Midnight Sun

by Jo Nesbo

  ‘Outside.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘What for? Because I don’t live here.’

  ‘Mum’s not as cross as she seems.’

  ‘Say goodbye from me.’

  ‘From whom?’ her voice called. She was walking back towards the altar rail.

  ‘Ulf.’ I was starting to get used to the name.

  ‘And what are you doing here in Kåsund, Ulf?’ She wrung out a cloth above the bucket.

  ‘Hunting.’ I thought it was best to stick to one and the same story in such a small community.

  She fixed the cloth to the end of the broom. ‘What for?’

  ‘Grouse,’ I chanced. Did they have grouse this far north? ‘Or anything with a pulse, really,’ I added.

  ‘It’s been a bad year for mice and lemmings this year,’ she said.

  I hummed. ‘Well, I was thinking something a bit bigger than that.’

  She raised an eyebrow. ‘I just meant that there aren’t many grouse.’

  There was a pause.

  In the end Knut broke it. ‘When predators can’t get enough mice and lemmings, they take grouse eggs.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said with a nod, and realised my back was sweating. I could do with a wash. My shirt and money belt could do with a wash. My suit jacket could do with a wash. ‘I daresay I’ll find something to shoot. It’s more of a problem that I’m a week early. After all, hunting season doesn’t start until next week. I’ll just have to practise until then.’ I hoped the Sámi had given me accurate information.

  ‘I don’t know about a season,’ the woman said, pushing the broom across the floor where I had slept so hard that the broom head squeaked. ‘You southerners are the ones who came up with that idea. Here we go hunting when we have to. And don’t bother when there’s no need.’

  ‘Speaking of needs,’ I said. ‘You don’t know of anywhere in the village where I could stay?’

  She stopped cleaning and leaned on the broom. ‘You just have to knock on a door and they’ll give you a bed.’

  ‘Anywhere?’

  ‘Yes, I’d say so. But of course there aren’t that many people at home right now.’

  ‘Of course.’ I nodded towards Knut. ‘Summer holidays?’

  She smiled and tilted her head. ‘Summer work. Anyone who’s got reindeer is sleeping in tents and caravans at the pastures down by the coast. A few have gone fishing for pollock. And a lot of people have gone off to the fair in Kautokeino.’

  ‘I see. Any chance I could rent a bed from you?’ When she hesitated I quickly added: ‘I’ll pay well. Very well.’

  ‘No one here would let you pay much. But my husband isn’t at home, so it’s really not befitting.’

  Befitting? I looked at her skirt. Her long hair.

  ‘I see. Is there anywhere that isn’t so . . . er, central? Where you can get some peace and quiet. With a view.’ By which I meant, where you can see if anyone’s coming.

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘Seeing as you’re going to be hunting, I suppose you could always stay in the hunting cabin. Everyone uses it. It’s fairly remote, and a bit cramped and ramshackle, but you’d certainly get your peace and quiet. And a fine view in all directions, that much is certain.’

  ‘Sounds perfect.’

  ‘Knut can show you the way.’

  ‘There’s no need for him to do that. I’m sure I can—’

  ‘No!’ Knut said. ‘Please!’

  I looked down at him again. Summer holidays. Everyone away. Bored having to follow his mum to do her cleaning. Finally, something happening.

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Shall we go, then?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘What’s bothering me,’ the dark-haired woman said, dipping the broom in the bucket, ‘is what you’re going to shoot with. You’ve hardly got a shotgun in that case.’

  I stared down at my case. As if I were measuring it to see if I agreed with her.

  ‘I left it on the train,’ I said. ‘I called them, they’ve promised to send it on the bus in a couple of days.’

  ‘But you’ll be wanting something to practise with,’ she said, then smiled. ‘Before the season starts.’

  ‘I . . .’

  ‘You can borrow my husband’s shotgun. The two of you can wait outside until I’m done, this won’t take long.’

  A shotgun? Hell, why not? And because none of her questions was phrased as a question, I simply nodded and walked towards the door. I heard quick breathing behind me and slowed down slightly. The young lad tripped over my heels.

  ‘Ulf?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you know any jokes?’

  I sat on the south side of the church and smoked a cigarette. I don’t know why I smoke. Because I’m not addicted. I mean, my blood doesn’t thirst for nicotine. It’s not that. It’s something else. Something to do with the act itself. It calms me down. I might as well smoke bits of straw. Am I addicted to nicotine? No, I’m sure I’m not. I might possibly be an alcoholic, but I’m really not sure about that either. But I like being high, wired, drunk, that much is obvious. I liked Valium a lot. Or rather, I really didn’t like not taking Valium. That’s why it was the only drug I’ve ever felt I had to actively cut out.

  When I started dealing hash it was mainly to finance my own use. It was simple and logical: you buy enough grammes so you can haggle about the price, sell two thirds of it in small quantities at a higher price, and hey presto, you get free dope. The path from there to turning it into a full-time occupation isn’t a long one. It was the path to my first sale that was long. Long, complicated, and with a couple of twists and turns I could have done without. But there I stood, in Slottsparken, muttering my concise sales pitch (‘Dope?’) to passers-by I thought had long enough hair or freaky enough clothes. And like most things in life, the first time is always the worst. So when a bloke with a crew cut and a blue shirt stopped and asked for two grammes, I freaked out and ran.

  I knew he wasn’t an undercover cop – they were the ones with the longest hair and the freakiest clothes. I was scared he was one of the Fisherman’s men. But gradually I realised that the Fisherman didn’t care about small fry like me. You just had to make sure you didn’t get too big. And didn’t venture into his amphetamine and heroin market. Unlike Hoffmann. Things had ended badly for Hoffmann. There no longer was a Hoffmann.

  I flicked the cigarette butt in amongst the gravestones in front of me.

  You have an allotted time, you burn down to the filter, and then it’s over, for good. But the point is to burn down to the filter, and not go out before that. Well, maybe that isn’t the whole point, but just then it was my goal. I don’t really give a shit about the point of it. And there’d been plenty of days since the funeral when I hadn’t been very sure of the goal either.

  I shut my eyes and concentrated on the sun, and on feeling it warm my skin. On pleasure. Hedon. The Greek god. Or idol, as he should probably be called seeing as I was on hallowed ground. It’s pretty arrogant, calling all other gods, apart from the one you’ve come up with, idols. Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Every dictator’s command to his subjects, of course. The funny thing was that Christians couldn’t see it themselves, they didn’t see the mechanism, the regenerative, self-fulfilling, self-aggrandising aspect which meant that a superstition like this could survive for two thousand years, and in which the key – salvation – was restricted to those who were fortunate enough to have been born in a space of time which was a merest blink of the eye in human history, and who also happened to live on the only little bit of the planet that ever got to hear the commandment and were able to formulate an opinion about the concise sales pitch (‘paradise?’).

  The heat disappeared. A cloud was passing in front of the sun.

  ‘That’s Grandma.’

  I opened my eyes. It wasn’t a cloud. The sun was forming a halo around the young boy’s red hair. Was the woman in there really his grandmother?

  ‘Sorry?’

  He
pointed. ‘The grave you just threw your cigarette at.’

  I looked past him. I could see a plume of smoke rise from the flower bed in front of a black stone. ‘I’m sorry. I was aiming at the path.’

  He folded his arms. ‘Really? So how are you going to hit grouse when you can’t even hit a path?’

  ‘Good question.’

  ‘Have you thought of any jokes, then?’

  ‘No, I said it was going to take me a while.’

  ‘It’s been –’ he looked at the watch he didn’t have – ‘twenty-five minutes.’

  It hadn’t. It was beginning to dawn on me that the walk to the hunting cabin was going to be a long one.

  ‘Knut! Leave the man alone.’ It was his mother. She came out through the church door and walked towards the gate.

  I stood up and followed her. She had a quick stride and a way of moving that reminded me of a swan. The gravel road that went past the church led down into the cluster of houses that made up Kåsund. The stillness was almost unsettling. As yet I hadn’t seen anyone else apart from these two and the Sámi last night.

  ‘Why don’t most of the houses have curtains?’ I asked.

  ‘Because Læstadius taught us to let the light of God in,’ she said.

  ‘Læstadius?’

  ‘Lars Levi Læstadius. You don’t know of his teachings?’

  I shook my head. I guess I’d read about the Swedish priest from the last century, who’d had to clean up the licentious ways of the locals, but I couldn’t claim to know of his teachings, and I suppose I’d imagined that old-fashioned stuff like that had died out.

  ‘Aren’t you a Læstadian?’ the boy asked. ‘You’ll burn in hell, then.’

  ‘Knut!’

  ‘But that’s what Grandpa says! And he knows, because he’s a travelling preacher all over Finnmark and Nord-Troms, so there!’

  ‘Grandpa also says that you shouldn’t shout your faith from the street corner.’ She looked at me with a pained expression. ‘Knut sometimes gets a bit overzealous. Are you from Oslo?’

  ‘Born and raised.’

  ‘Family?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘What?’

  She smiled. ‘You hesitated. Divorced, perhaps?’

  ‘Then you’ll definitely burn!’ Knut cried, wiggling his fingers in a way I assumed was supposed to represent flames.

  ‘Not divorced,’ I said.

  I noticed her giving me a sideways look. ‘A lonely hunter far from home, then. What do you do otherwise?’

  ‘Fixer,’ I said. A movement made me look up, and I caught a glimpse of a face behind a window before the curtain was closed again. ‘But I’ve just resigned. I’m going to try to find something new.’

  ‘Something new,’ she repeated. It sounded like a sigh.

  ‘And you’re a cleaner?’ I asked, mostly for the sake of saying something.

  ‘Mum’s the sexton too, and the verger,’ Knut said. ‘Grandpa says she could have taken over as vicar as well. If she was a man, I mean.’

  ‘I thought they’d passed legislation about female vicars?’

  She laughed. ‘A female vicar in Kåsund?’

  The boy waggled his fingers again.

  ‘Here we are.’ She turned off towards a small, curtainless house. In the drive, perched on breeze blocks, was a Volvo with no wheels, and next to it stood a wheelbarrow containing two rusty wheel rims.

  ‘That’s Dad’s car,’ Knut said. ‘That one’s Mum’s.’ He pointed to a Volkswagen Beetle parked in the shade inside the garage.

  We went in the unlocked house, and she showed me into the living room and said she’d fetch the shotgun, leaving me standing there with Knut. The room was sparsely furnished, neat, clean and tidy. Sturdy furniture, but no television or stereo. No pot plants. And the only pictures on the wall were Jesus carrying a sheep, and a wedding photograph.

  I went closer. It was her, no doubt about that. She looked sweet, almost beautiful in her bridal gown. The man next to her was tall and broad-shouldered. For some reason, his smiling yet impassive face made me think of the face I had just caught a glimpse of in the window.

  ‘Come here, Ulf!’

  I followed the voice, through a passageway and in through the open door of what looked as like a workroom. His workroom. A carpenter’s bench with rusty car parts, broken children’s toys that looked as though they’d been there for a while, plus several other half-finished projects.

  She had pulled out a box of cartridges and pointed at a shotgun that was hanging next to a rifle balanced on two nails on the wall, too high for her to reach. I suspected she had asked me to wait in the living room so she could clear some things away in there first. I looked round for bottles, and I couldn’t miss the smell of home brew, alcohol and cigarettes.

  ‘Have you got bullets for that rifle?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘But weren’t you going to be hunting grouse?’

  ‘It’s more of a challenge with a rifle,’ I said, as I reached up and took it down. I aimed it out of the window. The curtains in the next house twitched. ‘And then you don’t have the job of getting all the shot out. How do you load it?’

  She looked at me intently, evidently not sure if I was joking, before she showed me. Given my job, you’d think I’d know a lot about guns, but all I know is a bit about pistols. She inserted a magazine, demonstrated the loading action, and explained that the rifle was semi-automatic, but that the hunting laws said it was illegal to have more than three bullets in the magazine and one in the chamber.

  ‘Of course,’ I said, practising the loading action. What I like about guns is the sound of greased metal, of precision engineering. But that’s all.

  ‘You’ll find these useful as well,’ she said.

  I turned round. She was holding a pair of binoculars out to me. They were Soviet B8 military binoculars. My grandfather had managed to get hold of a pair somehow, which he used to study the details of church architecture. He had told me that before and during the war, all the good optical engineering came from Germany, and the first thing the Russians did when they occupied the east of the country was steal the Germans’ industrial secrets and make cheaper, but damn good copies. God knows how they’d got hold of a pair of B8 binoculars here. I put the rifle down and looked through them. At the house with the face. No one there now.

  ‘Obviously I’ll pay to hire them.’

  ‘Nonsense.’ She replaced the box of bullets in front of me with one of rifle cartridges. ‘But Hugo would probably like it if you could cover the cost of the ammunition you use.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  It was clearly an inappropriate question, because I saw her face twitch.

  ‘Fishing for pollock. Have you got any food and drink?’ she asked.

  I shook my head. I hadn’t really thought about that. How many meals had I actually eaten since Oslo?

  ‘I’ll put together some food for you, and you can get the rest from Pirjo’s shop. Knut will show you.’

  We went back out onto the steps. She looked at the time. Presumably making sure I hadn’t been inside long enough to give the neighbours anything to talk about. Knut was racing about the garden, eager as a puppy to get going.

  ‘It’ll take between thirty minutes and an hour to get to the cabin,’ she said. ‘Depending on how quick you are on your feet.’

  ‘Hmm. I’m not sure when my own shotgun’s going to arrive.’

  ‘There’s no rush. Hugo doesn’t hunt much.’

  I nodded, then adjusted the strap on the rifle and slung it over my shoulder. My good shoulder. Time to get going. I tried to think of something to say in farewell. She tilted her head slightly, just like her son, and brushed some strands of hair from her face.

  ‘You don’t think it’s that beautiful, do you?’

  I must have looked a bit confused, because she let out a short laugh and her high cheekbones flushed. ‘Kåsund, I mean. Our houses. It used to be
nice here. Before the war. But when the Russians came in 1945 and the Germans fled, they burned down everything that was left as they retreated. Everything except the church.’

  ‘The scorched-earth tactics.’

  ‘People needed houses. So they built quickly. With no thought to what they looked like.’

  ‘Oh, they’re not that bad,’ I lied.

  ‘Yes, they are,’ she laughed. ‘The houses are ugly. But not the people who live in them.’

  I looked at her scar. ‘I believe you. Right, time to get going. Thank you.’ I held out my hand. This time she took it. Her hand was firm and warm, like a smooth, sun-warmed stone.

  ‘The peace of God.’

  I stared at her. She looked as if she meant it.

  Pirjo’s shop was in the basement of one of the houses. It was dark inside, and she only showed up after Knut had called her name three times. She was big and round, and was wearing a headscarf. She had a squeaky voice:

  ‘Jumalan terve.’

  ‘Sorry?’ I said.

  She turned away from me and looked at Knut.

  ‘The peace of God,’ he said. ‘Pirjo only speaks Finnish, but she knows the Norwegian for the things in her shop.’

  The goods were behind the counter, and she got them out as I listed them. Tinned reindeer meatballs. Tinned fish balls. Sausages. Cheese. Crispbread.

  She evidently added them up in her head, because when I was finished she just wrote a number on a piece of paper and showed it to me. I realised that I should have taken some notes out of the money belt before I went in. Seeing as I didn’t want to advertise the fact that I was carrying a serious amount of money, around a hundred and thirteen thousand kroner, I turned my back on the other two and undid the bottom two buttons of my shirt.

  ‘You’re not allowed to pee in here, Ulf,’ Knut said.

  I half-turned to look at him.

  ‘I was joking,’ he said with a laugh.

  Pirjo gestured that she couldn’t change the hundred-kroner note I gave her.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘Take it as a tip.’

  She said something in her harsh, incomprehensible language.

  ‘She says you can have more supplies when you come back,’ Knut said.

  ‘Maybe she should write the outstanding amount down.’