I Can See in the Dark (3 page)

When we’re sitting in the park, he sends surreptitious glances in Miranda’s direction. It’s hard to guess his thoughts when he sees that little cripple, she’s often screaming and impossible to ignore. Sometimes she hits her mother with her fist. That’s human beings for you: if we can’t find the words, we fall back on the fist.

One day, when Arnfinn and I were alone in the park, he tottered off down the path without his hip flask. It lay there on the bench after he’d gone, silver and shining, but I didn’t notice it until he’d vanished amongst the trees. I was curious, and went over immediately to take a closer look. It really was a most elegant hip flask, with a screw top and a cap to drink from, and last but not least, a neatly engraved inscription.

Here’s to Arnfinn
.

I unscrewed the top and held the flask to my nose. It contained a small amount of liquid which was almost odourless, so I concluded it must be vodka. I stood with the hip flask in my hand, unsure of what to do. Obviously if I left it there, someone would take it. So I put it in my inside pocket; it didn’t take up much room. Naturally, I’d return it at some point. I reasoned that its loss would be a large one for him, once he felt his pocket and realised it was missing. I returned to my own bench with the trophy close to my heart. I sat and admired the dolphins spouting water. This was in the morning. I was on late shift that day, and wasn’t due at work until two o’clock. I kept half an eye out for Arnfinn, in case he came back for his hip flask. But he didn’t show up. He’d probably collapsed somewhere, on a sofa or under a bridge. You never can tell with people like that, they’re past all help.

I’M TAKING FOOD,
juice and medicine from room to room, checking off that the old people have eaten and drunk and swallowed their tablets. But the truth is rather different. The injections go into the mattress, the food is tipped down the toilet, and ditto the drugs. Then I flush it and cover all traces. Boiled fish or mince disappears into the plumbing system, there to serve, presumably, as nutrition for rats the size of elephants. The old people wave their pale, wrinkled hands helplessly after the vanishing food. No one understands what they’re saying or why they’re fretting. No one at Løkka has discovered my little game. But caution is required. Some relatives enjoy creating a fuss, they watch us like hawks, making sure we’re doing what we’re supposed to. What
are
we supposed to be doing, I often think, especially on days when I’m feeling very tired. Are we supposed to keep them alive no matter what, by any means, for as long as possible? Even though they’re on the brink of death and are unproductive and useless now, and don’t even afford anyone any pleasure? I can’t cope with all this helplessness, and sometimes my temper turns evil. What’s the point in eating when you’re almost a hundred?

Ebba often comes to the park.

She always brings something she can do with her hands, some crocheting or knitting, a sock or a doily. There are people who can’t sit quietly with their hands in their lap, Ebba is one of them. I’d put her at close to eighty, but she’s upright and strong in body, and fleet of foot. When she comes walking along the path, she often stops to admire
Woman Weeping
. She stands looking at it for a moment, her head to one side. She’s always well dressed, her hair beautifully coiffured, and her hands work industriously at her knitting or crocheting. I imagine she must have been something like a schoolteacher, a secretary, or a nursing officer in a hospital, or maybe even an accountant, but certainly a career woman. I assume she’s crocheting for her children and grandchildren. Small tablecloths or long lengths destined to become bedspreads. She seems very content, both with herself and the life she leads, she’s certainly not bowed with age, she’s at one with everything. With the bench she’s sitting on, with the earth beneath her feet. Just occasionally, but only very rarely, she lowers her work to her lap. Then she turns her face up to the sun and closes her eyes. But after an instant she’s off again with renewed vigour. The ball of wool on the bench beside her dances its rhythmic jig as she tugs at the yarn.

*

They say that Nelly Friis is blind.

That she’s been blind for more than thirty years. Her relatives, a son and daughter, say so. On a rare visit to Løkka, one of her grandchildren, sitting helplessly at her bedside and wringing her hands, says that Nelly Friis is blind. Sali Singh says so, too, and Dr Fischer and Sister Anna, but I have my doubts. I’ve heard that supposedly blind people can actually see quite a lot, movement and deep shadow, the brightest light. In addition, they can recognise smells, they can hear voices and register details and fine distinctions, they notice lots of tiny things that escape the sighted. Despite this, I often go to her room. I can’t resist it. She weighs a mere forty kilos, she’s as fragile and grey as paper and, in theory at least, shouldn’t see that it’s me, Riktor, who’s entered. I bend over the bed, take hold of the delicate skin behind her ear with my long, sharp nails, and squeeze as hard as I can. The thin, dry skin is punctured. She hasn’t the voice to scream, nor the strength to avoid me.

I listen to check if anyone’s coming along the corridor. If I’m feeling really bad, I’ll tug the hair at her temples, where I know it hurts the most. She hasn’t got much hair left, there are several bald patches on her scalp, and no one knows that I’m the one responsible. They think its age and decrepitude. No one notices the red sores behind her ears, no one washes that thoroughly, there are so many who require sponging and moving and turning and massaging and a whole lot of other things; old people take a lot of work. I torture her for a good while. I notice an artery pulsing in her neck, I notice her blind, gooseberry-like eyes are filling with liquid. And I don’t know how much she can see. If my face is merely a pale oval in a larger blackness without visible characteristics. If she recognises the smell of my Henley aftershave. It’s not easy to tell. But in the past, Anna and I have been into her room together, and she’d begin to flail her hands with the little strength she had. Anna ran off to fetch Dr Fischer. And he prescribed diazepam, and after that Nelly hadn’t the strength to be anxious. The torture that I inflict gives me a feeling of desperation and delight. A blissful mixture of guilt and superiority. And adrenalin, coursing hotly through my body. Pinching Nelly Friis behind the ears and giving her contusions where no one can see them, causes my own pent-up frustration, my own fear and sorrow, to drain out of my body like pus from a wound.

What a wasteland this world is.

What a misfortune that we live to be so old.

This thought constantly comes into my mind.

If only I had a woman, to soothe and comfort me.

Sometimes Anna follows me down the corridor in her quiet and careful way. Often, as she passes, she’ll put a hand on my shoulder and give it a squeeze.

‘Hi, Riktor, you all right?’ she’ll say, and hurry on without waiting for a reply. It’s only a friendly gesture in passing, a minute distraction. But so strong is the effect of her pleasant greeting, that I’ve known my eyes fill with tears. I am really, moved, and that doesn’t happen often. Anna does things like that and they cost her nothing at all. If only she knew, I think. Nelly Friis is not the only one who’s blind.

ONE DAY AT
the beginning of April, I went out for a walk near Lake Mester. Lake Mester is a small lake, and that day its surface lay ice-bound and covered with snow in the bright, sparkling weather. All was white and smooth like a newly ironed sheet. After several days of mild conditions, and a tentative promise of spring, the cold had returned. And as I was walking I caught sight of a skier working his way across the fields. He came on quickly, his modern, red, skin-hugging ski-suit so visible in that overwhelming whiteness, as was the little waist pouch that gave a hop with each tug on the poles. I stood there watching him as he came down the slopes. My imagination had free rein, each of the skier’s strides seemed like a race against time. It’s a question of holding age at bay, he was saying to himself perhaps, I’m on the offensive against death and decay, always one step ahead and as fit as a fiddle.

I went on a few paces as he rapidly drew nearer. He was a middle-aged man, probably in his fifties, the age at which they often begin these desperate remedies. To put it simply: he was being hounded by the demon of fitness. His arms would thrust forwards in almost aggressive lunges, his body seemed robust and firm in that red ski-suit. I ambled off slowly, inhaling the sharp air, and keeping my eye on the red skier. There was a speed and fluidity and forcefulness about him, and so it took me some time to register where he was going. He was heading towards the water, towards the lake with its covering of snow and ice, the lake in April. Can you credit it, I thought to myself, and followed him with my eyes. Naturally I assumed he’d keep to the shore. But to my astonishment I saw him swish out on to the ice. This daring manoeuvre flabbergasted me. Still I reasoned that he’d hug the land; after all it’s a golden rule, whether you’re swimming or in a boat. Or travelling across frozen water. I was thoroughly mistaken, however. He set out across the ice with gusto, using his poles with impressive force and pushing with his skis as hard as he could. I took a few hasty steps. I was drawn towards him, tense, expectant and horrified all at once. After a couple of minutes I was down at the edge of the lake. I stood there with my hand shading my eyes, watching that hazardous passage over the ice.

He’d got a good way out.

I stared after the long legs in their red tights, and then I noticed something happen. All at once, his steady rhythm changed. He lost speed and seemed to stumble over his skis. At first I thought he might have hit a rough patch of ice, because he was working his arms very fast, and then their movement became frantic. He fell through the ice. As I watched from the shore, he fell through the thin ice on Lake Mester and started sinking. My pulse began to race with a mixture of fear and shock; my whole body felt hot, my cheeks and neck were burning. Now he was struggling in the water like a madman. Suddenly, he had the idea of using the spikes on his poles for purchase and dragging himself out like that, but this didn’t work because the ice kept breaking. Time and again flakes, large and small, broke off from the edge. I stood as if turned to stone on the shore and watched the frenzied struggle for life. Simultaneously, I reached for the mobile phone in my pocket, as if there were time enough for that to save him. I certainly wasn’t willing to sacrifice my life for some unknown idiot. So I stood there watching in horror, while he fought frantically in the icy water. I heard his screams clearly, and although he was a long way off, their harrowing sound pierced me to my very marrow. His cries wrung me, but I also found them strangely exciting. He should have known better than to cross an ice-covered lake in April, I thought. People generally get what they deserve, don’t they? The ice continued to crack beneath his hands. His shouts had lost something of their strength. Sometimes he left off for a few moments, it was clear he was beginning to get chilled, he was moving more slowly in the black water.

You skied as fast as you could over the fields, I mused, as I stood watching.

You were skiing for life.

But death was waiting a little way ahead.

And then, silence.

The dark pool gaped like the jaws of a predator. The man in the red suit had disappeared, swallowed up by the inky water. I stood on the lake shore panting, my cheeks still flaming hot, for his death throes had also played themselves out in me. I strove to calm my body, my respiration and heart, no one else had witnessed what I had seen. For an eternity I stood there staring. Then I turned and walked quickly homeward, glancing over my shoulder now and again, afraid that he might have risen from the depths again in his red ski-suit. As I walked I clutched the mobile phone in my pocket, I really should report it. But something held me back. An unwillingness to draw attention to myself, to admit that I’d stood there looking on ineffectually, and perhaps be criticised because I hadn’t done anything, hadn’t shouted a warning after him as he’d raced over the fields, I could at least have done that. When, forty minutes later, I reached my house at last, I was dizzy and faint. I attempted to digest this new self-awareness, that I was not a man of action. I tried to think clearly, but I was intoxicated by what I’d seen, the man who’d struggled and sunk, screaming with fear and agony. Then for a while I imagined his watery death and the pain he’d endured, the feeling of pressure behind his eyes, the fire in his lungs. That it had taken time. The thoughts that had raced through his mind, the dizzying feeling of loneliness in dying out there alone in the cold water. Eventually I collapsed into a chair. I sat there for a long while with my head in my hands. Perhaps he’d noticed me standing on the shore staring. What treachery it must have seemed to him that I hadn’t lifted a finger.

It was a long and restless night.

Accusations came from every corner of the room, recriminations from under the bed, threats from up near the ceiling, that I was a miserable and worthless person. That I lacked backbone and any notion of self-sacrifice. At the same time I was dazzled by it all, as if someone had selected me as sole witness to that awful event. I didn’t get to sleep until nearly daybreak, exhausted by everything that had happened, and when the light came through the window, I jumped out of bed.

I WENT STRAIGHT
to the living room and switched on the radio.

When the foreign news was over, they ran a piece about a missing skier, just as I’d expected. The man had gone out for exercise and hadn’t come home, they said. They feared he’d gone through the ice. Search parties had found ski tracks on the lake. I listened to all this as I prepared a light breakfast: a couple of slices of wholemeal bread with marmalade, and some really hot, strong coffee, which tasted wonderful. It struck me that I could still phone the police, and simply mention guardedly that I’d seen a skier dressed in red in the fields close to Lake Mester. But I ate and did nothing; I was excited by the whole event, and a bit troubled at my own reaction, and there was a slight rushing in my head, like there used to be when I was a boy and had eaten too much sugar. The sight of the man who went through the ice was mine alone, it was something I wanted to keep to myself. God hadn’t seen him, nor yet the devil, only I, Riktor, had that drowning man branded on my memory for ever.