But it never came. Sir William had more than enough to do, holding forth about Haile Selassie as if he were the world’s leading authority on Ethiopia, a personal friend of the emperor who had personally witnessed the skinny little monarch feeding the lions and leopards, not to mention the black panther, in the course of his regular morning constitutional. Not that Sir William did not have an excellent excuse for making this his topic for the evening, since the emperor had just died, a prisoner in his own palace. ‘D’you remember when we visited Addis Ababa, Veronika,’ he said, addressing his daughter, ‘and we saw St George’s Cathedral, where Haile Selassie was crowned?’
Veronika made some inconsequential, corroborative reply, but Sir William was not listening. Veronika, attractive, almost too attractive, and the same age as Jonas, had just started her studies at the institution which was to lay the foundations for her sensational career: the College of Journalism.
Uncle William went on pontificating about Haile Selassie — about his fantastic memory and his gratitude to loyal servants — realizing to his delight that he had come up with the perfect subject with which to dominate the dinner party, better in fact than the optional extras on his latest Mercedes, or his meetings with the prime minister, so he talked in glowing terms of Haile Selassie. Encouraged by the fact that no one was interrupting him, he launched into a long account of how the emperor had resisted Mussolini’s invasion of his country, growing more and more animated as he went on, like those mediocre actors who never land a leading role and so, in an effort to get even, elevate every social gathering to a stage upon which they blow their trumpet loud and long all evening, delivering endless monologues broken only by their own hoots of laughter.
The Brothers Grimm, who had not been to Africa, sat facing one another, wearing impeccable, almost identical suits and lending a strange symmetry to the table. Their names were Preben and Stephan, and Jonas recalled with a shudder his uncle incessantly cheering them on when they holidayed together on Hvaler as boys, whether they were diving, fishing or kicking a football about: Perfect, Preben! Splendid, Stephan! Rakel called them the Brothers Grimm because they were so ugly and because they had once ruined a fabulous doll’s house belonging to her. Rakel never forgave anyone for ruining a fairy-tale.
Now, however, the Brothers Grimm said hardly a word. In Sir William’s presence even these two inveterate egotists were relegated to walk-on parts. They had to content themselves with laughing or making little comments — when, that is, they were not blatantly inspecting the backs of the cutlery for hallmarks or sniggering eloquently at one another over the cheap crystal glasses. The Brothers Grimm were pushing thirty, but they were still just big kids, something which went some way to explaining why they were the first — and by that I mean at least a year ahead of everybody else — to have mobile telephones, pagers, laptop computers, Time Managers, fax machines, SUVs and the like. Fix & Fax Ltd., as Rakel said when speaking of their business dealings.
They were sitting in the dining room of the new villa. The large windows looked out onto Bergensveien, the town and a September day in the mid-seventies. Before dinner, Sir William and his three children had been shown around the house, which really was a very different story from the three-room flat in one of the low blocks of flats across the road. Only the picture in the bathroom, Theodor Kittelsen’s Soria Moria Castle remained the same. Sir William had run a curious eye over the place and a finger along the mantelpiece merely to ascertain with obvious disapproval Åse and Haakon Hansen’s relaxed approach to housework. For his own part, after his divorce he had employed someone to keep house for him. He banged a wall here and there or admired the pleasing blend of wood, tile and Persian rugs, these last a generous gift from Aunt Laura, who had most firmly declined the invitation to dinner. Even now, as he relentlessly continued his soliloquy on the emperor of Ethiopia, spouting assertions which no one was in a position to check, Sir William’s eye roved the room, taking in the full suite of dining-room furniture, all in pine, as if he could not believe what he was seeing: that his younger brother finally had his own house.
Jonas sat fiddling with the tablecloth and gazing out of the window as his uncle launched into a long, involved story to do with Haile Selassie’s reforms and his building projects, in which he gave the impression that this diminutive monarch had more or less single-handedly raised Ethiopia out of the Stone Age and into the twentieth century, even though Sir William knew very well that the emperor was a despot of the first order who had clung to power any way he could and had vast sums of money salted away in foreign bank accounts, while his land lay fallow and his people ate sand. Suddenly, Jonas’s uncle turned to his hostess. ‘By the way, Åse, where’s your mother?’ he asked artlessly. ‘Still playing war games over in Oscars gate?’ The Brothers Grimm obviously got a great kick out of this question. Sir William was referring to Jonas’s grandmother who had, for long spells in her life, adopted the persona of Winston Churchill.
Jonas’s mother did not turn a hair, just sat there, smiling her little half-smile, as if now, as always, she knew something that no one else knew. In fact, she set some store by her brother-in-law’s lack of social nous, not least because his rude remarks usually provided fodder for weeks of amusing conversation with her husband.
Jonas felt much the same. There was something about his uncle’s creatively poisonous tongue which fascinated him, that ability to spend a whole evening going on and on about what a brilliant diplomat Haile Selassie was simply to prevent anyone else from getting a word in edgewise: a manifest demonstration of power quite in the spirit of the old emperor himself.
Rakel, on the other hand, had had enough of their uncle and had decided to shut him up more or less as an experiment, to see whether such a thing was even possible. She had hatched a plan to which Jonas was party, more out of principle than out of hate. Rakel believed it was time their uncle was given a taste of his own medicine: poison. So when she now appeared in the kitchen doorway wreathed in delicious smells, only these two, sister and brother, were aware that, all going well, this evening was liable to turn out rather differently than their uncle imagined.
The dishes were set on the table, thus forcing Sir William to stem his own stream of rhetoric: a mishmash of facts about Ethiopia, about all the intrigue which had sadly toppled the emperor from his throne the previous year, and snide remarks about Norwegian radicals who did not know the first thing about Africa, these aimed mainly at Jonas’s brother Daniel, one year his senior, ‘Red Daniel’ as he was known in those days. His brother, however, having been on the receiving end before, had been wise enough to make himself scarce that Sunday. Besides, he hated ‘such petty bourgeois affairs’.
Rakel had taken a lot of trouble over dinner, preparing filet de boeuf en croûte with a mushroom stuffing. Sir William smacked his lips at the very sight of the laden serving dish, and Rakel flashed Jonas a look of encouragement before she started slicing into the pastry, revealing what lay inside, the slices of beef interspersed with the mushrooms — this last being, obviously, the vital ingredient. Rakel passed round the bowl of salad, but had the dinner guests hand their plates to her to help them to the meat. That way she could make sure that her uncle was given the correct portion of mushrooms. If all went according to plan, in a little while he would have more to think about than sitting there like an emperor on his throne, dispensing spiteful remarks. Buddha was just about the only one to be exempt from his insinuations. He simply sat there, wearing his inscrutable smile and seeming to rise far above the verbal ructions round about him.