Where Roses Never Die

by Staalesen, Gunnar

  ‘Everyone ready for the draw?’ Terje shouted from the podium. ‘Anyone else want to go home?’

  Again hurried glances went from husband to wife and back, but no one budged; everyone was prepared to … well, they were all ready.’

  ‘Afterwards I often thought … What made us act as we did? But I think … it must have been the champagne. We were all … how shall I put it … a bit merry and frivolous. And I suppose it must have been the excitement of the suggestion. The titillation of it. I mean … we’d all been married for a few years. Or been living together. Everyone except Terje and Vibeke had children. Perhaps … I’m not complaining. Nils and I were happy together, in all ways, I think. But … maybe that wasn’t true for everyone. And … that was a special time, from a historical perspective. Women had become freer, more independent. Perhaps we would finally experience some of the freedom men had had for generations. I suppose we all had our family histories … which we’d heard about, I mean…’

  She examined my face, as though I had one to contribute as well.

  ‘Certainly,’ I said, gesticulating agreement. ‘You don’t need to apologise to me. I’ve been single and divorced for most of my life, so I have my own skeletons in the cupboard. Both while I was married and unmarried, so to speak.’

  She nodded. ‘See. There’s no reason for anyone to get on their high horse.’

  ‘No, can you see any?’

  ‘Any what?’

  ‘Horses?’

  ‘Well – no…’ For the first time she gave me the trace of a smile, as though we had at last found some common ground in humour.

  ‘Let’s raise our glasses for a toast first!’ Terje roared from above. ‘One for all and all for one!’ And then he added a little slogan for the event: ‘Variety is the spice of life, isn’t that what they say?’

  Then the drawing of lots began.

  19

  Rarely had a glass of beer and an aquavit tasted as good as on this Tuesday evening. The malty flavour of the beer and the strong infiltration of caraway in Simers Taffel lay like a reflection of an autumnal landscape in my mouth, red and yellow leaves mirrored in a dark watery surface, so dark that you could hardly imagine the depths it concealed.

  I looked at Randi Hagenberg in the same tight green dress as earlier in the day, with the brown belt around her waist and the slim body that looked younger than the slender, careworn face, where not even judicious make-up could camouflage the fact that it had seen its best years. She had long passed fifty, perhaps even more, winters. But at that time, twenty-five years ago, she must have been something of a trophy too.

  ‘So … how did the draw go?’

  At once there was silence in the room. The last cassette had finished and no one had bothered with another.

  ‘Let’s start with the gentlemen,’ Terje said. ‘Nils! Would you like to come up here?’

  Nils, at sixes and sevens, looked around him. ‘Me? But … I didn’t quite understand … How’s this supposed to work?’

  ‘Just come up here and we’ll sort it out.’

  ‘OK…’ He looked in her direction, almost apologetically, but she just nodded for him to go on up, she encouraged him.

  Vibeke was holding up the yellow bowl in an elegant pose that emphasised the shape of her breasts, and Nils fumbled like a confirmation candidate as he reached for the bowl, put his fingers in and drew the first slip of paper. It was red. He stood holding it in the air, embarrassed. ‘Red,’ he said, as though he were telling them something they couldn’t see.

  ‘Now the first lady.’ Terje looked around. ‘Perhaps you’d like to accompany Nils, Randi?’

  As she went up to the stage she felt for the first time that evening that her skirt was too short. She discreetly pulled at the hems, not that it helped much, and to her it was as though she could feel the gazes of the three men below brushing her calves, knees, thighs and – in their imaginations – even higher.

  She met Vibeke’s eyes. They were both redheads, but Randi’s colour was genuine. Vibeke’s hair was dyed for her role; normally she was blonde. The look she received was provocative, almost feverish, as though she wished she…

  Randi turned to Terje, who was holding the red bowl in the air. He looked at her with the same smile he had worn all evening, and with a shudder she imagined what it would be like to be kissed by him, with that beard of his … then she stretched up and drew a slip of paper. ‘Blue!’

  ‘No re-draw necessary then. But so far we don’t have a couple either. Tor! It’s your turn…’

  Tor came to life. He winked at Randi before stepping up to the podium with quick, manly strides, walking directly towards Vibeke, putting one arm around her waist and, with his other hand, stretching up to the bowl she was holding aloft. When he held out the slip of paper you could read the disappointment on his face. ‘Pink!’

  ‘We’ll do as we did before. Now it’s your wife’s turn. Helle…’

  Helle came forward, slight more tentatively in her posture than her husband had been. She drew a slip: ‘Red.’

  Four eyes met. Nils looked at Helle. Helle looked at Tor, and then at Nils. Nils shifted his gaze from Tor and finally to Helle.

  Terje clapped his hands and Vibeke joined in. ‘The first couple has been formed! Helle and Nils…’

  Nils still looked embarrassed. ‘Well, shall we … erm … go, do you think?’

  ‘Yes, unless you want to follow the rest of the draw, then…’

  ‘Yes, we’d…’

  ‘… Like to,’ Helle added.

  ‘Good! Then I suggest you go next, Truls.’

  Truls went up and drew: ‘Green.’

  ‘The tension’s mounting!’ Terje shouted. ‘Maja!’

  Maja glided across the floor and up on to the stage with an almost supernatural, fairy-like movement. Terje held the red bowl above her head.

  ‘Not so high, if you don’t mind.’

  He lowered the bowl a fraction; she stretched up and took a slip of paper. Without a word, she held it up.

  ‘Pink!’ Terje called out. ‘Tor and Maja! Another couple.’

  Their eyes met, and they smiled, a little bewildered, both of them, as if this wasn’t an option they had considered.

  Terje continued regardless: ‘There are not many lots left.’ He looked from Vibeke to Truls and said: ‘Actually the rest is obvious, but we’ll have to carry on so that everyone can see that everything’s above board.’

  They chose. Vibeke drew green and he held up the last slip of paper: ‘Blue!’

  I tried to follow as well as I could. I took out my notebook and wrote as I talked. ‘In other words … correct me if I’m wrong. Truls Misvær won the main prize, as you put it: Vibeke Waaler.’

  She nodded.

  ‘Your husband got Helle Fylling. So it was Tor Fylling and … Maja. And you ended up with Terje Torbeinsvik.’

  She bristled with annoyance. Either she regretted having told me so much or there was something awful she was trying to shake off. ‘But what does this have to do with the Mette Case? I really don’t understand!

  ‘Nor me … yet. So … what happened?’

  ‘What happened? What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, I was thinking about … You must have had some kind of system for … the game. There were small children in most of the houses, weren’t there?’

  ‘Ah, I see…’ Again her eyes wandered. ‘Yes, he’d devised some rules. We had about five hours, from about one till six. So it was off to the marital bed. And we went back to the women’s houses. That was because Terje thought that if any of the children woke up it would be more reassuring for them – and probably most normal, as he said in his usual sarcastic way – for the mother to look after them.’

  ‘Five hours of New Year’s fun and games, in other words.’

  ‘You don’t need to rub salt into the wound. It was nothing to get excited about, I can tell you.’

  ‘No? But you said before … that you didn’t do anything wrong,
anyway.’

  She looked past me with a film of frost over her eyes. ‘No, I didn’t…’

  ‘But others … did?’

  She suddenly leaned forward and snarled at me so I recoiled against the back of the chair. ‘I was raped!’

  ‘You were…?’

  ‘By Terje Torbeinsvik, yes. When it came to the crunch I didn’t damn well want … he wasn’t particularly attractive with all that beard and hair, and when he started groping me … my stomach turned. I said…

  ‘No, Terje! I don’t want to! Stop it!’

  ‘You don’t want to? You’ve got no choice! I won you.’

  ‘You won me?!’

  ‘You didn’t object before! You could have gone on your way, as Svein and Synnøve did! Come on. I won’t hurt you! I’ll do it better than you’ve ever…’

  ‘I’m telling you, no. No, no, no…’

  But he had put his hand over her mouth – ‘You’ll wake your kids!’ – and lifted up her skirt and pulled down her knickers and…

  At once she had tears in her eyes. ‘It was terrible. The worst thing I’ve ever experienced! And he didn’t stop after the first time. Twice more he forced himself on me. And I just gave up. I lay there, passive, taking it, crossing my fingers and praying Joachim and Janne wouldn’t wake up and come in…’

  ‘But … you could have reported him.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Three cheers for little me. Of course I could have reported him, Veum. And you know how rape victims are treated. I’d agreed to it, hadn’t I? He’d won me, as he put it! No, I just had to grit my teeth and keep my mouth shut. And that’s what I’d done … until now.’

  ‘But … your husband. You must have told him?’

  ‘Nils! Are you crazy? He came home at six as happy and bewildered as he’d been all New Year’s Eve. I don’t think he understood any of what happened.’

  ‘But … you split up?’

  ‘Yes. After a few years. That night destroyed so much. Now perhaps you understand a bit better why things went as they did up there. Why we’re all divorced, except for Svein and Synnøve – who went home. They did the right thing. That’s what we all should have done. And now he’s dead.’

  ‘Nils, yes.’

  ‘And this has nothing to do with Mette?’

  ‘No, there’s no reason to believe it has. But … did Nils say how he and Helle Fylling got on?’

  Again she rolled her eyes. ‘Oh, yes. He came home happy and content with the world’s best conscience, he said.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘They had just chatted, he said. Helle and him. He’d never had such a good chat with her before, so, as far as he was concerned, we could happily repeat this game.’

  ‘But you didn’t?’

  ‘No, you can bet your life we didn’t. It was never mentioned again – and from that day on until you heard about it from Svein Stangeland I don’t think one of us ever brought up the subject. We just put it behind us and that’s where it should have stayed, Veum. Do you understand?’ Again she sent me an accusatory look. ‘And now I’m off.’

  I stood up. ‘Let me get you a…’

  ‘And I don’t need to be taken home, either. Thanks, but no thanks!’ She grabbed her coat, which she had hung over the back of her chair, took her bag and opened it, found a hundred-kroner note and flung it onto the table in front of us. ‘This should cover the wine.’

  ‘Yes, but let me…’

  ‘Goodnight, Veum! And let me repeat what I said last time. Next time I’ll call security. Have you got that?’

  I nodded and plumped back heavily in my chair.

  It wasn’t long before the bartender reappeared. ‘Another round?’ he said sympathetically, as though assuming I had been given the elbow; it was a fairly accurate assessment of the situation, although there hadn’t been such strong feelings at play, from her side or mine.

  ‘Please,’ I said feebly, and lowered my head to meet the storm, as I was wont to do.

  Late the same night I stumbled back up to Telthussmauet. I had been given a lot to chew on. In my mind’s eye I tried to visualise them as they crossed the dark yard at Solstølen Co-op, as the New Year’s rockets were still crackling in the winter sky that frosty night twenty-five years ago. Tor Fylling had gone home with Maja Misvær, while her husband, Truls, perhaps only had to take the indoor route to Vibeke Waaler’s bedroom and whatever happened there. Nils Bringeland joined Helle Fylling, with whom he had chatted for the rest of the night, according to what he had said. And Terje Torbeinsvik … Yes, he became a rapist overnight with Randi Hagenberg as his involuntary victim, if I was to take her at her word. And why shouldn’t I?

  On this night there were no stars and no fireworks being set off. Like the lonesome wolf I was, I sought my lair up the mountainside, with a good view of the town but practically no insight into what I was supposed to be finding out: what happened to Mette Misvær on that September day in 1977? Did it have anything to do with the New Year game eight or nine months earlier?

  I staggered up the stairs to my flat. There I unscrewed the top of a new bottle of aquavit, put it to my mouth and drank deeply, as though it was life I was imbibing – or death. Because you could hardly get closer. The liquid burned like phosphorus in my throat, flames from hell. Next morning I found myself lying on the floor by my bed, clueless as to how I had got there and without a clear thought in my head.

  20

  It was the dream that had woken me. I had my head between Karin’s legs and was luxuriating in her velvet charms when suddenly she began to resist, and when I looked up it was Randi Hagenberg lying there, writhing madly as she slapped my face and pushed me away. I got up and stumbled towards the half-open door, where I bumped into Sølvi Hegge, who, elegant and stylishly dressed, stood disdainfully surveying my naked body, my member jutting out like a gnarled twig. She leaned forward, as if to kiss me, when a powerful blow struck me on the head and propelled me out of the dream. I lay huddled on the floor, bathed in cold sweat and with rotating lava in my abdominal region.

  I crawled to the bathroom and leaned over the toilet bowl. The eruption started with cramp-like pains that washed up from deep in my body to my scalp. I spewed like a marathon runner after passing the tape, my last remaining strength gone.

  After I had finally finished I poured cold water over my head, let the water run, drank straight from my hands and rinsed my mouth as best I could. Then I staggered into my bedroom, got into bed this time and collapsed in a restless semi-doze from which I didn’t wake until late in the day. Even after opening my eyes I found it difficult to get out of bed.

  I could feel the symptoms again. When I flew home, after Karin had been buried, I drank steadily, on average between two and three bottles a week. This put strains on both my finances and my health: the former causing me to take on jobs I normally wouldn’t touch with a barge pole; the latter such that I only managed occasionally to complete the seasoned running pattern I had – three times a week. The result was that my bank balance was catastrophic and my physical shape the worst I had been in since the early 1960s. My moral state was even worse. The infidelity cases I had taken on for well-heeled clients, but deceived spouses nonetheless, had left me with an even more bitter taste in my mouth than the one I woke up with most mornings. And some of the women I had slept with over the past two years I had pasted into my book of oblivion for all eternity, hoping I would never meet them again. Several of them had been paid for the services they rendered, with varying degrees of TLC. When I looked at myself in the mirror on such mornings, I turned away sharply, and the days I arrived at the office, unshaven and unkempt for the same reason, were not inconsiderable. It didn’t make any difference anyway. Clients in office hours were few and far between.

  I had tried to break out of this pattern many times, but abstinence laid its clammy fingers around my throat, lifted me up and shook me until I was gasping for more alcohol and grabbed blindly at a bottle of aquavit. My mouth was dry, cold sweat ran down my b
ody and I was dizzy in the street. A couple of times I experienced what I defined afterwards as panic attacks. I couldn’t breathe. It was as though my legs wouldn’t move beneath me, my heart throbbed, my pulse mercilessly pumped blood through my veins at a much higher rate than normal, and I wondered where this would end. For an instant I was convinced I was going to die there and then. So I closed my eyes, took deep, regular breaths, talked calmly to myself and slowly got myself moving again. On several occasions I noticed the same angst at the exact same locations where I had experienced the panic attack the first time, so gradually I began to give these places a wide berth, as though it was the geography that had induced this intense distress.

  For long periods I was feverish and uneasy, and when I finally got home and hit the hay it was impossible to sleep. Often I wandered restlessly through the town at night, blessed by the darkness but pursued by demons. They whirled around my head, whispering her name mockingly in my ears: Karin, Kar-in, Kar-iin … I went to the tip of Nordnes peninsula, clambered down to what we, in our childhood years, called Balangen, the remains of the old ballast quay, stood on the slippery rocks, listened to the waves splashing around my feet and thought how wonderful it would be: just to let go, dive in and start swimming … into the darkness, across the border, to see if we would meet there after all, on the other side. But I didn’t. There was still something holding me back. Thomas, Mari and…

  One day eighteen months before I had flown down to Stavanger to visit my ex-wife Beate. I’d had my hair cut, shaved and stayed sober for several days. Nevertheless, she scrutinised me sceptically when we met at a café by the market square, with a view of Alexander Kielland and the cathedral.

  ‘You look terrible, Varg,’ she said. ‘A mess.’ But not as in the messes we’d had at least twice before, after the divorce: once in Bergen and once in Løten. With unfinished business and another illusion shattered I travelled back to Bergen. ‘I’ve got someone else now, Varg. A true friend,’ she had told me. ‘And what’s his name?’ ‘Her name’s Regine,’ she had said with the smirk I had known so well a long time ago.