The elk jumps and turns at the same moment. The great body hauls itself forward, but it does not get anywhere, for something holds it back, and it falls on its side in the snow. I look down at my hands, what has happened to them, what have they done; I didn’t mean any harm, didn’t mean any harm, I rush from my shelter and out into the clearing, yelling:
“I meant no harm,” and then the elk kicks the empty air, whipping slush from its hooves in lofty curves and gets up in a way I will never forget, like a fall in a film in reverse, coming up and up in a snowy cascade, trembling and struggling to be standing again before trotting on across the clearing, into the shadows and is gone.
I run on and pass the big hollow in the snow where the elk fell and I feel sick. But I control myself and just run on as if running is the only thing in the world I want to do, and I run across the clearing and in among the trees and do not stop until I get to a slope, and there I put on new speed and sail over the edge and slide on my slippery ski boots all the way down, and when I stop at the bottom I am standing in the middle of the main ski track. The lamps are out, so it must be daytime still.
But where is everyone? I look up to the nearest bend. All is quiet that way and downhill it is quiet, nothing but my own breath and the misty air, and I do not know which way leads where. I close my eyes and stand completely still and imagine I can lift myself out of this forest, float away and be suddenly grown up, and look back at this with time in between, or not look back and forget it all. And then the silence suddenly whirls away. There is the noise of dogs and voices, two teams come down the track from the hill above, the men shouting strange words, and the dogs reply. I place myself in the middle of the track with my arms out to both sides. They brake and the men shout again and then they come to a stop. I look at them and they look at me and the dogs are panting. The nearest one has eyes that are completely yellow, and a smell comes from the dogs’ bodies that has nothing to do with my life, and I like that.
The tallest man walks round the sledge, stops in front of me and says: “Are you standing here waiting for a bus?” He smiles, but there is nothing I can say to that. I keep my arms stretched out.
“Where are your skis?” he asks.
I point into the forest.
“Has something happened?”
“I shot an elk,” I say. The man starts to laugh, then he turns to his companion and says:
“Did you hear that? He’s shot an elk. Not bad, not bad at all.” He looks at me again.
“What with, if I may ask?”
I show him my hands, and my face and neck start to tingle, and then my neck and then my fingertips.
“That’s not what I meant to say. It’s my father.”
“You have shot your father?”
I look at him. “I don’t know,” I say, and then I hear a rattling sound. It fills my head. It hurts. The man in front of me thrusts his hand into his anorak pocket and pulls out a chocolate bar, unwraps it and pushes it between my teeth. I bite it right off. And the odd thing is I don’t remember anything after that. Not a thing.
Somebody is knocking at the windscreen of my car. I roll the window down. He puts a hand on the roof and almost leans inside.
“You can’t stay here,” he says. “Didn’t you see the sign?”
He is wearing overalls. There is something familiar about the way he leans against the car. He must be a caretaker. There is a notice on the garage walclass="underline" No Parking. Vehicles left here will be toed away at owner’s cost. I had not seen it.
“There is a ‘w’ in ‘towed’,” I say.
“What?”
“There’s a ‘w’ in ‘towed’. It is spelled ‘t-o-w’. Can I sit in the car while they tow it?” I ask. He doesn’t answer that, so I ask: “Where will I be towed to, then?”
“Ullevål. It will cost you. It doesn’t pay to get lost.”
“I know,” I say, “I have heard that one before. Thanks for the offer, but that would be the wrong direction.” I start the car, saying: “And thanks for the chat. I feel much better now.”
I roll the window up, he takes his hand off the roof and I back out and turn the car, drive past the garages and out on to the road back to the roundabout by the E6. He stays in the mirror in his overalls, hands on hips and head to one side, and I look around and see housing blocks everywhere. The fog has lifted, it is Furuset. I am in Furuset. Then I can take the Gamle Strømsvei across Lørenskog and on home.
I drive along Strømsvei with a wall of rock on the right and the motorway straight down on the left and over a bridge to the other side past the big Publishers’ Centre warehouse where I am sure I haven’t got a book left, every unsold copy shredded, and on to Karihaugen where a woman was murdered twenty years ago, driven away and buried under the snow in Nittedal. Her name was Berit and her husband was in the editorial office of Dagbladet, weeping because he missed her so and wanted to help Dagbladet with their daily reports on the investigation, and then of course he was the one who had done it. “I am Berit. I have gone away,” the poet Jan Erik Vold chanted on his record of that year with Jan Garbarek on saxophone, and Dag Solstad wrote a novel a few years later. I still remember her picture in the paper. It was the first tabloid murder in Norway, and I think of it every time I drive past.
I stop at the optician’s in Lørenskog where I am pretty certain I have phoned and ordered new glasses. Tentatively, with an innocent smile, I ask if I can collect them now, in case I did call, playing the distrait professor who forgets most things in everyday life and everybody knows he cannot be any different. The lady behind the counter laughs and joins in the joke and pulls out the drawer with completed orders in little brown bags and leafs through them, and there they are. I throw out my arms and laugh too, for after all it was just a joke, and of course I did remember. But it will cost you when you lose things. Maybe more than I have got. I swallow and use my Visa card and hope for the best. I need those glasses. I want to work, and I can’t do that without them.
“Approved” comes up on the screen after a pause. I get a receipt I can use against tax and push the case with my new glasses deep down into my pocket. I leave and get into the car and drive to Skårer and out on to Gamleveien, over the open country and up past the church and the school on the hill and on past farmland towards the ridge until I turn off the road up the bend to the hospital. The helicopter is on its pad with its insect wings at rest. It seems a long time since last I was here, but it is less than twenty-four hours.
It is daylight now. I thought it was easier last night. And then I think about that night and the cocoa I had that tasted so mysteriously good and of the time when my brother and I came home from Denmark six years ago in a borrowed van we had far from emptied, and it was still a spring of some kind, the longest ever. He went off to his life, and I went off to mine, and then silence fell. I do not know what happened. I do not know what didn’t happen. We had a mission. We had to empty the flat we had grown up in and sell to the highest bidder as quickly as possible. It would actually take us a year to finish that job, but we did not know that then. He would call me early to say he was on the way from his home at Fetsund and coming round, for I had no car then, and after twenty minutes he bowled up in front of the block and we drove down to Oslo and the suburb of Veitvet. We stayed there for an hour or less, picked things up and put them down again, went down to the basement to fetch tools, filled a cardboard box or maybe two and sat on the sofa going through old papers or old photographs of the cottage at Bunnefjorden from the time my father built it almost single-handedly, looking like Johnny Weissmuller or a sculpture from ancient Greece. Like the guy with the discus. And then we gave up and locked the door and stood by the hedge in front of the terraced house talking with a neighbour we had always known, and he wondered how we were getting on. We had no idea how we were getting on. We did not fly any more, we did not float any more. We were on our way to the bottom, but we did not see that. And then we went home. We used to stop at Gjeller Hill, on the way out of Oslo, at Morten’s Inn, and we had dinner there and glanced sideways at each other and looked out of the window and did not utter one sensible word. It was like walking through syrup. On the way out to the car my brother always went ahead of me, and he could look so heavy and exhausted, and he stared at the ground as if each thought was a torture, and it made me so annoyed it almost frightened me.