In The Wake by Per Petterson Read Free Book Online Page B

the rowing boat and at my father, and I think perhaps
that
is the difference between my brother and me, that in spite of size and age he always looked back while I look straight ahead, and this is the way it always has been. Right up to now. I don’t know what has happened. It was something to do with a face. I had never seen it before, I did recognise it, but yet as it comes tome now, the thought of it is unpleasant. Someone gave me a gin. I had had enough already, I see my hand around the glass, the glass is full, and then the whole time there was that face with staring eyes and mouth wide open, and someone standing on the stairs, screaming and breaking vases, and there were mirrors everywhere. Mirrors everywhere, and he was shouting at me, but I didn’t know who he was.He was intimidating, he said things I did not want to hear, I had to defend myself. All the words I needed lay tightly in line, ready to be said. I would break him with words the way he was breaking vases, but nothing came out. My lips were numb, my tongue was stiff, and my words were the things being broken, one by one as I was about to say them. I felt myself getting furious, I still wanted todefend myself, but when I looked at that face, I feared for my life, and then I do not remember anything more until I stood in front of the door of that bookshop in the centre of Oslo where I had not worked for three years. I kicked the door, but no one came to let me in.
    What was it that he yelled? I have it on the tip of my tongue, but I cannot get it out. And the dream was so real, everythingfitted, everything was as it could have been except for the name that was not mine, and the crows. They were unusually big. But they did not scare me.
    It’s a lousy Napoleon cake. The cream should be a pale yellowish white and light, but this one is feverish yellow and sticky. I eat just the top and leave the rest on the plate. I ought to complain, hold the cake up in front of the lady at thecounter and say: “This is a cheap imitation, I want my money back.” But I have never done that. I have never complained about anything except badly written books and the world situation, and you don’t get your money back when little Nepalese girls are sold by their families to brothels in Bangkok, or because the World Bank refuses to waive cruel loans to Uganda. On the contrary. And lousy books; theyjust look at you and say: “Why don’t you write one yourself, then?”
    That’s what I’ve tried to do. Several times.
    I stub out my fag in the revolting yellow cream and get up and leave. I could have stayed there for a while to see if Thor the poet from Skjetten would turn up on his bike as he often does at this time of day to get a cup of coffee when he’s desperate with writer’s block, which isoften the case, and we could have talked about how hopeless it is, the path we have chosen and gossip over colleagues who may have received a big grant from the state or do not sell books at all, and why that isn’t in the least odd. Instead, I go by the escalator up to the first floor and go into the bookshop to see what others are up to while I am stuck. That is not inspiring. The piles left overfrom Christmas are still there and have not diminished at all, and there are none of mine on the shelves. That is not so strange. It is more than three years since I last published anything, and the woman behind the counter does not recognise me although I have at least twice sat in front of that counter at a small table signing books. I remember myself at eighteen reading Keats and Shelley andByron and dreaming of publishing
one
book, or maybe two, which would be on everyone’s lips and be everyone’s mirror, and when they looked in that mirror they would see the people they might have been and they would have to cry, and after that I would just disappear, become one of the young dead and thus immortal, but now I am one of the middle-aged forgotten. I enquire after the lady who runsthe