The Half Brother: A Novel (32 page)

could breathe a sigh of relief; Esther could put her hand in my curls, and the rest of the class could laugh at me because the girls had grown too in the course of the summer. They’d spurted up, way beyond me; I remained alone in the lowlands, out in the cold. And I stood still; I had to look up to everybody else, and there was no one I could look down on. I would have given anything to be able to tell Fred all that happened on the farm. I could have told him that it hadn’t been fun at all. But I couldn’t do that either. He was still more than silent. His silence laid waste streets and cities. Perhaps there was a similar remedy for the dumb? That was a thought that appealed to me. I could see it in my minds eye — a farm in the country (or in a park) where the dumb sat together in the shade under the trees and had to talk to each other. One word on the first day four the next, and by the time the twelfth and final day had come they’d be able to speak an entire sentence. I christened it Barnum’s Remedy But there was no remedy for Fred.

It began to rain in September. Dad had been away the whole weekend. On Monday he came home. He didn’t even waste any time taking off his coat and his muddy shoes. He went straight into the living room and put a huge cardboard box on the table. He was going to get a smile from Mom once and for all. “Look!” he cried. We gathered around the cardboard box. All of a sudden Dad started taking his time. He dried both gloves carefully with his handkerchief, combed his hair, put a cigarette in his mouth and looked around for some matches. “You can’t wait now, can you?” he said. But he didn’t get the response he was hoping for. We weren’t pawing the ground with expectation, driven mad by the waiting. We didn’t leap on the box and rip it to shreds. We were a pathetic and ungrateful audience. Perhaps we were just tired out by all that had transpired since the deaths of King Haakon and the Old One — an interval of only a few hours between them. It had been too much for us; soon we wouldn’t be able to take any more, the show had gone on too long and our senses had gone to sleep. We’d hit rock bottom. Dad was bewildered for a second; he took the cigarette from his mouth and instead put it back in his case, as if he wanted to rewind time and begin everything again from the start. That didn’t help either, and he was sorely disappointed in us; he became offended and had to improvise. So he just up and took the box out again. Perhaps he’d make a new entrance, come in a different way, without his coat and wet shoes — and there was almost something comforting about this, that there was a possibility of doing things over again in a better way “Where are you going?” Mom asked. Dad stopped, turned around slowly, and pretended to act all surprised. “Oh, I didn’t know you were here.” Mom smiled. “We’re here, Arnold.” We
were
there — Boletta, Mom and myself, even Fred. Dad looked at each of us in turn as if he were seeing us for the first time. “I thought I would just take out the trash,” he said sulkily. Mom had to coax him now. “Don’t be silly. Let’s see what you’ve got there.” Dad hesitated a moment longer before returning with the cardboard box. He had the upper hand now and knew it; finally he had us right in the palm of his hand. “Well, well,” he sighed. “As if my little presents could be of any remote interest to you.” With that he tore the string in two, pushed the lid to one side, took a deep breath, and our eyes became saucers as Dad lifted out a gramophone, a real Radionette gramophone with two speeds, 45 and 33, and automatic pickup. We went closer. We trembled with wonder. Dad found his cigarette and lit it, and appeared satisfied with the performance, despite everything. “But we don’t have any records to play,” Boletta said. As if Dad hadn’t thought of that. This was the moment he’d been waiting for. He gave a crooked smile and blew smoke from the upper corner of his mouth. “That’s why I’m bringing this house the new star shining with such brightness in the skies of the music world.” Suddenly he was holding a gold single between his gloves, and I wasn’t able to see where he’d produced it from. Now it was we who sighed, all of us except Fred. Dad whispered, “And his name is Cliff Richard.” Dad laid the record down carefully on the gramophone, depressed a button, the pickup glided into place of its own accord, and the needle landed on the grooves. There was whistling and crackling and to begin with there were some dark, heavy noises and the voice that started singing was so deep the whole thing sounded pretty much like King Haakon’s funeral backward. Dad began fussing, stuck his cigarette in Boletta’s mouth and twisted a knob three times. The speed increased and the needle leaped forward a couple of grooves, but in the end we could hear it, pure and clear and close as if he had been standing in our own living room: Cliff Richard singing “Livin’ Lovin’ Doll.” As soon as the record was played, the needle was lifted back to the beginning. We could hear it long after we went to bed. Mom and Dad danced in the living room, and Cliff Richard sang. Thereafter there was loud noise from the bedroom. The same thing happened the following evening. Cliff Richard sang “Livin’ Lovin’ Doll,” Mom and Dad danced in the living room, and for the remainder of the night they were equally loud in bed. Fred stayed out until after they’d calmed down. Boletta fled to the North Pole. Once I lay there at home, the pillow over my face, listening to those long, drawn-out concerts each and every evening — Cliff Richard, “Livin’ Lovin’ Doll” and the strange rumpus that always came in its wake. Mom and Dad had found each other again, and both of them had found Cliff Richard. All through the autumn it went on like that. I should have been happy. Yet I couldn’t be. The Old One was dead, Fred was mute, and I didn’t grow any taller. The door frame never moved. And for that reason, for long enough I sensed a sinking of the heart, a tinge of sadness that quickly changed to shame and panic, whenever I happened to hear Cliff Richard in an elevator or a bar. That dry yet smooth voice — a voice without any defect, beautiful and invisible. Right until I saw him with my very own eyes by the swimming pool in the Kempinski Hotel in Berlin; then it was as if the curse was lifted, the sinking of the heart dissolved at the actual sight of Cliff, just as Fred himself broke his own protracted silence in the end. Because one evening there wasn’t a sound in the living room, neither was there any noise thereafter. I lay awake and heard nothing. The following morning Mom came into the room. She had the gramophone with her. “Here you are,” she said. I wanted to ask what had happened, but I didn’t. She just put the gramophone on the table and went back out again. Dad disappeared for several days. Boletta had a headache. Fred came home, as mute as ever. It started snowing. We were living in a silent movie. There weren’t even subtitles between the scenes. The snow kept falling. And there came a point when I couldn’t take any more. It was a completely ordinary evening. Spring had come. I heard the bicycle bells racing down Church Road. The room was filled with stillness and sunlight. I stood by the door frame and measured my height. I hadn’t gotten any taller. I had to have sound. I had to hear something. I pressed in the button on the gramophone. The pickup lifted. It descended toward the grooves. I blew the dust from the needle. Never had it been stiller in my head. And that second, or immediately thereafter, in that second’s end, Cliff Richard started singing, yet again and for the very last time in our house, “Livin’ Lovin’ Doll.” Then Fred got up, broke off the pickup, hurled the record at the wall and stared right at me. The silence was redoubled. “Shall I kill your father for you?” he demanded. Fred had spoken. It was the first thing he said. I was so happy. I laughed out loud. “What did you say?” I asked him. Fred came closer. “Shall I kill your father for you, Barnum?” I stopped laughing. Fred took the whole contraption with him, went down into the yard and threw it in the garbage. I think Bang the caretaker rescued it, since he always tended to sift through the garbage cans before they were emptied, but he obviously never knew how to get it working again. I ran into the living room. Mom was sitting sleeping by the open balcony door. “Freds talked,” I whispered. She woke gradually, raised her head and rubbed the sleep from her eyes. “What did you say, Barnum?” “Freds talked!” Mom got up quickly. “Has he?” “Yes, Mom. Freds talking!” “But what did he say?” she asked. I fell silent. Mom grabbed my arm and shook me. “What did he say, Barnum?” I looked down. “That he doesn’t like Cliff Richard,” I said.

The Obituary

One morning Mom screamed. We were sitting in the kitchen eating breakfast. Fred had been talking again for a good while, though he was saying nothing then. In fact it was Dad who was the quietest. He missed the gramophone. And not least he missed the Buick. The rest of us weren’t particularly talkative either. We missed the Old One. Sometimes I thought to myself that perhaps it wouldn’t do any harm if we were all to lose our voices at the same time, to be inflicted with aphasia, since there was so much we couldn’t talk about anyway. It was then that Mom shrieked. And she came tearing out toward us, her hair a crow’s nest and her nightie all to one side, and in her hand she was waving that
Aftenposten
like a flag. “We’re in the paper!” she cried. “We’re in the paper!” Never had I seen her so worked up — nor did I ever see her like that again either. She swept breakfast things to the four winds and threw the paper down on the table. There we could see it with our own eyes. It was about the Old One. It was her obituary, two years too late. Mom sat down with us, already crying. Boletta, who generally couldn’t see clearly before the arrival of the afternoon edition of the paper, leaned over the table, pale and shaken. “Read,” she whispered. And Mom lifted the paper and read aloud, in her grandmother’s voice, and this is how I remember those crooked, soft words in her mouth.

THE INVISIBLE STAR

The beautiful Ellen Jebsen has relinquished her human role and left the ever-changing scenes of the times in which we live. Those of us who knew her now feel a deep sorrow in our hearts, a sorrow that may only be assuaged when we follow into darkness in her wake. She was born in K0ge in 1880. Her father was a highly respected saddler and upholsterer, but it was her mother she took after, early on in life when she learned to love the art of storytelling, when in the evening she listened to her tales as the scent of baked apples on the stove filled the living room with an aroma that opened the pores of her imagination.

But it wasn’t before she met her beloved Wilhelm, then a young and gifted mariner, that her life took its first abrupt change of direction — the first of many. They met when the Jebsen family was on an excursion to Copenhagen, on the skating rink at the S0 Pavilion, and he wasn’t about to let go of this magnificent girl. There is no blame to be assigned to her parents, even now at this juncture in the closing chapter of her story, for their refusal to look with favor on this alliance, and indeed their attempts to do all in their power to prevent it.

I do not mention this to cast any doubt on their own renown — not in the least; I include it solely to illustrate the sheer strength of the young ones’ love. Yet as the great poet wrote: It is the truest love that leads to the greatest misfortune. They never married. In June 1900, Wilhelm left with the SS
Antarctic,
which was sailing from Copenhagen to Greenland to carry back a musk ox for the zoological gardens. He never returned. Wilhelm vanished up there in the ice. He never came back to the ship in the wake of a hunting expedition when he and the second gunner were searching for musk oxen on the other side of the fjord. His tracks disappeared beside a fissure in the ice and his body was never recovered. May he rest in peace. But she who awaited his return was still in K0ge. She waited in vain. And in the same year she gave birth to their daughter, who was christened Boletta. I will not dwell on this, which was unheard of in its time, save to establish that she broke with her family and moved to Copenhagen, where she was to be found thereafter in the ticket office in the first cinema in Denmark. This was at Vimmelskaftet, in the pioneer days of the silent film, when films had titles like
Susanna in the Bath
and
An Emigrant’s Story or the Vanished Bag of Money.
And many there were, from gentlemen to one-time servants, who would rather have turned their eyes on Ellen Jebsen than on the mystical women of the screen. And one of those who could not take his eyes off her was the legendary Ole Olsen, the juggler and cinema manager. He came upon Ellen Jebsen in the ticket office at Vimmelskaftet, and he knew that her face had been made for the silent film. For after her beloved, the father of her daughter, vanished in the blue ice, her beauty had deepened — tragedy itself was sculpted in Ellen Jebsen’s face and love’s very features were visible in her expression. She spoke to him without words. And right away Ole Olsen offered her a place in what he called his actors’ stable, and that same summer she and little Boletta went out to the Visby development, where the studio consisted of a rickety shack that would later become Nordic Films. A magnificent epoch began! We attacked comedies and dramas alike with gusto, and little did we realize the future we were setting in motion, in those days when Visby was bigger than Hollywood. Here the early Storm-P was rapidly developing; here were real Chinese, wild lions, trees painted with palm leaves, murder and romance. And in the midst of this creative anarchy, Ellen Jebsen stood like a pillar of sorrowful beauty. She could have been an Asta Nielson, yes, she could have become a Garbo. It is, therefore, a double calamity and disgrace that our generation is unable to see her. The films from the Visby days have been lost, and later she was cut out entirely. Ellen Jebsen’s moment in the electric theater was rubbed out. She was the forerunner left in the shadows by those who came in her wake.