The Half Brother: A Novel (93 page)

Later I go down to the basement again. This is the last place I have to get rid of. I have a flashlight with me, and I watch the frail beam weakly circling the walls. There’s a pile of stinking, wet clothes by the dryer and an empty bottle rolls over the floor. I kick it for all I’m worth and hear the shattering of glass in the darkness. The silent suitcase is right at the back in the corner. It’s then I become aware of people, swift shadows; and before I can turn around, I’m pinned up against the door as the flashlight drops from my hand and a warm queasiness fills my head and blood runs into my mouth. Then I’m dragged around and a far stronger light blinds my eyes. One of the officers searches my pockets. “Looking for somewhere to sleep tonight?” he demands. “I live here,” I whisper. “Witty little midget,” the other one says. I go mad, break something, and feel only a profound sense of resignation when they pull me out to their car and drive off with me. The neighbor’s on the stairs, her hands full of garbage. And the stars are shining in every window except my own. It is Christmas after all. I start laughing. I fall down. They get me back onto my feet and take me down a corridor. Behind a metal grill I catch sight of Fleming Brant; I thought he was dead, yet it’s like him all right. He stretches out one thin hand and holds a pair of gleaming scissors in his fingers, and it’s the last time I ever see him — the cutter. “Happy Birthday, my friend,” he whispers. I try to tear myself free. Resignation is replaced by fear. They remove my belt, my shoelaces, my watch and my comb. And the door slams with a boom that throws my head backward. I sit in the corner of the padded cell, beside the hole in the floor, and like that disappear before my own eyes.

The Cormorant

An island appears like a full stop on the very edge of the ocean. I sit out on deck, wrapped in a blanket. I’ve been here before. This was where I got my name. But when I go ashore on R0st, there’s not a soul who knows who I am. I have my typewriter and a calendar with me. For a moment I stop and take a deep breath, but I feel nothing except the raw wind. I go up to the Fishermen’s Mission. They have a vacant room. A dark girl at the reception asks how long I’ll be staying. “Long enough,” I tell her. She smiles and wants to know my name as well. “Bruce Grant,” I say. “Bruce Grant,” she repeats slowly, and looks up quickly before recording both name and date in a book. Finally I’m given my key. The room’s up on the second floor. The bed’s over by a window discolored by salt. I don’t sleep. I cross off yet another white day. The following evening I do the same. On the morning of the third day, there’s a knock at the door. It’s the dark girl from down at the reception. She’s brought me some breakfast — eggs, bread and jam. I ask her to get me a roll of adhesive tape. She brings me one that evening. She takes the tray and sees I haven’t eaten a thing. I write
The Night Man,
Sequence 1, and tape the sheet to the wall.

I try to sleep.

I hear the birds in the darkness.

One wet day I go out. The rain comes straight at me, as if the skies have slipped sideways. I bend my head forward and follow the road across the flat island between the fish-drying frames that resemble great fish gardens. But I can’t smell them — there’s nothing; my senses have fallen away, just as the wind rubs these outcrops with its great sheets of sandpaper until their dust sinks into the sea and is gone. I open the door to the graveyard and can’t manage to close it again. A flagpole stands there like a hoop amid the squalls of rain. I have to crawl along in the lee of the stone wall, and finally I discover their names on a tall, black column surrounded by white sand from the sea — evert and aurora. The letters are all but buried under guano. I’m about to wipe it off but at the last minute leave it be. I suddenly remember what the vicar said at Dad’s funeral, that the cormorant shits on the rocks to find its way home.

When I turn around the wind’s just as strong, a salt storm full in my face. It’s not shyness and modesty that makes everyone look down, it’s just the wind. I come past a shed, a lopsided boathouse, and all at once recognize something — a car under a tarpaulin with a bit of the windshield visible. I look around. There’s no one around. I go in and pull back a bit more of the tarpaulin. It’s the Buick, Dad’s old car — worn, rusty and filled with rain. I shut my eyes. Then I see someone there after all. A stooped man, with a high, white brow above a dark face, is leaning across a broken fridge, saying nothing as he brushes earth off his coverall. I let the tarpaulin fall back into place. “Rare car in these parts,” I observe. “A Roadmaster Cabriolet.” The mans still silent, but doesn’t seem antagonistic. He just looks at me, in the same way that a good tailor measures someone with his eyes. “How did you get hold of it?” I inquire. “At one time there was a fellow who owed us brandy and a gravestone,” the man replies. I nod. “But why don’t you use it?” It’s now he smiles. “We do use it, when the Italians come here.”

I cross off more days on the calendar.

That’s all I get written.

One evening I go down to the cafe, drink apple juice and look at some television along with a number of the other guests — permanent residents — who come here to have some cake or because of the dark girl. These are men who’ve come ashore, and they look at me with gentle curiosity, friendly and silent, as I stare at the flickering, distorted images that have no accompanying sound. It’s as if the antenna’s in the middle of the waves, plugged in to the wind; and I think to myself that these familiar faces that flicker over the salty screen here in the Fishermen’s Mission — the last hotel before the ocean — have just been given their makeup by Vivian. I get up quickly. “What are you doing here, Bruce Grant?” the girl asks when I give her my glass and am on my way back up to my room once more. The others are listening, but not letting on that they are; their forks just pause for a second. “I’m drying out,” I reply. “I think you ought to eat a bit all the same,” she says. Soon I’ll need a new calendar.

It’s getting lighter.

One morning I take a different route than usual, not to the graveyard and around the stone wall, but over the knoll and along the shore to the small inlet behind the jetties. Its there I see the house. It isn’t actually a house any longer, a dwelling place for human beings, but just ruins falling slowly to the ground and washing away like driftwood. The coffin door bangs in the wind. In the frail, golden grass there’s the whitewashed skull of a sheep. It’s then it happens. The wind suddenly takes hold of my jacket and billows it into a black sail that lifts me right off the ground. I struggle and do all I can to make myself heavy and unwieldy, but it’s to no avail; I’m nothing more than a little gnat in these gusts of wind that carry me through the air. I shout out and flail my arms wildly, until at last the wind sets me down gently once more beside the narrow path.

I go back straightaway to the Mission, dazed and shaken. The dark girl’s there behind the counter, a hint of amusement on her lips, and the same men look at each other as their expressive faces break into crooked smiles and one of them says, loudly, before the laughter erupts, “Well, if it isn’t the cormorant himself!”

I spread the dust of stories and let it flower in everyone’s mouths as bouquets of the most beautiful lies.

One morning there’s a knock at the door again. It’s the dark girl. She glances quickly all around at the walls that’ll soon be covered in sheets of paper. “I’m not hungry,” I assure her. She smiles. “But there’s a letter for you.” I can’t fathom this. She hands me an envelope. I recognize Peder’s writing. And the letter’s traveled far — address after address has been crossed out. “Thank you,” I murmur. The girl doesn’t move. “Shall I put the name Barnum Nilsen in the visitors’ book instead?” I go nearer her. Her eyes are brown. “How did you know it was me?” “It wasn’t all that hard.” “Do I look like my name?” She laughs now. “My dad said there weren’t all that many who could recognize a Buick like that under a tarpaulin.”

I put the letter on my bedside table and can’t face reading it. I dream for the first time in a long while. I dream about the suitcase. Someone’s carrying it, but I can’t make out who. In the dream I can see only the person’s shoes and legs, and the hand holding it — the suitcase is heavy.

The sun wakes me up suddenly. It’s filling the entire room. I get up. The letters on the bedside table. I open it. Peder’s written:
My friend, I don’t know where you are, but perhaps you’ll get this letter. Do you remember the card we found from the world’s tallest man that summer on Ildjernet? I have to tell you that nothing came of
The Viking
after all. A new boss started at the film company. I met him in LA. He’d been living at Venice Beach since 1969 and the only thing he could say was:
What about Vikings in outer space?
Something for you perhaps, Barnum?
I had to sit down on the bed until my laughter had subsided. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d laughed. Then I hear noise from outside — voices, shouts and music. I go over to the window, and it’s only now I see that someone’s washed it — everything’s clear and seems suddenly close. I’m blinded by the world. It’s the ferry that’s come in. Just about everyone from the islands must have congregated here today. And it’s as if I’ve seen it all before and yet am witnessing it for the first time too. It’s the Italians, as purchasers, who’re coming to harvest R0st’s dry gardens, its coastal grapevines. They’re accompanied down the gangway, and the yellow Buick materializes from the other direction, all sleek and shiny and with the top down — it bumps silently along like a polished, wheeled carriage. The driver’s wearing a uniform and has on a bright cap that covers his high, white brow. He stops the car at the gangway; the guests take their seats, and slowly he drives off between wind and people.

Peder’s closed the letter thus:
P.S. Greetings from Vivian. Thomas has spoken his first word. Guess what it was!

Later that day I take a wander over to the lopsided shack. The Buick’s parked outside. The driver’s down on his knees polishing the hubcaps so they’ll shine once more like four mirrors. “Do you know where my dad set up the windmill?” I ask him. He wipes the sweat from his brow, for a moment embarrassed. “We shelled out for the party after the baptism, and we had to bring the gravestone all the way from Bod0,” he murmurs. I put my hand on the warm hood. “Then you deserved this beast.” He looks at me smiling. “Come with me,” he says.

We row across the sound to the resolute pile of rock. We sit side by side on the thwart. The oar slides around in my hands. The driver laughs. “You’re sculling backward like Arnold did.” We get the boat on an even keel. “What do you know about my father?” I ask him. He just keeps rowing for a time and doesn’t say anything. I have to pull hard to match his rhythm, and soon enough have almost no strength left. “Arnold chopped off one of his fingers when he was a boy,” he says. We near land, a narrow bay with a rough shore. “Was he a good man?” I breathe. The driver, the ferryman, the only son of Elendius — leans sorrowfully on his oar. “When Arnold returned to christen you, his whole hand was gone,” he says softly. Finally we’re there. He helps me ashore. “Shall I come up with you to the top?” I shake my head. “I can manage myself.” But he won’t let me go yet, and he places two heavy rocks in my jacket pockets. “You don’t want to blow away again,” he says. And so I climb up the same path that Dad descended as a wheel. I’ve no idea how long it takes. The light hangs still in a shimmer of white birds. When I reach the last part of the climb and the grass levels out in an oval curve, I see Dad’s windmill. It resembles a crashed plane or a broken cross. I sit down. The sun is lying on the horizon, and I can see that that sun is green. I roll my stones back down the steep slope and the rank stench of guano hits me. The wind tears at the remains of the construction so they emit a beautiful keening sound — a rusty song. And I know now — this is my place.

Next morning I head south. I take the ferry to Bod0, the plane to Oslo, and a taxi back to Boltel0kka. I have to air the place for three whole days. It’s like after an extended summer holiday New folk have moved into the neighbor’s apartment, a young couple. I don’t meet Vivian. I still haven’t seen Thomas. But Peder and I keep up our electric theater. I wait behind the scenes in the shadows counting white days, working on
The Night Man
and submitting synopses and treatments, right until the day I’m sent a button in the mail with two words —
Dads button
— the same day we leave for the film festival in Berlin.