Free In The Wake by Per Petterson Page B

as I cross the threshold. There is a chairjust to the right of the door. I sit down on that. I do not want to intrude, I don’t know
what
I am doing here really, it is just that I can’t find my keys. But I have not told her that yet. She stands barefoot in the middle of the hall with a dressing gown tied tightly round her waist with a leather belt, like a paramilitary dressing gown, I think, and she runs her hand through her hair and bitesher lip, and I close my eyes and let the heat ooze gently in through my clothes, through my skin until my hands and feet start to tingle so sharply that it hurts, and I could not have moved if I wanted to. But I do not want to. I want to sit right here.
    When I open my eyes again she looks different. Her hair has been brushed back from her face.
    “I can’t see very well without glasses,” she says.“I thought you were drunk, you frightened me a bit.”
    I nod. “I’m not drunk,” I say.
    “No,” she says. “You’re not drunk. I can see that now.”
    She stands short-sighted in front of me, and I sit on the chair. We are waiting for something. Here in the no man’s land right inside her door; the to-and-fro place, but no place really. Finally, she sits down on the chest underneath the mirror. She istired.
    “Could I just sit here for a bit?” I say. “Then I’ll go away. You go back to bed. I’ll be fine.”
    She runs her hand through her hair. “Oh, but I can’t do that,” she says.
    No, of course she can’t. We wait again. She thinks my eyes are closed, and they are, in a way, at least very nearly, but I can see her all the same and I like her and I like the skin of her throat and know how warm itis just there and then on and on into extents and roundings beyond comprehension. But
she
doesn’t know that, I can see she does not, and I would have to talk her out of that belt and that dressing gown and into her bed and then do what I had to do, which I honestly have nothing against, but really am not up to right now, to get into that warmth and thaw myself out as Erik Lagus did in the Stockholmof
The Class Warrior
thirty-three years ago when I was only ten and knew all there was to know about skin without even giving it a thought, for the warmth was everywhere then, in the walls of houses and rough stones and in the bark of the tall pine tree by the path down to Dumpa and in the hoods of black cars and in my father’s blue T-shirt and what was inside that shirt. But all that was lostlong ago, and I do not have the strength to try. It is hard work. It would take me at least an hour to get her there even if it was at all possible, and I only have a few minutes left before I must leave. It is too late now to say I have no keys.
    I open my eyes wide, looking straight at her, and then she gets up from the chest, not impatiently, but restlessly maybe, at a loss.
    “May I tell yousomething?” I ask.
    “About what?”
    “Something about my father.”
    She bites her lip again and does not know what to say, and then she says: “I suppose you may. Will it take long?”
    “Oh, no,” I say.
    *
    Only six months before my father died he had to go to hospital. He had been there earlier for a minor operation. Now they were afraid he had cancer. He was seventy-six, but on the few occasions Isaw him he looked the same as he had always done. Maybe I was being dim. I don’t know. There were so many other things. My head was full of cotton wool. I was always tired. My first book had just been published. Almost everything in that book was about him, and I knew he had read it, my mother said he had, but he never mentioned it when I went home to visit. Their neighbours too had read it and theother old chaps stopped him on the road in front of the house and said: “Well, well, Frank, we didn’t know you used to be such a tough guy,” and then he just smiled secretively and would not say a word. Perhaps he was a little proud, or he smiled because he had no choice. I will never know.