Kaja picked up the cup of tea Erland had given her. She looked at him, and he saw her realise that he was waiting for the end of the story.
“Sonia died. The father too. But the boy survived.”
Erland drew three vertical lines on his notepad. Struck through two of them.
“Did you feel guilty?” he asked.
“Obviously.” Her face looked surprised. Was that a trace of irritation in her voice?
“Why is it obvious, Kaja?”
“Because I killed her. I killed someone who didn’t have an ounce of malice in her.”
“Don’t you think you’re being a bit hard on yourself now? Like you say, you tried to warn her.”
“Don’t you get paid enough to think you have to listen carefully, Madsen?”
Erland noted the aggression in her voice, but also that there was no trace of it in the mild expression on her face.
“What do you think I didn’t hear, Kaja?”
“It doesn’t take so long to breathe in and shout ‘PROM-1’ that someone has time to turn away from you, jump over a fence and stand on one of those fuckers. Your voice doesn’t get drowned out by a boy lying half a football pitch away, Madsen.”
Silence settled on the office for a few moments.
“Have you spoken to anyone else about this?”
“No. Like I said, Sonia and I kept to ourselves. I told the others I had warned her about both types of mine. They didn’t think it odd, they knew how selfless Sonia was. During the memorial service in the camp, Anton told me he thought that Sonia’s desire to be accepted, to be loved, had led to her demise. I’ve thought about that since then, how dangerous it can be for us, this longing to be loved. I’m the only person who knows what really happened. And now you.” Kaja smiled. With small, pointed teeth. As if they were two teenagers sharing a secret, Erland thought.
“What consequences did Sonia’s death have for you?”
“I got Anton back.”
“You got Anton back. Was that all?”
“Yes.”
“Why do you think you got back together with someone who had betrayed you like that?”
“I wanted him close so I could see him suffer. See him mourn his loss, devoured by it the way I had been. I held on to him for a while, then I told him I didn’t love him anymore and left him.”
“You’d got your revenge?”
“Yes. And it had also dawned on me why I had actually wanted him in the first place.”
“And that was?”
“Because he was married and unavailable. And because he was tall and fair-haired. He reminded me of someone I used to love.”
Erland noted that this was evidently also important, but it was something they would have to come back to at a later stage of the therapy.
“Let’s get back to the trauma, Kaja. You said you felt guilty. Can I ask what might sound like the same question, even though it isn’t: Do you regret it?”
Kaja put one finger under her chin, as if to show him she was thinking about it.
“Yes,” she said. “But at the same time it gave me a strange sense of relief. I felt better.”
“You felt better after Sonia died?”
“I felt better after I’d killed Sonia.”
Erland Madsen made a note. Felt better after killing. “Can you describe what you mean by that?”
“Free. I felt free. Killing someone was like crossing some sort of border. You think there’s a fence, some sort of wall, but when you cross it you realise that it’s just a line someone’s drawn on a map. Sonia and I, we had both crossed a boundary. She was dead, and I was free. But first and foremost, I felt better because the man who had betrayed me was suffering.”
“You’re talking about Anton?”
“Yes. He was suffering, so I didn’t have to. Anton was my Jesus. My personal Jesus.”
“In what way?”
“I crucified him so he could take on my suffering, the way we did with Jesus. Because Jesus didn’t put himself on the cross, we hung him up there, that’s the whole point. We achieved salvation and eternal life by killing Jesus. God couldn’t do much, God didn’t sacrifice his son. If it’s true that God gave us free will, then we killed Jesus against God’s will. And the day we realise that, that we defied God’s will, that’s the day we set ourselves free, Madsen. And then everything can happen.”
Kaja Solness laughed, and Erland Madsen tried in vain to formulate a question. Instead he sat there looking at the peculiar glint in her eyes.
“My question is,” she said, “if it was so liberating last time, should I try it again? Should I crucify the real Jesus? Or am I just mad?”
Erland Madsen moistened his lips. “Who’s the real Jesus?”
“You didn’t answer my question. Have you got an answer for me, Doctor?”
“That depends what you’re really asking.”
Kaja smiled and let out a deep sigh. “Quite true,” she said, then looked at the watch on her slender wrist. “Looks like we’re out of time.”
After she had gone, Erland Madsen sat there looking at his notes. He wrote at the bottom of the page: NB! Dig deeper into this next time. What does “better after killing someone” mean?
Two days later Torill passed on a phone message she had received at the reception desk. A Kaja Solness had said they could cancel her next appointment, that she wouldn’t be coming back, and that she’d found a solution to her problem.
44
Alexandra Sturdza was sitting at one of the window tables in the empty canteen at the Rikshospital. In front of her lay a cup of black coffee and another long day at work. She had worked until midnight the previous day, slept for five hours, and needed all the stimulants she could get.
The sun was on its way up. This city was like the sort of woman who could be dazzlingly beautiful in the right light, only to look so ordinary a moment later that she becomes utterly unremarkable, even ugly. But right now, at this early hour of the morning, before the average Norwegian got to work, Oslo was hers, like a secret lover she was sharing a stolen hour with. And it was a rendezvous with someone who was still unfamiliar and exciting.
The hills to the east lay in shadow, while those to the west were bathed in soft light. The buildings in the city centre down by the fjord were black silhouettes behind black silhouettes, like a cemetery at sunrise. Just a few glass buildings were lit up, like silver-coloured fish beneath the dark surface of the water. And the sea glinted between islands and skerries that would soon be green. How she longed for spring! They called March the first month of spring here, even if everyone knew it was still winter. Washed-out, cold, with isolated, sudden bursts of warm passion. April was at best a deceitful flirt. May was the first month you could rely on. May. Alexandra wanted a May. She knew that on the occasions when she had had a man like that, a warm, gentle man who gave her all she could ask for, even in suitable doses, she just became spoiled and demanding and ended up betraying him with June or, even worse, July, who was completely unreliable. How about a good, grown-up man like August next time, one with a bit of grey in his hair and a marriage and family behind him? Yes, she would have welcomed someone like that. So how come she had ended up falling in love with November? A gloomy, dark, rain-drenched man with prospects of getting even darker, who was either so quiet that you couldn’t even hear any birds, or felt like he was going to tear the roof off your house with his crazy, rumbling autumn gales. Sure, he rewarded you with sunny days of unexpected warmth that you valued all the more as a result, revealing a strangely beautiful, ruined, ravaged landscape where a few buildings were still standing. Solid and unshakeable, like the bedrock itself, which you knew would still be standing on the last day of the month, and where Alexandra — in the absence of anything better — had sought refuge from time to time. But something better would surely have to come along soon. She stretched and tried to yawn the tiredness out of her body. It must be spring soon. May.