‘Oh…’ I didn’t want to press her any more. It was probably nothing important anyway. ‘But after Birger was born… what sort of life did she have?’
‘She was an outcast. Even if his father wasn’t German, the child was illegitimate, and in Stavanger then – well, that was almost as bad! So she went on public assistance, lived in a home for mothers run by the church for a while, they were certainly good to her there, but the rules and regulations were horrendous for a woman in her thirties, after all!’
‘But when you were born…’
‘Well, er… by then she was in service down at Nærbø, on a farm, and she met a seaman from the locality. Well, he gave her a child and went off on a long trip and didn’t come back till two years later, and how could he know it was his child she’d given birth to? Then she moved back into Stavanger, and we’ve lived here ever since.’ She sighed. ‘But I can’t complain. I’ve a good husband and manage fine. Time is working in our favour. Soon there’ll be no one left who remembers either Kathrine Haugane or her Nazi bastard any longer. So you can give Birger my best regards and tell him it’s just as well he stays away! No one here misses him!’
‘Birger? Is it you, Birger?’ Her mother had suddenly sat up in bed.
‘No, mother,’ said Laura Nielsen. ‘It’s not Birger, you can see that!’ She looked at me apologetically. ‘This happens every time she hears a man’s voice. It’s the same when Ove comes with me. She certainly doesn’t forget him!’
Kathrine Haugane looked in my direction with her pale-blue, watery eyes. It was almost as though she was looking straight through me. ‘Birger! I haven’t breathed a word! Not to a soul! You were at home the whole day! The whole day: right, Birger?’
‘Yes, yes, mother!’ She raised her eyes. ‘It’s the same old thing over and over again! Lie down and rest now, mother!’ She almost forced her mother back down into bed and gave a sigh of satisfaction when she saw the despairing eyes close again.
She looked at the other bed. ‘If only she’d been able to find peace too… Oh, perhaps one shouldn’t wish something like that for one’s own mother, but sometimes… may God forgive me, is it an un-Christian thought?’
‘Un-Christian… But it must… it must be quite an important event if it’s left such a lasting impression on her?’
‘Yes, I’ve no idea what she’s babbling on about!’ She bent down to tuck the blanket tightly under her mother’s chin, who looked to have calmed down again completely. ‘So now you can return to Bergen and tell Birger what life’s like for us here! As if he could care less.’
‘Yes, Birger… Do you know what it is he does in Bergen?’
She looked at me in surprise. ‘What he does… Business, isn’t it?’
‘But – what sort?’
‘Oh, er… All I know about him is that… he could have joined the Salvation Army for all I know!’
‘Is that likely?’
‘Well, yes, actually. You see, when mother came back to Stavanger from Nærbø and the second great disappointment in her life – at least, as far as I know – she was saved.’ Bitterly she said: ‘It was probably a travelling preacher who saw her as his Mary Magdalene, I’m afraid, but saved she was, at any rate, and so much so that both Birger and I spent more time at chapel than we did at home from when we were six years old till we were well into our teens. Well, Birger right till his military service. I broke away earlier, but by then mother had started to flag, so it wasn’t such a big step.’
I glanced at the clock and stood up. ‘Well, I don’t think I ought to take up any more of your time now.’
‘You weren’t! On the contrary, it’s made a change. In spite of my harsh words, please remember me to Birger when you see him.’
Not without a pang of conscience, I said I would do so before leaving mother and daughter in a sort of silent symbiosis: one lying in bed eyes closed, the other staring vacantly at the other bed and the hope it represented.
Once out in the corridor, I stopped a nurse on her way past with a bedpan. ‘Excuse me but… I spoke to a nurse a little while ago, small, dark-haired…’
‘Trude Litlabø?’
‘Yes, I don’t know…’
‘Try at the office.’ She pointed towards an open door near the end of the corridor.
I went down and looked in.
Trude Litlabø stood up from her chair in front of a computer screen, as I knocked gently on the doorframe. It was a few seconds before she recognised me. ‘Oh, hello! How did it go with – Kathrine?’
‘Oh, not so bad. I had a nice chat with her daughter, at any rate. Is she always so yonderly, her mother, I mean?’
‘Unfortunately, yes. In her condition you might say she’s gone into a room someone’s lost the key to and is never going to find it again.’
‘But she does see something from the window now and then, doesn’t she?’
She gave me a look of surprise. ‘Yes, she does. Certain events are engraved on her memory.’
‘She said something about a boy called Roger. Remember him?’
‘Roger, Roger… You mean, the one who drowned?’
‘Drowned?’
‘Er, well, I’m not sure. It’s Einar you should have asked about that.’
‘Your brother?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where can I find him?’
‘Well, er…’ A shadow ran over her face. ‘He’s not all that easy to get hold of.’
‘Oh? Why not?’
‘He’s not – well. I mean… To be frank, he’s in a detox clinic for alcoholics, down in Jæren.
‘I’d really like to have had a word with him.’
She looked at me searchingly. ‘And why is that?’
‘I can’t say. But I think it could be quite important actually.’
After thinking about it for a few moments she made up her mind. ‘Oh, I suppose it can’t… If only it could make him feel, feel that he means something, then… Here you are…’
She wrote her brother’s name and address on a scrap of paper and pushed it over to me. Then she unlocked the door and let me out of the department, wishing me good luck. I thanked her, went down to reception and ordered a taxi to the railway station.
Thirty-nine
NOWHERE IN NORWAY is the sky so heavy as over Jæren. Nowhere is there so much sea in it. On grey days, sky and sea form as one towards the horizon as though a piece of sky has been folded under the land. On sunny days the sea blows up, and before you know it, it’s raining.
That day a thin layer of frost lay on the horizon, a stroke from a feather quill that would remain there even in the darkness of night.
‘The stamp of February,’ muttered Einar Litlabø, nodding seawards.
‘How do you mean?’
‘That the sea’s never darker than at this time of year. As though the colour from all the winter nights had seeped down here, into a kind of melting pot. That’s why we have the heavy storms in late winter, so everything can be released before spring. Didn’t you know that?’
He had invited me to accompany him on a short walk along narrow tracks that lay in the most sheltered hollows in the windswept terrain and were marked out by sombre dry-stone walls, the timeless boundaries of Norwegian farmland, which were always a bone of contention with somebody or other: the source of hundreds of court cases relating to wills, thousands of arguments between neighbours. He appeared to welcome this break in the daily routine, and when I had told the duty doctor about the period I’d spent in Hjellestad some years before, they had allowed us outside the premises without a permit, in the belief that he was in good hands.
His resemblance to his sister lay mainly in the colour of his hair. Einar Litlabø had dark, shoulder-length hair with streaks of grey, as if life had passed him by all too fast, and he had never had time to go to the barber’s.