The Half Brother: A Novel (86 page)

When I came out, we saw that Peder’s mother was putting out the lights, and slowly the house fell into darkness. I don’t know why, but I wanted to go into the garage. Vivian held me back. “Don’t,” she told me. I went anyway. She came after me. She was livid and afraid. “What are you doing here?” I didn’t answer her. I didn’t know myself. She let me go and went the other way. I bent under the garage door. I found a switch and a yellow light went on in the corner right at the back. The car was gone. Maybe the police had taken it away. This was no longer a place, it was the scene of a crime. I thought I could smell something dry and pungent. Peder’s mother had displayed her paintings there. They were all along the wall. I glanced at some of them; most were unfinished. Then I caught sight of another painting — the one she must have begun work on that summer we went to Ildjernet and Vivian tried to suck the poison from me. I couldn’t stand any longer. I went down on my knees. She’d written the title on the frame:
Friends on the Rock Ledge.
Its evening beside the fjord and almost everything is blue, but the two boys in the foreground are standing in their own light — it shines around their young brown forms. I recognize us. The fat one and the small one. We are naked. We have our arms around each other. Our lips meet in a kiss and our eyes are closed.

Parasol in Snow

Mom’s knitted a pair of mittens for me with just half fingers, similar to the things Louis Armstrong wore when he played the trumpet at Bislet. It means I can keep my hands warm at the same time as being able to get out goodies and count change. She says I’m wasting my time. She says I ought to find something better to do. But I like it fine here in the unsteady deck chair, and the mittens are grand to write with now that it’s getting chillier, particularly in the mornings. Soon enough the snow'll be here, and the little blower I have by the door isn’t much of a help because of all the draft. I’ve closed the little window and pulled down the curtains. There are neither customers nor bullies around. Not even after winning Norwegian Film’s competition has custom increased. I thought there might be a line in front of Barnum’s kiosk when it became common knowledge that I’d won, but alas no. It doesn’t really bother me. Sausages are ancient history now, but the weeklies come each Tuesday. Some of the brands of chocolate, particularly those designed for the cheering of the spirit, are beginning to grow hard and gray — I figure they’ve been here since the middle of the 1960s.

I get out my notebook and try to make some headway with
The Night Man.
I have this picture of the boy, the skinny boy, running through deserted streets toward the harbor. It’s become fixed in my mind, this image, and I can’t dislodge it — and I see a ship sailing through the fog, so close the boy could just stretch out his hand and touch the hull made ready for the ice.
Antarctic.
But I have nothing more than those few fragments — the boy, the city and the ship — little points in a story bigger than myself (not that that takes a great deal). I’m stuck in the run-up. It’s Fred I’m seeing. He’s the one stretching out his arm to halt the ship. Since Ditlev wrote about him in the paper, Mom’s received letters every other day from people who believe they’ve seen Fred some place or other. I think the whole lot of them have screws loose; they’re just individuals who want a bit of limelight either for themselves or someone else. But they maintain all the same that they’ve seen him — in Times Square in New York, at the market in Montevideo, at Stroget and in Karl Johan, and on the ferry between Moskenes and R0st. And these rumors, as unreliable as they are cocky have given Mom new hope — the most hopeless thing of all. It’s her duty twenty-four hours a day — to wait and hope, to hope and wait — for this is the curse that’s put on the one who waits by the one for whom they wait. “But someone has to be mistaken,” I often say. “What do you mean?” she demands. “Well, he can’t be in each and every place at the same time, can he?” Then Mom just accuses me of being a killjoy and opens yet another letter in which someone writes that they’ve almost certainly seen Fred Nilsen on Mallorca or in Arvika — they can recall that crooked nose and his lean features. Mom gives all the letters to the Salvation Army’s missing persons bureau so they can sort out all the leads. I write in my margin:
To follow a letter. How far backward can one
go? I see before me a forest and there I decide on one tree, this tree’s the one that’s felled. But who cuts it down; who lops off the branches and chops it up? Am I to trace them too? Instead I go quickly to the river, to the timber that’s floating there — the raft of tree trunks like some colossal stick race — and the people there who’re freeing them. I take the tree into the factory just beside the waterfall — or perhaps I’ll make this paper by hand in a family firm, in Italy for instance, in Bellagio, I imagine. And so I’ll follow the finished clear sheet of paper all the way to the shop where it’s bought by a young man. Here I have to make a leap — my first leap — to a deserted, frozen landscape, but before I do that I have to find the springboard and I have to be sure of hitting it. The springboard’s the young man embracing his beloved, a proud and beautiful girl, and going on board the ship that will take him to the land of ice and snow. I see him there sitting in his cabin writing to his beloved — the tree becomes thoughts, thoughts become words, and these words will become pictures. I will have the hand that writes. I will have the pocket in which the letter is placed, and the coat that he doesn’t put on, that’s left hanging on a hook in the cramped cabin when he leaves on his final journey and disappears in a fissure or freezes in the ice that presses him into an everlasting grave. This is good. This is the beginning of a leap, a triple jump. I gulp down a mouthful of brandy. It’s well deserved. The dark spirit sets me alight. And then I’m interrupted, right in the middle of my new run-up. Somebody taps on the window. I decide not to open it. Today Barnum’s kiosk is closed. But the knocking comes again, and harder this time. I don’t let myself be interrupted. I’m just hitting my stride. But when the person thunders on the window for the third time and all but brings down the kiosk, I’ve got no choice but to unfasten the curtain and take a look at this nuisance. An oval face, which is far too brown and half enveloped by sunglasses, is all but filling the window. “Sausage in a roll, please.” “We don’t serve sausages,” I tell him. “Then I’ll have a carton of juice instead.” “I’m afraid they’re all frozen.” “Well, you can surely manage a packet of unfiltered Teddy, can’t you, Tiny?” “You’re an ungrateful customer,” I tell him. “And you’re a diabolical shopkeeper, Barnum Nilsen!” It’s Peder. It’s none other than Peder Miil. He grabs hold of my jacket, hauls me through the kiosk window and we roll over on the sidewalk. We embrace each other, almost as in the old days, and a wild joy floods my heart. At last Peder’s come back. We get up and brush the dust from ourselves. “You’ve put on weight,” I remark. Peder gives his usual bellow of a laugh. “And you’ve grown even smaller!” We stand there silent a moment, there in Church Road on a Sunday at the end of November, and we try to find that harmony — we search for it and know that nothing is the same any more. We see that we’ve both changed. Peder’s wearing a thin blue shirt and a blazer. I lay my hand on his arm. “Just hellish, the whole thing with your Dad.” He takes off his sunglasses and looks at me. “What have you done to your eye?” he asks. I don’t mention his father again, not before he himself does. “Now we’ll go home to Vivian,” I say instead. I put my mittens in the till and close the kiosk for the day. We’re silent right until we stand together outside the door in Boltel0kka. Peder looks at the plate, the shining bronze plate bearing our names, vivian and barnum. “What was it I said?” he mused. “What was it you said?” “That it would be you two, right?” I unlock the door. Vivian’s standing by the window, facing away. We sneak in and stand still. “Is that you home already?” she asks. We talk like some old married couple. We’ve lifted the dialogue from a film with Jean Gabin. “Very quiet,” I answer. “And you’re sober too?” Peder looks at me again. I change my repertoire. “Guess who’s coming to dinner?” I ask her quickly. Vivian’s changed too. It’s something to do with her posture. She’s round-shouldered, her neck is all hunched — it’s as though she’s lost something and is having to bend over to look for it. I’ve often thought that it’s being with me that’s made her that way; she’s trying to sink down to my level — perhaps that’s also a kind of love. And I think to myself that it should really be the other way around, it should be a case of me stretching up to her height. “Fred,” she says all at once. I stand there frozen. “What?” “Is it Fred who’s coming to dinner?” I laugh loudly. Peder takes off his sunglasses. “Hullo, my accident,” he says. Vivian turns around and her back straightens, she lets her shoulders sink and she lifts her neck — and in the moment she realizes that it’s Peder, she becomes herself again. The years in between are rubbed away and time is joined up. I can see it, and it makes me happy and bewildered. “Hi, Fatty,” she says. Peder laughs and pulls out his handkerchief to polish his sunglasses. “Fine nameplate you have there, Vivian.” She takes him in, meticulously, as if to assure herself it really is him, Peder Miil, the fat one. “When did you come?” she asks. “A week ago.” “Have you been here a whole week?” I roar. Peder doesn’t take his eyes off Vivian. “There were a couple of things I had to sort out,” he says. Then finally Vivian rushes over to him, and they hug each other long and hard, and one of them’s crying. It’s Vivian. Peder once said that we were together with her, both of us. Now we are again. I go out to the kitchen to get some beer.

When we woke up, Vivian had left. There was a bottle on the bedside table. I had a drink from it and passed it to Peder. “Lauren Bacall’s still looking down at us,” he said. He pointed to the picture on the wall. It was hanging crooked that day. “I thought it was Vivian’s mother,” I said. “Me too,” Peder laughed. He put the bottle down on the floor. “Are you being good to Vivian?” he asked out of the blue. “What do you mean?” “You know perfectly well what I mean, Barnum.” “No, I don’t.” And I felt the angst growing inside, the heavy engine that drives you down to the depths — the submarine inside your soul. Peder went quiet. I noticed it had started snowing. I’d forgotten to take in the parasol from the balcony. And the sight of that blue parasol, amid the thick flakes of snow falling to make a slushy rim on the railing, still casts a shadow of sorrow and — bizarrely enough — joy, too, when the seconds shine too bright and blind me. “Did I do anything yesterday?” I murmured. “Nothing much other than drink and laugh.” I let out my breath. “Why do you ask then?” “I saw the blackness in her eyes,” Peder said. Perhaps it took someone else to see it, someone who’d been away long enough. “I can’t make a baby,” I told him. Peder lay there silent a time. He didn’t say any more about it. Instead he lay over me. “Do you still dream, Barnum?” “I dream the whole time, you blockhead!” But Peder wasn’t satisfied. “Do you dream in plus, though?” He laughed and pulled my arms backward. I tried to break free of his grasp. “Did you become commercial in America?” I shouted at him. Peder suddenly let me go. “I’m going to show you something,” he told me.

We finished the bottle, I went to get my scripts, and we went out. There were already ridges of snow left by the plow, and still the flakes kept falling. I must remember to take that parasol in. It couldn’t stay out on the balcony. Peder looked like an immigrant worker in his thin blue shirt, open at the neck — the type that hasn’t the foggiest what real cold is and needs a whole winter to learn what shivering means. We got a taxi in Therese Street and took it down to Solli Square. Our tree had white branches, as if it had become an albino since we saw it last. But it wasn’t the tree Peder had wanted to show me. It was his father’s shop. Above the door was no longer miil’s stamps — bought and sold. Now there were new words etched in sharp-edged plastic: miil and barnum. I wanted to ask what the meaning of all this really was, but Peder unlocked the door and shoved me inside. There wasn’t a stamp to be seen. The drawers and cabinets were empty Everything was gone, even the unmistakable odor of paper and gum. Instead there was new furniture, a desk, a filing cabinet, a sofa and an office chair. “What do you think?” Peder asked me. I turned to him. “What’s happened to everything?” “Sold, of course.” “You just came home and sold everything your father had here?” Peder lifted his hand, brushed it over his lips — self-conscious for a moment. There was a tremor in his voice. “Have you grown sentimental, Barnum?” “No,” I said. I saw the smile beginning on his lips. Nothing with Peder lasted for any length of time. “Did you think I was going to count perforated edges the rest of my days?” I sat down on the office chair. It had a headrest, padding, wheels, and could swivel around. It made me think of Tati,
Playtime
— doors that are soundless when you slam them behind you. “What’s my name doing on that sign out there?” I asked. Peder sighed. “Have you forgotten everything we talked about?” I got up and grabbed hold of his shirt. I think I tore off one of his buttons. “I haven’t forgotten there wasn’t so much as a word out of you,” I hissed. Peder shoved me down again. “That’s your chair, Barnum,” he said. I looked up. “What?” And Peder whirled me around at lightning speed — I had to clutch the armrests and became really dizzy. I screeched and Peder roared with laughter, and finally the chair came to a standstill — it was a bit like spinning a bottle, me being the bottle. Peder bent down. “Dreams and mathematics, Barnum. You’re the dreamer, and I’m going to work out how much they cost.” I closed my eyes and shook my head. Peder put his hands on my shoulders. “We’re going to make films, Barnum. You’ll do the writing. I’ll sell them.” “And Vivian’ll do the makeup!” I shouted. Peder went to get a clipping from the papers in the filing cabinet. It was Bente Synt’s article.
“New fare in Norwegian film”
he read aloud. He looked at me, and that smile, which was Peder’s and Peder’s alone, finally lit up his face. “I’m so proud of you, Barnum,” he said. “Thank you,” I breathed, and had to have a spin on the chair. “You know what I almost did when I read this on the plane coming over?” “Tell me, Peder, tell me.” “I almost went through to the cockpit to shout to them that Barnum Nilsen was my best friend!” I laughed. “You should have hijacked the whole plane!” I exclaimed. Peder went on reading.
“And Barnum Nilsen’s vote of thanks will go down in history as the briefest and oddest we’ve ever heard.”
Peder looked up again. “It just slipped out,” I told him. But Peder shook his head. “To hell with you. Just perfect, Barnum. Now they’ll never forget you.” He folded up the clipping and put it back in the cabinet. I didn’t quite know if I liked what he’d said. I’d rather people forget it. But I didn’t feel like arguing. I was thirsty and got up. “Have you sold the fridge too?” I asked him. Peder flipped through a wad of notes and counted them. “Did you bring the script?” I put “Fattening” down on the table. Peder gave me three notes. “You go off to the ‘pole’ while I read this,” he said. I stood there, for a moment amazed, almost annoyed, with Peder’s money in my hand. What was he thinking? He sat down on the sofa and began going through the script. I went out into the snow to the “pole” in Drammen Road. I wanted red wine and had to show identification. I always have it on me. There are age restrictions all over the place. The shop assistant looked at it long and hard, held it up to the light, and got out colleagues to hear what they had to say about the worn and tattered document, with a picture of me taken at the passport booth at the West End Station where the seat’s highest. It’s as if I no longer correspond with myself; a transition has taken place — I create uncertainty, but not the kind Dad meant, rather a
real
uncertainty that makes people believe everything. My doubt is impure, a clamp around the foot. They began to laugh behind the counter. I should have left, turned around and left and slammed the door behind me. I waited. I was thirsty. Finally I got my card back together with my bag of bottles. The assistant hesitated one final moment when he saw my eyelid droop. I hurried out. I was on the point of kicking the door but checked myself and held it open instead for one of the neighborhood’s old ladies coming in with all her empties rolled up in newspaper. I closed the door quietly after her, because I’d more than likely return here many times in the future. I had a beer in Le Coq d’or. Peder was a slow reader. I left my identification lying on the counter. The bartender made a joke of it. “I see you’re afraid you’ll forget who you are,” he said. “I’m afraid of not getting any beer,” I said. I had another and went back to the shop. I stood outside looking at the new sign, miil & barnum. There was something wrong, something that grated — it reminded me of an ad for honey or some bad poem. “You’re still dreaming in minus,” he said. I opened a bottle of red wine. “Didn’t you like it?” I asked him. Peder got up and began a long, drawn-out speech, all the while lifting his chubby hands as if he were pumping out the words. I managed to drink almost a whole bottle. And this is the gist of what he said. “Did I like it? Sure I liked it. I don’t just like it, I love it. But has that got anything to do with it? Has it? Answer, no. What
does
is that there’s nobody who could be bothered to go and see it at the movie theater. ‘Fattening’ indeed! There’s nothing but minus here. Every single person in the story’s in the red. All they do, each and every action, only increases their debt. The mother, the school doctor, the farmer and his wife and even the projectionist himself — you put the whole bunch of them out of business. You have to make a profit, Barnum. That’s what the public wants. When they go out of that theater, they want to take some- thing away with them! They want to be full, not empty! Right?” Peder stopped, drew breath, and looked at me. “Now I know what’s wrong,” I told him. “Good!” he exclaimed. “My name should come first.” Peder was bewildered for a minute. “What are you talking about?” “Barnum & Miil,” I said. “Sounds much better.” Peder let his hands drop and grinned. “That can be fixed.” He made a call, talked briefly to someone or other, put down the receiver and turned back to me. “It’s as good as done,” he said. He sat down. I have no idea whom he phoned, but I was impressed. “Do you have any more?” he asked. I sloshed some more liquor into his glass. Peder laughed. “I mean
material,
Barnum.” I shut my eyes. Was I destroying my ideas now and using them up? How little should I reveal and how much should I keep to myself? And it struck me that I was halfway in regard to almost everything — my face, my height, my thoughts — I was a half person. The only thing that was whole was my halfness. “The swimming pool.” Peder leaned closer. “The swimming pool?” “That’s the title. The swimming pool.” Peder lifted his mug and set it down again. “Miil wants more,” he said. I gave him more. I gave away my story. This is how I did it. “I imagine two laborers who build swimming pools in the gardens of the rich. They dig, they build, they lay tiles — in short, they work around the clock to finish these luxurious swimming pools for the capitalists. And as they work parties go on in the gardens — the men in dinner jackets and the women in long dresses — they walk along the poolsides with drinks and canapes. But no water ever goes into the swimming pools. When autumn comes around, they’re just as empty, full of leaves and rain. Like great tombs.” I had some more to drink and glanced at Peder. He had a rather lost expression on his face. His brow was furrowed. “Is that all that happens?” he asked. “Do you think there should be more?” “Yes, I do, Barnum. Nothing really happens. Except for the building of the swimming pools.” “The pools a metaphor,” I explained. “It never has water.” Peder sighed. “That’s what I mean. They never have water.” “But that’s the whole idea,” I went on. “The idea?” “The metaphor. That they build swimming pools without water.” “Do the laborers do it deliberately, or is it a kind of sabotage?” “I haven’t considered that.” Peder grew impatient. “Then you have to explain the whole thing to me in more detail. Take your time.” “There’s nothing to explain.” “There’s a great deal to explain, Barnum.” “Life is an empty swimming pool.” Peder’s sigh was more profound than before. “Is it my fault or yours that I feel like a total idiot at this moment?” “What do you mean?” “Do you want your audience to feel like fools, Barnum?” “Absolutely not.” “We could send it to the television drama department.” A van stopped outside. Two men in overalls with reflectors around their legs put up a ladder against the window. Peder got up, opened the door and gave some instructions. Then he came back. I opened a new bottle and filled our mugs. Peder said cheers. “You remember what Dad used to call a hangover?” he suddenly asked. “Postal surcharge,” I said. Peder gave a laugh. “Too few stamps on the celebration,” he said. And I saw the tremor in his eyes. He had to look down. “Thank you both for being there for Mom,” he murmured. “That was the least we could do, Peder.” “I feel so ashamed, Barnum.” “Why?” “I couldn’t manage to come back for the funeral. I’m a coward.” He looked up. “I was so damned angry when she told me what he’d done.” “Angry?” “I don’t understand it. Him taking his own life. And I hate everything I don’t understand.” Peder bent forward once more. “To hell with him,” he breathed. “To hell with him.” I had the urge to tell Peder about
The Night Man,
of the first scenes in
The Night Man
and my great plans. But he got in before me. “There’s another thing too,” he said. He had a swig of his drink and looked at me. “I haven’t taken a single exam.” “What have you done then?” “Been on the beach.” “Well, you’ve certainly gotten extremely brown,” I told him. Peder got up abruptly. “Aren’t you listening to what I’m saying? I’m nothing. Absolutely nothing.” “Don’t boast,” I said. Peder stood there, silent and bewildered — his shirt hanging out of his pants, his brow drenched in sweat, his hands twitching. “Now you know what kind of person you’re dealing with,” he murmured. “How many letters are there in our names?” I breathed. “Ten,” Peder replied, tired. I got up too and took hold of his hand. “That’ll do,” I tell him. And he leaned his head against my shoulder.