The other one is from up north. He is busy with something or other. Probably that telephone call. Arranging something between themselves, which I am not to get wind of. The police are always that way. Acting as though they know something more. Or maybe they do. Whatever that might be. The person who commits the crime knows most no matter what.
Can she stand?
They are not asking me but each other. Is she able to get up?
Think so, yeah.
Then we’ll walk up this set of stairs here, he says to me. As though I am not familiar with my own stairs. One man on either side, one hand under each arm. Young men, strong men. If I were ten years younger they would be friendlier. But I am just a middle-aged woman now. A random body, in all its weight and helplessness.
I have to ask for a glass of water. They do not realise that I need one. Or is it because they suspect me? I am a suspect, not a victim, so I do not deserve water.
The talkative one is given a dressing down in the kitchen. Later on, this is, when the house is full of people and two patrol cars are parked in the yard. The policemen and the officer in charge are talking in the kitchen and the one from the north raises his voice: What good was that? You just frightened her. The officer in charge says something I do not catch.
Afterwards we sit at the big, heavy claw-foot table. One of them asks most of the questions, while the other one comes over now and again and sits down beside him. They ask about everything. What I write. Why I am not married. Not if I am married, but why I am not.
Is that a normal question? I ask, but they just put another one to me instead of answering. Do I like living by myself in such a big house? And why do I have a knife in the drawer?
Which drawer, what knife?
He holds it up for me to see. The old sheath knife with the black handle. It was in the desk drawer.
Because I sharpen my pencil with it.
Don’t you have a pencil sharpener?
I do, but I like using that, my father taught me. We use a knife to sharpen pencils, I say, and picture the rugged wood at the end after the knife has been, the lead that turns flat if you whittle away too much.
They ask to see my pencils but I cannot find any.
It’s probably been a good while, I say.
A good while since what? they ask. Since I used a pencil, I say. Since Dad and I sharpened pencils together, I think, a good while since childhood and adolescence. Yet it is always present, pulling and pulling.
They want the telephone number for Mum and Dad. For Tuva and Georg. For Knut. They ask if I have a good relationship with the children. If we are close. They ask if I can tell them something about my sexual orientation.
Now you’re overstepping the mark, I say.
This concerns a kidnapping, he replies.
Have I had relationships with other women in the past?
I become weary. I don’t know, I say. I don’t know.
What is it that I do not know? Do I not know if I am a lesbian? If I am attracted to children? No, I don’t know anything about that girl.
The same questions are put to me over and over, in particular:
Where were you the day she disappeared?
Here. In the garden. Or inside the house.
Someone else hid the bag in my garden, not me. Now we are at the police station, and that is what I tell them: somebody else hid it. Why would somebody do that? they ask. What reason do I think they might have? It must be the type of question intended to catch me out. They think if they get me to speculate around what occurred I might end up spilling the beans, it would be so natural, easy to talk your way into, hard to talk your way out of. I am aware of that and think they are stupid. Or that their strategy is clever but they themselves are stupid. Only idiots could have suspected me. At least they are nice. I am given coffee and a baguette sandwich wrapped in clingfilm. But they do not get it.
Just look at the garden, I say. It’s huge and in a mess. Completely overgrown. And all that stuff, all those tarpaulins. You could easily hide there, or hide somebody else there.
Have you hidden Emilie in the garden as well? they ask.
No.
But you hid the bag, why did you hide the bag?
I didn’t hide it.
You just threw it there, didn’t care if anyone found it or not?
No.
But you did put it there?
No, I didn’t put it there.
What about the tarpaulins? Why do you have so many?
They belong to my father.
Your father?
He doesn’t like throwing things away.
Do you like hanging on to things as well?
No. I usually throw out junk, I don’t like having too much stuff. I don’t like clutter.
Did you throw out Emilie’s things as well? Is Emilie a thing you’d like to get rid of as well?
No.
So you like Emilie, don’t want to get rid of her?
I don’t know Emilie.
They show me several photographs of Emilie.
Have you never seen her before?
Yes, I have seen her.
When?
On the road now and again. When she walks her dog. It was the dog that first caught my attention. I like dogs.
So you like dogs?
Yes.
Did you maybe want to take the dog from Emilie, did you think you could take better care of it?
No, on the contrary. I thought she was good with it. Taking it out often, going on long walks. And she did it by herself, even though girls that age rarely go anywhere without their friends.
So, you thought about that, her walking on her own?
No, that it was good of her to walk the dog even though she was on her own.
Did you follow her?
No.
How do you know she takes long walks?
I see her on the way back.
Couldn’t she just have been visiting a friend?
Yes, she could.
So you keep an eye out for her, do you sit by the window waiting for her to come back the other way?
No.
Isn’t it a little odd, your seeing her all the time, don’t you have other things to be doing?
I didn’t say I saw her all the time. Sometimes. My writing desk is by the window.
But it’s been a good while since you wrote any books?
Yes.
Yet you still sit at the desk?
Yes. I’m trying. I have writer’s block.
And in the meantime it’s your parents who support you?
Yes, and I receive a grant.
It continues like this. It takes a long time. At noon I am given a break and another baguette sandwich. We switch interview rooms. Mum, Dad, Tuva and Georg are to be questioned in the room I have been in. I do not see them, it is the one conducting the interview who informs me, but I do not have the energy to ask him why. You can talk to Beate too, I say. Beate is often round. And her mother, Anita. She’s my best friend. Actually, I don’t see much of her any more. The interviewer does not reply. I wonder if he has so much to think about that he did not hear what I said. Or is it some type of trick: am I supposed to feel as though I have no power, as though nothing I come out with will influence the situation?
The room I am moved to is exactly the same as the last. White walls, no windows. Recording equipment, a PC. A rubbish bin beneath the table we sit either side of. I glance up at the vent on the wall. Imagine if I said that I think there’s someone in the ventilation shaft watching us, I said. That in not too long my accomplices were going to spray poison gas through the ventilation system.
The man conducting the interview stares fixedly at me. Do you think I’m daft? I ask. He does not answer. Everything is being recorded so he cannot say what he wants. Do you believe that, he asks, do you actually mean it? At the same time he types something into the PC. I am guessing he is writing a comment on what I said. What, I do not know.
No, I say. But do you
really believe that I have something to do with Emilie’s disappearance? Anybody could have put that bag there.
This is an investigation, he says.
Yes, I say.
In the evening I am allowed to go. I have been cleared of any involvement in the case, they say. For the time being. The pleasure was all mine. I told them everything there was to tell. Almost. I was reluctant to tell them about Emilie while I was sitting there. Not that it was of any significance. I just had a feeling that they must not find out that I often stuck close to the gate around the time Emilie took the dog for a walk. That we sometimes spoke. That I opened the gate and went into the road to say hello to Skee, who would jump into my arms, the way miniature poodles do, to be better able to lick my face. I was so soft on that dog. His name is actually Skeeto, Emilie told me, as in Skipper & Skeeto on children’s TV, you know, Mummy says he’s as small as a mosquito, and when we cuddle him we just say skee, skee, skee, she said, laughing, while the dog hopped up and down, squeaking with joy at hearing its name.
Emilie reminds me of Tuva that way. The way she rabbits on. She is not like her in other ways. I would never have been able to get Tuva to take Balder on such long walks, or to have her do homework before she left, for that matter. Emilie does, she has told me so. But Emilie and Skee are gone now, and on the late-night news they say that the police have interviewed numerous people in connection with the discovery of Emilie’s bag, but are still following several lines of inquiry with regard to the case.
10
I watch all the news broadcasts that night. Georg is with me, Tuva too. Mum and Dad. And Knut, even though he has not forgiven me. I was not the person he thought, he is still bitter about that.
Now, you see, I say to Dad, when you have an odd dress sense and have strange stuff in the garden, it makes people suspicious. Not just the neighbours, the police too, look at the way they’re acting.
It’s true, Mum says, I’ve been trying to tell you that for years, Finn, but you just don’t want to listen.
No, Dad peers at the TV screen, neither listening nor responding. He’ll hang on to whatever junk he wants, after all, the things are in his house, aren’t they, in his garden.
In any case, Tuva is quick to defend him. What are you on about, she says, odd dress sense? They brought you in for questioning because of Emilie’s bag, Mum, not because of the garden or what clothes Granddad wears, they didn’t even know who he was before that.
But the bag was only there because of the garden, wasn’t it? Huge piles covered with tarpaulins. Chaos and clutter. And not mowing the lawn or cutting back the hedge, it’s just asking for this kind of crap.
Well, you’re the one who doesn’t tend to the garden, Mum.
The newsreader in the studio is talking to a reporter who is standing outside our house. In the background we can make out the red-and-white barricade tape and police busy in the garden, wearing headlamps. What are they doing now, I ask, I thought they were finished searching here?
When Tuva pulls the curtain aside to look out, we see her on the TV screen, a dark figure in the light of the window. The TV crew’s lights shine on the neighbours who have turned out and the assembled journalists.
This is nuts, Tuva says, standing looking at the screen again, I can look out and see what’s happening at the same time as it’s on TV. She turns up the volume. NRK are reshowing the footage from earlier in the day when the police searched the house and garden. They had three dogs with them. Alsatians that unrelentingly sniffed the grass and Dad’s scrap piles.
It is a question of time, the police say. When Emilie walked past my gate with Skee on a lead, what time could it have been? They have tried to work it out. When she was last seen. When she took the dog’s lead down from the peg on the wall, when she locked the door, shouldered her schoolbag, when she walked down the hill and crossed the tramlines. At times the dog has tugged on the lead, and she has stopped to let it sniff around or pee.
If she took her usual route, she would have passed by my house around two o’clock, they reckon, and minutes later she is gone. Or at least nobody has seen her after that, neither in Skogryggveien or Huldreveien, where they found her things.
If I had been standing at the gate then. Or if Emilie had walked a different way. If someone had looked up and seen what was about to happen. That a car pulled up, yes, perhaps that is how it happened: the car stopped. There may have been more than one so they could lift her into the car, two, maybe three. No one heard her shout, the dog did not bark, nobody saw a thing. It must have happened quickly. If only I had been by the gate, then time would not have changed the house and garden so radically. Now nothing is the same any more.
The policeman from the north is standing on the Persian rug in the living room still wearing his boots. I have not heard the doorbell and do not understand how he has come to be standing there. For a moment my thoughts veer off course and I think it is he who has taken Emilie, that he has only dressed up as a policeman. But that is not how it is. So how is it actually, why are they plodding in here without any warning? Is it because they are in a hurry or due to a lack of respect? Do they think I am worthless? Perhaps I do not exist, I am someone other than I have always thought, and they have cottoned on, realised who I am and what I have done. Jelly-like.
Am I under suspicion, I ask crossly, seeing how all of you traipse in and out as you please? He does not reply. Or at least I do not remember what he said later, not to that. But I do remember him saying they needed to conduct several more searches of the house. New finds in the garden necessitate it. What could that be? I think. Blood? Are you going to look for evidence while we’re here? Tuva asks. Detectives on TV never do that. But maybe you view us as a part of the evidence?
He shakes his head, they do not. Naturally, we cannot be here.
Your mother shouldn’t take it personally, he says to Tuva.
He was gorgeous, Tuva says, watching from the window as he trudges over the gravel towards the gate and the waiting patrol car.
I go up to the bedroom to pack a bag. The window is open. Outside, a strong wind is blowing. Is it Emilie’s wind, her solace? Is she lying out there in the forest, her face expressionless, empty, while it soughs in the trees above? And in the morning the sun will rise and shine upon her, the grass will be green where she is lying, and the blades will sway, a new day with warm wind over her, while her body is still here. And the dog. It is terrified.
I am staying over at Tuva’s place. We are sitting on her bed and she is showing me her exam paper in archiving. She is going to be a librarian, but only as a temporary solution to what she terms her employment problem.
This is a keyword hierarchy, she says, and here are the references. You can’t refer to something you don’t have an instance of in the literature. You can’t write Elephants, see also Tusks, if there’s no documents about tusks in the library. However, from Tusks you can point in the direction of Elephants if the library has books about elephants, which they no doubt have.
Tears well up in my eyes. It seems so beautiful. To cross-refer from something that does not exist to something that does. Well, tusks exist, of course, it is the documentation that is lacking. I picture hierarchies with loose ends that cannot be brought together. Love hanging, dangling.
Before going to bed I put my arms around Tuva and hold her body against mine. Our kneecaps, hips and breasts touching. She is four centimetres taller than me, and holding her like this, I feel the child’s form within the larger body, a gentle weight, the small, soft arm around my neck, the hand playing with my hair.
11
They did not go to the halls of residence in Kringsjå, but home to her place on Observatorie Terrasse. She did not know it was supposed to be like this. That it could feel so good in her body she had to scream. That it did not stop. That tears would come. That he would shed some too. That her lips would sting. That he would cry out in her mouth. Now they will not let go of one another. They are naked, neither of them has
the upper hand. Now nothing bad can happen, Erik says, his mouth against her throat, no one can get to us here, it’s just you and me.
Mum rings the following day and attempts to rope her into the possible purchase of a Persian rug. I need something beautiful, she says. It is just that she feels so restricted, finds it difficult to change anything in the house when everything found its place so long ago. Besides, Dad won’t hear of it, he doesn’t like splurging, and one of those carpets, it could put you back a few thousand kroners. She really wants it though. And she has her own money, but Dad’s views are holding her back, she doesn’t want to rile him. True, the rug would be for the floor of her study, but still, he is right about the cost, and they do have the constant expense of the upkeep of the house to think of. But, Jesus, on the other hand, they do earn good money after all, her and Dad, there is no question they can afford it.
So what do you think, Beate, Mum says, would you like to inherit a Persian rug some day or not? And then she laughs.
Bea Britt has lots of Persian rugs, Beate says, and that gets Mum going: yes, exactly, have you seen the one in the first-floor living room, it’s lovely, I’d love to have one like that. Bea Britt doesn’t need to ask anyone’s permission, she’s lucky, she can do what she wants in her house, and she has good taste. Mum laughs again. Bea Britt is Mum’s best friend, or at least she was, now they hardly ever see each other. It is Mum’s fault, Beate thinks, she avoids Bea Britt, becomes distant if I bring her name up and does not reply to her text messages. Is Anita very busy, Bea Britt will ask, or has she changed her mobile number? I never get a reply from her any more.
Bea Britt is so serious, Mum says when Beate asks why they have lost touch, I don’t know, I feel kind of stuck with her, and she bores me, she doesn’t have a particularly positive outlook on life.
Beate has been standing in the kitchen looking out at the lawn, but now she is so tired of the talk about the Persian rug that she has to sit down. She has never noticed it before, how the thought of the rooms in Mum and Dad’s place makes her empty and tired. All their things, it is as though they cannot be budged, but stand where they stand. The restrained energy in Mum’s voice. Dad’s resistance. Mum’s thoughts revolving around the same thing, her doing the rounds of shops that stock Persian rugs. Bea Britt’s rooms are different, even though they are also filled with things she seldom moves. Old, worn-out things, giving off a sense of unease, Beate thinks, as though they should not be where they are if they cannot demonstrate having purpose. Is it because Bea Britt does not think about them, does not dust, just leaves them be? Or is it the disquiet in the house, something in the atmosphere, the stories of those who have lived there, or just Bea Britt herself?
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