Yours Until Death

by Gunnar Staalesen

  ‘That’s how it was with us. As if I woke suddenly one morning and heard how he slept beside me. And I smelled his sweat and the stale beer and I wondered: What’s happened to us? He’d begun to drink quite a bit. He’d come home from work late. Had had to go out for a beer, he said. Then it was dinners with customers, and seminars at weekends and conferences in Oslo. He’d moved to a larger ad agency with customers over the whole country.

  ‘I slept alone more and more. But there was one morning when I thought to myself – before, before when I woke up with you, Jonas, there was a spark and then a fire that burned inside me all day until we slept together. But now? Now I’m cold, I thought to myself, and when you wake up and lean over and kiss me as usual, you look at me and you grunt as if you were saying: you again? Am I stuck with you for ever? Am I talking too much?’ she said suddenly.

  I drank some wine so I wouldn’t have to answer right away. ‘Oh, no,’ I said.

  Just come to Veum, good old Veum, no life story’s too dreary to lay on him. No matter how ordinary it is. Just talk. Willing Veum will listen. It’s his job.

  ‘It’s a long time since I’ve talked to anyone. I mean – so openly. But we should talk about you, too. Tell me about you, Veum.’

  ‘Can’t you call me Varg?’ I said.

  She nodded. ‘Okay.’ She poured herself another glass. ‘Okay, Varg. Tell me about your wife …’

  ‘Beate?’ I shrugged. ‘There’s not much to tell about Beate. Not any more. We were married for several years. Five to be exact. We had a little boy and then we divorced. She married again. A lecturer at the university. They live out in Ytre Sandviken. In a few years they’ll have a front-row seat overlooking the new four-lane motorway. They’ve got something to look forward to. Beate, she …’

  It was four years ago now and thinking about her didn’t hurt so much any more. As a matter of fact, the pain had begun again just before I started talking about her.

  ‘I don’t know exactly when I knew he was playing around with somebody else,’ Wenche Andresen said. ‘But I caught on. Finally. And it had already been going on for years. Her name is Solveig.’ She said it with a long drawn-out hissing ‘s’ sound which made you think of a snake. Maybe the serpent in Eden.

  ‘Sometimes I ask myself if maybe I … if it wasn’t my fault. If the marriage died first and then he looked for somebody else. Or was it the other way around? But why did he have to? You men!’

  She glared at me. I was on trial now. But it didn’t bother me much. I was used to it.

  ‘You can’t ever control yourselves. If somebody eggs you on you’ve got to go for it. You can’t seem to stop yourselves.’

  ‘The same goes for women,’ I said. ‘I mean, some women.’

  ‘But you’re the worst! There are more unfaithful husbands and more disappointed wives in this world than the other way around.’

  I shrugged. ‘Well … who worked out those statistics? UNESCO?’

  She banged her glass on the table and pointed at me. ‘And another thing is, you always stick up for each other. Jonas was like that. Whenever we heard about this sort of thing he always said we shouldn’t judge, there are always two sides to it. Two sides! But I never would have believed, I never dreamed I’d ever be in the same boat.’

  Her eyes dimmed again and she said one word almost to herself: ‘Disappointed …’

  She filled her glass and looked at me. Puzzled. ‘Don’t you drink?’

  ‘I do. But I’m driving.’

  ‘Obviously I could have chosen somebody else,’ she said. There was a pause. Thoughtful. ‘I could have married somebody else.’ Another pause. ‘There were certainly others.’

  On the TV, a dark-haired man was silently holding and shaking a blonde, leering at her. A door opened and another man came in. He looked confused. Then he let out a yell that never made it out of the set.

  ‘But after I met Jonas … there weren’t any others. That’s how love is. Blind and deaf and with no sense of smell. Love never looks ten years ahead. It sees as far as the end of its nose – if it sees that far.’

  ‘What’s love? The woman in the dark glasses sitting over there at the corner table?’ I said.

  She looked uncertainly at me. ‘What?’

  She stood up. A little unsteadily. ‘And we were so happy those first years. I’ll show you …’

  She went to the bookcase and got out a photograph album, came back and sat on the arm of my chair. It bothered me having her that close. She opened the album and laid it in my lap. Leaned down over me and pointed at the dark pages. ‘See?’

  It was summer. Wenche Andresen and her husband stood on one of those colourless beaches by a green, sun-dazzled sea. A chalk-white, freshly painted hotel in the background. Their bodies were young and brown, and their teeth were strong and white. They were smiling like kids at a funfair.

  ‘Tenerife,’ she said. ‘Summer of 1970. That’s when Roar was conceived. And look at this one. September. We were in the mountains. Jonas had a week off and I’d just been to the doctor. We were so happy.’

  I looked. It could have been the same photograph except for the clothes and setting. They were on a mountain. There was a low grey stone hut in the background to their right. The grass was the colours of autumn and the sky a vivid blue. Her hair blew in the wind. They were wearing heavy sweaters. And they smiled and smiled. Her hair was longer and a little lighter then. His was longish and thick. He had sunglasses on in both snapshots. He was good-looking. Broad-shouldered. In good shape.

  She turned the pages and more pictures flickered by. Jonas and Wenche at a party. His arm around her and a big smile for the photographer. Hair growing low on his forehead. The two of them dancing, looking at me and laughing. Then Wenche alone, lovingly photographed on Mount Fløien. Jonas alone on Constitution Day. Standing in front of a flag-decked wooden house somewhere in the mountains: his same joyous smile but a little more forehead showing.

  She turned to baby pictures. Roar as an infant in a baby’s bath. In his crib. In a chair. Too young to focus yet. In a garden with blossoming fruit trees and a blue mountain across shining water. Must have been Hardangerfjord. Roar was reaching toward an older grey-haired woman and a younger man with dark hair combed straight back.

  Family photographs. The same garden. White furniture and people posed as for a class picture. Children of different ages and Wenche Andresen with Roar in her arms.

  ‘That was at home,’ she said.

  The door bell rang. She looked at me and at the clock. ‘Shall I?’ I said.

  ‘No. I’d better …’

  I stayed in the living room with the album in my lap. Listened. I could hear her talking softly even through the closed door.

  I flipped through the album again, to a time before Jonas Andresen, to a time when she wore pigtails and her face was girlish and round.

  In one snapshot she was staring lovingly up at a young man whose blond curly hair stuck straight up. It must have been warm. His shirt was open at the neck. He had a nice face, an open smile – and the body under the shirt hinted that he’d be considerably heavier one day. In another picture she was walking on a gravel road somewhere, hand in hand with a thin, dark-haired boy a head taller than she. He wore a dark suit, white shirt and a tie and she was wearing a flowered dress with a full skirt. She was looking at the camera. Talking and laughing.

  Maybe Wenche Andresen should have chosen one of these two instead of Jonas. Maybe they’d also deserved to have been more to her than just a couple of snapshots in an old album, a couple of squares of forgotten life.

  I heard the outside door close and saw she was out in the kitchen. Then she came in and said, ‘It wasn’t anything.’

  She sat back down on the arm of the chair, rested her hip against my shoulder and upper arm. I closed the album and put it on the table. Emptied my glass.

  ‘I’d better be thinking about getting home,’ I said.

  I looked up at her. She looked at me with those hu
ge dewy eyes. ‘I have more wine.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s …’ I said.

  She sighed.

  ‘You look sad,’ I said. ‘Don’t. It’s going to work out. I’ll talk to the youth club leader in the morning. Drop by and see you later if that’s okay.’

  She nodded.

  ‘Just to be sure everything’s all right,’ I said.

  She smiled but it was sad.

  I stood up. She still sat on the armrest. I reached down and gently stroked her hair. ‘Wenche Andresen is dressed in mourning,’ I said, mostly to myself.

  She looked up at me. Her lips were trembling.

  So I bent and kissed her. Carefully. As I’d kiss a child. Then our lips opened. Searching. Tender.

  She melted against me. I could feel her warmth, her fingers on my back and around my neck. I closed my eyes and slept. A thirty-second Sleeping-Beauty trance. And then the picture of Roar bound and gagged up in the hut broke into the dream. I squeezed my eyes together and opened them. Hers were closed. I gently freed myself and went out into the entrance hall.

  The spell was broken. Now she wouldn’t look at me. She stood like a shy teenager, almost hiding behind the door jamb.

  I got my jacket and went to the door.

  ‘See you, Wenche,’ I said and nearly didn’t recognise my own voice.

  She nodded and finally looked up. Her eyes had turned almost violet. Because of wonder or worry? Or for another reason? They didn’t look as if birds might fly out of them now. They looked as if they led to dark tunnels, to smoke-filled cellar rooms, to rooms with garishly painted walls, to opium dens. To villages deep in the jungle.

  I smiled stiffly, shut the door on those eyes, and walked along the balcony. Took the lift down. Got in my car. Drove. Didn’t come to until I was back in the city.

  12

  I woke the next morning with heartburn, a stiff neck and eyes full of sand. Sleet and rain pawed at the window. The light was straining itself through a sieve, and across the alley the clouds were about even with the roof-tops.

  I got out of bed and lay on the floor. Three sets each of twenty neck exercises and then thirty push-ups which left me lying flat and gasping. That took care of the neck.

  Then I went to the kitchen and mixed the apostate Boy Scout’s morning toddy: a glass of ice-cold milk and two Titralacs. That took care of the stomach.

  I poured lukewarm salt-water into an eye-glass and bathed my eyes. It didn’t fix them permanently but it did get rid of some of the sand. I was now ready for a shower, breakfast and a new struggle for survival.

  I checked the office to make sure that it was still there. After a little trouble, I was able to get in touch with Gunnar Våge, the youth club leader. Told him I was coming but not why. Then I was in the car and on my way.

  The roads were wet and slippery and there was frost on the grass. I could see a long open wound of new unwelcome snow on the Lyderhorn. Suddenly it was winter again.

  The youth club was located in the first of the four high-rises. I walked through the main entrance. Two signs hung on the wall to the right. One of them, made of yellow metal and shaped like an arrow, said Air-Raid Shelter. It pointed towards a cellar door which was wedged ajar. The other was hand-painted in fresh teenage-type colours. It said Y-Club. Youth Leader. A red arrow on it pointed in the same direction.

  I followed the arrows down the cellar stairs. It was one of those grey cement stairways which look as if they lead you straight to the catacombs. The right-hand wall was marked with a stream of red arrows. You didn’t need much imagination to find your way. Then I walked past a row of storage rooms, all of them fitted with unusually solid padlocks, stopped in front of an iron door with the same triple greeting: Air-Raid Shelter. Y-Club. Youth Leader.

  It was a large low-ceilinged concrete room, simply furnished with a long table, some benches, stools, rickety slat-back chairs. The walls were decorated with posters of pop stars, football players and a couple in a sunset. There was also a picture of Per Kleppe, the Minister of Finance. I didn’t quite understand what he was doing there but it looked as if he’d been used as a dart board. There were as many holes in him as there were in his budget.

  A worn brown-painted piano stood in one corner. And on one wall a sign in dayglo colours said: Stop Smoking and Start Jogging! Some kind of poetry! A wooden door stood ajar at the other end of the room. Light oozed through the crack. I knocked.

  ‘Come in.’

  I accepted the challenge.

  It was a small office with pine-panelled walls and a yellow-brown desk which looked as if it had been bought at a flea market. A large calendar displaying all the months of the year hung on the wall. Some dates were marked with circles, others with squares. There was also a poster of a white mountaintop framed by the needles of a red-brown pine branch. A little bookcase held loose-leaf notebooks, magazines, mimeographed circulars and worn comics. An old black Remington with keys the size of bar stools stood on the desk, but you couldn’t tell whether it worked or was just part of the decoration.

  The man behind the desk had an animal’s big brown eyes. He wasn’t much past thirty, but he was bald except for a fringe of thin curly blond hair hanging down over his ears and neck. It looked funny.

  He looked as sad as his eyes. Dark stubble edged his face with a band of mourning. He was wearing a brown polo-neck and grey corduroy trousers. When he stood up I saw he was quite heavyset. He stretched out a pale hand. ‘Veum? Is that right?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Gunnar Våge. Have a seat.’ He waved me to one of those slat-backed chairs. He himself settled into a large office chair with arms as broad as jumping skis.

  There was the kind of note-taking silence which sometimes happens when two people meet for the first time.

  I studied him more closely. Pale oily eyebrows with a little red pimple in between. Dark half-moons under his eyes. A little tic flicking in the corner of his right eye. One earlobe was longer than the other, and he’d clearly had problems shaving around his nose. He’d left some whiskers and a cut was slowly healing.

  ‘Finished playing Sherlock Holmes?’ he said. ‘Find anything interesting?’

  ‘You use a straight razor but your hand shakes when you try shaving around your nose. Fear of castration. A domineering mother. Anxiety at being alone. Isn’t that how you people solve all your problems?’ I said.

  He smiled sourly. ‘Not all of them. How do you people solve yours? With your right fists?’

  ‘Depends on the problems you mean. You know a guy they call Joker?’

  He nodded slowly and his mouth looked resigned. ‘It’s about Joker.’ He didn’t say ‘again’, but then he didn’t have to. The word hung in the air.

  ‘Problems with him before?’ I said.

  He didn’t answer right away. He stroked a thumb slowly along the desk, opened a drawer, looked in it, dosed it. Then he looked at me long and searchingly.

  ‘I believe I’m one of the few people who’ve made some kind of contact with – Johan,’ he said. ‘I believe he respects me in a way. In some way. I … When I first came here he had to test me. Obviously. The previous leader was sent to the funny farm. He’s out now and I hear he’s better, but just mention Joker to him and he cries like a baby. So I knew what I was getting into before I came. Maybe I don’t look so tough – I mean, not to a detective …’

  He paused for effect, to see if he’d hooked me, but I let the line silently float by. I don’t bite all that easily.

  ‘But I can be very tough,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t involve muscles or anything like that. Has to do with your attitude. If you can make kids see you understand and respect them and want them to be okay and to decide for themselves as much as possible, then maybe they respect you.

  ‘Get them involved, direct them – where you want them to go – show them the friendship they almost never get and never will accept at home, be their pal without looking down at them – but set limits. Most of them need limits.
>
  ‘Anyway, a kid like Johan needs them. When he shows up here and waves his knives I take them away from him. It’s as simple as that. Then he can come back and ask for them. A day or two later.

  ‘I remember the first time. We had a get-together down here one evening. Cokes. Buns some of the girls had baked. There was dancing. Singing. One boy read a poem he’d written. And then Joker showed up. He’d been drinking. Didn’t like the look of one of the boys. He pulled his knife. There was a lot of screaming. I turned off the loudspeaker and there was dead silence.

  ‘I went over to Johan. He’d shoved the other kid up against the wail. Put my hand on his shoulder. Swung him around. Looked him in the eye and said: Give me the knife. He stood there looking furious. I said: Give me the knife. I need it for the buns. Unless you want them without jam.

  ‘Somebody began laughing and I could see him getting madder. They weren’t laughing at him, naturally. They didn’t dare and he knew it. Then he started laughing. And so I got the knife and I sliced two hundred buns with a switchblade.’

  His hand wandered over his skull as if it were searching for new growth. ‘The next day, just about now … Well, he’d already asked me that same evening if he could have his knife back. Stop by tomorrow, I said. So he did. He stood in that doorway there. Tall and dark and as unsure of himself as a three-year-old. What about the knife? he said. I got it out and asked him to sit down. Put it on the desk between us. Then I asked him some questions, tried to start him talking. Not much happened that first time. Or the second. But gradually… For a while he was almost a steady customer.

  ‘That first time he felt he had to act tough. On his way out, he folded the knife, stuck his thumbs in his pockets, gave me a hard look and said: Don’t ever take my knife away from me again, mister. And then he left. But later, it was as if he had to pull his knife just so I could take it away from him. Then he could come back the next day. He obviously needed to talk. All macho teenagers are lonely little boys. And he’s had a tough time.’