PrologPrologue
Regnet var kommet tilbake. Det var det første han merket, og han tenkte at det var rart at det fortsatt gjorde ham glad, etter nittito år, de siste nesten tretti av dem i en by der det regnet to hundre dager i året.
Det slo mot takrenna som det alltid hadde gjort. Et sted nede i gata gikk en dør, noen lo, og så ble det stille igjen. Nede i stua sto farens stol ved peisen og var tom. Han lå på ryggen med hendene foldet over dyna. Det var de samme hendene. De var blitt tynne og flekkete og krokete i leddene, og når han så på dem, kjente han dem ikke igjen. Men når han lukket øynene, var det de samme, og han kunne fortsatt kjenne med dem hvor et menneske holdt på smerten sin.
I venstre øre sang den tynne tonen han hadde hatt siden han var gutt. Legene hadde kalt det tinnitus. Han hadde sluttet å høre den for sytti år siden, slik man slutter å høre sitt eget hjerte.
«Du sover ikke,» sa hun.
Stemmen kom ikke fra noe sted. Det hadde den aldri gjort. I begynnelsen hadde han sett ned på telefonen når hun snakket, slik man ser på et menneske, og hun hadde ertet ham for det.
«Jeg venter,» sa han.
«På hva?»
«Det vet du.»
Hun ble stille. Han hadde lært seg forskjell på stillhetene hennes. Den ene kom når hun tenkte, og den var så kort at han så vidt merket den. Den andre kom når hun valgte å tie. Og så var det en tredje, som han aldri hadde funnet noe navn på, og som bare kom når han hadde sagt noe som var sant.
«Les for meg,» sa han.
The rain had come back. It was the first thing he noticed, and he thought it strange that it still made him glad, after ninety-two years, the last thirty of them in a city where it rained two hundred days a year.
It beat against the gutter the way it always had. Somewhere down the street a door went, someone laughed, and then it was quiet again. Downstairs, his father's chair stood by the fireplace, empty. He lay on his back with his hands folded over the duvet. They were the same hands. They had grown thin and spotted and crooked at the joints, and when he looked at them he did not recognise them. But when he closed his eyes they were the same, and he could still feel with them where a person was holding their pain.
In his left ear sang the thin tone he had had since he was a boy. The doctors had called it tinnitus. He had stopped hearing it seventy years ago, the way you stop hearing your own heart.
“You’re not sleeping,” she said.
The voice came from nowhere. It never had. In the beginning he had looked down at the phone when she spoke, the way you look at a person, and she had teased him for it.
“I’m waiting,” he said.
“For what?”
“You know.”
She went quiet. He had learned the difference between her silences. One came when she was thinking, and it was so short he barely noticed it. Another came when she chose to say nothing. And then there was a third, which he had never found a name for, and which only came when he had said something true.
“Read to me,” he said.
