You

by Zoran Drvenkar

  “Majgull loves you too,” you interrupted him, feeling acid rising up in your stomach. Even those simple words hurt. Majgull belonged to you.

  “She’s calling, I’ve got to go,” said Oskar.

  “Wait.”

  “Thank you for listening to me. I’ll call you as soon as I’ve met this bastard. I don’t want to lose her, Ragnar, I’ll do anything not to leave her.”

  With those words he hung up.

  You wanted to call Majgull and ask her what she was playing at. Instead you treated your phone as an oracle and looked for Majgull’s last message in your inbox. Nine hours previously, you had still had no idea what lie she was talking about, but now you were starting to work it out. Majgull wanted to reveal herself to you, she wanted to hold up the facts in front of Oskar and give up her family for you. Oskar was to see you, speak to you, everything would be explained. Her detachment, her pretense that her interest in you had been only sexual, had been a lie all along. She wanted to give up her family, she wanted you to give up your family. You didn’t know if that pleased or frightened you.

  Action was important, you couldn’t just sit around waiting to be crushed by events. So you hired a car and drove north. A six-hour journey and then? You didn’t know what then. You could hardly tell Oskar you’d just hopped on a plane to solve the problem with Majgull. Even a credulous person like Oskar would have seen through that one.

  What on earth am I doing here?

  Six hours is a long time to forge a plan. Your phone was on the passenger seat all the time. Perhaps she’d call you, perhaps she’d cancel everything. It could be so easy. You could take the next flight back to Berlin. Her name could vanish from your memory. Her number from your phone. But there was this pull, there was this boundless hunger. You wanted that woman. Damn it, you wanted that woman.

  Two cars on the road, two planets that were never supposed to touch.

  Oskar drove, Taja was asleep on the backseat, Majgull didn’t say a word. If you’d seen that, you’d have seen the pain in your little brother’s face, who knows whether you mightn’t have turned round on the spot. Majgull’s face, on the other hand, gave nothing away. She leaned against the passenger door as if to keep her distance from Oskar.

  Your brother knew he was losing his wife, he knew it and he was keeping himself under control. Who knows how different things might have been if Taja hadn’t been lying on the backseat. Oskar didn’t want to make a scene in front of his daughter. He wanted to look his enemy in the face and then decide what happened next. You’ve always been very similar. In true crisis situations you’ve waited until the last minute before deciding on your reaction. Your brother and you.

  And maybe you would have just driven past one another and in that way everyone would have reached his destination. You in Ulvtannen, they in Oslo. You on the steps of the beach hotel, them in the lobby of the Plaza Hotel. Maybe all that dark energy would have gone up in smoke, but you know that’s not what happened.

  Less than two hours on the road, you couldn’t bear it any longer, you took your phone and called her number. You just needed to know if they were on the way. You didn’t even think of calling Oskar. You just needed to talk to Majgull.

  She picked up after the second ring. Her words were warm, she smiled at you through the phone.

  “We’ll be in Oslo in four hours,” she said in English. “I’m looking forward to it.”

  She said twice more, “I am happy, I am so happy.”

  And then you heard Oskar saying in German, “Give it to me.”

  And Majgull said, “I don’t think so.”

  And Oskar cursed and demanded the phone.

  And Majgull told him to keep his eye on the road.

  “GIVE ME THE PHONE OR I’LL SLAP YOU!”

  “YOU ARE NOT GOING TO HIT ME. NOT YOU!”

  Oskar had never planned to hit her, he swore afterward, he said he’d only threatened to because he’d wanted to have the damn phone. She ignored his threat, so he grabbed for it. He missed the phone and grabbed her wrist. She pulled, he pulled, the car started swerving, Oskar was driving fast. When a car starts swerving at a hundred miles an hour, you need control to get back on track. Oskar lost control. Luckily there was no traffic coming in the opposite direction.

  The car slewed into the opposite lane, slewed back, came off the road and drove into a ditch, ran up the embankment and turned over twice before settling on its side.

  You heard your brother shouting into the phone, the screech of the tires and the dull thud as the car turned over. Then it was suddenly quiet and in the midst of the silence there was the quiet weeping of a child.

  Even today you don’t understand your reaction. You opened the window and threw your phone out. You saw it bounce twice on the tarmac before breaking apart. Only then did you brake and drive to the side of the road. Your arms were shaking, your heartbeat was irregular. You sat in the car and went through every second that had passed over and over again in your head. After fifteen minutes you turned the car and set off back to Oslo. You drove straight to the airport and had to wait less than an hour before catching a plane back to Berlin. Just before eight you got out of a taxi in front of your home and turned up in time to read a bedtime story to your son, while in a hotel in Oslo a damp towel hung drying over a towel rack.

  No one asked where you’d been.

  No one knew you’d been away.

  The call came just before midnight. Oskar called you from the hospital in Laedal. He had a cut on his head, but Taja had got away without as much as a scratch. It was a miracle. The doctors had pumped your hysterical brother full of tranquilizers, and he could only mumble incoherent stuff, but the sense seeped through, the sense reached you and so you learned that Majgull had broken her neck when the car turned over. And time and again Oskar said he should have listened to you, everything would have been different if he’d listened to you.

  And so ends our little story of Ragnar, who destroyed the love of his life with a single phone call. And of course we keep that to ourselves, because this story has nothing to do with anybody.

  Because I killed her fourteen years ago is testimony enough.

  No more truth is needed.

  “What the fuck?”

  Once again you can’t keep your trap shut, you step forward and push Taja’s uncle aside like a piece of furniture that’s in the way. No idea when the guy was last pushed aside. Out of the corner of your eye you see his face slipping away like some stupid pancake falling out of the pan. You don’t care. You’ve got a completely different kind of problem. The Eiffel Tower is a matchbox in comparison.

  “Taja, give me an answer!”

  She doesn’t react. You push her on the chest with both hands, making her stagger back and nearly fall. In fact she doesn’t need to answer. Her face tells you everything you need to know. And you don’t believe it, you just don’t believe it. Your good friend lied to you. You saved her life and wiped up after her and she’s seriously lied to you. You point at Ragnar Desche, your voice is shrill: “So your mother is dead, and that bastard killed her? Is that right? So when were you going to tell us that?”

  A moment later your head explodes. It feels as if you’ve just been french-kissed by a bomb. You don’t understand what’s happened. I was standing up a second ago. You try to get up again, your arm slips away, your sense of balance has just been on a roller-coaster ride, you’re lying flat on the ground. Let that be a lesson to you, unpredictable violence is a little fucker who lives on surprise. This fucker is wearing a smart suit, he has hit you with his fist, and now he says, “I’ve been looking forward to this all this time.”

  Taja’s uncle shakes his fingers out, and at the same moment Taja clears out. She wants to get to the road, she really thinks she’ll manage to get past her uncle, who only needs to stretch his arm out to grab her. He pulls Taja roughly to him, so that her chest hits his.

  “Where do you think you’re going? We’ve only just got here.”

&n
bsp; He turns around with Taja in front of him, so that you can see her. Your girls pull you to your feet, Nessi keeps an arm around you. There’s a shrill ringing in your left ear that only slowly subsides. He’s using Taja as a human shield, you think, and you follow your logic through: If you need a human shield, it means you’re scared.

  “We’re not finished here, not by a long way,” says Taja’s uncle. “We haven’t heard the whole story. Have we, Taja? Now you’re going to tell us what really happened to Oskar.”

  “It … it was an accident,” says Taja, and looks at you pleadingly.

  Save me, hurry up, save me, her eyes say.

  “What sort of accident?” asks her uncle.

  “He … Oskar was sitting there and … we argued and suddenly … he was gone … he stopped breathing. It was … it was just over. Like when Grandpa died … Grandpa died like that too, didn’t he? Oskar told me that—”

  “Taja—”

  “I swear! I really swear!”

  Her uncle draws a gun and aims it right at you, of course. It was obvious, this guy has a private feud with you, it was perfectly obvious. He should try wrestling with you, you’d twist his balls till he sounded like Mickey Mouse.

  “Take a good look at your friend,” he says. “I’m going to blow this arrogant mouth of hers away if you don’t tell me what really happened.”

  “I said—”

  “STOP LYING, I’VE SEEN IT!”

  Taja closes her eyes.

  “I’ve seen everything,” her uncle whispers suddenly, but you understand every word, because all of a sudden it’s quiet on the cliff, no seagulls, no wind disturbs the scene as he whispers in Taja’s ear, “Three of the cameras were running. They’d been running for the last ten days. It’s as if I was there. Are you going to risk your friend’s life for your lies?”

  You girls stare at Taja, you have no idea what cameras he’s talking about, but you can see that Taja knows. Her face goes so sad that you’re sure she’s about to burst into tears again. Her eyes open, but there are no tears in them, she looks at you and in this short moment something happens to your friend, as if a part of her was getting loose and disappearing forever. And then she says the two words you don’t want to hear. You want to hear: Run, he’s nuts. You want to hear what a miserable fucker Ragnar Desche is and that it’s all a bunch of stupid lies. Everything, but not these two words. But there they are. Live with it.

  “I’m sorry.”

  It isn’t a heroic moment for you. Look at your girlfriends, they still don’t understand exactly what has hit them, but they smell the corruption in the air, they feel it with every fiber of their bodies, as if the corruption had wings and was about to plunge down on them from thirty thousand feet up.

  Did you really think it wouldn’t come out? By the time you were standing outside the derelict beach hotel, you must have understood how brittle your reality was.

  Of course you were surprised.

  You thought the hotel would still look as it did in the photographs. But why should time be good to a place that’s been empty for twelve years? Time isn’t good to anybody. Even if you turn time into God, it just laughs at you. Like now. You hear? Her laughter sounds like a storm, like the storm that came down on Berlin exactly a year ago, with a cooling summer rain. The thunder kept you awake for a while, as if the weather knew exactly what you intended to do. It spurred you on.

  You summoned your courage and went downstairs to drink a glass of water. You thought you could have a look at what your father was doing. There were nights when he stayed in the attic till the early hours, working on his new jingles. And there were nights when he had visitors.

  You knew he was alone that night.

  You went upstairs and looked in his bedroom. He was lying on his side, his back was rising and falling as he breathed calmly. Sometimes he twitched when a crack of thunder made the sky outside tremble. You heard the rain on the plank flooring and closed the door. Now you were in his room, you’d taken the first step. You hesitated for a few minutes and watched him, you listened to his breath before you lay down next to him. As you had always done when you were little. At the age of ten you knew it had to stop. I’m not a child anymore, you had said. Tonight you aren’t a child anymore either, but you want to be with your father. For a while. In safety. And perhaps it had something to do with the fact that your boyfriend had split up with you, perhaps you were lonely and wanted to hear that everything was okay. Perhaps even that is just a lie.

  You lay down behind your father and it felt proper and warm. He was aware of your presence, he turned round and looked at you in surprise. Before he could say anything, you threw your arms around him and pressed him to you as if you were lost and he was your salvation. Your heart was thumping wild and confused, and your leg pushed its way between his legs. Only then did he slowly start to understand that you weren’t his little girl anymore. He tried to pull away from you, he actually recoiled, and that was too much for you, that wasn’t right, he couldn’t push you away, so you held him tight, your hands on his back, your breath on his neck. You felt his erection, and it was shockingly beautiful and right, because an erection meant something, it meant he was aroused, it meant you were arousing him.

  He hurled you out of bed and gathered the blanket between his legs as you sat bewildered on the floor in your T-shirt and black knickers that you’d chosen specially for this evening. Planning is everything. Only those who are brave reach their goal.

  “You … It’s you?”

  Your father tried to laugh.

  “Who did you think it was?” you asked him and rubbed your bottom and thought of his erection and wondered if it was still there. Until then you’d only slept with Kai and you always had to hurry, because his erections came and went, as if he had to think every few minutes about whether he actually wanted to have sex.

  “Were you afraid of the storm?” your father asked in a falsely chatty tone, and you could tell by his eyes that he wanted to say something else. Something like Are you crazy? How the hell could you even think of this? I’m your father!

  But he didn’t say it, and that encouraged you.

  “Nightmare,” you replied and got up. You turned round and showed him your sweet ass and asked him if there was a bruise on it, and as you did so you looked at him over your shoulder. He didn’t risk a glance, he stared at the bedcovers and said there wasn’t a bruise and did you want some hot milk with honey.

  That was how the night ended—the two of you in the kitchen, each holding a cup of hot milk, candles burned, a summer storm raged outside and you talked about music.

  For two days there was peace.

  For two days he studied you out of the corner of his eye.

  On the third day you stood by his bed again in the middle of the night.

  “Dad?”

  “Yes.”

  He wasn’t asleep. He must have heard you coming in. Perhaps he’d been waiting. You liked that idea. His back was turned to you.

  “Can I get into bed with you?”

  “Taja, no, it’s not right.”

  “I’m so alone.”

  “Sweetheart, that …”

  You started crying. It was real, you weren’t acting. You couldn’t deal with rejection. You stood by the side of the bed and cried and held your hand out to him. Help me. He turned around. Your hand was trembling. He pulled you into bed and held you in his arms as he had held his little girl in his arms six years before. Your back was turned toward him, he held you tight. It was lovely, but it wasn’t what you wanted. More. You slowly started pressing your ass against his crotch. He shrank back, he tried to hide his erection, you held his arms tight, he couldn’t get away. Stay. You heard him groaning, his breath burned the back of your neck and smelled of pot and slightly of vodka. Mine, you thought, as your bottom rubbed against him and then you took his sweaty hand and stuck his thumb in your mouth. It was as simple as that.

  It wasn’t love, it wasn’t passion, it was pure power
. And of course we want to hear that it was despair that drove you to it. Loneliness, abuse, violence. Give us something so that we can understand and forgive you. But there’s nothing. There’s just a fifteen-year-old girl who wanted to test her power and whose only excuse was that her boyfriend dumped her.

  You wanted it; it made you grow. Each time it happened your value increased, while your father’s attempts to resist got weaker and weaker. When you got into the shower with him, when you stuck your hand down his trousers in the kitchen in the morning. Discreet, always discreet. Never when you had visitors, never when he was composing. You could still be the daughter who loved her life and didn’t get in her father’s way; but you could also be the little slut who seduced him and felt triumphant.

  When women stayed overnight, you asked him in the morning if it had been any good. He blushed, tried to defend himself, and you walked away mid-sentence. You enjoyed it. You were taking your mother’s place without even thinking about it. And perhaps at some point you’d have had enough, normality would have returned, and you could have dumped your father like a boy who didn’t interest you anymore. It didn’t come to that, because your father started losing himself.

  He couldn’t do it anymore, he didn’t want to do it anymore.

  Six months had passed. No one noticed anything, even your girls hadn’t a clue. There was just you and your father in the house, you lived in a cocoon of lust. Your father knew it was wrong. He said he didn’t want to be a square, but it couldn’t go on like this. You knew your weapons and you used them. You look so like your mother and you pulled out all the stops. Clothes and hairdos. At Christmas you had your hair cut because your mother had a pageboy cut at her wedding. You became a second Majgull, and your father would have been a liar if he’d claimed he didn’t like it.

  It didn’t last long. He avoided you until the summer, then he broke down completely, he took more drugs, drank vodka for breakfast, and wanted you both to see a psychologist. Your father became paranoid with guilt. He didn’t want to be alone with you in a room anymore, he was ashamed and said he’d go voluntarily to jail if it had to be.