4
WHEN MY MOTHER and father came out of the tabernacle in Hausmannsgate after they had stood before the priest and both said yes, my father stared at the ground with a frown on his face, and turned to one of his brothers, Trond, and said: “Nailed to a cross on earth.” And then he laughed.
I don’t know how many people heard what he said, but I heard it from Uncle Trond on the telephone only a month ago, and you might think I would feel my father was a shit for saying a thing like that, for if anything I was a mother’s boy, but I did not, I thought: Christ, did he say that?
It was October, it was sunny, and my mother had not learned to speak Norwegian yet, but she made herself perfectly well understood, and “ja” was more or less the same in Danish, so she got that right. She was slim again, or as slim as she could be. She had let her hair grow down to her shoulders after keeping it short for several years, and it was more curly now than frizzy, and she had a white flower stuck into it above one ear about where Billie Holiday used to wear hers, and like Billie Holiday she needed no clasp to fasten it with. She pushed it in and it stayed put. She probably needed that flower, for not one of her family was there in Oslo that day.
They all were on my father’s side. Four brothers and two sisters and my grandfather Adolf Jansson, a Baptist from the countryside south of Sunne in Värmland, Sweden, who was finally awarded the King’s silver medal of merit for long and acquiescent service at Salomon Shoe Factory, where he had been all his working life, where all his children worked, a factory he must have chosen because of its name or because the people who ran it shared his brand of faith.
Now they were clustered on the pavement. My mother smoked a cigarette, the only one who did, except for maybe Uncle Alf who had ambitions and wanted to leave the factory, and I do not know whether she took in my father’s biblical sense of humour. Anyway, there was complete silence. She stood at the edge of the little group. A whirlwind spiralled in the grey street and lifted her hair, made it big and sparkling in the autumn sunshine, and her dress was pale blue and swung around her strong calves, and it looked like a dance, but I do not think she thought that was what she was doing. Dancing. Her hair settled again, and her dress fell into place, and she stubbed out her fag with the toe of her shoe on the side of a kerbstone, pushed a hand in under her blouse to straighten a bra strap, while my father looked the other way, while they all looked the other way, and then they went down the street to the photographer round the corner in Storgata.
I keep that photograph in a drawer, and it’s just the two of them there, but I can sense the others, they push against the edges of the picture wanting to be in it, and my father likes that, I can see it by the way he smiles. He is at ease again, surrounded by his family, and as long as that lasts he does not have to think about how bewildering it is to find himself there at this moment. For a while it was difficult, but now they stand close, and he has a lady beside him with long dark curly hair. She is Danish. He does not know her very well. She looks obstinate, but she is good-looking in a southern way, like an Italian, or maybe Moroccan, and in the inside pocket of the jacket he fills to bursting point there is a picture of another lady who is Danish too, stuffed between the notes his father gave him for a wedding present. It is stupid and he knows it, but he cannot part with it, and in fact it is not that bad to stand shoulder to shoulder with one attractive lady and have another in his wallet. He thinks of that too as he looks at the photographer and faintly smiles.
The only one who is no way near the picture is my brother. He was put away on a farm belonging to someone my mother knew on an island off the coast of Denmark. There he trudged around among sheep and sheepdogs and thought that all was well with the world. He had very fair hair and was almost eighteen months old. I don’t know how many knew he existed. My father knew, or he would not have been standing outside the tabernacle saying: “Nailed to a cross on earth.”
My brother’s hair is darker now, and thinner. He is forty-six. There is a tube in his mouth and another through his nose, and one is fastened to the back of his hand, and there is a screen by the wall where a curve moves up and down, up and down towards a point it will never reach, and it looks as though it moves a little unevenly, but then I don’t understand such things. I pull a chair to the end of the bed and sit down. It is evening. As I walked down the corridor to ask my way, the nurse on duty stuck her head out and said: “That was none too soon.”
“I couldn’t get here before,” I replied.
But that was not true. I had walked around the apartment for quite a while, and in the end I lay down on the sofa and fell asleep at once, and when I woke up it was far into the evening. I emptied a glass I had poured from a bottle I kept in the kitchen cupboard, brushed my teeth and then got dressed and left.
“I mean he survived by a hair’s breadth. Half an hour more…” she said, leaving the rest to drift. “Are you family?”
“I’m his brother,” I said. “I am the only family he has,” and even if that is not true either, the look she gave me made me so furious that I was still shaking as I went on down the corridor.
“He is stable now,” she said icily behind me, but I did not turn round, merely found the right door and went into the intensive care ward and stopped by his bed.
I sit there for a long time just watching him. His eyes are closed. His eyelids are swollen as his face is swollen, and he looks big and seems immensely heavy beneath the thin duvet on the bed of this white-painted room. He was the first one in our family to pass his examination to go to university. He was the first one in our street to go to university. That’s more than twenty-five years ago. I can remember the black student’s cap that was kept tidily wrapped in soft paper on the top shelf of the cupboard in the hall, and he used it that once only, when he enrolled at the university, because it embarrassed him, but he thought he had to, and then he put it away for good. When I passed my student’s examination three years later and enrolled at the university, it never occurred to anyone that I might want a student’s cap. But then nothing came of it. I never showed up. I lost my courage, or something else was lost, and with my hand upon my heart I cannot say my father was sorry for it.
My brother’s bare chest rises and falls slowly and evenly and the graph makes the same movements on the screen, then he suddenly raises himself on his elbows and starts to speak in a language only drunk men understand. One of the tubes comes loose and falls onto the duvet, and he opens his eyes and looks straight at me.
“You’re stable,” I say. “Relax, for Christ’s sake.” But he does not relax, he starts to shout, and if the name he shouts is mine, I do not recognise it. I go and fetch the nurse. She lays her hand on his forehead and fastens the loose tube, and then he slides down on to the pillow again.