The Half Brother: A Novel

by Christensen, Lars Saabye

  As it happens, that was the last time we had dinner at her parents’. Mom went home by taxi to Boletta. Vivian wanted to walk. We stopped at Peder’s house. Light shone from the ground floor, but there was no sign of life inside. “Did you think it would be Peder and you, too?” I asked her. Vivian didn’t answer immediately. “No, I thought it would be you and Peder,” she said. We continued up Tiedemann Street, and I see us passing through the seasons in one single stretch — it’s autumn when we turn the comer and the lights go out in Peder’s house; at the Vestkanttonget we go into winter; spring approaches as we arrive at Bislet, and at Boltelokka summer’s come already — yet another summer. I open the windows to air the place; I get a cloth while the neighbor goes out with the trash, and in the hallway I polish our nameplate till it’s shining bright: Vivian and barnum. I hear her right behind me. She hasn’t made a sound on the stairs. Now she puts her hands over my eyes. I laugh. “I’ve been at the doctor’s,” she whispers. “The doctor’s? There’s nothing wrong?” “I’m fine, Barnum. You’ll have to get checked, too.” She takes her hands away. I stand there still with my back to her. “Are you sure you want to have a child with me, Vivian?”

  The Half Dark

  “Many thanks!” the polite little boy says when I give him his fifty 0re change. His fingers close around the shiny coin, and in the other hand he clutches a red carton of juice. “You don’t need to say many thanks,” I tell him. I give him a pat on the head. He twists free. “Huh?” he murmurs. “Whose money is this?” I ask him. “Whose money?” “Yes, who does this fifty 0re belong to?” He clenches his fist even tighter around the coin. “It’s mine!” “Exactly,” I agree. “So there’s no need to say many thanks.” The boy races across the road. “Cuckoo!” he shouts. I’m standing on an empty lemonade crate leaning against the kiosk window. It’s pretty good to see the world from here, from the inside of Esther’s kiosk. I’m the one who’s running it now, together with Mom. Just before summer Esther took a turn that made her forget the price of sugar candy, how many 0re there are to a krone, and when to turn off the stove. On the other hand she can remember every single thing that happened between 1945 and 1972 — the weather, international elections, Holmenkollen competitions, the moon landing, and the most frequent choices on the all-requests program. She shares a room at the Prince August Memorial in Storgata, no longer remembers her own name but has an entire calendar in her head. Autumn’s arrived. I’ve hung the latest weeklies by clips from a little line in the window. The juice cartons are stored in the freezer and the bottles of cola are in the fridge. What I like least are the sausages. They’re just a nuisance. They lie there in the tepid water till they turn gray and wrinkly and are of no use whatsoever except as dog food. I’m going to stop doing sausages. I’ll have a kiosk with dry goods: color supplements, cigarettes and candies. But Mom doesn’t want any changes, she’d like to continue just where Esther left off. They’ve started doing shrimp salad and fried onions at the stall in S0rkedal’s Road, but I have no intention of trying to compete — they’re welcome to go on serving their muck. I’ve got a fine view over to the Little City too. A class is there to learn the Green Cross Code from a policeman. They’re standing to the left and to the right, most likely listening to him going on about bicycle lights and reflectors, because the dark nights aren’t far away now and being visible’s what counts then. And when I see them like this, these kids, with their serious expressions and their incomplete features, it’s as if I can put my finger on time and see it passing. I jot this down in my notebook. Time. How can time be shown passing in a new way? If it were possible you could, for instance, put someone in front of a camera for fifty years and film the changes in their face. Possible title — Echo. Then the lesson’s over, and the kids rush across the road as the policeman is left standing sorrowfully in the little pedestrian crossing, able to confirm that they haven’t learned a thing, or that they’ve forgotten anything they did learn already. None of them looks to see if it’s safe to cross, they just dart out over the road to be first at Barnum’s kiosk. Soon enough there’s a long line in front of the little window. I lean out and peer down at them, and they look up at me. They can’t know I’m standing on a crate in there. “So what will it be?” I ask. And the boy at the front, a chubby fellow with his hair down over his eyes, puts five kroner on the ledge. “Sausage and sauce,” he says. I put paper around a pale sausage, smear on some ketchup and mustard, and put the carcasses in his hand. He gets four kroner back — this dead meat is worth no more than that — and the overweight boy thinks I’ve given him the wrong change, too much; he doesn’t so much as thank me but hurries off down the sidewalk as he stuffs the sausage into his mouth. “You could say thank you,” I shout after him. But he doesn’t hear a thing, and the next in line is a slender girl with a much too large schoolbag; she’s on the verge of toppling backward with it. “What can I get for twenty-five 0re?” she asks. I have a think. “For twenty-five 0re you can get sugar candy,” I tell her. “What’s sugar candy?” “It’s good,” I assure her. I give her a big chunk in a twist of paper and drop the small coin in her hand once more. “I almost forgot that sugar candy’s free if you share it with someone else.” She looks up at me in astonishment and walks off alone toward Majorstuen. And at the end of the line are two boys on a mission that’s troubling them. They look all around and don’t risk saying a word until the coast’s clear for at least a mile in every direction. I know what they’re after all right. I just let them sweat a bit. Then one of them strains toward the little window. “Cocktail” he says, suddenly and speedily; he all but swallows the word before he’s spoken it. “What was that?” I ask. The other one kicks his friend in the leg, and the poor soul has to go through the whole thing again. “Cocktail” he repeats, more clearly this time; the sweat’s running from the smooth, as yet untroubled, brow. “Do you mean the mens magazine Cocktail?” Both of them nod their heads off, impatient and glancing this way and that, as if mom at any moment could appear on the scene and catch them in the act. And who would have thought that this type of reading would be in among all the stuff that Esther left to me? Oh yes, a whole pile of Cocktail magazines from the 1960s were still lying in a box under the chocolate. I’d long wondered who it was who bought Cocktail from Esther’s kiosk — it certainly wasn’t me — and I’d come to the conclusion that it probably had to be Bang the caretaker. I took my time opening the box as the hearts of the boys outside went like dynamos. I chose Number 13 from 1967, that had the lady with the hairdo squatting on a rug at the foot of a tree. It’ll be a good start for these two young gents. They’ve already put a tenner through the window. I give it back, pat them both on the head and ruffle their hair a bit. “You don’t need to pay for old ladies,” I tell them. Then I roll up the magazine, put a rubber band around it and hand it over like a relay baton to these wild lads who set a new record for running the last part of Church Road that autumn. That’s enough for today. I close the window, pull down the little blinds, and finally get myself into the camp chair I’ve inherited from Esther. I can sit here and write a bit and have a beer in peace and quiet. Shouldn’t the kiosk itself to be the starting point for a script? It could be a way of showing time too — time as seen from the window of Esther’s kiosk at the beginning of Church Road: the changing customers, the hairstyles, the wares, the passing cars, the money, the streetlights. Time and place; time seen from the place, and, not least, the place seen through time. Possible title — Barnums kiosk. I sense this warmth in the shoulders, a sort of good fever, the joy of being in the proximity of something. But that day I don’t have the calm to develop my thoughts all the same. In my pocket I have a letter I still haven’t opened. I can’t wait any longer. Vivian’ll ask me soon, and I ought to be able to give her an answer. The letter’s from a Dr. Lund. Barnum Nilsen. Please come to Lab III at the Royal Infirmary on Thursday September 12 at 1:00 p.m. Please bring with you a sample of sperm, which should be no more than three hours old; at least five days sho
uld have passed since intercourse or your last ejaculation. Inside the voluminous envelope was a transparent container with a lid. Tomorrow is Thursday and the last time we made love was on Midsummer night. It was raining that evening, and the bonfires would hardly burn. I drain my bottle of beer, chew some salt sweets and nip up to visit Mom. I haven’t seen her for a while. She’s pleased to see me and puts her arms around me. Boletta’s sleeping on the living room divan. “How is she?” “Dreaming,” Mom whispers. We go into the kitchen. I stop for a moment by our room. Fred’s bed is still made up and ready it’s been like that a long time. Mom changes the sheets twice a month. “Do you want a coffee?” she asks. “You wouldn’t have a beer?” She sighs, her back to me. “It’s not more than three in the afternoon, Barnum.” I sit down at the kitchen table. “Would you like some good news, Mom?” She turns abruptly. Her voice barely reaches over her lips. “Fred? Have you heard from Fred?” There was such a great stillness in my head. I smile. “No. But Vivian and I are going to have a baby” Mom looks at me for a long time. It’s as if she has to set her face to a different speed. “Oh, Barnum,” she says at last, and pulls at my curls a bit and kisses my brow. I bend away. She laughs. “Beer I can’t give you. But champagne I can.” And at the back of the fridge she finds a green bottle, and I carefully uncork it so as not to wake Boletta. There’s a fine crackling in our tall glasses. We drink to each other’s health. We sit there at the kitchen table on a Wednesday in September drinking champagne. Mom takes my hand. “When?” she asks me. “When?” “Yes, when are you having the baby?” “As soon as possible,” I answer. “As soon as possible?” “We’ve only decided to have a baby, Mom.” She pulls back her arm and pushes the bottle away. “Why do you say things like that?” “Like what?” “That you’re having a baby. Do you do it just to get a drink?” I don’t quite know what comes over me, but I’m consumed with a sudden rage. “Our child’ll at least have a father,” I all but scream. Mom doesn’t look away from me. It’s me who looks down as soon as I’ve uttered the words and drink my champagne. “That wasn’t necessary,” she breathes. I shake my head and want to try to make it look like righteous indignation. But I can’t. “Forgive me,” I say. I look up. Mom’s eyes are black. And I see, perhaps for the first time, because it’s so clearly etched in her face, her expression — how like Fred she is. She takes my hand once more. “It’s of no consequence, Barnum.” “But it is, and I’d like to talk about it.” “Talk about what?” “Do you remember the time Fred and I went to get Boletta from the North Pole?” Mom smiles. I pour some more into our glasses. “Who could forget? We thought you were dead.” “Was it your father she was drinking with there?” I ask her. Mom clammed up and grew restive. “I said I didn’t want to talk about it,” she says in the end. I get up and go over with the bottle to the window. The flowerbeds beside the garbage cans are almost overgrown. There are weeds around the stairs. The creeper’s begun to turn red against the bricks like veins. I shrug my shoulders. “Fine then. Don’t talk about it.” Mom gets up herself. “Boletta wanted it that way,” she says, her voice low. “Why?” “Because it was me she wanted, Barnum.” I understand what Mom’s saying, but I can’t comprehend it. “What do you mean?” “She didn’t just want a man who disappeared.” “In the same way as with the Old One? Did Boletta find a sailor too?” “I don’t know, Barnum. And I don’t want to know either.” “I always imagined that granddad was a tram driver,” I tell her. “That he looked after me every time I took the tram from Majorstuen.” “Stop it, Barnum.” “I liked to think that, Mom. That he kept an eye on us as he was driving the tram.” Then something hits me, slowly but surely, and I start laughing, laughing out loud. “What is it now?” Mom asks me crossly. “Fleming Brant,” I murmur. “What about him?” “Maybe he was Boletta’s husband?” “Don’t be silly, Barnum.” “I mean it! The man who cut the movies is your father! That’s it!” Mom boxes my ears. Then she lays her hand on my shoulder. “I was back at the police station yesterday. To ask about Fred.” I close my eyes. “Anything new?” “They said that being missing was no crime,” she goes on. Then I notice three men in shiny suits emerging from the entrance by the gate. They’re accompanied by Bang the caretaker, who’s wearing a suit himself, the same one he used to come to funerals in. They stop on the stairs. Bang points with a stick, and the whole group looks up at the roof. “What’s going on?” I ask. Mom glances over my shoulder. “There seems to be talk of converting the drying lofts into apartments.” “Who the hell would want to live up there?” Mom takes the bottle from me and puts it back in the fridge. “You and Vivian perhaps. And the child,” she adds. “Or Fred,” I breathe.

  I go back to the kiosk before Boletta wakes up. She’s become a creature of the night. She just sleeps by day. I settled myself in the camp chair, opened a beer, and kept the curtains closed. I added a section in my notebook under places — the drying loft. What becomes of a place when it’s no longer to be found, when it’s obliterated and leveled to the ground? Does that place become nothing more than a mark on some old and useless map? But I couldn’t manage to carry the thought any further, I stopped in mid-jump; I wasn’t just lacking height, I lacked length too. I chewed a candy and instead got out some faded editions of Cocktail from the Middle Ages. I quickly flipped through the pictures of these women who’d turned pale and shy-looking in the course of the years. They almost looked as if they were about to fall asleep or burst out crying there where they sat crouching in baths with foam between their breasts. And to think I’d gone all the way to Frogner Road just to buy Cocktail. But I was struck by another idea as I flicked through this forbidden archive — maybe I could write a story for the magazine to make a few kroner. If I took out this and that and did a bit of expanding, I could maybe use the experience in Frogner Park when Vivian had her way with me. For instance it could be on a warm summer night instead of in the middle of a wet autumn — a soft, still glow in the trees. I could imagine that Vivian was a lonely upper-class lady close to thirty out on a horse ride, and that I was a poor but good-hearted gardener cutting the grass outside the summer house. And she’d set upon me with the same wild fever, she’d get me down on the ground and take me in the mouth, greedily and decisively. Or maybe I could write a pornographic comedy? I’d never heard of such a thing before. But when I thought about it, I quickly realized that wasn’t such a surprise. Because aren’t laughter and pornography incompatible? Romance is amusing, but pornography is nothing more than silence and action, and who gets randy seeing a funny man? I noted this down too. Then someone knocked on the little door at the back of the kiosk. I didn’t have time to get up. They came in, three of them, and took up position around the deck chair. One of them got out a bottle of Coke from the rack and hit me right on the front of the head with it. “Are you touching my brother?” he demanded. I’d never seen them before. I only knew they belonged to the bullying fraternity. There’s forever a bully who can pass on the gift. Here they were again. I felt an arm around my throat. I was pulled backward and the one who’d spoken kicked me in the groin. “Are you touching my brother?” he screeched. I heard a crunching, like that of something breaking — the sound came first and the pain followed, and in that white no-man’s-land between the sound of something breaking and the heavy nauseating pain, I could sink as deep as I wanted. Was he meaning the boys I’d given Cocktail and had patted on the head? I tried to say something but my voice was gone. I only remember suddenly lying on the floor and somebody standing on my neck. The same voice shouted, “Fucking faggot! Sitting here jerking off!” I couldn’t breathe. I just waited. It had to pass. Was that how they spoke of me, as that fag of a midget in the kiosk who gave away free candies and couldn’t keep his hands to himself — was that what rumor had made me? I could have shouted for the policeman in the Little City. I could have called on Fred. But the policeman had gone home, and no one knew where Fred was. I managed to get as far as thinking that I’d never felt so lonely. There was the glint of a knife. They hacked
off my belt, pulled it off me and whipped me in the face with it. The buckle got caught like a hook in my eyelid, and the blood ran down into my mouth. Perhaps it was all the blood that scared them. At any rate they scampered, after smashing the box I used as a stool and washing my face in the water for the sausages. After that, things became dark and silent. When I came to, I could only see out of one eye. I managed to get up onto my feet. I had an extra shirt hanging by the door for when I spilled mustard or ketchup. I changed. I tidied up a bit. I threw out the copies of Cocktail and put the sausages in the garbage can in the entryway. Then I went down to the beauty salon in Jacob Aall Street where Vivian worked. I tended to put my head around the door at the end of the day. I liked seeing her like that as she restored those tired ladies from Majorstuen and Fagerborg — hid their wrinkles and lifted their faces to a temporary triumph — this quiet hubris broken only by small bits of conversation, perhaps about some celebrity or other’s new hairstylist or the latest night cream from Paris that could wake the dead. Her clients always came back. They became dependent on her. She was a magician. Now she was working on the neck of an elderly lady putting shadow on the limp skin — and I thought to myself, with a certain amount of sorrow, that all beauty at the end of the day is just a mirage. Then Vivian caught sight of me in the mirror. She put down what she had in her hands and came over to the chair where I was sitting. “Good God, what a state you’re in,” she breathed. “I got broken into.” Vivian bent down closer. “You have to go to the doctors, Barnum.” “You can put me back together again,” I told her. “Wait in the back,” she hissed. “Am I scaring your client?” “Yes,” she said. I went through to the back premises. The smell of makeup and creams was overpowering. I fell asleep. Vivian woke me up. It was my turn. The salon was closed, and at last I could sit in the soft chair in front of the mirror. I couldn’t recognize my own face. I was a stranger. Vivian wiped away the blood with a bit of cotton wool. “Were you really broken into?” “They didn’t get much.” “But you’ll have to report it?” “It was just some kids, Vivian. I don’t want to ruin their lives.” Vivian sighed. “You’re just too kind,” she said. I laughed. “I’m just a rotten shopkeeper.” I liked her fixing me up like this. I liked the softness of her hands, and yet their confidence too. “Guess what,” I told her. “What?” “The drying lofts at Mom’s are going to be converted. We could get an apartment there.” “Is that what you want?” “You haven’t actually considered staying in just one room when we have kids?” Vivian looked at me in the mirror. “Do you think we’ll manage to make a baby?” “I’m going to the Royal tomorrow.” “Good, Barnum.” She went on putting my face back together. She cleaned the cuts and put some cream on my eyelid. “A bit of rouge too, please,” I asked politely. And that’s how I came to have the eye I did, the eye that both puzzled and annoyed people. The nerves in my left eyelid were ruined — I couldn’t actually feel it — and as a result the lid often drooped down of its own accord, and it was impossible to raise it again. It could appear to people that I was blinking deceptively or that I was already drunk, in the process of nodding off or else quite simply being impertinent and arrogant. My face took on a crooked look, a furtive appearance, one open and one closed side. The ring muscle of my eye no longer functioned, and I’m described as having a halfway face.