by Agnete Friis
“I wish she were mine,” said Christi. “I feel like I know her already. I know what she likes to read, I know which songs she likes listening to when she goes to bed . . . ” Christi pulled him closer and looked deep into his eyes. “I wish we had ten more trolls just like her. I miss it. And I miss you.”
He sighed. There were things he missed as well. He missed the carefree lightness of their initial meetings in the dunes. He missed the rush of joy that had carried him through the spring and summer. And in a strange, contradictory way, he also missed his relationship to Anna as it had been before Christi. That intimacy that, despite everything, still lay in the fact that they were faithful to each other in the midst of the grey their marriage had become.
“You will have your own family one day,” he said, even as the though tormented him with a maddening jealousy.
“With you?”
“With someone. You are a beautiful young woman, Christi. You have your whole life ahead of you.”
“I want you and Ella,” she said. Her pelvis was moving against his—not without effect—and he had long since forgotten what they were talking about when she starting alternately licking and sucking on his nipple.
“I can’t see you again till you’re done with your wife,” she whispered in his ear. “It hurts too much. Can’t you understand that? I want all of you.”
“Hmm . . . ”
“Your wife is strong. She’s a grown woman who can take responsibility for her own life. Doesn’t she deserve better than being with a man who doesn’t love her? If it were me, I would want to know the truth, so I could find someone, who really loved me.”
“You are not Anna.”
He pushed her away slightly, turned to face her, and thrust deep inside her. Kissed her mouth, her neck.
“You don’t know her at all.”
“She’s using you.”
She rolled away, leaving him exposed next to her, his rapidly diminishing erection resting against his thigh. She wanted to talk again, Christi. This happened more and more of late.
“What do you mean? How could she be using me?”
“You’re not sleeping together anymore, are you? You don’t love each other in that way. She keeps you because you have a lovely house together, and a chic sofa, and a beautiful child. The whole setup is so unimaginably dull, and you’re not even getting any sex in return. Is that how you want to live the rest of your life, just because she’s too ugly and too dull to find another man? She’s nuts, isn’t she? All that bloody religion.”
She snorted with a glint of evil shining in her eyes, he noted, as she thrust her beautiful breasts under his nose. It was the younger, more beautiful woman’s smile in anticipation of victory; the most desirable woman wins. The rules of the game were older than our modern civilization, and yet he felt the need to protect Anna from her attack.
“I don’t want to talk about her, Christi.”
“What would like to talk about, then?”
He closed his eyes, indulging in an echo of their first conversations in the dunes. All the things he had asked her while their fingers were locked together.
Favorite color? Yellow.
Favorite city? Paris.
Favorite musician? She’d laughed. Elvis, of course. Who else?
In the beginning they had talked about how Poul Henningsen worked with light and reflection. They had talked about traveling to Sydney to see the Opera House. Now it struck him how little they both knew about architecture.
They got dressed in silence and she went into the bathroom, locking the door behind her. He went into the kitchen and sat down at the kitchen table. That sharp look in her eyes when she talked about Anna still bothered him. Christi didn’t know her. She had no right to poke around in Anna’s mind. Call her crazy.
His hand rested on Christi’s bag, which was slung over the chair next to his. The bag was open, and he could see the shape of her wallet. He lifted it out of her bag and opened it, carefully listening for sounds coming from the bathroom door. But the contents were a disappointment.
There were no identity documents. No cards. Only a couple of coins and notes, and a fuzzy photo of two boys, aged about three and four, playing in a sand-pit. A few slips from the gas station, receipts from a supermarket in Holstebro. He riffled through the slips of paper quickly, not knowing what he was looking for. Anything that could give him some foundation of proof, some balance of substance between everything she knew about him and the nothingness he knew about her.
He could hear the sound of water running in the bathroom. There was also a slip from the postman for the failed delivery of package for a Christi Johansen at Aurikelvej 18, Holstebro. He stuck the delivery slip into his back pocket, zipped up her wallet, and managed to drop it back into her bag a split second before she appeared in the doorway. Her face was arranged in neutral folds, but he could see that she’d been crying.
They drove back up the sandy road in silence. It was only once they reached the bus stop that she turned and put a hand on his thigh.
“You’re not going to leave her, are you?”
He took a deep breath. Did not dare look her in the eye.
“No . . . not right now. It’s not possible.” Her lips narrowed, and he imagined he could see something of the girl slide from her face, and an older woman came to the fore. A woman the world had taken a few chunks out of. He was about to take it back, say he was sorry, but of course it was impossible. He had dreaded this moment for such a long time, and now that it had come, there was no point in prolonging the agony.
“Christi,” he said. “We need to stop this. It’s not working.”
She looked at him vacantly. The tears of a woman. He remembered that only a month ago, he had promised to make her happy. During the last couple of weeks he had imagined what this moment would be like, let himself feel the pain in small doses. He had imagined a life without Christi stretching before him like a gold-and-grey landscape of trivialities, the days slowly passing by as he got older and older. Ella would move out in eleven years’ time—and never come back. He and Anna would sit alone in the house, work for a few more years. They would buy a new kitchen, a new sofa, move into a nursing home, and die. The panic fluttered in his chest.
“I thought you loved me,” she said.
The words hit him like a bludgeon to his stomach. Again he fought the urge to take her in his arms, say he didn’t mean it, that of course they would see each other again.
“And I thought you understood me. It’s not that I don’t love you. But I’m married, for heaven’s sake, and Anna and I have been together for such a long time. We have a child. And it’s . . . complicated. I thought that this was understood between us.”
He tried to imbue his voice with indignant severity, but it crashed to the ground heavily. He just shook his head.
“I don’t understand anything at all,” she said. Her voice had become harder. “Why did you come with me to the museum that day at all, if you knew that you were never going to leave your wife?”
“Christi . . . if things had been different . . . I guess I also believed in it, in us, at least some of the time. If Anna didn’t exist, there would be nothing in this world, I would rather do. Please don’t be angry with me, sweetheart . . . I can’t bear it.”
She bit into the soft flesh of her bottom lip. Exactly how she had bitten him. A little habit she undoubtedly knew he found irresistible. “I need some time to think. You are . . . ”
She stopped there, just before saying it: a disappointment, not what I had hoped for. And he felt . . . erased. Not once in their five-month-long dream together had she said anything other than how wonderful he was. She had whispered it in his ear when she came, and afterward, when they lay staring up into the sky. She had said that she loved him.
He felt a fresh wave of panic.
Initially, her secrets
lent him a sense of freedom, as if their relationship was hovering above it all, suspended in the universe. But now . . . He knew nothing about her, and if he changed his mind . . . where would he even begin to look for her? He remembered all the sleepless nights he’d spent wondering whether she was alive or dead—or perhaps had just forgotten him.
“Give me a telephone number,” he said, resting a hand on her arm. “I would like to call and make sure you’re all right.”
There was a twitch at the corner of her mouth, like a person becoming aware of the stench coming from a bucket of vomit. Then she opened her bag, rummaged inside, and hurriedly scrawled a number onto the back of an old receipt. He watched her strained expression, imagined a telephone in the hall of a house on Aurikelvej 18 in Holstebro—a yellow-brick house from the 1970s, a flat roof, ivy growing up a low gable, perhaps a husband tinkering with a car in the carport. He felt a rush of insane jealousy burning wild and hot in his chest, but he let go of her arm.
She opened the car door and stepped out into the autumn rain. He remained in his seat. A slightly overweight, going-on-fifty man in a knitted sweater with a safety belt drawn over his slightly-too-big belly. The wipers swept over the windscreen. Swish, swash.
Before, when he had tried to imagine old age, he’d thought it would feel like a gradual loss of the ability to dream. A sixty-year-old could achieve less than a man in his thirties—such were the realities of life. But he would never have imagined that it would be possible to put a time and date to the day the world engulfed him, and all opportunities ceased to exist.
It was 2:30 on the afternoon of October 15, 1994.
22
“Food?”
I was lying on the sofa, staring up at the dirty, ash-grey ceiling with its fat cracks in the cement and spider webs in the corners. Barbara had already placed a glass of water in front of me on the coffee table. She put a cool hand on my forehead. Her bangles clashed in my eardrums. Indeed, everything about Barbara was loud. Her hair—newly-dyed in the interim—her eyebrows painted in brown earth tones, and her necklace of polished wooden pearls that rattled like an irate snake.
But I was no longer high.
The walk from Thisted to Klitmøller had burnt off the last of the chemical reserves in my system. The only thing I felt by the time I got home was a profound exhaustion in my bones. I was too tired to eat.
“No, thanks.”
Barbara nodded, sat down in the easy chair in the corner, and tucked her thin brown legs in under her. Her feet looked like the claws of a crow. Two thin, tattooed snakes entwined around each other on her right ankle.
“Where were you?”
“I went for a walk.”
“You’ve been gone for almost five hours.”
I didn’t budge. The visit to my grandmother’s wasn’t something I could put into words just yet, and I was still furious. Because Bæk-Nielsen had forced me to talk to her. But mostly because I kept thinking about what she’d said. About my father. That he claimed he was innocent. It wasn’t as if I felt I owed him any loyalty—there was nothing to be loyal to—but that his treachery ran so deep . . . I had always thought he would have the decency to admit his guilt.
“Would you like me to sing for you?”
I turned my head to meet Barbara’s radiant gaze.
“You’re nuts,” I mumbled. “Why are you doing all this for me?”
“I guess because I like you,” she said. “A clever man once told me that we don’t always choose the people we have in our lives. Sometimes life, or circumstances, can bring us together, and sometimes we are deliberately chosen by others—and I have chosen you, sweetheart.”
Her singing voice was off-key and smoky, and the tones became twisted on their way out of her brain and into the world via her vocal cords. Her song sounded like an echo from a different world. Peace reigns in country and town . . .
I closed my eyes, felt a ripple run through my body. I was no longer lying on my grandmother’s sofa, I was in my own room, the attic walls were painted golden yellow, a poster of Emil from Lönneberga was stuck on the wall above my bed. My mother was bent over me, I could smell her. A mixture of soap and something honey-sweet on her breath.
I remembered her. I remembered her, and the sleep that followed in the wake of her memory was deep, and peaceful.
When I woke up again it was getting dark, and there was a knocking at the door. Barbara was nowhere to be seen, but Lupo growled softly at the entrance as I walked down the stairs to open the door.
It was Thomas.
A hooded sweater and long pants—homage to the grey skies above. Just behind him stood Alex, looking like he wished he were any place other than right there. He had two brown paper bags clutched in his hands.
“Burgers and fries,” said Thomas. “We bought some dinner at the grill bar on our way home.”
“We?”
I caught Alex’s eye, but he simply shrugged and slipped past me into the kitchen.
“Yes, I bumped into your son down at the harbor. He was collecting cans, you know . . . ”
Thomas peered at me, dodged through the open door himself, and strode into the kitchen with Lupo hot on his heels.
“I don’t mean to intrude,” he said, “but people are starting to talk about you and your son’s err . . . activities.”
“What’s wrong with collecting cans?”
I had followed Thomas into the kitchen and stood watching as the two boys ripped open the brown paper bags and tucked into their grub. Alex wasn’t used to junk food, so he was certainly easy to tempt on that score. The puppy-dog look from before had disappeared just as swiftly as the oily fries and ketchup were disappearing down his gullet now. There must have been at least three hundred kroner’s worth of food spread over the kitchen table.
“Nothing was wrong with it before. But things have changed. You seem to have become unpopular with the store owner,” said Thomas, looking at me with a steady gaze.
“How much do I owe you?”
Thomas, who had just sunk his teeth into his burger, raised a conciliatory hand.
“Nothing,” he said. “It’s on me. You can buy the next round.”
He knew I was broke, of course. I assumed that’s what everybody in town was talking about. That, and the stealing.
“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll pay you back next month.”
The kitchen suddenly seemed very small, and neither of us said anything else before Alex had finished his fries and gone upstairs. The sound of a faint bass beat filtered down to us through the cracked plaster of the ceiling.
“What I’m trying to ask, Ella, is whether you need any help,” said Thomas. “If you’re okay.”
I shrugged. “Poverty stinks. Most people think it’s contagious. Like lice, and the flu, and herpes. I guess it’s not such a good idea to parade your symptoms in public, but I can’t do anything about it. We need whatever extra cash we can scrape in on the side.”
“Alex is starting school in less than three weeks.” Thomas crumpled the burger wrappings and paper napkins together in one hand. “He’s emptying garbage bins as fast as the other children can fill them. I don’t know how things work in Hvidovre, but out here, that could become a problem.”
“Maybe we’ll move,” I said. “I don’t think this is the right place for us after all. It was only meant to be temporary anyway.”
Thomas stared at me in surprise. “How so?”
“We needed to get away from Hvidovre.”
“And now you need to get away from Klitmøller?”
His gaze shone with mock innocence, and I chose to ignore the implications underlying his question. “You’re quick on the uptake, T. You’ve been pretty lucky with that brain of yours.”
He got up without looking at me, petted Lupo affectionately on the neck. “Hmm, I’d better be going.”
“Yes, I’ll see you around.”
“One more thing. About your parents.” Thomas was standing half-turned in the doorway, still, without looking at me.
“Yes?”
“Did you know that your mother was a Jehovah’s Witness?”
“Yes.”
That was a lie. I knew that my mother’s family had been very religious, but my beautiful Book of Childhood Memories had made no mention of Jehovah’s Witnesses or the particular sect my mother’s family had belonged to. Barring the optimistic and spaced-out religious types who occasionally roamed the apartment blocks in Hvidovre in the hope of roping in forlorn souls, I knew nothing about that kind of thing.
“And did you know that your mother had obtained a restraining order against her own sister and father? Apparently they harassed her after she left their church. They called her at all times of the day and night. On several occasions her father lit flame torches in your backyard, he planted wooden stakes right outside your parents’ house; their congregation believed that Jesus was executed on a stake, not a cross. Apparently he was a real nutcase, her father.”
“Where did you get this information?”
“You’d be surprised how much folklore there is in a closed tribal community like ours. Nobody can remember who saw what and when, but everyone knows the stories,” he said. “Once you have ripped a hole in the web, all the spiders that were trapped inside come crawling out.”
23
HELGI, 1994
He pulled the trigger as soon as he registered movement amongst the trees, but the shot was premature. The buck bolted in a twisted leap and crashed through the undergrowth in a stumbling, inelegant flight. It was hit, but only in the rump, and it would take some time to round it up.
He cracked the rifle, slung it over his shoulder, and made his way along the line of trees that flanked the plantation. There was blood on the forest bed. Not a lot of blood, but enough to create a trail of dark red dots on the carpet of dry pine needles. He bent down and pressed a finger into one of the murky smudges. The blood was warm to the touch, and all around him the forest breathed a haze of early winter. It felt good, and necessary; made it possible to breathe after Christi had gone.