The Half Brother: A Novel

by Christensen, Lars Saabye

  We reached Flensburg the following day and were waved across the border by two men in tight-fitting uniforms. Boletta was our navigator now, and she’d folded Europe away and put it in the glove compartment a long time ago. I think what she wanted more than anything was for Dad to go the wrong way. I wanted him to speak German to us, but instead he was silent and sullen. He wanted to make progress, and he swung down onto the Autobahn. It went to Hamburg, where we were going to spend the night. I saw nothing except the speedometer needle rising toward fifty-five. The Volvo Duett shook. We had to hold tight. But we were still being passed the whole time. Low sportscars raced past us, and it was just as if we were standing still. We were the slowest. Dad pushed our speed up to sixty. It made no difference. His new gloves were slippery on the steering wheel. He was sweating. Everyone else was just driving faster. I grew sad. How could we be last when we’d never driven so fast before? And Dad told us about those drivers who become speed blind, who think they’re standing still and get out of the car while driving thirty-five at least. Ever since, I’ve always thought that Fred wasn’t dyslexic — word blind — but rather speed blind; he left language too quickly. Then everyone had to slow down anyway since a bit farther on blue lights were flashing; something had happened, an accident. Perhaps it was a word-blind driver who’d misread a sign. I caught a glimpse of a crashed car and the accident’s detritus — an arm, blood on the pavement, clothes, a kneeling woman, a stretcher, a dead dog and a crumpled stroller — before Mom put her hands over my eyes and held me tight. She held me like that all the way to Hamburg, where we got lost at a rotary, and it was then Dad first began talking, and it was Norwegian he spoke. All of a sudden a guy ran out onto the road in front of us waving his arms and pointing at something, and we thought we had a flat, that that was what he was trying to tell us. Dad swung up onto the sidewalk and rolled down his window. The stranger bent down and looked in, beaming. He had a scar at the corner of his mouth that was like an extension of his smile. “Norway?” he said, his accent rather broken. Dad nodded. “Norway?” he said again. “Yes,” Dad said. “We’re from Norway. What do you want?” The German stuck his arm through the window to shake hands with each of us. “I was in Norway during the war,” he explained. “A magnificent fatherland!” Dad stared at him, incredulous. Boletta pushed his hand away as if it were unclean and infected. Mom put her arm around Fred and me. The smiling German with the scar on his face was moved. He wiped away a tear. “I hope I can come back to Norway one day,” he whispered. Then Dad snapped. He took off his glove and exposed his mutilated fist; it was as if he clenched that fist with all its missing fingers and shook it right under the Germans jaw. But then all at once he changed his mind. Perhaps he remembered we’d gotten lost at a Hamburg rotary and that it was late in the evening and we still had nowhere to stay because none of us was keen to spend another night in this black box of a Volvo Duett. Instead the injured fist relaxed in friendship and the man took the lump of flesh in both hands and wept. “We’re just two injured soldiers, you and I,” he whispered. Dad was greatly moved. “Could you recommend a hotel around here?” he inquired, and quickly drew back his arm. “Only the best is good enough for you,” the German said, and pointed in the opposite direction. “On the righthand side of the lower lake you’ll find Vier Jahrzeiten.” Dad rolled up his window so it closed with a thud and spun the car away from the sidewalk. I turned and saw the German soldier, the polite loser, still standing at the rotary with his hat raised in salute. “Oh, yes, you really won that war, Arnold Nilsen,” Boletta said. “Couldn’t you just have knocked him down?” Dad didn’t reply. He leaned pale and sullen against the steering wheel and pulled on the glove with the artificial fingers. Someone honked their horn behind us. There were cars everywhere. We just flowed with the traffic down into Hamburg, as in a river on wheels, and there, beside a small lake surrounded by a thin belt of trees, lay the hotel, Vier Jahrzeiten. Dad stopped in front of the broad steps. A doorman stood in attendance on the red carpet. “It looks expensive,” Mom breathed. Dad just smiled, brushed back his hair, polished his shoes with his handkerchief, lit a cigarette and went up the steps — quickly giving some money to the little doorman. Up at the top another employee opened a golden door to admit him. We waited. Time went by. “Can’t we just turn and drive home?” Boletta whispered. Mom was annoyed and leaned forward between the seats. “You are not going to ruin this vacation for me!” Boletta turned around and said for the last time, “You shouldn’t disturb the dead.” Just then the doorman pressed his face against the windshield to take a look at us. He resembled a clown with his shiny lips and white cheeks. Boletta raised her fist and he retreated, bowing, to the red carpet. “Perhaps the rooms have showers,” Mom murmured. We sat in silence then, just waiting. We could see guests in the foyer slowly walking back and forth with glasses and cigarettes and sparkling jewels. Eventually Dad returned. He shoved the doorman to one side, tumbled into the car behind the wheel and drove off. He was angry about something or other. His hands were shaking so badly he could barely manage to steer. “There were no vacant rooms,” he mumbled. Mom attempted a smile. “No vacant rooms?” Dad breathed heavily. “And just be thankful there weren’t!” he shouted. “That wretched youth hostel of a place only had five stars anyway.” Boletta glanced at him. “Five stars? Isn’t that a lot?” Dad roared with laughter. “I’ve stayed in hotels with ten stars and that’s twice as many as five!” Boletta laughed herself. “Perhaps we weren’t good enough for Vier Jahrzeiten,” she suggested. Dad fell silent and had to stop at the corner. He was in a black mood again. Mom dried the sweat from his brow and could have wrung the handkerchief out afterward. “What do we do now?” she asked carefully. Dad produced a map of Hamburg from his pocket. In the middle of the creased paper there was a cross. “In their great charity they recommended a hotel in Grosse Freiheit,” he replied. “Grosse Freiheit?” Mom repeated. “It’s a well-known street here, love. We have to look out for an elephant.” We drove on — not down, but in — to the loudness and the light that quickly engulfed us, all the way till we reached the inner chambers of the city’s godless heart. It was a heart that beat madly and unevenly, a wonderful systole that made the car’s hood shudder; and finally we came to a halt in a blood clot in a narrow street where the windows were all red. I glanced out. I saw women with naked thighs, sailors drinking beer, shadows that resembled dogs in dark alleyways, men with high heels and doormen enticing people to come inside. Mom put her hands over my eyes again, hard this time, so I could barely breathe. “An elephant?” she murmured. Dad pointed. “There!” he exclaimed. Mom released her hold and down a lane we saw a sign with an elephant on it. Its trunk hung in a circle that shone in several colors. Dad drove the last part of the way there and parked in front of the entrance. The place was called the Indra Club. There was no red carpet, no doorman and no stars. “Have you taken us to the circus?” Boletta asked. Dad said nothing. He sat thinking for a bit. Then, all of a sudden, he’d made up his mind. He wanted us all to come with him and to bring our luggage there and then. Fred and I took our suitcases through the door of the Indra Club. We came to a cloakroom. Behind the counter a man with a shaved head stood looking at us in amazement. And at last Dad talked in German. He spoke at length and he spoke fluently, and I haven’t the slightest idea what it was he said. But the bald man listened intently, pointed to the ceiling and mentioned something that sounded like a number. Dad turned to us with satisfaction. “I’ve just got us a room on the second floor!” he announced. We were led through a smoky place where a handful of guests sat at round tables drinking from wide glasses with handles. They looked at us as we passed and, smiling, shook their heads — foam on their mouths. On a stage in back, against the wall, there was a set of drums and three amplifiers. A black electric guitar lay on the floor. Then we went up a steep, angled staircase and arrived at what was to pass for our room for the night. Mom stood there staring. There wasn’t even a sink. The double bed sagged in the middle,
and it had obviously been a good while since the sheet was changed. On the windowsill there was a light with a red lampshade full of flies. On the pillow was half a roll of toilet paper. Even Dad himself had to take a deep breath. “We’ll just have to make the best of it,” he said. Boletta sat down on the one and only chair. “But not with the best of them now,” she murmured. Fred rolled out the sleeping bags. Mom crept out into the corridor to find a shower. She came back almost immediately, even paler than before. “What is it?” Dad asked. Mom had already begun gathering up her things. “Are we really going to spend the night in a brothel?” she shouted. Dad blinked. “A brothel?” Mom was seething. “Oh, yes! A brothel! There are women in these rooms!” Dad tried to put his arms around her, but his attempt failed — not even laughter was a help now. “I’m not staying here one second longer!” she hissed. And with that we left the room, our bill and the Indra Club hastily and soundlessly. Mom had her hand on my neck and whispered the whole time, “Look straight ahead, Barnum. Look straight ahead!” We reached the bottom of the stairs and discovered a rear exit on the ground floor. And just as we sneaked out, I caught sight of five boys in tight pants and lilac jackets jumping onto the stage, picking up their guitars and drumsticks. I stood still for a moment. I wanted to hear this. The tallest of them leaned toward the microphone, twisted his mouth, counted in English — one, two, one two three four — and was about to begin singing. I saw his lips shaping into a yell. I saw the cords on the guitars, the drumsticks falling heavily toward the drums, the pointed black shoes about to begin keeping time. And right at that moment, before they started, before the five boys began — in a strange and heavy silence as in the seconds between lightning and thunder — Mom pulled me away and the door closed behind us. We ran to the front, tossed suitcases and bags in the trunk, and flung ourselves into the car, and Dad drove off as fast as he could between the neon lights and the stars. And the last I managed to glimpse of Hamburg was a gaudy poster on a brick wall: The Beatles. England. Liverpool.

  We reached Bellagio the following evening and stopped at a sharp curve before the town. We got out of the car. Only Boletta sat where she was, her arms folded. The sun went down behind the green hills, and all the steep roofs shone like dark, angled mirrors. It was just like the sea sinking too from blue to black. The air was full of still, hot wind. A row of narrow, pointed trees hung like dark knives on a hill above the graveyard, impaled on the sky. Dad, who’d been singing opera ever since Austria so as not to nod off at the wheel, and who could barely stand on his feet, drew us close. Thus we stood together in the humming dark of Lombardy. We had got there. “What do we do now?” Mom murmured.

  First of all we found the police station. It was beside the market square. We parked there. Three officers came out right away and peered in curiosity at our license plate. Dad rolled down the window and greeted them. Dad spoke Italian. It was unbelievable that there was room for so many languages in the one mouth. They spoke at length. Mom followed it all with pride and continually put her finger to her lips as if she were afraid we might disturb him. But we were dumb with wonder. Even Boletta had to raise an eyebrow. And I like to think this was Dad’s finest hour, the high point of his shady career, when he spoke in Italian with the officers at Bellagio market square. Already a crowd of people had gathered around the car. Perhaps they’d never seen a Volvo Duett in Italy before. Dad rolled up his window again, the conversation over. “They knew who Fleming Brant was all right,” he said, and tantalizingly revealed no more for a time. Boletta shut her eyes, and Mom had to drag it out of him. “So tell us then,” she begged. Dad smiled. “They call him the Red Dog.” “The Red Dog?” “Why?” “Don’t ask me,” Dad replied. “But he works at the Villa Serbelloni.”

  A flock of thin, golden boys ran ahead of us to show us the way. The Villa Serbelloni was a hotel. It lay right out on a spit of land that extended deep into Lake Como, and it resembled a castle with its arches, pillars and terraces. This had to be a place for those with nothing less than blue blood. The boys didn’t dare go any farther, and they disappeared in the shadows under the palms. Dad slowed gradually and finally stopped the car by the tennis court, which lay deserted in the floodlights that made the red gravel glow. We got out of the car. Our eyes were like saucers. Never had we seen anything like this before. A man in dress coat and tails was coming quickly to meet us. Dad asked for Fleming Brant. And as soon as Dad had mentioned the name Fleming Brant, we were treated like kings and queens. A veritable army of doormen arrived to take our luggage. A chauffeur in a gray uniform parked the Volvo in the garage on the other side of the hotel, and we were all but carried up the wide steps. “I said we were related to him,” Dad whispered. The ceiling above the reception was so high I got dizzy, and Fred had to keep me upright. Boletta wanted to leave, but Mom kept hold of her. Dad put a pile of banknotes on the table. The receptionist smiled and got down a huge key from a board. Then the head waiter appeared too. He bowed and showed us into the dining room. Guests looked up from their dinners. Waiters wheeled trolleys groaning with cakes and strange fruit. A man sat by himself in the far corner. It was a long way away. Boletta wanted to go back, but Mom wouldn’t let her. The man was extremely old. He wore white gloves and dark glasses. He read from a book as he drank coffee from a tiny green cup. The skin of his face was rough and ruddy, as if he’d sat for too long in the sun, and his hair was white and thin. It was Fleming Brant. He didn’t notice us until we’d reached his table. He laid down his book, Dante’s Divina Commedia, and got up, amazed, reeling as he did because he recognized us, or saw the Old One again in us. And I couldn’t see all that this brief meeting constituted; I only knew that this moment was bigger than itself, that here time came together. But this I did see — Fleming Brant’s sorrowful serenity, a dark joy, as he slowly took off his glasses and lowered his pained gaze. It was Mom who offered her hand in greeting. “We’ve come to thank you,” she said. “Thank me?” But Fleming Brant wasn’t looking at Mom. He was looking rather at Boletta. “For the beautiful words that you wrote about my mother, Ellen Jebsen.” Fleming Brant just stood in silence in front of Boletta, and Boletta herself was lost for words. Slowly he turned toward Mom again. “Sit down,” he whispered. He spoke slowly. Waiters were there in the blink of an eye with more chairs. A trolley of fruit and cakes was brought over, and bottles of wine and glasses put on the table. We sat down. I thought that it had to be Fleming Brant who owned the hotel — maybe he had the lake and the whole town in the bargain. He picked up the book he’d been reading. “It was my dream that one day Ellen Jebsen would play the part of Beatrice in Dante’s Comedy” he said. “Is it funny?” I asked. Fleming Brant thought for a moment. “Yes, it is. What’s your name?” “Barnum,” I replied. Fleming Brant put on his sunglasses again. “I’m very moved,” he said, his voice low. Dad extended his hand. “And I’m Arnold Nilsen!” They shook hands — one black and one white glove — and Fleming Brant withdrew his hand first and apologized for doing so. “I have this rash,” he exclaimed. “Eczema. I got it from the film.” “Yes, they called you the Red Dog,” Dad laughed. There was silence for a few seconds. Fleming Brant looked down. “I couldn’t tolerate the light and the chemicals. I gradually fell to pieces.” Mom looked at him. “Were you an actor yourself?” she asked. Fleming Brant shook his head and smiled, but it was a sad smile. “I cut the film,” he replied.

  Later on we went up to the room. It was larger than the apartment on Church Road. There was a four-poster bed, bath, shower and large balcony. Mom was such a long time in the bath that in the end we had to check on her. She lay there laughing in a cloud of foam. Dad sat down on the side of the bath. Mom put her wet naked arm around him. We had gotten there. We had found Fleming Brant. Soon we would turn around once more. Then Fred spoke, and he hadn’t said anything the entire evening. “Where’s Boletta?” Mom fell silent. Dad rolled up his sleeve, took off the glove from his good hand and plunged it into the foam. “Not here,” he said. But Mom wasn’t amused. S
he got up quickly, and I looked the other way. Fred was standing over by the window. I went to join him. And down there on the terrace was Boletta, together with Fleming Brant; they were the only ones there, the other tables were deserted and the lights along the balcony rail cast blue shadows beyond them. A waiter came out with a blanket, and Fleming Brant laid it over Boletta’s shoulders. I thought, without knowing it, that now she’d disturbed the dead just the same. “I can’t believe he’s anything but an exceptionally rich man,” Dad said.

  I see Fleming Brant the following morning. I’m out on the balcony before the others are awake. He’s standing down on the beach. His face is withering away. The skin is flaking. He supports himself against a rake. Then the first guests arrive — both men and women — hand in hand. Silently they go out into the water and start swimming. And Fleming Brant rakes away their tracks in the sand, laboriously, from the steps and down to the edge, where the first waves are lapping. And when the guests come out of the water again and hurry toward the terrace and breakfast, it’s Fleming Brant who has to rake away their prints, so the sand can be smooth and even for the new guests coming.

  And this is my memory — of windmills in the night, the band I never heard, and the cutter of films who rakes away footprints in the sand — so carefully and efficiently that nothing shows. And when I go down shortly onto the same beach, the cutter of films will follow me too and rake over my tracks in the cool, light sand that falls away beneath my feet.

  Barnum’s Ruler

  I’m not saying how tall I am. It’s recorded in the school doctor’s notes. It’s marked on the door frame in our room. It’s entered in my passport. But my eyes are blue, not brown. I only inherited Dad’s stature. I didn’t grow any taller. Right up to that day when the policeman cursed me in the little city in front of the whole class, I wasn’t particularly different. Except for my curls, which old ladies in kiosks and on trams yearned to touch. But after that I somehow lagged behind. I came to a standstill, while the others rose about me — rose and rose like some forest gone to seed. I was left down there among the moss and the pine needles, a prisoner forever of my own wretched inches. And considering that growth is greatest in the early years and reduces thereafter until one grows less than a fraction of an inch by the time one reaches thirty and starts shrinking thereafter, my prospects were pretty bleak. It’s of little comfort to learn that the heart keeps growing to the very last. Of no comfort to me either that I’d certainly have been above the minimum height required to enlist in the Roman army around 200 bc. That was just under five feet. Even the girls shot past me — with their long legs and straight necks, I was hardly worth a second glance. When they did occasionally look at me, they looked down, right down — and I think they enjoyed that, looking down on me, because it meant I had to look up to them. What else were they to use their new-found height for if not to look down? I’ve been called Tom Thumb, toadstool, tiny, dwarf, pygmy, gnat, pipsqueak and runt — as if my real name wasn’t enough to be saddled with. There was no choice about it. I remember one time I was on my way home from school. It was in October. It was raining; of course it had to be raining. Fortunately, I escaped having to wear rubber boots, because they more or less went up to my groin. I wouldn’t be caught dead with an umbrella or a sou’wester. I just had a short yellow raincoat and simply got wet. I didn’t care. I felt those curls that I hated so much, but couldn’t rid myself of nonetheless, being plastered flat over my head as hair should lie. I liked the rain. I’ve always liked it. Suns a drag. Sun hounds you. With rain you can rest among the drops. I puttered through Urra Park. I tended to stop at the church and lean over the railing to look down on the tram as it passed by Now and then someone standing at the back would wave up to me. I’d wave down to them. It felt good to look down, to look down on somebody and wave to them at the same time. That day there wasn’t a single passenger at the back of the tram. I waved just the same and thought about everything you do that no one ever sees. And when you shut your eyes, how could you really and truly be sure that everything didn’t disappear for that time and reappear when you opened them again? Was that how God had created the world, by blinking twice? What if God were to get tired and close His eyes again, once and for all, or if He got fed up and fell asleep? I stood leaning against the railing in the rain, lost in my own thoughts. If God had decided everything already, what was the point then? It made no difference what you did, because everything would happen as it had to anyway By the way, Fred had started at a new school right in the city. Perhaps God had a hand in all that too. The teachers said that Fred was stupid and had to go into a special class at the boys’ school in Stener Street. Class F it was — yes, Class F; designed for boys who for one reason or another had fallen behind in primary school. Some said that the boys there were so thick they couldn’t manage to find their way to the girls’ school in Osterhaus Street, even if you supplied them with map and compass and followed them half the way there. You could say plenty about Fred, but stupid was one thing he wasn’t, and God ought to have known that all right. Yet there was something about his letters he couldn’t quite manage. Of course he could talk fine, but on paper everything went to pieces. He would write his name as Ferd, and everyone laughed their heads off at this to begin with. Once he wrote Branum on a present for me. I thought it sounded all right. To Branum. I had no objection to being called that. And it was the best present I’ve ever been given — a real typewriter. But soon enough the snickering melted away and no one laughed any more, barring me, and when Fred kept writing Ferd and was reading Ibsen’s Peer Gnyt, the teacher gave him a smack on the ear you could have heard over by the garbage on the far side, and everyone put their hands to their heads as if to ease a soreness they could feel themselves. The school had decided that Fred was sufficiently stupid, and now he was down in the slums in Stener Street together with the city’s morons — all branded backward, hopeless and impossible. I hawked a gob of spit down on the cobbles and then heard someone approaching between the raindrops, long before the gob landed. I opened my eyes and turned around. I knew it. It was the gang from the seventh grade — Aslak, Preben and Hamster. They were smiling nastily, with toothy smiles, and I couldn’t stop thinking that if I hadn’t shut my eyes this would never have happened.