I said nothing. If he wanted to give up what we had together for a twenty-five-year-old, then he wasn’t worth sharing my life with, it was as simple as that.
Then, just as quickly as it had started, it was gone. And as obvious as his earlier radiance was now pain, and it too could not be concealed from me.
But he didn’t know that I knew. He thought it was his own little secret.
The TV came on in the living room.
I pulled my Mac out of my bag, put it down on the desk and plugged it in at the socket.
Erlend had sent a new draft the evening before, so I noted, from the beginning of the Book of Leviticus. I knew it wouldn’t engage me at that moment, but still I opened the document and glanced at what he’d done.
No, I wasn’t going to sit here pretending.
Like a prisoner in my house.
I got up and left the room. As I passed the sofa where Marie sat snuggled in the crook of Gaute’s arm watching TV, I told them I was going for a walk.
“At this hour?” Gaute said. “Where are you going?”
“No idea,” I said. “Just out.”
“As long as you’re back before their bedtime,” he said.
“You’re here, aren’t you?” I said.
He didn’t answer and I closed the hall door behind me, put my shoes on and a lightweight jacket, got in the car, started the engine and drove through the estate to the main road. I didn’t know where I was going, turning right, turning left impulsively in the general direction of town. At Solheimsviken I made a left and carried on toward Laksevåg. Reaching the roundabout, where there was a choice between the tunnel and the bridge, I chose the tunnel, and as I came out the other side I decided to drive on to the sea.
The roads narrowed increasingly, the vegetation becoming more and more sparse, dwindling eventually to little more than grass and moss in an undulating landscape, until at last the sea was in front of me, dark and vast.
I parked on a pier, turning off the engine but leaving the headlights on, each beam opening a tunnel in the darkness which the rain lacerated with hundreds of scratches. The sound of the waves as they battered the shore was not a rush, but a roar. It was as if something were coming apart out there.
I folded my hands together and lowered my head.
“Lord God, I am in distress,” I said. “Help me. Help me now.”
* * *
—
Gaute was asleep, or pretending to be, when I got home. I undressed as quietly as I could, shielding my phone so the light of the display wouldn’t wake him as I set the alarm.
I was getting up at five.
When it rang, it felt like only a moment later. I resisted the temptation to snooze and got up, taking my clothes with me in case I woke him while I got dressed. I would have preferred to go straight to the office and begin the day’s work there, but I couldn’t leave the children to Gaute again, so I went to the kitchen and got some coffee on the go.
The sky was competely blue, not a cloud in sight, and sunlight flooded across the floor. The birds were singing and chirping outside the window. I opened it. An odd boot lay in the grass under the badminton net, next to it a discarded plastic bowl from the weekend before last when my mother, my brother and his family had been here and we’d sat outside with ice cream and cake.
The light seemed not to fill the garden, I thought, but rather the other way round: it emptied it—of darkness, but also of meaning.
The emptiness of the world.
But it was the wrong way of looking at it, I knew that. Meaning was something that came from us. Meaning was something we gave to the world, not something we took from it.
I put the dish that had been left in the sink in the dishwasher, wiped the work surface, draped the cloth over the tap. I poured some coffee into a mug and took it with me into the study, sat down and opened the document from Erlend again.
I read through the text as slowly as I could.
If your offering is a goat, you shall show it to the face of the Lord and lay your hand on its head; it shall be slaughtered before the tent of meeting; and the sons of Aaron shall dash its blood against all sides of the altar. You shall present as your offering from it, as an offering by fire to the Lord, the fat that covers the entrails; the two kidneys with the fat that is on them at the loins, and the appendage of the liver, which you shall remove with the kidneys. Then the priest shall turn these into smoke on the altar as a food-offering by fire for an aroma that is pleasing to the Lord. All fat is the Lord’s. It shall be a perpetual statute throughout your generations, in all your settlements: you must not eat any fat or any blood.
I took a slurp of my coffee and read it quite as slowly again.
I didn’t care for the wording “the face of the Lord,” but we’d been instructed to use it, it belonged to the modernization, so there was nothing to be done. But “the presence of the Lord,” as it had been before, was better; “the face of the Lord” made it so human. On the other hand, it was a reasonable interpretation of the Hebrew , or lifney, for while strictly that meant “before,” it came from the same root as “face”—panav—and there were certainly plenty of humanizing details in the rest of the text, not least the smell of the burned offering being pleasing to the Lord. So in a way, “face” was probably better than “presence,” precisely because it was more human, whereas “presence” was better in a different way, being older.
But a pleasing aroma?
Wasn’t that a bit too refined and cultivated?
It wasn’t my job to correct the language, but the language was almost impossible to separate from the theology, so I did it all the time.
for a smell that is pleasing to the Lord, I wrote down, just to see what it looked like.
It wasn’t much better, but still I noted it for Erlend’s sake. He could not be reminded enough that the language of these texts was simple and concrete with barely any abstractions at all, the references were to bodies and actions, even in Leviticus with its laws and commands. Entrails, kidneys, loins, fat and blood: this was the law.
No wonder there were Gnostic sects that had believed the Lord in these texts was in fact the Devil. That the earth was made by the Devil, and that it was he we worshipped when we worshipped God.
Imagine if I were to preach such a thing.
I smiled.
Even today it would be the stuff of headlines.
There were many other interesting matters I could not take up or discuss, of course. The church and congregation was not the place to try out thoughts and ideas, to alter existing conceptions by questioning new life into them. What was important about faith was that it was true, and what was important about truth was that it eliminated all other possibilities. Truth was absolute. And it had to be too, I often thought, with life being so brittle. At the same time, the Bible was so complex, contained so many conflicting voices and models of understanding that theology in the main had been all about bringing them together as an expression of one and the same thing, and the only possible way to do that was by suppressing and hushing up, ignoring and letting be. One of the most familiar passages in the Old Testament was the story of Abraham being commanded to offer his son Isaac to the Lord, a sacrifice Abraham was prepared to make without asking questions, and indeed he would certainly have done so had the Lord not intervened and stopped him, directing him to sacrifice a lamb instead. Less familiar, but also related, was the Old Testament story of Jephthah, who swore an oath to the Lord, saying that if he succeeded in defeating the Ammonites in battle he would offer to the Lord the first person he met on his return. And Jephthah duly defeated the Ammonites, and conquered twenty cities, and when he returned home the first person he met was his own daughter, who came from the doors of his house to greet and celebrate him. She was his only child. He tore his clothes in despair and told her he had given a promise to the Lord which he could
not break. And she said to him, Father, if you have given your oath to the Lord, then do with me according to its word. But allow me one thing: let me be alone for two months so that I may go up and down on the mountains and weep for my virginity, I and my companions. And when the two months expired, Jephthah offered her to the Lord, and the Lord did not intervene to stop him as He had done when Abraham had bound his son for the offering.
This was a story that could not be held up in the work of any priest. Had I been a theologist, in the employment of that university department, I could have written about it and brought it up in my teaching, but I wasn’t. No one wanted a priest who would preach on the religion’s female offering. I didn’t want to be that kind of priest, either. If there was such a thing as feminist theology, it had to unfold itself in practice, not in theory. In encounters with people, not in the sermon, not in ideas, but in goodwill and benevolence between people. We had to listen, ask, empathize, accommodate. For it was there, in the spaces between us, that God was to be found. That was the message of Jesus. In the eyes of God we are all equal.
There were a lot of things I didn’t believe in. But I believed in that.
That was the core.
Or rather, not the core, I thought, swallowing another mouthful of my coffee, which had now gone cold. A core is something solid and unyielding.
This was something fluid, something in constant flux.
Or rather, not in flux exactly, because it remained the same albeit in ever shifting forms, among ever shifting constellations of people.
I’d been staring out of the window for some time without looking at the view. Now, what I saw seemed to suddenly materialize and come into being. Dry lawns, white wooden fences, fruit trees, outer walls, all drenched in sunlight.
Was it really the case that colors did not exist on their own, but were constructed in the brain?
A cat appeared down by the fence. It sauntered onto the lawn, lay down and lazed in the sun.
Upstairs, the shower was turned on.
Was that the time already?
I sent my e-mail off to Erlend, opened another document and began to type what I was going to say at the funeral. A bit later, I heard Gaute come down the stairs. I knew that he would sit on one of the bar stools at the kitchen island with a bowl of Special K while checking the news on his phone, and then have a cup of coffee. In the half-hour that followed he would prepare his day at the desk in the living room, before the children woke and took up the next hour until it was time to go to school.
I couldn’t avoid him for the rest of my life, and I couldn’t disappear for another evening either, so when the children had gone to bed either conflict or reconciliation was inevitable.
At eight o’clock I went upstairs to their rooms and woke them up. Marie was in good cheer from the word go, up and dressed in no time. Peter was reluctant and difficult to rouse.
Did he pick up on the ill feeling between us?
Of course he did.
But was it sufficient to get to him like that?
“Peter, my big boy, you’re going to be late,” I said, returning to his room and finding him still not up. “You’ve time for breakfast, but you must get up now.”
He lay with his eyes closed.
“He’s asleep,” I said, as if to myself. “I wonder how I can wake him. Or perhaps he can sleepwalk?”
“Mm,” he said.
I took hold of his hands and pulled him slowly upright.
“That’s amazing,” I said.
He put his feet on the floor and stood up, still with his eyes closed, and stretched his arms out in front of him.
“Are you asleep, Peter?” I said.
“Mm,” he said.
“I wonder if he can get dressed in his sleep too?”
Five minutes later he was seated at the table eating his cornflakes with his sister. Perhaps I was too sensitive to his moods, I thought, and leaned in over him, putting my cheek to his.
“Good morning, grumpy guts,” I said. “Are you awake now?”
“Mm,” he said, nodding.
“I want a hug as well!” said Marie.
I hugged her, and then sat down opposite them.
“Why isn’t Daddy here?” said Marie.
“He’s got some work to do,” I said.
“He works before working at work,” said Peter.
Marie laughed.
The little loves, I thought as they went down the drive with their school rucksacks on their backs and I stood in the doorway waving. They’ll be fine.
Gaute, who I’d barely seen that morning, left shortly after. We hadn’t exchanged a word, but at least he said good-bye when he went.
The only thing in my diary for that day was the funeral service beginning at eleven o’clock, which I’d already prepared, but still I drove off to the church as soon as Gaute had left. I liked being there, in the church itself, and in my little office in the adjoining building.
Another lovely day by the looks of it, I thought as I got out of the car. Everything was still and the air already so warm that in some places it was actually visible, shimmering little columns above the gravel.
But the church, with its thick white walls, looked almost wintry, even in the sunshine.
I walked past it and went into the annex, where first I knocked on Karin’s door. She looked up with a smile as I went in. She asked about the seminar, and I’d just started telling her about it when a car pulled up at the rear of the church. That will be the undertakers, I thought, glancing at the time. It was hardly even ten o’clock yet.
“I’ll go out and speak to them,” I said. “Looks like there’ll be no mourners.”
“How awful,” said Karin. “Man or woman?”
“A man.”
“Elderly, was he?”
“In his sixties,” I said.
“Ah,” she said. “I’m not sure how you cope, surrounded by all that grief.”
“There’s always a light,” I said, smiled and left her again.
The doors of the side entrance were open. Two men from the funeral directors’ stood bent over the open coffin. I’d seen both of them before, a number of times, but I couldn’t remember their names.
“Hello,” I said.
They straightened up and nodded in reply.
One of them was young, no more than in his early thirties. He had a beard and his hair was gathered in a ponytail, but his informal appearance was at least partly compensated for by the white shirt and black suit. The other man was around sixty, with a large head and a ponderous-looking face. In terms of age, they could have been father and son, but were of such different builds they probably weren’t.
“Did you find any more information on him?” the older one said.
“I’m afraid not,” I said. “All we have is his date and place of birth. That, and his address. How about you?”
“Nothing,” the young one said. “Not a trace. No relatives, no friends.”
“Workmates, colleagues?”
“No luck there, either. He had his own firm, apparently, though what he actually did seems a bit of a mystery, too.”
“There’s nothing sadder, is there?” I said. “When there’s no one to mourn the deceased, I mean. Will you stay for the service?”
They nodded, and I looked down into the coffin.
At once, it felt as if the blood drained from my head.
I knew that face.
It was the man from the elevator. The man who had pestered me in the arrivals hall.
But it was impossible.
It was impossible.
The death had been registered ten days ago. The funeral was booked a week ago.
“Are you all right?” the young undertaker said.
“Do you know him?” the older one said.
�
�No,” I said. “I don’t know him.”
EMIL
The last hour was always the best. The youngest kids would just have finished their nap then and were so drowsy and lifeless all they wanted to do was sit in your lap, while the older ones were exhausted after a whole day bombing about, they too ready for a bit of peace and quiet. I normally took them all into the comfy room and put some music on for them, before reading them a story or two. They liked Americana, and that afternoon I put Father John Misty on. Other favorites were early Pink Floyd—“Echoes” in particular they liked—and Kraftwerk.
After a year working there, it still amazed me how they bought into even the most sophisticated music, as opposed to the stories, which had to be almost impossibly simple to hold their interest. The stories they liked best were ones that mirrored some aspect of their own lives, so there was a lot of Molly and Polly going to nursery school, or eating their dinner or going to see Nana and Nanda, Peppa Pig splashing about in paddling pools, and that cute crocodile.
How weird was that? They could actually enjoy a violin concerto by Bach, sit there spellbound and listen, while everything else in their lives had to be simpler than simple.
I switched the fan off, put the music on and sat down against the wall with Aksel on my lap and Liam and Frida snuggled up to me on either side. The others lay on their backs looking at the ceiling as they listened.
Luckily, they didn’t understand the words, which were all about sharpened knives, capsizing boats, and bleeding to death!
Through the window I saw Saida cross the yard, almost certainly going for a smoke on the street outside the gate. Mercedes and Gunn I knew were sitting under the parasol over in the far corner, though I couldn’t see them from where I was sitting. The water from the sprinkler which the older kids had been playing under earlier on had all but dried up, and the hose had been coiled and put in its place. The toys and bikes had all been taken in.
The Morning Star Page 9