Ivan groaned and ran his hand through his hair, looking like he wanted to punch someone. Luckily he lit up considerably when Ingvill stepped out of the elevator a few minutes later.
“Good morning, my lovely,” he said and kissed her hand.
She giggled and looked at me, as if she were expecting a similar greeting from me. But I was speechless. Her hair was braided like Pippi Longstocking and accompanied by a wide-necked, floral blouse and pants that were a mishmash of zippers and pockets and what looked like parachute cords. On her feet she wore high-heeled ankle boots, which made her twice my height.
Pippi Longstocking meets Bride of Frankenstein, I thought, noting that the baguette and cheese had settled like rocks in my stomach.
“Do we have time for breakfast?” asked Peter, who was dressed for a manorial pheasant hunt. “I have low blood sugar.”
“No,” Ivan said tersely.
“Maybe we could stop somewhere on the way,” I suggested helpfully, “and buy a little food that Peter and Ingvill can eat in the car?”
“No,” said Ivan. “No food in the car.”
“But . . .”
“Didn’t you hear what he said?” hissed Ingvill, leaning over me from her great height. “No food in the car!”
“The breakfast wasn’t that good,” I said to comfort a pale Peter as we climbed into the backseat five minutes later.
“Maybe they have a vending machine at the university,” he muttered.
They did, but when Peter tried to insert coins into the machine, Ivan took him by the arm and led him firmly onward.
“The dean is waiting,” he informed us.
Shortly thereafter we stood squashed into a kind of antechamber, where three secretaries were doing their respective best to stack papers, type on a manual typewriter, and open the window. In the midst of all this, Ivan was trying to make our presence known, something which ultimately resulted in two of the secretaries each starting to flip frantically through their appointment books while the third shook her head just as frantically.
After a moderately large dose of roaring, Ivan stormed out of the room with Ingvill hot on his heels. Peter and I lingered uncertainly, until he bowed understatedly to the secretaries and led me out into the corridor, where we could see Ivan’s and Ingvill’s backs in the distance.
“Come,” growled Ivan.
We followed. Down some stairs and up some stairs and through doors and narrow and wide hallways and past groups of students and employees and old women who looked like they’d just found themselves a bench for the day. Ivan gave us a sort of tour, frantically opening doors to seemingly random rooms, his behavior not unlike that of the secretaries.
“Here,” he said as he opened the door of something that looked like a library.
“The library,” I said, nodding in recognition. “Wonderful.”
He scoffed and waved us on.
Eventually I started having a hard time making informed-sounding comments.
“Ah,” I said stupidly, “microphones.”
In the end we found ourselves in Ivan’s office, where he picked up a phone and started screaming into it.
“Is everything all right?” I asked when he hung up.
“That was my secretary,” Ivan complained, irritated. “She’s stuck in traffic on the highway, typical woman. I’ll chew her out later.”
“Why is it typical of a woman to be stuck in traffic?” I asked.
“I’m sure you know,” Ingvill said.
She’d sidled in and now stood behind Ivan, rubbing his shoulders. I tried to catch Peter’s eye so that we could exchange knowing glances, but he was just sitting there staring at his own knees. He did perk up, though, when some other people appeared. First in the door was a muscular man with short blond hair and light-blue eyes, wearing a turtleneck wool sweater and short dress pants. At the sight of him Ivan jumped up and started to bow, but changed his mind halfway through and pulled out a chair. Behind the muscleman came a young woman, who sat down in the corner with a notepad.
The latter was what caught Peter’s attention, although his low blood sugar was making everything tough for him. He tried to greet the newly arrived goddess, but she brushed him off, so instead he extended his hand to the man with the blue eyes, who took it with a slight bow, but without introducing himself to any of us.
I decided to call him Pretty Putin.
“Well,” said Ivan, “now you have seen the possibilities for cooperation.”
Peter and I exchanged a puzzled glance.
“Do you mean the meeting rooms?” I asked.
He gestured as if he were a spokesmodel.
“Yes,” Ingvill responded. “It looks great. What a wonderful place. I’d love to spend some time here.”
“But what are we supposed to use the rooms for?” I asked. “The ones you showed us, I mean.”
Everyone laughed long and hard at this question, but no one answered it. Instead Pretty Putin pulled out some small bags of chocolates and cookies and passed one to each of us.
“Present,” he said.
“Thank you very much,” I said as Peter ravaged his bag and inhaled his cookies.
“Good,” he muttered to himself.
It was starting to get hot in the overcrowded room, and I could feel my armpits sweating. Besides, Pretty Putin was making me nervous, sitting there staring at us with those pale-blue eyes of his. I wondered what his academic specialty was and was about to ask him when Irina arrived.
“Hi,” she said, nodding seriously and squeezing into the room.
“Hello,” said Peter, standing up and creating a shower of cookie crumbs before elbowing me in the head in his eagerness to make it over to Irina and kiss her hand.
“You were enchanting last night,” I heard him tell her.
“Thank you,” she said, and turned to Ivan. “The dean is waiting.”
Ivan leapt up and headed out the door with Ingvill, Peter, and me following. Pretty Putin, the woman taking notes, Irina, and a custodian-like guy who had just shown up presumably remained behind in the office.
We hurried past ferns, up the stairs, and squeezed through narrow hallways and past the old women who were still sitting idly on a bench. Ivan was moving so fast that Ingvill couldn’t keep up, and I could hear her panting, trailing a few yards behind us up the stairs. When we rounded the last corner, I was sure we’d lost her, but whether she’d put a GPS tracker on Ivan or was equipped with an unusually good sense of direction, she managed to turn up almost in unison with us at the overcrowded antechamber to the dean’s office, where the three secretaries were making a big show of our being way, way, way too late.
The dean’s office was dark green with big, gleaming, heavily polished furniture. The dean welcomed us. He was just as big and well polished, wearing a blue suit and a light-green shirt that matched the walls impeccably. He had lips the same color as the rest of his face, eyelashes, and hair. He also had no neck and looked like he could have killed everyone in the room with his bare hands. Without saying a word, he gestured lazily that we could sit down at the meeting table, where the three secretaries sat like stenographers, each with a notepad.
I sat down on the front edge of a chair and prepared to say something about how lovely the office was, but didn’t have a chance to open my mouth before Ivan inhaled and then launched into a speech that lasted a good half hour. The whole time he talked he kept watching his own reflection on the table below him. Every once in a while he waved his hand in our direction, which I responded to each time with a smile and a nod.
Ivan’s monotone mumbling settled like a membrane over the room. The shiny, polished desk reflected the sun and little motes of dust were suspended, motionless, in the light. The dean fell asleep after about ten minutes and ultimately his head lolled backward and he was snoring openly, while the three secretaries kept taking notes with such vigor that I almost suspected they were doing something else. Sleep tingled in my brain, and I glanced over at my two fel
low travelers. Ingvill sat staring fixedly at Ivan, and Peter was slowly swaying back and forth looking like he was going into insulin shock.
Eventually Ivan finished talking and it got quiet. It was quiet longer than was strictly necessary, but apparently custom dictated that the dean should be permitted to sleep until he woke up on his own. In the end I couldn’t take it anymore and tried warily to clear my throat a few times, which resulted in the dean slowly raising his head and staring us down with a look indicating that he had no idea who we were or why we were there.
I averted my gaze. I had the vague sense we had made some kind of misstep, a really big one. I thought about the chair. About the preschool-teacher program. About the unemployment office. About the KGB. About financial ruin. About how extremely lonely I would be in a basement apartment way outside of town.
And I smiled my broadest smile and opened my mouth right as a fourth secretary walked in, carrying three books that she placed on the table in front of us. The dean stood up and placed a business card on top of each of the books. The card said, “Vladimir Vesper. Dean of Faculty.”
“Thank you,” we said, making do with nodding to each person in the room since none of us had a business card ready to offer in return. “Thank you.”
The dean walked over to a glass cabinet and took out a small picture that he brought over to the table and placed before us. It was an icon and seemed to be a depiction of Jesus holding his hands up in blessing. He was surrounded by a golden halo with the inscription Ὁ ὬΝ in Greek. I am that I am. God’s words from the burning bush.
“What a beautiful icon,” I said, but the dean brushed me aside.
“Friends,” he said, gesturing toward the icon, “are to be treasured. Russia has never been to war with Norway. Norway has never been to war with Russia. Friendship.”
He put his hand on his heart as he enunciated the last word and looked at us with his unreadable eyes, which didn’t look the least bit sleepy anymore.
“Friendship,” Ingvill repeated mechanically.
“Magnificent,” mumbled Peter, picking up the icon from the table. “Absolutely magnificent. Reminds me of Rublev himself.”
Only then did I realize that Ivan had stood up. He was standing by the door gesturing for us to join him. I leapt up and walked over to the dean, who kissed me on both cheeks and after that gave a giggling Ingvill the same treatment. Since we’d been talking about friendship so much, I decided to shake hands with all the secretaries as well. We were up to six of them now, and all of them smiled and nodded, especially pleased.
The last in line was Peter, who for his part was dragging his feet and hanging his head and looking quite sad, shuffling along with a limp plastic bag in his hand. Even his tweed suit looked sad, and I noticed there was a big brown stain on one lapel.
“Magnificent,” he repeated mechanically as he took the dean’s hand, “absolutely magnificent. Eternal friendship.”
22
Back at the hotel I finally managed to get online, and the very first thing I accessed was an e-mail from the PTA president. “Dear Ingrid,” she wrote, “please forward me the official municipal response on the right of children to have their shoes tied at school ASAP! Please also prepare a ten-minute summary for the next meeting. This will be one of the main items on the agenda.”
I wondered if she actually thought this was one of the leading issues of the day, something our generation would be judged on after we were gone. The committee had always suffered from an inferiority complex compared to the legendary PTA that had stood on the barricades seven years ago to procure a new art room for the school. Everyone knew that feat couldn’t be topped, but standing up for children’s rights . . . maybe this was the closest you could get.
The next message was from the violin teacher, who wondered why neither Ebba nor Jenny had shown up for their lessons the last two weeks. “It makes our work that much more difficult when these little instrumentalists don’t show up as agreed. Please review the home/school relationship bylaws (attached).”
Then there was one with “The Hobbit” in the subject line, but I scrolled right past that, moving on to an e-mail from Frank that had been sent to Ingvill, Peter, and me. “Call me,” it said, “as soon as possible. We may have miscalculated our strategy.”
This was followed by one from the chair: “Because of an unfortunate development related to the course revision, I’ve been forced to convene a departmental meeting that will also be attended by the ergonomics, occupational safety, and regulatory compliance officer, the dean of College of Arts and Sciences, and a representative from the university’s Office of the General Counsel. Until that time, I would appreciate not receiving any anonymous letters in my mail slot.”
I yanked on my hair and hit “Reply All” to Frank’s e-mail: “Do NOT send anonymous letters to the chair! And I’m not part of any strategy!”
The response from Peter arrived promptly: “We’re all part of the strategy, Ms. Bad Cop. ;-)”
I tried calling Bjørnar, but he didn’t answer, so I sent a quick e-mail instead: “Things are OK here. Still alive. Glad Norway never went to war with Russia. How are you guys?”
Then I dialed the phone number for the Office of the City Clerk.
“Could I speak to whoever’s responsible for children’s rights?” I asked the person who answered the main phone line and was transferred to the Office of School, Culture, and Leisure Affairs, which was apparently extremely busy, because I was on hold for a long time listening to panpipes.
While I waited, I picked up an English-Russian newspaper I’d found in the lobby. There was a picture on the front page of a sinkhole that had appeared in Siberia. No one knew why it happened. The article didn’t make any attempt to explain it. No speculations.
I hung up the phone in the middle of one of Norway’s top hits from 1989 and looked out the window where the snow was still blowing around. Maybe some of the flakes would end up in Siberia. Some might even stray down into the sinkhole that had opened without anyone knowing why. Sinkhole. The word made me think of something, some memory, without my being able to quite put my finger on it.
I Googled “sinkhole in Siberia.” Articles from both American and British newspapers popped up. All of them agreed that the sinkhole was inexplicable, but they weren’t afraid to speculate. Some thought the crater was caused by a UFO that had landed in Siberia and was now lying hidden at the bottom, but most were of the opinion that the collapse stemmed from Soviet-era test drilling in the seventies. Apparently they had been feverishly searching for gas in Siberia back then and had big plans to extract it, but eventually the project had been back-burnered when several big holes opened up on the surface of the earth. They were all lying there like open wounds in the landscape, and most of them were still burning because of the methane gas pouring out.
I pictured those burning holes. Like big torches or lighthouses, not showing the way to anywhere other than destruction and death. Just like the bonfires of those people who rob shipwrecks. Could you see them all the way from space? Maybe that’s what had attracted the UFO here? Maybe that’s why it came?
And if we were being invaded from outer space, how was I going to get home? Bjørnar had a lot of wonderful qualities, but he knew pretty much nothing about how to save a family from bloodthirsty aliens who had depleted their own planet and were now hoping for a piece of ours. My brain started tingling and the squeezing feeling was back in my chest. I closed my eyes and tried to think happy thoughts.
I went down to the lobby, where Peter was sitting in the bar with a glass of beer in front of him.
“Hi,” I said. “Are you sitting here alone?”
“Actually, Ingvill’s here, too. She’s buying herself a glass of white wine. She suggested we have a drink before we go to the Hermitage.”
“The Hermitage?”
“Didn’t you know about that? Ivan sent her a text message to invite us. I figured she would have told you?”
“Nope, s
he didn’t.”
“What didn’t I do, Ms. Know-It-All?” asked Ms. Tropical Fruit Salad.
I rolled my eyes and walked over to the bar. It was completely silent in there with the exception of some quiet murmuring from a Russian news channel on TV.
“Bad news,” Peter said when I returned.
“What?”
“A reliable source informs me that the dean won’t approve the bilateral cooperation agreement between our respective universities,” Ingvill said.
“Why? Things went so well at the meeting today. It was all friendship this and friendship that, in the past and the future and the present.”
She scoffed.
“You thought it went well? Then you must not know much about Russian body language.”
I wanted to tell her what I thought about her body language, but I refrained. Instead I turned to Peter.
“Don’t you think it went well?”
“Yes, yes.” He nodded, his mouth full of cocktail nuts. “We got presents and everything. Nice presents.”
Ingvill scoffed again.
“You guys are clearly novices when it comes to internationalization.”
“That’s true,” I said, taking a sip of my wine. “And if I’m not mistaken, you’ve never been any farther east than the outlet mall just across the border into Sweden.”
“Maybe we can make a better impression at tomorrow’s meetings,” Peter said, sounding hopeful. “Don’t we have three of them?”
“Ivan said there’s only going to be one. The other two were canceled. And of course it doesn’t help that the icon disappeared. No, I think we’re going to have to use the same tactic we’re using back home. I can be the hard-liner, and—”
“What icon?” Peter interrupted.
“That picture the dean showed us. In his office,” Ingvill said. “Ivan says it’s extremely valuable. Priceless, apparently. If you ask me, it looked kind of junky. That Christ figure looked like something my niece might have painted. But anyway, it’s gone. And apparently that’s a problem for us.”
“Why is that a problem for us?” I asked. “We didn’t take it.”
The Marvelous Misadventures of Ingrid Winter (The Ingrid Winter Misadventure Series) Page 12