He dropped the bonnet. There was nothing more he could do. But the car had to make it all the way into Oslo and back again, sixty kilometres in, sixty kilometres out, that was the problem, and this time he was on his own. For she couldn’t take the train, stand there on the platform.
He tapped gently on the door. Why am I doing this, he thought, and the door swung open at once, so she must have been waiting right next to it. Tommy was in bed, asleep. The boy. All the times he had sneaked up to Jonsen’s with his backside on fire and sat on the soft sofa by the radio, and as time went by, in front of the TV.
He saw her face in the doorway. A face looks different in real life from the face you see when you’re alone in bed trying to call it forth in your mind’s eye. In real life the lines are clearer around the corners of the mouth, something right there which can change everything, something in the eyes that’s not there in the dark, the mouth that can open without words and close again, anything can happen, wild dreams, like panic. And he thought, that is why. And he could feel it in his stomach. What will it gain me, he thought, if she leaves tonight.
‘I don’t know how we will make it,’ he said, ‘the snow is so high I don’t think I can get the car out.’ He saw her suitcase on the floor behind her. It wasn’t very big. Is that all that is hers, he thought.
‘Is that all you’re taking,’ he said. ‘Nothing more, nothing personal.’
‘No,’ she said, ‘Nothing that’s personal,’ and then she said: ‘We just have to try.’
‘But it’s impossible to get out. It’s true what I’m saying.’
‘Then I’ll lose my life,’ she said.
He turned it over in his mind, how far was it to the main road, six hundred metres, seven hundred. Perhaps it would be OK if he could make the car pick up speed, but where on the road was it supposed to pick up speed, he needed at least fifty metres to accelerate, not a metre less, and it would take him the rest of the night to clear a run long enough, and anyway it was hopeless, for even the main road would probably not have been ploughed, if they made it that far. He felt despair now, and irritation creeping in, for what else could they do, if they got stuck in the snow and couldn’t turn the car round or reverse it home, than to walk back in full view, and then everything would be revealed.
‘You won’t lose your life,’ he said. ‘But we don’t have a chance now, not tonight,’ he said, and she didn’t answer.
‘But you can’t stand here,’ he said, ‘not with that suitcase,’ and it started snowing again, he raised his head, and the wind picked up, and he thought, I’ll take her with me, and then the new snow can cover our tracks, if it keeps falling, and it will. It’s that kind of sky. Let it come down.
Soon it would be Christmas. In some windows the electric candlesticks were lit, it was the new fashion. He leaned over the threshold and got hold of the handle of her suitcase with two fingers, careful not to place a foot on the floor inside, which he didn’t want at any cost, not there, not him, and he pulled the case over and lifted it through the door, and she stood there ready with her boots on and her warm gloves and with the headscarf over her hair, she looked older than she was. She wasn’t much more than thirty, and neither was he, and now she looked like a wife, which, of course, was what she was, but what he couldn’t stop thinking about, not one, single day, was the corners of her mouth, the skin behind her ears, her naked palms, her naked body, that came to him as such a wonder, so suddenly one evening when they were sitting in his kitchen till late in the night, and soberly she had told him of her life up to that day, and captivated by her voice he was locked to his chair, his elbows on the table and between them the full glass of brandy he never raised, and it was cool and not warm, as perhaps you might think, and he didn’t know then, if it was a good thing, a fine thing, that her body was cool, if that was how it was meant to be. It had been so unexpected, beyond everything else in his life, but love it was not. And tonight he didn’t think of her in that way at all, for she was scarcely the same woman. This woman was afraid, the naked one was not.
He went ahead of her to his house. ‘Stay behind me,’ he said. ‘Walk in my footsteps so they can’t tell them apart, it’s important,’ and she did as he told her, and it must have looked strange, and what he did then was pray. He said to the Lord: Let no one be without sleep tonight, let no one stand up from their beds in this hour to sit on a chair by the window and gaze out into the blizzard with their head full of worries they cannot escape in their sleep and then catch sight of us here, this woman in my footsteps in the deep snow, in the mellow light from the snow that makes everything so clear no matter how dark it is, and it was past midnight now, and if anyone did, if anyone could really see them, he would no longer be the same person to those who lived here, he would for ever be a different man to them and could no longer stay in this neighbourhood where he had lived for most of his life, but it was not a part of her plan. That he should go with her.
They entered the hall. He left the door open and put the suitcase down under the mirror, and he didn’t look at her, he went straight back out with a broom and swept the four steps he had dug free of snow only half an hour ago and took a shovel and shovelled his way down to the gate, and he was furious now, his body shaking beneath his jacket, and it took him only five minutes to clear the footpath, and then he went back up and put the shovel by the door under the overhang, stamped the snow off his boots and went in and closed the door behind him. She was still standing in the hall, in her grey coat, and had not moved an inch.
‘You there, get going,’ he said and impatiently he started to undo the big buttons at the front of her coat and was so rough in doing it that one came loose and was dangling from a thin thread, and she said:
‘What are you doing. Jonsen, stop it, I can unbutton my own coat, I don’t need your help with everything,’ and he felt desperate when she called him Jonsen, oh Christ, the distance there was in that name, as though he didn’t have a first name like any other person. But no one had called him anything else since he went to school, but then they all called one another by their surnames, just for fun, like precocious nicknames, it was what they were doing then, carrying their bags under the left arm and saluting with two fingers to the cap, as the grown-ups did, but gradually their names went back to Vidar and Olaf and Øivind or any other name they were christened with. Only his surname stayed on, Jonsen persisted in the years afterwards, and he didn’t understand why, but his solid first name slowly melted into air, into thin air, and at times it was as though he himself couldn’t remember what he was called other than Jonsen, and now he was Jonsen for her too, even though he called her Tya, and he liked her name so much, but he stopped using it, and he didn’t call her anything any more, the woman who had lain beside him in his bed, her body outstretched and cool, and him with his tentative warmth, but she had been a stranger to the district, she had come here in Berggren’s car, pregnant with Tommy, and for all he knew she might never have heard his first name.
‘That’s fine,’ he said. ‘Do it yourself, but hurry up and take that coat off,’ and he heard his words and the tone he used and knew she hadn’t deserved them, for it was he who had offered to help her.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Take the time you need and I’ll make a bed for you in the living room,’ and she said:
‘Maybe you can make make a bed for us both. That would be nice,’ she said, ‘wouldn’t it,’ and he did, with taut sheets and much effort he made a bed for them both, but she was only half there during the act, as it’s known, during the act she was only half there, she made love with him absent-mindedly, and once, right in the middle, when he was well into deeper waters and full flow, she said: