The Hidden Child (33 page)

It was Per who opened the door when Frans rang the bell.

‘Grandpa,’ Per said, looking like a puppy that needed a pat on the head.

‘What have you got yourself mixed up in?’ said Frans brusquely, stepping inside.

‘But I . . . he . . . he was talking a lot of bullshit. Was I just supposed to take it, or what?’ Per sounded hurt. He thought that if anyone would understand, it would be his grandfather. ‘Besides, it was nothing compared to what you’ve done,’ he added defiantly, though he didn’t dare look Frans in the eye.

‘That’s exactly why I know what I’m talking about!’ Frans took the boy by the shoulders and gave him a shake, forcing his grandson to look at him.

‘Let’s go in and sit down and have a talk, then maybe I can knock some sense into that stubborn head of yours. Where’s your mother, by the way?’ Frans looked around for Carina, ready to fight for his right to talk to his grandson.

‘Probably sleeping it off,’ said Per, slouching into the kitchen. ‘She started drinking as soon as we got home yesterday and was still at it last night when I went to bed. But I haven’t heard anything from her in a while.’

‘I’ll just go in and say hello. In the meantime make us some coffee,’ said Frans.

‘But I don’t know how to make . . .’ Per began in a whiny tone of voice.

‘Then it’s time you learned,’ snapped Frans, heading for Carina’s bedroom.

‘Carina,’ he said loudly as he went into her room. The only sound was a loud snoring. She lay halfway off the bed, one arm touching the floor. The room smelled of stale booze and vomit.

Taking a deep breath, Frans went over to her. He placed his hand on her shoulder and shook her.

‘Carina, time to get up.’ No reaction. He glanced around. The door to the bathroom opened right off her bedroom. He went in and turned on the taps to run her a bath. As the water poured into the tub, he began undressing her, unable to hide his disgust. It didn’t take long, since she was wearing only her bra and underwear. He wrapped her in a blanket, carried her to the bathroom, and without further ado put her in the tub.

‘Jesus Christ!’ snorted his former daughter-in-law in a daze. ‘What are you doing here?’

Frans didn’t reply. Instead, he went over to her wardrobe, opened the door, and selected some clean clothes for her. He set them on the toilet next to the tub.

‘Per is making coffee. Dry yourself off, get dressed, and come out to the kitchen.’

For a moment it looked like she might refuse. Then she nodded submissively.

‘So, have you figured out the art of using the coffeemaker?’ he asked Per, who was sitting at the kitchen table examining his cuticles.

‘It’s probably going to taste like shit,’ Per grumbled. ‘But at least I tried.’

Frans studied the pitch-black liquid that had started trickling into the glass pot. ‘It looks plenty strong, at least.’

For a long time, he and his grandson sat at the table across from each other, not speaking. It was such a strange feeling to see his own history in somebody else. He could glimpse traces of his own father in the boy. Traces of the father that he still regretted not killing. Maybe everything would have been different if he’d done that. Summoned up all the rage boiling inside of him and directed it at the one person who truly deserved it. Instead, his anger had seeped out in a totally different direction, without any purpose. And it was still there. He knew that. He just didn’t let it run riot as he had when he was younger. Now he was in control of his fury, and not the other way around. That was what he had to make his grandson understand. There was nothing wrong with his anger, but he needed to make sure that he was the one who decided when to let it loose. Anger was an arrow to be released in a controlled manner, not an axe to be swung wildly. Frans had tried that method and as a result he’d spent much of his life in prison, and his only son couldn’t bear to be in the same room with him. He had no one else. The men in the organization were not his friends. He’d never made the mistake of assuming that they were, or tried to make them friends. They were all too consumed with their own rage to establish that sort of a relationship with each other. They shared a goal. That was all.

He looked at Per and saw his father. But he also saw himself. And Kjell. He’d done his best to get to know his son during the brief family visits to the prison and those short periods when he was actually at home. But it was an endeavour doomed to failure. If he was honest with himself, Frans didn’t even know whether he really loved his son. Maybe he had once. Maybe his heart had once leapt when Rakel brought along their son to see him in prison. But he no longer remembered.

The strange thing was that as he sat there at the kitchen table with his grandson, the only love he could ever recall feeling was for Elsy. A love that was sixty years old, but it was still etched in his memory. Elsy and his grandson. They were the only people he’d ever felt any affection for. They had managed to elicit some sort of emotion from him. But it was dead now. His father had killed everything else. Frans hadn’t thought about it in a long time. About his father. Or all the rest. But recent events had made the past come alive for him. And now it was time to think about it again.

‘Kjell will be furious if he finds out that you came here.’ Carina stood in the doorway. She swayed a bit, but she was clean and dressed. Her hair was dripping wet, and she’d draped a towel over her shoulders so her shirt wouldn’t get wet.

‘I don’t care what Kjell thinks,’ said Frans drily. He got up to pour some coffee for Carina and himself.

‘This doesn’t look drinkable,’ she said as she sat down and stared at her cup, filled to the brim with the pitch-black brew.

‘Drink it,’ said Frans, opening cupboards and drawers.

‘What are you looking for?’ asked Carina, taking a sip and making a face. ‘Leave my cupboards alone!’

Frans didn’t reply as he pulled out one bottle after another and methodically poured the contents down the sink.

‘You have no right to interfere!’ she shouted at him. Per got up to leave.

‘Sit down,’ said Frans, pointing at his grandson. ‘We’re going to get to the bottom of this.’

Per obeyed at once, sinking back on to his chair.

An hour later, after all the booze had been dumped out, only the truth was left.

Kjell stared at his computer screen. Feelings of guilt had been gnawing at him ever since the police had come to see him yesterday. He knew he should go and see Per and Carina, but he just couldn’t bring himself to do it. He had no idea where to start. What scared him was the realization that he was starting to give up. He could fight external enemies. He could direct all his energy to combatting the power-mongers and neo-Nazis and wage battles with windmills, no matter how big they were. But when it came to his former family, when it came to Per and Carina, it was as if he had no strength left. It had been sapped by a guilty conscience.

He looked at the photo of Beata and the kids. Of course he loved Magda and Loke, and he wouldn’t want to live without them. But at the same time, it had all happened so fast, gone so wrong. He’d landed in a situation that had swept him away, and sometimes he still wondered if it had caused more harm than good. Maybe it was just the timing that had been unfortunate. Maybe he’d been going through some sort of midlife crisis, and Beata came along at just the wrong moment. At first he couldn’t believe it: an attractive young girl like her, interested in someone like him. But it had turned out to be true. And he hadn’t been able to resist sleeping with her, touching her firm, naked body, seeing the admiration in those eyes. It was nothing short of intoxicating. He couldn’t think clearly, couldn’t take a step back and make any sort of rational decision. Ironically enough, he’d just begun to show the first signs of coming to his senses when he’d lost all control of the situation. He had started to tire of the fact that she never offered any counter-arguments in their discussions, that she knew nothing about moon landings or the revolt in Hungary. He was even growing tired of the feeling of her smooth skin under his fingers.

He could still remember the moment when everything fell apart. It seemed like only yesterday, that she’d looked at him with those big blue eyes and told him that he was going to be a father, that now he would finally have to tell Carina, as he’d long promised to do.

It was at that moment he realized what a mistake he’d made. For a second he considered getting up and leaving her there in the café, going home to lie down on the sofa next to Carina to watch the news on TV while five-year-old Per slept soundly in his bed. But his male instinct told him that there was no going back. There were mistresses who wouldn’t dream of telling the wife, and there were mistresses who would delight in revealing every last detail of the affair. He had no doubt which category Beata fell into. She wouldn’t care who or what she crushed if he dared to crush her first. She would stomp on his life, destroy his very existence without looking back. And he would be left behind with the pieces.

And so he had chosen the coward’s way out. Terrified of ending up alone in some shitty bachelor’s flat, staring at the walls and wondering what to do with his life, he’d taken the only way remaining to him. Beata’s way. She had won. And he’d walked out on Carina and Per. Cast them aside like rubbish on the side of the road, even he could see that. In the process he had destroyed Carina. And he’d lost Per. That was the price that he’d paid for the touch of youthful skin under his fingertips.

Maybe he could have held on to Per if he’d been able to ignore the guilt that settled like a heavy stone on his chest every time he so much as thought about the two he’d left behind. But he wasn’t capable of doing that. He’d made sporadic attempts, played the authority figure, played the father on rare occasions, with miserable results.

Now his son was a stranger to him. And Kjell didn’t have the energy to try again. After a lifetime spent hating the father who had abandoned him and his mother in favour of a life in which they had no part, he had done the same thing to his own son. He had turned into his father, and that was the bitter truth.

He pounded his fist on the table, trying to replace the pain in his heart with a physical pain. It didn’t help. Then he opened the bottom desk drawer to look at the only thing that could distract his mind from this torture.

There had been a moment when he had considered handing the material to the police, but at the last second the professional journalist in him had put on the brakes. Erik hadn’t given him much. When he came up to Kjell’s office, he’d spent quite a while talking in circles, obviously uncertain how much he wanted to divulge. At one stage he’d seemed about to turn on his heel and leave without having revealed anything at all.

Kjell opened the folder. He wished he’d managed to ask Erik more questions, to get some pointers as to where he ought to look. All he had were a few newspaper articles that Erik had given him, without comment or explanation.

‘What do you expect me to do with this?’ Kjell had asked, throwing out his hands.

‘That’s your job,’ was Erik’s reply. ‘I know it might seem strange, but I can’t give you the whole answer. I don’t dare. So I’m giving you the tools – you can do the rest.’

And then he’d gone, leaving Kjell sitting at his desk with a folder containing three articles.

Kjell scratched his beard and opened the folder. He’d already read through the material several times, but other things kept coming up that had prevented him from giving his full attention to the task. If he were to be completely honest, he had also questioned the wisdom of devoting any time to it. The old man might just be senile. And if he was really in possession of material as explosive as he’d intimated why hadn’t he explained things better? But with Erik Frankel’s murder, he began to look at the folder in a different light. He was ready to give it his all now. And he knew exactly where to begin: with the common denominator in all three articles. A Norwegian resistance fighter by the name of Hans Olavsen.

Chapter 26
Fjällbacka 1944

‘Hilma!’ Something in Elof’s tone of voice made both his wife and daughter dash out to meet him.

‘Heavens, how you’re shouting. What’s going on?’ exclaimed Hilma, but her voice trailed off when she saw that Elof was not alone. ‘Are we having guests?’ she asked, nervously wiping her hands on her apron. ‘I was just in the middle of washing the dishes.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Elof assured her. ‘The boy won’t mind how things look in the house. He came on the boat with us today. He was fleeing from the Germans.’

The boy held out his hand to Hilma and bowed when she shook it.

‘Hans Olavsen,’ he said in his lilting Norwegian. Then he held out his hand to Elsy, who shook it awkwardly, giving a little curtsey.

‘He’s had a hard time on the way here, so maybe we could offer him some refreshment,’ said Elof. He hung up his peaked cap and handed his coat to Elsy, who held it in her arms without moving.

‘Don’t just stand there, girl. Hang up your father’s coat,’ he said sternly, but then he couldn’t resist stroking his daughter’s cheek. Considering the dangers that now accompanied every voyage, it always felt like a gift when he was able to come back home and see Elsy and Hilma again. He cleared his throat, embarrassed to have succumbed to such emotion in the presence of a stranger. Then he motioned with his hand.

‘Come in, come in. I’m sure Hilma will find something nice for us,’ he said, sitting down on one of the kitchen chairs.

‘We don’t have much to offer,’ said his wife, her eyes lowered. ‘But what little we have, we will gladly share.’

‘I’m sincerely grateful,’ said the boy, sitting down across from Elof as he hungrily eyed the plate of sandwiches that Hilma was setting on the table.

‘All right, help yourself,’ she said, and then went over to the cupboard to pour a little dram of aquavit for them both. Liquor was scarce, but this seemed a proper occasion for it.

They ate in silence. When there was only one sandwich left, Elof pushed the plate towards the Norwegian boy, urging him with a glance to take it. Elsy watched surreptitiously as she stood next to the counter, helping her mother. This was all so exciting. In their very own kitchen was somebody who had fled from the Germans, coming all the way here from Norway. She couldn’t wait to tell the others. Then a thought occurred to her, and she almost couldn’t stop the words from spilling out. But her father must have had the same thought, because he asked the very question that was on her mind.