Yours Until Death (21 page)

‘He was a naval officer.’

She nodded heavily.

‘And his name’s Richard Ljosne.’

She scowled. ‘How did you find that out, Veum?’

‘He told me himself – indirectly. Or else I jumped to some hasty conclusions which turned out to be not so hasty.’

I stood up. So now I knew. Without being entirely sure of what it told me or whether it told me anything. Maybe it was just a coincidence. Maybe when you start nosing around in
people’s backgrounds, their pasts, you always find a few
skeletons
in the cupboard. Everybody’s got them.

I handed her the bottle. ‘Here you are, Fru Pedersen. It’s a long time until morning.’

She took the vodka and glared at it. ‘Too many long nights, Veum. Too many bottles.’

I nodded. It was an epitaph I could use myself one of these days. ‘Take care of yourself. See you.’

‘Take care, Veum. Thanks for coming. Always nice to see you. Find your way out?’

‘Umm.’

The bottle lay between her thighs like an exhausted lover. I left. There was nothing more we could give one another. I’d asked my questions, she’d answered them. And I moved on. I was a swarm of locusts. I consumed everything I found. I left lives picked clean and nights emptied of their secrets behind me. I was the sun. I left a trail of scorched fields, dying forests and blasted lives behind me. But if the sun kills, it also gives life. Rain always follows a drought, winter always gives way to spring. But drought and winter always come first. The truth always demands first place in the queue. I cautiously left Hildur Pedersen’s life behind me.

Nothing more to do now. I was eaten up and burnt out myself.

I walked stiffly to the car park and my car. Put the key in the ignition, let in the clutch, turned the key.

No reaction, just an unwilling grunt.

I tried again, a little more violently. ‘Come on!’ I growled. Then I leaned my face against the windscreen. I should have caught on. The car wasn’t just stone dead. It had been murdered.

The shadows came alive around me. There were a lot of them this time. Not just five.

There were too many of them.

For a second I considered locking the car door. But then they’d just break the windows, slash the tyres, bash up the bonnet. Turn the car into a bigger wreck than it already was.

They came closer. Circled around the car. Dark oblong shadows with staring pale faces. Some were armed with steel pipes, bicycle chains and other charming weapons.

I’m not a brave man, just a little rash now and then. I began to sweat. My stomach turned queasy and my legs were weak.

They waited quietly in their circle around the car. The
distances
to the nearest high-rises seemed greater than those in the Sahara, and those winking lights as far away and as unreachable as the summit of Everest. Except for that lynch mob around my car, the car park was as empty and deserted as the Pacific. I felt as if even the Lyderhorn was leaning forward expectantly. Just like them.

I got out of the car. Fast. There were twelve or thirteen of them and my only chance was to hold them at bay by talking. Find an opening and get out of there as fast as I could and hope to all the gods that it was fast enough.

But Joker had learned. Before I could open my mouth, I heard him say, ‘Get him!’

And they got me.

They came on so fast I hardly had time to put up my fists. I could feel fingers, fists, legs, boots and steel pipes hitting my
body’s tender spots. A bicycle chain cut through my clothes and slashed my underarm. I was thrown, slammed into the car on my way down and was kicked in the chin before I hit the pavement. I felt a knee in my stomach and fists hammering my chest.

I aimed a blow upward, hit something hard. Saw something soft, swore, and was kicked in the groin. Heard ugly singing inside me. Somebody laughed. I could hear them cursing.

I curled up. Covered my head with my elbows, bent my head down as far as I could, and pulled my thighs up over my most vulnerable parts.

My eyes were streaming. I couldn’t help it. I was crying as much from fury and humiliation as from pain and fear. Is this it? I thought. So undignified? So unfair?

I passed out. The hard ground relaxed under me, as open and soft as a feather bed. A wonderful warmth spread through my body. A warmth that burned away all the pain, a great numbing warmth.

They’d begun to let up now. A last boot in the small of my back, a contemptuous kick at a helpless leg, a gob of spit in my face. It wasn’t just tears wetting my face now. It was something stickier, more viscous.

Suddenly somebody was very very dose. I felt thin hard fists yanking me up. Through a shimmering red veil I could see a face shoved into mine, a pale, cold face. A priest. ‘I warned you, Veum. You’ll stay away from my mother for keeps now.’

Then he let me go and I sagged to the ground. It didn’t hurt. It was soft and warm. The only thing I wanted to do was sleep and sleep …

I heard footsteps going away. They sounded like a herd of buffalo. Then it was quiet. And then the voice was back.
Somewhere above me the sharp toe of a boot, a toe sank into my side.

The voice said, ‘And if you think you’re the only one who pussyfoots around your whore, you’re wrong. People were winning that jackpot long before you showed up!’

A last kick and then a pair of feet going away. The
thunderangel
flew over a burning meadow.

I raised my head and tried to see him. See whether he was carrying a fiery sword and wearing a halo of flames. But what was the point in raising my head?

I lay on the ground, half aware of the smell of petrol and oil from my car. Looked up into an uneven lunar landscape of rust and hardened dirt. I was in a canopy bed whose canopy was grey, brown and black, a canopy of rotting silk edged with spiders’ webs and mouse shit. And there was a strong smell. A smell of death.

I vomited. Slowly and gently. I was on my back.
Immobile
. And then I could feel it welling up, my mouth filling and running over, my injured lips opening. And then I threw up, as slowly and carefully - as if it were the tenderest, most
sensitive
kiss.

And then I slept.

‘Hello?’

I was asleep. I was in heaven. A woman whose hair was neither blonde nor brown nor red carefully bent over me. I felt her breath on my face. Her face was beautiful and she was old enough to have acquired some laugh-lines round her eyes. Her lips …

‘Hello?’

Her lips. I tried not to lose the vision of her lips. I hung on to the picture of those lips …

‘Hey you! Are you dead or something?’

I opened my eyes. It hurt. It was like opening a rusty cake tin jammed shut two Christmases ago. My field of vision was edged with rust, and the man bending over me was twins. And then triplets. And then twins again.

I firmly closed my eyes.

‘Hello?’

Somebody was calling in the darkness. But where was that somebody calling in the forest?

‘Hello.’ That was my voice and it scared me so much I opened my eyes. The man had stopped being twins, but my voice sounded like a two-voiced men’s choir with the castrati on the left. The face bending over me was elderly. About sixty. Only sixty-year-olds these days talk to people who lie dying under old cars. ‘Is something wrong?’ he asked.

‘Hello,’ I said.

‘Is something wrong?’ he repeated. Louder this time.

I could see him clearly now. He had an old man’s
moustache
: white and brown. His mouth was dark and his teeth were brown. His eyes seemed black, his face white. His hair under the hat was grey-white.

He wore a scarf and a dark heavy coat. One hand held a cane. The other hung by his side as if it weren’t his.

I tried standing but settled for sitting. The car park whirled around me. I leaned heavily against the car and patiently waited for the universe to settle down again.

‘You’re bleeding,’ he said.

I lifted a hand to my face. It felt as if I were wearing boxing gloves. I felt my face. It was wet. And tender.

‘You don’t look so good,’ the man above me said.

‘I never have,’ I mumbled.

‘I beg your pardon, I didn’t hear you.’

I shook my head.

The car park settled down. I tried sliding upwards against the car door. It was working. Slowly. But I was extremely
nauseated
. I must have been severely concussed. If I still had a brain. I had the feeling it was slowly dripping from my face, on to my hands and then to the ground. From ground thou art come, to ground thou shalt return.

‘Was it those youngsters?’ he said.

‘No, no,’ I said. ‘I just enjoy lying around in car parks and looking up under my car. Best view in the world.’

He nodded understandingly. ‘I can tell you’ve been beaten up. It’s a shame. Want me to call the police? Or a doctor?’

‘A doctor? At this hour?’ I tried to laugh.

‘Does it hurt?’ he said anxiously.

‘Only when I laugh,’ I said.

But it also hurt when I stopped laughing. ‘Do you know anything about cars?’ I said.

He lit up. ‘I had a Graham once. From before the war until 1963. They knew how to make cars back then.’

‘Well. This isn’t what you’d call a car. More like a piece of junk on wheels, but if you could help me open the bonnet …’

I turned around. That was a mistake. One leg sort of gave way under me, and the car wasn’t where it had been. I was aware that I stood and leaned towards the ground for a minute before it spun and gave me a rabbit-punch.

‘Hello? Hello!’ More than one voice now.

My stomach was in my throat. It contracted. I vomited again.

‘I’m going to get help,’ a voice said. ‘Stay where you are. Don’t move.’

‘I’ll try not to,’ I muttered.

The woman with that wonderful hair came back. But she was standing up now and her face was distorted: stretched on one side and shrunken on the other. It hurt to look at her. I opened my eyes.

I lay completely still and breathed slowly. Easy now, I said, just take it easy. And then I tried standing. Very very slowly. Very carefully. Braced myself against the car. It felt like raising a flag-pole with one hand tied behind your back.

But it worked. The ground stayed put under my feet, the car didn’t disintegrate behind my back. I gradually eased around to the front. Found the bonnet catch and squeezed it. That drained me.

The bonnet opened with a sullen click. I was dripping with sweat and little black dots exploded before my eyes like startled pheasants taking off.

I took a break. Then I lifted the bonnet and peered with tired sore eyes at that complicated Leyland engine.

They hadn’t gone in for real sabotage. I tightened the spark plugs and reconnected the fuel line. Then I stumbled back to the door, opened it and got behind the wheel. Turned on the ignition. The car started like an oldster suddenly in love. It was a little sluggish at first but once it got started, you couldn’t stop it.

I let the engine warm up, climbed out, made that endless trip back to the bonnet. Closed it and set out on the long journey back to the driver’s seat. I had to make a few stops on the way. Then I got a grip on the steering wheel and stared straight up. I was a little boy who sat there playing cars.

Then I took a deep breath, let out the dutch, turned out of the parking place and aimed at the entrance to the road. Two wheels were against the kerb, the other two in the road. I turned on to the road, found the right-hand drainage ditch and sighted along it.

It worked best when I dosed my left eye and drove between twenty and thirty kilometres an hour. And didn’t meet other drivers.

The lights coming toward me were confusing. They spread out in open formation and jumped up and down like a group of disoriented UFOs. And they were brighter than I’d ever remembered.

I had to stop five or six times to throw up along the way. I couldn’t leave the car and be sick on the shoulder. I just stayed where I was. But I tried to be discreet. When other cars went by I’d lean out and pretend I was checking the rear wheel, which was in fine shape.

If it had been the rush hour I’d never have made it to Bjørndalssvingen. But I made it all the way. Didn’t miss
Puddefjord Bridge and I remembered to get in the right lane after Sentralbadet.

I never found out what happened to the old man who’d once owned a Graham. Maybe he’s still looking for help. Which isn’t so easy to find these days.

It’s been said of Bergen’s City Emergency Room that they ought to write
Abandon all hope ye who enter here
in gold letters over the main entrance.

That’s an exaggeration. Most people survive. If they show the scars from the visit for the rest of their lives, well, that’s how it is. There’s no point in complaining if they feel worse when they leave than when they came.

They tell the story of a guy from eastern Norway, who once had to have an ankle set in the Bergen City Emergency Room. When he got back to Oslo and went for a check-up, the doctor took one look at the ankle and asked, ‘Bergen City
Emergency
?’ The terrified patient said yes, and the doctor called a bunch of medical students to gather round. They stared at the patient as if he were an extremely rare case. The doctor happily rubbed his hands together and said, ‘You have now learned how not to do it.’

Obviously you shouldn’t listen to stories like these. Mostly they’re untrue. You shouldn’t read medical textbooks either. And if you don’t have to, you shouldn’t go near Bergen’s City Emergency Room.

I parked. It was after ten so the main entrance was locked. A sign with an arrow on it directed me to an entrance by the driveway. I followed the arrow, walked up some wide concrete steps and came to a locked door and a door bell. After several misses, my finger found the bell.

Somebody in her late thirties and dressed in white opened the door. You could bet she wasn’t married and hadn’t ever entertained the idea. She looked as if she wanted to say we don’t buy at the door. But she held it open and I wobbled in.

‘What’s your problem?’ she said.

I pointed to my face. Which I felt should tell her something. ‘I’m so swollen,’ I said. ‘Could it be mumps?’

She looked sourly at me. Nodded towards a couple of chairs. ‘Sit down,’ she said, trotted down a hall and around a corner.

I looked around. Not a doctor in sight. A dark-skinned man hunched in one of the chairs. Black hair fell across his
forehead
. He was bleeding from an ugly cut over one eyebrow, his left ear looked as if it would fall off any moment and he was holding half of his teeth. His blood dripped in three separate pools on to the floor in front of him: slowly and rhythmically as if the blood were pumping straight from his heart.

I could hear a child crying behind a green curtain. A man in a taxi driver’s uniform paced back and forth, glaring at a sign that said he couldn’t smoke. He looked as if he might yank it off the wall and use it as a toothpick. He was big enough.

The place smelled of ether or whatever all these places smell of.

There was a washbasin and mirror over in one corner. I walked over and discovered it wasn’t a mirror. It was a painting of an extremely ugly person. It wasn’t until I raised my hand and felt what used to be my mouth that I understood that I was really looking at myself. It was too much. I ducked quickly out of range, but I filled the basin and tried to wash. When I looked in the mirror again, it looked more like me but not much. Even my mother would have had problems recognising me and old friends would have walked right by me in the street.

My eyes were gummy slits. Mouth two sizes too large and it sloped up towards one eye. My neck looked like one of those freak potatoes people are always taking around to the
newspapers
. And this morning’s beautiful skin had changed into a landscape that would have been a sensation at an agriculture seminar.

I plodded over to the foreigner and sat beside him.

He looked at me with black, mournful, baffled eyes. ‘I didn’t do anything to them,’ he said. ‘Why did they beat me up? Because I’m a different colour? Because I come from a different country? I don’t understand.’

I tried to answer but the words wouldn’t come.

He looked at me. Incredulous. ‘But you – you’re a
Norwegian
. And they beat you up. Why?’

‘I come from a different part of town.’

He shook his head despairingly, looked at the large white teeth shining in the pale palms of his hands. ‘I don’t
understand
it. I don’t understand why people beat each other up.’

A doctor came in. One of those young doctors they put on night duty. The kind who always has a snappy answer on his tongue and a soothing misdiagnosis in his back pocket. He stopped in front of us and looked us over. ‘Which one of you’s going to live longest?’ he said.

‘He was here first,’ I said.

‘He’s in the wrong place,’ he said. ‘He’s going to the dental clinic. He needs some spare parts.’ He motioned to the
foreigner
. ‘Come on, comrade. Let’s have a look at those cuts.’ And they disappeared behind a green curtain.

The taxi driver stopped pacing and stared at the curtain. ‘These fucking Pakis!’ he burst out. ‘Who the fuck are they to bitch? Move up here, take people’s jobs, they get what they deserve.’

I looked up to see whether he was talking to me.

He had a face like a quarry man, but the sledgehammer had smashed him back. Flat broad face. Twenty centimetres between his eyes. Nose as wide as a steam-iron and his mouth sagged to the right from holding a cigarette in the corner. I began to wonder whether I shouldn’t go home and go to bed. I could dream up my own nightmares.

‘You oughta hear ’em sitting in the back talking that shit. About girls. I don’t get the words – can’t understand a word they’re saying – but I get the music, know what I mean? Once I stopped the cab, turned around and told ’em: I’m telling you, don’t go waving your dirty black dicks at Norwegians. You better believe they shut up. Not a sound out of ’em rest of the trip. And I got a ten-kroner tip. What yer say to that?’

I didn’t say anything. I sighed.

‘And they got so fucking pure in this dump you can’t even smoke.’

‘Why don’t you go outside?’ I said cautiously.

‘See her face? Ring the bell once too often, she’d rip your stuff off you, take it home and plant it in a flowerpot. Wouldn’t think twice. You don’t wanna mess with that widow woman.’

The doctor and the foreigner emerged from behind the curtain and the foreigner was sent away to fill out some forms. The doctor turned to me. ‘And what trolley did you fall off?’

‘Sandvikey,’ I said. ‘Twenty years ago. It just takes a hell of a long time to get here.’

‘You’re one of the lucky ones.’

Twenty minutes later he said, ‘OK. Here’s a prescription. Get it filled and go home and go to bed. Stay quiet two or three days and take it easy a week at least. No sudden
movements
. No excitement. OK?’

No sudden movements? No excitement? I was in the wrong business. I ought to be working for a florist.

‘One more thing,’ he said. ‘Booze?
Nyet
!’

Before I left I took another look at the mirror to see if the same picture hung there. It did. They’d merely changed the style a little. Added some bandages, and some iodine.

I walked away with my life in my hands. Life’s a
prescription
scribbled by an inexperienced doctor on night duty. He’s got handwriting not a living soul can decipher. And the idea is nobody should be able to decipher it. The pharmacist takes a chance. We all do. That’s how life is: you survive if the
prescription’s
legible. If you’re given the wrong medicine, you get lucky and die.