by Anne Holt
“An incurable loneliness of the soul” is how she explained her need on the rare occasions when he asked. She would close down, smile without warmth in her eyes, and her face would become inscrutable.
Sometimes he wondered if she had a secret. But that was hard to imagine. They had always known each other; their childhood homes were barely a couple hundred steps apart. They didn’t see much of each other when they were teenagers; they were too different. So he couldn’t believe his luck when they accidentally met in a café in Oslo when they were twenty. He had just finished his apprenticeship and started to work in his father’s plumbing business. Fiona had long blonde hair and was studying at the University of Oslo. He had hoisted his pants up at the bar so she wouldn’t realize that he was starting to get a plumber’s crack. They got together that evening, and Bernt Helle had never been with another woman since.
She was strangely restless and yet she clung on to anything and everything that was fixed and lasting.
“I shouldn’t have done it,” Yvonne said suddenly and opened her eyes. “We shouldn’t have done it.”
“Yvonne,” he said and leaned over her.
“Oh,” she exclaimed weakly. “I was dreaming. Water, please.”
“She’s starting to lose it,” he thought flatly.
She fell asleep again.
It was no longer possible to have a normal conversation with Yvonne, he realized. But it didn’t matter. They shared a great sorrow. That was enough.
He got up and looked at the clock. It was nearly midnight. He quietly put on his jacket and pulled the duvet over Yvonne. She obviously didn’t want to carry on. They were each dealing with the loss in their own way; she was using what little strength she had left to shrug off this life while he, on the other hand, hoped that he would be able fight his way back into it one day.
The reconstruction was over. Most people had gone. Only Adam Stubo and Trond Arnesen were left in the bedroom. The young man couldn’t pull himself away. He looked around the room, again and again; he walked about stroking things, as if he needed reassurance that they still existed.
“Do you think it’s strange that I want to move back?” he asked without looking at Adam.
“Not at all. It’s perfectly natural, if you ask me. This was your house. It’s still your home, even if Victoria is dead. I understand that you helped her fix it up.”
“Yes. This room too.”
“Is this how you remember it?”
“No.”
“You should try. This is what the bedroom looks like.”
Adam opened his arms and then hesitated before he continued, “Our people have done nothing except . . . clean. Unfortunately, the duvet and the bedclothes were beyond saving. Otherwise, everything is as it was, as far as I know. And this is how you should remember it. You’re going to live here, Trond. You may live here for many years. In some way or another, you have to let go of that evening just over a week ago. I know just what you’re going through. And I can assure you, it gets easier. I’ve been there, Trond. It passes.”
The younger man looked directly at him. His eyes were blue with specks of green. Only now did Adam notice the hint of red in Trond Arnesen’s thick blond hair and a shadow of freckles over his nose, despite his winter pallor.
“What do you mean?” he said indistinctly.
“I found my family dead in the garden,” Adam replied slowly, looking at Trond squarely. “An accident. I was convinced that I would never be able to go near the place again. I wanted to move, but didn’t have the energy. Then one day, it must’ve been a couple of months later, I opened the terrace door and went out. I didn’t dare open my eyes, but I started to listen.”
Trond sat down on the bed. His body was stiff and tense, as if he didn’t believe that the bed would hold him. He put both his hands on the mattress to support himself.
“What did you hear?” he asked.
Adam fumbled around in his breast pocket and found the cigar case. He let it slide between his thumb and forefinger, backwards and forwards, again and again.
“So much,” he said in a hushed voice. “I heard so much. The birds were still there. Just as they had been long ago when we first moved in, right after we got married. We were only twenty. We rented it at first, then bought it later. They were singing.”
Suddenly he gasped for breath.
“They were singing,” he repeated, louder this time. “The birds were singing as always. And through the birdsong, and in amongst all that damned chirping, I heard . . . Trine. My daughter. I heard her shouting for me when she was only three, bawling her eyes out because she’d fallen off the swing. I heard the clinking of ice cubes in glasses when my wife came out with juice. Trine’s laughter as she played with the neighbor’s dog was suddenly so clear. I swear I could hear the hissing of evening barbecues. Suddenly I could smell them both. My wife. My daughter. I opened my eyes, and there was the garden. A garden full of the best memories I have. Of course I couldn’t move.”
“Do you still live there?” Trond was more relaxed now. His back was bent, and he was leaning on his elbows.
“No, but that’s another story.” Adam gave a short laugh and dropped the cigar case back into his pocket.
“You’ll get new stories,” he said. “New stories happen all the time, Trond. That’s life. But in the meantime, you have to take ownership of this room again. The house. The whole place. This is your home. And it’s full of happy memories. Remember them, and forget that terrible evening.”
Trond got up, stretched his body, rolled his head from side to side, and straightened his pants. Then he gave a weak smile.
“You’re a nice policeman.”
“Most policemen are nice.”
The young man went on smiling. He looked around one last time and then walked toward the door.
Trond Arnesen was at last ready to leave.
Halfway across the floor, he stopped, hesitated, and took another step forward before turning and walking back to the bedside table on the left of the bed. He opened the small drawer with a slow, cautious hand, as if he expected to find something nasty in it.
“Did you say that nothing else had been done here?” Trond asked. “That you’d just cleaned the place? Nothing was removed?”
“Yes. Not in here. We took some papers and the computer, obviously, but we told you we were going to do that and—”
“But nothing from here?”
“No.”
“My watch. It was lying on the bedside table. And my book.”
“Okay?”
“I’ve got a diving watch. A great lump of a thing. Can’t sleep with it on, so I always leave it here in the evening.” He tapped the bedside table with his fingers. Then he pressed them to his lips in concentration.
“But you didn’t go to bed. You were at your brother’s . . .”
“Exactly,” Trond interrupted. “I was dressed up. We were all wearing tuxedos, and a great big black plastic watch doesn’t exactly match. So I left it here . . .”
“Are you sure?” Adam inquired with an edge to his voice.
Trond Arnesen turned toward him, and Adam could hear the irritation in his voice when he answered, “My book and watch were lying here. On the bedside table. Victoria was”— when he mentioned her name, the aggression in his voice disappeared—“Victoria had a slight allergy,” he muttered. “She didn’t want books in the bedroom. I was only allowed to have the one I was reading at the time. Berger’s latest. I was halfway through. It was lying here.”
“Okay . . . I’ll ask you once more, are you certain about it?”
“Yes! My watch . . . I mean, I really liked that watch. Got it from Victoria. I would never have—”
He stopped himself. A faint blush was visible along his hairline. He tugged his ear in discomfort. “Of course, I could be wrong,” he said feebly. “I don’t know, I—”
“But you remember—”
“As I remember . . . Maybe I did leave the book somewhere
else. But I only read in bed, I . . .”
He stared at Adam, obviously upset. This had nothing to do with the book, Adam thought to himself. Trond Arnesen had for a moment allowed himself to believe that everything could be as it was. Adam had, for a moment or two, convinced him that the image of the crucified Victoria in bed could be erased and disappear.
“I wouldn’t have . . . Not the book. The watch perhaps, that might have been left somewhere else, but I—”
“Come on,” Adam said. “I’ll find out what’s happened. They’ve probably just been put somewhere else. Come on, let’s go.”
Trond Arnesen opened the drawer again. It was empty. Then he went over to the other side of the bed. But he didn’t find anything there either. He had a slightly crazed look in his eyes as he stormed into the bathroom. Adam stayed where he was. He heard the sound of drawers and cabinets being opened and shut, the banging of what could be the lid of the trash can.
Then the boy was there again, in the doorway, holding out his empty hands.
“I must’ve made a mistake,” he said in a hoarse voice.
His eyes were downcast as he followed Adam out of the bedroom.
“Victoria was always saying that, that I was an airhead.”
Evil is an illusion, she thought.
She was standing by the bronze bust of Jean Cocteau. In her opinion it looked slapdash, with the features running into each other as if a child had been playing with melted wax and suddenly decided to make a bust and dedicate it to someone. The sculpture stood on the edge of the quay, a short distance from the small chapel that Cocteau himself had decorated. You had to pay to get in, so she only caught a glimpse of the frescos. It was Christmas, and she had been overwhelmed by a nostalgic desire to visit a church. St. Michel, the church on the hill behind her, had been unbearable with all its Catholic kitsch and the monotonous mumblings of the priest. She had backed her way out.
But paying to meet a God she had never believed in was even worse. She had the urge to remind the fat old woman inside the chapel door of Christ’s rampage in the temple. The sour-faced old witch sat behind a table of simple but outrageously overpriced souvenirs and demanded an entrance fee of two euros. It was irritating that her French didn’t stretch to anything more than mild swearing under her breath.
It was late in the day on Friday, February 13. The spring tides that afternoon had caused considerable damage. The panorama windows of restaurants along the promenade had been broken by the high seas. Shivering young men in white shirts ran backwards and forwards with plywood that they nailed up without much skill, temporary protection against the wind and weather. Chairs had been smashed to kindling. A table was floating some distance from the quay. Most of the boats in the bay were loosely moored and had survived the storm, but four or five dinghies that had been moored by the jetty had fared worse, and now only driftwood and the remains of some rope could be seen in the turbulent, murky waters.
She leaned toward Jean Cocteau and once again thought to herself, “Evil is an illusion.”
The dark side of humanity was her bread and butter. She was never sloppy. To the contrary. She knew more about betrayal, malice, and spiritual bankruptcy than most.
She had once felt some pride in that.
To begin with, nineteen years ago, when she was still in her twenties and had newly discovered how easy it was for her to use this hidden and surprising talent, she had been excited by it. Enthusiastic. Even happy. At least, that is how she remembered it. She wasn’t even bitter about all the years of education she would never use, all the conscientious effort in college that had only helped to pass the time. It was all a waste. But that didn’t matter anymore, once she found her niche in life at the age of twenty-six.
The cliché made her smile.
One March evening in 1985, she sat with a copy of her bank statement in front of her, a beer in her hand, and tried to imagine what her niche was, her special place on the imaginary bookcase of life. This niche would make her special and valuable, completely unique. She had laughed at the well-worn metaphor and imagined everyone creeping around, searching for their niche on some vacant corner.
The sea was calmer now. The temperature was no more than a few degrees above freezing, and what little warmth there was was cut through by the gusts of wind that continued to blow from the south. The boys in shirts had managed to patch up the worst holes and obviously couldn’t be bothered to do any more. A young couple in dark clothes walked toward her. They giggled and whispered something she didn’t understand as they passed. She turned around and followed them with her eyes as they slipped on the wet cobbles and then disappeared into the dark.
They looked Norwegian. He had a backpack on.
Fortunately, the last photograph of her had been taken twelve years ago. Almost exactly. She was slimmer then. Much slimmer, and she had long hair. The picture, which she sometimes looked at by mistake, looked like someone else. That was what she had to think. She wore glasses now. Long hair didn’t look good on her anymore. When she looked in the mirror, she saw that life had shown no mercy in leaving its mark on what was once a very ordinary face. Her nose, which was as small back then as it was now, looked like a button. Her eyes had never been big, but they were brown and therefore not like everyone else’s. They were now almost entirely hidden by her glasses and bangs that were far too long.
The idea that anyone was unique was an illusion.
People were so damned alike.
She didn’t know when the truth had dawned on her. She figured it must have been a gradual realization. She became impatient with the repetitiveness of her work without really knowing what she wanted to change. Of course, every plan was special, every crime had its own value. The circumstances varied, the victims were never the same. She put in tremendous effort. She was never sloppy in her work. But she still couldn’t think of it as anything other than an enervating, endless repetition.
She could no longer make time pass.
It just happened, of its own accord.
“Until now,” she thought and drew breath.
Everyone was the same.
Time, which everyone was so keen on “filling,” was a meaningless concept, created to give false meaning to what was meaningless: simply being alive.
The woman pulled her hat down over her head and slowly climbed the steps that were squeezed in between the old stone houses. The narrow alleys were unusually dark. Maybe the storm had knocked out the electricity.
By studying people’s behavior, she had at some point understood that consideration, solidarity, and goodness were no more than empty expressions. Virtues of model behavior, as given by God and set in stone, extolled by aged monks and in the prophecies of an Arab warrior, in the musings of philosophers and tales from the mouths of persecuted Jews.
Evil was the true human nature, she thought.
Evil was not the work of the devil or the result of original sin, nor was it a dialectical consequence of material need and injustice. If a lioness abandoned a sick cub to a painful, loveless death, no one would say she was evil. The male alligator was not judged in zoological terms because he sired more children than he instinctively knew the environment could support.
She stopped in the alley by the insignificant door into St. Michel’s church. She hesitated for a moment. She was breathing heavily after climbing all the stairs. She gently put her hand on the door handle but then pulled back and kept going. It was time to get home. It had started to rain again, a fine, light rain that covered her skin in a moist film.
There was no point in stigmatizing natural behavior, she thought. That was why animals were free. Humans were likely to exterminate themselves if there was no culture, no order, bans, or threats of corrective punishment, so it might possibly be expedient to brand anyone who deviated from the norm and followed their true nature with the mark of Cain.
“It’s still not evil,” she whispered and gasped for breath in the Place de la Paix.
The pharmac
y’s bright green cross winked at the deserted, closed café over the street. She stopped in front of a real estate office.
Her thighs ached, a dull pain, even though she had not climbed more than a couple hundred steps. She could taste the sweat on her upper lip. A blister was stinging on her left heel. It was a long time since she’d known the pleasure of physical exercise. The dull pain gave her a sense of being alive. She lifted her face to the sky and felt the rain run down the inside of her collar, over her skin and down her shoulder; she felt her nipples harden.
Everything had changed. Life had taken on a palpable, tangible intensity that she had never experienced before.
At last, she was unique.
Seven
It was too big a job.
Johanne Vik wrinkled her nose at her tea. It had steeped for too long and was dark and bitter. She spat the yellowish brown liquid back into the cup.
“Ugh,” she muttered. She felt glad to be alone as she put down the cup and opened the fridge.
She should have refused. The two murder cases were hard enough to crack for professional policemen working in a team, with access to modern technology, advanced data programs, progress reports, breaking news, and all the time in the world.
Johanne had none of that. She had bitten off more than she could chew. The children ruled her days. Sometimes she felt she moved on autopilot, from the washing machine to helping Kristiane with her homework, making food and trying to snatch a few moments’ peace on the sofa while feeding the baby. Even when Kristiane wasn’t at home, there was plenty to do.
But the nights were long.
They passed slowly, the hours she spent poring over the copies of documents that Adam took home with him every afternoon, which was highly irregular for him. It was as if the clock also felt it deserved a rest after a tiring day.
