It was a cold autumn, the first after Turid. I felt cold all the time. I wrote almost nothing. I could wake up at night and not remember that her side of the bed was empty, a certain number of kilos permanently lifted from the mattress and her smell fainter with the passing days, and with the nights, weeks, and in the end completely dissolved and gone. Half asleep I would still expect to hear her steady breathing, and even believe I was hearing it too, for she always slept well once she had fallen asleep, which unlike me she usually did right away, regardless of what was going on in our lives. In the same way I expected to hear the small sounds she unwittingly made when she turned over under the duvet, and then would remember down in my sleep that she no longer turned towards me, but turned away, and as far as she was concerned I might as well go back down to the car and lie there in the cold, it didn’t matter to her where I was, and then I had no wish to wake up, and I struggled against it. But it didn’t work, of course, and after a brief moment with my eyes open I realised how the land lay. I lay there alone.
And there was the fact that she hadn’t taken her duvet with her when she moved out. Maybe out of consideration for me, because it would look unsymmetrical in a painful way if the duvet on her side of the bed was gone, and thereby make the whole bed tip over towards the opposite side under the weight of the only remaining duvet, which was mine, and dump me on the floor in front of the window which used to be open most nights, in the winter too, when we still shared this bed, or because she had suddenly got it into her head that her duvet had gathered so many unwanted imprints and impressions over the years that she preferred to buy a new one.
I didn’t know what to do with that duvet. At first I left it where it was without changing the cover to soften the transition, but after only a month it felt sad and wrong and plain embarrassing. So I pulled off the pillowcase and the duvet cover, and washing nothing I crammed the smooth sun-patterned material into a plastic bag from the Co-op and tied the handles and threw the bag into the dustbin down in the yard on my way out of the building. Then I rolled the duvet up tight and stuffed it onto the shelf at the top of the wardrobe, where six months later I accidentally found a white cotton top with lace around the neck and waistline and could remember well how her skin looked after summer when she wore it. Underneath the top there was a letter she had written but not finished and therefore hadn’t given me or sent me, and it wasn’t hard to understand why when I saw the date she had neatly inscribed at the top of the sheet. It had been written nearly a year and a half before she finally moved out with the girls, and exactly one week before the ship burned.
She had probably meant to finish it, but then suddenly it was impossible. In all decency she could not take away from me the very last thing I had, moving out with the girls when all of a sudden I had so few people around me. She was too late, death beat her to it.
So she endured for one more long year, out of necessity, not by choice, but finally it was over, and the letter began like this: ‘Dear Arvid. I woke up one morning and didn’t love you any more. Don’t be sad, it’s not your fault.’ It was hardly a bombshell, but still I felt dizzy and had to lean against the wardrobe for support. A whole year, I thought, without love, that’s a long time. For all I knew it may have been even longer. But when I stood there, letter in hand, I could clearly remember lying close on top of her, chest to chest, not heavily, but still I covered her entirely and held her arms out to both sides, her fingers folded in mine, and I said, what do you feel now. She was silent, she took a deep breath, she said, I feel I am loved. You are loved, I said. It really wasn’t that long ago, not years, anyway, but I never acted on it, not firmly enough, I can’t possibly have understood what I was saying, not in its fullest sense, but a door had been opened, and I closed it without knowing. Or perhaps I did know and closed it anyway, because it would have been asking too much of me to keep it open.
I didn’t know what to do with the letter either, it didn’t feel right to get rid of it, as if the Keeper of Public Records at any moment might bang on the door and shout, no, no, no, for God’s sake, it must be preserved, because it was an important historical document. And I guess it was. So I put it back and threw away the cotton top and thought, why is she writing that it was all her fault. It couldn’t possibly be true.
The emptiness, the bare space behind my back, felt even worse. I should have known. I always woke up right after midnight feeling ice-cold in the most inaccessible parts of my body, on the back up towards the shoulder blades, uppermost between my wings (oh, fly me away), even though I had closed the window permanently and turned the heater to 3. But in the long run the close air, the sleepless nights, the headaches and the working days down the drain became so exhausting that I thought I’d see my doctor who admittedly was a sly old fox and a trickster and ask him to give me some pills I knew he kept in a bottle discreetly in the back room, which he himself might take in the middle of the day and suddenly feel his spirits lift. I had seen it a few times when I was there with a pneumonia that wouldn’t clear up, I felt flat, squeezed, I could hardly get air into my lungs, and this made him sincerely concerned and empathetic, but he said, could you wait a moment, and would then disappear behind the door and remain there for a while, and his gaze was clearer and more sparkling when he came back out than when he went in. For me it was the other way round, I could fall asleep from those pills and in fact had done so, which was the point, but this time I couldn’t bring myself to go there. I was afraid of becoming addicted, to drugs, to pills, for the paradoxical reason that it was precisely now that I needed them the most. But I would have been greedy once I got started, I was sure of it, so I let it drop and decided the cigarettes and the car would have to do.
Every morning I got up and tried to write some more on my big novel about the factory. That’s what it was going to be about, all the years I’d spent there, the bus to work in the darkness, the bus back home again to Turid, in the same darkness, my work mates in the vast hall, the congealed colours in the dust and the light from the tall windows, in the rumble during day shift, in the rumble during night shift, and the morning after how overtired wide awake we were with a liquid like champagne fizzing through our veins, it would be about suicide and rage, and the laughter, how crazy we were, how loose-tongued towards the end of a shift, these were the important things, but it was difficult to concentrate, I couldn’t do it, and finally it ground to a halt. I didn’t even try. But I had nothing else, had nothing published in magazines or newspapers, nothing I could send to my editor of what I found in the desk drawer. There was nothing in my desk drawer. What could there have been. The grant I was living on I spread out thinly, I had to have enough for petrol and for the girls when they came.
I had left the bedroom and gone into the living room to smoke a cigarette and wait for sleep. It was a little past one. I was alone in the apartment. I was so tired it was difficult to hold on to my thoughts. But I couldn’t sleep. The bed was still a difficult place. I lay down on the sofa. That didn’t work either. I got up and went to the window and stood there smoking, looking out over the square in front of me and the roundabout and the few lights and the Mazda I hadn’t slept in since Turid left, there was no reason to any more, but finally I thought, what the heck, I’m so tired, I’ll do whatever I have to. I stubbed out the cigarette and went into the hallway to the wardrobe in the corner and found a frayed old Icelandic sweater that had belonged to my father. I should have thrown it away a long time ago, but he wouldn’t have liked that, and I had so little left that had been his. I hadn’t cared about it and it never crossed my mind that maybe I should have kept some of it, it didn’t seem to matter. Later I have come to regret it. But I had this sweater. It was at least thirty years old, maybe forty, and if it was, it was older than me. I couldn’t remember him ever not having it.
I pulled on my reefer jacket over the Icelandic sweater, and went down the stairs in the pitch-black cold and out through the gateway to the parking space and got into the car and soon fell asleep in the same position I had slept in so many times before.
I dreamed that I died. I often did, but unlike before I could still remember the dream the whole of the next day, and for months later, years later, if not every detail then at least the essentials, that I died, and the way I died. I couldn’t remember what led up to it, in the dream, it didn’t feel like I had done anything very wrong, had committed a crime or a misdemeanour and if so been sentenced to death, or had been in an accident or had become incurably ill, but I was in a funnel, or not a funnel, but more like inside a flower, a tulip, a very large tulip which was narrow at the top, and it wasn’t really a tulip, I didn’t know what it was, but I was already in it up to my waist, and then to my chest, and the thing that wasn’t a tulip squeezed my body, not very hard, only so hard, so tight, that I couldn’t get up again, and I knew that once I was all the way down, I would be dead. I felt very sad, and a little afraid, but I didn’t panic, I didn’t try to kick and push, there was really no point, this is where it would end. My left arm lay tightly along my side, against my hip, but the right one I had at some point managed to raise into the air, and she was holding my hand tightly, she was the only one who mattered. She was on her knees now and let her hand follow me down as far as possible from a floor up there in a room with white walls I could no longer see, I could only see the ceiling, where clouds drifted slowly by for the last time, and her hand felt safe and warm, it was her firm hand, and as long as she held mine, I could die without panicking. In the dream I looked up into the familiar face, and that made me calmer, and I saw how sad she was, but also how focused on the task she had taken on, as she always was when something was at stake and just had to be done, and not like me, who was flighty in most things. And what she had to accomplish now was to hold me tight as long as she could, so I wouldn’t leave this life in panic and despair. I didn’t despair, I was just very sad, and a little expectant too, I must admit, in the face of what was about to happen. And I kept sinking until I could feel the gentle tightening of petals around my chin, if petals they were, and then I drew a deep breath, as if I was about to dive, for this was it, and it was not unpleasant, as one might imagine, it had a softness of its own, its own kindness, and she still held my hand, it was the last thing I felt, and then I died and scarcely had time to take in death’s vast valley of shadows made up of absolutely nothing before I rose rapidly and shot through the watery surface of life with a gasp so loud it woke me in the Mazda in the parking space by the roundabout close to Bjølsen school, where Grete Waitz, the long-distance runner, was a teacher in the seventies, I remembered her well, in the schoolyard with her shiny whistle, and my first thought was, who was the woman holding my hand. Her face was suddenly gone. It could not have been Turid, that I would have taken with me out of the dream, and the hand in the dream was not like Turid’s hand, which was narrow and nowhere near as resolute, and with my eyes still closed I searched my memory to try and bring back the woman who had held my hand so firmly and followed me down into the tulip of death as far as possible before she had to let go. I narrowed my memory to a penetrating ray of light as from a torch large enough to hold a face, but nothing more, to be able to think the woman up out of the dream, out into the glare of the street light high above the windscreen of the Mazda where I was half sitting, half lying in the seat, and in that way see who she was and maybe find her.
But it didn’t work, she was familiar to me, but I didn’t know who she was.
The clock on the dashboard showed four a.m. The street and the square were silent and everything else just as silent, the doors that didn’t open, the closed windows, the dark gateways, the street lamps with their light turned inwards and the air was dead calm, soft as water. At the top of the hill, by the plain, the buses were still resting in the huge garage, heavy, motionless in the slick darkness beneath the rafters, the fuel smooth and shiny in the tanks, the blind windowpanes, the abandoned drivers’ seats, the naked cold gear sticks. Not a soul in sight. I felt cold, there was a tremor in both my legs and in one hand, but not in the other, which she had held.
I straightened up the seat and got out of my car and locked it and practically dragged myself up the three tall flights of stairs and lay down in bed, and now it was more than warm enough, and I fell asleep at once.