Fallen Angels

by Gunnar Staalesen

Laila Mongstad was sitting in the TV room drinking coffee with Jorunn Tveit and a couple of the others. I greeted everyone around the table. The men had straggly beards, all of them; the women slightly bloated faces, after their over-hectic night lives. There was something dogged and calm about them, as though they were determined to achieve what they had set out to do.

  A stout, auburn woman, her hair smelling of food, came in and said lunch was ready in the kitchen.

  We all filed in. A single table was set with slices of bread and a variety of meats and cheese, semi-skimmed milk and kefir, and the offer of reheated stew from the day before.

  It was a strange meal. The residents were talking in low voices about practical matters. Jorunn Tveit and the stout chef tried to draw us into the conversation now and then, without success.

  Laila Mongstad and I were on the outside. Neither of us had scars from needle marks along our arms, neither of us trembled noticeably when we lifted a cup of coffee or a glass of milk to our mouths, and if we found it hard to swallow there were other reasons for that than abstinence.

  ‘Isn’t Roar coming?’ I asked.

  ‘He’ll come when it suits him,’ Jorunn Tveit said.

  After a while I asked Laila: ‘Did you get everything you wanted?’

  ‘I just have to take a few pictures.’

  After lunch we thanked everyone and went outside. Some of the patients agreed to be in a couple of photographs. Two of them wanted to stand with their backs to the camera, but no one refused. The countryside didn’t either. But then it was greater than all of us. It would still be there, looking much the same long after we had all gone for good, when Mongstad was an ancient relic from the past and only the sky and the sea had outlived everything.

  Then we got back into the car. Before I started up I cast a final glance at the edge of the wood where Roar was riding his horse back and forth, back and forth.

  I switched on the ignition and left him to it, this time.

  Some of the hills to the main road were so steep that we had the feeling we were lying on our backs. It was a stimulating sensation, as though we were lying beside each other in the same bed.

  I glanced at her. She had opened her jacket and was sitting holding her camera, which hung from a tight strap around her neck over her breasts. Her thighs were slightly apart and the thin, light-blue denim followed the contours of her legs.

  ‘You’re so quiet, Varg. What are you thinking about?’

  ‘I’m not sure you’d like it if I told you.’

  There were so many homeless children in the world. So many involuntary orphans…

  Once again, after a sudden bend, I glanced at her. The car hit a dip and her breasts jiggled. Had we been twenty years younger I would have proposed to her on the spot, driven down a forest path, grabbed her around the waist – and made babies with her.

  It was too late though. She was too old to have children and I … had had my chances.

  But all the same. Why not drive down the forest track, park the car, move to the rear seat and … make love?

  ‘Varg!’

  Her voice pierced the silence. I almost drove into the ditch.

  I straightened the car from its skid, stopped and sat with my hands on the wheel.

  She looked at me with genuine bewilderment in her eyes. ‘What’s the matter, Varg? Tell me!’

  I looked at her and said: ‘It was just someone I met … out there, someone I would never have wanted to meet … in such a place.’

  ‘Ohhh!’ She came close, put her arms around me, kissed the side of my neck, let me feel the heat of her body and held me for a long time.

  In the end, I gently freed myself. I met her eyes, looked at her lips, the gentle, smiling mouth and her concerned brow.

  I had the feeling that if I leaned forward at this precise moment and began to kiss her, all the other stuff would start, just as I had imagined.

  But I didn’t, and nothing happened.

  We drove back home, all propriety, sanity and morality intact.

  When we parted she smiled and said: ‘See you, Varg. Thanks for the trip…’ Then she strode with youthful steps to the editorial office and her computer.

  I drove to Strandkaien, parked in the market square and went up to my office to meet Berge Brevik.

  38

  The December gloom had descended on my office with leaden-grey foreboding. I switched on the light and in a flash saw a reflection of myself, in the office on the outside of the windows. For a moment it didn’t even look like me, but the general practitioner whose office I had taken over eleven years earlier. Perhaps it was his ghost staring in at me, and my own would one day haunt the same expanses of lino, the same yellowing window frames and the same December darkness.

  I sat down behind the desk, opened the lowest drawer, took out the bottle of aquavit and placed it on the desk in front of me.

  I unscrewed the top and leaned forward and breathed in the familiar, distinctive smell of caraway. Then it struck me that the bottle wasn’t exactly altar wine and that Berge Brevik would have a poor impression of me if he came here and noticed that I reeked of booze.

  With that, I screwed on the top, put the aquavit back in the drawer and made my way down to the café on the first floor.

  The typical afternoon clientele was there: old bachelors eating the meal of the day with a newspaper open on the table; the evening’s street girls chain-smoking and staring out of the window and waiting for demand to increase; students from rural areas with modest food budgets; a single mother who had picked her daughter up from day care and couldn’t afford to have lunch today; and then a private investigator who had returned from a painful morning in Lindås, waiting for an afternoon conference with one of God’s representatives on earth.

  I had a hamburger on rye with beetroot and pickled gherkins, two cups of coffee and rounded off with a plate of waffles, then went up to my office, leafed through the previous days’ advertising brochures, listened to the same period’s silence on the answerphone, tried to find a station on the radio that didn’t send me into a depression or bring on indigestion, and concluded by staring through the window, in silence.

  Berge Brevik arrived on time, at two seconds to six. He knocked on all the doors he saw, first the waiting room, then the office. I wondered whether he had knocked on the lift door as well.

  He opened the final door and closed it firmly behind him as though wanting to assure himself that there were waterproof bulkheads between us and the outside world.

  As he came in he quickly looked up at me and flashed his programmed smile. In his dark-grey winter coat, brown leather gloves, with his black briefcase and sober appearance, he looked more like a businessman than a carer of souls.

  There was also something businesslike about the way he asked if he could hang up his coat. I indicated the coat stand, and he removed his gloves, hung up his coat, unwound the plum-red scarf and revealed a white collar, black clerical shirt and grey suit with subtle green stripes. Finally he meticulously settled himself on my client chair and crossed his legs. Instinctively he brushed a few specks of dust from his shiny, dark-brown shoes, then began to speak. ‘I’m pleased you had time to receive me, Veum,’ he said by way of an opening gambit.

  ‘It’s a pleasure.’

  He looked around somewhat stiffly. ‘So this … is what a private detective’s office looks like.’

  ‘Private investigator. Yes, this is what it looks like.’

  ‘We aren’t used to so much luxury in our sector, either,’ he said, politely referring to the shabby state of my office. ‘In this respect, we’re in the same boat.’

  ‘I’m a sailor on the sea of life. Isn’t that how the song goes?’

  ‘Yes indeed, Veum … and that’s exactly how it is. We’re all sailors on the sea of life, in the hands of the weather gods, becalmed or exposed to storms, and as such … powerless.’

  ‘And that coming from a priest?’

  ‘Why not? The church has nev
er asserted anything else. All power lies in God’s hands. He watches over his own and not even a sparrow falls to earth without … In short, we humans are mere snowflakes that melt when fate reaches out a hand and seizes us. But fate is God’s to…’

  ‘And sits on His right-hand side.’

  ‘No, that place is occupied. But fate is God and vice versa.’

  I opened my palms. ‘So in other words you’re saying that all of us down here are without guilt?’

  His eyes darkened. ‘We all need forgiveness, Veum. You, too.’

  ‘Of course, of course. I assume you haven’t come here today to tell me that?’

  ‘No,’ he said quickly and cleared his throat. ‘No, Veum. No.’

  He interlaced his fingers, leaned forward as if to create an impression of confidentiality, and said: ‘When I met you yesterday on my way from Reb— … fru Aasen’s it struck me that you … might have misunderstood.’

  He looked at me, but I said nothing. There was a story here, the content of which I could only guess at, and I didn’t want to put obstacles in his path.

  On hearing no reaction, he continued: ‘That you might imagine … it had started again. And you might mention it to Jakob. I don’t know how much he…’

  He arched his eyebrows and I made a vague gesture while feigning an expression that said, yes, he had told me everything. And he had, but he had never mentioned any names.

  He nodded, as though he’d had his worst fears confirmed. ‘Yes, I know how it is when old friends meet. All of a sudden there’s a new intimacy, and yet it’s someone who isn’t that close. Then confidences fall thick and fast, don’t they, Veum?’

  I nodded. ‘Yes, that’s true enough.’

  ‘But what happened at that time … was a one-off occurrence. I swear to you by the blood of my christened heart, Veum. It will never happen again. Nor did it happen yesterday. I was there solely for one purpose. To make her think of her children, her unhappy husband and try – at least try – to forge the links one more time.’ After a short pause, he added quietly: ‘She’s done it before.’

  He rose from his chair, did half a circuit behind it, looked around like a doubting monk in a much too cramped monastery cell, slapped the palm of one hand and exclaimed: ‘Before I met her I’d lived a blame-free life, Veum! One devoted to Jesus, in the flock of Our Lord.’

  He swallowed and looked at me through moist eyes. ‘Listen. I come from a pietistic background, from a tiny place at the end of a fjord arm in Møre. My father was a lay preacher and foreman in the local furniture factory; my mother gave birth to ten children. I was the penultimate. Two of my brothers are also priests, one of my sisters joined the Salvation Army and lives in Reykjavik now, another works as a deaconess, a third a teacher, in Sunday school too – we’ve all lived our lives, dedicated to the light and salvation, free from Satan and shadowed by angels. I went to secondary school in Volda and moved into a bed-sit as a fourteen-year-old. Then I went to Oslo and studied theology, worked as an army chaplain and was sent to Finnmark as my first post. After four years I served for two years in Vest-Agder and then … in 1982 I moved to Bergen. The first big town I’ve ever lived in.’

  ‘What about Oslo?’

  ‘I didn’t live there, not as such. I spent the years commuting between faculty and bed-sit, from the church to Østbane station to catch the train to Åndalsnes. Veum, for me it’s as if my seven years in Oslo have been blacked out. They were learning years, years spent in a study, surrounded by theological writings, Bible texts in Greek and Hebrew, learned dissertations and philosophical interpretations. It was a monk’s existence, Veum. A … devotion to what was sacred.’

  ‘But in Bergen you met the temptations of a big town?’

  He didn’t answer directly. ‘Imagine these outposts. The first period in wind-blown Finnmark’s flatlands, with the Arctic Sea in front of the sitting-room door, a tundra existence for most of the year, massive darkness all winter and floods of light in the summer … as though … as though God Himself had turned his back on us in the darkness, but was glaring at us during the summer nights. There were sects and free-thinkers, people with … heathen ancestors, and then the faithful religious community, life’s toilers, self-sacrificing and generous, but … in a way old even at a young age.’

  ‘So you didn’t find … a life companion there either?’ I asked delicately.

  He shook his head.

  ‘What about in Vest-Agder?’

  ‘There?! There, they only marry their own. I’m glad I left after just two years. It was a closed life, Veum. I’ve never seen so many people keep such a beady eye on one another, every step they took, whether they were in the congregation or not. There were some fights about Christian mission statements in schools and kindergartens that made even a conservative theologian like me back away.’

  ‘So you belong to the young, conservative thinkers?’

  ‘Yes!’ he exclaimed with renewed passion. ‘Faith and religion are too serious to trifle with, to make compromises over or to set up on democratic guidelines. It’s better to separate from the state, which makes its own laws and regulations. I cannot make a secular state’s laws mine. I’ve always fought tooth and claw for the rights of the unborn child, against the abortion law and its advocates.’

  ‘But you could work as an army chaplain and give your blessing to the taking of adult lives?’

  ‘I had this debate out when I was in Oslo, Veum. You know the salon radicals there, with the morality of the thirties, against priests, for women priests, against war, for abortion – there’s no substance to what they think. It makes no sense.’

  ‘But if you think in a similar fashion, albeit with opposing views, isn’t all you’re doing exactly the same?’

  ‘No, because I have God’s scriptures to support me, years of theological studies behind me, studies of the Holy Writ no leader-writer on the Oslo newspapers would take the time to…’

  ‘Now it’s not just…’

  ‘We’ve lived through a time with far too many empty words and much too little passion, Veum. Among priests too. Liturgy has become empty phrases, and everything has been adapted to fit social democracy and pseudo-standpoints written in standard bokmål. Priests have become bureaucrats and civil servants and are no longer God’s impassioned wanderers on earth, preachers who praise the Lord. They stand in their pulpits like a sort of tax official, counting income and deducting tax allowances to tell you how much you owe or what refund you’re entitled to. They’re God’s accountants and not his missionaries.’ With a resigned sigh he added: ‘And they also generally preach to empty pews.’

  ‘And you do too, strictly speaking?’

  ‘Yes, I do. But the way I live my Christianity, I have gatherings elsewhere as well. I don’t just go to care homes and hospitals. I visit the young where they are, in youth clubs and snack bars, on street corners. I visit schools, kindergartens and I see it as my life’s mission to serve the Lord. Otherwise you have the disconcerting sensation in this country that God has fixed opening hours, from eleven to one on Sundays, and you can’t meet Him without an appointment. Churches are shut on the other days, like outposts in a Godless territory. If anyone wished to pay a visit, they would find the church door closed. This is the inheritance of Puritanism within the Protestant church. It’s what we have lost on our way from the mother church.’

  ‘By which you mean the Catholic church?’

  ‘Yes. I mean the difference no one can fail to notice, not least we priests, when you visit a Catholic church at lunch time, somewhere in France, shall we say, enter through the open door, see all the lit candles, the portraits of saints, everyone at prayer, priests chanting their cryptic liturgies, in Latin, a tradition which is, so to speak, synonymous with Christianity itself. Ur-Christianity!’

  ‘I assume you explain this to your colleagues?’

  He stood with his hands folded, in front of his lower abdomen. ‘Yes, we’re a group of relatively young priests who see oursel
ves as fundamentalists, to a greater degree than those who have ruled the church for the last fifty years. In that sense we’re going back to the original text, to Jesus, Jacob and Paul. We’re trying to practise what we perceive as genuine Christianity, which the church has played its part in corrupting – both the Catholic and the Protestant churches. But then we have to espouse unpopular standpoints.’

  ‘Yes, we’re reading more and more about you – or some of you – in the papers.’

  He shrugged. ‘There are degrees within our ranks as well. Some have a greater predilection for self-publicising than others. Some of us prefer to work out of the public eye. Perform good deeds. Live … a clean life.’ A twitch flitted across his face, like the shadow of a bird flying past.

  ‘And it’s because of this you—?’

  ‘But often it’s like sowing on untilled ground!’ he interrupted. ‘It’s as though the whole population in the course of the twentieth century has lost contact with this part of themselves, as though rationalism and science and all the demands of logic and intellect have taken control of the human mind, that is until now, coming up to the new millennium, when we can glimpse a new longing for the inexplicable, a form of…’ He stopped and pointed a long, pale index finger at me. ‘You, for example, Veum. If I ask you a direct question: what is your attitude to Christianity? Have you got any childhood faith to build on?’

  I slowly shook my head. ‘I grew up in an irreligious home. It wasn’t something we ever talked about. My mother may have hummed a hymn while she was dusting or washing up the lunch dishes, but generally speaking there wasn’t much singing in her. She was left on her own prematurely. We went with the others to church and back on Christmas Eve or if anyone was going to get married. I was even confirmed. But my father would probably have preferred to make a sacrifice to Thor and Odin than light a candle for the Virgin Mary. He had a rather special relationship with Norse mythology.’

  Brevik threw his hands in the air. ‘You see. Fallow ground.’

  ‘But,’ I said, and now I was on the point of standing up as well, ‘in my philosophy of life I’d guess that I’m closer to Jesus’s teachings, not to mention Francis of Assisi’s, than many self-professed Christians I know. I would still subscribe to today Christianity’s social message and commitment. Many of the people working in the Salvation Army are literally my colleagues. God’s private investigators on earth, as you might put it. I have a more problematic relationship with the Christian faith.’