In The Wake Read Free Page B

There are two books on it and about a hundred pages of manuscript with a coating of dust on the top sheet. NEW BOOK is written under the dust. I find my cheap spare glasses, turn on my veteran Macand click my way to the program I use now, then open a new file. I write:
    “Early November. It is nine o’clock. The titmice are crashing against the windowpanes. Sometimes they fly unsteadily off after the collision, at other times they fall to the ground and lie floundering in the fresh snow before they get back on the wing. I do not know what I have that they want. I look out of the window acrossthe field to the woods. There is a reddish light above the trees towards the lake. The wind is getting up. I can see the shape of the wind on the water.”
    I am writing myself into a possible future. Then the first thing I must do is to picture an entirely different place, and I like to do that, because here it has become impossible. And then there is a ringing. I look into the hall to the door,but this time it is the telephone. It is almost two o’clock. It is my brother. He is three years old than I am, a partner in a firm of architects, making money.
    “Hi,” he says.
    “Do you know what time it is?” I say. “It’s Tuesday, damn it, or it
was
Tuesday. Don’t you have to work tomorrow?’
    “Hi,” he says.
    “Hi. Are you drunk?”
    “Not quite. Not quite yet . I think I’m going to be divorced.”
    “Oh boy! Welcome to the club. Does Randi know?”
    “She’s the one who knows. She hasn’t told me yet. But soon she will. She’s not here. I’m alone.”
    “Hey. Really. Who had long hair first? I did. And who cut it off first. Me again. I was the one to stick Mao on the wall, and I was the one who took him down again . I liked Bob Dylan first, and I liked opera best, and Steve Forbert I liked first, andthe Smiths and Billy Bragg, and I was the one who said Ken Loach would be important, and now you don’t watch anyone else’s films. I read
Pelle the Conqueror
first, and I read
The Arch of Triumph
first and went to the off-licence to ask for calvados, and it cost more than 200 kroner, in 1973! I was the one who first went to a Vietnam demonstration. By the time
you
came along the war was almostover. I was married first and divorced first. You beat me by three days with the first child, but that was because I used condoms longer than you did. Maybe you’d never used condoms. Hell, you’re three years older than me. You ought to come up with something I haven’t already done. You could start to paint again, only you know how to do that.”
    “That’s a lot of balls, I could make just as longas list. And anyway, I knew Dad better than you did.”
    “Why do you talk about him now? Christ,
Dad
. Why do you say
Dad
? Isn’t is
Papa
any longer? We’ve always said
Papa
.”
    “
You’ve
always said Papa.”
    “Oh, no, I didn’t.”
    “Listen, Arvid. Remember when we got back from Copenhagen after laying the wreaths on the sea along with all the firefighters and policemen and psychiatrists and priests, thewhole shebang; and we went straight to Harald and borrowed his blue van and drove to Veitvet and stuffed it full of things from the flat. And then we went off again, to Gothenburg to cross with the ferry one more time with all the stuff we didn’t actually know why we were moving, and we were so bushed that we fell asleep at the wheel before we had gone an hour so we had to stop at a Wayside Innand flop on the benches outside, and I asked you if you felt guilty about Dad. You almost fell off the bench even though you were so tired.”
    “What are you talking about? I didn’t fall off the bench. I thought we were talking about divorce.”
    “I’m talking about divorce. I have no idea what you are talking about.”
    “Don’t talk to me about divorce. Shit, I know all about divorce.”
    “Right, that’sgood,” he says, and hangs up, and I sit there with the phone in my hand, and then I hang up too, and the