The Half Brother: A Novel (6 page)

Afterward everything is quiet. He lets her go. She could get up, but remains lying nonetheless. He puts his hand on her neck. It smells of urine and vomit. Then he runs. She can feel it, a soundless drumming against her face, her cheek. He crept up on her, and now he’s running away through the long attic corridors in Church Road, on May 8, 1945. The dove sits on the window frame. And Vera, our mother, just lies there like that, her cheek against the floor, her dress in her mouth and her hand full of blood, as a beam of sunlight slowly passes over her.

The Apartment

Boletta, Vera’s mother, was anything but religious — rather quite the opposite — she’d had enough of miracles. But now she opened the door onto the narrow balcony over Gørbitz Street, stood there and drank in that moment to the last drop; the church bells ringing together across town from Majorstuen, Aker and Fagerborg, even the bells of Sagene and Uranienborg audible. The wild, sweet clamor seemed drawn and carried by the light and the wind, and rose in one tremendous sound to deafen once and for all the sharp, white echo of the air-raid sirens. “Can you close the door! There’s a draft!” Boletta turned toward the living room, almost blinded. The dark inside had grown bleaker still. The brown furniture resembled immovable, heavy shadows, bolted fast by the hard ticking of the clock in the entrance hall. She had to shield her eyes for a few seconds. “Do you really think we want to get colds today? When we’ve been fine and healthy the whole of the war!” “There’s no need to shout, Mother.”

Boletta closed the door to the balcony and now she could see the Old One over by the bookcases. She was standing there in her ankle-length petticoat and red velvet slippers tearing out books that she proceeded to throw into the fireplace, talking all the while and evidently just to herself. The cacophony of church bells diminished to one single song. Carefully Boletta went closer. “What are you doing, Mother?”

But the Old One didn’t answer, or rather didn’t hear her, and for that reason didn’t reply. For the Old One was deaf in one ear and the other one didn’t function as it should. The damage had happened when Filipstad exploded in December 1943. She had been sitting in the dining room twisting the dials on the radio back and forth, the radio she had refused to give up on the grounds that she was a Danish citizen and considered it inconceivable not to listen to programs from Copenhagen. She maintained that the explosions came out of the loudspeaker in varying degrees of intensity, accompanied by an unauthorized jazz band from America, and this was how the anvil in her left ear was put out of action, and the stapes in the other pushed forward. Deep down, Boletta was sure that her mother’s ears were in perfect working order, but that she had decided it was her prerogative to hear just what she wanted to hear. Now she realized that it was the novels of Knut Hamsun that the Old One was tearing from the shelves and stuffing into the green stove. “What are you doing?” Boletta shrieked a second time, and grabbed her mother’s arm. “I’m finished with Hamsun!” “Hamsun? But you love Hamsun!” “I haven’t read him in five years. And he should have been out of this house a long time ago!” The Old One turned to her daughter. She waved
The Crops of the Field
in front of her nose. “Particularly after what he wrote in the paper!” “What did he write?”

The Old One laid
The Crops of the Field
in the stove too and fetched the afternoon edition of
Aftenposten
from the previous day. She banged her finger at the front page so hard it almost made a hole in the paper. “Now I’ll tell you word for word what that wretched creature wrote!
We, his close followers, now bow our heads at his death.”
The Old One looked up. “Could you imagine a worse time to write Hitler’s obituary? There shouldn’t have been an obituary for him in the first place. Better that we danced on his grave!”

She dropped the paper in the stove and attacked the shelves again with venomous rage. Her long gray hair waved about her; she swore mightily as she threw out each of Hamsun’s collected works. And I’d have given anything to see this sight — the Old One, our great granny, removing all trace of the deaf Nobel Prize-winner in our living room in Church Road on May 8, 1945. But suddenly she stopped, just as she was about to throw away the last part of the August trilogy,
Yet Life Survives,
and she remained standing with the first edition in her hand as she silently bent toward the bookcase and maneuvered out something else that had been hidden behind the traitor’s novels — an untouched bottle of Malaga from 1936. The Old One lifted the bottle carefully and for a second forgot Hamsun and all his works. Boletta came beside her to see what it was. “The thing I’ve been looking for everywhere,” the Old One sighed. “In the dirty laundry basket. In the fuse box. In the resevoir. And it’s here, for heaven’s sake, right behind the stiff covers of the August books!” She gave the bottle a quick kiss and turned back toward the bookshelves. “Thank you for your company Knut. Now we’re going our separate ways!”

For safety’s sake she took a peek behind Herman Bang and Johannes V. Jensen, just to see if there might be some bottles there too, but there weren’t, neither there nor behind the collected works of Ibsen. The Old One was already on her way toward the kitchen. Boletta stopped her. “Did you hide that in the bookcase?” “Me? If so I’d have found it an eternity ago and drunk it before Hitler invaded Poland! It must have been you who put it there.” Boletta leaned in against her mother’s working ear. “There aren’t other things you’ve hidden in there, are there?”

But the Old One heard nothing of this and instead began twisting the cork with her crooked and wrinkled fingers, and Boletta had to hold the bottle for her while the Old One twisted and pulled, and they stood there long enough laboring and panting. But all of a sudden the Old One let go of her hold and looked down at herself in horror, as though it was only now she realized she certainly wasn’t dressed properly She took the bottle from Boletta and was almost offended on her account. “One doesn’t drink Malaga from 1936 in one’s underclothes! But where on earth is Vera? I wanted my dress right away!”

Boletta spun around toward the oval clock that stood on the cabinet out in the entrance hall, the magic clock from the life insurance firm Bien where we always put our premium on the first Saturday each month. For that reason, for long enough, I believed that it was money that made time go. Boletta looked closer. It couldn’t be so late. It wasn’t possible. Vera should have been down with the clothes ages ago. The clock must be fast; perhaps, improbable though it seemed, it was because of the stresses of the last twenty-four hours that it had gained time; when the prisoners in Grini were released and General Rediess shut the door on himself on the second floor at Skaugum, put his gun as far into his mouth as he could, and fired. Boletta could just hear the beat of the second hand’s jagged wheel and the coins that still clinked in the drawer under the clock face.

She looked quietly at her own watch. The clock was showing the right time. “I’ll go and see what she’s doing.” Boletta turned and gave her mother a hard look. “Don’t you dare touch that bottle before we come back down.” The Old One just smiled. “I can’t wait to see King Haakon again. When do you suppose he’ll come?” Boletta bent toward the other ear. “Don’t even think about opening it! Not before Vera and I have come down!” The Old One kissed her daughter on the cheek and shivered. “I honestly think I’ll put the fire on for a bit. The war has made the walls cold.”

Boletta sighed, threw a shawl over her shoulders, hurried through the apartment and began to climb the steep staircase.

The Dove

The door into the loft is open. It’s so still. Boletta can hear neither voices nor music from the town and the streets, nor even the wind that always makes the walls tremble, as if the whole block is shifting just a little each time it gusts. “Vera?” she calls. But no one answers. She goes along the corridor, past all the storerooms, drawing the shawls tighter around her. It’s drafty, but the wind is soundless. Bright dust shimmers down from the high beams under the roof. “Vera?” she calls again.

Why isn’t she answering? Perhaps she’s sneaked off to Majorstuen. Impossible. Boletta laughs. As if Vera would sneak off! She’s probably just far away in dreamland again. And today of all days there’s no law against dreaming. Today one can forget and tomorrow remember exactly what one wants. Today one can do anything. Suddenly Boletta freezes. A stroller full of logs for the fire lies tipped over in front of her.

She stops. “Vera?” Even the doves aren’t cooing. The quiet is twice as intense. The door to our drying loft is still trembling in its frame. And then she does hear a sound — a constant chafing sound, a buzzing, like a swarm of insects that is coming closer all the time but that is impossible to see. It’s this sound that she’ll never be able to forget. Boletta shoves the stroller to one side and runs the last part of the way to stop out of breath in the doorway. That’s how she finds her own daughter. Vera is squatting beside the clothes basket. In her lap she’s holding the newly washed dress, and she strokes it, over and over again, humming softly to herself all the time, as if some distorted tune has stuck fast inside her. Slowly Boletta goes over to her. Vera doesn’t look up. She stares at her own hands as they smooth the thin material, faster and ever faster. “What is it, Vera?”

Vera just turns away, rubs her fingers over the blue dress. Boletta kneels in front of her daughter and presses her hand in Vera’s lap to make her stop what she’s doing. She was almost becoming annoyed and felt like shaking Vera, but this day of all days was not fit for being cross or for scolding. Instead she tries to laugh. “The Old One has found a bottle of Malaga behind all the Hamsuns, but she won’t drink it before she’s wearing her dress. Are you coming?” Vera turns slowly toward her mother and smiles. Her lips and whole face are twisted, her left cheek is all swollen. She has a cut on her temple, under her hair. But it’s her eyes that are worst. They are huge and clear, and they focus on nothing and nowhere.

Boletta almost screams. “My dearest love. What on earth has happened?” Vera just hums. She tilts her head to one side and keeps humming. “Have you fallen? Did you fall on the stairs? My love, say something, Vera!” Vera closes her eyes and smiles. “Remember to let the dove out,” she says. Then Boletta realizes that the new dress is damp and sticky. She lifts her hand. Her fingers are dark with blood. “The dove? Which dove?”

But Vera makes no answer. Vera, our mother, has withdrawn into silence and utters not another word for eight months and thirteen days.
Remember to let the dove out,
those are the last words she speaks. Boletta gazes up as the blood drips from her hand. The sun has long gone from the attic window. Instead shadow, like a pillar of dark dust, falls jagged through the room. And on the clothesline right above them the gray bird sits motionless.

Boletta shakes her hand. “Good Lord! What have you done with all this blood!” Vera leans against her mother, who lifts her carefully and carries her through the corridor and down the stairs. Sheer terror has made Boletta, small soul that she is, strong and frantic. One of them is crying, or perhaps they both are, and Vera will not let go of the blood-drenched dress. The clothespins spill from her apron pocket with every step that her mother takes, and they lie strewn behind them. But it doesn’t bother Boletta; she can pick them up again when she goes to fetch the clothes basket, which is still in the drying loft. And I remember the bird we found inside the storeroom one night, Fred and I; a hard and dried-up dove, like a mummy with feathers, that time when Fred had bought himself a coffin and wanted to practice dying. But all that’s still far away.