“Problem,” he says again. And I can understand that. He is thousands of miles from the place where he has lived for most of his life, and perhaps he has a father in a village in the far north of Iraq and he will never see him again, or that father is dead, and someone did kill him, and then he comes here, and the first word he learns is “thanks” and the third is “problem”. Then “hi” in the middle is not of much help. I nod again.
“I have seen you at night, you know,” I say. He cocks his head and looks at me enquiringly, and then I put my face in my hands and rock my body back and forth, and while I am doing this I realise I may have gone too far. I cautiously glance up at him. His eyes are shining and he strokes his moustache again and again, but he nods. Very slightly. I hasten to fill up his cup and pass him the basket of oatcakes. He is polite and takes some and has a mouthful of coffee, and then he puts his hand on the book and pushes it towards me and then opens his hands. I am to receive yet another gift. It is too much, really. I turn it over and see it is Memed, my Hawk by Yasar Kemal. I remember well when I read it fifteen years ago. Remember the chair I was sitting in and the colour of the curtains and the colours of the paint on the walls in the apartment in Bjølsen where I lived then, and the humming sound of buses on their way in to the roundabout outside my windows and the brakes at the bus stop and the doors opening. Remember the Irish music I played each day that became linked for ever with the burning thistles on the Tsjukorova plain and the stockings that Memed’s sweetheart knitted in a unique pattern meant especially for him. And I remember who gave me that book, and that I asked if she could knit a pair of stockings like that for me. And she did, as well as she could from Kemal’s description in the book. And suddenly her face is back, and the years when I saw that face, and the scent of her and the way she walked, and the way she ran her fingers through her hair to push it away from her eyes, and then the face again as it was in the labour ward twice with me on my knees by her bed, and once more as it was at the end, distorted and furious, and at once my throat starts to hurt. I desperately clear it and stand up, I take his hand and say:
“Thanks,” and I cough again. “Just a moment,” I say and put down the book and leave the table and walk through the living room to the bathroom in the hall. There I turn on the tap and put the plug in and let the water fill the basin more than halfway up. I take a deep breath and hold it down and bend and push my face into the water. It is icy cold, but I stand like that until I have to breathe. This time I dry my face thoroughly in a big towel hanging on the wall. I run my hands through my hair and look at myself in the mirror. I do not know whom I resemble any more. Then I go back. He sits on his chair and has not moved. He looks at me, and I know what he is going to say. I nod.
“Problem,” I say. No question.
12
TIME SLIDES INTO April. It is spring, no doubt about it. I reread books. I have made a list of the twenty I have liked the best, and after several sittings it is down to ten. Memed, my Hawk is one of them. I am looking for something, but I do not know what.
My brother is discharged from hospital after a short stay in the psychiatric ward in the basement, the bunker, as it is called. I do not visit him. There is no point, and anyway they cannot give him any help there that he would accept. So he does not stay long, and when he gets home he is into divorce proceedings at once. I talk to Randi on the telephone. She is the one who calls me.
“He is completely apathetic,” she says. “He doesn’t give a damn. Won’t you talk to him?”
What am I to say to that? She likes to fight, and now there is no resistance. That makes her confused and angry. But it is not my problem.
“Just get it over with,” I say.
“It shouldn’t be that easy,” she says.
“Oh, yes, it should,” I say. “Here today, gone tomorrow. That’s how it is.”
*
She moves out one Saturday, with David and a good deal more, and then he is alone in the big empty house on Fetsund. He buys her share of the house, and that cleans him out and then some. The house is mortgaged up to the hilt.
I call him on April 7, early in the day. He is at home on sick leave.
“Hello,” he says.
“Hi,” I say, “it’s me. Your brother. You’ll remember me if you search your mind. It is a kind of jubilee today, is it not. Want to go for a beer?”
“Your treat?”
“Sure thing.”
“OK,” he says. “Can you pick me up? She took the car.”
“If my car will start, I will.”
It does, of course, it never lets me down. Give me any car at all, as long as it’s Japanese and begins with an m and ends with an a. I have replaced the scratched bumper with one from a scrapyard, and it is really posh, and even has the same paint colour as the original.
I drive down the hills to Lillestrøm, cross the bridge over the Nitelva and in through the first streets past the station. All the snow has gone, not a patch to be seen on the way down. There are coltsfoot beside the roadside ditches, the April sun is shining, and the workers on the new railway to Gardermoen airport wear orange trousers and white T-shirts that are still quite clean. They are laying rails with huge machines and signal to each other with gloved hands. The gloves are yellow and can be seen from a long way off. I catch myself singing “Somewhere” from West Side Story, and not quite like in the original version by Leonard Bernstein, but more like Tom Waits on the Blue Valentine LP from before he stopped smoking. To my ears it sounds quite similar, but I’m not sure everyone would support that view. “There’s a place for us,” I bellow in a gurgling voice, and then I start coughing. I ought to stop smoking myself. My father would have liked that. Or maybe not. It would have made him less unique among us, with his body like a temple; no whited sepulchres in sight. His temple got cancer, but that can happen to anyone; a genetic time bomb placed there by chance at birth, ticking and running, and then one day: Bang. If that happens to me it will be far from chance. That is the difference between us, and it is a big difference.
But I feel better now than I have for a long time. I do.
They are building a new railway station beside the old one in Lillestrøm, and it looks good. I like railway stations made of glass and steel, I like airports, I like big bridge spans and concrete constructions if they are bold enough, I can drive long diversions to see a power station in the mountains or in the depths of a valley, I like high-tension cables in straight lines through the landscape, and presumably that is because I read too many Soviet novels at a certain age. Light over the land, that is what we want. Light in every lamp, light in every mind.
I drive out of Lillestrøm following the roundabouts by Åråsen football stadium where LSK plays its home matches, but I have never liked LSK in their canary-yellow colours, have never been into that ground, only heard the heart-rending jubilation when Vålerenga gets knocked out again and again, and then I turn out on to the road to Fetsund and step on the gas to about ninety kilometres an hour straight over the big plain where the rivers meet and break their banks at the end of spring every single year when the melt water from the mountains comes down through the valleys and all the way here. Sometimes the cattle stand in the meadows beside the highway with water above their hocks in the mist looking like water buffalo in films from the Yangtze, Mekong; I remember women on bicycles in round pointed hats with grenades on the handlebars and grenades in their carriers in the rain and the water up to the hubs on their way through the forest to the front.