I remember one house I was in. I lay on the sofa in the living room trying to recover, I might have been to a party the night before and I felt worn out and left out, I had no family any more, everything was lost. Then my father came downstairs. I knew his step from all others, the weight of him, and he walked past me across the floor to the window and pulled the curtain aside. A faint light came in.
“The fog is lifting,” he said. “We must get going. They are on your trail.” I turned and saw the light on his face, a soft grey light, like invisible smoke in the room. He was as old as I am now, and what he said did not frighten me, for he was keeping watch and knew what we had to do. But there wasn’t much time, I had to pull myself together.
It must have been a dream, of course, because I do not remember what that house looked like from outside or what he saw from the windows or why we were actually there. I remember a lot of dreams. Sometimes they are hard to distinguish from what has really happened. That is not so terrible. It is the same with books.
I walk a kilometre or two over easy slopes both up and down, and then the path bends steeply towards the top of a knoll. I really have to make my legs work, and though my breathing is not that good, the going is better than expected and that makes me enthusiastic. I could have had a dog like Glahn has in Hamsun’s Pan, and it could have bounded in front of me along this path and its name could be Aesop or Lyra, and each time a person or an animal was going to cross our path it would warn me at once so I could retreat among the trees and watch them pass, and the dog would sit there obediently at my feet. I could have had a gun and lived on what I managed to shoot, small game and large birds, and lived in a cabin with the few things I needed: some books, an old-fashioned typewriter, clothes for all seasons and enough dry firewood, I could have been a Tibetan monk, I could have been someone completely different from the person I am, of course, but I am not, and when I get to the top of the knoll and there is a view, I see forest whichever way I turn. Far down to the right is a long narrow lake, and from where I stand I cannot see where it begins or ends. There is ice on the lake with open patches, and I would not have tried to walk on that ice. In the shadows on the other side there is snow on the slope. There ought to have been an elk walking beside that lake, but there is no elk in sight, and everything is quiet, nothing moves but a thin wisp of smoke from some place deeper into the forest.
I sit down by a rock with a view of the lake and roll a cigarette, and when it’s lit I take the book of haiku from my pocket. It is a long time since I read it, but I leaf through and find the poem about the night falling on to the road where no-one walks, and I read it a couple of times and then some more poems, and then one about a willow tree that paints the wind without a brush, and I know willows well from Denmark where you can see them everywhere and there is always a wind, and I can picture it clearly. I close the book and put out the cigarette and look across the lake to the thin wisp of smoke that still hangs there above the forest some miles away and barely moves, and then I close my eyes and rest my head against the rock with the sun on my face and sleep for a while. When I wake what I remember is just something about the wind and a white house by the water.
On the way home I call in at the Co-op and buy the things I did not get yesterday. I just make it before closing time, and in truth I buy rather more than I need, and then I walk up the pathway with the bag in my hand. Clouds have come up and it is cold again, but not that cold. I see no-one in front of the block. Inside the hall I take my post from the letter box, and when I get to my door, Naim Hajo, the Kurd from the second floor, is ringing my doorbell. He has a book under his arm.
“Hi,” I say, and he says:
“Hi” with a smile, and I unlock the door, push it open and make a slight bow with one arm out. The arm trembles, and I do not know why. Perhaps because I have forgotten to eat again. He does not miss that.
“Go on in,” I say. And so he does, takes a step across the threshold, then stops short and looks at the splinters of glass sparkling like a carpet right over to the living-room door, and he looks at me and grows serious. He points at the floor with an enquiring look on his face.
“That’s nothing,” I say.
He looks as if he understands what I say, and he looks as if he does not agree. Perhaps he has read Basho. He shakes his head and says: “Problem.” Just like that. And then he points at me, and not at my face, rather at where my heart is. I consider whether I have a problem in that area, but there is none that I can explain to him, not in the language he and I use. What I have is a broken mirror. But I know I am glad he is concerned. And he has three words now. That almost elates me.
“One moment,” I say and stop him with my hands. I fetch a brush and a dustpan and sweep a way for us through the glass splinters from the front door to the living room, and I wave him on.
“Come on in,” I say. “Coffee?” I ask, and he smiles and understands that word well without any trouble and follows me into the kitchen. I indicate one of the chairs with my hand, and he sits down and takes the book from under his arm and places it on the table in front of the brass bowl. The bowl glitters newly polished in the light from the window. I can see it makes him pleased. I am pleased too. I take the groceries out of the shopping bag and spread them out on the worktop, and for want of something more oriental I make some ferociously strong coffee with the Co-op’s green brand, the way I hope he will like it. Fortunately there is a clean cloth on the table, and I lay cups and bowls and plates from the same service, the finest I have, which I inherited from my mother, who brought it with her from Denmark in the early fifties. Suddenly the way everything looks seems important, that everything is for real, and that he understands that, because in his part of the world the drinking of coffee is more than filling a mug and taking it out on the balcony. After all, I am not completely ignorant. I pour milk into a small jug and put sugar in a matching bowl, and find two teaspoons that are actually silver. I get a packet of oatcakes from the shopping bag, tear it open and take out a suitable number and spread them with light margarine, put them in a small basket that someone who once lived here left behind, and for a moment I wonder whether to light some candles. But I do not have any candles, and anyway it is the middle of the day, and with candles it might have looked like a rendezvous.
When there is nothing more to be done, I sit down and pour out his coffee and wait until he has helped himself to sugar and stirred with the spoon and taken the first mouthful. He nods and smiles. That is a proper cup of coffee, is what he thinks, and I fill my own cup and have a taste.
“A bit on the strong side if you ask me,” I say, “but then I am Norwegian.” and he is with me, whether he understands what I say or not, and I take a biscuit and he takes a biscuit, and we chew and drink coffee for a while without saying anything, and then I remember the dream of the house I was in with my father, that they were after me, and that he helped me get out before it was too late.
“Is your father alive?” I ask, then wait before saying:
“My father is dead. That’s not so strange, he would have been more than eighty now and maybe dead no matter what had happened. It is really much worse than the others are dead. But the odd thing is that it took me six years to realise it is unbearable. Can you understand that?” I say, shaking my head, and he points at me and says:
“Problem,” and I do not deny it. When you run naked through your hall in the night and on impulse smash the wall mirror into powder, you do have a small problem, that goes without saying. I nod and openly admit it, and he points to his own heart.