I opened my eyes. I couldn’t remember ever experiencing this, it was not a memory, but if it was not a memory, what was it?
Oh, no, he was dead.
I took a deep breath and got up. A short line had developed by the counter, here passengers interpreted everything the staff did, as soon as there was any evidence to suggest that departure was imminent, they were there, physically.
Dead.
I took my place behind the last person in the queue, a broad-shouldered man half a head shorter than me. There was hair growing on the nape of his neck and in his ears. He smelled of aftershave. A woman joined the line behind me. I craned my neck to catch a glimpse, and saw her face, which with its neatly applied lipstick, rouge, eyeliner, and powder, looked more like a mask than a human physiognomy. But she did smell good.
The cleaning staff scurried up the bridge from the plane. The uniformed woman talked into a telephone. After putting it down she picked up a small microphone and announced that the plane was ready for boarding. I opened the outside pocket of my bag and took out the ticket. My heart beat faster again, as though it was on a trip of its own. It was unbearable standing there. But I had to. I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, bent my head forward to see the runway through the window. One of the small vehicles towing the baggage carts drove past. A man in overalls with ear protectors walked across, he was holding those things like ping-pong rackets used to direct planes into position. The line began to inch forward. My heart was beating rapidly. My palms were sweaty. I yearned for a seat, yearned to be high in the air and looking down. The squat fellow in front of me was handed the stub from his ticket. I passed mine to the uniformed woman. For some reason she looked me straight in the eye as she took it. She was attractive in a severe way with regular features, nose perhaps a bit pointed, mouth narrow. Her eyes were bright and blue, the dark circle around the iris unusually distinct. I returned the gaze for a brief moment, then lowered it. She smiled.
“Have a good flight,” she said.
“Thank you,” I replied and followed the others down the tunnel-like gang-way into the plane, where a middle-aged stewardess nodded a welcome to the new arrivals, moved down the aisle, as far as the last row of seats. Up went my bag and coat into the overhead compartment, down I flopped into the cramped seat, on with the belt, out with my feet, back I leaned.
That’s the way.
Meta-thoughts, that I was sitting on the plane on my way to bury my father while thinking that I was sitting on the plane on my way to bury my father, increased. Everything I saw, faces, bodies ambling through the cabin, stowing their baggage here, sitting down, stowing their baggage there, sitting down, was followed by a reflective shadow that could not desist from telling me that I was seeing this now while aware that I was seeing this, and so on ad absurdum, and the presence of this thought-shadow, or perhaps better, thought-mirror, also implied a criticism, that I did not feel more than I did. Dad was dead, I thought — and an image of him flashed up before me, as though I needed an illustration of the word “Dad” — and I, sitting in a plane on my way to bury him, am reacting coldly to it, I think, as I watch two ten-year-old girls taking a seat in one row and what must have been their mother and father taking a seat on the other side of the aisle to them, I think that I think that I think. Events were racing through me at great speed, nothing that made any sense. I started to feel nauseous. A woman put her case in the overhead compartment above me, took off her coat and put it in, met my gaze, smiled automatically, and sat down beside me. She was around forty, had a gentle face, warm eyes, black hair, was short, a bit chubby, but not fat. She was wearing a kind of suit, that is, pants and jacket of the same color and design, what did women call them? An outfit? And a white blouse. I faced the front, but my attention was not on what I saw there, it was on what I saw through the corner of my eye, that was where “I” was, I thought, looking at her. She must have been holding a pair of glasses which I hadn’t noticed because now she perched them on the tip of her nose and opened a book.
There seemed to be something of the bank teller about her. Not the gentleness, though, nor the whiteness. Her thighs, which seemed to spread outward in the fabric when pressed down against the seat, how white would they be in the dark late one night in a hotel room somewhere?
I tried to swallow, but my mouth was so dry that the little saliva I could muster was not enough to cover the distance to my throat. Another passenger stopped by our row, a middle-aged man, sallow, stern and thin, dressed in a gray suit, he occupied the aisle seat without a sideways glance at either her or me. Boarding completed, a voice said in the intercom. I leaned forward to look at the sky above the airport. To the west the bank of cloud had split open, and a strip of low forest was lit up by the sun, a shiny, almost glistening green. The engines were started. The window vibrated faintly. The woman beside me had marked her page with a finger and was staring ahead.
Dad had always had a fear of flying. They were the only times in my childhood that I could recall him drinking. As a rule, he avoided flying, we traveled by car if we were going anywhere, regardless of how far it was, but sometimes he had to, and then it was a case of knocking back whatever alcoholic drinks were available at the airport café. There were several other things he avoided as well, but which I had never considered, had never seen, because what a person does always overshadows what he does not do, and what Dad didn’t do was not so conspicuous, also because there was nothing at all neurotic about him. But he never went to the barber’s; he always cut his own hair. He never traveled by bus. He hardly ever did his shopping at the local shop, but always at the large supermarkets outside town. All these were scenarios where he might have come into contact with people, or have been seen by them, and even though he was a teacher by profession and so stood in front of a class every day, occasionally summoned parents to meetings, and also spoke to his colleagues in the staff room every day, he still consistently avoided these social situations. What was it they had in common? That he might be assimilated into a community with no more than chance as its basis? That he might be seen in a way over which he had no control? That he felt vulnerable sitting on the bus, in the barber’s chair, by the supermarket till? That was all quite possible. But when I was there I didn’t notice. It was only many, many years later that it struck me I had never seen Dad on a bus. And that he had never taken part in any of the social events that sprang up around Yngve’s and my activities. Once he attended an end-of-term show, sat close to the wall to see the play we had rehearsed, in which I performed the main role, but unfortunately I had not studied it hard enough, after the previous year’s success I was suffering from child hubris, I didn’t need to learn all the lines, everything would be fine, I had thought, but standing there, affected I suppose by my father’s presence, I could barely remember a line, and our teacher prompted me all the way through a long play about a town of which I was supposed to be the mayor. In the car on the way home he said he had never been so embarrassed in his life and he would never attend any of my end-of-term shows again. That was a promise he kept. Nor did he go to any of the countless soccer matches I played in as I was growing up, he was never one of the parents who drove to away games, never one of the parents who watched home matches, and I didn’t react to that either, I didn’t even consider it unusual, for that was the way he was, my father, and many other fathers like him, this was the end of the seventies and the beginning of the eighties, when being a father had a different and, at least on a practical level, a less comprehensive significance than today.