‘I’m Jakob Sara.’
‘Iulf . . . Er, Ulf Hansen.’
‘My grandson says you tell jokes.’
‘He does?’
‘But he wasn’t able to tell me what your profession is. Or what you’re doing here in Kåsund. Just that you’ve got my son-in-law’s rifle. And that you’re not a man of faith.’
I nodded blandly, the sort of nod that is neither confirmation nor denial, but which merely acknowledges that you’ve heard what is being said, then stuffed a large piece of cake into my mouth to give myself a few seconds to think. I went on chewing and nodding.
‘And that’s none of my business either,’ the man continued. ‘Not that, and not how long you’re thinking of staying here. But I can see for myself that you like almond cake.’
He looked me hard in the eye as I struggled to swallow. Then he put a hand on my bad shoulder. ‘Remember, young man, that God’s mercy is boundless.’ He paused, and I felt the warmth of his hand spread through the fabric and into my skin. ‘Almost.’
He smiled and walked away, moving on to another of the mourners, and I heard their muttered exchange of ‘The peace of God’.
‘Ulf?’
I didn’t have to turn round to know who it was.
‘Shall we play secret hiding?’ He was looking up at me with a serious face.
‘Knut, I’m—’
‘Please!’
‘Hmm.’ I looked down at the remnants of the cake. ‘What’s secret hiding?’
‘Hiding so that no grown-ups know you’re hiding. You’re not allowed to run or shout or laugh, and you’re not allowed to hide in silly places. We play it when we’re at parish meetings. It’s good fun. I’ll look first.’
I looked around. There were no other children here, just Knut. Alone at his father’s funeral. Secret hiding. Why not?
‘I’ll count to thirty-three,’ he whispered. ‘From now.’
He turned to face the wall, as if he were looking at his parents’ wedding picture, while I put my plate down and discreetly made my way out of the living room and through the corridor. I glanced in the kitchen, but she was no longer there. I went outside. The wind was getting up. I walked round the old car. A few raindrops hit the windscreen as the wind gusted past. I carried on round the back of the house. I leaned against the wall beneath the open window of the workroom. Lit a cigarette.
It was only when the wind died down that I heard the voices in the workroom:
‘Let go, Ove! You’ve been drinking, you don’t know what you’re saying.’
‘Don’t struggle, Lea. You shouldn’t mourn too long, Hugo wouldn’t want that.’
‘You don’t know what Hugo would want!’
‘Well, I know what I want. And always have wanted. And so do you.’
‘Let go now, Ove. Or I’ll shout.’
‘The way you shouted that night with Hugo?’ Hoarse, drunken laughter. ‘You argue a lot, Lea, but in the end you back down and obey your menfolk. Like you obeyed Hugo, and like you obeyed your father. And like you’re going to obey me.’
‘Never!’
‘That’s the way we do it in our family, Lea. Hugo was my brother, now he’s gone, and you and Knut are my responsibility.’
‘Ove, that’s enough now.’
‘Just ask your father.’
In the silence that followed, I wondered if I should move.
I stayed where I was.
‘You’re a widow and a mother, Lea. Be sensible. Hugo and I shared everything – this is what he would have wanted, I promise you. And it’s what I want. Now, come here, let me just . . . ow! Fucking women!’
A door slammed.
I heard more muttered cursing. Something fell to the floor. Just then Knut came round the corner of the house. He opened his mouth wide to shout, and I steeled myself for the cry that would give me away.
But it didn’t come, just the silent-movie version.
Secret hiding.
I tossed the cigarette away, hurried towards him and threw out my arms in resignation. I led him towards the garage.
‘I’ll count to thirty-three,’ I said, then turned to face his mother’s red Volkswagen. I heard his footsteps run off, then the front door open.
When I finished counting, I went back inside.
She was standing on her own in the kitchen again, peeling potatoes.
‘Hi,’ I said quietly.
She looked up. Her cheeks were red, her eyes shiny.
‘Sorry,’ she said with a sniff.
‘You could have got some help to make dinner today.’
‘Oh, they all offered. But it’s better to keep yourself busy, I think.’
‘Yes, maybe you’re right,’ I said, sitting down at the kitchen table. I noticed her stiffen slightly. ‘You don’t have to say anything,’ I said. ‘I just wanted to sit down for a while before I left, and in there . . . well, I haven’t got much to talk to anyone about.’
‘Apart from Knut.’
‘Oh, he does most of the talking. Clever boy. He’s done a lot of thinking for someone his age.’
‘He’s had plenty to think about.’ She wiped her nose with the back of her hand.
‘Yes.’
I felt I was about to say something, that the words were on their way, I just wasn’t quite sure which ones they were going to be. And when they arrived it was as if they had arranged themselves, that I wasn’t in charge of them, yet they were still born of the clearest logic.
‘If you’d like to be on your own with Knut,’ I said, ‘but aren’t sure if you could manage, I’d really like to help you.’
I looked down at my hands. Heard the peeling stop.
‘I don’t know how long I’ve got to live,’ I said. ‘And I haven’t got any family. No heirs.’
‘What are you saying, Ulf?’
Yes, what exactly was I saying? Had these thoughts appeared in the few minutes that had passed since I had been standing beneath the window?
‘Just that if I disappear, then you should look behind the loose plank to the left of the wall cupboard up there,’ I said. ‘Behind the moss.’
She let the potato peeler fall into the sink and was looking at me with a concerned expression on her face. ‘Are you ill, Ulf?’
I shook my head.
She stared at me with that distant, blue look in her eyes. The look Ove had seen, and had drowned in. He must have done.
‘Then I’m not sure you should think like that,’ she said. ‘And Knut and I will be fine, so don’t worry about that either. If you’re looking for something to spend your money on, there are plenty of people in the village who are worse off.’
I felt my cheeks flush. She turned her back on me and started peeling again. She stopped again when she heard my chair scrape.
‘But thanks for coming,’ she said. ‘Seeing you cheered Knut up.’
‘No, thank you,’ I said, and headed towards the door.
‘And . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘There’s a prayer meeting here in two days’ time. Six o’clock. Like I said, you’d be very welcome.’
I found Knut in what I assumed was his room. His thin legs stuck out from under his bed. He was wearing a pair of football boots that had to be at least two sizes too small. He giggled as I pulled him out and dropped him down on top of the bed.
‘I’m off now,’ I said.
‘Already? But . . .’
‘Have you got a football?’
He nodded, but his bottom lip was pouting.
‘Good, then you can practise your kicking against the garage wall. Draw a circle, aim as hard as you can, then stop the ball as it comes back. If you do that a thousand times, you’ll be much better than the others in the team when they come home after the summer.’
‘I’m not in the team.’
‘You will be, if you do that.’
‘I’m not in the team because I’m not allowed to be.’
‘Not allowed?’
‘Mum
says I can, but Grandpa says sport takes your attention away from God, that the rest of the world can spend Sundays shouting and yelling and running after a ball, but for us Sunday belongs to the Word.’
‘I see,’ I lied. ‘And what did your father say about that?’
The lad shrugged. ‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing?’
‘He didn’t care. All he cared about . . .’ Knut stopped. He had tears in his eyes. I put my arm round his shoulders. I didn’t need to hear it. Because I already knew, I’d met plenty of Hugos, some of them had been my customers. And I myself was fond of that sort of escape, I needed that outlet. It was just that as I sat there feeling the boy lean against me, the mute sobbing that rocked his warm body, I couldn’t help thinking that that had to be something no father could run away from, would even want to escape. That it was a blessing and a curse that strapped you firmly to the tiller. But who was I to say anything about that, I who – whether or not of my own accord – had abandoned ship before she had even been born? I let go of Knut.
‘You’re coming to the prayer meeting?’ he said.
‘I don’t know. But I’ve got another job for you.’
‘Okay!’
‘It’s like secret hiding, it’s all about not saying anything, not to anyone.’
‘Great!’
‘How often does the bus come?’
‘Four times a day. Two from the south, two from the east. Two during the day, two at night.’
‘Okay. I want you to be there when the daytime bus from the south arrives. If anyone you don’t know gets off, you come straight to me. You don’t run, you don’t shout, you don’t say anything. Same thing if a car with Oslo plates arrives. Do you get it? I’ll give you five kroner each time.’
‘Like a . . . spy mission?’
‘Something like that, yes.’
‘Are they the people who are going to bring your shotgun?’
‘See you, Knut.’ I tousled his hair and stood up.
On the way out I met the tall, fair-haired man as he stumbled out of the toilet. I heard the water flush behind him as he was still fumbling with his belt. He raised his head and looked at me. Ove Eliassen.
‘The peace of God,’ I said.
I could feel his heavy, drink-soused gaze on my back.
I came to a stop a short way down the road. The sound of drums was carrying on the wind. But I had already sated my hunger, I’d fulfilled my need to see other people.
‘I think it’s time for me to go home and have a good cry,’ Toralf would sometimes say late in the evening. That always made the other drinkers chuckle. That it happened to be precisely what Toralf did was another matter.
‘Put on that angry bloke of yours,’ he would say when we got home. ‘Let’s take a trip into the depths.’ I don’t know if he actually liked Charles Mingus, or any of my other jazz records, for that matter, or if he just wanted the company of another miserable bastard. But occasionally Toralf and I would enter the black of night at the same time.
‘Now we’re properly miserable!’ he would laugh.
Toralf and I called it the black hole. I’d read about a guy called Finkelstein who had discovered that there were holes in space which would suck everything in if you got too close, even light, and that they were so black they were impossible to observe with the naked eye. And that was exactly what it was like. You couldn’t see anything, you were just getting on with your life, and then one day you could just physically feel that you’d got caught in the gravitational field, and then you were lost, you got sucked into a black hole of hopelessness and infinite despair. And in there everything was the mirror image of the way it was outside, you’d keep asking yourself if there was any reason to have any hope, if there was any good reason not to despair. It was a hole in which you just had to let time run its course, put on a record by another depressed soul, the angry man of jazz, Charles Mingus, and hope you emerged on the other side, like some fucking Alice popping out of her rabbit hole. But according to Finkelstein and the others, that might be exactly what it was like, that there was a sort of mirror-image wonderland on the other side of the black hole. I don’t know, but it strikes me that it’s as good and reliable a religion as any other.
I looked over to where I knew the path ran. At the landscape that seemed to rise up and vanish into the clouds. Somewhere in there, the long night started.
CHAPTER 8
BOBBY WAS ONE of the girls in Slottsparken. She had very long brown hair and dark eyes, and she smoked hash. That’s obviously an extremely superficial description of anyone, but those are the first things I think of. She didn’t say much, but she smoked a lot, which made her eyes soft. We were fairly similar. Her real name was Borgny, and she was from a wealthy family in the western suburbs. Well, she wasn’t quite as wealthy as she liked to make out; she just liked the idea of the rebellious hippy chick breaking away from social conservatism, financial security and right-wing politics for . . . well, what? To test some naive ideas about how to live life, expand her consciousness and break from old-fashioned convention. Such as the convention that when a man and a woman have a child together, that brings with it a certain responsibility for both parties. Like I said, we were fairly similar.
We were sitting in Slottsparken, listening to a guy play a dodgy version of ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’ on an untuned guitar when Bobby told me she was pregnant. And that she was pretty sure I was the father.
‘Cool, we’re going to be parents,’ I said, trying not to look as though someone had just tipped a bucket of ice-cold water over my head.
‘You just have to pay maintenance,’ she said.
‘Well, obviously I’ll be happy to do my bit. We’ll do this together.’
‘Together is right,’ she said. ‘But not together with you.’
‘Oh? So . . . together with who, then?’
‘Me and Ingvald,’ she said, nodding towards the guy with the guitar. ‘We’re together now, and he says he’d like to be a father. As long as you pay maintenance, of course.’
And that’s what happened. Okay, so Ingvald didn’t hang around for long. By the time Anna was born Bobby was with another bloke whose name started with ‘I’, I think it might have been Ivar. I was allowed to see Anna very occasionally, at irregular intervals, but there was never any discussion of me looking after her. Nor did I think that was what I wanted either, not then. Not because I didn’t care – I fell in love with her the moment I first set eyes on her. Her eyes radiated a sort of blue shimmer as she lay in her pram gurgling and looking up at me, and even if I didn’t really know her, she became the most valuable thing in my life overnight.
Maybe that was why. She was so small and fragile, but so precious that I didn’t want to look after her on my own. I couldn’t. I didn’t dare. Because I was bound to do something wrong, something irrevocable. I was sure I would do lasting damage to Anna one way or another. Not that I’m an irresponsible or careless person, I’ve just got really bad judgement. That’s why I was always prepared to follow the advice given by random strangers, and leave important decisions to other people. Even when I knew that they – in this case Bobby – were no better than me. Cowardly is probably the word I’m looking for. So I kept out of the way, sold hash, and gave Bobby half the money once a week, when I would look down into the magical blue shimmer of Anna’s smiling eyes, and maybe even get to hold her when we were having coffee if Bobby was between men.
I told Bobby that if she could stay away from Slottsparken and dope, I’d keep away from the cops, from the Fisherman, from trouble. Because she and Anna wouldn’t be able to manage if I ended up behind bars. Like I said, Bobby’s parents weren’t actually that rich, but were so middle class and conservative that they’d made it very clear that they wanted nothing to do with their hash-smoking, promiscuous hippy daughter, and that she and the child’s father would have to fend for themselves, possibly with the help of the state.
Finally the day came when Bobby said she could
n’t handle looking after the bloody kid any more. Anna had been crying, her nose bleeding, and she had been running a fever for four days in a row. When I looked down at the bed, the blue light in her eyes had been replaced by blue circles beneath them; she was pale and had strange blue bruises on her knees and elbows. I took her to the doctor’s, and three days later came the diagnosis. Acute leukaemia. A one-way ticket to death. The doctors gave her four months. Everyone kept saying that things like that just happened, lightning striking at random, mercilessly, pointlessly.
I flew into a rage, asked questions, made phone calls, checked, went to see specialists, and eventually found out that there was a treatment for leukaemia in Germany. It didn’t save everyone, and it cost a fortune, but it gave one thing: hope. Sensibly, the Norwegian state had other things to spend its money on than fragile hope, and Bobby’s parents said it was fate, and a matter for the Norwegian health service, they weren’t paying for some fantasy cure from Naziland. I did the sums. If I sold five times as much hash, I still wouldn’t make enough in time. Even so, I tried, I worked eighteen-hour shifts and pushed like mad for sales, heading down towards the cathedral when the Slottsparken fell silent at night. When I next went to the hospital they asked why no one had been there for the past three days.
‘Hasn’t Bobby been here?’
The nurse and doctor shook their heads, said they’d tried calling her, but that her phone seemed to have been cut off.
When I got to Bobby’s she was lying in bed and said she was ill, and that it was my fault she couldn’t afford to pay the phone bill. I went to the toilet and was about to drop a cigarette butt in the bin when I saw the bloody cotton-wool ball. Further down in the bin I found a syringe. Maybe I’d been half-expecting it to happen; I’d seen more fragile souls than Bobby cross that line.
So what did I do?