Fallen Angels

by Gunnar Staalesen

  We entered a dark, gloomy basement room. On the wall hung a somewhat amateurishly woven rug, two negress figures from the fifties, a couple of old photographs of long-deceased relatives and four collector-series dishes, painted in blue and white and dated 1967, 1968, 1969 and 1971. The furniture looked as if it had been bought on a rainy day from a Sally Army shop. The air was stale and musty, like in a burial chamber, which lent the cat, which was still following us, an Egyptian aura.

  We sat down, me still wearing my coat, her in a red, green and white striped dress. She took a packet of cigarettes and a lighter from a pocket, lit up with a trembling hand and had almost put the cigarettes back before remembering that she perhaps ought to offer me one. When I shook my head she seemed relieved.

  As she settled into the chair the cat jumped onto her lap, curled up and lay there, its eyes fixed on me, as though it were guarding Anita’s long-lost virtue.

  She squinted at me through the grey cigarette smoke. ‘Well?’

  ‘Was that your daughter I met outside?’

  She nodded. ‘Yes, that was Sissel. The baby.’ An expression of sudden horror spread across her face. ‘This isn’t about…? She hasn’t…? She’s a decent girl and she’s going to be confirmed in spring and all that. Please don’t get me wrong about what I said. She’s not … like that.’

  ‘No, no, of course not.’

  ‘Oh, thank goodness. But suddenly you looked so … official. Like someone from social services.’

  ‘This is about Johnny.’

  ‘Ah … Johnny.’ The expression on her face changed to a kind of despair. She waved her cigarette and searched for the right words. ‘He died as he lived.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What do I mean? You knew him, didn’t you? Foot on the accelerator all the time. Fire up his arse. Raced through life like a rocket, and in the end there was an almighty bang! There was a limit to how much she could take as well.’

  ‘She?’

  ‘Yes? This is between us, but who would know better than me how he … treated us?’

  ‘You’re referring to his new wife?’

  ‘Who else?’

  ‘But…’

  ‘He was a bully.’

  ‘But she…’

  ‘Especially when he’d had a few.’

  ‘Was that when he hit you?’

  ‘Not half. The local hero!’ She held up her trembling hands for me. The skin on top was red and chapped; her fingers were short, stained with nicotine. ‘You don’t think I’d go for legal separation for no reason, do you? I got custody of both kids. And where am I now? And where was he?’

  She glared at me accusingly, as though it were my fault. ‘He could carry on touring, remarry, have more kids, while I … Nothing.’ She looked around. ‘I’m in this house, but the council pays half the rent and I’m on disability benefit … nerves. Ruth, the elder girl, has gone and Sissel … It’s not so easy to bring up kids on your own. Last weekend she didn’t come home until the early hours and she’s only fifteen.’

  ‘No, it isn’t easy,’ I said gently. ‘I’m impressed by how well you’ve managed.’

  ‘And what do you know about it?’ she barked, though not without a glint of conciliation in her eyes.

  ‘What did you mean when you said Ruth had gone?’

  ‘I mean flown the nest. She’s old enough and can manage. It’s not that … it’s that I don’t know where she is anymore. Not at this moment anyway.’

  ‘So you don’t have much contact?’

  ‘You can say that again.’

  After a pause I said: ‘When you separated, it was 1975, wasn’t it?’

  She eyed me suspiciously. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Was there any special reason why it happened then?’

  ‘Such as?’ she asked timidly.

  ‘Well … was he giving you or the children a particularly hard time?’

  She shook her head.

  I said quickly: ‘It’s not unusual. I worked in child welfare myself and I don’t know how often—’

  ‘Child welfare can go to hell.’

  ‘But there was none of that?’

  ‘No, I told you.’

  ‘The Harpers split up at around the same time.’

  ‘Yes, so? They were probably sick of him too. He was becoming a real arsehole.’

  ‘You can’t say it any clearer than that.’

  ‘I’ll draw it for you, if you like.’

  ‘No, thank you, I know what one looks like.’

  She calmed down. The cat glowered at me. It didn’t like me, but the feeling was mutual. ‘OK, it’s a long time ago, but it still makes me angry to think about it.’

  ‘What does?’

  ‘The years I wasted on him. And what am I left with? A life on the skids, squashed so flat that I’ll never be able to get up.’

  ‘I remember you as a girl with vitality.’

  ‘Bah!’ She snorted with derision. ‘You remember me! You probably do. But that was before … before Johnny took me on a tour of hell.’ She slumped forward. ‘I’ll tell you what it was like … the endless uncertainty, never knowing. Will he come home like this or like that, drunk or sober? Will he be violent or not? Will he want to get his leg over or not? You’re never your own master – or mistress – or whatever you call it. Always on your guard. For years I had two suitcases packed under the beds in the kids’ room. One with their clothes in and one with mine.’

  ‘But why … why do you women stick it for so long, that’s what I never understand.’

  ‘Because we used to love them. I did love him once. And in those days there were no crisis centres to go to either. Not as far as I knew anyway. Social services had to step in, and you know the stigma attached to that.’

  ‘Mm. To change the subject, Anita, I was wondering…’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘The other two in The Harpers who died – Harry Kløve and Arild Hjellestad.’

  ‘Yes, I remember I saw that in the papers.’

  ‘You didn’t have any contact with them in later years?’

  She shook her head. ‘Not with either of them.’

  ‘Nor with Jakob Aasen?’

  She looked at me with unseeing eyes. ‘No,’ she said softly. ‘Not with him either.’

  I carried on quickly. ‘Harry’s situation was clear enough. There was his mother, but Arild … Do you remember who he was with at the time they split up?’

  ‘In 1975?’ she said tensely.

  ‘Yes.’ And I added with an apologetic smile: ‘I know he had so many.’

  She seemed to be giving this question a lot of thought. The cat stared. It didn’t appear to be thinking at all. It was like the Gestapo. Whenever I met its eyes I felt a need to avert my own as though afraid it might jump up at my face.

  Eventually she said: ‘It could’ve been Halldis. I saw quite a bit of her for a while. We understood each other in a way … Just a moment.’ She moved the cat to the side, straightened up with difficulty and went out, closing the door behind her and leaving me alone with my guard.

  I pretended to ignore it and looked around. The room was a monument to a musty November, a chronic area of low pressure. The portraits in the oval frames stared down their noses at me, as though they were glad they didn’t have to be here in person.

  Then she returned, holding a faded photograph with a pink tint. She plumped down heavily again and after studying the picture herself for a few moments passed it to me. The cat leaped back onto her lap, and Anita patted it absent-mindedly while I examined the amateur snap.

  It showed a stout woman, in stature she might easily have been Anita Solheim’s half-sister, standing by the corner of a house somewhere near the sea. The wind had lifted her hair like a mushroom cloud over her marked features: dark, heavy eyebrows, and a mouth like a garage door. On the back of the picture someone had written in grey pencil: Halldis H, 1977.

  Anita Solheim nodded
towards the photograph. ‘It was her. I know it was. I remember because we … because I spoke to her immediately after Johnny and I separated and she was right behind me.’

  ‘Have you been in touch since then?’

  ‘I was for a while. A few years. But then that petered out too. I’ve never been much good at keeping in contact with people. Besides…’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well, she changed too,’ she said, swinging again between candour and reticence.

  ‘What was her surname?’

  ‘Heggøy. Halldis Heggøy. She was from Øygården. Somewhere north of Blomøy. We went to visit her there once. Right by the sea. They picked her up when they were playing there. On Rong, I’d guess.’

  ‘Do you think she still lives there?’

  ‘She definitely moved back there after she and Arild … I visited her a few times, last in 1978, maybe seventy-nine. Before that she worked in town.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Shop assistant. She worked in a textiles shop in Strandgaten.’

  ‘And at home?’

  ‘Up there? I think she has a smallholding. And she knits jumpers for the arts-and-crafts folk and sews traditional costumes. She was always good with her hands. If Sissel had needed a traditional dress for her confirmation I would’ve gone to her for certain. But young people aren’t interested in that anymore.’

  We were back where we started.

  ‘Anita, I’ve heard a rumour. Tell me…’

  She looked at me without saying a word.

  ‘Is it true that once upon a time you had an affair with Jakob Aasen?’

  Her face assumed a frozen expression, like a gravestone, one that would be petrified until doomsday.

  ‘I don’t mean to—’

  She cut me short. ‘No? And so what? It happened a hundred years ago and it had absolutely no meaning beyond … what it was.’

  ‘Mm, so there was…?’

  She went on the offensive. ‘And how many dark chapters are there in your past? Would you like it if I asked you?’

  I raised my palms in defence.

  ‘Now I think it’s time you were on your way.’

  The cat thought so, too. As Anita Solheim stood up, it hissed at me in total agreement and shadow-boxed in the air with bared claws in front of my foot; an unambiguous warning about what would happen unless I made a prompt exit.

  Not wishing to tempt fate, I did as they commanded.

  28

  To visit a nursing home, however well run it is, you need strong nerves. It is like entering a waiting room for asylum seekers, waiting mindlessly for their lawyer to eventually deliver the happy news that their application has been approved on the other side. Then they can leave their waiting status behind them with weary smiles, look around one final time and abandon their luggage for others to pack. Because they won’t need it. At the border there will be nothing to declare.

  At a nursing home uncertain old age waits for you with hungry eyes. Here, in the secure corridors of an institution, you may yourself totter through the last years of your life as you search for a lost key or a code you never managed to learn by heart. Because the door is always locked.

  I arrived there in the tense hour before the eagerly awaited lunch. From the kitchen came the hectic clinking and clanking of metal and crockery, white-clad carers hurried past with bedpans in one direction, steaming towels in another, smiling like marionettes, driven to the edge of a nervous breakdown because of staff shortages and too much overtime, reliant on public budgets’ miscellany section, because politicians blindly wiped the elderly from the fund-allocation documents, unheedful of their own potential fates.

  At the reception desk near the main entrance I was referred to the floor and department where Ingeborg Kløve lived, and a few minutes later I was wandering down a symbolic corridor.

  The atmosphere was that of spent lives, pungent with body fluids, damp with tearless weeping. From a room you would never visit croaky voices called for help. A man’s falsetto voice chanted monotonously: ‘Jesus – Jesus – Jesus…’ Along the corridor came a very old man in a cardigan with holes in the elbows. On his chest he wore all the medals and ribbons he had been awarded in the boys’ brigade. He marched like a soldier, as erect as a standard-bearer, and gave himself orders: ‘Skansen Battalion! Order arms! Port arms! Mark time! Forward march!’ But the ranks behind him were invisible and no one apart from himself kept in time.

  A much younger man, barely past his mid-sixties, was sitting in a chair, supporting himself on the arm rests as though in a space capsule ready for blast-off, but his expression was more vacant than the void he was heading for and his eyes were lifeless satellites, meteorites that had collided years before.

  A couple of chairs away sat an old woman dressed in black with a large, pink doll on her lap. She was talking in a low voice to the doll, holding it up and combing its hair, straightening the little cardigan it was wearing, and if you didn’t know her you would never have imagined she had once been one of the most energetic debaters in the student union in the late fifties, one of the most tenacious campaigners for women’s rights.

  I reached the end of the corridor where the marching man was doing his drills, the prematurely senile sixty-year-old was continuing his mindless space odyssey and the fifties debater was preening her doll, when a man I had never seen before suddenly trotted up to me, grabbed my lapels and shouted: ‘Anders! At last you’re here. Anders, Anders…’ then burst into tears on my chest.

  An authoritative carer led him gently away while asking who I had come to see.

  ‘Room 312,’ she said when I told her the name. Then she sent me a look of curiosity. ‘I can’t remember seeing you here before. Are you … family?’

  I shook my head. ‘I’m a childhood friend of her … late son. I don’t know if she has any family.’

  ‘No, she doesn’t. At least she never has any visitors. Don’t be shocked now. If it’s a few years since you’ve seen her … She’s quite changed.’ She whispered: ‘She stays in her bed now. She hasn’t got long to go.’

  I nodded and she led the man waiting for Anders back to his base while I found the way to room 312.

  Ingeborg Kløve was in a two-person room. The other patient had a visitor, a bossy matron in a dark-brown winter coat with coiffured hair and a mouth that would have made a pike envious. The woman in the bed looked like a run-down version of the matron, frail and debilitated.

  Ingeborg Kløve was lying on her back, her head on the pillow, her white hair in thin, untidy curls around a pinkish skull, a pained expression on her ruminant mouth and palpitating life behind her closed eyelids. She was whimpering softly in her sleep.

  I went closer. No, I didn’t recognise her, but then I couldn’t remember ever having met Harry Kløve’s mother in Nordnes, when she must have been much livelier than she was today.

  ‘Just wake her!’ the matron by the neighbouring bed barked. ‘She’s slept long enough as it is, and it’ll soon be time for dinner.’

  ‘I can wait a bit,’ I said, pulling a chair over to the bed, and sat watching Ingeborg Kløve for a few minutes.

  ‘Is she your mother?’ a voice asked behind me.

  I shook my head.

  ‘You should visit her more often,’ the stern voice said.

  I didn’t answer.

  ‘Yes, I know myself what a fag it is, but I’m here as often as I can make it. Well, you have to consider that they could’ve been in bed at home, couldn’t they?’

  I turned round and looked at her. Her mother had her eyes open, but she didn’t say a word. She continued regardless: ‘Yes, now I’ve been here almost every single afternoon, taking the bus to and fro, and there’s no appreciation, no assistance from anyone else. What do you say to that?’

  I said: ‘And the price of bus tickets has gone through the roof, hasn’t it, eh? Isn’t that scandalous?’

  ‘Yes, I…’ She bit her tongue, sent me an angry look and demonstratively moved
to the side.

  I winked at her mother, although she didn’t seem to react. Then I turned my attention back to Ingeborg.

  She had opened her eyes. ‘Did someone say something?’ Her voice was weak but distinct.

  I leaned into her field of vision. ‘Yes, fru Kløve. It was me. Varg Veum. I was a childhood friend of your son, Harry.’ By now I had acquired quite a few childhood friends.

  ‘Harry? Is that you?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m a friend of Harry’s. My name’s Varg.’

  ‘What was that you said?’

  I looked away. Behind me I heard a derisive snort.

  On Ingeborg’s bedside table there was a half-full glass of water. I leaned closer. ‘Would you like some water?’

  Suddenly her head was clear. ‘Yes, please.’

  I held the glass to her thin, cracked lips.

  One of her hands, as light as an old avian claw you might find in the loft, rested on the back of mine, and she drank in small sips, just like a bird.

  ‘He’s dead, Harry is,’ she said.

  I nodded. ‘Yes, fru Kløve. I’m afraid he is.’ I tried to put as much compassion as I could into my words, as though it had just happened.

  ‘He got a picture of an angel in the post, and then he died.’

  I looked at her. ‘What did you say? What did he get?’

  She stared straight ahead. ‘A picture of an angel. And then he died.’

  ‘A picture of an angel?’

  She attempted a nod.

  ‘What do you mean, a picture of an angel?’

  ‘A picture of an angel,’ she repeated, as though there were only one kind.

  ‘He received a picture of an angel,’ I said. ‘And then he died?’

  She nodded. ‘A black cross means dead. Harry’s dead. It was in the paper. A black cross.’

  ‘The death notice, do you mean?’

  She smiled, happy that I understood. ‘The death notice. He’s dead now, Harry is.’

  ‘Completely dotty,’ I heard behind me. ‘That’s how they go.’

  I spun round. ‘And what about people like you? Who are completely dotty, but still upright?’

  She snapped for air and looked even more like a pike.

  I turned back to Ingeborg. Her eyelids were closing. But there was still a glint of life in the narrow slits. Quietly, she sang an old Bergen song to herself: ‘Give a Shilling for a Sewing Machine’: ‘In Strangehagen at number eighteen – lives the love of my life – she has no clothes to go out in during the day – so she’s only seen at night…’ The rest was lost in humming, which faded, then stopped, at about the same time as her eyes closed.