In The Wake Read Online Free PDF Page B

It was a film in slow motion. I saw his face on the way down, an incredulous expression in his eyes, before he landed flat on his chest with the bloody hands out to his sides. Now he will die, I thought. Everyone shot up from their chairs and the chairs crashed over, and I didn’t want him to die, but I couldn’t get up. I sat glued to my chair. I saw him lying with his back on the floorbetween the worktop and the wall and the beer running out of the bag over the newly varnished floor towards my chair. It was so hot in the room that the air turned misty and then into fog, and I saw everything through that fog: the furniture, the orange oilcloth, the photographs on the wall with the whole family history, curtains and lamps and my father on the floor in a lake of beer, and I didn’twant him to die, I wanted to be ten years old again and have the smell of leather tickling my nose on my way down to the cellar, I wanted all that I looked upon to have a meaning and to surround and embrace me, and all that had happened to be gathered into one
now
and give me peace. I wanted my father to say Hemingway, not Hemningway.
    But he didn’t die then. He rose to his knees and impatientlypushed away the helping hands.
    “Cut it out,” he said. “This is nothing.” He stared at the floor and said: “Isn’t that so, Hemningway,” and he was right about that, and then four years went by in which everything changed. Now only my brother and I were left. We sat drinking at the same table in the same room. We drank far too much, he said skål all the time, and we were going to get drunk. I tookgulp after gulp and swallowed away as if drinking was the only thing I wanted in this world, and I felt anger coming, and I looked around me and said: “Wait a bit. Hold on a moment.”
    It was those photographs on the wall. I couldn’t stand looking at them. And it was the curtains and the orange oilcloth and the knick-knacks on the window sill by the kitchen corner, it was the souvenirs from Germanyand the journey to Siberia. I put my glass on the table, walked rapidly out to the car and found a roll of black plastic sacks behind the driving seat and went in again. I pulled off the first sack and started to tear at the curtains. They didn’t want to come down. I took a good grip with both hands and leaned on them with all my weight. The loops tore and broke off the rail right over to thewall, and I went down and landed on the floor in a heap of striped cloth.
    “For fuck’s sake, can’t you give me a hand?” I struggled up on all four. My brother got up from the table.
    “What are you playing at?” he said. I didn’t reply, just tore off another plastic sack and threw it to him and stuffed the curtains into the one I held. I pointed around me and he watched my finger and saw what itpointed at.
    “You’re crazy,” he said. But he opened the sack, pulled the cloth off the table and fed it in, went across the room and took one photograph off the wall, and then another, and pretty soon there were none left, he was efficient, and I went to the window sill, and with my underarm swept everything on it into the sack with the curtains. In no time we had cleared the room, the sacks werefull and we carried them out to the heap of shoes and left them there.
    The cup is half full. The coffee has gone cold. I don’t know what I have been doing. It is still dark, it is still winter, there’s a cold draught from the balcony door. In the next block Mrs Grinde has put on her kitchen light again. It has been off for a while. I look at the clock . It says four. What is she doing up now,there’s no-one to spy on except me, and I’m not that interesting, or maybe I am, to her, and I picture her even though I have only ever seen her out of doors, on the way to the bus or at the Co-op; the stern eyes behind her glasses, her small body restlessly passing from room to room, one lit, one dark, then one lit again, in her dressing gown maybe, her brown hair