To Siberia (20 page)

But it was too much in the end. It was the third week of three double shifts at a stretch. I knew I was tired, but I did not feel it. What I felt was a sensation around my eyes as if the skin was cardboard, and I heard a buzzing that irritated me, and I thought it came from bad telephone lines, but when I took off my earphones it did not go away. The voices I heard came from the bottom of tin buckets, and even though I understood what everyone said and answered all the questions correctly and connected the right wire to the right line, I had forgotten everything the next moment. A light came on again, I plugged in, and a blurred voice said:

“Can I speak to my wife?”

“Does she work here?”

“Are you suggesting
my
wife works at the telephone exchange?”

“Well, I don’t know, do I, it was you who asked for your wife.”

“Tell me something, young lady, are you being impertinent?”

He’d certainly had a few, that was obvious, and it had not done his temper any good.

“No, not at all.”

“That’s good. I can hear you are from North Jutland. I have had a lot of unpleasant experiences of North Jutlanders, I can tell you. So now you will just set up a conversation for me with my wife without further ado.”

He speaks slowly and
very
clearly as drunk men do when they want to show they are not drunk, and I felt I wanted to get home, that I had no more to give.

“As to where I come from that’s nothing to do with you, and as to your wife I haven’t the slightest idea who she is or where she might be, so it will be pretty difficult to connect you. If you had helped me along a little it would have been fine.”

“Tell me one thing, young lady, don’t you know who my wife
is
?”

“It’s a pity to have to admit it, but I don’t.”

“And you don’t know who
I
am either?”

“Haven’t a clue. But you’ve obviously had a couple of schnapps too many, so now I think you should go and lie down. Take a big glass of water and two aspirins on your way to bed. That’s my advice. Good-bye.”

I disconnected him, and that was that. It was five to eleven, so I shut down my position and went home to sleep like a stone until far into the next day when I was due on late shift. I ate my lunch standing at the counter still asleep and cycled the whole way to the exchange with my body full of dreams, and in the corridor I met Luise on her way out from early duty. She looked at me with big eyes.

“You’re to go to the duty manager at once. They’re completely hysterical in there.”

“What’s it about?” I said, and she threw out her arms.

“I would have thought
you
knew that, but whatever it’s about, it’s something outrageous.”

I went in through the switchboards looking at the ceiling, the voices dropped and there was silence in the big hall, the only thing I heard was my own footsteps on the floor. My shoes were new and rather expensive, and now I had no more money for the rest of the month. At the duty manager’s office on the other side I looked in through the glass door, and saw her standing there stiffly behind the desk with two stripes on her sleeves, and out on the floor stood a man in a gray coat and one in a gray suit. That was the director, I knew, for he always greeted people with his whole body and smiled with glossy eyes at every female under twenty-five.

I knocked and went in, closing the door behind me.

What they said was that the drunk man who wanted to talk to his wife the night before was the King. The King of Denmark. They did
not
say he had been drunk. I had been insolent to the King of Denmark, and since there was still a week left of my probationary period of six months, I was dismissed as of today. They didn’t ask me for my version, and I didn’t ask them to listen to it either, because if I have to ask for something, I no longer want it.

“How did they know it was you?” said Luise.

“I’m the only North Jutlander in the whole telephone exchange. The King has had nothing but bad experiences of people from that part of the country.”

I borrowed some money from Luise and traveled to Stockholm to become an apprentice glassblower with the Danish immigrant Peter Aaen in the working-class district of Søder, and I tell all this to the man in the alcove nearest the window on to Uelandsgate, that I was kicked out of the central telephone exchange in Copenhagen because I had been impertinent to the King of Denmark.

He grows thoughtful. No one in his family has ever been fired from a job. They have turned up faithfully at the factory every single morning at six or seven o’clock, his father, his brothers, year in and year out, and he says he has only stayed away from work one single time when he had to go to hospital with a back he had ruined ski jumping.

“It’s not healed yet,” he says. “When it gets too bad I have to wear a corset. As tight as hell.”

And they have a different way of thinking about the King here than we have in Denmark. No one offends the King of Norway and makes jokes of it next day even though the King is Danish, and I didn’t tell it to make a joke either. But it’s given him something to ponder as he takes the bus in from Waldemar Thranesgate instead of relaying the latest news from the boxing ring or the old boys’ team at Vålerenga where he still plays soccer twice a week.

The café shuts early on Saturday. It is a restaurant, not a place where you can sit over beer after beer until late at night and talk till you’re thick in the head.

“Off you go, then,” says Aunt Kari. “It’s Saturday. I have to make up the till and close up. You’re going into town, I expect?”

It’s not called town here on Kiellands Square though it is part of Oslo. The town is the center.

“I don’t know.”

“Oh, surely,” she says, but I stand there while she does the books and puts the money from the till into a little leather bag.

“I don’t know,” I mumble again, feeling as heavy as the mattresses I have seen out in the rain in autumn, impossible to budge, heavy as a dead animal. I rub my eyes, and she walks around putting out the lights, and I go reluctantly out of the door and wait on the sidewalk until she comes out and locks up with one of the keys in the big bunch she always keeps in her coat pocket. It’s blowing hard down the street, I look around for a way to go.

“Well?” says Aunt Kari.

“Do you never feel homesick?” I ask.

“Home,” she says, “where’s that?”

“Aren’t you happy here?”

“Not for one second.”

“But you could have gone back, surely. Why didn’t you?”

“L’amour,” says Aunt Kari, “and now it’s been too late for a long time. There’s nothing to be done about that.”

She suddenly turns and walks towards her car and throws the money bag through the half-open window on the driver’s side, opens the door, and gets in. She is the only woman I know who can drive a car, a black Citröen from before the war. When I ask where it came from she replies:

“It was just left lying about.”

“Have a good Saturday in town,” she says through the window, starts the car, and turns out from the curb. I stand there watching her drive across Kiellands Square and along Sannergate toward Carl Berners Square before I turn and start to walk down.

But I don’t go right down to the center. Just past Telthusbakken I turn and take the road through Fredensborg to the Deichmanske library from the back, past the Swedish Margareta Church. I shouldn’t have left Stockholm. Those old men were not so bad. They were exhausting, but they slept far into the morning dreaming of Barcelona, and I went down to the glassblowing factory on the ground floor, and it was quiet there then and there was light on the dark window from the lamps in the ceiling and light and heat from the flames in the furnace. It shone on Uncle Peter’s glistening forehead when he coughed and bent over the long blowing pipe and did not want to look at me because he had been drunk the night before and had stood outside my door calling out a name that was not mine until far into the night. I should not have taken the train to Gothenburg and the boat across the sea to Denmark, should not have stood on deck through the opening in the breakwater with the old lighthouses flashing and flashing at our town where Pikkerbakken was lost in fog behind the houses and Frydenstrand Hotel in darkness to the north and only one drunk stood on the quay vomiting, wisps of fog around his legs. I should not have put my suitcase into the room behind the dairy shop only to leave again a week later. I had not been there for two years, and my mother was at my heels up the stairs asking questions about everything she could think of; why I had gone away as soon as the Germans left,
before
Jesper came home, why I didn’t stay in Copenhagen, in Stockholm, why I did not write home.

Jesper was not there when the boat arrived. There were none of his things in the bedroom. Greta Garbo had gone and the red curtain and Rosa Luxemburg who had hung on the wall throughout the war camouflaged as an aunt of my father’s, she had gone too.

“Where is Jesper?” I asked.

“Jesper is in Morocco,” my mother said harshly, “but perhaps you have had enough of the world.” I could not recognize her. I stood beside the old bed where Lucifer still hung on the wall. I took garment after garment out of the suitcase. She stood in the doorway with her hands crossed over her chest, and I thought she looked ugly. Her skull pushed at the skin of her face, her eyes were a bottomless blue, I looked through them.

“There’s plenty to do
here,
” she said. Then I slammed down the lid, left the rest of the things, and went out.

It was nearly dark and there was no curfew. I walked the streets for several hours, up Danmarksgate and down again, out on the quay and back again, and all the way north to Rosevej. Lone’s house seemed farther away from the road than before, no light in any window, the fence was broken in several places, and the hedge had grown to a gigantic height. The nameplate on the gate had been taken down. It had never been painted underneath, and I stood gazing at the gray square. I passed my fingers over it. The wood felt rotten and decaying.

One day I saw Ruben in the town. He walked straight past me in the street, but he didn’t know me. Maybe because of my short hair. For a moment I thought I might seduce him shamelessly, take him into Vannverks forest or out to Kæret beach among the dunes. He would be naked and speechless in the wind, and he would see who I was. But his back grew smaller on his way along the sidewalk, and I stood there without waving or calling him. He was alive anyway. Almost all the Jews in Denmark got away in time on board speedboats, fishing boats, and rowing boats, thanks to people like Jesper. But Jesper was in Morocco, and I couldn’t stay at home, the breakwater arms were crushing me, there was a paralysis in my body, my limbs were stiff and my lips dry, I could not breathe, could not speak, and I wanted to go to London but only had enough money for Oslo.

Six silent days on Lodsgate, and on the seventh I put my clothes back in my suitcase and went down to the boat. My father went with me. He wanted to carry the case. It was ridiculously light, but I let him do it and walked a few steps ahead so he could not see my face. He said nothing on the way down and nothing when I went up the gangway of the old boat. The
Melchior
was still in service.

Once on the boat I put my case in the cloakroom and went up on deck to the after rail. He stood by himself a few meters from a group of people shouting and waving handkerchiefs, and I thought he might be going to wave too, but he did not, just stood there in the long coat he still wore when it was windy, with his hands at his back and his brown beret on his head, and it was not possible to see what he was thinking, his face was perfectly calm. The engines were started, the hawsers let slip from the bollards on the quay and smacked down into the water before the winches pulled them on board, and the deck vibrated. Then my father raised his hand and took a cigar out of the waistcoat pocket under his coat, lit it and blew the smoke out into the wind. The smoke blew back in his face, and I knew it smarted, that the tears rolled down, and I squeezed my eyes into narrow slits and looked down on to the quay and my father through a swirling mist. It was irritating, I blinked hard, but could no longer make him out.

I
t is autumn. Jesper and I play on the slope above the old well. We have to cross a field behind the Chinese garden to get to it. It is not cold enough yet to have to wear shoes. The corn has been cut and the fields are open. We are free, we can go where we like, and there is no one to scold us. The sky is high, we can run without getting wet through. It is a good place to play, sheltered from the wind and no one can see us, it’s just Jesper and me. Far away we hear an axe in the forest and the horses at Vrangbæk and Grandfather shouting, but he isn’t shouting at us. There is quiet around us. We can play. We run after each other on the slope that’s round as a crater, in the middle is the open well, and there is thick grass there that is good to run on. I am trying to catch Jesper, but it’s not easy. He is quick, he is Ernst Bremer and I am a customs man, and no one can catch Ernst Bremer. We run in a circle until the sky spins round and we get dizzy and totter in zigzags and we are drunk farmers. We have seen drunk farmers lots of times. Grandfather gets roaring drunk once a month but Jesper is even drunker, he staggers and clutches his head crying: