by Anne Holt
Adam stood with his back to the reception rooms and wondered where he would find his coat. The former party leader’s speech, with frequent pauses and a cough here and there, filtered through the wood of the solid doors as a muffled murmur.
Then he heard another voice to his left, through a door that was ajar to what might be the kitchen. It was the sibilant, urgent whisper of a woman who sounded like she actually wanted to shout but felt that it might be inappropriate, given the occasion. Adam was about to make his presence known when he heard a man’s voice, deep and aggressive, say, “Don’t you worry about that.”
There was the sound of a glass being banged down on a table, followed by what was obviously a sniff from the woman. Then she said something. Adam could only make out a few individual words that meant nothing to him. He took a couple of cautious steps toward the half-open door.
“Be careful,” he heard the woman say. “You had better watch it now, Rudolf.”
She came out into the hall so suddenly that Adam had to step back.
“Jesus,” he said and smiled. “You really scared me. Adam Stubo.”
The woman let a man out after her, closed the door with care, took Adam’s hand, and returned his smile. She was smaller than he’d imagined, almost strikingly petite. She had a slim waist, something she emphasized with a tight, fitted black skirt that stopped just below the knee. The gray silk blouse had ruffles at the neck and down the front. She reminded him of a miniature Margaret Thatcher. Her nose was big and hooked, and her chin was pointed. Her eyes were worthy of the iron lady. Icy blue and sharp, though her face was relaxed and welcoming.
“Kari Mundal,” she said quietly. “Pleasure. You are very welcome here, despite the occasion. Perhaps you’ve already met Rudolf Fjord?”
The man was twice her height and half as old. He was obviously less practiced at hiding his feelings. His hand was sweaty when he held it out, and his eyes darted here and there for a few moments before he finally managed to pull himself together and smile. At the same time he nodded and nearly bowed, as if he realized that his handshake was not particularly impressive.
“Were you looking for something?” Kari Mundal asked. “The bathroom? Just down there.” She pointed. “When the service is over,” she added, “there will be a bite to eat. Of course, we hadn’t expected so many people. But a little something is better than nothing. Victoria was such . . .” She smoothed her hair.
Kari Mundal was as close as you could get to the model of a good, old-fashioned housewife; she had stayed at home with her four daughters and three sons, and her husband was the first to admit that his stamina on the political front was entirely due to his loyal wife.
“Everyone should have a Kari at home,” he often said in interviews, blissfully unaffected by the complaints of a younger generation of women. “A Kari at home is better than ten in the workplace.”
Kari Mundal had looked after the house and children and ironed his shirts for more than forty years. She was happy to appear in magazines and on Saturday night TV, and since her husband had retired from politics, she had become a sort of national mascot, a politically incorrect, friendly, and sharp little granny.
“Were you looking for the bahroom?” she asked and pointed again.
“Yes,” Adam replied. “Sorry to have to miss some of your husband’s speech—”
“When you have to go, you have to go,” interrupted Kari Mundal. “Rudolf, shall we go in?”
Rudolf Fjord bowed again, stiff and obviously ill at ease. He followed behind the older woman, who opened the door to the reception room. It closed silently behind them.
Adam was alone.
The voice on the other side of the door sounded as if it was conducting a church service now. Adam wondered whether the gathering would soon start to sing. Victoria Heinerback’s body would not be released for a funeral for a long time, so in a sense there was nothing odd about holding a memorial service, but it struck him for the first time since he arrived that there was something vaguely distasteful about holding it here, in a private house. It was a sudden, but obviously well planned, event.
When he looked into the room where Rudolf Fjord and Kari Mundal had been having their whispered contretemps, his suspicion was confirmed. The kitchen was massive, as if it had been planned with occasions like this in mind. Silver platters of sandwiches, finger food, and elegant hors d’oeuvres stood lined up on the countertops and table, between bowls full of colorful salads. Cases of mineral water were stacked against the wall. On the windowsill, which was at least half a yard deep and two yards long, the hostess had lined up bottles of red and white wine. Some had already been opened.
Adam carefully lifted the plastic wrap on one of the trays and stuffed three bits of chicken into his mouth.
Then he left the kitchen again.
He noticed a wardrobe at the end of the hall. As he chewed while trying to find his coat among all the other coats, jackets, hats, and scarves, it struck him that Mrs. Mundal had not even asked who he was and why he was there. It wasn’t likely that she knew him from before. Adam had only ever had one interview in the national media. The following day, he had promised himself and his superiors that it would never happen again.
He eventually found his coat. He went out.
An argument, he mused as the raw sea air hit him.
Arguing on a day like today. Little Mrs. Mundal and Rudolf Fjord, second in charge of the party and, according to the papers, Victoria Heinerback’s obvious successor as party leader. The disagreement was obviously important enough to make them miss Kristian Mundal’s speech in the main room.
A gust of wind made his coattails flap against his legs. Adam looked up at the sky and then ran with heavy steps over the gravel.
Of course it didn’t have to mean anything.
When he got to the car, he heard the helicopters. There were two of them, one over a hill to the east, the other low over the water a few hundred yards from the shore. He also now saw that the small boat down by the jetty was a police boat. He counted five uniformed men along the road, all armed.
The gathering indoors was safe.
To the extent that anyone was, he thought as he got into the car.
He spat out some parsley and had to drive in reverse for fifty yards before he was able to turn.
The physical pain was not the worst thing. She was used to it. Her body had been ravaged by multiple sclerosis for more than twenty years now. Even though she was only sixty-seven, she knew that she was nearing the end. Nothing worked anymore. Her bedsores leaked and were painful. Yvonne Knutsen’s body was a shell around what could barely be called a life. She lay flat in a bed in a bland room in an institution that she had never liked. Grief drained what remained of her life force.
Bernt was wonderful. He came every day with little Fiorella and stayed with her for a long time, even though Yvonne was constantly falling asleep. Her medicine was stronger now.
She wanted to die. But God refused to come and get her.
The worst thing about just lying like this was time. Time multiplied when you weren’t able to do anything. It went in circles, in loops, in great big arcs, before returning back to where it started. She didn’t want this anymore. Her time on this earth should be over, it should have been over long ago, and her grief made the fact that her body was clinging onto life even more unbearable.
Fiona had been a good daughter. Naturally they had argued, like every mother and daughter. Their relationship had been cool now and then, but was it reasonable to expect anything else? It never took more than a few weeks before everything was the same as before. Fiona was kind. Yvonne’s friends had always said so, in the days when she could still make and serve coffee, or even a meal on a good day.
“You’re lucky, Yvonne.”
Fiona had never let her down.
They shared a secret, the two of them.
Just as time warped beyond recognition when it had no meaning, so secrets could grow to be so enormous that
they were invisible. At the beginning, it had been like a thorn between them. But since there was no turning back, they had managed to agree with surprising ease: We’ll forget this.
Yvonne Knutsen could still hear her own voice back then, firm and maternal with an edge of determined protection: “We will forget this.”
And they had forgotten.
Now Fiona was dead, and loneliness gave the secret new life. It haunted her, particularly at night, when she thought she could see a shadow by the window, a silent figure seeking revenge who had now found reason to plague her, now when she had no one to help her forget.
If only God would let her follow Fiona.
“Dear God,” she whispered into the room.
But her heart went on beating stubbornly in her emaciated chest.
Daylight was disappearing fast. It was four o’clock in the afternoon on Monday, February 9. A thirty-seven-year-old man was about to climb a crane without permission. It was yellow and over twenty yards high, towering above a confusion of construction materials and machinery. He was only a few yards from the ground, and he could already feel the cold wind blasting through his clothes. His gloves were too thin. His friend had warned him. The metal felt like ice. But he had not dared to choose anything warmer. It was better, after all, to have more control over your fingers.
He wasn’t going fast enough. His friend was already halfway up. But he was younger and well trained.
Vegard Krogh tried to be positive.
He didn’t really have the energy for this sort of thing anymore. He was reluctantly approaching forty and had never received the recognition and publicity he deserved. He thought his writing was accessible, and his literary sarcasm was clever and good. The critics all agreed, but Vegard Krogh’s work was seldom given more than a passing comment in the local paper from his hometown. Vegard Krogh had a distinct voice, a critic once said, an original and ironic pen. He was described as a talent. But since then he had not only gotten older, he had also become an author of some note. He knew it: he had important things to tell. His talent had blossomed, he should be established by now, a force to be reckoned with. A review of his third novel from a national newspaper hung on the corkboard at home. Not particularly impressive, just two columns, worn and yellow after several years in the kitchen, but the phrase “strong, vital and at times technically brilliant” was written there.
The readers, however, had totally let him down.
Don’t think. Climb.
He should have worn overalls. There was a gap between the waistband of his pants and his sweater. The cold cut into his back like icicles. He tried to stuff his woolen vest into his pants with one hand. It helped for a few seconds.
He would just have to manage. He didn’t know where he got the energy. Without thinking about the cold, without worrying about his increasing distance from the ground, without thinking about how dangerous the project was that he was now determined to carry through, he simply concentrated on lifting one leg after the other. Lifting one hand up a step while the other clung to the metal. Again and again. Keeping pace. Iron will.
He was up.
The wind was so strong that he could feel the crane swaying. He looked down. Closed his eyes.
“Don’t look down,” his friend shouted. “Don’t look down yet, Vegard! Look at me!”
His eyelids were stuck to his irises.
He wanted to look but didn’t dare. A violent wave of nausea washed over him.
“You’ve done this before,” he heard his friend’s voice saying, much closer now. “It’ll be fine, just wait.”
A hand gripped his lower arm. A firm grip.
“It’s exactly the same as this summer,” the voice said. “The only difference is the weather.”
And the fact that it was illegal, thought Vegard Krogh as he tried not to look back.
His job at the left-leaning paper Klassekampen had been a dead end. He had stayed there too long. Maybe because he was, after all, allowed to write what he wanted. Klassekampen was important. It took sides. Papers should take sides, politically and on principle. And Vegard Krogh was allowed to rant as much as he liked. As long as his aggression was targeted in the right direction, as the editor put it. As Klassekampen and the young Vegard Krogh had more or less the same views on Norwegian cultural life, the paper fully supported his vitriolic, well- written reviews, angry analyses, and highly libelous remarks. He carried on for several years, until he was exhausted and finally had to admit that practically no one read Klassekampen.
He was never actually sued.
When he got the job working in the culture department of TV2, everything looked set to improve. For a brief year he achieved a sort of cult status among the angry young men who voiced their views about the state of the nation and what direction Norway should take. Vegard Krogh was one of them; even if he was a bit old, he was one of them. He had first gained notoriety as a stunt reporter for Young and Urban and was given his own irate ten-minute slot on Absolute Entertainment every Thursday.
Then after one too many lawsuits, which never made it to the courtroom thanks to the jolly and apologetic executive director, he lost the slot. TV2 was not as open as Klassekampen to what they ignorantly called “shit” in an internal review. Vegard Krogh was actually glad, when he thought about it. TV2 was a totally commercial channel, just like the worst American ones.
Finally he dared to look down.
“Can you see it?” his friend shouted. “On the orange target?”
Vegard Krogh looked down. The wind had blown his anorak up into a balloon, a great big bubble that made it difficult to see.
“Okay, let’s go,” he spluttered.
“We have to go further out on to the arm,” his friend shouted and let go of him. “Can you do it?”
He finally managed to get to where he was supposed to be. He tried to relax. Ignore the cold. Forget the height. Fixed his eyes on the book down there, an almost invisible rectangle on a large orange target. Tears streamed down his face. He blamed the wind and tried to muster his own inner strength. The camera had been positioned to the left on a pile of foundation blocks. The photographer had pulled a hood over his head. Vegard Krogh raised his arm as a signal. A bright light blinded him, and it took him a few seconds to fix his eyes on the target.
The harness was properly buckled. His friend checked one last time.
“There,” he said loudly. “You can jump.”
“Are you sure the bungee rope will hold?” Vegard Krogh shouted back, even though he didn’t need to.
“To the last ounce,” shouted his friend. “I weighed you three times before choosing the bungee rope, for God’s sake! And I measured this crane only yesterday! Jump! I’m fucking freezing!”
Vegard Krogh shot a glance at the photographer one last time. His hood, with its wolfskin trim, covered half the camera. The lens was focused on the two of them up there. He could hear sirens in the distance. They were getting closer.
Vegard Krogh took aim at the book. It was his latest collection of essays, an almost invisible speck on a round orange disk.
He jumped.
The fall was too slow.
He had time to think. He thought about the fact that he would soon be forty. He thought that his wife didn’t appear to be very fertile. They had been trying to have children for three years now, without any results other than the monthly disappointment, which they didn’t talk about anymore. He thought about the fact that they still lived in a one-bedroom apartment in Grønland and that they never managed to save anything more than a pittance.
When he was halfway through the fall, he stopped thinking.
It was happening too fast.
Far too fast, thought the photographer, his lens following the man’s descent toward the ground.
The book grew in front of Vegard’s eyes. He couldn’t blink, couldn’t see anything other than the white cover that just kept growing. He stretched his arms down and out, he was plummeting toward the ground and
at last thought: this is happening too fast.
The wind pulled off his hat, and his fair hair, which was stuck to his sweaty forehead, brushed the orange target at the same moment that Vegard Krogh realized it was over. With great care, as if he had all the time in the world, he picked up his book and pressed it to his heart; his forehead brushed the ground, his bangs kissed the wood of the target.
The bungee rope recoiled. The movement rippled through his body, a powerful jolt from the soles of his feet, an oppressive pulse through his calves to his legs. It felt like his spine was being stretched by the tension.
He laughed.
He roared as he bounced up and down, from side to side. The laughter caught in his throat when the police car turned into the construction site and the photographer tried to pack away all his equipment as he ran toward the hole in the fence that protected the area.
Vegard Krogh had never felt so alive. As long as the film was okay, this would be perfect. The jump had been just as he had wanted, just like the book, just like Vegard Krogh believed he had always been: daring, dangerous, and provocative, bordering on what was permissible.
He didn’t die that Monday in the middle of February. On the contrary, he felt immortal as he hung there, upside down below a bright yellow crane, above an orange target, in the sharp blue light of the police car that howled toward him on the ground. Vegard Krogh swung between two bright colors that gray, windy afternoon, clutching the first copy of his new book: Bungee Jump.