by Anne Holt
“Now you’re being unkind.”
“I guess so. I’ve a lot of unkindness in my favour, actually. In this marriage of ours.”
Hanne smiled as she wiped her mouth.
“True enough,” she said, nodding. “But as you say yourself: everyone is loved by someone.”
“I’ve never said that. Because it’s quite simply not true.”
Hanne leaned forward and picked up the remote control.
“Boring self-laceration from some individuals,” she summed up with her mouth full of food as she switched off the TV. “Idiotic, stiff-necked self-defense from others. Plus the usual media critics hammering away at journalists as soon as they get the chance. The truth about this case probably lies somewhere in the middle, in my opinion.”
“And where is the middle?”
“Iselin Havørn deserved more than most to be unmasked. VG did a solid piece of journalism: apparently it was impressive the extent to which this woman used the very latest computer technology to conceal her true identity. Fist bump to VG, I think.”
She pushed her clenched fist lethargically out into the air.
“That doesn’t exactly sound like a point of view from the middle,” Nefis objected. “Are you pouring?”
Hanne lifted the bottle of red wine and poured a generous amount into the glass Nefis had brought from the kitchen, where she had been playing Monopoly with their soon-to-be thirteen-year-old daughter Ida and her sleepover guest.
“The problem isn’t that such things are discussed. They ought to be. You can say whatever the hell you like about freedom of speech and all that, but people should damn well stand up for their shit and express their opinion under their own full name. We must all be held accountable. For whatever we say as well as anything else.”
“I still don’t see any ‘middle’ in this,” Nefis said, drawing quote marks in the air.
“The problem is the usual one, that everyone jumps on the bandwagon. This was actually VG’s story, but it was so juicy that none of the other media outlets could keep their hands off it. They poked their noses into everything. Her apartment was virtually under siege. I think that’s a real invasion of privacy. Just think – the magnitude of it all. The pressure, you might say. And if she’d been a very famous person, a politician, for example, then it might have been–”
“But she was famous!” Nefis protested.
“In the past, yes. But anyway, that was before you came to Norway.”
“That’s a long time ago now,” Nefis said, putting a hand on Hanne’s thigh. “You really mustn’t get any thinner, sweetheart.”
“I do eat. Look!”
Hanne grabbed another slice of pizza.
“Do you remember her?” Nefis asked.
“Yes. I remember her programs. It must have been in the mid-eighties. Round about then. Before the NRK monopoly was ended, at the time when the whole of Norway sat and watched exactly the same thing every single night. She came to NRK from a post as a journalist in the culture section at Dagbladet newspaper and became the presenter for some sort of infotainment show. Current affairs with entertaining guests, sort of thing. With breaks for music and so on. I’ve lost count of the number of formats like that NRK tried out, but Iselin Havørn was actually pretty okay. By the way, that was before she was called Havørn. At that time her name was Solvang. Iselin Solvang.”
“Did she get married?”
Hanne rolled her eyes. “Havørn, Nefis! Nobody’s called Havørn! It’s a made-up name. Or …”
She bit into the pizza and went on talking as she chewed.
“Of course there is something called ‘havørn’: a sea eagle. So it’s the name of a bird rather than a person. She changed her surname in 1989, according to what I’ve read. After she’d completely withdrawn from everything and everyone.”
“1989? She can’t have been very old then?”
“No, born in 1953, so she must have been–”
“Thirty-six at that time,” Nefis said quickly. “What happened?”
“Don’t you read newspapers?”
“Slightly different newspapers from you. And slightly different pages in those newspapers, for that matter.”
“She was …”
Hanne swallowed and took a mouthful of wine.
“She got mercury poisoning,” she said with a broad smile. “And contracted electromagnetic hypersensitivity.”
“Oh no,” Nefis said softly. “Not one of them.”
“Yep. In fact she’s taken a path that’s not entirely unusual. Comical, perhaps. And pretty tragic, but not really out of the ordinary.”
“What do you mean?”
“It started in the seventies. With the great awakening visited upon our country.”
“What?”
Seeming a bit annoyed, Nefis pulled ever so slightly back from Hanne, and straightened up.
“A slightly distorted book title,” Hanne rushed to explain. “Iselin Havørn, or Solvang, was highly active in the Marxist-Leninist movement, in other words, AKP, the Workers’ Communist Party. Real left-wing radicals.”
“Aha,” Nefis exclaimed slowly. “Communists.”
“Marxist-Leninists,” Hanne corrected her. “Total idiots. Maybe there weren’t so many of them, but my goodness what a song and dance they made. Many of them went on to do well in later life. Most of them came to their senses and distanced themselves from what they had thought and done, while others have resorted to ‘context’ and ‘well, those were different times’ …”
Now she was the one who sketched quote marks in the air.
“… as if there weren’t many of us others in the seventies who could see quite easily what terrorist regimes they supported, and stood for. Even me, and I was only a teenager then.”
She rearranged her lifeless legs and tucked a cushion behind her back.
“You can be glad you weren’t here at the time.”
“Glad? Do you think I preferred being a really young, lesbian Muslim living in Turkey in the seventies?”
Hanne gave her a big smile and clasped her hand.
“Touché.”
“But what was this journey you mentioned?”
“From the AKP to cultural radicalism to alternative lifestyles and on to what might be called pure unadulterated nationalism. And often racism too. Some of this also has a lavish sprinkling of fairly blind hatred of the USA, which actually brings us back to what it all started with in the first place. The Vietnam War, for one thing. A completely absurd circle, if you ask me. All the same, surprisingly large numbers have trotted around it, in some variant or other. And what most of them have in common is that they acquire a propensity for conspiracy theories. Which isn’t so strange after all, since …”
Hesitating slightly, she set down her wine glass.
“There’s a weird connection here,” she said slowly. “When I was working on the major terrorist case, I had to read up a great deal on right-wing extremists. Both the violent ones and the ones that seemingly stick to the keyboard, but share many of the same opinions. And, to put it bluntly, it’s striking how many of them become alternative.”
A narrow furrow appeared between Nefis’s eyebrows.
“You look so much younger than me,” Hanne said sotto voce, using her thumb to smooth the frown.
“And by alternative you mean–” Nefis ventured, turning away.
“It usually begins with one of these bizarre illnesses. You go around with some allergy or reaction to something for which there’s not a scrap of scientific evidence. Electricity and suchlike.”
“There’s a great deal that science still can’t explain, you know. That doesn’t mean it won’t be explained when we have more knowledge.”
“For heaven’s sake! You’re a professor of mathematics and should be agreeing with me here. You know what I’m referring to. There’s probably a lot of that sort of thing in the Middle East as well. When I was a child, all of a sudden everybody was supposed to drink ash extract. I
t was meant to help cure everything from cancer to rheumatism. When I was a young teenager, there was an epidemic of candida. Everyone who felt unwell in the slightest was suddenly able to buy all sorts of wonder cures to counteract a fungus … a fungus! One we all have inside us whether we’re healthy or sick!”
Nefis’s frown had returned.
“But what on earth does all this have to do with right-wing extremists?”
With a sigh, Hanne leaned over to her wheelchair, and extracted paper and pen from the pocket under the seat.
“This is right-wing extremism,” she said, drawing a circle. “And this is the people who have a predisposition to conspiracy theories.”
She drew another circle so that it only partially covered the first one.
“What do you mean by conspiracy theories in this context?”
“Chemtrails, for instance. A theory that says,” she laughed softly, “vapor trails from aircraft are actually–”
“I know what chemtrails are, Hanna.”
After all these years, Nefis had still not learned to pronounce Hanne’s name correctly.
“Then I don’t need to explain it. You know what I mean. That the moon landing didn’t actually take place. That it was in fact Jews who were behind 9/11. That all the Muslims in the world have a secret plan to take over Europe and drive out all the rest of us.”
“Aren’t we actually supposed to kill you all?”
“Or kill us, that’s right.”
Although Hanne was still smiling, she suddenly grew serious.
“The people claimed to be behind these conspiracies are many and varied, but what they have in common is that they are either the authorities, such as the CIA, ethnic groups or immensely wealthy organizations. The medical industry is one example, at which all the nonsense spouted by the opponents of vaccines is directed. But worst of all, the ones with the most sinister intentions and the greatest power, they are–”
“USA, the Jews and Muslims.”
“Exactly. And this here …”
Hanne drew yet another circle. This one also only partially covered the other two.
“This, roughly, is what we can call the alternative.”
She used her pen to shade the middle area of her sketch.
“My contention is that there are a surprising number of people who end up here,” she said.
“That’s called a subset.”
“Whatever. They’ve been left-wing radicals, become terrified of Islam, they are often alternative and into the bargain believe so many weird conspiracy theories that it would make you dizzy. Either simultaneously, or subsequently, they move around from one circle to another. I’ll show you what I found on the Internet, on the blog written by someone who was actually at the forefront of the Marxist-Leninist movement at one time. I …”
She snatched her laptop from the wheelchair and opened up the screen.
“No,” Nefis said, shutting it again. “I can’t put up with that right now.”
“But it’s absolutely crazy,” Hanne insisted. “He insinuates that it’s actually the Americans who are behind the Paris terrorist attacks! That the whole of ISIS is a fabrication, a–”
“It’s Saturday evening, Hanna.”
Hanne paused before putting the laptop back in place.
“As you wish. But while working on the terrorist case I was able to read a lot of what Iselin Havørn wrote on the Internet under her alias, Tyrfing. And what’s quite odd, in point of fact, is that …”
She heard laughter from the kitchen and the sound of dice rolling across the table.
“What?” Nefis asked when Hanne demurred too long.
Ida gave a cheer from the kitchen and her friend groaned noisily.
“It’s unbelievably strange that a woman like that took her own life,” Hanne said in an undertone. “On reflection, I mean. At first it struck me that her suicide was understandable, but … no. Not for her in particular.”
“Why not? After all, you said yourself that she’d been driven so hard that–”
“Because she’s convinced, Nefis. Because she knows she’s right. She simply knows that what she writes, and the battle she’s fighting, is the most important thing in the world. A number of times she’s written that she’s taking part in a war of resistance, at least as important as the one that took place during the Second World War. People like her …”
She glanced at the black TV screen and touched her forehead.
“… don’t take their own lives. No matter what. Setbacks give the fanatic strength. It’s unbearable pain and a completely different conviction that leads to suicide. A conviction that all the world and your nearest and dearest will be better off without you. And that this terrible pain is not going to subside.”
Nefis picked up the remote control.
“But she did feel that, didn’t she? She actually did take her own life. Shall we watch a movie?”
She looked questioningly at Hanne as the youngsters entered the living room. Hanne did not answer. She said next to nothing for the rest of the evening.
Jonas Abrahamsen could remember the very first time he had seen Christel. The little girl had been eight years old then, and only four months had passed since Dina died.
He had still been on sick leave.
Anna was already back at work, a fact he used against her for all it was worth in the progressively uncompromising quarrels between them. In the beginning, in the days and the first weeks after the accident, they had tried in some way to comfort each other. At least Jonas had tried to comfort Anna. Most of all he wanted it to be just the two of them. He wanted to browse through photo albums. To be in Dina’s room, that princess pink room he often crept into at night to lie on a narrow divan bed with Dina’s favorite teddy bear in his arms and wait for morning to come. Anna wanted to see other people. Friends. It was as if she needed to fill every single waking hour with noise and distraction, conversation and meals and as far as Jonas was concerned, increasingly unfamiliar people who came and went in the house at Stugguveien 2B. She began to attend church, and the pestering clergyman with the gentle expression paid so many visits that Jonas wondered for a while whether Anna had embarked on a relationship with him.
At night she took two sleeping tablets and burrowed down into her side of the bed.
She was lost, both to him and to Dina.
Anna had never reproached him. Not once, even during their most poisonous arguments, had she blamed Jonas for not taking better care of their daughter.
That provoked him.
He deserved to be blamed. It was even more difficult to bear his sense of guilt when it failed to be nourished by the only other person in the world who had loved Dina just as much as he had. If only she had screamed accusations at him, he could have defended himself. He could have refuted them. Screamed back at her. She could have been just as inattentive herself, and wasn’t she the one who had turned away for a fatal second when Dina at the age of one had upset a cup of coffee and burned her arm so badly that they had to rush her to Accident & Emergency?
But there never was a reproachful word, and Jonas was left to pass judgment on himself.
On one of those spring days in 2002, he had visited Christel’s address for the first time. She lived only a kilometer or so away from Anna’s house. He had been standing there for more than half an hour when she appeared, in new training shoes and with her schoolbag slung over her right shoulder, carrying a bunch of coltsfoot and bluebell flowers in her left hand.
She was singing.
Jonas did not want anything of her. It was just one of those periods when he couldn’t sleep, even after lying awake for two nights in a row. He never drove the car in that state and had walked to the low-rise functionalist villa. He had cut out alcohol long before, following one evening when Anna had thrown a poker at him after they had sobbed their way through three bottles of wine. Nevertheless he felt intoxicated as he stood there beneath a weeping birch that had not yet sprouted any pale gree
n leaves.
He had no idea whether watching her felt good or bad.
It was something, though, something other than sorrow.
Every feeling that was not sorrow was welcome. And so he continued.
Sometimes frequently, while at other times several weeks could pass between the occasions when he felt the urge to see Christel. As years went by, he got to know her. She played football until the age of twelve. She was not particularly good, he had discovered, though from a fair distance. When the coaches were eventually able to select the best players and she ended up parked on the bench, she transferred her allegiance to dancing classes. When Jonas was jailed, Christel was no longer accessible to him for a lengthy period, but as soon as he was granted spells of parole, he found his way back to her. She had become a dancer by then and attended Bårdars Dance Institute in the city center on an almost daily basis. Once he had booked a ticket for one of the performances held at the end of the spring term. When he arrived to watch, at the last minute, so that he could sneak in after the lights had dimmed, he caught sight of Christel’s father and Jonas had turned on his heel and fled.
But she was a good dancer. He could see that from the way she walked. There was a spring in every step. A rhythm, in a sense, as if she was always actually dancing. From having been small and compact, almost plump, puberty increased her height. At sixteen, Christel was a beautiful, slim and athletic girl, with the same blond hair as in her younger days.
Now she was twenty-two years of age and a mother herself.
Jonas knew that her three-year-old daughter was called Hedda. She was so like Dina that it was a shock to set eyes on her for the first time. The child was a one-year-old then and was being carried by her mother from the car into the apartment block at St. Hanshaugen, where they now lived. Prior to that, the baby had been a bundle, invisible to Jonas, tucked up inside a pram.
Hedda was wearing a blue snowsuit and a pink bonnet, and the wisps of hair that had escaped around the edges were so blond and fine that they would almost certainly stick out in every direction when the bonnet was removed.