HELGI, 1994
A child. Another child.
Helgi muttered to himself as the flat and colorless fields swept by. He hammered a hand against the steering wheel, furious. He had tried calling Christi at least ten times, and every time he got the same result. A high-pitched tone followed by an automated message that the number didn’t exist. He refused to believe it, but had to admit that he had always known. That Christi’s secrecy ran deeper than that sexual tension sparked by the constant uncertainty underlying their relationship. She was playing with him. And now his child was stowed in her uterus, along for the ride.
A child could never be kept secret from Anna.
His relationship with Christi had been a challenge from an organizational perspective alone. All those extra working hours on the building site, the walks in the dunes, the quick showers. Anna could still have her doubts, but her body reacted with a blind and unrelenting certainty. Somewhere in her mind she already knew he was having an affair, even if the fact itself had not yet surfaced in her mind. The pounds were melting away, and the loss of weight made her look older. The wrinkles on her face were more pronounced, her skin sagging under her eyes and chin.
And now he was going to have a child with a woman he seemed to know less and less. In fact, he didn’t know her at all. He accelerated, overtaking two trucks in a row. A car coming in from the opposite direction made a panicked swerve to avoid him, furiously honking. He banged on the steering wheel again.
The rifle rattled in the trunk as he slammed on the brakes for a red light.
“Damn, damn, damn.”
He scanned the other vehicles around him. If she was on her way home, she could be sitting in one of the cars in front or behind him. She could be sitting in the bus. Segments of her profile reflected in car windscreens all around him. He was hooted at again. The lights had turned green and he fumbled with the gears before finally accelerating off again.
“Get a grip,” he chided himself. “Everything can still be fixed. We can all sit down and figure this out. We’re all adults, for Christ’s sake. And with a child on the way . . . ”
He ran a hand through his sweat-drenched hair and turned down the road of dingy houses in Holstebro, where he had been once before. There was no car in the drive in front of the low-roofed house; it was late in the afternoon and already dark outside, but the windows were black.
At the front door he found her name on an antiquated bronze plate. Christi Pinholt Johansen. Thin spider webs connected the door handle with the wall. The curtains were drawn. He banged on the front door, a stone lodged in his breast.
The silence was massive. No scraping or shuffling. No doors slamming. Only thick, dead silence. All around him the wind tore at the leafless crowns of the trees in the garden. He walked along the wall till he reached one of the dark windows, cupped his hands against the pane, and tried to peer inside. Nothing to be seen but dark shadows. Dead things. He walked round the house and into the back garden, panic rising from the pit of his stomach.
The neighbors’ houses were hidden behind the shabby hedge and thorny brambles. The wet grass was so long that it had flattened out, turning yellow in a tangle of rotting autumn leaves and fallen apples, but he managed to kick free a well-laid, cobbled border of what he assumed had once been a flower bed. He worked one of the border stones free, testing its weight in his hand. On the road the headlights of a car swept through the hedge as it slowed down and parked against the curb with a thump of tires. He waited till the car doors slammed and the echo of voices had faded. Then he felt his way to the terrace door and shattered the pane. The smack of the stone against the glass was no more than a dull, lifeless thud, but an instant later, he held his breath as the shards fell from the frame with a crisp clang. Nothing but silence followed.
The house was deserted.
He could smell it the moment he stepped in the door. It hadn’t been heated in months—if not years. The cold and damp clung to the walls. Even though he couldn’t see the full extent of the decay in the semi-darkness, he could still make out the relatively pale patches on the carpet where furniture once had stood. Against the wall, a single bookcase and cabinet with open drawers remained, as well as a couple of collapsed, half-filled cardboard boxes. In the kitchen, the washing machine was disconnected carelessly. There was nothing of any value in the adjacent room. The house was stripped like a moped that had been deserted on the beach, and a single glance in the bedroom, at the darkly polished mahogany bed, was enough to conclude the house had been inhabited by an old woman. The floral bedding lay crumpled in a heap, a jewelry box gaped on the old-fashioned dresser. But there were also signs of more recent inhabitants. A pizza carton, the leftovers still identifiable. On the bedside table were several paper cups containing a rancid black-brown liquid, and a thin copy of the Bible was lying open on the bed. It had been purchased in a bookstore in Århus, still so new that the pages were stiff. He frowned as he swiftly paged through it. On several passages someone had underlined passages in pencil.
I am the way, the truth, and the light.
A caricature of cockeyed, dancing trolls rollicked in the margins, contrasting sharply with the industrious highlighting. He put the Bible down and went into the passageway again. Peeked inside some of the cupboards in the entrance at random. They were empty, apart from a few old blankets and a partly decomposed cardboard box containing a set of crockery. Something crunched under the sole of his boot as he stepped into the bathroom, and in the weak light from the window, he could see it. A hypodermic needle.
•••
“Christi Pinholt? She died, let me see . . . hang on a minute.” The man behind the door turned and called over his shoulder. “Pia? When did Christi die? Was it three years ago . . . ?”
The man’s wife, a woman in her forties with a cascade of birthmarks on her face, appeared in the doorway beside her husband. He caught a glimpse of a half-grown boy in the brightly lit kitchen behind the couple in the doorway.
“Yes, it was the summer of ninety-one,” the woman said helpfully as she dried her hands in her apron. “The house has been empty ever since.”
Helgi cleared his throat. “Yes, well, please forgive the intrusion, but I’m looking for someone . . . and nobody has lived in the house since? No tenants or borders or . . . ”
The woman shook her head. “The children can’t decide what to do with it. The son is . . . he’s a drug addict, and his sister doesn’t want to sell the house so her brother can use the money for drugs. At least that’s what she said the last time I saw her. So now the house is just going to ruin. The son—we don’t know him personally—has been to the house a few times to get some things. And he stayed there once or twice with a girlfriend, but apart from that . . . ”
“What was the name of the sister?”
“Charlotte Lundgård. She now lives with her husband near Viborg.”
“And what does she look like?”
The woman stole an uneasy glance at her husband. He had gone too far. He looked down at his hands and realized that they were still stained with the blood of the buck, as were the knees of his overalls.
“She has short, dark hair, about fifty years old, I think, and is somewhat heavy-set . . . where did you say you were from . . . ?”
He recalled the needle crushed under the sole of his boot. The half-eaten pizza.
“I’m looking for my sister,” he said quickly. “I haven’t seen her for a long time, and I’m starting to worry. Sometimes she forgets to take her medication. She is thirty-three years old, and tall with blonde hair . . . pretty.”
Husband and wife exchanged glances once more, but then apparently decided to take pity on a concerned brother. The woman even tilted her head to one side and nodded sympathetically. He guessed that they weren’t very pleased with their neighbors.
“There has been a woman here matching your description. Quite recently, in fact. She used to come to the house with the son, but that was a long time ago, and she looks a lot better now. Nice. She has her own key, and she seems to come and go as she pleases. I don’t know her name. But she scratched our car once, when it was parked on the sidewalk. Crashed right into it on her bicycle. Peter got her number so we could call our insurance and sort it out, but she never called back, and we haven’t seen her since.”
A grim line appeared around the corners of her husband’s mouth.
“There was something wrong with that number . . . ”
He took a deep breath. So he couldn’t count on her showing up there again. Fuck. He didn’t even know if Christi was her real name, it could have been a name she had taken from the nameplate on the door. She had never wanted him to find her. And she didn’t want him to find her now, either. Especially not now. It had always been her who had contacted him, and it seemed she had no intention of changing the status quo.
“Thank you.” He nodded at the elderly couple, politely wrote down the number they gave him on a business card in his wallet, said his goodbyes, and walked back down the garden path. He felt very old and heavy as a stone. Too old to run after girls and have children, and definitely too old for this—whatever this was.
There were lights on in the windows when he turned down the drive, but neither Anna nor Ella appeared to greet him when he dragged the dead buck into the garage, swearing under his breath as he began to partition the carcass. He cut out the lungs and the gullet and pulled the tongue through the slit neck.
But it was too late. Of course it was too late. The stomach was already swollen with digestive gases, the intestines and stomach lining punctured when he finally removed the internal organs, their reeking contents oozing into the abdominal cavity and spilling out over the dead animal’s stiff coat. The meat was ruined. There was nothing to be saved.
He left the carcass lying prostrate on the garage floor, scrubbed his hands and forearms, and went indoors with a feeling of defeat.
“Anna!”
No answer. No answer from Ella either. He glanced at his watch. It was six-thirty, someone ought to have started dinner by now. If everything had been as usual, Anna would have been at the kitchen counter making carrot salad with Ella, chatting about seagull feathers and the wind blowing in over the sea, all the way from America.
But the kitchen was cold and dark.
He went into the living room, and there she was, Anna. All the lights were on and she was lying on the sofa with her eyes closed. The television was running without sound, pictures of the war in Yugoslavia flooded into the room; children crying in make-shift refugee camps, ancient, toothless women wailing at the sky.
Seeing her, he was overwhelmed by an unexpected wave of tenderness. Not desire, not a need to penetrate and melt into her, but a glowing warmth; a stream of images and words they had said to each other over the years, trivialities that had become something else, something heartfelt. She looked haggard. Thin. Her wrists and hands were bony and frail, resting on her unevenly buttoned shirt front. She was not beautiful, not like Christi, but he knew her. Even when Anna was the darkest version of herself, he knew her, and he knew that she would never have toyed with him the way that Christi was toying with him now. Anna had no intrigues about her. She was herself.
He took a blanket from the foot of the sofa and carefully draped it over her. He wanted to grant her the rest she needed, but when he laid a hand on her forehead, it was damp and clammy with sweat.
“Anna!”
No response. Her motionlessness seemed unnatural. Even for someone who was sleeping deeply, she seemed unnaturally still, reminding him of a picture of Sleeping Beauty in a glass case in one of Ella’s fairytale books. He shook her gently by the shoulder.
“Don’t wake her up.”
Ella was standing behind him with her wildly salt-and-wind-swept halo of hair.
“Where have you been?” He said, turning back to Anna, shaking her lightly again. Touched her cold lips.
“I went to play at Thomas’s house. Mom said she wanted to lie down for an hour or two.”
He felt a stab of cold in the ribs. A feeling of entering yet another uninhabited house.
“How long ago was that?” he asked gently, not once taking his eyes off Anna’s face. He felt her wrist, counted her pulse. “How long have you been at Thomas’s house?”
Ella shrugged and changed channels on the television with a tired look on her face. He shook Anna a little harder, then slapped her in the face, hard. Once, twice. After the second blow, she waved her arms weakly in front of her face, as if to protect herself. Ella stared at him with huge, frightened eyes.
“Ella, go up to your room.”
She shook her head mutely, but he didn’t have time to explain.
“Anna! Anna!” He pulled her up into a sitting position, threw her arms over his shoulder, picked her up, and carried her swiftly up the stairs. She hung over his shoulder like a dead weight, not moving once till he lowered her into the bathtub as gently as he could. He had to spray cold water directly into her face before she sputtered and lashed out at him.
“Let me go.”
He slapped her again.
Ella, who had followed them into the bathroom, screamed at the top of her lungs and pounced onto his back, her small teeth digging into his neck. He winced and shrugged her off roughly, hearing her fall onto the bathroom tiles with a thud. Then he bent over Anna again.
“Dad, no . . . you’re not allowed to hurt Mom. Don’t hit her, Dad. She was just sleeping . . . ” Ella was crying now.
“Anna! Have you taken something? What have you taken? How many pills have you taken?” Without waiting for an answer, he lifted her out of the tub and bent her head over the toilet bowl.
“Do you want to do it, or should I?”
Anna gasped. She sat drenched and shaking on the floor with her forehead resting on the toilet seat, the water running off her formed a pool around her.
“Again. Do you want to do it, or should I? Anna, help me out here . . . say something . . . ”
“I’ll do it.”
Her eyes were blurred and half-closed, but she pulled herself into an upright position slowly, and he held her over the toilet bowl as she stuck two fingers down her throat and threw up. Two almost-dissolved tablets swam on the surface of the water for a few seconds before disappearing into the murky water. Only two. He felt a wave of relief.
“One more time.”
She repeated the exercise, and this time, only a small cascade of clear fluid was deposited into the toilet.
“Good girl. Two pills. Is that it? Did you only take two of them?”
She shrugged, but then nodded. He let go of her shoulders and stroked a hand over her forehead instead, trying to regain control of his breathing.
“I just needed to get some sleep,” she mumbled. “It was just a couple of sleeping pills. That’s all. I thought you would be home sooner.”
Behind him he could hear Ella hiccupping and crying hysterically.
Later, much later, he stood watching Anna as she slept in their bed. He brushed his fingers across her forehead before leaving her to sleep and going to check on Ella. The light was still on in her room, one of her legs jutted out over the edge of the bed, as if she’d fallen asleep in the throes of a wild kick, her cheeks were streaked with tears and dried snot. The cut over her eyebrow was gaping a little, but a trip to the Emergency Room would have to wait till tomorrow. There was no energy left. Not for him, not for her. He had tried to comfort her as best he could, tried to put some ice on the egg-sized bruise on her forehead from her fall in the bathroom, but she had fended him off with a manic fury. Kicks and blows with little fists that he had borne in silence. He turned off the light and quietly closed the door behind him.
He draped Anna’s soaked clothing over the bathtub and emptied her pockets of coins and hair-clips and a couple of soggy bits of paper that he unfolded carefully.
Where will you be on judgment day?
There was also a photograph in the back pocket of her jeans. He stared at it, stupefied. It was a picture of him and Anna when they were very young. Someone had written Whores end up in Hell in fat red letters across the picture. Anna’s bikini bottom had been cut out. A disproportionately large and grotesque erection had been drawn onto his own bathing suit
He dropped the photo to the floor as if he’d been burnt. He hadn’t seen the picture for a long time, but he knew where it came from: Anna’s meticulously arranged photo albums in the living room. It was a picture from their first summer together. He went to the bookcase and ran a finger along the broad spines of Anna’s albums. He found the first volume and began paging through it systematically. There were a few sharply-focused black-and-white photographs of the two of them doing homework together in his room. He recalled a friend of theirs taking the pictures; he’d been taking night classes in photography. There were also several shots with more classic motifs: He and Anna astride their bikes with a billowing cornfield in the background; the two of them at the prom together, Anna with a forbidden drink in her hand and a glowing smile next to his cheek.
Further.
There was a whole series of photos of the two of them on the beach together. They must have been about eighteen and nineteen years old, a year before they got married. Before the final exclusion from the church, before the harassment and the restraining order. At that time Anna had hoped that some kind of reconciliation with her family would be possible, that perhaps she would be given leave to live on the fringes of their congregation; this had happened before.
Anna is smiling into the camera, for once, stunningly beautiful.
Further. Pictures of them on the beach with a group of friends: Søren and Nils Peter, who had graduated and moved to Århus the following summer, another couple, Helle and Bjarne, were standing a little off to one side. They had moved to Hanstholm in the interim. He and Anna hadn’t managed to keep contact with any of them.
The final series of pictures was missing from the album. A little row of trolls with horns had been drawn in the space instead, like an irrepressible running commentary of scorn.
Christi.
The break-in in spring when everything had been smashed onto the floor in the living room.
The telephone rang. He picked it up, knowing it was her. “Christi . . . ”
Silence.
“Christi, we need to talk . . . ” He took a deep breath. Tried to keep his voice steady, tried to control the wave of shock threatening to overwhelm his body. “Christi, of course we will be together. I’ll leave Anna. My love . . . please don’t . . . I will leave her. If you are pregnant, we will have the baby together. But we have to talk about it.”
Silence.
“My love . . . ?”
“Do you love me?”
Christi’s voice was a faint whisper in a rush of stormy rain in the background. A click from a coin being dropped into a call box.
“I . . . ” He hesitated. He knew he had to weigh his words carefully. God forbid he scared her away before he knew where she was. “We need to talk about us. About the baby. Please don’t disappear on me. I miss you.”
A short laugh, bordering on a sob.
“I’ll kill the child if you don’t want me,” she said. “I’ll get an abortion, Helgi. I’ll flush it down the toilet.”
“Christi . . . Where are you?” He sank into the sofa.
Mumbled words, sniffing.
“Christi, I know it’s late, but I want to see you. I miss you.” He tried to inject his voice with the same depth of feeling they had shared before; only a couple of months previously their voices and words had entwined like two bodies making love.
“I’ll come out to the dunes,” she said finally. “The usual place. Now.”
She put the phone down, and Helgi got up from the sofa slowly with some remnant of hope. Upstairs Anna and Ella were sleeping. Warm, living bodies. His family.