There wasn’t much left of Sunday, but I had not gone to bed yet, I didn’t want to. It had been a long day, an eventful day, now it might as well last a little longer. I was tired and dazed, but also strangely calm, and I didn’t want to let go of that. I suddenly feared the coming day. I knew it would be emptier. Just me and the typewriter. Today I had been in life, in spite of it all, tomorrow I would be pushed back out of gravity. Or rather, let myself be pushed out. And float away. I could see no bridge from today over to tomorrow other than sleep, which was a doubtful bridge. Suddenly I wanted to be where I was, in what this day had been, I had to postpone sleep for as long as possible. If I fell asleep, anything could happen. Anything could not happen. Absolutely nothing, and then I would remain where I was. I didn’t want that. I felt less troubled. I wanted it to stay that way. What if it didn’t last the night, what if sleep was not a bridge, but an eraser.
I had eaten. I had got the stove started. I went out into the kitchen and reached for a bottle of red wine from the shelf I had fastened to the wall above the kitchen counter. I had wanted that bottle for a long time, but hadn’t touched alcohol for a week, except for the couple of Pilsners I’d had the evening before this Sunday in September, in a bar that was once a pharmacy, where I had been several times before, one of them on Christmas Eve. I fetched the corkscrew from the top drawer and opened the bottle and took a sip straight from the neck, it must have looked pretty shabby. It can be a good discipline, watching from the outside, what you are doing, as if you were someone else, and what you would think if you saw that person, who was you, drinking red wine straight from the neck of a bottle before even having looked for a wine glass in the cupboard. As if it was a matter of life and death.
I felt the effect at once, so I took another swig and went into the living room and sat down on the sofa and stood up again and pulled out a record with a symphony by Mahler that I had just bought from Kjell Hillveg at Norsk Musikforlag on Karl Johans gate, the fifth symphony conducted by Leonard Bernstein, not the ninth with the grey-haired Japanese conductor, not the Mahler-woman’s Mahler. To me the fifth was the greatest, with the funeral march and all and the fourth movement flowing calm and acutely mournful and yet so uplifting, although Bernstein could be rather sluggish at times, you grew impatient, it was as if the piece of string he held the notes together with could snap at any moment and a gap would appear that you could tumble into, but at his best he was supreme. I was a Mahler expert now.
I sat there listening until the first movement, the funeral march, was over. Then the phone rang again. I was growing weary of it. And this was not Turid. I had no idea who it was. I had lost my gift. It might be the alcohol. I took the bottle I held on my lap, the one I had taken a third sip from while I listened to the music, and set it on the coffee table and went over and switched the turntable off and went over to the desk and lifted the receiver and said, yes, it’s Arvid, it’s actually pretty late. And it was Audun. It’s Audun, he said, I know it’s late. Hello Audun, I said. Hello Arvid, he said, it’s been a long time since last I saw you, and it sounded like a song, with the words in that order, and maybe it was a song, I tried to think, in that case which song. Is there something wrong with you, he said. Is there, I thought, is there something wrong with me, and a long time since last I saw you, is it dum dum, da dum, it was definitely the wine. Is it that long ago, I said. It is, he said. Yes, I know, I said, and he was right, how long could it be, it’s been four months, he said. Oh, I said, that’s a long time. Yes, it is, he said, in fact it’s more like five, come to think of it. He had been my best friend for most of my life, ever since he moved from the countryside with his mother and siblings and started seventh grade at Veitvet school with a bang. When together we looked back, we were often unable to separate his life from my life, no matter how different they had been, no matter how different we had been, but we had shared each other’s lives, and he was still my best friend. Nothing had happened to make that friendship end. Maybe things had been a little difficult in the past year, not the friendship, but everything surrounding it, and the truth was that I had forgotten him, my best, my closest friend, I had forgotten that he was my friend.
After the ship burned we were together nearly all the time. Not Turid and me. Audun and me. Maybe I shut her out, shut the girls out. He called every other day to talk, we went to the cinema together, we ate out as often as I thought I could get away with, mostly at the restaurant in the shopping centre at Veitvet, in the corner on the second level where we had been out for our first Pilsners together, other times at Lompa on Grønlandsleiret in the centre of Oslo. We travelled up to old Gardermoen airport to watch scenes being played out in the departure hall before the plane to America took off. The kisses were long, many cried, and some yelled at each other. We sat on the balcony alongside the cafeteria each with our Coke or coffee gazing out over the hall and saw two women saying goodbye to the same man; one close up, hanging around his neck, the other with her hand raised a bit further away, under the balcony, so the first woman would not see her. But we saw her. Another time we saw a woman making a show of turning her back on the man who had come with her to the airport and carried her suitcase and checked it in for her, and on the way towards security she slowly opened her hand and let an object drop to the floor, and we turned to look at the man who saw the same thing that we saw, and I said, what the hell did she drop. She dropped her wedding ring, Audun said. Are you taking notes, Arvid, he said, you have to take notes. And one time he drove in to Advokat Dehlis plass and picked me up off the floor where I was lying flat out on my stomach. Turid and the girls were in Trondheim, and I had no intention of getting up for a good while, but rather preferred to lie there with my forehead ground into the hard cold dusty floorboards, and I thought, how does one measure grief, is there a yardstick for grieving, is there any difference, say, between grieving for one person as opposed to two or three persons, or even four, as in my case, did all this fit on a yardstick, or could the level of grief register as on an instrument, such as a Geiger counter, and the closer the instrument got to the full power, the full height, the full number, the faster and louder the instrument would emit its familiar beep. And how was I to know when there was grief enough, and if grief was liquid like melting silver, could one then pour the grief into a litre measure and conclude, under these circumstances eight decilitres ought to be sufficient, and let the silver congeal hard and shiny not far below the rim. How was I to know. And how was I to know it really was grief I was feeling, it didn’t seem to resemble anything I had seen on film, or what others told me they had felt when their people died, and I was bewildered, for I didn’t cry, and when did one cry really, when you were alone, or in the company of witnesses. And if one were alone, what was the point, when no one would see it, how was I to know, I didn’t have that yardstick, that litre measure. I had to deal with it myself, was that not so, I let no one else inside, no one else’s yardstick was of any use, no one’s litre measure, and in a way it felt strangely irrelevant, no, not irrelevant, but rather beyond my field of vision. I could barely glimpse a dark swishing tail disappearing, and when I grasped it and held it fast, I was left with nothing but the tail in my hand. The rest was gone, like a lizard sacrificing its tail for freedom. I did try, and hard too, with open eyes to face what had happened, but I didn’t know what to do with what I saw, I had already watched most versions of the issue acted out on TV, they were used up, and I couldn’t think of any others. So then I simply tried not thinking about it at all. That didn’t work either. And so instead I wanted to find an image that could cover all this, after all it was my job, to turn the whirling liquid into something concrete, turn the waves of distracting electric shocks to the stomach into solid surface. But I didn’t have any images that were large enough, firm enough, and after a while I found it pretty exhausting. So I lay there until Audun arrived. He walked straight in, the door wasn’t locked, I had forgotten as usual, and before even seeing me, he said into the hallway, hello Arvid, for Christ’s sake, why don’t you answer the phone when I call. And it was true, often I didn’t answer, it was a breach of every rule, but I was afraid there might be an undertaker at the other end, although I knew the funerals I was supposed to attend lay behind me for now. And there came Audun, in through the living-room door and he saw me on the floor and said, what the hell are you doing down there. I’m thinking, I said. All right, he said, so what are you thinking about. Litre measures, I said, yardsticks, that kind of thing. Okay, he said, that sounds practical in a way, but you can get up now. I’m not sure I can, I said down into the floor, my lips cold against the cold planks, covered in dust, the vacuum cleaner hadn’t been out for a good while. Yes, you can, he said, just do it, and I’ll go to the kitchen and put the kettle on for coffee.
Ten minutes later when he came back with two full cups of coffee and milk and sugar on a tray, I was sitting on my chair at the desk. It wasn’t exactly Mont Blanc, but it had been a long climb.
And now, with the receiver in my hand and Audun at the other end, I couldn’t think of what to say. I had forgotten him, it was a little odd, but I hadn’t had time to consider it yet, what was there to consider, I didn’t know. I’ve been busy, I said. That’s just it, he said, I have more than one witness telling me they’ve seen you downtown, quite often in fact, hanging around bars and whatnot, looking like you’d had a few, always with someone, I mean with women, a different woman each time. That sounds familiar, I said. But it might tell you something about your witnesses too, doesn’t it, I said. You’re right about that, he said, it does, but what are you up to, what goes on in your life, and in a way I could understand why he was asking, and it made me glad too, for he did it out of concern, no one else showed me any concern, except Mary Jondal, who maybe still was at Regnbuen with a late dessert on the table before her. I just didn’t want to talk about my life. And still, it was Audun, so when he asked, and I’d been lucky enough to have him return from oblivion, I had to give him an answer. It’s not easy to explain, I said, it’s all a little hazy. Well, you can try, he said. But do you have the time, I said. Of course I have the time, I have all night. Do you, I thought, aren’t you going to work tomorrow, are you no longer a typographer, have you shelved the alphabet, and I hesitated, and it didn’t escape him, but he was not offended, he said, Arvid, you can sit down now. I am sitting, I said, and he said, no, you’re not. And I wasn’t, it surprised me, I thought I was sitting. I let myself down into the chair, lay my left arm on the desk and leaned forward. Now I’m sitting, I said. That’s good, he said, no, wait a little, I said and put down the receiver, hooked the cord around the Buddha so the receiver wouldn’t crash to the floor, and stood up and walked quickly out of the living room and into the kitchen and fetched a glass without a stem from the cupboard above the sink, and on my way back I picked up the bottle from the coffee table and passed the no in Chinese characters framed on the wall, and I thought, no to what, I had forgotten that too. I set the bottle and glass on the desk and poured a sizeable amount, it was wine, after all, not spirits, it wasn’t that bad. I took the receiver in my right hand and set my left elbow on the tabletop in front of me, and I leaned forward and rested on said elbow. There, I’m sitting again. That’s good, Audun said. Are you comfortable. Yes, I am, I said. Are you drinking, Arvid, he said, and I said, yes, I am drinking a little, but it’s wine, not spirits. That’s good, he said, that it’s not spirits. Just take your time, I’m not going anywhere. Or maybe a quick visit to the toilet first, he said, so I won’t have to interrupt in the middle of everything. Don’t hang up, he said and put the receiver down and left, and I didn’t move, just sat there waiting. I won’t, I said and took a long sip of the wine.
When he came back, I could hear him set a glass on the table, but he didn’t say anything, and I didn’t say anything, I could hear his breathing, and it would have been strange if he couldn’t hear mine, and we sat like that for a while, and finally he said, hey Arvid, I’m waiting. Oh, I said, sorry, it slipped my mind.
It wasn’t true, though, it hadn’t slipped my mind.