The very second before the truck hit the bike and Nefertiti’s soft body at a speed of fifty kilometres per hour, the unknown driver instinctively tried to avert the accident by ramming on the brakes and laying on the horn. At the sound of this deep, resounding note, like the amplified blare of a tuba, Jonas saw the Scania-Vabis shift shape, first to an organ on wheels, then to a ship, a vessel the size of the Danish ferry, its bow surging straight for you, and as the seventeen-ton truck hit a girl with a cap and plaits and the longest eyelashes in the world, Jonas saw — or at least he would swear later that he had seen — a multi-coloured light flashing and rippling back and forth between all the lights on the lorry and the Michelin men on the cab roof covering their eyes and the pin-up girls on the grille kicking their legs, while the whole cab was surrounded by a blinding orange light.
When the truck hit Nefertiti she still had the mouth organ to her lips, and her last breath was forced through the instrument before it soared aloft like a silver bird in a different direction from and further than Nefertiti, who was tossed high into the air, shot out almost, like a human cannonball, one of those foreign circus acts that they had tried to emulate up in the loft, with the aid of an old mattress; Jonas saw it all from the seat of his bike, endeavoured to follow both those arcs, the mouth organ’s and Nefertiti’s, and he could see that the mouth organ was going to land right next to the little stream just down from the road, where they had once gazed in fascination at dry ice bubbling on the bottom, and he knew, even as his eyes were following Nefertiti’s course through the air, that he would pick it up and keep it for the rest of his life, safe in the knowledge that by blowing through that filter he would be able to survive even in a gas chamber of lies, and he was still following Nefertiti’s course through the air and he knew she was already dead, and he thought to himself, before she hit the ground, that this was not the end, even though it was the end, that it would never end, not when it came to Nefertiti anyway, just like that expedition to Rakkestad and inner Østfold when, after saying goodbye to Nefertiti’s long-lost aunt, and with their heads reeling with all that they had seen and done, they had almost reached the railway station when they suddenly saw a van swing past, a van bearing a logo they knew better than any other: the jolly Eskimo girl, the Diplom ice cream girl, and because she seemed to be waving to them, they followed her until they came to two red-brick buildings with a sign over the door that read: Østfoldmeierienes fabrikk A/L — Ostfold Dairies Ltd — and just then a man in a white coat came out and asked them if they would like to take a look inside, and he led them into a hall that smelled of vanilla and chocolate and strawberry, as well as praline, made from almonds roasted with sugar on huge frying pans in one corner; they could not believe it, but there they were, right inside an ice cream factory, surrounded by ladies in white overalls and white caps, all busy making Pin-up lollies, Pin-ups of all things, heaven knows how many Pin-up ice-lollies they had consumed in their time. Of course, the production process was very different from today, so there the ladies stood, filling trays of moulds with ice cream from the ice cream chiller by hand, after which the trays were passed through a bath of brine, in which the sticks were stuck into the lollies while they froze solid, then they were lifted out again at a point where different ladies took them two at a time, one in each hand, and dipped them in chocolate; Jonas and Nefertiti blinked, hardly able to believe their eyes, the absence of whirling machinery and conveyer belts did not make it any less magical, but more so, in that they could watch every part of the process at once, a bit like being in Father Christmas’s workshop, and Jonas felt as if he were standing at the end of a chain of cause and effect, at the source of something. When they returned from Rakkestad naturally no one would believe them, just as great discoverers are seldom believed, especially when they claim to have been inside the castle of Soria Moria itself, but they had brought back proof, a treasure; their good fairy in the white coat had given them samples of a brand-new make of ice cream, carefully packed in a cardboard box with dry ice wrapped in newspaper: it was called a Combi Ice, and it consisted of a transparent, plastic tub containing vanilla ice cream with a strawberry topping, with a coloured lid that you could remove and fix onto the base of the tub like a stem, making a little goblet, a wonder of wonders, a grail that Jonas and Nefertiti showed off triumphantly, together with the dry ice, which they threw into the stream and which only served to underline the magical nature of the entire episode with its smoke and mysterious bubbling.
For a long time after that, Jonas was convinced that life was an adventure, one that would go on forever, behind one adventure another one would always be lurking, but could that be true here, too, he thought, as a girl with the longest eyelashes in the world and a head as fragile as terracotta, flew through the air, already dead, and hit the tarmac at his feet with a horrid soft thud, while the last note from the mouth organ hung over the landscape, hung on and on, seeming to take up residence in the granite face of Ravnkollen, and Jonas stood there, unable to tear his eyes away from Nefertiti’s bike, lying in the ditch with the front wheel spinning round and round.
The unknown driver was climbing out of his cab, and people were running down the road from Solhaug. But before anyone could reach them, before he himself collapsed in a fit of anguished weeping, on the longest, lightest day of the year Jonas walked over to the girl lying lifeless, seemingly without a scratch, on the tarmac before him, only a few drops of blood trickling from her ear to betray that something fatal had occurred. Jonas bent down, wanting to remember her face, to stick it up in the place of honour in his memory, and as he did so he saw a tiny beetle crawl out of the pocket of her white blouse, across her heart; a beetle with red wings, he thought to himself, making one last effort before total and utter collapse, before the beetle flew off.
The Seducer
‘Do you have to go?’ she asked.
‘Of course I have to go,’ he said.
‘Why do you play that tune over and over again?’ she said.
He did not answer.
‘Why can’t you stay home?’ she said.
He did not answer.
‘Jonas, why do you keep playing that song?’
He lifted the seventy-eight off the turntable, regarded it: a black hole. Normally she never asked him about Duke Ellington, as if she knew this was a sacrosanct, nigh-on taboo, subject; that a whole host of feelings lay buried there, feelings associated with a life long before she came along. Instead he put on a CD, although he missed the crackling, missed the less than perfect sound quality, a breath of long ago. For him, Duke Ellington would always be the 1940 orchestra, in the loft at Solhaug, with Nefertiti.
‘You’ve never said that much about him,’ Margrete said.
‘Who?’
‘Your uncle.’ Margrete pointed to the pile of seventy-eights.
‘He was a big Duke Ellington fan,’ said Jonas, not knowing, the way one never does know, that this would be one of the most crucial conversations of his life.