I Curse the River of Time (7 page)

A car came down the street and honked loudly, and we were still standing in the middle of the junction, and then Frank whose name was not Frank said:

‘Go get yourself some sleep and wake up fit for a fight,’ and I said I surely intended to. Then he crossed to his side and I crossed to mine and the car drove past and I walked through the arch and crossed to the stairwell and up the two flights of stairs and stuck my key in the lock.

The flat was quiet. It smelled of dust. There was a droning in my head and my body still felt the rasping beat of the machines, thump, thump, thump, my temples were
pounding, and my ears ringing. If I went to bed now, I would not fall asleep.

I felt like some coffee, but that would only make it worse. I opened the door to the fridge to see if I had a beer, just a half, but there was no beer, and I did not want juice. So I drank a glass of water. I sat down at the table, rested my head in my hands and closed my eyes and sat like this for a while. Sometimes it troubled me that what we produced in the factory was so completely unnecessary, stupefying even, but I knew that this was not important. It was the work itself that was important.

I stood up and went to the living room to fetch the book that I was reading from the coffee table: Jan Myrdal on Afghanistan,
Crossroad of Cultures
, where lines crossed from east to west, from west to east, caravans of visions and barely audible songs in the thin air. I sat down at the kitchen table to read. There was a wide open sky over Jan Myrdal’s sentences. The world unfolded in all its majesty, back in time, forward in time, history was one long river and we were all borne along by that river. People all over the world had the same yearnings, the same dreams and stood hand in hand in one great circle around the globe.

I went into the living room, undressed and glanced at Mao who was hanging there between Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell before I slipped under the duvet. I read a few pages, and then my eyes grew tired. I put the book aside, I can sleep now, I thought, we will manage, I thought, it will be all right.

9

I
got up from the old sofa bed and went to the window. Between our summer house and Hansen’s was a well trodden path through the willow hedge and on that path I saw my mother’s back and Hansen’s back disappear, as my own back and the back of a girl called Inger had done more than twenty years ago on our way to the other side of the hedge to kiss and hug when she had the house to herself. I just presumed it would carry on like this for ever, until one summer I came down and they had sold their summer house and she was gone. I have never really been able to see enormous changes coming until the last minute, never seen how one trend conceals another, as Mao used to say, how the one flowing right below the surface can move in a whole different direction than the one you thought everyone had agreed on, and if you did not pay attention when everything was shifting, you would be left behind alone.

I went to the door where my boots were, laced them up and put on my reefer jacket and went outside and around the summer house where the old pine tree stood. Ten years ago there had been three of them, but winter storms had knocked the two over and my father had spent a full summer cutting them into logs which he split into firewood and
stacked by the shed under corrugated iron he fastened with a rope against the wind. But the last pine was still standing and refused to be moved or knocked over by any wind and it had grown tall, and more than tall, and its needles and sprigs were thick and dense and blocked the sun in the evenings, and the lower branches stretched out across our roof and creaked and groaned when the wind came in from the sea. My mother wanted it down. She had been saying so for years, she wanted it down
now
, but time went by and my father withdrew from the task, he was no longer a young man, I could see that, and he had my sympathy.

I walked past the gap in the hedge where the path led to Hansen’s summer house, and down the gravel road and walked the same route I had walked a couple of hours earlier. It felt ridiculous, as if I was getting nowhere and was only repeating what I had done already.

An elderly woman came cycling past me on her way to town. A brown bag hung from the handlebars and I knew at once who she was. She was the mother of a girl called Bente, that my brother used to know, not my eldest brother, nor the one who came last, but the one who came after me and had already died. It happened six years earlier. That he died. I gave her a nod, but she did not recognise me, or she did not want to, and simply kept going on her black, Danish bicycle, leaving me with the sight of her back. She too had a summer house out here. She lived on the southern side of town, less than one hour away on a bicycle.

Fifteen, twenty metres further on she suddenly put her feet awkwardly to the ground and started braking that way.
She nearly fell over, bicycle, bag and all. Then she made a half-turn with one hand on the saddle.

‘Is that you, Arvid?’ she almost yelled. Mrs Kaspersen was her name. Else Marie Kaspersen in full, but we had never said that.

I walked up to her, stopped by the handlebars of her bicycle and said:

‘Yes, it is. It’s me.’

‘Are you here now?’ she said. ‘Is your mother here?’

‘Yes, she is.’

‘I’ve been thinking so much about her. How is she?’

‘She’s fine,’ I said. ‘Just fine.’

‘That’s good to hear.’ She looked down at the pedals. ‘It was so sad what happened to your brother. He was such a nice lad.’

My brother, I thought, what brother, I have forgotten my brother, I thought, but of course I had not. I had not forgotten my brother.

‘You know, for a long time I hoped he would be my son-in-law.’

‘Well, Bente didn’t want him, did she?’

‘Is that so? I thought he was the one that ended it,’ Mrs Kaspersen said.

‘I don’t think so. Not as far as I remember.’

‘You may be right. I don’t know. But I wouldn’t have minded him for a son-in-law,’ she said.

‘I know that,’ I said.

‘It was so sad what happened.’

‘Yes, it was sad,’ I said, but that was not what I was thinking. I thought, stupid cow, what do you know about
sad, what do you know about sad? Nothing, I thought. Nothing.

‘I remember it like yesterday,’ she said.

‘Well, it’s been six years now,’ I said.

‘Has it really been that long?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

She shook her head and bit her lip, she was probably thinking about her daughter. Perhaps Bente was not doing that well, perhaps she had married an idiot. And then I thought: Maybe she should have chosen my brother after all, and he would not have died.

‘Ah well, the past, no one can change it,’ she said, ‘but please give my best to your mother. Tell her I’ll come by if she’s staying a few days.’

You won’t come by, I thought. Not you. No bloody way.

‘I will tell her,’ I said. ‘I promise.’ And she was happy. Then a worried expression fell over her face like a blind coming down.

‘Well, I must not be late. It’s a bit chilly, isn’t it. It’s November, and all.’

‘That much is true,’ I said, ‘it is November.’ And she said:

‘Goodbye then, Arvid,’ and I said:

‘Take care, Mrs Kaspersen,’ and she cycled off on her black bicycle. I waited until she had gone around the bend with the dog roses and then I walked on to the beach.

When I got there, I sat down in the same spot I had sat earlier that morning, where my mother had sat too. I looked around me and saw that the ribbon of reeds had expanded these last few years and now made swimming on this beach difficult unless you came equipped with a large
machete, and this because a small river ran into the sea just north of here turning the water brackish and gave to this stretch of coast a different character. When I was a boy, there was a bridge over the river and the reeds, so we could walk out to the good bathing spots without getting our feet wet, but not even a pole was left of it. Those who wanted to swim had to move closer to town and the beaches there.

I closed my eyes and buried my hands in the sand, and I just wanted to sit here and then I suddenly knew that familiar scent and the air on my skin I had felt down the years in precisely this place, but never like when I was seven years old, even though everything was different then, the season was different, the whole beach was different, no reeds or scrub back then, everything more horizontal, one line behind another, again and again, right out to the last line, where the clouds tumbled like smoke. But this was where we sat, at the foot of the dunes, and it was not yet the Sixties. Straight to the east lay the island with the lighthouse. It was hazy out there, and the lighthouse was not lit up, but I knew every minute where the lighthouse was. I had it in the corner of my eye.

It had been a very hot day, there was a sharp smell of drying seaweed in the air, of half-dead jellyfish baking in the splintering light, the smell of the sea and the prickling scent of marram grass and the tang of newly opened bottles of sweet orange squash. Black-haired and small, I sat with a spade in my hand digging in the dark, moist sand, and all around me were my blond, full-grown, coarse-limbed brothers. There were only two of them at the time, and
they were nice, but they took up a lot of space. Every time I turned around, one of them was there.

A man with bare feet came along the path from the north. He had rolled up his trouser legs, showing ankles as white as chalk. He stared as he passed us and then he stopped a few steps further on and looked down at my mother who was lying on her side on a tartan rug in the sun with a smoking cigarette in one hand. She was still not afraid of lung cancer, so the cigarette was a Carlton, not a menthol. In the other hand she held a novel by Günter Grass, a thick one, I recall, that someone must have sent up from Germany:
The Tin Drum
, probably, which had been published that year, it was a sensation. She was tanned in her swimming costume, it was red with blue piping, I remember it well, the crêpe, its sly folds, I often dreamt about it.

‘I just had to tell you, madam,’ the man said, ‘how very charitable of you I think it is to take a little refugee child on holiday within your own family.’

That was how he phrased it and he spoke in Danish, but we had no problem with that, nor was there any doubt which child he was referring to even though I was not so goddamn little that year, and they all turned as one and stared at me, and my brothers looked embarrassed for reasons I did not comprehend. They blushed and my mother smiled, she too a bit awkward, it seemed. But she made no reply, and the man, he raised his hat, a straw hat, I am certain it was, a Panama with a black band, and then he swaggered on, his hands behind his back, barefoot and pleased with himself and the modest lady on the rug and
a remark he did not doubt was correct, but where was I supposed to have fled from? From Korea, or the mountains of Tibet? But I did not look Oriental at all, nor was I a refugee from the war in Algiers, and yes, I was dark in those days, but not that dark, so then maybe I was running from Hungary, from the crisis down there? And still there were countries to choose from, but maybe he had no special country in mind, just the fact that I looked different and it was obvious to everyone that I was not like my brothers, and that made me a refugee child, and he was the kind of man who could not keep his mouth shut.

I wish he had never spoken those words on the beach that day. I would never forget them. And no matter how much I came to resemble my father, and no matter how much they assured me that I was not an accident, in fact the only one who was not,
that
in itself confirmed what I had already suspected, that my place in the family was not as evident as I would have wished.

When the man left, my game was ruined. Yet we stayed on the beach for a good while longer and my mother lit another cigarette and returned to her book, but from where I sat in the sand I could see that she never raised her hand to turn the page. She must have read the same lines over and over, distracted, or no longer in the mood, or maybe she was not reading at all, just staring at the printed page. It made me uneasy, things were not as they should be, and the only thing I could do was pretend to play a game I no longer gave a damn about.

But what I found out that summer, the last summer before the Fifties ended and the Sixties kicked off, before
the wall was built between East and West, was that I could swallow whatever hit me and let it sink as if nothing had happened. So I mimicked a game that meant nothing to me now, I was going through the motions, and then it looked as if what I was doing had a purpose, but it did not.

There was still a path in the sand alongside the reeds to where the bridge had once been, and in some places even right through the reeds, and I stood up, I was thirty-seven years old and brushed the sand off my trousers and followed the path for a while and suddenly I could not see the lighthouse any more or the sea, but only thick, rustling, yellow stems on both sides, like a wall of bamboo, I thought, in China, on the banks of the Yangtze Kiang. So then for a while I was Chinese, my legs trembling like the legs of a weary soldier fighting the Japanese invasion, or like the poet Tu Fu many centuries before, on one of his long and hazardous journeys.

A jetty had been built at a bend in the river right in front of me, and three rowing boats were moored to it, each painted a different colour, red and green and blue. The oars were neatly placed across the thwarts. There was not a soul in sight, on land nor at sea, only the path and the reeds and an open patch of grass in front of the jetty, and I cautiously climbed into the one boat that had no water in it and sat down on the middle thwart with my back against the jetty and the shore. I did not touch the oars, just sat there, very still, looking across the water in the river. It was green and shiny as a mirror in a way the open sea could
never be, and I had never felt as unhappy as I did right then.

I don’t know how long I sat in that boat, but when I stood up from the thwart to step ashore, my body felt cold and stiff. I took a long step over to the jetty, and as I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, I slipped off the plank and right down between the boat and the jetty, and the gap was so narrow that the back of my head hit the side of the boat as I fell. Sparks flew in the great dark inside my brain and it hurt so badly I was scared and when I opened my mouth to call for help, the brackish water poured in and the water seeped into my jacket and my jumper grew heavy and dragged me down. I coughed and spluttered and thrashed my arms about trying to swim, but there was no room. Then I realised where I was, that I could probably touch the bottom, and so I stood up and the water only came to my chest. I could not haul myself up between the boat and the jetty, the gap was too narrow, so I sacrificed what dignity I had left, took a deep breath and ducked under the jetty and with my knees against the sandy bottom moved to the other side and up on to the planks. I lay there, stretched out, until the cold got such a grip of me that my teeth were chattering and I was forced to stand up.