You (58 page)

“What are we doing here?”

Your father takes one of the spades, moves a little way away from his mother’s grave, and sticks it in the ground before he answers.

“We’re going to dig a grave. A nice deep grave for four girls.”

You spend the next hour and a half in the graveyard. The ground feels as soft as if it were dug over every week. You’re working back to back. You have no more questions. You’re on a collision course. You’re only a part of the whole, your father knows the formula and isn’t planning on telling you about it. He scares you, but you know the feeling, and you’re still surprised every time. Like watching a horror movie over and over. You know exactly what’s going to happen and yet the fear won’t leave you.

You climb out of the grave, drenched in sweat, your muscles feel good. You wash yourselves in a water trough beside the shed and your father remarks how lucky you are.

“If it was a Sunday we wouldn’t be alone here.”

You go back to the hole; your father puts his jacket back on and crouches down with his back against the gravestone. He sighs. The sun shines in his face, it’s pleasantly cool, the summer heat hasn’t yet invaded the patch of forest.

“Sit down, rest for a moment.”

You stop and look across the graveyard. You deliberately turn your back on your father.
If he takes a nap right now, I’m going to lose it
. Your father sighs again. He has all the time in the world. He isn’t planning to die.

You set the spades down by the grave and leave the cemetery, but you don’t go back to the car. Your father heads off in the opposite direction and you walk side by side through the wood until you see
water. The fjord is a sliver of blue that gets bigger and bigger with every step. You’d like to sit down on its bank and hold your hand in the water.

“Along here.”

Before you get to the water your father leads you to a steep cliff. A footpath winds its way up. You don’t know how your father knows his way around here. You’re a clueless dork taking a quick holiday in Norway. It would be nice if the bit about the holiday were true.

You climb the cliff. It’s tough, the sun is scorching, you don’t say a word. Before you reach the top, your father grabs you by the arm, so that you have to stop.

“It’s going to be a very nice view.”

“What’s going to be a very nice view?”

“The past …”

He looks to his right. The fjord, the opposite shore and individual houses. All that’s missing is a sailboat drifting gently along the water, and it would be perfect. Your father finishes his sentence.

“… however you look at the past, in the end it always looks shabby.”

Your father lets go of your hand and invites you to walk ahead of him. Six steps and you’re up at the top, and give a start. Your father’s behind you, and rests a hand on your shoulder, there’s no going back.

There it is.

There are all the stories your uncle told you condensed into a single moment: the hotel on the cliff. The mountains on the other side of the fjord. Everything.

Ulvtannen
, you think, while your uncle’s stories flee your head with a sudden shriek. Your father was right. It looks as if the Norwegian past had crouched down up here and taken a shit. But of course that’s not enough, because four girls are standing in front of the ruined hotel and all four girls are looking at you in amazement.

At first only a head appears. It floats above the knoll like a furious balloon, then the rest follows. Shiny shaven head, pale face. Darian wears a black and red tracksuit and white sneakers. He looks at you and freezes. Behind him comes a man in a dark suit and a gray polo-neck sweater. He’s the first guy ever to wear a sweater like that and not look like he writes poems. He’s slim, with a narrow face and weird gleam in his eyes—if you saw someone like that in the street, you’d cross to the other side. You learned that from your mother.
Pay attention to the eyes
. That gleam is naked and furious. No warmth. He only has eyes for Taja. You don’t need an IQ of 200 to know who’s standing in front of you. Your brain has much more trouble processing how Darian and his father managed to track you down.

We got rid of the car
, you think.
We did everything right
. You’re about to call out to the girls that it would be a good idea to get out of here as fast as possible, when Taja’s uncle gets moving. In his fury he’s so fast that you don’t know how he does it. Suddenly he’s standing a few yards away from Taja, and he says, “Are you running away from me?”

He taps his chest.

“From me?”

He doesn’t come any closer, he just stands motionlessly in front of Taja, as if he’d traveled halfway around the world to say those two sentences. You’ve all automatically taken a step back instead of gathering around Taja, but there’s this gleam in his eyes, and if
someone doesn’t recoil from that, then it’s your own fault. Taja starts breathing frantically.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing here?” her uncle wants to know.

Stink starts to lunge forward, Nessi holds her back by the arm; you’re about to move too, you’re about to grab Taja’s hand to pull her out of her uncle’s spell, when your girl speaks, and her words are a loud whisper, if there is such a thing, because that’s exactly what it is. She says, “I want to visit my mother.”

“What?”

Taja clears her throat and says in a louder voice, “I … We want to visit my mother.”

“Are you fucking with me?”

All of a sudden her uncle’s voice is loud, spit flies from his mouth.

“Tell me, you fucking with me?”

Taja shakes her head.

Stink’s had enough, and pulls away from Nessi. Taja’s uncle snarls at Stink, without deigning even to look at her.

“Move one more inch and Darian’s going to shoot off your kneecaps.”

Your heads whip round, you look up at Darian, who stands in the background holding a gun like a cop in an American movie—both hands, one hand under the grip, one around it, finger on the trigger, arms outstretched at chest height, the barrel pointing at Stink.

“What on earth have you done?” Taja’s uncle continues. “Did you think I wouldn’t find you if you switched cars? And how the hell did you get Neil Exner involved? At first I was sure he was part of your plan, but then I worked out that you haven’t got a plan. You do whatever you like, with no regard for anyone else, and this is how it ends up. Take a look at your cousin. He’s become a murderer because you had to steal that car from that boy, from a complete stranger. Your cousin’s a killer now, Taja. He killed for me. And it would be amazing if he could remember the boy’s name. We all make mistakes …”

He turns round and spits his words at Darian.

“… but we’re not all leaving three fucking corpses behind!”

You stand there like someone has turned you into stone.

Marten
, you think,
is this fucker talking about Marten?

Taja’s uncle turns back to Taja.

“Are you surprised by all this? Does anything surprise you? What if I tell you those dead bodies are on your account, would
that
surprise you?”

Stink can’t keep her mouth shut.

“She hasn’t done any—”

“SHUT YOUR FUCKING TRAP!”

Stink shuts up. What works on Stink doesn’t always work on you. Sometimes you wish it were the other way around.
If wishes were horses
, your mother used to say. Scared or not, you don’t like it when other people talk for more than two minutes without making sense. Taja’s uncle exceeded that limit ages ago.

“Chill out,” you say.

“What?”

He looks at you. That bloody gleam in his eyes makes you shiver, but you’re not a bastard for nothing. You wear thick armor. And yet you have a wish.
If that guy would just shut his eyes everything would be okay
. You’re about ten feet apart. If he gets closer, you can put on a sprint. You’re fast, you proved that yesterday, you can prove it again. But unfortunately speed isn’t called for at the moment. First you’ve got to assert yourself here. Eye to eye. You know what this guy’s problem is. It’s not about Taja’s mother or poor Marten, it’s about Oskar, who you and the girls fished frozen out of the freezer. At least that’s what you hope, because if it isn’t the case you may as well throw in your cards right now. Your voice tries to sound bigger.

“Chill out, I said. Taja hasn’t done anything. Oskar’s heart stopped. Or his brain. A stroke or something, get me?”

Taja’s uncle looks at you as if he’s been confronted with a new species. Then he asks you, “Says who?”

You are lost for a second, you ask back, “What do you mean, says who?”

“Who says my brother’s heart stopped?”

Schnappi looks at you as if you’re an idiot. You have to admit that you admire her cheek, which wouldn’t stop you from smashing her face in.

“Taja, of course,” she answers. “Who else? She was there when it happened.”

“Is that so?”

You focus your attention on Taja again. You control yourself, you’ve been controlling yourself the whole time. You’d like to grab that little piece of shit and strangle her until the tenderness and innocence fades from her face and the truth beneath emerges.

“And what happened after you stuffed Oskar in the freezer?” you ask her. “Did you think you’d just clear off with my merchandise and visit your mother? Was that the plan? If that was the plan, then let me repeat my question: what the hell are you doing here?”

“I … I thought she still lived in the hotel. I didn’t know …”

Taja hunches her shoulders, looks at the ruin, looks at you again, and for a few seconds you have your doubts, for a few seconds you believe her naïveté and you believe in her innocence. She gives you the warm feeling of being wrong, of making a mistake. How could she know you were the kind of person who never makes mistakes?

“I didn’t know anything about what’s happened here,” she says.

“And now you do. So what do you think, shall I bring you to your mother now?”

Taja stares at you, no further reaction, the naïveté has vanished from her face. She shakes her head, she doesn’t want to.

“How about you tell your girlfriends why you don’t want to come with me?”

She starts weeping silently. She exudes invisible threads that try to clutch your heart. As she does so, she looks so like Majgull that your heart contracts. You have to look away, you say to the girls, “You have no idea what’s going on here, do you? You’re the good friends who join in all kinds of crap because they’ve known each other forever. Loyal to the end. One for all, all for one.”

You shake your head, you can’t believe it.

“You’ve caused me so many problems, so unbelievably many problems, and you’re such idiots there ought to be a law against it. Do you want to know why your Taja suddenly doesn’t want to see her mother anymore? It’s because her mother—”

Taja interrupts him, stressing every word.

“My mother isn’t dead.”

“Says who?”

“Oskar. He … he lied to me all those years. My mother wasn’t allowed to see me. He … he kidnapped me. My mother isn’t dead, she never had an accident.”

You come so close to her as if you wanted to kiss her. She stares right through you. It’s a mystery to you. They look so similar. Mother and daughter. The faint scent of sandalwood and oranges. You deliberately kept your distance from Taja all those years because that resemblance was too much for you.

“You want to know why I know better than anyone else that your mother is dead?”

Taja narrows her eyes and nods. She really wants to know, and juts her chin defiantly. Your gaze, her gaze. She asks, “Why?”

“Because I killed her fourteen years ago.”

We’re back in 1995, it’s the end of silence between Majgull and you. She left you a message on your answering machine. She wants you to understand her lie, so she wants to meet you at the Plaza Hotel in Oslo.
What lie?
The question won’t leave you in peace.

You flew back to Norway the same day. No one knew. Majgull
and you. Your nervousness felt like a controlled high. You were your father’s son, and you didn’t lose control, but deep inside you’d been severely unbalanced for some time. Without that woman you are only half of what you are—half-present, half-happy, half-full. With her, everything was whole. She made you dream. She made you yearn. Your own marriage felt worthless in comparison, and your son was just a piece of luggage that you could take along or leave behind.