The Half Brother: A Novel

by Christensen, Lars Saabye

  The Last Picture

  But Peder didn’t come. Vivian and I waited out at Fornebu. It was early in the morning on the day of his father’s committal. We stood at the huge window through which we could see the plane landing, slowly as if its wheels would never touch the ground. The runways shone after the night’s rain. We rushed down to the arrivals area on the ground floor. We weren’t alone. We could barely get through. I sat down. Perhaps I wouldn’t recognize him. Perhaps it was he who would have to recognize us. But Peder wasn’t on the plane from London. Peder didn’t come. In the end only Vivian and I remained there, together with a dark-skinned cleaning lady sweeping away flowers, cigarettes, flags, and a child’s shoe with her great wide brush.

  We took a taxi back to his mother’s. She was sitting ready in the wheelchair — tiny and all in black. “The flight was canceled,” I told her. Vivian nodded and looked the other way. Peder’s mother put her withered hands on the wheels. She wanted to be pushed up to the crematorium. There was time enough. Perhaps this was her way of preparing herself and building up courage, by taking a roundabout way — because who wants to hurry where one doesn’t want to go? We went slowly through Frogner Park, behind the Monolith, and came into Wester Gravlund, where the Old One and Dad were buried. I saw T’s grave too. The grass was tall and golden around the low stone. I had to stop for a moment and take a deep breath. We are forgotten. Peder’s dad had closed the garage door, gotten into the car, and turned on the engine. In the morning he was dead. It was the paper boy who found him. He was still holding the steering wheel and they had to break his fingers free.

  The crematorium bells rang out. We walked the last part of the way, lifted the wheelchair up the steps, and wheeled her into the darkness nearest the white coffin. The place was already full. Only Peder was missing. There were wreaths from the family, fellow philatelists and friends all down the aisle. Vivian and I joined Mom and Boletta. The organist began playing. And I thought to myself that if we’d gone to see them that time we were coming back from Vivian’s parents’, and hadn’t just stood there at the comer looking at the lights on the ground floor, then maybe everything might be different. If I hadn’t complained about the broken window in the car and asked him to get it repaired, perhaps he’d be alive now. Is that all it takes? And I thought to myself, How little does it take to save a person? There was utter stillness — neither a cough nor a sob — as if this death had frightened us into muteness. We waited. Peder’s mother laid a rose on the coffin. Then she turned the wheelchair and smiled to all those who’d come. She was transparent and beautiful. Her voice was clear and slow. “Oscar didn’t want there to be any vicar. He didn’t believe in any life beyond this one. We often talked about death. But never that it would happen in this way.” She closed her eyes and the silence became more profound still. The seconds thudded past. Then she went on with her speech for her dead husband. “I loved Oscar exceptionally deeply. He was patient with me. I love him just as much now, and I always will love him. I will remember his laughter and his forgetfulness and all the joy we shared. This is my only comfort today. That sorrow does not have retrospective effect. That the sorrow of today cannot erase all of yesterday’s colors.” She had to stop a second time. And she said something as she bowed her head, quietly, and maybe I was the only one who heard her, and those words were branded into me — she whispered, she moaned, “Oh, God. Oh, God, I didn’t know him!” Then she straightened up again. “Peder should have been with me now, but he’s been prevented from doing so. My thanks to all those who are here.” She turned back once more to face the coffin.

  Formality fizzled out at the graveside. And it was there I understood that the suicide of Oscar Miil hadn’t frightened us into muteness, but instead had rendered us embarrassed and therefore dumb. That old word condolences didn’t work. This was a shameful sorrow. Some people slipped quickly away, to the parking place or the station, and just left a visiting card in the basket at the exit. Peder’s mother sat there, a green rug over her legs, accepting this silent compassion. I noticed that she could no longer manage to raise her hand. When it was my turn I bent down and kissed her cheek, not to try to be any better than the others but to hide the fact that I was crying. “Come home with me too, both of you,” she whispered. And we pushed her the same way back. It was even farther now. We helped her into the hall. “Peder!” she suddenly shouted. But Peder gave no answer. Peder still hadn’t come. She didn’t want us to go. She wanted us to stay. There was already a bottle of wine on the table. We sat in the living room and drank in silence. We each said cheers. She could barely manage to hold her glass. She’d cleared away all her canvases and frames. I could see the garage through the window. The door had been brought down, but only halfway. Maybe it needed airing. And the only question I wanted to ask was why? But it was an impossible question. “Did you ever finish your pictures?” I asked instead. She looked at me abruptly and I realized there and then the question was indelicate in this brittle and fragile moment, that it was in danger of breaking it. With huge strength she raised both hands. “Perhaps. Perhaps not,” she murmured. “As Peder would have put it,” I said. Her arms fell into her lap once more. Vivian poured us more wine. I got up to go for a pee. I stopped in the hall and leaned against the wall. The door to the bedroom was open. Peder’s dad’s pyjamas were still lying there. On the bedside table were two clocks. The one showed a quarter past five. The other was set to American Pacific time, so they could always follow Peder’s day. The door to his room was locked. I went for a pee and then returned to them. Vivian had gotten up. We ought to go. “Do you need any help?” I asked. Peder’s mom wheeled herself out into the hall. “Oscar used to carry me to bed.” “I can do that,” I told her. She smiled. “I’d rather sleep down here tonight.” And she suddenly held me, and I felt the grasp of her thin and wrinkled fingers already failing. “Do you think things can ever be the way they were before, Barnum?” she murmured. I didn’t know what to say, and I couldn’t lie to her. “No,” I said, my voice as quiet as hers.

  When I came out, we saw that Peder’s mother was putting out the lights, and slowly the house fell into darkness. I don’t know why, but I wanted to go into the garage. Vivian held me back. “Don’t,” she told me. I went anyway. She came after me. She was livid and afraid. “What are you doing here?” I didn’t answer her. I didn’t know myself. She let me go and went the other way. I bent under the garage door. I found a switch and a yellow light went on in the corner right at the back. The car was gone. Maybe the police had taken it away. This was no longer a place, it was the scene of a crime. I thought I could smell something dry and pungent. Peder’s mother had displayed her paintings there. They were all along the wall. I glanced at some of them; most were unfinished. Then I caught sight of another painting — the one she must have begun work on that summer we went to Ildjernet and Vivian tried to suck the poison from me. I couldn’t stand any longer. I went down on my knees. She’d written the title on the frame: Friends on the Rock Ledge. Its evening beside the fjord and almost everything is blue, but the two boys in the foreground are standing in their own light — it shines around their young brown forms. I recognize us. The fat one and the small one. We are naked. We have our arms around each other. Our lips meet in a kiss and our eyes are closed.

  Parasol in Snow

  Mom’s knitted a pair of mittens for me with just half fingers, similar to the things Louis Armstrong wore when he played the trumpet at Bislet. It means I can keep my hands warm at the same time as being able to get out goodies and count change. She says I’m wasting my time. She says I ought to find something better to do. But I like it fine here in the unsteady deck chair, and the mittens are grand to write with now that it’s getting chillier, particularly in the mornings. Soon enough the snow'll be here, and the little blower I have by the door isn’t much of a help because of all the draft. I’ve closed the little window and pulled down the curtains. There are neither customers nor bullies around. Not even after winnin
g Norwegian Film’s competition has custom increased. I thought there might be a line in front of Barnum’s kiosk when it became common knowledge that I’d won, but alas no. It doesn’t really bother me. Sausages are ancient history now, but the weeklies come each Tuesday. Some of the brands of chocolate, particularly those designed for the cheering of the spirit, are beginning to grow hard and gray — I figure they’ve been here since the middle of the 1960s.

  I get out my notebook and try to make some headway with The Night Man. I have this picture of the boy, the skinny boy, running through deserted streets toward the harbor. It’s become fixed in my mind, this image, and I can’t dislodge it — and I see a ship sailing through the fog, so close the boy could just stretch out his hand and touch the hull made ready for the ice. Antarctic. But I have nothing more than those few fragments — the boy, the city and the ship — little points in a story bigger than myself (not that that takes a great deal). I’m stuck in the run-up. It’s Fred I’m seeing. He’s the one stretching out his arm to halt the ship. Since Ditlev wrote about him in the paper, Mom’s received letters every other day from people who believe they’ve seen Fred some place or other. I think the whole lot of them have screws loose; they’re just individuals who want a bit of limelight either for themselves or someone else. But they maintain all the same that they’ve seen him — in Times Square in New York, at the market in Montevideo, at Stroget and in Karl Johan, and on the ferry between Moskenes and R0st. And these rumors, as unreliable as they are cocky have given Mom new hope — the most hopeless thing of all. It’s her duty twenty-four hours a day — to wait and hope, to hope and wait — for this is the curse that’s put on the one who waits by the one for whom they wait. “But someone has to be mistaken,” I often say. “What do you mean?” she demands. “Well, he can’t be in each and every place at the same time, can he?” Then Mom just accuses me of being a killjoy and opens yet another letter in which someone writes that they’ve almost certainly seen Fred Nilsen on Mallorca or in Arvika — they can recall that crooked nose and his lean features. Mom gives all the letters to the Salvation Army’s missing persons bureau so they can sort out all the leads. I write in my margin: To follow a letter. How far backward can one go? I see before me a forest and there I decide on one tree, this tree’s the one that’s felled. But who cuts it down; who lops off the branches and chops it up? Am I to trace them too? Instead I go quickly to the river, to the timber that’s floating there — the raft of tree trunks like some colossal stick race — and the people there who’re freeing them. I take the tree into the factory just beside the waterfall — or perhaps I’ll make this paper by hand in a family firm, in Italy for instance, in Bellagio, I imagine. And so I’ll follow the finished clear sheet of paper all the way to the shop where it’s bought by a young man. Here I have to make a leap — my first leap — to a deserted, frozen landscape, but before I do that I have to find the springboard and I have to be sure of hitting it. The springboard’s the young man embracing his beloved, a proud and beautiful girl, and going on board the ship that will take him to the land of ice and snow. I see him there sitting in his cabin writing to his beloved — the tree becomes thoughts, thoughts become words, and these words will become pictures. I will have the hand that writes. I will have the pocket in which the letter is placed, and the coat that he doesn’t put on, that’s left hanging on a hook in the cramped cabin when he leaves on his final journey and disappears in a fissure or freezes in the ice that presses him into an everlasting grave. This is good. This is the beginning of a leap, a triple jump. I gulp down a mouthful of brandy. It’s well deserved. The dark spirit sets me alight. And then I’m interrupted, right in the middle of my new run-up. Somebody taps on the window. I decide not to open it. Today Barnum’s kiosk is closed. But the knocking comes again, and harder this time. I don’t let myself be interrupted. I’m just hitting my stride. But when the person thunders on the window for the third time and all but brings down the kiosk, I’ve got no choice but to unfasten the curtain and take a look at this nuisance. An oval face, which is far too brown and half enveloped by sunglasses, is all but filling the window. “Sausage in a roll, please.” “We don’t serve sausages,” I tell him. “Then I’ll have a carton of juice instead.” “I’m afraid they’re all frozen.” “Well, you can surely manage a packet of unfiltered Teddy, can’t you, Tiny?” “You’re an ungrateful customer,” I tell him. “And you’re a diabolical shopkeeper, Barnum Nilsen!” It’s Peder. It’s none other than Peder Miil. He grabs hold of my jacket, hauls me through the kiosk window and we roll over on the sidewalk. We embrace each other, almost as in the old days, and a wild joy floods my heart. At last Peder’s come back. We get up and brush the dust from ourselves. “You’ve put on weight,” I remark. Peder gives his usual bellow of a laugh. “And you’ve grown even smaller!” We stand there silent a moment, there in Church Road on a Sunday at the end of November, and we try to find that harmony — we search for it and know that nothing is the same any more. We see that we’ve both changed. Peder’s wearing a thin blue shirt and a blazer. I lay my hand on his arm. “Just hellish, the whole thing with your Dad.” He takes off his sunglasses and looks at me. “What have you done to your eye?” he asks. I don’t mention his father again, not before he himself does. “Now we’ll go home to Vivian,” I say instead. I put my mittens in the till and close the kiosk for the day. We’re silent right until we stand together outside the door in Boltel0kka. Peder looks at the plate, the shining bronze plate bearing our names, vivian and barnum. “What was it I said?” he mused. “What was it you said?” “That it would be you two, right?” I unlock the door. Vivian’s standing by the window, facing away. We sneak in and stand still. “Is that you home already?” she asks. We talk like some old married couple. We’ve lifted the dialogue from a film with Jean Gabin. “Very quiet,” I answer. “And you’re sober too?” Peder looks at me again. I change my repertoire. “Guess who’s coming to dinner?” I ask her quickly. Vivian’s changed too. It’s something to do with her posture. She’s round-shouldered, her neck is all hunched — it’s as though she’s lost something and is having to bend over to look for it. I’ve often thought that it’s being with me that’s made her that way; she’s trying to sink down to my level — perhaps that’s also a kind of love. And I think to myself that it should really be the other way around, it should be a case of me stretching up to her height. “Fred,” she says all at once. I stand there frozen. “What?” “Is it Fred who’s coming to dinner?” I laugh loudly. Peder takes off his sunglasses. “Hullo, my accident,” he says. Vivian turns around and her back straightens, she lets her shoulders sink and she lifts her neck — and in the moment she realizes that it’s Peder, she becomes herself again. The years in between are rubbed away and time is joined up. I can see it, and it makes me happy and bewildered. “Hi, Fatty,” she says. Peder laughs and pulls out his handkerchief to polish his sunglasses. “Fine nameplate you have there, Vivian.” She takes him in, meticulously, as if to assure herself it really is him, Peder Miil, the fat one. “When did you come?” she asks. “A week ago.” “Have you been here a whole week?” I roar. Peder doesn’t take his eyes off Vivian. “There were a couple of things I had to sort out,” he says. Then finally Vivian rushes over to him, and they hug each other long and hard, and one of them’s crying. It’s Vivian. Peder once said that we were together with her, both of us. Now we are again. I go out to the kitchen to get some beer.