by K. O. Dahl
Three years ago the great secret was just a black, impenetrable void. If she thought enough about the great secret she might be re-born.
She smiled to herself. Re-born. Henning would call that kitsch. But then Henning had never wished he had not been born.
Henning parked at the bottom of Cort Adelers gate. Aker Brygge, a shopping precinct, lay like a fortress in front of Honnor wharf, the City Hall square and Akershus Castle on the other side. Although it was around midnight, it didn't seem like night. They strolled down the tramlines, passed a taxi rank, and two younger taxi drivers whistled after Katrine who was walking by the broad display windows in Aker Brygge. She glanced at her reflection. It felt good to see herself. It felt good to make faces at her reflection: to be saucy but not tarty. Confident, but not cheap. This is me, she thought. This is how I am. Not naked, not dressed; not hungry, not satiated.
They made friends with a drunk in the queue at McDonald's. He grabbed Katrine's hand and winked at Henning. 'Christ,' he said. 'I wish I was young like you.' Katrine bummed cigarettes off him. A street musician sitting on one of the benches in front of the ferries to Nesodden began to play Neil Young's 'Heart of Gold'. The drunk asked Katrine to dance. She did. The guests at the cafe tables along the promenade sat like dark shadows in the summer night, shadows who might be friends, who might be enemies. She didn't care about the shadows scowling at her, not understanding what was going on. Tourists in shorts and white trainers with purses on strings around their necks strutted past them in the dark.
Afterwards she feasted on a double cheeseburger, chips with a dollop of ketchup and a large Coke. Henning had a milkshake as always, a vanilla milkshake. That was Henning.
'Didn't you get any food up on Holmenkollen?' he asked once they were back in the car.
'I spewed it up. Guess why.'
'Mr Nice Guy?'
She nodded.
'He tried it on?'
'As always.'
Henning produced a small joint from his shirt pocket, lit it and took a noisy suck. 'It's what I've always said,' he gasped, holding his breath for a few seconds before continuing, 'The guy is enough to make anyone spew.' He was breathing normally again. The smell of marijuana spread around them. Henning said: 'But I wouldn't have thought you would chuck up. I thought you were normal.'
'Shit, I hate being normal.' Katrine grinned through a mouthful of chips and ketchup.
Henning took another noisy suck on the joint.
'Would you like to be normal?' he asked with tears in his eyes.
She tossed back her head and screamed: 'No! And it's wonderful!'
They drove along Mosseveien to the sounds of a gentle night-time voice speaking through the car's speakers. Henning turned off on the old Mossevei by Mastemyr, passed Hvervenbukta beach and drove at a leisurely speed along the night-still road. Katrine switched off the radio and stretched her arms in the air. The wind tried to flatten her arms; the verdant tops of the trees formed shadows against the sky; there was a smell of grass, of camomile. The smell of summer came streaming towards them. Henning turned right, down the road to Ingierstrand.
He stopped and parked in a kind of gravel parking area, under some large pine trees, with the bonnet facing the calm Bunnefjord and a narrow beach further down.
Both of them turned at the sound of another car. They were not alone. A light came round the bend, a car braked and came to a halt further back.
Henning smiled and started the engine again. 'Never any peace. I want us to be alone.'
She said nothing. She was considering what he said and wondered whether to say anything.
Henning reversed and drove back the way he had come. But at the crossing with the old Mossevei he took a right. They drove carefully round the bends and parked by Lake Gjer. It was a wonderful undisturbed area. A table and bench and a few bushes. Henning drove in between the trees. They could see across the lake; a few hundred metres away they could make out the silhouette of the gigantic car tyre marking Hjulet caravan site.
Henning switched off the engine. For a few moments they heard the chirping of a cricket. Soon it too was quiet. The quietness around them made them feel as if they had entered a void.
She wanted to tell him how she felt, to communicate to him the trembling sensation she had which was making her skin nubble, here and now. But she could not find the words. They gazed at each other. In the end the silence was broken by the click of the electric lighter. Henning's face glowed red as he lit his cigarette.
The leather seat creaked as she leaned back and peered up at the blue-black sky where the stars sparkled, like the gleam from a lamp covered with a black sieve. She said aloud 'Like the gleam from a lamp covered with a damn great black sieve.'
They looked into each other's eyes again, so long that she almost felt part of her was drowning in his dark eyes. She wondered whether it would always be like this for her, whether the boundary between friendship and love would always be confused.
He said: 'If we can move away, step back far enough, here on earth, we see a kind of system in what is only fiery chaos. We can see two stars, one may have died years ago, and been extinguished, and the other may be in the process of exploding right now. We consider it a system, but everything is in constant flux. The earth falls, the sun falls, stars explode in the beyond and create time!'
The cigarette bobbed up and down in the corner of his mouth and his eyes shone with enthusiasm. He is a little boy, she thought, taking the cigarette from his dry lips. She held it between her long fingers and kissed him tentatively. He tasted of smoke and lozenges. The stubble of his beard rasped against her chin. He said something she didn't catch; the words caressed her face like silent breaths of wind between fine beach grass. She opened her mouth as he went on, parted her lips to blow at the whispering voice.
'Imagine a woman,' he whispered. 'A beautiful woman a long time ago, one who is a bit wild…'
'Wild?'
'It's a long time ago anyway, and one day she is walking along a path and comes to a river. There's a bridge over the river, one of those old-fashioned ones made with tree trunks, with no railing…'
'Is it spring or autumn?' she asked.
'It's spring, and the river is running high and she stops to look down, into the foaming torrent. She stands there playing with her ring, but drops it in the water…'
'What sort of ring is it?'
'I'm coming to that. The ring has been passed down through generations. And the ring falls in the water and is lost. Many years later she meets a man. He's from Canada…'
'Where is she from?'
'Hm?'
She smiled at the bewildered expression on his face. 'You said he was from Canada. Where is she from?'
He thrust out his hands. 'She's from… from… Namsos.'
'You see. It takes so little for you to lose your composure.' 'But you ask so many questions. You're ruining my story.'
She smiled. 'That's because you get so excited. Don't be annoyed. Go on.'
'The two of them marry. But all his life he walks around with an amulet around his neck. It's a small Indian box carved out of wood; inside he has a secret, something he found in the stomach of a salmon he gutted as a young man…'
'The ring!' she exulted.
Despairing intake of breath from Henning.
She grinned. 'Are you denying that the ring is in the amulet?'
He, also with a grin: 'The ring is indeed in the amulet. But that's not the point.'
'OK, get to the point.'
'The point is that he dies.'
'Dies? Hey, you're evil.'
'… And when he's dead, the widow opens the amulet he wore around his neck all his life… what are you grinning at?'
'You're such a hopeless romantic.'
With another grin: 'I'm never going to the cinema with you.'
'Yes, you will. Let's go to the cinema. Let's go tomorrow.'
'But you don't let anyone finish what they're saying.'
'I
don't go to the cinema to talk!'
'No, tut I'm sure you'll sit there commenting on the film. I hate it when people talk in the cinema.'
'I promise to be quiet if you come with me to the cinema tomorrow.'
'What will Ole say if you and I go to the cinema?'
'Don't bring Ole into this. I'm talking about you and me.'
'And I'm talking about the system,' he insisted, remaining objective. 'My whole point is that it is not chance that made this man live his life with her ring round his neck. No two rings are identical; it's the same ring she lost before they met. He caught a fish with the ring in its stomach. However, the ring and the man, plus her and the salmon, along with the ring, are all part of the system, a pattern which becomes logical if it is put in the right perspective. If you step back far enough.'
'And you're floating on a pink cloud,' she said, taking a last drag of his cigarette. She held it out to him with a quizzical expression, then crushed it in the ashtray in the car door when, with a wave of his hand, he refused. She said: 'The strange thing about this story is that she didn't know about the ring the man had around his neck all his life. After all, they were married.'
He sighed again. 'You're the one who's hopeless,' he whispered, and after a little reflection went on: 'OK, but I think this guy had the ring in the amulet around his neck because he dreamed about the woman who owned it, and I think he didn't want to reveal the dream to his wife because he loved her so much. He didn't want her to know about this dream he had about another woman.'
'And in fact it was his wife who owned the ring. It was her he was dreaming about all the time.' She nodded deep in thought. 'In a way, that's beautiful.'
Henning leaned forwards, groped around the dashboard and pressed a button. A buzz came from the roof of the car as it closed above them.
'Wouldn't you like to see the stars?' she asked with sham surprise.
'I'm a bit cold,' he answered - as though quoting a line from a book.
With the roof over their heads and the windows closed it was like sitting in front of a warm hearth. The car bonnet reflected the glow of the starry sky. An insect brushed against her forehead, leaving her with a mild itch which she rubbed with her index finger.
'What I am trying to point out is the pattern,' he continued. 'Imagine the hand that gathers strength to cast the bait, a second in an ocean of seconds, but still this second is part of a system. It is at this second that the salmon takes the bait - so that the man can land the fish and find the ring in its stomach. For one moment, imagine that moment - the sun reflecting on the drops of water and the metal hook - a hundredth of a second that fulfils the fish's feeling of hunger and its drive to swim up the river. This hundredth is one link in a system. Everything is connected: fate, man, woman, salmon, time and the ring she fidgets with on the bridge. Together they are points in a greater unity. Take us two. Or imagine two people, any two young people, two people who love each other without being aware that they do.'
'But is that possible?'
He shrank back, stole a glance and said: 'Of course it's possible. These two people see each other every day, they may meet every day at work - or not even that - for that matter they might see each other every day at a bus stop - or on a bus in the morning rush hour. She may run past a window where he is standing and waiting every morning. Think about it: every morning she rims past a particular office window to see him, and he rushes to the window to see her; this is a moment of contact neither of them can analyze or understand to any meaningful extent until a lot of time has passed. Later, with more experience, with the passage of more time, they think back and know in their hearts that what they had felt at that moment was a kind of love. They know that they already loved each other then.'
'But, Henning,' she said, stroking his beard with her lips. She placed a light kiss on Henning's mouth and whispered: 'You can let them meet again because you're in charge, you're telling the story.'
He whispered back: 'You have to remember that these two met in the way they did without knowing they were meeting. It was just something that happened. Past meetings of this kind are a source of the loss or the warmth they carry inside - for the rest of their lives.'
'But you can let them meet once more,' she insisted.
'OK,' he said.
'Tell me now they did,' she begged. 'Tell me they met again.'
'OK,' he repeated. 'The two of them met again. This is how it happened: he was sitting on a train going south. The train stopped at a station and he got up to look out of the window. Then he saw her.
Because another train was standing in the station too. She stood looking out of the train window - the train going north, in the opposite direction. A metre of air separated them. Can you imagine that? Her standing with the wind playing in her hair. She was wearing a white summer dress which was semi-transparent; through two train windows he could see the dress clinging to her body - he could see the outline of her stomach muscles under the dress. They saw each other for five seconds, looked into each other's eyes until the trains moved off. One train went north, the other south. And they were separated again.'
She caressed Henning's chin with her lips. 'What's her name?' she whispered.
He grinned and shook his head. 'This isn't about me. This is a story. This is something that happens every day. To someone. The one thing you can say is that there is something beautiful about the moment the two of them experience.'
'And you're in a world of your own,' she whispered. 'Do you fantasize about her?'
'Of course.'
His smile was sad: 'The only comprehensible thing you can take from the system that affects those two is the poetry. The language, the words we say to each other form a box in which we can collect the beautiful things in life and reveal them to each other at moments like now - here, you and I in this car, tonight. Language and poetry are our way of sensing the incomprehensible because we cannot step far back enough, outside ourselves, to a place where you can enjoy the logic and the inevitability of reality.'
He was breathless from all the speaking. Henning is actually very charming, she thought, Henning is naive, child-like and charming. She said:
'I don't agree.'
'Eh?'
'You're good at storytelling, but you don't know anything about reality.'
He sent her a gentle, sarcastic smile. 'That's how easy it was to get off with you.'
'Now you listen to me,' she said. 'Outside Kragerø there is a little place called Portør. It's not the name of the place which is important; the point is that you can see the whole horizon from there. It sticks out into the sea - all that is between you and Denmark is the Skagerrak. Once upon a time there was a dead calm. Do you know what that is? Dead calm. That's when the water is like a mirror, not a ripple. I was swimming, early in the morning, the sun was shining, the water was warm, not a breath of wind and the sea was completely still. I began to swim, towards the horizon. You know how I love swimming. And I swam and I swam until I felt so tired I needed to rest. I lay floating on my back looking up at the burning sun. I could see my white body under the surface of the water and I glanced around. And do you know what? I had swum so far out that it was not possible to see land anywhere. Whichever way I looked there was just calm, black sea. I couldn't see anything, not a boat, not a sail, not a strip of land. And I lay there thinking about the black deep beneath me, thinking that I had no idea which way led back to where I had come from, and I closed my eyes. Lying there like that was the biggest kick I have ever known, before or since. I knew in my heart that this was what it is all about. This is life; this is what actually happens every day. Every second of the day is like lying there, alone in the sea.'
'But you found the way back?'
She smiled. 'Of course I did. I'm here, aren't I?'
'Yes, I know, but how? Was it just luck that you swam in the right direction?'
'Maybe. It might have been luck, but that's not the point. The fact is that it was the most important e
xperience I have had in my life.'
'Why do you think that?'
'It was what made me decide to come off drugs. But perhaps even more important than that was the revelation.'
She smiled and whispered softly. 'My single thought while I was out there was that nothing is predetermined. There is no system. You tell great stories, Henning, but this business about predetermined systems is just bullshit. My life begins somewhere between me and the sea. I believe in myself and in reality. That's it.'
The final word hung quivering in the air. Neither of them said anything. They sat close together and Katrine could feel the heat from Henning's thighs against her own. 'What kind of amulet did he have?' she asked.
'Who?'
'The guy from Canada.'
'Oh, him…' Henning tried to force a hand down into his trouser pocket, but had to raise his bottom first. 'Here,' he said, passing her a beautiful, small, white box. She took it. There were neat drawings in gold on the lid. 'The kind we used to keep our amphetamines in,' she said, weighing the small box in her hand.
'Not like this one,' he said, taking off the lid.
'Marble,' she burst out. 'Is it made of marble?'
Henning nodded. 'It's the same technique they use in the Taj Mahal. The mother-of-pearl and the blue stone have been worked into the material. Feel,' he whispered, stroking the smooth surface of the lid with his finger. At that instant their eyes met. She slowly lowered the white box and put it in her lap. Then she loosened the thick band of massive gold with two inlaid jewels she was wearing on the ring finger of her left hand. She dropped the ring in the box where it fell with a dry thud. She closed the lid and passed him the box. Henning took it with a gulp.
They huddled close together and the intimacy between them grew. She stared at Henning's glowing skin, at his black eyes shining in the dark. Sinews and veins formed dark shadows in his skin. That's how I want him, she thought. And that was how she took him. She forced Henning under her and fucked him, there in the car; she rode him until the constellations in the sky made small reflections in the beads of sweat on his forehead. She could read in his dark pupils how his orgasm was building up, and when he came inside her, she covered his mouth with hers and let him scream as much he was able, deep down into her stomach.