But he didn’t die then. He rose to his knees and impatiently pushed away the helping hands.
“Cut it out,” he said. “This is nothing.” He stared at the floor and said: “Isn’t that so, Hemningway,” and he was right about that, and then four years went by in which everything changed. Now only my brother and I were left. We sat drinking at the same table in the same room. We drank far too much, he said skål all the time, and we were going to get drunk. I took gulp after gulp and swallowed away as if drinking was the only thing I wanted in this world, and I felt anger coming, and I looked around me and said: “Wait a bit. Hold on a moment.”
It was those photographs on the wall. I couldn’t stand looking at them. And it was the curtains and the orange oilcloth and the knick-knacks on the window sill by the kitchen corner, it was the souvenirs from Germany and the journey to Siberia. I put my glass on the table, walked rapidly out to the car and found a roll of black plastic sacks behind the driving seat and went in again. I pulled off the first sack and started to tear at the curtains. They didn’t want to come down. I took a good grip with both hands and leaned on them with all my weight. The loops tore and broke off the rail right over to the wall, and I went down and landed on the floor in a heap of striped cloth.
“For fuck’s sake, can’t you give me a hand?” I struggled up on all four. My brother got up from the table.
“What are you playing at?” he said. I didn’t reply, just tore off another plastic sack and threw it to him and stuffed the curtains into the one I held. I pointed around me and he watched my finger and saw what it pointed at.
“You’re crazy,” he said. But he opened the sack, pulled the cloth off the table and fed it in, went across the room and took one photograph off the wall, and then another, and pretty soon there were none left, he was efficient, and I went to the window sill, and with my underarm swept everything on it into the sack with the curtains. In no time we had cleared the room, the sacks were full and we carried them out to the heap of shoes and left them there.
The cup is half full. The coffee has gone cold. I don’t know what I have been doing. It is still dark, it is still winter, there’s a cold draught from the balcony door. In the next block Mrs Grinde has put on her kitchen light again. It has been off for a while. I look at the clock. It says four. What is she doing up now, there’s no-one to spy on except me, and I’m not that interesting, or maybe I am, to her, and I picture her even though I have only ever seen her out of doors, on the way to the bus or at the Co-op; the stern eyes behind her glasses, her small body restlessly passing from room to room, one lit, one dark, then one lit again, in her dressing gown maybe, her brown hair gathered at the neck in a rubber band, and the binoculars on the window sill.
I don’t know. I get up, take the cup and go into the kitchen, pour the coffee down the sink, rinse the cup in hot water and dry it on the dish cloth. Then I hurl the cup as hard as I can down into the sink. It breaks with an unexpectedly loud crash. Some of the pieces fly over the edge and land on the floor. I pick them up and put them into the sink with the others, take a bottle from the worktop and start to mash all the pieces, it makes a horrible noise, but I don’t stop until the cup has turned into a coarse powder. When I turn the taps on full, everything disappears down the drain. I suddenly hear myself breathing heavily through my nose. It sounds silly. I turn the taps off and all is quiet. Water has splashed up from the sink on to my sweater and my stomach is quite wet. I go to the cupboard in the hall and find another sweater, it is my father’s too, I have four of them, and then I hang the wet one over the edge of the bathtub to dry. I straighten up and look at my face in the mirror. There is still a swelling under my right eye, but it is much less now, the colour more purple than blue and not so obvious, no longer the first thing you’d notice. That’s what I think, anyway, but I don’t really know, I haven’t been out for almost a week, nor have I talked to anyone except the doctor and my brother and the Kurd on the third floor, and that was hardly a conversation.
I go on looking at myself in the mirror. I am so like him it would make you laugh. It won’t be long before I reach the point where he was when I remember him way back, and I remember him well. If I screw up my eyes and stand there in the charcoal-grey sweater with the red band at the neck it looks like a photograph slightly out of focus from 1956. He was still boxing then. He was the eldest father in the block where we lived, but none of the others looked like him, at least not in the summer, in his shorts and nothing else on the lawn beside the road when there was voluntary work and a new path to be laid with flagstones, or when the balconies were being built and the whole house was out and there was not room enough for everyone in the photographs that were taken. We were twenty-five children and sixteen adults in eight apartments, there were bodies everywhere, white skin to the throat and sinewy arms, shabby belts and braces stretched like guy ropes over beer bellies, there were grazes on knees and spiky hair, there were big hands with crowbars and sledgehammers, and you could go wrong, you could pick the wrong parent, a sheepdog was needed to separate the families in the evening. I was the only one that never went wrong, for I always knew where he was. He was visible. In real life. In photographs.
I pull the sweater off and the T-shirt and stand in front of the mirror half naked with the bandage round my chest, and I still look like him. I am not like him, I smoke and drink when I feel like it, and I often feel like it. On Sundays I sit at home reading whether it’s sunny or raining or snowing. I haven’t owned skis since I was thirty. But I have trained for several years, sometimes a lot and sometimes less, I have lifted most things around me, chairs and tables and boxes of books, ten-kilo sacks of potatoes I have bought, I’ve stood in the kitchen and just lifted them; shopping bags full of milk cartons, I’ve lifted them up and down, up and down until the sinews by my wrists have tensed like bowstrings. I have attended health studios for six months at a time, and if I need to go to the shopping centre three kilometres away I walk, and I walk fast. All the way along the footpath past the football pitch, past endless rows of housing blocks and past roundabouts and two schools and a new sports ground and on down past the houses in Station Road which have been there for thirty, forty, maybe fifty years, to the centre beside the old E6, and then back again at the same pace up all the hills and especially the last one which is so long and steep that the breath burns in my throat and the lactic acid bubbles in my thighs right up to this satellite town at the north-east end of the Østmark Forest. When I get indoors I set the shopping bags on the floor and breathe like a man coming up for air before I do twenty push-ups in the hall, and then twenty more, and there is not one sweater that belonged to him that I cannot fill today.