The Cold Song (5 page)

JON DREYER HAD
fooled everyone.

He was in the attic room at Mailund, that dilapidated white turn-of-the-century house, where the Dreyer-Brodal family spent their summers. He was looking at Milla.

The room was small and bright and dusty with a view of the meadow and the woods and of Milla picking flowers with his children. His wife, she of the asymmetric back (a little kink in her waist, that’s all), owned a restaurant in the center of town, in the old bakery. Siri was her name.

Siri was at work.

He was at work too.

His work was right here. He had his desk, his computer, this is where they left him in peace. He had a book to finish.

But he was looking at Milla.

Siri’s restaurant was called Gloucester, after the fishing port in Massachusetts where she and Jon and Alma had spent a summer when Jon was writing the first part of his trilogy. That was nine years ago, when Alma was three and Liv wasn’t even born yet.

Oh, how he could write back then. Pages and pages, effortlessly every day. And now here he was, working on part three;
the first and second parts had been great successes, published in quick succession in 2000 and 2002. And then nothing. Part three—nothing!

He was supposed to have finished part three a long time ago but the days were frittered away and he had nothing to show for them. Maybe he was depressed. Siri said she thought he might be depressed.

Back then, when they were in Gloucester and he was still writing an average of ten pages a day, he’d lie beside his sleepless wife at night, hold her hand, tell her stories. He would remember things he thought he had forgotten long ago: the interior of his grandmother’s apartment; his mother’s colorful dresses, detailed one by one; the names and faces of his childhood friends. He told her about the silent ski excursions through the woods with his father, the sadness he sometimes felt when he was little, the snow falling everywhere on his trail, white, blue, silver, gray. And he lay beside her and talked and talked and occasionally she fell asleep, but more often than not she didn’t, and he was nevertheless thankful for the warmth and nearness of her and he stroked her hand until he talked himself into his own sleep. And when Jon went quiet, sometimes dozing off mid-word, she took over. She told of dreams she’d had as a child and of dreams she had now. She told of films she had seen and books she had read, “And Jon,” she whispered, “do you read and also write in order to become someone else?” He liked lying next to her, listening to her voice, but was too tired to reply. “Do you think it’s even possible to put yourself in someone else’s place, to suffer, breathe,
feel as they do?” And when he still didn’t answer she told him of when she was a little girl and of her father and how, instead of reading to her, he recounted snatches from books he loved. Siri was only six and her little brother, Syver, was four, but that didn’t stop their father, who told the children about Karenin, Anna Karenina’s husband, who was so strict that everyone was afraid of him, when in fact he was just very sad. And Siri remembered how she had understood what it must be like to be Karenin, even though she was just a little girl. And she told Jon, as she had so many times, about the time when Syver died in the forest, about her mother, who started drinking, who never staggered but simply moved fitfully around the house, suddenly popping up in a corner of the living room, suddenly on the edge of the bed, suddenly standing over pots and pans in the vast kitchen, suddenly in front of the mirror and “I tried to grab hold of her, but she slipped through my fingers and into the pots, into the mirror.” And she told of how her father ran off to Slite on the island of Gotland and married Sofia, starting up his own stonemasonry, and of the time when he paid a visit to Mailund and had forgotten to bring a birthday present, so to make up for it he cut up his gabardine coat and gave it to her, telling her that it was an invisibility cloak. It was her father—on one of the few occasions in Siri’s childhood when she had visited him in Slite—who had taken her to the lighthouse on the nearby island of Fårö. She liked Slite, liked the cement factory that seemed to loom over the whole town and the tired little streets in the center and the white dust that settled over everything and everyone, but Fårö was something else, Fårö was too beautiful, almost forbidding, with its red
poppies and pebbled beaches and shifting lights of gray, and she remembered not wanting to go back there and she really hadn’t thought much about that trip with her father until she and Jon and Alma were standing on Good Harbor Beach in Gloucester more than twenty years later and thousands of miles away, looking at the silhouettes of the two lighthouses, the twin lights, on Thacher Island.

And Jon would turn around and say to her, “Your light shines more.” And she would make fun of him for coming up with a line like that, “You really do know your lines, Jon,” she would say, but she’d let him get away with it. That was then. These days she never let him get away with anything.

Yet it was something he’d say to her from time to time: “Your light shines more.” More than the lighthouses on Thacher Island, more than the bright rooms they had inhabited during those first years of marriage.

When Siri said, “I think you’re depressed,” it wasn’t out of concern, it was more of an accusation, her voice demonstratively weary, telling him
Oh, I am so tired of you and all your crap
.

On a threadbare blanket on the threadbare couch lay Jon’s dog, with his relish for the inner organs of beasts and fowls, hence his name, Leopold, after Leopold Bloom; regular dog food was out of the question, he’d rather starve than eat regular dog food. He was a big, black Lab mix with a white patch on his chest and a doleful look in his eyes. Leopold knew that Jon was never going to finish his book and this worried him.
The reason that this worried him—he was, after all, a dog and not a particularly pensive dog—was that Jon had stopped taking him for long walks. Jon was incapable of doing
anything
until the book was finished—apart, of course, from
not
writing,
not
beginning, and
not
finishing,

What Jon Dreyer said to himself and also to Leopold was that once the summer was over and the book was finished, everything would return to normal and then they would go for long walks. It was still possible to finish it this summer. It was only the end of June. If he wrote ten pages a day, he would have sixty new pages every week—he’d take Sundays off and spend quality time with his children—which meant that he would have about three hundred pages by the end of August. Three hundred pages was a book. It had worked before, it could work again. Ten pages a day starting tomorrow. So day after day Jon sat at his laptop intending to write, either that or he lay on the floor next to his dog and tried to sleep, or he gazed out the window, or he read newspapers online and wrote text messages to women who might or might not reply, and after a lot of all that he ate peanuts and drank beer.

Jon had a way of resorting to attic rooms. There was the attic study at Jenny’s house, where he was now, with the window facing the meadow, and then there was the attic at his and Siri’s home in Oslo, the extortionately expensive and drafty house on which they had a mortgage of more than eighty percent. Why the bank still trusted Siri and him and kept raising their credit limit was a mystery to him.

Jon leaned over the keys and typed:

10 × 6 is 60

60 × 5 is 300

300 is a book

Sometimes he spent the night in the attic room. In Oslo the attic was even more drafty than the rest of the house, but at least he could get some peace. Lie underneath the sloping walls and pointed roof and drink. Play his guitar. Google stuff. Send and receive text messages, which he promptly deleted. It’s hard to say when Jon and Siri had started sleeping apart. It wasn’t something he wanted and it wasn’t something she wanted, it wasn’t a permanent solution and it wasn’t as if they slept apart every night either. And this summer they had even made love once or twice. He liked to run his hand over the sharp indent of her waist (which was so sharp because of her asymmetric back), he liked to run his finger down the nape of her slender neck.

Jon stood up and stretched a little. Leopold followed him with his eyes.

Walk time now?

Leopold let out a sigh.

No, apparently not, he’s sitting down again
.

Everyone except the dog was confident that Jon was going to finish the book, which was why he had been granted an additional advance of 200,000 kroner from his publisher. Yes, parts one and two of the trilogy had sold like hotcakes. That was what they had said, that was what they had written in the papers. But it was a while now since anyone had said or written
anything about Jon’s books, and the money had all been spent. Besides: Jon would never have used the expression “sell like hotcakes”—not only was it a cliché, it was also inaccurate. Hotcakes no longer sold like hotcakes. He had no statistics to back this up, but he was pretty sure that hotcakes fared poorly compared to smartphones or drafty houses in overpriced areas (like his own, for example) or antiaging creams. What a strange word,
antiage
. Jon typed it on his computer.

Antithis. Antithat. Antiage
.

The point of an antiaging cream was that women and men who buy it and apply it to their faces will look younger. Feel younger. Be younger. Turn the clock back. Stop aging and start antiaging.
Antitime. Antihunger. Antianxiety
(that was already a word!).
Antideath
.

He remembered that much against his will, he had gone to a mall outside of Oslo with Siri to buy Christmas presents, and, that done, she had said that she had to stop by the cosmetics department to buy moisturizer.

“Feel how dry my skin is,” she’d said, and she had taken his hand and run it over her cheek.

Antidry. Antidrought
.

The woman behind the cosmetics counter, clad in a white coatdress, like a kind of trailblazing scientist, spoke softly and confidentially about the state of things in general. A demigoddess for our times, Jon thought. In his fifty years on this earth, he had witnessed and even participated in one or two political revivals and ideas about how to run the world and he could not help but admire her. The white skin, the white dress, the white voice, never uttering a word about fear, she talked only
about beauty. And Siri, his clever, cool, critical, hot-tempered Siri, with her gracefully asymmetric back and dry cheeks, listened raptly and wound up paying 1,750 kroner of the million that the bank had just paid into their joint account with their drafty house as security,
antidebt
, for a cream containing peptides, retinol, EGF (discovered, according to the white-clad demigoddess, by a Nobel Prize winner), collagen, and AHA.

Leopold looked at his master:
Walk time now?

The final part of his trilogy was to be about time. Jon planned to write a hymn to everything that endures and everything that falls apart. But truth be told he wasn’t sure what he actually meant by “everything that endures and everything that falls apart” or how he was supposed to write about it, but no one argued with him, except the dog who was stretched out on the floor with his leash between his teeth, waiting, and reminding him that one human year is equal to seven dog years and how is that for a thought on the nature of time?
Just think how many years it’s been since I had a proper walk, I’m a humble dog, born with big muscles and long limbs and I need to get out and run, I have no other wish
.

For a while Jon toyed with the idea of picking up where Walter Benjamin’s
Arcades Project
had left off. This would be something quite different, of course, Jon was writing a novel and not a massive, impenetrable work on the arcades of nineteenth-century Paris (Walter Benjamin had been somewhat disdainful of fiction). But something that took its outset in shopping malls, the arcades of our own day, a depiction not merely of the people, of white-frocked women
with their gospel on how to turn back time, but of the things themselves.

Jon sighed and looked over his notes.

Siri was a chef. Siri cooked real food for real people. Not pretentious pap. People ate her food and were happy. And here he sat, year in, year out, writing a novel that might or might not have to do with a mall. Or with time. Leopold raised his big head and looked at him.

Jon had fooled everyone. The cover art was ready, the catalog blurb was written, he had agreed to do a reading from the book at his publisher’s press conference at the end of August. And he had nothing.

Not “nothing” as a modest man might say about something, but quite literally nothing. Not a word.

Jon took a swig of beer and looked out the window. His girls were playing in the meadow. Alma and Liv. Alma black-haired and dark-eyed. Liv fair-haired and finespun. They were picking flowers and dancing about in the sunshine with the girl who Siri had hired to look after them. The girl called Milla. He had barely said hello to her the previous evening, after Siri had picked her up at the bus stop.

He regarded his daughters. They were jumping back and forth and Liv laughed and lay down in the meadow and made angel wings in the snow, even though it was summer and there wasn’t any snow and she would leave no imprint. Something to hold on to. Something that was real. Alma turned and looked up at the window, but it was so dim in the attic
and so bright outside that she could not possibly have seen him standing there looking down at her. Don’t let go. Try to live a decent life. Hold on to my girls. Protect them. Don’t let go.

And maybe Alma realized that he was standing there looking down at her, because she broke into a wild sort of dance in the tall grass, with her eyes fixed on the window. She spun around and around then suddenly fell down. Jon laughed. Alma got back onto her feet and looked up at him as if she had heard him laughing. Alma’s short dark hair. Alma’s chubby face. Alma’s unformed body. She started spinning again. Around and around and around.

Jon shifted his gaze, looking for Liv, who was closer to the woods, having found a spot where there were obviously more flowers. Milla was right behind her, together they were picking an enormous bouquet.