The Half Brother

by Lars Saabye Christensen

  Yet there was something. For the second time, two strange men came with catastrophic news to Mrs. Arnesen. But now there was no mistake about it. Now it wasn’t a case of having found a business card by chance in the anorak pocket of a corpse on Nord-marka. Now they had evidence. They parked in Jacob Aall Street and right away aroused a good deal of attention. Faces behind curtains. Doors left ajar. Me at the window. There was a light rain falling. A hush over Fagerborg, and everyone knows everything at the same time. They ring the bell up on the third floor. Mrs. Arnesen opens the door. She takes in the two men and smiles. Does she think they’re there to sell something? Does she maybe imagine they’re from the Jehovah’s Witnesses and want to convert her? There were a couple of missionaries in the district earlier in the year; they always come in pairs and are so alike they could be twins. These two men are also like one another, but they aren’t smiling. Does she really not know, or is she aware of what’s going to happen and still attempting to keep the mask intact with as much dignity as possible for a person who’s about to go into free fall? The men don’t introduce themselves. They just ask if her husband is at home. He is. He’s sitting in the innermost room, waiting. He’s been waiting for them. He knew this had to happen. She calls him and he gets up, tightens his tie and thinks over the fact that this is the last normal moment of his life. When he appears, he’s wearing his outdoor clothes. He’s ready. He gives his wife a quick kiss on the cheek. The two men look down, embarrassed. She tries to hold him back. “What is it?” she asks. She actually doesn’t know. That’s to her advantage. But it doesn’t help her. “It’s all over,” is all he says. “Over? What do you mean?” She finds out soon enough. Perhaps she understands even as she sees them get into the car, the black car, that speeds out of sight. He has been an unfaithful servant. He’d dug too deep in the drawers beneath the clocks; he’d grown greedy, he’d taken time before he should, and eaten up his clients’ life insurances until he couldn’t stop. It would have been better had he been an unfaithful husband. That could be hushed up. But it would have been best if he’d been dead, if he’d been the one lying in the melting snow between Mylla and Kikut, a pile of bones and poles and skis — dead long before the temptation to put coins in his own pocket (that special hidden inner pocket) became too great. Then Mrs. Arnesen could have looked everyone in the face, because sorrow elevates and tragedy ennobles. But shame eats away at you and debases you — it consumes your eyes, it drinks your blood and it bends your back. “What’s going on?” Mom asked. She stood behind me and put her hands on my shoulders, and was the only one who didn’t know. “Arnesen’s been pinched for embezzlement,” I whispered. “What are you talking about?” “They came for him just now.” Mom ran in to Boletta’s. “Arnesen’s been arrested!” she exclaimed. Boletta thumped all around her with the stick. “I’ve always said that man was made of the wrong stuff. He had too many pockets!” Mom pulled out the drawer from under the clock. “But it’s sad for Mrs. Arnesen,” she whispered. Boletta gave a snort. “And when did they last feel sorry for anyone? Other than themselves!” “Be quiet,” Mom told her. “Stop telling me to be quiet! You know as well as I do that they moved into that apartment before anyone had the slightest inkling that Rakel was dead!” Mom leaned against the clock. “That was all a long time ago,” she said softly. “And what’s that got to do with it?” Boletta demanded. Then the doorbell rang. It was Peder and Vivian. Mom wiped the tears away and attempted a smile instead. “Here we have the other actors,” she said. Peder and Vivian shook hands and were polite to a fault, but they looked away the whole time as if each had double sties. I got them fairly smartly into my room, and Vivian sat on Fred’s bed, and all at once I hoped they’d go before he came back. Peder wasn’t in particularly good form either. He looked like a crumpled rucksack and resembled the Sun King on a bad day. But at least his hands weren’t shaking. “Thanks for yesterday,” he said. “Yeah, gosh,” I said. “What a night.” “You got pretty drunk,” Peder said. “You too,” I told him. He smiled. “But you got drunk quickest because you’re so small.” I threw an eraser at his ear. “And you have to drink twice as much because you’re so fat.” We both turned to Vivian. She didn’t need to drink at all, even though she had been born in an accident. I wished she was sitting somewhere else and not on Fred’s bed. “You could do with some makeup, Barnum,” she said. And perhaps it was at that moment, as she spoke the words, that she decided that’s what she’d be — a makeup artist — when she saw my gray and blotchy face the day after the night before. Or perhaps she’d known it all along, from the time when she saw her own mother’s shattered visage. Peder laughed and pounded me so hard on the back I all but banged my forehead on the floor. “That was great what you read to us,” he said. “Damned great.” “Thank you,” I spluttered. “You’re welcome. Nothing to be thanked for.” “I mean to both of you for getting me home.” Peder fell silent and glanced at Vivian. “You took the tram,” she said in a low voice. “Don’t you remember?” Now it was my turn to laugh. “’Course I remember! Do you think I’m stupid, or what?” But I still couldn’t remember taking the tram from Solli Square, buying my ticket, getting off at Majorstuen, making my way along the rest of Church Road, unlocking the door and sitting down in the chair in front of the stopped clock. I’d lost all that for good. “Is your Mom furious?” Peder asked me. We turned toward the door, where she was standing with some food and three huge glasses of milk. “Unfortunately I don’t have champagne,” she said. I looked down and my face became the way Dr. Greve described, blue-red and swollen. But Peder just got up and bowed. “Thanks, but we had enough champagne yesterday.” Mom had to laugh, and she put the plate down on the desk and courteously withdrew once more. Peder was hungry, so we didn’t need to worry about him; he ate all the sandwiches and drank the milk — his appetite was pretty much insatiable. Vivian moved over to my bed; she leaned back and put her head on my pillow — I figured I’d never be able to sleep there again without thinking of her. “Your Mom’s nice,” she said. “Oh, yes. When she is nice.” Vivian looked at me. “Is it true she was in an accident herself?” I heard what she was saying. But I didn’t understand. “What do you mean?” I asked, and my voice was porous and unstable. Peder coughed so mightily that his mouth was ringed by white crumbs. “What I was going to say,” he all but shouted, “was that we have to replace those bottles for my dad. Otherwise he might get a bit grumpy.” We pooled our earnings — fifteen kroner — that was barely enough for some tonic water and a stamp, but Peder was pleased. “I’ll borrow the rest from Dad,” he said. They went before Fred came home. Vivian had to go to the bathroom first. Peder and I waited in the hall. Mom and Bo-letta sat smiling in the living room. We smiled to them. “Vivian’s in love with you,” Peder whispered. I assumed an air of nonchalance. “Really?” “Yes, she is. Whys your clock stopped?” “Because the man who winds it’s been arrested for embezzlement.” “Cool.” “How do you know?” “Know what, Barnum?” “That she’s in love with me?” I was speaking even more quietly. The words in my mouth were impossible. “I’ve counted all the times she’s looked at you.” “Have you?” “Sixty-eight times, Barnum.” I considered this. “She’s taking a long time in there,” I commented, and must have said it rather loudly because Mom suddenly stared at me and Peder smiled all the more. “Thanks for your hospitality!” he called out. “It was great!” I heard Vivian flushing. “Girls take a long time in the bathroom,” Peder said. “Particularly Vivian.” Now she was washing her hands. Those hands had been places. I sighed. “Hasn’t she looked at you, though?” I murmured. “Only forty-two times. You’re in the lead, Barnum.” Then she emerged. The two of them went. Most people go before Fred comes home. After that I lay in bed, my cheek where Vivian had been lying — her hair, her fair skin, her eyelashes that were so long and curved, and that I’d have given anything to have touched. But I wasn’t dreaming. I lay quite still, bewildered and afraid. Could anyone be in love with me, the midget from Fagerborg, the lit
tlest fly in the whole neighborhood — the mitten, the dwarf? Or had she looked at me sixty-eight times because she’d never seen anything so ridiculous before? That was more probable — yes, that had to be the truth of it. No one fell in love with me. I aroused no deeper emotions than kind-heartedness, amazement and laughter — rather like the well-groomed poodles in the dog run in Frogner Park. These poodles with their bottoms like bright red dents under their stiff tails; these curly creatures that the old ladies bent down to make such a fuss over and to talk in tongues to. I was a poodle. I never aroused so much as alarm. And why had Vivian asked if Mom had been in an accident? It was intolerable. Wasn’t there a single feeling that was pure and unsullied? I tried to read the novel I’d been given by Vivian, Hunger, but I couldn’t get farther than the title page, where she’d written To Barnum from Vivian. I studied the letters; was there any deeper meaning behind those four words? Could there be some secret message here, some clue? The B of my name was pretty big, and her V was like a giant vase — was this also a sign? I looked up instead under H in Greve’s bible to see what he had on Hunger. The feeling of hunger resides in the heart, was what I read. Adult humans can, with adequate supplies of drinking water, starve for several months — as so-called fasting professionals. That’s what I’d become — a fasting professional — with the world’s most starved heart. Fred came in once I’d gone to sleep. I dreamed that Vivian measured me with the reverse side of Dad’s tape and discovered I was over six foot three inches tall, and afterward she licked every single one of my golden inches. “Who was sitting on my bed?” Fred asked. I woke up. “Peder,” I said. Fred turned around. “Peder? The fat guy?” I nodded. “Don’t believe it,” Fred said. “The mattress would have shattered.” “Maybe Vivian then,” I whispered. “She was here too.” Fred lay down and looked up at the ceiling for a while. Then he switched off the light. “It doesn’t matter, Barnum. Just good to know who’s been on your bed, you know.” “Of course,” I said. I thought I’d ask him about the line on the floor that was gone now. But my courage failed me. “Have you got a job?” I asked instead. Fred put the light on again, tore off the shade and stuck his face right in under the bulb. “Look at me,” he said. I didn’t want to. I did all the same. I looked at him. I shut my eyes. “Do you think anyone’ll have me? Huh? You think they will?” He was almost shouting. “Don’t know,” I whispered. It was dark. “Have you done any writing today?” he asked me. “Not really.” “Not really? And how much is that?” “Nothing, Fred.” “Damn it to hell, Barnum! Half stories are nothing but crap!” Then we heard it, the last chord of Mrs. Arnesen’s piano — Mozart — and nobody opened their windows to shout for quiet because Mrs. Arnesen should be allowed to bring her twenty-year concert to a close in peace. And a dark sound hung on in the blackness and slowly died out, between the garbage cans and the clotheslines. “Did you know?” I asked him. “Know what, Barnum?” “That Arnesen had been pinched?” Fred didn’t answer. He lay there smiling for a while. “What you don’t know won’t hurt you,” was all he said. “You think so?” “Yes,” he said. “I’m sure of it.” All at once he sat up in bed. “When’s the premiere of your movie, by the way?” “Which movie?” Fred laughed. “Have you been in many movies recently? Ben Hur, for instance?” “I don’t know,” I murmured. “I don’t know when the premiere will be.” “Looking forward to it?” “Yes, Fred.” And so began that which I call my in-between time, my first one — and there would be many. Those sections, which some immediately want to scrub, to cut out; dramaturges see red when these long, quiet scenes materialize, and producers chuck the script in the nearest wastepaper basket. Directors ask you to put in a strange man with a rifle or an unhappy childhood, and disappear to the bathroom while you compose a new draft. They’d rather have murder and loud music and fading to black; they’d rather have ads, they’d rather have anything but this, because what scares them most of all is getting bored. But they still haven’t got the hang of the fact that it’s in these corners of the story that the turning point may lie — the anticipated unrest — rising slowly from the bottom and spreading its rings from below. And the image I carry of that in-between time — my dark image — is of Mrs. Arnesen’s empty apartment. They can’t afford to keep it now, and we stand on the opposite sidewalk watching the movers carrying out furniture, carpets, vases, lamps, paintings. We nod, silent and comprehending; we all think the same, absolutely, that it was coming. We knew that, that something wasn’t right, and we see someone taking down the curtains; we see the bare windows and the sills with their flowers gone. Finally they take out the piano; two men carried it up twenty years before, but four men are needed to take it out — black, shiny, its lid shut. And a sigh goes through us — some are on the point of applauding. We wait for Mrs. Arnesen; we keep warm under the wet and glistening trees — and I’m one of the women in the street now, until Mom comes and drags me away like some urchin. She grabs me by the scruff of the neck, and I wonder if I’ve ever seen her so fierce and enraged. Once we’re home she keeps a hold of me, and she shakes her fist against my Adam’s apple and says, with her mouth shoved right up at my face, “Mrs. Arnesen has done nothing wrong! And you stand there like an old housewife making fun of her!” “I wasn’t making fun of her,” I whispered. “Yes, you were! You made fun of her simply by standing there gloating! Go to your room!” She shoves me away; I nearly tumble and I close the door, shaking all over. Because something had broken in Mom that day; I hear her crying out there, and then there’s utter stillness. Later that same evening she comes into the room, all beautifully dressed up and wearing a coat she’d otherwise only put on on Sundays. She’s almost herself again, and she takes my hand. “Forgive me, Bar-num,” she says. I look down. “I shouldn’t have stood there like that,” I breathe. She takes out a comb and runs it through my hair. “Go and get your jacket.” I look up at her. “Where are we going?” “We’re going to say goodbye to Mrs. Arnesen, Barnum.”

  We cross the yard and take the kitchen steps. On the third floor the door’s ajar. The plate that bore their name has been unscrewed, and we can see that another plate has hung there at one time; the holes for the screws are there, smaller than those for the Arnesens’. Mom rings the bell. More than anything I want to get away but she keeps a hold of me. She attempts a smile. Her breath is held inside her like a heavy wave. No one comes to the door. Mom rings the bell again, and then we realize it isn’t working. The stillness only intensifies. Mom pushes the door open. I follow her in. She stops and looks about her with wondering, shining eyes. The walls are bare and covered with splotches. The stove has been removed. There’s a border of soot and grease along the upper edge. And behind everything we can see other marks, marks that can’t be hidden, signs of people who lived here before the Arnesens. And then we see her, Mrs. Arnesen herself, standing in the empty living room under the light in the ceiling — the only light that encircles her in one yellow, unsteady pool of illumination. She turns toward us. Mom lets go of my arm and goes closer. I’m the one who sees them, these two women, wounded and proud. They’ve given birth in the same maternity ward, they’ve lived in the same building, and in the course of all these years have barely exchanged a word. They’ve lived their own lives; yet in that moment, here, in this deserted apartment — my unfurnished memory — there’s nothing between them. “You knew the people who lived here before us, didn’t you?” Mrs. Arnesen says. Mom just nods, and smiles again. “She was my best friend. Her name was Rakel.” “Where is she now?” “She and her family were sent to Ravensbrück.” Mom stretches out her hand. “She gave me this ring,” she says. “I was to look after it for her.” Mrs. Arnesen extends her hand too. They shake hands. “We just wanted to say goodbye,” Mom tells her. “Thank you. That was nice of you.” “Where are you moving to?” “To my parents’ house. Outside town. A long way from here.” Mrs. Arnesen drops Mom’s hand. “I’ll miss your playing,” Mom tells her. “Most people will be glad to be rid of it.” Suddenly she turns in my direction
, as if she’s only now realized I’m there. “Are you here, too?” she says. I bow and hear a sound from somewhere else, that of running water being turned off. “A shame we didn’t get to talk more,” Mom says. Mrs. Arnesen looks at her again. “Yes, and now it’s too late.” Mom looks awkward for a moment, and I feel the desire to go. “Is it?” Suddenly Mrs. Arnesen laughs. “Do you remember how Fred kept everyone in the ward awake? How that boy shrieked!” Mom laughs herself. “Mercifully he stopped all that once we got home.” They’re silent for a bit. I take a step backward. There are others in the apartment. There’s someone else here. “How are things going with your son?” Mom finally asks. Mrs. Arnesen holds her hands in a knot in front of her. “Fortunately he got leave from military service. So he could help me. With the move.” And Aslak materializes from the bathroom — Aslak, my tormentor, our tormentor. He’s wearing a dark green outfit, and his hands are dripping. He doesn’t give us so much as a glance and just wants to get past. But his mother stops him. “Don’t you remember Barnum?” she says. Aslak turns slowly in my direction. “Oh, yes. He hasn’t changed in the least.” Aslak extends his dripping hand, and I have no choice but to take it. “My condolences,” I breathe. Mom flushes in horror, and a tremor passes through Aslak’s arm. “Yes, that’s right,” he says. “My father’s dead, too.” And when we’re standing down in the yard once more, Mom lets out her breath. “I know you didn’t mean it, Barnum. But you have to watch what you say.” It has cleared up. The darkness is close and clear. The heavens are a shining, black square above our heads. “I’ll stay here a while,” I murmur. Mom hesitates. Finally she goes. And I sit down on the steps by the garbage cans. The windows darken around me one by one until only the stars are visible. I listen. I hear. Because just as Fred said once in the graveyard, it’s true that you can listen to the building, that there are stories all around that never fall silent, that never stop. But none of them can tell who Fred’s father was, who it was that destroyed Mom; not the clotheslines in the loft, nor even the dusty light in the angled attic window. The stories have their secrets too, secrets they won’t reveal, and when you get too close they begin to tell another story instead. They tell, for instance, that Arnesen’s apartment lies vacant a long time after his wife has gone home to her parents’ house where no one plays the piano. But in the new year a third nameplate goes onto the front door — bigger still this time and of polished, shining cop- per: Ole Arvid Bang. It’s the caretaker who’s moving up from his gloomy studio apartment by the gate to four rooms, a balcony and early morning sunlight on the third floor. This is his reward for long and faithful service; it’s his final triple jump, his longest leap yet — a personal record. At last he’s got to the top of the tree, but it’s said he feels so lonely there that when he sits in the kitchen in the morning talking to himself he doesn’t get an answer till he’s gone to bed. And many years later, once Arnesen had been released for quite some time, he returned to his old apartment, saw the new name-plate and rang the bell. Bang just stared at him through the peephole he’d fitted in the door; he saw Arnesen’s pale face like a moon, stole back to the kitchen and drew the curtains. Bang had been promoted to loneliness, and Arnesen had been released, but the latter gained admission nowhere — for he bore an infection with him, a shadow of shame. And there are those who say that thereafter he slept in a box on Krankaia, shaved beside the hydrant on Bispekaia, and earned eight kroner a day buying brandy at the “pole” in the City Chambers Square for the tramps who couldn’t keep sober once the clouds of frost from the fjord caused their tongues to wilt in their parched mouths.