The Half Brother: A Novel (8 page)

And they tried to comfort themselves with this thought, that it was Vera’s menstrual blood that had driven itself through her with extraordinary force on that extraordinary day — May 8, 1945 — and taken her feet from her up in the drying loft.

“Ill call the doctor all the same,” Boletta whispered. “He’s bound to be busy,” the Old One insisted as she had before, her voice as low as her daughter’s. She crossed herself three times, very quickly Boletta let her mother’s hair drop against her hunched back and came around to face her. “What was that you did just then?” “What? What are you talking about?” “You know exactly what I’m talking about. Don’t make such a face.” “I’m tired,” the Old One announced sulkily and tried to get up. Boletta stopped her. “You crossed yourself. I saw you.” The Old One freed her arm. “Yes, yes. So I crossed myself! An old witch who crosses herself! Is it of such importance?” “I thought you’d given up on God and wouldn’t talk to Him again. No?” The Old One crossed herself again. “It’s a long while since God and I stopped being on speaking terms. But now and again I let Him know I’m there. So that He won’t feel lonely. And now I’m tired!”

The Old One went into the dining room and slept there on the divan, while Boletta lay down with Vera, her arm around her, just as they’d lain many times together during those last five years. Sometimes all three of them had slept together, after they came up from the cellar in the wake of air-raid sirens and explosions. And then it might be that the Old One would read from Wilhelm’s letter, as they lay together waiting for night and sleep and peace, and Vera would always cry when the Old One neared the end, that last beautiful sentence that Wilhelm, Boletta’s father, had written before he disappeared in the land between ice and snow.

Boletta lay awake a long time. She thought of the Old One, who’d crossed herself, who’d found it right to converse with God with finger language that evening. Boletta trembled, she shook so violently she had to raise both arms so as not to waken Vera. Was Boletta as disturbed by the Old One’s sudden piety as Vera had been when Rakel gave her the ring? Oh, when we consider all we do that backfires — our actions that are turned on their heads — the comforting that is transformed into pain, the rewarding that becomes punishment, the prayer that changes to cursing. Still laughter and shouting echo from the streets. Peace. Terboven had dropped the corpse of Rediess into the bunkers at Skaugum and ordered the guard to light the fuse of the enormous explosives container. It was said that for a second Terboven was filled with regret, not for his deeds but for this final action — the fuse that glistened along the stone floor. He attempted to stop the fuse’s burning but didn’t succeed (he was too drunk), and no one noticed the massive explosion that made the birds cloud upward from the surrounding woods. The war was over. For the first time Boletta felt afraid.

She must have slept nonetheless but had no memory of doing so. When she awoke, suddenly and exhausted, Vera wasn’t there. The space beside her in the bed was empty. It was already after seven. Boletta had to go to work. It was just an ordinary Wednesday, a Wednesday in May. Someone was talking in the dining room. Quickly she got herself there. The Old One had gone to sleep with the radio on.
This is the Norwegian Broadcasting Service. The genuine, bona fide broadcasting service.
Boletta turned it off, and through the stillness that swam back she could hear something else, the same humming, cooing, except that it was even deeper now, almost like gurgling. The sound was coming from the bathroom, and it chilled Boletta to the marrow. She woke the Old One up and brought her out with her into the hallway. The bathroom door was locked. Vera was in there.

Boletta knocked. “Vera? Would you open the door, Vera?” The humming died away, almost with a sigh. Everything was silent. But now and again they heard water dripping and something rubbing, the same sound Boletta had heard up in the drying loft, only it was stronger now, like a shoe on a doormat. “Are you coming, Vera? What is it you’re doing?” The Old One bent down and looked through the keyhole. She felt a slight blowing, a draft against her eye. “I can’t see anything. The key’s in the lock.” All at once Boletta rattled the door handle and shouted, “Vera! Open this door! Stop this nonsense at once! Are you listening? Open this door!” The Old One had to intervene and calm her down. “Pull yourself together and don’t bring down the whole building!” Boletta let go of the door handle and, forcing herself not to shout, she whispered behind her fingers, “What are we to do?” “Stop shouting, first of all. There’s nothing I like less.” Boletta gave a laugh. “Oh, really. Are you hearing so well that it’s a nuisance now?” “That’s none of your business.” “Has the world healed both your ears?” But the Old One had nothing to say to that. Instead she produced a hairpin and stuck it in the keyhole, and twisted and turned it until they heard the big key fall onto the floor inside. At once Boletta tried to push open the door, but it was no less locked than it had been. The Old One looked through the keyhole again. “Can you see anything now?” The Old One whispered: “I think she’s sitting in the bath. I can see one arm.” Now Boletta herself bent down to have a look through the keyhole. She felt a cold wind against her eye, and always, for as long as I can remember, it was this she blamed, the times when that one eye became red and swollen and started running, as though that eye, alone in her face, was weeping. Boletta saw it too; Vera’s arm, her bare arm over the side of the bath, and her hand, the thin fingers and Rakel’s heavy ring. “Well get the caretaker! He can break it open!” Boletta was already on her way to the kitchen, but the Old One managed to stop her and hold her back. “He’s probably up to the eyes with other things right now,” she told her. “But someone has to get that door open!” “Would you really want that nosy fool to see her like that in there? Naked!” Boletta was ciying now. “But what are we to do?” “Talk to her. Talk to your daughter!” Boletta took a deep breath and went back to the bathroom door. “Vera? Will you be finished soon?” But she wouldn’t answer. And all at once Boletta became aware of the clock in the hall and the seconds that were ticking away; it was as if the shadow of the clock face itself fell over her. “I’ve to go to work, Vera! I have to get ready or I’ll be late!” The Old One caught her arm. “Work? Today?” “Even though the war’s over, don’t you imagine people phone each other?” “No, in all honesty, I think they’ll neither think of it nor have the time.” Boletta shoved the Old One to one side. “Vera, love. Do you know what I thought we could do tomorrow? When I’m off? We could go to the hairdresser’s in Adamstuen.” Now it was the Old One who shoved Boletta out of the way. “The hairdressers in Adamstuen! What rubbish!” “Be quiet!” “Do you really think the hairdresser’s will have the time to be open? Not a chance.” “It was just something to say!” “Just something to say! You talked about nothing but hairdressers all yesterday!” “I did not.” “You said my hair was like a tramp’s. I won’t forget that!” “I said you looked like an old witch!”

Then Vera began humming again inside, so low and softly it was all but impossible to hear her. Boletta went to pieces completely and had to be supported by her mother. “I’m so afraid,” she whispered. “Just so long as she doesn’t harm herself.” “Harm herself? What are you talking about?” “I don’t know what I’m saying any more!” “No, that goes for all of us.” The Old One turned to face the door and knocked on it hard, three times. “It’s my turn now, Vera. And if I don’t get in right away there’s going to be an accident!” But Vera neither answered nor opened the door. She just went on humming and humming. Three more times the Old One knocked on the door as hard as before. “You don’t want your poor grandmother to have to sit on the sink, do you?” They listened, the two of them, they stood with their faces close together, so close they were aware of the other’s breath, and suddenly everything fell silent inside once more. Vera stopped humming and there was no sound of water either. It was then the Old One went at the door at full tilt. There wasn’t much “tilt” to draw on, but she ran at the door with her shoulder nonetheless. It did no good, and so she tried again, her neck bent, her shoulders lifted, her head down. She was like a bull; the Old One became like a bull — it was as though an inexorable power rose within her, the muscles of grief, and she threw herself against the door so it broke open with a terrific crash. She all but pitched over onto the floor, but Boletta caught her, and together they stood there on the threshold beholding that which made them utterly terrified, terrified and yet at the same time relieved and thankful, for Vera was alive.

She’s sitting in the bath, one arm hanging over its curved edge, and in the water, the dark water, a brush is floating — the floor brush from the kitchen. And Vera doesn’t notice them, or else she doesn’t want to look at them; she stares away somewhere else, just as she did up in the drying loft, and her eyes are far too large for her, they’re clear and almost black. The skin on her breasts, her shoulders, her throat, her face — is discolored and streaked, as if she has tried to wash it away to scour it from her body. And that thin body is trembling.

Boletta knelt beside the bath. “My dear, beloved Vera, what have you done?” Water was trickling over the edge of the bath, gray and tepid. Vera made no answer. “It’s over now, Vera. Its over. There’s nothing to be afraid of any more.” The Old One sat down on the laundry basket in the corner; she sighed and massaged her shoulder. Boletta gently caressed her daughter’s arm. “Rakel will come home soon, that’s for sure. You don’t want to be ill then, do you? You’ll get pneumonia lying here.” The Old One gave an even deeper sigh. “Take out the plug,” she said simply. “That’s enough talk.” Vera drew back her arm. Boletta tried to keep hold of it, but it was far too thin and slippery, and it just slid from her fingers. “Say something!” Boletta shouted. “Say something to me!”

But Vera remained cocooned in her muteness, and the only thing she could do was hum. Her lips were almost blue — they quivered as she kept cooing. The Old One got up and raised her hands toward the ceiling and folded them there, like a clenched fist above her head. “Pull out the damned plug, for God’s sake! Or do I have to do it myself?” Boletta put her hand into the water. And then Vera hit her. She hit her smack in the face with the floor brush, and Boletta screamed so shrilly Vera had to cover her ears. And people in Church Road and Jacob Aall Street, those who have lived long enough to remember those days, say that they can never forget that scream, which was talked about for years. It loosened the plaster, shook chandeliers and caused whole slates to fall — indeed it almost made some believe that the war had started up again. It wasn’t that the blow itself hurt so greatly; Boletta screamed more out of sheer terror, for she was sure that now they had lost the plot completely, that finally the war had robbed them of whatever sanity they’d ever had. For now Vera was hitting her own mother, she was sitting with a floor brush in the bath hitting her own mother in the face. The Old One had to calm Boletta forcefully, and when finally she’d managed to do so and the two of them were kneeling breathless together on the stone tiles, Vera began scrubbing her neck. She scrubbed at it with the hard, stiff brush, as if there was some speck there on her neck that she hadn’t managed to get rid of. “I can’t take any more,” Boletta sobbed.

And right then the kitchen doorbell rang. For a second, the briefest moment, Vera stopped scrubbing herself. Perhaps she thought it was Rakel, Rakel finally home and ringing the kitchen doorbell because she wanted Vera to come out and join her. Perhaps she did believe that, in the fleeting blink of an eye between two seconds, but then she continued scouring, even harder; she bent her head and her neck vertebrae stood out like a taut bow of glowing coals. “Who can that be?” Boletta hissed. The Old One leaned against the side of the bath and let her hand trail in the water; five twisted and wrinkled fingers in that dark water, carefully trailing around Vera’s body. “There, there, child. You’re clean enough now.” The doorbell rang again. The Old One pulled her hand out of the water. “Who the devil? Can’t we be left in peace! Don’t you think so, Vera?” And Vera turned toward them; it almost looked as if she wanted to give in, to give herself up to Boletta and the Old One, but she remained in her cave of silence nonetheless. The Old One plunged her arm into the water again and pulled out the plug. “Now I’m going to throw someone down the steps,” she said.

Gradually the water began to sink around Vera. Boletta put a towel over her shoulders without her protesting. The Old One struggled out to the kitchen and opened the door. Of course it was none other than Bang, the caretaker for the building who had his own subsidized apartment in the very bottom corner by the garbage sheds. It was Bang — protector of the flowerbeds, guardian of the laundry, terror of tomcats, and commander of law and order. He was forty-two, a bachelor, a former triple jump champion, and he was hopeless when it came to conflict. He was standing there in all his finery — a wide, blue jacket hanging from his gangly frame, pants that were too short for him and with saliva stains on the worn, thin knees. From his top buttonhole there waved a bow composed of the national colors of Norway — it was so enormous it almost made him topple forward. Bang’s face was shining with sweat; it was as though he had rushed up all the steps to the loft and down again and around the yard and back, or perhaps he had just rubbed spit on his forehead too. Inquisitiveness was glowing in his eyes, and he smiled with a full set of teeth as he raised his hat and bowed. “So, it’s the handyman,” the Old One said. Bang’s mouth puckered. “Has something happened?” he asked. Behind him, on the next landing, stood the neighbors — the chatty housewives from their kitchen sinks. They were jostling each other to see better — the Old One still in her petticoat — and the time already quarter past eight on May 9. She’s standing there in nothing but her petticoat and with her hair like a gray avalanche down her hunched shoulders, this strange creature from Denmark who talks pretty much as she looks and whom they’ve never quite got the measure of, even though she’s almost the oldest resident in the place, living in this apartment on the corner of Church Road and Gørbitz Street, where to that day no man had been in residence. “Happened?” the Old One repeated. “What makes you think something happened?” The caretaker leaned against the door frame. “I heard a scream. Everyone here heard a scream.” The neighbors nodded and took a step forward; yes, they had heard it too, an appalling scream. The Old One smiled. “It was only me — I burned myself on the stove.” And she wanted to shut the door on them now, but Bang remained standing there with one shoe a little too far forward. He looked hard at her wet arm. “Are you quite certain that everything’s all right?” “I am completely certain, and thank you so very much for your concern.” Bang wasn’t about to give up so easily. “And how’s Vera, by the way? Some of the boys said that she wasn’t well.” “What did you say?” The caretaker smiled again. “They said you’d said so. That Vera wasn’t well.” The Old One looked down at his shoe; it was misshapen and the lace didn’t reach through all the holes. “If you don’t move your foot right now, you will be the next one to scream in this neighborhood.” Bang took a hurried step backward, but his eyes remained fixed on her all the while. “I only wanted to ask, ma’am. These are troubled times.” “I’m aware of that. But house-to-house searches are, I believe, a thing of the past now?”