The Half Brother: A Novel (30 page)

King Barnum.
These too were things the Old One had left behind — a picture of Mom’s best friend and a shiny button with a black thread. I started crying. It was all I could do. I cried until Dad came home and we had to eat dinner. Fred’s place was empty. Mom was silent and barely touched her food. We ate fishballs in white sauce. Dad mashed his potatoes with his fork and for a long time was as silent as Mom. Boletta drank beer, and apart from that it was a dismal mealtime. Eventually Dad said, “I’ve been speaking to Arnesen.” No one responded to this. Dad grew impatient and spilled some food on the cloth. “Do you perhaps want to know what I spoke to Amesen about?” Boletta stretched over the table. “What did you speak to Arnesen about?” she asked. Dad dried his mouth with his napkin. “The life insurance money. We will receive a payment of no more than a miserable two thousand kroner.” Boletta pushed away her plate of fishballs. “Have you begun working out what the Old Ones worth already, Arnold Nilsen?” Dad got up and all but overturned his chair. “Have you become so high and mighty, Boletta? I just think the Old One was worth more than a measly few thousand kroner.” “Sit down,” Mom said suddenly. Dad did sit down. Silence fell once more. I could hear the sound of the fishballs as they slid around the slippery plates. “Our premium has been too small,” Dad whispered. “We’ve always paid what was expected of us,” Mom said. Dad shook his head and turned to me. “Perhaps someone’s been tempted by the money under the clock,” he said. I looked down. I’d spilled food on the cloth too. “Not me,” I whispered. “No, but have you perhaps noticed Fred being a little light-fingered with the money in the drawer?” Boletta banged the table. She thumped it so hard the glasses overturned. Mom shrieked, and Dad’s face became as white as his napkin. And I was actually relieved, because perhaps now I wouldn’t have to answer. “You’re not always to blame Fred,” Boletta said. Dad twisted around on his chair. “I’m not blaming anyone. I’m only trying to find out what’s happened.” Boletta smiled. “Perhaps it’s Arnesen who’s cheated us?” she said. For several minutes Dad was pensive. Then he laid his hand on Boletta’s small fingers. “At least we could have done with that money” he said. “Now that you’re not working at the Exchange.” “I have my pension,” Boletta said. “And you’re welcome to borrow money if you need it.” Dad got up slowly and left the table, without so much as uttering a single word. Mom groaned. “You didn’t have to say that,” she breathed. Boletta rested her head in her hands. “Arnold Nilsen is a shopkeeper from head to foot. I can’t abide all this money talk!” Now Mom left the table too. I remained where I was. The fishballs had gone cold. The white sauce was congealing around the fork. “Don’t listen to all we grown-ups say” Boletta said. “All right. I won’t.” Boletta chuckled: “But you have to listen to me when I tell you that you’re not always to listen to all we say.” Boletta had had two glasses of beer. Maybe that was the reason she was talking like this. “All right,” I said. Boletta brought her chair a bit closer. “Has Fred said anything to you?” “No. About what?” “I’d so like to know what they were talking about before the Old One died, Barnum.” “He hasn’t said anything,” I whispered. I helped to clear the table. Afterward I dried while Boletta washed, and then I waited for Fred. He came in after I’d gone to sleep. All of a sudden he was sitting there on his bed. I could just make him out in the dark. It was his eyes I could see most clearly I didn’t dare turn on the light. “What were you talking to the Old One about?” I asked him. The eyes disappeared. He didn’t reply. I got my pencil case from my school bag and carefully laid the heavy button in his hand. The eyes became visible once more. “It’s the Old One’s button,” I whispered. Fred turned on the light. He stared at the button and closed his hand. “You can have it if you want,” I told him. I thought he was going to say something, but then he just dropped the button on the floor. I had to crawl under the bed to find it, and Fred switched off the light. He continued his long silence. No one paid any attention to it at first apart from me, because Fred had never been particularly talkative to begin with, in fact quite the opposite. He spoke little, and reluctantly. He wasn’t someone with words on his side. Words were topsy-turvy inside him, and letters often came out in the wrong order. Fred wrote the world’s shortest compositions — that was if he handed them in to begin with. He got the lowest grades in Norwegian without fail, and once he got nothing at all. At recess, he stood facing the wall. No one ever went over to him, though I could see myself that the girls took secret peeks at him and went past arm in arm with hopeful smiles. I so much wanted to be proud of Fred. One day someone had written the word
bastard
on the shed wall. The janitor took about two hours to wash it off and there was a good deal of a rumpus, but nobody got caught. The following Monday, Aslak came to school with sunglasses on, although it was raining. One eye was dark blue and hung in a fat bulge beneath his forehead. Aslak said he’d bumped into a door and got the lock in his eye. There weren’t many who believed the tale (except for the teachers). Still Fred stood silent by the wall. I went over to him. He didn’t turn around. Aslak, Hamster and Preben sat on the railing behind the tram stop following everything. “Shall we go home?” I asked. We went home. I walked on one sidewalk. Fred walked on the other. Esther leaned out of her kiosk and stuck some sugar candy wrapped in crackling sandwich paper deep in my pocket. “Share it with your brother,” she told me, and drew her hand through my curls. But Fred had disappeared ages ago; Fred never waited, he was off around the corner or away behind the church — I don’t know, he could vanish in an inkling, before I’d so much as had a suck of sugar candy. I was left standing there all on my own. It was as though the only thing that remained of him was a slim shadow on the sidewalk, a shadow that Bang the caretaker would have to sweep up with his push broom and carry off to the trash cans. Fred usually didn’t come home until after I’d gone to bed. Sometimes Boletta came in later still. She took her time finding the way between bathroom and bedroom, and the following day she’d have a headache and Mom would be testy and on her guard. “Have you been at the North Pole again?” she’d whisper, her mouth straight as a ruler. She said it like that,
Have you been at the North Pole again,
and I became equally perturbed each time she did. For I had a vision of Boletta struggling through ice and wind and cold, and perhaps not making it; and I didn’t understand what she wanted with the North Pole anyway — was she searching for something there? “Why does Boletta go to the North Pole?” I asked Fred that same evening. But Fred didn’t say anything. It began to snow one Friday in the middle of November. I lay and listened to the growing silence. Then it was suddenly broken. Mrs. Arnesen was playing the piano — but it was a new tune, and not only that, she played a whole series of pieces. It was like a complete concert, and afterward everyone around the yard opened their windows and applauded; even Bang the caretaker straightened his back, leaned on his snow shovel and clapped. And the following Sunday we saw Gotfred Arnesen going for a walk down Church Road with his wife; they were off to church and she wore a great shiny fur, which made all the heads turn (particularly those of the Fagerborg ladies). They shook their heads — amazed, suspicious and envious — and there was talk and plenty of it in private about that fur in the days that followed. A goodly number of men had to work out just what a fur like that would cost if one were to pay for it in installments over a couple of years. “What do you want for Christmas?” Dad asked. “A fur coat,” Mom answered. Dad got up and went toward the door, trying to clench the fist of his damaged hand. “I think our dear Arnesen must be in sore need of forgiveness when he goes to church and it’s eighteen below!” Mom wasn’t going to let that pass. “That was why his wife was wearing the fur,” she said. “Because it was cold!” “But it’s warm enough in church!” Dad protested. Mom sighed. “You’re just envious.” Dad roared with laughter. “Do you really think I’d march around in a wild animal with buttons like that?” Now it was Mom’s turn to laugh. “You’re envious of Arnesen, who can afford to give his wife gifts!” Dad thumped his damaged fist against the door. “At the cost of our insurance money!” He was gone for two days. Mom turned to Fred. He was sitting by the stove with his hands on his lap. “What do
you
want?” she inquired. But Fred said nothing. Mom asked a second time. And Fred maintained his silence. “If you don’t want anything, you don’t need to get anything,” Mom told him. “Let the boy be,” Boletta murmured, and went to the North Pole. Mom hid her face in her hands and cried. My stomach hurt. My throat burned. I put my hand on her back. It was as warm as the stove. “Could we read the letter?” I asked warily Mom nodded. “Go, Barnum.” I fetched the letter from the cabinet and sat on the sofa under the lamp. I read, slowly and carefully, for the words were heavy, even though I almost knew them by heart. And while I read Fred stared at me; and there was something in his expression, in the way he looked — a darkness that grew and grew in his eyes, his smile. It was just as if he had changed in the course of those sentences, so that I all but lost the place in my great-grandfather’s letter from Greenland.
It was decided that we should take back with us a musk ox, and on the same day we anchored we found a flock grazing on arctic willow, all but the only vegetation to be found. The captain and myself and five men went ashore to attempt to capture a calf There was indeed a calf in their midst, but it was such that we could not come into close proximity. The creatures saw us
—
there were fifteen or sixteen in all
—
and they gathered themselves into a tight circle with their young in the center and began snorting and pawing the ground like wild bulls. We were forced to return on board, our mission unfulfilled, to the great amusement of the others on the ship. However, two bull calves were later taken (of which the one was dead), but it was at the expense of the lives of twenty-two adult beasts, since two flocks had to be shot to obtain them.
All at once Fred laughed, and it was the first sound he’d emitted since the death of the Old One. Yet it was only when the class teacher phoned after Christmas that Mom realized Fred wasn’t just introverted and strange but that he’d actually stopped talking altogether. “I must insist that you attend a parents’ evening next Wednesday” the class teacher eventually said. Mom had to sit down. “Has he done something wrong?” she breathed. There was silence for a while at the other end. “Maybe you haven’t noticed then?” the teacher finally asked. “Noticed what?” “That your son hasn’t spoken a word for three months and fourteen days.” Mom hung up and went straight into the bedroom. “What is this nonsense!” she demanded. Fred was lying on his bed. He didn’t move. I was doing my homework. At least trying to do it. I’d gotten a ruler for Christmas with centimeters on one side and inches on the other. It wasn’t the same length when I turned it over. With this ruler I was drawing lines to resemble streets and crossroads, because the class was shortly to have a visit from a policeman who would give us instruction in traffic safety. “Now you’re to talk to me, Fred!” Mom shrieked. She shouted the words. Fred still didn’t answer. There was utter stillness. Mom sat down on the bed. Fred stared at the ceiling. “You can talk to me, Fred,” she whispered. That didn’t help either. Mom began crying; she shook him so violently that it actually forced him to get up. But then he did something strange. He put his arms around her and kissed her brow. Then he left. She just sat there, thunderstruck, feeling the spot in the middle of her forehead where Fred had kissed her. It almost looked as if she were trying to rub away a mark. Slowly she turned toward me. “Has he said anything to you, Barnum?” I shook my head. “You’re not telling fibs, Bar-num?” “No, Mom, I don’t tell lies.” She put her arms around me and felt heavy. “You couldn’t lie, could you, Barnum?” she said. “Now you said Barnum three times in a row,” I said. Mom gave a bit of a laugh, but not anything to write home about. Next day it was Dad’s turn. He sat in the living room waiting for Fred. “Come here,” he said. Fred went straight to our room. And I wondered if he hadn’t heard — perhaps that was what was wrong with him, that his ears had stopped working. A little later Dad stood at the door. “I hear you’ve lost your voice,” he said. Fred didn’t bother turning around. He just kept on staring at the ceiling. Dad went closer. “It’s best you find it before it’s gone for good,” he told him. And I saw in my mind’s eye Fred’s voice lying somewhere, in a gutter perhaps, or down a drain — calling out to him. But Dad refused to give up. “If you’re pretending to be skin-dead, you’re doing a bad job,” he told him. After he’d said that, there was silence for at least three minutes, until Dad cracked. “Speak to me!” he screamed, and stamped the floor so hard that the lines in my notebook wobbled and broke. “Let the boy be,” said Boletta. But no one would let Fred be. Everyone wanted to get him to talk. They didn’t manage to. Fred’s silence just grew outward — it infected us, as Mom’s silence had once driven Boletta and the Old One to distraction in the days when she was expecting Fred. Now he had inherited it. Now it was his. In the end it exceeded Mom’s. As Easter approached and Fred still hadn’t said a word, and not a sound had escaped his lips either at school, at home or in his sleep — he was sent to a specialist in muteness at the Royal Infirmary. There they attached wires to his head to measure the pressure in his brain. The muteness specialist speculated that Fred had probably received a blow to the head when the Old One was run over; perhaps he’d fallen or else been hit by the vehicle itself, something which could have resulted in bleeding that impacted on the part responsible for speech, thereby depriving him of the ability to speak. But in all the reports on the accident it had been concluded that Fred was not in the vicinity of the truck at the time the accident took place. And it was this that was so strange, that all of a sudden the Old One had been out in the middle of the street while Fred was still standing crying on the sidewalk. The specialist measured the pres- sure once more and affixed still more wires and electrodes. Fred lay on a wooden platform looking like a Martian. Boletta just sneered at all this science. “Fred was so frightened when the Old One died, he just lost his voice,” she declared. “It’s as simple as that. Hell talk again in the fullness of time.” But at least Freds muteness was given a name. The specialist described it as