Professor Andersen's Night

by Dag Solstad

  Instead, he stationed himself at the window, behind the curtain, with all the lights in his living room switched off, and kept watch on the window where he had seen a murder being committed. He stood thus for several hours, in the dark in his own living room, and stared. At the rectangular surface over there. Which shut out what he had seen. ‘It is odd that I don’t call the police,’ he thought. ‘It is still not too late. Even if they won’t believe me, claim that I am drunk or whatever they may say, at any rate I would have reported it, and then it’s up to them what they decide to do. It’s as simple as that.’ But he didn’t go and call them. He stood at the window and stared. Stared across at the rectangular surface over there. Was he in there still? Probably, because he hadn’t seen any man come out of the front entrance on his own. But he could have fled while Professor Andersen was over at the telephone. But then why would he have drawn the curtains? ‘No, he has to be in there still,’ thought Professor Andersen. ‘Behind those thick curtains is a young man in the company of a dead woman, whom he has just murdered. And I know it,’ he thought, ‘but I’m not doing anything about it. I ought to have phoned, for my own sake, if for no other reason. It’s curious. I know I should have done it, but I can’t. That is how it is, I simply cannot do it.’

  He continued to stare at the closed window, but also kept watch on the front entrance, in case the murderer should come out. But nothing happened. It was late at night, and Professor Andersen noticed that he was sleepy. What was he standing there for? To see if the curtains were suddenly drawn back again? Or if the murderer came out of the front entrance, so he could take a look at him? Why should he do that? What was the purpose of that? Did he have to see the man he was incapable of reporting to the police, so that he could be arrested for the murder he had just committed? Why on earth would he have to do that? Professor Andersen had to admit that he cherished an obsessive desire to see the murderer. Otherwise why would he be standing here at the window keeping a closer and closer eye on the front entrance? Because there was one thing of which he was certain: that he had fastened his gaze on that closed window for so long in the hope of seeing the curtains being drawn back, due surely to a crazy notion that everything would be as before, that the young woman would appear in the window, young and beautiful as before, for some reason or other, which he wouldn’t need to speculate about. But when his eyes slipped towards the front entrance, it was to catch the murderer bounding away, not to see the impossible dream of the young couple coming out of it, whistling, on the night before Christmas Day; oh no, he didn’t have the slightest belief in that at all, not even as an impossible hope; as his eyes now swept over the front entrance, it was to see the murderer bounding away, the murderer’s face, an obsessive wish for that to happen. Nevertheless, Professor Andersen found this wish so distasteful that he decided not to stand there embroiled in the situation until he fulfilled this singular urge to see the murderer’s face. So he went to bed.

  He managed to sleep. Uneasily, to be sure, but he slept. He tossed and turned in bed, more or less in an uneasy doze, but he slept. Towards morning he woke up as he needed to get up and pee. He tumbled out, and went to the toilet. When he was finished, he tumbled back into bed, but only after making a detour through the living room, where he went over to the window and stared across at the apartment on the other side of the street. The curtain was still drawn. He went back to bed, and when he woke up, it was late in the day.

  He went to the bathroom and showered. Put on the same suit as the day before, white shirt and a tie, black shoes, since it was Christmas Day, and went out into the kitchen to make breakfast. While he was laying the table in the dining room he walked over to the window and stared out. It had begun to snow. Large snowflakes were floating down from the sky and had covered the street and the pavement. It seemed so peaceful that Professor Andersen felt a pang in his heart as he let his gaze rest on the window of the apartment straight across the street. The curtain was still drawn. He ate his Christmas breakfast, and decided afterwards to go for a walk in the snowy weather.

  Professor Andersen had a roomy apartment in Skillebekk, a residential area down by the sea at Frognerkilen, but cut off from the sea first by the (now disused) railway line and then by the motorway, which is the main traffic route into West Oslo. There was a chill in the air, which hit him in the face as he came out of the entrance and turned round the corner into Drammensveien, while at the same time he noticed that the snow was falling thick and fast and was settling in his hair (he was bare-headed). The snow was already quite deep and it hadn’t been cleared, except in Drammensveien itself, and a cheerful, resigned mood prevailed in the side streets, whilst car owners had great difficulties driving off in their cars, and since it was Christmas Day, and no real duties awaited anyone, this led to noisy agreement about the chaotic wintry conditions which the night’s, or the early morning hours’, snowfall had caused, and it all seemed terribly social to Professor Andersen as he stomped through the snow among all the cheerful people, who were drawing attention to their futile but demanding tasks. He walked up Niels Juels gate, to Bygdøy Allee, and from there further on towards Briskeby. He was only out for a walk, as were a great many others that Christmas morning. But even before he reached Briskeby he decided to turn back. He couldn’t bear to walk, he felt so heavy at heart. He was extremely restless. ‘Oh,’ he thought, ‘I wish I had phoned after all, then this episode would have been over and done with. Then it would just have been an exciting episode, which would have been over as far as I was concerned. But now I’m so restless,’ he thought, and decided to turn back.

  For an instant, however, he wondered if he shouldn’t carry on all the same, up towards Briskeby and from there along Briskebyveien in order to go up Industrigata to Majorstua and to the police station in Jacob Aalls gate. ‘After all, I can report it now,’ he thought. ‘Then it is over and done with. Certainly I might run into some unpleasantness, because I haven’t told them before, but everybody is bound to understand, if they just try to understand, that it can happen to the best of people.’ For an instant he was so strongly tempted by the idea of carrying on up towards Briskeby, along Briskebyveien, right up to Majorstua police station, that he felt positively relieved by the very possibility of it. But no sooner had he felt this sense of relief coursing through his body than he realised that these were in any case just idle thoughts, which could cheer him up true enough, momentarily, but which he was never going to act on, and he decided once and for all to stop toying with such hypothetical ideas, which only led him deeper and deeper into the mire, or so he put it to himself, whilst he turned and walked back down Niels Juels gate towards Skillebekk again. He headed back home, anxious to see if anything had happened. He managed to stop himself looking over at the window in the other apartment building, while he himself was down on the street, in front of the building where he lived, with the other building on the other side of the street, and waited until he had unlocked the door at the front entrance and had gone up the stairs to his own apartment and let himself in there and gone over to the window. No. It was the same.

  ‘Pull yourself together,’ he told himself urgently. ‘You have been gone for half an hour on Christmas morning, to be exact from 12.45 p.m. to 1.15 p.m.; how do you imagine that anything could have happened at the window in such a short space of time? Hope, well, yes, but it’s a faint hope. Something will happen over there sometime, but it needn’t happen today. Calm down. Think about something else.’ But he could think of nothing else.

  ‘I have to talk to someone,’ he thought. ‘I must call someone.’ He thought about his friends, which of them he should call, and while he was thinking about it, he remembered that tomorrow, on Boxing Day, he was of course supposed to go to Nina and Bernt Halvorsen’s place for dinner. ‘I can wait till then,’ he thought. ‘I’ll talk to Bernt about it. He is a doctor after all.’ He was invited for seven o’clock, and if he arrived an hour earlier, then he and Bernt would have plenty of time to talk, while Nina
was in the kitchen getting the food ready, he thought. Bernt most likely only has to see to the wine, uncork it and put it beside the heater to bring it to the right temperature, and while Bernt Halvorsen saw to that, he could explain. The thought of this calmed him. All he had to do was to stick it out for just over a day, and then he could explain. He’d manage that. He could bear it for that long. He went into the kitchen and had a look at the lutefisk he had in the fridge. Took it out and felt it. It was nice and firm, you can keep lutefisk in the fridge for a whole day, as long as you buy prime quality fish, he thought, and put the fish back in the fridge again. He wasn’t going to dine until evening. In the meantime he was going to read a good book, whatever he meant by that, he thought. And along with the book he’d have a drink. With dinner: beer and aquavit. With the coffee: cognac.

  And that was the way it turned out, you might say. Professor Andersen woke up the next morning with a bad hangover. It was still snowing. The roar of snowploughs could be heard everywhere, as well as the grating sound they made as they scraped the snow off the road surface on Drammensveien. The curtains in the window opposite were still drawn. The rectangular curtains which covered the whole window, in an extremely compact manner. Professor Andersen had repeatedly gone across and looked over at the other side of the street, yesterday Christmas Day, and last night, and he did so frequently this day, too. He was looking forward to the dinner party at Nina and Bernt Halvorsen’s. As early as five in the afternoon he left his apartment, because he suddenly decided that he wanted to walk all the way to Sagene.

  He walked up Niels Juels gate to Riddervolds Plass, after that up Camilla Colletts vei and Josefines gate to Homansbyen and Bislet. From Bislet: up Dalsbergstien to Ullevålsveien and St Hanshaugen, then steeply down Waldemar Thranes gate to Alexander Kiellands Plass. From there he walked along Maridalsveien up to Vøien Bridge, and up there, in a small house beside the River Aker whose grassy banks were now covered in snow, lived the Halvorsens, the married couple, both doctors, who had invited him to dinner. He walked along calmly at first, slowly, in fact, through the driving snow and the Yuletide darkness towards Riddervolds Plass and Bislet, because he had plenty of time and did not want to arrive too early; after all, he intended to arrive at six o’clock for a dinner he was invited to at seven. But even before he was at Bislet he noticed that his pace had quickened, because he had a burning desire to carry out his plan, and so, when he was at St Hanshaugen and about to start on the descent to Alexander Kiellands Plass, he felt good and warm and longed to reach his destination, so that he might give vent to the thoughts burning inside him. Because he knew why he had put himself in this situation. He couldn’t have acted otherwise. He had witnessed a murder, and hadn’t reported it. No, indeed, he had not. He didn’t have the slightest inclination to do so, and he knew why. The murder had happened. That was the issue, something irreversible had happened, something he had witnessed. He couldn’t warn them about something irreversible. If he had witnessed a burglary, had he, for instance, seen there were thieves in that same apartment, who were carrying out a television and a stereo, then he wouldn’t have hesitated to call the police. Because then it would have been urgent. Likewise if there had been a fire. If he had seen smoke seeping out of the window, or smelt it, he would, of course, have called the fire brigade without a moment’s hesitation. And, well, if he had witnessed a vicious assault down on the street, and it had looked as though one of them was killing the other, then he would have run over to the phone and called the police. And while he waited for the police, he would have considered intervening himself in order to stop the abuse, if he hadn’t been too cowardly, that is. Well, let’s say that he had been too cowardly, and one person had battered the other to death before the police arrived, while he stood and watched it, then he would it is true have had dreadful pangs of conscience to contend with, but he could have lived with that, yes, he damn well could live with that, he thought defiantly, and, coward or not, he would certainly have called the police. There was no doubt about that, because that phone call could have prevented something irreversible happening. But he had been a witness to something irreversible, and there was nothing he could do. He couldn’t make things better by calling to notify them that it had happened. The murder, which he’d witnessed, was an accomplished fact. ‘I can’t tell them about this. The only outcome would be the murderer’s arrest.’ And the murderer might well be caught, but not on account of him, Professor Andersen, intervening and notifying them that the man had committed a murder. The idea was distasteful to him.

  ‘Do you understand what I’m saying?’ he thought, directed to the people whose house he was now hastening towards. ‘The young woman will never stand in the window again. Maybe I have been hoping for two days that she will stand in the window again, but she isn’t going to. She is dead. She is murdered. The curtains are drawn. And when they get drawn back, it will be the murderer who is standing in the window, peering out. It’s impossible for me to play a part in his capture. I can’t commit such an offence against a man who has murdered,’ he thought, horrified at what he was actually thinking, but at the same time longing to talk about it to a friend, so he hurried up Maridalsveien. Yes, he almost ran through the snowy weather and the winter darkness and the city’s lights, for an opportunity to share his opinion on the irreversible thing that had happened.

  He was out of breath when he rang the doorbell at the Halvorsens’. Bernt opened it. ‘Heavens, are you here already?’ he exclaimed. ‘Yes, wasn’t it at seven o’clock then?’ answered Professor Andersen innocently. ‘Yes, but it’s a quarter to six now,’ said Bernt, and he laughed. ‘Oh, damn, I must have got the time wrong,’ muttered Professor Andersen. Bernt opened the door wide, and Professor Andersen shuffled in, crestfallen. This wasn’t how he had imagined it. He had thought that when Bernt Halvorsen looked surprised and said that he had come far too early, that he would, of course, have answered: ‘Yes, I know that, but I have something important to talk to you about.’ Why had he not said that?

  Maybe because it struck him as being a little impetuous. He had, after all, enough time before the other guests arrived to talk to Bernt about this. He would try to bring the conversation round to it in a natural way. But that proved to be impossible. He couldn’t bring himself to talk about it, even though he and Bernt had ended up sitting in the living room with a drink each (as he had imagined in advance), while Nina was out in the kitchen making food, now and then asking her husband to come and help with something or other. Each time Bernt went into the kitchen, Professor Andersen had an abundance of time to consider how he might ease the conversation round to the subject he was dying to tell a friend in confidence, either by summoning up his courage and coming straight to the point, or by finding a lead which would allow Professor Andersen to drop an opportune remark lightly and easily, even though it was dreadful. But when Bernt Halvorsen returned to the living room, that remark did not present itself. The time was getting on for 7 p.m., and the other guests would soon be arriving. Professor Andersen expected the doorbell to ring. The doorbell might just as well ring. Because he understood. He knew now; he wasn’t able to confide in his good friend Bernt Halvorsen, not about this. About a lot of other things, but for some reason or other not about this.

  The other guests arrived. They were all acquaintances of Professor Andersen. There was the actor Jan Brynhildsen, who had become a marvellous interpreter of comic roles at the National Theatre, and his second wife, the somewhat faded air hostess Judith Berg, and there was the senior psychologist Per Ekeberg and his partner Trine Napstad, the top civil-service administrator in the Ministry of Culture. All the guests were in their fifties like their hosts Nina and Bernt Halvorsen, and had known each other for years. Professor Andersen was glad Nina and Bernt hadn’t invited an additional female guest, who would have been his table companion, as he thought it much easier to relate to social occasions without having imposed on him the duty of entertaining a single woman, who, in advance, one had to
assume, had looked forward to an eventful evening, and whose expectations he therefore would have had to do his utmost not to disappoint. He felt much freer as a single guest without a single woman accompanying him at the table, it also made him wittier, because then he could throw himself into the role of being an affable participant in the party as a whole, instead of having to be a tense, though gallant, cavalier.

  They sat down at the dinner table. The seating arrangement had been fixed elegantly and with an experienced hand so that their being an odd number went unnoticed, but gave them an added sense of well being, since Nina, their hostess, had two companions at the table, Jan Brynhildsen, sitting on her left, and Per Ekeberg on her right, both of whom could then cheerfully compete to win her favour and attention, while Bernt, their host, had one female companion, Judith Berg, on his left, who for her part could enjoy this, while at the same time she had Per Ekeberg on her left. Trine Napstad could likewise enjoy having Professor Andersen as a table companion, but she also had Jan Brynhildsen, the comedy actor with leading roles at the National Theatre, on her right side, and he could converse with her if, or rather when, their hostess Nina was deep in conversation with Per Ekeberg sitting on her right, and in that way was able to relieve Professor Andersen, who then could take the opportunity to exchange a few words with his old friend Bernt Halvorsen, the host, whom he had sitting on his left, or just to stare vacantly into space, if the latter was deep in conversation with Judith Berg, his table companion. In this manner the conversation could flow easily from one to the other, with plenty of opportunity for all of them to get involved in one single topic, if most found it sufficiently interesting, because the responsibility of having a fixed female table companion hadn’t been laid on anyone, apart from Bernt, but since he was the only one, a clear responsibility rested on him to ensure that the whole table was engaged in conversation, and preferably the same one at that, and thus it was evident yet again that on social occasions it is an advantage, and not a drawback, to have an odd number, thought Professor Andersen, and therefore it is so peculiar that those who take it upon themselves to invite people to a party worry time and again very much about inviting couples; remarkable, thought Professor Andersen, who could scarcely recall the last time he had been at a successful dinner party with an even number seated round the table.