Professor Andersen's Night (2 page)

But lo and behold a woman appeared at one of the windows. It did not belong to one of the four apartments he had under special surveillance that evening, but to one of the smaller apartments in the same building, which had been lit up the whole time, he had noticed, but without arousing his curiosity to any
extent
, maybe because the residents were sitting so far inside the apartment that it was impossible to get an impression of them. But now a woman was standing there. She was staring out of the window. She was beautiful, it occurred to Professor Andersen, standing there in the window with her long, fair hair, staring gravely straight in front of her. She need not be beautiful in reality, but from the way she appeared in the window, she seemed to be beautiful, with a slim, girlish figure and her long, fair hair. ‘Young,’ thought Professor Andersen, ‘maybe an office worker, or someone who studies, either full-time or on the side.’ He did not manage to observe her for long, however, for she turned round suddenly, because another figure appeared in the room behind her. It was a man; he, too, seemed to be young, although Professor Andersen was unable off-hand to say why he assumed the new figure to be a young man. ‘But one is reasonably certain about that kind of thing, it strikes one immediately; it may be something about the sprightliness with which he appeared on the scene, for
instance
,’ he thought, before he reared back in horror as the man whom he had declared with such immediate certainty to be young put his hands around the woman’s neck and squeezed. She flailed her arms about, Professor Andersen noticed, her body jerked, he observed, before she all at once became completely still beneath the man’s hands and went limp. The young man straightened up, and Professor Andersen hurriedly hid behind his own curtains, for he saw that the young man was heading over to the window. When Professor Andersen peeked carefully from behind his curtain, he saw that the curtains in the other apartment had been drawn.

‘I must call the police,’ he thought. He went over to the telephone, but did not lift the receiver. ‘It was murder. I must call the police,’ he thought, but still did not lift the receiver. Instead he went back to the window. The curtains were still drawn in the window in the apartment on the other side of the street. Nothing indicated that anything unusual had happened there. Late Christmas Eve, the curtains drawn, quite common. ‘But I saw it with my own eyes,’ he groaned. ‘I have witnessed a murder, I must let someone
know
.’ He stared across at the window with the drawn curtains. He stared and stared. Thick curtains that did not let a glimpse of light in or out. ‘What on earth has happened?’ he thought. ‘It is horrible really, and right in front of my eyes, too. I saw it with my own eyes, didn’t I? Yes, I can describe it in detail. I must call the police.’ He went over to the telephone, but didn’t lift the receiver. ‘What shall I say,’ he thought, ‘that I have seen a murder? Yes, that’s what I have to say. And then they will laugh at me, and tell me to go and lie down, and to call back when I have sobered up, because it is a well-known fact,’ he added, ‘that when you have drunk a bit and try to sound sober, you may easily be considered fairly heavily intoxicated, because you get so anxious about sounding slurred that slurring positively takes hold of you. And so beside myself as I am now, it won’t work.’

Instead, he stationed himself at the window, behind the curtain, with all the lights in his living room switched off, and kept watch on the window where he had
seen
a murder being committed. He stood thus for several hours, in the dark in his own living room, and stared. At the rectangular surface over there. Which shut out what he had seen. ‘It is odd that I don’t call the police,’ he thought. ‘It is still not too late. Even if they won’t believe me, claim that I am drunk or whatever they may say, at any rate I would have reported it, and then it’s up to them what they decide to do. It’s as simple as that.’ But he didn’t go and call them. He stood at the window and stared. Stared across at the rectangular surface over there. Was he in there still? Probably, because he hadn’t seen any man come out of the front entrance on his own. But he could have fled while Professor Andersen was over at the telephone. But then why would he have drawn the curtains? ‘No, he has to be in there still,’ thought Professor Andersen. ‘Behind those thick curtains is a young man in the company of a dead woman, whom he has just murdered. And I know it,’ he thought, ‘but I’m not doing anything about it. I ought to have phoned, for my
own
sake, if for no other reason. It’s curious. I know I should have done it, but I can’t. That is how it is, I simply cannot do it.’

He continued to stare at the closed window, but also kept watch on the front entrance, in case the murderer should come out. But nothing happened. It was late at night, and Professor Andersen noticed that he was sleepy. What was he standing there for? To
see
if the curtains were suddenly drawn back again? Or if the murderer came out of the front entrance, so he could take a look at him? Why should he do that? What was the purpose of that? Did he have to see the man he was incapable of reporting to the police, so that he could be arrested for the murder he had just committed? Why on earth would he have to do that? Professor Andersen had to admit that he cherished an obsessive desire to
see
the murderer. Otherwise why would he be standing here at the window keeping a closer and closer eye on the front entrance? Because there was one thing of which he was certain: that he had fastened his gaze on that closed window for so long in the hope of seeing the curtains being drawn back, due surely to a crazy notion that everything
would
be as before, that the young woman would appear in the window, young and beautiful as before, for some reason or other, which he wouldn’t need to speculate about. But when his eyes slipped towards the front entrance, it was to catch the murderer bounding away, not to see the impossible dream of the young couple coming out of it, whistling, on the night before Christmas Day; oh no, he didn’t have the slightest belief in that at all, not even as an impossible hope; as his eyes now swept over the front entrance, it was to see the murderer bounding away, the murderer’s face, an obsessive wish for that to happen. Nevertheless, Professor Andersen found this wish so distasteful that he decided not to stand there embroiled in the situation until he fulfilled this singular urge to see the murderer’s face. So he went to bed.

He managed to sleep. Uneasily, to be sure, but he slept. He tossed and turned in bed, more or less in an uneasy doze, but he slept. Towards morning he woke up as he needed to get up and pee. He tumbled out, and went to the toilet. When he was
finished
, he tumbled back into bed, but only after making a detour through the living room, where he went over to the window and stared across at the apartment on the other side of the street. The curtain was still drawn. He went back to bed, and when he woke up, it was late in the day.

He went to the bathroom and showered. Put on the same suit as the day before, white shirt and a tie, black shoes, since it was Christmas Day, and went out into the kitchen to make breakfast. While he was laying the table in the dining room he walked over to the window and stared out. It had begun to snow. Large snowflakes were floating down from the sky and had covered the street and the pavement. It seemed so peaceful that Professor Andersen felt a pang in his heart as he let his gaze rest on the window of the apartment straight across the street. The curtain was still drawn. He ate his Christmas breakfast, and decided afterwards to go for a walk in the snowy weather.

Professor Andersen had a roomy
apartment
in Skillebekk, a residential area down by the sea at Frognerkilen, but cut off from the sea first by the (now disused) railway line and then by the motorway, which is the main traffic route into West Oslo. There was a chill in the air, which hit him in the face as he came out of the entrance and turned round the corner into Drammensveien, while at the same time he noticed that the snow was falling thick and fast and was settling in his hair (he was bare-headed). The snow was already quite deep and it hadn’t been cleared, except in Drammensveien itself, and a cheerful, resigned mood prevailed in the side streets, whilst car owners had great difficulties driving off in their cars, and since it was Christmas Day, and no real duties awaited anyone, this led to noisy agreement about the chaotic wintry conditions which the night’s, or the early morning hours’, snowfall had caused, and it all seemed terribly social to Professor Andersen as he stomped through the snow among all the cheerful people, who were drawing attention to their futile but demanding tasks. He walked up Niels Juels gate, to Bygdøy Allee, and from there further on towards Briskeby. He was only out for a walk, as were a great
many
others that Christmas morning. But even before he reached Briskeby he decided to turn back. He couldn’t bear to walk, he felt so heavy at heart. He was extremely restless. ‘Oh,’ he thought, ‘I wish I had phoned after all, then this episode would have been over and done with. Then it would just have been an exciting episode, which would have been over as far as I was concerned. But now I’m so restless,’ he thought, and decided to turn back.

For an instant, however, he wondered if he shouldn’t carry on all the same, up towards Briskeby and from there along Briskebyveien in order to go up Industrigata to Majorstua and to the police station in Jacob Aalls gate. ‘After all, I can report it now,’ he thought. ‘Then it is over and done with. Certainly I might run into some unpleasantness, because I haven’t told them before, but everybody is bound to understand, if they just try to understand, that it can happen to the best of people.’ For an instant he was so strongly tempted by the idea of carrying on up towards Briskeby, along Briskebyveien, right up to Majorstua
police
station, that he felt positively relieved by the very possibility of it. But no sooner had he felt this sense of relief coursing through his body than he realised that these were in any case just idle thoughts, which could cheer him up true enough, momentarily, but which he was never going to act on, and he decided once and for all to stop toying with such hypothetical ideas, which only led him deeper and deeper into the mire, or so he put it to himself, whilst he turned and walked back down Niels Juels gate towards Skillebekk again. He headed back home, anxious to see if anything had happened. He managed to stop himself looking over at the window in the other apartment building, while he himself was down on the street, in front of the building where he lived, with the other building on the other side of the street, and waited until he had unlocked the door at the front entrance and had gone up the stairs to his own apartment and let himself in there and gone over to the window. No. It was the same.

‘Pull yourself together,’ he told himself urgently. ‘You have been gone
for
half an hour on Christmas morning, to be exact from 12.45 p.m. to 1.15 p.m.; how do you imagine that anything could have happened at the window in such a short space of time? Hope, well, yes, but it’s a faint hope. Something will happen over there sometime, but it needn’t happen today. Calm down. Think about something else.’ But he could think of nothing else.

‘I have to talk to someone,’ he thought. ‘I must call someone.’ He thought about his friends, which of them he should call, and while he was thinking about it, he remembered that tomorrow, on Boxing Day, he was of course supposed to go to Nina and Bernt Halvorsen’s place for dinner. ‘I can wait till then,’ he thought. ‘I’ll talk to Bernt about it. He is a doctor after all.’ He was invited for seven o’clock, and if he arrived an hour earlier, then he and Bernt would have plenty of time to talk, while Nina was in the kitchen getting the food ready, he thought. Bernt most likely only has to see to the wine, uncork it and put it beside the heater to bring it to the right temperature, and while Bernt Halvorsen saw to that, he could explain. The thought of this calmed him. All he had to do was to stick it out for just over a day, and then he could explain. He’d manage that. He could bear it for that long. He went into the kitchen and had a look at the lutefisk he had in the fridge. Took it out and felt it. It was nice and firm, you can keep lutefisk in the fridge for a whole day, as long as you buy prime quality fish, he thought, and put the fish back in the fridge again. He wasn’t going to dine until evening. In the meantime he was going to read a good book, whatever he meant by that, he thought. And along with the book he’d have a drink. With dinner: beer and aquavit. With the coffee: cognac.

And that was the way it turned out, you might say. Professor Andersen woke up the next morning with a bad hangover. It was still snowing. The roar of snowploughs could be heard everywhere, as well as the grating sound they made as they scraped the snow off the road surface on Drammensveien. The curtains in the window opposite were still drawn. The rectangular curtains which covered the whole window, in an extremely compact manner. Professor Andersen had
repeatedly
gone across and looked over at the other side of the street, yesterday Christmas Day, and last night, and he did so frequently this day, too. He was looking forward to the dinner party at Nina and Bernt Halvorsen’s. As early as five in the afternoon he left his apartment, because he suddenly decided that he wanted to walk all the way to Sagene.

He walked up Niels Juels gate to Riddervolds Plass, after that up Camilla Colletts vei and Josefines gate to Homansbyen and Bislet. From Bislet: up Dalsbergstien to Ullevålsveien and St Hanshaugen, then steeply down Waldemar Thranes gate to Alexander Kiellands Plass. From there he walked along Maridalsveien up to Vøien Bridge, and up there, in a small house beside the River Aker whose grassy banks were now covered in snow, lived the Halvorsens, the married couple, both doctors, who had invited him to dinner. He walked along calmly at first, slowly, in fact, through the driving snow and the Yuletide darkness towards Riddervolds Plass and Bislet, because he had plenty of time and did not want to
arrive
too early; after all, he intended to arrive at six o’clock for a dinner he was invited to at seven. But even before he was at Bislet he noticed that his pace had quickened, because he had a burning desire to carry out his plan, and so, when he was at St Hanshaugen and about to start on the descent to Alexander Kiellands Plass, he felt good and warm and longed to reach his destination, so that he might give vent to the thoughts burning inside him. Because he knew why he had put himself in this situation. He couldn’t have acted otherwise. He had witnessed a murder, and hadn’t reported it. No, indeed, he had not. He didn’t have the slightest inclination to do so, and he knew why. The murder had happened. That was the issue, something irreversible had happened, something he had witnessed. He couldn’t warn them about something irreversible. If he had witnessed a burglary, had he, for instance, seen there were thieves in that same apartment, who were carrying out a television and a stereo, then he wouldn’t have hesitated to call the police. Because then it would have
been
urgent. Likewise if there had been a fire. If he had seen smoke seeping out of the window, or smelt it, he would, of course, have called the fire brigade without a moment’s hesitation. And, well, if he had witnessed a vicious assault down on the street, and it had looked as though one of them was killing the other, then he would have run over to the phone and called the police. And while he waited for the police, he would have considered intervening himself in order to stop the abuse, if he hadn’t been too cowardly, that is. Well, let’s say that he had been too cowardly, and one person had battered the other to death before the police arrived, while he stood and watched it, then he would it is true have had dreadful pangs of conscience to contend with, but he could have lived with that, yes, he damn well could live with that, he thought defiantly, and, coward or not, he would certainly have called the police. There was no doubt about that, because that phone call could have prevented something irreversible happening. But he had been a witness to something irreversible, and there was nothing he could do. He couldn’t make things better by calling to notify them that
it
had happened. The murder, which he’d witnessed, was an accomplished fact. ‘I can’t tell them about this. The only outcome would be the murderer’s arrest.’ And the murderer might well be caught, but not on account of him, Professor Andersen, intervening and notifying them that the man had committed a murder. The idea was distasteful to him.