It wasn’t lung cancer; I had two fractured ribs. Not until I got home from town and walked, half bent over, past the mirror in the hall did I notice that I had a black eye as well. Everyone on the train and on the bus from the station had seen it, people I know and have said hello to for several years, only I didn’t know. All the pains had converged into one big one, and I could not distinguish one from the other. And then I lay in bed, for days and nights, head spinning, before I called the doctor, dizzy from the want of air and thoughts of death, trying to unravel what had happened when I was far out of this world.
I go into my apartment and shut the door. Only the light over my bed is on. In the bedroom I ease one of my father’s old sweaters over my head, it is washed out and soft to the touch, and then I put socks on before turning out the light, walking through the dark hall to the living room and turning on the lamp over the desk. The first thing I did when I found myself alone was to move the desk into the living room. There are two books on it and about a hundred pages of manuscript with a coating of dust on the top sheet. NEW BOOK is written under the dust. I find my cheap spare glasses, turn on my veteran Mac and click my way to the program I use now, then open a new file. I write:
“Early November. It is nine o’clock. The titmice are crashing against the windowpanes. Sometimes they fly unsteadily off after the collision, at other times they fall to the ground and lie floundering in the fresh snow before they get back on the wing. I do not know what I have that they want. I look out of the window across the field to the woods. There is a reddish light above the trees towards the lake. The wind is getting up. I can see the shape of the wind on the water.”
I am writing myself into a possible future. Then the first thing I must do is to picture an entirely different place, and I like to do that, because here it has become impossible. And then there is a ringing. I look into the hall to the door, but this time it is the telephone. It is almost two o’clock. It is my brother. He is three years old than I am, a partner in a firm of architects, making money.
“Hi,” he says.
“Do you know what time it is?” I say. “It’s Tuesday, damn it, or it was Tuesday. Don’t you have to work tomorrow?’
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi. Are you drunk?”
“Not quite. Not quite yet. I think I’m going to be divorced.”
“Oh boy! Welcome to the club. Does Randi know?”
“She’s the one who knows. She hasn’t told me yet. But soon she will. She’s not here. I’m alone.”
“Hey. Really. Who had long hair first? I did. And who cut it off first. Me again. I was the one to stick Mao on the wall, and I was the one who took him down again. I liked Bob Dylan first, and I liked opera best, and Steve Forbert I liked first, and the Smiths and Billy Bragg, and I was the one who said Ken Loach would be important, and now you don’t watch anyone else’s films. I read Pelle the Conqueror first, and I read The Arch of Triumph first and went to the off-licence to ask for calvados, and it cost more than 200 kroner, in 1973! I was the one who first went to a Vietnam demonstration. By the time you came along the war was almost over. I was married first and divorced first. You beat me by three days with the first child, but that was because I used condoms longer than you did. Maybe you’d never used condoms. Hell, you’re three years older than me. You ought to come up with something I haven’t already done. You could start to paint again, only you know how to do that.”
“That’s a lot of balls, I could make just as long as list. And anyway, I knew Dad better than you did.”
“Why do you talk about him now? Christ, Dad. Why do you say Dad? Isn’t is Papa any longer? We’ve always said Papa.”
“You’ve always said Papa.”
“Oh, no, I didn’t.”
“Listen, Arvid. Remember when we got back from Copenhagen after laying the wreaths on the sea along with all the firefighters and policemen and psychiatrists and priests, the whole shebang; and we went straight to Harald and borrowed his blue van and drove to Veitvet and stuffed it full of things from the flat. And then we went off again, to Gothenburg to cross with the ferry one more time with all the stuff we didn’t actually know why we were moving, and we were so bushed that we fell asleep at the wheel before we had gone an hour so we had to stop at a Wayside Inn and flop on the benches outside, and I asked you if you felt guilty about Dad. You almost fell off the bench even though you were so tired.”
“What are you talking about? I didn’t fall off the bench. I thought we were talking about divorce.”
“I’m talking about divorce. I have no idea what you are talking about.”
“Don’t talk to me about divorce. Shit, I know all about divorce.”
“Right, that’s good,” he says, and hangs up, and I sit there with the phone in my hand, and then I hang up too, and the night is quiet again. It is dark in the hall, and it is dark outside, there is only light in one window in the next-door block. Mrs Grinde lives there. The neighbours say she has binoculars, and it may be so, I don’t know anything about her, but she cannot be using them now, not unless they are army ones, and I do not think they are. I read the words on my screen: “I see the shape of the wind on the water.” Did I write that?
I didn’t make a speech on my father’s seventy-fifth birthday. I had nothing against making a speech, but it did not occur to me for a moment that I should. We didn’t make speeches in my family. Not for birthdays, not for confirmations, never had any one of us risen at the table to pay tribute to another. With a single exception. The previous year my mother had been sixty, and I gave a long speech in verse from all her children. I think she liked that, and I think she felt that at last they were getting some dividend for voting Labour and being loyal union members most of their lives so that we should have a better and richer life. It was a fine speech, and although it might not have won me the Nobel Prize for Literature I was quite proud of it. So on my father’s seventy-fifth birthday I realised she was sitting there staring at me across the table. Dinner was well advanced, I was expecting nothing but peace, so I returned her gaze, and suddenly I realised that she was waiting for the speech I would be making for my father, and her expression told me she was really wondering what had I thought up this time.
I had not thought up anything. Nor could I spontaneously stand up and invent something. I had nothing to say. I turned and looked at the others at the table, my two brothers who were still alive and all the children and uncles and aunts, and they were all looking at me. The only one who was not looking at me was my father. And suddenly silence fell at the table.
I get up from the desk, walk into the hall, open the door to the stairwell and listen. I take a few steps, lean over the banisters and gaze up. Not a sound. It is the middle of the night, but maybe someone is standing up there and not moving. I clear my throat quietly, but the sound comes out loud and makes an echo and that is embarrassing, and I go in again to the dark hall and close the door. The two rooms next to my bedroom are empty now, but the doors are open, and it is dark in there too and not as before when at least one of the two girls had to sleep with a spotlight right in her face, yellow light under her eyelids and on into her dream. Now they do that in another place, another man maybe turns on those lights. I close both of their doors. Then I go into the kitchen. I won’t be able to sleep anyway, I may as well have some coffee.