I do not know how long we stand like this, perhaps a minute, perhaps five minutes, but then it is over. She raises one hand and covers her face, and with the other makes a movement meant only for me, that most people would call indecent indeed, and I know she is laughing, and she waves and I wave back and then she is gone.
It will soon be morning, but I go back to bed and sleep until the day is far advanced. I have no dreams I can remember when I wake up, but I am sweating under the duvet and have a headache. There is sunshine in the room. The air is thick, and I get up and open the window and look straight out to the path and the space in front of the block where the usual ladies walk past with the usual kids in rather lighter clothes today on their way to the playground or on their way back, and it is late March and suddenly warm. The men I see are refugees from very different parts of the world, and they do not play with their children as I might have done just a few years ago in front of this very block, no, they stand quite still and rigid by the sandpit with their hands in their pockets or arms crossed on their chest, with a stiff smile round their mouth and a dreaming expression in their eyes looking right through the blocks and far, far away.
A couple of Norwegian men who are on social security walk past very slowly with a slight but pronounced limp. It is wasted on me, I have no reason to doubt their disability. It is mine I doubt. When one of the neighbours had seen me staying at home for the third month on end, he came up to me one day at the Co-op and asked timidly:
“So, are you on benefit now?”
“No,” I said, “I am on a scholarship,” and he gave a sympathetic nod, understanding it was something to do with my nerves.
“Well, it’s not easy,” he said.
“No,” I said, “it’s not.”
He stayed at home himself, and told me he did not dare go shopping before the middle of the day. I took his point. That was a couple of years ago. After that we have greeted each other like two men with a fate in common. Now I see him walking along the path on his way to the Co-op, so it must be late.
I go from the open bedroom window through the hall close to the wall as carefully as I can and into the living room where the desk is tidy and dusted with the little Mac switched off and quiet. Beside it lies a not particularly thick pile of typescript. I put on my spectacles and riffle lightly through the pile, and it seems as if I had not seen it before, page after page with unreadable, indifferent writing, from a world no longer mine. If it ever was. I pick up the pile from the table and walk into the kitchen and throw everything into the plastic bag beneath the sink. Two years straight into the bin. I feel neither one thing nor another. I take the plastic bag out and tie the drawstring and go back to the living room, switch the Mac on, wait, click on “hard disk” and get the menu, then use the mouse to log on to the file named “new book” and drag it round the whole screen to the waste bin in the bottom right-hand corner. It always makes me think of the first Fleetwood Mac LP I bought in 1968 when Peter Green was young and his brain not yet bombed. I’ve got a hellhound on my trail, it sings inside of me, the bin bulges and widens in the middle, and I find the icon for “empty waste bin”. “Click,” I say aloud and push my index finger down, and the waste bin gets slim again. Then I find the file with the few sentences I wrote some days ago, which run: I see the shape of the wind on the water, and switch on the printer to make a copy. I click off and close down, pick up the one sheet and put it in the top drawer. Brush invisible dust from the table top. Get up. That was that. Now I must go out.
I put my boots on and lace them up, then the pea jacket with only a T-shirt underneath, trying not to look down at the floor still covered with glass splinters. I pick up the rubbish bag and stuff the dog-eared, much-read edition of 100 Haiku in Norwegian in my pocket, and then I go out and lock the door and throw the bag down the rubbish shaft, and on my way through the entrance hall I open the letter box. There lies The Class Struggle and two letters. One is from my publisher. Not long ago I would have torn it open at once and gone to sit by myself to read in peace, but now I leave it all where it is, shut the box and go out into the sunshine. It is Friday, I think. The blocks lie in a row shutting out the view, and further up there are terraced houses for those who can afford them and want to get on in the world and have a little lawn they can mow. Some think that important. It will soon be time for the annual voluntary spring-cleaning. Then we must all go out together on the caretaker’s orders to sweep the paths and hose away refuse and dog mess and plant shrubs and paint the fence in front of two square metres of grass on each side of the entrance doors, and though there is not one of us who gives a damn, we have to chat. I simply hate it. I do not know anyone any more, do not know who lives on my stair apart from Naim Hajo although I am the one who has been here longest. No-one in their right mind stays for more than three years.
But at least the sun is shining. The windows sparkle and it’s not nearly as warm as it seemed inside the apartment. I am glad about that. I walk the pathway further up the hill through the neutral zone that divides the area between blocks and terraced houses, and the nursery school is just opposite the small football pitch. All the children are outside. I stop by the fence and stand watching them at play, and see G’s boy on top of a sand heap in a thick jumper and waterproof trousers. He is talking loudly, he waves a little red spade and points. He knows what he wants. He is the boss. And then he notices me standing there watching him, and he has no idea we have been twice in combat, that he was beaten both times, at home and away both. I nod to him with a slight smile, I feel obliged to, and he looks straight at me, and he does not know who I am. He makes a face and then sticks his tongue out. The little bastard. I laugh and shake my head. He is suitably miffed and turns his back and with his little spade starts to shovel sand with great force.
I walk away from the fence and up to the summit where the terraced houses have the finest view of the forest and the valley and all that is nice, and their hedges and lawns will soon be subjected to a strict ritual before spring breaks out in earnest, and right at the top I drop down below the road on a pathway leading into the forest on the other side. The whole time I have had eyes on my back from windows and doorways, and although it has not been as bad as it usually is I stop in the semi-darkness beneath the little bridge to rest and roll a cigarette before deciding whether to turn and go back the same way or take the road round the whole housing area or perhaps some other way altogether. I can go from here and get on to the ancient paths and walk there for days, seeing no other houses than long-forgotten smallholdings with their buildings falling down or crumbled long ago and after that just the occasional log cabin. That is what the neighbours say. I have lived here for fourteen years and never been further in than a few hundred metres to collect fir cones when the girls were quite small and fascinated by small things.
I stand smoking in the shadow of the little concrete bridge, watching the sun shining on the spruces closest by and on the path that bends and disappears behind a cliff. A cluster of birches filters the light in yellow and shining black through its bare branches, and it looks like a magazine illustration or an old print from China or Japan, and I could have hung that picture on my wall. So why not? I finish my smoke and stub the butt out with the toe of my boot and start walking. I turn twice and look back, and the houses are still there, but the third time they have gone. I try to recall the last time I could not see a house or was close to one or inside one, and it must be long since.