You (57 page)

“I will never forgive you,” says your father. “Never.”

Your father pulls the trigger. Once. Twice. Each movement of the trigger is like an electric shock that travels into your brain on one side and shoots out on the other. You think about Mirko, you think about Gina and Nadine and that you’ll probably never decide which is the right one for you. You think everything at the same time and sit still and wait.

Your father takes the gun from your temple. It leaves a deep imprint on your temple.

“You can thank me because
I
didn’t forget the safety catch.”

“Thanks,” you say quietly.

He hands you back the gun.
It’s over
, you think, then he looks at you, both hands rest on the steering wheel, he isn’t interested
in the road anymore, he looks at you and there’s sheer rage in his eyes and at that moment you realize that he despises you, that your own father deeply and fervently despises you. You want to explain yourself, you somehow want to react to that gaze, when he looks ahead again as if nothing had happened, and the gun is in your hand. Everything’s going too quickly. Like Timo, who got stuck on LSD two years ago, ended up spending a few months in the bin and later told you the world was a record player turning too fast. You need something to come down. Gear down. Take a break. A bit of weed would be good. Just a couple of drags. Something to relax you. Your father doesn’t plan to let you take a break. He says, “At least you’ve understood what it means to be a man. You know the relief. You know the loneliness. Did you look him in the eye?”

You react far too quickly.

“Of course.”

Your father laughs, it’s like the barking of a dog that you sometimes hear in the city at night, short and dry. And then you feel his hand pressing your knee.

“That’s my boy. A damned ice-cold killer who can’t even look his victims in the eye.”

It’s so terrifyingly intimate that you get goose bumps.

How can he know me so well?

Your father lowers the window and spits, spits his rage and his closeness to you into the road. You look at your knee, from which his hand has disappeared, and don’t know what’s going on with you. Love and hate are raging in you, and you’re filled with pride. You’ve been close to your father, he’s touched you. Be honest, how sad is that? The man who’s bringing you up the way you bring up a fucking pit bull. The man who makes you murder, and who is tirelessly bringing you toward chaos at sixty miles an hour. This man has made you proud.

You eat breakfast in a café that a taxi driver recommended to you. Vik wakes up slowly. Oskar worked in the hydraulic power station here, and met Majgull on the night shift.
Love at first breath
, he called it. You ask your father if he knows anything more about the story. Your father doesn’t react and you go on eating in silence.

It makes you nervous that you’re not getting a move on. You have no idea why your father is taking his time. It’s a bit as if he’d lost his sense of logic. Even in Berlin you had a sense of that when you were standing on the Teufelsberg watching him scattering Oskar’s ashes. Tanner must have felt it too. And now all this creeping along. Since you’ve been on the road he hasn’t driven above the speed limit, he’s eaten his omelet in slow motion and seems to be as calm as anything. On the other hand you feel as if you’re sitting on a pile of burning firecrackers.

Of course your father doesn’t miss any of that.

“We have all the time in the world. They’re not going to run away, they’re going to wait for us. Finish your coffee, then we can get going.”

You could ask what makes him so sure, but you’ve got Tanner’s voice in your head:
If you don’t understand something, then try to understand it. The answer will come all by itself
. You drink your coffee and wish your father’s confidence was infectious. You have a bad feeling, you don’t like Norway. Until today Norway was the memory of your uncle, which took place entirely in Ulvtannen. You don’t want to take the magic away from that memory and tear it down into reality, it should stay a memory. You miss Berlin, because Berlin is reality and a safe place, your place, which you know and control. So much has changed in your life. Death travels with you now. It hides in the corners of your eyes and in the shadows that surround you and accompany every one of your thoughts. You’ve already noticed the change. Ask your father, he’ll know what’s happening to you. He’s responsible for the fact that you have a companion. Death has devoured your innocence. From now on every moment of your life will feel as if you’re running across a frozen lake, knowing quite clearly:
Every moment the ice is about to break, every moment it will happen
. And you run and run, because it would be a mistake to stop. As soon as you stop, it’s all over. Your father shares this feeling with you. In his case it’s a steep slope plunging ceaselessly down. You on the other hand are running over ice.

The house isn’t a house anymore. It’s a dog that’s been hit by a car, lying by the roadside, guts spilled, unable to move. The roof has been torn away, and the exposed rafters look like the ribs of a whale you once saw in the natural history museum. A fir tree collapsed into one side of it long ago, seedlings have fought their way through the rubble and point their gaunt branches defiantly at the sky. The windows are broken, the masonry is fragile, even the graffiti is decayed, and the painting of the façade, once blue, is a dingy gray. On your right there towers a public rubbish dump. You see washbasins, mattresses, washstands, and chairs. There’s a pyramid of bulging black garbage sacks, a bright red and yellow IKEA bag gleaming among them with bits of cable sticking out. It hurts to look. As if someone had opened a corpse and forgotten to close it again.

“Pinch me,” says Stink.

“Shit, that looks like shit,” says Schnappi.

“Taja, what is it?” you ask.

“I … I don’t know.”

“We must have taken a wrong turn,” Schnappi says firmly, looking round. “Taja, where are we?”

Taja doesn’t reply, she stares at the ruin.

“I don’t understand. We …”

She walks closer.

“We’re in the right place.”

“Are you sure?”

Taja points at a pile of stones.

“There’s the old well I told you about, and over there, where the fence has collapsed, was the dog kennel. Where all the trash is, that was the parking area. I know it all from the photographs. Even the tree—that used to be a giant fir. And right here there was a fence. You see? But … I don’t understand this.”

The trunk of the fallen fir has flattened a quarter of the hotel, and brought down the roof. You’re sure that if nature could murder deliberately, it would look exactly like this.

“And where’s your mother?” asks Stink.

“I don’t know.”

“She certainly doesn’t live here,” says Schnappi.

“Do you think anyone might know where your mother is?”

“I have no idea, Stink,” Taja replies irritably. “I don’t know anyone here.”

“But you’re going to—”

“Have you gone deaf?” you cut in. “If Taja says she doesn’t know, then she doesn’t know.”

You turn to Taja.

“Maybe we could ask down in the village. Everybody here’s bound to know everybody else.”

“Maybe.” Taja softens her tone, and for a moment the situation relaxes, and you’re glad you opened your mouth. Your stomach doesn’t need any extra tension, it’s already been turning itself inside out for a while, and at the moment there are lots of things you want—like a shower and breakfast—but throwing up like a pregnant bitch isn’t one of them.

Everything’ll probably sort itself out
, you think.
Taja’s mother probably has one of those beautiful houses right down by the water, and she’s laughing because we went up to the dump
.

You stare at the ruin for a while, then Schnappi stirs herself and turns away.

“Off we go. Anyone who wants coffee …”

She pauses. You feel a tingle in your back, just below your left shoulder blade. You don’t want to turn round.

I don’t want to
.

If you could stop this moment and see it from outside, you would know what a surreal scene this is—the sun laughs down at you, the mist above the fjord has melted away, the morning air is refreshingly
clear. It’s a magnificent summer day in Norway, the birds are singing, and you’re standing by an ugly ruin, but that’s okay, because everything seems to be in harmony, and if everything’s in harmony it makes life a lot easier.

I still don’t want to
.

You reluctantly turn round and look darkness in the face.

You leave Vik and after a couple of miles the fjord appears on your left. Your father ignores the sign for Lunnis, he turns right at the crossroads and reaches a narrow road leading up a small hill. A church appears in front of you. It’s made of dark wood and reminds you of old Japanese movies and samurais barking their orders like dogs. You can’t know that it’s a stave church, and you can’t know that your father stood in this church at Oskar and Majgull’s wedding, and couldn’t take his eyes off the bride. Beside the church there’s a little graveyard that looks as if people only died here every hundred years. You drive past the church and find yourselves on a forest path.

“And where are we going now?” you ask.

“Surprise.”

After a few minutes you’re surrounded by pine trees. The forest is dense and dark. You lower the window slightly, the scent of resin settles coolly on your face and fills the car. Five hundred yards further on, the forest clears and you see a chapel with a dome. In front of the chapel there’s an abandoned parking lot. You get out, walk down the stone path past the chapel, and reach a second graveyard. Now you know where all the dead end up. A graveyard, surrounded by a pine forest. You follow your father along the rows. He stops by your grandmother’s grave. She’s dropped the name Desche and returned to her maiden name. Sinding. Your father says, “If you die before me, I’ll bury you here.”

“I want to be cremated.”

He laughs.

“You must have loved that crematorium.”

“I don’t want to lie down there and get eaten by worms.”

“Fine, we’ll cremate you, then.”

“And you?”

“I don’t intend to die.”

He looks at the headstone as if he’s looking for something. You were seven months old when your grandmother died. Your father never talked about Norway, or about his mother either. You only know her from Oskar’s stories.

“Do you miss her?”

Your father shrugs.

“She betrayed us when we were children. She stood by our father. A mother should always stand by her children.”

“And what about fathers?”

“Fathers stand by themselves. That’s how it’s always been. When you’re a father you’ll understand.”

He spits on the ground beneath which his mother lies.

“She was a cowardly woman. You don’t miss someone who’s betrayed you.”

“So why are we here?”

He smiles.

“Not because of her.”

Your father sits down on his mother’s gravestone and points to the graves to his left.

“From here over to the statue of the angel, that’s all your relatives. They built Ulvtannen. And this …”

He points to his right, where there is nothing.

“… is reserved for us. Past and future, you see?”

Before you can answer, your father waves his hand dismissively.

“You don’t need to understand. Go back down the path. Beside the chapel there’s a shed. You’ll find spades in there. Fetch us two.”

You don’t move.

“The grave isn’t for you,” says your father, and in his eyes you can read that anything’s possible, even a grave for you if you don’t jump to it.

You go to the shed, the door isn’t locked. There are tools hanging on one wall, standing against the other there are three wheel-barrows,
rakes, spades, and a brand-new lawnmower. There are stacked-up buckets and several zinc watering cans. You take two spades and try to imagine burying Tanner and Leo. You know it’s wrong. They deserve a decent burial. When you come back, your father has taken off his jacket and hung it on his mother’s gravestone. You have to ask him.