The Half Brother: A Novel (94 page)

Tempelhof

It’s Peder who’s breathing down my neck. He it is who follows me into Tempelhof, this architectural structure fashioned by the Nazis; it’s still early morning and I’m suffused with a heavy calm. I’m going home. I’m going home to Fred, because Fred’s come back. I haven’t seen him for twenty-eight years and sixty days. But he’s possibly seen me. Perhaps he’s seen us the whole time. Peder takes my hand. He’s changed bookings, canceled meetings, paid bills, taken phone calls and apologized to the vast majority of those I’ve been in the vicinity of. “Sure you don’t want me to come with you?” he asks. “You’re more needed here,” I tell him. He bustles around in front of me so I’m forced to stop. “You knew he’d come back one day, didn’t you?” “What do you mean?” Peder looks away. “You knew he wasn’t dead, Barnum.” We stand there in the empty hall. There’s a smell of soap. The walls are swaying and about to fall. I have to hold onto something, I sit down on my suitcase. “Perhaps. Perhaps not,” I breathe. An armed guard suddenly rushes out from the toilet area, his gun in its black holster, a baton in his tightly fastened belt. He pushes his cap into place as he momentarily scans the place, and his eye lingers a little longer on me. His hands are dripping. Then he proceeds over to the luggage carousel, where someone’s forgotten a blue umbrella bearing the festival logo. There’s a smell of soap here. “Do you think it’s possible to be forgiven for something you haven’t done yet?” I ask. Peder bends down closer, even more worried. “You aren’t planning something crazy, are you?” I start laughing. “It’s no laughing matter,” he says. “I’m not laughing.” “Do you need some pills?” he whispers. I shake my head. “I’ve been thinking about the fact that nothing’s ever come of it all, Peder.” He doesn’t follow what I’m talking about. “Nothing’s ever come of what?” “Of everything we’ve worked on. Not one film. Not a single image. Not a solitary frame.” Peder shrugs. “That’s not how I see it” is all he says. I get up from my suitcase. “Do you think everything would be different if we’d have made it with our films?” Peder smiles. “At least we’d have been met in a limo.” “I mean it, Peder. Would anything have been different?” Peder turns to look at the screen. The Oslo flight’s on time. “It would appear the world’s done fine without us,” he says. “But aren’t we the world too?” “Yes, we are, Barnum. And isn’t it great that no one knows how good we really are?” “I’m not sure,” I murmur. Peder’s silent for a moment. The umbrella keeps going round and round on the carousel. “Would it be untimely to inquire about the script you mentioned last night?” he finally says. I have it in my suitcase. I open the script, cross out
The Night Man
and replace it with
The Night Men.
Peder slaps me on the back and can’t wait to look at it. “Good title, Barnum.” And Peder looks first at the final page. Peder’s best at reading numbers. He’s on the verge of being stunned into silence. “Four and a half hours?” he breathes. I shut my suitcase. “So?” Peder sighs. “That’s long, Barnum.” “And not so much as a comma’s to be moved,” I tell him. We go over to the check-in counter. My suitcase slides down a hole and disappears. I get my boarding pass. My flight’s called. And Peder, the tired optimist, smiles once more. “You’ll manage all right?” “I’ll manage.” “I’m going to buy something really special for Thomas,” he says. I close my eyes. “You do that, Peder.” We hug each other there in the Tempelhof hall, just as we’ve done so often before. We hug each other — Peder and Barnum, the fat one and the small one. And how could I know that that would be the last time we’d hold each other thus? I couldn’t, I don’t. “I’ll be back tomorrow,” Peder says. He gives me a quick kiss on the cheek. “And say hello from me to that damned brother of yours!” And Peder laughs, that laughter I know so well; he swipes the umbrella from the carousel and hurries out to where the taxis are, the script under his arm. But he didn’t come home the following day. There was an accident on the way to the Kempinski Hotel. I’m stopped in the security area. The armed guard takes me to one side into a cubicle. He draws a thin curtain. I have to empty all my pockets. I put my pen, my lighter, my comb, my keys and my mirror in a box. There’s still bleeping when he moves his electronic baton up and down. I take off my belt. That doesn’t help either. Finally he asks me to remove my shoes. I have to do as he says. He’s wearing rubber gloves now. He feels Inside my shoes. He turns them over and starts tapping the soles instead. Then he breaks off the high heels on both shoes. I turn away. Another guard comes and studies my mutilated footwear intently. It takes two armed men in uniform to declare my shoes safe — my trick shoes. I can get dressed again. They smile, tight-lipped. I’ve shrunk two inches. It doesn’t matter any more. Finally I’m allowed through, and I hear the laughter at my back. I go on board the bus that takes us out to the small plane. It’s raining. I run up the steep steps. From here the arrival hall looks like an oval temple with its pillars and arches — a dirty temple for travelers. It’s me they’re waiting for. Someone nods, and I act as if I don’t recognize them. I have the seat right at the back. I fasten my seatbelt and ask for a glass of water. The aircraft taxis out onto the runway. And as we take off from that airport in the heart of Berlin, as we rise between the houses, I can see the people inside, in the rooms of their apartments, starting their new day — pulling the curtains, putting the lights on, watering plants, sitting down to breakfast, drinking coffee, opening the paper, feeding their children. It’s just as in a movie, I think to myself — the stories of people from window to window — their movements and their beautiful, everyday routines. This is my movie, and in the last window I see an old couple sitting by the bedside kissing, before the plane breaks into the clouds and I get my glass of water.

Epilogue

It’s Boletta who’s waiting for me at Fornebu airport. We haven’t seen each other since that day I went off and left her on the top of Blåsen. She’s older now than the Old One was; it’s as if life is going backward in her. She’s growing downward and is smaller than I am — a hunched little wrinkle — and she smells like dried fruit. Her hand is still strong and steady when she takes my arm and guides me out to the taxis, where right away she jumps the line and incurs immediate wrath for doing so. There’s a light snow falling, flakes that melt before they’ve landed. We get into the backseat. Boletta lays her cheek against my shoulder. “You’re whole now, Bar-num,” she says. “What do you mean?” But she doesn’t answer me, and I think to myself as we drive up the gentle inclines around Gaustad that I don’t want to be whole — I don’t want that — and I clench Boletta’s hand so hard she rattles. The red-brick building appears between the bare, black trees — it resembles a castle, a fairytale castle with its towers and windows, not an asylum. “Why is he here?” I ask her. Boletta pays the driver. “It’s your mother who’s here,” she says softly. She turns abruptly, as if remembering now, too late. “Didn’t you have any luggage, Barnum?” I shake my head. “It was lost.” “Lost?” “It doesn’t matter,” I murmur. “It was just an old suitcase.” Then we go inside to find them. The first person I see in a kind of day room is a little boy in gray pants and a blue sweater. And it’s the first time he sees me. He’s sitting on a chair that’s too high for him. He doesn’t move. It’s Thomas. I stop in front of him. His eyes are fearful and curious at one and the same time, as if he’s watching everything and everyone. I don’t know him, but I recognize myself in him. I only know that I’d go through fire and flood for those dark and vulnerable eyes. Helplessly and clumsily I put my hand on his head, but the frightened boy just twists away, exactly as I’d have done. Vivian looks at us, and when I meet her gaze she suddenly blushes. She still has the ring on her finger. It’s as though we both have to take deep breaths, concentrate our thoughts, so as not to sink beneath the weight of this silence. Boletta lifts Thomas and holds him. “Freds with Vera,” Vivian murmurs. I go down a corridor. A nurse is waiting outside. He opens the door. Mom’s lying in bed. It looks as if she’s sleeping, but as soon as I come in she smiles. A thin man’s standing by the window, his back to us. Mom tries to say something, but her mouth is soundless and she starts crying instead. The thin, old man turns around. It’s my brother. His eyes are still. “Why have you come back?” I ask him. And I don’t know if it’s me or Mom Fred is looking at when he says, “To tell you all this.”