The Half Brother: A Novel (28 page)

The Name of Silence

I’ll tell the story of a strange day. I was awakened by the Old One crying. I lay for a while listening. She cried softly and protractedly and what frightened me most was that I’d never heard her crying before. I got up. I packed my schoolbag. I had started school. Now Mom was crying too. I could hear them in the living room. They were crying together and trying to comfort each other. The school-bag was almost new and full of timetables I’d gotten at the booksellers in Bogstad Road. I actually only needed one timetable, but it felt good to have lots. Then I could make up my own timetable, and in the first period write
dream
so I could sleep longer. Perhaps Fred had done something bad, and that was why they were crying? I went out to the bathroom. He was standing there in front of the mirror combing his hair. He glanced at my bag. “Thinking of going to school, Barnum?” He stuck the shiny comb in his back pocket. “Don’t need to go to school when the king’s dead,” he said. “Is the king dead?” Fred sighed. “He died at four thirty-five during the night.” I smiled. I could have laughed out loud; I was so relieved — it was only the king who had died and that was the reason they were crying. I was about to run in to see them but Fred held me back. “Not so smart to go around laughing today, Barnum.” I thought about this as I walked the long way between bathroom and living room, that it was wicked of me to start laughing when the king was dead, and that I must be a bad person. And I went as slowly as I could so that the smile would be wiped from my face, except that somehow it had stuck on my mouth, my lips had locked, and I had to think of something else instead. I had to think that it was Dad who was dead, that he had crashed on a curve, or been hit by a train and crushed beneath eighteen wheels, and it was me who now had to tell Mom because she still didn’t know he was dead. But he had managed to whisper her name, and half of mine, before finally giving up the ghost. I was on the verge of tears by the time I came to a halt in the doorway The Old One sat on the sofa beside Mom, sobbing behind a handkerchief. Boletta was standing beside the balcony; she wore a black dress and was quite pale. She was holding her coffee with both hands.
Aftenposten
lay on the table with just one headline:
The King is Dead.
I couldn’t speak. My cheeks were streaming. Mom got up, smiling regardless, and enfolded me in her arms. “There, there, my boy. There, there.” I laid my head against her tummy and cried. “You don’t need to go to school today,” she said. “When the king dies everyone stays home.” “Not me,” I heard Boletta say. But then it was the Old One’s turn to speak. “Come here,” she whispered. Mom let me go, and I went over to the sofa. The Old One dried my face with her handkerchief, and it tasted sweet, as if it had been dipped in sugar. Perhaps that was how tears should really be, like juice, not bitter and hard like mine. On her lap was a picture of King Haakon that she’d shown me so many times I could memorize it perfectly. It was from when he returned home after the war and drove through the city in the open touring car, at precisely seventeen minutes past one, and passed the Lotus Perfumery in Torg Street beneath a billowing canopy of flags. The Old One’s visible on the left amid a rejoicing throng waving for their king, and drops have fallen onto the picture, black drops that have gradually rubbed out this moment of celebration. “Now you’re my little king,” the Old One said and kissed me on the forehead.

I went to school nonetheless. I went with Boletta as far as Majorstuen. Autumn was just beginning. Bang the caretaker stood in a dark suit sweeping leaves from the sidewalk. It was raining on the Little City. The flags hung at half-mast. Esther had tied a black ribbon around the window of her kiosk, and she cried in there among the weeklies. The cars drove slowly and the trams waited for everybody. Boletta kept hold of my hand right up to the point where we had to go our separate ways. “Today there won’t be many people calling each other,” I said. Boletta wiped away a tear — a real tear, not like mine, which I’d just made myself. “The world isn’t always the way we would like it to be,” she whispered.

At school the grown-ups cried too. All the teachers were crying. They tried not to, but they couldn’t manage, and in the end they just gave up. It was quite a sight. I thought that nothing could be the same after we’d seen them crying. Some of the girls stood in a huddle by the fountain supporting each other. I envied them be- cause they could cry. They were good. I wasn’t. I was bad. I had never seen the playground so quiet before. Nobody laughed. No one threw chestnuts at me. No one called my name. It was a fine morning. It should have been like that every day. It was just the way I wanted the world to be — slow, quiet, and with no jagged edges. I would much rather have heard crying than laughter. The bell didn’t even ring. Instead we were led down into the gymnasium, which was set up with chairs; the wall bars decorated with branches and flowers.
Just imagine it could look like this every time we had gym,
I thought.
Think if the king could die every night.
First Class 7 sang “Between Buttress and Bluff,” and when finally we sat down I found I wasn’t with my own class but was sitting beside a girl I didn’t know at all. She had a mole on her cheek that shone. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. She moved to an empty seat right at the front and whispered something to a girl who turned around and stared. I thought I needed to go to the bathroom. Then the head teacher made a long speech of which I remember very little except the first sentence:
During the occupation we wrote Haakon the Seventh’s name in the snow.
For I’d discovered that Aslak, Preben and Hamster were sitting right behind me (they were in Fred’s class). They couldn’t do anything to me there. The king was dead. But when the head teacher asked everyone to stand for a moment of silence, Preben whispered, “Isn’t your half brother here?” I didn’t reply. Hamster leaned forward. “Didn’t he have the guts to come today?” Still I didn’t answer. The silence wasn’t up yet. Aslak breathed right in my ear. “The king isn’t everyone’s king,” he whispered. When the minute had passed, the head teacher summoned Aslak to the lectern. I thought he was going to be told off. In fact Aslak was supposed to read a poem. He had been the pupil of the year the previous term, had won the woodworking prize and had come in second in the athletics tournament, right behind Preben. The pupil of the year doesn’t get told off. The pupil of the year reads Nordahl Grieg in a commanding voice.
Toils tired and heavy furrows, in his face are all his own. Yet the pain there is for others. Thus the face of peace must be.
Aslak gave a deep bow, and after we had sung the national anthem we all went to our classrooms. Once there, Knuckles told us to take out our notebooks and draw the king. She herself sat behind her desk, and it looked as if her face was framed by the blackboard. But I couldn’t get out of my head what Aslak had whispered in my ear, even though it was the shiny mole of the girl who’d moved that I’d never forget. I raised my hand. Everyone looked at me. Knuckles gave a nod. “Was the king everyone’s king?” I asked. Knuckles’ smile was sad as she answered. “He was indeed, Barnum. King Haakon was king of the small, the great, the high and the low.” That wasn’t what I had wanted to hear. I wanted to know if he was king of the halves and the wholes as well. But now suddenly everyone had their hands up, and particularly Mouse in the back row, who had both arms in the air — the most eager in the whole class. Knuckles pointed to him. “There’ll still be the game against Sweden even though the king’s dead?” Mouse asked. Knuckles got up, walked between the desks, stopped at Mouse’s desk and twisted his ear around three times. “When the king has died, we do not think of soccer,” Knuckles said. “Our thoughts should be pure and honorable.” She let go of her hold, and Mouse’s ear unwound once more like a propeller, and he all but fell off his chair. After that no one had any more questions. Knuckles wrote in capitals on the blackboard:
All for Norway.
I bent over my notebook and drew a tall man with a crown and a red mantle. Underneath I wrote
King Barnum.
Then the door opened. It was the head teacher. We stood at our desks. The head teacher whispered something to Knuckles, and both of them turned in my direction. I thought Knuckles was a fine name. I wondered if men could be called Knuckles too. She came over to my desk, and I had to go with them. The head teacher went first. And down at the end of the corridor, between the coat pegs, Mom was waiting. She’s like a black paper cutout, seen from far away at the end of the corridor and in her somber attire. She was standing quite still. I started running. I was the only one running today. At last I stopped in front of her, and she crouched down, held my hands and looked straight at me. She had been crying. The skin of her cheeks was streaked. She smelled of perfume strongly and sharply — as if she had tried to sweeten her tears. “There’s been an accident,” Mom whispered. I closed my eyes. Mom laid her cheek against mine. “The Old One is dead, Barnum.” Knuckles put my schoolbag onto my back. I followed Mom out into the playground. It was empty. We were alone there. The drinking fountain was shut off. And right at that moment the cannons on Akershus boomed twenty-one times, and all the church bells in the land rang together. The Old One was dead.

We went down to the Exchange to tell Boletta what had happened. Mom was silent the whole way there. She needed time. And I didn’t dare ask anything else. Perhaps it was best not to know. I knew that the Old One was dead. That was enough. It was my fault. If I hadn’t had all those thoughts about Dad being dead, the Old One would still be alive. I couldn’t cry now either. It was just as if my tears had frozen inside me and couldn’t get out. I held Mom’s hand when we finally stood together in the enormous hall in Tolbu Street. Everyone spoke in low voices. “Hush,” Mom said. But I hadn’t said a thing. We had to climb a wide staircase. Inside another room sat a whole squad of women with apparatus in their ears, pressing buttons in tables full of wires. We couldn’t see Boletta there. A few of them glanced at us before turning away again just as quickly. I got a headache. My tears were flakes of ice whirling around in my head. Mom spoke with a woman who sat at a table leafing through some great tome. When she came back, she was surprised. “Boletta must be eating,” she whispered. We had to descend the same staircase again. In the end we found Boletta in the canteen in the basement. She was standing behind the counter serving coffee. She had a white apron on. When she first realized we were there, she looked away and acted all embarrassed, as if she’d been caught red-handed stealing money from the drawer under the clock. But soon she appeared angry instead, and I thought that she must already know the news that the Old One was dead, since here everything was heard, and I thought that maybe she was angry with the Old One for being dead. “What are you doing here?” Mom asked her in a low voice. Boletta started moving abruptly and roughly. “What am I doing here? What are you doing here?” Now Mom had to say what she’d come to say, but she didn’t give in all the same. “Why aren’t you up at the switchboard?” “Because I’m down here,” Boletta replied tersely, and spilled some coffee. Mom was bewildered and beside herself. “But you’re employed as an operator, not a waitress?” Boletta took hold of Mom’s arm. “I couldn’t operate the switchboard any longer! I began to lose my hearing in my right ear! Satisfied?” But Mom was anything but satisfied. She was irritated, and it was just as if she were talking in her sleep. “And so they sent you down here?” Boletta sighed. “Yes, I’m down here now. At the bottom of the building.” Mom just shook her head. “How long has this being going on?” “For twelve years.” “Twelve years!” Mom exclaimed. Boletta looked down. “Yes, I’ve been working here since the end of the war.” I couldn’t understand that they could talk like this on that day of all days — talk about everything other than what had happened. “And not a word have you spoken to us about this,” Mom hissed. Boletta laid out a series of cups. “I have kept my fall to myself,” she said. I took Mom’s hand. “Aren’t you going to tell her?” I asked. Boletta laid her hand on my head. “It’s the king who’s dead, Barnum.” Mom drew in her breath. “The Old One is dead too, Boletta.” Boletta didn’t start crying. She just dropped the coffee cups onto the floor. They broke, one after the other. Then she tore off her apron and threw it onto the counter. After that we took a taxi up to Ullevål Hospital. We passed through endless corridors that smelled horrible before we finally found Fred. He was sitting on a bed in a room without windows. He stared at us and his eyes were shining brightly, like two spoons. Mom rushed over to him. Fred turned away. Boletta held me back. We stood together in the doorway and watched Mom trying to hug Fred — but he didn’t want to be touched, he pushed her away. Not long after that a doctor arrived and whispered something to Mom, just as the head teacher had to Knuckles. And I had to wait with Fred while Mom and Boletta disappeared with the doctor. I remember Boletta saying something about the Old One having been sent to the basement too, and Mom snapped at her to be quiet. I sat down beside Fred. We sat like that for a long while. The bed was hard and too tall and most likely uncomfortable to lie on. There was a drop of blood on Fred’s jacket, at the bottom of one sleeve. Had Fred been injured too? “Are you bleeding?” I asked him. He didn’t answer. An ambulance approached outside. A nurse rushed past. There was a picture on the gray wall — of someone pulling a net up from the sea. “Why is the Old One dead?” I whispered. But Fred was as silent as before. Fred had begun his long silence. His eyes were the reverse sides of spoons and he stared straight ahead, at the door or at nothing. I wanted to hold his hand. He clenched his fist and buried it in his pocket. I didn’t want to sit there any longer. I jumped down to the floor. Fred didn’t try to stop me. I went out into the corridor again and tried to find Mom and Boletta. The corridors were like the ones at school, except that here there were no pegs to hang coats on. First I ran down some stairs. I heard sounds coming from a room. I peeped in and saw a man crying behind a bouquet. I crept on and came to more stairs, went down those too. It grew colder. I was freezing. I wished Fred had kept me from going. I had to be in the basement now, for there were no more stairs. I couldn’t go any farther down. I continued through the corridor. Long pipes shone in the ceiling. An old man in a white jacket was wheeling a bed in the opposite direction. He hesitated for a second, but let me go on. The bed was covered with a white sheet, and someone lay beneath it. One foot was sticking out. I came to a corner. There were some letters on a wall that I couldn’t understand. Perhaps it was another language. I could speak another language, but only the sounds. Dad had taught them to me:
Mundus vult decipi.
Now I was lost. Perhaps I would never find my way above ground again. I wanted to cry, properly now — the ice melted behind my forehead and flowed toward my eyes. Then I sensed it — another smell, a hint of sweetness — Mom’s perfume. I ran in that direction, the direction of Mom’s perfume, Mom’s smell; and it grew stronger and stronger, as if she were leading me the last part of the way, until at length I came to a standstill outside a wide door that wasn’t shut. I looked in. Mom and Boletta were standing there, one on each side of a table with shiny sides and wheels, and the doctor was leaning against a cabinet right under a light that cast a strong, black shadow over both my shoes. Mom looked up and saw me. I went in to them. The Old One was completely naked. I dared only look at her face. She had a pronounced dent in her forehead. I raised my arm and laid one finger on her lips, and her lips were cold and soft and my fingers sank down into her mouth.