of Nikolai’s uncles lay in long-forgotten mass graves.
‘Listen,’ his father had said. ‘How beautiful and how futile their singing.’
Nikolai became aware of someone clearing his throat and twisted round.
A tall man in a T-shirt and jeans was standing in the doorway. He had a bandage round one hand. The first thing Nikolai thought was that it was one of those drug addicts who turned up from time to time.
‘Can I help you?’ Nikolai called out. The severe acoustics in the room made his voice sound less friendly than he had intended.
The man stepped in over the threshold.
‘I hope so,’ he said. ‘I’ve come to make amends.’
‘I’m so pleased,’ Nikolai said. ‘But I’m afraid I can’t receive confessions here. There’s a list in the hall with a timetable. And you’ll have to go to our chapel in Inkognitogata.’
The man came over to him. Nikolai concluded from the dark circles under his bloodshot eyes that the man had not slept for a while.
‘I want to make amends for destroying the star on the door.’
It took Nikolai a few seconds to take in what the man was referring to.
‘Oh, now I’m with you. That’s not really anything to do with me. Except that I can see that the star is loose and is hanging upside down.’ He smiled. ‘A little inappropriate in a religious house, to put it mildly.’
‘So you don’t work here?’
Nikolai shook his head.
‘We have to borrow these rooms on occasion. I’m from the church of the Holy Apostolic Princess Olga.’
Harry raised his eyebrows.
‘The Russian Orthodox Church,’ Nikolai added. ‘I am a pastor and chief administrator. You need to go to the church office and see if you can find someone to help you there.’
‘Mm. Thank you.’
The man didn’t make a move to leave.
‘Tchaikovsky, wasn’t it? First Piano Concerto?’
‘Correct,’ Nikolai said with surprise in his voice. Norwegians were not exactly what you might call a cultured people. On top of that, this one was wearing a T-shirt and looked like a down-and-out.
‘My mother used to play it to me,’ the man said. ‘She said it was difficult.’
‘You have a good mother. Who played pieces she thought were too difficult for you.’
‘Yes, she was good. Saintly.’
There was something about the man’s lopsided smile that confused Nikolai. It was a self-contradictory smile. Open and closed, friendly and cynical, laughing and pained. But he was probably reading too much into things, as usual.
‘Thank you for your help,’ the man said, moving towards the door.
‘Not at all.’
Nikolai turned his attention to the piano and focused his concentration. He pressed down a key gently enough for it to touch, but make no sound – he could feel the felt lying against the piano string – and it was then he became aware that he had not heard the door shut. He turned round and saw the man standing there, his hand on the door handle, staring at the star in the smashed window.
‘Something wrong?’
The man looked up.
‘No. I was just wondering what you meant when you said it was inappropriate that the star was hanging upside down.’
Nikolai released a laugh which rebounded off the walls.
‘It’s the upside-down pentagram, isn’t it.’
From the expression on the man’s face it was clear to Nikolai that he didn’t understand.
‘The pentagram is an old religious symbol, not just for Christianity. As you can see, it is a five-pointed star made up of a continuous line that intersects itself a number of times: it has been found carved into headstones dating back several thousand years. However, when it hangs upside down with one point downwards and two points upwards, it’s something completely different. It’s one of the most important symbols in demonology.’
‘Demonology?’
The man asked questions in a calm yet firm voice, like someone who was used to getting answers, Nikolai thought.
‘The study of evil. The term originates from the time when people thought that evil emanated from the existence of demons.’
‘Hm. And now the demons have been abolished?’
Nikolai swivelled round on his piano stool. Had he misjudged the man? He seemed to be a bit too sharp for a drug addict or a down-and-out.
‘I’m a policeman,’ the man said, as if answering his thoughts. ‘We tend to ask questions.’
‘Alright, but why are you asking about this in particular?’
The man shrugged his shoulders.
‘I don’t know. I’ve seen this symbol just recently, but I can’t put my finger on where. I’m not sure if it’s significant or not. Which demon uses this symbol?’
‘Tchort,’ Nikolai said, gently pressing down three keys. Dissonance. ‘Also called Satan.’
In the afternoon Olaug Sivertsen opened the French doors to the balcony facing Bjorvika, sat down on a chair and watched the red train glide past her house. It was quite an ordinary house, a detached redbrick building dating back to 1891; what was so extraordinary was its location. Villa Valle – named after the man who designed it – stood on its own beside the railway track just outside Oslo Central Station, inside railway domain. The nearest neighbours were some low sheds and workshops belonging to Norwegian Railways. Villa Valle was built to accommodate the station master, his family and servants and was designed with extra thick walls so that the station master and his wife would not be awakened every time a train passed. In addition, the station master had asked the builder – who had got the job because it was well known that he used a special mortar to make the walls extra solid – to strengthen it even further. In the event that a train came off the rails and hit the house, the station master wanted the train driver to take the brunt of the collision and not him and his family. So far no train had crashed into the elegant station master’s house that stood in such strange isolation, like a castle in the air above a wilderness of black gravel in which the rails gleamed and wriggled like snakes in the sun.
Olaug closed her eyes and basked in the warmth of the sun.
As a young woman she hadn’t liked the heat. Her skin went red and itched and she had longed for the cool, damp summers of northwest Norway. Now she was old – almost 80 – she preferred the hot to cold, light to darkness, company to solitude, sound to silence.
It hadn’t been like that when, in 1941 and at 16 years of age, she had left Averoya and gone to Oslo on those same rails and begun work as a maidservant for Gruppenfuhrer Ernst Schwabe and his wife Randi in Villa Valle. He was a tall, good-looking man, and she came from an aristocratic family. Olaug was terrified in the first few days. However, they treated her well and showed her respect, and soon Olaug realised that she had nothing to fear so long as she did her job with the thoroughness and punctuality that Germans are, not unjustifiably, famous for.
Ernst Schwabe was responsible for the WLTA, the Wehrmacht’s Landtransportabteilung, their transport division, and he himself chose the house by the railway station. His wife, Randi, probably also worked in the WLTA, but Olaug never saw her in uniform. Olaug’s room faced south, overlooking the garden and the tracks. During the first weeks the clattering of the long trains, the shrill whistles and all the other noises of a town kept her awake at night, but gradually she became used to it. When she went home on her first holiday the year after, she lay in bed in the house she had grown up in, listening to the silence and the nothingness and longed for the sounds of life and living people.
Living people, there had been many of them in Villa Valle during the war. The Schwabes were very active socially, and both Germans and Norwegians were present at social engagements. If only people knew which heads of Norwegian society had been here, eating, drinking and smoking with the Wehrmacht as their hosts. One of the first things she was told to do after the war was to burn the seating cards she had been hoarding. She did what she was told and never said a word to anyone. Of course, she had felt an occasional urge to disobey when photographs of the selfsame persons appeared in the press, which went on about living under the yoke of the German
