She looked at him. Saw no sign of grief in his eyes, or regret. And there was no passion in what he was offering her either. It was a partnership. Start a firm, with themselves as joint owners, for the transporting of corpses.
She moved her gaze to the window. The wind swirled up a rain of dead leaves and then laid them down again, making a pattern.
Without saying anything more, she turned away from him, crossed the living room and found her own way out.
As I sit here in the living room looking out on the winter afternoon, I continue our conversation in my thoughts. How could you who knows everything about a child’s needs allow yourself to do something like that? you ask. And again I try to tell you about that spring thirteen years ago, before the trip to Makrigialos. I had patients, I had TV programmes, I had regular columns in newspapers and magazines. Everyone had a piece of me. And I had something for everyone. Then came that day in early April. When I let myself into the living room, Elsa, the woman I was married to, was sitting in that chair you have just vacated. She asked me to sit down on the sofa. Then she said: ‘I’m moving out, Tormod.’ I didn’t believe her. Ours was a good marriage. Our children were happy. We did things together, she and I, even still had a sex life after almost twenty years. ‘It’s not true,’ I said. But three days later, she was gone. I walked into a storm. It was everywhere, around me and inside me. I didn’t know if I could survive it. Then suddenly it was gone.
That was when things became difficult. Getting up in the morning. Washing, getting dressed. Not to speak of going to the shops. Or taking the kids to after-school activities. I had been tossed aside, washed up in another landscape. Complete stillness. Utterly dead. No trees, no colours, nothing but that huge black sun up there, sucking all the light into itself. All I heard was the sound of my own footsteps as I trod through the ashes. A friend and colleague, well intentioned, perceptive, came to talk to me, friendly and cautious at first but then tough and decisive. One day early that autumn, he tossed a few clothes into a suitcase and drove me out to Gardermoen in his car. He’d booked me on a holiday. He was actually supposed to come with me, but something happened at home, illness, and he had to cancel at the last moment.
You can’t make me believe the relationship between you and Viljam was reciprocal, you say, that you were equals.
We were, Liss. In the beginning. But Jo, as I still think of him, bonded with me. He clung to me as if it was a matter of life and death. He worshipped me. And wouldn’t let me be anything else for him but the god that he needed.
And Ylva, you ask, how could you fail to know who had killed her?
I saw no connection. I want you to believe me, Liss. A girl in Bergen named Ylva. A front-page picture in the newspapers. Maybe she resembled someone I’d seen at a holiday resort many years previously. Maybe not… Of course I would have seen the connection if I could have faced looking for it. Because we often talked about her. I had to build up a picture of her in his imagination. Teach him how to approach her. She was a symbol of womanhood. I guided his desire in that direction, towards her, towards a girl his own age. Not Ylva in a literal sense, but Ylva as an image.
Do you understand me, Liss? Tell me you understand me.
You aren’t here any more. All that remains in the room is the sound of your footsteps crossing the floor. The sound of the door closing. The sound of the last words you said to me: You killed Mailin.
Maybeyou know that whatever happens now is entirely up to you. Wander like a blind person. The unending drought. Or chance upon a few drops of water. A peace that passeth all understanding.
She reached Frognerseter Way and carried on down through the smell of cold exhaust. It started snowing again, but the wind had dropped by now. She passed the metro station, continued along the banks left by the snowplough. Her feet were still painful from the chilblains after being frozen at Morr Water. A steady stream of cars came towards her, splashing dirty snow over them.
She turned off when she reached the Riks Hospital and stamped her way along the road that twisted by Gaustad. The country’s first insane asylum, she knew that. Had stood there for more than a hundred and fifty years. Her father’s mother had been locked up in there for a few months before she died. Had she done it to herself? Had she twisted bed linen and clothes together into a rope and fastened it to the light fitting in the ceiling, looped it around her neck and kicked away the chair? No one talked about it; what happened had been deleted from history by silence. What was left of her? A few black-and-white photos of a beautiful woman, strange and distant.
On the path leading towards the lake at Sognsvann, the snow lay deep. Liss kept on walking. Heard the sound of her own footsteps. At one point she stopped and turned round, studied her tracks through the dense, driving snow. Soon they’ll be gone, she thought, and the thought latched on to another: He caught me just before I smashed to pieces. He threw me down, but never dropped me once.
By the time she reached the lake, she had made up her mind. She didn’t carry on up into the woods but took a right turn and headed across the car park. She stopped outside the entrance to the sports academy and sent a text message.
It took three minutes for Jomar Vindheim to come running down the steps.
– Sorry if I interrupted your lectures.
He stood there open mouthed, staring at her.
– Thought you ought to see the one-eyed troll after all, she said. – Because I’m sure you like going to freak shows and stuff like that.
He stepped closer. For the second time he laid a hand on her cheek. This time she didn’t take it away.
– There are two things I want to ask of you, Jomar.
– All right, he said.
– The first is that you take me home to your flat. Treat me the way you were going to that night we were supposed to be going out.
He stood there looking down into her good eye. Maybe he was searching for a code there, something that might explain what was happening.
– Liss… he said finally.
– I’ll tell you the other thing later, she interrupted. – My only condition is that you don’t talk about your grandfather. Not a single word.
He was thinly dressed, wearing only a T-shirt, but he put his arms around her as though she were the one who needed warming.
She stood naked by the living-room window on the ninth floor, trying to make things out through the driving snow. On a clear day I bet you can see a long way from here, she thought. The whole city and out over the fjord, down to Drøbak, maybe further…
Mailin hadn’t said anything to their mother about those nights at the house in Lørenskog. She’d wanted to protect her. Now there’s no one who knows what happened, thought Liss. No one but the person who went away and never came back. And me, who cannot bring it to the surface… That was where she must live from now on, in the place between what she could not remember, and what she would never be able to forget.
She heard Jomar getting out of the bed. He came into the room, crossing the floor. Hands around her from behind. They smelled of something that reminded her of sap, not too sweet, not too strong. It would be possible to learn to like these hands.
– The nurse at the hospital said you should be my girlfriend.
The way children talked to each other. She had to laugh at him.
– She probably meant for a while, she answered.
He pulled away and looked at her through the grey light.
– There are a lot of things I don’t understand about you, Liss. But it doesn’t matter, because I’ve got a long time to find out about them.
She looked down. – There were two things I was going to ask of you, she said. – Now I’ll tell you what the second one is.