by Dag Solstad
Professor Andersen was in other words attached to his students, and to a much greater extent than they were aware. For he did not associate with them. After his lectures and seminars he shut himself away in his office, and spent his time there. But he was preoccupied with them, and he wasn’t unaffected by associating professionally with so much youthfulness and, in better days, such a potential harvest. But he kept himself at a certain distance, he had always done that, and it had become more and more important to him over the years. But his eyes roved in their direction, and he thought about them often. For one thing, in recent years several students had cropped up who had something unmistakably familiar about them. There were features he recognised, and there were characteristic ways of making gestures, or ways of walking; they were the children of his own fellow students. And then he couldn’t resist asking them whether it wasn’t by any chance the case that such and such was the son of H. S. …, or the daughter of H. Kj …, and if the answer was yes, he felt great satisfaction. Being childless himself, he therefore got a certain pleasure from seeing new students crop up whom he could link directly to his own student days, thirty years ago, and in a way also to his own life, and not least because he was capable of discovering the connection. But occasionally he was wrong. When he posed his question as to whether it wasn’t the case that such and such was the son of U … A, and the person in question didn’t affirm it as he had expected, but replied U … A, who is that? or No, my father’s name is N … B, then he became truly embarrassed, because, by doing this, he had tried to break into the intimate sphere of one of his students, which was how he then perceived it.
One afternoon at the end of February at around 3 p.m. he bumped into two of his students, two female students, on Karl Johans gate, right after he had left a board meeting at the National Theatre. He did that quite often, and he therefore stopped to exchange a few words with them. He asked them, because it was the done thing, how they were getting on with their master’s theses, but they both burst out laughing, saying that he mustn’t ask them today, because this was one of their rare days off. It turned out that both students worked in a wine bar when they weren’t studying, each in separate bars, or rather wine bars, and that they weren’t going to work until the next evening, and therefore were making the most of their liberty, strolling along Karl Johan in the pale, late-February afternoon sun, and they certainly weren’t spending any time discussing their master’s theses, instead they were discussing their customers in the wine bars, he understood them to say. ‘So you’re barmaids in your spare time, the two of you,’ said Professor Andersen, being friendly. ‘Yes,’ they laughed, ‘we’re barmaids.’ One of the female students suggested jokingly that Professor Andersen should come and visit the wine bar where she worked, he surely had time for a beer now and then, which made the other one equally eager for him to do so, the difference being that she wanted him to visit her wine bar, or pub, and not her friend’s. Professor Andersen noted down the names and addresses of both the wine bars, and promised, without committing himself, of course, that he would do his best, because to tell the truth his life was arranged with such foresight that he had time for a beer or two. They parted and continued in different directions, the two female students on their way down Karl Johan, and he himself on his way up it, where he went through the Palace Park, before walking up towards Briskeby and after that down the whole of Niels Juels gate to Skillebekk, a rather roundabout route, which he enjoyed taking because the days were lighter now and there was, as already mentioned, some afternoon sun, which warmed him a little in the middle of winter. ‘I really do believe I’ll do it,’ he thought to himself as he walked through the Palace Park. ‘Yes, why not?’ he added, as he walked up towards Briskeby. At the same time, he was a little startled that he was seriously considering what both he and the two girls had obviously regarded as a teasing suggestion, made in passing, while one exchanged some remarks because one had accidentally bumped into the other one afternoon on Karl Johan. ‘No, give over,’ he said to himself, while he walked down Niels Juels gate, ‘this town has hundreds of wine bars you could go to if you want a beer, and many of them are much closer to your house than those names and addresses you noted down just now,’ he added matter-of-factly, while shaking his head.
But he couldn’t stop thinking about the conversation with the two female students. He couldn’t stop himself going over and over it in his mind, when he was back home, and sitting in his study. There had been something merry about the two female students, which he couldn’t just drop. They had tried to lure him in for a joke. They had begun to compete openly about possibly winning his favour, full of laughter, as a joke. And he had willingly allowed himself to be lured, as a joke, and had written down the names of both wine bars and in that way made it clear that he had nothing against being the object of their rivalry, and that this really was something he would consider. There was an undertone that he, one fine day, in the not too distant future, would crop up unexpectedly at one of the wine bars, and it might well be that he would actually do it, too, thought Professor Andersen, elated. It was in the spirit of the joke. One could turn up at only one of the wine bars. If he visited them both it would seem rather silly, as they would soon find out and the joke would be spoiled, he would have punctured it, and in that way made himself look foolish in their eyes, in not understanding a joke. If he were to follow the joke properly, he had to choose one of the wine bars, that is to say one of the female students, and then he would have pursued the ambiguity of the joke right to its final conclusion, which would be when he, Professor Andersen, cropped up at the counter in one of the wine bars and sat down there and let himself be served beer by the chosen student. Professor Andersen was so roused by this thought that he got up out of the armchair in his study and paced back and forth in his spacious apartment while he gave himself over to the fanciful idea, trying to decide which of the two female students he would surprise by suddenly cropping up in the wine bar while she was busy at work, in the bar, and then sitting down at the counter and ordering a beer, with a knowing expression on his face, yes, on his whole person. For he would then have shown that he had understood, and carried out, a joke in accordance with its ambivalent message. He had to admit that he had, to put it bluntly, become captivated by this accidental meeting with the two female students, and friends, on Karl Johan. By the two girls’ joking insistence. By their closeness at the time. A spontaneous suggestion from two young girls. First one of them, out of the sheer joy of living, asked the professor to come and have a beer in the wine bar where she was a barmaid, and then the other joined in equally playfully, her throat full of bubbling laughter. Oh, he could imagine them now, all three, himself and the two female students who flocked around him, how they clamoured for his attention, threw back their heads and let out peals of laughter. If he had to choose, then he probably preferred the second one. Not the first one, even though it was she who had started the whole thing off, and who therefore could claim most of the honour for Professor Andersen being in such a frame of mind. Come to think of it, was it her, was that not the second one? It was after the second one joined in that the whole scene took on this strange innocence, bathed in an ambivalent light. If it had only been the first one, and the other one had remained standing a little self-consciously in the background, then the scene might easily have seemed rather blunt, and might have made him self-conscious, too. No, it was when the other one joined in and turned it into joking rivalry to win favour that it appeared to be pure and innocent, and the peals of laughter could trill out loud in Karl Johan, where they were standing, a professor and his two female students. So it was her he had to visit. Added to this judgement was also the fact that she, the second one, in contrast to the first, had been one of those he had seen with a gleam in her eyes in the seminar room at Blindern, when he had conducted the master’s seminar on Ibsen and managed to trace the stir caused by art from Ibsen as a final port of call, for us at least, all the way back to Greek tragedy in
its mythical landscape, in what we call antiquity, although she, as a rule, kept quiet during the following discussions. On account of the gleam he had seen in her eyes, he had been attracted to her shyness, and therefore he had been all the more surprised when she suddenly bubbled over in a teasing, joyful mood and appeared to be her girlfriend’s rival in requesting that he favour her with a visit to the wine bar where she worked and not her girlfriend. He thought about the peculiar life she lived, her thoughts engrossed with the dramatic structures in Hedda Gabler during the day, and then acting as a raffish waitress at a bar during the evening. Thinking about this double life had the effect of making him intensely elated at the idea of paying her a visit in her bar, and in that way, within the bounds of a joke, sitting down at the counter and nodding knowingly to her, and that she would respond to this knowing nod by pouring him a ceremonial beer. Thinking of this forced him to sit down in his armchair and lean back, overwhelmed by this imagined agreement, which could become reality the moment he made up his mind to pursue the joke to its beautiful consummation. Professor Andersen didn’t know exactly whether he would actually realise this fancy, but having the possibility open to him made him light-hearted this afternoon at the end of February, which had now become a dark evening. He therefore made up his mind to celebrate, so to speak, his good mood by going out for dinner. He fetched one of his Italian suits from the wardrobe and changed his clothes. He would relish having dinner at a restaurant round the corner from where he lived. A Japanese restaurant, which had an elegant sushi bar on the ground floor.
No sooner said than done. He set off round the corner and went into the Japanese restaurant. In the bar stood a Japanese bartender or chef, making sushi dishes which he then served, one after the other, to the guests who were sitting around the bar and eating their sushi off a wooden platter. Professor Andersen saw that there were a couple of seats available there, and sat down on one of them. He ordered his sushi and a bottle of lager. A waitress soon arrived with the wooden platter, chopsticks and the lager. ‘You ought to drink sake with it,’ said the man who was sitting beside him. Professor Andersen turned towards him and said, ‘Yes, I do believe you’re right.’ He beckoned to the waitress and asked her to change the lager to a small jar of sake. He then turned to his neighbour again, because he felt a strong urge to make it clear to him that it wasn’t his first time in a Japanese restaurant, and that he was therefore well aware that this small jar of sake was an excellent drink to have with sushi dishes, but now and then it so happened that he preferred lager, just as he had tonight, but when his neighbour had suggested sake, he actually wanted that instead. He hesitated a little, right enough, before he embarked on this explanation, because at first he wondered if it wasn’t sufficient that his neighbour had just heard him ordering ‘a small jar of sake’, which was the way it was served in this establishment, but as he didn’t dare to rely entirely on this being sufficient rectification, he turned to his neighbour all the same. He embarked on his explanation, and then he suddenly recognised the man next to him, and to his horror he became aware of finding himself sitting beside the man whom on Holy Night, as we call the evening before Christmas Day, he had seen murdering a young woman in an apartment on the other side of the street from his own apartment building.
He was sitting beside Henrik Nordstrøm. He was staring into the murderer’s face. He didn’t know what to do. But he had begun his explanation, and he couldn’t not complete it. He chose, however, to smile while he finished the explanation as to why he had chosen lager instead of sake, which he, as a rule, preferred when he was there. But when his neighbour, whom he familiarly called ‘you’, mentioned sake, he had such a great fancy for sake all the same, and therefore he called on the waitress at once and asked to change his lager to sake. ‘Yes, that was the right thing to do,’ said Henrik Nordstrøm. ‘It has to be sake, in my opinion.’ ‘Not always,’ said Professor Andersen, ‘sometimes I prefer lager.’ ‘Well, yes, sometimes we do prefer to have a lager with whatever we eat, no matter what is really best with it,’ said Henrik Nordstrøm. ‘When I think about it, I mainly drink lager with meals when I’m in the Far East.’ ‘So you are often in the Far East?’ asked Professor Andersen. ‘Not any longer,’ answered Henrik Nordstrøm. ‘Before, but not now. Later, but not now. Now I’m here,’ he said with a shrug.
Henrik Nordstrøm had the same kind of wooden platter in front of him, too. On it lay a couple of pieces of sushi, which he ate very elegantly using chopsticks. Shortly afterwards the Japanese bartender or chef handed the first piece of sushi over to Professor Andersen, along with horseradish and ginger. Professor Andersen began to eat. He dreaded it somewhat, as for one thing he was sitting beside the murderer and in this upsetting situation had to try to force down a bite of food, but also because he was a little uncertain about how he would master using chopsticks, which, after much practice, he could use more or less correctly, but he had never used them in such an upsetting and nerve-racking situation before. He concentrated intensely on this, and was relieved when his table companion didn’t make any comments which might indicate that he now had some reason to believe that Professor Andersen wasn’t really so familiar with Japanese restaurants after all, as he had just claimed. So Henrik Nordstrøm was still at large. He knew that anyway, for he could often observe him from the window of his apartment. Professor Andersen didn’t understand how he had been able to keep his crime concealed for so long. Didn’t the murdered woman, Mrs Nordstrøm, have any relatives or friends or workmates who missed her, or in some other way had become suspicious that something was not as it should be? He supposed Henrik Nordstrøm had managed to put them off with excuses, and with a story, which for the meantime was more or less credible and sufficiently reassuring for a relative or a workmate not to go to the sensational lengths of instigating a search for a woman whose husband had assured them of her good reasons for not coming to visit. But it was a dangerous gamble, and he was doomed in advance to lose. It was just a question of time. And that he knew, while he played this dangerous game. But so far nothing had happened, as yet no one missed Mrs Nordstrøm, or whatever her name was, to the extent that suspicion had been aroused and turned into manifest and vigilant uneasiness and anxiety, which demanded another answer. Now he was sitting here, in a Japanese restaurant in his own neighbourhood, and eating sushi in a sushi bar, along with Professor Andersen. They got talking and Henrik Nordstrøm talked willingly. For every piece of sushi that landed on Professor Andersen’s platter, he had a comment to make, because he had just eaten the same piece, hadn’t he, so he asked if his neighbour agreed with him that this bit was very good, in the circumstances, or whether he, too, hadn’t tasted better. And Professor Andersen passed comment. As a rule he agreed with Henrik Nordstrøm, but now and then he took care to have an independent opinion, and then he might say, ‘I’ve never tasted better scallops than this, at least not at this Japanese restaurant.’ When Professor Andersen disagreed in this way, Henrik Nordstrøm opened his eyes wide and said, peeved, ‘Well, that’s your opinion, I have mine.’ This way of opening his eyes wide and looking peeved, before dismissing it, wiping it out, was the most distinctive trait Professor Andersen could detect in Henrik Nordstrøm. Apart from his connection to the Far East, which he willingly made known, and willingly talked about. Small remarks about different places in the Far East, towns which Professor Andersen had never heard of, such as Siem Reap, M Tho and Phitsanulok, seasoned, literally speaking, his comments on the pieces of sushi which Professor Andersen was eating, and which Henrik Nordstrøm had just eaten, and which made him remember different tastes from those Japanese tastes, the taste of lemon grass, coconut milk and fish from the Mekong Delta’s inner reaches. ‘In Japan the sushi is quite different,’ he said. ‘Oh, indeed, have you been to Japan often?’ asked Professor Andersen. ‘No, never, but I know that, because the sushi you get in Kuala Lumpur doesn’t in the least remind you of the sushi you get here, of course not, it stands to reason, doesn’t it?’ ‘Ye
s, it does,’ answered Professor Andersen, ‘but the sushi you get in New York isn’t very different from what you get here,’ he added. ‘Apart from the mackerel, that is, and the cod.’ ‘I haven’t been in New York,’ said Henrik Nordstrøm, ‘and actually I prefer Vietnamese and Chinese food, but you don’t get that here in Norway, do you? And rarely in the rest of Europe either,’ he added. ‘It’s only the name they have in common. I call that cheating.’ ‘I’ve been to Japan,’ said Professor Andersen, ‘for an Ibsen seminar. I’ve been to Beijing, too. For an Ibsen seminar, I’m a professor of literature,’ he added. ‘Oh,’ said Henrik Nordstrøm, ‘one wouldn’t have guessed it from the way you handle your chopsticks.’ ‘It’s good enough for me,’ said Professor Andersen, annoyed. ‘I manage to use them for what they are supposed to be used for, without having to pretend that I’m a native Japanese, or Chinese, for that matter.’ Henrik Nordstrøm began to talk about something else. About the attraction the Far East held for him. About how a person who gets attracted to the Far East is never the same again. He had done business in the Far East. Roamed around in the Far East, in a way. Been connected to Norwegian companies there, in the Far East. Which companies? He hedged a bit. ‘Statoil for one,’ he answered. ‘So you’re in oil?’ asked Professor Andersen. ‘No, not exactly that. Was involved with other things. Been a kind of supplier,’ said Henrik Nordstrøm. ‘Supplying what then?’ ‘Different things. Whatever Statoil needs. Arranged contact between Statoil and suppliers,’ said Henrik Nordstrøm. ‘Well, not on my own, but along with some Americans down there. And also some Germans that I’m in contact with.’ ‘Whereabouts?’ ‘Vietnam,’ he said. He preferred to talk about the mud, he said. The yellow mud in the Mekong river. About boat trips on the Mekong river. Sunsets on the Mekong. ‘You become different in the Far East,’ he said. ‘There isn’t anything mystical about it, it just happens to you. I’ll soon be going down there again.’ ‘Where to?’ ‘Cambodia,’ he said, ‘or Campuchea, that’s where things are happening, if you have connections. I can turn my hand to almost anything,’ he added. ‘I’m an electrician really. Or electrical fitter.’
