Certain Signs that You are Dead

by Torkil Damhaug

  The two men outside concluded their conversation. The one in the suit headed right towards the station while the other, in jeans and a T-shirt, stayed where he was and pulled something from his back pocket, a packet of cigarettes. He lit one, turned and glanced across the street towards the café window. For a few seconds he stood there, looking at the table where they were sitting, and Arash met his gaze and recognised him immediately. It couldn’t possibly be him, but he was no longer able to doubt it; he never forgot a face, and this was one he had seen just a few hours earlier.

  – What is it? Marita twisted round and followed his gaze.

  – Don’t turn round. He grabbed her arm and she did as he said.

  – Wait here, he told her.

  – Arash, what’s going on?

  Her voice seemed far away, as though she was sitting in the next room. She sounded scared.

  – Don’t go anywhere. Don’t be afraid.

  She tried to protest, but he was already at the door.

  Outside, he saw the man crossing the roundabout. Arash half ran after him. The man turned down into the station underpass; he was tall, quite well built. Arash knew he ought to leave it. A voice, maybe his own, kept telling him he was making a mistake, that it must be someone else. He kept muttering to himself as he ran.

  He caught up with him halfway through the underpass.

  – Hello.

  The man stopped and looked down at him. Arash saw it then, in the eyes, the way the pupils expanded.

  – Yes?

  – I know you.

  Again he studied the face, the muscles flickering in the forehead, in the jaw.

  – Don’t think so, the man said in broken Norwegian.

  – Ibro Hakanovic.

  The man’s eyebrows gathered, the eyes narrowed.

  – You are mistaken.

  Arash didn’t stop looking at him. If he backed off now, he would never get rid of him, he would see this man in others who passed him by, more and more often, every minute, every second.

  – I am not mistaken. You were at the hospital. You were injured. I followed you down into the basement.

  The man shook his head, carried on walking. Arash followed him for a few steps, until the other whipped round.

  – Get lost.

  Arash raised a hand. He was holding something in it, a knife; he must have taken it with him from the café.

  – I know who you are, he shouted.

  The man took a step towards him, then he backed away, turned and ran.

  Arash slumped again the wall of the underpass, buried his face in its rough surface.

  She was standing outside when he returned to the café. When she saw him coming, she went to meet him and took hold of his arm.

  – Arash, you must tell me what’s going on.

  She was right, he had to tell her, he no longer had any choice. She was afraid, and he didn’t want her to be afraid.

  – I’ve paid. You said you had a car.

  He nodded and led the way to the car park, got in, didn’t start the engine. Sat there staring through the windscreen, out into the car park. People passing on the pavement. They’ve got nothing to do with me, he thought. Don’t let them into your story. An elderly man putting bags of shopping into the boot of a car. Someone younger, in a tracksuit, walking a dog. A tall woman with dark hair and a slight limp; maybe he’d seen her earlier that day. Marita, beside him in the front seat. And when he said her name inside, he started to talk, as though the name had been a switch. He told her about the patient who had disappeared. Who before he vanished had asked him about his ring and said something about a car crash, like a warning. He described how he had to search down in the basement. And the man tumbling out of the storeroom, the heavy body forcing him down on to the floor. He smelled of sweat and blood and dead flowers, and maybe that was what Ibro Hakanovic was trying to do, warn him about something that was going to happen. Because he sort of had his arms around Arash as they lay there on the floor, as if he was trying to stop him from getting up.

  Afterwards he realised he was dead.

  – If he’s dead, then you can’t have seen him walking along the street in Lillestrøm.

  He was still glancing round. Today was even warmer than the ones before, the sun even sharper.

  – You’re probably right.

  She didn’t take her eyes off him. – Of course I’m right.

  – I can’t have seen him here.

  She put an arm around his neck, pulled his head towards her, resting it against her neck, hugged him.

  – It must have been awful, Arash.

  He inhaled the smell of her warm skin. Her voice had come closer again; she was no longer in an adjacent room. He told her about the basement, the other basement, the one in Evin jail. He managed to control his thoughts again, light and shadow parted.

  He didn’t tell her everything; most of what happened couldn’t be spoken of. She was a good person. The two of them had come together for a reason. He must take care of her. There were people in the world who wanted evil. And there were people who wanted to protect others. Maybe everyone had something of both in them. Maybe it was he himself who turned the people he met into one or the other. That it was because of him that she was now sitting beside him as his protector. He held on to that thought. She was good because he had made her good.

  – We’ll take a drive, she decided.

  It wasn’t his car they were sitting in; it belonged to Finn Olav from the floor above. That time he had walked the crying young girl home, Finn Olav had invited him in for coffee, thanked him, and over and over again insisted that if there was any way at all in which he could repay him, he mustn’t hesitate to ask. And that afternoon he had not hesitated. Borrow the car? Finn Olav had echoed, his forehead creased in wrinkles. Arash was on the point of withdrawing the request, but then the doctor smiled broadly and slapped him on the shoulder. Of course Arash could borrow a car. Which one, Tonje’s Golf or his own new Prius hybrid? Take that one, think green.

  That was the thought he clung on to as he started the silent car. Everywhere you went there were people who helped each other. Small things, large things. And people with evil intentions. He had to make sure he was always in a place where he was able to see who was what.

  – Of course, I can’t drive you home, he said.

  The light was still not completely divided from the darkness, but he felt safer now. She sat there, still stroking his hair.

  – We can go back to your place. I never got round to drinking my coffee. Didn’t eat anything either.

  He tried to think it through. Ferhat was going to be out all day. For some reason or other he’d asked the Kurd about that before leaving the flat.

  – Coffee, he nodded. – Coffee and food.

  The door wasn’t locked. He understood why, and for an instant he thought of turning round and taking her somewhere else. She was already standing in the hallway.

  Ferhat was sitting in the living room. No newspaper on the table in front of him, only a bag of chewing tobacco, a kettle, a jar of instant coffee, half full. He looked up as they came in. Looked at Arash, looked at Marita, no reaction at all showing in his face.

  – This is Ferhat.

  The Kurd didn’t react, carried on slowly chewing the tobacco or whatever it was he had in his mouth.

  Arash turned to Marita. – Ferhat’s staying here with me for a few nights, he explained. – He doesn’t have anywhere to live.

  He took Marita into the kitchen. – He’s having a hard time of it, he told her.

  She nodded. – You like helping people. I noticed that about you at once.

  He put out cups, found some biscuits in the cupboard, fetched the kettle from the living room where Ferhat, barefoot and wearing only a shirt and a pair of stained tracksuit trousers, still sat motionless on the sofa, chewing and staring into the air.

  – We’ll go for a walk and take our food with us, Marita decided. – I like walking.

 
10

  Before starting the autopsy, Jennifer described the corpse lying on the table. Male, 193 centimetres tall, powerfully built, cropped black hair. External injuries: five stab wounds in the lower belly with a pointed sharp weapon, probably a knife, the deepest of them 8.3 centimetres. Laceration to the throat, a thin cut 7.5 centimetres in length, the cartilage, nerves and vessel in the thyroid gland severed, but none of the main arteries in the neck, which explained the limited amount of blood at the scene. She also described the blunt-force traumas, presuming that most of them were inflicted before admission to hospital, almost certainly the cause of his admission.

  At about eleven, Zoran appeared. He had one of the junior doctors with him. Jennifer tried to move some of the strands of hair dangling down over her face without using her hands, felt herself blushing from the edge of her cap down.

  – This is Finn Olav, said Zoran. – He was the one who admitted the patient yesterday.

  She held up the bloody gloves to show why she couldn’t shake hands.

  Finn Olav repeated his name, and his surname, Kiran. He didn’t look to be much over thirty but already showed signs of a double chin and an emerging bald spot. In the pathology lab lighting his face looked a pale yellow colour. It made her think of how she herself must look, standing there in the green gown, glasses perched on her nose and a face puffy from lack of sleep.

  – Everyone’s talking about this down on the wards, said Zoran. It must have been a long time since he’d had any sleep too, but it didn’t show, and the stubble on his cheeks that turned grey at the point of his chin and then black down his throat suited him. – There are rumours that someone stabbed him.

  Jennifer opened her arms wide in exasperation. – The management is trying to keep it quiet. They’re hoping to have the weekend before they need to give details. Not a good idea if you ask me.

  – And they did, presumably? Ask you?

  – Of course not. But I said so anyway, to the chief physician himself.

  She had seen a brief report on the net under the headline Died at Akershus as a result of injuries. Not exactly wrong, but nothing about the murder that had taken place in the basement. Did management think that people’s confidence in the hospital wouldn’t be shaken if it took several days for the truth to emerge?

  – Just wait till the press gets hold of this. And yes, it is true that a man was stabbed to death. She thought there was no harm in revealing at least this much to the doctors responsible for the patient. – But you didn’t hear it from me.

  She stepped aside and let them see the body with the now opened chest.

  – Stab wounds to the lower belly, she indicated.

  – Look fatal, Zoran observed. He had now put his spectacles on.

  – He died of drowning, Jennifer informed him with a slight smile.

  Finn Olav turned to her. – The man drowned? Where?

  She lifted the sheet covering the head and neck. Zoran studied the cut in the throat. – I presume blood from the severed thyroid gland ran down into the lungs, he said.

  – He drowned in his own blood.

  Finn Olav bent over to look at the lungs, which had been removed and laid separately on the table. –That’s crazy. Though wouldn’t the lack of blood to the brain be fatal before that?

  Zoran nodded. – But all the main arteries seem to be intact. Is that correct, Jenny?

  – If you want to take over and finish the job, then be my guest, she sighed, feeling a desire to cuddle up to him.

  – I wish I could. You need to get some rest.

  – What about you? You’ve been on duty for over twenty-four hours.

  – I’m fine. I’m off in another hour. When are you finished for the day?

  He looked at her, and the question turned into an invitation. Finn Olav glanced quickly at each of them in turn, an angled wrinkle forming over one eye. In the beginning, Jennifer had done what she could to keep the relationship with Zoran a secret, but now the whole world might as well know it.

  By the time she was finished, it was eleven thirty. Still not tired, but feeling a tenacious exhaustion that prickled all over, mostly in her neck. She thought about having lunch, decided to dictate her preliminary report first. It took ten minutes, on autopilot; she’d lost count of how many of these she’d done over the years.

  She should have spent the afternoon on her research project. The project group had arranged a meeting for Monday, the scholarship student had shown her something that was possibly a new discovery and Jennifer had promised to run the tests again, see what came up and get a presentation ready. Despite the student’s enthusiasm, she didn’t really believe they’d have anything new to offer. Nothing that could help to explain why some women got pregnant time after time whilst others, for no apparent reason, tried and tried without success, with their biological clocks ticking away all the time and getting reading to stop.

  She was in no state to deal with such matters right now, and after dictating some eight or ten notes that had been lying around on her desk for a little too long, she stalked out through the vestibule on her thin heels. More like wobbled, she thought, and straightened up in her new sandals. She’d found them a couple of days earlier in an English internet shop. They suited her, but in her state of chronic exhaustion they were not easy to manoeuvre in.

  She sent a message to Zoran. He would definitely be asleep. Could get his head down anywhere, sleep for five minutes or six hours and get up refreshed, always refreshed.

  He wasn’t sleeping, and she headed past the garages and down in the direction of the block where he lived. It felt as if she’d been drifting for a long time. She’d made the break, left Ivar, left the farm, quit the job with forensics. The beginning of a journey, that was what it was. She didn’t know where it would end. Recently she had started thinking that the road would perhaps lead back to where she’d come from, to a town on the far side of the world, the one she had left nearly thirty years ago. But that town was no more. Her parents were both dead. An older brother had moved to Darwin, her little sister was living in one of Sydney’s posher suburbs; they kept in sporadic touch through Facebook. The friends she had once had in Canberra were now scattered to the four winds.

  The door to Zoran’s flat was locked. She wondered whether she should ring the bell, decided to let herself in with the key he had given her a long time ago. As she closed the door behind her, he emerged from the bathroom, bare chested, his face covered in shaving foam.

  She reached up and scraped an opening around his mouth. – Santa Claus here in the middle of summer?

  – Well, I need to keep in practice.

  She followed him into the bathroom, stood there watching as he finished shaving.

  He wiped off the rest of the shaving foam, turned to her, shaking his head.

  – They’re working you to death, Jenny.

  She let herself collapse on to him; he caught her and held her tightly.

  – But not you? she murmured into his chest. He was working five-man twenty-four-hour shifts. If any of the others were ill, he sometimes had to take a double shift. And surgeons couldn’t exactly doze their way through shifts. She had never heard him complain.

  He led her into the living room, let her slump down into the sofa. – Shall I fix you something to eat?

  She grunted something that was probably a yes.

  – Perhaps you’d prefer to sleep? he said, leaning over her. – I’ll carry you into the bedroom.

  She considered giving in to the desire to be lifted up and taken to bed. The first time she’d been there he had carried her into the bedroom, and quite a few times since then too.

  – Think I’d better eat first, she yawned.

  He disappeared into the kitchen, and she curled up and lay there looking out into the warm light. Drifted into a doze, but as if her eyes were still open. Someone calling to her. It’s Trym, not more than five years old. He’s standing in the doorway; he can’t sleep either.

  Are you asleep
?

  No.

  Not Trym that answers, but a little girl.

  She forced her eyes open wide, remembered where she was, in Zoran’s front room. Frugally furnished. A print on the wall, a landscape, that was it. If she were to move in, the flat would change pretty quickly; she was no minimalist. Zoran didn’t have a single photograph on his shelves either. In her own flat, however temporary it was, she had several pictures of the boys as children. Zoran had a daughter, but Jennifer knew nothing about her. Lying there on the sofa, she thought they ought to meet, her and the daughter.

  He came in carrying a plate, put it down in front of her. Bacon and egg, sliced tomatoes, fresh bread with Dutch cheese. Espresso coffee. Olives in a little glass bowl. He bought them from a Turkish shop in Lillestrøm. She had never liked olives until she met him; now she could almost have lived off them.

  – When did you last see your daughter?

  He shrugged his shoulders. – A few years ago. Why do you ask?

  – Just wondered. You said once she lives in Germany.

  – That’s right.

  – Well that’s not so far away.

  – Not in terms of geography.

  He didn’t say anything else, and she thought she ought to.

  – I always wanted a daughter.

  He nodded; she’d said that before.

  – All the things we never got and never did.

  – I think lack of sleep is bringing out the melancholy in you, he smiled.

  – Not at all, she protested. – I’m the sanguine type. A bit choleric. But never melancholic.