‘It’s not bad,’ I said, but I had no idea whether it was good or bad. I had simply read it. It was a long time ago. I couldn’t remember the last time I read a novel.
‘I hope there is time to read it,’ he said.
‘You’ll have plenty,’ I said.
‘That’s not so sure, my friend.’
That was the second time he had said that, my friend. He never said that before. He just said Tommy. He looked me in the eye a little too firmly. I turned. The doctor was chewing his bottom lip, holding his hands tightly behind his back and studying the floor. He slowly shook his head. I turned back.
‘What’s that supposed to mean.’
‘I haven’t got long left, my friend.’
Goddamnit, stop saying my friend, I thought. I can’t take it.
‘Hell, surely you’ve got time to read a book,’ I said, and that was a pathetic thing to say, for what has a book got to do with anything when someone is dying. When Jonsen is dying.
‘Are you going to die,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he said, and I said:
‘Yes, but I mean now, are you going to die now,’ I said.
‘He’s given me two or three weeks,’ Jonsen said, nodding to the doctor who was still standing there, half behind me. I had already forgotten him, he was certainly a discreet doctor. ‘There’s nothing they can do, he says,’ Jonsen said.
‘Of course there is something they can do,’ I said. ‘This is 2006 not 1706.’
‘It’s too late now,’ Jonsen said. He was exhausted, his voice had no energy, no air in it.
I looked around. My legs felt suddenly tired. On the other side of the bed, by the window, there was a chair. I walked round alongside the window, picked up the chair and placed it next to the bed on the opposite side to where I had come in. I sat down, but then the doctor wasn’t behind me any more, but in front of me. I should have carried the chair all the way round, I thought, but it was too late now, and it would look rude if I moved the chair a second time and sat with my back to him. It would be rude, too. But he could go, couldn’t he, the doctor, and leave me alone with Jonsen.
‘So what’s in your thoughts now,’ I said.
He didn’t answer, what would he be thinking. What would I have been thinking if it was me.
‘I hold life dearly,’ he said. ‘I don’t feel like it’s over.’ He was seventy-five. I was fifty-four. Almost. ‘You could refuse, of course,’ he said, trying to laugh, but it turned into a cough. ‘But this is it,’ he said. ‘It’s all right. It doesn’t matter.’ He turned his head on the pillow, towards the window, away from me.
I didn’t agree. It wasn’t all right. It did matter.
‘Of course you can refuse,’ I said.
He looked at me again. ‘You can’t refuse to die, my friend.’
‘Goddamnit, of course you can refuse,’ I said.
Two Sundays later he was laid to rest behind the old church in Mørk. It was a simple and pretty church, painted white outside and inside. Only the altar and the seats had any colour, they were farmhouse red and blue. There weren’t many people there. The priest was a woman. He wouldn’t have minded. He had always liked women, most men did, of course, but he really liked women, he liked being with them, talking to them, he thought they were more intelligent by far than men. At least the men he knew. He’d had a good relationship with my mother as well, in the time before she left us one evening just before Christmas, when the snowdrifts by the road stood as tall as a man and just getting in and out of the house was a grind. They often talked.
‘It wasn’t her fault,’ he had said three Sundays before. We were standing in his living room, I still had the purple coat on with a suit underneath, it was his birthday. I had driven all the way out for the occasion and had put on my leather gloves and a scarf around my neck, but he had only a flannel shirt on. He had forgotten his own birthday, he looked surprised when I wished him many happy returns, and it was still morning and as long as I stayed on my feet he did too, even though he looked in a bad way.
‘Heavens above,’ he said, ‘it certainly was not. What was she supposed to do.’
‘Sit down,’ I said, and he sat down at once while I stayed on my feet. ‘She could have taken us with her,’ I said.
‘Four kids. On her own. Not bloody likely.’
He had been to sea for a few years when he was young, as so many others had around here, and had learned plenty of English expressions, but he rarely used them, he thought they sounded stupid, and he didn’t say ‘all hands on deck’or ‘shiver my timbers’ or any of that rubbish, either.
‘It wouldn’t have worked, you understand that, don’t you,’ Jonsen said.
‘I don’t understand a thing,’ I said.
‘No, of course not,’ he said. ‘It’s not your job to understand. It isn’t easy to understand. It became hell for all of you. I know. But you shouldn’t be bitter. You should put it behind you and forgive. Jesus, you’re over fifty now, how long are you going to keep it up,’ and on the tip of my tongue I had something ugly to say, something furry and nasty, and I must have looked that way, but I didn’t say it, and he grabbed the arm of the chair and hoisted himself up, and he did that because I was still standing. He said:
‘Have you started drinking, Tommy.’
‘Oh, hell, Jonsen,’ I said. ‘Why do you have to say something like that now.’ But he was right, I drank every night without exception, and then he fell to the floor, straight down, as if he didn’t have a bone in his body. I panicked, there was no one else around and I couldn’t remember what to do in a situation like this. I lifted him up by the shoulders and dragged him over to the sofa, but he was limp and heavy, and I carefully laid him down again and ran around opening drawers and cupboards, with no clue what I was looking for, a box of Paracet, perhaps, Paralgin forte or something for asthma, an inhaler, if he had one lying around, and then I realised how addled my brain was, I said, for Christ’s sake, Tommy, pull yourself together, and finally I got around to ringing the hospital.
They came in a helicopter shortly afterwards. I went up into the sky with them, I had never been in a helicopter before, and I held his hand as we flew through the air, and the sky wasn’t as blue up there as it was when you were down on the ground looking up, it was greyer, more indeterminate, more undefined, and his hand was clammy and lifeless and hadn’t held a hammer for a long time, nor a saw, not even something as small as a folding rule. I stroked his head and it felt so strange, for my palms didn’t know his head. The noise of the rotor blades was without mercy and to me it seemed that the helicopter was moving very slowly, slower than I had imagined, flying across the big lake, but then it finally landed on the helipad by the hospital, and they got him on to a stretcher in casualty, and standing there was a doctor I would meet a week later when I went to visit him straight from Gardemoen Airport, and two nurses came running down the long corridor at full speed with his bed between them, and one of them shouted to me, you can’t see him today, do you understand, come back tomorrow, and to be honest, that was fine with me, I had to go to Haugesund on a job.
The job took me a week or so, and when I was back, I caught the airport express to Lillestrøm and a taxi from the station, through the tunnel, right up to the big hospital, and now he was dead and his coffin lowered into the ground behind the white church in Mørk, and if he did refuse, he hadn’t refused hard enough.
TOMMY ⋅ 1970