Mads Madsen had only done a short course in drawing, design and colour at upper secondary school, but he was familiar with the two computer programs and fired off an application on spec.
In the very first days of 2005 he was invited to the offices of the E-Commerce Group, which was the new company name. The young man was offered the graphic designer job. But once his role was fully explained to him, he hesitated.
‘Is it legal?’
‘As long as we don’t forge official stamps or anything like that, it’s legal,’ replied the besuited managing director. ‘It’s been tested in court in the US.’
He called them decorative diplomas. ‘Your job is to check for spelling mistakes and evaluate the composition.’
On its website, E-Commerce Group covered itself legally by saying that the diplomas were intended as props in films and so on.
The truth was that they never asked customers, merely assumed the diplomas were for decorative purposes, or to replace documents that had been lost or destroyed. Anders had made a template for signatures, which Mads was to use. Anders called it a joke signature: it was not meant to imitate that of any actual university vice-chancellor and thus not illegal.
The salary offered was generous: Mads would get thirty thousand kroner a month. He proved to be quick and efficient.
One day, Anders asked him if he would rather work for cash. Mads could then avoid paying tax and keep more of the money for himself. The employee didn’t want to. So he carried on receiving monthly pay slips stating the amount of tax paid.
After a while Anders asked him to dress more smartly, in a shirt and tie. Mads refused, and carried on wearing his jumper and jeans.
Then Anders started taunting his employee about being a vegetarian and tried to get him to come out for a decent meal. Mads said he was trying to leave the smallest possible footprint on earth when he was gone.
Anders became obsessed with catching Mads out, with discovering something unethical about him. ‘If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s a hypocrite,’ he said.
Most of his acquaintances from the School of Commerce had now embarked on university and college courses. Magnus, one of his childhood friends, had become a firefighter, another was applying for jobs in the shipping industry. Lots of them were getting steady girlfriends, some even had partners they lived with, while others had strings of one-night stands. Anders did none of this, but he kept tabs on it all. One friend had been to bed with hundreds of women, he reckoned. He himself generally went home on his own. He didn’t appeal to the girls and they didn’t appeal to him. He complained to his friends that the Norwegian girls were too liberated and would never make good housewives. His friends laughed and told him to stop talking rubbish. Who wanted a housewife?
Then he did something his friends found rather strange. In December 2004 he ordered the contact details of ten women from a dating website in the Ukraine. In February the following year he ordered ten more. In all, he paid one hundred euros to the website, which featured the profiles of thousands of women from Eastern Europe.
When a female friend pointed out that acquiring a bride by mail order was not what boys of his age usually did, his other friends made light of it, saying he could be a bit odd sometimes.
The women he chose were blue-eyed and slim, with girlish figures. They were all younger than him, mostly teenagers.
He picked two photos from his most recent batch of downloads. One was dark-haired, the other blonde. He couldn’t make his mind up, so he asked his mother.
When he showed her the two pictures, she pointed to the fairer one.
She was Natascha from Belarus.
He wrote and received an immediate reply. They emailed back and forth for a couple of weeks. In March he left the office under supervision of Mads and took a trip to Minsk.
Natascha, who had grown up in a workers’ district on the edge of the Belarus capital, was fascinated by the good-looking, well-mannered, nicely dressed Norwegian and liked what he had to say about himself: his education, his company, his status. The only thing was, she found it a bit hard to understand everything he said. Natascha didn’t speak much English, and Anders used so many difficult words.
At home with her parents, he was served blini – Russian pancakes. He asked about radiation in the area and was careful not to consume too much locally produced food or contaminated water. He asked various people how many had died as a result of the radioactivity ‘to get an overview of the hazards’.
On his return home a bare week later, he spoke enthusiastically of Natascha. She was blonde and stylish, he said.
Later in the spring he bought her a ticket so she could come and visit him in Oslo. His mother thought she was pretty and was very taken with her. ‘It must be true love,’ she told a friend, ‘because it’s the first time Anders has ever invited a girl round to meet his mother.’ Anders had told his mother that Natascha lived in reduced circumstances in a very basic block of flats and was not used to anything else. Wenche thought that would be an advantage. ‘Because a demanding girl won’t do for Anders.’
She framed a picture she had taken of the couple when they all had dinner together and put it on the sideboard in her living room. ‘Isn’t it a bit too soon?’ a friend who lived in the same block of flats had asked.
‘Oh no, they’re so much in love, you’ll see,’ Wenche had replied.
But it turned out that Natascha was not as easy to cope with as Anders had hoped.
His friends were sceptical about the Belarussian girl. All she wanted to do was go shopping and hand the bill to Anders, they said. She had probably been expecting something more than his little bachelor flat, Anders thought. Perhaps she was disappointed that he wasn’t more extravagant in his spending habits.
For her part, she said the chemistry between them had gone and that he didn’t respect her.
She called him a male chauvinist.
He called her a gold-digger.
Natascha was put on a plane home, and later married a church organist in a small town in America.
The person who was saddest about the break-up was Wenche.
When she finally took down the photo, a long time after Natascha’s departure, she said Anders ‘hadn’t been able to afford to keep her’.
The fact that all Anders’s friends were finding nice girlfriends while he was still on his own was a sore point with her.
The Natascha affair came as a blow to Anders. His vision of the ideal woman had turned out to be nothing but a dream. He was the type who would rather comment on the appearance of women in pictures, like Pamela Anderson, than on real girls he met. Women of flesh and blood were problematic. Some of his friends concluded he wasn’t interested in the opposite sex.
One evening when he was out in town, he ran into his former partner from his time selling billboard space. Kristian was still working for the company that had bought up their mobile advertising idea. They stopped to chat at the bottom of Hegdehaugsveien, an exclusive shopping street which in the evenings was a social hub for yuppies and fashion babes. Kristian thought Anders looked a bit lost, a bit slumped inside that blazer of his, his face set beneath its foundation. They were both slightly inebriated. Kristian let slip something he had been thinking for a long time.
‘Come out of the closet, Anders!’
Anders gave a strained laugh and pushed his friend away. Kristian refused to be shaken off, not wanting to drop the subject.
‘You’ve got to come out, we’re living in the twenty-first century, for God’s sake!’