Fallen Angels

by Gunnar Staalesen

  I regarded her with some scepticism. ‘In here?’

  She nodded.

  ‘So she didn’t often invite people to a banquet.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you think this is … better?’

  ‘For the moment, yes. What was it you wanted, Varg?’

  ‘Don’t you want to sit down?’

  She gave a weak nod. Then she came in, closed the door after her, pointed to the sofa bed and said: ‘You sit there then.’

  I sat down. She pulled over the chair from the desk, keeping her back to the suitcases by the wall, and sat down. That meant we were sitting at two different levels: me with my knees uncomfortably high, her so close and in a position that if I fell forward my head would have ended up in her lap.

  A scent of pale roses wafted over to me; it was a perfume that suited her. As a reflection of the fragrance, a light blush reddened her cheeks. ‘What was it you wanted, Varg?’ she repeated.

  ‘Berge Brevik has just been to see me.’

  I observed her. She was instantly on her guard. ‘I see. And so what?’

  ‘He told me everything.’

  The blush deepened. ‘He couldn’t have done. He’s under oath.’

  ‘Not about what he does. I think he felt a need to explain himself.’

  She turned away, to the window. Her profile was distinctive: the strong bridge of her nose; the sullen lower lip. In the somewhat heavy features I immediately recognised her father.

  I cleared my throat and carried on: ‘Before he was killed, Johnny told me about, well, the same.’

  She whirled back, her eyes flashing. ‘Did he indeed?’ After a short silence, in a calmer voice, she added: ‘But you still haven’t told me what you want, Varg.’

  ‘Actually, I suppose I’m trying to find out why Johnny died the way he did.’

  ‘And what has that got to do with me?’

  ‘A wish to purge or atone for the past maybe.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I don’t know. Not yet. It’s just that too many people have died over the last two years.’

  ‘Arild and Harry, you mean? That might be chance.’

  ‘Do you think so?’

  She stared past me, her face turned to the window again. Then she shrugged her shoulders. ‘I … don’t know. As I told you, I didn’t really know them.’

  ‘Listen.’ I leaned forward. ‘Their break-up – the dissolution of the band – was in 1975.’ I paused and waited, as though hoping she would interrupt me and finally tell me what really happened that year, but she maintained her stony expression, her eyes still fixed on the black winter evening. ‘It wasn’t until 1985 that something started happening. Ten years afterwards. Why, Rebecca? What happened that year, in 1985.’

  She turned back to me. ‘In 1985…’

  ‘You and Berge Brevik, for example,’ I said, and quickly added: ‘Anything else?’

  She looked perplexed, as though reeling from sustaining one attack after another. ‘It’s all … chance, Varg. They all died in different ways, didn’t they?’

  I nodded. ‘They did, but they all received a letter first.’

  ‘A letter?’

  ‘Mhm. A kind of threatening letter. Or a warning. A letter containing pictures of angels. Stickers. The Harpers. Harpegjengen. Do you understand? And gradually the angels were crossed out. Now there’s only one left. Jakob’s.’

  Her mouth fell open. ‘But this … Do the police know about all of this, Varg?’

  ‘Of course. I only…’ I didn’t complete the sentence.

  ‘And so this began…?’

  I counted on my fingers. ‘In 1985 Harry Kløve died. In 1986 Arild Hjellestad, Johnny Solheim and Jan Petter Olsen died.’

  ‘But Jan Petter Olsen wasn’t in…’

  ‘No, but he was present on that October evening in 1975. Quite by chance. Don’t you think that’s odd, Rebecca? Isn’t it an absolutely incontrovertible clue?’

  ‘I…’

  ‘And in 1987 it might be Jakob’s turn. Unless…’

  ‘Unless what?’

  ‘Unless it all stops now.’

  ‘And if so what would that mean?’

  I stared at her intently. ‘Well, what would it mean, Rebecca?’

  She stroked her hand through her unruly, dark-blonde hair.

  ‘I don’t know, Varg. I’m completely at sea.’

  I nodded. ‘I’m not surprised.’

  ‘The funeral’s tomorrow,’ she said.

  ‘Whose funeral?’

  ‘Johnny’s. I saw the death notice.’

  Something clicked in my head. ‘The death not … Listen, Rebecca,’ I said with a sudden burst of enthusiasm. ‘You haven’t got the Bergens Tidende from last Monday and the previous Saturday, have you?’

  She eyed me, her head tilted. ‘There’s a pile in the kitchen. Is it important?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Last Monday and the Saturday before?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She left the room. Shortly afterwards she returned with the two newspapers.

  ‘Did you find them?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Thank you very much.’

  I took the Monday edition first and opened it at the personal page. Spot on. Jan Petter Olsen’s death notice: ‘…died suddenly on Friday…’

  I left the page open, took the other one and started to flick through.

  On one of the first news pages I found it: a small note in the right-hand column.

  ‘…fell from a six-storey-high scaffolding structure … all the health and safety precautions taken … a tragic accident, says the site manager…’

  First Saturday.

  Then Monday.

  And on Friday the funeral had taken place.

  ‘What is it, Varg?’

  ‘Nothing. Just … an idea.’ But I sat pondering it for quite a long while.

  In the meantime her attention was again caught by the winter darkness outside. I saw the reflection of her face in the pane, like another Rebecca.

  Her faces flickered past me. The little girl, a new arrival to the street, standing on the lowest step outside their house, a finger in her mouth and a doubtful gaze directed at the new life she had around her. The thirteen-year-old running at full speed down the street or arm in arm with girlfriends, giggling as they walked past us, while we played football pretending we hadn’t seen them … all of a sudden she was gone and lived in another part of town. The eighteen-year-old in the darkly lit room, with adult features now, an anxious sensuality, as though she was holding her breath on the threshold of life, I leaned forward slowly and met her in the middle of what was to become the first kiss of my life. Her face above the shelves when I happened to meet her in the foreign section of Beyer bookshop, in the basement. I had been to sea and we had written to each other. But the intervals between letters had become longer and when we met by chance one rainy September day her eyes wandered and we talked across the shelves about everything and nothing until she said: ‘Thank you for the letters, by the way. I suppose you must’ve heard I’m with Jakob now?’ And even later, a chance meeting, over a buzz of voices, in the Student Union one of the years I was pretending I would go on to take exams: her face, older and at once different, more serious; she had a new perspective on life, and all the things that had happened were a long, long way back in the past. And then … now.

  She suddenly had a strange look in her eyes and she turned to me, no longer studying me in the window. ‘You … look at me in such a way, Varg. What do you see?’

  I smiled wryly. ‘The girl you once were, Rebecca,’ I said in a reedy voice.

  ‘And who was that?’

  I made a grab for her hand and missed. Hesitantly she passed me a hand and I squeezed it as though it were a magic lamp that could transport us back in time, to the moments we had once shared.

  She watched me for a few seconds. Then she took a decision, gently disengaged her hand, stood up and said: ‘I thi
nk I’ll go and get a bottle of red wine. Is that OK?’

  I nodded and she went to the kitchen. For a few instants I was alone. In the window I could see my own high forehead, my fair hair, which I brushed back and to the side and – through it – the windows facing the yard in the house across the way. Like an illuminated chessboard, they broke into the contours of my face, reality breaking through memories.

  She returned with two glasses and a bottle. Set them down on the desk, moved the books and poured the wine. The bright light made the liquid sparkle, like red glass: stained glass drenched with blood.

  Then she passed me a glass, said ‘skål’ quietly and we drank. The taste of the wine made my palate constrict for a second and I could feel it lying like a very thin membrane over my teeth.

  ‘The girl I once was,’ she said pensively.

  I opened my mouth, but she raised a palm and carried on: ‘How long do you think we carry the past with us? We are not the same any longer of course. All the cells have changed. Medically, or physiologically, I’m quite a different Rebecca from the one you saw then. Every single battery has been changed, the lacquer has lost its shine, my hair…’ She held both sides of her head. ‘A completely new person. You don’t know me any longer.’

  ‘In which case you’re a bloody good copy,’ I said. ‘Your voice sounds exactly the same. Eyes. If I leaned over … and kissed you…’

  She raised her glass to her mouth to show it was busy. ‘Yes?’

  I gestured towards her. ‘You are the same Rebecca. With half a lifetime’s experiences, perhaps more … With a lot of new memories. But still you’re … mine.’

  ‘Yours?’

  ‘Yes? You meant something to me once, Rebecca.’

  She looked past me again and started another conversation: ‘Childhood’s like … its own country. A life we move around in, innocent and unknowing. Like … well, small angels. But then we grow up…’

  ‘Eat from the tree of knowledge…’

  ‘Yes, perhaps.’

  ‘And are driven out…’

  ‘Or in. For me becoming an adult was … falling in love with Jakob. Both happened at the same time.’

  I was silent.

  She continued: ‘I … it was so strange. I’d known you both from Nordnes. Then I met you both again after some years, at upper secondary. But still nothing was happening.’

  I grinned. ‘Do you remember … we discussed for hours who Cain’s wife was.’

  She looked at me, distracted. ‘Lilith, wasn’t it?’

  ‘So you’ve started reading apocryphal writings now as well? In the Bible it says only that Cain travelled to a country, Nod, which is east of Eden and took himself a wife there. But there’s nothing about who the wife was.’

  ‘Oh.’ She still wasn’t with me.

  ‘And if Adam and Eve were the first and only people on earth, then in Nod Cain couldn’t have had any wife, unless she was his runaway sister. That was of course a kind of explanation, yet not really acceptable in the circles you moved in. If a brother and sister had … Admittedly the deluge came afterwards, but nevertheless …’

  ‘I thought most people had accepted by now that these are myths. Fabulous myths, but still myths? Adam and Eve could hardly have been alone, people like them lived in Nod and other places, in Asia and Africa, and there were animals in America long before Adam and Eve were children.’

  ‘Yes, of course. But think of all the discussions we would’ve missed out on.’

  She changed tack. ‘Anyhow, afterwards I had a few other relationships, very superficial, and still nothing happened…’

  ‘Among others, me.’

  ‘Yes? Yes, right,’ she said with a new glint in her eyes, as though she had only just remembered. ‘But then I met Jakob again. This time it was serious. Like me, he’d grown up. In fact, he’d caught me up. As if I’d been just ahead of him. And after that there was no one else.’

  ‘Yes, I noticed.’

  ‘What?’ she exclaimed, as though she was thinking about something else. ‘When?’

  ‘I returned from sea that year. It must’ve been 1964. Don’t you remember? I met you in the basement of Beyer’s bookshop. It was the foreign section in those days. We talked.’

  She looked at me with a sudden sadness while shaking her head. ‘No, I don’t remember that,’ she said softly.

  ‘Exactly.’ I took a sip. My lips still wet from the wine, I said: ‘Love is a lonely business. Love is something no one else knows about.’

  ‘Who said that?’

  I looked at her and grinned. ‘A banned writer in a banned book … No, it just occurred to me.’

  We sat in our own silences with nothing in common, it seemed. At length I said: ‘What happened later – to you and Jakob?’

  She sat up and became matter-of-fact again. ‘I suppose what happens to most couples. The storm of passion abates, but if you’re lucky you can still have a few years with a gentle breeze in your sails and small lagoons of … excited reprises.’

  ‘However, you turned to others?’

  ‘Let’s not talk about this anymore. I did have good reason to, though. He’d done the same. He’d had someone else all the time. He didn’t think I knew, but I … Gro, wasn’t it? Isn’t that her name?’

  I made a show of shrugging my shoulders, as if to emphasise I knew nothing about this. ‘Then Johnny, of all people?’

  She studied me. ‘And why not? The whole point wasn’t who I did it with, but that I did it at all. Perhaps I knew that this would hurt Jakob more than anything else. Perhaps … it was just happenstance.’

  ‘And then Berge Brevik.’

  ‘Let’s not talk about this, I said!’

  Another silence. Our glasses were empty. She refilled them. A low, red sun rose over the landscape inside us and she went to get another bottle.

  On her return she said: ‘Everything is so, so long ago, Varg. I think about my parents. Of course I loved them, all of them: my mother, my father, my brothers. The milieu we grew up in, one foot in the chapel and the other … somewhere else … It was safe. I still know all the hymns off by heart. Verbatim. In the evenings, if I pass a parish hall and I hear the old tunes being played I can’t help saying the words, under my breath. But I never go in. That time’s over and they’ll never get me back.’

  ‘Really? Not even a man like Berge Brevik?’

  ‘No! The state church is even further away from me now. After all, I’ve grown up in a world where religion permeated everything, from when you woke up in the morning to when you went to bed at night. A life framed by prayers. Morning prayers and evening prayers, grace before and after all meals, prayers at gatherings and meetings. Not like in the state church where for most people prayers are said once a year, on Christmas Eve or at christenings and burials, weddings and confirmations. I’ve lived Christianity, Varg. All those years. But I grew out of it and that hurt my nearest and dearest more than anything else I’ve done. But not so much that we weren’t always welcome. Pappa never turned his back on us, but there was always something sad about him when he watched us … which can still cut me to the quick now that I know he no longer … exists.’

  I clung to the stem of my glass, overcome by a sudden dizziness. ‘I’ve always envied you your upbringing, Rebecca. Belonging to a community, regardless of which. I’ve seen the same in communist families, the ones that stuck together in the fifties despite the Cold War and all that, with never a doubt. I remember … I went to the parish hall a few times, to meetings. While you prayed I stood silent, with my head lowered and my hands together, but not folded, stealing a glance at you, all of you, praying with such openness and pleasure. The way the Norwegian Communist Party pioneers said they sang at summer camps. Belonging to a community is part of something bigger … which I’ve never experienced, Rebecca. Never.’

  She eyed me over the rim of her glass. ‘Really?’

  ‘No.’

  Now it was as if she had come closer, as if her face was gr
owing in front of me. I lurched forward, placed a hand around her neck and held her for a moment.

  Then I angled my head, leaned fully forward and kissed her. I kissed Rebecca.

  But she was too far away. I got off the sofa bed and pulled her to me, held her slender body in my arms, lifted her face to mine and kissed her again – once, twice, three times, again and again, until I realised who we were, where we were and what time it was.

  She didn’t respond to my kisses. Like a pillar of salt she stood in my arms and gazed backwards, to Sodom and Gomorrah.

  I let go of her, mumbled an apology and slumped back onto the sofa bed.

  She sat back down as if nothing had happened.

  We finished the second bottle as well. It felt as if all the sediment had sunk to the bottom of my legs and turned to lead. I was gripped by a mind-numbing paralysis. Sleep had already sent its scouts into my territory. In a voice that seemed to come from outside me I heard myself say: ‘Can I sleep here with you tonight, Rebecca?’

  She rested her head on my shoulder, but her voice came from far, far away as she said: ‘That’s fine. You can sleep next to me, but not with me.’

  Then I was in a toilet by the rear staircase, holding my head against a cistern covered in condensation and trying to draw a heart in the wet drops.

  When I returned to the tiny room, she had cleared away the bottles and glasses, folded down the sofa bed and pulled it out and put on a cotton nightdress she could have walked straight into an atomic reactor wearing and emerged unharmed.

  ‘You’d better sleep by the wall,’ she muttered from a place where I wasn’t. ‘I’m just … going out.’

  I wasn’t sure how much clothing to take off, but ended up in a T-shirt and underpants. The duvet I spread over me smelt faintly of childhood and I was already halfway back there when she returned.

  She crept warily under the duvet, as though her body were made of glass and she was afraid it would break.

  Before settling her head on the pillow she looked me straight in the eye and said: ‘And I mean it.’

  ‘I didn’t say a word,’ I mumbled.

  ‘Goodnight,’ she said.

  ‘Goodnight.’