Dated 19 August last year:
I know you saw me today. You walked right past the car. You saw me and then pretended you hadn’t seen me and crossed over the road with your friend. You took the Metro down to the Storting and then walked to Alexis’s. You spent an hour there and then you went home. There was a light on in your window until ten past eleven. Then it was dark. You were sleeping. Or else lying there thinking. I’ve been off work all this week. There hasn’t been a single second of the day when I haven’t known where you are or what you’re doing.
On 9 June:
If you can just manage to forget what happened, this is my plan. I’ll sell the cabin and borrow from the bank and buy a place in town. Big enough for two. Please forget what happened. I made a mistake and I’ve really learned my lesson.
He flipped back through the bundle of letters. Flipping his way back through a relationship he didn’t want to know about. He knew that what he was reading could tell him what had happened to her. Suddenly it dawned on him that it might also tell him something about where she was. He recalled what she had said about the cabin she’d been in. Had to be the same one that was mentioned in the letters. A cellar that had been used during the war. The former owner of it had been a border guide, she’d told him. The grandfather of someone she knew.
As he read back through the letters, more and more of them were written in an untidy scrawl. The tone of them changed too, the threats disappearing as he reached a time before what must have been the break-up. He opened an envelope stamped 16 July, five years ago:
I’m still sitting here on the steps and looking down at the path. Then I look at the finger with the ring I got from you. Engaged. Imagine if you’d got the weekend off and decided to come out here again. Surprise! You like to surprise me. What you wanted to do the night before you had to leave, I never would have believed it…
Axel skimmed ahead.
I knew you’d like it out here in the forest. Best cabin in all Hedmark. We can stay up here for months and years with no one ever disturbing us. Maybe we should move out here, settle down, go hunting, live off the forest. The way my father did. Leave the rest of the world behind.
There was a photo with the letter. Axel held it under the light from the desk lamp. It was the same picture that had been in the envelope in her kitchen, only this one wasn’t cut in half. She was standing in front of the creosoted cabin. The person with his arm around her looked to be twenty or thirty centimetres taller than her. From his features it was clear he had Down’s syndrome. On the ground in front of them was the shadow of a head and a hand. Thrown by whoever was taking the picture. On the back of the photo was written: Oswald doesn’t have the words to say so, but he likes you too.
Axel tore the letter out of the envelope that was date-stamped four weeks before the last one he had read.
Pottering about here and counting the days until you come. Looking forward to showing you the real me. I know of a great place to swim that nobody else knows about. A tarn not too far away. Then we can head on towards the border, and I’ll show you a bear’s hide. Maybe the mummy bear herself will be there. Saw the tracks of a female and two cubs not long ago. You say the bear is my inner animal. Yours too, if you ask me. Have fixed the car and will pick you up at the station as planned. But that old bus isn’t reliable. If it breaks down on the timber road, you’ll have to take the bus to Åmoen. The cabin is nearly ten kilometres further north and deep in the forest, so don’t try getting there by yourself. Ask one of the guys at the Esso station to drive you up here. I worked there every school holiday when I was a kid. Ask for Roger Åheim and say hello from me.
He read through the last lines again. She’s in that cabin, he thought with a jolt. And in the same instant: I know how I can find it.
It was just after midnight. After the phone had rung for the seventh time, he began to doubt whether anyone would answer. Another ten rings and he was about to give up. Then he heard a grunt at the other end.
– Tom? It’s Dad.
No answer, but he could hear his son’s breathing. Imagined him standing there in the dark in his boxers and T-shirt, trying to figure out what was going on.
– Dad, he muttered. – Christ…
His hair would be dangling down over his eyes as he stood there, thin and pale, shivering with cold. When was the last time Axel had felt the need to put his arms around his son? Hold him close, hold him tight so that he wouldn’t disappear.
– What is it?
The voice was distant; the boy had regained his composure.
– Tom, you’ve got a thousand questions you want to ask me. I’ll give you answers to all of them in just a little while. All the answers I can. But right now I need you to help me with something very urgent. Can you do that?
A grunt from the other end.
– You know Grandad’s old maps, the ones up in the loft? We used to look at them together, you and me and Daniel.
– That stuff from the war?
– That’s exactly what I’m talking about. I want you to go up to the loft and get them.
– You mean now?
– I mean now.
– What d’you want them for?
As calmly as he could, Axel said: – A woman has gone missing. I have to find her. Before it’s too late.
– Are you and Mum going to get divorced?
– I need you to do as I ask, Axel said, pulling hard at his cheek. – Go up to the cupboard behind the suitcases and the boxes with the winter gear. Take your phone with you. Don’t wake anyone.
He heard Tom opening the door of his room. Moving through the house. Axel imagined himself walking along beside him. The smells from the kitchen, the bathroom and toilet, of unwashed clothes, soap, perfume, bread, leftover food. The smell of the house itself, layered in the walls, contained his whole history within it. And the smells of the sleeping, those who meant more to him than anything in the world. If the door was slightly ajar, he could stop outside, listen out for Bie’s breathing in the dark.
He heard Tom open the door to the loft and pulled himself together. Thought about what he was looking for. The box on the second shelf down of the cupboard.
– Have you found them, Tom?
– Yes.
– I want you to fax them to me. But you have to be quiet, don’t wake your mother.
– Don’t think these’ll go in the fax.
– You’ll have to cut them up and send them in smaller sections.
– You want me to ruin them?
– We can tape them together if we need them later.
He explained to Tom what to do. Shortly afterwards, the fax machine in the photocopying room next to the office whirred into life. Once he had satisfied himself the maps were legible, he asked:
– How is Marlen?
Tom didn’t know. – She’s started sleeping with Mum. Why have I never met Brede when he’s my uncle?
Axel glanced at his watch. It was 12.55.
– He refuses to see me.
– Mum says he’s an idiot.
– She’s never met him either. Brede was treated badly. He was angry because I had all the advantages.
Tom said: – If you’re Daniel, then I’m Brede.
Axel felt his heart sink.
– That’s not true, Tom. I love you very much indeed.
– You’re in all the newspapers and on TV. Everyone I meet talks about you the moment my back is turned. Calling you a bloody killer.
– They’re wrong. He buried his face in his hands, rubbed hard up and down.
– Are you going to be moving out?
– I don’t know, Tom. All I know is that this will soon be over.
He spread the pages out across the desk. The maps were from the 1940s. Routes taken by refugees over the border into Sweden drawn by the old Resistance hero Torstein Glenne for his sons. Circles around the places where there were cabins that could be used as hideouts. Which Axel, many years later, had pointed out to his own sons, using the same words about the price of freedom as his father had.