Fireraiser

by Torkil Damhaug

  He had never mentioned any of this to Elsa. She had asked him a lot of things about those days, but he could never bring himself to talk about this. And this evening she wasn’t home, she was out having dinner with her prince. He was the one who filled her thoughts now. As if she’d just been waiting for years.

  He got into the car, peeled back a section of felt beneath the dashboard, pushed the bag holding the four ignition devices inside. As he started the car and began to reverse, still thinking about Elsa and her prince, he stamped on the accelerator and hit something, the wheels spun, and he jumped out and went round to the rear of the car. Three fence posts destroyed. He swore loudly, calmed down, decided to ring Elsa and explain what had happened. Then she might tell him to stay home that evening and not finish what he’d started. He changed his mind. She believed in what was good. But she was the one who had spoken about the purifying power of fire.

  A few minutes later, he turned on to Erleveien. Years since he’d last been there. He’d been sent away when he was fifteen.

  The house had turned a brownish colour, but next door’s was still yellow. On the field where the fire had been a small block of houses had been built, red with white door frames. He parked by the side of the road, sat there a while looking out into the dusk. A few children were playing in the little strip of garden where the field had once been. There were no signs of life in the house he used to live in. He climbed out of the car, strolled over to the letter box. It said Jakobsen on the lid. When he opened the small gate, the hinges creaked. In the days when he was living there, they were always well oiled. Tord looked after everything, couldn’t stand slovenliness. He was a major and used to things being done. Now the house needed repainting, and the wheelbarrow outside the garden shed looked as if it had been there all winter, full of stones and with a layer of ice at the bottom.

  The front door was visible from the road, but not from any of the nearby houses. The porch light wasn’t on; he had to bend down to read the name plate in the dusk. Sara, Dan-Levi and Rakel Jakobsen live here.

  Just then he heard a car approaching further along the road. He darted down the steps and round the corner, pressed himself up against the wall of the garden shed. The car glided past the gate and turned in towards the garage. He could have run for it, jumped over the fence and off between the trees in the garden next door. He waited until the car had pulled up and the garage door been closed. Until he heard footsteps on the icy gravel path, up the steps, the front door being opened and then shut. Only then did he glide out of the shadow, walk calmly down the flagstone path and out through the creaking gate.

  He stopped a little further down the road and saw lights going on inside the house. First the kitchen, then the living room. A few moments later upstairs. But his old room remained in darkness.

  On the way home, he called in at Studio Q. Hadn’t planned another workout that day, but had to get rid of that itch before it spread through his whole body. It was already crawling around in his arms and legs.

  He did a simple programme of bench presses, biceps curls and thighs. A woman in dark red workout tights was using the treadmill. He’d seen her there before and nodded back when she gave him a brief smile. She had a hooked nose that was too big for her small, narrow face. He let his gaze take in the rest of her body. From the neck down she was great. He looked again, no more than vaguely interested, but probably what she was expecting.

  In the toilet he took out the bag with the capsules and syringes, gave himself two mils each of Testo and Trenbo, still determined not to rush things. He glanced at his face in the mirror; three or four pimples had appeared just below his hairline. Elsa had some herbs that would fix that. It would give him an excuse to drop in that evening.

  Back in the studio, he noticed a man in police uniform at the reception desk. He gave a start, struck by the thought that the guy was there because of him. Calmly, without so much as a sideways glance, he headed for the weights room. Turning to close the door, he saw the woman with the hooked nose on her way over to the reception desk, then stretching up and giving the policeman a quick kiss.

  He pulled back from the glass door. From a corner of the weights room he could still see them reflected in a mirror on the opposite wall. The man in uniform had a reddish handlebar moustache vainly twisted into points at the ends. He had to grin, relieved and curious. It’s a warning, he thought. He would have to build up slower; the mixture of Testo and Trenbo was making him paranoid. Just showed how easy it was to lose control.

  7

  They were still talking about what had happened at Tonje’s party in the last lesson on Monday. They had a supply teacher, the type who made it his business to overhear everything. He picked up what they were saying.

  – So you were attacked by a gang.

  Karsten stared at his desktop. When he’d left the party, the floor in the hallway and living room had been covered with bits of shattered glass and foam from the fire extinguisher; the TV had been smashed, CDs and ornaments lying all over the place. Some were sobbing, some puking, others talking about revenge.

  – How many of them were there? the supply teacher wanted to know.

  – Four or five, said Tonje.

  One of the boys added: – There was another gang of them waiting outside.

  – Then it was some kind of strategically planned attack, the teacher concluded. – And you say they were Pakistanis? Do you know that for sure? Why not Kurds, or Iraqis, or Afghans?

  The teacher appeared to be in his mid twenties and was probably a student at the university. He was wearing a suit jacket that looked quite expensive, dark trousers with a crease in them and a shirt with a wide collar, and when he had introduced himself it emerged that, among other things, he had served as a soldier in Afghanistan.

  – I don’t give a shit where they were from, Priest said from his desk in the middle of the room; he had a plaster that went right across his swollen nose. – It was totally a gang thing. They came to get Lam. There’s total war between the Lørenskog Pakis and the Lia gang, Lam’s brother’s gang.

  There was a Pakistani girl in the class. The way Priest was speaking caused Karsten to glance across at her. Her name was Jasmeen. For the whole of that school year she had been sitting a knight’s jump behind him; several times they’d worked on class projects together. When she met his gaze, he turned away.

  – Isn’t gang war like that a type of cultural conflict? the teacher persisted.

  A number of voices were raised in protest. Priest said: – It’s got nothing to do with culture. They’re criminal arseholes, it’s just fucking wicked.

  The supply teacher was tall and broad shouldered, with longish hair swept back and a neatly trimmed chin beard.

  – How many were at the party?

  Only now did Karsten notice there was something about the way he spoke, some kind of almost imperceptible accent.

  – About thirty, Tonje replied.

  – And how many lads?

  She looked around. – Maybe about half.

  The teacher ran a finger over his stubble. – So that means there were at least twice as many lads in the house as there were interlopers, maybe three times as many. I’m sure some of the girls could have helped out too if there was any talk of self-defence. But that didn’t happen?

  A vague disquiet spread through the room. – What d’you mean? one of the boys muttered.

  Inga interrupted: – Maybe he means that someone might have lifted a finger if our lives were being threatened. Apart from Karsten, no one did shit.

  Karsten stared straight ahead. A hot flush invaded his skin at the hairline and crept downwards. He was about to protest, but she carried on: – Karsten isn’t exactly Rambo, but at least he tried to fight back, even if they did slash him in the face with a knife.

  The burning sensation gathered in the centre of his cheeks, in the cut made by the hedge outside Tonje’s house.

  – And what’s more, he doesn’t get hammered every time yo
u need to have your wits about you, Inga went on. – Half of the boys lay there puking up and the rest were completely paralysed. It’s pathetic.

  Karsten glanced up at the teacher, hoping he’d start the lesson soon.

  – Quite a few of us tried to stop them, Priest protested. – It’s not that bloody easy to organise a defence when you get taken by surprise.

  The teacher pointed at him. – You’ve got a point there, Finn Olav.

  Priest touched his broken nose, clearly surprised that the teacher had learnt his name.

  – As I say, I was a soldier for several years, the teacher went on. – I’ve been in situations where the element of surprise is crucial. Suppose you’d been given a warning that an attack was imminent, that you had a few minutes, what would you have done?

  Various suggestions were aired, gradually more and more drastic. The idea of wasting vodka on making Molotov cocktails gave rise to protests, and after that, to Karsten’s relief, the discussion turned into a joke session. The teacher grinned and let them carry on for while before interrupting.

  – We’re going to be talking about the period after the Cold War. In other words, more or less what we’ve just been doing.

  He fell silent. The talking stopped in the classroom. There was something about this teacher that encouraged them to sit quietly and wait to hear what he was going to say.

  – During the Cold War, the world was in theory divided because of political ideologies, the liberal West against the communist East. The struggle in the world today is between civilisations with different cultures and religions, first and foremost Islam and the Western world. Maybe we’ll end by seeing a connection between what you’re going to learn in your history lessons and what you actually experience in your own lives.

  He let this prospect hang in the air for a few moments before resuming.

  – I asked you if what happened at the party had anything to do with culture. Of course it does. Everything is about culture.

  He began talking about civilisations, tracing the connections between the ancient river cultures of Mesopotamia to present-day Iraq, led by the most hated man in the West, that same West which had armed this tyrant to the teeth before invading his country to get rid of him. He spoke without raising his voice, but there was an intensity to the narrative, a battle between opposing forces, a drama in which they were themselves participants and in which they might find themselves playing a crucial role. Their history exam was only a few months away, and their regular history teacher had given them the topics they would be going through a long time ago, and now here was this supply teacher getting into something that wasn’t even on the list. No one complained. That the girls sat there staring at him as if he came from another world wasn’t all that surprising, thought Karsten, but the boys were behaving in an unusual way too. This was the second time he’d taken the class. He used their names when he spoke to them, and when he was asked how many he had learnt, he pointed to each of them in turn and said what their names were. He didn’t get it wrong once. They stared at him in astonishment, as if he’d just performed a conjuring trick. Even Karsten, who people said had a photographic memory, was impressed.

  – Let’s have a show of hands, the teacher suddenly announced. – How many Christians in the class?

  Three students raised their hands. A murmuring started up and spread around the room. Priest spoke up.

  – What right do you have to ask that? Isn’t that a personal matter?

  The teacher nodded. – Good question, he said with a little smile. – Naturally it’s a question of whether you mean a legal right or an ethical right or some other kind of right. Of course it’s entirely up to you whether you answer or not.

  Another couple of hands were raised.

  Five altogether, the teacher concluded. – What about the other faiths? Buddhism, Sikhism, Hinduism, Islam?

  Karsten wasn’t the only one who looked over at Jasmeen. Hesitantly she raised her hand.

  – Jasmeen Chadar, the teacher said.

  It sounded funny, the way he used both her first and second names. It occurred to Karsten that maybe that was the way people showed respect for girls in the countries where the teacher had been as a soldier.

  – I’m a Muslim, said Jasmeen, and something passed through the class, as though they were surprised to hear her say out loud something everybody knew. In the previous school year they’d gone through all the great religions, and one guy in a parallel class, another Pakistani, had given a talk. Not a word about religious wars or 9/11. Nothing about arranged marriages or infants with mutilated genitals. And no one had confronted him about it. In the name of inclusiveness he got away with it. That their regular history teacher didn’t bring it up either wasn’t surprising; he was an absolute fanatic about everything to do with multicultural and rainbow societies and wouldn’t dream of saying something that might offend a minority. Karsten himself wasn’t the type to discuss such matters in a classroom. He was interested in other things and contented himself with the observation that part of the world was still living in the Middle Ages.

  The supply teacher sat on the edge of the desk.

  – So then, five Christians and one Muslim. From which I conclude that the rest of you are atheists.

  Tonje was sitting closest to the teacher’s desk. The whole time she’d been staring at their supply teacher in a way that Karsten sometimes fantasised girls would stare at him. Several of the girls in class took turns at being visitors to these fantasies, and just lately some of them had started visiting at the same time. But never Tonje. Even in his fantasies she was unattainable, and the thought of her sitting there and being interested in the teacher in that way caused little jolts in his stomach that replicated themselves down through the rest of his body. Sometimes Karsten consoled himself with the thought that since after all he had the poorest man in the world between his legs, he might as well make him even poorer. If he had his remaining testicle removed, he would be freed from this type of disturbance. He could devote himself completely to the world of research, live a useful life, exploit all the talents he possessed so effortlessly.

  Suddenly he raised his hand.

  – Atheists have beliefs too, he declared. – They believe God doesn’t exist.

  The teacher turned towards him. – Do we have an agnostic here? Someone who declines to express a view on something we can know nothing about. Tell us more.

  Karsten tried to think clearly. Had the situation been different, he would have remained silent. But now it was him Tonje was looking at. He took a grip on himself.

  – I believe in genes.

  There should have been more after this, but now the eyes of the whole class were glued to him, and that burning feeling that had started up at his hairline had now extended to cover every inch of his body. Of course he knew what he believed. His mother was a tepid Christian who had made sure both he and Synne were baptised, but she never talked about any God. His father, on the other hand, who was a nuclear researcher and an atheist, was forever holding forth about the origin of things, those molecules in the primordial soup that took the great leap from the inorganic to the replicating and could propagate themselves. Karsten was slightly interested. Maths and physics were more his field; there was too much chaos in biology.

  – Genes have a lifespan of thousands, maybe millions of year, he said, and thought of something his father often said. – Even the greatest civilisations collapse after a few centuries.

  He realised he wasn’t quite sticking to the question, but the teacher was watching him with something like curiosity in his eyes.

  – Genes reproduce themselves at the expense of their competitors. They keep the world going and create evolution, and to do that, they use us individuals.

  – At last, someone with an opinion, the teacher exclaimed. – Go on.

  Karsten was stuck. He mumbled something about all religions arising because people needed something to comfort themselves with. Finally the teacher rele
ased him and addressed the class again.

  – There are plenty of examples and plenty of new arenas in which Islam and the Western world are in conflict with each other. Are there any particular aspects of Islam that might account for this?

  – Are you saying it’s Islam’s fault that there’s war in the world? said Jasmeen. Her voice was loud and clear. They had been in the same class for nearly two years, but outside those projects worked on together, Karsten had hardly spoken to her. She didn’t talk much in the class, and in the early days he hardly noticed her presence at all. At break time she hung around with the other immigrant girls. She lived in Lørenskog, he gathered; her father had a couple of shops, including a sweet shop in Strømmen.

  The teacher was looking at her, and when Karsten again turned, it was as though he was seeing her through the teacher’s eyes. The boys who made lists thought she was hot, between eight and nine on a one-to-ten. Her tits were supposed to be as good as Inga’s, though those who said so couldn’t possibly have seen them. Inga’s, on the other hand, could be accurately described, and from primary school onwards they’d been the gold standard. Karsten had never taken part in these contests. Sure, it was all based on verifiable criteria like size and shape, but there were fundamental flaws. Tonje was small and thin, with hardly any breasts at all. But she’d recently been selected to participate at a gathering for the junior national handball team, and she was leader of the students’ graduation party committee. Not one of the boys who made these lists would have said no to her, no matter what she asked for.

  – I’m about to ask the opposite question, the teacher said calmly. – Is there anything in Christianity, or some other aspect of Western culture, that leads to conflict? What do the rest of you think?

  Karsten waited before getting up once the lesson was over. He was hoping Tonje would hang about so he could walk out with her and at last confess to his pathetic behaviour when the intruders arrived. But there was evidently something she wanted to talk to the teacher about, and she disappeared through the door with him. Priest sidled behind them, crestfallen. Karsten stayed where he was; there was no one else he wanted to talk to. But Jasmeen was still sitting at her desk.