In The Wake by Per Petterson Page B

fine.”
    “I’m like a whited sepulchre,” I say. “You’re the one who is fine.”
    She laughs then, deep down in her throat, andI laugh too although I did not mean to be funny, and she asks if I am still cold, and then I answer no, and someone says: “Do you like it when I do this?” but afterwards I do not remember which one of us it was, and then I ask: “What’s your first name?” and she definitely answers something with a G, but I am already sleeping then and do not hear a thing.

6
    I AM FLYING a soundless helicopter above Oslo town. I am not yet born. That doesn’t matter because I am high up and merely looking and shall not interfere. But everything is known to me. There is glass around me on all sides and a rushing silence. The city lies beneath me. It is early morning. The helicopter circles from Nydalen to the fjord, I can see the forests and the Holmenkollen ski jumpand the river running through the city like a silvery-grey ribbon with all the bridges and the small boats moored to poles right down by the mouth, and nothing moves except a pale speck on its way to the river and one of the bridges crossing to the Maridalsveien on the other side. It is my father. The war is over, the party is over, spring has gone and summer has passed with its male choirs singingand laughter across the country and Norwegian flags flying from newly painted poles; the summer he rode on old buses with his white chorister’s cap on his head or on the back of old lorries decorated with beech leaves and red, white and blue ribbons, the stench of bad diesel burning his nose, and he sang at the top of his voice. Now the rubbish rolls along the pavements.
    Everything is black andwhite again, as in films. Autumn is coming, and he turns on to the bridge with the old leather briefcase under his arm, and that briefcase is so worn out that he keeps a rope tied round it to hold it together, and the late summer wind buffets his back with a hint of the first cold and it pulls at his coat, which is the same one he had ten years earlier when he bought it second-hand. It is almostwhite now. For five years he learned things he would never have dreamed of, and they cannot be used for anything now, cannot be told to anyone. He stops on the bridge and leans against the white-painted iron railing where the paint is peeling off in big flakes and the iron is rusty beneath. He stands there gazing into the running water until it makes him dizzy, then he has to sit down on the coarseplanks with his back to the railing and his case on his lap and close his eyes. Up the road across the bridge is the factory, but he just sits there quite still as the minutes pass, seven o’clock has come and gone, and I fly around him in big circles and can see him up close and at the same time as a little white fleck, and then he straightens his back, stretches his arms out to the sides andstarts breathing deeply. Slowly in and out with closed eyes, in and out with his case on his lap, in the nearly white coat and the river under the bridge and the waterfall he hears but cannot see, but which
I
can see quite clearly foaming white, and it falls and it falls, and then I start to weep so loudly it wakes me.
    I am sopping wet in the face and my back is stiff. I don’t know what timeit is, but when I turn round it is light outside, and there’s a scrap of paper on the pillow beside me. I see it at once. I run my hand over the sheet. The warmth has gone. I lie on my back looking up at the ceiling, and then I get that feeling of a film I sometimes have, though not as often as when I was younger, but sometimes, in certain situations. As if I am this man in a film and have to getinside him to play him properly and feel what he feels after a night when everything possible has happened and he wakes up in the bed of a woman he has not even talked to before, and he lies staring up at the ceiling letting everything sort of sink in, and I look at him and at the same time