The Half Brother: A Novel

by Christensen, Lars Saabye

  And I can hear Montgomery screaming. And when Montgomery screams, he wakes the entire city whether we’re sleeping or not. Montgomery screams like a possessed rooster, and no longer knows the difference between the sun and the moon. He crawls along the railway tracks in his long army jacket, weeping and screaming, the old and broken soldier. He’s still at war, because the war is still in him. He left his senses in Normandy in 1944, and now there’s just a front-line trench in his soul and a bloody beach in his heart as far as he can see. And every night Montgomery screams to wake the dead. He lies down beside Fred, who’s sunk into the frail brown grass now. And Montgomery carefully lifts his head and pours brandy into his mutilated mouth. Montgomery cries; he screams and cries and whispers. “Don’t be frightened, boy The Allies are coming soon.”

  And I’m dancing with Mom. She’s cleared the living room, and we have the floor to ourselves. We dance together and Boletta’s sitting on the divan following every step. I have my arms around Mom and lead her as well as I can from corner to corner and diagonally over the floor and back again. Boletta’s most disappointed. “Did you learn nothing at all at Svae’s?” she asks. Mom laughs and pushes me against the wall. “He’ll dance better with Vivian,” she says, and gives me a quick kiss on the cheek. Boletta comes and takes over. I dance with her. Mom sits on the sofa and lets out her breath. I dance with Boletta. She leads. She shakes her head. “Have you forgotten everything I told you about who should lead?” she asks. “Yes,” I say and push her away; I’m rough and firm, and after a moment the ghost of a smile crosses her face. “That was better, Barnum! You’re allowed to be a bit rough!” And we dance like that for the rest of the evening. We sit on the sofa and let out our breath one after the other until Mom and Boletta dance together, and they look like two old wallflowers, full of mirth, whom no one wants to dance with. And when there’s no music left on the radio, we give up and go to bed.

  It’s far into the night when Fred comes back, it’s almost morning. The light’s frail and shimmers in the room. I’ve been sleeping and dreamt something weird. I dreamed I was lying in the coffin that Fred brought home. And I’m not alone. Vivians holding me. Its cramped, but that makes no difference. She takes her hand and strokes it down over my stomach. We’re not dead yet, by the way. And she takes my hand and takes it where she wants it to go, and I rub. Someone knocks on the lid. We pretend we don’t hear. I remember wondering just who it could be knocking on the lid — Peder or someone else entirely? It’s from this dream I wake suddenly to find Fred there. I see him. He’s turned away. My stomach is all wet. He says nothing. I dry myself off on the quilt. “Where have you been?” I ask. Fred doesn’t reply. He’s breathing heavily, as if he has a cold — it sounds like whining, the noise of a draft. It makes me think of Dad. I feel afraid. I sit up. There’s something on the floor, something dark. There’s something dripping from Fred’s bed, dripping onto the floor. “What was it Dad said before he died?” I whisper. “Shut it,” Fred tells me. But there’s something wrong with his voice. He can barely speak; he’s like a radio that’s not tuned right. There’s a grating noise there. I grow still more afraid. I tiptoe over to him. I can’t see his face. I light the lamp over his bed. I shut my eyes because what I’ve seen can’t be right. I open them again. It is. Fred turns and stares up at me. He’s unrecognizable. His face has been mashed. There’s blood everywhere. His hair is full of it; his nose is smeared over his swollen cheeks, and his mouth is just a hole from which more blood trickles now and again. Everything is crooked and shattered in Fred’s face. His eyes are barely visible between blue chunks of flesh. I don’t know if he can see me. I feel like crying. “Who’s done this?” I breathe. He doesn’t answer that either. He just lies there. “You have to go to the doctor, Fred.” “Shut it,” he says again, almost inaudibly — it’s more like a groan, and he takes my hand, holds it in a vicelike grip and won’t let go. I have to sit down on the bed. I sit there for a good while. I don’t quite know who’s comforting whom. Finally he lets go of his hold. I get a cloth from the bathroom and wash his face as delicately as I can. “Dry my eyes,” he whispers. “What?” I ask him, because his speech is so unclear. “I can’t see, Barnum.” So I wash his eyes. Slowly his face comes to view, just a shattered mess, and he sees me now too, as if doing so for the first time. “Thank you,” Fred says. “Thank you.” “Who did this to you?” I ask him again. “Shut it,” is the only answer I get. After that he sleeps. At any rate I hear no more from him except his heavy breathing, which somehow seems locked in his flattened nose. And I can’t help thinking that it reminds me of Dad, and it seems so bizarre that Fred should be lying there making me remember Dad. I wipe the blood from the floor. I sit with Fred for the remainder of the night, and once I’m absolutely sure he’s asleep, Mom and Boletta have already gotten up and I go out to join them in the kitchen. Boletta waves at me with a teaspoon and laughs craftily “I guess you do look tired, Barnum. Did we old ladies exhaust you completely yesterday evening?” I just shake my head and realize I’m not hungry. I’ve even forgotten what day it is, though most likely it’s an ordinary day in the middle of the week, as far from one of the high days on the calendar as it’s possible to be. “Has Fred kept you awake?” Mom asks me out of the blue. I shake my head. And just as suddenly she gets up and makes for our room. “Don’t,” I tell her. She stops and looks at me surprised. “Don’t what, Barnum?” “Don’t go in to Fred,” I whisper. Mom stands still a few seconds, then shrugs her shoulders, annoyed, and quickly opens the door. I look at Boletta. Her brow is furrowed, and she leans over the table. “Has something happened, Barnum?” she asks. And at that moment Mom screams. She screams and immediately afterward storms out and stares at me wild-eyed. “What has happened to Fred?” “He tripped,” I tell her. Boletta’s gotten up too, and she goes in to look. She shrieks at the sight of him herself. She’s even quieter when she comes back. “He’s tripped, Barnum?” “Yes, when he came home during the night. Right on his face.” Mom takes hold of my arm. “You’re not telling lies? This isn’t just something you’ve made up?” “I swear! I had to dry up the blood too. Just look at the cloth!” Mom goes back into the room and fetches the blood-soaked rag, which has somehow stiffened; it resembles one of those marzipan roses you put on expensive cakes, except that the cloth is a lot larger and not particularly appetizing. But it does look as if Mom’s holding a ruined artificial rose in her hand, and she just shakes her head. “He won’t say a thing. I think he’s been drinking. He stinks of brandy!”

  Boletta called the doctor. I took a taxi to school. That was the way Mom was, until long after Dad’s death — she got me a taxi to school so I wouldn’t get there late. But I was late anyway I asked the driver to go around Wester Gravlund three times, slowly, and I could see that someone had been digging right down in the corner of the dark-green graveyard. And anyway it didn’t matter one iota that I went into school late, nor was I made to give answers to my homework, because my father had just died. Since that day I had been shielded, but not as I’d dreamed when I thought up accidents and suffering, and that I aroused everyone’s pity so I was crowned the all-powerful ruler of world compassion. Now I imagined instead I could see laughter behind each and every face, a hidden laughter on everyone’s lips, because a more hilarious death than Arnold Nilsen’s was impossible to imagine — a discus in the head in the middle of Bislet on a Sunday morning. They laughed behind their faces and behind my back, and I thought of the list I’d found in Dad’s pocket because this laughter should have been included. I’d have called it shameful, the shameful laughter, which ought to fall backward and stick in the throat, and slowly but surely strangle the person who’s dared to emit it. That was pretty much my thinking as I sat by the classroom window, shielded into loneliness and abandonment like a leper, covered with scabs of mockery and grief. Right at that moment I wished that Peder and Vivian were in my class; one thing I could have done would have been to send a note to them with no more than the words the sh
ameful laughter on it, and right away they’d have understood what I meant. But Peder went to another school outside town and had to take the bus there every morning or else go by car with his dad if he managed to get the Vauxhall started. And Vivian had private lessons — that’s what she said at least, perhaps it was her mother who tutored her. So we never did go to the same school, and perhaps that was for the best, perhaps that was what rendered us inseparable, the fact that we longed, yes, longed for each other when we were separated. Perhaps the tyranny of recess would have caused trouble; perhaps music, woodworking, gym and Norwegian periods would have made us enemies. Instead we could meet beyond the playground, beyond the timetable, in our own great free period — under the red tree in the park, inside the cool movie theaters. It was just the three of us — Peder, Vivian and Barnum — we were outside, no, we were inside; we had our own places, and it was all the others who were outside. “Are you not feeling so good again, Barnum?” Knuckles is the one asking the question, and her voice is brittle, her words wrinkled. She’s beginning to grow tired of me and everything that has to do with me. I turn around slowly and everything is still. But far off I can hear Montgomery screaming. The war goes on. Every day is D-Day. Knuckles stands with her hands folded, and behind her the board is completely black. We’re having Religious Education. “Just a bit leprous,” I tell her. And I get up and go. Knuckles tries to stop me, for a moment impatient, indignant. She feels the time for shielding me should be over soon (widows mourn for just one year), but I won’t let it go, this lonely freedom of mine, even though I realize it can’t last. I leave and don’t turn around. And the others in the class are envious of brokenhearted Barnum; they’d like to have a dead father too.

  By the time I got home, the doctor had been by. Mom was in the living room and I had to go in there. She was sitting there mournfully. Her eyes rolled emptily back and forth. She even whistled. That was no good sign. She wanted to talk to me but would say nothing. In the end I was the one to speak. “What is it, Mom? Is it something to do with Fred?” She suddenly smiled, and the whistling stopped. “Such an amusing doctor we had here,” she said. “Really?” “Yes, really. He said that if Fred had fallen and hit the floor, then the floor would have had to hit him at least twenty times and finally jumped on him from behind.” I looked down. Mom gave a sigh. “Why do you lie to me, Barnum?” “I don’t know,” I murmured. Mom pulled me toward her. “You really don’t know why you do it?” I shook my head quickly. “I don’t know what happened.” Mom gave another deep sigh. “Someone’s attacked Fred, but he’ll say nothing, of course.” She leaned back on the divan and for a moment looked like Boletta. The sighs came in quick succession now. “No, no one tells me anything. The doctor said we should report the attack to the police, but what can we report when Fred won’t say a word?” Mom hid her face in her hands. Everything was just too much for her. And then she said something that always scared me and that I wished she’d never say. There was something about the words, words she tended to use when she was in a particular frame of mind, that left me feeling so helpless. It was something about the way she stressed the words, the matter-of-factness in the midst of the horror, that could rob me of sleep for several weeks at a stretch. It was the ultimate rejection, the final threat. She said, as she breathed out, “What am I to do with the two of you, Barnum?” “Don’t say that,” I breathed. “Please.” She took my hand. “Go in to your brother, and see if you can get him to admit it.” “Admit it?” “Well, he was the one who was attacked.” She let me go, and I was already on my way to the room because I’d rather sit with Fred than listen to Mom. But suddenly she got up and fanned herself with both hands. It was too much for her again. Everything was too much for her. “No!” she exclaimed. “I don’t want to know! I don’t want to know who beat up my son! I don’t want to know anything!” She kept on talking like that, to herself and with herself, that of all the people in the world she was the one who knew least. She knew nothing; the world treated her like a fool, we were strangers to each other and she barely knew who she was herself except a lonely widow, still too young to go clad in black the rest of her days and already too old to start a new life. “Poor Fred!” she suddenly cried out. “Poor Fred!” Quietly, I withdrew without her noticing and went in to sit with him. He was lying on his back looking like a mummy. It made me think of a photograph I’d seen in Who, What, Where of Lenin. Fred resembled Lenin as he lay there like that; a photographer had actually managed to take a photograph of Lenin’s embalmed body in the mausoleum in Red Square. Very carefully I touched the great bandage around Fred’s head. “Now Mom’s in a bad way,” I breathed. Beside Lenin was Stalin — he was also in the picture — they were like two old friends. Stalin was wearing his uniform; you can see the polished buttons, and thus they’ll lie for eternity. I didn’t like the picture, but I couldn’t take my eyes off it either, because it was as if the photographer had managed to take a picture of death itself — he’d developed death. There’s a pale white glow to the faces, which is perhaps because their brains have been removed; Soviet doctors drew them out of both Lenin and Stalin, through their noses using a sharp hook — just like the ancient Egyptians when a Pharaoh was to sleep for 3,000 years. I wrote an essay about it. “Concussion,” Fred says. I bend closer. “Who? Has Mom got a concussion?” Fred sighs. “No, me. Have you become completely thick again, or what?” “Does it hurt?” He doesn’t say anything for a time. “Get a mirror, Barnum.” “Why?” “Just get one, damn it!” I steal out and get a mirror from the bathroom. Boletta’s come home. She’s sitting with Mom. That’s the way things are. We’re sitting with each other, each of us alone. I hurry back into the bedroom. “Hold the mirror for me,” Fred mumbles. “Where?” “Over my face, Barnum. I want to see how I look.” And I hold it low over his face for him, and finally his heavy breaths cloud the mirror. “You’re alive,” I tell him. “Or do you want me to stick a hatpin in your heart? Boletta’s bound to have one.” He just laughs. “Put a glass of brandy on me instead,” he whispers. But when I take the mirror away, I see that Fred has turned away and is crying.