Though he worked in many forms, Bjørneboe wrote only two short stories. One was eventually incorporated into the last chapter of The Silence. Here is the other.
It was late in the evening, but still very light and he had never seen a dead person before.
Now as he stood and looked at his brother, from the side like this, everything was in one way just as usual and in another way very different.
That the face was a thing he hadn't noticed earlier. Purely and simply a thing which had taut yellowish skin stretched over it and which you could talk to without getting an answer—that was something new.
What he didn't like was that the teeth were visible—they shouldn't be—and that you could see something of the dead whites of the eyes, two yellowish-white stripes which had nothing to do with the world. The pupils must be turned upward.
Of course he had cried a little, perhaps quite a lot, but not from sorrow, for after all his brother wasn't gone. On the contrary the whole house was full of him. And his things lay around as usual, the shoes and the pocket knife and the magnifying glass. Yes, the house breathed with him—anybody could feel that. Of course you couldn't talk with him after the light was turned out, but you could think that he was just staying out late—or perhaps off on a little trip. Besides, his books were lying there—including the book, the one which was wrapped up and which nobody was allowed to look at, and which had something to do with it all. No, his brother hadn't been gone that long, you still had to respect the taboo. He was still present and filled the house the way the fragrance of the two great lilac bushes filled it.
When he had cried, it had been mostly from the shock. That his brother really had done it. Peter looked again at the face in front of him. He was standing between it and the window, so that it reposed against the darkness inside, wholly in its own thoughts.
When he noticed that he wasn't alone, it was because the consul was standing there. The consul who had been here as long as he could remember, who had been in many lands and seen everything. The consul with the starched cuffs and the grey, heavy face, with grey hair, grey shoes and a grey suit. Although today he was wearing black. And the consul looked down when their eyes met.
Peter peered at him closely in the bluish evening light. It couldn't be denied that the consul had grown old in the past year.
The consul walked through the streets in the half light. The little coastal town had broad, straight streets, even a couple of tree-lined avenues, but it was only on summer evenings like this that you could see how spacious they really were. In the daytime the pavement swarms with thousands of souls, but in the evening the streets grow quiet early. Then you have the town just as much to yourself as your own soul. At the end of the street—above a low jetty—he could see a piece of the ocean and the horizon, and the rhythmic thud of his walking stick stopped abruptly. He stood still and looked around him in the street and drew up his upper lip the way he was wont to do when he was thinking. It was a somewhat troubled but not unfriendly grimace. Behind the curtains, there in the dark, many people lay sleeping, some lay dying. You live in a small coastal town like this for twenty years, look after your consulate, and it's inevitable that now and then you have to make a condolence call. Although today's wasn't of the usual sort—eighteen-year-olds don't die very often.
His stick slowly resumed its tapping against the paving stones, and he placidly rounded the corner to the left, then swiftly crossed the street kitty-corner and went in at a big gate. It was a very large and old, white-painted one-story wooden building with a roof of black glazed tile.
The rooms in the club were quiet and almost empty, and in the billiard room the tables loomed alone. Only down at the far end of the room were two men bent over the green cover—the lawyer and a young teacher from the cathedral school. The air was close and summer-warm. He walked through the reading room and into the bodega. It was empty, and the window stood open. The rambling roses along the wall of the house across the street looked black in the evening light. The bouquet of lilacs on the table filled the room with its fragrance.
He opened his locker, took out a bottle and got a glass from the sideboard. Then he sat down. The worst thing about growing old was that you remembered everything so clearly. He thought for a moment that nobody was alone in a place which smelled of lilacs; to them belonged all the summer nights which had been and all the summer nights which were to come. And to the lilacs belonged the eighteen-year-old who lay up there and was no longer an eighteen-year-old, but an age-old and terrible question which with no difficulty could fill a whole night and a whole summer and a whole life if need be. You grow old, he thought; and you never really manage to get started on it. And finally you can't even look younger brothers in the eye.
Well, now it was three weeks since the boy had been admitted by the housekeeper. The lilacs were already blooming then. He had come into the library, and the consul had bid him sit down. In the big, cool leather chair.
He had sat down and laid the book—the wrapped book—on the armrest, but he couldn't get it to balance there, so it had ended up on the desk. Which was where it was meant to go anyhow.
Had he seen it in him then?
Oh yes, one could certainly say so. The boy had had a look in his eyes which didn't really fit with the down in front of his ears and around his mouth. His hands were as they should be on such a young person; round and soft—not really used yet, and without the stamp of the person they belonged to. But they were very restless.
He had spoken rather shyly, as you do with older people you don't particularly trust, but whom you can still turn to as the last resort in a pinch. Quite simply because they are so old. The boy hadn't understood that it was he who had the upper hand because he posed the question first. He had posed it quietly and calmly, but it was clear that if he hadn't just a few days before suddenly become an adult, so grown up that he had forgotten both bike rides and friends, he would have borne himself very differently.
But instead he sat there asking while the consul merely took in the scent of the lilacs and grew more and more tense out of sheer helplessness. What good did it do to ask about such things?
First the boy had told a little about himself, but then he had come to the point and had asked if he, who was a powerful man, couldn't help. And if there was a meaning in such things. And when the consul had replied that in that case he would have had to be much more powerful, but that he would look into it all the same, then the other had unwrapped the book—which was not a book, but a collection of loose documents—and shown him what was in them. And then he had asked the real questions—the ones at the heart of the matter.
He had been so embarrassed that he looked away, and turned his profile so that one could see the slightly undershot jaw very clearly in the lamplight. The consul had polished his pince-nez and noticed that the room was full of the scent of lilacs.
And when he answered—yes, what had he answered?
He felt a warm and faint paralysis in his knees when he thought of it. Something along the lines of life's still having so much to offer.
Offer?
He noticed that the paralysis was spreading to his belly. But he hadn't known any better. He hadn't had anything else to say. He had merely looked and looked at the eight-year-old's shirt. It was freshly ironed, but at least a size too big around the neck. It was a shirt to grow into. But what could you answer to such a thing! And still it was your duty to know the right answer.
He raised his glass and almost drained it.
It was a heavy, fragrant port at room temperature, and felt good in his chest.
The lawyer had abandoned his game and was standing in the doorway to the bar. He looked for a moment at the consul, the black-clad, white-haired old man sitting there in the twilight shaking his head. The large, heavy grey head.
The game hadn't managed to capture the jurist's attention.
The stream of soothing triviality which usually issued from the cool, heavy ivory balls and the green felt cover had had no effect at all this evening. He had had more desire to play with the balls in his hands than to shoot billiards with them. Although he was well aware of the secret: You had to give up your own world completely so as to take the game's play-reality seriously, give yourself up totally to the rules' safe miniature life if you were to enjoy the peace it could give.
This evening, though, his own world had been too strong.
A deep, ominous vibration lay within him, a disquiet lodged in his very flesh which gave him a sense of having forgotten something which he at all costs ought to have remembered.
The vibration came from his diaphragm, from somewhere right under his heart. Indeed he could just as well have played blindfolded. Finally his opponent told him that he was pale.
It didn't help that the felt-covered tables and the world were standing there as usual; there hadn't been any game this evening.
When the consul noticed that the lawyer had come in, a distant feeling of distaste went through him. It was a new generation which stood in the doorway, a wholly new human type. And when the other bowed and offered his hand, he looked at it as he pressed it. It was a short, square hand. And it occurred to him that the other's parents had been occupied in manual labor. His own hand was quite different.
But he bade him get a glass from the bar and take a seat.
Usually when he saw the lawyer he just thought “socialism,” a word which gave him a feeling of something clever, benevolent and sharp which was useless in life and had nothing to do with the lilacs.
But tonight it was different.
It came to him that if the boy had gone to the other, had asked him, he would have got an answer which could be used. The lawyer was younger and well-informed on many fronts. Perhaps he had a better idea. Strictly speaking he should know better than a confused old consul whose thoughts revolved more and more around things which had happened two or three generations ago, and who read the newspapers purely for the sake of appearances.
When the other sat down, he saw that he too was dressed in black.
“I paid a condolence call today,” said the lawyer, “at the harbormaster's. I feel sorry for the parents.”
He paused to taste the wine—held it a long time in his mouth. He served good stuff, the old man, but perhaps it was out of place to praise it now. And when he noticed the consul looking at him with big, childlike gray eyes behind his pince-nez, he went on:
“Of course it was dismally inconsiderate of the boy. But in a way you can understand him. To be perfectly honest, it's no joke being human.
“The strange thing is that I had a conversation with him a fortnight ago.”
Again he paused briefly, as if calculating that it must be exactly two weeks.
“That is: he sought me out to ask about something, and he had a book with him. As the consul may know, he took part in the war in his way. Ran around a bit with newspapers and such, just enough to get the impression that he was helping to save the world. And he must have been somewhat warmed up by that. But of course that was two years ago.”
Yes, he'd known about that, but he wasn't listening with the same eagerness as before. Lord, thought the consul to himself, what have we done! He felt the paralysis in his body again, a painful dullness from his knees up to above his heart. And as the lawyer talked on, he merely heard the words as dead objects being thrown around the room. He was aware only of the aroma of lilacs, which was beginning to get too strong and which filled the room totally.
Then the dislike of the other rose up in him again: he thought of his face and of the dead boy's. The lawyer had managed admirably to unite his socialist interests with his private mercantile ones. Socialism and everything to do with it reigned at the top, around his eyes which were blue, fast and nervous—devoted and frank. His nose was short and honest. But in the lower part of his face sat the businessman. He belonged to those who buy stocks instead of fine porcelain.
And now he sat in the graying light, half hidden behind the bouquet of lilacs, and talked and talked as if he were arguing an almost lost case. Quickly and anxiously. The only likeness the consul could find between him and the deceased was his pallor, and even that might be due to the light.
“. . . was a collection of documents about atrocities committed against prisoners after the war,” said the jurist; “ and he wanted me to intervene . . .”
For the lawyer the chance to talk didn't help; he noticed that the words didn't express what he really wanted to say, but came and went of themselves— empty and futile. They didn't move the other and neither did they help him to get away from the painful precision in the picture he wanted to forget. His hands grew clammy and his mouth dry, and he let the words fly away like carrier pigeons without messages. It didn't even help to get it out that the boy wanted him to intervene, and the consul hardly seemed to hear it. And why had the boy picked him? He should have gone to the others, then he might have got something to go on. Yes, of course he would have! He himself, after all, was nothing but a small-town lawyer who had studied for a few poor miserable years in the capital. But the consul had seen the world— And yet the boy had come to him, the lawyer, instead, probably because someone had told him that he wasn't always so particular about fees—and that may have made him think that he was something outside the ordinary. That should oblige a person to answer such questions!
So now it was fourteen days since the boy had come to his office, ungainly and embarrassed the way one is at that age.
His vision flickered when he thought of it; he had responded by defending himself. That was all he could do. Suddenly he remembered that he had thought of something else as he was talking—of a few words he'd heard once, he didn't know where: “God help me! I'm too young to become king!” There was no remembering who had said that. But the words had rung loud and anxiously inside him: “God help me! I'm too young to become king!” And the boy sat in the client's chair looking like judge and prosecutor at once. His hair kept falling down in his face, a face with very light skin and faint freckles around the root of his nose. Finally he let his hair hang. While the lawyer had talked and talked—
And it was what he had said which he now repeated to the consul, feverishly and with a heavy, hollow pain in his midriff.
It was almost midnight, and the twilight inside the room had grown thicker. The consul saw the other only as a dark, violet mass against the window. Before him on the table lay a white mask, very slightly undershot. Then he closed his eyes to look more closely at the other thing, the thing which constantly lay behind it all. It was endlessly old. It was himself as a boy of fifteen or sixteen. He took off his clothes and laid them in the grass and immersed himself in a river, under a tall roof of green treetops. The sunlight itself turned green before it came down to him and blended with the foamy wave crests.
Was that the last time he had swum in such a river? And how earth did one survive growing up at all? Who could get through it? He would have liked to think more about this, but the lawyer was disturbing him; the little man who sat facing him, talking and talking.
Now the jurist was on what he had replied to the boy; that nobody could do anything about it, and that you had to be able to understand those who were doing it. They too had suffered. In the last analysis you had to tend to your own duties and see to making something out of your own life. There was no use blowing this thing up out of proportion; and he was sorry but he couldn't get involved. Now that the war was over, the main thing was to build the society up again.
The society must be built up!
It was as if the lawyer now heard the words for the first time as he repeated them aloud to another. He thought of the freckles he had noticed when the boy visited him. Today, when he had visited the boy, the freckles were gone. The pain under his chest moved upward, and he felt a pang with every heartbeat.
The consul closed his eyes and wished that the whole thing, that all would soon come to an end. He wished it more strongly than he had done in many, many years. Not since he was very young.
And to the torment of them both the lawyer went on talking.
It felt like a relief when the school principal, the old French teacher and philologist, appeared in the doorway—although it was uncomfortable to realize that it must be the first time in the club's history that he showed his face here at this time of night. His features were blotted out in the dim light, but you could recognize the big, lopsided figure by its outline.
He stood for a moment dark and heavy against the lit billiard room beyond, but didn't look at them and didn't even say good evening when he sat down. They both knew that he had spent the last hours of the evening at the harbormaster's; after all he was the boy's principal and teacher.
The lawyer got another glass, and for awhile three men in black sat looking at each other. The scent of the lilacs was strong.
The principal raised his glass to his broad, scarred face and drank. He had a small strip of plaster over the back of his hand. A blue and white striped cuff encircled the round, pale wrist. Then he put down his glass and said in a low, rather dry voice that he had had a visit from the boy at the principal's office eight or ten days ago. And that he had wanted something in particular: help and an explanation. But you never knew how seriously such a thing was meant; at that age most youngsters had metaphysical questions. And anyway, what could you tell a schoolboy about a thing like that? Luther's catechism didn't help much anymore.
The sad, kindly eyes followed a moth which had come in through the open window. It was vainly trying to get out again through the closed one. The buzzing was broken by small, eager thumps on the glass every time it tried to get through the pane. It swung back and forth in front of the light rectangle and lost a little height at every push.
“It would be hard enough to understand it yourself,” he added. And the boy had always been a special case, one of those doomed in advance never really to grow up.
The lawyer gazed at the plaster strip on the back of the principal's hand; it suddenly seemed enormous.
“I know what I'm talking about,” continued the principal: “I haven't dedicated my life to young people without learning something from it. In such a case one utterly powerless.” He swallowed and wiped his face with his handkerchief.
The consul listened with big gray eyes, but didn't really join in the conversation. He knew that he had never sacrificed himself particularly for young people. He polished his pince-nez and looked down, and it struck the others how old he had gotten of late. Terribly old. The heavy gray head had grown smaller.
And the lawyer thought that when the day came, there wouldn't be anyone to pay a condolence visit to.
The principal wiped his face again and felt that he'd rather sit up all night than go to bed.
But because of the consul the conversation came to a standstill.
There was a long, uneasy silence, and the moth fluttered again against the window.
Then the consul hawked, he straightened up and cleared his throat slowly and thoroughly. Then he put on his pince-nez.
“To keep asking,” he said; “as far as I can understand, for such people the thing is to keep on asking. They must never give up.”
They looked at him astonished, and for a moment he looked down again. But then, turning his gaze on them, he continued slowly and hesitantly, as if proposing an epitaph:
“There are people who are born to ask questions—to ask them over and over again. About the same things.”
Then he fell silent, groping for words. The lawyer looked at him open-mouthed, and the principal leaned forward.
“And it's very important that they ask,” the consul went on weakly; “very important. For they are thereby taking a great burden on themselves for us all, and a general passport can be issued for the whole crew in their name. ”
He stopped again, his cuffs shining white in the dusk. Then he leaned back in his chair. The others waited, but nothing more came from him.
When they parted outside the big white wooden house, the day was already dawning behind the mountains to the northeast. It was two o'clock.
Then each went his own way.
Peter stood by one of the street's chestnut trees, high as a church tower, and reflected. It was wonderful how broad the street was when you saw it like this without people—in this grayish-white light. Way down at the end he saw a triangle of ocean and horizon which seemed to lie higher than the land. You really had to see a street like this at night! While people were inside sleeping. It was as flat and still as the leaden sea outside.
Far off down the street came a black-clad man with a big gray head. He walked slowly and must be very tired, the way he was leaning on his cane. All at once he stood stock-still and looked around with his upper lip drawn up. Then he went on.
But Peter sprang quickly around the corner. He went straight home, let himself in—for now he had his brother's key—and sneaked upstairs past his parents' bedroom. Up in the boys' room he took off his shoes and sat down on his brother's bed.
He looked at the books lying there, and at the book which was wrapped up. And the shirt which lay over the chair—the new shirt. He picked it up and noticed that it still smelled very faintly of his brother.
Would he be able to use it? —It would certainly be awhile, for it had been too big for his brother too; it was the kind of shirt that was bought to grow into.
It gave him eyestrain and a headache to understand such things. And as he undressed his face grew wet. A salt taste filled his mouth.
He sat there naked on the edge of the bed, with his face turned downward. His hands and knees shone in the half-darkness, and for the first time he saw how they resembled his brother's: in a way there was the same cut to them. Yet they were his own, his own hands and his own knees. Then they grew indistinct, distorted and blurred as if seen through a thick lens. He closed his eyes.
He sat like that for a long time, facing straight ahead in the cold, light summer night. And slowly, slowly the pain inside his head gave way; the hammering flowed out and down along his cheeks. The last drops tickled his skin before they went away.
When he opened his eyes, it was broad daylight around him, and all at once the birds began to sing. First one lone voice which quivered and leaped— crystal-clear and for a few seconds quite alone in the world—and then the sound came from all of them, like hundreds of small rolling glass beads. He knew that in the next moment the sun would be up. With a bound he was over at the window, raising the light, almost transparent curtain. At once the first ray of the sun shot out behind the mountain north of the town, it caught his face and chest and colored them pink. Then the sun itself tumbled forth, wild and weighty—a sun which made the mountains and the trees and the gardens and the houses tremble in swift blue shadows. There was a faint cool scent of lilacs in the garden.
When he went to bed, he felt that his brother was once again present in the room. Downstairs he was still, more still than anything else in the world, but up here you could hear him like a full, rich tone in the air.
And before he slept, he knew that he would be in his company for many, many years to come—and that he had inherited more from him than just the shirt.
This page added Feb 1999, revised July 1999