You (33 page)

Perhaps it’s the similarity, or perhaps it’s the fact that you’ve already been standing for two minutes beside this boy, holding a gun to his head—eventually the threat loses its effect.

You lower the gun.

The boy doesn’t move, he keeps his head at an angle, still suspicious.

Like Oskar and me
.

You feel a tingle down your spine and have the feeling your brother’s watching you from the chair.
He’s dead, he can’t see anything anymore
, you say to yourself, and wonder what kind of waves his death will make, and who you’re going to have to inform. There are a lot of people who need to know. What are you going to say to them? How are you going to explain this business here?

“Everything okay?” asks Tanner.

You nod, you are so far away in your thoughts that it’s shaming. If your dead brother knew what you were thinking about right now, he’d probably come back from the dead to strangle you. Nothing can be made good. And even though you know that, you wish you could casually take out your phone and call Majgull. You miss hearing her voice. She’d know what needed to be done. She’d be a great help to you.

Two years after the Wall came down, your business was flourishing and you’d started working with couriers. Whether it was drugs, guns, or antiques, the product itself didn’t matter. You were responsible for the logistics of the operation, and you were one of the best. You’d worked your way up to a position that allowed you to control the market from the background. If someone wanted security for their goods, they didn’t get past you. Even in those days you were consistent and hungry in whatever you did. You dictated the rules, no one broke them. Without consistency and hunger you’d have gone on working in the video store.

1992 turned out to be a golden year. Your company had established itself, your contacts extended as far as Australia, and the Asian market was waiting to do business with you. Even in private you couldn’t complain. You were with angel number 14. Her name was Helen, she was pregnant, and in the middle of May she would become Darian’s mother. The world seemed full of positive surprises, your brother’s phone call was definitely one of them. Oskar had had enough of the distance between you, and took a step in your direction.

He invited you to his wedding.

You knew from your few telephone conversations that he’d met a woman, but you had no idea that he was so serious about it. You hadn’t seen your brother for eleven years. It was mainly your fault. You stayed away from him for purely intuitive reasons. Perhaps you were just afraid of introducing him to the new Ragnar. Who knows. At any rate no one could have known how fatal a meeting between you two would be after such a long time. It was a mistake you should never have made. You were spontaneous.

Your brother’s invitation came at exactly the right time. The success was stressful. You needed a break. Tanner was the only one who put it quite openly: “No phone calls, no questions, no Berlin. Be a stranger in a strange land, I’ll deal with everything else.”

You took the car. There were three ferries a day from Rostock to Trelleborg. You stood at the railing and thought about the past few years. The company, your pregnant angel, your successes. Taking stock was very cleansing.
I’m going to be a father
, you thought and
wondered how that was going to work out. When the ferry landed, you crossed Sweden without a break and only stopped beyond the border, to spend the night on Norwegian soil.

You didn’t know what you’d been expecting on your first night. Perhaps a moment of enlightenment, your long-dead ancestors’ drunken, jovial voices calling to you, something like that.

It didn’t happen, it was a night like any other. The next morning, though, you were filled with a pleasant feeling of calm that stayed with you all the way to the far north. It was important to you to drive the whole way yourself. It was your own kind of meditation. Being alone. Without anyone else’s thoughts.

Of course you missed the road to the beach hotel, it would have been too perfect otherwise. You ended up in the little town of Lunnis and asked a boy sitting on the edge of a well with a skinny dog on a leash. The boy jumped down from the well, pulled you around the corner, and pointed to a cliff that looms beside the town like the angry, fist-clenched arm of a giant.

“Ulvtannen!” said the boy.

You looked up, and there was nothing but a rough, rocky wall.

Oskar hadn’t been lying: the hotel could only be glimpsed from the fjord.

Who knows, perhaps your ancestors had a warped sense of humor and thought the fjord might eventually climb to the edge of the cliff and then the hotel would actually be a beach hotel. Or else they thought the pebble beach at the bottom of the cliff was enough of a lure for tourists. Whatever your ancestors thought, they refused to be deterred and built a beach hotel on top of the cliff that looks like a grand building from colonial times.

You sat back down in the car and found the right road.

Like something out of a fairy tale
, was your first thought when after the final bend the hotel appeared in front of you. A massive Nordmann fir stood to the left of it, casting a shadow on the façade. It reminded you that once upon a time only fir trees had stood here, a whole forest of them. What a view that must have been—hundreds of fir trees stirring in the wind.

Home
.

The hotel had gone out of business in the late seventies. The family had scattered around the world and didn’t want to invest any
more money in the old building. You only knew the hotel from photographs. Your father had never shown any interest in taking you and your brother to your mother’s birthplace. Oskar had done fantastic work. Since his arrival in Norway four years ago, your brother had been working on saving the hotel. He had painted the façade, put in new pipes and wiring, and replaced the roof.

It was a new start. The hotel had never looked so good in photographs.

You parked in the driveway and got out. You were just taking your luggage out of the trunk when the double doors flew open, and there he was. If you’d met him on the street, you wouldn’t have recognized him. Up until that moment the twelve-year-old Oskar had lived on in your head, the little brother who stole your comic books and pressed himself inconspicuously against your side so that you would protect him against the world.

“Ragnar!”

It was a good feeling to hug him.

It was like coming home.

The beach hotel has twelve rooms spread over the second and third floors. The rooms look out on the water, and a terrace runs around each of the floors like a belt. If you stand on the terrace and look down, the fjord looks up at you.

Your mother lived on the first floor, your brother had converted the second floor for himself and his fiancée. He had knocked walls through and turned the individual bedrooms into airy spaces. The third floor was almost untouched by renovation. You found the only finished room and stood on the terrace for a while, looking down at the fjord before you went to see your mother.

She immediately burst into tears and rushed to touch you as if to see whether you were real. She didn’t scold you. She kept repeating over and over how much you looked like your father. It wasn’t a flattering comparison, but you didn’t say anything.

You couldn’t have known that day that a tumor was already spreading in your mother’s abdomen. She had eight months to live. Your second visit to Ulvtannen was for her funeral.

After dinner you walked with Oskar down the winding road
into Lunnis. You were introduced to friends and acquaintances and understood hardly a word. Your Norwegian was atrophied, and you had to answer in English. You liked the people, they welcomed you like a prodigal son, but you had quite different problems. No one could tell how this idyll depressed you. It was raining, and the fjord was a threatening shadow. Oskar told you he couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. He loved the hotel and the morning mist on the water, he even liked the work—four days a week he drove to the hydraulic power station in Vik, where he had met his Majgull.

“I don’t need anything more to live,” he said.

Majgull’s home was a farm two miles from Lunnis. The family greeted you warmly, a dog jumped up at you, a little boy hugged your left leg and wouldn’t let go. Everyone gathered around you in a big living room, aquavit was served and you clinked glasses, answered questions, and then, out of nowhere, fire broke out. You’d never have expected it. You knew the situation from movies and books. You felt unprotected and naked. One glance was enough, and you went up in flames like a bundle of twigs.

Majgull
.

Even today you don’t think anyone noticed. Not your glances, not the horror in your eyes as she stood opposite you, her hair still wet and her skin red from the shower, with an almost invisible film of sweat on her upper lip. As certain as you are even today that no one noticed, you are equally certain that Majgull alone saw through you right away. She sensed the danger. She sensed your hunger.

“Ragnar,” you introduced yourself.

“Majgull,” she said and hesitated briefly before leaning in as if to tell you a secret. Her voice was quiet, her words, in English, were meant only for you.

“So you’re the one who killed his father.”

It wasn’t a question, it was a statement. You didn’t react, you just looked at her as a clear thought sped like a ricochet through your head:
Oskar knows
. Majgull let go of your hand and turned to your brother. They laughed, he threw his arms around her, and that was all it took, you lowered your gaze almost blinded by their sight and from that moment on you tried to stay out of Majgull’s way.

Two days,
you thought,
then I’ll be gone
.

Oskar didn’t mention your father’s death and you were clever enough to avoid the subject. Everything between you seemed to have been resolved, and that was how you wanted it to stay.

The ballroom of the hotel was prepared for the wedding day. Since breakfast a band had been practicing hits from the 1960s, and you told Oskar that you had a few calls to make in private. At the time Oskar still thought you were in the building trade. Like father, like son.

You strolled along the fjord. The weather had turned, and the landscape suddenly glowed in a completely new light. You sat in the grass for two hours, looked down at the water, and began to understand Oskar. If you didn’t want much, you had more than enough right here.

She was sitting with her bridesmaids on a meadow that you only walked across because you thought it was a shortcut to Ulvtannen. The women were like Sirens waiting for a lonely seafarer. You landed among them like a ship in distress. A rapture of femininity enfolded you. And in the midst of them was Majgull. And in the midst was Majgull.

They offered you things to eat and drink. Their rudimentary English aroused you, their words alone were enough to seduce you. There was so much warmth, and for the first time in your life you became aware that a man needs more than one woman around him.

To try out everything, to miss nothing
.

When you had eaten and drunk and were about to go, the bridesmaids told you that the first man who meets the bride with her retinue is the last man the bride kisses before she’s given away.

“You have to do this, please, please, please!” the bridesmaids begged you, and your fate was sealed.

Yours, Majgull’s, and your brother’s.

Majgull’s lips pressed firm and hard on yours, then for a second
they softened and you looked into her eyes, clear and open and watching as you watched her. The bridesmaids applauded. Majgull touched your arm as if in thanks, then she laughed, and that laughter did send her breath into your mouth.

You still clearly remember that.

Her breath in your mouth.

The ceremony was held in Hopperstad church in Vikøyri. It was cramped and musty, thirty people tried to cram themselves into a historical wooden building that should have fallen in on itself over a hundred years ago. You leaned against one of the pillars and didn’t understand a word of the ceremony. You struggled not to stare openly at Majgull. Your hands were behind your back, you didn’t want anybody to see your fists.