They would not let me see her for a long time. First, the police wanted to talk to me. Digging in the archives had produced old reports about enforced care orders, drunkenness, raids to follow up possession of drugs, and more of this kind, a long list. They quizzed me incessantly about Minna’s circumstances, people she might have known or met, many such questions, which of course I could not answer. While these conversations (as the police chose to put it) went on, my mind was blank and alert at the same time, the way you respond when some enormity has befallen you, something you know will have consequences not only for your entire future but also for your past, and then not just for how the past should be understood or evaluated but also for what you know about it. Now I cannot say what was worst, the unthinkable fact of Minna’s death or the realisation that I had been lied to all my life: about who we were but also about what – what our relationship was, exactly. It took much bureaucratic manoeuvring to persuade the authorities that I really was Minna’s brother and that it was therefore appropriate to allow me to see her in the hospital mortuary. There was no trace of pain in her face –on the contrary, she looked calm and peaceful – but around her lips a faint, singular smile still lingered, the rubber-band smile I always associated with her. Seeing it filled me with a strange sensation of being seen by her even though the gaze had left her eyes: she saw me, right through our shared past. When I had pulled myself together, I signed for the few things she had brought with her to the pool: a simple cloth bag for towel, shampoo, deodorant and some makeup things, and a shoulder bag with worn clasps. In one of its pockets, I found the wallet with Indian-style fringes that she had owned for as long as I could remember. The pocket also contained the black notebook in which she had written down Johannes’s number. This was how the hospital staff had managed to reach us when I was drying Johannes’s hair. My number had not been entered anywhere in her address book. In addition, the bag contained a half-finished packet of menthol cigarettes, a Bic lighter, a few coins and notes, a box with tampons and a sheet of Sobril tranquilliser tablets. The Sobril must have been what had made the police suspect that she had taken drugs before going in for a swim. Underneath all this, I found the envelope from Mr Carsten that I had given to her that day in the tram. It was unopened. I could not work it out. Why carry it around in her bag if she had no intention of opening it? Had she simply forgotten it was there? I tried to remember which bag she had with her in the tram; was it this one? But the fact of her death had changed everything. I could not remember any more. It ended with me taking her things home. At first, I was going to leave Mr Carsten’s message alone. But the thought that it might cast a light over what had happened made me have a look after all. It was not a letter, as I had assumed, but an old black-and-white photograph that had been folded once longways. It showed a girl of about three or four sitting on a horse, saddled but with the reins hanging down from the bridle so that the child clearly found it hard to stay in the saddle and was leaning forward with both arms clutching the flanks of the horse. The horse: he was my horse, the same white horse that I had looked at from my bedroom window, evening after evening, right through my childhood. The girl on the horse was Minna. Even though the fold of the photo ran across her face, there was no doubt in my mind that it was she.
I am not sure how long I can hold out here. The dusk is gathering outside and Mr Carsten will soon decide that he has waited long enough. Anyway, the sacking of the Yellow Villa has surely not gone unnoticed. Simonsen or Brekke may well have notified the police already. They will start a search for me soon. And if they move up here as part of the search, what will he do? Some time ago, I adjusted the rifle scope so that I can scan as much as possible of my house and the garden on either side of the drive but, apart from the patches lit by the street lamps, a grainy, hazy darkness is swallowing up the outlines of everything else. Hearing is the only sense I can rely on now, but all I can hear is the never-ending, monotonous whine of a succession of aeroplanes, part of the dense evening traffic above the island, which one by one begin their descent. The cabin lights are switched off before landing, so that only the cone of light near the nose wheel and the blinking lights at the wing tips can be seen as the plane comes past; its body is no more than a long, heavy shadow. Then I hear him, surprisingly close, on the long veranda, clomping and wheezing as he goes. The beam of a torch slices through the room, but aimlessly, more sliding along the walls than searching for something. The sounds tell me that he is moving around outside the house. Is there a way into the house other than the ones I have already tried to block, some entrance I do not know? I go to the kitchen. Not a sound in there, only the noise of the wind as it surges against roof and walls. I go back into the hall and wait by the trapdoor to the cellar steps. Then I see the sharp torchlight glowing white in the long row of windows facing the veranda. He is moving more slowly now. I wonder if he has brought his hunting rifle. Never mind. He will get through my modest barricades; it is only a matter of how much time he has and how much effort he is prepared to make. I move over to the cellar door under the stairs, pull it up and climb down to stand on the top step. I hear a massive thump near the front door. The solid marble top of the hall table had tipped over and slammed into the floor. I slowly lower the trapdoor but stay close underneath, hunched on one of the top steps, and listen as he drags his heavy leg through the dark hall. His hoarse breathing is interrupted by loud swearing. He must have bumped into something. Now I listen out for the dog, its long, panting breaths, the excited scraping of claws on the hall floor and thresholds. But no, it seems he has not brought the dog. Perhaps he felt no need: he knows that I am here. I tense my body in anticipation of him gripping the trapdoor handles and forcing his way in here, where I am crouching, waiting to see the beam of his torch or perhaps the sole of one of his boots. But nothing happens. He does not come. Perhaps his courage fails him at the last moment. Or else he assumes that he has all the time in the world, that he can easily starve me into defeat. Is that how he thinks? Then it suddenly dawns on me. He cannot get down here because of his leg. And, at that instant, it comes to me how it must have been then. That time, the very last, when I begged you, pleaded with you not to go up to the farm any more.
But, of course, you went anyway, all dressed up in the clothes he had given you and looking like a depraved virgin bride: the far too low-cut dress in cream silk, which a woman with a certain hauteur, like Mrs Kaufmann, could possibly have carried off but which made you look ridiculous, and glammed up like a past-her-best diva in all the jewellery he wanted to decorate you with, the outfit completed by a pair of white high-heeled shoes so outsized they threatened to come off your feet with every step, forcing you to walk as bandy-legged as a cow. You must have felt that a touch of vulgarity was required to show off all this finery to greatest effect: you thrust one bony hip forward and placed your hand defiantly on it before you wrapped the matching shawl around your shoulders and left. Once on the road, you quickly lost your stiff-necked selfassurance because your high heels kept getting stuck in the mud. I watched you from the window: you had to pinch the cigarette between your lips to have both hands free for holding the already dirty hem of your dress clear of the muck and gravel. Can I reimagine it now? There is Mr Carsten waiting for you in the yard; his legs in high, black boots are planted far apart and he has put on the checked waistcoat he wears only for special occasions. He feels proud, naturally; you are his own shy little flower. Just to get you to dress up for him is quite a feat. It is a mild evening in August, though in the dusk the air is already as swollen as in September and the sky is grey with light clouds after a long rain that still fills the ditches and the deep wheel ruts in the yard. When you reach him, blushing, sweaty and breathing quickly, he says there is something he wants to show you and, without more ado, takes your arm and leads you past the stables to the paddock that he has laid out and fenced with Kaufmann’s approval. Boxer is there, over at the far end and almost blanched out of sight in the hazy dusk. Boxer is the harness-r
acing roan that Mr Carsten and Weiler, his old chum, have invested a great deal in, time as well as money. All Mr Carsten has to do is make a few clicking noises and the horse comes to them, trotting lightly across the damp grass, and strokes the leather-gloved hand with his soft muzzle. As sensitive as the finest Miss, Mr Carsten says. He costs a lot to keep, but it’s worth every penny. Can you guess how much he got in prize money last year? He tells you. The sum means little to you, but the horse is really beautiful. You are allowed to come close and hold his great, warm head in your arms. To hide his limp, Mr Carsten stands with the heel of the boot on his good leg hooked into the low fence rail, while his stiff, calliper-supported leg bears the entire weight of his body. It must hurt but it is a pain he is used to. He sips from a flat hip flask he keeps in his inside waistcoat pocket and lets the cigarette hang in the corner of his mouth when he offers you one. He lights your cigarette, coming so close that you can pick up his characteristic smell, the smell I always found disgusting, a harsh mixture of stable and leather and sweat and ingrained tobacco smoke but with another ingredient that is more than just distasteful: it is somehow swollen, thick and milky. You are side by side, leaning on the fence. Boxer stands a little away with his head close to the ground. An unidentifiable bird gives off a drawn-out burbling sound, followed by a heavy beating of wings from inside the leafy crown of a tree. On the opposite side of the yard, light is spilling out of the downstairs windows along the veranda of the Kaufmann villa. The lamps are on upstairs, too. Presumably, Helga is seated at a window, trying to make out who they are, these figures she can just see standing over by the paddock fence. Of course she recognises Mr Carsten, but who is the short female by his side? Helga thinks that the woman’s clothes are somehow familiar, at least the shawl. Because of your bulky outfit, it is impossible for you to climb up on the fence as you would have liked to; it would have been the natural kind of thing for you to do and, if you had, it would have made you feel more at ease. But in this dress and those shoes, all you can do is stand up straight and let yourself be scrutinised. He does exactly that: he looks you over or, more precisely, his gaze is turning you this way and that, as if he is trying to see who you are, or who he takes you to be without these clothes, and distinguish this you from the person you seem to be when wearing them. Aren’t you scared? you say to him just to escape his eyes for a while, and: scared of what? he says, still looking at you. So you say: scared that they’ll see you, because you’re drinking? And he takes the flask from his pocket again and untwists the top and drinks and then he smiles some more and, again, that look in his eyes, and: would you like some? He hands you the flask and you do drink a small mouthful and cannot hide the face you make as the rough alcohol slips down your throat, and then he takes the flask back from you and wipes the rim with his hand before putting the top back on and returning it to his inside pocket. What is there for me to be afraid of? he asks, and seems suddenly to have made a decision. He straightens his body (without moving the heel of the boot, it is still hooked over the fence bar, as if it were stuck). They’re the ones who should worry, I’ve been at this farm much longer than they have and will survive the lot of them, and don’t they know it. Holding his cigarette just a little way from your face, he goes on: tell you one thing, better not worry about how many masters you serve or what kind of masters they are, never mind what they choose to do to you or not, as the case may be: all of it is slavery and as long as you admit it, you’ll also be able to take it, all you need is patience. And: how do you mean? you ask. He replies: just look at me now, I own this, and he points across the paddock to where Boxer stands in exactly the same position as before, the white-painted bars of the paddock fence looking almost fluorescent against the dark trees, and he takes in the farm manager’s house and the Volvo and the horse trailer parked next to it. My kingdom, he says. But you have stopped listening. For some reason or other, he has stirred up thoughts that you are getting lost in. Then he says: you’re cold. Let’s go indoors. And you ask: indoors, where? And then he points towards the main house, which seems to float like a gigantic ship in the thickening dusk. Are you crazy? you say, laughing. But he does not pay attention, just flicks his cigarette away with his thumb and index finger, unhooks his good leg from the fence and moves heavily off towards the house without turning round to make sure that you are following him.
And perhaps that is your big mistake: agreeing to follow him into the Kaufmanns’ large villa. Of course that was not part of the plan from the beginning. All you had wanted was to be seen when you shone in your beautiful new clothes. He had said that it was fine for you to bring your friends up to the farm sometime. But you no longer had any friends, not among the lads, not anywhere else either. It was after you had told him this that he came by to drop off the fancy clothes and dismissed your protests with an impatient wave of the hand. Some old stuff, he said. Do you think the two old harpies have cause to dress up any more? Better someone use these things rather than leaving them to rot at the back of the wardrobe of some old Miss. I was in my room, looking at you while you tried the clothes on in front of the mirror. Johannes saw you too, even though he never let on. He must have known that it was only a matter of time before the dam burst, the reassuring wall he had kept trying to shore up between us and what had really happened. Now you are both standing inside the villa. He walks with his muddy boots well apart on the highly polished parquet in the drawing room, and all the rooms in the Kaufmann home are brightly lit as if for a party. But the hosts seem to have chosen to hide. Small wall lamps have been switched on next to the large painting of the St John’s Eve bonfire, the naked human bodies rest on the rocks, and I am here now! Mr Carsten shouts straight out into the room, but no one answers and you say: why don’t they answer? and he shouts again, we are here now! and you join in, WE ARE HERE NOW! and burst out laughing, you cannot stop it, and: come along, he says, and takes hold of your arm. Where is Mrs Kaufmann in that moment? Maybe she is standing behind the door to what was once her husband’s study, rigid with fear, her senses alert to the slightest change in Mr Carsten’s words and expression. What about Helga? But Helga’s face has never been distinct, apart from the broad lower jaw that she moves so frenetically, as if she was obsessively chewing on something. Probably she is also observing everything because, after all, your clothes belonged to her. Her father wanted her to wear them at the reception for the guests from abroad, and it is her dress that Mr Carsten touches now, strokes again and again with his hand, and perhaps you are shrinking back under his arm, repulsed or frightened, but then he says again: there’s something I want to show you.
*
It is as if, in a completely dark room, a light is suddenly switched on in front of a painting. For a moment, it is not the painted image you see but your own face reflected on the surface of the varnish and paint. Just for a fleeting moment: then the reflection dissolves and your face vanishes as if it was never there. In the same way, as evanescently, I stand on the cellar floor, watching in the light from the open trapdoor as the two of you climb down the steps. You come first, in your absurdly long dress, and stop after just a few steps so that, with your back to the wall, you can help him. Mr Carsten has not been down here since Sigrid Kaufmann decided to block the cellar entrance from the yard at the back. That was after Kaufmann’s death and everything down here stayed just as it was, Mr Carsten says, while he manoeuvres his stiff leg into the gap. He can only get down if you help him to place his useless leg in its specially reinforced boot at a right angle to the top step and then wait as the rest of his body follows, and you, who kicked off your own idiotic shoes ages ago, support your back against the wall while the lantern in his hand casts a flaring light over the roughcast cellar wall that picks out the outlines of both your faces and then deletes them again. Finally down there, he pulls off his thick boot and lets you have a feel of what remains of his paralysed leg: shrunk and atrophied inside a cage of jointed metal struts and leather straps with clasps he can loosen only by usin
g all the muscular strength he can muster in his arms. When I was a child, polio was incurable, he explains, you were simply grateful that you didn’t have the worst of it, so at least you escaped the iron lung. And then he went on to tell you what it was like to grow up on the Inner Islands back then, when there was no permanent bridge to the mainland and no drivable roads on the island. His family had been living there ever since the Danes ruled over Norway. His mother and father were both Kaufmann’s tenant farmers, the elder Mr Kaufmann, of course. Though he had met the son already. There were only some seven years between us, he explains. I remember him as tall and thin as a rake, neatly dressed in trousers with braces and an always freshly ironed, long-sleeved shirt that he wore buttoned right up to the throat. He would bring books with him to read outside, sitting back against a tree trunk. That is, when he wasn’t watching me and the others at work. It was hard for me to be a harvest worker, what with my leg. I had to learn how to scythe with one hand. One day, when I was sitting down on the verge, he came along to speak to me and said he would find a cure for me. There is a cure for everything, he told me. Including the illnesses science has failed to deal with so far. We are human beings, you know, he said, we don’t need to endure hunger or thirst, so why should we have to suffer disease? Only our strength of mind and our imagination can set limits for what we can learn to achieve. He would say things like that. And he went on to speak of a vision he had had (yes, that’s really the word he used, as if it had been a sighting or a mirage): one day it would become possible to get rid of all the ancient practices in farming and animal husbandry still in use on the Inner Islands, even though neither the crops nor their management were adjusted to the soil and climatic conditions here. He had been to England and had read about new methods of fodder improvement that he was going to put to the test. Not that this kind of thing was enough for him. The mentality of the farmers out here must also change. It was pointless for just one farmer and his family to work their small plot. Instead, all growing and grazing should be managed collectively, with equal distribution of seed stock and tools. It is futile to toil on the land without the knowledge of what is best for it, he would say. At the time, I suppose I thought it sounded mostly like silly fantasies but, just five years later, he had begun to turn his dreams into reality out on West Island. A total of eighteen hectares of good agricultural land and also grazing meadows for cows and goats had been set aside for collective farming, according to rules for the island that he had drafted; it included an apple orchard and cider press that used to belong to the Sanatorium but had reverted into the Kaufmann family’s ownership. This was how it all began, and it soon led to the first colony being set up. Kaufmann advertised to get the right people to join it and in the beginning things moved pretty slowly, but once the word got around they arrived in bigger and bigger numbers: young idealists like himself or ordinary workers looking for a better daily wage. Because I realised that my bad leg meant that I would never farm our old land alone, I joined in as well, and in return, as a sign of our mutual trust, he appointed me to the foreman’s position in the collective. We lived in shared lodgings in the old Sanatorium or in a barrack that Kaufmann had had built in the hospital grounds. We were divided up into work teams. Some of the women were asked to cook in the communal kitchen and some of the men to join the carpenters, especially to maintain the tools, together with the engineers who looked after the tractors and other equipment that Kaufmann gradually acquired on the colony’s behalf. There were other communal activities, like everyone taking half an hour off in the morning for exercises, at Kaufmann’s insistence. The colony grew larger all the time. We already had the farm out on West Island, but after a few years Kaufmann bought up two older farm properties on Holm Island. The Mains Farm was here, of course, and Kaufmann moved in with his young wife. It was when Helga was born a couple of years later that things changed. It is an evil disease, partly because of the way it comes to light only slowly, and then the first symptoms are so vague they could mean many things. But those of us who worked close by his side noticed well enough what it did to him. He grew more and more withdrawn and reserved and glum. I know he saw it as a curse that he, who had wanted to embody happiness and health and good living, should have a child so miserably malformed. Not that the word was ever used, though. Helga was frail, that’s all anyone admitted to. And I am told that it was not the worst form of this atrophy that afflicted her, which might have made it harder for him not to put his hope in there being some cure after all. Kaufmann consulted all these specialist doctors, and from the age of just three or four, Helga had to put up with a lot of different treatments. She had to soak in baths of rock-salt brine and sit strapped into various contraptions meant to strengthen her muscles. Just before the war started, Kaufmann went in for experiments with ionising radiation which absorbed him completely for quite some time. The Sanatorium was turned into a clinic and everyone who joined the colony had to have a dose of radiation to give him a large group of subjects to compare. My wife and I went along to be irradiated as well. Yes, you look shocked but he actually found me a wife! On condition that we became experimental subjects, of course. Katarina, that was my wife’s name, was the daughter of a farm worker who had been in Kaufmann’s employ ever since the time of the first colony. This was before I was appointed farm manager and given my own residence at the Mains Farm, so Katarina and I were lodged down here, in the basement, together with the other farm workers, and she was to serve upstairs as a housemaid and also as Miss Helga’s own maid. If you ask me, Katarina went quite peculiar from all the radiation. Anyway, she started to steal things. Mrs Guddal? you say at that point. I remember her, Johannes used to drive out to visit her on Sundays but we were never allowed to come along. Mr Carsten looks at you. The two of you sit side by side on the bottom step, and he has stretched his stiff leg out. In the flickering light of the lantern, his face is at the same time intrusive and remote. You can’t understand what it was like then, he finally says, then looks away. He owned us, do you have any idea of what it is like to be owned? But you don’t say anything. What can you say? After all, to be owned means that someone else thinks you’re worth owning and, just at this moment, what are you worth? Mr Carsten goes on talking without waiting for an answer. The war began, and with it all the children came to the islands. I don’t know how many Kaufmann had recruited. It must have been several hundred in the end. At least half a dozen of them were from Germany, Franz Lehman among them. He was treated like everyone else, at least at first – quartered on West Island and so on – but we soon realised that he was someone special. He was allowed to come and stay at the farm, and not with us but in the big house. Then he and Miss Helga began to spend more and more time together. I have to say, it vexed quite a few of us that she, who had always been so uppity, should all of a sudden start behaving like an ordinary mortal. For a while, it almost looked as if having this boy around was the one thing that might make Helga better, after everything else had failed. I can’t say if Kaufmann himself saw the irony of it, maybe he did. But none of us knew for sure if he, Franz, really was a Jewish kid, though people whispered about it and many claimed to know. I do remember once, it was in the middle of the war and Kaufmann had a visit from a German delegation. A whole banquet was laid on to entertain them. I remember it well, I had to spend an entire day just setting up lights along the roads for the guests’ motors – to give them a ‘grand entrance’, as Mrs Kaufmann called it – and then there was the long veranda and the farm to be illuminated as well. Twenty staff were on duty that evening, all with special jobs to do, and then, when the last course of the meal had been served and it was time for coffee and brandy, Franz was asked to come downstairs. Say what you like, that boy had a wonderful singing voice. Didn’t you know that? He was asked to declaim poems and to sing to the gentry and, naturally enough, Helga had taught him to sing in Norwegian without rolling the consonants. Afterwards, the entire company almost went out of control, that’s how pleased they were. Flushed
faces, a storm of applause. Fancy that, for a little Jewboy. Kaufmann saved his life, no question about it, and later, long after the end of the war, he came back here and brought his wife. And his own children too, you interrupt. After a short silence, you ask: might they have been Mrs Guddal’s children? You have understood at last, though perhaps you guessed long before then. Mr Carsten looks down at his shrivelled leg. Franz was going to adopt you, he said, without looking up. After the war, when Franz was over in the States, he and Kaufmann kept in close touch. They wrote to each other while Kaufmann was in jail as well. Apparently, Franz and his young American wife had realised they couldn’t have children, perhaps, Franz thought, due to the radiation that Kaufmann had subjected him to when he was here as a child. I don’t know if it’s the truth. After all, many couples are childless and the whys and wherefores are never explained. But Kaufmann suggested a solution and there they were, come all the way from America to adopt you. As far as the authorities were concerned, everything was in order, the paperwork signed and witnessed, your names added to your new parents’ passports. You were free to leave. Except, at the last moment, Mrs Kaufmann did not dare to let you go. She hated Franz, had hated him from the moment he arrived. Not because he was a Jew but because he had barged his way into the family. She called him the little parasite. And perhaps she hated him because he was everything that Helga was not, healthy in every way. Besides, she was scared about what might come out in public if she allowed the two of you to go abroad, the whole story about the volunteers coming to the island and the experiments that had come to obsess her husband more and more over the years. Mr Carsten falls silent. And then? you ask. And, because she and I always got on, she asked me to do something about it. And you: so it was you who fixed it? Mr Carsten fumbles inside his waistcoat and pulls out the flask, stares at it as if it were an utterly alien object, then undoes the top and takes a long, deep drink. And then: you must understand, he says, that after the colony and all those projects that Kaufmann dreamed up, the inbreeding on the island was something else, you couldn’t make it up, and if everyone is related to everyone else, it’s that much easier to keep things in the dark. If you two got away, no one on the island could silence you. Besides, there was no telling what Lehman really knew and whom he could have told and what the outcome might be. Not just for the people on the farm but for everyone here! A brief silence and then you ask: what happened afterwards? Mr Carsten stares at you. In the dim light around the cellar steps his face seems to hover, freed from his body, large and alien. What, with them? he says, and moistens his lips, dry from the alcohol. With our parents, you say. All I know is what happened to you two, Mr Carsten replies. Then he looks at you again. I never stopped keeping an eye on the two of you, regardless of what you were up to, he says in a voice that sounds somehow hollow, and I’m glad I didn’t. So, you had us with this Mrs Guddal, you say. You are the child I had with her, Mr Carsten says. As for the boy, to this day I’ve no idea who his parents are. And, at last, both of you sit in silence and your voices have a quality precisely like the glint in the layer of varnish on an oil painting when the light falls on it: having sounded eerily clear for a short while, they dissolve into white noise and broken silences. A handful of tired, trivial words are all that is left. Minna, in the tram: what makes you think that? Are we the slightest bit alike? Now that I think about it, she nearly always avoided the words brother and sister, and it is also true what she said that afternoon about the Javanese box photos, that there is not one that shows the two of us together. All of them are either of Frank and his wife Elizabeth, or of me or of Minna, always one without the other. And of the person who should by rights also be in a photo, Mr Carsten, there is not even a shadow. Now he is sitting upstairs in the villa with his rifle pointing straight at the cellar trapdoor. He has waited almost fifty years for just this: the moment when I dared to return to the place from where I came so that, once and for all, he can erase the error that bears my name, and kill me the way you kill a crippled or malformed animal.
The Tempest Page 19