The Half Brother: A Novel (26 page)

After that, they stand on deck as the vessel sails under the steep wall of the Lofotens. Mom stands tall and strong as I sleep, exhausted by wind and electricity. Not even when the boat cuts into the Moskenes whirlpool does she waver. She has toughened. In- stead it’s Dads turn to weaken. He sees the lighthouse. He sees Nykene. He teaches Mom the many names of the birds in order to forget his own fear in that moment. He sees the white stacks that are the cormorants’ landmarks. He’s getting closer. He’s been away for eighteen years. He has no idea what awaits him out there. When the vessel comes in to that flat island which the storms and the salt have worn down to nothing out there on the edge of the world, there’s barely standing room left on the cramped dockside. The rumors have traveled more swiftly than the ship. The waves have rolled in their reports. The wind has sent its telegrams. Arnold Nilsen holds Mom close. “What is it I’m smelling?” she murmurs. And Dad is glad she asks, because it gives him time to get his land legs, to feel his roots again. “Dried cod, my dear. The perfume of the nets.” Mom sees the fish hanging everywhere from wooden frames, as though in some great, strange garden a new fruit is drying on its deformed trees. Afterward Mom said that she never could get rid of that smell again; it took hold in her hair and skin and under her nails and in her clothes. It came with them when they left again, and it could make her sick at any time, while on other occasions it made her dream, wild and silent. But now the waiting crowd below is growing impatient. Isn’t Arnold Nielsen going ashore? Has he only come to show his face before turning again and making fools of them all? And then someone suddenly shouts, “The Wheel’s come home! The Wheel’s come home!” And now they’re all shouting. Shouting for the Wheel. They can see that heightwise he hasn’t achieved much, but as far as breadth is concerned he’s certainly caught up pretty well. Arnold Nilsen closes his eyes; he swallows, swallows the piercing wind, the acrid wind — he takes Mom by the hand and goes with her down the gangway. And I wake up. I become aware of the same smell. Ever since, I’ve never been able to eat fish. I cry. Mom comforts me. Dad is greeting people; he shakes hands with some, and the faces stream past. It’s just as much the city girl they stare at; the young city girl with the thin shoes and wailing child. Dad stops, looks about him. “Aurora and Evert,” he murmurs. “Where are Aurora and Evert?” But no one has time to answer, because now the mighty crate has to be lowered onto the jetty — Arnold Nilsen doesn’t only have wife and child with him, he also has a crate the size of a boathouse. “Aren’t you going to open it?” the most inquisitive among them ask (and that means the vast majority). Arnold Nilsen laughs. “It’s not Christmas yet,” he says. And he pulls Mom with him; he wants to go over to his house. He’s put this off for eighteen years, and he wants to go home, he wants to see his parents, Aurora and Evert — it has to be done. Then an old, smiling man stands before him, blocking his way, and Arnold knows who it is — it’s his neighbor, the one they called Elendius. He’d been given the name because it was always he who came bearing news of shipwrecks, unusable saws, illnesses, sheep that had gotten stuck on outcrops, delayed mail and hurricanes. He hasn’t grown any older, Arnold thinks, he’s always been this old. “Don’t you know?” Elendius asks, and takes off his cap. Arnold Nilsen realizes what Elendius is going to say, but he shakes his head nonetheless; he doesn’t know yet. “Aurora and Evert are dead.”

And so Dad, the half son, has to go to the graveyard first, in order to come all the way home. He walks between Mom and the old vicar; pushing the stroller in which I’m lying in front of him along the narrow gravel path over the island, past the lighthouse. Behind us come all those who refuse to let Arnold Nilsen out of their sight, and Elendius is first among the last. The church warden comes running from the storehouse for the funeral biers and shows them to the right grave, which can barely be described as a proper tomb at all — just a crooked, white wooden cross stuck in dry soil in the weeds beside the dike. Two names are scratched into the plank — Evert and Aurora Nilsen. Dad sinks to his knees, pulls off his gloves and clasps his hands. The old vicar kneels too, and even he, who hasn’t missed much in his time, starts when he sees Arnold’s mutilated hand. “Death and baptism,” the vicar whispers. “You have come in sorrow and joy.” Dad doesn’t hear him. He just stares at the two names, written in the same writing. He gets up again. “Did they die at the same time?” he asks. At once Elendius is beside him. “Aurora departed in the winter of ‘46,” he tells him. “Evert followed her at Pentecost. Once the ground was soft enough to take them.” Arnold Nilsen nods. “Yes, we follow those we love,” he says, and begins to cry. Elendius looks down at all the missing fingers on my father’s hand. “No one could find you to tell you,” Elendius says. Dad turns instead to face the church warden, one of the boys he cut grass alongside and he, perhaps, who laughed loudest of the bunch when the scythe grew too heavy and the slope too steep. “I want a proper memorial to my parents,” Dad said loudly so all could hear, as he pulled on the glove with the false fingers. “I want a mausoleum built of nothing less than the biggest stones to be found here, and I want it to be filled with sand from the sea and their names to be inscribed in marble!” The church warden nods. Everyone nods. Because that’s the way it’s to be. At last the Wheel is to honor his father and mother. The wind gusts between the crosses. Flowers are torn loose and hang like restless bouquets over graves. “It won’t come cheap, a mausoleum like that,” the warden says. “Yes, and make it even more precious than that!” Dad cries. “And send the bill to Arnold Nilsen, Oslo!” People are beginning to drift from the graveyard in ones and twos, slowly and with heavy steps, for they’re curious to hear where Arnold Nilsen has planned to stay. Perhaps he’s thinking of moving into the Fisherman’s Mission with the vicar to make his confession, or perhaps it’s a camper with windows and a garden he has in his intriguing crate on the dock? Then Elendius, at long last and for the first time, wants to be the bearer of good news. “You are welcome to stay with me!” he shouts as loud as he can. And none of the others wants to be outdone. Arnold Nilsen and his family can stay with all of them. Arnold Nilsen takes Mom’s hand, moved, downhearted and yet uplifted. “No, dear friends. We will stay with ourselves!” Silence falls around Arnold Nilsen, and people look down, shake their heads and go their own ways.

It’s Saturday. It’ll soon be night, and night is without darkness and full of wind. The following day I’m to be baptized in the new church by the old vicar. My name’s to be Barnum. Dad points out the road back; he’s taken that same way so many times before, he could walk it in his sleep, even though telegraph poles have appeared now that might bamboozle him. It’s just a case of following the smell of the dry, skinny fish that will be collected from the drying racks and sent south before the Midsummer bonfires are lit — although the smell will stay just the same, like the pain of his lost fingers that never quite disappears. At the mill, they take the path along the length of the sound. Arnold Nilsen’s chest tightens. It’s a path that’s been seldom used in the past. They leave the stroller by the lopsided gate, and Mom carries me. She loses the heel of her right shoe but doesn’t say a word. There isn’t an ounce of shelter to be found from the wind. Dad toils on with the suitcase. “Should have made a suitcase with wheels,” he says. Mom doesn’t hear him. She hears only the wind and the sound of swift birds swooping on them and veering away so close she can hear the tips of their wings in front of her face. She steps in a hole and loses her other heel too. She feels the urge to cry to turn around — but she does neither. For where else is she to go on an island like this? She has to follow Arnold Nilsen home. And now he stops. Over on a low mound there stands a house. No, it’s the remains of a house, and perhaps even that’s overstating it — it’s the memory of a house. They go closer. The grass has grown tall and wild. The windowpanes are shattered. The door bangs in the wind. There’s a jawbone on the doorstep. Arnold Nilsen puts down the suitcase and hesitates a moment.
The dog,
he thinks.
Tuss.
They go in. Mom has to bend her head. She looks around her. The kettle’s on the stove. A clock has tumbled down from the wall. Arnold hangs it in place on the hook his father hammered into the driftwood they found on the beach. The hands of the clock slip and hang vertically down behind the dull glass; on the back of the figure 6 there’s a fly. He rights a chair. He picks up some fragments of glass he doesn’t know what to do with. There’s sheep dung in the corners. “We’re not going to sleep here?” Mom whispers. “It’ll be fine,” Dad says. “It’ll be fine.” With that he goes out, finds the scythe at the back of the house, sharpens it, and begins to cut the grass. Mom stands in the doorway with me in her arms, looking at this man, Arnold Nilsen, cutting the grass, cutting it for all he’s worth in his dark suit and leather gloves. He scythes like one possessed, and the tool is still huge and unwieldy in his grasp, but he refuses to acknowledge defeat. And Mom lets him go on, even though he’s ruining the clothes he’ll wear in church, and perhaps she thinks that she doesn’t really know him, that she knows nothing about him at all. Yet it’s not he who is a stranger that evening; she is. And Arnold Nilsen slices through the grass; he breathes heavily, he cries and laughs. And when that rugged bit of ground lies flat and new-mown, he fetches the dry remains of the fishing nets from the shed to bind up the dry grass — and the green sun has turned golden.

By the time he comes in, it’s already night. He has with him a bucket of water from the barrel, but it’s salty too. The rain here’s salty. The wind’s salty. I’m asleep on the hard bench. I have a strong heart. They lie down on his parents’ bed. There’s barely room for them both. Mom lies awake. She points in the direction of a door she’s been curious about, a tall door in the outer wall of the wind trap beside the doorstep. “What’s that used for?” she asks. Dad smiles. “That’s the coffin door, Vera. They could carry the coffins right out and not dishonor the dead by turning them on their sides.” They’re silent for a time. Perhaps it’s me they’re listening to. “I would like to have met Aurora and Evert,” Mom whispers. Dad takes her hand in his. “They would no doubt have wondered how I managed to get hold of you.” Mom smiles too. “And I’d have just said that you made me laugh,” she replies. All of a sudden Dad gasps for breath and crushes her hand with his artificial fingers, so strongly that it hurts. She cries out, but he pays no attention. He gasps. “There’s something I have to tell you, Vera.” He almost shouts and lets go of his grip at the same time. But he doesn’t say any more. “What is it, Arnold?” She waits. He’s silent. She thinks he’s just being dramatic. She turns toward him, amused, and sees him lying there paralyzed beside her, the sweat pouring from his face and running in black rivers from his hair. He has saliva about his mouth — froth, white foam — and his eyes are like brown glass, and broken at the bottom. Mom screams again. “What is it, Arnold?” And then it’s as if he wakes up, recovers his breath, and the darkness falls from him. He can see — he sees her, shocked. “Nothing,” he whispers. “It’s nothing.” He has no idea how long he’s been out, perhaps only a second. He gets up and has to go outside, alone, to get some air. He sits down on the doorstep and picks up the gray, smooth jawbone of the dog, smells it and throws it away. After a while Mom gets up herself. She stops behind him. He waits. Perhaps he’s talked in his sleep, said too much and revealed everything. He waits and in that moment knows that all could be lost. “What was it you wanted to tell me?” she asks him at last. He sighs. Only that — a sigh of relief. “You have to be rested for tomorrow,” he murmurs. She hides her face in her hands. It’s shining brightly from everywhere around, even the sea. “It’s impossible to sleep on nights like this,” she says. “It’s just a case of closing your eyes, Vera.” She doesn’t take her hands away. “The light’s too strong.” With that she goes in all the same, perhaps because she’s heard me waking. Arnold Nilsen remains sitting there. He looks at the wind. It’s never the same wind. The wind is a wide river that flows through his world. The boat lies down beside its shed, turned over on its side and decaying like some dead, rotting animal. He’s still trembling; there’s an echo yet in his body. It’ll soon be gone. There has to be a bottle somewhere in the house, a mouthful of brandy left over for Christmas. Arnold Nilsen gets up. He stands in front of the coffin door. Not that way, he thinks. No, not that way now. He goes around and quietly comes in by the kitchen. He pulls out a drawer and finds cutlery, plates, cups and tools heaped together — it must have been Evert who couldn’t keep everything in order after Aurora departed. And everything is covered in dust and salt that wears away all color, just as the island itself is being consumed until the day the sea rolls over it. But then Arnold Nilsen finds something he wasn’t looking for. Under the papers in the bottom drawer, together with the message he left for his mother on a page he’d torn out of his arithmetic book, there’s a card. He lifts it up. It’s the hand-colored picture of Paturson, the world’s tallest man. And on the reverse side he’s written a message to his good friend, Arnold, in May 1945. He writes that the Chocolate Girl is dead. A fresh tremor passes through Arnold. The card has been sent from Akureyri on Iceland, and has traveled to numerous addresses both in Norway and abroad before in the end coming to rest here, with his parents, on R0st. Arnold Nilsen secretes it in the old black suitcase, in a corner of the lining, and this card is the only thing he takes with him when we leave.

It’s morning. It doesn’t show. Day and night are seamless. Time has no edges. Mom has had some rest just the same — he’s let her sleep, with me at her side. He goes out. He observes that boats are approaching from the other islands in the vicinity; it’s like a whole armada — even the men employed on Skomvaer and their families are making the journey here this Sunday. Arnold Nilsen smiles. He’s on top of things once more. His hands aren’t shaking. No one’s going to sit at home when the Wheel and his fine wife from the city have come to have their child baptized in the new church. The boats toss in the wind. The waves are white around the lighthouse, and they break over the jetty. Arnold Nilsen laughs. The wind is appropriate and there’s more than enough of it. He washes his face in the salty water, shaves, and wakes Mom and myself with a kiss. “The pews in our church are hard,” he says. “Take a cushion with you.”