The Cold Song (30 page)

IT HAD BEGUN
to snow as they were driving out of Oslo and the snow had followed them all the way to Mailund; there had been snow on the roads, on the windshield, on the children when they ran to and from the shop at the gas station to buy candy, on the trees, on the roofs, on the fields and barns and farmhouses, on the jetties, and on the long road that wound from the old bakery all the way up to the house; they had been here for two days now and it just kept on drifting down.

Christmas was coming and would be celebrated at Mailund.

“Couldn’t we just go and stay for a little while?” Siri had said.

She couldn’t decide what to do with her mother’s house. It had been in the family since just after the war and she didn’t want to sell it.

“We need the money,” she said, “but I just can’t imagine strangers living here.”

“No,” Jon said.

He looked at her. He was sitting on the sofa, she was standing with her back to him, looking out the window at the garden, the maple tree, the white flower bed, which was whiter now than it had ever been, covered by new-fallen snow. He longed to touch her.

Jon had recently applied for and gotten a temporary job as the editor for a new book club. He would be starting after Christmas, which was perfect. A proper job.

“But,” Siri said, “it would probably cost far too much for us to keep it.” She flung out her arms, as if to embrace the whole house. “I mean it’s completely run-down and I don’t know how you and I would ever be able to maintain it. We can’t afford to do it up and we can’t afford to maintain it, we can’t even afford to replace the boiler, never mind all the rewiring, I think the fuse box is from the fifties, and it would be horrible just to sit here and watch it all fall apart.”

“I could clean the gutters,” Jon said.

Siri turned and smiled. The light from the window fell on her face and he felt like telling her that she was so beautiful standing there in the light, but he didn’t, he knew that if he said
you are beautiful standing there in the light
she would shrug and turn away. Jon would have to invent an entirely new language, one that didn’t include the word
light
, if he was to get through to Siri.

Every morning over the past few months Jon and Leopold had taken a walk down to the butcher in Torshov to get Leopold his fresh meats; there weren’t too many butchers left in Oslo, but in Torshov there was a butcher, and a pretty little park where Jon could sit with a coffee while Leopold wandered about. Leopold no longer ran away like before and could be allowed to run loose.

It had started with the trip to the butcher, but Jon had found that he liked being in this part of town, he knew no one, no one knew him, and gradually he discovered that on these early-morning
walks he acquired what Strindberg once described as an
impersonal circle of acquaintance
. These were people whom he saw every single day but never spoke to. They all recognized one another, they nodded to one another, and that was that. An elderly man with a big, playful golden retriever. A pretty young mother of two on her way to nursery school with a four-year-old and a five-year-old. The four-year-old almost always lay down at the same spot in the road and howled that she was tired of walking. She wanted to be carried now. She would lie there on the pavement, all rigged out in a pink snowsuit, pink boots, and a pink woolen hat with rabbit ears. And her mother and five-year-older sister would turn to look at the tot and wait patiently until she couldn’t be bothered to lie there screaming on the pavement any longer. Reluctantly, then, the little girl would get up and join them.

Jon recognized a writer couple on their way to have breakfast. Each morning this husband and wife had breakfast together in the same coffee shop. Sometimes they held hands and he wondered what their lives were like, were they happy. Yes, he recognized them and they recognized him. But they respected each other’s reticence, it would never have occurred to any of them to stop and say
Hello
, or
How are you
, or, worse still,
How funny, seeing you here every day, do you live around here?
That would ruin everything. The writer couple would find somewhere else to have their morning coffee and Jon would find somewhere else to take his walks. A nod. A friendly, but not too friendly, smile. The impersonal circle of acquaintance, which had become Jon’s preferred (and only) circle of acquaintance, had its own unwritten rules. And rule number one was that you did not attempt, by look or word, to make anything
that could be construed as an approach, that you stayed within the bounds of the completely impersonal. For the most part this worked well, although some dog owners might cross the line by asking, “Is that a male or female you’ve got there?”

And not only does this leave Jon at a loss for words, he isn’t even sure what the correct answer is. Obviously he knows the sex of his dog. But he’s not sure whether Leopold being male is
good
(the other dog, according to its owner, is impossible around bitches) or
bad
(the other dog, regardless of sex, feels threatened by males). There are, Jon thought, a lot of situations in which it would be preferable for dogs (male or female) not to meet and sniff each other, as dogs do. Either dog A would want to mate dog B against dog B’s will, or dog C would develop an immediate antipathy toward dog D and this antipathy would be expressed by dog C attacking dog D; either that or dogs A, B, C, and D would get so excited and/or confused at running into one another that their leashes would get all snarled up and their owners would have a hard time disentangling them.

Jon much preferred to avoid the small talk that comes as a natural consequence of having a dog, so he suggested to Leopold that he should also retreat to a kind of canine version of the
impersonal circle of acquaintance
. Which was to say: No snuffling. No sniffing. Merely a little friendly tail-wagging from afar—and then move on.

Jon thought only good of all the new people he encountered every day on the way to the butcher and the park, and it was a great relief to him that he had not endangered his own self-containment by trying, for example, to stare the gorgeous
young mother of two to him. That he didn’t want to. That he didn’t have to.

His cell chirruped. He dug it out of his trouser pocket.

The worst thing is not knowing what happened, what became of her. The second worst is that today is a new day and tomorrow is another new day. A
.

Jon had taken one bench for his own and here he would sit in the autumn sunshine, making notes for his novel. (He always had his notebook with him, no longer trusting himself to remember what he wanted to remember; more than once he had found himself seeing something or overhearing something or even thinking something that seemed important, a flash of insight maybe, only, when he sat down at the computer later, to find that it was gone. He could recall the sense of elation that this flash of insight had engendered in him, but the
insight
itself was gone. And so, because he forgot things, even important things, he always carried a notebook in his pocket, and he wrote in this as often as he could.)

At home in his study he had gone through old work documents and found his notes about a woman with a kinked waist.

He thought of his wife.

“Do you think that’s how it is?” Siri had whispered, turning to him. He had pretended to be asleep, they had kept each other awake all night that summer in Gloucester, many years ago. First he had told stories to help her fall asleep and then, if she was still awake, she had told stories. He remembered her whispering, “Do you tell stories in order to become someone
else, Jon? Do you think it’s possible to put yourself in someone else’s place, to suffer, breathe, feel as they do?”

As October passed into November Jon had to take his walks to Torshov (to the butcher, the coffee bar, and the park) without Leopold. His walks with the dog became steadily briefer, amounting eventually to just a couple of turns around the block. Leopold no longer strained at the leash. Jon remembered the power of that big body. The fights he and Leopold had had over what sort of dog Leopold ought to be. But Leopold wasn’t interested in fighting anymore, and whenever they went for a walk he stuck close to Jon’s side, grateful and finally conquered.

Jon bought chicken giblets, hearts, liver, kidneys, and other offal at the butcher’s, but it got to the point where Leopold only sniffed at his food before lying down in a corner of the living room and going back to sleep. The last time the vet had examined him, he had scratched Leopold’s belly and said, “There’s not an awful lot we can do here, he’s not in any pain, although that can change from day to day, it’s already spread quite far,” and then he had looked at Siri and Jon and said, “The important thing now is for you to have a good Christmas together, hold him, massage his paws, and prepare yourselves for making some difficult decisions come the new year.”

Jon had gotten into the habit of waking early. He was up before six, showered, had breakfast and took a cup of coffee standing at the kitchen counter, whistled for Leopold, and off they went. When Leopold fell ill, he made a change in their routine. First he took Leopold for a little walk around the
house, then he took his own long walk to Torshov, and when he got back he sat down at his desk to write.

It was December now, and he was back at Mailund, and here too he woke early. He opened his eyes and for a brief moment everything was blank. He was no one. None. None thought. None flesh. None sleep. None waking. Before everything came flooding back to him. Before he remembered everything. The bright expanse between being and not being.

The first thing he did on waking was reach out his hand and touch Siri, she didn’t push him away, they were sharing a bed again, but more often than not she would roll over and carry on sleeping. She had started dreaming. Dreadful dreams that woke her in the middle of the night, and sometimes she told him about them and sometimes not. The dreams had started when Jenny died.
I should have done more
, she said, sitting up in bed. Jon took her hand and squeezed it in the way that she recognized, the way he had squeezed it when they were living in Gloucester and she couldn’t sleep, when they lay side by side in the dark and told each other stories. Siri lay down again, but didn’t settle. She should have been more alert! She should have taken better care! There was so much she should have said. But now her mother was dead and all that was said, was said and there was no way now to go back and start over. And then there was Alma.

We have to talk about Alma
.

Jenny died only days before the three boys found Milla in the woods. The young man known as K.B. was immediately
brought in for new questioning, his status was altered from witness to accused, he had been charged and remanded to custody.

But no one, except Jon, knew what Jenny had told Siri just days before she died, namely that she had seen Milla on the road that night.

“I know what I heard, Jon,” Siri told her husband. “I know what she was talking about. My mother wasn’t
that
mad. Sometimes I think she was only pretending.”

“Pretending what?”

“To be mad.”

“But why—it doesn’t make sense. Jenny was many things, but not a pretender.

“You know why?” Siri said. “You know why she pretended to be crazy? So that she could escape, so she could opt out.
What a relief. I’m a looney and can’t be held responsible for anything whatsoever. I’m no longer a member of normal human society
.“

“No, I don’t think that’s how it was, Siri” Jon said. “I think she was old and sad and very tired. I think her brain … I think her spirit was worn out.”

“She had, like, five bottles of wine and took Alma with her in the car for God’s sake …” Siri almost shouted. “She could have killed her, she could have crashed into a tree and killed her … she could have killed Alma!”

Jon nodded.

“So it was very convenient to start acting crazy after that. And then she tells me before she goes and dies that she and Alma might have been the last people to see Milla alive. Was she raving? Or was she actually speaking the truth and just pretending to rave? I don’t know! And what about Alma? What did Alma
see? What are
we
to do with this information? Do you think Alma saw anything that night and hasn’t told us? What do we tell the police? And Milla’s mother? What do we tell Amanda? She calls, sends text messages, and we say nothing. Oh, no. She’s a bit of a nuisance, isn’t she? With her grief and her texts and her telephone calls. Well, I mean, what can we do, except express our sympathy. What good is that? So we don’t even express sympathy. Amanda says,
You two know something about my daughter that you’re not telling
. And we say
No, we don’t
and then we tell each other that she too has been driven mad by suspicion and anger and grief. She sends text messages and calls and hangs up and we put up with it because she lost a daughter. But the fact is that she’s right! She’s right. We
do
know something and we’re not telling it and I don’t know what we should do.”

“Well, anyway,” Jon said quietly, “it wouldn’t have made any difference one way or the other. What we know, I mean. She’d still be dead.”

“That’s not true, Jon,” Siri said, “it’s not true what you say, that it doesn’t make any difference one way or the other. It’s not true!”

“What I mean,” Jon said quietly, “is that no one could have imagined what this K.B. character was capable of. He raped her, followed her in his car, killed her, and buried her in the woods. This is what we know. He’s the one who did it. And we don’t know anything about him … nothing except that until that evening he was just this ordinary kid living in this town among us.”

Siri and Jon had been having this conversation, or variations on this conversation, ever since Jenny’s admission during her
last days. Maybe, Jon said to Siri, Jenny had been talking about something else entirely. Well, they would never know now. But Siri mustn’t forget that toward the end it had been impossible to understand what Jenny said, she wasn’t in her right mind, and the craziness wasn’t an act, Jon insisted, she
was
crazy, and maybe Siri had conjured up this whole story about her mother and Alma seeing Milla there on the road, allowing her own fear and anxiety to weave themselves into disastrous events.