Fireraiser

by Torkil Damhaug

  The final row consisted of cards that would reveal events to come in three to six months’ time, according to Elsa Wilkins. She closed her eyes. All professionals have their tricks, Dan-Levi thought. Psychologists, lawyers and of course journalists. This was probably the tarotist’s. Closing the eyes as though peering inwards in order to see what lay hidden within intuition.

  The final card was called The Lovers, marked with a six in Roman numerals. Even though he was keeping a professional distance from the session, Dan-Levi was relieved, since this was obviously a love card.

  – The Lovers, intoned Elsa Wilkins.

  – The Lovers, said Dan-Levi, and repeating it like that, without any irony, alerted him to the fact that he was starting to take the ceremony more seriously than he ought to. He decided to talk to Sara about it once he got home.

  – The Lovers, upside down.

  – Upside down?

  – The meaning of a card changes when it’s upside down.

  He felt himself frowning and again saw his father in his mind’s eye.

  – The card is upside down for you, but not for me, he tried to object.

  Once more that melancholy smile, making him recall the fragments of her life story that she had revealed. A failed marriage, and a son who ran a security firm in Iraq.

  – It’s upside down for me, said Elsa Wilkins. – That’s what counts.

  – What does it mean?

  Again she let her gaze glide across the rows of cards, as though searching for something.

  – The Lovers upside down indicates problems in relationships, broken marriages and loveless sex. There might be jealousy, rejection, infidelity, or just a warning not to have a fling. It might also mean that faith is challenged by doubt.

  Dan-Levi sat up straight in his chair. Infidelity had never been one of the themes of his life. He had known Sara since they were children. Their parents were friends. Sara was the sweetest girl in the circle around Bethany. She was a soloist in the church choir and played the organ. In secondary school she had left the congregation, at least partly, at the same time as she was the girlfriend of his best friend Roar Horvath, an atheist and son of a Hungarian refugee. But after a couple of years she returned to Bethany, and from that time onwards there was never any doubt about who she was going to share her life with. It had always been the two of them. Not in his wildest fantasies could Dan-Levi see himself with anyone else, and it had never occurred to him that this might be different for Sara.

  Elsa Wilkins talked about the other cards too. Something about corn that had been sowed but had not yet ripened, and one of the cards indicated what could be either a genuine illness or just an exaggerated worry. But after she was finished, it was that business with the Lovers upside down that Dan-Levi sat brooding over.

  Fifteen minutes later, he rounded things off by taking a series of photographs of her in the chilly April afternoon, noting that he’d captured the drops of misty rain that glinted in her dark hair. Even then the thought of that card cropped up. It stayed with him as he made his way back to his car, and on the drive back to his desk at the newspaper office, where his tasks included working out how to angle the story, what use to make of text boxes, and how the photos he had just taken would work in the piece.

  2

  I have always felt a compulsion to lie.

  Synne Clausen looked up from the keyboard, sat a while gazing out of the window towards the stone wall on the other side of the grassy slope before lowering her eyes again and reading the single line there, the first she had written for months. She pulled out the earplugs so suddenly there was a stinging in one of her eardrums. From a room further down the corridor came the sound of a flute. She was relieved that Maja was obviously at home. She stood up, walked out of her bedsit into the kitchen, switched the kettle on, turned on the radio, tried a couple of stations, turned it off again, hoping that Maja would realise it was her out there and come out to see her. But the flute-playing continued, the lines of the melody interrupted and repeated, with small breaks each time, and Synne remained alone on the tiny veranda with her cup of coffee, wrapped in a quilted anorak and blankets. In about half an hour the sun would be setting behind the roof of the block next door. She tried not to think, just concentrate on the sounds drifting up through the endless hum of the city and disappearing again. A car accelerating up the hill in Sognsveien, a great tit in the pine tree, another answering some distance away, and from within the house, the dark notes of the flute.

  It was almost a year now since the unbelievable had happened. She had sent a brown envelope out into the world. It contained words she had forced out of herself, then taken apart and reassembled, polished, roughed up, turned into miniatures, destroying most of them, keeping just a few. When she posted that envelope, she imagined it as a bottle with a letter pushed down inside it, tossed into the sea from a skerry or a boat. The unbelievable was that someone had found her message in a bottle. An editor at one of the big publishing companies had called her the following week. He assured her that her images were unlike anything else he had ever read. He insisted that after a few revisions they must be sent off to the printers and from there to the bookshops and the libraries, that they must be made accessible to a great number of people. Even more incomprehensible was the fact that several of the major newspapers had devoted valuable column space to her sliver of a book, and that a couple of them wrote that it was worth thinking about what she had to say.

  Even before the book was published, she had started on something new. Worked night and day for a couple of months. For a whole autumn she was a genius. She was Virginia Woolf on the verge of madness, and everything she touched burnt her fingers. And then very suddenly it all stopped. She developed physical aversions, in the first instance towards the keyboard. Began writing by hand in notebooks, but the aversion spread until even holding a pen became painful and nauseating. She sat tensed and strained at her desk for hours on end. Around New Year, she realised she was ill. Pain moved around inside her whole body. It was painful to walk, painful to sit, painful to lie still. The doctor subjected her to all sorts of examinations but could find no cause. In the end he said it was fibromyalgia, a diagnosis he evidently regarded with contempt.

  As the sun disappeared behind the rooftop, she suddenly stood up, took her coffee inside and slumped down in front of the keyboard again. She twisted the yellow earplugs into two pointed cones and wedged them into her ears, closed her eyes as the sounds from the outside world disappeared.

  I never lie about big things and never about things where I might be found out. It’s the tiny little things. I tell Erika I sent an email and made a couple of phone calls. I only called one person. I tell her I met someone I used to go to school with and we stopped for a chat on Karl Johan. But I walked straight past Tamara, sitting on the steps outside a shop in Dronningens gate. I nodded, and maybe she nodded back. If Erika decides to ask who it was, I can give her the name, or say I’ve forgotten it, and smile as though I find it a bit embarrassing. And if she asks what we talked about, I can laugh it off and say it was confidential, or invent the conversation. Naturally that will be enough to satisfy her. But if she really looked closely at it she would find all sorts of holes in the story of my life, little holes, but lots of them, spread all over the place.

  Synne knew that she must not stop there. If she stopped, she wouldn’t be able to start again. Not for weeks and months, maybe not ever. She mustn’t begin reading what she had written, just let her fingers go, let it stream out through them.

  I’ve got nothing to talk to Tamara about.

  I turn and peer upwards along the dark scale.

  Someone approaching me from up there.

  Karsten, I say out loud, and a figure emerges from this word, face emaciated and eyes that don’t recognise me, don’t recognise anything at all.

  You owe, says the voice that is no longer his.

  You owe for everything you never had to pay.

  I know, I murmur, I
owe you more than I can ever repay.

  You don’t owe me, he says, that same mechanical voice that is no longer his.

  You owe the grey, that’s why you’re sinking, you pay what you owe by sinking down, becoming part of the grey yourself.

  Again she looked up from the keyboard and out of the window. A magpie landed in the fir tree. It was big and had something in its beak; could be a piece of bread it had found down on the playground. She carried on typing, writing about this piece of bread. About where it came from, about the mother who buttered it for her little girl that morning, as she was running from the house, to the nursery school, to drop her daughter off. She sat hunched over the keyboard, driving her fingers on. No idea where the sentences were going, didn’t want to know, because then she would have to stop, give up, go back to bed again.

  She had just put the machine in hibernation mode when Erika arrived. It was late afternoon. Erika had been giving a seminar at Blindern and she looked worn out.

  – You people who can take time off whenever you like have no idea how lucky you are, she groaned as she stretched out on the bed.

  The teasing wasn’t malicious, but it irritated Synne.

  – Do I work any less than you do?

  Erika raised her hands in a gesture of apology. – Didn’t mean to offend.

  Synne went out to the kitchen and switched on the coffee machine. When she returned with two full cups, Erika was lying there, her eyelids flickering.

  – I slept so badly last night after you left, she complained. – Come here.

  Synne sat down on the edge of the bed, held out one of the cups to her.

  – Just put it down.

  She did so. Erika put a hand around her neck and drew her down towards her.

  – Lie close to me. Just for a little while. I promise I won’t fall asleep.

  By the time Synne sat up again, the coffee was lukewarm. She added another spoonful of sugar, but it didn’t help.

  – I’ve written today.

  Erika turned over on her side and looked at her. – Have you? But that’s fantastic.

  – No need to get carried away.

  – Let me see.

  Synne hesitated. It was new. The first tentative step. A wrong word from Erika, or even a look, could upend it. And then more days and nights with no hope of getting started again. And yet she woke the machine, put it in Erika’s lap, opened the document in which Karsten had made his appearance. The other texts, especially the one about the little lies, she would never show to anyone, or at least not to Erika.

  She turned away and leaned her forehead against the window. Tried not to think about Erika sitting there reading. Tried not to listen out for any changes in her breathing, or some other sort of sound emerging from her throat, or bodily movements that might express impatience or, even more intolerable to contemplate, enthusiasm. Erika was exact, and she was merciless. She had helped her with the poetry collection. Made it better. But what Synne wanted above all right now was a more naïve reader. Someone who didn’t have that sharpness, someone who was easy to seduce.

  Erika put the computer down on the floor. Synne waited, didn’t dare turn round. Didn’t Erika understand how she felt? Didn’t she realise what was hanging in the balance through these waiting seconds? Whether the text was good or bad, or somewhere in between, which was probably what it was, surely Erika ought to know that a tiny word could be enough to transport her to heaven, or to the darkest pits. So then she must be tormenting her with silence deliberately.

  Finally Erika got up. Synne stared out at the grey and yellow slope between the blocks. The magpie of course was long gone. Not a sparrow in sight. Only that dirty lawn with the scattered patches of late winter snow that should have been rained away long ago.

  Erika put her arms around her from behind. If she was doing this as a way of offering comfort, then it was the most unbearably clumsy attempt Synne had ever experienced. She pulled herself away.

  – Don’t cling to me. Say something. Is it that bloody difficult to speak?

  Her eyes filled with tears. Not because this scrap of writing was so important. It had taken her five minutes to wring it out of herself, certainly no more than ten. She should have deleted it, but had let herself be tricked into showing it to Erika of all people, literary expert and assistant professor, writing her doctoral thesis on the subject of Beckett’s anti-novels. Erika, most cynical, brutal and cruel of all the billions of readers in the world.

  – You hate it, Synne announced. – You think it’s the most banal little-girl twaddle that any hard disk has ever been compelled to save.

  Erika burst out laughing, and Synne started laughing too. She cursed, but nothing could stop the laughter. It felt okay to laugh; that was the only thing her text really deserved.

  – Don’t ask me to pass judgement on that thing, said Erika, and it felt like another kick in the stomach.

  – That thing? Is that how you refer to my work? As though it doesn’t even deserve a proper name.

  – Sorry, I didn’t mean it like that.

  – You hate it, Synne hissed. – You hate everything I write. You’ve never been able to endure having to read it.

  Erika shook her head. – Synne, she sang, perhaps trying to sound cheerful.

  – I’ll tell you one thing I think, Synne interrupted. – You don’t like the fact that I write at all. It makes you jealous.

  Finally the smile disappeared, and she knew she must have touched a nerve. Not that she had been aiming. Throwing everything out, tossing it in all directions, sooner or later she had to hit something.

  Erika wandered over and sat down on the bed again.

  – I understand it was too early for you to be showing it to anyone, she said in a fairly controlled voice.

  – No it was not, Synne fumed. – It was too early to show it to you.

  Erika took a sip of her coffee, which must have been cold by now.

  – Does that mean you don’t want a response?

  Suddenly Synne felt cold. She wrapped her woollen jacket around herself.

  – I don’t want a beating. That’s all.

  – Synne … Erika’s voice had that maternal tone that had always been there in the early days. – Come and sit down, she said calmly and firmly, patting the blanket beside her a couple of times.

  Synne did as she was told.

  – If I really was going to say anything about good or bad, then I would praise rather than be negative.

  – Because you feel sorry for me!

  – There, there. Erika stroked her hair. – I understand why you’re defending yourself, she said comfortingly. – It means there’s something at stake here.

  Synne rested her cheek on Erika’s neck. – Everything is at stake.

  – Well, fine, if you want to express it in such an operatic way. Let’s not talk about turning points and ways forward and all that kind of thing. But it’s obvious that what we were talking about last night has had some effect on you.

  – Oh really.

  – You’ve got so hung up on all this Knausgård stuff, trying to imitate his style – no, don’t interrupt, I know what you’re going to say – but the only thing really worth writing about in your write-your-life project is the one thing you spend your whole time avoiding.

  – Oh really.

  Erika continued to stroke her hair, and Synne didn’t want her to stop.

  – When you were talking about your brother last night …

  – I’d been drinking.

  – It’s okay, I’m glad you told me about it.

  – It’s coming up for Easter. I always get like that at Easter.

  – Stop apologising. What I said to you last night is exactly what you’ve done.

  – Oh really.

  – Find out where it hurts the most. When your brother appears in your writing, something happens. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Right then, I was so moved I could hardly breathe. Understand? That’s where you have to go.<
br />
  – Oh really, Synne mumbled and let her lips brush across Erika’s neck. She couldn’t remember the last time she had felt such joy.

  Synne rang the bell. She’d started doing that one day, instead of going straight in and calling out hello. It was weeks now since she’d visited her father, maybe more than a month. There had been several postponements. Not that he would remind her of how long it had been, but she knew that it was a disappointment to him.

  The front door opened. Her father stood there, glasses in hand. He had grown older these last few weeks, it struck her; his cheeks had started to sag. His hair was uncombed but didn’t look dirty.

  – Hi, Synne, he said, spreading his arms a little, a signal that she could give him a hug if she wanted to. She leaned over and pressed her cheek against his, held it there for a few seconds. He had shaved, and smelled of his usual aftershave. It was a relief to her, the smell recalling family holidays, on their way to the cabin, the trees flashing by.

  She kicked off her boots. Was about to say something about why she hadn’t come before, but didn’t.

  – Are you hungry? she asked instead.

  In the end she made a plate of bread and butter for them both, as she had often done in the evenings, before she moved out. He didn’t comment on it. Neither the fact that she was rummaging in a fridge that was no longer hers, nor that she sniffed the cheese to make sure it was okay, nor that she assumed the role of hostess and made him a guest in his own house.

  Once they had eaten she said: – I’d like to see Karsten’s room.

  He peered at her over his glasses. His gaze sharpened, as though he had been pulled up out of his own train of thought.

  – Karsten’s? Why?

  She had always told him what she did, and he had never expressed any displeasure at her doing something different from what he would have recommended. Studying literature was fair enough, even though he couldn’t understand what use it would be. Publishing poems was fine too. He was visibly pleased when she handed him a copy of her first book, the one she had received herself from the publisher. He started leafing through it at once, hectically self-conscious. After that he had read each poem thoroughly several times, apologising for only having understood the occasional fragment. – They are only fragments, she had exclaimed.