In The Wake by Per Petterson

But he and I could not talk.
    Then my mother called one day.
    “Your father has been in hospital for severaldays,” she said. “You have to go and see him.”
    I’m sure I knew he was there. One of my brothers must have told me, but I hadn’t taken it in. It was nothing to do with me. I had never been to see anyone in hospital before. But now I did go.
    It took less than half an hour to drive to Aker Hospital. It was early October and the rowan berries hung in heavy clusters at the edge of the forest alongsideGamleveien on the journey in. All the leaves had blown away in a few nights, all the colour was gone, and the berries hung as the only decorations, and had ripened and fermented in the cold weather and were about to split, and I had heard the thrushes liked them especially just then. They gobbled them up and afterwards were so intoxicated they were not able to fly straight. They could not getenough of them. It’s the truth. Someone I trust had told me, and that was what I was thinking about as I drove in to the hospital along Gamleveien, past Lørenskog station and on to Økern and Sinsen; how the thrushes ate fermented rowan berries and got drunk. I had never seen it myself, but I could picture it clearly, and I remember I wished the road to Aker Hospital would be longer than that half-hour.But it was not, and there was hardly any traffic, so it took even less time. So I stayed in the car in the car park for more than ten minutes. Several more cars arrived as I sat there, and almost everyone who got out carried flowers or nicely wrapped boxes of chocolate, and some had brought books for the people they were visiting. I hadn’t brought anything.
    In the end I got myself out of thecar and walked towards the entrance to the surgical wards where a porter gave me directions, and then went two floors up. When I came through the glass door from the staircase and out into the corridor my father stood at the other end. I saw him at once and stopped. I don’t know whether he had had the operation and was on his feet again, or if he was still waiting. I am sure he did not see mebecause he stood with his face to the wall, one hand above his head and the other on his stomach, and it struck me as an odd way to stand. I looked around and there was no-one else in the corridor just then. Only him at one end and me at the other, and I took a few steps towards him, and then I saw that his body was shaking, was trembling, and I went on a few more steps before I realised my fatherwas crying. Then I stopped completely. Never once in my life had I seen him cry, and I realised from the way he was clutching his stomach that he cried because he was in pain, and he must have been in tremendous pain.
    I will tell you something about my father. He was past forty when I was born, but he was different from the other men where we lived. He was an athlete. I mean a real pro. He hadtaken his body as far as it could go and filled it with a strength you would think it could not hold, and you could see it in the way he walked and in the way he ran, in the way he talked and in the way he laughed that there was a fire inside him that no-one could ignore, and it was clear from the way that he was
seen
that he was body and energy both, that he reached out and was heading somewhere,that there was something
about
him. And he had been that way for as long as anyone could remember. He had trained and trained to make his body into a crowbar, a vaulting pole to break free with and be lifted by. He had worn tracks into mountainsides on his way up and on his way down to strengthen his legs to get better on the football pitch, on the ski run and in the boxing ring, and on his waythrough town to the factory from Galgeberg and Vålerenga where he lived, and no-one
had
a strength like his. He had crossed the Østmark by every single path, up every single ridge and down on the other side, and it made him into an all-rounder. Good at everything and best at nothing.