The Half Brother: A Novel

by Christensen, Lars Saabye

  But a long time later, after the cast had been removed and my arm was left gray and thin and sewed up with a seam of crooked blue, and I’d begun dancing classes and had met Peder and Vivian, Fred wanted me to go with him to Wester Gravlund. I didn’t have any particular desire — graveyards held no appeal for me, they left me gaunt and sleepless. But Fred had already swiped two tulips from Bang’s flowerbed, and now he wanted me to join him because there was something he wanted to tell me, so I had no choice. I got to borrow his suede jacket in the bargain, and I wished someone would see me wearing it — Vivian, for instance. We met nobody. I thought first of all we were going to the Old One’s grave, but when we got there, to that beautiful and awful graveyard (it was May and the trees were groaning under the weight of their own verdure), he went right to the far end, to the rough, disordered corner at the bottom of the side street of the dead. He laid the flowers by a slender wooden cross standing crookedly in the ground. Even I had to bend to read the name. k. schultz 1885-1945. “Who’s that?” I asked him. “My doctor,” said Fred. I looked at the grave again. I didn’t feel good. I wanted to go home. “Sit down,” Fred said. We sat in the thin, golden grass. “The finest rot first,” he said. I sat there, completely still. “What?” “The finest rot first,” he repeated, and it was almost as though he were smiling. He leaned backward and I did the same. We looked up at the heavens slowly moving in the light. “K. saved my life,” Fred said. I almost didn’t dare breathe. “But how?” I whispered. “By rights I shouldn’t have been born,” he said. I lay completely still beside Fred in the rigid grass of Wester Gravlund. The wind passed through the trees. The sun flowed through. An ant crept the length of a blade; a plane appeared out of the sky. I tried to imagine Fred not being there, that I was alone, that it was just me — a single child. But I couldn’t manage it. My dreams were dry, as if they too had been encased in plaster, and hung now just as thin and impotent from sleep’s restless old body. A world without Fred was impossible to imagine, even though I’d wished often enough I could have been rid of him for good. “What?” I said. “I shouldn’t have been born,” Fred repeated. I wanted him to go on, but hoped that he’d stay quiet. “I was forced into Mom,” he said quietly. “I should have been removed. Scraped out and chucked away. But Mom didn’t say anything before it was too late, and Dr. Schultz was so drunk that he didn’t find out I was there.” “How do you know that?” I whispered. Fred smiled. “I’ve listened. In the backyard. In the loft. There are stories everywhere, Barnum. But no one can say who my father is. The one who took Mom. The one who broke his way into her and destroyed her.” Fred was talking so strangely. I’d never heard him talk like this before. It was just as though he’d taught himself a new language or invented it himself. He tore off a blade of grass, stuck it in his mouth, and turned toward me. “The best thing would be if he was dead, right? Right, Barnum?”

  We lay like that a while longer without saying a thing. I was freezing. I wished Fred hadn’t told me all this. There was so much I didn’t want to hear. Then he got up, brushed the earth and grass from his shirt, and stood for a moment looking down at the two tulips and the wretched grave that no one visited and that soon would have grown over entirely. And I remember thinking to myself, Can a person vanish without a trace? “Soon there won’t be space for any more,” I said. “Space for who?” “Dead people.” Fred shrugged his shoulders. “One more, at any rate,” was all he said. He lit a cigarette and began walking faster. I tried to keep up with him but couldn’t manage. He left me at Wester Gravlund — that dark, thin form vanished behind the trees at Frogner Park, and I was left standing breathless on the narrow gravel path in the dissolving cloud of tobacco, between tall marble gravestones and bulging bouquets of flowers. And I thought one other thing, even though soon there wouldn’t be any more room left in my head. The dead are different too. Then I saw it. It was Tale’s grave. Her name was written on the black stone, the date of her birth and her death. Our priceless one — those were the words inscribed there. Priceless and already lost. And suddenly I realized that Fred had led me here to Tale’s grave — he’d just gone some roundabout way first. And I felt such a warmth for him — yes, I really loved him at that moment, fully and sincerely, and I cried real tears for him, my half brother. I went back to Dr. K. Schultz and took one of the tulips and put it beside Tale’s gravestone. I wondered for a while if I should fetch the ring, but I let it be. It could lie where it was. And afterward I forgot all about it, I even forgot myself, because I had so much else to remember. But when Vivian was expecting Thomas and had moved into the attic in Church Road (which had been renovated and made into apartments when money began to flow over this city), I sat there one evening under the angled skylight window drinking. I did so without any pleasure, just deliberately and stubbornly to accelerate oblivion, and then I came upon something, namely that ring. It must have been somewhere in the wall by then, plastered in, and there was a certain joy in remembering it, that ring with the letter T, the first letter of the name of the girl who never received it, the ring that had been bought for her. The snow was falling against the sloping window. And I considered, as I drank up and drank myself down — we do not disappear without trace. We leave a wake that never quite disappears, a gash in time that we so laboriously leave behind us.

  The North Pole

  Fred woke me. “We’re going to the North Pole,” he whispered. I was awake right away. “Now?” Fred nodded. “Boletta’s dancing, Bar-num. Get going.” Fred had already dressed, had on a sweater, a windproof jacket, heavy boots, two pairs of pants, a hat, a scarf and gloves. I put on the same garb, except for the type of boots. We were going to the North Pole. I couldn’t take any chances. It was the middle of the night. Fred had even packed a rucksack in which he’d put oatcakes, cigarettes, a flashlight, coffee, a flask and some matches. We let Mom sleep. She slept beside Dad, who breathed heavily through his nose, a quivering dark exhalation of sound that made the curtains tremble and the room shudder. It was like a whale that had come up for air. We sneaked down to the yard. The toboggan was standing there all ready. Fred secured the rucksack with some string. And so we pulled the sled out through the gate and began the severe climb up Church Road.

  It was so still. The snow was lit by its own brightness, or perhaps it was the moon that caused the plowed edges to shine, as it hung there over the city like some frozen clock face. At first it wasn’t cold at all. I was almost incredulous. Maybe I’d put on too many layers? Long underwear with ski pants over them could be too much, and not a good idea either. But when we came to the crossroads, where Fred had been bora in a taxi, my mouth was filled with a chill that spread like an iron fist through my face, and that knotted the skin to one tight point between my eyes. Fred went at the front and pulled. I stayed at the back and pushed. Our route followed the fence beside the hospital, where blue lamps were lit in the lower windows. Now I no longer heard the silence. I heard the runners of the sled making a noise against the hard-packed snow and my boots squeaking at every step — soon I wouldn’t be able so much as to wiggle a single toe. Fred turned around. “Everything fine,” I shouted. We struggled on and all but went the wrong way at the school gardens, where one apple hung like a red droplet at the very end of a dark branch. We almost went east, and then we’d have landed up in the pack ice around Torshov and perhaps never come home alive at all. Fred changed course. We had the moon at our backs. We passed Northern Gravlund; many had gone here before us and had had to pay with their lives. The gravestones cast long shadows in the night. Don’t give up, the whisper came from every grave. Don’t give up! I pushed. Fred pulled. He turned once more. “The soles of your boots are squeaking something awful,” he said. “It frightens the polar bears,” I whispered. “Shut it,” he said. We had to go over an open crossroads; the wind stung from every point of the compass, and pieces of snow broke from the plowed edges and were whirled in waves through the air. We were on the verge of slipping down to the foul waters by Alexander Kiell
and Square, and when we eventually got over to the other side we had snow in just about every orifice. We had to find somewhere to rest. We found shelter on the steps at the back of the church. There we could sit in the lee of the wind. We were at Sagene. It was still a long way to the North Pole. And between Sagene and the North Pole there were steep descents, deep gorges and rivers that tore the ice with ease with their fierce rapids and high waterfalls. My eyes bled tears, but I said nothing. Fred lit a cigarette, and I got a drag too. A cloud covered the moon. The dark became more intense. We were alone at Sagene, right beside the Arctic Circle. “Do you remember Andre that great-granddad writes about?” Fred asked. “Yes, the one they were looking for?” Fred gave me a cookie. “You know what he had with him on his expedition?” I didn’t know. The only thing I did know was that he had a balloon with him that unfortunately came down on the way. “Fifty pounds of shoe polish,” Fred said. “Fifty pounds?” “That’s what I said, Barnum.” “But why did he have fifty pounds of shoe polish with him?” Fred sighed. I shouldn’t have asked. I should have known myself. Perhaps he wanted to grease the polar bears. Perhaps he wanted to leave a trail of black shoe polish in his wake in order to find the way back. Fred pointed at my unyielding boots. “Andre had fifty pounds of shoe polish with him so he wouldn’t get sore feet,” he said. “Real smart,” I whispered. “Each morning and each evening he used it to soften his boots, Barnum. There’s no point having the best equipment in the world if your shoes don’t last.” “But it didn’t help all the same,” I murmured. “Fifty pounds of shoe polish.” Fred was quiet for a bit. The moon broke through the cloud, and for a second it was just as if the sun were shining down on us. We were blinded by the moon at Sagene that night, before the darkness restored our sight once more. “No, it didn’t help,” Fred said. “No matter how much shoe polish you take you can never be sure.” I ate another cookie and had a gulp of coffee from the thermos. “Did anyone find him at all?” I asked. Fred nodded and started packing up the rucksack. “Forty years later, Barnum. In a heap of stones on an island. There were just a couple of bones left. He’d been eaten by some creature or other.” I was freezing. More than anything I wanted to turn around now, go back the same way we’d come (if indeed it was still the same way, because maybe the snow had blown over it now). Perhaps our tracks were gone and we couldn’t follow the moon either since it was somewhere else, its empty slice of light no longer to be relied upon. I stayed sitting where I was. The steps were cold. “Do you think great-granddad got eaten too?” I asked, my voice so low I could scarcely hear it myself. Fred looked at me. “He disappeared in the ice. And he’s there yet. Still in one piece.” “Still in one piece?” Fred secured the rucksack to the sled. “A glacier is like one huge freezer, Barnum. Everything keeps in it.” I could see it all before me and had to shut my eyes — great-granddad deep in the ice, where time makes no impression, the same age as when he vanished and died. Perhaps he’s stretching out one hand that’s frozen solid and which no one managed to catch hold of. “But what if the ice melts?” I ask. “It doesn’t melt.” “But if it melts, Fred?” “Just shut up, Barnum.” Fred began dragging the sled on northward. I ran in his wake. My boots squeaked. We had to cross the river with poles as flakes of ice drove past us in sudden merciless gusts. And then the string around the rucksack broke. We might have lost our provisions there, midway between Sagene and the North Pole, had it not been for Fred, who lay down and caught hold of one of the ends before everything disappeared for good in the dark whirlpools near M0llene. We crept up onto a snowdrift and found a bench right down by the final, decisive slope. Fred swore and dragged the rucksack onto his back instead. “What did they do when they had to go to the toilet?” I asked. Fred gave me a dismal look. “You don’t need to shit right now, do you, Barnum?” I shook my head emphatically. “I just wondered,” I said. Fred pulled his hat down over his head. “They had to shit where they stood,” he said. “Did they really just shit where they were standing?” “What did you imagine? That they had their own toilet with them?” I didn’t quite know what I’d thought, but it was something I constantly had to consider, how astronauts, mountaineers, divers, fakirs and polar explorers actually went to the toilet. “Nansen too?” I inquired. “Nansen? What about Nansen?” “Did he shit where he stood too?” The part of Fred beneath the hat started looking a little weary. I shouldn’t have asked. I should have saved my strength instead. The wind was picking up. The night was one raging, white circle. “Nansen just had to shit where he stood,” Fred said. “Roald Amundsen had to shit where he stood too. And the shit turned to ice before it hit the ground, so they had to be quick, Barnum. Damn quick.” “Did they?” “They did indeed, Bar-num. If not, the whole load might have frozen solid in their bums.” “Oh, Jesus,” I said. “Yes, you might well say that. And that’s why they shaved their bums too.” “Nansen?” I whispered. “Have you got hair on your bum, Barnum?” I didn’t answer. I’d basically never looked for it. I was glad I didn’t have to go to the toilet. It had been ages since Fred and I had had such a fine talk together, and it was even longer since we’d said so much at one given time. And now he said even more, as he got up and hunched his shoulders against the wind. “They found more among Andre’s remains than just bones,” he said. I got up too and had to cling to Fred so as not to fall over. “What?” “A watch. One of those old-fashioned watches with a lid. And inside his watch there was a picture of his girlfriend and a lock of her hair.” “Was it working?” I whispered. “Was it working? Are you out of your mind, Barnum? Who would there have been to wind it?” Fred shook the rucksack into place and we struggled onward — that last slope in the land of ice and snow. I pushed, Fred pulled, and there at the top, at the innermost point of the endless plateau, golden light shone from high windows, and behind them I could glimpse people raising their arms as if all the time waving to one another. This was the North Pole then. Others had gotten here before us. “They’ve beaten us to it!” I exclaimed. “We’ve lost!” “Now you really are going to shut up, Barnum.” Fred drew the sled closer. I ran after him. “Why do they call it the North Pole?” I asked him. He didn’t answer. He stopped on the sidewalk by the sharp curve of the rotary so that we were standing in the shadows between the moon and the streetlight. We stared at the golden windows. I saw people in there laughing and talking, but I could hear nothing. It was all silent, with their faces resembling red lamps, brightly lit and soundless. These men were sluggish, and they could barely manage to stand up. The women in their midst wore white aprons and black dresses, and they went back and forth with heaving trays of foaming glasses and many empty ones, too. Then Boletta was there. She walked between the tables. They jostled to touch her but never succeeded. The men wanted to pull her down, but she pushed them away. Boletta laughed. Boletta clambered up onto a table and perhaps there was music there too, because Boletta danced on the table while the men clapped, and the faster she danced the slower everything seemed to go in my eyes. “Boletta’s having fun all right,” I whispered. Fred said nothing. And Boletta danced until she didn’t have the strength for more, and sank into arms that were stretched out to catch her, a billowing bed of willing hands. And she was given a seat, and a glass was put in front of her. All of a sudden I didn’t want to see any more. “Shall we go?” I asked. But Fred held me back. And it was too late anyway. We’d already been seen. The faces inside were turned toward us. The moon had shifted and we stood now in its cold glow, visible to those who still could see. And since that time I’ve never been able to forget the scene played out in there, silent and swiftly moving — as if the window had been a screen and Fred and I were standing outside in the cold watching a movie. And perhaps there was a thread from Boletta’s life that was fixed here — a fine, thin thread that trembled when she danced on the table, and that was cut, that broke, the day the North Pole was finally closed forever. But for now a man in a white jacket came out of the doorway. “What are you doing here?” he demanded. “Waiting for Boletta,”
Fred told him. “So we can take her home,” I added. The white jacket vanished once more and soon enough Boletta appeared, supported by two men who could have done with some support themselves. One of them was wearing a kind of uniform — he looked like the conductor of an orchestra who’d lost all his instruments. The sweat froze immediately to thin flakes on their wide brows. “We never get to take Boletta home!” the unsteady conductor exclaimed and cackled with laughter. The other fellow didn’t want to be outdone by the first and roared with mirth. “Boletta is the North Poles last virgin! No man has gotten closer to her than Father Christmas to his wife!” Fred took a step in their direction, and his eyes had gotten back their blackness. “Let my grandmother go,” he said. The sweat broke. The men became sober and meek. “Should we call a taxi?” the first one asked. “We have the sled,” Fred told them. They let Boletta go. She sank into our arms, and we got her down onto the sled. She was heavy and sleepy. Fred put his windproof jacket around her, and she got my scarf to sit on. The two men wanted to help keep her warm too and began dragging off their coats. Fred just looked at them. “She has enough.” The men put their coats on again. And on the other side of the window the rest of the customers and waitresses sat staring out at us. Now it was happening here, just as in the earliest movie theaters when the screen was hung in the middle of the hall and soaked in oil, so that it became transparent and people could watch the movie from both sides. The other man, the one wearing the uniform, bent closer and laid his hand on Fred’s shoulder. Fred shook it off. “Boletta is our angel,” whispered the man. “Take good care of her.” That we did. We secured her fast with string, and then we pulled her home. Fred and I pulled together, and Boletta sat on the sled and slept. We pulled her safe and sound through the storm. We found the way. It was quite a night. There should have been fanfares and flags, grandstands and flaming torches! Oh, to have been seen now, with Boletta tied securely to our sled, on the way home from the North Pole. And that did happen. Because as Fred guided Boletta, who was walking beside the banister in her sleep, and as I was opening the door as quietly as humanly possible with such frozen fingers I was barely able to hold a key horizontal, Mom was suddenly there instead, pale and out of breath. And behind her in the hallway Dad turned around, the telephone in his hand and his bathrobe inside out, and our welcome lasted no longer than the time it took for Dad to bang the receiver down on its cradle. Mom pulled me close against her own bathrobe. “Where have you been?” she murmured. “Just to the North Pole,” I replied. And it was only now she saw Fred pushing Boletta up the last steps. Dad whistled loudly, and Mom dragged her into the apartment and all but banged the door in Freds face. But he dodged it at the last moment, and the snow turned to sleet and began pouring from our hair and clothes. Finally Dad put down the phone. “Well, I don’t need to call the police after all then,” he said. “Be quiet,” Mom told him. She went nearer Boletta, who had had woken up. She stood there melting. “Have you no shame?” Mom hissed. Boletta said nothing. Mom didn’t stop. “At your age! Have you no shame?” Boletta bent her head, but in truth I think it was mostly because it was too heavy to hold up for so long at one stretch. “Well, well,” said Dad. Mom turned on him. “Don’t say well, well to me!” she shrieked. “Well, well,” Dad said. “Soon we’ll have awakened the whole of Church Road.” He put his arms around Mom, and the air somehow went out of her. This was the life she had to accept. This was the way things had become. Dad’s nose was more crooked than usual — it pointed away from his face. “Now I think we’ll send the polar explorers to bed before there’s a flood in here,” he murmured. Then Boletta lifted her head and looked around her amazed, as if she’d discovered us all at the same time. “Greenland is a country particularly suitable for walking in,” she told us. And didn’t we laugh! We laughed. Dad laughed through his whole nose, like a blocked clarinet in the night. We had to hold our ears. We laughed and held our ears. Even Mom laughed. She couldn’t help it, and what would she have done otherwise — weep? Mom laughed instead. And Fred, even Fred himself laughed; he leaned against the wall and laughed his head off. He laughed, and it struck me as I looked at his thin, wet face split with laughter, that I couldn’t recall having seen him laugh before, and that thought frightened me as much as it cheered me. And I thought too that I would make my own list of different sorts of laughter, just as Dad (who was laughing loudest of us all) had done once upon a time. And the list would have looked something like this: Mom’s laughter — albatross; Dad’s laughter — cuckoo; Boletta’s laughter — pigeon; Freds laughter — cormorant; Barnum’s laughter — auk. “But what is it we’re laughing about?” Boletta suddenly asked. And when she spoke those words, things fell so strangely silent.