The morning did not begin well. I hadn’t gone to bed until nearly four and having forgotten to draw the blind I woke up as soon as the first sunlight flooded the room somewhere around half past six. There was no way I could fall asleep again, I knew that, but I tried nonetheless, for few things are worse than those pointless hours in the morning when you haven’t had enough sleep to be able to concentrate—and can no longer, as I could no longer, have a drink or two to help get you going.
Or rather, I could, I thought to myself, tossing and turning under the covers in the first warmth of day. The restriction was self-imposed, which meant I could lift it myself at any time.
Why were there two of me? One who said no, and one who egged me on. One who wanted to, and one who did not. How much easier human life would be if inner agreement had been our default setting.
And then everything that had happened the evening and night before came crashing down on me.
The new star.
Was it still there?
I got up and went out onto the veranda.
The star was still shining in the north. Even then, in the morning, with the sun in the sky.
Clearly, it was strong. Or close.
A morning star.
I am the bright Morning Star, Jesus said.
But in Isaiah the Morning Star was the Devil.
Wasn’t that right?
I’d have to check.
I stood with my hands on the rail, angled forward as I looked out over the sea. It was dark blue and so still that its surface didn’t appear to be fluid at all, but comprised of something firm. A kind of blue glass in which the sun glittered and gleamed.
Some gulls soared in the air above me. They seemed almost to be enjoying the warmth and stillness.
A stillness so seldom here.
I ran a hand through my hair and realized how greasy it was.
It was too hot for a shower, but maybe a swim instead?
I went inside and took a towel from the cupboard in the bedroom, put a pair of trunks on and a shirt, slipped my feet into my sandals and went back out again, pausing at the desk in the living room where the typewriter was, pulling out the sheet of paper I’d been typing on when Arne rang, putting it on top of the pile next to the typewriter without reading what I’d written.
The star was obviously a sign.
But of what?
It would become apparent soon enough.
But where, and to whom?
I followed the path below the house to the smooth, flat rock at the shore. I’d swum from the same place ever since I was a child, dark, gently sloping rock sheltered by a sheer outcrop with a deep pool at its foot. It felt like the spot belonged to the property, and it always annoyed me if other people used it, though of course I never said anything, we didn’t own the rocks.
But I was alone.
The water looked inviting with its unruffled, deep blue surface, but I wasn’t twelve years old anymore, I knew that the first seconds of immersion would be an icy shock regardless of how warm the water actually was, so I took off my shirt and sandals and sat down first to gather courage and soak up some sun.
There had been something rather nightmarish about the evening before, I thought, as I stared at the hazy horizon. Arne’s bloodied face on the beach, the car crashed among the trees, the enormous star in the sky. The heat in the dark of night, the badger inside the house, the cat with its head torn off. And Tove, her manic demeanor.
It all seemed such a far cry from the peacefulness that surrounded me as I sat there on the rock.
It was all their own doing, and yet they acted like it was something that just happened to them, like it was the same for everyone.
I wondered for a second whether I should look in on them later, but dismissed the idea almost immediately. I liked talking to Arne, so it wasn’t that, it just seemed to come with a price I wasn’t ready to pay for the moment. It was impossible to be in that house without it leaving a mark in some way, as if when I left bits of their chaos would be stuck to me and I always had to struggle to get rid of them again. They were a family in need, only they didn’t realize it.
How stupid to accept those beers.
I needed to stay well away.
Even if it had only been a couple of beers and I’d been nowhere near drunk, it was the contact with it that mattered. It being so near to me the whole time.
Why was it so damn hard to stick to a decision?
I got to my feet and clambered up the rock, stood on the edge, raised my arms above my head and dived in. Cold, briny water engulfed my warm skin. I opened my eyes to a swirling effervescence of tiny bubbles, the bottom shimmering green a couple of meters beneath me. I took a few short strokes, pulling myself downwards before turning, launching myself upward and breaking the surface with a splutter.
It was good.
I climbed up onto the low rock, rubbed myself dry with the towel, put on my shirt without buttoning it, slipped my feet into my sandals and went back up to the house again.
The summer house is all I want, nothing else, I’d told my father when the issue of inheritance had been raised. If I can’t have it, then so be it, but I won’t have anything else.
And so he gave it to me. As well as a generous sum of money transferred to my account every month. I hadn’t asked for that, but I hadn’t turned it down either.
It wasn’t good, taking the money. I assumed he despised me for my lack of pride, the way one hand refused to take what he was offering, while the other accepted it. But he’d never said so, not with a single word.
And I needed the money.
I walked round the side of the house to the end that faced west, to see if the spider had caught anything in its web. I referred to it as the King, an enormous beast of a thing that seemed to have been around for several years. It moved about a bit, spun its webs, hid itself away, first in one place, then another, according to its own unfathomable logic. It had been settled at this side of the house for a couple of months now.
A bumblebee hung suspended in the web. It looked like it was dead, but it was hard to tell. I leaned forward and peered up under the beam, where the King at present resided.
There he was, yes.
Quite unmoving, his legs tucked into his body in the darkness, the intricate structure he’d woven stretched out beneath him.
No way could evolution be blind. No way could something so sophisticated and yet so simple have arisen by chance, no matter how many millions of years chance had at its disposal.
I prodded the bumblebee cautiously with the tip of my finger and watched it sway a couple of times back and forth.
How on earth could a spider manage to eat such a thing?
I went back up onto the veranda, slid the big glass door open, fetched a can of Pepsi Max from the fridge, picked up the novel I was reading, my cigarettes and an ashtray, and sat down in my chair outside.
There still wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and if it hadn’t been for the rocks at the shore and the islets that seemed almost radiantly white in the sunshine, the world would have been completely blue from where I was sitting.
I opened the can and took a slurp, lit a cigarette and tried to read for a bit. I was halfway through Hemingway’s Islands in the Stream, but the Caribbean world in which it was set was impossible to conjure up in the sun-drenched Nordic coastal landscape that surrounded me. I saw pine forest, Scandinavian summer homes and pebbled beaches, not palm trees and colonial mansions. Besides, I was rather too tired to concentrate properly. And the heat was already exasperating, to put it mildly.
A smeigedag, I thought, putting the book down on the table next to me. Wasn’t that what they were called, days like this? Or maybe that wasn’t quite right. The word was unconditionally positive in its associations, used to refer to those long and lazy summer days that miraculously opened up to us after the interminable winter season, but this heat had something sick about it that could only be endured, not enjoyed.
And yet, going by the number of plastic tubs, with and without sails, that had now begun plowing the waters out there (I refused to call such vessels boats), people were somehow doing just that.
The phone rang in the bedroom. I stubbed out my smoke and went inside, bending down to try and see the number on the little display in the bright sunlight that fell into the room.
It was Camilla.
What did she want now?
I waited until it stopped ringing, muted it and dropped it into my shirt pocket, put on a pair of shorts, a straw hat and sunglasses, went out the other side, got on my bike and pedaled off down the narrow gravel track, past the pontoons in the bay and onto the road, which although paved was barely wider than the track.
The hot air rose up in columns between the trees, and the smell of the woods, of bare, dry leaves and sun-baked soil, wafted toward me as I cycled.
Willowherb in the roadside ditches, on the sloping ground that swept toward the water, raspberry bushes clinging to the crash barriers.
She’d called the evening before. I’d answered then. Fool that I was. She told me she was going to Rome and that I’d have to look after Viktor for a week. She was leaving today!
I’d told her I couldn’t, that it was impossible at such short notice.
I’d kept a civil tongue and been quite rational. She was angry. Furious, more accurately.
But it was unreasonable, to say the least.
Why couldn’t you have told me before? I said. It wouldn’t have been a problem then.
But I only got to know today, that’s what I’m saying! she shouted. You never spend time with him. And this is a big chance for me, I can’t possibly say no!
No need to shout, I told her. What about your parents?
My parents are in fucking Thailand!
Your brother, then?
But you’re his dad. For fuck’s sake, Egil!
Can’t you take him with you? I suggested.
But then she hung up.
I missed the boy, of course I did, so it wasn’t that. But he couldn’t just come at the drop of a hat. I had to prepare, get in the right frame of mind. Because when he was here, he took up my whole time. Took up all my space.
I’d reached the foot of the hill leading up toward the woods, and stood up on the pedals.
Bilberry, heather, liverworts and mosses carpeted the ground between the trees. White shimmering trunks of birch could be glimpsed farther within, where the bogland began.
Why wasn’t this good enough? Why wasn’t it sufficient in itself?
Passing through the woods, the air was if anything even hotter, and I felt the sweat trickle down my neck and the length of my spine as I sat down again and pedaled on.
I am here, at this moment in time.
It’s enough.
No smartphone, just a small Nokia, no GPS, no engine, only pedals, wheels, the hot air against my body, the woods.
The last few kilometers were easy, the road either flat or sloping gently away, and after fifteen minutes or so I was at the place where Arne had crashed his car the night before. I wheeled the bike down the path toward the stony beach, lugged it over the rocks and through the trees in the direction of the inlet where I’d moored the boat. It was hard going, boggy areas of blackthorn and thorny rose hip over which the bike had to be lifted before I could carry on were a hindrance, and the low, wind-pressed pines that were more like bushes would have been difficult to negotiate even without a bike. And all because of that idiot Arne, I thought, leaning on the handlebars as I paused for a moment.
In some strange way he seemed to bask in Tove’s madness. It made him important, or so he seemed to believe.
But anxiety is hell. Depression is hell. Psychosis is hell.
The path on which I now stood was dry earth, carpeted with twigs and yellow pine needles, edged with rocks and scrubby vegetation. The sun beat down on it, its golden light shimmering in every detail, as if everything had been accorded its own little halo. I lit a cigarette, noticing a large anthill a bit farther on, in a small glade between low, crooked pines.
I pulled the branches aside and went up to it, crouching down with my cigarette in my hand. The mound was crawling with ants, its whole surface seemed to be in motion, as if it were alive, a creature in its own right. A moment later, the first ant crawled onto my foot. Brown and black in color, its tiny body perfectly articulated, it proceeded fearlessly across the strap of my sandal. More followed, and I wondered what they would do. Bite me to chase me away? Or did they think I was a kind of tree they should climb?
I brushed them away carefully, straightened up and turned to go back.
But there was something strange, glistening in the sunlight by one of the tree trunks beside me. At first I thought it was a coat, half rotted and shapeless, but when I stepped toward it and bent forward to investigate I saw that it was a skin of some kind that had been sloughed off. Dry and translucent, like the snakeskins you could sometimes find in the woods in spring, only this wasn’t from a snake, it was far too big.
I gripped it tentatively between my thumb and index finger and pulled it toward me.
Christ almighty.
It was as long as a child was tall.
What kind of animal could it have belonged to?
Thin, dry and scaly.
I drew myself upright and looked around me.
Everything was still, not even the sea made a sound.
And then: the drone of an outboard at the top of its register, passing toward the mouth of the sea in the west.
A smartphone would have been handy, I thought as I went back to the bike. I could have taken a photo of the skin, if that’s what it was, and maybe googled it too. The same thing with the Morning Star, that strange double reference in the Bible to the Devil and Jesus. I’d have to sit and pore through books now.
Not that it was any particular sacrifice. In fact, it was better that way. It meant there was a time lapse between question and answer, a space that opened up: a span that had to be bridged, an effort to be made.
The knowledge gained would be the same, but the effort increased its value.
Wasn’t that right?
Or was it just harking back to the eighties? A time when friction was a marker of quality? Noise in music, unreadability in literature?
I picked up the bike, rested the frame on my shoulder and walked the last bit of the way through the wood and down to the boat, which was still there, the outboard and everything else exactly as I’d left it. I untied the mooring and drew the boat in, hauling it up slightly onto the narrow shore, put the bike down in the bottom, pushed out while wading alongside, then climbed in, took up the small anchor, started the engine and drew slowly away.
The weather was as boiling hot as before, but the heat wasn’t nearly as oppressive on the water.
I turned round and saw the waves spread in my wake, the landscape that seemed almost to come down to greet the sea, sloping toward its surface, its vegetation thinning and diminishing, until at last it faded into it and was gone.
I got my phone out to see if Camilla had sent me an abusive text, as I was expecting. The light was so strong I had to hunch up and shield the display with my hand so as to create enough shadow to be able to see.
Yes, there was a message from her.
I opened it.
Viktor’s on the bus on his way to you. Collect him at the bus station 11:40. Camilla
What the hell?
Had she gone mad?
She couldn’t do this to me.
There was no agreement!
What if I was ill?
I’d told her I couldn’t!
I couldn’t!
And who was supposed to look after him then?
Didn’t she think of what might be best for him?
I felt like hurling the phone into the sea, but then thought better of it, put it down next to me on the thwart and opened the throttle until I regained some equilibrium.
Damn bitch.
11:40?
It was nearly that now!
I picked up the phone again and texted her while glancing up now and again to make sure there were no other boats coming toward me.
I can’t collect him. So he’ll be on his own at the bus station. Egil
She wasn’t the only one who could play games, I told myself, the phone in my hand so that I could see as soon as she replied.
I was clear of Vågsøya and described now a wide arc as I turned toward the east. With the speed I was doing, I’d be back in a matter of minutes.
By the time I eased off the throttle again and the bow sank back, the boat slowly gliding in toward the jetty, she still hadn’t answered. I moored, lifted the bike ashore, took the fuel can with me and went up to the house.
It was nearly ten o’clock.
I’d have to go and collect him, there were no two ways about it. And then I’d put him on the next bus back the other way.
I put the fuel can in the shed, lit a cigarette and got myself a beer from the fridge, put the parasol up on the decking and sat down with my feet up on the rail.
I took a long slurp. And then phoned her.
No answer.
She had to have some kind of contingency plan in case I didn’t turn up, surely? It would be totally unlike her to run such a risk.
But I couldn’t be sure.
What would happen if no one picked him up?
It’d be a case for the authorities then. The child protection system.
Which would hurt her more than me, seeing as she had custody.
But what if they took it away from her? Would it then be passed on to me?
I couldn’t have him full-time. It wasn’t even an option.
Did she have a contingency plan?
I phoned again.
No answer.
I finished my beer, went into the kitchen and put the empty bottle in the crate next to the fridge, then stood there for a moment staring into the room without really seeing anything.
My phone vibrated as a text came in.
Not answering your calls. So now you know how it feels. Boarding flight now. Enjoy yourself with Viktor!
Her triumphant tone filled me with loathing. I saw the look on her face, the smirk she put on when she knew she was right. Her eyes, at once goading and as cold as ice.
At least we weren’t together anymore, that was one good thing.
Can’t collect him, I’m afraid, I typed. Hope for your sake someone does. You’re the one with custody.
That would give her something to think about.
I fetched the fuel can from the shed again and went down to the boat.
She knew I’d cave in eventually, knew how weak I was. She’d seen me with tears in my eyes when we’d argued. But also when something unexpectedly good happened, she’d seen me cry then too.
It was beyond her comprehension. That a modicum of goodness all of a sudden could bring me to tears.
I couldn’t have stayed with her.
With the fuel can beside me on the jetty, bright red in all the blue, I drew the boat in, stepped on board, untied the moorings and connected the fuel line to the outboard, backed out carefully in a tight crescent and threw the motor into forward gear before setting off.
If I ever wrote a love poem, I’d dedicate it to the skerries here. To the maritime life, where the water is the way and boats the mode of transport. I’d never been able to express to anyone what it meant to me, what lifted inside me when I saw the jetties in town where people moored up, the ferries that plied between the islands, the water lapping toward the bank building, the hotel, the warehouses that lined the road, the fish processing plant where the mackerel lay on their beds of ice in polystyrene crates, the flags that flapped in the sea breeze, flaglines snapping against their poles. The cormorants out on the islands, the grassy hollows of the islets, the lighthouse at the mouth of the sea, the fish in the depths, the crabs on the barnacles at night. I’d tried many times over the years, to explain to friends and girlfriends I’d had, and to a point they’d understood, nodding and agreeing how pleasant it all was. But that wasn’t it at all! Whenever I looked around, at the waterways and the boats, the houses that were turned toward the sea, the sea buffeting the land, be it the islets and islands, inlets or towns, whenever I saw all that, what struck me with such force was that it was so alien, so other, as if it were the inception of a different world altogether, a world of water. And when I crossed the square with my carrier bags of groceries and went down the steps to the boat that lay moored there in the middle of town, and sailed slowly out through the channel toward the open sea, it was as if I inhabited Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities.
It was a feeling that never ran down. On the contrary, it became more entrenched with every year I lived here.
It was by no means unthinkable that Viktor in time would relate to the place in the same way, though it was hardly likely, I thought to myself as I entered the narrow strait between the two main islands, where the houses stood huddled together on both sides, red or white, an occasional yellow ochre, windows glittering in the sunshine. He was a city boy and preferred the indoors.
But maybe we could enjoy a few nice days here together anyway.
A bit of fishing, a bit of swimming. A trip into town now and then for an ice cream.
What more could a ten-year-old want?
But a whole week was a long time. I already longed to sit down and read, go for a walk afterward, read again as darkness fell, and perhaps do some more writing too.
I sailed at the sedatest of paces among all the boats in the strait. People didn’t care once they were out here, but lay sunbathing on their decks, filling themselves with food and beer, music blaring as if they were at home, not a thought for being in a public space.
I wished they weren’t here. That the strait was devoid of boats, the islands devoid of people. So it all could emerge in its true form and come into its own. Or perhaps that wasn’t the way to put it. I just wanted the sense of being here, here in this particular place, a place on earth. I wanted the place to inhabit me, and I it.
That’s how it was in autumn, throughout the winter and early spring. So I couldn’t complain.
And other people had just as much right to be here as me.
But they were encapsulated in something else when they were here. They turned up their music, listened to their radios, exchanged chat and banter, immersed themselves in their phones. They brought their own worlds with them and barely absorbed this one.
I entered the more open part of the strait and picked up speed. It was quarter past eleven already, but I still had plenty of time.
Between the green trees growing on the two islands, houses and outcrops of rock projected in explosive displays of color and detail. At the end of the strait lay the town, as if vibrating beneath the blue sky, white-painted houses clinging to its steep streets, the old radio mast rising up from the top of the hill.
Jesus had been a loner, he had all the features. He rejected his mother and brother, didn’t want to know about them. The disciples he attracted were no substitute family—the relationship was one way only: Jesus spoke, the disciples listened; Jesus dictated, the disciples obeyed. Weeks in the wilderness. A clear longing for death.
What had he done in the thirty years before stepping out as the Savior?
Had he reimagined himself? Was that why he suddenly emerged into the open and became visible?
Emerged from what? From what existence, from what life?
One of the things I’d been thinking about most that summer was whether religion—specifically Christianity—was mainly a social phenomenon or whether conversely it was turned away from the social domain. The teachings of Christ were of course highly social in nature, to the extent that they were all about turning the other cheek and looking after the weak and infirm. That all men were equal was easy enough to proclaim, and indeed many did, but the full implications of such a standpoint were in fact almost inhuman. In an essay he once wrote about Rembrandt, Jean Genet goes off track and describes a situation in a train carriage in which a hideous and loathsome-looking man is seated opposite him, and Genet is struck by sudden, terrifying insight as he asks himself whether such a man could be his equal. Are you equal to me?
Idiots, liars, murderers, wife-beaters, pedophiles. Equal to me?
Yes, and yes again.
It was the social aspect of Christianity that Nietzsche railed against and so brutally exposed. In Christianity, the weak discovered they could browbeat the strong. So weak became strong, bad became good, sickness became health. Morality constrains, oppresses, hinders. No true development, no true freedom, no true greatness is possible under the tyranny of the weak. But Nietzsche was impossible to read without consideration of the fact that he himself was a loser, weak and alone, and that everything he wrote about will, about power and about the strong, was to compensate for his own inadequacy. His thoughts were by no means poorer on that account, for there is no doubt that Nietzsche was one of the greatest thinkers since the classical era, the freedom in his thoughts, their sheer power, was unrivaled—but they remained just that, thoughts. The thoughts of Christ changed the world. Nietzsche’s thoughts changed merely thoughts. And Jesus was not weak, his unprecedented power shines throughout the Gospels, though they were written so long after his death.
But it wasn’t the message of love for one’s fellow men that turned me toward Christianity. On the contrary, in fact. The great problem of our time was that everything was about human beings and nothing existed any longer outside the sphere of the human. No matter which way you turned, you encountered human eyes, or something human eyes had seen. In a way, I was as far removed from faith as could be. From the moment I opted out of the Church of Norway at the age of sixteen, I’d felt nothing but contempt for Christianity—and all other religions too, for that matter—but I was still interested in faith as a phenomenon, what it meant, basically, to believe. Faith was something that gave meaning to life, I assumed, and meaning interested me. But to believe seemed to me to pander to a system, a package as it were of conceptions and values, something ready-made and compiled by others, and the price to be paid for being rewarded with that meaning was constraints on one’s freedom. Faith was for the feeble of mind, those lacking independence, the submissive, who gladly allowed themselves to be led. I read Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling and realized there was another way of believing, and a Christianity other than the one Nietzsche had attacked—issuing from the idea of the social realm. Kierkegaard’s book contains a number of strange vignettes concerning the weaning of a child from the mother’s breast, that first relationship in a child’s life, the symbiosis, warmth and security it was suddenly denied, and one could almost see the desire for what no longer was there, and the turning outwards toward everything else, which to the child as yet barely existed. Other people, the social world, society. Faith was thus a turning away from the realm of the social, again toward something that as yet barely existed. This was where Abraham went when he climbed the mount to sacrifice his son to God. He was filled with a father’s love, and his faith directed him toward an abyss. Perhaps what awaited him there was simply emptiness, the terrible void. His faith surmounted his fear, which made faith inhuman, for what person can kill his son with intent and leave the human realm to face the unknown that perhaps indeed was the terrible void? I found the thought compelling, but it meant nothing to me, it was without consequence, there was no way I could absorb it into my own life.
But something must have happened, unbeknown to my conscious self I must have been working away at it, because during the winter I had become converted. In an indescribable moment of joy, everything slotted into place. The insight, for that’s what it was, had since faded somewhat, and I strove continually to approach it once more. And although the days were dark, its light was somewhere always shining, whether in my soul I was in the forest or on the sea, all I had to do was go toward it.
I had basically vegetated all that winter, sleeping long into the mornings, my phone muted, not bothering to wash or change my clothes, still trying to get out for a walk during the daytime, but mostly lazing around on the sofa. I had started drinking as soon as the light began to fade. In previous years, I’d often thought about how fantastic it would be to live on my own in the summer house, and then, after Camilla, I’d actually moved out here. It wasn’t that fantastic anymore. Of course, I realized it wasn’t the house, or the landscape, or the hermit-like existence that was the problem, it was me. I didn’t care for my own company. This was ironic. For all the years I’d been in various relationships I’d always yearned to be alone, and when eventually I took the consequences of that yearning, it merely led me to yearn even more. But to where? For what? I’d been running away all my life, a person didn’t have to be a psychoanalyst to see that. I’d thought I was running away from the others—my father and brothers, Torill and the whole shebang, my hometown, and home country, the conformity of education, Therese and Helene and Hanne, and all the women I’d had in between, when I was king of the castle—but it was so clearly myself I’d been running from.
It was an embarrassing insight, all the more so for it being so obvious. Those around me had surely recognized it for what it was all along.
Was everything a person did down to the disposition of their soul?
I had refused to accept it, and yet, lying there on the sofa that winter, with that key in my hand, all doors were indeed opened.
I was cowardly, shied away from conflicts, from work, from people. I avoided every demand, sought the path of least resistance, drank too much, thought only of myself.
It had led me here.
The first days of the new year had brought snow, thick and still. The temperature had been around zero, a fog had settled heavily on the sea and woods. When I went for my daily walks, usually in the afternoon just before dusk, always the same route, following the smooth, rounded rock of the shore, along the pebbled beach and back again through the woods, the stillness was so apparent as to seem ominous. Fog deadens all sound, packing the landscape in its dampness, and no one else was out here at that time of year, the nearest road with any traffic to speak of was several kilometers away.
All I could hear on my walks were my own footsteps, my own thoughts.
The air grew colder, a thin layer of ice covering the rocks, the fog retreating, but not the clouds, which hung like a dark curtain over the horizon. A wind picked up as the snow fell once more, the air a flurry of tiny shards tossed this way and that. Even the few steps to the shed to fetch wood became an expedition requiring a scarf, woolly hat and gloves. Returning inside, I placed three logs from the pile I held in my arms in the stove, dumping the rest in the box next to it, then I removed my outer garments and lay down on the sofa. It was only just gone eleven o’clock, but it was so dark outside that the fire already reflected faintly in the windowpane. The sea roared.
Then: church bells.
Or rather: at first I couldn’t place the sound that was only just audible against the storm, dissolving almost completely into the rushing of trees, the battering wind that raced up from the shore, the low, thunderous rumble of the sea.
Ding, ding, ding, they said, so faint and so apart from the other sounds out there that it was as if they came from a land beyond.
I hadn’t even known it was Sunday.
I’m going, I said to myself, and got to my feet. It would do me good to listen to something other than just my own thoughts. And if I couldn’t stand what I heard, at least there’d be something to look at in there.
I had put a thick sweater on, anorak, hat and gloves, wound a scarf around my lower face and gone out. It had stopped snowing, though no one would have believed it, for the air was still whirling with snowflakes whipped up by the wind, thrown about at its will.
The church stood on top of a ridge above the sea and was visible from afar to anyone approaching the land by boat, yet almost completely hidden if you came from the road on the other side, as of course most people did nowadays. An outer wall of stone and brick dated back to the twelfth century when the first church had been situated there, whereas the rest of the structure was eighteenth-century and made of timber.
I’d been up to the church several times before on my walks, it was only some twenty minutes away and I liked to emerge from the woods to see it there on top of the ridge: there was something fascinatingly archaic in our modern age about a house of God in the midst of nature. But I’d still never been inside.
When I opened the door on that particular morning, the service was already under way and the few people who were seated inside—hardly more than six or seven, eight at most, and all elderly—turned as I entered. I pulled off my hat and gloves and nodded tentatively, then tucked myself into one of the rows of benches at the back, unwinding my scarf and unzipping my anorak. My face felt warm on the inside after my bracing walk, cold on the outside because of the biting wind. I rubbed my cheeks a couple of times as I looked straight ahead at the priest. He was elderly too, with a saggy face and glasses whose lenses were so thick, their frames so obtrusive, that they wholly dominated his appearance. His white collar was barely noticeable in comparison.
They had come to the confession. The priest looked down at the floor as he led the congregation:
Holy God, our Creator,
look upon us in mercy.
We have sinned against you
and broken your commandments.
For the sake of Jesus Christ, forgive us.
Set us free that we may serve you, preserve the Creation
and love our neighbors as ourselves.
Had I possessed faith, I thought to myself, I’d probably have found comfort in the words. But since I did not, the words had no force, were connected to nothing. There was no one to look upon us in mercy, no one to forgive us, no one to set us free.
I looked up at the ceiling. It was green with white clouds painted on it. The green color was beautiful, but unexpected: why not sky blue? The hue reminded me of the sea over a deep sandbank on a summer’s day. The clouds were crude representations and quite identical. Suspended from the sky hung a large model of a sailing ship. What kind of Christianity was this? Rococo clouds under an eighteenth-century maritime sky?
The rows of benches terminated in a kind of portal with a large, stylized lion on each side. Here and there were paintings showing biblical motifs, which must have been even more unfamiliar then, before the advent of photographs and film, in an age when none of the people who came to sit in the church would have been able to travel to Israel to behold with their own eyes the Sea of Galilee, Jerusalem, Bethlehem or Nazareth.
It must have been like a fairy tale.
As the maritime eighteenth century with its forests of masts in the harbor was now like a fairy tale to us.
It felt strange to be present in a space that was so dense with meaning, in the woodland at the edge of the sea, but even stranger, I thought to myself, that none of that meaning remained valid. The insights that were immersed in those symbols, their deposits of meaning, were no longer relevant to us.
Only a few dithering old folk cared enough to come here now. To them, the church was a kind of spiritual walking aid. Their voices as the priest led them in the hymns were crackled and dry. A single woman, however, sang brightly and with gusto, and perhaps then she heard again her twenty-year-old self, though her song projected now backward rather than forward in life.
Toward the end of the service, the priest said the creed and I pricked up my ears:
I believe in God, the Father almighty,
creator of heaven and earth.
I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord,
who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,
born of the Virgin Mary,
suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried;
he descended to the dead.
On the third day he rose again;
he ascended into heaven,
he is seated at the right hand of the Father,
and he will come to judge the living and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the holy catholic Church,
the communion of saints,
the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the body,
and the life everlasting.
Amen.
This too was like a fairy tale. Born of a virgin, yet son of a king. And “the third day,” why not the second or fourth?
Then followed the intercessions, the repeated confession and prayers that concluded the service, and the attendant, a squinting man in his sixties with wiry white hair who licked his lips incessantly, passed among the congregation for the collection. I found a couple of crumpled 500-krone notes in my trouser pocket, which I gave him, mostly because I felt sorry for him, only a small handful of coins lying at the bottom of the small woven basket he held out toward me.
Outside: the wind, the mighty sea, the darkened sky.
Cars, turning one by one in the car park, pulling away onto the road in the flurrying snow.
I followed the old cart road through the woods, where the wind squeezed its way past the trunks of the trees, dumping its snow against their bark, and emerged after a while into the wide-open space that a few decades earlier had been used as a shooting range and before that, during the war, had served as a landing strip for German aircraft. Now its only purpose was as a place for people to leave their cars when they came to swim and laze on the beach in summer. The concrete ruins of abandoned German fortifications faced the sea, from where the wind now came whipping. It was conceivable, I thought to myself as I crossed that empty space, my head bent against the elements, that it was merely their way of worship that was archaic, belonging to a bygone age, whereas what they believed in was immutable, had always been there and always would be there, and that faith would be able to find—as perhaps it always had found—new pathways to deliverance, from the different places that were the cultures of our different ages?
The problem in that was Jesus. There was absolutely nothing timeless about him, and nothing immutable. He’d lived in a particular place, in a particular age, at the same time as others known to us from history. Augustus, Herod, Pontius Pilate. And what happened to him happened only once and was never repeated, as is the case for all of us, in all our lives, in the natural circumstances of time under which we live.
The worship of Jesus Christ amounted to a hallowing of ourselves, did it not? Making God one of us?
Was this perhaps the germ of the total humanization of existence in which we now lived?
I reached the end of the clearing and followed the path on into the woods. Everything around me seemed to be in a state of turmoil. The wind rushed in the trees, whose branches creaked and groaned; the waves roared and crashed; the air was a howl. I felt invigorated, though more by the church interior than by the ritual that had taken place there; the sense of being in a space so filled with meaning had been good, even if that meaning was less than relevant to me.
What did they believe, those who believed?
I’d never quite understood it.
Below me, great waves rose up like sea monsters hurling themselves at the shore. The sea crested white as far as I could see; above, the sky was gray-black and low. Where the path veered to the north, the sea disappeared from view, but its noise remained, lingering among the trees as if disconnected from its origin.
I wanted meaning in my life. But I couldn’t believe in something I didn’t believe in. I couldn’t just plunge in and hope something out there would gather me up, quite simply because I didn’t believe there was anything out there.
I paused and stared ahead. Tall, straight spruce swayed like ships’ masts in the wind. Farther in was a thick belt of pine, their branches waving, flailing, though the trees themselves stood almost unmoving. There was a different weight about them, a different darkness.
“God, give me a sign!” I said into the air.
Did I really say that? I asked myself in the very next instant.
Was I, a grown man, really standing there in the woods asking God for a sign?
Embarrassed and ashamed, I forged on, burying my lower face in my thick, wide scarf, my woolly hat pulled down to my eyes. Suddenly all I wanted was the sofa, bed, sleep, darkness.
Something moved above me and I looked up.
A large, black bird came flying out of the storm. It flapped about, for a moment hanging suspended on a gust, though its wings were beating still. Then it settled on a branch just above me.
It was a raven, and it looked straight down at me.
I didn’t know what to make of it.
It opened its beak, tipped its head back and squawked three times.
Krroaa! Krroaa! Krroaa!
With that, it flapped its wings, flew up above the treetops and vanished from sight.
Bewildered, I began to walk again. I had asked for a sign, and a bird had come. It was a coincidence, it had to be! If there was a God, an almighty, He surely wouldn’t care what I did or said!
And yet: a bird had come. It had looked straight at me. And it had cried three times. Not two, not four.
After I’d been pondering the fairy-tale aspect of Jesus spending three days in the kingdom of the dead.
The path skirted a small rise in the landscape before leading down toward the sea again. An old sand quarry lay gaping. Not a soul to be seen. Nor any beast or bird.
When I’d moved to Norway at sixteen to start gymnasium school, I’d spent some time during that first autumn term discussing religion with one of the girls in my class, Kathrine her name was, she was a Christian and defended her faith fiercely. My opinions then hadn’t been that important to me, and the things I said were intended to goad her more than anything else, and to make me interesting to her. In fact, for a few months I hardly thought about anything else but her. One day, she brought a picture with her to school that she wanted to show me. It was a column of light breaking through dense cloud. You say God doesn’t exist, she said, that He’s just an invention. But this is no invention, she said, holding the picture up in front of me. But that’s just the sun, I said. You worship the sun? I was genuinely surprised at her naivety. It hurt her, of course. And now all of a sudden I was the one seeing signs of God’s presence, not in the sun, but in a bird, and not as a credulous sixteen-year-old, but as a grown man at the midpoint of life.
By the time I got back to the house and let myself in, I’d distanced myself sufficiently from the occurrence to be able to smile at my folly. I stamped the snow from my boots against the door sill, took off my outer layers and hung them on two chairs I pulled up in front of the wood burner, placed three logs on top of the embers, knelt down and blew until the flames began to wrap around them. Then I went into the bedroom, switched the light on and stood in front of the bookshelf. Reading Fear and Trembling, I’d become so enthused by Kierkegaard’s thinking and the style of his writing that I’d immediately ordered his collected works from the Danish publishers. They amounted to more than fifty volumes and to my shame I’d yet to open a single one, since my fervor over the knight of faith and the sphere of infinite resignation, and all the other things Kierkegaard wrote about, had evaporated during the time it took for the box of books to arrive.
Now my eyes passed along their blue spines. One title contained the word “bird” and I pulled it out. The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air. Flicking through the pages, I realized it was a sermon. An interpretation of a passage in the New Testament. I took it with me to the desk in the living room, sat down and began to read.
When I’d finished, it was dark outside and the wind had subsided.
I was filled with an emotion so immense I hardly knew what to do with it. Thoughts were suddenly nothing, nada, nichts.
I closed the book and crouched down in front of the wood burner again, crumpled some newspaper, placed some bits of bark, twigs and other dry sweepings on top, leaned three logs up against each other as if to form a tepee, struck a match and watched as the fire flamed yellow and a circle of black spread across the newspaper, which at the same time curled in on itself and was consumed.
God’s kingdom was here.
I turned round and felt the clothes that were hung from the backs of the two chairs. They were quite dry now. I put them on, sat down on the stool by the door and put my boots on. The snow from earlier had melted into little pools that still lay on the floor, slight, lustrous distensions on the varnished floorboards. The flames leaped in the wood burner. Apart from the hiss and crackle of the fire, the room was quite still.
God’s kingdom was here.
I got to my feet, opened the door and went out. The snow-covered ground leading down to the sea in front of me was without movement. Stars shimmered in the clear, dark sky. The temperature had dropped dramatically; it felt like minus five, perhaps even minus ten. A snowdrift was blocking the door of the shed. I decided I might as well shift it, went round the side of the house to the little extension where my father used to keep the car, fetched the spade, went back and began to dig.
I suppose all of us have yearned for freedom at some stage in life. That yearning is like a spring, pressed tighter and tighter together, packed ever harder, until it reaches the point where its compacted force can be compacted no more, and the spring releases. Often, this happens first at the age of seventeen or eighteen, when the young adult leaves the home of the parents, and again in one’s forties, when our new family is torn asunder by it. But it’s not only our need for freedom that changes as we proceed through life, our understanding of it does too. I like to think of society in such a way that a key concept like freedom is construed differently by different groups, and it’s the force that arises in their interactions, in the friction of dissimilarity, that drives society forward—or back, if that’s where the momentum is directed, or round in circles. The yearning for freedom, if acted upon, leads to departure and thereby to something new. We break up, and break away. That the new is so often the same as the old, precipitates counter-insights, which too are prevalent, living their lives alongside our yearnings for freedom, our urges to break away, our beliefs as to the future, they too graduated, from mild to bottomless resignation, from the considerate desire to preserve, to the brutal compulsion to stagnate.
Hans Jonas, the Jewish philosopher who penned the standard work on Gnosticism, a pupil of Heidegger who, like other prominent pupils of Heidegger, distanced himself from his philosophy, not primarily by condemning it—though he did that too—but by expanding it, outlined toward the end of his life a proposal for a philosophy of biology in the framework of which he traced back such an ethically charged concept as freedom to a time long before man emerged; right back, in fact, to the very first origins of life. Reality, in this conception: matter in the thrall of material forces, without will, constrained by mechanical patterns of action. Streaming lava cooling into mountains, oceans evaporated by sun to become clouds, plummeting atmospheric pressure becoming winds, winds that cause the seas to storm, water eroding the rock, sand carried on the wind. Electrical charges dissecting the sky, bolts of lightning striving toward the ground. Indeed, the burning sun, the twinkling stars, the moon that orbits the earth that orbits the sun, in a disk-shaped galaxy that sails through the universe. Life, even its very first, unimaginably primitive forms, frees itself from this matter and the mechanics of this matter. Life is itself matter, and this is the miracle, that matter frees itself from matter and can do as it will, more or less independently of any system. That for those first hundreds of millions of years such will is so constrained, its room to maneuver so immeasurably small, is of no consequence in relation to the gigantic and unfathomable leap from matter that life entails. But the freedom that so occurs is not unconditional, for what happens when matter is set free is that at once a dependency arises, it too new and unprecedented. Life demands ever-constant supplies of nourishment, whether from the sun, water, soil or other life forms, and if such supplies are curtailed the living matter will revert to dead matter and freedom will come to an end. The dynamic between freedom and dependency is in other words fundamentally the same for monocellular life and bacteria as it is for us.
When I was sixteen, I saw only the one side of freedom. I held it above everything else and called myself an anarchist. What I had in mind then was a kind of absolute freedom: no one should have the right to decide over me, I should be able to do only as I pleased, and the same should apply to everyone. There should be no authorities, no societal superstructure, no boundaries between countries. In discussions I entered into at that time, my opinions naturally met with fierce opposition and much shaking of heads. Society would collapse without some form of hierarchy, and crime would flourish. “What if you got the urge to kill someone, would that be OK, if no one was allowed to decide over another person’s actions and there was nothing to stop you?” “Of course,” I’d tell them, “if you want to kill someone, go ahead, feel free. But you wouldn’t kill another person, would you, even if you could? There’s something stopping you? Those are your morals. It’s your morals that set the limits, no one else’s. People kill each other as it is, don’t they? Even though we’ve got laws against it, and prisons and police, and even though it’s the biggest taboo that exists. People are always going to kill other people, an anarchist society is no exception. But I think there’d be fewer cases. Because it’s not just down to laws and rules of conduct imposed on people, there’s also a huge pressure on people to live up to society’s demands on them to fit in, earn money, obtain goods and status symbols, and those who fall by the wayside find freedom in criminality. Do you understand what I’m saying? In a society where that kind of pressure doesn’t exist, where there’s freedom for everybody, crime, at least to a very large degree, will cease.” “Oh, you’re so naive,” they’d naturally reply. “No, you’re the ones who are naive,” I’d come back at them, quite as naturally. “Man is fundamentally good, it’s society that turns him bad. Have you ever known a bad baby?”
It wasn’t difficult to see where these opinions had come from. My father had taken over the family shipping business from his father, and as the eldest son it was expected that I should do likewise. He never said so in as many words, and when I began moving in a different direction, one that quite clearly was incompatible with a career in business, he expressed no disappointment. I understood that he’d already given up on me a long time before. But I felt the pressure, I felt that I’d disappointed him.
Dad was always working while I was growing up. Usually, he wouldn’t be home until after I’d gone to bed, and although he never laid a hand on me and barely ever raised his voice against me, there was something about him, no matter how mild-mannered and restrained he came across, that told me he didn’t like me. I was overweight as a child, which I’m sure displeased him, and I was so shy that I couldn’t look any visitor in the eye or utter anything sensible, much less comprehensible. He put up with it when we were on our own as a family, but when visitors came I saw that it vexed him, even though he made light of it. Most of all, I liked to play on my own; even when I was twelve years old, my room was filled with action figures and I wasn’t afraid to play with dolls either. My brothers were quite different, Harald especially, who was only a year younger and exploited my weaknesses the best he could when we were children. Powerful is he to whom we give power, as Nietzsche said, but of course I was oblivious to it then and would put up with being treated like a dog if it meant I could be left in peace. If I cried on account of a conflict with Harald, it wouldn’t be Harald who got told off, but me, because I was the eldest and ought properly to be chastising my brother instead of the other way round.
Later, in adulthood, we got on fine together, and there was nothing wrong with my upbringing for that matter either, not really; we simply belonged to different worlds. Dad stepped down when he reached sixty, and Harald, who had attended the London School of Economics and gone on to enjoy a very successful spell working for Goldman Sachs in the City, stepped up to head the company in his place. Gunnar, three years younger than me, took a similar path and was now CEO of a medical company he’d got involved in while it was still little more than a start-up and which now, having developed a new antidepressant, basically a hallucinogen, was in explosive growth. All three continued to be based in London. Dad had sold the house in Hampstead and taken up residence at a central hotel. He was doing fine, as far as I knew, cultivating his hobby as a collector of art, visiting the exhibitions, private views and dinner parties that were important to him in that respect. His particular interest was for constructivism. There was much that I hadn’t the heart to say to him as far as his art interest was concerned. In his business life, he’d been the fulcrum, in control of everything and generally savvier than most about the way things worked. He appeared to think this carried over to the art world, not least because he found himself so welcome wherever he went. But what made him welcome was his money, and if artists, gallerists and curators listened patiently to him as he held forth about his beloved Russian constructivists or American pop artists, whose work he also purchased in quantity, it was not because they found what he had to say interesting, but because they were being indulgent toward him, the truth being that he most likely bored them. My father was rather small in stature, self-confident without being self-obsessed, dapper and well dressed with his white shirts, blue suits, brown shoes, ties and cufflinks, but his eyes, although kind, could turn cold whenever his cynicism, which I took to be more practiced than hereditary, kicked in. He could assess a man rather well, but a lot of things went over his head, there being very little depth in him.
He had met Torill in the Norwegian expat community when she was working as an au pair in London, a Scandinavian beauty whose life when the two of them got together took a turn she almost certainly could never have envisaged. Something of a neurotic, she loved me more than any other. Torill had depth, but was also unreflecting, her emotions totally unsorted, everything was intense for her. She took me with her to the cinema even when I was a small boy, and before I was thirteen or fourteen I’d become quite the film buff. Films were her emotional release, allowing her to let go instead of keeping everything in, which must have felt like a blessing.
They divorced during the summer of my sixteenth birthday, and we brothers moved back to Norway with her. Torill was a master in making me feel guilty, forever spinning her little webs in which I would become trapped. She was only forty years old then, and still very good-looking, but something had unraveled inside her, perhaps because she’d never built anything of her own, and in that respect it was no help at all that her family lived in the same town; in fact, if anything, it probably only infantilized her somewhat.
Physically, my development had really taken off the year before we moved, and by the time I started gymnasium school I was no longer overweight. I looked all right, though without it having any noticeable effect, and the same was true of me coming from London, something I’d thought would automatically make me popular. The other kids found me a bit odd, presumably because I was introverted and never instigated anything on my own, preferring instead to keep well out of things, but also I think because I took such an interest in many of our lessons. Torill would occasionally ask me about girls at school, and I answered her as truthfully as I could, but I never mentioned Kathrine, although by remaining silent about her it felt like I was betraying her. There was nothing between us, but she was sacrosanct to me, a place in my heart that I would guard as I lay on my bed reading, dreaming about getting up, leaving the room and never coming back.
I discovered Bjørneboe’s books and identified strongly with him, he too the anarchist son of a shipping magnate. I read Kaj Skagen’s Bazarov’s Children and Erling Gjelsvik’s Dead Heat, which led me to Hemingway, from where it was a short step to Turgenev, and from there an even shorter one to Dostoevsky.
I fantasized about killing someone, not Torill, although it would have turned my life into something fantastical, but someone random. The chances of being caught in such a case, where there was no connection between the murderer and his victim, were, I knew, immeasurably small. But in view of my propensity to feel guilt—I couldn’t actually kill a fly without feeling torment—I realized that I would surely give myself away. I couldn’t leave Torill either. And contradict my father? Not without tears welling in my eyes.
I put it all behind me the summer I finished gymnasium, and standing on the deck of the ferry on my way to Denmark, watching Norway disappear from view, I was consumed by a feeling of happiness. I was planning on being away for a year, traveling around the continent, taking odd jobs here and there to earn some money; in my rucksack was a book called Vagabonding in Europe which listed different jobs that were easy to get, picking oranges in Spain, for instance, or laboring on French docks. But I still wasn’t completely free, Torill having insisted that I was to phone her every day, something I’d been unable to refuse. To start with, heading toward Munich, from where I was going on to the Alps, I ventured not to call her a couple of times, only she’d felt such despair, had been so worried about me, that I hadn’t the heart to do it again.
I zigzagged through Italy, and from Brindisi caught the ferry to Athens, from there sailing out to some of the islands before plotting a course north again, arriving in Zurich in late September. There I succumbed to a kind of collapse, gripped one evening by a sudden fear, frightened for my life, frightened about everything that could happen, and when morning came I found myself unable to get out of bed. I lay there the whole day, trying to sleep to get away from it, but little helped, and when darkness fell I descended into such panic that my whole body trembled. I was hungry, had nothing to eat and was quite unable to go out and get something. And the fear I felt doubled, for being scared only scared me that much more, and being alone in a foreign city made it even worse. I couldn’t phone Torill, I realized that even in the fragile state I was in. And I certainly couldn’t phone my father, which would have been too great a failure. But eventually I did so, and sat trembling on the floor with the phone in my hand, dialing his number at the tone.
“Stray speaking,” he said at the other end.
“It’s Egil,” I breathed.
“Sorry?” he said. “Who did you say it was?”
“Egil,” I said.
“Egil!” he said. “Where in the world are you?”
I started to cry.
“Is something wrong?” he said. “What’s the matter? Has something happened?”
I couldn’t speak, all I could do was weep, and then I hung up. I hadn’t the strength to go to bed and could only lie down on the floor. After a couple of minutes, the phone rang. I picked up the receiver and held it to my ear.
“Egil?” said Dad. “I’ve found out where you’re staying. If you can’t answer me now, so that I can hear you, I’ll send a trusted friend to help.”
“Yes,” I breathed.
“I don’t know what’s happened,” he said. “But we’ll sort it out. It’s no problem.”
I started crying again, disintegrating into sobs, not wanting him to hear me, and again I hung up.
An hour later there was a knock on the door. I was lying in bed and couldn’t get up to answer. A besuited man in his forties came in. He was wearing glasses, rectangular lenses in a very thin frame, his features rather nondescript, in fact he would have been quite anonymous had it not been for the fullness of his lips and a somewhat oblique smile.
“Hello there, young man,” he said in German. “Not doing too well, I hear?”
All I could do was stare at him while I shook inside.
“My name is Dieter. I’m a friend of your father’s. I’m here to help you.”
He smiled. His hair was thin and sandy-colored. His eyes were blue.
“First we must get you out of here,” he said. “Are you able to get dressed?”
I said nothing.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll help you.”
He opened my rucksack and took out some clothes, holding my blue-green paisley shirt up in front of me.
“Will this do?”
I didn’t answer him, couldn’t answer him, and he smiled again, picked out a pair of trousers and then sat down on the edge of the bed, drew the cover aside and began to dress me. Once I’d got the trousers on, he slid his hand under my back and raised me into a sitting position, helping me on with the shirt as if he had all the time in the world, doing up the buttons, then proceeding to the shoes, a jacket.
He packed my bag, slung it over his shoulder, took me by the hand and pulled me upright. His arm around me, we left the room. He’d already paid the hotel, he said. Now we were going back to his house, where I would spend the night, and in the morning I was booked onto a flight to London, where my father would come and pick me up.
“How does that sound? A good plan?”
I burst into tears.
He had two kids of his own, he told me as we drove out of the city. Six and eight years old and a right handful, but I wouldn’t have to worry about them.
“Are you hungry?”
I nodded.
He parked outside a rather swish residence, got out of the car and came round to open the door on my side, where I sat without moving. His wife, whose face was gentle with a smattering of freckles running across the bridge of her nose and dispersing over her cheeks, her eyes rather narrow and creased at the corners, was in the kitchen rinsing vegetables in the sink when we came in.
“This is Egil,” said Dieter. “Egil, this is my wife, Annika. Egil isn’t feeling that good, so we’re putting him up for the night. Is there something for him to eat?”
“Yes, of course,” said Annika.
How I got through the evening and night I can’t remember. I assume I slept. The next morning, a nurse came to the house, she was to accompany me all the way to London. Dieter drove us to the airport, where he bid me a hearty farewell, embracing me as if we were old friends. My father was waiting for me at Heathrow, welcoming, if rather measured. There was no one to help me where he was living, he said, so he’d put me into a small private clinic close by where I could rest until I was well again.
He was no doubt thinking a week, perhaps two. I stayed there for six months. I remember hardly anything from that time, it seems such a blur. I know that I was unable to read, unable to listen to the radio or even to music. It wasn’t that I couldn’t concentrate, though I couldn’t do that either, it was more like there was no room in me for anything that came from outside, everything from outside hurt. It even hurt to look at a vase of flowers or a curtain. It was terrible. The most terrible thing was perhaps that as such there was no way out. All I could do was exist in the same darkness, the same hurt the whole time. I spoke to no one, and for six months opened my mouth only to take in nourishment.
It was spring by the time they let me out. I remember that. Dad came and picked me up sometime in the morning. I’d packed and got myself ready. Torill was going to come too, only I’d told her not to. She was staying at a hotel, waiting to meet me. But that’s not the reason I remember that day so well, at least not the only one. Because when I followed my father out of the door and walked to the car beneath a mild, white spring sky, it was with the very strong feeling that the world did not wish me well. That nothing good would come of my life.
It was all so very ironic. I’d had a kind of vision on one of the Greek islands, not Patmos, of which I knew nothing at the time, and not Hydra either, but a totally unknown and unimportant little island where I’d been staying for a week or so. It was no major vision, certainly nothing that was worth telling anyone about, yet it was significant enough to me. In the mornings I would wade out to a small islet some way off the beach, taking with me some food, a towel, a change of T-shirt and a couple of books in a bag I carried above my head, and I would spend the day out there on my own, reading and swimming and taking in the sun, while back on the island in the evenings I would eat at one of the restaurants, have a few beers and pass my time people-watching. I felt restless during my stay there, anxious even, it was as if I didn’t really want to be there, as if there was something I was longing for without really knowing what it was. It wasn’t people, because in the little village in the evenings there were people all around me, which made me want to go somewhere else—especially if someone tried to strike up a conversation—though again it wasn’t something that exerted any great pull on me. One evening, I decided to go for a walk. I walked up through the narrow streets to where the village came to an end and the mountain began, and carried on upward, determining all of a sudden to reach the top. There was a tall radio mast there, blinking red in the darkness. I sat down and lit a cigarette, and looked out at the sea that was quite black with little dots of light from the ships out there, and at the sky, it too black, though more velvety than I was used to from the night sky at home. Occasionally, lights blinked there as well, from planes on their way to or from the airport in Athens.
Could a person live without a name? I wondered at once.
Without identity?
Could a person exist without being connected to anything?
Unbound to any past or history, family or society?
Could a person simply be a human being on earth, who could go wherever they wished without interpreting what they saw in terms of any kind of system, but thinking quite freely? In other words: seeing what they saw as if for the very first time, in every instance? Could a human being simply exist? Without ambition, without plan, without theory? Could I live, not as Egil Stray, but simply as someone, anyone, no one? A human being through which the world streamed without attaching itself, and who for his part likewise streamed through the world, without attaching himself?
Or, to put it differently: could a person be completely free?
That was the vision I had. To be a person without a name, without a history. To be nothing more than a human being.
It was, on the surface of it, so threadbare an idea that it couldn’t have made sense to anyone but me. Certainly, those with whom I subsequently shared it did not understand it the way I did. It was so simple a thought that it could barely be called a thought at all. “Yes, of course. To not have a name, yes. And no identity. Interesting. A bit like an animal, yes? Is that what you mean?”
Yet to me, the thought was flesh and blood and quivering nerves. I knew it could not be brought to fruition, but I considered that it could be something to strive for, an ideal for life, as it were.
But how could a person disconnect?
I could, for instance, have bought myself a boat and set off around the world, on my own, sailing wherever I wanted, going ashore wherever I wanted; my father would more than likely have given me the money if only I’d asked him, and even if he would have disapproved, he’d seen the direction I was heading and had probably already written me off. But even then, I think, I’d begun to realize that the ties that bind are inside a person, and that disconnecting from the external world was unlikely to make a difference.
Nevertheless, the idea became precious to me in the weeks that followed and, so I thought, would remain so for the rest of my life. But then when I had my breakdown, everything changed, my whole life turned around at once, because after that everything was about making sure I would never end up there again, in that terrible place inside me. The doctors talked about keeping firm structures, firm contexts, maintaining an overview, developing routines. Which of course was the very antithesis of simply existing as a human being.
All this, indeed everything in my entire life, became catalyzed that winter day in the summer house, suddenly and unexpectedly slotting into place in my conversion.
How can I explain it?
I can’t.
When later I read The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air again, it was hard to understand exactly what had made such an impression on me the first time round. I couldn’t trace back the grand emotions I had felt to any single sentence or paragraph, though many had been underlined in what seemed to be a state of inner fervor. But this is a mistake we make time and again, we think thoughts are isolated units, apart not only from our emotions, but also from the surroundings in which they are conceived. Which is probably why philosophers have always been so concerned with building systems, for in the system a thought is given its own designated place, independently of whatever happens outside of it; thoughts are thus protected from the world and may appear as entities in their own right, so pure and impersonal that they may be thought by anyone, over and over again, wherever and whenever. But the fact of the matter is that thoughts cannot get by on their own. When Nietzsche conceived the notion of eternal return, the apex of his thinking, it was as if he became so gripped by emotion that he was barely able to contain himself, the letters he wrote about the great discovery he’d made were manic in their enthusiasm, at the same time as he was unable to reveal in a single word what exactly it was he had thought that was going to change everything. This would be his labor, trying to put the thought and its implications into words, for the thought in itself, naked and bereft of emotion, was indeed anything but grand and fabulous, and actually, when at last it could be considered, manifested as black ink on a white page, rather banal. Its grandness lay in the storm it had precipitated inside him, and it was the storm he wanted to convey, not the thought on its own. The thought had to be supported from below, underpinned and lifted by the thoughts that surrounded it, in order that it might produce the gasp of awe that he considered it to be worth.
As different as they were, Kierkegaard had in common with Nietzsche that his writing was so personal that it was nigh on impossible to take his thoughts and make them one’s own, at least not without mutilating them. When he wrote
Would that in the silence you might forget yourself, forget what you yourself are called, your own name, the famous name, the lowly name, the insignificant name, in order in silence to pray to God, “Hallowed be your name!” Would that in silence you might forget yourself, your plans, the great, all-encompassing plans, or the limited plans concerning your life and its future, in order in silence to pray to God, “Your kingdom come!” Would that you might in silence forget your will, your willfulness, in order in silence to pray to God, “Your will be done!”
these were not unfamiliar thoughts to me, apart from the fact that I would never have put God into that equation. Abandoning oneself to the Divine, giving up the self, was of course a well-known component of any religion, which had given rise to systems of prayer and worship and meditation, something that had never interested me, seeming to me to be a simple matter of suggestion, a mere trick of the Low Church. But Kierkegaard’s abandonment was different. The silence in which one might forget oneself was like the silence of the lily and the bird, they were our teachers, but also like the silence of the forest and the silence of the sea. Even when the sea rages loudly, he wrote, it is nonetheless silent, and these words I read as the sea raged loudly outside the house in which I sat. The forest keeps silent; even when it whispers, he wrote, and I listened to the forest as it whispered, and to the silence in its whispering, and I knew that silence, for the clamor of my own inner life resounded so clearly against it. When I was with others, I never heard it, the clamor then being everywhere, generated by our every will, our every plan, our every ambition, our every quest for pleasure, but when I was out walking here, in the silence that is here, I heard it.
In a strange way, what I read coincided with what I was. I read about the raging sea as the sea raged, I read about the whispering forest as the forest whispered, and when I read that to pray was not to speak, but to become silent, that only in silence could God’s kingdom be sought, God’s kingdom came.
God’s kingdom was the moment.
The trees, the forest, the sea, the lily, the bird, all existed in the moment. To them, there was no such thing as future or past. Nor any fear or terror.
That was the first turning point. The second came when I read what followed: What happens to the bird does not concern it.
It was the most radical thought I had ever known. It would free me from all pain, all suffering. What happens to me does not concern me.
This required absolute faith and absolute abandonment to God, as the lily of the field and the bird of the sky exemplified. Even in deepest sorrow, with so frightful a tomorrow, the bird was unconditionally joyful. Sorrow and tomorrow did not concern it, but were given over to God.
To be obedient as the grass when bent by the wind, I thought, and looked up: outside, the storm had abated, all was dark and still; the faint light of the moon, reflected by the snow, made the smooth rock of the shore seem as though it were levitating.
God’s kingdom was here.
And I existed for God.
In the half-year that had passed since that night, those thoughts had been like a place to which I could return. It was as if the insights I’d gained there continually needed renewing in order to be maintained; I fell so easily back into old ways. I read extensively in the Gospels and saw everything as if in a new light. The light of freedom and the unbidden, and the light of God’s kingdom. When Jesus said, “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple,” I understood what he meant, he was preaching the message of total freedom, disconnection from every relationship. And when he said, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head,” what he was talking about was disconnection from every place. Jesus lived in the open, or aspired to live in the open. The idea of cutting all ties to other people, to one’s own past and to all places, may sound self-centered and egoistic, but is in fact the opposite, for only thereby, only as but-a-human, do all humans become equal, only then may all be seen for what they are: but-a-human-humans. And the following brief passage in Luke, “And he said unto another, Follow me. But he said, Lord, suffer me first to go and bury my father. Jesus said unto him, Let the dead bury their dead: but go thou and preach the kingdom of God. And another also said, Lord I will follow thee; but let me first go bid them farewell, which are at home at my house. And Jesus said unto him, No man, having put his hand to the plow, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God,” underlined the radicality of the message of Jesus and reinforced the importance of freedom for the coming of the kingdom of God. No past, no future, only a vast now, and in its light God assumed form.
That was the light I saw that night in the summer house.
Not the work of creation itself, not the crooked pines with their tassels of needles, not the clear, burning fire and the crackling logs as they gradually turned into ash and cinders. Not the stars that shimmered in the dark and unendingly still night sky, not the ice-mantled rock of the shore. Not the foxes that lived in the forest, with their thick coats and wily-looking faces, not the big gulls that screeched and soared over land and sea, in their white-and-gray plumage, with their yellow beaks and black, beady eyes. Not the cod that lay motionless above the shallow banks off the islets, yellowy-brown and white, and utterly silent. Not the kelp that grew beneath the water, nor the clusters of blue-black mussels that clacked against the rocks in the pull of the waves. Nothing of what existed, but its consequence: in this, God emerged into being.
I had thought about this all through the summer, and read accordingly, though of course without ambition of coming to any conclusion, for God was not something firm that allowed itself to be easily grasped. But, I thought as I stood steering the boat through the strait, the town looming up ahead, at least I knew what to look for, and in which direction to look. In the social realm, only the social was visible, the human sphere was everything there, even animals and trees vanished from view, and that was why true religion turned away from the social. People are created not in, but for the image of God, as Hans Jonas wrote. And only he who hates his father and mother, his wife and children and brethren and sisters, and his own life too, will be able to see it.
Even in the wind of motion, the air in the strait felt like an oven, so it was no wonder the water close to shore was teeming with people, their pale little heads bobbing like seals, thin white bodies wading out or clambering back.
The colorful array of towels spread out on the beach.
Ahead, the details of the town began gradually to emerge. I saw people in the streets and seated at the sidewalk cafes, carrier bags gleaming in the sunshine, even the tiny white dots of the ice creams some of them held in their hands.
Ten minutes until the bus arrived. I’d be just in time, I thought, slowing down as the little ferry came chugging from the jetty, on its way to one of the outlying islands. I opened up the throttle again after it had gone, slowing once more a couple of minutes later as I entered the wide channel leading into the harbor itself.
I found a space, moored and went into town.
Maybe I could have a beer when he got his ice cream?
One beer never hurt anyone.
There was a church bazaar on across the road and I looked up at the church building itself with its red-brick walls, its green copper roof and copper spire, and it struck me that I’d always overlooked it, taken it for granted. I’d certainly never been inside.
But it would have to wait. It was hardly the kind of thing a young boy would be looking forward to.
The clock on the tower told me I still had a couple of minutes. I crossed the road and hurried the last bit of the way to the bus station. A big, sleek coach, white with red and blue writing on the sides, came gliding in just as I got there. That would be it.
It pulled into the bay, the doors opened and people began to file out, most gathering at the side to wait for their luggage, others walking directly away into the town, free men and women.
I couldn’t see Viktor anywhere.
I went over to the huddle of passengers where the driver had now opened the luggage compartment and begun to unload the bags.
“Excuse me,” I said. “Is this the bus from Oslo?”
He didn’t reply, his upper body momentarily consumed inside the cavernous compartment as he tried to extricate a stroller. His white shirt was soaked through with sweat all the way up his back.
“It’s from Oslo, yes,” a young man said.
“Thanks,” I said, and went to the door, up the steps and into the bus to see if he was there. Coming from the bright light outside, I could barely see a thing at first. A funny taste filled my mouth, it reminded me of a particular apple variety, only then it was gone, my eyes adjusted to the half-light and I went up the aisle.
Viktor was sitting at the back, his knees wedged against the seat in front. He didn’t look at me as I came toward him, but stared harshly out of the window.
“Hi, Viktor! Good to see you!” I said.
He ignored me.
“Have you had a good trip?”
No answer.
A slight curl of his mouth told me he wasn’t completely indifferent.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s go, shall we?”
I touched his shoulder.
“Have you brought any luggage? If you have, we’ll need to get it. We’re going by boat to the summer house. It’ll be fun. I was thinking we could get an ice cream first.”
“I don’t want an ice cream,” he said, flashing me a glance.
“Suit yourself,” I said. “But we need to get off the bus now, come on.”
“I’m not coming,” he said. “I want to go home.”
“It’s only for a few days,” I said. “You’ll be home again before you know it.”
“I want to go home now.”
“Well, I’m afraid you can’t, buddy.”
“I’m not your buddy.”
“All right,” I said. “But you can’t sit here. Everyone else has gone now.”
“I don’t give a shit,” he said.
“That’s enough, Viktor,” I said. “I won’t have you swearing. It’s not nice.”
“I don’t give a fuck,” he said. “And you’re a dick.”
“Don’t call me that,” I said. “I’m your dad.”
“Fuckwit,” he said.
“Viktor,” I said, “don’t call me that.”
“Fuckwit,” he said. “Fucking dick.”
“That’s enough now,” I said.
His eyes stared straight ahead. Then, a smile passed fleetingly over his face before his hardened expression returned.
I couldn’t believe it.
Was he really that wicked?
I’d thought he was upset and angry at his mother having left him. But then he wouldn’t have smiled, surely?
“Come on,” I said.
“No,” he said.
Outside, the driver drew himself upright. There were only a couple of suitcases and bags in front of him now.
“Viktor, we’ve got to go now,” I said. “You know full well we do. You can’t stay here.”
He said nothing, but sat without moving, staring out of the window.
I took his arm gently and tugged.
“Come on, Viktor,” I said.
He looked down at my hands.
“Cunt,” he said.
A sudden rage welled inside me.
“That’s ENOUGH!” I said. “You’re coming with me, NOW!”
I dragged him to his feet. He gripped the seat in front and clung to it.
“HELP!” he shouted. “HELP!”
Just then, the driver came up the steps at the front of the bus. I let go of Viktor.
“What’s going on here?” the driver said, coming toward us.
“It’s all right,” I said. “My son here refuses to come with me, but we’ll sort it out.”
“Viktor, wasn’t it?” he said. “You know I promised your mother I’d look after you? You’d better do as your dad says.”
“He’s not my dad,” Viktor said.
“You heard me,” said the driver. “I promised your mum. So you go with your dad now and pick up your luggage out there before someone runs off with it.”
“OK,” said Viktor after a moment’s hesitation, and stood up without looking at me.
I followed him out and we went to where the luggage had been left. A small carry-on suitcase and a little rucksack.
“If you take the rucksack, I’ll take the suitcase. OK?” I said.
“You can take them both,” he said.
“All right, no problem,” I said, as I swung the rucksack over my shoulder and picked up the suitcase.
How come he did what the driver said, when he wouldn’t listen to me? I wondered as we started to walk, Viktor keeping a couple of paces in front of me. Being his father presumably meant I was someone he felt safe with, thereby allowing him to feel he could take things out on me, whereas the driver was a stranger. Moreover, the man’s black trousers and white shirt looked a bit like a uniform, which automatically instilled a form of respect.
I ought to have taken him by the hand and led the way. After all, he was only ten. But I held back in case he rejected me again.
“How about an ice cream?” I said. “It’s so hot!”
“I said I didn’t want one,” he said. “Are you deaf?”
“Right, we’ll go straight to the boat, then,” I said.
He was wearing a pair of green shorts of a kind that looked more usual for an adult, and a yellow T-shirt with a surfing print across the chest. His skin was as white as chalk and only highlighted by his mother’s choice of colors for him, I thought. His arms and legs were thin, his head rather small, eyes narrow, his lips, too, narrow and tight. He never looked anyone in the eye, and when his mother and I had still been together I’d suggested we should perhaps take him to a specialist and have him examined, it being a sign of autism.
She hit the roof, so we never did.
But there was definitely some issue there.
He stared at the ground as we walked, his hands in his pockets. When we got to the crossing, he glanced up at me and I was relieved to see a trace of uncertainty in him, regardless of everything else.
“Cross over here,” I said.
I stayed a couple of paces behind him. Then, so that he wouldn’t have to reveal his uncertainty to me again, I said:
“Turn left down to the jetty a bit farther on. Can you see where I mean?”
Outside the old post office, I recognized a face coming toward me. It was Tore. He lifted his hand in a wave as he saw me. Despite the heat, he was sporting a pair of long black trousers and a black T-shirt, his eyes hidden behind big, black sunglasses. A bag hung from his shoulder.
“There’s a turn-up,” he said.
“Long time no see,” I said. “How’s things?”
I saw my own reflection in his sunglasses and wished he would take them off.
“Oh, you know,” he said. “You?”
“Good,” I said.
Viktor had come to a halt and was standing a bit farther away pretending not to know me.
“Still out in the summer house?” Tore said.
“That’s right,” I said. “Just came in to pick up my son.”
“I didn’t know you had one,” he said. There was surprise in his voice, but as long as I couldn’t see his eyes it was hard to tell if he was having me on or not.
“Didn’t you?” I said. “He’s ten years old now.”
“Just goes to show,” he said. “You never said.”
“Didn’t I?” I said. “He lives with his mother most of the time, so he’s not here that often.”
I looked at Viktor.
“Hey, Viktor, come and say hello to a friend of mine!”
He stayed where he was, as if he hadn’t heard me.
“He’s a bit shy,” I said. “Anyway, what about you? Been up to much?”
“Not really. Still slogging away at the opera.”
“Oh, I’d forgotten about that!” I said. “It’ll be nearly finished now, surely?”
He nodded.
“And there’s a decent chance of it running at the arts center in the spring.”
“Wow!” I said. “I’ll look forward to that. Listen, I’ve got to get going. But look after yourself, and see you again soon, I hope!”
“Yes, likewise,” he said, walking away as I turned toward Viktor again.
“Who was that?” he said.
“His name’s Tore,” I said, and smiled at him, glad that he’d said something without being asked. “An old friend of mine.”
“Why didn’t you tell him about me?” he said.
He looked up at me.
A chill went through me.
“Of course I told him,” I said, starting to walk. “He was only joking. He’s never seen you before, that’s all.”
“It didn’t sound like he was joking,” said Viktor.
“Well, he was,” I said. “Come on, the boat’s just over there.”
Wasn’t there something I could distract him with?
He didn’t want an ice cream.
A Coke or a lemonade?
But that would mean sitting down somewhere, which would give him time to reflect and perhaps ask more questions.
No, the boat would be best.
In my mind’s eye, I suddenly saw myself walking along the jetty with a carrier bag in each hand, bending forward to put them down in the boat.
I’d forgotten to do the shopping. There was no food for him out there.
“It’s just the way he and I talk to each other,” I said. “We pretend to be stupider than we are. It’s a bit hard to explain. It’s called irony.”
He didn’t even turn round.
There was no reason for him not to believe me. It was true as well, in a way; Tore could have forgotten I’d told him, or he could have been joking. It would be like him.
We went down the steps onto the jetty. Viktor came to a halt by the boat without looking back at me.
“I’m impressed,” I said. “I wouldn’t have thought you’d recognize it.”
It struck me immediately that what I’d said undermined our relationship. Of course he recognized it.
“There are so many boats here,” I said. “And so many that look the same.”
I put the luggage down on the ground, drew the boat in and stepped aboard.
“Will you hand me the suitcase?” I said.
He picked it up and handed it to me.
“And the rucksack?”
He handed that to me too, then got into the boat himself. His face was serious, determined almost. But at least he was no longer refusing to go with me. That was always something, I thought, loosening the mooring.
“I want a life jacket,” he said.
“I haven’t got one,” I said. “Sorry about that. But I promise to take care. You’ll be fine. You can swim, can’t you?”
“It’s against the law not to have a life jacket,” he said.
“Not exactly,” I said. “It’s not the smartest thing to do, but if we go easy, it’ll be all right, you’ll see. Then we can buy you a life jacket tomorrow. OK?”
He said nothing and I started the motor and backed out a bit before turning and heading off. The sun was high in the sky, beating down without a cloud in sight. Its rays glittered and twinkled from windows and cars, bikes, outboards, railings, benches and tables, the water in the harbor a scintillating display of tiny, trembling flecks, while farther out, toward the horizon, they seemed to pool in great, sweeping rivers of light.
Viktor sat with his back to the prow, staring at the gradually diminishing town as we picked up speed and the boat planed.
He could manage a smile, surely?
The salty wind that ruffled his hair, the warm air and the blue, blue world that surrounded us.
My own childhood hadn’t been that easy either. Fat and repugnant as I was then. But I couldn’t recall being aggressive. I liked being on my own, and I’d been shy too. Definitely. But not angry. Not impudent like that. And I couldn’t have hurt anyone if I’d tried.
I had to treat him kindly and be patient with him.
He was only ten.
I looked up at the new star. It seemed more distant now, in the great glare of day, but it still shone brightly.
I pointed to it.
“Have you seen the new star?” I shouted.
He stared up at it. But his face revealed no interest, and again he turned his attention to the landscape we left behind.
Twenty minutes later, we drew into the marina.
“Are you coming into the shop with me?” I said.
He shook his head.
“Are you going to be all right sitting here on your own, do you think?”
“Yes,” he said.
“OK. There’s not much that can happen to you here, I suppose,” I said, and stepped ashore, mooring the boat before going inside the freezing cold supermarket where there wasn’t another customer in sight. I tried to make do with buying as little as possible, basically potatoes and vegetables to go with the fish I caught, and then some crispbread and cheese, and I’d need cigarettes, of course. But what was I meant to get for him?
I wondered what he might like.
Leaving my basket in the shop, I went back outside to ask him. He was sitting with his arm on the gunwale, his cheek resting on top. Seeing me come toward him, he straightened up.
“Is there anything in particular you’d like me to buy?” I said.
“No,” he said.
“What do you like?”
“I don’t know.”
“Crisps? Chocolate? Pizza? You can have what you want, it’s up to you.”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Anything at all?”
“I don’t care.”
“All right,” I said. “I’ll see if I can find something nice.”
Back in the supermarket, I tried to remember what sort of things I’d liked when I was his age. I put a bag of paprika-flavored crisps in the basket, then another kind, salt and vinegar, some salted peanuts and popcorn. A couple of bottles of fizzy drink for him, a few beers for me. A steak for each of us. Béarnaise sauce. Chocolate bars. Chocolate pudding, raspberry jam, vanilla sauce. And half a dozen raisin buns.
After I went to the checkout and started putting my items onto the conveyor, it occurred to me I should get a couple of pizzas in as well. I put the basket down, went back and got four different ones from the frozen counter.
“Any cigarettes today?” the assistant at the checkout said, a young guy of about eighteen with pale skin and dark hair, a red zit on his cheek, bursting with yellow pus. I seemed to remember his name was Simon.
“Oh yes,” I said. “Thanks for reminding me.”
“No need to thank me,” he said, and smiled hesitantly, the way he often did. “Every cigarette you smoke takes two minutes off your life, isn’t that what they say?”
“I believe so,” I said, bagging my items as they came down the line. “They never say which two minutes, though, do they? It could be the ones we could do without.”
He smiled again, and turned to open the cigarette display behind him.
“How many? Three as usual?”
“That’ll be fine, yes,” I said. “Thanks.”
Behind me, the door opened and a slight woman of about sixty came in, removing her sunglasses and putting them away in the bag that hung from her arm.
“Hello, kiddo,” she said. “How’s it going here?”
Her voice was throaty, her skin rather blotched. It was clear that she smoked a lot.
Simon, if that was his name, pushed the card reader toward me.
“Fine,” he said. “Not exactly busy, though.”
“No one can be bothered in this weather,” she said.
“Not in the middle of the day, they can’t,” he said.
I inserted my card and keyed in my PIN. I was surprised by the familiarity of the tone between them, and reasoned that she was his mother, in which case I might have expected him to be more reserved there in public, only he wasn’t.
“Thank you,” he said when the transaction was approved, and I picked up the two carrier bags.
“Thanks a lot,” I said. “See you again.”
The heat outside was a shock even if I did know it was coming. The air shimmered here and there over the empty car park. The woods, extending all the way down to its far end, were green and dry. But the air smelled of salt, not of the woods, and it wafted toward me as I turned the corner, the jetty stretching out into the still and blinking water.
Viktor had sat down at the edge and was tossing small stones into the water. When he saw me coming, he got up without a word and climbed into the boat again. I stepped past him, a bag in each hand, and when the boat rolled more than I’d anticipated under my additional weight, I crouched and put them down. The bottles chinked, and Viktor looked first at the bags, then at me, with narrow, peering eyes.
“How many beers did you buy?” he said.
“Just a couple,” I said. “To go with the dinner. And some pop for you.”
“Mum says you’re a sad alky,” he said.
Another chill ran through me.
I tried to contain myself, mustering all my willpower as I stowed the bags away, one on each side, making sure they weren’t going to tip over, before sitting down on the thwart in the stern.
Viktor stared at me.
“Is that what she says to you?” I said.
He shook his head.
“She said so to Milo. She didn’t know I was listening.”
“Who’s Milo?” I said.
“Her boyfriend, I suppose,” he said.
“She’s got a boyfriend?” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “Milo.”
“And she told him I was an alcoholic?”
“No. She told him you were a sad alky.”
“Well, I’m not, Viktor. It’s very important that you understand that. It’s not true.”
He said nothing, but leaned over the side and dipped his hand in the water.
“I may have a beer with my meal now and then,” I said. “But that doesn’t make me an alcoholic.”
Nothing suggested that he was listening. I started the outboard and backed out. The boat came to an abrupt halt.
I’d forgotten the mooring line.
I put the motor into neutral and stepped forward into the bow, knelt down next to Viktor and drew us in, undid the knot, shoved off, went back and sat down on the thwart again, then shifted into forward gear and opened the throttle. I didn’t care what the speed limit was inside the harbor, all I wanted was to get back home as fast as possible.
Not long after, we were there. If Jesus had not where to lay his head, as it said in the Gospel, because he wanted to be completely free and be just a human being, unconnected to anything or anyone, something I totally understood, I could not let go of this. I loved the sight of the storehouse at the jetty, in its coat of thick red paint, nestled in the little inlet, the smell inside it, of tar and salt, as I loved my house itself, yellow ochre in color, long and low on the crest of the rise, and of course the woods, the smooth, bare rock of the shore, the jetty. The decked veranda, the living room with its wood burner, the little kitchen.
Without that anchor, I’d be lost. I wasn’t strong enough to drift about, even if it really was what I wanted. But the world had opened itself up to me anyway, and it was here that it had opened.
With a carrier bag in each hand, I followed Viktor’s delicate frame up the path to the house. He wasn’t exactly agile; the rough terrain seemed to be difficult for him to manage, there was something awkward and uncoordinated about his whole body, he was rather knock-kneed, and his arms never quite seemed to be under control.
It broke my heart to see it.
After I’d put the groceries away in the kitchen, I went back down to the boat and got his case and rucksack, while Viktor stood on the veranda and pretended I didn’t exist.
“Don’t you want to sit down?” I said as I came back toward him and saw him still standing in the corner.
He shook his head.
He’ll come round after a bit, I reasoned, and left him in peace, putting his things on the floor in the little bedroom, where I paused and lifted the duvet to my nose. It was clean, but it had been ages, perhaps six months, since I’d changed the bed clothes, so it didn’t exactly smell fresh.
But kids didn’t care about stuff like that, the important thing was that it was clean. If he complained, there were several sleeping bags in the loft in the garage.
I pulled the curtain aside and looked out at the woods. Shafts of sunlight slanted down from bough to bough, the way water might run from rock to rock as it made its way down a fellside, though only the fewest beams penetrated into their deepest depths, the light therefore seeming that much brighter there, in the darkness and gloom of the woodland floor.
They could say what they wanted about me, but I wasn’t an alcoholic.
Why had she said that?
To come across as a victim in the eyes of her new boyfriend?
Milo. It sounded like a detergent.
I straightened up. It didn’t concern me. It didn’t concern me in the slightest.
I was the person I was.
Let it go. It makes no odds. Don’t rise to it.
I went out onto the veranda and lit a cigarette. Viktor had gone down to the shore and was sitting on the rock prodding a stick at something by his feet.
In the blue sky high above him, three gulls soared. They were sent, to that place, to that time.
Yet they brought no message but their presence.
Which was mysterious enough in itself.
I turned round and looked up at the star.
What message did it bring?
The Morning Star was important in the Bible. But in conflicting ways.
Now it was important in our world.
I needed to check what the Bible said about it once Viktor was asleep.
I went into the kitchen and got him a bread roll, thinking it would be good to offer him something when I went down to see what he was doing. Maybe a soft drink as well?
No, that would be overdoing it. He’d think I was pandering to him.
A roll was fine.
He looked up at me as I came back out onto the decking. Then, as I went down toward him, he looked away again.
“Hi, Viktor!” I said, crouching down beside him. “I brought you a bread roll, in case you fancied something.”
“I’m not hungry,” he said.
“Come on,” I said. “You’ve got to eat. And you might as well enjoy yourself now you’re here. Sulking’s not much fun. It’s a dead end.”
I put the roll down next to him and stood up.
“I reckon this must be the finest day of the year so far,” I said. “Do you fancy a swim? Or maybe we could fish for some crabs? Or we could go out somewhere in the boat, if you want. To one of the islands. The lighthouse!”
“I want to go home,” he said.
“This is home,” I said. “But if you’d rather sit and sulk, that’s fine by me.”
He looked up at me with that narrow-eyed smile.
Was that what he wanted, for me to get angry? Was he goading me on purpose?
If he was, he was in for a disappointment. I wasn’t going to lose my temper with him, it didn’t matter what happened.
I went back up to the house, and as I reached the veranda again I had an idea. Arne’s twins were about the same age as Viktor. We could go over there. They could play together. Maybe he could even stay the night there. Arne owed me more than one favor.
I pressed his number, leaned my elbows on the rail and looked out at the sea.
“Hello, Egil,” he said. “I’m in the car and you’re on speakerphone. Tove’s with me.”
“OK,” I said. “How is everything?”
“We’re on our way to the hospital.”
“OK. When are you going to be back, do you think?”
“No idea. Why?”
“Viktor’s here,” I said. “Surprise visit.”
“Viktor? Is that your son?”
“That’s it. I was thinking maybe he and the twins could hook up?”
“Yes, of course,” said Arne. “They’re at home, as far as I know. My mother’s there to keep an eye on them.”
“Oh, right,” I said. “In that case, perhaps tomorrow would be better?”
“Up to you,” he said. “I’m sure she’d be happy to see someone.”
“I’ll have a think about it,” I said. “But thanks, anyway. Speak to you soon.”
For a few seconds, I thought about mixing myself a drink, an ice-cold gin and tonic would have done rather nicely, but I went and got myself a Pepsi Max instead, pressed some ice cubes out into a glass, cut a slice of lemon and put that in too, before pouring the drink and taking it out with me onto the veranda.
“Viktor!” I shouted. “Come and get something to drink!”
I hadn’t expected him to react, but he did, getting to his feet and trudging back up toward the house.
“What would you like?” I said as he stepped onto the decking. “There’s Villa Farris, Solo and Pepsi Max.”
“Solo,” he said.
“Bottle or glass?”
“Bottle,” he said.
I opened a bottle for him in the kitchen. He gulped a mouthful before going back down to the shore with the bottle in his hand.
Was he going to stay there all week?
I sat down in the chair outside with the Bible in my lap and began skimming through Isaiah until I found the quote I was looking for.
The volume had belonged to my paternal grandfather, it was as heavy as a small child and wonderfully elaborate, but now it was mine and bestrewn with my underlinings and comments.
It turned out I’d already underlined the passage about the Morning Star.
How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!
For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north:
I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High.
Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit.
The Morning Star was called Lucifer in Latin, which meant “bearer of light.” Here in Isaiah, Lucifer was the son of the morning, and the son of the morning could normally hardly be anything else but God, the creator of all things. Lucifer was thus aspiring to become His equal, but was banished from heaven into the kingdom of the dead, over which traditionally he was then considered to rule.
On the face of it, the passage would have us believe that Lucifer was the son of God. But in the oldest parts of the Bible, the relationships between the different characters are often unclear, the nature of the angels being particularly inscrutable; in one place we are told that the angels mingled with the daughters of men, who begat them children who for a time wandered the earth as giants, while elsewhere the distinction between God and the angels is often fluid and uncertain. Moreover, the word “son” could of course be construed in a looser sense meaning “created by.” But it was striking nonetheless that in other passages Jesus, who was the son of God, was likewise referred to as the Morning Star, which is to say Lucifer.
The angel Lucifer, the Morning Star, had been banished from heaven to earth. Now the Morning Star shone once more from the sky. So what did that mean?
Not that I believed the star to be Lucifer or Christ. The star was a star. But I had no doubt that it was a sign of something.
I swallowed a mouthful of Pepsi. It was diluted now, the ice cubes already melted.
You only had to look at it, I thought, and tipped my head back to gaze at it. The star was filled with meaning. It affected everyone who saw it. Something silent and intense streamed from it. It was almost as if it possessed a will, something indomitable that the soul could contain, but not change or influence.
The feeling that someone was looking at us.
I snapped back at a sudden noise from the shore. Viktor was standing up, focused on something on the ground in front of him. I realized he’d smashed the bottle against the rocks. I put the Bible down, stubbing out my cigarette as I got to my feet, and dashed down to where he was standing.
“Did you smash that bottle?” I said.
He nodded and smiled.
“But, Viktor, you know you can’t do that! There’s broken glass everywhere now, people can injure themselves. Animals too, for that matter. That’s not what you want, is it?”
“It’s so boring here,” he said.
“You might think so,” I said. “But there’s lots of things to do, if you bother to think about it. Come on, how about a swim? It’s like the Mediterranean out there.”
“I don’t want to,” he said.
“OK,” I said. “How about something to eat, then? You must be starving by now. I bought pizzas.”
He said nothing.
“Are you hungry?”
He nodded.
“Good!” I said. “But first we’ve got to pick up all this broken glass. Come on!”
“You can do it,” he said.
For a moment, I wasn’t sure what to do. I knew I ought to insist, maybe even force him, because disrespecting nature was one of the worst things I knew, and that was something he had to learn. On the other hand, I had the distinct feeling he was only going to be obstructive and that I’d end up doing it myself anyway. If I forced him, the rest of the day and the evening too would be ruined.
I crouched down beside him.
“Listen, Viktor,” I said. “Somebody might injure themselves on that broken glass. An innocent animal could cut itself and perhaps be prevented from finding food because of it. And we don’t want an innocent animal to die because of something you did, do we?”
“Who cares?” he said. “It’s only some glass. You can pick it up yourself, if it’s so important to you.”
“OK,” I said. “But if you do it again, I’m going to be angry with you.”
I went up to the house and came back again with a plastic bag to put the shards in. They were spread over a fairly large area, and although I probably didn’t retrieve them all, I was reasonably sure I found the biggest bits, at least.
Now and then, I looked up at Viktor as he sat by himself on the rock, small and hostile. It was hard to believe that he belonged to me.
I dropped the plastic bag into the recycling bin at the front of the house, and then had a look in the garage to see if there was anything there that he could play with, finding an old dartboard and a set of darts that I took out onto the veranda and put in the corner for later on, before going inside to make us something to eat.
I never fussed about setting the table properly when I was on my own, naturally, but now I took out two of the best plates, which according to my father were from the mid-nineteenth century, and two wine glasses, even if we were only having pizza and soft drinks.
Viktor came as soon as I called for him, grabbed a piece of pizza and stuffed it in his mouth even before he’d sat down. I hadn’t eaten frozen pizza since the time I’d been living with Torill and she’d had one of those days where she just lay in her bedroom.
It tasted like cardboard then, and it tasted like cardboard now.
“Have we got any ketchup?” Viktor said, without looking at me.
The joy of him saying “we” was immediately offset by the realization that I could only disappoint him.
“Sorry,” I said. “I forgot to buy some.”
He grabbed another slice, his fingers digging into the topping, and devoured it.
“Are you sure you don’t want to go for a swim?” I said. “It’s just the weather for it.”
He shook his head.
“Don’t you like swimming?” I said. “The water’s not cold in this heat.”
He stood up and went behind his chair, and before I’d managed to react or even knew what was happening, he’d lifted it above his head and brought it crashing down onto the table with all his might, smashing the plates and glasses in the process.
He let go of it, turned and walked out.
My heart was thumping in my chest.
I remained seated for a minute to collect myself, noticing that he’d gone and sat down at the same place on the shore.
There was something seriously wrong with the boy.
I went into the kitchen and got a bin liner and a dustpan and brush, and started to clear the table, then I dumped everything, the pizza, the shards of china and glass, into the bin outside. Once I’d got things reasonably straightened up inside, I went out onto the veranda and lit a cigarette. I was still trembling all over.
He’d done it for the sake of attention. Or to make me punish him.
I wasn’t going to punish him. And I wasn’t going to give him any attention for such a wanton act of destruction.
The best thing I could do was ignore him.
It would give him something to think about.
Again, I felt the strong urge to mix myself a gin and tonic. It was something to do with the taste of it in the heat, the cold glass in the palm of my hand. The liquid’s gentle rotation as the hand drew its little circles. The chinking together of the ice cubes, small and slick. The green slice of lime in the gleaming, transparent refrain of it all.
Why was he so angry?
It couldn’t be that bad out here, not even for a ten-year-old.
He was more than angry. It was as if a rage were set inside him, deep in the marrow of his bones.
What was he thinking now?
Was he pleased at what he’d done?
Was he even thinking about it?
I couldn’t remember what I thought about when I was his age. I hadn’t the faintest idea.
It was too hot for coffee.
Or maybe an espresso? Three little mouthfuls.
A slight wind came in from the sea. I could see it ripple the surface at the shore. The pennant at the side of the house lifted on its breath, like an animal after a long sleep.
I’d always disliked these sea breezes intensely, even when I was little. It was something to do with the world, hitherto so polished and still, becoming unsettled. The surface of the sea became unsettled, the flowers and bushes became unsettled, the trees became unsettled, and then the flaglines would begin to rattle against their poles, the worst sound in all of my childhood.
Why did the world become unsettled? What tormented it? What was on its mind?
I went into the kitchen, put some water in the bottom of the espresso pot, poured some coffee into the little metal cylinder, screwed the top on and put the pot on the ring of the cooker, where it soon sizzled and spat.
How strange that I’d tasted apple when I stepped inside the bus, I thought, at the same time picturing myself sitting down next to Viktor out there on the shore, putting my arm around him and hugging him tight.
He would only twist away, perhaps get to his feet and stomp off.
But perhaps it was what he wanted?
All children, surely, wanted to be hugged?
I decided to do so, as soon as I’d drunk my coffee. He’d just have to run off, if that was how he wanted it.
The coffee pot hissed.
That taste of apple had been so distinct, there was a recollection attached to it, but I couldn’t work out what it was, it was like a dream you try to pin down, only for it to keep dissolving.
I went into the living room and looked out.
Viktor wasn’t there anymore.
I heard footsteps and rummaging from the veranda outside.
When I went out, he was trying to lean the dartboard up against the window, but seemed to have realized it wasn’t such a good idea and stepped back to stand there holding it in his hands.
I wasn’t angry with him, I sensed as I saw him there, his slight frame awkwardly askew, as if bent oblique by the wind, his face as ever resembling a grin, with its narrow eyes and prominent cheekbones. But I didn’t feel any affection for him either.
“We can nail it up somewhere, if you like,” I said.
He nodded.
“To a tree, maybe?” he said.
“No, trees are living. We shouldn’t put nails in them. How about round the front? On the side of the garage, perhaps?”
He nodded again.
“I just need to see to something in the kitchen first,” I said. “Are you going to wait here? Or do you want to go round on your own?”
He shrugged.
I wondered if I’d been too appeasing as I went inside again. The coffee pot was hissing louder now, but the water had yet to come to the boil.
Should I wait for it, or turn it off and go back out?
If I made him wait, the initiative he’d taken could disintegrate.
But it would only take a few moments for the coffee to be ready. Wouldn’t it be ruined if I turned the cooker off now?
I pressed the pot down hard against the ring, and the hissing got louder. I took a cup from the shelf above the cooker and put it out on the counter, then fished my mobile out of my shirt pocket to see if anyone had phoned.
Johan. Three times.
Unlike him, I thought to myself, and as I heard the coffee start to bubble up to the upper chamber of the pot I decided to call him back later on. I took the pot off the ring, turned the cooker off and glanced out of the window while I waited for the coffee to settle.
A sailing boat was putting in next to the boathouse. It was using its outboard. A woman stood at the rudder, while a man stood aft with his arm outstretched, a gaff in his hand. Two kids sat in the bow, looking down, their heads lowered, no doubt immersed in their mobile phones.
This was my property.
I’d never put a sign up, not believing in private property rights in that sense, and it was OK by me if it was only for a couple of hours, but something told me they were planning on anchoring up for the night.
I poured the coffee into the cup and went round to the front of the house with it. Viktor stood throwing darts at the garage wall, trying to make them stick.
“This is a good place,” I said. “Hang on a minute, I’ll get the hammer and some nails.”
I drank the coffee in one go, put the cup down on the ground next to my bike and went into the garage, to the corner where my dad’s toolbox was kept. There were plenty of loose nails in the bottom of it, and I found a small hammer too.
“How about here?” I said, holding the dartboard against the wall about a meter and a half off the ground.
Viktor nodded, and I drove the nail into the wood.
“There we are,” I said. “You’re all set now.”
I picked up my cup and was about to go back inside, already looking forward to sitting down, the light streaming in, the Bible in my lap, pausing now and then to ponder the sea, but then it struck me that here was a chance to get close to him, and I put the cup down again.
“I thought you were going in,” he said as he took aim, moving his arm backward and forward from the elbow a couple of times, before launching the dart.
It fell flat against the board and dropped to the ground.
“Bad luck,” I said.
A swarm of midges hung in the air by the wall, each tiny insect whirring this way and that, though without the shape of the swarm altering in any way.
The apple tree in the woods. That was where the taste had come from. The wild apples I’d eaten as a child. There was something fairy tale about a tree no one owned, blossoming alone in spring, quite apart from the trees that surrounded it, to bear such copious fruit in late summer.
“You try, then, if you think it’s so easy,” said Viktor, handing me a dart.
I threw without thinking, and a wave of regret washed through me as the dart buried itself in the board only a hair’s breadth from the bull’s eye.
“Beginner’s luck,” I said. “Your turn.”
He aimed again, making the same movement of his arm before throwing his dart. The arc it described was far too short, and it struck the wall side-on below the board and dropped to the ground again.
“OK,” I said. This time I was more aware of the situation as he handed me the dart, and my throw pierced the wall above the board where it remained.
“You see,” I said.
“See what?” he said.
“That my first throw was just lucky.”
The sunlight poured down from above and seemed to refract from even the smallest surface, radiant in every tree of the sloping woods, particularly the birch that were almost shimmering as they trembled in the breeze.
The soil that bordered the track looked like dust that would whirl up at a glance.
Viktor concentrated again.
Perhaps we could go into the woods and see if there were apples on the tree?
He lifted a foot from the ground and lunged forward as he threw. This time, the dart struck the board properly, but lacked the thrust to penetrate.
He spun round and walked away.
“Hey, where are you going?” I said.
“It’s boring,” he said.
“I can show you how to do it,” I said.
“You’re no good at it either,” he said, and disappeared round the side of the house.
I picked up the darts, then threw them quickly in succession. They ringed the bull’s eye like a bunch of flowers. I felt deceitful, and turned round to make sure Viktor hadn’t come back unexpectedly and seen me throw. He hadn’t, and I removed them from the board, putting them down on the ground and leaving them there. Going back inside, I got my phone out and pressed Johan’s number.
“Well, if it isn’t my old pal!” he said in his Swedish, as if I were calling out of the blue.
“Johan,” I said. “How’s things?”
“Excellent, I must say. How about you? Still in that hut of yours? Ha ha ha!”
“I’m doing fine,” I said, leaning forward with my hand on the windowsill as I looked down toward the inlet. “I can see you phoned earlier on?”
“I did, yes. Have you seen the news today?”
“Not yet, no.”
They’d put a tent up down there. Only now they were nowhere to be seen. Maybe they were on the boat, below deck.
“So you’ve not heard about Kvitekrist?”
“Them going missing, you mean? My guess is they’ve gone into hiding.”
“Well, you’re wrong there, I’m afraid. They’ve been done in, the lot of them, and rather brutally, so it seems, too. It’s even made the news here in Sweden today. They’re saying it looks like a ritual killing. The whole of Bergen’s buzzing about it.”
“Seriously?” I said. “All of them?”
“Well, three of them, anyway. All suspicion’s on number four, the drummer.”
“Jesper? Never, I don’t believe it. But . . . where did this happen? And when?”
“Up at Svartediket. You know the place, you’ve been there yourself.”
I sat down on the floor and leaned back against the wall. I felt sick.
“What are you going to do with all the footage you’ve got? Every TV station in the world’s going to be after it now. CNN, Fox, you name it. And please don’t say you’re going to keep it to yourself!”
“Why not?” I said. “Why would I want to sell?”
He sighed at the other end.
“Then finish the film, at least! I can put everything else on hold if you want.”
“I’ll have to think,” I said. “When did you say it happened?”
“They were found yesterday.”
“And they were definitely murdered?”
“Three of them, yes. Murdered and mutilated.”
“Christ,” I said. “They were just kids.”
“Not anymore,” he said. “Anyway, call me if you decide to go ahead. You know where to get hold of me. And listen, you need to finish that film! Please?”
After the call, I lit a cigarette and went back out onto the veranda. Seeing Viktor sitting there, I stubbed it out again and went over to him.
“We must find something to do, Viktor,” I said. “I agree darts is a bit boring. But we can’t just sit and do nothing.”
He didn’t answer.
“Do you want to phone your mum?”
He shook his head.
“Maybe we can go to the garage and see if we can find something? There’s all sorts of stuff in there. There’s bikes, too. We could go out somewhere on them, if you want? Or go off in the boat? I’ll let you steer?”
“Haven’t you got an iPad?” he said.
“No. I’ve got no internet here. Not even on my phone. But hey, I know this apple tree in the woods. Do you want to come with me and see if there’s any apples on it yet?”
“Who are they?” he said, pointing at the boat in the inlet, the four figures who were walking back along the shore toward it.
“No idea,” I said, and got to my feet. “Tourists, that’s all.”
“What are you going to do?” he said.
“Nothing in particular,” I said. “Read a bit, perhaps. I quite fancy a swim now, too. There aren’t many things better than a swim in the sea on an evening like this. Have you tried it?”
“I can’t swim,” he said quietly.
“You can’t swim?” I said, realizing immediately it was a stupid thing to say. “Well, you can learn in no time here,” I said, quickly making amends. “I can teach you.”
The sea had darkened in the last hour. It lay there in front of us, deep blue and still. The smooth rock was aglow in the light of the descending sun. The wind had died down completely.
I could hardly believe they were dead. All three?
What could have happened?
Jesper was alive. I had to call him. But he’d be in custody if they thought it was him?
Was he crying?
“Hey, Viktor, what’s the matter?” I said, and sat down next to him.
“I don’t like it here,” he said. “And I hate you.”
“OK,” I said. “Hate’s a very strong word. What have I done to make you hate me?
He got up and walked away.
I let him go, not even looking to see where he went.
What had she done to the boy? Calling me an alcoholic and turning him against me. He’d be grown up before he understood who I really was. Telling him was no use. Don’t believe what your mother says. I’m not an alcoholic. I’m actually quite a decent person.
But there was more wrong with him than Camilla could be blamed for.
The family had continued their walk, passing along the shore below me now, no more than twenty meters away. It felt like an intrusion, they were well inside my personal space, and I got to my feet and went back inside. Viktor was lying on the sofa. I tipped a bag of crisps into a bowl, opened another bottle of soft drink, and put both things on a tray along with a dessert bowl and a spoon, a carton of chocolate pudding and another of vanilla sauce, and carried the whole lot into the living room.
“I’ll put this here on the table for you, in case you feel like it,” I said, then went outside again, lit up a smoke and sat down in the chair with my feet up on the rail. I called Jesper’s number from my contacts, only to get through to a generic voicemail saying the person at that number couldn’t be reached at the moment.
What could have happened?
It couldn’t have been coincidence. They were too preoccupied with violence for it to be that, filling their lives with all its symbols.
Could it have been one of the other bands?
I typed him a text.
I’m hearing all hell’s broken loose and you’re in trouble. Call me if you need help or want to talk with someone unconnected / Skallgrim
I sat and looked at it for a moment, deleted Skallgrim and put Egil instead, then sent it. Skallgrim was their name for me—because of Egill Skallagrímsson, of course, from the Viking sagas—but using it myself made it look like I identified with them, which I certainly didn’t. I’d found them interesting, yes. Had even been rather fascinated by them, for a while. But my interest and fascination was precisely down to my not being able to identify with them. I couldn’t understand them, and it was impossible for me to see how I could ever have become like them if I’d run into their kind when I’d been twenty. They were naive, their symbols and posturing nothing but an act, all about bigging themselves up—but still it had led them, consciously or not, into something else more dangerous, and infinitely more radical. The devil the satanist scene worshipped stood for the transgression of every law and rule, every notion of human kindness and solidarity; it was an egotism so great it could easily have driven them to kill another person and remain unmoved by it. As one adherent had said: a person dies every second, so why make a fuss about a single murder? He was in prison now for killing a random man in a park, a crime he probably would have got away with if he hadn’t boasted about it.
After spending a few weeks with them, I’d understood with dismay that in their eyes what they were doing was all about freedom. And that to them freedom and violence belonged together. Death was something they asserted and cultivated, believing, so I realized, that a person could only be free when death, whether one’s own or someone else’s, was no longer something to be feared and avoided. At that point, compassion for others came to an end, and such ruthlessness was of course freedom’s fundamental condition.
Nietzsche and Bataille were the philosophers of freedom, and ruthlessness was alien to neither, but their thoughts were only thoughts, their words only words. Bataille, and other members of the secret society that went by the name of Acéphale, had toyed with the idea of human sacrifice by decapitation, even going so far as to select a victim, though falling short of actually carrying it out. Kvitekrist, however, and the circles in which they moved, translated such ideas into action and made them real, presumably with little knowledge of either Nietzsche or Bataille, though the most charismatic scene members, Skjalg, or Heksa, had read Zarathustra, or at least claimed to have done. That was what made me get in touch with them.
Two of those I’d interviewed, and whose lives I had followed to a certain extent, committed suicide, one during my months of filming them, the other a year later. The whole thing was so toxic that eventually I pulled out, archiving the footage and dropping the project, whose working title had been The Devil in the Valley, for good.
I decided that as soon as Viktor had gone to bed, I was going to dig out the material and see what I’d got. I’d no idea how many hours of footage there was, but nothing had been edited. Some of it I’d never even seen.
Or maybe it wasn’t such a good idea, I thought a second later, reaching for my cigarettes. Maybe I’d just leave it alone. Three were dead now. And there was nothing anyone could do about it.
Far away in the east, it looked like the sky was darkening, more black than blue, rising up like a wall above the sea. It was hardly surprising with the temperatures we’d been having, I thought, and lifted the Bible onto my lap, proceeding to flick through the Gospels to see if I could find the passage where it said Jesus was the Morning Star, but it was hopeless as long as I didn’t have the slightest idea where to look, and so I put it down again, took a deep drag on my cigarette and gazed toward the sea.
The tourist family had appropriated my space, the grown-ups sitting on the rocky outcrop, the two kids swimming silently in the pool below. A gull cried piercingly, its horrid noise emitting into the open and immediately dissolving. I sensed the stillness that remained, the stillness of evening, leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes.
I awoke in the twilight.
A strange noise came from the woods behind the house. A throaty, clicking kind of noise.
kalikalikalikalik
Immediately, there was a response from farther away.
kalikalikalikalik
What could it be?
An animal of some sort, but what? I thought, getting to my feet. Only then did I see the campfire that was burning down at the shore, its flames bright and distinct in the gloaming.
A bird?
Herons made a prehistoric sound. But this wasn’t a heron.
I went inside. Viktor was asleep on the sofa, lying on his back with his mouth open, his eyes partially so, enough for me to see the whites.
Bless him.
I lifted him up and carried him into his room. His head lolled back, and he opened his eyes. They looked completely vacant, as if his soul had left him.
“Just putting you to bed,” I said.
“Mmm,” he said. “Mmmm.”
Once under the covers, he curled up in the fetal position. I couldn’t tell if he was asleep or not.
“Goodnight, little man,” I said, stepping back out and leaving the door open in case he woke up and panicked when he didn’t know where he was.
I opened a bottle of Delamain and poured myself a glass, drinking it standing on the veranda. I knew nothing better. A couple of drops on the tongue were enough for the magnificent taste to well in the mouth, and yet it was such a thin liquid. I ordered six bottles at a time from the state liquor store twice a year, ever since tasting it with my father some years previously.
The air was still warm, though moister now, almost steaming in the dusk.
Whatever kind of animal it was, it was quiet now.
My body was stiff after having slept for so long in the chair. I felt a bit of a chill, too, despite the warmth.
I went into the bedroom and took off my shirt, wiped the sweat away with a towel, put on a clean shirt, lightweight cotton, and a pair of white socks, then sat down on the stool in front of the sliding door while I tied the laces of my running shoes. After that, I looked in on Viktor to see if he was asleep. He was, well away by the looks of it.
I went outside, down onto the rock, though staying above the path for a while so as to avoid the tourist family from the boat.
A band of rose-colored light edged the horizon behind me, enough to still bring out the colors of the landscape, albeit only just: the dianthus were more gray than pink, the grass that grew in all the little hollows more ashen than yellow, but the rock itself was a tawny hue, and the sea below still blue.
It felt good to walk. And it was good to see the light slowly being absorbed from the ground by the hazy veil of darkness that so quickly grew dense in these last days of August.
If I was quick about it, I’d be able to find the tree while there was still enough light. I went up the stony beach toward the woods behind, where there was a small clearing perhaps a hundred meters in. Wasn’t there a little stream there too?
Yes, there was.
Lightning flashed in the black sky above the horizon. The thunder that followed sounded distant and faint. How strange that the sky in the west could be so bright and clear, while in the east it was thick with thunder-clouds.
It would be an hour, at least, before the rain came.
I hurried over the stones, cutting toward the woods along a path that ran between bushes of sloe and rose hip whose tops were like barbed-wire fences, entering then among the trees, which at first were no taller than me, though as I walked on they began to strive toward the sky, until the tallest rose up, ten and twenty meters, like watchtowers in every quarter.
The first part of the woods extended some two hundred meters before being traversed by the road; beyond the road were some open fields, and then the trees stretched away once more. There was a big pond in there, where as a boy I’d swum, but its water was so thick with algae now one could almost walk on it.
I followed a gravel track that ran through the fields, then a path that went up the hill into the woods on the other side. The darkness was falling faster than I’d anticipated, and I began to regret having come so far. But I liked there being a point to my walks. The clearing I was aiming for wouldn’t take more than a few minutes to reach, and Viktor had been so fast asleep he wasn’t likely to wake until morning.
Something rustled in the undergrowth close by.
For some obscure reason, the thought came into my head that it was a dead person unable to find rest.
But the dead were hardly likely to make a sound, I told myself, and smiled at the thought.
I’d only just written about a dead person I’d seen, so it wasn’t so strange that the thought had occurred to me like that. It had been lingering in my subconscious. But it was something I’d seen only once, and I wasn’t sure if what I’d seen had been real or not, whether it had been something inside me or something external. What’s more, I’d never know, I told myself, and just then I saw something move across the path in front of me.
I halted, standing quite still for a moment as I stared, but whatever it was had disappeared into the undergrowth.
A snake, most likely, I thought, and stamped my feet down hard as I went on, making sure it would know I was there. It had been moving away from me, but it was when they were surprised that they attacked. If it was an adder, of course. But it could have been a grass snake.
I hadn’t seen a snake since the spring, when I’d come across a number of them coiled up in the sun on the warm stones at the beach, as yet cold and sluggish from the winter.
Again, something moved in front of me. This time I saw it quite clearly as it slithered across the path into the bushes, its flat head slightly raised.
It was an adder.
But two in the same spot at this time of year? Or maybe there were even more?
My fingertips and toes tingled. Rationally, I wasn’t afraid of them; they weren’t dangerous, at least not if you were careful, but there was something about them as creatures that filled me with terror. It was a terror that had existed on earth as long as the snake itself.
Wasn’t it around here somewhere?
Yes, through that little dell there.
I walked on a bit, following the low outcrop of bare rock. After some fifty meters, the woods opened out into a clearing.
Sure enough, a stream ran beyond it on the other side.
And the apple tree was there ahead of me, set apart from the other trees.
I went up to it. Its branches were heavy with fruit. The summer had been good to it, I thought to myself, reaching out and gripping one of its apples, twisting it free and sinking my teeth into it.
Mmmm.
The taste, at once sweet and tart, was exactly as I remembered. A faint suggestion of bitterness that wasn’t there in any shop-bought apple, something unusual, unique.
The old world.
It was my uncle who’d brought me here first. My dad’s younger brother Håkon.
Distant in manner, gruff and stern.
But always good to me. He told me things about my dad that I’d never have known otherwise. It must have amused him, I thought, picking some more apples so that Viktor could taste them too, filling my pockets. And then, as I was about to go back, something moved again in the grass next to me.
Another adder.
It stopped and raised its head, its tongue flicking the air.
It seemed to be looking straight at me. But snakes could barely see a thing.
I stamped my foot hard on the ground, and then again.
It thrust its head forward, the movement transmitting through its body as it wound away toward the trees.
I looked around to see if there were any more. To see so many in such a short space of time was unusual. Were they gathered here to mate? Or perhaps their food was particularly plentiful here?
All was peaceful and still. The grass was gray in the dusk, darker among the trees, the tallest of which stood black against the sky.
I went over to the rock, whose slope was gentle enough for me to scramble up without using my hands.
From behind me came the sound I’d heard earlier.
kalikalikalikalik
I turned and surveyed the clearing. It had come from close by, perhaps from the trees across the grass.
If it was a bird, it was of considerable size.
There were no birds like that in this landscape, not as far as I was aware.
I climbed the hill and was making my way back down the other side when I saw what could only be a fire among the trees, not far from the pond.
There was a band of more open terrain there, sheltered by rock, slanting away toward the pond. I’d been there many times as a child. One summer, I’d found a dead cow there, lying in the stream. I remembered I’d poked a hole in its belly with a stick. The stench had been indescribable.
Unable to imagine anyone camping there anymore, I decided to go over and have a look.
The pond was tranquil, edged with reeds. The banks, which I remembered to be claylike and slippery, were now dry and cracked apart. And yet the memories returned; I recalled features and details of the place moments before my eyes picked them out, much as when I returned to a book I hadn’t read in years and thought I’d forgotten.
I stopped at the foot of the narrow, open incline. The fire was burning above it, at the fringe of the wood.
I couldn’t see anyone there.
But they had to be close by. Who would leave a fire in the woods in a dry period like this?
I went slowly toward it.
There was no one to be seen.
I came to a halt at the fire, which burned gleefully in the dim late-summer night.
“Hello?” I called out. “Is anyone there?”
Not a sound.
I looked around, peering into the darkness among the trees.
What the hell was that?
Farther in, between the wood and the rock, was a kind of mast.
I’d never seen it before.
“Hello!” I called out again.
Strange.
It stood some fifteen meters tall, sheltered by the steep rock face. At its foot, two wooden ramps had been constructed, the mast itself rising up between them, thin and delicate, made of what looked to be wire mesh.
It wasn’t a radio or telephone mast, but seemed to be completely homemade.
A student project of some kind?
Whoever made it had probably lit the fire.
They could have gone back to their car to fetch something. It wasn’t far to the road.
In fact, I could go back that way, I thought. It would be quicker.
I followed the path into the trees. There was no one else around, and the car park was empty too when I came to the road. Whoever lit the fire must have gone for a walk, somewhere close to the pond, and felt sure the fire wouldn’t get out of hand.
It had been a well-constructed fire.
I went along the road until coming to the fields and the gravel track that led back toward the beach, from where I soon saw the light from the house in the distance, as if suspended in the air.
Reaching the smooth ribbon of rock that rose out of the water along the shore, I went up the slope to the right and followed the fringe of the woods for a bit before heading down again where the terrain flattened out.
The tourist family’s campfire had gone out.
Lights twinkled from a few boats farther away, but apart from that the night was dark and black.
August night.
I paused and lit myself a smoke, sitting down on the still-warm rock. The cover of cloud was so dense now that not even the new star was visible.
Thunder rolled in the distance.
Unrest in the land beyond, I said to myself, and got my phone out to see if Jesper had replied. He hadn’t. But there was a text from Camilla.
You two getting on all right? C
Fine, I replied. You?
Fantastic, she wrote back promptly.
That good? I replied.
She sent a smiley back. From some Roman restaurant, I imagined, out with that Milo guy.
Who cared?
Lightning lit up the sky out there.
Ten seconds later and there was a peal of thunder.
It was louder now.
I stood up and went the last bit of the way toward the house. I stopped above the inlet and looked down at the sailing boat as it lay white and motionless in the darkness. No sign of the tourists. No doubt they were tucked up down below. Strange to think of people sleeping there, afloat inside that thin shell. Helpless, to all intents and purposes. Anyone could go on board.
Another lightning flash illuminated the sky. I counted the seconds. Seven before the thunder came.
Suddenly there was a scream.
I wheeled round.
It was from the house. It was from Viktor.
I started running.
Another scream, more protracted, more sustained.
I got to the veranda, pulled the sliding door open and dashed into the living room.
Viktor was standing back against the wall staring at me. His face was distorted in terror.
“Viktor, what is it?” I said. “Is someone here? What’s happened?”
He pointed to the bedroom door. It was closed.
I jumped forward and opened it. The room was empty.
I spun back to Viktor.
“There’s no one there,” I said, and stepped toward him.
He was crying, and I put my arms around him.
“What is it? What’s the matter?” I said.
“A man,” he sobbed.
“Was there a man here?” I said, thinking immediately of the man from the sailing boat.
Viktor nodded.
“At . . . at . . . at . . .” he sobbed. “At the wi . . . window.”
“A man at the window? Outside?”
“Y . . . y . . . yes,” he said.
I didn’t like what he was saying, but I couldn’t let him know.
I crouched down.
“There’s nothing to be afraid of, I promise. It was probably just someone going past who thought they’d look in.”
“No, no, no,” said Viktor.
I ruffled his hair.
“I’m sure it was,” I said. “You woke up and saw someone at the window, and you thought you were all on your own here. No wonder you were frightened! But there’s nothing to be afraid of, I promise.”
“But there is,” he said, and clung to me.
“We’re safe here in our little house. And nobody’s been in. It was just someone out for a walk, that’s all, who was curious to see what was inside. They shouldn’t have looked in, but some people are a bit like that. It’s happened to me too, twice at least.”
“But . . . he . . . he . . . didn’t look . . . like . . .”
“Like what?”
“A . . . hu . . . hu . . . human,” he sobbed.
Not like a human, is that what he was saying?
Like what, then? Like a dead person?
Had the gates of hell opened?
“You stay right here, Viktor, and I’ll go out and have a look.”
“No!” he cried.
Oh, the poor kid.
“Of course it was a human,” I said. “It’s dark outside, that’s all. Things often look strange and different in the dark. Even quite normal things.”
“No, Daddy,” he said. “It . . . wasn’t . . . a human . . .”
“Could it have been an animal, then, do you think?”
He shook his head as the tears ran down his cheeks.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll go into your room and open the window and look out. There’s nothing there, but I want you to be quite sure, OK?”
“OK,” he said.
I went into the room, turning round to give him the thumbs up before opening the window. The trees in the darkness swayed in the wind that had gathered over the sea and now rushed about the land. Everything was sighing and creaking out there.
“Is anyone there?” I called out.
No reply, obviously. I felt stupid. But I’d done it for Viktor’s sake, not mine.
I closed the window and returned to him.
“You see, there’s no one there,” I said. “Perhaps you just imagined there was?”
He shook his head firmly.
“Then I’m sure it was only an inquisitive walker,” I said. “Listen, shall we do something cozy?”
He looked at me without speaking.
What would he find cozy?
“How about some chocolate pudding?”
He shook his head.
“We could light a candle and sit for a bit? How does that sound?”
He shook his head again.
He was scared out of his wits. It was more than just waking up on his own and feeling frightened. He must have seen something.
I felt there was some kind of underlying angst in him, too.
I put my arms around him. He was as stiff as a board.
“Everything’s all right, Viktor,” I said. “There’s nothing to be afraid of. Come on, let’s sit outside for a bit.”
I led him tentatively toward the door. He allowed me to guide him, and a moment later we were sitting in our chairs on the veranda. The sky above the sea split with lightning every now and then. He looked out, expressionless.
I was concerned. Something clearly wasn’t right.
The new star. The great skin I’d found shed in the woods. The crabs on the road.
The dead girl.
And now Viktor seeing something that wasn’t human.
But then again, I had no idea what films he watched, what games he played.
“I got a text from your mum just before,” I said. “She’s having a nice time in Rome.”
“Mhm,” he said.
“Are you and Mum getting on all right?”
He turned his head and looked at me for a second, then looked back at the sea.
It was impossible to tell what he was thinking.
“Do you fancy some crisps?” I said after a moment.
“OK,” he said.
I got up and fetched the tray I’d left for him in the living room, a candleholder and four candles.
He leaned forward and took a handful of crisps as I lit the candles.
“Are you still frightened?” I said, sitting down again.
“A bit,” he said.
“But you know there’s nothing to be afraid of now, don’t you?”
He shrugged.
I poured some soft drink into his glass. He drank it in one go.
“It’s like being at the cinema, this!” I said.
It really was magnificent, watching the lightning in the dark sky in front of us.
Viktor took another handful of crisps, and stuffed them into his mouth, flakes and crumbs dropping onto his chest.
He hadn’t been taught any manners, that much was obvious.
But he did seem calmer now.
I reached out and picked up my cigarettes, tapping one out against my palm and then lighting up.
There was that sound again, from behind the house.
kalikalikalikalik
What was it?
I stood up.
“I’m just going to get something from the garage,” I said. “Won’t be a minute.”
“Don’t go!” said Viktor.
I couldn’t take him with me, and I couldn’t leave him on his own.
I sat down again. From the sea came a faint, thrumming sound. It was the rain beginning to fall. And then, moments later, the first drops struck the rock in front of us, spattering everywhere within seconds, and all of a sudden we were as if in a dome, sheltered on the veranda from the elements that raged around us.
We sat for a while without speaking.
“Is there something else you’re afraid of?” I said after a bit. “I understand you being scared seeing someone at the window like that. Especially if you thought you were on your own. But is there anything apart from that?”
“No,” he said.
He picked up his bottle of pop and drank from it.
“That’s all right, then,” I said. “Because there is nothing to be afraid of. You know that, don’t you?”
“I know,” he said.
“But listen,” I said, “it’s late. I think you should go to bed now, don’t you?”
He shook his head.
“Are you frightened of being on your own in your room?”
“No.”
“You can sleep in my bed, if you want.”
“What about you?”
“I can sleep on a mattress on the floor.”
“OK,” he said.
I followed him into the bedroom. He took his shorts and T-shirt off and his pale, skinny body crept under the duvet.
I sat down on the edge of the bed, but when I made to run my hand through his hair he turned away.
I got up.
“Where are you going?” he said.
“Just onto the veranda,” I said. “It’s a bit early for me to go to bed yet.”
He sat up immediately, picked his shorts up off the floor and put them on.
“Viktor, it’s bedtime now,” I said. “Do you want me to sit here with you?”
As soon as I said it, he pulled off his shorts again and got back into bed.
“You mustn’t go when I’m asleep,” he said.
“I won’t,” I said.
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
He closed his eyes, and I sat down on the floor with my back against the wall. His breathing was calm and steady, and I sat for several minutes without moving, sensing that he wasn’t quite asleep.
“Daddy?” he said abruptly.
“I’m here.”
“I am afraid of something.”
“What are you afraid of?” I said.
For a long moment, he didn’t speak.
I turned my head and looked at him. He was lying quite still, staring at the ceiling.
“I’m afraid of death,” he said quietly.
I didn’t know what to say. But he was waiting for an answer.
Perhaps he’d never told anyone before.
If there was one thing I wasn’t afraid of myself, it was death. It could come only as a relief, a liberation from life’s torment, its badness and petty malice; from those who constantly craved, who took and never gave.
“Everyone is from time to time,” I said after a pause. “Even grown-ups.”
He said nothing. It was almost as if I could hear him think.
“But you’ve a long life to look forward to,” I said. “There’s nothing to be afraid of. OK?”
He didn’t answer.
Twenty minutes later, he was fast asleep.
I crept out and sat down outside. The darkness was alive with pouring, dripping rain. I wondered if the rain was warm, and whether to go and see what was making that noise. But I dismissed the idea, put my feet up on the rail and lit a cigarette.
kalikalikalikalik, came the noise from the woods behind the house.
kalikalikalikalik, came the reply.