You (59 page)

After you got to the Plaza Hotel you swam in the hotel pool until you were exhausted. You went to the sauna and had a massage. Giving your body all that attention helped, it meant your head was silenced for a while. When you got out of the shower, your phone was ringing. You were prepared for everything—problems with the company, a confused Tanner wanting to know where you were, or your wife, fed up waiting for you all day. Anything was possible, but you hadn’t bargained on your brother. He had broken down in tears and didn’t know what to do.

“Take a deep breath,” you said.

The situation felt unreal. You’d been in Berlin what seemed like a moment ago, and now all of a sudden you were standing dressed only in a towel in a room in the Plaza Hotel, Oslo, talking to your brother whom you’d last talked to at Christmas, and who couldn’t have had any idea how close to him you were.

“She’s got somebody else,” said Oskar.

“Who?”

“Majgull, of course.”

“Oh.”

“I knew it, Ragnar, I guessed it a while back and now she’s admitted it. What should I do now? What can I do? I love her, what am I going to do?”

“First of all, calm down.”

“She wants me to meet him today.”

“What?”

“She … she says she wants to explain everything, she …”

He was gasping for air, taking deep breaths.

“What am I supposed to do, Ragnar?”

“Where are you now?”

“I’m at the hotel, I’m racing like mad along the terrace, and I’m
just about to throw myself into the fjord. It’s my fourth circuit, I’ve run around this hotel four times and I’ve got side stitches.”

“Stop, then.”

“I can’t.”

“Oskar, stop!”

“Okay. Fine. I’ve stopped. What now?”

“Where’s Majgull?”

“She’s putting a diaper on Taja, she wants us to go right away. She’s arranged to see this bastard in Oslo. She wants … she wants us all to go together. As a family. Isn’t that sick? I wish you were here. I don’t know if I can cope on my own. She wants to have the kid there too. She says she’s not going without Taja. What happens if she leaves me?”

“She’s not going to leave you.”

“Ragnar, I’m so scared.”

A shrill noise sounded in your ears, pleading with you to get out of Oslo as soon as possible.
Clear off, it’s too much for you, run
. But Ragnar Desche doesn’t run. That’s the law.

“Couldn’t you talk to her?”

“What?”

“Please, Ragnar, couldn’t you talk to her? She likes you, maybe you could bring her back down to earth.”

You wanted to ask him what you had to do with it, you of all people, but it would have been pure hypocrisy. You shook your head. There was no question of your speaking to Majgull. You saw it right in front of you. Her coming to the phone and asking you why you’re getting involved. Passing the receiver to your brother and saying,
My new lover wants to talk to you
. You and your brother never seeing each other again, and you dying of shame. You were aware you would have to make a sacrifice.

Majgull or Oskar.

“Oskar, I can’t talk to her right now. I’m at work right now, the conference room is full, people are waiting for me. Try to calm Majgull, tell her you’re not going.”

“But I
want
to go.”

“What? Why do you want to go?”

“I want to see him. I want to know who is daring to tear my family apart.”

“Oskar, leave it.”

“You don’t understand what it’s like. You’ve got a good life in Berlin and your wife loves you—”

“Majgull loves you too,” you interrupted him, feeling acid rising up in your stomach. Even those simple words hurt. Majgull belonged to you.

“She’s calling, I’ve got to go,” said Oskar.

“Wait.”

“Thank you for listening to me. I’ll call you as soon as I’ve met this bastard. I don’t want to lose her, Ragnar, I’ll do anything not to leave her.”

With those words he hung up.

You wanted to call Majgull and ask her what she was playing at. Instead you treated your phone as an oracle and looked for Majgull’s last message in your inbox. Nine hours previously, you had still had no idea what lie she was talking about, but now you were starting to work it out. Majgull wanted to reveal herself to you, she wanted to hold up the facts in front of Oskar and give up her family for you. Oskar was to see you, speak to you, everything would be explained. Her detachment, her pretense that her interest in you had been only sexual, had been a lie all along. She wanted to give up her family, she wanted you to give up your family. You didn’t know if that pleased or frightened you.

Action was important, you couldn’t just sit around waiting to be crushed by events. So you hired a car and drove north. A six-hour journey and then? You didn’t know what then. You could hardly tell Oskar you’d just hopped on a plane to solve the problem with Majgull. Even a credulous person like Oskar would have seen through that one.

What on earth am I doing here?

Six hours is a long time to forge a plan. Your phone was on the passenger seat all the time. Perhaps she’d call you, perhaps she’d cancel everything. It could be so easy. You could take the next flight back to Berlin. Her name could vanish from your memory. Her
number from your phone. But there was this pull, there was this boundless hunger. You wanted that woman. Damn it, you wanted that woman.

Two cars on the road, two planets that were never supposed to touch.

Oskar drove, Taja was asleep on the backseat, Majgull didn’t say a word. If you’d seen that, you’d have seen the pain in your little brother’s face, who knows whether you mightn’t have turned round on the spot. Majgull’s face, on the other hand, gave nothing away. She leaned against the passenger door as if to keep her distance from Oskar.

Your brother knew he was losing his wife, he knew it and he was keeping himself under control. Who knows how different things might have been if Taja hadn’t been lying on the backseat. Oskar didn’t want to make a scene in front of his daughter. He wanted to look his enemy in the face and then decide what happened next. You’ve always been very similar. In true crisis situations you’ve waited until the last minute before deciding on your reaction. Your brother and you.

And maybe you would have just driven past one another and in that way everyone would have reached his destination. You in Ulvtannen, they in Oslo. You on the steps of the beach hotel, them in the lobby of the Plaza Hotel. Maybe all that dark energy would have gone up in smoke, but you know that’s not what happened.

Less than two hours on the road, you couldn’t bear it any longer, you took your phone and called her number. You just needed to know if they were on the way. You didn’t even think of calling Oskar. You just needed to talk to Majgull.

She picked up after the second ring. Her words were warm, she smiled at you through the phone.

“We’ll be in Oslo in four hours,” she said in English. “I’m looking forward to it.”

She said twice more, “I am happy, I am so happy.”

And then you heard Oskar saying in German, “Give it to me.”

And Majgull said, “I don’t think so.”

And Oskar cursed and demanded the phone.

And Majgull told him to keep his eye on the road.

“GIVE ME THE PHONE OR I’LL SLAP YOU!”

“YOU ARE NOT GOING TO HIT ME. NOT YOU!”

Oskar had never planned to hit her, he swore afterward, he said he’d only threatened to because he’d wanted to have the damn phone. She ignored his threat, so he grabbed for it. He missed the phone and grabbed her wrist. She pulled, he pulled, the car started swerving, Oskar was driving fast. When a car starts swerving at a hundred miles an hour, you need control to get back on track. Oskar lost control. Luckily there was no traffic coming in the opposite direction.

The car slewed into the opposite lane, slewed back, came off the road and drove into a ditch, ran up the embankment and turned over twice before settling on its side.

You heard your brother shouting into the phone, the screech of the tires and the dull thud as the car turned over. Then it was suddenly quiet and in the midst of the silence there was the quiet weeping of a child.

Even today you don’t understand your reaction. You opened the window and threw your phone out. You saw it bounce twice on the tarmac before breaking apart. Only then did you brake and drive to the side of the road. Your arms were shaking, your heartbeat was irregular. You sat in the car and went through every second that had passed over and over again in your head. After fifteen minutes you turned the car and set off back to Oslo. You drove straight to the airport and had to wait less than an hour before catching a plane back to Berlin. Just before eight you got out of a taxi in front of your home and turned up in time to read a bedtime story to your son, while in a hotel in Oslo a damp towel hung drying over a towel rack.

No one asked where you’d been.

No one knew you’d been away.

The call came just before midnight. Oskar called you from the hospital in Laedal. He had a cut on his head, but Taja had got away without as much as a scratch. It was a miracle. The doctors had pumped your hysterical brother full of tranquilizers, and he could only mumble incoherent stuff, but the sense seeped through, the
sense reached you and so you learned that Majgull had broken her neck when the car turned over. And time and again Oskar said he should have listened to you, everything would have been different if he’d listened to you.

And so ends our little story of Ragnar, who destroyed the love of his life with a single phone call. And of course we keep that to ourselves, because this story has nothing to do with anybody.

Because I killed her fourteen years ago
is testimony enough.

No more truth is needed.

“What the fuck?”

Once again you can’t keep your trap shut, you step forward and push Taja’s uncle aside like a piece of furniture that’s in the way. No idea when the guy was last pushed aside. Out of the corner of your eye you see his face slipping away like some stupid pancake falling out of the pan. You don’t care. You’ve got a completely different kind of problem. The Eiffel Tower is a matchbox in comparison.

“Taja, give me an answer!”

She doesn’t react. You push her on the chest with both hands, making her stagger back and nearly fall. In fact she doesn’t need to answer. Her face tells you everything you need to know. And you don’t believe it, you just don’t believe it. Your good friend lied to you. You saved her life and wiped up after her and she’s seriously lied to you. You point at Ragnar Desche, your voice is shrill: “So your mother
is
dead, and that bastard
killed
her? Is that right? So when were you going to tell us
that?”

A moment later your head explodes. It feels as if you’ve just been french-kissed by a bomb. You don’t understand what’s happened.
I was standing up a second ago
. You try to get up again, your arm slips away, your sense of balance has just been on a roller-coaster ride, you’re lying flat on the ground. Let that be a lesson to you, unpredictable violence is a little fucker who lives on surprise. This fucker is wearing a smart suit, he has hit you with his fist, and now he says, “I’ve been looking forward to this all this time.”

Taja’s uncle shakes his fingers out, and at the same moment Taja
clears out. She wants to get to the road, she really thinks she’ll manage to get past her uncle, who only needs to stretch his arm out to grab her. He pulls Taja roughly to him, so that her chest hits his.

“Where do you think you’re going? We’ve only just got here.”

He turns around with Taja in front of him, so that you can see her. Your girls pull you to your feet, Nessi keeps an arm around you. There’s a shrill ringing in your left ear that only slowly subsides.
He’s using Taja as a human shield
, you think, and you follow your logic through:
If you need a human shield, it means you’re scared
.

“We’re not finished here, not by a long way,” says Taja’s uncle. “We haven’t heard the whole story. Have we, Taja? Now you’re going to tell us what really happened to Oskar.”

“It … it was an accident,” says Taja, and looks at you pleadingly.

Save me, hurry up, save me
, her eyes say.

“What sort of accident?” asks her uncle.

“He … Oskar was sitting there and … we argued and suddenly … he was gone … he stopped breathing. It was … it was just over. Like when Grandpa died … Grandpa died like that too, didn’t he? Oskar told me that—”

“Taja—”

“I swear! I really swear!”

Her uncle draws a gun and aims it right at you, of course. It was obvious, this guy has a private feud with you, it was perfectly obvious. He should try wrestling with you, you’d twist his balls till he sounded like Mickey Mouse.

“Take a good look at your friend,” he says. “I’m going to blow this arrogant mouth of hers away if you don’t tell me what really happened.”

“I said—”

“STOP LYING, I’VE SEEN IT!”

Taja closes her eyes.

“I’ve seen everything,” her uncle whispers suddenly, but you understand every word, because all of a sudden it’s quiet on the cliff, no seagulls, no wind disturbs the scene as he whispers in Taja’s ear, “Three of the cameras were running. They’d been running for the last ten days. It’s as if I was there. Are you going to risk your friend’s life for your lies?”