Certain Signs that You are Dead

by Torkil Damhaug

  – But come on in, for goodness’ sake, Jenny exclaimed, her voice a little too loud. – Are you Swedish?

  A coolness had descended into Katja’s eyes, making them even darker. Sigurd held her back, pulled her close and tried to kiss her. She turned aside with a look that reminded him of that first evening at Togo, and it occurred to him that perhaps it wasn’t so much the smile as the way she turned aside that had made him follow her down into the basement.

  Three candles were burning on the dining table. A couple sat there; they looked to be about the same age as his mother.

  – The only thing that was missing to make this into the perfect birthday, Jenny enthused. – A visit from one’s son … one of them at least. Zoran, will you fetch some chairs from the kitchen.

  Introductions ensued. The balding man was Knut Reinertsen. He wore rectangular spectacles with a green frame and had a surprisingly limp handshake.

  – Knut is a psychiatrist, Jenny explained, and Sigurd wondered why that had to be the first thing he knew about him.

  – And this is Lydia, his wife, originally from Russia.

  Making that the most important thing about her, rather than the fact that she was a gynaecologist heading a research project into childlessness in which Jenny was involved, all of which he later learned. He smiled at his mother’s clumsiness. She was doing her best, and he was the one who had put her in the position in which she was struggling. Suddenly he felt for her.

  He turned to Katja. – And this is Jenny, my mother. Apart from also being doctor to the dead.

  – I already gathered that.

  – I’ve always got on well with the dead, Jenny announced. – The relationship’s really quite simple.

  – I couldn’t agree more, Knut Reinertsen chimed in, his voice a rumbling bass that didn’t match his handshake.

  – Although right now I’m working as much with those not born yet, Jenny went on.

  – They’re not all that demanding either, Knut Reinersten boomed. – Although sometimes I wonder. Days can go by with that being all Lydia ever thinks about. In a world threatened by overpopulation, women like you spare no attempt to ensure that there are even more of us, even quicker.

  Sigurd sat down next to Katja, pinched her thigh below the edge of her skirt. She removed his hand.

  They were offered some of Jenny’s moussaka. Sigurd took one look at it before declining on behalf of both of them. But he couldn’t refuse the cakes when they made their appearance on the table, a sort of sweet and sticky Australian delicacy that he’d grown up with and never had the heart to admit he couldn’t stand. They were accompanied by a Russian dessert wine that Lydia Reinertsen had brought along. She was a little grey mouse of a woman who could have come from anywhere, though it turned out to be St Petersburg. As he sat there, it occurred to Sigurd that of all of them sitting round that table, only the psychiatrist Knut Reinertsen was a hundred per cent Norwegian. They had obviously made a point of the fact, because there was something from each person’s country of origin on the menu. Zoran produced a bottle of slivovitz to go with their coffee, apologising that it was the only speciality he’d had time to produce after a week on duty in the surgical ward. Sigurd stuck to fizzy water; he was driving and anyway didn’t feel a need to get intoxicated in this company. Katja clearly did, draining her glass in two large swigs and unhesitatingly accepting Zoran’s offer of a refill. She seemed to be getting on better with Jenny’s new partner than with any of the others.

  Knut Reinertsen was knocking it back too, his deep rumble acquiring an increasing nasality as the evening wore on. Clearly a man who was used to being listened to. Apparently he was doing research into the ways people who had been exposed to war and torture found of coping. He lectured away for a while in an increasingly loud bass, but then suddenly decided it was time for him to arrange for contributions from others. He began by asking Sigurd what it was that he did.

  – Business, Sigurd answered, knowing that his brush-off would not be enough to discourage the man’s persistence.

  – Business? Well well—

  Zoran interrupted: – Sigurd is twenty-three years old and already earns more than you and I will ever earn, Knut.

  It wasn’t completely true, but Sigurd had no objection at all to Zoran’s saying it.

  The mention of money seemed to make the psychiatrist genuinely curious; he wanted to know more. Network marketing was clearly a concept that made him turn up his nose.

  – Isn’t that some kind of pyramid scheme?

  Sigurd declined to be provoked; he’d fielded the question many times. He described the idea behind Newlife. Every month recruit three new people with the motivation to sell specific products, these recruits in turn bringing in three more, and so on. Working like that, you could quickly make a million.

  He looked at Katja as he said this. The first time he’d explained to her what he’d achieved with Newlife, she found it hard to believe and he had to show her the books. Then her jaw dropped. Now she sat there with this cool look in her eyes and no apparent interest in the conversation.

  – What kinds of products? the psychiatrist wanted to know, and Sigurd gave him a couple of examples and a brief account of some of the research behind the health products.

  – Newlife is the second-fastest-growing company in the USA, well ahead of Apple.

  Knut Reinertsen dried around his mouth with his napkin. Sigurd could see that he was disguising a smile. – Research that has produced skin products that can completely reset the genes? What does that mean—

  Jenny interrupted: – Besides earning a fortune, Sigurd studies at the business institute. By the time he finishes, he’ll have a master’s in business and economics.

  He’d teased her a number of times by saying this wasn’t necessary. That for him it was a waste of time to sit for exams he didn’t need. That it was actually all about one single thing, succeeding. This time he couldn’t be bothered to correct her. He wasn’t there looking for recruits for his business.

  As in all such gatherings, the evening was dominated by those who preferred to talk about their own affairs rather than pay attention to what others had to say. Sigurd reckoned he was a good listener. It gave him several advantages. Now he sat listening to what they were all saying, and the way they were saying it. Zoran with his accent, not really more than a dislocation of the rhythm, even though he’d only been in Norway a few years. Jenny, on the other hand, still spoke with a broad Australian accent even after a quarter of a century, and had given up any attempt to get rid of it a long time ago. It had occurred to Sigurd that there might be an element of protest in it, an admission of the fact that she would never become a Norwegian. He glanced over at Lydia Reinertsen. Her eyes would be all he would ever remember of her. She had an outward squint, and it was fascinating to try to decide which eye was looking at him. As he attempted to work out the way to meet her gaze, he engaged her in a conversation about Russia, a country in which he had never been interested.

  – What about you, Katja?

  Knut Reinertsen leaned across the table. Sigurd had noticed his gaze flickering over her on a couple of occasion, as though trying to find out whether her breasts were the real thing.

  – What about me?

  She stared back at him. Knut Reinertsen drank some slivovitz; she did the same.

  – What do you do?

  Sigurd groaned inwardly, but Katja gave a tolerant smile, a hint of that teasing light back in her eyes. – I work as a waitress.

  Knut Reinertsen nodded as though he had guessed as much a long time ago.

  – She’s starting to study in the autumn, Sigurd interjected, to his own annoyance. There was no need to decorate her with a bit of status. And she could speak for herself. Which she did, announcing that she had applied to do a course in film and TV at Westerdal’s media college. Sigurd knew that her answer wasn’t meant as an invitation to proceed to further enquiries, but the psychiatrist did not. He wanted to know where she was f
rom, and failed to pick up her signals to the effect that this was not something she intended to talk to him about.

  Sigurd tried to move the conversation on to another subject, but Katja interrupted him.

  – I’ll mail you my story, she said to Knut Reinertsen. – Or perhaps better if you send me a questionnaire that I can fill in.

  She was still smiling, but it was not a smile Sigurd recognised. It struck him how quickly she could turn into someone quite different from the person he thought he was in the process of getting to know. He balled his napkin and dropped it on to his plate alongside the half-eaten cake, determined to leave now and get her out of there.

  – Because I think it’s about time to pay some attention to your wife, she went on, still staring straight at the psychiatrist. – You haven’t said a word to her all evening.

  In the car he said to her: – Well at least you made him shut up.

  – He didn’t shut up enough.

  He felt she’d gone too far, tried to work out the right way to say this to her.

  – I thought you’d taken your mother’s name, she said before he’d found it. – But her name isn’t Woods.

  – She still calls herself Plåterud, my father’s name. I don’t know why, they’ve been separated for over a year.

  That his name was Sigurd Woods and not Sigurd Plåterud had nothing to do with the ongoing divorce proceedings. He had decided to use the name years ago; it felt like it had always been his real name. In taking it he didn’t become someone else, he became himself. Moved differently, thought differently, took decisions that he had previously postponed.

  – Does it bother you? she asked.

  – Does what bother me?

  – That they split up?

  He smiled, shook his head. – I’m twenty-three, he said as he turned down on to the motorway and put his foot down, letting the BMW use up some of the power that had been accumulating under the bonnet. – I’d been waiting for it to happen. For thirteen years at least.

  Suddenly he saw an image of the room in the loft of the barn back home. The peephole in the wall through which they could follow everything that went on in front of the house.

  – Why exactly thirteen years?

  He shrugged. He’d put it behind him. And if he was going to start talking about something like that, he’d need to know more about her. As though it were a game: don’t reveal your best cards before the other person does. Don’t be left there with nothing more to show.

  – I’m not sure it was necessary to make such a fool of him, he said instead.

  – Who the hell are you talking about?

  – The psychiatrist.

  He could feel her gaze boring into him from the side.

  – If you’re going to start talking shit, you can just let me out right here.

  He moved out into the overtaking lane, accelerated. The sky above Groruddalen was a shading of pink and orange light dotted with grey-black smoke and shafts of blue. He imagined the air full of swirling grains whipped up from the asphalt, and metal shavings so finely fibred they could scarcely be seen, glinting in the light from the fjord far ahead of them, like tiny flakes of snow in the warm evening.

  He didn’t turn to her until they had passed through the toll ring.

  – Sorry.

  A word he didn’t intend to use too often, but right then it was the best he had, even though he didn’t quite know what he meant by saying it.

  2

  Sigurd Woods always took a walk around the hall before a lecture. He spoke to as many as possible of those who had turned up, got some idea of who were the sceptics, and who would be the most easily persuaded.

  – How many people here want to be in charge of their own lives? he said once silence had descended on the large auditorium. It was full that evening, more than seventy in the audience, and extra chairs had been brought in. The usual assortment of students, pensioners, tired dental assistants, nurses and secretaries, all there because they needed something new in their lives; a restart was the word he liked to use.

  – No one here who wants to take charge of their own life? His eyes alighted on a woman about Jenny’s age. She was suntanned, too much peroxide in her hair, and pink wrinkles on her chest above the neckline. She looked away, and he realised he hadn’t phrased the question properly.

  – How many of you want to earn a huge amount of money? he asked, and one hand went up, followed by a couple of others.

  – Of course you do, that’s why you’re giving up over an hour of this beautiful summer evening to listen to me. He smiled broadly. – You will not regret it.

  He looked at the woman again. This time she held his gaze.

  – And how many of you want a good income and at the same time be able to spend as much time as you like doing what you really want to do?

  He said it with just a touch of irony. A forest of hands shot up into the air.

  – I thought as much. Smart people.

  From this point onwards it would have been sufficient to proceed as he usually did, but he chose to improvise. That was why he was successful, that ability to surprise even himself.

  – My father, he said as he filled a tumbler of water. – My father owns a farm.

  As he said it, he visualised Katja. Her face as she lay in bed, divided in two by the light streaming in through the window. The thought of taking her to the farm. Showing her where he came from. Showing her the barn loft where you could stand on a chest and look down on to the grass in front of the house, see who came and went. He shook his head, shook the idea away.

  – Running a farm is a lot of hard work for very little return. He took a sip of water. – That’s a given, in a country that consists of mountains with a few wind-blown acres of arable land in between them. Everyone knows that, including my father. So he got himself a teaching qualification. Hard at it all week, with just a few hundred thousand to show for it at the end of the year. Most of it goes in taxes, the rest in expenses. He’ll carry on like that until he retires, wearing himself out for nothing. My mother is a doctor, works long hours, always having to get up in the night, and she doesn’t make much more.

  They liked this, the way he was getting personal.

  – You know what I earned last month?

  He turned and wrote a figure on the whiteboard. A number followed by five zeros. Someone in the audience expressed disbelief, and the figure was a touch too high, but not much; the last couple of months had actually been very good.

  – And I earned this much simply by doing things I like doing, he continued. – Such as standing here talking to you. I’m studying at BI; in a couple of years’ time I’ll be a qualified business economist. And I won’t owe a krone in student loans. And this is only the beginning. The two people in this country who’ve been with Newlife the longest earn the same money as me. Times ten.

  He let that sink in for a few moments.

  – In the final analysis, it’s all about one thing: time.

  He was careful to look serious now. – Your own time. Time you can spend doing what you want to do.

  He was about to go even further but reined himself in. The one word he hadn’t mentioned was left hanging in the air, because he knew it wasn’t appropriate for this gathering. He had tried it before and discovered then that it was best to leave it unsaid on the introductory night, because those who followed what he was saying so far knew that everything led up to this one word.

  Freedom.

  Afterwards he walked out on what was one of the lightest evenings of the year. It was past eight thirty, but the sky was only a slightly deeper shade of blue than it had been at midday. He had bought new shoes. They cost three thousand and weighed nothing. The wind up from the fjord carried a damp heat with it. He had made one of his best presentations, recruited a dozen new members for the network. And two days before the deadline he had handed in his exam paper on finance and economic strategies. Not exactly a masterpiece, but certainly good enough. And he wouldn’t
be opening another book until the autumn. He had been checking out holiday options on the internet. Maybe surprise Katja, book something without telling her. An island off the west coast of Mexico with hardly any tourists. Katja sitting on the edge of the swimming pool, her red swimsuit soaking wet, her hair too, looking right at him, the same look as that evening at Togo. Katja wading naked out into a lagoon. He stands watching from the beach, and waits a few seconds before following her. She starts running but he catches up with her, puts his arms around her from behind, lays her down in the warm water.

  People were sitting on Aker Brygge wearing T-shirts, women in flimsy strapless dresses. Someone from BI waved to him, one of those with shares worth millions, a present from his father. He used to laugh at Sigurd’s network trading, because what was the point of working that hard for a lousy few million? What was the point of starting from scratch? And now the guy sat there waving him over. Sigurd smiled back at him. He’d started buying shares too, but using money he’d made himself. He made a sign with his index finger that was supposed to mean something like enjoy it while you can.

  The only vacant table with a view of the fjord was of course reserved, but he knew the head waiter at L’Olive, it could be fixed. Sigurd slipped him a two hundred and sat down, hung his Moods jacket on the back of the chair, stretched his legs. He was early, ordered a Bonaqua while he waited. Didn’t like waiting, but that was one of the things he intended to work on. It was always about that, about pushing forward, encountering new obstacles, overcoming them.

  After a quarter of an hour he’d worked enough on it. He drank the rest of his Bonaqua, picked up his mobile, no message from Katja. He sent one to her. Not impatient, just making sure she hadn’t made a mistake about the time and place.

  He needed to move, got up and went to the toilet. Twenty minutes now. No answer to his message. He felt something that might be anger. Decided he needed to work more on that. To show anger was to show weakness. He logged on to Facebook, scrolled down through a few dozen happy messages. Clicked on her page. Not been updated for some weeks. He’d checked out her friends there, didn’t find out much. No information about her he didn’t already know, nothing about her family. A reference to a film she was in. He’d asked her about it, she’d laughed it off.