The Half Brother: A Novel (91 page)

By the time I get home, Vivian’s up. I hear her in the shower. She’s humming something, a hymn I can’t recall. I knock on the door. “There’s something I have to tell you,” I say loudly. There’s silence from within. I sit down on the bed and wait. Her black dress is hanging over the last seat, number 18 — my seat. The light outside is wet and heavy. Vivian stands in front of me. She’s dripping. She’s naked. “Why did you say what you did in church?” she asks me. “That I was pregnant?” I look down. “I wanted to make Mom happy,” I whisper. Quickly she runs her hand through my curls and tugs at them gently “I’ve been worried about you, Barnum.” And those words, this action — her hand through my hair — leave me submissive and bewildered; it’s as if everything comes together in that single moment, in one drop, heavy as a cliff, that soon will break and fall away. But she doesn’t ask where I’ve been. It’s like a kind of pact between us; we don’t want to know any more about each other. Perhaps Peder’s already phoned to say he found me in Room 502 of Coch’s Hostel. I kiss her hips. Her skin is sharp and soft against my lips; there’s another scent there, strange and exciting. She tears herself away, goes over to the window and holds the black dress in front of her. “The moving company is picking up everything else today,” she says. I look past her. “Have you sorted through the stuff in the basement?” “It can all go,” Vivian replies. “Everything? Are you sure?” “Is there anything you want down there?” she asks. I shrug my shoulders. “Perhaps I’ll go back to my platform shoes,” I tell her. Vivian laughs. I did it. I got Vivian to laugh after all. “Give them to the props department at Norwegian Film,” she suggests. “Peder and I have something big cooking,” I tell her. “Really big.” Vivian smiles cautiously. “And what’s that?” she inquires. “A Viking film, Vivian. We’re going to go berserk.” I show her the check and point to all the zeros. “What was it you wanted to say to me?” she asks. And when she stands like that, in the heavy light from the window, I see that her body changes — I see it, from one second to the next, that she’s someone else all the time and never the same. I get up. “I just wanted to say that I’m not moving.” Vivian comes a step closer and stops there, right between the window and the bed. She doesn’t protest; she doesn’t get down on her knees and beg. There’s rather a sad relief in her eyes, and perhaps she sees something comparable in my own expression, a tired melancholy. “Were you thinking of living here?” she murmurs. “If that’s all right with you?” Vivian nods. “Sure, Barnum.” She gets dressed. It’s a completely ordinary morning. I go out onto the balcony and light a cigarette. I’m both awake and tired at one and the same time. If I were to lie down now, I could sleep for seven years. If I managed to stay on my feet, I need never sleep again. I have a swig of the hip flask, whose contents have gotten nice and cold in the snow in the window box, and go back in to find Vivian. “What’ll we do with the plate?” I ask her. At first she doesn’t get what I mean. That wounds me. I take a step toward her — maybe I stamp hard on the floor — and she backs off. “Please, Barnum.” Her voice is suddenly quiet and fearful. I stop, utterly taken aback. I start laughing. “Our nameplate, Vivian. On the door. What’ll we do with it?” She turns away. “Can’t it just stay there,” she murmurs. “Stay there? Vivian and Barnum? It’s a lie, isn’t it? Or have you considered coming back, perhaps?” She looks at me, no longer afraid now but just impatient — no one stays afraid of me for any length of time. “Do whatever you want with it,” she says. “Yes, I’ll hack the thing in two,” I shout. Then the bell rings. It’s the movers — a young guy who starts lifting the first thing he claps eyes on, and an older man who slowly goes though the room measuring its dimensions. He has a sad, cold look about him, as if he’s seen this all too often in the past Vivian shows him what can be taken. The bed, the desk and the chair are left where they are. The fridge and stove are fixed units in the kitchen. The flowers out on the balcony have frozen solid. And I think to myself as they carry the final boxes down to the van, that it was the signmaker in Pilestredet who married us and the moving company from Adamstuen who separated us. Vivian takes my hand. “I’m leaving the ring behind,” she says. I have to hold my breath. “That was a gift.” “I know.” “Don’t offend me any more than you have.” Vivian drops my hand. “We can sort the rest out later,” she breathes. I nod. “Yes, of course. We can sort the rest out later.” And her parting words, before she hurries off after the moving men to Church Road, are odd. “It’s not just your fault, Barnum,” she says. I stand there listening to her steps on the stairs. Soon I can’t hear them any longer. The accident and the small one are living apart. But there are still times I wake up and think she’ll come back. I find a knife in the kitchen drawer and break off the copper nameplate — the black letters of vivian and bar-num. It’s well and truly fixed in place, and the door is left with some ugly marks. My neighbor’s standing right behind me. I get the smell of her garbage. “So has she left you?” she says. I turn around. She’s beginning to take on the appearance of the trash she always has in a plastic bag; one day she’ll maybe get mixed up and squeeze herself into the chute and descend into the stinking darkness. “She’s just gone on vacation,” I say. The woman smiles, and a wave of bad breath flows from her; it’s as though her mouth is full of fish guts and old chicken wings. She whispers now, as if she’s frightened of revealing a secret. “She’s taken her name from the mailbox too.” I have to take a step backward. She’s more hideous than Miss Donkey Head, proclaimed the world’s ugliest woman in Connecticut in 1911. She could have entered a new competition and won hands down. Mundus lost out on a real winner. She laughs at me, right in my face. And all of a sudden I do something she never expected. I begin crying. She puts her hand on my shoulder, bewildered, and suddenly becomes humane and almost beautiful in all her ghastliness — and she says exactly what Vivian said, mysteriously and quietly, as a comfort perhaps, even though it sounds more like a threat: “It’s not just your fault.” I shove her aside, fling the nameplate into the garbage chute and slam the bare door be- hind me. No one lives here, and there’s enough room. I go and get all the bottles I’ve hidden away and place them on the table, pull the curtains and put a sheet of paper into the machine. The first word that comes to me is this:
revenge.
I devise a plot — my bloody triple jump — an idyllic state, death and resurrection. A son comes back to avenge his family. One morning the phone rings. It’s Mom. She first wants to know how I am. “Busy,” I tell her. “But not too busy to have Sunday dinner with us?” she asks. It’s Sunday. I can hear that by the church bells. I put down the receiver and unplug the phone. I’ve come to the first turning point, the plank. I’m going at a good speed. The avenger has found his foe. The avenger is waiting for the right moment. I write,
The one eye doesn’t see the other.
I have sixty pages left. I take a bottle of vodka with me into the shower. Then I find myself a white shirt in the laundry basket. It blinds me, as the snow does too, when I walk over to Church Road. I need a pair of sunglasses. Mom’s gone even grayer. We sit down at the table. Boletta’s sullen and seething; smoldering with an inner rage. She can barely bring herself to pour me a glass of wine, and she puts the bottle as far from me as possible. The table’s set for four. “Someone else coming?” I inquire. “Vivian wasn’t feeling well,” Mom replies. She passes me the serving dish. I have no appetite. I go over in my mind the scene I’m going to write; the enraged mother who humiliates her coward of a son by serving him raw meat on the day his brother is killed. I drink my wine instead. “It’ll be an awful burden for her, living up there,” I murmur. Boletta takes the bottle from me. “Especially when there’s no man in the house,” she says. Then Vivian shows up just the same. She’s wearing an expansive, faded tracksuit. The hair that falls from her brow’s thin and greasy. She has no appetite either. And it’s as though I can hear an echo deep down; it’s the oval clock in the hall that’s begun to go again and the coins clink in the drawer, when I see them thus — Mom, Boletta and the pregnant Vivian around the living room table — and now I’m the one visiting the house with only women within its walls. Silence has gone in a circle and made a black scarf of time. I have to search for something to say. “What’s happening about the kiosk?” I ask. Mom puts more meat on my plate. “It isn’t worth running a kiosk like that any longer,” she replies. “Why not?” She attempts a smile. “Well, it’s only an entryway, Barnum.” I push my food to one side and reach out for the bottle. But Boletta pours the last of the wine into her own glass. I light a cigarette. “I thought it was somewhat more than just a doorway.” Mom shakes her head. “Even the beauty salons shut down. Right, Vivian?” Vivian nods. Her facial skin is all shiny and greasy. “There’s a hairdresser for dogs there instead,” she says. “Four paws instead of two.” I’m tempted to laugh but don’t dare; it would be like dirtying the tablecloth, deliberately spilling laughter over the white cloth. “Coffee,” I say loudly. Mom sighs. “Coffee? But you haven’t eaten anything, Barnum.” Now I can laugh. Now there’s a place for laughter. “I mean coffee in the kiosk, Mom. To sell coffee there, in a cup with a lid and a straw and everything.” Boletta gets up and leaves the table without a word. She shuts the door behind her with a bang. “What’s up with her?” I ask quietly. “Perhaps she doesn’t like your smoking,” Mom says. Vivian looks at me. “Or your drinking.” I should never have broken that silence. I push back my chair and flick the cigarette butt into the stove. The photograph’s still up on the wall — the electric Barnum, the little genius — taken in the City Chambers that day I got my prize for “The Little City.” I turn to look at Mom. “There’s one thing I thinks strange,” I say. “What’s that, Bar-num?” “That Fred’s worn that jacket all those years.” Mom becomes awkward — her voice is cramped, cut short — there’s barely room for all the words in it. “You know he was fond of that suede jacket,” she murmurs. Vivian’s gotten to her feet. “Will you come up with me to see the place?” she asks. I excuse myself and go after her. She has to rest on each landing. She’s carrying a heavy burden. And I see Mom in my mind’s eye when she carried the clothes basket from the basement right up to the drying loft; that woven basket full of wet clothes, her fingers numb, the ache in her hips spreading over her back, the net full of wooden clothespins. Perhaps she had to rest herself as she silently counted the number of steps that were left and dreamed of something else entirely. Vivian turns around; she breathes through her mouth and her lips are swollen and dry. “They’ll be building an elevator, of course, on the outside of the building,” she says. “From the yard.” At last we’re there, vivian wie — the name’s on the door — a simple, gray plate with black lettering, and she lets me in. I stop under the angled ceiling window. The snow melts as soon as it touches the glass. The light runs off and pulls the darkness with it. And then I see, in the corner by the whitewashed chimney breast — the old stroller, the playpen, a pile of baby clothes that Fred and I had, and the worn cradle that’s been gotten out too and made ready — all these old things waiting now for a new person. I look over toward the kitchen instead; she’s forgotten to put the milk in the fridge. “What do you think?” Vivian asks. I walk away from the window. “Do you feel it swaying?” “What was that?” “It’s swaying,” I say again. She stands there with a worried look, perfectly still, holding her hands over her stomach. “It’s not swaying, Barnum.” “You’ll notice it soon,” I assure her. All of a sudden she becomes exasperated. “It isn’t swaying!” she exclaims. I go nearer her. “That’s why the clothes became so fine and dry up here, Vivian.” She’s almost in tears. “Why?” “Because of the swaying.” She goes off into the bathroom. I put the milk in the fridge and find myself a beer. The old baby clothes feel soft to the touch — a pair of pyjamas, leggings, a T-shirt — in those days I still took normal sizes and wore Fred’s old things. I never knew Mom had kept all this. And when I bend down over the stroller where the leather pouch is lying with its thick, white lining, I suddenly feel a touch of cold along the edge of my mouth — just like when Mom used to put camphor oil on my lips. Yet the realization doesn’t affect me; I’m detached — and it’s perhaps this that frightens me most of all, that I feel nothing, I’m dead. Vivian’s baby’ll be born in the winter too, in the coldest month of the year, with the beautiful clouds of frost billowing in from the fjord. I hear her breathing. She must have stood there a good while looking at me, from the doorway to what will be the baby’s room. I look away, for a moment dizzy and embarrassed all the same. “How’s it going with the Viking?” she asks. “I think I’ve hit the plank.” Vivian smiles. “Peder says it’s going to be fine.” I turn slowly toward her. “What about you? Didn’t you get a job in the dog shop?” She wipes the smile away with the back of her hand. “I’ve gotten a job in makeup at NRK beginning in the new year.” “Who’ll look after the kid?” “Vera and Boletta,” Vivian replies. And at that moment we’re blinded by a bright flash; at first I imagine it must have been lightning, but the flash comes from somewhere else rather than the ceiling window. It’s Mom. She’s standing there in the entrance holding the old camera, and she blinds us a second time as we each look our separate ways. I don’t have time to stop her. “Do you remember this camera, Barnum?” I shake my head. Mom laughs. “Once upon a time I dreamed of becoming a photographer,” she says. “So why didn’t you?” I ask, and at once regret the question. Mom looks up at the window. “So much else got in the way.” “But it isn’t too late,” I say She raises the camera again. I have to hold on to her, and I only barely manage to. She shakes and suddenly begins crying. And shouldn’t I have realized that there was something Mom couldn’t bear, something more, a weight that was greater than I was able to perceive and which she could no longer carry on her own? I was detached. Is this what I call the slow shutter of memory? Mom takes hold of both my hands. “I so much regret not having taken pictures in the church, Barnum.” “We’ll remember it just the same,” I tell her. I look at Vivian. “Would you take the stroller down for me?” she asks. I do so willingly Mom stays with Vivian. Vivian stays with Mom. And as I go past the apartment Boletta comes out with her fur around her and her stick. “I need some air,” she says. I stand the stroller under the mailboxes, and Boletta, who walks in front of me, doesn’t say any more before she’s at the top of Blåsen. Then she says, “I can’t be bothered to go any further with you, you fool.” I brush the snow from the bench, and we sit down. We just remain there like that a good while, not knowing what to say. The dusk makes everything flow into one; a rusty darkness framed by snow. “Why aren’t you living with Vivian?” Boletta asks. I dry my hands on my pants. “It’s best that way,” I reply. Boletta searches for something in her coat. She finds it. She hands me a flat hip flask, and when I unscrew the awkward top I get the powerful whiff of my first love, the one I was only able to smell and run my lips around — Malaga. And my whole childhood enfolds me like the snow — I’m no longer detached and I’m moved. I have a gulp of it and give the hip flask back to Boletta, who takes a careful sip. “This is the last Malaga in the city,” she whispers. “Thank you, Boletta.” “And you don’t waste stuff like that.” “Not Malaga,” I say. Boletta hides the hip flask in her coat again and leans on her stick. “What the devil is it that’s wrong with us?” she sighs. All at once I think of Fleming Brant when I see the windows going dark, the city sinking into another night under the snow and the skies. I want to say something about him, the cutter in the sand, but can’t get the sentence together — the words are ranged against me and soon I’ll be broken beyond repair. “I can’t have children,” I say. Boletta doesn’t turn around. “And so?” she demands. “I can’t have children,” I say again. “And still you leave her?” “It’s she who’s left me,” I murmur. Boletta gets up and thumps her stick into the snow “You’re being petty.” I look up and can’t get over it. Her face is just as in the days when she was afflicted and had to go to the North Pole to cool down. “What was that you said, Boletta?” She points at me with the stick. “I’ve never felt enraged at you, Barnum. But now I’ve got more rage in me than’s good for me.” I tried to smile. “You were mad at me when I skipped dancing classes,” I remind her. Boletta sits down again, tired and resigned. “Being mad isn’t the same as being enraged, Barnum. Anger is nothing but a little dot in comparison to rage.” “Then I’m enraged too,” I whisper. Boletta places her feeble hand on my own. “And you shouldn’t be,” she says. “You should love Vivian and your child instead.” I look down. “I can’t.” Boletta withdraws her hand. “Then you’re only half a man, Barnum.” I feel enraged, and that rage is real enough now; it’s as if all the fury I’ve stored up since the policeman picked me out in the Little City gathers in one great, trembling muscle. “Do you dare repeat that, Boletta?” I demand. “You won’t be any more whole if I do!” she says. I tear the stick from her grasp, break it in two and crash away down through the snow. “I never want to see you again!” I shout. “Do you hear me, you old bat!” and when I turn for the last time by the empty fountain, she’s still sitting there on the bench at the top of Blåsen — a thin, hunched shadow in the ever thicker snow, and like that she’s swallowed from sight.