I Curse the River of Time (12 page)

I threw the cigarette stub on to the lawn, and then I
raised my glass anyway, said
skol
and took a sip even though her glass remained untouched on the table, but then she too raised her glass and said:

‘Well,
skol
then, Arvid,’ and took a large gulp and coughed violently and said: ‘Bloody hell, that was strong,’ and then she said: ‘Oh, that’s good booze! Imagine, to live so long and still have that in store!’

Then we just sat there. For a long time she was silent and her breathing was wheezy, and if you listened carefully, you could hear her taking great pains to keep it going, and eventually it was her breathing that made me drowsy. We lay in the deckchairs with our eyes closed and the duvets tightly around us, so only our heads were free and our right hands free to hold the glass. And I could picture us looking like TB patients at Glitre Sanatorium in Hakadal, on the terrace with a view of the valley, or in the Alps in Switzerland. But it was not TB that ailed my mother. Nor me, if you could say that something ailed me. It felt that way.

‘Are you feeling better now?’ I said.

She did not reply.

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘So am I,’ I said.

Then out of the blue she said: ‘Do you remember little brother?’

I thought, little brother, of course I remember little brother, why did she say it like that? I grew scared, had something happened to little brother that I did not know about? Surely he was OK where he was, he was in Norway,
he was in the last year of his apprenticeship with a plumber and he was different from the rest of us brothers. He did not want to go to college, he hated school, he did not read books, he was dyslexic, and I liked him very much. He was little brother, he was the last one, not him who came after me, who had died.

And then I realised what she meant. Across the meadow a dog came hopping on stiff legs in the tall grass and landed just about half a metre further on each time, it was an Alsatian chasing something that was moving deep below the roof of crested wheat grass and thistles. I had seen a fox leap that way once and thought it was a rare sight, but clearly it was not.

‘The dog, you mean?’

‘Yes,’ she said.

Every year when we came down on the ferry, an Alsatian called Teddy would be waiting for little brother on the other side of the hedge. The dog knew precisely when we came, when
he
came, it had a sixth sense, that maybe only dogs have, and it would grow restless from early in the morning and would pine to be let out of the house and press its nose against the hedge until we arrived from the ferry to the summer house in our own car or in a taxi.

As soon as we opened the car door, Teddy would storm through the hedge and throw himself at little brother, sending him sprawling, and little brother would knock Teddy down and get back on his feet and hurry inside to change. A moment later he reappeared in shorts and trainers
and together they raced down to the beach and all the way up to Strandby in the north and back again, and damnit, that was a long way. Two hours later they would run up along the hedge, both exhausted and throw themselves on the grass, panting and gasping. They would do this almost every single day. He loved that dog.

‘Out of all of you, he’s the best looking,’ my mother said, and maybe that was true, but I felt it was wrong of her to classify us in that way. Then she said: ‘Teddy couldn’t live for ever. It’s sad, really.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it’s sad,’ and it was true that little brother was the best looking. Once a lady had stopped him on Karl Johansgate and asked if her sister could take a photo of them together. Several people stopped and stared, and when he told us about it at home, he blushed, but right now all I remember was his body against mine, the substance of it, the trust, and the few words he said over and over again were the only words he knew, and my name was one of them, and I would not let him go.

‘He’ll never learn to walk properly,’ my mother said. ‘Put him down, for God’s sake.’ But I did not put him down, and he did not want me to.

14

T
he empty glasses were on the table, she rose with an effort and rolled up the duvet in her lap and was already on the way to her room. She squeezed her eyes tightly shut, opened them, and I rose and blocked her path and said:

‘Are you feeling unwell?’

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘Is there anything I can do for you?’ I said, but she raised her hand and said:

‘If anything needs doing, I’ll do it myself. Get out of my way,’ she said and pushed me in the chest.

‘But, Mother,’ I said, ‘why won’t you let me do something for you? I want to.’

‘Well, that seems reasonable,’ she said, ‘but it’s not going to happen. And we’ll say no more about it.’

And we will say no more about it, and my eyes were stinging and my legs were burning, and she pushed me aside and went into the living room and on into the bedroom and closed the door and it fell silent.

I followed her and stopped outside the door, just staring at it. I turned and looked in the mirror that hung on the wall by the bathroom, and I did not like what I saw, did not like those eyes. I felt restless. I took the two glasses from the table outside and put them on the kitchen counter, moved them to the sink and I filled the sink with hot water
and a dash of Zalo and I washed the glasses, and the cups and the plates from breakfast, and everything else I could find I washed and stacked in the cupboards and I carefully wiped the kitchen counter, wiped the tablecloth, and then there was nothing more to do.

She had gone to bed in such haste that she had forgotten the book she was reading,
The Razor’s Edge
, and that was unusual for her, but she did not call out to me to bring it.

I went over to the big window and pulled the curtain aside and looked across the meadow. I could not see a single animal, not a single bird of interest. Beneath the clouds the sun came in low across the tall, pale, withered grass pushing long shadows out from behind the tiniest objects, and far across the meadow, where the farm was, white smoke came swirling from the chimney of the main building. The barn was chalk white in the blinding light. A man came on his moped along the road to the farm. He had a helmet on, although he was not going very fast, and the light caught his mirror, and the puffing sound from the small engine cut sharply through the autumn air and could clearly be heard, even behind the window where I was standing holding the curtain. I bent down to add a couple of logs to the rumbling fire and put my boots on even though they were still damp, and I tied the long laces around my ankles and went out on the terrace, and there I stood in the cold, slanted November sun, shining on the grass in front of the summer house.

I looked across the meadow. Smoke was still coming from the chimney, but the moped was gone. I turned and walked along the hedge and then on the path leading to Hansen’s
plot. I bent double and slipped through the hole in the hedge and walked around his summer house, which was barely bigger than a shed, and there I found him hunched over an outboard motor he had attached to the sawhorse. He heard me coming, straightened up and turned with a monkey wrench in his hand and smiled his strange, fine and toothless smile.

‘Jesus Christ, you look just like your father,’ he said, and his voice made the air quiver.

‘I know it,’ I said.

‘Especially in those clothes,’ he said. ‘For a moment I thought … you know what I mean.’

I did, but any answer I could have given him had been used up long ago. He sat on the edge of his terrace, put the monkey wrench down with that dry little sound only a monkey wrench makes, and wiped his hands on a bright orange rag, which he then stuffed into his back pocket.

‘I’ll never get this piece of crap running again,’ he said.

‘Why, what’s wrong with it?’

‘I really don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’ve tried everything. It just won’t start. So I guess I’ll have to row instead.’

Hansen was no athlete. He looked like Andy Capp, but in a lovable way. He used to put eel traps in the river and sometimes he fished for plaice from a small boat with this outboard motor attached to the stern. He had had it for years. He never bought anything new. He preferred simple tools, antique outboard motors, a small moped. Old things, used things, things with uncomplicated mechanics, things he had bought from people he knew from the railway. Buying something new seemed senseless to him. He never
had any money, and I don’t think he even found money interesting.

‘Well don’t row too much, then, it may ruin your health,’ I said, and that was not much of a thing to say, but it was all I had, and then it fell quiet and Hansen said:

‘Listen, Arvid my friend, tell me something. Is it true that you’re getting a divorce?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s correct.’

‘Jesus Christ. My condolences.’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t think it kills you.’

‘Don’t be too sure,’ Hansen said. ‘Anything can happen. Let’s have a beer,’ he said. He stood up with a groan and went inside his shed through a ramshackle glasshouse, the orange rag hanging from his back pocket like an angry flag, a railway flag, I thought, for explosive cargo, trains of thought, maybe: Lenin on the train on his way home from his exile in Geneva, heading for the Finland Station in Petrograd, and Hansen shouting: Look out! Look out! But he was not that old, of course. Instead he swiftly returned with a bottle of beer in each hand. He passed me one, it was cold in my hand, and I said:

‘Long live the people,’ and then I said: ‘Down the hatch!’ And we drank deeply, and then Hansen said:

‘That didn’t hurt none.’

The wind cut through my clothes as I sat on the edge of the terrace, my hands were cold. The trees around us were bare now, hazel and oak and beech trees were bare, and willow and alder, and ancient plum trees, and all kinds of other trees, and they were all stripped of their leaves. And the wind came from the north, from the town of Skagen,
from icy Norway with its spruce forests and granite, and my father heading along winding paths for he did not know where else to take his body.

Hansen waved me over and said:

‘Come, let’s enter Crystal Palace. We can take off our coats in there, if that’s what we want to do.’ And it was. He had an electric heater which was red hot behind the mesh, and it sent waves of heat out into the room, and we sat down on white plastic chairs holding our shiny green bottles of beer. I raised the bottle to my mouth and took a big swig, and with the Calvados already in my stomach like a small bullet, it tasted so good. I might start drinking, I thought, drink often, every day, just to feel like this, close my eyes and feel the alcohol flowing through my body. I closed my eyes. Crystal Palace was quiet. It was warm. Only a low fizz from the bottles and some gulls above the trees outside could be heard.

‘Your mother,’ Hansen said.

‘Yes,’ I said, but I kept my eyes closed.

‘She’s ill,’ Hansen said.

‘I know,’ I said. ‘That’s why I’m here,’ and it went quiet, and he said nothing and then I said:

‘That’s why I’ve come. Why else would I at this time of the year? It’s not summer exactly,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t planning to get a tan or anything.’

‘No, it’s not summer, that’s true,’ he said.

I opened my eyes. On the wall there was a large framed picture of the
Christian Radich
, fully rigged on the ocean blue, in the Bay of Biscay perhaps, or in the North Sea on her way to Newcastle. My mother had given the picture to Hansen many years ago, for his fiftieth birthday. Next to
the picture was a bookcase, packed with novels by John Steinbeck; a handsome two-volume edition of
East of Eden
, and
Three Comrades
by Erich Maria Remarque was there too. I had read it before I turned twenty, and one called
Heaven Has No Favourites
which I had read too. It was about a racing driver and the woman he loved, who had TB, and was now staying at a sanatorium where he often went to see her, in the Swiss Alps,
Bella Vista
, it was called. There was always a woman with TB in Remarque’s books. Frankly I was a little fed up with it.

I stood up with my beer in my hand and went over to the small bookcase and took out
Three Comrades
and looked at the fine jacket with a colourful drawing of
Karl, das Chaussegespenst
, which was the name of the racing car they owned, the three comrades, who were the characters in the book. And then there was the woman with TB, the fourth comrade, as in
The Three Musketeers
, which was not about three characters either, but about four, and the fourth was D’Artagnan.

‘How is she doing in there?’ Hansen said.

‘She was tired,’ I said, ‘she has gone to lie down.’

‘I can understand that. Would you be offended if I did the same?’

‘Did what?’ I said.

‘Lie down for a bit?’

‘Are you ill as well?’

‘No, I don’t think so. But I’m tired, I am, and not as young as you.’

‘No, of course not,’ I said. ‘You go and lie down.’ I took two steps towards the door thinking, does he want me to leave?

‘That’s what I’ll do then,’ Hansen said, and then he got up and drained the rest of his beer, and said: ‘You can stay here where it’s warm. You’re always welcome.’ And he went into the bedroom at the back of Crystal Palace with his revolutionary cloth still hanging from his back pocket.

Always welcome. I stood with the bottle in my hand. I did not know if I should go or sit down again and maybe read a bit of
Three Comrades
. But the air was heavy in there, too warm, and there was something wrong with the book. I felt cheated.

I quickly left Crystal Palace, taking the beer with me; I might as well go home to Norway, I thought. Nobody wants me here.

I crossed the small terrace and walked past the sawhorse with the outboard motor on top, and as I turned to look back, there was a pheasant standing dead still in the stripy shadow of a leafless bush, its strange, long tail feathers pointing towards the road, and it was brown and green and red within a silence so compact I found it menacing. Only one shiny eye was moving inside its red frame and it followed every step I took, and this eye frightened me.