Then my mother called one day.
“Your father has been in hospital for several days,” she said. “You have to go and see him.”
I’m sure I knew he was there. One of my brothers must have told me, but I hadn’t taken it in. It was nothing to do with me. I had never been to see anyone in hospital before. But now I did go.
It took less than half an hour to drive to Aker Hospital. It was early October and the rowan berries hung in heavy clusters at the edge of the forest alongside Gamleveien on the journey in. All the leaves had blown away in a few nights, all the colour was gone, and the berries hung as the only decorations, and had ripened and fermented in the cold weather and were about to split, and I had heard the thrushes liked them especially just then. They gobbled them up and afterwards were so intoxicated they were not able to fly straight. They could not get enough of them. It’s the truth. Someone I trust had told me, and that was what I was thinking about as I drove in to the hospital along Gamleveien, past Lørenskog station and on to Økern and Sinsen; how the thrushes ate fermented rowan berries and got drunk. I had never seen it myself, but I could picture it clearly, and I remember I wished the road to Aker Hospital would be longer than that half-hour. But it was not, and there was hardly any traffic, so it took even less time. So I stayed in the car in the car park for more than ten minutes. Several more cars arrived as I sat there, and almost everyone who got out carried flowers or nicely wrapped boxes of chocolate, and some had brought books for the people they were visiting. I hadn’t brought anything.
In the end I got myself out of the car and walked towards the entrance to the surgical wards where a porter gave me directions, and then went two floors up. When I came through the glass door from the staircase and out into the corridor my father stood at the other end. I saw him at once and stopped. I don’t know whether he had had the operation and was on his feet again, or if he was still waiting. I am sure he did not see me because he stood with his face to the wall, one hand above his head and the other on his stomach, and it struck me as an odd way to stand. I looked around and there was no-one else in the corridor just then. Only him at one end and me at the other, and I took a few steps towards him, and then I saw that his body was shaking, was trembling, and I went on a few more steps before I realised my father was crying. Then I stopped completely. Never once in my life had I seen him cry, and I realised from the way he was clutching his stomach that he cried because he was in pain, and he must have been in tremendous pain.
I will tell you something about my father. He was past forty when I was born, but he was different from the other men where we lived. He was an athlete. I mean a real pro. He had taken his body as far as it could go and filled it with a strength you would think it could not hold, and you could see it in the way he walked and in the way he ran, in the way he talked and in the way he laughed that there was a fire inside him that no-one could ignore, and it was clear from the way that he was seen that he was body and energy both, that he reached out and was heading somewhere, that there was something about him. And he had been that way for as long as anyone could remember. He had trained and trained to make his body into a crowbar, a vaulting pole to break free with and be lifted by. He had worn tracks into mountainsides on his way up and on his way down to strengthen his legs to get better on the football pitch, on the ski run and in the boxing ring, and on his way through town to the factory from Galgeberg and Vålerenga where he lived, and no-one had a strength like his. He had crossed the Østmark by every single path, up every single ridge and down on the other side, and it made him into an all-rounder. Good at everything and best at nothing. He was not fast enough. He could keep running in the tracks longer than most, but weaker men crossed the finishing line before him. He was never frontman, never anchorman, and even though no-one was untouched by his capacity for taking a beating in the ring, standing firm with his little smile, driving his opponent crazy, for much longer than anyone thought possible, it was hardly ever enough to make him one of the chosen few sent out to tournaments to fight for the club and its colours and be seen by the crowd the way he had longed for. He had the strength and he had the will, but he did not have the speed nor the imagination to give him that little extra. But that did not break him, as you might have thought. He just went on, year after year, and far beyond the point in time when what he trained for would be possible, and it made him different from all the other grown men I knew. He could endure anything. And now he stood leaning against the yellow wall of the corridor in Aker Hospital crying because he was in pain. We had not had a proper talk for as long as I could recall, maybe not since the year I was twelve and we sat by a bonfire far into the Lillomark Forest, and he showed me how a boy only 142 centimetres tall could make an asshole of 160 afraid. I suddenly felt faint and ill. There were only the two of us in that corridor, and I could not take another step. No way. I stood there for I don’t know how long, and I remember thinking it was incredibly hot, that I was thirsty and wanted a drink, but I am sure he did not know I was there, for he never turned round, just held his hand to his stomach and his face to the wall as he wept, and that was what saved me. I held my breath, turned silently and walked away. Straight out of the hospital, into the car and then drove home.
I sit on the chair beside Mrs Grinde’s door looking at the floor and talk and talk and do not know whether what I say and what I think are the same things, but if they are it is hard to believe, for in the years that have passed since that day at Aker Hospital I have never told anyone what happened. Not my mother while she lived, not the one who left her make-up in the bathroom, not my brother, now hovering in a stable way down in the valley between this and a different world entirely, and G. Grinde stands in front of me in the hall biting her lip and running her hand through her hair. I can’t see her doing it, but I know she is, and she shifts her weight from foot to foot, not impatiently but restlessly maybe, at a loss. But when I look up she peers at me short-sightedly and says: “Are you sure he didn’t know you were there?”
I look down at the floor again and say: “No.”
She makes a decision then which I do not catch on to, because I am gazing down between my knees with my hands pressed to my temples, swallowing again and again and I do not see her face. It’s not until much later when we lie close in the heavy warmth, and she has in fact switched the light off, that I realise it was then it happened, and yet again it strikes me what a story can accomplish.
I wake once, and it is still dark. I raise myself on my elbow and look out the window and see the light from my apartment in the opposite block, and two floors up there is light in the Hajo family home. My friend the family father stands at the centre of the room, his head bowed and his face in his hands, his whole body rocking back and forth, I can see him quite clearly, but I cannot find a way to think about it with this unknown perfume making me drowsy, and when I lie down again she turns to me under the duvet and does something that makes me gasp, it almost hurts. I cannot remember when anyone last did just that to me. And she is so warm, and her hair smells of the same perfume, it tickles my face and the way her skin touches mine makes me think of an animal whose name I do not know but would have liked to see, and once she strokes my chest and shoulders and says: “You’re so fine.”