Yours Until Death

by Gunnar Staalesen

  ‘Somebody there? Are you stuck?’ It was a rough, caretaker’s voice.

  ‘We’re here and we’re stuck,’ I said. ‘Can you get us out?’

  Something was happening. I stopped sweating and the woman raised her head and began listening.

  ‘Of course I can. It’s those damned kids again. One of the fuses has blown. Just wait. It’ll be five or ten minutes.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I whispered to the heavy footsteps as they moved away.

  Then fifteen minutes went by. The woman and I had nothing to discuss. Just one common interest: getting out. I looked at my watch. Could she be at home?

  The woman had already stood up, tidied her hair, and was fanning her face with a little ecru handkerchief. Her eyes were red-rimmed but it didn’t make much difference. She looked almost the same as she had when she got in the lift – maybe a couple of years older. I bet I did, too. That’s one of the things about getting stuck in a lift. You age so quickly. And sometimes you collapse.

  Before she left me, she suddenly shook my hand. ‘Solfrid Brede,’ she said in that same husky voice.

  ‘Nice meeting you,’ I said.

  Then she was gone and I rode up two more floors. Hello and goodbye, Solfrid Brede. Maybe we’ll meet again in another lift, somewhere else in hell. You never know, Solfrid Brede, you never know …

  I opened the door and stepped out. Wenche Andresen was standing there waiting. She wasn’t alone. A man was with her.

  14

  He was tall. Strong. Athletic. Probably in his late forties or early fifties. His face was lean and tough. Dark, deep-set eyes, a little hidden by bushy grey-black eyebrows. What I could see of his hair had the same grizzled tone and that, together with his slightly wary stance, reminded me of a wolf. He was wearing the uniform of a naval commander and he looked as if he expected me to snap to attention the minute I saw him.

  Wenche Andresen looked a little embarrassed. ‘Va … Veum?’ she said, glancing back and forth between the wolf and me.

  ‘I wanted to find out how Roar is,’ I said.

  ‘He’s fine,’ she said. ‘But I’m just on my way to work. This is my boss, Commander …’ She mumbled something.

  He repeated it, pronouncing each letter as if he were talking to a moronic sailor. ‘Richard Ljosne,’ he said, and shook my hand with his strong muscular fingers.

  ‘Veum,’ I said.

  Then there was silence. Wenche Andresen was still looking embarrassed. There were dark circles under her eyes and she was very pale.

  ‘I wasn’t feeling good so I called and said I’d be in a little later today and so Richard – so Ljosne – said he could come and pick me up because …’

  ‘We have some very important papers to get out today,’ he said. ‘And Wenche’s the only one who knows the format. Otherwise we’d have to get a substitute and it would take hours to explain it to her.’

  His voice was deep and musical. A voice I could have fallen for if I’d been ten years younger and a woman. But I wasn’t. Wenche Andresen was still embarrassed.

  I looked at her mouth. Thought about the previous evening, about how it had felt getting acquainted with her mouth, learning about the contours of her lips against mine.

  I looked at Richard Ljosne’s mouth. A large, wide mouth with narrow red lips and sharp yellow-white teeth. The stubble on his face was blue-grey. The hair curled high on his throat and around his neck. His eyebrows met.

  ‘Well, don’t let me keep you,’ I said. ‘I just wanted to find out how things were – as I said.’ Then I added, ‘Listen. Where does Joker live?’

  Wenche Andresen looked toward the high-rise further down the hill. ‘Over there. With his mother.’

  ‘Well. Thanks.’ I held the lift door for them. As I was about to close it she said, ‘But aren’t you coming, Veum?’

  ‘No thanks,’ I said. ‘I’ll walk.’

  Then I let go of the door and it dosed slowly behind them.

  I kept thinking about her mouth and I wasn’t sure that was a good idea. Not today. Not now.

  I walked along the balcony in the opposite direction from her flat to the south end of the building. From there I could see Wenche Andresen and Richard Ljosne strolling towards a big black car which could have been a Mercedes. That’s the way it looked from the ninth floor anyway.

  That’s how they go out of my life, I thought. They just get into a car and drive away.

  But I had an uneasy feeling it wasn’t going to be like that, that I’d see both of them again and that it wouldn’t be especially pleasant. For any of us.

  I walked slowly down the stairs and wondered what to do next.

  15

  I could do one of two things: go back to the office or do something constructive. Or something which looked as if it were. The office wasn’t going to disappear and the only thing that could happen to the phone was that somebody would come and take it away because I hadn’t paid the bill. No matter what, I was better off not going to the office.

  Wenche Andresen had said that Joker lived with his mother in the high-rise across from hers. Gunnar Våge had told me that Joker’s real name was Johan Pedersen.

  I could see if he was home. I could recommend a course in Norwegian floral painting to fill his spare time. Or maybe an evening seminar in the history of the picaresque novel. Today’s educational system offers so many choices. If you don’t know something, you can learn about it and it doesn’t cost much. A little effort maybe, but that’s all. If you take a ten-hour course at the Free School or the Workers’ Information Association you can learn how to make the traditional regional costume they wear in Hardanger or how to handle a pocket calculator. Or you can learn how to paint almost as well as Edvard Munch or how to speak Spanish. Handy for your next trip to the Canary Islands when you want to talk to Swedes. Or you can learn how to take perfect back-lit photographs of your mother-in-law and screaming kids. So Joker had a lot to look forward to if only he were willing. Or at home.

  I found the name on a letter box inside the lift room. H. Pedersen, 4th Floor, it said, but I didn’t take the lift. I walked up. I was glad they didn’t live on the tenth floor. If this kept up I could cut out my weekly jogging.

  Hildur and Johan Pedersen, mother and son, lived nearest the lift. The name was on the door. I looked in the kitchen window but didn’t see anything except white curtains which had needed washing a long time ago.

  I rang the bell.

  A couple of years passed but I can be very patient. I rang again.

  A couple more years went by before I heard a voice from far inside the flat. It sounded like the stomach rumblings of a man who’s standing at the very end of the bus. No way you could understand the words. It was either a deep female or a high male voice. I bet on the first and waited.

  The woman who opened the door and looked suspiciously at me had a face only a son could love. At first glance anyway. The next time I was short of nightmares I’d try remembering it.

  It was a face which had seen too many nights and too few days. It was a face which had been through life’s darkest corridors and had never got as far as the daylight. A face you could like if you saw it on the far side of a dark room you were leaving.

  Hildur Pedersen’s hair wasn’t grey or brown or black or red. It was uneven tufts of all those colours, and it hadn’t seen brush or comb for a couple of months. It stuck out in all directions like the mane of an ancient lion in a dilapidated circus. It was the right frame for her face.

  Maybe Hildur Pedersen had been really pretty twenty years and several kilos ago. I’ve never been good at guessing people’s weights but I’d have bet she was in the one-twenty kilo class and about thirty of them were in her face.

  Her eyes had sunk between folds of fat and her nose had to be at least twenty centimetres long for its tip to stick out at all. She had a mouth somewhere but it wasn’t easy to find it among all those chins. But one of them was painted red.

  Her whole head, and it was a big one,
rested on a collar of fat and the body under it was huge. She was an avalanche of a woman and I wouldn’t have wanted to be in her path if my life had depended on it.

  She opened her mouth and I caught the unmistakable smell of cheap booze. ‘What do you want?’

  A harsh but highly educated voice. As if she’d been born and raised in silver-spoon Kalfare but had never found her way home again.

  ‘A little chat. About old times. About nothing much.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘My name’s Veum and I’m a sort of private investigator.’

  ‘Sort of? Either you are or you aren’t.’

  ‘Yes. Well. But it’s always embarrassing to come right out and say it. If you see what I mean.’

  ‘I certainly do. And if I went around looking like you, I’d really be embarrassed.’

  ‘You would?’ I had a lot of snappy answers ready but I didn’t want to be thrown out before I got in. And I sort of liked the lady. She sounded as if she’d be fun to play ping-pong with for half an hour or so.

  ‘Aren’t you going to ask me in to admire the view?’ I said.

  ‘Take your vodka neat?’

  ‘I’d sooner aquavit.’

  ‘I’ve only got vodka. No mixers. No coffee or tea. No milk. But there’s water if you get thirsty. Or there’s vodka. Tastes like hell but it works wonders. For a while.’

  As she talked she began to ooze back into the flat as if she were being pulled by a powerful invisible force. But she left the door open. I took it as an invitation, followed her in and closed the door behind me.

  The flat was almost identical to Wenche Andresen’s – except for the contents. The furniture was worn out. The chairs and sofas had held up too many kilos, the tables had been through too many drinking contests. You could see the floor through the rugs. Somebody had performed euthanasia on the plants in the window if they hadn’t died by themselves, and the newspapers under the coffee table were six months old. The team which had won then was now in the bottom of the second division. Where we all end up sooner or later.

  Hildur Pedersen gathered up a half-full bottle of vodka and two dirty glasses, and sat down in the middle of a sofa which sagged like a hammock. She waved a huge hand at an exhausted armchair the colour of old pigeon shit.

  For one brief moment I saw a glass-clear azure spring sky (the way the skies always are over our childhood’s sun-gilded streets) and a flock of pigeons flying. Over the low red roofs down towards Vågen and across Vågen toward Skoltegrunn’s quay and the America-bound ships. And lagging behind all the other birds, in meaningless helpless somersaults, a tumbler pigeon came rolling and spinning in the air.

  How many times I’ve felt like that – like a tumbler pigeon, always lagging a little behind the others. Too dizzy to be able to get an overall view of existence. With that blue sky below me and the red roofs above, I went swerving through life from one temporary landing to another, just like the tumbler pigeon. And now I was in a fossilised living room with a dinosaur of a woman.

  Hildur Pedersen poured neat vodka into the glasses and pushed one towards me. The coffee table between us was yellow-brown, covered with the pale rings of many a glass and bottle, small scars from years of cigarette ash and a varnish of dust.

  ‘Skål, Fatso,’ she said and emptied the glass.

  ‘Skål, Slim,’ I said and took a cautious sip as I thought of the car in the car park and about getting home today. Preferably not hanging from a tow-truck.

  ‘Spit it out. What do you want? Who’s sent you to old Hildur?’

  ‘Nobody’s sent me. But what I want is – Johan.’

  ‘Johan?’ She said it as if it were the name of a distant relative. ‘What about him?’

  ‘I ran into him recently. Accidentally, you could say. Or maybe he ran into me. Or to put it another way, some of his mates ran into me. He stayed in the background.’

  ‘What are you raving about?’

  ‘Always had problems with him?’

  ‘Problems? With Johan? What the hell do you think? Have you ever heard of anybody not having problems with their kids? Johan’s been a problem from the time he was a month old – and I mean for the eight months before he was born. But that’s how it is with most of them.’

  ‘His father.

  ‘That fool!’

  ‘You never married?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have married him if he imported vodka. Anyway, he was already married. A sailor, a happy sailor on shore leave in the big city. A real stril, a bumpkin from somewhere up in Sogn. Met him at the Starlight Ballroom and asked him home to my one-room flat in the Old Quarter. Top floor, with a view right into the house next door. The fool was so drunk I had to stuff him inside me. It wasn’t what you’d call fun. But it was somebody to sleep with. Didn’t have to wake up alone. But I’ve got to tell you I was bloody furious when I found out Johan was on the way!’ She glowered at me as if I were guilty.

  ‘I looked up his address and wrote him a letter. Asked for money. He called the next time he was in town. He was so nervous that he almost dropped the phone with every other word. He said of course he’d pay. He’d give me as much as I needed. He’d be glad to pay for the kid’s food, clothes. Education. And there’d be no limit to it … as long as I didn’t send any more letters. He’d had problems explaining to Madame who’d sent the first one. But that was his problem, right? A man shouldn’t have a free ride with kids.’

  ‘And then what happened?’

  ‘Then what happened? What do you think? He’s sent money every damned month. I had to promise not to name him as the father, but I’ve got a kind of insurance policy running around here somewhere, if you get what I mean. Said he was going to send me money, and he did.’ She looked wonderingly down at the vodka bottle as if it delivered the money.

  ‘And Johan?’

  ‘Johan grew up. Not with the best of mothers, but at least he had a mother. He never went short. He got what he needed clothes, food, drink – until he was old enough to take care of himself. When he finished secondary school I said to him, now you’re damn well finished with school, Johan. Get yourself a job and earn the butter for your bread. And if it’s not butter, at least go for margarine.’

  ‘What kind of job was it?’

  ‘No idea. Ask him. I haven’t had any … These last few years we’ve … I reckon I’m done with him. He lives here but he might as well be renting. We don’t talk. He calls me a fat old whore. Won’t answer me. And I know why.’ She squinted drunkenly at me and poured more vodka into her glass.

  ‘Are you a High and Dry or something? A member of AA? Mother’s baby boy? Drink up and keep me company, damn it!’

  ‘Sorry. But I’m driving. Have to keep my head above water.’

  ‘So you’re old enough to have a licence?’

  ‘Got it the day before yesterday. Eighteenth birthday. I look over thirty-five in the photograph. The truth is I feel over sixty.’

  ‘Your tongue’s in the right place anyway.’

  ‘It is. Right between my eyes. Why does Johan call you an … old whore?’

  ‘Why do you think?’

  I acted as if I were thinking, but she answered first. ‘Because I won’t tell him who his father is.’

  ‘Why does he want to know? I mean, any special reason?’

  ‘Ask him. If that fool had been my father, I’d have been better off not knowing. But you know how kids are.’

  ‘I can remember.’

  ‘They’re always wanting to know things that aren’t good for them. What’s going to become of them, who their fathers are. Things like that. The fools.’

  ‘But you haven’t told him?’

  ‘No. Not in – how many years is it – eighteen, nineteen? I’ve told him the same thing I told them at the Women’s Clinic. No idea. There’d been so many. And that was that.

  ‘But it wasn’t like that then. There was a lull in my life then. I’d just been … very disappointed. And so here came another disappoint
ment – in the middle of my life. Nine months of disappointment that never went away. I tell him, I don’t know, Johan. It could have been anybody. Can’t you tell me the name of one of them? he says. I say, I don’t remember. There were so many of them. Not all of them introduced themselves. Not many left calling cards and the repeaters came for the booze. Is it so strange he calls me a …?’

  Her gaze disappeared into the glass and when she suddenly looked up her eyes were wet. ‘It’s a hell of a life, isn’t it? Veum?’

  I nodded. ‘Every other day,’ I said.

  ‘Every other day? You’re damn lucky.’

  I drank. Just for something to do. She found a well-used handkerchief and swabbed the upper part of her face as if she were digging ditches in June.

  ‘Have you seen him since – the father?’

  She drank from the bottle now and wouldn’t look at me. ‘No. Why should I? As long as he sends the money. He got this flat for me – for Johan’s sake. Paid the down payment and everything. Otherwise I’d never have been able to afford it. And I would never go on welfare.’

  ‘What’s his name?’

  Now she was looking at me again. ‘None of your bloody business. Why are you asking about this ancient history? Nothing better to do? Go home and play with your electric trains or something.’

  ‘You know Johan terrorises this neighbourhood, don’t you? Mention him, people shiver. Did you know they call him Joker?’

  Her eyes were like furled umbrellas. ‘Who? Johan? That little twerp? I could mash him between my thumb and forefinger. If they’re afraid of him, they’re afraid of the evening breeze.’

  ‘It’s not just him. He’s got a fair-sized gang and they think they’re tough. Sometimes.’ Without meaning to, I felt my face.

  ‘He does have some mates who come here now and then. They sit in his room. Drink beer and smoke and play some bloody awful cassettes. But I never pay any attention to them. As long as there aren’t any girls.’ She suddenly looked pious. ‘I won’t stand for that kind of thing. Not in my house.’

  I looked around her house. A picture hung crookedly over her head. A kind of painting of a kind of boat somewhere on a kind of lake. The proportions were all wrong. The fir trees on the far side of the water were taller than the ones on this side, and the boat was so big it took up almost the whole lake.