The Half Brother: A Novel

by Christensen, Lars Saabye

  I took the elevator down to the swimming pool, borrowed a pair of trunks, drank a beer and one more Jägermeister, then managed three lengths before I was exhausted. I lay down by the side of the pool. Classical music wafted from loudspeakers that I couldn’t see — Bach, of course — synthetic versions, untouched by human hand. A few ladies lay on their backs and floated in tranquillity. They floated in an American way, their arms like wings, and with sunglasses on, sunglasses they constantly had to shove up onto their foreheads to see better, to catch a passing glance. For maybe Robert Downey Jr. himself might walk unevenly along the poolside, or Al Pacino in his platform shoes, or even my old friend Sean Connery — I’d have treated him to a proper drink and caught up on his news. But no one from that level of heaven was in view and I wasn’t much of a pretty sight myself. The ladies flicked their sunglasses down once more and kept themselves afloat with relaxed, blue arms; they were a company of angels with small, inflated stomachs. Suddenly this made me feel so placid, so beat and placid and almost happy. I floated too. I floated in a Norwegian way, with my hands at my sides and my fingers working like shovels to keep my balance, sculling water behind me. Now I was in water. Then angst gripped me — it always came abruptly, even though I knew it would come, in the same way as snow. Angst crept into my tranquillity. Had something happened during the night? Was there someone I had to buy flowers for, say sorry to, ask forgiveness from, work for nothing for, or whose feet I had to kiss? No idea. Anything could have happened. I was in the grip of misgivings. I turned over, making waves under the American ladies, clambered up the unsteady steps like some hunchbacked hermaphrodite, and heard a low ripple of laughter passing over the water. At that moment Cliff Richard appeared from the changing rooms, the man himself, wearing a hotel robe and slippers. His hair lay like a plateau on his head, and his face was hale and he held it high. He looked like a mummy who’d fled from the pyramid of the sixties. He’d aged well, in other words, and the ladies out there showed a bit of interest; they breathed like friendly porpoises, even though Cliff wasn’t necessarily at the top of their wish lists. But for me he was more than good enough. He made me actually forget my fear for a moment; by his sheer proximity he gave me a break, just as he did back then, in that life that is our story, my story and Fred’s story, and which I just call that time, when I sat in our room, that time, in Church Road, with my ear fastened to the record player listening to “Livin’ Lovin’ Doll.” While Fred lay dumb on his bed with wide eyes; he hadn’t spoken in twenty-two months, for as long as elephants are pregnant; he hadn’t spoken a single word since the Old One died, and everyone had given up trying to get him to speak, whether it was Mom, Boletta, the teacher, the school dentist, Esther from the kiosk, God or anyone else; nobody got a word out of him, least of all me. But when I lifted the needle to play “Livin’ Lovin’ Doll” for the twentieth time, Fred got up from his bed, ripped it off, went down into the backyard, chucked the gramophone into the garbage and started talking. It took a Cliff to do that. And I wanted to thank him for it. But Sir Cliff Richard just walked past me in a wide arc, sat astride an exercise bike between the mirrors in the corner and pedaled away toward his own reflection, without getting any closer, like a mummy with tennis elbow. And my hand slid over the bar counter and picked up the first thing it came in contact with — gin and tonic — the Real McCoy. Four different clocks showed the time in New York, Buenos Aires, Djakarta and Berlin. I made do with Berlin. Quarter to two. Peder would be sweating now. He’d be making small talk, apologizing, fetching beer and coffee and sandwiches, phoning hotels, searching for me, leaving messages, racing over to the press center and nodding to all those he remembered, bowing to all those he didn’t remember, and leaving his card with all those who didn’t remember him. I could almost hear him saying — Barnum’ll be coming soon, he’s probably just taken a roundabout route, you know how it is, as often as not the best ideas come from the most muddled heads, and I’ve just got the practical imagination to transform them into reality — let’s drink to Barnum! Yes, Peder would definitely be sweating by now and it would do him good. I laughed, laughed loudly at the side of the swimming pool in the Kempinski Hotel, while Cliff Richard raced on his bike with the three mirrors and the gazes of the fat American ladies, and just as suddenly as both angst and laughter had hit home so a shadow enveloped me. What was the matter with me? What twisted delight had carried me off, what sort of black humor possessed me? I froze. For a moment I staggered there on the green marble tiles. I sucked that laughter into me. I called it back. This wasn’t the stillness before the storm. This was the stillness that makes cats tremble long before the rain begins to fall.

  I showered and wondered for a while if I should go and lie in the solarium. A hint of a tan and a facial before the meeting could be beneficial. But I was in an awkward and restless frame of mind. I got myself a beer instead. The waiter gave me a thin smile along with the bottle. It struck me suddenly how young he was. He wore the hotel uniform with a clumsy dignity, almost defiantly, like a child who’s taken his father’s suit. I guessed he was from the former East Germany; it was something about the defiance that made me think that. He’d begun the long climb to the top from the swimming pool at the Kempinski. “Mr. Barnum?” he said in a low voice. He evidently believed that was my surname. He wasn’t alone there. I forgave him. “Yes. That’s me.” “There’s a message for you.” He handed me a broad envelope with the hotel logo on it. Peder had found me in the end. Even if I’d hidden behind the fish sheds on the island of R0st he’d have found me. If I was sleeping in a drunken stupor, the odds were it would be Peder who roused me. And if I woke at Coch’s Hostel on Bogstad Road, it would be because Peder had hammered on the door. I leaned against the bar. “What’s your name?” I asked. “Kurt, sir.” I nodded in the direction of the mirrors in the corner. “You see that guy there, Kurt? Cycling away?” “Yes, sir, I can see him.” “Yes, but do you see who it is?” “Sorry, sir. No.” And I realized, slowly, that I was old now. “It doesn’t matter, Kurt. Just take a Coke over to him. A Diet Coke. And put it on my bill.”

  I folded the envelope four times and put it in the pocket of my robe. If Peder wanted to make me sweat too, he would have his wish fulfilled. I took my beer with me into the sauna and found a place for myself on the top ledge. There was someone sitting there whom I half-recognized but couldn’t quite place, so I acknowledged her without actually meeting her gaze — just a quick nod — my speciality, my personal gesture to the world. But the others stared right at me, quite brazenly. I just prayed there weren’t any fellow countrymen present — screenwriters from Norwegian Film, journalists from the gossip columns, chatterboxes from magazines, or directors. I immediately regretted this move of mine, this mad detour, because in here everybody was supposed to be naked, and there were both men and women present. And the one with a towel around his waist was an intruder who put all the others in a terrible dilemma. I was the clothed one who made their nakedness immediately visible and unbearable — all the varicose veins, the flat buttocks, the spare tires, the sagging breasts, the scars, the rolls of skin, and moles that might be malignant. There was nothing else to be done. I couldn’t retreat because that would only have served to reveal my cowardice and brand me a voyeur, and the festival still had three days to run. Reluctantly I folded my towel beside me to show them that I too could be natural, unafraid of revealing my vulnerability. I sat with my legs crossed, stripped in a German sauna, marveling at the fact that in this rigidly law-abiding and humorless land, men and women were more or less obliged to sit together naked in order to sweat a bit. In ultra-natural Norway, the country that’s only just broken free of its glaciers, this type of behavior would have prompted a constitutional crisis and letters to the editor. But there was a sort of logic in it being mandatory here. There was just one sauna in the hotel and this was for the use of both men and women, unclothed and at the same time. If it had been optional, the whole thing would have been indecent. The war had to have so
mething to do with it. Everything here had something to do with the war, and I thought about the concentration camps — that final shower where men and women were separated, once and for all, and about the precision of those mass murderers. There was even a camp for females, Ravensbrück, and for a moment, almost excited, it crossed my mind that this could be used in some way, this leap, this linkage between the Holocaust and a chance meeting in the Kempinski sauna during the film festival in the new Berlin. But as so often happened lately, the idea fizzled out. The thought faded away, the spark wasn’t trapped in time, and as it flickered out I sank deeper into self-doubt. What did I really have to offer? Which stories was I capable of handling? How much can you steal before you’re caught? How much can you lie before you’re believed? Hadn’t I always been a doubter, a run-of-the-mill doubter? Yes, I’d doubted almost everything, including myself; in fact I wasn’t even sure there was someone who could be described as a “me” at all. In periods of gloom I considered myself just a piece of meat put into a biological system that went under the name of Barnum. I had doubted everything, apart from Fred. Fred was indubitable, he was beyond doubt. I remembered what my father used to say: It’s not what you see that counts, but rather what you think you see. I emptied the bottle and now recognized one of those who was sitting there. It was just as I’d feared — a well-known critic and old acquaintance whose name I won’t mention — we simply called her the Elk because she always reminded us of a sunset. She had written in her time that I was “a Volkswagen among Rolls Royces,” but I never read that article because at the time I was out of favor generally. Peder planned legal action for harassment, something that mercifully never came to pass, but if she wanted to play games with metaphors she’d come to the wrong man. Now she was looking in my direction and starting to smile, and even though she seemed far less pompous in here than in her columns, looking almost like a slightly overripe fruit, I was still eager to avoid returning the smile. Besides, I might have said something I shouldn’t have. She was my ill omen. What doom did she herald this time? I didn’t dare imagine. I smiled. “To hell with you!” I said. I leaned forward over my knees and coughed violently. It couldn’t be true. My tongue had become restive again. The tongue was a banana skin. Your tongue is a slide, Fred used to say. It was only me who’d heard. To hell with you. But the Elk looked up in surprise; I coughed my lungs out and was on the point of throwing up, when yet again Cliff Richard came to my rescue. For at that moment he came into the sauna, with a Coke in his hand; he was reminiscent of the cover of “Livin’ Lovin’ Doll”; he stood for a second or two by the glass timer in which the sand dropped and gathered. Then Cliff sat down beside me on the uppermost ledge. It was cramped. It would soon be too hot. The needle was at ninety. The Elk had had enough. She sneaked out behind her towel and gave a last quick glance over her shoulder. Was she laughing? Was she laughing at me? Would she have a tale to tell in the bars tonight? Someone threw water over the stone chips so they hissed. The humidity was like boiling fog. I turned toward Cliff. He wasn’t sweating. He was quite dry. Every hair was in place. His skin was finely bronzed. Now at last I could finally tell him. “Thanks,” he said suddenly. “For the Coke.” “Its me that should be doing the thanking,” I said. “Thank you” Cliff lifted the bottle and smiled. “For what?” “It was your song that made my brother talk,” I replied. He looked embarrassed for a moment. “It wasn’t my song but the power of God.”

  It got too hot. I took my towel and tottered out, dizzy and thirsty, showered again and caught a glimpse of Kurt at the bar. He nodded discreetly and blinked. He was my man now. I took the elevator up to my room. The phone still displayed its red light. I lifted the receiver and dropped it again, threw my robe onto the bed, changed into my suit and put a bottle from the minibar in each pocket. That suit had many pockets. I was armed with spirits. Then I drank the final Jägermeister and it remained hanging there like a burning column all the way from throat to innards; I ate a spoonful of toothpaste and put extra insoles in my new Italian shoes. I was all ready for the meeting.

  And what could I possibly know about everything that happened in my absence, moves that were beyond my control? I had no idea. I was still unaware, in the grip of misgivings, nor did I want to know. I stood in the slow-sinking elevator with mirrors on every side, even the ceiling. I just wanted to be in that moment, a man of his own generation who took one second at a time, frozen into the tiniest of all epochs, where there was only room for me. I caught a glimpse of my face in the mirrors and imagined a child who falls, gets up again and only starts howling when he sees the terrified and anxious humans around him — like a delayed pain, the echo of the shock. I had time to gulp some vodka. Then a white-haired porter opened the door and wanted to follow me out with an umbrella. I gave him five marks so he wouldn’t. He looked aggrieved at the banknote, and then suddenly it had vanished between the smooth, gray fingers, and it was impossible to tell if I had offended by giving him too much or too little. He resembled a servant from colonial times. He was the one who tied up the loose ends at the Kempinski Hotel. It was he who broke the seals on the toilet seats. I went out onto the red carpet, which was already worn at the edges. Four black limos with soot-dark windows were parked right at the sidewalks edge. None of them was for me. There’s an old saying in this business: No limo, no deal. I didn’t give a damn. The vodka burned at the back of my tongue. I lit a cigarette. Two television crews, one from CNN and the other from NDR, were waiting for something to happen. A thin film of rain fell over Berlin. The smell of ashes. The furious noise from building sites. Cranes slowly swung around, barely visible beneath the low clouds. God was playing with an Erector set. Yet another limo — a long, white locomotive with American streamers — stopped right in front of the hotel, and a woman with the straightest back I had ever seen emerged from it. Nineteen umbrellas were put at her disposal. She laughed, and her laughter was drenched with whiskey, thickened by tar and polished with rough sandpaper. She never stopped laughing and started over the red carpet, waving with a thin hand that crept with the elegance of a pickpocket between the raindrops. And there was no one who could walk a red carpet like her. It was Lauren Bacall. It was none other than Lauren Bacall. This was she right here, in flesh and blood, each and every gram of her. She filled her own self to the ends of her fingers, to the lobes of her ears, to her very eyebrows. The umbrellas turned inside out above her as she jutted out her chin. She had just invaded Germany. And I simply stood there, fastened to the electric sight — Lauren Bacall walking slowly and powerfully past me — and I was left standing in the aftermath of her passing. And it’s like a back-to-front omen of doom, a mirror-image déjà vu; I see it all in front of me, Rosenborg Cinema, row 14, seats 18, 19 and 20, The Big Sleep, with Vivian sitting in the middle. It’s close and clear, I can even feel the new turtleneck that’s scratching my neck, and I can hear Lauren Bacall whispering to Humphrey Bogart, with that voice that gives us goose pimples in our mouths and restlessness in the very marrow of our spines: A lot depends on who’s in the saddle. And Peder and I put our arms around Vivian at the same time; my hand meets Peder’s fingers and nobody says a word but Vivian smiles, she smiles to herself, and leans backward, into our arms. And yet when I turn toward her I see that she’s crying.

  And now I was standing in the rain in Berlin beside the red carpet, outside the Kempinski Hotel. Something had happened. Someone was still calling out and I couldn’t hear a thing. The lights had gone out, the limos had driven elsewhere. The same porter took hold of my arm. “Is everything all right, sir?” “What?” His face came closer. Everyone has to bend down to me. “Sir, is everything all right?” I nodded. I looked around me. The cranes were still; God couldn’t be bothered with the Erector set any more, or maybe it was just that the clouds had piled across the sky in the opposite direction and made it look like that. “Are you sure, sir?” A cigarette was floating in the gutter. Someone had lost a camera. It lay there and the spool was winding backward. “Would you
get me a taxi?” “But of course, sir.” He blew a whistle he had at the ready in his hand. I got out some money, wanting to give it to him, for he deserved it. But he shook his head and looked away. “Just keep it, sir.” Quickly I put the money back in my pocket. “Many thanks,” I said.