That is how children are – like joggers you meet in the night. They come from faraway, come straight at you and then, all of a sudden, they are gone. And you run further into the valley, alone.
After the newspapers had done their bit to ruin our digestion we went back into the street, stopped off at a video rental place and carried on up the hillside.
To the west a colossal, dark-grey bank of cloud was building up. It was like a signal from the interwar period, a warning of the darkness to come, a last, fateful salutation to the autumn’s fugitives.
Once during the evening I asked him: ‘When you got confirmed in the spring, Thomas, did it have any significance for you? I mean, did you really believe or was it just something you did because everyone else … because that’s what you do?’
He observed me while considering his response, then he countered my question with another. ‘What did you think when you got confirmed?’
‘Me?’ I’d been head over heels in love with Rebecca, but she’d moved to another part of town that year so I found my consolation, for a short while, in preparations for confirmation. Perhaps that’s why I took them so seriously. ‘I…’
‘See? It’s not so easy to answer that question, is it,’ he said, looking at me earnestly.
‘Perhaps we should go to church tomorrow?’
‘Should we?’ He sent me a sceptical look, and we didn’t return to the topic until the following morning.
Yes, he was definitely on the way to becoming an adult. He had learned not to respond to what he was asked and to parry all unpleasant questions with a counter-question. There was nothing more I could say. It was like when we played chess; he knew the rules better than his own father. Now we were equals.
42
I woke to new light.
At first I didn’t understand what had happened. But then I knew. I had woken to the same light once a year ever since I had been born.
I swung my legs onto the cold floor and walked over to the window. It was overwhelming. It wasn’t only that the first snow had come. It was that there was half a metre of it, which was rare on our side of the country.
As if in muffled triumph, cascades of snow had fallen over the town, settled on roofs and cars, turned streets into unploughed fields of cotton and, because it was also Sunday, there was a silence over Bergen, the like of which I could not remember since the oil crisis and car-free Sundays.
The nearest modern humans come to creation is precisely the day the first snow falls. And God said: Let there be snow. And lo, there was.
I shuffled into the sitting room, where Thomas was asleep on the sofa and shouted: ‘Thomas. Wake up. It’s snowed.’
He grunted from deep in his winter lair, rolled over heavily and carried on sleeping.
I went into the kitchen, brewed some coffee and made some breakfast, surrounded by the same intense light. Getting to Laksevåg now seemed as impossible as skiing across Greenland. But if Fridtjof Nansen had managed the latter, I would manage the former.
Almost an hour later we were stamping our way up the alley, leaving the first prints in a virgin wilderness, through air still thick with mist, although the sun was already beginning to shine through the thinnest patches.
We dug through the snow to the car, each from our own side, started the engine and skidded with the help of dogged front-wheel drive to the top of the first hill, reached the main arterial road from Mulen and used the ruts left by the morning bus, as deep as the wounds after broken love and as undeviating as a political manifesto.
When we reached Torgalmenningen, for the first time in my life I witnessed people crossing Småstrandgaten on skis. They were heading for Mount Fløien and would probably be able to ski home as well. It was a fantastic pre-Christmas present for everyone, except motorists and snow-plough crews.
Thomas was dubious about the whole expedition. ‘Wouldn’t it be better to go up there?’ he said, gazing longingly at Fløien, where the trees were like monks in white cowls forming a silent procession to morning Mass.
‘There’s someone I have to talk to,’ I mumbled.
‘In the church?’
I nodded. ‘He works there as an organist.’
We crossed Pudde fjord, which was like a frozen rainbow, parked the car on the slope down from the church and followed the hushed trickle of churchgoers entering through the main entrance. Older women dressed in black walked gingerly over the newly fallen snow as though it were a frozen lake and they were frightened of falling in.
In the porch we breathed white steam. Two small stained-glass windows met us just inside the entrance. One depicted Adam and Eve in Eden; the other the expulsion from Paradise.
We went to the left and into the nave. A stooped verger gave us a hymn book and a sideways look that told us he was wondering who we were. We definitely weren’t regulars.
It was two minutes to eleven.
I cast a glance up at the gallery. Jakob was there. His eyes met mine over the balustrade and he made a sign to indicate that he was surprised to see us. I gestured I would like to talk to him afterwards and he nodded.
Then he turned his attention to the organ.
The last members of the congregation shuffled into their places, making a total turnout of around fifty. Eighty per cent of them were over pensionable age, or approaching it. A couple of families with small children and some young people I assumed were confirmands brought the average age down a little. Among them I saw Sissel Solheim and her mother, Anita.
As the prelude started, Berge Brevik entered by the altar rail, wearing white and purple, holding his head high. He sent us a quick side-glance, as if to reassure himself that someone was here.
From the gallery the choir ensured that the first hymn had the backbone it needed: ‘The King shall come when morning dawns. And light triumphant breaks. When beauty gilds the eastern hills. And life to joy awakes.’
Beside me Thomas joined in with his breaking voice. I found the right notes somewhere in the second verse: ‘Not as of old, a little child. To bear, and fight, and die. But crowned with glory like the sun. That lights that morning sky.’
Two of the small children stepped forward and lit the four candles on the advent wreath and another hymn was sung: ‘Lift up your heads, ye mighty gates…’
Sissel Solheim read an extract from the Bible with a lowered gaze and a voice trembling from the stress of public speaking. Her small facial features seemed strangely precocious in these surroundings, as though she were the bearer of two millennia of wisdom and knew far more than the rest of us put together.
‘This holy script comes from the Gospel of John, chapter 1, verses 19-27. “And this is the record of John, when the Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, Who art thou? And he confessed, and denied not; but confessed, I am not the Christ. And they asked him, What then? Art thou Elias? And he saith, I am not. Art thou that prophet? And he answered, No. Then said they unto him, Who art thou? that we may give an answer to them that sent us. What sayest thou of thyself? He said, I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, Make straight the way of the Lord, as said the prophet Esaias. And they which were sent were of the Pharisees. And they asked him, and said unto him, Why baptisest thou then, if thou be not that Christ, nor Elias, neither that prophet? John answered them, saying, I baptise with water: but there standeth one among you, whom ye know not; He it is, who coming after me is preferred before me, whose shoe’s latchet I am not worthy to unloose.” These are the words of the Lord.’
Without raising her eyes Sissel sat back down beside her mother.
After the liturgical ritual was over, Berge Brevik stood in the pulpit, surveying the sparsely populated benches, his face twitching, as though he was aware that he was such a voice, calling in the wilderness, and the wilderness was the decrepit, age-ridden souls who had found their way to the church on this, the last Sunday before Christmas in a country with, on paper, the most Christians in the world, relative to its population.
He ran his eyes over us, located my face and lingered there. ‘But we must not forget the vow he made before he left us. He will come again! And also today we can hear, if we listen carefully, voices calling in the wilderness. Mine is one of them. My colleagues the whole world over belong to the same family. We are all John the Baptist’s descendants on earth, and you would be wise to listen to what we tell you. For tomorrow it may be too late.’
His eyes bored into my face and, apparently in a strictly personal warning, he repeated: ‘Tomorrow it may be too late.’
Then he relinquished my face and moved on. ‘When you walk through Bergen during this pre-Christmas period, what is the music that you hear? Is it the singing of angels in the firmament – or is it the ringing of a thousand cash tills? When you open your post boxes, what is it that falls out? Hundreds of coloured advertising brochures telling you what to spend your last money on or a message proclaiming the return of Jesus? Is there not an unimaginable racket around us? So loud that it can be difficult to hear the solitary voice proclaiming his message in the market square, our John the Baptist saying: “There standeth one among you, whom ye know not.”’
He held the pulpit rail tightly and raised his voice: ‘For perhaps He has already come. Perhaps you will meet Him as you leave the church after Mass. Perhaps He is one of those who will ask you for a krone for the bus. Or perhaps you will see Him on a poster for Church Aid, one of the Ethiopian children who at this moment are in agony, dying of hunger and thirst. And you haven’t seen Him. For you don’t know who He is. So turn to the Lord before it is too late. Join with Jesus before he opens the eventide book to see if your name is there. Don’t allow yourselves to be deceived into thinking Christmas has any other message than this: Jesus came once. And Jesus will come again.’
I discreetly looked around. The message seemed to be hitting home. The old, who had already felt the first blush of eventide on their cheeks, were ready to fall to their knees. The young stared in rapture at the eloquent preacher, and even in my own hardened heart I felt a longing to turn to Jesus.
But we were not the people he should have been talking to. We were not the ones who were the real wilderness.
He should have been in the main streets stopping the traffic. He should have been in the big department stores and outside the malls, demanding that his voice be heard. But if he had done that I was afraid the shoppers would have trampled all over him and shouted for the return of Barabbas, while Salome on the cash till would have screamed for his head on a platter and registered this as a bonus on her December pay cheque.
And as our eyes met again, before he came down from the pulpit, I saw that he knew, that he had been thinking exactly the same, that he had been preaching to the converted and the whole message went in one ear and came out the other.
The last hymn rang out: ‘When the dark of winter is all around.’
With the last note of the post-ludium hanging there, like a delicate echo in the brown walls, we got up.
I timed my exit to walk along the aisle with Sissel and Anita Solheim, politely said hello and asked: ‘Tell me, have you heard from Ruth?’
Anita Solheim glared at me and shook her head. ‘She’s fine out there in Lindås.’
‘And you?’ I asked Sissel.
She looked at me with her little face and blushed. ‘N-no.’
‘Because she’s no longer there,’ I added.
‘No?’ Anita exclaimed, suddenly alarmed.
‘No,’ I said in a soft voice. ‘So I thought she might’ve got in touch … before Christmas.’
We were now beside Berge Brevik, who was standing at the exit and shaking hands with the congregation.
‘Thank you again…’ I heard Anita say in response to his sympathetic smile.
He sent a cheerier smile to Sissel and said: ‘Thank you for your reading, Sissel. It was lovely. Have you answered everything on your form?’
She looked down at the confirmation form she was holding and nodded.
He patted her on the shoulder and let them pass.
‘Veum…’ he said with an ironic glint in his eye. ‘You’re a rare visitor.’
‘I’d like to talk to Jakob.’
‘Help yourself. And this is…?’ He focused on Thomas.
‘My son, Thomas.’
‘Nice to meet you,’ Berge Brevik said, smiled easily and let us follow the others.
I motioned to the door up to the gallery and Thomas came with me.
Jakob was ready to leave, wearing a winter coat of many greys, a beige and plum-red scarf around his neck and clutching a brown woollen hat with an orange pattern. He had a black briefcase under his arm. He sent Thomas a surprised look and greeted me hastily.
‘I don’t have any time to talk, Varg,’ he said. ‘I’ve promised the kids…’ He nodded towards the exit.
‘I understand. I just wanted to ask you: have you seen Vadheim yet about the letter?’
‘Nah,’ he said flippantly. ‘I’m not taking this that seriously.’
‘Why not? Because you wrote it yourself?’
He gaped at me. ‘Wh-what do you mean? Wrote it myself? Why would I write something like that and send it to myself?’
‘To cover the fact that it was you who sent these letters to the others, maybe?’
‘Tell me, Varg, do you really think that?’
I eyeballed him. ‘Not necessarily. But it’s a possibility that has been nagging at me. Especially as you’re so unwilling to see Vadheim.’
‘Honestly, Varg, I can’t see—’
I went up close to him and whispered: ‘Isn’t it time you told me everything about what happened in 1975?’
His eyes went walkabout. ‘Everything? Tell you? Why would I…?’
‘Because it would make everything much easier. I’m going to find out anyway. And when I do, discovering what you haven’t told me will be even more shocking, and I’ll ask myself why. I’m beginning to get a pretty clear picture, you know.’
‘Then go home and finish painting it.’
‘Perhaps I’ll do that, right now. You know Ruth’s in Bergen?’
‘R-r-r…?’
‘Ruth Solheim, yes. You may even know where she is?’
‘I haven’t the foggiest. She … What about…?’
‘But I know someone who does. And when I finally meet her – Ruth I mean – I’m pretty sure the last pieces will fall into place – and you know that too, don’t you.’
He looked past me. ‘Yeah, maybe. I’ll be off then,’ he said sheepishly. He knotted the scarf around his neck, glanced at Thomas again, as if he couldn’t understand what he was doing there and went down the stairs.
I stood watching him for a moment. I could feel it. Something had gone, forever.
I patted Thomas on the shoulder and we followed Jakob down the staircase.
The verger was waiting by the door, keen to see us off the premises. Office hours were over. God had gone home.
43
While we had been inside the church the main roads had been cleared and the tarmac salted. Dirty piles of snow had been piled along the kerbs and to free my car from the car park I had to get my little spade from the boot. Afterwards we followed dark strips of tarmac home, through the centre of Bergen and up through Fjellsiden. Around us the smoke from a thousand chimneys rose like the bonfires surrounding a town under siege.
Bergensians were still skiing across the market square. The sun had passed its zenith without breaking through the cloud and the mountain looked as white as untoasted bread. The snowfall had come suddenly and the funicular railway was running non-stop with the cars packed to the rafters. Thomas kept his skis at my plac
e, but they were too small now, so we walked up.
Someone had made deep footprints in front of us, but still the snow came up to our calves. It felt like we were on a rabbit hunt in Alaska the year all the rabbits went to Australia.
In Midtfjellet there was a Troll Forest waiting for us. The trees were bowed like pregnant women and the ones you met on the path talked in low, devout voices, as though they were in church. And perhaps they were. For most people nature is the only church they attend. Nowhere are the roof vaults higher. Nowhere is the divine closer.
Winter had laid a noose around the light and the winter sun had pulled the rope tight. Behind the mountains in the south-west a reddish hue spread across the grey-and-white canvas until everything was erased with ink.
When we arrived home we roasted a potato dish I had prepared earlier, boiled some broccoli and fried two steaks before letting an afternoon snooze wrap itself around us like a fur collar while a listeners’ requests programme on the radio took us back to the fifties as though nothing had happened since.
Two or three times during the afternoon I called Belinda Bruflåt’s number, but without success. In the end I decided to pay her a visit after I’d driven Thomas home.
We left at eight. It was cold and the night frost had purged the sky of clouds, like some kind of chemical bath, forced the stars out and turned the road surface into a polished dance floor. I did forty kilometres an hour and still had difficulty controlling the car.
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