‘You don’t seem to have suffered as a result.’
‘It’s reason enough to be bad-tempered. If I’m really lucky they’ll throw me out of the hotel.’
‘Bad-tempered? At me?’
‘I think you know as well as I do that this performance was executed under the auspices of a certain gentleman with a stick trying to tell me who’s boss.’
‘Keep me out of this,’ she says. ‘I came here to meditate over a grave, not to hear your intrigues with Sverre or anyone else.’
She looks down at the gravestone again. Feeling annoyed that Gerhard has dared to talk about his private circumstances over this grave.
She steps away.
He follows her.
They walk side by side down to the water. They pass a litter bin and she throws away the packaging from the flowers. She is reminded of the night when she followed Gerhard to another cemetery, and thinks this must be a sign – the way death keeps forcing itself onto her relations with him. This reminds her of the Colt Cobra, which is still on the bookshelf at home. She is out of training, slow off the mark.
‘Have you been here before, to see the grave?’
‘No,’ she says. ‘This is thanks to you, actually. Seeing you again made me think of her. So I wanted to come here.’
They gaze across the still lake. The cold autumn air has a bite in it now. ‘And what about you?’ she asks.
He angles his head towards the grave. ‘We have quite a bit in common, Ester.’
‘I had a taxi waiting for me,’ she says, ‘but it left.’
‘I sent him away,’ he says.
‘Why?’
‘Thought you could go back with me.’
She doesn’t say anything at first. There is an aggression in most of what Gerhard says and does. Is that how he has become, or is this behaviour tied to his specific situation? This is not something she wants to ask him about. His sullen attitude is not conducive to that kind of dialogue. On the other hand, paying for her taxi and sending it on its way is so invasive that he must have done it to provoke her. So what does he want to achieve? He is testing me, she thinks the very next moment. He wants to see how I react. He wants to know who I am. The thought is reassuring; she is a past master at this kind of game – in his league, even.
The November darkness is falling. If she is going to do what she has planned, she will have to start moving. ‘Then I’d like you to drive up around the cemetery,’ she says.
‘I just came that way.’
‘Then I’ll take a taxi. I want to go there now I’m here.’
‘Of course I’ll drive around it,’ he says quickly. ‘You can’t do a good thing too often.’ He turns and heads for the car park.
‘But I think you’ll be disappointed,’ he says enigmatically.
When they reach the rental car, he opens first the passenger door, then walks around and gets in behind the wheel.
Ester hesitates.
He motions with his head inside the car. ‘Shall we go?’
Ester gets in.
Stockholm, December 1942
1
The dress is purple, plain, with shoulder straps and a modest neckline. It also has a matching belt. The buckle is clad with the same material. The dress is the second item of smart clothing she has bought in all the time she has lived in Stockholm. With her first wage packet she bought a pair of party shoes. They have hardly been worn, so there is still a risk of blisters. But there is nothing she can do about that. Buying the dress was a nightmare. She has never found it so difficult to be pleased. Her body doesn’t seem to fit it, and she doesn’t have the time to take the dress in. It was the material she fell for. But it is all fine now, thanks to a few safety pins. It will be a trial run, then she can take it in at the weekend. She wishes she had some jewellery. The lucky charm will have to do. And the ring.
She is still excited. She has been excited for two days.
A briefing can’t take forever. Torgersen said an hour. She has reserved a table for two and is willing to pay for the whole evening for both of them. She is looking forward to this and has calculated that she can manage it with her savings. A couple of days without eating won’t harm; not if she’s going to experience this: going to a restaurant with someone, dancing, feeling normal for a whole evening, excluding absolutely everything except the here and now.
As the time approaches she goes to the bathroom. She puts on some eye shadow, but stops and instead critically assesses herself. Sees her nervousness and closes her eyes. Tries to breathe calmly. She raises her hand and studies it in the mirror. She has put the ring back on. They will present themselves at Berns as herr and fru Larsen.
There is a ring at the door.
It startles her. She looks at herself in the mirror. Runs a finger under both eyes. She hears a car hooting its horn. She stumbles over the door sill. Hurries to the window, draws the curtain aside and looks down. A taxi has pulled up. Gerhard is standing by the open rear door. He waves. She waves back and lets go of the curtain. Runs into the hallway. Casts another glance at the mirror. A different woman looks back at her now. A smiling person. She composes herself. Takes a deep breath. Drops her new shoes into a shopping net. Puts on her boots, woollen coat and gloves, annoyed at herself for taking so much time while he is waiting. She checks she has the house key in her pocket and closes the door. Runs down the stairs.
Outside, there is snow in the air. But the taxi has gone. She casts around. Takes a few steps in one direction, turns round. Comes back. It is a fact. The car has gone.
For a fraction of a second she thinks this hasn’t happened. No one rang the bell. No car hooted its horn. He didn’t wave. But then she looks down. The tyre marks tell their own story.
She goes in. Slowly, back up the stairs. Unlocks the door and goes to the window. Looks outside.
No car. She stays like that, mind blank, bewildered. Then she walks out of the flat to the telephone in the corridor.
She lifts the receiver and inserts the coin when the switchboard answers. She asks for Torgersen’s number.
She stands with the receiver under her chin while it rings. She turns. The corridor is still empty and quiet.
Finally she hears a woman’s voice. She asks for Torgersen. The receiver crackles as it is placed on a table. She hears them talking. Now she feels stupid. Why should she talk to the boss about this? Gerhard has probably gone on to the briefing. Getting to England is all that has any meaning for him. He just doesn’t want to have anything to do with her.
She hangs up.
Stands motionless, trying, and failing, to think clearly. Returns to her flat. Stops in the middle of the room, still wearing her coat and carrying the shopping net with her party shoes in. Angrily, she hurls the net against the wall. She paces back and forth. Sits down in the armchair.
Takes off the ring. Places it in the palm of her hand. Garish. Fake. It has discoloured her finger. She rubs it to remove the dark colour. In vain. She throws away the ring. That is how much she is worth.
She stares into the distance. At a loss as to know what to do.
Is there anything she can do apart from hunker down?
Then she hears an electric click. A chill runs down her spine. Her eyes are drawn to the clock on the wall. She listens to the ticking. Watches the minute hand move. There is something familiar about this situation. She stands up, goes back into the corridor to the telephone. Her instructions were to travel with Gerhard. If he doesn’t want her along, that is his business, not hers. She lifts the receiver. Inserts a coin. Asks for a taxi and waits for an answer. Tells him her address and rings off. Afterwards she goes back to her sitting room. Stands by the window, looking out. It is only now that she realises how thick the snow is. It is blanketing down.
2
The taxi leaves the town behind them. The snow is settling on the road and on a sharp bend up the hill, the rear of the car skids. She has never been to Huddinge and is relying on the driver to know the way. She can’
t get Gerhard out of her head. Dreads meeting him again. Dreads what she is going to say to him. Dreads what he is going to say to her. She leans against the window. A snow plough roars towards them. She is startled, lets out a cry and puts a hand over her mouth. She still hasn’t quite got used to traffic driving on the left. A welt of snow hits the windscreen. The wipers thrash as if in panic.
After a while the taxi turns off the main road and into a narrower side road with wheel tracks in the snow. Then she sees a blaze of red behind the trees. The taxi slows down and comes to a halt.
The Swedish taxi driver says nothing. He just sits quietly, both hands on the wheel.
‘What now?’
‘I’m stopping here.’
‘Why?’
The driver says he doesn’t want to go any closer. ‘The farmhouse.’ He takes his left hand off the wheel and points. ‘It’s on fire.’
Ester opens the door and gets out. It is the last house on the road. She has never seen a fire like it. Smoke seems to be pouring through the walls. She moves closer. Yellow flames are licking out from under the eaves. Several of the window panes shatter, then there is a loud explosion. She recoils. The whole house is consumed by flames. She turns to the driver. He has rolled his window down. He shouts. She is paralysed. Her thoughts are too. She tells him to wait, barely able to hear her own voice, turns back to the fire and steps closer.
The heat is immense and gusts in her direction. It is as though the fire is throbbing with its own pulse, she thinks. Within the inferno she can hear a tinkle of glass as another window explodes. There is a whoosh and then she sees him in the sea of flames, through the window. His clothes are alight. The blazing man runs to the window, but is blown back. She is standing thirty metres away and even she can feel the heat singeing her face. She calls his name, but her cry is drowned in the fury of the fire. She shouts again, but the roar stifles any other sound. He is no longer visible. The flames pop and crackle. Something gives way inside and plunges down from the roof. The whole house caves in amid the sky-high conflagration.
Ester wants to be sick. Her hands are trembling and she has to concentrate to put one foot in front of the other. The driver has left his seat. His whole body is bathed in red against the backdrop of the night and he stares with an open mouth and vacant eyes.
Ester supports herself on the bonnet of the car. Inhales and breathes in smoke. Coughs. Staggers towards the rear seat. Closes the door with a bang. The driver is standing in front of the car, mesmerised. Ester wants to leave. She leans across the driver’s seat and hoots the horn. The driver comes to, turns, trudges back to the car and gets behind the wheel.
Fagernes, November 1967
1
She doesn’t fasten her seat belt. Old habits die hard. In case … He notices. Watches her as he fastens his belt, every movement deliberate. Neither of them speaks. He starts the car. Sets off.
She takes in the countryside. Wondering what he knows about her. Maybe a little. Maybe nothing. Time will tell.
It isn’t a long trip. The house is at the top of a rock face on the opposite side of the road. It appears as they round one of the first bends. But the roof is sunken and the house seems to be abandoned. The paintwork is peeling and some tiles have fallen off. Some windows have no glass and gape at the world, black-eyed.
He pulls in and stops. ‘I was disappointed too,’ he says, indicating a more robust house further up the mountain. ‘I spoke to the neighbour. He’s taken over the plot, but soon they’re going to use this house for fire drills.’
‘Keep going,’ she says.
‘The mountain farm?’
‘Yes, I want to see that too.’
They drive on, round the hairpin bends, up the last steep inclines and above the tree line. The Bitihorn peak arches against the sky, and soon the mountain lake is revealed. ‘You can stop here,’ she says.
He obeys. Drives into an almost overgrown lay-by. Switches off the engine. The lake resembles a blue stripe on a dark palette dominated by greens and ochres, reds, yellows and browns. There are mountain cabins dotted around. Most of them are tarred log constructions with grass growing on the roofs. Only the roof ridge and chimney are visible on one, only a flagpole next to another.
She sits gazing at the countryside. Eventually she opens the door and gets out. To inhale the air. To feel the ground under her feet.
It is colder up here. She walks over to a decaying stump of wood at the side of the road. Cowberries and crowberries grow here. She crouches down, takes a few berries and puts them in her mouth. Grabs a handful of moss and squeezes it in her fist. The sound of a car door opening behind her breaks the spell. A cold gust of wind makes her shiver. She stands up.
He comes up beside her.
She points to the cabin idyllically situated on a headland extending into the lake. ‘The one on the headland belonged to our neighbour in Eckersbergs gate, a nice, tall, fat lady called Ada. Her husband was dead. She let us use the cabin in the holidays and so on. Or I went on my own with Ada. In the end I was here every single summer and most Easter holidays. Åse was eleven and I was nine.’ Ester’s hand sweeps to the left and points to a fenced-in mountain pasture. ‘She was the gatekeeper.’
‘Åse and I didn’t come here so often,’ Gerhard says.
‘They called us Night and Day,’ she says. ‘After the name of the pansy. Åse was as blonde as I was dark.’
She turns her back on him and puts a knuckle to her eye to catch the moisture.
‘Meaning you always hung out together?’
‘The original Two Little Maids. I can’t remember us ever quarrelling. Did she tell you about the time we almost had a fatal accident?’
‘Don’t think so.’
‘I was fifteen years old. It was in the autumn – it was so dark outside you could barely see a hand in front of your face. We’d been playing cards in the cabin. It was late and we had to go down to the farm to sleep there that night. We walked along that cliff edge.’ She points. ‘We both knew the way, naturally enough, and set off. But we got lost. We were both petrified of the dark, so neither of us said anything, we just walked. Suddenly in the darkness – you might not believe this – I saw a light, a very strange light, horizontal, a bit like a neon tube in the darkness. Straight in front of me. I stopped instantly and asked Åse if she could see what I could see. Yes, she whispered, from right behind me. At that moment I was about to raise my foot. And it was stuck. I screamed, and she screamed too. And I pulled at my foot, hard. I got my foot free, but my boot was stuck there. We turned and ran back to the cabin as fast as we could. Me with a boot on one foot and a sock on the other.’
Ester smiles at the memory.
Gerhard just looks at her, not at all interested.
Ester regrets telling him the story and cannot understand why she did.
‘And so?’ he says. ‘What happened?’
Ester shrugs. ‘It’s just a story, a memory. We didn’t dare go out again. Åse found my boot the next morning. It was stuck between two fibres of a pine tree root, on the edge of a precipice. You can’t see it from here. If we’d taken a step further we would’ve fallen fifty metres and been smashed on the scree below. Åse talked a lot about that incident. She was sure it had some hidden meaning.’
Silence descends between them again. Hands in pockets, he stands gazing into the distance, as though there is something pent up inside him.
‘I imagine Turid comes here a lot,’ he says at length. ‘If she’s inherited it. The farm, I mean.’
‘What are you actually doing here?’ she says.
‘Here in Valdres?’
‘That too.’
‘I came here to see her grave.’
‘Why?’
He fixes her with a long stare. ‘She and I never said goodbye.’
‘Then I was in your way, down in the cemetery, when you wanted to say your goodbyes?’
For an instant she is frightened she has gone too far.
Without ano
ther word he turns on his heel and walks back to the car.
2
The sun is so low that occasionally it disappears behind the mountain crags. More often than not it hangs behind tall tree trunks and sends its final fiery rays into the car racing through the forest. As the terrain opens up, grassland comes into view above the rapids in the river. Ester is reminded of when she was small and her family drove through Begna valley. And of looking out at the trees and imagining that if you attached a big knife to the side of the car the trees would fall and the car would leave a terrible trail behind it.
She leans back in her seat. Remembering the day after the outbreak of war. The air-raid sirens went off. There was total panic. People ran helter-skelter through the streets. Buses and lorries, packed to the gunwales with people, left Oslo and headed for the hills. She ended up on a lorry that stopped on Frognerseter meadow. She walked among the crowds there all day, searching for her mother and father. The snow was still deep. But people were everywhere – people she didn’t know, frightened people. There was no food. Some had packed lunches; someone from the council was providing porridge. A market trader was handing out eggs. An elderly lady was hugging a suitcase and shouting the name of her child. People around the woman were jeering. In the suitcase she had her silverware, but she had lost her child.
It had been there, on Frognerseter, that Ester had seen Åse for the first time for more than a year. Åse told her she was living with a man in Oslo. Ester smiles as she remembers the happiness and surprise at the reunion.
The Courier Page 23