In The Wake by Per Petterson Read Free Book Online

road, staring straight in front of me until I cross with the green light and walk between the cars ranked close in the car park, and in through the tall glass doors.
    It is Wednesday and only one o’clock, but there are people in all the shops on the ground floor and in all the ones in the gallery on the first floor, and high up under the ceiling there are greatblue-painted beams across the whole span with long rails where the big cranes moved back and forth when this was a steelworks. It seems a long time ago now, but it is only fifteen years. I knew people who worked here. Reidar did, but Reidar is dead. He too wanted to write, and he did in the end, and then he died. But we were everywhere then, we who wanted the world to be new; in factories, onbuilding sites, in print shops and tram drivers’ seats, we wanted to assault the Winter Palace in the light of Lenin, see our muscles swell in the glimmer of molten steel, hear the tigersaw howl in red forests and stretch cables and groan and vigorously sing like the Volga boatmen, da da daa da, haaa! da da daa da, haaa! We wanted light over the land, and even if the world was like we said it was,almost all we did was wrong, for in every living room the lamps were lit and the TV sets flickered far into the night, and the world grew newer than we had ever imagined. Now the steelworks is a shopping centre, and a stone’s throw away was my father’s last shoe factory, where he jumped when the boss said jump until the factory collapsed under the weight of cheap Italian shoes, and then nothing wasleft. But I did not see him, did not want to see him. I saw the thousands on their march to Jenan and Dimitrov standing up against Hitler, I saw the masses of Petrograd and Mayakovsky’s posters. I saw the mountains of Albania covered with guns and draped in red banners, and compared with all that he almost became invisible.
    I walk among the shops in the big hall as far as the patisserie at theother end and take my place in the queue for a coffee and Napoleon cake. You can say what you like about Napoleon, but he
could
make a cake, my father used to say, and that was about as funny as he could get. He really loved Napoleon cakes. So do I. I take my tray with the coffee and cake and walk towards a table where smoking is allowed, and as I’m about to sit down I remember the dream I washaving before the Kurd from the third floor rang my doorbell.
    In the dream it was Easter time. I was twelve. We had gone out to the cottage by the Bunnefjord, it was morning and the sun shone sharply on the bare birch crowns where the crows roosted in dark clusters. They were unusually big. We had heard them carrying on quite early, before we got up, and we could hear them still. All else wasquiet. My brother and I had climbed the rocks along the fjord towards Roald Amundsen’s house until we were stopped by a high wire fence running down the steep slopes from the gravel road and continuing several metres out into the sea. We could see the house through the fence some way up from the shore, pale grey and huge in the sunshine, and the windows were dark. Roald Amundsen had been dead fora long time, but the house was still there and had been renovated, and if you paid the entrance fee you could go inside and look at his books and all the maps and polar bear skins and maybe a few old anoraks, but we had never done that, my brother and I. I stuck my fingers through the holes in the fence and put my face to it and shouted up at the house:
    “I don’t give a shit about Roald Amundsen!”I heard the sound of my voice so clear and metallic and I knew that I meant what I said, and what I said was momentously new. Now we were free to do as we pleased. We could smell the melting snow and the heather and the sun-warmed pines. It was springtime. The ice had broken on the fjord, only last night big patches had opened and lay darkly where before there was white in white, and the wholetime floes broke free and floated on