The Cold Song (16 page)

“Ow!” she said with a little laugh. “Sorry,” she added and gave him a kiss. “I know we’re not supposed to laugh. Or say ‘ow.’ ”

“We’ll turn back,” Jon said. “I’d better take a look at your ankle.”

So they turned and walked back up the stairs. Jon helped her to their bedroom, which was on the second floor, set her down on the bed, undressed her, propped pillows under her leg, packed ice cubes in a towel, and packed the towel around her ankle. Siri laughed and said that it didn’t hurt
that
much, and he kissed her ankle and then her knee, as if she was a little girl who had injured herself, and then he put his lips to the inside of her thigh, and then they fucked.

Jon was still in the garden, wandering from guest to guest,
I’m putting the finishing touches to a book at the moment, it’s coming out soon, at least I hope so, if I get it finished
, she had seen him talking animatedly to Ola and to Steve Knightley from Seattle and to Karoline and Kurt Mandl and it struck her that she had never liked Karoline, Jon’s vain little dentist friend from when he was young. Why couldn’t Karoline and
Kurt,
the Mandls
, have found a summer house somewhere else? Did they have to come here? She pictured Karoline’s face—so much insecurity and vanity squeezed into something so little and blond. Jon didn’t like her either, he had called her “humorless” and Siri had agreed. Sometimes they would laugh at how humorless Karoline had been on this or that occasion and how they really didn’t like her very much at all.

And Milla—she’s not helping. She’s in the way. It’s not working.
People are in the way. People must leave us in peace
. She repeated these phrases inside her head.
People are ruining things
.

Siri sat on the floor in the hallway and tried to summon the courage to climb up the stairs and fetch her mother, but something was not right. She lay down on the hardwood floor in a rustle of silk and closed her eyes.

Three years earlier Siri and Jon had gone to Gotland to see Sofia, her father’s Swedish widow. Sofia was going to sell the house in Slite and move into a two-room flat. According to Siri’s father’s will, some of the money from the sale was to go to her, so there were papers to be signed—and Siri and Jon and Leopold were going to have five days together on Gotland without the children.

Siri remembered laying a flower on her father’s grave, saying “I’ll be back!” even though nobody was there to hear her, she remembered picking
kajp
, a sort of wild chive that only grows on Gotland, and making soup for Sofia and Jon, and she remembered Jon and her taking the car out for a long
drive on the island and Jon hitting the brakes, whispering, “How about buying a house here on Gotland, a little limestone house where you and I and Alma and Liv could live?”

They had explored the island from Burgsvik to Fårö, visiting the medieval stone churches. Bunge church, Lokrume church, the cathedral in Visby, Hörsne church, Gothem church with its tall tower, Follingbo church with its painted ceilings, Eskelhem church, and Hamra church.

“You could start up a restaurant,” he said, “one that’s only open in the summer months and I’ll become a writer again, one who actually writes, we’ll sell the house in Oslo and clear our debts, we’ll know no one, bother with no one, it’ll just be us, you and me and Alma and Liv and Leopold and our love and all this.” He flung out his arms, embracing everything around him. The shifting lights of gray that were typical for Gotland, the grassy moors on Fårö that called to mind African savannas, the impressive rock formations—
raukarna—
that were four hundred million years old, the sand dunes, the cement works in Slite, the phantom ship out at Norsholmen.

“A little limestone house,” he said again.

Siri laughed and shook her head. She didn’t say anything, but if she had, it would have been:
You can’t just move to a strange place and think, oh yes, here I’ll be happy, here I’ll find peace, here I’ll be able to write my book
. They had climbed out of the car to take in the ghostly landscape that had unveiled itself to them on the way to the old limestone works at Furillen.

“Alma could go to a Swedish school and Liv could start at nursery school here,” Jon went on. “I bet there’s no problem
getting your kids into a good nursery school here, and they can both run in the woods and on the moors and pick scarlet poppies and swim in the sea until late in September.”

Siri stroked his hair and said that he should put it all in his book. It was nice. The limestone house, the love, and the poppies.

“I mean it,” he said softly. “I’m talking about something we could actually do.”

“But we don’t belong here, Jon,” Siri said. “We can’t just pack up and move. That’s not something we can do. I want to be with you, I want to be with Alma and Liv, I belong with the three of you, but I don’t belong here. This island has nothing to do with us. It doesn’t work that way.”

“Why can’t we just pack up and make a new start somewhere else?” Jon asked. “Why not? Where does it say that we can’t do that?”

“I don’t know,” Siri said. Her patience had run out. She got back into the car. “You just can’t. End of story.”

But Mailund was another matter.

After all the dreary summer cottages and houses lining the long road up from the little town, Mailund appeared like an oasis from another age, the age of white lace dresses, the age of straw hats, of handlebar mustaches, Rhenish wine, and croquet. Never mind that on moonlit autumn nights the place seemed to shine with an almost uncanny glow and in misty weather could look somehow forbidding, as if it were hovering a few feet above the ground. This was her childhood home, it had been in the family since 1947, Alma
and Liv had spent every summer here—this is where she belonged, for better or for worse. Siri knew every room, every bedroom, every inch of the vast kitchen (she could have cooked a meal blindfolded in there), every window, every threshold, every single wall, and every single floorboard on every single floor, at any time she could call to mind the various sounds that each room and each stair made, and the blue moonlight that caressed the furniture and ornaments in the front room or flickered over her big bed in the over-large bedroom on the second floor on all the nights when she could not sleep.

Siri looked up. She had been lying on the floor long enough. Now she must go and get her mother, drunk or sober.

Up the stairs, first door on the left.

Drag her out of her bed, down and out into the garden, kicking and screaming.

Here’s the birthday girl, everyone! Here she is!

When Siri was a little girl her legs often buckled under her and she would sit in the hallway like this and look around. As if she were readying herself. She came home from school, pulled off her satchel, shut the door, and flopped to the floor. After a little while she’d begin to listen. That was the whole point. To listen. The ticking of the grandfather clock in the living room. Faint rustlings on the first floor or in the kitchen. Where was Jenny? Was she back from work? Had she gone to work at all? Was she in a bad mood? Had she been drinking? It was the guessing game.

Where are we today?

Who are we today?

What do we do today?

What do we say today?

Every day was different, so Siri needed this time after she came home from school. To flop and ready herself. To dissolve and re-form. To lie or sit or stand perfectly still and listen. Become one big ear. Were those crying sounds she heard from Jenny’s bedroom? Singing? Snoring? Angry mutterings?

“Siri? Is that you?”

And you had to be able to interpret the tone of voice.

“I love you more than anything in all the world, Siri,” her mother might say and then burst into tears. “I don’t blame you, I really don’t, I just miss him so much.”

Her drinking escalated as the years after Syver’s death wore on, but then, when Siri was seventeen, Jenny stopped drinking quite decisively and hadn’t touched a drop until today, her seventy-fifth birthday, the day of the party, her fete.

Siri listened to the noises from the garden.

The voices, the music, the clinking glasses, the plates, the cutlery, the fluttering white tablecloths (she had put them on the tables, then taken them in, then put them on the tables again), snatches of conversation,
Have any of you seen anything of the birthday girl, No, neither have I
, all the different ways in which people laugh when they are gathered at a party, high and low, all the sounds that the guests don’t even hear: the wind, the sighing in the treetops, the first drops of rain,
I don’t think it’s going to rain. The forecast said rain, but you can’t trust the forecast
.

Her plan was to run up the stairs and knock, no,
bang
on Jenny’s door, and say that now she really did have to come downstairs, now it was time to honor her guests with her presence. Her plan was to take matters in hand. But Siri was still sitting on the floor, eyes fixed on the stairway.

She said: Get up and go to her.

Nothing.

And then she said: I’ll sit here awhile longer.

Siri gazed up at the stairway. It coiled its way through the house like a rattlesnake.
And together they had counted the stairs in between kisses
. She could hear Jenny moving about in her room. Siri stood up and stretched until the kink in her waist was barely noticeable under her long, pale blue silk dress.

Then she shouted at the top of her voice wincing at its shrillness: “Jenny Brodal! Mama!” She walked to the foot of the stairs. “Listen to me now, you’ve got to come down! The party’s started and your guests are all waiting for you!”

THE RAIN FILTERED
down, thin and gray, and the wind picked up and pulled and tugged at Milla’s red umbrella. No one could say exactly when she had left the party and gone down to the jetties. Maybe there were other parties that evening. The quayside was shrouded in mist. Milla bought a hot dog at the kiosk, she spilled ketchup on her red dress and gasped softly. A young man with fair hair turned, looked at Milla, and smiled.

“Love the red umbrella.”

Milla smiled back.

“Thanks. But I’ve stained my dress. Look.”

The boy, known to his friends as K.B., shrugged and spread his arms.

“Some summer evening, this, huh?”

“It was my birthday a few weeks back,” Milla said, thinking that he was good-looking, and that she should say something. “I’m nineteen now and about to start a new life.”

“Oh,
good
. How old are you?”

“Nineteen,” Milla said again.

“Shame about the weather, though,” he said. “Oh, and happy birthday.”

“Thanks.” Milla stared at the boy. “But that was weeks ago.”

The boy went on talking: “Good, good. Well, see you later maybe. I’m off to the Bellini to meet some people. Ever been to the Bellini?”

Milla shook her head.

“Well, see you there, maybe. Bye.”

“Bye,” Milla said, smiling. “See you, maybe.”

“
I
’
M LEAVING NOW
,” said Jon. He felt raindrops on his fingertips. He thought: If it started to rain everyone could crowd together under the sails he’d strung up in the garden.

“Are you leaving …?” The bespectacled professor of literature who might or might not have been Jenny’s lover some time in the last century looked surprised. “But you can’t leave now?”

“Oh, but I can,” Jon replied.

“But the birthday girl hasn’t put in an appearance yet.”

“Well, that may well be,” Jon said, “but I have to go.”

The man Jon was talking to, Hansén his name was, had the vexing habit of throwing his head back and roaring with laughter every time he said something he deemed amusing. He was a literary critic for
Bergens Tidende
and was known for once having plagiarized an obscure American essay on William Faulkner and to have gotten away with it. He had a big belly, a big nose, and a big beard. Jon had studied the beard closely while listening for what seemed like an eternity to the critic’s pessimistic views on contemporary writing and literature (contemporary writing in general and Jon’s writing in particular), and to his delight he had discovered a ladybug living in that soft, hairy indent between Hansén’s lower lip and his chin.

“Yes, well, nice talking to you,” Jon said, tearing his eyes off the ladybug.

“Maybe we can pick up where we left off some other time?” Hansén said.

Jon smiled noncommittally.

“My dog, Leopold,” he said, “relishes the inner organs of beasts and fowls—a well-read man like yourself will get the reference, right?—anyway, the dog must have his evening walk.”

Hansén nodded curtly and walked away. Jon glanced around, looking for Karoline. She and Kurt were standing a little way off, talking to Steve Knightley from Seattle. Karoline felt his eyes on her and made a little gesture with her hand that he found hard to interpret. A wave, perhaps, or a caress? He smiled at her and strolled off to find Siri. She was talking to some distant aunt who’d just had a hip operation, and Siri was listening and nodding and being sympathetic and looking stunning and slightly aloof in the pale blue silk dress with her dark hair in a silver clasp. Jon went over to her, put his arm around her. He kissed her on the cheek, whispered in her ear, “Where’s Jenny?”

Siri smiled and nodded, outwardly giving the aunt her full attention, and whispered back, “In her room, plastered.”

Jon squeezed her hand, they had not had a chance to talk about it, had not talked about Jenny, upstairs in her room, drinking her brains out, but this was not the right moment. Jon flashed his most winning smile and asked the old lady with the newly operated hip a few hip-related questions before excusing himself and leaving.

“Our dog needs his evening walk,” he said. “He’s shut up in my study, feeling a bit lonely and neglected …”

The aunt nodded, but Siri shot him a puzzled look.

“You’re taking the dog out again?”

“Well somebody has to,” Jon replied. “Don’t worry, I’ll be back in twenty minutes or so. Maybe half an hour. I’ll pick up some milk and bread for tomorrow’s breakfast.”