The Half Brother: A Novel (55 page)

Funeral

There weren’t many at Dads funeral. It was a Saturday, and it was raining. We sat in the front pew. Esther from the kiosk was there. So was the caretaker, Bang, who’d found an unoccupied seat away over by the pillars, together with Arnesen and his wife, Mrs. Arnesen, the manic pianist. She was wearing an enormous fur, even though it was now June. There really weren’t any others there when the bells began to ring, except for a few ancient ladies we didn’t know but who tended to turn up for funerals to practice before their own turn came. No one from the far North appeared either. Most of them were dead too. Dad’s coffin was black. I sat between Fred and Boletta. Mom held Fred’s hand. It was raining that day. I looked down. There were dark pools around my shoes, my shiny dancing shoes. A caterpillar wriggled along the sole of my right shoe and out across the floor toward the flowers that were lying there. It made its way there, over the silk ribbon tied around the stalks of the flowers, from friends in the building. I couldn’t take my eyes off it, that caterpillar there in the Western Crematorium; and maybe I gave a laugh, because Boletta nudged me hard in the ribs. The vicar had to shake hands with us. It was a completely different vicar, who came across as just as nervous as ourselves. For in his brief will, Dad had written in tablets of stone that the Majorstuen vicar, who’d refused to baptize both Fred and myself, should under no circumstances have anything whatsoever to do with the Nilsen family, whether it concerned marriage, communion, baptism, confirmation or burial. Perhaps Dad had been ready just the same, ready for death, because he’d written his will, his last wish list, his testimony — the words from the Bible and the laughter. The vicar dropped my hand and patted my cheek. His fingers were dry. Then he went up into the pulpit. I couldn’t see the caterpillar any more. The vicar spoke about Dad. I looked for the caterpillar. But it was gone. And when I turned around, because perhaps it had crawled down the aisle, I saw Peder and Vivian sitting quietly in the rear pew. Peder raised one hand a fraction and slowly shook his head. Vivian waved too, and I think she blushed. I felt so happy. My friends were there. Dad had died and my friends had come to the funeral, and it didn’t matter they were late. I wanted to run down to them. Boletta held me back. The vicar said that Dad had been a generous person. He’d brought with him a broader horizon from his islands on the edge of the world in the North. Mom wept. I closed my eyes. Fred leaned toward his knees. Boletta got out a handkerchief. Then the vicar said something strange. He talked about the cormorants, the black birds out there on the coast that shit on the stacks and the buttresses to find their way back — white road signs of shit. I opened my eyes. The vicar smiled, but then remembered himself, and turned instead toward the coffin in which Dad lay. He had stood on the ocean floor. He had been skin-dead. He’d lain under the big top. Now there was no way back. I dreaded singing. The vicar had said his piece. The organist began playing. I looked through the little order of service booklet where Dad’s name was inscribed in flowing curves, together with his dates and the hymns we were to sing. “God is God.” We coughed. We waited. Shoes scraped between pews. The raindrops we’d brought in with us. The umbrellas that slid down beside the pews. The painful sorrow. The thin voices.
God is God though every man.
The vicar tried to rouse our enthusiasm, but his own voice didn’t carry very far either — it was as dry and flat as paper.
God is God though every man.
We were a pretty feeble choir. I thought I could hear Peder belting it out, and he was hardly choirboy of the year. I wanted to laugh again. But there was another voice that overpowered our own — a dark and powerful and strange voice that suddenly lifted the whole crematorium, and carried the psalm, loud and proud.
God is God though every man were dead.
I turned around; Mom and Boletta too — even Fred had to look, and the vicar himself stared in silence toward the door. And there, midway between the shadow and the light, the stained glass and the rain, stood an old thin figure, clad in a long black coat. He held a hat in his hands, and his hair was white, as white as the beard that tumbled over his mouth and buried it. So it seemed as if the hymn he sang rose out of his whole self; he lifted it in his hands and sang with his entire frame.
God is God though every land laid waste.
We let him finish it alone to the very last verse; he was a whole male choir in himself. I never heard silence akin to that which fell thereafter. Just the rain on the roof. Just the almost imperceptible rustling of the flowers and the dust falling from the petals. Just the last sighs of the organ pipes. And the next thing I remember, after Dads coffin had sunk down into the floor forever, was our standing on the steps outside the crematorium, and a little line of people forming to offer their condolences. That strange and foreign-sounding word which is so good to have when we don’t know what to say.
Our condolences
— the words we can mumble, whisper or sob;
our condolences
— like a formula, the polite language of sorrow, when we have no other language to take refuge in other than noise or silence, for constraint is always stronger than sorrow.
Our condolences,
said Arnesen;
our condolences,
the caretaker said once more;
my condolences,
whispered Esther from the kiosk;
our condolences,
said the old ladies we didn’t know and who cried more than anyone else. Fred went over to the fence by the railway line and lit a cigarette. It had stopped raining. Fred dropped his match on the ground and didn’t take his eyes off us. It was Peder and Vivian’s turn in the line and they shook hands with Mom, awkward as at Svae’s classes in their dark and unfamiliar garments, and turned to me instead and took my hand too. “My condolences,” Peder said. “Thank you,” I said. “My condolences,” Vivian said. “I’m grateful,” I said. But the one we were all waiting for was the tall, thin man with the mustache, the singer, the one nobody recognized. He came forward, gave a deep bow, stood tall and looked straight at Mom. “No one may cheat death, Mrs. Nilsen. Death is the great director.” It was odd, his voice was different now and bore no resemblance to the voice that had sung. This voice was frail, and seemed to break at every second word — it was a voice on crutches. But his gaze was utterly confident when he finally stood tall; his eyes were bolted fast in his drawn face, and his beard hung like a hedge beneath his nose. He gripped Boletta’s hand too. “I have had many names, but Arnold Nilsen knew me best as Mundus.” First of all the old priest had sung that hymn to rouse Dad from the dead, then Dad himself sang it as he rowed over Moskenes, and now Mundus the circus master had sung it at Dad’s funeral, once he was dead for real.
God is God.
And just at that moment we heard a violent bang from down in the parking lot, and before I had any idea of the cause, Peder had hid his face in his hands and begun groaning like a dog. Of course it was his father. He clambered out of the ramshackle Vauxhall and ran up in our direction, a bouquet under his arm, but slowed his pace by and by, until he came to a standstill in front of Mom and could draw breath. “My sincere apologies,” he said. “That ridiculous vehicle quit on me at Solli Square and I didn’t manage to pick up Peder and Vivian in time.” Peder closed his eyes and gazed heavenward. Vivian was about to laugh herself silly. Fred came closer. Peder’s dad gave his flowers to Mom and suddenly became formal. “I am Peder Mill’s father. Your husband made a strong impression on me.” Mom looked at him in amazement. And she smiled. She smiled to one and all, and it struck me that I had no memory of seeing her thus —
happy
— that’s the word I have to use to describe her at that moment, happy on the steps of the Western Crematorium. I had to search her face to be sure I was seeing right, that it wasn’t a grimace rather than a smile, a mask. But I hadn’t imagined it, this was her genuine expression, and I don’t quite know why but I felt ashamed of her. Suddenly Fred went over to Vivian. “Do you have a light?” he asked. Vivian quickly shook her head and moved away. That was what I should have paid attention to; it was this I should have been watching and been aware of right at that moment; Vivian shaking her head and backing off, and Fred taking another step toward her, a caterpillar held between two fingers, before stopping, going off in the other direction, past the station and over the tramlines. Instead I look at Mom. She was standing between Peder’s dad and the man who called himself Mundus. She raised her hand and spoke. “It would be an honor,” she said in a strong voice, “if you would join us at the Grand to remember my late husband.”

We took two taxis to Karl Johan, since Peder’s dad left the Vauxhall behind, not wanting to risk it breaking down again. And he’s probably the only one ever to have been fined and had his car towed away from the Western Crematorium parking lot, as if the deceased had driven to their own funeral and left their car there for eternity. And so finally we got to the Grand and were given the largest window table there was; and those who went by outside that afternoon, that first Saturday in June, might have imagined we were celebrating something — a particular anniversary or what- ever — as the clouds parted and the sun shone on the dark, wet street. They might have imagined we were having a party at the Grand, and I was aware of such a feeling of loneliness and bewilderment, there where I was sitting between Peder and Vivian. For we don’t know any more about one another than that which we can see; we stand with a magnifying glass in the middle of the Milky Way. And what we see isn’t real either; we know absolutely nothing, we are divided and alone, we stand outside, we are but impatient onlookers, and we know less still about our own selves. Waiters came thick and fast with cake and coffee and liqueurs, and the gracious headwaiter buzzed about us. Boletta had chilled bottled beer, the caretaker ate with two forks, Arnesen smoked cigars, Mundus wiped his beard with the whole of his napkin and poured his liqueur into his coffee, Peder’s dad polished his glasses, Esther had one more liqueur, and Fred wasn’t there. And Mom, she was in such a bustle, so out of it, on the edge either of a nervous breakdown or the greatest joy — and suddenly I understood and felt a sense of peace, for we weren’t totally lonely after all. This was her one and only chance to hold a party for Arnold Nilsen, the last party and perhaps the best — and Mom was at the very heart of it, undisturbed and unchallenged. The wake had been transformed into a banquet at that window table in the Grand. Peder leaned toward me. “What happened to Fred?” His dad told him to be quiet because the man called Mundus had gotten to his feet and was going to say something, make a speech. And it was as though stillness fell over the whole dining room and everyone wanted to listen to the words of this strange, thin man. This is what he said. “My thanks for the kind welcome extended to me here today. I hope that Arnold Nilsen felt something of the same when he came to me so many years ago. He came to me like a little angel.” Mom began crying once more, and Mundus laid his hand gently on her shoulder. “I bring greetings from all those in the circus — the world’s tallest man, the Chocolate Girl, the seamstresses, the clowns and the musicians — from one and all I pass on greetings to Arnold Nilsen, even though the majority died a long while ago and my circus is dead and nothing more than a dusty memory blown to the four winds.” Suddenly he chuckled quietly at his own words. Black — that was how Dad had described his laughter. I listened. Dad was right, it
was
black — his laughter shone like black marble. And all at once Mundus turned to me. “You’re like your father,” he said. I bowed my head. I didn’t want to be like Dad. I didn’t want to resemble anyone, least of all him. “What’s your name?” I looked up once more. “Barnum,” I breathed. Mundus smiled a long while. “Yes, Barnum. Could indeed your name have been anything else.” He wiped a tear from both eyes, and when he’d done that he shifted his gaze to Peder. “And you are Barnum’s brother?” Peder all but laughed out loud, and just managed to hold himself in check. “No, I’m just Peder. Peder Miil. Barnum’s friend.” Mundus looked at Mom once more. “Hadn’t Arnold Nilsen two sons?” he asked. There was utter stillness around the table. There wasn’t a sound in the whole place. The headwaiter stood frozen to stone in the middle of the floor, a bill in his hand; the waiters had stopped in their tracks with trays and menus. And it seemed as if it was only now that Mom felt Fred’s absence; her face fell, in the way that silk and leaves do, and she stared at me. “Where is Fred?” “Roaming,” I whispered. Mundus remained standing. Disquiet had come into our midst that couldn’t be hidden. He broke the silence that had settled once more. “Arnold Nilsen used to carry my luggage, my most precious suitcase. I lost sight of him. But I never forgot him.” Mundus bowed and left the table. We first thought he was going to the bathroom, or fetching something from the cloakroom. But immediately afterward we saw him going past outside on Karl Johan, the man who called himself Mundus. And he didn’t turn around; he crossed over the street and disappeared from sight. None of us heard from him again, and later we sometimes thought he was just someone we’d dreamed up who didn’t exist at all, that he was somebody we’d just told each other about. “I’ll be damned,” Peder whispers. And the headwaiter comes to our table with the bill. The magic’s gone. It’s a wake and not a banquet. We’re in the wrong place. There we are on show in our awkward grief. People outside on the sidewalk look in at us and laugh, point at us and laugh. Mom gets up, pale and dizzy, and we follow her. We leave the table. And in the cloakroom she makes her way up to Peder’s dad and asks, “Did you know my husband?” He clears his throat. “I met him on just the one occasion. As I said before, he made a strong impression on me.” Mom is startled. “Where did you meet him?” “He came to my shop. He wanted to sell an un- usual letter from Greenland.” Boletta sighs deeply — it’s more a groan than anything else — and has to lean against the counter for support. The cloakroom attendant thinks for a moment she’s going to faint and holds her up, but Boletta fights him off with an umbrella. “Do you by any chance still have this letter?” she asks calmly Peder’s father shakes his head. “No, it was immediately sold abroad. A lot of interest in it.” Mom smiles. She tries to smile. “Well, that was interesting,” she says. “Thank you. Thank you all.”