You

by Zoran Drvenkar

  The night is fraying at the edges, a gloomy gray flows into the black while the road remains a colorless strip leading all the way across Norway to Ulvtannen. You only know your destination from stories, your father never talked about his origins, that was your uncle’s job. You wish he’d kept his trap shut.

  When Oskar left Norway with Taja and moved from Ulvtannen to Berlin, you were four years old and your uncle told you all about the beach hotel overlooking the fjord, about the people from the next village and their peculiarities, but what impressed you most was how the cliff got its name.

  Ulvtannen means wolf’s tooth.

  Winter after winter a wolf pack used to assemble here at full moon. In those days the ground was still densely covered with fir trees. Then one summer your great-great-grandfather came with his four brothers. They felled the firs and built a massive house for their family, a house that would one day become the beach hotel. They left a single Nordmann fir standing; it became the family tree. At the time everybody thought the wolves had been driven away, but in the winter they arrived right on time every full moon and stared at the house. The wolf pack would not be driven away by noise or gunshots. It only disappeared with the waning moon. Since then every generation has put up with the wolf pack in the winter months, and watched the wolves lying patiently in the snow or pacing around the house and rubbing against the fence, leaving clumps of fur hanging on it. As soon as winter was over, the clumps of fur were collected by the children and thrown into the big fire for the spring festival to keep the wolves’ hunger at bay.

  You wish your uncle had never told you those stories because by doing that he gave you attention and got closer to you than your father did. Without your uncle’s interest you would never have been so aware of your distance from your father. The yearning began. The longing for a father who would talk to you, who would take an interest in you, and at the same time it was the longing for Ulvtannen, a place at the end of the world. Although you hardly had anything in common with Taja, in those days you had the same longing and wanted to spend your winters in the beach hotel—by a big hearth with ice flowers on the windows and a wolf pack outside the door, howling and wailing. How were you supposed to know that Taja had more in common with you than just that sense of yearning? Both of you yearned so much for your fathers that you lost yourselves.

  A car speeds past the filling station and drags you from your thoughts. For a moment you could swear it was the Range Rover, but of course that’s silly. Oskar’s car is a good four hundred miles away in front of the restaurant and will stay there until your father deals with it.

  My father.

  You look over at the house. Your father is handing the woman a few bank notes. The woman goes back into the house and shuts the door behind her. Your father comes back to the car and opens the fuel tank flap. You hear the gasoline flowing. Three minutes later you’re still sitting in the car and your father is a little way off at the tap washing his face and hands. He has hung his jacket on top of a young tree that leans slightly under the weight. That’s exactly what I feel like, you think and want to slip over, start the car, and just drive off.

  As if.

  After your father turns the tap off, he shakes his hands out, tugs the sleeves of his sweater back down, and pulls on his jacket. When he gets into the car, you smell the water on his skin. Rusty and cold. You smell your father, too. That familiar mixture of sweat and energy. You don’t look at him. You’ve made your decision. He will never know what Tanner told you. Because if he finds out, you’ll have to react to him, and if you react to him, his world will keel over and everything will be different and you’re not sure if you can bear that.

  You haven’t spoken for hours, not since all the white appeared in the road and you thought it was slush. Your father took his foot off the accelerator, and you saw the burst bags glittering in the headlights. Your father hesitated for a moment before putting his foot down and driving on. In the rearview mirror you saw the heroin floating in the air like fog.

  Your father didn’t waste a word on it. He didn’t ask what you were thinking, and for the first time you were happy about his lack of interest. The sight of the heroin had made you feel calmer. As if it was right for your father to fail too. Satisfaction was the right word.

  Over the next few hours you kept falling asleep, because there was nothing to say. Now you’re fifty miles away from your destination at a closed filling station. Dawn is breaking, and the silence has made itself comfortable on the backseat, and won’t think about leaving you alone.

  “You should wash too,” says your father and starts the car but doesn’t put it in gear, as if he wants to give you a chance to jump out quickly. You don’t move, you stare straight ahead, your hands are still dirty, there’s no reason to leave the car.

  The car moves into gear, you drive away from the gas station.

  Fifteen minutes later.

  “Well?”

  He takes a break, the break is like an airless space that you’re suddenly standing in and don’t know where to go next. Everything within you contracts, you don’t want to ask, you ask.

  “Well what?”

  “How did it feel?”

  You look at your hands, which are fists again. It happens automatically. As if your hands wanted to take the answers from you. “It was okay.”

  “Okay?”

  “It was …”

  The oxygen turns to lead in your lungs, you try to find the right word, a manly word. And you know you’ll only say the wrong thing. And you say, “… a relief?”

  Your father doesn’t react. For a brief moment you’re sure you didn’t answer, that the word has got stuck in the convolutions of your brain, then your father says, “Give me the gun.”

  He sticks his right hand out. You hesitate. How can you hesitate? His hand stays in the air, waiting. When your father speaks again, you give a start.

  “You are responsible for the deaths of two important people. Leo looked after you, he taught you to box and was beside you when your mad mother wandered around the house at night. And Tanner was your godfather. He’d have done anything for you. He …”

  He stops, you both know what he wanted to say, the words “loved you” hang like a gentle sound in the air. Your father changes the subject, this isn’t a space for gentle sounds.

  “Give me the gun.”

  You draw the gun and rest it in your father’s open palm, grip first. He’s right. You don’t deserve the gun. Your father weighs the weapon in his hand as if checking whether it has lost weight. He doesn’t look at you once, he looks at the road and looks at the road and suddenly the barrel of the gun is pressed to your temple and pushes your head aside so that you have to look straight ahead.

  You tense up, you freeze.

  “How could you.”

  It isn’t a question, it’s an observation, but you still try and defend yourself like an idiot.

  “I’m. I’m sorry. The boy …”

  “It wasn’t the boy’s fault.”

  Your chest is covered with sweat and you even feel it running down the back of your neck, but that’s very unlikely, it’s more likely that it’s your soul saying goodbye.

  “Then why did he have to die?” you blurt out, and you understand that you’re calling your father into question. What on earth am I doing here? The pressure against your temple increases, you sit still, just don’t show any weakness.

  “It was a punishment,” says your father.

  “But I thought he wasn’t to blame.”

  “Who said he was the one being punished?”

  You understand, you want to lower your head. Shame. You keep your head up.

  “I will never forgive you,” says your father. “Never.”

  Your father pulls the trigger. Once. Twice. Each movement of the trigger is like an electric shock that travels into your brain on one side and shoots out on the other. You think about Mirko, you think about Gina and Nadine and that you’ll probably never decide whi
ch is the right one for you. You think everything at the same time and sit still and wait.

  Your father takes the gun from your temple. It leaves a deep imprint on your temple.

  “You can thank me because I didn’t forget the safety catch.”

  “Thanks,” you say quietly.

  He hands you back the gun. It’s over, you think, then he looks at you, both hands rest on the steering wheel, he isn’t interested in the road anymore, he looks at you and there’s sheer rage in his eyes and at that moment you realize that he despises you, that your own father deeply and fervently despises you. You want to explain yourself, you somehow want to react to that gaze, when he looks ahead again as if nothing had happened, and the gun is in your hand. Everything’s going too quickly. Like Timo, who got stuck on LSD two years ago, ended up spending a few months in the bin and later told you the world was a record player turning too fast. You need something to come down. Gear down. Take a break. A bit of weed would be good. Just a couple of drags. Something to relax you. Your father doesn’t plan to let you take a break. He says, “At least you’ve understood what it means to be a man. You know the relief. You know the loneliness. Did you look him in the eye?”

  You react far too quickly.

  “Of course.”

  Your father laughs, it’s like the barking of a dog that you sometimes hear in the city at night, short and dry. And then you feel his hand pressing your knee.

  “That’s my boy. A damned ice-cold killer who can’t even look his victims in the eye.”

  It’s so terrifyingly intimate that you get goose bumps.

  How can he know me so well?

  Your father lowers the window and spits, spits his rage and his closeness to you into the road. You look at your knee, from which his hand has disappeared, and don’t know what’s going on with you. Love and hate are raging in you, and you’re filled with pride. You’ve been close to your father, he’s touched you. Be honest, how sad is that? The man who’s bringing you up the way you bring up a fucking pit bull. The man who makes you murder, and who is tirelessly bringing you toward chaos at sixty miles an hour. This man has made you proud.

  You eat breakfast in a café that a taxi driver recommended to you. Vik wakes up slowly. Oskar worked in the hydraulic power station here, and met Majgull on the night shift. Love at first breath, he called it. You ask your father if he knows anything more about the story. Your father doesn’t react and you go on eating in silence.

  It makes you nervous that you’re not getting a move on. You have no idea why your father is taking his time. It’s a bit as if he’d lost his sense of logic. Even in Berlin you had a sense of that when you were standing on the Teufelsberg watching him scattering Oskar’s ashes. Tanner must have felt it too. And now all this creeping along. Since you’ve been on the road he hasn’t driven above the speed limit, he’s eaten his omelet in slow motion and seems to be as calm as anything. On the other hand you feel as if you’re sitting on a pile of burning firecrackers.

  Of course your father doesn’t miss any of that.

  “We have all the time in the world. They’re not going to run away, they’re going to wait for us. Finish your coffee, then we can get going.”

  You could ask what makes him so sure, but you’ve got Tanner’s voice in your head: If you don’t understand something, then try to understand it. The answer will come all by itself. You drink your coffee and wish your father’s confidence was infectious. You have a bad feeling, you don’t like Norway. Until today Norway was the memory of your uncle, which took place entirely in Ulvtannen. You don’t want to take the magic away from that memory and tear it down into reality, it should stay a memory. You miss Berlin, because Berlin is reality and a safe place, your place, which you know and control. So much has changed in your life. Death travels with you now. It hides in the corners of your eyes and in the shadows that surround you and accompany every one of your thoughts. You’ve already noticed the change. Ask your father, he’ll know what’s happening to you. He’s responsible for the fact that you have a companion. Death has devoured your innocence. From now on every moment of your life will feel as if you’re running across a frozen lake, knowing quite clearly: Every moment the ice is about to break, every moment it will happen. And you run and run, because it would be a mistake to stop. As soon as you stop, it’s all over. Your father shares this feeling with you. In his case it’s a steep slope plunging ceaselessly down. You on the other hand are running over ice.

  The house isn’t a house anymore. It’s a dog that’s been hit by a car, lying by the roadside, guts spilled, unable to move. The roof has been torn away, and the exposed rafters look like the ribs of a whale you once saw in the natural history museum. A fir tree collapsed into one side of it long ago, seedlings have fought their way through the rubble and point their gaunt branches defiantly at the sky. The windows are broken, the masonry is fragile, even the graffiti is decayed, and the painting of the façade, once blue, is a dingy gray. On your right there towers a public rubbish dump. You see washbasins, mattresses, washstands, and chairs. There’s a pyramid of bulging black garbage sacks, a bright red and yellow IKEA bag gleaming among them with bits of cable sticking out. It hurts to look. As if someone had opened a corpse and forgotten to close it again.

  “Pinch me,” says Stink.

  “Shit, that looks like shit,” says Schnappi.

  “Taja, what is it?” you ask.

  “I … I don’t know.”

  “We must have taken a wrong turn,” Schnappi says firmly, looking round. “Taja, where are we?”

  Taja doesn’t reply, she stares at the ruin.

  “I don’t understand. We …”

  She walks closer.

  “We’re in the right place.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Taja points at a pile of stones.

  “There’s the old well I told you about, and over there, where the fence has collapsed, was the dog kennel. Where all the trash is, that was the parking area. I know it all from the photographs. Even the tree—that used to be a giant fir. And right here there was a fence. You see? But … I don’t understand this.”

  The trunk of the fallen fir has flattened a quarter of the hotel, and brought down the roof. You’re sure that if nature could murder deliberately, it would look exactly like this.

  “And where’s your mother?” asks Stink.

  “I don’t know.”

  “She certainly doesn’t live here,” says Schnappi.

  “Do you think anyone might know where your mother is?”

  “I have no idea, Stink,” Taja replies irritably. “I don’t know anyone here.”

  “But you’re going to—”

  “Have you gone deaf?” you cut in. “If Taja says she doesn’t know, then she doesn’t know.”

  You turn to Taja.

  “Maybe we could ask down in the village. Everybody here’s bound to know everybody else.”

  “Maybe.” Taja softens her tone, and for a moment the situation relaxes, and you’re glad you opened your mouth. Your stomach doesn’t need any extra tension, it’s already been turning itself inside out for a while, and at the moment there are lots of things you want—like a shower and breakfast—but throwing up like a pregnant bitch isn’t one of them.

  Everything’ll probably sort itself out, you think. Taja’s mother probably has one of those beautiful houses right down by the water, and she’s laughing because we went up to the dump.

  You stare at the ruin for a while, then Schnappi stirs herself and turns away.

  “Off we go. Anyone who wants coffee …”

  She pauses. You feel a tingle in your back, just below your left shoulder blade. You don’t want to turn round.

  I don’t want to.

  If you could stop this moment and see it from outside, you would know what a surreal scene this is—the sun laughs down at you, the mist above the fjord has melted away, the morning air is refreshingly clear. It’s a magnificent summer day in Norway, the bi
rds are singing, and you’re standing by an ugly ruin, but that’s okay, because everything seems to be in harmony, and if everything’s in harmony it makes life a lot easier.

  I still don’t want to.

  You reluctantly turn round and look darkness in the face.

  You leave Vik and after a couple of miles the fjord appears on your left. Your father ignores the sign for Lunnis, he turns right at the crossroads and reaches a narrow road leading up a small hill. A church appears in front of you. It’s made of dark wood and reminds you of old Japanese movies and samurais barking their orders like dogs. You can’t know that it’s a stave church, and you can’t know that your father stood in this church at Oskar and Majgull’s wedding, and couldn’t take his eyes off the bride. Beside the church there’s a little graveyard that looks as if people only died here every hundred years. You drive past the church and find yourselves on a forest path.

  “And where are we going now?” you ask.

  “Surprise.”

  After a few minutes you’re surrounded by pine trees. The forest is dense and dark. You lower the window slightly, the scent of resin settles coolly on your face and fills the car. Five hundred yards further on, the forest clears and you see a chapel with a dome. In front of the chapel there’s an abandoned parking lot. You get out, walk down the stone path past the chapel, and reach a second graveyard. Now you know where all the dead end up. A graveyard, surrounded by a pine forest. You follow your father along the rows. He stops by your grandmother’s grave. She’s dropped the name Desche and returned to her maiden name. Sinding. Your father says, “If you die before me, I’ll bury you here.”

  “I want to be cremated.”

  He laughs.

  “You must have loved that crematorium.”

  “I don’t want to lie down there and get eaten by worms.”

  “Fine, we’ll cremate you, then.”

  “And you?”

  “I don’t intend to die.”

  He looks at the headstone as if he’s looking for something. You were seven months old when your grandmother died. Your father never talked about Norway, or about his mother either. You only know her from Oskar’s stories.