by Anne Holt
Thank God, Johanne thought. Thank God I’ve managed to put up with Mum and Dad for all these years. Thank God they’ve put up with me. I’d never have been able to cope with a situation like this.
She had never believed in God, but if there were ever a reason to turn to him, it would have to be here, somehow. She fixed her gaze on the enormous stained-glass window behind the altar, a patchwork of seven rectangles in shades of orange and blue that did not seem imbued with any religious significance.
The northern lights, perhaps.
Heaven, where God resides.
Joachim was sitting restlessly at her side. He fingered the booklet with a picture of Sander on the front page. The same photograph that hung in Helga Mohr’s hallway, Johanne noticed, feeling an odd burst of irritation that they could not have chosen a more recent one. The boy had been about to embark on the third year at primary school in a fortnight’s time. This photo had been taken on his very first day of school. It seemed somehow disrespectful, she felt; the picture showed a lack of recognition that Sander had been a child who was growing, getting new teeth, developing and turning into someone different from the shy kid in front of a blackboard with 1A written in pale-blue chalk.
She shut her eyes and tried to forget where she was.
The sight of the white coffin had made her dizzy.
The children would be home on Sunday. Never before had they been away from her for so long. Suddenly she was overwhelmed by missing them, a physical gnawing in her body that made her gasp and clutch her chest. When the vicar at the front began to speak, she felt overcome by near-panic. She concentrated all her efforts on breathing and on shutting out the voice; she did not want to acknowledge this atmosphere – all these adults taking a last farewell of a boy whose life had hardly begun before it was over. No children, no teenagers were present in the entire church, as if death was something from which youngsters should be shielded. Apart from when it suddenly and incomprehensibly affected them personally.
‘Is everything okay?’ Joachim whispered, placing his hand on her thigh.
‘Doesn’t Sander have any friends?’ she answered, in a whisper. ‘Where are Jon’s sister’s children? There are no children here.’
‘They’re grown-up. They’re here. They’re sitting over there at the front.’
The fainting spell had made her feel sick, and she touched her stomach, running her hand over the taut abdomen under the black skirt, which had suddenly become so tight it was held together with a safety pin at the back.
She wanted the children home again. She wanted to turn time back, or forward – it was all the same to her – she just did not want to be here, and certainly not to listen to Ellen’s shrieks occasionally breaking through the vicar’s eulogy, filling the bleak interior of the church with unendurable pain.
‘I think I’ll have to leave,’ she whispered.
‘No. Please don’t. Take a deep breath. Here, have a pastille.’
Her fingers were shaking so uncontrollably that she dropped two on the floor, before finally managing to cram one into her mouth. The taste of liquorice was so strong and intense that it brought tears to her eyes; closing them, she breathed as calmly as she could through her nose while clasping Joachim’s dry, warm hand.
When the service was over, she could not say how long it had lasted. She had stood up lethargically each time Joachim had nudged her, and sat down again when he tugged at her jacket. The unfamiliar feeling of being somewhere else entirely had scared her, but at the same time made it possible for her to stay. Now it was as if she had wakened from a deep coma, and she turned in confusion to the centre aisle where the coffin was on its way to the door, carried by Jon and three other anonymous men.
‘I’ve got you,’ Joachim whispered as she swayed.
Ellen was walking behind the coffin, Jon’s sisters flanking her, and it seemed as if they were virtually carrying her to the door. She was no longer weeping. Her eyes were wide and her mouth half-open in an astonished, inappropriate expression, as if the reality was only now dawning on her and she still could not take it in. When Johanne peered across to the back row on the opposite side, before the coffin reached that far, she saw that Agnes and Torbjørn had already gone.
‘Let’s wait till the very last,’ she said softly to Joachim. ‘We’ll stand here.’
He squeezed her arm in response.
Neither Ellen nor Jon was still waiting at the church door to receive condolences when Johanne and Joachim emerged, the very last of the congregation. Husband and wife were standing beside the hearse as the coffin was placed inside. Ellen was a pillar of salt. Jon had both his arms round her, he too as erect as a soldier, both in black clothing that was turning even darker in the pouring rain.
‘What do we do now?’ Joachim whispered, so close to Johanne’s ear that she could feel his lips brush against her skin. ‘Shouldn’t we say something to them? I thought they would stand here and—’
He broke off when he caught sight of what had attracted Johanne’s attention.
A dark car had parked a bit farther along the driveway. It threatened to block the hearse, but the two men who stepped out had obviously no intention of moving it. They were both dressed in dark clothes, like the rest of the large crowd now standing in silence waiting for the hearse doors to close. Instead of approaching the church, the two men stopped halfway and stood there waiting.
‘Police,’ Johanne whispered. ‘They’re plain-clothes police officers.’
‘What?’
Joachim’s hand flew to his mouth.
‘What are they doing here?’ he said so loudly that a woman five metres away turned to him, crossly touching a finger to her lips.
‘We’ll soon find out,’ Johanne said.
She felt remarkably alert, as if the attack she had experienced indoors had saved her strength, which now returned tenfold. She noticed everything. Even at a distance of ten metres, she could see that one of the policemen had green flecks on his iris and was going to have a coldsore at the corner of his mouth in less than five hours. The heavy, dusty smell of the rain-sodden asphalt forced her to breathe through her mouth, and it felt as if she was three steps ahead of events, when the hearse slowly started to move off. The two men began to approach as soon as the Mercedes with Sander Mohr’s coffin had taken to the grass, in order to drive past both them and their vehicle. When the police officers began walking, she knew that Ellen would soon start to scream. As soon as Ellen saw them, they showed their ID cards, as regulations prescribed, and Ellen shrieked so loudly that Jon let her go. Johanne knew what was about to happen: she pictured Jon’s sisters, who dashed over only seconds before Ellen fell to the ground; she watched Jon, stunned and passive; she could actually hear the friendly but firm policeman asking him to accompany them, long before he had reached him and Ellen fainted and everything grew incredibly quiet.
‘Henrik Holme was wrong,’ she said softly. ‘Jon won’t get away.’
If her attention had not simply been directed straight ahead, if this moment of deep concentration had also captured the man standing behind her, she would have detected an anxiety just as intense as the one she saw on Jon’s face as they led him away.
But she did not, and three minutes later, when both the hearse and the dark police vehicle were gone and she turned to Joachim, he had managed to pull himself together: ‘Damn and blast. Bloody hell – what fucking pigs!’
*
The time was now six p.m., and Ellen Mohr’s home had been returned to her at last. The police had spent two hours ransacking the house. Ellen had stayed at Helga’s in the meantime, though she hadn’t done anything apart from stare at the walls, quite literally. Her mother-in-law had been almost equally incapacitated. They had sat there in silence, on the white sofas, in the perfect interior decor of the living room where old Wilhelm Mohr gazed down at them both with speechless scepticism. Even when they were told that the house in Glads vei was at the family’s disposal again, they had barely exchan
ged a word. When Helga parked her car in front of the garages, Ellen lethargically registered that her mother-in-law accompanied her inside, instead of driving back to Vinderen. It did not matter. The only thing of any significance was that she had destroyed the MacBook before it had been removed by the police. The big iMac in Jon’s office had also been seized, but there was nothing dangerous on that.
A police officer had been waiting for them when they arrived. He had returned the house keys in a friendly manner, but refused to answer Helga’s question about why Jon had been arrested, just as neither of the two men at the church had been willing to enlighten her. As if that was necessary, Ellen thought, sinking deeper into the bathtub. The police believed that Jon had killed Sander. That was what they had thought the entire time. That was what the police were like, just as Helga had always said; they latched on to a theory like dogs with a juicy bone and would not let go.
But there was no proof.
It would all turn out well, Ellen said to herself.
‘It’ll be fine.’
She whispered the words into the steam rising from the water that was far too hot, before slipping down and immersing her head.
‘It’ll be fine,’ she repeated in a whisper, her mouth filling with water as she surfaced. ‘I managed to get rid of all that horrible stuff.’
She grabbed the plastic cup containing equal measures of gin and tonic from the edge of the bathtub and drank.
Ellen had not thought about all that horrible stuff since she had wrecked Jon’s laptop, and would prefer never to do so again. What she had seen of the photographs and chat pages was not Jon’s taste, not her husband’s; there must be some mistake, a mix-up with machines or something of that kind, to explain what was utterly inexplicable. Jon wasn’t like that. She had lived with him for fifteen years. She knew him better than anyone else did – better than Helga, who thought she knew everything there was to know about her son. Helga had never seen Jon when he was at his best, when he had captured Ellen’s heart that time he had turned up, totally transformed, almost ten years after high school. He had stepped out of the succession of nice boys and had come to her, different and determined, sombre and dark by night – he was always strong and mature – and swept her off her feet in a way that no one else in that perpetually long queue of suitors had managed to do: doctors and sailors, Adonises and lawyers, they were blond and friendly around the clock and had never understood what Ellen really yearned for. She knew Jon, and all that horrible stuff must be a mistake, it wasn’t him; and anyway she had cooked the evidence.
Sitting upright in the bathtub, she rubbed her skin with the hemp wash-mitt, with long, painful strokes. The wound on her hand had healed. A thin red line circumscribed by white tissue along the edge of her thumb was all that was left. No infection. There might be a scar, just as everything that had happened in the last fortnight would leave scars in her life and Jon’s, but you could live with that; in the longer term, it must be possible to move on and find new avenues, if only Jon came home and the police understood that he had never hurt Sander.
The dark side of Jon was never nasty. The darkness in him was Ellen’s peace of mind. Even when he had discovered her deception, he had been able to forgive her. It had taken time – weeks on end, with days filled with recriminations and nights of keeping his distance – but he had taken her back. He should never really have found out, but Sander was so different, so unlike them both. The profusion of photos of Jon, with narrow shoulders in a sailor suit, on skis with a torso so skinny that he had to use his father’s belt to hold up his ski trousers, close-ups that showed eyelashes as long as a giraffe’s: there was nothing of Sander in all of that.
Jon had tested himself and the boy, and she had been exposed.
To begin with, he wouldn’t listen to her. His fury made him unapproachable. Ellen had crept around like a thrashed dog for days on end until he had finally, one night, sat up in bed and demanded an explanation.
She had needed to gloss it over to some extent.
When, after her third miscarriage, they had called at the fertility clinic in Finland, far from the gaze of their friends and neighbours, it had rapidly been established that Jon’s sperm quality was deficient. They were both informed of that. What Ellen, on her own, had learned during a discussion with the doctor, when she had returned to start hormone treatment, was that further investigation had shown that her three aborted pregnancies had been nothing short of miraculous. Defective sperm produced no embryos, or else flawed ones. Normally the female body expelled that sort of thing. There would never be any full-term baby, and was hardly likely to be another pregnancy, unless they considered very different possibilities.
Sperm donation was what he had suggested.
Yes, she had said, without hesitation, without a shadow of a doubt. Yes.
You’ll have to speak to your husband, was the answer she had received. We must have consent from both of you.
They would never obtain that.
It was impossible to talk to Jon about such matters, and he would never have gone along with that. He wanted children, his own children; he wanted offspring with Mohr family genes and had abruptly dismissed the idea of adoption when she had proposed that two years earlier.
That night, a few days after Sander’s first birthday, she had been forced to lie when the truth had begun to leak out. Her story was that the doctor had helped her. Ellen was inseminated with sperm from a Finnish donor; it was all safe and hygienic, it was discreet, no one would get to know about it, and wasn’t it actually better that she had never said anything about it? Sander was Jon’s regardless, he was their own child, and who nowadays would get hung up about such genetic details?
The truth was that the doctor had flatly refused. Without a spouse’s consent, sperm donation was out of the question. She would have to speak to her husband and was welcome to return when they had both arrived at a decision.
The doctor and Jon were ranged uncompromisingly on either side of Ellen’s most heartfelt wish. She would never become pregnant.
The solution had been a hasty trip to Denmark, once when Jon was attending a seminar in Spain. In basement premises in Copenhagen a buxom woman with close-cropped hair had made Ellen pregnant on the spot, in exchange for 4,000 kroner and a farewell hug. The clinic was run by a midwife with old-school feminist ideals, and all that was required in advance to secure the insemination was a telephone conversation lasting three-quarters of an hour. The donor would forever remain anonymous and, contrary to Ellen’s preconceptions, there were no sumptuous catalogues of human characteristics, outward appearance and careers. She had been permitted to state on a form her preference for blue eyes and fair hair. That was all.
Both Jon and Ellen had dark-blue eyes. Sander’s turned out to be a pale icy-blue. Ellen’s blonde hair was bought and paid for every five weeks, and Jon had got darker year by year. Even though, like many Norwegian boys, he had been platinum-haired as a boy, the wisps of hair on his childhood photos looked nothing like Sander’s wheat-coloured thatch. No one in the family had seen anything like it and, even as a one-year-old, the boy had needed regular haircuts.
Ellen had told Jon part of the truth about Sander’s conception, and thereafter sugar-coated it with a falsehood she had not thought through properly.
As it slipped out from her mouth, in her despair and anxiety in the bedroom with Jon by her side in the darkness, so agitated that he was shaking, she had been filled with panic at the thought that he might check her story. She could not quite understand her own lie, it had taken shape by itself because she had appreciated there was something clinical about the Finnish facility; it was very nearly a hospital, they had been there together, full of hope, and the doctor had been middle-aged, proper and had worn a white coat.
Jon would never have been able to accept a brief visit to an ample-bosomed lesbian in the back streets of Copenhagen. The lie had been inevitable.
And she had been right.
Jon was k
een to forget the whole story about Sander’s origins. It would not occur to him to make contact with the Finnish clinic, and as days went by and Sander was nearly fifteen months old, his father had begun to take an interest in the boy again. Lift him up into their bed on a Sunday morning for one of the few enjoyable spells when the boy could actually be happy and placid. Father and son had eventually become reconciled through a silent pact between Ellen and Jon that the truth simply did not exist. Jon was a Mohr, and a Mohr kept up appearances if at all possible. Besides, he loved Sander. She had never doubted that.
The water was no longer warm. The lavender bath salts had combined with grease and tension into an oily scum. She was about to get up to rinse her body with the hand-spray when she heard a knock at the door.
‘Ellen,’ Helga called out.
‘Yes?’
She quickly emptied the plastic cup and dropped it into the water.
‘The police phoned. Jon’s coming home. They’re driving him home, Ellen, he’s been released!’
‘Jon!’ Ellen yelled and almost toppled over as, wet and lathered in soap, she stepped out of the bathtub.
*
It was Johanne who had suggested they go for a walk in the woods. Jack had been on his own all morning, and for the past couple of days had been restricted to short walks in the neighbourhood. Henrik Holme had phoned her after the funeral to hear how it had gone: he had not wanted to provoke the parents by attending himself. Even though he would have liked to be there, for Sander’s sake, he added. When Johanne had told him about the arrest, Henrik fell silent at the other end of the line. He had known nothing about it, he eventually stammered, and after that he came out with so many questions that in the end Johanne had asked him if he would like to accompany her to Øyungen lake. Henrik had been very doubtful about the weather, but allowed himself to be persuaded to put on a raincoat and come to Hauges vei. From there he could travel with her in the car.