The Half Brother: A Novel (88 page)

Suede

Where the loft window once was there’s now a great wide window with a view to the darkness and the skies. I wonder to myself if the glass would hold if the snow were to fall really heavily over a long period. The wall housing the chimney and the coal shaft has been whitewashed. The floor has been sanded; it’s as if the planks are springy when I walk across them, and they’ve been given a beautiful, pale varnish that has the effect of making the place feel bigger than I remember it. But maybe that’s because it’s still empty for no one’s moved in yet — this still hasn’t
become
somewhere. There’s an open kitchen area, and the two storerooms to the side have been converted into a bedroom and a bathroom respectively. I know already I could never live here.

Then I hear someone coming up the stairs. I turn around. Mom stops and stands there under the clotheslines. That’s how I see her. I mingle these pictures that time develops at one and the same time; Mom has stopped under the clotheslines that hang in slack loops in the light, attached to the walls by rusty hooks. And if she stretches just a bit she can reach the clothespins and bring down a garment that’s been forgotten there — a flowery dress — as a dove sits cooing up on one of the beams. I almost say something, but at the last moment don’t. There’s something about her, something else — a calm that chills me. “It’s over,” Mom says. “Over? What do you mean?” “Fred,” she murmurs. Rain patters on the angled window. I could never manage to sleep in these rooms. I go nearer her. It amazes me that I feel neither joy nor sorrow — I’m not even afraid. It’s as if Mom’s dark tranquillity has become my own. But when I speak, my voice suddenly breaks. “Have they found him?” I ask. Mom shakes her head. “They’ve found some of his clothes.” “His clothes?” “Do you remember his old suede jacket?” I nod. I once got to borrow it when he made me go with him to the graveyard, and it was far too big for me. “They found it in Copenhagen. In Nyhavn. It was hanging over the railings on one of the bridges.” Mom smiles. “Wasn’t it a good thing I sewed those nametags on your clothes.” she says. “Yes, Mom.” And I realize, after she’s uttered those words, that she’s given up. That’s the way of it. She can’t endure the waiting any longer. She can’t hope any more. She wants to rest. We won’t call him missing now, we’ll give him a new name — dead. It’s as though she’s actually relieved. “They’ve dragged the canals, but they haven’t found him,” she breathes. “The current’s probably taken him miles away.” She comes another step closer. The floor trembles. I try to meet her gaze but can’t. “It could have been someone else who was wearing his jacket,” I point out. Mom smiles again and hands me a sheet of paper on which something’s written. It’s the last paragraph from the Greenland letter, and for a moment there’s a flicker of victory — he found the letter in the end, his journey wasn’t in vain. But then I recognize Fred’s own handwriting and his twisted letters. He’d just learned the words by heart in the same way I had, in his own distorted way. But the very last sentence was missing. “It was in his pocket,” Mom says. We stand there silent for a moment, as if we’ve reached a kind of consensus. Up here, in the place that once was the drying loft and where everything began, Mom now says that it’s over. She takes back the sheet of paper from me. “I want you to give the eulogy, Barnum.” I have to meet her gaze now. Her eyes are clear and dark. I don’t like what I see there. “Eulogy? Where?” “At the memorial service for Fred,” she says.

Later I go back to Boltel0kka. All the shelves, drawers and closets are empty. The wastepaper baskets are ranged along the sides of the walls. The photograph of the woman we thought was Lauren Bacall has left behind a pale, faded square on the wallpaper. I try to work on
The Night Man,
but the images are frozen. Where is Fred’s jacket now? That was something I forgot to ask Mom. Instead I drink until Vivian comes back home. I don’t know where she’s been. Nor do I ask her. She lies down beside me in the darkness. I can hear that she isn’t sleeping. It’s at that moment she says it. “I’m going to have a baby,” she whispers. And I can sense that we’re each in our own lie, the one bigger than the other and catching the other as with some soundless clockwork device. It’s infuriating and it’s shameful, and I have no idea what I will do with all this loneliness. I turn around slowly to Vivian and cautiously place my hand on her stom- ach, afraid to damage anything. A tremor passes through the thin and almost luminous skin, as if something is already alive inside. She sits over me. I can’t see her face. I cry. She bends down, almost to my mouth, and takes her hand through my hair, over and over again as she softly rocks from side to side. “Don’t cry,” she whispers. “Don’t cry now, Barnum.” And this consolation (the only honest thing that night) is in danger of upsetting the equilibrium of our clockwork lies and giving our game away. “Fred’s dead,” I tell her. Vivian slides off me, pushes me forcibly away and pulls me close in one single, trembling movement. Her voice barely makes any sound whatsoever. “Dead? Is Fred dead?” “They found his jacket in Copenhagen. They figured he drowned in one of the canals.” “But they haven’t found him?” “No,” I breathe. Vivian lets go of her hold of me. I put on the light. She hides her face in her hands. The room is white, it’s a room that’s in the process of being abandoned. It’s like us. I close my eyes. I don’t want to see this. “I want him,” Vivian suddenly says, and there’s something resolute, almost fierce, about her voice, as if I had contradicted her. At first I don’t know what she means. My one eyelid hangs there like a thin, sticky bandage. Then I get the message. “Him? You know it’s going to be a boy?” Vivian turns away. “I’m three months pregnant,” she whispers. I put on a shirt and sit outside on the balcony, in seat 18, at the end. I see nothing. Everything’s one. It amazes me that the city’s so still, as if we’re the only ones there that night, paralyzed. Is doubt a kind of lie too? I drink what’s left over. I always do. What was Fred doing in Copenhagen, if he was actually there at all? Was he on his way home? Was he going to K0ge, or did he just want to see the musk oxen in the zoo? And I try to imagine him in my mind, the way he now must look, so many years older — soon middle-aged. But I can’t; I can’t imagine him any other way than as I remember him on that last morning in the Church Road kitchen, when he left for good, barely twenty years of age. That’s the only way I can picture him — the thin, young Fred I once knew, tossing his old suede jacket on a Nyhavn bridge and going over to the darkness on the other side. “Do you think he’s dead?” Vivian stands by the door and the living room light frames her in silver. I believe I can see a slight curve over her stomach, or maybe it’s just something I imagine now that I know she’s having the child I couldn’t give her. We protect each other with lies. She’s cold and puts her hands on her shoulders. Her arms form a cross. She asks the question a second time, and her lips tremble around the words. “Do you think Fred is dead, Barnum?” “Mom wants to hold a memorial service for him,” I tell her. Vivian looks at me; it’s as though she’s standing in a shining hole in the darkness, at the bottom of a well of light. “Get her to leave it be,” she whispers.

But Mom’s mind wasn’t going to be changed. I tried for long enough to dissuade her, but nothing would do it. She’d made up her mind, once and for all. Waiting had drained her, and at last she had something she could focus on. And she did so with a zeal and a pride — almost an enthusiasm — I could barely remember having seen in her before, and it scared the life out of me. She told the Salvation Army’s missing persons bureau it was no longer necessary to go on looking for Fred. The search was over. She ordered flowers and wreaths. She put an announcement in
Aftenposten.
She had the hymns we’d sing printed. And she cleared away his things from our room. I stood leaning against the door frame, and it was a weird sight. My half of the room had been empty long enough — only the bed frame remained. Now Fred’s half went too, so that in a way the room became whole again — equally stripped, equally empty. Mom put away everything in the closet and turned to me, smiling, her face shining — almost young again, and beautiful. She’d rid herself of the suffocating mask that belongs to the one who waits, and she was free. It was like an intoxication, an even more powerful intoxication, and I was counting down to the moment of complete collapse. This couldn’t last. I went in to Boletta and roused her. “Can’t you make Mom stop all this?” I murmured. Boletta shook her head, almost imperceptibly. “Maybe she feels she owes him this,” she said. “Owes him? What do you mean?” Boletta got up from the divan. “Fred wasn’t planned, Barnum.” Mom was calling from the hall, impatiently and emphatically. “Are you coming?” Quickly I took hold of Boletta’s hand. “Do you think he’s dead?” Boletta looked up. “Fred’s roamed long enough now,” she said. Mom called again, and I had to join her. “Where are we going?” I asked. But she didn’t have time to reply, and when we got out onto the sidewalk we met Peder and Vivian. Mom put her arms around Vivian and kissed her on both cheeks. Vivian whispered something to her I couldn’t hear. I looked at Peder. I couldn’t see any difference. “Vivian’s going to show me the loft conversion,” he said. He turned quickly toward Mom. “What can I say?” he murmured. “My condolences.” Mom kissed him too. “Thank you, Peder. You know all about losing someone.” It was only then he became self-conscious and fumbled a good deal with the umbrella he mainly used as a stick. “Yes,” he said quietly. “I do know.” Mom sighed. “It’s good it’s over.” Then we stood there in silence for a bit, at the corner of Church Road and G0rbitz Street, in the frail cold rain that often falls in Oslo late in September. A number of fine, shining drops ran down Vivians brow, and she let them fall, down onto her eyebrows and eventually to her mouth — then she licked them away, and when I met her gaze it was as though she was standing on the other side of the rain, behind a trellis of water. I couldn’t reach her. Finally Peder opened his black umbrella, and it was sufficiently large to cover all four of us. “Are you coming too?” he asked. Mom didn’t have time to answer that either. Vivian and Peder went into the yard, and we continued on our way toward Majorstuen. I could only just manage to keep up with Mom. She turned around. “Is Vivian ill, Barnum?” “Ill, no. What do you mean?” But she didn’t answer. She’d already forgotten her own question. We passed the kiosk that was shut up now; several bits of wood had been pulled away and someone had scrawled on the little window in red letters:
Occupied!
Mom didn’t pay the slightest heed to it. She only walked the faster. We were going to Majorstuen police station.

We had to wait for three quarters of an hour. It became apparent that Mom had handed in the sheet that was in Fred’s jacket pocket to an officer for his opinion, and perhaps it would be possible to obtain fingerprints too — whatever their use was now. I began to feel tired. Mom was even more alert than before. Then we were shown into an office. An older uniformed man with thin gray hair pressed down flat on his head by his hat, and with a groove-like ring around his head that was also a result of the hat, was sitting behind a desk. In front of him was a cake with a single candle on it. Mom shook hands with him, and we sat down. The officer appeared rather lost in his own world. He inadvertently licked the cream from his finger, and went pink when he realized what he’d just done. “Have you had a chance to have a look at it?” Mom asked him. The officer drew his finger through his thin beard, pulled out a drawer and took out a plastic folder containing the sheet. “Are these his own words or ones he could have read somewhere else?” he asked. “It’s the last part of a letter sent from Greenland by my grandfather to my grandmother,” she told him. But she didn’t make mention of the fact that the last sentence was missing. Perhaps she’d forgotten. Perhaps Fred had too. I could remember it, though. “It’s obviously a quote from an old Inuit,” I said. “The shaman Odark.” The officer pushed the cake over the desk. “Would you both like a piece?” We each took a bit. He smiled and picked up the sheet of paper. “I’m retiring today” he explained. “This is my last case.” He went over to the wall and took down a certificate in a glass frame and put it in a box that was already full. We ate our cake in silence. Mom was finished long before me. “But what do you make of it?” she asked him. The officer came back and put the sheet back in the plastic folder. “It isn’t easy to know what to make of it,” he admitted. Mom grew impatient. What was it she wanted to know? What did she think these words, clumsily written from memory on a small sheet of paper, could reveal? She leaned closer. “You can read?” she said. The officer looked at her. “Yes, I can read. But I don’t necessarily read it in the same way you do.” Mom appeared dissatisfied with this response. “What are you trying to say?” “Tell me instead how you read it,” the officer said. Mom began crying. “These are my son’s parting words,” she murmured. “That’s what they are!” and I realized that Mom didn’t want to know the truth at all. She didn’t want to descend any further than she had. She wanted to believe what she’d made up in her mind was the truth. Her time of waiting was over. I took the sheet of paper and had to support her as we went over toward the door The officer got up. “By the way, did your grandfather return from Greenland?” he inquired. Mom stopped. “No,” she said. “He was lost too.” And it was at that moment the old officer recognized something, a thread running through his life, a connection he’d been hunting for, some kind of meaning on this his final day. “Vera Jebsen?” he suddenly said. Mom looked at him in amazement. “That’s my maiden name.” The officer had to sit down. “Then it was your grandmother who came here just after the war to report a crime,” he said. Mom was silent, and he stood up again. “The case was never solved, as far as I remember. I was young and inexperienced in those days.” Mom staggered; it was as though she was standing dizzily on the edge of a cliff — it lasted only a second (she didn’t fall yet), but blew the hair from her brow, smiling. “Are you any the wiser now?” she asked him. The officer straightened his uniform and looked down — at the cake crumbs, the empty desk, the clock. In a few minutes he’d have done his duty and could go home for good. “No,” he whispered.