by Helene Flood
“My husband is at sea,” she says. “Did you know that?”
“Oh,” I say awkwardly. “No, I didn’t.”
“He’s the love of my life,” she says.
She points to a photograph on a side table beside the sofa. A newly married couple, the man in a suit, the woman in a white dress that reaches her ankles. They’re standing outside a small church. The photograph is too far away for me to make out their features; I can’t tell whether they’re young, whether they’re attractive, or even whether the woman is the same as the one standing before me.
“What’s he doing at sea?”
“Sailing,” she says, closing her eyes. “Sailing and sailing.”
I nod; she remains unmoving for a moment. Then she opens her eyes again, takes a step towards me.
“I’ll show you the room. Come on.”
She takes my hand – hers is small and crooked, but it’s strong, squeezing mine as if her life depended on it. I want to stay where I am, don’t want to go further into this apartment, want to stay close to the exit, but she pulls me after her. We go past the curtain and into a dark corridor. She leads me further and further down it, past a door, and up to yet another curtain, this one of thick velvet. With her other tiny hand she pushes it aside. Behind it is another door, which she opens.
On the other side of the door is an open, light space – an empty room with dirty windows facing the back courtyard where I can see several bicycles, and I breathe a sigh of relief, as if for a moment I believed that the dark of the apartment had no end. Outside, the sun is shining. The courtyard even has a plastic slide.
“The stairs will go down here,” says my little hostess, still clutching my hand, “when my husband comes back.”
There are a number of boards leaning against the walls, some large and wide, and a box labelled as being from the local council’s office for home aids. There are elements of a building site here, but it doesn’t look as if any construction work has started.
“Have you agreed on the final design?” I say. “With Sigurd, I mean?”
She sets her eyes on me, studies me from head to toe. We stand this way for almost a full minute – she’s scrutinising me, and I let her, my hand resting in hers. Then she says:
“But don’t you know?”
“What?” I say.
“Sigurd completed the drawings before Christmas,” she says. “He hasn’t been here in months.”
I almost can’t breathe as I follow her back to the living room. There is possibly more information I should collect while I’m here, but I don’t have the presence of mind to keep up this act. Luckily, she has now let go of my hand, which is trembling. I just want to get out of here, as rapidly as possible, but she doesn’t go into the kitchen as I had hoped when we return to the dark corridor. She walks ahead of me, out into the living room. I follow her, passively; draw a deep breath and fill my lungs with the sweet, spiced smoke that hangs above her furniture. She says nothing, but goes across to the table, opens the box containing the cigarette holder from Paris and takes out a new cigarette. I keep my eyes fixed on the portrait on the wall, and the strict-looking man in uniform. Breathe, I say to myself. Breathe. The two children in sailor suits stare out of the splotchy painting, a little boy and a little girl, both blonde and blue-eyed. The same cat rubs itself against my leg again. I glance back at the man in uniform. On his lapel I catch sight of a swastika.
“You seem surprised,” she says.
She’s taken a seat again, is sitting there smoking. I say nothing. The tiara is about to slide down onto her forehead. She’s fastened it to her hair, but her hair is thin, only strands of it remain. Her crooked fingers are full of gold rings.
“The police were surprised, too,” she says. “They said Sigurd Torp told them he’s been here all winter. But the drawings were finished within a month. I haven’t seen him since November.”
All I can manage is a nod. Another, older picture is hang-ing further away, near the bookcase – another man, another uniform. I have no wish to look any closer; don’t want to know in which war he may have fought.
“Sigurd is dead,” she says. “That’s what the police said.”
“Yes,” I say.
“You’re not his assistant.”
“I’m his wife.”
“Ah. I see.”
She nods her head several times, almost rocking it.
“My husband was at sea for several months at a time. I never knew where he was. Never even knew whether he came home.”
Silence falls. On the wall beside the picture of the other man in uniform is a dagger. Its blade is rusty with black flecks. Fru Atkinson smokes with her eyes closed. Then the glass clock beside the armchair chimes, and she gets up.
“I’ll get the tea,” she says. “I assume you take sugar?”
As she reaches the curtain she turns to face me. She studies me again, and for a moment her sick, blue eyes are almost friendly.
“You seem like a nice girl,” she says. “Sigurd Torp wasn’t anything to write home about. It’s better for you that he’s gone.”
We stand and look at one another in silence, and Fru Atkinson has an expression of pure madness in her eyes – they’re too round, too penetrating, her smile out of place. I say nothing, and she turns and leaves the room. She lets the curtain fall closed behind her and is gone. As soon as I hear her clattering around in the kitchen I tiptoe towards the exit, unlock the front door and slip out into the stairwell. I close the door behind me as quietly as I can, and then I run – out of the stairwell, through the gate and onto the street, running as fast as I can down the road by which I arrived, not slowing down until I am several blocks away.
I’m always at home. The furthest I ever get on a normal day is the Kiwi supermarket in Nordberg. Otherwise, I’m in my office or the house. Reading my e-mails. Checking Facebook. Waiting for Sigurd. Waiting for patients. Waiting for them to find me – not actively seeking them, or at any rate not actively enough. Feeling the pressure at the base of my throat, I should, I should. We don’t have very much money. I should contribute more. Should be working just as much, just as vehemently, as Sigurd. Shouldn’t be feeling so tired; so discouraged. Should just be getting on with it. Working hard.
Waiting for Sigurd. Waiting for someone to talk to, someone to be with. He comes home late, exhausted. Doesn’t want to go anywhere. Doesn’t want to talk. Only wants to sit there with his laptop on his knees. I ask him about things. When will all this be finished? The bathroom, the downstairs hallway, the bedroom? All the stairs? Sigurd says, “I’m working my ass off, in case you hadn’t noticed, and it isn’t as if we have loads of cash to pay for it all, either.” I tell him about my workday. Try to explain the loneliness between these walls, what it’s like to wander around in here, hour after hour, without anyone to talk to. Sigurd says, “Well, try having Flemming breathing down your neck, with all his idiotic suggestions about how we should run the business – the fucking little boss man who thinks he’s a business genius just because he remembers something or other from his second year of business studies.” We almost never have sex anymore.
One night I find a box of snus in his pocket. It wasn’t as if I was looking – I pick up his jacket and it just falls out.
“Sigurd,” I say, “are you using snus?”
He looks at me, his eyes empty.
“Yes,” he says.
“For how long?”
“A few months.”
“How many?”
“I don’t know. Four, five.”
I start to laugh. He simply looks at me.
“What is it?” he says.
I try to stop laughing.
“No, I don’t know,” I say. “I just – why have you never mentioned it?”
He shrugs.
“What would I say?”
He doesn’t want
to share it with me. Doesn’t need to say anything. I get it. We don’t speak about it again.
It’s not as if I’m easy to live with, either. My morning explosions in the bathroom – it’s too cold, winter is approaching, it feels as if the water in the shower will end up as icicles hanging from my chin! I do want to be kind. I’d like to take the same easy tone with him as before. Laugh together, have a sense of humour. But then I just snap, go crazy. All this damned loneliness.
In the mornings, when he’s gone to work, I sit and look out across the fjord from my privileged position up here in Nordberg – lady of the house. Who am I to complain?
And then it all falls apart for me, one day in December. We’ve eaten in front of the T.V. as usual. I ask whether we should watch a film, there’s a new one on Netflix that someone’s been raving about on Facebook. Sigurd is too tired, he says, he has his computer on his lap, just wants to play computer games and half-watch some meaningless T.V. series or other neither of us is really keeping up with and kill a couple of hours before he goes to bed. Not to be rude, but that’s all he wants to do. O.K., I say, and carry the plates from the coffee table into the kitchen. On the way I stub my toe between two uneven floorboards, not hard, but I lose my balance for a moment and one of the plates hits the floor.
“Fuck,” I say.
Sigurd says nothing. I don’t need to turn around to know how he’s sitting there, bent over his laptop, lost to the world. I’ve seen him like this so many times. He must have heard me. I’m only ten metres from him, and the plate smashed as it hit the ground. But still he says nothing.
Everyone wants to be loved and respected – it’s only human. But even worse than being hated is being invisible. Not being seen as the person you want to be – O.K., that’s one thing – but not having your very existence acknowledged? If you cry out in the woods and nobody answers, have you even shouted? If your plate smashes against the floor and your husband says nothing, has it even happened? Or is it true that the place you occupy, the tiny morsel of existence you inhabit, doesn’t even register with the man with whom you share your home and bed? That’s a different kind of pain. It wells up in my throat like vomit, bursts from my mouth in the form of a wretched sob, and then I start to cry.
In the seconds it takes him to come over to me I’ve managed to throw the other plate against the floor, too – this time with force, so that it shatters into hundreds of pieces, all across the floor. I’ve slumped down, am kneeling there hugging myself and sobbing among the fragments of dirty plate and cutlery.
“What in the world just happened?” Sigurd says, mainly, it seems, angry that I pulverised the second plate, as if he doesn’t see how much pain I’m in, and I scream at him:
“Are you mad, are you crazy, is it THE PLATE that’s the priority here?”
And when he doesn’t answer, I say:
“It feels like you’ve stopped caring about me. I don’t think you love me anymore. I get the impression I’m just another thing in this house that you have to find it in yourself to live with.”
He sinks to the floor beside me, and we sit there.
Then we talk. Not about what I’ve just said, but about everything else. About the fact that things are hard. That we’re tired. That things haven’t worked out the way we expected, that we were so naive when we sat there in our old kitchen in Torshov, drawing up the plans and contours of the life we’d have in the new house, with our new jobs.
That he’s exhausted.
“I feel as if I’m failing you,” he says. “I was supposed to be so successful.”
That I’m lonely. That he knows, but doesn’t have the energy to do anything about it.
And so we decide to go away between Christmas and New Year. We don’t have the money for it, but we’ll scrape it together, borrow from my father, borrow from Margrethe. For our relationship, we say. Because a divorce would be much more expensive, Sigurd says with a half-smile. It’s a joke, but not only that. We go online, searching, look at images of white hotels bathed in sunlight and the clear blue rectangles of their swimming pools. Maybe there, or perhaps there. First aid. My heart feels warmer already.
Thursday, March 12: The fortress
“Is this Arild’s Security?” I say.
“Yes, this is Arild,” says the voice on the telephone.
I’m sitting at the kitchen island at home. I slept in the office again last night, took the inflatable guest mattress with me so that at least I wouldn’t have to lie directly on the floor, but I’ve hardly slept. I spent most of the time lying with my eyes open, looking out into the dark and listening. Twice I got up and went to the window, to the glass wall over by the chairs, and stood in the dark, staring out. The road that goes past the house is lit. We don’t have lights along the drive, but even Old Torp had known enough to install a light on the outer wall of the house, and it’s this light source I stare into at night, the little circle around it. Did I hear something? Can I see anyone? Is there something moving, there in the shadows beyond the circle? Is there movement in the darkened windows of the house? Did the curtains flutter, up in the living room? I don’t know anymore. I clasp the kitchen knife in both hands. If anyone were to see me now, they’d think I was crazy.
But what can I do? I go back to bed, back to the blow-up mattress, which sinks under my weight and squeaks every time I turn, the sound loud in the darkness. I lie there with my eyes open. I hold my knife. I try to sleep, but really I’m just waiting. For morning to come. Or for something to happen. I can no longer trust my senses – I’m always hearing something. Cars along the road. The sound of metal against metal, the lock in the front door being opened. The creepiness from Fru Atkinson’s stifling living room has become lodged in my body, and I know that I can no longer be sure of what I hear. I can no longer dis-tinguish the sound of my front door from the sound of a neighbour’s, or from the nightmarish anxiety that my own door is being opened.
At around six-thirty I decide that it must be safe, that it’s morning, that the intruder must have gone away. I don’t feel certain of this assumption, but my office exile is driving me out of my wits. I take the knife with me when I cross the drive and go up to my front door. I unlock it, go inside. I stay standing in the hallway, smelling, listening – can I sense the intruder, is he still here? I hold the knife in both hands. I call out, hello, and hear how pathetic it sounds, how feeble and afraid. Not at all like the call of an armed homeowner ready to defend what is hers.
I go upstairs to the kitchen. I look around. The curtains are in disarray; something about the bookcase. I no longer know whether I can trust my memory, either. This is unknown territory – my memory is the cornerstone of my abilities. But I’m no longer able to distinguish a change in the curtains or disorder on the bookcase from the scream that is swelling in my chest. I no longer know what I’m seeing, and what I think I’m seeing.
I go up to the bedroom. Feel an intense reluctance to enter it, imagine someone lying there, that new horrors await me behind every door – and especially behind this one, the door to the most intimate room in the house. But it’s empty. I check the bedside tables. Look under the bed.
Reassured at finding the bedroom untouched, I go on up to the loft. Old Torp’s office is silent, there’s no-one here. But someone has been here. Someone has disturbed the dust on the table. Someone has lifted the maps on his shelves. I can see the marks left in the dust where things have been moved.
Did this happen last night? Did it happen the night before last? Could it have been the police officers when they were searching the place? I go out again, then turn on my heel on the landing. I’ve thought of something. There is one thing I should check, one thing I haven’t checked since Sigurd disappeared. I go back into the loft, cross the room to walk straight to the furthest bookcase, crouch in front of the bottom shelf and heave away a couple of the maps the paranoid old man kept until I reach the small, flat box. There’s n
othing special about it, but Old Torp himself showed us its contents as he was nearing the end of his life – perhaps he had hoped that his grandson would take up the fight. I open the box, and see that there’s nothing in it.
The box was where he kept his old revolver. The jewel in his crown, and worth quite a bit, too – or so said the owner himself, eyes shining, when he showed us the weapon. It had probably been owned by a man who fought in the Russian revolution, although we got the impression that this man must have purchased the revolver a good while later. It was fully functional. “What weapon could be better for putting a bullet between the eyes of communism’s enemy?” the old man asked rhetorically. He had rounds for it, too – they had been in the box beside the gun. The weapon was ready to be used. When did I last check? When was I last up here? I had never thought about the revolver. It didn’t occur to me to check it when Sigurd disappeared – even when I’ve needed something to protect myself with, it hasn’t dawned on me to go and get it. I simply didn’t think of it.
Someone has taken it. Was it the intruder, the person who broke into the house and wandered around up here that night? Was that what he was looking for? There are several hundred boxes in this room, most of them full of newspaper clippings and documents and Old Torp’s notebooks, filled with his cramped handwriting. Most of it is pretty dull. How lucky the intruder would have to have been to open the one box containing a weapon! Almost a little too lucky. He would have to have known where to look. But Old Torp didn’t have many visitors. Margrethe, Sigurd, me. Maybe Harald, when he was home, his visits many years apart.
Hardly anyone knows about the revolver.
I close the door to the loft behind me – don’t know where the key is, otherwise I would gladly have locked it – and run down the stairs to the kitchen to find my mobile. I try to calm my breathing before I dial. Maybe the police took it? Then I call Gundersen. He doesn’t pick up, so I leave a message on his voicemail telling him what I’ve found, say that I hope it was his team, and could he please confirm that for me, because I’m feeling a little frightened. And then I think, fuck it, and call Arild.