by Anne Holt
It was the charitable donations that had taken time.
Marcus Koll Junior put his heart and soul into each donation. Dispensing generous gifts was his Christmas present to himself. It always did him good, and reminded him of his grandfather. The old man, who had been the closest thing to God that little Marcus could imagine, had once asked him the following question with a smile. A man helps ten other men who are in need, and takes the credit for doing so. A different man helps one other man in need, but keeps it to himself and gets no thanks for what he has done. Which of the two is the better person?
The ten-year-old replied that it was the first man, and had to defend his position. Marcus stuck to his guns for a long time: the intention of the donor was not the issue. It was the result that mattered. Helping ten people was better than helping one. The old man had stubbornly argued for the opposite point of view – until, at the age of fifteen, the boy changed his mind. Then his grandfather did the same. The argument continued until Marcus Koll Senior died at the age of ninety-three, leaving behind a well-organized life in a pale green folder with the logo of the Norwegian state railway on it. The documents showed that he had given away 20 per cent of everything he had earned throughout his adult life. Not 10 per cent, as was traditional within the labour movement, but 20. A fifth of his grandfather’s earnings had been a gift to those worse off than himself.
Marcus looked through all the documents on the day his grandfather was buried. It was a journey in time through the darkest events of the twentieth century. He found receipts for deposits made to needy widows before the war and Jewish children after it. To refugees from Hungary in 1956. Save the Children had received a small amount each month since 1959, and his grandfather had made decent donations after most disasters from 1920 onwards: shipwrecks in the years between the wars, the famine in Biafra, right up to the tsunami in Southeast Asia. He died on New Year’s Eve 2004, only five days after the tidal wave, but had managed to get to the post office in Tøyen in order to send 5,000 kroner to Médecins Sans Frontières.
As a train driver with a wife who stayed at home, five children and eventually fourteen grandchildren, it couldn’t have been particularly easy to nibble away at his wage packet and later his pension, year after year. But he never took any credit for it. The money had been paid at different post offices, always far enough away from his apartment in Vålerenga so that he wouldn’t be recognized. The name of the donor was always false, but the handwriting gave him away.
His grandfather hadn’t helped one person, he had helped thousands.
Just like his grandson.
Marcus Koll Junior’s contributions to charity and research were of quite a different order from those of the old man. As was to be expected. He earned more in just a few weeks than his grandfather had in his entire life. But he imagined the joy of giving was just the same for both of them, and that there was no real answer to his grandfather’s riddle. Sharing what you had was not a question of being noble for either man. It was simply about being contented with one’s own life. And just as his grandfather had allowed himself the small vanity of letting his grandson know what he had done, when it was all over and the discussion had literally died, Marcus Junior also kept a detailed record of his donations. They were made with great discretion, through various channels which made it impossible for the recipient to identify the real donor. The money was a gift from Marcus himself, not from one of his companies; it was declared and taxed before he passed it on via circuitous routes that only he knew about. And nobody would know, apart from the youngest Marcus Koll, eight years old in two months, who would find out one day, when he turned thirty-five, what his father had been doing every night up to the last Sunday in Advent.
It usually brought him a sense of calm; the calmness he needed.
His heart was beating too fast.
He walked back and forth across the room. It wasn’t particularly large, and there was no evidence of the money generated behind the old oak desk. Marcus Koll’s office was located on Aker Brygge, which had been an impressive address a couple of financial crises ago, but the area was no longer so desirable. Which suited Marcus very well.
He clutched his chest and tried to breathe slowly. His lungs had a will of their own, gasping for air much too quickly, his breathing much too shallow. It was as if he had been nailed to the floor. It was impossible to move: he was dying. His fingertips prickled. His lips were numb, and the stiffness in his mouth made his tongue feel huge and dry. He had to breathe through his nose, but his nose was blocked, he had stopped breathing, he would be dead in a few seconds.
He saw himself in a way that he had read about, a sensation he had experienced so many times before. He was standing outside his body, leaning slightly at an angle with something approaching a bird’s-eye view, and he could see a stocky, 44-year-old man with bags under his eyes. He could smell his own fear.
A hot flush surged through his body, making it impossible for him to shake it off. He staggered over to the desk and grabbed a paper bag from the top drawer. He gathered the top loosely between his right thumb and forefinger, put the bag to his lips and breathed as deeply and evenly as he could.
The metallic taste didn’t diminish.
He tossed the bag aside and rested his forehead against the window.
Not ill. He wasn’t ill. His heart was OK, even though he had a stabbing pain beneath his left shoulder blade and in his arm – his left arm now that he thought about it. No, no pain.
Don’t think about it.
Breathe.
His hands felt as if they were covered in tiny crawling insects and he didn’t even dare to shake them off. His head felt light and alien, as if it didn’t belong to him. His thoughts were whirling so fast that he couldn’t catch them. Fragmented images and disjointed phrases kept spinning by on a carousel that made him sway. He tried to think of a recipe, a recipe for pizza, pizza with feta cheese and broccoli, an American pizza he had made thousands of times and could no longer remember.
Not ill. Not a brain haemorrhage. Not feeling sick. He was perfectly fine.
Perhaps it was cancer. He felt a stabbing pain in his right side, the side where his liver was, his pancreas, the side for cancer and disease and death.
Slowly he opened his eyes. A small part of his mind knew that he was fine. He must focus on that, not on forgotten recipes and death. The dampness on the window pane left its ice-cold impression on his forehead, and the tears began to flow.
It was becoming easier to breathe. His pulse, which had been pounding at his eardrums, against his breastbone, in the tips of his fingers and painfully hard in his groin, was slowing down.
Oslo still lay there on the other side of the window, outside this room with its view of the harbour, the fjord and the islands. Marcus Koll had just donated a fortune to charitable causes and he really wanted to feel the warmth that the last Sunday in Advent always gave him: the contented feeling of happiness because of Christmas, because of the gifts, because his son was looking forward to the holiday, because his mother was still alive, quarrelsome and impossible, because he had done the right thing, and because everything was as it should be. He wanted to think about his life which was not yet over, if he could just manage to calm his breathing.
Calm down. Just calm down.
He caught sight of someone out walking, one of the few people still wandering around down there on the quayside, apparently with no goal or purpose. It was almost five o’clock on Sunday morning. All the bars were closed. The man down below was alone. He was staggering from side to side, having difficulty staying upright on the slippery surface. Suddenly he took a couple of despairing steps off at an angle, grabbed hold of his hat as if it were a fixed point, and disappeared over the quayside.
Suddenly everything was different. His heart was beating normally once more. The pressure on his chest eased. Marcus Koll straightened his back and focused. It was as if his mucus membranes suddenly became slippery and smooth; his tongue shrank; his
mouth was lubricated as it was meant to be. His thoughts gradually fell into line, one following the other in a logical sequence. He quickly worked out how long it would take him to get out of the office, down the stairs and over to the edge of the quayside. Before he had finished he could see people running to the scene. Five or six men, including a Securitas guard, yelling so loudly that he could hear them from where he was standing, five storeys above them and behind a triple-glazed window. The uniformed man was already clambering down the side of the quay.
Marcus Koll turned away and decided to go home.
Only now did he realize how tired he was.
If he hurried he might manage three hours’ sleep before the boy demanded his attention. It was Sunday, after all, and it would soon be Christmas. Presumably some of the snow that had fallen yesterday would still be lying on the hills around the city. They could go out. Skiing, perhaps, if they went far enough into Marka.
The last thing Marcus Koll did before leaving was to open the little jar of white, oval tablets in the top drawer. They were probably past their best-before date. It was such a long time ago. He tipped one of them into the palm of his hand. A moment later he put it back, screwed on the lid and locked the drawer.
It was over. For now.
The sirens were already approaching.
*
‘Are the police on their way? Is that them? Has someone called an ambulance? Those sirens are the police, for God’s sake! Call an ambulance! Give me a hand here!’
The security guard had one arm over the edge of the quayside. One foot was resting on a slippery crossbar no more than half a metre above the surface of the water. The other was dangling back and forth in a desperate attempt to keep the heavy body balanced.
‘Grab hold of me! Get hold of my jacket!
A young lad lay down on his stomach in the slush and seized the guard’s sleeves with both hands. His eyes were shining. He would be eighteen in a couple of months, but was blessed with dark stubble that made it possible for him to go from bar to bar all night without any questions being asked. He was broke, and had mostly stuck to finishing the dregs of other people’s beer. Right now he felt stone-cold sober.
‘That’s not him,’ he panted, getting a firmer grip. ‘The guy who fell in is further out.’
‘What? What the hell are you talking about?’
The guard stared at the body he was desperately trying to haul out of the water. He had a good grip on the collar, but the body inside the clothes was lifeless and as heavy as lead in the water, with the hood pulled up and fastened.
‘Help,’ someone yelled in the dark water further out. ‘Help! I …’
The cry died away.
The boy with the stubble let go of the guard.
‘You’ll have to hang on yourself!’ he shouted. ‘I’ll get the other one!’
He stood up, kicked off his shoes, pulled off his padded jacket and dived into the dark water without hesitation. When he came up he was in the exact spot where he had seen the drunken man splashing around.
‘Were there two of them? Did two people fall in? Did you see? Did anyone see?’
The guard was still hanging on with one arm over the quayside, bellowing. His other hand was clutching something that was definitely a body: a head facing away from him, two arms and a dark jacket. It was just so heavy. So bloody heavy. His arms were aching and he had no feeling in his fingers.
He didn’t let go.
The young man who had just jumped in was gasping for air. The first paralyzing shock of the cold water had given way to an agonising pain so fierce that his lungs were threatening to go on strike. He was treading water so frenetically that half his body was above the surface. Beneath him he could see nothing but a dark, colourless depth of water.
‘There!’ shouted an out-of-breath police officer from the quay.
The boy turned around and made a grab. He couldn’t actually see anything. It was more of a reflex action. His fingers closed around something and he pulled. The half-drowned drunk broke the surface of the water with a roar, as if he had already started screaming underwater. His rescuer had a firm hold on his hair. The drunk tried to wrench himself free and clamber on top of the younger man at the same time. Both of them disappeared. When they came up a few seconds later, the older man was lying on his back, his arms and legs outstretched on the water. He screamed with pain as his rescuer refused to let go of his hair, and, in fact, clutched it more tightly as he wound a rope four times around his other arm, without considering where it had come from.
‘Have you got it?’ shouted the police officer up above. ‘Can you hold on?’
The boy tried to answer, but ended up with a mouthful of water. He managed to give a sign with the arm that was attached to the rope.
‘Pull,’ he groaned almost inaudibly, swallowing even more water.
Never in his life had he imagined that the cold could be so intense. The water seared its way into every pore. Needles of ice pierced him all over. His temples felt as if someone were trying to push them into his brain, and it seemed as if his sinuses were packed with ice. He could no longer feel his hands, and for one moment of pure, sheer terror he thought his testicles had disappeared. His crotch was on fire, a paradoxical warmth spreading from his balls and out into his thighs.
He was finding it more difficult to move. He knew his eyes were dead. Somebody must have unscrewed them. There was nothing but wetness, cold and darkness. It couldn’t have been more than a minute since he dived in, but it occurred to him that this was the last thing he would ever experience, losing his balls in the depths of the December sea, because of some fucking idiot on Aker Brygge.
Suddenly he was out.
He was lying on the ground on a blanket that looked as if it were made of aluminium foil, and somebody was trying to remove his clothes.
He held on tight to his trousers.
‘Take it easy,’ said a police officer, presumably the same one that had thrown the rope. ‘We need to get those wet clothes off. The paramedics will soon be here to look after you.’
‘My balls,’ whimpered the boy. ‘And my fingers, they …’
He turned away. Two police officers – the place was crawling with them now – were just laying a person down on the ground a few metres away. Streams of water poured from the figure as they struggled, but he didn’t move. As soon as they had put him down, an ambulance driver came running over with a trolley. The older police officer pushed him away when he tried to help move the body again.
‘He’s dead. Look after the living.’
‘Fuck,’ groaned the boy.
‘He’s dead? He didn’t make it?’ ‘He’s not the one you saved,’ the police officer said calmly, still struggling to undress the boy. ‘I think it was too late for him. Your man is over there. The one who’s put his hat back on.’
He grinned and shook his head. His movements were rapid, and soon the reckless young man realized his sexual organs were still intact. He gave in and allowed himself to be undressed. Three police officers were busy cordoning off the area with red-and-white tape, and one of them placed a tarpaulin over the body on the trolley.
‘H-h-h-hey you there,’ said the man in the hat, moving closer. ‘W-w-w-w-were you trying to sc-sc-scalp me?’
He was still fully dressed. Someone had placed a woollen blanket around his shoulders. Not only were his teeth chattering, but his entire body was shaking, droplets of water cascading from the clumps of hair sticking out from beneath his sodden hat.
The boy on the ground didn’t remember any hat.
‘I s-s-s-s-saved my hat,’ the other man grinned. ‘I h-h-h-held on to it as hard as I could.’
‘Shift yourself,’ the police officer said wearily. ‘Over there!’
He pointed to an ambulance parked at an angle on the quayside, casting its blue flashing light across the melee of uniformed figures.
‘Who-who-who’s that?’ asked the man, completely unmoved as he gazed with interest at
the lifeless form on the stretcher. ‘I d-d-d-didn’t s-s-s-see h-h-h-him in the wa-wa-water.’
‘That’s nothing to do with … Arne! Arne, can you take this guy over to the ambulance? He’s pushing his luck here.’
The shivering man was led away to the ambulance with a certain amount of brute force.
‘He could at least have thanked you,’ said the police officer, waving over one of the paramedics. ‘It was pretty brave, jumping in like that. Not everybody would have had the courage. Over here!’
He stood up and placed his hand on the shoulder of a man in a high-visibility yellow uniform.
‘Look after our hero,’ he said with a smile. ‘He needs warming up.’
‘I’ll just go and get another stretcher. Two seconds and …’
The boy shook his head and tried to get to his feet. He was naked beneath a thick blanket, and without his even noticing somebody had pushed his feet into a pair of trainers that were far too big. The paramedic grabbed him under one arm as he swayed.
‘I’m fine,’ mumbled the boy, pulling the blanket more tightly around him. ‘I’m just so fucking cold.’
‘I think we’d be better with a stretcher,’ the paramedic said doubtfully. ‘It’s just …’
‘No.’
The boy wobbled towards the ambulance. When he had almost reached the edge of the quay, he stopped for a moment. The salty gusts of wind blowing in from the fjord suddenly made him realize how close he had been to death. He was on the point of bursting into tears. Embarrassed, he pulled the blanket over his eyes. He had to take a little sidestep, and tripped over the edge of the blanket. In order to keep his balance, he grabbed hold of the nearest thing. It was the tarpaulin covering the body on the stretcher.
