I Curse the River of Time (8 page)

There were two ways out of this mess, one was to go back on the path on which I came, or I could walk along the river, past the houses where the people lived who owned the rowing boats, but I did not want them to see
me in the shape I was in, and so I ran back across the open grassy mounds and along the path with the tall reeds on either side, and I did not feel Chinese now, and I ran all the way back and came stomping in my boots past our shed, around the pine tree that blocked the sun and around the corner by the terrace where the door to the living room was open, and my mother stood alone inside with her head bent and both hands in her hair. When she heard me coming she took hold of the door frame, and I could have been the man in the moon or anyone at all by the look she gave me, but then she stared me right in the eye and said:

‘But, Arvid, where did you come from?’

Water was dripping from the sleeves of my jacket, from my hair, and I turned and pointed towards the road and the sea behind the trees.

‘I came from down there,’ I said.

‘Oh, dear God,’ my mother said, shaking her head. ‘That was not what I meant.’

‘OK,’ I said. I kept looking at her. She didn’t look well.

‘What are you staring at?’ she said.

‘You,’ I said, ‘I’m looking at you.’

‘Well, you can stop that,’ she said and went into the living room.

10

W
hat Mrs Else Marie Kaspersen had in mind and took the liberty of bringing up was the following.

My eldest brother called me at work one morning and told me to go to Ullevål Hospital.

‘Don’t even sit down,’ he said, ‘just go.’

It concerned the brother who came after me in the queue, whom Mrs Kaspersen so badly had wanted as her son-in-law. That was in 1983. I was working in a bookshop then, in the centre of Oslo, right by the National Gallery. I had been there for two years. Before that I had worked in a factory where we produced a thick slick weekly magazine, and I manned the last stage of the production line for five years. I thought I had to. But I didn’t.

I had just got to work when I heard the telephone ring. I switched the lamp on, leaned over the counter and picked up the receiver from the telephone that was squashed between two stacks of catalogues from publishers in England and the US. I was the only one who was in this early. Every day except Sundays and every other Saturday I would come down the stairway at home, run along the footpath between the houses and take my seat on the bus, leaning against the vibrating window all the way into
Oslo. I was usually the first one to lock myself into the shop and would happily have gone there on Sundays too. I was happy with my work as I had never been before. It was the first time I would wake up in the morning and think,
I am going to work
, and not feel any reluctance whatsoever. I was so happy in that bookshop that it took me a long time to understand that it was not just the job in itself, but the fact that every morning I could close the door behind me, and just let go.

It was not difficult to get to Ullevål Hospital from the street where the bookshop was. I could simply run to Pilestredet, a parallel street, where the trams stopped in those days, and catch one there and it would take fifteen minutes to get to the hospital.

It was early autumn and the sky was clear. I sat by the window in the tram, my face pressed against the glass and looked out at the strange, low sunlight which gave to the buildings a surreal shade of yellow, like in a stage play, I thought, from hidden spotlights, and I could not recall that I had ever seen such an incredibly yellow light, but of course I must have.

I was well aware of what was waiting for me at the other end of this tram ride, but I did not want to think about it yet. I had a whole quarter of an hour I could spend on something else. A whole life could be contained in those fifteen minutes, yes, it was as though that quarter of an hour might never end, but instead expand like a space where nothing
could
ever end, even though I knew that
after fifteen minutes, a few seconds and a certain number of stops I would reach Ullevål Hospital and would have to step off the tram to walk the hundred metres on the pavement along Kirkeveien and turn left through the archway in the tower and walk to the hospital block which had my second-youngest brother locked up somewhere on the twelfth floor.

‘Take the corridor to the right after the lift, and ask for the duty nurse,’ my brother explained on the telephone, ‘and say his name loud,’ he said in an insistent voice I only rarely heard him use, but I did not know if I could do that, say his name out loud.

But all this would happen soon enough, and I started to think about something quite different in the section of the brain I thought might have some capacity to spare. I believed I could cover quite a few topics if only I was able to concentrate, and the first that for some reason occurred to me was the episode in Hemingway’s book
A Moveable Feast
where Hemingway himself and his older more established colleague, Scott Fitzgerald, go to the men’s room in a café on the corner of rue Jacob and rue des Saints-Pères in Paris to estimate the size of Fitzgerald’s equipment. His wife, Zelda, had spoken scornfully about it and claimed that the happiness in a relationship such as theirs was a question of length, and that Fitzgerald would never be able to make a woman happy the way he had been put together; and now the man was crushed. But in the men’s room, Hemingway was able to confirm that everything was fine, you’re all right, Scott, he said. But when you see it from above you get a false impression, look at yourself in profile in a mirror, he
lectured, then go to the Louvre and look at the statues there, and you’ll realise how fortunate you are. And it was not that the advice was bad, but when I read it again after I had turned thirty, the year we are talking about now, 1983, then the first thing that struck me was the condescending tone in which the episode had been written. More than thirty years after Paris, Hemingway still needed to humiliate Fitzgerald, even though Fitzgerald at the time this took place was already on his way down and would end his life practically forgotten, wasted away in alcohol, while Hemingway was on his way up, and would stay there for a long time. It was the sign of a pettiness which recurred in his work, and I especially found the incident in the men’s room in rue Jacob painful, as though it concerned me personally, and I began to wonder how much it told about Hemingway’s writing, the fact that he could clearly be a bastard, and I think I could have underlined my argument with several examples if the tram I was in had not at that very moment turned past the redbrick buildings that make up the Veterinary College in Oslo. It was on the right hand side of the tramlines on the road through an area of west Oslo called Adamstuen, a part of the city I did not know anything about and I could not have told you where it was, if my life depended on it, had it not been for the one time the year before when I came in a car that was not mine, the long way from where I lived north-east of Oslo, with a map spread out on the passenger seat, going to the Veterinary College to have a dog put down, that also did not belong to me.

I cannot understand why I had volunteered to do this,
but I had. It was a bitch that belonged to someone in the family. For reasons that were none of my business they could no longer keep her. I knew the dog quite well and had often taken her for walks in the early morning to help out when things were not easy. I think we liked each other in a distant and polite way, and after all, we had known each other since she was a puppy and I was a younger man. But she also annoyed me, for she was half hunting dog, half beagle, I think, and she found it hard to walk to heel the way I wanted her to. Instead she was the kind of dog who strained and strained at the leash until I felt torn in half from frustration, and if I let her loose, she was gone with the wind. I found that embarrassing, especially if I had to catch the bus into Oslo, and instead was forced to run around calling out for her among the trees that surrounded the suburb where I lived then and still do. And I remember thinking I was glad she was not my dog.

As I turned into the car park of what I supposed was the clinic for animals of medium size, she sat calmly in the back seat gazing out of the window of the car, which was the red Opel Kadett she always rode in. For once she walked calmly and obediently by my side through the door and over to the hatch where a woman was sitting behind glass looking with her blue eyes so deeply into mine I felt uneasy, and when she asked what it was about, I said it was about putting this dog down.

‘I see,’ she said, and she leaned forward to look at the dog, and the dog looked back and cautiously wagged its tail.

‘You’ll have to take a seat over there and wait with the
others,’ she said, and pointed. It was not necessary, I could easily find my way. I went over and sat down, still holding the dog by its leash, and now I had a numbered ticket in my hand. She settled down on the floor right in front of me with her paws on the toes of my shoes, and I thought I ought to talk softly to her the last few minutes she had left to live, and give her some words of comfort, but I could not think of anything appropriate. Besides, she was calm now, a little introverted even, though there were people on the chairs to my left and right with cats in cages and hamsters and all sorts of other creatures.

After some time a man in a white coat opened a door and called out the number on my ticket. I stood up and went to the door and gave him the leash with the dog at the other end of it, and she followed him willingly. I went back and sat down to wait, even though he had not told me to. What worried me was that no one had asked if the dog was really mine. It felt unsafe, ambiguous, anything could happen, to anyone, if the one it was happening to had a trusting heart.

It took less than ten minutes before the man reappeared in the doorway in his coat, which was still as white as it was before. He called me over. I stood up and walked to the door, and he opened it wide so I could walk past him and he held out his hand in a bidding gesture towards the next door.

‘You will want to see her,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Of course.’ And as he was still holding his arm out in the same frozen gesture, I walked a few steps and opened the next door. She was lying on a table of
brightly polished metal. It looked cold, and she lay keeled over with all four legs stretched out to the same side in a way she would never have done had she been alive and I had never ever seen her so quiet. A dead dog is quieter than a house on a plain, a chair in an empty room.

‘There was no problem,’ the man in the white coat said.

I said nothing. I wondered if I was supposed to take her back to the car. I could see myself with the dog, heavy in my arms, walking through the room from one end to the other, her fur against my palms, head lolling, ears dangling, on my way past the people waiting on their chairs, but there was nothing to suggest that, so, empty-handed, I turned to leave.

‘Thank you,’ I said.

‘You forgot this,’ he said.

I turned back, startled, and then he gave me the leash with the open collar. I took it and went to pay for services rendered, and back in the car I placed the leash with the collar on the seat next to me, on top of the map that was lying there, the area of Adamstuen still circled with a ballpoint pen, and I forgot where it was the moment I left, and I hit the steering wheel with my fist and said to myself, you idiot, why did you agree to see her, why do you always say yes, just because you think you have to, and I punched the steering wheel with my fist, I kept hitting it, and inside the tram I hammered my fist just as hard against the window ledge and we were past the Veterinary College now and I realised that these fifteen minutes I had thought I could inhabit so safely were far from being an expanding space, on the contrary, it was like it always is with time,
that it can slip through your fingers when you are not looking.

Shortly afterwards I came to the junction with Kirkeveien, which is where you get off if you want to go to Ullevål Hospital.

On the twelfth floor I got out of the lift and took a few steps to the right. I did not feel ready. I stopped and stood very still. Something was stuck in my throat and I could not get it out. Right in front of me there were large windows with a view to the north. I went right up to one of them and leaned my forehead against the glass and looked down, and I felt such an unexpected blow to my stomach that I thought perhaps I was going to fall right through the window all the way to the ground. A flush of heat washed through my body, and it was as if a wind came through my head with a deafening blast and all sorts of trash I had long forgotten crashed against the walls of my brain. I spread my legs like sailors do and pressed both palms against the window, and with my forehead still hard against the glass, I held my eyes open and forced myself to remain there, and if a helicopter, maybe with several injured patients on board, had come sweeping past at that moment, the pilot would have seen a man with his eyes and mouth wide open, like a mask pressed against the window a dozen floors up. Then I squeezed my eyes tightly shut and sucked the air into my lungs and held it there for as long as I could, and when I finally opened my eyes, the world stood still.

On the ground, at the foot of the building, a man, or
perhaps a boy, came running at full speed past the entrance and around the corner, and shortly afterward reappeared from the other corner and began a new round. There was something vaguely familiar about that figure, but at the same time he looked weird, distorted somehow, seen from the twelfth floor.

Down the corridor I found the office of the duty nurse and said my brother’s name out loud through the open door and received a clear answer and a long look in return, and even further down the corridor I found the room where my brother was, opened the door and went right in.

It was not what I had expected. He was the only patient there, and he was on a ventilator. He was lost, I could see that right away, it was not him breathing, it was this machine that pushed air into his lungs in a way no human being had ever breathed, and there were sounds coming from the machine, scary mechanical, hissing noises. The machine looked evil, it was hurting him, it was beating his body, and he could not defend himself, could not stop the hammering, for he was lost. But my mother sat by his side holding his one hand in both of hers, and she was not crying, she only said: ‘my boy,’ she said, ‘my boy,’ she said, and she was completely absorbed by what was happening, or had already happened, so overwhelmingly blind to everything else she was, and her boy was this brother of mine who was younger than me, but not the youngest, and who was tall and heavy-set and did not look like me at all, but without a doubt had been important to me in the time that was behind us. And I too must have played some part in his life, in the twenty-seven years we had known each other and had surely
exchanged thoughts and done many things together in spite of the years which divided us, but I had forgotten what they were. Big chunks of life had been lost when I entered the room in Ullevål Hospital and saw him lying in the ventilator, fettered and chained like a naked cosmonaut all alone in his cockpit, launched and alone on his way to some small maybe warmer place in the cold universe, if such a place existed, which sadly I did not believe, but I could not recall a single thing we had shared. No confidences exchanged between us, not in recent years certainly, and not when we were children either. And that could not be right. It was all there if only I could concentrate hard enough, but inside my brain there was something inattentive, some slippery patch of Teflon, where things that came swirling in and struck it bounced off again and were gone, a fickleness of the mind. I was not paying attention, things happened and were lost. Important things.