. “I never said I was.” “Well, shut up, then!” Mom puts down her knife and fork and just stares at him. His neck becomes a bow from which his head hangs low. “I shouldn’t have said that,” he whispers. “No, you shouldn’t have,” Mom says, and goes off into her bedroom and locks the door behind her. She doesn’t open it again until the following morning. Dad’s taken the whole night to work out what to say. “I’ve sold the car,” he tells her. Mom looks at him. Dad looks at me. Boletta gets up from the divan. Fred comes out from the bathroom. “Sold the car?” Mom breathes. Dad nods. Mom can’t believe her ears. “I thought we were going on a long drive this summer,” she says. Dad looks down. “Perhaps next summer, dear.” Mom slams th
e door and opens it again just as quickly. “Next summer? When I’ve promised Barnum we’d go this summer!” Dad turns to look at me. “It doesn’t matter,” I whisper. Dad gives a smile, his mouth heavy. “There you are,” he says. “But why did you sell the car?” Boletta asks him. Dad takes a deep breath. “Because we needed the money.” Mom stamps the floor and becomes enraged. “That’s a lie!” she shrieks. “You’re lying through your teeth!” Dad doesn’t know where to look or what to say. Instead he pretends to be deeply offended and that makes Mom all the angrier. I go between them. “It’s not what you see that matters most,” I say “but rather what you think that you see.” Dad lays his smooth, stiff hand in gratitude on my shoulder, but Mom just shakes her head and is mad for at least a month more. She goes out loudly to the kitchen and makes up a packed lunch for me, which I chuck in the nearest garbage can as soon as I know no one’s watching. In fact no one paid particular attention to the fact that I’d stopped eating, any more than they had noticed my muteness. But I held out longer. I starved in silence. Now I had my own aphasia, the aphasia of the stomach and the intestine. And I set to work on it with a will. If I got sweets from Esther, I’d hide the bag under a stone behind the broadcasting center. At the school cafeteria, I made as if to eat a sandwich with roe spread and some carrots, but I went to the bathroom afterward and vomited everything up again. At home I just passed the pots and dishes on and no one said a thing. I was invisible. Hunger made me see-through and hollow. Each evening I’d measure my height against the door frame but still couldn’t notice any change. My mark remained the same. My curly shortness remained rock solid. Growing is a slow process. And fortunately everyone had other things to think about. Mom was still livid because of the whole business about the car, and Dad did his level best to make her happy again — he bought flowers, was home each evening, cleaned the windows, said she was more lovely than ever — but it was all to no avail. Mom’s rage couldn’t simply be interrupted; it had to run its course until nothing more remained. Boletta drank her beer at the North Pole, and Fred was just taken up with his own silence. One evening I felt he looked at me with new eyes all the same, and I thought that perhaps he was going to say something — but no. I d lost several pounds. I wanted to trade them in for inches, but I was still waiting. To start with I became lethargic. I managed to get up all right in the mornings. Everything was focused on not eating. Hunger was my one thought. I had to go to the toilet a lot too. Something had to give soon. There was nothing to come out. It was like a piece of addition — it kept on increasing. Except that I still hadn’t gotten any taller. But I didn’t give up. I’ve never not eaten so much. I became a small shadow in the spring sunlight. No one saw my starvation until the moment I collapsed in Knuckles’ arms in Religious Education on the last Friday before the summer holidays and was carried down to the school doctor. I came to on a mattress there. Hunger was a strange song in my head. The doctor took in my thin, stubby body with large, worried eyes. “How long is it since you last ate?” he asked. “A long time,” I whispered. The school doctor shook his head. “But why not?” That I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t tell him the real reason. He wouldn’t have believed me. “Don’t know,” I replied quietly. The doctor placed a finger on my wrist and counted out loud. “Do you get food at home?” he asked when the counting was done. It was now that I gave the wrong answer. I knew it as soon as the words were out. The lie was born in my mouth, and that lie would leave its own trail of consequences in its wake. “Not much,” I answered. The school doctor glanced at the nurse, who stood by the door with her arms folded. She phoned Mom right away. I was weighed and was allowed to get dressed again. Mom came within the hour. First she had to have a long talk with the school doctor and the head teacher. I was waiting on the mattress. The nurse kept an eye on me. Did she really think I was going to run away? Not a chance — she could be more than certain of that. I didn’t have the strength. I barely managed to lift my hand to scratch my nose. “So you don’t get fed at home?” she said. I wanted to say something, that that wasn’t true, that our table was positively groaning with food — fishballs, chops, stew, cauliflower soup and pickled gherkins. But then Mom appeared from the office — hunched, red-faced, bowed with shame. Not only did she have a son with aphasia, but she had another son who was both short and malnourished. But suddenly she straightened up and blew back the hair from her brow, and her eyes became clear and strong. “What did we have for dinner yesterday Barnum?” “Leftovers,” I whispered. Then she took my hand and left with me. But by the time we got to the park she couldn’t take any more; she sat down on a bench and began crying. “How could you say that? That you didn’t get fed?” “I didn’t mean to,” I murmured. Mom wrung her hands. “What is it I’ve done wrong?” she sobbed. I went closer. “You haven’t done anything wrong, Mom.” She looked up and it was just as if she first noticed at that moment how thin I’d grown. She hugged me, felt my ribs like the frame of an abacus under my shirt and cried even more. “What are we to do with you, Barnum?” She’d find out soon enough. A letter came to Mom and Dad from the school doctor. I was to be sent to a farm for twelve days to be fattened up. Now it was Dad’s turn to become livid. He banged the table and refused point blank, but they had no choice. I’ll say no more at this stage; I’ll just say Weir Mitchel’s Remedy, and that it was Mom who took me to the train. I had with me a rucksack with clothes, toothpaste and a ruler; and I was met at Dal station by the farmer himself, and driven in a truck to the farm by Lake Hurdal. I could see the lake in the evening from my room. Fish floated there in the moonlight. The farmer had a wife with large hands. There were two other boys there too. I was thinner than they were. When I came home, I was a butterball. But before school started up again I was myself once more, neither taller nor smaller, neither more nor less — I was Barnum once and for all, as if nothing had happened, as if Weir Mitchel’s Remedy in Hurdal had been but a dream. I was called in to see the school doctor, and he examined everything from my bum to my back teeth and pronounced that I’d improved, that the Remedy had been a success; the fat was plentifully distributed over my body, and the intestinal pistons were working so well they were a joy to behold. “Was it fun to be on the farm?” the school doctor asked. I couldn’t answer. I just nodded. Mom and Dad could breathe a sigh of relief; Esther could put her hand in my curls, and the rest of the class could laugh at me because the girls had grown too in the course of the summer. They’d spurted up, way beyond me; I remained alone in the lowlands, out in the cold. And I stood still; I had to look up to everybody else, and there was no one I could look down on. I would have given anything to be able to tell Fred all that happened on the farm. I could have told him that it hadn’t been fun at all. But I couldn’t do that either. He was still more than silent. His silence laid waste streets and cities. Perhaps there was a similar remedy for the dumb? That was a thought that appealed to me. I could see it in my minds eye — a farm in the country (or in a park) where the dumb sat together in the shade under the trees and had to talk to each other. One word on the first day four the next, and by the time the twelfth and final day had come they’d be able to speak an entire sentence. I christened it Barnum’s Remedy But there was no remedy for Fred.