A movement across his neck, like a breath of wind. He turned, feeling unease at having invaded someone else’s life, whoever it might be that was living here. He put the book back where he’d found it, climbed back up the hillock and ran on as hard as he could along the track, felt the warmth creeping back into his body.
Not until he had unlocked his bike and was wheeling it back down to the path did he notice that the rear tyre was flat. He checked the valve. It seemed in order. He got out the pump. When he squeezed the tyre a couple of minutes later, it was still flat.
Approaching Ullevålseter, he saw a woman coming towards him, striding energetically along with walking poles in each hand. There was something familiar about the little figure and the determined face, and Axel greeted her as she passed.
She stopped.
– Is that you? she said.
He tried to remember where he’d seen her before.
– So you’re out keeping fit? She looked at the bicycle. – And you’ve had a puncture.
He recognised the voice. Must have spoken to her on the phone.
– Looks like it, he agreed.
– Sorry I can’t help you, she said.
– No, why would you be carrying a puncture repair kit around with you?
She laughed.
– Ask at Ullevålseter, maybe they have something there.
He was about to move on.
– Actually, I was going to ring you, she said. – Funny meeting you of all people. A referral you sent in the other day. An elderly man with problems after a back operation.
The physiotherapist. She was the physiotherapist at the clinic in Majorstua. Any moment now and he’d recall her name. Bie used to go to her.
– I doubt if I can help him much when he’s in such pain. But we can talk about it later.
He didn’t protest. Rain had begun drizzling from the low cloud, and soon it would be dark. It wasn’t every woman who would head off into the forest in the dark, he thought. Bie didn’t like walking in the forest alone even in daylight.
– Safe journey home, she chirruped, furrowing her brow sympathetically as she pointed with her stick at the punctured tyre.
10
Friday 28 September
THE EVENING HAD turned cold, but Axel remained sitting on the terrace with the living-room door ajar behind him. He’d made a fire and put on a pullover. It was now past eleven and he had just gone in to Marlen, who had woken up and called for him. She’d been dreaming that the dead twin had been following her. Before going to bed, she’d come out to see him on the terrace. They’d sat for a while looking at the night sky together, and Axel had told her about the Ethiopian queen Cassiopeia. When she refused to go to bed until he told her one more story, he’d shown her the Twins, Castor and Pollux. He’d told her how strong and brave they were. No one could best Castor when it came to riding and taming horses, nor Pollux in a bare-fist fight. But most of all they were famed for being true to each other. They loved each other more than any other brothers loved, and nothing could part them. Nothing except death. Because the sad thing was that Pollux was the son of the god Zeus and immortal, while Castor was the son of an earthly king. But weren’t they twins? Marlen protested. They couldn’t have different fathers, could they? In the world of fairy tales such things are possible, Axel smiled. When Castor was killed in a fight, he had to go to the underworld. Pollux begged Zeus to make him mortal too, so that he too could go down to the kingdom of the dead and be with his beloved brother. But not even Zeus could arrange that. If you’re immortal, you’re immortal. Then he had an idea, and he fixed things so that the brothers could be together after all. Every other day Pollux could go to the realm of the dead and meet his twin brother, and the other days they could be together up in the sky.
Axel had told the boys the same story, but neither of them had had nightmares afterwards. Before Marlen could get back to sleep, he had to drive the dead twin away. He tucked the duvet tightly around her into a cocoon, and assured her that nobody could get at her now. On top of that, Mikk the mountain lion and Geiki the goat were standing guard around the bed. It all worked, and he heard no more from her.
Before returning to his chair on the terrace Axel had popped downstairs to have a few words with Tom. He stopped outside the door and listened to the reedy voice within. He felt as though he knew the song now, even though he’d only heard it in snatches. When Marlen was going to sleep, Tom had to turn off his amplifier, and his voice sounded even more frail against the almost inaudible chords from the guitar.
Axel had gone back upstairs without knocking. Taken the bottle of cognac and a glass out into the dark with him. Moments later Tom appeared in the doorway asking if he could spend the night at his friend Findus’s house, the lad he was going to start a band with. Axel reluctantly agreed. It was better than him sitting on his own in his bedroom all evening. After dinner he’d been on the point of suggesting they might do something together, but he’d waited too long and then it was too late. Daniel was getting to be more and more like a friend the older he got, he thought. Axel could talk about most things with him, and recognised himself in much of what his elder son said. And Marlen could always make him laugh with her strange notions. But there was something about Tom that made him hesitate to approach too close. He didn’t know what it was, only that it made him feel shy and clumsy.
He poured himself a glass and sat there inhaling the scent of the golden liquid. He’d bought the bottle on the plane back from Cyprus. They’d spent their Easter holiday there, the last holiday before Daniel moved away from home. Axel had dreaded it. And the sharp white sun and the turquoise sea had heightened his feeling of tristesse. The bus driver who drove them out to the airport was called Andreas. Axel had conversed with him during one of the outings they’d gone on. They were both about the same age. The driver had small eyes and a nose that had been broken and grown back crooked. He watched Bie as she climbed aboard in the short white frock that clung to her thighs and was almost translucent, and Marlen, Tom and Daniel as they followed her into the bus. As Axel passed him, bringing up the rear, he exclaimed: You must be a very happy man. He laughed, exposing brown gums. And when Axel sat down in the back of the bus, and Bie pinched his thigh and whispered in his ear that she fancied him, and he put his arm around her and looked at the desolate yellow land gliding by outside, he thought: I must be a very happy man.
The fire had gone out. He poured himself another glass, studied the dying embers as they slowly paled. He thought: I will go up to Miriam’s. I’ll sit there in her attic apartment in Rodeløkka. Sit there and not do anything but drink the coffee she makes, and talk to her.
He was on his way to the bathroom when he heard a car down in the driveway. He looked out and saw a taxi at the gate. The time was 2.15. Sound of the door being unlocked, Bie’s bunch of keys chinking against the glass top of the chest of drawers.
He undressed and stood in his boxers, glanced at himself in the mirror. He still looked like he kept himself in shape, though the line down to the ridge of the hips had acquired a tiny undulation. A few moments later she came into the bathroom and stood behind him.
– Are you still up?
He looked at her in the mirror.
– Unless I’m sleepwalking.
Her hair was unkempt and her eyes were bleary, though the make-up hadn’t run. She was wearing a dark green tight-fitting satin dress, with shoulder straps and a plunging neckline. There was a hint of green in her eyeshadow too. When she was made up like that, accentuating the slightly slanting eyes and the high cheekbones, she might be taken for five years younger. Maybe more.
He turned, inhaling. The perfume he usually bought her, the way it smelt hours later, mingling with the smell of her sweat and of other people’s cigarettes. A second, foreign perfume was mixed in with the smell of Shalimar; something a man would wear. He could follow the thought, conjure up images of who she’d been sitting with, dancing with. He took her by the arm and pulled her t
owards him.
– Christ, she murmured as he started to kiss her. – You’re hot for it.
Closer and closer it came, the smell of the strange, the thing he didn’t know about, that turned her into something other than the person he knew. Her tongue tasted of wine, but vodka too, or gin. It was not often she could be persuaded to drink spirits, and when he lifted her skirt and took hold of her naked buttocks, she groaned and began to pull at his boxer shorts.
He lifted her up on to the rim of the basin, pulled off the translucent string.
– Axel, she scolded him. – Not here, the kids might wake up.
But that was exactly what she wanted, for him to take her right there and then, sitting on the cold porcelain basin, only half undressed, protesting against the damage to her dress when he pulled the shoulder straps down and fastened his mouth to one of her breasts, raised her lower body and pushed himself inside her.
When she came, she swallowed back the sounds. It ended up a long-drawn-out rattle, unlike anything he’d ever heard from her before. He didn’t come. When it was over for her, he carried her out of the bathroom.
– Wait, she groaned. – At least let me pee.
He got into bed. Through the open door he heard her flush the toilet, wash her hands, open the cupboard, almost certainly to remove her contact lenses. Then she came padding into him, naked, and closed the door behind her.
– Can’t a poor girl get even a few hours’ sleep? she complained.
He pulled her down and turned her round. – Oh Axel, she moaned, the way he was used to hearing her. He bent her body at the hips and entered her from behind, lying there without moving, like an insect.
– Tell me where you’ve been, he whispered as he began to move slowly inside her.
– What is it with you, Axel? she groaned.
– Tell me what you did tonight.
– Lotta and Maren. We ate at Theatrecaféen. Then we went on to Smuget.
– Did you meet anyone?
She twisted her body.
– A whole crowd, she sighed.
– Did you dance?
– Of course.
– With lots of men?
– One especially. A policeman.
He withdrew, then entered her again, quicker and harder.
– He wouldn’t take no for an answer. Must have been ten years younger than me. Yes, like that, harder. Oh fuck, yes.
She didn’t usually swear; it moved his excitement up another notch. He couldn’t face asking any more questions about the policeman, whether they went on anywhere else afterwards, but he could see them in his mind’s eye as she put her arm around his neck and pressed up close against him. He surrendered, pushing her down into the mattress, forcing himself up tight against her buttocks. As he came, a face appeared far away inside the darkness. It came closer, veiled in green, looking in at him through an open car door.
11
Saturday 29 September
AXEL WOKE AT six o’clock. He wasn’t on duty this weekend and could lie in as long as he liked. But he felt himself well rested and swung his feet on to the floor. A few minutes later he was running through the copse, towards the farm lane. It was still only dawn light, the outlines of things flowing into each other. But he could tell that it was going to be a clear autumn day.
By 7.30, he had laid the breakfast table and was sitting fresh from the shower in his boxer shorts and T-shirt, with coffee, orange juice and the Aftenposten. He read it back to front, quickly through the sport, lingering over the financial pages. The price of oil was down, in general bad news for those with their money in unit trusts. All the same, as long as there was war and terrorism in the Middle East, prices would stay high. He had some money invested, but not enough to create a dilemma for him. He glanced through the news. Man threatened with a knife in Rosenkranz gate, woman missing in the Nordmarka, electricity prices on the way down after all the rain in the early autumn. He heard someone slipping into the toilet, saw bare feet padding out into the hallway. Marlen popped her head in.
– You sleepyhead, he chided her as he put the newspaper aside. – It’s the middle of the day.
She stood there bleary eyed, in a red nightie with a crocodile across the front.
– You’re always bragging about how early you get up.
He laughed.
– You want egg and bread, or muesli?
She poked out her lip, sat down and gave the question some thought.
– Egg, she decided.
He buttered her a slice of bread with a squeeze of caviar, then turned to her and conjured an egg from her ear.
She pulled a face and stared out of the window, the trees still hidden behind the grey morning mist.
– Get out the wrong side of the bed today?
She turned to him with an exasperated sigh.
– Dad, everyone has the right to be in a bad mood in the morning. For half an hour. At least.
– Quite agree, he conceded. – That is a human right.
– Which came first, the chicken or the egg? she asked.
– The egg?
– Wrong. Because God doesn’t lay eggs.
Axel peered into Tom’s room and discovered that his son had come home last night after all. He could just make out his shape as he lay under the duvet, his breathing heavy, his face turned towards the wall. There was a close, confined atmosphere there, and the smell of smoke. Axel picked up a shirt that had been tossed over the back of a chair, sniffed at it. He’d seen several of the kids Tom hung out with sitting on the grass behind the centre smoking, but Tom denied that he would ever do anything like that. Axel opened the window, stood a while beside the bed, decided to let the boy sleep on for a while.
Instead, he let himself into the loft. Been putting off for far too long clearing up all the things that had just been tossed in there. He sorted out the sports gear the kids had grown out of, and the clothes he didn’t use any more. Suits and shirts that he thought were okay himself, but that Bie had condemned as old fashioned and refused to let him wear. Over the years the Salvation Army had done pretty well out of Bie’s aesthetics.
In the furthest corner of the loft, behind the empty suitcases and the drums full of winter clothing, was an old mahogany cupboard. The key hung from a hook on the ceiling. For the first time in years, he opened it. The two upper drawers contained the few things he had kept after his father’s death. A peaked hat. Military paraphernalia. Two pistols: a Spanish one that had been used in the civil war, and a Luger taken when the Germans were disarmed in the final days before the surrender. There was a box containing letters sent to Torstein Glenne by friends being held in the prison camp at Grini. He’d read them all to Axel. Sometimes to Brede as well, but mostly to Axel, to teach him that freedom has its price. The maps were in the same box.
On summer evenings, when Colonel Glenne had been sitting long enough in front of the terrace fire with his whisky and his pretzels, he would sometimes allow himself to be persuaded to go up and fetch the maps with all the secret routes inscribed on them. I probably shouldn’t be showing you these, boys, he’d growl, though twenty-five years had passed since the German surrender. I might let slip things I’ve promised on pain of death never to reveal. And then without further ado he would describe the various hiding places along the Swedish border. Here was where they had hidden out after their actions. After they’d blown factories to smithereens, cut vital telephone wires, helped refugees over the border: Jewish children, Resistance members who had been betrayed, even those occasional oddballs who just panicked and wanted to get out even though the Germans weren’t after them.
His father had marked the maps: a cross for each meeting point, dotted lines for the escape routes, circles for the hiding places and communication centres. Afterwards Axel and Brede would play refugees and border guides, and especially Resistance fighters engaging in mortally dangerous sabotage operations. They sank the Blücher in the waters off Drøbak, and drove the Bismarck and the Tirpitz int
o narrow and treacherous fjords. Above all they blew up the heavy water plant in Vemork. At the very last moment they managed to light the fuse, just before Hitler had finally made his atom bomb; all that was needed was just a few litres of that water, and the Glenne brothers had ruined everything for him. Hitler was furious. He developed an obsessive hatred of them and sent his most dangerous SS men to Norway to capture them. The twins fled to the forest and hid out in the cabins their father had told them about. They sneaked from one to another, dog patrols on their heels, hearing the barking and the shouting of the commandos in German, the most gruesome of all languages. But if one of them was captured, the other would get away, because both had sworn to die rather than inform on his brother.
These games would get Brede so worked up that he could lie awake all night. Sometimes he would even wake Axel to swear the pact all over again: You will never betray me. I will never betray you.
Even when they weren’t playing, Axel knew he had to look after his brother. That no one else would do it. Every time Brede did something terrible, their parents talked about how they couldn’t have him in the house any longer. Axel thought of these as threats meant to get Brede to pull himself together; he never dreamt they might actually mean it. Brede couldn’t pull himself together. One week after Balder was shot, they sent him away.
He was sitting on the sofa with Marlen playing Buzz! Jungle when Bie appeared. She stood in the door and watched them. It was 11.30. Axel was still in his boxer shorts and T-shirt, Marlen in her nightie.
– So this is where you are.
– Don’t interrupt, Mum, can’t you see we’re working?
– I see, is that what you’re doing?
– Don’t you know that playing for children is the same thing as working is for grown-ups?
– Yes, I guess it is. But what about Daddy? He isn’t a child, is he, or at least not completely.
Medusa Page 5
