I, who am always early, never late for anything—and I mean never—found myself scurrying along the platform toward the elevator up to the departure hall at Gardermoen only half an hour before my flight on a Sunday evening in August, pulling my trolley case behind me, my bag dangling awkwardly from my shoulder and my heart thumping in my chest. It would be no disaster if I missed it—I could always check into the airport hotel, catch the first flight the next morning and be at the office by nine o’clock—but I simply couldn’t bear the thought. There was a darkness in it that was already seeping out, and there was badness in it too. This was irrational, of course, but it didn’t help at all to know this. The only thing that helped was to make it in time.
The elevator was already going up when I reached the door.
Typical.
Why hadn’t I taken the escalator instead?
I pressed the button, leaned forward and saw through the glass doors the bottom of the elevator, halted above me. I checked my phone for any messages. There was one from Gaute asking when my flight got in, one from Camilla to say thank you for a lovely weekend, and one from SAS, unopened since the day before.
Where was that elevator?
I pressed the button again.
“It doesn’t matter how many times you press, it won’t come any quicker,” a voice behind me said.
It made me jump and I turned to see who it was. A man in his sixties with a singularly soft, round face was standing there.
How had I not been aware of his presence?
“I know,” I said. “I still do it, though.”
“It won’t do any harm, at least,” he said with a smile.
He clearly belonged to the category of jovial men, the sort who need to be cheery all the time, and who exploit others to that end.
The elevator came gliding down.
“There, you see,” I said. “It did help.”
I pulled my case inside and stood by the door at the other end.
“Off to Bergen, are we?” the man said.
How on earth did he know?
“No,” I said. “What makes you think so?”
“Doesn’t look like you’re going far,” he said. “And the Bergen flight’s one of the last domestic departures.”
“Ah,” I said, hoping he wasn’t going to press the matter.
I hurried through the enormous departure hall which was rather empty at that hour, checked in and passed through security without having to queue. In fact, I may have been the only passenger there. The departure board told me the flight was already boarding, and as I set off along the wide, endless corridor I broke into a trot. I didn’t care for it at all, it made me feel irresponsible with my flapping coat and dangling shoulder bag, my arms flailing back and forth like that, but the chances of anyone I knew witnessing such a loss of dignity were almost non-existent, and to anyone else I was just a woman who was late for her flight.
Apart from two airline staff behind the counter, the gate was empty.
“You’re just in time,” one of them said, a young man with a dark, trimmed beard. Breathless, I handed him my boarding card. He scanned it, and as I went toward the plane I heard him give the boarding completed announcement over his walkie-talkie.
I was still gasping, and paused for a second to get my breathing under control. I felt slightly unwell too.
Was I really in such poor shape?
Entering the aircraft a moment later, I saw the man from the elevator in one of the business-class seats. Immediately, I looked the other way, but too late.
“Changed your mind, did you?” he said, his face lighting up.
“No, just trying to keep my private life to myself,” I said, and gave him a smile of sorts before putting my case in the overhead compartment and sitting down in my seat, two rows behind him.
I leaned back and closed my eyes as my pulse began to settle. But the queasiness I felt wouldn’t go away, its waves of nausea washing through my chest and stomach. I knew I ought to send Gaute a text message, but at that moment I didn’t feel up to it.
I opened my eyes.
How had he got here before me?
He’d been behind me at the elevator. I’d hurried, run even, and there’d been no queues anywhere.
Perhaps he’d gone another way. Perhaps he worked for one of the airlines and had used a shortcut for staff only.
Outside the window a ground-support vehicle was pushing one of the bigger aircraft back. Wherever I looked I saw flashing lights. Yellow, orange, red. Two men wearing overalls and ear protection stood idly watching. They seemed so oddly small, like the vehicles that whirred this way and that, as if they belonged to a miniature world, vastly inferior in the majestic presence of the airplanes.
Peter had PE the next day. I would have to remind him. Gaute almost certainly hadn’t remembered to wash his sports things after training the day before, but there had to be something that was clean. And Marie had to go to the library with the books she’d borrowed.
They’d seemed cheerful enough when I’d spoken to them. Gaute had taken them to the baths at Nordnes, which both of them loved so much. Water had always done them good; all conflicts dissolved the moment they immersed themselves in a pool or swam out from a beach.
A flight attendant welcomed the passengers on board over the loudspeaker. I got my phone out of my bag and opened the text message Gaute had sent.
When do you land? Entrecôte and red wine await! he’d written.
Home around eleven, I typed back. Looking forward to late dinner with you!
Only then I deleted it and sat with the phone held forlornly in my hand as the plane began to move. The domes of light above the building we were leaving behind were etched with rain. I remembered the dark clouds I’d seen from the railway station in town, they’d been almost black.
I wished I could stay where I was, in that seat, never having to move. If only I could just sit there, taxi out to the runway, take off, and fly away somewhere else, far above the world. I would have to get up to leave the aircraft, of course, but in a foreign city, in a foreign land.
Anywhere but home.
Anywhere.
Abruptly, I was gripped by a sense of grief.
Was that how things were?
The thought was so very painful.
But it was true. I didn’t want to go home.
I didn’t want to go home.
On the Thursday before, I’d sat on the airport shuttle on my way out to Flesland, relishing the feeling of being on my way somewhere, though everything I saw out of the bus window was familiar to me and the only reason I was going away was for work. It happened less and less frequently that I actually looked forward to something. But I’d been looking forward to this particular trip for quite a while. For some years, I’d been a part of a team of translators working on a new version of the Bible, and now that the work was coming to an end everyone involved had been called together for an intensive three-day seminar at the Bible Society premises in Oslo, where those traveling from outside the capital were also being accommodated. Most of those taking part were people I knew already—Norway’s theological circles are rather small—and the thing I was looking forward to most was seeing them again. Or at least some of them. Camilla, Helle and Sigbjørn, whom I’d been at the university with, and Torunn, whom I’d got to know later and who was a researcher. I missed the discussions we always had, the openness toward the world and life that had felt so much a part of them. Perhaps that openness had been naive, but it was certainly genuine. In those days I’d thought that was how life was going to be. We squandered our time and thoughts, and only when it was over did I understand that it had all been unique and would never return. That is what life is like, is it not? When we’re young we think there’s more to come, that this is only the beginning, whereas in fact it’s all there is, and what we have now, and barely even think about, will soon be the only thing we ever had. There had been no new abundance of friends, only Camilla, Helle and Sigbjørn, and no new abundance of thoughts; the ones we’d had then were the ones we still have now.
In a way, my life was more truthful than it had been then, for the reality in which it was anchored was more absolute. I’d given birth to two children, and the love I felt for them was perhaps the only thing I had that was unconditional, the only thing I never questioned or doubted. On the other hand, I thought to myself as the bus crossed through Danmarksplass, which glistened in the rain, and I looked up in the direction of Solheimslien, life being more absolute didn’t simply mean that it was more truthful, but also that there was no getting away from it. Nothing stood open any longer, the way everything had when we were in our early twenties.
But who said life had to be open?
The priest who’d supervised me when I was a student had once said to me that a person only has to step sideways for everything to look different. He’d been talking about the priest’s role as a director of souls. I don’t know why I remembered it so vividly, because he said all sorts of clever things, but I reasoned it was because it was true, and because it was something I’d needed to know and thus found significant. People disappeared into their own lives and conflicts, and in doing so they lost perspective, not only on where they were, but also on who they were, and who they had been or could become.
But stepping sideways in one’s own life was well nigh impossible.
Just the thought of this filled me with guilt. I had Peter, I had Marie, what more could I want? What good was openness to me now?
I missed them already, even though I’d seen them that morning and would be seeing them again in three days’ time.
It was pouring down as the bus swung into the bay outside the Lagunen shopping center to pick up more passengers. People hurried past, huddling under umbrellas, cheerless faces lugging their carrier bags, pushing their kids ahead of them in their strollers. Taillights shone red, car trunks were opened and slammed shut, buses roared past.
The priest had said something else that time too, that had likewise etched itself into my memory: One must fasten one’s gaze.
“Have you seen Being There?” Camilla had said when I told her what he’d said.
“Why, do you think it’s trite?”
“Yes, I do! Can’t you hear it? ‘Step sideways.’ ‘Fasten one’s gaze’!”
What had I said in reply?
I couldn’t remember. But probably something about the simplest things often being the truest.
Which also could have been said by Chance the gardener in Being There, I realized with a smile, and I looked out at the fields, their green sheen in the rain, their almost archaic appearance among the industrial buildings and construction sites.
Some sheep stood with their heads lowered, grazing beside an outcrop of rock a few hundred meters away.
How inconceivable it was that someone could make a sacrificial site there, pick out one of those sheep and cut open its throat, splash its blood in accordance with the ritual, and then cook the beast on an open fire in honor of God.
How different our times now.
But the sheep were the same. The grass was the same, the rocks, the clouds, the rain.
At that moment I received a text message from Gaute. I opened it and saw that it was all hearts, smileys, cars and planes. Underneath he’d written, Marie wanted to say this to you.
I replied with a heart of my own.
On the flatland in the distance the air traffic control tower came into view.
If I stepped sideways in my own life, I considered, there would be nothing missing. And if I fastened my gaze, I saw the children and nothing else.
I decided to close the door on my daydreaming for good.
I would fly over to Oslo, take part in the seminar with all my enthusiasm, come home on the Sunday evening and be glad of all that I had there.
And for a while it worked; I enjoyed the flight, the train ride into the main station, the taxi ride and the atmosphere of the grand building that was home to the Bible Society, to which I arrived late in the evening, the small, austerely furnished room I’d been given there. Something white that resembled semen was floating in the toilet bowl and I laughed when I saw it, entertaining the idea for a moment that I could inquire as to who had been staying in the room before me, though I quickly dismissed the notion. I went out for something to eat at a Chinese restaurant nearby, slept like a log all night, gave my talk the next day, took part in a discussion that carried on over lunch, and then in the evening met up with Torunn. The two days that followed continued in the same vein: sessions in our various groups, talks in the lecture room, fruitful discussions afterward. Everything was conducted to such a high level, and it was a joy to listen to what the others had to say, not least because it all reminded me so much of my time as a student—many of the speakers had lectured then too.
Only now it was over.
I didn’t want to go home.
It was a dreadful insight.
But it was truthful.
I stared at the phone in my hand and tried to think as clearly as I could as the plane taxied out to the runway and the rain streaked the small windows, the cabin crew going through their safety routine in the aisle.
Then, breathlessly almost, I typed a message to Gaute and sent it before I had time to change my mind:
Missed the plane. Having to stay over at Gardermoen. Catching first flight in the morning then going straight to work. Really sorry. Maybe the wine and the entrecôte will keep till tomorrow?
Immediately, three little dots rippled under the text I’d written, and I visualized him standing alone in the living room, his head lowered as he typed. The flight attendant who was standing two rows in front of me put on her life jacket, demonstrating exaggeratedly how it was to be deployed, her gestures timed to coincide with the instructions being voiced over the loudspeaker.
Not like you at all. What happened?
Went out with Camilla and Helle after the seminar, couldn’t get a taxi and the train stood still for an age, I replied as the flight attendant began walking down the aisle, her head moving from side to side, little abrupt movements as she checked the rows of seats on both sides, and then three more dots appeared beneath my message.
I put the phone down in my lap, but she must have seen me texting, because she stopped beside me.
“Have you got your phone in flight mode?” she said.
I nodded and gave her a smile.
“It is now, yes,” I said.
She carried on down the aisle.
I had to answer him, otherwise he was bound to become suspicious. If I was at a hotel as I’d told him I was, my silence would have no plausible explanation, and I couldn’t say I was running low on battery, because why wouldn’t I just recharge it? And if I’d forgotten my charger, something he would find unlikely—and surely two unlikely occurrences, first missing my flight and then my battery running down, would already have him wondering—couldn’t I borrow one from reception?
I turned the phone in my hand and read his new text:
A lot of misfortune all at once! All well here, kids asleep and I’m working. Miss you.
Miss you too, I typed back. Sleep well.
I switched the phone off, dropped it into my bag and stared out of the window. I looked at the rain as it darkened the concrete underneath us, the runway lights that close up looked as if they’d been laid out haphazardly, but which from a distance formed straight, luminous lines.
The plane halted and the engines began to roar. With a jolt, their restrained force was unleashed and the aircraft began hurtling down the runway.
I suddenly had no idea why I’d lied to Gaute, or what good it would do me to stay the night in a hotel. I hardly ever did anything rash, always thinking things through before doing anything.
But since there was no way I could go home now, at least not without dishing up another pack of lies, I should just make the best of the few hours I’d stolen.
The feeling of freedom had been overwhelming.
That’s what it was.
But I hadn’t done anything wrong. Stupid, perhaps, but not wrong.
Nothing more needed to happen. I could stay the night in a hotel, go to work as usual in the morning, come home in the afternoon and spend time with the children. Read to them, put them to bed, perhaps work for an hour or so . . .
Life itself was never the problem, it was the way you looked at it. Provided, of course, that it was a life without hunger, need or violence.
Gaute was a good husband and good father, considerate and unselfish; I couldn’t ask for more. And the life we had together was fine too, if only I allowed that aspect of it to shine through.
What was I doing?
In the depths of the darkness outside, lights glittered from a road, twisting serpent-like around invisible hindrances. A small town shone like a chandelier a bit farther away. Beyond it, darkness once more.
A soft pling sounded in the cabin and the Fasten Seat Belts sign switched off. The cabin crew at the front jumped to their feet and started getting ready to go through the aircraft with their trolley cases. The flight time was only just over half an hour, so it was no wonder they looked like they were in a hurry, I thought to myself, bending down and taking a book from my bag, one that Camilla had been talking about for years, a copy of which she’d finally given me at the seminar. The Kingdom of God is Within You, by Tolstoy. I put it down on the seat beside me, rummaged for my glasses without finding them, then lifted my bag onto my lap for a proper look. I couldn’t have left them behind at the restaurant, surely?
I’d put them on to look at the menu.
Hadn’t I put them back in my bag?
I couldn’t remember.
As I put the bag down again a new wave of nausea ran through me. I leaned back and tried to breathe steadily. I felt like I could be sick at any moment.
As a matter of precaution, I took one of the little white bags from the pocket of the seat in front and held it discreetly in my hand next to my thigh.
My brow was sticky with perspiration.
Ohh.
I tried to control the wave inside me as it continued to rise, sitting completely still and allowing my thoughts to ride with it in the hope they would tame it and make it go away. And it worked. Slowly the queasiness receded and soon it had settled sufficiently for me to put the bag back in its place and start breathing normally again.
The snack trolley was coming closer and I got my purse out. I wanted a Coke and a packet of biscuits, if they had any—it was what my father had always given me whenever I’d felt sick as a child, and I’d connected the combination with getting better ever since.
It must have been the food I’d eaten. We’d all had moules-frites, perhaps the mussels had been off. A single bad one was enough.
I remembered I’d have to remind Gaute to pay the mechanic before they sent the overdue bill to a debt agency. And to bring the two dishes home that we’d left at the school after the get-together to celebrate the break for the holidays.
Perhaps not both things at once. He disliked it intensely if I went on at him. Still, he only had himself to blame, putting things off the way he did.
And then there was the funeral to prepare for on Tuesday.
I was rather dreading it, I sensed. The deceased was a man with no next of kin, and no friends had made themselves known either. After burying children, it was the most unpleasant of all my undertakings, to conduct someone’s funeral in an empty church.
The flight attendant pushed her trolley past. I tried to catch her attention, but she was busy with the passengers across the aisle.
“Excuse me,” I said.
She gave no sign of having seen or heard me.
“Excuse me!” I said again, louder this time.
Too loud, it seemed, for when she turned toward me it was with a look of annoyance on her face.
“Yes?” she said.
“Could I have a Coke, please?”
She said nothing, but opened one of the trolley drawers and took out a can, handing it to me together with a plastic cup, though still without a word.
“Have you got any biscuits of any sort?” I said.
“Biscuits, no.”
“How about crispbread?”
She sighed and pulled out another drawer, then handed me a thin green-and-white packet with a piece of Wasa crispbread inside.
I held out my debit card.
“Payment’s with my colleague,” she said with a nod in the direction of the other flight attendant, before turning her attention with a smile to the passengers in the row behind me.
I didn’t see why she had to be so unfriendly. Could it have been that I used my phone when I wasn’t supposed to? But surely they were used to that?
Anyway, it was no reason to act the way she did.
I opened the crispbread and took a couple of bites, washing them down with a mouthful of Coke. After that, I got my phone out again and looked at my recent photos, mostly from the holiday we’d spent in Crete a few weeks earlier. Marie had learned to swim there, all of a sudden she could just swim. Fortunately, I’d had my wits about me and managed to film her, not the first time, when she’d discovered it was something she could do, but the second, a few minutes later. We’d been at a little bay next to a busy road, and there were some industrial buildings quite close by, but none of that could be seen in the video, all you could see was little Marie with her head held high above the surface, arms and legs paddling away beneath her. Behind, the blue sea stretched away until meeting the bluish-green rock face on the other side of the bay which rose steeply toward the bright sky, dashed with sandy-colored ruts and crevices. Her whole face exuded concentration and joy.
“Wow, Marie!” Gaute exclaimed in the background.
He’d been standing next to me as I filmed and had put his arm around me.
What would he say if I told him I was leaving him?
But I wasn’t.
I wasn’t.
I put the phone back in my bag. The noise of the engines changed; we must have already started our descent.
He wouldn’t understand. He’d think I’d found someone else. It would be the only explanation he’d be able to comprehend.
“What have I done?” he would say. “Is there something I can do differently?”
What was I supposed to say then?
I hadn’t found anyone else, he hadn’t done anything, and there was nothing he could change to make it any better.
But what is it, then?
We’ve nothing but the children in common anymore, haven’t you noticed?
No. We’ve got everything in common. We have a life together.
I’m sorry, Gaute. But I can’t go on.
Would he cry? Would he be angry? Would he refuse to have anything to do with me after that?
No, I couldn’t leave him. I had no reason to. Besides, it would be devastating for the children. Especially for Peter, who was so sensitive. Things were difficult enough for him as it was.
Was I really that selfish? So selfish that I would completely mess up our children’s lives and Gaute’s too, just because I felt like it?
Below, the lights of the city came into view. It wasn’t often I’d seen it from that angle; usually the flights came in from the south, over the rugged fells and the small islands there, but now I could see the entire city clearly: there was Sandviken, there was Nordnes, there was Bryggen, there was Klosteret, there was Sydneshaugen.
The sky was clear, and the lights of the Vågen harbor district shimmered on the inky water.
After the long walkways of Gardermoen, it felt good to enter the small airport terminal and walk just a few meters to the staircase leading down to the baggage reclaim area and the exit.
At the bottom I paused to put my case down and pull the handle up when there was a voice behind me.
“I didn’t think priests were supposed to tell lies.”
It was the man from the elevator. He smiled.
I began to walk away.
“No offense,” he said, coming up alongside me. “Only you said you weren’t going to Bergen. And where are you now?”
“Do I know you?” I said without looking at him, pressing on.
“I don’t think so,” he said.
I knew I shouldn’t say anything, that it would only encourage him further, yet there was something about him that invited me to ask:
“How do you know I’m a priest?”
“I go to church now and then,” he said. “I’ve noticed you. You’re a good priest. You’ve got lots of interesting thoughts. Not all priests have.”
I said nothing, but carried on through the exit, and when I halted outside to get my bearings and look for the taxi rank he was gone.
Torgallmenningen lay almost deserted in front of me as I walked toward the hotel. Only the odd night owl was about. The hotel was in one of the side streets off the square. I’d booked the room from the taxi. It felt strange to be in town in such circumstances. I crossed Torgallmenningen several times a week and had done so nearly all my life—this was my city, it was where I’d grown up and spent my entire working life—but all sense of familiarity and belonging seemed suddenly to have dissolved. I wasn’t supposed to be there, I reasoned, and so I felt detached from it all.
It was as if I’d put my whole life to one side.
As if for one night I was now someone else.
A woman in her twenties was standing behind the reception desk in the lobby and glanced at me as I came in through the door, only then to continue staring at the screen in front of her. I heard the clicking of her keyboard. Her face was pale and rather full, in contrast to her slim figure, formally dressed in a blue jacket, blue skirt and white blouse. Her lips were too red, but her hair was thick and beautiful. It made me want to be her. She looked like she had no problems, and even if she did, they wouldn’t have been anything I couldn’t have solved.
“Kathrine Reinhardsen,” I said. “I phoned just a short time ago and booked a room until tomorrow.”
She looked up and smiled.
“Hi, and welcome,” she said. “I’ve got your key ready for you here. If you’d just like to sign your name?”
She placed a sheet of paper and a pen on the counter, and once I’d signed she handed me the key.
“So, you’ll be on the third floor. The elevator’s over there. Breakfast between seven and ten. OK?”
“Thanks,” I said.
“You’re welcome,” she said. “Goodnight!”
“Goodnight,” I said, and pulled my case behind me to the elevator. The walls inside were mirrors and I stared at the floor as we slid upward.
There were no sounds to be heard from any of the rooms I passed along the carpeted corridor. I unlocked the door at the end and stepped inside. The room was a lot smaller than I’d envisaged when this ridiculous idea had occurred to me.
I felt stupid.
I left the case where it was, unopened in the middle of the floor, and lay down on the bed without removing my coat or shoes.
Now they would all be asleep at home. My family.
And I was lying there.
What should I do?
Go to a bar?
It would only make things worse.
Go for a walk, then?
I stood up, slipped the key card into the inside pocket of my coat and went out again. First down to the ferry terminal, then out in the direction of Nordnes, past the old city gate and up to Klosteret, the old town, the houses there incandescent in the yellow light of the street lamps. There was a chill in the air, it felt uplifting after the long, hot summer. I walked all the way to the park at the far end, sat down on a bench at the point and gazed out at the lights across the fjord.
What a lovely evening it was, I thought to myself. And then I thought of the children and started to cry.
When I stopped, I looked around, feeling suddenly unprotected.
If only I could talk to someone.
There was nothing I couldn’t share with Camilla. But I couldn’t phone her now, not this late. Anyway, I didn’t know what to say. It was nothing.
Sigrid, whom I’d know all my life, was another person I could talk to about anything. Apart from Gaute and our relationship. Her husband, Martin, had become good friends with Gaute, and I didn’t quite trust her not to divulge to him the things we talked about. Or rather, I trusted her, but a person’s loyalty to their partner is so often greater than to their friends.
It was just the way it was.
But when had I last told Gaute anything that no one else knew?
I’d even kept my great crisis from him.
Someone came walking along the path behind me. I turned to look, but there was no danger, it was just an elderly couple with a dog.
I got my phone out and scrolled through my contacts.
Stopping at my mother’s number.
I could phone her late, she wouldn’t mind.
But did I want to?
I put my hands in my coat pockets, pressed my arms close to my body.
The darkness in the tall trees around me was dense and seemed almost to be a part of them as they loomed there, black against the sky.
When I was a child, I’d known every tree in the neighborhood. In my mind they were individuals, each with their own particular characteristics, though the thought hadn’t ever been so explicit. They bent down to me, and like feelings seeped into my consciousness. Birch, oak, spruce, pine, aspen, ash, rowan.
My father had been like a tree. Wasn’t that what I’d thought when I’d sat on his shoulders so high above the ground with my hands holding on to his head?
I remembered his hands, they were so big. And I remembered his beard. His eyes, the gleam in them. But if I tried to think about him, those images dissolved and I was left with only the vaguest suggestion of him ever having lived.
He existed only at the edgelands of my thoughts now, the habitation of the vague. Suddenly, I saw myself surrounded by great, living creations. Silent and inscrutable, neither hostile nor friendly, and quite without opinion regarding us little people, who always scuttled and scurried about at such a speed that they themselves could not comprehend it, nor even did they care. And they were living creations, not just things, as people so often considered them.
As a teenager I’d read an absolutely staggering poem in The Book of Hours by Rilke. My God is dark, it said,
and like a webbing made
of a hundred roots that drink in silence.
I know that my trunk rose from his warmth, but that’s all,
because my branches hardly move at all
near the ground, and just wave a little in the wind.
It was the first time the thought of God transcended me and what was mine.
The trees were living creations, and God was their creator.
The darkness, the earth, the moisture: this was the God of the trees.
What was my God?
What was my warmth?
I’d said that I was a Christian long before I became one. Someone in my class had been a member of Ten Sing and persuaded me to go along with them one night. I knew my mother would dislike the idea intensely, and perhaps that was part of the reason I went, because it was something forbidden that wasn’t actually illegal. I was thirteen years old, with a right to my own life. That was basically how I felt. When I was sixteen, I left Ten Sing and joined a church choir, with whom a year later I attended a choir festival in Kraków, Poland. We sang in a magnificent old church, and as our voices filled the room I heard them as if from without, at the same time as I was a part of them, and my soul filled with an intense joy and delight, stronger and purer than anything I had ever known, and in the same way, both from without and within. I think it had to do with being alive, the feeling of being alive, but also of belonging, of being a part of some greater connection, and it was in that connection all meaning resided.
These had been the feelings of a seventeen-year-old. But they were still valid now, more than twenty years on, they were still true, regardless of how much experience and knowledge I’d gained. Meaning wasn’t in me, meaning wasn’t in another, meaning arose in the encounter between us. Singing in the choir was the simplest example of that. And the teachings of Christ were about practicing it. Everyone was equal, everyone was a part of something greater, and in that greater thing was God. The radicality of that idea could not be overestimated. But in order to properly understand it one had to peel away two thousand years of theological history and look at what Jesus actually did and said. He had sought those who were marginalized, those without a voice, the oppressed. In one of the few passages of the Bible where a woman is heard, namely in the Magnificat, Mary says of the Lord that He put down the mighty from their seat, and exalted the humble and meek; that He filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich empty away. The Lord she exalted was subversive. And the child to which she gave birth, Jesus, later went among the ostracized and the unliked, the sick and the poor, lepers and whores. His message, that we are all of us equal before God, cannot live as theory, for the majority are excluded from theory, which was precisely why Jesus went among the disenfranchised rather than aspiring to join the Scribes, or the theorists, as I tended to refer to them. There was a chasm between the theorists and the ordinary run of people, and there was a chasm between the ordinary run of people and those at the bottom of society. The teachings of Christ were practical: he did not write about those he went among, did not write even for their sake, but went among them. Talked with them, listened to them, included them. All were equal, all were a part of something greater, and in that greater thing was God. And in God grace, in God forgiveness, in God the fullness of being.
That was my warmth.
But what good was it when I couldn’t even sustain my relationship to the people who were closest to me in my life?
I pictured myself arriving home, pecking Gaute on the lips, bending down to hug Peter and Marie, finding their presents in my suitcase, catching Gaute’s smiling look over the top of their heads as they unwrapped them, smiling myself.
It was theater.
It wasn’t me.
But who was I then?
What did I want, if things could be exactly as I wanted them?
Did I want to install myself in a little post-divorce apartment, with the children every other week?
I turned the phone so the screen lit up, and saw that it was just past midnight. I found Mum’s number and tapped it.
It rang for a while.
“Is there something wrong?” her voice said when at last she answered. “Are the children all right?”
“Hi, Mum,” I said. “Everything’s fine. I’m sorry to be calling so late. Were you asleep?”
“Yes, I was asleep. What time is it? It’s the middle of the night, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said, and wished I hadn’t phoned. I didn’t know what to say, or if there was anything to say at all.
“What is it, then?”
“Nothing, really,” I said. “Or rather . . .”
“Or rather what?”
I took a deep breath.
“I didn’t go home tonight. I went to a hotel.”
“What for?” she said. Her voice was so objective and unsentimental that I had to resist the feeling of being rejected. It was the way she was. It had nothing to do with me.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I honestly don’t know.”
“Are you crying?” she said.
I didn’t answer.
“Are you and Gaute having problems?”
I wiped my tears with the sleeve of my coat.
“In a way, I suppose,” I said.
“Do you want to divorce him?”
I didn’t answer.
There was a silence at the other end too.
“I don’t know, Mum,” I said. “I think so. Or no. I can’t really, can I?”
I began to sob.
“Where are you now?” she said.
“Nordnes.”
“Can we meet up tomorrow and talk about it properly?” she said.
“Yes,” I said.
“How about lunch? Half past twelve at Kafé Oscar?”
“All right,” I said.
“You get yourself a good night’s sleep,” she said. “It’ll all look different in the morning, and then we’ll have lunch.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“That’s all right,” she said. “Goodnight.”
“Goodnight,” I said, but she’d already hung up.
As I slept, the nausea stirred and grew inside me. I sensed it in my dream, imposing itself, though without my waking. For what felt like a long time, it was a place from which I tried to escape, but it kept drawing me toward it. It had no name, and was nowhere in particular, just a place from which I wanted away. Gradually, thoughts began to interject—I feel sick, why do I feel sick?—and I drifted in and out between them, thoughts that were neither mine nor not mine, until at last I identified them as my own, and opened my eyes.
It felt as if the slightest movement would cause me to vomit.
For a while, I lay quite still in the hope that it would pass. But then suddenly it all welled up, I jumped out of bed, dashed for the bathroom, knelt in front of the toilet bowl and let everything spew out.
Afterward, I brushed my teeth, and stood under the shower for some time before getting dressed and sitting down on the edge of the bed to text Gaute and tell him everything was all right, and to remind him about what the children needed to take with them to school, and the bill he had to remember to pay.
Mum was right: it all looked different now.
I sent her a text to say that the conflict had resolved itself, apologized for having phoned her so late, and told her we no longer needed to meet up for lunch.
I don’t believe it, not for a minute, she wrote back. Besides, what if I wanted to see you? Half past twelve.
She was such an annoying person. Not least because when she thought she could see through a matter, it very often turned out that she was right. I’d always had to contend with it. Struggled to hold on to my illusions, even though I knew they were illusions, just because it was she who pointed her finger at them.
As you wish, I replied. Looking forward to seeing you!
I deleted the exclamation mark, finding it made the message come across too chirpy. Without, it was measured, ominous almost, but at least closer to the way I felt.
As you wish. Looking forward to seeing you.
She didn’t reply, and I called Karin to tell her I wasn’t feeling well and wouldn’t be in today, but that I would try to get some work done at home. It wasn’t untrue, I’d just been sick after all, and for the next two hours I sat at the little desk in my room, replying to e-mails, running through the funeral order for the day after, and continuing my discussion with Erlend about translating Leviticus, and my ongoing quarrel about Ezekiel with Harald, whom I so disagreed with on some points that our correspondence bordered on conflict.
At twelve o’clock I checked out and went into the street with my case trundling behind me. The sky was overcast, though thinly so, the clouds as white as milk, the air warm and muggy. The buildings, which in rain appeared so gray and drab, now stood out sharply in their every nuance. I looked up at the sky. Two birds were circling high above, their wings stretched out and unmoving. They were birds of prey, though I couldn’t tell what kind. Hawks, perhaps. Eagles wouldn’t be flying over the city, would they?
Emerging onto Torgallmenningen, which was busy with people, I made my way to the bookshop on the corner. I didn’t want to sit and wait for her, but would rather be a few minutes late.
Outside the bookshop some workmen were standing smoking around a hole that had been cordoned off. Their orange overalls reflected the light in a way I found odd, it made them look like they were floating, as if the men wearing them were simply stuck inside.
Entering the shop, I looked first at the shelf of new publications, before going over to the small philosophy section. Sometimes, though not often, they would have something interesting there.
I pulled out a book with what I thought was a promising title. Experience and Nature, it was called, by John Dewey. I knew of it, but had never read it.
I opened it to a random page.
We have substituted sophistication for superstition, it said. But the sophistication is often so irrational and as much at the mercy of words as the superstition it replaces.
I turned the book in my hand and read the blurb on the back. The work had originally been published in 1925. Before the world began, in other words.
What did he mean by sophistication?
I took the book with me to the till and paid for it with my card, dropped it into my bag and went out. I still had ten minutes, and the cafe was only a five-minute walk, but it no longer felt important to be late. It was a silly reflex from my teenage years.
Mum appeared at the far end of the little square just as I sat down at one of the tables outside the cafe. I could pick her out in any crowd and at almost any distance. She was thin and straight-backed, which made her seem taller than she actually was, but most characteristic was the way she held her head, always slightly tipped back, which lent her an air of superiority or arrogance, but also gave a faintly birdlike impression. Her hair was red, her skin pale and freckled, and when I was a child I’d thought that everyone with red hair and freckles belonged to their own race, and more than anything else had wished that I’d been like that too, because it would have meant that she and I, and not just she and Eirik, belonged together.
As she came closer, I saw she was wearing her favorite colors. Light brown cords, white blouse, dark green jacket.
“Hello, Mum,” I said, and gave her a hug. “You’re looking good.”
“Thank you,” she said. “Are we sitting out?”
“I thought we might. It’s certainly warm enough?”
She nodded and sat down.
Yellowed leaves lay on the ground under the tree next to our table, and I looked up. It was a chestnut tree and seemed to be blighted by something, its foliage sparse, the leaves small and withered. So it wasn’t that the autumn had come, it was just disease.
Mum caught the attention of a waiter who was clearing one of the tables by the wall.
“How are you?” I asked her.
She looked at me.
“I thought I was supposed to be asking you,” she said. “But I’m fine. Everyone’s back at work after the holiday. Mikael’s still away at the summer house.”
Behind her, the waiter went inside with a tray full of cups and glasses.
“What’s he doing there now?” I said.
“Fishing a lot, and reading.”
“Enjoying retirement?”
“He hates it. That’s why he’s still there, I think, so he can pretend it’s just a holiday. But he likes to read. He’s got the time for it now.”
She turned round.
“Where did he get to?”
“He went in with a tray. I’m sure he’ll be back again in a minute.”
Mum looked out over the square that narrowed into a street with shops on both sides. She looked at the stone church, so solid and substantial in between all the white-painted wooden buildings. The gray-stone walls had a touch of green in them. As if the church stood in a forest, I thought, and imagined it among towering spruce and toppled tree trunks, overgrown boulders, a mossy rock-side, some hills in the distance.
Christ, wandering the forests.
Mum put down the bag she’d been holding in her lap on the chair beside her.
“So, Kathrine,” she said, and looked at me. “You were in a bit of a state last night.”
“Yes, I was,” I said. “But it’s all right now. I’m sorry to have bothered you about it. I shouldn’t have.”
“You stayed the night at a hotel in your own city?”
“Yes.”
“But why?”
I didn’t know what to say, and looked down. I didn’t want to give her anything to go on. At the same time, I wanted her to know.
I looked up at her and smiled.
“I honestly don’t know,” I said. “It was an impulse.”
The waiter appeared, wiping both hands on his apron as he came down the steps before taking two menus from an empty table and coming over to ours.
“What’s the soup of the day?” Mum asked.
“French onion,” he said.
“It was French onion the last time I was here, too,” she said.
“Did you like it?” he inquired.
“Yes, as a matter of fact I did,” she replied. “But that’s beside the point. If you have the same soup every day, you can hardly call it soup of the day. Soup of the day means it’s a different one every day.”
The waiter smiled without speaking.
“I’ll have the quiche with feta,” I said.
“Caesar salad for me,” Mum said.
We sat for a moment in silence after he’d gone. A bit farther away, two sparrows landed on a table that hadn’t been cleared. They hopped about on their matchstick legs, pecking and pulling at some half-eaten pieces of bread.
“Has Gaute been unfaithful?” Mum asked.
“God, no!” I said.
“Have you?”
“Mum. You know me better than that.”
“What do I know?” she said. “You phone me up crying in the middle of the night and say you don’t know if you want to get divorced or not. The next day you’re saying it was nothing and everything’s fine. What am I supposed to think?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Things aren’t well between you and Gaute,” she said.
“They’re not exactly bad though either,” I said. “There’s just nothing there, that’s all. No excitement, no curiosity. We’ve got nothing in common. The only thing we can talk about is the children. Yesterday was the first time I understood I don’t want to live like that. I was sitting on the plane and realized I didn’t want to go home.”
“Not many marriages are exciting after twenty years.”
“I know that,” I said. “And I’m sure I’ll stick it out.”
Above us, something came sweeping through the air. I looked up in time to see it come hurtling, closer and closer, bigger and bigger. It was a large bird of prey. It swooped down on the neighboring table and snatched one of the sparrows, beat its wings a few times and then rose above the rooftops before disappearing from view.
“Did you see that?” I said, astonished. “In the middle of the city?”
Mum nodded.
“What a remarkable thing,” she said.
“What was it? A sea eagle?”
“I wouldn’t know. A hawk, I should think. Mikael would know.”
“I can’t believe it,” I said. “It just came down and took that little bird.”
Mum lit one of her cigarettes, cupping her elbow in her other hand, the way she always did when she smoked.
“What if you found yourself a bit on the side?” she said.
I stared at her.
“Is that supposed to be a joke?”
“No, not at all. It would be a practical solution to what is clearly a very palpable problem. You lack excitement and someone to share the things that interest you. And you wouldn’t have to leave your family. It stands to reason.”
“I can’t believe you’re even suggesting this,” I said.
“Yes, you can. But it’s your life.”
“I’m a priest.”
“It would have to be kept secret, priest or not,” she said.
“No, you don’t understand. It’s not that someone could find out. It’s the fact that it’s immoral. In itself. It’s the fact that it’s wrong. In itself.”
Mum nodded.
“I hear you,” she said, and placed her hand on mine for a second.
Abruptly, tears came to my eyes and I had to look away. Fortunately, the waiter appeared at that same moment, carrying a full tray, and the seconds that followed were all about the food he placed on the table in front of us.
She’d noticed, of course. But she pretended she hadn’t, and I was thankful for it.
The house was empty when I got home. I unpacked my case, put some washing in the machine and emptied the dishwasher while I waited for them to return. Peter and Marie attended the same school just down the road and went there and back on their own.
I sat down on the sofa with a cup of coffee and stared at the uniform suburban landscape outside the window.
Mum would say morals were relative rather than absolute, and socially and historically determined. Nothing was absolute to her, aside perhaps from her belief in rationalism.
There was something cold about her. Always had been.
How many times had I wondered what it was like to be her, what went on inside her mind?
And how many times had I wondered what she thought of me?
I got up and went into the study, standing in front of the window to see if the children were on their way.
Instead it was Gaute I saw, coming up the hill in his red Polo. I stepped back into the room, put my mug down and went upstairs to the bathroom to run a bath. I didn’t feel like encountering him on my own, without the children there.
And yet, as I pulled my top over my head, I changed my mind. Why should I have to avoid him? I had nothing to hide. I’d done nothing wrong.
I turned the tap off, ran the brush through my hair and went downstairs to meet him.
He came into the kitchen from the hallway with his brown leather briefcase in his hand.
“Hi,” I said. “Do you want some coffee? I just made some.”
“Are you home already?” he said. “I thought you were at work?”
“I missed you all,” I said.
He came up and gave me a peck on the cheek.
“Coffee, then?” I said.
“Yes, please,” he said, but remained where he was. I was about to turn when he said: “Can I ask you something?”
“Of course,” I said.
“Have you been unfaithful?”
My face immediately felt warm. But my eyes didn’t move from his.
“I can’t believe you’re asking me that,” I said. “Don’t you trust me anymore?”
“Have you?” he said.
“I won’t even answer that.”
He sighed.
“So you have, then,” he said.
I didn’t reply, but went over to the side, took two mugs out of the cupboard and poured us some coffee while he sat down on the sofa, leaned back and stared up at the ceiling.
“Why don’t you trust me?” I said, putting his mug down on the table in front of him.
He answered without looking at me.
“You just told me you’ve been unfaithful,” he said.
“No, I didn’t,” I said. “I told you I wasn’t going to answer you.”
“And why wouldn’t you want to do that? No, I’ll tell you why. Because you won’t lie.”
“I want you to trust me,” I said. “You think badly of me. That’s up to you. But don’t come to me expecting to have your paranoid suspicions confirmed or dispelled.”
“You blushed when I asked you.”
“I was angry.”
“So why can’t you just tell me you haven’t been unfaithful?”
“This is an all-time low, Gaute.”
“Is it?”
“Yes.”
“What hotel did you stay at?”
“What does it matter?”
“So you won’t tell me that either?”
“No, not when you’re asking like that.”
The front door opened, followed by the bustle of the children coming into the hall.
“There, I told you,” I heard Marie say. “Mummy is home.”
I went out into the hall.
“Mummy!” Marie exclaimed, and threw her arms around me.
“Hello, dear,” I said, and kissed her on the head. “Hello, Peter, have you got a hug for me too?”
“I suppose so,” he said. Marie let go and I put my arms around him.
“Have you been all right?” I asked them.
“Yes,” said Marie, already on her way into the living room.
“And you, Peter?”
“OK,” he said.
While Gaute made dinner and Peter sat doing homework at the kitchen table, I gave Marie a bath. After the holiday in Crete she kept pestering us to take her to the pool, and when we couldn’t go the bath became her alternative to quench her unstoppable desire to be immersed in water. She pulled off her clothes and climbed in before the water had even covered the bottom. I sat on the edge and handed her various toys and other things to play with. At one point she lay facedown with a diving mask on, her breathing hollow and alien-sounding, then sat up and played with her plastic dogs, before putting on her goggles and pretending to swim lengths of the tub that was barely longer than herself.
She was fun to be with, and I gave not a single thought to the argument with Gaute while we were together there.
Washed and dried, and wrapped in a big towel, she marched off into her room, where with a little help she chose some clothes to put on and got dressed.
Downstairs smelled of chops and onion being fried. On any other day, I’d have asked Gaute if we could dispense with the thick gravy he liked the chops to be served in, the way his mother had always done when he’d been growing up. But just one look at him as he stood there whisking the gravy in the pan was enough for me to see that he’d retreated into himself, and when he was in that sort of mood even the most innocent of comments would be construed as a provocation.
I didn’t need this, he could do as he pleased.
Peter sat reading, his head propped in his hand, elbow against the table next to his book, pen at the ready in his other hand. Gaute, who had gone over to get something from the cupboard, tousled his hair as he came back. Peter looked up and smiled at him.
“What’s that you’re reading?” I asked, sitting down beside him.
“Science,” he said.
“About what?”
“We’ve got to find information about an animal that’s extinct, and then write about the way it lived.”
“That sounds interesting!” I said. “What animal have you chosen?”
“I don’t know yet. That’s why I’m reading this book.”
“Dinosaurs?”
He sighed.
“Mum, that’s too obvious,” he said.
“My clever boy,” I said, glancing at Gaute as I got up.
“When’s dinner ready?”
“In ten minutes,” he said.
“I’ll set the table, then,” I said.
“Yes, do that,” he said.
Gaute didn’t speak as we sat eating. I tried to lighten the mood, asking Peter about various things, to which, bent over his food, he replied only grudgingly. Marie, on the other hand, was talkative as ever.
“Can I eat the white bit?” she said, poking her knife at the thick wedge of fat on the outside of her chop.
“You can eat it, yes,” I said. “But I don’t think you’ll like it much. Do you want to taste?”
She shook her head.
“Can’t you cut it off?”
I leaned across and cut away the fat.
“I don’t want it on my plate,” she said. “It looks like an animal.”
“That’s because it is an animal,” said Peter.
“Leave it on the side,” I said.
“No!” she said.
“It’s your food,” I said. “I’ve got mine.”
“I’ll have it,” said Gaute, and lifted it onto his own plate.
I looked at him, but he didn’t return my gaze.
Fine, I thought. If you can’t be bothered, I can’t either.
We ate the rest of the meal in silence. Afterward, Peter and Marie disappeared into their rooms while I took care of the washing-up and Gaute sat down on the sofa to read the paper. Then, with the dishwasher started and the saucepans and frying pan scrubbed and put away, I made myself a coffee and went into the study.
I skimmed the book I’d bought without being able to concentrate or muster much of an interest.
Once during the time we’d been married, Gaute had fallen in love with someone else. He never said anything about it, but I knew him and realized what was happening. He’d had a student teacher in his class for a few weeks. He talked about her the first few days, what she was like, what she was good at, and less good at, the things she did. Then he stopped talking about her. He started switching his phone off when he came home, and something radiated in him. It was so strong he was unable to conceal it no matter how hard he tried, all of a sudden he was bubbling with excitement even when he was with the children, with me.
I said nothing. If he wanted to give up what we had together for a twenty-five-year-old, then he wasn’t worth sharing my life with, it was as simple as that.
Then, just as quickly as it had started, it was gone. And as obvious as his earlier radiance was now pain, and it too could not be concealed from me.
But he didn’t know that I knew. He thought it was his own little secret.
The TV came on in the living room.
I pulled my Mac out of my bag, put it down on the desk and plugged it in at the socket.
Erlend had sent a new draft the evening before, so I noted, from the beginning of the Book of Leviticus. I knew it wouldn’t engage me at that moment, but still I opened the document and glanced at what he’d done.
No, I wasn’t going to sit here pretending.
Like a prisoner in my house.
I got up and left the room. As I passed the sofa where Marie sat snuggled in the crook of Gaute’s arm watching TV, I told them I was going for a walk.
“At this hour?” Gaute said. “Where are you going?”
“No idea,” I said. “Just out.”
“As long as you’re back before their bedtime,” he said.
“You’re here, aren’t you?” I said.
He didn’t answer and I closed the hall door behind me, put my shoes on and a lightweight jacket, got in the car, started the engine and drove through the estate to the main road. I didn’t know where I was going, turning right, turning left impulsively in the general direction of town. At Solheimsviken I made a left and carried on toward Laksevåg. Reaching the roundabout, where there was a choice between the tunnel and the bridge, I chose the tunnel, and as I came out the other side I decided to drive on to the sea.
The roads narrowed increasingly, the vegetation becoming more and more sparse, dwindling eventually to little more than grass and moss in an undulating landscape, until at last the sea was in front of me, dark and vast.
I parked on a pier, turning off the engine but leaving the headlights on, each beam opening a tunnel in the darkness which the rain lacerated with hundreds of scratches. The sound of the waves as they battered the shore was not a rush, but a roar. It was as if something were coming apart out there.
I folded my hands together and lowered my head.
“Lord God, I am in distress,” I said. “Help me. Help me now.”
Gaute was asleep, or pretending to be, when I got home. I undressed as quietly as I could, shielding my phone so the light of the display wouldn’t wake him as I set the alarm.
I was getting up at five.
When it rang, it felt like only a moment later. I resisted the temptation to snooze and got up, taking my clothes with me in case I woke him while I got dressed. I would have preferred to go straight to the office and begin the day’s work there, but I couldn’t leave the children to Gaute again, so I went to the kitchen and got some coffee on the go.
The sky was competely blue, not a cloud in sight, and sunlight flooded across the floor. The birds were singing and chirping outside the window. I opened it. An odd boot lay in the grass under the badminton net, next to it a discarded plastic bowl from the weekend before last when my mother, my brother and his family had been here and we’d sat outside with ice cream and cake.
The light seemed not to fill the garden, I thought, but rather the other way round: it emptied it—of darkness, but also of meaning.
The emptiness of the world.
But it was the wrong way of looking at it, I knew that. Meaning was something that came from us. Meaning was something we gave to the world, not something we took from it.
I put the dish that had been left in the sink in the dishwasher, wiped the work surface, draped the cloth over the tap. I poured some coffee into a mug and took it with me into the study, sat down and opened the document from Erlend again.
I read through the text as slowly as I could.
If your offering is a goat, you shall show it to the face of the Lord and lay your hand on its head; it shall be slaughtered before the tent of meeting; and the sons of Aaron shall dash its blood against all sides of the altar. You shall present as your offering from it, as an offering by fire to the Lord, the fat that covers the entrails; the two kidneys with the fat that is on them at the loins, and the appendage of the liver, which you shall remove with the kidneys. Then the priest shall turn these into smoke on the altar as a food-offering by fire for an aroma that is pleasing to the Lord. All fat is the Lord’s. It shall be a perpetual statute throughout your generations, in all your settlements: you must not eat any fat or any blood.
I took a slurp of my coffee and read it quite as slowly again.
I didn’t care for the wording “the face of the Lord,” but we’d been instructed to use it, it belonged to the modernization, so there was nothing to be done. But “the presence of the Lord,” as it had been before, was better; “the face of the Lord” made it so human. On the other hand, it was a reasonable interpretation of the Hebrew 
, or lifney, for while strictly that meant “before,” it came from the same root as “face”—panav—and there were certainly plenty of humanizing details in the rest of the text, not least the smell of the burned offering being pleasing to the Lord. So in a way, “face” was probably better than “presence,” precisely because it was more human, whereas “presence” was better in a different way, being older.
But a pleasing aroma?
Wasn’t that a bit too refined and cultivated?
It wasn’t my job to correct the language, but the language was almost impossible to separate from the theology, so I did it all the time.
for a smell that is pleasing to the Lord, I wrote down, just to see what it looked like.
It wasn’t much better, but still I noted it for Erlend’s sake. He could not be reminded enough that the language of these texts was simple and concrete with barely any abstractions at all, the references were to bodies and actions, even in Leviticus with its laws and commands. Entrails, kidneys, loins, fat and blood: this was the law.
No wonder there were Gnostic sects that had believed the Lord in these texts was in fact the Devil. That the earth was made by the Devil, and that it was he we worshipped when we worshipped God.
Imagine if I were to preach such a thing.
I smiled.
Even today it would be the stuff of headlines.
There were many other interesting matters I could not take up or discuss, of course. The church and congregation was not the place to try out thoughts and ideas, to alter existing conceptions by questioning new life into them. What was important about faith was that it was true, and what was important about truth was that it eliminated all other possibilities. Truth was absolute. And it had to be too, I often thought, with life being so brittle. At the same time, the Bible was so complex, contained so many conflicting voices and models of understanding that theology in the main had been all about bringing them together as an expression of one and the same thing, and the only possible way to do that was by suppressing and hushing up, ignoring and letting be. One of the most familiar passages in the Old Testament was the story of Abraham being commanded to offer his son Isaac to the Lord, a sacrifice Abraham was prepared to make without asking questions, and indeed he would certainly have done so had the Lord not intervened and stopped him, directing him to sacrifice a lamb instead. Less familiar, but also related, was the Old Testament story of Jephthah, who swore an oath to the Lord, saying that if he succeeded in defeating the Ammonites in battle he would offer to the Lord the first person he met on his return. And Jephthah duly defeated the Ammonites, and conquered twenty cities, and when he returned home the first person he met was his own daughter, who came from the doors of his house to greet and celebrate him. She was his only child. He tore his clothes in despair and told her he had given a promise to the Lord which he could not break. And she said to him, Father, if you have given your oath to the Lord, then do with me according to its word. But allow me one thing: let me be alone for two months so that I may go up and down on the mountains and weep for my virginity, I and my companions. And when the two months expired, Jephthah offered her to the Lord, and the Lord did not intervene to stop him as He had done when Abraham had bound his son for the offering.
This was a story that could not be held up in the work of any priest. Had I been a theologist, in the employment of that university department, I could have written about it and brought it up in my teaching, but I wasn’t. No one wanted a priest who would preach on the religion’s female offering. I didn’t want to be that kind of priest, either. If there was such a thing as feminist theology, it had to unfold itself in practice, not in theory. In encounters with people, not in the sermon, not in ideas, but in goodwill and benevolence between people. We had to listen, ask, empathize, accommodate. For it was there, in the spaces between us, that God was to be found. That was the message of Jesus. In the eyes of God we are all equal.
There were a lot of things I didn’t believe in. But I believed in that.
That was the core.
Or rather, not the core, I thought, swallowing another mouthful of my coffee, which had now gone cold. A core is something solid and unyielding.
This was something fluid, something in constant flux.
Or rather, not in flux exactly, because it remained the same albeit in ever shifting forms, among ever shifting constellations of people.
I’d been staring out of the window for some time without looking at the view. Now, what I saw seemed to suddenly materialize and come into being. Dry lawns, white wooden fences, fruit trees, outer walls, all drenched in sunlight.
Was it really the case that colors did not exist on their own, but were constructed in the brain?
A cat appeared down by the fence. It sauntered onto the lawn, lay down and lazed in the sun.
Upstairs, the shower was turned on.
Was that the time already?
I sent my e-mail off to Erlend, opened another document and began to type what I was going to say at the funeral. A bit later, I heard Gaute come down the stairs. I knew that he would sit on one of the bar stools at the kitchen island with a bowl of Special K while checking the news on his phone, and then have a cup of coffee. In the half-hour that followed he would prepare his day at the desk in the living room, before the children woke and took up the next hour until it was time to go to school.
I couldn’t avoid him for the rest of my life, and I couldn’t disappear for another evening either, so when the children had gone to bed either conflict or reconciliation was inevitable.
At eight o’clock I went upstairs to their rooms and woke them up. Marie was in good cheer from the word go, up and dressed in no time. Peter was reluctant and difficult to rouse.
Did he pick up on the ill feeling between us?
Of course he did.
But was it sufficient to get to him like that?
“Peter, my big boy, you’re going to be late,” I said, returning to his room and finding him still not up. “You’ve time for breakfast, but you must get up now.”
He lay with his eyes closed.
“He’s asleep,” I said, as if to myself. “I wonder how I can wake him. Or perhaps he can sleepwalk?”
“Mm,” he said.
I took hold of his hands and pulled him slowly upright.
“That’s amazing,” I said.
He put his feet on the floor and stood up, still with his eyes closed, and stretched his arms out in front of him.
“Are you asleep, Peter?” I said.
“Mm,” he said.
“I wonder if he can get dressed in his sleep too?”
Five minutes later he was seated at the table eating his cornflakes with his sister. Perhaps I was too sensitive to his moods, I thought, and leaned in over him, putting my cheek to his.
“Good morning, grumpy guts,” I said. “Are you awake now?”
“Mm,” he said, nodding.
“I want a hug as well!” said Marie.
I hugged her, and then sat down opposite them.
“Why isn’t Daddy here?” said Marie.
“He’s got some work to do,” I said.
“He works before working at work,” said Peter.
Marie laughed.
The little loves, I thought as they went down the drive with their school rucksacks on their backs and I stood in the doorway waving. They’ll be fine.
Gaute, who I’d barely seen that morning, left shortly after. We hadn’t exchanged a word, but at least he said good-bye when he went.
The only thing in my diary for that day was the funeral service beginning at eleven o’clock, which I’d already prepared, but still I drove off to the church as soon as Gaute had left. I liked being there, in the church itself, and in my little office in the adjoining building.
Another lovely day by the looks of it, I thought as I got out of the car. Everything was still and the air already so warm that in some places it was actually visible, shimmering little columns above the gravel.
But the church, with its thick white walls, looked almost wintry, even in the sunshine.
I walked past it and went into the annex, where first I knocked on Karin’s door. She looked up with a smile as I went in. She asked about the seminar, and I’d just started telling her about it when a car pulled up at the rear of the church. That will be the undertakers, I thought, glancing at the time. It was hardly even ten o’clock yet.
“I’ll go out and speak to them,” I said. “Looks like there’ll be no mourners.”
“How awful,” said Karin. “Man or woman?”
“A man.”
“Elderly, was he?”
“In his sixties,” I said.
“Ah,” she said. “I’m not sure how you cope, surrounded by all that grief.”
“There’s always a light,” I said, smiled and left her again.
The doors of the side entrance were open. Two men from the funeral directors’ stood bent over the open coffin. I’d seen both of them before, a number of times, but I couldn’t remember their names.
“Hello,” I said.
They straightened up and nodded in reply.
One of them was young, no more than in his early thirties. He had a beard and his hair was gathered in a ponytail, but his informal appearance was at least partly compensated for by the white shirt and black suit. The other man was around sixty, with a large head and a ponderous-looking face. In terms of age, they could have been father and son, but were of such different builds they probably weren’t.
“Did you find any more information on him?” the older one said.
“I’m afraid not,” I said. “All we have is his date and place of birth. That, and his address. How about you?”
“Nothing,” the young one said. “Not a trace. No relatives, no friends.”
“Workmates, colleagues?”
“No luck there, either. He had his own firm, apparently, though what he actually did seems a bit of a mystery, too.”
“There’s nothing sadder, is there?” I said. “When there’s no one to mourn the deceased, I mean. Will you stay for the service?”
They nodded, and I looked down into the coffin.
At once, it felt as if the blood drained from my head.
I knew that face.
It was the man from the elevator. The man who had pestered me in the arrivals hall.
But it was impossible.
It was impossible.
The death had been registered ten days ago. The funeral was booked a week ago.
“Are you all right?” the young undertaker said.
“Do you know him?” the older one said.
“No,” I said. “I don’t know him.”