You

by Zoran Drvenkar

  You get back into the car and are about to start the engine when the shaking begins. First your jaw, your teeth chatter against each other, then it wanders downward, and within seconds your whole body is shaking so hard that you have to hold on tight to the steering wheel. Your balls contract painfully as if trying to hide in your abdomen, your guts want to spill their contents, you control them, you control yourself, the car rocks, the shaking turns into a hurricane that rushes through your life and drags away everything that isn’t nailed or bolted down. Including your son.

  A few minutes later you’re calm and bathed in sweat. The windows are covered with condensation from inside, the car stands still. You carefully peel your fingers off the steering wheel and reach for the ignition key. The peace remains. You start the engine, put the car in gear. The car starts moving. You lower the window, the wind cools the sweat on your face. The monster in the deep jolts awake and rises to the surface. The Traveler is on the road once more.

  you think the world owes you

  it don’t owe you a thing

  Sean Hayes

  ROSEBUSH INSIDE

  The night is a narrow tunnel that you’re moving through with great determination. Everything about you is efficient. Even your breathing, even your glances, every movement has a purpose. You stop twice. Once to fill up, once to stretch your back. While you’re filling up you drink water and eat a cheese sandwich. You see, you breathe, you move. Nothing else happens.

  At the age of seven Marten wanted to know what you were scared of. You didn’t have a good answer for him. So you said the stupidest thing a father can say to his fearful child.

  “There’s nothing to be afraid of. When you’ve grown up, you’ll see for yourself that there’s nothing in life to be afraid of.”

  Apart from the death of your own child.

  While you were looking for Marten at the restaurant, true fear gripped you for the first time. Only after you’d lifted his corpse out of the dirt and laid it in the Range Rover did your fear melt away again. Like an illness leaving you. Forever. There’s no one now that you need to look after. There’s no reason for you ever to be afraid again.

  Seven hours later the sky lightens. You drive through Vik, morning comes hesitantly, on your left side a fjord peels away from the landscape, misty and gray. You stop at an abandoned crossroads. The navigation system lets you know that you’ve reached your destination. The car stops, the engine is running, you look in the rearview mirror and meet your own gaze. A stranger looks at you and the stranger is your best friend. You tap on recalculate destination. The result is the same. You haven’t driven all the way across Norway to arrive at a crossroads. You turn off the navigation system. You have a choice of two roads. One leads up on the right, the other leads further along the fjord. A sign says LUNNIS 1 KM. No mention of Ulvtannen. You drive further along the fjord.

  It’s Saturday, seven in the morning, even the bakeries are still shut. A delivery guy beeps at you because you’ve stopped in the middle of the street. You get out, walk to the back of the car, and ask the man if he knows where Ulvtannen is. He shakes his head, he’s not from around here. You get back into the Range Rover and pull over. What now? For a quarter of an hour you just sit in the car and stare into the street. You try and work out what you’re doing in Lunnis.

  A man with a greyhound on a leash taps on the glass. You lower the window. The greyhound looks at you with its head tilted as if it wants to say something to you. The man is in his mid-twenties, he has a pockmarked face and smells of woodsmoke.

  “Good morning,” he says in English.

  “Good morning.”

  “Do you need help?”

  “I’m looking for a place called Ulvtannen.”

  “You are looking for the hotel?”

  Before you can answer, the man laughs and speaks to his dog in Norwegian, the dog yawns, the man looks at you again and says, “Sorry. My dog is tired.”

  “I’m tired, too,” you say.

  The man jabs his thumb over his shoulder.

  “You see the building behind the church? There’s a path to the water. You climb the hill. Up and up. You don’t need your car. You can walk it easily. Fifteen minutes.”

  “Thank you.”

  “No problem.”

  You park the Range Rover outside the closed post office, walk past the church and an old building, and climb a path that consists largely of broken stone slabs. The fjord appears again on your left. It could also be a football field; the view doesn’t interest you. Thick mist floats like a layer of cream on the water. By the shore you see a boathouse and next to it a flagpole with the Norwegian flag hanging slackly from it. A beaten path replaces the stone slabs, leading up between the cliffs and disappearing behind a bend.

  After twenty minutes you reach a knoll and there is your car waiting for you. You stop. Nothing happens. You go over and see four girls. They’re asleep and look so innocent that your heart contracts.

  The window on the driver’s side is open. One of the girls is leaning against the door, she has golden hair, a few strands blowing out of the open window. In her lap is the head of a red-haired girl, and in the back a fine-boned Asian girl is sleeping arm in arm with a pale beauty. The girls look as if they’d belonged together forever. You know there’s something not quite right about this situation, but you don’t yet know what it is. You can hear the girls breathing and wonder which one of them is Taja and whether that has any significance. You thought you’d find them and make them pay for what they did to your son. You didn’t expect a sight like this. You look round. There is a road leading up to the top of the cliff.

  If this is Ulvtannen, what are they doing here? And where’s the hotel?

  So many questions, so few answers.

  You reach through the window and pull out the ignition key.

  Later.

  The water below you, the sky above you and you’re sitting in the grass, your feet dangling over the edge, and nothing is as it was in your dream—the day isn’t gray, no snow is falling, and the valley walls shimmer in the morning sun like liquid silver and don’t look in the slightest like Japanese ink-wash drawings.

  It’s nine in the morning, and your girls are still asleep in the car. You woke up half an hour ago and looked outside. And there it was, there was everything. The earth and the sky, the cliff and the fjord.

  Home.

  In front of you the cliff climbs higher, twenty yards to your left you see a narrow, overgrown path leading down to the pebble beach. On the beach there’s a boathouse, the boards are painted green, the paint has faded on the lower edge. The shadow of a flagpole draws a sharp line across the façade. You sit very still, you look at the line and wait for it to wander on. The sunbeams are tireless, they tear holes in the pale gray carpet of mist, letting the surface of the water shine through. A high-pitched cry makes you start. It echoes for several seconds over the fjord, then silence falls again. You look into the clouds. Perhaps a bird of prey, perhaps a seagull.

  Or my father, calling to me.

  You sniff hard. Since you’ve been sitting here, the tears won’t stop flowing. Tears for your father, tears for Ruth, and most particularly tears for yourself. Melodramatic and so pathetic that you get a pain in the back of your head. But the tears help and release the pressure that weighs down on you like a great hand, trying to make you smaller.

  “Brilliant!”

  You hastily wipe your face dry. Schnappi comes and stands next to you and looks at the fjord.

  “This isn’t a place, this is a fairy tale!”

  The passenger door opens. Stink blinks around suspiciously, then braces her feet against the dashboard and puts on her boots. She’s the only one you’re really afraid of. Nessi and Schnappi are the ideal listeners, full of sympathy and love. Stink’s always critical, she only ever sees the dark side, but she’s fair, you particularly like that about her. If she sees a lie, she gets her teeth into it and tears it to pieces. Which doesn’t stop her lyi
ng like a loon herself. You love and hate it in her. There’s always a bit of distance between you two. As if you mustn’t get too close to each other. Even the way she jumps out of the car and runs both hands furiously through her mane, as if she were washing her hair. She reminds you of a warrior who’s escaped from a Viking movie. After she’s stretched she says, “I’m in urgent need of coffee. Coffee and a roll.”

  “First take a look at this,” says Schnappi, “it’s fantastic.”

  “Yeah, yeah, in a minute.”

  Stink pulls her pants down and squats beside a bush. She yawns, winks at you, and says, “So, are you a voyeur or something?”

  “You look awful.”

  “Take a look in the mirror, bitch.”

  “You’re really pale,” says Schnappi and points at her hairdo. “How do I look?”

  You wave her over, Schnappi leans forward and you comb her sticking-out hair behind her ears, and after that she looks tolerable again.

  Stink snaps her fingers.

  “Hey, I don’t suppose one of you could …?”

  You rummage in your jacket and hand Schnappi a pack of tissues. She throws them to Stink. Stink joins you a minute later and says, “Funny lake.”

  Schnappi rolls her eyes.

  “Girl, that’s not a lake, that’s a fjord.”

  Stink gives her a shove with her backside.

  “Oh, is that right?”

  “Where do you think we are?”

  “In the country where you can mess with little Vietnamese girls?”

  Schnappi shoves back.

  “Ever fallen in a fjord?”

  “Ever had the worst hairdo of all time?”

  “Sit down and shut up,” you interrupt them, and your girls listen to you and sit down, let their legs dangle and say nothing. A whole two minutes.

  “And the coffee?”

  You sigh. A seagull lands on the flagpole. Stink yawns and asks who wants a cigarette. Schnappi throws her head back and spits into the fjord in a high arc.

  “That hit the spot!”

  “Yeah, and I got half of it in my face.”

  Stink makes a show of wiping her face on her sweatshirt. You look down between your feet.

  “Do you think if we jumped we’d die?”

  Your girls take a look too, Stink stretches her hand out and drops the used tissue. You watch it curving, sweeping down and landing on the water like a clumsy bird.

  “No, that wouldn’t kill anybody,” says Stink. “You’d just make a big splash and go swimming around. Where are we, by the way?”

  In my dream, you want to answer, but you know how stupid it would sound. And your friends don’t know anything about your dream. Your sense of longing is as alien to them as you yourself have been to them for quite some time.

  “Nessi will know where we are,” you say and get to your feet.

  Of course you can’t wait until Nessi wakes up of her own accord. While you stand beside the car, talking about who’s going to wake her, Nessi sits up.

  “You’re talking so loud I’d wake up if I’d been in a coma.”

  “So, had enough sleep?” asks Stink.

  “Not really. How is it?”

  “How’s what?”

  “We’re here.”

  “Where’s here, Nessi?”

  She frowns.

  “Well, the address. Ulvtannen.”

  Nessi leans out of the window and looks around; you look around too. There isn’t much to see, a knoll looming out into the fjord, and beside it rocks and a cliff.

  “So where’s this village?” asks Stink.

  “You’d be better off asking where the hotel is,” says Schnappi.

  They look at you. You have no answer. Being here feels as if you’d found something and lost it again right away. From euphoria to depression in two seconds. Wherever you look, there’s definitely never been a hotel here, and the boathouse down at the beach doesn’t count.

  “Maybe the navigation system is acting up,” says Schnappi.

  “Why would it act up?” asks Nessi and gets out. Schnappi climbs into the car, Nessi takes a deep breath and says the air’s amazing. She stretches the way Stink did before. Nessi is the only one who’s never had trouble with her hair. She looks like a fresh-baked angel. Schnappi’s hand comes out of the window. She wiggles her fingers.

  “I can’t start the navigation system without the keys.”

  “They’re in there,” says Nessi.

  “Nope.”

  Schnappi looks around the floor, checks under the seats. Nothing. Nessi rummages in her jeans.

  “I don’t understand it. I definitely didn’t take the key out. And it can’t have come flying out on the drive, either.”

  “I think that’s impossible,” says Schnappi.

  “Oh, is it really?”

  “Guys, the key can’t just disappear,” says Stink, and drags Schnappi out of the car to do a bit of looking herself.

  “Is this like a horror movie or something?” says Schnappi. “One of you is about to go crazy and you’re just waiting for night to fall?”

  You look at each other helplessly. You look at the road leading down. Then you look at the road winding its way back around the bend between the rocks and up to the cliff.

  “What’s up there?”

  “No idea. I listened to the navigation system, that’s why we’re here.”

  “Let’s take a look,” you decide, and go on ahead.

  The euphoria is still there, and it sweeps the bad mood away. You know you’re in the right place. You can feel it. And you have to prove it to your girls so that everything’s all right again.

  “And what about the key?” Stink calls after you.

  You turn round and hold out your hand for her.

  “We’ll find it, come on.”

  After the first bend the road leads into a second bend. Fifty yards further on you see the summit in front of you; the sky all around it looks as if it’s been cut with a blunt knife. You’re glad to be moving. Over the past few days you’ve either been lying in bed or sitting in the car. Stink is cursing constantly, she’s out of breath after less than a minute. She says she’s absolutely had it, and she’s going to spit her lungs up if the rest of you don’t slow down.

  “I need coffee, I’ve got to fill up my batteries.”

  Schnappi links arms with her, Nessi does the same on the other side. They support Stink like a grandma who’s lost her walking stick. You go and stand behind Stink, grab her ass with both hands, and start pushing. Stink screeches and runs off. You all go after her and could be four girls who’ve run away from summer camp. And so you reach the peak and stop as if you’d walked into a glass wall. The cliff is in front of you, and Stink says, “That’s impossible …”

  “But …”

  You don’t get another word out.

  Nessi throws her hand over her mouth as if to keep her words in.

  Schnappi has no words left.

  You stand there and don’t believe what you see.

  “Boy, listen to me.”

  You wake up with a start and gasp for air. It feels as if a great weight is lifted off your chest. The seat belt cuts into your ribs, you unfasten it and look around, register your environment and breathe out with relief. Your fists are clenched, you open them and wonder how long you’ve been sitting like that. In the yellow light of the filling station your fingers look dead. They’re ice-cold and filthy, black soil is stuck under your nails. It tingles as the blood starts flowing again. Slowly the rest of your body wakes up. An unpleasant clamminess creeps up from your feet as if you were standing in water. You touch your knees. Dry. You look at your hands. Dirty. You shut your eyes again and try to make everything around you disappear. Your arms tense, you’re in your cellar lifting weights. For a few seconds.

  “Your father wants to train you.”

  Tanner’s last words won’t leave you in peace. The thought that your father still wants to train you. The thought that Tanner was
telling the truth.

  “He does what he has to do.”

  You jolt upright, you have nodded off again. Tanner’s voice falls silent, your car is still at the filling station, moths flutter around the pale yellow light, and your father is a silhouette ringing a doorbell beside the closed gas station shop. He’s put his jacket on again, he means business.

  The house looks as if it’s been yielding to the wind for a decade. It leans slightly to the side, even the window frames look crooked. In another life you’d have been messing about with your mates and taken a picture of them—Darian, supporting the house. In this life you stare at the façade, and imagine everything going up in flames.

  Upstairs there’s a television on, the first floor is in darkness. A low-energy bulb flickers on. How you hate that lifeless light. A shadow passes by one of the windows. You can just imagine one of those old shits muttering and cursing his way through the house in his slippers and coming downstairs, a shotgun in the crook of his arm, spitting with rage. But he doesn’t know my father. No one knows your father, who knows whether your father even knows himself after tonight.

  You wonder, not for the first time, where you’d be if your mother had taken you to Spain. You’d probably be running one of her boutiques in Madrid, and you’d have biceps like a girl.

  I’d probably be gay.

  You are who you are because your father made you what you are.

  I am who I am because my father made me who I am?

  You’re not sure what to make of that thought. Perhaps you will love this summer with your mother so much that you won’t be coming back. Anything is possible.

  The front door opens. The woman has put a woolen jacket around her shoulders, and rather than a shotgun she’s holding a cup. For a moment it looks as if she’s bringing your father some tea. You wait for an explosion of rage, the clock says six in the morning, and instead the woman laughs. Ragnar Desche and his charm. Your father opens his briefcase, the woman waves him away and drinks from her cup. She spots you in the car, you look in the other direction.