The Last Pilgrim (29 page)

For a moment they stood in the entryway, as if they were both thinking that maybe they didn’t know each other well enough for this sort of thing. Then Hadja leaned forward, and they ended up giving each other a hug. She even patted him on the back.

“I’m glad you’re here, Tommy.”

When she let him go, her eyes gleamed in a way that almost made him regret accepting the invitation. He wasn’t sure whether he was up to meeting the expectations that she seemed to have.

“I hope you don’t think I’m completely nuts,” said Hadja. She took off the turban with another laugh, and Tommy started to feel more relaxed.

“You’re not nuts,” he said.
You’re fantastic,
he thought.

“Help yourself to some wine. I just need to get changed. Okay?”

She picked up one of the wine bottles and handed it to him.

“Then we can get dinner going. I was so late getting home . . . But you’re a good cook, aren’t you?”

“An excellent cook,” said Bergmann, staring at the door to Sara’s room, which was covered with posters of teen idols. He barely recognized any of them.

Bergmann gripped the wine bottle firmly and went into the living room. It was a one-bedroom apartment with a big, bright living room and a spacious balcony with scenic views. Above the gray-upholstered sofa hung a big expressionist lithograph in black and white. He stood there, studying it. Only then did he notice the music playing. On the corner bookcase he saw what looked like a newer model of record player. From the old JBL speakers came the low tones of Radka Toneff’s version of “My Funny Valentine.” The
Fairytales
LP cover had been tossed on the floor. He shook his head.

“What?” said Hadja behind him. She was barefoot, wearing a light summer dress, her head tilted to one side.

“Nothing,” said Bergmann. “This just reminds me of something.”

“What does?”

“The bookcase, the music, the record player . . . I grew up with all this.” The music reminded him of his childhood in a similar apartment, with lung mash and blood pudding for supper, the feminist magazine
Sirene
on the bookshelf, and the smell of cigarette smoke lingering in the air. Along with the music of Radka Toneff and Joni Mitchell and expensive prints on the walls, which had taken several years of savings to buy. And a mother whose hair was almost as dark as Hadja’s. Bergmann had to smile.

“Sorry. My mother used to listen to that record. I could put on something else. It’s kind of depressing, isn’t it?”

“No,” said Bergmann, touching her arm. “Keep it on. I like her.”
My dear Hadja,
he thought, stealing a glance at her as she went back to the bathroom.
Will our mothers be the connection that brings us together?
Then his eyes fell on a photograph next to one of the speakers. A dark-haired woman standing on a dock, probably Sørlandet, and holding a three- or four-year-old Hadja in her arms. She was smiling at the photographer, wearing the pastel colors typical of the seventies.

Before the food was ready—lamb chops that she’d soaked in a chermoula marinade the night before—they’d each finished off a couple of glasses of wine. Bergmann was feeling pleasantly muddled as he went to the bathroom to splash cold water on his face. They were not alike at all at first glance, yet he already felt as if they were quite similar deep down. Or maybe it was just that there was something about her that made him feel relaxed and happy. The way Hadja spoke to him—the calm and confident air she exuded—made him almost feel like a different person. As he dried his hands on the towel, he happened to catch sight of two packets of sleeping pills on the shelf under the mirror.
That’s not so unusual,
he told himself. When he’d done shift work, he’d sometimes taken one of Hege’s pills to be able to sleep during the day. And Hadja was a nursing assistant. That was explanation enough.

They ate their dinner out on the balcony, and Hadja talked openly about her life, as if they’d known each other for years. He occasionally asked a question or told her a few things about himself, but she did most of the talking. The trust she showed by confiding in him made her seem even more beautiful, but it also made him a bit nervous. He was relieved, however, that he didn’t have to say much about himself.

“Mama committed suicide when I was fifteen, so after that it was just Papa and me. And when I came back home from the States, pregnant with a black man’s child, he washed his hands of me. He’s such a hypocrite. Down in Morocco he’s a Muslim when it suits him. He goes to the mosque when he pleases, then has a drink when he comes home. You see?”

Bergmann lit a cigarette for her.

“I shouldn’t be bothering you with all this, Tommy.”

He shook his head and emptied his glass. Although it was already 11:30, it was still warm enough to sit outside. A few kids were playing six stories below. He was feeling giddy from the wine, from the fragrance of all the jasmine and lavender plants she had on the balcony, from the sight of her, and from the fact that she’d placed her bare feet in his lap. He ran his hand lightly up and down her calves. Not once did it occur to him that this was going much too fast.

“My father was a liberal Muslim while Mama was alive. Ours was an artist’s home. He ran a restaurant and looked the other way regarding Mama’s love affairs. She painted, and the apartment was always full of people. But after she died, he changed. It was as if he was scared that I’d turn out like her. So he suddenly insisted that I start acting like an obedient Muslim girl. I moved in with my aunt and started at the local Catholic high school . . .” She paused and stared into the distance. She didn’t speak for several minutes as her cigarette burned down.

“How long were you married?” she asked at last.

“We were never married.”

“Was she the one who broke it off?”

Bergmann hesitated before answering.

“Yes.”

“What a fool she was,” said Hadja.

She took his hand.

He couldn’t remember how long it had been since he’d kissed anyone. Hege had left the previous August.
A year,
he thought to himself.

“The first time I saw you,” she said quietly. She was now sitting astride him and didn’t say anything more. She simply leaned forward and put her arms around him, breathing hard.

Bergmann stopped thinking altogether.

Not even when he lay down on the sofa in the living room did he allow himself to think. All he did was stare at the petite woman walking around the room half-naked, turning off the lights, one by one, until finally the only light left came from the summer night outside.

CHAPTER 35

Friday, May 28, 1942

Kristian Augusts Gate

Oslo, Norway

From the window Agnes Gerner could see a National Police patrol walking up the street toward the Royal Palace. A black-clad police officer led the way with determined strides. The young militia boys followed like a flock of ducklings, eager to put into action the orders issued by the man in front of them. A small German military column passed, heading in the opposite direction. The three trucks drove in single file, one of them filled with Wehrmacht soldiers who were waving to several girls on the sidewalk. The police officer raised his arm in greeting. A little farther down the street, he badgered two young men who had stopped to have a smoke.

Agnes pressed her head against the windowpane, offering up a silent prayer that those two men had the proper identification papers. The National Police had standing orders to open fire on anyone who tried to flee from having their ID examined, and this particular officer looked like he wouldn’t mind enforcing such orders. Agnes murmured a curse. She would have loved to end the life of one of these Norwegian Nazis instead of going to bed with them. So many times she had asked both the Pilgrim and Number 1—on the rare occasion when they spoke—whether this was all she could do. Wasn’t there more they needed from her? She gave a start when the phone rang on the executive secretary’s desk beyond the potted plants. The door to Helge Schreiner’s office stood open, and he hadn’t gone out for lunch. So she was going to have to take the call.

It rang four times before Schreiner appeared in the doorway. His expression was businesslike, though he’d had a hard time hiding the fact that their breakup had been haunting him nearly every hour of the day and night.

“Could you answer the phone, please?” he said, leaning against the doorframe.

Agnes nodded and walked over to the other side of the reception area.

“Schreiner and Willum Attorneys at Law,” she said. She cast another glance out the window, mostly to avoid the pleading look in Schreiner’s eyes. He stood there like a beseeching dog, eager to sit at her feet and obey her slightest command. The police must have taken the two young men with them, since she couldn’t see them down on the street anymore.

Then she heard a voice on the phone say, “You’re the best thing that ever happened to me.”

“Gustav,” she said without thinking.

Schreiner’s face fell. He stared at her blankly for a few seconds, then backed away in an attempt to make a dignified retreat.

“I’ll send a driver to pick you up,” said Gustav Lande. “If that’s all right with you.”

Agnes hesitated before saying, “What . . . what should I bring with me?”

“Pack enough for the weekend,” said Lande. “I want you to feel comfortable. I want you to feel at home, Agnes.”

“I’ve been thinking about you,” she said.

Lande didn’t seem to know what to say.

“I’ve been thinking about you too,” he finally said.

In some other time,
she thought.
And some other place.

She agreed to be ready at three thirty. Absurdly, Agnes actually felt so elated that she walked right into Schreiner’s office and told him that unfortunately she would have to leave an hour early. Schreiner merely nodded with that hangdog look on his face.

“Gustav Lande, right?” he said.

Just before three thirty there was a knock on the door, startling Agnes. What if it was the Gestapo and not the driver?
Nonsense,
she told herself. She finished putting on her lipstick and studied herself one last time in the mirror. There was another knock.

When she opened the door, she saw a young man with a pale complexion. A glance at his collar insignia told her that he was a corporal, and his uniform indicated that he belonged to a regular Wehrmacht division. Thank God he wasn’t part of the SS.

“Fräulein Gerner,”
he said, clicking his heels together. “I have orders to take you to Herr Gustav Lande’s summer estate.”

“Yes,” said Agnes. “Good.”

“Allow me,” said the corporal, picking up her suitcase.

If only Christopher Bratchard could see me now,
she thought when they stopped at the checkpoint in Skøyen. The corporal nonchalantly handed his papers to the soldier, who had stuck his head in the window, just to make sure that the black BMW really belonged to the Germans. Agnes gave him a weary, uninterested look as she held out her papers too.

They drove down to Rødtangen in silence. The corporal didn’t say a single word to her, and not once did he glance in the rearview mirror. Nothing could have suited Agnes better. She closed her eyes and dozed, not waking until the car turned onto a bumpy road. The road headed down a steep slope, and there, nestled amid the dense woods, she caught a glimpse of a white chalet-style house and the mast of a sailboat gently rocking in the water.

Agnes was speechless as she stood, a short while later, at the end of the dock, with Gustav Lande’s hand on her shoulder and Cecilia’s little hand in hers. The whole setting seemed surreal. She turned back to cast her gaze over the big white house, the two bathing huts, and the reddish expanse of rocks between the dock and the garden, where a variety of fruit trees grew. She imagined what it would be like if all this belonged to her and the Pilgrim; what it would be like if the little girl holding her hand were theirs.

“Over there,” said Lande. “That’s Holmestrand, between Langøya and Bleikøya.” He stroked her shoulder and then took his pipe from his mouth to point. “And beyond Bleikøya is—”

“Goose Rump Island,” said Cecilia, letting go of Agnes’s hand so she could hide her mouth as she giggled.

“Is that true?” said Agnes. “Is that the real name of the island?”

“Yes,” said Cecilia.

“Are you sure you’re not the one who named it Goose Rump?”

Cecilia laughed even harder, and then all three of them were laughing. Agnes almost felt guilty when she saw how Gustav’s eyes sparkled. He actually believed in this whole charade. It was clear that he was envisioning a future in which he often found himself laughing out there on the dock. The sea breeze blew in from the open waters of the fjord, the slate roof on the white house gleamed in the bright sunshine, and the Norwegian flag fluttered gently in the warm wind. And the young woman standing here at his side would be his forever.

Thank God,
thought Agnes an hour later as the first guests began to arrive. Not because she hadn’t played her role perfectly. Or because her heart leaped every time Cecilia looked in her direction or openly showed her affection. What was unbearable was the thought that none of it was genuine.