The Cold Song

by Linn Ullmann

  She had posed for pictures in front of the church, grave-eyed behind the stripy glasses, with the same flower clasp in her hair.

  And now here they were, Siri, Jon, and Beth, and Beth said, “I know, of course, that Jenny was an important figure in the local community, what with her running the bookshop. I’ve heard that she built up a fabulous selection of foreign literature in translation. That’s right, isn’t it?”

  Siri pressed her lips together and nodded.

  Beth leaned across the Formica table and smiled at Jon.

  “Jon.”

  Jon jumped when he heard her say his name.

  “Jon,“ she repeated. “You’re a writer, aren’t you?”

  Jon glanced at Siri, her nose and cheeks were pink.

  “I am a writer,” Jon said.

  “I read one of your books,” Beth said. “I thought it was wonderful. It was that one with the title that has something to do with hair …?… Your hair?… My hair?… Something to do with hair.” She smiled apologetically. “You know the one I mean, don’t you?”

  “No,” Jon said, shaking his head. “I’ve never written a book with hair in the title.”

  “Oh,” said Beth. “Really? Oops. Then it must be me who’s getting mixed up.”

  “Maybe,” said Jon and turned to Siri. “Maybe we could talk a bit about Jenny now, and about what you’re going to say at the funeral.”

  “Yes, let’s do that,” said Beth. “And I’d like it if we could talk a bit about her grandchildren. You do have children, don’t you?”

  “Their names are Alma and Liv,” Siri said flatly.

  “Alma and Liv,” Beth said and smiled. “Perhaps you could tell me a little bit about them and what their grandma meant to them? I bet there are some wonderful memories.”

  And so, a few days later in an almost full church, Jon and Siri held each other’s hands very tightly, and tighter still during Beth’s sermon. Jon didn’t dare to look at Siri, but he could feel her fury and her grief. And her fear too. Felt it like a vibration just under her skin. When his turn came to speak he had to extricate his hand from hers. When he rose and made his way up to the altar, he was sure he could feel Siri’s eyes on him. He stood for a moment beside the coffin before stepping up to the lectern and clearing his throat.

  “I found this passage in a book that I was reading,” he said, “and I thought of … well, I thought of all of us. Strindberg ought to be read in Swedish, but I tried to translate it, so here it goes.” He looked up at the mourners and then at Siri and his children sitting in the first pew. “It’s from Strindberg’s novella Alone,” he added, “and I’m going to begin in the middle of a sentence, I think Jenny would have liked that.”

  He smiled. And then he read:

  “I had, however, noted that we were not so quick to smile as before and that we observed a certain care in our speech. We had discovered the weight and the worth of the spoken word. Life had certainly not mellowed our judgment, but wisdom had eventually taught us that all one’s words come back to one; furthermore we had come to see that men cannot be described in full tones, but that one must also use halftones in order to express as accurately as possible one’s opinion of a person.”

  After the funeral, Siri invited all of the mourners to a simple repast in the old bakery, and when Jon and Siri and the children were walking back to Mailund that October evening, up the long road to the house, Jon said, “If we could hear Jenny now, what do you think she would say?”

  “I think she’s saying: Who lives in this house?” said Siri, looking up at the old white mansion at the top of the road.

  A few weeks later it was Milla’s turn to be buried. Siri and Jon talked about going, they really ought to, but what would they say? What good would they do there? It might even cause offense.

  “It was all a mistake, right from the start,” Siri said. “The whole thing. And we should have done more.”

  The day after the funeral Jon received a text.

  They found her in the ground and now we’ve buried her again. She was nineteen when we lost her and you are as mute as ever. A.

  Jon and Leopold had reached the foot of the road, they had met no one. There was just him and Leopold and the road and the snow and nothing else was left in the world. But then, as it began to brighten up ever so slightly, a small figure appeared before him. It took Jon a minute to recognize it. The figure. And then, in a flash he realized who it was and what his name was. The only thing missing was the bike.

  “Hi,” said Simen.

  “Hi,” said Jon. “What have you done with your bike? I hardly recognized you without it.”

  Simen rolled his eyes and spread his arms.

  “Yeah, well—it just goes on snowing and snowing.”

  “Merry Christmas,” said Jon.

  “Merry Christmas to you too,” said Simen.

  “Did you get some good presents?” Jon asked.

  “Yes,” said Simen.

  “So what did you get?”

  Simen began to walk toward the jetties and signaled with a jerk of his head for Jon and Leopold to join him.

  “I don’t want to talk about what I got for Christmas,” Simen said. “That’s not important … Did you know, by the way, that it was me who found Milla a few months ago? Me and my two friends?”

  Jon looked away.

  “Ah yes, of course … it was you, it—”

  “He buried her alive,” Simen said, coming to a halt. “Did you know that?”

  “Well, that hasn’t actually been confirmed,” Jon said.

  “It was K.B. that did it. He buried her. He was living right here in town and he buried her, while she was still breathing.”

  “Yes,” said Jon.

  Simen looked at him.

  “She was buried deep in the ground all along. She shouldn’t have been.”

  “No,” said Jon.

  “We were hunting for treasure,” Simen said.

  “Yes, I read something about that in the paper,” Jon said.

  “The thing is,” said Simen, “that last summer Gunnar and Christian and I buried a milk pail in the woods—”

  “A milk pail?” Jon repeated, puzzled.

  “Yes, a milk pail,” Simen replied. “That was like our treasure chest. And the idea was for all three of us to put something in the pail. Something really valuable and irreplaceable. You had to feel, you know, that you were parting with it. For example, Gunnar had an autograph book with the autographs of Steven Gerrard, Fernando Torres, and Jamie Carragher. That was his contribution.”

  “And what was your contribution?” Jon asked.

  Simen didn’t answer. He bent down, made a big snowball, and sent it flying down toward one of the jetties.

  “What was your contribution?” Jon asked again.

  “A necklace,” Simen said. “One of those crucifix things.”

  “Was it your necklace?” Jon asked.

  “No, it was my mother’s,” Simen said and looked at Jon. “And she’s still really sad about losing it.”

  “Well, couldn’t you just dig the treasure up,” Jon said. “I mean … couldn’t you just dig up that milk pail and give your mother her necklace back? You could say that you’d found it, you don’t need to say that you had … how shall we put it … borrowed it for a while.”

  Simen looked at Jon and smiled.

  “You mean lie about it, right?”

  “A white lie,” Jon said. “If you did it would be a white lie.”

  “Yeah, well anyway, I can’t.”

  “Why can’t you?”

  “Well, for one thing the whole point of treasure is never to unearth it. That’s what makes it treasure.”

  “Yes, but …” Jon wasn’t sure how to answer that.

  “And for another,” Simen went on, “I’ve no idea where it is. That’s the problem, you see. Gunnar and Christian, my friends, they were the ones who wanted to dig up the treasure, and that was what we were digging for when we found Milla.”
Simen shook his head. “I knew we were digging in the wrong place. I knew we were cycling in the wrong direction. And now I’ve no idea where to start looking.”

  Simen stopped, he eyed Jon, then Leopold, who was lying flat in the snow, panting hard.

  “Is your dog sick or something? He looks sick.”

  “Yes,” Jon said.

  “And Alma’s grandma is dead, right?”

  “Yes,” Jon said.

  “And Irma’s gone?”

  “That’s right,” Jon said.

  “She wasn’t very nice,” Simen said. “My mother says she was a lovely person, even though she was big and glowed in the dark, but she wasn’t lovely at all.”

  “No, she wasn’t,” Jon said.

  “Definitely not,” Simen said, and then he turned and ran off.

  Leopold was still lying in the snow, a black patch in all the white, Jon tugged gently on the leash and said, “Come on, Leopold, come on, boy,” and Leopold raised his big head and looked at him, and Jon wished he could lie down in the snow beside him, close to him, feel the warmth from his body, the thickness of his coat, and not get up again.

  “Come on, let’s go,” Jon said, and Leopold got up, whining faintly, he was in pain now, although he tried not to show it. Jon wanted to pick him up and carry him home, but he was too big and too heavy.

  They plodded slowly up the road. Snow and silence. No matter how slowly Jon walked it was a struggle for Leopold to keep up, and isn’t it odd, Jon said out loud, as if to console him, that this road’s called the Bend and not the Bends? Jon looked at Leopold.

  “It’s always a lot farther than you think,” he added. “But we’ll soon be home.”

  Jon and Siri and the children celebrated New Year’s Eve quietly at Mailund. At midnight a text message flashed on Jon’s mobile.

  There’s nothing to believe in. A.

  Liv had been given a sparkler, she darted out into the snow with it. Alma stood alongside her parents, watching Liv from the window. No one said a word. Jon noticed that Alma had grown taller, her soft chubbiness was gradually disappearing, allowing another girl to reveal herself. Another Alma. Her eyes were heavily made-up, her face dusted white with powder—it looked quite dramatic. Like a boy playing a girl in some medieval pageant. She would be sixteen this year. They still called her Lull, but it didn’t really fit anymore.

  They stood quietly side by side, all three of them, watching Liv outside in the snow with her sparkler. The sky was black. Alma took a deep breath.

  “Did you know I went to Milla’s funeral?” she said. “I went. You two didn’t go, but I did.”

  Jon and Siri turned to look at their daughter. Her eyes were fixed on the window.

  “And by the way,” she continued, turning slowly to her father, “I saw her that night.”

  Siri shut her eyes and shook her head.

  “Alma,” she said, “are you sure, I mean —”

  “I was with Grandma in the car,” Alma went on. “And we were racing up the road and then I said Stop and Grandma stopped and we looked back and I said something like That’s Milla sitting there, all funny-looking, by the side of the road, shouldn’t we take her with us and Grandma said Who and I thought that maybe Milla wouldn’t like us to see her like that, sitting at the side of the road, that she wanted to be alone, that it would only embarrass her if she realized that we’d seen her, it was only a few yards up to the house, and Grandma said Who’s sitting at the side of the road and I said Nobody, just drive on, there’s nobody there, forget it, and she drove on.”

  And Siri and Jon turned to Alma and Alma burst into tears and then Liv ran in, for the thousandth time crying: “Happy New Year, everybody!”

  The next morning Siri packed backpacks and bags, stripped the beds, emptied the fridge, emptied the larder, emptied the drawers, put all the food into paper bags to take back to Oslo—there wasn’t that much left, but Siri never threw away food. Then she vacuumed and washed the floors, swept the stairs, every single step, and wiped down the banister with a cloth.

  Jon had gone out to the garage to check that everything was as it should be, he had straightened the tarpaulin covering the Opel, then he had gone up to the attic, cleared away notebooks in which he had written very little, and glanced through the collection of CDs, which were his, and the record collection, which must have been Jenny’s, and after that he stood for a moment, looking out of the window at the meadow white with snow. He remembered standing here watching Alma and Liv and Milla, remembered Alma doing a wild dance, as if she knew he was watching her.

  They had told her that she couldn’t have done anything one way or the other. What had happened to Milla had nothing to do with Jenny not stopping the car. There was no connection between these two things. The house had been only yards away. Milla could have gotten up from the side of the road and walked home, of course she could. Alma must never, never, never blame herself.

  Alma had stared long and hard at them both and at last she had said, “It’s not true what you’re saying. You’re lying! There’s plenty of connection. There’s lots we could have done!”

  And now they were leaving. Jon drew a finger over his CDs and turned, hearing something down in the hall. The vacuum cleaner. Its drone had stopped.

  “Jon,” Siri called softly, “we have visitors. You better come down.”

  He walked slowly down the stairs. He counted every step, hoping that this time they might actually swallow him up. Siri turned and looked at him, Liv and Alma beside her. They too turned. Liv was wearing the invisibility cloak that Siri had given her, and that Siri had once been given by her father. Liv put a finger to her lips, looked at Jon, and breathed shh. Also standing there were a man and a woman. Jon knew who they were. Siri didn’t need to introduce them, but she did anyway.

  “You know Milla’s mother and father,” she said. “Jon, you remember Amanda and Mikkel.”

  “Hello,” Jon said.

  “Hello,” said the woman, who was carrying a large brown leather bag over her shoulder.

  Jon regarded Amanda, that slim, taut woman with her dancer’s body and her hair drawn severely back from her face. He wondered whether he should ask her about her text messages. Whether she didn’t think it had gone far enough now. He wondered whether he should ask what they were doing here, what did they mean by showing up here like this, breaking in on him and his wife and children? It was a goddamned invasion. That’s what it felt like. He looked at Alma. She stared at the floor. He looked at Siri and at Liv in her invisibility cloak and at the two strangers here in their house. He thought of Leopold, lying asleep beside the hearth. Next week Siri was going to take him to the vet to be put down. Why weren’t Amanda and Mikkel in their own house? Why were they here? It wouldn’t have made any difference: The scrapbook that he had stolen from the annex that night and read and torn up and thrown in the lake. The picture he had taken of Milla, the one she had liked so much. The car with Jenny and Alma in it, hurtling past her as she lay there in the ditch. K.B. was the guilty party. K.B. and nobody else. An ordinary young man called K.B. He conjured up the image of the big slug under Milla’s duvet. He looked at Milla’s mother and wanted to shout, he didn’t know quite what, but he wanted to shout that she and her husband had to go now and leave them in peace, but instead he walked over to them and shook their hands, and Siri said, “Why don’t I fix us something to eat.” She said, “It’s not much. But you have to eat, right? Sometimes you forget to eat and things become awfully hard, and I have bread and I have cheese and I have some nice ham and a really good jam that I got from Liv for Christmas.”

  She chivied them all into the kitchen and unpacked the bags of food. She found a tablecloth, put it on the table, pulled out the chairs, and said, “Sit down, sit down, now you’ll have something to eat,” and Amanda and Mikkel and Jon and Alma and Liv sat down, and then Amanda opened her mouth and blurted out: “I wanted to ask you about that summer with Milla—”

  Her husband interrupted her.
“It’s just that … it’s just that I wake up every morning and it takes about a tenth of a second before I remember that she’s actually gone, and I wish it were longer … that tenth of a second, I mean.” He stared at the table. “I wish it were longer,” he repeated.

  Amanda lifted the big brown leather bag onto her lap, opened it, and took out a book. She placed it on the table. On the cover was a black-and-white photograph of a little girl with brown curly hair and dark eyes, wearing a pair of dotted underpants that were a little too big for her. Amanda spoke slowly.

  “This is a book I put together years ago to tie in with an exhibition. I thought you might like to have a look at it.”

  The photograph must have been taken in the summer, Jon thought, as he leafed through the book, not knowing what else to do while Milla’s parents struggled to compose themselves. The little girl in the grass was wearing nothing but dotted underpants and her skin was all tanned. You could sense the color of her even though the photo was in black and white. The skinny little torso, with the shading of the ribs. The long arms and the long legs. The tiny nipples where her breasts would one day develop.

  The little girl stared straight into the camera lens unsmiling.

  “Why is the book called Amanda’s?” asked Liv, who had just learned to read and had now taken off her invisibility cloak.

  Amanda looked at her and shook her head.

  “Because,” she said, “because it was me who … my name’s Amanda … this was something Milla and I did when she was just a little bit younger than you are now.” Amanda nodded to Liv. “One summer a long time ago.”