“Are there any ashtrays out here?” I said.
“Not that I know of,” he said. “Use a bottle.”
I did as he said and flicked the butt down the neck of a green Heineken bottle. If I suggested that we should hold the funeral here, which I was pretty certain he would say was impossible, the difference between us, which I did not want to be visible, would become obvious. He would be the realistic, practical person; I would be the idealistic, emotion-driven one. Dad was father to both of us, but not in the same way, and my wanting to use the funeral as a kind of resurrection could, along with my tendency to cry all the time whereas Yngve had not yet shed a tear, be interpreted as evidence that my relationship was more heartfelt and, I suspected, as a covert criticism of Yngve’s attitude. I did not perceive it as such, I did fear the possibility that it might be understood in that light, though. At the same time the proposal would cause a clash of wills. Over a bagatelle, it was true, but in this situation I did not want there to be anything between us.
A thin wisp of smoke rose from the bottle by the wall. So the cigarette could not have been completely extinguished. I looked around for something to put over the top. The plate Grandma had used to feed the seagull perhaps? There were still two scraps of rissole on it, and some thick gravy, but that would have to do, I thought, balancing it carefully.
“What are you doing?” Yngve said, looking at me.
“Making a little sculpture,” I said. “It’s called Beer and Rissole in the Garden. Or Des boulettes et de la bière dans le jardin.”
I straightened up and took a step back.
“The pièce de résistance is the smoke spiraling up,” I said. “In a way, this makes it environmentally interactive. It’s not your everyday sculpture. And the leftovers represent decay, of course. That, too, is interactive, a process, something in flux. Or flux itself. A counterpoint to stasis. And the beer bottle is empty, it no longer has any function, for what is a container that does not contain anything? It is nothing. But nothing has a form, don’t you see? The form is what I’m trying to emphasize here.”
“Aha,” he said.
I took another cigarette from the packet on the fence, although I didn’t feel like one, and lit up.
“Yngve,” I said.
“Yes?” he said.
“I’ve been thinking about something. Quite a lot, in fact. About whether we should hold the wake here. In this house. We can get the house into shape in a week, if we get going. I have this sense that he ruined everything here, and we’re not obliged to put up with that. Do you understand what I mean?”
“Of course,” Yngve said. “But do you think we can do it? I have to go back to Stavanger on Monday night. And I can’t make it back before Thursday. Wednesday at a pinch, but probably Thursday.”
“That’s alright,” I said. “Are you with me on this?”
“Yep. The question, however, is how Gunnar will take the news.”
“It’s none of his business. He’s our father.”
We finished smoking without a word. Beneath us the evening had begun to soften the landscape; its sharp edges, which also included human activity, were gradually being toned down. A few small boats were on their way into the bay, and I thought of the smells on board: plastic, salt, gasoline; they made up such an important part of my childhood. A passenger plane flew in over the town so low that I could see Braathen’s SAFE logo. It vanished from sight leaving behind a low rumble. In the garden some birds were twittering under cover of the leaves of an apple tree.
Yngve drained his glass and got to his feet.
“One more shift,” he said. “And we can call it a day.”
He looked at me.
“Have you made any progress downstairs?”
“I’ve done all the laundry area, and the bathroom walls.”
“Great,” he said.
I followed him in. Hearing the loud but muffled sounds of the television, I remembered that Grandma was indoors. I couldn’t do anything for her, no one could, but I thought that it might be a tiny relief for her to see us, and to be reminded that we were there, so I went over and stood beside her chair.
“Anything you need?” I said.
She glanced up at me.
“Ah, it’s you,” she said. “Where’s Yngve?”
“He’s in the kitchen.”
“Mm,” she said, returning her gaze to the television. Her vivacity had not gone, but it had changed with her scrawny figure, or was apparent in a different way, tied to her movements, not to her personality as before. Before, she had been lively, cheerful, sociable, never short of a response, often with a wink, to clarify when she was being ironical. Now there was a somberness inside her. Her soul was somber. I could see that; it struck you straightaway. But had the somberness always been there? Had she always been filled with it?
Her arms were stretched along the seat rests, with her hands gripping the ends as if she were traveling at breakneck speed.
“I’m going down to clean the bathroom,” I said.
She turned her head to me.
“Ah, it’s you,” she said.
“Yes,” I answered. “I’m going down to clean the bathroom. Is there anything you need?”
“No, thank you, Karl Ove,” she said.
“Okay,” I said, about to go.
“You don’t happen to take a little dram in the evening, do you?” she asked. “You and Yngve?”
Did she imagine that we drank as well? It wasn’t just Dad who ruined his life but also his sons?
“No. Absolutely not.”
Grandma didn’t appear to want to say anything else, and I went downstairs to the cellar floor, which still stank to high heaven, even though the source of the stench had been removed, rinsed the red bucket, filled it with fresh, scalding hot water and started to wash the bathroom. First the mirror, on which the yellow-brown coating was proving stubborn to shift, and only came off when I used a knife, which I ran upstairs to fetch from the kitchen, and a coarse scouring pad, next it was the sink’s turn, then the bathtub, then the windowsill above, then the narrow, rectangular, frosted window, then the toilet bowl, then the door, the sill, and the frame, and finally I scrubbed the floor, poured the dark gray water down the drain and carried the bag of garbage onto the steps where I stood for a few minutes gazing into the murky summer dusk, which was not really dark, more like defective light.
The rise and fall of loud voices on the main road beyond, probably a group of people out on the town, reminded me that it was a Saturday night.
Why had she asked if we drank? Was it just Dad’s fate that had prompted her, or was there something else underlying it?
I thought of my graduation celebrations, ten years ago, of how drunk I had been in the procession, my grandparents standing in the crowds along the route and shouting to me, their strained expressions when they realized the state I was in. I had started drinking seriously that Easter at the soccer training camp in Switzerland, and just continued through the spring, there was always an occasion, always a gathering, there were always others who wanted to join in, and dressed in prom gear everything was allowed and forgiven. For me this was paradise, but for Mom, with whom I lived on my own, it was different, in the end she threw me out, which did not concern me too much, finding somewhere to sleep was the easiest thing in the world, whether it was a sofa in a friend’s cellar or on the prom bus or under a bush in the park. For my grandparents this partying period was the transition to academic life, as it had been for my grandfather and his sons, there was a solemnity about it which I degraded by drinking myself senseless and getting stoned, and by being the editor of the student newspaper, which had illustrated the lead story, a deportation case from Flekkerøya, with a picture of Jews being deported from the ghettos to concentration camps. There was also the matter of tradition; my father had in his turn been the editor of the student magazine in the final school year. So I dragged everything into the dirt.