She pulled on trousers and a top, padded out into the corridor. Heard Viljam busy down below, and once she was finished on the loo went downstairs to join him. He was sitting at the kitchen table reading Aftenposten with a cup of coffee. Again the thought that he grieved in the same way she did, something silent, something he wanted to be alone with. She felt an urge to stroke his hair. It won’t pass, Viljam. Just keep going anyway.
– Have you thought of how similar your name is to hers?
He looked up and gave her a quick smile. – Mailin noticed it, it hadn’t occurred to me. It’s almost hers backwards
Mailin must have noticed the other thing too, the similarity to their father. Not so much the individual features. Something in the eyes. A way of moving the hands. The timbre of the voice. The sorts of things Liss believed she remembered.
He folded up the newspaper and put it on the windowsill. – How long are you going to stay in Norway?
She didn’t know if she’d be going back to Amsterdam. Mailin had called her brave. Maybe it was the thought of Mailin being somewhere in the world that made her brave.
– I’ll see after the funeral. She poured herself a mug of coffee. The mug was white with a large red M on it. – My mother still hasn’t heard whether she can be cremated. That’s what Mailin would have wanted. The police haven’t decided yet whether they’ll allow us to.
Mailin’s dead body lying in the ground? Sudden thought: she mustn’t get cold. We must wrap her in something warm. Blankets, or a duvet.
– Have you been in touch with any of your friends here? Viljam asked, obviously wanting to talk about something else.
– I had one night out. Just before Christmas.
She told him about the evening out with Catrine. The party she went to. Mentioned the footballer, although not the fact that she’d seen him again.
– What did you say his name was?
She had avoided using his name. He didn’t belong in a conversation between them. She turned the coffee mug round and round. – Jomar something or other.
– Plays for Lyn? Jomar Vindheim?
– Something like that, she said, exaggerating her tone of indifference. – Have you met him?
– No, but anybody with the slightest interest in football knows his name. He’s played for the national team. Even Mailin knew who he was.
– Mailin? She never had a clue about football.
Viljam shrugged. – There was a picture of him on the front page of the sports section. ‘Isn’t that Jomar Vindheim?’ she said. Apparently she’d bumped into him somewhere or other.
To Liss it didn’t add up. Twice she’d met Jomar. He hadn’t said a word about knowing Mailin.
Viljam got up suddenly, went out into the corridor. She heard him open a drawer in the chest. When he came back, he had a letter in his hand. Not for me,she prayed inwardly.
– Tage called in yesterday. Wanted to know how things were going. And deliver this.
He put it down in front of her. It had been sent to her mother’s address in Lørenskog. The envelope was creamy yellow, the paper thick, the handwriting in ink, elegant and neat. There were Dutch stamps on it, and it was postmarked Amsterdam. On the back, the sender’s name in printed capitals, A. K. El Hachem. She sat looking at it for some time, waiting for the reaction she knew would come. It took five seconds, maybe longer. In this brief interlude she had time to think, Zako’s surname, and damn you, Rikke before her body took over. She excused herself, managed to get up the stairs and into the bathroom. Stuck her finger down her throat, but her stomach was empty. She stood stooped over, spitting down into the curve of the porcelain as the water formed a whirlpool around the outlet.
In her room she stood by the window, the letter in her hand. The magpie on the roof outside was at it again. Throw it away without opening it, it chattered. That’d make things even worse, she thought. Lie awake every night wondering what was in it. Wait for someone in uniform to come and pull the duvet off her and drag her out to a waiting car. A man wearing a grey overcoat sitting in the back seat. Wouters, that’s his name, and she will never be able to forget it.
The writing paper was the same creamy yellow as the envelope, the heading a curling monogram formed with the initials AKH. Dear Miss Liss Bjerke. Zako had occasionally called her Miss Lizzie, she remembered, usually when he was about to say something sarcastic. A. K. El Hachem was not sarcastic. He was Zako’s father. He hoped that it wasn’t inconvenient of him to approach her in this way. He had heard that she had recently lost her sister, and expressed his deepest sympathies. He realised that this was the reason she had been unable to attend Zako’s funeral. She skimmed through these and several other extended formal courtesies, as convoluted as the monogram. She searched for a reason why she should now be standing here with this letter in her hand. Had to read more closely to find out. A few words about losing those closest to one, as had happened to them both. Zako was A. K. El Hachem’s only son – Liss had always thought he had a younger brother; they had always been close, even if in recent years Zako had started leading a life his father could not approve of. Until the unthinkable happened, he had, however, entertained hopes that this son of his would return to the course laid out for him, become a partner in his father’s firm, and later take over and carry on the hard work of four generations before him. For none among those who knew him could have any doubt that Zako was a young man of remarkable talents.
And now the father approached his reason for writing the letter. In conversations with his son over the past year, it had become apparent that something unusual had happened in his life. It concerned a woman. Zako had never had any trouble attracting women, it was a curse as well as a gift, but this young woman was, he had revealed to his father, not just one of many, but the only one. And the father had seen the change in his son. He had grown less hot headed, more thoughtful, more interested in planning for a secure future, more concerned for the well-being of his parents and sisters; in a word, the maturing of a self-centred young man that only a woman could effect, the thing his father had been waiting for with growing impatience as time went by, although never quite losing his faith that it would happen. There could be no doubt that this woman, that is, Miss Bjerke, had been sent to his son from a better world; the scales had fallen from Zako’s eyes, and his life was about to take a turn in the direction his father, in the depth of his heart, had always longed to see it take.
A. K. El Hachem was writing to her to express his deepest gratitude that his son had known this time together with her, this reminder that life was good when one was open to what was good. In the darkest hours following his son’s death, the knowledge that he had experienced something like this was an enormous comfort to him as a father, and to the whole of the family, and they had talked a lot about this Norwegian woman who had brought new light into their son’s life. In conclusion, A. K. El Hachem expressed his deepest hope that at some point he would have the opportunity to meet her, whether in Nimes, where the family lived for most of the year, in Amsterdam, or in her own country up there in the far north.
25
THIS TIME IT was Berger himself who opened the door when Liss arrived. He took her jacket and hung it up for her.
– Did you give your butler the evening off? she said casually, and Berger confirmed that he had indeed done so.
– A couple of times a year he has a weekend off. He has his aged mother to visit, that kind of thing.
In the living room, music was coming from speakers she couldn’t see. Indian drumming, it sounded like, with a kind of accordion and a man with a light, hoarse voice forcing curious sounds from his throat at a ferocious pace, up and down strange musical scales.