23

HELGI, 1994

He pulled the trigger as soon as he registered movement amongst the trees, but the shot was premature. The buck bolted in a twisted leap and crashed through the undergrowth in a stumbling, inelegant flight. It was hit, but only in the rump, and it would take some time to round it up.

He cracked the rifle, slung it over his shoulder, and made his way along the line of trees that flanked the plantation. There was blood on the forest bed. Not a lot of blood, but enough to create a trail of dark red dots on the carpet of dry pine needles. He bent down and pressed a finger into one of the murky smudges. The blood was warm to the touch, and all around him the forest breathed a haze of early winter. It felt good, and necessary; made it possible to breathe after Christi had gone.

Two weeks had passed since she’d stepped out of his car, and now she was nowhere to be found. When he sat down in the dunes in their usual meeting place, there was nothing but cold wind, sand, and the shredded sky above.

More than once he imagined that he had seen her. Between two containers on a building site, behind a shelf at the store, a shadow outside the window, on a street in Thisted. He ran after a woman on the road, but when he caught up with her and put a hand on her shoulder, it was a stranger’s face that greeted him in return. Another time, he drove to Holstebro and parked across the street of the house on Aurikelvej. It was a small, ugly bungalow with a red-brick façade. The curtains were closed, and there had been no signs of life in the two hours that passed while he was parked there, but she was probably . . . at work, or visiting her mother—if she had one. He felt as if he knew her, knew her innermost being, but in fact he knew so desperately little about her. Once she’d told him that she worked in the field of cultural relations, whatever that was. Parents or siblings she never mentioned. There had always been more important things to talk about. A book she had read. A photography exhibition in Århus. Ex-boyfriends she never mentioned either, although there must have been at least one significant partner, the father of the boys she had lost. But the house showed no signs of a man’s presence, and if there had been one, he was of one of the useless sort; the gutters were coming undone and the window frames were rotten, and he returned to Klitmøller with a renewed sense of relief coupled with a deeper desperation in his bones.

He was the kind of man that knew how to look after his own. He was a rock. You could harness him to a plough and he would turn up the soil of an entire meadow in the space of an afternoon. He could build things with his bare hands, and when he stood in front of the bathroom mirror, the bulges on his upper arms and the muscles that played under his skin when he flicked his wrists were testimony of his immense physical strength. But none of it could help him now. He was falling apart, and it was all because of her.

Her and Anna.

The two unhappy women who needed him—each in their own way. But he was just one human being with just one soul.

Anna was going to pieces too. It was as if they glided past each other much more frequently than they had before. On those rare occasions that he had tried to hold her, she was unable to soften in his embrace—or he was unable to open his arms to receive her. They repelled each other like two negative poles of a magnet.

He knew that she had tried to regain contact with an old friend. A woman she had met in a support group for people who had been expelled from their church. Anna and the woman had fallen out over something a number of years previously, and he had never met her, but apparently she was a rehabilitated drug addict, and this only added to his unease. It seemed as though Anna was moving even further away from him now that he was finally ready to come back.

He clenched his jaw. He’d already shot a couple of squawking pheasants earlier that day. Every shot had eased the tension in his muscles. The buck was meant for the butcher.

He could hear the animal’s haphazard flight through the undergrowth and he followed after it patiently. There was no need for haste, there were plenty of daylight hours left, and there was nothing to hurry home for. Above him and beyond the tops of the dense fir trees a cold autumn rain was raging, but the raindrops never reached him. And then he spotted the buck. It was lying on its side, panting, its head lifted to the sky. The worst of the animal’s panic had dissipated along with the drainage of blood, and for a while he stood watching it from a distance. It was a fine roebuck. Not one of the young bulls. In several places its coat bore dark patterned patches, presumably from deathly duels over the females in the herd. Warm clouds of breath rose from its flared nostrils.

He crept closer through the brush. He would prefer to shoot at close range, but he didn’t want to scare the buck any more than he’d done already, nor did he wish to look him in the eye. Not today.

He lifted the rifle to his shoulder, and pulled the trigger. The animal shuddered and the shot resonated briefly in the air. A couple of pheasants were startled higher into the trees, and then the forest was completely still.

He went over to the buck and lifted its antlers. The flesh was torn on the edge of its jaw, the eyes dull against the shimmer of light. He bent down, gripped the forelegs in his hands, and slung the animal over his shoulder. Then he forced his way back through the scattered undergrowth.

The car was parked where he had left it, but when he opened the boot to spread out a few black garbage bags in the back, something seemed out of place. The cold had a hint of perfume in the air that disappeared the very instant he tried to capture it.

Christi.

He glanced rapidly over his shoulder, but there was nothing to be seen among the dense fir trees. Out in the clearing the cold rain poured down over him, and he flipped the hood of his sweater up over his head. He flung the dead animal into the trunk together with his rifle, opened door on the driver’s side, and stumbled back. There was a tiny doll sitting up against the grey upholstery. Not a baby doll, but a ragdoll with yellow threads of curly hair. Next to the doll lay an oblong white plastic tube that he first mistook for a thermometer, but after closer inspection he identified it for what it was: a pregnancy test. On countless occasions Anna had used a more primitive form of the tests over the span of years she’d tried to conceive before Ella was born. Sometimes, when she’d been particularly desperate, she had done three tests on the same day. The white strips of paper lay scattered on the edge of the bathtub, on the sink, on the tile floor, each displaying its own, solitary purple stripe.

He carefully lifted the doll and sat down with the tube in his hand. Two purple stripes were visible in the display.

The test was positive.

From her perch on the passenger seat the doll stared at him with embroidered, light-blue eyes.