But they’re so damned cold, the whole nasty lot of them, they just start pissing and moaning about my suit, as if the best suit of clothes I own ain’t fit for a small country funeral. “Shut your mouths,” I tell ’em. “Not everybody can make a living overcharging folks for old radio consoles and then drop money on brand new white shirts every other day. A man might not get fat working in the sanitation trade, but I’ll be goddamned if I’m gonna be ashamed of the way I make my living!”
What a miserable thing, standing here and trying to talk to a roomful of family and the unmentionable trash they’ve brought into it, ’cause not an ear in the room is paying me the least bit of heed. It’s enough to drive you crazy. You’re alone, Knut-boy, and you’ve always been alone. Is it any wonder you start to sob?
“He can have my suit,” Tage says. “I’ve got my uniform. I can wear that to the funeral.”
And then that son of a bitch radio dealer says he thinks Tage’s clothes should do the trick, long as he don’t mind they might end up with puke all over them.
“Getting motion sick can happen to anybody,” I tell that no-good lout. “If they ain’t used to riding in a car like that. Not everybody’s got the luxury of coasting around every day like some kind of showboat in their Volvo ’39, or whatever the hell it is.”
“Pontyak,” the radio dealer says. “Tage’s suit will fit good enough. For being thirty-three years old he still has the build of a tenderfoot.”
“You don’t gotta be a fat-ass,” I say to him, “to bust a fella in the chops so hard he’ll be sorry he ever opened his goddamn mouth. If it comes to that.”
“Well, then, maybe you should start with Elinda’s boyfriends,” he blurts out. “Before they eat you out of house and home.”
Here you stand at this table, alone and grieving, and as you do your woman is climbing into bed with another man. And your own family, wouldn’t you think that they would listen for even half a second to what you have to say? Don’t kid yourself. You’re on your own. And you’ve always been on your own. So now you cry. How can you not cry when your sister Lydia just keeps at you with no end in sight?
But then finally she comes up and says, “Let’s get you to bed.” She must be good and worn out, ’cause she has to lean on me all the way into the old man’s room. The air’s so damn stuffy in here I start to feel the motion sickness all over again. But at least I manage to throw myself down on the old man’s couch before it all comes up again. Except it don’t come up again, ’cause I’ve learned by now how to control myself. But I should probably get up and have a tinkle.
But Lydia rears up and snaps, “You just stay put, you!” and then she starts pulling my trousers off me. So of course I’ll have to hear about this till my dying day. “Knut was so damned drunk the night before the old man’s funeral his own sister had to take his pants off him.” And my jacket, ’cause she pulls that off me too. Treating me like a goddamn storefront dummy! But Lydia and her radio-dealing slug got another thing coming if they think they can treat me any old way they want. And so that’s what I tell her, right to her face. And the scolding starts all over again.
“You’re nothing but a damned liar, you! ’Cause you never want to Mamma’s grave with no flowers!”
“I did so,” I say. “I even raked the gravel!”
No way for her to know anyway.
And then she really gets furious and yanks at my arm so it almost comes right out of my shoulder.
“You’re drunk and you’re a damn liar,” she says. “’Cause the family plot is all dug up for Dad! So there ain’t no gravel to rake. Nisse and I saw that with our own eyes when we went there this afternoon!”
So I went and left flowers on the wrong grave. And if they ain’t still there tomorrow that’s just eight crowns right down the drain. And now you’re branded a liar. And you’re sick. And back in town your own dear woman is lying in bed with another man. And every time you come home your own little boy, Yngve, runs and hides. So they badmouth you to everyone, near or far, big or small. Is it any wonder you lay here and blubber?
Here on the old man’s couch, stripped pretty much naked, blubbering. So many nights the old man laid right here himself, on this very spot. And this is where we sat, me and him, the last time we ever saw each other. So you should know that, Lydia, you should know that this is right where the old man put his arm around me and gave me a big squeeze. And then he got up and went over to that dresser there and rummaged around in the drawer for something. After a while he got his hands on what he was after and he laid it out right here on the table. A little sweater.
“’Member this, Knut?” he said to me. “’Member this Icelandic sweater? I picked it up for you one Christmas in the city. And you, well, I ain’t never seen a kid so goddamned pleased with anything in my life …”
I could do with that Icelandic sweater right about now. The old man, he had it in his hands the last time I was here. I sure could do with it, alright, to hold under the blanket whiles I think about the old man.
“Where’s my Icelandic sweater?” I say to Lydia.
Lydia stands there besides the couch. Her nose looks like the knob on a copper pot, her face so red it’s shining.
“Where’s my Icelandic sweater?” I ask again but she don’t answer. Probably thinks I’m rambling.
But then she says, “Your Icelandic sweater! I suppose you’re going to try and wear that to the funeral, instead of a proper suit of clothes! That suit of yours you might as well give to some lost soul in the poorhouse now.”
So Lydia, she don’t understand nothing. Not a goddamn thing! And I can’t really look for it myself ’cause the second I lift my head up a little I get a throatful of the stuff. Motion sickness is a son of a bitch.
Lydia stands there with my suit draped over her arm like it’s done her some kind of terrible wrong.
“And I see now you lost your armband!” she says.
The grieving band! My body suddenly turns cold and the grudge I bear the others just falls away like nothing. I stop thinking how everybody’s out to run me down. And I pretty much forget Elinda. I don’t cry anymore on account of my misunderstood heart of gold. Instead I lay here on the old man’s sofa bed and see myself for the fucking pig I am. To lose the grieving band like that — that’s like losing the grief. I took the wrong path somewhere and let that band slip from my arm. That’s my memorial to the old man — getting shitfaced drunk and losing the reminder of my loss. What a lousy pig I am. Always have been and always will be. And much as I try to close my eyes and block it out, the shame is there all the same. I can picture that black band laying in a pool of puke or dangling from the barbed wire outside the Pavilion. Or maybe somebody’s picked it up there by the outdoor dance floor and said, “Look! Someone went and lost their armband! That miserable slob Knut, of course. That goddamn boozehound that can’t keep sober once, not even the night before his old man’s funeral. Same damn thing when his mother got buried. What a piece of work that son of a bitch is, good old Knut Lindqvist — spelled with a ‘qv,’ like he told the deputy! He sure has come up in the world since he moved to the city to pick up other people’s garbage.”
And as I sink further down into a yellow gloom, so warm and vile, I can remember all at once how things went at Mamma’s funeral. How the first thing I did that day was get up and puke out the window, just as Ulrik was passing by with a couple of milk pails, and how he spat out his contempt at me.