ANNA, 1994
Where will you be when the world starts to burn . . . ?
Anna stood petrified to the spot, staring at the words typed onto the card she was holding in her hand. She had found it in an envelope stuck under the windshield wipers of her car. Any and all hopes that this was some kind of mistake—that the card was meant for someone else, left on the wrong windshield—were dashed when she saw her name clearly printed on the front.
For Anna. It was one of those floral-print cards that you could buy for ten kroner at a Fakta supermarket. Yellow roses. Her father’s favorite. And the words were her father’s, an echo from their living room whenever she had dared to step out of line.
Where will you be when the world starts to burn, Anna? Will you be standing among the living or the dead?
It was three in the afternoon and the sun was bright and warm after eight hours under the neon lights of the fish factory. But the cold lingered in her fingers; they were stiff and clumsy, making it difficult to fumble the card into her bag. She wouldn’t dream of simply throwing it away. If somebody saw it, saw her name written on the card, they would know the message was meant for her, that she had been caught in some unforgivable shameful act. She had to destroy it, get rid of it, later, when there was no risk of being seen.
Anna opened the car door and slid into the driver’s seat. Tried to breathe calmly, looked up and out over the wind-blown parking lot. Other workers were leaving the factory now, either alone or in small groups. Little bow-necked Ellen scurried over the asphalt like a mouse fearing a hawk hovering overhead. And a little farther off the mainstays emerged: the routine floor-workers who reigned supreme over the other girls on the factory floor. They lived next door to one another, gave one another lifts to work; their children played together, and on the weekends their husbands watched soccer games together and stood around the barbecue drinking beer. It was a community she had never been able to find her way into, even though she’d made her own tentative attempts to do so over the years. On her fortieth birthday she had invited her neighbors to a barbecue. She had rented a tent, served white wine and homemade potato salad. Everybody came, and went home again. And nothing changed. She was alone.
Anna put the car in gear and turned onto the country road along the coastline leading to Klitmøller. The sun was shining in a pale blue sky, but the wind had turned, and the waves breaking on the beach sent a mist of shattered grey pearls into the air. Soon the roaring autumn storms would rage along the coast.
She wiped away her tears with the back of her hand, swore, and then cursed herself for doing so.
There was no reason to panic. All she had to do was think rationally, not let her feelings run wild. She was an adult human being, and she had to think of Ella. And Helgi. The life they had built together. It was only a card after all. Just words.
Helgi was already home. His car was parked in the drive. Ella’s schoolbag lay abandoned in a corner at the entrance. He had fetched her from daycare and bought the groceries for dinner. The card was burning in Anna’s handbag, but she knew that she couldn’t show it to Helgi. It was meant for her.
No one can protect you from the wrath of God.
The rasped inner voice was calm and polite, muted.
Anna went into the kitchen. Helgi was sitting at the small kitchen table with his back turned. He was reading the newspaper. His shoulders were broad and so familiar to her. There had been a time when she knew those shoulders could bear whatever she laid there. She reached out and brushed a hand over them.
“Hi.”
He did not look at her, didn’t even turn around. It had been like this for some time now—stress at work, he’d said, but apart from that, he didn’t say anything at all. She wanted to hold him in her arms, but he didn’t look like something you could hold onto. He looked like steel and stone.
“I’m going for a walk,” he said. His voice like rust.
“Again? But you’ve already been out for a walk today.” Ella had appeared in the doorway, she stood there shaking those massive curls of hers. “Shall I come with you? Shall we go fishing? Last week you promised we could go fishing.”
“Not today, Ella.”
He tried to smile, but his mouth was little more than a line. Then he turned and went into the entrance, the car keys jangling in his hand.
He is leaving you. You left God for him, and now you are being punished. There is no love stronger than the love of God.
“Mom? Should we do something together?”
Ella’s small face was tipped up to Anna’s, bearing all the courage a little girl could muster. Rejection hurt, this Anna knew. She also knew that she had to go to her daughter now.
Anna’s smile seemed reassuring and real.
“Let’s sit on the couch together for a while,” she said. “We could play cards, if you like.”
Ella’s face brightened up briefly, but after the first hand, she flung the cards at the wall and kicked the coffee table.
“Dad promised we could go fishing.”
Her small blue lips were curled into a pout, demanding an answer, but Anna merely cleared away their game. Neither one of them said anything, and a little later, Ella jumped up, went into the foyer, thrust her feet into her galoshes, and darted out the door for Thomas’s house. She and the boy had been inseparable all summer. Her little back cut defiantly through the wind as she disappeared down the drive. It was autumn, and it was already getting dark.
Anna wandered from room to room, lighting candles in the dark windowsills as she went—in the kitchen, the living room, even in the washing room. Then she went back into the living room and looked up Lea’s telephone number in her address book.
Lea would calm her down. Lea had always had a calming effect on Anna when she started to panic. She too had left the church, but she understood the terror of Judgment Day, the depths of this fear, and she had found a place where it couldn’t reach her anymore. Anna knew that when she heard about the card, she would laugh her hoarse smoker’s laugh and swear all Anna’s problems away. Tobacco was the only crutch Lea still clung to after her last rehabilitation. Tobacco and a little hash. That is, as far as Anna knew. It had been such a long time since they had spoken. Years, even.
Anna punched in the number and waited. Heard nothing but a mechanical beep. Busy. She called up again, taking extra pains to punch in the number correctly. The same aggressive, mechanical beep. Still no answer.
The restless dread returned. It seemed forever stored in her body, logged into her bones from a time when her father took her on his knee in the evenings and read the Proverbs to her.
The righteous—men of integrity—will live in this land of ours. But God will snatch wicked men from the land and pull sinners out of it, like plants from the ground.
Anna took the card out of her jacket pocket and held it over a candle. A weak, bluish flame caught, curled, and smoldered the card’s edges as she carefully turned it over. She let the final embers fizzle out in the sink.