Beyond the Truth

by Anne Holt

  She scared so easily these days, and that worried her.

  Alexander slept the way teenagers do, almost spreadeagled across the bed, on his stomach, with his face resting on his right hand and his left arm dangling over the edge. The quilt covered only the middle of his body. In the dim light that sneaked into the room from the hallway, Hanne could just discern a single buttock. The boy was sleeping naked with his socks on. At one time they might have been white. Now the soles of his feet were finely outlined with dirt and dust, and the elastic was loose around his legs.

  A cardboard box sat beside the bed, along with a duffel bag stuffed full of clothes. They had still not been opened.

  “He doesn’t really believe all this,” Nefis whispered. “He’s doing nothing to settle in.”

  “What did you expect?” Hanne said. “He’s only been here for twenty-four hours.”

  “What was it like?” Nefis asked, still whispering, even though the boy was fast asleep.

  “What do you mean?”

  “To be thrown out.”

  “I was never thrown out. I was frozen out. That’s even worse. Or …”

  She would have to resist the urge to tuck the boy in more snugly. Actually they shouldn’t be here at all. He had closed the door when he went to bed. It crossed Hanne’s mind that Alexander was a big boy, entitled to privacy and being left to sleep in peace, undisturbed by two lopsided aunts he didn’t even know.

  Slowly she approached the bed. She lifted the quilt carefully and replaced it the right way around, covering him and tucking the edges lightly under his feet. The dangling bare arm she left well alone.

  “Like that,” she said quietly, nudging Nefis gently aside, before closing the door. “I must go to bed,” she said. “Tomorrow will be a long day.”

  Nefis crept along after her to their own bedroom.

  “Are you ever going to be able to take a proper holiday?” she asked, before answering her own question: “Never, of course.”

  “I took a week off last summer.”

  Hanne padded into the bathroom and began to brush her teeth.

  “Five days,” Nefis corrected her.

  “Are we going to argue now?”

  “No. What was it like?”

  “Wonderful. Unaccustomed. Strange.” Hanne smiled with her mouth full of toothpaste.

  “I didn’t mean your days off,” Nefis said, stretching out on the unmade bed without taking off her clothes. “I meant being frozen out.”

  “It’s too late, Nefis. I can’t go into that now. I survived.”

  Nefis pulled a smile as she picked up the remote control from the bedside table. Hanne finished in the bathroom and, standing stark naked, opened out her arms.

  “Aren’t you getting ready for bed?”

  “Yes, of course. But first you can tell me something about what it was like.”

  “No. I can’t face that just now.”

  “Then I want a story.”

  The video on the massive LCD screen on the wall a couple of meters from the foot of the bed flickered convulsively as Madonna cavorted mutely. Nefis took Hanne’s hand and drew her close.

  “A story before we go to sleep!”

  Sometimes Hanne had the idea that Nefis thought she was less talented. For a long time Hanne had realized that the short stories Nefis demanded, in exchange for acceptance of Hanne’s silence about the real things in life, were fragments she pieced together to form a complete picture of Hanne’s childhood.

  “It won’t be a long one,” Hanne said.

  “Not too short, either—”

  Pulling her down on to the bed, Nefis rolled Hanne on to her back.

  “No,” Hanne said with a smile; on the big screen, Madonna was dancing a Spanish flamenco to deaf ears.

  “Yes!”

  “I have to ask you something first.”

  Nefis was almost on top of her now, a pleasant weight on her abdomen and mount of Venus.

  “Wait,” Hanne said. “That dog …”

  Nefis’s mouth tasted of olives and parsley.

  “Wait,” Hanne said, trying to wriggle free, giggling and slapping the hands that stroked her thighs. “That mongrel you were talking about during autumn – when you decided to build that ridiculous garbage shed out there – what sort of animal was that?”

  Nefis was right on top of her now, with all her clothes on, and entwined Hanne’s arms with her own. The buttons on her blouse scraped Hanne’s stomach. Nefis’s tongue was toying with her ear lobes.

  “Listen to me, Nefis! That dog … I just want to know if it’s been here long. Does anyone own it?”

  Nefis hauled herself up abruptly. Her hair hung like a dark curtain over her face. In the backlight from the TV screen, Hanne could scarcely distinguish her features.

  “A dog, Hanne. A stray dog. Someone said it had been here for a long time, for years. It’s frightening, especially for children. Besides, it makes a mess of the garbage. Somebody said they were going to phone the health authors.”

  “Health authorities,” Hanne said, laughing. “Fine. Are you going to get undressed?”

  “I thought you could do that,” Nefis said, kissing her again.

  Hanne unbuttoned her blouse.

  She had escaped yet again. She had escaped telling about the time when she was five years old and wanted to sleep with the light switched on.

  In her mind, the closet was full of blood-sucking bats and the only way to keep them shut inside was to leave the light shining all night long. When she woke to a dark house and clear, terrifying, rustling noises from the closet in the corner, she had hardly dared to lift her hand to switch on her bedside lamp. The bulb had been unscrewed and removed. The ceiling light had also been disabled. Her father got into the habit of casting her room in darkness at night time. A year later Hanne had declared at suppertime that bats lived in caves, churches, attics, and other dark, roomy places and naturally could not survive in a little closet full of clothes and shoes. Anyway, she now knew that vampire bats did not exist in Norway at all. Her father had nodded in satisfaction and stopped coming into her room at night.

  Hanne had now stripped Nefis naked, her whole body, soft and firm and voluptuous.

  THURSDAY DECEMBER 26

  The old lady in Blindernvei was alone again. Her son had left her early that morning as he had a flight to catch. He would be back on Monday for the funeral, but in the meantime had to return home. It was only fair. After all, he had a wife and child and a demanding job. His own life. Just as she would also have to carve one out for herself, now that Karl-Oskar was dead. One of us had to go first, as her husband always used to say. They had both sent up a silent prayer that it would be them. In the end it turned out that he was the one.

  Terje had cleared things out for her. It would be more correct to say with her: they had slowly gone through drawers and cupboards. It had been so good, almost beautiful, to clear Karl-Oskar out of the house without him ever being truly gone.

  Terje had left only the bedroom in peace. No one apart from her would go through Karl-Oskar’s most personal possessions.

  His pajamas were still tucked, neatly folded, under the pillow. She sat gingerly on the edge of the bed and touched her cheek with the worn, soft fabric.

  His clothes would go to the Salvation Army. They had decided on that together, several years ago, on one of those evenings when they had sat out on the terrace, each with a drink, watching the sunset over Tåsen. Material things should not be romanticized, Karl-Oskar felt, insisting that they should send all of it to people who needed it more than they did. Clothing and everything else that had no special significance for the surviving spouse should go. He had been almost brusque when he said that, as if he suddenly found it tasteless to discuss departure and death.

  She was the surviving spouse.

  Setting the pajamas down on the blanket, she stood up stiffly and walked over to the wardrobe. Halfway across the room, she stumbled across something.

  Seein
g that it was a folder, she picked it up.

  The paramedics had been in here of course. They had genuinely tried to revive Karl-Oskar, that Thursday only a week ago. It felt longer. It was so difficult to remember. The folder must have been lying on the bedside table and must have fallen on the floor in the midst of all the commotion caused by their resuscitation efforts. She hadn’t been over on that side of the room since Friday morning, when that odd little clergywoman was due to arrive and Kristina had made her husband’s bed for the last time. She hadn’t noticed anything then. Perhaps that was not so strange, since she had hardly any recollection of tidying up.

  The house was overflowing with flowers. Even now, in the midst of the festivities, friends and acquaintances, business connections and distant relatives had gone to the trouble of sending condolences. No one had left behind a folder. It was probably nothing important.

  Kristina tried to remember which meeting Karl-Oskar had actually intended to attend on that fatal evening just prior to Christmas. She rubbed her hands together, rocking from side to side.

  He might simply have omitted to mention it to her.

  She would have remembered, of that she was certain.

  She had been married to a lawyer for nearly fifty years and had never once touched her husband’s papers.

  Kristina placed the unopened folder on her husband’s bedside table. Terje could skim through the contents when he came back. She took a deep breath as she crossed to the wardrobe. Sooner or later, she would have to clear things out and she might as well get it over and done with now.

  Carl-Christian Stahlberg did not dare to raise the glass of water to his mouth. Instead he sat on his own hands. Thirst made his tongue grow large inside his mouth, and he smacked his lips to stimulate his saliva secretions. Someone had forgotten to provide him with water for the night, perhaps deliberately. He did not know for certain, but of course rumors flew around. Torture was of course not something that Norwegian police engaged in, but letting someone sit in an overheated cell for ten hours with neither food nor drink was not very friendly, either. Now that he had finally been given something to drink, he was more consumed by fear of revealing how scared he was. The glass of water could just sit there.

  “Thirsty?”

  The woman who was about to question him might be in her early forties. Carl-Christian tried to memorize her, to focus his attention on her oval face with the first signs of wrinkles around her big blue eyes. They weren’t entirely blue, though: it was as if someone had placed a washer over the iris, a coal-black border around the light. Carl-Christian reluctantly called to mind a science-fiction film in which invaders from another galaxy sneaked around in human guise among fortunately unwitting earth-dwellers, who had not yet discovered that the strangers could be unmasked by their eyes, which were black and blue at the same time.

  He had to stare at this woman, intently. Last night, through all the absurd hours in a room stinking of urine where there was barely space to walk three steps in any single direction, he had felt his grasp on reality slip away. He visualized glimpses of his mother in summer wearing an unbecoming dress that his father had claimed to like: it had a floral pattern, and little Carl-Christian had thought the yellow sunflowers looked like smiling lions. A contented cat’s head had grown in his thoughts until he hit his fist against the cell wall to force the pain in his knuckles to bring him back to his present surroundings.

  For a moment he had thought he was asleep; that must have been about three o’clock. They had taken his watch away, so it was difficult to know for sure. He felt cold. The snow blinded him, he squinted at a pale spring sun, wearing skis that were far too large and which he struggled to lift off the ground, when he discovered he was standing in the cell pissing into the bricked-up hole in the corner. At daybreak he had realized the only way to anchor reality was to fix his eyes and keep his focus on one specific object.

  In fact the woman was attractive, even though Mabelle would have advised her to lose some weight. Her hair was uneven at the edges and probably hadn’t been cut in a long time. But it was shiny and brown and fell beautifully over her shoulders. Her clothes were another story. Carl-Christian tried to think about clothes. About fashions. About Mabelle’s magazine, about F&F, which now appeared to generate a tidy little profit. If only this hadn’t happened. Only the fates now knew how things would turn out. He didn’t even dare to consider how the press would be treating them as they sat in prison.

  “You should know that we are doing what we can to emphasize that this case remains unsolved,” the policewoman said. “To the media, I mean. If that’s what you’re thinking about.”

  Carl-Christian tried to remember what the movie was called, that film in which the invaders with blue-black eyes could read human thoughts and in the end our entire civilization gets dumped into a gigantic space shuttle.

  “Are you actually willing to say anything at all?”

  He could not remember her name. He no longer remembered anything, no matter how much he concentrated on something other than his thirst – that dreadful thirst that he lacked the courage to do anything about – he kept forgetting her name, but she seemed friendly enough, with an inexplicable mild manner that confused him and made it impossible to recall who she was and what he was supposed to say.

  “Hanne Wilhelmsen,” she repeated for the third time. “My name is Hanne Wilhelmsen.”

  Carl-Christian Stahlberg was no stranger to lies. He had once read that the average person lied five times every day. He thought that seemed an underestimate. As for himself, he could easily nod approvingly at something he found idiotic. He thought nothing of nattering enthusiastically with his neighbors about things he found totally uninteresting. Lies were tools to maintain an expedient harmony with your environment.

  All the same, the lie he must now tell was too enormous. It had no beginning and most certainly no end. This was a real lie, so fictional and contrived that he quite simply had no idea how to make a start on it. Each time the policewoman posed a question, he opened his mouth to answer. He wanted to say something. He wanted to be reliable and trustworthy. He wanted to satisfy this dark-haired woman in her slightly-too-tight suit jacket, flamboyant footwear, with her dangerous eyes. He wanted to get her on his side. But the lie was too far-reaching. Carl-Christian was not adult enough for his own story and so he closed his mouth after uttering a few incoherent words.

  “Of course you have the right to refuse to provide a statement,” Hanne Wilhelmsen said. “But it would be beneficial really if you could say so. That way, we avoid wasting time.”

  All of a sudden he realized that she smelled nice. Something struck him. A soft stroke on his face, almost physical: he shut his eyes and grew aware of a heavy scent that reminded him of something that was almost over. He smiled and breathed deeply for the first time in fifteen hours.

  “It’s Turkish,” Hanne Wilhelmsen said, returning his smile; now at last he remembered her name. “I have a … friend from Turkey who makes this perfume herself. I’ve no idea what she puts into it, but I do like it.”

  Then she laughed, slightly self-conscious, as if they were two strangers reluctantly seated together at a dinner party, who had finally found something to talk about.

  “I do, too,” Carl-Christian said. “It smells of autumn.”

  “Autumn?”

  Now she laughed again, inclining her head and sizing him up.

  “I have to ask you again,” she said gently. “Are you sure you don’t want a lawyer?”

  He nodded hesitantly. He did not know for definite. Most of all he wanted this to be over. That it was all a jest, a rude practical joke that had gone much too far and would soon be uncovered when someone popped up with a clown nose and a bunch of balloons. A deception that would be broadcast on TV, so that people could laugh at how stupid he looked and how easily he had allowed himself to be duped. He could have put up with that. He would have laughed at himself, slapped his thighs perhaps, sworn a little, and entere
d into a play-fight with the presenter, because it was all over and of course Carl-Christian could go along with a genuine prank.

  A lawyer would only make it all bigger. Truer.

  “You really should have a lawyer.”

  Now she was leaning toward him. The tape recorder was switched off. There were only the two of them in the room and, from the corridor outside, no sound could any longer be heard. Carl-Christian tried to think, tried to return to where he should be.

  He had a terrible thirst and would give anything to know how Mabelle was getting on.

  Mabelle was actually looking good. Erik Henriksen thought she could have been really attractive, if it hadn’t been for her hair being lightened a touch too much and her face having a tad too much make-up. Her eyes lingered slightly too long on his, as if she felt the key to credibility was a steady and unflinching gaze. Instead, it all seemed inappropriately flirtatious. Erik did not quite understand where and when she had managed to fix herself up like this. It appeared as if she had come directly from a beauty salon, and not from a night’s uncomfortable stay in a remand cell.

  Mabelle had an enormous range. That much, at least, was clear. Even her lawyer seemed tired of her fluctuations between pleading and rage, tears and disbelief, desperate laughter and affected indifference to what must now take place: her life was in ruins anyway, thanks to the terrible mistake made by the police.

  Of course Mabelle had accepted a lawyer. However, she had contented herself with her usual shyster, an elderly business lawyer, partner in one of the middle-sized firms in Oslo. He sat erect in his chair, immaculately dressed in a charcoal-gray suit, and had immediately shown himself to be an approachable man. Erik was relieved and somewhat surprised. Gunnar Huse, the lawyer, had shown up a mere half hour after Erik’s phone call to explain the situation. He was polite, borderline friendly, and had no objections to the actual arrest. Admittedly, he was alert and watchful when Mabelle was on the point of saying too much, but he did not seem excessively eager to spoil the interview situation. That made Erik more vigilant, preparing himself for a long day. After this, other lawyers would come. The guy with the alert eyes behind discreet glasses would hardly last the next twenty-four hours. The next one would be worse. Gunnar Huse had said as much himself when he arrived, in a confidential tone, bending to speak in Erik’s ear: “I’m the young Stahlbergs’ regular lawyer. My domain is business affairs. I see no reason to object to my client being interviewed today, but I’d like to draw your attention to the fact that my office is already working on finding a replacement. A lawyer with better qualifications to handle a case of … these dimensions and character.”