The Half Brother: A Novel (5 page)

Then it was as if he awoke and had suddenly aged. A great furrow I’d never noticed before slanted down from his left eye, in the midst of lines that had long been there, and that furrow created an imbalance in his face that threatened to make his head topple right over. Peder and I were beginning to resemble one another. “Vivian called, by the way,” he said. “I think she’s worried about Thomas.” “Vivian has always been worried.” Peder shook his head sorrowfully. “I think we should buy something nice for Thomas.” I tried to smile. I failed miserably. “Of course we should,” I laughed. “Remember what the big boys said? It’s the family that counts now.” Peder sank into his glass and was taciturn for a time. “Everyone thinks you’re a bastard,” he breathed at last. I heard him saying the words, but they didn’t get through to me. “Everyone?” I asked. Now he was looking at me. “I can’t think of anyone right at this minute who doesn’t think so,” he said. “Thomas, too?” Peder turned away. “Thomas is such a quiet boy, Barnum. I don’t know what he understands.” I lit a cigarette. My mouth was sore. I lay my hand over Peder’s fingers. “Maybe we can buy him something together? Something really special. How about that?” “Of course,” Peder said.

Later on we dragged ourselves over to the festival bar. It was there the important players hung out. Peder maintained that we had to be visible. That was how he put it. We had to be on course, in the groove, at the right place and at the right time. We ate greasy sausages to keep our balance. We drank X-ray fluid with ice. We became visible. There was plenty of talk concerning Sigrid Undset, and whether any male director was capable of making Kristin Lavransdatter’s film. This was the elite. I didn’t mix — apart from drinks, and I thought about Thomas. I was a bastard. I was going to buy a massive present for him; I’d buy a whole wall he could write on and a crane from Berlin. I’d take with me God’s Erector set, so that Thomas, Vivian’s son, could screw the skies back together again. The voices were coming from all around now. I drank myself into oblivion. If I closed my eyes all the sounds were swallowed, as if my optic nerve was somehow attached to the labyrinth of my ear, but it had been a long time since I believed the world disappeared so tantalizingly easily, after nothing more than the closing of my eyes. Ideally I would have wished for the disappearance of both, the sounds and the world from which they rose. But when I opened my eyes the critic from the sauna was approaching, my ill omen. Already she’d acquired the festival look — that of a boozy Cyclops. Of course it was Peder whose back she now stroked. “Have you anything to write home about then, boys? Other than Barnum treats Cliff to Coke in the sauna?” Peder moved his head horizontally, as if the space was dangerously cramped beneath the ceiling. “Too early to tell,” he said. “But there’s no smoke without fire. You can write that Barnum and Miil are in business.” The Elk was almost suffocating him with her dress. I was on the point of ordering snorkels. “Are you traveling on the Kristin train? Is Barnum going to translate the script from Swedish?” Peder pushed away her hand. “If Kristin Lavransdatter’s going to be champagne,” he said, “then well be making heavy water.” The Elk snickered and bent backward to catch the last drops in her brandy glass. “Tell me something else, boys. We’ve had enough tired metaphors.” “Then imagine
The Elk
meets
The Sunset,”
I said. She turned slowly toward me and acted as if she was only now realizing that I had been standing beside her all along. Of course that wasn’t the case. She’d seen me the whole time. She gave a slow grimace. “We’ll give you the nod when the time comes,” Peder said quickly. “An exclusive.” But she just kept looking at me. “It’s a date then. Say hi to Cliff from me, Barnum.” Suddenly, she leaned down close to my ear. “To hell with you.”

And with that she vanished into the thick fog in the direction of the toilets. Peder began to tug at my jacket. “Did she say Cliff in the sauna? Cliff and Barnum in the sauna?” “Saunas are mixed here in Germany, Peder. Do you think it has something to do with the war?” “What are you talking about? Were you in the sauna with Cliff?” “The Elk was there first. It’s the only time I’ve ever seen her naked.” “I’d prefer to avoid hearing this, Barnum.” “She was like an overripe pear.” “What was it she muttered to you?” “Just my old saying. To hell with you.” Peder rolled his eyes and slumped over once more. “Don’t tempt her to write more crap about you, Barnum. That’s the last thing you need.”

When on rare occasions Peder got drunk, all of him started sloping downward — his hair, his wrinkles, his mouth, his fingers and his shoulders. The alcohol hung like a lead weight in his body. All of him slipped toward his own shoes. I could have said to him that we were getting old now, two curious companions who had shared everything in life, and who were now left with only half of the best of it. And with a smile, I could have stroked a finger carefully along the deepest furrow in his face.

“The last thing I need,” I told him, “is for you to tell me what the last thing I need is.”

“The last thing we need is a drink,” said Peder.

He stretched one arm into the air but it collapsed amid ashtrays, used napkins and bottles. Somebody sang in Norwegian at a table where mercifully there wasn’t room for more. The credits would soon be rolling. The last drinks appeared. Peder hoisted his glass with both hands. “Here’s to you, Barnum. Basically we don’t really have much more to do here in Berlin, eh? Except for buying a gift for Thomas. Or maybe you’ve forgotten that by now, too?” I looked down and suddenly remembered what I had in my suitcase at the hotel. “I have a script with me,” I said. Peder quietly put down his drink. “And you tell me that now? That you have a goddamn script with you?” “Aren’t you pleased, Peder?” “Pleased? Hell, give me something, Barnum. A hint of some kind. A title.”
“The Night Man,”
I told him.
“The Night Man”
Peder said and smiled. “Do you have to say everything twice?” “What’s it about? Pitch me, Barnum!” I had to smile. That was the way we were talking now. Pitch me. Fill me in. Give me something. “My family,” I told him. “What else?” Peder gripped his head with both hands and shook it. “Why didn’t you say something at the meeting? Why the hell didn’t you take the script with you to the meeting!” “Because you woke me up, Peder.” He let go of his head and it slipped onto his shoulders. “I woke you?” “Yes, Peder. You wake me and hang up and there are messages for me everywhere. I barely get any peace in the sauna, Peder. I hate it. And you know that.” “I know, Barnum.” “I hate being nagged. I’ve been bossed around and nagged all my life. Everyone’s bossed me. I’m basically fed up with it, Peder.” His eyes had become empty and expressionless. “Are you finished now, Barnum?” “Don’t nag,” I said. Peder came closer and tried to straighten up. He almost held my hand. “It’s not me who’s been calling. And I haven’t left any messages for you.”

And in the moment he said that I became clear-headed and was frozen to ice; everything around me trembled, horrible and close. Everything I had put off was happening now. I left. Peder tried to make me stay He failed. I went out into the Berlin night. It was snowing; a glimmer between the lights and the dark. I heard the animals screeching from the zoo. I walked through the ruins and past the restaurants that had already closed, back to the Kempinski Hotel, where the same limousines stood filed like extended hearses in a hopeless line. And the white-haired old porter opened the heavy door and doffed his hat and smiled indulgently; I took the elevator up to my room, opened the door and saw that the maid had been in to make up the room — and I saw too the telephone’s red light; I tore off the receiver but heard only a foreign dial tone. And then I noticed the envelope, the one I’d folded and put in the pocket of my robe — it lay on the desk beside a bowl of fruit and a bottle of red wine there courtesy of the festival. I dropped the receiver and went over to it. I opened the envelope and pulled out a sheet of paper. I sat down on the bed. It was a fax, and at the top I could read where it had come from: Gaustad Hospital, Department of Psychiatry — that morning at 7:41. The writing was my mother’s; just two sloping lines of trembling letters.
Dear Barnum. You won’t believe it. Fred has come hack. Come home as fast as you can. Mother.

I read the two lines one more time and then slowly got up, almost calmly; my hands as they lifted the paper were quite still, yes, my hands were still, and I glanced over my shoulder, quickly, just as I always do, as if I imagined someone was standing there, in the shadow by the door, watching me.

THE WOMEN

The Drying Loft

It is Thursday, May 8, 1945, and Vera, our mother, is standing deep inside the drying loft in Church Road, unpegging the clothes that have become dry and soft up there in the course of the night. There are three pairs of woolen socks that can be put away for good now, two green bathing suits with buttons and neck straps that haven’t been used yet, three bras, a white handkerchief, and last but not least the three thin dresses and pale rayon tops that have lain so long in the bedroom closet that they have almost faded in the dark. Vera hasn’t dared hang the clothes out in the yard; so much has happened in the course of those days and years, why shouldn’t someone steal their clothes too, even now at the last moment? And she hurries, she’s impatient and can hardly be finished quickly enough, because she’s going out to celebrate the peace, the victory; every bit of it she’ll celebrate, of life and of spring, together with Boletta and the Old One, and perhaps Rakel will be back home too, now that it’s all over. And she laughs quickly as she stretches up to the slack clotheslines, which feel rough against her fingers and which can easily sting if she isn’t careful. It’s Vera, our mother, who stands thus, alone in the drying loft; she laughs and drops the wooden clothspins down into the wide pocket of her apron, and carefully places item after item in the woven basket beside her. She is warm and she is thinking of nothing; she’s just full to the brim with a great and curious joy, like nothing she has ever known before. Because she feels new now. There has been war for five years and in the summer she’ll be twenty, and it’s now, right now, that her life is beginning, if only she could get these clothes down. And she wonders if she should leave the woolen socks up, but decides not to, for it isn’t right to be hanging clothes to dry on such a day, not even high up in the drying loft. Vera has to rest a moment, straighten her bent back, and lift her head to breathe in the thrilling scent of the clean clothes, the three dresses. She laughs again. She blows the hair from her forehead. In the corner under the coal shaft there sits a gray dove cooing. She can just hear shouting and music from the streets. Vera stretches up to the clothesline to take down the final piece, her own blue dress, which she hasn’t yet had the chance to wear, and at that moment, as she unfastens one of the wooden pegs and holds up the garment with her other hand so that it won’t fall onto the dusty floor, she hears footsteps behind her. Slowly they come closer, and for a moment Vera imagines it’s Rakel who’s come back and that she’s run through all the corridors to meet her, but she knows it’s probably just Boletta who has lost patience and who has come to help her finish, for there’s no time to lose — it’s peace at last and the war is over. And Vera is about to say something to her mother —
Oh yes, there’s only this one dress to go, don’t you see how fine it is?
— or perhaps she’ll just laugh, laugh with sheer delight, and afterward they can carry the clothes basket down all the steps together. But then she realizes it’s not her mother, nor is it Rakel, for these steps have another rhythm, another weight, the floorboards give in the wake of their passing, and the dove in the corner suddenly stops cooing. These are the steps of war that keep going, and before Vera can turn around someone has gripped her and held her tightly, and a dry hand has been pressed over her face and she cannot even scream. She senses the harsh stench of unwashed skin, the raw stink of a strange man’s mouth, a tongue that rasps her neck. She tries to bite, her teeth sink into the rough skin, but he doesn’t let go of his hold. She can’t breathe. He lifts her and she kicks for all she’s worth; one of her shoes falls off and he forces her down onto her knees and pushes her forward. She notices that the dress is hanging at an angle on the line by the one clothespin and she tears it down with her in her fall. He takes his hand away from her mouth and she can breathe, yet now that she’s able to scream she doesn’t all the same. She sees his hands tearing up her skirt, and it’s only this that she sees of him — his hands — one of them missing a finger, and she plunges her nails into this hand, but even then he doesn’t make a sound. Nine fingers, that’s all he is. He forces her face to the floor and her cheek is chafed by the rough planks. The light is distorted now and the clothes basket has toppled over; the dove is preening itself. She feels the man’s hands around her hips, nine fingers that scrape against her skin, and he tears her open, he pulls her apart. She doesn’t hear him; she shoves the dress into her mouth, chews the thin material over and over, and the sun in the loft window shifts with a shudder. He presses himself through her and in the same moment the church bells begin ringing, all the church bells in town ring out at the same time. And the dove suddenly takes off from the corner under the coal shaft and flaps wildly about them; she can feel the wings brushing against her, and now it’s all too late. She still isn’t twenty, and in the end it’s he who screams.