family, for example?’
She gave a faint nod. ‘Distant family. They almost thrust it on me when I said I was interested. The soil wasn’t much to shout about. Just scree and rocks. No one wanted to take it. You’re not exactly top of the world if you do agriculture at the moment, anyway, I’m told.’
‘But I suppose that wasn’t the only reason you came to Jolster?’
‘I told you why! I didn’t pay a button for it.’
‘Wasn’t it more that you found out that Jan was living here? In another valley, true enough, but not so far away that you couldn’t keep an eye on him.’
She didn’t answer; just stared ahead with a darkened brow.
‘How did you find out? Who told you where he’d gone?’
‘… erje,’ she mumbled.
‘Terje? Terje Hammersten?’
She nodded in silence.
‘And where had he got it from?’
‘You’ll have to ask ’im yourself!’
‘I’ll consider doing that. If I meet him. But, at any rate, we can establish that you moved here because you… because Jan lived here.’
‘Let’s say that then! If that’s the way you want it.’
I put all the sympathy I could into my intonation. ‘You couldn’t let go of him?’
She squeezed the cup with her thin, dry, reddened fingers, the nails chewed right down. The knuckles went white and the gaze she directed at me was dark and angry. ‘No, I couldn’t! But that’s absolutely impossible for bastards like you to understand, isn’t it? All that bloody social services shite!’
‘I’m no longer in — ’
‘No, I heard you the first time! But I don’t care what you’re doin’ now. You were in social services when you took Johnny boy from me!’
‘I just visited you at home, Mette. In 1970. It wasn’t me who took the decision.’
‘No, because then everything would’ve come up roses, wouldn’t it? If you’d been in charge.’ The scorn was unmistakable, concise and honed after many years of confrontations with bureaucracy and public authorities. ‘Don’t make me laugh.’
‘But listen…’
‘No, now you listen. Can you imagine what it feels like, here…?’ She placed her hand on her left breast. ‘Inside here, when local services come and take away the thing you love most, the most precious thing you possess?’
In a flash I saw in front of me the neglected, apathetic child we had visited at home on the Rothaugen estate that summer day in 1970. ‘But you weren’t capable of…’
‘No, so you said! And no, perhaps I wasn’t. Not then. But later, when I’d dried out and recovered from this and that… when I was ready to start afresh again, the whole of my life… where was he then? Well, he was out of your hands, you said. He’d been transferred to a new home. Yes, but I should have visiting rights, I said. Visiting rights, repeated that bitch I was speaking to. You signed the adoption papers, she said. Adoption papers! How was I supposed to remember any adoption papers?’
‘You must have signed them if they said so.’
‘Yes, but I reckon I must have been doped up at the time! Not in my right mind! I couldn’t have just given him away… he was the only thing I had… the only thing I had left. After that…’
I waited. A terrible grief seemed to have taken over her face, a nameless, indescribable grief, greater than all else.
‘After that I had nothing else to live for. From then on everything went downhill for me.’ Tears ran down her wrinkled, all too prematurely aged cheeks; shiny, transparent tears. Her nose ran too, and with an irritated movement she wiped it all away with the back of her hand. ‘Into the depths of hell,’ she concluded, almost slumped over the table.
I had a feeling that I had heard this story before, and not just from her mouth. We sat in silence for some minutes. I looked towards the window. The daylight was pale and milky from behind the unwashed panes, a reflection of another world, somewhere far from where we were, in the shadow of a wretched past with little to look forward to.
‘Things could have gone so much better for me, I’m tellin’ you,’ she broke the silence with a weary obstinacy, a doggedness she would never set aside.
‘So tell…’
‘Oh yes, you’d like that, wouldn’t you! I could tell you some stuff, Veum, if I wanted. But…’ She got up from the table with stiff movements. She supported herself on the table and walked to the door. I heard her out in the corridor and from there into what had been the drawing room of the house, where those living here only sat on Sunday mornings to listen to the church service on the radio, or on other formal occasions.
On her return, she had a small photo album in her hand. The red cover was torn, and when she flicked through I could see that several of the plastic pockets were empty. She flicked slowly from picture to picture. I glimpsed some black-and-white photographs from a distant childhood and a couple of pink colour snaps from an equally distant teenage period. Then she stopped by one photo, which she took out of the pocket and passed to me.
Despite the drastic change in her appearance, I could see that the woman in the picture was her. But it was still a different Mette from the one I had ever met. It was a beautiful young woman smiling happily at the photographer. She was wearing a colourful patterned blouse with a plunging neckline, and her hair had fluffy blonde curls, decorated with lots of small red and white ribbons, as if for a party. With an arm around her shoulders stood a man with long blond hair and a thin youthful beard, dressed in a white shirt, wide at the neck and hanging loosely from his chest, a Jesus freak smiling at her, in love, some time in the 1960s, I reckoned it would have to be.
‘Taken in Copenhagen, summer of ’66,’ she said quietly.
‘Who’s the person you’re with?’
‘… David.’
‘That was… your boyfriend?’
She nodded. ‘Yes.’
I hesitated, but I knew I had to ask. ‘What happened?’
Her gaze swept along the tabletop as though the answer was scratched into the oilcloth somewhere. Once again I saw how she was gripped by a terrible pain, a grief beyond all words. ‘He died,’ she almost whispered.
I waited a while. ‘How?’
She raised her face again. Stared me straight in the eye. ‘We were betrayed. Someone stabbed us in the back.’
I motioned to her to continue.
‘We — I had met him in Copenhagen in the early summer — and we fell head over heels in love. We were young and foolish, and we were already talking about moving in together, going back to Bergen and finding a place to live. And then we were offered a chance for quick money. We… made a deal, packed our bags and took the plane to Flesland. But they were standing there waiting. Someone had snitched on us, of that I’ve been convinced from that day to this. And…’ She snatched desperately at her cup again, as if it were a lifebuoy. ‘We were arrested.’ She swallowed several times before proceeding. ‘It was worse for David. He was carrying all of it, in a belt round here…’ She pointed to round her waist. ‘I didn’t have anything on me. But I was taken in as an accessory, and they charged me too, the bastards. Had it not been for my lawyer, I’d have had to do a stretch.’
‘Langeland?’
‘Jens?’
‘Yes.’
She looked at me, perplexed. ‘No, it was Bakke. An old boy. But you’re right that Jens was there, too. But just as a junior. A superior gofer, I remember, he called himself. Do you know him?’
I nodded, but didn’t add anything.
‘He said… but you mustn’t tell anyone this, right?’
‘It’ll stay between us, Mette.’
