by Karin Fossum
She rang the police on her landline. A female officer answered. She was polite, but not particularly interested or helpful.
‘Duty officer. How can I help?’
Ragna tried as hard as she could to make herself understood.
‘There’s a man watching my house,’ she whispered. ‘He’s standing down by the road staring up at the house and he’s been there for a long time.’
Silence. Perhaps the officer was writing it all down, or maybe she was rolling her eyes to a colleague.
‘So he’s not in your house?’
‘No,’ Ragna whispered.
‘He’s standing down by the road?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, why are you whispering then? It makes it very hard to hear what you’re saying? Could you speak normally, please?’
There. She heard the first hint of irritation because she was not like everyone else.
She swallowed and tried to explain, managed to stammer that she did not have a voice because of an injury. Again, there was silence on the other end.
‘So he’s hurt you?’
‘No!’
Another silence. Ragna could feel the pressure in her head; her throat tightened.
‘He’s been standing there for over an hour,’ she whispered. ‘He hasn’t moved, he just stands there staring.’
‘I’m sorry, can you repeat that?’
‘He’s been standing there for over an hour!’
‘What’s your address?’
‘Kirkelina 7. Riegel.’
‘And you don’t know who he is? You don’t know him?’
‘He’s sent me some letters.’
‘I see.’
A pause.
‘So you’re drawing your own conclusions here. You’ve received some letters, and now there’s a man standing outside looking at your house. Are you sure it’s the same person?’
‘I think so.’
‘You think?’
The officer did not say anything for a long time, but Ragna could hear some mumbling, as though she was conferring with someone else. The mumbling lasted for some time, and then she was back.
‘Is there a bus stop or something like that on the road?’
‘No, that’s further down.’
‘And you’re sure that he’s looking at your house? He’s not standing with his back to you? It’s dark, after all.’
‘His face is pale,’ Ragna said. ‘He’s standing under a street light at the end of my drive. He wants me to see him.’
‘Is he doing anything other than standing there?’
‘No.’
‘Have you recently broken up from a relationship?’
It was Ragna’s turn to be silent. But then she realised what the officer was thinking.
‘No, I haven’t.’
‘No ex-husband or ex-partner?’
She thought about Walther, who had suddenly popped up after all these years, but then dismissed the idea.
‘No,’ she said firmly.
The officer asked her for more information about the letters. It dawned on her that she thought of Ragna as disabled, as people always treated her in that special way. No doubt they got lots of calls from confused and sick people, who shouted and screamed and made a fuss. The switchboard was probably constantly flashing red with incoming calls.
‘But he’s done nothing to you?’
‘He’s just standing there.’
‘He hasn’t shouted or threatened you?’
‘No.’
‘Then I’m afraid there’s not a lot we can do,’ the officer explained. ‘Not unless he’s on your property. And as you said that he’s down on the road, I’m afraid he has every right to stand there, unless he threatens you.’
Ragna was really running into problems now. It was getting harder for her to express herself clearly. She desperately wanted to slam the phone down, but decided to try once more.
‘How long do I have to wait then?’ she whispered in desperation. ‘What if he stands there all night?’
‘Sorry, can you say that again?’
‘What if he stands there all night?’
‘That’s not very likely,’ the officer said. ‘We don’t have any cars available in your area at the moment, I’m afraid. You’ll just have to try your best to ignore him. It’s cold out there,’ she added. ‘He’ll be freezing soon enough, but that’s his problem.’
Ragna guessed that the officer was smiling. At herself and the elegant way in which she dealt with the public, the kind of smile she used when she wanted to end a conversation. The officer was of course very good at discerning what was serious and what was nonsense. People’s constant need for attention. Old ladies were the worst.
‘But the letters,’ Ragna whispered in desperation. ‘They must mean something. I’ve had three of them. He’s threatening me!’
‘In that case,’ the officer said, ‘you should bring them here so we can have a look.’
Ragna threw the receiver down. She could not bear having to admit that she had burnt them.
She stomped to the bathroom, without even glancing at the window, and started to run a bath. As she could not scream, she had to find other ways to make a noise. She sprinkled a handful of peach-coloured bath salts into the water, which were supposed to have a ‘relaxing and revitalising’ effect. Not that she believed it, but she had nothing else, not even a drop of red wine. There was good pressure in the old pipes and the water gushed out of the taps, so the bath was quickly full of cascades of calming foam. She took off her clothes and left them lying on the floor like an abandoned nest. The foam meant that she did not need to look at her own skinny body in the water, and she lay there without moving, and with her eyes closed. Breathed slowly and evenly. She had understood how important it was to breathe properly. She had even heard that some people went on courses to learn the art, and that the right breathing could remedy all kinds of ills, including anxiety and stress. She decided to lie there until the water had lost most of its warmth. The man would be gone by then. Tired and blue with cold, he would finally have slunk off. Slowly she started to relax and both she and the room smelt good. She had heard that you could get high from bath salts, and that it is a powerful and destructive rush, which surprised her. Bath salts were available everywhere, even young children could get hold of them, and old ladies were given them for Christmas. The warm water had made her so heavy and relaxed that she felt quite dizzy when she stood up and got out. She was smooth and pink like a salmon. The mirror had steamed up so she could only see herself as a shadow. I’ve always been unclear, she thought, that’s nothing new. Before she left the bathroom, she opened the window to let out the steam. She went straight back to the living room. The man had gone. He really had gone! She peered up and down the road, no one was standing under the street lamp staring. She thought that he might have moved on to the next house to terrorise them, Olaf or the Sois, or someone else. And the officer she had spoken to would still be on duty, answering the phone. There would be red flashing lights on the switchboard all night, and the next day, and she was just one little red light that they could turn off whenever they liked. One of seven billion. One of the complainers.
She felt hot as a poker straight out of the fire and her clothes were sticking to her. She checked again to see that the man had gone, leaned against the window that immediately steamed up, so she drew a smiley face. Turned on her computer and searched for ‘The Jumper’ on YouTube. She never got tired of watching the weightless dive from the tall building all the way down to the ground. Never tired of the resurrection, when he stood up and walked towards the camera. His eyes, black, inscrutable, that said so much. You hadn’t expected this, had you? A spark of triumph. Or perhaps, his eyes were challenging her, as though he wanted to tell her something or get her to do something, as though he had seen her, Ragna Riegel from Kirkelina 7. She went to the window again, the man was not there. Irfan’s shop was still dark. She cautiously went out and round to the back of th
e house to get some wood from the pile under the bathroom window, pulled the tarpaulin into place. The November air was sharp and cold, but she was still warm from the bath. Her blood vessels that had been opened contracted with such speed that her cheeks prickled. She was no longer heavy and slow, she was sharp and alert. She went back in and put the wood on the fire, sat on her knees in front of the glass door until it was burning well. Turned down the volume on the television and sat there staring at the flames. The door had beautiful cast-iron latticework, so she watched the flames through several small, arched spaces, a bit like a stained-glass window in a church. Why do flames have such a powerful effect on people, almost hypnotic? They were enough, she needed nothing else. And by the sea, one needs nothing apart from the waves that roll in and break on the shore. It must be something to do with endless repetitiveness, the dancing flames, the swell of the waves, the sense of something that has always been and always will be. The eternal. She found that she wanted to meditate, but did not know how. Was it not a case of closing out the world and focusing on a small space, for example the blue at the centre of a flame, which she had heard was actually cold? If she chose one of the small windows in the door, and only looked at the flames through that one alone, everything around her, the room, the house, the street, would disappear and her tormented soul would find peace. But she found no peace.
She took four sleeping pills before she went to bed. They had no effect, no matter how many she took, but she swallowed them all the same, she might as well use what she had, and she was all too familiar with the power of imagination. She closed the bathroom window, and wrestled the hasp back into place. It got harder with each year, as the wood expanded with the humidity. The mirror had cleared and she glanced at herself. And immediately regretted it, as she saw nothing to cheer her. It was so quiet in the house that the silence had its own sound, a steady hum. Or in fact, she realised, not steady at all, it swelled and subsided, rose and fell. When she lay in bed, the hum got louder. She knocked her knuckles gently against the wall seven times. Stopped, then knocked one more time. No one answered. The hum was still there. It made her think of a leak. A poisonous gas seeping out of a large container.
Chapter 16
On the day that Ragna told Sejer about the man standing under the street light and her conversation with his colleague, who had dismissed her, he pondered long and hard when he got home in the evening. He also felt solidarity for his colleagues who received an endless torrent of phone calls day and night, an enormous amount of which were gibberish from lunatics or drunks, or pranks from children.
He pulled his chair over to the window and sat there in the half-light thinking. From the twelfth floor, he could look out over the town that sparkled and twinkled below him with the lights reflected in the river. Some important buildings were floodlit, like the theatre, the old fire station and the brewery, and the strings of lit streets reminded him of Christmas lights. He liked to see the city from above, as he had an overview and it gave him a sense of distance and control. The nights must have been so dark before electricity, he mused, pitch-black and overwhelming. Only the moon bathing the river in its cold light. Frank was asleep at his feet. He took a sip of whisky. He sometimes smoked a cigarette, just the one, in the evening; the tobacco was dry and strong and made him dizzy. He tried to imagine the fear that Ragna must have felt when she saw the man by the street light. Dressed in black, immobile, staring at her house. There were clear rules when it came to communication between people, and staring was not the done thing. Eye contact could easily switch from being open and inviting, flirtatious, an expression of interest, to being threatening, a serious precursor of aggression and violence. The man had stood there like a statue. That in itself was puzzling and unsettling, a form of aggression. If he had been pacing back and forth, just glancing up at the house every so often, then he might have been waiting for somebody there, by the lamp post. Someone who never showed up. He snapped out of his reverie and took Frank out for a walk, his steps light on the newly fallen snow. They met nobody, the streets were empty, and all the windows bright and warm. It’s inside the four walls of the home it happens, he thought, the abuse and betrayal, threats and slavery. It often went on for years, and no one knew anything about it. The same defence mechanisms in people that made them avoid anything uncomfortable, also kept them alive. It was a paradox that had always bothered him. He studied the windows one by one, as he passed, saw figures moving around inside. Perhaps some were sitting looking out, as he so often did himself. But here in the denseness of the dark, the bright windows looked inviting. It would not be long now before there would be stars and wreaths in nearly every window in anticipation of Christmas. He carried on at a steady pace. Other dogs had left their signatures by the roadside. Frank knew them all, they walked the same route between the blocks every night. They never went particularly far, as Frank was fat and found it hard to breathe. Sejer himself was lean and resilient, an ascetic on the verge of undernourished, some might say. He liked being that way, alert, sharp and clear. Hunger, not for food, but for everything else.
And he liked the dark. The biting snow on his cheeks, the cold that made his eyes water, the snow crunching under his boots – it was so clean and cold that everyone and everything left a mark. A sparrow weighed no more than a few grams, but still left a trail. On other continents far away, the sun was blasting the landscape, breaking down heaths and forests, drying out riverbeds, destroying harvests, forcing people into the shadows, where they sat and begged for mercy as they dreamt of a cool paradise and longed for soothing rain and glittering rivers. He tried to imagine living in that heat, working in it, struggling in it. He would never manage that.
He looked up at the stars that were sparkling clear in the cold. He knew the obvious constellations, like the Big Dipper and Orion’s Belt, and usually looked for the Dog Star. He loved its brightness that outshone all the other stars, and reminded him of a boat. It was actually two stars very close together, he knew that, which was why it sparkled more than other single stars. But as soon as he had found it and confirmed it was still there, he looked down again. On the whole, he was a man who concerned himself with what happened on dry land. There was more than enough to keep him occupied there. And he could neither understand nor move the stars, and he liked to keep things moving.
Frank picked up a plastic chocolate milkshake cup from the side of the road – so that was tonight’s trophy that he would take home. Sejer allowed him this, it was a dog’s instinct to take home prey, after all. Once he was home he would heave his heavy rump up onto the sofa, which he usually managed on the third attempt, and then bury the quarry under a cushion. To hide it from other predators so it could be eaten some other time. There was something about this simple ritual that touched Sejer. Frank continued to be Frank, an ageing hunting dog, even though he got food in a dish twice a day, and the occasional sausage or biscuit. With misgivings. Twice on the short walk the dog did his business, turned his back on the result and kicked snow over it. He moved slowly on the way home, was out of breath. It’s all my fault, Sejer thought, as he tugged at the lead. You’ll have to stop dribbling in front of the fridge, Frank, you mustn’t look at me with those black eyes, I’m an old man.
When he had turned off the light that evening, and Frank had buried the plastic cup under the cushions and fallen asleep on the mat by his bed, Sejer lay awake thinking about Ragna. And the fact that she was alone in a cell, on a narrow bunk. With bars in front of the window and a toilet bucket in the corner. There was something very appealing about her that was slowly growing on him. This delicate woman with tiny cinnamon-coloured freckles on her hands and a rare mix of shyness and pride. She would often not look at him, and yet came across as determined. She was sad, but she was not ashamed. She was patient and grateful for all she got, she never complained or fretted. He was still not sure how much she accepted responsibility for what had happened, they were not at that point yet. There were moments when he felt that she w
as glad of the situation, not with what she had done, but with where she found herself now, that someone else had taken charge of the catastrophe. That she was being looked after. For her, something was over, the problem was solved. And would not disrupt her life again. He had not seen much despair, or defiance. He did not know if she understood the magnitude of her crime, or if she was at all concerned about forgiveness, if she thought about things like that – they had never discussed it.
If he was honest, he had never really understood what forgiveness was himself. What it entailed, what it might mean to those implicated. Could one forgive and then later regret it, like giving a present one couldn’t really afford? He suspected that the one who forgave had a motive for doing so, in much the same way that the guilty party had a motive for the crime. Was forgiveness something that the victim or those affected gave out of pure magnanimity, a generosity of almost divine proportions, or was there an egotistical need to be better than the offender? See this insurmountable divide between us? Well, I’ll just make it bigger. You’ll never reach my level, that is your punishment, you will never deserve it. You will have to carry my forgiveness for the rest of your life, and it will be as heavy a burden as the crime you have committed. It is binding, and will hold you forever. If you break this pact we have made, through my forgiveness, you will be eternally damned. He realised they were not particularly charitable thoughts. Mean, in fact. And as a result, he could not sleep. What did he know about forgiveness and supernatural goodness? Of course it existed. And Ragna Riegel would need it.
