“He doesn’t seem very stable,” I say.
“He is stable, but he doesn’t know you’re here. If you come again tomorrow you may get through to him. He’s full of poison now.”
I feel offended on his behalf. “There’s nothing the matter with my brother, he just can’t stop looking back.”
“Is that so?” she says, smoothing the duvet and straightening the tubes, and looking at the screen as she mumbles: “Of course he’s stable,” and then she says more audibly: “Do you want to sit here a while longer?”
“A bit longer, maybe.” I sit down again and she leaves, and I sit perfectly still looking at him, and then I fall asleep, and when I wake up she is standing in the doorway. She smiles.
“I’ve made some cocoa. Would you like a cup? You can come along to the office with me.”
I haven’t tasted cocoa since I made a jug the morning my daughters moved out. It seems a long time ago. I say yes, please, and get up and follow her. The big hospital is quiet, there are thousands of people here, but they do not make a sound. Only one patient suddenly coughs behind the curtain in the corridor as I go by, and I try to walk without a sound in my lace-up boots, but it’s not easy. In the nurses’ office she pours me a cup, and I sit down on a spare chair drinking the hot cocoa slowly, letting it warm my stomach while she writes a report or whatever it is that nurses write at night. She looks up at me once or twice and smiles. I like her better now.
“It tastes good,” I say, and she smiles and nods and goes on writing, and then I start to cry and get up with the cup in my hand and stand by the window until it has passed and then I sit down again and say: “He’s going to be divorced, you know, but that’s not what this is about.”
Carefully, she puts down her pen and looks at me with absolute calm, and then I tell her about the boat and the fire and all those who died in the flames, and died from the poisonous smoke, and how they lay close together in the companionways, side by side like a single conjoined body, and many lay on top of their children to shield them from the smoke, and some were in the shower with the water running, and that did not help them at all, but there was nowhere else to go, and only those having a ball in the bar had all their clothes on, because it was the middle of the night, the way it is now. And she nods, she remembers that fire, everyone remembers that fire, that’s why it is so difficult to talk about, they all nod and grow quiet, and it is like beating a duvet filled with down; completely numb and dumb, and they nod and nod, but she merely pours me a second cup of cocoa, and I drink it slowly, for it warms my stomach so pleasantly. I wonder whether it is proper cocoa or one that takes five seconds with a teaspoon and boiling water, because it reminds me of the kind my mother made when I was a child, and I look around for the packet to see what it says, and then I tell her of all the discussions we have had since then, my brother and I, about how they died, my two younger brothers and my mother and my father, and I have said it again and again, that they were asleep and died from the smoke and never knew what had happened to them, while he is convinced they were awake and tried to get out, and then could not because the flames were so fierce at that particular place in the boat and the smoke was so thick, and he cannot stop thinking about what their thoughts were just then, what their last feelings were, and I have said it does not do any good to go on thinking like that. “But he cannot stop,” I say. “Six years have gone by, and goddamnit, he cannot stop thinking about it.”
“Shall I make some more cocoa?” she asks, picking up the empty pitcher. For a moment I think that that would be great, and I could see how she makes it, and then just sit there drinking really good cocoa, but I do not say that, I say: “No, thanks, I’m fine.”
She puts the pitcher back and looks out of the window down at Gamleveien where the line of street lights glitter, and then it is dark all the way up to the ridge where I live in an apartment block in a satellite town I usually call the Eagle’s Nest.
“If he had succeeded in what he was trying to do, then you would have been left alone,” she says, and my heart sinks, I know that song, I don’t have to listen to that crap, and anyway it’s not true, I am not alone, there are people in my life although none comes to mind at this very moment, but she may not be talking to me, as she is just sitting there looking out of the window, she may be talking to herself.
“I cope,” I say. “I always have.” I put my cup on her desk and stand up. She turns, but she didn’t like that last remark, that’s obvious. She does not want me to cope, she wants us to be dependent on each other and hold each other’s hands and have dinner together every bloody Sunday and be a close and happy family with a summer house on the coast and have smiles on our faces no matter what happens. She belongs to the Christian People’s Party, I can tell from her dialect.
“You want to look in on him again?” she asks.
“No, I’ll come back tomorrow. Maybe he won’t be so stable then.”
She does not think I am funny at all.
In the lift going down there is a woman who cannot stop weeping, and I do not know which department she has left, maybe maternity a few floors up, where I have been twice in an earlier life, and if she comes from there and is weeping still it must be because she has a daughter of fourteen who has had her first baby and will not tell who the father is. Her tears trickle down her face and she looks at me as if I might say something wise at any moment, and that is what she needs right now, for me to say something wise to make her stop feeling such a lousy mother, but she has got the wrong man. I have nothing to say. At the ground floor I walk from the lift and can hear her behind me, sniffing all the way through the vast, empty entrance hall to the door.
It is cold outside, and immediately dark as I walk out of the ring of lights that circles the yard in front of the hospital. The ambulance helicopter is parked on a pad some distance away like an enormous insect with long shadows, and when I turn into the walkway to Gamleveien I hear a man shouting and motors starting up and the fluttering rush of the rotor blades, and I turn and watch the helicopter take off tail first and then rise in an arc around the hospital block and vanish high up over the ridge with its searchlights aiming for the Østmark and the great lake and the forests on the other side.
I come down to Gamleveien and walk alongside the lamp-posts up the first slopes which are not too steep, and it is dark on both sides, but I know how the fields undulate and rise to the right towards the ridge lying there huge and heavy, and I know how steep it is and dread the last long slope. Suddenly a car comes down the road. The headlights dazzle me so I have to stop and stand still for a moment, and as it goes past I see the compartment light is on. The car is crammed with people and they laugh, and one has a bottle in his hand, and they are all quite young. There is music howling from the car stereo, and the driver leans on his horn to greet me, a middle-aged man on his way through the night on foot, and they do not have a care in the world at this moment. I turn and watch the car with its lit interior and red rear lights until it disappears round the bend before the church and how it rushes past, and the last thing I hear is the bass thumping out through the half-open windows.
I walk on again. Everything is quieter now, the asphalt glittering with frost. I am freezing in my pea jacket, I put on speed and find a pace I can manage without exhausting myself. When I come to the foot of the last hill I am warm and sweating and a little mad, so instead of following the walkway along the ridge I take the path that goes up through the spruce trees, which is twice as steep but much shorter. Halfway up I have to stop. I do not know what is wrong. I cannot take another step. My legs are shaking and my side hurts. I lean against a tree practically panting, then lie down with my feet resting against the trunk to stop myself from sliding. Through the trees I see the lights of the hospital in the valley and the street lamps along Gamleveien and otherwise nothing. I close my eyes, I hear the wind in the treetops, and it is a good sound. I have heard it both summer and winter on hundreds of cross-country treks with my father, when we rested and my breath was not the only sound I could hear, and sometimes the wind in the treetops was the only thing that was good. And sometimes it was good when he stood there on the ski track in front of us with his arms stretched out to his sides taking deep breaths and then keeping the air down for a long time, and letting it out again and passed it all on to us who were his sons when the hills were steep on the way up to Lilloseter and Sinober, deep into the forest. We stood there in a line, with our skis on whether we wanted to or not, our arms stretched out, with thick gloves and dangling ski poles, and he said: “Close your eyes, breathe deeply, and let the air out again slowly, and you will see that it helps.” And we did that in chorus. Took deep breaths with loud gasps, and the forest that surrounded us grew quiet, and the world held its breath while we held ours, and when we let the air out again a wind came that lifted us all for years until it could carry us no more. And I never asked myself why, never looked back to find out whether he was still standing there, but now I am sitting in the middle of this steep slope on a ridge north-east of Oslo with my feet against the base of a spruce tree to stop me from slipping, and there is not much snow now, but it is well below freezing, and I stretch my arms out to the sides and suck the air in, keep it down for a long time and slowly let it out again, and I do it once more and then again until I find a rhythm I can keep. I gently pump space into my chest which has been cramped for a long, long time, until the silence inside me matches the silence that surrounds me. I lie down again with my back in the pine needles, and it feels good to breathe the ice-cold air. I look up between the tree trunks to the sky, which is completely clear and full of stars, and it slowly turns around, the whole world turns slowly around and is a huge, empty space. Silence is everywhere, and there is nothing between me and the stars, and when I try to think of something, I think of nothing. I close my eyes and smile to myself.