I watch all the news broadcasts that night. Georg is with me, Tuva too. Mum and Dad. And Knut, even though he has not forgiven me. I was not the person he thought, he is still bitter about that.
Now, you see, I say to Dad, when you have an odd dress sense and have strange stuff in the garden, it makes people suspicious. Not just the neighbours, the police too, look at the way they’re acting.
It’s true, Mum says, I’ve been trying to tell you that for years, Finn, but you just don’t want to listen.
No, Dad peers at the TV screen, neither listening nor responding. He’ll hang on to whatever junk he wants, after all, the things are in his house, aren’t they, in his garden.
In any case, Tuva is quick to defend him. What are you on about, she says, odd dress sense? They brought you in for questioning because of Emilie’s bag, Mum, not because of the garden or what clothes Granddad wears, they didn’t even know who he was before that.
But the bag was only there because of the garden, wasn’t it? Huge piles covered with tarpaulins. Chaos and clutter. And not mowing the lawn or cutting back the hedge, it’s just asking for this kind of crap.
Well, you’re the one who doesn’t tend to the garden, Mum.
The newsreader in the studio is talking to a reporter who is standing outside our house. In the background we can make out the red-and-white barricade tape and police busy in the garden, wearing headlamps. What are they doing now, I ask, I thought they were finished searching here?
When Tuva pulls the curtain aside to look out, we see her on the TV screen, a dark figure in the light of the window. The TV crew’s lights shine on the neighbours who have turned out and the assembled journalists.
This is nuts, Tuva says, standing looking at the screen again, I can look out and see what’s happening at the same time as it’s on TV. She turns up the volume. NRK are reshowing the footage from earlier in the day when the police searched the house and garden. They had three dogs with them. Alsatians that unrelentingly sniffed the grass and Dad’s scrap piles.
It is a question of time, the police say. When Emilie walked past my gate with Skee on a lead, what time could it have been? They have tried to work it out. When she was last seen. When she took the dog’s lead down from the peg on the wall, when she locked the door, shouldered her schoolbag, when she walked down the hill and crossed the tramlines. At times the dog has tugged on the lead, and she has stopped to let it sniff around or pee.
If she took her usual route, she would have passed by my house around two o’clock, they reckon, and minutes later she is gone. Or at least nobody has seen her after that, neither in Skogryggveien or Huldreveien, where they found her things.
If I had been standing at the gate then. Or if Emilie had walked a different way. If someone had looked up and seen what was about to happen. That a car pulled up, yes, perhaps that is how it happened: the car stopped. There may have been more than one so they could lift her into the car, two, maybe three. No one heard her shout, the dog did not bark, nobody saw a thing. It must have happened quickly. If only I had been by the gate, then time would not have changed the house and garden so radically. Now nothing is the same any more.
The policeman from the north is standing on the Persian rug in the living room still wearing his boots. I have not heard the doorbell and do not understand how he has come to be standing there. For a moment my thoughts veer off course and I think it is he who has taken Emilie, that he has only dressed up as a policeman. But that is not how it is. So how is it actually, why are they plodding in here without any warning? Is it because they are in a hurry or due to a lack of respect? Do they think I am worthless? Perhaps I do not exist, I am someone other than I have always thought, and they have cottoned on, realised who I am and what I have done. Jelly-like.
Am I under suspicion, I ask crossly, seeing how all of you traipse in and out as you please? He does not reply. Or at least I do not remember what he said later, not to that. But I do remember him saying they needed to conduct several more searches of the house. New finds in the garden necessitate it. What could that be? I think. Blood? Are you going to look for evidence while we’re here? Tuva asks. Detectives on TV never do that. But maybe you view us as a part of the evidence?
He shakes his head, they do not. Naturally, we cannot be here.
Your mother shouldn’t take it personally, he says to Tuva.
He was gorgeous, Tuva says, watching from the window as he trudges over the gravel towards the gate and the waiting patrol car.
I go up to the bedroom to pack a bag. The window is open. Outside, a strong wind is blowing. Is it Emilie’s wind, her solace? Is she lying out there in the forest, her face expressionless, empty, while it soughs in the trees above? And in the morning the sun will rise and shine upon her, the grass will be green where she is lying, and the blades will sway, a new day with warm wind over her, while her body is still here. And the dog. It is terrified.
I am staying over at Tuva’s place. We are sitting on her bed and she is showing me her exam paper in archiving. She is going to be a librarian, but only as a temporary solution to what she terms her employment problem.
This is a keyword hierarchy, she says, and here are the references. You can’t refer to something you don’t have an instance of in the literature. You can’t write Elephants, see also Tusks, if there’s no documents about tusks in the library. However, from Tusks you can point in the direction of Elephants if the library has books about elephants, which they no doubt have.
Tears well up in my eyes. It seems so beautiful. To cross-refer from something that does not exist to something that does. Well, tusks exist, of course, it is the documentation that is lacking. I picture hierarchies with loose ends that cannot be brought together. Love hanging, dangling.
Before going to bed I put my arms around Tuva and hold her body against mine. Our kneecaps, hips and breasts touching. She is four centimetres taller than me, and holding her like this, I feel the child’s form within the larger body, a gentle weight, the small, soft arm around my neck, the hand playing with my hair.